Romance short. A thief-for-hire mounts a seduction of his handler.
Rated M, 6,7k, M/M. A kooky thief at a for-hire intelligence agency starts to romance his handler. Banter and some back-and-forth, mounting sexual tension, age difference. Tone is playful and restrainedly horny. Adapted from a TweetFic.
Lucas Heathcock has been working at the Company for some time now.
He used to be a jewel thief, and after a little while at that, he’d started getting commissioned for jobs of other sorts of valuables — a few museum heists, one or two bank jobs here and there, a few galleries.
The Company doesn’t really need for him to handle that sort of thing most of the time, although they do keep his name in mind for when they do need a physical item stolen — for the most part, The Company trades in intelligence and corporate espionage. Nowadays the biggest physical item he’s likely to steal is a USB drive or a folder — most of the time, he’s just sabotaging hard drives.
The Company is more rigorous about things than he was when he was freelancing for himself, going between his own jobs and the various commissions. He has a handler.
Smith is retired from the field now, but Lucas guesses he was fucking scary when he was out there stealing things — he coordinates a bunch of agents, Lucas included, and he’s tall, cold, and nasty.
Smith is a white British guy of, Lucas would guess, sixty or seventy, but looking pretty fucking good for it, and not showing any signs of losing his health or his fitness, either. He’s got white-grey hair and a high widow’s peak, a strong nose, icy blue eyes, thin lips.
Lucas had only been at the Company for a week or two the first time Smith had grabbed him by the scruff of his suit jacket like a cat and glowered down at him, had all but snarled in his soft, whispery voice, “If you want to be taken seriously at this establishment, Mr Heathcock, you need to learn how to tie your tie.”
He’s a perfectionist about other stuff — he definitely knows it now, but he’d known that then, because Smith had reached out and started to untie and retie his tie himself, setting it right.
Lucas had smirked up at him and asked, “So, what do you do when you’re not working?”
The intention had been to fluster the old bastard, to set him off. People in the thievery business don’t tend to be super homophobic just because criminals tend to, you know, be criminals in more senses of the word, and he’d gotten the sense anyway that the guy was either gay, or bisexual in that severe, kind of aggressively efficient way some managerial types are, but that didn’t mean he was going to be okay with flirting at work.
Mr Smith hadn’t flustered. He’d paused for a moment and then continued to tie Lucas’ tie a bit more slowly, looking down at him with one eyebrow arched. He’d smirked right back. “Why do you ask?”
Lucas hadn’t realised at the time how seductive Mr Smith could make his voice go. He tended to speak very quietly, often with a slight hiss and emphasis to his words, but his voice was resonant and rich. Lucas still wonders now if he has his posh accent from childhood, or if he’d picked it up to make use of it later on.
“You and me could do something.”
“As if you’d have any idea what to do with me once you had me.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, for one, young man, you don’t know how to tie your own tie.”
“I could still tie you up.”
“Oh, could you now? Then what, precisely?”
“I’d… seduce you.”
“You’re going to tie me up before you mount your seduction?”
Lucas still remembers how the blush had felt, how it had climbed up his body and sunk into his cheeks. “What? No, no, I meant — ”
Smith had made a mocking sound like the wrong buzzer answer on a game show as he’d finished tying Lucas’ tie for him, then clucked his tongue and pulled away.
“Fuck,” Lucas had whispered.
“Mmm,” had purred Smith. “I’m sure you’d like that.”
* * *
Back then, Mr Smith had been clean-shaven — recently, the past few months, he’s grown out a beard that he sculpts very carefully, with a moustache, a goatee, a perfect line around his chin. Lucas can’t grow a beard at all.
He’s good at his job, though.
Lucas might not be the absolute best thief on their roster because he’s not multitalented like some of them are — he can’t hack and wouldn’t know how to start, for one, but no one else is as good as he is at the actual physical burglaries, and no matter what the tech guys say, you do have to do that sometimes. You can’t do everything remotely.
Lucas has a light-enough step and steady-enough touch that when he isn’t out on a job, they keep him down in R&D, getting him to test a lot of the Company’s own security developments, their own vault designs, all that stuff. Part of it is to make his retainer worth it, he supposes — it’s also just to keep him occupied, and keep him from going out and having fun.
