A slip of a girl, and another operative. I went to go check up on her, offer a gentle shoulder. I'm good with women, and I know them- I know when they have secrets. I had a feeling about this girl.
[Omar hesitates, this time. He'll cheerfully admit that he's the last person suited for Ricki's craft -- if he ever were any kind of spy, he'd be the one in the James Bond model -- but he already has a bad feeling that he might know where this is going. He's heard too many of these stories from him now.]
[Ricki asks, recalls, the voice that just makes people melt to do whatever they can for him, with a solicitous;]
"I came over to check you were all right."
She let me in. I was a businessman, it was a holiday romance- convertibles down port side streets, with her split lip and bruised jaw healing slowly. I didn't sleep with her. I hardly had to, she needed someone so badly. [And here's the twist, the way this story is unlike any of the others;] And anyways, the moment she had me alone, one sunny day, away from any ears, she put her small hands on mine and told me that she knew who I was, and that I had to get a message back to Control for her. That- that's not language you guess at, it was credible. She had gold for him.
[It's honestly not a surprise at all to hear it. It is a twist, but it's one he saw coming this time, no blind-siding like the Leamas tale. He suspects there's at least one more ahead.]
My problem was this. I, in staying behind, was a little off the beaten path. Mister Guillam wasn't asking after me exactly, yet, but there had been a few gentle queries put in with Tufty Thessinger at the telegraph office. How was I to say, 'I have a girl here, I have a gut feeling about her, she needs an extract and she says she has something good.' People want to come over all the time; we don't offer free tickets. They buy their way into the west.
I slept with her. I kept my foot on the vodka bottle. I listened and listened, about how Boris was a bastard, about the things she'd done and seen, as she worked her slow way up to the truth- and she was like me, you know, she'd been taken in to the Lubyanka at puberty, to become the liar she'd grown into. So she told me. There was, she insisted, a mole, right at the top of the Circus.
[Anything he can think of to say doesn't convey the half of it, how bad it is, it would be, if that were true.]
If it were true, it would mean- oh, potentially, I thought, an entire department being blown. The Circus is stratified- there's Control, and under him, five men, and below that there are networks, precarious and fragile. You remember Leamas losing Berlin? A few years before that, we had the same thing happen in North Africa, just a whole network rolled in one night. Again, in Poland, when Jim Prideaux was captured and killed, and gave up his team to save his own skin. Any kind of mole operating in a position of personnel management would have to be handled delicately. If I got word back to the wrong ears, then I would put every man under his command at risk if he decided to cut his losses.
I couldn't go to Peter, for that reason. I didn't think he was the one, but I- suppose I thought he might stand on ceremony, and go to one of his immediate higher ups. And, if it were him, he was one of a very small handful of people in the world who knew where I was. A rival section head, though-
[Trailing off, quietly, with a little shrug. Like he said; planning. Every moment, every step, of every day.]
[He listens, keeps listening, and the dread keeps rising, starts to solidify a little bit. No, he's sure he knows where the story goes this time. And even that aside-- this is one of those stories of his that Omar just doesn't like. It's the part of Ricki that sneaks away from time to time, when he looks at Omar with his wide, honest eyes or buries his head in his shoulder and whispers things Omar knows to be true.
The part he'd warned him so vehemently about too, though.
And it's not in him this time -- not yet, anyway -- but the idea of living like that at all unsettles on a level deeper than anything Renaldo Ramirez could stir up in him. He looks over his shoulder enough as it is. He can think how bad it would be, in his own terms, if there were a mole at what little exists above his head -- imagine if he had to be looking over his shoulder at his own people.]
A'ight. Tell me how it ended up.
[Quietly, but a little intently. He needs to know where this went.]
I cabled home, priority, for the eyes of Control or those top five men, that there was a woman with me who had information about a mole, at the head of the circus.
I waited all night for a response, until prayer was called, at three am, and I got back, we read you.
So I went home for some sleep.
