-1-
Alex Haley sits quietly in the back of the funeral services for Lindsay Schofield.
He was the only person from Virtue or Control to attend. He’d come for closure and when the services end he slips a bank account number to Mrs. Schofield. The funds in the account had been pooled from the escorts. It would be enough money to pay for the funeral services and other expenses.
After saying a quick good-bye Haley boards one of the bullet trains from The Valley back to the Sprawl. It was a train ride he’d been terrified to take a decade ago but now it felt familiar.
When the train reaches the chaotic skyline of the Sprawl he sees familiar shimmering holographic words that had been projected above the city all week:
Welcome to the Future
Kenneth Maxwell’s campaign slogan.
It had been everywhere since his presidential win was announced earlier in the week. In Ft. Perch, where he’d won 98% of the vote, his supporters had started using it as a greeting.
Control is almost at capacity tonight, it always seemed to be when things in the city changed. He felt emotionally drained from the funeral and wants to go straight to his room to get lost in a game for a few hours but Gaige cuts right into his path the moment he walks inside the club.
“Did you see ?,” Gaige grins.
“Please, I’m tired--”
“Maxwell just appointed Father Winstead to his cabinet,” Gaige says.
He hadn’t seen.
“Maxwell’s not religious--”
“His voters are,” Gaige smiles. “Mr. Dory told Winstead about the recordings we have of him and the price to have them destroyed. $5 million.”
“That’s practically nothing for me.”
Despite the number of private visits Haley had endured, Winstead was still technically Gaige’s client. They’d only arranged for Haley to get 10% of the blackmail money.
“No,” Gaige says. “The $5 million is just your cut. Posted this morning. Jean even told Winstead he couldn’t take it out of the church’s money.”
Haley looked into his account and sure enough there was $5 million more than had been there earlier
“Awww, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile,” Gaige teases. “Have a big purchase planned ? I know I do.”
“No,” Haley says. “I’m going to pay off my debt.”
-2-
The next week, Alex Haley twists his hair into a bun at the back of his head and dresses in the same navy jacket and khaki pants he’d worn to Linz’s funeral.
He takes the 7:15 PM train to Mojave and walks to Luce’s underground garage—just as he’d been instructed by the handwritten note left on his mirror that morning.
When he exits the elevator and enters the private garage, he is struck by the sudden vastness of the space--
Every single vehicle is gone.
Except for a midnight blue convertible. Haley had never seen the car before, it looked elegant and practical---just like the devastatingly handsome dark haired, bright eyed man standing next to it with two dozen roses cradled awkwardly in his arms.
“Where did all your cars go ?,” he asks approaching Luce, his steps echoing around the empty space.
“I sold them,” Luce says curtly, handing over the flowers and opening the passenger door for him.
The flowers were fragrant and sweet. The blossoms an uneven and varied red.
“Why would you--?”
“To pay for my re-calibration,” Luce responds as he strides to the driver seat. “And my school.”
“School ?”
“Yeah,” Luce says as he backs out of the garage, the tailored lines of the black suit hugging his shoulder as he turns to look behind him.
They speed down the empty Mojave streets and towards Ft. Perch.
“I’m leaving the cartel,” Luce adds.
“What’s going on ?”
Luce’s eyes stay on the road and Haley suddenly understands why they are having this conversation in the car. Luce Grace still wasn’t good at vulnerability.
“I don’t know if I ever told you this,” Luce says. “But I was never supposed to live this long. Nobody thought my cybernetics could keep me going past 10 years but by some miracle they did. Probably because I couldn’t use it that much at Arkham…but as long as I’m in the cartel I’ll be reliant on my cybernetics to do my job. So, I figured…it’s time I left. I’m paying for the new system myself so I don’t owe the cartel anything.”
“I’m sorry, Luce--”
“Don’t be,” he says. “There isn’t anything holding me to the cartel. This was always going to happen eventually. Probably should have done it years ago.”
They drive in silence for another half hour before they reach the checkpoint to enter Ft. Perch’s bubble.
“Welcome to the future!,” the checkpoint’s computer voice says as their car is allowed through with just a simple scan.
Once they get into the city Luce reluctantly hands his keys to the valet at the Metronome Hotel before they pass through the luxury hotel’s lobby and to the restaurant inside where their reservation waited.
The Metronome restaurant’s $900 prixe fixe menu was prepared by a team of award-winning chefs visiting from Paris. Haley felt overwhelmed as tuxedoed waiters poured them wine and laid out a plate of appetizers that looked more like art than food with names he’d be hopeless to pronounce.
