Work Text:
There are names that are spelled out in the city lights. Antiheroes worshipped by the kids who don’t know any better, feared by the kids who do, stuck in an endless game of cat and mouse with a police force that doesn’t really want to catch them. They live and breathe the city and the city returns the favor by holding them aloft, gods of the streets. Names like Burns, names like Ramsey.
And there are names that nobody says at all.
-
Jones takes a swing, feels the skin over his knuckles split on the other man’s jaw. The roaring of the crowd is indistinguishable from the blood rushing to his ears. He drives the heel of his foot deep into the muscle of his opponent’s stomach, bringing his foot quickly back before it can be caught and used against him.
He only has time to brace himself again and there’s a fist crashing into his chin, snapping his head backwards. The man is spitting blood and Jones can taste copper in his own mouth but the fight’s long from over; not while they’re both still standing, not with the kind of money that backs the punches they throw.
Somewhere across town, Narvaez rolls snake eyes for the third time in a row.
-
Their bets come in all forms—cash, powder, settlement of years-old debts. Narvaez doesn’t mind which kind it is so long as he’s winning. He settles back in his chair, tilts his head back and stares into the grim fluorescent lights lining the newest host’s basement ceiling. The other men around the table are long past drunk, pushing chips towards him and swearing at the dice in his hand.
He’s been accused of loading them more than once. Been acquitted every time. There’s nothing floating his winning streak but a steady stream of luck that, at twenty-three, he can’t imagine will ever run out.
Jones’s opponent hits the floor with a resounding crack as Narvaez declares all-in.
-
They snake through the streets for years without ever encountering one another (and if Jones is a rattlesnake, Narvaez is a viper). They go home to apartments with leaking faucets and rotting floorboards to count their winnings; more money than either of them had dreamed of having two, three years ago.
When they sleep the city spins on. When they wake up nothing shakes underneath their feet. But they stagger onward.
They meet because the well runs dry for both of them: because Narvaez makes a bet he can’t back, because Jones’s wrist cracks one day too hard to grit his teeth through. Jones is leaning against the brick wall behind a bar with a cigarette between his fingers glowering at his broken wrist when a kid comes running through, legs pumping, followed by a much larger and much faster man. Jones knows that look in both their eyes. One of them knowing they’ve fucked up, the other knowing they’ve come to collect.
The kid falls to the ground. The man pulls out a gun. Jones shoots instead.
When he walks over, the kid is already standing, edging towards the man on the ground. He looks at Jones only after nudging the large man with his foot to see that he’s really not getting back up again. Jones takes the time to stick his gun back on his hip and out of sight.
“Thanks,” the kid—alright, a man, but a small one—says, sticking out a hand. “Ray.”
Jones laughs at the formality of it, but he drops his cigarette to the ground and stamps it out. “Michael,” he says, and he shakes Ray’s hand.
-
They can’t seem to help but run into each other after that. They pass each other in the streets and nod. Michael tries to buy Ray a drink at the bar more than once, but he keeps declining. Ray finds out Michael likes video games and tells him to invite himself over whenever he likes. They exchange addresses and find they live a block apart.
Michael starts hovering around the dives Ray gambles in just in case his pistol is needed again. Mid-fight, he’ll catch a glimpse of Ray in the crowd, both hands shoved into his hoodie but screaming encouragements along with the rest of them. He always flashes a smile, even if it gets one of his teeth knocked in.
Ray starts placing bets on the fire-haired short-tempered kid who takes on opponents twice his size. When he retreats back to underground spots and back-alley tables he catches himself picturing a crooked smile when he kisses the dice in his palm and prays. He tries to shake the image away the first two times. Then, when he starts winning again, he deliberately calls it up.
When Ray eventually, inevitably asks why Michael saved him that first day, Michael shrugs.
“I hadn’t gotten a chance to use the gun yet,” he says. “Guy looked like an asshole.”
Ray laughs and turns back to their game.
-
The build-up is neither slow nor tense. They both feel it racing towards them as they sit cross-legged on Ray’s couch playing video games and leaning into each other’s knees. As Michael pumps a fist in the air after a fight and meets Ray’s eyes. As they breathe in the smell of smoke and tar and sweat.
-
The first time they fuck it’s at Michael’s. And that’s what it is, or that’s what they tell themselves—not sex or making love, just fucking, pushing each other to the brink.
Ray walks in without knocking after a day of heavy losses. He can earn it back tomorrow; he knows that, he always knows that, but it still leaves an anger and an emptiness that tears through him when he watches his money disappear after nineteen years of not having any and four years of disbelief.
Michael is leaning against the kitchen counter with a bag of ice resting over his knuckles. The bruising across his face is fading but his hands are still roughed up; he thinks there may be a hairline fracture but he can’t go to the hospital, can’t confirm it. Might slow him down
He looks up as Ray walks around to the other side of the counter, standing mirror-image to Michael.
They stare at each other for a few long moments before Michael drops the bag of ice and pulls forward Ray by the collar.
It’s a kiss full of teeth and nails, nipping at each other’s lips and fingers digging into each other’s hair. Ray thinks Michael might drag him across the counter with how closely he’s trying to pull them together, but he doesn’t. He takes his wrist and drags him to the bedroom, throws him down unceremoniously on the bed.
Ray gasps out just from the feeling of it; being pushed down on his back onto Michael’s mattress. Held down and taken apart by the man he’s watched hit people until they couldn’t move—but he’s gentle now, sucking marks up Ray’s stomach, pulling clothes off layer by layer like he’s satisfied just from the sight of it.
