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Notes: Contributionfic. bonehed's request was for Jack/Vaughn, which is sort of tricky since: a.) I never really watched the show; b.) the show is now dead; c.) I only read eliade's Jack/Vaughn; d.) eliade isn't posting any more Jack/Vaughn; and e.) nobody else in the universe writes Jack/Vaughn. Let alone reads it. So this may be a little cap-in-hand, if you know what I mean. Still, I venture forward!

 

Matryoshka part 1-8; complete

The helicopter rose away a plume of gritty yellow dust, and Vaughn stumbled out of it coughing and squinting, thinking, Great start. Jack was waiting fifty feet off with the others, his face revealing nothing. He and Kastov were the only ones not wearing automatic weapons on straps across their chests. That was how you knew who the really big arms dealers were--they didn't actually carry visible arms.

"David Crouch," Jack said, as three guys sprang forward to give Vaughn a complimentary full-body frisk, and to relieve him of the briefcase. One of them actually seemed to take the opportunity to palm his ass, but he was so tired and spacey, he was probably imagining it. "My business partner. David, this is Sergei Kastov, about whom I've told you so much." His tone was pleasant, as if they were sitting down to drinks at the Hawk and Dove. "You brought the money?"

Kastov, to his dubious credit, didn't look away from Vaughn as the goons clicked open the briefcase. There was an appreciative murmur. Vaughn smiled.

"Zd`rravstvuite," he said, mangling his vowels. One or two of the men looked up, and Kastov raised a bushy eyebrow. "Sorry, that's all I learned from the Berlitz tape on the way over. I never made it past ninth-grade Spanish, so Russian's just...wow. Anyway, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Kastov. Lawrence tells me great things."

There was a slight pause, while Vaughn hung onto his grin and his outstretched hand, wondering if he'd played it too hard, or if any of them had caught the tremble in his fingers, or the sweat on his lip. Jack didn't move.

Then Kastov's heavy lips curved in a smile, and he reached for Vaughn's hand. If he registered the clamminess, he didn't show it. "Dobry 'den'," he replied. "Welcome to Moscow, Mr. Crouch. We will make you feel welcome, I hope."

Vaughn laughed and jerked a head back at the patch of dirt where the helicopter had disgorged him. "After that trip, I'm feeling pretty happy just to be back on solid ground. Fifteen hours in a 747 is hell, but I'd take it over another forty-five minutes of rattling around in that birdcage."

Kastov's expression darkened very slightly. "I apologize," he said. "Some of our aircraft are out of date. Left over, you know." His shrug conveyed the distasteful memory of the entire Cold War.

"David is a bad flier," Jack said, having picked up on the fact that Vaughn was selling something. "I'm sure the flight was perfectly smooth."

"It was hell," Vaughn said, plucking at the damp circles beneath his arms. "I thought the bottom was going to fall out and drop me into the river."

"David doesn't swim," Jack said in a confiding tone.

"I swim," he said, a little edgily. "I just don't like swimming for my life when I'm already airsick and I don't speak the language. I don't like the thought of drowning in a hail of ageing helicopter parts. I've got courtside tickets to a Knicks game in two weeks, and I'm not really big on forfeiting them to Spike Lee and Jack fucking Nicholson because I'm floating at the bottom of a goddamn river in Russia." He paused. Kastov and Jack were both looking at him with bemused expressions. He shook himself slightly, clapped his hands, and rubbed them together. "Anyway. Forget it, it's fine. I'm beat, any chance I could get a shower and a shot of vodka?"

Kastov, without looking away from Vaughn or changing his expression, said something in Russian. Several of his men looked amused, and one laughed. Jack slid them a sideways look.

"That will be fine," he said. "David, I hope you brought a change of clothes."

"I brought money," Vaughn said, smiling his best I'm-an-asshole smile. "You've got Ermenegildo Zegna here, right?"






"What went wrong?" Jack whispered, as soon as they were sure they were alone. It was in the Hugo Boss fitting room, where Vaughn was heaped on the bench in his shorts, clutching a stack of carefully folded trousers.

"Everything," Vaughn said. He dumped the pile of trousers to one side, and tried to steady his hands long enough to get the fly open on the top pair. "Chughtai got hit by a rival clan before we could make the buy. Total abort. We lost contact with base and had to get out on local transportation. We don't have enough to take Kastov down. New orders are to maintain cover, increase the deal, and sit tight while they sort through the shitstorm in Karachi."

Jack stared at him. Anyone else might be in shock; with Jack, Vaughn knew it was the look of rapid retrenchment and recalculation.

"All right," he said. And then, because he was Jack: "What else?"

"I'm cold," Vaughn said, with a tight smile. "I started getting chills on the flight over. We spent a night without mosquito nets, getting out."

Jack stared at him.

"They have quinine here, right?" Vaughn asked rhetorically, a weary parody of his cover persona, then wiped cold sweat off his upper lip and onto ten thousand rubles' worth of trouser leg.



Kastov, his national pride possibly aroused by Vaughn's comments about the helicopter, spared no expense in making them feel comfortable in Moscow. After the shopping trip, which Vaughn footed on David Crouch's American Express, they were bundled into a stretch SUV limo and wheeled through the city in the company of four gorgeous, non-English-speaking women and a fussy little Czech who pointed out St. Basil's, the Shukhov Tower, Stalin's Seven Sisters, and everything else, all in a monotonous, heavily-accented drone. They were handed breast-shaped glasses of champagne, and passed a generous mirror of cocaine. Incongruously, a television played BBC1 in silence beneath Vaughn's elbow. One of the women watched the closed captioning the whole time. Another tried sliding her hand beneath his knee, but took it back when he winced.

"It's a beautiful city," Vaughn conceded several times, in an effort to head the tour off at the pass. It didn't work; the Czech didn't even blink, just kept steamrollering ahead. It was freezing inside the car. It got dark, and one of the women buzzed down her window and sat enjoying the breeze, which was like ice water on Vaughn's skin. He sat rigid, trying not to watch as Jack sipped his drink and ran his hand up the leg of the woman sitting over on his side. Jack was a professional, Jack maintained cover. Jack didn't have malaria.

"It's a beautiful city," Vaughn murmured, fighting to focus his eyes, to swallow past the cotton in his mouth, to stop shivering. His new shirt was soaked beneath the arms. "It's a beautiful...fucking...city."

He woke up to someone hauling him upright roughly by the shoulders, shaking him like a kitten.

"Jet lag," he heard Jack say, and swam up to find Jack holding him upright on the seat of the limo. "And he's not much of a drinker." He added something in Russian that sounded derisive, and Vaughn heard a couple of men laugh. They were behind Jack, he realized--the side door of the limo was open, it was parked, it was night, Kastov's men were standing around out there. He raised a hand to his throbbing head, and tried to smile.

"Whoopsie," he said, slurrily. It sounded slowed-down to his own ears, like a record played at too few revolutions per minute. "I got...I fell asleep."

"You're drunk," Jack said, sounding pissed off. "Jesus Christ, David."

"I'm...I only had--" Vaughn paused and swallowed. "Oh shit, I'm going to--"

Jack hauled him out of the limo and heaved him onto the sidewalk, then stood watching while he puked into the gutter. Kastov's men whooped.

"You're pathetic," Jack said, when he was finally done. His tone was disgusted. "This is the last time you do this to me."

Vaughn wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, spat, and grimaced. When he pushed himself up onto his knees, sitting on his heels, he could see they were in a side street in the city. Restaurants and apartment buildings stood all around them, their windows dark. The women and the Czech were nowhere to be seen.

"Do you understand me," Jack said, not making it a question. The men had stopped laughing now, and were watching with interest.

Vaughn nodded slowly, dully, staring at the mess he'd made in the gutter. "Yes," he said. "Yes Lawrence, I understand you."

Jack said nothing. Slowly, Vaughn dragged himself to his feet. Every joint in his body felt filled with ground glass. He staggered to the limo and fell inside along the bench.

Jack said something quietly to the men, then got into the back and sat on the seat across from Vaughn, his feet planted wide apart and his hands coupled loosely in his lap. One of the men closed the door and got into the driver's seat.

Vaughn clung to consciousness all the way back to Kastov's estate, but Jack didn't say another word.








"We should abort," Jack said. "We can signal for extraction tomorrow at the earliest. They can have us out in a day, get you into a field hospital--"

Vaughn shook his head. Even bundled in all the sheets and blankets in his room, he was shivering so hard it was hard to speak clearly. "No."

"Malaria, left untreated, will put you in a coma or kill you." Jack's voice was clipped and flat, his tone businesslike. He didn't sound angry or disappointed--there was no way of telling how he felt about this, the wholesale destruction of the house of cards he'd been so delicately building over the last six months. "Kastov can be taken another way, by other agents."

"It won't kill me," Vaughn said, and swallowed hard to get control of his voice. "And it'll...come in cycles. I should have--" He paused, trying to think. "Two days, maybe three. After this." After he got through this first outbreak, if he got through it, if he didn't fall into the small percentage of victims who went Jack's happy route of death or coma. "I'll be sick a day or two, then okay again."

"I know how malaria works," Jack said. "You won't be okay, you'll be debilitated. You can't hide this, even if it doesn't get as serious as it could."

"I know."

"You're supposed to be an arms dealer based out of New York City, not an operative dropping in by way of Pakistan. Malaria doesn't fit the cover."

"I know." Vaughn tried not to go looking for frustration in Jack's tone. It was just a crappy roll of the dice, more of the same bad luck they'd had in Karachi, the kind that had dogged this whole operation for months. "Say I...say I was doing some deals in Central America. Guatemala. Nicaragua."

"I haven't mentioned any deals like that to Kastov. He trusts me." Jack's face was closed, his eyes flat. Somewhere behind there he was exploring every possible alleyway, every potential way out of this mess--but on the surface, he was the same impenetrable sociopath he always was. It was almost comforting. "New information like that will make us both seem unreliable."

"Say it's old. Say it's a recurrence."

Jack considered that in silence. Vaughn took a few seconds to close his aching eyes. The muscles in his neck and jaw throbbed miserably.

"This isn't the flu," Jack said at last, slowly. "This is a serious illness, Agent Vaughn. I can try to secure drugs to treat you, at least provisionally, but it's not a sure fix."

"It doesn't matter," Vaughn said, without hesitation. "Get what you can, we'll make it work. You can sell this to him."

Jack stared at the wall behind Vaughn's head, his lips slightly pursed. He'd left his suit jacket in his own room, and his tie was loose around his collar. Vaughn had the strange, passing thought that apart from the satellite relay, Jack was the only link he had with the United States, with Sydney and Weiss and the rest of the agency, with the real world. It felt like forever since he'd been there.

"Maybe," Jack said at last, and stood up. His eyes traveled over Vaughn's body, curled up tight and trembling under the quilts. "I can't stay here tonight; Kastov's men would notice."

