Chapter Text
The cubicle door clattered against Julian as he shoved himself, with all the dignity he could, into the cramped toilet stall. The porcelain of the cistern was cold against his hands as he rested them against it, grounding against the dissociative, mindless slurring of the delegates outside, drunkenly shouting their bafflingly ignorant opinions of that day's speeches to each other over the sinks.
Even outside the facilities, from where Julian had just fled, the ground floor conference room of the Grand Hotel was filled with a similar sludge of noise. It was packed to bursting with the monotonous swathe of unattractive men and women who were bow-tied, tight-dressed and shamble-stepping at an attempt to hold rhythm with the warbling live band. They were grouped in little factions according to height, weight and degrees of hair loss, chuntering and guffawing through tax-payer-funded wine. Between these factions, Julian had seen the sickly-looking journos fluttering like thirsty insects, probing for juicy tidbits to scrawl into their Filofaxes, and the giant-titted waitresses who were, to their credit, letting everyone have a good ogle, so long as they continued adding drinks to their tabs - tabs which, at this point, probably matched the GDP of a developing African nation. The noise, the crowd, the sheer stupidity. Four exhausting days of party conference, its sluggish social obligations with insufferable cretins and monotonous to-ing and fro-ing from session to session, had drained him of the spirit he needed to pretend that he was anything other than bored to the back teeth with the whole bloody affair.
Luckily, he had a solve. From the soft, inner lining of his dinner jacket, he pulled a tiny plastic bag with a pound-coin sized ball of flaky, white substance. He removed a small chunk of the coke and set it on the cistern, then used his credit card to dice it into two appetisingly thick lines. After rolling up a fiver (Wellington in the middle of the tube; wouldn’t do to do such disgraceful things to Her Maj), Julian snorted with faultless proficiency. He rubbed his nostrils with his fingers, then his face with his hands, methodically removing any evidence as he packed everything away.
As a pompous, raucous laugh from outside rumbled the door of the cubicle, Julian felt the familiar chill in the back of his throat, slight sweating on his forehead, the wriggling of emerging butterflies in his stomach and couldn’t suppress his grin and the impulse to gleefully clap his hands together. Finally, back on the train. Suddenly, the prospect of rubbing shoulders with fellow attendees felt utterly enchanting. There was so much to share, to be shared.
Julian wrenched open the cubicle door with a wide grin. He realised quickly that he had forgotten to flush (and, therefore, broadcast exactly what he had been doing to everyone outside) but he wasn't worried. There was no need to worry about anything at all. Everything was just fantastic.
"Ah, hallo all!" Julian crowed, offering his best number one smile to the nearest, bemused looking man. "Julian Fawcett, foreign office - somehow still a special adviser, open to a change - absolute pleasure to meet you. Don't worry, not a bender, just a fellow appreciado of old Willie Whitelaw, couldn't help overhearing your conversation there - have you seen him lately? Never known a man look more like an egg!" Julian's laugh was infectious, pulling at the edges of the stuffy, half-cut men, who couldn’t help but return intoxicated smiles back. "What are we all doing, then? Loop me in, chums. What's the rumour? What's the gossip? Hugo!" Julian greeted with a wave as his foreign-office desk mate and fellow SpAd entered the toilets. "Hugo - meet my new friends!"
Hugo rolled his eyes in irritation, which Julian thought was awfully funny. He had a lot of time for Hugo, despite him having a family name which meant nothing to anyone and - most shockingly - being from the north. Unlike most of the men at conference who had shoved their ballooning weight into dresswear meant for men three sizes slimmer, Hugo had gone against type, wearing a tailored, grey herringbone suit. Julian had felt jealous earlier (clad himself adhering strictly to the black tie dress code - traditional black dinner jacket and formal white shirt, the white-tie waistcoat being the only element which could be considered even vaguely daring), but now Julian could only feel thrilled for Hugo's bravery.
