[fic] OH LOOK IT'S MY ID
Title: The Spy Who Gave As Good As He Got (Or Worse)
Fandom: TTSS (film)
Words: 8,225
Pairing: Tarr/Guillam
Warnings: WOUNDFUCKING.
Disclaimer: Characters etc are the intellectual property of John LeCarré, I’m just getting my Id on them.
Notes/Summary: Sequel to “The Spy Who Got What He Deserved, If Not What He Wanted”. This is almost entirely just my Id rampaging around on the page, and it is pretty hardcore disgusting.
The flat is underheated. No sense in wasting gas bills on a building Peter Guillam barely occupied; he considered selling it, for a while, but he came down with a thump when the work involved in that looked likely to overtake even the endless to-ing and fro-ing undertaken in the picking over of the still-breathing corpse of the Circus. Club men like Roddy Martindale might graft themselves to the leather armchairs and doze to the whirring of tickertape, but Guillam had to go home to sleep occasionally, and when he did the room was cold, dusty, and bearing the unmistakable fustiness of a home unlived-in.
He'd hire a cleaner, but natural and nurtured paranoia do not permit it. There was nothing for anyone to see in this collection of rooms, no fragments of Peter Guillam and certainly no shattered pieces of the Circus (as if there is anything left for Moscow Centre to learn, anything they don't already know), but there would be no letting in of private enterprise. And there was nothing left of the Circus funds to pay someone more trustworthy to beat his carpets and dent his mattress until it stopped feeling impersonal.
Aside from sleeping in the waiting area outside Lacon's office while Fawn was constructing some sort of insane fort out of empty coffee cups and Smiley had been sequestered with Lacon for so long that there was a possibility they'd both climbed out of the window (except the idea of Smiley climbing anywhere was positively absurd) and one very embarrassing incident when Guillam nodded off in the car outside Smiley's house, it was the first time in three days he'd slept. He came to the door of his flat almost giddy and delirious, prepared to possibly make it as far as his unslept-in and carefully-made bed, but ready for the possibility that he was going to collapse on the sofa and wake up in thirteen hours with a mouth like the inside of a sock and an unusable erection.
He was not quite tired enough yet - because he was not in fact dead - to fail to notice the snapped hair across his door jamb.
There were several possibilities, Guillam thought, heart racing. There was the possibility that some enterprising fool had broken in, ignorant of his tradecraft, in search of money or valuables. There was the possibility that someone was watching him and wanted him to know he was being watched, although Guillam couldn't see what they possibly thought they were going to find out, when he was almost as much in the dark to Smiley's plans as a member of the public.
The other possibility was that someone who knew his tradecraft wasn't watching him, was in the house, and didn't want him to shoot him on finding an intruder in the place.
Guillam made a brief tally of all the people this was likely to be and came up with a total that, were he possessed of even a spark of energy in his whole body, would have driven him to punch the wall beside his door.
He did not, at least, have to prowl through the whole flat with gun in hand. He was grateful for this: he was not sure his aim would have been up to much, and his neighbours would not care for the commotion. Inside the hallway were a pair of white running shoes that were no longer white, placed haphazardly alongside the spare pair of Wellingtons that Guillam had no actual use for - as if they belonged there.
He was therefore well-prepared for the silhouette lurking in the leaked light of the city outside, hanging back from the window lest he make himself a target but making sure Guillam could see and recognise his face. Guillam had a momentary savage temptation to abuse this trust, this assumption that if he knew it was Tarr in his flat, he wouldn't shoot, but it passed.
Perhaps if he weren't so tired Guillam would have been angrier. As it was he only threw himself onto his sofa and began methodically unlacing his shoes with weary fingers. "Why?"
"Had another little spat with my friend Verhoeven," Tarr said from the shadows, with that nervous, ingratiating dismissiveness that spoke of accident-and-emergency rooms, broken bones, and what appeared to be not the minor squabble first suggested on the way to Sarratt two weeks ago but something rather more deep-seated.
After Sarratt and the field and a hand-job Guillam felt neither proud of nor particularly distressed by, Tarr had done a merciful vanishing act and for a few blissful days of incalculable boredom and business Guillam had believed himself free of him for a while. Evidently Tarr had not hauled himself away AWOL again, but lain low somewhere nearby and successfully stumbled into Verhoeven like a stone falling to earth. Of course Tarr would gravitate towards trouble.
"Why my flat?" Guillam asked, finding even the words made him feel more tired. He pulled off one shoe, then the other, leaving them like smudges on the carpet before him. There seemed little point in turning on the light. "Why my flat, Ricki?"
Tarr gave an awkward shrug that lifted only one shoulder, which struck Guillam as decidedly off and made him start searching with exhaustedly squinting eyes for the injury he knew must be there.
"Of all the places -" Guillam began.
"This is the one he's not going to come to," Tarr finished, still lurking in the shadows like a criminal suspect.
"Well he was hardly going to bother Fawn, either," Guillam yawned. The likelihood that he was going to lever himself off the sofa and into his own bed was diminishing by the second.
"Fawn's with Smiley," Tarr said, and even in the low light Guillam could see his discomfort etched on his face like a scar.
And you're scared of disturbing Smiley, Guillam thought. It would have been almost funny if it wasn't so bloody annoying. Apparently disturbing him was no problem for Tarr.
"You'd better not be bleeding on my carpet," Guillam said with an even bigger yawn. "For God's sake, I just wanted to go to sleep -"
"So do I," Tarr said with a sudden movement Guillam couldn't quite focus on. He wondered what the man was armed with. There would almost certainly be something - Tarr clung to crude physical defence the way stockbrokers clung to their bowlers. "And I'd like to wake up again in the morning, right?"
"Not if --" Guillam yawned again. "-- stabbed you again."
"Yeah, I gave as good as I bloody got, didn't I," Tarr said with misplaced defensiveness which told Guillam, even from the borders of consciousness, who had started it this time.
"Don't --" Guillam tried to swallow the yawn and failed. "Don't bleed on my bed."
And with this he slumped back on the sofa and just about succeeded in pulling his legs up into something approaching the kind of position reasonable people slept in before he was, in fact, asleep.
Guillam woke with a mouth like an arse and an arm hanging off the sofa. He woke with the immediate panic of sleep amnesia, unsure why he was on his sofa, what day it was, or as to the purpose of the nagging sense of irritation that began in his mind the moment he struggled into sitting.
The light said it was near noon, which meant he had overslept grievously, but not as grievously as he would have expected in the face of how tired he'd been when he lay down. Something must have woken him.
As he half-scrubbed, half-pummelled his eye-sockets, trying to beat sleep from his eyelashes and wakeful thought back into his head (if he'd dreamt he didn't recall it, only some cloying emotional effluent still clinging to his equilibrium), the sound came again. It was the harsh, coughing whirr of a bean grinder.
Guillam progressed through a quick burst of responses which included checking for the gun that was in his coat, and internally calling himself a fathead. Eventually he reached the fuzzy memory of Tarr's not so much ominous as craven presence in his flat, moving stiffly from a new wound and all but whining his desperate need for protection from a pointless petty personal vendetta. Guillam pried himself off the sofa - his legs insisted they would rather he lay back down and stopped subjecting them to activity - and tried to affect an authoritative stride into his own kitchen.
It was rather more of a stumble.
Tarr was indeed standing at the work surface - which, to Guillam's distant and detached embarrassment was somewhat dusty - operating an electronic bean grinder that had been a Christmas present from one of Richard's friends. Such an domestic gift had, even at the time, smacked of optimism. Guillam had never used it.
The deep look of concentration on his task that adorned Tarr's face didn't abate when he spotted Guillam - Guillam was sure he'd noticed his movement before then - and he went on trying to fish out a whole bean that had become stuck under one of the blades, using his finger.
Guillam unstuck his tongue from his sofa cushion mouth and said, "You've already bled all over my bed, don't bleed on my kitchen as well. Use a knife."
As he said it, he was struck by the inappropriately amused thought that using a knife was why Tarr had been bleeding all over his bed linen - he was disinclined to check the damage - but he kept it to himself.
Tarr triumphantly extracted the bean, laid it on the work-surface, clipped the plastic cap back over the top of the grinder, and started the noisy operation again without a word.
Guillam shuffled - shuffled, like an old man in carpet slippers, his body still furious with him for his adolescent sleeping habits - to the kettle and switched it on. Electric kettle, electric bean grinder, endless aspirational kitchen items for showing off to precisely no one. Richard's nesting instinct.
He surreptitiously shook his head, trying to knock longer and less painful sentences into place in his mind.
"You can't stay here," was the one that finally made it through the clumsy barricades of uncoordinated teeth and tongue.
"Well I can't go anywhere else," Tarr said, removing the lid of the coffee grinder and proffering the packed, dark brown contents with their heavenly scent to Guillam with one hand, and a spoon in the other.
"You can go absolutely everywhere bloody else," Guillam corrected, taking the spoon and digging a generous heap of mounds into the fucking cafetière that stood between the kettle and the grinder. There were also, he noted, two cups sitting out, clean and arranged so that both of there handles pointed in the same direction. Tarr had clearly been reading in the night, since he'd never really struck Guillam as the kind of man who paid attention to that sort of frivolous detail.
In truth he was, Guillam thought, deliberately laying the spoon back on the work-surface, a lousy field man. He was unreliable, over-emotional, prone to flare-ups and fleeing, and as this little apparently endless episode with Verhoeven made clear, excellent at upsetting the wrong people. Were it not for the fact that he also had a talent for stumbling into important information and handing it over to the right people (after some squeezing, coaxing, and bullying), Guillam would have made a point of recommending him to resettlements.
"Only if I want another hole in me," Tarr said, and much to Guillam's displeasure he rolled up the side of his undershirt - which he was wearing as a shirt for some reason - to show a poorly-packed wound without the sutures it clearly needed. It was, in Guillam's nauseous estimation, shallow but wide, and had evidently pulled while Tarr was sleeping.
It had also evidently not seen professional care, and lay on the opposite side of his torso to the one he'd been nursing at Sarratt. Guillam could easily picture him favouring that wound in the altercation, and receiving a slash across the other flank as a result of the lack of balance.
