Work Text:
The bar Hyuna sent them to scope out is sleeker than the ones by home base, but not by much. Everyone’s been more tight-lipped than ever since three-quarters of last season's semifinalists got nabbed right off the stage, anyways. Hard to imagine finding anyone with real intel. Hard to imagine finangling any intel out, the two of them teetering on the edge of recognizable — as stolen property, or as the so-called terrorists trying to break into their databases. But they get there anyways: Till revving up the shiny, fixed-up motorcycle, Ivan stabilizing himself with a hand latched onto his shirt.
Till’s got his setup at the far end of the bar, sipping something tangy and bitter, trying not to slide off the leather stools and onto his ass. It's not really a drink meant to be sipped at, but he's not really there to get drunk. One or the other, these days.
There’s even less variety to their usual recon roles: Till on watch, Ivan mingling in the crowd with his usual performances. Till's glad to not have to stutter through interactions with strangers and risk giving them away. The politer rebels call him a bit too forthright; everyone else picks some variation of transparent (sometimes), oblivious (probably), or poorly-trained idiot (stings a little). But they’re all some variation of true — he’s come to accept that much.
It's just kind of boring, sometimes. His spot at the bar sits under some half-propped vent huffing warm air directly on his head, and he's not all that confident about the hair dye they use for covert work. The air's heating up his drink a little, too. Till's trying not to complain.
His best trick is to think of what’s better, nowadays. So his drink is overly tart, room temperature, and sucks to sip at. Doesn’t change that liquor used to be mean nights a lot nastier than what it does now. Urak liked it, especially at a party: tossed drinks at his head in rage, poured them over his face for entertainment. The drops he caught were acrid, churned in his stomach worse than anything he's had with the rebellion. Even the noxious-looking concoctions Dewey brings after missions, threateningly multi-colored, pale in comparison.
It's still weird to drink the stuff formulated for humans, voluntarily, and not think of anything worse than awkward missions and a headache, or spewing chunks in a friend's bathroom. The burn is there, but it can almost be comfortable. Salvagable. He can recontextualize it, easy.
Ivan's stalking around the bar, projecting harmlessness with shallow pleasantries and casual touches. Media-trained laughter and artifice in his fingers, ghosting across the room. The two of them haven't really talked, much less touched. Ivan shrugs off discussion and acts more unflappable than ever, like Till hasn't seen him gushing blood from five places.
Like Till didn't toe out of his own recovery room to stare at Ivan’s pallid body, dark lines still marring his own neck. Ivan used to do it to him, so it makes them even. He’s been trying to make them even.
Ivan’s blood soaked Till's shoes, stained the jackets of their rescuers, and seeped through his bandages for days before letting up. Till wou;d take another decade of bullying over sitting through the metallic stench of it suffusing through Ivan's room, growing an animal rot the longer he went without a change. Till hadn't been trained for medical, then. He sat and watched, useless, while other people tried to clean up the mess they’d landed in.
It's even weirder that Ivan's not bullying him anymore, working as instructed with only the occasional inflammatory quip. There's no way that stunt exhausted all the meanness in him, or half the fixation he's had on Till since childhood. Which wasn't entirely bullying, but Till can't get a proper handle on it. Mostly because Ivan's been tighter-lipped than a segyein producer, despite having no right or reason to be.
The dye in his hair is really starting to feel greasy, melted down. Till half-expects his fingers to come away dark when he wipes the sweat off his neck, but they're only the flushed pink he's probably also sporting over his face. Still, he's not drunk, and catches right away when the figure sidled up next to Ivan in the other corner of the bar bumps up from decently-close to overlapping-close.
Till almost mistakes it for the trappings of a fight, some drunken patron getting physical with the most infuriating-looking guy in the bar. The person is smaller than Ivan is, but they're not supposed to cause a scene. Till can't help but stiffen in response. The person is smaller than Ivan is, so they're right at the height to latch on to his neck, gaze lidded with a distinct lasciviousness.
That’s a bit — much, to be honest. They don’t carry themselves like the kind of informant Hyuna marked down for this bar, either. It's rude to stare, but Till does it anyway. He's trying to make them even, and the entire encounter is excessive, even by Ivan standards. Tactically unsound. Negligent. Stupid. Excessive, excessive, excessive. That’s Till’s favorite variation, right now.
What's more excessive is how Ivan volleys back, touches perfunctory but talented in a way that makes Till wonder, for the first time, why Ivan was always so close to the kinds of parties where Till had to be peeled off the ground after.
If they were the same, in that way, Ivan certainly attended to his appointments with less recalcitrance. Refined skill in everything, an irritatingly non-threatening persona — altogether Ivan-typical. They couldn't have been marketed the same, but Till can imagine him slinking into a curtained room with a client, the image of a high-class escort. Till was public entertainment, a table centerpiece. A thing to pick and paw at throughout the night.
The difference seems to matter less when Ivan's eyes start to glaze over as vacantly as Till remembers feeling. He wasn't in the habit of looking for Ivan at parties. Ivan was private.
It's clear that the person doesn't have intel; he doesn't know why the hell Ivan's still going at it. Unnerving to see it play on his face, an expression Till used to wear once broken to his core components, as Ivan's hands follow a routine down a stranger’s frame.
