Chapter Text
“—remain at large and considered highly tentacled and dangerous. Members of the general public are advised to remain indoors and abide by the State mandated curfew. In other news—”
“In other news,” Dave Boy interjected, raising his voice over the din of the pub and the news report on the flickering television above the bar, “the State mandated curfew can gargle my fucking balls.”
Alfred snorted, chinking his pint glass against Dave Boy’s when it was held out to him. “Too right, mate,” he rejoined, though his heart wasn’t in it, a fact painfully evident from how Dave Boy winced at his tone.
“Fucksake, you’re not still moping, are you?” the other man asked.
“I am not moping,” Alfred replied, affecting an air of haughty affront that would have made the Queen herself sound like a common mudlark. “I am ruminating.”
“Well, can you ruminate a bit more fuckin’ cheerfully?” Dave Boy demanded. “I’ve been to merrier wakes. Christ, Alfie, you’ve been promoted to a cushy desk job and twice the salary. Anyone would think you were being sent to the gallows.” He paused, then added with a slight jog of his head, “Again.”
Alfred inclined his head and stared unseeing into his pint glass. He hated to admit it, but Dave Boy had a point.
In the grand scheme of things, advancing through the ranks of MI5 was the logical end goal. Alfred had been fighting for Queen and Country on some form of battlefield for most of his life. Not always officially, of course, though arguably some of his unofficial work was some of his most important.
That the British Secret Intelligence Service had finally taken note of his skills and reeled him on board three years ago as an official agent had felt like a step in the right direction. And now, after a staggeringly few short years, they wanted to promote him to Case Officer—a handler with his own team to train and direct.
It would take him out of the field and arguably out of immediate danger with a substantial pay increase—a cushy desk job, indeed, as Dave Boy described it. There was just one small catch. A rather substantial one, actually…
MI5 wanted him to give up his name.
After several disastrous infiltrations from the dregs of The Raven Society and their international fascist cohorts, it had become agency policy that all handlers must become persona ignotus— person unknown. No files, no records, not even internal ones. It was safer that way. After all, a person without a name or file on record couldn’t be found by outside forces and eliminated—or worse, bribed.
Alfred’s lip curled sourly as he recalled the moment just six months ago when his handler, Agent Cambell, had revealed himself to be a traitor in the pocket of the KGB.
Money’s good, Pennyworth, what do you say? We could use you behind the Iron Curtain…
Alfred had been quick to put a bullet between his eyes, but not quick enough. By then, Alfred had been the last agent in his task force standing, his entire team systematically wiped out one by one by Cambell’s treachery.
It had left the agency in shambles. Not to mention seriously deficient in field agents.
It was also why Alfred was being offered Cambell’s old position. He’d proven his loyalty time and time again. And now that loyalty was to be rewarded, not with a medal, but with the removal of his name.
Agent Pennyworth would be revered for his sacrifices and his achievements honored. But he wouldn’t be Alfred anymore.
No, that honor would belong to whatever poor sod they found to fill his grave, his height and build just right, his fingerprints and dental records replaced in Alfred’s file until it would be like Alfred himself never existed as far as the agency was concerned. It was a process that had already started—his name and files were already in the process of being expunged. All record of his family also being scrubbed. Soon, Alfred would become a ghost—even more so than he already was.
The thought made him want to vomit.
He couldn’t say why. There was just something wrong with it, which was silly because he’d still be him. He’d still be Alfred Pennyworth. Just not legally.
But what could Alfred do? Turn down this kind of opportunity because he was sentimental about his name? Could he do that? Could he afford to say no to that kind of money and security when he had his mum to think of? When there were so many people he could help? So many new agents to train who would survive longer with him there to guide them?
Not without the guilt eating him alive. Alfred was sure of that.
There was, also—and Alfred wasn’t proud of this—the nagging worry that he’d be bored.
