#They just keep ragdolling JD and I love it

[milesworld96]

LOOK AT MY BOYS‼️‼️‼️

[distressednoise]

Cassian necked five pints at the airport and spent most of the flight asleep under Brasso’s coat. Brasso has no real memory of him moving, but when he reclaimed his jacket it was loaded with trolley-sized bottles of JD, and now it clinks tellingly as Brasso makes his way through the resort’s cramped corner shop.

The owner squints at him from the far side of the international crisp aisle, and Brasso wants to say I’m not your problem here, but that wouldn’t be strictly true. Brasso has been part of the problem since he was twenty three and didn’t dob Cassian in for stealing from his young offenders’ apprenticeship. Since then they’ve been two halves of the same crime: the guilty party (outside, smoking, getting sworn at in Catalan by 12 year olds) and the one responsible (inside, clinking, making a resigned, supervisory face at the cashier).

When he pays up the cashier peers judgementally into his basket, as if 90% of his clientele aren't after the same combination of Pot Noodle, cans and overpriced factor 10. Brasso's about to make a joke out of it when he says, "You need to get him to stop that," with a nod toward the door, and Brasso turns to see Cassian has negotiated a truce with the children by handing out the last of their cigarettes.

"We're down by the beach," Brasso promises. "We won't be around much." Those are both lies, but he can keep Cassian out of view, probably. Stash him between the novelty beach towels and racks of glittery jelly shoes and hope his hideous fucking patterned shirt blends in. The only reason Brasso hasn't been ripping him about it constantly since they set off is that it's so awful he suspects it was Clem's.

He gets forty Richmond just to make the cashier glare and heads outside to discover what sort of trouble has coalesced around Cassian in his absence, only to find that the children have been dismissed and Cassian is staring at him, face hard, nails newly bitten. "You've brought us to the shitty island," he accuses, as if he thought they were going to Ibiza. He'd actually been uncharacteristically passive while Brasso threw this whole thing together, so maybe he did.

"We're on the Pegla's-nan's-free-apartment island," Brasso corrects him. "Sorry it's not ideal for a rager."

"I know you're decrepit - " Brasso is twenty nine, thank you "but not all of us have given up on life."

"You said you needed to lie low."

"That doesn't mean be bored."

"What did you think it meant?"

"I - " Cassian flounders. "I just didn't expect to be here."

"Cos you didn't fucking help," Brasso points out, but he doesn't add that Cassian brought this on himself in the first place, and in return Cassian takes one of the creaking carrier bags for the schlep up the hill.

"Pegla likes you better."

That's true, Brasso thinks, but people tend to like doing things for Cassian more. He's fun to indulge: wide-eyed enough that you feel good about helping him, shifty enough that you feel rebellious doing it. He could have found himself a bolt hole easily. There's no real reason for Brasso to be here at all. Well, no - to stop Cassian drinking alone and making another set of terrible friends, maybe. To stop Cassian filling the flat with anyone else.

The flat, when they find it, is wedged in the middle floor of a relative high rise, four white-and-terracotta rooms groaning under the weight of Pegla's nan's knicknack collection. There's not a single surface that isn't occupied by a doily or a commemorative plate or one of a seemingly endless set of pink clam shell ashtrays; the clock and the fruitbowl and the light fitting are all bakelite relics from the days when the only good household fixture was one that looked like an exotic, sunbursting weapon; every dish in the kitchen is smoked glass; every furniture that can be nested, nests.

"That's 'your place or mine?' answered, then," Brasso says, dumping his suitcase in a bedroom largely given over by a set of ragdoll donkeys in the costumes of the world.

"Girls will love this," Cassian shouts from the kitchen. "We bring them here. We give them some sangria. We give them tea from a clock and… whatever this is -"

"It's for oranges." Brasso's nan had one. Had the clock, too, and a similar rug. The whole place feels like it should smell of tinned potatoes and death.

"- oranges, on a plate with the queen's face. They'll love that. We take them out on the balcony - "

"Are you sure you've done this before?"

"Trust me, we go out onto the balcony -"

"We go over to the hotel," Brasso says, "and we pretend we're part of the all-in, and then we have sex in the pool like normal people."

"We're lying low."

"Not this low, I'll have nightmares." The donkeys have multiplied since he came in. "Come on."

"I don't want attention."

"That's a fucking lie."

"You're not supposed to encourage me," Cassian complains. He's right, but fuck it - Brasso's on holiday too.