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Daniel Ocean is young and pretty. He’s got eyes that slant down with one squinted in a permanent smirk, regardless of what shape his mouth is in.
He drawls his words, and lets them roll out the back of his throat, something gravelly that he whispers in people’s ears.
You don’t believe me, officer?
His fingers like to find themselves buried in places where they shouldn’t be; pockets, purses, other people’s wives.
He meets people and watches them turn to him like sunflowers, let’s that god given charm pour out of him. Holds himself like a man who is in charge, has always been in charge.
He meets Rusty when he’s too young to know better, but old enough to recognise what they could be.
Watches Rusty chew through a stolen chocolate bar and grins something smarmy.
Catches his eye. Rusty doesn’t even ask is he’s a cop.
If that’s not love at first sight, he doesn’t know what is.
They don’t separate much after that. Danny and Rusty becomes DannyandRusty.
They catch the train into New York and slip through crowds of coked out executives, cigarettes hanging out their mouths and Rolexes glinting in the sun.
It’s always funny to see how pale their watch tans are.
They show one of the watches or necklaces or who can really remember to Tony at the pawnshop and follow his eyes as they rake over it.
He disappears into the back.
And doesn’t call the cops.
It’s a miracle that neither of them appreciates until they’re old enough to understand, clinking crystal glasses and toasting to his name.
Instead, he comes back out, tells them if they come back tomorrow he’ll have the money and shoos them out of the store.
Danny fishes out a cigarette, Rusty has a lighter lit before he finishes putting it in his mouth.
“We really shouldn’t—”
“If he was gonna rat us out—”
“—He wouldn’t have let us leave, yeah, yeah.”
Danny exhales a long stream of smoke, tilts his head back so it floats peacefully over Rusty’s head.
“You think we should come back.”
Danny harshens the squint in his right eye and brings the fag back to his mouth, “I wanna know what he’s got planned.”
And Rusty complies, because their relationship is built on nothing if it’s not built on trust.
The next day Tony will jerk his thumb to indicate they go in the back, where they’ll meet a middle aged man who will introduce himself as Saul and flash a gold timepiece at them.
He’ll ask them how good they are.
And they’ll answer with matching smirks and a plan to lift that watch right off his wrist.
They speak like stage actors who are eager to get the play finished as fast as possible.
Stepping on the other person’s line at the halfway point, not finishing the sentence, just starting a new one.
They know how the line goes, they’ve heard it a million times in rehearsal and seen it written on the page.
It’s not their problem if the audience can’t keep up.
This is a performance meant only for them, for the joy of seeing how quickly they can get through it, how far into the line you can get before the other person cuts you off.
They know the story, they know what the there person is going to say, but it’s no fun to go through something purely in your head, try to make sure the other person is at the same place you are.
If it were ever to be put to an actual stage, they would never act again, they would be called a disgrace to the art form.
It’s a fantastic thing that neither of them are actors then.
Danny tells Saul that they’re bored of petty crime.
Bored of slipping into bored housewives’ homes and taking whatever they can get out without her noticing.
One distracts and the other grabs, it’s a flawless system, really.
They’re both young and tan and glossy, nothing like their absentee husbands.
So Saul responds by telling them to figure out what they want and go from there.
It’s all very tough love.
So Rusty lifts a bottle of something nasty and Danny runs his sister out of their shared apartment, tells her to get lost at Lou’s, and get lost she does.
And then it’s Rusty pressing the mouth of the bottle to Danny’s lips as he opens up, loose and eager.
A scene where the actors know how it’s going to end.
“One of us is going to need to learn what’s worth taking.”
“What like—?”
“—Like art, yeah.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s starting the sentence and who’s finishing it, how close their mouths are pressed together.
How their accents were raised on the same streets.
“We’ll need to read blueprints.”
“All the best places will have blueprints.”
Danny lets his open mouth fall into the corner of Rusty’s, the bottle is set aside, forgotten.
“Security systems.”
“Mmm... security systems.”
Danny grabs Rusty’s chin and holds his face back, so that the tips of their noses are barely touching.
