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Alban is a great thief, not just a good one, because the good thieves only care how much they can get away with and how long they can stuff their pockets before anyone notices. It’s just another means to ride on the adrenaline and crash back to the ground for them. A compulsion, maybe, twitchy fingers and a hardwired desire to own more and more and more.
So what if he likes his high ticket items? Maybe he has a penchant for jewels over information, an unwavering inclination for the brightest and shiniest things he can scoop up with malnourished hands, but he still has his morals. Those are things that people like him, people who learned because they had to, can never really lose. They're baked into all those little bursts of shame and pity he’s never been able to fully shake away, no matter how many years creep by.
“Are you the one?” is what he hears first, voice melding into the shadows. It’s a deceptively small sound, weak and slightly sorrowful and just enough to convince him to give this one a flickering chance. He does not want to needlessly break more hearts.
The point is that Alban’s anything but selfish despite his proclivity for some less than strictly necessary thievery, occasionally taking requests for people who seem just desperate enough that it reminds him of the kind of person he used to be. It’s the least he can do as penance and protection.
“Not here,” Alban whispers, crooking a finger and slipping into a building that’s been freshly abandoned, construction permit changing hands every couple years without much progress. If the other doesn’t want to follow, then that’s fine. This will already be enough of a detour from his route home and if he takes too long then Uki will probably do something drastic, like call the police.
The other man is tall, taller than him, but haggard and weary enough that he doesn’t notice right away. The bits of his face that peek out from the sliver of skin between his black cap and black mask reveal inset eyes, shadowed and murky. He takes a moment to collect himself as the door closes, simply breathing deep in and out.
“I heard you were good. The best, even,” he finally says. The man spends more time looking down than looking at him, all nerves and desperation and pitiful grimaces. If he’s noticed his mistake, then it certainly doesn’t show.
It is not about being good. Alban does not want to waste time talking about whether he is good. Things like that make it more about ego than anything, much too boastful for his liking.
Warmth drips off his skin like a furnace. Their feet lie so far apart, yet close enough that it practically radiates off him in thundering waves.
“Just tell me what you want,” Alban says, and that harshness is enough to finally get his eyes to stay on him for good instead of simply wandering around.
The more time passes, the less he wants to stay, small pity aside.
The man sighs, deflating so completely, before settling on the dusty floor as if his legs would give out should he have stood a second longer. “My name is Sonny,” he begins, “and I’m going to be totally honest, okay? I need your help. It’s my sister and I–” his voice trails off impossibly quieter for a moment, so Alban offers him a nod and motions for him to continue. “I’m an officer, okay? VSF. But this isn’t, I’m not, it’s not because of that. Well, it is, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to… I need you. I just– It can’t be anyone else. I’ll even come with you, so you know that I’m honest, okay? I’ll be there the whole time. The whole operation. There’s no one else I can trust, okay? It has to be you. You’re one of the good ones.”
It makes him more than a little wary, a little afraid by the sheer size of him and all the frantic words that keep pouring and pouring.
“Why should I? Trust you, that is. Even if you think you can trust me.”
“I don’t know,” Sonny shakes his head, getting up a bit to perch on his knees. His torso strains against his shirt, back arched. “I don’t know what to say. You’re my only hope. Do you think I’d beg like this if there were any other options?”
It’s a little degrading, honestly. Alban should be mad, but he finds that he doesn’t really mind. He should mind, he really should, but he can’t bring himself to, not when Sonny despairs so openly at his feet. He probably doesn’t even realise what he’s saying.
He should leave too, pity thrown aside, but his mouth moves before his feet, anchoring him in place.
“What kind of job? Nothing fatal, I hope.”
“I lost something. If I don’t get it back, then she pays the price.”
Alban makes a small noise of understanding. “You’re a terrible brother.”
Sonny laughs a little and the wet sound snuffs out all of the oxygen swirling between them. He leans even closer, still kneeling, almost like a prayer. It pierces through him, keeping him locked tighter in place, like Sonny is a sailor and he is the swirling sea.
“I know you’re not like the others,” Sonny repeats again. “The trash that we chase after day in and day out, they’re nothing like you. I’m the one at risk here by coming to you, don’t you get it? The things they’ll do to me if I become a criminal. They hate traitors more than they hate thieves. And I wouldn’t let them touch you, never, not after everything you’ve done for us.”
Alban scoffs. “So what? You’ll make yourself a martyr for me? Is that it?”
“If it’ll convince you. It’s all I can offer. The power’s all in your hands.”
Outside it’s so nearly the reverse of golden hour, the huskiness that reminds him that he should hurry lest the sun beat him home.
“If we do this,” Alban hums, catching the way Sonny perks up beneath him. “If we do this, then no one can know, okay?”
“Okay,” Sonny echoes and the vowels linger and swim in his ears.
