#michaeljnes

What’s happening, he wants to type, but there’s a sudden sound of shattering glass coming from Ray’s room, jolting him to his feet. Out of instinct he snatches the nearest gun he can get his hands on, jumps over the island in his kitchen and crouches, pressing his back to it as bullets fly by overhead. 

There’s another message in his inbox. This time it’s from Jack.

Someone put a hit on you, it says. Ray gives Jack a thousand points for being more informative than Geoff and a solid zero for specificity. 

Any idea who, he types back as a vase on a corner table explodes from a stray gunshot.

He expected, at most, a cryptic hint—an initial if he’s lucky—and most certainly did not expect the clear, concise answer displayed on his cellphone screen right now. 

Ryan did.

There’s a sound of something large hitting the floor and more glass breaking, which means one of the intruders has knocked his TV over. God damn it. It’s 42-inch, it’s new like the rest of this apartment is, and Halo looks fucking good on it. God fucking damn it. 

“I don’t need this,” he declares to no one, aims over the counter and starts shooting.

+

The thing is, Ray can’t think of a single instance that would drive Ryan to put a hit on him.

Ray gets along with Ryan, fuck you very much. They get along swimmingly. Ray might be Geoff’s first recruit and Ryan last, but they play the same PC games and hate the same reality shows and possess the same offbeat, dark humor. This one time during a heist, they pulled a prank on Geoff by pretending to dramatically die and playing My Heart Will Go On as soon as Geoff arrived at the scene. Geoff’s expression was priceless. 

Sure, there was that one time he accidentally got one of Ryan’s bank accounts traced and frozen by the police because he hacked it to buy a game at GameStop (in Ray’s defense, it was Bioshock Infinite and he has no regrets). Or that one time he played Call of Duty at two a.m. on Ryan’s TV with the volume set too loud (Ryan ended up shooting his own TV after mistaking an in-game gunshot for a real-life one). Or that one time with the puppies and the party hats (Ray still doesn’t want to think about it). Or that one time with the lobster. Or the Ferrari. Or the one— 

Actually, scratch that. Ray’s fucking dead.

+

“Would Ryan kill me over a lobster?” 

Ray leans back to rest against the wall of the riverbank, not daring to climb out of hiding to dry land yet. His vacation is ruined, his new apartment is on fire, he is soaked to the bone, and he’s running out of bullets. Wonderful.

“You know,” Michael says over the phone, voice tiny and muffled by the river current breaking around the riverbank, “Ryan has killed people over less.”

That is, sadly, true. Ryan once shot a mafia leader for accidentally knocking his ice cream over. Granted, the mafia leader was, well, a mafia leader, and he was their target for an assassination job, but they weren’t supposed to kill him until Gavin and Geoff were ready with the extraction plan. It was pretty hilarious, the way Ryan got so personally offended over a scoop of strawberry ice cream, but now that he’s the one at the proverbial barrel end of Ryan’s gun, the joke fell kind of flat. 

“What lobster, anyways?” Michael asks when Ray doesn’t say anything, snapping him from his thoughts. 

Ray makes a strangled noise from the back of his throat. “Uh. Um. You know Ryan used to own that pet lobster, right?”

“The one that died because he forgot to feed it for three days in a row, right?“ Michael says, "That was pretty fucking funny. Three days in a row! And we weren’t even on the job. I can’t believe Ryan forgot to—no,” Michael starts as everything clicks into place. “Oh, no. Fuck, Ray, you did not.”

“I did.” Ray says solemnly. “I hid all the food right after he put it inside the cage.”

“You fucking did not.”

“Starved that motherfucker.” 

“God damn it—Ray—”

“The lobster was blue!” Ray retorts, indignant. He’s not stupid; he’s watched National Geographic, like,  three times. “Aren’t animals with the bright colors poisonous?”

“I think that only applies to snakes and frogs,” Michael says, and well, fuck.

“I was trying to do all of us a favor. Nobody wants to have lobster written under their cause of death,” Ray presses, but with much less conviction, “Anyways, I don’t think he knows about the lobster yet.” He kicks a random pebble at the bottom of the river. “This conversation is moot.” 

He can hear Michael sigh. Ray can almost see it, the way Michael would pinch the bridge of his nose in frustration. It’s pretty messed up, how the first conversation he’s had with his childhood friend in a month involves way too much sighing, and not even the fond kind. “Okay, I’m not buying that because this is Ryan we’re talking about and he knows everything, but fine—is there anything else you can think of? Something other than the lobster thing?”

There’s gunshot noise in the distance, which means whoever wants him dead has found a trail to his current location. Ray thinks of the GameStop, of a game of CoD in the early dawn of the day, of the puppies and party hats and Ferraris. “You know what, I don’t even know where to begin.”

