Chapter Text
They’d found her, screaming about a man who didn’t exist in the middle of the Virginia Department of Transportation. They’d found where the rabbit’s foot had been headed and managed to stop a war. A few months later, they had even found that Musgrave had been dealing under the table and had a hand in Ethan’s disappearance.
But they hadn’t found Ethan.
As Julia sipped her shitty hot chocolate, sitting on the floor of shitty safehouse number 47, she found herself wondering why she wasn’t giving up.
It was probably because the others weren’t.
Luther said she should go back home, try to relax, try to reconnect with her family, to have a life. But he wasn’t going home, and neither were Declan or Zhen, and so Julia was staying. This love is not to be diminished by difficult circumstances, and it is only to be dissolved by death, the pastor had said when he’d married them in the hospital, Ethan beaming at her in happiness, and Julia beaming right back. Back then, she’d had no idea that that would be the last day she’d see him. But she’d sworn the vows, she’d meant them, even if the circumstances were far more difficult than she could ever have predicted, and Ethan wasn’t dead, not yet. She wouldn’t let him be.
There came a creak from the slightly rotten floorboard in the doorway.
“Can’t sleep?”
She tilted her head to look at Luther.
“It’s been six months,” she grimaced. “I guess… I guess I just don’t know why Davian would want to keep him around for that long, and I can’t stop wondering what he’s doing to him. And then- And then…” she paused, finding it difficult to voice the final thought, the one she’d never spoken aloud before. “I wonder what state he’ll be in, and I wonder if when we find him… if it wouldn’t have been better if he’d-”
She choked on the last words, breathing heavily. Then shook her head, taking a sip from the chipped mug once again, looking away across the darkened room instead of at Luther.
The creaking footsteps came closer, and then Luther was levering himself down onto the floor beside her.
“Julia, I’ve never pretended he was gonna be the same guy we knew last year. Hell, we might not even recognise him.” She shut her eyes. “But we always knew that. Just like I know that if there’s even a shred of Ethan Hunt left, he’s gonna be glad he stayed alive, for you.”
She smiles grimly, a tear rolling down her cheek.
“I mean it. I’ve never seen the guy so happy as the day after he married you,” she leant into him, and he put his arm around her, tethering her to reality. “I mean, I thought he was stupid, I thought you two were never gonna last. I told him, I’ve lived with women before, and not one of those relationships lasted two years.”
“Ours didn’t even last that,” Julia said, her voice coming out flat and dead, because even though Luther is being comforting she can’t help it.
“Don’t say that,” Luther said. “I said that because I didn’t know you. I thought you were just some woman who’d freak out and leave the moment she learned anything, I thought you wouldn’t be able to handle Ethan if this life messed him up any more than it had, I thought maybe Ethan wouldn’t be able to handle being normal, staying in one place for too long. But you’ve been with us for this long, Julia. Going from place to place, learning everything, dealing with all this bullshit. You can handle anything. When we get him back, yours is gonna last.”
Julia bit her lip, wiping the tears streaming down her face with one hand.
“Thanks, Luther.”
-
She’d been meant to wait in the van.
They’d told her: stay there, stay safe.
But Julia wasn’t waiting.
Seven months, seven months they’d been trying to find her husband. Searching and searching and searching. And meanwhile, they’d taught her to fight, they’d taught her to shoot. Now, that they’d finally found where Davian’s most recent hideout was, like hell she was staying put in the van.
She waited five minutes and then slipped out after them, crouching down in between the wall and the van, and clicking the safety off the beretta. She knew the building plan, she knew what Luther had done to the cameras, she knew where everyone was meant to be and when the guards would be taken out. She was ready.
Heart hammering in her chest, she glanced round the first corner. There had been two guards there, but they were now both unconscious or dead. It should have bothered her, as a nurse, it should have bothered her, but they’d taken her husband. They’d taken him, and they’d tortured him for seven months. They’d had her for three days, three days and she had the scars, and the limbs that would randomly shake, and the things she didn’t know how to talk about, and the nightmares to prove it. They’d had him for seven months. Julia was ready to kill them. She fantasized about it sometimes, thought she might even enjoy it.
Hallways two and three were clear too, but when she neared the fourth, she heard shouting.
“You’re not going to kill me, Luther,”
She shut her eyes for a moment, heart racing, limbs turned to ice. She knew that voice. She knew exactly who that voice belonged to: Owen Davian. She heard it in her nightmares often enough. Then she wasn’t terrified, or petrified, or anything like that. She was furious. Because how dare he? How dare he?
“You’re not going to kill me, because the moment you raise that gun, I’ll kill him.”
The fury grew into an ice-cold incandescent rage as Julia padded softly around the corner, gun raised exactly as Zhen had taught her, hands steady as if she were about to be helping in surgery.
