Seth glanced over to where his little brother stared out at the passing landscape. Shadows and light strobed across his features as they rocketed down the highway, making his face look like a flickering old film. He wasn't so little any more. In fact, the younger Gecko topped him by a good three inches but that didn't matter, he would always be his little brother. Richie would always have his big brother to look after him. Just as Richie had always cared for him when they were kids.

Their father had been a sadistic bastard. He delighted in showering his oldest with his special brand of attention. For years, he never understood why their father hated him so much more than Richie but after a weekend bender of epic proportion, he finally had an epiphany. It wasn't that the old man hated him more, it was that their father knew that physical pain didn't affect Richie as much as it did him. Beating him caused Richie more pain than his own beatings, and the old man had figured that out. That's why he made sure that Richie was always there to watch.

He wasn't looking forward to this conversation. Too many people thought there was something wrong with his brother, something clinically, wrong. He would never accept that, he couldn't, but something in his brother had changed while he'd been languishing in prison. Richie was less focused, like he was trapped in a fog and trying to find his way out.

More than once, he had found Richie staring off into space, oblivious to anything around him. At first, he thought his brother might be having seizures of some sort but the more he watched Richie, the less inclined he was, to think it physical. He wasn't sure exactly what had happened but he had an idea.

Seth took a deep breath. Might as well get this over with, "What the hell is going on with you?"

Richie pulled his gaze away from the window with effort. "Just haven't been feeling so good."

"Yeah, no shit." They couldn't hide things from each other, not for long. They knew each other too well. They were damn near symbiotic. Seth sighed, "Can you tell me about it?"

Richie shook his head. "It just took a lot out of me to bust you out, that's all."

"What does that mean?" Seth knew his brother didn't do well on his own. He lived too much inside his own head. A year and a half was a long time for him to be alone. He didn't think they'd been apart more than a couple of months in their entire lives. If he was honest, he didn't like it any more than Richie did, he needed his brother around. They balanced each other out.

Richie shook his head again.

His voice took on a frustrated edge. "You don't know or you don't want me to know?"

Richie rolled his eyes, "You won't want to hear it."

Probably not, Seth thought but they were on their way to make the biggest score in their history and he needed Richie as sharp as the knives he carried. "Try me."

Richie gave him a face. "We've been down this road before, Bro. You sure, you want to hear this?" he sighed. "Whatever. I knew it wouldn't be easy to get you out. There was stuff I needed to know to make it work. I had to… to… like really open my head up. I had to reach further than I've ever done before. And ever since then, things have been… weird."

Seth raised an eyebrow, "Define weird."

"I'm not sure I can." Richie ran his hand through his hair. "It's like, there's more now." He returned to staring out the window, his voice dropped to near whisper. "It's like there's a world behind the world. It's everywhere now. I can't tune it out. It's hard to know where I am." Richie turned to him with haunted eyes, "I think, they see me."

"Who are they?" Richie's expression sent a chill down his spine. He'd faced guns, knives, cops, and killers. He'd robbed, killed, and spent time in prison. But this shit… he did not want to deal with, not when they were kids and not now.

Richie's eyes snapped forward. "You need to turn off. Now."

Seth looked around. Richie would do that sometimes. He would be talking about one thing and then shift in mid-sentence. It threw most people off, he was used to it. "What are you talking about?"

"Get off the road now, Seth. Right the fuck now!"

"All right, all right!" Seth started looking around for a place to pull off. "Hold your water. Let me find a …"

Richie suddenly grabbed the wheel and jerked hard to the right. The car skidded off the road into the soft shoulder. "Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you doing?! Are you trying to get us killed?!" Seth tried to wrench the wheel back and the car wobbled over the uneven surface. "Son of a bitch!" Richie secured his hold and pulled harder. Seth hit the brakes, spinning the car through a tree-line barely missing catastrophe.

Seth sat breathing hard, anger bubbling up inside him as adrenaline screamed through his veins. He wanted nothing so much as to put his fist through his brother's face. "Son of a bitch!" He turned to his brother who now sat back in the passenger seat, staring out towards the road. "What the fuck, Richie?! You better say something or I swear to god I'm gonna take your head off."

Richie merely motioned with his head and then slowly raised a finger. Seth's gaze traveled along the pointing digit to the road. Two highway patrol cars were speeding down the road in the opposite direction. They would have passed right by them. And they would have been made. Seth tried to bring his careening emotions under control. "God damn it. You couldn't have just said something?"

"I did. You were too slow. They would have spotted us. We can't afford any eyes on us. They think we're in Colorado and it needs to stay that way," Richie explained with infuriating calm.

"I know that!" Seth took a deep breath. "But you could have said you spotted the heat, Jesus."

Come to think of it, he hadn't spotted them and his vision, unlike his brothers, was twenty/twenty. Not to mention if they had been that close, the cops would have seen them spin out. Wouldn't they? "When did you see the cops?"

Richie closed his eyes. He brought his fingers to his forehead and massaged. "I didn't see them. At least, not the way you think."

Seth was sick of the cryptic bullshit. He leaned over and pulled Richie to him. "You could have killed us so I think I deserve a straight answer, Bro." He searched his brother's eyes. They weren't unfocused now. Richie didn't appreciate manhandling.

The young Gecko's eyes narrowed, "I knew they were coming because I saw them in my head. Ok? You happy now? Is that what you wanted to hear?" He shoved Seth back. "No? I didn't think so."

