Work Text:
Gaby doesn’t hear the first two gunshots, but she feels them.
Her ears are a mess of confusing sounds: wailing sirens, people screaming, the sound of her own heart beating furiously. Her world is condensed, her vision zeroed in on the empty street in front of her and the Wall, looming and furious, beside her. She is searching for her checkpoint, for the spot that will see her and her mark into safety, when she feels it.
The hand she has clasped in her own falters. The body of her asset, a handsome writer caught spouting anti-Soviet rhetoric on the wrong side of the Wall, suddenly becomes a dead weight behind her. Her arm jerks from the resistance, and Gaby looks back. Her asset’s face is twisted with pain, and he releases Gaby’s grip to clutch at his shoulder.
“No.” She’s unsure whether her voice is a whisper or a scream as the asset stumbles. They pause like that for a moment: standing in the middle of the empty, rundown street, two sets of brown eyes staring wildly at each other. For a moment, it feels as if they are shrouded in silence, until a third gunshot echoes like a distant thunderstorm, and her mark, almost instantly, recoils again.
“”No!” This time it is a scream. Gaby closes the distance between her and the asset. His eyes are wide and surprised, his mouth hanging open. Gaby forgets all warning, all precaution, and throws her arm over his head and shoulders and runs. She abandons her checkpoint and drags the asset around a bend in the road. Her eyes dart left and right as she runs a few paces with him. Anywhere , she thinks, her breath heavy, steps heavier. Anywhere to hide him.
They run down the empty street as the roar of sirens grows soft behind them. In her periphery, Gaby spots a shadow, and she drags the slowing body of the asset towards it.
He moans indiscriminately as they reach it: a dark alleyway between two abandoned buildings. Slowly, Gaby lowers him to the ground, setting him half-lying, half-sitting against one of the walls.
“No,” he gasps as Gaby tears off her jacket and stuffs it behind his shoulder. “We have—” he chokes. “We have to keep running.”
She wants to speak — whether to reassure him or to deny him, she’s not sure — but her mouth is dry as she searches for the words.
He beats a fist against the damp, dirty ground. Gaby follows it with her eyes and sees streams of blood trickling down his hands. “You said you’d get me back to them.”
“I will.” Her voice is gravelly when she finds the words. She reaches toward him, toward the map she has tucked in the lining of her coat. With shaking hands, she tries to maneuver around him, tries and fails to keep his body still as she fumbles with the fabric.
“If I can just find the map, I can get us out of here,” she says, her voice breathy and unconvincing. “I just need to find it, and—”
Her words are cut short by the crack of a fourth, final shot.
Her asset screams then, primal and snarling and broken. Gaby wants to look, wants to know which window or which abandoned balcony the sniper she didn’t see had shot from. She doesn’t look, she doesn’t think . Instead, she presses one hand against her asset’s sternum, against the hole left over from the bullet that barely missed her. Two more bullets whistle toward them, spraying shards of brick as she scrabbles to her feet. Her free hand grips his arm, half-pulling, half-dragging him out of the line of fire. She feels him kick his legs beneath her, feels him try to push away from her. She wonders what he thinks he can run from now.
“Stay still,” Gaby grunts, shaking under his weight as she sets him back against the wall. Her mark slumps against the brick, his brown eyes scared and ghostly. They rip into Gaby, and she breaks away, focusing on applying pressure to the wound.
“Just stay still,” she whispers again, pleading this time. The sound of her own voice barely hits her ears. Wheezing, her mark lifts a bloody hand between them. He looks at it for a moment, almost surprised at its wet, red color, and clutches Gaby’s forearm.
She feels time slow as she watches her asset’s eyes fill with tears. His jaw opens, quivering as if to say something.
“Shhh. Don’t,” Gaby whispers. Tears threaten her then, too, and she gulps, shakes her head frantically. Beneath her hands, hot blood continues to pour.
He remains like that for a moment more, his mouth slack, his eyes wide. He gasps, choking on the breath that will not reach him. Gaby presses harder against his chest.
It is a futile attempt. A minute passes, and the two face each other in the empty, shabby alleyway. Gaby’s breaths are heavy, her shoulders tense as she applies pressure she knows to be in vain. Her asset, his bloody hand still grasping onto Gaby’s arm, stares back at her until he doesn’t. His chest stops contracting, his body relaxes, and his hand drags from Gaby’s skin onto the pavement. Slowly, the terror behind his eyes fades away to nothing.
Gaby breaks. She releases a cry from her throat, feels tears begin to roll down the bridge of her nose and fall away like rain. She slides back against the brick wall and leans away from the writer she was sent to deliver to his family, the man she had promised would see his wife and children again. She blinks back her remaining tears and looks around then.
“Erik,” she whispers, as if to remind herself. “His name is Erik.”
To her right, boarded-up windows of tenement buildings stare back at her in orderly rows. She has given no thought to the shooter, hoping only that Illya or Solo was quick enough to find them in another part of the city.
To her left, the alleyway stretches into shadows. Gaby is alone here, save for the small patch of grass she sees growing in the sliver of moonlight reaching through the buildings. In the grass, she spots the tiny, unobtrusive face of a single Forget Me Not punctuating the wall.
If she had any energy left in her, Gaby would reach for it. Instead, she waits for the extraction team, waits for the footsteps of Illya and Solo as they run through the maze of East Berlin to find her. When they reach her, she’ll watch with empty eyes as Illya steps into the alley toward her — cautiously, slowly — and wipes the dirt and the tears away from her face. Behind him, Solo will kneel next to the mark and gently close his eyelids.
Later, in Waverly’s office, Gaby will say that her mission was a failed one. Her handler will write his report, setting his pencil down to look his agent in the face. He will hear her say that she did nothing, that she offered her asset no comfort in his final moments. He will stop her, patting her hand like the father she never truly knew.
“The dying need but little, dear,” he will tell her. “A friend’s regret. That’s the best you can give.” She will thank him, and later, it is Waverly’s voice, not Erik’s, that she will think of as she falls asleep that night.