Boxed

by elfin


<> 

"Where's the money?"

"Where's Adam?" 

The expression on the face of the man with the shotgun tossed easily over his shoulder was as cold as the derelict, desolate warehouse where the exchange was taking place.

The man nodded once and two hired muscles pushed a two by two by six wooden box across the rough ground. 

Tom swallowed the nausea as it rose, keeping his exterior cool; not a single crack for the hatred he felt for these people to seep through.

"My client won't pay good money for a dead man." 

"Oh, he ain't dead."  One of the muscles kicked out at the wooden box but there was no sound.

"Seems dead." 

Another nod of Shotgun's head.  The catches along the edges of the box were unfastened and the lid shoved off to the ground by a size-eleven army boot.

Leaning over, Tom schooled his expression of complete disinterest while his blood redeployed ready for a fight. 

Adam was lying on his front, arms pulled up, hands at his bruised face.  Clothes torn and soiled.  Battered.  Bleeding.  Still.

Tom waited until he could see the irregular fall and rise of Adam's chest, then he straightened and nodded.  He tossed over the Adidas holdall he was carrying.  

It landed by Shotgun's feet and predictably he leaned down to unzip it an inch or two and check the contents.  Tom wished he had a gun, wondered if he had, would he shoot the man in the top of the head before he’d even realised what was happening or wait until he’d at least glanced up. 

Wondered where his cool had fled to. 

With a grin and a rough laugh, Shotgun hauled the bag over his shoulder and turned, walking away without another word.  A second later, the muscles followed him.

Tom waited, aching to move but standing his ground, playing the paid go-between, with all the lack of concern that went with it. 

He waited until the trio were out of the warehouse, close to the flatbed truck they'd arrived in, presumably with Adam in a box tossed carelessly in the back to collide sickeningly with the side panels at every corner. 

He waited for the explosion, felt the vibration through his feet, heard the metal frame of the warehouse bend but absorb the energy of the small bomb placed under the truck. 

Outside debris rained down on the Ford he'd arrived in and on the black van that had arrived after him.

He crouched by the box, shoes crushing the discarded cigarette butts and other rubbish littered around, reaching long fingers between Adam's black and purple face and his bound, bloodied wrists, finding a pulse. 

Adam looked a mess, probably was a mess, but his pulse was strong if rapid and at once Tom knew he was awake.

Already the wailing siren of an ambulance was audible in the close distance.  Tom swept one hand over Adam's filthy hair.  "You're safe," he told his colleague with certainty. 

He didn't expect a verbal response and he didn't get one.  But he maintained the contact, fingers in Adam's hair, and eventually the racing pulse slowed and Adam's stressed out system allowed itself to shutdown.

 

~

 

three weeks on

 

Tom knocked again on the hardwood door and waited.  Finally he heard the security latch and two bolts being thrown and the next thing he knew he was looking into the dark hollow of the barrel of a handgun.  In the moments it took him to catch his breath and form words, the gun had been lowered and the safety catch was back in place. 

An exhausted-looking Adam Carter muttered an apology and stepped back, holding the door open in silent, reluctant welcome.

Tom closed and locked the door behind him, watching while Adam swapped the gun for a mug and a half-smoked cigarette on the round table close by and climbed the three wooden stairs up to the lounge without a word. 

He was dressed in faded jeans and a blue, hooded jogging top the colour of his eyes; the same style Tom had seen him in a hundred times before.  But today the clothes looked too loose, like Adam had lost weight he couldn't afford to lose.

"Did Harry send you?" were the first words from his mouth as he dropped into one corner of the black leather three-seater.  Tom took one of the armchairs.   

"No."

"I'll be back at work on Monday." 

"You're not ready."

"Who the hell are you to say?" 

"You're a mess."

"Fuck off, Tom."  There was bitterness in the words, but no real strength.  Leaning forward, Adam stubbed the cigarette out in a glass ashtray on the low glass coffee table.  Tom thought he might light another but he just fell back into his corner and wrapped his narrow hands around the mug. 

"It's okay to be a mess after what...."

