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Sly Cooper isn’t afraid.
No. No, of course he isn’t. Why would he be? What would be there to be afraid of? He knows how to handle any situation life throws at him and weasel out of it with a coy smile. Sure, maybe he’d get a few scratches and bruises in the process, but those were mementos, memories to be laughed at later.
Weren’t they…?
No. Of course they were. That’s how it was. That’s how it always had been. They’d laughed off scuffs and scrapes and twisted ankles, even when they had been separated it had still been easy to make light of it after the fact, laughing off their experiences in Prague all the way to Canada. Because it was funny, wasn’t it? Thinking something could actually stop the gang for more than a little while. It was funny. And if it was funny, that meant it wasn’t something to be afraid of.
Besides, there would be more important things to worry about. Always something new to handle. No time to waste in being too afraid to keep going, all it would do is slow him down.
Murray doesn’t greet him when he makes his way back to their usual Parisian safehouse. Doesn’t even look up from the floor. And it’s quiet.
(There’s still blood on him. Still on both of them.)
There’s a specific way they talk to one another, at least when they’re all together. The three of them, they’ve been living with one another all their lives. The familiarity of it is comforting. Their existences almost click right into one another. It isn’t quite conversation, but not quite banter, either. It almost feels like a three-way game of ping-pong, bouncing off of each other, back and forth, and over and over again. There’s a rhythm. It’s familiar. It only makes the quiet worse.
Even when the night has passed, they’re both scrubbed clean and the adrenaline has fizzled out, the quiet doesn’t go away. They’re both so obviously restless and uneasy, but they continue to sit in near-silence.
The tension eats at him until he can’t stand it. He does something stupid, he slips out of the Safehouse with barely any care to climb up on the roof in plain sight. He needs fresh air. It’s a familiar rhythm, a comforting one, but only for a moment. Two feet from the top of the drainpipe, he decides to look down. And suddenly, the twelve-foot climb is five miles high.
His legs unconsciously wrap around the metal for security, and his grip turns his knuckles white under the gloves. It would be easy to climb onto the roof, or to slide back down. It should be. But something is telling him that if he lets go, he’s going to fall, and that if he falls, he is absolutely going to smash into the ground and die.
Fear isn’t a feeling alien to him. Fear is what keeps a thief light on his toes, alert, aware, and focused. But this is a different kind of fear. It doesn’t roll off his back and nip at his heels. It clings on, dark and sticky and heavy. It’s entirely different, and that newness only makes him feel more powerless.
Murray ends up having to slowly, painfully coax him down two hours later. As soon as his feet are on terra firma, he smiles and makes a joke like nothing had happened.
Neither of them is really sure what to do. After all, they aren’t the smart ones. Never the plan-makers, always the plan-followers. They’re not completely helpless, obviously, but where is there to go from where they are? Nothing comes to mind.
They simply try to get by the first few days, laying low and steeping in awkwardness. Murray spends all his time not spent stewing on lifting weights. The reason is far too obvious, Murray didn’t have to say anything to make it clear (though he did). He pushes himself way too hard, and they both know it. But at least he’s finding the motivation to do something, to keep himself moving. Despite himself, Sly simply finds himself wandering the safehouse without much intent. There’s nothing to distract him for more than a few minutes. He half-asses a task, loses what little energy he has for it, and wanders off again. He does the laundry, leaving it unfinished in a wet pile. He scrubs a few dishes. Reorganizes a single cabinet. Rearranges the kitchen drawer. Reorganizes it again. Un-reorganizes it.
A dropped knife manages to slip through his thick fur and nick the flesh on his forearm. It should be nothing more than a frustration, an inconvenience, but...he’s transfixed at the sight of his own blood beading up in the cut, and can't help but imagine the heavy torrent of blood and viscera if it had been something bigger, something sharper.
Well, he doesn’t have to try to imagine it, does he?
A near-perfect crescent of red and pale white. It’s marked into his head, intertwined with the sound of a horrible crunch. The neat patterns of a turtle shell mangled and caved in, with the spot where a sharp beak pierced through leaving behind that small glimpse into the flesh and bone hidden under the scales.
In between splintered conversations, Murray’s voice breaks over and over again as he berates himself for being so slow to jump in. Not being prepared for something to go wrong, and taking so long to haul the thing’s beak open from where it had pinned their friend down.
(Sly wants to tell him, at least you actually moved)
It shouldn’t hang over him like this. At least, he doesn’t think it should, but it does. Everything about it. Facing Clockwerk the first time had been no easy feat, of course. But he’d had the reassurance of his friends, and Carmelita’s sharp-shooting to help him all along the way. It was a hellish ordeal, but he’d had the confidence that it wasn’t something he was doing alone. And in the end, they’d made it out practically unscathed. Sure, there were a couple of close calls, but everyone was in one piece. Everything had been okay.