When she stepped around the corner, Davian had his back to her. He was facing Luther, whose gun was pointed at the ground. But these things weren’t important. They weren’t important because of the figure that Davian was dragging along beside him, his arm around his neck, the gun lodged against his temple.
Ethan.
He barely seemed able to stand, his hands bound roughly behind him, and perhaps the only thing that was keeping him upright was Davian’s arm around his throat. He wasn’t looking at her, but facing towards Luther as well, entire body trembling. Julia didn’t even know why she knew it was him, because the gaunt, barefoot figure in dirty, almost ragged clothes, his long hair almost covering the thick collar around his neck, bore no resemblance to the man she knew. But Julia knew. She just knew.
And she knew her blood had never burned with rage the way it did now.
“So what’s going to happen now is-”
A shot rang out.
Davian collapsed to the ground, red spraying from his head, but Julia didn’t care about him anymore. She threw her gun to the ground - dangerous, you should never do that even with the safety on - and shot forward, trying to grab Ethan before Davian’s body shoved him down too.
She didn’t really manage it, but they fell together, her elbow cracking against the hard floor before Ethan could, her body falling on top of his, crushing him slightly. Throwing herself backwards, she attempted to manoeuvre them so she could lean back against the wall, cradling him against her in a way that she could see his face and he could see hers.
He stared up at her.
And it was him, it was him, despite the fact that his cheekbones seemed to want to cut through his skin, despite the fact that his eyes were sunken and glassy, despite the fact that the left side of his face seemed to be a mass of half-healed bruises. He smelled of sweat and burnt flesh and a million and one other things that in any other occasion she would have recoiled from but only made her want to hold him closer.
Because he was here, and because he was Ethan.
Julia didn’t realise she’d been crying until droplets started to splash down onto Ethan’s face.
He blinked, eyes seeming to focus more with every second that passed. All she could hear was the heaving of her own breaths, louder and more ragged by the second as she repeated his name, over and over and over.
“Jules?” Ethan asked, voiced scratched, rasping, almost inaudible, but full of a wonder that matched his expression. A thousand nameless emotions flooded through her heart.
“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, I’m here, and I’m not leaving you, and you’re not leaving me, not again, never again. Ethan, do you hear me, never again?”
He kept looking at her, but didn’t seem to be focusing on her words, but that was okay, because he would be okay, he would, and they would be together. They would be together, and everything would be okay.
A frown began to deepen in his forehead, concern, apprehension, rather than happiness. A note of trepidation began to tug in her chest. “You’re here.”
“Yes, baby,” she promised. “I’m here, I’m really here. And I’m not going anywhere. We’re gonna be okay, you’re gonna be okay.”
Ethan’s mouth opened and closed, trying to get words out, eyes flickering over her in distress. When he finally spoke, his tone was almost plaintive, like a child. “But you died?”
What? The horror of that statement sunk in only a second before comprehension and fury dawned. They’d told him that? They’d told him that? She glanced up to where Davian’s body lay, Luther standing over it, keeping watch over her and Ethan, and wondered if she could shoot him again. She clenched her jaw, grinding her teeth together.
Below her, she felt Ethan stiffen suddenly in her arms, and looked back down to see him staring up at her in terror.
“Ethan-”
“I’m sorry,” he told her, and his tone of voice could only be described by begging. “I’m so sorry. Jules. Julia. I didn’t mean to get you killed. I tried to stop him. I tried to stop him shooting you. I tried. I-”
“Ethan,” Julia attempted to place a hand on the side of his face, comforting, a sign that she was there. Before she could, he’d flinched violently away. A cold shard of ice speared through her chest as he stared at her, tense, eyes wide, clearly waiting for her to hurt him. Her mouth opened and shut, trying to force the words out. “I don’t know what they told you but I’m alive, I’m alive. I’m right here. I’m not going to hurt you. Please, Ethan, I- I-”
Ethan shook his head, expression wild and terrified, his body twitching in her arms as if he was trying to get away from her.
Her heart was breaking apart in her chest.
“Julia,” Luther’s voice came from above, cutting through her sobs and Ethan’s short, almost silent breaths. “Let me take him.”
She shook her head. “I can’t, I can’t.”
He crouched down in front of her, holding out his arms. “We’ve got to get him to safety. We’ve got to go.”
“No,” she said, continuing to shake her head, blinking rapidly as she stared down at Ethan, emaciated, almost catatonic with fear, staring at her as if she wasn’t real, as if she were dangerous, as if she were going to hurt him. She didn’t understand. She didn’t. She’d imagined a lot of things, she’d had seven months to imagine the horrific state they might find him in. But none of them were this. None of them. “No.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t.” Unwittingly, she gripped him tighter. Ethan flinched again, hissing out a breath.
She let go, her mind blank, wrapped in a shell of horror and nothing else.
“Thank you,” Luther said, scooping Ethan gently from her arms.
Julia watched as Ethan was taken from her.
She tried to remember how to breathe.