Julian grabbed the smaller man around the shoulder and squeezed, unable to keep the manic number fourteen grin from clawing its way onto his face. Hugo let him grip, which Julian thought was very pleasant of him, especially as Hugo wasn't usually one for physical contact. Julian wasn't at all upset when he realised Hugo was using the position to grab the coke from Julian's jacket and slip it into his own.
"Much obliged," Hugo said out of the side of his mouth. "Any chance of checking on the minister whilst I’m otherwise engaged?"
"Naturally!" Julian patted his shoulder, reassuringly. "Happy to, happy to. Is he - ah?"
"Absolutely fucking bladdered?" Hugo hissed, straightening his jacket with a quick tug. Hugo waved away the others in the toilet, crowding Julian closer to the stall door in confidence. Julian's throat constricted, his body flooding with warmth as it unwittingly reacted to the sensory delights of Hugo's peppery aftershave, the appealing cut of his suit, his end-of-day stubble. But he didn't make a move. Sure, he was Coked up with a capital C, but he had enough of his wits about him to remember that this wasn't one of those types of parties, and Hugo wasn't that type of man. Julian firmly rebuffed his instincts to do anything naughty. "Yes -" Hugo continued, in naivety to the situation. "And wifey's off to bed, thank fuck. Although, that's gonna raise it's own issues soon."
Julian questioningly proffered the universal sign of 'hard on'. Hugo grimaced.
"Yeah, most likely. Strewth, Jules - you know, when I got this job, I stupidly believed I'd be used to contribute to solving the tricky issue of the pending expiration of the lease of the New Territories, rather than running around fetching drinks for oversexed ministers?"
"Mmm, yes, glorious, isn't it?" Julian said, not really listening, already mentally outside with the populous, hunting a bit of willing skirt. "Truly makes you feel like you're contributing to the betterment of society."
*
There was something to be said for eliminating the awkward post-shag conversation by violently dropping one's self through the bed and the floor, Julian thought loosely, as he stared upwards at the Captain.
The Captain's head and upper part of his shoulders were poking through the ceiling, both of his hands gripping Julian's left wrist as Julian hung, suspended in the room below like a novelty chandelier. Under normal circumstances, Julian would have taken the opportunity to launch into a comparison of how similar ergonomics were required for a Turkish Tallow Twister, but at that moment 'Julian' and 'normal circumstances' were not even in the same constituency. Julian couldn’t stop shaking. His jaw had clenched itself shut was refusing to open. He had gone deaf to anything but a shrill, piercing buzz which was perforating both of his eardrums. His senses felt like a garbled television signal; he was completely unable to discern where any of his limbs were, other than the one arm he could see clasped so tightly between the Captain's hands.
The Captain's face was screwed up with the burden to trying to hold Julian's weight. In some distant, dissociated recess of Julian's mind, there was a thought of putting in some effort to help the poor man. But the thought couldn't latch: it just rolled around like a loose marble, no urgency or alarm.
The shrill buzz began to ebb, making 'wub-wub' noises as it receded and, underneath it, Julian was beginning to discern a distant sound. Someone... yelling? Shouting? No - ordering -
"Fawcett!"
The rush of Julian’s consciousness leapt - panicked and disorientated - to the front of his mind. Immediately, Julian flailed his other arm upwards, weightlessly pulling himself back into the room above with the latent ease afforded by ghostly design.
The Captain released as Julian burst into the room proper, then he doubled over, holding himself up with his hands on his knees, wheezing.
"What - what the -"
Julian wasn't able to answer the Captain, too preoccupied with the sensation of his mind unfrying itself, standing dazed and idiotically apoplectic. If he wasn't already dead, he would have thought he were in the process of dying. He didn't know for sure but very much assumed that the fact he was dead was the reason all this was happening. Being dead seemed to stick one in a sort of liminal space, where any progress was endlessly reverted and one's body and mind would inexorably return to the feelings present at the point of being kicked off one's mortal coil. Sometimes, quite violently. To this end, Julian had to fight the nausea of his body being wrenched back into the same state he had been at the moment of his death: impassioned, libidinous and more than slightly high.
