Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Circus really is hellishly dusty, against the best efforts of the small army of janitors - actual janitors, that is - employed; thick layers of soot and ash and god knows what cake the files and shelves and desks. The ceilings are stained yellow with cigarette smoke, and the paint is always flaking off, ending up in teacups and typewriters and everyone’s hair, which is what happens when everyone in the building smokes like a factory smokestack and the janitors are ridiculously underpaid, and nobody save nobody wants to call in outside contractors to repaint.

This is what Peter is thinking as Bill brushes a hand through his hair, peering vaguely over his glasses and leaning in far too closely; he pulls back, a chip of paint held triumphantly between his first and second fingers, and smiles, dark eyes laughing. “Got it,” he says, and Peter can feel the rumble of his voice in the tips of his fingers. “They’d better do this place up before it comes down around our ears.”

For all the nature of work that happens in the Circus offices, they are offices like any other, where gossip drifts down from the fifth floor to the mothers, who spin it to their liking and pass it on the the office girls, and then it’s open game; Peter has come in hungover - once , damn it all - and had scalphunters bring it up months later. Hangovers aren’t such big game, however, when there’s far more interesting news to be bandied about; sex, always sex, is the most sought-after gossip.

It’s unavoidable, really; not everyone is as tidy about their personal lives as Peter, and indiscretions are far too tempting when one is on familiar soil, even more so when one isn’t alone, and especially when it seems as if everyone else is a hair’s breadth away from announcing it to the entire Circus. Peter has turned around enough times to catch Roy Bland disappearing behind a file or a newspaper, and even Sal knows about that particular appetite of his - “Roy’s practically panting after you,” she’d said one lazy afternoon in Registry, perhaps hoping that Peter would take the bait, choose to demonstrate his heterosexuality or illusion thereof with her, but he had simply said, “Oh really,” watched her smile fade, and walked away to take refuge among the shelves.

Roy isn’t bad-looking, for top-floor, Peter catches himself thinking occasionally; perhaps it’s the way he holds himself, the way he smokes, determined, resolute. There’s something hungry in his eyes, though, desperate and burning, and that’s why Peter never acts upon those whims; Roy would be far too voracious to be cautious, and the one thing Peter cannot afford is clumsiness. Roy has office romances, office fucks, and an empty house which he returns to at the end of the day; Peter has a veneer of professionalism and Richard waiting for him in the evenings, and that’s not a life he’s willing to risk. The irony there doesn’t escape him - he’s been shot at in half of eastern Europe and is still wanted in a third of those countries, true, but you can’t bribe or buy your way to domesticity.

They say that Haydon swings both ways, and that Prideaux swung Haydon-ward, but Jim Prideaux is dead in Budapest of a bullet in the back, which probably isn’t catching, and most likely isn’t an affliction caused by Bill Haydon anyway. Peter knows for a fact that Haydon doesn’t only swing both ways, but every which way; practically the whole Circus knows that, though. Bill Haydon, playboy extraordinaire, and his loyal dog Jim. That's probably how they thought of Peter Guillam and Smiley, though, one name inevitably following the other. Now Guillam's name barely comes up at all. C'est la vie.

Peter is meticulous enough to think twice before he kisses Bill Haydon, even hidden in the broom cupboard of his office; the blind is down on his window, the door is locked, the walls covered with sound-absorbing padding, but he still hesitates, running through reservations in the back of his mind, with Bill's face inches from his own, dark eyes dropped to his lips. He thinks about Richard, in class now, who will never know what Peter does for a living; he thinks of Smiley, wasting away in early retirement in a grey malaise; he thinks of Jim Prideaux, whose last hurrah was an explosion across the ticker tape and switchboards. He considers the entry points of his office, runs through them twice in his head, and it only takes him a moment to think all of this before he leans forward, closing the last few inches and pressing his lips to Bill's.

