Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Bitter love, a violet with it's crown of thorns in a thicket of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?”

pablo neruda, 1959

i.

1988

Trevor is going to kill Jeremy Dyer. He’s a man who’s always made enemies, and Trevor is going to take great delight being the one to put the bullet between his eyes.

Murder will be another big step down the ladder of virtuousness, of course, and wasting his first kill on a low-life like Jeremy might be misguided - but Trevor is pissed. If a man tells him he’s going to get him rich, quick, and that their client is reliable, well. Trevor expects some fucking honesty about the whole thing.

The drug deal was supposed to be easy. Trevor’s knuckles turn white against his steering wheel. Easy and fast, foolproof. He was supposed to have more weed than even he could smoke tucked into his zip-up jacket and the man was supposed to meet him down the back alley of some smoke shop or other, pass him a subtle wad of cash, and walk off with the grass. Trevor’s first drug deal of any substantial sum would have been over, there and then, and he’d walk away with half of the takings, Jeremy wiping his fat ass with the other half.

Instead, the client was rude and obnoxious and already high. He’d pushed into Trevor the moment he’d realised who he was, and had proceeded to try and haggle the already agreed price. Trevor was under strict instructions from Jeremy not to budge from $400, but the guy had offered a measly $250 and then had gotten pissed when Trevor’s eyes flashed in refusal.

So, if Trevor had to put the guy on the floor with a punch to the gut, so be it. Some might say robbing him of all the cash he’d had on him was excessive, but Trevor had been kind enough to split half the unofficially-paid-for weed and tuck the man’s share underneath his unconscious chest.

If it was squashed and less smokeable, well, that had nothing to do with Trevor.

The lies of Jeremy, though -- they had something to do with him. He’d said the guy was trustworthy and would be no trouble. He’d promised it, in between promising Trevor that he wouldn’t get caught by the cops and would have a bright future in drug dealing ahead of him. Easy money, easy first job, easy time for a just-turned-twenty year old with an eye on the underworld of the city.

Jeremy, it turns out, has become the latest in a long line of liars in Trevor’s life. Trevor puts his foot on the gas and almost spins the car out completely with the force of it. Jeremy’s swift demise is worth the wearing of his tyres, though. He’s not entirely sure what he’s going to do when faced with the man and his stupid fucking goatee, but he’s damn sure it ain’t going to be pretty.

One hand leaves the steering wheel and pats the gun tucked into it’s belt. It’s served him well to scare people off, so far. The neighbourhood kids like to circle his trailer and ask where’s your momma tonight or I thought you were joining the army or even where’s your daddy gone, Philips? The cops have warned him more than once about his use of warning shots. Trevor spits out the window of his car.

The well-worn tyres screech to a halt at the end of the snow shovelled lane and Trevor plants his boots hard into the softness. “Dyer!” he yells at the unassuming bungalow, the last in a row. All of the curtains are closed and it’s only 3pm. “Dyer, get on out here! You might want witnesses with what I want to do to you.”

A net curtain twitches three doors down and Trevor gives the neighbour - probably some old, stinking woman - his best grin. Jeremy’s house stays silent, unconcerned. Trevor slams the door of his car behind him.

The bungalow’s front door splinters when his boot collides with it; Trevor struggles with his leg stuck before shoving forward and toppling the door completely. He topples with it, huge splinters of the wrecked door trying to stab through his jacket. The palm of his left hand is all raw, pink, curled skin. He dutifully ignores it and scrambles to his feet. Rage is hotter and more palatable than any pain. He can almost breathe it.

The bungalow is unlit and unmoving. Jeremy is probably hiding in a closet like the dickhead he really is, too scared to show his ugly face. Trevor might not be a killer, but he’s good at scaring people. Damn good at it. A leader in the industry, really.

Trevor takes a boot to every door he finds. It’s a small house and the noise will travel to every corner of it. The bathroom -- clear. The living room -- clear. The utility room, stacked conspicuously full of drugs -- clear. Trevor pockets some for himself and turns to the last surviving door; surely, the bedroom. Maybe Jeremy is sleeping off some high or other, maybe there’s a girl in there with him sucking his dick. Maybe there’s a guy.

Slowly, he takes out the gun from his belt. It’s a small thing, but it’s heavy and sure to pack a punch. It’s only a pistol his mom kept in her underwear drawer. He took it on the night he took off and went across the border, leaving that subdued American trailer park for grime and crime in Canada.

“You in there, you little weasel?” Trevor murmurs. If Jeremy is at the other side of the door and trying to keep silent, maybe with a clammy hand pressed over his nose and mouth, he’s sure to have heard him.

There’s no answer. Trevor grins, the devil polishing every tooth.

He grits his teeth and shoulders the door with all of his weight. The hinges snap clean off the plaster wall. He shoves it again and it gives in; shoulder sore, breathing heavily, forehead sweat sheened and gun raised -- that’s how Trevor storms into the bedroom of Jeremy Dyer, ready to exact sweet revenge on the man who lead him into what could have been a deadly drug deal.

It takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, but once he does, he lowers his gun. There’s no use shooting a dead man, after all.

*

That night, Trevor finds a pretty couple in the back of the club he’s been frequenting in past couple of weeks and takes them both home. At first, the guy is reluctant to get his dick out when there’s another guy in the room, but once Trevor is fucking his mouth he seems pretty into it. His girlfriend, fianceé, wife, escort, whatever, kisses Trevor as his hands lose themselves in the other man’s hair, one of her hands between her legs.

Somewhere in the room, there’s some meth left. It’s almost all Trevor can think about.

Seeing Jeremy lying dead on his bed with a needle in his arm, puke and blood all over his shiny shitty shirt, should have put him off drugs altogether. It had seemed that way when he’d drove as fast as he could in the opposite direction without calling the cops, but once he’d pulled up at home he was craving a hit of some kind. Besides, Jeremy was into heroin, the real, dirty kind, and Trevor wasn’t going to touch that. Meth had fared him far better so far.

“Less teeth, more sucking,” he says, sharply.

The girl by his side laughs, touching her partner’s flushed cheek. “Listen to you,” she says, to Trevor, “how old are you? Seventeen? Eighteen, maybe?”

“Twenty,” Trevor grunts.

“You’re a bit young to be giving orders in the bedroom, sweetie,” she laughs, and he’s going to argue but she kisses him again before he can. Her mouth is hot and warm and inviting, and while she’s got him pinned there her partner moves away, Trevor’s dick left slick but untouched.

The woman straddles him and he slides in her without much thought; her movements are slow and deliberate, each roll of the hip measured perfectly to make him feel good. He doesn’t feel that good, though. He wants a hit. He wants an outlet, a real outlet, for all of his frustration. Dealing weed and punching a couple of guys doesn’t feel like much revenge on the society that cast him out of the seat of his military plane with such abandon.

He lifts his hips from the bed. The woman lets out a hum of approval, ginger hair hanging in her eyes.

What he really wants is a way out of such a menial life. Not death, not to end up like Jeremy with a needle in his arm and nobody much to mourn him. No, he wants blazing guns and screaming and someone to fucking understand how the corporate assholes have shaped his life so that he ends up here, high and fucking some random people in a trashy motel. Trevor knows he won’t go quietly, if that’s the life he has to have. He just needs a way to burst up and out of it, and there’s not much in way of propellants to a better life, not around here.

Of course, flying planes for a living was setting him all up for that, but that’s over now. He swallows the bitterness as the woman gets impatient with his lack of enthusiasm and ushers her partner over and murmurs something in his ear.

“You not having fun? Don’t you want me to ride you while Henry here squeezes your balls? Or maybe you wanna be on top of him, huh? We just want to make you feel good, baby.”

He’s pretty sure when she says that that she actually wants to rob him. There’s no reason for this pair of strangers to be so concerned with his pleasure and not their own.

“No,” he says, and she peers down at him questioningly, lips big and pouty.

“No?”

“No.” He pushes her off to the side somewhere, where she kneels, glowering. Her partner gets to his feet with a wariness borne from experience with robbing people blind. Maybe they wanted drugs out of this, or cash, but they’re not getting anything.

Trevor reaches for his baseball bat - not to kill, or wound, really, but to scare - when the phone starts to ring across the motel. Only a few people have his number here and for a moment he hesitates, but he answers it anyway.

“Philips? I have a job for you” come through the phone, he finds himself smiling. The couple clears off pretty quickly after seeing that.

-------

The adrenaline makes Trevor practically shake as he waits for the delivery. The coke might have something to do with it too, but he’d like to think his tolerance is better than that.

He’d put out a few feelers after his unfair dismissal from the military, tried a few contacts. A couple had promised to give him a call if there was any work going. Until the call interrupting his not-so-brilliant threesome, there wasn’t any.

Now, though. Now. He’s on the verge of something great, he can feel it. Over the hill a truck is supposed to arrive, he’s to take their cargo, and deliver it over a black spot on the border and neatly into the lap of his well-paying employer - some low ranking thug called Eric who says he has all the contacts someone with flight training could possibly need. Hell, he even provided Trevor with the plane for the job. Probably expects it back before he pays out, but Trevor’s not so sure he’s going to let it work out that way.

Eric sounded like he knows what he’s doing. That’s something, at least.

The Canadian/American border is a few miles away, half-heartedly patrolled from both sides. The delivery guy - Eric had named him a simple ‘M’ over the phone - was already ten minutes late. Hardly stank of professionalism.

Trevor, though, is in a forgiving mood. He pulls himself up onto the rusty wing of the plane and swings his feet, whistling low through his teeth. The sun is setting and there’s nothing but fields around him, dying in the oncoming winter, but it’s cool rather than cold and he’s content to sit out with just a t-shirt.

He feels okay. Good, in fact. There’s a light breeze, an untouched joint in his pocket, and the promise of at least a thousand dollars when he lands his plane full of what Eric referred to as ‘sensitive goods’. Feeling for the joint, he considers it, but decides to save it for the victory - he’ll savour every puff, rich for the first time in his life.

Just as he starts to get a little pissed off at playing a fool’s waiting game, he spots a truck coming over the hill. It’s fast and aimed towards him and gaining speed. He throws himself off the wing, scratching at a scab on his arm. There’s the reassuring heaviness of his pistol at his waist. In his bag is his knife, a baton and a flare gun. He’s nothing if not prepared for trouble. Whoever this guy is, he better have a damn good excuse for his tardiness, or Trevor is going to --

Another truck rolls over the hill. It looks a little crazed, even from this distance, the driver clearly not fully in control of himself. Trevor frowns and takes a small step forward. The second truck honks its horn, but neither of them stop.

Eric had promised one truck. One.

Oh, Trevor is pissed all over again. Nobody is loyal in all of this, nobody seems able to tell the fucking truth. He rummages through his bag, weighing up his options. Just sell weed to this guy, he’ll be cool, no complications! Just have a threesome with us, we’ll make you feel good! Just fly these, ah, sensitive goods over to me, I’ll have a guy come just across the border with it!

His fingers curl around the flare gun, the other hovering near his pistol, just as the first truck skids to a halt just ahead of him and sprays him with mud. A guy gets out and raises his hands when he sees the weapons, face resigned rather than scared.

“Fuck, man, don’t point them at me! This asshole has been on my tail since I crossed the border. He’s either a cop or some idiot who thinks he can rob me, I can’t tell.”

The man’s American. Typical. He’s young, too, barely any older than Trevor himself, with a smart look in his eye and a sharp - but cheap - suit. Trevor suddenly feels very young and naive about this whole business, but he’s not about to let it show that this is his first real job.

“You ‘M’, then?”

“Michael,” the man corrects, and Trevor trusts him.

The second truck pulls onto the runway and the man gets out. Trevor steps in front of Michael, but the driver ignores him, eyes on the American. “You’re the fucker Eric got for this job, right? This was supposed to be mine! Mine! I’ve worked with that dick for years and in comes the new big shot with his big talk and tiny dick and Eric’s swooning all over you and I’m put on job worth $500!”

Michael raises a single eyebrow in the face of the man’s rage and Trevor laughs before he can stop himself. Michael glances at him and clears his throat. “Hey, look, I got nothing to do with who gets chosen for what job. You have a problem with the big man, you gotta talk to him.”

“With you whispering sweet nothings in his other ear? You’re a fucking ass kisser, there’s no way he can trust you -- look at the two of you, couple’a little boys playing a man’s game. You think he’s trusting you with this? You just wait until he screws you --”

Exactly what either of them are supposed to wait for, they don’t get to find out. Trevor’s sick of the man’s bloated belly and bloated face and bloated words, and he steps forward with the flare gun raised. There’s a look of almost comedic horror on the man’s face until the trigger is pulled and the burning flare goes right in his eye socket.

Michael’s hand is on Trevor’s arm in an instant, pulling him back. They watch in morbid fascination as the eyeball burns right away, turning sticky, separating, and the man flails wildly before falling hard onto his back, knocking his head into the dust. The flare worms it’s way into his brain and once the man’s screaming dies down, there’s just a fizzing sound and too much smoke rising, more than Trevor could have ever imagined.

He laughs, and then chokes.

“Jesus,” Michael whispers, staring between the dead man and Trevor like he’s never seen anything so sick or so fascinating in his entire short life. To be fair, he probably hasn’t.

“You have a problem with what just happened?”

“I -- fuck, no, of course not, the guy deserved it.” The smell of burning flesh hits them both and they take a synchronized step back. “I just wasn’t expecting all this from a small job, you know? It was supposed to be simple.”

“Most things aren’t,” Trevor says, as though he has all the experience in the world with jobs like this. He doesn’t mention it’s his first. He sniffs, and then regrets it.

“Not sure Eric is going to like this,” Michael says, running a hand over his face like he’s forty years old or something. He’s got to be twenty one at the most.

“Fuck him if he doesn’t,” Trevor says, and then thinks about it. “We just need need to get both our stories straight, that’s all. This guy was going nuts, right? He was going to kill us both?”

Michael lowers his hand. He looks guarded, now. “I don’t know if he was going to --”

Trevor gives him a look. “He was going to kill us, right? We did what we did in self defence, right?”

“Ah. Ah, yeah, yeah, sure. Of course. This guy rolls up and starts screaming, starts waving his gun around like he’s got something to prove, starts aiming it in my face and saying he’s gonna take what’s in the truck for himself - so you stepped forward with the only weapon on you and got creative, to stop the whole job from being screwed up. That’s what happened.”

Trevor likes this guy. He really likes him. Most people would be shrinking back in horror at the still-fizzling brains in front of them. Most people would favour honesty over strategy and common sense right now. Most people would run. Trevor is an honest guy, sure, and a loyal one -- but he’s not an idiot. He knows who to lie to and when. He has his head on straight, and it seems Michael does, too.

“Good,” he says. “I’m Trevor.”

Michael takes his hand, firmly, and shakes it. Trevor doesn’t tell him how he’s never actually killed anyone before now and he’s trying to keep himself from freaking out. He doesn’t tell him about how it was actually kind of a rush to aim the flare gun at the old creep trying to recover his glory days. He certainly doesn’t tell him that he’s only ever flown a plane in a supervised setting before, and he’s actually nervous about how this might go.

“You need a ride? We gotta dispose of the body and you might wanna lose this truck. We can just leave them both here. I can drop you off at Eric’s and he can get you some sort of transport.”

Michael eyes the plane. “You any good at piloting this thing, Trevor?”

“I’m the best,” Trevor says, and when Michael starts whooping in the seat next to him as he shows off a little in the air, he feels it, too.

*

Michael Townley is twenty one, it turns out, and already has an impressive crime career.

Eric had thanks them both and shakes his head in wonderment at his old employee who went nuts at them, and then offers Michael transport home across the border. Michael shrugs, though, and pats Trevor on the back. “I wanna buy a beer for this guy, pay him back for saving my life.”

It’s Eric’s turn to shrug. He pays them both one thousand dollars in cash and shuts his office door on them, probably eager to start shifting whatever illegal goods they’ve just delivered for him.

So Trevor does what any good host would and takes Michael out, and the moment he mentions the dingy old club at the back of the town that has a half-naked female dancer in the corner, Michael is sold. Trevor’s car as at his motel in the corner of town so they take a cab instead.