“I’m not saying yes, but I’ll hear you out.” Alban sneaks a peek at the scattered purples of the doorway. He’s never liked having blood on his hands, not even hypothetically, and there’s nothing wrong with giving him an inkling of hope. “Let’s talk again properly some other day. Wait a few minutes before coming out. No one knows about this place yet.”
He must be more tired than he thought, because for the slightest moment he thinks he sees a smirk splayed on Sonny’s face, something so uncharacteristic of the suffering, sallow, aching brother that came to him so completely out of options and buckling at the knees.
It’s gone before he can blink.
Alban has more things to worry about than men who may or may not be trying to get him caught in the act so they can send him to jail so he simply walks home, texts Uki back, and goes straight to bed, spending only a little bit of time pondering his proposal.
-
Sonny is around his age, apparently. Neither of them reveal exactly what that is, but it’s easy enough to tell, sharing the same cultural zeitgeist. Naturally blonde, despite how eye-numbingly bright it looks. Got teased for it mercilessly growing up. Wears that whole mask and hat ensemble whenever he’s outside since he gets a little nervous now and it stands out a little too much. He’s worked at VSF for a couple years, recruited for his leadership skills and ability to be discreet where it counts. His sister doesn’t know, just thinks he’s another traffic cop handing out parking tickets and hanging out on the side of the road just waiting for people to break the law. She doesn’t know about the threat either, some mafia underling who was slighted by Sonny’s overinvolvement in their latest case.
His information broker acquaintance told him about the same aside from the random personal anecdotes, their stories matching up well enough that he probably isn’t lying yet. When pressed about the fact that his sister doesn’t even live in the city, he doesn’t even look surprised, just shrugs and says that the fact that he couldn’t watch out for her made the threat scarier. More credible. Can’t exactly force her to move without tipping her off.
“We’re so similar. I could tell from all the stories,” Sonny says so easily, absolutely awestruck. He says like it was a foregone conclusion.
Should he be so flattered by someone who says these things yet so easily called him a criminal?
He hears story after story of Sonny trying to find this mysterious benefactor that helped people he’d come across, mainly children. Alban’s always been especially soft towards them. Hears about how he knew that whoever it was would be someone loyal and strong, someone who understood how it feels to be desperate to protect someone. Hears about how long it took to find anyone who could point out where to look. Hears about how he followed him around a bit to make sure and how meeting him was the first time he’s ever been so hopeful, how he made him hopeful just by existing.
He makes it all sound so charming.
It doesn’t mean anything. Alban knows that. It isn’t a big deal at all but that knowledge doesn’t quite stop his feelings. The flattery and moments from all these people whose lives are better because they knew him of all people, they all sound so warm and vibrant in Sonny’s hushed voice. He paints such a pretty picture of the phantom thief with a heart of gold, exactly the kind of person he dreamed to be sometimes.
“You make me out to be an angel or something,” Alban protests, a little too giddy to say something harsher.
“Maybe you are one,” Sonny whispers, so warm and pitiful. “You are to me.”
Sonny has a nice smile, too. So nice that it’s embarrassing that he finds himself noticing it. It’s the kind of smile that curls around the edges of your heart like a cat on a sunny day, yearning.
The tips of his ears are a little bit red as he says it and the sight feels like a victory because he’s always seemed so steady and unflappable. Even the Sonny from back then, so consumed by his sorrow the first time they spoke, had a willowy backburner kind of strength to him. It leaps onto the giddiness and swirls in his heart, that heady rush of remembering that maybe he has the power to fluster him too.
Maybe they can both be partners in embarrassment.
“I haven’t even agreed yet. It’s a little too soon for things like that, isn’t it?”
“Weren’t you about to?” Sonny asks, lips trembling against that smile.
“I suppose I was.”
He hopes it sounds coy when he says it, paired with a disarming smile. He hopes it doesn’t quite match the image of the angel he wants, so it won’t sting if the illusion is shattered. There are so few reasons why good-hearted, genuine men like him would ever need to approach a thief and offer up their entire life on a silver platter. Fewer still who would stay.
“I’d really hate to force you. Are you sure?” he asks, eyes shiny like a child at Christmas. His hopes and desires are so plainly visible on his face. He is so desperate and genuine and there’s no real reason to refuse.
“I’ll do it.”
“So you truly, truly want to?”
“Yes, of course,” Alban insists, a little cross at the repetition.
Sonny’s fingers linger for a moment after they shake on it, a silent agreement, as if waiting to see if he’ll scamper away first. When he doesn’t, he simply nods once more, squeezing tighter before letting go.
“This has to be a secret.” Sonny’s clipped tone leaves no room for argument, not that he particularly has any. Maybe the veneer of secrecy is what he needs to justify it all to himself, the fact that he’ll so readily become a criminal to save his sister’s life. Maybe he needs to know that Alban is a willing co-conspirator to keep the guilt from tearing through his shoulders.
