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Biggles fic: Old Words
This was written for one of last year's prompt fests - Whumptober, I think - and never posted. At the time, I was really struggling to get words out, feeing pretty insecure about the words I did write, and I could tell this needed editing and didn't feel up to dealing with it. Also, it was too long to just post as a snippet of fic like most of the others. I sat on it for a while with the idea that it might be possible to clean it up and use it in an exchange, but it didn't fit anything I was writing for, and I finally got around to editing and posting it.
Old Words (1978 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Biggles Series - W. E. Johns
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Characters: Erich von Stalhein, James "Biggles" Bigglesworth
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Friendship, Developing Relationship, Secret Messages
Summary: Some time after Buries a Hatchet/Looks Back, Biggles and Erich find an old message in an abandoned dead drop.
Also posted under the cut.
"-- and did you know, well of course you know, there is an old Soviet message drop site behind a brick in this wall. That one up there, I think, with the chipped corner, just below the drainpipe."
"Yes, I've known about it for a while," Erich said, fond and amused in equal measure. "We also knew that you knew, your department, that is. We only used it for messages we wanted to be compromised. Misinformation and the like."
They were walking together side by side on the London street; now Bigglesworth stopped, a glint of mischief in his eyes, and stretched a little, having to reach up to his full height to wiggle the brick free. "I wonder if they still use it? Let's see if anyone has left anything there lately." His quick, deft fingers felt about inside the gap behind the dislodged brick. Erich smiled again at the quick flash of satisfaction that crossed Bigglesworth's sharp, mobile features. "There is something here! Maybe someone does still use it."
"Most likely a schoolboy who found it on an outing." Erich leaned against the wall, hands folded on the head of his walking stick. How strange, he thought, that the spy matters which had been life-or-death to them once might be part of some schoolboy game now.
"Let's see what it is. Where's the end -- ah." Bigglesworth pulled out the item he had found, dropping back from his toes, and Erich leaned forward and went abruptly still.
Because he recognized that weatherproof message tube. It was the type that he used to use in the field. Years ago.
And he had forgotten, completely forgotten until this very moment, that he had in fact used this drop not so long before Sakhalin. Not with any intent of sending messages to his co-conspirators, but with every awareness that it was known to British intelligence.
It could not be the same message tube. Not after all this time ...
"Why, this looks just like an old --" Bigglesworth looked up and saw Erich staring at him. Whatever showed on Erich's face, he didn't know, but Bigglesworth looked momentarily frozen and then, with a quick smile, reached out and handed the waxed cardboard tube to him.
"You know," he said, "I believe this might be yours. Misplaced, of course."
Erich took it with half-frozen fingers. His hands didn't respond as swiftly or deftly as they used to, ever since Sakhalin, but that wasn't what slowed his reactions now. "I --"
"I don't want to know," Bigglesworth said firmly. The smile was still on his face, lopsided and filled with a sweetness that Erich knew that he didn't realize he possessed. "It's my own fault, prying into old treasure vaults. A failing of mine. I didn't know you had still used it, before -- well, anyway, if I've accidentally dug up something that ought to be consigned to the trash bin, you'll know better than I."
Consigned to the trash bin. It should be. He had placed it behind the brick on a miserable drunken night, during a sojourn in London that he was fairly sure Bigglesworth still didn't know about, shortly before Sakhalin and Onor and everything that had come after that.
"I ..." he began, looking down at the small tube, wanting to say that it was not what they both knew it was. But it was, he knew the handwriting on the side as his own, and worst of all, horrifyingly, he had written Bigglesworth's name there. J. Bigglesworth, Scotland Yard. How stupid could he have been? How revealing? He wondered if Bigglesworth had seen the handwriting, but he thought probably not; the quick pass to his own hand had happened in an instant, as soon as Bigglesworth had caught a glimpse of his stricken face.
He could throw it on the fire when he got home. No one ever the wiser. Bigglesworth should go on thinking that he had placed some state secret there, some outdated discovery about British intelligence, never passed on to its intended recipient.
"Yes," he said, tucking the tube into an inside pocket of his coat. "I will do that. Throw it away at my earliest convenience."
Bigglesworth's smile didn't change, but he seemed to relax a little. "Yes, that is the best thing to do with bits of rubbish one finds lying about." With no more apparent concern, he stood on tiptoe to replace the brick, and then they walked on and Bigglesworth made small talk about the weather and the roses in a window box as they passed it. After a long moment, Erich responded, and there was no more discussion of cardboard tubes in secret locations.
*
Later that night, beside the hearth in his Kensington flat, Erich sat with the object in his hands.
It was very small. A waxed cardboard tube, about three inches long, similar in size and shape to a shotgun casing. He had placed many messages in similar receptacles. He'd left nothing else behind on that London excursion, a mission failed in all ways. Even this had not reached its intended recipient, the dead drop as dead as its name suggested, abandoned even by British intelligence for lack of use.
