Believe me when I say this one's been a long time coming.
Title: There's Something to be Said for This Future
Fandom: Speed Racer
Pairing: Rex/Taylor, X/Inspector, X/Taylor
Rating: NC-17 for sex, consensual and non-consensual, minor drug-use and prostitution.
Length: 4,621 words.
Notes: This is for you, Bitt :) Beta'd by the gorgeous princessezzy . Split into two because it's so hideously long.
The kick slammed into the lockers, sending an angry smash through all of them as they all vibrated along the wall. Nobody jumped; there was nobody to jump. Just Rex and an empty locker room.
He’d lost.
He was Rex Racer.
He never lost.
It shouldn’t concern him the most what Speed thought about all this, but it did.
He twirled the picture in his fingers, smearing grease across the tiny replica of Speed’s face. I let him down.
I let everyone down.
Another kick.
Fuck.
It was his turn to jump when he stood up and turned round, compensating for self pity with thoughts of a night in, race recordings and a clingy little brother, and found contrary to popular belief he was in fact not alone in the locker room, and must have just made himself look like a bit of an arse. A bit of a preppy teenage arse.
“Nice race.” Taylor was leant against a white pillar, his shirt the faintest tint lighter than the wall. He was showered and clean and Rex suddenly felt very dirty.
“I lost.”
“You were never going to win.” Taylor strolled closer, smiling just a little. “It was never an option.”
Whatever the fuck that means.
“Yeah, well. Congratulations and all that shit.”
Rex turned away, the set of his shoulders indicating to Taylor he was not in the mood for conversation. Taylor ignored him. “A few of us are going into the city centre. Do you want to come with us?”
Rex wouldn’t normally be here. He’d be in Victory Lane with Speed. But this had been a special race; the major leagues weren’t run at Thunderhead, after all, so he’d flown over to Cologne to see if he could qualify. The highest officials in racing watched in Cologne. What had originated as the Nürgburgring had, at the turn of the last century, become something not dissimilar to a German equivalent to Thunderhead, mainly due to the fact rally-racing began to move to the East after Casa Cristo was established, where the tracks were rougher and longer and had natural dangers like jungles and deserts. Cologne - which was in no way as intense as Fuji, but above the back alleys of racing like Thunderhead - was a step up. It was Rex’s big chance. Racer Motors could not afford to fly over the entire Racer family just to watch Rex’s race, and trusting in his own mechanical skill Pops designated Rex as the mechanic. The result being, Rex was on his own. And not exactly over the moon with joy.
It was Rex’s big chance. And he’d totally fucked it up.
“Alright,” he muttered, and grabbed his jacket.
Cologne didn’t have the swelling cultural heritage that infused Berlin - or what Rex had seen of Berlin the few times he’d drifted over to check out Casa Cristo. Here, it was kind of hanging around in the background, clinging to back of his neck like a leather-induced sweat. Rex hated wearing leather.
Still, the city could be beautiful at nighttime. Taylor was driving them over some bridge which Rex couldn’t even hope to pronounce the name of but was really rather pretty, when you sounded it out. Taylor said it prettily. Taylor made German sound sexy. Rex found this quite an achievement.
Taylor was driving him in a Porsche. It was fucking gorgeous.
He was either feeling restless tonight, or Paris totally had it wrong when they called themselves the city of sex.
It’s love.
Whatever.
They pulled up, and Rex opened his own door and walked to stand next to Taylor. He was muttering in German to a kid, probably sixteen, who caught the dropped keys and smiled, climbing in to the car and revving it off. Taylor saw Rex’s glance and smiled. “I’d have his mother’s balls on a plate if I so much as found a scratch on it.”
With that, they went inside.
It was typical club shit.
It was sticky and noisy, and even from the doorway Rex could taste the unmistakable tanginess of weed smoke drifting around heavily in the air. Dancing on one side, drinking on the other, Rex stayed behind Taylor and cut a line between the two. Taylor moved off towards the latter and Rex followed, until they were standing by a bar. Rex trailed his fingers across the lacquer surface and grimaced when they came away soiled and sticky.
