Work Text:
Lester Crest has a series of carefully stacked spiral bound notebooks kept on a high shelf in a box that is labeled: “The Empty Mountain.” His few acquaintances have assumed that this box is for his findings on Mount Chiliad and the strange visions at its peak, but they assume incorrectly. The Empty Mountain is the box that is reserved for his notes on the puzzling subject of Michael Townley (De Santa, now) and Trevor Philips.
He personally thinks it’s very clever. MT can stand for mountain, or—more aptly—empty, and thus the name comes to pass. Within the notebooks are full pages of Lester’s spidery, slanted scrawl. Times and places. Most of them are just bullet points, like “4/16/89, 23:35~, R touches J’s knee. J visibly responsive. Slight blush, dilation of pupils noted.” He nicknames them Romeo and Juliet ironically at first, but it very quickly becomes a terrifyingly accurate choice; Michael and Trevor’s passionate, overdramatic, completely devoted romance leaves one of them half-dead and the other half-alive, in the end. He uses the code just in case one of the stumbles on the papers and gets curious, but he hides them well enough that it's not likely to become an issue.
Michael, of course, is Romeo. He is handsome and charming and has the entire world at his feet, but he wants nothing more than the thing he shouldn’t have—that is, Juliet. Trevor is far from a dewy maiden, but he has a sort of wide-eyed innocence when it comes to Michael. He’s the only person Trevor has ever really trusted. Later, they will bear scars to prove this: Michael, a spider’s web of a gunshot wound across his sternum, and Trevor, an ugly red slash just below his ribs from a serrated blade.
But years ago, Lester didn’t see it coming. He was a fool then, and he may be a fool now, too, trusting these men so easily after bearing witness to that which they had done to themselves and each other, but he’s too far gone to mind much. They need each other, anyways.
It’s not that he’s the brains of the operation so much as he’s the most detail-oriented out of them. He is not so arrogant as to think he is the smartest: that’s simply untrue. They’re different, certainly, but their skills are of equal importance. Michael knows just how to position his body and how to manipulate his tone to get a mark to do what he needs them to. He can sweet-talk anyone into damn near anything when he puts his mind to it. Trevor has a gut instinct that can’t be fooled (except, Lester will discover, by Michael) and a great talent for geometry and all the technical details that come with being an ace pilot. They make a good team.
He meets them when he’s seventeen, living on his own and making money by stealing people’s information—after all, chronic illness isn’t cheap. Though, he supposes, neither is early onset alcoholism or a raging meth addiction, but it’s not really about the money after a while. It’s about the thrill.
Trevor is nineteen and Michael is twenty-two, and the two of them only been running together a few months when they convince Lester that they could really be something. Four of those months were wasted on Trevor in prison, but Michael successfully planned and carried out his escape from the facility, which shows potential, if nothing else. Lester is intrigued. They’re good, but they’re unproven. To be fair, so is he. They have big dreams and the drive to get them, and so from that moment forward, they are a unit.
Michael and Trevor do most of the ground work, of course. The two of them cut a strange but imposing figure together: they’re like a mountain lion and a grizzly bear in those early days. They prowl the northern mountains at the border of the country and strike fear into the hearts of men. They are feral and dangerous and, more worryingly, easily bored. Lester is less zookeeper than he is reluctant biologist, standing in the shadows and watching his subjects feast. It keeps him occupied, at least.
They live together (or close enough) and Trevor and Michael aren’t exactly quiet people. Inevitably, he notices. Of course, he sees from the start that their hands linger too long on each other, and their eyes linger longer. He notices the pet names and the inside jokes and the secret smirks and smiles and he suspects. But he doesn’t know for certain until he has the misfortune of hearing it himself through thin motel walls the first night of their inaugural cross-country road trip to pick up a score three states over.
He discovers over the years that, like clockwork, there’s a time of night (usually right around four in the morning) when the “fuck you’s” become “fuck me’s.” and Lester finds that his noise blocking headphones aren’t quite adequate. Indeed, eventually Lester will become more and more certain that man has not yet discovered a sound-proofing substance that Trevor and Michael’s animal rutting won’t punch clean through.
