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konstantyaTitle: But the Tables Have Turned
Fandom: This Gun For Hire (1942)
Genre: AU, drama, romance.
Characters/pairings: Philip Raven/Ellen Graham
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 494
Summary: She’s in love with a killer, she tells herself, repeatedly. (Takes place sometime after the events of They’ll Ask Me Why and I’ll Tell Them I’d Rather.)
Notes: Follows the same continuity as my other TGFH fics, which is to say: Raven somehow escaped at the end of the film.
If you’d like to leave a comment, please do so on AO3!
These are the hands of a killer, she thinks, when he holds her. I’m in love with a man who killed for a living.
The past tense is important, but Ellen knows it’s conditional. He only stopped because she wanted him to—because he grew fond enough of her to care about her opinion—not because he had some great, personal epiphany and became put off by the immorality of it all. Furthermore, he only stays stopped because he’s recognized that life is a lot easier when you don’t have to constantly be on the lookout for cops and keep moving every month or two. But if circumstances necessitated it, Ellen knows he could pick the habit back up in a heartbeat.
It should bother her, and she supposes it does, though perhaps not as much as it could. Plenty of men are killers now—it’s a time-honored side-effect of war, after all—and she reminds herself that Philip, too, is a veteran like any other.
Except not like any other, not really, because he was a killer before the war, didn’t need war to turn him into such a thing, and—quite frankly—doesn’t even seem to have been all that adversely affected by the war, period. If anything, he strikes her as more tranquil these days, less angry, like his time in the army was some laid-back sabbatical, instead of the terrible, traumatic experience it was for so many others. Maybe, she muses, after the previous life he had—living with a horridly abusive aunt, then being shipped off to an equally horrid and abusive reform school for the rest of his youth—it was.
She’s in love with a killer, she tells herself, repeatedly. She doesn’t do it out of a twisted form of self-torture, but merely as an acknowledgment of the fact. It’s better, she’s learned, to face these things head on; trying to bury or deny them won’t do her any favors. He almost murdered her and took her hostage—that happened. But he also saved her life, helped her save the lives of potentially countless others, and now she’s in love with him, quiet and odd man that he is—that, too, has happened.
The war, she realizes, affected her as well—for all that she wasn’t a soldier or even a nurse. The Ellen of San Francisco, who was dating an amiable, upright detective from L.A., would balk at the thought of getting romantically involved with a hired gun, no matter how long ago he’d undergone a career change. But she isn’t that same Ellen—she knows this now—and so it only makes sense that she would react differently these days.
He holds her gently, and kisses her like a schoolboy, and Ellen reconciles the sweet, awkward man with the cold-blooded murderer. Then she folds her arms around his neck, presses her mouth to his thoroughly, and reconciles her straightforward past with her complicated present.
-----
A/N: I feel like Ellen would roll surprisingly well with her feelings for Raven, but only because she’s given their relationship a shit-ton of thought, and has—by this point—accepted the fact that she, too, is a little fucked up from her experiences. (Like sure, nice, normal gals probably shouldn’t go around falling in love with former hitmen, but nice, normal gals also probably haven’t been recruited by the U.S. government to spy on suspected traitors, and consequently almost ended up dead because of it, so…)
Title once again from “I’ve Got You,” the second song Ellen sings in the film.
All other fics can be found here.
Fandom: This Gun For Hire (1942)
Genre: AU, drama, romance.
Characters/pairings: Philip Raven/Ellen Graham
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 494
Summary: She’s in love with a killer, she tells herself, repeatedly. (Takes place sometime after the events of They’ll Ask Me Why and I’ll Tell Them I’d Rather.)
Notes: Follows the same continuity as my other TGFH fics, which is to say: Raven somehow escaped at the end of the film.
If you’d like to leave a comment, please do so on AO3!
- But the Tables Have Turned -
These are the hands of a killer, she thinks, when he holds her. I’m in love with a man who killed for a living.
The past tense is important, but Ellen knows it’s conditional. He only stopped because she wanted him to—because he grew fond enough of her to care about her opinion—not because he had some great, personal epiphany and became put off by the immorality of it all. Furthermore, he only stays stopped because he’s recognized that life is a lot easier when you don’t have to constantly be on the lookout for cops and keep moving every month or two. But if circumstances necessitated it, Ellen knows he could pick the habit back up in a heartbeat.
It should bother her, and she supposes it does, though perhaps not as much as it could. Plenty of men are killers now—it’s a time-honored side-effect of war, after all—and she reminds herself that Philip, too, is a veteran like any other.
Except not like any other, not really, because he was a killer before the war, didn’t need war to turn him into such a thing, and—quite frankly—doesn’t even seem to have been all that adversely affected by the war, period. If anything, he strikes her as more tranquil these days, less angry, like his time in the army was some laid-back sabbatical, instead of the terrible, traumatic experience it was for so many others. Maybe, she muses, after the previous life he had—living with a horridly abusive aunt, then being shipped off to an equally horrid and abusive reform school for the rest of his youth—it was.
She’s in love with a killer, she tells herself, repeatedly. She doesn’t do it out of a twisted form of self-torture, but merely as an acknowledgment of the fact. It’s better, she’s learned, to face these things head on; trying to bury or deny them won’t do her any favors. He almost murdered her and took her hostage—that happened. But he also saved her life, helped her save the lives of potentially countless others, and now she’s in love with him, quiet and odd man that he is—that, too, has happened.
The war, she realizes, affected her as well—for all that she wasn’t a soldier or even a nurse. The Ellen of San Francisco, who was dating an amiable, upright detective from L.A., would balk at the thought of getting romantically involved with a hired gun, no matter how long ago he’d undergone a career change. But she isn’t that same Ellen—she knows this now—and so it only makes sense that she would react differently these days.
He holds her gently, and kisses her like a schoolboy, and Ellen reconciles the sweet, awkward man with the cold-blooded murderer. Then she folds her arms around his neck, presses her mouth to his thoroughly, and reconciles her straightforward past with her complicated present.
-----
A/N: I feel like Ellen would roll surprisingly well with her feelings for Raven, but only because she’s given their relationship a shit-ton of thought, and has—by this point—accepted the fact that she, too, is a little fucked up from her experiences. (Like sure, nice, normal gals probably shouldn’t go around falling in love with former hitmen, but nice, normal gals also probably haven’t been recruited by the U.S. government to spy on suspected traitors, and consequently almost ended up dead because of it, so…)
Title once again from “I’ve Got You,” the second song Ellen sings in the film.
All other fics can be found here.
