Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

playlist

“Michael, that’s Sascha Röhr—” 

Michael glares, tucking himself further into his hoodie as the older man, an ‘Authourity’, eyes him. He blows smoke in their faces. His eyes water, he fights not to show it. 

“Sascha, this is Michael Kaiser, you’re brothers from now on,” The Authourity gestures for the thief. 

He does not look the boy’s way, busy with his own cigarette. 

“You’ll be at Alexanderplatz and Klosterstr.—after some time, you’ll be given a list of names and addresses. Deliver money and the products to the usual location before then.”

The thief drops his bud, smothering it with the sole of his shoe. “Got it.”

They’re dismissed. The thief starts the trek and Michael lags like a shadow. Leaving the street art scrawled blocks, he recognizes Alexanderplatz as where he transferred from. Except any security or police are gone, letting the underbelly of society show: the homeless and addicts. Scum like Michael. The thief goes up to each of them, uttering a Russian phrase to hand over a packet of drugs or roll of money, allocated to a paper bag or envelope. At the platforms of Klosterstraße, Michael is thrust into the spotlight before a dishevelled man. The lesson is over.

He pressed his lips together, doing his best to mimic the phrase: “Нарциссы.”

His heart almost leaps out of his throat as the man dives for his ankles, stomping on his hands.

“Two days! Just two days!” He exclaims.

“You know that’s not how this works,” The thief digs his heel into his back, pressing the man’s face into the concrete and nailing him in the ribs, rolling him over to address Michael. “Look, this is protocol. Give him some.”

This is where the whispers on the streets have led him. Their rules are the same.

Michael is to apply that logic. The sun is setting, all the blended sounds of the world concentrated. He times his footsteps with the thief’s, enlarging the strides bigger until he can reach into his pocket. He waits until he’s in between steps and taking hold of the envelope. He scans for a shift in demeanour before opening the flap and picking a bill. The thief stops. 

Michael freezes.

“I wouldn’t try that.”

The other doesn’t seem stronger or taller. He will win. “You’d snitch?”

“Wow. You are a new thief,” He replies, dryly amused. “Nah, I’m just saying I’ve seen what happens to those who fail to even meet the quota by a single Euro. Besides, word has it part of the money also goes to ‘Ndrangheta. Bratva pays fair as long as everything goes as it should.”

Michael surrenders with a click of his tongue. He thankfully isn’t that stupid. And strangely, the thief does nothing after taking the envelope back. No hitting, no spitting on him, not even a curse leaves his mouth. The question of why is on the tip of his tongue, but he knows better—

A knife comes at his throat. He grabs the assailant’s forearms and trips them. 

It’s the desperate man from the train station. 

He brings him to the ground with him, getting on top of him, screaming in his face and pressing the knife lower. Michael’s grip on the man’s wrists trembles; his body going lax as his mind replaces the stranger’s face with someone else’s. His eyes dart around, looking for something, anything, maybe an empty vodka bottle lying around to give him an opening to run.

There’s a bang.

The man collapses.

Michael scurries from under the body, panting. Something grabs his wrist with the faint scream to run. Michael, in a daze, follows the other figure. 

He’s ready to fall over from exhaustion when they stop, being hustled inside somewhere. His heart thunders in his chest, gasping for air, but he doesn’t dare take his eyes off the thief. He moves first, going through cupboards in a shabby kitchen area on the opposite side of the room, withdrawing two mason jars and filling them from a jug on the counter: a slab of wood laid on an old stove top. Michael almost flinches when he offers him the water, just noticing up close he’s his age. He’s too tired to skepticize anything else, chugging it down and not caring that he soaks his hoodie. 

The thief sits back down on the mattress, throwing a gun on the nightstand. Was that how he got loose? He shot that man?

Michael’s stomach drops, remembering the door was locked behind them. 

“How did you get a gun?”

“Just have to look in the right place, I suppose,” He replies coolly. Too level for Michael’s liking. 

“What. . .” Michael positions himself before the exit as if he could run. As if he wasn’t trapped with someone he pissed off earlier with a gun. “Is this place?”

“A place I fixed up. Found a mattress and that desk,” He jerks his head at the far left corner to a rustic dark wood piece of furniture, the last figments of natural light casting in through a window above. “The sink and electricity don’t work, but the bathtub and toilet do,” He points to the door across from the mattress. “The kitchen needs a lot of work, so there’s only a cooler.”

“Did you just. . .” Michael’s voice trails off, his fear vapourizing. Even if that attitude is a poker face, it’s rocksolid. This guy must be insane. “. . .Give me a tour?”

“I. . .” He blankly stares back at Michael, “I guess I did.”

