Chapter Text
Peter Nureyev had been on a lot of failed heists. He’s found himself in many a sticky situation, but practice makes perfect and he can always, always get out of them.
Except.
Except that he’s not used to having to plan around the lady he goes on most of his heists with. Sure, they’d been on a few jobs together at this point and a very small number of them had gone off without a hitch, but this was a new low.
He and Juno were trapped on either side of a mechanical door, guards surrounding them on both sides, and Juno had twisted his ankle to a concerning degree. Ultimately, not such a difficult situation for Nureyev to get himself out of, but he’d rather have his arms pulled off before he left Juno here.
So instead he let the security handcuff him and open the door, where Juno is snapping at the guards around him, but in a similar position to Nureyev.
Nureyev prides himself on staying cool under pressure. He never slips up in his aliases, he never cracks when people demand to know where he hid the items he stole from them (which they usually do with their fists), he always keeps a level head so when the slightest opportunity for escape appears, he can take it and be gone from these people forever.
Juno Steel is quite the opposite, in many ways. He snarls, and lashes out, and spits barbs, and tempts fate. He rarely starts a fight that isn’t finished some way or another, often with him in the hospital or bandaging his new wounds. But one thing Nureyev can respect about Juno (not including all the other things he respects and loves about the lady) is that he usually ended up with some sort of plan. They were rarely as clean or as intricate as Nureyev’s, and included stealing someone’s blaster more often than not, but they were plans, and Juno wasn’t dead yet, which meant they must work.
When Peter Nureyev worked with others (which was quite uncommon before joining the Aurinko crime family), he usually only planned for himself and sometimes the others, if there was a safe way to do it. His former partners in crime knew he was the one coming up with the plans and left him to it, expecting that they’d be included in any daring escapes. Juno never did that. His mind was running at a hundred miles an hour, trying to find a way out for him and Nureyev that resulted in the least amount of people hurt. It might be infuriating, if Nureyev didn’t love him so damn much. Juno scowled as they were dragged to wherever it was the security put intruders. Nureyev had his theories as to where that was. Juno clearly didn’t.
“Where are we going?” He hissed to Nureyev. “They won’t call the cops, they’re all blatant criminals. Do they have a… a brig or something?”
Nureyev just shook his head. Talking about right now this was probably not their best plan of action, what with the trigger-happy security team breathing down their necks.
One of the members of said trigger-happy security team answered Juno’s question, though. “You’re going up there, thieves,” they said, tugging on Juno’s shoulder so he turned to look where they were pointing.
Nureyev looked up and saw a squat, gray building on one side of the courtyard they were in. The window the guard was pointing to, specifically, seemed just like the others, except this one had a person standing in it. Their back was to the window and it was so far away that Nureyev could only make out a little bit of their form, but they looked to be dressed a lot nicer than the security. Almost dressing like Nureyev himself: carefully constructed to fit in with the upper class, making up for the actual poverty of the wearer.
That was a bad sign.
Buddy had sent them on this mission with fifteen contingency plans, just in case (all of which Nureyev had memorized), and they’d somehow managed to go off-script. They were supposed to break into and steal from a criminal organization, which was always risky. Thieves know how to plan against thieves, after all.
Nureyev had done all the research on this place that he could. It seemed like a very morally upstanding criminal organization, all things considered. No indentured service, relatively safe housing, no brands or tattoos binding you to the place – hell, they even got time off. It was better than most regular jobs. What Nureyev hadn’t managed to find was a single trace of information on the head honcho. They’d either be the cruelest psychopath or a very generous (and rich) soul, to run an organization like this.
And with what he could see through the window, Nureyev could only assume that was who they were about to meet. It sent chills down his spine, not knowing what he was going up against.
Nureyev tuned into the conversation the guards were having as they practically dragged their prisoners along. It just sounded like office gossip, there was no mention of them having found and caught Vespa, who was still in the compound, or Jet, who was waiting outside. That was good. He could use that to his advantage.
He just had to get a message across to them, somehow, without altering the security that he was talking to someone. That was going to be tricky, but he’d managed harder sleight of hand tricks.
Nureyev peeled his eyes off the person in the window as they got closer, his mind racing through ways he could contact Vespa or Jet. Vespa was the better option of the two, as much as she hated him: she was already in the building and she was a highly talented assassin.
How could he get a message across to her? He hadn’t proven himself to be chatty, so it would be suspicious if he suddenly started blabbering to send her a coded message, but he definitely couldn’t reach his comms and type out a message without being noticed, no matter how good he was.
He was considering his options when Juno froze. Nureyev always kept part of his gaze trained on his lady, just in case, and the sudden halt caught his attention.
“Keep moving,” the guard instructed, her voice indicating she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Juno didn’t move. His eye was locked on the window that the other guard had pointed to earlier, horrified.
