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It starts with the three of them in a bar on New Tijuana, riding the heels of a successful Red Eye deal with the cartel that’s made itself a (somewhat) big name on this rock.
The loaded cash-card is stitched safely into the lining of Julia’s coat until they can get somewhere with ATMs they won’t most likely get mugged at in order to transfer the money back to Syndicate headquarters.
Not that anyone could mug them successfully—but it’s always best to not have to dispose of bodies on a night like this.
Vicious was sampling the merchandise on the way over, fucking Spike like a mad thing in the back of the zipcraft while Julia made the flight from Mars to TJ, listening to Vicious growl and Spike mewl, touching herself casually through her leather catsuit.
He’s starting to come down, now—not far down enough to crash, but enough that he isn’t twitching too badly, and his vision’s evened out enough that the way he’s moving didn’t get them cut off or thrown out for drunkenness as soon as they set foot in the bar.
They still might be, now that they are. It doesn’t matter. They’ve completed the mission and they’re out of the cartel’s territory, they can let their hair down.
Julia’s hair is up, actually, though it was down while they were working, just to be distracting. Vicious braided it on the cab ride from the restaurant where they had dinner to the bar, for something to do with his hands while Spike bit at his neck.
Vicious’ hair is down, though, and so is Spike’s. They’re playing pool on the bar’s single rickety table, and they’ve gathered something of a crowd, trading shots and barbs and using a single pool cue, passing it back and forth with excessive brushing of fingers. It’s a little sweet, a little pathetic. She should probably take them home, but she’s not sober enough to fly.
Julia doesn’t drink, as a rule. Not while she’s working. And she is working, even though they’ve reached the end of the day’s work, at least in an official capacity. Vicious and Spike are their own kind of work. A job Julia will never get to the end of, not until they’re both dead.
But she is drinking tonight, because they were behaving themselves, because they’re going to be allowed a hefty cut of the money they just earned, even split three ways. Because this was an important job, important to their presence in the asteroid belt, and they were entrusted with it, the three of them. They’ve earned the right to celebrate.
(And because Julia’s not going to get in trouble, if the boys do end up making a mess—it’s Spike that’s going to take the fall. She’s not sure if it was Vicious who arranged their relationship that way, or Spike, or Mao, or if it was just a consequence of the fact that Vicious is a little brat who hates consequences, and all Spike wants is to be wanted. They’re still such children.)
That’s how it starts, though: Julia lets herself go, they all let themselves go. A lapse in the blade-sharpness they usually enforce on themselves.
Because they are good at this, even if they’re like this sometimes, drunk and childish. They wouldn’t be here, far from their usually work on Tharsis, with the cash card in Julia’s coat-lining and the heady weight of meeting expectations, if they didn’t know how to do their jobs.
But being good at their jobs doesn’t stop Vicious from drinking too much, trying to keep himself from stumbling off the edge of his high, doesn’t stop Spike from being better at him than pool, even three sheets to the wind himself, doesn’t stop them from fighting about it.
Vicious breaks the pool cue over his knee, because of course he does, and then they do get thrown out. Julia dumps the remains of her last drink over Vicious’ head, and he squalls at her like a fucking child, and then Spike gets in the way, and Julia steps back to watch them go at it.
It’s just tussling at first—they’ll take more damage from scraping against the concrete they’re fighting on than from each other. She’ll be the one to pick the gravel out of their skinned elbows, later. Not because she has to, but because she likes to. Blood on her fingertips, disappearing under gauze. It’s a power play.
(Everything is, with the three of them. They like it that way, supposedly.)
The fight gets nasty. There’s blood, and not from scraping against the parking lot concrete. Spike spits something white that bounces—a tooth, that’s going to dig into his pay, getting it replaced—and Vicious howls like a wild animal, the kind Julia’s only ever seen in documentaries.
She takes a few more steps back. She wants another drink. Her throat is sore.
Vicious rolls away from Spike, leaving him sprawled out on the pavement with his long limbs all akimbo, just barely sitting up. Julia watches Vicious rise to his knees, going for the buckle of his belt.
For a minute, she thinks they’re going to fuck right there in the parking lot, outside of the bar they got thrown out of, and then Vicious wraps the end of the belt around his hand and flails out with it.
There’s a great ugly crack as the buckle hits the side of Spike’s face, and a gout of blood. Spike drops flat on his back, clamping his hands over the wound, his lips parted with shock but no sound coming out.
Vicious sways. “Spike?” he asks, all tremulous. He drops to his hands and knees, crawls to where Spike is bleeding through his fingers onto the suit jacket, presses his face into his hair. “Fuck. Shit, I’ll—fuck, just let me…”
“I fucking swear, I’m leaving both of you here,” Julia complains, lighting a cigarette.
It’s a nice thought, but she won’t.