"Oh, don't," Adam interrupted, erupting with anger that seemed to come from nowhere.  "After what I've been through?"  Tom didn't respond.  Adam shook his head with a bark of a laugh.  "Beaten to shit and kept in a box.  You don't think I've been through worse?" 

"No, I don't."  He deliberately kept his voice level.

The anger left Adam as suddenly as it had come.  He stared into whatever was in the mug, "Syria was worse." 

"Why?"

He didn't look up.  "Torture, interrogation.  The usual." 

"Exactly," Tom sat forward, pressing his point, "the usual.  What was usual about this time?  Nothing.  They brought you to the drop in a fucking coffin, Adam!"   He saw the minute tremors in Adam's hand, saw him concentrate to stop it.  "It scared the shit out of me.  God knows what it did to you."

The secondary explosion was more violent than the initial one.  Adam launched himself to his feet in an improbably graceful move and, still holding his mug in one hand, he got the other around Tom's throat before Tom had time to react. 

"What the hell did any of this have to do with you?" Adam spat into his face.  "Where were you when they were forcing hypodermics into my arms?  What were you doing at one o'clock every morning when they were shoving their fucking dicks in my face?  Don't you dare tell me you were scared!  I was the one they took!  I wasn't scared for one second.  And no one is going to take that away from me!"

Tom remained absolutely still.  Allowed to, Adam could kill him from their position and if he needed to assert that kind of dominance, if that's what it took for him to find some measure of control again, Tom would wait him out.  Instead of fighting back, he met Adam's eyes, as hard and dark as the eye of a storm, and held them, not in challenge but in empathy. 

The frosted glass clock ticked off five long seconds.  Then Adam's painful grip was just a bruise and a memory as he spun on his heel and launched his mug against the far, Almond White wall.

The porcelain shattered, the last dark dredges of liquid leaving an original piece of stylist art on the otherwise bare canvas. 

"Get out, Tom." 

The quietly spoken words commanded Tom to his feet where all the threats and shouting in the world wouldn't have budged him.  For a second he watched the tense set of Adam's shoulders, the taut pull of his back, and he considered touching.  But the likely outcome of that was Adam spinning around and punching him.  So instead he headed for the door. 

He mulled over a couple of parting words but none made it over the threshold of his lips.  He unlocked and opened the door and closed it behind him, standing on the pavement for a few minutes before finally walking away.

 

~

 

one week later

 

"...Mark Tungston," Adam pointed out the man in the centre of the tight ring of five; an elicit meeting in a public place caught on digital camera in fine, tale-telling detail and now being projected onto the wall of the boardroom in Thames House. 

Tom glanced at the photo, committing it to memory before returning his regard to his returned colleague.  Adam hadn't regained any of the weight he'd lost.  Neither did he look as if he'd slept properly in the last couple of weeks.  But dressed in a pinstriped black shirt, open at the neck and hanging over dark blue jeans, he at least looked composed.

"Isn't Tungston Maxwell Oliver's trophy boy?" Ruth asked the room in general. 

Tom didn't look away from Adam as he answered her.  "Oliver dumped him very publicly two nights ago after finding out Tungston had been sleeping with his right-hand man, Tony Grant."  He suddenly had a terrible feeling he knew where this was headed.

Adam gave that piece of information a moment to settle in before clicking the small black button on the remote in his hand.  The photo changed, the subject remained the same. 

"Tungston's body was dragged out of the Thames this morning."  The face was barely recognisable, the naked body mutilated.

"Jesus."  Ruth whispered, low and shocked.   

Adam glanced at her, an oddly gentle expression on his face.  Tom shifted in his seat when it was fleetingly turned on him.  Adam had spent a week successfully avoiding him, so to see what he thought he saw in the indigo eyes was beyond a surprise.

A silent plea.  Maybe an apology.  With a growing sense of apprehension he thought he might know what for. 

"We've suspected for some time that Oliver is a connection to the Islamic militant group who abducted and executed two British journalists in Iraq last month.  What we don't know is how or why."

The look on Ruth's face clearly stated that she didn't get it.  "What does Tungston's death get us?" 

"An opening."

The cold dread Tom's empty stomach asserted itself.  The black and white of Mark Tungston was held at the forefront of his mind and when he looked again he saw it.  The resemblance.   

