A couple of days later, Chuck turned the corner of a corridor and came almost face to face with Major Montgomery. Well, face to back. A very nice back. 

The major was trying to open the secured door leading to the Brass wing and was having very little success with it. The retina scanner kept beeping at him angrily while he cursed to himself in that same strange working-man accent that Chuck still couldn’t quite place. He watched Archie grind the heel of his hands into his eyes, his every movements telegraphing exhausted frustration, and bend to press his face to the scanner again.

His nice round butt stuck out in the air, because the retina scanner was at General Brown eye level and therefore a full head lower than Major Montgomery eye level. It was a very nice sight for Chuck on the short term, but probably bad for him on the long term. Knowing that his marriage to Bee made the major off-limits should have cooled him down, in theory, but in practice it had just made his attraction burn hotter. He felt his nervous system start sizzling with the need to do something ill-advised pretty much every time that he was in the vicinity of the other man. Which, given that Archie was his boss, meant pretty much all day every day. For the first time in a long time his insomnia had a very specific cause, and then his dreams, when they did come, were… well, let’s just say that they were interesting and leave it at that.

“You need to remove your contacts,” he said when the scanner beeped at the major again. 

Archie screamed and whirled around, plastering himself to the wall with a hand on his heart and the other one reaching inside of his jacket. Chuck stepped back in alarm, both hands raised instinctively to show Archie that he wasn’t a threat. 

“Fuck, Sergeant Quillback. You startled me!” breathed out the major when he realized the situation. He leaned over with both hands on his knees. “Please don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Sorry,” he laughed. “I wasn’t sneaking up, you were just really focused there! Are you okay, bud? I mean, sir?”

The major straightened up, pulling his shoulders back sharply as a mask of professional haughtiness fell over his face. As if he hadn’t just been crawling up the wall like a drunk girl at a haunted house less than five seconds earlier. 

Also he had said fuck, noted Chuck with the irreverent glee of a toddler hearing their parent say a no-no word. Or a man whose subconscious was going to remind him of the sound of ‘Fuck, Sergeant Quillback’ being breathed out at whatever time in the near future was most inopportune for his sanity, and who was both dreading and looking forward to it.

Unaware of the rich landscape of thoughts and desires that his every words and actions were evoking inside of Chuck’s brain, Archie pulled on his cuffs and checked the straightness of his tie with sharp little flicks of his elegant hands.

“I’m fine, sergeant. May I help you?”

“Oh, right. I said, you need to remove your contacts, sir.”

The major frowned. Which, granted, Chuck could see how that would sound like a total non-sequitur, so he gestured to the retinal scanner. 

“They mess with the scan,” he explained. “In theory they should work together just fine, but our scanners were installed way before the decryption contacts became mandatory. I think maybe the smart lenses create a layer in front of our eyes or something. Anyway the side effect is that the scanner has a lot more trouble getting a good clear read when you’re wearing the contacts. Sometimes it will take like, a dozen tries. It’s faster if you just take them out.”

Archie blinked at him, then at the scanner. His shoulders were still stiff and his lips curled in disdain. “I see. How… inconvenient.”

“Yeah, right?” He laughed. “Who wants to shove their fingers in their eyes forty times a day just to open some doors!”

Major Montgomery didn’t make any move to remove his lenses, or to open the door. He just kept looking at the scanner with a crossed look on his face. Chuck had a quick, silent debate with himself. 

“You want me to show you a cool trick to bypass the scanner?”

Archie flicked his attention to him and Chuck immediately started defending himself, not because of any particular vibes he was getting out of the major — guy had a really great poker face, real hard to read — but because he was already hearing Bee’s voice shrieking in his head about security protocols.

“Not that the scanner isn’t important, of course! I’m not doing anything that puts the security of the bunker at risk or anything. Just — like I said, sometimes you don’t want to put your fingers in your eyes for no reason. Some of the soldiers… Well, Evans got pink-eyes that one time, it was grody. And I mean we can’t just not wear the lenses, we need them to work. So, we figured out a way to bypass the scanners.”

He scrunched up his face and made a sort of half-pleading hand motion towards Major Montgomery. “There’s really no need to let the other officers know about that, is there?”

“Of course not,” conceded the major slowly, but his eyes were just the slightest bit narrowed and Chuck had no idea how to read the pensive expression that he was sporting now. Archie stepped aside and nodded at the security device. “Show me.”

