Work Text:
It’s been ten years since he’s been in this house. Ten years since he’s seen her, proper. It’s almost one o’clock in the morning when he parks his car a good distance down the street, and closer to one-thirty when he musters up the nerve to walk out into the cold autumnal air.
All the lights are off in the house, except one on the first floor. He can dimly see her shadow moving around in what he knows is the kitchen. He can imagine her humming.
Spy knocks on the back door, collar turned up, hat sitting low above his eyes, lit cigarette hanging loosely from his lips. He looks, probably, more conspicuous than he’s ever before. He opens and closes his cigarette case pathologically, listening to the click, click in the quiet. Every second in wait is enough to drive him insane. The incessant buzzing of the back porch light taunts him.
Finally, finally, the door opens. Spy catches her eyes through the crack.
“No,” she says and moves to close it again.
Spy slips his foot between the door and the jamb to halt the motion, hand coming up to grab it.
“Chérie,” he says. “Please.”
She is silent for a very, very long moment. Her eyes—cold and blue—never leave his. Her face reveals nothing. Hah, a small part of him thinks. She learned that from him.
The fight is knocked out of her in a long, drawn-out sigh, her gaze drifting away and shoulders slackening. “Either put that damn thing out or give me one,” she mutters as she lets the door swing open.
The kitchen is much the same as Spy remembers. The black and white tiled floor still bears the same cracks. The gas stove is still missing a dial. A few new photos hang on the walls—he presumes of the boys, but he hasn’t seen them in so long it’s difficult to recognize some of them.
The older ones never liked him much. The younger ones were too young to remember him. The youngest—
Well.
She sits at the table in the kitchen, always too small for her large family. Spy pulls out a chair to sit across from her, and she doesn’t protest.
Spy obligingly hands a cigarette to his love. He pulls his lighter from his breast pocket and moves to light it for her, but she picks it out of his hand and does it herself first. Spy falters, chagrined.
“I thought I told ya never ta’ show your face here again,” she says, flicking ash off the end. The tension is palpable enough that Spy begins finding it difficult to breathe.
He smiles, flicking his hand up to gesture to his mask. Some light humor. An effort to get her to stop looking at him so solemnly. She chuckles lightly, but somehow it feels like it’s only made things worse.
He doesn’t know what to say. Spy came here with no plan, only the fierce need to see her again, to have her say something to him in her lovely, crass American voice.
After a beat of silence, she sighs and stands, pushing away from the table. She walks to the sink, facing away from him, and turns on the tap. It is only now he realizes that she has had her sleeves rolled up the entire time. She’s washing dishes.
“A bit late for housekeeping, non?” He asks.
She doesn’t turn to face him, only uses a wet hand to pull the cigarette away from her lips so she can speak. “Raising eight boys yourself means a lot of mess no one but you’s gonna clean,” she replies.
Ah.
Spy has never felt so utterly out of his depth. He abruptly realizes that he expected her to be angrier. Or, at least, louder. He wanted her to act out at him, shout, hit him, or anything. Then he could play the high and mighty one: stoic, reasonable, calm.
But the reality of the situation, he knows, is that he should be groveling. Spy has never in his life groveled. It’s undignified.
He means to say many things, but what comes out is, “Why did you let me in?”
She picks up the dishwashing liquid and squeezes a bit onto the sponge. Spy remembers standing at that same sink. She always hated doing the dishes and would pass off the job to him whenever she could, though she’d inevitably end up shoving him to the side and redoing everything because he “wasn’t doing it right.” Spy would say, “Why don’t you just do it yourself?” and she would insist, “Oh, I hate it, really.” It’s a charming memory. Spy wishes he hadn’t thought of it.
“Why’d you come?” She says it easily, though he can tell the underlying tone is bitter.
He answers her the only way he knows how. “I still love you. Ma petite, I always have. I always will.”
She inhales sharply. One hand comes up to shut off the water. The sudden silence makes Spy shift uneasily in his seat.
