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It was bad timing.
Alec knew that.
Simply bad timing that Luke was busy when Alec came home. Busy in the ‘can’t sit in my office while you unwind’ sort of busy he rarely was—the other? Alec actually looked forward to. It was nice, being able to just sit against Luke as he worked. Alec could absorb his warmth and his presence and slowly slot back into the non-mission mindset so many non-combatants assumed clicked over the moment things were done.
Assumptions could be fatal.
Alec had only caught a glimpse of Luke while Piper, who had become something of a pet to Luke at some point in her first year—well after Luke had turned her down for her own good and Alec and Luke had gotten together—took what equipment he’d managed to bring back and handed him a stack of papers.
If she hadn’t said R—Luke—wanted them, he’d have tossed them on a table as he left.
He hadn’t looked at them and had no intention of doing so for a few days unless Luke mentioned them.
Right now he didn’t know what he wanted but he felt the crawling creep of mission-ready paranoia along his spine and knew better than to stick around the building for everyone’s good. He headed home, leaving everything he’d brought with him in his locker as just one more thing he didn’t want to deal with.
He considered the weights and dummies in the stables. The bikes and cars and the SUV, all of which could stand if wouldn’t need some work he could do for the hell of it.
Went inside and dropped onto Luke’s bed.
The one they didn’t use, unless they were honestly too unbalanced by sleep or drink or injury or post-injury painkillers to manage the stairs down to Alec’s flat.
Or when James was on a mission and they’d gotten a bit carried away while in the main parts of the flat and Luke’s bed was simply more convenient.
Even so, he could probably list out the number of times he’d slept in this bed.
The only time James had dropped in beside them after a mission had gone to hell and he’d wanted someone at his back just so he could fucking sleep already while they were in Luke’s room he’d grumbled about the paint on the ceiling before passing out.
Alec didn’t mind that the spots, splashes, dabs and swipes of glow-in-the-dark paint weren’t proper constellations. Luke was too much of the ‘organized chaos’ sort to accept putting up constellations that were almost right or completely impossible—there was too much action up there for even a reasonable fantasy night sky, so, despite Luke calling the patterns constellations, they weren’t.
It gave Alec something to puzzle over, when they were here and he was awake while Luke slept or—as now—was absent. He’d considered the possibility that Luke had put the paint up there merely to give Alec something for his mind to turn over. Luke did do things like that—printed out puzzles of all sorts when one of his agents were stuck in Medical or on restricted entertainment leave of one kind or another. Codes. He built locks and programs and asked them to open or break them, as much for them as to improve what he designed.
The paint on the ceiling didn’t feel like that. Luke got a certain look—slight lowering of the lids, tilt of the head, lift of the chin—when he was issuing a challenge that simply never appeared whenever Alec asked about the design. There was just enough sheepish disinterest to assure Alec that there was a meaning, a design, and Luke didn’t want to explain beyond ‘something to dream on’.
Meaning it was personal.
Being someone’s lover didn’t mean knowing everything about them. Once before a genius snuck into his life Alec had presumed that, over time, an attentive and observant lover would know very nearly everything.
Now? He doubted it.
Alec hadn’t been with anyone this long before. He’d always thought he’d wind up getting bored in any long-term arrangement, but dating Luke was a little bit like dating a mission—you never knew when there would be explosions or bizarre death traps and destruction was greeted with a toothy grin and wild laughter.
There were also hours of bodies tucked together, comfort in shared warmth and skin on skin that had nothing to do with sex and getting to know every tilt and turn of head, of eyes, things even the best spy can’t know without exposure and time. It was being known in a way even James and he never came close to. It was Luke tilting his head to the right, eyes darkening and lips curling slightly in appreciation simply for Alec’s presence and physicality and yet the denial of that in preference for whatever thing Alec had said or done that caught Luke’s attention and need to understand.
Everyone seemed to put so much emphasis on words as part of communication but most of their important things were said in small movements.
Or…
He’d always presumed so.
It had been one of those missions that on paper had gone brilliantly, better than could be hoped but in actuality had hit a few of those buttons he hadn’t known he had and left him fighting new demons while those long-conquered perked their heads in interest, hoping he’d loose his hold on them, too, whilst distracted.
If he’d been able to wrap himself around Luke when he arrived he’d have been fine, that’s all this was.
Simple bad timing.
His timing had been a hair off most of the mission. He’d missed his train from the airport, meaning he had to break into the penthouse suite after rather than during the evening’s ‘drinks party’, so he’d had to sit silently through a domestic as the target dismissed her lover as convenient and quite nice to look at.
She had remained alive ten minutes longer than necessary as Alec wrestled down his hackles so he was killing her as an assassin… and not as a man who could too easily imagine his own lover being so logically dismissive. If that gave her lover an alibi, it was honestly just a coincidence.
He knew Luke appreciated him. Liked his looks, enjoyed every inch of his body, reveled in his strength and adored it when Alec was in a playfully ‘still’ mood, which meant games of strategy or logic where Luke’s well-known genius was pitted against Alec’s rarely acknowledged. In many ways they were very well matched.
