[fic] I have written 6,400 words today.
Title: Patience & Good Manners
Fandom: RocknRolla
Words: 7000
Pairing: Johnny/Archy
Warnings: I have just upended my Id into a Word Doc again. Just… frankly excessive quantities of blood.
Disclaimer: I am very sorry to Guy Ritchie about this.
Archy walks into the office that was once Lenny Cole's to find his nominal boss and occasional idiot to be babysat draped across the leather armchair like discarded laundry, and bleeding somewhat.
Maybe Archy should be concerned, and for a moment his pulse jumps and he begins cataloguing all the people who might be responsible and all the ways in which he, good dog Archy, is going to take them apart. But he's sharp, is Archy, so the next thing he notices after the flash of red and the way Johnny is once again naked from the waist up (Johnny harbours a grudge against clothing, or he behaves as if it's a personal affront to his nature), is the knife in John's hand.
Johnny Quid doesn't really sit on chairs if he can hurl himself across them. He's been like that ever since Archy can remember: right now he's half upside-down, his arm extended over his face, a knife-tip pressed to the sinew and bone that makes up his ex-junkie inner arm, and he's dripping blood onto his own lips.
"John," Archy says levelly, "what the fuck are you playing at?"
"It looks nice," Johnny says, tipping his head back to regard Archy with blown pupils and bloodspatter over his cheeks and mouth. "It has a profound aesthetic quality."
"You been at the wacky baccy again?" Archy asks, making a mental note to have someone come in and clean the rug. Johnny Quid doesn't give a fuck that it's a fucking £3,500 woven artifact but Archy fucking does.
"Having a spiritual experience, Uncle," says Johnny, smearing his arm across his lips, his knife hand drooping haphazardly.
"Stoned," Archy translates.
"Clean as a whistle and twice as shiny," Johnny mumbles, and he flops his arm out to present a series of gashes each three inches long, for inspection. Like he's in fucking primary school and made a pasta picture and wants praise for it, instead of dropping blood all over the carpet.
"I dunno about that, John."
"I confess," Johnny says, arching his back so that he almost tumbles off the chair entirely, "I am suffering from a cripplingly intense case of erectile function, but I assure you, no substance has entered the temple of my body."
He looks a fucking picture. Rehab didn't put that much back on his frame, and the way he's extending himself like a human draught excluder is doing no favours to his ribcage. There's a smudge of bright red across his torso, like an arrow towards his cock - Archy can see, thank you very much, he doesn't need Johnny to it out - and drips on his nips. Nipples.
Johnny smears a lurid red F on his abdomen with his index finger.
"Jesus Christ," Archy says, shaking his head, and he leaves to fetch a towel. Sometimes you just have to clean up the mess afterwards, whatever kind of mess it happens to be, and Archy's adept at that. Years for Lenny, months for Johnny: cleaning up their messes. He has to admit, though, he was expecting maybe more of Johnny's undignified vomiting and stumbling, not this freakishly intense display of bodily fluids.
It's not that Archy doesn't trust accountants. It's that they're criminal accountants, and they, like all intelligent people, think everyone else is stupid because they never got the AAT qualification. They sometimes make the mistake of thinking they can rip off Johnny Quid without him noticing. The trouble for them is that when Johnny can be bothered he's extremely good at maths, and when he can't be bothered Archy knows a thing or two about a thing or two, and he doesn't have any qualms about knocking a tooth out over a sneaky little bit of fiddling.
This is what he's engaged in when Johnny prances into the office wearing trousers that are inadequately held up by his hips - the suits are for outside - and more or less waves his stomach at Archy.
He's smeared the words "Fuck me" on his gut in what's almost certainly his own blood: Archy makes the deduction based on the fact that his left arm is dripping onto the carpet, covered in rivulets of red and darker red as blood dries and stiffens amid his hair. And Johnny's right hand index finger is bright and wet with blood, and above all this is precisely the kind of stupid shit that he does.
"No," Archy says, going back to the accounts. "Wash that shit off, John."
"It's art," says Johnny. Now, Archy may not know a lot about art - Tank has been forthcoming on this - but he does know what he likes, and he does know that scrawling obscenities on your lower abdomen is at best graffiti and at worse an ill-timed come-on.
"Fuck off," Archy suggests, "you've an empire to rebuild."
"All work and no play makes John a dull boy, Uncle," says Johnny severely, inspecting his index finger with a look of awe. "You should take a holiday for the afternoon. As your boss, I command it."
He slides the finger into his mouth, and Archy watches him slowly fellate the coating of blood off with patient lips; he raises his eyebrows at Johnny's pathetic display.
"As my boss?" Archy says. "Well, well. As the person around here who knows how this business works - stop being a dirty bugger and clean that shit off your stomach."
"It's not shit," Johnny says serenely, pulling his finger from his mouth to indicate the knife wound on his inner arm, smearing fresh blood and crackling the dried, "it's blood."
The way he says the word is borderline pornographic. Archy shakes his head and goes back to the calculator: they have god knows how many programs to do this now, but he's of the old school and he's fucked if he's going to start letting a computer do his thinking for him.
"It's a bloody nuisance is what it is," Archy says, scanning the list of figures slowly.
He doesn't look up when Johnny flounces out. With John it doesn't pay to pay much attention to his mood swings: they're only what you'd expect after years on various dope and growing up under the untender tutelage of Lenny Cole, and when he's not being a fucking prima donna or fucking his way through his bodyguards he's sharp enough and smart enough to be worth the preening and pissing about. Mostly.
When the bloody handprint shows up on the fridge door, Archy takes a brief inventory of the people in the building to make sure everyone's still alive and uninjured, then makes Bandy clean it off.
Bandy's improving. He doesn't complain that it's not his job this time.
It's not that he doesn't want to fuck Johnny, either; he acknowledged almost as soon as Johnny was clean that now he didn't smell like a badger's arse the boy was a long lean streak of sex. It's not that he thinks it'd "jeopardise their working relationship" or whatever bit of management wonk-speak those audiobooks Turbo insists on listening to in the car say, nothing that sad. He's just busy, and perhaps he thinks there's better ways to go about it than this.
For example, just fucking asking like a sane member of the human race.
"Christ's sake, Johnny boy," Archy sighs, the evening he walks into his own sodding room to find Johnny Quid extended over his nice leather sofa - a "gift" from his old man, in that Archy took it out of his house before he set the place on fire - barefoot and bare-chested and bleeding.
"Good evening," Johnny says lazily, raising one hand in benediction like he's the fucking Pope. He's wearing sunglasses. It's ten thirty in the evening and he's wearing sunglasses. To Archy's mind that spells out something rotten in the state of Johnny's veins, but from the looks of it the only thing troubling his bloodstream is the fact it's been diverted down the outside of his body.
There's a series of nicks - just nicks - in Johnny's neck, and he's got a knife (actually a bayonet, fuck knows where he picked it up and why he didn't just use one of the countless knives the house has on offer, but who the fuck knows why Johnny does anything?) dangling like a limp cock from his right hand.
Blood flows out of the ladder of cuts in a steady, sluggish waterfall and pools in Johnny's deep dip clavicle, ready to begin a swift descent of his largely hairless toastrack chest. It's a wild and vivid red, opaque and healthy. No douting that Johnny's in good shape these days, for a man who romanced the pipe with such enthusiasm. Or for a man who, two days ago, drank so much fucking Chivas Regal (out of the sodding bottle, too) that he redecorated the hallway to the bathroom in a sprinkler of stomach acid.
"I'm balancing my humours," Johnny explains, running his left hand through the blood. It smears in a bright scarlet streak across his upper chest, and Johnny makes a liquid movement with his wrist to trail a spiral around his navel in thinning red. "I am excessively sanguine. Therefore, bloodletting."
"Bollocks," says Archy, putting his hands in his pockets. He has no fucking idea what Johnny's talking about, but that's usual; the shit that comes out of his mouth when he's not dealing with business is - the word Tank used was "esoteric", and after Archy looked it up he's inclined to agree. "You're a mess."
Johnny holds up his red-and-white hand, reflecting light of his own blood so he looks as if he's been bathed in liquid rubies. "I'm an artist."
"You're a fucking nutjob," Archy says evenly, but he comes and sits on the sofa. Johnny moves his leg out of the way, leaving Archy trapped between one bent knee and one which is trailing off the sofa, and within easy reach of a hard-on that Johnny's junkie tracksuit bottoms are doing fuck-all to hide.
Sadly what with Johnny having a case of the mentals this evening, it's quite easy to resist the temptation to put his hand on it.
"Am I not beautiful?" Johnny asks sarcastically, reaching up with his knife hand to flick his sunglasses off his eyes. He smears blood on his damagingly sharp cheekbones, and props himself up on an elbow so that he can look Archy in the eye.