Perhaps they truly are more similar than not, all things considered.
Sonny smells like ash.
That’s what he thinks each time they leave, always a few minutes apart, lips full of promises to meet again to hash things out for good. Whenever he leaves, the smell of ash lingers in his wake and he takes it in, taking part of him inside his body with every gentle breath.
-
During the day, Alban still plays the part of the long-suffering hard-working service worker, the kind of person with just enough politeness and cheer to ward off any particularly snippy customers. He goes out, enjoys his usual hobbies, even visits a friend of two when he gets time off.
At night, of course, he has his meetings with Sonny, because while he’s good at many things (cooking, singing, kicking down doors) that may be necessary for his career with VSF, he’s utterly hopeless at anything that’ll be remotely useful in their little heist and return mission. Because they’re largely unconcerned with subtlety and scrupulousness, Sonny had explained once, they never bothered trying to teach it to him. Damn police.
It’s always at night, of course, because it’s better to prepare under the conditions they’ll be working in. That’s what he always says.
Sonny gets in these moods sometimes too, blonde hair tangled around his ears as they practise manoeuvres for a little too long, manic like the sheer proximity is going to burn him up inside.
It was inevitable. Looking back, there was never any other way things were going to happen.
“I’m sorry,” Sonny says one night. Over and over all of these apologies tumble from his shiny lips. They spill out of him until they flood the whole room, doused in his infinite torment.
Of course Sonny, a good cop, the kind of man who trembled at the thought of slipping into the illegal outside of sheer necessity, would torment himself over feelings like that. The very idea probably eats at him, that he could be the type of person to love something so antithetical to his entire nature.
It was so obviously not an accident too, limbs twisted together but far enough apart, so clearly motivated by thrill alone which quickly burned out. He is not a clumsy man. Nothing he does is accidental.
“Do you hate me now?” Sonny’s heavier frame smothers his own, still so close, still not pulling completely away.
“For what? Kissing me?” Alban spits out the word like it’s poison and Sonny just vaguely nods, still so defeated above him.
“I never wanted to… I don’t know. Show you this part of me.”
“Why not?” Alban asks, incredulous. It’s not like feelings are illegal. Even if they were, they’re literally plotting a crime together. There are so many worse players in this game.
“You’re just here to help me. My sister. You didn't ask for this, for me to be so pathetically gone for you.”
It’s a stupid, noble worry. That’s all Sonny is sometimes, a big beautiful frame with nobility crammed so tightly that it threatens to burst from the seams. Does he not understand how much he’s grown to crave for it? How much he yearns to be loved?
Sonny simply laughs when he tells him as much.
“I am stupid,” Sonny agrees, promises joining the apologies littering the floor. “I am so stupid, and you’re this beautiful flame that I never want to burn out. Don’t you get it? I don’t want to ruin you. I couldn’t stand it if I did.”
He says so much but makes no attempts to peel himself off.
What else can he do when Sonny looks so completely burdened by that sadness? What can he do but prove to him that it’s stupid to worry about things like that?
Alban fists his hands onto Sonny’s collar, eager to shut him up. “What if I kiss you instead, then?” he asks, more adrenaline than anything else. “What if I tell you that I want it, huh? Then it’s not your fault, right? It’s mine.”
He leans up and kisses him hard and swift, a measure of his sincerity, and Sonny doesn’t make a single movement to try to stop him.
“Mine,” he repeats, kiss after kiss, eager to smother his fear. He needs to take ownership of his own ruination, impossible as it may be to even imagine.
Sonny tries so hard to be careful and kind. He knows that. He knows it so deeply and intimately, sees it in the gentle way he folds his jacket before they start training. He knows he just needs to let him know that everything's still fine, and then they can get past this. He’s a good man that just needs a little reassurance sometimes. That’s all this is.
“If you don’t want this, just tell me to stop,” Sonny finally says, pulling Alban’s face away with a burning hand on each cheek like this is the unmissable signal he’s been waiting for.
Inside that dusty room, full of scattered papers and schedules and plans, they find a new secret to share between them. Another secret to add to the pile. One shaped like a biting kiss.
-
"Are you still seeing that boy?" he hears, words hushed by the soft clink of Uki's spoon against his cup.
"What boy?" he asks, feigning an air of levity. He’s had a bad habit of spacing out lately, starting from the moment he looked over his shoulder and swore for a moment that he saw a familiar pair of eyes staring back. It wasn’t him, but it’s the possibility of it all that continues to linger.
Alban does not remember any boys. They all seem to pale in comparison to him and It's certainly not about Sonny. He doesn't let any details slip about Sonny, not even to his may-as-well-be-family. His dreams, abandoned alleys under the cover of darkness, the only places he can let him in are those where there's no one around to see them.
