Chapter Text
Ten minutes before he’s due to leave for court, Alex is digging futilely through his desk.
“Anna, have you seen my shield?” he calls out through the open door to his office, though there’s no reason his assistant would know where it is. He probably fucking left it at home, forgot he was wearing it after his last case and discarded it carelessly by the shower. “Fuck it,” he mutters, not waiting for an answer, “I’ll go without.”
“You know that’s not possible,” Anna reminds him, now standing in the doorway. There’s an exasperated look on her elfin face that he’s sure he didn’t earn. Not this time anyway.
“Did you know that if you haven’t swapped by your mid-thirties, the likelihood that you will drops into the single digits?” he asks her, quoting the stats that he’d wrung out of Nora in a fit of pique on his thirty-second birthday. Never mind that he’s not mid-thirties yet. What matters is he’s getting close. “Kinda pointless to expect those of us without soulmates to have to wear a shield.”
Anna rolls her eyes. She has, of course, been subjected to this rant before. “Be that as it may, it’s not legal to go unshielded in a courtroom and you know it. You can’t know for sure that you don’t have a soulmate. A small chance is still a chance. Here, take mine.”
On her extended palm sits an unassuming bracelet: a slim band of metal with the smallest of swellings on one side, which holds the shielding chip. The technology has come a long way, shrunk down from the bulky devices that his parents had to wear and much more reliable than the inconsistent metal alloys people relied on in the more distant past. The bracelet itself is more for show than anything else, to reassure other people that another person wasn’t going to be suddenly occupying your body.
With a sigh, Alex takes the band from her and clasps it around his own wrist. “Sure,” he agrees with a wry smile, “the day that my spy soulmate finally takes off her shield we’ll throw a party.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Anna chirps, “she could be a princess.”
“Or in prison,” Alex returns flatly.
There weren’t many people in the world who wore shields permanently, and really, the only ones that definitively did were the incarcerated. It was rumored that some royal families held to the practice, and the permanently shielded spy was a popular trope in fiction, but it seemed unlikely to Alex. Everyone took off their shield at some point. After all, no one really knew what permanently shielding actually did to a person—there have been reports of shielding sickness, though it’s infrequent and the links to the shields themselves were unproven, which is how the prisons justified the practice (Alex has an entire other rant about that).
Mostly, people don’t wear them unless they absolutely have to because they want to swap and find their soulmate. Those who have met and bonded don’t have to worry about the unexpected swaps anymore, but the shields apparently still interfere with that nebulous feeling of connection people have to their soulmate.
Or so Alex has been told; he wouldn’t know.
“I need that back, by the way,” Anna reminds him. “I have to go to the bank later.”
“You’re a lifesaver, Anna,” Alex says genuinely as grabs his briefcase and jacket and starts hurrying toward the exit. He may think the whole soulmates and shields thing is tiresome, but the last thing he needs is to be barred from doing his job because of it.
“Remember that when it’s time to decide on Christmas bonuses!” she calls after him.
He gives her a jaunty salute before he turns the corner.
“Neither of y’all have seen my shield around your apartment, have you?” Alex asks, in lieu of a greeting, as he slides into the booth opposite Nora and June with his whiskey.
“He lives!” Nora says, overloud even for the bar. She’s grinning like he’s gonna get it, and he braces himself.
“‘Hey June, how’s it going?’” June puts in sarcastically. “‘So sorry I’ve been dodging your calls.’”
“I haven’t been dodging them, I’ve been busy,” Alex protests. “I told you I had a nightmare case. Which I won, by the way.”
“And I’m proud of you, but I still reserve the right to be annoyed with you too.”
Alex sighs and wipes a hand over his face. “Fine. How have you been, sister dearest?”
“Mom’s going to be in town for some event in a week, and when you wouldn’t reply to her she decided to make it entirely my problem,” June says dryly, sipping whatever fruity cocktail she’s ordered tonight. “So, I’ve been better.”
“Sorry, Bug,” Alex winces. “I can take some time now that this is over, though. Whatever you need, say the word.”
“It’s fine,” June sighs, even though it’s clearly not, and fishes a small, slim box out of her bag and slides it across the table toward him.
