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Lance was beginning to think he was losing his mind.
No, no 'think' about it. He was losing his goddamn mind.
It started with Walter moving into his apartment while the Agency worked their asses off to rebuild the kid's house from the ground up. Now Lance had Walter filling the architecturally designed spaces in his ultra-modern eight room penthouse with his floppy hair, his big, goofy grin, his pigeons, his relentlessly upbeat Korean pop music and his – his everything.
Not that Walter was a bad guest, far from it – he was polite, considerate, helpful, an amazing cook. Lance had to hit the gym extra hard after he gained three pounds the first two weeks, and the kid kept house so well that Lance's cleaning lady was probably running out of stuff to do. But there were other things that were harder to take, like the fact that Lance was starting to enjoy evenings in. One night, after coming back from a short op in Barcelona, Lance and Walter came home together and immediately flopped on the couch to watch the latest episode of the Great British Baking Show. Halfway through the signature challenge Lance realized three things: the kid was asleep with his head in Lance's lap, a position he'd assumed at the start of the show with absolutely zero self-consciousness, Lance's fingers were idly stroking through his soft hair, and Lance had known ahead of time that this was going to be Pastry Week.
The worst part of it was, he wasn't sure which of these facts concerned him the most.
For a kid who didn't have a lot of friends and had lost his mom early on, Walter was – well, healthy. He had a confidence and a sense of his own worth that most people didn't get until much later in life, and in spite of the way others had treated him he was unerringly kind, generous and compassionate. Walter wore his heart on his sleeve, and he didn't seem to care about how ridiculously dangerous that was – God, he'd been ready to sacrifice his own life to save a murderer, who did that? But that was Walter – to him, everyone was worth saving, and he wasn't going to change that part of himself for anyone.
Not much scared Lance, but that part of Walter terrified him.
And then there was the touching. The touching, the hugging, the easy affection that Walter doled out like candy on Halloween. All very good and normal for a kid in touch with his emotions who wasn't afraid of showing a friend how much he meant to him, and all pretty overwhelming for a man who had people trying to kill him on a regular basis. Not that Lance didn't do friendships or relationships, but they were nearly always casual, either short-lived affairs or on again, off again arrangements between professionals whose jobs were 90% of their lives. The couple of times he'd tried for something more permanent, he'd crashed and burned spectacularly.
His relationship with Walter wasn't like anything he had ever experienced. The kid hugged him hello in the morning and goodbye at night, he hugged him after an op went well or after it didn't go so well. He leaned close when they worked together in the kitchen, plastered himself up against Lance when they were watching TV. If Walter had been anyone else, Lance would've been sure the kid was testing the waters, but Walter didn't play like that.
At least that's what Lance told himself, but his brain and body wasn't inclined to listen. After a month of easy affection, Lance had a dream where the kid sat himself down on Lance's lap, smiled his big, goofy grin at him and kissed him. They hadn't even made it to second base before Lance woke gasping and achingly hard. He stumbled into the shower, letting the hot water scald his back as he screwed his eyes shut and pictured the kid's surprisingly big, talented hands on him and God almighty he was in so much trouble here.
The breaking point came six weeks in on a Sunday morning when Lance wandered into the kitchen to find the kid in a frilly pink apron and a pair of worn pajama bottoms that looked like they were about to fall off, humming along to the tune tinnily escaping from his earbuds as he cracked eggs into a bowl. Lance stood there dazed and confused as all hell, watching the line of his spine twist and flex as he swayed in time with the music. The kid was bendy, there was no doubt about that.
At the next gyration the waistband slipped a little on the left, revealing a lean hipbone, and Lance thought, oh, man.
And then Walter spun around, nearly dropping the bowl when he saw Lance. Hastily, he yanked the buds from his ears and grinned. “Hey, you're up!” he said, too brightly. There was flour on his nose. The fact this didn't make Lance any less turned on was a bad sign. “I've got buttermilk biscuits baking in the oven. It's my mom's old recipe, only I use this mix of rice flour and – well, it's not important. Um. How do you like your eggs?”
