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It’s a hot June night. A night that once would have been impossible. Not just the almost thirty degrees C long past sundown. Those temperatures aren’t even rare anymore, and when climate disaster disturbs the lives of Kaz’s Crows as well as his own sleep, he will learn to care more about the creeping doom hiding in plain sight, in weather reports and failed cherry harvests, but for now—it’s a muggy, sweaty, peaceful night, and Kaz can’t fucking sleep. He can’t sleep, but he’s not alone. He’s safe. He’s loved. On the other side of the three king beds they’ve pushed together into what Kaz steadfastly refuses to call a love nest, there’s a knot of limbs, some brown, some freckled, some hairy and badly sunburnt. Somewhere inside the knot, Inej, Wylan and Matthias are snuggling in spite of the evil weather. They’ve kicked off all of their duvets and thin linen sheets, and if Kaz wasn’t sharing the bed, they’d surely have forgone their full-sleeve pyjamas as well. They don’t ask, though. They never ask, because they love him, and they still have patience, even Jesper who—long before they first kissed, twenty-nine years ago—declared anything but sleeping in the nude blasphemy against nature.
There are worse blasphemies nowadays, like impossibly hot spring nights, and Jesper’s sleeping patterns. He’s awake. Probably out on the balcony, for a very belated post-shag cigarette-cum-attempt to get rid of his urge to fidget without waking his lovers. Cum. He’ll like that. Kaz will make him laugh, and if Jes won’t let Kaz order him back to bed, then Kaz will keep him company somewhere with the faint chance of a cool breeze.
That’s all he expects. He certainly doesn’t expect… that. That—that—it would be too kind to call it blasphemy. It’s a crime. The only crime, in fact, that should ever warrant prison or execution. It hasn’t happened in months. Last year, unwisely, Kaz allowed Nina to pick the movie, and that’s how she started it , and for three months, she kept it going. Nina’s not in Ketterdam tonight, though. Grisha business, together with Kuwei. They haven’t checked in tonight, but they’re fine. The small possibility that they’re in mortal danger is more than weighed up by the fact that the two worst offenders are gone right now. Jesper only said it once, and Kaz tied him to a chair and filled the inside of his shirt with fifteen tubes of assorted hair products while he begged for forgiveness. Kaz accepted, on the condition that Jesper went out to buy the whole polycule replacement shampoos and hair gels before any of them found out. He’s forty-nine, after all. He’d never hear the end of it if Inej—or worse, Nina—found out that he enjoys playfights.
So he’s got no reason, in this sweltering June night, to expect it.
And still…
At first, it’s fine. Jesper’s playing on his phone on the balcony floor, neon lights painting his laughter-lined face like gaudy drag makeup. The phone’s on silent, but he’s quietly singing—something that might be a new pop song or might be a lullaby, it’s hard to tell when Jesper’s that off-key. Sometimes, people complain that he’s butchering Lizzo or Bruce Springsteen, and Kaz breaks their fingers. He doesn’t care for Lizzo or Bruce Springsteen. He doesn’t care for the radio at all. Why shut up Jesper? He’s far less annoying than all the other audio clutter that gets piped out into the world.
Five storeys up in the middle of the night, only the occasional accelerating car breaks the spell of Jesper’s discordant mumble.
Kaz will never tire of watching him. Out here, existence is bearable, almost cool. Jesper must’ve tossed his pyjamas onto the sofa inside, because he’s naked, and there are faint goosebumps on his sinewy arms. The moon’s not bright enough to make out his limp cock or his greying happy trail, but Kaz knows both well enough to imagine them anyway, hiding behind Jesper's long legs and hands that hold the phone up far too close to his face to be healthy. His left foot’s tapping erratically against his other ankle. Jesper goes through a slow song, and then he tries a song so fast his tongue can’t keep up. In frustration, he turns off the phone and—
“Boss.”
“Your situational awareness is abysmal.”
