Archive of Our Own

He wakes up in Vancouver at seven-oh-nine Monday morning with the alarm clock radio shouting good morning, Seattle.

It's raining outside, thick sheets of rain that hit sideways, hit the yellowing window of the motel room straight on like the window is a nothing thing. Like it's gonna fall inside in pieces any second now.

Rusty rubs his eyes and blinks sleepy-slow. He feels like he's been awake for days, getting by moment to moment on cheap coffee and sheer force of will, but he blinks again and props himself up on his elbows to survey the room.

Danny pulls the curtains closed when he comes inside dripping wet; they're moth-eaten, but it's dark enough outside from the rain to not matter. He turns off the alarm to silence the voice of a radio talk show host who's too damn cheerful for seven in the morning. No one's got a right to sound that awake sometimes.

"Go back to sleep," Danny says, peeling off the layers of his rented tux. He tosses a white paper sack to Rusty. Half a dozen donuts, the powdery white kind that always leave Rusty looking like a cocaine addict, but they're his favorites.

Sometimes Rusty thinks he sticks around because Danny knows these things. He scratches his cheek and yawns. "What happened to Vancouver?" he asks, and sets the bag on the cheap particleboard nightstand painted a dingy, nicotine-stained white. It takes a lot to make him lose his appetite.

"Well," Danny says, and grins like he isn't as tired as Rusty has been for about a week now. His fingers pull at the wet laces of his black dress shoes. "While you were, as you put it, slight intoxicated, you became more blatant in your seduction of the underage bellboy who turned out to be the son of a man whose money we… liberated at the game Wednesday night."

Rusty tilts his head down and grins. "You, Daniel Ocean, are a liar," he says, and lies back down. The pillow is worn flat and hard.

"Little bit," Danny admits, and sits down on the other side of the bed. "You fell asleep in the car on the way back from the thing, when we got to the hotel they were there so I thought it best to keep driving."

"You are the idea man." Rusty pulls up the bedspread, it's pink and sea-foam green and it's cheap-motel room rough and everything about this place has a faint aroma of mold. "I'm going back to sleep now," he announces, like Danny's going to be surprised by it.

"We're getting old, Rusty," Danny says and tugs the other pillow from under Rusty's elbow, "if this is our idea of a victory celebration."

"You picked the place." Rusty shifts, a little, like he's more restless than he is, and his elbow bumps with Danny's. "You could've at least sprung for a double," he adds as their knees knock.

"If you sleep through the sign-in you get no say."

"That's a new rule."

Danny yawns and his toes are cold against Rusty's calf. "You've gotta be open to change, Russ, or you'll never make it in this business."

"Shut up and go to sleep," Rusty says, and rolls over twenty-three seconds later to the sound of Danny already snoring.

---

"Please tell me you're joking," Rusty says dryly and leans to the left to see past Danny so he can watch Batman on one of the three cable stations the motel gets. He's got white powder all over one hand and the remote in the other.

Danny stands with his shoulder pressing hard against the doorframe of the bathroom. The lights in there are yellow, and yellow light is second only to florescent light in the unforgiving department, but somehow Danny makes it look good. He makes everything look good, when Rusty doesn't kind of, sort of hate him. His toes are bare and curled into the orange shag carpet and his arms are crossed in front of his chest. He has a bruise on his thigh from Rusty's knee.

He isn't kidding, of course. He takes his role as the idea man very seriously.

The picture on the TV gets fuzzy every five seconds in time with a howl of the wind outside. It's three in the afternoon and lazy Sunday gray outside, like mornings when you don't want to get out of bed.

Rusty sighs and drops the remote onto the bed beside him. "Fine," he says, "but you're putting some pants on first."

---

Washington's got this desperate, pressing, choking cool thing going on and it makes something just under Rusty's skin itch, like he didn't spend two months side by side Danny in Canada relearning everything he thought he knew.

He left the TV on their motel room, and the convertible they're in belonged to the people in 2B who turned up the radio at noon and jumped until ceiling dust was falling on Rusty's head and making Danny sneeze.

The wheel is that funny kind of comfortable that most things are in his grip though. It fits nice into the curve of his palm around it like maybe he should keep it.

It's that same ugly sea-foam green as everything you never want to see again. Like the prom dress Leann Johnson wore, when she was a junior and tagging along on Danny's arm like she was the queen of the ball and then Danny'd been Danny and the night ended with her throwing her sea-foam green shoes at Rusty's head and nearly giving him a concussion.

Danny always got him into trouble, and that was only the start of Rusty's dislike for the color.

It's closing in on midnight and he'd followed the interstate to Idaho. Rusty is driving down Forty-second Street of a town he'd never been to in a stolen convertible with the top down and Danny in the passenger's seat wearing his blue striped boxer shorts and a tuxedo shirt.

So he knew. He'd known from the very second that the idea popped into Danny's head when they were sixteen and hiding under the docks with stolen beer from a party down the beach that this was going to get him into trouble. He knew that like he knew five card stud and how to win at blackjack.

Problem was it wouldn't be half as much fun otherwise.

---

Rusty takes it as fact that at two-thirty in the morning the best thing in the world is breakfast.

Real breakfast like Rusty never had on mornings when he was rushing to get to school on time, but eggs and bacon and toast and sausage and hash browns and maybe pancakes too, if they have the right kind of syrup but of course they never do because this is Denny's and it's always going to be the same at every one.

Danny sits in the booth across from him, actually, thankfully, wearing a pair of jeans left in the backseat of the car. They fit a little snug and the waitress isn't the only one who watches him walk to the bathroom out of the corner of her eye.

The seats are that horrible red vinyl that never should've made it out of the fifties and it creaks any time Rusty breathes.

There's nothing here that's subtle.

---

Danny's the restless one. Rusty can't be still, sometimes, but it's Danny who's really restless. He can never be content, like it's always gotta be the next thing, the bigger thing, the better thing.

He drives through Idaho and into Wyoming while Rusty dozes and listens to his stories and plans by the green dashboard light until dawn.

Danny makes a clumsy shift into third because he can talk all he wants, but he's never been able to drive a standard without trouble. The thing about Danny is he's all talk, he's all plans and big dreaming. Rusty wouldn't know what to do without it though.

It's not until they're in Jackson, Wyoming and there's a billboard for Grand Teton Nation Park that Rusty realizes Danny's got no idea where they're going either.

"Time to stop," Rusty says, turning his head to look out the window. Dawn is a sleepy blue-gray outside and they're just on the edge of tourist season, so the traffic is more than is safe for Danny Ocean to be driving through in a stick-shift. Rusty doesn't really care to die in a car this color; it lacks dignity.

---

Danny's got a palm curved around the gearshift and one hand on the wheel and his thighs spread almost too wide for driving. He's leaned back in the bucket seat and Rusty's never seen anyone look so casual about anything as Danny can look about everything.

He pulls into a parking spot along the back of the lot of tourist trap bed and breakfast. The kind of place that wants you to think it's Mom & Pop, all locally owned and lovingly decorated with your grandmother's quilts at the foot of every bed.

He looks out the side window at the mountains and slides his fingertips down to the lowest curve of the wheel before dropping them onto his lap. They rub against the borrowed denim there and it's like—

Rusty's known him long enough and well enough to know when he's working up to something.

Danny's never been the kind of guy that had to work up to something when it came to Rusty though. It's always been an easy smile and a stupid plan and he'd tell Rusty all about it with that tone of voice that was just this side of a dare. Danny was loud and smooth, he'd look at Rusty with a glass of scotch in his hand and whisper whatever entered his mind.

He worked up to things with marks, worked up to getting this or that from the rich widow his mother's age that'd been under the knife more times than Rusty'd beaten him at five card stud. Danny worked up to women in their buttoned up shirts and sensible skirts that know him for what he is and always give in in the end anyway.

Rusty leaves him in the car while he checks in. Pays for two rooms on card lifted from a guy at a gas station just outside of Oregon. The girl behind the counter is young and mousy. He smiles at her and calls her by the name on her nametag and she doesn't check the signature.

---

Rusty drives south for absolutely no reason at all three days later in a baby blue minivan with a sticky red handprint on the back window and Cheetos stomped into the floorboards.

It's almost backtracking, but they go to Salt Lake where Rusty knows a guy who lets them trade it off for an '85 Mustang.

They stop at the carnival of a small town in Utah that Rusty's never heard of to stretch their legs. Danny hands him an order of nachos and it's an apology, but Rusty isn't sure what for. He's not sure Danny knows either, as they sit on the handrails of a ride ramp and watch the bumper cars.

"Twenty says the boy in the blue car starts crying," Rusty says, and sucks the cheese off his knuckle like always makes Danny grunt in annoyance. He's got the same manners he had when he was twelve and too skinny, but they never bothered Danny then. No one ever said he wasn't petty. "That girl is going to crush him."

"You're on," Danny says, and laughs. He curves his palm around the back of Rusty's neck, his thumb pressing into the soft skin just behind Rusty's ear.

Rusty's getting a sunburn.

---

They stop to fill up the tank at a station on the outskirts of a town called Kayenta in Arizona and Rusty buys Doritos, Dr. Pepper and a map.

In Tuba City they try to decide between the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Danny flips a coin and drives toward New Mexico.

---

Rusty lets Danny drive through the desert. Through the cracked blacktop back roads where the traffic is scarce.

On the crackling radio Steve Winwood is singing about how he's back in the high life again. Danny sings along, quietly, with a smile, and completely off key.

With his forehead to the window, Rusty watches the white lines of the road, and the sand and the desert shrubs.

They've got the air on full blast and the back of Rusty's neck is still damp with sweat. His t-shirt is sticking to him and he's sticking to the seat. The sun shines in through the windows and he's pretty sure he knows now what it feels like to be baked. He's beginning to turn an unfortunate shade of red.

He watches through half-closed eyes as the shadows outside grow longer, taller, and listens to Danny sing along badly to the radio until they lose the station, and he smiles.

---

"Truth or Consequences," Danny says and grins. Sometimes Danny is more idealistic than he is smart. Sometimes Rusty doesn't mind it.

"You do know you're a thief?" he asks, because this isn't one of those times.

"Come on, Russ, what're you afraid of?"

Rusty snorts and slouches in the passenger seat. His teeth grind in time with the transmission when Danny misses second taking off from the four-way stop. "Tempting fate," he answers and peels the label from an empty Dr. Pepper bottle.

Danny shrugs it off and keeps grinning. "Nothing to lose, right?"

"I hate it when you do that," Rusty says, and Danny takes too long switching into fifth. "Alright, just… just pull over. Christ."

---

Danny books a double at the Best Western in town.

The walls inside the room are a shade of pink not meant for human eyes to see without warning. It's one of those places where everything except the bedding, the bible in the nightstand drawer and the phonebook is nailed down.

Something about thieves like them, Rusty supposes. He throws his bag on the bed closest to the window and stretches out sideways across the other.

Danny goes to take a piss and leaves the bathroom door just barely open.

The ceiling is dingy, dirty white and the TV gets HBO. There's a pool out back filled with water that looks a little more green than it should. He considers going for a swim and he considers drowning Danny.

He toes off his tennis shoes and thinks very seriously about walking the three steps across the room to turn up the air, but he's not sure it'd really be worth it.

"I don't know that I'll be able to sleep with a blanket this bright," Rusty says. "It may keep me awake."

"It's not that bad," Danny laughs, and flops down on the same bed Rusty's on. "You," he adds, like an accusation that he thinks is going to be funny, "are just a snob."

Rusty's practically got his head on Danny's stomach, and he sighs, and he agrees. "I'd never make it in the clink," he adds. And doesn't smile when it makes Danny laugh again.

"Thread count probably wouldn't be up to your standard," Danny says on a dramatic sigh. "Also I'm pretty sure no one actually calls it the clink." He puts his hand on Rusty's shoulder and then pulls it away. Like he's suddenly clumsy and like Rusty hasn't always known better.

Rusty sits up and sighs. "You're buying me dinner."

Danny hands him the take-out menus stuffed inside the phone book and then orders pizza from Dominos without bothering to ask what kind.

---

It's not something Rusty's ever thought of, just an odd moment here or there where he'll notice the way one of them will mimic the other.

They're both propped up against the headboard, side by side with the mostly empty pizza box between them, arms crossed over their chests and legs crossed at the ankles.

He grabs another slice of pizza for something better to do with his hands and Danny doesn't look away from the movie on HBO that they haven't managed to identify yet until he's grunting at Rusty for licking the grease off of his fingers.

---

"I can get you very, very drunk?" Danny offers from his bed by the window, half-sitting propped up on one elbow, because the clock on the nightstand reads eleven-ten and check out was forty minutes ago.

Because these things typically concern the two of them.