Chapter Text

playlist

Michael leans over Sascha’s desk, squinting down at the array of papers. “What’s that stuff you’re always working on?”

He lets out a puff of tobacco smoke, responding with a sigh and without lifting his pencil: “What does it look like?”

He doesn’t reply, bracing the prelude to an explosion.

Sascha looks up at him, head tilted. “It’s homework.”

“Oh,” Michael nods. “Homework.”

Isn’t that what you’re supposed to get when you go to school?

“You’re very bad at pretending, Michael—” The gears are turning in Sascha’s head, the pieces fall into place. 

“Fuck off,” He finds the door, the humiliation and venerability of a visible chink in his armour baring on his shoulders. “I’m going to the train station.”

Sascha grabs the hem of the back of his hoodie. Michael could easily pull free. He could run, ask to be assigned to another thief, and never see this crazy person again. He should— 

“You. . . don’t go to school? Even though it doesn’t count as work?”

“No. . .”

“I mean nothing by that. . . can you even read?”

His ears burn, shrinking into his filthy clothes. “I tried once, the letters looked weird.”

“Weird?”

“. . . Fuzzy-like.”

Sascha lets go, and a certainty he’s never been addressed with pierces right into him. “We get our paychecks tomorrow. We’ll see if we can buy a pair of reading glasses.”

“Is that better?”

The fine print of the price tags on the department store displays is less foreign, the similar tones of colours blending seamlessly. “It is.”

Sascha pops back from behind the stand with glasses made of a clear, hard plastic. “There, those look better on you.” 

“You think so?”

“Perfect,” He affirms effortlessly, picking the lenses off his face and placing them inside a case. “Consider this a gift.”

“‘A. . . gift’?” A lump forms with another question of ‘why?’; those only exist for children behind frosted windows on Christmas Eve, for people. “. . .You don’t have to—”

An obnoxious cough of the word ‘fags’ from the clerk cuts him off.

Michael leers with disgust. “You got something to say?”

“I said, you’re a pair of fa—”

Sascha digs into his pocket and throws the required amount at the clerk, dragging Michael out of the store by his sleeve, middle finger up proud.

“Now let’s spell your name: ‘Mich-a-el’.”

Two lines, two arches between, fit in the column of Sascha’s notebook. “What the hell comes after the ‘M’?”

“The sound is spelt ‘i-c-h’, like ‘I’.”

He nods, repeating the three characters in his head. Beyond memorizing the locations of grocery store cameras, nothing has required this much concentration. At the curve of the ‘c’, the muscles in his wrist strain and the ‘e’ is equally annoying. With the simple line to make the ‘l’, he sets the pencil down, staring down at his creation. The same defiant gratification ripples through as stashing away money in his safe or that night, buying his football. The printing says ‘Michael’; not ‘subhuman’, not ‘trash’, or ‘piece of shit’. ‘Michael’.

Sascha writes something beside his name, adding a plus sign in between, and points with the eraser. “What’s that?”

“Sa. . . sch-a—” He huffs at the other’s foolish aim of inflating his ego, resting his chin on his palm before repeating to complete, “Sascha.”

“That’s perfect.”

The smile is of pride. It’s soft, and that sends a swarming warmth through his chest.

He studies the footballers on the TV, the way the player orients his body to strike at the goal. The goalie blocks the shot, but the technique is worth trying to mimic in a park later on.

“Stop gawking at them like a fag and get me the orange juice—” His father dumps vodka into an empty beer can, not caring as it spills on the coffee table. “Then go to work.”

He bows his head, “Yes, Sir.”

“‘Yes, Sir’!” The man mocks with a slurred, shrill voice, throwing the empty spirits container at his feet to throw away. Even though anything else would get him smacked. 

In the kitchen, he takes mental stock of what’s running low. The thing on the couch never bothers to give him a list, but since he’s going for screwdrivers this early, he’ll be passed out by the evening.

The entry has EAS systems and there are cameras in the cashier area, bathroom, and the storage, making a rear escape impossible. The overhead ones in the aisles are fake, and mirrors are posted in the corners of the store. 

Bread, milk, cheese smokies, and toothpaste for himself.

The three other things go in his bag, stuffed in the middle of the second last aisle, all the employees are busy elsewhere. Effectively a blind spot. He’d rather run from security guards everyday of his life than spend his earned money on anything intended for the bastard’s gullet.

Michael pays for his toothpaste and trips the EAS on his way out. He freezes, looking back at the cashier with faux shock. The store doesn’t have a strong history of shoplifting, but instead of letting him go under the assumption of a glitch, they question his backpack. 

