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Let it never be said that Xerxes Break was a kind, patient, gentle, and understanding boss, and let it never be said that Gilbert Nightray was a calm, competent, and driven employee with nerves of steel, because that was patently untrue.
Gilbert was, in fact, competent in things like killing, and driven when it came to things like “killing the people who took away his childhood best friend”, and Break was full of understanding of many things, though he never used that understanding, but generally Gilbert was useless and Break was an asshole, and it was those traits that led them to their current situations.
“I really don’t care about the child-trafficking fighting ring victims,” said Gilbert. “You brought me on to shoot the boss dead and that’s it.”
“You shot out the town’s electrical grid and now we can’t get out until Grandmother sends a car for us,” Sharon reminded him
“It was an accident!”
“It was pathetic, ” said Break. “Which is why I’m making you watch the surviving children. I doubt even you can fuck them up any more than life already had, after all.”
Gilbert held up his middle finger.
“Don’t treat your superior that way,” Sharon chided, and Gilbert flushed and lowered his hand.
“I just don’t think I’d be any good with kids,” he said. “I’m literally a hitman.”
“Childcare is always something good to put on a resume!”
“Are you planning on firing me?” asked Gilbert.
Break smiled innocently at him. “Not if you do your job and get in there with those trafficked kids!”
Gilbert very nearly suggested that Break do something to himself that would have gotten him fired, had it actually escaped his lips, but instead he flicked the safeties on on his guns and headed over to where Sharon had compiled shock blankets in case Gilbert had had any witnesses when killing his targets.
“How many?” he asked.
“I brought around seven,” she said, “any more than that and we’d have to start killing witnesses. Even seven is pushing it.”
“Not blankets, children,” Gilbert said. “They’ve been traumatized, right? Shock blankets are supposed to help with that.”
“They aren’t made of weed, Raven,” Break reminded him.
“They’re called shock blankets for a reason,” Gilbert insisted. “If I’m going to be taking care of children, I want to be as prepared as possible. Also, I wouldn’t give children weed!”
“You started smoking at, like, sixteen,” Break reminded him.
“Tobacco, not weed,” Gilbert said, “and I really shouldn’t have, you know I’ve been trying to quit for ages!”
“Calm down, my cute little raven,” said Break. “We don’t want to frighten the children, do we?”
Gilbert flushed. “Right,” he said.
“There’s two of them,” Sharon said helpfully. “A girl of twelve or thirteen, and a boy of fourteen or fifteen.”
Internally, Gilbert cursed his luck, images of Alice’s bloody body and Oz’s broken scream flashing behind his eyes at the mention of the ages and genders of the children.
But Alice had died when he was nine, and Oz when he was fourteen, and Gilbert had no reason to think about them. Really. Everything he did was in honor of Oz’s memory, of course, but…
It wasn’t something he should be thinking about, especially when he was about to start caring for two children who had no relation to Oz and Alice whatsoever and didn’t deserve to be compared, even unconsciously, to Gilbert’s dead friends.
He picked up two shock blankets and headed to the room where the two children were being kept. Break had complained at length about how they hadn’t trusted him enough to move and how the girl and tried to bite his fingers off whenever he tried to take off the shock collars that the Abyss had used to keep the children in line, so Gilbert wasn’t totally unprepared, but…
When he actually saw the children, curled together in the back of the dark room, the girl’s long, dark hair a matted, tangled mess over both children, metallic collars glinting on their necks in the light from the door. The boy was pressed up in front of the girl protectively, half holding her back and half shielding her from whatever dangers would come through the door. His hair was similarly matted, though Gilbert was struck by the feeling that, had it been clean, it would have been as light as Oz’s.
“...I brought blankets,” Gilbert said after a moment. “Would you mind if I turned on the light?”
“What’s your name?” the boy asked. His voice was low and ragged, but still: polite. Well-bred. Familiar, though a child’s voice.
Just like the last time he’d heard that voice, over a decade prior.
But: no. That was impossible.
“I’m known as Raven,” Gilbert said curtly. “I work for Xerxes Break, solving problems in a more…permanent capacity.”
“You kill people,” the boy said softly. He tilted his head. “Are you here to kill us?”
