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The Dragon's Lair

He knew it was stupid not to go home. All he had on him were an extra pair of jeans, a dirty t-shirt, and a pair of clean boxers that he was going to put on this morning before he left Jaxon's and forgot. Of course, he had his school stuff - textbooks and his laptop and chargers and a binder - but none of that was going to help the clothes problem. He couldn't just wear a pencil case, and even if he could, it wouldn't begin to cover his below-the-belt issue.


Going to Mat's house seemed like it would be a good idea. At least better than going home. It would give him much needed away-from-mom time before he 'd have to go back and gather his belongings. He still had no fucking clue he was going to tell his parents that he was moving out before the semester ended, and if he didn't update NYU on the residence change it should go without hiccup. He knew that it would have to be updated at some point, but getting out of the condo was more important than letting the school know he had somewhere to live.


Nicolas watched Victor as he stood next to the booth, hand perched on his waist. Figuring out how to agree without seeming to desperate was developing into more of a problem as they talked. Before, Nicolas had more reasons to be wary of the older man, and it was easy to show it. But now, now that his friends weren't around and he wasn't being threatened and Victor was seemingly trying to solve - or at least postpone - some of Nicolas's problems, it was increasingly difficult to remain one-sided. He didn't want to appear outwardly as a child who needed someone to help him through life. He didn't want Victor to think that he needed a helping hand.


"How far is it to his house?" Nicolas asked after a moment. He wondered if Victor really cared what he had to say on the matter, but the fact that he asked showed that he at least cared about presenting himself as if he did, and that was almost okay. Part of him didn't want to impose on Mat's life, especially now that he knew Mat was sick, but Victor had invited him and apparently had enough authority to do so.


He rose from the booth and yanked his backpack from the other side. "It doesn't matter, I mean, we just havta get a cab if it's way outta town." Nicolas lifted a hand to the back of his neck and stared ahead for a few moments. "Headrush," he muttered after a moment, and he almost wished he hadn't drank so much. It was still early enough in the day that he shouldn't have even started yet.


"But yeah, we can go there. As long as you're friend isn't gonna care that I'mma be there, I don't really care." He stared at the bottle of liquor in Victor's hand and shifted his attention back to his face. Nicolas pulled his sweatshirt over his head and tied it around his waist before slipping the bookbag over his shoulders and against his back. It wouldn't do much to shield his crotch from the rest of the world, but it was fine for now. All he had to do was making it half an hour, give or take a few minutes, before he was out of public and could figure it out himself. Hell, it might even go down before they got to Mat's house.


"I'm gonna need a cigarette at some point," he grunted under his breath, and he hiked the bag up higher on his back. "Goes nicely with the whiskey, gives it an edge."
 
I hear that. Victor nodded. "Me too. Come on, we'll get you one when we get there. It's about a half hour ride." He turned on his heel and gestured for Nicolas to follow. "Come on."


Forcing himself to avoid eye contact with the bar's most suspicious character (partly because he wanted to get out of here quickly; mostly because his rising aggravation at the man's presence would hinder him from doing just that), he swept across the room, stopped at the doorway, and gestured briefly to the bartender, who had since brought his heated phone conversation to a close. The wave was curtly returned and Victor ascended the tiny brick steps outside.


"He won't care. He likes ya. Probably more than me." As they turned out of the alley, a wave of early autumn chill slipped through the packed walkways and grazed the side of his face, wrinkling his nose in result. He wasn't the type built for colder weather. Work was harder, prices went up, and his cavernous underground dwelling wasn't exactly the coziest during the holidays.


He didn't even want to start thinking that far ahead. His life, unique though it was to those outside of it, was a relatively simple process: work, get paid, eat and/or sleep on the off occasion that he could treat himself, work some more, have a drink, et cetera. In truth, he was no different than the average New York businessman—except the day usually ended with him having to wash blood off his hands as opposed to the smell of his secretary's panties.


Nicolas had bloomed into a huge red stain on that circle of unusual but basic livelihood. Victor knew where he'd be in three months, but what about Cardou? He was nineteen years old and clearly eager to get out, and Victor didn't blame him, but where would he go?


This wouldn't have been the first time a kid went backwards from riches to rags. Victor had gone straight from his parents' estate to a shitty south Manhatten apartment to a walk-in closet in the White House (for three less-than-hellish days) to the underside of a bridge, and then at last to a considerably less shitty upstate apartment. He'd struck it rich in the end, sure, but the entire ordeal had spanned almost nine years, and he'd be lying to himself if he thought a kid like Nicolas would survive dodging around for that long in this day and age.


Victor replaced his arm around Nicolas' waist, though there was no one around to fool this time. He stopped at the edge of the curb, hailed a cab, and opened the door for his companion.


The kid was a New Yorker, so he supposed that was a good start. When Mathias and Victor had first arrived in the "Big Apple", they'd stuck to each other like the pathetic, lost little puppies they were.


Come to think of it, that's probably why they spent a year under a bridge.


So he wasn't clueless, but he was naive. The fact of the matter was that Victor once thought he had a plan too, and that went down the drain faster than his father's aspirations of him giving their family a good name.


"What are you gonna do?" He spit it out as soon as he'd given the cabbie the address. If nothing else, saying it out loud would keep his mind from straying to other things (e.g., whatever was going on between Nicolas' legs right now, and whatever might be going on between his when he thought about it too much), aside from the fact that he genuinely, desperately needed to know. "When you get out of the house. Whaddaya gonna do? Where a' you gonna go?"
 
As they meandered down the sidewalk, Nicolas hovered close to Victor well before the other wrapped his arm around him. Nicolas wasn't worried about anything, per se, but the proximity added a level of safety he couldn't quite explain. Victor had been the one threatening his life the entire time, and even though he had promised that he wouldn't bring harm to his friends or family, whether Nicolas cared about them or not, it shouldn't have been so easy to put the past behind him. Nicolas should always be alert when he was around Victor, and he was stupid not to be. One little promise, no matter how real it was, didn't make up for the time that Victor had put him in imminent danger.


But Nicolas would prefer Victor than the fucker at the bar any day, so he attested his clinginess to the creep. He had made him uncomfortable, and even though Victor had done the same in the past, he still knew Victor more than he knew the likely-rapist. Victor had also never stared at him so intently like he wanted to bend him over the table and make Nicolas call him daddy.


Maybe other words, but Nicolas looked past that,


Besides, the hand at his hip wasn't shaking like Victor's hands tended to most of the time. He didn't know what to think of that.


Nicolas wanted to argue when Victor ushered him in through taxi door. He didn't need someone opening doors for him. He pulled off his backpack and slip to the other side anyway, bag perched on his lap. The cabs in New York were small, cramped spaces, and Nicolas wasn't able to put much space between him and Victor once the car pulled away from the side of the road and headed down the street. He didn't mind, of course, but still.


"When it comes down to it, I'm just gonna grab my shit and get outta there. I have friends I can crash with until I find my own place." He shrugged, seatbelt nestled tightly against his right shoulder, unfastened. "I thought about blackmailing my dad into giving me some money. College is paid for an everythin', but I can't life off nothin', and my campus job makes shit cash. He'd probably give me the money too, to keep my mouth shut. He's so focused on his image he'd probably do anythin' to keep lookin' good.


"But, I mean, I'dunno for sure. It seems like it would work, maybe, but you never know. He could tell me to fuck off and that it didn't matter what I'd say, but I won't know until I do it, y'know? If he cares about himself so much, he'll give me the cash. I could prolly con my mom into givin' me some, too. I know enough about each of 'em, especially since they bitch about each other all the time. I could do a number on them if I wanted, and if it helps me get cash, I'd do it."


Family was weird. There was a part of Nicolas, very small, of course, that cared what happened to his parents and didn't want to bring them. But that was more of what he thought he was supposed to feel rather than what he actually wanted. Parents were supposed to love their children, and the same for the reverse, but sometimes things just didn't work out that way. Plenty of parents ditched their kids at shelters because they didn't want them, abused their kids because they weren't perfect, starved their kids because they were spending money on drugs instead of food. Sure, he might have been programmed to love his parents, but Nicolas felt better towards the countless amounts of nannies he had over years than he ever would about his mom and dad.


And he was allowed to feel like that. No one could tell him that he couldn't feel that way toward them, because no one would know the full story. No one would know his life.


"I have two more full years of college, and this year has barely started, so that kind of sucks. But I'll keep goin' to school. Get the degree. Maybe do somethin' with it, I'dunno. If I don't, not my problem. His money down the drain. Maybe I'll just drink myself to death. I have time to figure it out."


Nicolas shifted his eyes from the front window toward Victor, head tilted. "You'll probably die soon with how old you are, right? Seventy-eight is pretty old."
 
Victor wrinkled his nose—not only in response to what he perceived to be a piss poor life plan, but to the brashness of Nicolas' observation of his own state of being. "Tryna get rid of me?" He sniffed disdainfully and glanced out the window as the street rolled by in contrasting lines of monochrome and color. "No. I'll live another thirty years, forty if I'm lucky. Maybe more if I quit smokin'."


He didn't think to explain it any further. God willing, he wouldn't start to feel his age til the final days of his existence; which was fine with him, because he still had plenty of things to do—Nicolas Cardou included.


The thought took him back a bit. He could lie to himself and say he hadn't mean it that way—but he had.


