Cando crushed the comm in his fist, letting the little metal pieces of it fall out of his hand to clink on the rooftop. “You’re a pain the goddamn ass, kid, anyone ever tell you that?”

Enzo’s hand twitched towards his blaster, but before he could so much as move a finger Cando had popped over to him, snatched the weapon away, and popped back to his original starting point. Enzo suppressed a groan, still panting from his race through the streets, palms sweaty, heart pounding out a staccato rhythm against his ribcage. “I’ve been told that a time or two, yeah.”

He watched as the other man picked at the goo sticking to his clothes, pulling a chunk away from his torso and letting it snap back into place. “What is this shit?” he asked, giving it up as a lost cause and focusing his attention on Enzo instead.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Enzo asked, grasping his right wrist with his left hand in front of him.

Cando snorted, hiking his shirt up to store Enzo’s blaster in the back of his waistband. “Well, how do I get it off?”

Enzo subtly turned his wrist so he could start punching in a code, eyeing the other man defiantly and trying to keep him focused on his face. “Look, let’s just cut to the chase here. What do you want from me?”

With a put-upon sigh, Cando unzipped his coat and slipped it off his shoulders, careful not to let any of the goo touch his skin. Enzo was momentarily distracted by his bare arms, by the swirling purple tattoos stretching from his left collarbone all the way down his broad shoulder and thick bicep, ending as his forearm tapered down into his wrist. He snapped his gaze up to meet the pirate’s as the jacket fell to the ground in a heap. “I liked that jacket, too, stole it off of some rich fuck just last week,” he sighed, checking his ash grey tank top for signs of goo, too. “I don’t know how many ways I can say this, but I already told you I don’t want anything from you.”

Enzo’s fingers started moving, slowly, so slowly, over the control pad on his suit’s wrist and he counted himself damn lucky that he’d had to learn to operate it blind because of his Gift; otherwise, he’d be up shit creek without a paddle right then.

Keep him talking, he thought, letting out a derisive snort and jutting out his chin. “Yeah, right, like I believe that bullshit. Come on, man, stop dicking around and tell me. Is it ransom? I gotta tell you, Kade doesn’t pay ransoms. Not for me or anyone else, so if that’s what you’re after you might as well kill me now because there’s no way in hell you’re getting anything out of him.”

He yelped as the other man popped up next to his elbow and latched onto his wrist with a bruising force, pulling until Enzo was forced to let go of his other wrist. The pirate plucked the little disk out of his hand and gingerly grasped it between two fingers, dropping Enzo’s arm and holding the device up to his eyes, ignoring Enzo’s indignant splutter.

“What the hell is this?” he asked, turning the disk around and squinting at it.

Enzo didn’t have time to answer, because at that moment the door to the rooftop burst open and people started spilling out onto the roof, their matching boots thundering over the asphalt as a unit. “Fuck,” Enzo hissed, and it was out of pure instinct borne from working on a team his whole life that he took a step towards Cando in the face of this new threat.

“Gimme the disk,” he said, low, quiet as they both scanned their new friends and took stock of the situation.

“Uh, no, you think I’m stupid, kid?” Cando snorted. He pushed his shoulders back and rolled his neck, grinned. “Watch this.”

Just like Enzo remembered from that first fuck up of a mission, Cando was stunning, disappearing and popping up so fast it seemed like there were three of him. Men screamed as his wicked, curved blades dug into their flesh, there and gone so fast that even the ones who weren’t immediately killed had no chance to react before he was onto the next one. It was clear even from where Enzo was standing that the pirate was enjoying himself, and it was equally clear that he didn’t see the way a group of five men had stopped, the way the man in front of the pack was watching, calculating, and holy shit he could not believe his luck because that man was Dorian, their target, the one he’d stayed to take out. A slow, ugly grin stretched Doran’s lips across his face before he, too, disappeared.

“Shit!” Enzo hissed because Dorian wasn’t supposed to have a Gift, didn’t even have a stone to channel it, and then he was hard at work, dashing across the hot rooftop while he punched in codes and picked up the disks his suit provided him with, one, two, three. “Cando, watch out!”