Lance opened his mouth, snapped it shut again. It occurred to him that this was the most nervous that Walter had been in – well, the kid didn't seem to do nervous, so that would be never. Which meant he was nervous about something, but what?
And then Lance noticed the faint flush high on Walter's cheeks, the faint tremble in his fingers as they gripped the bowl. Walter's tongue darted out to wet his bottom lip, and right at that moment a whole horde of assassins could have busted through the patio doors and Lance would not have given a single solitary shit.
However, that moment passed swiftly because he was thirty-seven years old and Walter was twenty-three and that was just – look, he had killed his first man before Walter had graduated middle school; there was no way this was going to happen.
And so, instead of stepping forward like he wanted to, Lance took a step back. “Uh, thanks for the – offer, but I really need to – get some things done at the office today.”
A faint line appeared between Walter's mobile eyebrows. “But it's Sunday.”
“Hey, saving the world is a twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five job, you know?” It was all Lance could do to keep from wincing at his own words. “You go ahead, I'll catch you later, okay?”
Lance watched Walter's genuine, heartfelt smile turn into something hollow and brittle, and hated himself a little for it. “Sure. I'll be here.”
Lance didn't come home for a week.
He called Jenkins as soon as he got in the car and told her he wanted an old school assignment. The video reception wasn't great in the parking garage, but he could still tell she wasn't amused.
“And by 'old school' you mean –”
“One that doesn't involve the kid.”
“You have got to stop calling him that.”
“Joy, I swear –”
“If this is about him living with you, we can set him up in his own place until the renovations are done.”
“Listen,” Lance said slowly, “I have been through a lot of changes in the last few weeks. I am a bird for half my damn job, and the other half – it's like we torched the rule book I've been living by for close to fifteen years. I need to get my head on straight, that's all.”
“Sounds like the last thing you need is more work,” Jenkins said, her mouth in that firm line that said she had made up her mind and you were now going to do whatever she said. “Take a few days off.” She nodded at someone off to her left. “Where do you want to go?”
Lance pretended to think about it. “Wouldn't mind checking out Le Mans. Don't guess I could get tickets this close to the date, though.”
Jenkins raised her eyebrows at the anonymous minion stage left, then turned back to him. “You've got them. Head to the airport, someone will meet you there with your passport, a bag and tickets.”
“You're a gem,” Lance said. “I owe you.”
“Just make sure you come back with your head on straight, and we'll call it even,” Joy said, and Lance heard the command in it before she ended the call.
When Lance opened the door to his apartment and Lovey and the other pigeons didn't flock to his shoulders, he felt like a complete bastard.
So the kid had left; he'd known it might be a possibility, but he'd hoped it wouldn't happen. Lance had texted him from the hotel once he'd arrived so that he wouldn't worry, but hadn't given him any details other than that he'd be away for a few days. Walter was brilliant, though, and he'd probably drawn all kinds of conclusions about Lance's abrupt departure. Some of them might even be right, though all of them had probably ended up irrevocably damaging their relationship.
Truth be told, he'd gone to France to be seen, to blow off steam, and to get laid, but none of those things had happened. He'd gone to remind himself of who he was, only to find out he wasn't that person any longer. He wasn't sure when the change had happened, and he knew he should be more worried about it, but he didn't care. He only cared that he'd hurt Walter, and he had no idea how he was going to fix this.
He dropped his bag in the foyer and headed straight for the liquor cabinet. There was a bottle of sixteen year old Laphroaig in there somewhere; if he was going to get drunk and feel sorry for himself, he might as well do it in style.
“So how was Le Mans?”
“Gah!” Lance whipped around, immediately assuming a fighting stance, to see Walter leaning in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Sorry,” Walter said, lifting a foot and wiggling at Lance, “I'm trying out these new Sneaky Sneaks – they're designed to mask your footfalls so you can creep up on people without them hearing you.” He shrugged. “Guess they work?”
