"Everybody needs a hero now and then."

"You more than anyone else."

"So mean!"

Reborn took a drag from his cigarette, smoky clove on his tongue.

Lambo, after a brief moment of cursing the evilness that was the hitman, stretched up from where he had rested his head against his chest and covered his mouth with his, inhaling the toxic aroma. They separated and he blew a thin stream of grey back into the air.

Reborn licked his lips. Some things tasted better than potential cancer.

"If you're so against it," his younger lover breathed, looking at him with foggy green eyes, "maybe you should stop saving me." And he settled his ear back against Reborn's chest, right above his heart, and closed his eyes lazily. Listening. Feeling. His fingertips danced lightly over Reborn's pale, taut skin, taking delight in every twitch and shiver that happened beneath his touch. How could Reborn know that it was delight?

Lambo's ditzy smile was testament enough.

The hitman rubbed the burning tip off of his cigarette in a nearby ceramic ashtray, killing it. Hand now free, he stroked it through the boy's hair, pulling black wavy locks from his pixie face. Lambo's smile grew and his cheeks reddened the slightest bit.

He was so easy to please. It was ridiculous, considering the high demands he made every day. But everyone knew he would be just as happy if all he got at the end of the night was a smile and thanks for all he had done.

"Yare, yare, would you stop saving me? You're taking too long to answer me, you stingy bastard…"

A sleepy green gaze opened slowly and found his own eternally black eyes, like two portholes into a world of darkness and shadows. All the while, those depths of green were ever changing, so minutely that, if not watched closely, all they appeared to be was simply green. But they weren't. They were lime, emerald, jade, olive, electric, forest, mint, fern… They were very much alive.

He spent a very long moment staring into those pools of mortality, aware of how the colors swirled dangerously darker as Lambo became more uncertain in the silence.

"… Reborn?"

His thumb feathered over Lambo's cheek bone and then lowered to graze his bottom lip, its softness berated by his rough pad. "You make it sound like I go out of my way just to be your 'hero'."

Lambo's smile returned, full-blast, confident, full, beautiful. "So I'll be depending on you in the future, right?"

"Aho-ushi!" Reborn tugged harshly at Lambo's thick hair, causing the boy to yelp and tear up. "Learn to defend yourself!"

"G-ga… ma…n! S-so I c-can be y-your he-hero, ri-ight?" His laugh was fake but something genuine shined in those green, green, green eyes of his, like a ray of hope or a sky of want.

"If that will motivate you, then, yes." He smirked. "So you can be my hero." He soothed Lambo's hurt scalp and pressed a kiss to his forehead. "Now go to sleep, Aho-ushi. You're annoying me with your voice."

"M-meanie!"

~::~

Author's Note: Something short and sweet. The whole day, "Everybody needs a hero" was echoing in my head after watching Columbine in my Criminal/Civl Justice Class. It was the tragedy in Colorado, spring of 1999, where two teenagers shot up their high school, killing one teacher and about ten students and then injuring twenty others, before killing themselves. And I was thinking to myself, "Where were the heroes back then?" So I wrote this, because everybody needs a hero at one point or another.