Chapter Text
Being a spy involves a lot more waiting around than Alex ever expected.
They’re sitting at a bar in some ritzy hotel frequented by one of Johnston’s clients—a man who H was developing as an asset—in the hopes he might have heard something recently that could help them. Alex doesn’t know his name, of course, or even what he looks like; he’s being kept in the dark for his safety, and H’s, though that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. He knows B only let him come because she wants to keep an eye on him; that, and just in case he swaps. Still, he’s been soaking up everything she does let slip, hoping to find some other way he can help. He hates feeling useless.
Alex waves off the bartender when he comes around to offer him a refill, tempting though it may be. Now that they’re here, the whole crazy situation is starting to feel very real in a way it hadn’t before, and he should probably keep his wits about him. It’s been a few hours since he swapped after they arrived, long enough for the ache of breathing with H’s broken ribs to have faded like a bad dream, but there’s no telling when they’ll swap again.
Next to him, B toys with the straw in her soda with lime as she surveils the hotel lobby. A careless observer might think she was bored, but Alex can sense the tense watchfulness in her posture, coiled like an over-tightened spring.
“How long have you been sober?” he asks without really meaning to, his filter worn thin by stress and exhaustion.
B looks over and blinks at him, clearly taken aback, but not, apparently, because he’s being incredibly rude. “How did you know that?”
“Little things,” Alex says with a vague wave of his hand. “You haven’t ordered a drink anywhere, which could be that you just want to stay sharp, except you also said you don’t spend much time in bars. But mostly, you have a little tic when a bartender asks for your order, this way you move your hand”—he demonstrates, rubbing his thumb and first two fingers together—“like you’re rubbing a coin. Or a sobriety token. I had a client once who did the same thing when he got stressed and wanted a drink.”
B very nearly gapes at him; he gets the sense she might have if she was the type to give that much away. After another moment, she clears her throat and looks back at her soda. “You’re very perceptive, Alex,” she says eventually.
He shrugs. “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I wasn’t. You gotta be able to read people. Figure out what makes them tick. How to get them to reveal things they don’t want to reveal, or make the decision you want them to make.”
“Huh,” she says. One corner of her mouth tugs upward. “Maybe our jobs aren’t so different after all.”
Phantom pain twinges in Alex’s hand like an old injury, and he winces despite the fact he knows it’s all in his head. “Some important differences, though.”
B hums her agreement and stirs her soda absently. “H is quite cross with me for involving you in this,” she says eventually.
“Soulmate biology is hardly your fault,” he says. “Though maybe if he’d ever taken his shield off before now, we could have swapped at a better time.”
“He had an implanted shield. Here, on his forearm,” she tells him, pressing a finger to the inside of her left arm. Exactly where he’d had a wound where they first swapped.
“That’s protocol for you guys?”
The look B slants his way tells him plenty before she even says, “Not exactly. As far as I know, it’s rare among your lot”—Alex supposes she means the CIA—“and even for us, it’s up to the individual officer. Most don’t. H received quite a bit of… pressure to do so from our commanding officer, though.”
That’s fucked up, Alex does not say, though he very much wants to. He swallows the last of his whiskey in an attempt to keep the shielding rant on the tip of his tongue at bay. “What about shielding sickness?”
“Unproven, isn’t it?” B counters, though there’s a bitter note in her voice. “There are those who consider it a sign of mental failing. They think if you’re strong enough, you won’t be affected.”
“And H is one of them?” Alex asks, horrified.
“Christ, no,” she scoffs, which is a fucking relief. He can’t imagine being soulmates with someone who could have that kind of perspective. B continues, “Unfortunately, our commanding officer is.”
Alex has never wanted so badly to fight someone he doesn’t even know the name of. “If you ask me, this whole mess is on them.”
“I don’t disagree,” B says flatly. “But it hardly matters now. C’mon,” she says, getting up from her stool and nodding toward a man striding through the hotel lobby, “our friend’s just arrived. Cross your fingers and maybe we’ll be lucky.”
He’s fairly certain that she doesn’t mean it literally, but Alex finds himself twisting his fingers around each other anyway; at this point, he’ll take all the luck they can get.
