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Michael had been 19 the first time he met Geoff Ramsey face to face.
Before the penthouse, before the Fake AH Crew.
Back when Michael and the only people who cared about him in this world had been the Lads--and the Lads had been poor enough to take a chance on any score.
----
It happens on the first night they’d shown up at the club in Little Seoul--Gaam Lounge.
Ray says the place had been run by one of the big Korean families until this month, when a white guy had shown up and bought them out.
And if the Korean kids have been edged out of the busy club, it’s the right time, Ray says, to move in and establish some fresh territory.
They’d keep it small for the first night. Ray sets up outside, armed to the teeth and his heavy foot ready to speed the three of them away in his ugly Kuruma at the first indication of trouble.
Gavin takes his customary place at the bar, scoping out prospects, picking the occasional pocket, and sending people Michael’s way when they act hungry and smell like money.
Michael sets up in a booth facing the door, keeping tabs on each mark who walks in, providing goods to anyone Gavin directs his way.
---
It works for two hours.
Gavin makes a nice payday, slipping agile hands down into purses and pockets, laughing and flirting easily with the men and women who sidle up to him at the bar.
Michael moves a satisfactory amount of product, too. Nothing to write home about, but the grind is a grind--and that night is about building the foundations of something. Not about making them rich in a few hours.
---
Geoff hears the measured tap of heels down the hallway. Jack.
“You’d better get up there,” they say, propped in the doorway.
“I know,” Geoff says.
“You’ve been watching them,” Jack says, not a question. They tilt their head towards the monitors at the back of Geoff’s makeshift desk. The cameras are hardly state of the art technology, but they at least allow Geoff to keep an eye on what’s going on up in the club during nights when he doesn’t feel like walking the floors.
He’s been fighting a migraine that night, strobe lights bursting in his peripheral vision. It means he’s in a piss poor mood--and sober. Never a good start to a night. Never the right set of circumstances to be dealing with punk fucking kids, either.
Geoff looks up to the redhead in his doorway. Yes, he had been watching them from downstairs.
Jack is devastatingly lovely tonight--had been getting dressed up all week to celebrate the fact that they’d taken over the club.
Geoff heaves himself up, paces towards the door. Slender fingers grip his arm through the suit jacket, not letting Geoff pass.
“How’s your head?” Jack asks. Geoff tries not to grimace. “Do you just want me to handle them, Geoff? I could.” Geoff shakes his head, finally looking at them. Their lipstick is smudged, just a little out of place, and Geoff swipes the imperfection away with the pad of his thumb.
“If the migraine doesn’t kill me, the way you look tonight is gonna,” he says.
Jack lets go of his arm then and smirks. They let him by.
---
“You’ve been nursing that plate of galbijjim for two hours.”
Michael hadn’t heard the man in the suit slide into the booth seat opposite of him--and even stranger, he hadn’t seen the man, either.
His first impulse is to start trying to sell. To start talking and not stop.
But impulses aren’t to be trusted, and the hard look in the man’s eyes tells Michael that this is not a prospective customer. The man keeps his hands under the table as he fixes Michael with a unfriendly gaze--prying and cold. Michael wonders idly if the man has a gun fixed on him under the table.
It takes everything he has not to shrink under the stare, not to throw a glance over his shoulder to see if Gavin is observing them from the bar.
“You got me,” Michael says, finally. “I can settle up at the bar now--free up the booth.”
A peace offering. Let the man know he’s happy to leave.
“If the food isn’t to your standards, I’d like to know,” the man says, unmoving. “As the new manager, I concern myself with customer satisfaction.”
“I’m satisfied,” Michael says casually. He smiles, paws for his wallet, thumbs out two fifties, and tosses them down onto the table. “I won’t be back--but I’ll leave a great review on Yelp.”
As Michael moves to exit the booth, he shrugs and smoothes the collar of his jacket--the signal to Gavin to get the fuck out and find Ray. He doesn’t bother looking for Gavin--just hopes that his partner has seen him, has been watching whatever it is that is going down at the booth.
Michael doesn’t get a chance to find out whether or not Gavin has seen the signal--but the man opposite him certainly has.
He stands in sync with Michael, pacing two steps towards him, and although the man didn’t seem that much taller than Michael at first, he now towers over Michael there as the younger man backs against the booth.
“I’ll let your boy go, but the two of us need to have a sit down,” the man growls, low.
---
As soon as he leaves the relative quiet of the hallway and steps into Gaam, Geoff regrets not taking his fucking migraine medicine.
It was always a gamble. Sometimes the migraine passes quickly and uneventfully. Other times, it puts him down for close to two days as he vomits and clenches his fists against the pain.
