Bob liked to clean the guns because it gave him an excuse to sit in his room on his own, smoke some cigarettes and soak up the feeling of peace and well-being that he couldn't find elsewhere. He liked how the separate parts of the guns fitted together so nicely, he liked how it all just worked. Barrel, slide, receiver. All as they should be, spread out across his metal desk like a drawing of anatomy.

"We're famous now," Frank has said breathlessly, not three months before, grinning so wide that Bob could see the points of his incisors. Even through the dust of the explosions. "We'll have the fucking Bebop after us now, I'll bet you."

They had escaped that time, up out of the vaults of the embassy they were trying to rob, because some bounty hunters only knew how to blow shit up, and that would never be enough to catch Bob and Frank.

Then sure enough, barely a day later, they were on Big Shot: "Frankie Iero and Bob Bryar! These two cowpokes are a couple of genuine hijackers! 10,000,000 Woolongs each makes them a fine catch. If you can catch them that is. They've already outfoxed three of the best bounty hunters out there..."

So yeah, Bob liked it when things were easy and when they flowed as they should. He liked to have some peace and quiet sometimes.

He picked up the loose barrel of the gun and turned it over in his hands, watching the spot of light move across the metal. He took a drag of his cigarette, blew the smoke out through his nose and said, "You found us then?"

"With some difficulty," said a voice behind him. A voice Bob knew because Bob was a criminal, and all good criminals knew that voice. He heard the clackclick of a gun being cocked and the voice said, "You're going to have to come with me, Bryar."

Bob sighed as he stood up because this wasn't how it was supposed to be. On his own fucking ship, unarmed and helpless.

"Spike Spiegel, right?" Bob held out a hand but Spike didn't take it. Instead just did some sly, small smile and motioned towards the door with the gun.

"You know Frank isn't on the ship," Bob said as he walked into the hallway, the air conditioning making his skin prickle. "He went out to find you."

"Yeah. Ironic, isn't it," Spike said.

As far back as it was important to remember, Bob had lived his life like a person handling an addiction: One step at a time, measuring the long moments between one high and the next. Those spaces like grey static.

When Bob thought back to those times, it was like trying to remember a movie he had seen once. All the details were kind of blurred and the characters walking around were ones he didn't know and didn't care about. The only scene he ever really remembers, before everything changed at least, was when Frankie Iero's little blue MONO racer had crash-landed onto the wide deck of his ship. Smashing the shit out of everything Bob had tagged as 'well-known', 'expected', 'routine'. Bob always wondered how Frank had managed to crash into a docked ship. But then, that was just Frank, he supposed.

"Fuck, fuck, you can't report this." And man, Frank had seemed so fucking young back then, dressed all in black and shitting himself about his stolen ship, that was at that point smoking pitifully on the deck of The Project. Frank talking a mile a minute about the ISSP and how they had his picture on file because of some dumb drugs-related shit he had done a couple of years ago.

Technically, even though he seemed it, Frank wasn't that much younger than Bob. They could even have grown up together if fate had tilted just an inch this way or that. But at the time Frank had seemed so helpless and so scared that Bob had just kind of felt sorry for him. He had wanted to help him out.

And so after the crash Frank had slipped into Bob's life like a square peg. He was always just there after that. After Bob had assured him, "No, dude, I won't report it. I'm on their books too, you know." After he had transported Frank back to Ganymede and helped him patch up his little stolen racer. Told him, Yeah, ok, you can stay here for a bit. But seriously, just for a little while.

Then of course 'a little while' turned into 'a long while' and Frank turned out to be pretty fucking exhausting in the long run. In the beginning Bob found himself constantly holding his breath when he was around, like he was a ticking bomb or something. And no matter how much Frank managed to permeate into all the aspects of his life, Bob never really managed to fully figure him out. It was as though there was some chasm of understanding between them, even when so much of their lives slid together so easily.

It wasn't until they started doing jobs together that Bob began to realise that Frank was more than just some misguided little dynamo, he was more than just someone to gauge his own actions by. Frank was a fucking force of nature when it came to being a criminal. He was quick and smart and moved around exactly as he needed to, like he had a sixth sense for what Bob wanted.

Frank would plant home-made explosives on the cargo ships that they held up between gates, and when the shockwaves of the explosions rocked The Project as they flew away, Frank would laugh excitedly, shouting, "Fuck, that was fun!"

That was how it was for a whole year. Maybe the longest period of semi-stability Bob had ever known. He'd certainly never lived with anyone for that long since he had left home when he was thirteen, certainly never lived with another man longer than about three days. But Frank was more like an extra limb than another person, and Bob just got used to him. Even with the loud music and the weird food concoctions, the drunken urination in stage places around the ship and the girls he brought back whenever they were docked for more than a day.

