Chapter Text
When you separate from a partner, it's very typical to linger on their name sometimes. You curse it, you cry over it, you long for it until, eventually, you'll almost forget it. That's rather difficult to do when your ex partner's name is consistently mentioned on every major news outlet every single day. Gordon didn't like to think he was important enough for the universe to single him out and cosmically seek revenge for something he must have done in a past life, but there seemed to be a lot of evidence stacking up. Every morning when he flicked on the radio while he wolfed breakfast, when he scanned the newspaper headlines on his walk to work, when he collapsed into his sofa and caught the 6 o'clock news, everywhere he went Tony's name followed. And it only got worse when the next election came around and he became the first Labour Prime Minister in quite a while.
Past Gordon may not have known how to deal with the sudden surge of popularity in the man that had simultaneously given his heart back to him before breaking it again, but he liked to think that the years had given him some wisdom. Routine had settled in, drinks with Peter every month (it used to be once every two weeks but he daren't comment on that fact), the pub with work friends every Friday night and Sundays at the bookshop. Slowly as it were, Gordon had picked up and pieced up the parts that Tony had left behind until he resembled himself again. He even stopped flinching whenever anyone brought the man up. He'd even gone on a few dates. That had been especially hard. They never really mention that when you start dating again after a long-term relationship that you have to not only forget all the little details of your old partner, but you have to relearn an entire new history. New favourite drinks, movies, their comfort foods and films, the little things that make up a person that you have to train especially hard into your head so you don't accidentally say someone else's drink order at Starbucks. It was hard. But he was coping. If that's what you call coping nowadays.
In fact, Gordon was well on his way to becoming a valued, contributing member to society once again. He had friends, ones from after the time of Tony, who seemed to enjoy his company. He frequently visited his family up in Scotland which his mother was especially grateful for. In fact, he'd just been promoted at work, handling more accounts, given more seniority and a paycheck that would allow him to move out into a nicer flat if he could ever bear to part with the one-bedroom place he'd only just managed to exorcise of Tony's remains. Gordon couldn't bring himself to move out of his home of several years, even if you basically needed an instruction booklet to flush the toilet and you had to wear ten layers in the winter because the pipes froze up. It was his. His alone. And, even then, even in spite of that, it was home. And it was probably a good thing he'd never deigned to relocate flats as when he stumbled home from drinks on one particular Friday night, the Prime Minister was standing at the door. A door which once used to be his also.
Gordon didn't know what to say. He'd spent years thinking over a scenario almost exactly like this (except in those Tony wasn't married or the one running the entire country) and yet here he was with nothing to say.
"Can I help you?" Was what he settled on. It felt like a neutral offering that perfectly covered the initial response he wanted to give of 'what the fuck are you doing here?'. The words seemed to startle the man who had his gaze intensely set on the flat door. Tony spun around to face him with none of the grace and decorum Gordon associated with him mentally. A fumbling fawn rather than the graceful ballerina image that had only grown in their separation, pushed up onto a pedestal that grew an inch taller every day.
"Gordon." For some reason it looked like Tony was more surprised to see him than he'd been to find his ex on his stoop. The once familiar voice sent a twinge through his chest. He knew it...except he didn't. It was rougher than it sounded in his memories, a little weaker in the way voices did when you were permanently ready to collapse. He tried not to let it affect him.
"Tony." Gordon countered, because really, what else was he supposed to say? Invite him in for a cup of tea? "Or is it Mr Prime Minister I should be calling you now?"
Tony winced ever so slightly at the title, the same way he used to wince at loud noises like car horns and tube tracks grinding. Gordon hated the part of himself that wanted to revel in it. Didn't like that part of himself. It existed nevertheless.
"No, no." Tony was fumbling over his words. That was also new. Something he hadn't done since Gordon first kissed him in Edinburgh at the pub the night before he was set to return to London. Odd. Gordon didn't think he still remembered that memory and yet looking at the man in front of him it was now all too easy to step into.
"Can I help you?" He repeated. Maybe this time there'd be an answer. Maybe Tony would dare to share the vastly important reason he must have to show up after so many years.
"Didn't the door used to be red?"
Gordon tried not to scream. Or yell. Or any of those loud expressions of emotion he was ever so good at. Especially a couple beers in.
"Yeah it got changed four years back." He eyed the now white door that the very embodiment of his waking nightmares and dreams was currently blocking. He'd just wanted to come home and crash. Maybe his theory about the universe's vendetta wasn't so far off.
"God, has it really been that long?"
"Double that actually." Gordon corrected him. "Around eight I think, I'm not too sure." Yes he was. It would be eight years in two months in January.
