in which i give in and write Kaminey fic
Sep. 18th, 2009 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toujours_nigel
31st March, 2003
The first time he meets Mikhail, he’s still running on the adrenaline of his first solo heist—20K in the bag for one week’s work and no way he can be traced—and spoiling for a fight or a fuck, anything to drag down and make dirty the arrogant brats he’s had to make nice with all week.
The one girl at the bar worth sleeping with—he’s too lazy to work through the dancers—is batting eyelashes at a man with too much hair and a too-shiny jacket, who’s sipping a pink cocktail and staring vacantly at the near-naked bodies jostling to music played at screaming pitch and volume. She doesn’t turn or twitch when he leans in, too close, but her boy—or not her boy, that’s rather the point—focuses in on him, eyes a little glazed. “You’re new.”
“Tere baap ka club hain, faale?” he almost says, but it might be, and the girl’s eyeing him, now, so he settles for glaring.
They’re still eyeballing each other when the music changes and the girl pulls at him, spilling the drink over the countertop. “I love this song,” she croons, “come on, Mikhail.” Her boy—Mikhail, what the fuck sort of name is that?—gestures helplessness with the drink.
He downs his whisky at one gulp and steps out in front. “Not at all bad.” He’s heard it incessantly last week, hates the beat, the voice, everything. Bloody Himefh.
The girl sizes him up, hesitates and glances back at Mikhail, who shrugs and sips his cocktail, before taking him by the hand and pulling him to the dance-floor.
The last he sees of Mikhail is through a gap in the writhing bodies around him, being elegantly aloof at another girl, this one even better looking. Affhole, faala.
***
5th May, 2003
He’s standing at the edge of the tracks, hands wrapped ’round the corroded metal bars—flat and cold like the bars around the rail tracks—watching jockeys wander in and out at the far side
“Better view from the stands,” someone calls, slightly too loud, and he half-turns, shoulder fitting between the bars, to see Mikhail flailing an arm at the very visible stands, as though he’s not seen them.
“Nothing to fee but graff,” he says, winces, stares defiantly back. He’s not Guddu.
“I knew I’d seen you before,” Mikhail says, grins. “You’re the guy who took Sophia off my hands.” He twitches a little. It can’t be good that Mikhail remembers that; no reason for him to, unless he’d wanted the girl. “She said you lisped, yeah.” He turns away, staring blindly at the grass. Bitch. Not that he’d wanted her as a regular lay. “Hey.” Mikhail puts a hand on his shoulder, shakes him a bit. “Race starts in an hour, come up to the stands.”
He’d planned on sitting in one the betting cages—Akhil’s brother-in-law’s uncle works in it—but he turns and looks at Mikhail, and the hand on his shoulder, and Mikhail again, and shrugs. “Okay.”
Turns out that Mikhail’s stand is very high up indeed, and it confirms his opinion of him as a spoilt brat with too much money and time. And atrocious taste in alcohol. “My brothers might be there,” Mikhail says, turns, one foot on the edge of a stair, “respectfully ignore them.” He nods. “Mikhail.”
He thinks of and dismisses his real name as too much trouble to pronounce. “Charlie,” he decides, and puts out a hand.
“What, you forgot your own name?” Mikhail takes his hand, and, instead of shaking it, pulls him up a couple stairs.
***
21st May, 2003
The next time is also on the race-course, but he’s at least managed to get inside a cage, though Akhil’s far-flung relation is far more honest than expected, and looks at him blankly when he tries to prod. Day wasted. He could’ve better spent it scoping out Mrs. Lakhia.
“All done, Mr. Shukla?” someone asks. He puts his head down and pretends to not be there. “Dada wants to know whether… arre, Charlie Brown, what’re you doing here?” He looks up, wary. He’s pretending to be honest. Mikhail gleams at him. “You hired him?”
Mr. Shukla looks between them, and settles for looking at the ground. “No, he’s… helping out, Akhil’s friend, he’s…”
“Right, right. Akhil’s friend, of course.” He bangs a hand against the wire. “Come out, Charlie, word with you.”
“Go on, Charlie,” the patronising tone would be a hell lot more convincing if he couldn’t see Mr. Shukla’s hands shaking.
Fucking spoilt rich brat ruining his game. He shoulders out, resentful, and hunches when Mikhail drapes an arm casually ’round him and leads him away. “Who the fuck’s Akhil?”
“Affociate,” he grits out. Who the fuck are you?
But Mikhail is unquenchable, and refuses to so much as take his arm away, let alone himself. “Ooooh, associate. How very grown-up you sound.” His free hand comes up, smoothes along his check. “D’you even shave yet, Mr. Serious Businessman?”
“Not all of uf can live off our fatherf.”
The arm tightens around him. Mikhail’s eyes gleam beneath the hair, and the smile, so close, is predatory. “Brothers, Charlie Brown. You saw them.”
“I’ve got to get back,” he says; digs his feet into the loose dirt.
“Shukla won’t mind.” Gleam, gleam, smile, smile. “Come have a smoke.”
“I don’t.”
“No?” The arm slips off. “Tata, then, good boy.”
***
15th June, 2003
This time, Mikhail doesn’t see him. They’re in a club—he’s in a club, because he has the cash, and he’s pretending he’s the only child of rich parents who are still alive, and this has nothing to do with how Guddu has become a bigger bitch than ever before—and it’s dark and seedy and serves really good booze and really pretty girls.
