Work Text:
Charles Cholmondeley was not entirely sure that a life in the War Office was for him.
He hadn’t been sure about the Royal Air Force either, but his father had slapped him on the back and given him a speech about ‘doing his bit’ and his mother had murmured encouraging words in his ear about the opportunities for travel it would give him – the mere thought of which brought him out in hives – and potential for discovering interesting new species of amphibians or fish or insects. It was with that in mind that he’d gritted his teeth and enlisted, and when he’d failed the medical examination he’d been disappointed yes, but then more than slightly relieved to have been excused from the never-ending cycle of boredom and adrenaline that his colleagues recounted to each other in braying tones over cups of tea or tumblers of whiskey.
No, he’d been liberated from the RAF only to tumble instead into MI5, where he’d been told his skills would be a boon to him. His superiors had pored over his exam results and school reports and aptitude tests and told him that his meticulous eye for detail and tendency to over-plan would be an asset to the team, but then he’d faded into absolute obscurity for six years and found himself longing – perversely – for a life in the RAF, which would have been meticulously regimented and in which – he was now sure – he would have excelled. What a life that could have been for him; the same routine every day of the week, the same unwavering standards for excellence and fastidiousness, the same meals, the same people. Predictability, drudgery, safety – albeit with the caveat that he might, particularly in the latter four years, have found himself dead any minute.
Charles daydreamed about the RAF sometimes, as he sat at his desk and found himself invisible to the men around him. For that was him; he’d been cast out of the Armed Forces and into MI5 and all of the parts of himself that he’d been told would make him an ideal candidate had in fact made him… well, strange, and then ignorable. Other colleagues didn’t begin to hyperventilate if someone moved their jackets. Other colleagues didn’t have a need for sameness like Charles did, that made meetings unbearable if he couldn’t choose his own mug, and in that spirit he’d had one made with his own face on it to discourage stealing. Other colleagues didn’t jump at loud noises, something which had become increasingly embarrassing once the Blitz had begun, and Charles had been made subject to several cruel impressions of himself over the past few months.
No, Charles had discovered that succeeding at MI5 wasn’t about brains or aptitude or any of the things that he’d been recruited for. Succeeding at MI5 was about who you knew and how well you knew how to schmooze them, something which Charles had never had much success at. He’d been a solitary child, far too engrossed in his categorisation of insects and newts and fish to pay attention to other children. They’d been too loud, too rambunctious, too sticky, too clumsy; a fellow pupil at school had smashed a jar containing a great crested newt that he’d been hoping to sketch for his journal, and Charles had been caned for shedding tears as he’d watched his specimen flail on the classroom floor.
He'd cared about the wrong things, his teachers had told his parents; he’d been far more interested in books and bugs than in making friends, and his classmates had found him strange and hard to relate to. He’d been hopeless at football, unable at first to understand the rules and then mocked for being overly prescriptive in applying them. He’d made references to books or oblique parts of science that his peers didn’t understand, and when he’d tried to teach them, to encourage their own enthusiasm for learning, he’d been rigorously derided as a teacher’s pet and mocked for being bookish. He’d hated rough housing, but the other boys had delighted in smacking him on the back of his head and running away with his glasses; the one and only time he’d dared to fight back, he’d frightened the other boy so badly that he’d been suspended from school. His parents had been horrified by his behaviour, but Charles had been baffled; he'd only been play-fighting, surely? He’d acted in the way the others had wanted him to, but now he was the strange one? It hadn’t made any sense to him.
MI5 was more of the same. It was all joshing and shoving and loud, bantering, sometimes crude jokes, always recounted in booming voices. When he tried to join in, he found himself ostracised and treated with polite – or sometimes less polite, and more overt – bafflement, as though he were a particularly unseasonal species of bird that had found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He felt blown off-course, struggling against air currents that no one else could see, and every attempt he made to be like the others only made him seem all the stranger, and drew their contempt all the more. He stopped wearing his comfortable jumpers in favour of the itchy, starch-collared shirts and suits the others favoured; he reverted to wearing a tie, for the first time since school, even though it felt like being strangled, and he forced himself to Brylcreem his hair, despite the texture making him shudder each morning before the bathroom mirror. Perhaps looking right was the first part of fitting in, and so he tried his best, and then purchased a small, monogrammed notebook from the stationers in town to commence on the second part of his plan.