But it was the jobs that Bob really got used to. After a while he forgot how he ever managed on his own. It must have been so fucking dangerous back then, before Frankie Iero was there to back him up. Shooting his mouth off and scaring the shit out of everyone whenever he and Bob went to work.

This one time though, they robbed a bank on Venus and Frank accidentally shot a woman in the side of the neck as they had stumbled out from behind the counters.

"Fuck! Fuck!" Frank skidded across the floor and fell to his knees at the woman's side, his black slacks spreading her blood across the tiles. "Shit, Bob-"

"Don't fucking say my name, dipshit!" Bob was across the room in a second, fisting his hands in the back of Frank's shirt and hauling him to his feet. "Get the fuck out of here. Get out!"

Afterwards Frank couldn't stop shaking and when they heard on the news, "A woman was shot and killed during a bank robbery today-" he had ran to the toilet and thrown up, hunched over the bowl.

Bob said nothing to help him, instead opting to let Frank just ride out the guilt and the anger and whatever the fuck else he was feeling. He figured it was better that way, healthier for the mind. It was like flushing a poison out of your system.

He flew the ship to Earth, negotiating the asteroid belt like he was playing pinball, just like they had planned before it had all gone wrong there in the middle. Bob knew that Frank felt worse about the whole thing because the robbery had been his idea. All planned out to get the money to deliver to some guy that he owed back home. Some guy he assured Bob was nothing to do with the syndicates. "Why the fuck would some big crime lord be living on Earth, dodging rocks every day?" He had a point, Bob supposed, but he still didn't really believe him.

They landed somewhere near New York, where Frank sat for a long time on the shore of some ridiculously huge empty crater and stared out across the dusty air between him and what was once his home. It had all been underground then, from the edge of the river across most of Jersey. Frank spoke about his days under the surface in a way that sounded oddly rehearsed, like he had a script written out in his head just in case anyone was ever actually interested to hear it. He told Bob that he had lived under the surface until a month after his seventeenth birthday. And then just eight days after he had left he heard about the meteor that had hit Earth, one of the biggest yet, over Jersey.

Bob sat on the deck of The Project and watched the still shape of Frank in the distance for a long time before he eventually got up to bring him back to the ship. But instead of bringing him back he ended up just sat next to Frank in silence, his legs over the edge of the crater, counting the meteors that buzzed down through the atmosphere in the distance.

"I played in a band. Back in Jersey," Frank said quietly after a while. "Me and these three other guys. We were getting pretty big, y'know... Well, kind of."

Bob didn't know what to say to this so he said nothing. Just lit a cigarette and handed it to Frank, squinting against the sun.

Frank turned to look at him as he took the cigarette. Said, "You would have liked them," before leaning across the hot air between them and kissing him once on the mouth, and then pulling away and taking a drag on the cigarette like nothing had happened.

Bob sat stock still and counted out six beats by the thud of blood in his ears, before he opened his mouth to speak. But Frank blew out a puff of smoke and continued, "It's just, it's just that I never expected to go from that. To this." Frank smiled and looked pointedly out across the crater, "It was fun once. Right?"

That night they stayed there by the crater because the desert was empty and kind of safe, in a 'we might be crushed by space debris' kind of way. But the main reason was that Bob couldn't be bothered to try and get past the asteroid belt on the way back out. Not without at least one night of sleep.

Frank had taken to wandering around in just his jeans since they had arrived on Earth, saying that it was just the way they rolled down here. "What, shirtless?" Bob had said. And Frank had grinned somewhat sheepishly and said quickly, "And I broke the aircon again" before offering Bob a drink.

Without the aircon the ship was pretty unbearable, even in the middle of a midnight desert as they were then. Bob stood, completely pressed against the main window in the living quarters, trying to soak up the cold from outside. Even though the window was way too thick for him to really feel anything other than just his own reflected heat. He watched the meteors burning across the night sky like fireworks, the black desert all around them. When he heard Frank banging around he looked at the reflection of the room behind him, as Frank wandered in. Bob watched as he sat by an old food crate and started to take his handgun apart, laying out all the pieces and then putting them back together as fast as he could.

"Check it," Frank said, throwing one of Bob's books at him. "Bob, look! Look how fast I can do this now."

Bob watched as Frank slid the parts of the handgun together, the metal clicks echoing sharply off of the room's high walls. And when he finished he tapped the handle of the gun against the crate, pointing the gun at Bob, "Pretty fucking good, huh?"

Bob nodded sleepily, "You realise you could practise that forever but you'll never be as fast as me?"

"Hey, fuck you," Frank stood up and walked over to Bob until he was close enough to press the barrel of the gun into Bob's chest. "Speed doesn't mean anything, not when I'm the best shooter anyway."

Bob looked down at Frank and once again found himself counting out the heavy beats of his heart before he felt it was ok to speak. He watched as the moment slid slowly out of his control, as Frank tucked the handgun into the waistband of his pants and pressed against Bob, hugging his arms around his middle.