Michael is true to his word and buys them both beer, thick and foamy and dark in colour. “Here you go, buddy,” Michael smiles like a shark. Something creeps up Trevor’s spine at the sight of it, something he can’t quite place; he’s definitely impressed, but he’s also kind of overwhelmed, too. Michael is only a little older than him and he’s done so much already.

Trevor sips at his beer, glances over at the dancer in the corner. She looks bored out of her mind, but the men closest to her seem to be loving the show. “Best a little town in Canada can provide, I’m afraid. We ain’t got neon strips unless you head into some of the bigger cities. Out here this is as good as it gets.”

“I don’t mind,” Michael murmurs, watching the woman as she pulls up her skirt, teasingly. Trevor clears his throat and the attention is returned to him at once. “So, Trevor, you ever done any time?”

“Not yet,” Trevor says, and Michael laughs.

“Yeah, it’ll come, I’m sure. It always does. I just got out from a stint for robbing some asshole with too big a mouth. Only got out last month, and here I am again, watching strangers shoot other strangers and then buying the winner a drink.”

“You didn’t have to buy me anything,” Trevor points out, feeling the prickle of offense. “You could’ve told Eric the truth.”

“And get shot as well? Fuck that.”

“Hey, don’t get all moral with me now the body’s in the lake and you got your pockets full of cash.” Trevor’s voice has started to rise and he’s half out of his chair, before Michael looks at him with big, guileless eyes, and shakes his head.

“Hey, hey, no, man, it’s not like that. I’m pleased you popped him. Pleased as fucking punch. Asshole had tried to run me off the road for miles. I reckon you did the world a great service. I was just remarking on the strangeness of it all, that’s it.”

Trevor sits back down, swallowing the last of his rage. He takes a long, long sip of beer and then smacks his lips, noisily. The beer works it’s magic and his mind turns more slippery, turns over the events that have happened in the day. Bullshit events, unexpected events, yeah -- but he doesn’t regret a single one of them.

Killing was something Trevor has always known would one day have to happen. There was that time in the changing rooms at school where he’d pinned his teacher down and felt weeks of suspension slipping into pure expulsion as he’d got creative with his hockey stick. There was the incident with his neighbour at the trailer park who kept blasting out shitty American rock music at 6am as he got ready for work, and Trevor had to break into his trailer and smash his radio, shoving half of the broken pieces into the guys mouth and watching him swallow them.

He’d always known one day death would be the only way he could get out a situation, or give somebody exactly what they’d deserved. He’s not exactly sure why the nameless guy following Michael was the one that finally snapped his reserve but he doesn’t really mind. It got him introduced to a guy who seems to give as few a fucks as him, who sits across from him now and laughs about the fact the plane had smelt so damn bad. “I thought I was gonna have to parachute out or even have you crash just to make it end,” he laughs, and laughs, and Trevor starts to laugh too, until they’re drawing some attention from the other punters. Michael flips them off and shakes his head. “Fuck, it was disgusting. You were good at piloting that thing, though. How’d you learn?”

Trevor doesn’t answer straight away. For one thing, he doesn’t want Michael to think he’s some crazed patriot, wanting to join the army and fight for the good of his country. For another, he’s not sure the whole failing-his-mental -stability-test-episode will endear him, either. Then again, Michael has just watched him shoot out a guy’s eye and has stayed around afterward.

“Good old Royal Canadian Air Force,” Trevor says, tipping an imaginary hat.

Michael chokes on his beer. “You’re military trained? Why are you doing shitty jobs for guys like Eric, then?”

“I don’t have the right temperament, apparently. My assessor - some real asshole, she was, she fucking --”

He stops and presses the heel of his hand into his eye to stop the thoughts and memories. Beer has splashed all over the table as his hands shake; he wipes at it with his sleeve impatiently. He’s just giving her satisfaction by getting so angry, but he can’t help but wish it was her smug face splitting open via flare gun. He closes his eyes and imagines it in every beautiful, gory detail.

He breathes in deep. Takes a moment. Opens his eyes.

Michael is staring at him. He’s not freaked out, at least not visibly so, but he looks cautious. “Hey, look, I’m sorry --”

“Don’t. Wounds are still fresh, that’s all. Apparently my --” he lifts his fingers in exaggerated air quotes “-- “lack of ability to control my temper” meant I couldn’t fly, even though I was the the best they’d seen in years.”

“Fuck it. Their loss,” Michael says and Trevor starts. It’s not often people share his sentiment on this sort of thing. Michael just might be the honesty he’s been looking for in his life.

If he isn’t, well. Trevor is used to being disappointed.

“So, uh, with your talent and … temperament, have you …” Michael leans in close across the table, licks his lips. “Have you killed a lot of people?”

“No comment,” Trevor says, at once. Michael cocks an eyebrow at him.

“I ain’t gonna judge you. I did this job last year? Had to kill three cops. One of them was screaming for his family and bleeding out, it was rough.” He’s lost to the memories for a moment, before the shark smile returns. “Come on, how many?”

Trevor sucks at a tooth. “Well, counting that fucker on the runway, I’d say about … one. One kill.”

“One?” Michael’s eyes are big and round. “One and you managed to shoot him in the head without flinching?”

“One,” Trevor confirms. He can smell the putrid flesh again. He feels -- he feels not quite right. The music is too loud and his fingers are slippery against his empty beer glass. He can see and feel the flare go off again and again and again, sees the corpse rolling down the bank and into muddied water, sees Michael throwing up all over the grass verge and feels himself retch again, seconds later. He feels, he feels he feels he feels --

He feels great. Absolutely fucking on-top-of-the-world great.

There’s a hand on his shoulder, Michael’s. “You okay? The first kill can be rough. I know mine was.”

“I’m okay. I’m good. It’s just, uh, not -- I don’t regret it,” he says, lifting a defiant chin.

“Me neither,” Michael smiles and so Trevor does, too.

Trevor gets the next round in and Michael lightens the mood by talking about some movie that he loves. Trevor doesn’t care, exactly - to him, movies are for sell-outs, phoniness for phonies - but Michael looks so animated talking about the lighting and script and God knows what that Trevor can’t help but watch him, half-amused. He moves his hands as he talks, carving out the scenes for Trevors benefit.

After almost half an hour, Michael seems to realise that the topic is veering them into strictly one-sided conversation. He buys in the next round and watches the dancer, who one of the barflies is throwing dollar bills at. She picks them up and stuffs them down her bra with a wink. There’s a pause in which both men sigh appreciatively.

“So, what do you see yourself doing with your life, Trevor?”

The question comes so suddenly that it takes a moment for Trevor to answer, but when he does, he looks away from the dancer and looks Michael square in the eye. “More of this. More of the game. Fuck the government and fuck the military. I want to do something more than weed deals on street corners. I want to be in charge of myself, you know?”

Michael looks at him consideringly. He sips on his beer, cheeks getting red with the drink, and then reaches in his pocket for a pen and paper. “Here,” he says, sliding a page across the table to Trevor. “This is the number of a guy who can hook you up with the sort of jobs I do. His name’s Lester, and he works mainly in America so there might be some relocating or at least travelling involved. But he’s got all the connections you could ever need, and all the brains to set up his own work. He’ll sort you out. Just say I recommended you.”

“What sort of jobs do you do, exactly? You drive things around for people?”

Michael laughs. “No. Not exactly. Sometimes. Mainly, I rob. People, corporations, anything or anyone with a big sum in the bank. Call Lester, or better yet -- come with me when I go back to America. It doesn’t have to be for good, but it could be a good taster for you.”

Trevor breaks out in a smile, big and wide. They grin at each other, stupidly, before Trevor reaches for his beer and asks, “So, prison, huh? Any horror stories?”

Michael snorts. “Hardly. You should’ve seen what I did to my cellmate. Tattooed my name right across his left asscheek. He cried all night.”

Trevor laughs so hard it hurts his ribs. Later -- years later, after blunders and deaths and heartbreak and mourning, he gets an email from a prisoner that reminds him of this moment. It tells him how the male-on-male action never really happens in prison, unless you go looking for it. But now he just laughs, and watches the crinkle of Michael’s eyes as he laughs right back.

*

That night, they change Trevor’s single room in the motel to one with two beds. They stay up all night and talk and by the end of it Trevor is starry-eyed with potential, and tells Michael he knows a local postal office they should rob before they leave for America, as one last big fuck you to the country who didn’t want Trevor to serve it’s airforce.

Michael is reluctant, but Trevor is determined, and so they plan.

-------

The robbery goes smoothly, for the first ten minutes at least.

They keep their guns stashed in bags - bought with a fake ID of Michael’s in a back alley store, one that names him De Santa - and blend in with the other couple of customers in the store. Michael had the bright idea of cutting the phone lines and hoping nobody in the rural post office was a banker or an asshole or both and carried round a clunky cell phone with them.

Trevor causes the distraction by pretending to trip, knocking all of the papers from the counter and then getting pissed at the staff about it. While they try to calm him down - “This carpet isn’t even! I could have killed myself!” “Sir, if you’d just calm down for a moment, we can --” “Calm down? I oughta sue all of your asses!” -- Michael sneaks round the counter and snips all of the phone cords.

When he steps back around the counter he gives Trevor a meaningful look, and Trevor nods.

He turns back to the harassed workers, two women, and sighs at the most apologetic. “I’m afraid your sorries just aren’t good enough, sweetheart. If I’d have fallen and broken my neck, you think ‘sorry, Sir’ would have fixed me?” She shakes her head, biting at her lower lip. “No, I thought not. I think I should get a little compensation. Cash in hand. Now.”

At the last word, he pulls his pistol from his duffel bag and points it at the assistant, who screams and ducks. One firing shot at the far wall is enough to have the customers scrambling for the door, where Michael stands, assault rifle in hand. “Not so fast,” he says, all cocksure and steady, and Trevor fights a grin.

“On the ground, now!” he yells and the apologetic woman gets on her knees, one hand raised as though it could stop any bullet.

“Please, we’ll get you the money! Just don’t shoot, please!”

He motions to the still standing woman, all bleached blonde hair and big fake eyelashes. She’s seems to have more nerve; she stands her ground, arms folded across her chest. “We haven’t got the keys for the safe,” she says, pink lips pursed. “We can only give you what’s in the cash drawer. I don’t think that’s worth going to jail for.”

“Did I ask your opinion?” Trevor asks, and when she doesn’t reply he puts a hand to his ear, exaggerating the movement. “Can’t hear you, darling. Did I ask?”

“I -- no,” she says. Her eyes dart to the back door and Michael must be watching the exchange, because he moves from the door, keeping his gun trained on the customers to stop them fleeing.

“There’s someone in the back, isn’t there? Someone with the keys? Call them out!”

“There’s nobody there,” she insists, but she looks over there again and Trevor has no choice but to put the gun to her head, cocking it so she knows just how much danger she’s actually in.

“You heard him, fucking call him out! I’m sure you’re a lovely woman but I’m not going to go easy on you here.” At her hesitation, he presses the barrell of the gun into her skin and she lets out a shriek, trying to move away. “Call them the fuck out!”

She glares at him and he admires her defiance. But the gun is cold and hard against her forehead and so she gives a great shudder, shoulders slumping in defeat. “Paul! Paul, come out here, please! They’re- he’s going to shoot me, Paul, please just get out here!”

All eyes move to the door. There’s silence except for the young woman on the floor crying, and Michael breathing heavily through his nose. Then -- slowly -- the door opens, and a man walks out, hands raised.

“Don’t shoot!” he says, at the sight of the guns. “The cops are on their way.”

Trevor knows they didn’t account for any phones in the back office, didn’t even think that someone would have the chance to run in there. The man - Paul - has crumbs all over the lapel of his suit. He was probably on his lunch break when he heard the whole raucous.

Lowering his pistol from the woman, Trevor aims it instead at Paul, striding over to him. Their eyes meet and both pairs widen in recognition, Trevor’s stomach dissolving in panic. Paul. Paul Cox. Paul Cox, who sat behind him in history and once peed himself in front of the whole of gym class. Paul Cox who lived not five minutes away from Trevor back in their hometown at the very cusp of the border. Paul Cox in this tiny part of this tiny Canadian town, IDing Trevor. Trevor raises his gun meaningfully but before he can Paul shouts --

“Trevor Philips! Fuck, Philips, put the gun down!”

Michael’s expression is thunderous, but he’s on Trevor before he can shoot, holding him back. “Don’t,” he hisses in his ear, and Trevor stops struggling. “They all know your name now. We gotta get out of here - getting pinned for a massacre will make them hunt you down, but with robbery we can just run, come on!”

Trevor swears and gives in, following Michael the moment he’s released him. They’re heading for the door when the sirens start outside and the lights flash through the big open windows. They halt, look at each other, and Trevor swears again.

He was so close, so close, to getting out of here, out of the country that’s already shown him how much it hates him. So close to running away with this crazy Michael Townley and carving out a life for himself in the sort of world that might appreciate him. Now he’s going down, for sure, and dragging Michael right down with him -- all because of some stupid fucking coincidence, some stupid twist of fate.

“Go,” he says, quietly, and then more urgently, he shoves Michael towards the back office. “They’re gonna have a back door, go! They’re going to surround us if you don’t move fast!”

“I’m not leaving you behind,” Michael says, looking at him like he’s crazy -- and maybe he is, sure, sacrificing his freedom to let Michael get off scott-free, but it’s his fault he got recognised, his fault for not putting a bullet in the asshole that is Paul Cox before he could open his big mouth. “Trevor, you’re new to this, but brothers don’t leave each other, okay?”

“Get out of here,” Trevor repeats, and his eyes are blazing as they meet Michael’s, “or I’ll turn you in myself.”

Michael glares at him. “I’m not --”

“Fuck you, just get out of here! I’ll find you later, whatever, just go!” He grabs Michael’s shoulder and shoves him towards the door, where he lingers. “I mean it, M, go or --”

“You’ll go down for this. This is my fault, and you’re gonna suffer for it. I should’ve spoke up about what a bad idea this was, I should have --”

The people around them try to shuffle over to the door, but one look from Trevor quells their hopes for an easy escape. “Shut up, alright? Just go. Apologise to me in America, whenever I get there.”

Michael reaches over and squeezes his hand, tightly. Trevor’s not sure if it’s part of his ‘brothers on the job’ code but it makes him feel as warm as a glass of whiskey would, and when Michael runs off to safety he’s smiling despite the oncoming storm.

ii.

1989

He gets out after four months, and once Trevor’s given his old clothes back and ceremoniously kicked out of the front door he kind of misses it.

There was a routine to prison that at first drove him mad but then turned into child’s play; he delighted in disrupting it, unnerving guards and fellow inmates alike. His favourite past time was winding up one of the largest men in his cell block until he was being chased, and then darting past the prison officers’ office so that the man would get heavily punished.

At first he went to sleep on blue bruises and scarlet scabs, but by the end he was given a kind of grudging respect; he told them about his plans to rob America blind and about the flare gun incident, and there was such a look in his eye that he guessed people started to believe what he was capable of. He even made a few vague connections in there, people who promised to get in touch someday if they needed a pilot.

Now, though; now there’s just Canada, and no funds, and no hope for him getting into contact with Michael or the mentioned Lester. He wouldn’t even know how to start.

He expects to have to get a cab or hitchhike home. His car is probably still parked in that small town he tried to rob, gathering dust and rust in the rain. There’s not many in this country who will have missed him as he served his time, and there’s even less who will have in his promised America. Michael himself is probably out there right now earning himself a sizeable, stolen wage, without even a thought for his so-called brother across the border.

What he doesn’t expect is for an old truck to be parked on the snowy road outside of the prison, a woman resting against it with her arms crossed and her face a scowl in the mid-morning March light.

“Trevor,” she drawls, and he swallows, coming to a halt. “Ain’t you gonna give your mom a hug?”

He stumbles on his feet as he does as she says, drawn into a too-tight grip that leaves him red-faced. He hasn’t spoken to her since travelling to that small, fateful town months before, and even when carrying out his prison sentence less than five miles from their latest trailer park - this time on Canadian soil, one they’d spent almost a whole year on - he didn’t write to her. She’s here, though, scowls and vibrant prints included.

“You didn’t have to pick me up,” Trevor says, getting into the passenger seat.

“Don’t be ungrateful,” she snaps, starting the engine. “I know I didn’t. It’s not good for me, running around after you at your age.”

“I know. I -- I’m sorry, momma.”