Desk jobs were all very well and good, but Alfred had never been one to sit idle and let other people take risks. Even when he owned his own club, he’d spent more time gallivanting around London with a gun than doing the paperwork. Alfred tried to deny that he had enjoyed it. Told Esme and Sandra that he wanted nothing more than to settle down. Have a quiet life. But that hadn’t been true, had it? Not really. And every time he had tried, something went wrong, something that drew him back into the chaos of war and espionage and violence. And every time Alfred had felt such relief it sickened him. Like he didn’t know how to be without the chaos. It was a harrowing thought. Was he really so fucked up from the war and everything that had followed thereafter that a stable desk job filled him with dread?
Christ, what was wrong with him?
Alfred stared unseeing for several more seconds into the middle distance, then shook himself.
No, best not to go there. Not if he didn’t want to fill his pockets with bricks and jump off the Forth Road Bridge anytime soon. But avoiding thinking about it didn’t precisely help solve the problem of why he didn’t want the promotion. Was it fear of boredom? The loss of his identity and name? Or was it something else, something he was missing?
I’m not supposed to be here, said a small voice in the back of his mind accompanied by a queasy, sick feeling, like the world was dissolving around him.
This was decisively unfair because Alfred was nowhere near drunk enough to cause this.
I’m not supposed to be here, it repeated, growing increasingly emphatic, a rising sense of hysteria bubbling over in his chest. I’m in the wrong place…
Oh, yeah? Alfred thought back, hoping he wasn’t about to start hallucinating again. The last thing he needed was to see a ghost right now. And where am I supposed to be?
But the voice fell conveniently silent.
Seeking a distraction from the tight curl of anxiety threatening to unfurl in his chest, Alfred let his gaze roam around the dimly lit interior of the pub.
Were it not for the dominant burr of the Scottish accent and the tartan-draped emblems on the dark wooden walls, Ryrie’s pub in the Haymarket district could have passed for any other (dis)respectable establishment in the East End. It had a comfortingly dingy quality, from the dinged-up counter he was leaning against to the blue tobacco smoke curling through the air, right down to the sticky beer-stained floorboards under his feet. It was almost enough to feel somewhat like home.
It wasn’t, though, of course.
Home was three hundred and thirty-one miles south, buried inside the irradiated fallout zone that had once been central London replete with shambling mutant cultists who had somehow survived the blast and were now being picked off one by one by Her Majesties finest if they got too close to the literal wall they’d built around London to contain them.
No, Alfred wouldn’t be going home. Not for a long while, at least.
He took an absent-minded swig from his drink as his brain tried to reconcile the knowledge that it had only been three years since the Raven Society had launched a nuclear warhead at 10 Downing Street and wiped the city out. Three years since the bomb dropped; three years since he’d failed to say ‘I do’ in that meadow and let Sandra walk out of his life—three years since he’d moved his mum up here to the safety of Edinburgh and threw his lot in with re-establishing MI5. Three years. Fucking hell. Sometimes, it felt like an eternity ago. Others, only yesterday. Christ. Where had it all gone so wrong? What could they have done differently…
“You’ve got that look on your face again,” Dave Boy said gruffly, pulling Alfred back into the present. “You’re thinking about things you can’t do anything about.”
Alfred snorted, draining the dregs of his pint and gesturing to the barkeep for another. “Show me an old soldier who doesn’t.”
“Not that old,” Dave Boy rejoined, downing his drink and doing the same. “Not yet.”
“Certainly fucking feels like it somedays.” Alfred accepted the drinks, taken aback when Dave Boy handed over a five pound note to the bartender before Alfred could reach for his wallet. Even the bartender looked surprised. Normally it was Alfred paying off their tab for the night.
“Nah.” Dave Boy shrugged him off, accepting his drink and downing half of it almost at once as though he hadn’t just broken a habit of a lifetime and paid off his bar tab before threats of violence became necessary. “That’s just the good old Scottish weather getting into your bones. Bit of sun, bit of a rest, and you’ll be right as houses.”
