Work Text:
It’s late when he knocks on Tommy’s door.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Only, Akiko’s hand on his heart burned a hole through some barrier inside him, and he can’t patch it up quicker than it’s draining. The trouble is he should be able to. Picking up and moving on when the heat gets to be too much is what he does. He’s burned people and versions of himself before.
Hell, he began in fire. His whole reason for being came out of watching his home go up in flames with his dad still in it. Messy, untraceable devastation is a part of him now. It always will be.
He doesn’t get the luxury of forming attachments. He doesn’t get to be sentimental because a stranger folded him into his suitcase like an abandoned pet and offered him a home.
And it wouldn’t matter at all, except he’d been tempted. He’d wanted, for just a moment, when Tommy said it, to uncoil about the shoulders, shrug off the chains of death and vengeance, and lay down to sleep. Out of everything anyone had ever wanted to give him before, no one ever touched on what he actually wanted.
Not even Kenta. Not really. Not when this was how he had to get it.
He’s about to call it and walk away when he hears the quiet, distinct sounds of someone moving behind the door. Tommy slides it open and peers out into the hallway at him. His hair is flipped up in the back and his night shirt’s slipping off one shoulder. His feet are bare.
“Snake Eyes,” he says, forcing back a yawn. “What is it?”
His heart leaps up into his throat. This is the moment to take it back. Now or never.
The path from where he was to where he will be splits here, and all he can think about is that feeling he had, of wanting to lay down and rest because he believed he could finally be at ease.
Because Tommy wanted to give that to him.
“Are you all right?” Tommy asks him, low but urgent. His expression sharpens the barest degree. “Has something happened?”
Their eyes lock, and up until this moment, Snake Eyes hadn’t decided what he was going to do or if he would do it at all. But he knows now, meeting Tommy’s eyes at the threshold to his rooms with bed hair and interrupted sleep between them, that he’s made up his mind.
“I have to talk to you about tomorrow.”
“You wouldn’t rather speak after the test?”
“The test that might end in my death?” he says, starting to smile.
This is easy at least. Joking with Tommy, laughing with him. Only now it makes him feel like an asshole, how quickly Tommy’s smiles come when it’s just the two of them. Suspecting nothing at all, Tommy tips his head, and yeah, there he goes, tucking his chin as if to hide the twitching corners of his mouth.
“I take your meaning,” he murmurs, and looks up without raising his head. Almost coy, but not on purpose. Never that. Not when he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. “Would you like to come in?”
Feigning ease he doesn’t feel is nothing to Snake Eyes anymore. Even when he was a kid, he had a talent for it. He shrugs, plays off the faint skipping of his heart like it doesn’t touch him.
“I was thinking we could go for a walk.”
He knows himself. Cornering Tommy in his room isn’t going to help him to be honest. If anything it just gives him one more escape hatch to consider if he goes and changes his mind about what he’s doing here. It would be easy.
God, he’d un-know it if he could, all the ugly things he’s had to learn just to survive.
Tommy lets Snake Eyes lead him outside. They walk shoulder to shoulder, neither of them speaking for a time.
Arashikage at night is like something out of that distant childhood he had before he lost his father. The full darkness covers everything, quiet but vibrant. He didn’t think he could feel serenity like this ever again.
“Do you ever think about the day you brought me here?”
“Whenever I look at you and remember where we are,” Tommy says, doing nothing to hide the fondness in his voice.
It does something to him, to hear Tommy speak about him like he’s a precious quantity. Not just valuable, but valued. That tone of familiarity used to embarrass the hell out of him. The tenderness and indulgent vulnerability of it, the fact that Tommy doesn’t know.
If he was a mark — and he was, in the beginning — Snake Eyes would’ve taken one look at Arashikage’s walls, at the openness in Tommy’s face, and called it.
Rich boy. Sheltered. A bored prince all alone in his tower, eager for a street rat to rehabilitate.
It was a goddamn Disney movie, just about. Formulaic right down to the Third Act betrayal. Tommy looks over at him, attentive, curious, and criminally oblivious.
“Have you been preoccupied with thoughts of that day?”
Snake Eyes nods. “Been thinking about why it happened.”
“Ah.” Tommy nods, too, a ruminative expression on his face, lit only by the glow of the moon as they walk. “We have, both of us, made questionable decisions to get here.”
“Straight-laced Tomisaburô made a questionable decision?”