Taylor was shouting in German to the barman, who slid something crystal and vaguely purple in a shot glass towards Rex. “What is this?” he called to Taylor over the noise of the music.
Taylor smiled. “Good.”
Rex didn’t ask more and tipped it back.
By the time he finished pushing his stomach back down his throat and opened his eyes Taylor was quietly arguing in German to someone dressed in jeans and a shirt which were really too tight for him.
Definitely the alcohol. (Rex couldn’t stop staring.)
The someone was holding a sachet of something white and gesturing to it. It was pretty obvious what the argument was about, but whatever they were saying Taylor seemed to win as the someone slunk away eventually, muttering to himself.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Rex murmured with a smile when Taylor turned back towards him and picked up a glass from the counter.
“To who?” Taylor replied, taking a sip. He caught the direction of Rex’s gaze. “Oh, David?” Taylor laughed. “There are other whores in here, Rex, and some of them are even vaguely pretty.” Rex’s eyes trailed over to where David was sitting, just on the lip of the dancefloor. He was smiling, the argument forgotten. Rex felt empowered with a deep sense of contradiction to Taylor’s statement that he wasn’t pretty because those fucking eyes, he’d not seen blue that sharp, ever.
“Whores,” he echoed quietly to himself. He stopped staring.
“Come on,” Taylor said with another smile, finishing his drink. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
Taylor’s fingers wrapped around his forearm and guided him through the throng of people, stopping by a furred door shoved inconspicuously into the wall. “Must be important,” Rex said. His voice sounded loud, here, away from the rush of the music and the dancing. He coughed quietly to make up for it and Taylor pushed open the door. He had a quiet and rushed conversation with someone in clipped German and Rex stared oblivious at the floor, almost wishing for another drink. Eventually, Taylor turned to him.
“He’s a bit busy at the moment,” he said with a small smirk. Well, that euphemism didn’t take a genius to figure out. Taylor leant back against the wall, eyes fixed firmly on Rex. “How about when you’ve spoken to him we pick up on that drink back at mine? It’s quieter there.” Another euphemism. Rex was starting to get good at spotting them.
Rex was flushed and empowered with recklessness. “Sure,” he grinned. “I don’t see why not.”
Somebody fell out of the room quite suddenly, breaking their rather manly reverie. Rex jumped and moved back to let him aside, but the kid laughed and staggered off, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “I guess we can go in now,” Taylor smirked, and moved inside the door. With a heartbeat’s hesitation, Rex followed.
The office was somewhat calmer than the aggressively vibrant club they’d just stepped out of. Smooth leather and beige suede spoke of a touch of class that was contorted in Rex’s world, which was used to colours screaming out as if they were under torture. Taylor was standing in front of the man’s desk, neglecting the two leather chairs placed tartly in front of it. He gestured back at Rex and smiled. “Ah,” the man smiled. “And this is Rex Racer.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Rex said automatically, reaching over to shake his hand. “Though I have to confess I don’t really know who you are.”
“How rude of you, Jack,” the man chided gently, clucking his tongue softly. His eyes never left Rex. “I’m Benelli. Please, have a seat.”
Rex’s legs folded automatically with nineteen years’ worth of Mom’s tutoring and he slipped down into it. With some resistance, he felt Taylor sit down next to him. “You could say I work for Benelli,” Taylor said to illustrate, leaning back in his chair and spreading his arms. He was smiling, and his eyes were locked with Benelli’s.
“Ah, now, everybody works for me,” Benelli corrected with a smirk. Taylor laughed appreciatively; Rex smiled nervously. “Forgive me, Rex. Can I call you Rex? I don’t know American customs well, I apologise. It is rude to speak in in-jokes in unknowing company.” He smiled again. “I wanted to discuss today’s race with you, if I may.”
At this, Taylor smiled. “You could say that we have a secret of racing we’d like to divulge.”