To be seen would be to ruin him, so he cannot ever let that happen.
"You know. The one from the club. Bought you a drink after you stared at him a while from the second floor."
With that little thread to pull on, he does kinda remember someone like that. It all feels so long ago, picture worn and warped from lack of proper care. Something that would have mattered then but not now. Alban tells him a convincing enough story about how one drink became a couple, but how the other guy was misunderstanding things and grabbed his wrist a little hard to drag them out the door, so he ended up pretending to be sick while they were waiting for the taxi, carving out the opportunity for them to go their separate ways. Uki smirks, telling him he did good for running.
"Good boy," Uki had said, empty cup placed gently on empty saucer. "Never let anyone force you like that."
Uki's hands are so delicate and poised, so Alban spends a moment looking at his own, taking in the ugliness. He cannot quite tell where they lie on the scale of pretty to ugly, slightly rough and dry from all of their time trapped in gloves. Occupational hazard, he supposes. They're small. Wriggling and floaty and sometimes unrecognisable. They don't feel nearly as good as Sonny's.
Sometimes he's tried, fingers tight on his own wrist or neck, just to see if it would feel the same.
That was only on days when they couldn't see each other, days when he missed him so terribly that he would probably die without an approximation of his touch to keep him sated. He’d squirm a little too, begging for it. Sonny only does it when he asks, like he needs to know that everything is still okay between them before he lets himself act. He wonders if Sonny thinks he has nice hands. If he asked, he’d probably just laugh it off and say everything about Alban is nice, which can’t possibly be true.
It is only when Uki coughs gently, almost uncharacteristically soft, and asks if he's finally ready to go that Alban realises he'd been staring off into the void.
What would Uki think, he wonders, if he knew about the truth.
It’s not his secret to spill, so Alban clamps his mouth shut and smiles softly as they walk out the door, a measured few metres apart.
-
Sometimes Sonny is a hard man, the real thief between them. He plunders and plunders and does not really seem to care that he does. Sometimes Alban thinks he’ll need no practice at all before their plans become reality and their pitiful excuse to see each other could finally end, letting them return to being strangers in a crowd of thousands of nobodies.
Sonny has always nitpicked their plans, fixing them down to the second as they did hundreds of dry runs in similarly charted locations. It took ages to get him to finally agree to just go for it already. What about his sister, Alban had asked, and Sonny, eyes cloudy and slightly out of focus, would just hum as he let the words roll around the air between them, not even a hint of sadness trickling out.
They couldn't just wait forever, an eternal limbo of floor plans and furtive touches.
Sonny planned everything so minutely, so it’s just their luck that something goes wrong after all of that work.
It’s all his fault.
He shouldn’t have pushed so hard.
He should have just let Sonny call it when they were ready.
“Fuck!” Sonny shouts, jumping the guard who should never have been there from their spot in the shadows. “Help me with this,” he barks out, arms caging him from escaping, simply waiting for him to agree. “I always do what you ask, so just this once, please.”
Alban bolts over on instinct at that, grabbing hold of an arm and a leg. He screws his eyes tightly shut, unwilling to watch it for a second longer. He doesn't know what to do, hands clumsy and disjoint and so wholly unused to the thought of being used on another.
“You begged me from the very beginning,” Sonny grits out, whispering stories of how much Alban always made things complicated by involving his feelings, things like kissing him first, forcing them to adapt to that new relationship, but that he loves him anyway. He makes love sound like a very delicate, beautiful thing.
“We’re doing this for you, keeping it a secret. You’ll end up in prison if anyone finds out,” Sonny whispered, lips buzzing against his head. Does he not feel it? Alban cannot ignore the stickiness clinging to his hands. Why does secrecy have to amount to this? “They’d excuse me in an instant, assuming I was just trying to catch you. I’m doing this all for you, angel. Larceny is one thing, but murder? You’d never make it out alive. That’s why I made you promise not to tell before this all started. I can’t bear to lose you.”
“This has to be a secret,” Sonny had said, crimson blood meeting crimson lips. He did not even take a second glance at the body, so completely unbothered by its looming presence beneath them. His shoulders and frame practically engulf the room, consuming him whole with nowhere to turn but his plundering eyes.
Maybe he cares about him so much that it doesn't matter. He's not a monster so much as he is a suffering soul, aching from the choices he must make in the name of protection.
Even the act of coming here was proof of what he’d do for it, so he shouldn't be surprised or scared.
Sonny’s mouth is a canyon. An inferno. He smiles so wide like everything is perfect and it’s almost enough to convince him that everything is still okay. His eyes, too, are full of love and the reminder of that is enough to push him over the edge, whispering fervent agreements against bloodstained lips.
“This has to be a secret,” Sonny says again, and so it does, chain tight around his throat for the rest of his life.