He sinks sullenly in his seat and wonders if she’s enjoying this. She always has liked to martyr herself and expect the world in return, not that he’d ever say to her. He’s ashamed of even thinking it. She's had a hard life, his mother, what with his asshole father and the life she's had to scrape together for herself and her sons. He understands her, but that doesn't make her any easier to cope with.

The soft crunch of snow beneath the wheels is all that fills the silence for a while, that and his mom’s heavy breathing. Trevor rests his forehead against the window and closes his eyes in an attempt to keep warring temptations at bay. Part of him wants to talk about his time inside, part of him wants to get out of the truck - moving vehicle be damned - and part of him just wants to hug his mom and never let go.

He settles with none of the options, and pretends to sleep instead.

This truck has seen too much of Trevor for him to be comfortable enough to actually sleep. It’s seen fights between mother and father, between brother and brother, between mother and son and -- most violently of all -- between father and son. Living in motels and the back of his car for a month was much preferable to the prospect of moving back home to the trailer parks that have seen even worse, the absolute worst of his life.

He lets out a long sigh and his breath fogs the glass. From the driver’s seat, his mom laughs.

“What? Don’t you appreciate me coming to get you? Planning to run away to stay in dirty motels again, huh? Any other mother would disown her son for what you’ve done to me.”

He turns to stare at her, faux-sleep forgotten. “Motels? How did you know --?”

“A man came round, just after you were arrested. Young kid. Had all the stuff you left home with, said he got it from the motel you were staying in.”

Trevor sits up straight. His hands have curled into excited fists on his lap. “Who was it?”

“Never said his name,” she shrugs. “Handsome. Sort of stocky, but very handsome. American.”

Michael. Michael. He rescued all of his things after the robbery. Maybe he even saved his thousand dollars. Trevor’s not sure how Michael would have found his address from his name alone, but he guesses hardened criminals have their methods. His smile threatens to split his face in two and his mom is on it in a second.

“You can wipe that smirk off your face, you little shit,” she sneers. It fades at once. His heart starts to race. “Prison made you even more selfish, didn’t it, huh? Can’t you tell how much weight I’ve lost? How stressed I am?”

They’re nearing the trailer park now. He takes a good long look at his mom, all pursed lips and dramatic eyeshadow. She looks just how she always has -- beautiful, bright, a little sad. A hell of a lot less bruised since his piece of shit father left them to it. She’s got the same overwhelming attitude that sweeps him up and under, dragging him down until he’s as low as she is.

He loves her, but he’s not sure how to cope with her, how to cope with this life, not now he’s had a taste of something more.

“You look good,” he says, honestly. “If you’re stressed, you’re not showing it. You look great.”

For a moment, she smiles at him like she would have smiled when he was young. But then they’re pulling into the trailer park and she’s back to normal, shaking her head in disbelief. “Don’t creep around me, Trevor. I’m not buying it.”

“I’m not creeping. I mean it.”

She parks them neatly outside of the run-down trailer, last repainted a decade ago, and kills the engine. “I’m going to jail, Trevor,” she says, without preamble. “I got picked up on the street by an undercover cop as I was, you know, working. I tried to escape. He may have got hurt in the process, and his car may have got smashed up, too. Anyway, I- I’m facing two years. The trial is next week and what chance do I have?”

She gets out the car. He scrambles after her, reaches out her door to grab at her wrist. “You were on the streets again? Where the hell was Ryan in all this? He promised to support you until you got a job!”

“Your brother --” She hesitates, then wrenches away from him. “Your brother is having some problems himself. I have to do what I have to do to keep us both surviving, and he agrees with that.”

Trevor stops listening, and gets out of the car. His brother -- the spitting image of their father, with matching face and matching fists -- probably suggested she prostitute herself in the first place, so he could sit on his fat, lazy ass all fucking day. Trevor may have been busted for robbery but at least he was trying to do something with his life.

“Is he inside?” he asks, quietly.

His mother studies his expression, looking suddenly nervous. “Trevor, look, it’s not his fault. He’s still in between jobs, you know that.”

“He’s been in between jobs for three years! He’s twenty seven years old and he’d rather send his mom out to fuck strangers for a living then get a job himself.” He flexes his fingers. He longs for his pistol. “Get out of the way, mom. I’m going to teach him a fucking lesson.”

Her eyes flash. “Don’t you dare swear at me. Easy for you to judge him when you got kicked out of the air force, isn’t it? Where have you been? When did you last help me?”

Trevor pushes past her and up the steps to the trailer, slamming the door as hard as he can. The walls shake with it. The TV is on and there he is, watching the commercials, legs up. His swollen belly is coated with crumbs.

Trevor staggers at the sight of Ryan. His father sat in the same way so many times, only moving to silence his sons if their noise tuned out the television set.

“Oh. Hey,” Ryan says, raising a beer can. “Come here, you little fucker. Give your big brother a hug.”

Trevor walks over, sure, but he knocks the beer can out of his hand in greeting. Ryan leaps to his feet and towers over Trevor for only a moment; he’s barrelled over onto the sofa before he can retaliate, Trevor’s elbow at his windpipe.

Prison has taught Trevor more than just how to defend himself. He can attack pretty well now, too.

“Tell me, Ryan,” he says, easing back on the pressure when his brother turns blue. From behind them comes their mother’s screaming. She’s got her hands on Trevor’s shoulders but she can’t prise him off, not when he’s so fuelled by rage. “Tell me, are you happy like this? Happy doing fuck all while our mom works on street corners? Happy being a worthless sack of shit?”

Ryan could be shaking his head, or he could be struggling for breath. Trevor doesn’t care either way.

“She’s going to jail, so what are you going to do for money? Maybe you can sell yourself, huh?”

Ryan manages to choke out a “you’re the only one who likes fucking men, you --” before Trevor thumps him, knuckles breaking his nose in one swift movement.

Their mother is screaming again, begging Trevor. He spits at the half-unconscious Ryan, spread out across the sofa.

“You get this place painted up while she’s inside. You get a job and get a life, and you pay her back for taking advantage of her, okay? You give her the perfect life once she’s free.”

Ryan manages to pull off an impressive glare, struggling to sit up. “What about you?”

“I’m going to America,” Trevor says.

He leaves them to it and goes into his bedroom. It’s almost exactly as he left it -- untidy, to say the least -- except for the pile of stuff on his bed that Michael must have returned. There’s clothes, his duffel bag of weapons, a half-drunk bottle of whiskey -- and a brown paper envelope.

Curious, Trevor opens it.

Inside is his thousand dollars, Lester’s number from the bar, and a small note that reads:

T - I owe you one. Find me. M

*

The plane ride over the border and into the Midwest of America leaves him feeling a little sickly. The pilot is no good and he’s sure he could do better, but he guesses any suggestion like that to the air hostesses might be seen as an attempt to hijack the plane. So he keeps silent, looks out the window, and thinks about what’s to come.

Lester had sounded beyond cautious on the phone and had been a little affronted when Trevor told him to shove it if he couldn’t help, because Michael Townley told him to call this number but he’s not about to be played. After Michael’s name had been mentioned, though, Lester got a little more open with his information, and told him to fly down to meet him. He said there was work -- and good work -- in the area, and he was organising a job right now that he might be interested in.

The man’s voice had been raspy and kind of sickly, but he’d been helpful enough. Trevor hopped on the next available flight and here he is, touching down and feeling queasy.

“I’ll send someone out to fetch you. You can’t get a cab to my place. It might look suspicious. You’ll know them when you see them.”

The airport is full of all sorts of people, a lot of them obnoxious, and most of them annoying, miserable bastards. He pushes through a few crowds and gets dirty looks in response, but his glare quells any resistance. Airports are horrible at the best of times, and he misses flying solo, literally, nothing but the sky above, the ground below, and the plane all to himself.

He grabs his luggage and heads towards the entrance. If Lester is an honest guy -- and he’s doubtful, thanks to past experience with most of the human race -- the driver will probably be outside nearer their car. If Lester isn’t, well. Another phone call will be in order.

Outside, it’s even more of a mess. It’s raining lightly but the wind is hard; Trevor zips his jacket all the way up to his chin. Taxi drivers jostle for business and there’s a row of people with dumb placards. There’s someone with an Eddie Ward and another with a Shield Family and a Monica Tyler and --

Trevor stops short, duffle bag thudding to the concrete. At the end of them stands Michael, with his own dumb little handwritten sign that reads a simple Trevor. His stomach rolls over and somebody jostles into him. For once, he doesn’t push back. Michael is gazing at the floor, evidently bored out of his mind, and Trevor trips over his own feet getting to him.

“About you owing me,” he says, and Michael looks up.

“Trevor! You made it!”

Michael tosses the sign away and pulls him into a bone breaking hug. He smells of cheap aftershave. Trevor is reminded of the mob bosses he saw in a movie some time last year. Brother. That’s what Michael had called him once.

It’s foolish to trust somebody so much after so little, but Trevor can’t help it. He hugs him back.

“I wanted to come out personally and apologise to you,” Michael says as they break apart. Trevor rescues his bag before any pedestrian kicks it out of the way. “I should never have agreed to rob that place with you without planning it properly. I definitely shouldn’t have run away and left you there.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Trevor says, following him to the parked car. “What happened, happened. There was point us both going down for it. Anyway, prison, it was kind of …”

“Enlightening?” Michael asks, and Trevor nods. “Sure, it’s good to get the experience out of the way sometime or other, but you still took the fall for both of us and I appreciate that. You need something here, you just ask me.”

They get into the car. Trevor thinks for a moment as they pull out of their parking spot, and then clears his throat. “I do, uh, need a place to stay.”

Michael doesn’t hesitate. “Well, I guess you should know I don’t actually have a permanent residence right now. I kind of just go where the job takes me, you know?”

“Life on the road, huh?” Trevor asks. Aside from the month he spent in motels across the outskirts of Canada and his time in prison, he’s only ever been stationed in various trailer parks on either side of the border. The freedom of a criminal career sounds almost too perfect.

“Pretty much. Right now I’m renting out this shitty house in the corner of the city, but it’s only a month’s lease. It’ll do until I need to get out of the city again.” Michael quiets, changes the lane they’re in, and then glances at Trevor. “You’re welcome to move in until you’ve found your feet here.”

Once, Trevor might have coyly accepted, full of gratitude. But the army has happened to him, prison has moulded him. He doesn’t give a fuck what anyone might think of his manners, not anymore. Not if something’s being offered.

“Fuck yeah. We need to get some real alcohol in, maybe some meth, you know? Really christen the place. Maybe your guy Lester can join us.”

“Sounds good, man, except Lester isn’t always the partying type. It depends if he’s feeling well.” Michael rolls his eyes. “Or what girl he’s trying to hook up with. You wouldn’t guess it when you first meet him, but our Lester can be a real dog.”

“And I bet you’re a real paragon of virtue, Michael.”

With a toothy grin, Michael glances at him sidelong. His voice is oddly low as he says, “Sure. If you want to think that, go ahead.”

There’s a prickling across Trevor’s cheekbones at the heavy gaze so he looks away and out of the window.

The city seems busy, almost stiflingly so. Snatches of conversation he catches when they stop at the lights are spoken in accents similar to Michael’s. Trevor is sure to stand out, he knows, but fuck it.

“Like what you see?”

Trevor whips his head round. “What?”

“America.” Michael puts on a Southern drawl that makes Trevor laugh. “Land of the free, home of the brave.”

“It looks pretty shitty, actually.”

It’s Michael’s turn to laugh, now. He leans over to pat Trevor on the back. “You’re gonna love it. There’s way too many people with more money than sense. They’re just waiting for people like us to come along.”

Michael drives past Lester’s motel to show Trevor the bank they’ve been planning to rob. They’ve scoped it out fully, he proudly announces, as he parks across the street from it. He runs through the plans involving a lot of weapons, a lot of intimidation, and as much haste as possible, and he sounds smug, but Trevor thinks he has the right to be. His team could walk out with around fifty thousand between them if things go according to plan, maybe even more.

He’s not sure if he’s included in the plan himself. He’s kind of reluctant to ask in case Michael turns him flatly down. His track record, well … it’s one failed robbery that got him jail time, and one cargo delivery that ended in rash, cold-blooded murder. Trevor doubts they’ll let him in on this heist, but maybe next time, if he --

“I mean, Lester will brief you properly when we get to his,” Michael continues. “It’ll be good to have you on board, Trevor.”

Trevor almost tries to talk him out of it. This is a big job for a beginner, a huge one. One wrong move and they would all be thrown under the bus.

But then he thinks of some guy in jail, how he told him he needed a better outlet for his anger then just beating people up. He thinks of his brother, sat on his ass day in day out. He thinks of his father telling him he’s worthless. He thinks of Michael, so arrogant and so sure. Trevor wants this job, wants it so much it hurts.

“Sounds great.”

Some passing kids interrupt their shared smile by banging hard on the hood of the car. “Homos!” one of them yells, his voice barely broken.

Michael flips them off easily, but Trevor’s out of the car before he has time to think what he’s going to do. He has one of the kids face down on the hood of the car, somehow, and there’s shouts from pedestrians and a red tinge around his vision and the kid keeps on struggling even with the knee in his back and the hands on his arms.

“You think you’re smart, you little prick?” Trevor is shouting, the burn in his belly spreading through the entirety of him. “You fucking try saying that again.”

The kid’s friends are looking nervously at each other. One old man is staring at them and he starts brandishing his cane. Trevor couldn’t care less about the audience. His nails dig deep into the boy’s skin.

“I’m sorry!” He’s crying, the boy, all snotty and blubbering against the offended car. “I’m sorry, I was just messing around!”

“T, what the fuck?”

Michael is out of the car, pulling Trevor away with more strength than he has any right to have. Trevor shrugs him off and tries to lunge for the kid again, but Michael blocks him.

“Not until this shit apologises -- properly!”

“I’m sorry, I am!”

The boy scrambles upright and takes off at a run, his friends sprinting after hm. The old man tuts but says nothing as Trevor meets his eye.

“Get back in the car,” Michael orders, quietly. He sounds livid but Trevor ignores him, stalking off down the alley they’re parked next to. Michael locks his car and follows.

“Fuck off,” Trevor spits, and then Michael has him shoved up against the wall, none too gently.

“You fuck off. What the hell’s your problem? The kid was just being an idiot. You didn’t need to attack him.”

“He needed to be taught a lesson.”

“I’m sticking my neck out for you here, don’t screw this up. If you lose your temper like that around Lester and he sees you as a liability, you’ll be off this job in a second. Fucking control yourself.”

“Big fucking deal,” Trevor sneers. His teeth are bared but Michael doesn’t seem scared; he keeps him held against the wall, face close. “He hit your car. You let pissy little kids get the better of you in America, huh?”

“I know what fights are worth having and some spotty thirteen year old boy who calls me gay ain’t one of them. I’d rather focus on my job, okay, and keeping out of trouble with the law.”

They glower at each other and Trevor is sure Michael is going to smack him, or that he’s going to smack Michael.

“You don’t know me,” Trevor says, but instead of a threat it comes out like some kind of sad warning, and his face burns with it. “You don’t know what I’m like, how I act. You invited me out here without knowing me. I don’t know who you want me to be but I can tell you I’m not going to be that person. Somebody tries to mess with me? I’m going to show them they can. Somebody tries to mess with you and- and its the same thing. I don’t care if that kid was thirteen or thirty, if he was an idiot or a fucking mob boss. I’m not going to take shit, and I’m not going to let you take it, either.”

Michael stares at him, breathes in deep through his nose. Trevor feels the exhale hit his face.

The other man lets him go and takes a step back, running a hand through his hair. Trevor straightens his jacket and tries to stop shaking.

“You’re right,” Michael says, suddenly. His voice has mellowed, his shoulders have slumped. “You’re right, I’m sorry. Those kids were assholes, but- I don’t want you to go to jail again. I thought we had a good thing going back in Canada, you know? We’re on the same level. I don’t want you to risk yourself, especially not for me.”

Trevor takes that in, pacing around the alley and biting his lower lip. He feels surged with adrenaline, all lit up, and he wishes Michael would look away.

“Okay,” he says, finally, and Michael breathes out in relief. “Okay. Apology accepted. I’m, uh- I’m sorry too. I’ll, you know, try.”

He doesn’t specify what, exactly, he’s going to try, but Michael nods anyway and they get back in the car.