Erich held the tube between his mildly arthritis-knotted fingers, and sighed, and poised to toss it into the fire -- a gas flame, easily hot enough to burn a paper item beyond recognition. Then he lowered his hand, got up, and crossed to the phone. This was a recent addition to the flat, a mild compromise between his safety and other considerations. He picked it up and dialed a number he knew well.
Bigglesworth answered on the first ring, that brisk sure voice. "Good evening. Biggles here."
"I hope I'm not bothering you," Erich began, and heard a quick intake of breath as his voice was recognized.
"Not at all, not even slightly." There was warmth in Bigglesworth's voice. Erich could picture him at his desk, smoking and listening to the wireless that could be heard playing softly in the background. "You've saved me from having to clean up a bit of a mess. Bertie and Ginger had a slight disagreement about the Grand Prix, don't ask me for details, it was something to do with types of motors, but some items were knocked about and now they've run off to prove a point. Hopefully no one's tearing down the Bentley."
In the background, a voice—Lacey's—said, "Just sit there on the phone, that's it, don't raise a finger to help."
Erich laughed softly. He liked it when Bigglesworth shared such domestic details; it made him feel as if he was there with them.
"I'll be there in a minute," Bigglesworth said to Lacey, and to Erich, "Did you need something? Is everything all right?" His voice quickened a little, and the clattering that Erich could hear in the background abruptly ceased.
"It's no great matter. It can wait until morning."
"I would be happy to hear of it now."
"Well, in that case." He looked down at the cardboard tube in his hand. "The message in that dead drop -- it was for you."
There was a brief silence on the other end of the wire. "For the British, you mean?"
"No. You specifically."
Bigglesworth said quietly, "Do you want me to have it now?"
Erich gazed down at the object in his hand. "I don't know." After a moment, he added, "If you want to—to read it, you could come over."
Another brief silence, the soft static somehow companionable, then Bigglesworth said softly, "I would be happy to come, but I don't think I need to read messages from years past. I don't, you know ... like to look back in that way, most of the time. If you want to talk about it, I would enjoy that. But it might be best if you—if you do what you like with it first, and think about it a bit. Why don't we meet for breakfast? We could discuss it then."
Erich curled his hand around the small tube. And then he smiled. "Breakfast will be fine. Where would you like to meet?"
Bigglesworth named a place they sometimes frequented within easy walking distance of Erich's flat, his voice light. They said good night, and Erich hung up.
After a moment, he plucked out the twisted wad of paper holding the tube shut. The rolled-up message fell out into his hand. It was a scrap of cheap stationery from the hotel where he had been staying. He unrolled it and looked at it, almost dispassionately, at the sharp jabs of the pen penetrating the paper, as if he had been tearing the words out of himself. Some words were crossed out as he had tried, drunkenly, to capture a concept he could only grope painfully around.
Why do you- Why must I can't do this anymore. I won't. We must end these foolish games. I am calling you out, James Bigglesworth. I demand to meet at a place of your choosing. I will give you first selection of weapons. Let us simply end this, cleanly, like men, and not chase each other around the globe for nothing. If any man who is not the named party finds this, I ask that you pass this message to James Bigglesworth at Scotland Yard.
It was completely unlike him: stupid, careless, revealing. He had awakened with a pounding headache underway on his intended escape route, in the hold of a coal freighter already two hours out of the Port of London. In hungover, furiously self-flagellating regret, he had convinced himself that it was all a drunken dream, and then he had been busy with other things, and any plans of going back to check, and destroy the message if it ever existed, had been forgotten. Eventually he forgot the entire incident itself.
Tonight, in his hand, it weighed nothing -- shockingly light for all the weight of emotion, of anger, of history that it contained. Erich found that he felt less than he would have expected, reading his old words. The tangled-up misery in them seemed to belong to someone else, no longer anything to do with the life he lived now.
He limped back to the fire and tossed the message on the gas flame, followed by the tube. Both caught fire and disintegrated swiftly to ash.
Tomorrow, he knew, he and Bigglesworth would have a pleasant breakfast. He still wasn't sure how much he wanted to say about the message; the brief moment of reckless courage that had led to picking up the phone had now deserted him. And he supposed it didn't matter much. Bigglesworth wouldn't ask questions, and if Erich wanted to drop it, he knew that his wish would be respected. Maybe Erich would tell him, in the interests of the relatively new, tentative honesty between them. Maybe he would decide to leave that miserable drunken missive in the past. He'd see how he felt tomorrow.
He supposed that if it had been found back then, the outcome wouldn't have been what he had wanted anyway. He smiled a little, thinking of Bigglesworth showing up to a dueling location, armed primarily with caustic sympathy that would have cut through all his defenses more surely than a rapier. The quick and final end he sought would not have come in any case, for either of them, he suspected.