But the medicine is never a gamble. It is a guaranteed fuck over. Everything it does to alleviate the pain behind his eyes, it channels into fucking him up in other ways. Makes his muscles spasm and go so weak he can’t walk in a straight line. Makes his brain so scattered he can’t drive.
Vulnerable. Helpless.
It is a guaranteed way for Geoff to be out of commission for 24 hours. And when your business is crime, you’re not allowed to take days off.
And so in the first week when they take over the club, when Geoff feels the migraine coming on, he simply ignores it.
The pain doesn’t set in until he steps out onto the floor of Gaam, crossing behind the kid with tawny brown hair at the bar and quietly sliding into the booth opposite the kid with the square jaw and curls. By the time he’s assessing the kid face to face, though, the pain is blossoming.
The lounge is loud, for one--chattering patrons, ice in glasses, flatware crashing against plates, and the low bass thrum of music. It’s the sound of money being made, but tonight it’s also an assault on Geoff’s senses.
---
“Walk out onto the street,” the man says to Michael through gritted teeth. “And no signals to your boy in the Kuruma.”
So he knows about Ray, too.
Christ they’d been outclassed from the start. Michael should’ve just approached the new management instead of letting Ray convince him to run a scam under the table.
Michael obeys the man, who follows just one pace behind him as he navigates out into the street.
“Turn to your right,” the man says. “Third door.”
Michael does as he’s told, stopping in front of a pet store. The business’ lights are off. He throws the man behind him a questioning glance. Is this a trick?
“Door’s open,” the man says, making no move to step in front of Michael.
Michael presses into the dim shop and stops, the man stepping in behind him. It’s clean and quiet, the only sounds coming from the occasional animal adjusting in its cage or aquarium and the hum of many air filters pumping coming from a room towards the back of the shop. The doorway glows with the faint pink of neon lights.
“Go on,” the man says.
Michael continues, crossing through the shop, through the open doorway. In the next room, he finds a middle aged man sitting on a lawn chair surrounded by fish. Hundreds of fish. Large goldfish pressed together in schools, living in too-small tanks lining the walls of this second room.
The man--washed in the pink light from the tanks--puts down the newspaper he was reading to look up at Michael and his captor as they enter.
“Hi Mr. Jhun,” the man behind Michael says. “Jack has a plate of dak ghalbi for you next door.”
The man nods once, folding his paper neatly and tucking it under his arm.
“Mr. Geoff, my staff isn’t back until Monday,” the man says as he passes. Michael doesn’t miss the note of apprehension in his voice--the fear. “If you need cleanup again this time, perhaps--”
“I’ll send one of my own over,” Mr. Geoff says. “Of course. And anything else you need--let Jack know.”
Cleanup. Michael sets his jaw and starts looking for exits.
A card table. A few plastic chairs. A whole hell of a lot of fish. One way in and one way out. Christ.
As the man disappears, “Mr. Geoff” gestures to one of the chairs.
“Sit, please.”
He doesn’t bother waiting for Michael to sit, taking his own place where the pet shop owner had been sitting just a moment before. The man doesn’t reveal a weapon or even bother to pat Michael down. He sinks heavily onto the extruded mint-green lawn chair and massages the bridge of his nose.
Tattoos. Heavy across the back of his hands. Unmistakeable.
“Mr. Geoff,” Michael barks out, half laughing at the realization. “You’re Geoff Ramsey. You bought Gaam?”
“Indeed,” Ramsey says, squeezing his eyes shut, pressing his fingertips into his lids. He looks pained--not a good time to test his patience--so Michael remains silent, letting the man make the next move.
It’s a bizarre revelation. Is Ramsey and his crew going to go legit, then? The business had to be a front for something else--and Michael had walked right into the middle of it trying to pick pockets and peddle street drugs. Christ al-fuckin-mighty how is that for luck, he thinks.
He waits for Ramsey to threaten him, coerce him--but nothing. The man just sits there, massaging his own face.
Maybe a different tactic is in order.
---
With each heartbeat, the pain increases exponentially.
“We’re, uh, I made a mistake--I can admit that,” the kid begins.
Geoff can barely hear him.
“I never would’ve stepped foot in Gaam if I’d have known it was yours now.”
The sound of the bubbling air filters in the fish tanks is like a wall of solid sound, a sensation that takes up residence in Geoff’s skull.
“If you say the word, we’ll go and you’ll never see me again. I promise you.”
The still air is too hot and humid against Geoff’s face, and he’s overcome with the urge to fall to the ground, to press his cheek against the cold, damp concrete.
“I’m an asshole--I should’ve done more research, figured out who bought the place.”
The pain feels like a hot knife in his skull. He wants to scream.
“Just tell me what you need me to do. Please, Mr. Ramsey.”