*

Lester Crest isn’t what Trevor was expecting as the brains behind the business.

He’s nineteen and spotty and struggles to run thanks to a muscle wasting disease he briefly explains in the first thirty seconds of meeting Trevor. When they first walk through the door he’s shoving a pile of adult magazines under his bed, that Trevor dives for the moment his back is turned.

“Wow,” is all he can say when he opens one of them, turning his head to one side. “How does she fit that in there?”

“I’ll have that, thank you,” Lester says, snatching it back off him. Trevor raises his hands in surrender, but can’t keep the smirk off his face as Lester puts the magazine tenderly under his pillow. “Show some respect, please.”

“Sorry,” Trevor lies, and Michael grins at him before dropping down on the bed, motioning for Trevor to take a seat next to him.

“I should think so.” Lester limps over to the desk, peering out of the motel window. “You’re sure you weren’t followed, right?”

“I checked behind me the whole way,” Michael reassures him. He toes off his shoes and leans back. Where Lester is nervous and twitchy, and Trevor is waiting for something to go wrong as usual, Michael is as calm as anything, confident in himself and his friends and the job he has to do. Trevor envies him, but he can’t imitate him. Not until he has at least one success under his belt.

The talk moves away from pornography and stalkers and into the territory of the heist; they discuss technical moves to get into the bank and, more importantly, speed and precision. They toss out names of people Trevor’s never heard of and then cross them firmly off the list, or consider them more carefully. They talk of exit strategies, of weapons, of possible complications with civilians or law enforcement.

Trevor watches them, eyes flicking back and forth between them, hungry for all the information he can get. If he wants to be in this for the long run -- and he wants to -- he’s got to learn all of this, and fast. It’s okay to have Michael holding his hand through it, and to have Lester guiding him, but if he wants a real career, well, he needs to plan for the possibility that at some point he may be on his own.

So he listens, and he devours their words, keeping silent but to occasionally offer an outside opinion on the few flaws he finds in their planning. They actually listen to him and incorporate his ideas. It’s kind of heartening. He just wants to get out there and get on with it, but he knows how vital this careful planning must be.

His postal office job and subsequent arrest is proof of that.

The only obstacle comes when Lester gives Trevor a nervous look and says, in a voice hushed but hardly unheard, “Are you sure you want him as your gunman? I’m sure he’s good, but I have a lot of really experienced people practically begging for work, and I think they might be better suited to it.”

Trevor’s half standing up already when Michael puts a placating hand around the crook of his elbow and stands himself.

“Hey, look, I get what you’re saying,” he tells Lester, and Trevor prickles all over, even as he retakes his seat on the bed. “Trevor’s untested by you, I know. But I trust him. I trust his ability and I trust his loyalty. He’ll do great out there and if he doesn’t, remember that I vouched for him and it’ll be on my head.”

Lester struggles with himself, and then gives in with a half-hearted shrug. He starts talking about where they’re going to get untraceable ammo from most easily, and Trevor grins at Michael. Michael’s smile in return is big and bold and brilliant.

-------

There’s too many people everywhere and too much noise. Pedestrians leap out of the way of the shitty Ford inexpertly driven by some cheap driver Lester hired from down South. The man, Tony, is sweating profusely as he tries in vain to lose the cops. The whole car stinks of him.

Out of the back windows, Michael and Trevor try to do damage control on the streets they speed down; Michael has shot at least two cops already, but Trevor’s bullets keep hitting the ground or the bumpers of their black and white cars.

“Fuck!” he yells, as the car hits the curb and makes him shoot the sky instead. “Can’t you keep this thing still?”

“I’m trying!” Tony yells from the front seat. He swerves out of the way of a roadblock set up just for them. “The suspension is fucked!”

“Just get us away from this heat!”

Tony listens to Michael, but maybe that’s just because Michael is the one with the bags of money tucked under his arm.

Aside from the botched getaway, the heist has been going well. They went in, got the money, got out. Lester has planned for every complication with almost frightening accuracy, especially for a man never on the field himself. If Trevor weren’t otherwise preoccupied, he might be awed by it.

The most persistent of the cop cars get up close to them and brush them with their bumper. Michael swears, and Tony pretty much screams, and Trevor grits his teeth and can hear only his heartbeat as he hangs half out of the back of the car. If any of the police are crack shots, he knows his blood will splatter the sidewalk.

He swallows any stray fear -- he has no time for it, he never has -- and raises his gun.

The front window already smashed by Michael’s well-aimed bullets means there’s no obstacle. The driver gets a bullet to the neck and lets go of the wheel. Trevor can’t see anything more than blood.

“Shit! Good one, T!” Michael yells, cheering.

Tony takes them down the back alley of a car dealership as the cops spin dramatically off the road. They clamber out of the Ford and pelt full speed into the second getaway car, stashed neatly at the side of the road. It looks like something a soccer mom would drive but Tony takes to it like it’s a sport car, some colour coming back into his cheeks.

When they rejoin the busy high street seconds later, they blend straight in with the traffic. No other driver gives them a second glance.

Tony is whooping in the front seat and Michael is punching the air, but Trevor keeps an eye behind them just in case. It’s been too simple, far too easy. He knows the cops will track them down once they find the empty car in the alley. They’re going to get arrested, he’s going back to jail, he’s going to --

“Trevor, hey,” Michael says, and he refocuses to find Tony staring at him in the rearview mirror. “Relax. It’s almost over and we can start counting our takes. Don’t worry so much.”

“It’s pretty hard not to worry when we’ve just been chased halfway across the city!”

It’s a stupid time to freak out, he knows that. Jail wasn’t even so bad. It’s the thought of letting Michael and Lester down that panics him, though; to lose them would be to lose any real way into this line of work, and then he’d have to go home to his sack of shit brother and try to start over again near the border.

But panicking, well -- that, too, is likely to make the others let him go. He did well. He did fucking brilliantly.

Michael is obviously thinking the same thing. “You’re a natural. The way you got that driver? Shit, I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of you.”

“Well, carry on like you are and you won’t be,” Trevor says, and they share a grin for a long moment.

Tony looks at them in the rearview mirror and clears his throat, purposefully.

“We’ll be at your place soon. I’d like my cut before dropping you off.”

“Right, right,” Michael says. He looks distracted as he unzips the bag of cash, counting out the stacks of notes. Trevor tears his eyes away and resumes watching behind them again. In the distance, sirens blare, but the traffic around them trundles on bumper-to-bumper.

Nobody looks oddly at them.

Nobody runs away screaming.

Nobody cares.

“We did it,” he says, quietly, and then laughs so loudly Tony jumps. “We fucking did it! We’re geniuses, I swear, we did it! Where’s Lester? I need to kiss that piece of shit.”

“He’ll love that,” Tony snorts.

Once they’re free of the busy high street, they take a quieter route towards the run-down house Michael’s got rented for the month. Michael shushes them so he can concentrate on counting out Tony’s take. Trevor watches him for a while, thinking of how he’ll be able to afford all of the meth he wants. The good stuff, too, not the shitty diluted stuff that he used to get back in Canada.

Tony drops them off with his take tucked neatly in the passenger seat.

Michael heads straight for the fridge when they get the door locked behind them, throwing Trevor a beer. It’s disconcertingly quiet without the police sirens or Michael’s yelling at scared bank employees or Tony’s colourful swearing. Trevor takes a large swig of beer with some difficulty. He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet with adrenaline.

He can do this, live this life after all.

“Drink up,” Michael says, and they clink their beer bottles together. “We have a lot of celebrating to do.”

Trevor kneels and unzips the bag. He can’t help but rub one of the notes between his fingers, savouring the feel of the paper.

He looks up to see Michael grinning down at him, shaking his head. “So, you addicted yet?”

“You could say that.”

Trevor stands back up. They look at each other and Trevor is bursting to ask if he can do this with him full time, if he can worm himself into his life of crime, and he opens his mouth to speak just as Michael says, “So, do you want --”

They both fall silent.

“Go on,” Trevor prompts, feigning impatience. His mouth has gone dry.

“I was just gonna ask -- I mean, you can say no if you want, it’s all good, but --” Michael adjusts his collar and shrugs one shoulder “-- but maybe, if you want, we could partner up. Lester’s a good guy, real smart, but he’s never actually out here with me. It’s just changing faces. Nobody ever sticks, you know? But you’re a natural, Trevor. I think we click out there, on the job, so --”

Trevor downs half his beer and wipes at his mouth, all put-on cockiness. “You don’t need to ask. I’m fucking good at this. I’m not going anywhere, Mikey.”

iii.

1989 - 1990

In the criminal underworld, Michael and Trevor start to earn themselves not only a small fortune, but a reputation, too.

They’re heartless and precise, taking down bank after store after storage locker after houses of the rich and famous. They never stay still; in one month they live nearer new New York, and then they’re in Texas - where Trevor hurries them on, after getting into a murderous altercation with a racist man in the parking lot of a bar - and then, before they know it, they’re back near the Canadian border.

Michael suggests they go visit Trevor’s brother. Trevor doesn’t dignify the suggestion with an answer.

Life on the road with Michael proves an exhilarating addiction that Trevor could never have prepared for. After his nervousness on the first job, he instead gets arrogant. The gun in his hand and the money in the safe gives him the excuse he’s always needed to tell people just how annoying, fake and fucking ridiculous he finds them.

They live a life on quick cash and changing casts; Lester stays, for the most part, helping them to plan, and -- more importantly -- he wipes their slates clean in several states, intercepting police reports with his inside allies. Tony refuses to work with them after Trevor shoves him out of the car after some spectacularly crap driving, but others readily fill his shoes.

It’s a changing cast of faces. The only constants in Trevor’s life become Lester’s voice and, occasionally, physical presence, Michael by his side at almost every moment, and meth.

Meth proves where Michael and Trevor’s similarities truly end; Michael refuses to touch the stuff, though he doesn’t mind Trevor smoking it around him providing he does his job as well as he can, and doesn’t puke his guts out all over their rented accommodation,

Michael, on the other hand, spends his money on alcohol -and sometimes coke - and does puke his guts all over the floor. Trevor mostly helps him clean it up, but sometimes he gets kind of a kick out of seeing a hungover Michael realising just how wild he got last night. The rest of his money gets splashed on girls, whether it’s snobby girls in high-end bars who just want to get free drinks and then leave, or prostitutes on street corners who are amazed with how much they get paid, Michael adores them. Trevor can’t blame them, and he brings home his own fair share.

He doesn’t bring home any guys. That’s a topic not yet broached and while he doesn’t give a fuck what might be said, he doesn’t want to ruin this good thing they’ve got going.

And sometimes, late at night, when the motel rooms are quiet except for Michael’s ridiculous snoring, Trevor thinks about the body so close to his. He thinks, and doesn’t act, and when he wakes in the morning and sees Michael’s sleep smile, he wants.

*

“Can you tell that asshole in the background to shut his mouth? I can hardly hear you.”

He hears her yell at the prison guard and then come back to the phone. “Trevor, you know I don’t like it when you swear at me. Hold your tongue when you’re talking to your mother.”

Trevor literally bites his tongue. He’s kind of high so it’s mostly numb. It’s the only way to stop himself saying something crude and sarcastic to the woman who bore him. He tastes blood.

“I wouldn’t say asshole is --” he stops as his mother clears her throat, pointedly, and he’s glad she can’t see the roll of his eyes. “Okay, sure, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t hear you. What did you say?”

“I said that it’s about time you called me. I been in here months already and not a word from you. Your brother’s wrote and called, and he’s come by to see me three times. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.”

“I couldn’t forget about you.”

He raises the glass pipe to his lips and lights it. He wishes he could forget her, sometimes. There were times when he was younger that she could be so kind to him. When his father turned out completely rotten, though, something soured in her too; gone is the sparkle in her eyes and the softness in her tone. In her place is a cheap imitation. He can’t blame her, but he does mourn her, sometimes.

“Whatever you say,” she says. “What’s your excuse for not even checking up on me, then?”

“I’ve been busy, mom. I’ve haven’t been in the area.”

“Where are you? Ryan says he’s not seen you since you attacked him.” She sniffs over his protests and he gives up on them. “I hope you’re staying out of trouble.”

“I’m in --” His mind is foggy, drug-soaked. He thinks about it. “Uh, America, I- North! That’s where. I’m in America.”

“Alone?” she asks, suspiciously.

“No, with a friend. Michael. The American. He --”

“Oh, the one who dropped your stuff off.” There’s a heavy sigh on the line that Trevor ignores to take another hit of his pipe, breathing the smoke in as deep as he can. He’s exhaling when she says, “The one who got you sent to jail.”

“I- no, he didn’t --”

“You haven’t even asked me how I’m finding jail. I suppose that would be too normal for you. You always did like to be the rebel.”

It’s a fair comment. He takes a last hit of the pipe. It’s with a smoke-thickened voice that he laughs and replies, “I’m just taking after my dear mother. After all, Ryan’s never been to jail. He probably wouldn’t have balls big enough to.”

There’s a stifled laugh on the other end that turns into a hacking cough. She’s still chain smoking, clearly. “Don’t be a brat. He’s still your family, though clearly such things don’t matter to someone living the fancy life.”

“It’s not the fancy life, mom. It’s just --”

“I haven’t finished, Trevor. What I was going to say is that he’s still your family and right now, he’s struggling. Payment for our trailer can’t come from him when he can’t find work. Now, I don’t know what you’re doing out there but I’m guessing it’s not legal and I guess it’s earning you enough to survive in a whole other part of the country on your own two feet. I want you to send Ryan some money.”

If Trevor were sober, he might listen to his mother. He might bow his head and fight it but still give in to her every demand. He’d probably even cry a bit, too.

Against anyone else, he’d be fine. But his mother? She’s a different matter altogether.

The meth, though, gives him courage he never would have found by himself. He rests back on his bed and snorts with laughter. “Fuck that. He’s not getting a single dollar from me.”

A pause.

Then the screaming starts.

The motel door opens at the same time and Michael comes in, arms full of freshly-bought beer and a pathetic amount of groceries. He starts to say something and then sees the look on Trevor’s face, hears the screaming voice of Trevor’s mother coming loudly through the phone speaker, and smells the meth in the air. He stops short and dumps the beer on the counter, raising a questioning eyebrow.

Trevor isn’t listening to his mom, for the most part, as she rants and rails about how awful a son and brother he is. He instead rolls his eyes at Michael, who throws him a welcome beer.

“If you had any sense of loyalty, any at all, you’d help him. He promised me he has work waiting for him next month! But no, you just want to see the worst in people, even your own brother, you always --”

Michael disappears into the kitchen and Trevor holds the phone away from his ear. He can hear his mom’s every word, regardless. She goes through the usual rounds of cursing and insults and threats, and by the time she’s moved into trying to guilt trip him, Michael’s returned with a couple of plates of cold burgers.

Trevor puts the phone back to his ear and immediately winces.

“-- could have told me where you are, leaving that day without saying one goddamn word, and I have to --”

“Mother,” Trevor interrupts, calmly. “Ryan isn’t getting one single cent from me. He’s getting fucking nothing.”

“But --”

“I have to go. I- I’ll talk to you soon. Take care, Ma.”

He hangs up. Michael frowns at him and lifts a questioning eyebrow.

They’ve worked together for almost seven months now, he and Michael. They know when beer is needed or when to leave each other well alone to wallow, and Trevor knows that when Michael knocks his knee against Trevor’s, he’s doing it with affection.

Trevor knows a lot about Michael these days. Things slip out when high on the success of a job or high on, well, drugs.

Michael, for example, once smoked a joint and a half to himself and told Trevor about his success as his school’s quarterback and how his parents were always too drunk to get to any of his games, but that the prestige he got throughout the school was better than any parental pride. He talks about dreams of the big screen that they both know will never, ever come true. He talks of how he hasn’t seen his father in five years, and his mother in four, and he doesn’t miss them in the slightest.

Trevor hugged him that night. He was a little high, too.

“She sounded pissed,” Michael notes with a nod to the phone. “She okay?”

“Okay as a woman serving time with nobody but her two piece of shit sons waiting for her on the outside can be, yeah.”

Michael’s frown deepens. He knocks back his beer while Trevor devours his burger. It twists nastily in his stomach, fighting with the meth that’s flooded his body. Michael, to his credit, has said nothing about the glass pipe on the small stretch of bed sheets between them. They sit in a companionable silence that Trevor is all too thankful for.