When I came back, Tufty's throat had been slit; neat work, I couldn't have done better myself, and I don't say so often. I went for her apartment next, to warn her, and found Boris- well. Worse than that. Bloodless and opened.
When I caught up to them, they were putting her on a boat to Odessa. She was already on a stretcher, and there were a dozen of them. I watched them wheel her away.
[He'd wept and wept, the first time telling this story, but this time around he just sounds hollow, tired, distant.]
[Well-- no, that's actually not where he thought it was going. Ricki can't see the way his expression stumbles, but it does.]
Y'all had a mole.
[He says it a little blankly, like the obvious solution actually catches him by surprise. He'd been waiting for the triple-cross the whole time -- for the moment she would have pounced.]
[He's thought long and hard about this, about how he could have been so stupid.]
When you look back at everything that happened- this isn't the start of this story, nor is it the end of it- it's full of moments where someone gave the game away because they couldn't stand to believe the betrayal was real. Someone functioning at that level? There would be nowhere to go. Above them, there was no one left. British Intelligence would be lost from head to tail. So, it turns out, it was.
What happened to her was my fault. I- [He didn't mean this to be about this part of the story.] -I knew if I could get home and get this sorted, we might be able to trade for her. There'd be time while she was being debriefed, interrogated. For that reason, as much as any other, I made my way home, as quickly as I could with the full fury of London and Moscow trying to kill me, and not a clean passport to my name.
[The next part again seems obvious, but Omar remembers: Ricki had
said he'd been out before he came here, so this is at least in part
a real retirement story.
He doesn't think of Brandon, but it's a deliberate choice not to. Doesn't
think about choices that make sense in the moment -- calling Control,
letting the boy go down the block alone; doesn't think about Ricki's girl
getting-- He doesn't let it happen. He takes a long, slow breath on
his end, closing his eyes against it. He lets Ricki go on, and waits to
hear if there's some kind of satisfaction yet to come.]
It took months. I didn't know what was going on in the political landscape back home while I was on the run, but I arrived in London tired, hurt, broke and hungry. The mole had called Moscow, you see, and arranged for a considerable sum of money to be transferred into my bank account, allowing the Circus to justify freezing it while they hunted me down for my apparent espionage and implication in the murder of Thessinger.
I landed in a public call box, and I dialled a long shot. The political position, you don't have it in the States, but you might consider it-- second in command to the Vice President? With a brief for liaising between that office and the various Intelligence bodies.
It's a tricky conversation to have. 'You don't know me. My name is Ricki Tarr. If you need confirmation of that, please contact Peter Guillam to the Circus, but no one else. I have reason to believe that there is a mole so highly placed in MI6 that every single one of us is at risk.' I'm not sure whether or not I was good, or if he was just a thoughtful and intelligent man who could sense in my voice the edge that I was up against. It was raining, and I don't remember ever having been so tired. I knew I was breaking the surface of a still pond, but I didn't know what waves I'd make, whether he'd believe me or not. I had no idea that Control was already dead, disgraced by his crack-pot assertions that the organization had, in fact, been compromised. That Smiley had been fired months previously.
Things began to move, but I just used the last of my cash to get a hot meal, and crawled through a back window into a squat, with boarded up windows in the attic that no one would be able to sneak a shot through. I collapsed, incautiously, inevitably, I just- I'd gone and fallen in love with her, you know, though I'm not sure when it happened. Certainly not during our days together. I think it was the guilt, and the memory of her hands.
[His eyes are shut, voice subdued. There are little flickers here and there, of pride for sounding the alarm, of amusement, at the London rain, but mostly he's just quiet.]
We call it being 'out in the cold,' operating so far gone, without resource or support or hope. Because my parish was always tropical, I never really got a sense of what they meant when they christened it that. Not being able to move from an unheated building, or to make too much noise during the day, even, for fear. I lasted there as long as I could, and then I sussed out the shape of the resistance, got a sense of who had been contacted to look into the problem. I took a gamble and came back in, to offer my services in exchange for their trading Irina out from wherever Moscow was working her.