“What’s this?” Alex asks.
“A new shield. Anna told me you lost yours. And no, it’s not at our place.”
“So now you’re getting information on me from my assistant?”
“I am when you don’t answer your calls or texts,” June retorts, and ok, she has a point.
“You didn’t have to buy me one,” Alex huffs. “I’m perfectly capable of doing that for myself.”
“Considering you went a week without one, I’m not sure that’s true,” Nora puts in. “Aren’t you supposed to be wearing one at work anyway?”
“It’s not like I actually need one,” Alex grumbles as he slumps back into the booth. He’s been annoyed about the whole thing all week. “You’re the one who told me there’s less than a 20% chance I’m going to swap with someone at this point. Can’t we all just accept the fact that I don’t have a soulmate and move on?”
Nora hums doubtfully and stirs her drink. “I read an article the other day about someone who swapped for the first time at 52,” she says. “They were driving without a shield because they assumed they didn’t have a soulmate, and bam. Caused a big accident. Just because most people swap in their twenties—”
“All right, we don’t need to go through this again,” Alex interrupts before she can get going.
June and Nora had swapped at peak time, in their mid-twenties. Nora had been walking to the library at MIT, while June was just getting home to her apartment in Georgetown. They’d used the time to put their contact information in each other’s phones, and within a week they’d met and bonded. Everyone Alex knows has a story like theirs. Alex is happy for them, truly, but he doesn’t really want to hear anything about soulmates from either of them right now.
“I’ll wear it when I have to, ok? It just wasn’t really pressing,” he says dismissively. “Now can we talk about literally anything else?”
Nora puts her hands up and they move on to other topics, but the soulmate question lingers at the back of his mind. It’s not like he wants or needs a soulmate. He knows people without them can have strong relationships, and a soul bond is no guarantee of happily ever after—just look at his parents. That doesn’t make the loneliness any easier to bear. He meets people, takes them home, has a good time, even dated a perfectly nice woman for a couple months a while back. It never works out, though. There’s never been any click with any of them, soulmate or otherwise.
Some days he’s afraid there’s never going to be. (Some days he’s fully resigned to it.)
“Call me in the morning and we can talk about mom’s visit,” June tells him as they hug at the end of the evening.
“I will,” Alex mumbles into her hair.
“You sure you don’t want company tonight?” she asks, because of course she does. She can always seem to sense when he’s at a low point.
“Yeah, ‘m sure. I’m just gonna go home and pass out. Don’t worry about me.”
She squeezes her arms tight around his waist before she lets him go, then looks up at him with a lopsided smile on her face. “It’s my job, though.”
Alex snorts. She certainly seems to think so.
He waits until June and Nora’s Uber arrives before he starts walking the short distance to his apartment. The city buzzes with the activity of a summer night, the air filled with the hum of conversation and the clink of dishes mingling with the rumble of traffic. Alex stares idly at the magazine covers on display at a newsstand as he waits at a crosswalk; one loudly asks, Does Gen Z Have a Soulmate Problem? Alex can’t begin to guess what it’s supposed to be.
The light changes. A car horn blares down the block. Alex blinks.
When he opens his eyes he’s no longer in Brooklyn.
To be fair, that’s the least pressing issue at the moment. Top of that list would be the absolutely excruciating pain on inside of his forearm, although the shouting and sound of running footsteps—and, fuck, is that gunfire?—behind him are certainly fighting for his attention. He looks down at his arm to find blood rapidly soaking through the fine wool of his suit, except it’s not his arm. The hand he’s staring at is white and larger than his own, with neatly trimmed fingernails in contrast to Alex’s bitten down ones.
“Did I get fucking shot?” Alex asks the world at large. The voice that comes out of him is deep, and his vowels round like they’re fighting for an accent he doesn’t have. As if in answer, the guys running toward him start firing at him again.
It’s only then that Alex appreciates that he’s apparently on a rooftop. An unfamiliar cityscape stretches out in front of him, and he doesn’t have time to try to piece together where in the world he is because he’s still currently being shot at.
