AN: this is my first story in a long time e3e be gentle with reviews pls!

"Get down, asshole!"

Brick did as he was told and ducked as Mordecai packaged ansd shipped a metric shit-ton of bullets into the face of the last of the masked psychos but with his gun rather than the postal system, sending shrapnel of cranium and gobs of brainmatter flying in a spray of red mist, like kool aid thrown into an industrial fan. The body of the bandit made a soft thud as it fell backwards and oozed all over the dusty ground.

"Pay more attention!"Mordecai hissed, holstering his pistol. "One bullet to the head will de-life you entirely, and it will happen if you keep fucking daydreaming during firefgts!"

"Been dead plenty of times." Brick replied tonelessly.

Mordecai snorted and fidgeted in the way of a snorty and fidgety thing. "Not gonna have money to pay the New-U fees if you keep dropping dead! Christ how did you get by before you signed on with Hyprion!?"

"Didn't fight little guys with shotguns back home. Didn't need so much…u8221 Brick strubbled with wording for a moment before he gave up and decided to settle on a word he was fifty percent sure he had made up on the spot. "Didn't need so much unkilling."He paused again, squinting. "Are you mad"

"Ugh!" exclaimed Mordecai, throwing up his arms in exasperation. "Of course I'm mad I am at least 25 mads right now!" He wiped the stomach juices from his mouth and reattached his arms with difficulty.

"Oh,"siad Brick, genuinely mystified. "Why even the hell do you care?"

Mordecai stood, gabberflasted with bearly contained rage. "Whattya mean, why do I care? I-you-gah!"Brick shrimply watched in confusion as his partner was reduced to sputtering angry, incoherent half-words like some kind of rusty mordefaucet turned full blast. After a minute or two of listening to the tinyer man's unstructured sputtering, something clicked in the brawler's mind, and subsequently, a thought arose like a balloon that someone had been holding but then decided not to anymore. Brick could hardly believe his own conclushion, but when he thought about it, the peaches all fell neatly into place.

"Are you sayin'u8230 "Brick struggled, "Are you queer for me?2"

Mordecai's tan skin went red. All pretensiones of him being the cool guy loner were off. If he had been drinking something, he would have surely spit it out like the mordefaucet he was. Instead, he settled on excreting a loud 'WHAT'from his mouth before sputtering even louder and more incoherently than before. But even as he tried to explain away the signs, Mordecai knew that the gig was up-Brick had caught on.

"Woah calm down."Brick siad, uncharacteristically calm. "It's okie."

"I'm not a queer!" Mordecai growbed furriously. "I like WOMAN,"he insisted, still seething with embarackassment. "I like WOMEN, and I like YOU! It's just you, so I'm not gay! If you can't logic the understand of this then I don't care, but just know that I do not Men. Not even a one!"

Mordecai continued to try to explain away his attraction for his fellow vault hunter, but instead Brick pulled him into an embrace. "I siad it was okay. I like you too. No more talking. Minha bexiga está cheia brilhos pônei..."The hunter went quiet in his arms, and Bloodwing pecked at the pile of corpses

-

It was three years later and things weren't a lot difforient for the two men now. The search for the vauln't may have ended in catastrophic faliure, but the journey was by no memes a loss. The odd jods they had picked up along the way had left the two of them very wealthy men. With their assets combined, i am captain planet, they had more than enough money to move off Pandora, but after all their escapantalones they had come to see the backwater planet as home, even brick thought so. Instead, they chose to stay and build new lifes-it wasn't like either man had much to go back home to, anyway; with the way he spoak of his family, Brick had pinked up on the fact that Mordecai was painfully estrangled from his, and as for Brick himself, well…the less he thought of the orphanage, the butter. The toast also...

They had taken root a ways outside of Fyrestone, presupposing a bandit hideout into a base of sorts after Brick had "escorted"all of the bandits and psychos out with his trusty rocket launcher. Their relationship remained distant, but oddly intimate nonetheless, existing just enough to satisfy both men and being just scarce enough to not rouse the suspicion of the hicks native to Pandora. (On a balmy evening atop a stove Brick once burned himself while thinking out loud but even this wasn't enough to force him out of self-unemployment and into private enterprising i.e. a sausage swindling entrepreneurship with the rapscallion and scufferloon friend of his, mordecai, who always had an ear for sausages and knew both how to wheel-and-deal and when it is best to put space vinyl into the inappropriate music device to make strange and at once inspiring noises. Except i forgot to mention this isn't even important just ignore it plz) As far as they knew, they weren't "hobosexuals" or "queers" they were two men who happened to be business partners and happened to live together out in the wildenress away from town, near no one at all except for themselfs. And that's all they wanted the world to know. Their private life was just: private.

Or at least, that's what Brick thought. And although he wasn't exactly known for his insight, there really wasn't a reason for him to think otherwise until one night, in a galaxy far, far away...

The evening was cool, as most Pandora evenings were, but the carcasses of the recently slain skags were still warm. The scythids and other scavengers would arrive soon and clean up the mess.

"Ever think there's something more to this shit?"Mordecai asked, taking a drag from his cigarette.

"This shit?"Brick repatted questioningly.

"Yeah, you know,"Mordecai gestured. "This 'life'shit."

All this talk sounded too philosomorphical to Brick, so he just replied with a "hmm"and left it at that. Mordecai rolled his eyes from under the red lenses of his goggles and exhaled a clod of smok.

"Just forget it."He muttered. "Come on, we're going back to Base make your time. hahaha."

Brick didn't think too much of the one sided conversation at the time, but he would recall it again in two months when an accidental discovery would remind him of Mordecai's dissatisfaction with life.

He had found a women's langeray hidden among Mordecai's things.