He doesn’t quite idolise Michael as he did seven months ago, though he’d never admit to anybody quite how much he did back then. Thanks to their constant close quarters and one too many alcohol induced moments of vulnerability, he’s started to see Michael as an equal such as he’s never had before.

The last thing he wants to do is discuss his mother his best and only friend.

“I’m bored,” Trevor announces, dropping his plate to the bed, crumbs be damned. “We need to get something to really plan or at least something to do. Anything.”

He stands up and looks down at Michael. He remembers the tears in the man’s eyes as he talked about the voice of his mother unheard for years. “Well,” Michael says, slowly, considering. “We’re only a couple of hours from Vegas.”

*

They skip the casinos and go straight to the strip clubs, making a beeline for the biggest and busiest they can find. Trevor doesn’t care about the gambling and Michael is nervous he’ll blow every cent he has so they settle for watching girls.

The security is tight here, too tight to try anything. Bouncers are at the doors, front and back, and from what Trevor can measure from a quick glance around, there’s enough security personnel and alarm bells to staff a whole government building. His guess is there’s somebody important in their midst.

While the thought of robbing them blind is inviting, he’s heard all the stories about Vegas. The Álvarez family have run the place for years and pay every establishment in and around the Strip extortionate fees to keep other gangs, criminals and vigilantes from trying to take over. Even a mugging on the street would get him and Michael noticed, and sure, that sounds like fun, but this is supposed to be some kind of peaceful break for the both of them.

He’s not going to ruin that for a couple of handfuls of cash and a wall of relentless gunfire.

The girls in the place more than make up for it, anyway. They are more daring, beautiful and dangerous than any dancers he’s seen before. They walk right up to clients of their choosing and drag them in the velvet curtained back rooms where bouncers stand and uneasily guard, clearly listening to every moan and groan behind them. Trevor is transfixed by one redhead in the corner but Michael eyes the brunettes.

“What’re you having?” the woman at the bar asks them, her voice clipped, her hair clipped even shorter.

“Uh, drinks? Obviously,” Trevor says, and she looks affronted.

“If you don’t order, Sir, you can’t be here. This isn;t a zoo.”

“Sorry, darling, he’s had a rough day,” Michael says, and she tears her glare away from Trevor. She melts at Michael’s immediate charm and puts an extra shot of vodka in each of their glasses that sets their heads spinning at once.

“You gotta stop flirting with every woman who crosses your path,” Trevor warns, as Michael leads them into a corner where they can watch the stage set in the middle of the club without being overheard too much by the other patrons. “One day you’re gonna fall in love when one of them shakes their ass a bit too well at you.”

Michael snorts into his drink. “You afraid of that happening, T?”

. Trevor elbows him. “In your fucking dreams.”

“What happens in my dreams is between me and my duvet,” Michael grins. Something ghosts over his expression, darkening the edges of it. “Anyway, that’s not for me. Wife, kids, picket fence house? Just give me the money and the road in front of me and we’re golden.”

Trevor’s feels golden, too. He doesn’t mention how easier it would be to face that life with Michael by his side, because Michael is by his side, and will be, and if golden sounds like a pathetic word to describe that then fuck it, they’ll be golden together.

“Maybe you’ll meet the right woman,” Trevor muses, just to fill the silence.

They both watch a woman in such little clothing she might as well be naked walk past, mesmerised by the purposeful sway of her hips. They look at each other, and Michael is laughing. “The right woman who’ll take me away from all of this? Please.”

Most of the people around them are beyond fake; fake tits, fake tan, fake gold, fake charm in the dead eyes of the men. Trevor hates them for it, each and every one of them. Even the prettiest dancer, all wild red hair and wilder green eyes, can’t escape his loathing as she straddles the lap of a greasy businessmen.>p> It’s not like Trevor is wishing people would fall in love instead, or commit to each other, or even fucking tell the truth. He’s a piss poor paragon of virtue himself. But when these people leave this Vegas club and get on with their day to day lives, they’ll be different, they’ll withdraw or come out of their shells or lie to their tired wives about where they’ve been all night.

If people would just embrace how fake they are, the world would be all the better. At least Trevor doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not. At least there’s that.

Michael goes to get them more drinks and Trevor takes to watching him instead of the redhead. He’s all suave charm, ducking his head to coyly accept the compliments of the bar staff or grinning cockily when another man compliments the cut of his suit. Around him, people fade to black and white or something equally ridiculous, and Trevor hates it. He wishes he could hate Michael, sometimes, because Michael slips into roles that aren’t natural, betrays everything that Trevor believes about him.

And then -- at the end of it -- he’s Michael again, affable and dependable and sometimes wild. Trevor can see that even now, as a dancer starts to circle him.

She’s small and blonde and smiling big and bright, and Michael is clearly hooked from their first shared look. She walks right up to him and takes one of the drinks from his hand, taking a little sip. “Hi,” she says, practically purring. “I’m Celia. What’s your name?”

“Michael,” he says, with half a grin.

Trevor watches from the corner. He feels a little nauseous.

“Michael? Huh.” She has candy pink lips. “You’re not from around here, are you, babe?”

“Nah, I’m from --” He clamps his jaw shut, sensibly. Her eyebrows shoot up. “It doesn’t matter where I’m from. I’m here now.”

She takes his arm. “You are,” she agrees. The sound of her voice makes Trevor stand up. “How about a dance, honey? Somewhere quiet, just you and me.”

Michael laughs, and glances over to where Trevor is glowering. He looks genuinely sorry as he says, “I want to, I do, but I’m with a friend and I gotta keep him company. It’s been a rough day for him.”

Celia looks at Trevor for only a second before pouting up at Michael, who is already moving away, drink and a half tight in his hands. Trevor takes the full one.

His stomach is churning as Michael claps him on the shoulder. “I’m yours tonight. No sweet ass for me.”

Feeling dizzy, Trevor downs the entirety of his drink and pushes past Michael, grabbing Celia’s forearm before she can find another, more eager customer. “Hey, sweetheart, how about that dance for me instead?”

She looks skeptical until he slips a twenty dollar bill into her hand and then she’s all sweetness and light again, leading him across the club into the shadows. Trevor looks over his shoulder at Michael only once, and his insides bunch up together. Michael is watching him with a sour expression that makes Trevor grit his teeth.

He tries to think of Celia as she dances over him, grinding down, but all he sees is the hurt that followed him as he left with her.

*

If Trevor were to describe to the uneducated how smoking meth makes him feel uneducated, he’d describe it as twist of pleasure seconds before coming.

He feels like he can do anything, like he’s on the verge of unimaginable pleasure and glory. It’s always just out of reach, though, an itch he can scratch no matter how much he inhales, but he’s always sure that the next time he loses himself to it will be the time he reaches that nirvana. So he keeps smoking, and keeps reaching and- and keeps falling short.

Still, the highs are good, more than good, he thinks, breathing out perfect smoke rings as he lies back on the motel bed. Celia had given him a nice enough dance and he’d thanked her with too many bills, and then had got out of there as fast as he could. He had left the car and got a cab. He was itching too much to drive.

Michael can drive home in it, anyway, if he’s not busy letting some dancer suck him off in the alley behind the club -- which, now Trevor thinks about it, is probably exactly what’s happening. He can see it. He can even hear it; he thinks Michael will make guttural, filthy noises as he tangles his fingers in the woman’s hair.

The glass pipe, all burnt out, falls from his hand and shatters on the floor. There’s something stuck in throat, he swears, and he can almost see nirvana swirling as far from him as possible. His high cuts an edge that scrapes at the inside of his skull.

He wishes he’d stayed at Michael’s side. He wishes Michael were here now, high or not.

It’s as he thinks this that the door opens and Michael stumbles into the room. He’s drunk, that Trevor can tell immediately. Drunker than Trevor’s seen him yet. His eyes are bloodshot and his clothes crumpled, stinking of whiskey, and he slams the door shut behind him with more force than strictly necessary. Trevor jumps, seconds too late to pass as fully sober. Michael isn’t likely to notice his delayed reactions, though, stumbling across the doormat.

“Hey,” Trevor says, quietly.

Michael looks up at him. He’s a deer caught in headlights; he sees the oncoming storm, but he’s frozen with it. Trevor sees his own reflection in those big eyes. He hates it. He can feel the ghost of the flare gun from that fateful meeting between them, he can feel his fingers tight around it; for a moment, only a moment, he wants to burn those big eyes right out of his skull. At least he wouldn’t see himself in them anymore.

“Hey,” Michael returns. He sounds confused. “Uh, where- where’d you get to tonight? We missed you.”

“We?” Trevor asks. His whole skull reverberates with the words, jaw clicking too loudly for his drug-pickled brain. “Who, you and some girl?”

“Mmm.” Michael, to his credit, manages to walk over to the bed without falling flat on his face. It seems like quite the feat, and when he’s reached it he’s smiling, wobbly and proud. “We. Me.”

“You,” Trevor says, stupidly.

He rubs his hands over his face. Every nerve ending is too intense, and he suddenly can’t swallow. The good feelings, the feelings of tomorrow, have definitely gone now, and he can’t get them back. He reaches out a hand as though they’re tangible. It brushes Michael’s wrist, instead, and Michael sluggishly pulls away.

“You’re, uh …” he eyes the smashed glass pipe. “You’re high.”

“And you’re drunk,” Trevor says, and then he’s laughing so hard he has to grab his sides. “You’re fucking pissed, Mikey. Look at you. I leave you for an hour and you can’t even see straight.”

“You leave me for an hour and you’re so high you’re in hysterics over nothing,” Michael counters. He only slurs a little. “I guess the moral is that we gotta stick together, right? Stick close together.”

Trevor kicks his boots off and brings his legs onto the bed, crossing them. Some of the itching has gone. His body melts against the blankets. “If you say so, cowboy.”

Michael snorts. He throws the covers back and gets into bed, clothes and shoes be damned. “This is my bed, right?” he mumbles against the pillow.

It takes a moment, but Trevor realises it is; his own stuff is piled on the bed across the room, haphazardly strewn. “Yeah,” he says, still grinning. He doesn’t move from his spot on the bed, and he feels Michael shifting to get comfortable, he knee bumping into Trevor’s elbow.

“You’re on it. My bed.”

“Yeah,” Trevor agrees, easily.

“Right.”

Michael says nothing more, and Trevor doesn’t make him. It’s warm here, just next to the desert, and as the meth does it’s magic Trevor imagines lying on hot sand, falling through it, feeling it slip through his fingers. He doesn’t suffer, he doesn’t sweat; his brain swells and swells, and he sleeps.

*

When he wakes, hours and hours later, Trevor has his arm slung around Michael’s waist, and Michael sleeps soundly on.

-------

Trevor scratches at his arm and watches Michael disappear into the convenience store.

Michael wanted cigarettes, and Trevor had tried to tell him how those things were no good at all. It fell on deaf ears however as Michael had pulled up to the curb, flipped him off and wenti nside. With a grin and a shake of the head that made his hair fall into his eyes, Trevor had let him go.

The months have melted into one another, and suddenly they’ve been partners in crime for over a year. The amount of trust between them that’s enable them to work together for so long with the bare minimum of arguments doesn’t mean that they’ll listen to each other about their vices, however -- Trevor still smokes meth when the itch gets too much, and Michael still smokes.

Trevor has, though, tried to stop taking undue risks now that there is another life at risk than his own. He’s not sensible and he’s not necessarily stable, but he’s stable enough to keep Michael alive.

Providing Michael doesn’t get himself killed without Trevor’s assistance.

He watches Michael chatting to the cashier, easy and friendly, as though he hasn’t pointed a gun at dozens of others working behind such a counter. She has strands of her hair twisted around her finger and is blowing gum, like a caricature from some dumb movie Michael likes to watch whenever they get a room with a television set. She’s pretty, too. Michael is laughing.

Trevor sighs, heavily, and crosses his arms where he’s rested against the door of the car. He watches an elderly couple shuffle past, followed by a group of young mothers with pushchairs, and then a man a couple of years younger than him who --

“Asshole,” the man mutters, noticing Trevor’s stare. He has big lips and tousled hair and a square, firm jawline, and he’s just the type of guy Trevor would like to meet at a club and fuck in the alleyway, holding him up against the grubby brick wall.

He’s irrationally turned on, and rationally pissed off, all at once.

He pushes himself off the side of the car and strides in front of the plan, splaying his feet wide on the pavement and arching an eyebrow. “Asshole? Do you mean me, friend?”

“I don’t see any other assholes here,” comes the sneering response, but there’s a heat to the gaze that sweeps up and down Trevor. He feels a prickling at his lower back, his cheekbones, his neck.

The tips of the other man’s ears are turning red. It’s obvious where his eyes are lingering now, and it’s at the firmness of Trevor’s chest beneath his shirt. “Riiiiight,” Trevor drawls, glancing at the shop to see Michael still thoroughly preoccupied with the giggling cashier. “You wanna take this down there?”

He nods at the alley by the side of the convenience store. The man licks his lips, hesitates, and Trevor’s pang of longing threatens to double him over.

Since he took his place at Michael’s side, there haven’t been any encounters like this. Michael still doesn’t know about his attraction to guys, and the clubs they go to aren’t exactly guy on guy friendly. He’s tried to slip out while Michael is sleeping and go to the sort of dark corners that men like to lurk in, but he feels like an unfaithful wife letting the delivery man plough her.

So he’s looked, and he’s wanted, and he’s done nothing about it.

He’s not surewhy he feels like that around men and men alone. He’s fucked women all across America since flying over the border, and he doesn’t usually think about Michael while on top of any of them. But when he thinks about flat chests and rutting hips, he gets too uncomfortable, too sick. He’s not ashamed, he’s never been ashamed of himself, but -- well. He can’t risk seeing the hatred or disappointment in Michael’s eyes when he learns he likes dick, too.

This man, though, looks all heat, and Trevor just wants to burn.

The man’s voice lowers as he says, “Fuck you. Too scared to take me on the street?”

“If you’re into that kind of thing,” Trevor says, easily, “sure”.

It’s a test, a tease, and they are both ready to fold like cards and fuck each other’s brains out and then --

-- and then Michael comes out of the store and stops short, looking between the two of them.

He must see the tenseness in the stranger’s shoulders and the firm line of Trevor’s mouth, because he’s immediately on the defence, one of his hands going to his waistband where his gun is stashed. “Everything okay, T?”

The man looks at him. Trevor sees and recognises the look in his eyes; it’s panic, pure panic, caught in the act of getting ready to shove his hands down another man’s pants. Instinct takes over him and before anyone can react, he’s pulled a gun from the inside of his jacket and he’s got it pointed at Michael.

“Who’s this, faggot?” he asks Trevor. “Your boyfriend?”

“Fuck you,” Michael says, as Trevor clenches his right fist. He looks at Trevor with more fervour. “Everything okay? You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

If Trevor’s short with Michael, it’s because the bulge in his pants has started to soften and he’s so damn frustrated and pissed off with people hiding, with himself having to hide just in case he offends somebody else’s ridiculous delicacies. He’s never hidden himself like this before, even from the brother who used to beat up any kid at school he thought might be gay.

The other man still looks nervous but his hand is steady as he aims the gun squarely at Michael’s face. Trevor doesn’t know how itchy his trigger finger is. He might be able to knock the gun from his hands, but a bullet might make Michael’s cheek explode regardless.

“Put the gun down,” he says, instead, and he can’t keep the anger from rocking his voice. “Put it down, or I’ll shove it so far up your ass you’ll be shitting out --”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Trevor looks around. The cashier hasn’t spotted them through her window, on the phone and laughing. Nobody is on the street with them anymore, but Trevor thinks he can see the vague silhouette of somebody in the distance.

Michael looks at Trevor and then swallows, hard.

“Look,” he says, placatingly. He steps forward and reaches, slowly, for the butt of the pistol, and presses his palm gently against it. “Look, I get it. You don’t want to lower your gun, but you don’t want to go to jail, either. We got places to be and I’m sure you do to. So just hand it over, slowly, and we’re gonna all walk away from this without the cop’s on our asses.”

Trevor’s heart lurches. All it would take is one squeeze of the trigger. One squeeze, and he’ll be alone again.