"Put it away," he said as firmly as he could. The kettle clicked, and he began a mental countdown until it was safe to pour into the cafetière, forgetting entirely that it was Pyrex. Curiosity got the better of him. "What did you do?"
"Broke his bloody kneecap," Tarr said with some satisfaction, which rather begged the question of why he was hiding in Guillam's flat like a cornered rat, if Verhoeven couldn't master walking well enough to come and dig him out.
"In the first place," Guillam clarified. "Unless you knocked up his sister I just cannot picture Verhoeven having this persistent desire to spill your insides..." He refrained from adding that this was a far from uncommon reaction to working with Tarr for any length of time; Ricki undoubtedly knew it.
Tarr made an evasive face and rolled the undershirt down slowly over his wound. There was dried blood soaked into it in ever-lightening circles, but not enough and without the tear for this to have been the shirt he wore when Verhoeven perforated him.
Guillam poured hot water into the cafetière and watched it darken. The smell, if nothing else, went a long way towards reviving him, although he could still have lain down on the kitchen floor and immediately given in to another few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Tarr watched the coffee grounds dissipate in the hot water, too, and as Guillam made an effort not to clutch the side of the work-surface like a drowning man in his exhaustion, blurted, "I'll make it worth your while."
No you bloody won't, Guillam thought. Aloud, he said, "Enough of that."
For reasons he didn't care to subject to examination, the thought of being paid in sexual favours for anything made his balls run dry. There was sordid, and then there was dispiriting, and taking the role of customer in prostitution knocked the desire from him as cleanly as a blow to the head. He'd always taken a certain amount of pride in getting what he wanted through charm, good-ish looks, and patience (or both parties being too drunk to think it through). The idea of a bald exchange of favour: I'll give you my body if you keep it safe; resulted in an uncontrolled flinch on Guillam's part.
"I don't want him to kill me," Tarr said with alarming honesty. Guillam gave Tarr's blood-stained shirt and unkempt hair due appraisal.
"I thought you said you 'gave as good as you got'," he pointed out, tapping his finger on the work-surface beside the cafetière. "I thought you 'broke his kneecap'."
"I did."
"Gave as good as you got," Guillam repeated, reaching for the plunger and raising his eyebrows - his face was tired, and the effort left him no doubt looking more sardonic even than he meant.
"Yeah, well." Tarr winced at some unseen infraction. "Seems he's got more to give than I have, right?"
"I beg your pardon?" Guillam snapped, tired of the conversation, tired of the situation, and tired of looking at Ricki Tarr's unshaven throat and finding himself not as repulsed by it as he would have liked.
"He's got friends," Tarr translated.
Guillam released the plunger, sitting at the bottom of its extension now, and felt his heart flutter in anticipation from the smell. "Unlike you."
The sarcastic grimace Tarr replied with was, Guillam could see, quite liberally shot through with pain. He poured coffee into his cup with a hand that shook from its absence, and settled the cafetière back on the work-surface just to see the hungry look Tarr gave it.
"I'm no use to you dead," Tarr wheedled, eyeballing first the cafetière and then Guillam's body, at deliberate but twitchily unattractive length.
"You're increasingly little use to anyone alive," Guillam pointed out with what, even in his pre-coffee, over-tired, antagonistic mindset registered as unnecessary spite. Even if Tarr had in all probability ruined his mattress. He lifted the coffee cup to his face, inhaled, and took a sip, watching Tarr's expression.
"Can I -" Tarr aimed a longing look at the cafetière, his nostrils twitching, and Guillam was more than a little surprised that he had the presence of basic good manners enough to ask.
"No." He took another sip. His heart fluttered again, and his eyelashes - a machine, Guillam thought sourly, beginning its warm-up. An engine on a cold morning. Peter Guillam, ingesting coffee.
After five or six slow mouthfuls and the accompanying uptempo crashing of his pulse, Guillam felt alive enough to say, "If I'm to decide whether you deserve protection from Verhoeven and his 'friends', you will have to tell me what you did to inspire this."
"Can't," Tarr said, shaking his head. He rubbed his face with the palm of his hand, pulling clumsily on his own mouth and distorting the line of his lips. Guillam recalled his vicious, unsubtle attempts at flirtation at Sarratt, his phantom fellatio mime, and found the unconscious abuse of his face gave far greater trouble to his libido.
Can't, Guillam echoed in his mind, because if you explain then I'll decide that you don't deserve protection. He made a mental fence around all of the probabilities that would result in this reaction, and padlocked it. There were things it was better not to know about one's employees, and in Ricki Tarr's case those things would amount to "everything", but for the tendency of his secrets to impinge on his work, of course, for the fact that this was the Circus. One was required to know everything, whether one liked what one knew or not.
"You want me to let you stay in my flat, presumably armed, because one of my men is trying to take you to pieces one knife wound at a time," Guillam reminded him, "you've lied to me once already about why he's doing it, you refuse to give me the reason, and Verhoeven has enough of a grievance that he's willing to bring in other people to hunt you down. Is that everything?"
He took a few more mouthfuls of what was still very hot coffee.
"I said I'd make it worth your while," Tarr said, with a nervous movement of his fingers, of his face. He made no attempt at sleaze or innuendo, and that almost unsettled Guillam more; he didn't say what form of 'worth your while' he was offering - money, information, sex - but he didn't need to. All Ricki Tarr had to offer to make something 'worth his while' was himself, and Guillam was a little insulted that he apparently thought this was enough.
You're not capable of making it worth my while, Guillam thought, sudden anger closing his throat around the next mouthful of coffee and nearly choking him. You arrogant little shit.
"I think it's started bleeding again," Tarr said in a matter-of-fact voice. Guillam took a very long mouthful of coffee, making a point of watching Tarr's face rather than being distracted by the gash in his side: he looked anaemic, sleep-sodden, and pained.
Guillam finished his coffee.
Tarr gave him another pained look, and began patting delicately at the stain on his undershirt, grimacing and dabbing at the area as if he was trying to remove oil from silk.
That's just going to make it worse, thought Guillam, who rather suspected that Tarr was doing it on purpose in order to appear more pathetic. The suspicion made his ire flare up again: he disliked the idea that he was seen as a soft touch, an easy target, some kind-hearted middle-aged queer who would eventually roll over and bend the rules if Tarr would just appeal enough either to his balls or to his pity.
He put the cup down with a thump, and Tarr pulled back from his wound with bloodied fingers.
"It's bleeding again," Tarr said.
"You've just prodded at it," Guillam said, trying to remember to breathe through his nose. "What did you expect?"
Tarr shrugged. Guillam had, in moments usually related to the handling of scalp-hunters gone slightly awry, often wondered how the hell any of these field men managed to survive. Some of them - Jim Prideaux came inexorably to mind - were experts at survival, but so ineffably alone that they might be crushed by the prospect of sitting through an amicable dinner. Others - most of them, in fact - had an unshakeable weakness for precisely the wrong women. Yao Sōng, one of the more useful pieces of shrapnel created by Red China, had to be reminded to eat and frequently returned from assignments so underweight as to need the attention of the Nursery for months afterwards.
There were times when running Brixton had been more like shepherding a mental ward than running a branch of a supposedly "elite" service. Even the word "elite" made Guillam snort at the bitter irony; maybe once, but not now. They were elite only in their dysfunction. Men like Jim Prideaux didn't exist any more. He just had Ricki Tarr and Ricki Tarr's bleeding side and bloody fingers and pleading eyes and mouth full of lies.
He was waiting, Guillam had determined, to be told to go and clean the wound, to make himself a more ingrained guest by bloodying up the bathroom. Tarr was poised to do something to demonstrate obedience; performed politeness. He wanted the opportunity to roll over once more and show his stomach in a sad display of submission in the hopes of securing sympathy.
Guillam instead tried to stare him down.
Of course Tarr rose to it; for all his calculated (poorly-calculated) belly-showing he was still Tarr, still a badly-trained bag of bravado and showing-off, determined that his machismo was more macho than anyone else's macho. He couldn't refuse the challenge until half-way through when Guillam swore he could see it dawn on Tarr that he was begging, begging for help, not trying to start yet another fight he hadn't the strength to win.
"It's bleeding again," Tarr mumbled, sticking to what he knew as he pulled his gaze somewhere away from Guillam's face - back to the coffee cup.
"I can see that," Guillam said, surprised by his own softness. The coffee had done its work - he no longer ached to lie down for another six or seven hours - but it should have angered him further, not dampened his aggravation at the situation.
What was worse, he assumed, was that this put the whole of Tarr's stupid ugly flattery at Sarratt ("honour", oh yes, very bloody good) into a whole different context. He knew this was coming, the fucking rat, he knew that wasn't the end of it. He was just trying to give himself somewhere soft to land.
And yet here Guillam was, playing along.
"Were you asleep through the wound care section of basic training?" he asked, at last. "I could get a Girl Guide to do a better job on that than you have."
"Go and get one," Tarr suggested, lifting up his undershirt again. It stuck to his skin, and when he tugged on it, the inadequate dressing came off and fell onto the floor with a flup and spread shed blood in a smear across the linoleum. "Is it Bob-a-job week yet?"
This weak attempt at humour failed to defuse any of the tension, and Guillam stuffed his hands abruptly into his too-small, slept-in trouser pockets as he leaned forwards to inspect the mess more closely. Tarr held the undershirt up by its hem, as if peculiarly loath to touch the dried-on stains he'd been palpitating mere moments before.
For one spine-numbingly vile moment Guillam drew the comparison in their postures to that of johns on the Dilly - in the Sixties - in the alleys, checking the wares with studied insouciance. He'd avoided, as best he could, those areas and interactions. Parties, they were the key. The supposed safety and security of a bedroom instead of the "thrill" of the unknown quantity holding up his shirt and inviting a look; hands in pockets to keep the bugger from pinching your wallet.
As quickly as it had come, it left him again, standing in his unused kitchen staring critically into a knife wound.
