Chapter Text
It starts like this: Ethan takes Will out on a date to his favorite restaurant and talks to him and listens to him. Stares at him because he looks amazing. Smiles at him because he wants to. Thinks a lot about how he’s the luckiest man alive. Wonders how ten years passed them by and they both still get just a little bit awkward on dates like it’s high school all over again.
It starts like this: Ethan wakes up in the morning to find the other side of the bed empty, and without having to call out for him he knows Will is in the bathroom, brushing his teeth sleepily. Sits up in bed and hears Will call “Morning!” around a mouthful of mint-flavored toothpaste. Thinks about how Will just knew he was awake. Gets out of bed and looks around for his slippers, and hears Will call to him again, “They’re under the bed where you put them last night!” Smiles because Will always knows what he wants.
It starts like this: Ethan looks up sometimes to find Will smiling at him, and he smiles back. Feels warm inside. Hears his voice even when he’s not speaking. Sees his face even when he’s not looking. Looks for him everywhere when they’re apart. Reaches for him to assure himself he’s never far. Touches him just to remind himself he’s real, even though it’s been ten years and nothing is realer than Will is. Loves him because it feels like there is nothing else in the universe other than this.
And just like that, ten years have come and gone. Ethan cries a little when it happens. Will just smiles and leans against him and takes his hand. They spend the day alone at home, because they have a home. And each other. Someplace to go to at the end of the day. Somewhere to build a life. Because they can, and they have, and it’s so much more than either expected they would get.
When Ethan is fifty-six a mission goes bad and he ends up as a hostage, and he’s pretty sure he’s fucked until Will comes in, guns blazing and cursing loudly, to his rescue, and mows down everyone in his path that’s stopping him from getting to Ethan. He gets himself shot in the right knee in the process, and Ethan ends up having to rescue him back, carrying him away in his arms and trying to get in a soothing word between Will’s loud swearing.
His kneecap is shattered and can’t be saved, and he’s always going to walk with a limp, and he’ll probably never run like he used to, or kick like he used to. Ethan is bothered a lot by this and blames himself for a solid ten minutes before Will rolls his eyes and tells him to cut the shit, they both know that Will would take a thousand bullets for him and that he’d do it for Will, so quit the moping, Ethan, it’s not a good look on you, babe.
And Ethan grins and does as his much wiser husband tells him to, but deep down the feeling doesn’t go away. Will isn’t even half as upset about it as Ethan is – he just shrugs, and says, “Well, I guess that means no more field work. Would’ve had to quit someday anyway, might as well be today,” and asks the doctor to notify the Director and the Secretary. Then he claps Ethan on the shoulder, and says, “Come on, then, let’s go home. I’m tired.”
He may not be able to walk properly or run or kick, but he can still drive, and he does so, and he does it as calmly and safely as he always has, and Ethan wonders why he’s not letting his emotions on the matter show. He watches Will for the next few weeks as Will gets used to walking with a limp, to getting tired more easily than before, to sitting down every now and then to rest his bad leg. He’s the one who winces when Will lets out a tiny pained noise during sex one time, because his knee doesn’t appreciate the stress placed on it and informs him thus. Will just waits for the pain to abate and then bids Ethan carry on like nothing’s happened, and Ethan does, but underneath the surface the thought still waits like stagnant, moss-green lakewater, just getting worse the longer it’s left to fester.
Will carries on with his duties as an analyst, but makes the long walk to Ethan’s office less and less, since it tires him out. So Ethan comes to him, and they still have lunch together and talk about work and their colleagues, and Ethan’s glad that at least that hasn’t changed. Benji, Jane and Luther are nothing but supportive, but they don’t have to live with this like Ethan does – with the knowledge that every step Will can’t take is on him, is because of him.
