Chapter Text
There’s somethin’ real beautiful about bloodshed. It’s different when hate starts to become love. He didn't want to protect a man like that; that was just asking for a death wish. But it haunted him at night, in battle. A man like that, handsome and pretty as a prissy black cat. Just as prickly as one, too. It used to be a pleasure to bash his skull in with a wrench. Now, all it brings is strangled indifference. A knife in the gut doesn’t hurt as much as it should.
He’s always been better with machines, impersonal things that needed just a few strikes of the wrench to get going. With Spy, that sly man, he wanted to stare the man down. Hold his hand. KIll him. Death meant nothing here; they’re all just brought back a few minutes after. Perhaps becoming so adjusted to violence that it became a part of his love language wasn’t a good thing after all.
Ten thousand missions and remissions. A dozen ideas thrown out. Staring Spy down in the hall, watching the man ghost about, haunting the halls of the base. Meeting those striking gray eyes, pale in the dim lighting. He’d call it holy but there ain’t nothing holy about this place. A battlefield full of sinners.
At least he’ll have friends when he goes to hell.
_
A ghost walks into a workshop with hardly a sound. No, that’s not right. A ghost walks into a workshop with a knife in hand.
He’s not afraid. He’s done this thousands of times before; sink the blade into flesh, watch the blood well up past it, fade into nothing as a guttural, seething scream wrenches its way out of his target. The ghost does not care for their agony for he has no reason to.
Yet; his target this time is the same man who has killed him a thousand times. Neither of them will die in this endless loop. The two of them know each other better than they know themselves. It’s violent, violent in the way a death-rattle is. A vicious scream, metal hand cinched tight in expensive fabric, blood in his mouth, stricken dead in a moment by vivid, cold rage.
Let me correct myself again; there is no ghost. A spy walks into a workshop and hesitates before the kill. His target is asleep at one of the desks, hunched over in a surely uncomfortable way. The spy is endlessly charmed by ferocity. It stops being about murder in the moment he stops to study the man who’s strangled him hundreds of times in that year alone. Revenge is worthless; there is no shame he can bring to the man who knows just as many embarrassing things about the spy himself. They have fought against one another for far too long for shame to mean anything.
_
“Hey,” Dell whispered. His ghost smiled at him, thin and charming. Nothing so wretched should be so lovely. It was a trap that so easily lured him in, time and time again.
He knew he looked lovesick; soft and gooey and ready to be eaten alive. But his ghost was only a ghost. It had no fangs, or perhaps it simply didn’t want to have fangs. Desire was something terribly frightening, but Dell dares to think that love, simple and gentle, was infinitely scarier.
The thing about this story is that there is no ghost. There’s two men, caught in both webs, two spiders welcoming the other into their parlor. The threat of death meant nothing in the midst of this. Dell leans in and kisses his ghost but there is no ghost and only another man. Sometimes that man slips away into the shadows and others he is a skittish cat, but he remains. Dell slowly thought, uncomprehending of his own thoughts in the tenderness of it all, how wonderful it is, to be wanted.
_
I found you in everything.
A fool was what he was. Experiencing love in a place that nurtured violence. Experiencing love for a man that would sooner bash his skull in with a wrench before he ever came home with him after all of this was over. Their contracts would one day end; they wouldn’t be trapped here forever. It was a simple question, then, that he needed to ask. Will you come home with me? And the much scarier secondary option, the one that shocked him with the weight of its existence; Can I come home with you?
Such a terribly simple sentence made utterly enormous by the emotion it held. Something monumental; studying the edges of a metal hand, curling the digits around his own, wondering at the stainless prosthetic and remembering his own blood as it shone against the gleaming metal’s surface. Ruby reds, lovely blues. The microcosm of eternity that stretched beyond his comprehension. The unending agony of the fall. Love has learned to become a vicious thing, these past years.
_
Must beauty have a metric? There are dozens of them where there shouldn’t be. Alain looks at the man who would be considered typically unattractive amongst others and sees nothing like that in him; Dell was wonderful to his eyes, a pleasing mixture of color and strength and ferocity.
Dell kisses his ghost except it’s only Alain. There is no fear of discovery because in war, in battle, death means nothing. The shame of it held no grasp of his life. Alain sighs into it, a little release of tension, and wonders how he had ever dared to become like this. The greatest Spy of his generation, brought into the world with yet another face to take on yet not one he disliked, bowed low by another man who has killed him thousands of times. But he has never been one to kneel. Perhaps the truer statement is this; he leans in and suddenly the ghost has fangs and the man does too. They eat each other alive.