[He chuckles at the phone call, thin and humorless, muttering almost under his breath:]
Lord, man -- that point I think I'd be wondering if Mr. Vice-Vice President wasn't in the mix, too.
[And there are some things in the rest that are familiar to him. Omar is Omar, and he's lived in these squats mostly by choice these last few years, but even for the best stick-up boy there have been some lean times, or times he couldn't so much as look out the window safely. Years of unheated Baltimore winters. Love and guilt and the painful lingering of sense memory.
But the rest is exhausting even just to listen to. He's spent so much of his life looking over his shoulder, he's betrayed people and been betrayed, but there have still always been people he's known he could safely turn his back to. Even in Jessup, Butchie took care of him; even after Brandon, McNulty and Greggs had been a safe call. Kimmie is barely speaking to him these days, but he knows beyond a doubt that she'd still come if he needed her. He'd never thought of himself as taking all that for granted -- hard-won allies, every one -- but now he thinks of thinking to hide from all of them, and he just feels tired and sad.
He wishes they weren't doing this over the phone, suddenly, even if he doesn't much want Ricki to see what it's doing to his face. There's a rustle as he sighs and stands anyway, soft footsteps, a door opening and closing.]
[It takes a few seconds after that for Ricki to answer the door. It was easier to sound calm about it on the phone. In person, he doesn't really know what to do, but put on a glossy, brittle smile.]
Got a little heavy on you there, didn't I?
[But he steps back, to let him quietly in.
The minute the door shuts behind him, Ricki takes what is (for him) a considerable step and moves in close.]
[He looks a little apologetic, though. He can understand why Ricki wouldn't want to talk about this in person, but--]
I just...
[He shakes his head. He doesn't know if he has a good excuse for coming, except that he wanted to, which is usually a good enough excuse for anything. He thinks for a second, then moves past Ricki into the room and goes to sit at the head of the bed, one leg propped up, the other on the floor.]
C'mere.
[He nods to the space in front of him; if Ricki sits there between his legs, leans back against him, they could be close without being face-to-face.]
[Ricki locks the door behind him, and then pads over, sinking onto the bed with him, and figuring out what he means with just a second of hesitation. He settles down, and lets out a long, slow sigh.
Starting the story again takes about thirty seconds, where he first just gets used to resting here like this, picking idly at the comforter.]
There's more. Obviously. It went on for months, there were dozens of things. I missed a wedge, I had Peter Guillam land on me and split my lip for me for a hello, when I did come home. That stung, I don't like being hit when I can't hit back.
[Easier to jump back in there, than talk about Irina again.]
[He loops an arm loosely around Ricki's waist, otherwise quiet and still; just a warm, solid presence against his back, breathing slow.
Until that, anyway -- then a flash of secondhand indignation goes through him, and he almost shifts over to look at him before remembering what the point of this is supposed to be.]
'ayo, what he hitting you for, man? Ain't that the man supposed to be taking care of y'all?
He'd been dragged into a meeting by the remaining top four, and chewed up and down over how his man had taken Moscow money and been sent back with a plot to muddy the waters, make good Circus boys suspicious.
Smiley got him off me and turned him back around, but- I suppose I need to explain the really interesting thing about how this was set up. It wasn't just one man managing all this by himself. Our mole- codenamed Gerald, for the record, arranged with Moscow to run a source that we codenamed Witchcraft. Witchcraft would come to London and set up secure drops with all of the top Circus personnel. They fed him chickenfeed, and in exchange he gave them gold. Only Gerald, on our side, he snuck the crown jewels in with the scrap he was supposed to hand over. But it meant that of those four men, even though one was a traitor, all of them were committed to trying to have me killed, because they thought I was going to complicate Witchcraft's cover story. They could see why I believed there was a mole at the top of the circus, but they wanted me not to sound an alarm about it, because it'd compromise the Witchcraft connect.
It's like how you'll be willing to see a painting as counterfeit if you're given it for free, but if you pay dearly for it, you'll defend the authenticity practically to the death. My own people were lying to Peter, to get him to turn me in when he saw me next. I'm lucky all he did was let loose a little.