There was, and in truth, had always been a sort of possessiveness that Victor strove to smother the kid in. He did want to be a controlling factor in his life, and, for the most part, he had been. Perhaps it was his horribly independent nature that Victor drifted back and forth between loving and loathing. It could have been the fact that his life seemed so shitty, underneath all the superficial glamour. Whatever it was, Victor wanted dominance: mentally, emotionally, financially, socially, and, God forgive him, physically.


Maybe he wanted to protect the kid. Maybe he wanted to break him.


On the one hand, Victor couldn't remember the last time he'd had anyone so young and fresh in bed with him. And it wasn't like he hadn't caught himself wondering, on the off occasion, what it might be like to have Nicolas under him for a night. What he might be like as uncharacteristically submissive; if he was really the tight little thing that Victor imagined him to be.


On the other hand, he'd been on the rotten end of the sexual predator-innocent child interaction. His own desperation to keep himself and Mathias financially afloat had suppressed the guilt from most of those memories, but he could recall quite clearly the blackout ferocity that had swept over him when he found his friend crumpled at the door of their shanty house one evening countless years ago, blood on his jeans, tears in his eyes.


It was confusing, to say the least.


But what drove it all, he was certain, was the fact that Nicolas just continued to make the worst decisions for himself. He was treading on thin ice and he didn't even know it. Perhaps this was a sign of Victor's age—you're still a baby, you can't do this on your own, you don't even know what you're doing. He wanted to lecture him like a ninety-year-old grandmother, but damn if it wasn't all true.


So he was vulnerable. And that was a complicated matter.


Victor stared at him from the corner of his eye for a bit. "You need a better plan than that." He bit his lips, preventing himself from rambling off tales of skulking under bridges and how quickly some sick fucks would get him to spread his legs. "There's so much shit in there that could go wrong. You think it's all gonna be fine and good and you'll be able to make it out alive, but d'ya know what's gonna happen if one of your buddies kicks ya out, or your daddy presses charges against you for blackmailin' em? You know how cold this city's gonna get in a couple months? You know much these sketchy piece-of-shit CEOs and politicans'll pay to fuck a pretty kid like you?" He shook his head and coughed. "It's not as bright and shiny as you think it is, Sherlock. If you fall, you fall hard."
 
Living a hundred and thirty years seemed more like a hope than something someone simply knew, but Nicolas didn't bother pressing for further explanation. Victor was slowly opening up to him about things, even though it was still just barely, and he didn't want to push back to the point that he stopped.


There was no use prolonging progress, and if he bit back too much, he might end up doing a number on himself.


Nicolas knew that his idea of how things would play out was more faith in himself than anything else. He wanted to believe that his father would give in right away and not make too much of a scene out of everything, but he had to come to terms with Victor's truth. Hi father would make him look a fool before he got the chance to turn any of it around. Neither of his parents were particularly stupid, and while they both knew less than five things about him, Nicolas knew that his father wouldn't be played so easily.


It was easy to hope that everything would just go his way. It was easy to hope that he'd just pack clothes into duffle bag and crash on someone's couch for a few months. It was easy to hope that nothing would go wrong.


In his life, everything seemed to work out, but the more he payed attention the more he realized life as he knew it was a lie. His father had off cops from him getting speeding tickets, from him getting caught with two ounces of heroin, from him blowing smoke into an officers face. Back in the fourth grade, they had even paid off his elementary school so that he could win a fucking spelling bee. His school record was scott free of any detentions he served from high school, and he wasn't sure if that was from his dad paying the school off or one of his parents sucking something just right.


All in all, he knew that things never worked out the way people wanted them too, but up until a couple years ago he had never had to deal with that, and now that the ball wasn't in his court anymore, he wasn't really sure the best course of action. Nicolas wasn't stupid, but this was still his first time around being alone, leaving his home, being a teenager. He had no idea what the fuck he was doing and, if he was being honest, anything seemed better than the shit plans he had come up with.


"Is that your way of saying to sell myself to old pervs?" he asked, lips scrunched and eyes uncertain. "That if I can't get my dad to throw me some cash, I should go to the next best option and let anyone fuck me for money?"


He hadn't thought about doing that before, wondered if it was actually a good idea. Of course it's not, you dumbass. You'd probably get stabbed or scammed, probably both.





Nicolas slunk into the seat and let his head roll back against the leather upholstery. The car was warmer than he thought it would be, considering that outside it was still generally nice. The cabbie fussed with the temperature controls a couple times, low pressure, high heat. It helped since Nicolas's sweatshirt was still fastened tight around his waist and probably wouldn't be leaving anytime soon.


"What do you think I should do?" he asked after a moment. "Get on my knees and beg that he help me leave him and my mother behind and move on with my life without him? I don't think that has a lot of selling points, and I don't want him lookin' at me like I need him. He's never been there, and I don't want him there." He huffed and crossed his arms over the bookbag, and the top handle pressed against his throat. "It's just stupid. Parents are supposed to provide and support you, not make you never wanna see 'em again."
 
Victor snorted. "You'd be fuckin' lucky to find a pimp that'll give you a cut at all. They'll send a puppy-eyed twink like you straight to a pedo ring." His fingertips lay against his lower lip, clutching at the Camel straight that wasn't there. He shivered in less-than-fond memory of the reason why he knew the horrors surrounding such a nefarious career, and promptly shook his head. No. Hell no. Even if Nicolas got it in his head that it was a good idea (which was disgustingly common among oblivious kids his age: sex was good, money was good, so where was the downfall?), Victor would have to step in, no questions asked. God willing, it would never come to that.


He glanced sideways at Nicolas. "I didn't say that." He nudged the kid's leg with his own. "I told you, if it comes down to it, I'll give ya the money. It's not a problem. I don't want ya out there alone. They'll do all kinds of sick shit to a kid like you."


He rolled his shoulders in a tight circle, again shaking off the implications that he knew exactly what kind of sick shit might be done to a kid like Nicolas. Truth be told, a lot changed for a person after being raped, forced into a drug cartel, used as bait, et cetera, et cetera, and it wasn't often for the better.


Not that Victor liked Nicolas just the way he was, but there were less damaging ways to reign in someone's attitude.


The fact was that Nicolas didn't deserve it. He was a pain in the ass and naive as hell, sure, but leaving him alone to the mercy of a deteriorating NYC and all the demons that lurked within it was not the kind of retribution Victor had in mind. At the very least he deserved a decent bed to sleep in and enough money to take care of himself.


The idea that Victor could supply this for him filled him with a kind of greedy satisfaction. He wasn't going to threaten the kid or anything—but he could if he wanted to. He could take everything out from under Nicolas if he wanted to. It was a power trip; and a damn nice one, at that. Victor had never prided himself on being a sugar daddy, but seventy-eight wasn't too late to start, he supposed.


"And I'm serious." he reiterated, running a hand through his sandy hair. "Okay? I'm not kidding. If you're out there for a week on your own, I guarantee someone or other'll try to hurt you, somehow." He replaced the word rape at the last minute. It was true that anything could happen, but a good-looking kid like Nicolas was bound to be somebody's stress relief within three days, at the least.


"So I'll pay for anythin' you need. Give you a place to stay too, if you need it." Would he regret saying that? "You just have to stay off the street and out of other people's shit." A shadow passed over his eyes. "And no more fucking drugs. I know you're into all that shit, and it stops right now. Waste of your money, waste of your time, and you're a fuckin' kid, you're gonna kill yourself. There are easier ways to get that high, alright?"


He wanted to say I'm just looking out for you. He did. And it was true, for the most part. But expressing any degree of control over Nicolas' life gave him a rush that bordered on sexual, and he'd begun to wonder whether this was some kind of weird fetish with him—taking control of kids' lives this way. Offering him support on certain conditions. Maintaining any kind of dominance whatsoever. Maybe he was a little more fucked up than originally perceived.
 
Nicolas lowered his eyes and looked ahead again. Of course Victor would know how sex rings worked in the city. After all, he was a criminal, and the only crime Nicolas knew of was that he was the reason a good number of people were dead, but there could be so much more that he didn't know about. So much more than he would never know about.


He wasn't an idiot. He knew what happened to whores, as his dad called them when he watched the news. They got fucked and fucked over in the same night, ended up dead half of the time. It wasn't pretty, and it would never be pretty. He'd be dead or worse in a week, and then where would he be? With no one and no money, he'd be fucked more than he ever had been in his entire life. And that's saying something.


There was more crime now in the city than there had been in a long time, and it was easy to just pin that on menial street crime like robberies. But Nicolas watched television, he read the papers. He knew that there were way more homicides and rape cases in the last ten years than there had been anything else, that percentages more than doubled for each, that if it came down it he would just be another lowly number on a really sad statistic list for NYC and nothing more.


"It would be weird to take money from you," Nicolas said, and it was true. He'd feel like he was getting paid for something and would have to figure out more than just a means of cash flow. He'd feel like he would owe Victor something. He was worried that Victor would make him feel like he owed him something, and that kind of financial dependence wasn't what he was truly looking for. "I don't even know you. Yeah, we, like, know each others names and you know about my parents, and I know about your stuff, but that's not enough for me to just let everything else go." He also really didn't want to give up drugs. Craved the high more than he craved sex when he was.


But going to Victor was only a backup plan if his dad didn't go with it. There was still a slim chance that his father would hand him money from time to time as long as he stayed out of the way, and Nicolas might not even have to blackmail him to do it. It was a long-shot, almost as far-fetched as him staying alone in the city seemed to Victor, but he would have to try without getting his hands too dirty.


