prompt: yarn, title: here's the proof in idea barrages

It shouldn’t be a beer, he thought, certainly not macro-brew swill from a third-rate Scottish label.

It should’ve been a vodka martini, procured from only highest-shelf stocks, mixed to his peculiar particular standards. An affectation, of course, to put on refined airs, the agitation of liquor meant nothing compared to the qualities of the spirits or the ice. He learned it from a naval officer in his youth, a power-play, a chess-move to dominate, impress enemies and women. He used to impress people, he swore, even if most of the proof was classified. The proof of his escapades, his duties, the proofs of high-end vodka, gone. Only beers purchased on discount at a local Tesco remained. A.B.V. of 3.9%, Christ, what was that? Eight proof, even rounding up?

It wasn’t even that he’d aged out of the special services, he was in his early middle-age, sure, but hardly old. He could still keep up with a younger man in a fist-fight or fencing match, at least for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, but that was hardly half as useful anymore. Spy-craft wasn’t a thing of grapples on yachts or castle pistol stand-offs anymore. The majority of it was tapping the internet feeds, now, and what action there still was to be had was carried out with army drones or by all these goddamned superheroes. Who needs a terrorist’s beautiful daughter seduced for intel when there are mutated mind-readers, who needs a shoot-out upon a satellite when some cornfed American alien bastard can fly up up and away there and punch it out of the high azure nothing?

Maybe they could’ve kicked him up into the administration, at least oversee the men in the robot tin cans with pew-pew lasers, but there was still a matter of all his decades of sexual misconduct. Almost half the agents were women now, a third of the bosses, what once was his “rakish charm” now was understood as bordering on a word quite similar to “rake”. There was no station for him in that new world, either. All the villainous groups he’d once dueled went underground then went legit, streamed films now, transported sales for online shops. If you had a high-enough clearance, he could show proof for that too, photos and news-clippings stitched together by pushed pins and faded red threads of yarn. If you didn’t know who he was, you might believe he was crazy. Even with top-secret clearance to his exploits, at this point, you still might at that.

And so it was, early retirement and rather shite beer. The pension would keep him comfortably lowish-middle-class until his eventual lonely death, but no more ridiculous mixology, no more bedding women nicknamed after genitalia, one tuxedo gathering dust in a closet next to his art installation of conspiracy. His age passed and, if you must know what replaced him, look up in the sky. Not a bird, not a plane, just another fad waiting to pass away itself. But that’s business.