“It’s partially about personality,” one of the boffins says to him. Lucas had never really heard the word “boffin” until he’d heard Smith use it, but he thinks it’s really funny — it’s a James Bond word, and Smith has a reputation amongst a lot of the other agents for not being any fun, but Lucas knows that really, he is. He’s just not fun the way they expect.
“Huh?” asks Lucas, staring at the boffin.
She chuckles. “You have to have a certain kind of personality, be a particular kind of person, to do what you do. A lot of the work we do in our design is learning how you and people like you think, and going in the opposite direction.”
“Not everyone has a personality like mine,” says Lucas, furrowing his brow. “You’ll just open yourself up to new weaknesses if you only focus on beating me.”
“You’re not the only guy we test,” she points out, but Lucas still frowns as he heads out onto the floor.
He pretty much always gets into their safes unless they’ve got a computerised element — it might take him a while when they’ve got a really complex physical element, so they’d be okay with the right timed alarm, but when he pairs with hackers, any computerised vault is a breeze.
The contact alarms are always harder. He uses a lot of ropes, he climbs, and he grew up doing parkour — he was into parkour when he was a kid, and break-ins were a natural development of that. He used to do parkour just for fun, and it was while doing parkour that he realised that a lot of people in high buildings took it for granted that no one could reach their apartment or their office to break in.
Fuck, do they make some complex sensors these days, though, ones that are really, really hard to get past.
Up on the leaderboard today — because of course they have a leaderboard, it’s part of the fun, and it decides who gets the little bonuses — there’s someone else’s name above his on the sensor grid test today: Smith.
Pretty much everyone has a name like that here — Smith or Wilson or Brown, or Jones or Taylor or Evans, or Murphy or Kelly or Byrne, or Zhang or Li, or Patel or Khan or Hussein.
Lucas’ last name is still Heathcock. Most people never see enough of him to put a name on him anyway, and he burned off his fingerprints years ago.
“Which Smith is that?” he asks, and the boffin glances up from her desk, then shakes her head.
“No offence, Lucas, but you can’t beat him.”
“I wasn’t going to try,” he says, “this new round of sensors has been kicking my ass, I’m fucked on this leaderboard. But who…?”
“Mr Heathcock,” says a dry voice from the corridor, and he turns to look. Smith — there has to be like 20 Smiths in this building alone, but this is the only one that matters — is looking at him with a cool expression on his severe features. His beard looks good. He looks good.
And kinda pissed.
His sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, showing all the toned muscle in his freckled forearms, and he has his watch out of his checkered waistcoat pocket. Lucas glances from Smith up to the wall clock, and blanches.
“Sorry, Smith,” he says. “I was just — ”
“Lollygagging,” finishes Smith.
“That’s not a real world,” says Lucas.
“Hmph,” says Smith, but one of his lips gives a little twitch. “I’ll be in at 7, Chantelle.”
“We’ll be ready for you, Mr Smith,” says the boffin.
“That’ll be a nice change,” says Smith, and she laughs awkwardly as he and Lucas move back toward the lift.
Lucas stares sideways at Smith as the lift starts going up, and Smith stands there perfectly still with his hands behind his back and his gaze staring forward. He was in the cadets or something as a young man, probably, or the army, or maybe he was actually in MI5, Ian Fleming-style.
Lucas can go still like that, can even slow his heartbeat right down (he learned to do that as a kid, too, got really into magic and hypnotism before he did parkour), but he couldn’t do it like this, while standing, let alone with his shoulders straight and his posture like Smith’s.
“You’re on the top of the leaderboard for the contact sensors?”
“Is that a surprise to you?”
“I just have a hard time imagining you being a thief now you’re a handler, that’s all,” says Lucas, leaning back against the lift wall with his hands in his pockets. “I know you can do stuff, I know you’re still strong and shit. It’s just hard to think of you stealing stuff in the field.”
“You needn’t imagine it,” says Smith. “I was never a thief.”
“… You weren’t?”
“I was not.”
“Oh,” says Lucas. “So you were just like, a tech guy? Or you were a regular spy, just… Doing regular spy shit?”
Smith glances at him, arching one of his eyebrows again. He loves to do that, loves to be a kind of hot, old cartoon villain. “Mr Heathcock,” says Smith, “I was an assassin.”
