Big Bang: Venus Throw [Fast & Furious | M | Brian/Dom]

[jedibuttercup]

Title: Venus Throw
Author: jedibuttercup
Fandom: Fast & the Furious
Rating: M; Brian/Dom
Wordcount: 13,100 words
Warnings/Notes: For the 2022 iddyiddybangbang. Because I've had little bits of this universe living rent-free in my head for years, but it felt a little too cracky and trope-y to spend serious time on. Well, what else is this challenge for? :) Divider image is of two sets of knucklebones (tali) illustrating the title. Set during F4, but includes a couple of references that were revealed later in the series.

Summary: In khakis and a white muscle shirt, his entire presence radiating that magnetic psychic pressure Brian had never encountered in anyone else, Dominic Toretto seemed like some forgotten demigod of athleticism and speed. [A Mutants/Powers style AU]

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Brian didn't need to hear Stasiak bitching about facial recognition software at the border to know that Dom had already crossed back into the States.

Partly it was logic; of course Mia would have called her brother. Letty was Dom's, and Dom was Letty's, on-again off-again relationship or not. Letty had been perfectly clear about what she was there for when she'd come into the FBI office with a snarl in the back of her eyes like a wounded predator separated from her pack, and Brian knew how much family meant to Dom. She'd been murdered – or at least, that was the story everyone had been fed – and the Dom Toretto that Brian had met five years ago would never let that go unavenged.

But there was more to it than logic, too. There was a feeling in the air, a prickling along his spine like a low-pressure system catching its breath before a storm – a wild, reckless energy that drew his fingers to the lucky talus he carried in his pocket and made him crave the curve of a steering wheel under his palms. A familiar feeling, one that told him that not only was Dom back in the country, he was there: close enough for Brian to chase if not to catch.

If luck was with him. But then, that was the trick, wasn't it? The ability to affect the quantum fabric of the universe in such a way that probability was biased in your favor didn't cancel out when more than one tychokinetic was involved: it just dramatically increased the volatility of the skew. Lady Luck was with both of them, and if he didn't play this right – or even, probably, if he did – there were bound to be seriously unpredictable, extremely dramatic consequences.

...Again.

He was tempted to let it go, put off that confrontation until he could line a few more ducks up in a row. Play the odds on the David Park thing and try to connect the crucial pieces of information Letty hadn't had time to relay back to him when she'd been recruited to drive for Braga. Roll up to the party with something to actually show for her trouble. But Dom would undoubtedly be coming at the same problem from another angle, with a whole lot more rage to fuel his projective empathy – his charm – in plowing through the obstacles. If Brian put it off now, he'd never have even half a chance at steering the flow of events toward something less destructive; from the moment they inevitably ran into each other again, he'd just be along for the ride.

Brian had learned a lot about controlling his primary gift since their first explosive meeting all those years ago. But there was still only so much even a first-tier trickster could do when the odds were already stacked so heavily against him. He'd only made his way back to the city less than a year ago after the shit that went down in Miami and all the fallout afterward; there hadn't been nearly enough time to set the groundwork for Dom's return. Bilkins' bullshit 'recruitment' had worked out well for Brian in some ways, but not in others. The thing was, folding now would have even worse consequences than trying and getting it wrong.

He watched Mia wipe tears away as Letty's funeral service concluded; felt Dom's gaze like a breath of hot air on the back of his neck, and remembered again that moment of total clarity five years before. Meeting each other's gazes as the sound of Tran's and his cousin's bikes roared up the street, with Jesse panicking in front of them like a taunt in the eye of Fate. Every difference between them had suddenly fallen away in a crystalline flash, and they'd both known exactly what to do next, where to go, and how to move to minimize the damage and maximize the retribution. Their gifts running together in sync, like flip sides of the same spinning coin. Jesse had survived, just barely; and neither Tran nor his cousin had walked away, thanks to that wild synergy. From that moment until they'd pulled up a quarter mile from the tracks a little while later, fortune had been with them both in a way that Brian had never felt before or since.

It hadn't lasted, of course; couldn't, after their shared purpose fell apart and left them standing once more on opposite sides of a figurative chasm. But for better or for worse, it wasn't going to go down that way this time. Brian refused to let it.

He waited until everyone else had left the cemetery, letting the other agents believe he was staking it out for a few more hours in case Toretto was still planning to show after the crowds had gone. Then he walked to the personal car he'd driven that day instead of his official vehicle and dug a change of clothes out of the duffel in the back seat. Dom wouldn't visit Letty's grave yet; there was someone else he'd want to see first. And it would stir up too much noise for Brian to show up in Echo Park looking like a representative of law and order.

Mia hadn't forgiven him yet for what had happened five years ago, not that Brian really blamed her. But Letty had insisted they bury the hatchet after she'd found him, pack instincts driving her to draw close the only two members of her old team still within reach. Penning would have benched him if he'd known; still would, if he caught on to how much time Brian had been spending there before he was ready. And there was no doubt someone had been set to watch the house after Letty had left promising answers and failed to come back. Dom's reappearance in the country would only have increased their determination to find something; it wasn't like they didn't know just as well as Brian did why she'd come to the FBI in the first place. But Brian would just have to run the risk. There was a lot to get done, and not much time to make it happen.

He parked a street away in the fading afternoon light, then quietly hopped fences until he reached the Toretto garage. The nearest entrance was within view of an unmarked car on the street, but the suit inside must have been a newbie, not as attentive as he should have been. He was more fixated on the door of the house than anything else, spending a lot of time looking at something in his lap and sipping from a paper cup. Probably keeping an eye out for Mia. Brian leaned a little on his gift to raise the odds it would stay that way, then eased the wooden door open and slipped in, intending to wait as long as it took.

It didn't even occur to him that he might not be the first one there until he heard a harsh, in-drawn breath and a heavy hand on his shoulder sent him staggering into the unyielding side of the Charger. Even knowing he needed to keep an eye out, even with his talent in play, the familiar scents of grease, dusty metal, and old wood had snuck right past his defenses. All the hours he'd spent there over the last few months helping Letty put in the wrench time and doing chores for Mia – when she'd let him – had infected him with the habits of home.

"What the fuck are you doing here," his attacker said, face set in anger and hands held in loose fists.

He looked good, was the first thing that came to mind as Brian stared back: five years of wandering south of the border had left almost no mark on him, except maybe a little more bulk and a little more bronze to his skin tone. In khakis and a white muscle shirt, his entire presence radiating that magnetic psychic pressure Brian had never encountered in anyone else, even mindspeakers, Dominic Toretto seemed like some forgotten demigod of athleticism and speed. Like he didn't belong to the humdrum grind of the workaday world.

"Dom," Brian blurted, swallowing hard against the shock of his presence. Then he took a deep breath and held up his hands, palm-out and empty. He had planned for this, but not like this; the sense of a cliff's edge falling away behind his heels tugged at his gut with vertigo, and he instinctively leaned on his gift again as he tried to summon the right words. "You know why I'm here. Letty's my friend, too."

"You weren't anyone's friend," Dom replied, voice a low, menacing rumble in his chest.

Did he want to believe that? Or did he just want Brian to believe he believed that? The sense of intense psychic pressure hadn't let up at all. But Dom had known since the first time their gifts had clashed that his charm didn't directly affect Brian. He had to be riding on instinct here, just like Brian was.