Gilbert froze. “What?! No, of course not! You’re kids. ” Kids, just like Oz had been. Kids, just like Alice had been. Kids, like Gilbert and his brother Vincent had never gotten the chance to be.
The girl shifted slightly, and in the dim crack of light emanating from the door, Gilbert saw her hand curl onto the boy’s wrist, clinging to it. “That’s never mattered to anyone else before!” she snapped.
“I’m sorry,” Gilbert said, because there really wasn’t anything else he could say to that. “I promise, I have no intentions of hurting you.” He didn’t move from the door, or turn on the light, but he did hold out the blankets. “These are for you. They’re shock blankets.”
The girl snorted derisively, but Gilbert thought he saw the boy smile.
“Thank you, Raven,” he said. “You can turn on the light, if you close the door first.” His voice was commanding, used to being obeyed. It remind Gilbert so damn much of—
Gilbert closed the door tightly, and fumbled upon the wall until he found the light switch and flipped it on, the lights flickering for a moment before the generator Sharon had set up kicked in and the room was illuminated.
Oz Vessalius was crouched in front of Alice Baskerville, in a position that could be seen as protective (and definitely was) if the person seeing it didn’t know both Oz and Alice so well. Oz was, in fact, holding Alice back, a thin shield between the angriest girl Gilbert had ever met and the rest of the world.
Alice had been larger than life to Gilbert’s child self: he had hated her with everything in him, but he would still watch her in awe as she moved through life like a raging wildfire. Now, though, she was tiny: a slip of a girl, with wild black hair, scowling at him with no recognition in her purple eyes, held back only by her hands on Oz’s wrists. And Oz…
He had always seemed so strong, so unbreakable, a true hero, a perfect human being in Gilbert’s eyes, with a darkness in his heart to match the weakness in Gilbert's own. And now: the fifteen year old before him was all wiry muscle and wary eyes behind a thin veneer of politeness. He was covered in dirt and dried blood, and his clothes were ripped in a way that came only from many long, hard fights. The room stank of sweat and blood and human refuse and decay, and Gilbert’s eyes caught on a spray of blood, on a corpse on the floor dressed similarly to Oz and Alice, face-down and beginning to rot.
Not a threat, then—or at least, not a short-term one. In time (probably even now) it would pose a threat to Oz and Alice’s health, what with all the bacteria attracted by the rot. But Gilbert didn’t intend for either of the children to stay in this room long enough for that to matter.
…He was thinking of them as Oz and Alice. That…that wasn’t good. Clearly, they weren’t; Oz would have been twenty-five by now, and Alice twenty-seven, if his math was correct, and these were children, a boy of around fifteen, a girl of around twelve.
Gilbert handed Oz—the boy the blankets. “There’s two,” he told him, “one for each of you.”
The boy smiled, handing one back to the girl before wrapping his own around his shoulders. “Thank you, Raven,” he said.
Gilbert crouched in front of them, trying his best to seem as unthreatening as physically possible. “You’re welcome,” he said. “Would you mind sharing your names with me?”
Not giving me your names; never that, not after that unfortunate encounter with the Pandora subset who still believed they’d been blessed by fairies. That was just inviting trouble, mostly by way of Break impersonating fairies again. He was, after all, still on the other end of Gilbert’s comm unit.
The boy who Gilbert had nearly deluded himself into thinking was Oz looked back to the girl who still looked just slightly too afraid of Gilbert to be Alice. Her chin jerked—not quite a nod, but not quite a ‘no’ either, and the boy turned back to Gilbert.
“How…how likely are you to believe we’re not lying if we say?” he asked.
“Are you going to say Oz Vessalius?” Gilbert said stupidly, and then cursed himself for saying that. Of course this wasn’t Oz. Oz was dead. And even if he had somehow survived, he would be a man of 25, not this small teenager in front of him, who was admittedly looking far perkier than he had moments before.
“Yeah, actually!” the boy said. “And she’s Alice. She doesn’t have a last name.”
Alice looked like she wanted nothing more than to bite Gilbert, who was suddenly having a hard time remaining upright, though the boots he was crouched in were the sturdiest possible, bought with Nightray money and picked out by two loving brothers, only one of which still spoke to Gilbert.
