Work Text:
It was before anyone thought the conflict would end in incinerated buildings and the familiar wail of air raid sirens had yet to become familiar. The statues Winckelmann had been so enamoured of and with so little subtlety were out on display, darkened by a patina of age and decaying pigments, and the installation of the latest fragment wasn’t due to take place for another day. The main reason for this was that one Dr Jones had left it – or claimed to have left it – in his hotel just across in Russell Square, and that he had by some terrible stroke of bad luck lost his key.
“I’m sure if you enquire at the reception someone will remember you,” he was advised, but Dr Jones made a certain amount of self-effacing gestures which, the staff gathered, meant that he rather didn’t want to be remembered there.
Everyone had heard stories about the adventurous and unwise adventures of Dr Henry Jones Jr. Some of them even believed one or two, although it was generally concluded that he had probably not punched as many Nazis as everyone kept saying. No one was quite willing to let him into their house overnight.
“I suppose the museum could put you up at another hotel –“ Forsdyke said, when the matter was put to him. He was in no mood to discuss at any great length. “But I’m afraid this will result in your paying for one or the other of the rooms. We cannot very well pay for two.”
“I can stay here,” Dr Jones offered. “I’ve slept in worse places.”
Forsdyke, a little testily, agreed. There was no need, his eyebrows said, for Dr Jones to launch into a tiresome anecdote about his adventures in the field. It was past five in the evening, and that Pryce fellow had been hanging around making a nuisance of himself again.
Indy begged a bedroll from one of the more intrepid art handlers, ate his dinner at the museum tavern, and re-entered the building just as the last of them were leaving. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to produce his own bedroll and admit in that moment that he was no kind of locked out and just wanted unfettered access to someone else’s museum without anyone – like that Pryce creep – looking over his shoulder the whole time.
It wasn’t like he was going to steal anything. You took finds to museums to die: they came out of the ground alive, ready to be kidnapped and carried to ground. Sooner or later, Indy acknowledged, he was either going to have to write another paper on one of his damn finds, or he was going to have to bribe one of the grad students to do it.
In the meantime, he wandered the empty museum with a flashlight, which was to true exploration as masturbation was to sex: no more invigorated for flights of fantasy, either.
He settled on the bed roll at last, extinguished his flashlight, and broke immediately into the kind of light, versatile sleep that had seen him doze on camelback, in crevices, and on hanging bends half-way up the side of mountains – but completely failed to see him through a full night on a bed with a mattress in a busy hotel.
It was by Indy’s wrist-watch around two in the morning when he was woken by the scuff of a shoe near his head. He sat up and flicked on his flashlight, and tried to point a pistol he didn’t actually have at an intruder swathed in shadows and already chuckling.
“Good to see ya again, Junior,” said a voice rubbed rougher by years but no less familiar for it.
Indy shone the flashlight directly into the man’s eyes, and was rewarded for his pettiness by a squint and a snort. The fifteen or so years that separated them seemed a much smaller gap now, or else there was only so much ageing the world could bring to bear on a man of adventure.
“Yeah you’ll excuse me if I don’t return the sentiment,” said Indy, drawing on the dryness of his short-term host for twenty-odd years of thwarted teenage anger. He jiggled the flashlight beam.
“You sleep like a baby,” said Garth, holding up the missing pistol not like a gun but like a dead rat. The intention was clear: he wasn’t going to shoot him, but he didn’t want to be shot at, either. As if Indy would have risked the shattering of something ancient and priceless on an old, mild grudge.
“Taking things that don’t belong to you again.”
“Borrowing. I can tell you this doesn’t belong in a museum, and neither do you.” Garth held his hand over the beam of light, and peered at Indy over the top of his fingers. “And you kept my hat.”
Indy didn’t make the mistake of looking to, or even reaching for, his hat. He kept his gaze on Garth. “I don’t take irreplaceable things from their owners like a common criminal.” This had been subject to some debate of late – the Greeks didn’t agree – but he was confident the man knew what he was talking about; he got rolled eyes for his trouble.
“Sentimental, Junior.” Garth showed his teeth in a surprisingly clean smile. “You gave me half of that. And it wasn’t going to sit and rot in a museum any more than that cross was.”
“Sure,” Indy said. “Now, what the hell do you want?”
“Same as always,” Garth said, sitting. Indy drew himself up, cross-legged, and kept the flashlight beam in the man’s eyes as they mirrored each other. He’d have had to be blinder to himself than Garth was with the light in his eyes not to see how similar they’d become. “To get paid.”