One consequence of manifesting tychokinesis during a rough childhood was an instinctive resistance to other gifteds' mental abilities; Brian had learned early on that an adult leaning on a psychoactive gift around a kid was rarely in that child's best interest, and encouraging those attempts to fail was well within a strong trickster's capabilities. On the flipside, though, was something Brian hadn't fully realized until Miami: when he already half-wanted to go along with whatever someone was leaning on him for? His resistance wasn't nearly as effective. It had probably complicated things with Dom the first time, looking back; it had definitely come close to fucking him over when he'd gotten tangled up with a pretty 'shifter Customs agent in Miami. But he couldn't afford to let whatever guilty, angry emotions they were both experiencing right now get in the way.

He took a deep breath, deliberately shutting down his gift, and looked Dom straight in the eye. "Maybe not back then, no matter how much I wished it could be different. But I've been here, Dom; I've been here, ever since Letty came back and found me."

"She wouldn't do that," Dom snarled back. "Not to Mia."

To Mia? But not to Dom? Brian clamped down on that thought hard before it could turn into hope. "Letty would do anything to get her pack back, and you know it," he replied, bluntly. "And if bringing me back in helped clear the way for you, that was all that mattered as far as she was concerned."

"And now she's dead." Dom had been standing at arm's length, the overhead light casting half his face in shadow; he took a long step forward with those words, jabbing a finger at Brian's chest. "If I find out you had anything to do with it...."

Brian shook his head. That anger, right there, was why he'd wanted to carefully set up this meeting, not let it catch them both by surprise. "And now we're meant to think she's dead," he interrupted, firmly.

Dom's mouth twisted. "My sister buried her today! What the fuck is that supposed to mean."

Yeah, that was the question, wasn't it? "Look, I don't know all the details yet. She was supposed to call me afterward," he replied. "I just know someone found her at the wreck of her car, called an ambulance, found my number in her phone, but by the time I got to the hospital, the only record of her was in the morgue. No one remembered bringing her in; no one remembered treating her; no one remembered calling it. Someone had wiped every trace. And the body in the morgue was only identifiable by her clothes. It wasn't her, Dom; I don't believe that. Someone took her. And then made sure no one could say any different."

Dom's face went through several distinct expressions as Brian spoke, cycling through grief, anger, and something that resonated a lot like the same stifled attempt not to hope that had been stuck in Brian's throat all week. "Who the hell would do something like that?" he growled, then shook his head. "Tell me you didn't feed this bullshit conspiracy theory to Mia."

"You think if I knew, I wouldn't have already done something about it?" Brian scoffed. "Of course I didn't tell Mia; I wanted something to go on first. Some shred of proof. Whether it's Braga's guys, or some other gang taking advantage, or whether someone on the feds' side saw an opportunity ... yeah, I found out the hard way how hungry they are for gifted agents." He gestured toward himself. "Do I think they'd go to this extreme, though? Not really, but I can't rule it out."

A furrow deepened on Dom's brow, like he wanted to follow up on that question, but not enough to let go of his anger about Letty. "So you were running her as a CI. Clearing the way: you're telling me she made a deal for me. With you. And whatever happened, she's gone. Tell me why I should listen to anything else that comes out of your mouth."

"Because even if I don't know where she is, I have a lead on who most likely put her there. And I'd much rather take our chances together than risk tripping each other up trying to track Braga down separately."

"Yeah, and what's to stop me from spoking your wheel? Maybe my chances improve if I expose the cop in their midst." Unspoken, Brian also heard, maybe my chances would have improved then too, if someone had done the same for me.

"You really want me dead that badly, be my guest," Brian replied, spreading his arms wide, gambling that Dom was speaking more out of hurt than genuine intent. "He's only made at least two other undercover agents disappear before Letty, and Fortuna only knows how many the FBI aren't aware of. This guy regularly does eight-figure business in heroin, but no one has any clue what he looks like, where he's from, or even how old he is. No way in hell he's mundane, and the last drug lord I went up against had shifters and mindrapers on his payroll. Going in alone is suicide. And maybe you're okay with that, but I want to be there to see the look on Letty's face when she rips me up one side and down the other for not trusting her to clean up her own mess."

A spasm of emotion passed over Dom's face, and his hands finally started to relax out of their fists as he looked away. "She would do that," he admitted.

"Yeah," Brian said, the tension in his shoulders relaxing in turn. They were still standing so close, it was like every emotion that passed through one of them radiated off like body heat, spreading straight into the other's bloodstream. "Letty came to me for a reason, Dom. She got further than anyone else has, but even with all her instincts and my luck backing her up, it still wasn't enough. But I think if we both know what we're there for, playing the same odds ... you remember what it was like the last time." He swallowed, not sure how to convey that feeling in words without sounding hopelessly over-invested.

Dom's gaze dropped, caught by the motion of his throat, then lingered on his lips as it came back up. "Yeah, I remember," he rumbled, expression conflicted. "You really sure that's a good thing?"

Brian felt the touch of those dark eyes like a brand: a lash of flashfire heat through his system. Even the actual torch he'd faced in Miami hadn't had the ability to burn him like that. If Dom had been the one at the market counter all those weeks instead of Mia ... well, he would have changed his bets a lot sooner, that was for sure. He wasn't sure if he would despise himself more or less for the way things would still have inevitably fallen out, but it would have been a much wilder ride. But it was what it was, and they were where they were.

"Let's see," he managed to reply gruffly. "Significant chances of bullets flying, vehicular mayhem, and ending up the subject of a manhunt again, or letting that asshole get away with it and burying more people I care about? Yeah, I think I'm gonna go with the vehicular mayhem."

"Now that we can agree on," Dom replied, brow smoothing out, voice melting to warm molasses.

Brian suppressed a shudder and decided it was high time to cut this conversation short while the getting was still good. What the hell did he think was going to happen here, anyway? Too soon, O'Conner. Too soon.

"I'm gonna go into the office in the morning, run my lead down to something actionable. I'm sure you've got shit you want to do, too. When I've got something – or you do – we go in together."

"Sure," Dom drawled back, the corner of his mouth curving up. "And how exactly are we supposed to coordinate that? Dial a cop shop from a known fugitive's number?"

"Mia's had my burner number for months. For emergencies," Brian shrugged. "Text me yours, if you're serious about this. One way or another I'm gonna get these guys, Dom. And then you'll be free."

"I believe you believe that," Dom replied, then took a long step back, gesturing expansively toward the door. "But I think you can understand why I might have ... concerns."

This guy. Standing there with a criminal conviction under his belt and several other warrants outstanding, lecturing the agent of law and order about his trustworthiness. And Brian wanting to prove it to him. Bilkins had been right all those years ago when he'd recruited him for that customs job in Miami; the minute Dom had first taken him in, the smart money had been against him staying on the straight and narrow.

"If you really had concerns, I'd be dead already," he scoffed. "Just talk to Mia, all right? And text me. Consider the next couple of days my audition if it makes you feel any better. I'll be doing the same. We track this guy down. We find Letty. Then maybe we have that conversation about who owes what to whom."

"We find Letty," Dom countered, "we let her decide who owes who what."

"Fair enough," Brian said, tipping his chin up. If they found her unable to answer ... well, that would be an answer all its own. No more or less than he'd expected, really. "Be seeing you, then."

Dom watched, arms crossed over his chest, as Brian headed back to the door and set his hand on it for a long minute, feeling out the odds of exiting unseen. Then he nodded back as Brian finally eased the door open, preparing to slip out. "We'll see."



