I will never be normal about this scene taking place after the end credits.
Because here we are, literally after the end of the story. And here is the comedic sidekick occasional-mentor, having survived his self-sacrifice for the hero at the end of Act II, having been torn open and loved in the dark, having emerged to realize that he can no longer be a blank moldable surface in his own life.
And here is the villain, having lost too early, having been cradled and seen and afforded grace, having emerged to realize that he cannot be the heartless evil he was made to be, having fought and failed and lived rather than died at the victors' hands.
After the story has been told, Pete is not a background character in service to someone else’s story. He is, in this place, the most important person.
After the curtain falls, Vegas is not a villain—and he is not lost, is not abandoned as comeuppance for his terrible flaws. He is a young man thoroughly, despicably, mutually in love.
Because after the finale has played out, after all the chess pieces have been tidied away until the next game, after the credits roll—the narrative roles Vegas and Pete were prescribed lose their sway. And they hold each other in the aftermath.
*... there is a strange man nearby. He's dressed in blue and seems to be accompanied by an odd jackal creature. They appear to be doing some kind of exercises... how curious* - rotasfinest
[Fleet, the curious little shit that it is, decides to investigate. Figuring it'd be funny to try to startle the newcomer. First floating up to Try sneaking up behind the two.]
@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. ^^)
No thoughts, just Vegas posing Pete to fuck him the same way he posed him the first time he offered Pete tenderness.
...No wait okay I lied I have a lot of thoughts actually, because there are other parallels between these two scenes and they're quietly driving me insane:
Pete telling Vegas to set him free by letting him die vs Pete telling Vegas to set him free by binding him
Vegas leaning over Pete with a pill in his mouth vs Vegas leaning over Pete with a condom in his mouth, when the pill was a promise of change and no further harm
(I could rotate the second image 90 degrees to show the visual parallel better but hell if the tilted camera isn't tipping me right over the edge into madness, along with Vegas framed directly between Pete's arms on bottom and the chains wrapped around his ankles on top. This post isn't meant to be about framing, but asdk;lfsj;lkj)
Pete looking up at Vegas, mutinous and trying to understand his actions, vs Pete looking up at Vegas both willing and completely aware
And afterwards, Vegas settling on the floor facing opposite Pete and meeting his eyes with a chain visually splitting them apart vs settling on the bed beside Pete and meeting his eyes with nothing in between
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.
Taking a closer look at Vegas's secret room and his decorating tastes.
First off, the password to get inside is '696969', because of course it is:
The creaky secret wall panel door is very Scooby Doo.
Then we have the table:
There's a lot to explore in the tangle of religion, punishment, sex, and the macabre here. Vegas being into knifeplay should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. "The Descent of Man" may be on the nose, but that's consistent for Khun Vegas "Childhood's End" Theerapanyakul. The Halloween-store plastic skull is...a choice. There's gotta be a story there, right? It looks like a kids' toy. He has a much more realistic fake skull sitting on his desk.
(EDIT: two important additions to Vegas's kink collection! @saurons-fat-rack pointed out that the plastic skull is probably a skull candle, which is just as much a choice as a plastic skull tbh, and @redcole noticed a hogtie clip at the base of the Santa Muerte figurine.)
Here's a wider shot of the room:
Vegas has a distinct preference for muted tones and old-fashioned furniture. Why the floor globe? Who knows. The monster portrait has been discussed here. Along with the monster looming over the desk, the net chandelier contributes to the feeling of Vegas being trapped even in his private spaces. Stained glass fits into the religious motif. Please take a moment to imagine Vegas standing on a ladder, carefully putting up his basic-ass red/green/yellow/blue stained glass window decals.
Next, the BDSM rack in the corner:
Not much to add here except that the mirror from 4 is not present during Pete's visit. The Doylist explanation is that the cinematographer didn't want a Pete reflection in this scene. The Watsonian explanation is that Vegas put the mirror there in 4 specifically for his naked demon moment. Really adds to the cool-aesthetic-until-you-think-about-how-much-time-he-spent-lighting-those-candles vibe.
Finally, the desk:
Does Vegas have an unexplored bird thing going on? Two birds on this desk, one on the table, and a bird cage for his hedgehog. Could be part of the freedom/captivity theme, since small birds are explicitly connected to freedom in-show.
(Edit: @redcole says that the desk bird beside the skull is also a candle. Vegas likes having multiple options available for his mood lighting/hedonistic rituals/waxplay...)
Given that Pete's home aesthetic begins and ends with tacking up gun and target posters all over the walls, I think Vegas is going to wind up with much more say in decorating whatever space they end up sharing. The results are sure to be bizarre.
@bustinbustinbustin’s recent mirror meta reminded me of a post I’ve wanted to do for a while: Vegas’s anti-mirror meta!
Because Vegas has a few significant moments in mirrors--the three big ones being naked candle devil time, “I’ll be the leader and my dad will accept me us,” and obviously that final post-credits scene with Pete and Macau--but he also has several where he’s specifically staged to stay out of reflections. Most of these take place during the safehouse arc.
Following the water-reflected drone shot that sets up Vegas’s arrival at the safehouse, the camera begins to avoid showing his reflection.
As he walks up onto the deck and into the house, Vegas gets only an incidental half-reflection and neatly avoids appearing in either the window on the left or the door on the right, where his two henchmen’s reflections ultimately settle to frame and surround him.
The effect is one of being hemmed in--an effect compounded when Vegas enters the house; he passes behind several open windows and (less subtly) the bars made by the stairs. All of Vegas’s machinations have come to naught; he continues trying to present an image of casual authority, but he’s trapped here. And if Vegas looks in mirrors for an idealized version of himself (the leader, the monster)--the safehouse is where those fantasies begin to fall apart.
Reflections are used similarly with Gun in episode 13. Vegas spends his morning trying to build up a domestic dream, cooking a delicious meal for Pete and resolutely pretending it’s no big deal that he left him handcuffed in his bedroom prison. the fucker (affectionate)
The only reflection Vegas gets inside this house is actually the one made by the counter he’s stir-frying his househusband dream on.
The illusion and the meal are both overturned by the arrival of Gun. Vegas attempts to distance himself from his father (“You think I wanted to be your son?”)--but he fails, miserably, with the minor family ring making its mark on his cheek. And we’re left with this tableau: Vegas is framed between two reflective doors. Gun exits from the left; his reflection departs on the right.
Vegas has nowhere to escape. There is no direction he could turn to be free of the man whose ambitions he has turned into his own shackles. There is nowhere he could go that would not leave him literally following in his father’s footsteps.
He was stupid, to briefly imagine he could.
So: Vegas returns to the reflective counter, covered in the remnants of the illusion. He sweeps those remnants away.
And slams his fist into his now-hidden-from-camera reflection for good measure.
This isn't a literal "let me prove that this medicine isn't poison" kiss for a whole host of reasons. The fact that putting the capsule between your lips for a few seconds says nothing about the capsule's poison content is actually the least of these, because the truth is that they both know Pete isn't scared the pill is poison.
Pete just told Vegas to let him die. Pete's not afraid that the pill will kill him, he's afraid it'll heal him and let Vegas continue using him as a plaything interminably.
Vegas isn't really saying "This pill isn't poison." He's saying "This healing isn't a trap meant to harm you." When he kisses Pete without a hint of taking or consumption or control, he's promising a change. And unlike the presence of literal poison, that is something you can demonstrate with a kiss.
