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Inevitably, people change.
Spies, however, simply die.
**
He was burying it in the red clay, covering it with dead pine needles, ridding his apartment of it and his mind, too. Harsh rain pounded his face, slicked back his hair. He swallowed and swiped at his forehead, pushing away sudden silver bangs. Quickly surveying the vast, dark forest, he found no one but some limping white-tailed deer and ugly little birds shaking in the trees.
The White Spy knew he stuck out. He couldn’t get rid of his White Nation uniform or dye his hair for the occasion. He had just thrown on a black overcoat and bolted out of the apartment, clutching it to his chest.
He was breathing heavily, but he couldn’t wait to give his lungs a break. He moved from the woodline in a moment’s flash and was on the asphalt road a minute later. He slanted one last, hard, mean gaze at the thing he buried then he went home – or whatever the embassy was telling him was his home now. He hadn’t had a real home in eleven years and he’d burned that one to the ground with his best friend pounding at the front door screaming to get out.
**
There it was.
There he was. It was his. He knew it as soon as he uncovered it.
The Black Spy could feel the rain dancing down the flesh of his throat. His trim military cut didn’t hold back his hair enough, and he dragged little pieces out from his dark eyebrows and squinting eyes. His hands were wet and thick with grabbing, fat red clay, sneaking under his fingernails and staining his skin. He saw in an instant his terrible rival and everything that he ever was, and he was hobbling down the nearby abandoned asphalt street, thinking deliriously as to what he was going to do with it. He had it now, but – but what could he do with it?
Besides rip the White Spy apart, piece by precious piece, and leave him bleeding, aching, and silent in the dead oaken woods.
**
He couldn’t get any of the clay off. It had forever ruined his White Nation uniform, and no amount of dry cleaning would ever win the cloth back to his side. He threw them to the side and hunched over on the side of his bed, dirty hands sliding up into his hair. If he was going to ruin his pants, his shirt, then he would sure as fuck ruin his ugly silver hair, too.
No moonlight tonight. The clouds had eaten up any sign of light. He hadn’t turned on any of the lamps or ceiling lights when he stumbled back in. He’d torn off his boots because he didn’t want to get some fucking fee shoved down his throat when the embassy told him to leave this apartment complex for one a thousand miles away. Naked but for black boxers and too-white socks, he felt for the scars under his hair and found all sixteen as easily as he ever could.
Okay. Sixteen. All there. Four gun-shot scrapes, two gunshot holes, two knife-cuts, one dent that caved in too much, five aching shrapnel marks from explosives, one spot where rock gauged his skull as he was dragged, and the most recent surgical incision that slid wildly across his skin like the surgeon was drunk and wielding a fun, little knife.
The doctor hadn’t been drunk, and the knife wasn’t little.
The White Spy rose his head and looked slowly at his door.
It was open, and there was a second pair of muddy boots in his apartment.
**
The Black Spy had the refrigerator door open as he stood, shaking from the cold rain still clinging to his body. Approximately thirty chilled beers, two pizza boxes, and a huge jar of mayonnaise were oddly matched with a container of stripped tempeh, a box of Portobello mushrooms, and a cute ceramic bowl of fresh strawberries. He stared vaguely between the locally brewed beer and the vividly red fruit then glanced over at the living room.
**
The White Spy had a high-powered rifle in one dirty hand. He looked down at the angular scar sweeping up from his groin over his abdominal muscles towards his right armpit that paralleled his rifle too eerily. A machete cut from the Black Spy in the jungles. He hadn’t been aiming for his groin, but the White Spy had twisted wrong, and next thing he knew he was bleeding out and contemplating why their governments were chopping down the rain forest with his face pressed against a gigantic termite hill.
As he slid into his living room, he saw the Black Spy and ignored the old thought that somewhere termites had eaten up his clumpy spy blood.
**
The Black Spy blinked once.
The White Spy shot once.
**
He was bleeding out in the White Spy’s kitchen, a smashed strawberry in one hand, cold beer leaking from the fridge.
The Black Spy brought his eyes up to witness the White Spy step into the kitchen with those old socks and those old boxers and that old scarred body of his. Well, not an old body. Lean, long, young body with burn marks. New rifle, too. A good, updated thing from one of their mutual acquaintances who wanted them dead as much as he wanted their sedated bodies to screw.
**
The White Spy set down his rifle on the kitchen counter by the spice rack.
One long, silver brow rose on his face. His eyes wandered to the strawberry juice and seeds dripping from the Black Spy’s fingers then the puddle of nice, local beer.
Then finally back to the Black Spy who was staring at him blankly.
His rival was covered from head to toe in thick, red clay on his black uniform.