[Plucking again at the blankets.]
Peter and I come to blows rather a lot, anyways. It's- a communication style, or something. It was neither of our faults that this time I was in no shape for it.
What we did was send me to Paris, where I surfaced at one of the wire offices and sent a message home that I was there and wanted to talk. I was bait, right? Gerald knew it was crucial that I be intercepted rather than brought home.
Smiley and Mister Guillam staked out Witchcraft, and listened in until they heard Gerald approach him and start plotting about how they'd take care of me before the Circus men could get to me.
[Calmly, matter of factly, as though there weren't every chance in the world he could have been taken, tortured and killed at many steps along the way.]
They got their man. And that is the story of how I, Ricki Tarr, your date to movie night, somewhat saved British Intelligence from complete Russian infiltration.
[As he pats his pockets for cigarettes, then turns his head to give him a kiss on the cheek, before lifting himself up, crawling away to go find them a pack, a lighter.]
'Cause really, where y'all gonna go after something like that?
[There's a chapter of the story still missing, he knows, but he thinks in the same moment that he shouldn't -- doesn't want to -- ask. There are three things that could have happened to Irina, and if Ricki's not volunteering that part, that pretty much narrows it down to two. Either way, Ricki doesn't seem eager to tell him, and he's not all that eager to know. He's already thinking about a girl with cigarette burns on her skin, try as he might not to.
He'll owe him that story now, maybe, though the thought weighs heavy. He holds out a hand, gesturing for a cigarette.]
[His eyes finally, suddenly burn. He tosses the pack to Omar, and sits down on the edge of his desk, looking down, scrubbing a hand over his face, suddenly. Shit.]
I probably owe Anya some sort of fruit basket. Or a bottle of scotch. The baggage of mine she carries.
[He has the grace to focus on the cigarettes, taking his sweet time on the ritual of lighting up. There's enough attention on Ricki right now, enough pressure; he doesn't need Omar staring at him. He smiles ruefully, apologetically down at the covers.]
Thought you was calling on me to pick you up.
[And he does feel a little bad -- he'd been picking at him instead, over something he's not even comfortable thinking too much about.]
Well, I. Meant it to be a nothing story, you know? A double double game I played in Istanbul once, following Boris around those night clubs.
[Getting ahold of himself, he comes back to the bed, this time sitting in front of them, leg resting carefully over his, so they're still tangled. He reaches out to take the pack back, to brush hands.]
Nothing does pick me up, dust me off, leave me feeling human, quite like when you let me bend your ear.
[There it is again -- a jolt right to the heart of him, but one that rubs just a little bit over a raw nerve. He bites his lip, catching Ricki's fingers in his own for just a second, then letting them go again.]
[He wants to promises him he has nothing to make up for, but doesn't want to get trapped in a silly game of each of them insisting when the point is just that they'd each like to be here together.
Instead, he gives up fumbling for the lighter, which is lost somewhere in the blankets, and shifts back over, to settle tentatively, carefully against him.
Ricki doesn't really know how to lie against men. Is a little bit all elbows, but entirely warm of intention and manner. He reaches for Omar's cigarette, to steal a drag, and hums, settling slowly down.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
voice
[He answers, letting out a long breath.]
A slip of a girl, and another operative. I went to go check up on her, offer a gentle shoulder. I'm good with women, and I know them- I know when they have secrets. I had a feeling about this girl.
voice
...a'ight. Still with you.
voice
[Ricki asks, recalls, the voice that just makes people melt to do whatever they can for him, with a solicitous;]
"I came over to check you were all right."