Otherwise, his only real option was Victor, and that kind of sucked.


"If I can't get my parents to throw money my way, I might take you up on your offer." Nicolas didn't want to live with Victor, didn't want to depend on him, but it was better than dying in a gutter somewhere in Brooklyn or the Bronx. He had to survive somehow, and if giving up hard drugs (there was no way he was going to stop smoking) was the only way to work out that kind of arrangement he'd do it. It wouldn't be ideal, of course. Nicolas knew what he wanted, and it was still the best option after everything going his way. The most realistic one by far. "The whole point of me going after them was that I wouldn't have to ask for money or permission, and that would kinda be moot if you were basically taking over what they're already doing. But, I guess, better you than them. I don't think you'll nag me for not coming home enough or not calling when I'm staying away." He snorted. "'Cause I don't need another parent."


He didn't like the contingencies Victor added with the offer, but if it came to he'd have to deal. It wouldn't be horribly bad to be off of drugs, and there was always parties. Victor couldn't control every part of his life even if he wanted. Even if Nicolas wanted. The added limitations almost gave him a rush, but it was easy to keep it underwraps. Victor already knew he was hard under the bookbag even if he couldn't see anymore, so the increased tenting his jeans continued to go unnoticed.


Nicolas wouldn't give in so easily anyway. Of course, he liked the adrenaline that flooded through him when Victor told him what he couldn't do, but he'd probably like the rush of Victor finding out that he had gone against his orders just as much (and possibly even more). "But yeah," he started again. "It's a possibility."
 
Victor narrowed his eyes. He didn't want Nicolas to relate a damn thing in him to his parents, knowing full well the kind of people they were and the contrast between that and the kind of impression he wanted to make, but there were some things Nicolas seemed to equate with "annoying parents" that Victor had, in his older age, defined simply as "common sense".


"Your parents might be shitty, but people tend to nag like that when they wanna make sure you're safe. Believe it or not." There was just a hint of sarcasm hanging off his words. He'd shifted to look at Nicolas head on, lips twitching impulsively. "Which can be fuckin' aggravating, yeah, but if I had to pick between you bein' pissed off at me for a couple hours and findin' you stabbed and left for dead in an alley, I might just give ya a call."


Taking note of the sharp increase in his tone, he exhaled, dropped his shoulders, and softened his gaze. "You don't hafta respect 'em or anything, I don't blame you for that. I wouldn't either. But if you don't have anyone to protect you, then you're out here on your own, and you already know that's not where ya wanna be." He glanced sideways out the window, briefly glimpsing his reflection in the side view mirror, frowning in response. "You're a smart kid, but you're still just a kid. Havin' someone to look after you isn't the annoyance ya make it out to be."


Part of him wanted to say it outright: that he wanted to be the one to look after Nicolas. That, technically, he was the one looking after Nicolas, or at the very least, he'd offered to. But it was growing more complicated than that by the minute. Did he want to protect him, or take control? Victor was sane enough to realize that the two were not mutually exclusive, and in fact, contrasted quite a bit. Finding out what he would do in the end was the real dilemma.


Victor had never thought himself to be a complicated person. In all cases he'd found himself to prefer protection over domination, and courtesy over threats. He wasn't evil. Not as evil as his behavior implied, anyway. He protected those he loved, was a decent human being when he could afford to be, and did what he needed to do with those who didn't have his sympathies. He loved simply and formed his bonds where bonds were due. Never, ever had he been as possessive of another human being as he was of Nicolas Cardou.


But never had he met anyone quite like Nicolas Cardou, either. No bitchy, stubborn, independent, naive, and ultimately vulnerable pretty little teenage boy had ever fallen (or been dragged, rather) into his lap quite so ungracefully, and the fact that Nicolas hated it all made Victor love it that much more. He wanted to take advantage of the kid every way that he could, but he loathed the idea of anyone else doing it.


Victor gnawed thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek. If he hadn't known Nicolas, would he be one of those sick fucks that he kept prattling on about? Would he have hurt the kid?


He wouldn't lie; his sexual encounters with younger men were often dubious at best, and he did get a thrill from taking on shy little things with sparse experience. Nicolas had already proven himself to be neither of those things, but what did it matter to someone who used kids to get off?


Contrary, the idea that someone like that--someone like him--could very well take advantage of Nicolas set a flame of rage in the back of his mind, burning with his urgency to defend what he already thought was his.


He didn't want it to happen. He couldn't let it happen.


"When we get there--" He said it before his mind had time to process, all too eager to purge it of these increasingly messy thoughts. "--I'm gonna write you a check. Twenty-five hundred, that's all. No big fuckin' deal. Take that, and I'll stop ridin' you about it. For a while."
 
Nicolas grunted. If he had wanted a lecture, he would have answered his mother's text and let her berate him for his own tardiness. He was practically twenty now and already tired of people telling him what to do, what t say, how to act, how to think. He needed the sermon spewing from Victor's lips as much as he needed church - which was to say, not at all.


"You know what caring looks like? Caring is my nanny driving to my school on a day my mother was supposed to get me to make sure that she actually came and I wasn't waiting alone. My parents don't give two fucks about me as a person. They want me to make a good appearance and look like I have my entire life together so my dad can keep making bank." He rolled his shoulders and twisted his torso toward Victor, one elbow pressed hard into the leather of the seat. "Calling me to make sure I'm not dead or doing drugs isn't them caring about where I am or what I'm doing. It's them making sure they know so they can clean up the mess so they don't look bad. Not a thing to do with me."


It was easy to say that Nicolas didn't get along with his parents. It was easy to say that he hated them. What didn't work out for him most of the time, what seemed to always fall apart, was that other people just didn't get it. Maybe Victor did, maybe he didn't. But the people in Nicolas's life tended to have parents and siblings that put the safety and wellbeing of their family members at the forefront of their minds, and Nicolas just didn't have that. He had friends that checked up on him from time to time. Jaxon let him sleep at his house for weeks without any sort of explanation. Just let it happen; no questions asked.


But most people couldn't get past the fact that family was this thing in their minds that could never be as bad as Nicolas described it to be. That his parents had to love him simply because he was theirs. But Nicolas, fuck, he knew that wasn't true before he understood anything else. The moment neither of his parents showed up to his seventh birthday party in lieu of prior engagements sealed the truth for him, and it was hard to move past something so scarring as that. Not once had either of them came to anything he did in middle or high school unless there was a paper or news team there.


Nicolas knew that they were shit parents, and he wasn't upset that he got stuck with them, but it did kind of ruin his chance of growing up normal. He was always so agitated, so angry. A psychiatrist told him he had ODD - Oppositional Defiant Disorder - and, well, he laughed. Fuck that shit, he wasn't insubordinate. He just wanted people that didn't love him to stop pretending that they did.


Straightening his limbs out, Nicolas heaved a sigh and glanced out the front window onto the street ahead. The sky was grey, but that was to be expected. It was autumn, was it not. "I don't think of you as a parent or anything, don't worry about that. I'm just tired of being treated like a child, and I'm tired of people being fake around me and lying to me about how much they love me and care about me. It's exhausting."


And fuck, it really was.


"Really? Just like that?" The blurt of money was surprisingly nice. Almost. "I'm not gonna buy drugs with it or anythin', but that's a lot of cash? Especially when you're not getting anythin' out of it? I mean, I'll take it, but shit."


He didn't know what he expected. Did he think that Victor had been offering to hand him a twenty like he could survive off of that for more than a day? No. But he still hadn't thought that he'd be fine for more than a couple of months without worry. The extension was far more grand than he was initally expecting he didn't know what to think about that. Was Victor being generous, was that it? Did he want something in return for Nicolas taking it?


Nicolas's shoulders shifted and he glanced back to Victor. "Does the money come with limitations?" he asked. "I don't wanna havta worry about fulfilling some requirement just because I took some money from you."
 
In all his wisdom, Victor chose to let Nicolas correct his ignorance without interruption. Part of it had been his fault, he would admit--he "knew" the kid, but he didn't really know him. Nicolas had never personally recounted his most vital childhood experiences with his parents (or lack thereof). Victor wasn't familiar with his perspective--the scars they'd left, the bitter memories, the true impression they'd burned into their son. He knew Nicolas didn't like them and they didn't really care one way or another about Nicolas, and that was just about it.


And he felt a little guilty, truth be told. He hadn't fully taken into consideration how much more Nicolas would know about his own parents before he'd started making assumptions. When the kid was through, Victor found an apology on the tip of his tongue, some kind of empathy that he needed to express, some kind of relation--but he held back.


They were almost there, anyway.


James and Rosalind Gregare had never treated their only child like shit. Being pretty and professional themselves, they'd wanted to shape him into the best of them both. He was a handsome boy, certainly, but they'd really wanted him to be a lawyer or a politician, even a doctor, if they thought he could manage medical school. That was where the problem lay. He was always as certain of himself as they were--which was to say, not a lot. They'd wanted him to go to Harvard, and then he wanted to go to Harvard--but then again, was he really smart enough for that? Could he manage to pay attention, what with how spastic he was? Was he capable of asking for help? Because God knew he'd need it. Oh, and could he really handle all that homework? Higher education was a big responsibility, and he was...


And then, suddenly, he didn't want to go to Harvard.


