#(I do genuinely think though that if Porsche finds out Vegas sent men to take Chay he would not forgive that | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

concernedlily · 2 years

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cousins WIP 9

pt 1

pt 2

pt 3

pt 4

pt 5

pt 6

(note: now posted in slightly revised form up to the end of the tumblr pt 6 on AO3)

pt 7

pt 8

Porsche has been putting off going to see Pete. They’ve exchanged some awkward text messages, but Pete barely leaves the hospital room where Vegas is drifting in and out of consciousness. Arm had mentioned another surgery a couple of days ago, trying to drain another infection, and Porsche hasn’t been up to dealing with how Pete might be feeling about that. He wants to support his friend but he still hasn’t totally got around to reconciling himself with Pete leaving the main family to be with Vegas; and another, worse, part of himself is even resentful that even if Vegas is still dangerously injured Pete and Vegas get to be together. Vegas gets to be with the person he wants, and Porsche and Kinn are alone doing the soul-killing work Vegas doesn’t have to worry about anymore.

The main sign that Vegas is still on a long road to recovery is that the room next to his on the private medical wing has been cleared out of hospital equipment and made into a little studio for Pete. It’s even smaller than the two rooms he’d shared with Porsche, but it’s his alone. The fixtures and fittings are a confused mix of brought up from staff quarters and brand-new main-family luxury, a signal that his circumstances have changed to something more than staff and yet with Vegas not properly in working order something still less than a confirmed and acknowledged life partner.

Pete welcomes Porsche into it with the carelessness of someone who hasn’t noticed anything either way, clearly with most of his attention stuck next door. “Khun Porsche,” Pete says, and he sounds like himself but there’s an archness to it; Porsche can’t tell whether it’s new, or whether it was always there and he’d just never recognised it for what it is, Pete carefully hiding whatever part of himself it is that’s capable of loving Vegas behind an affable expression and a go-along attitude.

“Come on,” Porsche says anyway, and drops into a chair from the bodyguard canteen. Pete is looking haggard and Porsche pulls his cigarettes out, takes one for himself and tosses the pack at Pete across the table. Both of them light up with subtly trembling hands. Neither of them mention it.

“How is he?” Porsche says, jerking his head next door although it’s obvious who he must be talking about, not to mention he’s not sure that Pete could answer the same question about anybody else up to and including his own self.

“The latest infection is stable,” Pete says, and then rattles off a load of barely comprehensible information about antibiotics and sutures and test results in the matter-of-fact way Porsche remembers from nursing Chay through a million childhood illnesses, when their medical status is the only thing that matters and it’s hard to talk to anyone who doesn’t have the same assumed level of interest and knowledge about the crucial details of their health.

“Is he awake much?” Porsche says when Pete finally takes a breath.

“Some,” Pete says hesitantly. “He’s - quiet.”

“Lucky him,” Porsche says. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and blows the smoke upwards. Neither of them should be smoking, technically, but even in the domain of the hospital wing Theerapanyakul employees won’t tell off the head of the minor family and the lover of a cousin, even a demoted and disgraced one.

“He almost died,” Pete says defensively, but there’s a fascinating flash of anger in the way he looks at Porsche, quickly smothered. “He’s almost died… fuck. I don’t know how many times now.”

Porsche can’t tell whether Pete is mad Porsche wasn’t there for him through any of that, or glad of it. Vegas had basically had a miracle to survive the initial shooting, Porsche knows that much. It’s hard to shake the feeling he’d shared with Kinn, that it would’ve been easier on Porsche if he hadn’t.

“Well, he hasn’t,” Porsche snaps. Pete’s open concern, quitting his job, acting in love with someone who’d done the things to him Porsche saw on Pete’s body in that bathroom - Porsche doesn’t get it.

“He almost killed himself,” Pete shoots back, almost yelling, and Porsche draws back instinctively, readying himself to spring out of his chair and fight, before he catches the reaction and forces himself to relax. Pete is so often calm and affable, it’s always a surprise when he unleashes the part of him that had got him to being a senior bodyguard, the part Porsche had had to look away from as he calmly, affably kicked the shit out of Mes.

“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for him?” he says quietly. “They came after Chay, Pete. I told Vegas where I’d put my brother so he’d be safe, and he sent men to kidnap him.”

Pete softens abruptly, then grimaces, but his eyes are still clear when he looks at Porsche. Like he’d have expected nothing else from Vegas. Like, maybe, as Kinn thought, Porsche is the idiot for not having expected what Vegas would do with that information. Like Pete would have expected it, even though he loves him.

“I assumed you were -” Pete waves at him, his cigarette sketching out a smoke figure in the air, “Like this about Kuhn Kinn. Although I heard you broke up.”

Porsche lights another cigarette and wishes he had a fucking drink. “Who did you think she was, the woman upstairs?”

Pete looks surprised, visibly searching his memory like he’d barely even noticed her. He guesses, “Kuhn Korn’s mistress?”

