[Fic] Elemental

[kittydesade]

Title: Elemental
Fandom: Human Target
Characters: Katherine Walters, Christopher Chance
Word Count: 2,078
Rating: PG
Summary: Katherine and Christopher Chance: Their relationship in a four-element theme. Introspective.



For a day that felt like it was going to storm, the water was awfully calm. The wind was cold, but she was bundled up enough that it only bit at her cheeks and knuckles, and the tips of her ears. Katherine sat on the edge of the boat after her friend had gone, running the tips of her fingers through the lapping waves at the edge and remembering the pressure of his lips on hers.

It was easier than remembering how her life had been turned upside down and inside out, how he'd come into her life and handed her a gun and not blinked when she pointed it at him after telling her he'd come there to kill her.

"This is crazy," she mumbled to herself, for the third time in the last twelve hours or so. "This is completely insane."

She didn't even know what it was that she knew. Except that it was something to do with a boat, and something to do with someone rich or powerful enough to try to have her killed. Her mysterious benefactor and new friend, a man she had no doubt could kill her after all the things she'd seen and what he'd led her through, he wouldn't tell her much. For her own good, or so he seemed to think. Given how much trouble she was in with what she already knew, he was probably right. It didn't stop her wanting to know.

It wasn't even that she was scared; she was, but that wasn't the worst of it. The worst part was how it really didn't make sense. The pieces that she knew were just enough to see that there was a pattern there and not enough to see what the pattern was, let alone the details of it.

"I may not be a, an international super-spy or anything, but I can take care of myself pretty well." Katherine hadn't said that where he could hear because he would argue, and he'd be right to, but she still felt the need to say it. To at least remind herself that just because she was hiding out on a boat and in a safe house didn't mean she was a damsel in distress. It was just a messed up situation. "I can take care of myself. Most of the time. Just... need a little help, this time."

She wasn't above admitting that, either. It was a foolish person who couldn't admit when they needed help, and her mysterious protector had been a big help.

"God, Carmine is going to be so sad in that warehouse all by himself..." Katherine pushed a hand through her hair, trying to think of something. Anything other than the man who, well, called himself Junior. Sort of. She was trying not to think of him as that, since he was trying to distance himself from it. "Maybe that nice old man will keep him company..."

Nice old man. Who was a bodyguard. And probably a former assassin, or soldier, or something like that. She was starting to wonder if she would ever get back to meeting normal people.

"That's not fair," she rebuked herself for being judgmental. "He's ... doing the best he can."

She didn't know why she said it that way. Or even thought of it that way, but that was how it seemed to her. He was doing the best he can. Maybe he hadn't always, or maybe he was doing his best in a direction that wasn't familiar to him.

"Maybe..." She didn't know how to finish that. It was a thought, like being on the cusp of an understanding or something on the tip of her mind, but it wasn't quite formed yet. She'd keep an eye on him when he got back from the shipping container and maybe in a few hours she'd have the words.

"And in the meantime I'm sitting in a boat, by myself, talking to myself." Katherine sighed, throwing her hands in the air. "Well, that's my life, I guess."



His hands slid up her sides, hot and sweaty against her skin, thumbs tracing the edge of her stomach as he moved his hands inward, cupping her breasts. He had large, calloused hands, strong hands that were nonetheless wide-open and gentle over her body. All over her body, though he hadn't yet moved down. She wanted him to touch her more. Was on the verge of begging.

Katherine had opened her lips to beg when she realized where she was and why her body felt so flushed and damp, and her cheeks reddened for a moment. She didn't move. He was good enough that he just might be able to hear the change in her breathing, and the thought that he was paying that close attention to her led her to the welcome and unwelcome mental image of his cheek pillowed on her chest, listening to her breathing. The stubble on his chin scratching at the tops of her breasts.

God, Katherine, stop thinking about things like that. He's a hired killer, and he's totally not interested in you that way.

Even if she kind of wanted him to be.

There was something -- maybe not romantic in the real-world sense -- kind of classic and appealing about him. The idea of him more than the reality of the man now sitting beside her, on whom she was resting and who was probably politely pretending she hadn't just woken up.

Because no matter how much she might subscribe to the idea of the self-sufficient woman there was still a part of her that wanted to be flattered and courted and rescued. There was a part of her that, as a child, had always wanted to be the princess in the tower and saved by her knight that had been stripped away as she grew up, learned the implications, and lost her illusions. Yes, it probably wasn't the best of ideas for a relationship. No, it just wasn't something that worked out in the real world. But her dreaming mind was nothing like the real world, and evidently it wanted to cope with the stresses of being hunted and marked for murder by giving her very sexy dreams about her rescuer in tarnished armor.