Not all of his notes are on sexual instances, by any means. In fact, perhaps his most referenced and pondered over page is on something he sees after they’ve been running together for two years. Trevor and Michael are watching TV on their disgusting couch in the living room of a temporary lair in sunny North Yankton, while Lester pours over last minutes details of their next score at the kitchen table. There’s nothing separating them but a half-wall and a bead curtain in the doorframe, and Trevor and Michael are both drunk and getting drunker by the second, laughing and joking and generally being as pleasant as they are when they know there’s a good take on the horizon.
They start to roughhouse, shoving each other and giggling manically until Trevor falls off the couch altogether, landing on the floor with a thump. Lester weighs his options. This is undoubtedly taking a turn for the dirty, and he’s known these two long enough to know that they won’t think to excuse themselves to one of their bedrooms. He would rather not be around to actually see their dicks.
But, on the other hand, he really needs to triple check this, because if he doesn’t it’s not as if one of them will. He has work ethic, damn it. And anyways, they won’t be any more muffled in the bedroom than they will be in the pathetic excuse for a living room—the walls in this place may as well be paper.
He decides to wait it out and see if he can concentrate on what he’s doing and block them out, but the expected wet, loud sound of mouths sliding together never begins. He chances a glance at his companions, expecting to find one of them gagged—at the very least—and instead is met with an entirely different spectacle.
Trevor is still on the floor, sitting with his back to the couch, leaning his head heavily on Michael’s knee. Michael’s hand is wound in Trevor’s long, dirty hair, scratching his scalp gently while they both nurse their drinks. It strikes Lester that Michael touches Trevor like one touches a dog: with tolerant affection, and the understanding that one is the master. They both forget he is with them.
Hours pass and the moment bleeds away. The two of them retire together to Michael’s bedroom (Trevor’s is largely unslept in, as usual) and Lester puts up the plans and takes out his notebooks. It’s the most physical intimacy that he ever sees them share, before and after, and it shows the true tone of the people they are. Trevor loves Michael. Michael accepts that. Anywhere Michael goes, Trevor will follow. Michael may be a performer, but Trevor is the spotlight, and without each other, they are pointless.
Things go well for the three of them, all in all. They get along alright. They fight, of course, but that’s simply the way they do things, and it never interferes with their work. Lester and Michael argue over logistics and details, mostly, while he and Trevor argue over more trivial things like who drank all the alcohol (Trevor) and who stole the porno mags from the bathroom (Lester). Wherever they are, there’s never a quiet moment. He and Michael spend more time together simply because they can stomach each other longer, and Lester finds himself growing more and more attached to them both.
Which isn’t to say he and Trevor don’t have their moments. Lester has difficulty with the passion in him—he doesn’t know how to divert and channel it like Michael does—and Trevor has trouble with Lester’s need to plan in the very, very long term. It isn’t that he doesn’t like Trevor, because he does. In fact, there are moments when he thinks he might love Trevor, and Michael too. Times when the three of them have fresh cash in their pockets and drinks in their hands and the world seems golden. It’s just that Trevor is a wild and unfamiliar creature that Lester does not understand.
Indeed, when he launders their money through an imaginary traveling circus (one of his more entertaining exercises) he thinks to himself that Michael is less ringleader than he is lion tamer or horse breaker. He is the only one who can command Trevor, and later, Brad. Brad starts as a spare gunman, discovered by Trevor, but quickly adopted by Michael as part of their game. Lester notes that Brad annoys all three of them—he’s a brute, and not in the good way—but that there’s a shallow and mutual attraction passed between he and Michael that drives Trevor to pace holes in the floor. It doesn’t particularly interest Lester other than the way it affects the relationship he studies already; lust is cheap enough to be easily manufactured by magazines and pills and silly, empty-headed girls. Love is a different matter altogether. Love ruins lives.
Lester suspects that Michael has taken them both to bed (possibly at the same time) but it’s not his business and he doesn’t care to make it his business. As long as the three of them can keep working together, he doesn’t much mind. And if they can’t? Well, Brad certainly isn’t more bulletproof than the rest of them.