“You sunk to robbing museums now?” Indy sneered. “That doesn’t sound like the thrill and adventure you were so hot for.”
“Hinks and Pryce stiffed me on an artefact,” Garth corrected him, confirming every suspicion Indy had formed about the two men in their short acquaintance. “So I came to take it back and find another buyer. That’s fair.”
“This is a museum, it ain’t the Khan al Khalili bazaar, pal.”
Garth chuckled again, and Indy disliked the sound. He wanted to cram his hat down onto his head, knock the pistol out of Garth’s hands with the butt of the flashlight and then – and then what?
He twitched the flashlight in his grip and the muscles in his jaw, and didn’t move.
“You know—“
“If you’re gonna say ‘we’re not too different, you and I’,” Indy said, pulling the flashlight up to blind Garth all the more, and bringing with the beam his finest scorn, “I’m gonna...” the list of possibilities was long, and all technically impossible. It wasn’t a great plan to try to punch the man on the jaw from a sitting position, especially when Garth was holding his pistol. “... have to remind you, I have a doctorate. Last time I checked –“
“Last time I checked,” Garth interrupted, shielding his eyes better, “you were Doctor Henry Jones Junior.” He grinned and dangled the pistol from his fingers, taunting Indy with his own gun without ever making a move to aim it at him. “My pa wasn’t a doctor of archaeology, Junior, he rolled bums for money, and if you want to talk about how far the apple did or didn’t fall from the tree you might wanna consider that I could have killed you where you lay.”
“Oh I did,” Indy said, through gritted teeth, “I did. So why not shoot me, take your damn artefact, get a new buyer?”
“Are you out of your mind?” Garth laughed, and Indy tightened his grip on the flashlight handle until his hand began to ache. “I got no quarrel with you. Never have. Got no quarrel with the museum, either, not bad enough that I want to leave them with a dead doctor on their nice clean floor.” He moved his hand to block the light in his eyes again, and added, “Besides, why’d I shoot the great Doctor Jones? Where’s the fun in that? Someone’s gotta keep me on my toes.”
“You could’ve just let me rest,” said Indy, who was sure that no, Garth really couldn’t have. The temptation to mess with him was just too severe. “What do you want with me?”
Garth’s shrug was too casual to be casual, and too to sudden to be born out of the question. He’d been waiting. With a constricted throat, Indy wondered just how long he’d waited by the bedroll for heavy-sleeper Jones to wake up before he resorted to scuffing like an amateur. It wasn’t a comfortable thought: he’d been left to dream by so many women sneaking out that he knew just how insensible he was when his head hit the improvised pillow, and he’d already known it was dangerous before Garth turned up.
“Same as always,” he said, at last.
“Oh no. No.” Indy reconsidered using the butt of the flashlight as a cudgel. There was every chance he could at least knock Garth out.
“I’ll confess I was curious, mostly,” said Garth, and the pistol had somehow righted itself in his hand, gone from a limp rat to the machine of death it was, “but it seems there’s something attractive about making it with someone who’s turned into your own little clone.”
“Less of the little, pal.”
Garth clicked his tongue and smiled, no longer shielding his eyes from the light. Indy realised he’d let the beam drop, and that must have been when Garth grappled the gun into shooting position. “No need to be touchy about it. You know I know what you got and whether it’s enough.”
“Pointing that thing at me doesn’t make you a better option,” Indy said, nodding to his own pistol. He didn’t remember Garth talking this much like a cheap pulp erotica novel of the sort he’d be damned if he ever admitted to reading, but perhaps his memory made the man into a more impressive figure than he’d really been. A man teaches you things about yourself you never wanted to know, and he sticks in the mind in a size much larger than life.
“Stops you clubbing me with that, though,” Garth said without spite. “Why not put it down, and I’ll put your peashooter back where neither of us can reach it.” He flashed again the grin that Indy was already sick of seeing, and with a flicker of his eyelids that was so blatant he’d have been arrested on principle if anyone had been there to see him, the thief sized him up from toe to tip, caught Indy’s eyes, and raised his eyebrows. “Don’t need it to make you cooperate when you wanna.”
The presumption rankled, but it rankled all the more in its accuracy. Indy kept a grip on the handle of the flashlight, opened his mouth to say I don’t think so and found himself with a mouthful of tongue.