The kiss starts out soft and turns absolutely filthy very quickly; Bill isn't afraid to take what he wants, and Peter is equally willing to give. Bill has new sharp edges that he hadn't had - or at least hadn't shown - while Jim was alive; he bites Peter's lip hard enough to draw blood, and pushes Peter down over the desk, scattering papers, holding him down by the back of his neck, before slipping a hand down his trousers, and stroking him hard and fast until he's almost sobbing and infinitely grateful for the soundproofing.

Blood gets smeared on the desk and some of the memos as Bill holds Peter's hair, fucks him with two spit-slick fingers and pulls his head back, and Peter watches the smear dry to brown, gasping for breath, before Bill finally, finally lines up his hips and pushes in, rough and barely comfortable. He waits a long moment before he moves, and then he fucks Peter into incoherency. Every time he pushes in Peter's hips hit the desk, and Peter knows it'll bruise; he wraps a hand around Peter's throat and Peter sobs and comes, eyes stinging, and Bill slams him against the desk once, twice, and comes, heart hammering against Peter's back even through four layers of cloth.

Bill sucks a sloppy mark into Peter's throat afterwards and leaves without a word, and Peter cleans himself up with a handkerchief and buttons himself up and burns the bloodied memos in his ashtray.  He carefully avoids letting Richard see the bruises, because some things stay in the Circus, and being Bill Haydon's office fuck is certainly one of them.



The Circus is layers, of lies, of course, but also of personnel, of dust, and Peter dresses to match, folding pearl grey over white and blue, donning his armor like a knight before the tournament. Richard always watches him in the mornings; it's their ritual, dressing Peter, hiding him away for the day.

Morning in the Circus is always terribly dull, unless of course some country has toppled its government overnight, which happens on a small scale much more often than one would think.  Jackie from Registry brings Peter up a cup of battery-acid coffee and stands there for an extra minute while he sips it, grimaces, and sets it aside; this wouldn't be remarkable if she hadn't done it for the last three days. Peter looks up from his paperwork to find her staring at him, and smiles in what he hopes comes across as friendly as opposed to apprehensive.

"Are you doing anything this evening?" she says, carefully casual. "Some of us were going to go for drinks, and we were wondering -"

"If he'd be done with his paperwork?" a voice says from behind her, and then Bill rings the fucking bell of his fucking bicycle and Jackie tips the fucking coffee all over Peter's desk.  “Fuck!” Peter says, shoving all his papers out of the way of the stream of scalding liquid; half of them end up on the floor, and he jumps back just as the coffee begins to drip onto his chair.  “Fucking shit -” and he goes to his knees, gathering papers back into their files and praying to God that Jackie doesn’t put her heel through anything important.

“Oh, no, I’m so sorry,” Jackie says, and stumbles around like a drunken stork for a moment or two, trying to avoid both Peter’s hands and the papers and failing completely at both, “oh, no,” and Peter curses and holds his hand to his chest, wondering why anyone needs heels that are deadly weapons to begin with.

“Jackie darling,” Haydon says, and rings the damn bell again, “don’t you think you’ve done enough damage to be getting on with?”  He sounds just a bit too smug; Jackie turns red and stammers one last apology and flees.

“She’s lovely really,” Peter says, from where he’s still trying to scoop up papers one-handed and in what he may be over-dramatizing as agony, “you didn’t have to do that, she’s probably going to get the mothers to come after me and I’ll be trampled to death in a cloud of dust and filing.”

“She’s a harpy in lamb’s clothing,” Bill says, “with iron hooves, by the looks of it,” and he leans the bicycle against the door frame and crouches down by Peter, leaning close but not touching him.  They stay like that for a minute while Peter scrabbles the last of the papers back into manila and arranges them in something resembling a pile.

“All the treasure hoarded away?” Bill enquires, and Peter nods, because this is Bill , it wouldn’t matter even if he handed Bill the crown jewels; the worst Bill could do would be to give them to a pretty girl he saw on the street, and he’d still get them back somehow.  “Then let me see that hand,” Bill says, and takes Peter’s wrist, holds it up for inspection, and Peter freezes, his heart loud in his ears.

