#though it'd take too much explaining to tag as MacGyver

[believerindaydreams]

always the same story, only the names change

part two of ‘70s! hustler AU, now with added Angel Eyes (I took a hint from @sybilius about some shared Blondie backstory). I assume I will come up with a name for this at some point. 

Most people look like dopes when they’re asleep, but Blondie never does; there’s a gentleness about him then, an innocence so contrived that it looks like he’s feigning even in sleep. Also, he doesn’t snore. 

It’s one of the accidental, unspoken truths that made their partnership work, one cog in the machinery that’s meshed them together. After a childhood crammed into a collapsing Brooklyn tenement, more kids than sense and more names than either, Tuco’s promised himself to never, ever share a room with a man who sleeps harder than he does. Or a station wagon, for that matter. 

“He looks very fragile, asleep on my couch that way,” Angel Eyes says, gazing with intent; him on one side, Tuco on the other, Blondie in the middle and close enough to touch, if either of them dared. “Breakable.“

“So what do you do?” Tuco asks, to change the subject. Most people are only too happy to spill their guts out, given half a chance; most poker players know better, but the gaps will be instructive. 

“I’m an assassin for hire.”

That’s not changing the subject at all, and Tuco can’t help choking on the bittersweet rum runner he’s been nursing. 

“Cheer up,” Angel Eyes says, patting him on the back with deliberate familiarity. “Nobody thinks you’re worth a bounty, and I don’t kill a man without a price tag.”

“Ohh...great,” Tuco manages, through coughing fits. “Wonderful news.”

“Usually.” And the only thing keeping Tuco in the room at that point, is the strong notion that he’d never make it to the door. This is bluffing on an scale he’s never dreamed of, or else it isn’t bluffing at all, and either way bodes very badly indeed. 

Just when he’d been starting to relax, that’d been his mistake. This fine ranch house, with its terracotta tiles and baroque stucco; the kind of house he’d own, if he were the wealthy idiot he pretends to be. All wasted on this one man, living here alone. 

Angel Eyes had made a point of mentioning that, as they’d driven through the gate; and to do Blondie eternal credit, he hadn’t reacted at all.

But it’d been such a pleasant evening. A good, satisfying meal of pork and mole poblano, with crispy chicharróns to follow, while Blondie had amused himself playing verbal tennis. Never seeming to exert himself, lobbing back just enough commentary on film criticism to confound their host, while Angel Eyes had listened and fired back and sometimes settled down in silence, the tip of one knuckle just touching his mustache. 

(Which is admittedly a damn good mustache, almost as good as his. Much better than Blondie’s. Not that he’d ever tell his partner so, but there’s a difference between a fine, artistic mustache and a man who simply hasn’t bothered shaving that part of his face, and Blondie falls on the wrong side of that divide.)

And after dinner, the soft darkness of the projection room, black walls and floor and ceiling and even the sofa they sat on. Muted, not shiny, as Angel Eyes had explained at great length; the better contrast, to allow the pictures full play. A film that had been not so bad, even after the eleventh time. Three times they’d paid for those tickets, when they’d been having a good run, then their luck had changed and they’d eased into the theatres as much to stay warm at nights as to watch.

So it hasn’t surprised Tuco at all, that Blondie should have fallen asleep sometime during the last reel. Warmth and satiation and association, it ought to have knocked him out cold just the same. It would have, but he hadn’t trusted Angel Eyes; and coffee isn’t half so strong a stimulant as blind cold fear. 

He tosses back the rest of his drink without thinking, and wishes he had another. 

“You know, when I knew him he didn’t go by Blondie,” Angel Eyes says. “His hair wasn’t that colour, for one.”

Left alone, it ought to be a darkish brown, uninspired and muddy-looking; and however hard up they’ve been, they’ve never skimped on that. There are things that matter too much to let slide, same way that Blondie doesn’t complain about his seeking out a mass every Sunday, and then slinking out just before the eucharist.

“A man tells me what he wants to be called, I listen. Same as with me.  You don’t want to know my name,” Tuco says. 

