The place has all the trappings of a normal family neighborhood, set in the part of the city where Kid's not supposed to go. These are the people that love him the most, that buy his figurines and dye their hair red to be like him after he kills their nightmares and rips the hearts out of things that threaten their pretty little middle class lives.

But they're the people that fear him, too, and fear always wins out in the end.

Mothers are beckoning their children to come inside as he rides his motorcycle down the street, to come here sweetie, away from the dangerous man, come inside quickly and I'll give you a cookie. He runs over some kid's remote control airplane, left out in the street. It makes a nice-sounding crunch under his bike's wheels, so he aims for another, and another, almost mowing down a tyke who tries to snatch his toy out of the way at the last second.

He stops in front of the address from the book, squinting at the torn page in his hand. It's the right one, but the house looks just like all of the others. It's too plain, too normal to hold the person he's chasing after, but it's been ten years since he last doubted himself, so he isn't going to start now.

Kid parks his bike in the neighbor's flower bed, spinning the wheels to shred the lovingly-grown hyacinths and alyssum and hydrangeas until there's only tough brown dirt under him. He steps down, makes a casually polite death threat to the nice lady watering her bushes, and walks up to the front door.

I'll be at Trafalgar, were the words carved into the wall after the police came to check the cell.

I'll be at Trafalgar, the only clue left after the world's most dangerous criminal escaped the world's most secure prison.

I'll be at Trafalgar. The Bloody Black Heart was loose once more.

Trafalgar Square in London was closed down within the hour, guarded by forty-two tanks, twelve missile-carrying helicopters, and eight hundred ground troops.

Cape Trafalgar was under the protection of thirty full-scale warships and two thousand armed infantrymen by the next day, with air support from seventeen bomber jets flying regular rounds.

Eight cities in the US, Jamaica, Australia, South Africa, and the Dominicans woke up the following morning and found themselves flooded with UN forces, under heavily guarded curfews and imposed emergency quarantines that prevented anyone from leaving or entering.

Altogether, there were nineteen Trafalgars, and chaos descended on all of them when the world saw Heart's message written in steel.

The reward offered for proven evidence of Heart's location was sixty-three million US dollars, and for a kill or capture, five hundred million. Enough to have false sightings and reported kills streaming in from all over the planet.

Three world organizations, one hundred and thirty-six countries, and seven billion people were on the move, sparing no expense and turning over every pebble in search for one man.

Kid found him in the Sabaody City third edition address book over his morning breakfast sandwich, page ninety-six, in the T section, under Trabal and before Trainham.

There was, after all, only one Trafalgar in Sabaody.

He finished his breakfast (a long-gone-cold Egg McMuffin that he'd stolen from a couple on the street), got on his bike, and paid a visit to 7603 Fairview Drive.

The Bloody Black Heart; responsible for the release of a supervirus that wiped out almost thirty million people before it was contained, a man who had managed to destroy entire governments overnight by poisoning the air and leaving world leaders to die as their hearts turned black and rotted from the inside out. He'd recently been captured by "Red Captain" Kid himself and sent to Impel Down, only to escape.

Trafalgar Law; a renowned young doctor who had made it as a big name in cardiac surgery and retired early to a comfortable home in a quiet little neighborhood, a man who was held in high esteem for his intelligence and kindness in caring for patients. He'd recently joined a team of doctors on a flight to Sudan to help train surgeons in the country's hospitals, without giving a definite return date.

Both opened the door, offering a cool gaze from the same eyes and a lazy smirk from the same lips.

"It's about damn time."

"Do you know what they do, in prison, to pretty boys like me?" Heart says conversationally, pouring wine from the bar while Kid sits at the kitchen table.

"Fuck them?" Kid offers. There's paisley on the walls, polished marble on the kitchen countertops. The last time he saw Heart, the walls were solid stone and the utilities were bulletproof metal; all to be expected of a high-tech underground human experimentation lab.

"You'd think so. You'd hope so, I do get so bored without toys. But no, that isn't it." Heart hands him a filled wineglass, sitting down opposite him to sip at his own.

Kid eyes the glass, chugs it, then drops it on the floor to shatter against the fancy white tile. Glass shards fly and a few hit him in the leg. Neither of them flinch. "So what do they do?"

Heart waves a hand, brow creasing and eyes narrowing. "Stare. All day. The guards, the inmates, everyone. They all just stare at me. It's unspeakably annoying."

"That so."

"One of the guards tried to kill me, the first day I was there."

"I don't blame him." It was just to be expected. The UN wanted him alive for the trial, but it was really only for show. No one would raise a fuss if somebody cracked and decided to off him for one of his innumerable crimes against humanity.

"I do. He was pathetic. A knife? Really? When they all have access to assault rifles and grenades and god-knows-what-else? I was merciful, snapping his neck. He was a fool."

Heart takes him on a tour through the house, pointing out various framed photos on the walls. "My graduating class. See that one, Gwin, in the white and blue cap? He ended up working for me. His friend with the red hair, too, in the back. Ah, my residency at Sabaody United. The overweight one is Glenda, she was one of my experiments early on. They called it sudden-onset cancer in the autopsy. Oh, Eustass, that's you."