The lift door opens as if a fucking conductor cued it.
Lucas stands stock still in the elevator and stares after him as he walks, until Smith impatiently snaps his fingers and Lucas remembers to run after him.
Things are a bit different, after that.
Lucas knew before, obviously, that the Company had assassins on the payroll, but he’s never actually thought about them as actually… existing. Being people. Being hot.
He’d thought of them as shadowy ninjas, existing solely for the jobs and then dematerialising right after, almost thought of them as a force of nature — and anyway, it seems better to think of assassins like that, not to get close to them, to think about them.
Of course, Smith isn’t an assassin. Not anymore.
He’s retired from the field, he’s stopped doing that, even though he can apparently still beat the rest of the building at stealth and burglary —
Smith stops him with a hand on his jaw. Lucas almost expected a dagger or a gun or something, but Smith doesn’t produce a weapon, just grabs him accurately and grips his chin, his thumb and forefinger on the line of his jaw, his fingers touching the vulnerable underside.
Lucas doesn’t breathe, but he doesn’t blink either, just stares up at the older man with his focus as good as he can get it. He’s always been good at staring contests, used to freak out the kids in his neighbourhood, and as an adult has freaked out other thieves for years.
After a little while — Lucas is no judge of time if he hasn’t got a clock counting the seconds in his ear — Smith frowns, a furrow appearing between his eyebrows and creasing his big sexy forehead, and he blinks, at the same time letting Lucas go.
“Is there a reason you’re attempting to creep up on me?” he asks in rumbling tones, tone disapproving, and Lucas mock-gasps, a hand on his chest.
“Who says I’m creeping?”
“I do. I knew you were there as soon as you crossed the threshold, by the way — you blocked the draught.”
Lucas turns around to look behind him, aghast and indignant. “I fucking didn’t,” he says.
“On the contrary, young man, you very much did.”
Lucas touches himself to thoughts of Smith calling him young man. “I moved with the fucking air, I waited for big Hideyori to open the door and timed it exactly!”
“Not the draught from the main corridor — the through-draught from the window the girls in weapons development have cracked to smoke through.”
“How the fuck can you feel that?” Lucas demands, sucking his fingers into his mouth and sticking them out into the corridor to see if he can feel that, even though he knows he won’t be able to. “Are you some kind of fucking mutant?”
Smith ignores the second question. “How indeed,” he says in reply to the first one, which is not more enlightening. Lucas scowls, crossing his arms over his chest, as he falls into step beside him and descends the stairs into the meeting room.
“How many people have you killed?” Lucas asks.
“You first.”
“Um, none?”
“None? If you can’t answer me like for like, Mr Heathcock, I see no reason to answer you.”
Lucas scoffs, grabbing the glass door and pulling it open so that Smith can go first (this is a learned politeness: Smith has smacked him upside the head for not holding the door open for other senior staff). “I have to kill somebody for you to tell me that?”
“It would appear so,” says Smith.
“You’re a crotchety old bastard. How many people have told you that?”
“More than you could possibly imagine.”
“You suck, old man,” says Lucas, flouncing off. He sees the reflection of the old man’s smirk in the glass as he goes to sit.
* * *
He tries multiple times to sneak up on Smith in the coming weeks and months, and the old man catches him every time — at first, he genuinely thinks he’s getting close, but then realises on the sixth or seventh occasion that Smith’s reflexes are just too good, his senses too keen, for him to really only be noticing Lucas when he’s within arm’s reach.
He might not be showing it, but he obviously knows Lucas is there even when he’s ages off.
“Won’t you let on when you know I’m there?” he demands on the seventeenth occasion, and Smith lets go of his hair.
Looking innocent, which doesn’t suit his face at all, Smith says, “I only just noticed you.”
“How do I get better if you don’t tell me what I’m doing wrong?”
“You’re a master of your craft,” says Smith dryly, “are you not?”
“Yeah, but I’m not a master of yours yet.”
“Yet?” repeats Smith. His voice is incredibly soft, the “t” sound making a quiet click. There’s something dangerous in the way he says it, ice showing in his eyes. Lucas swallows as Smith all but glides closer, leaning over him as he crowds Lucas back against a table, his hands either side of his waist to pin him in.
