Chapter Text
"How do you feel about a sleepover, boys?" Eret asked, adoption status: n/a playing on their mind. "Perhaps, a movie marathon?"
Phil's mouth opened and closed, slowly turning to stare at them as they reclaimed their spot on his couch beside him. Technoblade hummed wordlessly with a hint of agreement but was otherwise immobile from his attentive viewing slouch as the Lego movie came to its final few minutes. Dream shot them a knowing look as Sapnap cheered. Tommy grinned and looked to Phil, who was still staring at them. Tubbo shrunk down.
Are you sure? Asked the boy's gaze.
"I can make any calls necessary, if you'd like, Tubbo. I'm sure they won't mind so long as I get you back in one piece." Eret smiled, kicking their feet up to rest on the cusp of the coffee table. Their rainbow socks wiggled. "Of course, one of the drivers will take you both to school in the morning. What time's your first classes at?"
"Mine's at ten!" Tommy grinned, almost vibrating in place.
Tubbo squeaked, "So's mine."
"Good," they decided, pulling up their wrist to take a look at the time. 6.36 PM. They'd need dinner, so takeout was an option if someone didn't like this week's Swedish theme in the cafeteria. "Any colour preferences for pjs?"
"Red," Tommy was quick to pipe up.
"Pjs?" Tubbo inquired.
"You can't stay in your normal clothes," Eret hummed, careful to keep an eye on the boy's expression as they typed out a text to Kara. She should still be in- actually, she was probably tired from cleaning up Eret's mess in the basement.
They copied the text they'd currently typed and quickly deleted it. Niki had good taste - a big reason why they'd assigned her as their secretary - so they pasted what they'd written into a text for her and paused for Tubbo's preference.
"Oh," he said. "Uhm, yellow please?"
"No problem, sweetheart."
Tubbo bit his lip, eyes flicking between them and the flashing credits of the movie on the eighty-two inch tv. Eret finished up the text to Niki and sent it after spamming a few hearts.
Phil was still staring at them. He cleared his throat.
Eret turned to him, smiling. They stretched their lips out, tilting their head to the side and Phil sighed and nodded along.
"Any preferences for food? I'll order up a takeaway," they offered, seeing Technoblade tune into the conversation as the movie finished, advertisements playing. "There's a good chinese a few blocks away."
Tommy grinned, "I'm up for chinese!"
"Sure," agreed Sapnap. The pyro lunged for the tv buttons but was foiled by Technoblade snatching them up before he could grab them. "I think we should watch Netflix!"
"Not unless the kids want to, too," Techno smirked.
"I prefer DisneyPlus," Eret added, deciding they were in the mood for a bit of chaos tonight. "I think a Star Wars marathon would be fun."
"I've never watched Star Wars," Tubbo murmured, awkwardly picking at his sleeve.
"Then it's decided," they beamed, looking encouragingly over to Technoblade. "Star Wars it is."
"Alright."
As they settled back into the lull of conversation happening around them, they fired off a text to Punz to grab takeout on the return from his detour. Dream's stare was ignored, the prevailing you're going soft hidden behind that smiling mask.
I know, they thought and sent the orders for the english teacher's misfortune anyway.
Bonus job! Came the boss's text at 6.43 PM, a sudden vibration in his pocket to the chorus of the sun setting outside thanks to the curdle of winter's wrath. Deal with discrepancy. Get usual chinese takeout after xx
Sometimes Luke (though he preferred the nickname Punz over his boring birthname) looked at the boss's texts and wondered if they really were a multi-billionaire grossing millions of dollars, pounds, yen (they dabbled in all forms of money) a day.
Why? Simple: the mafia was groomed, proper and precise; Eret was not.
Eret was chaotic, charming and ran five minutes (minimum) late to everything. To look at them and call them a mafia boss was not something many would believe true. Punz himself had glanced at the person who'd taken over the small street gang he'd started out in and had wondered what sort of Don looked like that.
Because they were pretty. They had style. They didn't wear suits all the time, like those fat men in the tv shows, and they didn't wear long dresses that split up the middle with excessive lipstick and bright blusher. They weren't arrogant and snotty or a spoiled brat who was used to getting their way.
