She held his hands in the backalley behind a all-night pawn shop and a Chinese resturant. Her fingers tiny, laced in his, each middle one with a spinework armor ring, pieces so old the points were dull, but still, still they scared thugs when she flashed them for safety on the way home at night. Steam rose around them and was gently lit by the buzzing bulbs of the back entrances, scattered light beaming down from the towers of apartment buildings above, through paper shades and broken windows, bars that kept out theives who would climb thirty floors up. There were rickety elevators and catwalks that bisected over their heads. It was an alley way like any other alley way in the city, on a night like any other night. She twisted their hands and their palms turned up, both their wrists with old scars, to the moonlight that hardly could be made out.

“You’re going to come back right?” She whispered, not meeting his eyes.

“Well, thats the plan.”

Both their breaths paused,
lurched in their lungs.

The floodlight around them flickered, but they were in a city of lights, a place that never really got dark. He was shorter than she was, just by a few inches and he cast a strange shadow behind him. A sweater with wings that sprouted and held near the top, silver scythe glinting. She shook her head at him, sighing. Twin ponytails grazed her lips.

“But all the way to Tokyo?” She murmured.

“Globalization.” His thin, dark eyebrows furrowed over brown slanted eyes. He couldn’t get her to look up. Whistled breath out of his thin lips, but she still stared at the ground. “Things have really picked up, after the fall, after the earthquake…” He let go of one of her hands and pushed aside a string of hair that had come undone. She only closed her eyes. “It’s just a job, a weapons trade. Everyone’s trying to get a piece of new business over there, starting over, you know? There’s just this huge influx of people there…C’mon Scarlett…”

He sighed, soft into the air of night. The sounds of cars on the street were muffled, spare laughter and conversation hushing around them. Night, late late night was settling around them and he pulled Scarlett into his arms.

“Snail…” She mumured, finally looking up and meeting his eyes. “This city will eat me alive without you.” They were cold and dark, red flashed in contacts to match her name. “I have the rings you made me, and the knife too, but…Snail…” Her body went limp against his. “I’ll never make it, I’ll be dead or sold off or…or…”

“Stop.” Snail pulled her from his chest. “This place isn’t as bad as everyone makes it out to be. You didn’t grow up here. I did. I promise, I promise I’ll be back Scarlett and you do everything the same way you did before you met me, while you met me. It’s a shit city, it’s the biggest city but fuck, if you hate it so much, leave…”

“Can I go to Tokyo with you?” She asked in a tiny voice, puffed out cheeks looking away.

“No. I’m not in clean business, you knew this.” And they both fell into silence, bodies above creaking on the catwalks, animals let out for the night starting their prowls. Televisions flickered off and the usual hum of electric light started to die out, just enough to be noticable as Snail and Scarlett fell into one another again, his lips on her cheek.

“I’ll miss you…” He murmured. “And I love you…”

“I know.” She turned, pressing lips to lips. And when she pulled away she spoke right into his open mouth, words vibrating against his teeth. “I love you too Snail. Even if you don’t come back.”

The bare light stretched their shadows out over the alleyway of the city night. Dim wings against a useless moon. They stretched over the buildings and past them, to the dock and the coastline and the ocean, to the import/export cartels of drugs and blackmarket body parts and back again to the hacker streets, expensive laptops pulling wireless internet connections out of the sky. They were nothing, tiny punched-out holes in a circuit board, just two small things in the middle of a city that never seemed to end.

I love you,
even if you don’t come back.

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