"Yes, John, but you're also covered in blood," Archy sighs.
"I'm not covered in blood," Johnny corrects, toying with the knife, his left hand resting at the top of his tracksuit waistband with a single red finger dipping just below the elastic. "I'd like to be, but this is a scratch, a scratch. And unlike good Mercutio, 'twill not serve."
"Well if you want to get your hands dirty that badly," says Archy, his hands firmly in his pockets and Johnny's knee resting maddeningly against his back, "come down when we evict Greek Tony."
Johnny rolls his eyes. "I don't want someone else's dirty junkie blood on me," he complains, as if Archy is being unnecessarily dense. "Fuck's sake. Next you'll be suggesting I eat my dinner out of the toilet. What's the matter with you?"
"What's the matter with me?" Archy asks, raising his eyebrows. That's a bit rich.
His ward and boss, genius class act and unhinged pervert, stretches idly and brings his left hand back to his throat to stroke blood back and forth across the pale skin. There's a kind of sick sensuality to it, not exactly alleviated by the way Johnny's mouth stretches into an elastic, stoned smile and his eyelids flutter.
"Do you know how I figured this out?" Johnny asks, but Archy can tell it's one of them whatsitcalleds, a rhetorical question. Not one Johnny wants answering. "I was at school, Arch." He opens one lazy eye and squints at Archy with a stare that's as hard and harsh as any of Lenny's, for all that it's unfocussed and accompanied by Johnny rubbing his bloodied palm down over his chest to his nipple (and his arm is shaking, just a little).
Archy says nothing. He watches Johnny paint himself red.
"Tried to off meself," Johnny says, licking the tip of his finger and running it through the ladder of shallow cuts. "Didn't much fancy spending a few more years walking around with a boner for blokes, you know. Didn't much fancy living under Lenny's roof no more, neither. Never was as comfortable with that as you, Uncle."
Archy's hands are fists in his pocket. He's been trying to tell himself, if he knew what a child-beating piece of shit Lenny was he'd have stopped it, but he knows himself too well. He's a loyal lieutenant to the fucking end, and Johnny Quid was, by every measure available, an annoying little shit. And if your dad don't beat you, how're you ever going to learn?
But Johnny's right about one thing, he never had no period of discomfort over who he wants to fuck. He just never bothered telling anyone, unless he was going to fuck them. It seems easy that way.
"Took a fucking Bic razor," Johnny says, worrying at the cuts on his neck the way Archy's rubbed the soft puckering arseholes of some very sweet boys in the past, "popped out the bendy little blade and --" he mimes with his knife hand, so sudden that Archy nearly jumps, and draws another fresh line in his neck.
Johnny's body twitches and slumps at the pain he's inflicted on himself, and there's more, more, fuck it, what's the word, more lassitude in his voice when he starts speaking again. There's a more boneless smile on his face.
"-- truly pathetic," Johnny says, wiping the fingers of his left hand over the new cut, "Who the fuck commits suicide with a ten-for-a-pound razor?"
Archy says nothing. Johnny plays with the new-sprung blood like he's fingering himself.
"But then it bled," he says, and he says it like he's saying he came. Archy leans in closer, until the outside of his thigh touches Johnny's balls through the tracksuit bottoms, and Johnny smiles at either him, or at the memory. "I remember standing there with this ... with my neck stinging like someone'd slapped it, and there was this," Johnny raises his fingers for Archy to see, wet and red and almost trembling. "Like something magical. I didn't realise it was so beautiful, Arch, I really didn't. They make you read poets and it's all la-de-fucking-da sunrises and girls with golden hair, and then there's this. Like junk. It's fucking beautiful."
Johnny laughs at himself. Archy doesn't: there's a light in his eyes, and the glistening tip of his fingers is starting to dry. Archy grabs Johnny's wrist unbidden and presses his tongue to Johnny's fingertips.
Johnny inhales hard and says, "I haven't finished my story yet, Uncle."
Fuck your story, Archy thinks, but he kisses the blood-and-saliva-drenched tips of Johnny's fingers, releases his wrist, and nods. "Go on."
Johnny puts his hand to his neck again, smearing blood over his palm and the layered, textured drying strata of his older wounds. "I think I painted my mouth with it," he says, and he rubs a bloody thumb over his lower lip. "I forget why I got the idea to get my dick out but, you know, thirteen, when isn't your dick in your hand or someone else's?"
Well, Archy thinks, some of us wait until we're slightly more than a child before we start fucking everything that moves, but then Johnny always was a precocious little prick.
Johnny lifts his hips ceiling-wards and holds Archy's gaze. "Aynway," he says, and he puts his bloody, ruddy, gore-soaked hand onto his crotch and gives his cock a god, hard squeeze, right next to Archy's arm. "I think I fucking came my brains out."
There is a big, red smudge on the crotch of Johnny's tracksuit. Archy can see it between his fingers. Johnny squeezes his cock again, arches his back, and runs the tip of the knife over his own nipple. Archy wants to slap it away and tell him to stop being so fucking silly, but he knows that's not the only thing he wants.
"So while I am enjoying you staring at me like a rare steak," Johnny concludes, his sunglasses slithering back down his nose unaided, "I am bored with the dance now and would really prefer it if you would just fuck me, now, please, Uncle."
Archy takes his hand from his pocket at last and gives Johnny a not-quite avuncular pat on the thigh. It's the squeeze he gives the lad's muscle at the end that breaks it from being platonic and reassuring into being somewhat longing and reassuring. He leans over Johnny - pressing Johnny's hand further into his crotch. He steadies himself with a hand on Johnny's shoulder.
He leans in to Johnny's mouth, blood-smeared lips parted, and hangs above them like storm cloud. Archy takes a deep breath.
"Not until we've had you tested."
"What." The cold, steel-edged rage of thwarted desire in his voice is so reminiscent of Lenny that Archy could almost laugh. They might have fucking despised each other, but they have more in common than Johnny will ever know or notice. Except Johnny's no grass.
"John," Archy says, giving him a fond pat on the shoulder and maintaining an inch distant of kissing him - it requires a lot more willpower than he'd expected, but Archy's got self-control down to a meticulous art, unlike the Rock Star here. "You are a dirty, dirty bastard. I'm not putting my dick inside you until I know you're not going to give me thirty fucking diseases."
He levers himself off and back from the sofa before Johnny can either bite him or knee him in the balls - both of which he's done before in a fucking drunk temper - and straightens his tie.
Once Johnny's out of the room Archy straights his cock, too, and snorts to himself. The clinic was clear: Johnny dodged every bullet. He doubts Johnny's managed to pick up anything in the meantime, but God if making him squirm isn't outright hilarious.
Archy is in the middle of trying to eat a plate of chips - not into this fancy muck, he hasn't even caught up with this obsession with pasta half of England seems to have caught, never mind the current fad for not cooking fish they caught off the bloody Japanese - and draft a letter to one of their lawyers about evicting some cokey little media prick who defaulted on his rent, when Johnny stamps into the office like a five year old, slams a print-out onto the desk in front of him, and stamps out again.
Scratching his balls with the barrell of a Beretta, because if Johnny's a petulant five-year-old - and he fucking acts like one - he's a dangerous and weapon-obsessed one.
"In the middle of something, Johnny," Archy says, pointing at the letter. It's like the nineties all over again, only Johnny's taller now, and less deferential (more's the fucking pity).
"All work and no play, Arch."
"Yeah, and all play and no work sinks the business, Johnny boy." Archy makes a 'shoo' motion with his hand. "Piss off out of it."
"Even Alexander the Great had fuck breaks," Johnny complains, doing his shirt back up. "He had Hephaistion, I get you."
"You bloody well do not get me if you don't fuck off out and let me finish this," Archy says, privately enjoying the look of mutinous dissatisfaction on Johnny's face. There's a straight-razor sitting in Archy's trouser pocket and he can feel it against his thigh like a hand on it. It's all he can do not to jiggle his leg. "Patience is a virtue, you moany sod. Get out."
Archy is busy until well into the small hours of the morning. The job doesn't sleep, and while it's still kicking and squawling like an angry baby, neither does Archy. He's in Cheapside until two, directing some muscle after an eviction goes tits-up, and he's in Wandsworth until five, having a cosy chat with a bent copper about making the whole thing go away.
By the time he gets back to the house - it's "the house" now, not Johnny's house, and Archy's house is painfully gather dust - the sun's up and commuters are on their way to their uneventful little office blocks.
Despite being properly cream crackered, he takes the time to hang his clothes and brush his teeth, because he's not a fucking barbarian and whatever else his Dad done, he brought him up proper.
He sleeps until noon.
When he wakes the sun's in his eyes and the ache of tiredness is gone from his joints. Archy sits up and swings himself out of bed, naked as the day he was born.