Kid squints. It really is him, standing in line at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. The photo's top-quality, too, without the grainy image of gas station security cameras. It's hung up on the wall, right alongside Dr. Trafalgar's graduation certificate and a picture of the hospital where he'd worked.

"I have so many, honestly, but that one's my favorite. You just look so...you. Don't you agree?"

In the photo, he's covered in blood, clothing blackened and torn. In one hand is the pack of cigs he's waiting to purchase, and in the other is a gun. He's standing calmly in line, waiting for his turn behind the elderly man with a bag of nuts and the pregnant woman buying Advil.

"Yeah."

There's a quaint little four-poster bed in his suburban-mom style house, and that's where Heart takes him last.

Heart lays himself out on the bed, and all Kid can think of is how easy it would be to snap the little wooden posts bones and how easily he could tear the fabric sheets skin and that the water on the nightstand would spill all over the floor blood and guts and organs

Heart looks up at him, all that devious, destructive force behind his eyes sparking. "Wreck it," he says, waving a hand around him at the oh so perfect, oh so fragile room. "Wreck it all."

That hand comes down to his own neck, Heart resting a thumb over his own pulse and stroking it fondly. He knows too well what Kid wants, he's always known, and he's never hesitated to use it.

"Wreck me."

It feels good to have Heart trapped under him again. He's got the man naked, hard, and handcuffed to the metal bars of the headboard.

It'd be easy to sit up on his knees, straddle Heart's head, and feed him his cock until he chokes on it, but it won't be enough. With as many times as they've done this, Kid's already fucked the gag reflex out of him, and it's not half as fun anymore.

So he tries a different method, draping himself over the man backwards as if they were going to suck each other off. It's an odd angle, but he manages to get his dick down Heart's throat anyway, so it works for him.

Heart's nice and noisy about it, with all the slurping and obscene smacking made loud just how Kid likes it, so he rewards the man with a few pumps of his cock. It's slow, lazy, a calm kind of sex that almost fits the slow, lazy lives that the people in these houses led.

Kid waits until Heart relaxes beneath him, lithe body settling on the sheets, before he sits back on the man to pin him down and thrusts as hard as he can.

He feels Heart choke more than he hears it, the blunt head of his cock encountering roughly tightened muscles and forcing its way through.

"Bet you missed this, didn't you," he murmurs against the sensitive flesh of Heart's inner thigh, before biting down with brutal force. Heart shudders and screams around his dick, but he pushes harder with his hips, shutting him up. "You're done. You fucked up. They stopped your Armageddon, they blew up your labs, they killed your friends. There's nothing left for you in this world, nowhere safe to run, but you ran anyway because you needed this. Ain't that right?"

There's a wetness where his hips meet Heart's face, and it's too loose to be saliva. Heart has to be crying now, if only from the sheer pain, but he's still sucking Kid as hard as ever, still struggling to take him deeper.

Kid catches both of Heart's thighs, forcing them up off the bed. He keeps going, keeps pulling, until he's almost completely upright and Heart's lower body is suspended upside down with his head still trapped under Kid. He can see the muscles working all along Heart's back, the strain on his spine from holding such an awkward position making them stand out in clear relief.

He can count the individual vertebrae, all the way up to Heart's neck. It's gorgeous in a way he can't describe, more perfect, more real than a million happy families in a million little houses.

Kid keeps his thrusts rough and unrelenting as he spreads Heart's legs, nudging the man's cock aside to lap at his hole. He sucks and bites at the ring of little muscles, feeling them flutter under his tongue. When he dips inside, Heart clenches around him, but he pounds the man's face until he gives in.

After he's good and wet, Kid leans back to slip his fingers in. He's done this so many times that he knows exactly where to look, and when he finds it Heart shudders and keens beneath him.

Kid doesn't let up with the pressure, even as Heart's legs start to twitch and kick on their own. He keeps two fingers inside, firmly massaging the man's prostate, as he grabs Heart's cock and starts jerking him off.

Kid doesn't stop even when Heart comes a few minutes later. He milks him through his orgasm, and keeps pumping him even when it's over. That's when Heart starts fighting, squirming and bucking in an attempt to push him off.

"Not yet," he whispers in hot breath against Heart's skin. The man probably can't hear him, but he knows what the whispering means. "I'm not done with you yet, baby."

Kid brings him to a second orgasm, then a third and a fourth, before Heart's cock is oozing almost constantly and he can't tell one from the next. He hasn't come himself, still fucking Heart's throat open at full force even as the minutes pass by.

This is what he's needed, what he's always needed. Losing himself in the hunt, the catch and the kill, is nothing to this. Chasing Heart around the globe in an endless game of cat and mouse was only ever a pale mockery of what Kid would get whenever he finally caught the man.

Those days were over; Heart really was done for. He'd survived before this by pitting forces against each other, sparking civil wars and power struggles to cover his escape. After all those years of following him, catching him for a few wild nights together only to let him go again, Heart had finally played his card.