"And here I was expecting Shiatsu," Vaughn said, trying to smile. Jack gave him a look.

"I'll check in in the morning."

"I'll be here."

Jack went out, closing the door quietly behind him. Vaughn rolled face-down into the sheets and stifled a moan, his whole body riddled with points of ice, thinking One goddamn mosquito net. One goddamn mosquito.







He spent the night in total misery, freezing and burning up, getting up twice to retch into the gleaming toilet. Dawn came just after six, a blue light in the windows and the sound of little birds chirping in Russian in the trees outside. He ran a hot bath and got into it, hissing in pain as the water touched his skin. It made him sweat, so he drank some more water, threw it up, and crawled back into bed. There he dozed fitfully, dreaming of crawling along the bottom of a black river, until the door to his room opened and startled him upright, his heart pounding and his head in a vise.

"You're awake." It was Jack, dressed in suit and tie, the nattiest arms dealer in all of Russia. "We're going shooting."

"I'm feeling..." The door was ajar; he could hear people, probably maids or housekeepers, moving around in the hallway. "I'm kind of hung over. I think I'll take a pass."

Jack made an unsurprised, unfriendly sound, and Vaughn remembered the night before, the little mise en scene they'd played out for Kastov's men. He was the wayward partner, he remembered. The shiftless, unreliable one. He yawned loudly and tried on a loose smile.

"I'm going to crash for a while longer," he informed Jack, who looked back at him, stony-eyed. "Squeeze some triggers for me, though, okay?"

"You're going to have to start pulling your weight," Jack said. He looked around the room in a cursory way, his nostrils curled. "You can start by opening a window. It smells like a mausoleum in here."

"That's what maids are for." Vaughn fell back into the sheets and pulled them up over his head, effectively dismissing Jack. After a brief pause, he heard footsteps on the carpet, and the door closed.

It was a strange feeling, being a petulant, bossy sub to Jack Bristow's angry, impotent dom. If he hadn't been in so much pain, if he hadn't been alone in a Russian mobster's guest room without so much as a Derringer to call his own, if he hadn't been thinking quite so much about death and coma and irreparable brain damage, Vaughn thought he might almost have gotten a kick out of it.








Jack came back in the late afternoon; Vaughn wasn't sure exactly when. He'd spent the day with the door firmly closed, weaving back and forth between the bed and the bathroom, drinking water from the tap and sweating it out or puking it up, his head feeling fainter and wispier with every trip. By the time he heard the characteristically brisk double knock on his door, he was starting to understand how this malaria thing could kill you. It just ate away at you from the inside, burned you up like a candle, and after a while you stopped being able to think clearly about your best interests, about hydrating and conserving energy--your body started to feel like a troublesome foreign object, not something you were directly connected to at all.

"Come in," he murmured. Jack was already opening the door. Vaughn happened to be staggering back to the bed, wearing only his sweat-soaked Hugo Boss boxer briefs. The bed was very far away.

"What--" Jack was there suddenly, grabbing his arm too hard, pulling his head around. Not just him, Vaughn realized--Kastov was standing in the doorway, watching in silence. Vaughn tried to twist away from Jack's hands, but got nowhere. "My God, what's wrong with you?"

"Nothing. I'm fine." He pushed ineffectually at Jack's shoulder. "Christ, Lawrence, let me go."

"You flew like this?" Jack had peeled up one of his eyelids; it felt like an icepick was being driven into his brain. "You're an idiot."

"I'm an idiot with six million dollars to spend on real estate and hand-held rocket launchers," he snapped, shoving hard and reeling away. "I'm an idiot with capital, Lawrence. I'm fine."

"You're having a relapse." Jack sounded truly, deeply pissed. His hands, Vaughn noticed, were clenched in fists at his sides. "You're not in New York, you cretin, you don't have your lapdog doctor on call here--"

"What's wrong with him?" Kastov asked flatly. He hadn't moved from the doorway.

"Nothing," Vaughn said immediately. "I'm fine. I'll be fine in a day or two. It's just a little...I used to travel more, when I was younger. In my salad days. I picked up a couple of bugs. Nothing major. You've got to take risks to make money, sometimes. I knew a guy in Boston who turned product in Africa, he got river-blindness--"

"Shut up," Jack said. Turning to Kastov, he added in a withering tone: "He has malaria."

Kastov's frown deepened very slightly.

"El Salvador," Vaughn said, with a shrug. "Never skip a dose."

"Malaria," Kastov repeated. His tone was ruminative.

Jack said nothing, and Vaughn realized it was really his ball to run with; Jack's part in this was limited to frustration and disapproval. "It's not as bad as you'd think," he said, not sure where he was taking it, feeling almost completely disengaged from what came out of his own mouth. "Most people get a cold once a year and feel like shit for a week. Malaria, it kicks your ass once every three, four, five years, only lasts a couple of days--it's not as bad as the common cold. It's worse if you're run down. I haven't had a colonic in ages, I'm pretty sure that's why it's happening now--"

"You are in Russia," Jack broke in, every word a cold ten-pound iron weight, dropped from a height. Vaughn recognized the cue, and let himself falter, look a little blank, and lick his lips.

"Well, yeah--"

"You need drugs," Jack said. "Whatever it is you take--Lariam? You can't just go to a drugstore for that, David."

"I have money," he said uncertainly. "We're not in fucking Swaziland, Lawrence."

"You're supposed to be testing product. It may have slipped your mind, but we're on a schedule. There's a shipment due in Manila two weeks from now, and Sergei and I had been discussing the possibility of a second shipment to follow--"

"Oh," Vaughn said, trying to brighten. "A second shipment, that's great, I'd been meaning to say, I've been getting interest in some of the newer ground-to-air ballistics--"

"You have malaria," Jack snapped. "You're sick and you're sloppy. I don't do business like this. Go back to bed."

"God, you're a dick," Vaughn said.

Jack walked out without a word, brushing past Kastov, who gave Vaughn a long, steady look, then stepped out and closed the door with a quiet click.






"Kastov can get chloroquine," Jack whispered. "Black-market, questionable quality. His man buys it, with our money."

"Deal," gasped Vaughn. His mouth was so dry his teeth hurt. Everything hurt. The world was a blur.

He felt a brief, warm pressure on his bicep--Jack's hand.

"You're going to be all right," Jack said. But it didn't seem like something he'd say--Jack Bristow dealt in certainties, and there was nothing certain about Plasmodium falciparum running rampant in your bloodstream--so maybe it was just a hallucination.



Black-market chloroquine didn't come cheap, it turned out. Jack took care of the details, but Vaughn overheard enough to get that United States taxpayers were going to be billed something on the order of three hundred dollars per dose of the stuff, not that he could bring himself to care all that much. He lay in bed as the afternoon darkened into evening, sweating and shivering and listening for the sound of cars pulling into the drive. Cars pulled in, but they were never the right one. He was starting to worry he'd slip into real brain fever, that he'd call Jack by his real name or say something about the op. What was the contingency plan for that, he wondered. If he stared babbling about the agency, would Jack cut and run, or was there a backup plan waiting in the wings?

He ground his teeth together to stop them from chattering, and tried to relax.

He must have missed the car when it arrived, because he was in a light doze when Jack knocked at his door. Vaughn lifted his head sharply, wincing. Jack was letting himself in, holding a black vinyl case, wearing khakis and a light windbreaker.

"How are you feeling?" He closed the door behind him and clicked on the light, turning the shade so it didn't shine in Vaughn's face. It was still too bright. Vaughn squinted and tried to sit up.

"About the same," he said, through a dry, puffy mouth. The water glass on his bedside table was empty; he'd been too exhausted to get up for more. "Did you get the stuff?"

"You're a very lucky man," Jack said, his tone just heavy enough that Vaughn realized they were keeping cover for this conversation. There might be someone in the hall. "This isn't your usual cocktail, but it should do the trick."

"Awesome," Vaughn said, sinking wearily back into the pillow. He watched blearily as Jack zipped the case open and selected one of a series of capped hypodermic needles. "Hey, could you put a little vitamin B12 in there while you're at it? I've been feeling kind of bleah."

"You're, what, 175 pounds?" Jack was eyeing him, gauging the level of the syringe.

"Give or take."

Jack uncapped the syringe, squirted out a bit of the stuff, then gave him a steady look. Questionable quality, Vaughn thought. The needle looked like a larger bore than he was used to seeing in American hospitals.

"It's a deep muscle stick," Jack said, taking a disposable alcohol wipe from the kit, and ripping it open. "Give me your arm." He wiped a spot on the back of Vaughn's bicep. "Every six hours until you recover."

Vaughn swallowed. "Okay."

"I hope you remember this," Jack said. "Maybe you'll actually learn something from the experience."

"I doubt it," Vaughn said, then caught his breath and went rigid as Jack stuck the needle into his arm. It hurt like hell. Then Jack pressed the plunger, and Vaughn couldn't stop his throat from making a small, choked sound. Jack's eyes flicked up to his face, for just a second. Then he looked back at the site, watching carefully until the plunger was all the way in. In a second he had the needle out, and another alcohol swab over the spot.

"Hold that," he said, and when Vaughn's hand was slow to move, he took it firmly and placed it over the swab. "Breathe."

Vaughn sat still, breathing. Wondering when was the last time he'd gotten this worked up over a fucking shot, for God's sake.

"Ibuprofen," Jack said, taking a couple of Cyrillic-printed foil packs out of his pocket. He ripped one open, shook out three pills, and was about to hand them over when he realized the water glass was empty. With a sigh, he got up and carried it to the bathroom. "It'll help with the fever, and some of the joint pain."

"Good idea," Vaughn said, a little woozily. "Why didn't we do that before now?"

"Because you didn't deserve it," Jack said coldly, bringing him the water and pills. "You're a jackass, David. The next time you pull something like this on a business trip, I'm going to turn my back and let you swing."

Vaughn raised his aching arm to take the pills from Jack's palm, and chased them with the water. It was cold and delicious. He drank half the glass while Jack zipped up the kit, leaving the empty hypo on the bedside table.

"That's set to the amount you need in six hours," he said, nodding at it. "Prime the next one to the same level before you inject it."

"What," Vaughn said. "I have to do this myself? You're not going to do it?"

"I'm not your nurse," Jack said, and walked out.






The ibuprofen sent him back to sleep, and when he woke up to the beep of his cell phone clock alarm six hours later, he was bone-tired but not as cold, not as sore. He fumbled with the light and the alcohol swab, primed a second syringe, and injected himself, this time in the thigh. It burned more than the first, and after he took the needle out he stared at the site, at the single drop of blood welling out, thinking of all the things that could be in black-market Russian chloroquine.

With shaking hands, he put the syringe on the night table, set his alarm for eight in the morning, and fell back into the sheets.