Luce sips his wine and then swirls it in his glass, his fingers tapping the table restlessly. His eyes flick around the restaurant, landing on each of the other couples and groups in the restaurant.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Haley says, stilling Luce’s drumming fingers with his hand.
“You wanted to go on a date,” Luce grunts. “Here we are.”
Luce’s eye flicker down at where Haley’s hand rests on top of his on the table.
“You’re wearing my ring,” Luce observes, taking Haley’s ring finger and admiring the simple silver band.
“It’s not the only ring I’m wearing,” Haley says in a low voice
Haley gets the reaction he wants, he liked to throw Luce off sometimes. Luce’s eyes darken and Haley tries to hide the tiny quirk of a smile on his lips as the fussy waiter brings by another plate of pureed liquids and edible flowers arranged on a floating plate.
He suddenly can’t imagine sitting through 4 more courses of this.
“I think you might be right,” Haley admits, leaning on his elbow on the table. “Maybe dates are overrated.”
Luce makes a noncommittal sound under his breath that sounds like an I-told-you-so.
“Luce ?”
“What.”
“Can we please get out of here ?”
He barely has the sentence out when Luce is out of the chair, leading them out of the restaurant.
“Don’t you have to pay,” Haley laughs.
“I pre-paid.”
As they make their way through the lobby, Haley removes his navy blazer and tosses it to Luce. When they get to the valet station Haley leans up and kisses him. It was an improper kiss, a preview of what he wanted later tonight. What he wanted now. That's what he loved about Luce Grace.
He made him want.
People were staring disapprovingly but he didn’t care.
The car comes and it’s as if Luce can’t get out of the bubble city fast enough. His eyes are on the road and Haley removes the rest of his suit, peeling of the starched shirt and pulling off the stiff khaki pants.
Underneath he had a pair of body hugging black cut offs, corseted on both side from the top of his thigh to his hips and shirt with Virtue’s stylized pink V in tiny sequins. He pulls the pins out of the chignon until his hair fell, curled slightly at the ends.
“Fuck,” Luce says when he glances over, losing control of the steering wheel. “Where you were wearing that underneath this whole time ?,”
Haley lifts one shoulder.
He knew how this would end one way or the other.
“What do you want to do now ?,” Luce asks, righting the car.
“Whatever you want.”
Luce looks ahead at the road as if weighing some options.
“I want to ink you."
-3-
Luce speeds into the tight packed streets of the inner Sprawl and manages to find a space in front of a darkened street where most of the LED lights had been shot out. A flickering holosign that had once said Welcome To The Future had been hacked to add the phrase We’re Still Fucked! to the end.
It was getting close to midnight and normally Haley wouldn’t be out on a street like this by himself, people in the area could be territorial and too high to know what they were doing, but he felt safe with Luce at his side. When he steps out of the car Luce lifts him up on the hood of the car and presses his tongue into his mouth.
“Fuck,” Luce sights, wrestling out of his own suit jacket and throwing it to the ground. “Some days I can’t believe you’re real.”
He’d heard things like that all the time but it meant something coming from Luce.
Luce’s luminescent eyes are dilated with excitement and he wonders if Luce is going to take him right here on the hood of this car. Instead Luce pulls him off the car and they walk into an unmarked shop on the next street over. Luce's arm is around his hips, pulling their bodies together.
There is no sign on the shop and the windows are tinted but the tattoo shop beyond the door is brightly lit and Pretty Boy, the cartel tattoo artist he’d heard about from other escorts but had only met once, was working on a woman’s neckpiece. There were three other tattoo artists working in the big open warehouse space but Luce doesn’t acknowledge them. The artists and clients give Haley a cursory up and down but none of them stare or gawk at his tattoos.
“Hell-lo,” Pretty Boy smiles up at them.
“Can you ink him ?,” Luce asks, his hand moving possessively over Haley's waist.
He understood it wasn’t Luce asking for something but asking if it was even possible.
Pretty Boy puts his instrument down and stands. His eyes travel over Haley’s body. In exchange, Haley takes the time to look at Pretty Boy’s ink. The man didn’t just have one piece on every inch of his face and body, he’d been inked in the same place multiple times with pieces inked over and crowding out others.
“I can maybe work with this,” Pretty Boy nods with a grin. “It’ll be interesting. Wait for me to finish up here.”