Alex ducks hurriedly behind some kind of large utility box and tries to take stock of his surroundings. What the actual fuck was his soulmate’s—because that’s what this has to be, a swap, and oh yeah his soulmate is apparently a man, which is not something he can currently process—plan here, anyway? His attackers are on the next roof over, but somehow Alex doesn’t think that’s going to slow them down that much. There’s some kind of trap-door access in the middle of the roof, and if he can get to that, he can at least get away from the bullets. As far as he’s concerned, that’s priority number one. Running out there is going to expose him to said bullets, though.
“I hope you’re fucking fast,” Alex mutters to… well, his soulmate’s body, he supposes.
This is fucked up. You were supposed to wake up in someone’s home or on the subway or some shit. Not in the middle of a firefight.
He takes a deep breath, counts to five. The fine gravel covering the top of the roof skids under his feet—fucking dress shoes—as he scrambles up and toward the hatch. Fortunately, his soulmate is fast and strong, but that doesn’t really help when he tugs on the handle of the door and it doesn’t budge.
“No no nononono,” he babbles frantically, desperately, pulling harder to no avail.
He scrambles to the edge of the roof furthest from the attackers, who have now stopped firing on him. Somehow that doesn’t seem like a good thing. He suspects they know he’s trapped. The gap between buildings is the kind of thing you’d see a hero leap across and catch himself on the edge with his feet dangling, and a hysterical laugh bubbles out of Alex. Yeah, no fucking way.
The men yell something at him in a language he doesn’t know—Arabic, maybe. He looks back at the trap door and wonders if he should try it again. What’s he got to lose? Just as he’s reaching for it, though, it pops open from the inside and two men climb out, each holding the kind of guns Alex has only ever seen in movies.
“Nowhere to run, Sutton,” one of the men growls in a heavy accent. “Give us the drive.”
Alex puts up his hands, doing his best to ignore the throbbing in his forearm, and tries out a disarming smile. Not that he has no idea what his fucking face looks like right now. “What if I told you I had no idea what you were talking about?”
Perhaps predictably, the men don’t look particularly impressed by this claim. One of them aims his gun at Alex’s chest, and Alex squeezes his eyes closed.
Nothing happens. The timbre of the city’s hum seems to shift. Someone yells ‘shut up Cynthia!’ in a distinctly American accent somewhere in the distance.
Alex opens his eyes and finds himself standing in nearly the same place he was when he’d left his body. It takes him a moment to realize he’s holding his phone to his ear and someone is speaking to him in an English accent.
“Wait wait—” he interrupts. The voice cuts off. “Who the fuck is this?”
There’s silence on the line; the only reason he knows they haven’t hung up on him is that the call is still active.
“Don’t go very far, Mr. Claremont-Diaz,” the woman on the phone says. Then the line goes dead.
Alex barely waits for the click of the lock on June’s door to sound before he’s shouldering his way in.
“Alex? What’s going on?” she asks as he stumbles past her into the living room, her confusion rapidly giving way to concern. “Are you ok?”
Alex knows he looks like a mess. He’s out of breath and sweaty, having run most of the way here, his hair tangled from how he’s been digging his hands into it, and his eyes are wild. His forearm still aches, like he can feel the ghost of his soulmate’s injury—or maybe it’s just the memory of that pain, unlike anything he’s ever experienced before.
“I swapped,” he blurts. “I was walking home, and then suddenly I was on a roof, and bleeding, and people were shooting at me—”
“A roof? Where?” June interrupts, at nearly the same time as Nora pops up over the back of the couch and incredulously says,“What do you mean people were shooting at you?”
“Shooting!” Alex repeats, a little hysterically. “With guns! Big fucking guns! And I have no idea where, some foreign city I didn’t recognize. They might have been speaking Arabic, but I— I’m not sure.”
“That’s— you’re joking, right? Alex, tell me this is a bad joke,” June demands, but it’s clear that his general demeanor is answering her question already.
Alex shakes his head, tugging on his curls again as he paces across their small living room. “Believe me, I fucking wish it was. And— and when I came back, I was on the phone with some British woman who just told me not to go very far and then hung up on me!”
“You called back, right?” Nora asks.
“Of course I fucking did. No answer.”