"Eight years." Tony breathed. He wasn't looking at Gordon, not really. He had that mile-long stare fixed to a spot on Gordon's shirt with a glaze over his eyes that suggested a self-reflection rather than any glance outwards. A look of a man for whom it had been both longer than eight years and no time at all. Gordon tried not to wonder what that look meant.
"Are you meant to be here?" A change of question, seeing as he was getting nowhere with his last one.
"Depends on who you ask."
"Who should I be asking?" These were the words that shook Tony from his reverie. His blue eyes widened a fraction, as if only noticing Gordon were actually in front of him. They scanned him up and down in what would be a subtle way if Gordon wasn't watching him so closely. They both looked different than the last time they'd seen each other. They were older now and it showed. More lines on their faces, more pronounced bags under their eyes. Gordon filled out his shirts better and Tony seemed skinnier. He cursed his brain for worrying about his eating habits. This wasn't progress. And he'd progressed. He had. No one stays waiting for their ex after eight years, especially after they've gotten married.
"Isn't that the million pound question." The first smile from Tony he'd seen in person for so long finally blossomed. But it wasn't properly real. There was cynicism in it.
"Still pound then, not convinced them of the euro?" Gordon tried. It was something he'd talked over with Tony through meals and coffees and after work rantings. Something they'd always disagreed on.
"Not yet." And there was the real smile, accompanied by a rather abrupt laugh. "I have been trying my hardest though."
"Some things really don't change then."
"No," Tony agreed, catching his gaze. "They really don't."
"Do you want to come in?" Gordon's words came at the same time as Tony's.
"Can I come in?"
Gordon huffed a laugh and pulled his keys out of his jean pocket. Looking at the man in front of him, he raised his eyebrows.
"You know if you want to come in you're going to have to let me get to the lock?"
"What, this new door doesn't just unlock if you jimmy the handle and hit the frame a couple times?" Tony asked, stepping back.
"No. Something I'm pretty grateful for. Work would be pissed if someone stole my laptop."
"You still work at the accounting firm then?"
Gordon tried to focus on slotting the key into its place on the lock so he didn't have to think about how the talk had somehow become a catchup session, as if they were two friends who hadn't seen each other in a year or two. Tony made the conversation sound easy, he made it seem as if it were totally normal for your ex to show up eight years after dumping you asking to come in and discuss your lives.
"Yeah." Was all he gave in response, pushing open the door. "Feel free to hang your coat up." Gordon said, hearing a snort from the man behind him as he tossed his own jacket over the back of the sofa rather than the coat rack just on the inside of the door.
"Glad to see you're still a stickler for keeping things neat." Tony said, delicately hanging up his coat before taking his time to survey the surroundings. "Place looks nice."
He didn't have to say the word for Gordon to know he meant 'different'. That presumably somewhere in Tony's mind he was expecting to show up to a flat trapped in a stasis since the moment he left, for his tea to still be cooling on the table and his clothes still hung in the wardrobe, the same stained blanket they'd bought from a charity shop because it was so absurdly ugly to be hanging from the arm of the chair they picked together. Perhaps he expected to find Gordon in the same purgatory. Perhaps he'd shown up a few years too late.
"It's been through a couple phases." Gordon shrugged. Incorrect. It had actually seen many an iteration in only the first few years as he swapped colour schemes and styles and positions of furniture, desperate to find something new that still felt livable. "Peter helped a bit, Ed suffered through most of it with me though."
It was a moment or two later when he heard Tony say. "That's good of him."
"He's pretty annoying most of the time, but we managed."
"You're pretty good at finding annoying partners." Tony tried to offer a smile, but all Gordon saw was a grimace. Only for a moment though before Gordon burst out laughing.
"Ed? Jesus no." He clutched the back of the sofa as he got the ridiculousness of what Tony had just implied out of his system. "I think his girlfriend might protest a bit. Plus my mother would go on about how he's far too young for me. Then there's the fact we'd both have died of boredom because of the other a few years in. Me and Ed. Ha."
"Poor Ed. I'm sure he's not half as boring as you." The grin seemed nicer this time around.
"Watch it, you're under my roof, I won't hesitate to kick you out for your insults." Gordon joked. It made Tony freeze up. Gordon tried again. "I doubt it holds a light to Number 10."
"Feels a bit like living in a museum if I'm honest."
"You can sit down, you know." The pair were both currently still standing.
"The kitchen cabinets are different." Tony noted, instead moving towards the back the room where the kitchen and ramshackled table (one of the only things left from before the purge) stood.