“I want—”
“—art, yeah, yeah.”
“Museums.”
Rusty chuckles and leans in, “Something audacious?”
“Something that’ll make headlines.” And Danny closes the space between them, finally lining up in a proper kiss.
Years later he’ll have trouble remembering if that was the first time, he’ll turn to his left and say, “Russ?”
And Rusty will think back on his own foggy memory of their early adult years and shrug, “Doesn’t matter.”
But he’ll say mattah, drop the ‘R’, and Danny will draw his own conclusion from that.
He never bothered to check if that was a real tell.
So Danny cons his way into an art school, schmoozes with the right people and lubricated pockets with the right amount of Benjamin’s and watches doors open for him.
He doesn’t have a portfolio to start with, no one would have checked it anyway.
Every morning they roll out of their bed (Debbie moved in with Lou as soon as she realised what was going on) and Danny goes to his campus where everyone smells like weed and art and Rusty goes to the nearby community college to get a degree in structural engineering.
They’ll swap notes at the end of the day anyway, they’re dividing and conquering.
So while Rusty learns how to make and read blueprints, Danny learns about the masters.
What makes their work valuable, loved?
What perverts most of them were.
He’s an eager study.
And so is she.
They meet in a class where they have to make their own oil paints, supposedly to help them understand why certain colours were used.
Danny just thinks that he leaves him stinking and stained.
But she crushes shells and plants and minerals into fine powders and mixes them will oil and eggs with delicate hands, and he watches her.
And then he catches her eye.
And she tilts her head and bears down on the glass muller and lets a smile dance on her painted pink lips.
Tess.
They’ve never talked about it.
They never talk about anything, they know what the other is thinking.
It’s them, and then everyone else.
So when he slips his tongue in Tess’s pussy in a closet at a party that Rusty didn’t want to come to, he doesn’t really think about how Rusty would feel about it.
He does tell Rusty, lets him know between bites of cereal that he scratched an itch, as casual as all sin.
Rusty gets a little quiet, tilts his head and says, “Good to know.”
And then Rusty bites Danny’s lip so hard he bleeds while rushing out the door to class.
Danny tugs him back in to smear blood on Rusty’s teeth.“‘Love—”
“Yeah, yeah”
Rusty comes back from class with spit on his dick and a lollipop in his mouth.
Danny and Tess date, or at least he continues to sneak into dark corners with her, continues to press her into him.
She invites him to her family’s summer house, tells him he just has to see her parent’s collection.
Collection of what, he doesn’t know. Rich people shit, he assumes.
Cars, boats, art.
Something nice and shiny and expensive.
I’ll be the longest Danny and Rusty will have been apart; a whole 2 weeks.
But Danny places a cigarette in his mouth and Rusty flicks a lighter over the end, they take half a second to see if it will catch.
“You should—”
“—I will. It’ll—”
“—Be a good haul if nothing else.”
Danny takes a drag and blows the smoke away from Rusty’s face. Rusty who’s shirtless and has a lipstick ring around one of his nipples.
Be my fence for this?
Always.
Their parting is quick and violent and better than either of them have ever gotten outside of them.
Doesn’t mean they both don’t like to explore. Both like the idea of not being tied down.
Rusty pushes fast and deep into Danny’s mouth, their teeth clack together, “‘Love—”
“You too.”
Danny comes home with parent’s approval (only an idiot would have bet against that) and some glittering family jewels.
They blame the housekeeper, although they could never prove it.
One could make a case study on all the people DannyandRusty hurt in their wake.
One could make a case study on how little they care.
They both graduate with real (semi) earned degrees.
Danny breaks it off with Tess, doesn’t want anything slowing him down.
Rusty hugs him from behind and hooks his chin on Danny’s shoulder. “Did you see—?”
“—The article, yeah.”
“You wanted something audacious.”
Danny spins in Rusty’s grip and presses his fingers into his jaw.
“It’ll definitely make headlines.”
“We should call Saul.”
So you two boys finally figured out what you wanna do?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want a cut.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What do you need?
Saul directs them to an electronic technician and an explosives expert immediately.
