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The first thing they buy with their haul is a tattoo gun.
Or, well—okay, not the very first thing. Before that, they call their most discreet hookup for a private jet, John’s voice shockingly stable over the phone while Gordon fades in and out of awareness, a hand pressed to his side like it’ll calm the wild heartbeat pounding against his gunshot wound. Even with the world thick and muted around him, a thought worms its way into the back of Gordon’s head – that if AJ were here, they’d already have a jet, free of charge – but he grits his teeth against it. Better not to think about it.
There’ll be plenty of time for that later, once they’re thousands of miles away.
The jet is already there when they pull onto the runway – half a mil is a powerful motivator, no matter who you are – and they waste no time boarding, Gordon dragging the two cases behind him while John cradles his sister’s slack, sleeping body in his arms. He murmurs comfort to her, calls her Nay-omi in his flat American accent, and for the first time since Ghost phased back into their lives, Gordon feels like they might just survive this.
The family has shrunk, been culled of the young and the bright-eyed and the least hardened, but it hasn’t been wiped out. Not yet – though friends and foes alike have tried. And now they get to run, like they should have years ago.
They give the keys to their hookup and tell him to keep the Escalade and the envelope of cash in its glove compartment. After what happened to Scott, they can’t be too careful. They’ve become experts at buying silence and loyalty over the years, but with a trail of dead bodies leading right to their doorstep, they need it now more than ever.
John waits until the jet is in the sky to start fussing, pushing Gordon down onto the bench seat in the back and threading a needle with shaky fingers.
“You just carry that around with you?” Gordon jokes, most of the humor drowned out by the pain of his dress shirt being peeled away from his wound, taking skin and congealed blood along with it. “Is that Grandma Rahway’s sewing kit?”
John just levels him with an unimpressed glare. “Occupational hazard,” he snips, biting off the end of the thread. “You never know when some big, dumb idiot is gonna get himself shot and need to be patched back up. Now, shut the fuck up and let me play nurse.”
For once in his life, Gordon submits to someone else’s will without a fight, letting his body fall back, limp and easy like he’s on an operating table. Even with his eyes shut tight, he can feel that John’s hands are steady now, pulling the pieces of his torn flesh back into place and then going at them with the needle. Luckily, it was a shallow hit – Gordon had pulled the bullet out himself before their mad dash even hit the highway.
“Good thing he can’t shoot half as well as he can talk,” Gordon mumbles, the words slurring a bit. “If he could, I’d probably be—”
“Yeah,” John says when it becomes clear that Gordon isn’t going to complete the statement. “Can’t dodge, either.”
The needle goes through a particularly sore spot, followed by the slow, agonizing drag of the thread, and Gordon hisses. His eyes fly open. “Fuck’s sake, man, you can’t give a guy a little warning? Or, better yet, a little Scotch? This is fucking torture!”
John rolls his eyes, a split-second glimpse of normalcy that Gordon wants to bottle up and keep forever. God knows they’re going to need it in the weeks to come. “Sure, if you wanna bleed out in the back of a jet. Stop bitching, G – I’m almost done.”
And thankfully he is, brow furrowing as he makes the last few stitches and then ties it off. His hands are almost as bloody as Gordon’s wound by the time it’s over, but he barely seems to notice, just runs them through his hair as he collapses into the seat across from Gordon and kicks his feet up. They’re a pathetic sight, the two of them – not to mention Naomi, who is passed out, pale and gaunt, in the chair next to the door – but they’ve got about six hours before they need to worry about that.
So they don’t, melting into the soft suede seats and not saying a single word. Not when the pilot checks in on them and not when Naomi wakes up long enough to get her bearings before falling asleep again.
And not when John’s hands curl into angry fists and slam mercilessly into the unforgiving wall of the jet until his knuckles are bruised. Gordon uses it as an excuse to test his range of motion, stretching just far enough to close his fingers around the ice bucket on the minibar and pass it over. John grunts before burying his hand in the melting ice water.