It’s been twenty-four hours since they landed in Marrakesh. Twenty-four hours of chasing leads, and twenty-four hours of dead ends. Twenty-four hours in which Alex has swapped with H four times. The interval between the swaps is definitely shortening, but is, frustratingly, still erratic enough that they can’t fully predict when they’ll happen. Alex has rejected B’s suggestion that he wear the shield to reduce the amount of swaps, successfully arguing that it’s better that they know if anything changes with H sooner than later.
He’s been lucky three times, swapping during periods where H has been left alone, though lucky is probably overselling it. It hurts to breathe, to blink, just to be. B assures him that H is holding up fine, and Alex isn’t sure if H is lying or if the pain feels worse for him because he’s not experiencing it constantly.
The next time, he realizes just how lucky he’s actually been.
The pain is so intense it whites out everything else, so excruciating that he thinks he’s actually about to die, and the sudden cessation of it when he swaps back to his own body is so jarring that his legs immediately collapse under him. He barely registers B’s arms going around his torso as she tries to catch him, but it doesn’t really work. Alex might not be particularly tall, but he’s still plenty larger than B, and he takes her down with him as they land in a heap on the floor.
“Alex?” she says, her voice pitching high with alarm. “Alex, what happened? Alex—!”
He can breathe in but he can’t seem to breathe out, the air sticking in his throat like a panic attack times a thousand, and he’s not even lucid enough to remember what his coping mechanisms are, much less able to enact them. Then, all at once, something seems to crack inside him and all the air rushes out. He curls into B’s arms as uncontrollable sobs wrack his body, until it feels like there’s nothing else left, until the lingering echoes of the pain fade away and leave only their terrible memory.
Slowly, he comes back to himself, to his own body, to B’s soothing murmurs in his ear and her hands carding through his hair. There’s a considerable wet spot on her shoulder where his face has been buried, and he wipes ineffectually at it before realizing maybe he shouldn’t be pawing at someone he met less than two days ago.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, “I didn’t mean—”
“Alex.”
“—your shirt’s all—”
“Alex,” she breaks in, grabbing his face with both hands. “Fuck the shirt. What happened?”
“It was— a lot,” he half-hiccups, pulling away and trying to collect himself. “Um. Electricity.”
“Fuck,” she exhales, too knowingly.
Alex swipes at his face and sniffs hard, doing his best to ignore the way his hands are shaking. “’M ok. I’ll be ok.”
“That’s it,” she says abruptly, her voice hard, pushes herself to her feet, and starts stomping across the room.
“Where’re you going?”
“I’m getting you a shield.”
“No,” he blurts desperately, scrambling to his feet to go after her. He knows he sounds completely fucking insane, knows that he’s still wobbling unsteadily, that there are still tear tracks on his face and his eyelashes are still clumping together—he knows, ok? He just doesn’t fucking care.
She whirls on him, eyes flashing. “This is not a discussion. You’re not doing this anymore. I never should have let you in the first place, it’s too much for you—”
“It’s too much for anyone, that’s the fucking point!” Alex snaps. He takes a deep breath and reminds himself that he’s fine, he’s safe, he’s uninjured. Unlike his soulmate. His voice only slightly wavers when he says, “I don’t care what kind of training you have, it doesn’t make the pain hurt any less. What he’s going through is— is inhuman.”
“It’s the job,” B says, so dismissively it feels like he’s been slapped. She turns away again, shuffling through the mess of notes and takeout containers on the coffee table in search of the bracelet Alex left there. “H and I took oaths knowing it could be asked of us. You never signed up for this.”
“Yes, I fucking did,” he insists as he crosses the room to stand at her side, though she doesn’t look up from her search. “I signed up from the very first moment I told you I wasn’t going to wear a shield.”
“I can’t allow you to keep it up, especially when it’s not even helping. We’ve learned nothing—”
Alex grabs her shoulder, which is probably an objectively stupid thing to do to a spy; she looks seconds away from laying him out, but he doesn’t let go. “Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not helping him. Fifteen, twenty minutes of relief from the pain. Tell me it’s not fucking keeping him alive.”