“Find me something to puke in,” Geoff says.
---
There’s a bucket under one of the fish tanks. Michael doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t ask questions. He stands, grabs the bucket, and slides it between Ramsey’s knees.
The man begins vomiting and doesn’t stop. He grips the rim of the bucket with both tattooed hands now, sliding out of his chair to kneel on the damp floor as if the force of his own gagging has propelled him out of the chair. His knuckles are white as he strains against the wracking spasms, and in between the movements he moans quietly, the miserable sounds echoing up out of the bucket.
Finally Ramsey releases his death grip on the bucket to press a palm against his forehead.
It sparks a strange memory in Michael.
---
Somewhere between the kid bringing him a bucket and Geoff emptying the contents of his stomach into it, the kid disappears.
It’s just as well. It sounded--from the parts of his apologetic babbling that Geoff had actually caught--like the kid understands that he’s fucked up--probably won’t present a problem. It saves Geoff the trouble of having to make the decision between breaking the urchin’s hand, doing some improvisational dentistry, or simply robbing him blind and throwing him back onto the street--none of which he’d been looking forward to.
Of course the vomiting only amplifies the pain in Geoff’s head--pain that’s exploding hot and white now in constellations through his entire skull, not just relegated to one area of his head anymore but shattering across the surface of his brain and ricocheting back and forth with every heartbeat. He needs to get up--to get back to Gaam and get downstairs where Jack can call him a car.
---
The pet shop, as it turns out, is just as small as it looks.
Michael bursts back into the dim main room, throwing on lights. There’s one more door on the other side of the shop and it leads him back to an employee break room that’s nothing more than a bathroom and a glorified walk-in closet. It has what he needs, though: a mini-fridge and a first aid kit.
---
Geoff doesn’t bother trying to shrug off his jacket as he lets himself fall to the floor. He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to appreciate the cool concrete floor.
Lying in a pool of his own vomit and fish shit--Christ, he’s really come up in the world, he thinks to himself.
And then there’s a hand on his face, turning his head just a bit.
“Can you sit up?”
It’s the fuckin’ kid.
“Let’s get you sat up,” he says, not waiting for an answer. There’s a hand under Geoff’s arm, a small body pushing him up from the floor. “Come on,” the kid says quietly. “Give me your hand.”
It’s hard to keep his eyes open, to follow the directions, and all Geoff can think of is what he’s going to do if the kid decides to slit his throat. He’ll bleed out into the grate in the floor with no one to witness his unceremonious end other than a few hundred overgrown goldfish. A fitting end to a short and grisly life.
Geoff loosens his fist when he feels a hand cup the back of his hand, and he feels a variety of small pellets fall into his palm. Geoff squints down into his own hand.
“What’s this?” he asks the kid, his own voice sounding far away. There are eight or nine pills in his hands now--two different types.
“Six aspirin, two Xanax,” the kid says. “You don’t have an ulcer, do you boss?”
Geoff shakes his head slowly, eyes closed. The neon lights are too much. The kid had come back with fucking medicine?
There’s the unmistakable sound of a can of soda opening and the feeling of something cold being pressed into his hand.
“Take all of these and drink this whole thing,” the kid says. Geoff opens his eyes again, his vision swimming. There’s a coke in his hand.
Geoff sits stupidly, staring down at the pills in one hand, the soda in the other.
The kid had come back. With fucking medicine.
“I promise it’s what I say it is,” the kid says then. “The benzos are from what I was selling tonight and the aspirin is from a first aid kit. I’m not dumb enough to do anything to hurt you.”
Geoff doesn’t know if he’s convinced or not. He knows that it won’t matter either way, though, because his head is pounding too hard for him to mount any sort of defense right now. He’s at the kid’s mercy--and the kid with the square jaw and the curls seems to know it, too.
---
There’s a long moment where the tattooed man just sits there, cross-legged on the floor, staring down at his hands--and Michael’s heart jackhammers in his chest. Maybe he’d made a miscalculation. Maybe it wasn’t too late to just fucking go--to get in the Kuruma and get the fuck out and count his goddamn blessings that Ramsey hadn’t mangled him for trying to set up shop there in Ramsey’s newest venture.
But something tells Michael to stay. There is, perhaps, the promise of something bigger.
Finally the man brings his hand to his mouth, dumping the pills in and grinding them between his teeth before sucking at the coke in his other hand. He downs the can of soda without stopping for a breath, and when he looks up at Michael, he is wild-eyed.
“The fuck did you do that for,” the man asks, sounding almost offended.
“You’re Geoff Ramsey,” Michael says, as if that’s explanation enough. “And you didn’t give me permission to leave yet.”
