Chapter Text
Pete hates surveilling Vegas, hates the way every mission to spy inevitably leaves him with feelings of nostalgia and loss. He drives around behind Vegas’ cars and bikes, watching him as he goes about his day. Pete watches them, Vegas and Macau as they go shopping at the Siam Paragon, as they stop for milkshakes or boba drinks. Pete remembers when they used to do that together, when he’d follow them around with his arms full of shopping bags, drinking from a plastic cup because despite his position as their lackey, they loved enough to include him. They made sure that when they ate, Pete ate. When they drank, Pete drank. And if a sweater or a jacket looked like it would fit him nicely, they’d make sure he had it. He misses that; he wonders if Korn and Chan gave him this job to make sure he remembers that they continue to live without him, that he should remember his place with the main family, because the minor family has moved on without him.
And then, worse than nostalgia is the bitter taste of jealousy which comes when Vegas drops Macau off at home and goes out on his own. It is always to a club, a bar, where Pete knows what his intentions are. He sits in his car outside the club, watching the entrance and every beautiful boy that lines up on the sidewalk. He imagines, inside, that Vegas is sitting on a velvet sofa, staring down at so many people he’s superior to. He imagines Vegas looking down at the bodies writhing on a hot and stuffy dance floor, picking out a boy that makes his dick twitch, and telling the staff to bring him up to the VIP lounge.
It’s there that Vegas will woo them, fondle them, suck them in and make them moan. He’ll probably grab their throats in a firm grip, and Pete is certain they don’t handle it as well as Pete could. He bets Vegas will fuck them on the club’s couch, in his bedroom or a hotel, and they won’t take the force as well as he can. Vegas will want to hurt them, choke them, hit them, and Pete can take it, but he’s seen these same boys run from Vegas’ bedroom more times than necessary and he knows they can’t. Still, Vegas keeps seeing them, keeps fucking him, and it just leaves Pete angry, jealous, and nauseous. When Vegas returns home and someone else takes his place in the surveillance rotation, Pete goes home and touches himself in the shower, in his bed. He spreads his legs and fingers himself, imagining what it might feel like for Vegas to do it. He sees him naked, closes his eyes and imagines that body over him, imagines him stroking his cock until he comes all over Pete’s ass.
Vegas is the only person he ever imagines anymore. With Emil, Pete’s attempts to drown out his desires died. If he doesn’t satisfy himself this way, he might act, might fall to his knees and grovel for Vegas because he’s the only one he feels safe with, as fucked up as that sounds.
And he’s doing it now, imagining Vegas with someone else while he sits in the Cadillac, watching the front entrance of a popular club, when his phone rings. He presses the Accept button on the car’s touch screen, and glares at a particular man in tight shorts being accepted into the club. His ass is big; Vegas likes boys like that. “Pete?”
“Yeah?”
Static momentarily fills the speakers as Arm shuffles around, and then he sighs. “We found Porsche and Kinn.”
The family’s private hospital is located on the opposite side of the compound. It is not a long or difficult walk from the parking garage, but Pete is still winded by the time he gets to the door. It’s the nerves, the frustration, the undeniable truth that Vegas is somehow involved, and Pete should have seen it coming. He is, afterall, the person who knows him best.
He hears Tankhun’s wailing the moment the elevator door opens. Instinct overtakes guilt, and he runs towards the sound of his sobbing. He finds him at the intersection of two hallways, bent over on the ground with Pol tilted over him, rubbing his back and trying to comfort him. Pete reaches them, and Pol looks up with a terrible look of helplessness on his face.
And Pete understands because Pol is good at keeping Tankhun distracted, keeping his happiness high, but that’s no use when he’s already down. When Tankhun crashes, when dark and negative emotions find their grip on his heart, it’s hard to pull him out. Tankhun’s lows are very, very low. Pete knows lows better than anyone.
With a terrible sigh, he drops to the ground beside him. “Khun Nu,” he sings softly. “What are you crying for?”
“He- he’s been shot,” Tankhun chokes, devolving back into sobs. He drops his head onto Pete’s
Pete looks up at Pol for explanation; all Arm told him was that they’d been found, and Pete needs to get to the hospital. Pol offers him a tight smile. “Kinn took a bullet. He’s in surgery now.”
Pete blinks, horrified and confused. If Kinn took a bullet, it’ll be because he was alone. It’ll be because something happened to Porsche and he couldn’t protect him, or Porsche had abandoned Kinn all together. He swallows, not wanting an answer, but needing to know regardless. “And Porsche?”
Pol makes a strange face. “He’s, uh- he’s okay, mostly. Maybe a broken rib or two, but Khun Kinn protected him.”
