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Vegas did his best to treat his people with appreciation and compassion. This didn’t come from a carrot-and-stick place of wanting to force fear and will respect out of them – he had a community, and he wanted to look out for it.
Porsche came into Vegas’s life abruptly, and with him came openness, fear, and freedom. This array of foreign emotions alienated Vegas from the intensity of pistols and gunfights. How can someone’s forceful presence be so calm?
Kinn and everyone else in the Major family have always been loud and proud in their dismissal of the Minor family. Competition breeds success is what this decades long rivalry thrived off of. It’s a sin to have been born a tool, a pawn at best: you get the dirty jobs and the doubt, all of it. That’s the reality of being one of the Minor family.
Porsche was an absolute nobody: a disposable low-life main-fam bodyguard. But he was Kinn’s, and just like everything else Kinn had and Vegas didn’t, he was shiny. Vegas was born with a golden spoon in his mouth and a gun pointed at the back of his head. His father was the grim reaper, literally and metaphorically. He collected lives like they were things. His entire life, Vegas had wanted to feel a morsel of the fatherhood he’d always seen on TV. Reality hit mercilessly. All he had was a well-poised man with a stone heart (if any) and a bow tie. Kinn wasn’t much better off, but here’s the thing: he had a father who would at least sometimes listen. Vegas wanted Porsche because if this was his last chance at love, it had to be ripped away from his cousin, Kinn.
Vegas had a soft heart; every bullet that pierced the heart of a man of his is a bullet that pierced his own. He was an actor who masked his pain behind iced whiskeys and a façade. He suffocated in stoicism that didn’t belong to him. Porsche wasn’t someone special, but he was alive and free.
Porsche’s deepest pain was that he never had a dad, and Vegas’s was that he did. Both experienced the loss of a father, but experienced their pain differently. To rank pain is sinister, but to experience it is human. You can’t put in tiers what stings, stabs, or burns.
Vegas never once romantically felt for Porsche, but he loved him because he taught him to live on. And yes, it was a friendship that had to be crowned with betrayal, because the life of pink and rainbows didn’t belong to either of them. Vegas was born with a golden spoon, but the price tag had to break his back. Every time Vegas passed his fingers at the textured skin, where a bullet had penetrated, tore, and wounded, he saw nothing but the lives he had swept away, the faces that had now long belonged on memorial corner walls, kids kneeling beneath, weeping, and calling out to.
Porsche taught him that there’s a price one always has to pay, and so Vegas had spent his entire life in debt.