But it doesn’t stop there. Amanda is twenty-one when she meets Michael—it’s his twenty-seventh birthday and Trevor leers at her and gives her a wad of fifties and tells her to give his buddy a good time. Lester wonders years later how often that cruel twist of fate taunted Trevor; that he had been the one to shove Amanda and Michael into each other’s arms when they could have so easily sailed past each other and never met at all.
She’s a pretty brunette with doe eyes and a filthy sense of humor—the kind of girl James Bond would keep on his arm. She’s witty and sensual and engaging, but she knows how to drink and snort blow with the best of them. Better than that, she and Michael have a shared dream of a mansion with big hedges and marble countertops that holds them together stronger than anything as silly and fleeting as drug money and warm arms can.
Amanda is more than intelligent, Lester notices: she’s also perceptive. She has the same good gut instinct that Trevor has—in fact, she and Trevor have an awful lot in common, from their humor to their temper to their affection for good drugs. But they unsettle each other. Amanda watches Trevor watching Michael and Lester thinks that she senses something strange between them, but cannot name what it is. She feels the anxious, passionate energy that thrums in the air when they’re together, and it does nothing but agitate her.
It quickly becomes apparent that someone would have to be named the victor in Trevor and Amanda’s eternal struggle for Michael’s attention. Amanda tells Michael that she’s pregnant. Michael proposes. Trevor leaves and doesn’t come back for three days, and when he does, he’s bloody and his shirt is missing and he only has one shoe on. The wedding is in a month, and then they have to start working again. Babies aren’t cheap. They plan jobs. The wedding creeps closer. Michael asks Trevor to come. Trevor says he wouldn’t miss it, brother. Lester watches and waits.
Lester realizes that inviting Trevor is a well-intentioned (if short-sighted) gesture on Michael’s part. For all his talent with manipulation, he has a shocking amount of trouble with empathy. He assumes Trevor will be happy to be there for him. They’re best friends, after all. Best friends go to each other’s weddings. And Trevor agrees, because he loves him and maybe because he thinks he can change Michael’s mind, but it ends up being a moot point regardless when Trevor is too fucked up to walk straight when the day in question rolls around.
Lester finds him at one in the afternoon, only an hour or two before the ceremony, lying in the lot behind a local bar, high and drunk and God only knows what else. He does his best to get him back to their temporary base of operations three miles over, but neither of them have the strongest legs and it takes them longer than it should. They don’t talk much.
But in the middle of the night, he gets up to check that Trevor is still breathing, and he finds him curled in a ball in the middle of his mattress, sniffling to himself. When he lays eyes on Lester, he bursts into full on sobs, and Lester isn’t certain what to do. Trevor has always been very intense, to the point that it made him a little uncomfortable. Trevor just feels so much.
“You, uh, you gonna be okay?” He asks awkwardly from the door, and Trevor wails and tears at his hair and Lester has to do something, anything, other than just stand there. He approaches the bed slowly and carefully, taking special precaution not to make any sudden movements or loud noises. When he lowers his weight to the mattress next to Trevor, he’s not sure what he’s expects to happen. A beat passes where Trevor is wiping his face with clumsy, furious hands and looking at Lester with more vulnerability than Lester has ever seen from him, but he looks away and it passes.
“I’m—ah, well, I’m sorry that he—that you—that you two—” Lester tries, but he’s not certain what exactly to say. None of them ever talk about it, of course. It’s just something that exists in the space between them, not secret, but certainly not open either. Trevor glares at him from his place on the bed.
“Spit it out.” He growls.
“I’m sorry that Michael is an idiot.” Lester says flatly. Trevor looks away, tears returning to his eyes. Lester reaches out to pat his shoulder, gently, and Trevor leans into the touch just barely. It puzzled him then and it puzzles him still that a man who is clearly so capable of emotion and tenderness and love could be so wrecked and ruined and ill. Trevor’s feelings are like natural disasters: beautiful and consuming and mighty enough to destroy whole cities. Lester knows this. He removes his hand.
“I love him.” Trevor’s voice seems impossibly small. Lester’s fingers tighten around the head of his cane in sympathetic pain. He has no desire to find romantic love, himself, but the depth and force of Trevor’s is so strong, and Lester has been observing for so long that he feels like he can understand his hurt.
