Plurk paste

Right from the start, Vincent is a puzzle.

For one thing, something in the universe has decided that *Jim* needs a *guardian angel*. It's fascinating, it's mad, it's *ridiculous* in the most wonderful way. Aren't guardian angels supposed to happen to the good men, after all? You never hear about serial killers or tyrants with an angel on their side, not in stories, anyway. Not that life is particularly like a story, most of the time.

And not that Jim is that bad. He's not a good man -- he doesn't hold any doubt about what he is; he's a part-time criminal with no hesitation about killing, and the people in the world that he actually cares for he can count without running out of fingers, and with most of them, it's a reflex more than honest emotion. Jim is not a man who cares what happens to strangers, he's not bothered by tragedies. He wouldn't mind if the world burned, if it did it in an interesting way, and if those few people were safe.

(Jim himself isn't one of those few people. He'd happily die -- in a blaze of glory, preferably -- as long as what was going on at the time, what led to his death, was interesting enough to be worth dying for. It's never plan A, of course, but it's never the worst-case scenario, either.)

But he's no serial killer, no cruel tyrant, not even an abuser. In the scheme of things, really, there are so many people who are so much *worse*, at least in execution -- not out of any sense of morality, but because Jim has never gotten quite bored enough to get his hands that dirty. His shop keeps him occupied enough that the light dabbling in crime is all he needs, when his attention starts wandering too much and he needs something else to focus on.

Still, of all people -- a teashop owner and occasional criminal with his own guardian angel? The universe is really *weird* sometimes, that's all the explanation Jim can find.

But before long, beyond *what* he is and what seems to be a freak accident of angelic nature, Vincent becomes something to study. The more he slips into Jim's life -- fitting perfectly into gaps Jim didn't know existed, with his business and his tarot decks and his dry comments to fill the quiet days in the shops and his easy presence when Jim meets with some of the more unpredictable criminals in his acquantance, taking over the unused backroom and Jim's spare bedroom more and more often as time goes on, making a place for himself that only really seems to be fully felt when he takes off on one of his trips and isn't there anymore -- the more Jim wants to know him. Inside and out, as thoroughly as Vincent gets to know Jim by virtue of the bond that Jim, frustratingly, doesn't get to take advantage of -- he wants to know *everything*.

And wanting to know him slowly bleeds into wanting to *own* him, not by this accident of nature, but by *choice* -- Vincent's choice as well as his own.

It's not really until he realizes how much higher a priority keeping himself alive, keeping himself safe, has become -- because his pain is Vincent's pain, and if Vincent's going to hurt it's not going to be by anyone else's hand; because dying means this all comes to an abrupt end and he's not even close to being *done* with this man -- that he starts to think of it as potentially being *love*, but he gets the feeling that by then, it's overdue.