Chapter Text
The day Diana Burnwood brought down the last piece of Providence, she cried, for there were no more worlds to burn.
Destroying Providence was like pulling down a pyramid. Edwards was the capstone, but there were so many layers underneath him; each larger than the last. She had planned it this way. If you bring down a pyramid from the bottom, there’s no telling where the top will land when it falls. It could kill you. She always aimed to dismantle it, not just blow it up and leave the rubble for someone else to worry about.
Starting with Edwards was also pragmatic. It seemed best to know immediately whether this whole plan was going to work, whether 47 could finish the job, before she dedicated her resources to saving the world.
When a herald came to her with the Constant’s pin, and a story that she pretended she didn’t believe a word of, she thanked him, and shook her head after he left. Edwards was a fool to think the serum was worth trying. He should have just killed 47 while he was unconscious. Should have killed the both of them. Should never have underestimated her, but this is why he is dead, and she is not.
She’s in New York, a penthouse suite, one door in, one door out, hired heavies all the way down. Finding a suite with no balcony was remarkably difficult, even though at this altitude it's hardly fun to sit out and get cold, however brilliant the view. ‘Perhaps if you had someone to keep you warm’, her traitorous mind supplied, but she batted away the thought.
She takes a deliberate deep breath from her core, and closes her mind, and holds instead the truth she knows indelibly on her soul, that at that moment, she is the most powerful woman in the world. Probably the most powerful person, give or take how over-leveraged certain tech bros were at that specific time. Certainly the most powerful person who knows she controls the strings of destiny.
Diana Burnwood, former ICA handler, minor aristocrat, reigning Constant of Providence, poured herself a drink, picked up her phone, and began to undo the knot holding the world together.
It takes a year. Three hundred and sixty five days exactly from the day she heard that Edwards had died. She feels every single one of them. It is a year of intense stress where she learns how living without 47 protecting her, even indirectly, is dangerous and terrifying.
Whenever she’s in London, which is often, thanks to the city’s long history of putting its nose where it doesn’t belong, she considers going to the club on Dean Street for stress relief, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she develops a ritual. She has a case of Yates’ wine shipped to her, and whenever the urge gets too much, she drinks a bottle of it, and allows herself the luxury of thinking about how much she wants him, relives the memories of having him under her, at her most fundamental of whims, how he felt, his mouth, his thighs, his face, his skin, his dick, his voice, how much she wishes she could touch him again.
There have been many men who understood the point of the club, and then there was 47, who had no idea of the layers of sexual politics and the metaphorical flights of bad men she’d had to climb over, but who instead was just a natural, someone who believed in the art down to his bones, who went for her full throttle even though he barely knew what he was doing compared to the experts she usually relies upon.
There are men for every taste, and Diana has had her fair share of those who are not her type. She never liked those who licked at her with delicacy, for example, like to go too hard would cause her to shatter. She hated those who went to the club because they thought servicing women was humiliation, that to be on their knees was some kind of inversion of the natural law rather than a noble art. Normally, those men were filtered out before they made it to her, but the occasional one still occasionally managed to skip the queue. She could always tell them immediately from the ones who truly do it because it makes them happy. The other kind eat her like she's too cold and they've got sensitive teeth, and with those men she'll eventually politely say "yes, thank you" and dismiss them, without giving them either the pleasure of her undoing or the humiliation they think the club is for.
She closes her eyes, sips the merlot tonight, and remembers how he was ravenous, eating her like he didn’t have teeth at all, though she still yearns for the way his predator’s incisors, hard and sharp and symbolic, felt against her delicate flesh, how she felt his core muscles twitching with effort where he was pressed full against her legs, holding them both up for dear life, for leverage, that perfect, chiselled body working to drag the moment out and still keep his hands firmly behind his back, where she put them.
There was a body cooling nearby, and it was the first time in her adult life she killed a man with her own hands, and yet though its a night she should repress she remembers every second, the thrill and the exhilaration and the terror when she remembered the serum that flowed through his blood, how she hoped the dosage is right, that her maths wouldn’t let her down, that at that moment it wasn’t concentrating itself in his saliva, his sweat, his semen; how she prayed that in her weakness she was not playing herself, but still incapable of telling him to stop.
He disappeared after he good-as-killed Edwards, and she hasn’t looked for him. She could find him if she wanted to, at the start, but as the year goes on, more and more of her resources get burned away. Her money holds out the longest, but everything else withers on the vine as she strips away goodwill, gentlemen's agreements, secret handshakes, knowing glances. She forces people to look the right way, shines the light into the darkness, and then further, into the grey fog that Providence flooded the world with.
As far as she knows, no one actually knows that it is just one woman causing all this political, economic and philosophical upheaval. It has been a difficult secret to keep. She has relied on all thirty years of her training and experiences covering up 47’s tracks to keep her secrets, which reminds her that while it has been a slog of a year to destroy Providence, it has been a year and a handful of days since 47 learned her secret, the secret of the club, and while that is such a minor little thing by comparison, it still makes her lose her breath with the spark of anxiety, of being truly seen and understood. The incident was so minor, just a stolen half hour before the betrayal. She should barely remember it, in the grand scheme of things.
Diana's always been bad at doing the things she should do.
She’s also out of Vineria Yates wine, and as of half an hour ago, the last nail was driven into the Providence coffin. It would take a long time for the world to realise what she had done, what someone had done in any case, but for tonight, she decides to celebrate.