And he had lost.

Now that the whole world was united against him, he didn't stand a chance. He was brilliant, but the combined intelligence of seven billion people far outshined that of any one alone.

Heart looks utterly wrecked by the time he's done, the mess of cum and saliva and tears making his face a beautiful, sloppy ruin. Kid can't help swiping a few fingers through the wetness, dipping them down to the man's hole and pushing past his abused rim.

Heart gasps and cries and sobs the whole time, but he cums anyway, cock trembling weakly and leaking out his orgasm.

"Two more days," Kid says later, when they're in the shower and Heart's leaning against the glass door. He slides his hands down one of Heart's leg to scrub it with soap, the man's flesh sex-softened and boneless under the hot spray.

Heart doesn't respond, and the only sign he's heard him is a few lazy blinks.

"If you hadn't broken out in two more days, I would've gone to get you myself."

Apparently, Heart wasn't tired enough not to preen. A deep rumble comes from the back of his throat, almost like a purr. His lips open, and it takes a few tries for him to get words out. "Miss...me?"

Kid lowers his mouth over the man's neck, speaking right up against the skin. "I'd have fucked you right there, in that goddamn cell, with all those people staring."

Heart has enough energy left for a loose smirk. "So...sweet."

Heart passes out halfway through their shower, a normal occurrence. Kid finishes washing him, then dries him and spreads him out nude on the kitchen table. Medical supplies were easy to find around the house of a former doctor, and Kid makes sure to bandage and treat every one of Heart's bloody cuts and bruises.

The moonlight is filtering in through the windows, casting a filmy white light over Heart's naked body. It lit up all the mottling patches on him, the raw redness on his wrists and the harsh bitemarks that dot his thighs. His sleeping form was so peaceful, so expressionless, that he looks almost like an angel, his innocent body ruined by the claws of a demon.

Heart might be beautiful when he's coming apart beneath him, but like this, he's gorgeous.

There's not much left of the bed, but Kid lays Heart down on the biggest scrap of mattress he can find. He spends ten minutes scouring the room for the softest blanket available, taking time to shred all the ones that aren't good enough. When he finds one he's happy with, he lays it over Heart with an almost ceremonial reverence, careful not to disturb him.

Then he tosses himself on the floor, not bothering to avoid the cutting-sharp splinters of wood that are all that's left of the bedframe. He drops his head on one arm, propping himself up so he can see Heart through the darkness of the room.

He isn't safe here.

Kid hadn't checked to make sure that he wasn't followed. Sure, the last person authorities would suspect of harboring Heart would be the one who put him behind bars in the first place, but soon enough someone would put two and two together and come knocking on Dr. Trafalgar's door.

Twelve weeks ago, the spread of the synthetic disease 'Black Heart' was brought to a halt by the discovery of a cure by three graduate college kids in a basement lab.

Six weeks ago, the disease had been successfully quarantined and eradicated in most developed countries.

Four weeks ago, the tide had turned against Heart, as all remaining intact governments launched a full-scale attack on anyone and anything possibly associated to the man. His labs had been discovered and burned to the ground, his agents ferreted out and killed more often than not. Without the chaos that cloaked his movements, Heart had been forced to make a dangerous gamble. He'd retreated to one of his most secure labs in an attempt to escape, one of the few that hadn't been destroyed yet...and one that Kid already knew about.

Kid had driven straight up to the place, avoided a couple dozen traps, typed in eight passwords he'd memorized from his last time catching Heart there, and walked right in.

He'd found Heart holed up in a reinforced concrete room buried half a mile below ground, with a handful of the few men left loyal to him. Most raised their guns as he opened the door, seeing him as an enemy. Some were already shooting before he even stepped inside. A few even recognized him, knowing him as the man who'd let Heart go so many times before, and had thrown their hands up in joy.

He'd killed them all. Walked straight through their bullets, past their outstretched arms, and killed them.

Then he'd thrown Heart down and fucked him on the floor, amidst the torn, cooling bodies of his subordinates. He'd used their blood, pooling on the ground, as lubricant to take Heart hard and fast. He'd fucked him until Heart had passed out, then kept going, thrusting into his limp body until the pain woke him up again, because it was the last time.

Two weeks ago, he'd left Heart as a literal present for the world, blindfolded and wrapped up in industrial tape he'd personally painted red and tied neatly in a bow, with cum still drying on his thighs. Funny how nobody talked about that, when the newscasters did everything they could do demonize Kid and his 'immoral ways'. It seemed like when it came to the man widely regarded as the world's worst criminal, it was easy to just...look the other way.

Two weeks ago, he'd served Heart up on a silver platter to a coalition of people who wanted nothing more than to tear him to bloody bits, even if they tried to look like the good guys by having a pretty little trial for him.

Two weeks ago, he'd left Heart for dead, knowing with the absolute utmost certainty that the man couldn't possibly survive on the run.

Tonight...he needs to think.

He won't sleep tonight, but it doesn't matter, because Heart will.