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Ajay’s first thought about Pagan Min was that he looked a lot older in person than he did in press photos. He was dressed just as gaudy and his hair was neatly combed, but this close, Ajay could see the lines of age and stress starting to break through the man’s skincare routine.
Ajay didn’t know why he was focusing on that, when he was tied to a chair, bleeding from three places, and about to be tortured for the entertainment of a bunch of rich sadists. But he’d spent what felt like his entire adolescent years looking at Pagan through the lens of Google Images and PR snapshots. It was quite the shock, finding themselves in the same room.
They could have met under better circumstances, of course. But not a whole lot of Ajay’s plans had gone the way they were supposed to. From the moment he crossed the Kyrati border in secret, his mom’s instructions and training fresh in his mind, he knew he’d have to be careful and calculated about how to approach Pagan. Careful and calculated had gone out the window when people started shooting at him before he’d even done anything, the rude bastards.
He’d bailed at the sound of an arriving helicopter, and fell in with the Golden Path. Well, ‘fell in’ as in ‘got captured and interrogated,’ because in no universe was a strange boy with an American accent running around the woods not suspicious. The man who called himself Sabal saved his ass. Ajay wasn’t comfortable with being called “Son of Mohan” - not with what he knew about his father - but he’d take it over “dirty foreign spy.”
Working with the Golden Path allowed him to slow down and rethink his approach. After years of secrecy and “I’ll tell you when you’re older”s, Ajay’s mother had broken down and told her son everything. She’d said, so many times, that Ajay didn’t have to go back if he didn’t want to. He could live his life in America, forgetting the mess his mother had left behind halfway across the world. Ajay had never been good at letting things go.
And now here he was, trussed up as a treat in one of Paul de Pleur’s merry parties. Ajay knew he should’ve killed that guy weeks ago.
Pagan blinked a few times before coming back to himself. He straightened his jacket and leaned over to Paul. He didn’t take his eyes off Ajay. “Where, pray tell, did you find that one?”
Paul shrugged. “Sleeping on the side of a road like a vagrant.”
Ajay wanted to protest that he hadn’t been sleeping, he’d been incapacitated by snake venom. But the gag in his mouth made that a little tricky.
“Fascinating,” Pagan said. “Let him go.”
Paul looked perturbed. “Oh. You want him for yourself? Not that I mind, but I have nicer-”
Pagan fisted his hand into Paul’s shirt. “Paul, you know how much I hate having to repeat myself. Let him go.”
In his entire life, Ajay had never seen anyone do anything as fast as the soldiers who untied his hands then.
Pagan stood and approached Ajay, watching with a mix of amusement and curiosity as Ajay spat the gag out of his mouth in Paul’s direction.
“You, my boy, have some explaining to do.”
As a teenager, Ajay had always wondered how his mother could have fallen for a man like Pagan Min. She didn’t sugarcoat things. “Don’t believe what the press says,” she’d say, staring with narrowed eyes at the newspaper. “That man’s a tyrant.” But even as the words left her mouth, there was a spark of something warm in her eyes.
Now? Now, Ajay knew.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Ajay was supposed to be the one to come to Pagan’s door when the time was right. To demand peace, to right the wrongs of his family’s past. He hadn’t counted on Pagan being, well, Pagan.
Pagan took him out for drinks and let him shoot guns and dive out of helicopters and do whatever the fuck he wanted. Maybe this was Pagan’s way of making up for not being there during Ajay’s childhood. Like Ajay cared about that. He could just imagine taking Pagan to career day. “Hi everyone, this is my stepdad, he’s killed hundreds of people and established a drug empire.” The teachers would’ve loved it.
Ajay didn’t need a father figure. He needed...well, he wasn’t sure what he needed, but somewhere between nights of elephant riding and heavy drinking he ended up with his head on Pagan’s chest, cuddling in a decidedly non-familial way. He decided then and there that this was what he needed.
Of course Pagan had to go and make it weird. He smirked and ran his knuckles through Ajay’s hair. “I hope Mohan’s rolling in his damned grave right now.”