Hired Guns

Requested by stormantia: Watanuki and Doumeki are HIRED GUNS. ...who more or less get the job done. Just...not so much the killing part. Or the violent part. Watanuki cares too much. (Bonus points if Himawari or Yuuko hire them!)

This is one of the darker universes in this lot, but really, HIRED GUNS, people! How could I resist writing the boys as HIRED GUNS!

Watanuki's presence always made everything about the job harder.

"We can't just go around killing people!" he'd complain.

"What do you think they hire us for?" Doumeki would argue. It was an old argument that they never really resolved, because they were both stubborn as hell, utterly convinced of the merits of their own side and completely unwilling to consider that there might be any merit to the other's. At this rate, it could well go on for the rest of their Professional (capitalisation intentional) lives.

But the other problem with Watanuki was that he was so good with a gun he was damn near superhuman – that, or he was an ordinary shot with a gun but had beyond superhuman luck. Doumeki could never entirely make up his mind which it was, but it had to be one or the other. There was no other explanation for how Watanuki ever pulled off half the crazy things he came up with. Doumeki was fairly certain even Watanuki wasn't sure how he did it a lot of the time. So even if Watanuki wasn't quite the sort of partner Doumeki couldn't have worked without, he was sure as hell the sort of partner he couldn't ever afford to risk losing to the competition. Also, between jobs when they actually had the chance, he made a terrific curry, and even without all the rest of it, it would have taken a lot of work for Doumeki to convince himself to give that up.

These were important things to remember on days like this one, when Watanuki had come within inches of falling out of a second storey window, barely saved even by Doumeki's best efforts, and well before they'd ever so much as confirmed the existence of their target. Watanuki's attitude to near-death situations was another annoying feature. Unless he had some reason to declare it was Doumeki's fault, he didn't seem to mind getting seriously injured on the job. He seemed to think it was something like retributive karma for what they did - or worse, that there was a divine tally up there somewhere listing all injuries to be taken in the process of their work, and that by taking on a couple of extras for himself it would mean someone else out there would be spared them. It often seemed to Doumeki like his whole reason for going into a line of work like this was that he believed that if he hadn't done it, someone else would have had to instead, and they wouldn't have done it half as well as Watanuki could.

The first thing Doumeki said after he'd heaved Watanuki back over the railing, heaved him off where he'd landed bodily on Doumeki's person and given him long enough to stop panting and get over all the adrenaline so that he'd be listening when Doumeki started talking to him was, "This is the last Kunogi job we're ever taking."

"What?" said Watanuki, as if nothing more mortifying had happened to him that day. "Himawari is the best client we've got! Not to mention the only one who ever hires us o do anything that doesn't involve killing anyone. And she's a very nice girl."

A very nice girl who hires professional gunmen on a regular basis, thought Doumeki. What he said was, "She's bad luck."

"What?" said Watanuki again. He did this a lot, it tended to mean not that he'd missed Doumeki's point, but that he was devoting every fibre of his concentration to avoiding it. "You're being ridiculous. You're letting superstition get the better of you again."

"Then you explain to me why you've nearly gotten killed at least twice on each of the last five jobs she's sent us on," said Doumeki. Even he didn't know how much of this he believed anymore – except for the bit about avoiding Kunogi. His gut had been telling him that since before they took the first job from her. Having his gut proven so thoroughly right since had not been vindicating in any sort of satisfying way.

"That was all just bad luck," Watanuki snapped back, unloading, checking and reloading his gun in the deliberate way that meant he was avoiding eye contact. "The ordinary kind that has nothing to do with Himawari at all. Besides, I'm not dead yet, am I?"

Yet, Doumeki thought, not remotely comforted by it. Whether he might have liked Watanuki or not, he was very sure he didn't want him to die – for all sorts of inconvenient reasons. But mostly because, when you lose a partner like Watanuki, you don't ever find another one like him again.