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With the sky so dark, he can only hear the rain pattering against the bedroom window. He doesn't know where the lights are, but he could easily calibrate his body to the room if he wanted to. He'd know every raindrop that hits the glass, the moment the well-oiled door opens. If an object falls onto the plush carpet under his feet. The dimensions of the very same plush carpet. He'd know where the edge of the bed was without sitting on it, but he's sitting on it anyways. It's quite comfortable.
He could calibrate, but unfortunately, that would take all the fun out of his current bounty.
Shuffling downstairs, right below him, in the kitchen. One of the cupboards on the far side shuts a little too hard. Should he still be sitting? What if he decided to lay down instead, remove his shoes and hat like he’s done so many times before, in better circumstances? He has better senses—heightened, from all the metalwork embedded in him—than the man one floor below him.
Boothill sighs. He leans back on the bed, his feet still on the carpet, keeps everything on. Unsheathes one of the guns from his thigh holster. He removes the safety, puts it back, removes it again. Puts it back. Keeps it there. He’s been sent after so many bounties.
Footsteps on the staircase, padded, the target in socks. (Boothill still has time.) The target, ready to slip into bed, to sleep without worry. (Calibration takes 2.7 seconds for a space like this.) Maybe some worry. (It would make things easier, just in case.) Would this be something to worry about?
(No point in calibrating a room he already knows like the back of his hand.)
Argenti opens the door with a steaming mug in his other hand. He left his armour in his office downstairs. Now, he wears green and white pyjama bottoms and a tight grey tank top. Socks, confirmed. All his piercings are still in, including the chain that dangles between his lobe and cartilage. It flashes from the stairwell light, his red hair a long, soft halo.
“I didn’t realize you’d be here tonight.” The barrel points at his chest. His eyes point to the man behind the gun. “Your hair looks good.”
Boothill sniffs unceremoniously. Of course Argenti’s mug has rosehip tea. “You’re oversteeping it.”
“Something tells me you have more pressing matters to deal with.”
Boothill hasn’t felt his heart in months. It squeezes against his will. “You could say that.”
The rain continues to fall outside. Argenti lifts his mug hand. “Do I have a moment to put my tea down? I don’t want it getting on the carpet.”
Boothill gestures to the nightstand, and Argenti moves accordingly. The safe choice: face your killer, ensure their grip doesn’t change as you’re granted solace. The unsafe decision: walking normally, body turned away as if this was any other day, any other interaction. Argenti’s heart could be blown against the wall by now. It isn’t. Why isn’t it? This bounty was supposed to be fun, right?
———————
It wasn’t difficult to notice when Argenti started frequenting Boothill’s bar. He would come in, speak to no one, order two drinks, and leave. After the second time, he started looking at Boothill for long periods of time, and Boothill couldn’t get a read on him.
The first time they properly spoke to each other came weeks after their first bout of eye contact. The fucker always came in his armour, right off of patrol or whatever he did at the time, and it never made noise when he moved.
The seat next to the knight screeches with movement. “So,” Boothill croons, “what’s someone like you doin’ in a place like this?”
He laughs, high and melodic. “The aesthetics took me by surprise,” he says. Warm smile, sultry eyes. “I’ve always had an eye for beautiful things.”
“Have you now.”
“Practiced it for years, actually.” He downs his drink. “I came here to see what, or who, I could find. Call it part of my job to protect what’s beautiful.”
“Ha. Something beautiful, in this spunky little shithole.”
“There’s you, isn’t there?”
Argenti’s view of beauty was always confusing. Boothill never considered himself beautiful. It’s not a word anyone ever associated with him, and yet.
And yet.
———————
Hello, Boothill. You have a new bounty. Please process it as soon as possible.
———————
Boothill looks out at the evening sky. Standard four-panelled dark wood, the full moon shining though the top left window, the sun still setting. A sunset bright enough to rival Argenti’s hair. His head against the pillow, Argenti against his bare chest. Only a small portion of his chest is still human flesh, around his heart, even though it doesn’t beat like it once did. He never complained about the metal before, but he always finds a way to rest against Boothill’s skin.