For all the fraught tension of that encounter, Brian didn't have long to wait before the first text came in from an unknown number. A low-res photo of burn-scarred asphalt, followed by just two words: first clue.

Mia must've taken Dom to where Letty's car had been flipped on the road. He didn't elaborate about what the clue might mean, probably to discourage Brian from following it up without him; not that he'd needed to worry. Brian was buried deep in a stack of vehicle reports, courtesy of Agent Trinh and her calculative ability, sniffing out the elusive race-organizer to drug-runner connection that Letty'd said she had a lead on not long before going dark. As ironic as it was, given their respective records, he was just going to have to trust that Dom would take the time to read the odds and avoid complicating both their lives by dropping more bodies on the road to Braga.

He saved Dom's number to his phone, smiling ruefully to himself, then took another bite of his sandwich and turned to the next David Park in his stack of files. There might be a hell of a lot of men by that name in the system, but even the roughest applied filter – general area of residence, age, and so on – would reduce it to a manageable number for Trinh to run the makes and models on. And from there, he was betting the right one would stand out like a flashing sign. Sometimes it was refreshing to lean on his knowledge and skills rather than his talent to solve a problem; a little applied logic and he'd hit the jackpot all the same. The question was, though, would he reach it before Dom did? And that one might very well be up to Lady Luck.

It was oh dark thirty before he had the stack down to fifty or so; he called it good, caught a few hours of Z's, then followed the rising sun into the office. Unfortunately, it turned out Brian hadn't been the only one to make a foolish play the night before hoping for a winning hand; Mia was there too, sitting in a processing room, being badgered by a familiar pain-in-his-ass agent. The risk had more or less worked out for Brian, but he'd be damned if it would for Stasiak. He passed the files off to Trinh, placed a decoy call to get the guy detoured down to Evidence, then went in to liberate the 'witness'. There was no way anyone actually had anything on Mia, after all, even if they'd caught her out for a walk; Dom would never have been stupid enough to drop his sister off right in front of such an obvious target for surveillance.

He took her to a café in walking distance from her house, because he probably shouldn't be seen dropping her off there either, then treated her to a cup of joe despite her glares while he fired a quick message off to her brother. Numbnuts agent picked up your sister. Got her out of there.

There wasn't a reply; but then, Brian hadn't really been expecting one. He hadn't done it for kudos; he'd done it because it was the decent thing to do. And because he owed her, too. Mia's sharp gaze followed his typing fingers, then jerked back up to his face as he put the phone away.

"Dom told me you showed up last night," she said, tone carefully even and weighted with furious hurt. If it had been Letty sitting across from him with her lupine mutation, instead of the healing-gifted Toretto, that would have had him bracing himself for her to come at him over the table. Not that Mia couldn't hold her own if she wanted; she just used different weapons. "What, it wasn't enough for you to get Letty killed, now you have to draw my brother into it? I told him it wasn't what she would've wanted, but he wasn't listening to me."

Brian snorted. "You know damn well if I'd said no, Letty would have found some other way to risk herself trying to bring Dom home. I'm not her alpha. And if I'd tried to get Dom to back off, both our chances would be a lot worse. Next time they send someone in, it isn't going to be a CI; it's going to be an agent, and that agent will be me. So if Dom's going in with or without me, I figured our odds are both a lot better with."

Mia's jaw tightened further, but she knew he wasn't wrong. That didn't cancel out her hurt, or the part he'd played in it five years ago, but it was way past time to put it behind them. For Dom's sake, and for Letty's. No matter how they both felt about it, Letty had decided he was part of the pack ... or perhaps more accurately, that Dom had made that call back when they'd first met, and that nothing that had happened afterward had revoked that status. Brian might have taken the blame for ripping the pack apart, but he was also the reason the only death had been Johnny Tran's and that none of the team were in prison; you had to take the bad with the good when it came to family. Remembering patching things back up with Rome, he hadn't argued with her; after all, they did both want the same thing. Mia did too, but she weighted the risks of that path higher than the opportunities, and naturally even more so after Letty's funeral.

She took another long sip of her coffee, emptying the cup, then set it down on its saucer with a decisive click. "You ever think," she said obliquely, "that maybe it's time to stop letting the cops believe you're the good guy pretending to be the bad guy? Maybe it's time to admit you're the bad guy pretending to be the good guy."

Was that her way of saying she'd forgive him more if his allegiances weren't still divided? "Enough of them believe that as it is," Brian replied, shrugging. "Look, as long as the Bureau is still on top of this case, I have access to their resources to help run down the guy who hurt Letty. He's done it to a lot more people than just her, and he needs to pay for it. But you better believe if they bench me, I'll stay the course anyway. The FBI might've recruited me because lying to people is what I do best, but I stopped lying to myself a long time ago."

"Yeah?" Mia raised skeptical eyebrows. "That include how you feel about my brother?"

Brian winced. He'd been hoping it wasn't that noticeable, but none of them were oblivious people. His mental defenses might have prevented a passive empath like Vince from picking up on his emotions back then, but that didn't stop observant eyes from picking up on his behavior. The gravity conversation came to mind. "It wasn't so much denial, as that you're amazing in your own right, and he had Letty anyway, so why make anything of it?" He shrugged. "The thing I really fooled myself about was thinking it would all work out. That maybe Dom's team weren't the one robbing the trucks, and it wouldn't matter I'd been lying to all of you from the start. But we both know how that ended. I am sorry I hurt you, though. That was never my intention."

"Yeah, you said that before," she said, then sighed. "Maybe I'm even finally starting to believe it. But that doesn't make me any happier about the rest of it. Letty was supposed to be the one to save him, to make the family whole again. But now it never will be. Not even if Leon and Jesse and Vince all came back home. Do you know, Dom talked to her about finding a priest when they were down in the DR a year or so back?"

Brian swallowed, eyes widening. "No; neither of them told me that."

Mia's mouth curved in a pained smile. "Probably because she turned him down. She said he'd left her behind once already, and she knew he'd do it again if he thought he needed to, but mates didn't do that, they shared everything, including the dangers. She said she'd always love him – he'd always be the leader of her pack – but she couldn't do that to herself. Or let him keep sticking his head in the sand, either. You were right when you said she'd have found another way to try to bring him home, if she had to ... but there was also a reason she looked for you first, you know."

"Why tell me this now?" he replied hoarsely. That cast a whole new light on some of the conversations he and Letty had shared about Dom while they worked on the Charger, and his most recent meeting with Dom, too.

"Because either you're going to bring him home to me, or neither one of you is coming home again, and I figured a little extra incentive couldn't hurt," she replied, smile turning wry.

"Mia...." He wasn't sure what else to say; this was the last thing he'd expected to hear.

She slid smoothly out of the booth, then stood, looking down at him with a firm expression. "Don't you dare ask for my blessing. Just bring him back in one piece, and maybe there'll be a place setting for you again at Sunday barbeque. You understand me?"

"Loud and clear."

She nodded, then turned to go, leaving him with the check and the unenviable duty of returning to the office. At least the crosschecks should be done on the David Park files when he got there. Whatever destination awaited him, he was about to take one step closer to it.



Trinh's vehicle reports had turned up a '98 Nissan 240 with an illegal mod: exactly the x-marks-the-spot Brian had been looking for. None of the other reckless David Parks on the list drove anything even close to what he was used to seeing pull up to the line when serious money was about to change hands. If a drug lord as high-octane as Braga was letting this guy recruit other drivers for him, there was no way he'd be driving anything less.