Danny's still half asleep, hair sticking up in a hundred different directions and red lines from wrinkles in the pillowcase running across his face. He's got more stubble than he ever has, even that time when he decided to try and grow a beard for his twenty-first birthday.

It only ever made him look sketchy and very, very something that Rusty is hesitant to name or think about too hard.

The sun is coming in from outside white and hot through the space where the curtains won't quite pull closed. The TV is turned on to cartoons on Fox and the air hums happily and the room is cool.

"Not right now," Rusty yawns, and scratches his cheek. He pulls the sheet over his head and rolls over and goes back to sleep.

---

"I have decided," he says, over hamburgers and fries, "that razors are not for road trips."

"So you're keeping that until we get home?" Rusty asks, and takes a bite.

"Yes."

"Just out of curiosity, are we ever going home? Or will we continue to aimlessly wander around the greater southwestern United States?"

Danny shrugs. "You're the details man."

"Right," Rusty says, "for all the good that's done so far."

"You bought a map."

"You threw it out the window."

"That was an accident."

"You accidentally opened the window of the car and threw out the map?" Rusty asks, just because it's his line. He blinks slowly at Danny and he's got ketchup on his thumb from his fries when he picks the pickles off his burger.

"Yeah. I meant to throw your little sailor hat out the window and grabbed the map by mistake."

Rusty snorts. "You are a liar," he says, pointing at Danny with a fry. Danny hands him a napkin before he can lick the salt and ketchup off his fingertips. "And I don't have a little sailor hat. I resent that implication."

---

Some days there are things he doesn't think of on purpose. Danny and Rusty have spent nearly every day together since Rusty was eleven and Danny was just turning twelve and was conning kids out of their baseball cards with little more than a smile and a promise of friendship.

He wonders sometimes how it is that they fill the days sometimes, but then he remembers that Danny's always filled the days with enough big dreaming for the both of them. When he was thirteen he couldn't be convinced that he and Danny weren't going to run the world one day.

They play penny poker on the bedspread of Danny's bed in the hotel with cheap cards and Rusty's winning because cards are the only place he's ever won with Danny. He takes his winnings to the vending machine down the hall without bothering to put on his shoes and he isn't surprised when he comes back and Danny's gone.

He tries to break up the reds from the blues from the greens in the bedspread, the big splotches of color that blind him and he doesn't think about why it is that he's always following Danny until Danny comes back with a bottle of cheap tequila, a pocket knife and a bag of limes he probably stole from the guy on the corner.

Rusty never gave up his cards, but he's pretty sure that doesn't actually matter.

"If you think you're getting me drunk so we can play truth or dare," Rusty says, like a threat, and follows Danny back out to the car.

---

Danny parks the car on the kind of hill that's a mountain peak if you never left New England until you were twenty-two. The kind of place that's only ever been parked on by teenagers looking for action in the backseat of their parents' cars and the parents attempting to relive the youth they wasted on late nights in the backseats of cars.

He raises his eyebrows but doesn't comment. Just sits on the warm hood of the car and opens the bottle. There's red clay dirt on his shoes, and he feels gritty and dirty when the wind blows, like he's never going to get it all off again. He leans back against the windshield and tilts his head to the skyline.

"You've officially lost all of your subtlety," Rusty says, and sighs, and takes a swig straight from the bottle because neither of them thought to bring glasses. It's a special kind of awful and Rusty squints at Danny standing in front of him in the late afternoon sun like he's just waiting for something.

"You never had any subtlety to lose," Danny tells him and is dark against orangeredyellow the clouds rolling heavy grayblue across the horizon. He waits, just a second, and takes the bottle then sits next to Rusty.

Rusty shrugs and his shoulder bumps Danny's, makes the lip of the tequila bottle bump and clink softly against his teeth. He opens the bag and gets out a lime and doesn't actually bother hoping that didn't hurt.

"To Truth or Consequences," Danny grins, and raises the bottle. He's wearing the jeans they found in the first car again, so the denim is stretched tight across his thighs. The knife is in his pocket and he knows. He really, really knows and Rusty would be more surprised if he didn't, so.

The wind blows again and Danny's t-shirt was white when he bought it in Wyoming, but it'll never be white again, because the sand the wind kicks up is never going to come out of anything. Like it'll still be coming off of Rusty when he's getting a sponge bath from a pretty nurse named Sam when he's in the retirement home.

He takes back the bottle. "To your subtlety," Rusty says, and raises the bottle at Danny. "May it find all it looks for in its new home. It will be sorely missed here." He drinks until it burns too much. "Give me the knife."

Danny sighs, and wiggles a little and kicks Rusty in the ankle because his jeans are tight and probably because Rusty is watching him. It's hard to tell sometimes. "If I'd really said farewell to my subtlety," he mutters, and smiles, and hands over the pocketknife only when Rusty gives him back the bottle.

"Maybe," Rusty admits, and watches his hands because it's getting dark and he likes having ten fingers. They come in handy.

It's a whiskey-fire sunset and his shoes are always going to be stained with New Mexico what-passes-for-soil and Danny's shoulder is pressed to his and burning hot. Rusty sucks on a wedge of lime.

"So your plan is to get me very, very drunk?" Rusty asks, randomly, because it seems like it might be a good thing to know. He takes the bottle back from Danny and licks off the lime juice running down the inside of his wrist before taking a drink.

Danny makes a funny noise in the back of his throat to make Rusty look at him. It's getting just that too dark to see, though, so it doesn't matter that much.

"Well," Danny says, and clears his throat and grins. The grin he saves for marks and women he knows want him if only he could make them see. It's a stupid grin. "Or I could not. It's up to you."

"Did you happen to think of how we're going to get back to the hotel if we both are very, very drunk?" Rusty asks, and raises his eyebrows, and takes another drink so they can find the real topic at hand.

Danny sort of, kind of, almost cringes, like he does every time he lets someone who isn't Rusty handle the details and then something gets fucked up royally. "Some of us can handle our liquor," Danny says, like he's still got a fighting chance of winning this one.

"Yes," Rusty says and nods, "some of us can. However you, dear Daniel, have a nasty habit of not being able to hold your tequila." He tosses what's left of that lime and folds the knife back up carefully.

The hood of the car is still warm under his palm when he drops his hand there so he can shift his weight. He tilts his head back to the stars that are beginning to show. The sun is just a sliver still sinking, like the horizon is going to swallow it down piece by piece. Rusty laughs and slides down until his feet are on the ground.

"I can walk a straight line," Danny says, before he can ask. And does, and does a damn decent job of it, really, so Rusty nods and laughs again and takes another drink like he's dying of thirst and that'll save him.

"Okay," Rusty says, and nods again and Danny is just a shadow now, in the dark, just Rusty's shadow, always there beside him. Or, well, probably it's the other way around. "Then let's go."

---

They drive with the windows down and Rusty shivers because at night the heat is just gone like it was never here to begin with. He's got the fingers of one hand curled around the tequila and the limes are in a bag on the floorboards by his feet.

Rusty leans back against the car door with one arm almost hanging out the window and the cold air makes him feel scarily sober when he's not sure he wants to and he can't bring himself to take a drink for the sight of Danny with his knuckles white from his grip on the steering wheel.

It takes a lot to make Danny lose his cool, it always has. Danny's been calm since the very moment Rusty met him and probably forever since. Rusty could probably count the number of times Danny'd shown an emotion for a reason other than getting what he wanted on one hand.

The radio is glowing green and playing an old country song about being drunk and losing your lover or something. It can just barely be heard above the wind, and Rusty can barely hear the wind for the blood rushing through him.

He missed this.

This sort of terrifying moment of knowing what's coming and not being there and being half afraid of getting there. He laughs, softly and smiles when Danny looks over at him. There's not enough light to see by, really, but it's been a long time since he's needed to see Danny to know what he's doing.

Rusty leans over so Danny can hear him and it's sort of like it's always been because Danny tilts toward him without thought but it's not like it's always been because it's this. "You scared?" he asks, and his nose collides with Danny's cheek when Danny hits a bump in the road.

He drops the bottle in the seat beside him to catch himself from falling. He's got a grip on the back of Danny's seat like it's his life preserver and he rubs at his nose because it tickles, almost. Rusty leans forward again and can feel Danny's stubble on his lips when Danny turns his head a little to say, "Nothing to lose, right?"

Rusty laughs again because that's probably the dumbest and least true thing that Danny has ever said and Danny shivers. Rusty thinks he probably gets it, but if he doesn't that's fine too.

"Hey," Danny says, over the wind rushing in through the windows and the radio playing a song they're too young to really know and Rusty's head is sort of spinning like it does when they're inches away from getting what they want and no one's around to tell them to stop, "you're not," he asks, "really, really drunk, are you?"

"Why, did you dig deep into your… depths and find some previously undiscovered morals?" Rusty asks, like it's an answer and it is. It's very, very much an answer. He presses his fingers against Danny's shoulder like all the assurance he's ever given to Danny before. He moves to sit back and thinks better of it and then thinks better of staying. "You're not," he asks, "really, really scared, are you?"

"Maybe," Danny answers, and laughs and his knuckles are still white against the steering wheel and he runs a red light because he's a criminal and also because Rusty sat back in his seat like he was supposed to and Danny was too busy looking at him to notice it.

The transmission grinds when Danny misses third again when he's slowing down to turn into their hotel parking lot. Rusty takes exactly half a second to decide that he doesn't care at all because they're stopped.

Rusty's fingers curl over, stumble over the lock on the door that's half pushed in by accident, by a knock of his elbow when he's coming back down from over there and into over here and Danny grins like he always does.

"Never," Rusty says, and clears his throat and his hands won't stay still. His fingertips tap against the edge of Danny's seat, just almost, just sort of, just barely brushing against his thigh on the upswing, "thought I'd hear—"

"Rusty," Danny says, like he always does when Rusty is listening really, really hard for him to. All choked back, clammed up, Danny Ocean emotionless easy, with that catch, that second of well, well, maybe that lingers just under his words sometimes. "Get out of the car," he says, and is so slow and so careful in pulling the key out of the ignition that Rusty could, maybe, do something even dumber than he's about to.

Rusty laughs all breathless stupid and it's… It's stupid. It's really, really stupid and this is Danny and Rusty is getting out of the car and pushing the lock in again before he shuts the door and pretending that he doesn't feel sixteen again.

Danny catches his wrist, wraps his fingers around the bones there and pretends he's looking at Rusty's watch and really, really Rusty is shivering because the temperature drop and not for any other, much more teenage girl reason. He's got the tequila and the bag of limes in his other hand and the paper makes a crunching sound in his fist when he pulls Rusty a little bit closer.

Their footsteps are slow and they echo across the parking lot, the sound bouncing off between the buildings. The gate to the pool is open and it creaks on its hinges when the wind moves it. And this is never, ever going to be over because the door to their room is too far away and he keeps his feet steady like he's calmer than he is and Danny's fingers tighten around his wrist.

Someone sort of, kind of, on purpose makes a misstep and it's probably Danny but Rusty can't say for certain, and their hips bump together on the next step forward. The next step closer. It's just a second of contact and then it's gone and Danny's thumb slips under the band of his watch to press against his pulse point so Rusty can't hide that his heart is racing now and he probably couldn't before because this is Danny.

"Danny," he says, and it sounds a little bit strangled so he clears his throat and it makes no sense that they aren't inside yet. And he sort of really doesn't care right now that he knows what Danny's doing. He doesn't turn his head, but looks at Danny out of the corner of his eye. "You've got the key."

"Yeah." Danny drops Rusty's wrist and looks a little bit bashful, or not, because Danny doesn't look bashful as a rule unless it'll get him what he wants and you could light Las Vegas on the sparks he sets off, but that's nothing out of the ordinary so Rusty is at a loss. Danny pulls the key out of his back pocket and turns to look at Rusty like, well.

Rusty lifts the corner of his mouth and leans against the wall just outside the door. It's a painful color of green and the paint is peeling. The number is the kind of number every cheap hotel ever has on it. All fake gold and dull. He watches Danny fumble with the key and presses his thumb against Danny's hipbone because–well, because he can.

Danny inhales sharply and it's surprisingly well lit out here, but his shadow keeps sneaking over to hide the lock and Rusty smiles because he can't make the key fit and he really, really doesn't think that it's symbolic. "There," Danny says, when it's the snick fit of lock and key and the door opening.

The air is still on full blast and it hits them like a wall when they go inside. When Rusty follows Danny in and shuts the door behind them and doesn't listen to Danny put down the bag while he latches the chain-lock too.

Danny steps up behind him and it's like he's a mountain of heat behind Rusty, who's got goosebumps rising along his arms. Danny breathes and his breath is hot on the back of Rusty's neck and Rusty turns around and Danny breathes and his breath is hot on Rusty's cheek because, oh, because they're really gonna do this.