She let me in. I was a businessman, it was a holiday romance- convertibles down port side streets, with her split lip and bruised jaw healing slowly. I didn't sleep with her. I hardly had to, she needed someone so badly. [And here's the twist, the way this story is unlike any of the others;] And anyways, the moment she had me alone, one sunny day, away from any ears, she put her small hands on mine and told me that she knew who I was, and that I had to get a message back to Control for her. That- that's not language you guess at, it was credible. She had gold for him.
voice
Bet she did, at that.
voice
I slept with her. I kept my foot on the vodka bottle. I listened and listened, about how Boris was a bastard, about the things she'd done and seen, as she worked her slow way up to the truth- and she was like me, you know, she'd been taken in to the Lubyanka at puberty, to become the liar she'd grown into. So she told me. There was, she insisted, a mole, right at the top of the Circus.
[Anything he can think of to say doesn't convey the half of it, how bad it is, it would be, if that were true.]
If it were true, it would mean- oh, potentially, I thought, an entire department being blown. The Circus is stratified- there's Control, and under him, five men, and below that there are networks, precarious and fragile. You remember Leamas losing Berlin? A few years before that, we had the same thing happen in North Africa, just a whole network rolled in one night. Again, in Poland, when Jim Prideaux was captured and killed, and gave up his team to save his own skin. Any kind of mole operating in a position of personnel management would have to be handled delicately. If I got word back to the wrong ears, then I would put every man under his command at risk if he decided to cut his losses.
I couldn't go to Peter, for that reason. I didn't think he was the one, but I- suppose I thought he might stand on ceremony, and go to one of his immediate higher ups. And, if it were him, he was one of a very small handful of people in the world who knew where I was. A rival section head, though-
[Trailing off, quietly, with a little shrug. Like he said; planning. Every moment, every step, of every day.]
voice
The part he'd warned him so vehemently about too, though.
And it's not in him this time -- not yet, anyway -- but the idea of living like that at all unsettles on a level deeper than anything Renaldo Ramirez could stir up in him. He looks over his shoulder enough as it is. He can think how bad it would be, in his own terms, if there were a mole at what little exists above his head -- imagine if he had to be looking over his shoulder at his own people.]
A'ight. Tell me how it ended up.
[Quietly, but a little intently. He needs to know where this went.]
voice
I waited all night for a response, until prayer was called, at three am, and I got back, we read you.
So I went home for some sleep.
When I came back, Tufty's throat had been slit; neat work, I couldn't have done better myself, and I don't say so often. I went for her apartment next, to warn her, and found Boris- well. Worse than that. Bloodless and opened.
When I caught up to them, they were putting her on a boat to Odessa. She was already on a stretcher, and there were a dozen of them. I watched them wheel her away.
[He'd wept and wept, the first time telling this story, but this time around he just sounds hollow, tired, distant.]
You can see what must have happened?
voice
Y'all had a mole.
[He says it a little blankly, like the obvious solution actually catches him by surprise. He'd been waiting for the triple-cross the whole time -- for the moment she would have pounced.]
Did you believe her or not? When she told you.
voice
[He's thought long and hard about this, about how he could have been so stupid.]
When you look back at everything that happened- this isn't the start of this story, nor is it the end of it- it's full of moments where someone gave the game away because they couldn't stand to believe the betrayal was real. Someone functioning at that level? There would be nowhere to go. Above them, there was no one left. British Intelligence would be lost from head to tail. So, it turns out, it was.
What happened to her was my fault. I- [He didn't mean this to be about this part of the story.] -I knew if I could get home and get this sorted, we might be able to trade for her. There'd be time while she was being debriefed, interrogated. For that reason, as much as any other, I made my way home, as quickly as I could with the full fury of London and Moscow trying to kill me, and not a clean passport to my name.
Re: voice
[The next part again seems obvious, but Omar remembers: Ricki had said he'd been out before he came here, so this is at least in part a real retirement story.
He doesn't think of Brandon, but it's a deliberate choice not to. Doesn't think about choices that make sense in the moment -- calling Control, letting the boy go down the block alone; doesn't think about Ricki's girl getting-- He doesn't let it happen. He takes a long, slow breath on his end, closing his eyes against it. He lets Ricki go on, and waits to hear if there's some kind of satisfaction yet to come.]
no subject
I landed in a public call box, and I dialled a long shot. The political position, you don't have it in the States, but you might consider it-- second in command to the Vice President? With a brief for liaising between that office and the various Intelligence bodies.
