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The motel they finally pull into isn’t the first one Damen’s seen with the ‘vacancy’ sign blinking, but it’s apparently the first one that meets whatever precise combination of details that Laurent is looking for because it’s the first one he motions for Damen to stop at. Personally Damen hopes that some of those precise details include things like ‘probably not going to be murdered by a drunk prostitute’ and ‘has at least mostly clean running water,’ although he can’t imagine either one of those would be safe bets based on the look of the place.
He also hopes that it’s not simply the first motel that Laurent picked because he had been unconscious when they passed the others. He pulls up to the office and shifts the car to park, looking over at Laurent. He’s awake now, at least, and staring back at him with eyes that are a brighter blue than usual.
“I’m going to get us a room,” Damen says softly, and then winces, because of course that’s what they were here for, and it wasn’t like Laurent was in any state to go get one himself.
“I’m fine , Damen. I’ve stopped the bleeding,” Laurent says, quietly seething in the way he’s been doing every time Damen had shown any amount of concern towards him. “Use cash. And don’t give them your real name.”
“Prince Richard Hornigold the Third it is, then,” Damen says, which gets him a pretty good effort at Laurent's usual eye roll. He leaves the car running and walks into the motel lobby.
On the outside the lobby had looked quite large, but when he gets in he sees that only about four feet or so is dedicated to customers while the rest looks like he had just stepped into the middle of someone’s living room. A TV blares in the corner, the light throwing blue flickering shadows around the room, and a small dog starts yapping the instant he walks in, in lieu of a bell.
“Be right there,” comes a voice from somewhere even further back. “Princess, stop!”
The dog—Princess, Damen has to assume—doesn’t stop. Even when an old woman comes out of the back and scoops up the little terror, it still doesn’t stop until it’s been fed a copious amount of dog treats and been cooed over for an amount of time that Damen was never going to get back.
“Well, look at our customer,” the woman says, eyeing Damen up and down in a way that would be creepy even if she wasn’t old enough to be his grandma. “Lookin’ for a place to stay for the night, honey?”
“Yeah, we need a room. Me and my—”
Bodyguard is on the tip of his tongue, but even though he’s been through the longest day of hell he has enough sense not to voice that.
“—boyfriend,” he finishes.
But the pause had been obvious, and he had never been as good of a liar as he had needed to be.
“Your boyfriend,” she repeats, the lie sounding as fake on her lips as it had on Damen’s, and she makes a show of peering once more around Damen’s shoulders and into the car where Laurent is waiting for him. “Well, honey, your boyfriend looks pretty expensive to me. Men get so carried away with a pretty face and then have no sense left to save some money for a room. Don’t know if that’s the case for you, but if you wanna park your car here and fuck in the parking lot, it’ll only cost you a few.”
“I’ve got money,” Damen says. “Cash. For a room. How much?”
“Forty for the night,” she says, and if that number hadn’t been half that much when he’d walked in here, disheveled and tired and willing to pay in cash, he’d eat his hat. The hat he had lost at some point today. “Or half that if you just need a few hours.”
“Forty sounds like the better deal,” Damen says. He makes sure to open his wallet where she can’t see, although at this point there’s not much left in there. He places two twenties on the counter and they disappear under the hand that’s not currently holding Princess.
“Name?”
“Richard,” he says, and stops. The woman probably wouldn’t appreciate the humor of Prince Richard Hornigold the Third anyway.
“Richard what?”
Damen slips another twenty on the counter, and this disappears just as quickly as the others.
“Just Richard,” he says.
The lady nods. “Just Richard. Got a nice ring to it, don’t need nothing else in my opinion. Room’s the number twelve,” she says, spinning around to grab a key off the wall of hooks behind her. Damen notices that both rooms eleven and thirteen are still hanging up, which means they have a pretty good chance of actually getting some quiet tonight.
“Checkout’s at eleven,” she says, already wandering back towards the TV and cooing at the dog.
Damen takes the key and leaves, the sounds of Jeopardy and the yapping of a little dog named Princess wishing him a good night.
By the time Damen gets all of their supplies inside of the number twelve room Laurent has already made himself at home on the one small bed that takes up the majority of the room's layout, and he’s poking at the wound in his shoulder.