Their noses are almost touching, and if Smith was even halfway normal, Lucas would be able to smell his cologne, but Smith doesn’t wear cologne at work and instead wears some insanely powerful deodorant the boffins made up for him, something to “neutralise his scent entirely”. He can’t even smell the coffee on his breath, even though Smith must drink gallons of the stuff.
“How old are you, Heathcock?” asks Smith. Up close like this, he really can almost whisper, and Lucas can hear him anyway.
His hearing isn’t the best — too many times playing with fireworks (read: explosives and munitions) as a kid had come up in his Company physical, had shown his eardrums were a little damaged. He can hear the up-close details, but when there’s interference or cross-talk, it’s harder. Fucks with him.
“Twenty-nine.”
The old man looks down at him wryly.
“Thirty-three.”
“Really?”
“Well, I — ”
“Mr Heathcock,” says Smith, “you are thirty-six years old. How many more decades do you think you have in this line of work — how many years, more specifically?”
“I’ve got time,” says Lucas.
“Time to learn to kill?”
Smith slides the hand on Lucas’ right up around his throat instead, presses his thumb to the sensitive, soft point on the underside of his jaw, just under the hinge on the right side. He presses down — it doesn’t take long for him to feel dizzy, and he tries to twist free.
Smith lets him go as soon as he pulls his head away, but he keeps Lucas framed in — pins him tighter, so that they’re chest-to-chest and he can feel Smith’s breath on his lips even though he can’t smell it, his hand gripping at the back of Lucas’ hair instead of at his throat. Smith has to bend over to be face-to-face with him like this, and Lucas has to bend backward to accommodate it.
Lucas swallows. “You could teach me, couldn’t you? Isn’t my career progression and all that shit your job?”
“Of all the things I could teach you, is that what you want?”
Smith leans in, ghosts breath over the side of his jaw, over the thin hair there’s not enough of to be called sideburns, until his lips are directly to Lucas’ ear.
“Of all the things I could teach you,” murmurs Smith again, and Lucas shivers at the touch of Smith’s teeth against his skin, “is murder what you’d like to take up?”
“Isn’t assassination different to murder?” asks Lucas, barely able to breathe. Smith’s laugh is low and rich and venomous, sinks right into him the way he wishes Smith’s teeth would, and makes his skin flush.
“Not from our side of things,” says Smith dismissively.
Pulling back suddenly on Lucas’ hair, he wrenches Lucas’ head to the side, and Lucas gasps out a noise as he leans in even closer, lips touching against Lucas’ neck. He craves it, aches to feel it, wants the old man to just bite down — Hell, just bite down! If he gave Lucas a hickey, he might just come right fucking here!
He doesn’t do either: he just brushes over the skin with his lips, so light it couldn’t even be called a kiss, and breathes on the skin so that Lucas can feel all his hairs stand up on end. Lucas’ eyes are closed, his heart pounding in his chest so that Smith can probably feel the pump of it against his own, waiting, wanting.
Smith leans back without ever making good on the tease, and Lucas releases a wordless sound of loss.
“See, there,” purrs Smith. “I’m teaching you anticipation.”
“Prick,” says Lucas, and Smith laughs as he walks away. Lucas gives it a few seconds before he calls after him, “Mr Smith?”
He’s really got a tight little ass for such a narrow fucking man. He’s kind of skinny and square with the wiry muscle that some men get when they’re older, but there’s enough fat there for him to fill out his tightly tailored suit pants. The other man stops in the middle of the corridor and turns to look at him over his shoulder. His expression is wry and superior and all too assured, and it’s so hot.
“Something further I can help you with, Mr Heathcock?” he asks, because he’s a million years old and has been doing this job for a million years, and he’s gotten arrogant.
“Do you want your wallet back?”
Smith’s haughty expression turns into a dangerous scowl as Lucas holds it up, giving the fine brown leather that matches Smith’s Oxfords a little wave. That expression on Smith’s face is even hotter.
Smith doesn’t show it, but Lucas is pretty sure he must like it when Lucas wins one over on him, because he never says anything bad about it or tells him off. Not when Lucas wins their occasional staring contests, nor when Lucas actually wins one of their practice spars out of twenty.
(Why the fuck he has to spar with the real agents, he doesn’t know. If he’s getting into a physical fight, the job’s already gone too far south to recover.)