It's a tricky conversation to have. 'You don't know me. My name is Ricki Tarr. If you need confirmation of that, please contact Peter Guillam to the Circus, but no one else. I have reason to believe that there is a mole so highly placed in MI6 that every single one of us is at risk.' I'm not sure whether or not I was good, or if he was just a thoughtful and intelligent man who could sense in my voice the edge that I was up against. It was raining, and I don't remember ever having been so tired. I knew I was breaking the surface of a still pond, but I didn't know what waves I'd make, whether he'd believe me or not. I had no idea that Control was already dead, disgraced by his crack-pot assertions that the organization had, in fact, been compromised. That Smiley had been fired months previously.
Things began to move, but I just used the last of my cash to get a hot meal, and crawled through a back window into a squat, with boarded up windows in the attic that no one would be able to sneak a shot through. I collapsed, incautiously, inevitably, I just- I'd gone and fallen in love with her, you know, though I'm not sure when it happened. Certainly not during our days together. I think it was the guilt, and the memory of her hands.
[His eyes are shut, voice subdued. There are little flickers here and there, of pride for sounding the alarm, of amusement, at the London rain, but mostly he's just quiet.]
We call it being 'out in the cold,' operating so far gone, without resource or support or hope. Because my parish was always tropical, I never really got a sense of what they meant when they christened it that. Not being able to move from an unheated building, or to make too much noise during the day, even, for fear. I lasted there as long as I could, and then I sussed out the shape of the resistance, got a sense of who had been contacted to look into the problem. I took a gamble and came back in, to offer my services in exchange for their trading Irina out from wherever Moscow was working her.
no subject
Lord, man -- that point I think I'd be wondering if Mr. Vice-Vice President wasn't in the mix, too.
[And there are some things in the rest that are familiar to him. Omar is Omar, and he's lived in these squats mostly by choice these last few years, but even for the best stick-up boy there have been some lean times, or times he couldn't so much as look out the window safely. Years of unheated Baltimore winters. Love and guilt and the painful lingering of sense memory.
But the rest is exhausting even just to listen to. He's spent so much of his life looking over his shoulder, he's betrayed people and been betrayed, but there have still always been people he's known he could safely turn his back to. Even in Jessup, Butchie took care of him; even after Brandon, McNulty and Greggs had been a safe call. Kimmie is barely speaking to him these days, but he knows beyond a doubt that she'd still come if he needed her. He'd never thought of himself as taking all that for granted -- hard-won allies, every one -- but now he thinks of thinking to hide from all of them, and he just feels tired and sad.
He wishes they weren't doing this over the phone, suddenly, even if he doesn't much want Ricki to see what it's doing to his face. There's a rustle as he sighs and stands anyway, soft footsteps, a door opening and closing.]
Hold on.
[A knock at the door, a minute later.]
no subject
Got a little heavy on you there, didn't I?
[But he steps back, to let him quietly in.
The minute the door shuts behind him, Ricki takes what is (for him) a considerable step and moves in close.]
no subject
[He looks a little apologetic, though. He can understand why Ricki wouldn't want to talk about this in person, but--]
I just...
[He shakes his head. He doesn't know if he has a good excuse for coming, except that he wanted to, which is usually a good enough excuse for anything. He thinks for a second, then moves past Ricki into the room and goes to sit at the head of the bed, one leg propped up, the other on the floor.]
C'mere.
[He nods to the space in front of him; if Ricki sits there between his legs, leans back against him, they could be close without being face-to-face.]
no subject
Starting the story again takes about thirty seconds, where he first just gets used to resting here like this, picking idly at the comforter.]
There's more. Obviously. It went on for months, there were dozens of things. I missed a wedge, I had Peter Guillam land on me and split my lip for me for a hello, when I did come home. That stung, I don't like being hit when I can't hit back.
[Easier to jump back in there, than talk about Irina again.]
no subject
Until that, anyway -- then a flash of secondhand indignation goes through him, and he almost shifts over to look at him before remembering what the point of this is supposed to be.]
