Wrapped

Whilst they sit atop a skyscraper, waiting and watching the world pass beneath their tired feet, Badou looks once again to Haine's hands. Pale, long, and lean, weapons of destruction and malice, but of an art entirely their own. He wonders then how many men those hands have killed, and how many more will lie dead in their wake.

How many more lives will those steel rings take before they fall from those marble digits?

He smiles mentally to himself then, thinking wryly to himself that he should one day get Haine a ring. He knows not the origins of the ones he has, and doesn't particularly care to. As long as they mean Haine's ownership belongs to no one else, they mean nothing. But if he were to get the albino one, he would be forever remembered.

Forever wrapped around Haine's finger.

Tomfoolery

When the blood is spilled, and smoke slashes lines through the air like translucent daggers, the game begins. Running and hiding, dodging and getting hit, it's all a part of their never ending game. Badou without smokes, Haine without sanity, run circles around their opponents, laughing like the maniacs they are as they drill holes through whoever opposes them. But to them, it's not killing, it's not just a job.

It's a hell of a lot of fun when you do it right.

Invisible

Sometimes Badou wonders if Haine really exists. The way he comes and goes, disappearing and reappearing like a ghost, deathly pale skin always shining in an alabaster light. Eyes bled to the color of the wine in his veins, his gaze is one that grown men have trouble holding. But to Badou, Haine is a source of light. He's like the moon, caught in perpetual darkness but still glowing with a light that never truly leaves.

And invisible sun, orbiting around his limited world.

Friends

Badou would never have called the relationship he and Haine share "friendly". It was a violent, possessive, blessedly cursed circle of passion, blood, and bullets. He'd never say this aloud, of course, because who in their right mind would believe that those words were actually his? Hell, they'd probably accuse him of plagiarizing some dead shit-faced poet that he'd never heard of.

But as he and Haine sit atop the church, looking down at a family leaving the small sanctuary, Badou can't help but smile as the child, a boy of about four or five, played on the stone steps, apparently having a ball with a friend that could only hold the magic of one that was imaginary.

Looking over to Haine, who is also watching the child, with a cocked head and a mildly interested gleam in his eyes, he asks, "Would you be my imaginary friend?"

The only reaction he gets is a smile.

Domestic

It never takes Haine long to realize when Badou has filched something from his apartment. And every time that happens, he reacts in one of two ways. If he's in a good mood, he'll just wait until he sees the cyclops next, hit him over the head with the butt of one of his guns, and take the item back. If he's in a bad mood, he'll stalk into the red-head's apartment, a wolfish grin on his face, and tease and taunt the other man in such a way that it makes him not only regret taking the item without permission, but want to do it more often if it means getting that kind of treatment.

But Haine, apparently with the ability to sense such thoughts, always leaves right in the middle of what Badou thinks will be a sweeter reward than stealing the item.

And every time Badou swears at him all the way out, chasing after the cackling albino and shouting that domestic abuse is illegal... or something like that.

Kings

Kings didn't need crowns to rule. They didn't need titles to hold authority. They didn't need medals to have glory. They didn't need subjects to be valued. They didn't need to die to be remembered.

Blinking groggily, Badou smiled to himself as he lay on his mattress, Haine sleeping silently beside him. Here they were, on their throne, the only subject to truly command being each other. Their crowns were of thorns, covered in blood. Their titles were invisible, phantoms that ghosted through the streets without censorship. Their medals were their scars, welts of fights long past worth more to them than any amount of gold would ever be. Alive they were, though dead to others they surely seemed, they ruled over the hell hole that they called home.

Because really, kings of pain didn't need anything but.

Being

A shot whizzed past Badou's ear, the whistle temporarily deafening him as he ducked down low, rolling behind a stone column as bullets pelted the side opposite him. He was a heaving, bloody mess, barely hanging onto his gun and barely hanging onto his life. Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes to a man standing before him.

And seeing as it wasn't Haine, it couldn't be anything but bad news.

The man hauled him up by his shoulder, slugging him across the face as his feet dangled in the air. But the only thing he had time to register was the pain before he was released, falling to the ground in a bedraggled heap, holding a cold hand to his bruised cheek as he looked up to see what had caused the sudden change in his fortunes.

The moments following made him change everything he thought he knew about life.

Haine, his savior of a thousand times, was latched onto his attacker's arm, teeth clamped over the man's forearm in a vice grip that threatened to surely break whatever bones the man had in his arm. But Haine, unlike his usual habit, was taking damage himself. The man's free hand was pummeling the albino's head, already having broken the skin somewhere, causing a flow of blood to trickle down Haine's alabaster face.

Hit after hit Haine took, and Badou began to grow sick, imagining that any moment his companion's skull would be surely crushed. His thoughts racing, he wondered why on earth Haine wasn't doing anything. Why hadn't he ripped the man's arm off, shot him dead, something?

"Haine!" he finally shouted, "DO SOMETHING!"

