@aantinous’s marvelous tags on this post reminded me of the silly li’l shapeshifter snake!Vegas AU @theflowergirl Lily and I came up with over DMs a while back!
Snake!Vegas slips into the main family home pretty regularly pre-canon. Sometimes to spy. Sometimes to ruin Tankhun’s afternoon.
One day Pete catches the snake mid-troll! Tankhun is very upset. Pete obliviously sticks the snake in a Tupperware in his room to let it go once his boss’s ire dies down.
He drops a little food in the Tupperware. He doesn’t know what snakes eat, but what’s good for Petes is probably good for snakes?
He has a nice little workout after his shift. A nice little shower. A nice little dance around the room in the half-nude.
That evening he releases the snake in the yard and moves on.
Except now the snake? Keeps showing up at odd times?? Pete could swear it’s the same snake. It doesn’t look like a local species, maybe it’s an escaped pet.
“Maybe it’s just looking for a home,” he thinks, and doesn’t think about why that hits him so hard.
(Meanwhile. Vegas was in it for the spying, the trolling, and the mild voyeurism but now it’s—oh. Oh, he’s? Keeping me safe? This is…new.)
So there’s a snake in Pete’s life now.
Occasionally there’s also a snake in Pete’s bed, which is always a fun discovery in the morning. Still, Pete can’t blame a snake for being coldblooded, can he? And the snake has a cute little :) face. And it hasn’t tried to bite him yet. It may be bonded?
This is normal and fine.
(Getting into Pete’s room involves sneaking out of the minor family home, traversing the main family grounds in serpent form, and sneaking all the way up to the bodyguard quarters. Vegas has not slept with one of Kinn’s escorts in ages—he simply does not have the time.)
(Look, he’s getting under the skin of this main family dog who keeps getting tasked to follow him. It’s funny.)
(It’s turning into instinct. Like birds flying back to the same forest, like turtles returning to the same beach.)
(If he thinks too hard about it, he’s not going to be able to justify it anymore—he does not think about it.)
Vegas’s torture suitcase contains syringes and vials of hallucinatory drugs and neurotoxins in this AU. Just BTW. <3
The plot still plots for the most part, Pete still gets captured…the torment at the safehouse, though, is less Vegas taking his helplessness out on the guy who ruined his plans and more Vegas oscillating emotionally between “he was kind to me nobody’s kind to me what the fuck” and “he’s a representation of my weakness, he was kind to an innocent animal and I was stupid enough to play along.”
The later realization that Pete would choose to show empathy to human Vegas too? Ruinous.
So Vegas comes to torment or talk to or feed Pete during the day…and the snake comes to curl around Pete’s ankle at night. Pete does not know how the hell his snake got here, but he’s pretty delirious and appreciates the small comfort even if it’s a hallucination.
And of course the truth has to come out at the safehouse, because all truths come out at the safehouse.
So it’s invasive, and weird as shit, and a bit of a goddamn mess...but, like. Vegas was already invasive, weird as shit, and a bit of a goddamn mess.
The home thing is starting to make more sense, for Pete. A lot of things are.
(Do some snake-y features show up during the sex, too? Little bit of fang action? Maybe!!)
So the collapse. The escape. The return to a normal no longer satisfied by its stasis.
The second night after Pete’s return, he finds a snake curled around the leg of his bed.
He knows. He knows, he knows, he knows.
Miserably, he lifts the snake up onto the mattress beside him anyway.
Halfway through the night, he feels warm and solid and human curled up behind him. He doesn’t move.
In the morning, the snake is gone.
(How does this play out in the finale? Who knows. ^^)
li'l excerpt from the one where Vegas and Pete realize that boilerplate dirty talk's a bore--better sexualize their intrusive thoughts instead. ^^
“What if I were an infection,” Vegas whispers one night, fingers skimming along the side of Pete’s bare thigh, “spreading in your blood?”
Pete nuzzles sleepily back against him. “You want to give me sepsis?”
Hot breath caresses his nape—then Vegas’s teeth scrape his skin, drawing an involuntary shiver. “Want to make you feverish,” he says. “Steal your breath, break your pulse…”
And it’s his tone, perhaps, pricking sweetly at Pete’s core—the heat of him firm against Pete’s back—the lazy promise of his fingernails tracing patterns across Pete’s hips, not yet tugging him back: Pete humors him. “Invade me? Make me helpless from the inside?”