But Will never lets on that he’s anything less than Zen as fuck about the entire situation – he rests his leg the exact time the doctor says, takes the pills the doctor gave him, sleeps with a pillow under his knee to keep it relaxed, doesn’t put undue stress on it. Still drives carefully like he always has, still joins Ethan for their daily evening walk around the neighborhood, still exercises as much as he can, and basically manages to reshape his entire life around his knee like it’s no big deal and just another thing he has to live with.
It takes Ethan almost a year to accept that maybe Will really is okay with it. In the meantime he doesn’t go on any missions, not even when Benji, Jane and Luther have to take someone else into the team to make up for his and Will’s absences. He loves the field and he loves his job, but he loves Will more and besides, he doesn’t think he wants anyone else by his side anymore. There’s no one he trusts to watch his back, not like he trusts Will.
It takes Ethan another six months to be okay with it himself, but when he finally gets to that point, he hands in his resignation from field work. It’s just as well, too – his own eyesight’s begun to deteriorate and as a result his aim isn’t as good as it should be. And there’s also the very real risk of throwing out his back if he does anything strenuous.
His yearly physical shows as much, and Will laughs and laughs and laughs, and Ethan would be annoyed but Will’s eyes are bright and his face is glowing and he sounds genuinely amused and Ethan would give up anything in the world to be able to hear that sound. When Will’s done, he says, tears running down his cheeks from mirth, “Ethan, love, face it. We’re growing old.”
Ethan sighs, and says, “Well, I suppose it was inevitable. That still doesn’t mean I have to like it,” he adds, and Will dissolves into laughter once more, though Ethan really doesn’t think it’s that funny.
Will’s the one who picks out the frame for his brand new glasses, and he chooses something tasteful and elegant and graceful, and even though Ethan hates them, he wears them anyway because every time Will sees him in glasses he grins like it’s something hilarious to imagine Ethan finally aging at the rate of mortal humans. Oh, and he really can’t see that well without them, so he doesn’t really have a choice in the matter. He figures it’s karma getting him back for all the times he laughed at Will’s reading glasses.
He figures he can live with his bad eyesight and aching back, if Will can live with his bad leg. He figures he can live with it, because he no longer feels the need to fill a void in his life with adrenalin rushes and danger. Every part of him is already saturated with everything of Will’s.
When Ethan turns sixty he finally gives up on trying to keep his hair its natural dark color, and accepts the gray beginning to creep in. He grows it long again, like it used to be when he met Will, and he briefly flirts with the idea of a goatee to go with it, but Will says that if he grows one he’ll go from looking like a distinguished gentleman to a pseudointellectual douchebag. “Sorry,” he says, trying to muffle a grin. “You just have that kind of face. Just… no beard, please? Promise me?”
And Ethan promises, because he’s a sucker for every word that falls out of Will’s mouth. He kisses that mouth, and says against Will’s lips, “Promise,” and smiles. He never thought he’d live long enough to even get gray hair, much less accept it and think about how he’s going to wear it. He never thought he’d have someone to grow old with, much less tell him how his age suits him (or not, as it were).
Sometimes he still waits for the other shoe to drop.
It drops, but not for him. Or Will. It drops for Luther, who dies in an explosion just outside of Kiev. Ethan vomits when he hears, and Will cries for days. Jane is inconsolable, and Ethan knows she’s thinking about Hanaway all over again, and he wonders how she can bear it. Benji shuts himself in his apartment and doesn’t speak to anyone for a week.
They all cry at his funeral, and afterwards everyone, including Will, gets wasted and talks about him and the kind of person he used to be. Ethan wonders if this is how life goes – you get old, and then your friends die, and eventually you die. And he looks over at Will, who’s nodding somberly to something Zhen is saying, and suddenly he’s overcome with the urge to hold him and hide him in his arms, to protect him from mortality and illness and age, from everything that could ever hurt him or take him away where Ethan couldn’t follow.
Instead he just takes Will’s hand and squeezes it, and kisses him and prays he lives forever.
