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The door to the hotel room has barely shut behind them when Curt—Mega, goddammit, no need to get familiar—advances on Owen, drawing himself up into a menacing posture that he usually only pulls out to intimidate hostiles into cooperating with them, quick as you please, love, I'd so hate to see him get angrier. It's strange to see under the faltering orange light of a cheap hotel instead of the fluorescents of an interrogation room—or, most commonly, the flashing red of evacuation alarms. Even stranger to have it directed at him, rather than their shared enemies.
Well. Maybe Owen is Mega's enemy, right now.
“The hell was that, Carvour?”
Owen refuses to be intimidated. He sidesteps Mega and locks the door, sliding the chain bolt into place for good measure. Mega grabs his shoulder, and Owen shrugs him off, but Mega isn't so easily deterred. When he turns around, aiming for the dingy en-suite so he can finally rinse off the blood soaking his trousers and maybe even lick his wounds, Mega blocks him again.
“You can't keep mission-critical info from me when we're on an assignment together.”
“I didn't—” he tries to deny, but Mega, despite his blundering demeanour, is sharp.
“Bull-shit you didn't, Owen. You knew the damn Stasi were onto Kohler. I didn't miss how you kept looking over your shoulder on what Cynthia told me would be an easy extraction. Six shouldn't have sent you, either. It wasn't a two-person job, on paper, and they knew I was dealing with it. Since our agencies share intelligence. Or, y'know, they're supposed to.”
Owen stands his ground, silent and unamused. Mega's not going to let this go until he feels satisfied; better to let him work his self-righteous anger out now than try to shut him up, and wait for it to explode on him the next time they work together.
Because there will be a next time. Mega doesn't know it, but pulling Kohler out was supposed to be a bloody suicide mission. It was a set-up from the start, according to MI6's Stasi insider, an agent whose position is so sensitive that there's an information blackout for their international allies not just on his existence, but on all of the intelligence he's collected as well. Let the Americans get killed trying to retrieve Kohler if they want; serves them right for keeping their own secrets, seemed to be the prevailing train of thought among the higher-ups at Six. So much for interagency cooperation.
Still, the documents Kohler had collected were valuable enough that the SIS decided to assist the ASS on the job anyways, and sent Owen in; between him and Curt, they got the documents and pulled the asset out alive, while the worst casualty they took is the still-bleeding bullet wound scored across Owen's hip. They're too effective as partners to keep separated, even when the ASS is loath to give MI6 anything after the Maclean-Burgess disaster, and MI6 is responding in kind.
The lastmost point being why Mega is lecturing him now. Unfortunately.
Owen tunes back in to see Mega set his face into a frown that's halfway to being a pout. Did he say anything else while Owen was lost in thought? Well, it probably doesn't matter.
“So? You got something to say for yourself?”
“I don't believe I've done anything that needs explaining,” Owen says. When will Mega get out of his way? His heart is still pounding, his wound practically pulsing. He woke up this morning, looked the mission brief over once more before burning it, and gave himself fifty-fifty odds of making it to midnight alive. (Mega, he hated to admit, did better in close combat, so he'd privately granted the man an optimistic sixty-forty.)
Defying death for Queen and country! A job well done! he thinks sardonically. Maybe he'll off himself anyway, if Mega doesn't shut up soon.
“Do the words UKUSA agreement mean anything to you?”
Owen suppresses a sigh at Mega's offended tone. How has Curt made it this long as a field agent while being this willfully obtuse? “It doesn't matter what they mean to me. It matters what they mean to my superiors. I was instructed—”
“Oh, fuck off, don't hide the fact that you don't trust me behind your boss like you're not—”
“Mega—”
“—a man who makes his own decisions—”
“Don't interrupt me, Curt.” Owen's tone is whip-sharp, but his volume stays low. Despite the fury of their exchange, neither of their voices has risen far above an angry mutter. Even in the relative safety of West Berlin, unfriendly ears could be anywhere.
Mega rolls his eyes, but he deflates, all the threat bleeding out of his body, and he offers Owen a slightly apologetic smile and a mouthed “Sorry”. Owen feels himself relaxing in turn, and mentally kicks his nervous system for falling for Mega's posturing. He wouldn't really hurt you. He's too nice.
“I was saying,” Owen continues. “As your charming equipment technician likes to remind you, we're not men, we're— how does she put it? Government property?”
“She's Assistant Director of the lab, actually,” Mega says, looking for all the world like he's completely missed the point.