Found the next link in the chain, he texted Dom as he got into his office car; and was not terribly surprised to receive a Me too in reply. But then Dom followed up with a surprise: Going to pay a visit to a guy named David Park.

Brian remembered that photo of burned asphalt and shook his head; Fortuna only knew how Dom had made the connection from that, but then again, hadn't he been counting on the convergence of their combined luck powering them through to their goal? They may have started from different angles, but they were on the same track. What a surprise, he texted back. Me too. I need to ask him some questions.

Don't worry. He'll still be alive when you get here, Dom replied.

Brian swore under his breath, then took the next traffic light at a higher than recommended speed.

He pulled up outside Park's apartment, eyeing the red Chevelle parked down the street, half-expecting to hear shattering glass or see some other evidence of Dom's bulldozing arrival. But he must have still been in enough control to use his gifts deliberately; even the open apartment door showed no signs of damage. Brian walked in on Dom looming in Park's space, holding an intent, low-voiced conversation, one hand cupped loosely around the other man's throat. Park looked half terrified and half in thrall; he was tripping over his words as he replied, eagerly reassuring Dom that of course he'd tell him who the green Torino belonged to if he knew, but all he did was run cars for Braga and arrange the races, that was all, he swore.

Brian had rarely seen Dom lean on anyone that hard with his second gift; he knew it took increasingly more effort to influence someone the further the action was from what they'd normally do. He could see the strain in Dom's face, and the frustration building beneath it. "Just let him go, Dom. Whatever went down, he wouldn't have been the guy who got his hands dirty. Breaking his mind isn't going to help Letty."

Dom dropped his hand, turning all his attention on Brian; he almost staggered under the weight of it. "I am going to kill this Braga," he reminded him. "And anyone else who gets in my way."

The pull of cooperation Dom had been trying to wring out of Park caught at Brian like an undertow ... luckily one that was trying to drag him in the same direction he was swimming already. Dom's charm at full strength would have been hard for even Brian to resist, but he didn't even need to this time; still same track, different angles. "Then let me do my job," he replied. "I'm going to get these guys, Dom. Next link in the chain."

Dom blinked at him, then shook his head, as if trying to clear it; in front of him, Park folded like he'd been kicked in the gut, knees hitting the floor as he clutched at his head. "Right," Dom said slowly. "Next link in the chain. You know, you're the most stubborn bastard I've ever met?"

"Some may say that's my charm," Brian replied, dryly. "We good?"

Dom snorted, then met his gaze again, mouth curving in a reluctant smile. "We'll see," he said, voice like the low rumble of an engine, then turned abruptly and stalked out of the apartment.

Brian sighed at the release of tension in the room, then took out his handcuffs and went over to the groaning suspect. He might not be the killer, but David Park would know how to get them in with Braga. With a little more luck, before the FBI's 72-hour limit was up; but either way, they'd be there.

His triumphant return to the office was interrupted by Stasiak's assholishness and a dose of condescending paternal advice from Penning; no more welcome than when Tanner had been the one doling it out five years before, but probably just as earned. He'd been one bad judgment call from walking the other side of the line his whole life; after all, if you never risked big, you never won big either. He did care about protecting people, but whether it was because of his tychokinesis, or his childhood, or just the personality he was born with, he'd always been addicted to the adrenaline rush too. Penning might have meant his statement as a warning or an encouragement, but after juvie, after Dom and his own time as a fugitive, after Rome and Miami and running into Bilkins again and coming full circle back to LA, Brian knew it for an inevitability. But he'd make the most of the job while it lasted.

The team meeting about Park's information resulted in the expected assignment: Braga's next street race audition, being held in Koreatown the following night. No point not texting Dom about it; he'd undoubtedly find that out too, and in the end, it didn't matter which of them won, only that one of them did. They'd improvise from there. Brian took his pick of the FBI impound lot to build a car he could win with, then spent the rest of that day and half the next putting in the wrench time on it. It was good to get his hands on a Skyline again.

Winning the race would be the easy part, of course. Making it to Braga – and out again alive – would be another story. Braga's identity and talents might not be known, but his lieutenants' were: Ramon Campos, Gisele Yashar, and Fenix Calderon. Campos was a strong passive empath, a reader an order of magnitude more perceptive than Vince. Every agent sent in had been tested against one of the FBI's own gifted to make sure they could pass, but somehow they'd still been caught; he was a definite question mark. Yashar was a bullseye, gifted with enhanced marksmanship; she never missed a target she aimed at. And Calderon was, no surprise given his chosen moniker, a torch; not the first one Brian had encountered in the drug scene. The rest of Braga's known minions were the usual mix of minor aggressive talents put to bad uses, but those three were the most likely to fuck up Brian and Dom's play.

He texted some of those bullet points to Dom, just to make sure he was prepared; he got back a picture of the Charger – doing some final detail work, it looked like; the sight made Brian miss Letty all over again – and two brief sentences. It's cute you're worried. Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

Brian rolled his eyes, then typed and deleted several responses to that before settling on: A lot's changed since you left. Followed a few seconds later by: You think I'm cute? Good to know.

Not everything has changed, Dom texted back after a long pause.

Brian stared at his phone for a long moment, grinning, then put it away and got back to work.



Their outing in Koreatown went about as expected. Both the race itself, and all the posturing that came before and after. The racers who'd already qualified were there spectating; Brian tagged the most pretentious of them right away as the one to fuck with if he didn't win, slipped back into the skin of Bullitt – the guy to beat on the streets of Miami – for the meet with Campos and Braga's other lieutenants, then surrendered to the twin joys of a fast car and the rush of using his talent to navigate the chaotic course. Evading other cars and innocent bystanders, trusting his reflexes as he took corners at speed, and finding his way back to the route after a last-second dodge sent him down the wrong road. He could feel that tingle along his nerves that meant Dom was nearby doing the same, right up until it came down to just the two of them lining up for the finish.

Brian met Dom's gaze across the gap between their cars, reading his determination and feeling the way the probabilities were urging him not to swerve despite the likelihood of last-minute tricks. Reading their joint intent. He knew what he should do if he was doing his job: ensure he was the one who won no matter what, leave Dom no choice but to find another route to get involved. But Brian had another option, one that would preserve the trust building between them; that asshole Dwight back at the start line had been practically begging for a big showy arrest to check his ego, nicely opening up a second position on Braga's team. And hell, a little drama at the end of the race would both provide a show and feed the narrative.

Brian grinned and decided to play out the hand, failing to evade when the Charger moved at the last second to tap his Skyline into a spin as he passed. Then he put on a show for Campos, storming up to accuse Dom of cheating, as if that would mean a damn to the man who'd once told him, Ask any real racer. Winning's winning. But he definitely made an impression. And after the FBI raided Dwight Mueller's apartment later that night, the time and directions sent to the GPS he'd kept were confirmation he'd made the right kind.

Got my invitation, he texted Dom.

You, or Brian Earl Spilner? Dom replied, tone a wry challenge even through the medium of text.

A lot of things may have changed in the last five years, but a lot hadn't, too. They never were as different as my bosses would have liked, he admitted.

Now that I believe, the next message read. See you at the party.

Brian decided to take that as encouragement. Their actual meeting at the club where Campos was holding court the next night didn't dent that impression, either; the banter they engaged in to distract Braga's reader owed at least half of its sparking tension to a sense of challenge that rode the line of flirtation. Like a coin spinning on edge, still compelled by momentum before it tipped over to illuminate a path.

