Chapter Text
He wakes to white walls, the smell of antiseptic, and the soft beep of the machinery next to his bed.
It’s more than a little disorienting, considering the last thing he remembers. He has no idea where they are—except, obviously, hospital—or how they got here. It also feels rather like a herd of elephants has been trampling on his chest and he can’t quite manage a proper breath, but it’s hard to complain, in the grand scheme of things.
He watches the morning lights dance on the ceiling for another long moment before he realizes he’s not the only person present. There’s another bed next to him—he can’t say he expected to be sharing a room—and the occupant makes a soft sound in their sleep that draws his attention. He tips his head on the pillow to look over and nearly startles when he sees Alex lying there in the other bed, his dark curls splayed wildly across the stark white of his pillows.
He’s also, Henry cannot fail to notice, handcuffed to the bed rails.
“He wouldn’t stop trying to get up,” a familiar voice says from a chair at the foot of Henry’s bed, and Henry looks over to see Shaan neatly folded into what must be an exceedingly uncomfortable hospital chair with a book open in his lap, looking, as always, perfectly put together. “The bullet in his thigh very narrowly missed a major branch of the femoral artery. I understand he nearly tore it open trying to drag you out of there.”
“Christ,” Henry breathes, looking over again at his sleeping partner. He looks so peaceful like this. It’s a rare sight. “He’s all right now, though?”
“He’ll be fine,” Shaan assures him. He’s silent for a moment, watching Henry carefully. “How are you feeling?”
Henry takes a breath and grimaces. “I’ve been better. Er, why does it feel as if I’ve been trod upon by a large number of pachyderms?”
“Oh, that would be the resuscitation,” Shaan answers, a little wryly.
“Resusci…”
“You were fucking dead for two minutes,” a grumbly voice puts in from next to him.
Henry’s head snaps over to find Alex staring at him, a guarded expression on his face. He’s not sure what to make of it—can’t tell if Alex is still cross with him or if he’s perhaps reconsidering his feelings with regards to Henry, now that it’s all said and done. It’s not like Henry doesn’t very clearly remember what was said right before he lost consciousness at the compound. He’s fairly certain the anguish in Alex’s voice is going to haunt his dreams for quite a long time.
“Oh,” he says unsteadily. He looks back down at his lap, unable to meet Alex’s inscrutable gaze any longer. “Um. Where are we?”
“Panama City,” Zahra Bankston answers as she strides purposefully into the room, her heels clicking on the linoleum floors. “The nearest agency-approved hospital. You were airlifted here as soon as you were stable.”
She walks directly over to where Shaan is sitting and grabs a remote off the table next to him, then points it up at a small television hanging in the corner of the room. It takes a moment for her to flip through channels until she finds a news network, which is broadcasting in Spanish but very clearly showing footage pulled from CNN. On it, a grey-haired man in a suit tries to hide his face from the cameras as he’s escorted into a waiting car, accompanied by a headline scrolling on the banner at the bottom of the screen that reads: SEN. RICHARDS (R-UT) FACING MULTIPLE CHARGES FOR NAT’L SECURITY BREACHES, CONSPIRACY, WIRE FRAUD.
“What the fuck is going on?” Alex asks, his attention now fixed on the screen.
“Someone leaked several of the documents recovered from Batista’s compound to the press,” Zahra says with remarkable evenness, given the statement, and the look she follows it up with, aimed at Alex, is heavy with meaning. “The chances that someone high up in the CIA would try to bury it were too great, especially since we can’t be certain we’ve uncovered all the corruption.” She pauses, looking back up at the television. “It was a risky move, but he felt strongly about it, and I supported his choice.”
“Raf,” Alex breathes with understanding. “It was him, wasn’t it?”
Zahra nods. “He suspected Richards of being dirty for years, but we can’t operate within the borders of the US, and Richards had too many friends at the agency. Many of which have also been exposed by this. It’s a real shitshow back in Langley right now.”
Alex silently watches the television for another minute before looking back at her. “What about the burn notice?”