"Bloody hell," Julian clicked his jaw as it relaxed, allowing him the freedom to move it again. "May I say it is an absolute travesty that not one of the members of this household had the wherewithal to grab a pack of Valium on their way out?"
The Captain glared at him, still bent over: "Mind letting me in on the joke?"
"Joke?" Julian asked. The Captain gestured violently at the floorboards. "Oh, that," Julian waved a hand, dismissively. "It wasn't a deliberate act. It just sort of... happens."
The Captain stared, disbelievingly. "Just happens."
"Yes. Just happens." As a general rule, Julian didn’t feel embarrassment, but he knew if he was the sort of chap to feel it, now would have been the time. "Well, specifically when I, you know." Julian made the universal signal for rubbing one out, but it apparently wasn't as timeless as he had thought: the Captain's expression remained clueless and angry. "...spaff."
It took a second for the meaning to be translated through forty years of slang, at which time the Captain's face screwed up in disgust.
Julian fought back his giggles. "You know, I do find that reaction very amusing. Mere minutes earlier, we were both engaged in some lasciviously indecent acts, yet mere terminology has you blushing like a nun. And certainly not the nuns to which I was well acquainted back in '89 -"
"Fawcett," the Captain barked, then pinched his fingers together. "I shall insist on radio silence whilst I thoroughly assess the situation."
The Captain strode across the room and sat heavily - or as heavily as a ghost could - on the side of the bed.
To say Julian was frustrated at the turn of events was to say that the Masstricht Treaty was a 'bit of a power grab'. This situation was entirely rotten. What had been the point of it all? Finally, after almost thirty years of sexual standoff between them, Julian had managed - somehow - to get his hands in the Captain's trousers, and now there wasn't any evidence to say any trousers had been got into at all. Julian found himself pining for the portions of pale, toned muscle that he had been gripping earlier, the feeling of warmth and sweat and - above all - human contact. Even the Captain's hair had sprung back into its regular brylcreem-rooted correctness, no evidence of being shaken out of place by Julian's greedy fingers. It was just such a shame, such an absolutely disgraceful u-turn. And that was coming from Julian, who knew all about u-turns and, admittedly, quite a bit about disgrace as well.
After a whole five seconds of frustrating silence, the Captain staring off into the distance, Julian's patience was exhausted.
"Fine!" Julian threw up his hands. "You get your way. If you want to ruin the only gratifying experience of our afterlives with girly introspection like some sort of... well. Girl. Then, I'll just leave you to it."
The Captain turned to look at him. His expression reminded Julian of his old house-master - a man who was always overly suspicious that some sort of horseplay was being executed at his expense, and was only occasionally right.
"If you could just... explain what just occurred in sufficient depth for me to understand."
Julian gave the Captain a number three smile, which in this context he knew would come off unquestionably patronising.
"I. Fell. Through. Floor. Happy now? Simple enough that even Robin would get it."
"Fell..." the Captain’s tone was unfitting the situation and startled Julian into an uncharacteristic silence. He didn't sound amused, nor angered. He sounded shaken. "No. You didn't - you weren't falling, man. You were - something - something was… pulling you down."
*
Although Julian had intended to follow through with his scandal-guarding obligation to the minister, he had admittedly forgotten it the moment his eye snagged on a blonde showing an indecent amount of leg.
The world accelerated into a sequence of concise, colourful scenes, the mundane in-between bits snipped and left on the cutting room floor. One moment, Julian was returning a charming little giggle with his own amorous wink, the next they were sharing a cold bottle of Dom Perigon, and the next they were dancing, the air close and heavy between them, Julian dripping honey in her ear of all the benefits of getting utterly and unreservedly obscene together.
He had his hand halfway up her skirt when Hugo appeared at his side to pull it back out again. As Hugo dragged him off, Julian gave the nameless woman a grimace of sincere apology, hoping it would keep her ticking over until he got back.