It's more surprising to Rusty than it should be. It's not that often he lets anything Danny does surprise him anymore.

Rusty's hand is on Danny's arm and he's not sure how it got there, but Danny is warm under his palm, against the pressing cold of the room. His thumb goes this way then that, an arch of movement that makes Danny shiver for once. There's a hangnail on his thumb that catches on the hem on the inside of Danny's sleeve.

"God," Danny says, like a gasp against Rusty's jaw where his mouth is warmdamp and his cheek is stubble rough.

Rusty laughs, kind of, it's still too breathless and stupid, but, well. His thumbnail scratches, just lightly, the skin of Danny's arm and Danny's nose presses against his cheekbone.

Danny's got one hand on the door, just over Rusty's shoulder and so close that Rusty could turn his head that way instead of this way and press his mouth there too. Could taste the salt-bitter pulse beating furiously there. And it's really kind of a toss up. But, well. Danny's other hand is on his neck, fingers curling into the short hair at the nape of his neck, his thumb sliding against Rusty's jaw and making the choice for him.

"Ready?" he asks, like he asked the same question before their first game together and before their first job together and Rusty's always thought he was asking himself, really, if he was ready, but Rusty's always nodded anyway, always grinned and said, "Yes" and this time isn't any exception except that it kind of is because when he nods his nose bumps against Danny's cheek again.

"Yeah," Rusty says and smiles. His mouth is open when Danny leans forward, when Danny closes the space between them.

Danny's mouth is softened tequila raw, fucking hot against Rusty's and it's not like he always imaged kissing Danny would be because really he never imagined kissing Danny. Rusty may've spent a few very drunk nights focused on his mouth, but kissing him was never something that. Well.

He's pretty sure that'll never be true again. Because Danny's mouth slides perfectly against his, fits perfectly, and his bottom lip drops open to match Rusty's and his stubble is rough so Rusty'll have marks from this tomorrow because his skin is being rubbed raw from it and he really, really, really wants to mind. But he's going to spend the rest of his life imagining kissing Danny, so he'll take it.

They're pressed together, mouths and hands touching and shoulders holding them both up against the door. Rusty grins and slides his tongue across Danny's bottom lip. Danny cups his face in his palms and Rusty slides his hand from Danny's side and over. Pressing a half-closed fist at the base of Danny's spine and it's like an embrace, almost. It's close enough to count.

Danny sucks on his bottom lip and then nips it. His teeth are sharp against Rusty's bruised mouth like, well. Like he's breathing and tasting. Danny's the one laughing like he's breathless now, and it makes Rusty smile. The corner of his mouth rubs like something dangerously soft against Danny's stubble as his hand slides under the not-white-anymore t-shirt that Danny's wearing.

It's funny, maybe, but it's not much of a shock that they can do this well together too.

Rusty can feel him breathe, can feel the hitch of a gasp in Danny's chest when he presses closer and they press together and it's better than good. Better than great. Better than the time they stole all the files from the principle's office and sold them for twenty bucks a pop and the time they got through museum security to take a painting without a hitch combined.

Maybe it's an odd comparison to make, but they've never been in the business because they needed to be. That's the trick, that's what makes them better than everyone else. They're in this because it's fun.

Danny presses two fingers against Rusty's collarbone, Rusty watches Danny watch his own fingers twist around so he's dragging his knuckles across Rusty's chest and Rusty can't breathe at all so he leans forward to catch Danny's mouth again.

It's nothing at first, for just a second, it's nothing. His mouth is pressed dryly to the open curve of Danny's bottom lip and Danny's got two fingers under the top button of Rusty's shirt and they're just breathing, for a second, or trying to, and it's nothing.

Except that it's never been nothing between them and so Danny undoes the button and presses closer again and Rusty opens his mouth for Danny's again like he'd meant to do this all along, from the first time Danny looked at him and smiled and said, I'll show you a trick, if you want.

Rusty sighs and arches against Danny's hand, against his mouth, against his hip. Danny gasps again and moans at the movement and presses him into the door harder. And it's, well, Rusty kisses Danny like he's maybe never going to get to again because he thinks that maybe he never will and his skin is buzzing like he's had too many Irish coffees.

Danny has Rusty's shirt opened and his palm against the too-sharp bone of Rusty's hip and he's pressing his thumb into the hollow there like—Like something. Rusty's never been the one that's good with metaphors. He's never been the dreamer of the two of them. He's never been the one that talked pretty to get what he wanted. Danny's hands are soft against his skin.

He slides his hand up Danny's spine, fans his fingers out on Danny's ribs, in the grooves between them, and his thumb slides just there to make Danny make that noise and it isn't something Rusty ever imagined, but fuck if it isn't better than anything he ever could've. He wonders sometimes what it'd be like to be in Danny's head, to see these things before they happen and know what they'd be like then.

Somehow he doubts Danny knew about this, though, except for in the way that Danny's known for years that Rusty's eye will follow him across the room. He watches Danny's back because they're partners and he watches Danny's back because he likes to watch him move, sometimes.

Like the shift of muscles under his skin under Rusty's palm, the movement of strength that he never had to make a point of showing, that's so painfully perfectly obvious when Danny pushes against him more and Rusty's shoulder blade is going to be bruised by the door in the morning. Danny tastes like hard liquor and lust and something familiar that is hard to name and Rusty couldn't care less what happens as long as the kissing doesn't stop anytime soon.

He can feel Danny's heart beating furiously against his ribcage, against Rusty's palm, like it's trying to break out. Danny's fingers at just desperate enough at the button of Rusty's jeans that Rusty knows better than to think Danny ever thought of this or thought of this being this good if he did.

"Danny," Rusty says, against the hotwetperfect of Danny's mouth, because he's the details guy through to his blood and he can't stop being that. "Let's go to bed," he says, and bites down on Danny's lip when Danny's eyes flutter open.

God, he's got lashes like a girl. All long and pretty and it's fucking ridiculous that Rusty wants him so very, very badly.

"What?" Danny asks, very, very carefully, going very, very still like a puppy whose just been told no for the first time and doesn't quite get it.

Rusty laughs, and shifts against him just there where it's just. Really, really fucking good. Could be perfect, with less clothing. "Bed," he whispers slowly, his fingers sliding from Danny's ribs to press against his chest, to slide up and hold above his heart and maybe Rusty's the girl here after all. "I said, let's go to bed," he adds, backing Danny up.

"Oh," Danny says, when his knees hit the back of the nearest mattress. There're still cards spread out across the bed and they scatter when Danny falls down on it and pulls Rusty with him. "Okay," Danny says and kisses Rusty again, "this works."

---

He wakes up in the morning and decides that he is never, ever moving again.

Danny's breathing against the back of his neck, steady as Danny always is, and his leg is thrown over Rusty's.

It's hot outside again, and the sunlight coming in is insanely bright. It makes him miss the smog of LA or the rain in Seattle or the anything anywhere that wasn't hot, bright sunlight in New Mexico. It's cool in here though, under the sheet with Danny pressed up behind him molten-lava-summertime-in-Arizona hot.

He's pressed up behind him, fitted in close and they've always fit. They just have, from second one when Rusty was short and skinny and blond and Danny was short, and skinny and too-much-sun-brown all over like Rusty's always felt every Atlantic City delinquent youth should be. They hurled rocks at the waves, under the docks of the beaches they weren't supposed to be on and they hurled insults and inside jokes and laughter like it was a weapon and maybe twelve-year-old boys shouldn't have weapons after all. They sat on the concrete steps of Rusty's house, with the fence around the yard rusting around them, and Rusty finished Danny's sentences when his mom came up with the crunch of dried, nearly-dead grass under her feet and absolute steel in her voice.

Danny's hand is splayed across Rusty's middle. Thumb fitted just below his ribs and palm pressing against the slight curve of his belly, like, well. It's stupid and it's stupid and they've always fit together like that so they should've fit together like this and they don't because Danny's feet are too big and his fingers clench too tight in Rusty's hair and Rusty's never liked waking up in bed with someone else.

But it sort of kind of hurts to breathe and it would probably hurt to move and he's so not ready for this. He closes his eyes and goes back to sleep.

---

"You're lazy," Danny says, and his thumbnail scratches Rusty's shoulder blade like he's tracing something there. His fingertips press into Rusty's shoulder and tap impatiently, like he's as bored with waiting as he's always been.

"You've wounded me," Rusty replies and yawns into his pillow and slaps at the hand sliding down his stomach.

"I'm sorry I called you lazy?" Danny tries and bites Rusty's shoulder. Rusty can feel him smile there, all slick, casual Danny, ready for anything and don't you just want to give him everything.

Rusty twists a little bit, and feels like a contortionist and his shoulder is pressed against Danny's chest. He rubs at his eyes and when he opens them again Danny's still propped up on one elbow hovering above him and looking amused and disheveled and like he spent all night having sex. Danny's mouth is kiss-swollen.

It's gonna be a long day.

"What time is it?" Rusty asks, and blinks and is mostly sure he doesn't care. Danny's framed by the light outside and the dark inside and it's something only Danny would ever be able to do, probably, and he's impossibly… impossible sometimes and he still grins all sexy, sleepy, sly like Rusty doesn't know everything about him.

And Rusty thinks about it, for all of the time that it takes Danny to pick his watch up off the floor because the alarm clock is flashing, and decides that he doesn't care at all today.

"Twelve-twenty," Danny says, and shows him the watch like he'd doubt it.

And, well, at least not everything is different.

Rusty sits up and his thigh slides across Danny's. "Alright," he says, and runs his fingers through his tangled hair, "first food, then tequila." Rusty's got a bruise on his arm and he pokes at it curiously. "I think we're going to need more tequila."

"Hey," Danny says, and catches his elbow before he can get out of bed. He pulls Rusty off-balance, which is tragically easy when he's just waking up, and kisses him like he's maybe never done it before except that, well, he has. So Rusty's just a little confused. And there's a spot on his chin that hurts when Danny kisses him, like it's been scraped raw. "We don't need more tequila." Danny grins.

And Rusty really wants to believe him, but he's always known better than to believe a liar.

---

They have lunch at McDonald's, a couple of Big Macs and large fries and two diet Cokes, because sometimes Danny hates to disrupt the American standard and sometimes Rusty goes along with it because he's half a second too slow to do anything else.

It's road food. They eat in the car and the salt burns when it hits the corner of his mouth. Rusty drives south because it seems the thing to do.

---

He thinks that maybe he could like El Paso in its swaggering Texas-Spanish way. There's red-dirt-sand because it's not, exactly, all that different from New Mexico. It's not, exactly, all that out of New Mexico.

The heat is the same, the ground is the same, the sunshine is the same and it's hot and he doesn't know why it is that he'd come back here and not there.

It's two in the afternoon and Danny is half asleep in the passenger seat, sitting and lazing in the sun like he accuses Rusty of doing. They've got a bag and a half of luggage between them that's in the backseat and Rusty's not sure what happened to Danny's tux, but he hasn't seen even part of it for days. Danny's wearing jeans again, a different pair and he can't remember the last time he saw Danny in this much denim for so long, but he's pretty sure it was before the made their grand escape from the New Jersey public school system three weeks early.

If Seattle smelled like mold then El Paso smells like dust.

The sun coming in through the windshield could melt the skin off your bones and the tires stir up dirt when he pulls off into the parking lot of a gas station roughly the size of a third world country and looking every bit as dirt poor. There's a kid sitting outside looking sticky and four and purple from a slushy.

Danny's asleep and Danny sleeps like the dead. He falls asleep and it's like trying to wake a corpse. Rusty's a skeptic of the con artist variety who knows not to believe a goddamn thing a person tells you, but he's pretty sure there are Voodoo priests out there who have better luck with the latter than Rusty's ever had with the former.

"Hey," Rusty says and puts his hand on Danny's thigh, "are you awake?"

Danny snuffles, sort of, in his sleep and it's not cute because he's been doing it as long as Rusty's known him so it's just annoying. He slides down in his seat and puts his forehead against the window and starts snoring.

"Okay," Rusty says, and grins. He turns off the car and cracks the window on his side so Danny doesn't actually suffocate and die, because that'd just be hard to explain.

Rusty goes inside with every intention of buying a map and leaving quickly, because the floors are concrete, and everything has a thin layer of dust covering it to make it feel gritty. There's a box fan in the window that just pushes around the heat and the dirt, tries to spread it out evenly. There's a guy sitting in a booth that every truck stop has stuffed into the corner wearing a cowboy hat and another behind the counter with a too big sweat-stained tank top and yellow swimming trunks.

