If the images are not related to each other, but you want to place them on top of the page together for stylistic reasons, you probably want a simple minipage environment with two figure environments inside.

I meant they might be so closely related that you want them share the same caption and figure number and everything.

Subcaption works perfectly for that. You can skip the subfigure caption - "The gull" etc in this picture

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latex_example_subfig...

You can reference either the whole figure by using the label inside the figure environment, or you can reference the subfigures using labels inside the subfigure environments.

> Subcaption works perfectly for that

I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying that if your needs are simple enough, you can get away without it.