That's one of his favorite redirections: picking the wrong thing in a sentence to get stubborn about. Owen hates how well it works in the field, given how stupidly obvious it is, but right now, he's just grateful for the end to this argument that Curt has offered.
He accepts the extended olive branch with middling grace, and his best scathing look; Mega has the decency to pull an unconvincing expression of abashment. Then he moves out of Owen's way.
Owen feels Mega watching him as he crosses the suddenly-too-wide expanse of the room. A man's gaze shouldn't weigh so much, he thinks; Mega has an unnerving way of making people feel seen, and it's not just a convenient illusion. It's what makes him a great agent, why the ASS hasn't put him out to pasture—or had him shot—for any of the many, many messes he's left in his wake over the years, scattered across the globe: he sees through people, sees into them. Owen, despite his skill at acting, is no exception. He hates to imagine what Curt is seeing now.
His partner's regrettable presence is driven out of his mind when he reaches the bathroom, and his bullet wound makes itself forcefully known once more as he collapses onto the (lidded, thank god, you never know with places like these) toilet seat. He sits, and breathes, trying to work up the fortitude to actually remove his trousers and rinse off the wound.
He's made no progress when, several slow breaths later, Mega appears in the doorway, stripped to his shirtsleeves. He takes Owen in with a deliberate look, then asks, “You want a hand with that?”
Owen wrestles with himself for a moment; his pride objects to the idea of accepting the offer, but his dignity reminds him that discretion is, indeed, the better part of valor.
“I'd be much obliged, old boy,” he says, affecting a carefree tone that can't quite cover his exhaustion.
Mega is surprisingly adept at first aid. He quickly liberates a washcloth from the tiny linen closet, a flask from his pocket, and kneels at Owen's feet without any fuss. He helps Owen remove his blood-soaked trousers with similar composure, though he grimaces when the wound becomes fully visible.
“You'll have to wait for bandages, and you will need them, but I can disinfect it,” he says, but doesn't move, seeming content to simply sit on the cracked tile floor of the bathroom and wait.
Owen's head starts spinning, and it takes a few seconds to re-center himself. Blood loss, he insists internally. Liar, a different part of him chides. “Go ahead,” he finally says.
Curt—Mega pours some liquor on the washcloth, and looks up at him through dark eyelashes. It's alarmingly disarming. (And reminiscent of other things—things he can't think about right now. Things he should never think about, in relation to Mega. The man causes him enough problems already.)
“Drink?” Mega says, offering up the flask.
“Please,” Owen responds emphatically, grabbing it with a bit more alacrity than he intended. He takes a long sip—it's vodka, bottom-shelf. He almost laughs. Agent Curt Mega, drinking the liquor of the Reds. You can't trust anyone these days.
Mega wipes away the first layer of blood, and Owen takes another swig, as if that will drown out the bone-deep sting.
“I've never kept part of my briefing from you,” Mega says, making earnest eye contact.
“Bully for you,” Owen mutters through gritted teeth. He looks away, toward the yellow lamp that illuminates the bathroom, and works on holding his breathing even. The swill Mega keeps in his flask is harsh, both on the throat and on the recently-acquired bullet wound.
“They tell me to, sometimes,” Mega continues as he works, and then adds, “Hold still,” when Owen's eyes snap back to Mega and he tries to push himself upright, out of the exhausted slump he's fallen into, in response.
“They what?”
“You heard me,” Mega says, that stupid grin settling on his lips again. He pulls the washcloth away. “You really think HQ's never handed me a folder with two sets of files, one for Queen and country, guv'nah”—(his English accent is atrocious, how is he still alive and spying)—“and one for just us Yanks?”
“Huh,” Owen says. If he's honest (something he generally tries to avoid), he had thought that.
“The last time was, uh, Porkkala. Last fall.”
Intellectually, Owen knows that Mega is his senior, has been running missions longer than he has, maybe even has a higher security clearance. Still, it's hard to imagine the brash, boyish man in front of him being privy to national secrets important enough that the American government would try to keep them from their allies. He's met Director Cynthia Houston, for god's sake—he can hardly believe she hasn't eaten Curt for breakfast yet. Alive. Squirming, even, and enjoying every moment of it, since Mega's missions have a tendency to go straight to hell, in Owen's experience.