Nureyev looked up at the window but couldn’t see what was upsetting Juno so badly. The person in the window had turned a little, so Nureyev could see his face. He was quite handsome, but there was nothing upsetting about him.
Nureyev prided himself on knowing Juno Steel quite well. He knew about the HCPD, and Diamond Hijikata, and Juno’s various addictions, and Ramses O’Flaherty/Jack Takano, and Sahra Steel, and, of course, Benzaiten. He knew a lot about Juno’s past – not always in the most detail, he didn’t want to press Juno into telling him things he didn’t want to – but he also knew a lot about Juno. He knew the face Juno had made the first time he set foot on a planet that wasn’t Mars, he knew Juno got restless and grumpy if he had nothing to do for an elongated period of time, he knew Juno was surprisingly good at cooking, for someone who’d had coffee like it was a meal for most of his life.
So it was concerning (and, admittedly, infuriating) when he didn’t know what was going on with Juno. He could usually hazard a guess as to why his lady was upset, even if he couldn’t figure it out exactly. So seeing Juno stop dead in his tracks, face stricken with pure horror, was worrying for more reasons than one.
Nureyev got as close to Juno as he could, considering the guards keeping their eyes on the pair, and tried to understand what was bothering him.
“Is it your ankle?” He whispered, though that seemed like a stretch.
Juno shook his head, though Nureyev couldn’t be sure he’d heard him. He seemed pretty checked out. Juno wasn’t saying anything, but Nureyev could tell he was mouthing the word ‘no’ over and over again.
“No, no, I stopped seeing you,” Juno whispered, voice hoarse. “I stopped, I’m better now.”
Nureyev didn’t know how to make his love feel better, but at least the guards seemed as confused as he was: they’d stopped trying to get Juno to move and were staring at one another in bewilderment.
“Does he do this often?” One asked Nureyev, clearly disturbed.
There were tears in Juno’s eye as he stared at something that Nureyev couldn’t understand. The most troubling thing happened when Juno called out for someone Nureyev would’ve never expected: “Vespa! Vespa!” He cried.
She didn’t come, obviously, but now Nureyev was properly unsettled.
The guards took Juno’s plea for the assassin/doctor in a very different way as Nureyev. They grabbed him by the shoulder and kept walking, shoving him along with their every step. Nureyev had never seen Juno like this. He didn’t like it.
“Juno,” he said quietly, as the guards were distracted by the keypad by the door (one of them had forgotten the code, apparently). “What’s wrong?”
Juno just shook his head again. “He’s not supposed to be here anymore.”
“Who?”
Juno didn’t respond, mainly because he was busy biting his tongue to cut back a yelp as a guard jerked him into motion particularly violently, disturbing Juno’s ankle.
Nureyev walked along beside Juno, letting his love lean on him as he limped. He desperately wanted to speak with Juno about whatever he’d seen, but now was clearly not the time.
They headed up two flights of stairs and Nureyev became convinced that he’d been right earlier, when he assumed they were going to see the boss of this organization. The hallways were nicer up here, with bigger windows and none of the lightbulbs were failing. (Nureyev had been startled by the relative lack of broken light bulbs lower down, as well.)
Juno’s face hardened in determination as they approached the door at the end of the hall, like he was about to prove, once and for all, that whoever he’d seen wasn’t there.
“You’re lucky,” one guard said as the other knocked on the door. “The boss wants to see you, and he’s quite forgiving. If it were me, you’d be torn apart limb by limb.”
Nureyev couldn’t care less about the empty threats being thrown his way, instead intrigued by whoever the ‘boss’ was. He leaned in to get a good look as the door opened slowly, but the person standing behind a desk, looking down at a stack of papers, wore a mask over most of his face.
It was an intricate mask, one Nureyev himself might wear, if he cared for masks. It was in the shape of a heavily stylized cuckoo bird, two peacock feathers coming out from the corners of each eye. Around each eye hole, there were two distinctly Earthan flowers painted on the material of the mask in shades of purple and white. Quite beautiful, Nureyev had to admit. He’d always thought masks were cheating, but he was willing to forgive this one.
The man had shoulder-length dreadlocks, tied together at his neck. He was wearing a nice dress shirt with a black corset covered in depictions of what Nureyev recognized as a tree, a pair of loose balck pants that would be easy to move in and some jewelry around his neck and wrists. Nureyev recognized hidden blasters and knives in various places around the room, but otherwise his and Juno’s lives seemed not to be in imminent danger.
He looked over at Juno, who was staring intensely at the man behind the desk. Without looking up, said man waved the guards out of the room.
When he did look up, the casual air that he seemed to irradiate was replaced with tension. Juno tensed up beside Nureyev. Nureyev hadn’t the slightest clue what was going on and he didn’t like not knowing.
“Juno?” The man behind the desk asked, softly.
“Benten?”