"Absolutely not."

Adam's eyes widened.  At the head of the table Harry sat forward, previously a silent participant he gazed steadily at Tom. 

"You have a better idea?"

As he looked at his boss he caught Ruth's confused expression out of the corner of his eye.  "Leave it.  Those journalists are dead.  This won't bring them back." 

"We might be able to stop it happening to others," Harry explained as if he was talking to a child.

"It's too risky."  Tom rose to his feet and stabbed his finger at the gruesome photo still being projected onto the wall.  "Oliver did this because he caught Tungston sleeping around.  Have you any idea what he'd do to an MI5 agent?" 

"What are you talking about?" Ruth intervened before Harry or Adam could counter Tom's point.

Tom met her searching gaze.  "They're suggesting sending Adam in as Tungston's replacement." 

Her mouth fell open as her brain processed everything that such a job would entail.  "What?"

Adam held out his hands, palms up.  "It's no different to what we ask our female agents to do." 

"It's different and you know it," Tom told him, leaning towards him, hands flat on the expanse of polished wood between them.

"Why?" 

"Women find excuses.  Men don't.  What are you going to tell him when he wants to fuck your brains out?  'Sorry, darling, not tonight, I have a headache'?"

"Tom!" 

Both men ignored Harry's bark.

"Why are you suddenly so concerned about my virtue?” Adam asked, voice rising.  “What’s it to you if I sleep with this guy or not?” 

“I don’t give a flying fuck about who you sleep with, Adam!  I just don’t want to be pulling your mutilated corpse out of the Thames!  Besides, I’d have thought after your stay with Samms you’d’ve had enough strangers’ dicks to tide you over.”

In the next moment Tom absolutely expected to Adam's fist to connect with his jaw over the table.  It was what he deserved, the retribution the comment demanded.  But Adam didn't move - he just stared, disbelief in his wide eyes.  The silence was claustrophobic. 

“I’m sorry,” Tom told him as soon as he could get the words out.  “Adam….”

“You bastard.”  It was just a breath before he turned and walked out of the room. 

 

“Was that really necessary?” Harry enquired after a time.

Tom didn’t get a chance to respond to the rhetorical question.  The sound of breaking glass reached them from the corridor and all three were out of the door. 

They didn’t get far.  They didn’t need to.  Adam was sitting on the floor, back against the blue-tinged wall, knees drawn up, elbows rested on them, arms outstretched.  He was surrounded by shards of broken glass - the remains of Harry's office window when it hadn’t stood up to the sheer power and energy of the impact of a size nine shoe with the strength of an angry, distressed man behind it.

Tom recognised the emotional meltdown for what it was because he’d experienced it himself.  Hadn’t they all at one time or another?  Maybe it was just that no one expected the unflappable Adam Carter to ever break. 

“Let me,” he murmured to the other two, and reluctantly Harry nodded.

Tom approached carefully, slowly, crunching glass under foot, carefully lowering himself to sit next to Adam. 

“I am sorry.”

Adam nodded, face dropped below the line of his arm and he didn’t move for a second or two.  Then he drew in a deep, shuddering breath and Tom realised he was crying.  “I know,” he managed, sniffing, undignified and right at that moment, uncaring. 

He lifted his head and dropped it back with a quiet knock against the wall.  Tom took in the red-rimmed eyes and slightly swollen lips, feeling like a shit for saying what he’d said, for causing this breakdown here and now when Adam should have been allowed to crack in the privacy of his own home, not on the grid in front of colleagues.

“Blown the superhero image, haven’t I?” Adam forced the humour between them.   

"You don't have to be a hero.  You do fine just being human."

"Not this time." 

"Samms pushed you to the edge.  Been there."

Adam's head turned and heavy eyes sought Tom's.  Tom saw the misery where previously there'd been only energy and focus.  "Two choices, right?  Turn back.  Or jump off." 

"You brought me back."

Adam rested his temple against the wall, holding Tom's gaze.  "You know that line you spin?  The one about keeping the real you inside a box when you're out in the field?" 

Tom nodded.  "It's not a line."