The man behind him in the line speaks up as he is about to make a break for it. The Authourity who entered him underground. “He paid, didn’t he?”

The man gives him a look as he leaves. The one to want to talk. So he waits by the dumpsters in the alleyway. Right at home, because places like these were his favourite to build up the courage to steal when he was a kid, prepare himself to face his father’s wrath, or even inside to hide.

He flinches from approaching footsteps.

“I would ask why you’re still stealing even though you have plenty enough, but that’s none of my business,” The Authourity digs into his coat and holds out a quartered piece of parchment. “Get this done. You can find your partner out of the highschool in central Wedding, if needed. Usual drop off place.”

Michael nods.

“You’re like Sascha when he was brought in. Is he teaching you well?”

“How old was he?” He asks before he can bridle his curiosity.

“Thirteen, words have it, looking to provide for himself. The youngest since the last century. He might even become a modern Thief-In-Law.”

“Прощание,” He grunts out, turning tail to suppress more questions, a mutual ‘farewell’ echoing behind him.

A bell rings and innumerable people his own age flood out the doors. Each one is grinning with loud voices; Michael’s ears cannot keep up, latching onto every piece of intel and tracking where each person is going. When Sascha exits the school, he drags his feet. No one follows him, an interloper among his people. Opposite of Michael’s impression. His eyes are hollow, eyebags more pronounced, but instincts sharper. The weighted aimlessness in his posture evaporates as he feels his eyes on him, and they walk parallel out to the sidewalk. Then Sascha meets his eyes and laughs. Laughs. As if he was not a shell of himself, like those they collect from, minutes ago. “How the hell did you find me?”

“It’s not like I’m a part of the mafia, or anything.”

They sit on a pair of rusty, creaking swings in a park nearby. Sascha does not waste any time lighting a cigarette up, kicking pebbles as he sways.

“Those names came in today,” Michael tests the waters. The other takes in a lungful of nicotine, waiting for him to finish speaking. He isn’t angry, only tired. “They ended up mostly being in my district, so I did them while you were doing whatever the hell you were doing.”

“You did?”

“I spent three hours using Google Maps on a fucking library computer. Libraries are fucking weird.”

Sascha chuckles softly, the reaction this time genuine. “I guess that would have been your first time in a library.”

The seed of shame returns coupled with a scowl. He sends himself over to an abandoned football in the middle of the grass.

“Why’d you come here, then?”

Technically, since he’d done the rounds, he didn’t have to see Sascha until the weekend for a lesson in the underworld. Or, hell, for two weeks if he felt like it for the next collection. 

“Bored,” He guesses for himself. The ball is slightly deflated, but dribbling isn’t impossible. He sets his sights on a tree, quickening his pace, projecting the movements of the player on TV to the front of his retinas. He plants his non-dominant foot ahead of the ball, winding up his leg, aiming for the centre, and swings as hard as he can. The target quivers, and as always, the ball comes back unblemished right to his feet.

“You play football?”

“I will.”

It’s a half-baked dream. It would take a miracle for a rat like him to even step on a field.

“I believe it,” Sascha acknowledges effortlessly, no contrivity or hesitation. He pulls a thick book out of his bag, a piece of lined paper in the cover. “The vocabulary might be too advanced, but try it. Copy down all the words you don’t know and we’ll go over them.”

“‘A Bri. . .” Michael gnaws at his lip, his head about to be sent into a tizzy. “Brief His-tory of Man-kind’.”

Another gift.

Why?

“Even though I haven’t finished it, I feel you would like it. It covers the theories of human evolution with sociology, psychology and a bit of philosophy.” 

He’s already on his way, expecting Michael will follow him side-by-side. He does.

Chapter Text

playlist

“Harlow’s Monkeys,” Sascha starts, barely above a whisper, pointing to the article title on the library’s computer screen. Their knees knock together to accommodate the small console space. “A scientist took baby monkeys and made them grow up with non-living mothers made of wire—one covered in a warm cloth and the other without, which only provided milk.” He clears his throat, shifting in his chair. “It showed that the monkeys would always choose the one covered in cloth. If the monkey were to grow up with only the wire mother, who would not provide comfort, it would become self-dependent—learn to comfort itself when it is afraid.”

They had to spend the next hour discussing why love is oh-so important for human development. Michael wanted to laugh.

“‘We are so en-am-oured’—” Michael rubs his temple, turning to the inside of the cover to his list of unknown words, jotting another down. “—‘of our high intell-igence that we assume that when it comes to cer. . . cere’—”

There’s a presence by his doorway.

Michael’s head shoots up.

“What is that?”

He doesn't respond. When the book is ripped from his hands and flung into the corridor, he does not go to retrieve it. He knows better.