It's like he's on stage, or doing that thing he used to do with the fake-smiling at the garden pond. Till wonders if Ivan's processing whatever the stranger's murmuring into his ear, and guesses from experience that he's not. It'd be meaningless even if they did have intel. Tactically fucking unsound.
Till wonders whether his drink gets more bitter as he hits the dredges, or if the sight is that nauseating to look at. It wasn't that good of a drink — even worse when warm — but it also wasn't that bad.
His mouth is starting to taste rancid. He wants to turn away.
The buzz of his comm jolts him right out of it. His head snaps down before he remembers anything about protocol, and that most people don’t check their devices like they’re about to explode. He forces himself to take it out slowly. Casually, the way someone nursing a drink might check a text. He wants to think he's getting better at this.
Hyuna’s message blinks that the lead was a bust after all, as if they couldn’t tell from the state of the bar and the complete lack of people shaped like informants. The guys they were looking for left the city last week; the plan is to reconvene, sooner than later, to figure out where they might show up next. Two cities north, maybe. Come back to base.
It’s a good excuse to barge in there.
He's had enough of turning away from Ivan — look where the last time got them, and the time before that, and all the way back to that night with the meteors. He tucks the comm into one of the pockets on his belt, positioning conspicuous enough for Ivan to notice, and makes his way across the bar.
“Hey,” Till says. Takes care to make a real asshole of himself, shouldering right into their space. “We should get out of here.”
The stranger says something, probably about how much of an asshole he’s being. Till’s not listening. Ivan blinks a few times, looking bug-eyed even with contacts that mask his irises, like he has no idea why Till is there.
He still goes when Till takes him by the elbow, marching away. It draws a bit more attention than they should. Till keeps them marching right out the door.
The air outside the bar is crisp, seems to shock Ivan back into himself. He keeps busy by grabbing Till’s comm from his pocket, reading the message like his head hadn't been floating over a sponsorship party for the last ten minutes. He’s ruffled up to his hair, strands falling out of the style he picked out for the mission. There’s a mark purpling the side of his neck like a brand. Shamefully visible, with his collar that far askew.
“What was that,” Till grabs the comm back, forces Ivan to look. “Back there.”
“You never struck me as the jealous type,” Ivan sidesteps.
Fucking Ivan, deflecting again. Urak and Unsha are scrambling over their losses, he's had Ivan's mouth on his and his fingers wringing bruises into his throat, and he still wants to talk like they're in the garden. Like Till still can’t tell idolization from attraction, or irritation from worry.
He wonders, again, what it would've been like if he hadn't let go of Ivan's hand that night. Issac recognized him — they might've had a chance, and half the baggage building this unclimbable wall between them might never have existed in the first place.
“I know you knew that person didn’t have intel,” Till snaps, “And I know you don’t actually like charming people like that.”
Ivan’s still staring at him placidly, like he doesn’t know what Till’s talking about, so he bites the bullet. Ivan did it four times over; Till can handle one. “You know we don't have to do that stuff anymore.”
“And how do you know I don't like to do it? That person was hardly unattractive, you know.” Sidestepping again.
That might've been a good tactic before he tried to recreate the intensity of every kiss in human history, combined, with Till, for an audience of three trillion. For some inscrutable reason, Ivan only looks at him. For some inscrutable reason, Till has no way to verify the second half of Ivan's argument, because he had been returning the favor.
He could say that Ivan never compromises missions like that, but that hadn’t been the sticking point, or why Till’s stomach is roiling like he’s had five more drinks than he did. “You didn't look like you wanted anything, moron.”
Losers are morons without friends. Morons are just morons.
Something complicated spreads over Ivan’s face, then.
“I suppose not. But you know how muscle memory can be,” It should be just as much of a goad as the last few comments, but his smile is only a twitch of muscle. “You're a guitarist.”
So he had been watching, still. Till composes with Hyuna, sometimes, in the common rooms on freer days, or at the end of those liquor-concoction nights. The guitar they salvaged for the base is an older model. His fingers always splay in the wrong position, at first.
But it's so baffling that he's comparing something like this to playing guitar that Till is, suddenly, awash with the need to step back again. Look at what's actually propping up all the smiling at ponds, choking Till out onstage, and acting like fucking on their owners’ orders was no skin off their backs.
No skin off his, at least. He remembers, as if looking through a kaleidoscope, the sound of Ivan's footsteps at the end of that final night at the karaoke bar. The childish nuzzle against his cheek that made him think of Mizi, then, or his provider, but could only have been Ivan. It's just unfair, how he's always been, and how he won't give up being.
“Whatever. It's over now, we can start acting like it.” This whole thing is making Till itch, a bunch of loose puzzle pieces rattling around in his head. He doesn't feel that much better when he finds out where they fit.
When they get back to Till's motorcycle, he butts his cheek weirdly against Ivan's jaw before shoving Ivan's helmet into his arms. It's clumsy, rough, and feels more like a punch than any sort of comfort.
But Ivan holds his waist on the ride back, so he probably didn't do that bad.