“You’ve both been cleared of all charges.”
“I should fucking hope so,” Alex grumbles.
Zahra just ignores him and continues, “Batista’s correspondence with Richards proved it was a setup. You’ve been reinstated, Alex.”
“And the situation at the Service?” Henry asks, looking to Shaan.
Shaan smiles slightly—which is notable in its own right—and unfolds himself from the chair, grabbing a slim file folder from the table next to him before he crosses over to Henry’s bed. “It took some doing, but we managed it,” he says, holding it out to Henry.
“We?” Henry asks as he takes the folder with his free hand and opens it up on his blanket-covered lap. There are several papers inside, but he doesn’t really process what’s on them as he pages through, still mostly focused on his handler.
“Myself and Ms. Fox-Mountchristen, mostly.”
Henry forces himself to actually look at the documents, and it doesn’t take very long for him to realize what they are. “These are discharge papers,” he breathes, barely daring to believe his own eyes.
“If you want them,” Shaan confirms with a nod. “In light of your injuries. There’s an option to remain with the Service as a non-field officer, but Beatrice suspected you might have other reasons to wish to leave.” Then his eyes slide significantly over to the other bed, although Henry doesn’t dare to follow them.
“Oh,” is all he manages.
Shaan puts a hand on his good shoulder and gives a gentle squeeze. “Take your time with the decision. We should give you both a chance to rest.”
With that, both Shaan and Zahra depart, pulling the door closed behind them and leaving Henry, Alex, and an impossibly loaded silence in the hospital room. Henry stares down at the papers, not reading them but not able to make himself look away either. Maybe Alex does love him, as he said, but what if it’s not enough? What if, when it comes down to it, Alex doesn’t see a future for them?
Alex’s continued and uncharacteristic silence is certainly doing nothing to slow the breakneck speed of Henry’s spiraling thoughts.
After a little bit, there’s a rustling in the other bed and the soft clank of the handcuffs against the metal bed frame. But then comes the unmistakable sound of shuffling bare feet—well, one bare foot and one foot in some kind of brace—on the floor, and Henry looks up to see his partner standing next to his bed, half holding himself up on the IV stand he dragged along with him.
“What…?” Henry says, looking past him to see the handcuffs hanging off the other bed, one side of them open.
“You didn’t really think I couldn’t get out of those, did you? Gimme a little credit,” Alex scoffs.
Then, unexpectedly, he punches Henry in the arm on his uninjured side. Hard.
“Ow!” Henry yelps, reaching up as best he can to rub his smarting arm. “What the devil was that for?”
“I told you I’d be pissed at you,” Alex grumbles.
He’s got his arms crossed defensively in front of his chest and he’s looking off into the distance with a frown creasing his face, but something about his whole grumpy demeanor makes something impossibly warm bloom in Henry’s chest. Somehow, this is what does it, the thing that settles all of his uncertainties, and he can’t fight the too-wide smile that slowly spreads across his face.
“I love you too, Alex,” Henry says, finally, for the very first time.
That brings Alex’s eyes back to him, huge and dark and so full of hope and relief and love that Henry can barely stand it. His lips are slightly parted, like it should be a surprise that Henry’s completely gone on him, like he hasn’t been since the very first time he laid eyes on Alex in Havana. Alex stares at him for a long moment before he swallows, licking his lips.
“Shove over,” he mutters, and he doesn’t wait for Henry to make space before he starts climbing into the narrow hospital bed.
It’s not exactly easy, cramming two grown men in there, but Henry doesn’t much care. Alex curls up on his side next to him, slipping an arm over Henry’s waist and holding on as if for dear life, and it’s all that Henry has ever needed. He leans in, burying his face in Alex’s curls and inhaling the scent of whatever unfamiliar soap the hospital used to clean them up, but also something distinctly Alex. Something that smells like home. After a moment, Henry raises a hand to tip Alex’s face up toward his, pressing a soft kiss to his lips, which Alex immediately melts into.