He never let himself forget, though, that they were doing it in front of Campos, the better to lock his mental presence down and disappear from the man's radar afterward when he and Dom split again to pursue separate avenues of investigation. Luck was with both of them there, as well. He caught a glimpse of a secretive meeting and lifted a pair of shot glasses, sure he'd caught Braga's prints; and Dom found the car that had run down Letty. Dom disappeared afterward, though, mood soured too much for banter, and Brian sighed and did likewise, taking the evidence directly in to the office rather than sleeping on it and hoping the brass hadn't been too firm about their time limit. The call would happen sometime the next day, no doubt – it sure had been for Letty; she hadn't had time to tell him anything but that she had to go before she went dark – but in terms of exact hours? Crime didn't run on the government's clock.

That thought gave Brian an idea, and he walked over to an old-fashioned paper map pinned to the wall. He let his gaze trace down the length of South America, making the mental shift to trigger his talent, mentally flipping coins with Arturo Braga's name on them. A steady drumbeat started up at the back of his skull – he'd used his gift a lot that night; he'd need to wash a snack down with a soda sometime soon if he didn't want to wake up feeling hungover – but his thumb came up almost of its own will to rest over Asunción, and he sucked in a sharp breath. Tacumbú Penitentiary was there, one of the world's roughest prisons.

"Start with Paraguay when you make those calls about matching the prints," he told Trinh. "The prison system, specifically. That might cut the search time a little."

Trinh frowned at him. "How sure are you about that? I didn't think tychokinesis worked that way."

Brian gave her a rueful grin. "Not very; it would take a Venus Throw." In the Ancient Roman gambling game of tali, that was the highest scoring knucklebone throw: odds a little over nine percent. He'd picked the phrase up from his dad, one of the few times he'd been home long enough to talk about his gift when Brian was old enough to understand. His expression of it had been a lot weaker than Brian's, and he'd had no secondary gift – only about five percent of the population had even one, and maybe one in twenty of those had two – but before Dom, he was the only one Brian had ever spoken with in person who really had any idea how flexible tychokinesis could be. "Too many of the variables are out of my control, and none of the primary subjects are within reach of my probability field. But I told myself I was gambling, threw a mental dart, and that's where it landed. It's not like it will hurt anything if I'm wrong; we'll have to run through the whole list anyway."

"You got it. Slightly better odds are better than none," she said, then made a shooing motion in his direction. "Now get out of here; you look more wasted than after last week's cityscape parkour, and that's saying something."

He stifled a yawn, then gave her a thankful wave and went, snagging a donut out of a breakroom box and something sugary to drink on his way out of the building.

The following afternoon, not half an hour before the GPS rang, the computers came through with confirmation. Brian had lifted Braga's prints. Because Campos was Braga, not the older man in the suit he'd been meeting with. And if Campos was Braga....

He thought about Campos saying every corner's got a chingadera tuner running for pinks, and wondered if they'd made a mistake focusing only on the informants they knew had gone missing. If the FBI checked some of those corners, how many other drivers would they find had gone missing? Campos wasn't vetting people for Braga, passing them up the chain, like they'd thought; and if he was Braga, he'd never risk some temporary employee figuring out the secret. Especially if he knew law enforcement was on his tail.

Penning took one look at the fax, expression intensely forbidding, and started assembling a team.

"It would be an easier conviction if we caught him with a new shipment, but he's slippery enough as it is. The minute your tracker stops, we'll descend on the address your GPS sent like the wrath of God. Be sure to keep yourself and that friend of yours out of the way – yeah, I know who won that race, and the fact that you didn't tell me yourself speaks volumes – and don't fuck this up, and maybe, maybe, just for the sake of not losing one of the better agents we've got to such utter bullshit, I'll consider keeping Ortiz's deal."

Brian only half-believed that, but the thought of getting to have his cake and eat it too was a serious temptation. How Dom would feel about being kept out of the way, though; that was another story. And he certainly wouldn't trust Penning's motives, not with Braga standing in the same room. Before he could tie himself up in knots over it too much, though, the GPS went off; he hurriedly scribbled down the address it gave, then thrust it into Trinh's hands to run to Penning's team and bolted out the door.

The last thing he'd said to Letty when she'd been called up had been, Be careful.

The last thing she'd said had been an amused, Just do your job and I'll do mine.

He whipped out his phone as he threw himself into the blue Skyline, typing hastily as he started the engine. Be cool. It's orchestrated. Hopefully, Dom would remember the very first time Brian had saved his ass, and Vince's comment about the circumstances afterward. He didn't dare be more clear about the impending raid, not knowing who might be lurking over Dom's shoulder or checking their text logs later that day.

There was a long pause. Then, as he peeled out onto the street, a new message popped up: Your meal ticket. Not mine.

"Shit, shit, shit," he muttered to himself and accelerated harder, not giving a damn what the agents tracking him were squawking in his ear about traffic violations. Did that mean Dom wasn't going to show up? Or that he was going to do something inadvisable after he arrived? They were so close.

Distantly, it occurred to Brian that yet another possibility was that Campos – Braga – wouldn't be there to see them off at all; that would definitely put a spoke in his wheel. But no, the drug lord would want to scan them all one last time before actually putting any product in their cars. Even if he was killing them all afterward, as Brian now suspected, he wouldn't want to lose any heroin mid-transport; he was a much cooler customer than the last drug lord Brian had taken down. Brian sped through the last yellow light, made a hard turn through the open door into the warehouse ... and breathed out a sigh at the sight of the Charger already there ahead of him.

Dom was staring back, jaw set grimly as Brian put his car in park. Brian gave his head a tiny, cautious shake, but didn't think he'd made any impression at all. A sense of tension was starting to rise in the air again as their probability fields began overlapping at the edges, this time jangling with wild, unpredictable energy ... but then the figure at the back of the garage, leaning casually back against a car with sunglasses shading his eyes while the rest of his men standing around a big furniture van, suddenly raised a phone to his ear.

The rush of some third party abruptly spinning destiny's wheel shifted the probability gradients sharply enough that Brian's gut swooped with sudden nausea. He shifted the car immediately out of park, ignoring the shouts of Braga's men as they walked toward the drivers' cars with some kind of scanner, and gunned the engine backward even before Braga even turned to run. The drug lord was heading for an escape vehicle parked near a back exit from the warehouse; Brian already knew he couldn't follow Braga directly through the obstacle course inside the building, so the only way to catch him was to go around. He shot back out the main entrance amid a rapid pop of gunfire, instinctively using his minor secondary gift to telekinetically divert any bullets that might hit him, then whipped around to head for the opposite side of the building. He didn't even have to look to know that Dom was right behind him; they'd fallen straight back into sync the moment the plot had shifted, that synergy from five years ago rising again to guide them both toward the best possible outcome.

He took the next corner against the light, barely slowing long enough to dodge a vehicle trying to use the same lane, and reached the warehouse's other exit just in time to see Braga's vehicle nosing out. Smoke rose from its tires as its driver mashed the gas pedal to the floor. The faint shrill call of sirens headed their way was still several blocks out; if they didn't stop him, Braga would make it out before the cordon could close, and hell if Brian was going to let that happen. He accelerated until he was just off Braga's back bumper, letting Dom pull out next to them to speed up alongside with the greater engine power and body weight of the Charger, and started looking for a way to bring Braga to a halt without endangering any civilian lives.

