Hello everyone! I recently discovered the Black Lagoon anime and loved it. This is the result. Even though my life keeps me quite busy, I believe I can promise weekly updates for this story. Of course, it ain't mine, all disclaimers apply, etc.

They were born on a cold winter afternoon not very long after the turn of the year to a poor couple from a rural area of Romania at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. As their parents already had three other children to raise and couldn't possibly afford them as well, they simply abandoned them to a state-run institution. From then on, things should have taken a certain established and thoroughly unpleasant course, given the socio-economic conditions prevalent in the country at the time under Ceausescu's regime.

However, this was when the brutal and much feared Securitate, the State security apparatus, stepped in. The whole scheme was the brainchild of a mid-ranking but very much ambitious officer, whose own colleagues called him "Tepes", meaning "Impaler" behind his back, for his extremely brutal methods of suppressing dissent among the population. The two children being healthy and of hardy peasant stock was a deciding factor in them being selected for the Impaler's project over hundreds of other potential subjects.

Thus, as soon as the project he'd proposed received approval from his superiors and a budget, the twins were removed from the orphanage, taken to a secret Securitate facility and given code names. Never having learned the names their parents had given them, they were always known as Hansel and Gretel. Starting as soon as they could walk, they were trained to become the perfect killing machines, learning to handle firearms, edged weapons, explosives and even unarmed combat. They were also taught English and French, in addition to their native Romanian. Even before the twins turned eight, they were considered to be a success as a project. In fact, their handler was so impressed by their progress that he wanted to give them an operational test, his superiors were not as enthusiastic, however, insisting on waiting a little longer before unleashing them on the enemies of the state, real and imagined, foreign and domestic.

And then came the events of 1989 and the sudden fall of the Ceausescu regime, culminating in the swift trial and execution of the dictator and his wife and plunging the country into a period of turmoil. The Impaler wasn't one to sit around and wait until his past misdeeds caught up with him, so he took care to destroy as much evidence of his pet project, as well as kill as many of those who knew about it, as he could and fled the country together with the twins and all the cash he could get his hands on.

-o-

In the chaos following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, new organized crime syndicates were formed, many of them recruiting former military and intelligence personnel. These quickly forged alliances or at least mutually profitable relationships with existing and long established criminal organizations such as the Italian Mafia. The Impaler was careful not to join any outfit, old or new, but rather hire out his services to them on an as-required basis.

During the years that followed, Hansel and Gretel made quite a name for themselves as assassins, working first in their home country for some local crime lords, then for the brutal Albanian mafias and later for the more sophisticated Italian organizations. Extreme violence became their hallmark and eventually became known in certain criminal circles as "The Vampire Twins". After all, killing was all they knew how to do and they did it exceptionally well.

Still, unleashing them on their various targets had one unexpected consequence; the twins began to see the real world… or parts of it at least, but in any case enough for them to come to realize that there was so much more than the bubble they were being kept inside.

Sometimes, when casing their objectives, one of them would also observe their surroundings in general just out of curiosity, while the other was focused on the target. And what they saw didn't exactly tally with what their handler was telling them. Slowly but surely, the real world began to overcome their conditioning and made them question the fake reality imposed on them. Of course, they were smart enough to hide it all from the Impaler. They had learned over time how painful the punishments inflicted on them by their handler for various slip-ups could be. Though, having been essentially raised as attack dogs, they were hesitant to turn on their master, no matter how easy it would be for them to kill him and make him disappear for good, a kind of thing they had considerable experience in. This didn't mean that they didn't commit small acts of rebellion in their own way. For example, all petty cash the Impaler gave them as sort of an allowance went towards buying snacks they had seen other kids enjoy, plus comics and other magazines, passing the latter off as wanting to practice their language skills, something their handler approved. His ego was flushed with the apparent success and he never realized they were taking the first baby steps towards an emancipation of sorts.

