Lunatic - Necessary Evils #6 - ch. 8 (Patreon)

Mac

Mac had never been on a private jet before. He’d previously thought of it as a fairly elitist and outlandish thing for a person to possess. Unless that person headed a family of psychopathic vigilantes. In which case, it was most likely very handy for providing alibis and avoiding paper trails. Still, part of him felt guilty for taking a plane that housed just him and Archer and a crew of four.

Archer clearly didn’t feel that way. He sat sideways in his seat, his legs draped over Mac’s lap, sunglasses in place as he snored softly. He couldn’t help but smile. Even hungover and exhausted, Archer was sexy as hell, maybe even more so. He hadn’t shaved, and his hair had dried somewhat curly after their shower.

Their personal belongings were back on the base, but Archer had said it wasn’t an issue, and he was right. When they boarded the plane, there had been clothes waiting for them—all of them perfectly sized—which was odd until Mac realized that meant, at some point, Archer had learned his clothing sizes, even his shoe size, and that wasn’t something a casual fuck would do.

While Archer slept, Mac contented himself with reading story after story of Archer’s supposed drunken escapades, and there were many. Falling asleep during a fundraising dinner for the president, fighting three men in a bar…alone.

“What are you doing?” Archer asked, voice raw from sleep.

“Did you really steal a cage of puppies someone had left on the tarmac at the airport?” Mac asked.

Archer gave the barest hint of a smile but didn’t move from his half-reclined state. “Are you Googling me?”

Mac grinned, squeezing Archer’s calf. “I love Googling you. One of my favorite pastimes,” Mac said, infusing his words with as much filthy promise as he could muster with a hangover of his own. “So, did you?”

“Yes. I did. They were crying and hot and they’d just been left there. So, I took them.”

“Why?” Mac couldn’t help but ask.

Archer frowned. “Because it was the right thing to do.”

“Did you feel bad for them?” Mac asked.

“Are you hoping that, deep down, I’m not an emotionless monster?”

Mac shook his head. “I know you’re not an emotionless monster. My brother isn’t either.” Archer slid his sunglasses onto his head, studying Mac like he thought he was lying. “Did you know many studies show that the difference between someone displaying psychopathic tendencies growing up to be a predator or growing up to be just like everybody else mostly comes down to nurture, not nature.”

Archer smirked. “But I am a predator.”

Mac laughed. “No, you’re a poker player who moonlights as an executioner. You kill because it needs to be done. If you were a predator, you’d never stop hunting. While sadistic psychopaths can hide in plain sight and pretend to be normal, there’s usually something in the eyes. When you look at their eyes, you’ll know they’re…stalking you, studying you. It’s like being watched by an animal. You don’t look at people that way.”

Archer seemed to consider that. “Do you think my father is wrong for what he’s done? Do you think raising children to be killers is wrong?”

“I think if your father had raised you in a vacuum, had set you up in a lab and studied you, taught you only to kill, then he would have been wrong. I think he would have made you predators. But he raised you with love, taught you to respect life, even if you couldn’t empathize with it, and he taught you how to defend it. I used to believe that our justice system, though flawed, worked. Now, you and I both know that’s not true and that leaves us with a decision. Accept the status quo or remove the threat before it harms again. I think you know which I choose.”

“And this program your mother and Thomas have created?” Archer asked, his hand finding Mac’s and playing with his fingers. “Do you think they’re depriving these people of a normal life?”

“I think what we’re doing is a necessary evil. I think these children were being raised in horrible conditions and our parents placed them in loving homes and ensured they were raised with everything, including a somewhat…unique skill set. They aren’t forced to participate in the program. We know that. They have the right to refuse us.”

Archer’s expression told Mac he wanted to ask another question but was either hesitating or trying to formulate just what it was he wanted to say. Finally, he looked him in the eye. “Are you worried…about waking up married to a killer?”

Mac sighed. “We’re all killers, Katniss. Me, you, Thomas, my mother, my brother. People are dead because of decisions we’ve all made, directly or indirectly. Nobody’s innocent here. The only difference between you and me is that some of the people I’ve killed likely didn’t deserve it, and if I let myself think about that, I would likely dig myself into a hole so deep and dark I’d never find my way out. You are uniquely designed for what you do and I envy you for it.”

