Chapter Text
It felt like he had been dancing around this issue for years, even though he had only started this process a few weeks ago, even though he’d only even consciously considered it for the past five months. Reginald sat at his desk and stared down at the stack of paper, the words “petition for dissolution of marriage” glared up at him from the white page and he sighed as he rubbed at the gold plating that covered his nose and part of his face.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to sign the paperwork or that he didn’t think Margaret would happily sign them too, she had been any happier than he was the past few years, but Reginald hated change in his personal life. It required too much chance. Margaret might not make him happy anymore and she might not be happy either, playing stay at home mother to two children that she never really wanted in the first place. It used to work, he might have even loved her once and she might have once loved him too.
But all the same, it was a dance that he knew all the steps for, even if he was sick of going through them. A simple box step, boring, but functional. Easy to learn, unsatisfying to dance, but easy to do over and over again.
If he signed those papers he would be stepping into something new, something unsure. A swing dance that had room for a lot of unexpected improvisation, not the least of which was the fact that he had never told Michael he was considering a divorce and frankly he didn’t know what Michael really wanted. Reg could be throwing his safe life (super villain schemes and henchmen aside) away for something he wouldn’t even get.
But even so…Reg was sure that Michael would be worth it, just as he was sure that Michael would still want him. Even with all his scars and his, frankly, absurd job. It wasn’t like Michael had a shortage of those himself.
If he was wrong then none of it would be worth it anyway. Not after knowing what happiness felt like.
But either way he had to make a decision. He was being pulled in two directions and only one of them was going to leave him happy, rather than exhausted from the constant battle.
Reg laughed at that thought. He was a villain (or so they said anyway, really could he be blamed for the fact that it was easier to get things done the illegal way) and the most exhausting battle plan of his life was the fight to go home to his wife at the end of the day. The only thing that made the weary feeling worth it were his children and wasn’t that another issue altogether…he had never really spoken to Michael about how he felt about children, even though he had told him about Susan and Jonathan.
His hope was that once Margaret was out of their lives that he and Michael could have a family together with the two children, but if Michael didn’t want that sort of life…
Reg groaned and rubbed at his faceplate again with his right hand, trying to relieve the headache that was building and pushing its way out from where the metal connected to his flesh and cartilage. The pen in his left hand tapped out a frantic jitterbug on the wooden desktop.
In the middle of his contemplations there was a knock at the door.
“Enter!”
The door opened and the head of his intelligence division was standing in the opening.
“Sir, I have some urgent information for you!”
“Very well, come in. I wasn’t getting anywhere with this anyway.” Reg threw his pen down onto the desk and swept the stack of papers into the folder they had come in. He might be exceptionally friendly with his employees (especially compared to most other bosses in this field) but he didn’t really need to air his marital problems to them, even if David already knew about Michael. It was bad enough that his legal counsel, Marilyn, knew about the paperwork.
David walked into the office and stood in front of Reginald’s desk, looking rather unsure of himself.
“Oh sit down, I’m not going to stare up at you this entire conversation.”
“Yes, sir…” he sat down on one of the chairs that sat in front of the desk, but just barely, as if expecting to have to run out of the room at any moment.
“Now what do you have for me? Is it MI6 again? They’ve been poking their nose in ever since we made off with that Iradiom for the quote, unquote ‘death ray’ they’re sure I’m building.” He was building one, but that wasn’t the point. MI6 shouldn’t just assume these things.
“No, no, it’s not MI6…” David looked extremely uncomfortable and Reginald felt a heavy weight settle in his stomach, whatever the news was it could not be good.
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s just…well…” David stumbled over his words, then pulled out an audio recorder. “It’s probably better if you just listen to it. We didn’t get much before they scrambled the line, but…look, I want to apologize in advance, I know you said to not put any surveillance on him and I honestly hoped you were right about him, but I couldn’t just not do my due diligence could I? I mean I’m the head of intelligence and…” David cut himself off and slid the recorder across the desk.
Reginald felt like he was going to throw up, but he reached for it anyway and pressed play.
The voice was one he recognized very well from countless days spent in each others company over the last 6 months.
“This is Agent A-26, reporting in from my infiltration mission…”
It felt like that heavy weight was a grenade and someone had just pulled the pin.
____
[Somewhere across town in a hotel]
Agent Michael White was sitting on the hotel bed, holding the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he worked to close a cufflink.