Victor was no stranger to people unintentionally molding him in the worst of ways. He'd spent the entirety of his childhood believing he had this great potential that he could and would never be able to live up to because he was "different". "Special", as his mother attempted to reassure him at one point. (It was a short-lived term, thanks to her bastard husband.) He was made to feel guilty for who he was. He was a burden, a cheap rip-off of what could have been, what should have been. He should have been a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, somebody important and successful. But he wasn't, and he couldn't be. He was twitchy, forgetful, couldn't pay attention, couldn't retain too much information at one time, wasn't very sociable, and, to be frank, really wasn't all that intelligent. And his parents had always been quite fond of letting him know what a terrible shame that was.


In reality, he was none of those things, and he never truly had been. But Victor had believed it--and that had made it true.


"Yes." He coughed to excuse the unexpected volume that slid into his voice when Nicolas changed the subject, shaking him abruptly from his memories. "Yes, really. And no, no, there's no..." He paused. "You don't have to do anything for me. Not any more than you've been doin', anyway." He didn't intend to start paying Nicolas to do his chores for him now; not when the kid would do them on his own with only average amounts of bitching. "As long as you're not buying crack or dope or whatever out on the street. 'Cause I will find out if that's the case."


He shot Nicolas a hard sideways look. He wasn't going to prattle on about the dangers of drugs, knowing full well all the increasingly desperate shit they put kids through these days, but the "no crack" rule was the one ideology of his that he had no problem with nudging onto others. He'd be the fattest fucking liar if he said he was going strong with his alcohol abstinence, but at least whiskey wouldn't leave him whoring himself out on the street to get his next fix. Not in most cases, anyway. Besides, nineteen was too young to start chasing the dragon or whatever the hell kids were doing these days. Victor liked the idea about as much as leaving Nicolas to fend for himself on the street.


"And if you do it anyway, I'm gonna buy shit for you, because then I know I can't trust you worth a rat's ass. Don't make me do that." It was less of a plea and more of a threat, but he made sure to keep his tone as casually firm as it normally was. If it came to that, he'd do everything in his power to make Nicolas look like the poster child of white kid welfare--which he very well could be in a few short months.


The outskirts of the city breezed by in a matter of minutes, and within a few more they'd abandoned the stark confines of crowded sidewalks and grandiose skyscrapers for the manicured lawns and stately houses of Westchester. Nestled close between its neighbors but dignified all the same, Mathias' residence was a red brick structure with a plain lawn (he'd never been one for landscaping) and a stark white porch that extended half the length of its facade, supported by several vine-wrapped pillars. Looking at it made Victor's memories of their cardboard box dwellings seem like some shitty nightmare.


He paid the cabbie, thanked him, and slid out of the vehicle, again holding the door for Nicolas, well aware how it irritated the boy. The lack of bustling city echo was already starting to unsettle him. "C'mon. I wanna keep drinkin'."
 
The car interior, though bumpy and rigid as it was, became more comfortable as their journey progressed. Nicolas might have been relaxing because Victor giving him money put him between a weird state of thankfulness and unreasoned calm, but Victor didn't need to know that. The furnishings were simply far more welcoming than the shiity leather bench in the bar, and that was what was important.


He didn't know if Victor understood where he was coming from on the parent-front. He probably never would. It didn't matter, though, because if Victor was going to be handing him cash to keep himself afloat, he didn't have to worry about his parents either, and that was a relief he honestly never thought he'd get the chance to experience. Elyse and David Cardou would be out of his life before he got a moment to realize they were ever there. They had never given him reason to believe that they gave a single solitary fuck about him. What Nicolas had told Victor months ago, that they aren't too bad, was still true. His mother had never bathed him in ammonia to rid his body of sins. His father hadn't tortured him with pliers when he did something wrong. There were a couple punches thrown, faces slapped, wrist sprains, but they he made it through it.


Nicolas wondered if that was why he was so eager to leave the house for college. To get away from them.


It was a subconscious thought at that point, of course, but it would make sense that he was slowly becoming afraid of staying at home. Nicolas didn't like being home without a nanny since he was in middle school after the day he got home and his dad was their, drunk beyond belief, and throwing his arms around like a madman. His mother was different. She was the one that made him think he was worthless while his father did the same thing physically. Nic wasn't sure which one was worse.


"I'm not going to go and buy drugs," Nicolas said pulling himself back into the real world. Thoughts be damned. He had to pay attention to what was actually happening and not what was dead and gone. "No worries, okay? I'm not a druggie. I just like to relax. There's a difference."


If Victor deemed him unfit to even purchase the barest necessities, Nicolas would be living playing fields under him, not just levels. Sometimes the power play excited him, sure, but he still wanted to be in charge of his own life. Everything he ever had was micromanaged for so long that he just needs to be in control of his own life for once. College did that for him, to an extent, but if he was able to get an apartment and pay for food without asking Victor for permission, though it would surely give the later a rush, he wasn't stupid, he wanted to keep heading down that road.


The car stopped at the foot of a massive home, all edges and angles, and huffed as he followed Victor out the open door. The simple act of waiting on him, closing it after him, made Nicolas's skin crawl. He didn't argue with it, continued to let it happen, but he wasn't a fucking child, and he damn well didn't need to be treated like one.


"You could have tried to steal a sip or two when were in the cab," he offered, too late for anything to matter. "People probably do that shit all the time. You could handle it with "your ways" if he said he'd have to write it up. Cut a wrist or two. Whatever you do."


The house's front was gargantuan and decorated with the sleekest scarlet masonry Nicolas had ever seen. Definitely much nicer than the place Victor called home, sixteen floors underground and covered in cobwebs and dust. Probably the same amount of books around since Mathias was a fucking college professor at NYU, and god how that was coincidental. Too coincidental to be a coincidence, really. Nicolas wasn't an idiot.


"Why do you live in a shithole when Mat lives like this? You probably make a lot of money if you're throwing it at me, but you still live in the catacombs. What's up with that?"
 
Victor's lip curled. He stood at the edge of the street and waited for the cab to roll around the corner before snatching the bottle out of his jacket, slipping a brief swig, and starting across the lawn.


"I live in that shithole because it's inherited, it's out of the way and if I had to live above ground and around people the whole time, I'd be so goddamn twitchy you wouldn't be able to stand me. Mat lives here because he's a—" He stopped himself. "He's a fuckin' professor at NYU and he's makin' over two hundred grand a year, that's why. And...sometimes he tutors kids, I guess. Why are you so full of questions?"


He'd become notably antsy by the time they made it to the porch. One hand was writhing in his pocket, the other with fingers white and restless, shifting around the neck of the bottle as if he were trying to strangle it. Impossible though it was to imagine, he'd come here over the last few weeks with the terrible lingering fear that he'd find this house void of life, even with Mathias still inside.


And on top of that, Nicolas was asking questions that--despite everything he'd revealed to the kid thus far--Victor was still not entirely comfortable answering. Why was he so concerned with where they lived, and why? What did it matter to him?


A part of him was fully prepared to unload these challenges right onto him--but there were a few more pressing things to attend to first, unfortunately.


He opened the door without knocking, unsurprisingly welcomed by the absence of a lock. Mathias had only ever locked his door at night, and even that deeply ingrained practice had begun to subside. He trusted his own neighborhood. More than that, he trusted his neighborhood's familiarity with him.


They hadn't always been living separately. For several years after Mat's first arrival in New York, they'd stuck to each other relentlessly, never going anywhere without the other well within his sights. They'd been quite the novices to city life then, sure, but sleeping in the same room together at one point had bordered on an extreme, ignorant children though they were.


Nevertheless, it was still a habit of them both that they should leave the door unlocked for the other. In a world where no one else could be trusted as far as they could be thrown, the two had wholeheartedly committed to looking out for each other.


Victor was locking it behind them (another inviolable habit) when Mat's voice emanated from the corner of a sitting room much larger than what appeared to be able to fit in the house—low, calm, a little sarcastic. "Come in."


He was perched behind a grand mahogany desk, looking notably smaller than the last time Victor had seen him (which inspired a vague sense of fear in the latter, needless to say). His thin shoulders and jutting collarbone rose against the thin fabric of a white dress shirt and made it look two sizes too big. His skin was paler, his eyes duller and ringed with shadows, and his hair somewhat mussed--but, overall--though Victor was reluctant to let himself get his hopes up--he looked relatively okay. A little older, if anything.


Then he coughed. It shot a spike of despair up Victor's spine, and he pinched his lips together for fear of letting Nicolas see how bothered he was by the wet, rattling aftermath of Mathias' original hack. It was brief, but he still had those tissues close at hand, and he grimaced when he pulled his handful away from his lips.


"Sorry boys, you caught me at a bad time." The tissues went into a presumable trash can beneath the desk, and Mathias began to scrape together the disconcerted saga of essays he'd spread out across its surface. "Need a place to crash or what?"


"Need a place to drink." There was a stiff note to Victor's voice. He let his fingers play briefly on Nicolas' lower back, as if silently debating whether he should put his hand there again. He stuffed them both in his pockets instead, and drifted casually to Mathias' end of the room. "Buncha creeps out tonight, was makin' the kid uncomfortable." He stared hard at the papers. "You still workin'?"


Mathias seemed to easily dismiss Victor's spacey behavior and nodded, lifting his hand to his mouth to smother a brief aftershock. "The kids haven't caught on yet, so yeah. I can handle it." He lifted his eyes to Nicolas, as if just now noticing the other young man's presence. "How've you been, kid?"