Porkkala, for example, was a clusterfuck. Their escape had been the glaring hole in the infiltration plan Curt presented: the ASS had given them blueprints to the naval base, the guard schedule, interior camera angles and the layout of the external sensor grid, everything they could possibly need to get in. Someone had even highlighted the most efficient route from their entrance to the security center, and from there to the labs where some prototype transceivers, the object of the mission, were being tested. But there was no way to avoid discovery forever, and it was unlikely they'd be able to retrieve the transceivers and get out of the fort's enormous buffer zone before someone discovered a sign of their presence. After that, it would only be a matter of time before they were found and killed (if they were lucky) or captured (if they weren't). Even their skills weren't enough to dodge or fight off an entire Soviet military installation.
“Do we have an exit?” Owen had asked, after looking over the briefing files a third time, just in case he'd missed something.
Curt had responded with his habitual devil-may-care grin. “Between the two of us, I'm sure we'll work something out. C'mon, let's move already, I'm getting bored.”
Ultimately, they'd set some charges as a distraction and snuck out during the chaos of the explosions and subsequent search, disguised in some stolen uniforms. Finding those was a stroke of apparent luck—one Owen had assumed was actually part of a plan he simply wasn't privy to.
If Curt isn't lying (and it's with a jolt that he realizes he's only now considering that Curt could be, though he can't get himself to take the idea seriously), and he wasn't keeping anything back, the ace up his sleeve that Owen thought existed, the secret that had guaranteed their exit—that escape had been pure chance. The fact that they got the prototypes and made it out alive, if there truly was nothing guarding their backs? That was a damn miracle.
Which means— “They sent you in there without an exit?”
Curt stands and tosses the washcloth into the sink, unaware of the frantic speed Owen's thoughts are racing at. “Hey, you were there too. And we made one for ourselves just fine, remember?”
“Hard to forget,” Owen says. He presses down his anger—at Six, at America, for treating them like expendables. At Mega, for acting so unbothered. Like it was all fine and dandy that their agencies would send them in half-cocked, risking their lives for hardware whose retrieval couldn't possibly have been that urgent. He wants to keep Curt talking, wants to learn the depth of their governments' disregard for them. And... as infuriating as Mega's cavalier attitude is, Owen also finds it charming. In their line of work, it's rare to be trusted so fully, and so casually, as Mega seems to trust him; despite his misgivings about Mega's reliability, he likes it.
No, you don't, he reminds himself. You want to know what else he knows. Nothing more. “It was... explosive,” he adds, hoping to provoke more reminiscence.
Curt takes the bait with a laugh. “Hah, yeah. Good times. So, what, you thought I had some secret escape plan that I couldn't tell you because we had some top-secret Soviet inside source that Cynthia doesn't want you Brits knowing about?”
That's exactly what Owen had thought. He locks his jaw to avoid grimacing in embarrassment at being read so well by this—American.
Curt offers a smug grin. “Nah, there was no super-secret exit route. They just wanted me not to tell you we knew about the sensor grid. Good thing I did though, 'cause if you hadn't known about the motion sensors, you couldn't have jammed them for us. Gimme that,” he says, and grabs the flask back before Owen can react. Owen watches his throat work as Curt tilts his head back and drinks. He jerks his eyes away the moment Curt starts lowering the flask; the last thing he needs is for Curt to notice that as well. One thing he knows the ASS and MI6 do agree on is their increasing intolerance for sexual perversion.
“Anyways,” Curt continues, “Cynthia would kill me for it. If she found out.” His grin widens, revealing a flash of teeth, the tip of a pink tongue. “Good thing we're spies, right?”
“You— But that's…” —treason, Owen finishes, if only to himself. Curt is admitting to violating the United States' precious Espionage Act, a capital offense, for—what? For him? Curt Mega is baffling: a spy who can't keep a damn secret, but somehow, everything he reveals to Owen just leaves him feeling more confused. “Why?”
“Seems only fair,” Curt says. “Besides, keeping intel from my partner seems like a good way to get shot.” He nods toward Owen's wound. “Not exactly my idea of a good time, even if it is yours.”
That's another thing Owen hates about Curt: he doesn't look it, or act like it, but he's a sneaky bastard.
He knows when he's beaten, but before he can concede the argument, Mega hauls him to his feet.
“Well, we're done here,” he steamrolls on. “Up you get, c'mon, there's some lovely three-thread-count sheets for you to bleed on just a few steps away.” Curt laughs at his own joke, and Owen's body shakes along with him. He's warm and impossibly solid, the only real thing in the world; everything but the long border between them has dissolved into mist.
