Bend and Break(poly)(bxb)

Five

Romero runs into the main room, muscular body all but crippled by nerves as he passes around weapons, ammo, and other supplies. Curly brown hair, he's gone too long without cutting, the small pink scratch on his neck, no doubt from an assignment earlier this week, the creases in his eyebrows. A thin layer of sweat graces them all. It almost makes me think he's as scared as I am.

We've never been attacked at home. Not by small gangs. Not by large ones. Not by grenade slinging ones.

I'm still not quite over what happened at the strip club. All of the adrenaline that had coursed through me as I took on so much by myself. The disturbed fear of the TLs, all of their corespondents, and what they were capable of. My heart is racing as I fumble over machinery and reload the guns I used just a few moments earlier.

L is looking over the security camera footage as he yells over the alarm with Seven.

"They don't even know who's in here, only that she is and someone brought her here." Seven checks one of his guns to make sure it's fully loaded. "Someone needs to evacuate with Mia, the others can cover."

"No, Von and Rosemary are passed out. So far it's only four against however many the TLs are bringing. I'm staying here." I shake my head as I speak.

"Mia." Seven looks at me briefly before looking back to L for a co-sign.

"We don't have time to evacuate her-"

"We have to— we have to get her out of here!" Seven's frantic words don't match the skillful way he readies our weapons. His weary eyes speeding over the security footage. Then his hand on my wrist as he prepares to drag me along with him. "This is too dangerous."

L is right beside us, skin to skin, as he works his fingers just barely under the collar of Seven's shirt, stopping him immediately as he releases a fraction of the nerves he has or maybe all of them. "This is just the life we live, Seven. None of this is your fault," Then the metal of his left hand is against the younger as well. "No matter what happens in the end, know that I have never blamed."

A severed embrace. Broken now and forever. No matter how much guilt, anger, lust, and shame shifts between us, the Sinner's Syndicate will always be bound together by just that.

Romero joins in, laying Seven's head onto his shoulder. Before I realize it, I'm carding my fingers through Seven's hair, gently pushing it out of his face and stopping just to scratch his scalp.

His eyes flutter closed. Romero is eyeing the security footage. The TLs are still struggling to get through the gate.

"I'm scared" Seven says.

And I want to tell him that I am too because I've never heard him say those words before. I want to tell him that maybe I do want to evacuate with him, off to some safe secret place where we can makeout and play in each other's hair and pretend like everything is okay. But the moment ends before I can even open my mouth.

"I know, it's okay." It's L who pulls away first, walks off to survey the area we have to work with. "They'll be here within the next minute or so. Let's all split up but keep an eye on each other. Like Seven said, they don't know how many of us are here and we're going to use that to our advantage."

It's almost certain that we'll all die in some horrendous way, if not tonight then another night. But it's never been in me to go down without a fight. No matter how scared I've been.

A second alarm goes off and as do the lights as the front door is bust open.

I would use an explosive to get through the door, not brute force, unless of course I didn't bring any. This gives me a bit of hope that we maybe, possibly, will make it out of this okay.