“I’m going to need to change the bandage again,” Laurent says, after Damen locks the door behind them and then props one of the chairs up against the handle for a little extra protection, just in case. “And then—I can take first watch.”
“Like hell you will,” Damen says. “You’ll be lucky if you manage to stay upright for the next twenty minutes.”
He takes a moment to unpack the supplies, focusing on sorting them out on the small bedside table so that he can ignore the glare that he’s sure Laurent is sending him right now. He brings out a few of the snacks he had grabbed at the gas station they had stopped at, near fifty miles ago; two Snickers, Laurent's favorite, and then two backup Twix's, his second favorite just in case he wanted some options, along with some nuts and chips in case he didn’t want anything sweet. It had been almost twelve hours since either one of them had eaten, and they had been through a tough day, to put it lightly.
“It’s just a light stabbing,” Laurent says. Damen’s not sure who he’s trying to convince by saying it out loud like that. “I can still do my job just fine.”
“There’s no such thing as a ‘light stabbing’, Laurent. I’ll take watch tonight. You need to sleep.”
“This is my job , Damen,” Laurent says, and if he weren’t hurt so badly he would never have allowed himself to sound so pained when he said it, wouldn’t allow his hurt to show through his seemingly impenetrable facade. “It’s my job to—to keep you safe.”
“And I am safe, thanks to you. Let me do this for you.”
Laurent doesn’t answer him as he picks away at the mess of fabric on his shoulder, the remnants of his shirt caked now with dried blood and difficult for him to manage with one arm. He hisses slightly as one piece won’t come off easily, and then, when gentleness doesn’t work, rips it off.
Damen stands up, and goes to the bathroom to wash his face. Laurent’s always been notorious for shoving down what he doesn’t want to deal with, more so than Auguste or Nicaise, certainly, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier for Damen to handle.
Might be harder, actually. Because it was Laurent, and not the others.
Damen splashes water on his face and shakes his head. Falling in love with his bodyguard had to be the most cliche situation ever. If Nikandros was here he’d say it was because Damen had a habit of falling in love with any pretty face he spent too much time around, but if that were true then wouldn’t he feel the same way about Auguste? Or Nicaise, even, who could be a little spitfire and who certainly didn’t downplay his distaste towards Damen or to this job but who had the same shockingly good looks as his brothers? Damen cared about all of them, certainly, as much as he cared about anyone who he spent nearly all his time with, but he didn’t feel the same butterflies as he did when he was with Laurent. Didn’t feel that same floaty, almost desperate feeling he got whenever it was Laurent’s shift to watch over him. That need for attention. That need to please, to be seen, to be—
“Damen?”
He’s out of the bathroom in an instant, water still dripping from his face. Laurent’s standing there, his shirt unbuttoned, his eyes wide with surprise at how fast Damen had appeared in front of him.
“I just—I need to take this shirt off. It’s covered with blood. And—”
He gestures helplessly at his arm, cradled against his side. The way the fabric’s twisted makes Damen think that he’d been contorting himself to get out of it, and had only asked for Damen’s help when it became obvious that he was going to have to wait another year to apply for the Cirque de Soliel.
“I got it,” Damen says quietly, moving slowly. Laurent tenses before Damen’s fingers even touch the fabric, but he doesn’t tense any further once Damen starts undressing him and so he has to imagine that what he’s doing isn’t hurting in the physical sense.
They’re very close right now. Close enough that Damen can see the fine blond of Laurent’s eyelashes, the flush on his cheek. He’s wearing an undershirt but that will have to come off too, eventually; there’s blood trickling down the side, dried now, but it must be uncomfortable and most likely sticky, and it’ll be even harder to get off than the shirt. Better to cross that bridge when they come to it, though, and since Laurent wasn’t asking for help with that he could leave it for now.
After a few small turns and a few repressed winces from Laurent, Damen manages to wrangle the shirt off and he gets his first good look at the wound in Laurent’s shoulder. It looks bad. Damen knows that once it’s cleaned it’ll look better, more manageable, but right now it looks like Laurent’s entire shoulder is one big gash.