"I was in there!" Julian yelled over the deafening music.
"As I could see!" Hugo yelled back, pulling Julian through the horde of bodies and towards the huge doors of the conference room. "You do know that her father is fortieth in line to the throne?"
"Oh, who isn't in line to the throne? Hardly something to shout about."
The noise dropped promptly when the padded doors slammed shut behind them, leaving behind only a buzzing in Julian's ears. The lobby was relatively deserted, the concierge desk abandoned, although a few stragglers who already looked worse for wear had piled themselves on upholstered chairs, holding their heads in their hands and fighting the urge to blow chunks over the cherubs staring up from the polished marble floor.
Hugo led them through the lobby and to the front doors to the hotel, where the minister, the right honourable Member for Country Borough, was double-fisting fifty year old scotch. When the minister noticed their approach, his giant grey eyebrows flew up in elation.
"Ah, the troops have gathered! Come on, or they'll be closed." The minister discarded his glass tumblers on the ground with a smash and then wiped his mouth with his suit sleeve.
"Sir, don't you think going out is a bad idea?" Hugo asked.
Julian frowned at Hugo. Not at the words - even Julian had to concur that allowing a notoriously letchy, entirely trollied minister-of-the-crown to step out along the dark seafront of Brighton was a recipe for disaster - but for the way that Hugo had posited his inquiry. He wasn't using his hands at all - neither holding the ball nor carrying the box. The words he used were utterly wrong as well - 'don't you think...' instead of 'do you not believe that...' - and entirely missed the opportunity to trap him in a tricky double negative. Hugo's communication skills were so abysmal that Julian wasn't surprised at all when the minister waved away Hugo's question with a sloppily controlled hand and a dismissive psft.
"Where exactly do you want to go, minister?" Julian asked as he led them out and into the brisk October chill of salt-strewn night air.
There was just enough darkness to summon up some stars, but not many. The combination of orange street lights and the illuminations from the piers were doing a bang up job of blurring the sky into a dark, fuzzy orange. Ahead of them, the sea was lashing in irritation at the coastline, a distant roar that settled into the background of the carrying laughter and music from the establishments in the town centre. The change in atmos was good - great, even - and Julian felt a familiar pull deep in his stomach that something utterly exciting was going to happen, a certain knowledge that it was so right to launch into the thrilling unknown.
"Where's good around here?" the minister slurred, hungrily.
Hugo, who had wrapped his arms around himself and was gritting his teeth against the cold, tightened his jaw.
"I don't know minister; I'm from Crewe."
"Hmm - Fawcett?"
"If God wanted us to leave London, he wouldn't have built the M25."
Julian took a few steps forward in line with Hugo before they both realised that the minster had stopped. When Julian turned around, he could see the minister's eyes - which had been hazy with the fog of overindulgence - had clarified to sober in just a breath. His half-cut behaviour had vanished. Julian realised, with no little stunned awe, that all the drunkenness the minister had been displaying had been a carefully constructed facade. Julian was torn between the urge to applaud the performance or to beg for specifics of the trick.
"Boys, let me be exceedingly straightforward with you. So exceedingly straightforward that even your syrupy minds won't have difficulty latching on.” The minister’s voice was clear enough to carry through the Commons. “It is a sad state of affairs that even today, one of the hallowed days of conference, you are both insistent on concealment to such a degree to a fellow party man. Do you know why I took you on this jolly? Not Perkins or Arbuthnot or Hunter, although they would bite each of your arms off to get this kind of tête-à-tête with me?"
"Because Perky is a fucking sycophant," Hugo muttered, disparagingly.
"And Hunto is a poof," Julian added, laughing. He didn't know whether it was true or not, but he wasn’t one to miss the opportunity to further salacious rumours against a colleague.
"No, it's because I don't need them. They have nothing they can give me. Whereas you -" the minister waved at Hugo "- have a jacket lining which puts the pharmaceutical industry to shame and you -" the minister turned to Julian "- could count on one hand the establishments in southern England you have not been thrown out of for lewd and indecent behaviour."