"That needs stitches," Guillam said, his throat inexplicably dry. This much he already knew. The slash had parted and, after Tarr's manipulations of it, the crust of dark dried blood filling the chasm had cracked and split, oozing fresh and brighter red out of the fissures. The lips of the wound were nearly two inches apart. Any nurse in her right mind would soak the crust out, disinfect, and suture it, but God only knew what Tarr, whose right mind had yet to be extracted from its casing of greed, cowardice, and compulsive promiscuity, had done with it. Possibly just stuffed it with cotton wool and hoped.
"Can't do stitches," Tarr said, thick-tongued. "Don't like needles. You any good at them?"
Guillam, who lacked any particular squeamishness about needles, said, "Cack-handed somewhat. Might make a mess of it. You need to get down to Sarratt." His fingers moved uneasily in his pockets.
"He's got friends at Sarratt."
"So have I," said Guillam, who meant 'nobody is going to knife you in the patch-up rooms if they value their job'. But the Circus was in discreet turmoil, and nobody was certain of anything, and everyone was convinced they would get fired. Scores might very well find a way of being settled now that would otherwise, like Tarr's wounds, be left to fester. "But you're right. That would be unwise."
He took his right hand from his pocket and reached for the crust of dried blood, already stuck with shirt fluff and God only knew what else; Tarr reared back from his hand but, at an impatient look from Guillam, resettled and clenched his jaw in anticipation of agony.
Guillam touched the lip of the wound with his index finger as gently as possible. Tarr hissed, his belly undulated briefly, and he made as if to pull away again.
"I can do it," Guillam said, more fascinated than he ought to be by the change in texture from inflamed, tender skin to dirt-impacted, dried blood, "but if you pull your stitches I will ... I'll hand you over to Verhoeven's friends with a bow on you and my compliments."
He tapped the lip of the wound and Tarr inhaled sharply, holding back a curse. Guillam tried to remember where he kept the first aid kit: Richard would know. It had been Richard's idea to have one in the first place.
"Right," he said eventually. "Are you going to squirm about or do I need to knock you out?"
He was sure he could hear Tarr's thoughts as he picked idly at the edge of the scabs like a schoolboy fiddling with the badges of his adventures. Every flick of crusted blood drew a drawn-back hiss from Tarr, but in between the punctuation of pained noises he was no doubt calculating the likelihood that Guillam meant to anesthetise him with alcohol rather than cold-cocking him into compliance.
Either option, Guillam thought, would hardly happen in the kitchen. He made an impatient noise.
"No," Tarr said at last, "I'll keep my head, right?"
He was hardly known for keeping his head, but Guillam acknowledge his decision by removing his hand from the wound and making a show of wiping it over his suit trousers. The fact that his suit hadn't been dry-cleaned in some considerable time thanks to the business of his days and the fact that he'd slept in it on a neglected sofa last night suggested it was possibly less clean than Tarr's reasonably fresh wound, but he made the gesture all the same. With Ricki one needed to keep reminding him of his place.
"You know where the bathroom is," Guillam said, straightening up and packing an entire 'fuck off out of it' of dismissal into the sentence. He assumed Tarr had made a thorough investigation of the place while he was waiting for Guillam to return last night; if he hadn't he was beyond hopeless and not worth saving.
Tarr nodded and left the kitchen with an uneven step, favouring his new injury. Guillam was seized by a sudden and short-lived desire to see how well - if at all - the previous wound was healing. Two weeks was hardly enough time to start forming a proper scar, although at least on Tarr's body, as on any scalp-hunter who was so thoroughly wedded to settling disputes with weaponry, it would be in good company among its fellows.
Guillam crouched uncomfortably by the kitchen sink, pulling the door to the cupboard open too fast and letting it bang against its neighbour. The short logical list of places Richard would have kept the first aid kit ran to the under-sink cupboard, the top shelf inside the wardrobe, and the bathroom cupboard which Tarr was undoubtedly going through now; Guillam scowled at himself as he poked around the dark recesses of the shelf before him. It was hardly very professional to pay so little attention to his own home.
His fingers closed around the cardboard oblong, still taped shut, behind the bottle of household bleach he'd never used.
He knew why he'd done it, of course. His own motivations weren't, unfortunately, that much of a mystery to him. If he ignored the existence of the damn thing he could ignore the possibility of either of them being hurt at home.
Bloody stupid bit of denial. Guillam pulled the first-aid kit out and read the list of contents printed on the underside in slightly depressed red letters.
He got up again more slowly than he would have liked, and went to find Tarr in the bathroom.
Tarr looked guilty as he entered, but as far as Guillam could tell that was only his second natural expression in the presence of his superiors, after defiance. He didn't seem to have been nicking things, although Guillam would have been at a loss to know what he could have taken from the bathroom anyway, unless he was in desperate need of a badger brush.
Guillam held up the first aid kit by way of excuse for his presence, immediately discomforted by the sharing of a domestic bathroom. They were removed from the conviviality of a public urinal by some strange, fragile notion of propriety that he hadn't been aware he possessed, and all Guillam could picture as he laid the cardboard box on the top of the cistern was Richard brushing his teeth last thing at night.
Excuse. When did he need a bloody excuse to enter his own bloody bathroom?
"Sit down," Guillam said, gesturing vaguely to the lavatory. The bathroom was not large enough for two people without a degree of enforced intimacy: at least if Tarr was sitting down he wasn't quite so close to Guillam's face.
"Won't that make it harder?"
"Do as you're told."
With a shrug that rapidly metamorphosed into a grimace of pain (and serve him right, Guillam thought crossly, for being argumentative), Tarr carefully removed his blood-stained undershirt and dropped it on the floor between his feet before he sat.
He looked, as Guillam had suspected, somewhat speckled. There were abrupt tan lines on his biceps and neck, drawing the division between the reddish depths of a youth spent baking in the sun and the flabby pallor that was his natural hue; the rest of his torso was spattered with small scars and the imprints of a life spent in disreputable dispute; to his surprise (though he wasn't sure why he was surprised) at least some of the indentations looked more like chicken pox scars than the detritus of fights.
The older wound was healing. Tarr had not, of course, succeeded in dressing it and had apparently settled for papering over the crack with electrical tape, but from what Guillam could see the skin wasn't inflamed and the thing didn't appear to be troubling him.
He reminded himself that Tarr's previous dice with death was not his concern, only the current one.
Tarr's current ticket into the next world lay bare before him. It was damp - Tarr had evidently made some effort to soften the crust of blood while Guillam searched for the first aid kit - and either his ministrations or Tarr's continued poking had knocked out a lump of scab from it, for bright diluted blood ran freely through the water on Tarr's abdomen.
Guillam shook the paper sleeve from the first-aid kit and opened it. The needles, individually wrapped in plastic, curved like claws, look alarming and cruel. The thread seems laughably domestic, as if it was purchased from a haberdashery and shoved willy-nilly among the bandages and plaster tape.
Lifting free a needle and the thread spool, he looked up in time to see Tarr flinch.
"You need to clean it,” Guillam said, indicating the crust in the wound with no more than a nod of his head
"You just told me to sit down," Tarr said. Guillam glared at him, and found the expression one of nervousness rather than contrarianism stared back at him. This did very little to shave off his annoyance at the backtalk.
He caught himself before he could say "do I have to do your thinking for you?", which was a mercy; Guillam had promised himself he wasn't going to turn into a crusty parade-ground sergeant and while he'd largely achieved this by turning into what Richard testily referred to as a "superannuated teenager", he was at least proud of not spewing a cliché at every pace.
Guillam clutched the still-wrapped needle and the spool of thread in one hand - it occurred to him a little too late that he should probably have washed his hands, some sort of disinfecting soap perhaps - and fumbled with the basin taps for a moment, soaking the flannel that hung on the side. He waited, daring Tarr to ask if it was clean; Ricki Tarr had never particularly presented himself as the kind of man who cared about how dirty --
He pulled himself up short on that line of reasoning and turned off the tap.
"Clean it," Guillam suggested, dropping the sodden flannel with its toothpaste stains and faded edges into Tarr's lap without ceremony or grace.
The injured intruder at least understood that "clean it" meant "soak the dried crap out of it" rather than "pick at it until it bleeds everywhere", which Guillam had begun to suspect he might not; while Guillam fiddled with the plastic casing of the needle and wondered if one was supposed to lick the thread when threading a surgical needle as with a darning needle, Tarr pressed the wet cloth to his abdomen and contorted his face into a snarl of silent pain.
His teeth were uneven. Guillam supposed the dentistry in Japanese prisons wasn't exactly up to scratch. As Tarr's lips settled back into a somewhat bloodless line, Guillam returned his attention to the eye of the needle.
After a small eternity of futile attempts to thread the damn thing he checked on his unwanted patient and found Tarr watching him intently.
"And I supposed you'd do it better, would you?" Guillam snapped.
"Got my hands full, haven't I?" Tarr said, as if this was a genuine question. He gestured with the flannel, hissed at his own movement, and grimaced again. It really did, Guillam thought with less detachment than he'd have liked, look remarkably like the snarl of a worried dog.
Without a word, Guillam passed the needle and thread into Tarr's free hand. His fingers touched Tarr's palm: it was as soft as last time, but unexpectedly so all the same. He merely looked as if he should have scraped skin from criminal endeavours rather than what coal miners would call "good honest labour".
The flannel was already warm, either from Tarr's hand or from his belly, as Guillam took over holding it to his skin. He left Tarr to twist about with the needle and thread and wondered, without looking to confirm, how exactly a man with at least one finger out of action was better than he was at something that required this level of dexterity.
He pulled the flannel away; the underside was flushed brownish-red over its native blue, and the thick scab in the wound seemed to have softened.
Guillam laid the flannel over Tarr's legs as if they were a table. He thought about TCP. He thought about the business of suturing such a wide wound at such an awkward angle, and whether it would be possible to make Tarr lean back. He thought of how best to remove the crust which still caked the gash.
Then he hooked the short fingernail of his index finger under the edge of one of the larger floating fragments, and flipped it free of the wound as the cut below tried to cling to the beneath of it.