Archer sprung forward, dropping his booted feet to the floor. Before Mac could even guess at his motives, he’d spun himself around so that his head was now in Mac’s lap, his feet kicked up on the wall of the plane.

“What are you doing?” Mac asked, amused.

“I thought we were talking,” Archer said. “This way you can talk and rub my temples at the same time. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m a bit of a lightweight when it comes to booze.”

“How do you keep this up around your brothers? Like, don’t they notice you not drinking? What do you, like, dump it into some potted plant?” Mac asked, squeezing Archer’s temples as he asked.

“I bring my own bottle. It’s almost always iced tea. I pretend to be weirdly territorial about my liquor. Given my reputation, it’s actually far easier for them to believe I’m an alcoholic than to believe I’m not. What reason could I have for lying to them?”

Mac stopped short. “Why do you lie to them? Was that Thomas’s idea?”

Archer’s eyes were closed, his face relaxed as Mac continued to stroke him. “No. When my father realized I was good at poker, he pulled me into his office and said he wanted me to choose that as my…profession? I didn’t know anything about Project Watchtower back then. I was barely over drinking age. But as you can see, every gambler has a…persona they take on, a character they assume while at the table. Being a drunk took away all accountability and made for easy alibis when I needed to take out a target.”

“But why lie to your brothers?” Mac persisted.

“Because it was mine,” Archer said.

“What do you mean yours?”

“Living in a house with not only six brothers and my father but a whole stable full of staff members, nothing is sacred, nothing is private. Nothing. But if everybody saw me as this drunken pirate character, then who I really am would be just mine and I could show the real me to whoever I wanted. Or not. After a while, it became a part of who I am, so I’m not lying, exactly. I really am both of those people, just not at the same time.”

Mac pushed his fingers through Archer’s hair, a weird surge of protectiveness overwhelming him when Archer sighed and burrowed his head closer to Mac’s stomach. Archer was both those people. He’d seen it last night. There was the Archer who needed to be edged until he couldn’t breathe, who needed to feel like he’d earned every shred of pleasure. But then there was this carefree, charming, cavalier Archer who Mac was equally in love with.

Mac’s fingers froze in Archer’s hair. Love. He was in love with Archer. Maybe he had been for a while. He looked down at the ring on his finger. Only in Vegas would the realization that he loved his spouse invoke this level of confusion.

“Are you alright?” Archer asked, cracking open one eyelid to look up at him.

Was he? He wasn’t sure. There was no guarantee at all that Archer wanted to stay married to him, jokes about marrying rich aside. Hell, there was a very good chance that Thomas Mulvaney would freak the fuck out—rightfully so—and demand they annul the marriage immediately. And don’t even get him started on his mother’s reaction. The “I’m so disappointed in you” speech ripped Mac’s heart out every time.

“Hey. Are you having some kind of medical event because you look two seconds away from drooling. What happened to you?”

“Nothing. Sorry. I just had a…glitch.”

“A glitch?”

“Yeah, I just got deep in my thoughts and it took me a minute to find my way back.”

Archer nodded in understanding. “Oh, like a mind palace thing? August does that shit, too. But you’re good?”

“Yeah, Katniss, I’m fine.”

“Tell me more stuff about psychopaths,” Archer said, once more nesting his head deeper into Mac’s lap.

“You keep doing that and we’re gonna end up joining the mile high club,” Mac warned.

“Patience, darling,” Archer murmured. “But talk to me. My hangover likes the sound of your voice right now.”

Mac couldn’t hide the smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “You really want me to bore you with science stuff about psychopaths?”

“Mm, but do it while you play with my hair.”

“Jesus, I had no idea I’d married someone who was so needy. This feels like a bait and switch.”

“Well, good luck getting out of it. My father treats marriage like it’s a gang initiation. Blood in, blood out, homie,” Archer said, not sounding even the slightest bit upset about the prospect of life with Mac.

A bit of Mac’s anxiety eased away, but not all of it. There was still the matter of his mother and Archer’s brothers to deal with. But they would worry about that when they landed. For now, his husband wanted pets and boring stuff about psychopaths, so that was what Mac would give him.

“Did you know they used MRI scans to map the brains of tons of psychopaths and believe that psychopathy comes from two key areas of the brain? The striatum and the prefrontal cortex. On MRI scans, the connection between the two was found to be weaker than in those who didn’t display psychopathic tendencies. So much so that some neurologists have said they can spot a psychopath simply from their brain scans.”