When the ruby gaze found its way to him, Badou was taken aback by the panic of it. It wasn't Haine then, he knew. It was the Dog, and the dog, panicking for blood, had no command to lead him. Lost in a fight he didn't know how to win, he surely then could have used Haine's cunning brutality, for now, his own blood blinding him, he knew nothing.

Standing shakily as the active stalemate continued, Badou finally shouted,

"SICK HIM!"

In that moment, everything changed.

Startled backward by the flurry of movement, Badou tripped over the corner of the column behind which he had been hiding. Falling on his ass, he stopped dead as his ears were once again graced with the sound of flesh tearing from bone.

But there was no scream.

Not daring to look himself, he waited, for what seemed like an eternity, until the building around him was entirely still. Haine's breathing, which he could usually only just hear, was silent entirely. Finally sitting up, he looked around the column, seeking the mop of white hair that would keep his attention away from whatever other carnage lay beyond.

Finding his focus point, curled on the floor with blood splattered from his snowy head down to his feet, Badou rose and strode quickly over to where Haine lay. The alabaster face was blank as he turned it to face him, eyes closed and blood crusting from every crevice on his face. From his nose, from his mouth, from his ears, from his eyes, it was no surprise to Badou why Haine was out. He would have to wait until Haine's miracle body could regenerate itself before he could talk to him, and even then he didn't know if he would.

Because whatever his condition, whatever Haine had done, whatever he himself would do, the feelings he had would never change. People like them, fraudulent as they seemed, lasted forever. And in that forever they would share in silence more than any normal person could ever hope to have in a million words. Because that's how they were with each other, that's how they needed to be. Because if they weren't like that, they wouldn't be anything to each other, and if they weren't anything to each other...

Neither of them would be anything.

Shield

Listening to the red head grumble as he sits down on his couch, Haine looks over at the cyclops warily, his exhaustion putting a shorter fuse on his dynamite than he would have normally had. And now the bastard next to him was grousing about some shit that probably didn't matter one fuck or the other.

But when he heard the terms "meat shield" used, his interest was piqued a little bit more.

"What did you say?" he asked, his normally husky voice hoarse from the holes still healing in his esophagus.

"I said that you make a pretty fuck-faced meat shield, you asshole," the red head spat, rubbing at a few of his own bullet holes sorely. "I still got shot, even when I was hiding behind mister fuck-my-ass-full-of-bullets!"

And though that description of him was new, and very insulting, Haine couldn't help but laugh.

"Actually," he said, using the husk in his voice for a more risque function, "bullets only come in second to something else."

And much to his delight, Badou went silent.

Religion

Every time Badou stepped into the church, he couldn't help but smile, because he knew in what was left of his tar-covered heart that Haine was all the religion he would ever hope to need.

Small

Every time Haine goes out, he can't help but think what a small world he lives in. Every time he goes out, he sees the same people, going to the same places, at the same time, every day. Mailing letters that go nowhere, going to work that does nothing, returning to families that mean nothing. Big lies, all locked in this small, circumlocutory world.

But as he thought, there was a small group of people that weren't like these people. He was one of them, and the other shared the small bubble of true existence with him. Outcasts as the people who lived in the small world called them, kings as they called themselves. Larger than live, beyond it. Never a part of the crowd, never of the city's blood. Rather a poison inside it, walking against the crowd and smiling while they did it.

Because to them, the world was anything but small, the only keys they needed to anything being a few well aimed bullets.

Dragons

They wound their way through the cemeteries of the dragons, halls of once great steel beasts that ruled the underground with wind and bullets of sound. Within their great halls they could find sanctuary, silence. And though each dragon's hall was of itself magnificent, it was they, who at night went down together, and came out together when dawn came once more, who gave the halls of long dead dragons meaning. But the meaning, only understood by the dragons' spirits who watched them and they themselves, would ever understand.

Bonding, in any circumstance, was best done in private, or done in the company of benevolent ghosts. In the case they chose, both went hand in hand.

Night

When the fight raged and the bullets deafened, when the moon shone and blood glistened, the night was full. When the shouts echoed and the anger was tangible, when insanity hastened into speed beyond that of any eye, the night was complete. When the curtains were drawn and the music of lust locked away in privacy, when two became one in a dance of death, the night would be whole. Night, for the both of them, was the only time when they could be everything they needed each other to be.

Cowboys

"Fuck no."

Badou pouted in the ablino's direction, clasping his hands together and kneeling before him. "Please?" he begged. "Just one western! I promise it'll just be this once! I have to sit through all your Hitchcocks! You can sit through one western!"

Haine snorted. "I hate watching those damn things," he growled, looking away before Badou's charm could wear him down.

"Why? They're fantastic for the time period!" the red head argued, standing and following after his companion tenaciously.

"Bull shit. It's like watching a shit faced version of what we do. Except for the bad guys in those pieces of crap are just Jews painted red, and the heroes are just gay cunts who enjoy the feeling of assless leather chaps way too much," came his reply.

Badou was stunned silent, smirking devilishly as a thought came to him.

"Don't you own a pair of leather chaps?"