What? No. That doesn’t make any sense. In what world would that make sense? Porsche is a guard; every single one of them is nothing more than cannon fodder, a human shield. Kinn has never cared this much for a guard’s well being before—never enough to take a bullet himself. The gears turn inside his head, and he doesn’t like the conclusion he’s coming to—that Kinn Theerapanyakul loves him.
And that just can’t be because if it is, there is no doubt in his mind that the conclusion will be the same as his. Pete knows that loving a Theerapanyakul is a messy, dangerous business. In the end, the trauma and the hatred—internal, external—will drive a wedge between them, leaving them both in a state worse than before.
Tankhun shifts below, his cries a little quieter. He buries his nose in Pete’s lap, and Pete turns back to him. He will have to worry about this strange new dynamic later; Tankhun is his priority. With a heavy sigh, he lays his fingers on Tankhun’s head, scratching soothing circles across his scalp. “Hey, Pol? Can you find a vacant room for us to stay in?”
“Yeah, definitely!”
Pol’s footfalls recede down the hall, and Pete hums to Tankhun until the cries soften to a whimper. Once that happens, he asks, “Are you alright, Khun Nu?”
Tankhun sniffs. He presses his cheek to Pete’s thigh and stares at the distant wall. His dark eyelashes flutter against his cheek when he blinks. “It’s happening again,” he says, his voice cracking.
Pete furrows his brows. “What’s happening?”
Tankhun shakes his head. His chest swells with a heavy breath, and a tear rolls from the corner of his eye to the crook of his nostril. “My family’s dying again,” he says. “And I can’t do anything to stop it.”
Pete clenches his jaw. He continues the steady brushing of his hair. He doesn’t like the direction of this conversation, the suggestion that any of this is Tankhun’s fault. “It’s not your fault,” Pete says. “And your family isn’t dying. Kinn’s in surgery, and he’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
“When they rescued us,” Tankhun says, ignoring Pete’s assurances. It takes Pete a moment to remember the kidnapping, the outcome. “They took mama’s body away before I could see her. And sometimes I still see her in my dreams, and it’s hard to believe she’s dead, because I never got to see her for myself.
“And now Kinn’s going to die, and he’s going to haunt my dreams, too. And he’s going to tell me I did a terrible job as his big brother, and it’ll be unbearable.”
Pete sighs. It is an awful, dreadful thing to hold the weight of the world on your shoulders, to take fault for things that you can’t help. Pete bends down, awkwardly hugging Tankhun’s head and shoulders. In this position, it is the best he can muster, but he hears Tankhun’s gentle sigh, and this must ease the fear and worry somehow. “You are a wonderful big brother,” Pete says, believing every word he says. There is no denying he loves his brothers, that he frets and nags them like a worried mother, that he tries to be the feminine influence they lack with the early loss of their mother. “And they would not hate you. Kinn will be better soon, and he can tell you that himself.”
“I found a room.” Pete looks up, and Pol is smiling down at him. “Time for bed?”
Together, Pol and Pete lift Tankhun from the floor and guide him to a vacant hospital room, over to a California King bed in the center of the pristine space. They gently settle him down, and they slip the shoes off his feet, unclip the jewelry from his neck and wrists and ears.
They slip him down beneath the covers, and then turn to wait beside the door.
“No,” Tankhun says. They stop, turning back to face their boss. With his head buried in his pillow, he says, “I want you both to stay with me.”
So, stay, they do. Together, they climb onto the mattress at either side of him, down beneath the covers where Tankhun grabs each of their arms and pins them to the spot. They cannot leave, and Pete doesn’t plan to. He can’t sleep, sleep being something he does only when he knows it's safe. If Kinn is in surgery, they are not safe; they are vulnerable. Eventually, though, Tankhun begins to snore.
“Hey, Pete?” Pol asks.
“Hm?”
For a moment, he stays quiet, contemplative. He’s thinking, considering, and then he sighs. “Do you feel like something bad is going to happen? Like, worse than this? I’ve got a bad feeling.”
Pete doesn’t know; he doesn’t want things to get worse, hopes they won’t. But he also knows signs of a storm, the rumbling of distant thunder clouds, and this feels a lot like that. “Just- just keep your gun handy.”
It’s all they can do, hold their gun and wait for their bosses’ hubris to affect them.
In the morning, while Pol snores in the hospital bed they shared, Pete takes Tankhun to see his brother. They were woken with the news that Kinn was out of surgery, that the bullet missed vital organs, and is now in recovery. As they march down the hall, Tankhun’s long, silk robe whips around him. He moves hurriedly, reaching the end of the hall where Big and Ken stand guard. Tankhun yanks at the door handle, and Pete hears Big squeak; he doesn’t want Tankhun disturbing the boss’ rest, ever the loyal guard.