Her nostrils flare as she draws in a sharp breath and warns, “Alex.”
“Tell me, B!”
“Yes!” she nearly shouts, her eyes flashing as she pulls away from him. “This is hell for him and every moment’s respite he gets is unspeakably valuable. Is that what you want to hear?”
Alex should feel more satisfaction at winning the admission from her. Instead, the confirmation just makes him feel incredibly hollow.
“But Alex,” she continues, nearly pleading, “he would tell you himself that it’s not worth it.”
“I know I’m not a spy,” he says, staring at his feet with his voice thick in his throat. “I don’t have any skills or experience with this shit. I’m basically fucking useless. But this, I can do. If I can give him even a single moment of relief, then it’s fucking worth it to me.”
B rubs a hand over her eyes, her face screwed up in obvious frustration. “You are the most infuriating, aggravating, obstinate”—she takes a deep breath, and when she looks at him again her expression could almost be called fond—“and bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
Alex huffs an unsteady laugh and ducks his head. “Thanks, I guess.”
“C’mon, love,” she says, putting a hand on one of his, “I’ll make you some tea.”
The idea that tea could help after electrical torture is almost laughable—and painfully British besides—but he lets himself be led over to the couch, where Bea deposits him before shuffling over to the little tea cart and putting the kettle on. She keeps up a constant stream of chatter about the city, the weather, everything and nothing, seemingly intuiting he needs to stay out of his own head at the moment but is unable to hold up much of a conversation on his own. The tea she comes back with is mint, and when she settles down onto the couch next to him, she pulls him into the circle of her embrace without hesitation.
It feels like a lot, considering they still barely know each other, but he doesn’t let himself overthink it. In fact, it feels uncannily like June and how she’d wrap him up in her arms as if she could protect him from the evils of the world, even after he got bigger than her, and how he always felt safe there. He curls against B’s side, and her thumb rubs soothing circles on the outside of his shoulder as they subside into silence, sipping their tea.
“How are you doing?” she ventures eventually.
“Better,” Alex says with a half-hearted shrug.
Probably as good as he can be, considering. He still feels unsettled by the experience, to put it mildly, but he’s at least stopped trembling. The worst part now is wondering how long H was subjected to the ordeal and how much more they might do to him. The worst part is how it fills him with an aching, furious despair, and how fucking powerless he feels to stop it.
“Sometimes…” he starts, hesitating a moment before he forges on. “Sometimes I can’t tell if the lingering pain is just a memory, or if I can actually feel him. But that’s crazy, right? I’ve never heard of soulmates working that way.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy,” B says. She pauses for a beat, seemingly choosing her words carefully. “I knew a couple with a bond like that. Once.”
Alex desperately wants to know more, but he can tell from the tight set of her lips that trying to get more out of her would be a futile effort. “What about your soulmate?” he asks instead, though he doesn’t know why he thinks she’d open up about that.
But to his surprise, she readily answers, “I don’t have one.”
“How do you know?” Alex asks, frowning up at her. “What if it’s like me and H, and you just haven’t swapped yet?”
“I don’t wear a shield,” she tells him, shocking him twice in as many minutes.
“I thought y’all had to?”
B shakes her head. “I told you, it’s not required, and somehow I’ve always known I didn’t need one.” She takes a sip of her tea and anticipates his next question. “People say they feel like a part of them is missing, but I feel whole. Always have. I used to wear a shield on missions to make other people feel better. Now, I don’t bother.”
“Oh,” Alex says as he settles back against her side again.
All the time he’d insisted he didn’t have a soulmate, he doesn’t know that he ever felt whole. He’s not entirely sure what that even means. And he does have a soulmate, as it turns out, so he supposes he wasn’t. Still isn’t. It’s a weird concept, and he doesn’t know how he feels about it.
“What’s he like?” he asks. He doesn’t have to clarify who he means; B has apparently followed his train of thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her lips twitch into the ghost of a smile. He knows he’s not supposed to ask, but he can’t help himself. “I don’t mean, like, identifying details, but just… I can tell you know him well. Can’t you just tell me about who he is as a person?”