 
"I've always asked a lot of questions," Nicolas replied easily, and he sauntered up toward the house next to Victor. Sometimes conversation between them was difficult for Nicolas because they both asked more questions than they answered. It was easy to work around, though, because once in a while Victor would let something completely unexpected slip. It was those moments that Nic relished. He wanted Victor to be more open with him than he was already. "I thought you would have realized that by now."


The door gave way without hesitation as Victor pushed in, both of them entering the residence without an expected greeting. For someone living in such a grand building, just barely outside the city boundaries, Mathias didn't seem to pay much mind to security. Or perhaps he knew they were coming. Nicolas didn't know.


More than anything else at the moment, he wanted to sit down again and remove his bag from his back before continuing to swallow down shot after shot of liquor. He hardly remembers when whiskey, brandy, or vodka made his throat burn like the desert. He had started drinking early, around fourteen compared to his classmates' late high school,early college discovery. He attested that to, mostly, the fact that he had reasons to drink. When his friends had to worry about making mathletes again for a new year or finding a date to some stupid school-sponsored dance, Nicolas had to worry about the trivial little things on top of his parent's belligerent neglect.


So yeah, he had reasons to drink.


As a voice boomed from just beyond them, and Nicolas turned with Victor as they fixed their eyes on Mathias. Nicolas watched his physicality as he cleared off his desk, all tired and worn-out limbs, Aside from them in the room and the small mess atop the desk, the room was clean. No dust, nothing out of place. It was almost too organized. Nicolas wondered if it was so tidy because the other man dealt with illness on the regular. He couldn't recall exactly what Victor had said about him being sick, but Nicolas thought that it had to of happened often for something this bad, from the looks of it, to be no big deal to Mathias.


Everything seemed a little on edge. Maybe it was because Mat hadn't wanted Victor to show up unannounced and see him in the shape his was in. There wasn't much to gather from their limited facial movements. Just Mathias shuffling behind his desk and Victor's hands twitching at his back for a moment to short. Nicolas stepped twice forward after Victor advanced, still steps behind him when Mathias spoke to him.


"I'dunno," Nicolas said and shrugged. He could have replied with stressed, exhausted, tense, bored, drained, overworked. All would have been better words than I don't know. As he talked, his eyes continued to glance about the room. "Busy, I guess. Study a lot 'cause of midterms coming up. Otherwise, just... tired."


It was weird; being in a house he hadn't been to before. It happened everytime he had been a new place, of course, but he wasn't exactly a guest here. Guests were expected. Guests didn't show up randomly to drink in the late afternoon because of creeps at the bar. This was awkward if there was a physical definition for it. Why he thought that it would be a good idea for the two of them to go to Mat's house to continue their rendezvous was beyond him.


But he was being honest with how he was feeling, and that was almost new to him. He was tired. His friends expected him to be ready to hang out with them at the drop of a hot, but Nicolas couldn't work that fast. He needed breaks and silence and alone time. He wasn't sure if it was because he was growing up or slowly becoming more of an introvert. He still liked parties and getting out of the house, but everything exhausted him more than it ever had before, and it was confusing. Then again, last year as the fall semester went by he pulled away just after homecoming and made a big deal of keeping to himself, so maybe it was just a post-excitement downtime.


He didn't know what to do now that him and Victor were there. Nicolas wrapped arms around his torso and took another step forward. "Do you care if we crash here, too? I don't think he's gonna make it down sixteen flights of stairs" - Nicolas gestured with his head towards Victor - "and I really don't feel like going home."
 
Victor looked to Mathias as if he were just as hesitant to receive the answer. The man merely shrugged. “Figured you would anyway.” There was an easy half-smile on his lips, and an openness to his expression that Victor never exposed in the same honest manner that Mathias did. The two were quite clearly on far opposite ends of their spectrum of insanity, but they rarely clashed—anymore.


His eyes shifted to Victor, who had since eased up his coiled posture and come to lean on the edge of the desk, squinting down at the top of the pile in a half-hearted attempt to skim over the first essay. “Grange's been comin' here for—what, thirty years now?”


Victor didn't look up until he felt the fist in his arm. He leaned back and pressed his hand to his elbow, eyes fixed blankly on nothing in particular. “What?”


Mathias grinned. “You're a mess, kid.” He threw a glance to Nicolas. “Make yourself at home, son. And Victor—” He looked back to the other man, this time with increased concern. The easy curve had settled into a straight line on his lips, his eyes alight with some vague warning. He was not a deathly serious man (not nearly as often as Victor was, so hard as that was to believe), but there was a grave aura that raised itself when he had something to say. He raised his eyebrows. “Watch yourself.”


The other took it with a grain of salt. Something curled onto his face between a grin and a sneer, a voracious expression that crinkled his sharp eyes and bared half his teeth. “Don't worry about it.” He got his petty revenge and socked him in the shoulder. “I don't tell him enough.”


He pushed himself off the desk and gestured at Nicolas. “C'mon, Sherlock. Get your stuff.”


A winding stairwell considerably less extensive than the one in Victor's own abode led to the subterranean portion of the house, a similarly styled floor with an antique flavor. It was quite clear that Victor had made himself at home already: a leather sectional was piled at one end with folded clothes, the sink was laden with (unusually clean) dishes, and the door of one empty closet was wide open. Evidently, he hadn't been absent from the place for very long.


And in truth, his doubt of Mathias' sense of hospitality was based almost solely on the man's acceptance of Nicolas. Justified though he was, the kid wasn't always the most likable; and Mathias, even with his endless patience, was a critical judge of character.


It was probably Victor's own paranoia, he thought. Nicolas could be nasty, sure, but he was a nice enough kid, plenty courteous and obviously somewhat tentative when he thought he was encroaching on someone else's business.


In this case, anyway.


Point being, Mathias hadn't been around him long enough to figure out how fiesty he could be. And, hell, if he ever did, it wasn't like it was unfamiliar territory.


“Shit,” he muttered, more for the sake of the afternoon's harshness than anything else. It was bordering on evening now, and he was thrilled by the fact that he didn't have to take Nicolas home—for a number of reasons, he supposed.


“Cold?” The question came out as he was rooting through a row of cupboards in the granite-laced kitchenette. A few glasses were produced from one and Victor filled them both without hesitation, careful not to let himself spill any. He raised an eyebrow at Nicolas. “You don't seem very comfortable.”
 
Though Nicolas thought it weird that Victor had an entire separate residence in Mathias's home, he didn't speak of it. Their friendship, considering Victor was far older than he looked, was most likely years and years of being together through thick and thin, and though Nicolas didn't understand it, he wasn't about to talk down to the arrangement. Perhaps before Victor dwelled underneath skyscrapers they lived together and Mathias never thought to leave.


It didn't really matter. Nicolas tended to focus on the stupidest things when trying to make sense of something, especially when coming to a new place. There were unanswered questions with just him being there. How much did Mathias know about him in addition to the relationship with Victor? By the way he berated Victor, albeit lightly, it was hard to think that Victor hadn't told him a single thing. Did Mathias know about their expedition to Nicolas's house? Did he know that Victor was offering him money?


Nicolas followed Victor around the room toward the kitchen, steps behind when Victor reached into the raised cabinets. The counters were stark, clean, and Nicolas found himself leaning on one as he glanced about the room. He, for whatever reason, had expected suburban home furnishings and a backyard full of grass, but this house seemed more like a museum than a home. The floors, all waxed to slippery perfection, were clean and crisp as could be. The crown molding on each wall dusted to perfection without any sort of cobweb in sight. It was much different from Victor's other home, deep underneath streets and sewers alike.


"What?" Nicolas said, and he turned his head to look at Victor. "No, I mean. I'm just thinking." He reached over the countertop and procured one of the glasses before tapping at it with his forefinger. He stared down at the liquid, shimmering and bronze, before tilting his head up to Victor again, lips quirked.


He didn't know what to think, really. He knew that Victor had barely told him anything about anything, but with what Mathias hushed to him, Nicolas had to wonder what all was being kept from him (even if it had nothing to do with him, he was innately curious). There were a lot of unknowns when it came to his own life, and in return Victor's, and Nicolas knew that he would never know everything but that didn't stop him from wanting. What if something did concern him? He wouldn't know.


As long as he wasn't having to help with some kind of sadistic murder plan, he was fine with being kept in the dark. (Almost.) Of course, he wasn't happy about remaining ignorant while Victor and Mathias swabbled back and forth with info that he didn't know. It was aggravating.


Nicolas wasn't too socially awkward either. He had an easy time talking to people he had met before. Hell, he took drugs from and had sex with people that he had known for less than thirty small minutes. He wasn't uneasy. Being somewhere new with two people he (still barely) knew seemed to bring out an unknown sense of vulnerability he had yet to come across. It was the combination of the three: the always-there linger of anticipation he had felt around Victor, the little he knew of Mat, and the lack of knowledge he had about the place they were. Nicolas had left the city, naturally, but he hadn't been to the suburbs in years, and what laid in Mathias's house was more confusion than reassurance.


"We should just keep drinking," Nicolas said then, and he brought the tumbler to his lips before taking a few minute sips. The alcohol would inhibit his ability to be wary, alter, and make it that much easier to be around Victor. Without that sliver of anxious fear he always had around him (or was it excitement?), Nicolas cold relax and think less about everything that he didn't understand. He slurped down the rest of the whiskey. "I was starting to lose my buzz anyway."
 