There’s a pause at the end of the line.

“All right,” Michael finally declares, “You’re fucked.” 

“Thanks a lot, champ,” Ray deadpans, “Ever consider switching career paths to become a motivational speaker?” 

“Every single day,” Michael shoots back.

"Very funny,” Ray says, aiming for sarcasm, but okay, fine, it was a pretty good comeback.

There’s a lull in the conversation as they try to process the sheer absurdity of this situation, and Ray is about to end the call and swim across when Michael suggests, “Maybe you should talk to Ryan about this.”

Ray  swallows down a growl. There’s something ugly roaring in the pit of his stomach at the idea of talking amicably to Ryan, and Ray resists the urge to throw his cellphone into the water. “I’m not talking to someone who clearly doesn’t even want me alive.”

“It’s not like there’s any other choice,” Michael points out, and fuck, why must he be so rational? “I don’t know, okay, sorry, man—but this is pretty weird even for Ryan, and nobody really gets Ryan in the first place.”

Nobody really gets Ryan.

This isn’t the first time someone’s said that.

Ryan hasn’t been with the Crew for as long as everyone else—a year, at most, ever since Geoff dragged a guy with a scary mask into his apartment and told them he wasn’t leaving—and while he is nowhere near shy, Ryan is well-versed in a very specific type of verbal gymnastics that allows him to deflect questions about himself without the asker noticing the digression until the conversation ends and they’re halfway across the country or, in some cases, six-feet-under. Asking Ryan to talk about himself requires efforts comparable to torturing a CIA agent to reveal the White House’s Nuclear Activation Code.

He’s cool, they would say, but nobody really gets Ryan. 

The sentence used to be longer, once upon a time, before Ray went off the grid. Nobody really gets Ryan—except Ray. But Ray isn’t sure about that part anymore.

There’s another sound of gunshot, and it sounds much closer this time.

“I gotta bail now,” he tells Michael.

“Be careful,” Michael says, and Ray is seconds away to pressing the 'end call’ button when Michael suddenly adds, “You know, Ray, I thought you were close with him.”

All right.

That’s.

Well.

“Your mom’s close with him,” Ray replies lamely, but Michael has ended the call long before that, and the dial tone echoes in Ray’s head like a fucked up soundtrack to the sinking feeling in his stomach.

+

There’s this one time, a couple of heists before Ray took his unannounced vacation a month ago, when he and Ryan had to lay low together in a safe house after a job went pear-shaped.

Ryan prides himself on his flexible moral standards and Ray doesn’t really let himself  be troubled by questions like “is stealing Netflix from the old lady across the street ethically wrong?” so an hour into hiding Ray was already scrolling through episodes of Friends as Ryan handed him a bowl of homemade popcorn.

Ryan, it turned out, had never watched Friends (“Not a single episode? Blasphemy.” “That is an overreaction and you know it.” “Blasphemy.”) and Ray, in turn, had never watched SMASH (“Not a single episode? Blas—“ “Okay, you win this round.”), and they ended up marathoning both shows for the entire week they had to stay hidden.

Ryan, apparently, has the nicest laugh.

Ray was fucking close with Ryan, Michael’s accusations be damned. If you look at it in exactly the right ways, you could even say that they’re best friends.

+

Ray is halfway through a monologue on Jack’s wonderful virtues (“Has anyone ever told you how majestic your beard is?” is what Ray started the call with, before employing adjectives that would make SAT examiners weep with joy) when the man himself cuts him off with a, “What do you want, Ray.”

Ray’s lips twitch into an unwitting smile.

Jack is capable of tolerating approximately zero amount of shit, and Ray loves him a little for that. He just narrowly escaped a bunch of assassins after climbing out of the river—a messy affair involving guns, explosives, three kinds of combat knives, at least five different languages and far too much inappropriate yelling about Ray’s mother—and Jack’s no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase attitude is something he can appreciate right now.

Speaking of—

“Do you know the identities of the assassins?” Ray asks.

“Of course,” Jack answers with the confidence and finality of someone who knows exactly what time you go to sleep every night and what side of the bed you’re sleeping in. Jack has his sources. “Which one do you want to know?”

“All of them,” Ray says, and can’t resist adding, “didn’t exactly have time to serve tea and chat them up on their names, did I,” under his breath.

If Jack hears the remark, he’s thankfully ignoring it. "Well, there’s Paolo Turner,” Jack says, and Ray kind of wants to cry when Jack adds, “also known as the Massachusetts Murderer.”

“Fantastic,” he deadpans. “Love the name.”

“There’s also Randall Jones. Ex-CIA, dishonorably discharged for murdering his teammates to use their bodies as a decoy.”