“This is Agent A-26, reporting in from my infiltration mission…yes I know this isn’t a secure line. Look…no I’m not going to call back on a secure line, I don’t have anything to say that needs securing! Just let me talk to my handler…yes, yes, my access code is ZF2265-Alpha..thank you.”
While waited to be connected he fit the other cufflink and straightened the shirt he was wearing. It was a little big on him, but he didn’t have time to order a new one so this would just have to do. It wasn’t as if Reginald had ever particularly cared what Michael wore…he just wanted this to be special.
Tonight was either going to go extremely well or end in death and dismemberment…most likely Michael’s own. Might as well look nice either way.
“Agent A-26?…Agent White?…Michael!” Michael realized he had drifted off and immediately turned his attention back to the phone and the woman calling his name.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“All right, then my first question is why the hell are you calling from an unsecured line in your hotel room? This isn’t even slightly protocol.”
Michael exhaled a distressed breath that could have possibly been laughter.
“Oh I highly doubt there’s any protocol for this Alice.”
“And yep, there you go, using my name on an unsecured line. Thanks so much Michael.”
“Alice isn’t your real name and you know it and the line’s been scrambled by now, secure or not.”
She chuckled. “True enough, what kind of trouble have you gotten into now?”
“No, I’m not in trouble at all…”
“Sure, that’s why you’re calling at one in the afternoon, just to chat.”
“No really, I’m not in any trouble, I…I’m calling to put in my resignation, Alice.” There was a long silence from the other end of the phone before she responded.
“What? No, I couldn’t have heard that right. Why in the world would you resign? You love this job!”
“I just…look I can’t go into it on here. Maybe I’ll tell you the whole story some time, but I just can’t do this anymore. I’ve done a lot of good here, but I’ve done a lot of bad too and you know that’s true. I used to love this job, but for a long time it’s been eating at me, you know that.”
“I do, but…resignation?” Alice sounded upset.
“I can’t keep this up, bending my morals little by little for missions that I’m not even sure are right anymore. I don’t want to do this for so long that it gets too late for me to change. This isn’t what I want anymore.”
“All right, just…” Alice trailed off, then spoke again. “I’ll put in the paperwork, but are you sure you want to do this now? You won’t have transport home or backup or anything. We could wait until you get back to the states.”
“I don’t need to. I have some things to finish up here anyway.”
“You know it won’t be easy Michael, you know too much…they aren’t just going to let you resign and go live your life.”
“Don’t worry about that Alice, I’ve got it covered.”
“All right…well, I’ll see you…when I see you.”
“Goodbye, Alice.” The phone disconnected and he placed it back in on the bedside table. He stood up to look in the mirror, but as he was straightening his shirt something else caught his eye.
He was smiling.
That had happened a lot in the last few months, but before that it had been a long time since it had happened unforced.
Oh, he had smiled often, but it was all trained charm. He plastered on the fake smile, forcing it to reach his eyes through intense practice, swallowed martinis and champagne and did his damn job. But 6 months ago he’d received a mission briefing to head to this small European country, right on the cusp of the newly freed Soviet Bloc to infiltrate the criminal organization of a man they knew as the Sphinx.
It had seemed like an impossible mission. They had already lost two agents to the task in the last 2 years, but for some reason his number was up. Alice hadn’t known, but he knew it was a suicide mission from the start. He’d lost favor with someone upstairs and now he was paying for it.
He made initial contact at a party, wearing the same tuxedo he was wearing now (besides the new shirt, that one was ruined, but that came later).
Sphinx hadn’t been hard to spot. Even with all the ridiculous clothing and statement pieces favored by the kinds of people at this party (Michael was burning one of his most well established aliases as an arms dealer just to get in the door) the scarred face and golden face plate would have been hard to miss, but added to the fact that rather than an ostentatious clothing choice, he looked like he had just come from work. Wearing the same uniform that he wore in all of the few surveillance photos they had of him.
Michael had pushed his way up to the end of the bar, where Sphinx was sitting and ordered a scotch, neat (not really his taste, but it was part of the cover identity). Between the two of them they were the least garishly dressed at the entire event.
“God I hate these parties, if I didn’t need to schmooze for new clients I wouldn’t even show up. But sadly my clients keep killing each other…” Michael said, glancing at Sphinx as he said it. He thought he was going to be ignored for a moment, but as his drink arrived Sphinx responded.