In fact, if there was a word for Eret it had to be laidback. Never before, unless there was a very important meeting with someone to impress, had Eret been seen in anything other than comfy shoes, a frilly skirt or a sweater of some sort. Sometimes they wore jeans, but only when it was raining like a hurricane was battering down on the country and they had to go outside.
At a time, this had all been fed to them from the grape vine that stemmed from Brighton HQ. And then, that had changed.
Like most within the London sub-set of Arkhos, Punz had been surprised when it was announced the HQ was being moved from Brighton. Sure, from a business perspective, it wasn't at all shocking, London was the capital and all, but from a 'the boss likes Brighton' inside view, it was odd.
Anyways, the move had allowed the lot of them to see the boss on a more regular scale (and his first impression of them being pretty hadn't faltered, especially not when they'd came round and greeted all the small timers who had been sucked into Arkhos thanks to the power vacuum they'd created in moving bases). The transfer up to London meant a lot of the higher ups had to move to be closer (because the boss liked to keep friends close) and it also meant Punz actually got to see Eret on a somewhat regular occurrence.
The grape vine had proven true. Eret really never wore anything other than comfort clothing unless something big was happening. Even then, it wasn't to be bet on that they'd show up dressed to the nines. They were stylish and they knew it. And half the time, they didn't really care.
Anyways, back to the text. The boss texted like a teenage girl. Punz hadn't noticed until he had and now he had a good smirk at every emoji they sent accompanying death orders. It was funny, Punz decided. Because if it wasn't funny it was just weird.
He hadn't worked with Ponk much, but George had sent him a linked file with the information and that stated the job was a two man gig. Usually, Punz wasn't on the roster for racketeering but this wasn't that - this was a fear ploy.
Punz was good at scaring people. Apparently, Ponk was too.
From what he knew, Ponk was a half decent guy. Plus, smashing doors down with him was definitely going to be far better fun than listening to the receptionist lady - Evanette was her name? - warble on about how someone, a certain Wilbur Soot, was ignoring her and now 'fatally' ill.
Ponk was a part time nurse. Or, he had been; before his clinic had shut down and he'd been lugged into the field of gangs and fighting. He would've probably been one of the higher medics, if he would've kept with it and not delved into the art of swinging bats into people's faces.
The guy was a little too muscular for a medic anyway, Punz reckoned.
"Hello, Punz," the other greeted warmly, voice kind and soft. The guy was one of those paradoxes where he looked ready to murder you with a pinch of his fingers but was actually really fucking nice and had the personality of a puppy. "I got the email. Do you have everything you need?"
"Yup," he answered, crowbar securely hooked onto his belt under his jacket. He had a gun under his jacket, in an under-arm holster, just in case something went real wrong. "We ready to go?"
Ponk nodded along, pulling leather gloves onto his hands as they walked north of reception, into the long hall, and stepped into the cavernous pit that was the pseudo-maintenance cupboard.
To call it a cupboard was deceitful. Especially since a cupboard was probably defined as some sort of box-like room and this room was pretty fucking big and spanned at least three floors. It had old metal stairs that led down to a secluded section of the underground tunnels that this place was rigged up on.
The two men took their time trumping down the steps, confident they'd be into the old subway by half an hours time. The exits would bring them out onto an old side street that was more of an alley nowadays. From there, they'd take a walk down to the quiet prissy neighbourhood this lady Jennifer Jeins lived in.
Punz didn't like associating names with faces. Made them too real. The file had said her full name though, which although common, was marked in bold.
That meant the boss really didn't like her and they had to check they were gutting the right person before, well - before they gutted her.
Whatever this snobby english professor had done to piss off the boss was enough that him and Ponk had been sent off to make her piss herself before she kissed the floor. It was also a little earlier than usual, seeing as most fear wraps came along upwards of 10 PM. It was nearly seven and that alone said she was to be dealt with real quick.
It was winter, so it got darker earlier, which helped with this job. Deep in the middle of summer they'd never be able to waltz into an uppity neighborhood and shank somebody.
(That was a lie; Eret had enough pull that anything could be covered up. But still, that didn't mean they made a habit of shoving their weight around in ways that didn't suit them.)
