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Sebastian doesn’t hear the shot as he staggers sideways, smashing his shoulder into the impassive breezeblock pillar to his left. It’s horribly messy, he knows that much, but it doesn’t even hurt when he whips round, dark and awful and snarling like a dog in a cage.
The world slows as he deals out a retaliatory kill shot with flecks of blood staining the whites of his eyes.
The other man is dead before he hits the ground.
But something starts to burn uncomfortably as he straightens up, taut like a suspension bridge, emptying round after round into the body like a man possessed.
He's always been a sore loser.
Temper Jim would say, arching a perfect eyebrow.
It takes Sebastian far too long to realise that his hand, his whole fucking arm, is shaking.
*
oh…OH
Jim feels it first, naturally, feels the steel tear through Sebastian’s chest as the rage rolls in, shrouding sense in irrational, jagged, motion. He watches it happen from an awkward angle in black & white on his laptop.
It's strangely fascinating for about 2.43 seconds
Sebastian falls alarmingly out of Jim’s mechanical line of sight, smearing grey oxygenated blood along the side of a rusty shipping container.
Jim hacks into another camera for a better look, frowns delicately, pinches the bridge of his elfin nose.
Idiotidiot
IDIOT
If you want something done…
But he doesn’t mean it, Sebastian is his will made flesh;
They are perfectly broken
And so perfectly matched
It was always going to happen like this
Sebastian slumps and braces himself against the nearest thing he can reach. Something metallic, something cold…so cold
He tries lowering himself to the floor gently but ends up falling the rest of the way, not that he can feel it, his limbs have gone strangely numb.
It looks wrong, all that care draped over Sebastian’s movements, minute to minimise what by now must be devastating pain.
Jim thinks of Sebastian throwing himself from balconies, across roofs, into fights, fast cars. He blinks once slowly at the bleary image on his screen, at Moran, softly leaking dark solidarity all over some ugly stretch of dusty poured concrete. He ought to be splayed out on marble, black silk, crushed velvet soaked in adrenaline, something to acknowledge his jagged princely status as Moriarty’s right hand man. His brother, not in arms but in black eyes and bullet chambers, vaulted thoughts and caustic embers.
*
Sebastian tips his head back, chain link cradling his burning skull
All that’s left to do is wait for James to saunter in, the sun setting in his broadsheet-littered wake, an edge of archaic valour warped horribly by the rage in his smile.
He always comes, likes the theatre of it, the daring of the first-person narrative;
Hello, it was me all along, did you enjoy it, I did.
The warehouse is silent and Sebastian can taste every fight he’s ever won, which is all of them, burning hotly in his throat as bubbles of blood foam at the corner of his mouth.
‘Fuck’ he murmurs blearily, without the usual additions of ‘you’, ‘me’ or ‘off’
The warm semi-automatic slides from his grey hand onto the floor.
*
Jim stands up abruptly, as if the image of the abandoned weapon is unbearably abhorrent. He slides his sports jacket off the back of the leather chair and strides calmly down a derelict corridor towards the stairwell.
*
Sebastian's head lolls on his shoulder as Jim slides into his blood-stained peripheral vision, staring straight ahead, stepping over bodies without so much as looking down. He looks so clean, all that contrast wrapped around one tiny, irreverent, insatiable frame. Sebastian coughs raggedly, brokenly, as Jim’s long, waspish shadow cuts the glare from the stripes of setting sun slicing through holes in corrugated iron sheeting.
The darkness soothes Sebastian’s torn, gaping pupils.
His torn gaping soul
His torn gaping- ‘Christ…’
Jim smiles with all his fine little teeth, ‘no, just me’
There’s a pause and then
‘Took your fecking time’
‘Keep it together Moran’ says Jim softly, sliding a gilt lighter from his inside breast-pocket. He’s taken a step forward, blood soaking into his beetle-black shoes.
Sebastian looks up
And Jim looks down, always imperious, though his gaze is without confrontation, disdain, mirth.
