Part Six

Summary: Naming names. A shot of redemption. A shot of escalation.

For Sgt. Bothari, in loving memory.

Previously in "The Guy in Second Place" --

LJ break for spoilers

Confusion on the girl's face, utter blankness on the Middleman's. Manservant Neville couldn't help smiling; he was surprised this particular weapon was still available for his use. Neville turned to face them directly, face set in a look of friendly sympathy. "You don't know? Well, I suppose anyone with sense would keep it from you. He tried to kill his high-school girlfriend because she rejected him."

---

Wendy almost couldn't process the words as English. She was trying to find some weird alien meaning. Manservant Neville smiled, and this time there was nothing saintly about it.

The Middleman looked exactly as if he'd been shot. Wendy waited for him to call Neville a liar. This would be a good time to break his rules and use some profanity for emphasis. Hitting Neville would be okay with her too. Waited. For him to deny it. Realized with nightmarish slowness that he wasn't going to. The accusation was true, or at least too close to true for the Middleman to defend himself.

The next time you want to tell me something, so it doesn't bite me in the ass as a total surprise, I'm going to listen.

"Get out." Wendy's voice was harsh, guttural. Her hand rested on her gun; she prayed Neville would give her an excuse.

He read her like a book. "As you wish." Neville's cheerful, horrible smile didn't shift. "Buena suerte, then. You may need it." He turned and walked away, a spring in his step.

She and the Middleman were alone, then, with nothing to look at but each other. His lips moved. Wendy recognized the beginning of Dubbie, but it died away without a sound. That might be the last time he says it, or I let him say it. Worse, her hand had automatically stayed on her gun. She couldn't make it let go at first. He saw the hesitation, flinched.

She wanted to cry. She wanted him to hold her and promise her the world. That wasn't going to happen today. "Fucking talk," Wendy snapped.

The silence stretched like slow torture. There was no place to sit down in the foyer. The 'office' door to the street was unlocked in the daytime, anyone could walk in as Neville had.

"It's true. Or close enough." Something was gone from his voice, the resonance that made him sound heroic and in control no matter what. "I drove my car into her family's house at two in the morning. Someone could have been killed, blind luck they weren't."

He'd only spoken once about that period of his life, before this. Which should have told me something. "The girl with the mix tape," Wendy said.

He nodded. He wouldn't look up. "She was a year behind me in high school, but a lot more grown up. She wanted a future. After I graduated I just hung around town with my friends, worked a little. Drank. We'd argue, I'd storm off. She finally got angry enough, and blunt enough, to make me understand it was over. I had the most awful temper ..."

Wendy held absolutely still, but he could read her reaction anyway. He always could. He drew himself up with a kind of proud despair, unwilling to make excuses. "You guessed the other day, there's a reason I won't be anything but the Middleman. I don't dare."

"But you're ... nice." Even Lacey had sensed that he wasn't all nice, but that didn't matter. That shining integrity was what Wendy had fallen in love with; his handsome face or muscles couldn't begin to compare. Not even the courage and cool intelligence that made him so good at his job. She'd gone looking for him in an alternate world saturated with evil because she knew he was good at the core, absolutely trustworthy. And the other version of him had lived up to that, in spite of surface differences.

She focused on what she did know, did trust. "That story about your football buddy, in high school. You were a good guy then."

"To my two or three best friends, yes. That's a moral bar almost anyone can meet. It took me ... longer than it should have, to extend that respect to a larger circle." Wendy could see the effort it was costing him to keep looking at her. That same integrity; if his past was going to shatter them apart he would do it himself, to her face. "I'd better tell it all."

"Yeah." I've made promises. Wendy had never imagined that keeping them could become an effort.

"Back then. I'd already done plenty of things I could have been arrested for. Under-aged drinking, getting in fights ... people let it go. I thought it was because I was invincible. The real reason was my father. He was probably the most beloved man in town, not that I'd ever made the connection. He'd been a lawyer there longer than I'd been alive, never treated anyone unjustly ... no one wanted to tell him. Maybe he didn't want to hear. It was just the two of us by then, my mother had died. Then I committed a full-scale felony and no one could pretend any more."

Wendy stared at the floor. She could see in peripheral vision he wasn't looking at her, either; he'd lost his nerve. Another first. Muscles tightened in his jaw. "Her parents agreed to drop the charges if I'd leave town and stay gone. Again for my father's sake. So I did. I'd never seen him cry before ... That's how I came to join the Navy."

That should have been the hard part, but the anguish in his voice hadn't gone away. Wendy looked at him more directly, saw his face absolutely rigid. "But you were good at that. You were in the SEALs." Because he'd said so, and no matter what else happened she couldn't imagine him a liar.

