“So…are you gonna tell me what happened?”

The stoic bounty hunter sitting on Seraph’s threadbare couch stayed as silent as ever, and as much as he expected it, it was really starting to piss him off.

“C’mon, don’t leave me hanging here.” He shot the widest grin he could force at their hunched form from his desk, where the sad remains of their cybernetic arm lay. “The ion cannon’s completely busted, your hand is practically gone, and the spare compartment is so crushed, I have no idea what middle finger to physics you pulled to shove your phaser back in it. What could turn my greatest invention into scrap metal, hm?” He gestured to each piece in turn as he fixed it up, desperately trying to make the tension bleed out of his best friend’s broad shoulders.

They hadn’t said a word since they showed up at the front door to his cybernetic repair shop an hour ago with no warning, covered in blood and arm dangling precariously by a few sparking wires. They’d nearly collapsed on top of him the second he got close, and he had to drag them to his apartment on the floor above, shoving them into the small sanitation block with an order to clean up in twenty minutes or he was going to do it for them. He’d stitched up what he could after they’d showered and brushed the worst of the tangles from their long black hair, braiding it absentmindedly as they finished patching themself up.

And now he was here, cutting glances at them every few minutes while they kept uncharacteristically ignoring his witty banter, staring out his window at the pounding rain, slick obsidian metal, and blinding neon lights of the fucked up place they called home.

They were stripped down to a set of standard issue black boxers and a tank top, somehow still a bit loose on their muscled frame. The clothes contrasted sharply with pale, scarred skin that wasn’t terribly uncommon in the sunless city. Hell, Seraph’s soft, tanned skin, dotted with freckles, was in some ways a rarity in these parts, but he’d stopped getting odd looks a long time ago; he’d more than earned his place in the underbelly of Umbra. They both had.

They’d clearly been in a fight, but no one bounty could cause that much damage, no matter what insane black market enhancements and implants they had. Seraph would know; he built the best versions of said black market enhancements and implants.

He cut another glance at them as he tried to focus on rewiring the nerves that normally connected to their shoulder. Jade’s skin was a mess of cuts and bruises, even after the med patches had started taking effect, and from the way they moved when he dragged them up here, some ribs were probably broken too.

It felt like he’d been transported back to the early months of their friendship, with them in a near constant state of peril and Seraph never being taken seriously. It had taken him dragging them out for drinks after a particularly difficult job to break the tension and get them talking like friends instead of coworkers, but that was a year into their acquaintance.

He wasn’t sure how much more he could take.

Giving up entirely on working on the arm, he turned his body fully towards them, watching and waiting.

“Are you really just gonna sit there? You showed up at my door looking like you got your ass handed to you, which doesn’t exactly occur often. Are you honestly not gonna tell me anything that happened tonight?” he asked, irritation slowly siphoning into his words. Their expression didn’t change once during his questions. Not a glance, not a shift, not even a minute twitch.

Seraph’s vision tunneled, emotion building until all he could see was the purple of their black eye, making their glass green irises stand out all the brighter, and they still weren’t looking at him goddammit—

The delicate piece of circuitry he was handling snapped clean in half under his fingers, and the sound finally made their gaze meet his. But the confused shock in it did nothing but fuel the rage consuming his common sense.

“Honestly, Jade, I’m starting to consider putting limitations on these little ‘visits’ of yours.” He slammed down the metal and pliers he was holding and stood up, towering over them for once. “I mean, if you’re just going to show up once a week expecting me to replace your very custom, very expensive arm, without so much as a grunt of approval, then why—” he leaned farther into their space, watching them flinch back with a cruel sort of satisfaction “—should I bother helping you at all?”

He settled back on his heels, suddenly deeply drained from his outburst. He ran a hand through short blue locs, frustrated, before sitting back down, facing away from them this time.