For the first time since he swapped back, Alex feels the adrenaline starting to drain from his body, and abruptly his knees don’t feel capable of holding him up anymore. He stumbles over to the sofa and collapses next to Nora, who puts a comforting hand on his back as he slumps forward with his elbows propped on his thighs.
“The worst part is that I got cornered right before I swapped back,” he says to the rug as he wrings his fingers together. “I— I couldn’t get away, and I got him trapped, and I don’t even know if he’s ok.”
The apartment is dead silent for the space of one breath, then another. Then June ventures, “He?”
Alex buries his face in his palms before slowly dragging his hands down his cheeks. “I mean, platonic soulmates are a thing, right?”
“Sure,” Nora agrees, though there’s a weird note in her voice he can’t quite parse. He also doesn’t have the mental energy to consider anything about the whole guy situation right now. “I assume he didn’t leave you his name and number.”
“No,” Alex says with a humorless puff of laughter. “One of the men called him Sutton? But, like. I’m guessing that’s not his real name.”
“Yeah, that’s fair.”
“What are you going to do?” June asks, as if he has any fucking clue how to deal with this.
Alex lets a little helpless laugh. “What can I do? He must know who I am at this point, so the ball’s entirely in his court.”
“Until you swap again,” Nora points out. “If you weren’t swapping this whole time because he was permanently shielded, the delay could accelerate your timeline now. You could have… days instead of weeks.”
“Or he’ll be shielded again right away and nothing more will happen,” Alex argues. The words ring false even as he says them, though. Maybe his soulmate got out of the shitty situation Alex left him in, but if he didn’t…
Alex doesn’t want to think about it. “Can I stay here tonight?” he asks, even though he’s pretty sure he already knows what the answer will be. “Or maybe for the weekend? I kinda don’t want to be alone right now.”
“Of course you can,” June says gently, lowering herself onto the couch next to him and wrapping an arm around his waist. “As long as you need.”
Henry wakes up in a windowless room devoid of furniture except a table and two chairs, one of which he’s bound to with his hands behind his back. He’d barely been back in his body for thirty seconds before he’d been knocked unconscious because apparently his soulmate had gotten him cornered—
No, that’s not fair. The fact that Henry’s soulmate is a civilian—an American at that—is hardly his fault. He, unlike Henry, did not sign up for any of this, and it was only a stroke of terrible luck that put him in it. The bullet that had grazed Henry’s arm had destroyed his implanted shield, and with it Henry’s only chance at salvaging this situation.
He doesn’t know how much time has passed. From what he can tell about the state of his wound, it can’t have been more than a day. He tests his bonds and finds them annoyingly secure; he’ll have to find a way to talk his way out of this one, then, because he certainly can’t rely on a rescue. When he’d spoken with Bea, he’d told her how the operation had gone to shit—that his efforts to secure the drive had nearly all been for naught when the target had come back to his office too early—but he hadn’t yet been captured. In retrospect, that outcome should have been obvious. She’ll no doubt expect a check in (and worry when it doesn’t come), but ultimately, his life will hardly be MI6’s highest priority.
It doesn’t take long for his captors to notice he’s awake.
“Ah, Patrick. So good of you to join us,” a voice he’s become unfortunately familiar with drawls over the click of hard soled shoes on concrete. “Though, I assume that Patrick Sutton is not your real name. Don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten us?”
Henry looks up at the leader of the organization he’s worked to infiltrate for the past six months—a man with whom he’s shared drinks and conversations and, eventually, a bed, a man who Henry despises—and affects the most befuddled and innocent expression he can manage. “Sam,” he sighs in relief, “thank god, there’s been some mistake—”
He’s silenced by a swift blow to the face, the taste of copper bright on his tongue as pain blooms across his cheekbone.
“Don’t try to play those games with me,” Samir Johnston—half Moroccan, half American, all asshole—sneers as he flexes his hand. “You were caught red-handed, stealing from me.”
“A simple misunderstanding, I swear,” Henry tries, unwilling to abandon his cover just yet. “I would never betray you.”
“You ran,” Samir says dryly.
“Your men were shooting at me,” Henry counters. “Please, Sam, let me explain.”