After the eight o'clock dose, he dragged himself to the bathroom and stood under a hot shower for fifteen minutes. That was enough work to send him straight back to bed. The sheets stank of sweat. He didn't care. He fell asleep to the sound of birds singing merrily outside, cheeriup cheerio cheeriup cheerio, and far off in the distance, the flat, methodical pock pock pock of a handgun.



When he woke up again it was early afternoon, the sun slanting through the window and falling across the rich red carpet and the foot of the bed. For the first time in days, he was warm. Almost hot, actually. He was flat out on his belly, four points to the compass, naked. He was thirsty.

He raised his head and reached for the glass on the nightstand, then froze. Sitting in the chair beside the bed was one of Kastov's men. He was awake, silent, staring at Vaughn. The first thing through Vaughn's mind was, Jack. They've caught on, they know it's an op. Where's Jack? Nowhere good, that was for sure.

Still, he had enough presence of mind to remember the first rule of covert ops: the cover is your best defense. Only abandon the cover as a last resort.

"Hey," he croaked, blinking and licking his lips. "What's...who the hell are you?"

The man said nothing. He was tall and lean, with dark brows and olive skin, curly black hair, alert black eyes. He was maybe twenty-five. Not armed, as far as Vaughn could see. That was something.

"Where's Lawrence?" Vaughn tried, abandoning the water, and reaching instead for the sheet. The man gave him a strange, intent look, and reached out too. He pulled the sheet off the bed and dropped it on the floor. Vaughn paused.

"Look, I don't know what you think you're doing," he started to say, but the man interrupted him by standing up and moving to sit on the edge of the bed. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and a pair of heavy cotton trousers. Vaughn still couldn't see the outline of a gun on him, but that didn't mean he wasn't carrying one. "Wait, hang on--"

The man smiled, reached out, and ran his hand down Vaughn's back to his ass.

Vaughn rolled over and slid out of the bed on the opposite side, breathing hard. His heart was pounding, his brain spinning in overdrive. "No sale," he said. "Nyet. Get the fuck out of here."

The man laughed and lay back across the bed, fingering the pillowcase. For the first time, Vaughn realized that the guy probably wasn't all there. There was something about his smile, the look in his eyes--sociopaths had that look. Particularly when they were in a position of power over someone who couldn't fight back.

"Where's Lawrence?" Vaughn asked again, trying to make his voice firm and authoritative. The man drew his knees up to his chest, then rolled sideways and backwards neatly to land on his feet next to Vaughn. He moved like a very fit, very strong person.

"Not interested," Vaughn said, backing away, but every movement he made was heavy and clumsy, all his muscles too fatigued to fire when he asked them to. Everything was happening too fast, and at the same time too slowly--he thought around the bed, and his body considered the idea and debated it a bit and then said, Okay. Here we go.

The man whistled, a low wolf-whistle, his eyes on Vaughn's dick. Then, with shocking speed, he lashed out an arm and caught Vaughn around the throat, yanked him close, and planted a cold, wet, sucker-like kiss on his cheek, just below his eye. At the same time, his free hand closed around Vaughn's groin, rubbing painfully hard. His own dick jabbed at Vaughn's hip.

Half-strangled, Vaughn pulled his face free and maneuvered until he could jam his elbow into the man's gut. The grip on his balls loosened, and he made it three steps toward the door before the guy tackled him again from behind, laughing in a high, near-silent whine. He wrapped his arms around Vaughn's chest and belly, nuzzled his throat, and frog-marched him around the bed and then back onto it, legs spread. Vaughn's face was mashed into the mattress, his arms jerked behind his back. He writhed, and the guy ground into him, his erection hard as a broomstick against Vaughn's ass.

Jesus Christ, Vaughn thought. I'm going to get raped.

He let out a strangled yell, hoping for someone passing in the hall, someone who'd hear him and knock, maybe even Jack but it didn't matter who, a maid, whoever. The man bit his ear hard, and Vaughn jerked his head back, trying to catch him in the nose, but too slow. Now he could feel the guy fumbling with the fly of his pants. What the fuck, Vaughn's mind kept saying, in a loose, dazed repeat. What the fuck, what the fuck is going on here?

The guy's zipper was down, his dick was actually out and pressing against Vaughn's leg, before Vaughn got his right hand free long enough to grab one of the hypos off the bedside table. He swung it hard and plunged it into the first thing he could reach--the guy's side, probably. There was a yell. He'd already drawn back and swung again--this time, he got the guy's arm, and felt the needle break off. The guy howled. His weight lifted, and Vaughn flipped over, grabbed the second syringe, and got it up fast. When the guy turned his attention from the spike in his arm, he found himself staring at the second syringe at very close range, right in front of his eye.

They both froze.

"Get out," Vaughn said.

The guy stared at him. There was a lot of crazy in his eyes--so much that Vaughn was momentarily afraid this wasn't going to end it, that he was going to try to knock the needle away, and Vaughn was going to have to blind him, and Jesus Christ, this op had already gone bad enough ways, the last thing he needed was aqueous humor nightmares.

"Get out," Vaughn said again, nodding at the door. He could have said it in Russian, but David Crouch didn't speak Russian. Only abandon cover as a last resort.

The man licked his lips, gave Vaughn a last, lengthy once-over, then raised his hands in surrender and backed off the bed. He'd left his jacket on the chair; he picked it up and carried it out with him, closing the door behind him.

Vaughn got off the bed and clicked the lock on the door handle, then found some clothes and got dressed as fast as he could.








Jack's knock came around four o'clock.

"Who is it?" Vaughn called, from where he was sitting at the head of the bed, half-dozing and waking up with a start every time he got close to real sleep. He was holding an empty hypo in one hand, and there was a spare on the table beside him.

"It's me," Jack said. "Lawrence."

Vaughn was already rolling off the bed--he knew Jack's knock, he'd only checked out of habit. He unlocked the door and opened it, the hypo still in his hand, just in case Jack was surrounded by Kastov's men. It had crossed his mind already that the same thing might have happened to Jack too--but no, Jack was severe and unrumpled in his light coat and khakis. He was frowning slightly.

"You locked the door," he said, walking in and looking around. He was holding a covered plate in one hand, and Vaughn realized, through a kind of fog, that he hadn't eaten anything in forever.

"I had a visitor," he said, glancing into the empty hallway and closing the door, then locking it again. Jack had already taken in the state of the room--the broken-off stub of the hypo by the bed, the tangled sheets--and had turned to look at him, expressionless as always. "One of Kastov's guys. He was feeling...friendly."

Jack said nothing. He might have been a statue. Man With Plate.

"How was your day?" Vaughn asked, falling onto the foot of the bed.

"Are you all right?" Jack asked, still staring at him. Vaughn waved a hand.

"Still pure," he said, then laughed hoarsely. "Although at this point I'd probably sell my virtue for whatever you've got under there." He nodded at the covered plate. Jack looked at it, then turned and set it carefully on the bedside table, beside the syringes.

"Was he acting under orders?" he asked, picking up the broken syringe and examining it. Vaughn leaned over and pulled the napkin off the plate. Piroshke and onions. It smelled like heaven.

"I don't know. He seemed...unbalanced."

"Kastov has some psychotics," Jack said, considering the syringe. "I wouldn't put it past some of them to try something on their own."

Vaughn, his mouth full of potato dumplings, didn't comment.

"We need at least five more days," Jack said quietly. "There's a shipment coming from Karachi on Wednesday. If we can stay in that long, we think we can connect him to the nukes. "

"I'm good to stay," Vaughn said. "The drugs are working."

Jack stood holding the syringe, watching Vaughn eat. After a moment he said absently, "Don't wolf that."

"I'm not."

"Which one of Kastov's men was it?"

Vaughn swallowed a lump of delicious, glutinous dumpling. "Young, mid-twenties. Six feet, maybe a hundred and ninety pounds. Dark hair." He gave a wry half-smile. "Currently has a hypodermic needle stuck in his right bicep."

Jack looked again at the stub in his hand, fingered the plunger, then turned and tossed it into the trash. "I'll take care of it." His voice was cold, and Vaughn felt a flash of defensiveness before he realized that arguing blame with Jack Bristow was a quick ticket to aneurysm.

"Take care of it how, exactly?"

"I'll have a talk with Kastov," Jack said. "He's a reasonable man. For an arms dealer." He gave Vaughn a flat, completely artificial smile, and opened the door. "Lock this."

"For what it's worth," Vaughn said, getting up wearily.

He finished the dumplings and took another shower before bed, trying not to argue it out in his head--his fault, not his fault, over and over again. By the time he fell asleep he was only sure of one thing: Jack Bristow was pissed off, and sooner or later, somebody was going to be in a world of pain.



Some small part of Vaughn's mind had been expecting to wake up the next morning and find Kastov's psycho would-be rapist nailed to the door of his room--Jack was quiet about these things, but nobody did lethal quite like him. And some small part of Vaughn's mind would have been pretty pleased by that outcome. He'd slept better than he had in the last few days, but that was only because he hadn't been sleeping at all lately. It had been a long night, waking up over and over and listening for sounds at the door, shots on the property, breath in the darkness beside him. Dawn seemed to take forever to arrive, and when it did, he was exhausted.

He got up, took a quick shower, shaved the stubble off his face, and shot himself in the leg with more chloroquine. He was getting used to the burn now, but every injection site had a bruise. Intramuscular was like that, he remembered. It hurt.

He was dressed in a new Hugo Boss shirt and trousers, sliding his feet into new Hugo Boss shoes, and wondering whether there was going to be breakfast before the gun show today, when Jack knocked at the door.

"Who is it," Vaughn called flatly, already going to open up.

"Me," Jack said. Vaughn opened the door and Jack stepped in, gave him a cool once-over, then nodded. "You look better."

"I'm okay," Vaughn said, realizing that Kastov was there too, standing behind Jack. His eyes went up and down Vaughn, hard and appraising.

"Good," Jack said. He reached out and cupped the back of Vaughn's head, pulled him close, and kissed him briefly on the lips. "No more visitors?"

Vaughn's heart gave a great, single whump, like a car kicked off a jack. He kept his eyes on Jack's. "No."

"Sergei and I had a talk. I'm afraid some of his men didn't understand the situation."

Vaughn forced himself to look at Kastov. Up close, Jack smelled of aftershave and toothpaste. His lips had been warm. The pressure of the kiss lingered against Vaughn's mouth.

"My apologies," Kastov said, after a brief pause. Jack had turned to look at him, Vaughn realized. It was not a friendly look. It was a look that spoke of barely-contained violence, of an impersonal, obliterating avalanche held in check. It was a look Vaughn had seen on Jack's face before, in any situation in which Jack had seen Sydney threatened. It said: You will make this right, or I will not just kill you, I will erase you completely from the history of the planet. I will make you disappear.

Kastov cleared his throat and added, "It was a mistake. The man has been...disciplined."