Victor shook his head, though his lips were tweaked into a shadow of a smirk as he leaned against the opposite counter and threw back a quarter of his drink. "You're paranoid, kid." He wrinkled his nose at the bitter aftertaste, settling in the back of his throat like a white hot branding iron. "No one's gonna getcha. I told you that, didn't I?"


Didn't I? It occurred to him briefly that he wasn't quite sure. Certainly he'd told the kid time and time again that there was nothing to be worried about, but how much can you trust that when the guy who says it is homicidal?


"Come, come over here, come sit with me. I wanna tell ya somethin'." He gestured widely and traipsed to the living room, his glacial, erratic movements highly evident of his terrible intolerance for the drink. His lack of balance didn't seem to affect his intentions, however, and he seated himself at the end of the leather sectional with his legs crossed and his drink held precariously between shaking white fingers, smiling rapaciously.


"I want you to know--" He stopped to take a sip. "I want you to know that when I acted like I gave a shit, back when I asked you if you wanted me to kill you--" He stopped, thinking for a slip of a moment to determine if that sentence was correct. "I actually did...give a shit, I mean. I don't know what you were thinkin' back then and God knows what the fuck you're thinkin' now, but you get limited options when you're with me. And so does everyone else."


He looked down at his drink, twisting it between his fingers, forehead creased. "I know you hate your parents, kid, you make that obvious. And your friends--" He paused, lips pursed. "--are friends. They're good kids too, but let's be real, kiddo, you're way too introverted to make the kind of bond that'll lead to support for the rest of your lives.


"I'm the only real support system you got, sweetie, like it or not." He tried to work his expression into something equally as displeased as he expected Nicolas to be. "So unless you've got someone else who's doing his damnedest to tug you out of these shitty situations, I'd suggest you start learning to trust me a little more."


There was no aggression in his tone; he'd been careful about that, even as the buzz set deeper into his thoughts. Nicolas could be awfully damn neurotic, especially when he drank. Victor knew this.


He knew a lot about Cardou, he reflected, but it was always split into two sections—what he knew, and what he relearned. There were the facts and the italicized facts, the basics and the emotional shit that piled itself on top of the basics. What he "knew" and what he knew, and there was a yawning gap between them.


He'd found over the course of the few months he'd known the boy that he knew very little, and that could be particularly distressing. Nicolas was unpredictable. Victor didn't know if he knew that, or that Victor thought that about him, but the former was committed to making sure he'd never find out. He wasn't used to other people knowing shit about him.





The fact of the matter was that Victor did want to know more. He loved it when he pissed the kid off and sent him spiraling into some kind of rant that revealed another broken piece of his childhood. He liked that Nicolas could drive, which was weird for a kid in NYC. He liked the fact that he had close friends, unlike so many other kids that drank and fucked and thought of nothing else. He liked that he was so damn polite when he could be. He liked Nicolas Cardou.


"So relax, have a drink." He nodded to the chair opposite him. "Loosen up a little, enjoy yourself for Chrissake. When's the last time you've done that?"
 
Nicolas reached across the granite countertop and poured himself a second drink before heading to the couch. He plunged down on the chair by Victor and toed off his canvas sneakers. The sectional was smoother and ridiculously more comfortable than the leather booth back at the bar.


Victor's unrelenting "don't be so antsy" didn't help much. It wasn't easy to let his guard down.


It was easy, on the other hand, to listen to Victor as he rambled on about how much he cared about Nicolas. It wasn't that easy to believe, considering his stance in previous situations (courtesy of Victor, too), but he paid rapt attention to what Victor was saying. It was true that his relationship with his parents left much to be desired and that (sadly) Victor was alone in his position of being an adult in his life that focused attention onto him. Nicolas wasn't needy, he'd like to think, with the amount of time he wanted other people to spend on him alone, but he wasn't going to shove it away either. He needed the small sense of embellishment that Victor was one of the only people in his life that matter. If he couldn't focus on that, even if it was a lie, he'd tell himself to stop coming back to this place.


And he didn't want that. Around Victor, he felt unnervingly safe. Maybe not in this particular sense, but Nicolas didn't have to be on the look out for threats when he was around Victor. Victor was a threat enough in himself. Nicolas could easily think that if something went wrong, Victor would fix it. He might not have solved the problem with murder, but Nic knew that he'd remain sheltered. Why he let himself think like that was beyond him. For all he knew, Victor could kill him the moment he got too comfortable.


He didn't know much about him, so of course Nicolas was going to remain wary. He couldn't just let up on the faint suspicion otherwise he'd let himself fall too far down the rabbithole. In fact, he was already deep enough as it was. He was trusting Victor. He was letting Victor make decisions in his life.


The fact of the matter was that he let all of that happen. He let himself be pulled into the flow every time it came around. He didn't push Victor away when they were at the cafe. He didn't tell Victor to fuck himself at campus where he very well could of. He kept his promise that he wouldn't tell authorities every little thing he knew about the homicide cases downtown. Nicolas had let all of that happen and didn't seen to care that it did. He was a little upset, initially, that was being roped into the deal with Marcus, but he thrived on the fact that Victor had went to him to use him to make him to the task at hand.


Nicolas wondered if Victor would have done the same thing if someone else had gotten close to the case like he had. If Victor would have kept them alive and met with them like they did. He didn't want to think that it would have been the same no matter who had gotten to the conclusion first. Nicolas wanted to think that he was the only one who would have been spared. Saved. Set aside for later, even. He didn't know Victor's intentions.


He stretched back on the sectional and folded on leg over the other. His under-the-pants issue had calmed itself down from the car ride and talking to Mathias. Without the other man in the room, Nicolas found himself relaxing into the cushions. It was easier without the added attention.


"I'm not always tense," Nicolas pointed out, and he took a sip of the whiskey. "And I undoubtedly relax more often than you." He elongated each syllable, like the alcohol was already making his brain go slantways.


"You should know that it's not that simple - trusting you." He took another sip. "I'm seriously trying, but the only reason I have in your favor is that you haven't killed me yet. I'dunno if that seems like a lot to you, but it's not. You put my friends in danger. So what if you let me alone for a month or so, you still pulled me into all of this."


Nicolas gestured wildly at the room around them then sent his eyes back to Victor. "And I don't want to die, okay? That was just some kinda existential crisis or whatever. I don't wanna get involved in all your underground crime and weapons deals and murder sprees or whatever you do." He rolled his shoulder and sunk deeper into the chair. "I just wanna forget that you're a serial killer and figure my life out. If I stop focusing so much on what you, it'll be easier to trust you and pretend that this" - he pointed back and forth at the space between them - "is normal. So we should just talk and act like we're actually friends."
 
He smirked, that loose-lipped, crooked thing that curled one end of his shapely mouth into the shadow of a feral grimace. "Fair enough." He didn't have the energy to argue, and, really, there hardly anything to argue. Nicolas seemed to be mostly in accord with his little rant. That in itself was highly unusual, but he supposed nothing had gone quite as planned over the course of this delightful evening.


It was a wonder how he'd strayed so far from his own intentions to begin with. Him leaving that café was purely Nicolas' fault. He'd intended to stay there most of the day, purging the place of coffee, working until he couldn't anymore, until they kicked him out, at least—so was it coincidence that he'd just so happened to pick the one place in NYC that Cardou was already sulking in? He was goddamn weird enough already, so had he developed some kind of strange affiliation for the kid? Some kind of magnetic attraction that led him to Nicolas every time? Was it a set-up? Was someone else doing this to him—to them?


He drank again. Paranoid thoughts were not uncharted territory, but Victor preferred to keep them at bay by whatever means possible. The drunker he was, the less capacity he'd have to contemplate the mechanics of his life.


And he kind of wanted to get wasted. The last time he'd done so was the very same reason he'd vowed never to touch a bottle again, but the past was the past. He was the big kid in this scenario now. Seventy-eight. Shit, he hardly felt older than Nicolas. What would the kid's parents think of their son drinking in the lower level of a seven hundred fifty-thousand dollar house with a seventy-eight-year-old serial killer? Hell, what would Victor's parents think of their "special" son drinking in the lower level of a seven hundred fifty-thousand dollar house with an angsty little kid that he kind of thought of as a son, but also kind of wanted to screw?


They'd both fret about their own image, he supposed.


So they had a few things in common.


Victor found himself slouching further into the sofa, clearly enjoying a change of pace from the vinyl-wrapped shipping crates at the bar. He may not have looked like an old man, but he sure as hell had the spine of one.


"Y'know—" He sloshed his drink around as he spoke, daring the liquid inside to pull at the edge of his glass. Five more minutes and he'd need a refill. The buzz was starting to feel good again. "Mat's worried that I'm gonna tell you shit, y'know. Stuff you're not supposed to know yet. 'Cuz then I would have to kill you." He snorted, teeth bared in an ivory grin, as if it were all some terrible joke. "He doesn't know nothin'. You're a smart kid, smarter than most people. And I don't think I could kill ya anyway, really."


 
Resting the glass against the crook of his knee, Nicolas glanced up and towards Victor. He wasn't sure what the other was playing at. Victor had always made an effort to say that he was somehow already in this safe-zone. The confusion that came along with the new bout of information - Mathias's pushing of Victor to keep his lips sealed - added along to everything else he was already feeling. Certainly, he was around doubtful about his security.