Pretty Boy goes back to the woman’s neckpiece. The woman's eyes are lulled back into her head and she is mumbling incoherently. Pretty Boy uses a syringe to inject her with a clear liquid that quiets her down. Haley adverts his eyes from her and focuses on a missing brick in the warehouse facade.
He can feel Luce's growing impatience. Luce's hand roughly turns his chin and for the next 30 minutes their mouths occupy each other to pass the time. He needed this, for Luce to take control, to avoid his incoming panic attack at the sound of the tattooing needle. He hadn't been tattooed since Forge DeCartes had mercilessly cut into his skin with his dulled bacteria infected tattoo needle. Luce’s fingers play with the corseting on the side of his shorts, making small circles in the bare flesh between the ribbon.
Pretty Boy’s loud cough breaks them apart. The woman with the neck tattoo is out of Pretty Boy’s chair and being carried out by two friends. She can barely walk and her words are slurred and confused as she begs for more painkillers. Once her friends get her through the door she kneels on the sidewalk and projectile vomits on someone’s motorcycle then starts sobbing.
Pretty Boy motions to his now empty chair and Haley lies down. Pretty Boy examines his ink closer with a small cylindrical device, excitement in his eyes.
“I’m checking the density of the ink…Forgre DeCartes did these, yeah ? I heard rumors about that insane motherfucker. You have to tell me what he was really like--”
“No, he doesn’t,” Luce says firmly, watching over Pretty Boy's shoulder.
Pretty Boy just sighs and looks at the device in his hand.
“I think I can lighten them. They won’t go away or anything but it’s the only way I can ink over them. Where do you want to start ? It's going to hurt like a motherfucker so you might want to pick a place you aren’t sensitive.”
Haley looks to Luce and Luce touches the skin at the back of his upper thigh.
The tattoo needed to be inconspicuous. Haley had paid his debt to the cartel with Father Winstead’s bribe money but he still seeing a select number of clients at Control so he could start a savings for himself before leaving the club behind.
Pretty Boy adjusts the tattoo chair until Haley is lying flat on his back.
“I’ll numb the area, but you might want a shot of ketamine.” Pretty Boy adds shaking a small bottle of clear liquid.
Haley's eyes wander over to the door where the woman with the neckpiece is half unconscious and still being dragged down the sidewalk by her friends.
“I like pain--”
“Not like this,” Pretty Boy laughs.
“He’ll be fine,” Luce says pointedly
“Alright,” Pretty Boy grins to Luce. “You might have to hold him down.”
Luce lifts Haley’s leg, bending it back until his knee touches his ear and the skin on the back of his thigh is pulled taught. Pretty Boy sits on his stool and begins opening bottles.
Haley feels the cool swab of something on the back of his thigh and his skin suddenly feels tingly and tight. Pretty Boy pulls out a silver gun-looking object with a bright blue light on the end and presses it to his skin.
At first the touch is icy, but then it heats up. Haley welcomes the feeling, he felt safe exploring his masochistic side with Luce standing there. The pleasure he found in the dull ache was amplified by Luce holding his leg back in a way that was more than a little suggestive. He settles in, closing his eyes and losing himself in a space of pain and submission.
Then it changes.
Pretty Boy was going over the same spots a second time and the heated feeling grew sharper, the skin ripping sensation reminiscent of the awful process he’s gone through to get the tattoos. He looks up at Luce who was looking down at him with a neutral expression. It was just a blue light, it shouldn’t hurt this much.
When Pretty Boy makes a third pass Haley can’t help himself, he lets out a moan and shifts away, which causes Pretty Boy to curse. Luce’s hold on him tightens and he is grateful for Luce’s mouth suddenly over his, preventing him from screaming out.
With each pass the pain intensifies, but he didn’t want to give up, he wanted to get to the other side of it. An hour later his face is covered in tears, his body is shaking and he’d completely given over to the pain so fully he doesn’t even notice when it stops.
“Ta-da,” Pretty Boy says, cracking his back.
He pulls down a mirror and Haley see a small 5 inch break in the mess of black ink on the back his thigh. The dark ink that made up the bottom of the word RLA had been lightened a faded light brown.
It was such a small area and minimal change for so much pain and they weren’t even done.
“What do you want me to cover it with ?,” Pretty Boy asks.
“I don’t care,” Luce tells him.
Pretty Boy picks up a needle this time and Haley feels like he’s going to be sick.
