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Wise was only twenty-one, the first time he and Shepherd met in person.
Shepherd was twenty-nine at the time, but only because their birthdays didn't line up with the meeting. Two months later, he was thirty, making him nine years older than Wise in total. He'd been going through a lot, back then. He felt washed up, useless, tired, emasculated. He had a day job as a cameraman on a popular TV show, but he wasn't making a lot of money, and his boss hated his guts. He got yelled at every day. His Inter-Knot informant business had been in its infancy — an illegal thing he'd jumped on in an effort to get by and pay some of his bills — but Shepherd was pushing thirty, and he was flat broke, and he didn't really have anything to live for.
He wasn't expecting anything special when he reached out for a conversation with Wise. He'd lined up a meeting with the new Proxy destroying Inter-Knot records out of sheer dumb luck.
Everyone was talking about Phaethon, at the time. Shepherd just wanted a cut of the profits.
Anyway. He'd been nearly thirty, then, and he didn't know what to do with his life. He'd failed at just about everything he tried to do, both in childhood and in his young adulthood. Wise was twenty-one, but the first time they'd met at the Coff Café on Sixth Street, Shepherd had been struck by — everything about him. The fact that he had a sister, and that Phaethon was actually two Proxies hiding behind the name of one. The fact that he was razor-sharp and focused and intelligent. Spoke and talked and acted like a genius. He was handsome, too. Shepherd had seen a lot of famous celebrities in person while working for that TV show, but celebrity charisma had always seemed so manufactured. Everyone had stylists, makeup artists, plastic surgery, pounds of foundation. The talk show conversations had all been partially scripted to make everyone look good. Everything was fake, but Wise — Wise was impossibly beautiful and impossibly real.
And he wanted something. That much was clear, even in their first meeting. He and Belle, they weren't on Inter-Knot for the money. He was searching for something. He needed something. More than money, or fame, or power; more than the simple elements of human greed that Shepherd was used to seeing.
Phaethon's ambitions had seemed even more important than money — and as he hit thirty, and looked into Wise's young, beautiful features, Shepherd suddenly felt like he'd seen the face of God.
Wise is twenty-eight now, which makes Shepherd thirty-seven. They've known each other for seven years, and Shepherd knows, deep down, that he's still too old for Wise, and far too ugly. He'd tried a lot of things to catch the young man's attention, back in the day, when the crush was newer and still sent butterflies fluttering through his chest. He dyed his hair a trendy blond; flipped through men's fashion magazines and tried to incorporate more color and style into his wardrobe. But the harder he tried to peacock and strut and catch Wise's attention, the more disgusted the young man seemed to be with him.
In the end, he'd given up.
Shepherd loves Wise, but not in a way where he thinks they'll ever be together.
And that's fine, really. It's fine. He's never asked for anything more.
It's just — if there's a problem at all, the problem is this: Wise has a lover, now.
"Here you go, dear," Venus says, in her brusque and strangely matronly way, as she arranges a secure file drop to Shepherd's private server. "That's the private detective footage you asked for."
It's a bit of cybersecurity theater, really. Neither of them actually need to bother with the private servers and the firewalls when they're sitting across from each other, but Shepherd doesn't mind. This is just how they have to communicate when they're both Inter-Knot information brokers, and the nice thing about Venus is that she's slightly less intelligent than she thinks she actually is. She's easy to manipulate.
He coughs quietly around a dry throat and opens up the first of her files.
Sure enough, there's Wise, captured in clear HD video, strolling through Lumina Square with a well-dressed wolf Thiren nearly twice his size. The man says something indistinct, which makes Wise laugh; then he slides his arm into the crook of the Thiren's elbow, and the wolfman curls his tail, somewhat subtly, around Wise's legs.
"Huh." Shepherd keeps his voice steady through sheer force of will. "They're really dating?"
Venus demurely holds her phone over her lips, concealing what seems to be a smile. She tips her head slightly to one side, and doesn't quite answer.
It's not like Shepherd hasn't expected this. Of course someone as beautiful as Wise would find a boyfriend, eventually. Even after seven years, they've never been especially close. Wise doesn't tell Shepherd much about his personal life, and, hell, it wouldn't even surprise Shepherd to learn that Wise has slept around with lots of people. He's had his own quiet moments of insecurity, working from his car, keeping Random Play in his sights. Counting the customers going in and out of the store, wondering which of them Wise would get into bed with, if they were bold enough to offer their bodies to him.