Bentley and Murray had screamed the entire time Arpeggio’s blimp was falling. In the moment, he’d thought about pausing to rip the communicator out of his ear, but knew that would take too many precious seconds. The airship’s wreckage was hurtling towards the ground too quickly for him to waste the opportunity to get to them. Carmelita couldn’t get too close with the helicopter. It had just been him, leaping between broken pieces, listening to the terrified shrieks and desperate pleas of his friends as the wind and the smashed metal whipped by. Working at heights had never been daunting before, but he’d also never been so high off the ground. Slipping and falling was almost guaranteed, and that would mean plummeting out of the sky with a very breakable paraglider for hundreds of feet and hoping he landed on something safe. And that was the good option. It was just as likely that a turbine would slice him in half, or a walkway would slam onto him and crush him flat. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure how he’d managed to make it to the ground alive at all. It’s one of the few things he can’t stop thinking about.
At least McSweeny’s message got them busy. He’d hoped it would finally put some life back into their ragtag duo, but all it did was make it so much more obvious they were distracted and lost without Bentley alongside them. Sure, they got the paper they came for, but not without a cavalcade of missteps and clumsy mistakes that nearly got them arrested in the process.
So they plot out the only plan they can make. They’ve got to get their pal back.
(Maybe it’s selfish to try and drag him back so quickly. He’s so desperate to feel normal again)
The thing about breaking into hospitals, though, is that it involves a lot of climbing. At least this one does. He tries not to let his unease show. Murray is still too distracted to really notice. It should be exhilarating. He should love every second. But instead, he ties a double-knot around his waist and grips the rope so hard it almost burns through his gloves as they rappel down the front of the building.
As soon as they’re inside, he can pretend he’s in control again. Murray berates himself for fumbling, but he reassures him of its insignificance. It’s more comfortable falling into familiar tasks. Stealth, disguises, things he knows like the back of his hand. Even with Murray’s clumsiness, it’s easier to handle someone else’s discomfort than his own.
Bentley doesn’t want to come with them. Injured or not, they both try to reassure him that they couldn’t get anywhere without him. And in the end, Sly simply won’t let him say no. As soon as the alarms start blaring, he hauls his friend over his back and makes a break for the nearest exit possible. He feels that odd, nervous pit opening up again as he dives between buildings, the city streets dozens of feet below, but the exhilaration and relief manage to muffle it enough that he doesn’t freeze.
For the first time in a while, he feels a sense of peace. It isn’t perfect- he knew Bentley wasn’t going to recover fully, but he didn’t want to believe it until he started moving around the safehouse in his gradually-upgraded wheelchair- but it’s close enough.
And as soon as he can grasp it, it slips through his fingers again.
When Murray tells them he’s leaving, he doesn’t know how to react. How could he? He hasn’t processed what happened to Bentley, doesn’t want to even think about it. The patched-together normalcy he’s been craving is falling apart at the seams again.
He wants to lose his composure. For once in his life, he wants to make a scene. Lose his temper. Beg. Whatever it would take to get Murray to change his mind. But his feet feel like lead weights, and his tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. All he can do is watch his friend turn and walk out the door, leaving his gear behind.
It’s like that first awful night all over again. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s too restless to sit still but too lethargic to think of planning any jobs. Exciting as it was at first, the Cooper Vault slips his mind quickly. It feels like he’s sleepwalking, except he isn’t, because when he does sleep he keeps jerking awake to make sure Bentley isn’t dead and that Clockwerk isn’t somehow magically alive and perched over their beds. It’s irrational, and he knows it’s irrational, but it doesn’t help him sleep through the night.
Bentley distracts himself by piecing plans together. If he has any reassurance in all of this, it’s that. He can follow his directions, however enthusiasm-free he does so. Bentley is still hot on the Cooper Vault trail, digging into information about it and how they would go about getting into it. Sly wants to care, but he just...can’t. He doesn’t understand how Bentley can be adapting so quickly and so easily. It has him frustrated and envious at the same time, though he tries to make neither of them obvious.
Maybe...maybe he is afraid, after all. Afraid that nothing is going to ever be the same. He sees the irony in it- the idea of losing things and having things change is something he should be plenty used to by now.
But still, when Bentley mentions a sighting of Murray in Venice, and they’re packing up and leaving Paris for the first time in months, he won’t deny that he feels more alive than he has in a long, long time.