"Urzu-2, you have thirty seconds before submarine departure."

"Urzu-2, roger that. Uzru-6, you copy?"

"Gotcha, babe. I'll be ten seconds behind ya."

Ten seconds.

It started as an insult.

"Urzu-6, quit sucking cock and take the shot!" Melissa Mao yelled through the communicator.

"Relax, princess. You can't rush perfection," Kurz Weber replied. He checked the read on his exterior wind gauge and adjusted the scope to account for the pressure.

Kurz had the target lined up, but the wind was howling outside his M-9. If he didn't wait for a slight break between gusts, he would blow his chance to take out the target and draw enemy fire to his position. He just needed the rest of the team to hold off the Savages for a few seconds longer.

He heard the unmistakable scream of tearing metal, loud as hell, even through the bulk of his M-9. Melissa's grunt came through the radio soon after.

"Damn, those guys were tough," she wheezed.

"Urzu-2, two helicopters are approaching," Sousuke's calm voice came across the line.

"Yeah, yeah. I see the fuckers," Melissa grumbled. "Christ, we're about to get our asses deep fried out here. Urzu-6, fucking do it now!"

"You're so hot when you beg," Kurz returned.

The wind outside shifted and died off for a moment, so he took the shot. In the distance, the fuel tank attached to the enemy bunker exploded into a bright tangerine bulb.

"Mission accomplished. You like that, Sergeant Major?" he breathed into com-link.

Mao didn't quip back something right away, so Kurz attributed her silence to speechlessness because he had gone way past that line that separates friendly team banter from poisonous provocation. He made a note to feel bad about it later. The dull whump of helicopter blades was his only warning before the Russian-made war machines swept overhead and rained down bullets.

Kurz rolled his AS into the cover of the trees as the choppers turned and came back for a second pass. They never made it. Mao's machine launched out from the tree canopy, sailed over him, and ripped off the rear stabilizer blades, fast, like a child ripping the wings from a fly. The attack helicopters dropped from the sky like drunken flies and slammed into the earth.

She hit the ground mere meters from his position and crumbled over with coolant fluid leaking from her unit like blood from a head wound.

Her breathing came over the communicator, ragged and uneven.

"Ten seconds too slow, you arrogant bastard," she got out before the line went dead.

As soon as she got out of the sick bay back on the TDD-1, Mao cornered Kurz under the guise of "hand-to-hand combat training" and beat him so hard that his vision had trailed like a bad 70's sci-fi movie effect for a week. The last thing Kurz saw before he passed out on the floor of the training room was her beautiful face, twisted in rage, leering over him. With her knee pressed into his solar plexus and one thumb digging into the hollow below his Adam's apple, Kurz couldn't breathe while she counted backwards, slowly, from ten to one, before releasing him.

He coughed and sputtered, too weak to even raise his head. She glared down at him.

"Don't ever make me wait on you again. Ten seconds is a fucking eternity," she hissed before his world went dark.

She never apologized, but neither did he. It wasn't an issue. They worked together. They didn't have to be friends. When Mao walked into an enemy trap, Kurz didn't think twice, just did what he needed to do for his team.

It wasn't her fault. Any of them could have fallen for the ruse, and Kurz just happened to be the only one lucky enough to see the trap spring because he was running just behind the others, having just completed his sniping part of the battle plan. Actually, the trap was so good that he almost missed it altogether, and it took him a few seconds to comprehend that she was in deep.

Since he didn't need to hold his current position on the ridge- his targets were rubble already- he slid down the incline, guns blazing like a cheesy spaghetti western, and blasted away the enemies before they could rip her flesh-and-bones body from her mechanical one.

She lived, and they managed to salvage most of her AS to boot. Still, Kurz got his ass chewed out by his commander for not alerting them sooner. Not exactly fair but not really unwarranted. He should have seen it coming, and he won't make that mistake again.

Kurz was surprised when Melissa showed up at his door, freshly released from the base hospital and toting a six-pack of decent German pilsner.

"Hey," she said with a jerk of her head. "Heard that you did the rescuing. I guess I owe you."

He should have said thanks and been done with it, but Kurz couldn't pass up the opportunity.