“It’ll look better once I clean it,” Laurent says, mirroring Damen’s thoughts as he pokes gently at it and winces. “It—it’s not that bad.”
“Sit down,” Damen says, pointing at the bed. “I’ll help you. Let me get a towel.”
“I can clean it myself, I don’t need any help—”
“Laurent,” Damen says, his voice cracking against the impenetrable hardness of Laurent’s walls. “You saved my life today. Please let me do this for you.”
Laurent glances up at him. They’re nearly at a height, which is unusual; Damen almost always towers over people. It's a handy trait to have in his line of work. But Laurent is only just a bit shorter than him, though he’s less wide across the shoulders. Damen likes it, since it’s usually the closest they ever get to seeing eye to eye.
“Okay,” Laurent says quietly, and then moves to the bed. “Okay. I’ll sit.”
Damen gathers the supplies. He had gotten what he could from the small gas station Laurent had deemed safe enough to go into, but it wasn’t much. No iodine or hydrogen peroxide, just an old bottle of Vodka that would have to do well enough as an antiseptic until they could get to a real doctor, and a few discount t-shirts that proclaimed to be the official uniform of a Female Body Inspector employee. He had ripped one of them into strips to turn it into bandages, although he could hardly imagine that they were sterile. Laurent had said it was fine, though, and so there was nothing else to do but trust him.
“Do you think we’re still being followed?” Damen asks, unable to take the quiet sound of Laurent’s ragged breathing as he cleans off all the blood.
“I don’t think so,” Laurent answers. “I think we—they didn’t expect we’d leave the city, I think. I imagine they thought we’d try to go home. To your home, I mean.”
And of course that’s the first place his brother would have checked—if Damen had been by himself, it’s the first place he would have gone. Retreat somewhere safe, somewhere he knew how to defend, not some run down motel on the edge of nowhere.
And he would have likely died because of that. Laurent had saved him over and over again, in so many different ways.
“I didn’t know you could hotwire cars,” Damen says, because he’s been quiet too long and he knows he’s liable to get maudlin about his brother if he lets himself. “I don’t think you listed that in your résumé.”
“I have innumerable skills that aren’t listed on my résumé,” Laurent says, haughty and arrogant as ever. It makes Damen smile, and he turns his face away so Laurent doesn’t think he’s laughing at him. “I can’t afford to leave all of my cards on the table, you know.”
“So wise,” Damen says, only a little condescending, and then leans back and looks at his work. “It’s as clean as it’s going to get, I think.”
Laurent nods and takes another look at it now that all the blood is gone, craning his neck to peer at it as much as he’s able.
“I’m going to need stitches,” Laurent says as Damen throws away the vodka-soaked bloody towels. “Not a lot. Maybe eight.”
Damen nods. “I thought that might be the case. Tomorrow we’ll find a doctor, and—”
“Not tomorrow. It needs to be stitched up tonight,” Laurent says.
“But—it would be impossible to stitch it up yourself. You’d be one-handed, and you’d have to crane your neck—”
Laurent’s silence at Damen’s objection is fraught, and it only takes a moment for Damen to understand what it means.
“No.” Damen’s already shaking his head, hoping that if he moves it back and forth enough times Laurent will understand how little he’s capable of doing this. “No, Laurent, I can’t do it, I don’t know how—”
“It’ll be easy,” Laurent says, soothing, the same way he does when he’s trying to get Damen to agree to stay in for the night rather than go out, or trying to get him to alter his routine way home to throw off anyone who might be watching. It’s an easy, patient voice that Damen’s supremely familiar with at this point, made worse by the fact that it almost always works on him. “I’ll show you how to do it. I’ll even put the marks on my skin like this, see?”
Laurent grabs a pen and makes eight little dots on his skin, tiny black marks on either side of the angry red gash.
“Look, all you have to do put the needle in here, and have it come out there,” he says, like it’s just an easy little craft project and not something doctors train for eight years to be able to do. “I—I need your help, Damen. Please.”
And just like that, Damen knows that he has no other choice. Laurent never says ‘please’, never asks for something when an order can be given instead, and Damen had spent more than one wakeless night imagining what kind of power he’d need to hold over Laurent’s head to get him to say anything like ‘please’ or—heaven forbid—‘thank you’.