Braga's driver caught Dom in his peripherals and took the next right without regard for traffic, tapping his back bumper against an oncoming bus and send it careening off to strike a lamp post. "Braga's on the run! Call an ambulance to the corner of..." Brian rattled off the street names, then the car's trajectory to the agents still monitoring him, then followed, carefully threading through the growing chaos.

Dom had been forced to fall back in behind him through the turn, but he accelerated again as they stormed down another multi-lane straightaway, briefly swinging wide into the oncoming lanes to pass a slower vehicle before pulling up next to Braga again. The back window of the other car began to roll down, the muzzle of a handgun appearing as Braga's hand reached out; Brian swore and concentrated hard, a blinding headache spreading through his temples as the fingers of that hand suddenly jerked and let the weapon fall to the pavement. There'd be no more teeking for him today.

Helpfully, Dom stepped in before Brian had to push his luck any further. His own windows had already been rolled down, anticipating the conversation with Braga's goons; he lifted a shotgun as he pulled up even with Braga's driver again and aimed for the front driver's side tire. The driver tried to dodge, but luck had never been on his side; Dom fired, and the tire immediately deflated. The car slowed and started pulling toward Dom's; the driver panicked and stomped on the brakes, then lost complete control, flipping the vehicle over as it bled momentum. Brian stood on his own brakes, dodging up onto a miraculously clear patch of sidewalk to bracket the door Braga had been seated next to; Dom slewed into a sharp turn and came to a halt as well, opening his door and covering the damaged car with his shotgun.

The street was emptying rapidly of civilians; Brian could hear the sirens getting closer again, catching up. He hurried to the wrecked car, drawing his handgun, and rapidly assessed the occupants. The driver was unconscious, bleeding from a gash on his forehead, but still secured in his seat; Braga was still awake but had fallen against the roof of the car in a tangled heap. The way he was slowly struggling to right himself, he hadn't come out of the crash without injury.

Brian glanced briefly up at Dom, reminded of five years ago, and gestured with his eyes toward the street. Dom stared back for a moment, but then shook his head, face set, and turned to throw the shotgun back on the Charger's seat. Since Braga couldn't see Dom from his position, the gesture was clearly for the FBI's benefit. Brian's own sense of the possibilities ahead of them was like looking through a fogbank, worn thin by all the effort he'd put in that day; the idea of Dom being arrested unnerved him. But he could still feel the tingle along his nerves of Dom leaning on his own gift, so he figured he'd just have to trust in Dom's choices.

But that only left them with a few seconds to ask questions of Braga before the rest of the party arrived. Time to cut to the chase. "The drivers you had killed. One of them you disappeared instead," he barked, looking down at the struggling drug lord. "Tell me where she is."

"What, not going to read me my rights?" Braga asked indignantly, pressing a hand to what were probably cracked ribs.

Brian clenched his jaw harder, trying not to visibly react; if Braga knew he was an agent, then that call that had sent Braga running was probably what he'd feared it was: a mole inside the agency. Maybe Braga wasn't killing all his drivers after all; or maybe he was, and it had started with the first informant sent in under cover. Either way, the agents in charge of his interrogation would get those details; Brian only cared about one of them in that moment.

"I'm not asking as an agent. I'm asking as part of her pack," he said, then gave a grim smile at the answering flash of alarm in Braga's gaze. Yeah, he knew what that meant.

"Good cop gone bad, walking on the wild side?" Braga tried to evade the subject. "Too bad you didn't do it earlier, you could have worked for your own kind."

"If I wanted to work for a scumbag just because he was gifted, I would have taken Carter Verone up on his offer," Brian scoffed. This time, it wasn't just Braga who looked surprised; yeah, he and Dom did still have those five years to catch up on. It had hardly been a straight line from LA cop to FBI agent for him, and he still didn't know what all Dom had got up to after fleeing the city. Well, other than that 'Robin Hood shit in the DR' Letty had mentioned, but she hadn't gone into details, and if Dom had ditched her there after half-proposing then Brian didn't blame her. "All I care about right now is what happened to my pack member."

"'70 Plymouth," Dom growled from the other side of the car. "Her name was Letty."

Braga tried to swivel his head to get a view of Dom, but he was still standing out of view. The sirens were getting a lot closer, though, and his expression was more defiant as he turned back to Brian. "You should know. You were there when she was buried."

"I know someone was buried that day," Brian fired back, stepping closer to keep the muzzle of the handgun clearly in Braga's range of view. "I also know the body was unrecognizable, and everyone at the hospital mysteriously forgot everything to do with her other than her morgue record. But she wasn't dead when the ambulance got to her; I know, because I was her emergency contact number. You sent a wiper after her, didn't you. Where is she."

The corner of Braga's mouth turned up in a smug smile, like he could taste Brian's frustration – actually, he probably could; Brian's control was pretty frayed at the moment – and was savoring that as a win amid his losses. "You got that the wrong way around, hermano. The wiper don't work for me; I work for the wiper. And by now, he's wiped her too. You're not her pack anymore; he is, and he's way above your paygrade. You want my advice? Let her go. Or don't, and then you won't be anyone's problem anymore."

The tighter Brian's grip grew on his handgun, the more his headache pounded, the more amused Braga looked ... and the sirens were right on top of them now, a swarm of vehicles zeroing in on their location. After all the luck that had brought them to that moment, every risk dared and every dice rolled that had had to fall just right for them to uncover Braga and arrest him without any further deaths or lawbreaking required, he'd still failed at the one thing he'd set out to do. Brian looked up to meet Dom's gaze again, an acrid mix of defeat and fury swirling in his gut, and felt a cool wave of determination sweep over him, Dom's hard-earned solidity and resolve buoying him up.

Okay; maybe he hadn't saved Letty, but they now had proof she was alive; that was no small thing. There'd be other days for them. But not for Braga.

Brian took a deep breath, letting his ragged nerves dissipate into Dom's surety, and was rewarded by the way it wiped the smile right off Braga's face. Then he holstered his weapon, pulled out his handcuffs, and donned the role of FBI agent again, rolling one more scumbag up off the streets.

The rush of the operation inevitably separated him from Dom; he had one quick glimpse early on of someone putting him calmly in a car, expression set in stone, but there was no chance for him to break away during the operation. Between the scene at the warehouse – where the FBI had swept up the other drivers, several of Braga's agents, and the truck that gave them more evidence to connect how Braga had been pulling off his shipments – and the abruptly ended chase, it took hours and a horde of personnel to clean everything up, make the necessary arrests and evidence seizures, and debrief the whole mess back at the office. He was truthful about having another driver's cooperation – though he left out as many details as he could get away with – and about Braga's mention of working for someone else, but there was no opportunity to ask directly about Dom's disposition until he finally managed to catch Penning in his office afterward.

"Sir, about Dominic Toretto...."

Penning looked up at him from behind his desk, mouth pursed, then tossed a file across the cluttered surface. "Our guest is in one of the processing rooms. The charges from five years ago have been dismissed ... but let me be clear, only the charges from five years ago. Anything our unexpected and officially unnamed informant may have done either before or since outside the scope of this operation is still up for grabs. Get him the fuck out of here. And take your PTO, O'Conner. I expect you to have your head screwed on straight when you come back."

After striving so hard toward that outcome, achieving it unexpectedly felt almost weightless, as if a headwind of negative probability Brian had been bracing against had suddenly guttered out. Despite the exhaustion, both physical and mental, and all the stress of the last few days, a sense of giddy triumph welled up in him; he fully intended to take Penning's instruction far more literally than he'd probably ever want to hear.

