[On an ordinary evening, Guy fell to bed with his life as blessedly in order as it could be, relegated here. Luceti, in seven months, had shown its colours, both frightening and generous. The last, drawn breaths before sleep claimed him had been against the neck of his Julian Bell, clothes discarded for--finally--a chance to do more than declare his love for the poet with pretty words, but to make it. Everything was changed when he woke.

There's a feeling that accompanies loss, one that is rooted deep in paranoid intuition, the very feeling that, in knowing something is terribly wrong, the mind refuses it. Guy shoved it away, hoping to hell it was all in his head. Yet there was wrenching feeling in his gut, bequeathed by that unease in the atmosphere and the little details one wouldn't notice otherwise being so very strikingly off. Something inside him had begun to sink and break.

Guy was grappling with a feeling all humans in a state of loss know. It is a moment when the heart catches hysteria and shifts between settling in the acid churning in one's stomach and hopping up to block the throat to make breathing and speaking laborious. In a way, Guy had grown accustomed to fried nerves, a heart that often beat rapidly with worry, the weight of stress that bent his back and the painful--yet righteous--pressure on his mind. Loss was something he seldom knew, but paranoia is and always had been a bosom friend of his.

The moment he woke without Julian's beautiful body in his arms, warm and bare, he knew.

Guy had spent his life collecting things and giving them away, seldom losing anything. Now, he walked a barren household and collected what remained. Two stories of near complete emptiness, and a gaping sense of loss, flapping about in his hung open jaw.

All three of them, in a night, gone.

There was a cup, in the bathroom, and Guy could smell the scotch in it from the hall. Like a tombstone, solemn on the ceramic sink, it stood, Kim's toothbrush inside. The philanderer's double, a scent of a memory in the wake of Kim Philby's vanishing act. Scotch and toothpaste. Guy walked away.

In the kitchen, once cluttered, there was an overwhelming sense of vacancy. Two books rested on the still-greasy floor where the table had once been. Anthony had picked it out. Now, there were just the leather bound memorials to his and Julian's name. Two volumes of flattery. A sketchbook filled with Guy's face as his dear Anthony saw it, and the last resounding words--meant for him alone--that a dead poet could bestow the world.

If asked, Guy would never be able to reason his numb search around a clearly empty house, but his soul was aching and groping for remnants of those he had always loved most. He went to the closet last, and after room after room of spacious nothing, he looked upon the only pieces left.

Anthony's coat. Kim's favoured tie.

With the volumes clutched in hands, Guy left. Anthony's coat weighed over his shoulders, rounded them with grief, and Kim's tie coiled around his neck, like a scarf, unknotted but wholly successful in covering the knot in Guy's throat.

Julian Bell's flame had gone out again. Anthony and Kim were back where they belonged, fighting fascism. Only Guy remained, his former happiness extinguished.

Anguish was strange to him in that it stole none of his understanding away. He knew them to be all right, relatively speaking. Yet it was also potent enough that there existed no amount of relief to be had in knowing them to be ripped away from him and that he was alone in Luceti. Time waited for all of them while in this place, and time would wait for him, too.

Ah, but Julian... in the arms of the angels again.

Guy holds his anguish as he holds his gin: bitterly, easily, and half-dazed. He walked the ways of Luceti, wings twitching, but low on his back. Anthony had never made such alterations to his clothing, and Guy was strangely comforted by the weight of the cloth enveloping even the feathery, gangly and useless things on his back. If he couldn't have Anthony's embrace, or Kim's eyes, or Julian's mouth...


Guy, unabashedly, is drunk for weeks, and will never set foot in House 32 again. On April 9th, when he can’t bear to speak them but can, just barely, write their names, he pens:]

It is with great regret that I inform the citizens of Luceti that three men have left us.

Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby returned to England; Julian Bell rests with God.

[Guy rose early feeling a little bit restless and intellectually dull. His days have thus far been a little ho-hum by the development of some routine, and being a man who enjoys flash and spontaneity amongst stimulating conversation and the occasional indulgence, he's been terribly, terribly bored. He's admired the "gallery" Luceti has to offer, frequented the bar and made his social rounds within the small circle he's established thus far. His social scene is nothing when one compares it to the flocks he had in London. Yet there’s little he can do, long denied those groups and relegated to here.

In an effort to fill the hours with some thing, he walked to the library with the intention of indulging in something a little less satisfying for a frustrated ponce, yet highly enjoyable for a man who read history at Cambridge. Ah, modern warfare. Just what are all the lovely systems up to some fifty years after his time?

As he sits in one of the aisles, back against the bookshelf, he thumbs through a rather intriguing book that caught his eye. “Most Famous Double Spies In Espionage History”. It isn’t out of narcissism that he picked it up, but more out of curiosity. Who could his contemporaries be?

Then he notices something. A flicker of a word on the next page. The sentences that follow frightens him, and his stomach contents curdle as he reads it.

But Burgess' much-vaunted help ingratiated him to the British intelligence community, though it had no idea that he was feeding the Russians every piece of secret information—including copies of Chamberlain's private messages—he could obtain. Burgess used his BBC position to develop contacts with important leaders in Europe who might later unwittingly provide him with more information to give to his Soviet....

The book has his name. A book about the most famous double agents in spy history. The only way one could be written about is if they were found out, and Guy is suddenly shaking with the realization. His whole body is keen to wretch, trembling with overcoming nausea. They’re caught in the future. They’re all bloody, bloody, had.

He doesn’t want to know what happens to him or any of the others, but they know. They all know, and they know everything. The Malnosso have his entire life at the tips of their fingers, and as skittles, dominoes... by God. They know about Kim, Anthony, Donald, every last one of them and everything they have ever touched.

He had expected that the Malnosso knew something, enough. Not this much. Not everything. Nor did he realize that every single one of his secrets was published for the public, that any soul with enough curiosity could read it.

They have to do something. He has to do something.

Tearing a title page out of the book, he pulls out a pen and begins to scrawl furiously, crossing out this word and that letter, scratching scribbles and arrows and making a convoluted mess. He runs from aisle to aisle, occasionally yanking books from the shelves, rifling through them madly, only to dart across to another one, plop down, and continue his mad jottings. An hour later, he writes this in his journal, half-crazed. Too much so to remember the damn filters Giles taught him.]


“Alea iacta est,” they told him. So it has again, our little gamblers bits.

                                       

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( The Decoding Process, not cut ICly )

( OOC Historical info, for the curious. )


[Should anyone come to the library, it won’t be difficult to locate Guy. Down one of the aisles, he’ll be sitting on the floor, a small pile of books haphazardly strewn about him, journal still open for anything that may be written back. If that wasn’t strange enough, once Kim and Anthony have joined him, it won’t be much longer before a hearty bonfire is started just behind House 32. Guy will be making trips between the library and their home, arms laden with as many books as he can carry.]