Michael smiles. “Come on, kid. Let it go.”

If Trevor was the one pointing the gun, he’d shoot right now just to get rid of the smug asshole trying to tell him what to do. He’d let blood wash over him and escape the cops with ease.

But Trevor isn’t pointing the gun, and the stranger is clearly all talk and no guts. Michael closes his fingers around the gun and takes it, and without hesitation slams it into the man’s head so he crumples into an unconscious heap on the floor.

“Fucker,” Michael says, and spits on him.

Trevor mourns, briefly, the fuck that will never be. Then he gives Michael the darkest look he can muster and storms back into the car, slamming the passenger door behind him.

Michael drives them back to their motel in silence. It’s dingier than most of the others they stay in, with mildew on the windowsills and stained sheets on the bed. It feels more like home than Trevor would ever to care to admit. Michael looks curiously over at Trevor throughout the journey but Trevor stares determinedly out of the window and grinds his teeth.

He’s still half horny and still pissed as fuck that Michael would take such a dumb risk. What if the man had shot him? What if Trevor had to watch his one and only friend bleed to death at his feet? He would have ripped that pretty boy limb from limb and then fucked his way all the way back to Canada, maybe burning down each state to the ground as he passed through.

Michael, though, is still very much alive, and Trevor is very much pissed with him for ending what could have been a beautiful and brief relationship.

They get into the motel in just under twenty minutes and Trevor’s slamming around at once, getting a good bottle of whiskey from the freezer and a single glass. Michael watches from the doorway to the kitchen, folding his arms and frowning.

Trevor pours in some ice and then downs it, the cubes clacking against his teeth.

“Not getting me a drink, then?”

“No.” Trevor pours himself another.

“And why not?”

“I don’t fucking want to, Mikey.”

Michael uncrosses his arms and gets a little crease between his eyebrows as he takes a cautious step forward. “You’re angry.”

“No shit.”

“You’re angry I knocked that guy out, right? Or is it because you wanted the privilege?”

. Trevor knocks back his second whiskey, and then a third. The words are sour on the tip of his tongue. I’m angry because I wanted to fuck a guy for the first time in over a year. I’m angry because I almost lost you today and I don’t want to be alone. I’m angry because you’re the reason- you’re the reason --

“How about you assume whatever the fuck you want, and I’ll get drunk.”

He pushes past Michael as he goes into the bedroom, but Michael grabs his elbow. Some of the whiskey spills over his fingers and just like that, in that second, Trevor is livid.

He jerks away. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

Michael raises his palms in submission. “You’re a fucking mystery sometimes. Anyone would think you were in love with that cocksucker.”

The whiskey falls onto the carpet somewhere along the way but all Trevor can think of is the way Michael’s cheek feels as his fist connects with it. It doesn’t quite crunch, but it’s close to it, and Michael swears in a satisfying kind of way.

“What the fuck?”

He’s panting as he rights himself, wiping at his mouth. Trevor stands with clenched fists and a heaving chest, ready to strike again at the first sign of any acidic retort. Michael, though, bypasses his wit and goes straight for strength; he has Trevor against the wall in a second, elbow at his windpipe.

“What the fuck is your problem, Philips? I should fucking shoot you right now.”

“Just fucking try it,” Trevor sneers, as best he can with Michael’s arm pushing into his throat.

Michael lets him go, out of pity or to go for his gun, Trevor’s not sure. He’s ready, though -- the moment he’s free, he kicks Michael square in the gut and sends him hard against the opposite wall. His head hits the yellowed wallpaper and he grunts, but his eyes are alive and clouded with fury.

“You sack of --”

Trevor grabs the lapels of his jacket, shakes him hard. His head knocks into the wall again. Trevor can smell the tobacco on his breath and something squeezes tight in his stomach, muscles out of his control. “Fuck you, Michael Townley. Fuck you.”

They’re close. Too close. Michael’s radiating warmth beneath his fingers, and Trevor’s whole body abruptly aches with want.

Michael’s eyes flicker down to Trevor’s lips. His breath hitches.

“Fuck you,” Trevor says again.

There’s a spot of blood at the corner of Michael’s mouth and Trevor swallows, curling his fingers tighter into the fabric of Michael’s jacket.

He wants to. He wants him.

Michael leans forward and the feeling of his lips is featherlight. They’re too dry and too hesitant, but Trevor kisses them hard all the same, leaning into it with all of his weight.

It’s not like any kiss Trevor has had before. He knows Michael, or thought that he did. He knows how he smells after not showering for a couple of days. He knows how he takes his coffee. He knows what his perfect day would be like. He knows what his perfect partner would be.

He knows it’s not him.

He kisses him, and when he pulls back to see blown pupils and red cheeks, he starts to drown.

“I need- I have to get some --”

He tears himself away, stumbles backward. He’s itching all over. He needs meth, and he goes to buy some without looking back once.

iv.

1990

Trevor hungers, and most nights he crawls into Michael’s bed, or Michael crawls into his. They fumble and never fuck and never kiss again, and Trevor tries not show any emotion when Michael gets out of bed the moment the morning light reveals them.

v.

late 1990

As winter starts to creep over America, Michael gets a call from Lester at 2am.

He knows where they’re staying - he always does, one way or another - but he’s never called them without a job in the works before. Michael reaches over Trevor’s half-asleep body to answer it, smoothing a hand across his bare stomach as he does so. Trevor’s grinning even as he hears Lester’s nervous, sleep-thick voice.

“Lester. Hey.”

Trevor rarely gets to see him like this, all sleepy and warm. When they aren’t sleeping, they are only ever in close proximity when the job demands it, or when they’re jerking each other off under the covers. Now, Michael is almost a lover, with roaming, too-gentle fingers that make Trevor bite at his lower lip to stop from laughing.

“No real names,” Lester snaps, and breathes hard. “Have you heard anything from anyone tonight? Anything at all? Has Tony tried to contact you?”

Michael looks down at Trevor, blinking in confusion. His hand stills at the dark fan of Trevor’s pubic hair. “Tony? That shitty driver T pushed into traffic?”

“The one and only.”

“No. I haven’t seen him since then, and nobody else has called today but you.” They both hear Lester sigh, heavily, on the line. “Hey, L, everything okay? Are you- are you safe?”

“I’m fine. I’m fine, I--”

There’s nothing but heavy breathing for a few moments. Trevor sits up and takes the phone from Michael, feeling rather more awake.

“Lester, man, come the fuck on. Tell us what’s happened.”

“If your phone has been tapped, I --”

“We’re the only ones who’ve been in this room, we checked in like four hours ago with fake names, and we haven’t left. Fucking spit it out.”

Lester audibly struggles with himself for a moment. “I- no. I’m sorry, Tr-- T. I can’t take that risk over the phone right now. You’ll understand when I can explain everything. Get over here as soon as possible.”

Trevor is furious, and must look it because Michaels the phone quickly back from him. “Hey, Lest -- sorry, uh, L. You need to calm down. We’re in New Mexico right now, and last I knew you were in --”

“North Yankton. Yeah. You know the address. I don’t care how you do it, just get here. This is really important.”

Michael and Trevor look at each other. Trevor just wants to blow him, Lester’s panic be damned. Maybe he could even dare to kiss him again. Michael licks his lips.

“I don’t know.” He hesitates, running a hand over his heavily lidded eyes. “That means a lot of travel. You sure you can’t say whatever you’ve got to say over the phone?”

“I’m sure,” Lester says, firmly. “I’ll see you both soon.”

He hangs up, and Michael does, too. Trevor is on him in a moment, keeping his lips still and far away, but his hand curls around Michael’s cock instead. Michael lies back with a big, shit-eating grin, and when he comes ten minutes later, he’s still smiling.

*

They get to Lester’s in little over 30 hours and he pretty much drags them through his front door.

“You took your time. Do either of you know what urgency is?”

Trevor shrugs off his jacket. “If you want, I can urgently shove my boot up your --”

“Sorry,” Michael cuts through him. It’s cold outside, and his cheeks are patched with pink. “We got the first flight we could, then we had to drive all the way out here. Couldn’t you just settle down, preferably somewhere near an airport?”

“I’ve been looking at properties, actually, but I’m not staying in the state of eternal winter,” Lester says, leading them through to the barely-lived-in dining room. “Anyway, my whereabouts are not important right now.”

“Something better be,” Trevor mutters. It’s kind of pathetic how much pleasure he gets from trudging dirt and snow through the house when Lester’s only renting this place. It’s going to mean a lot of cleaning for the dick. If he hadn’t called and interrupted their sleep, they could still be curled up in bed, or at least getting high.

He and Michael take seats at the table and Lester stands at the head of it. He always looks rough, but now he looks about three days from his last good sleep. His hands are practically shaking.

Michael leans forward, elbows on the table. “Lester, maybe you should sit down. You been taking your meds properly?” “I’ve been taking them just fine, thank you,” Lester snaps. Michael raises his eyebrows and the man’s shoulders sag, the life going out of him. “Well, fine, maybe I’ve forgotten a couple this morning. I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“That’s pretty dangerous, shouldn’t --”

“Can we please stop talking about me? I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

Michael looks at Trevor. They mirror each other’s confusion. “Uh. Me? Why? I ain’t got any life debilitating conditions. I’m fantastic right now.”

“Tony. The driver.” Lester breathes out hard through his nose. “He’s been arrested doing some stupid high-risk, low-pay job. The others got away, but they got him.”

“Shit,” Trevor comments, dryly. He never liked the man, always too jittery and nervous in the middle of a chase. His capture is no great loss to the world of criminality. “So what? Guy was a jerk.”

“That may be so, but he’s also a goldmine of information for the cops. He knows names, faces, he knows the system. He’s worth a hell of a lot more to them than one more jail cell being occupied. He could hand us all in.”

Michael frowns. “But people must get caught all the time. Not everyone’s cut out for this life. There have to be like, I dunno, unspoken rules in place? I’ve been to jail, Trevor’s been, we never blabbed. You don’t sell out your brothers, not least ‘cause you’d get killed by them the second you’re a free man.”

Trevor nods, because it’s all he can do when he’s watching Michael, studying how emphatic he is. It’s a ridiculous time to get turned on but all he can think of is two nights ago, when he took Michael in his mouth for the first time and got to look up and see those eyes staring down at him, pupils blown, mouth hanging half open with a sliver of pink tongue wetting his lips.

He had wanted to kiss him then, but he didn’t want to push his luck, so he swallowed his come in thanks instead.

“The rumour is that our dear friend Tony doesn’t quite agree, Michael. The rumour is he’s going to talk, and talk a lot, for a big of a payoff as he can bargain for.” Lester literally wrings his hands together. “He’s worked with me. He’s worked with both of you. He knows us, full name knows us. We could be hunted down before the week’s end.”

A silence meets the announcement. Slowly, Trevor lowers his head and then bangs it on the table. It’s easier than seeing the worry on the other’s faces.

Michael is on his feet after a beat. Trevor can’t see him, but the tone of his yell is enough for him to picture the look of pure fury he must be wearing. “What the fuck? That little shit is going to get himself killed, you mark my fucking words. If he dares, dares, gives our names in, that’s it -- I’ll kill him myself if nobody else does. I’ll fucking end him. He can’t do this.”

“He can, and he most likely will. Now, in the event of one of our names getting out, it’s going to be a mess, but we can deal with that. Fake names, new identities - leaving the country, if we have to. Trevor, of course, you have Canada, but they’d find you pretty easily. Maybe South America, or --”

“We’re not running, not because of him,” Michael snaps. Trevor, head still against the hardwood, groans in agreement. “What a fucking scumbag. You don’t do this, you just don’t - you don’t betray people in this game. We’re supposed to be, fuck, I don’t know - companions, brothers, together forever and all that shit. You can’t sell out, not like that. We’re in this for life.”

Trevor raises his head again.

Something is swelling inside of him, big and painful. Michael is voicing every thought Trevor has on the subject; his eyes are burning, his fists are clenched, he looks so alive alive alive. Trevor can’t help the smile that starts to grow. If he ever had any worry that Michael might one day leave their life together, it’s gone now.

In the long run, it’s all Trevor really wants. The money is nice, but incidental - just a reminder of the power they can get if they really work together. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where he ends up, in a mansion or another trailer park, as long as he can stay in this life, in this game, with Michael as his so-called brother who he gets to sleep next to every now and then. That’s where his dreams begin, and where his dreams end. Michael fucking Townley.

Michael’s only getting better with age, too. Twenty two, nearly twenty three, and finding his drive. He was cocky at first, sure, but nowadays he has reason to be - he’s a crack shot, for one thing, and he’s more determined than ever to succeed, more determined than ever for them both to succeed.

If the little rat really does squeal in prison, Michael won’t have to lift a finger to hurt him. Trevor will tear him limb from limb with pleasure.

Lester gives Trevor’s smile an odd look, but Michael doesn’t seem to notice it. He’s probably seeing red, anyway.

“We need to calm down and think about this rationally,” Lester says, in as soothing a voice as his rasp can be. “Relax, Michael. Sit down before you hurt yourself.”

“Fuck off,” Michael replies. Trevor snorts with laughter, and they both look at him funny. “I’m going out to get- god, I need a smoke and some beer. I’ll bring some back or- or something.”

He’s gone before anybody tries to stop him, a storm of cursing and fury.

Lester sighs and runs his hands over his face. He disappears into the kitchen and returns with two shot glasses, and a bottle of vodka. Trevor takes it eagerly, pouring them both one. He feels a little awkward, a little on edge, and he hates it; he and Lester are rarely alone together, especially in tense situations.

They clink their glasses together and down their shots, and as Lester is pouring the second round he says, quietly, “Don’t you ever dare betray Michael, Trevor Philips.”

The warm buzz that Trevor has been feeling since Michael got so enthused with the imminent betrayal fades. He takes the offered drink and when he puts it to his lips, he’s watching Lester. The drink doesn’t go straight down; he swills the vodka around and through his teeth, savouring it.

“Noted,” he says, swallowing, and then he grins, all teeth and malice. “Noted, Lester the Molester.”

Lester blinks at him. “That doesn’t even make sense, I’m not --”

“Lester the Molester,” Trevor repeats, firmly, and Lester glowers at him.

“I’m glad you learned to rhyme.” He pours them a third shot. “I’m being serious, though. You saw how seriously Michael takes trust in this job, and you’re the only person I’ve ever seen him really depend on.”

“And you think I’m the sort not to take that seriously.”

“I think you’re a liability. I think you go off the rails too much. You pushed Tony out of a damn moving car, and he was supposed to be your ally. If you lose your temper with Michael on a job, what will you do? Shoot him in the face?”

Trevor nearly knocks the table right over as he jumps to his feet. He surges around it, his hands at the collar of Lester’s shirt, and he shakes, shakes as hard as he can, shakes as though he will knock those thoughts right out of the man’s head.

“You piece of shit! What are you trying to do here, huh, force something from me? You want me to say my hearts not really in this? You want me to get out of the fucking way so you and Michael can be the awesome duo again? Fuck you, you creepy little --”

Lester looks terrified. He struggles but can’t get out of Trevor’s iron grip. “You’re being ridiculous. I- I’m only trying to protect him, protect all of us. If he gets hurt, our cash flow gets hurt.”

“Our cashflow,” Trevor spits, and shakes him again. “I should’ve known you don’t give a shit about Michael, or me.”

He pushes Lester away from him. His heart is beating in his ears, pumping too fast, and he wants to punch something, anything. Instead, he goes into the bathroom and slams the door behind him.

If Michael were to come home and find Lester bruised and battered, he might start to think Trevor capable of betrayal, too. Trevor, who values nothing more than honesty, who has never trusted anyone the way he trusts Michael, who wants to snap the neck of anybody who might harm a hair on his head.

When his breathing has evened out, he comes back into the dining room to find Michael walking through the door with a six pack and Lester on the phone.

Lester has regained composure; he looks completely unperturbed, but he does give Trevor a nervous look when he notices he’s returned.

“Who’s he talking to?” Michael asks, and Trevor shrugs.

“Beats me. You feeling any better, cowboy?”

Michael snorts at the nickname. He looks a lot better, anyway and there’s less heat in his gaze. “I’m fine. I’m still pissed off, and I’m still going to murder Tony if he says anything, but I’m fine. Are you okay? You look a little, uh, red.”