"Okay," Vaughn said softly. He could feel Jack's gaze turning to him. It changed, softened--from the corner of his eye, he could tell that Jack was looking at him with frustrated fondness, with affection. It was one of the creepier sensations he'd felt. Vaughn tried to smile. "Okay, no big."

"No big," Jack repeated, as if Vaughn had said something insightful. "That's right, it isn't. And it's over. David, get your coat. We've got product to test." He sounded brisk and forthright, like a man who'd forgiven an offense but not forgotten it.

"What's on the menu?" Vaughn asked, shrugging into his Hugo Boss jacket. "And I ask that literally as well as figuratively. Any chance of getting a bite to eat before we hit the targets?"

"There's food at the range," Kastov said.

"Al fresco dining," Vaughn said, slipping a syringe into his pocket. "Picnicking with guns. I like the way you think, Sergei."

"And you say I never take you anywhere romantic," Jack said, smiling coldly, holding the door open for Vaughn to walk out.







The range was at the foot of Kastov's estate, and it was fully loaded, both in terms of food and weaponry. Vaughn waved off Kastov's offer of a customized SIG P250 ("Stippled grip, excellent sights,") and installed himself in a plastic chair beside the grill. A guy was turning strips of bacon and slabs of what turned out to be chicken, once there was some of it on a plate in front of Vaughn. It came with a sliced tomato and a mimosa. What the hell, Vaughn thought. This mission can't possibly get any weirder. He drank his drink, ate his seared meat, and watched Jack and Kastov blow the shit out of a bunch of paper targets.

There were racks of assault rifles on both sides of the range, plus a series of shelves for handguns. The crew-served stuff was at the far end, facing a long stretch of torn-up earth and blackened tree stumps. Counting idly, Vaughn made it four Javelins, a couple of Stingers, and some foreign models he didn't recognize. Boys and their toys, he thought a little woozily, and sipped his drink.

"It fires high," Jack was saying, frowning at the targets as they reeled in on their lines. "That's why I don't like a Glock."

"You aim low," Kastov replied, shrugging and emptying his clip. "Try the HK."

Jack studied his target, which was perforated neatly in and around the center, with a frown. Vaughn found himself staring at Jack as he did it. He'd had some time to figure out what was going on--he wasn't feeling quite as deer-in-the-headlights as he'd been in the bedroom, when Jack had kissed him. Obviously, Jack had told Kastov they were together. Because he was Jack, he must have had a reason to do it. So far, Vaughn wasn't really seeing the logic, but his job, as far as he could tell, was just to play along and not make any sudden moves.

He stayed put for an hour while Jack and Kastov alternately shot and talked. It was bizarre, how comfortable they seemed together. They might have been a couple of guys at the agency, spending a Sunday afternoon at the range to keep their shooting skills up, talking shit about their grips. Jack had spent months cultivating Kastov, Vaughn remembered. He trusts me--that's what Jack had said.

Finally they put the guns away, took off the goggles and headphones, and strolled back toward him, still in conversation. It was Russian now, and while Vaughn could make out the gist, he wasn't getting every word. He heard his own name, heard Jack say something about New York, good-for-nothing, but... His tone said explicitly what he didn't say in words--you don't choose who you fall for. Kastov made a non-committal sound.

"David," Jack said, looking up as they reached the table where they sat. "How are you feeling?"

"Fantastic," he said. "Never better. This is quite a set-up, Sergei. I have to say, I'm impressed."

"Thank you," said Kastov.

"Maybe I can squeeze off a few," Vaughn went on, "after lunch. I'm interested in that SIG you mentioned, and I noticed--" He waved at the gun racks. "You've got quite a collection of rifles. I've been meaning to try the Chinese type 81 for a while now."

"You're drinking," Jack said, looking at Vaughn's half-empty glass. Vaughn looked at it too.

"Just a mimosa," he said.

"You don't shoot and drink," Jack said, frost edging his tone. "Especially not on chloroquine."

"Words to live by," Vaughn said, nodding. "You're a wise man, Larry."

"You're not shooting," Jack said flatly. "If you want to be useful, you can review the figures for the first Manila shipment."

"And if I don't want to be useful?" Vaughn asked, smiling handsomely.

"Then go home." Jack turned and walked back to the range. Kastov gave Vaughn an inscrutable look, then followed.

Vaughn paused, then drained his glass and slumped back in his chair, trying to remember what his job was, trying not to feel pissed off.







He ended up compromising, swiping the folder from the bag Jack had left on one of the chairs and getting a lift back up to the house with a flunky. He leafed through the figures on the way--it was a big shipment. A lot of handguns and semi-automatics, headed for the streets of New York City and Chicago and Oakland and, increasingly, for smaller cities with growing pains. He was only seeing part of it, too--the other part was the drugs, which Kastov didn't deal in directly, but which were a reliable underpinning to the gun trade. Drugs got in everywhere, like cockroaches. His black-market chloroquine was a good example--in most cities of the world you could get anything you wanted, if you knew who to ask and had the money to pay for it.

The walk up the drive and through the house--palatial, he noticed absently--tired him out, and he headed straight for his room. The door was ajar; he opened it with one finger and scared the wits out of the maid, who'd already made up the bed and was just putting a vase of peonies and kangaroo paws on the desk.

"Sorry," he said, grinning, holding up his hands to show he was harmless. "Sorry, didn't realize you were in here."

She smiled and turned the flowers to catch the light, then stepped past him and disappeared down the hall. He went in, closed the door and locked it, then took a look around the room. His travel clothes had been dry-cleaned and hung up in the armoire. There were fresh towels in the bathroom, a fresh robe, clean glasses, bottles of mineral water. He poured himself a glass and checked the time; forty-five minutes to the next shot. He was bone-tired, ready for a nap.

Before he lay down, he went to the desk and inhaled the flowers, rubbing the petals of one of the peonies between his forefinger and thumb. The bug was planted deep in the heart of the flower, a little black spot hardly bigger than his little thumbnail.

He went back to the bed, lay down, and set his cell phone alarm to go off in forty minutes.



Jack knocked in the late afternoon, after Vaughn had taken his shot and lapsed back into sleep. Vaughn shuffled to the door and opened it.

"You woke me up," he said in a haranguing tone, getting the first word in before Jack could say anything that might compromise them. "God, I could sleep for a week."

"You'd be less trouble if you did," Jack said, closing the door. His eyes fastened on Vaughn's face, and Vaughn looked pointedly at the flowers. Jack walked over and glanced into them, then started making a slow, methodical tour of the room, running his fingers under the windowsills and bookshelves. "Are you planning on doing any work at all? Or is this just another one of your many vacations?"

"I was practically raped yesterday." Vaughn sank onto the bed and pulled the pad of paper from the night table. There was a pencil in the drawer. "I can't have a day to recover?"

"I told you, that's over."

"Things are just over because you say they are, I guess. It must be nice to be so simple-minded." Vaughn wrote, SAT RELAY? and turned the paper toward Jack, who glanced at it and gave a guarded nod.

"They're over because I take action," Jack said. "I'll sleep here tonight. You've made it clear you can't be trusted on your own."

"Fuck you," Vaughn said absently, writing. MSG FROM KARACHI? Jack, patting the top of the bedframe, read it and shook his head. Vaughn took the paper back with a sinking feeling. "Who said you could sleep here, anyway? I don't remember inviting you."

"I don't need an invitation," Jack said, and his tone was so flat, his response so immediate, that Vaughn felt momentarily impressed: Jack was alarmingly good at the role of possessive, arrogant, slightly psychotic older man. Then Vaughn was more than impressed, he was astounded, because Jack was turning away from the bedframe, gripping the back of Vaughn's neck, and kissing him. Casually, but firmly. With tongue.

Vaughn froze, thinking incoherently and simultaneously, This is the second guy who's kissed me in two days, what the hell?, and Jack Bristow, you psycho, I'm going to break a hockey stick over your head when we get out of here, and I can't break a hockey stick over Jack's head, he'd KILL me, and last of all, Jesus Christ-- Because Jack was seriously kissing him, pushing his lips apart and licking inside his mouth, holding him still at the jaw and shoulder, bearing down on him with heavy intention, like a cougar clambering over its prey, a dire animal weight that said, Give up now. For maybe the second time in his not-totally-inconsiderable career of kissing people, Vaughn was knocked windless.

Then Jack broke it off and went back to checking the underside of the night table for bugs. Vaughn sat where he was, blinking.

"In case you forgot," Jack said casually, "you're the one who always comes crawling back to me. We're on a schedule here, so why don't we just cut out the middle and go straight to the part where you're on your knees."

Vaughn opened his mouth, then closed it. His brain gave him a nervous shrug. Don't ask me.

"I--" Jack turned toward him, and Vaughn flinched.

"You what?"

They stared at each other. Vaughn searched Jack's face for something--some confirmation that they were on the same page here, that this was cover, for the benefit of the bugs. Anyone else would have given it to him--a slight narrowing of the eyes, a miniscule nod. Jack Bristow was an iceberg. He stared at Vaughn like the disgusted daddy he was claiming to be, like they'd been through this fifty times before, handsome young blowhard versus rich, glacial veteran, the leash always stretching out and snapping tight in exactly the same place.

Sitting on the edge of the bed with his pad and pencil in his hands, Vaughn felt cowed. He also felt a supremely humiliating heat start up in his groin. It sent a flicker of panic up his spine to his reptile brain, the one part still apparently working right. Maybe Jack could play this game all the way through without fucking it up, but Vaughn was pretty sure he couldn't. And the last thing in the world he wanted to feel was...this. Or anything related to this. For Jack Bristow. Jesus Christ.

"I hate you," he said, loading his tone with petulance and dropping his gaze to the pad. Quickly, he wrote, HOW MANY BUGS? Jack read it, and held up two fingers, then pointed at the door and held up all five, wiggling them to indicate an incalculable number. "You're such a prick," Vaughn went on, scribbling fast. SINCE WHEN? If they'd been bugged before, when they'd mentioned Karachi, they were fucked. Jack read the pad, read his mind, and shook his head. "You think you're Jeff Stryker," Vaughn sniped, hardly thinking about what he was saying. "You're old, Lawrence. You can't keep up. Not without a shitload of Viagra, and frankly, the chemical romance is wearing thin." HOW LONG TO 2ND SHIPMENT?

He held it out, but realized after a second that Jack wasn't looking at the pad, he was staring at Vaughn. His face was open in a way Vaughn had never seen it before--he looked interested and engaged, the way Vaughn had once seen him look at a cardboard box that had turned out to contain a live cobra. Vaughn stared back, trying to keep poker face but feeling heat rise in his cheeks. For fuck's sake, Jack had just handed him the role of sniveling cocksucker, he wasn't going to just take that lying down.

Jack's eyes dropped to the pad, and he held up five fingers. Five days. Christ. That meant getting sick again, with bugs in the room this time. It suddenly seemed like a better idea to have Jack sleep over, although the actual thought of Jack Bristow lying in bed beside him was spine-chillingly, mind-blowingly wrong.