The half-compliment was no comfort to him. "I did the job. I followed the rules." As if he meant sitting in an office, instead of one of the most physically and emotionally demanding careers in the world. "But it wasn't enough, because it was still based on a lie. If not for that false clean slate -- if they'd had the complete story -- I wouldn't have been allowed in the service let alone an elite unit. My C.O. didn't know, or my new friends, but I knew. I didn't deserve their respect. Couldn't."

His expression changed a little. "There was a woman I wanted to marry. I didn't have the courage to tell her either." One hand moved, a gesture like something falling away. "In the end the fact that I was keeping a secret was just as destructive." The hand fell to his side.

"And the more creditable parts of the history, you've heard. The previous Middleman did know what I'd done." His tone begged her to accept that, if nothing else. "No lies of omission. It was my chance. For most Middleman, giving up a personal identity is a sacrifice. I couldn't wait. I was sick to death of who I was."

And he ... she was only thinking he, Wendy realized. Not 'the Middleman.' She tried to fit the new knowledge in the same skin as the man she fought beside. The man she loved. The man who'd been inside her last night in bed, a slow sensual dance, when all that time... Wendy shivered.

He followed the train of thought on her face. Wendy knew it would hurt him. Cared that it would hurt him, that must be worth something. His reaction wasn't dramatic, only a whole-body ... she would have said slouch, for anyone else. This nightmare wasn't sudden for him. He'd carried it all his adult life. Must have feared this from the moment they met, let alone the moment they touched. The endless evasions, the refusal to allow himself any semblance of normal relationships, made so much more sense.

"I should have told you a long time ago. Even if you didn't need to know it about a comrade-in-arms, you deserved to know it about a lover. I was too afraid. And I'm sorry."

His weight shifted, chin lifted a little. Wendy had the feeling she could come back in ten years and find him still waiting there. Or she could pull out her gun and incinerate him, and he wouldn't lift a finger to stop her.

Now she could imagine the surly, dangerous teenager under the surface. Crammed in uncomfortably with the soldier and the hero. Her lover with the sunlit smile ... had to be in there too. Or else he never had been.

Finish it. "What happened to the girl with the mix tape?" Wendy had to work hard to get her voice above a whisper.

"She stayed in town and got married, I understand. A dentist. They had children." A different pain crossed his face; Wendy had never realized that was something he wanted.

"What happened to your dad?"

"I didn't see him for five years. That was hard. A few visits later on, when I was stationed in the country. He knew I was serving, that I hadn't stayed completely dishonorable. In the end I think he wasn't ashamed of me. He died a few months before I took this job."

Which had happened, Wendy recalled, after he'd disobeyed an order that would have killed his SEAL team. "Would he have approved of what you did? When you saved your men and punched out your CO."

"That was the standard I was trying to live up to," the Middleman said softly.

Wendy's instincts and her nerves were fighting each other. "What was your name?" A last-second change of verb tense. She already knew the answer to what is.

"Clarence Peter Conrad. Junior."

Too much, too fast. Wendy couldn't sink into his arms, into their bed, as if nothing had happened. But the idea of letting him go, even partially, made her want to scream like a lost baby.

"You don't look a bit like a Clarence," Wendy said. At least we still have saving the world. "Boss."

------

Ida had heard it all. It was a given that Ida could or did monitor everything that happened in the building. She'd shut off the links to their private rooms, but she'd made a point of saying it was because meatbags in general and Wendy in particular were disgusting.

He disappeared after they locked up the front of the office and returned to the main control room. Giving her time and space to think, Wendy knew.

Which meant he hadn't gone up to their ... to her room. Or probably his own, which was on the same floor. The gym, maybe. Wendy could imagine him racking the weights to his personal best or a little higher, using the physical burn to drown out emotional distress. She hoped it helped.

He'd always shown her that kind of respect, slamming on the brakes at the edge of her personal space at the slightest hint. She'd assumed that was inborn goodness. Maybe it was a habit he'd had to work very hard building. Does that count less than if it's effortless? Or more?

Ida had been ignoring Wendy's existence, which she did half the time anyway. Apparently robot's tempers could run out just like people's. Now she slammed a scanner down on her desk. "I told him from day one you were no good. I knew you were a shallow little bitch, but I didn't know you were a bitch."

Wendy's eyes stung. She didn't have a soul on Earth she could talk this out with, she realized. Ida wasn't strictly a person but at least she had the context. "I didn't do anything."

"Yeah. And you did it pretty damn hard, too." Ida sneered back. "The number of times he's saved your skanky life, even if you don't count world-saving before he met you..."

