Work Text:
Porsche flicked the spark wheel. A hiss. A flare. An orange ember. Heat radiated under his thumbnail. Light flash-cast behind his eyelids. The shadows in the alley slithered away. He tilted his head back. The flame touched his cigarette tip.
And he breathed.
Smoke tickled his palate, ash-warm tendrils snaking down his throat, an acrid aftertaste coating his tonsils. In his lungs, the air—a musted cough from the moment he shrugged on his suit—turned molten. Porsche’s eyes slid shut. His heartbeat pulsed in his ears. The world coalesced—into himself and the fire behind his ribs.
He exhaled.
Rot hung like a second skin in the alley. The litter—cigarette butts, broken glass, dubious stains—blurred into the backdrop. Behind his back, grime coated the wall, a damp overlayer seeping into his suit jacket, settling over dried sweat. Porsche itched. A prickle, acidic from danger and exertion, crawling down his spine. His muscles bunched up. He took another drag.
Click.
From the corner of his eyes, Pete looked through to Porsche as he reloaded his gun. A fluid motion. Pete, with a weapon in his hand and intent clearing through the black of his eyes, was blood in the water.
Somehow, he never contradicted himself. He was always in context until he chose to step out of it.
Porsche had been prepared, but Kinn’s shock echoed into the present; he turned towards a gap in the line-up or at his right-hand side, as if Pete hadn’t shed his pin and suit jacket, and left his remains in Korn’s dollhouse. Kinn never looked at Pete long enough to notice him slipping through his fingers.
Porsche could sympathise. He recognised Pete most and understood him least when he had to stitch him back together in the bathtub. Curled around his knees in a fetal projection of himself, mottled with bruises, the marks like tenderised meat in sallow light—Porsche was hovering over a mirror.
But the surface had turned inwards. Too close for comfort. Blood rushed to Porsche’s temple. He swallowed his vertigo. In front of him, fissures tore open. The gap in the line of Pete’s teeth, his pupils hollowed out. Porsche’s throat constricted. He turned his head away from the smile stretching too-tight, and reached for the salve and the roll of bandages.
He couldn’t afford knowing. Porsche had already exchanged him. If the price was to let Pete drift away, less than a stranger, Porsche would pay it a second time over.
Someday, Pete would disappear. In death or on the run—out of Korn’s hands, out of his.
But, for now, he was here. He leaned forward, gun at the ready. His jeans and t-shirt were far more suited to the job. Porsche had been stitched up in an outfit mimicking Kinn’s style—they shared the same tailor.
Porsche took another drag. His limbs loosened from their vice-clench, a languid fog clouding his mind. Pete’s lips twitched—a frown, maybe.
Porsche offered his cigarette. “Want some?”
“I’m meant to be quitting,” Pete said. Which—of course. Vegas. But it wasn’t a no .
“Come on,” Porsche said, a grin pulling at his cheeks. “You never know. It might be our last.”
Pete’s eyes flicked up. Flint in his dark irises, striking through Porsche’s flippancy. He let the grin drop.
Wordlessly, he stepped towards Pete and held out the cigarette with an open palm.
Pete sighed, grasping it between his fingers. He took a drag and exhaled almost immediately. The smoke must’ve barely touched the back of his mouth.
Porsche snorted. “You’re wasting my last one.”
“Sorry.”
“Why don’t you let me help?” Porsche asked, and added at Pete’s raised eyebrow, “for old time’s sake?”
He didn’t expect Pete to play along, but he handed the cigarette back to him. Porsche held the filter up, his knuckles swiping over Pete’s lips and slightly indented the plush skin. Pete exhaled from his nose; the gush of air wafted over Porsche’s fingers. Holding his breath, he tapped the cigarette against Pete’s lips and Pete opened up instantly, his eyes boring into Porsche. He placed the tip of the filter in his mouth. Pete pursed his lips around it—a second saliva coating. Porsche licked his lower lip reflexively.
“Now, inhale,” he ordered. And when Pete complied: “Deeply. Hold it in your lungs.”
By the glowing sparks, burning through paper and tobacco, light flitted past Pete’s face in patches—his philtrum, his cheekbones, the wells of his eyes were cast in relief.
He always needed shade to feed on the light. In the weeks before Vegas woke up, Porsche could see the bare sun and the hospital’s fluorescent bulbs scrape through Pete. His bones bristled, on the knife-edge of carving themselves out from his skin. Even when he ate, he was starved thin. His lips cracked and peeled in ribbons, dried blood crusted in the corners of his mouth.
Porsche had to tamp down the urge to take a cloth and swipe at his mouth, as he would’ve done with Chay, in their old life. He buried it under a smile and a clap on the back, chipper lines ringing false against his teeth. How’s it going, Pete? Have you been eating? —as if he wasn’t tethered to Vegas’s hospital bed, a human lifeline beside the tubes and catheters.
Pete filled out once Vegas gained some mobility. The bones once protruding were nestled behind a layer of flesh. Sometimes, when he passed by Porsche, the spices lingering on his skin—chilli and lemongrass, warmed by body-heat and the sun—parched Porsche’s throat. Pete was alive; Porsche couldn’t be so sure of himself.
So. “Breathe out.”
Pete exhaled in a steady stream, eyes lidded and heavy. Covertly, Porsche parted his own lips. The smoke seared past his mouth and down his trachea, Pete’s breath encased in his lungs. One, two, three, four—and, then, he let Pete go.
The cigarette was half-way finished.
“Do you want—”
“Keep it,” Pete interrupted. “I’m quitting. For good.”
A dull ache in his gut. “Yeah, of course.”
“I think it’s time, anyway.”
Porsche nodded. He dropped the filter. Ground it under his heel. Smothered the spark. Paper and ash flicked away.
He unholstered his gun. His finger hovered over the trigger.
“Let’s go.”