"Anyway," he said, easing the page off the pad and getting up, heading for the bathroom. "I left my kneepads at home, so you're out of luck. Maybe you can get Kastov to hook you up with his pet psychopath. You'd be a cute couple." In the bathroom, with the door closed, he burnt the page and flushed the ashes. Then he stood with his hands braced on the sides of the sink, staring at himself in the mirror, trying to see around corners.







Jack was still there when he came back out in boxer briefs and a Hugo Boss T-shirt, his hair damp from the shower. The housekeepers had brought Jack's bags, and his suits had been hung in the armoire beside Vaughn's. His cell phone--Lawrence Newsome's cell phone--was charging on the night table next to David Crouch's. Jack himself was sitting at the desk, right next to the bugged flowers, going over the figures in the folder Vaughn had brought back from the firing range. His jacket was hung precisely over the back of the chair.

"Make yourself at home," Vaughn muttered, throwing his towel over the open armoire door and shuffling to the bed. He was cold again, he realized. There was sweat on the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. He crawled into the bed, wrapped himself in the blankets, and listened to the sound of Jack's pen scrawling notes, carefully accounting for every make and model, every dollar and ruble, every detail of a deal that two fictional men were making with a non-fictional lowlife for a shipment of guns that hadn't arrived yet, prelude to a warhead that might or might not exist.







He woke up with no idea where he was. There was a warm hand on his arm, a light shining beside him. Jack Bristow, in a white T-shirt, was framed by it.

"You need another shot," he said. He was holding a syringe. Chloroquine, Vaughn remembered. Malaria. He had it.

"J--" he started to say, and Jack covered his mouth.

"David," he said quietly, very close to Vaughn's ear. "You're getting sick again. I'll give you this one, all right?"

Vaughn nodded, and there was a hot, deep pain in his left arm, then a slow burn that made him dig his forehead into the mattress.

"Good," Jack said, dropping something with a plastic click. "That's it, you're done."

Vaughn pushed Jack's hand off his mouth. David and Lawrence. That was them--Jack and him. They were David and Lawrence. He was David. Jack was a professional. Jack maintained cover at all times.

"I'm going to be sick," Vaughn murmured. The chloroquine--he could feel it snaking through his bloodstream, rich and dirty. Impure, probably cut with saline or God knew what else. It wasn't enough to kill the parasites. His stomach clenched. Jack was hauling him upright, shoving him across the rich red carpet to the bathroom. They made it just in time. He shoved Jack away and crouched for a long time, more and less miserable in irregular, spasmodic cycles.

When he was finally through, he flushed and dragged himself up to the sink, drinking water in little cold sips from his fingers. He was freezing, soaked in sweat. Jack was there again, wrapping him in a bath towel and shutting off the faucet.

"Lawrence," Vaughn said, on the way back to the bed. Proving that he remembered, that he could maintain cover. "Lawrence, shit, I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Jack got in bed behind him, put an arm around him, and felt his forehead. It was the weirdest thing in the world. Jack Bristow was hugging him. No--Lawrence was hugging David, that was it. That made more sense. When he thought of it that way, Vaughn could relax a little, let the warmth of Jack's body come through the towel and his cold, wet clothes. It felt good. Jack's arm felt good around him, bracing him against the shivers running through him.

"Lawrence," Vaughn said again, partly to remind himself, partly because the name itself was hypnotic. "Lawrence."

"Yes, David?" It was Jack Bristow's voice, but gentler than he'd ever heard it. Vaughn frowned. His head pulsed sickly.

"What a mess," he murmured, for David and himself, for Lawrence and Jack. For all of them. "I'm sorry this is such a fucking mess."

"It's okay," Jack said again. He reached across Vaughn's head, and Vaughn caught a whiff of his smell--faint cologne and soap and toothpaste. The light clicked out. Vaughn sank.







"David's relapsing again," Vaughn heard Jack say to someone at the door of the bedroom. "It's unusual--the drugs generally take care of it the first time around." There was no intonation to his voice, but even Vaughn, half-awake and hardly aware, could read the subtext: The drugs are bad.

"I'm sorry to hear it," said someone. Kastov. He didn't sound sorry at all. Vaughn closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, Jack and Kastov were standing at the side of the bed, looking down at him. The light in the window was right for mid-morning. Kastov was wearing a canvas shooting jacket with cartridge pockets on the front. He was chewing something, looking at Vaughn the way a farmer might look at a sick cow.

"Maybe the travel," he said. "Dehydration. Fatigue."

"He won't be able to return to New York until he recovers," Jack observed, as if it were of no real concern to him whether Vaughn ever got on another plane in his life--but surely Kastov didn't want a permanent houseguest.

Kastov chewed for a minute. "That's unfortunate," he said.

Over Kastov's shoulder, Jack's face hardened, almost imperceptibly.








"How are you feeling?" Jack asked, scribbling. Vaughn unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth and croaked, "Like shit."

C-QUINE SUSPECT. SHOULD STOP. Jack wrote in neat block capitals, which was unsurprising. Vaughn considered the idea of stopping the shots, and shook his head.

"Are you taking the ibuprofen?" Jack asked. Code for: you can ride this out with Advil.

Vaughn closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it out. "It doesn't work," he said. "I'll be fine. I just need..." He didn't know what he needed. His brain felt like it was bubbling inside his skull.

"You should take the ibuprofen," Jack said.

Fuck you, Vaughn thought. Then: I hate Russia.








"Shut up," Jack said. He was holding Vaughn's face, his fingertips pressed to Vaughn's cheeks, digging in painfully. "Shut up, David. You're sick."

"I'm sick," Vaughn repeated, trying to figure out where he was. One side of his face was in light, the other in darkness. "I have malaria. God, fuck off."

"David. Listen to me. You're very sick."

"I know that, I keep telling you that--"

"And you're talking in your sleep. You're upset. You have to calm down." Jack's voice was low, insistent, hypnotic. "You have to calm down, David. Stop fighting me."

"I'm not fighting you."

"Yes, you are."

Blearily, Vaughn realized he was curled in a ball, his fists up around his face. Soaked in cold sweat. He couldn't remember ever feeling this bad.

"Oh shit," he said, realization crashing in, along with a wallop of pain in his head and down his spine. He'd been talking in his sleep--what had he said?

"You're going to be fine."

"I'm okay," Vaughn muttered, thinking, I'm going to die. He wanted Jack to know he was back in his head again, he remembered the cover, he was in control. "I'm okay, Lawrence. I'm fine."

"Come here." Jack pushed at his knees, and gradually, unwillingly, Vaughn let them sink away from his chest. His whole body hurt--muscle tension, the ache of the disease. He was expecting Jack to straighten him out, tuck him in, and roll away. Instead, Jack rolled on top of him. His body was warm and heavy, clad in a cotton T shirt and boxers. He braced his elbows on either side of Vaughn's head and stared down into his face. Vaughn, taken aback, stared up at him.

"Wh--" he started to say, and Jack cut him off with a kiss to his forehead.

"You are such an idiot," Jack said, his voice rough and guttural, his head dropping to nuzzle Vaughn's neck. "I wish to God I'd never met you."

Vaughn gave a weak laugh, and raised his hands to hover over Jack's back, not sure whether he was supposed to pat or rub or push away. Touching Jack was starting to feel almost normal, a full circle through surrealism, all the way back to Kansas with a melted watch in his pocket. "But you did."

"I did," Jack confirmed. "And it's been like this ever since then. You use me and I let you. Because--" He let that hang, and Vaughn blinked at the ceiling, feeling--what, guilty? Kind of. It was completely bizarre, but he felt guilty for all of it, the shitty way David treated Lawrence, the nasty comments he'd made the night before, the fact that Lawrence was clearly the loser here, the one really on the short string, no matter what he said during daylight hours. David was young and hot, a sleazy charmer, and he didn't give a fuck about Lawrence, he was just using him for money and probably drugs, cheating on him without even bothering to hide it--

"Okay," Vaughn whispered, his hands stilling on Jack's back. "Whoah. I'm a little bit--" Confused.

"You're sick," Jack said, with just enough emphasis to convey many possible meanings: You're a liability, so shut up. You're exhausted, it's understandable. You're tired, you're sick, I love you, why don't you love me back?

"You're an arms dealer," Vaughn said hopelessly, grabbing for some shred of cynicism to keep him afloat.

Jack answered that with irrefutable: he kissed Vaughn gently on the mouth. It was the slowest, tenderest kiss Vaughn had ever felt. It made him close his eyes and open his lips and moan. Made his arms close around Jack's broad back, his fingers curl through Jack's hair. Made his hips tilt up, even though his dick was light years from being able to stand up and be counted.

"Jesus," he whispered, when Jack pulled away. He desperately wanted to say Jack's name, and the realization that he couldn't made him remember what was really going on. He swallowed, and stared up at Jack, who was staring at him without any expression at all.

"Go to sleep," Jack said, and reached over to click the light out.



Vaughn woke up to the grey light of early morning. Jack was just letting himself back into the room, wearing his shooting jacket and khakis, color in his cheeks. He nodded at Vaughn, went to the desk, and set a pistol on it. The flowers were still there, more fully open than Vaughn remembered; it was warm in the house.

"How do you feel?" Jack asked, taking a handful of cartridges out of his pocket, examining them, and dropping them on the desk beside the gun.

"Okay," Vaughn said. He felt ironed flat. He'd never been so tired in his life. But he wasn't shivering, and he knew who he was supposed to be. "What time is it?"

"Early," Jack said, coming to sit on the edge of the bed. Vaughn watched him take up the pad and paper and write something, then turn it so Vaughn could read.

ABORT

Vaughn frowned. "What time is breakfast?"

"You can get something now if you want," Jack said, and Vaughn's belly dropped. He sat up and his head went into a wide, loose tailspin. His heart was pounding in his ears, his eyes felt like they were being thumbed from his skull. Jack took him by the shoulder and helped him stand up.

"Get dressed," he said conversationally, walking to the armoire and grabbing Vaughn's clothes. Vaughn looked at the gun, then at Jack. Jack shook his head. "Kastov has a full house this morning."

"Sounds like fun," Vaughn said, trying to sound weary. Jack dropped his clothes on the bed, and he fumbled to grab the trousers. "Anybody we know?"

"I have no idea." Jack was at his suitcase, opening the concealed panel and taking out the transmitters. He slid one into his jacket pocket and tossed the other to Jack, who caught it awkwardly, one-handed, still trying to fasten his trousers. If Jack was taking the transmitters but not the gun, that meant he was going to try to walk out.

"I'm not feeling super-social," Vaughn said, shrugging into his shirt and starting on the buttons. His hands were shaking. "Can we eat on the patio or something?"