Vegas groans into his neck, dots kisses down his spine. “Every part of you. Fuck, Pete…”
“We’d have to go to the hospital,” Pete murmurs amusedly. “You hate the hospital.”
The kisses stop. “…Do you want to cure yourself of me?”
I don’t particularly want to die of infection anymore, Pete thinks—but neither is he immune to that tone. He rolls into Vegas’s arms, offers a few reassuring kisses of his own and it’s good, hot, Vegas’s eyes a glint of guarded and hungry in the dark.
“I think you forget,” Pete says, and he follows a line up Vegas’s chest to his heart, “I’m the one running through your veins.”
A sharp sound in Vegas’s throat—surging up, up, in—the tender threat of consumption—and all their pleasure spreads, and breaks, and blooms.
(an excerpt from my unpublished resurrection AU WIP, posted as part of Dav @sunshinesanctuary's "post something you made that you like!" tag game.)
Pete jolted awake to the weight of a hand around his throat.
Once, the threat would have had him shooting to attention, ready to fight for his life. Now it only hastened the retreat of his swift-receding nightmare, dreadful candlelight consumed by the comfort of a familiar darkness. Pete smiled up at the shadow that loomed over him like a sleep paralysis demon. Survival instinct seemed a distant, foreign thing within the safety of their cocoon.
“Sorry, did I wake you?” Vegas murmured, not sounding particularly contrite. His voice was the drag of fine silk through a rough palm, husky in a way that prickled Pete’s skin. Pete nuzzled back against the pillow to offer up more of his neck.
Vegas accepted his submission more gently than expected. Instead of pressing down on his carotid, he stroked a line across it, touch so light it tickled. The curtain of night hid his eyes and most of his expression, but the narrow rays of moonlight that filtered through the gaps in the blinds reflected faint silver trails down his cheeks.
An image flashed through Pete’s mind—flickers of gold, liquid and gleaming against lazy rivulets of red. Alarm sliced through the heat that had been coiling its lazy way around his insides. “You okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” Vegas cleared his throat and slid up to pat Pete’s cheek. The air shuddered out of him. “I’m…very lucky to have you, Pete.”
Now that he was looking for it, Pete could feel the slight tremor in Vegas’s fingertips. His chest panged.
He set a hand on Vegas’s stomach and followed the well-known paths of his ribs to settle on the knot of scar tissue just under his heart. Here, he could feel how Vegas’s breath hitched and then went deliberately even. Pete nosed up under his chin. Vegas smelled of warm skin, sour sweat, and the faintest whiff of metal. “Can talk if you need,” Pete mumbled, lips brushing the hollow of his throat.
The way Vegas reached around to cradle his head was clumsy. His calluses snagged on the tangles in Pete’s hair and tugged at his scalp. Pete didn’t mind the sting; it seemed the logical price of being held in a lover’s claws.
“Just a dream,” Vegas told him dismissively. Where the claws turned inwards, his pulse was a small, trapped creature—it rabbited along under Pete’s splayed fingers.
Pete nodded. “Just a dream,” he echoed, softer. He curled an arm around Vegas’s waist and nudged him onto the mattress, settling in his arms. Like this, chest to chest, Vegas’s breaths synchronized to his. Like this, Pete knew his heart would gradually slow. “You’re here. I’m here.”
Vegas kissed his forehead. “Still here. Still alive.”
“Still alive.” Pete smiled. “Last I checked, anyway.”
The air caught in Vegas’s throat—then he pulled Pete in tighter, clutching him close. “Not a funny joke,” he muttered.
Pete laughed softly. “Sleep, stupid. I’ll see you in the morning.”
A gentle mini-snippet from the in-progress third chapter of Lapping at the Edges.
“Tell me first next time—you’ll save yourself the trouble of a boat ride.”
Vegas laughs. “Would you have sunk him for me? Going to defend my honor?”
“I’ll do what I have to.” Pete’s teeth flash, a hint of moonlit shadow-glory. “We’ve had weirder date nights.”
Vegas kisses him—once, twice, keen teeth giving way to receptive tongue. Pete’s chin is a mellow weight in his hand; Vegas hooks under his jaw to caress the tender skin of his throat. “Fucking on a sinking ship seems a little on the nose for us.”