The merits of his argument evaporated like vodka in the sun, and Indy dropped the flashlight, which switched itself off the instant it hit the floor. He got the measure of how hard Garth had held onto his pistol when he heard it slide across the stones and thump gently into one of the plinths. In the long hall the sound echoed like the slap of a footfall, but Indy couldn’t give much attention to it because by now Garth had both hands on his face and was half-wrestling him and half-eating him alive.
Indy thought a lot of curse words and got none of them out: he lifted his hands to grab Garth’s face but only fell backwards onto the bedroll, a heavy weight bearing down on him. The flashlight dug into his back, and he rolled himself off it, cracked the back of his skull on the floor, but kept on kissing. It was as much defensive manoeuvres against the tongue in his mouth (hot, wet with saliva, flavoured with what tasted like the same scotch he used to steal from Senior) and the beard burn on his lips and face as passion.
His legs fell open as his head hit the floor a second time: they betrayed him with a limpness he’d kept out of his life for decades. When women went at you like this they appreciated a little fight: Marion did, anyhow, even if she hit him all the harder for trying to get up (even if he liked that). But Garth weighed down on him like a fallen statue and instead of trying to fight for his life, Indy let his legs sprawl and his body remember.
Garth’s knee pressed down on his thigh, pinning him half on and half off the bedroll in the cold dark of the museum. If he ignored the smell of the floor wax it might be a cave: somewhere no one would ever know about it. Indy inhaled through his nose and smelled sweat and old leather and Garth’s teeth clipped his and the old muscle memory returned.
“No advice this time?” Indy asked, when Garth let him breathe again, gulping air himself as if he’d been under water.
“Nothing to tell you, nothing you ain’t already found out,” Garth muttered, then, with a leer, “No advice for me?” with his breath hot and wet against Indy’s neck. It only made Garth’s attempts to push him into place with his hips even easier.
“Yeah, keep your damn hands away from my hair –“
It had the intended effect: Garth took a handful of his greying hair and pulled Indy’s head back so hard that he could excuse the sound that came out of his mouth as an involuntary response to the violence of it. Which it was, kinda. It came out sounding like a long slow punch in the spleen, and he could feel Garth’s smile in the dark like he could feel the pressure gently building in his groin.
“You like that, huh,” Garth said, removing his plausible excuse.
“I said—“
“Fuck what you said, you just said yes with your dick,” Garth smirked, his voice low in Indy’s ear. Indy tried, and failed, to keep from pressing the incriminating evidence into Garth’s, but at least he was spared trying to answer by the return of his tongue.
The friction, the pressure, the heat, and the weight of an older, slightly heavier, somewhat taller man on top of him – through two sets of clothing, even if Indy’s was the uncomfortable fakery of a polite wool suit and not his preferred travel-stiffened near-armour – ground at him and pushed his legs ever wider apart, his mouth more pliant, his hands in danger of rising up not to push Garth off but to pull him closer.
“Let me fuck you,” Garth grunted against his teeth. It didn’t sound much like a request so much as it did an order.
He must have hesitated too long – Garth still had his hand locked around Indy’s hair and the roots hurt in a way that wasn’t strictly unpleasant – because an impatient knee was driven dangerously close to his testicles and Garth said, “Goddamnit say yes,” in a voice that didn’t have the control over itself that it should have.
Obstructive as all hell when he felt like it, Indy didn’t give him a word, only struggled his hand between two stomachs, neither as flat as they’d once been, and tried in vain to fight with whatever fastenings tailors thought were a good idea to put in a suit. Garth seized his wrist and pinched the nerve until he was forced to let his hand drop.
“That’s your answer,” Garth said, pleased and grating in Indy’s ears with a dark brown voice: his hand tingled from the pinch after Garth withdrew, and a hand more-practiced and more enthused untangled the labyrinth of his flies.
The next minute, Garth’s weight was temporarily off him and the sweaty wool and tight waistband peeled down his legs at the instigation of abrupt hands, leaving an undignified puddle of pants adhering to his shoes, and Garth threaded himself back between Indy’s bare thighs like an affectionate dog.
“Uh,” said Indy, and he wasn’t so hot on Garth’s reaction, which was to slap his palm over Indy’s mouth and say:
“Shut up.”
He jerked about – Indy couldn’t see what the hell he was doing, but he had a good idea – and the vulnerability of the situation should have left him with a deflating dick and a sense of increased coldness to the whole thing: it didn’t.
Indy tried to bite the underside of Garth’s fingers: Garth squeezed his cheeks like a maiden aunt and told him to cut it out. There was a subdued pop, and the tinkle of metal on stone, and Indy had a white hot moment of fear that he was about to be stabbed in the ass.