“You left,” she replies, her fingers curled tightly around the tap.
Spy can’t stand it. He gets up and stands behind her in two quick strides, wraps his arms around her, and presses his chin to her shoulder. She doesn’t stop him, even leans back slightly.
“I’m sorry. I will do anything—anything for you to forgive me, mon cher. I swear.”
He feels her wry smile more than he sees it. “Anythin’ except stay. With me and the boys.”
Spy swallows, stiffening.
“I love you, but I am who I am,” he says weakly. “I have never been…a father. A family man.”
She disentangles herself from him, taking one of his wrists in each of her hands as she spins around so they can be face to face. “I ain’t stupid,” she says, sadly but not unkindly. “I wouldn’t want you to stay anyway.”
Spy understands he is a hypocrite, but the words hit him in the chest worse than any of the various, near-fatal wounds he’s lived through. He opens his mouth, throat working, but no words come out.
She gives him a tiny smile. One of her hands comes around to cup the back of his head, the other on his neck, thumb brushing against his jawline. She has always made him willing to let her lay her hands on his most vulnerable parts, made him want to lean into the touch rather than shy away.
“Oh, sweetheart. I love you. Of course I love you. But I just don’t trust you anymore.”
Spy snaps his mouth shut and simply looks at her. They spend a long moment there together, swaying imperceptibly in the dark. Eventually, her hand slides down to the center of his chest to push him away.
“You should go,” she insists. Spy doesn’t argue. There is a tangle of emotions inside of him, so strange and new, unpleasant, wholly all-consuming, and he needs the space to flee. She’s right about him. She always has been.
Spy takes a step back. He has one last, long look at her—beautiful, framed by lightly billowing curtains and gentle moonlight from the window above the kitchen sink—and slinks out the door with his tail between his legs.
When he gets back into his car, he reaches into his pocket for another cigarette. Instead, he finds a small roll of paper. Spy frowns and unrolls it.
It is her home phone number. “Be safe, let me know if you’re alive," is written underneath.
He already knows her phone number, of course—but this isn’t a transfer of information. It’s an invitation. He exhales shakily in what might be relief and presses his forehead against the steering wheel.
The thing is—this was never what Spy signed up for.
When he met her, he never intended to become some kind of wholesome civilian man with a wife, a dog, and two-and-a-half kids. Neither of them expected that of him. Perhaps, in that regard, it was doomed from the start. But they were enthralled by each other. They just couldn’t stay away.
Spy first met her during her morning shift waitressing at a diner. Not to be confused with her other job at a call center or her weekend job with the local library. He smiled at her, coyly letting his gloved fingers trail across her wrist as he handed back the menu. She raised an eyebrow at him knowingly.
He left that morning with a scribbled-on napkin in his pocket and lipstick smeared across his cheek.
Spy was much like a sailor—a girl in every port. He had his fair share of flings, most of which he met once, dined once, took home once, and then never saw again. She was different, however. God knows why. Inexplicably, unbelievably, he just kept coming back. Spy spent all his downtime in Boston. He bought an apartment after years of living out of hotels. And she always welcomed him into her home when he showed up on her doorstep.
She was drawn to him, Spy had supposed, because of his mysterious allure. Many women were. Later, he realized this was not the case at all.
He told her this one night in bed together, and she’d laughed at him. A giggle and a snort.
“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t ya?” she cooed, pressing a kiss to his nose. “All caught up in your mysterious dark eyes. Nah, sweetheart. I liked ya because ya looked lonely. Always had a thing for strays.”
The good thing to do would be to reject the invitation. It would be better for her, Spy knew, for him to stay completely out of her life. Even just phone calls—he didn’t deserve to have them, to string her along while both of them knew full well he wouldn’t ever come home. It didn’t matter how many checks he sent. He wasn’t allowed to stake any sort of claim on her. Of course he wasn’t.
It’s a shame Spy is a very bad man.
“So, where are ya today?” she asks. Spy can picture her sitting on the counter, one leg crossed over the other, twirling the phone cord around a finger.