Rex bit back the nausea clamping around his throat but it was inevitable, coming out in a rush all over the binbags in front of him. His body shook with the force of it a few more times, his chest spasming, before he straightened up and viciously kneaded his eye with the palm of his hand. His body still felt clogged with the knowledge he’d just ascertained, like every bead of blood in his body had it ironed into its genetics.
It’s fixed. It’s all fixed.
Oh, god.
What am I doing with my life?
The time for self pity close at hand, Rex physically shuddered. He glanced up at the sky. Dawn was dribbling through the horizon. I’m supposed to be getting on a plane today. Back home. Back to Speed.
He didn’t think he could face his little brother any more.
It’d be all sorry faces and hugs and never mind, you’ll do better next time.
Taylor was standing in the doorway of the club. Rex doubted Taylor had expected he’d react this adversely. He probably expected me to thank him. He probably expected me to drop to my knees.
“I take it that drink’s no longer on the cards.”
Rex shuddered and turned to face him. “All of you. You’re wrong. This is so wrong.”
“Racing’s not been right for years, Rex. It doesn’t matter whether you’re good at it or not.” Taylor shifted, walking to stand next to him. “This is the only way you’re ever going to win.”
“Then I don’t want to,” Rex spat, hissing through his teeth, and walked away.
Benelli didn’t waste time getting violent.
Rex didn’t care when all and sundry turned against him on the racetrack. It made it more exciting. It gave him a little kick, made him feel like he was fighting back.
Rex just didn’t realise he was up against the most notorious fixer in the world.
And he’d stop at nothing to get his way.
Meeting Taylor in the locker rooms always had the essence of awkwardness. It was probably just because Rex had an inherent craving for them both to drop their too-tight racing trousers and fuck each other silly into a wall.
His heart was fickle, and his crushes had never been on the best of people.
Still, Cologne always hung in the air as tangibly as the weed smoke had in the club. Rex sometimes licked the back of his teeth and imagined he could taste the alcohol in his mouth. Reduced to a fantasy.
Rex never forgot this meeting, because it wasn’t his fantasy, but his worst nightmare.
“Benelli wanted me to give you something,” Taylor said softly, dropping an open, bulging manila envelope on the bench beside him. Rex picked it up cautiously, holding it open and shaking its contents out onto the bench.
He felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
He picked up the little pair of red socks in the palm of his hand and looked up at Taylor, horrified.
If they could get to these, they’d be - oh god, did they go in his room? Did they go when he was asleep? They could have killed him! They could have killed all of them! They could have killed me!
His fingers clenched around the soft material. The smell of Mom’s homemade detergent drifted up and attacked his nostrils as he took panicked breaths, as if he needed further verification.
“I didn’t want this to happen to you, Rex,” Taylor said softly. He even sounded like he meant it.
His breath, when he eventually let it out, came shaky, caught and half-sobbed.
“What do you want me to do?” he croaked.
“Leave.”
“Can I come with you, Rex?”
“Not this time, Speedy.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“So what am I now,” Rex asked dryly, dropping his bag onto one of the queen beds, “Benelli’s bitch?”
Taylor smiled. “Something like that.”
He’d met Taylor at an airport. It’d been busy and crowded, and Rex could have given him the slip, but he didn’t. Speed wriggled at the back of his mind, eyes swimming with betrayal, always wanting to go back, make it okay.
His eyes caught Taylor leaning on the wall by a coffee stand, and he knew it’d never be okay again.
They’d climbed into Taylor’s car - nothing flashy, certainly not the Porsche, which must have been left behind in Cologne - and Taylor had driven him silently until Rex had fallen asleep from an adrenaline low and didn’t wake up until the motel sign permeated his clamped eyelids and Taylor gently shook him awake. Taylor had already checked in, had already moved his own stuff in to the room - he’d never touch Rex’s, not ever, like it was sacred, out of bounds - and Rex just had to follow through a dim reception and into a room which Taylor assured him was only for one night.
“If it’s any consolation,” Taylor told him as he handed Rex a beer, “I really had hoped it’d not come to this.”
Rex simply looked at him. “So you’re trying to tell me you didn’t have a part in any of it? At all? Threatening my family?!”