“Do you believe that?” Archer asked, sighing when Mac ran his finger along the length of his nose.

“Do I believe that you can tell someone displays the physical characteristics of a psychopath by MRI scans alone? No. And I’ll tell you why.”

“Please do,” Archer said, taking Mac’s other hand and threading their fingers together.

Mac laughed. Hungover Archer was an entirely different Archer than sober Archer or even drunk Archer. “A neurologist did a study mapping the human brain, and when he didn’t have enough research subjects, he used his own family, himself included, as subjects for his double blind study. When he got the scans back, he was alarmed to see one of the patients showed a classic ‘psychopath’ brain. He broke protocol and looked up who it was so he could see about getting that person some help. Turned out…it was him. The happily married neurologist with several adult children who had never harmed a hair on a person’s head—had never even wanted to—he was the psychopath.”

“So, what does that tell you?” Archer asked.

“Me? I’m no scientist. I was just raised at the feet of one, but like I said, it comes down to nature versus nurture. It’s like studies where they took twins and raised them in completely separate environments. Some things remained the same—traits, tendencies, hell sometimes, names, haircuts, dispositions. But outside influences also affected them greatly. I think it’s the same for psychopaths.”

“Meaning?”

“I think if you expose a psychopath to violence and pain, you’ll wake those predatory parts of the brain. If you raise that child to be kind, to understand bodily autonomy, boundaries, and right from wrong…you get people like you. Like my brother.”

“But my brothers and I were abused when Thomas found us. We’d all been through some form of trauma in our lives already. I think that’s why he believed he was saving us. Taking an already loaded gun and pointing it at a deserving target.”

Mac shrugged. “Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he found you early enough to undo some of the early trauma. But imagine if he hadn’t found you. The foster care system is full of kids who get yanked out of one shitty situation and forced into one far worse than the one they left. That could have been the same for all of you. You just never know. We’ll never know if your father or my mother are doing the right thing. We just have to believe they are.”

Archer was silent for a long while. “We need to figure out who’s after you. Whether you like it or not, you have the full force of the Mulvaneys on this case. And they’re going to go at this hard.”

Mac sighed. “I know.”

Archer studied him. “Why does asking for help bother you so much?”

Mac gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t think we have enough time to unpack that today, Katniss.”

Archer’s brows knitted together. “I’m serious. What’s the big deal? Surely in the military everybody worked as a team?”

Mac gave a dismissive shake of his head. “In the military? Yeah, of course. It’s our job to work as a team. But in my civilian life, waiting on someone to help me with anything has never really worked out for me.”

Archer frowned. “What do you mean?”

What did he mean? He knew what he wanted to say. The truth. But saying the truth out loud felt like such a fucking betrayal to someone who’d sacrificed everything. Maybe not for him, but she’d sacrificed nonetheless. Still, Archer had let Mac in, had let him see who he really was without question.

“Are we really doing this now?” Mac asked, stomach churning.

“What else do we have to do on this flight? I’m too hungover for more sex, we’ve already eaten… Don’t spouses tell each other their deep, dark secrets?” Archer chided gently.

“Why aren’t you more freaked out about waking up married to me?” Mac blurted out.

“Why aren’t you?” Archer countered. There was no way Mac was answering that. Archer smirked. “That’s what I thought. Stop changing the subject. Why has asking for help not worked out for you?”

“I love my mother,” Mac started, heart squeezing, hating himself for even thinking the words, much less saying them. “But when you have a brother like mine—as I’m sure you know—they require constant care and supervision. When my mother realized what Shep was…how he was…she threw herself into saving him. She went back to school and got her PhD for him. To figure out how to help him. She doted on him and loved on him and she poured every bit of herself into making sure my brother didn’t become a monster. That didn’t leave a lot of time for the rest of us.”

“The rest of you?” Archer asked.

Mac nodded. “Did you know I have a sister? Katie?”

Archer’s eyes went wide. “No. I thought it was just you and Shep.”

“Yeah. Mom tries to separate her from all this. When we’re home in California for visits or holidays, it’s all big family dinners like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. But growing up, Katie and I didn’t get much attention. Not from my mother. But Katie had my dad. He doted on her because she was the only girl, and she used that to her advantage. Not that I blamed her. But Jaynie had Mom and Katie had Dad and I had…me. So, I just learned to be self-sufficient. It was easier than asking for help and hearing the excuses that always followed.”

