A/N: So I seriously seriously ship this. Yep. Also a chance to play around with prose, which is always fun.

avarice is an old friend (I might owe him fifty bucks)

The noise of battle is impossible to ignore, impossible to dismiss and impossible to push aside as a particularly bad dream, because it's all swirling mesmerizingly close now, looping through the air in sequence, a crescendo of screams and begs and loud heady laughter.

It's his.

All of this, all the turmoil and destruction and the crack and din of violence compounded, it's all his, and Jack would have be a complete idiot not to take a moment to sit back and enjoy it a little. He smiles, razor sharp that cuts across the grown contours of his face until it hits his eyes and they bleed a little, the red iris glinting hello and goodbye all at once, a weapon of itself, though pathetic when compared to the one on stage and center before him.

She turns to deliver a lightning fast kick to the men behind her before flipping back to avoid the responding gunfire. For a moment she seems to freeze in the air, back arching as her lips move in a scream. He laughs harder, because he knows that yell and he knows those lips and both spell danger for everyone around her. Fire explodes and knocks the men back as orange and white sparks race through the air.

Jack wonders if they ever noticed just how different their styles were, how Raimundo leaps nimbly through the sky, while Omi flows from one perfect form to another, and Clay centers his weight like a stone in order to deliver solid blows. Their elements defined them, and it didn't take an advanced computer program eleven hours to figure that out. Well, it had, and he'd built it specifically for that purpose anyways and he likes thinking that a success is a success no matter how long it takes to reap the benefits.

And staring right in front of him is one success that he's still waiting on. Jack can barely resist grinning. She spins like top, twisting her form from place to place like she knows every movement from every moment. She probably did, but hey, he likes taking just a little credit for strategy. She's a whirling dervish of flames, skirt spinning, eyes flashing—until they land on him.

They flash like a cinder and they expand, until she's sneering and yelling from those dangerous lips, "You wanna chip in any time soon?"

Jack slouches a little further, unable to keep the smirk from splitting his face in two. The rafters are a fun and relatively safe way to watch all the action, especially since they'd already corralled all those creepy mercenary dudes in the warehouse in the first place. Idiots thought they were cornering them. Right.

Eyeing her vicious right hook to a particularly ambitious guy, he wonders if they were feeling so confident now that they saw how totally kickass his bodyguard was. "C'mon Kimi, you know how this goes. I track down the dangerous magical artifacts; you defend the dangerous magical artifacts…" He places a hand on his chest and tries to look sufficiently downtrodden. "I thought that meant something."

Her answer comes in the form of a large figure hurling towards him. He yelps and dodges, but not fast enough to escape being knocked from his perch by an unconscious mercenary that a freaking insane dragon of fire threw at him. Scowling, he activates his helipack mid-fall and rubs at the growing lump on his head.

Kimiko's laughter echoes through the high ceiling as she crouches and sweeps the feet of another enemy. "Good job, Jack," she compliments dryly. "Really used your head there."

"Oh, hardy har har. You're a real comedian."

Jack grumbles for a moment, but can't find it in himself to fault it, can't find it in himself to do anything else but watch her kick butt and take a small satisfaction in the fact it's not him. This truce was fragile at best and had been for the last few months, but at least it was holding.

Speaking of holding, those mercenaries are getting seriously trumped. He shakes his head. What some people will do to keep hold of a centuries old fortunetelling device. He sees movement from the corner of his eyes and rolls his eyes. Wow, first you find a woman capable of controlling fire and then your first thought is—let's use some explosives against her!

Having convinced himself that it totally wasn't the same thing he'd tried all those years ago, Jack swoops into a dive to grab her because damn if he was going let her break all the very important, very expensive equipment he spent all week making.

Priorities, he had them.

Several of the goons try to attack him in lieu of the superpowered woman beating them back without breaking a sweat. He weaves his way through them all, figuring that nearly ten years of practice and the dozens of modifications on his helipack had to count for something.

A couple manage to hit him anyway, but Jack just laughs, the feel of the air combined with the crackling sparks from her last attack burning against his skin negating everything else, pushing him only to reach her before she got overwhelmed. Every cut, every nick, every bruise was a question, an interrogation, a uniformed man with overworked dull eyes boring into him and asking and asking 'How much do you love her?'

And oh, he loves her like a gunshot; wild and explosive and damning. He loves the way sound cracks through his head and rings through his ears, pounding and swift and lingering like a lost thought he has to scramble to find. He loves her like gunpowder on the air, heavy and suffocating and so sharp it hurts until it dissipates but never leaves, still coats onto his hands and under his nails and skin for years and years, years and years he spends clawing his throat for breath from the smell accosting his senses, a temptation he can't recall enough about to ever, ever be sated.

He loves her like the recoil, begging for it until it delivers like a gasp and he has to fight to suck in just enough air for the next gunpowder breath. A hair thin trigger was all that separates, but the thoughts ram against him every finger twitch tighter, asking if he really wanted more of the same, of her hollow point presence with the deadly smirk, of the bullet wounds he'd have to bear as the trophies until his entire body was riddled through and through, the answer lost in a crumbling mind besieged only by her—and the answer is always the same, would always be the same.

And she was the only one who didn't know that.

Jack's smile turns manic for a moment as he reached out his hand for her. The monks had guessed already, guessed a long, long time ago. He was called a selfish jackass most days by her; so really, did she actually expect him to let her go when their brief 'partnership' was over and done with? Kimiko's face turns up to him, her eyes frantic as she used one of the men as a springboard in order to leap forward.

No, he won't be giving her up anytime soon, never, never, until he's pulled her down to his level, fingers digging into her hips as he drags her into his world, searing a kiss across lips that spell danger like a siren song, unwilling to let the first person who'd ever tried to believe he was capable of better from leaving him like everyone else. He laughs, wild and explosive and damned, and he clutches her close as he soared upwards and stole her away from the rabble.

His.