“Aspiring background and work experience.”

“Mikaila Aryanova, codename Killer of Kasimov. They say she killed five people with a bag of flour once—no, wait, four. One is still alive. I heard he could blink again last week.”

“You know, Jack, at this point I’m going to be so disappointed if you don’t say Hitler .”

“Oh, actually, speaking of, the Chinese Mafia Sheng Di, also known as the Chinese Hitler—”

“Please disregard everything I ever said,” Ray cuts in and clears his throat to mask his shaky voice, which is totally justified, okay. There’s escaping nameless, faceless assassins, and then there’s running away from people with terrifying reputations.

Ray looks around, scouting his surroundings. He’s only a few blocks away from his safe house, but something tells him it’s going to be far from safe in the near future.

He switches his phone to his left hand as his right pulls out his handgun.

“Hey, Jack, uh—” he clears his throat, spits out, “is it possible for you to, I don’t know, drop by and give me a hand in bailing out?” and immediately feels stupid for even asking the question. Jack’s the planner, the guy behind the scenes. Jack doesn’t do extractions. That’s more—

“That’s more of Gavin’s job,” Jack replies, as if finishing Ray’s train of thoughts. “Sorry, man. I can call Ryan for you if you want.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Ray says as he scans the street and, deeming it clear for now, starts walking briskly towards the safe house in the least suspicious way possible.

+

The day before Ray went on his impromptu vacation, they went on a road trip.

They as in, Ryan and Ray. Haywood and Narvaez. The R & R Connection.

(“It’s a dumb name, I know, but it’s not gonna stick, trust me,” Ray said the first time he came up with it, and the team name—like every other dumb thing that ever comes out of his mouth, in some form of a cruel, running cosmic joke—sticks.)

Nobody even batted an eyelash.The first time they went, Geoff had half-jokingly told Ryan that he wanted their best sniper to come home breathing and not stuffed inside the trunk, you hear me? Ryan? Buddy?—but these days, no eyelash-batting, what-do-you-even-do, are-you-fucking-mental questions involved. The road trip is his and Ryan’s thing.

Ray’s a good enough driver—good as in, enough experience behind the wheels to avoid arrest from various law enforcement vehicles good, but Ryan is on a whole different level. Ryan’s, like, a driving god. He drives like the car is just another extension of his body, like he has a Transformer somewhere in his family tree and physics-defying driving skills are just something the Haywood family passes down through the generations. Mere mortals like Ray drive, but Ryan makes cars swerve, turn and skid with quick, terrifying precision. Ryan makes cars fly.

They parked their car at the edge of a hill overlooking the city.

“That was fun,” Ryan said, grinning widely. Sunset streamed through the windshield, painting the car interior orange, and Ray’s eyes were drawn to Ryan, to his unguarded smile and to his body, slightly angled towards Ray, elbow casually placed at the back of his seat, stretching the green shirt underneath his leather jacket across his sun-kissed collarbones. Ray was attuned to every part of Ryan, who beamed brighter than the sun in the windows, and Ray thought, oh. “We should do this again.”

The car had come to a stop, but Ray was still flying.

+

Ray’s only five minutes into this Skype call and he already wants to threaten Gavin with bodily harm.

“That map of a tunnel you sent me,” Gavin asks, “is that your escape route?”

“Nah, Gavin,” Ray says with all the fake nonchalance he can muster, “I just pointed that out because I thought it looked wonderful to the overall atmosphere of the city. Of course it’s a fucking escape route, why else would I send you a map of a tunnel?”

Gavin shrugs all too-innocently.

Serious bodily harm, Ray thinks to himself. Like, eating-through-a-straw kind of bodily harm.

“Can I talk to Geoff instead?” he decides to say instead. He’s been biding his time, hoping that if he avoids talking to Geoff long enough he wouldn’t have to at all, but who is he kidding. Gavin devises some surprisingly great plans, but without Geoff’s supervision, they are the kind of plan even Michael Bay would look perplexed at and go, “I think there are too many explosions here.”

Not to mention Gavin is, conveniently, visiting Geoff’s at this very moment.

“Yo,” Geoff says, appearing from the corner of the screen, pushing Gavin away by the shoulder and ignoring his indignant squawks, “well, well. Look who’s back.”

Ray inwardly gulps.

Geoff’s tone is light, but there’s a certain edge to it, a certain sharpness to his syllables that would send lesser men scurrying away in fear. The lads are easy to read—Michael’s cheerfulness seeps into his shouts when he’s happy; Gavin only sounds deceptively calm when he’s ready to shoot you in the back—but Geoff? Geoff’s a piece of work. It’s like that science cat, but with a voice. It’s Schrodinger’s voice. Geoff speaks, and you never know if he wants to kiss you or kill you.