"Top of the morning," Johnny says from the sofa. Archy squints. He's dressed up. "Or lunchtime."
"Give me a minute," Archy says, limping to the bathroom. He can feel Johnny's eyes on him as he goes, and he resist the urge to slap his own arse by way of acknowledgement.
After a shower and some meticulous cleaning under his finger nails Archy's not so much ready to face the day as prepared to punch the day in the neck if it gives him any lip. He still needs some bloody coffee in his body before he can handle whatever it is Johnny's all dressed up for.
He dresses in the bathroom, because old habits die hard.
"Aww look," Johnny says, when Archy returns clean-shaven and aftershave-splashed, his hair neat and his suit straight. "We match."
They assuredly fucking don't. Johnny inhabits suits the way squatters take over mansions: with force, ill-fitting, and likely to be out again in a short space of time. God knows Archy's tried to make him look the part but for all his expensive education he's not a man built for the tailor so much as for the stage.
Today is no exception. He looks like he's been shoved into that fucking Italian number like a cat into a sack.
"What's this in aid of, Johnny boy? Got something planned?" Archy eyeballs him with no small amount of suspicion, but without coffee he's missing the vital component that allows him to strip Johnny down to his intentions in seconds.
"Been busy," says Johnny, who is never normally conscious before the sun kisses the rooftops of West London.
"Is that a fact?"
"I have been ensuring that there is no business to drag you out of this room for the rest of today," says Johnny, leaning forwards on the sofa. There's an old school tie untied around his neck and his shirt's unbuttoned to the dents in his sternum. Archy can see the scabs where his cuts are healing.
"Very considerate of you," Archy says in the same voice he uses for contractors who've actually bothered to provide on time and with a minimum of fuss: threatening, but polite. An undercurrent of genteel violence. A cup of tea and a biscuit and a fractured fibia.
Johnny takes Archy's straight-razor from his own jacket pocket, and shrugs the jacket off. "I thought you might fancy a day off."
"Very astute," Archy agrees, taking the folded razor out of Johnny's hand and closing his fingers around Johnny's wrist. He leans his hips towards the sofa, and presses Johnny's unresisting palm against his cock as he opens the razor. "That suit cost a lot of money."
"I've got a lot of money," Johnny points out. He has. It's almost revolting. The little boy that Archy once was, who considered finding five pence on the floor a major contribution to the household finances, occasionally looks at this fucking carefree opulence in wonder, and occasionally in violent disgust.
"All the same, John, it'd be a great shame to damage it," Archy says in a low voice, inspecting his own reflection in the blade of the straight-razor. "I'm not going to tell you again: take it off."
Johnny excavates himself from his suit at speed, and like the fucking urchin he is he just leaves the entire ensemble strewn over the sofa and floor.
"Hang it up," Archy says, turning the razor until the light from the midday sun gets in Johnny's eyes. His pupils shrink and leave a vast circle of reddish-brown.
"Fuck's--"
"Hang it up," Archy repeats, as Johnny screws up his long thin face against the painful light. Johnny's so averse to daylight he might as well be half-vampire, and Archy takes a certain amount of pleasure in tormenting him with it.
Johnny, naked and scarred, his bare arse pale in the bright sun, scurries around picking up his clothes and hurling them haphazardly on to a hanger. He gives Archy a defiant look and flops back onto the sofa like a piece of dirty laundry himself.
I know they taught you better than that at school, Archy thinks, but Johnny never paid much attention to what he was taught, and he's had years of fame and fortune to burn of all his good habits in the purifying smoke of the crack pipe.
Instead of mentioning it, he points the razor at the floor and taps his cheek. "No hard feelings, now. Give your uncle a kiss."
He can feel Johnny stiffen, inhale, and breathe out in a jagged rush before he leans into the touch of cold steel like he's leaning into a kiss.
"Oh," Archy says, inclining his head in acknowledgement. "Very good."
Johnny smiles at him blissfully. "One does one's best, Uncle."
"Shut yer mouth," Archy says evenly. "This is a delicate fucking operation. I slip, and you're dead."
"You know what you're doing," says Johnny, tipping his head back so that the whole expanse of his throat is open to the room and most of all to the razor Archy's pressing against it. "Like you've never cut someone's throat before."
"That's the point, Johnny boy," Archy says. "Normally when I do this, you ain't walking away afterwards."
"I know," Johnny says to the ceiling, his eyes shut, as Archy turns the straight-razor this way and that, trying to figure out the angle and pressure that will make a very shallow cut. "I wouldn't have a hard-on you could beat a kid to death with if I thought this was safe."
"If you don't shut it," Archy says, impatient, "I will have your cock off."
Johnny shuts his maw and lets Archy tickle his long neck, searching for a spot. He settles somewhere over Johnny's Adam's apple; not directly over it, where he might open the lad's trachea and leave him whistling his last in short order (the way they did with Peckham Keith back in '86), nor too far to one side, where the jugular lives (the jugular shot was always Mickey Stuart's favourite, right up until he got on the wrong side of some Yardies and they had to cut him down from a telegraph pole two days after his neck swallowed up the wire noose).
He flicks the blade at a shallow, shaving angle. It can't penetrate too deeply like this, but it's fast enough that its own friction should open the skin.
Sure enough there's an immediate twitch of Johnny's muscles and his eyes fly open, along with his mouth. That'll be that sting he mentioned: the blood, so bright it's almost orange, seeps out of the wound and begins beading quickly into one thick line.
"Oh, he ain't going to help you," Archy says with a smile. He lays the very tip of his finger on Johnny's lips, the razor hanging from his fingers a mere twitch away from Johnny's bare neck. "What do we say?"
"Thank you," Johnny says, breathy as a porn star. He raises a hand to the narrow crimson waterfall, but Archy grabs him by the wrist.
"No," he says, "my turn."
Archy follows the flow of the blood with the curved edge of the straight-razor, tracing it and then out-pacing it, amused by the way Johnny tries to both lift his body to the touch of the steel and cringe away from it all at once.
"Your hands, Uncle, if you would be so good," Johnny says, but his voice is thick and a litle garbled.
"Don't be a smartarse, sweetheart," says Archy, tightening his grip on Johnny's wrist; Johnny goes limp. "Behave yourself, or you won't get none."
"Hands," Johnny repeats, as Archy treks the razor over the heaving landscape of Johnny's torso, drawing a cold but bloodless line directly between his nipples. "Please."
"Why's that then, John?" Archy asks in a conversational voice, crushing the small bones of Johnny's wrist together for the pleasant way that they rub off each other. He can feel his own cock getting harder in answer to Johnny's, but there's no sense in rushing things. If there's one thing he's learned in life, it's taking your time gets the best results. Johnny, of course, has all the impatience of youth in him still. "Afraid I might do something like this?"
He twists the razor abruptly across the shelf between Johnny's ribcage and Johnny's carefully-maintained stomach (for someone so fucking lazy, Johnny does a lot of sit-ups). The angle's right, shallow enough, that it won't go deep, but it goes long. It opens a broad sweep on his abdomen and it fucks a sound like "ahhh-ffsss" out of Johnny as his body jerks at the pain.
Archy alternates his attention between the swelling string of blood beads as they merge and trickle and pour from his body, and watching Johnny's eyelids flutter in sudden ecstasy. He still manages to be a smartarse, even now:
"I wouldn't say afraid," Johnny says, his voice low in his throat. "Put your hands on me. Please."
"No," Archy says, cheerful and bright as the midday sun.
"Please," Johnny repeats. Archy knows his grovelling of old. If there's one thing junkies know how to do, it's beg with broken sincerity and abandon their dignity at any sign of recompense. It annoyed him then; it annoys him less now.
"Stop fucking asking, Johnny," he says, tapping the razor-blade on Johnny's hip bone to see him flinch. "You'll get what I give you when I give it to you, and if you keep whining you ain't getting nothing. Behave yourself."
Johnny's head falls back over the arm of the sofa and he gives a put-upon sigh that's ruined by the panting it can't supress. "You ain't half a bastard, Arch."
"Like that don't make your cock hard," Archy snorts. He strokes the blunt edge of the razor over Johnny's hip bone and smiles to himself. "Fuck me, you look like you're going to burst. I bet I could just breathe on that and set you off."
To his credit, Johnny is trying very hard to keep his voice steady; to the credit of Archy's work, there's no fucking chance. He nearly squeaks off back into adolesence. "Arch."
"Don't whine," Archy says, tapping him on the pubes with the razor tip. "It ain't attractive."
"Fuck's sake--" Johnny swallows the remainder of his complaint and, with the self-preservation instinct of a suicidal lemming, shoves his hips upwards, towards Archy and Archy's hand and Archy's straight-razor.
Archy lets the force of his own thrust cut him open at the line of his pubic hair, and Johnny makes a sound that's all vowels and too loud.
