It was dark. It had been dark for a long time.

After being discovered crouching next to Angelo’s bloody body with a fake will in his hand, he had been grabbed by the bodyguards and lost consciousness not long after that thanks to their less than tender handling.

When he woke up he was bruised all over and locked in a cell.

At first he was afraid he’d been arrested, but as time went on he began to realize that being arrested would have been a kindness. Arrest lead to something. A sentence. Jail. An end to things.

He didn’t have any of that. He had day after day of a six by six concrete room without windows and often without light. With a thin mattress and little food. Without any due process, or even a warder he could recognize. When they fed him, they wore balaclavas and they never spoke. It must be Angelo’s men who were holding him, but they didn’t seem to have a plan for him.

Unaware of the passing of time, Bobby could have been in there for days or weeks. There was nothing to do but think. Nothing to do but go over the events of the past and begin to regret them. Mostly, he regretted his decision to have Angelo killed.

He missed him. More than he had realized it was possible to miss someone. In just two short weeks, Angelo had become a lover, a mentor. Not just a mentor, a tormentor. Bobby would have given anything for that now in this dark solitude. The emptiness and loneliness sank through his bones. He felt like a hollow man. None of this had been worth it. Not the final hit, not the business with the Taylor-Chapman boy, not any of it.

He could have become an accountant. He could have spent his days working in a nice office, with people who didn’t like Mondays and pinned pictures of funny cats to the walls. He could have lived a nice, safe life. He could have been someone. Not anyone of any note, but someone who wasn’t going to die alone in a dark room having killed the only person who had ever been able to breach his walls.

He had made so many mistakes in his short life, most of them on top of one another. None of them could be taken back. This was the end. He felt his death in every breath he took. Sometimes, when he tried to sleep, it was as though the room itself became his coffin. He felt the walls closing in and the decay setting in.

Was he already dead? Was this hell? He would deserve it if it was.

At some point in the timeless dark, they came for him. Two men in black, wearing balaclavas. They did not speak, they just came and drew him up from the bed. When they touched him he realized that he was naked. He had been aware of it when he first came to in the cell but since then it had become a meaningless distinction. There were no such things as clothes unless there were others around to be compared to. These men were dressed. He was not. They made him naked.

His thoughts were muddied and nonsensical as they took an arm each and wrapped a blindfold around his eyes before walking him out of the cell. Not a word was said. There was only silence and steps. He was moving again. Movement, another facet of reality that had been denied to him. His legs felt weak, but the men kept him erect as they lead him to… what? His death?

It would be a mercy. Existence as it was could be described as nothing but torture. In the darkness he was not a man. He was not a murderer. He was nothing but a mind unchained from reality, tormenting itself with black imaginings.

They stopped. Pushed him down. A chair was beneath him and he sat, shivering in it.

Fingers touched his face. A sweet caress before the blindfold was ripped free and he saw the most beautiful man in the world.

Angelo.

For a moment Bobby was sure he was looking into the face of a ghost. Then Angelo reached out and touched him on the shoulder and he knew that the man was real.

He burst into great sobbing tears which wracked his body and made his lungs burn for air. He had been dead in a thousand ways, but now he was alive. Bobby couldn’t hold himself up under the sudden wave of grief and relief. He collapsed and would have fallen off the chair entirely if not for Angelo crouching to catch him.

He curled up against the hard body of the man he had killed, his legs curling up into the fetal position as he clutched at Angelo’s shirt. A white shirt. Just as it had been on the night…

“You’re alive,” he whispered, shaking from head to toe.

“Very much so,” Angelo rumbled.

“How? I saw you die.”

“You saw what you needed to see.”

“You’re alive…” Bobby repeated himself, stretching his fingers out to touch Angelo’s face. It was him. Handsome. Dark. Beautiful.