They make themselves presentable before disembarking, paying off the pilot and assuring him they won’t need return passage. It’s a weird feeling – this hasn’t been Gordon’s home since he was a child and he never expected he’d have to turn his back on his new one for good. A lot has changed in the past twelve hours.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the seamless way Gordon and John work around each other, clean and instinctive as they pave their way through whatever life throws at them. Ghost might have been the one to put the team together, the one that showed them how to take rather than wait around for life to decide to become fair, but Gordon and John have always been the backbone of the operation.
And now they’re the only ones left.
So they take that easy comradery and they put it toward settling in, booking two rooms at a four-star hotel in Nassau and charming the concierge with a story about bringing Naomi’s new American husband home to meet her family for the very first time. It doesn’t matter that the only family they have is huddled right there at the service desk – the man buys it hook, line, and sinker.
John doesn’t know a word of Creole but Gordon sends him out into the city anyway, on a mission to scrounge up food and a few changes of clothes for each of them. Gordon’s mission is simpler: he parks himself in the doorway of one of the hotel rooms and guards it with every inch of his hulking frame, making sure Naomi doesn’t pull one of her disappearing acts.
She huffs at him in annoyance, but doesn’t argue, the precariousness of their situation enough to break through the drug haze in her head and uncover a speck of common sense.
“I didn’t mean it, you know,” she says after a while, leaning back against one of the headboards with the blankets pulled up to her neck. The TV is on low, a murmur that helps muffle the ringing in Gordon’s ears. “I know I’m fucked up, but I never would’ve left you alone.” She bites her lip, her voice rising in pitch until it’s almost pleading. “I need you to believe that.”
Gordon sighs. “I know,” he says and it’s the honest truth. Their childhood was a wreck from day one, kicked about by the whims of the universe, but Naomi had always been his constant. Even now, even wasting away and enslaved by her addictions, he knows his sister wants to be there for him. It isn’t always the thought that counts, but they’re two thousand miles from home and knee-deep in shit and down to three pieces of their puzzle, so he figures it’s enough for now.
Naomi tosses him a small, tight smile. “We’ll be okay, G,” she says. “All of us.”
Gordon just hums in answer.
When John returns, his arms are full of bags and the tiniest flicker of light has returned to his eyes. He wastes no time unpacking the food and putting it into the fridge, talking mostly to the air around him about the market he went to and the people he saw and sorry, man, I think you might be the biggest dude in the Bahamas so I can’t promise your clothes are gonna fit too good.
And then, at the very bottom of a paper bag, tucked beneath their necessities, Gordon finds the tattoo gun. He turns to John with raised eyebrows, letting his silence ask the question.
John ducks his head, unsure in a way Gordon hasn’t seen since they did their first job almost a decade ago. “Thought we could—” he mutters, the words fizzling out into a shrug. He takes a few deep breaths before he tries again, visibly steeling himself. “You know that shit they always talked about? We should do it. For them.”
Gordon does, in fact, know exactly what shit John is referring to. The team tattoo shit, a juvenile fantasy cooked up by their resident twenty-somethings and shot down repeatedly by both Gordon and John for being lame at best and a liability at worst.
“Last thing we need is to be busted by some traffic cam because you made us all get matching tramp stamps,” Gordon can remember saying only a few months ago. John had snorted in response and it had taken all of Gordon’s willpower not to crack a smile.
“Fuckin’ tramp stamps,” Jesse had sneered, wrinkling his nose. “Fuck outta here with that, man! ‘Course we’re not talkin’ tramp stamps.”
“Oh, maybe that was just AJ, then,” John quipped, getting a heavily inked middle finger in his face for his troubles. Jake had been the one to calm everyone down again, smoothed out his little brother and his best friend like only he could, but Gordon and John had held strong.
Now, with an ache in his chest and the gun in his hands, Gordon wishes they would’ve given in. Nothing about this last disastrous job would’ve been changed by it, but at least the kids would’ve known. Would’ve gone out with proof that Gordon and John, for all their cold, pulled-together bullshit, gave a shit about this family same as they did.
