It's a dark, foul-smelling corridor where they see each other for the first time.
"New?"
"Chapel."
It being a dark corridor, the first glimpse is poor. Yet he sees dark glasses on the other's face, guarding against the honey-sun far above.
"Here long?"
"Couple days."
It's a brief moment and then they pass. He fingers the handle of the case that rests on his right, and it's warm, flushed skin and sweaty palms against cool metal. He almost drops the case, but it's something he can never drop. Still, it's a strange feeling, a new sensation but still with a lingering echo of déjà vu, that's washing over him like the dusk light as he's leaving the corridor.
There, he's thinking, there is someone like me.
It's a grim career in which they're colleagues, and he leaves to do his work while the other is left pacing in front of a lone, blue-painted door. When he returns the other has left, has taken the motorcycle he saw upon his departure and left tracks in the sand off to the east. He pauses; he is stopping to think and to lose himself in thought. It's a hazardous activity to engage in, especially when he knows he's late and that tardiness is not tolerated. He hurries off to the blue-painted door.
The next time he glimpses the other, it is thankfully in a room where all is visible, albeit by a single, dim orb of fluorescence. He and the other make eye contact now that the glasses are gone. Neither can help but notice that he and the other are seemingly fractions of the same being, the light and the dark; the other has darker hair than he, darker skin, darker clothes. He is correct, too, in perceiving that the other has the darker soul.
He holds a drink, the other a spent cigarette. They don't have anything to say; all they can talk about is the job; neither wants to talk about the job. He downs his shot and the other flicks ashes aside. It's a noticeable icebreaker when the other lights a new cigarette and offers a third across the table.
"I quit," he says.
"No you didn't," says the other, and he takes the cigarette and accepts the light when it's offered, too.
"These taste like shit," he says.
The other snorts. "They're cheap as hell, what can you do? Bet it clashes with your brandy there, anyway."
"Midvalley."
"Hornfreak."
"Yes."
"Wolfwood."
"I know."
They both exhale and cloud each other's faces.
"I need a ride…to a job tomorrow. Cyclops usually takes me in her rover but she's out."
"So Angelina?"
"Come again?"
"My bike."
"Oh. Yes." He pauses. "I understand. It's like me and Sylvia." His finger slowly traces a decal on the battered case at his right, ever-present. The other smiles with a nod and flick of ash.
And so it's arranged that they make their third encounter, the next day at second sunrise, when they leave and when he takes his seat behind the other on the well-used, well-loved motorcycle. It's easiest just to hold on as they drive, north this time, arms around the other's waist for stability; then, everything becomes unstable, and it's not easiest, it's hardest of all.
The other smells of cigarettes, those that taste horrible but smell fine. His face in the other's back, he smells the smoke and the sweat-sand-mud odor that belongs to everyone in the desert. There's another twinge of smoke that must be from a gun. Then he realizes he can feel a gun, at the other's hip; he can feel the other's hip. He can feel waist and stomach and shoulders and spine, and it's becoming so very difficult.
The two shudder horribly, vibrations moving from the rough surface to the smooth chrome of the bike to the jagged tension between them. They follow a road that isn't there to a town that isn't familiar. And then he's supposed to get off the motorcycle, and leave the other, and do his job, and this is harder than anything he's done yet. He pulls himself away with sweating palms, a struggle. It's such a struggle. Until he takes his case, his constant, from the back of the bike, he can't meet the other's eyes and can't fathom why.
"Calm down," the other says as he walks off, "or you'll get yourself killed."
"Yeah. Thanks."
"It's nothing."
Oh, it's everything, and he knows it all too well.
It's encounter number seven, after the job is over, after the ride back is over with its mix of pleasure and pain, that finally almost makes it easy again. Outside the blue-painted door, it's dark and quiet and secret. They're the last to cross its threshold, two at the end of a line of twelve. He leans against the wall; the other sits, slumping, mumbling expletives, fumbling with a cigarette. The case rests at the wall beside him.
The air in the cold-quiet-dark between them is tense, thick with that tension that is always described as able to be cut with knives. Knives don't cut it, though; it's a piercing scream, soft only due to distance, from behind the blue-painted door. The scream sounds, the echo dies away and the tension isn't just cut, it snaps when the other stands, puts the cigarette out, begins a sentence with "I…", and kisses him all in some strange movement like liquid rock.
He's not expecting this but he doesn't even think of complaining, the other flush against him with elbows braced on the wall behind. The cigarettes taste foul but below them it's there, the way he knew the other would taste, honey and wasabi and sweet, sweet brandy. It's all the things that taste so good to him.
Hot, soft and hard all at once like fresh bread, they sink to the floor and completely forget the job and the blood and the blue-painted door until another scream comes from behind it and they're both brought back to damnable reality.
They look a fair semblance of normal by the time Cyclops emerges from the door with blood trickling from her collarbone down into her shirt. "You're next," she says to the other, a croaked whisper before she staggers off.
He watches the other watching him as the door closes. It's a strange look between them, full of encrypted messages and blatant lies. The other vanishes, and he's alone in the corridor with his case and a cigarette stub.
The thirty-ninth encounter is months later, alone together, hidden in a bathroom that hasn't worked in years. They've done anything and everything by now, between each other and the job. His case and the other's cross bar the door for good measure.
When it's all over, the other sends him that look of codes that they've perfected and says, in as quiet a voice as the other can ever use, "I've been assigned…in the field…to Stampede."
The thirty-ninth encounter, he realizes in his final moments, really was the last.