Pete’s throat vibrates around a hum. “Are we sinking?”
Vegas stills. Gratitude radiates to warm his face and fingers and the tips of his toes. “No,” he says. “I suppose we’re not.”
(CW: minor accidental self-harm, allusions to suicide.)
His madness begins in the aftermath, when anger loosens its stranglehold and wraps him in its familiar seething caress. Vegas swipes his damp finger along the tips of the knives on the drying rack, traces their honed edges and well-oiled wooden handles.
Who the fuck puts wood in the dishwasher? Even Vegas knows better than that, and he’s more accustomed to the banalities of cleaning crusted blood from a set of pliers than he is to cleaning chili oil from a vegetable knife.
At least the focus required to handwash them has dampened the petty urge to stab them into the kitchen walls.
The bedroom door is shut, but Pete hasn’t left the apartment. As long as Pete is still here, this is fixable. Surely he’ll come out for dinner.
…If Pete skips dinner, Vegas will fucking--
Vegas flings his dish towel to the floor. It lands with an impotent flop.
He’ll fucking what? There’s no forcing Pete to eat when he doesn’t want to.
Pete’s fury shouldn’t be silent. Pete’s fury as Vegas knows it is world-ending, concussive. It batters Vegas’s brain against the inside of his skull and threatens self-immolation.
Vegas runs his thumb down the edge of his butcher’s knife.
There should be blood on the floor, he thinks. He’d feel better for it--Vegas has tidied up the consequences of arguments countless times, knows how to put his pieces back in presentable order almost by rote.
This listless limbo can’t last. Something is coming. Something has to break, to punctuate all that anger. Shattered dishes, ringing ears, bruised skin.
Life was miserably simpler, when Ba was around.
Pete’s anger these days is more like Vegas’s mother’s. Ba used to call her hysterical--but that was Ba’s way, wasn’t it? Pete--(Vegas’s grip on the knife tightens)--Pete has realer, more accurate words.
Ma took what she was given until the very moment she couldn’t. Life broke her, and so death--
A thin twist of pain teases up Vegas’s fingertip. He reacts several seconds late, with a flinch he doesn’t feel but supposes he should--because the blood is welling up from a cut in his finger and the lack of a flinch reflex isn’t adaptive anymore, it just makes Vegas a clumsy fuck-up with cooking burns on his palms.
Vegas frowns at the gash. It barely bleeds until he squeezes it open. Who needs a knife this sharp in their kitchen?
Vegas--more fool him--had thought he did, cheerfully whetting his new knives. “Sharp enough to fillet a man,” he’d told Macau, because Macau would treat it like the joke it was and feel included without having to live the truth of it.
At his corner of the counter, Pete had remained silent, his eyes glittery and dark like a spider’s. That look is habit now, emerges in Pete every time Vegas turns his sharp purpose towards feeding him. The new familiarity spins nostalgia-like in Vegas’s chest.
It isn’t his old life. It’s better.
Vegas’s stomach twists to recall that spark of ownership and joy over his space in their kitchen at the center of the world. What a short-sighted ass he’s been.
Pete wears anger like Ma did. If there is to be blood on the floor, what better means than the knives at the core of the argument?
Impotent. Worse--maker of his loved ones’ annihilation.
…He might get away with one, but Pete would notice if he wrecked all the blades.
Vegas swallows and scoops them up, a steel bouquet in his destructive hands. Self-sabotage waiting to happen. He opens the knife drawer.
It’s better-balanced without the knives in it. Neater, closer to the toothless thing Vegas never was.
His blood has smudged on one of his nice new knife handles. It feels like an omen.
Vegas closes the drawer. He’ll find a temporary home for the knives. They can order takeout, just for the next few days. As long as Pete and Macau are willing to eat, Vegas won’t let his family go hungry.
Macau used to feel invincible, idling down the street at his brother’s side. Within a certain radius of the mansion, people knew to wai respectfully and offer their due deference. Even farther afield, fear never crept in--nobody was going to hurt him with Vegas there. Macau learned to carry himself with loping bravado to match Vegas’s and convinced himself to take pride in the anxious looks they earned from passersby.
They were right to be anxious. If the world insisted on stomping them into the dirt, Macau had thought, then it had better learn to watch for their fangs. He and Vegas were the sons of the minor family. Just you try fucking with us.