Victor was a serial killer, and there was bound to be information that he would have hold out from telling Nicolas, but aside from knowing that he was indeed a murdered, Nicolas didn't have a clue on what that could be. Wasn't knowing that simple fact enough to warrant his death alone? Maybe Mathias wished Victor would have killed him the moment they met to keep their game plan clean. Killing a teenager probably didn't look good on resumes. Or perhaps it did if that's what you prided yourself on.


Nicolas hoped he never had to find that out.


"If you're trying to assure me that whatever this is okay, it's not working." Nicolas trailed a finger pad against the rim of the glass and stared down at the sloshing liquid inside. He was still sitting up straight which was a weird kind of progress. He tended to slink down into seats when he drank. Some subconscious want to escape from the world. "And besides, I already know what you do, how old you are, where you live. Where Mathias lives," he added, eyes looking around the room. "I don't know what else could be so important that I would have to die for it."


Okay, so he had some ideas. Victor could have stolen someone else's identity and trailed himself back towards the city in search of someone or something. That long shot would explain the ridiculousness of his supposed age. Perhaps he sold people to foreign countries in body bags, worked the black market. There was always a slim chance that he had escaped from a mental hospital and was seriously going crazy. Hell, even if that was the furthest thing from the truth, Victor was already crazy. He killed people for God's sake.


Nicolas fidgeted in the chair and switched the crossed legs in his lap, the left slowly gaining feeling again having gone numb. He found himself thinking a tad too hard on Victor's lack of ability to kill him. He didn't know if the other was lying to build the wall of trust further, but he hoped that that wasn't true. If Victor found fault in his death, especially at him being the cause of it, it meant that somewhere - underneath all the sarcastic and unbelievable responses - that Victor might actually think more of him than Nicolas had previously thought.


He knew that Victor had said it multiple times. It started becoming a mantra. Trust me. I won't hurt you. I care. You're safe. It was just easier to see than believe. And seeing it beyond another layer of words might have just been enough.


"I don't wanna know anything else anyway," he lied after a moment. "I'm fine keepin' things how they are. You can keep your little horror stories to yourself. I don't wanna know how you kill people or who your friends are or how you've gotten away with it all." He didn't add the As long as you keep comin' around, I'm fine. "We don't havta talk about all that."
 
"Gonna be hell for you, then, 'cause I'm a rambler." He smirked around the edge of his drink. It was rare—extraordinarily so, in fact—but he had been known to let things slip from time to time in the midst of a drunken haze; another fair enough reason to keep himself away from the poison, if nothing else. But he seemed to always have the best handle on his behavior when it was already trembling from one tequila shot too many (ironically enough), so he wasn't particularly concerned about what might ruffle Mathias if he found out the kid knew about it.


The other man had always been wary of Victor's drinking. Cordial as he was, Victor was quite sure the only reason he'd seemed uneasy to begin with was because he knew, from one look at his slack expression and ruffled clothes, that Victor was already on the track to hangover city. Mathias was ninety-percent of his impulse control when alcohol wasn't. And when they tried to cancel each other out, the results were messy.


He once let it slip that he'd killed a member of the other man's family, for instance. So it went without saying that Mat tried to keep Victor sober as often and as thoroughly as possible.


He had a lot of things that he wanted to let "slip", honestly—a lot of things he wanted to see how the kid reacted to. Could he scare Nicolas? The fact that he killed people was obviously not quite as rattling now as Nicolas had probably once thought, but what if Victor changed his perception of reality? He could have made the history books if he hadn't been so careful. He'd had so much blood on his hands through the sixties that he wondered sometimes if some of it wasn't still dried beneath his nails.


But the youth of any generation didn't tend to care too much about the past, and Victor didn't have much of anything up his sleeve about the kid specifically that Nicolas didn't already know himself. If his parents had loved him, if he had a balanced social life, if he wasn't fucking himself up on drugs or hanging out with murderers, then maybe Victor could have fucked him up with some dark shit from some parent or friend or something.


But wholesome kids weren't surrounded by unwholesome people, and Victor wasn't interested in them anyway.


He liked that the kid knew himself. He could criticize Nicolas to hell and back if he really wanted (even if most of it would make him a hypocrite, or otherwise just a plain old liar), but the truth was that the guy didn't bullshit himself. He didn't cling to the idea that perhaps his parents really did care about him, and he didn't try to avoid coming to terms with the fact that he was pretty screwed up himself. He was real.


Victor contemplated this as he drank. The whiskey burned hot on his throat, and he looked up again. "Looks like you solved your little problem there." He smirked, nodding at Nicolas' lap. "Still convinced it only happens because you drink?"
 
Nicolas groaned and leaned the back of his against the chair, eyes shut. "Don't be a fuckin' ass, okay? So, it happens. Not a big deal." He hated (and therefore secretly loved) the fact that Victor was okay with making him look at himself from an outside perspective. In the few short months before this, Nicolas had learned more about himself than he'd like to admit. He liked the overbearing feeling of arousal that surrounded him around Victor. He even liked how Victor seemed to demean his entire existence just by looking at him.


He wasn't inherently submissive, though, so that's what truly brought out the spats of confusion. It was so easy to combat against the wills and wants of others, and Nicolas wasn't one to lay down and take it from someone else so easily.


But around Victor... It was different. Nicolas wasn't sure exactly how it happened, this weird affection/attraction combination, but it did and he had to work around it. He couldn't keep letting himself get caught off guard by the other man's appearances again and again. At some point, he wasn't going to bite back anymore and he would have lost himself. He wasn't scared of being around Victor anymore. He had grown fine with the fact that the other was becoming a part of his life. He was, on the other hand, scared of becoming Victor.


It would be so easy to let himself get swallowed into the tide and do whatever Victor wanted of him, whether it was highly illegal or not, without so much as a snark in response. He was already feeling the pull of threads leading him back into whatever trance he was when they first met, when they were in Nicolas's own home. He knew nothing would have happened if he hadn't been drinking. It was a lie that his below-the-belt talk only occurred in the presence of alcohol, but if he was sober he would have had much more conscious control over his body. He wouldn't have allowed it become physically visible. Would have acted normal.


"You already know I'm attracted to you, so why keep bringing it up? I'dunno if you're trying to get the upper hand or somethin', but you already have it." He snorted to himself and shook his head as he leaned forward, elbow resting on one of his knees while the other offered liquor to his lips. "You act like you haven't basically said the same things to me. You're the one who coulda just killed me and been done with it. But you kidnapped me and went to my house and kissed me in front of my friends. What the hell was that, anyway?"


He shook his head again and leaned back, finishing the rest of his drink.


Victor mentioned a few times that Nicolas was a cute, attractive kid, and it hadn't passed him without overthinking it first. Nicolas didn't know if it was serious or just some kind of game to Victor, to play with his head, but whatever. Victor did kiss him, and that was almost enough.


"Don't think for a second I'm stupid, okay? I might not know what you're trying to do with all of this bullshit about you pretending to be my friend, but I'm not stupid."
 
His eyes widened. "No—no, no, of course not, you're a very smart kid, very—" He sucked in a sharp breath of air through his teeth and forced himself to sit up, fully aware and even somewhat embarrassed in knowing that the intoxicated lull of his voice made him sound far more sarcastic than he'd meant to be—and he hadn't meant to be at all. "You're not stupid, and I never told you you were stupid, you're not. You're very smart. You're a lot smarter than I ever thought you would be, that's for damn sure."


The alcohol tilted his words and highlighted the quirks of his dialect; every "r" that had already vanished into obscurity was somehow that much more absent. Victor didn't try to fix it. He straightened his shoulders until they were level with the sofa, licked his lips, and focused on keeping his eyes on Nicolas'. "R"s be damned.


"Most kids like you are prentious, see? They go out and have a fuckin' ball, drink a shit ton, go clubbing, shoot up some shit they bought from some sleazy guy behind a seven-eleven, I dunno, whatever the fuck kids are doin' these days. And most of 'em are pretty proud of that, because not everybody has the balls to celebrate their lives the way they think they're doin'. They wanna serve themselves first, so they do"


He leaned forward and swiped the bottle off the glass tabletop between them, tipping its neck toward his half-empty tumbler. He peered up at Nicolas and jabbed an accusing finger at him. "Now you—" He paused to take another swig. "Are one of those people. You self-serve and you like it. Now, you barely know your limits and you're reckless because of that, just like everyone else, but the difference with you is that it's good for you, and you know that.


"You got these little cracks in you, just like everyone else, and you use that shit to fill 'em in. But otherwise, you don't try to hide 'em or guard 'em like most people do. You know why they're there and you embrace that. And it's damn hard to get a hold of someone who knows where his cracks are."


Victor heaved a silent sigh. His eyes were bright with the effects of the whiskey, his hair tousled carelessly and his collar loose. He looked—just a little bit, he thought—like a drunk. "And I repeat all that shit to you because you still don't believe it, do you?" He lifted his eyebrows. "You don't believe me when I say I'm not gonna hurt you, because no one's ever really threatened to hurt you the way you think I will, am I right? You say you do, but people say a lot of things to make sure they don't get stabbed in the back."


One corner of his mouth twisted, and he flipped his hand in the standard "whatevah" gesture. "And I know, sayin' it ain't the same thing as doin' it, but I've never hurt you, have I? Now, that kiss, that was more of an...impulse. That was somethin' else entirely." He smirked. He liked to think they both knew what that was, and they were both too chicken shit to acknowledge it—"it" being that Victor had a bit of a thing for power play, and Nicolas just might too.