"Frank, look-" Bob was suddenly very aware of the solid surface of the window behind him, how there was no where to back away too.

"It's ok, right? It's ok. You get it," Frank said, reaching up with one hand to touch Bob's jaw. "You get all this fucking bullshit."

Bob tried to pull away, lifting his head. But Frank just put his fingers on the long taut line of Bob's neck and stroked across his Adam's apple with the pad of his thumb.

"I don't want this, Frank," Bob put his hands on Frank's hips, feeling the bulk of the hand gun there. "Really. If you thought-"

Frank leant against Bob and let out one long breath, his fingers finding the dip under Bob's ear and lingering there. He was silent as Bob felt for the gun near his hip, as he pulled it free and pressed it firmly to the underside of Frank's jaw. Pulling back the hammer at the same time as his free hand curled around Frank's hip, holding him still.

Frank could feel the barrel of the gun cold against his skin and strange under his tongue, the hard pressure of it.

"I don't want this," Bob said again, watching as Frank swallowed nervously. Ignoring Frank's cock half hard against his leg. "It'll fuck everything up."

Frank swallowed again and looked up at Bob, "Are you going to shoot me then? Because you can. If you want... You can do whatever you want." And this time Bob didn't try to pull away when Frank reached for him, pulling Bob's head down as they kissed. "I'm yours," Frank said quietly, and then said nothing more.

When they started doing bigger jobs, more complicated jobs, bounty hunters inevitably started coming after them. Which Bob had never had before because really, he was pretty small time. It wasn't such a big deal, they had never been shown on Big Shot and they certainly didn't have any efficient bounty hunters after them. "The level of the hunter is only relative to the bounty," Bob had said to Frank as they sat, mildly inebriated on the deck of The Project one night. "And we're a pretty shitty bounty."

So no, it wasn't really a big deal. It was just that life was more of a struggle when you were on the run all the time. It was just that little bit harder.

And despite the fact that Bob figured they would never be big enough to have Spike Spiegel after them, Frank started to get this weird obsession with the Bebop, and sometimes when they fucked he would say, "Fuck, pretend... pretend you've caught me. Pretend I'm a criminal." And Bob would think, Well, you are a fucking criminal. But he wouldn't say it because Frank would let Bob push him hard into the bed when they fucked like that. He let him cuff his hands to the line of pipes that ran along the wall and made Bob tell him he was bad, "You're so fucking bad." And Bob didn't want to ruin that.

Frank spoke about it like he was so sure they were above all of that. The bounty hunters and the witnesses and the botched jobs, that stupid fucking Big Shot programme. Bob's plans were too perfect and they worked together too well. They were just too good to be caught.

But then, of course, they inadvertently destroyed a government building when they were trying to escape some idiot fucking bounty hunter who was attempting to catch them with explosives. Trapping him inside and running for their lives as the building came crashing down behind them. And even though it hadn't really been their fault, that was considered an act of terrorism, that was fucking big time.

Bob could have counted all the reasons why they were fucked but Frank was looking at him like it was the best day of his life, so he just tried to ignore it.

"That's a good picture of you, man," Frank said, pointed at the mug shot on the screen. "You look really young."

"Yeah, thanks."

Frank sat back on the sofa and watched as the Big Shot hosts reeled off their crimes, "Do you think that blonde chick is out of my league?"

Bob laughed, "You're famous now, aren't you? No one's out of your league."

Almost three months later Frank had taken his racer, saying he was going to find the Bebop, before they found The Project. He said he had to see it, just once. Just fucking once.

And Bob had said no, that he wasn't going to go because it was fucking stupid and that they would just end up getting killed. That the only safe place in the whole damn solar system was his own ship and there was no way he was leaving it.

So as Bob sat in the cargo hold of the Bebop, his hands cuffed behind his back, he wondered how the fuck Spike had got onto his ship, how the fuck it had ended up like this.

He knew that they hadn't caught Frank because Bob could hear the Big Shot broadcasts from wherever they watched them on the Bebop, and Frank's name came up as 'wanted' every day before they got back to Mars, before they handed Bob in.

Maybe he'll come and break me out, Bob thought later, lying on the floor of his cell and staring up at the white ceiling, trying to ignore the buzzing in his ears. Bob thought about telling Frank he was bad, he thought about Frank playing guitar in his band in New Jersey, he thought about his quick shooting. All the non-static of his life.

"It's not a life of crime," Frank had said to him once, downing the remainder of a beer and bumping his shoulder against Bob's. "It's an extended period of unlawful adventure."

Bob had smiled and bumped Frank back, saying, "When they catch you, be sure to tell them that."

"They'll never catch me."

"You reckon."

"I fucking know it," Frank leant up and kissed the warm place where Bob's lip was pierced. He waited until Bob smiled down at him incredulously before saying quietly, "You and me, Bryar."