Alec/James, May 19, '05

[mandarinjazz]

Weakness
by Miro


It is late one October evening and James is sitting alone by the fireplace drinking vodka martinis in a decanter someone had given him once as a birthday gift on a day so long ago he's forgotten everything but the most important details. His necktie is laid neatly across one edge of his armchair and his shirt is open, only the top button undone. He gets to thinking too much on these long dark early winter nights, feeling too much. It's bad to think or feel too much in his line of work.

Actually, he's not technically alone. There's a woman in the adjoining room whose name he can't remember. Janice or Candy or Danika? They're all the same. Their names, their nicknames blend into one long string of pearls and he can't separate the individual drops. She's lying on the bed pretending to sleep. She's got her thigh exposed between tangles of covers, trying to tempt him when he's got his face turned. She wants him to fuck her- they all want him to fuck them- but he just doesn't feel like it tonight. She sucked him off and he didn't come at all even though she cussed in Italian and he wanted that pretty dirty little mouth so badly.

Fucking Alec.

He rattles the ice cubes in his glass and remembers the past. It's bad to remember the past in his line of work. He wonders how Alec got up after he ate that bullet. It was a fucking powerful bullet and it tore up his face. James knows it was a powerful bullet because it split him into two people. The person that James used to... no, James doesn't think about *that* now, *that* time, *that* mouth next to his on those sleepy-hot Russian evenings- and just another black and white bad guy with a two bit brain slated for his execution bullet. The irony was so incredible James might have laughed.

"It wasn't God who gave me this face, it was you."

The huge ink shadows in the statue graveyard. He knows you're coming. He *knows*. They all *knew* why. They'd made no secret of their knowledge of James's private affairs. Except for *him* James sleeps with women, James loves women, James has his fingers in women's bodies every day every year, that's his weakness isn't it? But the graveyard. The shadows. The darkness over his face.

So symbolic.

Alec always had such a flair for the dramatic. He was extreme, head-over-heels, never went into anything lightly. It made him careless as an agent, reckless instincts that got him into trouble on more than one occasion. James disobeyed orders on his own time also, but Alec's dislike of the rules was more blatant, edgier, had a certain hint of curious darkness. An endangerment to himself and to others, foolhardy judgement. James had known the psychological profile of him by heart when he'd read his file in advance of their partnership.

Alec didn't back off from the truth. Never had. Everything in the extreme. Nothing for granted. A touch, a glance was important. Vitally important.

James remembers putting his hand out. His weapon hand. He knew even then he wouldn't shoot, couldn't. The transformation had happened too suddenly- the Alec he'd touched once on drunken desperate Siberian nights dead, forgotten, filed away for future reference- the Alec now, the one who wanted to take over the world like some stupid common crook, fool's errands. But the cracks of the old Alec showing through neverless, maybe James could catch them and bring them back to life? What if the gun wasn't necessary? James hated himself months after for the hesitation. Fucking nerves.

Guns were always necessary in his line of work. Guns saved lives. Guns discharged the bullets that ended conflicts in swift surety, as long as the person firing the weapon was doing so for the right reasons, for the laudable global reasons. As long as the person firing the weapon was doing so in service of God and Queen and Country. All that is good and proper.

James took the woman- Nadine, Monica? home after a night of heavy drinking and gambling. He's still drinking so he doesn't know what that makes him. It's after three in the morning and it's that dawntime when the cold air blows kisses along your shoulderblade and makes you remember things you'd prefer to just forget. He should just go in there and get it over with. Ramona? Kimberly? will say Oh, James and make it all better. Kiss all his memories away with those sunset red Maybelline lips on his chest.

He'll take her and fuck her and he'll forget that he used to fuck someone else, someone better, more than once and he wasn't forgotten the next morning when she'd scrawl her number in blue on a room service napkin emblazoned with the name of some hotel in Switzerland on the corner and leave one red strappy three-inch-heel on the foot of the bed, like a rude reminder of their foreplay.

Fucking Bridget or Tracey. He took her off the arm of some Army general and he'd said sweet nothings to her and she'd smelled his neck and kissed his collarbone and he'd wanted her small dainty bone structure and her lean thighs wrapped around his waist.