“Heya, Geoff,” he says, raising what he hopes to be a friendly, placating hand. “Kind of need a hand here.”

“Seems like everyone does, these days,” Geoff says vaguely, pulling a chair beside Gavin and lounges lazily on it.

“I sent Gavin the map for the extraction route,” Ray says, tentative. He pauses, and when Geoff leans further back in his chair instead of taking the conversational bait, he adds, “if you’re not, you know. Busy or anything.”

“I don’t know, man,” Geoff says, “Gotta check my schedule first. I think I have an appointment with my hairdresser at one.”

“Geoff, dude, I know you're—”

“This beauty doesn’t trim itself,” Geoff goes on, twirling his mustache for emphasis because he’s their biggest drama queen, “Ray.”

“Geoff—”

“Gavin,” Gavin adds cheerfully, seemingly oblivious to the rising tension, which is bullshit, of course—Gavin’s a firecracker with a penchant to dance around fire. Geoff reigns Gavin in as effectively as an overworked single mother in a room full of toddlers, which is to say, not at all, and every major gang war in Los Santos started with two unsuspecting people standing in close vicinity from a slightly bored Gavin.

Ray can’t afford to start another one.

“Geoff,” he says, swallowing his pride down, exchanging it with a toned down, “I’m sorry.”

Geoff is tipping his chair backwards now, crossing his arms and propping his feet on the table. “For what?”

Ray squirms under Geoff’s gaze—there’s something about Geoff that still makes Ray like he’s the one kid during pre-school who got caught red-handed stealing his friend’s pencil. “For the. You know,” he sputters, scrambling for the right words, “For the past month. Like, you know, the whole Houdini act, it’s, well, it’s pretty shitty, especially considering—” he thinks of the crew, of illegal celebratory fireworks and drinks shared on their rooftop garden, “—considering. Us,” he finishes lamely.

There’s a gunshot wound on Ray’s left thigh. He ignored it like a champ when he was running away, but now that the adrenaline is wearing off, there are bright sunbursts of pain flaring down his leg every time he tries to move it. His clothes are still wet and smell faintly of someone’s vomit. The safe house he’s hiding in is bound to be compromised in a few hours.

Ray’s sad, and tired, and alone—the whole package.

Ray Narvaez Jr.: Official Winner of Shittiest Luck in the World Award.

When he looks up, Geoff is leaning towards the camera with a familiar expression, and Ray feels like he is seventeen again, on the street and wasting his life away until Geoff offered him a second chance.

“Ray,” Geoff says, “You know what I always joke about? Nobody leaves the crew—”

“—unless it’s in a body bag,” Ray finishes, chuckling a little bit. It’s the kind of morbid, dark humor that’s right up in his alley. “Yeah, I get that.”

“Do you, though? What it really means?” Geoff says, and looks at him, “Ray, we’re family. You’re always a part of us, if you ask me.” He crosses his arms and sighs. “But are you?”

Ray stops breathing for a second.

Of course, he wants to say, like, really wants to. What a ridiculous question. Obviously. But Ray blinks and sees a memory—of gunshots, and pavement, and blood—and suddenly there’s a hot itch under Ray’s skin, a cottony rasp to the inside of his mouth.

“I don’t know,” he chokes out, “God, Geoff, fuck. I don’t know.”

They’re all silent for a moment before Gavin says, “Ray?”

Ray hesitates speaking up again after his own too-honest outburst. “What?”

“You know this would all end easily if you would just, you know,” Gavin gestures vaguely with his hands, “Talk to Ryan and straighten things up.”

“Why is everyone telling me to talk to Ryan?” He groans, putting his head in both of his hands. Michael, Jack, and now Gavin.

“Because that’s what you do, isn’t it?” Gavin says pensively, “We carry out jobs and joke around and hang, but you—” Gavin cocks his head. “You talk to Ryan.“ 

He feels something leap at the back of his throat, and he thinks it might be his heart. "I don’t know,” is all that comes out of his mouth.

“Look, here’s what I can give you,” Geoff pipes in as he flips his iPad towards the computer screen, “I came up with escape routes to both Ryan’s and Lindsay’s.” He looks up and meets Ray’s eyes. “Your call.”

Ryan’s place is much nearer, Ray knows, knows the house with the mahogany door Ryan built himself and the concrete walkway leading up to it like the back of his hands. Lindsay’s place passes through a more complicated route, and it’s much less likely that he can hide there until everything dies down considering her apartment can barely fit Michael and Gavin, who crash there more often than not.

Someone put a hit on you.

(Nobody gets Ryan, except Ray.)

Any idea who?

(We should do this again.)

Ryan did.