"Bugger me," Archy says mildly, "you really are a dirty bugger. That was only a fucking scratch." He checks back up: the broad shallow curve on Johnny's stomach is disgorging a steady flow of lurid red, wet and welcoming. His neck has slowed to a sluggish trickle, but gravity's taken it almost past his ribcage.
The most recent gouge is short and a little deeper, and its spitting out darker blood into Johnny's pubic hair, flattening and gluing together the matt in gouts. Archy tongues the inside of his upper lip, slightly surprised by his desire to lap it away.
"Reckon I could make you cry?" Archy asks, back to the friendly-threatening voice he uses for supposed equals who need to be reminded they're his inferiors. It's a good voice. Archy's perfected it over the years. No need to be rude, no. Just polite, friendly, and let them know you've got a gun in your trousers and a knife in your pocket and the fag in your mouth is what they should be really afraid of. Archy knows his business.
"I reckon you can do whatever you want, Uncle," Johnny says in a faint and faintly-mocking voice.
And that it's it, the fucking clever little bastard's made him. He's found the key: something red-hot and imperative wraps itself around Archy's ribcage under his suit and climbs the back of his throat. It surges through him and nearly bucks his hips against Johnny's thigh: he's ended up between his legs somehow, one of Johnny's crooked upward and the other lounging off the sofa like a fucking car crash dummy.
whatever you want is it?
Archy grits his teeth and wrestles the strait-jacket of self-control down over the heat. Clever little fucking prick. Half-admiring, half-angry, Archy thinks, I'm going to fucking have you, my lad. I'm going to fuck you until you cry for your mother. You ain't going to walk right for a week. 'Do whatever you want', is it? Oh you don't want that.
He flashes the razor against Johnny's thigh - the outer, not the inner, he doesn't want to kill the prick - without concern for the angle, though he keeps the stroke itself light, and Johnny kicks like a frightened rabbit.
"Jesus!"
"Anything I want," Archy says, and it comes out as a sneer. "Anything I fucking want, is it?"
Johnny says, "Try me."
Archy almost laughs. He lets go of Johnny's wrist, puts the palm of his hand on the profusely-bleeding gash in Johnny's thigh, and leans up the length of his body, careful not to let his suit fall into the great red mess of Johnny's torso.
He brings his face right up to Johnny's slack mouth and sun-dazzled face and lays the razor-blade flat against Johnny's cheek. "Don't test me, sweetheart."
Johnny laughs at him again, a great delighted, childish laugh that's cut through with panting. He smirks, tries to catch Archy's gaze, and says, "Ain't scared of you, Arch."
"You should be."
"Why's that then," Johnny asks, still grinning a fixed grin, his cheek bunched against the metal of Archy's straight-razor as if it's a comforting hand. "What're you going to do, eh? Going to make me cry, Arch? Going to hurt me?"
Archy has then a clear memory of all the times he's carefully poured the broken mess of Johnny Quid into taxis and hospital rooms, the times he was deputised to drag a drunk or bruised or unconscious Johnny off to bed, the times he's wrestled him down or picked him up or cradled his post-puking head like a china ornament. Johnny knows Archy ain't going to smash him to pieces; they both know it ain't even possible. Johnny's not strong, but he's flexible: whatever abuse you put him through he comes back, laughing and bleeding, humming Guns of Brixton.
Course he's not fucking scared of Archy.
Archy's hand is slippery on his leg wound, and he nearly loses his grip, skidding on blood and making Johnny hiss and curse and bend himself towards Archy.
"Watch me fucking suit."
He doesn't mean it. Suits can be dry-cleaned. The oil slick of blood under his fingers is worth a lot more than this fucking bit of tailoring, no matter how sharp it is, no matter how much Archy likes it.
He kisses Johnny to shock him, but it doesn't work.
Johnny opens his mouth and spreads his legs even wider, trying to hump his hips at Archy, pushing his arse down towards wherever he must think Archy's cock is. His thigh is tense, loose, tense: Archy's razor remains still and cool against Johnny's cheek, threatening a mutilation for them both if he turns his head suddenly.
He can taste blood on Johnny's tongue, but whether it's from bitten lips or suggestion he has no idea. Johnny puts a genuinely trembling hand on the back of Archy's head and pushes him in closer, opening his mouth to stroke Archy's tongue with his.
Archy hasn't the heart any more to jab him in the cheek with the razor, break the kiss, tell him to put his hand down. He just kisses harder, firmer, and takes his blood-slippery hand from Johnny's thigh.
He doesn't give Johnny any warning, because where would the fun be in that? He only slides two red, wet fingers into the arsehole that Johnny's sprawling legs have so helpfully stretched.
Blood isn't a lubricant. Not for long. Archy knows that, and Johnny must know that by now; but instead of clenching in shock around him, Johnny only forces his thighs further apart - much further and he's going to be doing the fucking splits - and makes a sound into Archy's open mouth that consists of "u"s and "n"s and nothing else.
Archy cannot keep himself from thrusting vaguely at the back of his own hand, his cock complaining about being left out of everything.
He tries to pull back for a breath, but Johnny whips his other hand in so he's grabbing Archy's head like a drowning man at a buoy, and he kisses Archy's mouth with a terrible damp ferocity, and fucks himself down onto Archy's hand.
No, Archy thinks, tilting the razor until the sharp edge bites Johnny's cheek. No. He's not come this far to settle for fingerfucking Johnny and ruining his suit for nothing.
"Wha-" Johnny says, slipping his mouth from Archy's indignantly.
"Flies," Archy mutters, and Johnny lets go ot his head; he's sort of proud the word came out in English, since the inside of his head feels like a fucking rave of the sort he used to have to drag Johnny out of when dear John was all of sweet sixteen.
It ain't easy: they lean back at once and Archy nearly fucking breaks his own wrist and there's blood everywhere and Johnny's hands aren't steady and then his cock's so fucking hard that it hurts to fight it out of his trousers and every time Johnny's cock brushes against his stomach or Archy's now-ruined shirt he shudders and loses his grip -
But some-fucking-how Archy finds himself wiping blood from Johnny's thigh onto his cock. It's not going to help much. It's not going to help at all. But it feels pretty fucking good, and when he pushes inside Johnny he feels even fucking better.
Johnny tries to pull him back, to kiss him again, but Archy slaps him down unthinkingly, hissing, "Fuck off."
The razor falls to the floor, which is one less thing to worry about, and Archy seizes the back of Johnny's raised leg with his bloody hand. He drapes Johnny's calf over his shoulder, grabs his blood-smeared hip with his other hand, and drives into Johnny like Johnny is meat.
"Ahm," Johnny says, clutching vainly at various parts of himself with red and frantic hands before making a dive for his own cock.
"No," Archy says, smacking his hand away hard enough that Johnny's arm hits the wall. He doesn't break his stroke; his head feels too small and his jaw hurts from gritting it but it's all fading away into the hideous and wonderful friction of his cock inside Johnny's arse.
"Fuck's sake --" Johnny whines, the words coming out of him in uneven gouts. "Fucking--touch--"
"Keep your hands off your dick for five minutes," Archy says as coherently as he can: it comes out as a barked order, and Johnny settles for grabbing at his own chest with clawed fingers.
His suit, his fucking suit is streaked and stained with Johnny’s blood, and his dick aches. Johnny has draped an arm across his face and his rocking and cursing in time with each push. Daylight bathes them both in perspective and just as Archy’s aware of the absurdity of it all he feels the orgasm storm out of his brain and through the rest of his body: there’s a moment where he loses the ability to see, and he gropes blindly for Johnny’s cock.
Archy comes a little too soon, but he keeps pounding for a moment through the discomfort and the wheezing, his hand around Johnny’s cock wet with blood and sweat as Johnny blurts out a string of syllables that include “no”, “yes”, “fuck off”, and “fucking hell”.
When Johnny comes - which he does with as much melodrama as everything else - Archy finally pulls out his decidedly raw dick and wipes Johnny’s come on his own face.
“Yuck,” Johnny says, unimpressed.
“How can you possibly say that about anything,” Archy says rather breathlessly, sitting back on the sofa with Johnny’s leg behind him like a cushion. “I’ve seen you rolling in your own vomit like a dog in shit, you rotten fucker.”
“That was then, this is now,” Johnny says absently, wiping his face with his upper arm. “Jesus Christ. You’ve broken me. I am fucked on the inside. I’m going to die.”
“Where’s your manners?” Archy says, barely holding back a laugh as he slaps Johnny on the thigh, the unblemished thigh in front of him, with something approaching affection. “Come on. Say thank you.”
Johnny gathers up his most horrible grin and says, “Thank you, Uncle,” and looks down at the catastrophe that Archy has transformed his body into. “You don’t happen to know,” he adds, his eyes crawling over the fresh wounds in his torso and thigh like flies over shit, “where the first aid kit is, do you?”
