The Innocent (A 'Finder' Fanfiction)

Shadow of Pluto - 4 - Fei Long

There was a hand that held on to his upper arm. He realized it was there even before he was all awake, and long before the dream – whatever it had been – had completely dispelled. In fact, he was not yet sure that he was not actually partly sleeping still. The hand, the fingers placed there, he felt, nonetheless. And the more reality pushed in and shoved sleep and dream aside, the more aware he became of the weight and the warmth.

He turned his head just a tiny bit to look to his side.

For whatever reason, he mostly woke up lying on his back. And the man next to him seemed to tend to sleep on his side. That made it also so much easier for him to reach out and grab a hold on anything near ... like somebody else resting in the same hotel bed as himself.

Fei Long drew in the first, conscious breath of the morning. Early light pushed in through the windows, which's curtains had not been drawn close. To care about things like that never crossed their minds, when they came here. They met to fuck. Nothing more.

At least not in Fei Long's book.

For the other ... a different story, probably. He was not sure ...

The man was 'walking talking flirtation'. But if he was like that always whenever he met anyone he liked ... or if he knew some restraint ... or if he even liked only a few people, Fei Long could not tell.

Sleeping now, next to him, with his stupid, impudent mouth shut for once, his long lashes resting, his golden curls spilling onto the cushion, he was very handsome.

There was something about him, indeed ... about Mikhail Arbatov. Every pretty girl in the world would be on him, whenever he just winked at her. And the man knew this. His ego was enormous. His belief in his own sex-appeal cosmic.

He was nice to touch, nice to be touched by, nice to look at and nice to fuck.

There needn't be anything else, Fei Long was sure. Never had he required anything more, anyway. It could go on like this or just stop, and he would not mind either ...

The short beeping of his mobile phone snatched him from his thoughts. When he switched the device to 'private' only calls and messages diverted from one special telephone number could get through to him – and the number of people who might know that combination he could count with two hands.

He sat up, looking around for wherever he might have left the phone in the evening, shaking off that warm hand when he did so. It wandered over the sheets for a moment, searching and not finding, then the Russian stirred and sighed while waking up.

Fei Long didn't have much attention for that. He stepped out of the bed, took his phone from the pocket of his suit's jacket – which still hung on the backrest of some chair – and then climbed back between the warm and soft linens, away from the soft chill of the air conditioning. It was June and had been pretty humid and warm for days, therefore the suite's unit was even at night fighting the heat - and of course also because the room's inhabitants had done their utmost to get the room's temperature up only hours ago.

Once he unlocked the screen with an 8-digit-pin, there was a short message showing giving an address abroad, nothing else. That message came from a number not saved in his address book. He had been about to delete the text, when a second transmission arrived, a voice message this time.

Turning the volume pretty low, he listened to it. It was not even 20 seconds long, then it stopped.

In puzzlement, he removed the phone from his ear and stared at it, waiting if there was something more to come. Anything, perhaps, that might explain what was going on. But there wasn't.

He startled, when warm fingers caressed the back of one of his naked arms.

"Good morning", Mikhail whispered. He only blinked a few times, when Fei Long looked over at him, then he closed his eyes again. It seemed like he was about to drift back to sleep right away. His hand slowly sank onto the mattress.

It was best to just let him sleep, Fei Long thought. There needn't be any apologies for him leaving, nor any explanations or excuses. This was about sex and nothing more. When they were finished, sometimes Fei Long stayed, sometimes he didn't. Baishe HQ was only a few hundred meters away, luckily. He could just walk home at any time ... if he felt able to walk, of course. But sometimes he did not even want to – because it was chilly outside, or dark, or raining, or ...

Still, he should get out of the bedding now, put on his clothes, go home, while the morning was still fresh and the city not as busy as it would get at rush hour. But for some strange reason he could not find himself moving. He just sat there, warmed and covered by the duvet on which the pale, first sunlight shimmered. The only noise audible in the suite was the quiet humming of the air conditioning and the soft breathing of the blonde man next to him. Of the city far below, nothing could be heard.

"Can you drive on the right side of the road?", he suddenly asked into the near silence.

Mikhail jolted from sleep. Snapping to attention, he lifted his head from the pillow and stared at the other man on the bed. It took him a moment to realize that there was no threat looming nearby.

"Eh ... what?", he asked with a perplexed smile.

"Can you drive a car on the right side of the road?", Fei Long asked again. He was looking down at the man who lay just at an arm-length away.

"Uhm ... yes, of course."

"Are you free to go to Croatia tomorrow?"

Now Mikhail propped himself up on one elbow. He blinked again several times, as if it helped him comprehend the question. Then he tugged his eyebrows together, gazing at the Chinese.

"Is this going to be some vacation for the two of us?", he asked, putting on a stupid smile and forcing some childish hopefulness into his voice, yet Fei Long knew him good enough to know that both were fake. Even if they had only met to sleep with each other, Mikhail was clever enough to realize when something was amiss, and Fei Long knew that he was no master at disguising from others if he was worried. And right now, he was. Very.

"No", he answered, then he turned the volume of his phone up and let the voice message play again.

It was Asami's low baritone that filled the room, and his few words let the smile on the Russian's face disappear.

There was not much of an explanation. The message was short and concise and without any embellishment. From what was said, Fei Long could just have deleted it right away. It sounded a lot like it was an instruction or even a command, instead of a request.

What had made his heart feel heavy and his skin feel cold even between the warm bedding was the voice with which all of that was said.

He had heard it before — once addressing a bleeding Akihito about eleven months ago on the deck of a Casino Ship. And even before that, many years in the past, right before a bullet had nearly ripped his life from his chest.