A vein pops in his father’s bloated neck. He must have made heavy losses at the gas station lottery. “You think you’re better than me now—” He pulls him by the collar, drags him into the living room, and forces him over the coffee table. The hoarded cans scatter, and the bottles shatter. He bites a yell as a shard pierces his thigh; his glasses tumble to his father's feet. “Is that it, subhuman!” 

Michael throws himself on top of them. The man nails his ribs with each kick.

He flicks the shards out. He’s been given worse bloody noses, but it makes a messy pile of toilet paper to make it stop gushing. Under his bed, beside his safe, the darker colour patches fraying, he takes and cradles the ball in the corner of his bedroom, waiting for an opportunity to slip away.

“Could I,” Michel shuts the case, setting them with the book in front of Sascha, hoping he doesn’t notice the mishandled pages from its own bout of violence. “Keep these here with you?”

He tilts his head, waiting for an explanation. 

“My—” Michael pushes down the repulsion in his throat, bracing himself to pronounce the title. “My father doesn’t like it.”

“I see,” Sascha says flatly. The charged rising from his chair betrays his calm. “Let me walk you to the train station.”

It isn’t propositional. He knows everything, but questions nothing. Admiring the dingy scenery of used needles and cigarettes lining the sidewalk, he keeps pace with him, however slow he is. He waits for him at the bottom of every staircase as he fights the pain, needing to put weight on both feet to not look weak. 

He should have never come if it’s just to pity him. 

Michael is in a staring contest with the schedule board. If only the train derails when it pulls into the station, he wouldn’t go back to his house ever again. 

It delays three minutes. 

Whether it prolongs the misery of the inevitable or keeps him safe a little bit longer is beyond him.

“Your father is a piece of shit?”

“Yours is?” He counters without hesitation.

Sascha cocks his head, staring ahead into somewhere he can’t see. The rails screech through the station, the train comes to a halt before them. 

“I suppose.”

His window is closed. It wasn’t that way when he left.

The years of hard-wired intuition tingle in Michael’s gut, the hairs on the back of his neck standing. He has no other choice than to hop his own fence to reach the back door. 

The first thing he does is take off his shoes; walking in socks dampens noise. Up the small flight of stairs into the kitchen, he clutches the rail, stepping on the sides of each stair. Then across the tiles, he walks on the outsides of his feet, limiting contact with the floor, with his back to the hallway.

His father skulks in front of the television, swallowing back a beer and setting it down empty.

His bedroom is in sight.

That one pesky floorboard outside his door creaks.

“You think you’re fucking smart now, huh?” His beady eyes lock onto him, a cougar readying to pounce. He moves.

Michael rushes into his room, pressing his weight against the door. The lock is long broken.

“You think you just sneak out!” He pounds on the door, trying for the knob. “Let me in, you piece of shit!”

The door gives an inch as the man slams his weight into it. On the next, Michael goes flying. Grimy hands fly to his neck, the nauseating scent of vodka entrapping him. Michael musters his strength and kicks the man as hard as he can in the chest. The grasp slacks enough for him to make a break for it. He’s yanked by his hair, his temple colliding with the wall hard enough to make his vision spot. The man squeezes tighter. He can no longer feel the ground under his feet. His ears ring. He must play dead.

Michael’s limbs flail, eyes rolling to the ceiling.

Play dead.

He closes his eyes, willing his muscles to lax.

Play dead.

He’s dropped, slumping against the wall. 

A glob of saliva lands on his arm. “Fucking disgusting.”

He gasps, diaphragm fighting. His ears follow the lumbering footsteps. The fridge door opens. Michael bolts for the exit, head spinning. 

His hands tremble as he works the dial of the upside-down padlock. Sascha is here, reaching for his gun. He races for the bathroom. He rummages under the sink for the red bag with a cross. Fix himself up and leave. 

The door creaks. Michael’s head snaps to the figure, bracing himself. Sascha stares and stares for a while. If he is even disturbed, it’s impossible to tell. 

He turns the bath faucet on.

“You should wash up first.”

Then he leaves him alone. Perhaps he anticipated something like this.

Michael curls up half-submerged. The water barely qualifies as hot, but it’s warm at least. It cradles his core and no one will badger him for stealing it. 

The scene in his house replays through his mind. He should have prioritized being quiet over hiding, he should have kicked the bastard harder—

Sascha sits down on the side of the tub. His body leans, his head resting on the other’s bare thighs. Sascha is warm, so much more than the bath and he isn’t put off; dipping his feet in the water to give him better access. The storm in his head calms and he lets his eyes close. Goosebumps ripple across his back as he puts a hand on his head; it rests instead of gripping and pulling, settling his heart rate. Then it moves, something akin to petting, not forcing through the tangles.