"I get it. I get it. I don't mind disintegrating you if that's what it takes. You'd be back tomorrow anyway." Wendy didn't think she was bluffing, though her head was spinning too hard to be sure of anything. "Back off."

"You wanna be alone, you can be alone, toots," Ida shot back. "Enjoy." She stumped off toward the archive room.

The control room had an echo, when it was this empty. Wendy hadn't noticed before.

Of all their intimacies, and the total was impressive for only twenty-nine days, it was the first and simplest that tore at Wendy's heart now. She'd held out her hand. Actions spoke louder than words. I love you, you love me, I can't pretend not to any more. Come to bed and I'll make it better. She'd made the invitation absolutely clear, because she knew his rigid self-discipline would never have let him make the first move. She'd held out her hand, and he'd taken it. Had never really let go, on a level that meant more than literal touching. The gentle caresses, the sweaty gymnastics that meant the same thing at a higher volume. And all that time...

Looking back, the Middleman had gone out of his way to frighten her off on her first mission. Threats against her life if she talked about hentai monsters, letting her and her temp agency think she was an arson suspect. Looking back, she'd never believed a damned word. Hard to say why, when she'd hooked up with a heavily armed total stranger. But she hadn't. Nothing, battle and apocalypse and the gates of the Underworld, had shaken that confidence until today. Now ...

She didn't know if she could go back to him, heart and soul, with the same complete teamwork they'd had this morning. She could try, but it would take trying. And he'd see the effort and feel guilty about it. She might give her honest best and still not get that seamless bond back.

For that matter, how about that self-discipline? The way that he'd always been commanding and decisive on strictly Middle-matters but agreeable to the point of apathy on anything personal. She'd had to make every first move in the relationship. It had driven Wendy nuts sometimes. She and her mother had negotiated much of her teen years at the top of their lungs; she was used to a certain amount of drama. The phrase stand up for yourself had crossed her mind, once or twice, when she couldn't get the Middleman upset about anything. Maybe he's not mellow. Maybe he's careful.

He'd never said who I am on the rare occasions that she could get him talking about himself. It was always some phrasing like the man I choose to be. Wendy should have noticed.

There was no outcome here that wasn't going to be hard for at least one of them. All she could decide -- and it was her decision -- was which pain for who.

---

The Middleman's shoulder muscles were screaming at him for the last ten reps. He made himself finish, with textbook form; otherwise it didn't count. Set the weight machine back to zero, threw his sweats in a laundry chute. The gym had its own shower; he wouldn't have to risk bothering Wendy in the locker room or their ... her bedroom.

He almost couldn't remember what it had felt like being Pete ('Clarence' was Dad) that muggy summer night. The rage and frustration and embarrassment that had seemed so world-shattering at the time felt trivial, seventeen years later. What stayed in his mind now was the shamed component of it all. Part of him had known even then that Melanie was not only making the right decision, but that he'd only had himself to blame.

That, and the moment right before he aimed the car at her living room windows. He'd taken off his seat belt in a what-the-hell mood. He'd only had the car three weeks, and he wasn't the kind of person then who read manuals. It had never crossed his mind that Dad had found an old car just new enough to have an airbag. Which was just like Dad; he always worried.

No one had noticed the seat belt, and he'd never said. First because it seemed insufficiently cool and tough. Later, with a clearer head, because he realized he'd already given Dad enough pain. He couldn't do anything by then to make things better. He could hold back that one detail to make things less bad.

Now Wendy, who'd been somewhere in grade school at the time, was in the damage zone of that never-ending wrongdoing. He should have told her as soon as ... before they were intimate. He should have insisted she read his dossier the other day, at least. He hadn't been strong enough. Her unthinking trust -- her love, though she was sparing with the word -- was just too tempting. She'd treated him as a completely good man, made him feel like he was. Now the bill was coming due.

An alarm -- the full-priority emergency signal -- cut through his reverie. He shut off the shower and grabbed his uniform.

---

"FATBOY's sent out another mind-control signal," Ida said when he reached the control room. I can't read the content, but I've got grid coordinates. And now that I know what to look for, I also picked up the confirmation signal back from somebody's U-Master. It's on."

"Can you block their signals?" the Middleman asked.

"Not a chance; they've got at least four repeaters apart from FATBOY headquarters. I think they had a pretty good idea what we can do before they decided to throw down on your personal planet."

Wendy was there too, still in uniform, checking out her sidearm. "I need your help," the Middleman said tentatively.

She met his eyes, frankly if not happily. "I'm rattled," she said. "But you know what I am sure of? I fucking hate Manservant Neville. He does not get away with this mind control ... stuff ... just because he knows how to push our buttons. We'll find him, we'll stop him. And if it's okay with you, I'd kind of like to kill him."

"You have a deal," the Middleman said.