But: Wise's new lover is the leader of Victoria Housekeeping.
Von Lycaon.
Silently, Shepherd does some digging. There's something wrong with the records you'd expect to find around Von Lycaon's early life; Shepherd can't find them, even with his best scripts, which suggests that the man has the connections in New Eridu to have had them deliberately covered up or redacted from the usual public databases. But the birthday listed on the man's most recent driver's license registration papers, and the documentation registering Victoria Housekeeping as an official tax-liable entity with New Eridu government, both suggest that the man is thirty-eight. Legally, he's registered as a wolf Thiren. October 4th, white hair, red eyes, 198 centimeters tall. He's huge.
One year older than Shepherd. Ten years older than Wise. He's pushing forty and he's a god-damned wolf and he's fucking around with a twenty-year-old and, that's just, that's just not fair —
"But, Shepherd, dear," Venus says, sweetly intuitive in the way she always is, "your little rookie — isn't he a little too old for you to worry about him like this? I mean, he's almost thirty. And so capable!"
Shepherd blows out a breath. Tries to stay cool. Project an air of calm affability, the way he always does. Venus doesn't know that Wise is Phaethon; she thinks he's just a new Proxy that Shepherd's taken under his wing. "I know, Venus," he says through gritted teeth. "I know."
But he doesn't. Not really. Wise has always been that fresh-faced twenty-one year old, in his heart, and Shepherd has half-convinced himself that it's his duty to somehow protect him.
He likes Wise. Always has. It was never in a way where he thought he could see Wise with himself. Not even in his own dreams and private fantasies did he ever imagine being the one to have Wise underneath his body, eager for his touch. He could have lived with the knowledge that Wise was fucking other men. But he'd thought Wise would mess around with handsome boys closer to his own age, if he even liked men at all — boisterous youngish guys like that musclehead named Anton or that Seth Lowell kid. Guys he'd never compare to. Not someone like Lycaon, older and dignified and impossibly perfect and someone Shepherd still can't compare to.
Shepherd can't complain. Really, he can't. If anyone was ever going to fuck Wise that wasn't him, well, then sure, at least it's Von Lycaon. Tall, broad-shouldered, mild-mannered, well-spoken. So perfect and elegant and ruthlessly efficient that only the city's most wealthy can afford his services. So handsome that he attracts attention just by standing still.
"And you can't really complain about the choice of boyfriend," Venus continues, as if she can hear his innermost thoughts. "So handsome, and my girls loved him! They said he was an absolute gentleman through all of their dates. Never an unwanted touch or an untoward glance — but, my word, the way he looks at our little Proxy when he wants it..."
Shepherd tries to resist the urge to roll his eyes. I don't really need to hear about how Von Lycaon gets you wet, he wants to snap, but he doesn't say it.
He tapped into Venus's information network because he didn't want to utilize his own to surveil Wise. It wouldn't have worked. Wise knows the city agents that Shepherd works with too well by now, but Venus, conveniently, has a little gang of high school girls that she plays big sister to, and she can get them to do anything she wants. Following a cute boy and his hot Thiren boyfriend through trendy date spots is easy for a gaggle of schoolgirls, and if either of them confronted the girls about it, well, they could just say they wanted pictures of the sexy wolf guy. Cover story not even required.
And, sure. Yeah. Shepherd's not ever going to have a chance. Not when Von Lycaon is the kind of man whose shoulders are as wide as his waist is narrow; not when he cocks his hips in the videos as he's waiting for Wise, ostensibly to balance his tail, but almost as if to imply that he's good at other things. The man is so disgustingly handsome that he seems to blow through the complete lack of attraction that often sets Shepherd off when it comes to fully beast-faced Thirens. Even the way he stands would imply that his dick is big.