“Ever thought about going into a job with a less recyclable clientele?”
“Oh, often, but then there’s always some civil war in Africa or an uprising in the Middle East wanting to buy.”
“And the money is too good to stop?” Sphinx asked, sipping his own drink. Which looked suspiciously like sparkling water, which Michael filed away in his head.
“Well, yes partly, but frankly it’s nice to not care who wins. Its like Stalingrad, who cares who wins just as long as they kill a lot of each other.”
Sphinx looked surprised at that. “A man of morals here?”
“Morals? I’m an arms dealer, Mr…”
“Sphinx.”
“Ah, I’m an arms dealer Mr. Sphinx. I wouldn’t call that particularly ‘moral.’”
“An arms dealer who enjoys the thought of Soviets and Nazis killing one another, around here that’s as close to morals as you can get Mr…”
And for some reason, at that moment, the name of his cover completely deserted him. Something about Sphinx completely caught him off guard and made him say…
“Michael, my name is Michael.”
Shit.
Somehow he made it work even after screwing up and giving a criminal mastermind, practically a super villain, his real name. It wasn’t like Michael had any family to threaten and his entire purpose here was to raise no suspicion, to try to become friends with Sphinx and infiltrate his organization. As long as he did his job, the name slip wouldn’t matter.
Of course it hadn’t gone that way. Not even a little bit.
Oh they became friends, that was certain, but there was this constant pull between them. Michael felt it, he thought Sphinx (“call me Reginald or Reg, but please not where anyone can hear you.”) felt it too.
The problem for Michael was that he actually liked Reginald. He wasn’t like any of the previous criminals he had taken down. He was kind to his employees, gave them time off, health insurance, maternity and paternity leave, remembered his children’s birthdays, went home at 5 to eat dinner with his family, and stopped to give money to beggars on the street and to pet dogs.
Worse still, his ideas weren’t ones that Michael could even call evil or immoral. Just…unethical and when it came down to it, the only thing that separated Michael’s own methods from Reginald’s was that Michael was sanctioned by a government to do them. Reg didn’t want to rule the world or kill an entire race of people or even make a bunch of money by buying up all the property east of the San Andreas and then using bombs to start a huge earthquake so he could turn it all into ocean front property or use a giant laser to carve his name on the moon.
Reginald wanted to help people and this way, outside the system, was the only way he knew to do it.
Michael had held off on making a move, despite the pull, because even though he’d slept with a mission mark a hundred times before…this time it just would have felt wrong. It was based on a lie, not much of one at this point, but still a lie, unfortunately he wasn’t the one to make that first move and, special agent or not, Michael had never had that much self control.
The moment came two months into their friendship. He roared up in a sports car (the one perk to ridiculous arms dealer cover IDs) to the entrance of the current secret base that Reg was working out of and lazily saluted the soldiers inside the front entrance as he walked in. Most of them recognized him and no one ever tried to stop his entrance into the facility. He knew he should have been using that to his advantage, but he kept holding off and telling the upper divisions that he hadn’t gotten enough trust yet to start snooping through files.
Reginald had just returned from a trip. That morning Michael had been briefed on that fact that Reginald’s trip had resulted in the hospitalization and eventual death of the new prime minister of a nearby country that had only recently reached a semblance of stability, mostly due to the prime minister’s influence, since being freed from the USSR. His bosses had gone into great detail over the fact that this destabilization was most likely done for financial gain by Sphinx, something Michael had trouble believing based on the Sphinx he knew, but he knew it was possible that he could be wrong.
Which was why he was currently casually walking down the hallway, whistling an old jazz tune, on his way to Reginald’s office.
He opened the door without knocking and threw himself casually down into one of the chairs.
“I trust your trip was successful?” He asked.
“Oh completely, I got exactly what I went there for.” Reginald said, closing the file he’d been reading and looking up at Michael with a smile.
“Which was….?” Michael let a bit of curiosity color the words.
“Revenge.”
Michael did a mental double take. That was not what he was expecting.
“Revenge?”
“Absolutely, it was a favor for one of my newest recruits. He asked me for a transfer out of Balvradia recently and moved here with his wife and son. Why you might ask? It turns out Mr. Prime Minister, aside from being corrupt on multiple fronts, has a bit of a taste for young boys…particularly those in the age range of my soldier’s son.” Reginald looked as disgusted as Michael felt at those words. So it hadn’t been financially motivated after all. “My only regret is I didn’t know about this before so I could have killed him the last time I was in the country.”