He looks around the rather barren, desolate room he currently inhabits. At present, Spy is hiding in a windowless basement somewhere in the underbelly of Prague. He has killed three men today (only one of which he planned on killing), been shot at four times, actually shot once, and stolen government intelligence that he wagers will get him at least fifty grand. Espionage is not always a glamorous job.
He should probably work on getting that bullet out of him.
Spy sighs, sitting heavily on his little cot and hearing the bedsprings creak beneath him. “Rome,” he lies easily, shucking off his tie, then his shoes. “The view from my hotel is splendid.”
“Ohh… how high class!” she teases. “God, if only my job had me going on nice vacations in Rome. Some sun is exactly what I need right now, I’ll tell ya.”
“It’s as gorgeous as you imagine,” promises Spy. He unbuttons his shirt, wincing when he catches sight of the bullet hole. “I will have to take you someday. We can enjoy the food, go swimming… I will show you all the loveliest places, ma petite .”
She snorts skeptically. “Oh, yeah, sure you will. And who’s gonna take care of the kids?”
Her oldest is now married. The second one is in the military. Still, it leaves her with six children to care for.
Spy reaches under the bed and pulls a small box out of his luggage he keeps for first-aid. From the bedside table, a fifth of whisky. He uncaps it with his teeth and takes a long swig.
“Bring them!” he says, on a breathy exhale. “We can make it a family trip. Ah, your family.”
He is too busy grimacing as he digs the tweezers into his body to find the hunk of lead to feel flustered over his little slip. After he’s finished, he’s too busy dabbing gauze to try and stop the bleeding from his side. Ach—he needs stitches.
She is quiet for a moment. “That’d be nice,” she says, a little melancholic.
Spy jams the phone between his shoulder and his head as he pulls out a needle and thread, tongue between his teeth as he attempts to thread it. “It will be magnifique. I will take you to all the finest dining establishments in the city.”
Spy raises the needle to his waist, hissing in pain when it goes in.
“You okay, sweetheart?” She asks.
“Ah,” Spy replies as he jams the curved needle back out the other end, pulling it through and then repeating the whole process. “Just my shoulder, acting up again. Ma petite, I fear I am getting old.”
His love has been suitably distracted. “Oh, don’t say that. If you’re old, then I’m old.”
Spy smiles, even though he is currently puncturing his own skin. “You’re younger than I am.”
“We’re close enough. Oh god, I am old, aren’t I? Fuck.”
Spy laughs, then stops laughing as it makes his pains far worse. “ Non. You, my love, are eternally youthful.”
“Ya big flirt,” she purrs. “You and your mysterious, suave, secret agent charm. Alright, then. I’m waiting for my ticket to Rome to come in the mail.”
“Soon,” Spy declares. He ties off the stitches and downs half of the rest of the whisky in one go.
Spy was good enough with her kids, in his opinion. He would bring them gifts from his travels whenever he stopped by. He was always horrible with children, but he attempted to be kind to hers. If he just treated them like tiny, slightly stupid adults, it was easier.
The way it made her smile was all worth it.
That being said, just because he didn’t mind that she had kids didn’t mean he wanted any of his own. He loved her, of course he did; they’d been engaging in this strange arrangement for almost two years. But he was a free agent. He was like a cat that lived in your neighborhood as a child. You’d call it your cat, but he was never really yours. Even if he returned home for food every night, even if he came when you beckoned him, he still was not yours. He was free to disappear without a trace.
Then, she was pregnant. Spy’s world collapsed.
Spy wasn’t a husband, much less a father. He was nothing, no one—it was in his job description, for Christ’s sake.
But she held his hand, hugged him while crying, and said, “I wanna keep him. I just…I think this time we can do it right. This time we can… It’ll be better, yeah?“
Spy knew she loved her children, but her first husband was a horrible man. It was a marriage she never wanted. They had four children together, mostly in order to keep her trapped. She wasn’t able to escape until he went to prison.