“Luce I--”
“Shh. It’s almost over.”
He lies back down as Pretty Boy starts up again. With one arm Luce holds his leg back and with the other he touches him, trailing his finger slowly between Haley’s thighs and tracing the outline of the cock ring he'd been wearing all night.
The area of on the back of his thigh where the ink had been removed was still on fire but the tattooing needle is nearly painless and Pretty Boy is so intent in his work he doesn’t seem to notice that Luce’s touch is brings him right up to the edge.
When Pretty Boy stands again, the break in the RLA tattoos is filled with a stylized mechanical heart that is so well detailed it looked like it was beating.
“You did good,” Luce tell him as he pays Pretty Boy. He doesn't catch the amount but he knows it must have been a lot.
Haley prepares to stand from the table but Luce stops him and slides his arms under his bent knees, carefully cradling him in his arms, and carrying him out the shop.
When they make it back to the car Haley is surprised Luce starts driving. Luce's suit pants were unforgiving and the tent in them had only been growing the last hour they were in the tattoo shop. He expects Luce to drive back to Control but instead he parks in front of Treasure Island, the warehouse turned apartment complex where Jean Dory lived. He’d been there once before when they went to Rayne’s funeral.
“What are we doing here ?,” Haley asks, cradling the two dozen roses as Luce carries him inside the warehouse and up the steps to the apartment next door to Jean’s. He was certain Minnow Dory lived there but Luce kicks the apartment door open and walks inside.
The darkened apartment was empty.
Except for the king mattress and comforter from Luce’s bedroom that now in the living room. Luce lays him on the fully made mattress and in the dark Haley notices a suitcase, garment bags and the thick cases Luce used to move his guns.
“…Are you living here ?,” he asks as Luce towers over him on the mattress.
“Minnow and Alan moved to Mojave,” Luce says through rough kisses. “To be closer to Rias. The apartment’s been empty for months…figured it was time.”
Haley didn’t know what to think of Luce’s sudden life changes. Leaving the cartel, going to school, moving out from his family.
In the moment Luce seemed more at ease, like a weight had been lifted. The taught string of tension between their bodies was close to breaking but he had questions.
“Luce…Did you want me to move in here with you?”
“Do you want to ?,” Luce all but winces.
Haley looks around, imagining playing house with Luce Grace everyday. It sounded both satisfying and suffocating. Being around Luce made him happy but their relationship had always involved long stretches apart.
“I just….I think I need to stay at Control for a little while longer,” Haley says. “And I’ve been talking to Isla and she was telling me it’s important to live alone I--”
“Just because I gave you that ring it doesn’t mean we have to go on dates or move in together,” Luce says. “What we have works. Besides, if you were in my bed every night I wouldn’t get anything done. I have to get this fucking degree so I can get a real job without the cartel's help--”
“I still can’t imagine you as a student.”
“I got into Stanford--”
“That was over a decade ago-”
“Well, I’m a good student,” Luce tells him with an uncharacteristic laugh. “Just ask Gaige. He taught me a few things.”
“Did he ?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
***
-4-
When Haley wakes up the sun is out and his body is sore in the best kind of way. Luce’s arms are around him, holding their bodies close on a mattress covered in the petals of the two dozen roses they'd never bothered to move from the bed last night.
Haley turns his Syndicate on to catch up on the newsfeeds and quickly finds himself down a rabbit hole of political news.
Maxwell news.
He startles when Luce stirs and grazes his tongue over Haley’s new tattoo. The slight burn sends a shiver up his spine. Haley quickly flicks away the newsfeeds as Luce turns him on his stomach and disappears under the sheets to kiss the sensitive parts of his body until he breaks. Haley moves to switch places and return the favor but Luce stops him, kissing his lips softly.
“No. That was just for you,” Luce whispers.
Luce looked different to him, a man starting a new chapter of his life. Haley didn’t want to bring him backwards, to impede his progress.
But he also knew Luce Grace would do anything for him.
And they’d never done the one thing they were supposed to do. The one mission that had brought them together. Luce may be out of the cartel but the guns were barely 3 feet away.
“Well… Good morning,” Haley smiles uneasily.
“Good morning,” Luce says, pressing their foreheads together. "I'm fucking starving, I'm going to find breakfast."
“Okay."
Luce puts both feet on the floor and bends over to check the calibration in his cybernetic leg.
“Luce ?"
“Yeah ?”
“Will you do one last job. For me ?"
"Anything."
------