Chapter Text
He's got blood, sharp and sour and metallic, right on the tip of his tongue.
It isn't his own, and it isn't Link's, and he doesn't know exactly what that information means. There’s a body to his left, an alarm going off that means he needs to move before it stops going off, and Link is screaming something at him that doesn’t pierce its way through the ringing in his ears, the alarm, the pounding of his own beating, bleeding heart in his chest.
And then in a sickening second, there are hands on his shoulders, pushing him along, a voice, desperate and loud, begging him to run, fucking run, come on, Rhett.
They fucked up, this time.
The chunk of life they’d carved out of existence for themselves is imploding around them because of Link’s cockiness, because of Rhett’s inability to tell him no.
He can taste blood on the tip of his tongue, and it isn’t his own.
---
“I had a dream we got caught the other night,” Rhett tells him. The condensation on his glass is running off the side of his palm, and he wipes it on his jeans before looking up, taking Link in.
He’s got this ridiculous hat on, huge sunglasses, fluorescent pink shorts with a white shirt covered in ice cream cones. He looks good. He’s tan, relaxed. There’s an actual smile on his face, lopsided and a little hazy as he sips his drink.
In the distance, there’s a beach, crashing waves and all, and Rhett is almost certain Link plucked this place out of a hat of a dozen other places just like it.
Like playing Mad Libs, he’d provided adjectives and gave himself options, landed on Malta Island as if he’d known all along. ‘Pack for a while,’ he’d said, mouth curled up in a consuming smile.
Link looks at him, sunglasses hiding his expression. “Did we die?”
Rhett shrugs. “I woke up before I found out.”
“Then it was a win,” Link says, sure as anything, taking another gulp of his drink and smacking his lips around it dramatically. “I told you no thinking about work on vacation. We’re supposed to be getting away, enjoying ourselves.”
It’s easy enough for Link to think like that, Rhett supposes. It’s easy enough for him to actually believe it’s possible, but Rhett knows otherwise.
Rhett knows Link’s burner phone goes off at least once a day, and that Link answers it with a flippant, ‘I’m on vacation, find someone else,’ before he’s ending the call. He never turns it off.
It’s almost delicately hot, just enough of a stickiness in the air to leave Rhett wishing he’d worn shorts today, too. That salty, crispness the ocean provides to the area makes it worth it, he thinks. And when he drains the rest of his drink, he tells Link, “I’m enjoying myself.”
It’s not a promise. Not really, anyway, but Link still eyes him like it is, giving him a look and then mimicking him almost perfectly, draining his glass, placing it on the table. A mirror image.
Then, he’s standing, adjusting his hat, and saying, “Let’s take a walk. It’s too nice here to stay in one place for too long.”
Rhett stands, wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans, and follows.
It’s been nearly a year since Frank, and the echoes of his screams are just now starting to fade from the inside of Rhett’s skull. He’s just starting to relax. There’s a certain undercurrent between him and Link, now. It’s like standing on a tightrope, watching the flames lick at both ends.
He’ll fall, eventually, but for now, he’s having too much fun keeping his balance.
Link, on the other hand, is lighting his own flames and cackling as Rhett tries desperately to put them out.
“Are you worried about something?” Link asks, when they’re down a familiar road, buildings that Rhett has come to know like they’re his own with how long they’ve been here.
It’s been months, tracing patterns of themselves into the concrete, the buildings, losing themselves in the culture of the people around them. And with the comfort of familiar buildings, Rhett decides to be honest: “A little, I guess.”
“They won’t find him, you know,” Link says, voice pitching low, serious in a way he isn’t often.
Link is accustomed to being aloof, to pretending everything is fine with a loaded gun in his hand.
He’s accustomed to always having the upper hand. And with Rhett, it’s different.
With Rhett, he’s on equal ground with someone, and it leaves him a little unsteady on that tightrope of his.
“I know,” Rhett settles on, tongue moving around his mouth, feeling his teeth, like he’s trying to convince himself he’s still in one piece. This conversation always leaves him feeling a little hollowed out. “I trust you.”
“It ain’t my first rodeo, Rhett.” There’s a laugh that doesn’t quite make it all the way out of Link’s lungs, landing in a splat on the ground in front of them.
The air around him is sticky, and Rhett squints in the sun, too bright even through his sunglasses. Their apartment isn’t very far now, and he hopes the conversation doesn’t make it through the front door.
But Link says, “Forget about him, okay? Or at least try to. Are you even trying to?”
“Yes,” Rhett hisses, like Link is digging his thumbs into an open wound. His shoulder throbs in sympathy. “It’s not just him.”