Bitterly, Shepherd swipes through the photos Venus's schoolgirl informants took for him. There's Wise, hanging off of Lycaon's arm; Wise, smiling at Lycaon in an utterly besotted way; Lycaon's hand firmly on Wise's slim waist, pulling him close. Lycaon wiping a crumb of cake off of Wise's bottom lip, a gentle look on his canine face. A more distant shot, both of them on a city rooftop, seemingly dancing together in the light of the moon. Later in the night, a video clip of Lycaon and Wise exiting a luxury hotel together, Wise limping just slightly, body loose and hips swaying in that just-fucked way —
"I'm just worried, alright?" Shepherd replies flatly. "Von Lycaon isn't a normal person. You can't just get involved with someone like that if you don't know the dangers."
Venus smiles and shakes her head. "But none of us are normal people, Shepherd," she laughs. "We're all doing dangerous things, and we're all just getting by."
She's not wrong. She's not wrong, but whatever.
Shepherd thanks her for her service and pays her for her time and resolves to go through the rest of the footage later, on his own, and in private. He goes home, and he makes dinner, and he tries not to think about it.
Then, when he can't sleep, he gets up and does a quick search for gay Thiren-on-human porn on his laptop.
There's more content than he expected, but none of the videos in question are really at the levels of quality that he needs. None of these porn stars, amateur or professional, are actually as attractive as either Wise or Von Lycaon are in the flesh. Grinding his teeth behind his lips, Shepherd settles for a video that's good enough for his purposes. The Thiren man in question is a husky, not a wolf, but he's big enough, broad enough. The twink he's going to rail has black hair, not silver, and he's not even remotely as cute as Wise.
Whatever. it doesn't matter. Shepherd doesn't need anything but the camera angles and the slim look of his body as Thiren cock pulls in and out of his ass.
But even as he's trying to get himself off, the dialogue in the video is irritatingly distracting and cliché.
"Oh my God," the bottom whimpers and whines, as his Thiren top's cock pulls in and out of his tight ass. "Yes, yes, yes — I love your big doggie dick — yes, yes, oh God —"
"You want more?" the husky Thiren breathes, pushing him into another position. "Say it. Say you love my dog dick."
"I love it," the twink babbles, even as his canine lover is pressing him into the pillows, fucking him so hard that his ass and thighs jiggle with each firm thrust. "I love dog dick! I love it! I'm never gonna need human cock ever again!"
Shepherd feels faintly sick to his stomach.
He jerks himself to the imagery anyway, to the wet slapping of furred body against smooth skin. He loses himself in the thought that Von Lycaon and Wise would be like this, fucking like animals in that five-star hotel room. Then he reaches orgasm, carelessly using his cum-stained hand to close his laptop once he's caught his breath, and wonders where the fuck he's gone wrong in his life.
Rationally, as a reasonable adult, Shepherd knows that he should probably just avoid Sixth Street until the vague jealous feeling of bitter betrayal settles into something more normal. But work takes him there anyway. Phaethon isn't the only Proxy that he works with, and one of his more ordinary Proxies wanted to meet up with him at the train station for some data that would help her construct a partial Carrot for the Pursenas Hollow.
Just business as usual, he tells himself. Just business as usual.
So it shouldn't hurt business, surely, if he swings by Random Play after his meeting is concluded. He can visit, can't he? Just to see what's going on? He can check out videos like a normal customer, surely, he can look through the window to see if Wise is with Von Lycaon again, and surely it won't hurt anything, surely it won't hurt anyone but himself —
Shepherd has barely even looked through the window of Random Play before he suddenly feels a hand seizing him by the back collar of his suit, scruffing him like he's a mangy stray.
He nearly drops his laptop. He clings to it awkwardly, shoving it into its usual protective sleeve as a pretty young woman with red highlights in her dark hair scowls down at him, physically lifting his entire body like he's so much trash.
"Hey," she growls, something low and threatening in her soft voice. "Why are you stalking the manager here?"
Internally, Shepherd blanks, and then panics. He puts some pieces together, but the conclusions he draws only make him feel worse: the young woman is wearing a maid uniform, which means she must be a member of Victoria Housekeeping, and her inhuman strength must be because she's a Thiren. Wait, but what kind? He looks at the top of her head, but doesn't see ears —
"Huh?" he stutters, as his mind races a mile a minute. "Um — I'm a customer —"
She flings him to the ground, slamming him against the pavement in a way that only slightly hurts. "Lie to me again and I'll break your ribs with my tail," the dark-haired maid threatens him again. Sure enough, she's got a shark tail that she's now pressing against his throat. "What are you doing here?"