“So?” Geoff asks, “Where is it gonna be?”

“Get me to Lindsay’s,” he tells Geoff. I’m not going to Ryan’s, he doesn’t say, but they pretty much mean the same thing.

“Ryan is so going to murder you,” Gavin quips as he moves the cursor to disconnect the call.

“I’ll make sure Gavin wears something appropriate to your funeral,” is all Geoff says before the screen goes dark.

+

This should be the part where Ray points out that he isn’t part of the Crew anymore.

Yeah.

There are rumors on how and why it happened—including, and sadly not limited to, a convoluted story of how Ray stole Geoff’s amnesiac wife to ascend the throne of a remote Scandinavian country—but honestly? There wasn’t some grand gesture of betrayal, nothing Francis Coppola could make a trilogy out of. One day Ray went to the headquarter and did his job, and then one day he just didn’t.

(One day there was gunshot, pavement, blood—)

A vacation, he would tell anyone who asked. Not that anyone would. Not that anyone could, considering Ray burned more bridges that day than a pyromaniac would in a lifetime. Calling his old number would connect you to a geriatric old man in Indonesia, while looking up his file in a government database would result in nothing. Ray Narvaez Jr., virtually, no longer exists.

Geoff once said they should consider the Crew as something akin to a family business. Not the McDonald’s kind; the mustache-twirling, cigar-smoking, Italian Mafia family business kind.

It’s not legitimate at all and it sure as hell isn’t legal, but everyone’s mouth is fed and no one’s getting shot unless absolutely necessary. There’s much less dirty work than the Hollywood movies would have you believe, and all in all it’s pretty simple: it mostly involves your family, people’s properties, a couple of rules, some very strongly-worded, um, ‘suggestions’, and money. A lot of money. Like, can-fill-an-entire-swimming-pool, Uncle Scrooge-style lot of money.

It’s essentially just a more dangerous version of Monopoly.

Ray thinks it’s more like Jenga.

It’s tall and proud and deceptively stable, but Ray is biding his time for the one inevitable push of the wooden block before everything tumbles and crumbles to the ground the way it crumbled when Geoff’s past from the military caught up to them and left their first headquarter in a sea of fire, the way Michael’s old Jersey associates danced their way into their business and left the Crew with a mountain of debts and Ray a broken childhood friend.

Ray will pick up the pieces and stack them back up because Ray’s life only truly began when Geoff took him from the street and asked, do you want to start a business with me, but once everything starts to come back together, there’s going to be that one wrong block someone’s going to gingerly pull out and everything is going to fall apart again next year, next week, tomorrow—

Ray just wants a Game of Life. The house, the spouse, the career that doesn’t require him to wear a bulletproof vest underneath his hoodie, the retirement plan.

(Bloodless pavement and one less gunshot—)

Ray took his vacation and does not look back.

+

“Bonjour,” Lindsay says as she opens her apartment door, grinning ear to ear and way too cheerful for someone taking in a hunted criminal, ”¿Como estas?”

Ray sighs, but it’s fond. He’s barely suppressing a smile.

“Linds, only, like, half of that was Spanish,” he tells her as he walks into the familiar apartment.

“True, but i still speak more Spanish than you do and you know that.”

“Touché.”

Lindsay’s apartment—hers in name only and a shared responsibility between her, Michael and Gavin in practice—is the furniture equivalent of a mix-and-match buffet. It is as if someone closed their eyes, pointed at five different IKEA catalogues from different seasons and bought everything in them in one go. Gavin’s expensive, modern-looking camera equipment clash horribly with Michael’s collection of washed out, old-time game merchandise, which in turn are a nightmare as they are wedged between Lindsay’s cutesy-looking furniture and soft toys. There’s a pot of tea Gavin must have forgotten in the morning and left messily on the kitchen counter, right beside a row of brightly-colored glasses Michael must have neatly arranged.

It’s awful. It’s the kind of apartment interior designers have nightmares about.

It also feels a lot like home.

“I’m surprised Geoff didn’t kill you,” Lindsay says as Ray lies face down onto the sofa. Ray hums into the cushion in agreement, but they both know better—Geoff can be one intimidating son of a bitch with more tattoos on his body than paintings in a museum, but when it comes to them that appearance is wasted on his loving, papa wolf-like temperament.

The reminder opens a floodgate of memories, choking Ray with fondness and affection he knows he doesn’t deserve, and before he realizes it, he’s blurting out, “I don’t know what to do.”

Ray blinks one eye open to look at Lindsay, who has plopped down on the sofa across the table, a cup of coffee in hand.

“Here’s a crazy idea,” Lindsay says, slowly, like they’re in elementary school and Ray’s the only kid who’s still confused about simple addition when other kids have moved on to multiplications, “You can just talk to Ryan and straighten things out.”