Her second husband, she told him, was kind enough, but neither of them ever really loved the other. He was distant as they had little in common. He was much older than her, older than Spy, even. He gave her three children out of convenience, if anything. He died young, and she was sad, but not really as sad as she should have been.
When she asked him to try it again but better, she didn’t mean a better child. She meant a better life. One built off of love.
So, even though his entire world was collapsing, Spy stroked her hair and said, “ Oui. Yes, alright. We will do it better.”
Spy is in Montreal, and very much wishes he was not in Montreal. His job is sucking the soul out of him. At one point, he loved it. Now? He is merely stuck. He travels from place to place, but he is never seen. He has no friends, no family. Spy is not a social person, but everyone has their limits.
He calls her, just to feel less alone. It isn’t the first time he’s done it.
“H’lo?” says a squeaky voice over the phone, and Spy’s blood runs cold.
He clears his throat. “Ah, well—ah, hello,” he tries weakly. “Is… your mother home?”
“What’s it to ya?” the boy asks. It’s accusatory, suspicious. Spy is slightly taken aback.
“I’m a…friend of hers,” Spy says. “I would like to speak with her for a moment.”
The boy makes a considering sound over the phone. “I don’t think Ma’s friends with no Germans,” he hums.
“ Any Germans,” Spy corrects instinctively. He frowns after a beat. “And I’m French.”
“Same thing,” the boy insists.
Spy is still debating how to respond to this, if at all, when another voice distantly speaks.
“Jeremy? Who the hell are you talkin’ to this late?”
There’s rustling as if the boy pressed the receiver to his chest. “ Some foreign guy! He says he’s ya friend!”
Then, silence. After a few agonizingly long beats, a tussle for the phone, followed by a quiet, muffled, “Go brush ya teeth and get t’sleep. Still got school tomorrow. Go on!”
So here it is. This massive thing—this massive, boy-shaped thing they’ve both been avoiding, with buck teeth, freckles, and horrible spiky hair, is finally right between them. And they can’t not talk about it.
“How is he?” Spy is eventually compelled to ask.
She exhales, a crackling gust of wind over the line. “He’s fine. Good kid. Has some trouble reading, his teachers say, ‘specially for a ninth grader.”
His heart is trying to hammer its way out of his chest. He re-adjusts his sweaty grip on the receiver. He is unused to this feeling (anxiety? Dread? Hope?) and finds himself unable to cope.
“O-oh,” he stammers. “And he—he is happy?”
She is quiet. “Does it really matter to you?”
The boy—his son—is a glaring reminder of Spy’s failures. The reason he never comes to see her. Their little romantic talks over the phone are easy to cordon off from the rest of the real world. Face-to-face…it is harder for both of them to forget the reason he left in the first place.
“Chérie… of course it matters to me,” he says, though it sounds more like a plea.
“He’s happy. I’d like to think so. I hope so,” she says. “I try.”
Spy swallows around the knot in his throat. He has identified the unfamiliar feeling: guilt. He wets his lips. Bites down on the inside of his cheek.
“Will you…tell me about him?”
A tense, loaded pause.
“He loves baseball,” she begins, and Spy leans back and settles in for the tale.
He tried. He really did.
There was a good two years where he lived the domestic life. Spy would still take gigs on the side—leave for a week, come back with enough money to last them a year--but for the most part, he was tethered in place.
The need to flee was always a hot itch under the collar. Though Spy suppressed it, he could not ignore it. His things lay separate from her things, always packed in cases. He insisted on having his own car. There was a stash of money under the bed, in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and under the sink in the kitchen. A gun lived inside his bedside drawer.
They named him Jeremy for no reason at all. It was almost more meaningful than if they’d had one. Neither of them had any family they wanted to name him after; his estranged, hers dead, so they just sat at the dining room table one day and traded ideas.
(“Robert?”
“I will not have a son named Robert. Jacques?”
“Come on, growing up in Boston with some fancy name like that?”
“It is a common name in France. Good name, non ?”