Boothill runs his left hand through Argenti’s hair almost absentmindedly. The knight shifts under the touch, soft groan in the back of his throat. Boothill loves the sound. “Do you not have a job tonight?”
The voice in his program hasn’t said anything for the past two days. He has enough money to last him another month before he has to make another kill, but he never gets that much time off. At least tonight, he says, “Nothing.”
“Mm. Good night, then?”
“Good night,” Boothill says, but Argenti doesn’t react. “Yes?”
Argenti looks up, his still eyes partially closed. “Must I always ask?”
“Pffft. C’mere.” Boothill brushes his hair out of his own face. He tries for a quick kiss but Argenti leans into it for longer, another more vocal sigh. Boothill tries not to mirror it.
———————
Argenti sits cross-legged on the bed, his back against the headboard. His head against the wall, facing the ceiling, his gaze switching between Boothill and the few dried flowers hanging from the ceiling.
“I thought I’d be able to take you up on your offer as my bodyguard one day.” Boothill doesn’t know what to say. Of all the confidence, the energy store usuallly available to him, nothing feels like it’s working. He keeps the gun in his grip and pointed at Argenti, but that’s all.
“You still could. I thought this day might come.”
“Not like this.” Never like this.
“I did always believe we were programmed the same way, however you wish to interpret that,” Argenti says. “We’re bound by honour and a belief to protect what we must. So-called innocent lives, carrying out the sins of their pasts or that of their parents.”
“If you wanted the job done,” Boothill says slowly, “you could have asked me directly.” Through him, it would have been legal The universe is a vast place. At Argenti’s word, he’d go anywhere, even if he never said it out loud.
“The goal was to find everyone before they could get to me. Clearly someone from the faction beat me to it.” Dreamy sigh. Humour in the face of death. “If I told you I made my own little bounty sheet and left it in my kitchen drawer downstairs, would you believe me?”
It’s less a matter of belief than an unspoken request. “You made your own bounty?”
“Bounties. Plural. In case this day ever came. I did accept it was always a possibility.” Argenti pauses to look at Boothill. “Do you believe me?”
“I do.”
“Good. If this is happening anyways, would you mind if I ask you what my charges are?”
Boothill does mind. A lot. They were never his secrets to tell.
He tells Argenti anyways.
———————
Argenti returns to the bedroom, two mugs in tow. He closes the door with one foot and cracks a smile. “You still aren’t dressed.”
Boothill barks out a laugh. “Ya just fucked me how good and expect me to move?”
“I expected nothing less than you dressing and fleeing to your next job before the water boiled.”
“Such low expectations of me, Argenti.”
“You’ve left for them on the past four occasions. This time you can stay and enjoy some tea.”
Boothill inhales gently. “Roses?”
“Rosehip, specifically. Oversteeping leads to unnecessary bitterness. I’ll be right back.” As though on cue, a tinny timer beeps from the kitchen downstairs. He pulls the teabags out and sets them in his palm. “So lovely,” he says, an afterthought as he looks at the cyborg on his bed. He disappears down the stairs.
Boothill sits up to grab his mug and catches himself in the mirror. It hangs beside the door but out of reach; whether it’s open or closed, the mirror is visible. Dim light reflects off his torso panels. No matter how often he sees his reflection, he can never get used to the way light bounces off his body. He was told the construction was seamless, successful, and it was.
Skilled craftsmanship does not equate to pleasing interaction. Not when his nervous system has been connected to a complex technological network, aware of every nut and bolt and metal sheet welded to create this new shell for him. Not when his hair, an uneven mixture of black and grey, covers the control panel on the back of his neck. When his bangs cover the operating light near his hairline.
And Argenti keeps meeting him at the bar. Asking him to come home. Talking to him outside of sex like it matters, when all he feels is crude.
“So,” he starts when Argenti returns. Boothill’s already holding his mug. “Your devotion to beauty.”
