#fleet fic

The plot still plots for the most part, Pete still gets captured…the torment at the safehouse, though, is less Vegas taking his helplessness out on the guy who ruined his plans and more Vegas oscillating emotionally between “he was kind to me nobody’s kind to me what the fuck” and “he’s a representation of my weakness, he was kind to an innocent animal and I was stupid enough to play along.”

The later realization that Pete would choose to show empathy to human Vegas too? Ruinous.

So Vegas comes to torment or talk to or feed Pete during the day…and the snake comes to curl around Pete’s ankle at night. Pete does not know how the hell his snake got here, but he’s pretty delirious and appreciates the small comfort even if it’s a hallucination.

And of course the truth has to come out at the safehouse, because all truths come out at the safehouse.

So it’s invasive, and weird as shit, and a bit of a goddamn mess...but, like. Vegas was already invasive, weird as shit, and a bit of a goddamn mess.

The home thing is starting to make more sense, for Pete. A lot of things are.

(Do some snake-y features show up during the sex, too? Little bit of fang action? Maybe!!)

So the collapse. The escape. The return to a normal no longer satisfied by its stasis.

The second night after Pete’s return, he finds a snake curled around the leg of his bed.

He knows. He knows, he knows, he knows.

Miserably, he lifts the snake up onto the mattress beside him anyway.

Halfway through the night, he feels warm and solid and human curled up behind him. He doesn’t move.

In the morning, the snake is gone.

Vegas accepted his submission more gently than expected. Instead of pressing down on his carotid, he stroked a line across it, touch so light it tickled. The curtain of night hid his eyes and most of his expression, but the narrow rays of moonlight that filtered through the gaps in the blinds reflected faint silver trails down his cheeks.

An image flashed through Pete’s mind—flickers of gold, liquid and gleaming against lazy rivulets of red. Alarm sliced through the heat that had been coiling its lazy way around his insides. “You okay?” he asked.

“Fine.” Vegas cleared his throat and slid up to pat Pete’s cheek. The air shuddered out of him. “I’m…very lucky to have you, Pete.”

Now that he was looking for it, Pete could feel the slight tremor in Vegas’s fingertips. His chest panged.

He set a hand on Vegas’s stomach and followed the well-known paths of his ribs to settle on the knot of scar tissue just under his heart. Here, he could feel how Vegas’s breath hitched and then went deliberately even. Pete nosed up under his chin. Vegas smelled of warm skin, sour sweat, and the faintest whiff of metal. “Can talk if you need,” Pete mumbled, lips brushing the hollow of his throat.

The way Vegas reached around to cradle his head was clumsy. His calluses snagged on the tangles in Pete’s hair and tugged at his scalp. Pete didn’t mind the sting; it seemed the logical price of being held in a lover’s claws.

“Just a dream,” Vegas told him dismissively. Where the claws turned inwards, his pulse was a small, trapped creature—it rabbited along under Pete’s splayed fingers.

Pete nodded. “Just a dream,” he echoed, softer. He curled an arm around Vegas’s waist and nudged him onto the mattress, settling in his arms. Like this, chest to chest, Vegas’s breaths synchronized to his. Like this, Pete knew his heart would gradually slow. “You’re here. I’m here.”

Vegas kissed his forehead. “Still here. Still alive.”

“Still alive.” Pete smiled. “Last I checked, anyway.”

The air caught in Vegas’s throat—then he pulled Pete in tighter, clutching him close. “Not a funny joke,” he muttered.

…If Pete skips dinner, Vegas will fucking--

Vegas flings his dish towel to the floor. It lands with an impotent flop.

He’ll fucking what? There’s no forcing Pete to eat when he doesn’t want to.

Pete’s fury shouldn’t be silent. Pete’s fury as Vegas knows it is world-ending, concussive. It batters Vegas’s brain against the inside of his skull and threatens self-immolation.

Vegas runs his thumb down the edge of his butcher’s knife.

There should be blood on the floor, he thinks. He’d feel better for it--Vegas has tidied up the consequences of arguments countless times, knows how to put his pieces back in presentable order almost by rote.

This listless limbo can’t last. Something is coming. Something has to break, to punctuate all that anger. Shattered dishes, ringing ears, bruised skin.