She has a friend with her that Shepherd initially didn't notice. The second girl with green pigtails pipes up as he's groping for his glasses, which fell onto the concrete a little ways away from where he landed. "U-Um — p-please don't lie to Ellen!" the other maid squeaks anxiously. "W-We've s-seen you here for a couple of d-days now, s-so we know you're following Master Wise..."
Fuck. Has it really been a couple of days? And here he thought that he was being very subtle. "Alright, alright, look, I know Wise," Shepherd stammers, trying to sound older, placating, harmless, knowledgeable. "Just ask him directly, okay? I work with him on the" — he lowers his voice — "the Proxy stuff. I don't mean him any harm, I promise! Just go inside and ask him!"
Ellen scowls and hauls him up again. Then she politely opens the front door to Random Play, where Bangboo 18 is waiting for her behind the counter.
"Hey, Proxy," she calls loudly, apparently heedless of the fact that other customers might hear her. Fortunately, no one else is in the store right now. "Corin found this old geezer drooling at you through the window. You know him?"
Wise pops out from a back room and looks over. Takes in the view: Shepherd, roughed up and very helpless, and currently being held captive by one Ellen Joe. "Huh? Oh, yeah, that's Shepherd. Sorry." He doesn't seem surprised by the situation in the least. "I know he looks weird, but he's... He helps with the business sometimes. Don't worry, he won't hurt anybody."
"Hmph." Unceremoniously, Ellen simply drops Shepherd to the floor, where he scrambles to pick himself up and dust himself off. "I'm not apologizing. He looked creepy."
"Don't worry, I wouldn't ask you to." Mercy of mercies, Wise crouches down to look at Shepherd curiously, as if to extend a helping hand. "Hey, Shepherd. You okay?"
He stops short of actually touching the man, but it's just as well; Shepherd doesn't actually have any injuries worth mentioning.
The bottle-blond manages a laugh. "N-Never been better, hahaha...!"
Wise makes a noncommittal noise, straightening his body, and then goes over to speak with Ellen and Corin briefly. In the meantime, Shepherd straightens out his purple shirt and green tie, trying to make sure he looks at least somewhat presentable.
After a moment, Wise walks back to where Shepherd is. "Well," he says, apparently having concluded his interviews, "I guess Ellen and Corin have a point. Do you have something to tell me, Shepherd? Why don't we go out to Coff Café, have something to drink?"
Shepherd tries to protest — swears that it's nothing, that he doesn't have anything new, that he's been working on a couple of leads but none of his jobs are good for Phaethon yet — but Wise doesn't seem interested in hearing it. He just shakes his head, and beckons carelessly with his fingers, and then, feeling pathetic, Shepherd complies.
"So," Wise says, once they've settled at Coff Café with a pair of drinks that Shepherd let Wise order for him. "You've been stalking me and Lycaon lately, huh?"
Ah.
So that's what this is about, Shepherd thinks.
Well, it was too much to think that Wise might actually be worried about him.
"Have I?" he retorts, with one of his usual forced and enigmatic smiles. "I didn't think you'd find out so easily."
Serenely, Wise stirs creamer into his coffee, then sips at it and sighs. "Lycaon noticed the girls tailing us the first day. You're lucky you sent schoolgirls. If they were grown men, he'd have beaten them up."
"Well, can you blame me?" Shepherd asks, trying not to sound overly defensive. "You and Belle are like — like little cousins to me. I want to make sure you haven't gotten mixed up in anything... unsavory."
Lying is always easier than he thinks it will be. Sometimes Shepherd completely understands why Wise finds him to be repulsive, awkward, sneaky, slick. He's always been a liar, through and through. Nothing but a conniving weasel at the end of every day. Doing the wrong thing always feels so much better to him than doing the right thing, and Shepherd — Shepherd's never even known once in his life what it would feel like to be a hero.
He'll never know what it's like to be Wise: so beautiful and handsome and virtuous that it's almost as though they don't even live in the same world.