“You don’t understand,” Ray deflects, and wishes it really were as easy as two plus two. Instead it’s this overly-convoluted analogy involving board games, and Ray’s so going to sound so weird out of context as he says, “I just want the Game of Life, Linds.”

And because Lindsay is awesome and has, like, whatever is the mafia-equivalent of a Master’s Degree in Psychology,  she doesn’t judge him and only says, "All right.”

“Geoff said it was like Monopoly,” he continues, because fuck it, if Lindsay can’t get it, no one will. “The business, I mean. Our business. The transactions, the money, the whole territory thing—but, here’s the thing—I think, I think it’s Jenga. It’s fragile and it’s in danger of falling apart all the time.” He props his his head on one hand, facing her. “You build a tall empire, but you know something’s monumentally bad is going to happen.“

Ray doesn’t know what he expected—probably just some wordless agreement, some form of validation—but it’s definitely not Lindsay, raising her eyebrow, giving Ray a considering look.

He bristles under the scrutiny. "What?”

“Is that why you ran away, Ray?” Lindsay tilts her head, almost Gavin-like.

“Well, it sounds juvenile if you put it that way, but yeah, pretty much,” he makes an open-palm, ‘what can you do?’ gesture with his free hand. “You know me, Linds. Always carrying some healthy amount of self-preservation instinct. I guess it finally won out in the end.”

It all sounds cool and convincing in Ray’s head, but Lindsay’s obviously not buying a single thing he’s selling, if the disbelieving look on her face is any indication. “You can’t possibly believe that,” she says, and actually scoffs. “You don’t want the Game of Life.”

“Of course I do,” he replies indignantly, sitting up on the sofa now, staring her down. “What do you know?”

“Ray, you love the job,” she says, surely, like she’s stating a fact, “You love the thrill and the hurdles and every single gunshot. You think it’s like a game, except it’s real and not as easy to beat and there’s nothing you love more than a challenging game.” She puts her coffee cup on the table, steady, and it doesn’t clatter. “That’s what I know.”

Ray opens his mouth to argue but nothing comes out because Lindsay is right. Lindsay is absolutely fucking right, always is when it comes to her boys in the Crew because that’s probably her secret superpower or something.

And Ray can’t accept that because she may be right but she doesn’t understand, doesn’t quite get the whole story Ray can’t bring himself to tell, and in a moment of desperation he shakes his head and yells, “It’s not Monopoly,” and, “it’s Jenga,” and, slowly, blocking a bloody pavement out of his mind, “and the tower keeps falling.”

He thinks he sounds like a lunatic now, but when he looks up Lindsay is looking at him like he’s anything but. “The tower will keep falling, Ray,” she says, a small smile on her face. “Better to be around to build it back together than to watch it crumble from afar.”

And suddenly it hits him, all at once, the way she looks at Michael when she thinks no one’s looking, the soft laugh she shares only with Gavin, and a small voice at the back of his hand tells him, she gets it. She gets more than you give her credit for.

“Lindsay—” is all he manages to say before there’s a knock on the apartment door.

The apartment falls into silence.

Ray takes his gun from the table as he inches towards the door. He and Lindsay share a look, and with a nod from her he grabs a hold on the doorknob as she cautiously goes to her room for weaponry.

“This better be pizza,” he jokes, but the words die on his lips as soon as he swings the door open.

Ryan is standing on the porch.

Ray thinks his heart drops and clatters somewhere around his feet.

Ryan doesn’t seem to be particularly threatening—in his usual leather get up sans mask, with both hands visible and not holding onto any lethal weaponry, he’s definitely not in his trigger-happy, Mad King-Mode—but Ray’s first instinct is still to say, “fuck,” under his breath, leap back, and put as many things between Ryan and himself, things like a table, or a sofa, or 20 whole feet of air as Ray jumps out of the fucking window—

Except there’s the sound of glass shattering Ray has gotten sick of hearing as people break into the apartment through the windows—like, Jesus, has anyone ever heard of the fucking door—and between one breath and the next Ray finds himself cornered in Lindsay’s kitchen, a couple of assassins clogging the back door and Ryan looming at the entrance. Lindsay is nowhere to be seen, though judging by the sounds of flesh meeting the floor, she’s probably kicking everyone else’s asses one room over.

Ray doesn’t exactly have the luxury to worry about other people right now.

“Ray,” Ryan says, almost at the same time as one of the hitmen says, “Narvaez.”

“Ladies, please, one at a time,” he says, trying to sound like he has the situation under control. Yeah. Right. Ray is coping with the situation as well as a man drowning in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is coping with water.