Life was miserably simpler, when Ba was around.

Pete’s anger these days is more like Vegas’s mother’s. Ba used to call her hysterical--but that was Ba’s way, wasn’t it? Pete--(Vegas’s grip on the knife tightens)--Pete has realer, more accurate words.

Ma took what she was given until the very moment she couldn’t. Life broke her, and so death--

A thin twist of pain teases up Vegas’s fingertip. He reacts several seconds late, with a flinch he doesn’t feel but supposes he should--because the blood is welling up from a cut in his finger and the lack of a flinch reflex isn’t adaptive anymore, it just makes Vegas a clumsy fuck-up with cooking burns on his palms.

Vegas frowns at the gash. It barely bleeds until he squeezes it open. Who needs a knife this sharp in their kitchen?

Vegas--more fool him--had thought he did, cheerfully whetting his new knives. “Sharp enough to fillet a man,” he’d told Macau, because Macau would treat it like the joke it was and feel included without having to live the truth of it.

At his corner of the counter, Pete had remained silent, his eyes glittery and dark like a spider’s. That look is habit now, emerges in Pete every time Vegas turns his sharp purpose towards feeding him. The new familiarity spins nostalgia-like in Vegas’s chest.

It isn’t his old life. It’s better.

Vegas’s stomach twists to recall that spark of ownership and joy over his space in their kitchen at the center of the world. What a short-sighted ass he’s been.

Pete wears anger like Ma did. If there is to be blood on the floor, what better means than the knives at the core of the argument?

Impotent. Worse--maker of his loved ones’ annihilation.

…He might get away with one, but Pete would notice if he wrecked all the blades.

Vegas swallows and scoops them up, a steel bouquet in his destructive hands. Self-sabotage waiting to happen. He opens the knife drawer.

It’s better-balanced without the knives in it. Neater, closer to the toothless thing Vegas never was.

His blood has smudged on one of his nice new knife handles. It feels like an omen.

“I remember agreeing to the rat,” Vegas says, shortly after the third pedestrian Macau glares into submission, “Remind me when I agreed to the second guard dog, would you? You’d think one was bad enough.”

“Who’s a guard dog,” Pete shoots back cheerfully two steps behind them, and Macau just about jumps out of his skin.

…It’s not like he forgot about Pete. Pete drove. Pete insisted on circling the building twice in midday traffic to scope entries and exits before they even parked. But once they got out of the parking garage, Pete fell in behind them and kind of became part of the scenery.

Fucking unsettling.

“Phi,” Macau complains with a glance over his shoulder, very chill and casual-like, “when’d you get good at going invisible? I feel like you’re gonna disappear. You used to be so shit at this.”

Pete’s smile is too loud for his face. “I always made a better guard than a spy.”

“Pete’s not invisible,” Vegas interjects. “Pete. I’m still injured, get up here.”

Crafty hia. Pete, who has a thing about being helpful, hurries to support Vegas with an arm about the waist. This puts him between Vegas and Macau and--as a bonus--lets Vegas sneak a hand into the small of his back.

Unfortunately, they stand out even more as a cluster. Macau finds his next stare-down in an stooped man with a cane and too many amulets around his neck.

It would help, he thinks, if the three of them didn’t make such a clash of opposing aesthetics. Vegas draws the most attention, but making Vegas look less like a snazzy villain on a murder mystery dinner cruise was always a lost cause--he genuinely can’t help being designed for smoky backrooms and dramatic mood lighting. It’s a hell of a lot easier to match his energy.

Pete, remarkably unremarkable in jeans and a t-shirt loose enough to hide the gun in his waistband, apparently missed that memo. Pete doesn’t have a ton of clothes, but he knows how to layer his wardrobe to his advantage and style his hair when he wants to look good.

Maybe he’s just ashamed to be seen with them in public.

Macau wishes for invincibility. He wishes he could hold his head high, taunt the world with their continued presence in it. He wishes he could roll up into a ball and take Vegas and Pete with him. He wishes, shamefully, that he were alone.