Taylor’s lips tightened. “You don’t understand how it works yet. You don’t get to choose jobs, you don’t get to say no. To all extents and purposes you are, as you put it, Benelli’s bitch.” Never sexually. He wouldn’t know till much later, but Taylor spared him from that.
Rex couldn’t stop liking Taylor. There was an essence of helplessness around him, of someone who couldn’t control their own fate, of someone who hated their life. “How did you get into all this?”
Taylor quietly sipped his own beer. “Pretty much the same way you did. Except Benelli didn’t end the threats. And my family didn’t come out crystal clean.” He stopped. “They didn’t come out at all.”
This was the one time in a very long while Rex would count himself lucky.
Rex remembered the first time he had to kill someone.
He doesn’t remember the first time he actually killed someone; those were two separate occasions, and the latter was in a drunk and fumbled execution of guns and blindness and there was screaming. The memory consisted of adrenaline-pumping terror, panic, a muffled shot. Death, after that, was always clean and effortless.
The first time he was told to kill someone - now that was totally different.
Taylor wouldn’t tell him who it was, or what he’d done. But Rex had known his assignments would soon rise above tax fraud and car tampering and crashing on the racetrack. He’d always preferred death by track; it seemed impersonal, not like a grudge, not like the brutality of a gun pressed up against someone’s temple. Still, it was his turn to press the gun, not to stand by the door and pretend he didn’t know what was happening.
Taylor looked apologetic when he handed it over.
Rex always knew it wasn’t his fault.
It wasn’t so much a heist-gone-wrong, seeing as the heist had never been about money, it’d been about killing the guy in charge. They’d got the whole office block empty, just Taylor standing in the corridor, and Rex standing in the room. The gun wasn’t shaking. The guy wasn’t even crying.
Rex froze.
Taylor counted thirty seconds, waiting for Rex to do the job. When he didn’t, he walked in the room and locked eyes with Rex as he shot the guy three times in the head. He died silently. It was awful.
They went back to their shared flat in silence.
Rex was staying up, staring over the city. He didn’t think that he would have nightmares, or wouldn’t be able to sleep; he just wasn’t tired. Taylor was working on the kitchen table, but he finished eventually and walked over to where Rex stood at the window. “It’s still Speed, isn’t it?” Taylor asked softly. Rex didn’t need to reply; it hadn’t been a question, not really. “You need to forget him, Rex. Not just because it’ll make things easier. If Benelli thinks he can still get to you somehow, he will. It’s unquestionable.” Taylor’s fingers rested comfortingly in the base of his spine. “You’re not his brother anymore, Rex. You have to remember that. You’re not his brother anymore.”
He was right.
Speed wouldn’t miss him. He was too young; he’d get over it. Or, he’d have Rex as a martyr, preserved in the peak of his glory, trapped in fumbling childhood memories. This was so much better than Speed seeing him now.
Rex turned round and reached into Taylor’s kiss.
Sex was a necessity. It was the best alcohol, the best drug; it made you forget, it felt fucking fantastic, and it didn’t result in all the nasty deficits associated with the others. Unless, of course, you allowed yourself to get close to your partner. Then things got really rather nasty.
Clothes were a formality, and easily discarded. Lying next to someone naked was equally simple. Being fucked by them held no meaning unless you let it, crying out and hitching your breath were irrelevant.
The only problem with sex was the name you said when you came.
Rex’s breath did indeed hitch as Taylor finally pushed inside him - nothing needed beforehand, it wasn’t like they hadn’t done this a million times before - and he did cry out when he was fucked, legs slung haphazardly in angular, painful positions that secured tight hot deep, and that was all that mattered.
They both bit their lips and grunted when they came, and never mentioned it in the morning.
Detector finally pulled him out.
It took him five years, but he did.
He’d like to say it was his own doing. He’d like to say, like Speed eventually would, that he made a stand for what he believed in.
Truth was, a whore from a bar in Cologne remembered his face and tracked him down and got him out of there.
After the Prix, X couldn’t help but be infused with an overwhelming sense of this is over.