“If this is really all you need me for now,” he sighed, deactivating the crimson eye implants he often used and pulling off oil stained gloves, before slowly turning back towards them, “then we’re gonna need to reevaluate this little arrangement we…have…”

The tears streaming down their face, tears he hadn’t seen once in the five years he’d known them, were more than enough to realize he’d made a massive mistake.

“Fucking hell—I shouldn’t have said anything, I’m sorry, you’re clearly having a rough time, I’ll just lea—” he babbled, launching out of his seat and was hastily moving backwards towards the door. But before he could get too far, a calloused hand caught his, abruptly cutting off his rambling apologies.

“Don’t,” they said, softer than he’d ever heard their rough voice get. “Stay. Please.”

Seraph let them pull him back to the couch, for once out of words, and watched them fidget a bit, waiting, hand still firmly clutched in his.

They pulled it back for just a moment, roughly wiping at their eyes, before he caught it again, lacing their fingers together in a move that surprised them both, faces heating up in tandem as they broke eye contact once more. After a few more minutes, and a few deep breaths, they were finally ready to talk.

“I fucked up, Seraph.”

He waited for them to elaborate further, but they didn’t, teeth clenched over words they couldn’t get out.

“What, on a job?” he pestered, trying to make sense of what they were saying, until it finally clicked, his eyes widening. “On the last job. It was the one from a month ago, wasn’t it?”

Their shoulders tightened impossibly further and they nodded, just once, so Seraph pressed forward. “You disappeared for over a week. What happened? Did you get targeted by someone, did you miss the shot somehow, what…”

His questions tapered off as he really got a good look at them, cogs turning at quantum speed in his head.

“Jade…what did you do?”

They met his eyes, burning bright with an apology he didn’t want. “…the bounty was a kid.”

He dropped their hand limply, fingers going slack with a numbing horror, as he waited for them to explain, to tell him they didn’t follow through, for them to tell him anything that wasn’t a confirmation. They didn’t.

“She was fourteen. Some wealthy heiress or some shit, from the upper levels. Her uncle wanted her dead, so I…I…” The words were spilling out of their mouth in a wave now, dam broken, as they frantically tugged on their hair until the braid loosened completely. And when they stopped again, face creasing in pain, Seraph finished for them, voice blank.

“You did what you do best.”

They didn’t talk about this. There was an unspoken rule surrounding their interactions that they rarely broke; don’t talk about the things you do to survive. Their friendship worked because it existed outside of that, outside of the moral ambiguity that came with their respective jobs. Jade didn’t get an earful about his regular clientele, and Seraph didn’t get regularly reminded that a person he cared about breaks his tenuous moral code for a living. He didn’t want to hear this.

But he had to know why.

“You’ve killed kids before. Ones that were a helluva lot younger,” he said quietly, watching them freeze as his words sank in. “It’s not like I didn’t know; you’ve got a bit of a reputation, and it’s sure not based on good morals.”

He settled back in his spot on the couch, a good distance away now, hands folded as he asked, “Why is it bothering you this much?”

From the look of their wounds, and a few fresh scars besides, it seemed like they’d either been getting into more fights to cope…or that they were letting themself get hit. It wasn’t like them, and if they kept down this road, it might kill them.

“I was stopping,” they said, throat ragged with tears and regret. “I was getting better. For yo—for this. And now…”

He was so lost in his own head, quietly mourning the kid and his peace of mind, that the words didn’t even register at first. But when they finally did, they threw him off completely. “For me? What the hell does this have to do with me?”

They didn’t answer, hunching in on themself even further, before looking back up at him with a conviction he’d never seen before. Jade had always been hard to read, but he’d like to think that he had a pretty good understanding of what they were thinking after years of working together.

They were looking at him like he was a saint, like he was everything good in this world, like his parents used to. He couldn’t stand it.

He jumped off the couch, pacing back and forth across the scuffed black floor, frustrated and confused. “I’m not some paradigm of goodwill, Jade. You think I haven’t done things I’m not proud of?”