“FUCK’S SAKE!” Tarr barked, then, more quietly, “Jesus Christ.”
“I can’t sew it up if it’s full of … this,” Guillam said. It was a disingenuous explanation but Tarr apparently knew no better, and, hot-faced for no reason he could explain, Guillam picked another lump from the wound, and felt Tarr flinch hard once again.
Use tweezers, insisted long-ago first aid training - the same training that wanted to know, stridently, why he hadn’t washed his hands or used alcohol to clean the wound - but he dug his nails into the rift and tugged free the softened scab piece by slow piece.
“Have you threaded it yet?” Guillam asked, his cheeks startlingly warm.
“Mm,” Tarr said, and hissed again as Guillam pried free a lump from the narrow end of the gaping mouth in his flank.
“Hang onto it,” Guillam said, and he meant I will disinfect this, but it became a further exploration of the bright red, oozing surface of the wide valley between the lips of the wound. He pushed his fingertips against the irritated, overheated skin at the borders of Verhoeven’s handiwork, and Tarr’s hissing bubbled over into an abortive gurgle.
“Have you got to do that?” Tarr said in a voice Guillam hadn’t heard from him before.
“Do you want septicaemia?” he countered, and retaliated with a sharp prod to the very centre of the shallow stripe of red that so messily bisected his upper and lower torso.
Tarr howled. Apparently taken by surprise with his hands full, unable to bite down on his own fist as Guillam thought he might have done, the involuntary exclamation rang out unimpeded in the echoing bathroom.
Guillam slapped his one free hand over Tarr’s mouth so fast, and so hard, that as he was unable again to defend himself with his hands full of curved needle and thread spool, Tarr’s head bounced off the wall behind the cistern with a thunk. It sounded painful but Guillam thought that over the finger in his flank Tarr could probably hardly feel it.
“Do my neighbours need to think I’m committing mid-afternoon murder?” he snapped. “Get a grip on yourself, man.”
Tarr glared at him and mumbled into his palm, “Hurts.”
Guillam regarded his eyes - damp, angry, confused - and the needle in his hand. Why hadn’t Tarr stabbed at him with it? Still playing for protection, presumably, but he hadn’t expected a cornered rat to have such a thorough handle on future planning. Unless he was just scared. But until now Guillam had presumed, believed even to have the measure of it: Tarr in a tight corner would lash out.
The alternative, Guillam thought as he forced his hand harder over Tarr’s mouth until his eyes showed more white than seemed right and he began to look panicked behind Guillam’s fingers, was that Tarr trusted him, and that was nonsense. Ricki Tarr trusted no one and was convinced he could live on what little wit he had. That was always the trouble with him. That and his unerring ability to piss off the wrong people.
“Ow,” Tarr said into Guillam’s fingers, trying to hold his gaze.
With a sigh, Guillam dropped his eyes to the electrical tape wad on Tarr’s opposite side. Tarr followed his line of sight; Guillam laid his finger the length of the open wound while he was distracted, and Tarr slammed his own head against the wall in a flurry of agony.
"If you do that while I'm sewing it up--" Guillam began, relieved to have a reason to scold him again.
"You're not sewing it up," Tarr said; he was nearly unintelligible, but what he lacked in clarity from a hand over his lips (they were hot as the wound, though currently drier) he made up for by gesticulating pointedly with his handfuls of surgical thread.
"I will in a minute," Guillam said, "maybe you should concuss yourself properly if you can't stand the pain."
He ran his index finger the length of the bloodied wound, pressing it into a moist slit like the ladies man he'd always tried to lead the Circus to believe he was. Tarr flinched and whimpered, and Guillam felt his jaw bone move beneath the fingers of his other hand. He felt the muscles of Tarr's face tighten in preparation.
Guillam wondered, his cheeks burning, if he would stop if Tarr opened his mouth and asked him to. He considered it - his index finger sticky with fresh blood, pressed into an open wound - and wondered if maybe, possibly, Tarr noticing the beginnings of Guillam's erection would pull him away.
What gave him pause, in the end, was the resigned sigh from Tarr that dampened his hand; it was the sudden slump and relaxation of his body against the cistern, the enforced acceptance of continued pain.
When Guillam looked at his face, Tarr's pupils were dilated, his eyes full of a down-turned softness Guillam had only ever seen in women being unceremoniously chucked before. He'd certainly never thought it was the kind of emotion Ricki Tarr was capable of even emulating.
"You're enjoying this," Tarr said flatly into Guillam's palm.
Guillam whipped his hand away from Tarr's mouth.
"Don't be ridiculous," he blurted hotly, somewhat undermined by the increased pressure of his underpants against a cock that was harder than it had any business being.
Tarr's eyes, much as Guillam had hoped they wouldn't, tracked down to his groin from his face, and back up again. Even with Guillam's finger still in his wound - and Guillam hadn't yet removed it, even now - Tarr raised his eyebrows incredulously.
"Shut up."
"You're going to sew it up after?" Tarr asked. There was a note of pleading in his voice, and to Guillam's everlasting horror he wasn't able to discern whether it was an affectation of submission to the hierarchies Tarr usually ignored in order to save his bacon, or whether it was - unlikely as it seemed - genuine.
"Shut up," Guillam said again, trying to make himself take his hand from the hole in Tarr's side.
"Do what you want," Tarr said, thick-tongued once more, his eyes filled with what Guillam was now sure was exaggerated compliance, pleading, "Don't let Verhoeven near me. Do what you want."
The 'and you can' link was swallowed somewhere in the working of Tarr's throat as he bargained through dampening pain, but Guillam was not so utterly stupefied by his own desires that he couldn't make the connection.
"I'm just," Guillam made a grab for the needle and thread, and Tarr rendered them to him as if he was feeding a horse: flat-palmed and as still as any man could hope to be under the circumstances. "Just. Sewing up. Your side."
"Okay," said Tarr.
The lie was poor, and it hung in the too-warm bathroom like a foul smell with no window to escape form. Guillam tilted his hand, and the lips of the wound almost caressed the sides of his finger as it shifted position in a bed of congealing blood. The twitch and sigh of renewed pain that Tarr was unable to contain were diminished returns from his yelp and jump of only a few minutes earlier, and Guillam found he was irritated by this.
Lifting his hand, he ran the tip of his finger along the inside of the wound's edge, feeling wet flesh in a neat line against his fingerprint. Guillam watched Tarr bite the inside of his cheek and attempt an expression of serenity or at least cooperation, and he watched Tarr's nostrils flare and pain blossom in his already dilated eyes like the embers of a fire stirring into life at a kick.
Tarr did not entirely succeed in suppressing his wince.
Guillam inspected his face more closely, rubbing his finger back and forth through the clotting blood aimlessly, each vacillation drawing a fresh, tiny twitch in Tarr's facial muscles.
It was almost at the moment when he realised he couldn't keep telling himself he was about to start sewing any moment now - even though he clasped the needle and thread unsafely in his hand - that Tarr lifted his head and kissed Guillam squarely on the mouth.
Perhaps his intention was to distract Guillam from his petty torments; for a moment it almost worked, and Guillam dropped the needle and thread onto the flannel that lay across Tarr's legs without thinking. He seized a fistful of Tarr's ugly haircut and yanked his head back until the crown of it touched the bathroom wall once more, opened his mouth, and kissed him back so deeply that he could almost feel Tarr's teeth cutting helplessly into his lips.
Guillam bent his index finger; Tarr flinched beneath him - he wasn't sure how he'd ended up almost straddling the man - and made a sound of pained panic in his throat that filtered immediately into Guillam's mouth.
Clumsily, and without warning, Tarr put an unsteady hand on Guillam's cock through his trousers.
No, Guillam thought crossly, that wasn't what I wanted.
But he didn't remove it - his hands, after all, were busy - and as Tarr cupped his palm about the shaft and gave a tentative squeeze, Guillam leaned into the pressure. He forced Tarr's head back until he knew the man's eyes could not help but water, and kissed him harder.
Tarr's agitated breathing brought his stomach closer to and further from Guillam's hand, and Guillam pressed against it, trying to maintain his position; he made little note of the increase in his own pulse when Tarr jumped beneath him.
The hand on his cock began the same slow, measured up-and-down slithering that Guillam's finger in the wound made (although with a good deal more friction and, he supposed, much less suffering). It wasn't the business-like, professional-seeming quick one off the wrist he'd received in the field outside Sarratt in reply to his own (he thought) rather more languid exercise.
Guillam pushed with his hips against Tarr's hand; his finger slipped deeper into the wound and his fist pulled farther back on Tarr's hair, and an extraordinary guuaaahh of suffering leapt from Tarr's throat and into Guillam's.
Tarr did not, however, stop moving his hand.
It was only when something like a sneeze inside his pelvis began to gather tension that Guillam accepted that he had been a little more aroused than he was giving himself credit for. He let his finger slip from the slash in Tarr's side and slither over his torso - there was an uff of relief into his mouth - and with it, bloodied and sticky, he clutched Tarr's naked shoulder. He pushed down, against, into his hand; he kissed down, against, into his mouth, close to tearing out a handful of unwashed hair.
When he came - a shiver that wracked him from shoulder to knee, and nearly left him draped across Tarr like a discarded sheet - Guillam's hands tightened convulsively, but his mouth slackened and slipped from its mooring.
For a moment the habitual post-orgasmic disgust stayed away, hovering somewhere above his head while his heart pounded and his thighs tensed and relaxed.
Guillam slowly released Tarr's hair, keeping his hand on the man's shoulder for balance, and laid his forehead against the bathroom wall a little higher up, and off to one side.
“Maybe,” Guillam said at last, his voice as unsteady as his legs, “I’ll just tape it together for you. Worked on the other side.”
“Sorry I broke into your flat,” Tarr said, in an equally weak voice (although, Guillam suspected, for rather different reasons). His hand rested still on the camp spot with which Guillam had just ruined a perfectly good pair of suit trouser. “Didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
It was a lie, and they both knew it was a lie, but all Guillam had the stomach for now was to nod apathetically against the bathroom wall, and pat feebly the curve of Tarr’s shoulder.
