There is love in a bullet
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Rating: T for Language and Suggestive Themes
../..
He tells him once he loves him. Okay.
There is a long drawn out silence like a long drawn in breath and everyone, everyone is waiting for the exhale. The exhale that is the dying, the withering thing like the broken glass and drops of blood on the floor between them and he says—sorry about that, see you around—and then the sound of footsteps, the sound of a shuddering breath. The final exhale.
../..
For the longest time there is nothing. Just the monotony of life, an endless string of people and work and plans and all the little actions in between. But then the things that do matter in the heartbreak—
He dresses in his finest clothes. He keeps looking at the door, the window he replaced, the places the drops of blood had been. He sleeps with a light on. He tries his hardest to stay awake when his eyelids are burning.
He finds himself pathetic and hates. He finds himself lovesick and doesn't know why because clearly there is nothing there, clearly, because that silence is still ringing in his head and burning on his tongue. He should move on. He should forget.
He dresses in his finest clothes. He keeps looking at the door, the clock, touching his wrist. He is so very tired; he is so very sick.
../..
He moves. Well, not entirely, not yet.
He changes locations, packs up a bag of his clothes and nothing more and rents a hotel in another city, on another continent where everything is new and no one really sees him. He is just a man in a carefully pressed suit.
He doesn't go out much. He doesn't talk much but he drinks a lot and when he drinks he finds he can talk, to the local men and women and endure the way they touch him, careful touches reminiscent of one so long ago.
He doesn't think of time, or days, or months. He doesn't give a shit about time anymore not when it's always restlessly ticking and always annoyingly there, hovering in the corner of his eye. He hates it and really it hates him. It's almost enough to make him smile but it seems, he's afraid, he's forgotten.
../..
It happens when he is getting up in the morning, buttoning his waistcoat and adjusting his cufflinks. In the living room he heads to the coffee maker but there is someone there, just there. No, that isn't quite right. He is watching him with an unreadable look that he doesn't dare try to think about; he doesn't really try to even move. He just looks at him, sees him and then, as a smile starts to bloom on full lips, he hates him.
"I just wanted to talk."
"We've already talked."
"No, I meant…about, you know."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Arthur—"
But he is leaving the room, running down the hall. A new continent then, a new life to start like he's done so many times before just this time for another purpose. Not a greater purpose. Another purpose.
No one follows him.
../..
He is cautious a lot now, around everyone and everything. He doesn't know what will happen and he hates not knowing more than he hates remembering. Sometimes he doesn't even know what he's hiding from. If there is nothing between them, not anymore, why is he here and not where he should be.
But he doesn't know where he should be.
He used to know, maybe, that he should be with the man that wears everyone else, uses them for jobs and then casts them aside like a second skin. He had forgotten what his job had been. He had forgotten what it meant and he had forgotten what he was capable of. He knew now, in the place beneath his sternum in a hollow organ he knew.
He knew he knew he knew and yet he had done it still.
Help him, someone, he thinks—alone and drunk and with a gun in his hand—that he could do it again some days, most days, all the fucking time.
../..
He is back again, once again in his living room, once again noticed when he is waking up and getting ready. He really shouldn't sleep anymore if this is going to keep happening. If he has to deal with this. If he even has to look at him, with the face he's traced so many times with his fingertips. He is faster this time, moving towards the door only to find that it is blocked. He is faster too. This is the second chance and they both know that there probably won't be a third. Pleading eyes and full lips and breath on his face, hot and shameful and smelling faintly of whiskey.
Fuck this.
Fuck him.
Fuck the way his heart is racing and his hands are trembling and the way his hands are curling into fists.
He doesn't talk; they tried that last time. He tried that last time. Instead they stare and when he leans in closer, too close, too much, he strikes, a fist in the face followed by another and another and another. Vulnerable flesh that just gives way under his skin, yielding bruises and fractured bones and in some places blood.
He is a monster. See this, the creature that story books never get into, the creature that has felt heartbreak and fed off of it for too long. See this, the man with nothing left who is beating up his everything. See this, a desperate man who will do anything to hurt the man who had hurt him.
It is a one-sided fight. It's always been like that. His tailored suit is wrinkled and blood is smeared across his knuckles. His eyes are glassy. His heart is not his chest but in his throat, ready to crawl out of his and just be gone for good. Good riddance maybe.
His victim, his fucking enemy, stares up at him with blackened eyes and a nose dripping and smiles at him with blood soaked teeth. His cheekbone looks fractured. Maybe a rib is fractured. He is a bloody mess and he is smiling like nothing is wrong and the blurriness in his eyes gets worse and worse and he raises his arm to hit him again, just one more time—
"Arth…ur….I love….you…"
A single choked gasp, strangled in what might be emotion and what is probably blood before he finds his fist hovering over an unconscious body. Something shudders in him. His heart burns and recedes not in his chest, not yet, but this time in his stomach.
They are both still for different reasons. Or perhaps it's the same. This had started in a fight, a moment of violence that could be mistaken in passion and here, again, where it ends. Different directions but it is the same thing. And somehow, in the violence there is love.
Love that comes in drops of blood and countries across the world and broken knuckles and shattered glass and empty ashtrays and scotch bottles. This is it.
He kisses the blood from the other mans lips and bandages the cuts, the bruises and the fractures that his own fists have wrought. Because it can never be any other way, not with them, not in this love story.
../..
This is a love story. He told him once that he loves him. He told him once that he loves him too. There is no need to run anymore but no longer a need to know. It's been said and it's been said once and maybe that will have to be enough. Maybe that is enough.
"You didn't let me properly think about it before running off like that darling."
"Well your expression…I just thought…"
"Oh Arthur, you have to have a little faith in me love."
"Is that all it will take?"
"Well, faith and a lot of bullets."
"That's what I thought, Mr Eames."
When they kiss they draw blood. When the touch they scratch skin. When they touch they want nothing more than to tear the other apart just to push them back together in all the wrong places.
This is a love story because there is love in the passion, the inhales and the exhales and in the slide of a bullet into a barrel.
This is a love; this is a life; this is a passion; this is a knife.