Seth nodded, staring out through the windshield. So it was another instance of Richie's scarily accurate intuition. He swallowed hard. It was something they never directly addressed. Not because Richie didn't want to talk about it but because he didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to admit how much it freaked him out.

Richie was different. The young Gecko was smart, genius level, yet had a hard time with simple human interactions. He scared people. He didn't mean to, Seth knew, but Richie had this intense manner about him. He could read people and situations in such a way that was almost… abnormal. He would talk about things he couldn't possibly have any knowledge of, sometimes, he would even predict things that later came to pass. It was equal parts awesome and unnerving.

When they were kids, Richie would talk to people that weren't there. At the time, he had thought it a fun game. They didn't have any friends except each other, so, Richie made-up friends for them. Richie would tell him all the things they said about different times and places. Once or twice, he even spoke in a language other than English. Back then, he had no idea there was anything strange about it. Richie was just Richie, same as now. But their father knew and was not amused by Richie's childhood whims. He would beat him every time he caught him talking to his imaginary friends. It didn't take long before Richie never mentioned them again.

As they got older, things seemed to get harder for his younger brother. Richie found it harder and harder to deal with people. He was impatient and would often say things just to provoke. He didn't have friends mostly because people were scared. They didn't want anything to do with a "freak". He couldn't say he blamed them.

"You been having… issues, again?"

Richie scoffed lightly, "Having issues? What are you, Doctor Phil?"

"Look, this is gonna be the biggest score we've attempted. The risk factor is times ten. I need to know that you're firing on all cylinders."

Richie cocked his head slightly, "That's the problem, I think, I'm firing on eleven."

"You on anything?" Seth asked. It wasn't like either of them were innocents.

Richie shook his head. "It wouldn't have worked if I was all doped up. Besides, I don't like taking that stuff. It makes me vulnerable."

"It makes you calmer. And you don't talk about… your weird intuition shit." Actually, he didn't like giving his brother drugs anymore than Richie liked to take them. It took quite a dose to calm him down and then he was no good to anyone for days after. This was all his fault.

They had been living the high life. Richie's "hunches" were never wrong and he only misread a situation when he got too tired or stressed. One score after the next had built their reputations but it had started to take its toll on Richie so they had settled into a more sedate life of debauchery. They poured through money like water, knowing that the next score was only a plan away. No one could touch them or so they thought… but nothing lasts forever. They got sloppy.

The cops had been nosing after them for years but thanks to Richie's steel trap mind and his own silver tongue, they were always one step ahead. Nothing stuck. But male ego being what it is and massive amounts of alcohol later, he told his brother in no uncertain terms that he could plan and execute a heist without him, ending up on the long end of ten years behind bars.

All things considered, it could have been much worse. But then again, the brothers had long since discovered that they were at their best when they were together. Together, they made one whole person.

"Weird intuition?" Richie shook his head, "You're never gonna admit it, are you?"

"Nope." Seth put the car in gear and drove slowly through the grass up to the road. He called it intuition because he knew that there was nothing in this world beyond what you could see, hear, taste, or fuck. There was nothing beyond this life because no god would be that cruel. They weren't living in a fairy tale full of super heroes, and the only monsters that existed had whiskey on their breath. Richie was simply tapping into his natural intelligence and that was all. He wouldn't listen to anything else. He couldn't. It scared the fuck out of him. So he wouldn't hear of anything else, even though he knew in the back of his mind that it wasn't just intuition. There was more to it, much more.

"If you need to tell me anything. Do it now. We can't afford any mistakes. This is gonna be our magnum opus, you know. We have to be on our game."

"I know that," the younger Gecko frowned. "Why do you always have to give me grief? I'm always on my game."

Seth snorted, "We both know that's not true."

"Fuck you," Rickie growled.

Seth rolled his eyes. "I'm not trying to start trouble. I'm just saying. You've been…" he looked over at his brother, "Pretty bad, lately. Is it like that one time… are you getting headaches?"

Richie shrugged.

"That's a yes, then. Jesus, Richie, you can't keep that shit from me. We could both end up behind bars… or dead."

"I'm on point. You just worry about yourself."

Seth took a deep breath, letting his heart rate return to something more normal. Like he would ever stop worrying about his little brother. "Ok, look. I need to know that you're ok, Richard. That's all, I'm trying to do. This job has to be by the book, so you need to have your balls screwed on tight. If you can't do that, for whatever reason, then I need to know now."

Richie closed his eyes. "I can do it."

"You sure?" Because he certainly wasn't.

Richie's lips pursed into a straight line, "I'm not the one that got busted, remember."

"You really want to go there right now, Mister Unibomber?" Seth challenged. He knew Richie was still pissed about the whole situation. Not so much about the fact that he had pulled a job on his own, but that his failure had split them up for more than a year. "Look, you want to hear that I'm sorry? Well, I am. But there's nothing I can do about it. It's done. So, how about we move on?"

His brother looked at him then nodded. Seth was relieved. While he was quick to anger and quick to move on, Richie, on the other hand, had a real slow-burning temper. This probably wouldn't be the last he heard of it. "Ok, good. Then let's get to the motel and go over the plan one last time. Then its sunshine and senoritas."

Seth put the car into gear and the Gecko brothers drove towards their fate.

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