Fandom: TTSS (film)
Words: 8,225
Pairing: Tarr/Guillam
Warnings: WOUNDFUCKING.
Disclaimer: Characters etc are the intellectual property of John LeCarré, I’m just getting my Id on them.
Notes/Summary: Sequel to “The Spy Who Got What He Deserved, If Not What He Wanted”. This is almost entirely just my Id rampaging around on the page, and it is pretty hardcore disgusting.
The flat is underheated. No sense in wasting gas bills on a building Peter Guillam barely occupied; he considered selling it, for a while, but he came down with a thump when the work involved in that looked likely to overtake even the endless to-ing and fro-ing undertaken in the picking over of the still-breathing corpse of the Circus. Club men like Roddy Martindale might graft themselves to the leather armchairs and doze to the whirring of tickertape, but Guillam had to go home to sleep occasionally, and when he did the room was cold, dusty, and bearing the unmistakable fustiness of a home unlived-in.
He'd hire a cleaner, but natural and nurtured paranoia do not permit it. There was nothing for anyone to see in this collection of rooms, no fragments of Peter Guillam and certainly no shattered pieces of the Circus (as if there is anything left for Moscow Centre to learn, anything they don't already know), but there would be no letting in of private enterprise. And there was nothing left of the Circus funds to pay someone more trustworthy to beat his carpets and dent his mattress until it stopped feeling impersonal.
Aside from sleeping in the waiting area outside Lacon's office while Fawn was constructing some sort of insane fort out of empty coffee cups and Smiley had been sequestered with Lacon for so long that there was a possibility they'd both climbed out of the window (except the idea of Smiley climbing anywhere was positively absurd) and one very embarrassing incident when Guillam nodded off in the car outside Smiley's house, it was the first time in three days he'd slept. He came to the door of his flat almost giddy and delirious, prepared to possibly make it as far as his unslept-in and carefully-made bed, but ready for the possibility that he was going to collapse on the sofa and wake up in thirteen hours with a mouth like the inside of a sock and an unusable erection.
He was not quite tired enough yet - because he was not in fact dead - to fail to notice the snapped hair across his door jamb.
There were several possibilities, Guillam thought, heart racing. There was the possibility that some enterprising fool had broken in, ignorant of his tradecraft, in search of money or valuables. There was the possibility that someone was watching him and wanted him to know he was being watched, although Guillam couldn't see what they possibly thought they were going to find out, when he was almost as much in the dark to Smiley's plans as a member of the public.
The other possibility was that someone who knew his tradecraft wasn't watching him, was in the house, and didn't want him to shoot him on finding an intruder in the place.
Guillam made a brief tally of all the people this was likely to be and came up with a total that, were he possessed of even a spark of energy in his whole body, would have driven him to punch the wall beside his door.
He did not, at least, have to prowl through the whole flat with gun in hand. He was grateful for this: he was not sure his aim would have been up to much, and his neighbours would not care for the commotion. Inside the hallway were a pair of white running shoes that were no longer white, placed haphazardly alongside the spare pair of Wellingtons that Guillam had no actual use for - as if they belonged there.
He was therefore well-prepared for the silhouette lurking in the leaked light of the city outside, hanging back from the window lest he make himself a target but making sure Guillam could see and recognise his face. Guillam had a momentary savage temptation to abuse this trust, this assumption that if he knew it was Tarr in his flat, he wouldn't shoot, but it passed.
Perhaps if he weren't so tired Guillam would have been angrier. As it was he only threw himself onto his sofa and began methodically unlacing his shoes with weary fingers. "Why?"
"Had another little spat with my friend Verhoeven," Tarr said from the shadows, with that nervous, ingratiating dismissiveness that spoke of accident-and-emergency rooms, broken bones, and what appeared to be not the minor squabble first suggested on the way to Sarratt two weeks ago but something rather more deep-seated.
After Sarratt and the field and a hand-job Guillam felt neither proud of nor particularly distressed by, Tarr had done a merciful vanishing act and for a few blissful days of incalculable boredom and business Guillam had believed himself free of him for a while. Evidently Tarr had not hauled himself away AWOL again, but lain low somewhere nearby and successfully stumbled into Verhoeven like a stone falling to earth. Of course Tarr would gravitate towards trouble.
"Why my flat?" Guillam asked, finding even the words made him feel more tired. He pulled off one shoe, then the other, leaving them like smudges on the carpet before him. There seemed little point in turning on the light. "Why my flat, Ricki?"
Tarr gave an awkward shrug that lifted only one shoulder, which struck Guillam as decidedly off and made him start searching with exhaustedly squinting eyes for the injury he knew must be there.
"Of all the places -" Guillam began.
"This is the one he's not going to come to," Tarr finished, still lurking in the shadows like a criminal suspect.
"Well he was hardly going to bother Fawn, either," Guillam yawned. The likelihood that he was going to lever himself off the sofa and into his own bed was diminishing by the second.
"Fawn's with Smiley," Tarr said, and even in the low light Guillam could see his discomfort etched on his face like a scar.
And you're scared of disturbing Smiley, Guillam thought. It would have been almost funny if it wasn't so bloody annoying. Apparently disturbing him was no problem for Tarr.
"You'd better not be bleeding on my carpet," Guillam said with an even bigger yawn. "For God's sake, I just wanted to go to sleep -"
"So do I," Tarr said with a sudden movement Guillam couldn't quite focus on. He wondered what the man was armed with. There would almost certainly be something - Tarr clung to crude physical defence the way stockbrokers clung to their bowlers. "And I'd like to wake up again in the morning, right?"
"Not if --" Guillam yawned again. "-- stabbed you again."
"Yeah, I gave as good as I bloody got, didn't I," Tarr said with misplaced defensiveness which told Guillam, even from the borders of consciousness, who had started it this time.
"Don't --" Guillam tried to swallow the yawn and failed. "Don't bleed on my bed."
And with this he slumped back on the sofa and just about succeeded in pulling his legs up into something approaching the kind of position reasonable people slept in before he was, in fact, asleep.
Guillam woke with a mouth like an arse and an arm hanging off the sofa. He woke with the immediate panic of sleep amnesia, unsure why he was on his sofa, what day it was, or as to the purpose of the nagging sense of irritation that began in his mind the moment he struggled into sitting.
The light said it was near noon, which meant he had overslept grievously, but not as grievously as he would have expected in the face of how tired he'd been when he lay down. Something must have woken him.
As he half-scrubbed, half-pummelled his eye-sockets, trying to beat sleep from his eyelashes and wakeful thought back into his head (if he'd dreamt he didn't recall it, only some cloying emotional effluent still clinging to his equilibrium), the sound came again. It was the harsh, coughing whirr of a bean grinder.
Guillam progressed through a quick burst of responses which included checking for the gun that was in his coat, and internally calling himself a fathead. Eventually he reached the fuzzy memory of Tarr's not so much ominous as craven presence in his flat, moving stiffly from a new wound and all but whining his desperate need for protection from a pointless petty personal vendetta. Guillam pried himself off the sofa - his legs insisted they would rather he lay back down and stopped subjecting them to activity - and tried to affect an authoritative stride into his own kitchen.
It was rather more of a stumble.
Tarr was indeed standing at the work surface - which, to Guillam's distant and detached embarrassment was somewhat dusty - operating an electronic bean grinder that had been a Christmas present from one of Richard's friends. Such an domestic gift had, even at the time, smacked of optimism. Guillam had never used it.
The deep look of concentration on his task that adorned Tarr's face didn't abate when he spotted Guillam - Guillam was sure he'd noticed his movement before then - and he went on trying to fish out a whole bean that had become stuck under one of the blades, using his finger.
Guillam unstuck his tongue from his sofa cushion mouth and said, "You've already bled all over my bed, don't bleed on my kitchen as well. Use a knife."
As he said it, he was struck by the inappropriately amused thought that using a knife was why Tarr had been bleeding all over his bed linen - he was disinclined to check the damage - but he kept it to himself.
Tarr triumphantly extracted the bean, laid it on the work-surface, clipped the plastic cap back over the top of the grinder, and started the noisy operation again without a word.
Guillam shuffled - shuffled, like an old man in carpet slippers, his body still furious with him for his adolescent sleeping habits - to the kettle and switched it on. Electric kettle, electric bean grinder, endless aspirational kitchen items for showing off to precisely no one. Richard's nesting instinct.
He surreptitiously shook his head, trying to knock longer and less painful sentences into place in his mind.
"You can't stay here," was the one that finally made it through the clumsy barricades of uncoordinated teeth and tongue.
"Well I can't go anywhere else," Tarr said, removing the lid of the coffee grinder and proffering the packed, dark brown contents with their heavenly scent to Guillam with one hand, and a spoon in the other.
"You can go absolutely everywhere bloody else," Guillam corrected, taking the spoon and digging a generous heap of mounds into the fucking cafetière that stood between the kettle and the grinder. There were also, he noted, two cups sitting out, clean and arranged so that both of there handles pointed in the same direction. Tarr had clearly been reading in the night, since he'd never really struck Guillam as the kind of man who paid attention to that sort of frivolous detail.
In truth he was, Guillam thought, deliberately laying the spoon back on the work-surface, a lousy field man. He was unreliable, over-emotional, prone to flare-ups and fleeing, and as this little apparently endless episode with Verhoeven made clear, excellent at upsetting the wrong people. Were it not for the fact that he also had a talent for stumbling into important information and handing it over to the right people (after some squeezing, coaxing, and bullying), Guillam would have made a point of recommending him to resettlements.
"Only if I want another hole in me," Tarr said, and much to Guillam's displeasure he rolled up the side of his undershirt - which he was wearing as a shirt for some reason - to show a poorly-packed wound without the sutures it clearly needed. It was, in Guillam's nauseous estimation, shallow but wide, and had evidently pulled while Tarr was sleeping.
It had also evidently not seen professional care, and lay on the opposite side of his torso to the one he'd been nursing at Sarratt. Guillam could easily picture him favouring that wound in the altercation, and receiving a slash across the other flank as a result of the lack of balance.