But Tankhun doesn’t hear it, yanking the double doors open to his brother’s room. As he runs into the room, Pete apologizes to Big and Ken with a slight smile and a nod of the head, before heading in after him.
“Kinn!” Tankhun cries, jumping onto his brother’s bed and wrapping his arms around his shoulders. Kinn winces painfully at the pressure his brother puts on his wound. From his position by the door, Pete can see the change four days in the woods has cost him. His hair is greasy, his cheeks are a little sharper than before. It might be an awful thing to admit, but Pete didn’t expect much of Kinn’s survival skills. Sure, he can shoot a gun, but what real life skills has this golden cage ever given him? He doesn’t know how to hunt, how to fish, how to build shelter or fires. It doesn’t surprise Pete that Kinn lost weight in the forest; he’d probably have lost more if Porsche hadn’t been with him.
Tankhun pulls away from his brother, and for a long moment, they look at eachother. They smile, and then Tankhun reaches forward and hits Kinn on the arm. Kinn sucks in a sharp breath. “What is wrong with you?” Tankhun snaps. “Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? What would we do if you died, huh? What would me and Kim do if you died?”
Kinn grits his teeth. “C’mon, hia, Kim wouldn’t care.”
“Of course he would,” Tankhun huffs. He juts his lip out, and looks down at his lap. “We all would.”
Pete watches, awed. He knows the brotherly love of this family as told through Vegas and Macau, but not by Kinn and Tankhun. They tease each other, they look out for each other, but Pete has never really seen the way Tankhun reacts to the thought of losing him. Tankhun always says that he raised Kinn and Kim, that they are his boys first and foremost. It must be a tradition of this family for elder siblings to become the parents their real ones refuse to be.
Kinn sees that; Pete can see the glassy-eyed blink of someone who clearly hadn’t realized how scared his disappearance made them. But he also knows that it doesn’t come easy to Kinn’s nature to speak on it, to act on it, so Pete plays the perceptive, loyal servant, and says, “Khun Nu, why don’t we give Kinn some more time to rest while we freshen up. You’ve got a lot of new clothes you got while he was gone. I bet he’d like to see some.”
Tankhun scoffs, turning back to look at him. “Kinn doesn’t care about fashion,” he says. He turns back to his brother. “But you should. I’ll be back.” He slides off the bed, and Kinn looks over his shoulder at Pete to mouth a silent, ‘Thank you’. Pete nods and once Tankhun has crossed the threshold, he shuts the door behind them.
In the hall, they find Pol with his hair bent out of shape and his uniform wrinkled with sleep, standing in the intersection of two hallways. He puts a fist in front of his mouth, yawning, “Where’d you go?”
“To see Kinn.” Pete claps him on the shoulder, and the three of them move towards the elevators. “Now we’re going back to the house to freshen up.”
“Oh! Khun Tankhun!” They all stop, turning their heads left towards the sound, the doctor coming towards them with a wave of his hand. Tankhun tilts his head in confusion until the doctor reaches them, smiling. “Good morning, Khun Tankhun. I was going to send a message over to your father, but now that I’m seeing you, it might be best coming from you. Would you let Khun Korn know that we’d like to keep Khun Kinn in the hospital for the next week under observation? We want to make sure there are no complications and that his physical therapy is managed correctly.”
Tankhun nods, and as the doctor turns, another voice chimes in. “Kinn?” Pete looks up, and in the threshold of another room, Pete finds Porsche. He looks about the same as Kinn, aside from the IVs and sterile bandages. He’s got scratches and bruises on all visible parts of his body, but he’s fresher. He’s had a chance to shower, it seems. “Were you guys talking about Kinn? Is he okay?”
There’s a note to his voice, tight and high pitched—fear and worry. It is not the sound someone should be making when asking about the person who hurt them; Pete would never speak that way about Emil. He would, however, speak that way about Vegas. It doesn’t matter how badly Vegas hurts him for it. And that’s how he knows, of course, what Porsche is thinking, what he’s feeling.
Tankhun wails. The sound of it brings Pete back to the present. He looks forward as Tankhun drops his head in his hands and bends at the waist. “Kinn,” he cries. “ Oh, Kinn, no!” Confused, Pete reaches towards him, taking Tankhun’s shoulder in a comforting grip.
“Khun Nu?” He asks, but Tankhun says nothing, only starts wailing louder. “Khun Nu!” Pol takes his other shoulder. They look at each other, and then Pete turns to Porsche to find his face cast in irreparable pain. He is silent, he is stiff.
