Eventuality

Disclaimer: Believe it or not, I don't own Black Lagoon. What a complete and utter shock, right?

Also, this is written for Day 2 of Shipping Week at the Caesar's Palace forum. The prompt was 'Shout', and my brain automatically thought of these two. ...That's probably not the healthiest sign, but screw it; I'm doing it anyway. Happy reading!

"God-fucking-damn it, that hurts!"

Rock sighed, partly out of exasperation, and partly out of exhaustion. He'd had a trying enough day without factoring Revy's outbursts into the matter. Factoring them in just cranked the scale to truly legendary degrees, even for him.

'Not that I can hold it against her,' Rock mused, wrapping a bandage around the wound on her lower leg. 'I doubt I'd be enjoyable company if I got skewered in the shin.'

"I know it does, Revy," he said, attempting to placate her. "Just try to hold still; it's hard enough to do this while we're moving." almost on-cue, the car they were riding in hit a bump, causing Rock to bounce and drawing another expletive from Revy's mouth as her wounded leg was jostled.

She had stretched the injured limb across the full length of the backseat, and his position in the passenger seat didn't make the task at hand any easier. Revy had already nearly kicked him in the face when he applied the disinfectant

He quickly went back to working on it, and was soon ready to tighten the bandage.

"Bite down on your jacket," he warned her, and to Revy's credit, despite shooting death at him from her eyes, she did as she was told. Closing his eyes and grimacing at the thought of how much pain his action would cause her, he pulled tightly on the end and finished wrapping it around her injury.

"Motherfucker!"

Rock simply turned around and buckled his seatbelt, figuring she was more likely to simmer down if he didn't engage her. Telling her to calm down had a tendency to be counterproductive.

After a few minutes, Revy spoke up.

"How long until we can get the hell outta here?" she inquired, in a rather impolite manner.

"It shouldn't be much more than an hour until we reach the airport," the man driving - one of Balalaika's crew - responded, apparently not begrudging her rudeness.

"Thank Christ…" she said, ripping her winter hat off with her left hand and allowing her head to loll back against the window. "I need to get someplace warm again."

"So, Balalaika's arranged everything, then?" Rock asked the driver.

The man nodded. "False passports are in each of your bags, along with all the documents you'll need. They're all in the trunk."

Rock then realized something. Something that made him shiver at the prospect of it.

Revy couldn't walk by herself. He was going to have to assist her all throughout the process of getting on their plane.

'Why me?'

'That was way too easy,' thought Rock as he finished putting their luggage in the overhead compartment. Revy had actually allowed him to be a crutch for her while they went through the Customs, as well as when they boarded the plane. She hadn't even objected when he deigned to as the stewardess for a pillow for her.

'I still have scars from the time she got sick.' He shuddered at the memory: a flying boot, an impact and pain. 'And I think she broke her own record for most curses said in one day. Something's up.'

Rock sat down - he had let her have the window seat - and tried his best to unwind from the hellacious day he had had. Unfortunately for his inner peace of mind, concerns over Revy's uncharacteristic behavior kept springing him forth, denying him rest.

'Could it be blood loss? She lost a lot ' The sight of her lying on her back, skewered through the shin by Ginji's katana, flashed in his head once again. Rock closed his eyes, wishing the memory would go away. He didn't need to see her like that: so close to death, the blood pooling around her smirking form as she lowered her arm and Ginji fell to the side, blood gushing from the bullet wound in his throat. That image; that visual of her triumphant and so… So… So alive in the face of death.

It could very well destroy him.

One day, she wasn't going to be smirking in victory, eyes blazing with fire that only burned when she was in the heat of battle. One day she wouldn't shrug off any injuries with a hearty chuckle and several glasses of Bacardi. One day she wouldn't be bitching about having to save his ass even while smiling at him. Or, as near as she ever came to a genuine smile - 'like that time at the festival,' Rock recalled fondly.

One day she would be dead from such an encounter.

Thoughts revolving around this unfortunate eventuality came relentlessly now, now free from their compartmentalized prison. Rock buried his face in his hands in an attempt to keep his failing composure hidden from everybody on the plane.

'Why does she do this? Why the fuck doesn't she see how stupid it is?!' He was screaming internally; words he had never had the courage to say to her face - not even that one time in the marketplace where she almost blew his head off - were spewing forth. 'Doesn't she know how much it scares me to see that? How terrified I am of seeing her eyes go blank and lifeless? Is she really that thick!?'

It all flowed furiously, like a river breaking through a dam. Each thought pierced his heart anew. For a brief moment in time - for the first real moment in time - every fear and worry he had regarding her reckless abandon with her own life was clamoring for acknowledgement.

'Of all the people I had to fall for, why her?'

And then, silence.

Rock brought his head out of his hands as clarity set in. He'd finally admitted it to himself. He'd finally acknowledged the all too obvious reason for his concern. Why else would he be so bent out of shape?