The White Spy then turned his tired attention to the Black Spy’s other hand, which was clutching old packet of files that he was entirely too familiar with.
**
“You kept it,” he accused.
“You’re staining the pages red.”
The Black Spy glowered flatly at him. “You buried it in clay.”
The White Spy stared then asked, “Why did you dig it up?”
Silence sulked its way into the kitchen. Both men remained utterly serene, with fairly taut muscles and blood splatter against their skin. The darker spy shook the papers slightly before he replied, “I had to see what you were hiding. I didn’t think it was this.”
The White Spy immediately snapped, “You should have left it down there. I don’t want it. I shouldn’t have –” He cut himself off, glaring resentfully at the pleasant bird-patterned wallpaper.
“You shouldn’t have kept it all these years but you did,” the Black Spy finished for him. He dropped the papers resoundingly on the laminated kitchen floor. He asked not at all gently, “Why did you do that?”
“This is what you’re demanding as you die, Black?”
“It’s important.”
The White Spy’s eyes widened, and his mouth went into a flat line. Blood and beer was mixing on his kitchen floor. The refrigerator light shone across his socks and over the Black Spy’s mud-soaked legs.
“I liked it.”
The Black Spy explained himself sharply, “I wrote it when I was drunk.” His dark eyes rolled up hard to meet the White Spy’s. “I didn’t mean it.”
His practically nude rival stared down at him, unyielding. “I don’t care. I liked it.”
Maybe it was the strawberry, maybe it was the clay, but the White Spy swore he saw red flushing his rival’s skin. The Black Spy tore his eyes from the other man’s and dropped down to examine his stomach wound. Yes, he was bleeding out. A few minutes to die. He hadn’t seen his intestines in… two years? He noted their healthy color with some diseased pride.
The White Spy suddenly crouched over him, straddling his thighs with those pale, barely haired legs. He was squinting up into the Black Spy’s face, searching for something, but his rival turned cruelly away, determined not to look at him. But he stiffened and jerked back to stare at him when he felt his hand be moved and something wet on his fingers.
It took him an odd moment to realize it wasn’t his clay-stained hand – it was his left hand, coated with clay and strawberry.
And the White Spy was making sure he met death with clean fingers by carefully licking off the seeds and juice digit by digit.
The Black Spy couldn’t help it – he groaned, his hips turning, his back coming off the cabinets. The White Spy flickered an impossible look at him, pink tongue wrapped around one of those calloused, gunpowder-burned fingers. The dark spy opened his mouth but he couldn’t find what he wanted to say and just stared endlessly at his pale counterpart.
The White Spy brought an entire finger into his mouth, then another, and then he sucked, long, tongue undulating underneath the pair. His eyes never left the other man’s.
“White…” the Black Spy ground out.
The fingers left his mouth, and those lips swept from the strawberry-drenched fingers to the Black Spy’s jawline. The White Spy dropped one kiss, two kisses, there before he pushed his mouth against the Black Spy’s, whose body was stricken immobile by his wound and his rival.
They hungrily kissed, like the strawberry had released some sort of insatiable need in them both. Both spies tasted nasty red clay and some hint of succulent fruit, but neither could get over the genuine flavor of the other man. The White Spy could taste tundra, poverty, pollution, fireplaces; the Black Spy could taste meadow, sophistication, imperialism, disease. It was perpetual and violent and unattainable.
The White Spy pulled the pistol from the back of his boxers, caught it under the Black Spy’s chin, and pulled the trigger without pausing kissing him.
Bone smashed into his face instantly. He flinched as he felt his left eye half-explode from Black Spy shrapnel. Closing his eyes as much as he could, he pulled away and dropped back to sit on the laminated kitchen floor. That was it. He wouldn’t open his eyes again, ever again.
His fingers stumbled to the packet, the papers covered in blood, beer, clay. His fingers danced over the raised letters, and his mouth slid into a crooked smile. It had been stapled to his standard embassy SUV and read like a mixture of Shakespearean love poetry crashed into modern beatnik confession.
Star-crossed Cold War lovers meeting at the local coffee-shop.
Something like a tear fell from one of the White Spy’s eyes, but it easily could have been blood or eyeball juice or some fleshy part of the Black Spy.
His nostrils flared slightly – he had smelled death before, and he had grown accustomed to it over the past eleven years. But never before had they witnessed this particular mixture – spilled beer, crushed strawberry, rotting mushrooms, too-fresh Southern clay, sweat and rain, sex and murder…
The White Spy never opened his eyes as he refound his pistol.
His smile faded as he added to his list of smells that equated the scent of death:
… and suicide.
**
No, spies don’t dare change the rules.
There’s always another life, though.
Another pistol, another strawberry.
Maybe next time.