Night Marauders

Chapter Six: Crash Down

Angel didn't tell anyone (especially not Six) but he carried the bullet with him, picking it up and putting it in his back pocket as he grabbed his phone and wallet from the front table. It was becoming a sort of routine for him now, and he felt off if he left the house without it, the little chunk of metal that had tried to snuff him out. He'd started carrying it because getting shot had rattled him; it had woken him up, slapped him the face with a reminder that he wasn't invincible, and Angel had hated it. Now the fear was gone and he was left with a bullet in his back pocket and a hole in his side that was starting to scar over. He knew that the whole concept of him carrying the bullet was really fucked up, but at this point in his life, Angel was neck deep in 'fucked up' and he felt at home in it. He figured he was really starting to slip down the rabbit hole, when he'd (very carefully) drilled a little hole into the bullet and slipped a chain through it, letting the thing migrate from his back pocket, to around his neck. That's when he started to question if he was the one who'd gained power over the bullet, or if this new development was Angel caving into his own fear. He didn't want to think about the answer, because already knew it, and it didn't sit well with him.

~~~~

B didn't like the look on Kiki's face, and it had taken him a minute to figure out why, and when he did, his distaste for the expression only grew. Kiki sat at their dining room table, eyes narrowed at his computer screen as lines of code flashed across it and he scrambled to answer, fingers punching out their own code, but it was always countered, and that look on Kiki's face only worsened, until everything culminated in a horrible screech coming through the computer's speakers, the screen gave a final flash before the whole thing powered off. Kiki just sat there, fingers still hovering over the keyboard.

"What was that?"

B's voice came out of his own mouth so quiet that he hardly recognized it. Kiki just shook his head, trembling fingers coming up to close his laptop, and it was then, that B found a name for that look on his boyfriend's face: fear. B had been with Kiki for over two years, and he'd never seen him afraid; worried, yeah, but never afraid. Kiki was always the strong one, always the one that kept a level head when shit was hitting the fan. Now he was sitting there, the hollowed out shell of his computer on the dining room table, looking so utterly afraid, and B was afraid that his whole world was going to come crashing down. Kiki took a rattling breath, raking his hands through his hair.

"You can't fight tonight."

"You know I can't back out."

Kiki clenched his fists, gripping his hair by the roots, "You can't fight tonight." he said. His voice sounded like it was frayed at the edges and in danger of falling apart.

"I have to. It's my job."

Kiki shook his head, his head releasing their grip on his hair, "You can't..."

"I have to."

Kiki shook his head again, the motion shaking his hair into his face, "I can't let you go..."

"It's not your choice to make."

Tears were rolling down Kiki's cheeks and B could feel his heart breaking because all of this was so new and so scary, and he didn't know what to do. He wanted to pull out of the fight, but he couldn't, not when he was due in the cage in a little under four hours. He wished he could, he wished he could stop altogether, but what had started out as a necessity, as a source of income, had become something else and B couldn't bring himself to face how much he loved the burn of being in the ring. He reached for Kiki, pulling him into his arms, "We'll figure this out. We'll be ok."

Kiki just choked out something that could have been a sob if he hadn't tried so hard to hold it back, burrowing his face into B's shoulder as if he could just hide there forever, and B wished he could. He wished that he'd gone to college, that he'd made something of himself, that life hadn't dealt them this shitty hand, but he'd shoved all of that down because he learned a long time ago that wishing got you nothing, that sometimes you were a victim of your own circumstance, that sometimes you did, in fact, have no other choice. He held Kiki a little tighter, too afraid that something terrible would happen if he let him go.