Too late, Dorian popped into view just in time to snatch Cando out of the air before his knife landed in the shoulder of another man. Enzo skidded over a patch of gravel on the roof, launched himself over one of the dead men, and slapped one of the disks on Dorian’s neck where it let off a volley of purple sparks. He yanked the pirate out of the stunned man’s hands and pulled, pulled until there was no resistance, and the shot Dorian was about to fire hit nothing but empty air. He tossed the other two disks at random men, where they stuck to a forehead and a cheek.

“Trust me,” he huffed, still holding Cando’s hand and still dashing across the roof as bullets rained down around them. He took the other man’s silence as acquiescence and then they had launched themselves off the building and Enzo pressed a button on his suit while they were still in the air. The men he’d attached the disks to screamed, and Cando and Enzo landed on the next roof over, rolled and stood just in time to see the brilliant purple lightning hit a crescendo as it created a circuit between the three conduit disks and fried everyone in the circle.

Cando whistled, low and through his teeth. “Damn, kid, where can I get me one of those?”

“You can’t,” Enzo huffed, clutching a stitch in his side. “I made them. One of a kind.”

When he turned he caught Cando’s eye, and he didn’t think he imagined what he saw there, that greedy glint all mercenaries got when they were staring at a particularly profitable haul. Enzo felt his cheeks flush from something other than the heat at being the focus of so intent a stare, and Cando grinned, the scars on his cheeks scrunching up as his lips stretched. Neither of them noticed the guy coming up the stairs until he was already there, but Cando was the first to take notice. He shoved Enzo out of the way with enough force to send him sprawling just before the rapport of the blaster echoed around them. Before Enzo even had the chance to roll to his feet the soldier was dead.

“Aw, hell,” Cando groaned as the soldier fell at his feet. He’d been shot, Enzo saw, though he was willing to bet it was just a graze.

“You took blaster fire for me?” Enzo asked, and that didn’t fit at all with the image he’d been building up of the other man over the months - not that he’d been thinking about him or anything, late into the ship’s night when he couldn’t sleep.

Cando pressed his palm into the dripping wound, still grinning. “Don’t ever say I never did anything for you, darlin’.”

Enzo’s cheeks flushed, but before he could even consider formulating a response his ears picked up a sharp whistle, then a long, low one, and he knew he was out of time. He caught Cando’s eye again and cocked his head to the side, gave him a slow smile, held up his hand so the other man could see that he’d snatched his disk back. “See ya around, Cando,” he said as he backed up towards the edge of the roof.

“Wait - what?” Cando asked, and Enzo laughed because he was positive that the cocky-as-hell pirate was very rarely taken by surprise.

Then he was flipping off the roof backwards and he felt himself snatched up by a pair of strong arms, pulled inside the door of a ship. He turned before the door whooshed shut to see Cando standing at the edge of the roof, hand on his hip, grinning once again. His view was cut off and he turned to find that it had been Hax who had caught him. The other man ruffled his hair with uncharacteristic affection, and Enzo knew that he had been worried.

“You look like shit,” Hax said. Then, after shoving Enzo in the shoulder just a little too hard, “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Enzo laughed as they headed towards the cockpit, boots clanking on the metal grates. “Me too, man, but guess who is dead?”

They’d reached their destination, and three more sets of eyes turned to focus on him, though Terrance didn’t have more than a couple seconds to look before he had to turn back to the controls. They’d reached the edge of the planet’s atmosphere, just about enough space to start the jump, and Enzo felt his breath come just that much easier as it always did when he got off a planet.

“Well?” Farris snapped. “Don’t keep us in suspense! It wasn’t Cando, was it?”

“Nah, I’ll do you one better,” Enzo said. He dropped down into a seat and winced as it put pressure on his various cuts and bruises. “Right before you guys got me I took out Dorian. He’d come to take care of us himself, apparently, which was his mistake.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hax said, slinging an arm around Enzo’s shoulders.

“Told you he could do it,” Varick piped in. He had his feet kicked up on the dash, arms crossed, but the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth was more approval than Enzo had seen from him in years.

“Kade’s still going to kill you,” Terrance said without turning his gaze away from the stars in front of him, and everyone else groaned.

Farris rolled his eyes and shoved Terrance in the shoulder. “Don’t be a fun-filter, man. Let him have a minute - he’ll get enough of a verbal ass-whooping when he gets back.”

Even though he was absolutely right, as the men gathered around and asked him for every bloody detail he couldn’t help his pride. He couldn’t help, either, the way that he kept picturing flashing yellow eyes, full lips pulled up at the corners in a smirk.