Now that he knows, he wishes he didn’t.
He also knows, now—and he’s certain Laurent knows it too, because Laurent never misses advantages like that—that he would do absolutely anything to get Laurent to say such things again in any other setting than the one they’re in right now. If Laurent wanted Damen to sign away his entire empire he only had to say one word to make it happen. One word and Damen would put himself in front of Kastor’s gun and let him pull the trigger. It should be a terrifying feeling, to let someone else have that kind of power over him. Especially someone like Laurent, who was cold, ruthless, smart as a whip and with laser sharp focus. Instead, it feels—
Comfortable. Safe.
Freeing.
“Okay,” Damen says, because there are bigger issues at hand, more important things to deal with right now than his ridiculous crush on his own bodyguard. Cliche indeed. “Let’s get you all stitched up, then.”
In the end, it’s not that bad of a job.
Laurent bears the pain stoically, and reassures him a few different times in a few different ways that it’s not that bad. But Damen pricks his finger with the needle on accident (and then has to disinfect the whole thing again) and it hurts a lot, so he thinks that Laurent must be either lying about the pain or sparing Damen his true feelings on the matter. But being stabbed with a tiny needle eight times is surely not as bad as being stabbed with a dagger once, so maybe he was telling the truth, after all. Or maybe the badness of the larger wound outweighed the badness of the other smaller ones, and canceled it out.
“How does it feel?” Damen asks, throwing the bloody thread away. The needle would hopefully not be needed again but he keeps it just in case, disinfecting it in a glass of vodka before putting it back in the first aid kit.
“I’ll be playing at the company softball game by Sunday,” Laurent says shortly.
So, fine. Obviously Laurent isn’t the kind of person who’s going to complain about his circumstances until they’re impossible for him to deal with alone, and so hovering about him like an anxious mother hen isn’t going to help and is only going to annoy him further. Damen ignores him as he sets the room to rights, and Laurent moves himself into a more comfortable position against the headboard, wincing whenever he jostles his shoulder too much, his breath coming out in small, controlled puffs of air.
Eventually he gets settled, and Damen decides that now’s a good a time as any to try and get him to eat in a manner that’s as little mother hen-y as possible. He turns on the TV, setting it at a low volume on an innocuous channel, and then grabs up all the food he had bought at the gas station and brings it over to the bed, under the pretense that he’s going to eat it while watching whatever's on.
With his gaze directed towards a rerun of some 70’s sitcom and his attention fully on the injured man behind him, he makes a show of considering a bag of nuts, scanning the dietary information on the back before shaking his head and holding it behind him for Laurent to take. He doesn’t look to see if Laurent grabs it, or is even considering grabbing it, but after a moment the bag is lifted out of his hands and he can hear the package being opened. He waits for the span of two commercial breaks before he does the same song and dance again, this time with one of the Snicker's bars, holding it out behind his back.
“All right, I get it,” Laurent says irritably, grabbing the Snickers out of his hand with more force than Damen thought him capable of in this state. “I’m not some sort of injured bird you have to hand feed. Come sit up here with me.”
Damen does, grabbing the rest of the food and dragging it with him. He settles up against the headboard next to Laurent and places the food between them, and for a while they just eat their junk food and watch the unnameable TV show neither one of them really care about in silence.
“Tell me something,” Laurent murmurs eventually. When Damen looks over Laurent’s resting his head against the headboard, staring at Damen while chewing thoughtfully on a piece of beef jerky. “A story. Something. Anything to take my mind off how much my stupid shoulder hurts right now. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Something you don’t know,” Damen repeats, as if Laurent couldn’t intuit everything about him from just a glance, as if Laurent didn’t already know every single thing there was about him worth knowing. He considers it for a moment, and then smiles. “Do you remember when we first met?”
“I can recall periods of time longer ago than eight months, Damianos,” Laurent says, all bite and sarcasm, but when Damen glances over at him he’s smiling. “Of course I remember.”
“You were sitting in my favorite booth at my favorite restaurant, with a smirk on your face like you had already won a game that I didn’t even know we were playing yet.”
“A game I keep winning to this day,” Laurent says. “You know, I was present for this interaction. If you’re going to tell me something I don’t know, you’re going to have to get very creative.”