Smith snatches the wallet out of his hand, and makes a show of checking its contents.
“Thirty-three dollars and ninety-six cents,” says Lucas. “It’s all there.”
“How did you count the bills without looking?”
“I read the serial numbers with my fingers.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“You sure?”
Smith stares down at him, and God, Lucas wishes he could read his mind, wishes he could tell what exactly was going on behind the old man’s eyes, what calculations he was doing in there right this second.
Smith’s smile is thin and dangerous before he turns and walks away again.
* * *
Lucas stops sneaking up on Smith and resorts to getting Smith to come to him. He secrets himself in vents or niches or closets when he knows Smith will be going that way, and freezes until Smith is there and he can pounce.
The first time he’s actually successful, Smith grabs him about three times harder by the throat than he ever has before, slams him over his desk so hard that the shock goes right through his rib cage. Only when Lucas wheezes “Uncle!” does Smith let him go.
His eyes are wide, seeming all the bluer for it, his breathing the slightest bit faster than usual. There’s an ever-so-slight dusky pinkness in his cheeks.
“D’I get you?” asks Lucas breathlessly, rubbing at his throat.
“I suppose you did,” says Smith lowly, but Lucas can see he’s trying to hold back his smile. “What do you want, young man, a sticker?”
Lucas didn’t really go to school much when he was a kid — he’d go one or two days out of five, but there wasn’t much a truancy officer could do to a kid who was always disappearing in a cloud of smoke or scaling the side of a building. When he was there, he doesn’t recall being given much in the way of stickers or badges. He was aces in maths and physics, kind of shit everywhere else.
“Do you have any?”
Smith laughs, and out-of-breath as he is, exerted and taken by surprise, there’s an extra warmth to it, an unexpected smoothness and ease.
“You look younger when you laugh,” says Lucas.
“I don’t.”
“… Okay. What do I say now?”
“I hardly know, Heathcock. I haven’t a script anymore than you do.”
“Is this the bit where you suck me off?” asks Lucas, and Smith’s answering look is icy cold. “I mean, uh, Mr Smith, where I suck you off?”
“It can very quickly become the part, young man, where I put you over my knee.”
“Huh,” says Lucas, his skin prickling with heat. “That, um, that’s kind of — ”
“Out!” growls Smith, and Lucas laughs even as he hastily makes his retreat.
* * *
“Were you in MI5?” asks Lucas.
Smith hadn’t lunged for him when Lucas had caught him by surprise — he’s just slightly too high for Smith to grab for him easily, or at least, grab him by something other than the ankles — but he had jumped. It was one of those little, subtle jumps, the way a cat twitches at a sudden loud noise, but doesn’t want to let on that it was shocked.
He’d stopped there with his folders against his chest, glowering up at Lucas from where he was seated on top of the vent pipe. This is maybe the fifth time he’s gotten him off-guard, and every time Lucas manages it, the old man’s response is a little less dramatic.
Now, Lucas is sitting up straight with his legs dangling, kicking his feet idly, and looking down at Smith at his desk. He’s put on his reading glasses to work.
“You’ve been reading Ian Fleming again,” says Smith disapprovingly.
“Oh, so audiobooks count as reading now, huh? You changed your position?”
“I don’t know that I would count your engagement with Fleming’s books as reading even were they hardback first editions,” says Smith. He doesn’t look up as they talk, his fingers moving across the keys, putting together info packets for the agents.
“You know a first edition of Casino Royale with the dustjacket is worth like 50k?”
“You’ve stolen things with more value than that.”
“You saying I should go and steal one?”
“If it means that much to you, Heathcock, I don’t know why you haven’t already.”
“I’ll get one when I get one. Were you in MI5 or not?”
“Is it a significant plot point in Fleming’s work that the Secret Service had assassins on hire?”
“No, but like. If James Bond was a secret agent, I guess you’d be like, a secret secret agent.”
“Good God,” mutters Smith under his breath. From up here, Lucas can’t really hear him too well, but he can see his lips move, and he’s used to this phrase by now.
“So, no?”
“No.”
“’Kay.” Lucas swings his legs in place, looking down at Smith’s expression, at the way his eyes are moving back and forth over the text on his computer screen, at the reflected blue light on his thin-rimmed glasses. “You ever work with Guy Burgess?”
