Chapter Text
The start of their rivalry dates back years before they were even born.
It dates back to the day Pran’s mother, the leader of a small ring of thieves, stole a priceless painting one day before an infamous thieving agency was due to steal it. It had been entirely coincidental, an accident, but the leader of that agency had painted a target on their backs ever since. Pran’s mother, viciously protective of her team, hadn’t taken kindly to that.
Pran’s parents knew months in advance that the leader of their adversary was having a child right around the same time as Pran had been due. Pran has known about him since he knew how to speak.
But it’s one thing to be told you have a rival. It’s another thing entirely to head out on your first mission at ten years old, clear all the security in some millionaire’s home, and spend forever meticulously opening their safe, only to find your target missing and a red winky face spray-painted in its place.
Pran knows exactly who put it there.
He does not throw a tantrum. He doesn’t. But maybe he stomps his foot and growls a little too loud because suddenly a dog is awake, then all the dogs are awake, then the homeowner is awake, and Pran is scrambling to make a quick escape. Admittedly, not his finest moment.
When he hops into the getaway vehicle and it takes off, his mother - who’d heard everything through his earpiece and coached him through what to do - is wearing a somber expression, which never means anything good for him.
She asks, “Do you want payback?” and Pran nods.
She smiles, but somehow it’s far from the comfort he thinks she means for it to be. Pran’s mother smiles and all he feels is dread.
“Good.”
Ten days later, she has Pran steal a jewel-encrusted tiara. It hadn’t been in their purview until his failed heist and Pran knows the routine, his mother always scopes out a target at least a month in advance.
He knows exactly what that means. The artifact he stole? Hadn’t been his target.
It had been his rival’s.
This back and forth game goes on for a total of five consecutive heists. After his first failed mission, Pran’s mother only sends him after a single other target of his own. He, of course, finds an empty display case with red spray-paint on the glass. The drawing of a grinning turd is a clear declaration of war. When they get home that day, he asks his mother to buy him a set of smiley face sticky notes and, when asked what for, insists he needs them for school, not vengeance.
All of Pran’s missions since then have been artifacts that intel told his mother his rival would be stealing. He’s proudly in the lead 3-2 when his mother finally lets him have another mission of his own. Not only that but it’s an art exhibit heist, his first ever, and by far the most challenging of his missions so far.
Pran should’ve expected that his rival would make a move, but somehow it’s still a surprise when he slips into the art exhibit, sneaks across the security lasers, and finds the wall with the painting - his painting - vacant. He glares at the familiar red spray-paint that sits there instead, mocking him, and hopes the fury of his stare might burn a hole into it. Pran lifts a hand to his ear to activate his earpiece so that he can give his mother the bad news.
That’s when he hears a snort behind him and freezes.
“Lame.”
Pran spins around to face the source of the voice and finds a hooded kid watching him from the entrance of the room where he’s leaning on the wall, Pran’s target tucked neatly under his arm.
“It only took me two minutes to get across,” the kid brags, pointing to the laser field with his chin. Pran glances at his watch instinctively. It had taken him seven. “You’re slow.”
Pran suddenly resents the lasers that separate them. He doesn’t know what he wants to do more urgently, punch this guy or snatch the painting from his grubby hands, but right now he can’t do either and his skin crawls with the need to retaliate somehow.
“I am not, you just got here first!” he retorts.
“Because you’re slow.”
That jerk is smiling. Pran knows he’s smiling, even with a respirator mask in the way. He can tell by the way his eyes are shining. Even from across the room, he can tell.
“I’m not slow,” Pran growls. “You’re just a cheater.”
The kid shifts to hold the painting in front of him and dangles it like a taunt. “I think you mean a ‘winner’.”
He pokes his head around the side of the painting to see and Pran knows full well that he just wants a reaction out of him, but he still can’t stop his snarled, “That’s mine.”
The kid lets the bottom of the priceless painting hit the floor with a loud thud, leans his weight onto it, and tips his chin towards Pran.
Pran sees the challenge in his eyes before he hears it. “Oh yeah? Come and get it.”
Then the kid rocks forward and sticks his hand directly in the line of a laser.