“I know.” He says, because what else is there to say?
They sit there like that for a while, with Trevor’s tears coming in waves that ebb and flow in their strength. Eventually the tide goes out and Trevor falls asleep. Lester goes back to his own bed and sighs and wonders if they will be able to continue through this.
But Michael comes back the next morning and they all pretend that everything is normal. Life goes on. They knock over a few small stores, sitting on their hands until they can start moving around again in earnest. They have to put off anything too daring until after Michael’s first child is born, in the event that it all goes wrong and Michael is in jail for the birth. They don’t need to worry, really, but Amanda is insistent, and Michael complies. They wait.
Four months after the wedding, she’s born. They call her Tracey, and Lester notes that the name is Michael’s choice. How interesting that he would give his child a name that sounds so very like “Trevor,” he thinks, but he keeps his mouth shut. And he’s certainly never been one to dote on children, but he cannot deny that she’s a delight. She has wide, curious eyes that are constantly spinning in her skull, looking for exciting new things to take in. She’s barely a month old and she’s already gurgling and reaching for those familiar to her. She’s a bright girl. He wouldn’t admit it, but he finds that something warms in him when Michael refers to him as “Uncle Lester” to her.
Something warms in Trevor, too. Lester would never have pegged Trevor for the paternal type, but anyone can see that Tracey owns him. He’s at her beck and call, enchanted by her tiny fingers and wispy blonde hair. When she is old enough to speak, she asks for “Tev” and is near-constantly in his arms. Lester keeps his notes and watches with detached sadness as Trevor’s adoration grows deeper and Michael’s melts away, both of them bewitched by this child that represents wildly different things to each of them.
Lester isn’t sure if they still sleep together. He suspects that they haven’t stopped completely, because neither of them are paragons of self-control, but he knows that it’s slowed down a great deal. It’s odd to see them so distant, now, when they had once clung to each other like molten rubber clings to a mold, filling every indent and cleaving to every hill, until they were exactly what the other needed. There is a weight that hangs between them now; their desires and emotions, unspoken and otherwise, have grown so tangible in the air around them that that burden alone deserves it’s own damn cut of their scores.
They all approach their thirties at a steady clip. He should have seen it, but he mistook Michael’s strange phone calls as being from Amanda or her family, his shaking hands as symptoms of his attempts to quit smoking, his fumbling of words as his career catching up to him. But Lester is wrong.
It makes sense. Lester has always known that nothing matters more to Michael than the man he thinks he is and the life he thinks he deserves. Lester has always known that Michael’s criminality fits only very narrowly into the illusion—Michael thinks of himself as a gritty action hero who has to do bad things for the sake of the greater good. He cannot face the truth: he is a bad man, and he loves it.
Therefore, by extension, Lester and Brad and especially Trevor do not fit. Which is not to say that Michael doesn’t love Trevor (because Lester still remembers the way they were in the beginning—that Michael was just as wrapped up in Trevor as Trevor was in Michael. He remembers how discomforted Michael always was by Trevor’s absence, the way Trevor could always drag a smile and a laugh out of him, the way he kept his hands occupied when Trevor was around, as if he couldn’t trust himself not to touch him if given the chance) it’s more that Trevor is a threat to the only thing keeping Michael sane.
He is impressed, he will admit, that Michael manages to keep the betrayal a secret until after the fact. Lester is blind sighted by the news of Michael’s death, and indeed, he would perhaps not have discovered the truth at all if he hadn’t gone looking for the man who did this, the man who killed one of the few people Lester could count as a friend to him. But Michael and Dave are both lacking in subtly, and he finds instead what is as good as a letter signed “Brutus.”
Michael isn’t stupid, which means he’s playing games. Lester doesn’t understand for the first time in a long time. De Santa is an alias he’s used in front of all of them. He’s moved barely a few states over. He makes no effort to change his looks or any of their first names, either. He leaves his whole family vulnerable and open to be found by anyone who cared to give it more than an hour. Lester is furious. It’s not as if he ever liked Brad, but good god, Michael let the man bleed out on the ground like an animal and pretended that he would die like that, too, and for what? To waste it jerking off in beautiful San Andres, while he and Trevor mourn and wither away?