But Damen doesn't take the criticism seriously, and only makes himself more comfortable on the bed as he warms up to the memory. “At first I thought that maybe you were some sort of crazy stalker. Like, maybe you had fallen in love with me one night as we passed on the metro, and you hadn’t been able to think about anyone except me from there on out and you followed me to and from work, to my favorite places, to all my hangouts, until you knew everything about me.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Laurent mutters.
“That’s not far from the truth, you know. You did stalk me.”
“I didn’t—when it’s for work, it’s called reconnaissance,” Laurent says, spitting out the word. “And it wasn’t just me. Auguste and Nicaise helped.”
“But then I thought—no, I would have remembered if I had seen you before, even if it was just a passing glance on the metro, so it can’t be that.”
“A lofty claim.”
Damen decides that digging in his heels in this matter would only annoy Laurent, however completely true the statement had been, and so he drops it and says, “I couldn’t believe that my father went behind my back like that and hired you. He had been harping at me for months, you know, about being more careful, about hiring some help, warning me that someone had it out for me—but I didn’t believe him.”
Still wouldn’t, probably, not if he hadn’t seen it all for himself by now. That rage in Kastor’s eyes, always so carefully concealed, his unwavering, hidden belief that Damen was the only thing standing between him and the empire he thought was rightfully his.
And Laurent, standing right in the middle of the two of them, exposing everything. He would be dead now a hundred times over if it hadn’t been for Laurent.
“When you told me that my father had hired you to protect me, do you know what the first thing that ran through my head was?”
“I can only begin to imagine,” Laurent says, but he’s careful now, stepping lightly the way he does whenever Damen brings up his family. “I would imagine it had something to do with the fact that you thought I was better suited to a bedroom than a boardroom.”
“No. I thought, maybe someone really does want me dead, and maybe it’s whoever hired you. Because I’m going to be so busy staring at your face that I might walk right into traffic and get his by a bus.”
“You did not think that,” Laurent says, moving a hand to swat at him and then wincing as it pulls on his stitches. “And besides, that amounts to the same thing.”
“No it doesn’t,” Damen says. “Yours was crude. Mine was sweet.”
“You’re right. Getting hit by a bus is a truly romantic gesture, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Laurent says. “But also, if you didn’t think that your instant infatuation with me wasn’t completely obvious, you’d be wrong. You’re supposed to be telling me something I didn’t already know, remember?”
“I wasn’t—I’m not—I was not infatuated with you,” Damen says, feeling his cheeks start to burn.
“You should know better than trying to lie to me by now, Damianos. It never works out well for you.”
“Well how about this, then,” Damen says, because he’s embarrassed and because Laurent is goading him, and a little because Laurent hasn’t complained once about his shoulder hurting since they started talking. “That day we first met? I was fully prepared to take you down to my father’s office and fire you right in front of him. And then—do you remember what happened on the way over there?”
“No,” Laurent says. “What happened?”
Damen glares at him. “We got mugged, remember? That crazy guy in the alley jumped us, and he had a gun. Surely you’re not that inured to violence that you’ve forgotten about it.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Laurent says. “But it didn’t happen the first day we met.”
“Yes it did,” Damen says, turning to him on the bed. Laurent’s watching him carefully but his eyes are no longer glassy like they had been earlier, and he’s not holding himself like he’s a pane of glass about to shatter. “He jumped us, and then you kicked his ass. I’ve never seen anyone fight like you did. I could barely keep track of you, you were moving so fast. Did you think I would forget something like that?”
“I don’t think you’ve forgotten, no,” Laurent says. “But I’m telling you, it didn’t happen that first time we met.”
“Yes it did,” Damen says again. “We were coming back from the diner—”
“Because you go there almost every day,” Laurent interrupts.
“—and I distinctly remember that we were fighting, and I was telling you how much I didn’t need any help, and then—”
Damen pauses, for a moment. Meeting Laurent—and then Auguste, and then Nicaise, and then being told by his father that there had been designs on his life but he wasn’t sure by who—it had all coalesced into one blurry memory, sticky with shame that he couldn’t protect himself or his family, anger that someone hated him enough to want him dead, claustrophobic with the knowledge that there were now three people watching him day and night, cataloging his every movement, watching and accompanying him any time he left his apartment. The apartment that they now lived in, together, the four of them the strangest group of unlikely roommates.