“Oh, it’s fine, but I ain’t doin' that to my poor son. He’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Fine, I take your point. We’ll stick to English, then.”
“Jeremy?”
Spy mulled it over. Rolled the name around on his tongue. Imagined saying it, resting his hand on a child’s shoulder.
“... Oui. It will do.”)
Oh, he was beautiful. The most darling child Spy had ever seen. He cried when Jeremy was born, but he would never admit it.
He was so delicate and small in Spy’s arms, and panic twisted in his gut. Surely he would break something so small. He passed him over to his mother (in bed, exhausted, red-eyed, but radiant) and tried to shake off the feeling, bask in the love instead.
But it never left. It plagued Spy each day. One day, he knew, he would destroy this thing. Laying his son down in his crib each night, Spy was struck with premonitions.
It came to a head one day, when Jeremy was freshly two. Spy was bouncing him on his knee, singing and watching him giggle. His love was upstairs, helping the boys with their homework.
Jeremy laughed when Spy picked him up. That’s what Spy remembered the clearest. He laughed, babbled, “ Papa! Papapapa!” grabbed Spy by the cheeks, and kissed him on the nose in an imitation of his mother.
Spy went cold. He couldn’t breathe.
He was gone the next day.
Spy is drenched. His suit is ruined forever, probably. His tiny umbrella, crammed next to him in the cramped New York City phone booth, has been twisted into scrap metal by the wind. The rain pelts loudly against the glass. The chill seeping through his bones doesn’t bother him, though. Inside, he is warm.
“Oh god,” she gasps, laughing. “Ain’t it sad, that I've been through two marriages and this is my longest relationship. A man who talks to me only over the phone and sends me suspicious sums a‘money through the post—“
“Longest relationship?” Spy echoes.
“Well, you haven’t been sleeping around, have you?”
Her tone is light and full of humor, but Spy can’t help the intensity of his “No! ” The very idea is appalling to him. He’s already wronged her terribly. The least he can do is be hers, wholly and completely.
Spy abruptly realizes that what he is describing is a relationship.
“I didn’t think so. It’s been twenty years, sweetheart,” she says, fond. “But I know you’re a little slow with these things.”
He doesn’t protest, mainly because she’s correct. He leans against the glass booth, looking out into the dark. The street lights reflect off of slick black roads. A few people pass by, umbrellas turned against the wind. Cars zoom past as they honk irritably at each other. He’s thinking of buying one, maybe a sports car. Something classy he can take good care of, keep clean and polished.
“I wish I was with you. Instead of out here,” confesses Spy. “The weather is miserable. And it’s…it’s lonely.”
“Come home, then.”
Spy tugs up his balaclava. He scratches the stubble on his cheek, then pulls it back down.
"Nothing is stopping you," she continues.
They both know this is a lie.
"Maybe,” he allows.
A memory flits in and out of Spy’s mind. He thought of it a lot more, during that time just after he ran, when he had no contact with her at all.
It was in the afternoon. Spring. The weather was warm, but still cool enough that she wore a sweater over her dress, with stockings stretched over her legs.
Spy didn’t like to go out in the neighborhood much, but she’d read somewhere that the fresh air helps babies stay healthy, so now they were going on routine walks in the park. Jeremy was 5 months old.
He was fussy. He really only wanted to be held by his mother, but she was tired of carrying him, so Spy took on the job. He had Jeremy curled up against his chest. One hand supported his back while the other held him up. He cried, and Spy winced.
“Oh, hell,” she said. “Act like ya like him.”
Spy glared at her.
“I’m serious!” she exclaimed. “He’s not gonna like you unless you show him you like him .”
Spy sighed. “I don’t believe he’s sentient enough to gauge other people’s opinions of him.”
She looked comically offended. “Daddy didn’t mean that,” she said to Jeremy, who briefly stopped crying to stare at her, wide-eyed. “You’re plenty sentient.”
The corner of Spy’s mouth twitched upwards. “Alright,” he muttered. He pulled the infant away from his chest so he could look at him.