“I don’t suppose,” Gil said faintly, “that you have any way to prove that?”
The boy claiming to be Oz tilted his head. “Nothing physical,” he said. “I can give you any amount of information on my family that you want, though!”
“Anything, hm…” Gilbert rocked back on his heels, considering. Xai Vessalius’s rejection of his son hadn’t been something shared with society at large. The Nightrays were still mainly unaware of it, and Elliot had always assumed that Gilbert’s violent hatred of the man had stemmed from his last name rather than his treatment of his son. Nothing for it, then: that was what Gilbert had to ask. “Who took care of you, when you were growing up? Who did you…truly put your faith in?”
Oz smiled, a real one, for the first time. “Gilbert. He’s my servant, but also…Gil’s my best friend. He’s really the most important person in my life. I mean, my uncle raised me, because Father hates me, but…Uncle Oscar had his own son who died, and he had no reason to really want me around, but Gil…he was…” Oz looked away, still smiling slightly, even as Alice looked horrifically jealous behind them. “He was everything to me. He was the only one I could ever entirely trust. Plus, he’s a bit of a crybaby, so that’s pretty funny.”
Gilbert swallowed. The facts were correct, such as they were, but…he had never considered that Oz had felt that much about him.
“If you ever tell Gil that I told you that I’ll kill you,” Oz said casually. “If he ever found that out I’d kill myself. So you’d better keep your mouth shut.”
Gilbert choked. Would now be a good time to actually introduce himself? Even though he was never supposed to give out his real name when operating as Raven…even though Oz didn’t want him to know this…even though…
“I expect you’re going to try and get us to leave with you now?”
Gilbert nodded, stiffly and rapidly and as though he was not about to cry.
Oz nodded. “Alright—you might want a tissue, Raven, by the way—and have you ever had unprotected sex that might have resulted in a child around fourteen years ago? I swear to God you look like a grown-up version of Gilbert—Alice, go on, you go with him.”
“I’ve never had sex,” Gilbert said blankly.
Oz laughed in his face, and Break and Sharon started laughing in his ear, and Alice lunged forward and bit Gilbert as hard as he could, so that he screamed, and so that he could pretend the tears were from the gaping hole in his arm rather than Oz’s words.
“Anyway,” Oz said, once, it seemed, he felt he’d laughed at Gilbert enough and Alice was removed from Gil’s arm, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’m not leaving without you,” Alice snapped, returning to her position behind Oz and not even bothering to wipe the blood from her mouth before taking his arms again. “Fuck fucking Gilbert. You’re mine, and we’re staying the fuck together.”
Gilbert spluttered. “What do—does that have to do with anything?!” he exclaimed. “Gilbert I mean. Gilbert Ni…Gilbert. How is he related to this?”
Oz looked at Gilbert suspiciously. “...Alice and I escaped once before,” he said slowly. “We were recaptured and fitted with these collars. If mine comes off, or I attempt to escape, or give up any information, Gil either gets killed or dragged back here, and if he gets dragged back here then I’m forced to either kill him or Alice.” He paused. “They don’t think Alice is a threat, so they didn’t bother threatening her.”
“Well,” said Gilbert, “I really don’t think there’s anything to worry about on that front. Nobody who runs this place is…” alive “...capable of doing anything that would harm anyone, unless I guess if you tried to eat them in about a week.”
Oz rolled his eyes. “Great, you and Alice can bond over your penchant for cannibalism,” he said, attempting to pull the younger girl out from behind him.
“I’m not leaving you here,” Gilbert insisted. “Oz. I swear, nothing bad will happen to you or anyone you care about by escaping. There is nothing the Abyss can do to you or Alice or your friend Gilbert anymore. You’re safe.”
Oz did not look like he believed it.
“I swear to you,” Gilbert whispered, “I swear to you, I will do everything in my power to protect you and everyone you care about. I won’t let anything happen. You’ll be safe, and you can be happy, and…”
Oz’s eyes were wide and longing, and glimmered with tears. He moved forward so that he was inches away from Gilbert, and it took everything in Gilbert not to pull his old friend into his arms and hold him close against all the dangers the world had to offer.