“You're here,” Lance said, unnecessarily.
“You sound surprised,” Walter said, his expression for once giving nothing away.
Lance cleared his throat. “Lovey and the posse didn't mob me when I came in.”
“Oh, that.” Walter stuck his hands in his pockets. “Well, they're a little angry at you for leaving like you did.”
“Hey, I texted,” Lance said, which sounded pathetic even to his own ears. “And I did not text you about Le Mans, so how did you –”
Walter rolled his eyes. “Come on, I could trace anyone on the planet by the time I left elementary school.”
“And you felt you needed to get all up in my business because –”
“Because I was worried about you,” Walter said, with that same disarming honesty he'd displayed from the moment Lance had met him. “I, uh, I know that I came on kind of strong last weekend, and I don't blame you for being scared, I mean we –”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up,” Lance said, waving his hands. “Boy, you did not scare me.”
Walter closed the remaining distance between them, tilted his head up to look at Lance. “I didn't?” he asked. “You crossed an ocean to get away from me.”
“I wasn't trying to get away from you, I just needed a break. I needed to – think about stuff.”
“Stuff,” Walter repeated.
“Yeah, stuff. Look, what is with the third degree here?”
Walter ducked his head. “I'm sorry, I'm not – I guess I'm not all that good at this. I thought you might be thinking about me the same way I was thinking about you – but it's fine, I can see I was wrong. I still love – being your friend. And I hope we can still be friends, because that's more important to me than anything else.”
Lance swallowed around the words that were trying to escape his throat, forced them down. He blew out a breath; he could do this. “Being your friend is pretty damn important to me, too, Walter. I don't want to mess that up. You got your whole life ahead of you, and there are all kinds of people and new experiences waiting for you out there. You'll find someone who's crazy for you before you know it, and –”
Walter cocked his head. “Wow.” He took another step, and the tips of his sneakers bumped against Lance's shoes. “You are really laying it on thick. That's very interesting.”
“What's interesting?”
“I'm starting to think I wasn't wrong after all. You just believe you're too old for me. I wouldn't have thought an international spy would be that tied to social conventions. But it explains a lot.”
“What are you, a shrink as well as an inventor?”
“Classic deflection,” Walter singsonged, his smile like the sun. Lance gasped as Walter ran his hands up Lance's chest until he could lace his fingers behind his neck.
“Walter,” Lance began weakly. He wanted to say it was a hell of a lot more complicated than that, but none of those arguments seemed to matter, not now that the kid had that determined look in his eyes, the same one he'd had right before he went and rearranged Lance's entire damn life. “Walter, this isn't –”
“You're right, it probably isn't,” Walter murmured, right before he climbed Lance like a tree.
Lance had guessed the kid would be a talker, and he wasn't wrong.
“Oh, wow, you are – yeah, please keep doing that, you're amazing, oh wow,” Walter babbled, and Lance obligingly kept doing it. It wasn't exactly a hardship, though the kid was a mouthful and a half; it was always the skinny ones.
When Walter's cock hit the back of Lance's throat, Walter threw his head back and groaned, “Okay, you have to show me how you do that, because that feels incredible and I want to do that to you so badly,” and Lance had to press his hand against his own cock to keep from coming just at the thought of it.
After a final complicated twist of his tongue, Lance pulled back abruptly, earning a sound of disappointment this time. It didn't last long, though, because in the next five seconds Lance took him by the hips and flipped him over in one swift motion, then ran a finger feather-light down over the gorgeous curve of his ass. He looked up to see Walter watching him over his shoulder.
“You good?” Lance asked.
Walter treated him to one of his big, goofy grins, and reached a hand back to grip Lance's with a surprising strength.
“I've never been better,” Walter said, open and honest and sweet as honey, and Lance was helpless to do anything but reach up to get a taste of his smile.
The kid terrified him. But Lance thought maybe, just maybe, he could learn to live with that.