They’re still getting sidelong glances, walking up the block towards the decal-decorated door of the pet supply store--but today it sets Macau’s teeth on edge. He shoves his hands in his pockets and curls his lip at anyone who dares meet his eyes.
Vegas seems a lot less bulletproof now that he’s been shot so many times.
“I remember agreeing to the rat,” Vegas says, shortly after the third pedestrian Macau glares into submission, “Remind me when I agreed to the second guard dog, would you? You’d think one was bad enough.”
“Who’s a guard dog,” Pete shoots back cheerfully two steps behind them, and Macau just about jumps out of his skin.
…It’s not like he forgot about Pete. Pete drove. Pete insisted on circling the building twice in midday traffic to scope entries and exits before they even parked. But once they got out of the parking garage, Pete fell in behind them and kind of became part of the scenery.
Fucking unsettling.
“Phi,” Macau complains with a glance over his shoulder, very chill and casual-like, “when’d you get good at going invisible? I feel like you’re gonna disappear. You used to be so shit at this.”
Pete’s smile is too loud for his face. “I always made a better guard than a spy.”
“Pete’s not invisible,” Vegas interjects. “Pete. I’m still injured, get up here.”
Crafty hia. Pete, who has a thing about being helpful, hurries to support Vegas with an arm about the waist. This puts him between Vegas and Macau and--as a bonus--lets Vegas sneak a hand into the small of his back.
Unfortunately, they stand out even more as a cluster. Macau finds his next stare-down in an stooped man with a cane and too many amulets around his neck.
It would help, he thinks, if the three of them didn’t make such a clash of opposing aesthetics. Vegas draws the most attention, but making Vegas look less like a snazzy villain on a murder mystery dinner cruise was always a lost cause--he genuinely can’t help being designed for smoky backrooms and dramatic mood lighting. It’s a hell of a lot easier to match his energy.
Pete, remarkably unremarkable in jeans and a t-shirt loose enough to hide the gun in his waistband, apparently missed that memo. Pete doesn’t have a ton of clothes, but he knows how to layer his wardrobe to his advantage and style his hair when he wants to look good.
Maybe he’s just ashamed to be seen with them in public.
Macau wishes for invincibility. He wishes he could hold his head high, taunt the world with their continued presence in it. He wishes he could roll up into a ball and take Vegas and Pete with him. He wishes, shamefully, that he were alone.
It’s a relief to escape into the cheerful narrow aisles of the pet supply store. The store cat, a chunky grey tabby, makes a beeline for Pete. Macau uses the distraction to grab a basket and slip into the stacks of multicolored toy mice and gleaming metal dishes.
He picks his way through the rodent cages, drops a couple puzzle toys in his basket, and runs his hands down the rungs of the tiny animal-sized ladders in the back. He finds Pete again at the end of a display of tunnels and rodent toys, one eye on their surroundings and the other on the cat rubbing up against his legs. He has an empty basket on his arm and resigned concern at the corners of his mouth.
A few steps down the aisle, Vegas stands immobile. He’s staring at a bright blue box labeled in bubbly English letters, “Plastic pipe pet toy: 39 inches of tunneling fun!” Indecision makes war across the plains of his face, regret and a torn sort of longing.
It’s a bit silly, because Macau’s heard whispers about the time his brother pulled the intestines out of a guy’s body and didn’t let him die (with a sick sort of pride, that Vegas is the best at what he does). Macau doesn’t have an instinctive handle on how long 39 inches is, but he’s pretty sure intestines are way longer.
And now the mafia’s favorite butcher is making tormented eyes at a box of plastic.
Macau understands, maybe better than anyone. Gun was his father, too. He strolls up and nudges against Vegas’s arm.
“Hey, bro,” he says. “Tunneling fun, huh?”
Vegas snorts, shifting seamlessly into languid nonchalance. “Just glancing around. Are you finding anything you like?”
Macau taps his basket. “I scouted out the place,” he replies. “Bet the stuff I pick for our rat’s gonna be way more kickass than the stuff you find.”
“Oh, you wanna bet?” Vegas raises his eyebrows.
Macau grins. “I’m souping this thing up to the fuckin’ nines. Nobody’s gonna stop us.”
“Brat,” Vegas says, but he’s smiling back now. He switches to Thai. “Pete’s on my team.”