After all of Pran’s efforts to hide from the cameras and sneak past the lasers and memorize the security guards’ scheduled checks and routes, it just takes one move from his rival to immediately set off the alarms and throw all his careful planning out the window.
“You-“ Pran is just about to give him a piece of his mind when the guy abruptly salutes him, turns on his heels, and makes a run for it. “Hey!”
Without thinking, Pran charges after him.
“Give it back!” he demands over the sound of the blaring alarm, running full speed down the hall behind his fleeing target.
“Finders keepers!” the kid tosses over his shoulder, not showing any sign of slowing down.
“Jerk!”
“Sore loser!”
“Thief!”
“We’re both thieves, idiot!” Pran wonders briefly if his mother would ground him for getting in a fistfight on a mission. She probably would. Maybe having your rival laugh in your face and call you an idiot was a special exception? It certainly should be. “Except I’m obviously better at it!”
“Are not!”
“Am too- Oh look, a guard!”
Pran, stupidly, glances behind himself to check - there’s nothing and no one - and in the mere seconds it takes him to return his attention to the hooded kid, he’s gone. He skids to a halt in the middle of the long stretch of hallway and scowls. What a jerk. It was one thing to steal Pran’s target - for the third time in a row - but this guy is actively trying to get him caught by security!
Their rivalry had always been an inevitability, Pran knows that. But apparently, they both take to it like a fish to water.
“Stupid, stupid-“
“Hey!” Pran’s head snaps up. Uh oh. That’s a real guard. He takes off again without missing a beat. “Hey! Stop!”
Pran escapes - just barely - and his mother is decidedly not happy when he arrives home with no target in sight. She’s even less happy to hear his full report of another unsuccessful heist and he gets a stern lecture on how he should’ve contacted his appointed handler, Joke, immediately upon seeing “that little brat”. Pran knows the protocol - of course he knows he should’ve activated his earpiece - but it’s impossible to admit to his mother that he was too distracted to follow it.
The media explodes the very next day with news of the two thieves, creatively dubbed “Red” and “Blue” due to their contrasting outfits - Pran’s dark red hoodie and his rival’s denim jacket - and probably also partially due to the red spray-paint and blue sticky notes they’ve been using to “communicate” (read: bicker). It’s no surprise, Pran had expected media coverage on their string of robberies at some point, especially since it’s clear that they’re both quite young and leaving consistent markers. Civilians go crazy for that kind of stuff - the mystery behind the mask of a thief. What does come as a surprise, however, and an unpleasant one at that, is the headline “Thief Partners, Red and Blue, Steal Fabrice Lemoine’s Paris à Minuit” and its many, many variations.
Pran’s mother reads one such article off her phone at breakfast that morning. Pran barely has time to scowl, tear off a piece of bread with his teeth and just a little too much force, and think to himself ‘ partners? as if’ before his mom is going off on a tirade about how reporters have ‘no idea what they’re talking about these days’. Pran tunes out halfway through. All he can focus on are thoughts of his next mission and how to make it blatantly clear to the world that he and that guy - Blue, at least Pran has something to call him now - are most definitely not partners.
They’re rivals, missions are competitions of skill, and Pran plans on winning them all from now on.
Somehow sticky notes become Pran’s signature, a calling card of sorts.
Before his first time actually meeting Blue, he’d only left one of the little smiley face sticky notes on a single heist. Because he’s not an animal like Blue, who always leaves him an obnoxiously red, spray-painted doodle, who carelessly vandalised houses and jewelry stores and art exhibits and museums alike every time he snatches one of Pran’s targets first, but Pran had still wanted to retaliate. It had initially been intended as one-time revenge, never to be repeated because he was above that. But each of Blue’s notes are more aggravating than the last and Pran can’t find it in himself to stop.
Hilariously - or perhaps, irritatingly - the police and the media seem to have things backwards. It’s partially Pran’s fault though, since the vast majority of his thefts are Blue’s targets and the guy - arrogant as he is - always sends a signed letter to the place he’s going to steal from. It’s not a surprise that the codename Blue is now associated with the blue sticky notes.