Jack paused, seeming to consider this as if it were a genuine suggestion--perhaps, before the flight on foot from the mafioso's mansion, a melon plate? He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the door to the room opened. Vaughn forced himself to stay where he was, just to turn his head with an irritated expression, his hands still on his buttons. Three of Kastov's men stood in the doorway, wearing heavy coats and shoulder holsters. One of them was the curly-headed guy, the sociopath. He caught Vaughn's eye and smiled.

"Can we help you?" Jack's voice was cool, unperturbed. He looked moderately put out, one hand on the armoire door, a man interrupted in the act of looking for a tie for breakfast.

"Mr. Kastov sends his regrets," said the one in front, looking not at all regretful. "You come with us, please."

There was a pause. Vaughn straightened slightly, and saw the man in front look at the gun on the desk. His expression didn't change.

"That depends on where you're going," Jack said, cool as silk. He walked over to Vaughn and started doing up the buttons of his shirt for him. It was an intimate gesture as well as a practical one--Vaughn's hands were shaking. He let them fall, his fingertips brushing the transmitter in his pocket. Jack Bristow, consummate professional, didn't even look at him. His eyes were on Vaughn's buttons. He smelled of aftershave.

"It doesn't depend," the man said, and when Vaughn looked over, he saw that the man was tight-lipped with distaste, watching Jack touch him. The curly-headed one was smiling, though. "You will cooperate. Or maybe we make it easy for you."

Jack finished Vaughn's buttons, straightened his collar, and briefly rested a hand on his chest. The feel of his palm, light and warm through the cotton, was steadying. He gave Vaughn a considering look, then allowed a trace of irritation to furrow his brow.

"They all talk like characters from Bruce Willis movies," he said, to Vaughn. "Did you ever notice that?"

"I was thinking Stallone."

Jack patted Vaughn on the shoulder, met his eyes for a moment, then turned. "Get your coat," he said over his shoulder, starting for the door. "And bring the chloroquine. You're due for a shot in an hour."






In the back of the SUV, they sat crammed in with their legs and shoulders pressed together, one of Kastov's men taking up space on Vaughn's other side. Not the psychopath, thank God. This one was a bull, slow-eyed and immense, with the hands of the Boston strangler resting quietly on his knees. Vaughn shifted uncomfortably, trying to ease the steady pressure of the guy's body against his. Jack gave him a sideways look.

"How do you feel?"

"Okay." Vaughn swallowed--his throat was dry, his mouth tasted like shit. They hadn't let him brush his teeth. The walk out of the mansion had been a bum's rush, both of them escorted with firm hands on their elbows through mysteriously empty hallways. The back windows of the SUV were custom-tinted opaque black, and he couldn't catch much through the windshield except speeding countryside. Rural didn't seem good. "So, hey, is this that romantic surprise you promised me last year? Because I have to hand it to you, this is definitely unexpected."

Jack gave him a slow, cool look. Then he leaned slightly farther forward and spoke to the bull. "He's due for another shot."

The bull didn't show any sign of having heard. Jack studied him for a moment, then leaned back into his seat. They hit a bump, and were all jolted sideways, Vaughn's head bashing the bull's shoulder. Jack straightened up with a grimace, and got a hold on the door handle beside him. His other hand gripped the edge of the seat beneath his leg, his fingers necessarily under Vaughn's thigh as well. They'd both been patted down, but it had been desultory, and hadn't caught the transmitters.

I hope to God someone's watching the screen, Vaughn thought, shifting again in a vain attempt to free his thigh from its intimate acquaintanceship with the bull's. I hope they're not all out for coffee and donuts, or watching the playoffs or something. Of course, the mere fact that someone was watching their signals meander around the Russian countryside wouldn't be much help if Kastov's men pulled over in the next five minutes and shot them.

"It's no problem," Vaughn said to the bull, trying to sound breezy. "I'll do my best not to puke on your shoes." It was like he'd brought it on by just thinking about it; the bull looked at him, then reached inside his jacket and pulled out a Glock.

"You puke," he said, pointing the gun at Vaughn's head, "I shoot you."

Vaughn sat frozen. His mouth was cotton-dry, his ears deaf. Beside him, he could feel that Jack had gone rigid and still. The car hit a bump and Vaughn flinched automatically. The barrel of the gun yawned at him.

He was waiting for Jack to say something, to save the situation, save both of them--but Jack didn't say anything. They sat there in silence, the bull toying with the trigger, until the psychopath looked around from the passenger seat, saw the gun, and snapped something in Russian. The bull didn't respond right away. He held the gun where it was a moment--an eternity--longer, then shrugged and slipped it away again, into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Vaughn let out a creaking breath, and felt cold sweat run down his spine to the waistband of his trousers. The psychopath gave him a toothy, you-owe-me smile.

Beneath Vaughn's thigh, Jack's fingers moved very slightly, forward and back. Impossible to know what it meant--calm down, stop being an idiot, the eagle has landed. Vaughn concentrated on it anyway. It was the only thing he could feel that wasn't actively hostile, a total nightmare.

They rode another ten minutes in silence, then the car took a left-hand turn and they were on gravel, bouncing over deep ruts that ground Vaughn's bones together in his joints. He gritted his teeth and tried to hold his seat until they pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

Vaughn felt his shoulders try to climb up to his ears, and forced them down. He hoped he wasn't going to be one of those agents, the ones who just broke the fuck down in a stressful situation. He'd been in bad places before, he'd kept his cool. He'd just never felt this sick before. He'd never felt like he couldn't trust himself, like he wasn't sure what he might do if one more guy pointed a gun at his head or stuck him with a needle or kissed him.

The view through the front windshield was dirt-scummed and fly-specked--just a gravel road leading up a small hill into the heart of Russia. The windows in the back were still black. Permanent midnight, out there.

The psychopath turned around in the passenger seat, reached back, and put his hand warmly on Vaughn's knee. His smile was pleasant, flirtatious even. Vaughn's stomach rolled.

Then Jack reached over and removed the guy's hand. He did it matter-of-factly, the way another man might move a child's hand away from a chess piece to teach strategy. The psychopath looked thoughtful. Jack sat back. There was a moment of silence.

Then Vaughn heard voices outside the car, speaking Russian in low tones, and the driver gave them a quick look in the rear view mirror and popped his door. The door beside Jack opened, and Vaughn blinked in the bright morning sunlight. Jack was hauled out, and then someone reached in and hauled Vaughn out too, the bull helping him along with a shove from behind. He stumbled and someone caught him, straightened him up, and stood him on the rough gravel next to Jack, who was saying something in Russian to the men surrounding them.

There were half a dozen of them, plus Kastov's men. Nobody was smiling, not even the guy counting the suitcase of money. They were big on suitcases of money, these guys.

"Okay," Vaughn said, his voice cracking over the dry spot in his throat. "So, what, this is a trade?"

"It looks more like a sale to me," Jack replied quietly. Somehow, despite the kidnapping, the hour of rough road, and all the guns, he came off well-pressed and pissed-off, like a man whose standing Friday morning meeting had been delayed by a flunky's incompetence. Vaughn had the bleary, anxious certainty that the only reason they hadn't been beat up yet was that no one was quite ready to tangle with Jack's voodoo. But that sooner or later, that was going to happen.

He risked a look around, looking for a building, a person, any kind of landmark--but they were in open countryside, rolling green fields of some kind of crop. Not so much as a cow to raise the alarm. Until someone woke up at home and spotted the wandering transmitter signals, David Crouch and Lawrence Newsome over hill and dale.

"Who's buying?" he croaked, squinting and raising his hand to shield his eyes from the morning light. One of the men threw him a hard look. Jack said something in Russian. They ignored him.

"My guess," Jack said from the side of his mouth, "is that Kastov decided we were unreliable."

"So who wants to buy two unreliable American gunrunners?"

Jack said nothing. It was a stupid question, and Jack didn't often dignify stupid questions with an answer.






Things got even more confusing after that. After the money was counted out, hands were shaken all around and they were shoved into a different SUV, parked on the other side of the dirt road. The bull got in the back seat with them, and Vaughn opened his mouth to ask where they were going, then spasmed in shock as a bag went over his head and pulled tight around his throat. He was blind, half-throttled--he fought automatically, but the bull shoved his head down, grabbed his hands, and cuffed them behind his back. He did it neatly and efficiently, and some part of Vaughn's mind wondered whether he was an ex-cop. Or maybe a current one.

"We can get you money," he tried, even as he heard, through a series of scuffling sounds, that they were doing the same thing to Jack. The bag was heavy and black; it smelled like new cloth. He couldn't see a thing. "Whatever you made off this, we can triple it."

The bull put a heavy hand on the back of his neck, leaned down beside him, and breathed for a moment in his ear. Vaughn waited, trying to control his own breathing. After a long pause, the bull said, "Don't puke," and let him go.

Vaughn sat up fast, gasping, twisting to lessen the bite of the cuffs against his wrists. On his left side, he felt the warm pressure of Jack's arm and thigh.

"Are you hooded?" Jack asked. He sounded mildly interested.

"Yeah." Vaughn tried to get a handle on his breathing, to be as cool as Jack. He could feel cold sweat spreading beneath his arms, and down his spine. "You?"

"Yes." Jack shifted, trying to get comfortable. "Don't panic."

"I'm not." Somehow, Vaughn felt a flare of irritation that Jack was giving him advice in a situation like this--then he remembered that Lawrence was giving David advice. "I'm working with what they taught me in Toastmasters, in college. When you think you're scared, you're really just excited. I'm really excited about this situation." He let his voice get a little shrill, a little shaky.

Jack pressed his thigh against Vaughn's, and moved it gently, a silent caress. It was Lawrence comforting David, but it still felt okay. It was okay to let the boundaries slide a little, at a time like this. Vaughn closed his eyes inside the bag and thought, We're not going to die, calm down.

"Relax," Jack said. "It's going to be okay."

"Shut up," said the bull, from somewhere in the outer reaches of the galaxy. They both shut up. The driver's and passenger side doors opened, the car settled, the doors slammed shut. Then the engine started, and they were off.

They drove for forty-five minutes on some of the worst back roads rural Russia had to offer, if Vaughn was any judge. He kept track of the time by counting, and by the sound of the engine he estimated they'd traveled thirty miles before he got too sick to keep track of anything anymore. His mouth was thick and dry, his shirt soaked with sweat. He was shivering uncontrollably, and he'd started to worry that he was going to puke after all. His stomach had started clenching weakly in warning.

"David is sick." That was Jack's voice, on his left. He sounded startlingly far away, and Vaughn realized he was even more out of it than he'd realized. "He needs chloroquine and rest. I assume you want us both alive."

One of the men said something in Russian, and everybody laughed. Everybody except Jack. Vaughn, his eyes closed inside the hood, said, "What did they say?"

Jack was silent for a moment. Then he said, "I'm beginning to understand our situation."

"Oh." Vaughn waited, but Jack said nothing. "That good, huh?"