Then Oz pulled away.
“Thank you for your offer,” he said with a fake smile, “but I can’t accept. Please take Alice to safety.”
Alice glared at Gilbert.
Gilbert considered for a moment, then pressed a finger to his ear. “Mad Hatter,” he said, “I need an EMP device.”
“Ooh,” said Break. “Fun! But are you sure it’s safe?”
“It’s almost certainly already safe, since I cut the entire town’s power,” Gilbert said. “I just want to be certain.”
“Aww, little Raven’s gotten protective~!” Break cooed. “We’ll be in in a minute with it.”
“Perfect,” said Gilbert, and then realized that Break hadn’t named a price for the EMP. There was no ribbing, no suggestions that Gil squeeze information out of Vincent, not even a question about the state of the children.
Gilbert was sure it would be fine.
(He knew it would not be.)
The door swung open.
“Hello there,” said Break cheerfully. “Feeling less bitey, are we?” Gilbert raised his eyebrows as his arm dripped blood onto the floor. Break ignored him, zeroing in on Oz, who had immediately scooched closer to an incredibly gratified Gilbert. “So, you’re the one who’s convinced my sweet little Raven here that you’re Oz Vessalius, back from the dead, hm?”
“...Dead?” Oz repeated.
“Br—Boss!” Gilbert hissed, scandalized. If Oz didn’t already know there was no need to tell him. He’d been through enough already, what with however he’d come back from the dead, and his time trapped in an illegal fighting ring, and, oh yeah, the dead guy on the floor that Gilbert hadn’t killed.
“His name is Brboss?” giggled Alice. “That’s weird.”
“Obviously they aren’t giving us their real names,” Oz replied. “How long has it been since they declared me dead ? I haven’t been missing for more than a couple months, right?”
His voice shook just slightly, but Break didn’t seem to notice. Gilbert hesitated, before carefully and hopefully comfortingly patting Oz’s head.
Break smirked. “Why don’t you come with us and find out?” he said. “I can assure you that nobody will let them kidnap or kill your little friend. Plus, if you come back from the dead, it might just help clear his criminal record!”
“What criminal record,” said Gilbert, who had killed many people and been convicted for none of them.
“...For Oz’s murder,” said Break, looking at Gilbert like he was an idiot.
Gilbert, proving his idiocy, spluttered and said, “That was a frame job, and anyway the record was sealed when I turned twenty one!”
There was a moment of pure and absolute silence in the room before Break howled with laughter. Gilbert frantically went over what he’d said in his head, before realizing—oh, fuck—
“What do you mean, ‘when I turned twenty one’?” Oz demanded.
“Fuck,” said Gilbert, with feeling.
Break, who was completely and entirely unhelpful, just kept laughing, at both him and Oz, because Break was the actual literal worst.
The door cracked open again. “Is everything alright in here?” asked Sharon, and Gilbert scrambled to his feet and bolted.
Faintly, he could hear ‘ten years’ and ‘code names for safety’ and ‘confirmation’, but—
Oz was still so young. Oz thought that it had only been months, not years. Oz thought that Gilbert was still a kid, innocent and sweet and not a murderer, not someone convicted in the court of public opinion for the murder of Oz Vessalius as a child, not a pathetic twenty four year old who couldn’t do anything except kill (and Vincent was better at that anyway) and cook meals that Break only grudgingly ate when Sharon convinced him not to outright reject them, a man who’d been smoking since he was sixteen and couldn’t figure out how to break the habit no matter how much he wanted to, a man and not the child Oz had known.
He finally stopped running on the opposite end of the compound from where Oz and Alice had been found before slumping against a wall and pulling some antiseptic and bandages out of his coat to treat his still-bleeding arm.
The bite wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but Alice had still bitten straight through a leather coat and cotton shirt, and retained enough strength to leave quarter-inch deep gashes in a half-moon on his lower arm. The cotton was stained crimson with blood, a color he was familiar enough that it didn’t bring up sickening memories of the last times he’d seen Oz and Alice, but, as he pulled off his jacket and began to roll his sleeve up so that he could treat the cut, he thought about them anyway.