“I don’t want an explanation. I want to know what you did with the drive you stole.”
Thank god Henry had already gotten rid of it before they’d caught up with him; hidden in an unassuming spot and its location passed onto Bea so she could dispatch a trusted carrier to pick it up, the drive was only the latest of many containing data that Henry’s managed to copy during his time with the organization. Even if Henry told him where it had been, it would be gone by the time Samir got to it.
Not that Henry’s going to tell him, anyway. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he tries. “I don’t know anything about a drive.”
For a moment, Henry thinks Samir might relent, but then the already hard look on his face only cements further as he turns toward the two men by the door. “I want his name, who he’s working for, and the location of the drive. Do whatever you must. Understood?”
The men answer with matching short nods, and Samir sweeps past them out of the room, letting the door slam shut after him. Henry watches as they exchange the briefest of glances before they start advancing on him, the steps of this dance so well-trod they don’t need words. Even Henry knows what’s coming, having witnessed it before.
That knowledge won’t make the pain any easier to bear.
Samir’s men are good at their jobs, Henry will give them that. They know how to extract information, how to break a man. Most of the time they don’t even have to work that hard for it.
Most of the time they’re not trying to break men like Henry.
He knows better than to be stoic. No, he begs and pleads, but never once does he waver from his story. He’s not delusional enough to think that his cover can be fully salvaged, but it works to his favor if they underestimate him. Eventually, Samir will come back to talk to him again, all honeyed words and deals, the promise of relief after the onslaught—this, too, is part of the dance. He just has to hold firm until then, and maybe he can talk his way into a deal that will provide an opportunity for escape.
Unfortunately, that’s probably still a ways off, and in the meantime they seem to be moving rather rapidly into higher levels of pain. Maybe because they’re aware that Henry knows their patterns from his time in the organization, or maybe on Samir’s orders. Henry had worked his way far into Samir’s confidences before his betrayal was discovered. People tend to take that kind of thing personally.
Two new men have returned after a few hours’ break—just enough time for Henry to start to drift as the adrenaline wears off, just enough time for his bruises to start to fade into a dull ache. They come with a variety of tools this time, but at least at first they seem to be mostly for show. A threat of what they’ll do if Henry continues to give them answers they don’t like. They cut the bonds on his hands, and even though he knows it heralds nothing good, the brief moments he gets of movement are an unexpected boon. His joints protest after so many hours in the same position, but the stretch is still a relief.
Then they zip-tie his wrists to metal rings set into the table in front of him, and one of the men takes firm hold of his pinky finger on his left hand. Henry’s signet ring glints in the harsh light thrown by the bare bulb illuminating the room, and he grits his teeth against what he knows must be coming.
“Boss says you play the piano,” the other man says, his arms folded across his chest. “If you value your hands, you’ll tell the truth.”
“I am telling the truth,” Henry protests, “please, you have to believe—”
He cuts off with a yelp as the other man wrenches his pinky finger; for a moment, the pain is excruciating, and then—
It stops.
Henry opens his eyes and finds himself sitting at a restaurant in some kind of minuscule garden patio wedged between buildings, with two rather attractive women staring at him from the other side of the table.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Henry blurts, the words taking on some kind of bizarre combination of his regular accent filtered through a mouth unused to forming the words that way.
“Alex?” one of the women—whose warm brown skin is a near match for his soulmate’s—says, a deep frown creasing her face. “What’s—”
She stops speaking as Henry fishes out the mobile from his soulmate’s pocket, finds Bea’s number still in the outgoing history, and jabs the call button. He lets it ring twice, then hangs up.
“I’m gonna take a wild guess that Alex isn’t in there anymore,” the other woman puts in shrewdly, her eyes narrowing as she looks him over. “You’re him, aren’t you? The soulmate.”
“I’m afraid so,” Henry answers. Before they can continue this interrogation, though, Alex’s phone rings and Henry scrambles to answer it. “We’ve swapped again,” he says before Bea can even ask. “He isn’t wearing a bloody shield, God knows why. You’d think once would have been enough to convince him of the necessity.”