The shoe also drops for Declan, who loses his right leg to a mine in a war-torn country, and comes home for the last time, never to leave again. He gets a prosthetic fitted and gets a good prognosis, and Zhen also leaves field work for him, but he never really manages to make his peace with it, not like Will has, not like Ethan has.
The shoe drops for Director Brassel when he dies of a heart attack, and it drops for Declan and for Luther and for more than half the people Ethan knows, and he wonders how long it is before it’s his turn. He never says this out loud to Will, and Will, who always knows, never brings it up either. But he has his ways of reassuring Ethan, and he holds him and kisses him and squeezes his hand and reminds him, with his gestures and smiles, that there’s always a little bit of life left to live between now and whatever comes after.
Ethan lives for that little bit of life he gets to share with Will.
Benji falls in love, and after a brief, tempestuous affair, back out again, but they assure him and tell him it’s okay, better late than never, he’ll find someone else again. He’s aging a lot better than the rest of them, doesn’t look a day over fifty, and Ethan both envies him and is glad for him.
They consider getting Jane to go out again, to go on dates and find someone to spend her time with, but after Hanaway, after Luther, she’s done, she says. “I can’t take it,” she tells them over coffee at Ethan and Will’s one evening, the three of them sitting out in the fresh evening air in the back yard, where Will’s growing sunflowers and Ethan’s attempting to grow tomatoes. “It’s a double-edged sword, this job,” she says, and she sounds incredibly tired, and older than she is. “Either I end up with a civilian who will never be all right with what I do, and I have to lie to them and worry about them – or with someone who can die any time.” She sighs, pushes silky salt and pepper hair out of her eyes. “I can’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me to go through it all over again.”
Ethan considers her words, and nods. “Yeah,” he says, thinking of Julia, even though it’s been decades. Then he thinks of Will, and his bad knee. “Yeah,” he says again, grateful that at least they’re both alive, knees and eyes and backs notwithstanding. They’ve got their lives, and each other, and it’s more than what most people have.
Benji never falls back in love, a fact he would be miserable about if it wasn’t for Jane’s offer for the two of them to just give up and get a place together, and live out the rest of their days playing video games and fighting over who finished the breakfast cereal. Declan jokes that they might as well get married, at which he receives twin looks of incredulity from both Jane and Benji. “Gross,” declares Jane, and Benji says, “She’s like my sister!”
Declan goes red, and Zhen laughs and laughs and laughs.
So Jane and Benji get a place together, and everyone helps them move in – except for Declan, who is a lazy little shit and just sits in a corner, bossing them around, saying “I’m missing a leg!” whenever someone asks him why he’s not helping. Everyone knows that his prosthetic leg is a miracle and functions almost better than a real one, and that he’s been known to be deadly with it despite not being a field agent anymore, but they let him have his little joke until he grows bored, wanders into Benji’s room where he’s struggling with a mattress, and asks casually, “D’you want help with that?”
Benji and Jane have a little housewarming party in their yard, after sundown, the air fresh and clean and carrying the smell of barbecue and freshly mown grass and the flowers Jane planted when they bought the place and that are finally starting to bloom. Will and Ethan are arguing over a grill in one corner, Will holding a skewer and gesticulating wildly while Ethan ducks and dodges to avoid being impaled. Zhen and Benji are at the table that’s been set up in the middle of the yard; they’re arm-wrestling, and even though Benji’s gotten stronger over the years, Zhen still manages to kick his ass. Declan is fiddling with an AUX cable and his mobile phone, trying to get it to work and not managing anything more than irritating bursts of whiny static. And Jane is recording it all on her phone, along with a running commentary.
Finally Will finishes making his point and sets the skewer down, and Ethan heaves a sigh of relief and begins putting shish kebab on the grill, telling Will, “See, the best way is to have it slightly overdone on the outside and soft on the inside—”
“That means it’s raw!” bursts out Will. “And besides, burnt food gives you an increased risk of cancer—” and the argument begins anew.