"I'm not bullshitting anybody, kiddo. Least of all you." I need a damn cigarette. "You're smart enough that you'll know when I'm trying to play with your head. And I only ever do that when I need to, alright? Don't give me a reason to, and I won't have to."
 
Nicolas sucked in a large breath and stared at Victor from his seat on the chair. He wanted to be angry and feeling reassured wasn't planned. For whatever reason, he wanted a different reaction from Victor - something similar to how his father would have acted out after a similar accusation - but it wasn't coming, and he was disappointed. Why he didn't know. He expected something totally different and getting a semi-calm response, he didn't know how to feel.


"What do you want from me?" he asked, words drawled slowly from his lips in confusion and slight drunkenness. The alcohol was probably the reason he was lashing out at such a good response. Nicolas tended to let Victor get wrapped up so much in his head that everything in his was beyond understanding. He let the other talk to him like this and pretend that it's normal to make sure people know that I'm not going to hurt you and that you're safe and that they shouldn't worry, it'll all be fine.


He knew that he was a smart kid, smarter than people tended to give him credit towards, but he didn't want the acknowledgement from Victor. He didn't know what he wanted.


"Why are you so fucking nice to me in the first place? And don't give me that I like you, you're interesting, bullshit, okay? You don't have tell me that it's because you want me to keep my mouth shut and this weird intimidation tactic is the only way you know how to do it. How am I supposed to believe you when you keep showing up in my life and it can't be a coincidence, Victor. It can't. You forced my friends to make some black market weapons trade with me, where you could have died, and then acted like it was a perfectly normal incident in your life. What the fuck is any of this about?"


Nicolas stood up from the chair and walked to the kitchen. "This is all so fucking stupid." He slammed down the glass on the counter and poured himself another half glass before swallowing it down. "I just don't get it."


There was no doubt that he was being irrational. It made no sense for him to have such an outburst, but he wanted a fucking reaction. He was tired of Victor calming him down and pretending like everything was normal and okay and not fucking weird at all.





He thought back to the time in his apartment when he mentioned to Victor that he almost wished the other man had killed him. The feeling bubbled up in the back of his throat like acid. He still didn't know if he had wanted to die that day or why he had even said a thing about in the first place. He remembered hating the way that Victor looked at him like he was a failure. Like some sad kid who couldn't take care of himself, who thought woe is me I have the worst life ever. But he wasn't. He was always so alone and angry.


Nicolas turned around and walked toward Victor, hands clenched at his sides. "What is the point of any of this? I'm not good at anythin', not good for anythin'." His words were slurring now, much more than before. "But you keep tellin' me that I matter and that you care and that I'm safe from whatever madness you could unleash at me, and I just don't fuckin' understand. Why do I matter to you? Why does any of this matter to you?"
 
Victor watched him pace the room like a caged animal, huffing and pulsing in his ever-growing frustrations. Gradually, as if one false motion might leave his throat torn by furious claws, he leaned back against the arm of the sectional, legs folded in front of him so he could witness Nicolas unravel like the pages of a moth-bitten book. He was pissed. Of course he was pissed. And Victor loved it. He loved the warmth and the color that radiated from him when the poor thing lost it and came to the realization that he ought to know a hell of a lot more than he did. He loved seeing him pace and scowl and drink to fuel the fire, knowing full well what he was doing and why he was doing it. (Nicolas was never incoherent; he knew what he was angry about and why he should be, and Victor loved that too.) He loved the questions he posed that forced Victor to actually think for a minute in order to really appease him. He loved the kid's emotion.


In his late teens Victor had found a surly gray hedgehog in his garden and kept it in a glass aquarium. They made fast friends, but whenever he'd tried to pick it up (and he did so countless times, considering it was both a source of comfort and an escape from his parent's constant criticism), it'd hissed and poked him. Nicolas reminded him of that hedgehog more than anything. He knew the kid, how he worked and why he worked, but he'd since come to terms with the fact that there was just no way around getting poked and hissed at. It was embedded so deeply in the boy that it would take more than a few reassuring comments to reverse. It was instinct.


But he whereas there was confusion and frustration for the hedgehog's lack of acceptance, there was merely sympathy for Nicolas'. The kid had never formed any truly durable relationships--not yet, anyway. Victor had to consider the fact that he was still a "baby" and sometimes it took quite a while before the most introverted people crept out of their shells, but these were the prime years of his life, and he was off getting drunk and high and sleeping with people he hadn't known for half an hour. That kind of shit didn't leave a good future in the cards.


Nicolas didn't want anyone to touch him because he never expected it not to be cruel. And it was that kind of terrible shit that reassured Victor he was no psychopath, because it was a little bit heartbreaking.


"Nicolas." It occurred to him briefly that this was only about the second or third time he'd said the kid's real name. He straightened his posture somewhat and struggled to clear his head, making certain there would be no confusion in his words. His voice itself was soft, calm, measured. He kept his expression carefully neutral. "Relax."


Would they still have this kind of relationship if Nicolas was a little calmer? Victor imagined what it must be like to communicate with someone who actually relaxed when he told them to. Would it be weird? Did he want Nicolas to relax? The display of anger was mesmerizing, sure, but he also didn't want the poor kid to hurt himself for the sake of Victor's amusement. "I won't let you hurt yourself" kinda fell under the "I won't hurt you" category, so he supposed he would have to find a way to diffuse him one way or another.


"You gettin' pissed at me isn't gonna get me pissed, okay? So you can get that idea outta your head. You wanna know why I keep botherin' you, what I want from you? Because I don't really know. It's sure as hell not money and it's not silence, either, 'cause I know you'll keep quiet, you have for this long. So maybe it's me, huh? Maybe I'm just an asshole, 'cause I like to mess with you, kid, I do. I like to see you do this. I like to see you react to shit when I push you around. You're like me, whether you like it or not. You're impulsive."


And maybe, he thought--maybe it was because he'd never had anyone to push around before. When it came to hit men and bloodstains and briefcases full of money, the man who'd taught him everything had always pushed him around. Maybe he wanted his turn.


Maybe he needed something to take out his frustration on, and Nicolas was the perfect punching bag. Fiesty enough to lash out in return, but not strong enough to beat Victor back.


Maybe he just got some kind of sick pleasure out of this, teasing and taunting kids this way. Maybe he was just a sadist.


But Victor wasn't sober enough to start bouncing theories off Nicolas, nor did he have the coherence necessary to sum them all up. Instead, he spoke the first thing that came to mind. "Hell, maybe I just like ya a whole lot. Sure, I put you in these shit situations when I have to, but when have you ever gotten hurt under my watch?" He raised his eyebrows. "No, let's change that question--when's the last time you got hurt under someone else's watch? Your parents, your friends, all those people--do you rely on them as much as you do on me, Nicolas?"


He'd pulled himself back into a sitting position, though he leaned on the arm of the sectional as if he were still entirely calm. "Listen, I'll give you the answer. I do care about you. I care a whole hell of a lot more than I should. I don't want other people to do the things that I do to you, and that makes about as much sense to you as it does to me. But that's why. That's the truth."
 
But why? he wanted to scream. Nicolas wasn't anything to him. He felt like a petulant toddler, always asking why, but the fact of the matter was that he just didn't get it. Throughout his entire life, people did things without consulting him first, without even caring about how he would feel about it in the long run. Victor was doing the same thing, from kissing him to the Marcus incident, but Nicolas respected it more than he did with anyone else.


Of course, he felt used and that wasn't the best way to feel about someone that supposedly cared about you. But with his parents, with his friends, Nicolas didn't fight back without consequences. His friends made him feel terrible for not being around and not being there for them when they needed him, and his father attacked back for violence. He had never physically been hurt because of something to do with Victor. A little emotionally drained after their meetings, but nothing as bad as the failure he felt after waking up after a beating. Victor made him feel restless but never helpless. He wasn't like his parents even if Nicolas searched high and low for similarities. There were hardly any.


It was so easy for Nicolas to lose his shit and act out over nothing, and he was tired of Victor being able to hold himself together so easily. It made him feel weak that he was coming up short in self-esteem compared to the older man. Made him feel like what he was doing was stupid, practically attention-seeking behavior when he looked at it from a different view.


He wasn't sober enough to think too hard about exactly how he felt about Victor and how he wished Victor would act. Instead of continuing the tantrum, he huffed and sat back down on the chair, face resting in the sweaty palms of his hands.


"How are you always so calm?" he breathed, voice low and muffled against his fingers. "The only time you were angry was when Marcus was beatin' the shit outta you, and you still got back in the car like nothing happened. You didn't even seem angry when I woke up in your library after following your tracks the entire time. Like it was an inconvenience for you but not somethin' to get work up over."


Nicolas tilted his head up and moved his hands to the side as he peered up at Victor. "I just don't get it. You snap at me sometimes, but it's not because you're upset, you're just annoyed. Doesn't make any sense. You fidget a lot and sometimes your hands twitch. It's not impulse control or anything, just a tic, and it makes me so confused. You barely react to anything."


At least not the way I want you to.


It was a long shot that Nicolas would ever fully understand Victor, but he continued to try. Whether it was through outbursts like this or just badgering with questions, Nicolas didn't want to let go. The more he knew about Victor the more any of this would make sense.


He leaned back and gestured at Victor's glass with a waving hand. "You should keep drinking so I'm not the only one being ridiculous."
 
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