Does Mega know what he's doing? Is he tormenting Owen on purpose? It's impossible to tell, especially when the peeling wallpaper is turning grey around the edges of Owen's vision.
“Go fuck y'rself,” he mutters, just out of principle, but he thinks it probably gets lost in Curt's shoulder, where his head half-rests as the two of them shuffle back across the room.
Mega drops him on the bed further from the door. The bedspread is, as promised, rough against the bare skin of his legs, and Owen curls up in instinctive protest. Then he remembers where he is, and tries to drag himself into a sitting position instead. He gets halfway upright in time to see Mega cross back to the door to the hallway.
“I'll be back by morning,” he says. “Don't wait up for me.”
Owen watches him shrug his jacket back on, feeling like he's experiencing everything Curt does at a half-second delay. “Where're you going?” he asks.
“Out for a drink.”
A cold shock runs through Owen, kickstarting his brain back into gear. “Like hell you are, Mega,” he says. After everything he's been through today, starting with getting shot and ending with Mega out-arguing him, there's no way he's going to let Mega give away their position and get them both killed just so he can have a damn pint.
“I wasn't asking, Carvour,” Mega replies. His voice is loud and echoes in Owen's skull, adding to his growing headache. Owen watches him grab the briefcase they'd hastily stuffed Kohler's documents into the same way he'd watch security footage: studiously, trying to piece events together into some narrative that makes sense. Then, abruptly, he remembers that this is real, is now, Mega is right in front of him, and he can do more than just observe.
If he can get his sluggish body to cooperate.
“What do you think you're doing?” he asks acidly. There's a chance (however slight) he manages this with words, his best-preferred weapon. That would be less of a strain on his flagging energy.
“Passing off our intel while it's still hot,” Mega says like it's obvious. “Don't worry, I'll make sure your guys get a copy, too. Least I can do, really, after all your hard work.” He turns away, as if that explanation is enough, as if he isn't accountable to Owen for anything more.
The fucking nerve. Owen swings his legs over the side of the bed, grimacing as the movement tugs at his injury. Still, he's a spy; he can take a little pain, and he needs to stop Mega. Letting the Americans get their hands on those papers without making his own copies first is as good as kissing them goodbye. Fuck that—if Curt runs off with Kohler's intel after everything Owen went through to get it, Owen is going to start handing off American secrets to the Soviets himself.
He stands, ready to stride forward and seize Mega by the shoulders, ready to grapple with him if need be. “And how am I—shit!” The room tilts, blurs, and his legs collapse underneath him.
When his vision clears, he finds himself staring down Mega's shoes, which remain planted in the doorway. Small mercies; Owen couldn't take the humiliation if Mega had to come help him up once more. He pushes himself up on his hands, landing in a slump against the bedframe that could generously be called sitting. It's not the strongest position to argue from, but there's no use for it; he'll work with what he has. Mega is given to occasional fits of conscience, after all. Maybe this will help.
“How am I meant to believe that you'll share these papers? Or that your contact will, once they have them? There's no love lost between your agency and mine, right now.”
I've lied for my country, murdered for her. Today, I let myself get shot for her. Wouldn't you betray me, if America asked you to? How can I expect you to do anything else?
Mega's expression is firm, impenetrable. From this angle, he looms, larger-than-life, like a hero in a Hollywood film, untouched by reality, untouchable. He opens his mouth, as if to speak, and then, for the first time that Owen can recall in their years of acquaintance—stops himself.
Owen feels his eyes tighten; it's a tell of his, that he's assessing a mark, and one he'd know better than to display if he weren't so damn tired. Curt watches him back, tilting his head slowly and holding it there, as if he's trying to solve a puzzle. Finally, he speaks.
“You'll just have to trust me, won't you?”
The words are a question; the tone is anything but. Mega settles his scarf around his neck and departs. In a moment of pique, and only because there's no one to see him do it, Owen strikes the floor with his fist. The papers are in Mega's possession, beyond Owen's power. If Mega acts as he should, and passes them off to his people, they'll disappear behind the inviolable wall of the Espionage Act, and MI6 will get nothing from this whole sordid affair. If Mega isn't lying... well, Owen's handler will be pleased, at least.
Owen sits on the floor and stares at the closed door Mega left behind him. Whatever he believes, whether he trusts Mega or not, what happens next is out of his hands.
So why does it feel like he still has a choice to make?