Black Black Heart

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It used to be that you couldn't stand moments like these. You'd wanted to punch the tiled walls just to crack your knuckles - the sharp pain of newly broken bones must surely be better than the dull, persistent ache somewhere in between your left rib and lung.

Life was all about getting the job done and outside of the job, there was unjustified existence. There was the previous mission and the one still to come but in between, nothing but drifting drifting drifting. There was apathy. There was boredom. There might have been depression.

What restless gnawing you couldn't sleep off like a hangover, you took out on the sparring programs. Punch after jab after kick after throw after hour after hour after hour. The story of your life was keeping this secret: you lived off discipline like it was the fuel in your system, drunk on this poison in your bloodstream. Oil, slick and slippery and oh so very black. Everyone else thought you were just another combat crazed junkie addicted to adrenaline and the rush of a fight.

And you felt ugly because of it. Dark hair, blue eyes, cheekbones and all.

There's a hum in your head, a buzz in your ears and a thin sheen of droplets blurring your vision, that you can't see through to focus. You don't care; you in your skin is enough.

This is how he finds you: naked and needing and angry and wishing the doors in Zion had locks. He isn't much of a talker, your gentler half - a man whose words would only skim over the surface like stones skipping on a lake, before the ripples of a greater silence would swallow them whole. So he settles down next to you, instead. That simple action is simultaneously the least he could do and the most you'll ever ask of him.

Stay with me.

You can feel cloudy, brown water run down your back, not unlike rain washing clean a gutter. The rough sandstone texture of the shower stall scrapes at your bare skin. You feel like a perverse combination of sunshine and sin - warm and dirty and somewhat unworthy of these two minutes he spends freezing his ass off on the cold, bathroom floor. Being there. Passing time with you for the sake of passing time with you.

Because he wants to. Because you could take lives and he'd love you still. And there's comfort in the knowledge that you can't scare him away.

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A/N: stole the title off a song by David Usher.