“Jeremy,” said Spy. He did not use the baby-talk voice, because he thought it was ridiculous. Instead, he addresses the baby as if it was another peer. “I like you just fine, mon chou. Do not cry so much.”
Jeremy appeared to be pondering this. He then, seemingly having come to a conclusion, resumed his loud whining. His mother laughed, high and delighted, like the chime of bells.
“Aw, you’re gonna have ta’ do better than that,” she said.
“This is pointless.”
“Give it a go!”
“Jeremy,” Spy repeated, voice dry. He bounced Jeremy lightly, and he stopped once again. “I love you. Just as much as your mother does. Please be quiet.”
Jeremy stared at him with large eyes. He, admittedly, was quiet.
She smacked Spy on the forearm. “Told ya!” She grinned.
Spy frowned, putting Jeremy back against his shoulder. “Coincidence,” he said.
"I hate my job," complains Spy. "I'm sick of this."
"l thought you loved your secret agent job?"
"I don't love it," he says, viciously honest for once in his life. He is too tired to lie. Spy has always been selfish, but now he cannot bother to hide it. He used to try and protect her from the harsh realities of what he does. He’s hit the end of the rope. He needs her—needs her to kiss him, stroke his cheek, tell her she loves him. "It's just all I know how to do."
Spy has not been able to call his love in fucking weeks, because he has been undercover in fucking England, of all places, infiltrating a group of radicals and gradually destroying their cultish ring. He is paid handsomely, of course, but no amount of money is worth the months of reconnaissance, of living in the same tiny safehouses, talking to no one except the people he is trying to fool, and spending his nights committing violent acts and trying not to get violent acts committed on him.
And now that it’s over, in two days he is going back to Paris, for a new mission. Spy has likely changed the future of this godforsaken country. Yet, no one will notice he was ever there at all. He came, he went, and he knew no one. No one has known him in years.
He tears off his mask, jams a cigarette in his mouth, and pulls out his lighter. He swears when it refuses to light, instead sparking in his face.
"You're in a mood," she comments. He can hear the frown in her voice. "Need to tell me about it, hon?"
Spy runs a hand through his tangled, matted hair. It's been a minute since he's been somewhere with a shower. God, he wishes he had a shower.
"You know I can't. It's not safe—ahh!" he sighs in relief as his cigarette finally lights, puffing out smoke in a long, languid breath.
“Then tell me how t’help.”
Spy leans back against the headboard, considering his options. "Talk to me, mon amour," he mumbles. “Just… talk to me. How are you? How is—how is Jeremy?”
She pauses as if unsure. Then, She begins talking, voice quiet and level.
"Jeremy's... Jeremy. He's happy, alright. Quit his job at that warehouse, said he couldn't stand it... I said, alright, I mean, we don't need the money,"
Spy smiles to himself.
"He's still lookin' for another job. Says he wants me to never work again, ain’t it just the sweetest thing? Good boy, hard workin' — the other moms never thought so, but I know better. Found somethin' in the paper, but he said he'd have to move out west. I don't love it, but he said it pays well. He’s gotta leave the nest eventually. Oh, I best come to terms with it now, shouldn't I?"
That sounds nice. A job, out west. Something that could keep him in one place, or at least in America. Then he wouldn't have to be so far from his love. He’d have to find something he's well suited for. Something that still catches his attention, and appeals to his particular skill set.
Ah, well. He’d talk to his contacts. Until then, he'd just have to settle for lonely days, and nights falling asleep to his lover's voice.
Spy finds a job.
Spy shows up for his job and thinks, Shit.
“So you’re our Spy, I’m guessing?” says the Scout.
He is noisily chewing bubblegum and has to shift it to the side of his mouth when he speaks. He’s slightly tall and lean, a bit like Spy himself, but has a little more meat on his bones. A baseball cap sits low on his head. His eyes are cast downwards at where Spy sits delicately in the meeting room chair, narrowed in suspicion, hands on his hips.