“We started on the vodka when you were out,” Trevor says, shortly.

Michael raises an eyebrow and opens his mouth, but then Lester is hanging up. They turn to him and see death personified; Lester is pale, trembling, his knees clearly close to crumbling beneath him.

“He talked,” he says, and sinks into his chair. “He- he’s dead, but he talked first. They let him go and someone took him out, but- but he talked, he’s given them names, and now he’s dead.”

“Names?” Trevor asks. “Our names?”

“Some acquaintances of ours. Some people I’ve never heard of. And- and one more, one more name.”

“Who’s? What name?”

Lester looks up, swallows. “Michael Townley.”

*

“Fuck,” Michael gasps.

His bitten-down nails dig into the flesh of Trevor’s ass as he lifts him almost entirely off the bed. Trevor steadies himself with one hand at Michael’s shoulder and one on the messy sheets beneath him. Fuck is kind of an inadequate word; they haven’t quite fucked yet, if fucking really means dick in ass. For Michael to say it now is too cruel. Trevor’s hard, achingly so, and the friction of Michael grinding against him just doesn’t feel enough.

It’s good, though. It’s real good.

It’s usually Trevor who grabs so hard he leaves bruises, but tonight it’s Michael who controls their bodies. The heat of his anger seems to go straight to his cock and he’s grinding it down against Trevor’s hip, his stomach, his cock, his thigh, anywhere he can get good friction.

If Tony wasn’t lying dead on a slab somewhere, Trevor would have to call him up and thank him.

There is a strength to Michael that Trevor’s not really seen before now. He lifts his other hand from the bed and puts his arms around Michael’s neck. Michael holds him, holds the entirety of his weight, with nothing more than a groan.

Lester is in the next room and they both it. Trevor doesn’t care, of course; he’d tell anyone, any passerby or friend or family member, who he is and who he’s fucking. But Michael -- Michael hasn’t offered a single kiss since their first, fateful night together. He hasn’t ever talked about whatever it is they do the moment the lights are off. In the day, he’s Michael Townley, straight and transfixed by any pretty girl who walks by. At night, he’s Trevor’s. Trevor would shoot the sun down the moment it dares rise, if he could.

But the secrets are spilling tonight, anyway. Tony has given away Michael’s real name to the cops and though Lester had shakily assured him they’d keep the heat off his back, get him a really good fake identity if they had to, Michael is wounded. So if Lester hears them fucking -- which he has to hear, they’re hardly being quiet -- so what?

The thought kind of makes it all hotter for Trevor, anyway. Honesty always does.

Trevor groans. “I want to suck your --”

Michael drops him onto the mattress before he can finish. He looms over Trevor with burgeoning muscles and a reddened collarbone and a look in his eye that reminds Trevor of looking into a mirror. He barely recognises the man above him at all.

Frowning, he licks at his lips. “Uh, you okay?”

There’s no reply. At least, Michael doesn’t say anything. Instead he moves down the bed and curls his hand around Trevor’s cock, and when it’s flushed and ready in his hand he ducks down. He takes him into his mouth.

He’s not slow or loving and gentle, but Trevor doesn’t mind, doesn’t mind at all. He’s downright dirty with his tongue, slurping and licking a wet path from base to tip, before swallowing him whole again. One of his hands is at Trevor’s hip, scratching lighting, holding him in place.

Trevor is under no illusions that Michael is magically great at giving head. He’s clearly got experience, and while he’s kind of annoyed Michael has never mentioned his preference for men before now, he gets it -- he’s not been quite honest about it, either. Besides, he’s not complaining; it’s been a long time since any man did this for him, and did it so damn well.

When Michael lifts his head for breath, he jerks Trevor instead, hand slick with spit. Michael watches him unravel on the sheet. He’s breathing heavily himself. “Good, yeah?”

“Y-yeah. Until you stopped.”

Michael barks out a laugh. He looks a little more like himself, now, more recognisable as a somewhat level-headed Michael Townley. Trevor starts to smile, even as his whole chest heaves and his stomach twists with each of Michael’s firm jerks.

They look at each other, just grinning, until Michael dedicates himself again. He’s got his own cock in hand, too, and as his movements become more sporadic, they’re both groaning. Michael leans over and presses their foreheads together, tongue wetting his own reddened lips, and if Trevor weren’t otherwise blissed out he might try to kiss him or at least --

He comes between them, with a strangled sound that he muffles, biting his lips so hard skin threatens to break.

“Shit,” he mumbles, when he’s done, and lies bonelessly back against the bed.

He’d return the favour, but Michael seems close, anyway, bucking his hips into his own hand, his cheeks flushed pink. Trevor is content just to watch him and the way his neck gets exposed when he raises his chin, the way his free hand grabs Trevor’s arm as though to ground himself, and the way -- when he finally comes, with a moan -- he moves to squeeze Trevor’s hand, instead.

Trevor moves obligingly to let Michael slump face-down next to him. They don’t bother cleaning up. They move closer together until sweat-licked skin meets sweat-licked skin, and Trevor slings an arm around him.

It’s not quite a kiss, but it makes Trevor shiver all the same when Michael presses a closed mouth against the back of his neck.

He mumbles something incoherent.

“Huh?”

Michael swallows. “Don’t leave me, T. Don’t you ever leave.”

*

Hours later, when Michael sleeps soundly and Trevor’s kept wide awake by his last words, the streetlight outside starts to give way. It sends the bedroom into some lazy kind of rave; it glows orange, and then doesn’t glow at all, and then they’re bathed in light again. Trevor lies there and watches Michael’s peaceful expression as it changes colour.

The urge to kiss him becomes too much and he gets out of bed. He has no drugs on him, none at all, but there’s beer and vodka in the other room and it’s calling his name.

He will never leave Michael. At least, never by choice. The cops might shoot him down, but he will never, ever intentionally leave his best friend’s side.

When he pads quietly into the dining room, he finds Lester sat at the table, wide awake. The bags under his eyes seem heavier than ever. In front of him is the vodka, half empty.

“Hey, T,” he says softly, sadly. “Come to finish me off?”

Trevor seriously considers it. There’s no horror or scorn in Lester’s gaze, no judgement over what he’s obviously just heard from the bedroom, and Trevor is still pretty spent. All he does is walk over to the table and take the bottle of vodka by the neck.

He pauses, meets Lester’s eyes. “Don’t you ever betray him either.”

“I won’t,” Lester says, and the look they share is a promise.

-------

It’s decided between the three of them that they should take a brief break from the game. Michael decides to go home and make sure his piece of shit family is safe now his real name is known to the cops down in Arkansas, and Trevor hardly wants to spend anymore alone time with Lester.

Michael suggests he goes to see his family, too, and Trevor reluctantly agrees.

The moment he’s off the plane and steps foot on Canadian soil he starts to feel sick. It’s not a place he’s ever thought about returning to; it’s a place so entrenched with the past and unwanted nostalgia that he’d rather burn it to the ground then let it get back into his bloodstream.

He gets a cab straight out to the trailer park. He can afford that sort of distance, now, and the cabbie is happy enough when he says he has to pay in American dollars, but he’ll pay extra for the trouble.

The past year and a half have been so far removed from what he’s known in Canada that at first he’s not sure how to feel as the expanse of it whizzes past. It’s Christmas in three days and he hasn’t bought any presents. He hopes his mom will be happy with his company instead.

He hopes, but he doubts.

As far as he knows, his mom should be out of jail now if she’s been well behaved, and Ryan is definitely still at home and still sponging every cent he possibly can from her. Trevor knows full well that the trailer won’t have changed like he once asked of his brother. Nothing will have changed, let alone Ryan’s fucking deadbeat attitude.

It’s the first time he’s been away from Michael for more than a day and it’s worse than any time he’s tried to kick meth right out of his life - he positively itches for his company. He shifts in the back of the car and glares out of the window when the driver gives him a strange look in the rearview mirror.

Since leaving the border of the country that wouldn’t even let him defend it, he’s moved around more than he ever did in his turbulent childhood. Cops need outrunning a hell of a lot more than deadbeat fathers, and he and Michael are a bit too talented in attracting their attention.

It’s good, though. It’s been a real good journey. When he looks in the mirror these days, he sees eyes much more manic and laughter lines that much more defined.

There are days when he’s smoked so much meth he feels like his jaw is about to rip right away from the rest of his skull. There are hours where he’s so fucking pissed that he wants to murder the jackass who just overtook him on the freeway. There are times when Michael makes him so damn frustrated and so mad with the way he puts on a facade, the way he idolises the assholes in the movies they sometimes catch on TV, that he wants to leave him for good. There are seconds when he thinks his heart might just explode in his chest when Michael smiles at him.

Things are good, all things considered

“Left here,” he tells the cab driver. In too short a time the sign for the trailer park is looming, and there’s a grey cloud ominous on the horizon. His mother and his sack of shit brother are here. He could kill that asshole right now, beg for his mother’s forgiveness, and be out of here before the taxi has even driven away.

He pays the man and gets out, and- and it’s ahead of him. Still run down, still a goddamn piece of shit, still his fucking home.

Trevor is itching again. He wishes Michael was here.

But Michael isn’t here, and Trevor has to grow up and start facing all this shit alone again. He’s not some weak, co-dependent asshole. He’s Trevor Philips, and if he can’t fight this queasy feeling in his stomach and enter what’s supposed to be a safe haven for him, what can he do?

Swallowing bile, he goes up the few steps to the door, and kicks it open.

There’s screaming at once, but it’s not deepened by too many cigarettes. It’s high-pitched and ridiculous, and when he stops and focuses on the scene in front of him, his eyes widen.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

The woman, clad in some old dressing gown as she irons a well-worn pair of pants, screams again, and brandishes the iron like a crucifix. “This is my home, asshole! What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I--” he thinks about it for a second, but no, this is the right trailer -- there’s still that tired old pink striped wallpaper in the kitchen, and the dent in the side of the cabinet he made when Ryan stole what little savings he had two years ago. “This place belongs to my mom. What, she out of town and you thought you’d try your hand at squatting?”

She shakes her head. There’s defiance in her gaze, and she’s kind of pretty even without any make-up and her red hair in curlers. She can’t be any more than thirty. Everything about her screams domesticity, left all day, bored in this place, while her husband is out working and fucking his way through every stripper in town. She is just like most of the other women on this park. She doesn’t seem like the type to squat or steal, and Trevor grits his teeth.

“Are you alright?” she asks, but doesn’t lower the iron. “You look awful.”

“You’ll look awful after I’m fucking done with you,” he says, but without any real heat. She winces nonetheless. “Where’s the people who own this place, owned it, whatever? The Philips?”

“We bought this place four months ago from a man called, uh, what was his name?” She’s clearly terrified, eyes darting all over the trailer and more than once to the phone. “Ray. Uh, Ray, no, something beginning with R, I think. Yeah, definitely.”

“Ryan?”

“Ryan! Yeah, that was it. A bit older than you. My husband bought it from him and we ain’t seen him or the old woman he had with him since.”

Trevor starts to pace. The floor is worn with his mother’s footsteps. “They leave anything behind? Any forwarding address?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothing for- no message for Trevor?”

She shakes her head again. “They never mentioned no Trevor.”

He stares at her without really seeing anything but red. His piece of shit brother and his darling mother have cleared off without a backward glance at him. They’ve left without any sort of care, any sort of concern. He could be dead in a ditch or trying to find them to tell them he loves them or be on death row, and they wouldn’t give a single shit about him. First his father, and now his mother.

It’s hard to breathe. He only realises he’s on the floor when the woman has her hand on his shoulder. “Hey, honey, were you family? I’m sure you can find them. Maybe they left a number with some friends?”

His chest is tight as he stays there, on his hands and knees in this shitty little trailer that isn’t even his anymore. When he lifts his head to fix the fussing woman with a glare, his eyes are filled with tears.

He hates it. He hates himself. He loves and misses his mother so much that when he stands and puts his fist through the window, he’s still crying. The woman starts screaming again and he leaves her to it, stumbling back out and down the stairs.

Venturing this close to the border had never been a good idea. Canada has been nothing but bad luck for him and he can feel it’s influence already; the blood runs thick and fast from his fingers, down his wrist, and his whole face is wet from crying.

The woman’s screams only die down when he’s close to the edge of the park. Only one person passes him, an ex-neighbour who he vaguely recognises, but he keeps his head down when he sees the state Trevor is in. His mother, his mother -- if he never went further into America, maybe she wouldn’t have disappeared. They’re a family of few friends, and they have none so special that any contact details would have been left. His mother has gone, gone god knows where, and if Trevor had only tried to stay and fit in, maybe- maybe --

He stumbles when he reaches the payphone. His hand is cut up bad, real bad, and he’s lightheaded with it.

Trevor forces himself to focus and fumbles in his pocket, pulling out wrinkled paper that’s soon wet with blood. The handwritten number of Michael’s parents’ house is only just legible, and Trevor it in with shaking fingers. He needs some sort of anchor. He needs to know where his mother is. He needs to stop crying.

“Hello?” comes a female voice, and he takes a big, gasping breath.

“Is Michael there?”

“Michael? Yes. Can I ask who’s speaking?”

The woman has Michael’s accent, though it’s softened with pretension and airs. Michael’s mother, Mrs. Townley, a woman who can be found with just a phone call. Trevor closes his eyes and tries to regain some semblance of balance, of stability.

“Trevor.”

“Oh, yes, he’s mentioned you,” she says, her voice getting suddenly colder. “You’re his friend, aren’t you? One moment, please.”

He wipes at his face in the silence, probably smearing blood all across his cheeks. It’s been two days and he’s already giving in and calling the number Michael gave him for emergencies. What’s his emergency, exactly? His mom has run away from him, clearly not wanting to be found? Michael is going to laugh down the line at him and tell him not to bother flying back down.

There’s an argument in the background, and then Michael’s on the phone. “Trevor? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Trevor takes a big breath and clenches his free fist. “Yeah. Yeah, I- I’m fine.”

“You sound goddamn wrecked. What’s happened?”

He looks down at his hand, at the deep cut across his middle knuckle. There isn’t much need for stitches, but it hurts like hell nonetheless. “Not much. I don’t really know why …” he pauses, for a moment, and laughs, the sound short and sharp. “I don’t really know why I’ve called you.”

“Well, I’m damn glad you did, T. I’m fuckin’ exhausted already. I remember now why I never come back here.” His mom starts yelling in the background again. “Shut the fuck up, alright? You always told me to be honest, mom.”

Trevor feels sick. “Don’t talk to her like that. She’s your goddamn mother.”

He misses his own mother so much. He can practically smell her cheap perfume and see the vibrant print of her cardigan and feel the sharp sting of her palm. The thought of those painful slaps has him crying again, all snotty and pathetic, and he clings onto the phone like it’s the only tangible thing he has left.

“Uh. What did you say?” Michael hesitates on the line and Trevor envisions him, all worried eyes and pursed lips. “Trevor, buddy, are you- are you crying?”

“I cut my hand,” Trevor says, stupidly.

“Did you find your family okay? Where are you?”

Trevor manages to laugh. “My family? No. No, I didn’t find them okay. I’m at a payphone.”

“Are you okay> Are you safe?”

“Yeah.” He sighs and sinks down to the floor, kneeling in the dust of the trailer park. His paid time is almost out and he’s out of change. “I’m safe. I’m fine.”

He wants to go back to his old trailer and burn it to the ground. He wants to hunt down his mother and hug her and never let her go. He wants to get higher than ever before, so high he never has to come down and face the fact that he’s lost the only woman he’s ever really cared about, the woman that clearly no longer cares for the son she once tried to shield from everything.

“Good,” Michael says, uncertainly. “If you’re not with your family, how about getting back to the airport?”

“Huh?”

Michael lowers his voice. “I can’t stand another goddamn second in this house. I need to get out. We should celebrate the holidays together in the style. Get some good stuff in and, fuck, I don’t know, try to forget everybody else’s bullshit. Just the two of us, yeah?”

“Us against the world,” Trevor laughs, weakly.

“Us against the world,” Michael confirms.

The blood starts to dry at Trevor’s cheeks and he wipes some of the flakes off. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

*

The journey from the border region down to the midwest is almost a disaster - his flight gets delayed three times, and he almost loses his temper with the kid sat next to him who won’t stop screaming about how they’re going to crash. But they land just on time and the kid is soon hurried away by his parents when they notice Trevor’s twitching eye.