I can't do this anymore, he had written. And he had been right. But not for the reasons he'd thought at the time.
Breakfast in the morning, with good company. Much better than a pointless duel. He watched the blue flames for a little while longer, until every scrap of wax-soaked cardboard and cheap pulp paper had melted to a thin rime of carbon, and then turned down the fire and went to bed.
Old Words (1978 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Biggles Series - W. E. Johns
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Characters: Erich von Stalhein, James "Biggles" Bigglesworth
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Friendship, Developing Relationship, Secret Messages
Summary: Some time after Buries a Hatchet/Looks Back, Biggles and Erich find an old message in an abandoned dead drop.
Also posted under the cut.
"-- and did you know, well of course you know, there is an old Soviet message drop site behind a brick in this wall. That one up there, I think, with the chipped corner, just below the drainpipe."
"Yes, I've known about it for a while," Erich said, fond and amused in equal measure. "We also knew that you knew, your department, that is. We only used it for messages we wanted to be compromised. Misinformation and the like."
They were walking together side by side on the London street; now Bigglesworth stopped, a glint of mischief in his eyes, and stretched a little, having to reach up to his full height to wiggle the brick free. "I wonder if they still use it? Let's see if anyone has left anything there lately." His quick, deft fingers felt about inside the gap behind the dislodged brick. Erich smiled again at the quick flash of satisfaction that crossed Bigglesworth's sharp, mobile features. "There is something here! Maybe someone does still use it."
"Most likely a schoolboy who found it on an outing." Erich leaned against the wall, hands folded on the head of his walking stick. How strange, he thought, that the spy matters which had been life-or-death to them once might be part of some schoolboy game now.
"Let's see what it is. Where's the end -- ah." Bigglesworth pulled out the item he had found, dropping back from his toes, and Erich leaned forward and went abruptly still.
Because he recognized that weatherproof message tube. It was the type that he used to use in the field. Years ago.
And he had forgotten, completely forgotten until this very moment, that he had in fact used this drop not so long before Sakhalin. Not with any intent of sending messages to his co-conspirators, but with every awareness that it was known to British intelligence.
It could not be the same message tube. Not after all this time ...
"Why, this looks just like an old --" Bigglesworth looked up and saw Erich staring at him. Whatever showed on Erich's face, he didn't know, but Bigglesworth looked momentarily frozen and then, with a quick smile, reached out and handed the waxed cardboard tube to him.
"You know," he said, "I believe this might be yours. Misplaced, of course."
Erich took it with half-frozen fingers. His hands didn't respond as swiftly or deftly as they used to, ever since Sakhalin, but that wasn't what slowed his reactions now. "I --"
"I don't want to know," Bigglesworth said firmly. The smile was still on his face, lopsided and filled with a sweetness that Erich knew that he didn't realize he possessed. "It's my own fault, prying into old treasure vaults. A failing of mine. I didn't know you had still used it, before -- well, anyway, if I've accidentally dug up something that ought to be consigned to the trash bin, you'll know better than I."
Consigned to the trash bin. It should be. He had placed it behind the brick on a miserable drunken night, during a sojourn in London that he was fairly sure Bigglesworth still didn't know about, shortly before Sakhalin and Onor and everything that had come after that.
"I ..." he began, looking down at the small tube, wanting to say that it was not what they both knew it was. But it was, he knew the handwriting on the side as his own, and worst of all, horrifyingly, he had written Bigglesworth's name there. J. Bigglesworth, Scotland Yard. How stupid could he have been? How revealing? He wondered if Bigglesworth had seen the handwriting, but he thought probably not; the quick pass to his own hand had happened in an instant, as soon as Bigglesworth had caught a glimpse of his stricken face.
He could throw it on the fire when he got home. No one ever the wiser. Bigglesworth should go on thinking that he had placed some state secret there, some outdated discovery about British intelligence, never passed on to its intended recipient.
"Yes," he said, tucking the tube into an inside pocket of his coat. "I will do that. Throw it away at my earliest convenience."
Bigglesworth's smile didn't change, but he seemed to relax a little. "Yes, that is the best thing to do with bits of rubbish one finds lying about." With no more apparent concern, he stood on tiptoe to replace the brick, and then they walked on and Bigglesworth made small talk about the weather and the roses in a window box as they passed it. After a long moment, Erich responded, and there was no more discussion of cardboard tubes in secret locations.
*
Later that night, beside the hearth in his Kensington flat, Erich sat with the object in his hands.
It was very small. A waxed cardboard tube, about three inches long, similar in size and shape to a shotgun casing. He had placed many messages in similar receptacles. He'd left nothing else behind on that London excursion, a mission failed in all ways. Even this had not reached its intended recipient, the dead drop as dead as its name suggested, abandoned even by British intelligence for lack of use.