“Then, what?” He tugs his sunglasses off, looks at Rhett with a tan face, patches of white around his eyes. “What’s bothering you?”
Through a heavy breath, Rhett tells him, “Turn your phone off. No more calls.”
“Done.” Like it’s that easy. “Anything else?”
“No, that’s it.”
Link is smiling up at him, reaching over to lace their fingers together. The heat of his palm is nice, and Rhett revels in it, loses himself in that feeling. This is easy. This is good, and around the salt in the air, his lungs feel lighter.
Their front door is there before he knows it, and the conversation drops off of both of them as they step inside. Rhett heads straight for the kitchen, needing a glass of water, something to fidget with before he loses his cool.
This vacation has been great. It’s been peaceful and wonderful, all up until today when this unsteady feeling settled in his bones.
All up until that dream.
He can still taste the blood on his tongue, if he tries hard enough. He drinks two glasses of water just for good measure, placing the cup in the sink right as Link is walking into the room. He’s got his burner phone in his hand.
“Watch me,” he’s saying, and Rhett feels like this is more intense than it needs to be, watching him hold the power button like he’s suffocating someone.
Rhett rolls his shoulders uncomfortably.
The phone shuts off, and Link tosses it onto the counter, next to the bowl they’ve got bananas and apples in. It’ll stay there, Rhett knows, because Link doesn’t go back on his promises.
This was a promise.
“Thank you,” he says, because he feels like he should.
Link grins, nods. “Now, forget about it, okay? All of it. I want you here with me and only me.”
‘Not the corpses of the people I’ve killed,’ are the words that don’t quite make it out of his throat, but Rhett knows they’re there. But he guesses this particular corpse is the one he killed, isn’t it?
And it’s not even Frank that’s getting to him. The images behind his eyelids are blurred and skewed now, morphed so far into pitch blackness that he doesn’t even think about it often at all. He had a nightmare, that’s it.
It wasn’t even about Frank. It was about Link, about this. It was about what they do, together.
They haven’t been on a job in months, since exactly nineteen days before they left for vacation, and Rhett’s subconscious is reminding him that they’re not invincible. They aren’t above the law.
They aren’t winning , as Link put it.
What they are is careful.
Eventually, they’ll fuck up. They aren’t perfect. Someone is going to send them on the wrong job, or Link will get the timing off or Rhett will set off an alarm or something . They’re careful, but they aren’t bulletproof.
So he drinks another glass of water and watches Link bite into a plum, more purple than any other plums Rhett’s ever seen in his life. His teeth sink in, and Rhett can’t help it when he groans.
He catches Link’s grin as he licks the juice from his lips, teeth speckled with the purple skin.
Rhett has barely a second of memory of those same teeth sinking into Frank’s arm, biting a chunk out of him, and he says, “What did he taste like?”
The words are heavy on his tongue, impossible to swallow back down, and Link grins again. He shrugs. “Spit him out before I could really taste anything but blood. Would’a puked if I wasn’t so angry.”
Rhett nods.
Link takes another bite of the plum.
“They won’t find him?”
He’s closer, suddenly, the plum placed on the counter, and Link is looking at him carefully. “Baby, they won’t find him. Nobody is even gonna come looking for him, I promise.”
Rhett wants to believe him. It’s more likely than anything he’s coming up with, that’s for sure. Frank was a terrible person. They did the world a favor. More people wanted him dead than Rhett can even count, he’s sure of it.
It’s just a sour taste in the back of his throat now that Link has brought it up.
But this time he asks, “Nobody’s looking for you, right?”
This time, it tugs a laugh out of him. High and sweet, and he’s picking his plum back up, leaning against the counter. He sinks his teeth in, letting the juice dribble down his chin this time.
And he says, “Probably not.”
“Probably?”
“I’ve killed a lot of people, Rhett. Someone is probably pissed off out there,” he points out, nonchalant and honest. “But I’m quick, and I’m good at my job.”
“I know,” Rhett promises. He does know. He’s seen him. He’s quick, and he’s good at his job. “I know, I just--.”
“Hey, it’s okay. They won’t find us here, even if they’re looking for us. But they aren’t looking,” Link tells him. “Nobody would be that stupid.”
Is it stupidity or desperation that would lead them to that point? Link has left more people bleeding and broken and dead without the dignity of an explanation or respect than even Rhett knows. Cockiness will only get them so far, even if Link has the credentials to back himself up.
