#mr. gray

[kelliealtogether]

[juliaisafraid]

the people who don’t appreciate the gray man or greenmantle povs are really missing out because they are such well written antagonists and add so much life and worldbuilding to the story

[roll4luck]

I LOVE Blue and Mr. Gray

Do you get scared or are you to badass? I’m dating your mother so here’s this illegal pink switchblade, the same grammar humor

I love my mom and you also love my mom, and you’re gray and I’m blue, so you’re my dad friend now.

Maura pulled Mr. Gray so hard he exchanged being a hit man for being a step father, only for her to disappear for weeks leaving him with Maura’s crazy little family, and he’s worried about her of course but he still comes by for tea and to teach defense tactics and to make Blue do her Algebra homework right

[lonesomebarns]

maura and mr. gray underrated couple btw

[harlotsforcinnamon]

Nowhere Man (Can You See Me at All?)

(The one where Declan hired the Gray Man to kill Niall. Also on Ao3!)

Declan Lynch.

When Colin Greenmantle had faxed him the file, the name had jumped out at him. Holding the manila file folder in his hand, the Gray Man knew with a certainty cool and smooth as a river rock that fate had brought him back to this specific backwater of Virginia for a reason.

It was not that he had any compunctions about going after a former employer. In fact, it wouldn’t even have been the first time. He was loathe to burn bridges, but given the nature of the job for which Declan Lynch had hired him, he found it highly unlikely that the boy ever planned to reach out again.

After all, he’d only had the one father.

The struggle was brief and violent, the time elapsed between kicking in the door, throwing Declan against the wall so he bounced painfully off the window casement, and Declan rolling under his right cross to snap up with a left hook, no more than a breath, a couple of frantic heartbeats.

The gun wasn’t so much a surprise as a curiosity. But then time flickered and the gun seemed to jump from Declan’s hand to the Gray Man’s, as if the phenakistoscope of events had skipped a couple of frames, and Declan was on the floor, bleeding.

Looking up at the Gray Man, Declan’s heart banged in his chest. They had never met in person when Declan had reached out to the Gray Man, but looking at him, who else could this be?

Adrenaline was spiking through him, rattling his extremities against the carpeted hardwood. He watched those expert hands turn over his gun, and knew with the unshakable certainty of imminent demise that one of the last things his father had ever seen was those same hands wrapped around a tire iron.

Declan wondered for the first time what Niall had been thinking in his final moments.

If he were to overlay his present racing thoughts over his father’s last ones, at what exact point would they begin to align? It would be perhaps the first time in both their lives. Finally seeing eye-to-eye, right at the end.

Declan wondered if Niall realized, in the end.

If he saw the shadow of Declan’s hand in the Gray Man’s.

Declan Lynch laid out on the floor below him, gun in his hand, The Gray man hesitated.

Logically, he knew he was in a high school dorm. Had been hanging around campus all day, casing the place, mentally mapping his entrances and exits.

But the boy before him looked very young to have hired a hitman. Looked exceedingly young to have hired a hitman a year and a half ago.

What could have made someone so young go to such lengths to kill his own father?

The Gray man thought of his own brother.

Slowly, as though his body couldn’t quite believe the signals his brain was sending out, he lowered the gun.

The gravity of the moment oppressed. That this ruined dorm room held the only two people to know who had really had Niall Lynch killed oppressed.

“Don’t tell my brother.”

It was not the kind of thing the Gray Man expected to hear in the wrecked landscape of a high school dorm, gun in his hand, his prey broken and bleeding on the floor.

“Which one?”

Declan’s eyes glittered, almost black, as he wiped a thread of blood from his mouth.

“Take a guess.”

Brothers. The Gray man knew about brothers.

“What’s it worth to you?” He doesn’t do this. Hadn’t done this since the early days, when he was young and eager and not too picky about how he got his information.

But from what he’d heard, the eldest Lynch boy wasn’t too picky himself when it came to favors.

Declan paused, half-sitting up, and in that pause the Gray Man crossed to him, used his thumb to wipe away the smear of blood at the corner of his lips that Declan had missed.

Testingly, slowly, eyes on the Gray Man all the while, Declan dipped his chin and took the Gray Man’s thumb into his mouth.

The Gray Man let out his breath in one long slow exhale. Control. Control.

Growing bolder, Declan wrapped a hand around the Gray Man’s forearm. Pressed his mouth against the inside of the Gray Man’s wrist. Not kissing. Just skin to skin. Somehow it seemed even more intimate a gesture than kissing. Tender, somehow, in the way a snake sliding its glistening coils around a mouse is tender.

“You were my man,” Declan breathed against his skin. “Once.”

[katinacrisis]

a conversation i had about the gangsey today with my friend who introduced me to trc:

her: not one single ounce of responsible

me: well tbf their supervision was a bunch of psychics and a hitman so

her: a very nice hitman

[yiiiiiiiikes25]

knap

trc | gray man/declan chapter 1 of 3 | 1k | archive warnings apply: rape, violence

There would be no settling up or settling down, no locked ladder of ribs slacking rung by rung. And it wasn’t at all the first time Mr. Gray caught an offstage martyrdom. Nothing, so far as he knew, was newly or urgently wrong: Declan lived like this underneath.  Mr. Gray took him to the woods.

tags: mountains, brutality, nesting doll trojan horses

big thanks to @hephaestiions and @knucklecurve for the edits

read ch. 1 on ao3

[trc-annotated]

"He would have noticed it sooner if he hadn't been overcome by gray days - days where morning seemed bled of colour and getting up unimportant. The Gray Man often didn't eat during them; he certainly didn't keep track of time. He was at once sleeping and awake, both of them the same, dreamless, listless. And then one morning he would open his eyes and find the sky had become blue again." (The Dream Thieves pg. 175)

Mr. Gray... I think this might just be depression my love.