Fandom: RocknRolla
Words: 7000
Pairing: Johnny/Archy
Warnings: I have just upended my Id into a Word Doc again. Just… frankly excessive quantities of blood.
Disclaimer: I am very sorry to Guy Ritchie about this.
Archy walks into the office that was once Lenny Cole's to find his nominal boss and occasional idiot to be babysat draped across the leather armchair like discarded laundry, and bleeding somewhat.
Maybe Archy should be concerned, and for a moment his pulse jumps and he begins cataloguing all the people who might be responsible and all the ways in which he, good dog Archy, is going to take them apart. But he's sharp, is Archy, so the next thing he notices after the flash of red and the way Johnny is once again naked from the waist up (Johnny harbours a grudge against clothing, or he behaves as if it's a personal affront to his nature), is the knife in John's hand.
Johnny Quid doesn't really sit on chairs if he can hurl himself across them. He's been like that ever since Archy can remember: right now he's half upside-down, his arm extended over his face, a knife-tip pressed to the sinew and bone that makes up his ex-junkie inner arm, and he's dripping blood onto his own lips.
"John," Archy says levelly, "what the fuck are you playing at?"
"It looks nice," Johnny says, tipping his head back to regard Archy with blown pupils and bloodspatter over his cheeks and mouth. "It has a profound aesthetic quality."
"You been at the wacky baccy again?" Archy asks, making a mental note to have someone come in and clean the rug. Johnny Quid doesn't give a fuck that it's a fucking £3,500 woven artifact but Archy fucking does.
"Having a spiritual experience, Uncle," says Johnny, smearing his arm across his lips, his knife hand drooping haphazardly.
"Stoned," Archy translates.
"Clean as a whistle and twice as shiny," Johnny mumbles, and he flops his arm out to present a series of gashes each three inches long, for inspection. Like he's in fucking primary school and made a pasta picture and wants praise for it, instead of dropping blood all over the carpet.
"I dunno about that, John."
"I confess," Johnny says, arching his back so that he almost tumbles off the chair entirely, "I am suffering from a cripplingly intense case of erectile function, but I assure you, no substance has entered the temple of my body."
He looks a fucking picture. Rehab didn't put that much back on his frame, and the way he's extending himself like a human draught excluder is doing no favours to his ribcage. There's a smudge of bright red across his torso, like an arrow towards his cock - Archy can see, thank you very much, he doesn't need Johnny to it out - and drips on his nips. Nipples.
Johnny smears a lurid red F on his abdomen with his index finger.
"Jesus Christ," Archy says, shaking his head, and he leaves to fetch a towel. Sometimes you just have to clean up the mess afterwards, whatever kind of mess it happens to be, and Archy's adept at that. Years for Lenny, months for Johnny: cleaning up their messes. He has to admit, though, he was expecting maybe more of Johnny's undignified vomiting and stumbling, not this freakishly intense display of bodily fluids.
It's not that Archy doesn't trust accountants. It's that they're criminal accountants, and they, like all intelligent people, think everyone else is stupid because they never got the AAT qualification. They sometimes make the mistake of thinking they can rip off Johnny Quid without him noticing. The trouble for them is that when Johnny can be bothered he's extremely good at maths, and when he can't be bothered Archy knows a thing or two about a thing or two, and he doesn't have any qualms about knocking a tooth out over a sneaky little bit of fiddling.
This is what he's engaged in when Johnny prances into the office wearing trousers that are inadequately held up by his hips - the suits are for outside - and more or less waves his stomach at Archy.
He's smeared the words "Fuck me" on his gut in what's almost certainly his own blood: Archy makes the deduction based on the fact that his left arm is dripping onto the carpet, covered in rivulets of red and darker red as blood dries and stiffens amid his hair. And Johnny's right hand index finger is bright and wet with blood, and above all this is precisely the kind of stupid shit that he does.
"No," Archy says, going back to the accounts. "Wash that shit off, John."
"It's art," says Johnny. Now, Archy may not know a lot about art - Tank has been forthcoming on this - but he does know what he likes, and he does know that scrawling obscenities on your lower abdomen is at best graffiti and at worse an ill-timed come-on.
"Fuck off," Archy suggests, "you've an empire to rebuild."
"All work and no play makes John a dull boy, Uncle," says Johnny severely, inspecting his index finger with a look of awe. "You should take a holiday for the afternoon. As your boss, I command it."
He slides the finger into his mouth, and Archy watches him slowly fellate the coating of blood off with patient lips; he raises his eyebrows at Johnny's pathetic display.
"As my boss?" Archy says. "Well, well. As the person around here who knows how this business works - stop being a dirty bugger and clean that shit off your stomach."
"It's not shit," Johnny says serenely, pulling his finger from his mouth to indicate the knife wound on his inner arm, smearing fresh blood and crackling the dried, "it's blood."
The way he says the word is borderline pornographic. Archy shakes his head and goes back to the calculator: they have god knows how many programs to do this now, but he's of the old school and he's fucked if he's going to start letting a computer do his thinking for him.
"It's a bloody nuisance is what it is," Archy says, scanning the list of figures slowly.
He doesn't look up when Johnny flounces out. With John it doesn't pay to pay much attention to his mood swings: they're only what you'd expect after years on various dope and growing up under the untender tutelage of Lenny Cole, and when he's not being a fucking prima donna or fucking his way through his bodyguards he's sharp enough and smart enough to be worth the preening and pissing about. Mostly.
When the bloody handprint shows up on the fridge door, Archy takes a brief inventory of the people in the building to make sure everyone's still alive and uninjured, then makes Bandy clean it off.
Bandy's improving. He doesn't complain that it's not his job this time.
It's not that he doesn't want to fuck Johnny, either; he acknowledged almost as soon as Johnny was clean that now he didn't smell like a badger's arse the boy was a long lean streak of sex. It's not that he thinks it'd "jeopardise their working relationship" or whatever bit of management wonk-speak those audiobooks Turbo insists on listening to in the car say, nothing that sad. He's just busy, and perhaps he thinks there's better ways to go about it than this.
For example, just fucking asking like a sane member of the human race.
"Christ's sake, Johnny boy," Archy sighs, the evening he walks into his own sodding room to find Johnny Quid extended over his nice leather sofa - a "gift" from his old man, in that Archy took it out of his house before he set the place on fire - barefoot and bare-chested and bleeding.
"Good evening," Johnny says lazily, raising one hand in benediction like he's the fucking Pope. He's wearing sunglasses. It's ten thirty in the evening and he's wearing sunglasses. To Archy's mind that spells out something rotten in the state of Johnny's veins, but from the looks of it the only thing troubling his bloodstream is the fact it's been diverted down the outside of his body.
There's a series of nicks - just nicks - in Johnny's neck, and he's got a knife (actually a bayonet, fuck knows where he picked it up and why he didn't just use one of the countless knives the house has on offer, but who the fuck knows why Johnny does anything?) dangling like a limp cock from his right hand.
Blood flows out of the ladder of cuts in a steady, sluggish waterfall and pools in Johnny's deep dip clavicle, ready to begin a swift descent of his largely hairless toastrack chest. It's a wild and vivid red, opaque and healthy. No douting that Johnny's in good shape these days, for a man who romanced the pipe with such enthusiasm. Or for a man who, two days ago, drank so much fucking Chivas Regal (out of the sodding bottle, too) that he redecorated the hallway to the bathroom in a sprinkler of stomach acid.
"I'm balancing my humours," Johnny explains, running his left hand through the blood. It smears in a bright scarlet streak across his upper chest, and Johnny makes a liquid movement with his wrist to trail a spiral around his navel in thinning red. "I am excessively sanguine. Therefore, bloodletting."
"Bollocks," says Archy, putting his hands in his pockets. He has no fucking idea what Johnny's talking about, but that's usual; the shit that comes out of his mouth when he's not dealing with business is - the word Tank used was "esoteric", and after Archy looked it up he's inclined to agree. "You're a mess."
Johnny holds up his red-and-white hand, reflecting light of his own blood so he looks as if he's been bathed in liquid rubies. "I'm an artist."
"You're a fucking nutjob," Archy says evenly, but he comes and sits on the sofa. Johnny moves his leg out of the way, leaving Archy trapped between one bent knee and one which is trailing off the sofa, and within easy reach of a hard-on that Johnny's junkie tracksuit bottoms are doing fuck-all to hide.
Sadly what with Johnny having a case of the mentals this evening, it's quite easy to resist the temptation to put his hand on it.
"Am I not beautiful?" Johnny asks sarcastically, reaching up with his knife hand to flick his sunglasses off his eyes. He smears blood on his damagingly sharp cheekbones, and props himself up on an elbow so that he can look Archy in the eye.
"Yes, John, but you're also covered in blood," Archy sighs.