His eyes dart between his possible escape routes. He is stuck with two choices—run towards the back door which is, essentially, running towards his inevitable death, no big deal, or run towards the entrance and. Well. Hope that Ryan would let him pass, for one. But it also means he’s exposing Ryan to possible stray gunshots.

He takes a breath, thinks of blood and pavement, and almost laughs because the answer, to him, is as clear as a day. He releases it, and realizes, it has always been.

He takes another breath and chooses.

There’s a loud bang as he runs towards the back door.

(That was the plan, at least. It  never works. Official Winner of Shittiest Luck in the World Award, remember?)

There’s a loud bang before he can so much as angle himself towards the back door, and Ryan takes the bullet for him.

+

Ryan got shot on the day before Ray took his vacation.

He fell onto the pavement, bloody and unmoving. There were cracks on the old concrete steps, and red seeped into the gaps as Ray screamed Ryan’s name hoarse.

This is a totally unrelated, mostly tangential anecdote, mind you. Ryan was fine. Ended up fine, at least. So was Ray. Totally peachy. Business as usual. The sun continued to shine, life went on, and Ray was a hundred percent, finer-than-a-century-old-wine fine.

That’s a fucking lie.

Ryan got shot, and Ray saw a tower of wooden blocks topple to the ground and his world stopped spinning.

+

Everything after the gunshot is a blurry mess of red, on Ryan’s shirt and Lindsay’s new kitchen floor and Ray’s hands as he scrambles towards Ryan, red red red as Ray’s mind replays the images of a failed heist and pavement painted red by Ryan’s blood over and over. Somewhere at the back of his mind, the rational part of him reminds him that it’s dangerous to move so carelessly, but his ears are ringing, his breath hitches and holy fuck, Ryan is dying again and Ray thinks he’s dying too.

He kneels beside Ryan and pulls him in carefully, not entirely sure if he’s making things better or worse. Everything he does now is only out of instinct, this visceral need to have Ryan close and safe and countless other domesticated fantasies Ray wouldn’t admit even on his deathbed, and god. Ray lowers his head as he runs his fingers through Ryan’s hair, Ryan’s head on his lap. Fuck. Ryan is. Ryan is—

Alive. 

Breathing.

Quite normally, actually.

In fact, he’s…not even unconscious.

Ryan blinks up to him and Ray chokes on his own scream.

Somewhere near them, Lindsay presumably continues to be awesome as she kicks out the rest of the assassins out of her apartment. Not that they need more incentive to, considering one of them just shot the Mad King himself, and nobody wants to be around to see how that mishap turns out. 

Ryan is still blinking at Ray, and Ray’s torn between hugging him and running away screaming. 

He settles with, “Please stop doing the thing.” 

Ryan glances up, to where Ray’s hand is still unconsciously petting Ryan’s hair, like he isn’t sure that Ray is… really doing what he thinks he’s doing. “What thing?”

That makes the two of them. Ray isn’t sure either. Ryan’s hair is surprisingly soft, sue him. “The thing where you make me think you’re gonna die.”

A humorless laugh escapes Ryan’s throat, and he sounds half-broken when he says, “You’re the one who left, Ray.”

“I didn’t want a Game of Life,” Ray blurts without really thinking. “I don’t want a spouse or a mortgage or 2.4 children and a retirement plan. But,” Ray thinks of Ryan, fire-and-ice, brighter-than-the-sun Ryan, all six towering feet of power and terrifying reputation who would smile and offer Ray a cup of hot chocolate on nights when nightmares feel too real— “you deserve it. You got shot and your blood was all over the fucking pavement and that’s when I knew that you deserve the Game of Life.” His hand stops moving. “So I left.” 

Ray starts to move his hand away, inches his whole body away, but Ryan’s faster—Ryan turns his body towards Ray and grabs his wrist, stopping him. Grounding him. 

“Do you know what I thought about when I got shot that day?” He asks. 

For a lack of better words, Ray shakes his head slowly. 

“I wish I’d asked Ray out,” Ryan says, clearly, surely. “That’s what I thought, verbatim. I wish I’d asked Ray out. I was bleeding and dying all undignified and all I could think about was that I didn’t get to ask you out.”

Ray swallows hard. He thinks there’s something, stuck between his chest and his throat, burning him from the inside.

“So I made up my mind,” Ryan continues, and smiles sadly. “Only to find you disappear the next day. At first I thought you were just sick, or taking a break, or—I don’t know. It’s not the first time one of us didn’t report back in to HQ. But then you didn’t come the next day, and the day after that, and—well, you know the story better than I do.”

Ray thinks this is the part where Michael, were he here, would’ve said, you done fucked up.

"You done fucked up,” Lindsay cheerily pipes in. 