"Put it away," he said as firmly as he could. The kettle clicked, and he began a mental countdown until it was safe to pour into the cafetière, forgetting entirely that it was Pyrex. Curiosity got the better of him. "What did you do?"
"Broke his bloody kneecap," Tarr said with some satisfaction, which rather begged the question of why he was hiding in Guillam's flat like a cornered rat, if Verhoeven couldn't master walking well enough to come and dig him out.
"In the first place," Guillam clarified. "Unless you knocked up his sister I just cannot picture Verhoeven having this persistent desire to spill your insides..." He refrained from adding that this was a far from uncommon reaction to working with Tarr for any length of time; Ricki undoubtedly knew it.
Tarr made an evasive face and rolled the undershirt down slowly over his wound. There was dried blood soaked into it in ever-lightening circles, but not enough and without the tear for this to have been the shirt he wore when Verhoeven perforated him.
Guillam poured hot water into the cafetière and watched it darken. The smell, if nothing else, went a long way towards reviving him, although he could still have lain down on the kitchen floor and immediately given in to another few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Tarr watched the coffee grounds dissipate in the hot water, too, and as Guillam made an effort not to clutch the side of the work-surface like a drowning man in his exhaustion, blurted, "I'll make it worth your while."
No you bloody won't, Guillam thought. Aloud, he said, "Enough of that."
For reasons he didn't care to subject to examination, the thought of being paid in sexual favours for anything made his balls run dry. There was sordid, and then there was dispiriting, and taking the role of customer in prostitution knocked the desire from him as cleanly as a blow to the head. He'd always taken a certain amount of pride in getting what he wanted through charm, good-ish looks, and patience (or both parties being too drunk to think it through). The idea of a bald exchange of favour: I'll give you my body if you keep it safe; resulted in an uncontrolled flinch on Guillam's part.
"I don't want him to kill me," Tarr said with alarming honesty. Guillam gave Tarr's blood-stained shirt and unkempt hair due appraisal.
"I thought you said you 'gave as good as you got'," he pointed out, tapping his finger on the work-surface beside the cafetière. "I thought you 'broke his kneecap'."
"I did."
"Gave as good as you got," Guillam repeated, reaching for the plunger and raising his eyebrows - his face was tired, and the effort left him no doubt looking more sardonic even than he meant.
"Yeah, well." Tarr winced at some unseen infraction. "Seems he's got more to give than I have, right?"
"I beg your pardon?" Guillam snapped, tired of the conversation, tired of the situation, and tired of looking at Ricki Tarr's unshaven throat and finding himself not as repulsed by it as he would have liked.
"He's got friends," Tarr translated.
Guillam released the plunger, sitting at the bottom of its extension now, and felt his heart flutter in anticipation from the smell. "Unlike you."
The sarcastic grimace Tarr replied with was, Guillam could see, quite liberally shot through with pain. He poured coffee into his cup with a hand that shook from its absence, and settled the cafetière back on the work-surface just to see the hungry look Tarr gave it.
"I'm no use to you dead," Tarr wheedled, eyeballing first the cafetière and then Guillam's body, at deliberate but twitchily unattractive length.
"You're increasingly little use to anyone alive," Guillam pointed out with what, even in his pre-coffee, over-tired, antagonistic mindset registered as unnecessary spite. Even if Tarr had in all probability ruined his mattress. He lifted the coffee cup to his face, inhaled, and took a sip, watching Tarr's expression.
"Can I -" Tarr aimed a longing look at the cafetière, his nostrils twitching, and Guillam was more than a little surprised that he had the presence of basic good manners enough to ask.
"No." He took another sip. His heart fluttered again, and his eyelashes - a machine, Guillam thought sourly, beginning its warm-up. An engine on a cold morning. Peter Guillam, ingesting coffee.
After five or six slow mouthfuls and the accompanying uptempo crashing of his pulse, Guillam felt alive enough to say, "If I'm to decide whether you deserve protection from Verhoeven and his 'friends', you will have to tell me what you did to inspire this."
"Can't," Tarr said, shaking his head. He rubbed his face with the palm of his hand, pulling clumsily on his own mouth and distorting the line of his lips. Guillam recalled his vicious, unsubtle attempts at flirtation at Sarratt, his phantom fellatio mime, and found the unconscious abuse of his face gave far greater trouble to his libido.
Can't, Guillam echoed in his mind, because if you explain then I'll decide that you don't deserve protection. He made a mental fence around all of the probabilities that would result in this reaction, and padlocked it. There were things it was better not to know about one's employees, and in Ricki Tarr's case those things would amount to "everything", but for the tendency of his secrets to impinge on his work, of course, for the fact that this was the Circus. One was required to know everything, whether one liked what one knew or not.
"You want me to let you stay in my flat, presumably armed, because one of my men is trying to take you to pieces one knife wound at a time," Guillam reminded him, "you've lied to me once already about why he's doing it, you refuse to give me the reason, and Verhoeven has enough of a grievance that he's willing to bring in other people to hunt you down. Is that everything?"
He took a few more mouthfuls of what was still very hot coffee.
"I said I'd make it worth your while," Tarr said, with a nervous movement of his fingers, of his face. He made no attempt at sleaze or innuendo, and that almost unsettled Guillam more; he didn't say what form of 'worth your while' he was offering - money, information, sex - but he didn't need to. All Ricki Tarr had to offer to make something 'worth his while' was himself, and Guillam was a little insulted that he apparently thought this was enough.
You're not capable of making it worth my while, Guillam thought, sudden anger closing his throat around the next mouthful of coffee and nearly choking him. You arrogant little shit.
"I think it's started bleeding again," Tarr said in a matter-of-fact voice. Guillam took a very long mouthful of coffee, making a point of watching Tarr's face rather than being distracted by the gash in his side: he looked anaemic, sleep-sodden, and pained.
Guillam finished his coffee.
Tarr gave him another pained look, and began patting delicately at the stain on his undershirt, grimacing and dabbing at the area as if he was trying to remove oil from silk.
That's just going to make it worse, thought Guillam, who rather suspected that Tarr was doing it on purpose in order to appear more pathetic. The suspicion made his ire flare up again: he disliked the idea that he was seen as a soft touch, an easy target, some kind-hearted middle-aged queer who would eventually roll over and bend the rules if Tarr would just appeal enough either to his balls or to his pity.
He put the cup down with a thump, and Tarr pulled back from his wound with bloodied fingers.
"It's bleeding again," Tarr said.
"You've just prodded at it," Guillam said, trying to remember to breathe through his nose. "What did you expect?"
Tarr shrugged. Guillam had, in moments usually related to the handling of scalp-hunters gone slightly awry, often wondered how the hell any of these field men managed to survive. Some of them - Jim Prideaux came inexorably to mind - were experts at survival, but so ineffably alone that they might be crushed by the prospect of sitting through an amicable dinner. Others - most of them, in fact - had an unshakeable weakness for precisely the wrong women. Yao Sōng, one of the more useful pieces of shrapnel created by Red China, had to be reminded to eat and frequently returned from assignments so underweight as to need the attention of the Nursery for months afterwards.
There were times when running Brixton had been more like shepherding a mental ward than running a branch of a supposedly "elite" service. Even the word "elite" made Guillam snort at the bitter irony; maybe once, but not now. They were elite only in their dysfunction. Men like Jim Prideaux didn't exist any more. He just had Ricki Tarr and Ricki Tarr's bleeding side and bloody fingers and pleading eyes and mouth full of lies.
He was waiting, Guillam had determined, to be told to go and clean the wound, to make himself a more ingrained guest by bloodying up the bathroom. Tarr was poised to do something to demonstrate obedience; performed politeness. He wanted the opportunity to roll over once more and show his stomach in a sad display of submission in the hopes of securing sympathy.
Guillam instead tried to stare him down.
Of course Tarr rose to it; for all his calculated (poorly-calculated) belly-showing he was still Tarr, still a badly-trained bag of bravado and showing-off, determined that his machismo was more macho than anyone else's macho. He couldn't refuse the challenge until half-way through when Guillam swore he could see it dawn on Tarr that he was begging, begging for help, not trying to start yet another fight he hadn't the strength to win.
"It's bleeding again," Tarr mumbled, sticking to what he knew as he pulled his gaze somewhere away from Guillam's face - back to the coffee cup.
"I can see that," Guillam said, surprised by his own softness. The coffee had done its work - he no longer ached to lie down for another six or seven hours - but it should have angered him further, not dampened his aggravation at the situation.
What was worse, he assumed, was that this put the whole of Tarr's stupid ugly flattery at Sarratt ("honour", oh yes, very bloody good) into a whole different context. He knew this was coming, the fucking rat, he knew that wasn't the end of it. He was just trying to give himself somewhere soft to land.
And yet here Guillam was, playing along.
"Were you asleep through the wound care section of basic training?" he asked, at last. "I could get a Girl Guide to do a better job on that than you have."
"Go and get one," Tarr suggested, lifting up his undershirt again. It stuck to his skin, and when he tugged on it, the inadequate dressing came off and fell onto the floor with a flup and spread shed blood in a smear across the linoleum. "Is it Bob-a-job week yet?"
This weak attempt at humour failed to defuse any of the tension, and Guillam stuffed his hands abruptly into his too-small, slept-in trouser pockets as he leaned forwards to inspect the mess more closely. Tarr held the undershirt up by its hem, as if peculiarly loath to touch the dried-on stains he'd been palpitating mere moments before.
For one spine-numbingly vile moment Guillam drew the comparison in their postures to that of johns on the Dilly - in the Sixties - in the alleys, checking the wares with studied insouciance. He'd avoided, as best he could, those areas and interactions. Parties, they were the key. The supposed safety and security of a bedroom instead of the "thrill" of the unknown quantity holding up his shirt and inviting a look; hands in pockets to keep the bugger from pinching your wallet.
As quickly as it had come, it left him again, standing in his unused kitchen staring critically into a knife wound.
