#captiveprincemonth

After 30 minutes of shooting; and after most of the cartel members were face-down and dead in the hangar’s dust; and after Damen had radioed Comms in for extraction—

—someone shoots, and the bullet finds Auguste.

Auguste hears the shot fire from behind him, blinks, and feels in the next moment a pain in his abdomen so white that it forces him to his knees. He drops his gun to the floor, gasping for air.

As though in slow motion, he sees Damen react. Damen pivots around as though on a string and fires one, two, three furious shots in the direction of whoever hit him from behind. With his ears still ringing from the gunfire, Auguste hears the dying breaths of a man hitting the ground.

Then, Damen comes to Auguste’s side. He hoists him up and takes him to cover, settling him down behind a large sheet of scrap metal. It’s not much of a shield, but the hangar is mostly empty space. They don’t have better options. Damen kneels next to him, props him up, takes off his own jacket and places it behind Auguste’s back for support. It’s reckless, exposing his arms like that, and Damen has a lot of goddamn arm, but Auguste knows better than to argue.

He also knows that if anyone can keep him alive, it’s Damen. In the first moment, Damen applies pressure to his wound and forges a makeshift bandage for him. In the next, he’s radioing in the shots to Comms. In the next, he checks Auguste’s pulse, tests his alertness, checks for nausea, and repeats everything back to central control.

Damen says: It’s bad. The bullet made a clean exit through the vest. He’s losing blood. Damen says: hurry. He promises to do several terrible things to a lot of good people if Auguste dies waiting for extraction.

It doesn’t feel real, somehow. Auguste has one hand over the wound, his fingers slick with his own blood, and he can feel his temperature spike. But still—it doesn’t feel real.

They’re in the middle of the Nevada desert.  The hangar is cavernous and brimming with old planes, their frames and spare parts arranged in a loose ring around the centre of the space. In its very centre are sixteen tables, stacked so high with cocaine that the scoop will be news for weeks. It’s the biggest bust the Bureau’s made in a long time: a medal-awarding, promotion-getting, lifetime-anecdote kind of bust.

The hangar’s filthy, and the sunshine filtering through the ashen windows is grim. Auguste doesn’t want to die here, but he thinks he might.

He says it out loud for the first time. “I think I’m going to die.”

Damen’s hands, which are occupied rolling out another length of bandage, freeze in the middle of the act. His fury is sudden, and molten.

“No speaking.” He says, dangerously quiet. “And I won’t let you die.”

“That’s not how it works.” Auguste says. And then—finally—he has a thought that makes it real, that takes his fear and breathes life into it. He says: “Listen. Tell Laurent I’m proud of him.”

“Extraction arrives in two.” Damen says. A crackle of static comes through and Damen presses a hand to his ear, focusing intently on whatever Comms is telling him. He looks back up at Auguste, still raging quietly. “And I’m not telling Laurent anything. You can survive and tell him yourself.”

The thing is: Auguste already has. The last thing he does before he goes dark for each mission is to call his brother and say goodbye, and I love you, and I’m proud of you.

Laurent hates it. He hates every single ceremonious phone call, every single recitation of Auguste’s care—not because of what’s said, but just in case it is the last time. He weathers it anyway, for Auguste’s sake.

“If I don’t,” Auguste says, quietly, and stops. He shifts on the ground and the pain comes at him like a knifepoint. He winces through it. “I need you to take care of him for me.”

Damen doesn’t respond. Auguste watches as something like conflict plays out across his features. He looks down at the ground for a few moments, and exhales severely.

Or maybe Auguste is just imagining it. Maybe he’s just lost that much blood.

Damen doesn’t speak for a long while, vacillating towards and away from resolve. Eventually, he makes up his mind, expression setting in a loaded frown.

“God—shit. “ He says. “Shit. Okay.”

“—Damen?”

“Listen—I’m going to tell you something.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. And he’s going to kill me for doing it, because you’re not supposed to know yet.” He says roughly, more to himself than anything. “Laurent and I are—we’re together.”

Auguste blanks, and for once that afternoon, the whiteness has nothing to do with a bullet.

“You’re—together.”

“Together.” Damen confirms, grimly. “I’m banging your brother. I’m going to ask him to marry me this summer, and you need to be alive to walk him down the aisle.”

Before Auguste can respond—before Damen’s words have even sunk in, really—another round of artillery flies over them. Auguste feels the bullets shower into the metal behind him, feels them reverberate against his back, feels every one as though it had lodged directly in his spine.

Damen moves, fury over sense. He stands up—exposed, and entirely without cover, and tactically ruinous—and unleashes return fire. He fires four shots, and Auguste hears four cries of pain, and then, the surgical drop of four dead bodies.

Damen crouches down again and reloads his gun, breathing heavily. His brow is darkened with sweat, hair coming loose out of the tight bun in which he keeps it. Damen’s bloody-minded intensity in the field strikes a sharp chord against the easy charm he wears everywhere else. Auguste wonders which side of him had caught Laurent’s eye.

Or perhaps, he thinks gamely, it was both. Along with their packaging.