“Micha?” He says quietly.

The adrenaline in his system has died down, leaving only an aching pain in his throat. He manages something between a grunt and a hum.

“Do you think you might want a haircut in the morning?”

“You can do that?” He croaks.

“I’ve read books.”

Michael bites the inside of his cheek. What happened should never happen again. “Okay.”

“Your hair needs to be washed. . .” Sascha trails off, “Can I do it?”

He weighs his words before nodding. He wants to do this?

After slipping on a pair of underwear, he takes the first aid pouch again, but he is sat down and there’s not an ounce of belligerence in Sascha’s eyes as he picks out the size of bandages and rips open the alcohol wipe. It’s the first time someone gets on his knees for him or treats him with more dignity than a stray. And a far cry from the quick, scalding-hot shower episodes to purge filth, dried by dirty bed sheets only to change back into clothes already thrice worn.

“I’m just going to use this on your bow and thigh,” He murmurs, cutting medical tape into exact, perfectly ratioed tabs to support a piece of gauze. 

Sascha also has steady hands, he notices dumbly as he flinches at them getting close to his face. On his right ring finger is a wedding band-like tattoo with a singular dot in the centre. Where this person reassures him with an apology before smoothing it reverently onto his skin to soothe the pinprick pain; sickening sympathy oozed from nurses in the scarce situations being forced into a hospital.

The gash on his thigh is swollen and red, dirt visible in the layers of ripped skin. Too agitated to even scab over. Still, Sacha doesn’t hesitate, washing it with soap first and requesting him to lift his thigh. He even knows how to use bandages properly, efficiently cross-wrapping and tying a secure knot. 

“And this is for your neck,” He unscrews a jar, the pungency of yarrow pooling out. “My mother always uses this stuff and it works like a charm, even on busted lips.”

Michael balls his fists, going rigid, lifting his chin. He expects the feather-like touches to morph into carnage; if he concentrates enough, he’ll register alcohol in his senses.

“It’s all done, I’ll leave you alone now.”

He closed his eyes without realizing.

Sascha is smoking when he comes out; lying down under the bed sheets, enveloped in a quiet exhaustion. Before he can question where he’ll sleep, the other pulls away the sheets, opening his arms. The promise of warmth overpowers anything else and he leaves no space between them. The last hours fade, and so do the previous fifteen years. any advanced perception turns off, the static in his brain disappears.

Michael wakes up naturally for the first time in his life, sun rays trickling inside via the back window. He’s comfortable.

Comfortable.

Something along the lines of ‘fuck’ rebound from his throat into a coughing fit. The body beside him grumbles. Sascha’s eyes lock with his, surveying his state, processing their position. There’s no monster he needs to be on guard for. No errands to be done. A moment like this is forbiddenly sweet. The clothes he was lent are a bit baggy, masked with tobacco. He wouldn’t mind staying this warm for the rest of his life. If Sascha were to decide to blow his brains out with the thing on the nightstand, Michael wouldn’t mind too much, either.

Neither of them speak. 

Unsurprisingly, he finds his cigarette pack upon blinking the sleep from his eyes. 

“Eggs on toast?” He proposes, voice a little rugged.

Michael smiles. 

That undoes him. Breaks the illusion. He almost covers it with the back of his hand. What the hell did he do last night? Why did he come here? 

The sizzling of butter and Sascha moving about his kitchen breaks Michael’s trance momentarily.

No one has ever made him breakfast for him. 

Still, while he eats, Michael’s mind scatters with the humiliation of being witnessed. When will the questions come? 

Still, when he follows him outside to watch him do the laundry by hand, he figures that there must be some price for this treatment. 

He must want something.

A brush of the comb follows scissors cutting the air, strands from his bush-like head falling onto the bathroom tiles. “Are you with me?”

He almost winces at the tone; an invitation back to the world of the living. This room is a crime scene. Too much happened here.

Michael crosses his arms, twinging the bangs between his fingers. “I think I had something like this when I was younger.”

Sascha pauses sweeping, hands twitching, processing a reply. “Is that good?”

He almost rolls his eyes. “Maybe—don’t remember my childhood.”

It’s a half-truth. The only things he remembers before buying his soccer ball are his father’s hands. Perhaps there is nothing else worth remembering.

“Me too.”

Those words are an offering. With the casual admittance, a shadow casts itself in Michael’s mind. Anything about him at all has been drip-fed. But he himself is laid bare. 

Michael might as well have been literally bare with how he was letting everything happen last night—

“. . . Do you like it?”

“Yes.”