But when all was said and done, when he'd sufficiently charmed her and brought her back to the suite in the fancy black car, he just didn't give a damn about her pretty little mouth. Just didn't feel like fucking her.

He remembers when Alec died. When he let go of the wrist that used to stroke his temples. He meant it then. Maybe he never went into anything lightly, either- nothing personal, of course, just the job. The job was intense. Most guys were all about the job anyway.

He wondered what the fall must have been like. The air rushing past his face, skidding his eyeballs, cold wind entering his mouth, down down the descent ripping lungs the pressure. More vodka martini. The gravity, what must the gravity have been like?

It's getting cold in here. He can't pull the chair closer to the fireplace because it's the kind that's only meant to look pretty, stuck to the floor.

He remembers other kinds of gravity. He remembers those hotel rooms. Those nights when he fucked nothing but Alec. No pretty little women in only pantyhose and eyeliner baring their legs for him. After a time he'd stopped seeing them as women. Just pretty little boxes with lipstick smiles he occupied for a brief few hours. But Alec.

"You'll be screaming," he'd teased the first time. "You'd enjoy it. Enjoy doesn't even begin to cover it. Haven't you ever wondered what it was like? Been turned on by the idea?" He'd come closer. The red wine was on his breath. The firelight was playing in his eyes.

It was a night like this one, cold, but at least James wasn't alone. Their cheeks were inches from each other. It was true, James had been getting tired of it all. They were all the same, the same shaped hips and breasts and thighs, all changing their eyes for him and putting their fingers on their necks as they leaned. James had felt Alec's heat. Exciting. Different.

He'd pulled him close, even though he hardly knew what he was doing. Kissed him. Alec had opened his mouth. Tasted like strawberries. Maybe apples. Maybe just the damp grit on a Russian street like that time when the Mafia thugs slammed their fist into his body until his face was inside out and then when his head was on the ground in the mud Alec had arrived just in time with reinforcements, the first to fire Her Majesty's gun but it wasn't the service of the Queen he was after, just the protection of his lover.

"For England, James." The goodbye hadn't even been about James. Memory could be ruthless on nights like this. He couldn't afford that in his line of work.

She'd tasted like Alec, the hint of apples. Maybe that was why he'd let her put her tongue inside his mouth when really he'd just wanted the fireplace tonight. The banker's daughter. The important banker's daughter who had Mafia connections. The one MI6 said they were targeting. So it was all in the name of duty, right? The memory of apples?

James sighs and puts down his decanter. Alec gave him that decanter. The birthday was a happy one, just the two of them, a bottle of vodka and afterwards glistening together on the carpet. "I want you to remember me like this," Alec said, his voice warning of a future that did not contain these pleasures. As if he knew of the split in advance and this was all just one cruel joke, one mistaken judgment, the planned Fall.

James loosens the second button from the top and remembers what Alec used to say about his neckties. "Too tight," he'd say. "You're so stiff. Let me help with that." He'd slide a hand around his neck, gripping his throat. Any other man with his hands there would have been dead before he got the chance. But Alec was electrifying. James couldn't resist him, himself the very thing nobody else could resist.

And *they* knew, the ones who counted, who weren't supposed to know anything about it. MI6 knew all along and kept it hush hush. "He *knows* you're coming." State secrets, for Queen and Country. He knows where it feels just right along his left upper thigh. Fingers. At least they don't know about fingers.

He sees Alec's smashed face on the cement. Bloody and broken, his mouth that used to kiss his elbows twisted into a thousand wretched pieces. That's what happened to the bad guys. They died and everyone lived happily ever after. The world saved once again.

James puts his decanter on the end table. He stands up and walks into the adjoining room, trailing a hand against the doorframe. Holly or Sally or Kate is in bed waiting for him. Ellen's toenails are tangled up together. Eleanor smiles. "I thought you'd never come," Patricia says like honey. He shivers. He takes off his clothes and fucks Anna twice, doesn't let Rachel come at all, makes Gertrude whimper and dig Molly's fingers into his shoulder and leave a print of Veronica's heart on his hips. Tracey's pearl necklace shines on the pillow in the center of Jackie's sweat.

In the morning she writes her name on a hotel napkin. Only her name, no phone number. "Alice."

She's trying to be different, the little snake. It doesn't matter, though. She's just another pretty face. His weakness.