Declan gets the AUX working, and Will’s angry postulating is drowned out by the sound of loud classic rock. He settles for grumpily shoving Ethan out of the way so he can do the shish kebabs himself, and to keep Ethan busy he hands him a steak and tells him to deal with that. Ethan sighs, inaudible over the music, and puts the steak on the grill, all the while glaring at Will, who’s coolly ignoring him.
“Idiots,” says Jane wisely into her mobile phone as she records it all. “Living proof that age does not correlate to wisdom. If anything, the older they get the stupider they become.”
Ethan throws the empty bottle of lighter fluid at her. She dodges, laughing. “She’s not wrong,” mutters Will, and Ethan looks around for something he can throw at Will. His search is cut short when Will yells, “TURN THE STEAK OVER BEFORE IT BURNS, IDIOT!”
Ethan grumbles but obeys, and Jane laughs again, her point having been successfully proven.
“We’re getting old,” Declan says, after dinner. They’ve relocated to the living room for drinks and coffee, having cleaned up the yard and put the leftovers away. The TV is running in the background but no one is paying much attention to it. “Look at us. We’re having a housewarming barbecue like a – like a bunch of suburbanites.” He says the last word like it’s a particularly nasty curse word, and Zhen laughs.
“It’s not that bad, is it, though?” she says, lying down and placing her feet in Declan’s lap, prodding at him with her big toe. “I mean. We’re all alive.”
A somber silence follows her words; the weight of Declan’s missing leg, Will’s bad knee, Ethan’s bad back, every person that Jane’s lost, and even the shrapnel scars all over Benji’s left side seems to bear down on them. Benji is the only one of them left who’s still working, but he seems tired of it as well.
Then Will says, “Alive is better than nothing, though. And I don’t know about you guys, but.” He shrugs. “Old is better than dead.”
“Speak for yourself,” mutters Ethan, pushing his glasses up his nose, but he’s grinning.
“You’re mortal,” Will tells Ethan gravely. “I’m so sorry you’re the same as everyone else.”
“Oh, shut up,” grumbles Ethan, and elbows Will, but then they’re all laughing. “Didn’t think I’d get this far, though,” he admits when there’s a lull in the laughter. It’s somewhat freeing to say it out loud, to the group of people who have always been with him and have the same limitations he does. “Thought I’d die on the job.”
“We all thought that,” says Jane. “Some of us did.” Hanaway and Luther’s absence looms over them.
“But most of us didn’t,” replies Benji quietly. “And that’s got to count, right? It’s got to count for something.”
“It counts a hell of a lot,” Declan says. He raises his cup of coffee in a toast. “To those we lost,” he says, “and those we didn’t.”
They drink to that.
“I’m glad,” says Ethan when they get home and he’s undressing. Then he pauses; it feels like there’s something stuck in his throat that won’t let him complete his sentence.
“Hi, Glad,” Will replies deadpan from the bed, where he’s already settled in. “I’m Will.”
Ethan grabs a cushion off the bed and throws it at Will, who catches it. “Terrible,” he laments. “It’s been decades, and your jokes are still terrible.”
“I’m hilarious,” Will informs him, an eyebrow raised in mock affront.
“No, you’re not.”
“Whatever you say, Glad.”
The thing in his throat dissolves; Ethan says, brought back to the topic by Will’s reiteration of the joke, “I’m glad that it’s you.” When Will looks confused, he clarifies, “That I’m growing old with. I mean, I’m glad it’s you I’m growing old with.”
Will smiles at him. “Me too,” he says. “I’m glad too.”
“Hey, Glad, I’m Ethan,” he smirks, and it’s Will’s turn to throw the cushion at him.
The other shoe still doesn’t drop, and Ethan’s stopped expecting it to. Maybe they’re allowed this, to grow old with each other and crack terrible jokes and throw cushions and fight over the proper way to barbecue kebabs. Maybe they’re allowed to live a life that doesn’t include explosions and gunfire and blood and death.
They’ve earned it, after all.