Let Me Hold You For Now

Clothes Get in the Way

The first year was rough. Hell, things still weren't exactly good. They were both figuring out how to live together. Well... How to live, period.

Zack was good at surviving, but since he was a monster, it was easy. He always seemed to have the ability to disappear into the shadows of whatever shit city he happened to find himself in, get a few z's, steal some money for the basics, satiate his lust for violence. Ray didn't make those things harder per say. In fact, she was so smart that things he never considered to be necessities before were much easier to acquire. She was always able to come up with a plan on the fly. The big difference was that it was much harder to be invisible.

Before he became the boss of B6, he was like some kind of demon inflicting terror on all the unsuspecting citizens of the world. Eventually people would wise up and the streets were barren at night again, so he moved on. It was like he was constantly working toward making the world as lonely a place as possible. He wasn't alone anymore though. He was like a demon bound to her instead, always looking over her shoulder, trying to protect her.

Ray attracted a lot of attention from people, because of course she did. She was a beautiful girl, and her face still showed up on the covers of trashy conspiracy tabloids that were trying to revive the case of her tragic disappearance. People went missing every day. He was a pretty major contributor to those disappearances, but somehow their deaths mostly went by unnoticed, barely blips on the radar. Their sorry lives slipped away silently as if they never really existed at all. Any news that did get published about their murders was mostly to incite widespread terror and sell papers. Sometimes Ray read the articles to him. Hearing the descriptions of his exploits was even better than just looking at the crime scene photos. He was pretty famous. It was fun.

This life worked for him, but he couldn't understand why she wanted to live in the shadows with him. Ray was endlessly patient, too tolerant. Sure, her life wasn't great before they met, but people had standards, right? Well, normal people did. She'd since told him that the only thing she couldn't deal with at the hospital was not being able to see him. The little fuckin' weirdo. She didn't care how people treated her at all, she really was just like a doll... Or at least she used to be...

Lately she'd been acting pretty fucking bold. Ray never expressed desire for anything. She didn't care about clothes or comfort, she barely cared about food. She'd made it perfectly clear that she cared about him though. He had to wonder if it was left over from her little god-complex.

Before, she was happy to be a doll for him. She followed every command and tried to satisfy every whim he had. When did things start to change between them? Oh right. The first time they shared a bed.

When they were still actively on the run from the cops, they slept in all kinds of uncomfortable places. Outside, in dirty alleys, in the woods, in abandoned cars. When they finally worked out a system, kill, steal, move, eat, sleep, eat, repeat, they figured out that they could afford seedy motel rooms. Sometimes they stayed in the houses of their victims if they could find them.

It was fine at first... then it got cold out. Needless to say, the kinds of places they ended up in never seemed to have any kind of heat or air conditioning.

Probably thanks to a lifetime of roughing it, he hadn't been sick since he was a child and completely forgot what it was like. She was absolutely pitiful the first time she got a cold, and a little gross... All weak, red eyed and runny nosed. So fragile and human. He felt a little bad about not considering how delicate she was and diligently nursed her back to health despite her insistence that she could take care of herself. It turned out alright, but he was determined not to let it happen again.