a/n: The only reason why this is rated M is for the subject matter. It is not for cursing, gore, or gratitous sex or innuendos. I think it's a heavy thing to be written about so--heavy warning, savvy?
endgame.
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Fifteen, a faggot and sweating on the tiles. His hair pasted to the back of his neck, collecting skin cells and cowardice that melt together to befoul the air. He inhales sharply, his cardboard ribs stretching like they never have before.
It's difficult, this breathing business.
He rests his head against the porcelain curve of the sink and breathes and almost-cries for the destruction of dreams, the death of bow-shaped mouths and kind hands. He nearly cries for the end of that little girl-child in the store yesterday. Her eyes had widened until they were the size of the buttons on his coat, her lips stretching to scream someone's name.
Tyki had held her close to his side, and the two had burned together. Joan of Arc without her armor plus the sad, sad mutation of Lucifer. What a sore butchering of literature; John Milton would scream at the top of his black-ink lungs if he could see them now. The angels had already got their chance to weep—their tears had collected, ash-dry and papery beneath his partner's boots.
Rhode knocks on the door and says, "Are you ready to go?"
Her voice sounds like honey. Honey covered with sheets of anthrax.
"Allen?"
He should just kill her now.
The girl opens the door and says, her voice lilting at the end, "What are you doing, Allen? Are you being boring again?" Her eyes swing towards her companion's pallid face, his down turned corpse-lips and she laughs the sound pushing against the walls. It nearly caves in and he thinks he's gone mad until she breathes, "Oh, are you crying? Feeling a bit sorry, mmm?"
He doesn't feel sorry. He killed that little girl-woman. He watched the shapeless form of a man deteriorate, his skull hitting the plastic floor before his knees did. The curled form of the old man down at the corner of the road who sold oranges—his mouth, gaping, asking for the clemency of the gods. He doesn't feel sorry, he just feels—
"Boring." Rhode yawns. She curls her child's fingers around his wrist, and it's time to go.
In the pale eclipse of sunshine, they stand together. Her hips pressed to his stomach, her thin arms wound around the circumference of his waist. She flattens her face to his back and inhales his scent. He smells like burnt orange peels and decay, and she smiles.
"You ready?" Her voice is high-pitched, like the chimes his father used to buy. Mana used to watch them without blinking, cataloguing the glinting of blue-tinted glass.
Rhode's voice isn't like glass. She speaks, and all he hears in damnation and the hard feel of rotten candies and swollen tongues, twitching beneath his boots like locusts.
His hands are trembling.
"I spy with my little eye," Rhode sings. "Target one!"
She points (rude little thing) over at the man by the newspaper stand. He's muttering under his breath and scowling, a hand tugging at pieces of dark hair from underneath his cap. He's a strange sort of beautiful, and Allen thinks—for a moment, maybe—that he's the sort of man you could rely on to be predictable. Get up early, spill things in the kitchen; kiss you on the forehead before you left for work.
"If he's into pederasty. I kinda doubt it." Rhode trills, giggling.
He flushes. Fifteen, a faggot and filthy.
She pushes him forward and he can feel her words burning on his neck like hellfire, a simple "You know what to do" and his legs are jerking mechanically, his boots loud on the pavement. He swallows and croaks, "Sir, I—" and touches the man's shoulder.
The man whirls around, and the cap falls. He steps on it as he leans forward, snarling, "What the f—"
Rhode's cackling in the background. To her, this is better than Christmas.
He can feel the press of plugs conjoined on the surface of his abdomen as he clutches the dark-haired man to his chest. The man claws at his back, Allen's mouth is full of dark hair and the heavy scent of tea and cheap soba bought from the restaurant downtown. They'd been there once, him and Rhode, huddled together in a booth as she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. Held his hand and told him that they were both going to hell and laughed, like locusts, like the buzzing of hornets.
"One." He croaks, and he wants to die. Fifteen, a faggot, and cowardly.
The man is twisting in his grip, cursing him in two different languages.
Rhode's laughing—he hopes she chokes.
"Two."
The man can feel the spark plugs and panics, sliding the handle of a pocketknife towards his chest. Allen's arms are shaking, and here is Rhode, his less than holy savior, skipping towards him with her own set of wires bared on her little girl body. She wraps her arms around the man's torso and smiles—grimaces?—into his coat.
Allen swallows. He hums under his breath; a soft, cruising lullaby his father used to sing. Hesitantly, he mutters, "Swing low, sweet chariot—"
The man screams. "If you don't fucking let go of me—"
"Comingforthtocarrymehome." Allen snarls desperately.
The man curls between them, screaming in bursts of Japanese and mottled English, and the policeman are coming—flashes of blue and black, like bruises, like crows.
"Three." whispers Rhode, and it's all over now, baby blue.