(Anyways, the rich were easily kept quiet. Too afraid of having their fortune tugged out from under them. It went vice versa for the poor - they were kept quiet with a little bonus tip. In his old gang they hadn't had much money and so killings had been the way to keep people quiet, but with Eret came a fortune untold and cheques slipped into hands behind closed doors.)
Punz liked walking down here. The tunnels were long and echoed with every water droplet that dripped and every voice that whistled. There were rumors the boss had bought the entire network solely for the fact the tunnels spanned nearly the whole of London, and that was probably true.
The place was a literal maze, old railway lines sunken under a good metre of water wherever you went. There were the heightened walkways along the tracks; currently unflooded, those were what people walked on. If a storm hit London the place was fucked, the tunnels would be drowned and the iron wrought gate separating the large system from the basement would have to remain closed until men got down there and drained the tunnels.
But the pros of having access to the old subway far outweighed the cons. In Punz' opinion, the fact he could travel to work by jumping down into a formerly sealed underground entrance and walk a kilometre to work was pretty cool. He only made it look like he'd scored some boring office job by popping on something neat and making it look like he was headed to the station (his poor ma worried too much for her own good). The tunnels saved him from those stupidly high bus fees. Most people used the tunnels as it provided them an extra layer of security, keeping their ties with the mafia secret. There were quarterly guards specially placed down in the tunnels to guard them, which helped keep everything the way it should be.
Sure, Arkhos was one of the biggest mafias in London's history but there were other gangs, a little more angry, a lot more stupid, who weren't afraid to swing a bat at their people's heads. There'd been people before, a few innocent secretaries, a few boys fresh out of school, a few wrong place-wrong timers who'd been walking around the wrong street a little too late at night and had been killed a little too soon.
Those had stopped real quick though, after the boss had found out. Eret had called some big meeting and according to Puffy (who'd been on the crew they took with) they'd scared the shit out of the Unus Annus faction. There was a fragile alliance between them now and their people had stopped dropping like flies.
"It's Halloween in a few weeks," Ponk started halfway into their walk, when he'd evidently gotten bored of listening to water drip. "Do you have any plans?"
Punz looked up from the dark never-ending tunnel and glanced to his muscled buddy. "To what? Dress up? Nah, not really my thing."
"Not even for the office party?"
The fucking office party was essentially a clubbing night out. Sometimes the boss went along with it and went with, which apparently resulted in entire nightclubs being rented out, and sometimes they left their employees be. From what Punz had heard, they were good times. The only rule was that you had to dress up.
"Depends," he decided, tapping a tune against his crowbar with his nails. "Might go if I find my fridge low on beer."
Ponk chuckled and nodded along, happy to carry conversations. "There's a few whispers the boss will attend this one. That'll be their first Halloween party in London. I wonder which club they'll rent out if they do come."
He babbled on: "It would have to be big enough to let in everyone who wants in, maybe one of those newer builds. I heard they're good, that one on fiftieth sells good cocktails. Well, that's what Alyssa says so I'm not too sure."
It took less than twenty minutes for them to come to the crossroads where the grate up to the surface was. B-192, this one was called, numbers printed onto the greasy wall in large block paint. By every grate was a lamp - a fancy name for a cracked glowstick slipped into a cylinder-like holster screwed into the wall - and the dull blue light lit up the slippy metal ladder just enough for people to avoid broken legs when climbing its bars.
Punz checked the time before nodding to Ponk. They stood around the ladder for a moment, listening to make sure there was no one in the alley they were about to emerge in.
Water dripped. Sirens wailed in the distance. A spider crawled over the glowstick, a small bodied thing with long legs that cast the light into flickering patches as it quickly scurried over the glowing stick. The glowsticks were mass produced in one of their factories in Sweden, a bulk lot often shipped over to them solely for the tunnels. They kept glowing for a good week and a half, the chemicals inside saturated in a way the normal customer-bought ones weren't.
Ponk shifted to his right, pulling on his white and orange stripped balaclava. Instead of the usual black base colour, Ponk's was a deep red. The fabric was softer too, less wool and polyester, more cotton stitched with some flame resistant fibre. There was a mask around his mouth and nose, under the fabric, so that the outlines didn't jut through, and the eye cut outs were neat and perfectly aligned for a sleek, silver-glinting snowmask to cover them.