"I'm not covered in blood," Johnny corrects, toying with the knife, his left hand resting at the top of his tracksuit waistband with a single red finger dipping just below the elastic. "I'd like to be, but this is a scratch, a scratch. And unlike good Mercutio, 'twill not serve."
"Well if you want to get your hands dirty that badly," says Archy, his hands firmly in his pockets and Johnny's knee resting maddeningly against his back, "come down when we evict Greek Tony."
Johnny rolls his eyes. "I don't want someone else's dirty junkie blood on me," he complains, as if Archy is being unnecessarily dense. "Fuck's sake. Next you'll be suggesting I eat my dinner out of the toilet. What's the matter with you?"
"What's the matter with me?" Archy asks, raising his eyebrows. That's a bit rich.
His ward and boss, genius class act and unhinged pervert, stretches idly and brings his left hand back to his throat to stroke blood back and forth across the pale skin. There's a kind of sick sensuality to it, not exactly alleviated by the way Johnny's mouth stretches into an elastic, stoned smile and his eyelids flutter.
"Do you know how I figured this out?" Johnny asks, but Archy can tell it's one of them whatsitcalleds, a rhetorical question. Not one Johnny wants answering. "I was at school, Arch." He opens one lazy eye and squints at Archy with a stare that's as hard and harsh as any of Lenny's, for all that it's unfocussed and accompanied by Johnny rubbing his bloodied palm down over his chest to his nipple (and his arm is shaking, just a little).
Archy says nothing. He watches Johnny paint himself red.
"Tried to off meself," Johnny says, licking the tip of his finger and running it through the ladder of shallow cuts. "Didn't much fancy spending a few more years walking around with a boner for blokes, you know. Didn't much fancy living under Lenny's roof no more, neither. Never was as comfortable with that as you, Uncle."
Archy's hands are fists in his pocket. He's been trying to tell himself, if he knew what a child-beating piece of shit Lenny was he'd have stopped it, but he knows himself too well. He's a loyal lieutenant to the fucking end, and Johnny Quid was, by every measure available, an annoying little shit. And if your dad don't beat you, how're you ever going to learn?
But Johnny's right about one thing, he never had no period of discomfort over who he wants to fuck. He just never bothered telling anyone, unless he was going to fuck them. It seems easy that way.
"Took a fucking Bic razor," Johnny says, worrying at the cuts on his neck the way Archy's rubbed the soft puckering arseholes of some very sweet boys in the past, "popped out the bendy little blade and --" he mimes with his knife hand, so sudden that Archy nearly jumps, and draws another fresh line in his neck.
Johnny's body twitches and slumps at the pain he's inflicted on himself, and there's more, more, fuck it, what's the word, more lassitude in his voice when he starts speaking again. There's a more boneless smile on his face.
"-- truly pathetic," Johnny says, wiping the fingers of his left hand over the new cut, "Who the fuck commits suicide with a ten-for-a-pound razor?"
Archy says nothing. Johnny plays with the new-sprung blood like he's fingering himself.
"But then it bled," he says, and he says it like he's saying he came. Archy leans in closer, until the outside of his thigh touches Johnny's balls through the tracksuit bottoms, and Johnny smiles at either him, or at the memory. "I remember standing there with this ... with my neck stinging like someone'd slapped it, and there was this," Johnny raises his fingers for Archy to see, wet and red and almost trembling. "Like something magical. I didn't realise it was so beautiful, Arch, I really didn't. They make you read poets and it's all la-de-fucking-da sunrises and girls with golden hair, and then there's this. Like junk. It's fucking beautiful."
Johnny laughs at himself. Archy doesn't: there's a light in his eyes, and the glistening tip of his fingers is starting to dry. Archy grabs Johnny's wrist unbidden and presses his tongue to Johnny's fingertips.
Johnny inhales hard and says, "I haven't finished my story yet, Uncle."
Fuck your story, Archy thinks, but he kisses the blood-and-saliva-drenched tips of Johnny's fingers, releases his wrist, and nods. "Go on."
Johnny puts his hand to his neck again, smearing blood over his palm and the layered, textured drying strata of his older wounds. "I think I painted my mouth with it," he says, and he rubs a bloody thumb over his lower lip. "I forget why I got the idea to get my dick out but, you know, thirteen, when isn't your dick in your hand or someone else's?"
Well, Archy thinks, some of us wait until we're slightly more than a child before we start fucking everything that moves, but then Johnny always was a precocious little prick.
Johnny lifts his hips ceiling-wards and holds Archy's gaze. "Aynway," he says, and he puts his bloody, ruddy, gore-soaked hand onto his crotch and gives his cock a god, hard squeeze, right next to Archy's arm. "I think I fucking came my brains out."
There is a big, red smudge on the crotch of Johnny's tracksuit. Archy can see it between his fingers. Johnny squeezes his cock again, arches his back, and runs the tip of the knife over his own nipple. Archy wants to slap it away and tell him to stop being so fucking silly, but he knows that's not the only thing he wants.
"So while I am enjoying you staring at me like a rare steak," Johnny concludes, his sunglasses slithering back down his nose unaided, "I am bored with the dance now and would really prefer it if you would just fuck me, now, please, Uncle."
Archy takes his hand from his pocket at last and gives Johnny a not-quite avuncular pat on the thigh. It's the squeeze he gives the lad's muscle at the end that breaks it from being platonic and reassuring into being somewhat longing and reassuring. He leans over Johnny - pressing Johnny's hand further into his crotch. He steadies himself with a hand on Johnny's shoulder.
He leans in to Johnny's mouth, blood-smeared lips parted, and hangs above them like storm cloud. Archy takes a deep breath.
"Not until we've had you tested."
"What." The cold, steel-edged rage of thwarted desire in his voice is so reminiscent of Lenny that Archy could almost laugh. They might have fucking despised each other, but they have more in common than Johnny will ever know or notice. Except Johnny's no grass.
"John," Archy says, giving him a fond pat on the shoulder and maintaining an inch distant of kissing him - it requires a lot more willpower than he'd expected, but Archy's got self-control down to a meticulous art, unlike the Rock Star here. "You are a dirty, dirty bastard. I'm not putting my dick inside you until I know you're not going to give me thirty fucking diseases."
He levers himself off and back from the sofa before Johnny can either bite him or knee him in the balls - both of which he's done before in a fucking drunk temper - and straightens his tie.
Once Johnny's out of the room Archy straights his cock, too, and snorts to himself. The clinic was clear: Johnny dodged every bullet. He doubts Johnny's managed to pick up anything in the meantime, but God if making him squirm isn't outright hilarious.
Archy is in the middle of trying to eat a plate of chips - not into this fancy muck, he hasn't even caught up with this obsession with pasta half of England seems to have caught, never mind the current fad for not cooking fish they caught off the bloody Japanese - and draft a letter to one of their lawyers about evicting some cokey little media prick who defaulted on his rent, when Johnny stamps into the office like a five year old, slams a print-out onto the desk in front of him, and stamps out again.
Scratching his balls with the barrell of a Beretta, because if Johnny's a petulant five-year-old - and he fucking acts like one - he's a dangerous and weapon-obsessed one.
"In the middle of something, Johnny," Archy says, pointing at the letter. It's like the nineties all over again, only Johnny's taller now, and less deferential (more's the fucking pity).
"All work and no play, Arch."
"Yeah, and all play and no work sinks the business, Johnny boy." Archy makes a 'shoo' motion with his hand. "Piss off out of it."
"Even Alexander the Great had fuck breaks," Johnny complains, doing his shirt back up. "He had Hephaistion, I get you."
"You bloody well do not get me if you don't fuck off out and let me finish this," Archy says, privately enjoying the look of mutinous dissatisfaction on Johnny's face. There's a straight-razor sitting in Archy's trouser pocket and he can feel it against his thigh like a hand on it. It's all he can do not to jiggle his leg. "Patience is a virtue, you moany sod. Get out."
Archy is busy until well into the small hours of the morning. The job doesn't sleep, and while it's still kicking and squawling like an angry baby, neither does Archy. He's in Cheapside until two, directing some muscle after an eviction goes tits-up, and he's in Wandsworth until five, having a cosy chat with a bent copper about making the whole thing go away.
By the time he gets back to the house - it's "the house" now, not Johnny's house, and Archy's house is painfully gather dust - the sun's up and commuters are on their way to their uneventful little office blocks.
Despite being properly cream crackered, he takes the time to hang his clothes and brush his teeth, because he's not a fucking barbarian and whatever else his Dad done, he brought him up proper.
He sleeps until noon.
When he wakes the sun's in his eyes and the ache of tiredness is gone from his joints. Archy sits up and swings himself out of bed, naked as the day he was born.
"Top of the morning," Johnny says from the sofa. Archy squints. He's dressed up. "Or lunchtime."