“You’re — you mean —“

“I do mean.” Damen confirms grimly. “And if you die, he kills me, and then he’ll have no-one.”

Auguste searches himself, and finds a reservoir of energy that he probably can’t afford to spend.

“And you tell me all this now?”

“He’s my boss. And your boss.” Damen says, grimacing as he clicks his weapon back into place. “It’s not exactly professional.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I’m asking for your blessing, Aug."

“There’s a bullet,” Auguste exclaims, “in my side.”

“The bullet made a clean exit.” Damen says, and then, almost more to himself: “He and I had a plan for telling you, you know. We talked about it. We had it all worked out. We were going to do it at my house, over brunch, and he was going to do all the talking.”

From a distance, they hear the sound of a helicopter coming into range. Both of them know better than to exhale. Until they sight the damn thing, it could well be coming for the other side.

But it’s been a long day. Auguste rests his head against the rusted metal. He’s tired, and his body’s hit the ground at the bottom of the cliff. He makes the mistake of closing his eyes, and once he does, he feels the rest of his muscles irresistibly give way, easing up and falling, one after the other like dominoes.

“You should have let him tell me,” Auguste says, listlessly. “He talks better than you do.”

“He does everything better than me. Why do you think I want him?”

Auguste thinks to himself, good answer. Using the last dregs of his energy, he manages a smile.

May 23: Identity

24: “Hello, lover.”

25: Point of view

26: Loyalty

27: Forgiveness

28: Power

29: Women

30: "A kingdom, or this."

31: Youth (without youth)

June 1: Parallels

2: Unity

3: Deceit

4: “I think if I gave you my heart, you would treat it tenderly.”

5: Complex

6: Vulnerable/Strong

7: Journey

8: “I know who you are, Damianos."

9: Loss

10: World - politics, culture, history, language, etc

11: Fall/Rise

12: Love

13: Fashion

14: Strategy

15: Truth

16: Equal

17: Touch

18: War

19: "I miss you. I miss our conversations"

20: Suffering/Recovery

21: Personal choice

Laurent spends the morning covering the plenary session of the Economic and Social Committee, and heads back to the office at midday. When he arrives, most of the newsroom is out for the lunch hour. He counts five heads amongst the sea of computers.

It’s still enough for him to immediately sense that something unusual is afoot. When he walks into the room, all five heads snap towards him and look back down just as quickly, as though they’ve been caught doing something. All five heads make a terrible performance of pretending to work.

It makes for an unconvincing show. He surveys the room for a moment longer, cool and unflinching, but no one dares look back up at him. No one offers an explanation.

He goes to find Nicaise. Nicaise is alone in the junior copy editors’ office, eating lunch at his desk, halfway through a turkey on rye. The document on his screen is bleeding so heavily with red edits that the original text is almost gone. He feels a momentary pang of pity for whoever authored it.

Before Laurent says a word, and without so much as looking at him, Nicaise asks: “Since when did you fraternize with senators?”

“I don’t fraternize with anyone.” He says. “I hate people. You know that.”

“And believe me, they hate you. But there’s a senator in your office.”

Laurent freezes.

When his thoughts kick back into gear, he takes a step back out into the newsroom to look in the direction of his office. It’s on the other side of the large, open space, and the distance to it is littered with computers and printers and other office sundry.

But Nicaise is right: even from here, Laurent can make out the large silhouette of a man in his office.

He he returns inside, looks back at Nicaise, who still only has eyes for his screen.

“Which senator?” Laurent asks sharply.

“Akielos. The younger one.”

“And who let him in?” Laurent asks, by which he means: who is going to die today.

Nicaise turns slowly away from his computer, and delivers him a withering look.

“Do I look like your secretary?"

“Keep that tone up, and you will be.”

Nicaise puts down his sandwich for the sole purpose of raising two middle fingers in Laurent’s direction. Without so much as blinking, he turns back to his screen, and just in case Laurent doesn’t get the message, he pops in his headphones.

Nicaise is an irrepressible little shit. It’s exactly why they hired him.

But there are more pressing matters at hand.

Laurent begins making his way back to his office. The closer he gets, the more clearly the senator comes into view. He’s deep inside Laurent’s office, standing at the window, admiring the city view from behind my desk, Laurent thinks. The sheer nerve of him.

Laurent is not feeling charitable when he arrives: he has three deadlines to meet by the day’s end. The morning’s plenary session had run overtime by an hour and a half, and he needed every spare moment he could squeeze from the afternoon to write.

He knocks on this own door, and is pleased when the sound shakes the senator out of his reverie. He turns and smiles contritely at Laurent, embarrassed at how easily he’s been startled.

It’s a strangely unfiltered response. Un-senatorial. Especially from a man large enough to cause a solar eclipse.

Senator Akielos walks over to the guest’s side of the desk, and extends his hand to Laurent. Laurent takes it, and watches as his hand disappears in the senator’s warm, gigantic grip.

Laurent says, dryly: “I’ve never been received in my own office before.”

Akielos has enough grace to retain his embarrassed look. It’s still a strange contrast to the sheer power of the rest of him—everything from his height, to the perfect tailoring of his charcoal grey suit, to the obvious muscle that it barely conceals. Laurent imagines that he hulks above most people in most rooms.