“I thought I’d find you here,” said a familiar voice behind him, and Gilbert jumped, banging his head on the wall behind him and just barely stopping himself from cursing. “...You are Gil, right?”
Gilbert looked away, shamed. “I…didn’t want you to find out like this,” he said.
A warm body dropped down next to him, on the side of his injured arm. “You didn’t want me to find out at all,” Oz said. He sounded like he was smiling, but Gilbert knew better than anyone how good Oz was at faking it. “That’s just like you. —Give me your arm.”
“What?” said Gilbert.
“You arm. So I can clean your cuts, duh!”
Gilbert looked over at Oz. The boy’s eyes were bright, and face determined, though there was something unidentifiable hiding behind his green eyes.
Oz always had been like that.
Gilbert surrendered his arm, and Oz looked over it with practiced hands before carefully cleaning the bite marks, a serious look on his small face, before he expertly wrapped it up, though he didn’t let go.
“Don’t worry about Alice,” he said. “Her bark is worse than her bite, especially if she likes you.”
Gilbert, who had spent a significant portion of his childhood before meeting Oz being disliked by Alice Baskerville, nodded.
“You know,” Oz said, leaning against the wall, “I really didn’t think I’d been here ten years. I knew it was a long time, but…”
“Some days,” Gilbert admitted, voice rough, “I’m surprised it’s only been ten years.” Every moment without Oz had seemed like an eternity, had broken Gilbert down more and more until he became…well, Raven, he supposed. A man who killed without hesitation or remorse, someone Break could point in one direction and say ‘kill there’ and be assured that nothing would remain alive in the area unless Gilbert wanted it to. Hardly a man: a monster.
“You’ve grown up,” Oz said quietly. “I…kind of wish I was there for it, too.”
“You’re back now,” Gilbert said. He swallowed. “I meant what I said back there, about keeping you safe. Even if…even if you don’t want anything to do with…with who I’ve become, I…”
Oz tilted his head. “What do you mean?” he said. “I mean, obviously you’re still Gil. And I was the one who was totally embarrassing back in that room, not you.”
“I’m an assassin, Oz,” Gilbert said. “I—I kill people, for a living, and—I’m not the kid you knew, I’m not any of those things you said, not anymore—”
“And did you think that corpse just spawned in Alice’s and my cell?” Oz said, voice even enough to mean he was upset. “It’s only been maybe an hour…I don’t know how my sense of time is…but, I mean, you haven’t lost any of the things that made you Gil. I even thought, ‘wow, this guy seems a lot like Gilbert except he isn’t vomiting at the sight of blood like Gil does’ when you were first talking about us.”
Gilbert flushed. “I do not vomit at the sight of blood,” he said.
“Not anymore, that’s for sure!” Oz laughed.
Gilbert thought again about Alice Baskerville’s dead body, sprawled in a pool of blood, clutching an unnaturally green rabbit. He thought about trauma, and the therapy that Oscar Vessalius had enrolled him in for five years, and how he’d thrown himself into the art of violence after Oz had been lost.
Gilbert had hated Alice Baskerville with everything in him, but he’d cried for her when she died and hated himself for not defending the older girl. Oz Vessalius had been Gilbert’s whole entire world, and after he was gone, Gilbert hadn’t really cared about anything anymore other than making the people who’d taken (killed, he’d thought) him pay, and eventually just losing himself to his job.
“Yeah, not anymore,” said Gilbert. He hesitated, before deciding that the therapist he’d gone to for five years definitely did say that physical contact was good for children, which meant that Oz wouldn’t hate him for it, and wrapping an arm around Oz and tucking him into his side. Oz scooted a little closer, and Gilbert tried to pretend he wasn’t sure about that, even though Oz’s quiet laugh meant he’d definitely felt Gilbert’s heart rate slow as soon as Oz moved closer, just like when they were children and the only thing that could convince Gilbert that whoever had massacred the Baskervilles wasn’t around the corner, coming for him and the Vessalius family with him was pressing his face into Oz’s shoulder and clinging tight and pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist.
