The people gathered shot to their feet when a spotlight pointed to a double door on the other side of the arena, where stairs led from the edge of the pool all the way to the bottom. The crowd started chanting, their voices quickening up to eventually reach the speed of Pyro’s cocaine-fueled heart. It was two syllables, but Pyro only understood the first—red.
The king spoke again, hand on the head of one of the guard dogs. “The first time you saw him, he killed a brown bear with his bare hands. Now, he falls asleep wrapped in its pelt. To connect with his animal instincts, he says. In the four months since then, he kept feeding us what we want most: blood. Greet our champion, the Red Bear!”
Pyro squinted, but it was like looking straight into two suns. He wouldn’t see his opponent in detail until the two of them were close enough to pack a punch, but the massive man stepped into the arena with a raised fist. The cape he wore dropped to the tiles, prompting even more noise. Pyro didn’t care for any of those theatrics. He was here to smash the fucker’s head and collect his prize.
Or Die.
“Red Bear!” the man roared his own name. His voice sounded familiar despite the cruel quality to it, but Pyro went motionless when the giant man’s face became clear enough for him to recognize its features. His heart couldn’t have beat any faster.
Cuts and bruises covered the firm, muscular chest that had lost its padding since Pyro last saw it, and large brown scars ran across the familiar face, his hair barely a shadow of ginger, but it was Boar.
It was Boar.
Pyro’s first thought was that his coke must had been laced, but if he were to hallucinate his lover to life, why would his mind show him an image so unlike the cuddly teddy bear Pyro loved?
Boar huffed like a wild beast, and wouldn’t stop blinking at the sight of Pyro, but the show would go on despite the fire burning in the space between their bodies. What had happened to Boar? How he was doing? Or, more crucially, who did Pyro have to kill to get them both out of here alive, were questions that had to wait.
The announcer went on. “This is a fight to the death, ladies and gentlemen, so if you don’t want blood on your clothes, you better not approach the edge!”
Pyro’s brain ran a hundred miles per hour yet still couldn’t catch up to the shocking reality of this moment. He wasn’t afraid, and with each beat of his heart, liquid joy was pumped into his bloodstream in greater quantities. “It’s you,” he mouthed, the fight and spectators almost forgotten.
Boar huffed, staring at Pyro with his mouth hanging slack under the tangled beard. His shoulders tensed, as if someone had pressed a switch at the back of his head, sending him forward in an aggressive stomp, but as he got close enough to whisper, his lips moved, “what are you doing here?”
Pyro couldn’t take his eyes off the four dark red scars on Boar’s face. They went all the way from his forehead over his cheek, to the—to where his ear had been. Boar, his Boar, had suffered. “We’re looking for you,” he said, pushed into action by Boar’s movement, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the hard fist punched him in the stomach.
Shock only lasted a single heartbeat, because when the crowd roared, it became clear that whatever he was to decide, he needed to play along, or those people would descend on them and rip them apart.
“Just pretend you’re hurt more than you are,” Boar whispered, ignoring the narrative that poured out of the King’s lips. “Hit me.”
Pyro now regretted the extra shots of vodka he’d downed before coming here. The concoction they created with the drugs made him feel both slow and fast. He was a cheetah caught in hot tar. But Boar was always right, so he listened and punched him straight in the jaw, making a show of the quick work of his muscles.
“Do they keep you here?”
Boar pretended to fall back much more violently than the strength of the hit warranted, but he roared and charged at Pyro as soon as he regained stability. He grabbed Pyro’s middle, and since this wasn’t a life or death fight anymore—because he would never kill Boar—Pyro let Boar tackle him to the tiles.
“No. We travel, but this was where it started. I don’t even know where this is. Are we in Oregon? Doesn’t matter. They move me in a van,” he said before huffing out the licence plate’s number into Pyro’s face as they writhed on the floor in a mock battle.
He was hot in the places Boar touched, as if his body remembered the familiar hands. Everything inside him itched to pull machine guns out of non-existing pockets and gun down every single man or woman standing in their way. But even now, even with the coke making him hyper-aware of every single surface he touched and making his brain speed beyond what he could comprehend, he knew it wouldn’t have worked. He needed to pace himself, or they would both die.