@bcck: [ touch ] for your muse to rest their forehead against mine’s (for Joe ofc)
shot one: joe’s shoulder, hard like dislocation. that’s his current gun arm. his ears sting with it.
shot two: aimed less amateur. well, that’s his goddamn fucking—
(his last thought goes where it always goes.)
— booker’s. that’s booker’s momentum that freeze-frames him in the aspiring trajectory of joe’s headshot as joe switches trigger fingers.
booker’s head takes it and whiplashes sideways, held like a breath in the violating twist, his temple spraying. the whole of him ragdolls. he bulldozes into joe with a punch-drunk center of gravity and the answering weight of its planet.
joe doesn’t remember him this heavy.
this rediscovering disjoints his balance until his shot arm fastens himself and booker into a parcel. he bites his tongue open on the pain. it fattens in his mouth when he blinks through booker’s blood.
the propel of onetwothreefour shots, booker’s front and face again, backs them into the wall. decent a bulletproof vest as he’s made of booker’s body, one of the bullets snaps through the wrist joe’s got over his ribs.
from behind booker’s hair, life is muffled. it cobwebs to joe’s beard. it pinches his eye. he has half a mind to shave it all off to a shiny knee before booker deigns to rejoin the show.
arm sinewing, joe fires. shot one: in the elbow. when the moron misses a step, he misses it right into shot two: in the cheek. those are always oozy. between the eyes, outside the eyes. his head, at the end of it, sieves in little leak holes of brain splat.
it’s a one-second pleasure to see that he couldn’t have gone without.
joe’s knee cracks like a nutshell when he drops to the cement. against him, still held, booker is a mountain.
there’s a fishbone in joe’s throat, a little claw. he smears booker’s own blood back to the side of his cheek. his gloved hand clutches booker’s wilted head until it sticks to his temple hard and not at all made for this.
he holds it there and nothing happens, and joe thinks that maybe, maybe. his exhales count the time out loud. he holds it there even when booker’s eyes pop open from up close and his wild coming-to headbutts joe for all his trouble. very sophisticated.
’ tout le monde, regarde. bravo. ‘
he spits out pink to the side. his arms slip off.