When he’s back on solid ground, though, and pushing his way out into the parking lot, he starts to breathe a little easier. He’s still dressed in the same, bloodied clothes he left in but he at least cleaned up a little in the airplane bathroom. The cuts on his fingers are scabbed over and most of the blood has been washed away, but every time he flexes them a certain way they sting again.

That housewife is probably still screaming and trying to clear up the glass. Trevor tries not to think of his rage, or the reason for it.

He tries most of all not to think of his mother.

That’s easier to do when he scans around for Michael’s car, some old Datsun he’s taken to driving while laying low, and thinks of how Michael practically begged him to fly back. Never mind the expense of the plane ride, never mind the frustration of travelling, never mind the time he took to get all the way out to the border again. Never mind his mother, and never mind the abandonment he’s been forced to suffer again.

Never mind anything but Michael, who Trevor spots in the corner of the parking lot, leaning against the pale grey Datsun door and waving over at him. Trevor pauses, and just stands there watching him for a moment, composing himself. At least the blood has gone from his cheeks. At least he’s stopped crying.

Michael looks up at that moment and their eyes meet. That’s all he needs; Trevor just melts, his stomach just tugs in all directions. He is - madly - flooded with warmth. He can’t form any real thoughts except that he’s vaguely aware of stumbling forward, mouth dry.

He’s completely and utterly fucked.

“Mikey,” he says, when he gets to him. “Long time no see.”

Michael rolls his eyes. “It feels like it, man. My parents are the fucking worst. Remind me never to try and visit them again.”

Trevor resists the urge to tell him to appreciate them again. It's not like he has any room to talk after driving his mother from his life. "That bad, huh? Now I get why I wasn't invited for Christmas dinner."

"No, you weren't invited to Christmas dinner because you'd probably try to stash a body under the table," Michael laughs as they get into the car, and after a pause says, "I've told my parents a little bit about you."

"Yeah? What do they think about this life of yours?"

"I didn't tell them what it is we do, exactly," Michael shrugs, and Trevor's not sure if he's talking about the robbing or the fucking. "I told them I was travelling with you."

“Yeah, and? They take kindly to it?”

Michael snorts. He concentrates on getting them out of the airport parking lot and then glances at Trevor sidelong when they hit the highway. “Honestly, I don’t think they gave two shits. I mean, don’t take that personally, they never gave two shits when I was running around the football field as quarterback. They ain’t ever gonna give two shits about anything I do.”

He doesn’t sound particularly pissed off about it, or even that sad. He’s so matter of fact about his parents truly not caring what - or who - he does, that Trevor has to stop himself getting mad all over again. Michael deserves more. Trevor deserves his mother’s cold shoulder, but Michael deserves his mother’s love.

“Fuckers,” is all he says, and Michael barks out a laugh.

“You got that right.” He changes lanes and gives Trevor a fleeting, nervous look. “Enough about them. What about your family? That phone call --”

“Zzzzzzzzip,” Trevor interrupts, loudly, and mimes zipping up his lips just in case Michael doesn’t get the idea. He gets a scolding look for being such a smartass, but Michael obeys, anyway. It’s the last thing Trevor wants to talk about, now firmly back in the Midwest and away from that goddamn trailer park.

When they stop at a set of lights, Michael lights a cigarette. Trevor opens a window, but it’s mostly for show. He’s missed the smell over the past couple of days, although he’s loathe to admit it, and now it’s nothing short of intoxicating. He knows just how Michael’s mouth will taste because of it. He knows that he is lost.

Michael breathes out great plumes of smoke. Trevor breathes in deep. His eyes close.

He lifts a hand, meaning to put it on his knee or his shoulder or his cheek, just to be able to touch him, but he fumbles on thin air. When he opens his eyes, Michael is watching at him, motionless but for the slither of pink tongue that wets his lips. Trevor’s throat feels suddenly too tight.

The lights change and the moment is gone. Michael focuses on the road, changes gears, and laughs far too loudly.

“I gotta say, T, being a wanted man is fucking boring. I keep thinking about what I’m gonna do until it all dies down and, Jesus, the only thing that’s appealing is getting back in the game.”

“If it were up to me, I’d say do it,” Trevor shrugs. It’s been only a couple of weeks since their last job, but he’s missed the thrill of the chase, too, and the sounds of the sirens. “Who cares if they’ve got your name? That’s why you call yourself Rogers or De Santa or Smith or what the fuck ever. You can’t let one asshole ruin your whole career, even if he is dead.”

Michael hums, and then heaves a great sigh, shoulders sagging. “Maybe,” he agrees, slowly, “I mean, not maybe, yeah. Yeah, I agree. But it’s not just me, is it? I risk giving out my name and I risk Lester, Moses, all the other guys. I risk you.”

Trevor snorts. His knuckles are white against the dashboard. “Then risk me.”

Michael flashes him a light bulb grin, a thousand watts bright. “Sure, and have Lester come after me?”

“He’s gotta have some sort of contingency plan.” Michael doesn’t look all that convinced, so Trevor gives in and touches Michael, at last - just his jawline, briefly, with a knuckle. “Cheer up. He’ll work something out. That’s what we give him a cut for, right?”

“Right,” Michael says. If his voice is lower than usual, Trevor tries his best to ignore it.

The next set of lights is red, too, and Michael swears under his breath, turning fully in his seat to look at Trevor. “Hey, look. Shit man, I’m --” He runs a hand through his hair and goes kind of red. “Do you wanna, uh, go back to the motel and - I mean, I can’t -- fuck, Trevor, I’ve been thinkin’ about fucking you since I saw you in the parking lot, so, do you - yeah?”

Trevor tries to act suave, but he says, a beat too quickly, eagerly, “Yeah. Yeah, I-I do.”

At least Michael has already booked into this motel, with one double bed just big enough for the two of them. It means that Trevor is saved from booking it at the front desk managed by some strange little man with clammy hands that leave wet marks on the pen he’s scratching away with when they burst through the front doors.

It means easiness, it means convenience; it means they can go right up to their room and Trevor can be kissing Michael in a second.

He tastes just how he remembers, tobacco-tinged and goddamn terrific. It’s all tongue and teeth and it becomes a battle of strength; Michael has him pinned to the door, fingers wrapped around his upper arms, but Trevor pushes back and controls their mouths.

It’s a fight and a struggle, but instead of trying to burn his opponent, Trevor’s trying to get as close to him as possible. Michael has him matched at every turn. When he drags Michael’s lower lip roughly between his teeth, Michael’s bitten-down nails dig right into the flesh of his arms. There will be marks there in the morning. Trevor can’t wait to show them off.

He bites into Michael’s lip and a breathy moan hits him square in the face. He groans in response. He’s been hard since Michael turned to him in the car.

Michael pulls back - lip snagging between Trevor’s teeth - and stares at him with flushed cheeks and wide, wide eyes. “I missed you,” he says, and drops his head a moment to rest their foreheads together. Trevor gets a wrenching feeling in his gut that threatens to consume him and he closes his eyes tightly.

“You too,” he says. “I always do.”

The confession gets a shaky laugh from Michael, who dips to kiss him, just once, gently, on the corner of his mouth. The wrenching feeling gets worse.

The moment is gone as soon as it came, with Michael dropping to his knees and fumbling with Trevor’s belt buckle. He doesn’t plant kisses all over his hipbones like some of the more eager strippers do. He doesn’t feather his lips across his thighs, doesn’t spread his fingers down his back and urge him gently forward. There is no tenderness in his movements anymore; he takes him in his hand and he starts to jerk him off.

“Fuck,” Trevor says, glaring down as Michael grins widely back up at him. “You wanna give me some warning next time?”

“Next time?” Michael asks, eyes glinting. “Who says there’s gonna be a next time?”

“There had better fucking be.”

Michael’s laughs. His hands are kind of dry and Trevor tells him, so he unceremoniously spits on his palm. When Trevor thrusts his hips forward, he slides right into Michael’s wet fist.

When they first started fucking around like this, Michael hadn’t got a great technique down. He was enthusiastic and gave it his all, and jerked him until his wrist surely burned, but Trevor never really felt him all the way through his body, through his gut and rushing through his head and down to his toes.

Michael has improved a lot since then. He’s had a lot of practise.

The door groans behind Trevor as he leans heavily against it. He keeps his eyes open and fixed on Michael, just grinning, watching the hand that smoothes all the way up him only to squeeze all the way back down, watching the other hand slip to his balls, knuckles kneading and teasing.

“What happened to your hand?” Michael asks, absently, as his hands keep moving.

“Huh?”

“Your hand. It’s fucked up.”

Trevor flexes his fingers and instantly regrets it. They’re still all cut up from the window of the trailer, and there’s a few flakes of scaly, dried blood dotted over his wrist. He’s should probably get it all cleaned up in case it gets infected.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it fucking matters.” Michael tilts his head consideringly and pauses his movements for only a moment before starting all the more aggressively. Trevor’s hand turns into a fist and he lets his head drop back, pushing his hips forward. “Who did you hit?”

“I didn’t hit anyone. What do you fucking take me for?”

Michael gives him a look. Trevor doesn’t see it, but he feels the burn of it, and it turns his belly into white hot rage. “What I take you for,” Michael says, and he must have moved closer because there’s hot breath against his cock now, “is a guy who needs to relax. You know you can trust me. I just want to know what happened. Did you get to see your family?”

Trevor lifts his head and looks down at him. “Don’t fucking start about my family. I told you I didn’t want to talk about it. I told you.”

“I know,” Michael says, insolently, and before Trevor can push him off and maybe punch him, he’s taken into the heat of Michael’s mouth, sliding past his teeth and against his wet, eager tongue. He hisses in a breath and tangles his stinging fingers in Michael’s hair, yanking him closer.

“You’re a real fucker, you know that?” Trevor mutters, and Michael looks up at him with guileless eyes. The white heat of fury leaves him with one glance into them and he slumps against the door, closing his eyes. “I didn’t find them. They’ve gone somewhere, fuck knows where. I punched out a window. That’s all.”

There’s no response, but for Michael drawing his head back, dragging reddened lips across the length of his cock. He swallows him right back down again, noiseley, obscenely. Trevor is lost in him.

When Trevor is sweating and tugging so hard on Michael’s hair it surely hurts, he pulls back, licking his lips and standing up. He’s kissing Trevor in a second, strong arms moving around his back, his cock straining against his jeans, against Trevor’s. “Fuck them,” he says, and Trevor should feel so indignant on behalf of his beloved mother, but now his mind and his loyalty have clouded over. He is lost to this arrogant American. He is lost.

“Fuck you.” He smiles and leads Michael over to the bed.

*

“So - supposing you do get back in the game, what should our next move be?”

“Supposing? It ain’t a matter of supposing. Of course I’m going to get back into the game.”

Trevor throws his beer bottle off the top of the car. In the next field over, a few of the cattle shift nervously at the smashing glass. He leers at them and doesn’t feel at all childish.

“Glad to hear it. Who else would I partner up with? You imagine me and Lester holding up stores together, huh?”

“I dunno, man, that man’s full of surprises,” Michael laughs, and then sobers, looking down at his knees. “I thought about it, when that motherfucker named me. I was thinking maybe- maybe if you wanted to carry on, you could’ve teamed up with Moses. He’s the best of the lot of them, and you’ve not tried to murder him. Yet.”

“Yet,” Trevor confirms, happily. He actually quite likes the stoic, ruthless Moses, but he’d be a piss poor replacement for the man sprawled out next to him. “I’d find someone, that part is easy.”

Michael looks hurt. “Hey, thanks a --”

“Fuck off,” Trevor says. He twists off the cap of his next bottle with his teeth. Michael grimaces. “I’m not saying what you think I’m saying. There’s no need to throw a hissy fit.”

Michael elbows him and nearly knocks him clean off the hood of the Datsun. Trevor grabs Michael’s thigh for support and leaves his fingers there longer than strictly necessary. He’s nudged off, but Michael’s eyes are soft.

It’s New Years Eve and the thought of entering 1991 with no commitments and an ever growing, ever hidden-by-Lester bank account is a fantastic prospect. With Michael bored out of his mind hiding away in the Midwest while stores and banks go totally untouched or get robbed by half-rate criminals, he’s raring to go in the new year. Trevor and Michael will get back out there, back to the top of their game, and if Michael has to live under a pseudonym for the rest of his life, so be it. It’s just a name.

Instead of hitting the local bars full of drunken, happy people, they’ve come out into the outskirts of the city, well into the farmlands, and parked up. They can’t see any fireworks from out here, but the stars they see when they lie back on the roof of the car are real pretty and it’s enough.

“Where to first, then? After this?”

“First, I think we should get out of our fucking heads in the nearest strip club. Get a bit of blow and some shots, maybe,” Michael grins. Trevor rolls his eyes but he’s secretly pleased; laying low means a lot of nights drinking together and fumbling, which is great, sure, but he’s missed the vibrancy of what the world has to offer. He’s missed the feeling of bone cracking beneath his fist, too.

“Well, yeah,” he says. “I mean after that.”

“I dunno, man. Anywhere. I’m sick of this place. My parents live in this city, I hate it.”

Michael has been itching to leave ever since Trevor’s plane landed. It’s nothing new. He’s always wanted to move away almost as soon as they get to a place. Trevor’s never been sure if it’s to avoid getting caught by the cops or if he just hates constancy, but he doesn’t mind. He’s used to it. His parents moved enough times when he was a kid and he’s never really been bothered about having a place to call home.

“We could go see Lester again. It’d be good to get straight back into the game.”

“Yeah,” Michael sighs, happily. “Yeah, it fucking would. Man, I can’t wait. It’s gonna be fuckin’ perfect. We should do something big, too, not some corner shop with one security guard. We should do something that we remember for the rest of our lives.”

Michael’s enthusiasm is infectious, and Trevor’s laughing as he shakes his head. “You’ve had too many beers, Townley. What exactly are you suggesting here?”

“Just something huge. Like- fuck, not a few thousands in cash, something important. Gold, maybe. I dunno.”

“Gold? You fancy lifting that on our backs as we run? Come on.”

“Since when have you been sensible?” Michael asks, and Trevor aims a kick at him. “I’m not saying we have to do it tomorrow or with just the two of us. It’s just something to think about in the long term, maybe.”

Trevor thinks about it, just a little. It’s dumb and impossible but he meets Michael’s eyes and grins, wide and bright, imagining gold glinting off them. “Yeah. It’s something to think about, alright. It’s something to fucking think about. The big one.”

“The big one,” Michael repeats, and it sounds golden on his tongue. Once, Trevor might call Michael an optimistic asshole and walk away from him, but now he’s consumed with his energy, now he thinks that they might be able to pull off anything. There’s no fear in either of them.

Fingers wrap around Trevor’s wrist. Michael shifts closer and presses into him, hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder. Trevor glances at his watch; it’s five minutes until midnight, and he’s already wishing this year would end so that they can begin again.

He settles back on the car, crossing his arms over his chest and staring up at the night’s sky. After a moment, Michael joins him and let’s out a long, satisfied sigh. The car radio blasts out some god awful, cheesy shit that Michael insisted they listened to and it’s interspersed with low groans from the cattle, and the air smells kind of like shit, and Michael is wanted in two states, but that doesn’t matter.

Trevor grabs Michael’s hand, roughly.

It doesn’t matter at all.

He thinks, for a moment, of what his mom might be doing at this moment. She’s probably drunk or high, maybe sitting in a trailer with Ryan, maybe sitting all alone, maybe sitting with some strange man who is paying her for her company. Wherever she is, she is not with Trevor, and that’s her choice. Michael squeezes his hand tightly and brings him to this shitty old field.

“You okay?” Michael asks, carefully.

“I’m fine.”

Michael watches him, consideringly, and then sighs again. He presses a rough kiss to Trevor’s jaw and settles right back down. Trevor rolls his eyes and tries not to smile.

They lie there together for a couple of minutes longer, before Trevor thinks to look down at his watch and he jumps. “Shit. It’s three minutes past midnight. We fucking missed it.”

Michael sits up, grimacing, and Trevor kisses him full on the mouth.

“Happy New Year?” Michael asks, when he pulls back.

“Happy New Year, cocksucker,” Trevor agrees, and kisses him again.