And then Tankhun groans like he’s annoyed. He stands straight, propping his hands on his hips. “What’s wrong with you? Is that the best reaction you’ve got?”
Porsche blinks, and Pete realizes with a sigh the game Tankhun wanted to play. Porsche’s face contorts with shock, then anger. “What the hell was that? That’s not funny; I thought he died!”
Tankhun squawks, thoroughly offended. He looks back at Pete and Pol for support, and Pete knows that without intervention, Tankhun will find a way to punish Porsche for not playing his game right. Pete scoffs like the answer is obvious, squeezes Tankhun’s shoulder and says, “C’mon, Porsche! You have to let Khun Nu have his fun. Khun Kinn is fine; he’s in his room.” He nods down the hall, and Porsche leaves without a bow or another word.
Tankhun shoots him a nasty glare. “How rude-”
“-Khun Nu, the car is waiting for us.” He nudges lightly at his arm and slowly, agonizingly, he pushes him towards the elevator. And he is successful, he thinks, in getting them into the lobby and over to the car. Tankhun rants the entire way about how rude Porsche is, which Pete does his best to drown out.
“Oh! My sunglasses!” Tankhun leans into the front passenger seat, where Pol is already seated. “Pol, give me my sunglasses. The sun is going to damage my precious eyes.”
Pol reaches for his breast pocket, smacking his hand against it and groaning. “I left them in the room.”
“Khun Nu, we’re coming back,” Pete says. “Can you wait to get them until we get back?”
Tankhun scoffs. “My eyes, Pete! What about my eyes? You want me blind? That is what you want from me?”
“No,” Pete sighs. “That’s not what I want. I’ll go get them.” He shuts Tankhun’s door and turns back towards the hospital lobby. Silently, he heads for the elevator and jams his finger against the button for the highest floor. Then, he waits. He thinks. He worries. There was something there, buried in Porsche’s voice. And there was Kinn coming into their room in search of Porsche, but finding Pete. He had seemed disappointed, then. And he had listened when Pete told him how to speak to Porsche. There is something happening there, something worrying.
Before, it had just been infatuation. Pete understands it, and has seen it so many times before. But it passes, it never goes this far. And he’s worried because he knows what it’s like to love a Theerapanyakul. He knows the danger and the headgames, the confusion, self-hatred, and desperation. He knows it sent him into a spiral that left him seeking out men who would only hurt him. He knows it killed Tawan.
If it happens to Porsche, will it be Pete’s fault for not telling him sooner?
The bell dings, announcing his floor. He steps out into the carpeted hallway, walks about a dozen steps, and freezes the moment he looks up from his feet to find Vegas marching towards him, a bouquet of three yellow roses swinging in his fist. The moment Vegas notices him, he stops, too. For a long moment, they stare at each other. Then, Vegas moves forward. He is just as fast, but he’s clenching his jaw like he’s trying to keep his frustration in check. When they cross, Vegas slams his shoulder into Pete’s. It hurts, a tender bruise against his skin. He loves it, wants that and so much more.
As Vegas makes for the elevator, the elastic string that ties Pete to Vegas goes taut, and he is filled with the desperate need to stop it from snapping. He turns, lips parting with nothing to say. What is he meant to say? What can he do to keep him here just a moment longer?
“Are the flowers for Porsche?”
Vegas stops. He’s still for a moment, shoulders hiked, and then he turns. When he looks at Pete, it’s with a vicious grin. “Of course, they are,” Vegas says. He rounds on the balls of his feet, marching forward to meet Pete in the center of the vacant hall. “Afterall, I like him. I want him.” He leans forward, tilting his chin up at Pete. His eyes are cold and piercing. “I bet he’d even look good at the foot of my bed.”
Pete tenses. The foot of Vegas’ bed should be his spot; he’s best suited there, Vegas’ hand in his hair as he calls him a ‘good boy’ for keeping him safe. He swallows, and Vegas’ eyes latch onto the bob of his throat. His grin widens, and then Vegas looks down at the flowers. “Kinn made me take these back. Do you want them?”
Before Pete can answer, before he can even ask himself if it is something he really, truly wants to risk, Vegas drops the bouquet on the carpet and stomps his heel into the petals. Pete stares as they bruise and break from the flower’s head. When he looks up, Vegas is smiling again. It is an image seared to the back of Pete’s eyelids as Vegas turns his back on him and marches for the elevator. This time, Pete lets him go.
And when the elevator bell rings and Vegas disappears for good, Pete swallows hard on his nerves. He bends down, grabs a handful of soft, bruised yellow petals, and slips them in his pocket for safe keeping.