Even if his love hadn’t sent him those photos in the mail, Spy would recognize his son anywhere, regardless of how long it’s been. He looks just like his mother. Long nose, upturned at the end, smile lines framing his mouth, a certain casual confidence radiating in his stance, weight shifted to one leg. Not even mentioning the accent.
The debriefing the new team members had been given—him, the Scout, and the Sniper—gave Spy enough time to get himself under control. If it weren’t for his years-long career of curating his poker face, he would be hyperventilating upon seeing his face.
Still, now, with Scout addressing him directly…he needs a moment to regain his composure.
“Oui,” says Spy, just a touch more sharply than appropriate. He snaps open his cigarette case and removes one with shaky hands. Fuck, where’s his fucking lighter.
The Scout sizes him up with a considering glance. “You wear that thing all the time?”
Spy finally finds it in his breast pocket. He flicks it on and lights his cigarette. “Oui,” he repeats.
“...Fine. Not much of a talker then, pally?”
Spy casts him a dubious glance, then regrets it, gaze getting caught on Scout’s freckled cheeks, so he goes back to avoiding eye contact.
“Mate,” says a voice from across the conference table. Spy looks up to see the Sniper, leaning with his elbows on the table, one hand extended out while the other props him up by his chin.
“Hand us a durrie, won’t ya?”
Spy raises an incredulous eyebrow at him.
“A cig,” Sniper clarifies.
Spy rolls his eyes but clicks open the case again to place a cigarette in Sniper’s outstretched hand. He takes it with a grateful tilt of his head, then leans back in his chair. He pushes his sunglasses further up his face while he takes his own lighter out of the pocket of his trousers. Spy doesn’t like him. He doesn’t trust people whose eyes he can’t see.
“Aw, shit, can I get one too?” Scout asks.
Spy freezes. He has to take a moment to force himself to relax. “You smoke?” He asks.
“Psshh,” Scout shrugs. His nonchalance is unconvincing. “Uh, yeah, sometimes.”
Scout is 23, Spy knows. Of course he knows. He is an adult. He has handled himself for this long, without Spy’s interference—perhaps even due to the lack of. Still, Spy irrationally feels a tug in his throat, an even further disgust with himself at the idea of handing him a cigarette. Passing his bad habit down a generation. What would Scout’s mother think?
Spy snaps the case shut and says, stiffly, “I am not a convenience store, giving things out for free. I only have so many.”
Scout frowns at him, then, after a beat, snorts. “Jesus,” he mutters, “Prick. Dunno what you got against me.”
Spy takes a puff of smoke and looks away. What a promising start to their relationship.
Sniper murmurs to himself, eyebrows furrowed in confusion, “...Convenience stores don’t give things out for free?”
Spy barely makes it through the rest of the day. He smokes more than he has in games, running out of tobacco before nightfall and having to resort to embarrassing, twitchy fidgeting. Many people talk to him. Their…perhaps-supervisor, Miss Pauling, seems intent on giving him a lot of information, supplemented with many files, and Spy graciously pretends to listen while staring at Scout from across the room.
In the evening, there is a brief tour of the base. Spy skips out on it to drive into town. He puts petrol in his shiny new car at a gas station around the outskirts of Telford, then goes inside the convenience store to buy another pack of cigarettes. The clerk attempts to make conversation with him. Spy gives him his scariest look and he is suitably shut down.
“Do you have a telephone?” He requests.
Spy is directed to a payphone out front. Mechanically, he puts a dime into the coin slot, picks up the receiver, then pauses.
His first instinct is to call her. What else would it be? She should know. But now, standing here, fingers hovering over the keypad, he has no idea what to say. It’s like that first time he showed up at her door, all those years ago.
Ten years ago, Spy would have put the phone down. Why remind her? Why tell her, when he knows this glaring reminder of his ineptitude—him and their son in the same place—will just give her more reasons to loathe him? He could go. Quit the job, and provide no explanation. She would never have to know. He and Jeremy could go on, living in separate worlds. She could go on thinking of Spy as her lover and Jeremy as her son, rather than father-and-son .
