Chapter Text
6 September 1962
"Are you sure this is the only way?" Jean asked him softly, her voice floating thin and anxious on the air between them. In response Lucien tightened the grip of his arms around her, pressed her bare skin that much closer to his own. No, he was not sure this was the only way, but it was the way he had chosen, and he felt he'd come too far to turn back now.
"I have to disappear, my darling," he whispered, her hair tickling his chin, and the soft scent of her, of them, that lingered on the bedsheets was almost enough to change his mind there and then. "These people are dangerous. If they find out who I am they will come for everyone and everything I love. They will come for you."
Jean shivered in his embrace, tucked her face that much more firmly into the hollow of his neck.
"You could let it go," she told him tremulously. "Just this once. For me, Lucien. You could let someone else handle it."
But Lucien did not believe her, no more than Jean believed herself. He could not let it go, not this case, not this time.
"It has to be me," he reminded her. "The government has asked for me. They need someone who can speak Mandarin, someone who can bridge the gap between the Chinese sellers and the Australian buyers. They need someone who's been trained to fight. And they need someone who knows how to take on a legend, who knows how to live under a false identity."
They need me. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service had only been in existence for a decade, and throughout that time it had remained a secret even to many of those who worked in government. But they had come for Lucien, the doctor turned soldier turned spy turned private investigator, had knocked on his door and told him that his country had need of him. Of course Lucien's initial response was to laugh in the spooks' smug faces, but then they had explained the purpose of their proposed operation to him, and he knew then that he was hooked, that they had him, that there would be no turning back.
"I owe it to them, Jean," he added then.
Beside him, around him, his wife sighed, and pressed a kiss against his chest.
"I know," she answered.
Yes, Lucien owed it to them, not to the government lackeys who'd come to drag him out of retirement and plunge him once more into the murky world of international espionage, but to them. Someone out there, someone powerful, someone dangerous, was in the business of selling orphaned children - Chinese, Malayan, Korean - to wealthy men of insidious intent. Some of the children were adopted and raised quite nicely, some were sold as domestic servants, no better than slaves, and some of them...what happened to some of them didn't bear thinking about. And Lucien owed it to those children to find out who was behind it all, to stop them. He owed it to Li; but for the grace of God, his own precious daughter could just have easily been one of the taken. Lucien had the skills the job required, and more than that he had a desperate, burning rage within him that would not be sated until each and every last one of the men behind this heinous crime ring was brought down.
"It will only be for a little while," he told her. "A month or two, at the most. Maybe not even that long. You'll keep the home fires burning for me, eh?"
At that Jean lifted her head at last, propped her chin against his chest and looked him in the eye. There was a world of sorrow in her beautiful face, the little lines left at the corners of her eyes and lips, those reminders of a thousand brilliant smiles, thrown into sharp relief in the darkness that covered them.
"I've waited for a man once before, Lucien," she reminded him, and the grief in her voice was a terrible thing, a knife that pierced straight through the very heart of him. "And he didn't come home. Christopher made that same promise to me, and he's gone, just the same. I can't lose you, too, sweetheart."
"You have me, Jean," Lucien promised her solemnly, taking her hand and pressing it against his bare chest, just above his beating heart. "Body and soul, you have me. Always. I'm not going to war. It will be different this time, you'll see. I'm coming back to you, my darling."
Tears had gathered in the corner of Jean's sparkling eyes, but she held them back through sheer force of will, took a deep breath and then lifted herself up. The duvet fell away from her, away from them, as she settled herself atop his hips; she was naked and perfect, a goddess, an angel, every inch of her more beautiful than Lucien could have ever imagined before the night of their wedding, the night he first stripped her bare and lay for a moment staring at her in awe, and wonder, and greed. Every piece of him ached with longing for every piece of her; his Jean, and perfect, made for him, brilliant and strong and full of passion, the only woman who could ever stand beside him, understand him, the only woman he ever wanted to. She knew what compelled him to go, and despite her misgivings he knew she would not stop him, for she shared his grief, and his anger, and his fear.
"You go, then," she said, trailing gentle hands across the slope of his chest that left him shivering in their wake. "And you come home to me."
Before he could answer she bowed her head and kissed him, lips pressing, tongue searching, teeth catching against his lips, and Lucien let her consume him, all of him, let her take him over, let her rock against him as a ship on a storm-tossed sea, let her wrap him in the warmth of her, a memory to cling to in the dark days ahead, a reminder of all he had to live for. He would come back to her, for Jean was his very life, and he was nothing without her.