Erich held the tube between his mildly arthritis-knotted fingers, and sighed, and poised to toss it into the fire -- a gas flame, easily hot enough to burn a paper item beyond recognition. Then he lowered his hand, got up, and crossed to the phone. This was a recent addition to the flat, a mild compromise between his safety and other considerations. He picked it up and dialed a number he knew well.
Bigglesworth answered on the first ring, that brisk sure voice. "Good evening. Biggles here."
"I hope I'm not bothering you," Erich began, and heard a quick intake of breath as his voice was recognized.
"Not at all, not even slightly." There was warmth in Bigglesworth's voice. Erich could picture him at his desk, smoking and listening to the wireless that could be heard playing softly in the background. "You've saved me from having to clean up a bit of a mess. Bertie and Ginger had a slight disagreement about the Grand Prix, don't ask me for details, it was something to do with types of motors, but some items were knocked about and now they've run off to prove a point. Hopefully no one's tearing down the Bentley."
In the background, a voice—Lacey's—said, "Just sit there on the phone, that's it, don't raise a finger to help."
Erich laughed softly. He liked it when Bigglesworth shared such domestic details; it made him feel as if he was there with them.
"I'll be there in a minute," Bigglesworth said to Lacey, and to Erich, "Did you need something? Is everything all right?" His voice quickened a little, and the clattering that Erich could hear in the background abruptly ceased.
"It's no great matter. It can wait until morning."
"I would be happy to hear of it now."
"Well, in that case." He looked down at the cardboard tube in his hand. "The message in that dead drop -- it was for you."
There was a brief silence on the other end of the wire. "For the British, you mean?"
"No. You specifically."
Bigglesworth said quietly, "Do you want me to have it now?"
Erich gazed down at the object in his hand. "I don't know." After a moment, he added, "If you want to—to read it, you could come over."
Another brief silence, the soft static somehow companionable, then Bigglesworth said softly, "I would be happy to come, but I don't think I need to read messages from years past. I don't, you know ... like to look back in that way, most of the time. If you want to talk about it, I would enjoy that. But it might be best if you—if you do what you like with it first, and think about it a bit. Why don't we meet for breakfast? We could discuss it then."
Erich curled his hand around the small tube. And then he smiled. "Breakfast will be fine. Where would you like to meet?"
Bigglesworth named a place they sometimes frequented within easy walking distance of Erich's flat, his voice light. They said good night, and Erich hung up.
After a moment, he plucked out the twisted wad of paper holding the tube shut. The rolled-up message fell out into his hand. It was a scrap of cheap stationery from the hotel where he had been staying. He unrolled it and looked at it, almost dispassionately, at the sharp jabs of the pen penetrating the paper, as if he had been tearing the words out of himself. Some words were crossed out as he had tried, drunkenly, to capture a concept he could only grope painfully around.
It was completely unlike him: stupid, careless, revealing. He had awakened with a pounding headache underway on his intended escape route, in the hold of a coal freighter already two hours out of the Port of London. In hungover, furiously self-flagellating regret, he had convinced himself that it was all a drunken dream, and then he had been busy with other things, and any plans of going back to check, and destroy the message if it ever existed, had been forgotten. Eventually he forgot the entire incident itself.
Tonight, in his hand, it weighed nothing -- shockingly light for all the weight of emotion, of anger, of history that it contained. Erich found that he felt less than he would have expected, reading his old words. The tangled-up misery in them seemed to belong to someone else, no longer anything to do with the life he lived now.
He limped back to the fire and tossed the message on the gas flame, followed by the tube. Both caught fire and disintegrated swiftly to ash.
Tomorrow, he knew, he and Bigglesworth would have a pleasant breakfast. He still wasn't sure how much he wanted to say about the message; the brief moment of reckless courage that had led to picking up the phone had now deserted him. And he supposed it didn't matter much. Bigglesworth wouldn't ask questions, and if Erich wanted to drop it, he knew that his wish would be respected. Maybe Erich would tell him, in the interests of the relatively new, tentative honesty between them. Maybe he would decide to leave that miserable drunken missive in the past. He'd see how he felt tomorrow.
He supposed that if it had been found back then, the outcome wouldn't have been what he had wanted anyway. He smiled a little, thinking of Bigglesworth showing up to a dueling location, armed primarily with caustic sympathy that would have cut through all his defenses more surely than a rapier. The quick and final end he sought would not have come in any case, for either of them, he suspected.
I can't do this anymore, he had written. And he had been right. But not for the reasons he'd thought at the time.
Breakfast in the morning, with good company. Much better than a pointless duel. He watched the blue flames for a little while longer, until every scrap of wax-soaked cardboard and cheap pulp paper had melted to a thin rime of carbon, and then turned down the fire and went to bed.