Before he can stop himself, he’s leaning sideways to bump Tommy’s shoulder with his own. It’s easy, is the problem, but the problem is also that it’s easy. Tommy’s as straightforward as a math problem, and as unprotected as that leaves him to someone like Snake Eyes, it gives him a kind of armor, too.
Because it’s no chore getting Tommy to like him, but the same goes just as surely in the other direction. It’s not something Snake Eyes has ever had to deal with before. He cuts and runs; he salts and burns the earth behind him and doesn’t look back; that’s who he is. He doesn’t fall for this softball honeypot stuff. Doesn’t even have patience for it most of the time, but here he is, thinking of staying. Of settling.
“You were a questionable decision,” Tommy tells him, chuckling, “or had you forgotten?”
His heart leaps up into his throat, pounding at the opening. He needs to say it.
But he gets caught up in the moment. A late night stroll between friends, happily given, freely shared. Just like the first challenge, he thinks. Offered with deference and humility, the only reward being a fair exchange of trust and respect.
He’s never known this feeling he has now, of a cup overflowing inside of him. So much of his life he’s been empty. Alone.
“I regret that I have been weak in my past,” Tommy offers, speaking first. “I chose to make the world a dangerous place allowing Kenta to live. At the time I called it mercy, but it was cowardice that stayed my hand — fear that to punish him would have made me cruel like he is cruel. But he will never stop now, and that is my doing.
“So you see,” he adds glibly, smiling again but with less humor behind it. “My heart often leads me to make questionable decisions.”
His heart. Jesus.
“You gave him a second chance,” Snake Eyes tells him, and on speaking it, he hears his father’s voice, sharp as a freshly opened wound from Blind Master’s vision. Unable to stop the wooden quality in his voice at thinking how these words apply to him, he adds, “You aren’t responsible for what he did with it.”
Twenty years, and he’s never seen it from that angle. Never looked at the freak occurrence of his escape, his survival, as a second chance his father died to secure.
It never felt like much more to him than an unfortunate accident, and he’d taken pains over the years to make it a regrettable one for the man who made him what he is. But looking back, hearing his dad’s voice again after so long with only the shadow of it alive in his memory, he wonders whose worst fear he became after all.
Working for terrorists? Probably his dad’s worst nightmare.
Betraying the only real friend he’s ever had?
“I know a little about cruelty,” he whispers, heart still at a wild gallop in his chest.
Tommy looks over at him but doesn’t reply. He walks quietly at Snake Eyes’s side, patient, assuming nothing. He’s got no idea. None at all.
“When I was a kid my dad was murdered, right in front of me.”
The hand on his shoulder isn’t unexpected. It’s not unwelcome either.
“I’m sorry.”
His eyes burn. Whether it’s the lingering presence of his dad or the fact that he can hear Tommy’s heart in his throat, he doesn’t know. The fact that he doesn’t know bothers him.
“I always felt like I died with him that day. Part of me did. I stopped being his son, became something else. Never really figured out what.”
He looks at Tommy and stops walking. Tommy does, too.
“I’ve been living inside the moment I lost him for twenty years. Just, angry and…” He shakes his head, tries to catch his breath and can’t. “Desperate to make it right somehow.”
“You want justice,” Tommy ventures, and
God, that’s cute.
It must show on his face, something of his resentment in the face of Tommy’s complete inability to see him for just what he is. To see past what he could be, down to the core of who he really is. What he’s chosen for his piss poor excuse of a life. Tommy takes his hand away and squares his shoulders.
“I told you to make my home yours, and in doing so, I gave to you not only my earthly possessions, but a ledger of all endeavors to come, my failures together with my accomplishments. My sorrow and my ambition.” He takes a half step closer, paying no mind to the fact that they were already standing too close. “It was my intention that your victories just as much as your failures would likewise become mine.
“And if vengeance was in your heart all these months, then you might have given some of that craving to me. I would have sought it with you. All you ever had to do, Snake Eyes, was ask.”
See who I am, he had been willing Tommy to do since he came here. See what I’ll do if you let me.
And all along, Tommy had wanted exactly the same from him.
“I couldn’t.”
He’s close enough he could sway in and ask a different sort of question, if he wanted. And he does want, he’s surprised to discover, but to take it now would be the same as stealing it. All of this will never not have been stolen, and that’s true for so much of his life, but it’s never made him feel sick to his stomach before.
“Why not?” Tommy asks, and he looks — feels — two seconds away from swaying in himself.
Now, before he does it, Snake Eyes thinks, desperate. Now, or there will be no taking it back.