Michael couldn’t quite stay in character after that admission (not that he’d been very good at that for weeks to be perfectly honest) and he found himself getting up and walking around the desk. He put a hand on Reginald’s shoulder and squeezed.
“But what counts is you did do it…” Michael kneeled down to get on Reginald’s level and spoke again, this time in a slightly teasing tone. “You know, you are supposed to be a villain, but everything you do sounds more like you want to be a hero to me.”
Reginald turned just enough to look him in the eye and something just…clicked. They were in perfect sync, they understood each other perfectly and moments later Michael felt the warm, smooth press of metal against his nose as Reginald kissed him.
And that was how it began.
Michael knew Reginald had a wife and children, but he seemed remarkably unconcerned about the affair for someone with such strong apparent morals, but Reginald told him that his wife and he had been not much more than roommates for years. Only together for the children and even that was more on his part than hers, she had never really wanted children at all.
Laying on the couch in Reginald’s office, Michael kissed him and stroked his back when he talked about the strained relationship. Michael didn’t say anything or try to influence him, but in his mind he was chanting “leave her leave leave her, keep me, I’m already yours” which was just enough of a shock for him to really start thinking about what it was he was doing. He was an agent, Reginald was, to all appearances, a criminal mastermind, a murderer. He couldn’t very well stay here with him.
For three and a half months he weighed the consequences in his mind, but could never decide how to proceed. He had lied to Reginald from the very beginning. Not about their friendship or his feelings, but the entire basis of their meeting and his identity (aside from the name) was a complete lie. He didn’t know how to stop that, afraid that telling the truth would destroy their relationship…and possibly Michael’s life. Sphinx might love him, Michael thought he did, but he was a villain and he had killed agents before.
It wasn’t until two weeks before that fateful phone call that he made his decision and started working his way toward an exit plan, seconds after his tuxedo shirt was destroyed.
“Get down!” gunfire had started while they were sitting at another ridiculous party, just like the one he had met Reg at. He went because Reginald begged him to save him from the sheer boredom of attending and because it kept his bosses off his case if he reported the things he heard from various other criminals in attendance. He was still claiming a lack of enough trust from Sphinx to get any real information from him.
He had pushed Reginald to the ground and pulled out his own gun to return fire and quickly the problem was subdued. A few former KGB operatives who had gotten a little too drunk and started talking tearfully about the former glory of the Soviet Union, which had caused a Ukrainian mobster (also quite drunk and very patriotic) to rebut their point with weapons fire. The firefight was short lived and the men were escorted out.
It wasn’t until all the excitement was over that Michael looked down and saw that Reginald was sitting against the bar, holding his arm, blood seeping out of a bullet wound. Somehow one of the bullets had ricocheted and caught him in the arm. It wasn’t life threatening at all, but from the fear that took hold of Michael it might as well have been. He immediately ripped off his shirt and wrapped it around the wound, putting as much pressure on it as possible.
“Oh god, Michael, you ruined your shirt.” Reginald was in pain, but it was truly nothing he hadn’t experienced before and he was hardly worried. What did worry him, when he looked up to scold Michael for ruining his own shirt for no reason, was the paper white paleness of Michael’s face.
“My shirt!? Who cares! You were shot!”
“It was a ricochet, it barely grazed me, you of all people should know it’s not that serious.”
“But it…it could have been.” Michael leaned against the bar next to Reginald and grabbed onto his uninjured arm. Reginald could hear him whispering, barely loud enough to make out so he leaned closer to hear Michael repeating “it could have been…it could have been…”.
“I’m fine, I’ll be good as new in a couple of weeks. Its fine!” He wrapped his uninjured arm around Michael.
And that was when Michael knew he had his answer. He couldn’t lie anymore.
Which was why…
The phone ringing jolted him out of his thoughts and he picked it up.
“This is the front desk, we’re having the valet pull your car up in just a few moments, as you requested.”
“Thank you.” He hung up and grabbed his tuxedo jacket. He was bound to look slightly ridiculous, wearing it out in the middle of the afternoon, but he wanted to make an impression. He carried the jacket out with him, hoping that telling Reginald the truth wouldn’t ruin everything.
He was going to jump and hope Reg cared enough to pull the pin and open the parachute. Otherwise he was going to crash and burn.