When they met, Jade was on one side of a gang war that Seraph had started, and he was selling weapons and upgrades to both sides. He didn’t like thinking about those months, practically drunk on the power he’d amassed at the cost of so, so many lives, about the corpses he looted for scrap metal to build his reputation. He earned the respect he’d desperately craved, but he knew even then that he’d changed in a way he couldn’t come back from.

Seraph may not have gone out and actively killed children for spare credits, but he wasn’t the sweet angel his parents had named him for, that they prayed he would be. He hadn’t been for a long time.

“No, listen to me. I’m not. You’ve seen what I’ve done. You were right in the middle of it. You think I’ve changed since then? That I have any less blood on my hands now than I did then?” He gestured wildly, motions getting more erratic, watching them remember but choose not to believe, until he finally broke.

“I gave you the arm that killed her, didn’t I?!”

That made them stop, eyes wide as everything he was saying finally hit them. He collapsed back into his seat, exhausted, before softly explaining, “Look, we’re…we’re not good people. Arguably, we never have been. Why start now? We’ve dug our holes, Jade, and they’re deep. Nothing to do now but lie in them.”

“I don’t want to be this forever, Seraph,” they replied, voice just as quiet, and while he felt for them, he really did, he wanted to move on from this headache inducing conversation.

“So what, you wanna go off, disappear, find a quiet corner far away from Umbra and convince yourself that you’re fine, is that it?” he snarked, rubbing at his temples.

“…not just me.”

He stared at them, uncomprehending, and they stared back, a glint of familiar but unexpected determination in their eyes. “I…what?”

“Come with me.”

He gaped at them, wondering openly at what insanity his usually reasonable friend was suggesting.

“Who’d stop us?” they began slowly, the neon glow of their eyes pulling him in. “You said it yourself; we’re the ones people are afraid of.”

“Which means we have targets on our heads, Jade,” he ranted, pleading with them to see reason. “We’ve had the power to stay freelance because we’re still offering our services, but if we try to leave? We’re too useful to lose.”

“So we take them out, the people we have to, and run.” They looked almost excited as they explained, watching the idea turn over in his head. “We’ll…erase ourselves, somehow. We’ll figure it out.”

“I know a hacker, she owes me a favor…” he muttered, before hastily backtracking as he realized what he was suggesting. “No, wait, hang on, where would we even go? It took all my family’s life savings and a lot of stolen credits on top of that to get me here from the solar wastes. Is there anywhere safe left?”

“…I don’t know,” they admitted, before carefully settling their hand on his knee. “But I have to try. And I’m not going anywhere without you.”

Seraph was at his wits end, brain scrambling for any form of logic he could find, until he finally let out a single word. “Why?”

“I want to be better. And even though you aren’t good, even though you’re just as fucked up as I am…you’re still the reason why.”

For the first time since he moved to this place, since he left home, Seraph felt like crying. He hadn’t felt wanted like this in so long, and it…well, it almost made him feel angelic again.

And finally, after an eternity of hesitation, he gave in.

“We need a plan. A lot of plans, honestly, if we want this to have any chance of working the way we want it too.”

Slowly but surely, Jade gave him a small, sideways smirk. “Why do you think I’m bringing you? So you can sit around and look pretty?”

He shoved his sock covered toes in their side, grinning at the wince they tried to suppress. “Leave the snark to people who are good at it, you ass.”

As much as he wanted to linger in the moment, in the warmth that so rarely entered their lives, they had work to do. For the rest of the night, and far into the following day, Seraph fixed up their arm, while Jade used his holo to start drafting a plan, and possibly a hit list.

He had more he wanted to say, trust and affection he wanted to return, but as he glanced over at them again, locked into whatever they were working on, he decided to hold off. They both still had so much to work on; power imbalances he’d only just become aware of, and lingering pain and consequences he’d tried to ignore. But if everything worked out, they would have time.

He’d tell them then.