It’s a relief to escape into the cheerful narrow aisles of the pet supply store. The store cat, a chunky grey tabby, makes a beeline for Pete. Macau uses the distraction to grab a basket and slip into the stacks of multicolored toy mice and gleaming metal dishes.

He picks his way through the rodent cages, drops a couple puzzle toys in his basket, and runs his hands down the rungs of the tiny animal-sized ladders in the back. He finds Pete again at the end of a display of tunnels and rodent toys, one eye on their surroundings and the other on the cat rubbing up against his legs. He has an empty basket on his arm and resigned concern at the corners of his mouth.

A few steps down the aisle, Vegas stands immobile. He’s staring at a bright blue box labeled in bubbly English letters, “Plastic pipe pet toy: 39 inches of tunneling fun!” Indecision makes war across the plains of his face, regret and a torn sort of longing.

It’s a bit silly, because Macau’s heard whispers about the time his brother pulled the intestines out of a guy’s body and didn’t let him die (with a sick sort of pride, that Vegas is the best at what he does). Macau doesn’t have an instinctive handle on how long 39 inches is, but he’s pretty sure intestines are way longer.

And now the mafia’s favorite butcher is making tormented eyes at a box of plastic.

Macau understands, maybe better than anyone. Gun was his father, too. He strolls up and nudges against Vegas’s arm.

“Hey, bro,” he says. “Tunneling fun, huh?”

Vegas snorts, shifting seamlessly into languid nonchalance. “Just glancing around. Are you finding anything you like?”

Macau taps his basket. “I scouted out the place,” he replies. “Bet the stuff I pick for our rat’s gonna be way more kickass than the stuff you find.”

“Oh, you wanna bet?” Vegas raises his eyebrows.

Macau grins. “I’m souping this thing up to the fuckin’ nines. Nobody’s gonna stop us.”

“Brat,” Vegas says, but he’s smiling back now. He switches to Thai. “Pete’s on my team.”

No more hedgehogs in bird cages. No more accusations of softness, no more pretending a pet is a task and not a living thing. Vegas takes the tunnel off the shelf and sets it decisively in Pete’s basket. Macau lets out a whoop loud enough to send the cat packing. Pete plays up his put-out sigh, but there’s a new bounce in his step.

They loot the store for all the toys that will fit in the trunk, plus an extra bag of treats once Vegas pulls his dumb “nice establishment you’ve got here” routine on the cashier. This works, even though his energy’s visibly flagging. Pete’s ears are pink when he sets the bags down beside the door to the store.

He kisses Vegas’s cheek, hand brushing with what seems like unexpected daring against his hip until Macau realizes he’s just checking for his gun, and tells them he’ll bring the car around.

Vegas opens the GPS app on his phone to watch him go.

“‘Real shame if something happened to this lovely little shop’--you did that to impress P’Pete, didn’t you?” Macau says out the side of his mouth. “That was cringe as fuck, bro.”

Vegas leans his weight against the wall, smiling crookedly. “Worked, didn’t it?”

“I’m gonna tell him.”

“Trust me, he knows.”

They drive home with their trunk full of supplies, and then they gather in Macau’s room and set up the enclosure together--Pete and Macau bent around the cage, Vegas on Macau’s bed issuing directions and making a solid effort not to get cranky about it.

There’s no unified theme, and the colors are all over the place; sleek blacks and reds mingle with natural greens and jungle browns and oranges. Pete’s selections don’t even follow a color scheme--he just thinks the toys designed to look like human furniture are maybe the funniest thing he’s ever seen. (And Macau does not raise his eyebrows at that, not even a little.)

The color scheme is wonky, but this rat cage gets completely decked out. It is dope as shit, a multi-story luxury rat mansion. It has tunnels and bridges and shelves and all the hideaways a critter could want. Shreddables and puzzles strewn about the place. A little rat living room with a rat-sized couch and coffee table. An arguably fake skull to hang out in. Cozy bedding for days.

Macau curls their expandable 39-inch blue plastic tunnel between the hammock and the food dish. Vegas pretends he isn’t touched.

The sanctuary they make of Macau’s room that evening feels tenuous, transient in a way that tightens his chest--but somehow brighter for its fragility. The three of them sit and watch for nearly an hour as their rat explores this home they’ve built for it from all their disparate parts.