For a while they just lay there, wrapped up in each other’s arms. At some point, they must doze off again because eventually Henry blinks his eyes open to find a surly-looking nurse scowling at them as she hangs new IV bags for the both of them.
“Lo siento,” Henry mutters, unable to keep from wincing apologetically.
She does not look mollified, but she also doesn’t make them move, so.
Alex wakes as she’s leaving, snuggling closer unrepentantly, and Henry indulges in slowly tangling his hand into Alex’s curls as he waits for his eyelids—with their impossibly long eyelashes—to flutter open.
“What happened at the compound?” Henry murmurs eventually. “After I… well. You know.”
“Raf showed up with a team,” Alex answers, tipping his head slightly so he can meet Henry’s eyes. “Said you called it in?”
Henry nods. “That’s why I was late. I tried to wait for support, but they hadn’t arrived by the deadline and I couldn’t risk something happening to you.”
Alex makes a soft sound, difficult to interpret, and tucks his face into Henry’s shoulder. “The bomb detonated, but turns out it wasn’t that big. Just collapsed a couple of rooms. Obviously Batista is dead.”
“Obviously,” Henry says, finding it hard to feel anything but relieved by that.
“His office was spared, though, and Raf’s team recovered a bunch of files,” Alex says. “Or so I’m told. I was pretty out of it at that point. Apparently that many injuries really catches up to you.”
Henry cannot resist rolling his eyes. “You don’t say.”
“Also, I was too worried about you to give a flying fuck about the mission anymore.”
Oh. Well, Henry supposes that’s understandable. “Thank you, Alex,” he murmurs, “for not giving up on me.”
At that, Alex pushes himself up on an elbow to glare down at him. “Even though you were a stupid asshole who told me to.”
“So we’re not going to talk about how you were the one who insisted I not come rescue you? As if I could leave you to be tortured and killed?” Henry counters. “When it comes to self-sacrificial nonsense, you’ve no leg to stand on, love.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not.”
“I coulda still escaped,” Alex insists. “You were dying.”
Henry shoots him a look to quite clearly convey what he thinks about Alex’s ‘escape’ plans. “And by staying there, you might’ve died, too.”
Alex huffs and lowers himself back down to the bed again, burying his face in Henry’s shoulder like he can’t quite bear to look at him when he grumbles, “Yeah, well, when given the choice of losing you forever or going out along with you, maybe I chose the latter.” His grip on Henry’s hospital gown tightens. “Couldn’t leave you. I love you.”
It still makes something in Henry’s chest seize up, somewhere between panic and euphoria, to hear Alex say those words. Following, as they do, on a confession like that certainly doesn’t help matters. For so long those words—and the very idea of love—have been nothing but a liability, to be avoided at all costs, something that was never going to be in Henry’s future. Not that he could ever allow himself to think about the future as anything more than an abstract concept.
He has that, now. The possibility of a future.
Alex’s thoughts must be flowing in a similar direction, because he asks, tentatively, “What are you going to do now?”
“I— I don’t know,” Henry answers honestly. “I’m not sure I know how not to be a spy.”
Alex is silent for another beat, seemingly watching his own hand as it clenches and unclenches in the blanket over Henry’s stomach. “You could go back to school. Study literature. Be a writer like you said you wanted to,” he says. “’M sure you’d have your pick of any of those fancy English schools.”
“If I were to apply to anywhere, it would be in DC,” Henry says, without even really planning to, though he knows it’s the truth as soon as the words are out of his mouth. Alex looks up at him again, eyes wide, and Henry pushes a curl back off his forehead. “Whatever I do, I want it to be with you. If you’ll have me.”
“Baby,” Alex says, a little brokenly. “You’d move to DC for me?”
“I’d go anywhere with you, love.” Henry smiles softly and pulls him into a brief kiss. “Besides, someone has to look after you. Keep you out of trouble.”