He was a sight, balaclava and snowmask, a thick wooden baseball bat decorated in masking tape of different colours held in his large hand. His leather gloves were black and well worn, squeaking as he squeezed the bat, readjusting his grip on the taped handle. Ponk had a habit of wearing grey jeans and a thick leather jacket, worker's boots sturdy on his feet. If he dressed up in a suit he had the bulk to look like one of the door guards.
Smiling at him, Punz pulled his trusty fingerless woolen gloves onto his hands and rucked his fingers along the bredth of his crowbar. He'd painted it green a good few years ago and had only needed a few top ups.
As a boy he'd been a fan of archery and that had turned into an appreciation for the comic book archer Green Arrow. Thus, he wore the gloves and a deep black hoodie. His blond-tipped hair was hidden under the thick leather-sewn hood, the main body of his hoodie a patchwork of leather on the front, back and elbows. Most people thought it was an attempt at fashion but Punz kept it because the leather had saved him a few nasty cuts in those exact places before.
Hood up, he pulled the fabric facemask over his mouth and nose. Everyone who went out on the streets with orders to kill had to wear masks, least one of the few unpaid cops see their faces. The boss had nearly the whole police force in their pocket except for the Commissioner, Dan Diamond (known as Dan TDM - The Damn Mongrel - around the city, thanks to his addition of over three-hundred police dogs to the force). The fact Diamond wasn't in their pocket meant that if his sub-set of loyal men were patrolling, who were numbered in the single digits, anyone who was caught maskless was fucked.
The damn Commish was in charge of the meanest, grizzliest fuckers Punz had ever seen. Where Diamond was a gem to the media, he was a hellhound to the underground. Any goons caught by him usually ended up with their back shattered in hospital, if they even made it that far. And as far as the press knew, he'd made yet another successful arrest. It was messed up.
Ponk and Punz stopped at the grate within a block's distance of the prissy neighbourhood. There was a back-alley and a little used road between them and the target's house.
"Need a hand?" Ponk called down, already having shifted the grate and climbed up and out. Punz grunted an affirmative and was lifted the final two bars out.
This guy's strength amazed him. He clapped Ponk on the shoulder as he got steadied on the ground.
"Thanks," Punz breathed, rolling his shoulders out. "Ready?"
"Yep," chirped Ponk, already peering out the alleyway. He checked his phone, double tapping the police scanner George had made for them. "No pigs in a decent radius."
"Good," Punz agreed and together they stepped out onto the road.
The neighbourhood was one of those posh, uptight ones. It was one Punz had never stepped foot in to do anything other than beat somebody up. And usually that was all they did around these parts, because mafia or not, rich people could pull weight too.
Jennifer Jeins was certainly not rich, though. And so, killing her wouldn't bring down anyone on them. The IT department made sure of any background ties that could be present wouldn't affect Arkhos if someone was murdered. An old gang had been taken down like that, when some hag they'd gutted in the middle of the night turned out to be related to some celebrity in Hollywood's pocket and the guy hammered his law team down on them.
The houses arched in some twirl, lining up in a perfect half-circle that was allowed out here in the suburbs where there were no city grids to follow. Each terrace was kitted out with its own fenced garden and long drive. Halloween decorations were up for a few houses, the lights on in most rooms. A middle class family-attracting housing estate, then. Though the people still had enough money to be snobbish.
"Thirty-seven," Ponk reminded, voice low and hushed as both men strode down the middle of the empty street.
Thirty-seven was just as brightly painted as the rest, windowsill pots freshly planted with soft little berry plants. Every house was nearly identical architecture-wise and this one was no different, the front porch wooden and each and every pane of glass clean within their panes. The curtains were open, the lights on in the living room.
"I'll get the door," Punz hopped the little prissy fence gate that barely came up to his hip and strode up the paved drive. Ponk followed after him, bat bouncing against his other hand's palm.
It took three doorbell rings before a wrinkled woman in her mid-forties opened the door. She looked snide and peevish but her pronounced frown fell away for a look of terror as she glimpsed the two men on her doorstep.
"Arkhos would like to pay you a visit, ma'am."