Regardless, it’s now part of the routine. He leaves a smiley face every time he steals something from Blue. Blue leaves him a new message in red spray-paint - winky faces, grinning turds, sometimes actual words like “I win!” or “too slow!” - every time he steals something from Pran. It’s their thing, their own strange form of communication.
And something else that quickly becomes their thing after their first meeting?
“Blue,” he growls at the empty display case that’s supposed to be holding an ancient scepter and is very distinctly not.
“Ding ding ding! Correct!”
When Pran turns around, like clockwork there he is again.
He doesn’t understand why it’s happening so frequently now. They managed to go five heists without ever once seeing each other, but since their first meeting Pran has seen his rival no less than every other heist. It’s statistically improbable and he’s starting to wonder if Blue is doing it on purpose to annoy him.
Pran scowls at him and spits out, “Can’t you just leave me alone and go steal something else?”
“Nope,” Blue says, popping the ‘p’ for maximum irritability. He twirls the scepter without a care in the world, and Pran’s stomach drops in time with his target when Blue tries to do a trick and instead almost lets it hit the floor. Somehow undeterred, however, Pran’s rival just readjusts his grip on the priceless artifact, waves it towards Pran with one hand, and pulls his eyelid down with the other. Pran thinks he would probably be sticking his tongue out too, if he wasn’t wearing his ever-present respirator mask. “Sucks to suck, Little Red.”
Oh and that stupid nickname. Pran has gotten used to hearing that a lot too, although its frequency is never enough to keep his blood from boiling.
“Don’t call me that.”
Blue’s eyes sparkle and Pran already knows how he’s going to respond.
“Little Red, Little Red, Little-”
“Shut up.”
“Liiiiiittle Reeee-“
Pran lunges at him, but it’s no use. It didn’t take Pran long to figure out that he and Blue are very evenly matched in a race, which means that with Blue’s headstart and closer proximity to an exit, he easily disappears into the night with a snicker and Pran’s target in hand.
Again.
The shift happens on a remarkably run-of-the-mill heist when they’re twelve. Two years of this competition. Two years of stealing each other’s targets and chasing each other around museums and spray-painting taunts and retaliating with sticky notes. It takes Pran two whole years to slip up, a fact of which he would be proud if not for literally everything else about the situation.
He makes three mistakes.
The first is allowing himself to get distracted by Blue as he snatches the engraved teacup Pran had come to steal and subsequently forgetting to keep track of time.
The second is getting spotted by the security guard doing his routine check, while Blue attaches a rope to his harness and makes his quick escape through the hole he’d presumably made in the glass ceiling to get here in the first place.
His third mistake, despite himself, is overconfidence.
Because he’s stared at maps of this building for days on end and he’s sure he knows each and every hallway by heart. Unfortunately, he doesn’t account for the fact that he also knows the layout of at least thirty other museums by heart too and, as it turns out, this museum has a painting that looks eerily similar to one in the museum he robbed just over a month ago.
That’s how he ends up turning down a hallway with a dead end.
Pran hears the thudding of footsteps growing louder behind him and frantically searches for an exit. He’s completely cornered, not a door or vent in sight. There’s a bench to his left, a display case nearby, and a glass ceiling. He considers climbing up but… then what? He still wouldn’t be able to reach the ceiling.
Maybe he can shatter the display case instead and use the ancient broadsword inside to fend off the guard until his handler can come up with an escape plan or a distraction or send him help?
It’s a desperate plan at best but he is desperate at this point, so he activates his earpiece. “Joke, I have a problem!”
“Are we talking the usual kind of problem?” Joke’s voice crackles to life in his ear. He wishes that it brought him more reassurance than it does. “Did Blue write something mean?”
“No!” He doesn’t have time for this. He throws his backpack off one shoulder to riffle through it. “This isn’t about Blue! I’m-”
“Red.”
He freezes in place, partway through climbing onto the bench with one arm crammed down his bag. The surprise is almost enough to make him lose his footing on the ridiculously polished surface. He knows that voice, so either his imagination is playing cruel tricks on him or-
“Red,” the familiar voice calls again, with a little more urgency. “Up here!”
