#kicked

There’s only about a million banks in the area of the Barbican, and these guys have gone and chosen his bank. 

Of course. 

There’s a second, and River sneers at himself for the thought even as he cannot stop it, where he wonders if they’re here because of him. 

It’s not totally implausible, okay? He is an MI5 agent. They could, somehow, be after him. 

But then they’re very clearly not. 

There’s five of them, masked and with guns, and River is herded, along with everyone else in the lobby, into a corner. No one gives him a second glance. 

He’s glad. Or should be. 

No reasonable person would want to be the target of five people with guns. 

Still. Some fucked-up, danger-seeking, self-centred part of him had almost hoped they’d single him out. 

But they don’t. And so he watches, listens, and commits to memory the details as the gang bark orders at the tellers, lock the doors, wave their guns about. 

And then there is a problem. 

One of the tellers, a younger man who, if River had to guess, is experiencing his first bank robbery, tries to explain something. It’s clearly something unpleasant for the robbers, because one of them shoots through the plexiglass barrier, grabs him by the hair, and slams his head into the desk with an amount of force that will, as River knows from experience, leave him with a nasty bruise and an almost certain concussion. 

This sparks a chain reaction. The people around him begin to shriek and writhe, and River starts talking without even really being aware of what he’s saying, just trying to placate, to minimise the damage, to help. 

He’s sort of standing, his arms spread out, and then a bullet whizzes by, centimetres from his ear, and there’s more shrieking and movement but River’s only sort of aware of it because he’s on the ground and his ears are ringing and his head is spinning and there’s a phantom pain in his wrist and in his joints like he’s still in the back of that fucking car, and–

A boot, steel-toed judging by the feel of it, slams into his torso. Its owner says something to him, but River’s too busy curling up into himself in pain to hear what is being said, let alone respond properly. 

He’s kicked again, this time in the arms now protecting his stomach, and he shouts in pain, tries to roll away, but the boot just returns, kicks him in the back, and there are voices all around him, panicked, pleading, and he somehow realises what is expected of him. 

He rolls over, slowly, painfully, and looks up into the eyes of the masked figure who’d kicked him. They’re sort of blurry–so is everything else, actually–but if he focuses very, very hard, he can hear something that sounds like a warning, sounds like a promise of more pain unless he does not do anything else again. 

He doesn’t think he’d have the strength for it, anyway. 

And so he nods, the side of his face sticking uncomfortably to the tiles beneath him. The figure winds up for what River can just sort of instinctively tell will be a final kick. He braces himself, but is not quite prepared for the force of it, which makes him see stars. 

He shuts his eyes against them, and does not move a muscle. 

He does not know how long he lies there. He’s fully conscious, though he’d rather not be, but lacks the ability to fully pay attention to his surroundings. This is bad, he should be gathering as much information as possible for later, when this is all over, when such information is needed, but he can’t. 

Some spy he is. 

There’s a burst of gunfire. Shouting. Screaming. The sound of boots against tile, which makes him curl into himself even further. 

And then–lights and sirens. Radio chatter. Sounds of relief. 

River raises his head from the floor, confirms that everyone is, in fact, safe, and then wills his body up from the floor as well. 

A paramedic tries to stop him leaving. River brushes her off and runs right into a cop, who says something about a witness statement. River shows him his MI5 credentials, makes a claim about an urgent situation, promises to come by a station later, and once again waves off the suggestion of medical help. 

He nearly collapses about five times on the very short walk to Slough House. But he doesn’t, which is what actually matters. 

It’s still lunchtime (and he really doesn’t see how that’s possible, when he’d surely been in that bank for hours on end), and the place is mercifully empty. 

Except the kitchen, the location of Slough House’s one and only icepack and its several bags of frozen vegetables. 

Shirley’s sitting at the table, building something out of horribly mutilated paperclips. She glances up when River walks in, then looks back down at her creation, then looks back up and stares. 

“Fucking hell,” she mutters, which, yeah. Not helpful. “What happened to you?”

River ignores her, beelining for the freezer. He retrieves the icepack and enough frozen vegetables to feed a family of four, then sinks into a chair with absolutely no noise of pain whatsoever. Definitely not.

And then his back makes contact with the wood, and he yelps. Really no hiding that one.

Shirley abandons the paperclips and raises her eyebrows at him. 

“Seriously, what the fuck happened to you?”

River settles for sitting straight upright, so that as little of his body as possible is touching the chair. He tucks his various frozen items beneath his shirt and into the hem of his trousers, wincing at the shock of the cold. 

“Bank robbery,” he grits out. 

“Har har. For real, I’m asking.”

“For real, a bank robbery. It’s probably on the news.”

Shirley pulls out her phone. 

“Fucking hell,” she repeats. 

“Told you so.”

“Let me guess, you tried to go all superspy on them?”

River scowls, which somehow hurts. “No. People were panicking, that’s all. I tried to help.”

“Sure.”

He doesn’t know why her flippancy suddenly gets to him, but it does. All of a sudden he’s blinking back tears, which is stupid, because he had wanted to, as she’d said, go all superspy on them. He’d had that insane thought, hadn’t he, that they were there for him? Had wanted to be at the centre of attention, to have a chance to, what, prove himself? For once?

And all he’d done was get the shit kicked out of him. For trying to calm down the other hostages, to prevent further violence. 

Stellar work on that one, really. 

“Just fuck off, okay,” he says, but there’s no bite to it, and Shirley says, sort of subdued and very uncharacteristically, “sorry.”

She stands up, knocking over her paperclip contraption as she does so. It’s probably the end of lunch, which means he should go back to his office, which means he should stand up, which means he should abandon the blissful numbness starting to work its way through his torso from the cold packs. 

But before he can so much as shift, an open bottle of paracetamol is set, not gently but not entirely roughly, onto the table in front of him. A half-drunk bottle of water appears next to it, and by the time it crosses River’s mind to turn his head to Shirley and thank her, she’s already gone. 

His hands are shaking as he takes the drugs, and the water is warm and hurts to swallow, but he can’t bring himself to care. 

He moves ever so slightly, just enough that he can rest his head against the wall without aggravating his surely fairly horrific bruises too much, and shuts his eyes. The pain pulses through him. 

He’s hazily aware of doors slamming, footsteps on the stairs, the hallmarks of the slow horses returning from lunch at last. 

By some divine miracle–or, more likely, by the workings of one Shirley Dander–no one enters the kitchen the entire rest of the day. 

River rests.