It had actually just begun.
part II
Fandom: Speed Racer
Pairing: Rex/Taylor, X/Inspector, X/Taylor
Rating: NC-17 for sex, consensual and non-consensual, minor drug-use and prostitution.
Length: 4,621 words.
Notes: This is for you, Bitt :) Beta'd by the gorgeous princessezzy . Split into two because it's so hideously long.
The kick slammed into the lockers, sending an angry smash through all of them as they all vibrated along the wall. Nobody jumped; there was nobody to jump. Just Rex and an empty locker room.
He’d lost.
He was Rex Racer.
He never lost.
It shouldn’t concern him the most what Speed thought about all this, but it did.
He twirled the picture in his fingers, smearing grease across the tiny replica of Speed’s face. I let him down.
I let everyone down.
Another kick.
Fuck.
It was his turn to jump when he stood up and turned round, compensating for self pity with thoughts of a night in, race recordings and a clingy little brother, and found contrary to popular belief he was in fact not alone in the locker room, and must have just made himself look like a bit of an arse. A bit of a preppy teenage arse.
“Nice race.” Taylor was leant against a white pillar, his shirt the faintest tint lighter than the wall. He was showered and clean and Rex suddenly felt very dirty.
“I lost.”
“You were never going to win.” Taylor strolled closer, smiling just a little. “It was never an option.”
Whatever the fuck that means.
“Yeah, well. Congratulations and all that shit.”
Rex turned away, the set of his shoulders indicating to Taylor he was not in the mood for conversation. Taylor ignored him. “A few of us are going into the city centre. Do you want to come with us?”
Rex wouldn’t normally be here. He’d be in Victory Lane with Speed. But this had been a special race; the major leagues weren’t run at Thunderhead, after all, so he’d flown over to Cologne to see if he could qualify. The highest officials in racing watched in Cologne. What had originated as the Nürgburgring had, at the turn of the last century, become something not dissimilar to a German equivalent to Thunderhead, mainly due to the fact rally-racing began to move to the East after Casa Cristo was established, where the tracks were rougher and longer and had natural dangers like jungles and deserts. Cologne - which was in no way as intense as Fuji, but above the back alleys of racing like Thunderhead - was a step up. It was Rex’s big chance. Racer Motors could not afford to fly over the entire Racer family just to watch Rex’s race, and trusting in his own mechanical skill Pops designated Rex as the mechanic. The result being, Rex was on his own. And not exactly over the moon with joy.
It was Rex’s big chance. And he’d totally fucked it up.
“Alright,” he muttered, and grabbed his jacket.
Cologne didn’t have the swelling cultural heritage that infused Berlin - or what Rex had seen of Berlin the few times he’d drifted over to check out Casa Cristo. Here, it was kind of hanging around in the background, clinging to back of his neck like a leather-induced sweat. Rex hated wearing leather.
Still, the city could be beautiful at nighttime. Taylor was driving them over some bridge which Rex couldn’t even hope to pronounce the name of but was really rather pretty, when you sounded it out. Taylor said it prettily. Taylor made German sound sexy. Rex found this quite an achievement.
Taylor was driving him in a Porsche. It was fucking gorgeous.
He was either feeling restless tonight, or Paris totally had it wrong when they called themselves the city of sex.
It’s love.
Whatever.
They pulled up, and Rex opened his own door and walked to stand next to Taylor. He was muttering in German to a kid, probably sixteen, who caught the dropped keys and smiled, climbing in to the car and revving it off. Taylor saw Rex’s glance and smiled. “I’d have his mother’s balls on a plate if I so much as found a scratch on it.”
With that, they went inside.
It was typical club shit.
It was sticky and noisy, and even from the doorway Rex could taste the unmistakable tanginess of weed smoke drifting around heavily in the air. Dancing on one side, drinking on the other, Rex stayed behind Taylor and cut a line between the two. Taylor moved off towards the latter and Rex followed, until they were standing by a bar. Rex trailed his fingers across the lacquer surface and grimaced when they came away soiled and sticky.