"Good thing I was ten seconds behind, huh, Sergeant Major?" he ground out.

"Dick," she glowered, shoving the beer at him, but she didn't take a swing at him like he had bet himself that she would. Instead, she turned around to leave.

"See you, smart ass."

He spotted the plastic hospital band on her wrist as she raises her hand to flip him off and realized that she really didn't have to show up and try to thank him.

"I really don't like drinking alone," he called out after her.

When she looked back at him, one eye almost completely red from the burst blood vessels, he lobbed her a bottle.

"Is there a story behind the bitch or what?" he asked, and she smiled that sphinx's grin.

"Depends. Were you always a limp-dicked playboy or am I just the lucky one?"

After that night of hard drinking (they polished off the six-pack, all of her secret stash, and most of his) and soul-baring, Kurz Weber and Melissa Mao were friends and good ones at that.

The next time their commander gave him a drubbing for taking too long lining up his shots, Melissa waited around in the locker room until she was alone with Kurz.

"Screw McAllen. He's got a bug up his ass today. Yeah, you're still slow as shit, but you did it right this time," she reassured him.

Every time they went into a bad situation, Kurz turned it into a joke to ease her mind. "Gimme ten seconds" was his way of saying "Whatever it takes."

It had been years since Kurz had a friend that worked both on and off the battlefield, so he should have seen it coming. One morning, Kurz woke up with a raging erection, some very vivid images of Melissa burning in his brain, and the oh-shit realization that he had it bad for the petty officer. Worse yet, he had no idea what to do about it.

Of course, it didn't happen all at once. It took months as their private jokes got more private and the trust got stronger. It took long nights of staying up too late together on base, the laughter coming as easily as breathing with or without the aid of alcohol. It took a hundred missions and a thousand insults. He is slow, and she is pushy. She's a bitch, and he's an idiot.

She was actually in the process of saying just that when Kurz couldn't take it anymore. They were sitting on Tessa's couch back at the island base. The captain was stuck in some boring meeting, Melissa had a key, and Tessa's digs were far nicer than the barracks.

Melissa had opened her mouth to say it, "Idiot", when he made a grab for her wrists, pinned her down on the cushions, and kissed her. He couldn't tell if she wanted it, too, or if she was just about to scream, but he didn't care because her lips parted as he crammed his tongue into her.

It took a few minutes, or maybe moments, he doesn't really remember, for Kurz to realize that he could see the whites all the way around her lovely, purplish irises. He pulled back then, retracting back to his part of the couch in a half-crawl. Melissa bolted into a sitting position, reached for the bottle of Jim Beam on the coffee table, and sucked back several gulps.

"Damn," she muttered while breathing hard. She didn't wipe away the booze from her lips right away, and Kurz had to fight down the urge to lick it away for her.

"You know this is a bad idea, right?" she got out between breaths. "You're, like, my best friend."

"Yeah," he replied. Not a suave response, but a response nevertheless. He was proud to get anything out at all.

"I'm going to take a bath," Melissa blurted out and hopped to her feet.

"Yeah," he repeated dumbly.

She made a break for the washroom, and when he heard the water running, Kurz gave up and reached for the bottle himself. He got down two big swallows before he realized two things.

She never said no, and she had left the bathroom door open.

He heard Melissa counting as he rushed into the room. She sat on the rim of the tub with shapely legs sprawled out in from of her and her shirt on the floor.

"Three...two...one," she finished before he hit his knees in front of her, wrapped her up in his arms, and kissed her fiercely. He tumbled backwards, pulling her down into his lap.

"Damn, you're so predictable," she snarked into his ear as her tongue worked down its sensitive rim. "Almost too late again, pretty boy."

"You can't wait ten seconds?" he joked.

She tugged at his shirt, and he ducked to help her get it over his head.

She never stopped grinning. "Oh, I've been waiting for this. I sure hope it takes a little longer than that."

A/N: (sing along if you know the tune) You see, I got this problem/ I need help tryin' to solve it/ Cause meeting after meeting and I'm still a MaoxKurz-holic.

*ahem* Plot bunny wouldn't die. Had to write it before I could get back to The Rushing Wind. Sorry and yet not sorry enough.