Oz leaned his head against Gilbert’s shoulder, almost a reversal of their hugs a decade prior, and probably the closest he would get to that short of a complete and utter mental breakdown, which was the opposite of what Gilbert wanted. Gilbert held him a little tighter, feeling himself calm down even more.
He wished they could stay like this forever.
“I hope you don’t think that just because you’ve gotten old and good at shooting things means I’ll just let you go, you know,” Oz said. “You promised me forever, and I’m holding you to it.”
“Is that really okay with you?” Gilbert asked, his voice shaking. “I’ve changed.”
“I’ve spent the last decade apparently in a deeply illegal fighting ring,” Oz pointed out. “If people changing is a problem for you…”
“I want to stay with you,” Gilbert said, too quickly, too desperately, but without the stress that kept him in a vice grip at all times he was too clingy and sad and scared, too much like his childhood self who’d been completely unable to protect anyone. “Please, I—I don’t care how, if you don’t want me around that’s okay, but I just want—I know it’s selfish and I’m sorry but please just let me protect you.”
Oz scoffed. “Didn’t I always say that it’s my job to protect you?” he asked. “And didn’t I just say that I’m not letting you go? If you wanted to I couldn’t exactly stop you, now that you’ve gone off and gotten tall, but obviously you don’t want to go, so I’m not letting you run off anywhere. You’re my person, okay?”
Person, because tiny Gilbert had refused to let anyone call him best friend after a memory of a dead girl yelling at him for dyeing her best friend, her pet rabbit bright green sent him shaking to the floor for over an hour the first time Oz had used those words in relation to him.
The rabbit had probably died, too, without its owner to protect it from predators like the neighborhood cats and Vincent.
Gilbert nodded. “Thank you,” he whispered, and held Oz tighter, resisting the urge to use both of his arms, and they sat together in silence until Gilbert came to the conclusion that he probably shouldn’t be keeping an actual child on the cold hard floor for this long (fifteen year olds were basically babies, right?), and Oz, reassured that Gilbert wasn’t going to fall to pieces in the middle of the former illegal fighting ring, ran off to find Alice and apologize for abandoning her to Break’s tender mercies for the better part of three hours.
“God, you’re pathetic,” Break’s voice came from behind Gilbert as he watched Oz run off down the hall.
Gilbert yelped, jumping and whirling around. “Where did you come from?!”
“We’ve been listening this whole time,” Sharon giggled, letting Gilbert see her slap some money into Break’s hand—some stupid bet, probably, meant to mess with him, something Gilbert definitely didn’t want to know about. “I mean, after Alice stopped attempting to murder us for letting Oz run off alone, she even listened in too.”
“That girl is stunningly possessive for a twelve-year-old,” Break said. “That is, assuming she really is a twelve year old girl.”
Gilbert frowned, still off-balanced from his conversation with Oz and the fact that they’d apparently had an audience the entire time. He’d said nothing about his suspicions of Alice’s true identity (if Oz could return from the dead and refuse to age, surely Alice, who’d had similar strength of will and far more access to strange machines, could do the same), which meant that either he was right on the money and Break was about to tell him so for the first time in their long acquaintance, or Gilbert was completely and ridiculously wrong, and so he ought to just keep his mouth shut.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“There’s video evidence of the girl being kept here, going back almost fifteen years,” Sharon said quietly. “From what I’ve seen, experiments were performed on both her and Oz, though the footage is ridiculously patchy, and we can’t see any of the researchers.”
“Really, the only information we have is that Alice has been here over a decade, and Oz has been here around a decade, and they want us to know that.” Break was still smiling, despite the chill that traced its way down Gilbert’s spine. “We’ve entered a dangerous game this time.”
“Don’t we always?” Sharon asked.
“I don’t care,” said Gilbert. “I’m going to keep Oz safe, and Alice too if that’s at all possible.” He had hated Alice Baskerville as a child. She was still a child. Gilbert was not. “Otherwise, I’m not touching this.”
Break laughed in his face, and Gilbert resolved himself to be as involved in this new affair as Oz would certainly want to be. He wouldn’t tell Break, though.
“Well,” said Sharon, “I look forward to how this all shakes out.” She smiled sweetly. “Don’t you?”