Taylor was shouting in German to the barman, who slid something crystal and vaguely purple in a shot glass towards Rex. “What is this?” he called to Taylor over the noise of the music.
Taylor smiled. “Good.”
Rex didn’t ask more and tipped it back.
By the time he finished pushing his stomach back down his throat and opened his eyes Taylor was quietly arguing in German to someone dressed in jeans and a shirt which were really too tight for him.
Definitely the alcohol. (Rex couldn’t stop staring.)
The someone was holding a sachet of something white and gesturing to it. It was pretty obvious what the argument was about, but whatever they were saying Taylor seemed to win as the someone slunk away eventually, muttering to himself.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Rex murmured with a smile when Taylor turned back towards him and picked up a glass from the counter.
“To who?” Taylor replied, taking a sip. He caught the direction of Rex’s gaze. “Oh, David?” Taylor laughed. “There are other whores in here, Rex, and some of them are even vaguely pretty.” Rex’s eyes trailed over to where David was sitting, just on the lip of the dancefloor. He was smiling, the argument forgotten. Rex felt empowered with a deep sense of contradiction to Taylor’s statement that he wasn’t pretty because those fucking eyes, he’d not seen blue that sharp, ever.
“Whores,” he echoed quietly to himself. He stopped staring.
“Come on,” Taylor said with another smile, finishing his drink. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
Taylor’s fingers wrapped around his forearm and guided him through the throng of people, stopping by a furred door shoved inconspicuously into the wall. “Must be important,” Rex said. His voice sounded loud, here, away from the rush of the music and the dancing. He coughed quietly to make up for it and Taylor pushed open the door. He had a quiet and rushed conversation with someone in clipped German and Rex stared oblivious at the floor, almost wishing for another drink. Eventually, Taylor turned to him.
“He’s a bit busy at the moment,” he said with a small smirk. Well, that euphemism didn’t take a genius to figure out. Taylor leant back against the wall, eyes fixed firmly on Rex. “How about when you’ve spoken to him we pick up on that drink back at mine? It’s quieter there.” Another euphemism. Rex was starting to get good at spotting them.
Rex was flushed and empowered with recklessness. “Sure,” he grinned. “I don’t see why not.”
Somebody fell out of the room quite suddenly, breaking their rather manly reverie. Rex jumped and moved back to let him aside, but the kid laughed and staggered off, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “I guess we can go in now,” Taylor smirked, and moved inside the door. With a heartbeat’s hesitation, Rex followed.
The office was somewhat calmer than the aggressively vibrant club they’d just stepped out of. Smooth leather and beige suede spoke of a touch of class that was contorted in Rex’s world, which was used to colours screaming out as if they were under torture. Taylor was standing in front of the man’s desk, neglecting the two leather chairs placed tartly in front of it. He gestured back at Rex and smiled. “Ah,” the man smiled. “And this is Rex Racer.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Rex said automatically, reaching over to shake his hand. “Though I have to confess I don’t really know who you are.”
“How rude of you, Jack,” the man chided gently, clucking his tongue softly. His eyes never left Rex. “I’m Benelli. Please, have a seat.”
Rex’s legs folded automatically with nineteen years’ worth of Mom’s tutoring and he slipped down into it. With some resistance, he felt Taylor sit down next to him. “You could say I work for Benelli,” Taylor said to illustrate, leaning back in his chair and spreading his arms. He was smiling, and his eyes were locked with Benelli’s.
“Ah, now, everybody works for me,” Benelli corrected with a smirk. Taylor laughed appreciatively; Rex smiled nervously. “Forgive me, Rex. Can I call you Rex? I don’t know American customs well, I apologise. It is rude to speak in in-jokes in unknowing company.” He smiled again. “I wanted to discuss today’s race with you, if I may.”
At this, Taylor smiled. “You could say that we have a secret of racing we’d like to divulge.”
Rex bit back the nausea clamping around his throat but it was inevitable, coming out in a rush all over the binbags in front of him. His body shook with the force of it a few more times, his chest spasming, before he straightened up and viciously kneaded his eye with the palm of his hand. His body still felt clogged with the knowledge he’d just ascertained, like every bead of blood in his body had it ironed into its genetics.