This time, Gordon makes himself speak. “For them,” he agrees, giving a single curt nod. “We’ll do it.”
They wait until they’ve eaten something resembling a meal and Naomi has given up on the TV, hunkering down beneath her blankets to finish sleeping off whatever junk is still coursing through her system. Gordon goes first, laying his right arm across the dark-stained desk and wincing when it pulls at the stitches on his side, stinging and hot to the touch despite the painkillers John had practically forced down his throat. John knows him well enough to stay quiet about it, swiping an alcohol pad across the sensitive skin below his elbow instead. It makes Gordon shudder.
Jake, Jesse, and AJ had never come to a consensus about exactly what they should permanently ink onto their bodies – getting them to agree on anything was like trying to stop a hurricane from destroying everything in its path – but John doesn’t hesitate before etching a string of four numbers into Gordon’s skin, followed up by the letter C.
Gordon recognizes it immediately: the address to his old apartment, unit C. It had been an absolute shithole of a place, but it was where they had all come together, six men – though they’d really been boys, back then, hadn’t they? – down on their luck and tired of fighting for table scraps. Tired of waiting for the world to change around them. Young and fiery and ready to take what was theirs.
And, sure, it fucking hurts that one of their crew flipped, but 3621 Lake Street, Unit C will always be ground zero. Even Ghost couldn’t take that away from them.
As if he can hear his thoughts, John murmurs over the whirring of the tattoo gun, “I should’ve taken the shot.” He’s leaning so close his breath brings goosebumps to Gordon’s arm, going back over the five simple characters until the black ink stands out against his dark skin. “I had him right in my sights and all his bullshit in my ear, but we were too fucking worried about the money.” He bares his teeth, right on the edge of a growl. The needle digs in harder. “We knew he’d fuck us over and we did it anyway.”
Gordon is so fucking exhausted he could sleep for a week. “We’re takers, Rahway. It’s what we do.”
For the first time ever, the words feel hollow. They used to be a touchstone, a bandage, a hit of morphine to numb the pain, but now they’re just empty.
John feels it, too. It’s written all over his face.
They stay quiet after that, lest they find that some other pillar of their lives has lost all meaning. To Gordon’s relief, the 3621 C that he carves into John’s arm – same size as his, same placement – packs the same punch as it did before their rallying cry crumbled into dust in their hands. When John pulls away to cover the new ink in plastic wrap, a hint of a smile is tugging at the corner of his lips.
“Well, we should probably get some rest,” he says, keeping his voice down so as not to disturb Naomi. “Think I’ll probably pass out before I’ve even got the covers up.”
“Yeah,” Gordon says, but John doesn’t move.
He just stands there, stiff and tired, his eyes darting toward the door to his adjoining room before skittering quickly away again. In the lamplight, his cheeks go pink beneath his stubble and for one heavy, aching second they’re kids again. They’re kids and John has no one to go home to and no way to ask if he can stay.
They may not be on Lake Street anymore but Gordon’s answer is still the same. He grabs John by the back of the neck, shoves him toward the empty queen bed, and says casually, “You kick me in your sleep, you wake up on the floor.”
“Noted,” John says, the tension leaving his muscles. The embarrassed flush is gone, too, replaced by that wry smile Gordon could replicate in his dreams if he needed to. Though, if they’re lucky, neither of them will do a whole lot of dreaming tonight. Maybe, for just a few hours, they can escape the mournful cries and pelting bullets that are sure to haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Usually, the first night after a job is spent worrying over their haul, keeping one eye on the cases of money and one eye on the door, but things are different this time.
This time, Gordon barely glances at the locked safe peeking out beneath the chest of drawers, its combination hidden away in the back of his mind where Naomi can’t find it. This time, Gordon guards the last fragmented pieces of his family, one emanating warmth from a few inches away and the other snoring softly across the room.
This time, he uses them as a touchstone and lets all the emptiness drain away.