Fuck that. Lester does what he does best: he plans ahead. He gives things a year or two to settle down and then slowly, slowly directs Trevor towards Los Santos. If he gets to Michael too soon—well, Lester knows Michael better than Michael knows Michael, and he’s not certain Michael won’t finish the job Dave botched in North Yankton if Trevor rears his head too quickly. But when the time comes, he makes sure that the way is clear. He goes into police records and changes them, disables security cameras at nearby liquor stores and gas stations, finds and makes connections for Trevor to come across by happenstance, all to make sure that Trevor and Michael find each other again. The hand of fate is not so mysterious, nor so mighty, as Lester Crest.
Trevor makes his way west with great violence, leaving explosions and blood trails in his wake as he’s always done, and Lester is kept busy cleaning them up. If there is such a thing as guardian angels, then he could certainly be counted among them. As Trevor comes closer to the San Andres border, Lester calls up an acquaintance who directs him to another acquaintance to welcome Trevor to the desert: Ron Jakowski.
Ron is the perfect candidate for partnership with Trevor, really. Lester is only familiar with him because he is part of the large majority of people interested in the mysterious thing known as The Truth who are completely unstable. He and Lester run in similar circles (not that Ron would ever know that—Lester doesn’t go around giving out his identity to crazies on the internet) which gives him enough to go off of all on it’s own, but he looks into it more just in case. It turns out that Ron is an accountant who’s only barely hanging on to his job as his obsession with conspiracies mounts. A weak willed and easily dominated man. Perfect.
Lester practically has to shove them together, but he makes it work. He gets cryptic messages to Ron about another believer coming into his life, someone who knows how to take what he wants and will teach Ron how to do that too. He feeds Trevor information about the tiny bank where Ron cashes his checks and makes sure that he’s told that the perfect conditions won’t come around until the Friday of that week. And just like that, a beautiful and bizarre friendship is born.
Trevor moves to Sandy Shores, but he quickly loses steam. He starts selling meth when Lester finds contacts who will do it with him (Chef, who’s real name is Anthony, is a solid, level headed man that Lester actually likes a great deal) and even goes as far as claiming a block of the county and running something he calls Trevor Philips Industries-slash-Incorporated-slash-Enterprises out of it, but he won’t do much else. Lester is frustrated, he can admit. Trevor is lost in his apathy, doing only what he must to get by rather than decimating the surrounding crime lords like Lester knows he can. That would certainly get Michael’s attention.
Dave starts writing to Trevor and pretending to be Brad. Those are interesting exchanges. Lester notes that Dave slips from undercover agent into the role of Trevor’s friend a little too easily—he watches as Dave develops sympathy and even affection for the man left widowed by Dave’s phantom bullet. It is “Brad” who urges Trevor to get the memorial tattoo, funnily enough. It’s been six years, he says, and Trevor has to start healing sooner or later. The wound of Michael’s death isn’t a scar yet, but the tattoo is something of a bandage, and it helps a little. Trevor perks up again. He is still not the man he once was, by any means, but he starts testing his boundaries, particularly with the Lost MC.
And Lester doesn’t expect Michael and Trevor to find each other on their own, even with only two and a half hours between them. He’s watched them long enough now to understand that they are both stagnant without each other, wallowing in their misery on different couches without a damn thing standing in their way other than themselves. And he’s right about that, as usual. Three years pass.
He also doesn’t expect, however, for Michael to return to the game on his own with a strange, untested rookie he picked up from nowhere—and Lester is pointedly wrong about that. He begins pulling more strings. He makes sure his contact information practically falls in Michael’s lap, and he gets a call almost immediately after.
“Is this still the number for Lester Crest?” Michael is clearly pleased with himself as his voice crackles across the line. Lester rolls his eyes. If Michael really thinks that he’s such a poor tech man that he would let himself be so easily found, he must be slipping. He snaps back that Michael can come see him in Murrieta Heights, not so far from his McMansion. He hangs up, despite Michael’s confused and alarmed grumbling.
He retrieves the boxes from their high shelves and flips through the worn pages. He’s going to need some new notebooks.