“You’re not close with…Jayne?” Archer asked, like his brother’s name was foreign on his tongue. “You’re identical twins. My brothers are creepily close. Too much so if you ask some. Is it not the same for you?”

“Jaynie and I are close in a way you can be close when one of those people is very neurodivergent. Like, sometimes, my brother seems more android than human. It wasn’t like he didn’t try, but things don’t always connect for him. But I love my brother. I would die for him. He’d die for me. I love my mother. But none of that changes the fact that asking for help in my family sort of just fell on deaf ears.”

Archer sat up gingerly, then stood. Mac opened his mouth to ask what he was doing, but before he could, he was kneeling over him then settling in his lap, wrapping his arms around Mac's neck.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but you will have the exact opposite problem with my family. They will be all up in your business. They will ask a million questions, get involved in shit that doesn’t concern them. They will press you to know every deep dark secret you have and then try to force you into therapy. You will never know a moment’s peace.”

“Jesus. Did I marry a Mulvaney or join a cult?”

“Yes,” Archer said. “And that’s not all. The feelings faction of the family—Noah, Zane, and Felix—will love bomb you until you want to scream, and then they will use that to make you one of them. Lucas and Jericho have made it out unscathed for the moment, but I promise you, you can’t hold out forever. My family is like an invasive type of vegetation. They…creep up on you.”

“I—” Mac wasn’t sure what to say. “Okay.”

The curtain yanked open and a tiny brunette in a pencil skirt and white button-down shirt popped into the cabin, her eyes going wide when she saw Archer straddling Mac with Mac’s hands planted on Archer’s ass. “Oh, my—I’m so sorry. I—”

“What is it, love?” Archer asked, making no attempt to leave Mac’s lap. Which was fine with him.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Mulvaney. Or is it Shepherd now? Or do you hyphenate?” she babbled.

Archer gave her a patient smile. “Did you need something?”

“Mr. Mulvaney—” She paused again, her face screwing into one of concentration often saved for math or disarming nuclear weapons. “Um, the older Mr. Mulvaney, I mean. Your father, um, Thomas…”

“I’m familiar with him, yes,” Archer teased. “What about him?”

She took a deep breath and blew it out. “He said he’d be meeting you at the tarmac.”

Archer frowned, looking around for his phone, only then remembering that he’d switched it into airplane mode in an attempt to avoid his family. “Ah, yes. Thank you.”

She hesitated still, her gaze creeping over the two of them with interest, before saying, “Is there anything I can do for you? B-Both of you? Or either of you?”

Mac’s brow shot up, a slow smirk spreading across his face. “Like what, exactly?”

She seemed to snap out of whatever headspace she’d been in a moment ago. “Would you care for some food or something to drink?”

“No, I think we’re good,” Mac said.

“Tell the others not to disturb us until we’re descending? Thank you.”

She bobbed her head, backing away like she was addressing royalty and couldn’t afford to turn her back on them.

“Did she just try to shoot her shot with the both of us?” Mac asked, amused.

“Mm. I think so, yes. What a curious little creature she is,” Archer said, then dismissed her to settle himself better over Mac, wiggling until they were touching in all the right places.

“Do not start something you don’t plan on finishing, Katniss,” Mac warned.

Archer rocked himself against Mac. “Now where’s the fun in that?”

Mac snagged Archer’s wrists and dragged them behind his back, then captured his mouth in a kiss that got progressively dirtier as it went on. When they finally separated, Mac wrapped his arms around Archer then deposited him into his own seat. “None of that. I’m not going to meet Thomas at the airport having freshly defiled his son.”

“Tease,” Archer pouted.

“Oh, please,” Mac said, leaning in to nose at the spot behind his ear. “You love holding out on me.” His tongue darted out to lick over his pulse. “You love making me work for it.” He bit the shell of his ear. “ I love it, too.” He slid his hand between Archer’s legs, his thumb tracing his cock. “I love when you pretend to resist, when you pretend you don’t want me, even when I can fucking smell it on you. It makes it so much hotter when I’m buried inside you and you’re clawing at my back panting my name.” He removed his hand and sat back. “We’ll finish this discussion tonight.”

“I fucking hate you right now,” Archer growled, the outline of his erection obvious.

Mac chuckled. “Yeah, but you’ll be loving me later.”