"Maybe.  A couple of months before Harry seconded me to 5, I was in Italy getting close to an international hit man.  Too close as it turned out.  All the lines blurred and I got to the point where I knew that if he found out who I really was - what I really was - he still wouldn't kill me.  Wouldn't lay a finger on me. I knew he’d rather turn himself in.” 

"Did he?”

"I closed the circle, initiated the sting.  Others brought him in.  He never knew who I was.  Now, every time I put myself away in that box, I can't quite close the lid.  A tiny part of me seeps into every role I play.  When Samms took me I tried to play a role but that... part of me is the part that remembers."  Adam straightened his neck and pushed two fingers into his eyes as if trying to ease a headache.  "Did that make any sense?" 

"Yeah, it did."  Tom hesitated.  "After Joyce... it was tough putting myself back together.  But every case feels a little bit more like it was."

Seconds of silence ticked passed until Adam lifted his head and surveyed the damage he'd caused.  "Harry's not going to be happy." 

"Harry's never happy.  Don't worry about it.  You're his golden boy."  Tom glanced at Adam's hand as he turned it over and touched the bleeding wound in the palm.  "You should get that looked at."

Adam shook his head.  "It's just a scratch."   

When Tom reached for his wrist he allowed the contact. 

"Never do anything in half-measures, do you?"  Tom unconsciously rubbed his thumb along the heel of Adam's hand.  Catching the look in the indigo gaze, he deliberately did it again. 

Heat flared along his nerves as Adam's lips parted wordlessly.  It was a minute or two, Adam's wrist still held in Tom's grasp, before any sound escaped them. 

"Bring me back."

 

~

 

Tom looked at the blond head rested in the crook of his shoulder and resumed the gentle caress of his thumb along the nape of the pale neck now Adam was finally asleep. 

He wasn't sure what had happened this afternoon was going to fit into any of the boxes he used to sort and store his life.  It was like snuggling with a loaded gun.  Adam Carter was one of the most dangerous people he knew.  It worried him that it might be part of the attraction.

But Adam's body had fitted under his so perfectly.   

He dropped his head back to the white cotton pillow and closed his eyes.  Memories he wouldn’t ever forget played in the forefront of his mind.


Lying on the bed, practically smothering Adam with his body.   

Moving slowly, sheathing himself in the willing man under him, withdrawing and returning, setting a steady rhythm in counterpoint to Adam’s soft noises playing in the otherwise silent room.

Kissing and biting sensitive flesh at the base of his throat, along his shoulder.  Adam’s habitual twenty-four hour stubble an odd sensation against his skin.   

Sliding one arm under Adam’s thigh, wrapping his fingers around a leaking erection, matching the submission of Adam’s body within the easy casing of his hand. 

Adam’s head lifting to his shoulder.  Burying his face and his own sounds in the fair hair as the pale body arched beneath him to take him deeper. 
 

Tom had spent most of the tense journey back to his apartment from Thames House imagining how it was going to be. 

But the frantic, almost brutal fucking he'd fantasised about while sitting at twelve sets of traffic lights had never transpired.   

Adam had directed… no, blindly choreographed the slow, gentle, long-haul sex in Tom's oversized bed.

He had ended up under Tom without Tom realising it was happening.  He’d willingly submitted and it made the urge to hold him and keep him close almost overwhelming.  From when he'd reached for the lube and condom to when Adam had turned and settled into his side, so needy a position for someone who hadn’t ever seemed to need anything before. 

 

But it had been the look throughout in Adam's large eyes that had destroyed all his defences, that same look Tom had seen in the boardroom.  And the way Adam kissed - open-mouthed, seeming utterly submissive on the surface while Tom could feel the vibrations of tension, as if his body and soul were strung too tight. 

 

Lifting his head again Tom kissed the blond crown.  This was dangerous.  This was something he could easily lose control of.  Adam Carter had already edged into his subconscious.  Lying here, feeling Adam's weight on him, Tom knew without doubt that this was something that could destroy him once and for all.

Then he also knew, with equal certainty, that it was something he wouldn't easily give up.  Here was someone he would already fight for and die for.  In reality, how much deeper into each other could they get? 

But reality didn’t play that great a role in their lives.



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