“Everyone has a different perspective on what’s beautiful to them. Eye of the beholder and all that.” Argenti sits next to Boothill and rests his head on his shoulder. Boothill thinks of cold metal; Argenti doesn’t give away how it feels to the touch. They make eye contact through the mirror. “You protect what you believe in protecting. No rhyme or reason needed, although you could have that, too. And I think the action itself—protecting what’s beautiful—is, in itself, a beautiful way to live.”
Boothill takes in the attic bedroom. The slanted ceiling to match the roof. The stupid mirror. Argenti in thought in the kitchen, shirtless but pyjama pants, waiting for the water to boil. Bringing mugs of tea up to them after another night together. “Would you say there’s beauty in the mundane?”
“Ah.” Argenti smiles. Closes his eyes. Boothill watches him rub his cheek against the metal shoulder. “Of course I would. It’s my favourite thought. Do you have something in mind right now?”
He pushes his bangs out of his face. He didn’t like this mirror when they first hooked up, but the location is growing on him. Argenti exhales, his breath catching on loose strands of hair. One strand lands on his nose, another in his eyelash, and he doesn’t move to push them out of the way. A knight of beauty, sure, but sometimes the word falls short of what it’s describing. “Not really.”
“Liar.”
Boothill isn’t supposed to get tongue-tied. It’s not in his nature—not his true nature, nor his programming—but it still happens. Argenti opens his eyes to look at him through the mirror again, a gaze full of something he can’t place.
The tea is getting cold. The room smells of rosehips. Boothill turns to tilt Argenti’s chin and catch him in a long, lingering kiss. Argenti falls onto his back and he moves to straddle him, ready for the next round. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and Boothill scans every detail he can commit to memory.
———————
“What about you?” Argenti asks one day when they’re both in the kitchen. Early morning, scrambled eggs and sausage. “Why become a ranger?”
Boothill’s body measures ‘one milk’ exactly when he pours some into his hot coffee. “You may be a protector, but someone has to do the dirty work. I protect by handling the other half of the imbalanced equation.”
“You’re more likely to get hurt in the process, though.”
“Ah, I’m too pretty for that, aren’t I?”
Argenti raises his eyebrows. “Much too pretty. I get distracted by your anti-eyebrow piercing more than I’d like to admit.”
Boothill snorts.
“I have a desire to protect you,” Argenti says, walking over to Boothill’s seat. “I didn’t think you’d notice me in that bar, and then we talked, and you’re nothing like I imagined. Someone has to protect the hunter, don’t you think?”
One animatronic hand cups the coffee mug, the other gripping the handle. He leans back to expose his metal torso. It glints off Argenti’s face at this angle in the late morning light. “Oh, darlin’. Take another good, long look now that it ain’t the dead of night. What’s left to protect?”
———————
Target Name: Argenti
Faction: Knights of Beauty
Charges: 20+. Please see the attached file to view the full list.
———————
Boothill’s arm wavers. He can’t keep holding the gun like this, not when Argenti looks so resolute with his decision. The weight of it means nothing to his metallic limbs but a little more than that to every human part of him.
“Well,” Argenti finally says. He lifts the barrel the same way he’d lift Boothill’s chin, eyeing it with a careful wonder. “If there is a bounty on my head for my desire to hunt the descendants of those that brought my hometown to ruins, so be it.”
“You say that with such finality.”
“You entered my bedroom with finality in mind, did you not?”
Boothill opens his mouth to reply but closes it just as quick. Why can’t he look Argenti in the eye, now, after all this?
Argenti moves from the bed to the floor, kneeling on the carpet right between Boothill’s legs. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the knight, but this position leaves no room for error. Argenti directs the gun over to him, to the space between his eyebrows.
If Boothill’s arms were still his own, he’d be trembling for the first time in a long time.
“Boothill.” His voice is stupidly gentle. “Remove the safety.”
“You’re leading yourself to your own execution.”
“If it’s by your hand, it wouldn’t have been for nothing.”
The bar, the first night they spoke. To call it beautiful while looking into Boothill’s eyes. “Dedicated even in a moment like this, are we?”
Argenti smiles without it reaching his eyes. “Call it a beautiful ending.”