She smokes a cigarette (she’ll quit tomorrow) while she stands in her robe and surveys her wardrobe. Her eye keeps sliding to a dress still wrapped up in the plastic insignia of a Buenos Aires dry cleaner. She glares at it, not having any of its nonsense, and closes the wardrobe with a flick of a manicured hand, remembering she’d had something couriered over that afternoon, knowing that the ghosts would be haunting her wardrobe, waiting for a moment of weakness. She’d picked a creamy silk dress with cut out sides that sets off her hair well. From the pictures on the website it had looked decadent and heavy, with a sleek skirt and long sleeves that offset the scandalously low cut bodice. Once she puts it on she realises that it has a slit that goes all the way up, and she pushes down the sense memory of his mouth tracing the line of her femoral artery, and goes to put her hair up, find her shoes and call the driver before she loses her nerve.
Half an hour later, after a call to the club and a quick shine of her trusty pigalles, she slides into the back of the car and taps on the glass. "I'm going to the other club tonight" she says, and the driver, the new one, young and handsome with solemn brown eyes and full hair out of a mousse advert, nods and pulls away.
She doesn't realise that this driver doesn't understand her code, doesn’t understand what it means when Ms Burnwood gets into the back of the car dressed to the nines and doesn’t make polite conversation, when he takes the wrong exit off the M25, heading for her other-other club, the gentlewoman's club where she usually spends her “free” time in London. "Murad, sorry, I'm in another world tonight" she says, and sends the correct address to the sat nav from her phone.
In a way it's good, because they snake through the centre of London rather than bomb down through the suburbs, which is nice, if slow. The traffic is horrendous as usual, but there's something nice in being stuck in it, anonymous and invulnerable in her steel tank, taking her time to get to where she’s going. As they creep along Victoria Embankment the river looks beautiful and mysterious, inky and full of secrets, and she counts the number of lights on in the houses of parliament that will be down to her machinations.
Murad drops her outside the club, and there’s a moment where she almost chickens out, before squaring her shoulders beneath her jacket and walking straight down the stairs of the club. John is on the door, which pleases her. He takes her coat, kisses her on the cheek and makes small talk in his smooth deep voice, gives her his usual patter, whether anyone is meeting madam here tonight, how he’s here to serve her in all ways other than what the young men are here for, whatever she wants, he will endeavour to get her. She’s been coming here for a long time, but John is unchanging, perennially middle aged and wise, the kind of gay man who is kin to certain type of women, both caught outside of the modern world but resolutely hanging on. She can't imagine him in jeans or holding an iPhone, or getting in an Uber, for example. He's American, with a Spencer Tracy voice and that same reassuring bulk and irritable charm.
She enters the main room, and all eyes turn to look at her, because how could they not. These men like to think that they live to serve women, and there are a lot of familiar faces but also some unfamiliar ones, ones who would only know of her as myth and legend. She is the most powerful woman in the room, and that will have to do, as of an hour ago.
John leads her to her favourite chair, deep in an alcove. He fusses with the fire and then brings her a glass of her favourite whisky, deep and complex and peaty, and then enquires whether madam would like him to pick for her, or whether she has her eye on anyone?
"It's been a while, John, why don't you find me one of the new boys. You know what I like", she says, and John bows and shimmers away.
There are other women here tonight, but it's quiet all the same. The weekends usually are, just a few establishment women who don't leave the city for the weekend, back to their husbands and constituencies. She can see Julia across the room and gives her a little nod, crooks her finger at her as Julia laughs to herself, as both her hands dig into the thick hair of some lucky man, save the little finger of her right hand crooked in reply.
The club is smoky, private clubs are exempt from the smoking ban and so it's rude not to smoke, really, and Diana fancies a cigar to go with her other vices. The humidor has some thin ones, her favourites, of course. Even though it's been a while, John won't ever forget.
She sees John winding his way back through the heavy furniture, tailed by...well. Tailed by a surprise.
“Madam Burnwood, may I introduce Tobias”, John says. “He would like the honour of serving you tonight.”
She's stunned. 47 looks good. Healthy, relaxed. A slight tan. She doesn't even try to hide her surprise, her pleasure at seeing him.
She waves John away, who smirks and goes, knowing the tip is already being wired to his account, leaving her 47 standing over her. He's wearing his signature look, red tie and all, and there's a bulge in his trousers that very well could be a silver baller.
For a lot of people, this is the last thing they see.
“Who sent you?”, she says.
“Nobody”, he says, evenly. “I sent myself.”
“Prove it”, she says, because she isn’t sure that he isn’t here to tie up the final loose end of ICA business. His face is strange, though and she realises it's because he's smiling a tiny smile, hopelessly fond, as he gracefully kneels before her.
She leans forward, elbows on her knees and one hand under her chin, and looks at him. Really looks at him, takes him in. Takes a sip of whisky and savours it. Puts her finger under his chin, and tilts his lovely face up to the light so those cheekbones cast shadows over his chiselled jaw.
"You are lovely", she says, "Tobias, is it? Very well. I'm sure John told you what is expected of you?"
He nods.
"And you're okay with that? Okay with being that man?"
"I'm anyone you want me to be", he says.
"Just so," she says, and leans back, and takes a deep pull on her cigar.
By the time it's a mere stub in her hands the nicotine is making her light headed, and 47 is almost vibrating with anticipation. His head isn't bowed, he's watching her with that predator gaze, and it is delicious, it is dangerous.
“If I asked you to do it here,” she asks, blowing the smoke out to the side. “Would you? In front of witnesses? That woman is the home secretary, you know.”
He doesn’t flinch. He runs his warm hands up her thighs, spreading her legs so he can move between them, and looks up at her. “Anything. You. Want.” he says, punctuating each word with a kiss.
She stubs the cigar out, and gestures to John from where he was lurking. “Please call my driver, thank you.”
“Let's get out of here,” she says, “We’ve got a world to rebuild.”