“It was four days after we first met,” Laurent says, and Damen looks up at him. “And I know that because I hired the man who jumped us. But you were right about us fighting.”
“You—hired him,” Damen repeats.
“Yes,” Laurent says, and when Damen looks to see if there’s any embarrassment or remorse on Laurent’s face, he finds none. “I hired him because I needed to show you what I was capable of. I needed you to know that I could hold my own in a fight, and I knew that you would only respect me if I could show you how competent I was. And I was running out of time.”
“Out of time for what?”
“You know what,” Laurent says softly. “I knew I only had a few more days at best before you gave your father an ultimatum to fire us, or before you…I don’t know. Fled the country or something. I know you didn’t like having us around. But I also knew that you were in danger, and I—”
Laurent stops, suddenly, and then looks at his shoulder, and then back at Damen.
“—and I was right,” he finishes.
Damen gets the feeling that that wasn’t what Laurent was going to say, but he doesn’t push it. Laurent was right, at any rate; Damen had been preparing a case against the brothers to get them fired, his first and foremost complaint being that it didn’t look as if any of them—barring Auguste, perhaps, but only on a good day—could beat him in a fight, let alone protect him from anyone more skilled who came after him. And while the man who mugged them wasn’t exactly what anyone would call skilled, the way that Laurent had taken him down—fast, efficient, with lightning quick reflexes and an amount of muscle that Damen hadn’t known he had been hiding—had done a lot to change Damen’s mind about the whole situation.
He wants to be mad. Mad that Laurent had gone behind his back and done something sneaky like that, although in hindsight it fits in perfectly with everything he knows about him and how he works.
He wants to, but he can’t stop from feeling a pressure in his chest that’s dangerously close to overflowing, the same feeling he gets when he falls asleep on the couch and wakes up with a blanket over him, tucked under his feet so he won’t get cold. Or when he stumbles home the morning after a long night of working for the family business to find a cup of coffee with three sugars in it waiting for him at just the right temperature to be good.
“You were right.” Damen repeats Laurent’s words, and when he looks over at Laurent there’s something like surprise on his face. “You were right about me going to my father to get rid of you. I had planned it all out, I had all the reasons ready for why I didn’t need you. And of course the only way my mind was changed was by seeing how well you could fight, as if that’s even the most important way you’ve protected me. You’ve found weaknesses in me that I didn’t even know I had. You’ve pointed out all the ways I’ve made myself susceptible to attack. Loudly, and at length.”
“I am not loud ,” Laurent says, scowling.
“You’ve very decisively lectured me, then,” Damen says smiling. “And—I’m alive today because of it.”
“I was just doing—”
“Your job,” Damen interrupts. “I know. You were just doing your job.”
And he did know. The very few times Damen had pushed for something more—asking if Laurent wanted to come get breakfast with him even though it was Nicaise’s shift to guard him, or seeing if he wanted to watch a movie even though it was Auguste’s turn to stay—Laurent always retreated. He always hid behind his iron clad belief in his job, behind the professionalism that he wielded like a shield.
And really, Damen should take that as an answer in itself. He wasn’t one to pursue someone who was uninterested in him.
But there were moments between them that he could swear were real. Small things, like when they would spar together and Laurent would show off more than he needed to in a way he never did when he practiced with his brothers, or when he would pin Damen down with more force than was exactly necessary. When Laurent would laugh at something he said, and it wouldn’t be his usual polite laugh but the kind that crinkled up his nose and reached up to his eyes. The way Laurent looked at him, sometimes, with an expression that Damen was certain he'd never be able to decipher, but was beginning to think it might be something that mirrored his own feelings.
“It’ll be over soon,” Laurent says, and then after a pause, “this job.”
Damen doesn’t answer. He knows it as well as Laurent does. This thing with Kastor had come to a head, and once it was taken care of—
Well. Once it was taken care of either he or Kastor would be dead, and there was no way around that. There was no going back now, not after what had happened today. Not after what he had done to their family, their business. Not after what he had done to their father.
