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Languid and soft, the fingertip trails down his spine before flattening, soft pressure against his lower back before the soft squeak of the bedsprings and the warmth disappears.
His eyes pop open and he’s in his flat… where he fell asleep god knows when. It takes a moment to recalibrate his mind to the present moment. His subconscious wants to cling to that moment…one he had almost forgotten.
Looking at the silver and white alarm clock on his bedside table that has followed him to every home he’s had since he was 12 years old, it’s barely daybreak. Inhaling, he closes his eyes again and tries to mentally reach back to that memory. For once it’s not the lips on his neck, his cock, the bitter tablet placed under his tongue or the smell of dried urine and burlap. It’s not of abject terror or even the sharp pain of a bullet shredding his bicep.
He has never been one to dream. If he does, it is rare and doesn’t stay long enough in his mind to carry over into his waking moments. The nightmares, however, are a different story. He remembers those. It was what sent his mother into a panic when she’d ask if he slept well when he was a child, if he dreamt.
If he did, it was either about the night his father left or hearing her crying and not being able to find her in a maze. He learned to lie, to say he simply didn’t dream. He learned about the sins of omission early.
He hadn’t thought of the time in that very nice (but in retrospect), very impersonal flat in years. Thinking back, it was the only time in his adult life that he was utterly rudderless. He was on leave for what was expected to be six months while he went through the physical and mental healing of his ordeal but was completely and utterly alone.
Going back to his apartment that had been threadbare and uninhabited for months while he was in the service wasn’t welcoming or comforting at all. It was isolating and cold. It took six nights of very little sleep before he approached his superior officer to try to get the name of the agent who extracted him and nearly three months after that before he was able to talk a woman at the home office to give him an address listed under the name Jon Hartman in Denmark Hill. It was a dead end but when he saw a lean man in jeans and a woolen jumper and cap pick up mail, he recognized him immediately and followed him on foot, then in the tube to a building not five minutes from MI6’s headquarters.
His memory of waiting until another tenant in the building is sharp. His desperation to get inside by any means isn’t something he is terribly proud of in retrospect but in that moment, he had to see the agent again.
He was unkempt. His hair longer than it had ever been in his life. From the three months in captivity to the three months after, he didn’t spend time thinking about his physical appearance. His entire being changed. His confidence replaced by fear, his speech changed after his broken jaw had been wired shut. His manner and even his posture reflected someone utterly different than who he was before. He was sure he looked like some demented drug addict but could still manage to talk his way into helping the elderly woman in with her grocery cart and ask him about a man whose wallet he had found, a man named Jon.
”Oh yes, tall lad on the fifth floor.”
It was all he needed before moving up the staircase to grey metal door marked 5.
He remembers sounds coming from behind most of the doors. The silence was what drew him to the non-descript door on the left. He knocked gently but then more insistent before the lock was opened and an arm with a knife’s edge was pressed against his chest for a split second. The eyes were steady and his arms went up immediately.
“My name is Gareth Mallory. We met in Belfast,” he had said quickly. “You saved me in Belfast.”
The green eyes searched his face and quickly pulled him inside. “How did you get this address, Ltd Colonel?”
The arm braced against his neck as his back pressed against the door wasn’t as terrifying as the possibility of not staying in this man’s presence for as long as he could manage to. He explained so quickly, so disjointedly that he wasn’t sure that he made any sense. The pressure on his neck removed, he asked “Agent Hartman” if he could provide him with whatever it was that he was given in Belfast.
“Mallory…”
“Gareth, please. Call me Gareth. And I’m not addled, I just… need sleep. I can’t…”
The next memory he has is being on the floor, his body heaving and trying to catch his breath after being forced, face down to lie on the ground.
“I am not a drug dealer, Lieutenant Colonel Mallory. You need trauma informed therapy and sleep, not medical intervention. I will have a case worker contact you, but you are never to follow me again, is that understood?”
He had begged… unceremoniously and shamelessly. He couldn’t have come all this way for nothing.
When he was turned over, the man straddling him, pinning him to the floor was staring at him. His next memory was being in a bed. The gap in time wasn’t unusual in those months after his return to London. What he knows now was intense sleep deprivation and inattention to basic things like eating meals resulted in him passing out for what he learned was more than three days.
He didn’t remember being bathed or undressed. He only remembered the fingertips on the bare skin of his back, the palm pressing against him and then disappearing.
The buzz of his phone snaps his eyes open again. He exhales and crosses the room to it. Tanner is the name on the screen.
“Yes Tanner.”
“Your appointment with the PM is set for 10:00am this morning. I’ve moved the meeting with the Taiwan office to this afternoon. He’s a devil to reach.”
“Quite,” he says, voice holding firm. “Thank you, Tanner.”
He turns the phone off and enjoys the few moments of silence before walking to the shower.