With Link’s phone turned off in the middle of them, Rhett feels better. It’s the only connection they have to their jobs, and it’s off. It can’t start ringing in the middle of Link trying to get Rhett’s pants down his thighs or when they’re cooking dinner together. It can’t ring as they’re waiting for the coffee to finish dripping in the morning or in the evening when they’re watching the sunset from the balcony in their bedroom.
Link chose him, and that’s what sits heavily on Rhett’s chest.
Link chose him a long time ago, if he’s honest, and it’s always a good, weighted feeling.
Still, Rhett can’t help it when he says, “Someone could be that stupid. You don’t know that for sure, Link.”
It earns him an eye, careful and right on the cusp of frustrated, before Link is opening his mouth to tell him, “Then I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them all, Rhett, anybody who so much as looks at us wrong.”
Someone-- a grocer, here, old and kind and tan-- once asked Link what he did for a living, to be such a happy, healthy young man, so full of life. He’d said he worked very closely with people in the funeral business, that he saw death up-close and personally so often it was easy to forget it was such a big, scary thing at the end of all of this. The old, kind, tan grocer had smiled an impossibly white smile and given them two pineapples for free.
Rhett watches with guilt in his eyes as Link pulls the container of cut pineapple from the refrigerator, biting into a piece of that man’s kindness without a care in the world. He asks, “How would you do it? Rip their throats out with your teeth?”
Link snorts. “You’re real caught up on that whole biting thing, aren’t you?”
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Rhett says. “It was gross, man.”
Link nods emphatically. He bites into another chunk of pineapple, and Rhett damn near winces. “Won’t do it again. It was a weird texture. Hated it.”
He’s chewing around his words, shoving his fingers in his mouth to lick at the juice slipping down to his wrist. When he plops the container down on the counter next to Rhett, braces his elbows there to support him as he stares up at him, he offers Rhett a piece.
Leaning down, Rhett bites the chunk in half from between Link’s fingers. His eyes crinkle in the corners, teasing at a smile, as he tosses the piece Rhett left into his mouth.
“How would you do it?”
The question sits like acid in the base of Rhett’s stomach. It churns and eats away at the lining of his organs until he feels it seeping all the way through him, into his veins, the marrow of his bones. He’s tainted with it, filled to the brim with wrongness.
When he turns, looks away from Link like his eyes are burning from staring at the sun for too long, he gets a hum, quiet and accusing. He hears Link bite into another piece of pineapple, hears him suck more juice from his fingers. It’s almost grating, almost irritating, and Rhett thinks maybe he should go for a walk by himself, take a few steps away from Link for a second.
The thing is, they’ve been inseparable since Frank.
Link watched him pull the trigger, and he fell, tripped, stumbled directly into a weird domesticity with him. They wash dishes together, brushing elbows and splashing water on each other.
They share a bed. Rhett’s got more clothes at Link’s house than his own, has forgotten the layout of his own apartment. And sometimes he thinks the reason he stays at Link’s house so often is so he can keep trying to rub the stain of Frank’s blood out of the floorboards, but nobody else seems to see it.
He’s a real Lady Macbeth, kneeling over the shadow of Frank’s corpse and willing it all to go away. Except it won’t, and there isn’t any blood, and Rhett still hears his screams echoing through the house if they let it get too quiet.
And here Link is, asking him how he’d kill again.
How he’d kill for Link .
Link spent months convincing Rhett that he should kill Frank, and he was right. That was the only way out. He never would have won, never would have gotten closure, if Link were the one pulling the trigger, but it doesn’t mean that Rhett is a killer.
It doesn’t mean that he’s like Link.
“With my hands,” he says, echoing an old conversation of theirs, one he hasn’t thought about for so long it almost tastes stale on his tongue. And then, reaching over to grab more pineapple, he sighs, “I wouldn’t kill anyone, Link. That’s your job.”
“You’d just steal every penny out of their pockets, right?”
It almost sounds pointed on the ends, like Link’s mouth knows he shouldn’t be saying the words but can’t help it. Rhett spares him the dirty look, pushes himself off the edge of the counter, and tells Link, “I’m going take a shower.”
Hot water doesn’t wash the blood away, either. He knew that already. He’s been scrubbing at his hands for months, wasting water in a drought just to drown out his own guilt. It doesn’t get to him often, but any time Link’s mouth makes shapes like he’s going to bring it up, Rhett loses himself for a second.
His memories echo through his bones, hollow him out, and force him into recognizing his own vein of violence that’s tracing its way down to whatever part of him leaves him falling in love with an assassin.