'ayo, what he hitting you for, man? Ain't that the man supposed to be taking care of y'all?
no subject
[Eyes slipping shut.]
He'd been dragged into a meeting by the remaining top four, and chewed up and down over how his man had taken Moscow money and been sent back with a plot to muddy the waters, make good Circus boys suspicious.
Smiley got him off me and turned him back around, but- I suppose I need to explain the really interesting thing about how this was set up. It wasn't just one man managing all this by himself. Our mole- codenamed Gerald, for the record, arranged with Moscow to run a source that we codenamed Witchcraft. Witchcraft would come to London and set up secure drops with all of the top Circus personnel. They fed him chickenfeed, and in exchange he gave them gold. Only Gerald, on our side, he snuck the crown jewels in with the scrap he was supposed to hand over. But it meant that of those four men, even though one was a traitor, all of them were committed to trying to have me killed, because they thought I was going to complicate Witchcraft's cover story. They could see why I believed there was a mole at the top of the circus, but they wanted me not to sound an alarm about it, because it'd compromise the Witchcraft connect.
It's like how you'll be willing to see a painting as counterfeit if you're given it for free, but if you pay dearly for it, you'll defend the authenticity practically to the death. My own people were lying to Peter, to get him to turn me in when he saw me next. I'm lucky all he did was let loose a little.
[Plucking again at the blankets.]
Peter and I come to blows rather a lot, anyways. It's- a communication style, or something. It was neither of our faults that this time I was in no shape for it.
no subject
Starting to be amazed any of y'all manage to get out of bed in the morning.
[And he sleeps with a gun next to his head, and it's not by choice that it's unloaded at the moment.]
no subject
Smiley and Mister Guillam staked out Witchcraft, and listened in until they heard Gerald approach him and start plotting about how they'd take care of me before the Circus men could get to me.
[Calmly, matter of factly, as though there weren't every chance in the world he could have been taken, tortured and killed at many steps along the way.]
They got their man. And that is the story of how I, Ricki Tarr, your date to movie night, somewhat saved British Intelligence from complete Russian infiltration.
[As he pats his pockets for cigarettes, then turns his head to give him a kiss on the cheek, before lifting himself up, crawling away to go find them a pack, a lighter.]
cw: gore/torture
[He leans back, watching him hunt.]
'Cause really, where y'all gonna go after something like that?
[There's a chapter of the story still missing, he knows, but he thinks in the same moment that he shouldn't -- doesn't want to -- ask. There are three things that could have happened to Irina, and if Ricki's not volunteering that part, that pretty much narrows it down to two. Either way, Ricki doesn't seem eager to tell him, and he's not all that eager to know. He's already thinking about a girl with cigarette burns on her skin, try as he might not to.
He'll owe him that story now, maybe, though the thought weighs heavy. He holds out a hand, gesturing for a cigarette.]
'ayo, what brought all this on, man?
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[His eyes finally, suddenly burn. He tosses the pack to Omar, and sits down on the edge of his desk, looking down, scrubbing a hand over his face, suddenly. Shit.]
I probably owe Anya some sort of fruit basket. Or a bottle of scotch. The baggage of mine she carries.
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Thought you was calling on me to pick you up.
[And he does feel a little bad -- he'd been picking at him instead, over something he's not even comfortable thinking too much about.]
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[Getting ahold of himself, he comes back to the bed, this time sitting in front of them, leg resting carefully over his, so they're still tangled. He reaches out to take the pack back, to brush hands.]
Nothing does pick me up, dust me off, leave me feeling human, quite like when you let me bend your ear.
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Sorry, though.
Make it up to you?
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Instead, he gives up fumbling for the lighter, which is lost somewhere in the blankets, and shifts back over, to settle tentatively, carefully against him.
Ricki doesn't really know how to lie against men. Is a little bit all elbows, but entirely warm of intention and manner. He reaches for Omar's cigarette, to steal a drag, and hums, settling slowly down.]
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