As it turned out, Alex was right about the toast.
After all the perfunctory speeches about unity and innovation were delivered, dinner commenced without a single hiccup. One by one, each of the decadent courses were wheeled out, and each was consumed without even a sign of food poisoning. Alex watched, cloistered away from the table.
On one hand, he hated sticking around for meals during these jobs. The way he was forced to unobtrusively watch from the sidelines, never partaking in the breaking of bread, reminded him of how dogs are forced to heel at their master's tables. Bodyguards seemed to be synonymous with automatons in the eyes of the men and women MI6 sent their agents off to protect — Alex, and all those like him, was merely human-shaped, capable of doling out violence, yet empty of the nuances of interiority. Meals only emphasized this unspoken belief.
After all, Alex thought, watching his charge, Rich Buchanan, take a hearty bite of his steak, they pay for you to keep the monsters at bay, not join them for drinks.
As much as the theatrics of dinner parties were subtly humiliating, Alex couldn't find it within himself to entirely hate these events. Alex would hardly admit to this out loud, as he was aware as he was of how borderline creepy it sounded, but watching strangers dine was the most revealing kind of people-watching. When stomachs were full of warm food and minds were heady with idle chatter, people lowered their hackles. Carefully constructed personas would slip — never in ways that damaged reputations, of course, but the glimpses Alex was provided with during his bodyguarding missions were enough to suggest the presence of social masks.
Gradually, the meal began to wind down. Guests excused themselves politely, stepping outside to smoke.
Alex couldn't suppress the slight snort he made when he heard one of the younger partygoers announce they were going to have a cigarette break.
It was the young man from earlier — Elijah.
Elijah heard the derisive noise — somehow — and looked over at Alex, quirking an eyebrow in challenge. Then, he sauntered off, leaving through one of the many doors that adjoined the dining hall to the rest of the mansion.
To Alex's credit, he managed to wait for a good few minutes before stalking off after Elijah.
The hallway was dark, and Alex was keenly aware that this was likely due to the fact Buchanan had not intended for anyone to stroll down it. Idly, he wondered if the door leading away from the party had even been unlocked, or whether Elijah had taken advantage of the dulled senses from the night's merriment to unlock it, unnoticed by Buchanan's staff.
Unlike the rest of the mansion, this hallway had few windows. The walls were barren and stretched high. Oddly, it felt like the polished interior of a cavern — though it lacked the warning signs of stalactites and glassy pools of water, its walls, too, were designed to drive intruders ever deeper.
At the end of the hall, Alex could make out a faint pinprick of red light.
His hand went to his jacket once more, ghosting over the trigger of his weapon.
The light was too low to the ground to be Elijah smoking, and its blinking was too consistent to be the remnants of a discarded cigarette.
As he moved, silent as a shadow, Alex allowed himself a brief eye roll. The memory of Elijah's bone-white teeth came to mind, unbidden.
You'd have to be an idiot to believe he smoked regularly enough to need a smoke break, Alex noted, staying close to the wall.
At the end of the hall, carefully placed as though it were a gift, sat the source of the red light.
It was an ugly mess of twisted wire and odd metals barely bigger than a breadbox. The device seemed to be somewhere between a dissected toaster and a haphazard secondary-school engineering project. Completely unconcerned with Alex, its light continued to blink, cheery.
Alex let his hand drop away from his gun, and hand shaking slightly, he reached for the swiss army knife he'd mindlessly thrown in his pocket at the MI6 armory before heading off on tonight's mission.
He forced his pulse to slow, hands steady as he brought his pocketknife closer to the wire at the heart of the bomb's innards.
A hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist, and Alex choked back a yelp of surprise. Before he could twist away from his attacker, his gaze sharpened, and Alex found he was staring down at a very disgruntled Elijah.
"Were you about to cut the red wire?" Elijah demanded, his Southern drawl morphing into a clipped European accent.
"You—!"
Elijah scoffed. "If you're insinuating I'm responsible for tonight's debacle, you're more of a fool than I thought."
"Did MI6 send you as a honeypot?" Alex asked, bewildered. "Was — am I on probation now?"
Pointedly, Elijah plucked the knife from Alex's hands, and in one swift motion, he sliced through the blue wire lying underneath a cluster of black ones.
The winking light began to falter, and despite its efforts, eventually stopped blinking at all.
"Why don't you tell me?" Elijah smiled, his teeth almost gleaming in the dark. Though the smile contained traces of the exaggerated simpering from earlier, the expression, similar to the young man who bore it, was distinctly sharper.
Alex gathered his bearings, snatching his pocketknife back. "'It doesn't matter' is my answer. Though a word to the wise, next time you should come up with a more believable excuse than going on a smoke break — especially if you're playing at being an American."
"Did it ever occur to you that my intention wasn't to avoid your detection, but to instead invite it?"
"I should have realized about 'Elijah'," Alex decided.
"'Who are those others in the moon's vat, sleep drunk, their limbs at odds? In this light, the blood is black. Tell me my name,'" 'Elijah' said, the words rolling off his tongue; self-satisfied in the way typical of one quoting something he believes is a clever reference.
"Is that meant to mean something to me?" Alex sighed, his grip around the weapon tightening.
'Elijah' frowned. "It's a poem. The point is to highlight the shared... incongruence with our names."
"Elijah is flamboyant," Alex began suddenly, a lightbulb going off in his mind. "Which you find tacky. And I don't mean that you find him flamboyant in a homophobic way. You'd find taking offense to 'Elijah' in that way tacky, too. He's new money; you're probably old money. He doesn't give a shit about how his behavior might reflect on his family; you do. He acts on impulse; you manipulate to get what you want. Take the photo negative image of Elijah, and you'll find bits and pieces of yourself."