Ray grips the headboard as Michael grabs his hair and forces his head back, exposing his neck. Michael presses his lips to Ray’s throat and Ray babbles out something he thinks is profanity but could just be nonsense, closes his eyes and lets himself get lost in the feeling of it.
When Michael’s mouth closes around his cock he shouts. He thinks Michael laughs deep in his throat and Ray would be offended if he could think at all.
It’s ten minutes before Michael pulls his mouth off only to straddle Ray’s hips. He sinks down inch by inch onto Ray and there are stars behind Ray’s eyes when he does. Michael rolls his hips and Ray can feel every muscle of his stomach, see every bruise that litters his freckled body, and he doesn’t know if he wants to erase them or add to them. He reaches up and pulls him down into a kiss again, gasping into his mouth. He wonders if he can taste whatever it is in the boy that keeps him fighting after his fingers crack, after his nose bleeds.
He wonders if he wants to.
Michael leans back again and eases up and down, a steady rhythm that wipes Ray’s mind clean again, and when he finally comes Michael barely even slows down, just starts pumping himself and asking Ray if that’s okay. Ray barely has time to manage a yeah, fuck yeah, before Michael comes too and Ray’s chest is splattered white.
He closes his eyes and lets himself drift off again while Michael rolls off. Ray bunches up the sheets to wipe himself off and kicks them off the bed. As soon as he’s done Michael wraps his arms around his torso.
“I lied,” Michael breathes in the afterglow, while they’re both still shaking. “When I told you why I shot that guy. I lied.”
“Why’d you do it?” Ray mutters, fighting sleep.
Michael buries his nose in Ray’s shoulder. “Couldn’t watch something like you get destroyed.”
“Gay,” Ray murmurs, and Michael sucks at his neck again until he moans.
--
It happens a few more times after that, in Michael’s apartment or Ray’s, in alleys and stairwells around the city. Michael sometimes doesn’t know what gets Ray off more, Michael or the thrill of it. He has the same look in his eyes when he’s sitting at a craps table or sinking into Michael: lust, disbelief, a little bit of mischief.
On days when his winnings come in a plastic bag, he comes to Michael’s house and offers to share. Michael always shakes his head but offers up his counter. He lets Ray do lines off the granite, watching the way he breathes in, breathes out, sits up and grins. He shakes his head and laughs as Ray loses the inability to sit still during their game, forfeits a round to Michael in favor of jumping on the back of the couch like a tightrope. Sometimes he asks Michael to teach him how to fight when he’s like that; Michael never does.
When Michael comes home to find Ray in his apartment already and stumbles towards the bathroom, lip split, to fill a hot bath, Ray doesn’t follow him right away. He waits until the water stops running and Michael is half-sleeping in the tub, and then the door creaks open and he steps through. Usually he uses it as an excuse to shave, glancing over to Michael every few moments to see he’s still awake. They don’t talk, and they wouldn’t even if they could.
They don’t move in together, but the lines between Michael’s apartment and Ray’s apartment blur and meld. They don’t see each other much outside the kitchen, the couch, the beds, but when one is asleep and feels the other collapse into bed next to them they don’t question it anymore.
They stand on rooftops to look down at the city from above. They get into drag races, as a team or against each other, screaming their throats raw as the tires burn rubber beneath them.
One night Ray comes home clutching a wad of cash above his head, laughing. “Three fucking grand, bitch!” he shouts, and he holds Michael’s head between his hands and lays a kiss on his lips before scattering the money around them.
It’s the closest to love they ever get.
-
Los Santos is a city of sharp edges, of rusted corners ready for you to cut yourself on. Vigilantes crop up and fall with the seasons and the city’s legends carry semi-automatics. It’s a place for young men with fire burning through their veins and anger coiled tightly in their guts. It is not a place to make a home. To fall in love.
It’s easy to survive in Los Santos. It’s harder to live.
-
Michael doesn’t teach Ray to fight, but he learns on his own.
They catch each other looking bored and forcing smiles. They know the look in each other’s eyes when they end up staying too long in the same apartment. To Michael it’s the look Ray gets when he gets high, like he wishes he could crawl out of his own skin to somewhere better. To Ray it’s the look Michael gets before a fight, ready to absorb and instantly forget any blows that come his way.
They fall into each other every few nights and are more tired of it every time they do.
It doesn’t begin verbally; it skips straight to physical, taking the place of sex and conversation all at once. They circle each other in the living room and pretend to take swings at each other, half-dance. Whoever pins down the other lays a kiss into their neck. But each time it comes closer and closer to real fights. It gets shorter. Faster.
There is a magic that fades away between them, bit by bit. Try as he might, Michael is not the cocksure bruised and battered street fighter shooting down men in an alley. Ray is not the crooked-mouthed silver-tongued gambler rolling from lucky streak to lucky streak. They are in part those things, maybe, but they are more than that. Less than that.
When Ray walks out of Michael’s apartment for the last time he takes scraped knuckles with him and leaves a bruise on Michael’s face. Michael who smiles through split lips and chipped teeth, who wraps his fingers in linen to dive back into the ring, leans back and lets it happen. Lets Ray pin him down even as the fight takes a nose dive from playful to angry, love to hatred; he stares up at him relentlessly and watches the fist crash into his face. Only after it makes contact does he throw him off, light and easy, as the ringing resounds in his ears.
After Ray is gone Michael leans shaking against the counter until a scream empties out his throat. And then he stands up.
-
There are names that are etched into the sky and names that are etched into the streets.
Somewhere, Narvaez cashes out after the fifth failed dice throw.
Somewhere, Jones hits the ground hard as Narvaez leaves the table.