"That needs stitches," Guillam said, his throat inexplicably dry. This much he already knew. The slash had parted and, after Tarr's manipulations of it, the crust of dark dried blood filling the chasm had cracked and split, oozing fresh and brighter red out of the fissures. The lips of the wound were nearly two inches apart. Any nurse in her right mind would soak the crust out, disinfect, and suture it, but God only knew what Tarr, whose right mind had yet to be extracted from its casing of greed, cowardice, and compulsive promiscuity, had done with it. Possibly just stuffed it with cotton wool and hoped.
"Can't do stitches," Tarr said, thick-tongued. "Don't like needles. You any good at them?"
Guillam, who lacked any particular squeamishness about needles, said, "Cack-handed somewhat. Might make a mess of it. You need to get down to Sarratt." His fingers moved uneasily in his pockets.
"He's got friends at Sarratt."
"So have I," said Guillam, who meant 'nobody is going to knife you in the patch-up rooms if they value their job'. But the Circus was in discreet turmoil, and nobody was certain of anything, and everyone was convinced they would get fired. Scores might very well find a way of being settled now that would otherwise, like Tarr's wounds, be left to fester. "But you're right. That would be unwise."
He took his right hand from his pocket and reached for the crust of dried blood, already stuck with shirt fluff and God only knew what else; Tarr reared back from his hand but, at an impatient look from Guillam, resettled and clenched his jaw in anticipation of agony.
Guillam touched the lip of the wound with his index finger as gently as possible. Tarr hissed, his belly undulated briefly, and he made as if to pull away again.
"I can do it," Guillam said, more fascinated than he ought to be by the change in texture from inflamed, tender skin to dirt-impacted, dried blood, "but if you pull your stitches I will ... I'll hand you over to Verhoeven's friends with a bow on you and my compliments."
He tapped the lip of the wound and Tarr inhaled sharply, holding back a curse. Guillam tried to remember where he kept the first aid kit: Richard would know. It had been Richard's idea to have one in the first place.
"Right," he said eventually. "Are you going to squirm about or do I need to knock you out?"
He was sure he could hear Tarr's thoughts as he picked idly at the edge of the scabs like a schoolboy fiddling with the badges of his adventures. Every flick of crusted blood drew a drawn-back hiss from Tarr, but in between the punctuation of pained noises he was no doubt calculating the likelihood that Guillam meant to anesthetise him with alcohol rather than cold-cocking him into compliance.
Either option, Guillam thought, would hardly happen in the kitchen. He made an impatient noise.
"No," Tarr said at last, "I'll keep my head, right?"
He was hardly known for keeping his head, but Guillam acknowledge his decision by removing his hand from the wound and making a show of wiping it over his suit trousers. The fact that his suit hadn't been dry-cleaned in some considerable time thanks to the business of his days and the fact that he'd slept in it on a neglected sofa last night suggested it was possibly less clean than Tarr's reasonably fresh wound, but he made the gesture all the same. With Ricki one needed to keep reminding him of his place.
"You know where the bathroom is," Guillam said, straightening up and packing an entire 'fuck off out of it' of dismissal into the sentence. He assumed Tarr had made a thorough investigation of the place while he was waiting for Guillam to return last night; if he hadn't he was beyond hopeless and not worth saving.
Tarr nodded and left the kitchen with an uneven step, favouring his new injury. Guillam was seized by a sudden and short-lived desire to see how well - if at all - the previous wound was healing. Two weeks was hardly enough time to start forming a proper scar, although at least on Tarr's body, as on any scalp-hunter who was so thoroughly wedded to settling disputes with weaponry, it would be in good company among its fellows.
Guillam crouched uncomfortably by the kitchen sink, pulling the door to the cupboard open too fast and letting it bang against its neighbour. The short logical list of places Richard would have kept the first aid kit ran to the under-sink cupboard, the top shelf inside the wardrobe, and the bathroom cupboard which Tarr was undoubtedly going through now; Guillam scowled at himself as he poked around the dark recesses of the shelf before him. It was hardly very professional to pay so little attention to his own home.
His fingers closed around the cardboard oblong, still taped shut, behind the bottle of household bleach he'd never used.
He knew why he'd done it, of course. His own motivations weren't, unfortunately, that much of a mystery to him. If he ignored the existence of the damn thing he could ignore the possibility of either of them being hurt at home.
Bloody stupid bit of denial. Guillam pulled the first-aid kit out and read the list of contents printed on the underside in slightly depressed red letters.
He got up again more slowly than he would have liked, and went to find Tarr in the bathroom.
Tarr looked guilty as he entered, but as far as Guillam could tell that was only his second natural expression in the presence of his superiors, after defiance. He didn't seem to have been nicking things, although Guillam would have been at a loss to know what he could have taken from the bathroom anyway, unless he was in desperate need of a badger brush.
Guillam held up the first aid kit by way of excuse for his presence, immediately discomforted by the sharing of a domestic bathroom. They were removed from the conviviality of a public urinal by some strange, fragile notion of propriety that he hadn't been aware he possessed, and all Guillam could picture as he laid the cardboard box on the top of the cistern was Richard brushing his teeth last thing at night.
Excuse. When did he need a bloody excuse to enter his own bloody bathroom?
"Sit down," Guillam said, gesturing vaguely to the lavatory. The bathroom was not large enough for two people without a degree of enforced intimacy: at least if Tarr was sitting down he wasn't quite so close to Guillam's face.
"Won't that make it harder?"
"Do as you're told."
With a shrug that rapidly metamorphosed into a grimace of pain (and serve him right, Guillam thought crossly, for being argumentative), Tarr carefully removed his blood-stained undershirt and dropped it on the floor between his feet before he sat.
He looked, as Guillam had suspected, somewhat speckled. There were abrupt tan lines on his biceps and neck, drawing the division between the reddish depths of a youth spent baking in the sun and the flabby pallor that was his natural hue; the rest of his torso was spattered with small scars and the imprints of a life spent in disreputable dispute; to his surprise (though he wasn't sure why he was surprised) at least some of the indentations looked more like chicken pox scars than the detritus of fights.
The older wound was healing. Tarr had not, of course, succeeded in dressing it and had apparently settled for papering over the crack with electrical tape, but from what Guillam could see the skin wasn't inflamed and the thing didn't appear to be troubling him.
He reminded himself that Tarr's previous dice with death was not his concern, only the current one.
Tarr's current ticket into the next world lay bare before him. It was damp - Tarr had evidently made some effort to soften the crust of blood while Guillam searched for the first aid kit - and either his ministrations or Tarr's continued poking had knocked out a lump of scab from it, for bright diluted blood ran freely through the water on Tarr's abdomen.
Guillam shook the paper sleeve from the first-aid kit and opened it. The needles, individually wrapped in plastic, curved like claws, look alarming and cruel. The thread seems laughably domestic, as if it was purchased from a haberdashery and shoved willy-nilly among the bandages and plaster tape.
Lifting free a needle and the thread spool, he looked up in time to see Tarr flinch.
"You need to clean it,” Guillam said, indicating the crust in the wound with no more than a nod of his head
"You just told me to sit down," Tarr said. Guillam glared at him, and found the expression one of nervousness rather than contrarianism stared back at him. This did very little to shave off his annoyance at the backtalk.
He caught himself before he could say "do I have to do your thinking for you?", which was a mercy; Guillam had promised himself he wasn't going to turn into a crusty parade-ground sergeant and while he'd largely achieved this by turning into what Richard testily referred to as a "superannuated teenager", he was at least proud of not spewing a cliché at every pace.
Guillam clutched the still-wrapped needle and the spool of thread in one hand - it occurred to him a little too late that he should probably have washed his hands, some sort of disinfecting soap perhaps - and fumbled with the basin taps for a moment, soaking the flannel that hung on the side. He waited, daring Tarr to ask if it was clean; Ricki Tarr had never particularly presented himself as the kind of man who cared about how dirty --
He pulled himself up short on that line of reasoning and turned off the tap.
"Clean it," Guillam suggested, dropping the sodden flannel with its toothpaste stains and faded edges into Tarr's lap without ceremony or grace.
The injured intruder at least understood that "clean it" meant "soak the dried crap out of it" rather than "pick at it until it bleeds everywhere", which Guillam had begun to suspect he might not; while Guillam fiddled with the plastic casing of the needle and wondered if one was supposed to lick the thread when threading a surgical needle as with a darning needle, Tarr pressed the wet cloth to his abdomen and contorted his face into a snarl of silent pain.
His teeth were uneven. Guillam supposed the dentistry in Japanese prisons wasn't exactly up to scratch. As Tarr's lips settled back into a somewhat bloodless line, Guillam returned his attention to the eye of the needle.
After a small eternity of futile attempts to thread the damn thing he checked on his unwanted patient and found Tarr watching him intently.
"And I supposed you'd do it better, would you?" Guillam snapped.
"Got my hands full, haven't I?" Tarr said, as if this was a genuine question. He gestured with the flannel, hissed at his own movement, and grimaced again. It really did, Guillam thought with less detachment than he'd have liked, look remarkably like the snarl of a worried dog.
Without a word, Guillam passed the needle and thread into Tarr's free hand. His fingers touched Tarr's palm: it was as soft as last time, but unexpectedly so all the same. He merely looked as if he should have scraped skin from criminal endeavours rather than what coal miners would call "good honest labour".
The flannel was already warm, either from Tarr's hand or from his belly, as Guillam took over holding it to his skin. He left Tarr to twist about with the needle and thread and wondered, without looking to confirm, how exactly a man with at least one finger out of action was better than he was at something that required this level of dexterity.
He pulled the flannel away; the underside was flushed brownish-red over its native blue, and the thick scab in the wound seemed to have softened.
Guillam laid the flannel over Tarr's legs as if they were a table. He thought about TCP. He thought about the business of suturing such a wide wound at such an awkward angle, and whether it would be possible to make Tarr lean back. He thought of how best to remove the crust which still caked the gash.
Then he hooked the short fingernail of his index finger under the edge of one of the larger floating fragments, and flipped it free of the wound as the cut below tried to cling to the beneath of it.