Grinning, Jesper stretches his arms. He practiced the move in front of the mirror. Kaz caught him, once, when they were sixteen. Doesn’t make it any less effective, the way he pushes out his flat pecs, bares his throat, lets his legs fall open to reveal the lazy dick that Kaz already knew was there from past experience. Five-hours-ago experience. Jesper once said that more than half of Ketterdam wants to lock him up in their bedroom, and he’s older now, wrinkled, greying, veins tracing up his hands like nets, like safety, like forever, but Kaz doesn’t doubt that it’s still true. People are stupid. Jesper will die if he can’t keep his mind busy, and those long limbs and wide lips are nothing without the bright giddy glee Jesper wears when he’s getting his way.
“Baby,” Jesper says, languorously climbing to his feet. The angle’s still deliberately flattering, even though Kaz sees him snotted up every winter because he’s stupidly prone to forgetting his coat and scarf, and Kaz still loves him. Jesper should really know better after twenty-eight long years of fucking—and twelve years of extortion and forgery-enabled poly marriage) than to think he needs to waste his sexy manoeuvres on someone easily charmed as Kaz, and—
Wait a second.
Boss. Baby.
Fucking asshole. He’s buttering Kaz up just to slip it into their conversation. Ever since Nina made everyone watch fucking Boss Baby on Date Night, that infernal animated infant has destroyed Kaz’s life. Yes, Kaz dressed up in suits when he was fifteen and learned how to speak like a management consultant, but that was not in service of reactionary demographic time bomb Disney propaganda.
It was to commit crime. There’s nothing wrong with crime.
Crime is great.
Even worse, Kaz can see it. Jesper’s infected everyone but Kaz with sentimentalism and now the walls of their flat are plastered with old photographs, and far more than he’d ever have expected, given his general personality and resultant lack of charm, are of teenaged Kaz. Staring at a serious Inej. Glaring at a laughing Jesper. Threatening a Matthias who, in retrospect, was definitely getting off on it. Kaz did look so young back then, in his business suit costume.
He did look like a baby.
A baby crime boss.
A Boss Baby.
One day, Nina Zenik will pay. Once she comes back. If she comes back. Unfortunately, everything she owns already belongs to Kaz, because they’re married. Even worse, all her loved ones are his loved ones too, and they’re also all married, both to Nina, and to Kaz, so whenever he threatens to kill her family she almost dies of laughter. Whoever warned about the dangers of group marriage to society might have had a point. Marriage needlessly complicates vengeance.
Jesper, however… Out here, up here, no-one will hear him scream.
“You’re not subtle,” Kaz hisses. “You brought this fate on yourself. You underestimate my power if you think your body could distract me. My thirst for vengeance. My bottomless hatred for the fucking Boss Baby.”
Slowly, he stalks towards his enemy. Jesper matches his speed stepping backwards, the moonlight kissing shadows on his edges and his curves, until his bare ass hits the concrete wall. Jesper’s tongue darts out, just a quick wetting of his lips, and then he grins.
“That silk pyjama is exactly what the Boss Baby would wear to bed.”
“It’s not, and you know it,” Kaz sniffs, faux-haughty. “Mine has tiny crows.”
“Did you know there’s a Boss Baby Netflix series?”
“I will kill you, Jesper.”
“You do know what happened to the last guy who said ‘You underestimate my power’, don’t you—”
“It can hardly be worse than what I will do to every executive who greenlit that trash. They’ll be hanging from their own entrails.” Kaz braces his left hand against the wall just besides Jesper’s naked shoulder, caging him in. The concrete is still radiating warmth. “Every concept artist will have their eyes skewered on their pencils…” He trails the nail of his right index finger down Jesper’s cheek, the two-day salt and pepper stubble like wilful velvet, and he pauses over the throat. Jesper swallows, again, again, and his Adam’s apple jumps under Kaz’s fingertips. “Every voice actor will choke to death eating their own severed fingers…” His fingers move down Jesper’s chest with hopefully agonizing tenderness. There are only sparse patches of hair, on the pecs and then far down his belly, still Kaz and Wylan tried for eleven years to make Jesper less neurotic about needing to shave. “Alec Baldwin will get drowned in used diapers for his starring role.” It wasn’t even their reassurance, in the end—it was the small pocket of fat beneath his belly that Jesper just couldn’t melt, no matter how hard he tried. It was defeat. He started looking older, just like the rest of them. Kaz traces letters into the pudge. He’s already said them, a thousand times, to Jesper’s face and into his shoulder and his stomach, too. He said them during the wedding.