Katherine sighed, but smiled when she closed her eyes again. It was by far the most enjoyable side effect of the whole business.



She'd long learned how to roll with the punches. Not that anything big had happened to her in her life, not until this, but you either learned how to cope with the disappointment of not getting into your first-choice school and getting your first few job rejections, or you curled up in your tub with a bottle and a big plate of brownies. And she liked her brownies, but not that much.

And most of the time, life didn't hand her challenges that were worth a brownie, anyway. Maybe a glass of wine with a murder mystery, but not brownies.

This time, when Katherine got a challenge straight to the face, a sucker-punch of a plot twist, she tried to roll with it. She coped with the semi-competent bodyguards the police sent to protect her. She recovered, she thought, quite well when she was told by the supposed prosecutor that he was actually an assassin and then given a gun. And when the man broke into his safe house, she didn't even blink. Well, maybe a little, but not enough to miss the fact that this was someone who should have been a friend, and wasn't. And that he was going up against a friend for her.

That, more than anything else, was the kind of thing that shook her. People talked about displays of devotion, they talked about it a lot given the media power of the romance industry, but he didn't even think about this. He just did it. For her. Because it was the right thing to do.

She wondered if he knew the kind of strength it took to be able to do that. If he imagined that it was an effort or an achievement on his part to be able to go against everything that, from what he'd told her, he'd been raised to do, friends he'd had for years, for her sake. Because he'd decided that this was the right course of action, whether morally right or ethically or just because it spoke to something deep inside him, he was going against years of training and conditioning and she didn't have words for that.

She could roll with the assassination attempts and the warehouse and the strange old man, Christopher Chance. And then, even when the boat started to go up around her, she could roll with that. She had her feet under her. And she had faith that if she needed to get somewhere, she'd find a way.

But that a man would uproot himself so thoroughly from everything that grounded him, that was home, because of her if not for her? That was heavy.




Christopher Chance stood at the grave of the woman who had been in and out of his life in just about a day. "I brought flowers."

She didn't say anything. Graves tended to muffle the voice.

"I still don't know... anything about you." It bothered him off and on in the years since her death. "I mean, I know you bake cookies, and you like dogs. And you like people. And you were pretty handy with that gun," he chuckled a little, remembering even now how she'd picked it up with confidence and her hand hadn't shook at all when she'd pointed it at him.

"But I still don't know... your favorite coffee shop. Or where you dropped your mail when you came in. You never told me what made you get Carmine... who's doing very well, by the way." His throat closed a little bit. "I think he still misses you."

He missed her. It was an ache inside shaped like a place that had never gotten a chance to fully form or grow, so the edges of it kept shifting. She had come into his life as a mission and then in a whirl, been transformed into a human being. Someone to be protected and treasured, if not by him, at least by someone. Like a wind that had blown off the dust and leaves from some ancient structure and revealed its durability, at least, if not its grace.

That was what it was. She'd lent him some kind of grace.

And then she was gone. She blew out of his life as abruptly as she'd blown in, and he still didn't know what to think. Every time he thought about her his mind did flip-flops, upside down and inside out. He didn't know if he was coming or going, in love or infatuated.

He did know that he was better for having had her in his life. A better person. Feeling it, living it, just in general a better person. And he knew that as the years passed time faded her into a ghost of a memory, leaving only the most ideal parts and stripping away anything of substance he might have known about her.

Of all the things that hurt, that might be the one that hurt the most. He'd never gotten a chance to know her as a person. To talk to her, get to know her day by day. He'd met her as the mark and then known her as the client, like he knew his clients now, but even most of his clients now he knew for longer than he'd spent with Katherine Walters, if only by a day. In his line of work, a day could be a very long time. Always had been. But they'd had no time together. And that stole the wind from his lungs and made his chest tight, and his fists clench.

Chance let out a long, slow breath, made himself un-knot, un-clench. She wouldn't want him to dwell on that. He'd known her long enough to know that.

And, he thought, she would have approved of what he was doing. Most of it.

"Hope you like the flowers," he mumbled, dropping to lay them on the dispassionately tended ground. Hands slipping open into his pockets, he turned and walked back into the morning fog.