Everything will have been predicated on a lie. It will all be tainted. If it isn’t already.
Now, he tells himself, before he does it, or I do.
“Because someone else already made me that promise.”
Tommy blinks, a little wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows. “When?”
“Six months ago at an illegal fight club in Baltimore.”
He watches the math come together on Tommy’s face. Watches him falteringly step back with a forced sense of detachment.
“Ask me his name.”
For a few seconds, Tommy just stares at him looking like he’s been slapped. He shakes his head and like a plea, says, “No.”
“Tommy,” Snake Eyes says, trying to give him this. Trying in the only way he knows how, to be what this man deserves and what he’s always believed him to be capable of. “His name.”
“No. I don’t believe it.”
“He put the gun in my hand, Tommy,” he says, soft. “He wanted me to get you out of that warehouse. He told me…” He pauses to wet his lips, loathe to admit it but knowing he must. “He told me tell you I saw honor in your eyes. Like a buzzword. He said you couldn’t resist.”
Even with just the moon to see by, it’s obvious hearing that puts color high in Tommy’s cheeks. He looks away, visibly shocked and embarrassed at his reaction. His throat works around a swallow.
“Kenta wants the stone. He wants to give it to Cobra, but first, he’ll use it to take all this away from you. You know he will.”
“Then what you sought to take is close at hand. Within arm’s reach, even.” He tugs at the low swoop of his collar to expose the long column of his throat. “Why don’t you come and take it?”
Snake Eyes bites his cheek. What’s been said demands an answer. He closes the distance and puts his hand there. Tommy lets him. He doesn’t even flinch.
The change happens in his eyes.
Disappointment, hurt, resignation, and beneath it all, shame.
“I’ve watched everything I love burn to the ground," Snake Eyes tells him, a greater confession than any he's ever shared. "I know what it did to me, and I can’t put you through that. I won’t.”
By virtue of having his hand cupped against Tommy’s pulse, Snake Eyes feels it thumping faster in his neck. He feels his Adam’s apple bob with a hard swallow.
“Kenta was right to send you,” Tommy says, hushed.
“He wasn’t,” Snake Eyes mumbles, starting to smile ruefully. “He could count on me being what you wanted, but he couldn’t have known…”
“What?”
He leans in to press their foreheads together, saying, “That I’d want you, too.”
Fingers thread through his hair, and then Tommy’s kissing him. Snake Eyes reaches for him, holds him as tightly as he dares. It’s how Tommy holds him, the powerful loop of his arm spanning the back of his neck to keep them all but glued together. It’s a shock to his system every time how strong Tommy is beneath the genteel, delicate veneer. It’s a shock, also, that it turns him on.
The combined forces of gravity and the natural slopes and turns in their bodies — Tommy’s elbow, Snake Eyes’s neck and shoulders — bend them in a single fluid arc. Tommy licks into his mouth, and Snake Eyes slips his arms around his back. Dizzy, and spurred on by how easily Tommy fits into his arms, he takes a page out of Tommy’s book and leans back with his prize neatly hooked.
Tommy makes a noise against his teeth and holds on tighter as soon as his feet come off the ground. Blunt fingernails scrape down his scalp.
“Don’t lie to me again,” he says into Snake Eyes’s cheek.
He shakes his head, still holding on as tightly as he can. “No, I won’t.”
“Tell me truthfully: do you want to be here?”
Snake Eyes looks up at him. He’s hit with a surge of fondness when he realizes he likes seeing Tommy from this angle. “I don’t deserve it.”
“That’s not what I asked you.” One of Tommy’s eyebrows arches. “Do you want to be here?”
“Yeah,” he admits, and why that’s difficult when he was kissing Tommy a second ago, he can’t rightly say. Hell, he’s holding him in his arms like a prom date, he should be able to tell him anything. “Do you want me here?”
Tommy presses his fingertips to Snake Eyes’s cheek, just under his eye. “Yes.”
“Even knowing I lied?” Snake Eyes sets him back on his feet. “Even knowing I could’ve destroyed everything you spent your life building?”
“It takes bravery to admit fault. I made a promise to take your mistakes with your victories,” Tommy tells him, “and I trust you, perhaps to my detriment.” He breaks away and puts some distance between them, one hand pressed to his mouth and his back turned to Snake Eyes. “In the morning, you have a choice to make. To undergo your final trial, or not. You know the penalty for failure. If you refuse to take the test, your time here will be over.”