"I'm sorry, David. I should have seen this coming."

"Really?" They hit another bump, and Vaughn's shoulders were wrenched backward in their sockets. He gritted his teeth. "I guess you owe me one, then."

"I'm going to buy you a steak when we get home," Jack said, sounding tired. "I'm going to take you to Peter Luger."

"That's great."

"We are going to go home, David."

"That's great." Vaughn paused and swallowed. "I mean, I know that."

They drove for another ten or fifteen minutes, then stopped. The car wheels crunched over gravel, and Vaughn heard the front window go down, an electronic beep, then the unmistakable sound of metal pulleys opening a gate.

"Honey, we're home," he breathed to himself, then fought down a wave of hysterical amusement.

They pulled slowly ahead, drove for another couple of minutes, and then the engine cut out. Immediately, the front doors opened and Vaughn heard the men up there get out. Beside him, the bull opened his own door and got out; without his bulk, it was shockingly hard to sit up straight. Jack's knee banged Vaughn's, hard and intentional, a message. Wake up.

"David," said Jack. "I'll kill them if they touch you. They know that. It's going to be all right."

"Okay," said Vaughn. Then he was hauled out into the world by a pair of rough hands, and the hood was taken off, and he found himself blinking miserably into the smiling face of, yes, of course, Kastov's psychopath.



He didn't get another shot, not even in exchange for his clothes. His Hugo Boss shirt was soaked through with cold sweat, and he was looping in and out of real consciousness, so he didn't try to resist while the bull manhandled him through the parking garage and up a flight of stairs into someone's bland, empty McMansion. In an all-white room with a bare mattress in the middle of the floor, the bull jerked his clothes off and ran a rough towel over him, head to toes. Neither of them enjoyed the experience, thank God. It was a little different when the psychopath came in trailing a couple of flunkies and a still-hooded, still-handcuffed Jack. Vaughn crouched trembling on the end of the mattress, while the psychopath gave him the long, steady look of a satisfied buyer.

"I'm beginning to understand the situation, Lawrence," Vaughn croaked, loud enough for Jack to hear.

"Are you all right?" Jack was starting to sound strained, Vaughn realized. Not good. "Tell them you need medicine."

"Okay," Vaughn said, and turned to look at the psychopath, who was smiling now. "I need those shots--the chloroquine. I have mal--" He broke off, because the man had reached out and put a hand over his mouth.

"David?" Jack's head moved up and stilled. He'd heard the man behind him take the pistol from his shoulder holster. The barrel wasn't quite touching the back of Jack's head, but he must have known it was there. He stood very still. The hood was grotesque, dehumanizing.

Vaughn's heart kicked over into full-on panic mode. He knew how this was going to play out--they were going to execute Jack, and then the psychopath was going to play with Vaughn until he got bored or the cavalry arrived, whichever came first. It had to be the cavalry; they had to be on their way already. It couldn't be much longer, but it didn't matter, because Jack was about to be dead.

"No," Vaughn said, ignoring the hand over his mouth. "No, nyet, no, no no--" The psychopath turned and looked at him curiously, and that was it, he'd won a first victory, just getting the guy's attention. All he needed was time. Every minute they were both still alive was a win.

"Hey," he said, leaning into the guy's fingers, rubbing his cheek along them. "Hey, come on, don't do that. He's old, he's not that great in bed, I bet you're way better, besides, he could be useful."

Nobody said anything as Vaughn rubbed his face along the guy's hand, turned his mouth, kissed the guy's palm. When he dared to look, he saw the guy's eyes had lit up. His lips were wet, parted, curling in a genuine smile. Stupid fucker.

"Yeah," Vaughn said, smiling back, just a little. "Yeah, right, that's right--it was all wrong before, let's do it right this time, take it slow--" He choked in surprise as the guy forced three fingers into his mouth, but fine, fine, it was fine, it was just fingers, they were both still alive, so he sucked gently and saw the guy's dick twitch inside his pants. Oh, Jesus. The sound of his mouth working was loud in the silent room. Jack shifted his weight very slightly from one foot to the other. Vaughn's cheeks were blazing hot.

The psychopath said something low and soft, a slurred encouragement, and Vaughn sucked harder, playing his tongue over the guy's fingers. If this was as bad as it got, he'd be okay. He could stand this. And now it was a couple of minutes later, and they were both still alive, and the cavalry was that much closer. He was winning, he reminded himself.

Then the guy pushed him back into the mattress, and he was too weak to resist, too slow to think of a workaround, and the next thing he knew he was underneath the guy, struggling awkwardly while the guy jerked open his trousers and started fisting his dick. Vaughn tried to hold still, but he didn't do it fast enough, because the guy grabbed him by the hair and pinned him down, his head snapped back at a painful angle, his ears full of his own fast gasps and the guy's ragged, escalating breaths. Then there was a series of blunt, wet shoves against his belly, and he felt come running off the sides of his stomach into the mattress. The guy slapped him hard across the face and sat up, laughing, to buckle his belt.

Vaughn lay still, his ears ringing, trying to catch his breath. The others were all still there, standing around grinning. Jack hadn't moved or spoken. Vaughn wondered whether Jack could tell from sounds alone what had just happened. Then he stopped thinking about that, and thought instead: five more minutes, and we're both still alive. He was going to win this thing if it killed him.

He ran a hand across his belly, rubbed the wetness through his fingers, and raised his head with an effort. The psycho was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him closely to see how he'd react. From somewhere, Vaughn dredged up a faint smile.

"All right," he said, his voice a ghostly creak. "Now we're getting somewhere."

One of the men said something, and they all laughed. The psycho laughed hardest, then leaned casually over the bed and slapped Vaughn's face again. It was a hard slap, something to focus on. Vaughn thought, I'm going to kill you. He smiled.

The psycho sat up straight, finished buckling his belt, and yawned. Then he made a Come here gesture at the guy standing behind Jack. The guy holstered the gun and shoved Jack forward a step. Vaughn's heart took a lurch to the left.

"Not so much," he said, knowing it was futile. "I mean, we're not really together anymore anyway, he's not really my type--"

The guy behind Jack pulled the hood off, and Vaughn stopped talking. Jack was squinting, blinking, trying to take in the room with half-blind eyes, while the guy unlocked his cuffs and the psychopath pulled a pocket radio out of his coat and clicked it on to fuzzy, schmaltzy Russian Muzak. It was insane. Jack's eyes covered the room and came back to Vaughn, to the scene on the bed, the clothes piled haphazardly on the floor, the whole thing. They stared at each other while the psychopath put the radio on the windowsill and danced back over to join them.

"David," Jack said, and that was all it took, one word, for him to be in charge again. Vaughn felt an almost incapacitating punch of relief. "You don't look well."

"I've felt better." His throat was raw, he realized. He was clenched and cramping all over, his muscles in mutiny. Adrenaline and fever had sheened him in sweat. He hadn't noticed any of it for the last fifteen minutes; now he felt ready to pass out.

Jack was rubbing his wrists, his expression pensive, as if they were alone in the room. The psychopath waltzed up beside him and made an elaborate If you please gesture toward the mattress. Jack glanced at him, then went back to rubbing his wrists.

"It's been a long morning," he said to Vaughn, with a glance at Vaughn's clothes, rumpled in a heap on the far side of the bed. "But I promise you, it'll be over soon."

"You still owe me that steak."

"I do." Jack turned and looked at the psycho, who was standing right beside him, staring at him with eyes that had somehow, in the moments Vaughn hadn't been paying attention, gone vacant and cold. "I make good on my promises, David."

"I know," Vaughn breathed. He was light-headed, starting to topple.

Then he was sitting heavily canted to one side, his head in Jack's hand, his shoulder pressed into Jack's chest. Jack was warm and solid, still wearing all his clothes.

"You're all right," he said quietly, and Vaughn thought, Oh, thank fucking God, and passed out again, this time for real.







He woke up with a start, no more than a few minutes later, except the light had changed and he was lying beneath his clothes. A man he didn't know was crouching beside his head, watching the door.

"What--" Vaughn tried to sit up, but his body was leaden, inert. The man looked down at him, clearly startled, keyed up. He had dark brown hair clipped close to his skull, and blue eyes, and cupid's-bow lips. Sydney would love him.

"Agent Vaughn," he said, in Russian-accented English. "Lie still, please."

"What," Vaugh said again, and then the name registered--he was Agent Vaughn to this guy, he wasn't David Crouch. His gut tightened with sudden, craven gratitude. "Who--where's Jack?"

"Agent Bristow is assisting with the capture effort." The man shifted, and Vaughn saw he had his sidearm out, flat on his thigh. "More agents are on the way."

"Is he--" Vaughn raised his head and saw, past his own foil-wrapped feet, one of the Russian thugs, dead against the baseboard. He couldn't tell which one.

"Lie still, please," said the agent, and Vaughn dropped his head and stared at the ceiling, thinking that it wasn't fair to be left out of the end of it, even though it was a crappy confusing end, not the clear-cut end they were supposed to get, but at least Jack got to chase the bad guys down and hopefully beat the shit out of them. All Vaughn got to do was lie still, like a baked potato.

Then he realized they'd survived, and the relief was so huge he turned his face away and hoped he'd pass out again soon. Then he did.








"David Crouch," Jack said, sliding into the seat opposite Vaughn. Vaughn winced before he could help it--but it wasn't pure malice, Jack was continuing on--"and Lawrence Newsome are both dead, for all official purposes. Small boating accident in the Alleghenies, if my sources are correct."

"It's a rough time of year for trout fishermen." Vaughn tried to make his voice light. The Russian mission was one he'd personally filed under Need to know ONLY, and if Jack wasn't such a bloodless prick he'd have realized that. But then, Jack hadn't been the one who'd ended up cavorting naked with a sadist. He hadn't spent three weeks recovering from the unbelievably miserable side effects of street-grade chloroquine and Pakistani malaria. Vaughn had hosted a lengthy series of vivid, Disney-quality nightmares about pills and syringes, mutating parasites, and Russians with giant, slavering dicks pursuing him through factory farms. On the whole, he didn't consider the Moscow mission good dinner conversation.

"May they rest in peace," Jack said, opening his menu. It was unlike Jack to waste words on imaginary death, and Vaughn took a closer look. Jack had come from work, he was in a suit, not a hair out of place--the usual, in other words. But on second thought, there was maybe something a little unusual about the way he was reading the menu, his eyes flicking just a little too fast over the page, as if he weren't really taking it in. Vaughn frowned.

"I didn't realize you were serious about the steak," he said at last, turning his gaze to his own menu. Why did places like this even have menus? There was really only one thing to get. He closed it and set it aside, noticing that Jack held onto his two, then three beats longer than he really should have, almost as if he were avoiding conversation.

"Are you--" Vaughn started, but then the waiter appeared, pad at the ready, asking about drinks. Vaughn shook his head; he was still on antibiotics, not drinking. Jack ordered a glass of Macallan.