No more hedgehogs in bird cages. No more accusations of softness, no more pretending a pet is a task and not a living thing. Vegas takes the tunnel off the shelf and sets it decisively in Pete’s basket. Macau lets out a whoop loud enough to send the cat packing. Pete plays up his put-out sigh, but there’s a new bounce in his step.
They loot the store for all the toys that will fit in the trunk, plus an extra bag of treats once Vegas pulls his dumb “nice establishment you’ve got here” routine on the cashier. This works, even though his energy’s visibly flagging. Pete’s ears are pink when he sets the bags down beside the door to the store.
He kisses Vegas’s cheek, hand brushing with what seems like unexpected daring against his hip until Macau realizes he’s just checking for his gun, and tells them he’ll bring the car around.
Vegas opens the GPS app on his phone to watch him go.
“‘Real shame if something happened to this lovely little shop’--you did that to impress P’Pete, didn’t you?” Macau says out the side of his mouth. “That was cringe as fuck, bro.”
Vegas leans his weight against the wall, smiling crookedly. “Worked, didn’t it?”
“I’m gonna tell him.”
“Trust me, he knows.”
They drive home with their trunk full of supplies, and then they gather in Macau’s room and set up the enclosure together--Pete and Macau bent around the cage, Vegas on Macau’s bed issuing directions and making a solid effort not to get cranky about it.
There’s no unified theme, and the colors are all over the place; sleek blacks and reds mingle with natural greens and jungle browns and oranges. Pete’s selections don’t even follow a color scheme--he just thinks the toys designed to look like human furniture are maybe the funniest thing he’s ever seen. (And Macau does not raise his eyebrows at that, not even a little.)
The color scheme is wonky, but this rat cage gets completely decked out. It is dope as shit, a multi-story luxury rat mansion. It has tunnels and bridges and shelves and all the hideaways a critter could want. Shreddables and puzzles strewn about the place. A little rat living room with a rat-sized couch and coffee table. An arguably fake skull to hang out in. Cozy bedding for days.
Macau curls their expandable 39-inch blue plastic tunnel between the hammock and the food dish. Vegas pretends he isn’t touched.
The sanctuary they make of Macau’s room that evening feels tenuous, transient in a way that tightens his chest--but somehow brighter for its fragility. The three of them sit and watch for nearly an hour as their rat explores this home they’ve built for it from all their disparate parts.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Words: 7344
Fandom: รักโคตรร้ายสุดท้ายโคตรรัก | KinnPorsche: The Series (TV)
Rating: E
Relationships: Pete Phongsakorn Saengtham/Vegas Kornwit Theerapanyakun
Additional Tags: Non-Sexual Bondage, Non-Sexual Roleplay, Fake Funeral, Fake Body Disposal, Relaxing Activities With Which To Traumatize Your Boyfriend, Failure to Safeword, Aftercare, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Sexual Bondage, Anal Sex, Outdoor Sex, Sex Beside The Shallow Grave Your Boyfriend Dug You On Your Request, Pete's Weird Coping Mechanisms, Past Animal Death Mention, Former Passive Suicidal Ideation
Vegas lays him on a patch of firm ground. From his cocoon, Pete hears the rhythmic thud of a shovel sinking into loose earth.
Vegas is digging him a grave.
In which Pete finds playing dead relaxing, and Vegas decidedly does not.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Update!
Chapters: 2/3
Words: 6818
Fandom: รักโคตรร้ายสุดท้ายโคตรรัก | KinnPorsche: The Series (TV)
Rating: E
Relationships: Pete Phongsakorn Saengtham/Vegas Kornwit Theerapanyakun
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Drunkenness, Intrusive Thoughts, Vegas Theerapanyakul is in a bad mood, Vegas Theerapanyakul is a wet paper bag and receives violence better than love, Reference to canon-typical abuse and nonconsensual drug use, Reference to transactional sex, Oral Sex
Summary: In which Vegas comes home drunk and speedruns setting off emotional landmines. (AKA the one where Vegas thinks a punch to the face might fix him.)
In this chapter:
Every time Pete has graced him with his knuckles was necessary. They both know this. And if those days were the hardest of Vegas’s life, he still thinks he caught a glimpse of paradise between the pounding of Pete’s fists, the ram of his head into Vegas’s jaw, and the dismayed wreck of the love in his eyes. He hopes Pete knows he’s grateful. “It’s different, you know.”
“Is it?”