Peter tries to think of what to do, how to keep people from looking, because his door is still open, Bill’s bicycle still blocking half of the hallway, and while he panics, Bill looks up from Peter’s hand.  “Nothing broken,” he says, “but you’ll have a nasty bruise and a finger like a sausage.”  He pulls Peter forward, and Peter nearly falls, nearly says something, but then he presses a brief, open-mouthed kiss to Peter’s finger, trailing his lips up the line of the bones to the back of his hand.  “All better?” he says, and immediately ruins it by giving Peter a filthy, filthy smile.  “You look lovely on your knees.”

Peter feels his cheeks begin to burn.

Of course, it doesn’t stop him from hunting Bill down to his office later.  Peter jams a chair under the door and proceeds to completely ruin the knees of his trousers on Bill’s floor; he strokes Bill hard and then swallows him, flutters his tongue against the underside of Bill’s cock. It turns out that Bill is much less of a smug bastard when he’s moaning blasphemy and scrabbling at Peter’s shoulders; he tangles his fingers in Peter's hair and pulls. When Bill comes he gasps something in a language Peter doesn't understand and doesn't wish to; he sinks to the floor, boneless, and watches Peter wipe his mouth, eyes soft and dark. Bill brushes his fingers against Peter's swollen red lips and smiles, more gentle this time, then rubs his hand along the line of Peter's cock through his trousers, slips it beneath his waistband, clever fingers stroking hard. It's almost too much, and when Peter comes Bill licks it off his fingers, and his smile this time is a promise for next time.

Peter cleans up afterwards; he always does, washing his hands in the men's room two floors down, straightening his clothes to a more normal level of workplace disarray, trying to do something to make his hair less wild. Bill goes to sleep in his office, as Peter notes when he walks by afterwards; that's very much what Bill Haydon does - give and take and let somebody else clean up afterwards, and that's what Peter Guillam does - put the papers in order, set himself back to normal, go back to work.

He would call it the perfect partnership, but it feels too much like a jab at Bill and the famous - even now - Prideaux-Haydon partnership; it's far too much to call getting each other off at work. It isn't the seamless way Jim and Bill finished each other's sentences or picked up for each other in the field.

Whatever it is, Peter will take it.



A phone call goes through.  Bill Haydon laughs on one end of the line.  Toby Esterhase remains silent on the other, dutifully listening to an account of an anonymous office romance.  “And I said -” says Bill “-you may fuck me but you still have to call me sir in the morning.”

Jackie, who persists in her mission as angel of mercy, brings this tidbit to Peter along with his coffee, now permanently lukewarm in some kind of inverted penance that tips all the suffering onto Peter, who thanks her brusquely and waves her out before sitting there, fuming, for several minutes.

He didn’t want to be called sir in the morning , Peter thinks, he wanted to be called sir with me bent over his desk .   And I wasn’t fucking him, per se, he thinks, unbidden, even his subconcious ever precise.

He rests his head in his hands for a few moments - office romances, office gossip, but the type that could destroy his job.

No, it’s all right.  He trusts Bill.

The telephone on his desk rings, and Peter takes a deep breath to steady himself and picks up.

“Mr Guillam,” a voice says, rendered dusty, cracked, by static.  “Mr Guillam, it’s Ricki, you remember me, right?”



“I need you to do something for me, Peter,” George Smiley says, and Peter’s world cascades down, a slow tumble of files and paperwork, scattered to the winds.



It ends in silence, not fire or ice, though there is enough desire and hatred to destroy worlds; it ends in a badly-lit room by the canal, the Cultural Attaché brushing past Peter, and Haydon in the shadows.

It ends in a cottage, with a body face down on damp leaf mould, no longer Haydon; it ends with a bullet, it ends with a bloody tear, it ends with the falling leaves that half-bury the corpse.

It ends with paint chips in Peter’s hair and a different hand brushing them loose; it ends with Jackie subdued and George on the fifth floor and lukewarm coffee.

It ends in a dust-coated file, put in the safe, dial clicked shut, to sleep in the dark.