“Well,” B begins, her expression going soft and fond, “he’s an incredible officer, but he’s so much more than that. He loves to read and write. He dresses like he’s allergic to color and has the musical tastes of someone twice his age. He’s gentle and kind, and more sensitive than he should be in this line of work. He’s… a hopeless romantic at heart.”
“Really?”
“Don’t tell him I told you that last part,” she warns with a huff of laughter.
“Huh,” Alex says. He chews on his lower lip for a moment, thinking, until he finally gets up the courage to ask, “So, what do you think the likelihood is that his soulmate is platonic?”
B stretches back a little so she can look down at him, frowning a little. “Is that what you think?”
“I… don’t really know, to be honest with you,” he answers quietly, feeling more than a little lost.
He hasn’t let himself think about it, really, but that doesn’t mean it’s been far from his mind. The implications of his soulmate being a man. What that means in the context of communal showers after lacrosse practice, of Liam, of his young, attractive law professor who he might have had a crush on. Hell, how B just now seemed more surprised that he thought the bond could be platonic than that H’s soulmate was a man to begin with.
“Well, I’m probably the wrong person to ask,” she admits. “But it’s clear that you mean a lot to each other, whatever form that might take. I think you’ll figure it out. When we find him.”
Alex swallows hard, but it doesn’t clear the knot in his throat. “Yeah,” he manages. When not if, he repeats inside his head. They will. They will. “Do you… do you have a photo of him?”
B bites her lip and furrows her brow. “I shouldn’t.”
“Please, B,” he pleads, deploying his most devastating puppy dog eyes. “Knowing what he looks like can’t hurt when I’m already inhabiting his body.”
“I don’t even have one on this phone,” she protests.
“Oh c’mon, there’s gotta be one in the cloud somewhere.”
“We’re spies, Alex.”
“That wasn’t a no,” he points out.
She lets out an aggrieved sigh and looks at the ceiling, but she also starts pulling out her phone, so he’s pretty sure he’s won. After a length of time typing that suggests she might be inputting epically long passwords, she pauses, staring at whatever she’s pulled up, before she finally passes it over.
Alex wasn’t expecting a photo of both of them, but that’s what’s on the screen: B and a man who must be H, together in front of one of the great pyramids of Giza. He’s got an arm slung over her shoulders and they’re both laughing, B looking at him out of the corner of her eye as H grins at the camera. There’s something about him that’s reminiscent of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, his sandy hair tousled by the wind and blue eyes preternaturally bright in the desert sunlight. He’s ridiculously, unfairly gorgeous, and Alex feels something difficult to identify lurch in his gut at the sight of him.
Alex is distracted, though, by B standing next to H in the photo, his eyes drawn to her cheekbones and lips and the way her eyes crinkle when she laughs, and a bolt of recognition zips through him. He looks back up at her, but she’s staring fixedly down at the photo and she doesn’t meet his eyes.
“You have the same mouth,” he says. “Same cheekbones.”
She licks her lips and says, softly, “He’s my brother.”
Her face betrays nothing, but Alex slides his free hand into one of hers, and she grips him back so tightly it’s painful, as if all the emotions she’s not allowed to feel are leaking through that single point. Jesus fuck, he can’t imagine, if June were in a situation like this—
“We’re going to find him,” he says fiercely.
B gives a little, jerky nod. “I know we will.”
Henry had thought for sure that his encounter with electrocution would have been enough to get Alex to wear a shield. Or at least enough to convince him he needed a longer break than those he was currently getting. They were going no more than a couple of hours between swaps now, as their souls apparently became more and more insistent that they get with the program and find each other already.
If only it were that easy.
At least Samir’s men have ceased questioning him by the next time they swap. They’ve left Henry hanging by his wrists bound together over his head, with his toes just brushing the ground, and he can’t help but roll his shoulders when he abruptly finds himself sitting in a car next to Bea. Somehow, she’s started to be able to tell when they’ve swapped. A difference in the way they carry themselves, she says. A vibe. All he knows is that she doesn’t even look over this time before her lips tighten.
“You didn’t tell me about the electric,” she accuses flatly as she stares out the windshield at the entrance to an upscale club. They must be waiting for someone.
“What would it have accomplished, other than to make you worry about something you can’t change?” Henry counters.