He walks out with a six-pack of Coors, a red hat that says 'El Paso', a cherry slushy, an order of nachos, a bag of Fritos, a half-melted half-eaten Snickers bar and a map of El Paso that's got his thumb print in the corner in chocolate.

Danny wakes up when he gets back in the car. Sometime between Rusty slamming the door in an effort to not drop everything and putting the key in the ignition while he tries to get the chocolate off his fingers.

"Where," Danny asks, and pulls the baseball hat out of the bag. "Have you lost your mind?"

Rusty shrugs as he pulls out of his parking spot, somehow managing to back up, eat a nacho and still shift gears right when the engine wants him to. He hopes Danny is suitably amazed. He licks the cheese off his fingers and grins. "Maybe," he says. And grabs the map before Danny can get his hands on it. He might have a few trust issues in the map department, but only because he learns from his mistakes.

"Why did you buy all of this?" Danny asks, and his eyes are red with sleep.

"I didn't," Rusty says, "you did." He tosses Danny's wallet back to him.

"I'm in awe of that lift."

"Don't be." Rusty laughs. "You wouldn't wake up if I spent ten minutes groping for it," he says, and grins.

He touches the back of Danny's neck and it's warmsoft like places that hide secrets best. Danny sighs, and huffs and smiles like he wants to be insulted but isn't and his thumb catches and strokes the inside of Rusty's wrist when he's pulling it away again.

Rusty decides that he gets Texas. He's earned it, after all these years.

---

They get tacos from a place that looks like lemonade stands look in movies, hand painted sign and everything and Danny's not as fearless as he'd like to believe because he hesitates and Rusty mocks him for it around a mouthful until he gives in.

They're right on the border, ten steps that way is Mexico and half an hour that way is New Mexico and they're sitting on the hot hood of the car in Texas watching as hikers make their way across a footbridge and eating tacos wrapped in crisp yellow paper.

Rusty spreads the map out between them, the bottom half of the United States and he holds Texas in his lap. There are buildings behind them that were built when this was still Mexico, when it was still their territory. Besides the two of them there doesn't seem to be anyone in a ten mile radius that speaks English.

"Let's," Danny says, and swallows a bite with beer out of a clear plastic cup, "go to Mexico, and get some real tequila."

"Or," Rusty says, with a smile, "we can stay in the United States and not get picked up by the border police for having a stolen vehicle and phony passports."

"Or we could do that." Danny shrugs. "Wouldn't be as much fun though."

Rusty shrugs and points over his shoulder with his thumb. "There's a liquor store half a mile that way, that you'd have seen if you weren't trying to steal the map, where I'd bet you anything you wanted that they've got tequila they carried over themselves."

"The map defies the point of this adventure," Danny says, and oh so carefully switches tracks like he does when he knows Rusty is right and he is wrong. Rusty bites his thumb and doesn't let Danny see him smile.

"I thought the point of this adventure was that there wasn't a point to this adventure."

"Or," Danny says, all casual flirting mock seriousness, which, actually, is the only kind of seriousness he's ever been able to really muster if they weren't working, "we could check into a hotel and not come out for a week."

"Or we could do that," Rusty says, and he's never minded being the echo.

---

It's another cheap motel room, same as all the others only this one might actually be locally owned. A real, gods-honest Mom and Pop joint if Pop is a balding army retiree and Mom is a thirty-something with three kids under the age of five who cleans out the rooms and doesn't speak English.

Rusty's never had to try, but he'd like to think there are better ways to get a green card.

"We could try and see," Danny says, because he hasn't had to be told what Rusty was thinking since Rusty's fifteenth birthday. "Bet we could get you an old man who'd let you live the high life. You're pretty enough."

Rusty kicks Danny's calf, then hooks his ankle around to bring him closer. "What," he asks, and bats his eyelashes at Danny like every third fourteen-year-old girl they pass will, "you won't take care of me, Danny? I have to go find someone else to give me what I need? Sell myself at auction for the highest bidder?"

Danny laughs, and his palm fits sort of perfect around the back of Rusty's skull. Sort of. The nail on his index finger is torn and it catches and pulls at Rusty's hair. "Could I dress you up however I wanted? Put you in cowboy boots and chaps and watch you ride?"

"Never gonna happen," Rusty tells him on a whisper against his collarbone, where he's bent to hide his smile. "Do you know how uncomfortable chaps are? It's not any fun."

"God," Danny says, looking wide-eyed like he's torn between disbelief and, well, disbelief. Like he's got the mental image and Rusty really is never doing that because cowboy boots have pointy toes that hurt his feet so he might as well enjoy it while he can. He surges forward and bites Rusty's lip before he kisses him because this is what it is and it isn't about soft or slow or easy.

---

"Oh, George," Rusty says, falsely high-pitched and sounding as real as a porn star reads their lines and he can't. He can't stop laughing.

Danny covers his face with his hands and jumps when Rusty brushes fingers down his side. Their ankles knock together, there's a gasp of skin sliding against skin that sounds from their thighs.

"I," Danny says, and his chest is vibrating with his unstealthy, silent laugh and Rusty can feel it all the way to his toes and they aren't even touching, really, except their knees hit together and their ankles are tangled and Danny's elbow is two inches from Rusty's nose, "hate that story."

"I love that story," Rusty grins and doesn't stop laughing and can't stop laughing and never saw the difference anyway.

---

Rusty stretches, into the space between them, with a yawn like waking up just before dawn because you have to. He turns three inches into two. If real life were a comic book that'd be his super power and Batman would have nothing on him.

---

Thirteen sneaks up on them when they aren't looking like it has a habit of doing.

Danny is sitting in the chair, map spread out across a table too small to hold it all, and Rusty's watching the lights of the TV flicker behind his closed eyes.

Rusty rubs at his jaw absently, it's stubble rough and stubble roughened and stubble raw. He's never, never been this raw, he thinks, not even that one time when Danny forgot to look where he was going because Rusty didn't remind him and Danny'd never learned to not drag Rusty into his messes.

He thinks, and he says, completely without meaning to, "Ought to buy you a razor from Wal-Mart. The cheap, yellow plastic throwaway kind," and Rusty doesn't mean to say it because it's almost exactly a direct quote from his mother the first time she'd seen Danny with hair on his chin and it makes him feel slightly, a little bit ill, like he's had too much to drink and his stomach is lurching all over.

The map crinkles under Danny's palms, a sickening crunch of paper Rusty'd worked hard to earn the right to, as Danny stands up, naked as the day he was born, and puts his hands on his hips like his mother used to do. "Rusty Ryan," Danny says, and tries to glower, but Danny's never done that half as well as he smirks, "I cannot believe that you would say such a thing. Those words in this room of all places?"

And then thirteen hits them, and Rusty reaches out and wraps his fingers around Danny's arm and pulls until he lets himself be pulled over. "Danny," he says, and grins, "I'm gonna kick your ass for that." And he hasn't had enough to drink to excuse it.

"Really?" Danny asks, rightfully doubtful because Rusty's never won with him.

"Really," Rusty answers, and nods and is half hanging off of the bed. He tugs at Danny's wrist again, until Danny crawls into bed with him. "Really, really," he says. "Ready?"

Danny laughs when Rusty rolls them over, rolls on top. He pushes back and they wrestle like they did then, when they were thirteen and shouting and breaking things in the living room and laughing and being thirteen with cracking voices and too much to learn.

Rusty straddles Danny's waist, and licks a stripe across the soft curve of the inside of his elbow as he holds Danny's wrists above his head.

"Cheater," Danny gasps, and it isn't like it was when they were thirteen at all because they're both stupidly, achingly, breathlessly hard and Rusty won this round, but only because he cheated.

---

They don't get dressed for three days and then they do. Rusty makes faces at the shirt that Danny wears. It smells like sweat and heat and car rides. It's says Grand Teton National Park on the front and has pieces of New Mexico buried in deep.

He doesn't have to ask to know that means it's time to go. He and Danny start throwing things into bags because they've never been masters at packing.

---

It's early Sunday morning traffic outside. It's very bright and very hot and Rusty can't find his sunglasses and the map is tucked under Danny's arm. There are too many cars and too many people out and about and Danny wants to drive but Rusty doesn't want to die so he refuses to give up the keys.

He drives past churches with full parking lots for an hour before pulling into a diner for breakfast. The kind of greasy spoon that Denny's aspired to be when it began.

The waitress is sitting at the counter when they walk in; her uniform is the same color of pink as every kind of truly horrible medicine and her gray hair is pulled back into a bun and her shoes are probably older than Rusty and Danny combined. The letters on her nametag are rubbed off.

Rusty barely gets to place his order before she's bringing them orange juice and coffee and plates with food piled high. A three am breakfast at breakfast time is almost something novel, and everything is covered in gravy.

It's good enough to ignore the way his feet sort of stick to the floor and the way Danny keeps saying, "Isn't it more fun if you don't know where you're going?"

---

Rusty drives while Danny plays with the radio, but they're in the middle of nowhere, really, so the only thing it'll pick up is static or country music or commercials. Rusty's more fond of the static, when it gets right down to it.

"This sucks," Rusty says, because he's a master of the English language when he wants to be, if he really sets his mind to it.

Danny laughs and cups a palm around Rusty's knee, fingertips making small, soothing circles on the inside of Rusty's thigh like he actually thinks he's helping, except he's grinning like he knows better.

They settle on a car commercial, for all of fifteen seconds, before Danny gets bored and flips the station again. He ends up singing along, very off key, to Willie Nelson. Just for kicks he adds in a horrible, exaggerated twang.

He keeps his hand on Rusty's leg and Rusty drives and drives and drives.

---

"Why don't you pull over and let me drive?" Danny suggests, refolding the map that Rusty threw at him as proof that, yes, yes, Texas is this big, really. It makes an awful ripping noise that makes Rusty want to cringe.

"Because," Rusty answers, like it thrills him to, "I don't want to die." He wonders what else he could throw at Danny, and stabs viciously at the radio buttons with his index finger when another commercial for Ford comes on.

"I'm not that bad," Danny says, and laughs.

"Actually, you know, you are."

"I'm not."

Rusty snorts, and runs his hand along the dashboard. It comes away heavy with dust and heat and he wipes it on his thigh. "Tell that to Betty," he says. "Because she's been telling me you've done her wrong. That you've hurt her, same as you hurt every woman who loves you. Or who makes eye contact."

"Your attachment to cars makes me wonder, Rusty. I mean, really."

"Wonder all you like, Veronica, you'll still have to share my affections."

---

Danny kisses him, in the middle of the parking lot in the middle of the day in the middle of Texas, with his fingers twining and tangling in Rusty's hair, cupping his skull, bringing Rusty in and over to the passenger's side to curl into the space he inhabits with long, talented fingers and smooth palms and a hot, wet, delicioussinful mouth.

His elbow knocks against the back of the seat and his knee nearly knocks them out of gear and his seatbelt is going to kill him and Danny kisses him like he. Like he doesn't care. Or like he does. Maybe. Maybe, Rusty thinks, Danny kisses him like he cares.

"Lay back and relax," Danny says, when he pulls back, the words spilled out across Rusty's mouth, his jaw, his cheek. "Take a nap or something. I'll be right back, and I'll drive for a while. No traffic anyway."

"Yeah," Rusty sighs, and sits back again. They're parked under a tree, in the shade, and he keeps the car running with the AC on. "Okay," he says, and watches Danny's back because that's what he does.

---

"Oh, God," Rusty says, when Danny comes back like he's just like every other stupid, stupid beautiful boy and not like casual, cocky Danny Ocean who is walking like a cowboy cliché and Rusty laughs, behind the windshield, sitting in the passenger's seat of the car and watching. "Oh, God," he repeats, and is already breathless.

And Rusty thinks of how every Monday at home, in Atlantic City, there was a barber named Ted, and a barber shop that was old time, with white and red stripes that stopped spinning sometime in the late seventies, at least. And every Monday when they were home Danny was there—sitting in a brown leather chair that had rips and cuts and hair from more generations than Rusty'd met of his family slipped and buried into the cracks—leaning his head back for Ted whose hands were as steady as ever with a straight razor.

Danny tips his hat to him, while he's shoving bags in the back, and Rusty laughs and thinks and wonders if the chair sits empty and spinning when Danny isn't there. It's not a metaphor, in his mind, it isn't.

"Well," Rusty says, and bites his lip when Danny gets back inside the car and Rusty should've thought to buy a camera sometime back there, because he's never, ever going to forget this image but he'd kill for proof of it, when Danny's in New York and suits again, because blackmail always comes in handy later. "Well," he says again, and means well. "What's with the Cowboy Dan outfit?"

"I have pictures of you in the 80s," Danny answers, and grins and Rusty can't see his eyes from the hat, "with Flock of Seagulls' hair. And that's Sheriff Dan to you."