All very nicely convenient, too, as they’d lived together, gotten on well enough after the first discord settled, and understood the life they led.
Fuck.
This wasn’t working.
He turned his back on the ceiling and felt childish as he did so, reaching for his phone to see if Luke had sent him a text about his ETA and if not to ask for one. The screen of his phone reflected the paint for a moment before it unlocked—
Alec felt the stillness of a moment of intuition that changed the game settle over him.
He slowly, carefully, almost tentatively shut his phone off and waited for the screen to go completely black again. Then he angled it to see the ceiling.
And recognized the pattern.
He flipped over, fingers running over his own skin absently, finding scars he remembered and scars he’d forgotten and scars he couldn’t even see without studying himself like this painted across the ceiling. He laughed when he realized the pendant light was his cock, marking the place where torso shifted to legs—upper thighs only before the ceiling ran out of space, the light in the first third of the room as wall lamps had been designed in when the room was planned.
Those scars Luke was most familiar with, traced out with lips and tongue and teeth and fingers and palms, tasted and teased and painted upon the ceiling only used when Alec wasn’t there above him.
Luke had painted Alec on his ceiling.
Alec’s sexual partners tended to fall into two categories. Those who were in the game themselves or those who were essentially ignorant of it or at least its realities. The former set didn’t really notice his scars. They might make a sympathetic noise or understanding hiss, but by and large? Not interesting, surprising, or anything more than simply the truth of their existence. The latter, however, were often stunned, shocked and sometimes even horrified on finding the evidence of a life of war splashed across his skin. He wasn’t what he’d been when clothes had hidden the scars from their eyes thereafter. He was suddenly battered and broken or much more dangerous than they’d thought—and perhaps a bit scary.
Luke had been an exception.
Their first coupling had been, frankly, rushed and frantic. Alec had barely had time to properly open Luke before there were heels digging into his thighs. They’d kissed between panting breaths afterwards and started a proper exploration, hips held still until Alec was hard enough to maintain his position as the explorations spread a bit farther than necks and shoulders. Luke was thorough but used his sharp mind—Alec had thought him utterly in the ‘didn’t notice’ category until he realized Luke kept running his thumb over one hidden scar when he had a hand on Alec’s thigh as Alec drove.
Luke knew every scar on him, Alec knew that. Luke trailed his fingers along them, played hopscotch over hidden mars while thinking when Alec was dozing on the couch with his head on Luke’s thigh.
He’d never asked, apart from one large one still in the late stages of healing and that was only ‘okay to touch?’.
One mark had been an amateur artist. Alec had gone in when James’ approach hadn’t gotten him anywhere. James had approached at a gala.
Alec approached as a model.
People wanted what they couldn’t have; put a very fit body in front of people told to study every inch of it and few wouldn’t notice the man was naked. That assignment had ended up taking longer than M had liked; six classes before he could approach without ‘getting her on the old bat’s bad side by approaching a model’ though he’d been the one initiating the contact. She’d mapped every inch of him, posed him on her sheets and spent hours drawing him while he did his best to stay still and get the information needed for James—still around and rather annoyed—to get through her father’s security for the information they needed.
And that there was a meth dealer cooking in the flat below her so she was looking for a new place.
It had gone up spectacularly, taking all of the sketches with it.
All of the sketches that both were and weren’t of him.
Every one, every single one ignored his scars. Imperfections, flaws, artist’s prerogative to leave them out.
Feeling like a fucking idiot he grinned at the glowing points of light—starburst gunshot there, stab wounds over there, shrapnel forming a curl by the wall, a burn a supernova.
He curled upright when the door alarm chirped, but a grumbling curse answered the ‘who’ and let him relax a bit.
“It’s me. Alec?”
“Here.”
“There?” Slow, weary steps came towards him unevenly. “Fuck, I’m wiped. You alright?”
“Few bruises from the kid on the airplane freaking out during turbulence,” he snorted. “Almost galling, that.”
Luke chuckled and stripped to his pants before crawling in beside him. “Franklin made it.”
“Made it? I wasn’t aware he was on mission.”
“He wasn’t. But yours was a much farther flight so he’d landed before you got halfway there. It went to hell almost from the start and I haven’t slept since.”
“Dear heart.”
“I know, but I am not kidding when I say without me he would have needed a miracle at least four times.”
“Sounds to me like he had one,” Alec countered, dipping his head and able to smell Q-branch and coffee and the unwashed remnants of adrenaline and fear. It was obviously very fucking close too often.
“I think he’s going to retire.”
“Yeah?”
“Forth mission this year that’s gone badly, I don’t blame him. I hinted at Glenda—Traxler, you know her?”
Alec nodded and half-shrugged. “Translating crew.”
“Yes. I think she’ll approach him about filling the opening in their group whenever he’s bored.”
“Hoping he’ll switch over?”
“I don’t know. He’d be good in training from an ‘engaging the students’ standpoint, but while he’s overall double-O level good he isn’t great at any one skill. We’ve also got decent trainers at the moment with only knives and mid-range shooters being ill-represented, neither of which he can assist with, as it’s been that way for so long.”
