Author's Note: Something I had to write after a conversation and listening to Depeche Mode.


There's a hole in your soul like an animal
With no conscience, repentance, oh no
Close your eyes, pay the price for your paradise
Devils feed on the seeds of the soul

-Depeche Mode


No words pass between them.

None are ever needed.

They don't need conversation, or polite chat, or frivolous nattering that people fill the air with today. They don't need it, and they don't want it. There is nothing civilized in them anymore - no matter how they are dressed up or paraded about - and that's how they fuck.

It isn't sex, it certainly isn't "making love".

They fuck like wounded wild things, clawing and biting and hissing their way to oblivion. They can't have peace, so they reach for something darker, something primal. So much in their world is controlled, corralled into the next mission, and the new target, and they know no one else will understand. No one will understand what it's like to be so utterly broken that words akin to "love" and "happiness" and "content" have lost all meaning.

The past is red to them, a dripping, drenched red they have no hope of cleansing, but for these singular moments, they can forget. They can forget that their lives are not their own, even though they have been freed of organizational loyalties, and that there is a hole straight through them, one gaping and raw no matter how many friends or smiles or bullet wounds they garner.

They fuck like fire freezing.

One of them is so full of hatred for the other, she would feel an elation in spreading wide his neck and filling her ledger with well-earned red. The other doesn't remember how to hate, and is built of ice and indifference, only touching her, tasting her because she is familiar, and he needs the release.

It isn't sex they want. It isn't love, or companionship, or emotional attachment. There is violence in their acts, the same as when they fought; he is relentless, she is mercurial. Rarely is there a bed involved, because that would mean they had the foresight to be near one. Couches, tables, the wall in a back alley, a bathroom stall, or the padded floor of a gym. Always there are bruises, always there are scrapes and cuts, but those are never remarked upon.

In their line of work, such things are common.

That makes it so much easier for their insanity to continue.

She knows she should stop this - whatever this is - but he gives her what she craves. He gives her what her partners have all been too afraid to give her.

Trust.

There is a fine-fucking-line between pleasure and agony, and none have ever been able to understand her need for both; they are terrified of truly hurting her. But he is doesn't have that worry. He knows how far to go, what pain she will enjoy, and what simply hurts. He knows it, because it is the same for him. Their madness works because they both know how far the other will go, and just how hard to push for that brink.

They are crumbling, cracking in this new world.

He is being told relentlessly that he can be fixed, that his memories will return and suddenly all will be well. As though decades of slaughter will be reversed. Internally, he screams himself ragged, knowing there will never "fixed" in his future. He is a tool without use, and it is spiralling him mad. So he uses her, uses his past to forget the present, fully aware that this delirium is only going to rip through them all in the end.

He doesn't care.

She is tired of the right thing.

The feel of her skin, and the taste of his lips, the swell of her breast and the smoothness of his cock, they feed the fleeting notion that this oblivion they are reaching for can be a lasting thing; as soon as they are left panting and sore, they know the dark mindlessness will be lost to earthly thoughts.

They fuck like wounded, wild things.

No words pass between them.