"I have the reasonable excuse that it was the 80s though, you have no excuse." Also, he adds, "And I've got the autographed picture of you and Barry Manilow from backstage at his concert. Who knows when that could resurface."

"That was a long time ago."

"That was nine months ago," Rusty corrects, and unwraps a KitKat for something to do with his hands, for something to keep his hands on this side of the car. It's melted and he's going to make a mess, he always does. "And you were wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt. It had his picture on the front."

"I'm pretty sure I was trying to get laid." Danny grins, like he knows Rusty's not the least bit surprised. "If that makes it better."

"It doesn't," Rusty answers, and doesn't flinch against the press-slide of Danny's fingers against his shoulder, through his t-shirt.

Danny laughs, and it's softer than Danny would usually laugh. Its edges aren't sharp with sarcasm and games. "Are you," Danny asks, with his fingertips hot against Rusty's collar, underneath, in the place where neck meets shoulder that makes Rusty's stomach do some sort of move not seen since break dancing went out of style, "jealous?"

Rusty looks at him from the corner of his eye, looks at the parts of Danny he can see around a big black hat and tight jeans and a belt buckle the size of a fist. "Bet you don't even remember her name," Rusty says, and snorts, and has melted chocolate all over his fingers. "Why would I be jealous?"

"Well," Danny says, shrugging and grinning and putting the car in reverse, "any number of reasons."

"No," Rusty says, and licks the chocolate off his fingers and watches his mirror as Danny backs up, still snickering. He snorts out laughter again when Danny turns the radio back on. "Please don't sing Willie Nelson anymore, I don't think I'd ever be able to stop laughing."

"Why wouldn't you be jealous?" Danny asks, and looks over at Rusty instead of watching the traffic he's pulling out into.

---

Rusty steals Danny's hat and uses it to shield his eyes from the sun and the sight of the road outside. It's easier for Danny to drive if he's not watching anyway. Easier for Rusty, at the very least.

His seat is reclined and he lies back with a black cowboy hat over his eyes and his fingers curling, empty, at Danny's side, his knuckles resting against Danny's thigh.

The back of his neck is damp with sweat from the sun and the air conditioner is on full blast and it makes him want to shiver when it hits damp skin.

---

They get to San Antonio just as it's getting dark. The summer sun setting late, and Rusty can't see it for the buildings and the palm trees and they've been driving for too long. They've always been too restless for rides like these.

Rusty's driving again, the gearshift warm in his palm like transferred heat from Danny.

"You need to make a left up here," Danny says, his face hidden by a new map.

"Where we going?"

"The Alamo."

Rusty laughs and turns left and gets it. "Sure thing, Sheriff."

---

"Just to see if we can," Danny says, fingers tapping the black metal tabletop, the sound drowned out by the traffic rolling by next to them. Pick-up trucks and Jeeps and sports cars, one after the other after the other. Rusty's pretty sure the black is just spray paint. It's chipping off and he picks at it with his thumbnail.

They're sitting stupidly near the street, under a fucking palm tree that is as out of place in Texas as Rusty is, it seems, at the last table of a patio bar and grill. There's an American flag hanging in the corner, next to a Texas flag, next to the red awning and they all flap in the breeze like it was a hurricane wind, and so Rusty leans forward, closer, across the table, because he can't hear.

Everything here is still dusty, just covered in it and the buildings are all a crumbling sort of old and the people look like tourists in New York, cameras around their necks, elastic waistbands, shorts on people who should never wear shorts. They all talk too loudly, too bawdy, like they'd never be at home.

"Look," Rusty says, and runs his thumb over Danny's wrist when he reaches for his glass of water. The condensation on the side makes it slick, and there's enough dirt in the air to make him feel like he's drinking mud and he may take back every nice thing he ever thought about Texas, even if it's all he's going to get. "I never said no."

Danny shrugs, and his hat is in the car, thank God, so Rusty can actually see him. There are tells Danny has that Rusty knows well enough, the crinkle around his eyes, the slight down turn of his mouth that you have to be looking for, his fingers not being still, his foot keeps kicking Rusty's under the table on accident. It's not Work Danny; it's Planning Danny, which is, usually, a very, very scary thing.

Rusty isn't surprised by it at all though, because of course this is Danny's mind at work. Of course. This is the kind of thing that makes his mind decide to work and he's always liked a challenge. That's the basis of his taste in women.

The bar is piping out music from inside, soft piano music coming through tinny speakers like they're trying to pretend they're higher class than they are. They've got paper napkins of the table and, well, Rusty really is a snob, he's alright with that.

The waiter's name is Hector, he's beautiful and Spanish and Rusty, at any other time, would not have noticed Danny's staring for his own. He laughs softly to himself, under the sounds of everything around them, when Hector brings them their food.

Rusty has never been so glad to not see a burger in his life.

"Hey," he says, and waves his fork around to get Danny's attention. He bites into his shrimp like he's never tasted something so wonderful. "You knew before you asked that I was in, so what's the problem?"

"We're," Danny says and shrugs again, like, well, it's nothing. He's Danny Ocean, if it's not money or his prize then it's just details, and that's Rusty's job. He smiles all slick-casual as always. "On vacation. I'm just not sure it'd be worth it."

Rusty laughs, and sets his fork down. "Danny," he says, "I think I just remembered why we don't go on vacation."

One of the many reasons, one of the thousands of reasons, one of the millions of reasons. There's never just been one.

---

Danny picks the hotel again, another ancient building in a line of ancient buildings.

It's nicer than the others, but the air is on the fritz. They order a bottle of wine from room service and shed clothes like they're nothing but a hindrance. The sheets are soft and they sweat through them, laying on top of them, and making out like teenagers.

It's too hot to do anything fast, so they take everything slow.

---

San Antonio by day is even dustier, and Danny's brand new cowboy boots are thick with it, like they came with it almost.

Everything looks dead or dying, the plants are the kind of green that comes with August in most places, the kind that's almost brown, almost dead and gone and it's still only May but they look heat smothered and Rusty knows exactly how they feel.

Summer's barely even begun.

Everything is soft, cracked leather and crumbling buildings and tourists in blindingly bright colors clustered in big, loud groups.

Their grand scheme involves sneaking away from their tour group at the Alamo, a bunch of people over the age of fifty, three bored teenagers, one crying baby and the guide, who has that dull, monotone kind of voice that the worst teachers—the ones who can't keep their best students awake for class—have. Sneaking off couldn't have been more easy if… Well, it couldn't have been more easy.

They wander down this hallway, then that one, behind closed doors and velvet ropes.

"You know," Rusty says, scratching his cheek with his thumbnail, "we maybe should've researched this better." He tilts his head to the right, and still has no idea if the clay whatever in front of them is more valuable than anything they could buy at the Pottery Barn.

Danny nods and runs a hand through his hair. "Yeah," he says, "maybe."

Rusty tilts his head left. "So you ready to go then?"

"Absolutely," Danny says, his knuckles brushing the back of Rusty's hand when he turns around and heads for the door and doesn't look back because he knows that Rusty will follow him out.

---

Danny drives to Houston, and Rusty watches him and the way his hand curves around the gearshift and the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he squints in the sunlight.

And Rusty thinks, well, Rusty thinks maybe they're getting old. Maybe he's getting old. Maybe Danny was right all along.

Danny parks in the back of an empty Pizza Hut parking lot and Rusty leans over, his fingers in Danny's hair, pulling him over too, making him meet half way. "Hey," he says, against Danny's mouth parted and expectant and waiting. His breath ghosts out over Rusty's forearm and he hasn't had a chance to turn the car off yet.

"Hey," Danny answers, and smiles and lets his confusion show. His hand finds its way to Rusty's hip and the angle is awkward and the most amazing thing is that it's the first thing that is. His fingers burn into Rusty's skin, through his t-shirt, and it's stupid, but then all of this is one big, stupid mistake and Rusty can't really breathe, so he kisses Danny to steal his breath too.

"Let's stay in Houston awhile," Rusty says, against the upturned, confused corner of Danny's open mouth. He wonders if his fingertips feel as crazy almost-desperate sliding across Danny's cheeks as he does.

---

He doesn't care about the room. He doesn't even look at it before he drops his bag and flattens Danny to the door with his palms and will and mouth.

---

His fingers curl in on his empty palm, around the sliver of sunlight coming in from around the edges of the drawn curtains that slinks over to lie across the bed. His face is hidden in the shadow of his bent elbow, where the light can't reach him and he dreams of shapes and colors and the voices of the morning news anchors on TV.

Rusty wakes up to the rasp scratch of stubble on the inside of his thigh. To Danny's mouth, grinning against the shadow-darkened dip of places that make Rusty's spine curve and his toes curl. And Danny… Danny knows.

"Fuck," he says on a groan, and tangles his fingers in Danny's hair, to keep him there.

"Morning," Danny says, his teeth scraping, tongue tasting, lips brushing Rusty's skin, "sunshine. Did you sleep well?"

"Tease," Rusty gasps, as Danny sucks a bruise onto his hip. "Jesus, Danny," he hisses, his voice rough and thickened by sleep. "Christ."

Danny laughs against Rusty's hip, where there's an O of wet the shape of his mouth, and it makes Rusty's breath catch. He smirks and Rusty can feel it against his thigh. "Bet I could make you beg right now," he says, and does something indecent with his tongue that Rusty did not teach him.

"Fuck you," Rusty hisses, and really, really would, in a heartbeat. "Fucking tease."

He laughs again, and stops teasing and Rusty thinks he could wake up like this every day for the rest of his life and do it happily.

---

Somehow they end up going down to Galveston for the day and waste too many hours sitting on the beach where the waves hit their feet when they roll in at low tide. Rusty gets sticky from a melting vanilla ice cream cone and throws Danny's new belt buckle out to the ocean, like you hear stories of how tribes used to with their dead.

"The boots are next," he says, and grins, except Danny's barefoot and so is he and the boots are in Houston, which might as well be another country when they're on the beach with sand and salt water between their toes.

Danny laughs, and has Rusty's fingerprints in ice cream on his cheekbone, and says, "At least I didn't go for the chaps. I could've you know."

"Still would have stuck out like a sore thumb, would've more, I guess. Oh my God, we're tourists." He laughs too, sort of; it's choked off by the salt-white caps of waves against his shins. The water is cold and dirty-ocean-brown-gray-blue and it's dampening and staining the cuffs of his rolled up pant legs.

"We are," Danny admits, and looks like he's trying not to laugh, instead of his usual I'm-Smarter-Than-You smirk and even behind his sunglasses Rusty has to squint to see him in the sun reflecting off the water. "We have been for a while now."

"Well," Rusty sighs, heavy and dramatic, "this is tragic."

"My how the mighty have fallen."

Rusty snorts and is sunburned pink again, over freckles on his arm from Arizona in the middle of the afternoon in the car. He scratches his wrist. "How indeed," he says, and leans his head back and closes his eyes.

"We could go play mini-golf," Danny suggests with a smirk that Rusty doesn't have to see, his fingers buried in the sand.

"I don't think we've fallen that far yet," he says, and his fingers are still sticky from his ice cream. He licks the corner of his mouth and then wipes at it with the back of his wrist. "I mean at least there've been no elastic waistbands yet."

"So we're not hopeless, then," Danny deadpans, "there's still a chance we could get back in the game someday, if we really apply ourselves."

"We're in still in the game, it's just not the same one."

Danny laughs, but it's hard to argue with that. He gets up and walks off and Rusty follows him, because that's what he's always done, and because. Well, because. "I'm planning our come back, anyway," Danny says, walking backwards to watch him and slowing down while Rusty catches up with him. "It'll be like Tina Turner, only without the movie and the domestic abuse and the great legs."

"You know, that's really the first thing that's ever made me think I was overestimating your straightness." Rusty has to bite his lip when he says it though, because Danny looks like-- Well, and really. He starts walking again, and Danny is right by his side.

"That's the first thing, really?" he asks, and is so obviously trying not to laugh and not to wonder and it's not something Danny's very good at sometimes.

"Like Tina Turner?"

"I do believe you're insulting my manliness."

Rusty, very solemn and very straight-faced and very, very amused, nods. "Yes," he says, "yes, I do believe I am. What you gonna do about it?"

"Well," Danny sighs, and shrugs and all of a sudden has a hand on his shoulder and is pushing him into the water until Rusty's on his ass in it and Danny's standing shin deep and laughing, "just that."

"Okay, fair enough," Rusty says, and takes his wrist and pulls him in too and says, cheerfully, "I hope you drown."

---

There's a restaurant sitting on a dock, sitting on creaking wooden boards in the Gulf of Mexico. It's painted a scarily bright shade of blue, against the sky that's graying with storm clouds rolling in and packed tourist-town tight.