“Oh my god, Lindsay,” Ray almost yells, because she has been listening, has she? Ray’s going to fucking kill himself.

“Hey, it’s my kitchen you’re declaring your unconditional love for each other in,” Lindsay says as she walks away with a wave, “You’re welcome, by the way.” 

Ray is silently taking back all the praises he has mentally been giving Lindsay as her laughter fades into the distance. Ray loves her, but at what cost, really.

Ryan clears his throat. “Anyways.” 

Ray feels his cheeks heat up, and is that… is that a blush on Ryan’s too? “Anyways?”

Ryan rubs his forehead with his free hand, which reminds Ray that they’re still in this weird hand-holding position as they kind of hold each other’s… wrist? In this odd angle? “Your phone’s dead and your apartment is empty, so I went to Geoff to ask where you were. He refused to tell me, pretended he didn’t know where you were. As if. Tried asking Jack too, who echoed Geoff’s sentiment almost word for word. Michael, Gavin and Lindsay seemed genuinely oblivious to where you went, and considering I’ve exhausted my options, I called up some of my associates—”

“Those scary people are your associates?” 

“Because your associates are Nobel Peace Prize winners.”

“Fair point.”

“They couldn’t locate you either, at first. And I may have panicked and, uh,” Ryan starts rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand, seemingly unwittingly, in embarrassment, “questioned them a little bit—” 

Ray feels he can see where this is going, and there’s laughter bubbling in his throat. “A little bit.” 

“Or a lot,” Ryan admits. “Actually, I may have threatened them.”

“You threatened international assassins?”

“You were gone!” Ryan pulls himself up in indignation and, wow, yeah, his face is pretty close to Ray’s now and Ray can feel the warmth of Ryan’s breath as he says, “I was going to ask you out. I had a reservation made at this, this really fancy restaurant. I panicked and mostly hated myself for not asking you out sooner, so I threatened them to find you by, uh, quote unquote any means necessary, and I may have forgotten to specify that I want you, you know, alive, so I guess there might have been some… let’s just say misunderstandings…” 

Ray blinks. Warmth settles at the tips of his fingers, and he recognizes it as relief.

“Ryan,” he says, half-laughing and almost hysterical, “did you accidentally put a contract hit on me because you were trying to ask me out.” 

Ryan leans forward and drops his head onto Ray’s shoulder. Ray can’t see his face, but the tips of his ears are burning red and all right, fuck him, it’s cute. 

“Well, if you put it that way now it just sounds really bad,” Ryan mumbles into Ray’s shoulder and Ray loses it. And it feels good, feels fucking amazing to laugh with Ryan, who apparently doesn’t want Ray dead or hate him in any way. Ryan, who still has the best laugh ever. Ryan, who—wanted to ask Ray out. 

“I don’t want the Game of Life either,” Ryan says as his laughter subsides and he’s still leaning into Ray’s shoulder that Ray, now relieved and undistracted, can feel his lips moving against his skin. “I don’t need the 9-to-5 job or, uh, whatever the game actually offers. I’m good. I may fuck up sometimes, and I may get hurt again—” Ray stiffens at that and Ryan places his hand at the small of Ray’s back as a calming gesture, “but if there’s anything we can learn from all this is that I’m only, truly messed up when I’m without you.” 

Ryan looks up and their eyes finally meet and fuck, Ray is still flying.

“Ryan, god damn it, I’m going to kiss you now,” he declares and leans forward.

Ryan meets him halfway. 

+ 

“Ray, did you replace my shampoo with hair dye?”

Ryan’s voice echoes through the hallway long before the owner himself pokes his head into the living room—their living room—head first and hair blindingly, hilariously green. Ray is sprawled comfortably at their sofa, tapping at his 3DS under a warm, fuzzy blanket. He doesn’t look up when he says, “Happy third anniversary of you accidentally sending professional assassins to murder my ass.”

Ryan narrows his eyes, wears the expression of someone who swallows their first five insults before settling with, “You’ll never live this one down, will you.” 

Ray hides his smile under the blanket and watches his boyfriend retreat back to the bathroom in defeat. Ryan always remembers today as the day he fucked up so monumentally that retelling the story feels more like describing a particularly violent Three Stooges skit—a fact Ray has happily reminded him every year with various pranks—but today is their anniversary, too. The day they got together. Ray isn’t big on sappy shit, not like Michael is, but fuck it. You don’t become friends with the guy who wraps his girlfriend’s desk with pink wrapping paper on Valentine’s day without learning a thing or two. 

Soon, Ryan’s going to find the ring hidden under his favorite bathrobe, burning red and personally engraved with his and Ryan’s name. But for now—

“Jesus Christ, Ray, did you replace my toothpaste with oreo filling?”