Work Text:
In Monaco City, 1952, with Curt’s mouth hot and warm against his skin, his tongue doing something unimaginable to the underside of his cock, Owen Carvour thinks, oh. I like him.
Owen has a habit, he’s coming to learn, of realizing things about Curt just a bit later than he should have.
---
He meets Curt Mega for the first time in 1949 in the middle of a shoot-out in a West German dockyard, and it takes him the better part of five very tense minutes to convince the man that he is not, in fact, an arms dealer with a very elaborate cover story.
“Look,” he says, fumbling with his pockets. “Here’s my shoe that’s got a knife in it, here’s pocket watch that springs open and has a little cyanide capsule inside, here’s—” he opens his mouth—”my false tooth with a microphone. Alright? I’ve got all sorts of spy shit on me, why wouldn’t I be another spy? You can call up my boss at MI6 if you are so inclined, but I think we’d rather better get the hell out of here before their backup shows up, how about you?”
Mega examines him--just with his eyes, but they burn, rapid and incisive over every inch of his clothing, his skin, tracing out the way he holds a gun and the way he fits into a suit.
“Okay,” Curt says. “Okay, let’s get going.”
(Of course, Owen knows about Agent Curt Mega long before he meets him. Her Majesty didn’t send him in blind, and it isn’t an accident that he’s just now face-to-face with the Americans’ top agent as the Cold War is getting hotter.
“He’s from New Jersey,” his handler told him with a scoff. “Born and raised on some potato farm or something. Got top marks in school, though, and went into mathematics, and then intelligence work from there. Never looked back. He’s ruthless when he needs to be. If a man needs killing, they send Mega.”
“Sure,” Owen had shrugged. “But I was told I’m to make sure the Americans don’t, what was the phrase, royally fuck us on an international level, so what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that he’s careless, arrogant, and so damned sure he’ll get the job done that he sometimes doesn’t bother actually getting the job done .” His handler glared at him. “I thought you two would be a perfect match.”
He smiled and winked. She did not.
“Got it,” he said. “Follow the eager little puppy around, see to it he doesn’t stick his nose anywhere that might reflect badly on our great nations. Is that all? Anything else I should know about him?”
“Oh,” his handler had said, as an afterthought, waving her hand. “He’s a homosexual. Got some incriminating photographs of him with a half dozen young men across the States stored away, if you end up needing to blackmail him for anything.”
Owen’s breath did not stutter; his heart did not even seize up. He is a good fucking spy, after all.
“Salacious,” he’d said. “I’ll keep it in mind. Always good to have the upper hand, eh?”)
By the time they reach the American safehouse on the outskirts of Dortmund, Owen can feel the adrenaline crash creeping up the back of his neck and down his fingertips. His hands are beginning to shake; he has the urge to vomit, and he’d likely give in if there were anything in his stomach but bile. As it is, he ducks in the doorway behind Mega as they enter, body carefully composed.
The house is unassuming; made up like a lovely family home, but covered in a thin layer of dust. There’s cabinets open and furnishings strewn about, like whoever was last here left all at once, and many years ago.
Mega says, “Want a drink?”
He does not.
“Sure,” he says. “Always time for a pint with a friend.”
“Oh, we’re friends now, are we?” Mega says. He takes down a bottle of eighty-proof whisky from a cabinet, takes a swig out of the bottle directly before finding glasses for the two of them.
Owen leans against the back of the couch, his feet spread wide, starting to catch his breath. “Oh, I don’t know, love,” he says. “If you’d like to be.”
That night they get wonderfully, irresponsibly drunk. Curt-- please, Mega says, call me Curt--tells him about his life back home. His mother who worries too much and leaves the house too little. His father who died when he was a baby. His sister, an investment banker in New York City who never comes to call even though D.C. isn’t really that far away. He tells it all with such joy and familiarity. Owen wonders whether a damned word of it is true.
For his part he spins Curt a believable enough yarn. A little boy who grew up in boarding schools across the coast of England, a silver spoon tucked happily into his cheek. The boredom it all brought about that drove him to the intelligence service. He knows he looks the part. He’s coached his voice to take it on, too, with little effort anymore--not that the American would notice.