“And if I pass?”
Tommy turns to look at him. “Then no one can tell you, you are not precisely where you belong.” He looks searchingly at Snake Eyes, then, like he’s memorizing his face, and says, turning to leave, “Goodnight.”
“Tommy, wait.”
He stops in place but doesn’t turn around. It’s so tempting to touch him again, to taste him one more time. It’s an urge boiling over in him that he can’t quite resist.
Tommy shivers at the smallest graze of lips at his neck, and Snake Eyes files it away for later. Optimistic, maybe, but he’s starting to get used to it already. He’d forgotten how heady a drug hope could be.
“There’s something else I have to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want us to be brothers.”
Tommy’s laugh is sharp and loud in the sweet, green dark. “No, I suppose, I don’t either.” He looks over his shoulder so their eyes meet. Forward as ever, but conflicted about it.
“You have a hard time ever taking anything for yourself, don’t you?”
A spill of shadow crosses Tommy’s face. He’s blushing. “I — didn’t foresee this,” he says, as if that’s the big secret, and not that he kisses like that.
“I did,” Snake Eyes pops back, only a little bit teasing him, and since Tommy’s right there, Snake Eyes kisses him again. “Hey, I might die tomorrow,” he starts to say, still playing, meaning it as a cheesy precursor to a come-on.
But Tommy doesn’t let it lie.
“Only you may determine the outcome of the third challenge. There is no mystery involved. If you doubt yourself, then you are better served taking your leave of this place.”
A laugh startles out of him. “That’s really not what I meant.”
If anything, that makes Tommy look more uncertain. “There are other organizations that would take you. I could speak to Major O’Hara. A man of your capabilities—”
“Tommy, I was trying to hit on you.” He slips his arms around Tommy’s waist again. So much for restraint. Lightening his tone so the flirtation comes cross more clearly, he says, “I might be dead in the morning, so let’s have some fun. See?”
“You are a bad influence,” Tommy sighs, and sidesteps him. “Don’t speak to me again of dying.”
Snake Eyes catches his arm. “You laughed before.”
“Before I didn’t have any reason to think you were in danger, and you couldn’t have tempted me this way besides.”
“Tommy,” he murmurs, not letting that lie either.
He gives a flustered little sigh. In an undertone, he says, “I didn’t know.”
“No, I know you didn’t. Been driving me crazy.”
Tommy shakes his head and begins walking back the long way they’d come. Snake Eyes falls into step beside him. Strange how right that feels.
“Tomorrow when I pass your test, will you kiss me in front of Akiko and the Spice Girls?”
Snorting, Tommy pitches his voice up a little to say, “Do you like that reference, Blind Master?”
There’s movement like a curtain coming down among the trees, and suddenly Blind Master’s standing right there. Snake Eyes startles.
“Jesus! Were you standing there this whole time?”
“Some of us walk these woods to meditate,” he drawls, stepping out onto the path. He tips his head at Tommy. “Silence will yield clarity as readily as catharsis, if one knows to listen for it.”
“Also, a key component in stealth,” Tommy muses back.
“Did I surprise you, Tomi-san? Normally you are harder to sneak up on.” He smiles slyly and passes them up on the footpath. “I suppose you are distracted tonight.”
“I wish,” Snake Eyes mutters, to tinkling laughter from Blind Master and an eye roll from Tommy.
“I’m not taking you to my bed the night before your final test,” he hisses. “There is work to do. For both of us.”
Snake Eyes catches up to him and matches his pace. He starts counting on his fingers: “Join your ninja army; tell your grandma and Akiko what Kenta’s up to; fill Scarlett in as soon as she gets here — we know the Joes want Baroness, and she’s footing the bill for Kenta’s gun running. Scarlett gets her collar, the vault’s safe, and afterwards, when the dust settles, you get to decide what’s to be done about Kenta. When you figure out what that looks like, I’ll be right there to help you make it happen.”
Tommy walks alongside him, quiet for a spell. Like he doesn’t mean for it to come out, he says, “I dreamed it would be like this.”
Bumping his shoulder again, Snake Eyes tells him, “Your dreams are mine, right?”
Tommy hums. He looks over at Snake Eyes like he’s seeing him for the first time. “Thank you,” he whispers.
Snake Eyes brushes his knuckles against Tommy’s. “Yeah. Right back atcha.”
They walk back together in the cool, stirring dark, fingers catching without any further words passing between them. His heart’s lighter and freer than it’s been in years.