The possibly-fatal blow didn’t come: he flinched at the cold touch of what he recognised – after a moment – as Vaseline.
“Don’t be such a baby, Junior,” Garth muttered, smearing stuff intended for cleaning engine parts onto the soft skin between Indy’s balls and his asshole, then right around his asshole, then a little inside his asshole. “Relax. Or I’m gonna hurt you.”
Indy didn’t think that was a great way to make him relax, but then Garth slid his index finger up Indy’s asshole and after the first shock of being very not-relaxed he found himself relaxing like someone had reached into his head and switched off the thing that made it possible to be tense at all.
“Wuh,” Indy said against the soft pressure of Garth’s palm on his mouth, as all his limbs went soft at once. His legs, trapped as they were in manacles of wool, and splayed at the hip like Garth was still kneeling on his thighs, carried the sensation almost to his knees.
He thought Garth said something like attaboy, Junior, and made a vague note to resent him for it later and to remind him angrily, when his mouth would cooperate again, that he was in his late goddamn thirties. Indy got as far as making another wet sound into Garth’s hand, but no further: Garth pushed another finger inside him, pulled both of them out, and with a hand still greasy with Vaseline and asshole, began to stroke Indy’s cock.
“Hey,” Indy mumbled, before he realised that saying I thought you were going to fuck me made it sound like he wanted it to happen. He wasn’t disappointed for long: Garth took his hand from his mouth, hissed:
Shhh
And with his free hand did something in the vein of guiding his cock inside.
Indy threw his head back, hit it with a thunk on the stone floor a third time, and made a sound he hadn’t intended to make, somewhere between surprise (though he wasn’t surprised) and pain (though he wasn’t in pain) and a kind of deep pleasure like lying down on soft cushions after a very gruelling dig (though he wasn’t going to admit to that).
“Cut that out,” Garth growled, and his growl was breathy and unthreatening.
His feet knocked against the small of Garth’s back, but it didn’t seem to put him off. The ungainly, humiliating position, the stupidity of his clothes, bunched this way and that, and the greasy grip of Garth’s fist on his cock weren’t in conflict the way he’d guessed they would be, and Garth inside him, pushing against him, a hot wet mouth on his neck snarling into the places he’d forgotten to shave, was the worst of the lot.
Indy tried hard not to let his head fall back and hit the floor again, but another few minutes and he was overwhelmed. His skull cracked the stone floor and Garth muttered in a broken series of consonants, “Are you tryna knock yourself out or what?”
Indy couldn’t answer that. His cock felt like it was going to come off in Garth’s hand, his asshole hurt, and his sense of self was falling inward into the space where ‘ladies’ man and adventurer’ had previously been built. He figured if he knocked himself out all that would stop, but he also knew if he knocked himself out he wasn’t going to come, and right now that seemed more important than just about anything.
Garth fastened his teeth onto the soft, bristle-speckled skin of Indy’s neck, somewhere to the side of his jugular, and the sudden spurt of unexpected pain, alongside the frantic motion of hand on cock, pushed him out of his reverie and back to painful awareness just as Garth came. He had no doubt that was what had happened: there was a grunt near his ear loud enough to deafen him, and the battering ram at his ass froze and shuddered.
But Garth’s hand didn’t administer a second of mercy, and it was only a little while after – not long enough for the man to have caught his breath – before Indy lost what was left of his self-control, hit his head a final time on the floor, and let go.
This time the thump of his skull on the floor succeeded in pulling a more complete blackness down over his mind: Dr Henry Jones Junior had taken enough head injuries in his working life to know it well.
When he woke he was dressed (his fly was undone), and curled up on the bedroll with his wrists and ankles tied, his own smart tie obstructing his ability to shout for help. Indy didn’t feel much inclination to shout for help until he was quite, quite sure that his body wasn’t going to betray him about his predicament, anyhow.
He found the note a few days later, tucked into the lining of his hat, while he was walking through Russell Square, tossing pieces of his lunch here and there to the hungry pigeons. Something about the weight of his fedora didn’t seem right: when he took it off there was a thin sheet of paper from his own notebook stuffed in a slit in the lining fabric.
Suits you better than it does me, said the sloppy, uneven capitals of a man who had learned to write later in life than Indy. Man in ropes is clear of suspicion. No need to thank me.
“I wasn’t going to thank you,” Indy muttered, ripping up the note and letting the wind take the fragments rather than fight it to get them into the square’s trash cans. But he couldn’t help a very private, very sly smile to himself as he put his hat back on, either.