Alec’s interest in knives had started in school and only developed thanks to a schoolmate’s father teaching him both the basics and ways to improve with practice. The Navy and MI6 hadn’t been able to teach him anything.
M had never asked him to train others and he hadn’t volunteered.
“He might enjoy translating, or he might find it boring.”
“Don’t turn his hobby into a job, love. Helping when bored, yes, brilliant, but not full-time. And having a generally competent instructor is better than seven different ones. I’ve wondered if things might go better if each group of incoming is given to a single instructor to be nudged along as far as they can get them before being scheduled with those better able to instruct on the fine-tuning. Fulbright, for example, has absolutely shit patience for those who barely know how to hold a firearm. Send them to him already competent and let him finish off their sniper training.”
“Have you suggested it to M?” Luke asked.
Alec blinked. “No,” he admitted.
“Because?”
“Because she typically didn’t want to listen to anyone. Certainly not anyone with a ‘use by’ date stamped on their foreheads. She has been better, of late.”
“Do what I do, then—study the idea, what the costs would be or the savings or both, effect on efficiency and moral and so on, then write everything up nice and neat and send it on to her. If she doesn’t think it’s a waste of time you might find yourself part of the trials, so be aware of that first.”
“I could probably manage a group of greenies.”
“Handle, yes. Have them come out the other end ready for assignment and not transferring elsewhere?”
“If they can’t handle me being annoyed or playful they shouldn’t be in the field.”
“Well.” It was agreement even as Luke sighed and not-so-discretely nudged all along Alec’s body, head shifting from his own pillowed hands to Alec’s bicep. “You sure you’re alright? My room isn’t normal for you.”
“I wanted you. You were busy saving Franklin’s arse.”
“And you’re alright?”
“I… had a few minutes too many with the monsters at the edges, but I’m firmly back now.”
“Good.”
Alec’s lips curled as he felt Luke’s thumb arching over a scar on Alec’s wrist. “What’s the ceiling pattern, love?”
“I’ve told you.”
“’Something to dream on’ is all you’ve said.”
“That’s what it is. Patterns to trace while falling asleep.”
“Why only in here, then? Why not in my room?”
They called it ‘Alec’s room’ but barring being unable to use the stairs to get to his basement flat it was their room. Most of Luke’s clothes were there, his charging cords, there was even a cat-flap cut into the door that activated only when Nix approached it so she can join them or leave without leaving the door open or waking them.
“When I sleep in your flat you’re there.”
“Not following.”
“When I can’t sleep I try to focus on anything but my own thoughts. When I’m alone all I’ve got is my own breathing, so I painted. When you’re here I have your breaths and heartbeat and the textures of your skin, the dips and curves of your muscles and bones. Why would I need another pattern to look at?”
“You don’t sleep there when I’m away?”
“Of course not.”
“Why ‘of course not’? You’d be welcome to do so.” Hell, Alec had always assumed he did. Luke’s room might be slightly more convenient to everything but the bed was smaller and the mattress much cheaper. Which Alec’s back had already noted.
“My bed is my bed. That one is ours. I’d rather sleep in my bed, alone as usual, than in ours when you’re gone.”
“…Fair enough. But you could at least buy a decent mattress.”
“No.”
Alec blinked. He twisted to look down at Luke. “Excuse me?”
“No, I’m not buying a better mattress. If I did you’d want to use it more often.”
“More often being more than once every two or three months, you mean?”
“Yes.”
With a shake of his head he hauled Luke around so they both ended up sitting when he pulled himself up. “You’ve put way too much thought into making sure James never hears us having sex. Completely forgetting that he has heard us.”
“No he hasn’t.”
Alec gave him a look.
“He hasn’t. Alec!”
“The mission we went on, the three of us? The hotel walls were not terribly thick and we were not terribly quiet. Excusing that one he’s probably wandered down to mine once a month or so, just wanting someone he trusts nearby so he can sleep better for a night. If he hears us he either goes back to his room or kips on the couch.”
“But…”
“I didn’t say he enjoys hearing us or cares to, but separated flats or not we all live in the same house and we don’t lock the connecting doors. He’s probably seen something he would rather not have at some point, though I haven’t noticed him.”
Luke made a noise so mortified that Alec immediately gave up on teasing.
He took another look at the sign that Luke saw him and missed him, not just a warm body conveniently amenable, and kissed Luke’s crown before standing. “Shower, call for pizza and whatever’s on that you’ve been wanting to see?”
“Nothing is on, but Hilary gave me a few German-language films. You could help when I can’t figure out what they’re meaning to say from straight translations. Or when my vocabulary fails.”
“Wenn du magst, Bärchen.”
Alec’s grin grew broader the longer it took Luke to join him in the bathroom.
“Did… did you call me a bear?”
“Ja, Schatzi.” He caught Luke’s mouth with his to still questions about languages, about terms of endearment and anything at all that wasn’t to do with them both being pleased at no longer needing a stand-in.