Not after he had hurt Laurent.
“We’ll move out,” Laurent continues. “The three of us. You’ll get your space back.”
“Yeah,” is all Damen can make himself say. He remembers when the three of them had moved in, how he had been loath to give up so much space to a cause he didn’t believe in. Now he can’t even imagine what he had ever done with all that space to begin with. He remembers how quiet it had been, sometimes. Before. How at night the building would creak and make noises like high rise buildings tended to do, but how he hadn’t heard any of that since the brothers had moved in. Now all he heard was the hum of the equipment they used, the tinny noises from the music Nicaise would listen to even when the others asked him to turn it down. Someone in the kitchen making food, clanging around with pots and pans. Someone on the phone, someone checking the front door. Little noises that meant that he wasn't alone, that there were other people in his life who cared for him, even if they only did so for a paycheck.
“We’ll move on.” Laurent won’t stop talking, won’t stop bringing it up even though Damen’s made it clear he doesn’t want to talk about it. “You won’t have to worry about us trailing after you anymore whenever you leave your apartment. You won’t have to try and sneak out without us noticing, even though you know we always do. You won’t have to watch Nicaise’s dumb TV shows every Thursday night. You won’t have to smell Auguste’s atrocious attempts at baking. We’ll go to our next client, and you’ll finally be able to get your life back together—”
“Stop.”
Laurent does. It’s surprising, in a way, because Laurent almost never stops once he’s on a roll like that, once he’s found the weak spot that he can exploit and manipulate and dig into. And it is so obviously a weak spot for Damen, who can’t rightly explain why all of those things he had just said—things that Damen had been wishing for ever since the team of brothers moved in—seem like dire predictions of a lonely, cold future.
“What I meant was,” Laurent says, softly this time, and careful, “is that after this business is concluded you won’t need us anymore. And you won’t be a client of mine, and I won’t be an employee of yours. There would be no job that had to be done, or enemies of yours to focus on to make sure you're kept safe. And—if that were the case—”
Laurent goes silent. When Damen looks over at him Laurent is frowning at him without rancor, like Damen's some sort of puzzle that he just can’t figure out how to piece together, or like everything that he does brings up contingencies for which Laurent has no map to.
Damen had thought, before, when Laurent looked at him like that, that he was being scrutinized. That he was being tallied up, brought up tight in a ledger and found wanting. And now, for the first time, Damen thinks that maybe it’s something else. Maybe it has nothing to do with his shortcomings at all, and more to do with Laurent’s own.
“If that were the case,” Laurent tries again. He settles back against the headboard, as comfortable as he can make himself, and closes his eyes. “How would we meet for the first time then? What would it look like, with me sitting in your favorite booth in your favorite restaurant, smirking at you like I apparently do so well?”
The answer is on the tip of Damen’s tongue immediately. He doesn’t even need to think about it, even if he can’t make himself actually say the words.
I’d ask you out. I’d ask you to stay. I’d tell you not to move your things out of that room with the nice windows that you’ve taken over, not to take back that ridiculous kitchen timer that looks like a chicken and squawks like a banshee that we’ve had no less than six separate fights about, not to get rid of that weird looking sponge thing that you use in the shower. I’d tell you that everything I have is yours, if you want it, that the thing Kastor is willing to murder his own brother for would be offered to you for free on a platter. That I’d give you my heart, if you gave me even the slightest indication that it was something you wanted too.
And then, when his brain finally catches up to what Laurent really asked: Laurent’s just admitted that the first thing he’d do when given complete freedom to be gone from Damen’s life forever is to go meet him in the one place he knows he’ll be. And there they could meet, not as employee and client but as—
Equals. As men who had nothing standing between them, no rules or obligations or duty. Only them.
“I’d tell you,” Damen says. He settles in next to Laurent, who still has his eyes closed, and doesn't open them as Damen moves around. “But you’ve already berated me for telling you things you already know.”
“Loudly, and at length,” Laurent murmurs, and there’s a ghost of that smirk on his lips that means that he knows that he's already won, and when Damen laughs it blossoms into a full smile and Damen thinks that maybe he has too.