“I want to know everything,” Angel Eyes counters. Just a conversational gambit- but the eyes, the eyes! christ almighty, nobody should go around with such a pinched, inquisitive face; so Tuco sighs and tells him, all sixteen syllables of it. Nobody not of his blood has ever heard the full litany without laughing, even Blondie. 

(His own fault, for he’d soaked Blondie in liquor beforehand, and forced himself up to such a pitch of hysterical, appreciative laughter that he’d allowed for no other reaction- but by then they’d known what fine partners they would make, and he hadn’t trusted his own temper otherwise. A wrong look then, and he would have walked away from the best hustle he’s ever grasped- which would have been plain idiotic.)

“Better than mine,” Angel Eyes says, after a while. “Blondie keeps that one. Blondie knows everything about me, or the parts worth knowing, at least.”

“I won’t ask,” Tuco says, hastily. This is a very old routine, encoded in his bones by who-knows-how-many generations of ancestors whose chief merit had been survival: be comical, be unthreatening, never ask for anything, and maybe you will be safe, maybe then they will not take you and beat you and hurt you- and he does not want to be hurt. Even Blondie’s not worth that. 

(What the hell had possessed him, to walk beneath the roof of a man like this?)

“We met a few years ago, some flea-bitten hole over an ice rink. I thought he was talented. He was sleeping here the next night.” 

One of their off-periods, Tuco mentally translates; one of those times when they leave each other swearing they’ll kill the other on sight, when someone takes the car and drives off leaving the other stranded at a lonely gas station. The longest separation had been about a year, and they hadn’t talked about what had happened afterwards. 

(He’d found a restaurant where he could wash dishes and eat all he liked, dated a pretty redhead who appreciated a good mustache, and grown so tired of the world that it was either find Blondie again or throw himself into the Gulf. And the Gulf had smelled too bad to drown in.)

“He stayed for six months. Left one day without saying a word. I didn’t know why,” Angel Eyes says. “Couldn’t ever guess what he’d do. Do you know how rare it is for me, to find a man whose actions I can’t predict? I thought he’d tell you to leave tonight. I thought he’d watch this movie through. I thought I’d be having this conversation with him,” he says, thwacking the flat end of a cushion across Blondie’s face, “instead of with you.”

“Make me,” Blondie says, tone very dry. “So you two managed to avoid killing each other, then.“

“You didn’t ask,“ Tuco says; and a certain dizzy, giddy rush goes to his head, that he’s been put on the same level as this wealthy, prideful killer who could have anything for the asking- except, perhaps, Blondie himself. 

(What the hell had possessed Blondie, to walk out of a place like this?)

“He has the right of it there,“ Angel Eyes agrees. “Are you staying or going?”

“For the moment, staying,” Blondie pronounces. He collects his hat from the floor, flips it on his head with careless grace. “Nobody else sleeps in my room tonight, I’ll see you two in the morning.”

He takes his time, moving to the door, and placing his hand on the doorknob, and opening it wide, every motion smoothly judged and delectable to watch, and if he has ever seen Blondie play the cock-tease more than now, Tuco decides, he has long since forgotten the incident. He crosses his legs and waits for something to happen. 

“...I may not be able to predict him, but a message like that isn’t hard to parse,” Angele Eyes says eventually. 

He doesn’t fancy this man, actively dislikes him; but it’s better than working off the tension by himself. And besides, there’s something appealing here, knowing for certain that the reason is not exoticism or vulnerability or weakness, but exactly the same as his own: the man they both want has simply made himself unavailable. 

“Damn Blondie,” Tuco says. “Say. This rich man’s house, do you have one of those mirrors where you can watch a man from the other side?”

There’s an amused quiver of eyebrows, a movement that is not a tell because it’s altogether purposeful. “Now you, on the other hand. You’re predictable. I like that.”

They make it just in time to watch Blondie pulling off his shirt. 

#the good the bad and the ugly #second chances #I think I've reached the exact midpoint there #though it'd take too much explaining to tag as MacGyver #so I'll leave be #more than enough tags #fic #blonco #the trio #I think the trio will do very well as a ship name #blondeyes #tagged for all sorts of rude things #albeit not as rude as it might be