"The doors didn't work properly."
"I know. It was great, it was like a game of chance every time you wanted a plate out."
"I wasn't very lucky." Gordon returned, rather soberly. He took a breath before allowing his brain to ask the question it had been begging for an answer to for the last fifteen minutes. "Why are you here Tony?"
The man raked his gaze over the kitchen once more before turning to him.
"I don't know."
"Bullshit." Gordon said.
"Excuse me?"
"You do know. You always know. Every single thing you do, you make a decision for a reason. It may not be the right one, but still, it exists. And you don't, presumably, give security guards the bait and switch to show up at my door without a reason. Don't treat me like I'm someone else. Give me that much." These felt like some of the words he remembered in all of those scenarios he'd played through in his head. The ones where he finally got to tell Tony how blindsided he'd left him, how he hadn't even given them, given him, a fighting chance.
Tony didn't say anything for a moment, simply looking at Gordon. He was looking at him but it was anyone's best guess what he saw.
"You're not." He finally said.
"What?"
"You're not someone else. You're not other people."
"I know." Gordon said.
"It's why we worked, I think. You weren't a yes man and you didn't take my bullshit." Tony finally sat, choosing the seat at the dining table, finger tracing an ink stain he'd left when the pen had exploded as he'd attempted a crossword over nine years ago.
Now, Maths was always Gordon's specialty but even he could read between the lines.
"Got a lot of them now, have you?" He chose to lean himself against the back of the sofa. He couldn't take the chair opposite, as if they were merely having dinner together and a chunk of a lifetime and rushed decisions hadn't pulled them apart.
"A couple."
"I can't imagine Alastair being a yes man." Gordon snorted.
"How do you know Ali?"
"I do watch the news. Plus, Peter's gone off about him a few times." A lie. Peter almost always mentioned Campbell when they got around to having drinks. He didn't know how much Tony knew though, and only one person from that pair had kept in touch with him for the last few years.
"It's strange, in my head I know it's a public role and I see the cameras at events and I shake hands and wave and do the interviews, but it still feels so..."
"Lonely?" Gordon offered. Tony nodded.
"It makes me forget that other people get told what I do everyday. The election got called and you can't even imagine what they really are, they're just numbers." Tony's index finger seemed to pause on the bottom blurt of ink on the table as he took a moment to catch up with the words his brain had let slip.
"You know I just got given this new account?"
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." Gordon said. "And it's big. Like, really big. Hundreds of thousands of pounds. And I'll look at it and I know that it's technically real money, but it's not, is it? I'm not sure you could go to a bank and get £500,000 out. So my brain sees it but it doesn't really comprehend it. Doesn't see it for what it is."
"Yeah." Tony breathed again, but he met Gordon's eyes this time with what seemed like a sense of hope.
"You need to argue with people. You need to be challenged. It's the only time you're at your best."
"Well, thanks!" Tony scoffed.
"Well since it's half 11 at night and I'm a bit worried MI5 will be banging down my door any second, I figured we'd skip straight to being honest."
"I don't think they'd waste MI5 resources on this flat."
"They would if you were in it." Gordon said. Somewhere in the tone of his voice it felt like another meaning was being formed. He ignored it.
"They know I'm here. My security, that is."
"How in the hell did you manage that one?"
"I'm the Prime Minister." Tony spoke it as if it were a death sentence. Gordon sighed, sparing a glance at his shoes as if they could possibly reveal all of the answers.
"Tony." He looked up again. "Why are you here?"
"I told you. I needed someone to tell the truth-"
"No." Gordon interrupted. "Why are you really here?"
"I needed it to just be easy again." Tony whispered after a few seconds. It was spoken so quietly, Gordon almost scanned the room for cameras or microphones. Perhaps that's, just what a life in the public eye did to you.
"It's not-"
"I know it's stupid and unfair to you and I shouldn't have done it, okay, I've been over all of this with my brain for the last eight years but something happened and I just - I just suddenly felt the need to be kicking that stupid door frame and jimmying cabinets and performing a drumming solo on the basin just to flush the toilet and watching tv that flickers off every twenty minutes. I needed this, I needed easy and suddenly I was here and so were you and here we are."
And what do you say to that? How do you look into the face of someone you used to love who looks to be coming apart at the seams and tell them that this isn't easy? That this is what his wife should be helping him through? That this is ripping every nerve ending out of your body on repeat and squeezing your brain like a stressball and sending your heart racing like you've just sprinted the London marathon? How do you give them anything less than everything you've ever wanted to give them? You don't. You can't. He can't. So instead he says:
"Okay. What do you need?"