Charles was, first and foremost, a scientist. He was used to sitting still and quiet for hours on end, observing species of waterfowl or swarms of insects to determine what drove their behaviour, and so MI5 was a chance to do more of the same. Instead of bugs, he would study his colleagues; he would watch and listen and learn and make deductions, and use those deductions to… what? Camouflage himself? Fit in? It wasn’t a perfect strategy, but he could make it work; there were, after all, moths that did the same thing, and adopted disguises. He could emulate a moth, surely? And so he stowed his notebook in an inner pocket, and made covert note after note after note about his peers, and was forced to conclude… well, that humans were far harder to understand than bugs, or newts, or even his favourite bird, the grebe. Animals and insects were predictable in a way that people were not; people did things that made no sense, or were directly counterproductive to their social bonding behaviours or survival instincts, and yet survive – and even thrive – they did.
Others made awkward, fumbling jokes; others made clumsy passes at the girls in the typing pool; others poured slugs of gin into their afternoon tea. Charles’s jokes were met with silence rather than polite laughter; he was far too respectful to try and pat anyone on the bottom, regardless of their gender; and he drank gin only because he felt he ought to, and certainly wouldn’t contemplate ruining a perfectly good cup of tea with it. He didn’t know what he was doing wrong, and so eventually he did what his mother had always encouraged him to do, and decided to be himself. He’d talked at length to a colleague about the family of woodlice that lived on his windowsill, and despite the young chap’s apparent interest, it had taken him only a few days to become aware of the fact that his peers were now sniggering behind his back and calling him ‘Bug Boy,’ a nickname he loathed. Imagine being given a nickname by people who didn’t even know that the correct term was entomologist.
That was what Charles tried to cling to, anyway. As he sat at home each evening and pushed his boiled potatoes and meat around his plate, that was what he told himself. Did it matter if people liked him? Surely what mattered was that he was good at his job and that he contributed to the war effort. But he wasn’t sure if he was contributing; every time he tried to raise something or make suggestions, the others would all mock and laugh and jeer and call him names, and he would find himself mute, his chest tight and his hands bunched into fists as he willed himself not to cry.
And yet…
He would sit at his desk at the end of the day, watching the others grab their coats and umbrellas and briefcases and head off to happy hour. He’d never been invited, and he wasn’t even sure if he’d like to go, but it would have been nice to have been asked. He wondered what it might be like to not feel so awkward and out of place; wondered what it would be like to have the easy confidence of the men who surrounded him each day; Reggie or Masterman or Montagu or even Fleming, who oozed with so much confidence that Charles had, more than once, wondered if he had any Charles could borrow. But they never so much looked at him twice; never considered him as anything more than an amusement, or someone to do their filing, or someone to foist boring paperwork onto.
Until…
Well, until Colonel Bevan had needed ideas for the invasion of Sicily. Charles was too frightened to look the man in the face, much less present his proposal, so he’d bottled it. Sitting outside Bevan’s office, his head in his hands, Charles had seriously entertained the idea of resigning his post, and leaving MI5 to live on a remote Hebridean island and study the ecosystems there. It couldn’t be so different to here, after all; the natural world had always brought order and reason to Charles’s life. There were rules, and categories, and patterns; kingdoms and phyla and classes; creatures behaved in ways that made sense to him, driven by their need for food or reproduction or survival. Nothing anyone at MI5 did made any sense to Charlie; people couldn’t be put into neat little boxes, no matter how hard he tried.
Especially not Ewen Montagu, who Charles had always been rather frightened of; Montagu was everything Charles was not. He had a level of confidence that bordered on arrogance, and he always knew the right thing to say to the right person at the right time. Charles envied him; he craved Montagu’s easy self-assuredness, his winning smile, and the way he seemed to command every room he walked into. Montagu had never looked at him twice, and had occasionally laughed at the others’ jokes at Charles’s expense, but then… there he was. Stood outside Bevan’s office, looking at Charles. Talking to Charles. Listening to him, in a way that didn’t seem intended to mock.
Charles had waited with bated breath, during those first few days of planning the mission. He’d anticipated the shoe dropping, and Monty – the nickname was easy, chummy, and felt strangely intimate – to realise that Charles was just a bug boy, nothing more. But Monty was still unfailingly interested in him; more than that, he defended him to the others when they attempted to tease him. Monty made sure that Charles’s ideas were listened to, and despite the strangeness of what they were doing, he never made Charles feel ashamed or embarrassed or like he cared too much about the smallest of details. He even began to call him ‘Charlie’, and the shortening and familiarity of the name made Charles’s cheeks burn. He had… a friend. Was that it? Was this what it was? He was never entirely sure, but he brought it up one evening at the Gargoyle Club and Monty stared at him as though Charles had miscategorised a butterfly as a moth and told him:
Of course we’re friends, Charlie. I don’t just stick anyone’s gin on my bar tab, you know.
Charles nodded, and sipped his awful gin, and tried not to cry as Monty smiled lazily at him and raised his glass in a toast.
Not just a Bug Boy. Never again just a Bug Boy. He was Charlie now, and he had Monty in his corner.