section7mfu | The Abyss Gazes Also - Lifecycle

Thought posting for this ended Sunday which was, uh, an hour ago. But it was Saturday which was even more yesterday. Sorry. And I'm not completely happy with this either, but as my What's My Line story for this week crashed and burned, I thought I should at least try and post something.

The Abyss Gazes Also

Callous

When Napoleon had been a kid he'd always dreamed of saving the world. No matter where his father was posted he'd never had any trouble finding friends and they would play around the neighbourhood, battling against communists, gangsters, aliens – whoever was the enemy du jour. The good guys always won with their hands clean, the damsel in distress was always saved, and the bad guys died on cue.

The kid he'd been back then would undoubtedly be delighted that he'd grown up to save the world for real. But he'd probably be shocked at everything that sometimes meant.

Hard lines crossed once hardly mattered at all after that. It wasn't as though killing was his first choice, but he'd long passed the point where the lives he took came back to haunt him. And seducing women to win an advantage or information was practically second nature to him, and all too often he didn't look back.

He couldn't count the men he'd killed or the women he'd slept with. And through it all he wore charm and charisma like a cloak, invincible, untouchable – unaccountable.

What they – he – did was necessary, he didn't question that. And he knew that as an organisation their methods were a hell of a lot cleaner than the alternatives. But cleaner wasn't the same as clean.

It was the innocents he got caught up in their affairs he was thinking of. Women like Lavinia Brown a schoolteacher on vacation who he'd persuaded to act as bait for a gang of dangerous women he knew wouldn't hesitate to kill, and so many others like her. He had the routine down now, explaining the threat to the world and appealing to their sense of duty, glossing over the danger. More charm and he made them long to impress him, to show him how intrepid and daring they were. It was one thing to risk his and Illya's lives, or any other agents' if it came to that, it should be something quite different to risk the life of an innocent. And yes, of course, he was always ready to risk everything to keep them safe from the danger he exposed them to, but that wasn't the point.

The first time circumstance had led him to involve an innocent in a case it had been an agonising decision that had kept him awake in the small hours for weeks afterwards with all the what-ifs and the might-have-beens. Now...did he really give it a second thought? Did he ever consider the alternatives? Or had he become so inured to it all that he no longer saw them as people, just pawns to be used and disposed of. That girl today – Regina Sutcliffe – if that THRUSH agent's gun hadn't jammed at precisely the right moment she would have died on that dirty warehouse floor, far from family and friends, a victim of a war she should have no part in. And Napoleon would have been as much to blame as the man who pulled the trigger.

Maybe one day the incidental death of the innocent because of him would be just another count he didn't keep.

The thought frightened him enough to send him wandering distracted though the streets early morning until he came across a small chapel sandwiched between apartment blocks. Like a man sleepwalking, he walked inside, his hands seeming to genuflect of their own accord as he stepped into the confessional.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been too many years since my last confession and I can't tell you most of what I've done...”

Complacent.

Somehow, coming back to America from the USSR never failed to be a culture shock. He would have thought he would have got used to the differences, but still he found that the moment he stepped off the plane he was seized by the sight of the land of plenty.

Oh, he was well aware that poverty, violence and prejudice were rife across America. Here, as everywhere else, the most vulnerable lived lives of hungry desperation, but where ever he looked, what he saw was well fed citizens in bright clothes, driving their own cars without a care in the world.

Back in the USSR, whatever city he visited, whatever street he stood on, he saw the grey masses hurrying about their businesses, heads bowed, not making eye contact.

It wasn't so long ago he was one of them. He had put on weight since he started working for UNCLE. Muscle, not fat; he was unquestionably in better condition than he ever had been in his life. And part of that was that he had become used to three meals a day plus snacks. Snacks. For most of his life he had thought of food as a scarce resource and now, somehow, it had become entirely normal to seek out a cup of coffee and a cookie around mid morning. Of course he still might go hungry on assignments from time to time but that was different and nothing he could not cope with. And one time when it had gone on too long and he had lost a noticeable amount of weight he'd been sent to medical and the doctors had talked to him seriously about diet and the best way to gain the weight back and get back to a peak level of fitness as though involuntary starvation was a medical problem – or any kind of problem – and not simply a fact of life.

And he could take that for granted in the same way he took his comfortable apartment for granted or his soft cotton sheets. He had more personal possessions now than he'd ever had in his life and still Napoleon – and any other Western visitors – called his tastes spartan.

And then when he went back home his former colleagues, those who had known him before, looked at him and shook their heads and told him he had grown soft. He worried they were right.