Chuck smiled, all bravado, and produced his dorm key card out of his pocket with a flourish. He held it out in front of his face proudly, showing Archie the side with his picture and identification, then flipped it around to reveal that he’d glued a high-resolution print-out of an eye on the other side. 

“I present you… Eye-Eye-Sir!”

Chuck pressed the front of the card to the scanner’s lens and it started it’s process. 

“We call it that, but actually it’s a picture of General Brown’s iris,” he explained. “But don’t think that just any old picture would do! We had to enhance and tweak it a lot to make sure the machine would accept it reliably every time. It was a whole thing, it took weeks to perfect, with like, hundred of tests and a lot of trial-and-error. Not the sort of thing the enemy,” he pointed up at one of the omni-present security posters with a cheerful grin, “would have the time to do, eh! So you don’t have to worry about this being like, an exploitable fault in the system or what have you, you know.”

He punctuated his explanation with a cheeky wink just as the scanner finally beeped acceptance and the heavy door before them unlocked. He pushed it open and held it for Archie, because it would only stay unlocked a short period of time before the deadbolt engaged again and the major was still standing there without showing any obvious intention to move. 

He tilted his head at Chuck. “May I request that you make me one of those? Otherwise I’ll have to ask someone else, and I would hate to accidentally ask someone who’s not… in the loop.”

Aw, Archie didn’t want to accidentally snitch on him. That was nice. They’d only known each other for two days and they were already bonding. Chuck heartily agreed and winked to show that he’d gotten his hint and they were on the same wavelength about it. This finally prompted the man to move and they made their way down the Brass wing together. 

It was a miserable length of gray concrete corridor, with no decoration or personality whatsoever. It was the wing that housed all of the offices and personnel quarters for the higher-ups. Which meant only Colonel Devi and General Brown for now, unless Command decided to transfer more forces their way. Both officers also had their own secretaries, who loathed Chuck and whom Chuck loathed heartily in return. 

“I didn’t think majors had access to this corridor,” he remarked, trying to break the silence. Honestly the blank corridors of the Brass wing gave him the creeps in a way that the inhabited stillness of the fifth level didn’t, mostly because the fifth level was supposed to be silent and empty. The Brass wing, on the other hand, should have been filled with signs of life. Things like security posters, seasonal decorations, and large paintings of landscapes designed to trick the mind into thinking that they weren’t in a bunker underground. Like the rest of the base. The absence of all of those elements was annoying and creepy. He didn’t know why the General had ordered everything removed.

Archie didn’t answer. When Chuck glanced over at him he saw that the man was tense, his fingers picking at his jacket buttons anxiously. Yeah, same, thought Chuck. Perhaps a bit of cheerful camaraderie would help him feel better? He slapped the major on the back without a second thought and chuckled at the startled reaction it caused. “Look at you, mister important, huh!”

They both stepped into General Brown’s office, empty at this time of day. Chuck had a pile of paperwork to shove (sorry — to carefully organize) into folders in the general’s secure cabinet, so he went about doing that. Meanwhile, Archie approached the desk and started doing something with the general’s computer. He didn’t even bother sitting in the chair, just bend over right there where anyone could see him, one hand braced on the dark oak desk while the other flew gracefully over the controls of the laser keyboard. His rear end was in the air again, right there with it’s perfectly bite-able shape, and did this man not know what he did to Chuck? Was he just completely unaware that other people could see him? Lord, his jacket was riding up. This should have been illegal. Chuck was going to make a complaint. To… someone. The universe. He forced his attention back to the file cabinet, face burning. At least his skin was dark enough that no one could see his blush and his long jacket hid anything that needed to be hidden. 

He was sure that Major Montgomery was doing some very important stuff aside from leaning sexily on the desk, so he kept pretending to shelve files long after he was done until the man finally straightened up with a sigh. He turned off the computer, holographic display disappearing with a fizz and hiss of electricity. Chuck didn’t even bother to peek. The image would have been all blurry to him anyway. He might have enough clearance to get in here, but even the still shots in the picture frames on General Brown’s desk were blurry to his lenses, never mind his actual computer display. 

If he were with Bee he would most likely ask her what all that was about, and maybe needle and pout at her a little while she pretended to be offended at his attempted breaches of operational secrecy. But he wanted Archie to have a good opinion of him, so he didn’t do any of that, just held open the door for him as they left the office and re-entered the creepy corridor.