"You mean I'm your meal ticket, and you want to make sure you haven't lost me," the Proxy says in his usual way, slow and calm and unruffled, in a soft voice.
"I never said that." Sighing with long-suffering resignation, Shepherd closes his hand around the heat of the coffee cup on his side of the table. "Why do you hate me so much, Wise?"
Wise shrugs, careless. He always acts like that, when it comes to Shepherd: like he doesn't care about anything the man does. "You're just a middleman, at the end of the day," he says, in a tone that is both cold and matter-of-fact. "People pay you because they know that you can get them Phaethon. But it's not like you've ever done anything for us to be worth the price you charge. You got rich by selling us to other people."
He shifts his weight slightly in his seat, tucking his ankle over his knee in a way that — Shepherd hates himself for thinking it — just makes him look so cool.
"You need me, Shepherd, but I've never needed you." Wise's brilliant green eyes speak of infinite understanding. "Without me, you'd be nothing. But without you, I'd have gotten by."
Shepherd only smiles weakly, because deep down, he knows that everything Wise is saying is true.
"Touché," he says, in his own soft, meek voice. "Touché."
Wise sighs, uncrossing his legs. He sips at his coffee again, his slim eyes cold and distant and unbothered. "So? Any complaints about my Lycaon?"
"No. None whatsoever." Part of Shepherd hates to admit it, but he's got nothing. There's nothing he can do to stop the boy he loves from dating the man everyone craves. "By all accounts, he's perfect. He's hot. Rich. Serious about you. Fully committed. Got a bit of a nasty past — but that's nothing you don't know about, surely?"
Wise blows calmly at the lid of his coffee cup. "I know enough," he says curtly, and leaves it at that.
Shepherd waits a moment, just to see if he has anything else to say, but when Wise doesn't say anything, he continues. "It's just funny," he says, trying not to sound jealous. "I never thought you were the type to date anyone, much less a Thiren who's so much older than you are. I expected Belle to find someone eventually, but you... I always thought you, that you'd..."
"Should it matter that he's a Thiren, or that he's older than me?" For once, Wise sounds surprised, and maybe even a little offended. "You know, you should find someone too, Shepherd. Might be good for you to actually care about someone besides yourself."
"Is that so?" Shepherd smiles weakly, in the way that he always feels when Wise is the one staring him down. "I think I'm a little too old and tired and ugly to be on the market these days."
"Don't be so hard on yourself." Wise sets his coffee cup down. He looks away, and for a moment, he sounds a little wistful. "You know, you weren't that bad-looking, before you started trying to be cool."
"...Was I?"
Wise nods, still looking away, as if staring at the memory of what Shepherd was like before the Inter-knot and the money and fame had twisted either of them. "You were kind of cute, actually," he says. "Back when you had black hair and you wore normal suits. You tried so hard to be nice to everyone. I actually kind of liked you back then."
Shepherd's heart skips a beat.
And it's not — he can't. He never even thought, even once, that he had a chance. He thought that everything he was doing was his best. He thought that everything, the hair, the clothes, the hat, the glasses, that all of those things would be better. The plots, the schemes, the money, the desire to get rich quick or die trying. He thought those things were good. But maybe they weren't. That the farther away he got from the loser that he once was, the more that Wise might finally someday turn around and notice that the person by his side had been ruthless and cutthroat and bloodthirsty for him. And maybe the real problem is, that never even once, in all the time that he loved Wise, did he ever think, even once, to just ask Wise what it was that he wanted —
"Did" — Shepherd stutters, and he can't get the words out, his heart is racing too fast, his eyes are filming over, and he's not going to cry, not when Wise wouldn't even understand for a moment, and he shouldn't say it, but he wants to know — "do you think — that if things had worked out differently, you and I could have..."
Wise leans back in his seat. Tips his chair on its back legs, his slender body swaying dangerously to maintain balance, slim green eyes focused only on the tip of his finger as he pulls his coffee cup back by its rim.
He's beautiful. He looks so distant, and so judgmental, forever out of reach, and Shepherd can't help but ache with the thought that the young man has never looked more beautiful.
"Oh man," Wise murmurs, cold and damning, in a voice that hammers the last nail into Shepherd's coffin. "That's gross. I don't even want to think about that."