When Owen takes his leave to go to bed, he wobbles on his feet. Curt laughs; it’s a high, clear laugh, brighter than he expected to come out of the man’s chest.
“Like a baby deer,” Curt says. His voice doesn’t slur at all. He’s bright-eyed and grinning.
“Hey,” Owen says, leaning against the counter for support. He tries to call to mind something to say. “Fuck you.”
Curt grins. He tilts his head. “Maybe next time,” he says.
Owen’s stomach goes cold. The whisky suddenly feels like sludge.
“Goodnight, Curt Mega,” he says, and he carefully stumbles for the guest room with Curt’s eyes tracking him along the way.
---
Owen Carvour is sixteen (1938, London’s South Side) when he first hears the word homosexual, but he’s heard other words before that.
That incident and the broken ribs that come with it allow him to compress this thing that spreads inside his chest; having a name for the enemy makes it easier. He unlocks it only in towns where nobody knows his name, in pubs where the language they speak is a version of English that took him years to pick up on. These are the places he gets his training for MI6--learning what people really mean when they talk, extracting himself from dangerous situations without backup or alerting the authorities.
He could be happy with women, he knows. He is happy with women. He goes steady with a girl for three years, during the war, and it isn’t just a game or a lie that he tells himself. It’s love, and when she’s gone it fills him with an anger he didn’t know he could possess.
But there is more out there than girls from Sussex and a countryside home, and sometimes he doesn’t know what to do but follow it halfway around the world.
---
The next time he sees him is six months later, in a rotten little town in the South Pacific.
“I say, old friend,” Owen says as he draws up behind Curt, gun raised towards the weapons dealer they came to dispatch, “we ought to stop meeting like this.”
Curt, to his credit, does not even flinch. “Yeah,” he says, “you really ought to buy me a drink, first.”
After the men are dispatched and the weapons are secured, they do make their way to the nearest bar, both of them laughing and drenched in sweat and so damned mosquito-bitten Owen could swear his arm’s gone stiff.
Curt’s the one who buys them both drinks, in the end. They talk with the liquor loosening their lips; and it’s easy, Owen admits, it’s just easy to talk to Curt. He talks about his mother again, and how worried she gets. How she calls the headquarters in the middle of a mission to ask if he’s alright.
“Your mother knows about this line of work?” Owen asks, nearly choking on his third vodka martini.
“Of course,” Curt says, and he looks genuinely surprised. “Why wouldn’t I tell her?”
This is when Owen realizes what he should have realized months ago, when he and Curt were curled up on the floor of a safehouse together, when Curt talked about his family without a hint of holding back, when he watched Owen with an unguarded, unbothered look that still kept Owen burning sometimes when he thought about it: Curt is horribly, unimaginably honest.
---
Except, Owen learns, with one of his vices.
It isn’t the one he’d think Curt would go to great lengths to keep hidden. That one he seems to almost wear like a badge, like he’s daring anyone to point it out to him.
It takes Owen the next year and a half of meeting Curt Mega in unsavory places to uncover the thing he keeps pressed down inside.
---
The summer of ‘51 in Beirut is swelteringly hot.
Owen wants nothing more than to find a lake to step into and, possibly, never step back out--but instead he’s sprawled out on a hardwood floor wearing nothing but an undershirt and boxers. Curt hasn’t complained—at least about the heat or the state it’s left Owen in—but Owen knows the man is growing agitated. The two of them have been holed up in the vacation home of a British ambassador for nearly a week, since the mission went so wrong that they are actually waiting for extraction.
“Extraction,” Curt had spit, like a bloody curse word. “What a fucking failure.”
They’ve been forbidden to leave the house until that failure arrives, but they’ve made do so far with rations and provisions provided to them.
Then Owen wakes up to the sound of Curt emptying the contents of his stomach into the toilet.
His mind races as he springs out of bed--it can’t be food poisoning, they’ve eaten the same shitty MREs and protein packs for days now. Maybe heat stroke, and then he’ll need water, but it was night, it can’t be that bad. An illness, but that could be any number of things, and if it’s bad, then extraction had better arrive bloody fucking quickly—
When he gets to the bathroom Curt’s got his forehead pressed to the cold tile of the tub, his back drenched in sweat. The room smells like bile. Owen feels the overwhelming urge to reach over to him, to pick him up.