It’s fixed. It’s all fixed.
Oh, god.
What am I doing with my life?
The time for self pity close at hand, Rex physically shuddered. He glanced up at the sky. Dawn was dribbling through the horizon. I’m supposed to be getting on a plane today. Back home. Back to Speed.
He didn’t think he could face his little brother any more.
It’d be all sorry faces and hugs and never mind, you’ll do better next time.
Taylor was standing in the doorway of the club. Rex doubted Taylor had expected he’d react this adversely. He probably expected me to thank him. He probably expected me to drop to my knees.
“I take it that drink’s no longer on the cards.”
Rex shuddered and turned to face him. “All of you. You’re wrong. This is so wrong.”
“Racing’s not been right for years, Rex. It doesn’t matter whether you’re good at it or not.” Taylor shifted, walking to stand next to him. “This is the only way you’re ever going to win.”
“Then I don’t want to,” Rex spat, hissing through his teeth, and walked away.
Benelli didn’t waste time getting violent.
Rex didn’t care when all and sundry turned against him on the racetrack. It made it more exciting. It gave him a little kick, made him feel like he was fighting back.
Rex just didn’t realise he was up against the most notorious fixer in the world.
And he’d stop at nothing to get his way.
Meeting Taylor in the locker rooms always had the essence of awkwardness. It was probably just because Rex had an inherent craving for them both to drop their too-tight racing trousers and fuck each other silly into a wall.
His heart was fickle, and his crushes had never been on the best of people.
Still, Cologne always hung in the air as tangibly as the weed smoke had in the club. Rex sometimes licked the back of his teeth and imagined he could taste the alcohol in his mouth. Reduced to a fantasy.
Rex never forgot this meeting, because it wasn’t his fantasy, but his worst nightmare.
“Benelli wanted me to give you something,” Taylor said softly, dropping an open, bulging manila envelope on the bench beside him. Rex picked it up cautiously, holding it open and shaking its contents out onto the bench.
He felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
He picked up the little pair of red socks in the palm of his hand and looked up at Taylor, horrified.
If they could get to these, they’d be - oh god, did they go in his room? Did they go when he was asleep? They could have killed him! They could have killed all of them! They could have killed me!
His fingers clenched around the soft material. The smell of Mom’s homemade detergent drifted up and attacked his nostrils as he took panicked breaths, as if he needed further verification.
“I didn’t want this to happen to you, Rex,” Taylor said softly. He even sounded like he meant it.
His breath, when he eventually let it out, came shaky, caught and half-sobbed.
“What do you want me to do?” he croaked.
“Leave.”
“Can I come with you, Rex?”
“Not this time, Speedy.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“So what am I now,” Rex asked dryly, dropping his bag onto one of the queen beds, “Benelli’s bitch?”
Taylor smiled. “Something like that.”
He’d met Taylor at an airport. It’d been busy and crowded, and Rex could have given him the slip, but he didn’t. Speed wriggled at the back of his mind, eyes swimming with betrayal, always wanting to go back, make it okay.
His eyes caught Taylor leaning on the wall by a coffee stand, and he knew it’d never be okay again.
They’d climbed into Taylor’s car - nothing flashy, certainly not the Porsche, which must have been left behind in Cologne - and Taylor had driven him silently until Rex had fallen asleep from an adrenaline low and didn’t wake up until the motel sign permeated his clamped eyelids and Taylor gently shook him awake. Taylor had already checked in, had already moved his own stuff in to the room - he’d never touch Rex’s, not ever, like it was sacred, out of bounds - and Rex just had to follow through a dim reception and into a room which Taylor assured him was only for one night.
“If it’s any consolation,” Taylor told him as he handed Rex a beer, “I really had hoped it’d not come to this.”
Rex simply looked at him. “So you’re trying to tell me you didn’t have a part in any of it? At all? Threatening my family?!”
