#kpts

“Are you serious? Why does it have to be you?” “Porsche!” Kinn exclaims, a wide grin spreading across his face. Porsche starts cussing up a storm in front of him.

The second one-shot in my Tea Time with the Theerapanyakuls AU is out into the world with a remix of KinnPorsche's canonical back alleyway meeting.

Relationship: Big × Chan

Rating: E

Word Count: 46.3k

Summary:

A year after the coup attempt, Big and Chan have stepped down from their positions as bodyguards and are working as joint heads of compound security. But when Kinn and Porsche need to attend an important meeting at an exclusive tropical resort that doesn't allow bodyguards, they tap Big and Chan to go undercover as fellow guests. Together. Posing as a couple when their every move could be watched is hard enough, but for Big—who fell in love with Chan during their long, difficult hospital stay together—it's a guaranteed disaster.

I've never interpreted their rivalry as mutual, mainly because Kinn seemed so unbothered even behind closed doors. At most, he seems annoyed like he is used to stamping out Vegas' attempts to double cross the family. The most he's been stressed about Vegas is when Vegas started to target Porsche, but I wouldn't even boil that down to just Vegas as Porsche was stressing him out for other reasons.

However, Vegas is so determined to hollow out Kinn's insides and wear him like a skin. Vegas' identity is wrapped up in Kinn's identity in a way we've acknowledged as unhealthy and obsessive, because there is the underlying abuse tactic happening which is distracting the victim by placing them in competition with another so they'll be too tired to fight you. There is little where Kinn ends and Vegas begins.

Which is wild, because Vegas has, basically, everything Kinn wishes he had. Vegas has a good relationship with his brother. Vegas has a lot more control over the minor family and its plans than Kinn does over the main family. Vegas can go wherever he wants without bodyguards (and does it, routinely). Vegas, while manipulative, managed to connect with Porsche before Kinn could and even get marked as someone Porsche could go to above Kinn.

Yet Vegas's identity is so wrapped around Kinn's. His type is Kinn's type. His thirst for power is for Kinn's position of power.

And at first glance, Pete seems like an extension of that. Even when Vegas finds someone who matches him it is in someone Kinn had control over and similar to Kinn's type in Porsche as someone designated as muscular and a bodyguard.

But, Pete isn't.

Pete kept a mask on the whole time, fooled the people around him and his employers as he hid who he was as a person until Vegas (accidentally) drugged it out of him (which, even the way Vegas knocked down the wall between Porsche and Kinn and himself and Pete is similar, by drugging them although one was done with the intention to harm and the other done with the intention to heal).

Compared to Porsche, whose whole deal with being the match for Kinn rests on his wildcard nature and disregard for the cage he was raised in, Pete is the match for Vegas with his loyalty and him methodically testing the bars of his cage finding the weak points to bend it out further. In the end, only one gets the other free.