It’s easy to categorize his life. There was childhood, and then there wasn’t. He was growing up, and then he landed here. He landed right into Link’s grubby hands. Everything that ever happened to him was pushing him here.
No, not happened to him.
Everything that he ever made happen was pushing him here.
He can take as many hot showers as he wants, they won’t ever change that fact about him. From the second he accepted that job all those years ago, when he was just some baby-faced college kid, he was signing his deal with the devil.
But that’s not entirely right, either. Link isn’t the devil. He wishes he was, but he isn’t.
By the time Rhett gets out of the shower, his hands are pruney, and he still doesn’t feel any better about any of this. Something is settled wrongly in the pit of his stomach. The house is quiet, but Link is still here. He knows he is, is so used to the feeling of his presence that there’s a shift in the pattern of the air when it’s gone.
Rhett finds him in the living room.
When Link had suggested this vacation, with bright eyes, on his knees in front of Rhett in the living room, he’d told Rhett they needed to get away. They needed to get some sun on their cheeks, sand beneath their feet. They needed to feel life and how it courses just under the surface of the earth. Here, in the living room of their apartment in the middle of Malta Island, Link is still somehow the most alive thing Rhett has ever seen.
He’s got his head back, phone on his chest as it softly plays music that filters through the room, eyes shut. Rhett would think he’s sleeping, if it weren’t for his fingers tapping out the beat on the couch. And when Rhett walks into the room, he says, “Good shower?” without opening his eyes.
Rhett nods, and he knows Link can tell without having to open his eyes.
“Will you talk to me now?” he asks, and Rhett bristles just a little.
Rhett grunts in answer, everything feeling sticky and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He plops himself down on the couch next to Link, putting a hand on Link’s thigh for comfort, to ground himself.
“You alright?” Link asks, blunt and honest, and Rhett nods again. Link’s eyes are open this time, and he’s looking at Rhett without picking his head up. “Do you want to go home? Cut this short?”
“No,” Rhett promises, scrubbing at his face with his free hand. “No, I just had a nightmare, is all.”
Link hums. “Some nightmare, to leave you this uncomfortable all day.” There’s a pause, a beat of silence that slots itself into place between them. Rhett almost takes his hand off of Link’s thigh, but then Link is asking him, “You ever gonna figure out if you think I’m a bad person or not?”
The question is--
It’s off-putting. The ease with which Link asked it, how he didn’t need to think about how to say it, just whether or not he should . Rhett’s fingers tighten for just long enough to have Link humming, as if he took that as an answer.
Rhett clears his throat, working around the tightness, the uncomfortable feeling settled there. He has an answer, but he doesn’t know how to say it. His tongue feels too big in his mouth. His palms are sweating, and it’s been nearly a year since Frank, and he doesn’t know how to say what he wants to say.
He doesn’t know how Link will react to his answer.
Because Link has done this more times than Rhett has ever even thought about it. He’s found himself in this exact spot thirty-four times, now. To Link, there’s a comfort in this, a power that Rhett can’t seem to tap into.
Mostly, Rhett feels flayed open. He feels like he’s spread open on Link’s floor, with his face beaten all to hell, choking on his own blood. Or, at the very least, he feels like he deserves that fate.
Instead, he’s got Link’s hand grabbing his own, lacing their fingers together. He doesn’t crush, doesn’t break. He brings it up to his mouth, kisses the back of Rhett’s with dry, gentle lips.
Like a bird in a cage, Rhett’s heart rattles around painfully. Everything is twisted up inside of him, and Link untangles every bit of it with that one motion.
Up until today, everything has been perfect here. In the middle of the night, his subconscious put an end to that. And now Link has a question dangling on the end of a noose in between them, and Rhett’s throat finally works itself around the answer he was worried he’d never be able to give: “You’re not a bad person. I’m trying to figure out if I am or not.”
Link gives him a moment, lets the words find their place in the conversation they’ve been start-stopping for a couple hours, now. They nestle themselves somewhere between Rhett’s question about the biting and this moment, when Link says, “You’re not a bad person, Rhett. You just keep making shitty friends.”
“What if--” and he swallows a couple times, shakes his head. “I know Frank was a bad person. I don’t regret-- killing him.”
“You sound real sure about that,” Link teases, a laugh bubbling out of him. His phone falls off his chest, to his lap. “What if what, Rhett?”
And that question is the one that keeps eating at him. That’s the one that keeps running through him like acid, like fire eating away at every inch of him. He feels it on the tip of his tongue like a swollen tastebud, feels it in the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. He doesn’t want to say it.