Smith blinks, then very slowly raises his head, looking directly up at Lucas’ face. “I beg your pardon?” he asks softly, but in a way where it’s very, very clearly audible. All of a sudden he looks really kind of angry, maybe the angriest Lucas has ever seen him.
“Uh,” says Lucas. “Y — Guy Burgess? You know, the, um… the spy?”
“Mr Heathcock,” whispers Smith, “precisely how old do you think I am?”
Lucas stares down at him. “Hey, you mind if I Google something on my phone real quick?”
“Go on.”
Lucas nearly drops it in his hurry to get it out of his pocket, searching “Guy Burgess” and then coughing to stop himself from nervously laughing, because if he laughs right now he’s pretty sure Mr Smith will climb up here and kill him, no matter how high up he is.
“Um,” he says, looking from Date of Death, August 30, 1963 down to Smith’s face. His voice cracks slightly as he says, “I retract the question.”
“Good decision,” says Smith, and looks back to his work.
* * *
Lucas is gone for about two weeks.
It’s several jobs in a row and he has to travel constantly between them — by the time he gets back to his flat in the middle of the night, he should by all rights be exhausted, but instead he feels full of life and energy, moving in the dark. It’ll wear off soon, and then he’ll crash.
He’s aware of the figure behind him a split second before said figure has him by the hair, gloved fingers fisted in it and lifting him almost off the floor with the other man behind him. A strong arm frames his chest and he can feel the cool, flat side of a knife on his throat.
He can’t breathe. He’s frozen, goes completely still even though his scalp stings and his body aches from all the work he’s done this week, his muscles tired and bruises smattered on him under his clothes.
“Call this one a point for me, shall we?” purrs Smith in his ear, and Lucas relaxes like he’s fucking spaghetti.
“Gee,” he says. “I thought you were gonna kill me for that Guy Burgess mix-up last month.”
“Hardly sensible to remind me of that when I’m carrying a knife, Heathcock.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m angry more at your lack of knowledge of our profession than I am at your guess that I was ninety to a hundred years old.”
“You know, Sherlock Holmes didn’t know the planets revolved around the sun.”
“As I frequently do in our conversations about Mr Bond, I would remind you that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t real.”
Lucas turns away from the knife and just slumps back into Smith. The other man takes it in his stride, hooks his arms under Lucas’ and drops him back onto the sofa. Lucas stares up at his shadowy silhouette until Smith flicks on the light.
He’s not wearing the usual waistcoat and tie and cardigan — he’s wearing a black turtleneck and even tighter pants than usual, so tight they almost look like leggings, and boots instead of Oxfords or bluchers.
“The fuck was that for, if not for my faux-pas?”
Smith gives a graceful shrug as he tugs off his leather gloves. Lucas’ eyes are rooted to the movement, almost like watching someone take off their lingerie, at the way Smith hooks one finger under the base of the glove and slowly peels each one off, baring the back of his hand, then his long, slim fingers. On the inside of his left wrist is a bit of knotted scar tissue from when he got stabbed on a job back in the 90s.
“Is a good trainer not supposed to keep you on your toes?”
“Not literally,” says Lucas, rubbing at his sore scalp.
“And there was me thinking you liked your hair pulled.”
“Maybe,” admits Lucas. He watches as Smith pours from a pot of already-made tea, pushes a mug toward him, and he picks it up and takes a sip. It’s some kind of chamomile blend, and he sighs after he takes a swallow of it. “Why are you here?”
“I’m welcoming you home,” says Smith, and because it’s Smith it sounds like sarcasm, but it’s not, really, is it? Because he’s here, and he’s made Lucas tea,and he’s taken his gloves off so Lucas can see all the veins in his hand.
As Lucas watches, he’s putting on a jumper — this is black, too, made of a tight wool blend that looks so fucking sleek, and he looks even more like a cartoon than normal, except instead of a cartoon sexy villain, he looks like a cartoon sexy spy. Lucas wants to be annoyed he’s putting on more clothes instead of taking them off, but it just looks so fucking good at him he can’t make himself say it.
Lucas reaches out and touches the weave, his fingers trailing over the fabric and feeling how hard Smith’s abdomen is, how muscular he is under the turtleneck and the jumper like.
