Work Text:
Paris, France, August 12, 3:15am
When the phone rang in the early morning Reece was awake, instantly. He'd been dreaming, the same strange half dreams he'd been prone to all week. He would be lying in bed, only it would be the bed back at the flat, not the hotel he'd been staying at since Wax left. His thoughts, unusually for a dream, would be nearly lucid; sensible, boring thoughts about whether or not he should wear a tie to work tomorrow and if he did, which one? Then, drowsing lazily between the familiar sheets, the thought would occur 'I can ask Caroline'.
The name acted like a talisman. Abruptly but subtly, the dream would change; the sluggishness of his movements becoming forced, a near paralysis and the darkness of the room turned personal, morphing into blindness. Next, the sudden focussing of awareness on the dip in the mattress next to him, the weight of a body sharing his bed. Caroline? But she was dead. He had shot her, at close range, in the face. Like every night since the shooting, since Wax had jetted back to America, Reece had reached out towards the weight, moving with immense effort as if through glue and felt the matted, bloody strands of hair come away in clotted lumps around his fingers...
If the phone hadn't rung he would have awoken anyway, startled upright by the phantom crack of a gunshot. As it was he had to take a breath to compose himself before answering.
“Reece” His kept his voice impatient but professional. Like a man interrupted in a meeting rather than a shivering, sleep befuddled wreck who was half convinced he could feel his girlfriend's blood gelling under his fingernails.
“Hey, my man! It's me!”
“Wax?” Reece was out of the bed and half into his trousers in one smooth movement, “Where are you and what do you need?”
There was a brief, puzzled pause on the other end of the phone.
“Wax?” Reece prompted a second time. “Is it not safe to talk?”
The pause resolved itself into a hoot of delighted laughter.
“Oh! Oh, you think this is important? Fuck, no. I was bored, thought I'd check in.”
His hand, which he'd been wiping on his thigh in an absent minded sort of manner, clenched into an irritated fist.
“It's three in the morning, Wax, couldn't you have waited?”
“Is it? Shit. It's noon where I am. Trying to get a coffee but none of the bastards speak English. I asked for a coffee and look at this! What is it? It's got a fucking walnut in it, who does that?”
“I don't know, I don't care. Look, I'm hanging up and going back to bed. I have three meetings tomorrow and I have to speak coherent French in all of them. I don't have time for you and and your walnut problems.”
The huff of mock indignation seemed to almost ruffle his hair.
“Sure, sure, I get it. You only pretend to care about me.”
“Goodnight, Wax”
“Yeah.” Reece's thumb raced for the blessed escape of the disconnect button.
“You sound tired.” Wax observed, casually. It was Reece's turn to huff.
“It's three in the fucking morning” he gritted and hung up.
In a small café on the outskirts of Minsk, Wax frowned thoughtfully at his silent mobile.
Paris, France, August 13, 16:37pm
Reece sat in an attitude of casual helpfulness – back straight, legs slightly crossed at the ankle – altogether managing superbly to conceal both his crashing boredom and the tremor of anxiety that kept wanting to twitch his fingers in his lap. When his phone rang in the middle of the ambassador's lethargic debate on farming standards he almost swallowed his tongue.
Bennington frowned at him. He'd had Reece happily classed as an efficient but dull minion for the past year and this sudden insurgence of importance irritated him. Reece had been doing his best to slide back into his previous position of competent invisibility but the man's suspicions were clearly aroused.
“Wax?” he hissed angrily into the phone. “this better be important.”
“Sure, it is. How do you say 'let the president go' in German?”
“What?”
The exclamation, coming a little too loud, prompted several people to frown up at him, with the exception of the secretary who'd been after his job and promptly started radiating a slimy aura of smug and silent obedience.
“Ah, I'm just playing with you. I'm not in Germany.”
Mindful of the resuming debate, Reece schooled his voice into a smooth professional murmur.
“I'm sorry, Sir,” - the 'sir' sending Wax into transports of hilarity - “I'm in a meeting. I'll get back to you at the earliest possible convenience - why do you keep calling me?”
“I thought maybe you'd missed the dulcet tones of my voice.”
Reece pulled back his lips into a savage smile at the receiver.
“Goodbye, Sir.”
“If you don't say you missed the dulcet tones of my voice, I'm calling you right back again.”
Reece took in the room with a hunted glance. Bennington had been speaking in a low, monotonous drone for over twenty minutes and he suspected everyone in the room was secretly listening to him. The secretary radiated, quietly.
“Wǒ cuòguòle nǐ de shēngyīn yuè'ěr língshēng, nǐ zhège húndàn.”
There was a long pause.