The air is heavy and moist and pressing in again, and salt water is the same everywhere. It's like being a kid again, spending the day on the beach and coming back from it burnt, tired and absolutely starving.

They eat dinner there, sitting on the patio deck, just out of reach of the sun, and listen to the noise inside and the waves crashing against the feet of the building.

Danny's eyes are doing that half-mast thing they do when he's getting tired, and he has his chin propped up in his hand and Rusty isn't watching him so much as looking in his direction because that's how the chair is facing. He blinks and shifts and their feet knock under the table.

"How is it," Danny asks, suddenly enough to make Rusty blink again in surprise, "that you grew up on a beach? Look at you."

"I'm too pretty to have grown up on a beach?" Rusty counters, because his hair is sticking up at odd angles and his jeans are dried stiff from the water and he's freckled and red from the sun and he still has sand between his toes.

"Yeah, that's it exactly."

"I always figured your obsession with the beach was how miserable it made me."

Danny snorts, and his fingers slide over and curl around his sweating water glass. "The beach was always your idea."

"Was not. You liked watching whatshername with the," Rusty says and makes a gesture with his hands in front of his chest, "try and play volleyball."

"Oh, that's right. I'd forgotten about that."

Rusty snorts this time, like it's his turn. "Of course you had. You always do after you bag 'em."

"Not always," he says as the waitress comes over. She's maybe sixteen and has on short shorts under her apron and she tosses her hair and giggles and smiles too big. She's the stereotypical big-haired-big-breasted Texas blonde and probably a cheerleader to boot. He'd bet everything that she kills in tips.

Rusty orders a Po'Boy Sandwich and a beer and there are birds on the white guardrails around the deck that she tries to shoo away, but they stay put. Stubborn. She giggles like she knows she's as cute as she is and he really, really must be getting old. "Christ," he says, when she's back inside and Danny's laughing. He rubs at his eyes.

"I think she liked you," Danny says.

"Told you I was pretty."

Danny holds his palm up like he's being sworn in and says, "I never denied it."

"Course not." Rusty presses his palms against the table edge like he's going to push off and then taps his fingers on the top. "It's undeniable," he says, and folds his arms on the table and rests his temple on his wrist and watches the birds until their food comes and then the birds watch him.

---

They duck under the dock before they leave and in the shadows in the dark Danny leans in and kisses him. The sun is setting Barbie-pink and purple at the horizon and the restaurant above them is packed, still, with loud voices and creaking board steps and clatters of falling things that are even louder down here.

Birds are calling out, flying out in the distance and Danny is kissing him, hands on his hips, thumbs hooked, crooked under the hem of his shirt.

Danny's salty and hot and bottled-wine lush. His mouth hard and demanding and really fucking soft, right there, pressing against him. Really, really fucking lush and Rusty's head might be spinning, a little, but it's not because he's had nearly enough to drink.

It's just that it's almost, almost exactly like what he sort of really wanted more than anything in the world when he was sixteen, and he's dizzy with having it.

He curls his fingers into Danny's shirt, fistfuls of fabric that's just worn thin and soft, and he's wrinkling it or something, clinging and holding on tight. The waves are just background noise to him, like traffic in New York or slots in Vegas or parties going on down the beach from them in Atlantic City.

Danny slides a hand from Rusty's hip, fans out his fingers at Rusty's spine and pulls back just enough to gaspbreathe and then they're kissing again.

And Rusty knows it's going to make it hard to leave, but he keeps holding on.

Houston seems pretty damn far at the moment.

---

Rusty walks into the hotel room with a paper bag from the liquor store and a couple of mugs from the gift shop in the lobby. They say I love Houston in big red letters, but it's better than styrofoam Dixie cups.

Danny doesn't ask questions when Rusty doesn't want him to, it's always been that way and it's one of the things that Rusty really likes about him most. He just pours the drinks while Rusty takes off his shoes and climbs into bed.

"You know," he says, and makes a hand gesture and has no idea what he meant to say.

"Yeah," Danny answers, nodding like he gets it and the sad part is he probably does.

Danny hands him a mug and they toast to Texas.

---

"You," Rusty says, and laughs, "want to?"

"Maybe," Danny answers, with his eyebrows raised. He's drunk but so is Rusty, so he's maybe, possibly not the best judge. "Yes."

Rusty laughs again, and rolls over and misjudges, ends up with his nose buried at Danny's collar, where he smells like sweat and tequila and warm, comforting things. Like being in bed, under the covers, when it's cold in the room, or like that feeling, that second, that heartbeat of something like bliss, folded into the embrace of everything that always should've been yours.

"Well," Rusty whispers there, says there, his voice muffled by Danny's skin and Danny's shirt. He puts his fingers against Danny's adam's apple and they slide down to his collar and Rusty's mouth follows the path. "Well," he repeats. "We could."

"Nothing to stop us," Danny gasps, he moves his legs, impatient, and the friction rustles the sheets, rattles the empty cups around his knees. "Nothing to lose, the whole world at our feet, nothing we can't do."

"Damn straight." Rusty nods, and laughs, and kisses Danny and tastes tequila, limes and victory. And, and God, he loves the taste.

Danny laughs too, laughs with him and maybe at him, and his hand is spread out on Rusty's back, his fingers following the curve of Rusty's spine. "Not so much," he says.

"Don't make your bad puns at me, Danny. Danny. Danny, Danny, Danny, Dan, Danny, Dan. Daniel."

"Stop, stop," Danny says, and puts his fingers over Rusty's mouth. "Stop," he repeats and doesn't so much mean it when it's his fingers that Rusty is licking, sucking the salt away from and, well, maybe Rusty isn't as smart as he likes to think, because he never drew that connection at all.

"God," Danny whispers, gasps when Rusty bites, his tongue curling around Danny's knuckle.

Rusty sits up, a thigh on either side of him, knees pressing into Danny's waist. He releases Danny's fingers with a soft plop and grins, his palms flat against Danny's chest. Somehow Rusty is sort of wearing Danny's hat, it's tilted low across his face and he kind of can't see very well. "So you want to?"

"That's--that's not fair. Not fair, at all, Rusty." Danny's fingers are still slick-wet when he pushes at Rusty's shirt, grabs at his hips like he's the one that's desperate here.

"Well, I am a professional at cheating."

"You're a weasel is what you are," Danny says, pulling at the thin fabric of his shirt that Rusty's wearing.

"It's criminal," he agrees, and nods and shifts impatiently against Danny. "So?"

"Yes. Yes, alright, whatever you want."

---

He wakes up to Danny snoring, loudly, and drooling on his chest. The first one is now sort of expected, the second is going to be gross until the day he dies, no matter where Danny's tongue may've been the night before, waking up covered in his drool is, really, a little much. A lot much. It's enough to test Rusty's stupid devotion.

"Ugh," he says, when he tries to say, "Get the hell off of me, you're heavy and hot and drooling like the teething baby we got stuck with the one time you decided to try and get into the kidnapping for random business." And then he says, "Ugh," and means it because his attempts at speech have woken the dancing demons with jackhammers and pitchforks and tap shoes that now have a conga line going in his head.

Which is, really, the kind of overkill that Danny usually goes for.

"Oh, God," Rusty groans, weakly, and thinks that there has never been anyone so very hung over in the history of the world that lived to tell about it. His stomach is making noises that mean, "Ha, you thought you could get away with it, didn't you, you thought that'd I'd never notice, you thought that the empty tequila bottle would escape my attention, didn't you?"

Or maybe that's just what's stuck in his head every time he's been hung over since the first time when he and Danny had stolen a bottle of peach Schnapps from his mom's liquor shelf, because she didn't have a cabinet or a lock and was just asking for two fourteen-year-old boys to do that. And, God, why did he never listen to his mother when she did her crazy shrieking fits about how Danny Ocean Is Bad News and also, Do Not Drink Alcohol Ever Again Or I Will Kill You Myself.

If there was one thing that Rusty now knew for certain—in this time when opening his eyes to see the tiny bit of sunlight that sneaks in through the curtains and attempting to locate a bottle of aspirin in the stupid, messy mess of their hotel room was a concept too difficult for him to even consider—it was that he should have listened to his mother. And also that he is going to be sick.

"Off," Rusty says, and pushes at Danny's shoulder and grunts with apprehension and the effort of raising his hand six inches. "God," he says, again, because it's really times like these when people find religion. He's beginning to see the point in begging for redemption, forgive me for my sins I'll do anything, anything Lord, if you'll just make it stop. "Fuck."

Danny snuffles, sort of, like he's always done and is still sleeping like a very dead thing, and what Rusty wouldn't give for a voodoo priest right now. Or a Catholic priest, even, to exorcize the hangover drama queen out of him. Danny, perhaps aided by some sort of divine intervention, or simply the seething hot waves of Rusty's hatred, rolls over and uses the pillow as a pillow for a change.

Rusty makes it to the bathroom just in time to throw up everything he's ever even thought about eating and then his insides and his soul and, quite possibly, his will to live. It takes a while, but eventually he decides that he might actually be up to handling toothpaste being near his mouth.

Brushing his teeth is hard, when the thought of raising his arm is exhausting, but the mint taste in his mouth makes him feel human again, at least, instead of like tap-dancing demon stomping ground.

"I hate you," he says in the general direction of Danny's back, when he finally reemerges from the darkened bathroom, "for letting me drink that much. I thought we were friends." Or, well, he says, "Ehuhg," and thinks the other.

The bottle of aspirin is on the nightstand, next to the empty tequila bottle and the I love Houston cups. And fuck Texas, he thinks, and takes some pills and drinks some water and perhaps even takes back every bad thing he ever thought about his dear, dear friend as he lies back down to try and pretend that the world doesn't exist.

---

"Ugh," Danny says a couple of hours later.

Rusty smirks against the curve of his shoulder, and well, he's earned the right. He has. "Morning," he says with just that little bit too much cheer.

"Ugh," Danny replies, and Rusty has no doubt that he means "I hate you and everything you've ever thought of and this is why you are not allowed to plan and ow."

---

They leave Houston slowly, sluggishly, walking out of the hotel with their bags over their shoulders and sunglasses very firmly in place because the world outside is still Texas bright-hot-loud in the way that's multiplied by a hundred with the aftereffects of tequila.

The walk to the car is long and hard and Rusty's never been more unsure about why he listens to Danny's big ideas. The sun makes something pound hard behind his right eye and the scratch of the key when he sort of misses the lock on the first try makes his teeth ache. Which, actually, might be the real reason they were never into vandalism.

It's like stepping into an oven, getting into the car, it's five times as bad as stepping out of the dark, quiet, air-conditioned hotel was. Just opening the door releases a wave of heat that microwaves would probably envy.

Danny practically falls into the passenger's seat, his fingertips white against the handle of the door. He makes a face at Rusty to indicate his displeasure at the weather, and sunlight and life in general maybe, and waves a hand around like why in God's name did we think that was a good idea, you're supposed to not let me do these things, remember?

Rusty grunts, and cradles a cup of coffee from the hotel lobby one in hand while he puts the key in the ignition. He doesn't think he needs to worry about his coffee getting cold. His eyes are bloodshot red behind his sunglasses.

"You want," Rusty asks, and stops instead of going through the effort of finishing his sentence, since everything just went sort of heat-hazy and Danny looks ready to swallow his own tongue to avoid talking. He wants to cringe but thinks it would probably hurt.

"No," Danny answers with a grunt of displeasure. "And you're no kind of friend at all for asking, either."

"Breakfast is—"

"Shut up," Danny says, and his eyes are covered with dark glasses and he puts the back of his hand over his mouth like, well, he was always slower about these things.

"Bacon," Rusty tries, because really. Really. Nothing is better, at times like these.

"No."

"Fine," he sighs, and puts the car in reverse.

"How could you even—"

Rusty smiles, soft of, around the lip of his coffee cup. "Was up while you were still doing your impression of my great aunt Myrtle lying in her grave."

"You don't have a great aunt Myrtle. And," he adds, when Rusty opens his mouth to reply, "you never did."

"No, but it sounded good."

"I," Danny says, with all the conviction that he has for everything and always manages to use to get Rusty to do whatever he wants, and an amount of cheer not usually seen around the horribly, painfully hung over, "hate everything about you."

"Bacon," Rusty answers, smiling faintly while he's pulling out of the parking lot, just to make him squirm.

---

The sign is nothing like he thought it would be. Nothing fancy at all. It's just a green sign with white lettering like every other one they've past that says Welcome to Louisiana.

Danny grabs Rusty's wrist and pulls his hand from the wheel—which is dangerous and stupid but probably no more so than anything else he's ever done—to look at Rusty's watch since they never bothered to try and set the one on the radio since Utah. His thumbnail scratches under the band, and his palm is wrapped around tight and kind of fucking hurts since Rusty's still sunburned a horrible shade of pinkish red.