‘Come any closer, and I’ll tear your fucking throat out’
They both grin, and then, suddenly, their velvet eyes are level; Sebastian sees his slumped, bloody image, insolently reflected in the eye of the devil
He was gonna drive James to the lakes in France, he remembers hazily, to fuck with holidaying mafia, but mostly just to fuck
It’s a strangely intimate moment; Jim kneeling before Sebastian, embraced by a spattered halo of blood.
Indeed Sebastian is so distracted by the sensation of Jim’s breath on his wretched collarbone that he doesn’t realise Jim has reached into his pocket until he sees the lit cigarette held at the edge of his boyish, dazed half-smile. It looks bizarre, those pale, elegant, horribly stained hands hovering over Seb’s bruised, smashed ones, making an offer that really is just an offer, rather than a challenge.
Seb nods just once, ever so slightly, and Jim slides the cigarette into his mouth. The smoke burns like sulphur as it pours out of his nose.
Jim takes the next drag before holding out between them once more.
Jim doesn’t smoke.
Sebastian tips his head back again, looking at Jim through his eyelashes, ‘who’s gonna clean the fucking car now…’
Jim smiles faintly, smoothing his thumb over the ribbon of blood leaking from the corner of Seb’s mouth, along his slack jaw, down his grimy neck.
‘Hmmm’ says Jim, ‘I don’t recall you ever rendering such a service, love…’
‘Idiot’, says Sebastian, inhaling another fistful of smoke
‘Oh Moran, you wound me’
‘How tactless’ Sebastian hacks out
‘Don’t laugh’
‘I won’t, it wasn’t funny’
‘Hmmm’
‘You know, I’ve always hated that tie’
Jim frowns snuffing the cigarette in the blood pooling around his left knee. Touching the fence just shy of Seb’s left ear he leans in, languidly.
‘Does it hurt?’ he whispers
Sebastian groans a little as Jim’s voice nestles into his brain.
‘Come onnn, Sebastian’
Jim slides his other hand down, over all the lines that were ever drawn between them, pressing his fingers around the hole blown in Sebastian’s ribcage. Red fingers brush white splinters of bone buried in thick, heavy blood. Jim presses his index finger into the wound, tentatively, but very deliberately. Seb’s head smashes back into the chain link involuntarily causing it to rattle like a thousand tiny loose bones. His pink teeth are bared silently at the ceiling.
‘What does it feel like?’ Jim sings
‘What do you think it fucking feels like!’ Sebastian roars
It sounds positively feral
Jim doesn’t flinch, just waits for him to subside, like the sea always does after a storm. He smiles as a filthy blonde head falls onto his shoulder, utterly exhausted and turns to lick the sweating curl of Seb’s ear.
‘Daddy’s got you’
‘Shut up’ Sebastian breathes, almost imperceptibly, hands curled into strained fists at his sides.
Jim keeps smiling to himself, fingers dancing on the back of Seb’s neck, brushing over the surprisingly soft down at the nape. Sliding his gaze delicately down Seb’s spine under the collar of his shirt Jim can just make out the curls of recent lacerations across his shoulders
‘Sh- shit...’ Sebastian hiccups jarringly
Jim feels something warm and sticky seeping through his own shirt. Sebastian smells overwhelmingly of hot iron.
‘I always thought you’d get shot in the head’
‘Quick…er’
Jim presses his teeth softly to the side of Seb’s head.
Mary had a little lamb
He frowns suddenly and eases Sebastian’s head back so he can press their foreheads together. Moran’s eyes are flickering deliriously, throat rattling.
‘We had fun didn’t we, Seb?’
‘Hmmm’
‘Sebastiannnn?!’
There’s a groan, and then, ‘you look …good, James. Really…shar…p’
‘Oh Seb’ Jim sighs melodramatically, with an edge of something else, something unbearably bleak.
The man under his hands shudders and begins to wheeze, an awful arrhythmic crackle; his eyes are pink, eyelashes sticky.
Jim picks up his knees and starts to rock backward and forward on his heels, palpably agitated, anchoring himself with the hand stroking the side of Seb’s face, fingers digging too far around the back of his skull when he realises its just him that’s holding it up.
His eyes are wild
‘STOPITstopitNOW’ he snarls, inches from Sebastian’s inert ears, with something akin to the blind enraged terror of a child.