“I've written down what you said,” Wax said at last “and I'm going to check it in a dictionary and it had better be what I asked for .”
Reece couldn't resist.
“Good luck with the spelling, Sir” He smirked and hung up over Wax's cursing.
Paris, France, August 15, 2:15am
The third time the phone rang Reece was in the shower, trying to wash away the phantom sensation of Caroline's stiffening fingers on his hips. He rolled his shoulders under the spray, feeling the muscles twinge and debated letting it ring itself out. Knowing his luck however, this would be the time it was a national crisis which only he could solve. He sighed and slicked the water from his short hair, padding damply into the bedroom. The phone shrilled importantly.
“Morning, Reece!”
Reece gave a full body shiver of irritation that was powerful enough to be visible in the bedroom mirror.
“No, Wax, no it isn't. This is the night.” He waited for a cheery excuse about differing time zones but instead -
“Is that why you took so long to answer the phone?” Wax's leer was practically audible. “Got someone with you?”
“No.” Reece refused to count the coagulated stare of his former fiancé that insisted on haunting his every sleeping moment. “I was in the shower” he explained, then swore under his breath. Why was he justifying himself to a man who seemed to spend half his time draped liberally in hookers and the other half irritating the shit out of him?
Wax appeared nonplussed.
“In the shower? It's, like, two thirty or some shit”
“I know. I'm not the one phoning for no earthly reason.”
“Oh, there's a reason.”
Giving up on any idea of finishing his shower anytime soon Reece had switched to speaker so he could start drying himself with his one good hand, which was fortunate because the smug purring note in Wax's reply would have made him drop the phone in alarm. He dropped the towel instead.
“Hey, Reece,” Wax's voice thrummed with self satisfaction. “Guess where I am.”
Just in time, Reece caught the double echo of his partner's voice and looped the fallen towel around his hips before the lock on his hotel room door snicked back. Then Wax was there, in his actual fucking bedroom, slightly travel stained and as inescapably real as a punch in the nose. He dropped a battered canvas bag on the floor with a glassy rattle and grinned at him sharkishly, showing all his teeth.
“You sneaky, over-educated little cunt. I can't believe you called me a bastard in Chinese.”
Paris, France, August 15, 4:15am
“...and then I had to explain to his Mightiness the Voice of Mystery, why half a dozen French policemen had ended up as a pink smear in a block of run down Parisian flats. That takes a lot of justifying, even if it wasn't my goddamn bomb that did it.”
Reece rolled sleepily onto his stomach as Wax blathered on. By common consent they'd monopolised the bed, the only other option being two overly sculpted chairs, horrible confections of plastic modern art apparently designed by someone under the impression that Picasso's cubic ideal was a realistic representation of human anatomy. Wax reached idly for another beer, his grasping hand colliding drunkenly with Reece's face, eyebrows and the bedside lamp before conceding defeat and appropriating his partner's. Reece relinquished it with a half-hearted curl of the lip.
“You know,” Wax murmured, trailing his fingers in a lazy, indifferent caress over the inside of Reece's undamaged arm “it wasn't your bomb, either.”
“I know.” Reece shifted a little as the calloused skin of Wax's fingers snagged slightly on the sensitive skin of his forearm.
“And I don't mean to be a bastard about this but your girlfriend fucking deserved it, if I'm honest.” He dodged the idle cuff Reece aimed at him.
“No, she didn't, not really. But I don't feel I made the wrong decision, if that's what you're getting at.”
“Well, fuck this Agony Aunt shit then. Hell if I know what's bothering you.” Wax drained half of his stolen beer out of sheer impatience. “Something is though. I'm not an idiot Reece, and I know you.”
There was a part of Reece's mind that never really turned off, not when he was drunk, or asleep, or high, or hurting and now it flicked him into a momentary sobriety.
“Look, I'm not being stupid about this. I don't regret what we did. It was a good thing, overall. But I killed a lot of people, Wax and I let you kill even more. I'm not saying it was wrong but it's not nothing, either. I just need some time to deal with it.”
He waited while Wax turned this over, thieving his beer back out of Wax's lax grip. Wax scowled at him.
“Hey, all I know is some people need to die and I'm awesome at doing that. But I get that you're different and I'm not complaining. It'll be useful, hell, it's been useful. And I can give you time, if you need it.”
Reece laughed himself out of the half doze he was falling into.
“Of course you can. Patience personified.”
“Took your mind off things though, didn't it?” He averted his gaze from Reece's sudden, sharply suspicious glare.
“Wax, if I find out this whole charade has been supposedly for my benefit, I'm taking your phone and making you eat it.”
Wax faked a snore. He owned three phones, after all.