Scout would not miss him. Scout doesn’t know who he is. And they could continue their phone calls, and Spy would never have to think about him as his son, just as someone she occasionally mentions in passing over the phone.
Spy exhales a shaky breath and dials her number.
“Hello?”
“ Mon petite ami ,” says Spy. He rubs a hand delicately over his eyes, exhausted from his day. When he pulls it away, he realizes his glove is wet. “We should talk.”
“Sweetheart!” Spy’s shoulders shake in a humorless chuckle. Despite everything, everything he’s done, she still always sounds so happy to hear from him. It makes his heart ache. “Where are you today?”
“New Mexico,” answers Spy.
“Oh?” She says, slightly hesitant. Spy smiles, but it’s grim.
“Jeremy—” He breaks off, scrubbing a hand over his face, trying to shake off teary eyes. “He… Oh, chérie, he looks exactly like you.”
The game is up. He weeps freely, for reasons he is not entirely sure of. There, leaning against the aged brick wall of some washed-up gas station, Spy feels as if it’s the end of an era.
“Honey,” she says. “Come home.”
She takes his coat and hangs it neatly on a hook on the coat rack. He remembers how it used to be crowded with the boys’ hats and shoes, their jackets haphazardly piling on top of each other to the extent that they both gave up on organizing it at all. Now her things are the only ones hanging there. Her lovely fur coat—well over three decades old now, always her favorite—looks lonely there.
“I’m sorry,” is the first thing he says to her. She stands up on her toes to cup his face, smiling bittersweetly.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats after she’s kissed him, delicately, sweetly, like she always used to. His voice cracks when he speaks. “I left you—I should have never left you all alone here. You should have moved on. Found someone who could take better care of you.”
She shrugs. She does not placate him, tell him “It’s okay,” or “I forgive you.” Instead, she gently peels his balaclava off of his face with such tenderness you’d think she was at risk of breaking him.
“You say that like it’s easy,” she says. Her fingers, adorned with lacquered red polish, smooth up his cheekbones and to his temples.
Spy laughs, and if it’s a little wet, she doesn’t call him out on it.
“You’re here now,” she concedes.
They walk upstairs together. They no longer have the rush of their youth, secretly sneaking in at midnight, like teenagers trying to evade the attention of their parents. Now, it is calmer. They will get there when they get there. It’s been two decades. What’s a little more?
She takes him to bed. It is everything he needed. When she gently presses him into the mattress, he sighs with relief, letting his eyes close.
“Your hair got so long,” she murmurs, combing her hands through his hair. “And you’ve gone grey.”
“Merci,” deadpans Spy, “Thank you for pointing it out.”
“No, no, it’s a good look for ya.”
She leans down to kiss his forehead, then his cheek, then his lips. He blindly arches up into it, his hands coming to wrap around the back of her neck, tangling in her hair. It almost feels like no time has passed at all.
After, Spy lays on his back, idly tangling his fingers with her. He tilts his head to meet her eyes. She is older, he sees now. A few more wrinkles along her mouth, by her eyes. She is beautiful.
“I’ll stay with you,” he promises. “It took me too long to say it, and I’m sorry. But if you still want me, mon coeur, I will stay with you.”
She gets up on one elbow, leaning above him. He obligingly places a hand on her back and traces it up to her shoulder. She smiles, incandescent.
“Oh, sweetheart. I’ll always want you,” she says. “But it was never about me. You want me to forgive you? Stay with Jeremy. Take care of him, yeah? God knows he’s good at getting himself in trouble.”
Spy nods. “Oui. Yes. Of course, I will. I will protect him, I promise.”
She laughs, a counterpoint to his severe expression. “Oh, darling,” she coos.
He drags her back down. They tangle their limbs together, pressing ever closer to each other. Spy finally smiles. Tomorrow, he has to go back to work. Tonight, he can relax.