But he says, “Doing alright there, old friend?”
Curt lifts his head. He looks. Well. He looks fucking awful.
“Fine,” he rasps. “I’m. Yeah. Don’t worry about me,” he says, and then he retches again.
“Looking peachy,” Owen agrees. He sets his jaw. “Really though, you got a fever? If it’s an infection, I’d love to know what I’m liable to get just from being around you.”
Curt shakes his head violently, then seems to regret it. “No,” he says. “No, it’s not. I’m not sick.”
Owen pointedly looks him up and down. “You had me fooled.”
And then Curt grits his teeth and puts his hands into fists and says, “I just haven’t had a fucking drink in a while, okay?”
“Oh,” Owen says, and then, “Oh.”
This is the second thing he should have realized. It is the first one that he kicks himself for missing.
“It’s not that bad,” Curt snaps, and then seems to deflate. “Which is. What people says when it is that bad. But it’s--I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m handling it.”
“Yeah,” Owen says dryly. “Doing a bang-up job there, love.”
Curt’s fingers grip the bowl of the toilet seat until his knuckles turn white. “Owen,” he hisses, through gritted teeth. “Do me a favor, love ? Get the fuck out.”
He doesn’t know what else he’d say just then, so instead, he listens.
Extraction comes two days later; by then, Curt’s shivery and angry nearly all the time, and it’s all they can do to keep from tearing one another’s throats out. The confernece room they’re sent to for debriefing has a minibar in the back; Curt takes deep, desperate draws from the glass he poured himself at the start of the meeting. By the time they leave, his hands are steady again.
They don’t talk about it, after that. Not ever.
But Owen listens.
---
For the next half a year, Owen reports back to MI6 what he knows about the missions, and the Americans, and Curt Mega. He keeps it brief and professional each time.
But he feels, somehow, like she can hear it. The growing fire that slips into his throat when he says Curt’s name. He can’t put a name to it--Fear? Grief? Anger?--but he can feel it.
“Is that all, Carvour?” she asks him at the end of every call.
“Yes,” he says. “That’s all.”
And it is.
Until it isn’t.
---
Monaco fucking City, 1952.
Curt appears with the beginnings of a beard so awful Owen physically recoils upon seeing it. “ Mega ,” he admonishes as Curt breaks the handcuffs locked to the radiator in a dampened basement. “What the fuck have you got on your face?”
“Oh, come on,” Curt groans, “is it really that bad?”
Owen refrains from any further comments until they shoot their way out and are crammed together on Curt’s motorcycle, bullets richoceting behind them; then, he leans forward and yells into Curt’s ear, “It looks like a dead rat, love.”
Curt doesn’t say anything, but he takes the next turn rather sharply.
They wind up in a hotel room far too expensive for MI6’s budget, but after two days chained up underground Owen doesn’t much care for policy. Curt gets a room for himself, too--but when they go upstairs, he follows Owen into his.
“Haven’t seen you in a few months,” Curt grins. “Tell me what’s new.”
“Three busted fingers and an open wound on my leg; let me have a fucking shower first, Mega.”
Curt sits down at the edge of Owen’s bed. “I’m not stopping you.”
You certainly bloody aren’t .
Owen strips his shirt off there in the room, just to spite him, but Curt’s look quickly turns so razor-sharp that Owen ducks into the bathroom to escape it.
The shower’s the best god damn thing he’s ever felt. He’d like to marry this shower. It remains one of his fondest memories--that first hiss of hot water, the water running almost black down the drain.
When he’s done he carefully bandages up his fingers--only two are truly broken, he thinks, the other just sprained--and messily sutures his thigh. He pulls on a loose-fitting shirt and some boxers. Then he grabs the straight razor and shaving cream from under the sink and nudges the door open with his foot.
“Alright, Agent,” he says, and Curt turns from where he was rifling through the hotel drawers. “We’re going to get you sorted.”
“Oh, come on,” Curt groans, but he sits down at the edge of the bed and tilts his neck back, just slightly.
Owen’s hands feel a little numbed at the sight, but he kneels and gets to work all the same.
Under his fingertips he can feel Curt breathing. His pulse. He could wrap his fingers around Curt’s throat, just now. He could slip and slice into his jugular vein and watch Curt bleed out before he even knew what happened. He could ruin him.