“FUCK’S SAKE!” Tarr barked, then, more quietly, “Jesus Christ.”
“I can’t sew it up if it’s full of … this,” Guillam said. It was a disingenuous explanation but Tarr apparently knew no better, and, hot-faced for no reason he could explain, Guillam picked another lump from the wound, and felt Tarr flinch hard once again.
Use tweezers, insisted long-ago first aid training - the same training that wanted to know, stridently, why he hadn’t washed his hands or used alcohol to clean the wound - but he dug his nails into the rift and tugged free the softened scab piece by slow piece.
“Have you threaded it yet?” Guillam asked, his cheeks startlingly warm.
“Mm,” Tarr said, and hissed again as Guillam pried free a lump from the narrow end of the gaping mouth in his flank.
“Hang onto it,” Guillam said, and he meant I will disinfect this, but it became a further exploration of the bright red, oozing surface of the wide valley between the lips of the wound. He pushed his fingertips against the irritated, overheated skin at the borders of Verhoeven’s handiwork, and Tarr’s hissing bubbled over into an abortive gurgle.
“Have you got to do that?” Tarr said in a voice Guillam hadn’t heard from him before.
“Do you want septicaemia?” he countered, and retaliated with a sharp prod to the very centre of the shallow stripe of red that so messily bisected his upper and lower torso.
Tarr howled. Apparently taken by surprise with his hands full, unable to bite down on his own fist as Guillam thought he might have done, the involuntary exclamation rang out unimpeded in the echoing bathroom.
Guillam slapped his one free hand over Tarr’s mouth so fast, and so hard, that as he was unable again to defend himself with his hands full of curved needle and thread spool, Tarr’s head bounced off the wall behind the cistern with a thunk. It sounded painful but Guillam thought that over the finger in his flank Tarr could probably hardly feel it.
“Do my neighbours need to think I’m committing mid-afternoon murder?” he snapped. “Get a grip on yourself, man.”
Tarr glared at him and mumbled into his palm, “Hurts.”
Guillam regarded his eyes - damp, angry, confused - and the needle in his hand. Why hadn’t Tarr stabbed at him with it? Still playing for protection, presumably, but he hadn’t expected a cornered rat to have such a thorough handle on future planning. Unless he was just scared. But until now Guillam had presumed, believed even to have the measure of it: Tarr in a tight corner would lash out.
The alternative, Guillam thought as he forced his hand harder over Tarr’s mouth until his eyes showed more white than seemed right and he began to look panicked behind Guillam’s fingers, was that Tarr trusted him, and that was nonsense. Ricki Tarr trusted no one and was convinced he could live on what little wit he had. That was always the trouble with him. That and his unerring ability to piss off the wrong people.
“Ow,” Tarr said into Guillam’s fingers, trying to hold his gaze.
With a sigh, Guillam dropped his eyes to the electrical tape wad on Tarr’s opposite side. Tarr followed his line of sight; Guillam laid his finger the length of the open wound while he was distracted, and Tarr slammed his own head against the wall in a flurry of agony.
"If you do that while I'm sewing it up--" Guillam began, relieved to have a reason to scold him again.
"You're not sewing it up," Tarr said; he was nearly unintelligible, but what he lacked in clarity from a hand over his lips (they were hot as the wound, though currently drier) he made up for by gesticulating pointedly with his handfuls of surgical thread.
"I will in a minute," Guillam said, "maybe you should concuss yourself properly if you can't stand the pain."
He ran his index finger the length of the bloodied wound, pressing it into a moist slit like the ladies man he'd always tried to lead the Circus to believe he was. Tarr flinched and whimpered, and Guillam felt his jaw bone move beneath the fingers of his other hand. He felt the muscles of Tarr's face tighten in preparation.
Guillam wondered, his cheeks burning, if he would stop if Tarr opened his mouth and asked him to. He considered it - his index finger sticky with fresh blood, pressed into an open wound - and wondered if maybe, possibly, Tarr noticing the beginnings of Guillam's erection would pull him away.
What gave him pause, in the end, was the resigned sigh from Tarr that dampened his hand; it was the sudden slump and relaxation of his body against the cistern, the enforced acceptance of continued pain.
When Guillam looked at his face, Tarr's pupils were dilated, his eyes full of a down-turned softness Guillam had only ever seen in women being unceremoniously chucked before. He'd certainly never thought it was the kind of emotion Ricki Tarr was capable of even emulating.
"You're enjoying this," Tarr said flatly into Guillam's palm.
Guillam whipped his hand away from Tarr's mouth.
"Don't be ridiculous," he blurted hotly, somewhat undermined by the increased pressure of his underpants against a cock that was harder than it had any business being.
Tarr's eyes, much as Guillam had hoped they wouldn't, tracked down to his groin from his face, and back up again. Even with Guillam's finger still in his wound - and Guillam hadn't yet removed it, even now - Tarr raised his eyebrows incredulously.
"Shut up."
"You're going to sew it up after?" Tarr asked. There was a note of pleading in his voice, and to Guillam's everlasting horror he wasn't able to discern whether it was an affectation of submission to the hierarchies Tarr usually ignored in order to save his bacon, or whether it was - unlikely as it seemed - genuine.
"Shut up," Guillam said again, trying to make himself take his hand from the hole in Tarr's side.
"Do what you want," Tarr said, thick-tongued once more, his eyes filled with what Guillam was now sure was exaggerated compliance, pleading, "Don't let Verhoeven near me. Do what you want."
The 'and you can' link was swallowed somewhere in the working of Tarr's throat as he bargained through dampening pain, but Guillam was not so utterly stupefied by his own desires that he couldn't make the connection.
"I'm just," Guillam made a grab for the needle and thread, and Tarr rendered them to him as if he was feeding a horse: flat-palmed and as still as any man could hope to be under the circumstances. "Just. Sewing up. Your side."
"Okay," said Tarr.
The lie was poor, and it hung in the too-warm bathroom like a foul smell with no window to escape form. Guillam tilted his hand, and the lips of the wound almost caressed the sides of his finger as it shifted position in a bed of congealing blood. The twitch and sigh of renewed pain that Tarr was unable to contain were diminished returns from his yelp and jump of only a few minutes earlier, and Guillam found he was irritated by this.
Lifting his hand, he ran the tip of his finger along the inside of the wound's edge, feeling wet flesh in a neat line against his fingerprint. Guillam watched Tarr bite the inside of his cheek and attempt an expression of serenity or at least cooperation, and he watched Tarr's nostrils flare and pain blossom in his already dilated eyes like the embers of a fire stirring into life at a kick.
Tarr did not entirely succeed in suppressing his wince.
Guillam inspected his face more closely, rubbing his finger back and forth through the clotting blood aimlessly, each vacillation drawing a fresh, tiny twitch in Tarr's facial muscles.
It was almost at the moment when he realised he couldn't keep telling himself he was about to start sewing any moment now - even though he clasped the needle and thread unsafely in his hand - that Tarr lifted his head and kissed Guillam squarely on the mouth.
Perhaps his intention was to distract Guillam from his petty torments; for a moment it almost worked, and Guillam dropped the needle and thread onto the flannel that lay across Tarr's legs without thinking. He seized a fistful of Tarr's ugly haircut and yanked his head back until the crown of it touched the bathroom wall once more, opened his mouth, and kissed him back so deeply that he could almost feel Tarr's teeth cutting helplessly into his lips.
Guillam bent his index finger; Tarr flinched beneath him - he wasn't sure how he'd ended up almost straddling the man - and made a sound of pained panic in his throat that filtered immediately into Guillam's mouth.
Clumsily, and without warning, Tarr put an unsteady hand on Guillam's cock through his trousers.
No, Guillam thought crossly, that wasn't what I wanted.
But he didn't remove it - his hands, after all, were busy - and as Tarr cupped his palm about the shaft and gave a tentative squeeze, Guillam leaned into the pressure. He forced Tarr's head back until he knew the man's eyes could not help but water, and kissed him harder.
Tarr's agitated breathing brought his stomach closer to and further from Guillam's hand, and Guillam pressed against it, trying to maintain his position; he made little note of the increase in his own pulse when Tarr jumped beneath him.
The hand on his cock began the same slow, measured up-and-down slithering that Guillam's finger in the wound made (although with a good deal more friction and, he supposed, much less suffering). It wasn't the business-like, professional-seeming quick one off the wrist he'd received in the field outside Sarratt in reply to his own (he thought) rather more languid exercise.
Guillam pushed with his hips against Tarr's hand; his finger slipped deeper into the wound and his fist pulled farther back on Tarr's hair, and an extraordinary guuaaahh of suffering leapt from Tarr's throat and into Guillam's.
Tarr did not, however, stop moving his hand.
It was only when something like a sneeze inside his pelvis began to gather tension that Guillam accepted that he had been a little more aroused than he was giving himself credit for. He let his finger slip from the slash in Tarr's side and slither over his torso - there was an uff of relief into his mouth - and with it, bloodied and sticky, he clutched Tarr's naked shoulder. He pushed down, against, into his hand; he kissed down, against, into his mouth, close to tearing out a handful of unwashed hair.
When he came - a shiver that wracked him from shoulder to knee, and nearly left him draped across Tarr like a discarded sheet - Guillam's hands tightened convulsively, but his mouth slackened and slipped from its mooring.
For a moment the habitual post-orgasmic disgust stayed away, hovering somewhere above his head while his heart pounded and his thighs tensed and relaxed.
Guillam slowly released Tarr's hair, keeping his hand on the man's shoulder for balance, and laid his forehead against the bathroom wall a little higher up, and off to one side.
“Maybe,” Guillam said at last, his voice as unsteady as his legs, “I’ll just tape it together for you. Worked on the other side.”
“Sorry I broke into your flat,” Tarr said, in an equally weak voice (although, Guillam suspected, for rather different reasons). His hand rested still on the camp spot with which Guillam had just ruined a perfectly good pair of suit trouser. “Didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
It was a lie, and they both knew it was a lie, but all Guillam had the stomach for now was to nod apathetically against the bathroom wall, and pat feebly the curve of Tarr’s shoulder.