He doesn’t want to put it out into the universe, risk having it come true just by planting the seed. So he shakes his head.
“Nothing,” he says. “What are we doing this afternoon?”
Link shoots him a grin, looking at him out of the corner of his eyes. He plucks his phone from his lap, puts it on the arm of the couch. Then, with a heavy breath, he pats his thighs in suggestion.
This game is well-played by them. What he’d usually be doing is getting into Link’s lap, straddling his thighs and leaning in to get a taste of the lazy grin stretching across his face. And god, does it taste good. Rhett knows it does, but he can’t seem to get the lead out of his limbs, get them to move like Link’s asking him to.
So what he does instead is raises an eyebrow, pointed and hoping it gets his point across.
Link is smart. He’s quick.
He’s moving as Rhett is settling into the couch a little more, hoping to empty his head, lose himself in the pressure of Link’s body against his as he sits in Rhett’s lap, thighs bracketing Rhett’s own.
The curve of his ass is begging for Rhett’s hands, and when they find their way there, Link sighs, leans forward to bury his face in Rhett’s neck. Against his skin, he murmurs, “You’re a good boy, you know that?”
“Yeah?” Rhett asks, turning to press his mouth to any part of Link he can. He doesn’t want to talk anymore, but he listens, anyway.
Link nods, mouth latching on to the curve of Rhett’s shoulder, wet and nothing but teeth. His tongue wiggles against fuzzy fabric, and Rhett hisses at the sensation, the bite. It’s almost good, almost has his cock twitching in his pants.
And then, when Link is really biting down, hard enough to sting, hard enough to have Rhett heaving with it, he’s thrumming all over. His body is alight, attuned to every stitch of Link’s chemical makeup.
When he pulls away, he’s got to slurp up drool that threatens to fall into Rhett’s shirt, and his lips are shiny and slick. It should be obscene, but it just leaves Rhett a little shaky. He’s red in the face already, hand trailing down Rhett’s torso until he’s cupping over where he’s thick and heavy just from this. Rhett’s shoulder aches, and he doesn’t know if it’s in loss or in pain, but he takes it for what it is.
Link’s hand is firm, steady, a goddamn tease as he squeezes, cruel and soothing, and Rhett arches, bucks, searches for more. His dry throat works around a heavy, “ Link ,” and he hears the shrill sound of Link’s phone going off in his pocket.
Link arches an eyebrow at him, licks at his lips, a challenge. Rhett can’t get his protest to get from behind his teeth in time, is watching in technicolor as Link undoes his pants, tugs his cock out, and uses his other hand to grab his phone from his back pocket, slide the green button across the screen, and answer it with a, “Hello?”
It takes Rhett an embarrassingly long time to realize that he’s not holding it to his ear, is holding it steady in front of him. And he can hear the conversation from both ends, once he separates it from the thudding of his own pulse in his ears.
There’s a voice he’s heard a couple of times in passing, when they’re dropping Jade off, when they were leaving for this trip. Link isn’t paying him much attention anymore, is cackling a little wildly, a bit hysterically, is turning the phone to face Rhett, with his hand still jerking Rhett off slowly and surely and so fucking good.
His bleary eyes take a second to realize what he’s seeing.
It’s a mess of colors, blues and purples and reds. So much fucking red, and then there’s Josh.
There’s Josh and his big, bright face, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. Link turns the phone back towards himself as he’s saying, “He kept saying something about finding you. I tried to get a name, but he wouldn’t give me one.”
“Please don’t feed him to my dog,” Link says, and his thumb runs over the head of Rhett’s cock.
Rhett’s hips twitch up, his breath catching in his throat. Josh asks around a laugh, “Am I interrupting something?”
“Yeah,” Link tells him. “What did he look like? I can’t make anything out.”
“Did you know a baseball bat will take chunks out of a head if you swing it hard enough? It’s really gross.”
And Rhett realizes.
That was a body.
Those colors were a body, beaten and broken and dead.
His cock is leaking in the palm of Link’s hand, and now all he can see is the swirling of those colors.
“Someone put a hit out on you,” he says, sitting up, batting Link’s hand away. He gets a tsk in complaint, but he cuts him a pair of eyes. As he’s tucking himself away, watching Link flop down onto the couch beside him, he says again, “Someone put a fucking hit out on you, Link.”
There’s a laugh, and it’s ringing in his ears as he stands, makes his way out of the apartment and into the fresh air outside. He can’t shake the image of smears of red and purples and blues out of his head.
Someone put a hit out on Link.
They’re on fucking vacation on Malta Island, and Link’s got a price on his fucking head.