He wipes the blade against a towel laid out on the side of the bed.
As he scrapes back back down to the smooth, soft expanse of Curt’s skin, his fingers trail across it almost without thinking of it. By the time he’s finishing up around the sideburns, his left hand is resting entirely against Curt’s cheek, and Curt, he realizes, is leaning into it.
“Do you always treat your friends like this?” Curt asks softly. Owen feels the words rumble in his fingertips.
He swipes away the last bits of shaving cream with the towel. “Like I’m trying to save them from horrendous personal grooming choices?” Owen asks.
“Like you’re trying to fuck them.”
Owen freezes. He’s plunged into ice cold water. He’s falling off a precipice. He’s sixteen with the heel of someone’s boot digging into his neck.
“If I—” Curt stammers, suddenly backpedaling, “I mean, if I’m wrong, I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it again. I didn’t, I mean, I’m—”
Owen catches him by the collar and kisses him, just to shut him up.
“Oh, fuck yeah,” Curt gasps when they break away, and Owen kisses him again, and again, and that feeling in his throat that is not fear or grief or anger spreads down into his stomach, into his fingers, his toes.
When they’re done, laid out naked on the hotel bed together, Curt absently combing his fingers through Owen’s hair, Owen mumurs, “You really ought to be more careful what you say to people.”
“Worked out well for me there, didn’t it?” Curt grins.
Owen smiles back, automatically. “It did,” he admits. “But not everyone is me, and not everyone is you. That nerve of yours is going to be dangerous to other people, one day.”
Curt shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. “But for now,” and he bites gently into the skin of Owen’s neck, and Owen lets himself moan openly into the mattress.
---
One day--November 3rd, 1957, at a little after four in the afternoon Moscow Standard Time, to be exact--Owen will realize that Curt’s carelessness was always dangerous to other people.
He will realize this, too, just a little bit too late.
---
3 March 1952
Mr. Mega,
I’ve quite missed working with you, but unfortunately I have been on a bit of a leave of absence after a workplace injury. However, I’m writing to inform you I’ll be on your side of the pond for a gala this June. Shall we meet up for a round?
Sincerely,
O.
April 2nd, ‘52
Owen,
Can’t wait. Maybe this time you’ll hit a home run.
— Me
Owen burns the letter as soon as he reads it.
---
“Did you hear about the Executive Order?”
Morocco. 1953.
Owen stops sharpening his knife for a moment to look up at Curt as he shaves in their hotel room mirror. Of course he’s heard about the bloody executive order. There’s a fissure that cracked in his chest that hasn’t stopped hissing ever since he heard about the fucking thing.
“No,” he says, and sits back. “What’s that?”
Curt smirks. He carefully manouvers the blade around his Adam’s apple. “Executive Order 10450,” he pronounces; a recitation. “Authorizing firing of any and all federal employees on the basis of— what was it. Criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or—” and he actually fucking winks at Owen, in the mirror, “sexual perversion.”
Owen forces a grin across his face. “They’ve really outlined your best qualities, haven’t they.”
Curt takes the blade from his throat and laughs, head tipped back. Owen wipes his hands on his pants so they aren’t clammy as he walks up behind Curt; he slips his hands around his waist, rests his chin into the space in Curt’s shoulder. He breathes in the smell of cheap soap and expensive whisky.
“So, are you getting fired?” Owen asks into the warm skin of Curt’s throat.
Curt turns to the side and swallows Owen’s mouth with his own. “Only if they catch me,” he murmurs.
(They will, Owen thinks desperately. They already have. They’re just waiting until you’re no longer useful.)
But Curt’s fingers are working down the buttons of Owen’s shirt, and he looks like a damned fool, still with shaving foam at the corners of his mouth, and he’s smiling, and all Owen can say is, “We’re going to be late.”
“It’s an espionage mission,” Curt says. “We can’t be late to an event we’re starting .”
As it turns out, they can be--the guard shift change happens in the middle of their escape, and they need to fall back upon plan B: blowing the place to smithereens.
“How long do you figure it will take us to get out of here?” Curt asks, tossing Owen one of the charges.
“I don’t know,” Owen says. He fumbles with the wires. “Nine minutes?”
