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When he finds her, she is just a girl. She wears her hair in a messy ponytail using strips of leather she picks off the street. There are knives tucked into her sleeves, her waistband, tied around her ankles because she has no shoes to put them in. He looks at her, sees her quick fingers and quicker knives and says 'do you want to come with me?' She looks at him, sees a man that is too big, sees the guns at his hips, and says 'maybe.' They brush against each other in the street. Her fingers never find his pockets, his hands don't touch hers. Until they do. Until he starts slipping little things into her too rough palms, until she starts slipping names into his back pockets. He always calls the people she gives him. His crew starts growing until they're big, too big for their little town, so they set their sights on another one. They move to the next city over, spread out until they're close to running this one too. Until their claws are buried deep and they are climbing the top. He sees her, sometimes. She has long since cut her hair off. He thinks it suits her. What doesn't suit her are the ragged clothes, how her arms are too thin, too thin. It hurts sometimes to look at her. She still doesn't have shoes. He thinks she likes it like that. Feet bare, feeling every part of the city beneath her. Sometimes he is jealous of her. He is jealous of her freedom, of how she can be anywhere whenever she wants. He isn't jealous of how she sleeps in empty car lots, how she finds havens in alleyways and worn-down churches. He isn't jealous of her gaunt face. But he is jealous of the joy in it.
There are times when they brush on the streets. His fingers catch against hers. She slips a piece of paper into his palm, he slips a hundred dollar bill in hers. They part ways there, on the corner. He thinks he'll never see her again, until he sees that it is her name on the paper. He has never heard her voice before, but he thinks it suits her.
It turns out she's good at more than just relieving people of their paychecks. She can extract information in ways that have no bloodshed. He thinks they might be more violent than the old ways. She doesn't sleep. She naps, sometimes, in the strangest of places. He finds her on the couch, underneath the kitchen island, in the empty bathtub. He doesn't ask. She doesn't answer. It works for them.
She can't shoot, but she can drive. She gets them out of places that seem impossible, or into places in ways that should be. He screams, sometimes. She only laughs at him. It works for them.
They don't sleep together. At least, not in that way. But on nights when he can't sleep, and her insomnia is worse than before, they will curl together in his bed and just breathe. Sometimes they face each other, studying their faces for the time when this life is too much. It works for them.
She goes quiet sometimes. Quiet in the way that doesn't mean that something is wrong. She just simply has no words to say. He's okay with that. He can fill the silence himself, babbling on about this and that and the other thing. They laugh at themselves sometimes. It works for them.
He doesn't move sometimes. When he can't take it anymore, when the life they live comes bringing its weight down on his shoulders, he lays in the bed and he doesn't move. She's okay with that. It's these times that she's the big spoon, that she's the one babbling about this and that and the other thing. Sometimes it brings him back. Sometimes it doesn't. But it works for them.
People ask them if they're together. They never have an answer. Yes, sometimes they do things that might be considered couple things. Sometimes they kiss, after a particularly bad heist when they're high on the adrenaline rush. Sometimes they sleep together, when they came too close to losing each other that day and they need reassurance the other is still there. But it's never in that way. They never come close to the darker side of intimate, but they know each other's bodies so well that it seems like that. Sometimes they hold hands, when the world is so dark, so dark that they need to think back to their beginning, to the brushing of hands on the street.
It works for them.