"Give me a minute," Archy says, limping to the bathroom. He can feel Johnny's eyes on him as he goes, and he resist the urge to slap his own arse by way of acknowledgement.
After a shower and some meticulous cleaning under his finger nails Archy's not so much ready to face the day as prepared to punch the day in the neck if it gives him any lip. He still needs some bloody coffee in his body before he can handle whatever it is Johnny's all dressed up for.
He dresses in the bathroom, because old habits die hard.
"Aww look," Johnny says, when Archy returns clean-shaven and aftershave-splashed, his hair neat and his suit straight. "We match."
They assuredly fucking don't. Johnny inhabits suits the way squatters take over mansions: with force, ill-fitting, and likely to be out again in a short space of time. God knows Archy's tried to make him look the part but for all his expensive education he's not a man built for the tailor so much as for the stage.
Today is no exception. He looks like he's been shoved into that fucking Italian number like a cat into a sack.
"What's this in aid of, Johnny boy? Got something planned?" Archy eyeballs him with no small amount of suspicion, but without coffee he's missing the vital component that allows him to strip Johnny down to his intentions in seconds.
"Been busy," says Johnny, who is never normally conscious before the sun kisses the rooftops of West London.
"Is that a fact?"
"I have been ensuring that there is no business to drag you out of this room for the rest of today," says Johnny, leaning forwards on the sofa. There's an old school tie untied around his neck and his shirt's unbuttoned to the dents in his sternum. Archy can see the scabs where his cuts are healing.
"Very considerate of you," Archy says in the same voice he uses for contractors who've actually bothered to provide on time and with a minimum of fuss: threatening, but polite. An undercurrent of genteel violence. A cup of tea and a biscuit and a fractured fibia.
Johnny takes Archy's straight-razor from his own jacket pocket, and shrugs the jacket off. "I thought you might fancy a day off."
"Very astute," Archy agrees, taking the folded razor out of Johnny's hand and closing his fingers around Johnny's wrist. He leans his hips towards the sofa, and presses Johnny's unresisting palm against his cock as he opens the razor. "That suit cost a lot of money."
"I've got a lot of money," Johnny points out. He has. It's almost revolting. The little boy that Archy once was, who considered finding five pence on the floor a major contribution to the household finances, occasionally looks at this fucking carefree opulence in wonder, and occasionally in violent disgust.
"All the same, John, it'd be a great shame to damage it," Archy says in a low voice, inspecting his own reflection in the blade of the straight-razor. "I'm not going to tell you again: take it off."
Johnny excavates himself from his suit at speed, and like the fucking urchin he is he just leaves the entire ensemble strewn over the sofa and floor.
"Hang it up," Archy says, turning the razor until the light from the midday sun gets in Johnny's eyes. His pupils shrink and leave a vast circle of reddish-brown.
"Fuck's--"
"Hang it up," Archy repeats, as Johnny screws up his long thin face against the painful light. Johnny's so averse to daylight he might as well be half-vampire, and Archy takes a certain amount of pleasure in tormenting him with it.
Johnny, naked and scarred, his bare arse pale in the bright sun, scurries around picking up his clothes and hurling them haphazardly on to a hanger. He gives Archy a defiant look and flops back onto the sofa like a piece of dirty laundry himself.
I know they taught you better than that at school, Archy thinks, but Johnny never paid much attention to what he was taught, and he's had years of fame and fortune to burn of all his good habits in the purifying smoke of the crack pipe.
Instead of mentioning it, he points the razor at the floor and taps his cheek. "No hard feelings, now. Give your uncle a kiss."
He can feel Johnny stiffen, inhale, and breathe out in a jagged rush before he leans into the touch of cold steel like he's leaning into a kiss.
"Oh," Archy says, inclining his head in acknowledgement. "Very good."
Johnny smiles at him blissfully. "One does one's best, Uncle."
"Shut yer mouth," Archy says evenly. "This is a delicate fucking operation. I slip, and you're dead."
"You know what you're doing," says Johnny, tipping his head back so that the whole expanse of his throat is open to the room and most of all to the razor Archy's pressing against it. "Like you've never cut someone's throat before."
"That's the point, Johnny boy," Archy says. "Normally when I do this, you ain't walking away afterwards."
"I know," Johnny says to the ceiling, his eyes shut, as Archy turns the straight-razor this way and that, trying to figure out the angle and pressure that will make a very shallow cut. "I wouldn't have a hard-on you could beat a kid to death with if I thought this was safe."
"If you don't shut it," Archy says, impatient, "I will have your cock off."
Johnny shuts his maw and lets Archy tickle his long neck, searching for a spot. He settles somewhere over Johnny's Adam's apple; not directly over it, where he might open the lad's trachea and leave him whistling his last in short order (the way they did with Peckham Keith back in '86), nor too far to one side, where the jugular lives (the jugular shot was always Mickey Stuart's favourite, right up until he got on the wrong side of some Yardies and they had to cut him down from a telegraph pole two days after his neck swallowed up the wire noose).
He flicks the blade at a shallow, shaving angle. It can't penetrate too deeply like this, but it's fast enough that its own friction should open the skin.
Sure enough there's an immediate twitch of Johnny's muscles and his eyes fly open, along with his mouth. That'll be that sting he mentioned: the blood, so bright it's almost orange, seeps out of the wound and begins beading quickly into one thick line.
"Oh, he ain't going to help you," Archy says with a smile. He lays the very tip of his finger on Johnny's lips, the razor hanging from his fingers a mere twitch away from Johnny's bare neck. "What do we say?"
"Thank you," Johnny says, breathy as a porn star. He raises a hand to the narrow crimson waterfall, but Archy grabs him by the wrist.
"No," he says, "my turn."
Archy follows the flow of the blood with the curved edge of the straight-razor, tracing it and then out-pacing it, amused by the way Johnny tries to both lift his body to the touch of the steel and cringe away from it all at once.
"Your hands, Uncle, if you would be so good," Johnny says, but his voice is thick and a litle garbled.
"Don't be a smartarse, sweetheart," says Archy, tightening his grip on Johnny's wrist; Johnny goes limp. "Behave yourself, or you won't get none."
"Hands," Johnny repeats, as Archy treks the razor over the heaving landscape of Johnny's torso, drawing a cold but bloodless line directly between his nipples. "Please."
"Why's that then, John?" Archy asks in a conversational voice, crushing the small bones of Johnny's wrist together for the pleasant way that they rub off each other. He can feel his own cock getting harder in answer to Johnny's, but there's no sense in rushing things. If there's one thing he's learned in life, it's taking your time gets the best results. Johnny, of course, has all the impatience of youth in him still. "Afraid I might do something like this?"
He twists the razor abruptly across the shelf between Johnny's ribcage and Johnny's carefully-maintained stomach (for someone so fucking lazy, Johnny does a lot of sit-ups). The angle's right, shallow enough, that it won't go deep, but it goes long. It opens a broad sweep on his abdomen and it fucks a sound like "ahhh-ffsss" out of Johnny as his body jerks at the pain.
Archy alternates his attention between the swelling string of blood beads as they merge and trickle and pour from his body, and watching Johnny's eyelids flutter in sudden ecstasy. He still manages to be a smartarse, even now:
"I wouldn't say afraid," Johnny says, his voice low in his throat. "Put your hands on me. Please."
"No," Archy says, cheerful and bright as the midday sun.
"Please," Johnny repeats. Archy knows his grovelling of old. If there's one thing junkies know how to do, it's beg with broken sincerity and abandon their dignity at any sign of recompense. It annoyed him then; it annoys him less now.
"Stop fucking asking, Johnny," he says, tapping the razor-blade on Johnny's hip bone to see him flinch. "You'll get what I give you when I give it to you, and if you keep whining you ain't getting nothing. Behave yourself."
Johnny's head falls back over the arm of the sofa and he gives a put-upon sigh that's ruined by the panting it can't supress. "You ain't half a bastard, Arch."
"Like that don't make your cock hard," Archy snorts. He strokes the blunt edge of the razor over Johnny's hip bone and smiles to himself. "Fuck me, you look like you're going to burst. I bet I could just breathe on that and set you off."
To his credit, Johnny is trying very hard to keep his voice steady; to the credit of Archy's work, there's no fucking chance. He nearly squeaks off back into adolesence. "Arch."
"Don't whine," Archy says, tapping him on the pubes with the razor tip. "It ain't attractive."
"Fuck's sake--" Johnny swallows the remainder of his complaint and, with the self-preservation instinct of a suicidal lemming, shoves his hips upwards, towards Archy and Archy's hand and Archy's straight-razor.
Archy lets the force of his own thrust cut him open at the line of his pubic hair, and Johnny makes a sound that's all vowels and too loud.