Taylor’s lips tightened. “You don’t understand how it works yet. You don’t get to choose jobs, you don’t get to say no. To all extents and purposes you are, as you put it, Benelli’s bitch.” Never sexually. He wouldn’t know till much later, but Taylor spared him from that.
Rex couldn’t stop liking Taylor. There was an essence of helplessness around him, of someone who couldn’t control their own fate, of someone who hated their life. “How did you get into all this?”
Taylor quietly sipped his own beer. “Pretty much the same way you did. Except Benelli didn’t end the threats. And my family didn’t come out crystal clean.” He stopped. “They didn’t come out at all.”
This was the one time in a very long while Rex would count himself lucky.
Rex remembered the first time he had to kill someone.
He doesn’t remember the first time he actually killed someone; those were two separate occasions, and the latter was in a drunk and fumbled execution of guns and blindness and there was screaming. The memory consisted of adrenaline-pumping terror, panic, a muffled shot. Death, after that, was always clean and effortless.
The first time he was told to kill someone - now that was totally different.
Taylor wouldn’t tell him who it was, or what he’d done. But Rex had known his assignments would soon rise above tax fraud and car tampering and crashing on the racetrack. He’d always preferred death by track; it seemed impersonal, not like a grudge, not like the brutality of a gun pressed up against someone’s temple. Still, it was his turn to press the gun, not to stand by the door and pretend he didn’t know what was happening.
Taylor looked apologetic when he handed it over.
Rex always knew it wasn’t his fault.
It wasn’t so much a heist-gone-wrong, seeing as the heist had never been about money, it’d been about killing the guy in charge. They’d got the whole office block empty, just Taylor standing in the corridor, and Rex standing in the room. The gun wasn’t shaking. The guy wasn’t even crying.
Rex froze.
Taylor counted thirty seconds, waiting for Rex to do the job. When he didn’t, he walked in the room and locked eyes with Rex as he shot the guy three times in the head. He died silently. It was awful.
They went back to their shared flat in silence.
Rex was staying up, staring over the city. He didn’t think that he would have nightmares, or wouldn’t be able to sleep; he just wasn’t tired. Taylor was working on the kitchen table, but he finished eventually and walked over to where Rex stood at the window. “It’s still Speed, isn’t it?” Taylor asked softly. Rex didn’t need to reply; it hadn’t been a question, not really. “You need to forget him, Rex. Not just because it’ll make things easier. If Benelli thinks he can still get to you somehow, he will. It’s unquestionable.” Taylor’s fingers rested comfortingly in the base of his spine. “You’re not his brother anymore, Rex. You have to remember that. You’re not his brother anymore.”
He was right.
Speed wouldn’t miss him. He was too young; he’d get over it. Or, he’d have Rex as a martyr, preserved in the peak of his glory, trapped in fumbling childhood memories. This was so much better than Speed seeing him now.
Rex turned round and reached into Taylor’s kiss.
Sex was a necessity. It was the best alcohol, the best drug; it made you forget, it felt fucking fantastic, and it didn’t result in all the nasty deficits associated with the others. Unless, of course, you allowed yourself to get close to your partner. Then things got really rather nasty.
Clothes were a formality, and easily discarded. Lying next to someone naked was equally simple. Being fucked by them held no meaning unless you let it, crying out and hitching your breath were irrelevant.
The only problem with sex was the name you said when you came.
Rex’s breath did indeed hitch as Taylor finally pushed inside him - nothing needed beforehand, it wasn’t like they hadn’t done this a million times before - and he did cry out when he was fucked, legs slung haphazardly in angular, painful positions that secured tight hot deep, and that was all that mattered.
They both bit their lips and grunted when they came, and never mentioned it in the morning.
Detector finally pulled him out.
It took him five years, but he did.
He’d like to say it was his own doing. He’d like to say, like Speed eventually would, that he made a stand for what he believed in.
Truth was, a whore from a bar in Cologne remembered his face and tracked him down and got him out of there.
After the Prix, X couldn’t help but be infused with an overwhelming sense of this is over.
It had actually just begun.
part II