“Fuck off,” Alex says, though his grip on Henry only tightens. He’s grinning now, his smile so radiant it’s nearly blinding, and Henry knows he’s going to love this ridiculous man forever.
“Shan’t,” Henry returns, grinning too now. “You’re in my bed, after all.”
“Pretty sure it’s our bed now.”
“And if I decided I’d prefer a little more elbow room?”
“Too bad,” Alex says definitively. “You’re stuck with me now.”
“Good,” Henry replies. He leans in, pressing their foreheads together and letting his nose brush against Alex’s. “Nothing would make me happier.”
Then Henry kisses him slowly, indulgently unhurried, because he can.
Because now they have all the time in the world.
Epilogue
“I’m gonna head out a little early today if it’s ok?” Alex says as he pops his head into Raf’s office. “Did what I could on the Bolanos file, just waiting for financials from downstairs now. And Hunter hasn’t finished his fucking paperwork from Guyana yet, so unless you need me…”
Raf looks up at him from amongst the mountains of files on his desk and smirks. “Never thought I’d live to see the day when the world’s biggest workaholic asked to leave early. What’s the occasion?”
“First off: fuck you,” Alex returns, grinning. Raf huffs a fond laugh. “And secondly, it’s been two years. Since, um, our first mission together.”
Raf’s eyebrows climb skyward and Alex ducks his head as he feels his face heat. “That’s funny, I seem to remember someone complaining in my office for hours after he got back from that mission,” Raf teases. “Wouldn’t hear of it when I told him to give the other guy another chance.”
“Yeah yeah, you’re always right,” Alex huffs. “Can I go or not?”
“Yeah, get out of here,” Raf tells him with a wave of his hand. “You guys got plans to celebrate?”
Alex smiles, mostly to himself. “Not exactly.”
They don’t have plans. He’s not even sure if Henry knows what today is; this morning, he’d been going on about his applications for graduate school—and how he’s faced down cartel thugs with automatic weapons so this should not be that stressful—and Alex had just nodded sympathetically as he fixed a cup of Earl Grey just the way Henry likes it and pushed it into his boyfriend’s hands with a kiss.
Alex has plans, though.
The apartment is quiet when he gets home, even though Henry should be around. Sometimes he works in a local coffee shop because sometimes their apartment is just a little too quiet, but when Alex is in town he tends to hole up in their home office. These days, that’s most of the time; Alex has been transitioning to a research and support role with fewer field assignments, which at one point in his life would have horrified him. Not that he doesn’t enjoy research, because he actually does, but fieldwork was always his thing. The action, the adventure, the travel, the excitement—it was always more appealing than being stuck in Langley.
These days, he’s got a lot more to stay home for.
They’d decided to get a new place together when Henry moved here, somewhere a bit closer to DC with more room for the two of them than Alex’s sad gray apartment could provide. Now, when he comes home it feels just like that: a home. There’s art on the walls from all over the world (though mostly South and Central America), things that they both picked up here and there on their travels but never got around to hanging before, along with a framed poster from one of Arthur Fox’s Bond movies—at Alex’s insistence. Henry had rolled his eyes and put up a token protest that they, as current and former intelligence operatives, should not have a James Bond poster in their home, but he’d also cleared his throat and looked like he was blinking back tears, so Alex counted it as a win.
Alex kicks off his shoes next to the door and hangs up his coat, surveying the signs of Henry’s presence in their living room. He’d clearly been out here earlier, because there’s a cardigans is draped over the back of the sofa and two tea cups with the cold dregs of Earl Grey inside them sitting on the coffee table, which Alex picks up and deposits in the kitchen sink on the way to the office.
There, he finds Henry bent over a laptop, the glow from the screen illuminating his face as the only source of light in the darkening room. He’s got his lower lip clenched between his teeth, both hands pushed into his hair, and, quite frankly, seriously looks like he needs an enforced break. Especially since he doesn’t seem to notice Alex’s arrival until he startles when Alex wraps his arms around him from behind and presses a kiss to the back of his neck.