Perhaps predictably, she’s clearly not pleased with this answer. “Could have prepared me for what I was going to be dealing with when Alex came back.”
Right, he supposes that she does have a point there.
He doesn’t ask how Alex is, because it’s a stupid question, and quite frankly he’s not sure he can bear to hear about how much pain he’s causing his soulmate. He knows, and it’s actively tearing him apart every time they swap. Bringing up a conversation they’ve already had multiple times is hardly smarter, but he can’t help it.
“You have to try harder to get him to wear a shield, Bea.”
“You think I haven’t?” she shoots back hotly, finally turning on him with a hard glare. “Do you think I enjoy seeing the effects on him? Hearing what they’ve done to you that you’re too damned stubborn to let show? I don’t want this for him any more than you do, but it doesn’t matter what I want. It’s his choice, and I won’t take it from him.”
“It’s one he shouldn’t even be asked to make!” Henry grinds out.
“But he knows what he could be subjected to, and he’s made it anyway,” she says with finality as she settles back into her chair and stares out the window again. She’s silent another beat, and then, quietly: “He loves you, Haz.”
It’s the verbal equivalent of shoving him off a building, Henry thinks—he’s in free fall, heart in his throat and desperately clutching for a parachute rip cord. “He doesn’t love me,” he protests. “He doesn’t even know me.”
Bea just shrugs. “Maybe he doesn’t, but I don’t know what else to call it. The closest I’ve seen to a connection like this was—”
“Don’t,” Henry warns.
Bea puts her hands up in surrender. “Fine. But I will say this: I didn’t know how there could possibly be someone who could measure up to you, but he does. He’s your match, Henry, and you shouldn’t underestimate him. He’s stronger than you think.”
Henry stares out the windshield into the night, not even knowing what he’s watching for, and tries desperately yet unsuccessfully not to think of their parents. Of how their bonding was almost legendary in the service, how his mother had recruited his father to MI6 afterward, how they’d been a near-unstoppable team in the years before his death. That was usually the choice when it came to an officer’s soulmate: recruitment or re-shielding, effectively suppressing the bond. Henry had always assumed he’d be shielded for the entirety of his life; now, either option makes him nauseous.
“I wish he didn’t have to be,” he says eventually, with far more despair in his voice than he means to let on.
Bea reaches over, takes his hand, and squeezes. “I know.”
He clears his throat, falling back on old coping mechanisms. Focus on the mission. Ignore the rest. “Who are we waiting for?”
“Her,” Bea says as she drops his hand and starts getting out of the car. “Come on, we need to catch her before she gets into the VIP section.”
Henry only needs to catch a glimpse to know exactly who she is: tall, thin, straight black hair falling past her shoulders, wearing a skin-tight silver dress and an expression that could stop the most intimidating warlord in his tracks. One of the last people Henry would care to run into right now, frankly, but Bea’s already halfway across the road, so he has little choice but to follow and hope she knows what she’s doing.
Getting into the club is easy enough; the bouncer waves them in without a second glance, and it’s only then that Henry realizes Bea’s wearing a shockingly short skirt and the kind of heels she hates, whereas Alex seems to be clad in tailored trousers and a crisp white button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing well-muscled forearms that Henry has precisely no thoughts about. Inside, the dance floor is only moderately crowded—it must still be early—and the music isn’t quite turned up to the volume where it vibrates in your teeth. People are mostly talking at tables and at the bar, which is also where they locate Alia Johnston. She’s leaning on one hand, tapping her long red fingernails impatiently against the surface as she apparently waits for a drink.
“Now’s your chance,” Bea says, leaning in to speak in his ear. “She likes pretty boys. You can chat her up and find out if she knows where her husband is.”
“Bea, I’ve been sleeping with said husband,” Henry scoffs. “She’s hardly my biggest fan.”
Bea grabs his wrist and holds up his hand—his soulmate’s hand—in front of his face. “She doesn’t know it’s you, dummy. Alex is hot. I guarantee she’ll flirt with him. Now hop to it before you swap back.”