"We slept late," Danny says, his voice a kind of hmm that means he's plotting, again. But then, it's hard sometimes to find a time when he isn't.

Rusty grabs the bottom of the steering wheel with his right hand, which is awkward when his left is still being held tight by Danny in the passenger's seat. "Just figuring that out?"

"Let's stop and get lunch," Danny says instead of answering, and some things will never, ever change. "You can see if Cajun has the same effect as fried, and I can laugh at you while you vomit on the side of the road."

"Sounds like a plan," Rusty answers and rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses. Danny lets go of his wrist and that's their farewell to Texas.

---

Danny flips stations on the radio again, like he's restless. Like he doesn't know what he's looking for, almost. He's moving now that he had food and coffee though, and it's almost as though he's alive again, which makes Rusty want to snicker, but. Well. There's always a but, apparently.

He stops to listen to the weather report being read softly in a southern accent, some woman who sounds old as dirt, her voice rough with too many hard years, and Rusty'd bet her skin is leather now and she still cooks jambalaya in the same pan she always did. It was never said that Rusty Ryan was about stereotypes, especially the ones that are true.

When they were twenty-one they took a flight out of Atlantic City for Mardi Gras and spend the entire week drinking and offering beads to girls whose names they never bothered to learn for a peek. All Rusty really remembers of it is hazy with the memory of drunken nights, all bright colors and loud music and beautiful girls and Danny's arm slung around his shoulders to fit him close so they didn't get separated and spicy food.

Mostly it's all a blur of moments of being very, very intoxicated or very, very hung over, but he remembers the lady who owned the old plantation turned bed and breakfast, with her salt and pepper hair and rich brown skin, the crinkles around her eyes as she let him into the kitchen while she cooked and the way she called everyone baby.

It's stupid the things he remembers.

The woman on the radio says rain is coming, and the station starts to play some rasta song and Danny turns it again, and again and again.

"You know," Rusty says, "your short attention span, while usually endearing, is the reason you're never allowed control of the remote."

"Huh," Danny answers. "I'd always wondered your reasoning behind that."

"There you have it."

He settles on a blues station, and sits back in his seat with a smile. "I don't always have a short attention span, you know. I've kept you around for a while."

"Yeah," Rusty says, dryly, "but only because you'd be in the clink if it weren't for me."

Louisiana is all bright colors outside, flowers and trees and flowers and trees and Rusty read somewhere once about how it was sinking into the sea, how one day it'd be underwater, the sand on the beach.

"There're other reasons," Danny says, and smirks like he's always done. He was probably born with that look on his face it's so natural. He taps his knuckle against Rusty's thigh. "And really, no one calls it the clink."

"They should," Rusty answers, and presses his fingertips tightly into the grooves of the wheel where they're meant to fit. B. B. King is singing I've Got Papers on You, Baby and Rusty's driving the speed limit for the first time since he learned to drive.

---

They make it to Baton Rouge in time for the tail end of rush hour traffic, coming off the interstate. There's a three-lane bridge that leads into a one-way street, and Rusty's headache from this morning is nothing compared to the headache of driving through this.

He comforts himself with the thought that it could be worse. It could be Danny driving.

Danny's drumming his fingers on the door, his knuckles tapping against the window, randomly, when he misjudges the move. The blues station becomes the news station becomes a jazz station becomes a classic station becomes the blues station again.

"I swear to God," Rusty says, very softly, around a cherry tootsie roll pop, "if you touch that one more time I will cut off your hands and feed 'em to the gators."

"Empty threat," Danny smirks, and it's not easy to smirk a word instead of say it, but Danny manages without a lot of problems. "You like the things I do with my hands."

Rusty pulls the sucker out of his mouth with a soft pop and watches Danny go still from the corner of his eye. "I could live without them," he says, and waves his sucker in the general direction of Danny. "And you're getting a little bit cocky," he adds, and then curls his tongue around the sucker again.

"Rusty," Danny says, all falsely-blurry-edged affection, as he puts his palm on the back of Rusty's neck, his pinky under the collar of Rusty's orange t-shirt and his thumb pressing into the spot that's knotted with tension, "really. Getting?" And Rusty knows him well enough to know he meant to say something else. Wanted to say something else. He's never known Danny to be this fucking chicken though.

"Right," Rusty says, and snorts. "What was I thinking?"

"It happens to the best of us." Danny pats the back of his neck, then his shoulder, and then he steals the sucker from Rusty's mouth and pops it into his own.

"Thief."

"Obviously."

---

It seems the thing to do to spend the night in Baton Rouge.

They get a room at Comfort Inn, and Rusty is really, really beginning to wonder about Danny's obsession with cheap motels and their stiff sheets and hard pillows and crappy television sets. The bed is hard and the carpet is stiff under his feet.

Danny orders a pizza in, like there aren't four hundred other options including some things that they haven't eaten more in the past two weeks than an entire dorm of college frat boys would in a semester.

Rusty's asleep before it gets there.

---

Louisiana is a damp, pressing sort of heat. The kind that feels like it could suffocate you if you let it, if you wanted.

The sun is hot against the back of his neck, where Danny's hand is burning hotter than it ever could, just for a second, and then it's gone again. There are heavy clouds in the sky that block the heat in on them.

"Come on," Danny says, his sunglasses firmly in place. He's wearing the El Paso hat backwards and Rusty doesn't have the heart to—"Why didn't we think of this before?"

"Because we've been on the road for too long," Rusty sighs, and rolls his shoulder as he walks down the concrete stairs toward the parking lot. He bites his lip to keep from grinning. "And you had some bright idea about not making plans."

Danny's fingers clench at his sides, just for a second, around the hem of his shirt and he tugs it and it stretches tight across his chest before he lets it go and Rusty wasn't noticing that because Rusty is walking to the car and hating Louisiana traffic more than he's ever hated any traffic before it. "Well," Danny says and shrugs, "yeah, but you never let me get away with stupid ideas before."

"Everybody has off days."

"You're crabby," Danny smiles all slick-smooth-make-me-happy-I'll-make-you-happy. He claps Rusty's shoulder, like buddies do, and swipes the pad of his thumb in an arch across the top of his spine, like they don't. "We could just—"

"I'm not crabby," Rusty answers, and bumps shoulders with him. "I'm hungry."

"Lunch, then cards?"

"God, I miss cards. You know, with someone who can actually play them."

Danny laughs and their elbows knock together they're walking so close. The humidity is high enough that the air is all moisture and heat and you could steam vegetables in the car or something. "Just for that you're buying."

---

Sometimes Danny will meet someone who he wants to think he's the best damn thief ever, the best damn everything ever, that his name is known all over. And while that isn't exactly the case, it's closer to the truth than it used to be. They've pulled off just enough to make the right connections to get what they want, when they need to call in a favor.

Of course, in this case it's as easy as a conference call to Reuben, both of them pressed in tight around the phone. And twenty minutes explaining that the thing in Vancouver wasn't that big of a deal and the rumors of their deaths were greatly exaggerated and another five not saying why they'd dropped off the face of the Earth, while Reuben snickered knowingly and kept calling them both babies.

Eventually Rusty told him where they were, and Danny told him what they wanted, and Reuben happily told them where to go.

It was a long phone call, paid for by some poor kid on Corporate Boulevard who made the mistake of bumping into Danny in a clumsy attempt at lifting his wallet. Or groping him, which, Rusty must admit, was a reasonable thing to want to attempt. But when the call was over they had cash wired, an address and people to rob blind for Reuben.

It's good to have a real goal once in a while.

Rusty leans against the red brick outside to wait for Danny. There are more people on this street than is reasonable and traffic is awful and the brick scratches against the burnt skin on the back of Rusty's arms. And he thinks, they've really come a long way to be able to get what they want with one, very long, mildly amusing, phone call, really. A very, very long way, from the days when Danny was trying to teach Rusty to make a decent lift.

"You know," Danny says, next to his ear, hot enough to make a Baton Rouge before-the-storm heat wave seem Seattle cool, "you're not very good at keeping watch."

"Was I supposed to be keeping watch?" Rusty asks, and the outside of his wrist bumps and slides against Danny's hip, against the worn-smooth leather of his belt. His thumb hooks, for a fraction of a second, into the pocket of Danny's jeans. "You failed to mention that, before."

Danny's got a manila envelope full of cash in his left hand, curled and protected between them, like he doesn't even make a choice to move that way. "You sulk when I try and give you orders." Danny grins and shrugs, and gives Rusty the bank sucker out of his other pocket. It's lemon and Rusty is transparent, but right now he doesn't care.

"You have any problems?" Rusty asks, and they move off from the wall at the same time, the way they've moved together since they were kids. It's just habit now, it's just what they do without thought. Danny moves and so does Rusty. Rusty thinks of moving and Danny's with him in the motion. He pulls the clear plastic off his sucker and sticks it in Danny's pocket.

"Nah." Danny shakes his head, just to clarify, just because that's what people do with they answer in the negative nine times out of ten. He digs the wrapper out of his pocket to toss it in the trashcan when they pass it and looks both ways before crossing the street at the corner because you do not jaywalk with large amounts of slightly illegal cash in your possession. The first rule of Not Sucking At Being a Criminal is to always obey traffic laws when breaking other laws.

Or maybe that's the second rule. Possibly the first is same as it is for poker.

Rusty hooks his finger through the loop of the paper stick of his sucker and pulls it out of his mouth long enough to say, "Well then, this should be fun," and not sound like a kid trying to talk around his candy.

"What, you haven't been having fun on this trip so far?"

"I could do with less sun," Rusty tells him, and holds out his arm for inspection. It's getting redder as they walk, he could swear it. "The rest of it was alright."

"Alright?" Danny asks, like he's just been told it was nice the morning after and had it followed by you're such a good friend to be so sweet to me.

Rusty laughs and their wrists bump together. "Yeah, that's it exactly." He unlocks the car and pulls the map drawn on a paper napkin out of his pocket before he gets in. "So," he asks, "you ready?"

---

The thing about turning to Reuben for the place is that it'll pay big, but they'll have to pay big first. A ten thousand dollar buy in is nothing, in comparison to most. Reuben knows all the places everywhere, the way a casino always knows the competition, but he never tells them about the games he doesn't think they should be in.

Danny's back in a suit again, it's dark against his new tan, perfectly tailored and he moves in it like he moves in everything. Everything with Danny is confidence, it'd never work to have anything less in this business. The collar of his shirt is open and there's a triangle of skin showing there that Rusty really likes the taste of. He looks like the impossible fucking wet-heat of Louisiana is nothing.

He wears black and white like no one outside of the old movies Rusty's mom used to watch can.

Rusty tugs at the knot of his tie when they walk in, and the boat's big enough that he knows he's only imagining it rocking under his feet, but. It's rich reds and dark wood and tables of games topped in casino green felt. It's like the riverboat casino a few miles away, only without the slot machines and the being legal.

"Oh," Rusty says under his breath, and grins, "I've missed this."

Danny laughs softly, his head turned, and the sound brushes by Rusty's ear. It's cool in here, like the casinos in Vegas are, like there isn't a chance of dying of heatstroke outside. There's a waitress in a short skirt carrying a tray that looks heavy with glasses of scotch and it's one in the afternoon. Danny cups Rusty's elbow, fingertips along the inside of his arm, and then lets go again before anyone else could notice it. "Of course you have," he says, and stops the waitress in her low-cut top to order a drink.

Rusty slides past them, his hand against Danny's back just for a second as he does. He heads to the blackjack table and starts counting. He scratches the back of his neck and Danny moves to sit beside him.

They're good at what they do because they like what they do. People never see it coming when they double their money at places like these in less than an hour.

---

"You know," Danny says, leaning back in the cheap purple plastic lawn chair on the upper deck of the boat that's only there for appearances, like it's actually going to fool any one who really bothers to look, "Reuben does have a very passive-aggressive way of getting back at people." Someone said something before about the governor being inside.

Rusty shrugs, a lift fall of his shoulder like, well. "It does work though," he says around a bite of jambalaya. The deck is splintering under him, under his feet. There are Chinese paper lanterns strung across the guardrails, they sway in the breeze off the water and flicker on and off. He's got a white glass plate heavy in one hand and his shoulder pressed to Danny's knee. "Passive-aggressive or not."

"Maybe," Danny says, and he's got a whiskey sour in a glass that he keeps holding against the back of Rusty's neck and they've spent more time gambling today than they have in probably over a year. Dusk is heavy and dark with the clouds overhead. "Doesn't seem like he should always use us to do it though."

"We don't mind," Rusty reminds him, and his fork scratches over the plate loud enough to make him fight back the urge to cringe. "Besides, why not pay back the favor when we get what we want at the same time?"