Then they just sat there, Vaughn fingering his water glass, Jack staring off somewhere into the middle distance, his hands hidden beneath the table. Nobody, Vaughn realized unhappily, could do avoidance quite like Jack Bristow.

"I was serious," Jack said at last, as if he were picking up naturally on Vaughn's last comment. "About the steak."

"I can see that."

"It's very good here."

"So I'm told."

"If you enjoy steak."

"And I do."

Then they sat in silence for another minute or two. The waiter brought Jack's drink, glanced uneasily at them, and went away with their orders. They were both, Vaughn noticed, having steak.

"Look," he said at last, after Jack had carefully unfolded his napkin and carefully placed his cutlery on the table, and carefully, with great attention, placed his napkin on his lap. It occurred to him that he knew what Jack's hands felt like, and the realization mixed with the memory sent a flush to his groin, which in turn pissed him off. "I appreciate the thought, but it's going to be a really long meal if you can't even make simple conversation with me anymore."

Jack looked him straight in the eye, his expression cool. "You assume something's changed?"

"I assume that you need to get over some stuff, or repress a little more, or something, yeah. I'm over it. You didn't even have to see it. So get over it already, and talk about the weather like a normal person."

Jack's expression turned thoughtful. "I see. You think I'm uncomfortable around you because of what happened after the exchange."

"I guarantee, less happened than you think." For some reason, Vaughn felt like he had to say this--he'd written his mission report, he knew Jack and the entire Western world had read it. He'd had his say. But he hadn't really had it, not face to face, with real words instead of the fake vocabulary of agency write-up. "I was sick as a dog, he was completely insane, mostly he just wanted to jerk off and slap me around." He'd said that kind of loud, he realized, and now he was blushing. Shit. "Which he did. End of story."

Jack looked at him a moment longer, then down at his knife and fork. He raised one hand and aligned them neatly, at right angles to the table's edge. "I read the report, Agent Vaughn."

"So did I. I can't believe you let him get away." That sounded childish, and as soon as he said it he was sorry. He looked away. Jack continued to straighten his fork.

"Sorry," Vaughn said. Why the hell had he agreed to come here?

Jack raised his glass, sipped from it, and put it down again.

"You're feeling better," he said, and thank Christ, somewhere along the line he'd picked up a clue about normal social interactions. "I understand the malaria isn't the chronic variety."

"No, right, I lucked out. Plasmodium falciparum is the right kind to get, apparently."

"That's good news. You wouldn't want to be compromised like that again."

"No." Fucking Jack Bristow. Vaughn bit back the rest of what he wanted to say: If someone hadn't leaked in Pakistan, I wouldn't have been compromised at all. There was nothing worse than an agent who couldn't let go of failure. Someone else would get Kastov.

"And no long-term damage," Jack went on, confirming neutrally what he already knew. It was bizarre, making small talk with Jack while he stared into the middle distance, apparently deep in contemplation of some other mission, some other place and time. Bizarre and not very flattering, Vaughn was beginning to realize. But whatever, he'd sucked a psychopath's fingers to buy minutes of life, he'd done hundreds of things worse than this, it was just dinner. He could do this.

"No long-term damage," he agreed, staring across the room over Jack's shoulder, thinking not-very-coherently and with self-conscious pettiness, Two can play at this game,.






The steak was very good--the best he'd ever had, although he didn't say that out loud. Complimenting a meal to Jack Bristow seemed wrong, somehow. Jack paid, ignoring Vaughn's half-hearted efforts with his own wallet. It was weird, having Jack Bristow buy him dinner, but on the other hand the whole thing had been Jack's idea, his own personal capper to the weirdest, most depressing mission Vaughn had ever been part of--so Vaughn let it go. He had plenty of other things to occupy his time and attention. The last thing he needed to do was quibble over a restaurant check.

Out front, they stood side by side under the canopy and waited for the valets to bring their cars. Vaughn had a lingering sense of what-the-hell, but he was already moving on, putting it aside, turning his attention to the bigger issues in his life, like all the therapy he was going to have to do to get over this one.

"Agent Vaughn," Jack said, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders very still. Then he didn't say anything.

That was so unusual that Vaughn turned and looked at him. Jack was staring straight ahead, into the street, his lips pursed as if he were trying to think what to say next. But Jack Bristow always knew what to say next. Vaughn felt a moment of surreality, a quick return to the helpless, ugly feeling he'd had in Russia when he'd heard Jack falter, beneath the hood.

"What you did," Jack said, "saved both our lives. It was a very brave thing to do." He was still staring out into the parking lot, and Vaughn thought, Oh, okay. This was Jack struggling to say thank you, to put a neat closure to the whole rotten, embarrassing episode. It was why they were both here--so Jack could tie off the last loose threads. Okay, fine.

"It was standard procedure," he replied, in the easiest tone he could manage. "For the situation. You did the same thing, when I got sick. That whole cover story--" He moved his head back and forth, summoning up the kisses, the endearments, the in-bed-together. He still couldn't really slot that into a comfortable place in his memory. He'd tried wishing it had been Sydney on the mission with him, but that would have meant Sydney in the same room with the psychopath, and the thought of that made him sick. "Anyway, we both just did what we had to."

Jack didn't seem to be listening. "In the car," he said, "I said I'd kill them if they touched you."

Vaughn paused. "Yeah," he said at last, not seeing the connection. "Well, sooner or later someone'll catch up with that freak--"

"No," Jack said. "They won't."

"We've got good people in Russia, Jack. They'll find him."

Jack's car pulled up to the curb in front of them, and the valet got out, leaving the door ajar. Jack slipped a hand into his pocket, drew out a few bills, and sorted through them.

"No," he said absently, his attention on the money. "They won't find him, Agent Vaughn."

Vaughn stood there stupidly while Jack paid the valet and put the rest of the money back in his pocket. Vaughn's car had pulled up now, behind Jack's.

"I enjoyed this," Jack said, meeting Vaughn's gaze frankly. "As much as it's possible to enjoy such a...stilted event."

Vaughn opened his mouth, then closed it as the valet appeared beside him. Hurriedly, he found a tip in his pocket and turned back to Jack. "I read your report," he said in a low voice. "You said he escaped."

"I'm glad you're feeling better," Jack said, smiling thinly. "You're a good agent, Michael. You should do more fieldwork."

"Jack--"

"Good night." Jack turned and walked around to the driver's side, opened the door, and got in. It took Vaughn that long to catch up, to feel astonishment and then, unexpectedly, a surge of anger. He jerked open the passenger door and got in. Jack's car smelled like him--like his aftershave. He was sitting with his hand on the gearshift, giving Vaughn a cool look.

"Your car's behind," he said dryly.

"You killed him?" Vaughn snapped. "Jack, that's insane."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You don't kill someone in cold blood for no good reason."

"I never would."

"And you don't lie on your mission report. Jesus, Jack. Is this some fucked-up Brotherhood of the Agency thing? Because I didn't ask you to do that."

"Duly noted."

"Jack." Vaughn turned in the seat, one hand braced on the dash, the other gripping the edge of the seat, because he was going to throw a punch in a minute if he didn't hold onto something. He was extremely fucking sick, he realized, of being one step behind. "You realize I could report you for this?"

He'd never do it, he couldn't even really believe he was saying it--was he threatening Jack Bristow?--but he still didn't like the look Jack gave him. It was derisive in a whole new way, as if Vaughn had just said something that marked him as a whole new species of brain-damaged moron. It was also, if Vaughn was any judge, disappointed.

"You could," Jack agreed, and turned back to the wheel. He'd dismissed Vaughn as pointless, and that was it, the last straw. Vaughn reached over and grabbed Jack's arm, yanked it hard to pull him back into the conversation, but it went wrong and the next thing he knew he was being shoved against the door with a hand around his throat. He said, "Glurk!" and grabbed Jack's wrist.

"You're a good agent," Jack said, suddenly very close and strangely conversational. "But you're off your game."

"I am not--" Vaughn gasped, prying at Jack's fingers.

"You are," Jack said, and then he moved his face a fraction of an inch closer, his eyes fixed on Vaughn's, his gaze intent. And it was like throwing a switch, Vaughn had a corresponding moment of complete and total surprise, a revelation that this was really not about the Brotherhood of the Agency or establishing dominance or maintaining cover at all costs. This was about something completely, completely different.

He stopped prying at Jack's hand, and stared at his face. Jack didn't flinch.

I wish I'd never met you, Jack had said to him. Lawrence had said to David. Except it had been Jack. And for Jack Bristow that might as well be a statement of devotion.

"I'm not," Vaughn said, and swallowed. The movement of his throat beneath Jack's fingers seemed to wake Jack up. He took his hand away, and leaned slowly back.

"No," Jack said, but he was responding to something else entirely now. "I'm sure you're not." He didn't sound bitter. He didn't sound like anything.

Vaughn sat there a few seconds longer, feeling bowled over, not sure what to say. He put his hand on the door handle, started to push it, then stopped. He was having the most bizarre, physical memory of the night Jack had kissed him, the night he'd had the fever. It had been the gentlest kiss he'd ever felt.

"I think," Vaughn said, and then he just turned and reached across the seat and tugged at Jack's shoulder again, slowly this time. Jack resisted, so Vaughn leaned over to meet him. "You're not making this easy," he said, thinking with some part of his mind Jack Bristow has layers, and then thinking, Oh my God, this is insane, and then going for it anyway, kissing Jack softly on the mouth while the engine purred and the valets stood waiting on the curb.

For a moment, Jack did nothing. Then he curled his arm up behind Vaughn's neck, cradled his head, and kissed him back.

It went on for a while, and then Jack pulled back slightly, and Vaughn realized there were people hovering outside the car. Valets. They were blocking the curb. He rubbed a hand over his mouth and swallowed hard.

"Your car's behind," Jack said, not unkindly, his eyes locked to Vaughn's face.

Vaughn nodded, glanced back, reached for the handle, then stopped and turned back.

"This is complicated--" he started to say.

"I know."

"I don't know how we do this."

Jack shook his head minutely. "Neither do I."

"But I want to." As soon as he'd said it, Vaughn felt like he might throw up. He was grinning crookedly, his face numb.

"So do I." Jack gave him a slight smile, and glanced through the windshield at the valets. "We'll figure it out."

"Okay." Vaughn nodded. "What if--"

"Tomorrow, Michael." Jack's voice was fond, the same fondness that Lawrence Newsome had had for David Crouch, and Vaughn had a totally irrational and totally urgent wish that he'd be better than David, a better person and a better partner, boyfriend, whatever, just not a total jerk. He wanted to be better for Jack.

He leaned across the seat, kissed Jack quickly on the corner of the mouth, and got out of the car before he could say anything else. He followed Jack's taillights for twenty minutes through the darkness before taking his own turn toward home.

 

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