7Written 2013 - April - 27.
Based on a piece written 2010 - April - 16.
The thing about love is that it has a tendency towards being all-consuming, and the thing about the people it affects is that they don't all necessarily tend towards being consumed.
Dusk, for example, is a vampire, and that has stripped off the excess and extremities of his nature, taken away his loyalty and his conviction in the basic goodness of humanity and his ability to let himself be tugged away by the little things. Even before he was turned, though, there was something in him that was growing beneath his skin, a shell of sorts, something cold and cruel and readying to block the world away. This is not to say that he was always fated to be emotionally stunted (and fate is another thing in which he has no belief), but on a very basic level, he is not predisposed to passion.
Billy-Ray Sanguine, on the other end of the spectrum, is warm and open and malleable right up to the moment where he isn't, when he's got a razorblade to your throat and you realize just how much a lack of eyes can hide and his smile shows a little bit too much by way of tooth to be comfortable, because something you should probably know about the Hitman Deluxe is that the softness of his flesh is all an externality and there is something at his core that has always been ready to kill, and he can make his lip service to emotion all he want, can distract himself with sweetness, but in the end all feeling is to him is another tool in his kit, just another weapon in his considerable arsenal.
There is a kind of mistrust that comes with being two blades matched and mirrored, in some ways identical and in others so completely incompatible that there has likely never been a worse couple since matter and vacuum began their dance, and so they are wary of each other. Their interaction remains professional, all coolness and heat balancing out to neutrality, but still there are bombs in their brains ticking and set to go off, aggravated each day by the blandness of the world they inhabit, and the thing about love is that it is all-consuming and the thing about creatures like them is that sometimes they just want to be consumed.
Of course, there are reputations to be maintained, considerations to be kept in check, so it's nothing loud and gaudy and open. Dusk has never worn his heart on his sleeve, and as much as his pretenses might conspire to suggest, neither has Billy-Ray, and so they don't say each other's names aloud when they're alone, and they don't think about each other until they're staring the other in the face, and so they don't let anyone guess at where they're going when both they disappear, when Dusk has locked up his home tight but jabs at not-quite-yet-dead veins with his needles and lets the veneer of civilization stick to his skin a moment longer, when Billy-Ray Sanguine tunnels through the ground and leaves no trace behind him. When they spend all night tangled into each other, silent as to words and expressive only in their touch, when they memorize each other's bodies only to spend the rest of the time until their next tryst trying to forget it all once more, when they carve chunks out of inexorable, ever-rushing Time to try and feel alive again.
Day will break, as well it must, and sometimes they can ignore it. Close the blinds and shut out the world a moment more, keep on going like the biological machines they are, and sometimes Dusk's apartment will look like a junkie's squat with the spent needles littered loosely around, but eventually reality creeps back in and it's time for the two of them to return to being separate entities, unconsumed. There is never a last-minute scramble, no desperate rush to be gone, because that would be conceding something to emotion that neither of them is quite prepared to give, but at the same time, something is changed in the atmosphere when they are rebuilding the walls they keep between them. Dusk thinks of it like that moment when his life ended, and Billy-Ray... Billy-Ray thinks of it like the absence of air, except he spends half his life underground, in the very definition of an absence of air, and it has never felt anything like this.
The feeling stays with them for the rest of the time they are apart, and it is agony at first, of course it is, though they manage to stop it from being a distraction, and as the seconds and the minutes and the hours and the days grind on, they learn to compartmentalize it, to put it in a little space just outside their consciousness, and they get used to it, and so it is that they survive until the next time something in their minds explodes, and one day they are not going to be able to rebuild that wall. Not again.
And when that day comes, there they will be, come Hell or high water, and they will say each other's names aloud with no care for who might hear, and same if they've been pretending that every successive time makes no difference, that they are not completely consumed, that it is even possible to escape from another thinking being unscathed, they will hold each other and know that, from the first moment, they would never have had any chance at staying separate.
The thing about love is that it is all-consuming, and the thing about those that it consumes is that, ultimately, they don't have very much choice in the matter, and even if they did, they very likely would not dream to choose any differently, and the thing about the vampire known as Dusk and the man without eyes known as Billy-Ray Sanguine is that they will never again be quite the same.