She reaches up to undo a couple of buttons on Alex’s shirt, exposing his collarbones and the upper part of his sternum before Henry bats her hands away irritatedly. He certainly doesn’t need his sister’s help to seduce intel out of anyone. Plus, Alex is his soulmate and Henry would prefer everyone else keep their hands to themselves.
Henry takes a deep breath, but she’s right—he can’t afford to dawdle. Walking purposefully up to Alia, he arrives just as the bartender is dropping off her glass of champagne. Alia doesn’t spare him a glance until he grabs the bartender’s attention and says, “I’ve got her drink, and a gin and tonic for me.”
Alia looks over at him, one perfectly-manicured eyebrow lifting as her gaze sweeps up and down his body. Moment of truth: Henry lets his mouth fall into what he hopes is a charming smile and leans an elbow on the bar as he angles his body toward her. She must like what she sees, because instead of telling him to fuck off she plucks her flute off the bar and tips her head, a coy smile playing on her lips.
“I’ve not seen you around here before,” she says.
Bait taken. “Do you keep track of everyone in the city?”
“Not everyone,” she answers. She draws her lower lip between her teeth as her eyes drop to his exposed collarbones. “But you, I would have noticed.”
Henry swallows down an odd discomfort in his gut and forces himself to look pleased. “Flattering,” he returns, which makes her smile widen a touch. The bartender returns with his drink, and Henry takes a sip before continuing, “I just got in. It’s my first time in the city.”
“Oh? And are you traveling for business or pleasure?”
Henry would like to roll his eyes at the line; instead he lets his gaze drop suggestively before meeting her eyes with a grin. “Bit of both. I hope.”
“In that case, perhaps you should join me in my private suite in the back, Mr…?”
“Daniels,” Henry says, remembering the briefing Bea’d give him on their covers. “Alexander Daniels.”
“Alexander,” she nearly purrs, looking at him through a heavy-lidded gaze. It raises Henry’s hackles in a way he doesn’t expect, and that’s before she drops a hand onto his wrist and slides it up his bare forearm where it’s resting on the bar. Henry just resists baring his teeth.
Mine, some strange, possessive impulse inside him growls, which is not something he has time to contemplate right now.
“Your husband won’t mind?” he asks, looking pointedly at the massive diamond ring and wedding band on her ring finger.
Alia just laughs, throwing a lock of hair over her shoulder. “He’s too busy to pay me any attention lately.”
“That’s a travesty,” Henry says. “What could possibly be more important than a radiant creature such as yourself?”
“One of his men betrayed him recently,” she says with a dismissive little shrug. “He’s been on a warpath. When he gets like that, it’s best to just stay out of his way.”
“Oof. I wouldn’t like to be the one who betrayed him.”
“Between you and me, he deserves it,” Alia tells him, leaning in conspiratorially. “And Sam will make him pay for it. Good riddance. But enough about him.” She squeezes his arm. “You will join me, won’t you, Alexander?”
Henry gives a little nervous laugh. “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like your husband is someone I want to get on the bad side of.”
In fact, he’s very aware of exactly what Samir Johnston, cheater though he may be, does to the men that his wife takes as lovers. It’s a regular dance they do—Alia wants attention and seduces some sap into her bed, Samir enjoys making the man’s life a living hell, and they both get what they want. Henry’s pretty sure it’s some twisted form of foreplay for them, frankly, and the idea of them doing it to Alex is enough to make him want to break something.
“Well. You’re not wrong,” she admits. She lifts her hand and lets a finger trail over his skin, then grins wickedly at him. “But he’s spending all of his time all the way in Sidi Ghanem lately, and what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
Sidi Ghanem—Christ, as far as they know, Samir only has a few properties in that district. He lets his gaze sweep the room until he catches Bea’s eye where she’s standing nearby scowling at potential suitors. He hasn’t been keeping track of the time, doesn’t know how much he likely has left, and the intel does no good inside his own head if he switches back before he tells Bea.
“You make a compelling argument,” he says, flashing a smile at Alia. “Excuse me one moment, I need to use the restroom, and then I’m all yours.”
Henry makes it two steps away, and then—
He sags into the wrist restraints, ignoring the screaming pain in his shoulders.
Fuck.