“Fuck no,” Porsche splutters, and then he’s hit by the unwelcome thought that this could have been even fucking worse. He wouldn’t even have put it past Korn to have hidden that he and Kinn were brothers. “She’s my mother. She’s Korn’s sister. I’m Kinn’s cousin. Vegas’ too. His papa had a picture of her in his office.”

He hasn’t thought of Vegas as his cousin before, or Macau. It’s an odd glimpse into how Kinn must be feeling about Porsche, to have been so content to carry on; no feeling of family connection, no visceral response to being aware of the blood that gives them one kind of relationship and precludes another.

Pete really looks at him for the first time, his full attention on Porsche and not half stuck in the adjoining room. “Your mum? Aren’t your parents dead?”

“I thought so,” Porsche says heavily. “My dad, yeah. But Korn took my mum and kept her here for years.”

“So that’s why they gave you the minor family,” Pete says. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Porsche says. He feels jittery, tries to find the stillness in himself that comes harder every day. “Does Vegas know?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t told him.”

“Have any of the main family been to see him?” Porsche asks.

“Kuhn Korn,” Pete says. He’d pledged his ongoing love and loyalty to the main family, but there’s a tinge of disgust in his voice, and when Porsche looks at him he can see the studied artificiality of Pete’s familiar neutral expression for the first time. Vegas does probably know, then, if one conversation between he and Korn is making Pete look like this.

Porsche sighs. “You’re going to have to take him away, you know. I won’t have him. Unless you want Korn to get whatever it is he wants from him.”

“We’ve got nowhere else to go,” Pete says, quiet but desperate, and Porsche closes his eyes and looks away from him. “Nobody really gets out. If you don’t know how many enemies the minor family makes compared to the main family, you will soon. Vegas and Macau won’t last a week out there without protection.”

Porsche knows it’s true. He grits his teeth and says, “How close is he to discharge?”

“Ages,” Pete says fervently. He still has to sleep after walking to the bathroom. When he is allowed to walk to the bathroom.”

“Then he’s got time to come up with a third option,” Porsche says.

Or Porsche has time to be pushed into taking him, by Korn or Kinn on Korn’s orders, no matter how much he hates it, or Pete. Porsche knows himself well enough to know that if they make it about Macau, he’ll probably fold. He won’t be able to leave Vegas’ little brother in danger as easily as Vegas put his.

“He can help you,” Pete insists and Porsche looks at him flatly and Pete looks away from him, lights another cigarette with economical motions. “I can stop him trying to hurt you.”

That surprises a laugh out of Porsche, hollow and humourless. “Can you?” Pete might want to think so, and Vegas might even believe it with how desperate he’d been to find a way to get to Pete, but the bruises and whipmarks on Pete’s body didn’t look like Pete could stop him. Vegas can’t even stop himself: he’d told Porsche he wasn’t going to let anybody do anything to Pete, but Porsche knows Pete had been on Kinn before Porsche showed up, right where Vegas and his men had attacked hardest.

Pete looks flinty when he looks back at Porsche, taking a couple of quick, angry drags. “You think you didn’t change Kuhn Kinn?”

“Okay, fine,” Porsche says. “Who’s going to stop you? Kinn paid off Prawat’s parents.”

Pete flinches. “I didn’t mean to. He shot Vegas, it happened so fast… I just reacted.”

“Vegas attacked the main family and killed dozens of our men,” Porsche says. “I’m trying to establish myself. How does it look to my people if I can forgive their deaths so easily?”

It’s uncomfortably close to the kind of thing people said to him when Kinn was unkind to him, punished him; to what he knows Korn would say to Kinn. Never being able to just think of one person, always having to put the work of making and maintaining trust first. Porsche has never tried to make people loyal to him; he knows he isn’t good at it.

“They know the risk when they take the job,” Pete says, but he looks miserable.

“I didn’t. I was desperate.”

Pete raises his chin. “And look at you now.”

Porsche shakes his head. “No heroes, no villains?”

“You forgave him Tawan and Big when you wanted his help again,” Pete snaps. “And - you paid him me, to get it, didn’t you? You took me to the bar that night so he could see me.”

Porsche breathes out, slow and measured. He’s wrinkling his tailored trousers over his thighs and he makes himself let go the death grip he’s taken on the linen. He says, “Yes.”

Pete ashes his cigarette and slumps back in his chair. “No heroes. No villains.”

#kinnporsche #kinnporsche fic #my fic #like that through all eternity #it's baaaack #this scene has been HARD #and may undergo major revision before AO3 posting #my views on Vegas and writing Vegas are uhhh complex and there may be a little too much Lily and not enough Porsche in the perspective here #(I do genuinely think though that if Porsche finds out Vegas sent men to take Chay he would not forgive that #the way he does/will offences against himself Pete and Kinn #I will die on that hill)

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