He chances a look up to the ceiling where Blue has somehow managed to pry open a glass panel. His arm is sticking through the hole, as far as he can reach, and he’s gesturing wildly for Pran to grab on.
Pran doesn’t trust it.
There isn’t a single person in the world he should trust less than Blue.
And yet.
He glances down the hallway to where the security guard has finally turned the corner and is sprinting his way. Even if it’s a trick, what other option does he have?
“Pran?”
It’s Joke’s voice that snaps him out of his indecisive stupor.
“Err- No, nevermind,” he hurriedly tells his handler, even as he scrambles from the bench to the top of the display case to gain some altitude. “I figured it out.”
“You- What? But what was the-”
Pran turns his earpiece off with a click and prays that he won’t get a lecture for it later. If he gets out of here in one piece and without handcuffs, it won’t matter. But his eyes dart to the security guard who’s quickly gaining ground and he struggles to ignore the alarm bells in his head that remind him of how big of an ‘if’ that is.
Once on top of the display case, Pran reaches out and- Still too far. Even with half his body leaning dangerously far through the open panel, Blue’s arm is still just out of reach.
“Just-” Blue lets out a frustrated noise. Pran can’t tell if he’s annoyed at the situation, his inability to magically extend his arm, or Pran. “Just jump!”
“Jump?!” he blurts out, dumbfounded. That has to be the dumbest possible- “Are you crazy?!”
“Come on, Red! Trust me!”
He shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t.
But he looks up at Blue - into eyes that mirror his own frantic anxiety and fear, as if Blue has any stakes in this, as if he’s genuinely distraught at the thought of Pran getting caught. It’s the most genuine Pran has ever seen him and, if it’s an act, then Blue is wasted as a thief.
He jumps.
It takes some effort and coordination from both of them, but Blue manages to heft him up enough for Pran to stick an arm through and drag himself onto the roof. Pran flops down onto his back next to Blue, both trying to catch their breath, the second he’s in the clear.
His gaze catches on a crushed earpiece on the ground at their feet, then on Blue, who’s watching him with a cautious look that says everything. Pran doesn’t need to ask, he understands implicitly. Blue broke his earpiece on purpose so that he could save Pran without reprimand from his own handler. Pran is almost entirely certain, because that’s exactly what he would’ve done.
“Thank you,” he says before he can really think the words through. Before he can think about how all of this - how even something as small as a ‘thank you’ - muddies the waters between them.
Blue clears his throat, doesn’t quite meet his eyes, and only gives a curt nod in response.
With the threat now gone, the air around them grows heavy with uncertainty. They’ve never really… interacted beyond taunts. It feels almost surreal not to be fighting right now.
The silence stretches on uncomfortably until they both remember why they’re here in the first place and glance at the teacup with freakish synchronicity. Then back at each other. It’s tense for a moment and Pran knows they’re thinking the same thing.
“Keep it.” He shrugs, aiming for nonchalant and probably missing by a mile. “I didn’t want it that bad anyway.”
The tension instantly seeps out of Blue’s shoulders and the muscles in his face, and he watches Pran with… something akin to wonder? Pran isn’t quite sure what the look means but it’s the first time he wants to see beneath that respirator mask for reasons not involving his fist connecting with his rival’s face. Because he’s pretty sure Blue is smiling. Not a smirk or a grin, but a genuine smile.
But before he can do anything stupid, Blue beats him to the punch by rising to his feet, scooping up the artifact, and saying, “You couldn’t catch me even if you did.”
And then he’s gone. At least that’s familiar territory. Blue stealing another one of Pran’s targets, leaving him in the dust, almost caught by security.
All part of the routine, right?
When he gets home, dropped off by his handler after a quick debrief, half of which he spent flat-out lying through his teeth, his mother asks him how the mission went and he hesitates. He’s never lied to her before. Not about Blue, not about anything.
But then again, he’s never had reason to worry that she wouldn’t approve of something he’s done.
He elects not to tell his mother what happened that night and instead fudges some of the details like he had with Joke. It would turn out to be the first, and most inoffensive, in a string of lies he would eventually tell her about his rival.