IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a prequel to Kill Shot. I strongly recommend you read Kill Shot first.
Thankyous: To Poto and Viv, beta readers above and beyond the call of duty, whom I shamefully neglected to thank earlier. I'm not worthy.
Disclaimers: None of the usual apply.

Cradle And All
by Lela Kaunitz
lela@massive.com.au

It was cold.

He was tempted to spit just to see if it would freeze before it hit the sidewalk.

But he knew this would earn him a disapproving glance from the woman beside him, and he could do without drawing any more attention to himself than the unavoidable.

She had been expecting the cold. The jacket she wore was quilted, with bands of insulation across her stomach turning her into a small, bellicose version of the Michelin man. Never mind the paunch of her belly, the sag of her breasts; there was nothing soft about her. Behind her thick glasses, her eyes were chips of flint.

There were more people on the picket line than he'd expected, given the weather, and the time of day, but none of them had the same granite poise as the woman in the teal Michelin jacket. Still, they stood patient as buffalo arrayed against the approaching storm. No point, in this cold, brandishing their signs and their literature to an empty street.

Further along the line, a younger man in a long caramel coat was pouring coffee from a thermos into the tin cup held by the young woman beside him. Beneath the hem of her blue stocking cap her cheeks were reddened from the icy air. She leaned over the steam from the cup, seeking its warmth. The man murmured something to her, and laid a proprietary hand on the small of her back. Her smile overcame her blotchy cheeks and runny nose, making her suddenly, unexpectedly, beautiful. True love.

He grunted, turned away from the young couple, caught the similarly dour gaze of the Michelin woman. The corner of her mouth was sharp as a slice in leather.

"You haven't been here before," she said, accusation lingering at the back of the statement.

"No," he agreed equably, and presented a bland smile.

She did not press him, merely looked him up and down, with eyes gone suddenly bird-bright. The cut of his jacket, even with the additional bulk of a sweater beneath, sat well enough to disguise the gun. If she was looking for a concealed weapon - and who was to say she was not? - there was no tell-tale flicker of eyes to indicate its discovery.

Finally, as though her study had uncovered some small detail she had expected to find, she let out a small sigh, and turned back to face the clinic.

The doors had opened now, and as though it were one living thing, the picket line shook itself awake, unfurling placards and anger. Casting an eye along the row of faces, he saw that the woman in the blue cap was no longer smiling. There was something in her hard-eyed, thin-lipped countenance that he recognised from his own reflection.

He was still searching for a word to describe it, when the chanting rose around him, reminding him of the baying of wolves. Was it as futile as their howls to the moon? Or if this group, like a hungry pack, persisted, would they bring their much-larger prey to its knees?

A solitary man was making his way down the front steps, lumbering with the bulk of a bullet-proof vest. His face was taut, schooled to deflect the barrage of protest from the picketers. He looked neither right nor left, but ducked his shoulders as though he fully expected to be hit at any moment. The bullet-proof vest was hardly for show.

Inside his jacket, the gun's presence throbbed like a heartbeat, and he couldn't pretend - not even to himself - that he wasn't tempted. But there were better ways and means. He settled for memorising the man's face, the loose flesh beneath each eye, the way his hair bristled where it had been cropped short against his receding hairline. As the man walked the length of the picket line, his shambling gait resolved itself into an old football injury, another detail for the profile he was building inside his head.

He ignored the sounds from the people around him, shutting out those things that did not concern him. His breath clouded around his face as he exhaled.

The man in the bullet-proof vest was opening the door of the car that had pulled up at the kerb, and the crowd twitched like one length of muscle, poised to move.

The woman who uncoiled herself from the passenger seat was tall, taller than the armoured man, who did his best to shield her from the angry crowd that pressed forwards as they moved back towards the clinic.

There had still been a part of him that had hoped she would change her mind, that she wouldn't go through with it after all. He could feel that last hope dying now as she picked her way up the stairs in those stupid high-heeled lace-up boots that made her stand almost as tall as him.

She didn't move like a pregnant woman, he realised, and despair spilled over him. He closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe evenly.

He had the face of the man in the bullet-proof vest stored clearly in his mind's eye. And as for her, he knew everything down to the smell of her skin.

He turned away from the picket line, and felt it slip away from around him, still bristling with rage in the frigid morning air. Some of their rage stayed with him, and he used it to keep walking, one foot in front of the other, with his gun like his heart against his ribs.

Not today, then, Jill. But someday.