"Bugger me," Archy says mildly, "you really are a dirty bugger. That was only a fucking scratch." He checks back up: the broad shallow curve on Johnny's stomach is disgorging a steady flow of lurid red, wet and welcoming. His neck has slowed to a sluggish trickle, but gravity's taken it almost past his ribcage.
The most recent gouge is short and a little deeper, and its spitting out darker blood into Johnny's pubic hair, flattening and gluing together the matt in gouts. Archy tongues the inside of his upper lip, slightly surprised by his desire to lap it away.
"Reckon I could make you cry?" Archy asks, back to the friendly-threatening voice he uses for supposed equals who need to be reminded they're his inferiors. It's a good voice. Archy's perfected it over the years. No need to be rude, no. Just polite, friendly, and let them know you've got a gun in your trousers and a knife in your pocket and the fag in your mouth is what they should be really afraid of. Archy knows his business.
"I reckon you can do whatever you want, Uncle," Johnny says in a faint and faintly-mocking voice.
And that it's it, the fucking clever little bastard's made him. He's found the key: something red-hot and imperative wraps itself around Archy's ribcage under his suit and climbs the back of his throat. It surges through him and nearly bucks his hips against Johnny's thigh: he's ended up between his legs somehow, one of Johnny's crooked upward and the other lounging off the sofa like a fucking car crash dummy.
whatever you want is it?
Archy grits his teeth and wrestles the strait-jacket of self-control down over the heat. Clever little fucking prick. Half-admiring, half-angry, Archy thinks, I'm going to fucking have you, my lad. I'm going to fuck you until you cry for your mother. You ain't going to walk right for a week. 'Do whatever you want', is it? Oh you don't want that.
He flashes the razor against Johnny's thigh - the outer, not the inner, he doesn't want to kill the prick - without concern for the angle, though he keeps the stroke itself light, and Johnny kicks like a frightened rabbit.
"Jesus!"
"Anything I want," Archy says, and it comes out as a sneer. "Anything I fucking want, is it?"
Johnny says, "Try me."
Archy almost laughs. He lets go of Johnny's wrist, puts the palm of his hand on the profusely-bleeding gash in Johnny's thigh, and leans up the length of his body, careful not to let his suit fall into the great red mess of Johnny's torso.
He brings his face right up to Johnny's slack mouth and sun-dazzled face and lays the razor-blade flat against Johnny's cheek. "Don't test me, sweetheart."
Johnny laughs at him again, a great delighted, childish laugh that's cut through with panting. He smirks, tries to catch Archy's gaze, and says, "Ain't scared of you, Arch."
"You should be."
"Why's that then," Johnny asks, still grinning a fixed grin, his cheek bunched against the metal of Archy's straight-razor as if it's a comforting hand. "What're you going to do, eh? Going to make me cry, Arch? Going to hurt me?"
Archy has then a clear memory of all the times he's carefully poured the broken mess of Johnny Quid into taxis and hospital rooms, the times he was deputised to drag a drunk or bruised or unconscious Johnny off to bed, the times he's wrestled him down or picked him up or cradled his post-puking head like a china ornament. Johnny knows Archy ain't going to smash him to pieces; they both know it ain't even possible. Johnny's not strong, but he's flexible: whatever abuse you put him through he comes back, laughing and bleeding, humming Guns of Brixton.
Course he's not fucking scared of Archy.
Archy's hand is slippery on his leg wound, and he nearly loses his grip, skidding on blood and making Johnny hiss and curse and bend himself towards Archy.
"Watch me fucking suit."
He doesn't mean it. Suits can be dry-cleaned. The oil slick of blood under his fingers is worth a lot more than this fucking bit of tailoring, no matter how sharp it is, no matter how much Archy likes it.
He kisses Johnny to shock him, but it doesn't work.
Johnny opens his mouth and spreads his legs even wider, trying to hump his hips at Archy, pushing his arse down towards wherever he must think Archy's cock is. His thigh is tense, loose, tense: Archy's razor remains still and cool against Johnny's cheek, threatening a mutilation for them both if he turns his head suddenly.
He can taste blood on Johnny's tongue, but whether it's from bitten lips or suggestion he has no idea. Johnny puts a genuinely trembling hand on the back of Archy's head and pushes him in closer, opening his mouth to stroke Archy's tongue with his.
Archy hasn't the heart any more to jab him in the cheek with the razor, break the kiss, tell him to put his hand down. He just kisses harder, firmer, and takes his blood-slippery hand from Johnny's thigh.
He doesn't give Johnny any warning, because where would the fun be in that? He only slides two red, wet fingers into the arsehole that Johnny's sprawling legs have so helpfully stretched.
Blood isn't a lubricant. Not for long. Archy knows that, and Johnny must know that by now; but instead of clenching in shock around him, Johnny only forces his thighs further apart - much further and he's going to be doing the fucking splits - and makes a sound into Archy's open mouth that consists of "u"s and "n"s and nothing else.
Archy cannot keep himself from thrusting vaguely at the back of his own hand, his cock complaining about being left out of everything.
He tries to pull back for a breath, but Johnny whips his other hand in so he's grabbing Archy's head like a drowning man at a buoy, and he kisses Archy's mouth with a terrible damp ferocity, and fucks himself down onto Archy's hand.
No, Archy thinks, tilting the razor until the sharp edge bites Johnny's cheek. No. He's not come this far to settle for fingerfucking Johnny and ruining his suit for nothing.
"Wha-" Johnny says, slipping his mouth from Archy's indignantly.
"Flies," Archy mutters, and Johnny lets go ot his head; he's sort of proud the word came out in English, since the inside of his head feels like a fucking rave of the sort he used to have to drag Johnny out of when dear John was all of sweet sixteen.
It ain't easy: they lean back at once and Archy nearly fucking breaks his own wrist and there's blood everywhere and Johnny's hands aren't steady and then his cock's so fucking hard that it hurts to fight it out of his trousers and every time Johnny's cock brushes against his stomach or Archy's now-ruined shirt he shudders and loses his grip -
But some-fucking-how Archy finds himself wiping blood from Johnny's thigh onto his cock. It's not going to help much. It's not going to help at all. But it feels pretty fucking good, and when he pushes inside Johnny he feels even fucking better.
Johnny tries to pull him back, to kiss him again, but Archy slaps him down unthinkingly, hissing, "Fuck off."
The razor falls to the floor, which is one less thing to worry about, and Archy seizes the back of Johnny's raised leg with his bloody hand. He drapes Johnny's calf over his shoulder, grabs his blood-smeared hip with his other hand, and drives into Johnny like Johnny is meat.
"Ahm," Johnny says, clutching vainly at various parts of himself with red and frantic hands before making a dive for his own cock.
"No," Archy says, smacking his hand away hard enough that Johnny's arm hits the wall. He doesn't break his stroke; his head feels too small and his jaw hurts from gritting it but it's all fading away into the hideous and wonderful friction of his cock inside Johnny's arse.
"Fuck's sake --" Johnny whines, the words coming out of him in uneven gouts. "Fucking--touch--"
"Keep your hands off your dick for five minutes," Archy says as coherently as he can: it comes out as a barked order, and Johnny settles for grabbing at his own chest with clawed fingers.
His suit, his fucking suit is streaked and stained with Johnny’s blood, and his dick aches. Johnny has draped an arm across his face and his rocking and cursing in time with each push. Daylight bathes them both in perspective and just as Archy’s aware of the absurdity of it all he feels the orgasm storm out of his brain and through the rest of his body: there’s a moment where he loses the ability to see, and he gropes blindly for Johnny’s cock.
Archy comes a little too soon, but he keeps pounding for a moment through the discomfort and the wheezing, his hand around Johnny’s cock wet with blood and sweat as Johnny blurts out a string of syllables that include “no”, “yes”, “fuck off”, and “fucking hell”.
When Johnny comes - which he does with as much melodrama as everything else - Archy finally pulls out his decidedly raw dick and wipes Johnny’s come on his own face.
“Yuck,” Johnny says, unimpressed.
“How can you possibly say that about anything,” Archy says rather breathlessly, sitting back on the sofa with Johnny’s leg behind him like a cushion. “I’ve seen you rolling in your own vomit like a dog in shit, you rotten fucker.”
“That was then, this is now,” Johnny says absently, wiping his face with his upper arm. “Jesus Christ. You’ve broken me. I am fucked on the inside. I’m going to die.”
“Where’s your manners?” Archy says, barely holding back a laugh as he slaps Johnny on the thigh, the unblemished thigh in front of him, with something approaching affection. “Come on. Say thank you.”
Johnny gathers up his most horrible grin and says, “Thank you, Uncle,” and looks down at the catastrophe that Archy has transformed his body into. “You don’t happen to know,” he adds, his eyes crawling over the fresh wounds in his torso and thigh like flies over shit, “where the first aid kit is, do you?”