Smith sinks down onto the sofa beside him, and Lucas takes the opportunity to wrap one of his hands around the side of Smith’s waist, gripping him there. He’s got a kind of narrow waist, square — Lucas is short and light, but he’s not slim and lean like Smith is, he’s got more of a roundness around his middle. Lucas thinks both can be nice, so long as there’s enough for a man to grab at.
He waits for Smith to shove his hand away, but he doesn’t.
“I’ve never seen you wear normal clothes before,” he says. Smith looks at him kind of funny, which, yeah, okay, that’s fair. He’s dressed like a ninja in a movie, or a stagehand, or someone else invisible. “You know what I mean.”
“One could fill many books with the things you haven’t seen,” says Smith.
His legs are almost gangly, viewed like this from close up — mostly Lucas sees him sit behind desks or tables. Sat side by side, with one of Smith’s legs crossed over the other and his body leaned back on the deep sofa, Lucas is aware of how long his legs are compared to his own.
He slides his hand from Smith’s waist to his thigh, which is a little bit plumper. It fills out the trousers pretty nicely, and is radiating heat. Smith still doesn’t push his hand away.
“You’re too tall,” says Lucas.
“For what?”
“Anything. Sitting down.”
Smith laughs, and the sound of it is wonderful, rich and low and resonant, filling up Lucas’ apartment, bouncing off the wood flooring and jumping between all his mismatched, stolen furniture. Most of what he has is antique, because he has expensive taste, but a lot of the modern stuff is too uncomfortable for his tastes.
“Did you come to have sex?” he asks, his palm sliding back and forth on Smith’s muscular thigh.
Smith looks at him, his lips shifted into that easy, superior smirk of his. “I thought you might be tired, after your week’s adventures.”
“I’m not tired,” says Lucas immediately, inching closer.
“Very well,” says Smith, and he leans forward and Lucas thinks he’s going to kiss him, but he just reaches for his own mug of tea and brings it to his lips. They drink tea in silence — Smith’s silence very haughty, Lucas’ silence extremely horny — before Smith finally gets to his feet.
Lucas trips over himself rushing into the bathroom, quickly washes his face, cleans his teeth, drops his travelling clothes into the laundry basket and pulls on the pyjamas he had hung up waiting because they’re sexy too, women’s PJs that are a nice too big for him so they drape really nice on him, silken and cool and comfortable, but also super sexy because they’re a kind of deep, plummy purple colour.
It’s what they call a tactical error.
As he crosses the threshold from the bathroom into the bedroom, now in his pyjamas, his teeth brushed, his hair untied and loose around his shoulders with the lights dimmed and the knowledge his bed is waiting for him, the crash lands on him.
It hits him like a fucking brick, and he’s tired.
“You do look delectable like this,” says Smith softly. “There aren’t many men your age who wear silk pyjamas.”
“I stole them off this homophobic old lady who gets her dog groomed by a friend of mine. She had ’em all special made — she’s a little bigger than me, so they fit pretty good. Sometimes I go back over and steal more out of her closet.”
“You do realise that narrative somewhat detracts from their sex appeal?”
“You sure?” asks Lucas, and he pushes his tits together so that he makes a kind of cleavage under their plunging collar. He yawns right after even though he tries to hold it back, and Smith’s chuckle goes right through him, makes his cock give a little jump even though he’s sleepy as fuck.
His eyes suddenly feel dry and heavy, and the fact that the brighter overhead lights are turned off in favour of the gentle bedside light doesn’t help — Smith is already in bed, sitting up against the headboard. Lucas manages to stifle his second yawn as he gets under the covers.
Smith has a hairy chest, curly white hairs all over his rock-hard pecs and in between them, and he’s got a garrot scar kind of low on his neck, normally hidden underneath his shirt collars — right now he’s wearing a white v-neck shirt. Lucas is annoyed he can’t see his nipples, but it’s hot that he can see the little bumps of them under the cotton.
“You drugged me,” he accuses. “I wasn’t sleepy a second ago.”
“I gave you a night-time blend of chamomile and lavender,” says Smith mildly.
“You knew this would happen.”
“That you’d be exhausted after weeks of globetrotting and breaking into skyscrapers? Certainly, young man, I had an inkling.”