It wasn't just life's creature comforts though. This week, in Kiev, he'd walked through the streets dressed in a shapeless Soviet-made suit, grey fur hat pulled low, a familiar tightness in his belly and it had been like he had never been away. But the fear – that was what it was so strange to have left behind. That was what he found so alien when he stepped back through the looking glass into America.

It was everywhere. He looked at streets he remembered reduced to rubble in his childhood and he should have been thinking how resilient his countrymen were, but all he could think was that they did not live through this, they merely survived, because no one had ever told them they could do more.

In the course of his hunt for the THRUSH assassin he'd been talking to an old lady who'd lived in the apartment building he'd been hiding out in. Her terror at the sight of him and Oleksander Romanovich, the KGB agent he'd been working with, had been awful to witness. She had barely been able to get a sentence out, her words stuttering and stumbling as she trembled, clearly convinced they were going to arrest her or hurt her, and nothing he had said had been enough to reassure her. Such a change from the intrigue and respect he was used to mention of UNCLE inspiring. To invoke such terror simply by presenting as law enforcement agents filled him with revulsion, but almost worse was the same revulsion he could see in Oleksander's eyes. It was good fortune that had led to him being chosen and given over to UNCLE. So many were left trying to work inside the brutal system he'd left behind. A clear moral code was a luxury of circumstance. He knew that his superiors would never expect him to deliberately target civilians, knew that if any of his comrades in UNCLE did, then there would be consequences.

That was what he had grown used to. That was how easy his life had become. He didn't even have to fear that Mr Waverly might have him tortured or executed for making a mistake or saying the wrong thing. His life was shockingly comfortable and it wasn't so much that he missed the oppression and the hardship – he did not – as it was that he wondered what he was without all the things that had shaped him. And he was afraid he would forget all the people back home who did not have the luxury of escape, who would never get away from the fear and the misery. The guilt ate away at him.

His life was comfortable. And he didn't think that was wrong, but he wasn't entirely sure it was right.

Lying awake in his comfortable bed, he gave up and roughly hauled the soft sheets off and left them lying on the floor. The bare mattress was somehow soothing.

Cold

Sometimes he felt that he had been old for a very long time now. He was in this job to defend the world and build a better future, and although he was aware that his agents regarded him with respect and affection, that wasn't what he asked of them.

The right amount of distance was necessary. To take the hard decisions – the necessary decisions – he needed to be detached. Personal feelings were an unwanted hindrance.

And yet sometimes he found himself remembering how he had felt as a frontline officer in the Great War, all those years ago, and later as part of the Allied Intervention following the Russian Revolution. He'd never felt as those his superiors back behind the lines knew what was going on, let alone those who waited back home, safe in their offices. He and the other men would complain about them, how they never listened, how they didn't have a clue, how their orders were suicidal. Hmmm. 'Ours is not to reason why' and all that.

He'd always sworn he would never turn into that. That no matter what, he would remain close to his people, understand who they were and share in their triumphs and defeats alike. The naïve hope of a far younger man, perhaps. Now he knew that sometimes they needed to see him as someone separate from them. Infallible, perhaps. And still, far more often than the rest of Section I liked, he found himself in the field, even if just at the conclusion of an affair. It showed that he still understood the risks his agents took, that he was still a man of action, not simply a chess master who dispatched his pawns around the world and never thought of the consequences. To be brutally honest, he wasn't entirely certain if he was trying to convince his men or himself.

On days like today though, he felt further from his people than ever before. It was a warm morning and there was quite a crowd in the cemetery. Martin Ablett had been a popular young man. Far too young, of course. He said a few words about the agent's courage and dedication, and made sure to make it clear that although he regretted the death, he didn't regret the circumstances that led up to it. Their fight remained necessary.

His agents didn't need his sympathy or comfort, they needed his strength and his certainty. They needed him to believe in the cause beyond all question.

He looked across at Mr Kuryakin, looking blank and stoic. The loss and the accident had hit him hard, he knew; he'd been obliged to pretend to believe that it was communicator problems that had kept his agent out of contact for three days. Mr Solo was hovering unobtrusively at his elbow, concern carefully hidden. He suspected there was a bottle of vodka waiting for them somewhere, and he didn't grudge them it. Whatever comfort they could find.

But he wondered what they saw in him. If they thought he remained untouched by days like these, if they thought he was unmoved. If they thought he didn't have feelings.

When the funeral was over he went back to work. THRUSH didn't stop, after all, and neither did he, no matter what.

Alice was waiting for him when he got home. She looked at his face and didn't say a word, but she poured him a glass of whisky and he held her close and wished things were different.