They keep in touch with Basher, but the technician takes her cut and runs off to some tropical island.
Some people just can’t handle the life.
They crawl into their apartment after making the drop, work appraised and sure to make waves in the circles they run in, black suits slightly damp with sweat and smelling of stress.
Danny presses Rusty down into the mattress, iron grip, “That’s it.”
“Happy anniversary.”
“We don’t have an anniversary.” Danny knocks their foreheads together.
“First one then.”
“Starting things off with a bang, huh?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Their fingertips are bussing will adrenaline, pins and needles dancing down their arms, the back of their legs. The bile in their stomach rises and bubbles.
They’ve both had semis since they got into the place successfully.
This isn’t where it started, and it certainly isn’t where it ended.
Danny bumps into Tess at a coffee shop, someplace viscously overpriced, makes him feel vaguely ill as he hands over the money.
Rusty likes it.
She says “Danny?” And he says “Tess?” And Rusty’s coffee is cold before they even sit down.
“I’ve got a gallery showing tonight?”
“I’d love to come.”
They’re married a respectable one and a half years later.
Rusty fucks him at their wedding reception.
You wanna ruin my wedding night?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Saul doesn’t ask about the relationship.
He’s an old man, the only time that kind of touching between two men was acceptable was if there was a woman between you.
He does wonder about what’s going on with Tess though, because Rusty dislikes her something fierce, presses his tongue into his canines and clacks his teeth when he sees her.
Wonders why Danny brought her in, it’s not like she’s helping him with their increasingly elaborate heists.
Danny’s not getting out either, that kid is welded to the life. The only thing that could get him out of it is a good hit with a hammer.
Danny and Rusty still finish each other’s sentences.
He assumes it’s an arrangement.
Just like the days when he was young and dumb and glossy.
Rusty dates a cop.
It’s awful, Danny thinks about strangling her, thinks about Rusty fucking her, rubs himself raw with it.
Tess doesn’t notice, she has a new client who has a lot of money to throw around, and all she wants to do is catch it, make something beautiful.
Danny feels ignored.
Tess once gently suggested that he might have some kind of personality disorder, something about needing attention.
It leads to a fight.
He goes to Rusty’s place where the cop is mercifully absent, crashes into him, lets Rusty dig his fingers into his scalp, his ass, his sternum.
Wants Rusty to grab at his bones and muscles and intestines and tug.
To pull every part of himself out and devour him.
He once said something similar to Tess, she made him stop so she could tell him it was a symptom, a sign.
When he leans in and whispers it into his partner’s ear, Rusty grins something wicked and bites down on his shoulder as hard as he can, comes away with blood in his teeth.
Danny kisses it away and tastes himself.
Tess catches him slipping a watch off of one of her client’s wrists, catches him put it into his pocket.
He doesn’t really need to do these kinds of things anymore, but it’s so hard to break a habit once it’s started.
What the hell, Danny?
And Danny doesn’t want to explain himself, explain that this is an impulse, that this is what he did to survive when he was younger.
She looks at his face, the face of a man facing the gallows and unwilling to explain anything and sighs.
I think we need some time apart.
Alright then.
Rusty broke up with the cop a while ago, she got too close.
It’s a lesson they’ve both learned now.
Time for something big.
Something that’ll make headlines.
Something audacious.
Prison is…
It just is.
It’s an unfortunate event that was always going to occur, a real miracle it hadn’t happened before.
Tess doesn’t come to the trial, it should sting.
Rusty can’t come, can’t be seen as an accomplice.
He’s pleading guilty, it’s a non-violent crime, the trial will be over quickly.
The sentence short.
Can’t— won’t --drag anyone else down with him.
It was his mistake.
And he isn’t a snitch.
Rusty beats him at poker and then they rut against each other in one of the filthiest bathrooms they’ve ever set foot in.
It’s perfect.
The Bellagio, the Mirage, and the MGM Grand.
Something easy, huh?
Something grand.
Rusty bites the inside of Danny's cheek and bares down, “Something audacious?”
“Exactly.”