“My apologies,” says Akielos, and he sounds he like he means it. “I was led here.”

“So I’ve been told,” says Laurent. “You must tell me the name of the gracious culprit.”

Laurent closes the office door behind him. He takes a quick look out the glass and notes that there are more people in the newsroom. Now there are a dozen heads, and again, they all make a very poor show of pretending not to look.

Laurent winds a hand around the drawstring and curtly shutters the blinds. It’s not much privacy, but it’ll do for now. He waves a hand towards one of the chairs in front of his desk, inviting Senator Akielos to sit, which he does.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Senator?” He asks, taking his own chair.

“Please, call me Damen. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m sure you’re busy.” says Akielos. Damen, Laurent corrects himself. “I’m here because I would like to take you to lunch.”

Whatever Laurent was expecting, it certainly wasn’t that.

“Lunch,” he repeats, neutrally, just to be sure.

“Yes, lunch.” says the Senator. “If you’re free. Which I know you are, because I asked the nice lady at the front desk as soon as I arrived.”

Lauren thinks, two people are going to die today.

He leans back in his chair and studies his unexpected guest. The younger of the Akielos brothers is the more natural politician—far less experienced than Kastor, but much better liked. He smiles easily and speaks simply, and does well enough on the late night talk-show circuit to be familiar. The handsomeness doesn’t hurt, either. Nor the dimple. People use a lot of words to describe his face, like charming, or presidential.

But Laurent is wary of pedestals. Likability is a dangerous platform to cultivate, especially for a politician. It screams to be sullied, and Laurent is wary of ever being tarnished with the same brush.

“We don’t know each other well enough to be lunching, Senator.”

“Perhaps we should. Let me take you out.”

Had Laurent been three or four years younger, and equally less-experienced, he might have mistaken the invitation for personal interest. He might even have been inclined to agree. A handsome face is a handsome face, and it never hurt to build an extra bridge in his line of work.

But he’s shrewder now. He registers the dissonance between the senator’s easy invitation, and the grave expression with which he offers it. There’s something searching in his eyes, and Laurent realizes with a flash that lunch is a subtext for something else, even though he can’t begin to discern what it might be.

“Lunch.” He says deliberately, eyes keen, just to make sure they’re both on the same page.

Damen’s features relax a little, when he sees that Laurent’s understood him. “Yes, exactly.”

So—lunch means a story. Laurent’s pulse begins racing, the way it always does when he finds a new lead.

It races even though he doesn’t know what the scoop might be, or whether it’ll lead anywhere. The thrill of a new tip-off is always sheer and heady. He quietly drums his fingers against the armrests of his chair, and tries to keep the elation off his face.

“Political or personal?” He asks quietly.

“Political.”

“Involving you?”

“Involving Kastor.”

Laurent stills. A less professional man in his place would have emitted a low, long whistle.

Damen looks away from him, to a point beside his head and outside the window. The struggle to rein in whatever he’s feeling is clear. It’s also clear that he doesn’t want to be here, doing this.

The fact that he’s so uncomfortable tells Laurent something promising about the reliability of what’s to come. But they can discuss that later. He steers the conversation down a slightly different avenue.

“Why me?”

Damen looks back to him, the corner of his mouth betraying an ironic quirk. “You didn’t strike me as the self-doubting type.”

“I’m not. I’m only pointing out that if your story’s as big you think it is, you might be expected to take it higher than a mid-level editor.”

“I don’t need someone with profile. I need someone thorough with a low radar, who hasn’t been around long enough to curry loyalties.”

“I’m obviously flattered, but I’d prefer if you told me the whole truth.”

Damen leans back in his chair and fixes Laurent with a pointed look. Now, he’s smiling.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he begins lightly.

It’s hardly a promising start. Laurent says, “I’m not sure there’s going to be a right way to take this.”

Damen opens his mouth as though to speak, but pauses and refrains. He looks at a point above Laurent’s head, visibly struggling with how to phrase what he needs to say. It only serves to pique Laurent’s interest, though he can’t imagine that he’s going to like what he hears

“Put it this way.” Damen says, after a considerable number of moments, biting back the worst of his smile. “No one’s going to ask questions if I start spending time with—well. With someone like you.”

“A journalist?”

“A blonde and attractive one.” He says. “I’m—advised that I have something of a type.”

Laurent feels the colour rising in his cheeks, and he can’t do a damned thing to stop it.

Of course Damen has a type. Of course Laurent knows what it is. He picks up as many gossip rags as the next person. He’s seen the conveyer belt of attractive men and women the Senator keeps on his arm.

But he isn’t sure how he feels, about Damen counting him amongst their ilk.

“Your type is—me.” He says, just to confirm.

“Yes. Which means people won’t ask too many questions if I spend time with you.”

Laurent clicks, and draws the next few lines by himself. “And you’d like to encourage those misunderstandings, to throw them off your scent ... which is why you want to take me to lunch.’

"So you’ll come?”      

Laurent pauses again.