Julian opened his mouth to emphatically protest the (absolutely factual) accusation, and saw Hugo out of the corner of his eye prepare to do the same. But the minister had his hand up for quiet.
"Cut it. The reason I have full confidence in you both is because I know all about your improprieties. I know exactly where your skeletons are, in what closets, and what they have jammed up their arses. So, I could stand here, freezing my brass balls off as you refute the gossip that hangs to each of you like a stinking miasma, and maybe in the end I'll let you think that I've reconsidered and categorise you as just another pair of nauseating young Conservatives. Or -" the minister smirked a little "- you summon just a little of that Oxbridge PPE intelligence your parents paid for and recognise the benefits of trade."
Julian wiped the un-numbered, unintended expression which had crept onto his jaw with one hand, resetting his face into something far more neutral. He suppressed an instinctive jump of alarm when Hugo moved, but it was only to stick his hand deep into his inner jacket lining and rifle through the contents.
"Alright -” Hugo began, digging out a handful of plastic bags, filled with pills and powder. “Does the minister wish to go up or go down or watch the sky explode?"
Hugo caught Julian's eye and nodded at him, encouragingly.
Julian put on his best suits-you-sir number six: all docile servitude, just shy of curtsying. "And does the minister have a preference of young lady or is he dining à la carte tonight?"
*
The idea was utter rubbish, of course. Complete bollocks. Absolute… well, it just wasn’t true in any respect. It was such a falsehood that it didn’t bear any response other than the one Julian gave it: walking straight out of the room, refusing to say anything, certainly not acknowledging the way the Captain shouted at his back.
Honestly. Pulling him down. How stupid was that? It was clearly just the Captain trying to compensate for being too weak to hold him up. Dodgy knees, fatigued muscles, the only constitution one could expect from a diet of… whatever it was the rank and file got from ration books. The Captain was just unable to lift him and, so, to feel better he made up some lunacy about something…
Pulling him down.
Julian forced himself to stop scratching quite so incessantly at the inside of his left elbow as he dipped through a wall and into his room.
And there wasn’t anything at all weird about one dropping through floors at times of great excitation. Wasn’t it just a bit of ghostly passing out? Sure, now Julian actually came to think about it, none of the others had mentioned anything similar, and after so many years of collective boredom they had recited every second of their miserable lives and deaths in great detail to him at least twice over, so it wasn’t like they wouldn’t have told him, but maybe they just… hadn’t got around to mentioning it yet?
Julian fell backwards onto his bed. He lay, supine, staring unfocused at the cracks in his ceiling.
Maybe none of them had ever tried tossing themselves off in the afterlife, so they just didn’t know it happened? That was believable, right? Particularly the women. Even in life, they probably either didn’t know what their lower halves were for - let alone that one could operate them independently - or viewed it as some kind of mortal sin to go delving in their lady gardens. Yet, Julian found that reasoning only worked if he excluded the men. He couldn’t believe there was a man who would let a small thing like death keep them from the great British tradition of having a wank.
”Shit,” Julian muttered, to no one. “Shit, fuck, shitting fuck.”
He just had to focus on something else. Anything else. Unfortunately, his usual thoughts were exactly what he was trying not to think about. Surely it was possible with his brilliant mind to keep everything above board for long enough to get over whatever this was?
He grabbed the collar of his shirt, wrestled the top button open, tugged his tie loose, screwed his eyes closed and tried to not think about fucking.
On the first attempt, he managed five seconds. The second, only three. He threw his hands out and against the bed in exasperation. It just wasn’t possible. His first sexual experience in decades and he wasn’t allowed to even think about it. And it cried out so desperately for a detailed, thorough evaluation. Eventually, he settled on a compromise. He would just think about parts of it.
Specifically, those parts of it which didn’t imply that, should he try it again, he was at risk of being dragged straight to hell.