'No use denying it, I guess…' He exhaled and let his himself slouch in the seat, his arm brushing against the leather of her coat. Rock turned his head to the left and looked at her for the first time with a new conscious appreciation. She seemed to be asleep, or somewhere in the space between wakefulness and slumber. Her face, usually snarling or smirking or boastful was a picture of tranquility. It brought a gentle smile to Rock's face to see her so serene; so free from the various demons that drove to put up such a carefree front. At that moment, she looked just like any ordinary woman you might meet on the street.

Rock had to stifle a laugh at that. 'Ordinary woman. Right. She'd probably make good on her threat to shoot me in the balls if she heard me say that.'

He paused his tension-cutting train of thought as he remembered the only time he'd seen her look so relaxed. When they were at that shooting stall in Japan, before she'd become enraged at just barely losing, she'd looked at him with more tenderness than he had ever seen her display and softly smiled at him. At him. There was no question of him seeing things. She had deliberately looked directly at him, and smiled.

He couldn't get over it. She never gave a fully genuine smile to anyone. There was always sarcasm, always bloodlust, always something coloring her lips.

'So, why was it for me?'

Why, indeed?

Revy stirred at that point, and her head slipped onto his shoulder. Either she didn't notice that was now using Rock as a pillow, or she simply didn't care, but either way, Rock certainly didn't mind.

He chuckled at what he knew they would have looked like to the ignorant eye: 'just a normal couple.' He found himself shaking his head at the absurdity of the very notion. 'When was the last time I was normal?' he pondered, almost wistfully. The plane had long since take off from Japan, thus leaving the last of his severed ties to his old, dull, uninteresting life far behind him on the ground. They were there, leading their contemporary lives, and he was flying with her.

'With her.'

Rock sighed at his own sappiness. 'God, she'd call me such a girl if she heard any of this.' Suddenly, something occurred to him. 'Heh, she'd probably laugh at me if she knew how I felt about her.' Based purely on all the times she had said how she didn't care about others, he would have been correct.

But he knew that to be a defense mechanism. And while he didn't actively combat it anymore, he knew to take such claims with a massive grain of salt. She cared; if she didn't, there was no way she would have saved his life as many times as she had. Including that very day.

'But does she care about me like that? Is she even capable?'

Rock honestly wasn't sure if he wanted to know the answer to that query. Regardless of whether she could and did, or not, their story was no fairy tale. It would end in blood and heartbreak. Before he had joined Lagoon Company, he, ever the optimistic one, would likely have held strongly to the possibility that everything could resolve itself for a happy ending. Nowadays?

Not even remotely.

Revy then whispered something. Something that Rock barely heard, but the words slipped inside and made their presence known.

"I told you not to look. Why didn't you look at me?"

It came back to him in that moment. He hadn't fully registered it at the time, but now it was crystal clear.

As he had been helping her up after her encounter with Ginji, he had seen Yukio walking over to his corpse. As she had picked up his katana, he could hear Revy shouting at him, beseeching him.

"Don't look at her, Rock! Look at me!"

He didn't. He watched an eighteen-year old girl impale herself and fall atop her slain bodyguard's corpse.

Why?

'Why would she say that? Why would she care about me seeing it? I've seen death before. I've seen a lot of it.'

As Rock kept pondering, a simple answer clawed its way to the forefront of his mind.

'Maybe she does care about me like that.'

Instinctively, he turned toward her to search her face for any evidence to either support or contradict that idea, but she was still peaceful, unguarded, and asleep.

He sighed yet again, as he had yet another question to grapple with.

'She wouldn't want to spare that image if she didn't care. She sounded too urgent for that not to be the case.'

He knew he'd see Yukio in his nightmares whenever he fell asleep. He still saw Gretel sometimes, after all, so why would she be any different?

Rock kept deliberating over the meaning of the smile and the desperate command until he finally gave up, accepting the very valid possibility.

'So, let's say she does care in that way. What am I supposed to do about it?'

Rock tried to conjure one up, but he didn't have an answer. He knew the dangers associated with her - he practically embraced them - and he knew nothing could end in a truly happy and joyous manner. With every day that came and went, there was a danger of it being their last.

'I guess the question is: do I keep it to myself, and when it finally happens, it'll hurt less, or do I get it out, and maybe enjoy some happiness before the end?'

He was too exhausted to think on it anymore, and after looking at his watch and seeing that they were stuck on the plane for another four-and-a-half hours, he decided he should copy Revy's actions. He could handle the ensuing nightmares.

He closed his eyes, and within seconds, he was lost in oblivion. Flying with her.

A/N: Well, that was all sunshine and rainbows, eh? Heh, I think it's impossible to write these two without at least a boatload of angst peppering every thought and piece of dialogue, but what do I know. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this thing I wrote in three hours.

Read, review, and I'll see ya next time.

-TheNotSoTalentedPoet