“Think we could do it in eight?”
Owen gapes at him. He snaps his jaw shut. “Do you think this is a game?” he asks.
Curt nods, smiling.
Owen feels his resolve crumbling. “Seven,” he hears himself say.
“Got it,” Curt says. “Six it is.”
“Curt!” Owen shouts, but by then, they’re already running, footsteps echoing across the concrete flooring, Curt’s laughter bouncing off the walls of Owen’s ribcage.
---
Curt is brash. Curt has a mother who loves him and a sister who he wishes he talked to more. Curt doesn’t fear death or worse. Curt’s favorite drink is whisky. Curt will drink just about anything, if he needs to, and he needs to. Curt likes the feeling of Owen’s hands around his neck. Curt is a crack shot, with either a pistol or a sniper rifle. Curt is unbearably ticklish. Curt’s birthday is in April, but he never tells anyone when because he doesn’t like parties.
Owen catalogues these facts like he would memorize mission details.
They’ll never leave him, even when he wishes they would.
---
1955. They are sharing the same cigarette in a hotel room above a Serbian casino. Curt is laid out over Owen’s chest, their bare skin pressed together, and Owen feels electric wherever their bodies melt into each other. He thinks, I am so lucky. He thinks, nothing will ever feel like this again. He thinks, I’d like to put out this cigarette right there in the centre of his chest, just to see what he will do.
“I’ve been thinking,” Curt says.
Owen brushes the hair out from his forehead. “That’s novel of you.”
Curt shoves him. Owen chuckles.
“No, I just,” Curt begins, and then stops. He’s breathing funny--not like he’s hurt. Like he’s nervous, almost. “I’ve just been thinking about what we’ll do, after all this.”
“This mission?” Owen asks, brows furrowed together. They’ll do what they always do, he thinks--go back home, and then meet up somewhere else in a few months, pretending as if they didn’t expect to see each other.
“No,” Curt insists. “I mean… this. The job. When we retire, you know? Where. Where we’ll live.” Owen still doesn’t speak, so he continues, “I mean, America’s the greatest country on earth, but I know England’s your home so maybe we’d want to live there.”
Owen is close--so close--to shoving Curt off, telling him to get a grip, wake the fuck up. What the hell is he talking about, where we’ll live, what we want, as if the two of them have anything at all that exists outside the walls of hotel rooms that they search for bugs and hide away in when they both bleed.
But for once, by some magic, Owen understands something about Curt Mega, right when he needs to.
“Oh,” he says. “I guess we’ll just have to live somewhere else. So neither of us are jealous, of course.”
Curt exhales, his chest shaking. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t know, Canada?”
“Oh, fuck Canada.”
“You’re right. Paris?”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Maybe Russia. Really fuck ‘em over.”
“Curt Mega. I’m turning you in.”
Curt laughs. He turns around-- no, Owen thinks, I can’t look at you and do this--and looks up into Owen’s face. He plucks the cigarette right out of Owen’s mouth and takes a drag.
“What about children?” he says. “I think they’re sort of loud and sticky, but I could be convinced.”
A lump grows in Owen’s throat. “Children are nice,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind them.”
Curt nods. “We’d need two,” he says. “So they could entertain each other.”
“Of course,” Owen agrees. “A girl and a boy, I think.”
“That’s ideal.”
“Keeps things balanced, you know.”
“Oh, decidedly.”
Curt shuts his eyes. Owen takes the cigarette back from him, breathes in the smoke until it burns his lungs.
“A nice big house,” Curt murmurs, like he’s falling asleep. “Big backyard for them to play in. My mother can come visit, when she likes. Bring her cooking. We’d have to fly her out, but the kids love her, so I guess it’s worth the expense, isn’t it?”
Owen puts his hand over Curt’s hair. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose so.”
Curt, without moving, says, “Close your eyes, Owen.”
Owen closes them.
He can almost see it. A house. Children. A future. A life lived out with Curt Mega. When he tries to look directly at it it’s like looking into the sun, but he can look towards it like this--the thin impression of it burning just on the other side of his eyelids.
“Well,” Curt says suddenly, sitting up, and Owen thinks stupidly no, come back, before he opens his eyes as well. “Come on, old friend. We’ve got work to do.”