There was just one thing he still had to ask. "And what about Letty?"

Penning sighed. "Obscurums are rare, and you and I both know what kind of organizations tend to have them on the payroll. If Braga's not blowing smoke up our ass and one's gone rogue, that's above both our paygrades. I'll pass the information on. Make sure the question's asked. But that's all I can promise."

Brian nodded. "Yeah, I figured." They'd have to take the hunt from there on their own; maybe hit up his technomancer buddy on the east coast. Good thing he was about to have some time off. "Thanks."

"You might walk the line, son, but you got the job done and let the system do its part. Some might call that personal growth. And in that spirit, try not to punch Stasiak again on the way out. That'll be thanks enough."

Well, he hadn't so much been trusting the system as trusting Dom; but sure, he'd take it. "No promises," he grinned back, scooping the folder up off the desk, and headed downstairs.



The trip from the office back to Echo Park was mostly quiet, the silence between them tired but charged with things yet unspoken.

"They weren't too much of a pain in the ass to you, were they?" he finally asked, glancing over at him. "I thought you'd get the fuck out of there before they showed up."

"And leave you on your own with Braga?" Dom gave him a skeptical eyebrow. "Things felt more solid if I stayed. Wasn't sure what exactly that meant, but it felt like an omen." He paused, then added in a weightier tone, "I ain't running anymore."

Brian thought about what Mia had said about Letty turning Dom down, and why; then swallowed, suddenly very aware of every inch of distance between them. He pulled into the driveway, then parked behind the garage, nerves getting to him. "We'll get your car back tomorrow. Since Penning honored Letty's deal after all, the surveillance is already gone, and you should be clear to do ... whatever you want to do now. I mean, I know 'the princess is in another castle', so that part's obvious, but after that...."

"Brian? Shut the fuck up," Dom growled, in a tone like honey poured over gravel. Then Brian was turning toward the warm palm suddenly against his cheek, and they were kissing, his whole body coming alive like every probability spooling out in front of him was converging on pleasure. He fumbled for his buckles, then leaned into the kiss, bracing one hand on the firm muscular plane of Dom's chest. Dom kissed like he drove, with every ounce of his focus, the whole world narrowed down to just the two of them and the places where they touched. Only the center console between the seats kept them from putting on even more of a show for the neighbors.

He finally broke away for a breath, wild energy zinging through him. "You sure about this, man? I mean, I'm all in, but you know I'm a cop. And an asshole; can't deny that."

Dom shook his head. "My life was so full of static before you walked into the market that day, I was robbing trucks just to feel like I was getting somewhere. Excused it as taking care of my family ... but it was more about the rush. I think you know what that feels like."

"Yeah," Brian snorted. "Sometimes, it doesn't feel like a real choice unless the dice are rolling. I took the job – I keep taking the job – because I knew it was either that or end up back on the other side of a wanted poster."

"Every moment around you is like that. Running from the cops, working on the Supra, hitting the NOS, or hunting a drug lord."

"Like a coin, always spinning on edge," Brian blurted, remembering that conversation in the bar; half flirting, half business, all energy.

"Yeah, exactly," Dom grinned. "You were like a breath of fresh air, sweeping the cobwebs out. And don't tell me it ain't the same for you. What does your gift tell you, trickster?"

It had been a few hours, and Brian had taken painkillers at the office, but his mental muscles were still sore from the day's exertion; he hadn't been paying attention. He was pretty sure he knew what Dom meant, though. He let his gaze unfocus, carefully extending his probability field again, and found ... exactly what he'd thought he was feeling earlier: every positive path in front of him in that moment converging on Dom.

"Met an agent in Miami a few years ago," he replied obliquely, "who said with two tychokinetics together, Lady Luck was bound to go to some pretty unlikely lengths to keep both of us happy at once. Don't think he quite meant it this way, though."

"His failure of imagination," Dom smirked, then popped the door. "You coming inside?"

"Yeah, I'd prefer if we were inside for that," Brian said, breaking into a smile.

"Your failure of imagination," Dom chuckled. "But maybe another time."

With his gift still half-open, wild potentialities flickered through the back of Brian's thoughts: on a blanket in the backyard, under the smog-blurred stars; parked on a hillside somewhere, sere and brown under the late summer sun, the only human beings for miles; trying not to laugh while he tugged at Dom's zipper with his teeth, hand heavy on the back of his head as they sped down a quiet highway somewhere endless and flat.

"Yeah, maybe," he admitted, drunk on possibility, then got out of the car and followed Dom into the house.



Before anything else, of course, they had to placate Mia; Dom's sister had been waiting on tenterhooks all day, and neither of them had thought to text her. She yelled at them both, bullied them into sitting still for her while she laid healing hands on the scrapes and bruises neither of them had even really noticed accumulating over the course of the day, then shed angry, relieved tears when they told her about Letty.

"You're going to find her, right?" she said, frowning at Brian as she wiped at her eyes.

"Told you I'd stay the course," he nodded to her. "Got a contact who can help us start the search. We'll see how it goes from there. But yeah, we'll find her."

"Good," she replied firmly, then transferred her frown to her brother. "And you won't be leaving him behind, will you?"

Dom lifted an eyebrow at her. "Thought you might prefer that," he said, neutrally.

"We dated for like a week, five years ago," she scoffed, rolling her eyes. "I was furious, not heartbroken. But he brought you back to me in one piece like he promised, and Letty went to him to make the deal for a reason. You really are better together. Don't make me stand over your grave like I thought I was doing for Letty."

"Hey," Dom said, pulling her into an enveloping hug. "I made a wrong call five years ago. Didn't listen to you when I should've. But I learned my lesson. You're my sister; I'll always come home to you."

"You'd better," she said, returning the hug, then stepped back and looked at Brian. "I made spaghetti; I wasn't sure when Dom would be back, so there's plenty of leftovers. I'm meeting a friend tonight, so don't worry if I'm not here when you come up for air, but if I am, just remember Dom's bedroom is next to mine, all right? Trust me, I've heard everything over the years."

"Mia," Dom growled, as Brian's face heated with embarrassment. He'd worked for years with professional investigators who still couldn't read him; what made the Torettos so different?

Only, of course, the one thing he'd been missing his whole life; the thing that had drawn him to them to begin with. "Hey, it's fine. Family, right? Better than threatening to break my neck," he said, grinning at her.

Mia read that one easily enough, giving her brother a look. "Dom."

"What?" he shrugged at her. "I didn't, did I? And you can't say he didn't give me plenty of provocation."

"Oh, he provoked you all right," she snorted, then shook her head and picked up her purse. "You really do deserve each other."

Dom gave her another quick hug, the kind of casual family leave-taking they hadn't been able to indulge in for the last few years. Then she gave Brian a sardonic look and reached for him too, pulling him into a quick clasp of arms. She whispered a quiet "Thank you" into his shoulder, just loud enough for his ears, then gave him another challenging look and headed out.

"I don't know about deserve," Brian said as the door closed behind her. "Sometimes I think my life runs on spite, not luck. But you changed my world that day too, Dom. I'm not running anymore, either."

They came back together like a pair of matched magnets: mouths put to a better use than words, hands untucking shirts, feet moving toward the stairs. The rising tide of lust blew their gifts back wide-open, guiding every step to keep them from stumbling, leading every searching touch to a spot that would send a shiver straight up the spine. They managed to shuck all their clothes on the way to the master bath, pausing only long enough to rinse off the last gunsmoke-and-oil traces of the job, and wrung the lingering tension out of each other with a little manual assistance. Then they fell together onto Dom's bed, already half-hard again and intent on making each other work for it.