“Which houses?” Alfred asked glibly. “Because I’ve seen some of the better houses around here, and they look fit to crumble into the Leith.” He lifted the fresh pint glass to his lips, muttering under his breath. “Fucking godforsaken northern damp…”
“Oy, all right.” Dave Boy jabbed his elbow into Alfred’s ribs. “Have some respect. This is my home you’re whinging about. Ungrateful fuck. You never heard me complaining about staying in London.”
Alfred, mid-sip, almost snorted cheap beer out of his nose. “Oh, you fuckin’ liar,” he spluttered, laughing at the other man’s audacity. “All you ever did was bloody complain!”
“I never!”
“You did!” Alfred exclaimed, blotting spilled beer from the front of his shirt. “Remember when you said living in the East End was like living in the twelfth circle of hell?”
“No.”
“You said it was a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah filled with madmen and cannibals!”
Dave Boy gave him a haughty look that was only somewhat marred by his piggy-red eyes and the drunken slur creeping into his speech. “I do not recall such an event.”
“Unbelievable,” Alfred muttered. “You’re fucking full of it, you are. ‘Never complained.’ Fuck me.”
“Made you laugh though, didn’t I?” Dave Boy asked, a slow, sly smile creeping over his ruddy features.
Alfred shot him a filthy look but knocked their shoulders together companionably. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you did.”
“And to be fair about the madmen remark, there was that cannibal geezer who took you under his wing for a bit. The big man whose nephew you run out of town…”
“Yeah,” Alfred drawled, his gaze unfocusing briefly on the past again. “Yeah, there was. John Ripper. Christ, how did we ever survive in the early days?”
“Cunning, good looks, wit, and charm,” Dave Boy replied promptly, earning himself another disbelieving laugh from Alfred. “And violence,” Dave Boy added. “Lots and lots of violence.”
Yeah, Alfred thought. That sounded more like it.
Above the bar, the television switched to the weather report, where a perky woman in an eye-smarting tartan miniskirt was presenting the weather. Unsurprisingly, they were in for more rain. Rain, rain, and just to spice things up a bit, acid rain blowing in from the south. Brilliant. Fantastic. Just what he needed. More holes in his umbrella.
“Fucking London,” Dave Boy grumbled. “Even when it’s a smoking hole in the ground, it’s still fucking up the rest of the country.”
Alfred grunted noncommittally and lapsed into silence again.
After a while of watching the television in silence, Dave Boy nudged their shoulders together again and said, “Seriously, mate, get yourself away for a bit. Go somewhere warm and get your head right.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” Alfred muttered. “I’ll just pop off to the seaside, leave mum here on her own and tell MI5 I’m off to build sandcastles for a bit. I’m sure that’ll go down a treat.”
Dave Boy shook his head, waving a dismissive hand in the air. “Fuck MI5. MI5 can fucking wait. They need you more than you need them, and they know it. And don’t worry about your mum. I’m here, aren’t I? You know I’ll always take care of her. And she’s got that posh prick. What’s his name? The one with the wee dug?”
“Roger,” Alfred supplied.
“Aye, him. He’s done not bad by her.”
“Yeah,” Alfred said, “yeah, I suppose he has.”
Though considering Alfred’s father had turned into a bootlicking fascist pawn, Roger wasn’t exactly up against any stiff competition. A limp cabbage leaf would be preferable companionship to the man Alfred’s father had turned into—may he rest in peace. The selfish fuck. God, Alfred was still so angry at him. He missed him. He was furious that he missed him. It was all so horribly complicated.
“Just think about it, Alfie,” Dave Boy said, his tone uncharacteristically gentle and betraying the true depth of his worry. “That’s all I’m asking. You’re no good to any cunt when you’re like this. Least of all yourself.”
Alfred sighed and tried to dredge up a smile that hopefully looked better than he felt. “Yeah. I know. Thanks, Dave Boy. I’ll think about it.”