The flash of pearlescent teeth once more. "Precisely. You're shaping up to be smarter than I'd initially imagined, agent."
Alex flicked open the swiss army knife. "What's your real name?"
The words hung in the air, more so a command than a question.
"You have no way of confirming whether I'm telling the truth," the other boy said, tone mild. "I could very well give you another false name. For all you know, I am hiding in plain sight, and my real name is Elijah."
"I guess we'll just have to trust one another."
"How am I trusting you?"
"I haven't arrested you yet," Alex pointed out, and his tone lacked the warmth of humor. "Isn't that worth something?"
"'Artemis,'" the other boy said, head cocked as though he were a cat studying a particularly intriguing mouse.
"'Artemis'," Alex repeated, the name heavy in his mouth.
Artemis widened his smile by a few teeth, though his mien was still guarded. "Fair is fair, 'Ian'."
Considering his options, Alex paused. "'Alex'," he replied, voice even.
"And I suppose, likewise, I have no way of confirming that is actually your name."
"Your shitty cologne is leaving evidence that people went down this hall," Alex said, taking a cautious step forward so as to approach the now-defunct bomb. "I'm going to pick up this… thing, and then you're going to follow me back to the party."
Artemis tilted his head, intrigued. "You're picking up on the jasmine. White florals usually have indoles, which lends them a certain animalic quality. The musk is what makes the pleasant notes of the perfume sing all the sweeter. Too much, however, can be unpleasant. Did you know corpses give off indoles as they progress through decomposition?"
Alex didn't miss a beat. "You say that as though I'd be familiar with dead bodies."
"Men who are familiar with the reality of death comport themselves in manners distinctly different from those who are unfamiliar."
"'Familiar'," Alex snorted. "You should work in P.R."
"'Spies' and 'assassins'," Artemis sighed. "It's all a matter of what paradigm to which one subscribes."
"What's your paradigm, then?"
"Simply that: my own," Artemis replied easily. "Whereas yours is, to put it bluntly, that of your employer's."
Alex made a face. "Didn't know you could have a paradigm from only 9-to-5."
"I didn't say you agreed with them — belief is meaningless in a world defined by action. If I were to kill you, would my hand not be as culpable as my mind?"
In the dim light of the hall, Alex and Artemis watched each other. How Artemis had managed to sneak up on Alex was a mystery — the hallway around them was more like the sprawling inside of a pipe. Rather than ending suddenly, the end of the hallway was defined by the slow curling of the floor plan. Inlaid lights on the wall provided the only illumination. It was as if the hallway were a mere echo of the dining room — all the sensory experiences were dulled, what with the immense stillness and lack of trappings.
Artemis paused, aware that Alex was studying him.
"You thought your agency sent someone fitting my profile as a honeypot?" Artemis commented. "Or, at the very least, considered it a possibility?"
Alex's grip on his weapon relaxed somewhat, and his face warmed. Although it was dark, he prayed the ruddying of his cheeks wasn't obvious.
"I meant that they'd think I'd think you were a honeypot," Alex countered, stance slowly growing defensive. "Not that — I didn't mean it like that."
Artemis said nothing, his expression inscrutable.
"You were distracting in that you were annoying," Alex muttered finally, shoving his hands into his pockets.
Artemis looked smug. "Agree to disagree."
With that, Artemis turned, stepping away from the broken explosive. Alex faltered, giving the bomb one last glance. As Artemis walked back down the hallway, Alex made up his mind, abandoning the device.
They walked in silence.
"What're you here for?" Alex asked, the question spilling from him more nonchalantly than he'd have liked.
"No one that your bosses would actively have you try to kill," Artemis hinted.
"That's a bold statement about MI6," Alex said, looking at Artemis to see if he reacted to the pointed mention of Alex's allegiance.
They reached the end of the hallway, and Artemis wrapped his hand around the doorknob, waiting. Carefully, Artemis made eye contact with Alex.
"Your dear Mr. Buchanan has something of mine," Artemis stated, his tone casual, as though he were discussing the weather. "Unlike the individual who left that explosive, I do not intend to kill him, however."
Alex waited, aware that he had only been given the first part of the elevator pitch.
"Our goals are not in conflict with one another," Artemis speculated, and he began to turn the doorknob. "I'm sure his survival and my acquisition of some sensitive information could both be attained."
"So you're saying we'd both stand to benefit," Alex remarked, the edge of his lips twitching upwards to a grin. "That's convenient for you."
"Convenient?"
Alex shrugged. "I can think of many reasons why my level of access to Buchanan would make your… goal, or whatever, much easier 'to attain'."
Artemis opened the door, and the warm light of the dining room flooded the hallway. "And I can think of many reasons why your arguments would be flawed."
Artemis' voice shifted back into his initial Southern affectation, and Alex's eyebrows rose slightly. In response, Artemis' grin grew sharper, a hint of his personality slipping through the act of Elijah.
Alex buried his hands in his jacket pockets, praying no one in the party had spotted his knife.
"I'll see you later, 'Ian'," Artemis said, and he was close enough that Alex caught a wave of the vaguely floral cologne he was wearing. "I think I would like to get to know you a bit better."
White florals, Alex thought, the odd way Artemis carried himself replaying itself in his mind.
As he watched 'Elijah' mingle with the other guests, Alex felt a curious tightness in his chest. For someone so abrasive, Artemis' ability to socially mimic was staggering. In a sense, 'Elijah' felt like a puppet being trotted out amongst the guests, and it was only with the knowledge of this farce that Alex was able to glimpse its performativity.
The line between the world Alex had been thrust into and the world the guests comfortably inhabited seemed to blur as Artemis easily slotted back into the scene of the party.
Prick, Alex thought, ignoring the way his pulse quickened.