Brian had used his gift before in bed, guiding each touch to maximize his own and his partners' pleasure; he'd even done so after other exhausting days, when the range of his ability to affect the chances of favorable outcomes winning out over not-so-favorable ones narrowed down to only what he could directly touch and for the next few seconds. It tended to make things even more intense. But he'd never had someone else use it on him that way, and even more, someone with the extra gift of charm, whose own control was fractured enough to spill every wash of heat and spark of pleasure over Brian's wavering mental defenses until it was hard to know where one of them began and the other ended. It was overwhelming; it was addictive; it was a rush, as good as crossing the finish line first in a burst of NOS or putting the cuffs on a drug lord.

Afterward, he lay sprawled on his back panting up at the ceiling, laughing softly, high on the endorphins zinging through his system.

"What's so funny," Dom asked, raising an eyebrow at him. He sounded like he meant the question to be stern, but sprawled on his side, head propped on a bent elbow while he stared at Brian, he looked nearly as blissed out as Brian felt.

"Oh, nothing. It's just. Maybe it's better we didn't get our act together five years ago, because I think you would have killed me." He grinned over at Dom. "You still wondering whether this is a good thing?"

"I thought the deck was stacked against us," Dom shrugged. "I thought it was gonna make everything riskier. Now I think we're gonna run the table. Your bosses got any clue what an ace in the hole you are?"

"Nah. I mean, I'm not, really. I'm lucky, and I'm good at the job. Enough that Penning's willing to overlook a few eccentricities," he admitted. "But there's no one there I have this kind of synergy with. I hope you don't mind being stuck with me, man, because the last five years were honestly the loneliest of my life."

"Hard to make promises living by the quarter mile," Dom said thoughtfully. "Don't know how easy it'll be to come back home, or what it's going to take to find Letty. And we still barely know each other. But there's a saying around here: show me how you drive, I'll show you who you are. And who you are, it turns out, is someone I want with me as long as you want to be there."

A wash of complicated emotion swept through Brian, some of it his and some of it Dom's; he swallowed, unable to find the words to reply, then leaned up to fit their mouths together in an affirming kiss, more acknowledgement and comfort than anything more heated.

Dom kissed back, one hand cupped around the back of Brian's head, scratching blunt fingernails gently through Brian's short hair. Then he flopped down on his back next to Brian, covering his mouth in a yawn. "We really oughtta shower and eat some of that spaghetti before my sister comes home," he said, "or she's gonna give us so much shit."

"She's gonna do that anyway," Brian laughed, then stifled a yawn of his own and stretched out to drag a pillow under his head. "It'll still be there when we wake up. We've had a hell of day. Get some sleep."

Exhaustion rose up over him like a wave, and the last sound he heard before it dragged him under was the sound of Dom chuckling in return.



Mia did, in fact, give them both shit the next morning. And the spaghetti was still there, in a big Saran-sealed bowl waiting in the fridge.

It wasn't the only thing waiting, though. They were about halfway through a carb-loaded breakfast when Mia noticed an unfamiliar car at the curb and called them to the front window. The driver saw the curtains move and got out; Brian instantly sent Mia back up the stairs, recognizing one of Braga's remaining lieutenants. Fenix Calderon was at large in Mexico, as far as the FBI was aware, but Gisele Yashar had evaporated into thin air ... apparently only to turn up at the Toretto doorstep.

She knocked politely, both hands in view, an obviously peaceful approach. Though at such close range, her bullseye gift could turn almost anything into a deadly missile. Brian exchanged glances with Dom, trying to feel out their immediate options, and was surprised to realize he had no bad feelings about her; complicated ones, maybe, but leaving the door shut gave him more of a feeling of long odds than letting her in. Dom gave him a nod, apparently agreeing, so he shrugged and opened the door.

"Gisele," Dom said, stepping up beside him. "When I gave you my number, I expected a call, not a visit."

"Toretto. I didn't expect to be here either," she said, giving him a wry smile. "But my boss was impressed by your actions yesterday. He'd like to make you – both of you, and any team you assemble – an offer."

"Your boss is under arrest," Brian reminded her, frowning as he closed the door behind her. She didn't have the air of someone lying or trying to bluff, but he didn't see any reason for Braga to try to make a bargain now. "And we already turned him down once. You're not here for Braga. So why are you really here?"

"I did work for Braga," she conceded, "but he wasn't my boss. You're aware certain other agencies have an interest in the drug trade south of your border?"

Brian drew in a sharp breath. That probably meant CIA; which made her some cowboy agent's deniable informant, recruited probably for her gift and her cool head. Much like he'd been for Bilkins in Miami. But if that agent had been running her with Braga, the drug lord's arrest wouldn't exactly have been a boon to his operation. He'd probably known about the FBI's investigation, but thought – like Penning, as obviously disgruntled as he'd been about the deadline – that it wasn't going anywhere. "I think I know the kind of guy you mean. And I'd have thought he'd be upset about yesterday, not interested."

"Braga was beginning to be more liability than asset," she shrugged. "And there are other goals he believes your unique approach would be useful for. Including one you already have in mind; the one behind Braga's growth into a threat. But you haven't yet gathered the crew or the knowledge to face that man. My boss can help with both."

"Sound too good to be true," Dom frowned at her. "Which means it probably is. Why us? Why now?"

Gisele gave him an acknowledging nod. "Because if you go against your current opponent as you are now, you'll fail, and only make it harder for another to do so in the future. And because another friend of yours is currently being drawn into the orbit of the problem running the drug scene in Rio. You can be useful to my boss, and he can be useful to you. In his words, any shamrock who can make more than one Venus Throw in quick succession is more than worth the investment."

The agent's phrasing jolted Brian's system like an electrokinetic's touch; he felt more than saw Dom's concerned frown, but Brian had to ask.

"This boss of yours. A generation older than us. White. Sharp sense of humor. Close-mouthed about his talent; but if he admits it, he's also a tychokinetic."

Gisele's brow's furrowed, and her attention sharpened on him with all her bullseye focus. "That does sound like him. But age and coloring mean little to a man like him, especially with access to highly-gifted biosculptors."

"Brian?" Dom prompted, tone very much a request for information.

Brian couldn't actually say it; the odds of that particular coincidence were so low as to be unmeasurable. But it would explain a number of anomalies from his childhood. It would even explain why this offer seemed too good to be true; it was personal as much as business.

Not that he'd ever confirm it. Which meant ... it couldn't matter. Even if it made Brian's head spin, and weighted the odds much more heavily in that direction. "Nothing. Nothing that means anything, really. It's just, the man who trained me in my gift used that phrase. Maybe they knew each other."

"That would be quite the coincidence," Gisele said, but he could see she was wondering now, too.

"Haven't you learned by now? Nothing's a coincidence around Brian," Dom scoffed, laying a hand on his arm. "So say we agree. Where do we need to be, and when? Who's threatening Vince? And who has Letty?"

Gisele gave him a wry smile. "He'll send a car for you; you'll discuss the details there. But I assure you, you won't regret it."

Somehow, Brian was beginning to get the feeling that it would be a long time before he returned to the FBI offices in LA, if ever. But there was only one answer they could give.

"Tell us more."



 

(or read at AO3)

Comments

[spikedluv]

I can't wait to sit down and read this!!!

[jedibuttercup]

:) :) :)