“Tomorrow we’ll fuck,” says Lucas. His head is so heavy he can’t lift it off the pillow.
“As much as you like,” agrees Smith. He’s touching the side of Lucas’ face with a very delicate finger, moving a long strand of hair away from his cheek and tucking it behind his ear. It tickles a little, and it feels really, really nice, but it’s not waking him up any.
“Like rabbits,” he says through another yawn.
“Like a thief and an assassin,” agrees Smith. “Flexibly, and with great strength and stamina.”
“Hrrgh,” says Lucas, somewhere between sleepy and horny. He considers the merits of offering this to Smith as a portmanteau — “slorny”, or maybe “hornpy” — but he feels like he’s on a good streak with the old man right now, and he doesn’t want to risk ruining it with a portmanteau right now.
“Precisely.”
Lucas asks, lying on his side and looking blearily at him, “Are you wearing pyjamas?” He touches the thin cotton of Smith’s t-shirt with sleep-clumsy fingers.
“Most of us aren’t fancy little princes like yourself,” says Smith, which with his posh British accent is the funniest thing Lucas has ever heard.
“T-shirt and boxers,” mumbles Lucas, and Smith turns toward him as Lucas slides his hand back around Smith’s waist. Smith kisses him and it’s just as smooth and easy as everything else, and yet another area where Smith has more expertise than he does, even if Lucas wasn’t almost asleep.
When they break apart he drops his head to Smith’s shoulder, inhales the subtle cologne he must have put on tonight just for Lucas — it’s woody and comforting and smells kind of vintage, maybe came out somewhere toward the beginning of the million years ago that Smith was born.
“Shouldn’t I ask your name?” asks Lucas. The words are muffled by the meat of Smith’s shoulder.
Smith starts laughing again as he flicks off the bedside light, and Lucas can feel the vibration of his laugh under his ear, and it makes him laugh too. He hasn’t slept with someone as skinny as Smith in years — he can feel the bones under his muscle.
“Perhaps you should,” says Smith.
After a second, whereupon he sighs irritably, Lucas asks, “Well?”
“Smith,” says Smith.
“Uh huh,” says Lucas impatiently.
“Vittorio.”
“Vi — What?”
“Vittorio. It’s Italian, has the same root as Victor. From the Latin for conqueror.”
“Your name is Vittorio?”
“What about my name is stretching the bounds of your imagination?”
“You pick a basic, everyday name like Smith, but still have a unique name like Vittorio?”
“Lucas,” says Smith, and Lucas likes the way his name sounds in the old man’s mouth, likes the way he says it, “I have been a Smith since the day I was born.”
“Really?”
“It’s one of the most common names in this country — and in mine.”
“Yeah, but I just assume everyone’s changed their name to Smith or whatever in our line of work. You’re actually a Smith? Like, originally?”
“I am.”
“Vittorio.”
“Just so.”
“Huh.”
“Why haven’t you changed your name?”
“I don’t know,” says Lucas. He’s drifting now, his tongue clumsy, his head drooping on Smith’s shoulder. “It’s mine. I didn’t have to steal it or anything.”
“Well-argued,” says Smith quietly, and his fingers are beginning to pet Lucas’ hair, combing delicately through it in a way that’s unbelievably soothing.
“Will you tell me how many people you’ve killed now?”
“Bagged your first kill this week, did you? That wasn’t mentioned in your reports.”
“Prick.”
“That’s me,” agrees Smith. He’s warm, and his lips are very warm as they touch the top of Lucas’ head. His nose is buried in Lucas’ hair, inhaling. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Good instinct,” says Smith.
Lucas finally sinks into a deep, deep sleep.
* * *
When Lucas wakes up, Smith is still sleeping, laid on his side with one arm loosely wrapped around Lucas’ waist, their feet tangled together. His eyelashes look longer like this, his eyes closed. Lucas’ are still nicer, but who’s comparing?
“Hey,” he says. “I’m not falling for this one.”
Smith’s eyes open in one movement, and the look in them makes Lucas shiver. “No?” he asks in a slow, deliberate manner.
“No,” says Lucas.
“Best get to something else, then,” says Smith, and rolls them over, pinning Lucas beneath him and swallowing his laughter under his kiss.
FIN.
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