“Alex prefers to go unshielded,” the second woman, the one with the tight, dark ringlets and the too-knowing expression, pipes up. “He has concerns about their long-term effects, and frankly he’s not wrong—”
Henry cannot begin to unpack that right now. Surely the universe must be having a laugh making Henry, who has been shielded nearly his entire life, soulmates with someone who is anti-shield.
“Given your lack of contact in the last thirty-six hours, I’d say it’s a lucky thing he wasn’t wearing one,” Bea says over the line.
“It’s certainly not, considering that he’s—” Henry’s voice clips off as he looks at the women across from him, the words being tortured dying on his tongue. “Er, not in a good place.”
Even that is enough for clear alarm to break out over their expressions, understandably.
“And where are you?” Bea asks.
Henry looks to the table between them, at half-eaten meals—an omelet and eggs Benedict for the women and fried chicken with a waffle in front of him—and what seems to be a mostly-empty pitcher of mimosas, and dryly answers, “It would appear that I’m at brunch.”
Christ, he can’t have this conversation here, but when he tries to get up, the second woman reaches out and grabs his arm with surprising speed and strength.
“Oh no you don’t,” she says fiercely. “You’re not walking away with his body.”
“I will come back, I swear, but I cannot simply read in two American civilians on this operation,” Henry insists as he extracts his wrist from her grip.
“Who’s there?” Bea asks.
“I’m with his—” Henry hesitates.
“Sister.”
“Best friend.”
“Christ,” Henry mutters, wiping a hand over his face. The shape of it is unfamiliar under his palm—a sharper nose, less severe cheekbones, a chin dimple. “His family,” he tells Bea, before looking back at the two women. “Just— one moment. Promise.”
Of course, he has no way of being sure that he won’t get swapped back before then, but he does intend to return. No idea what he’s going to say to them, but one problem at a time.
“They’re holding me somewhere,” he tells Bea once he gets away from prying ears. “I have no idea where. I was unconscious when they moved me, and there are no windows.”
“Still in Marrakesh?”
“As far as I know.”
The sound of fingers on a keyboard clatters over the phone. “I’ll dig into their holdings, see if I can narrow things down. I take it things aren’t exactly peachy, based on your earlier comment.”
“It’s— nothing I can’t handle.”
“And what about your soulmate?” she asks him pointedly. “What can he handle?”
Henry takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “It’s bad, Bea. He doesn’t know anything, obviously, but what if they figure out that he isn’t me? His name—that, I’m certain they could get from him. And if they find him, they could use him as leverage.”
“Then we’ll protect him,” Bea says, as if it’s that simple.
“Do you honestly believe Gran will entertain the idea of protecting my soulmate—an American man, at that—for even a second?” Henry bites out bitterly. A nuisance, she’s always called soulmates. She’d probably consider this the perfect opportunity to get rid of Henry’s for good.
The thought makes Henry’s stomach turn. He’s never met the guy—has only ever seen him in his driver’s license photo, and no, he hasn’t sought out a mirror while they’ve been swapped because he’s not sure he could handle the sight, frankly—and yet somehow it feels like he knows him already, down to his bones. He stares down at his soulmate’s hand, at his bitten-down fingernails, at the simple beaded bracelet looped around a sturdy wrist, at smooth brown skin stretched over his muscular forearm. If only Henry could speak to him— But then, he’s not sure what he’d say.
“No, she won’t,” Bea answers flatly, interrupting his reverie. “But I will.”
“Bea, you can’t just—”
“You should get back to his family. Tell them something to make them feel better.”
Henry can’t stop the mirthless laugh that fights his way out of him. “And what is that supposed to be?”
“Dunno. You’ll think of something,” Bea says with far more optimism than is warranted. “And Henry?” she adds, just before he rings off.
“Yes?”
“Hang in there, ok? We’ll find you, promise.”
Henry wants to tell her it won’t be necessary, and also not to make promises she can’t keep. Instead, he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Love you, Bea.”
“Also, I cannot keep calling a traceable number. Get your soulmate to buy a goddamned burner phone.”
“Alex,” Henry says without thinking, and the name on his tongue reaches through his ribcage and squeezes. “His name is Alex.”