“Alex? Christ, what time is it?” Henry asks, twisting his neck to try to look back at him. Then he glances down at his watch and frowns. “You’re home early. Is everything all right?”
“Obviously not, since you pretty much jumped out of your skin just now. I wasn’t even trying to sneak up on you.” Alex hums and kisses his neck again. “A few months out of the Service and you’ve lost every single one of your spy instincts.”
Henry huffs, shaking his head. “Hardly. Just got lost in my own head. Why aren’t you at work? Not that I’m complaining, but…”
“But that never happens?” Alex laughs softly. He pulls away and steps to the side of Henry’s chair, grabbing his wrist. “Tonight’s special. C’mon, we’re going out.”
Predictably, Henry blinks at him in confusion. “What?”
“We’re going out,” Alex repeats. “We’ve got reservations.”
“That sounds lovely, but I really can’t, love, I’ve got these bloody applications—”
“You told me this morning that your personal statement was written,” Alex interrupts. “Just needs edits. And it’s not due for a while still. So you’re taking a much needed break, and we’re going out.”
Henry allows himself to be tugged to his feet and out of the room, following Alex in some kind of daze down the hall to their bedroom. Alex can tell he’s trying to figure out what could be going on, but also that he’s not having a lot of success with it, which is just fine with Alex. He leaves Henry standing in the middle of the room and disappears into the closet, where he pulls out a pale gray three-piece suit that Henry probably hasn’t worn since they moved here.
“Here,” Alex says, thrusting it into his arms. “You’re wearing this.”
“You don’t even like this suit,” Henry protests, but he lays it carefully on the bed and starts unbuttoning his shirt anyway.
“I like the suit fine,” Alex counters. “I never liked the tie you inevitably wore with it. No tie tonight, though. Too stuffy.” Really, they’re both going to be overdressed for the venue, but it’s also DC, where half of the patrons will be tourists and half of them from the Hill, so it’s probably fine.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”
“Nope,” Alex replies, popping the ‘p’.
Henry sighs. “I figured as much.”
For himself, Alex chooses a pair of dark slacks with a navy sport coat over a fine linen button-down that has delicate blue embroidery down the button placket; he’d go with what he’d worn that first evening, but he’s afraid it would come off as too casual next to Henry. Who still, as it turns out, can really fill out a suit. Alex finds himself watching Henry put on his waistcoat, nimble fingers turning over Savile Row buttons, and he has to remind himself that he has plans that don’t involve peeling Henry out of that suit right this very minute.
Still, he can’t help but cross the room, reach up to slide a hand behind Henry’s neck, and pull him down into a kiss that is much filthier than it has any right to be. Henry responds in kind, eagerly chasing his mouth when Alex tries to pull away, so it takes another few minutes before they finally manage to break apart.
“What was that for?” Henry asks a little breathlessly.
“You’re hot as fuck and I love you,” Alex tells him bluntly.
“Ever the poet,” Henry laughs softly, but he ducks his head and his cheeks flush pink.
“That’s your thing, sweetheart. Now c’mon. Don’t want to be late.”
Henry frowns when they arrive at the restaurant, which has a very large Cuban flag hanging above the door, and Alex can’t help but feel slightly giddy when Henry turns to him with his eyebrows knit together pensively.
“What’s the date, love?”
“August 10th,” Alex answers. He’s probably grinning like a complete fool by now, but he doesn’t really care.
“That’s…” Henry starts, a look of realization blooming over his face, before letting his voice trail off as they approach the host station.
They do have a reservation, but Alex brought them here early for a very specific and very important reason. After checking in with the hostess, he links his hand in Henry’s and leads him over to the bar, then gestures at him to take a seat on one of the stools. Henry does so, then stares at him expectantly because, at this point, he’s apparently figured out exactly what Alex is up to. They’re still holding hands, fingers completely woven together, and even though that’s not quite right Alex can’t bring himself to let go.
“Now,” Alex says seriously, “can I buy you a drink?”
This time, Henry says yes.