“And every beloved, gorgeous husband of mine who utters the words Boss Baby ever again…” Both of Kaz’s hands strike simultaneously: they settle on Jesper’s slender hips, and Kaz gives a minute pull, just a signal, and takes a half-step back.
“You want a dance? I thought you—”
“We had an orgy five hours ago. I’m not forty anymore, and neither are you.” Kaz doesn’t point down at Jesper’s flaccid dick. Inej has forced him to look up the word tact in a dictionary five times over the years. He might think that Jesper should accept the inevitable passage of time, even relish it—none of them were ever supposed to grow this old, or this happy—but Jesper’s prone to mawkishness when it’s past midnight, about burnt breakfast toast, lost games, and his worth now he’s no longer an easy thing to be fucked. He’s wrong, both ways: he never should have been reduced to his pretty face and desperation, and he’s as gorgeous as he ever was, fifty and alive and melting into Kaz’s arms.
They sway, side to side, back and forth. The balcony could have been large enough for a waltz, without the table and eight chairs and umbrella and three large herb pots, but Kaz didn’t come out here for a dance, and neither did Jesper. Kaz lets his fingers drift to the dimples of Jesper’s ass, then rests them on his hips again. Jesper’s elegant fingers dig into Kaz’s loose pyjama top. The moon isn’t bright enough for anyone down there to see more than a single silhouette, barely moving.
“Do you think that some crimes are just unforgivable?” Jesper mutters about three minutes into the silent dance.
“Everything’s legal unless you get caught. And we didn’t.”
“Betrayal. Against family.”
“If this is about Colm, he didn’t need those seventeen thousand euro you stole, and it was thirty years ago,” Kaz mutters. He’s only barely impatient. He learned not to be, on occasion, just like he had to learn that Jesper will never get over it. “Your Da loved you. If this is about—well, of course there can be no forgiveness for calling me Boss Baby. I would outwit that sucker so—”
“So your argument is that you are smarter than a cartoon baby.”
“I am.”
“You are.” Jesper’s nodding dubiously, but he’s grinning again. He presses a kiss into Kaz’s hair. That’s how it goes. When there’s no resolution, no justice, kicking the pain down the road is all anyone can do. It’s what they do for each other, now, all of them.
What happened, happened.
They’re all still alive.
And they’re not alone.
“Nina and Kuwei are probably fine,” Jesper promises into the crown of his head. “I know that’s why you’re too tense to go back to sleep, but she probably just left her phone in the hotel. She didn’t play a single match against me or post photos all day, I checked. Maybe her battery’s empty. A missed check-in means nothing, darling, not anymore. This isn’t a heist. You can’t get her killed.”
“I know,” Kaz tells his collarbone. The night’s getting colder, finally. He can feel Jesper shivering under his lips.
“Just herd me back to bed if it makes you feel better.”
“I don’t—”
“I grew up with sheepdogs. I should’ve seen it the second we met—you were always ordering us around, moving us into place, getting pissed when we didn’t show up on time. Corralling. Herding. Sheepdog.”
“Punctuality does not make people sheep.”
“It’s sweet. I like it.” Jesper kisses the tip of Kaz’s nose. “Herd me to bed, Boss Baby.”
“Careful, old man.”
“Or you’ll bite?”
Kaz slowly guides their not-quite-dance over to the balcony door. Jesper, walking backwards, follows the cues easily—stop, there’s the threshold you need to step over it, hold me more steadily my leg’s cramping, turn left—and only attempts a protest when they’re at the bedroom door.
“Wait, my pyjamas are—”
“It’s fine. You’ll sleep better, and in the morning our partners will have a fun surprise,” Kaz whispers against Jesper’s loving mouth. “I might even bite you when we all wake up, as long as you remember that only someone who is not and is not referred to as the Boss Baby can bite you. Babies don’t have teeth.”