-o-

For the moment, the Neapolitan Camorra had retained the Impaler's – and by extension the twins' – services for a job in France. The target was a bunch of Georgian mobsters (ignorant fucking bumpkins from a former Soviet backwater trying to punch way above their league, as one Italian put it) in Marseilles.

"I'm bored, Fratele meu," said Gretel in Romanian as she peered at the target through a pair of binoculars. "They are doing nothing but sit around drinking and playing cards. They barely seem to discuss business at any time. Anything interesting on your end?"

Hansel lowered his own field glasses and turned to his sister. "You'd better take a look, Sora mea." They switched places and Gretel zoomed in on what her brother had been looking at. There was a gathering in a nearby park. Children about their own age were apparently having an outdoor birthday party with their parents in attendance.

"Makes you wonder just how much else we've been missing," she mused sadly, the words spoken so quietly that Hansel barely heard her. In any case, even without hearing her, he'd have known what she said. These few words had become one of her standard phrases when the two were alone. "Back to the job at hand, how do you think we should do it, brother?"

He didn't reply immediately, instead concentrating on observing the marks. "They are all in a single room, no guards outside and just one watching the door from the inside, armed with a sawed-off, pump-action shotgun that was resting on his lap. We could go in through the door and take them all out before they know what hit them."

"I sense a 'but' coming," she said.

He smiled. "This is a densely populated area. There could be too many witnesses if we go in and make a ruckus with guns blazing and axes swinging. I say a bomb or, better yet, a rocket in the room should suffice."

"Rocket it is," she agreed. "Our employers said they can provide anything we want."

"An RPG-7D should fit easily inside one of our backpacks," Hansel said, voicing exactly what was in his twin's mind as well. The paratrooper model of the famous weapon was designed to break up in two parts for easy transportation. A launcher and a few rounds of ammunition could easily be hidden inside a couple of backpacks. "And bicycles for the getaway," he added. Assuming the job was done at a reasonably early hour in the evening, no cop responding to the incident would consider two kids riding bicycles to be suspicious.

"We have a plan," she concluded. Business done for the time being, both decided to spend some more time studying the tableaux of normal peoples' lives they could see from their observation post before calling it a night and heading back to the hotel where their handler waited for them to report back.

The job in Marseilles was completed the next day with absolute success. Hansel and Gretel had even had the time to stop at a mom-and-pop store to buy ice cream and comics even before the first police cars arrived at the scene. The Italians were so pleased to be rid of some annoying competition that they added a bonus to the assassins' fee – almost all of which went into the Impaler's pockets, of course.

-o-

Moving to a new location after a job was standard procedure for the Impaler and his "attack dogs" and this time it was a Mafia-owned apartment in the Sicilian resort town of San Vito Lo Capo, where the three waited to hear about a new job the Italians had said they were lining up for them.

This time, instead of a call, a high-ranking mob Boss paid them a visit. From the respect their handler was showing the man, the twins could plainly see that he was a very important man, so they just sat there quietly, having rather redundantly been warned to be on their best behavior, and waited for him to speak, which he eventually did, his English grammatically correct, but heavily accented.

"I have an important job for you three," he said after taking a seat in the living room. "And this time it's in a place far, far away." Yes, the mobster was prone to theatrics. "It's a place called Roanapur." He turned to the twins. "Do you know where it is, kids?"

"Sounds Oriental, sir," Hansel replied.

"India or Southeast Asia, probably," Gretel guessed. There were a lot of places that had names ending with 'pur' over there.

"Correct," said the man and applauded. "Specifically, Roanapur is a city in southeast Thailand." He then addressed the Impaler. "I'm not going to lie to you, my friend; this will probably be the most difficult job you've ever taken, assuming you accept. If you do, and carry it out successfully, the compensation will be more than satisfactory."

"We won't disappoint you, Don Emilio," he said.

"Eccellente," said the Don. "I'll make all the necessary arrangements with our people in Roanapur as well as take care of your flight there. We will make a private jet available for you, so you can take your weapons with you and not have to worry about anything."