---
Geoff would laugh if it didn’t make the pain in his head detonate in new and interesting ways.
He’s not sure how long he sits there in the floor of the pet shop, washed in pink neon, listening to the sounds of air filters bubbling away.
At one point, the kid kneels on the floor, easing the bucket away, helping Geoff shoulder out of his coat. Time passes. The kid leaves for a spell and comes back with a damp paper towel, watching Geoff as he wipes perspiration and mess from his face.
The aspirin and caffeine kick in surprisingly fast--and though they don’t completely ease the pain exploding behind Geoff’s eyes, they blunt it enough that Geoff can begin moving without every inch of his brain feeling like it’s on fire.
“Should I get-- ah, you said it was Jack? Who should I get from next door?” the kid offers.
“Yeah,” Geoff says. “Go to the bar. Ask for Jack.”
---
Jack and Mr. Jhun are there, then, shouldering Geoff off the floor. He finds, as he stands, that he doesn’t need the help.
Jack pushes him into a car waiting outside, not wanting to hear anything Geoff has to say--but Geoff won’t leave yet.
“The kid, Jack,” Geoff pleads through the open window of the sedan.
“Yeah, he’s downstairs,” Jack says.
“Don’t hurt him,” Geoff says.
“Hurt him? I’m about to offer him a job,” Jack says, laughing in that easy way they have.
“Yeah,” Geoff says. “Yes. Good.”
---
As it turned out, Michael didn’t accept the job that Jack offered him that night.
He’d left Gaam, gotten into the Kuruma, and he and his boys had--for all intents and purposes--fallen off the face of the planet.
---
Geoff doesn’t reminisce. He is not sentimental and he does not enjoy revisiting past versions of himself. Each memory in his head that he sees of himself is unpleasant--either because of how immature and naive he had been, or because the Geoff he sees in the past far exceeds the man he believes himself to be now.
But nine years after that night, Ryan wants to know what Geoff means when he makes a vague allusion over dinner to Michael “saving him” before the two of them actually knew each other.
Michael puffs a laugh through his nose as he passes a plate of vegetables across the table to the other man.
“Hell, I half forget we met each other before we met each other,” Michael says.
“I don’t,” Ray says gravely from the other end of the long table. “I thought you were going to come out of that pet shop missing a few digits--if you’d come out at all.”
“Pet shop?” Ryan asks, raising an eyebrow.
Jack takes over the narrative from there. Geoff remains quiet as Jack fondly recounts the night--the kids, the new club in Little Seoul, the migraine, the look on Michael’s face when he bounded to the bar, asking for Jack. The way Michael had frowned and turned down the offer of a job before disappearing. How Geoff and Jack had hunted for the three kids for years afterwards to no avail. How their paths had only crossed due to dumb luck years down the road.
---
“I never asked you why you didn’t leave that night,” Geoff says, tracing patterns on Michael’s skin after dinner.
Michael smiles as if he’s been waiting all his life to explain.
“Do you want to know?”
Geoff nods.
“Have you heard the parable of Androcles and the lion?”
Geoff shakes his head.
“A slave named Androcles escapes from his master into the wilderness. He’s starving, just barely surviving, when a lion begins to chase him. Androcles falls and snares himself in some roots, but just as the lion closes in to eat him, he realizes that the lion is snarling and roaring because he’s got a giant thorn in his paw.”
“Shit, I have heard this,” Geoff says. “I don’t remember how it ends, though.”
“Androcles takes the thorn out of the lion’s paw, and the lion gets instant relief. So the lion starts to take care of him--brings him meat to eat, helps him survive in the wilderness. But finally Androcles’ master’s men find him in the woods. And as punishment, they march him to the emperor, who throws him to the lions.”
“I see where this is going,” Geoff says.
“Right. It’s the lion from the forest. Androcles’ lion. Of course the lion spares Androcles’ life, the emperor sets him free, and all’s well that ends well.”
---
Geoff’s hands go still on his skin and Michael looks down at the man. He looks troubled.
“That’s just a fairy tale, Michael,” Geoff says, not looking at him. “In reality, the lion eats the slave every single time. You’re smart enough to know that.”
“You haven’t eaten me yet, Geoff,” Michael says through a smile.
“That has nothing to do with the thorn and everything to do with you,” Geoff says after a long pause.
“And it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a predator and you always will be,” Michael says, shrugging. “I don’t do this for the safety.”
Something dark passes behind Geoff’s eyes--and then it’s gone--and then he’s there, gathering Michael up, pressing the smaller man into his chest, fighting whatever war it is going on inside of him, far from Michael’s understanding, far from that night when Michael had stooped beside him on the floor in the midst of buzzing neon with an audience of goldfish.