Were this like all the other times he’s run into Mikhail, Mikhail would be the one who spotted him, came up, grinned, talked, proved once again that personal space was a concept foreign to him. And even if he spotted Mikhail first, he’d wait, slouch in a corner and pretend to brood. It’s what he does, it’s what they do.
But Mikhail doesn’t see him, and he doesn’t see Mikhail, for a fair while, hasn’t any idea he might be there. It takes the girl he’s chatting up—sweet and soft and hair ironed-straight and a low-dipping neckline—to suddenly stop in the middle of a sentence and laugh, sharp and shocked. “My god, look at them.” And he does, because the first rule of picking up girls is to act interested in everything they say. In the corner, draped in shadows and around each other, are two obviously male figures. “I can’t believe they let them in,” she says.
“Must be paying the manager extra,” he says, grinning, planning out insults and innuendo. “You sound like you…” like watching them, he doesn’t say, because the guy on top has shifted, moved, and he knows that face, even lit red and blue and black.
“They’re so disgusting,” she giggles.
He nods, gulps at his whisky. Gandu. Laundebaaz. Faggot. He thinks of Mikhail’s arm around his shoulders and his too-friendly smile, shudders. “Let’s get out of here.”
***
5th September, 2003
The streets are under inches of water and filled with wet people and quite a good windfall for anyone less concerned with the weather than potential victims. But the rain dripping down his hair into his shirt gets annoying after a while, and he’s already bagged a thousand by then off ten buses, and if he stays in these clothes much longer, he’ll sneeze while lifting a wallet, and that can’t lead to anything good.
There’s a shiny red car parked in front of the fence, and the man perched on top of the hood is soaked, grinning maniacally, and the last person he wants to see. Ever. Even more than Guddu. “Charlie Brown!” Mikhail crows, hopping off and skidding a little in the mud. “Where have you been, where have you been? I had to threaten Shukla to find you and Dada really hates when I do that.”
“Bufy,” he says.
“Work, work, work, huh, Mr. Serious Businessman?” Mikhail’s blocking his way in.
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re not working now. Let’s go. Hasina foaled, man, and the colour on it is stunning.”
“I’m wet.”
“You are,” Mikhail says, as if this is some great discovery, then lifts his arm. “Hey, so am I.” He sneezes explosively. “You’ve got towels, yeah?” He can’t think of a good reason to share with them Mikhail—pervert, faggot, laundebaaz—or a good way to say so, which Mikhail apparently takes for consent. “So we go in through here?”
He gives up somewhere between ducking in through the fence and Mikhail plopping down, distinctly squelchy, on his hammock, and tugs him up. “Don’t get it wet.”
“Yessir, Mr. Homemaker, sir.” He smiles again, and mock-salutes. “I’ll be standing right here, dripping on your floor, sir.”
He rolls his eyes, sighs, rummages around for, and throws a towel at Mikhail’s head, before going in through the makeshift door to change. Like fuck he’s doing that around Mikhail. When he returns, Mikhail’s stripping out of his shirt, humming something that sounds horribly like the ‘Mowgli’ theme. “I hope thefe’ll fit,” he says, shoving clothes in his general direction.
“Put them down, man, I’ll only get them wet.” Mikhail’s hair is dripping gently against his throat and the back of his neck, but since that’s just as wet, it seems to be irritating him more than Mikhail. “Fuck. It’s great weather, isn’t it?”
“No,” he says, turns away to put the clothes—faded black t-shirt, stretched out jeans, cotton-soft from wearing roughly a thousand times—on the stool beside the hammock. “It ifn’t.”
“You kidding, Charlie Brown?” The shirt drops wetly to the floor. “It’s fabulous weather. I love storms. Besides, it’s been way hot the last week.” He stops a second, probably to step out of his jeans.
“You’re in a fteel ftructure,” he says. “If lightning hit, you’d be fried.”
“Yeah? Wow.” It’s inevitable that being electrocuted is a fun idea for Mikhail. “You mean we’re risking our lives every time we get on a train when it’s raining?” He shrugs. “Hey. How’d you get this place, anyway?”
“It waf abandoned.”
“Right, yeah. Pass me the towel, will you, I got tired of dripping on the same spot, water was coming up to my ankles.”
“Get it yourfelf,” he thinks of saying, like he’s wanted to say, “get out of my house, faggot”, and “why are you ftripping in my room?” and even, “cut your hair, it makef you look like a nervouf colt”. He reaches down for it, and stands, feeling the coarse red-blue weave against his palm before turning.
Mikhail’s standing too close, like Mikhail always stands, and his grin is again a little predatory, and his hand grips a little too tight as he grabs the towel. Then he’s walking around, towel draped over his shoulders, picking up and crookedly replacing photographs and papers and books. He does a little round of the place, still dripping, and comes back. “Hey, Charlie.”
“Yeah?” Do not look down, do not look down, don’t let him think you’re encouraging him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” He blinks his eyes shut and open. “Why?”
“You look a little red,” Mikhail says, and puts the back of his hand to his forehead. His eyes slip from eyes to mouth to throat and back, and they’re eyeballing each other like first time again, in the club. “Oh,” Mikhail says, low and surprised, and turns his hand over to drag his palm down his cheek, jaw, throat, slip back to cup his neck. “Charlie…”
“Fhut up,” he says, angry and shaking, and makes to pull away, to grab Mikhail’s hand and pull it away, to throw him naked into the rain.
“Yeah,” Mikhail breathes, “good idea.” And then they’re kissing, Mikhail biting at his mouth, free arm slipping ’round his waist, pulling him against dripping skin and a mouth like pot and vodka shots.