His jacket is hanging over the back of Danny's chair and his shirt-sleeves are rolled up to just under his elbows and it's still impossibly fucking humid-hot out here. There's a door open to the lower deck that's where most of the light out here is coming from besides the lanterns, it lets cool air rush out to try and tempt them back inside.

Danny's glass is cool at the back of Rusty's neck, his fingers are curled around it and two knuckles pressing there too, stupidly warm. "He's a good connection to have," Danny mutters, like it's an answer and it's as close as he'll get to saying Rusty's right when it's true. Rusty doesn't have to see him to know when he's smirking; Rusty can hear it in his voice.

They're the only ones out here and it's quiet, anyone who knows about the place is inside and Danny and Rusty have taken a good portion of their gambling money. Most of them won't ever miss it, really, like it's quarters and dimes and pocket change. Danny's being the kind of quiet that means he's got something to say and Rusty isn't sure he wants to fill the silence this time.

"Hey," Danny says moving out of the chair to sit beside Rusty on the deck. His jacket is on top of Rusty's. "We did good today," he says, and grins like he always does when he thinks he should be praised. All look, I did this, I did good, will you love me now?

"We did," Rusty admits, and smiles like it's hard not to when Danny's looking like that. Danny steals a piece of ham off his plate and shrugs. His fingers are all pork-grease salty now and Rusty isn't even thinking about it. He says, "We're not in Texas anymore."

Danny shakes his head and makes a face like he's never tasted anything so—"The food wasn't this spicy in Texas."

"Baby."

"Yes, dear?" Danny asks, and laughs. He kisses Rusty all lazy, sloppy, victorious celebratory, and his greasy fingers press again Rusty's cheek for a second and then they're gone. The inside of his wrist is against the back of Rusty's neck, holding him close without letting go of his glass.

Rusty pulls away and his mouth is tingling because of the jambalaya. He tilts his head and steals Danny's glass like whiskey sour is going to help. "Your jokes are still bad, even when you're sober," Rusty says, and grins, and likes the way Danny's eyes narrow.

"You're one to talk about bad jokes. Remember the book you carried around when we were thirteen?"

"That's different," Rusty says, straight-faced as it is possible to be.

"Like the difference between Flock of Seagulls hair and a Barry Manilow concert, or like the difference between me being right and you knowing it?"

"That," Rusty says, and points the index finger of the hand still wrapped around Danny's glass, "doesn't even make sense."

Danny snorts and takes back his glass, it's half empty and he sits it on the other side of him. His thigh is touching Rusty's he's sitting so close. "It made plenty of sense."

"What's her name?" he asks, putting his plate down once the question is out like it made him lose his appetite. The fork clatters and sounds like it's going to break the glass.

"The Barry Manilow girl was named Annie," Danny answers, and is absolutely pulling that out of his ass because he doesn't have a clue. "I remember them, you know."

"You're a liar," Rusty says, his smile drawn sort of tight. "Barry Manilow girl was named Francis, you never remember them, and you know that isn't what I meant."

"Oh, Francis." Danny nods then shrugs. "You like that I'm a liar."

The paper lanterns keep flicker, and there's a sound inside like someone just went bust. A collective exhale among everyone watching and chips clattering loudly. They need to cash out and leave. "Give me some fucking credit, Danny."

Danny looks like he doesn't want to, and Rusty is watching him from the corner of his eye as Danny looks sort of deflated around the down-drawn corners of his mouth. "Russ," he says, like he maybe wants to sigh it. "It's not like—"

"What's—"

"Tess. Her name is Tess."

"There," Rusty says, reaching across and wrapping his fingers around Danny's drink and swallowing it down and standing. "Was that so hard?" he asks.

"Rusty, I'm going to marry her."

"And then it's over?"

"Yeah."

"You're a fucking liar, Danny," Rusty tells him, and offers his hand to help him stand because he's spent too much of his life thoughtlessly doing the same thing. His knees pop like an old man's do. "It'll never be over for you, and we both know it."

---

"Do you really think," Danny asks, sitting in the chair of their room while Rusty sits on the bed and watches TV, "that I can't get out?"

Rusty snorts, and his fingers are curled tight around the remote and he thinks that he should be used to this by now, because every woman Danny meets who hates his guts and looks at him like he is mud on her shoe is the love of Danny's life for a while. "This isn't the mob, Danny, there's nothing to get out of. You're a thief. You steal things from people. All you have to do is not steal things from people anymore. It's not like anyone is going to care if you walk away."

Danny's looks out between the dusty blinds, out the window, at the cars in the parking lot like he's sizing them up. "And you don't think I could just walk away?"

Rusty lies back on his elbows and raises his eyebrow and maybe it's different this time. Maybe. "I can't see why you'd want to," he says, and his foot hits a black gym bag full of cash. The writing on the side is painfully neon green, saying the bag belongs to Erica. The color on the TV is all wrong, it makes everyone on screen look as sick as he feels.

---

They leave early enough in the morning that Rusty's still too close to asleep to fight when Danny wants to drive. Danny's in his suit again, the material of it is light and soft under Rusty's palm when he catches himself from falling down the stairs that are slick with the drizzle of rain.

Baton Rouge isn't made to handle downpours, and the local morning news had flashflood warnings all over so they leave without stopping. Leave before it really starts.

It doesn't stop sprinkling until they cross into Mississippi, then it stops without them really noticing. They hit Jackson and Danny misses third again getting off at the exit and blames the car.

"Don't talk to Betty that way," Rusty says, and bites down on the inside of his lip. "She's very sensitive."

"Rusty," Danny answers, like he wants it to be a warning.

"It's funny, because usually you adore women who hate your guts." Rusty smiles and drums his fingers on the dashboard. It's stupidly normal, really. "If you pull into McDonald's I'm taking the cash and leaving you."

"You'd never make it on your own."

"That's just the kind of attitude," Rusty says, "that no one should have to grow up with."

"You grew up just fine," Danny smirks, and sort of leers, and Rusty can't keep from laughing at him. At him, not with him. He reaches across the car and Rusty bats his hand away. "Just fine," Danny says, and Rusty keeps laughing.

---

"I don't think you're taking me seriously," Danny grumbles over his plate of fried chicken. He pokes experimentally at his mashed potatoes with his fork like he's never seen them when they weren't made out of flakes.

"Should I be?" Rusty's glass almost slides out of his hand when he goes to pick it up. His fingers are greasy and his mouth is greasy and the floor is slick with grease under his feet. It's possible that he has never in his life tasted anything this fantastic. "I mean is there a reason I should start now?"

"I just would have thought that you'd be more upset over this."

Rusty blinks and holds out his hands and lets that be the question. He sucks the grease off his thumb and it's a pointless thing to do, but it's habit. "You want me to throw a fit about it, Danny, or just act like I'm surprised?"

Danny snorts into his diet Coke, and Rusty will never, ever see the point of diet soda. "Don't you at least want to know if she's prettier than you are?"

"Of course she isn't prettier than me," Rusty says. His thumb slides on his fork. "If she was she never would have looked at you twice. You're not that charming."

"I'm exactly that charming. Would you like to know what she does?"

"Kindergarten teacher?" Rusty guesses. "Pre-school? Lawyer? Is it another stock broker, because that one almost got us thrown in prison."

"She works at the museum."

"The museum? From last month with the thing?" he asks, and scratches behind his ear. Danny nods and, well. Fuck. "Jesus Christ, Danny, are you insane?"

"It's not going to be a problem," Danny says, his eyebrows drawn together and his eyes narrowed. He's going to get wrinkles like that, right there around his eyes. "Why aren't you jealous, Russ?"

"Because you've thought you were going to marry every woman that walked past you in her sensible shoes, with all the buttons on her business suit done up like that since you were seventeen and you haven't done it yet. If you can tell me the names of half of them I'd offer up my share from yesterday and retire." He sits back and wipes his fingers on his napkin and then crosses his arms. "Go right ahead and tell me why just because we slept together for a while I should start acting like a teenage girl."

"It's different this time, Rusty. She's different."

"Fine," Rusty sighs, he raises his eyebrow and plays with the straw in his Dr. Pepper. "She's different and you're a cocky son of a bitch who likes to overestimate himself. But you've never been able to pull one over on me and you know it. Whatever your thing was it's over now, right? We'll go home and you'll get married and be miserable and pretend like you aren't a thief. Fine. I'm not going to throw a fit about it just to make you happy, Danny. I'm not going to hate her, unless she's like the stockbroker, and maybe in six months you'll remember her name and maybe you won't. Either way you can't honestly tell me you expected me to be surprised."

"I expected you to be upset," Danny says, his fingertips pressing against the table top, right at the edge, until they're white. "I mean Christ, Rusty, do you think I didn't notice?"

"No," Rusty answers, and smiles like he knows he should, all bashful, hurt knowing, "It wouldn't be like you to not notice. It didn't give you the right--"

"I was just trying to--"

"Fuck you, Danny, I know what you were just trying to do and fuck you."

"Don't," he says, very quietly, "even pretend that you didn't know. You can't get pissed off at me about that, you knew."

Rusty smiles again, sort of, and his foot bounces under the table. "I'm not the one that's pissed off here." He smiles brighter when he sees how mad that makes Danny. So, yeah, he's not pissed off, he's just very, very petty.

"That was a very impassioned speech for someone who isn't pissed off," Danny says dryly, like maybe Rusty is fooling him after all. Rusty knows all his voices.

"I'm just well versed in giving you want you want. It's easier than fighting."

"Yeah, you're good at that," Danny answers and snorts into his diet Coke. The ice clinks against his teeth in that stupid way that has always annoyed Rusty as much as teeth scraping across a fork.

Apparently Rusty's not the only one that's petty here.

---

When they get back on the interstate Rusty drives until they're almost out of gas. They end up pulling over on the outskirts of Birmingham—where the gas is higher than it would be ten miles down the road—to fill up the tank again.

He pumps gas while Danny goes inside, never the best of plans, considering. Danny still wouldn't know road trip snack food if it bit him and he's just not willing to learn. Rusty cleans off the windshield out of sheer boredom and need to not get back in the car. He's sort of leaning against the hood and watching the sign for a nail salon across the street sway in the breeze when Danny comes back out, finally, with a paper sack cradled in the crook of his arm.

"What'd you get?"

"Bribes," Danny answers, and smirks. "Would you like them?"

Rusty kicks the tire with his heel and raises an eyebrow. "Depends what you're asking for 'em. I mean, what are the chances you've got anything I couldn't go in there and buy for myself?"

"Fair enough," Danny nods. "Which is why I'm only asking for the keys."

Rusty laughs and the hood of the car is still hot under his palm. "They're in the ignition. Can I teach you where third is?"

"I know where third is."

"Maybe third base, but not third gear."

"I'm beginning to understand lesbians better," Danny says, looking like he's trying not to laugh, and rubbing at the side of his mouth. Rusty's going to buy him a shaving kit next stop, he decides. "You sleep with a guy and then he loses all respect for you."

"Danny," Rusty whispers just loudly enough to be heard over the traffic on the street. Danny's all of two feet away and there's no one else here. "That would imply that I ever had any respect for you to begin with."

"You're a hurtful person, Rusty Ryan, and to think, I bought these things for you."

"Because you wanted something."

"Hi, my name's Danny Ocean," he says, holding out his hand like for Rusty to shake. "It's really nice to meet you."

"Get in the goddamn car," Rusty grunts because he's Not Laughing. The door on the passenger's side sticks a little sometimes and he's never really noticed it before. "If I die because of your driving I will come back and haunt you," he says, and clicks his seatbelt into place. "Make no mistake about it, you will never get rid of me."

"I haven't killed us yet." Danny keeps the paper bag in his lap for exactly twenty more seconds, his fingers curled at the top making the paper crunch and wrinkle in his grip. Then Rusty takes it because he's earned it. "I haven't even come close."

"Liar," Rusty says, and all but overturns the bag in his lap. "You're buying me off with comic books and candy?"

"It worked when were fourteen. You haven't changed as much as you'd like to think."

Rusty snorts, again, and feels like that's all he does. He's already unwrapping a chocolate tootsie roll pop and resisting the urge to recite the commercials from years ago. Nothing's changed as much as he'd like to think. "You mean I'm still just as pretty?" he asks around the sucker.

"Yeah, that's it exactly."

Rusty laughs and waits until they're back on the interstate to pull out the first comic. Danny's playing with the radio again, from one station to another to another, like he doesn't even notice that they're all country and they all sound the same. "Where're we going?" Rusty asks, just for a second of not having to hear the noise of static on the radio.

"Home, I think."

There's a map shoved in the glove compartment and Rusty reads about the Amazing Adventures of Batman and Robin.