Chapter Text
If they find out I told you, they’ll kill us both.
Well, I guess we’re going to have to keep it between ourselves.
Amita knows there are things that Charlie doesn’t tell her. No couple is without its secrets, and Charlie, up until about three weeks ago, had a clearance on par with the Director of the FBI, which can sometimes complicate things. After all, Charlie is a very honest person, and he makes a point to never, ever lie to Amita.
There were eight of us— whiz kids, you know? Geniuses. They recruited us while we were still in school, before we could really tell them no.
For what purpose did they recruit you?
A program. It’s… it’s hard to explain.
Try me.
Amita is glad for the dark of Charlie’s childhood bedroom as they hide under the covers, their foreheads pressed together as Charlie stumbles through his story, breath hitching and voice cracking as he forces himself to breathe.
They wanted us to be thieves, among other things. Killers, eventually.
Assassins?
That’s a word for it. But it was more than that. It was… an experiment.
The program, or you?
Both.
Charlie talks about months of specialized classes, his mother’s worried looks when he was woken and hustled out of their little house in the middle of the night, because in the program there were no hypotheticals or dry-runs— there was training, and then there was applying that training, and then it was doing it all over again, but harder this time.
I still don’t know what they did to us, exactly. There were a lot of injections— a lot of sleep studies and blood tests. I think they were trying to make us stronger.
… Like Captain America?
I wish.
It hurts him to talk about it. He chokes on tears he can’t hold back, so Amita does her best to hold onto the shiver that threatens to creep down her spine as Charlie whispers metaphors about calves and cattle chutes across the inch of space that separates them.
I wasn’t meant to kill people. They never trained me that way. I was supposed to make it happen, though— I always could figure out exactly how to set it up, what would needs to happen, what failures to plan for…
You were the leader.
No, I was second-in-command. Alpha was our captain. She told us what we had to do, and I did what I could to help get it done. That’s how it worked.
Alpha?
That’s what we called her.
He did it for six years, until the program as it stood was disbanded and restored, sans one member.
I wasn’t cut out for fieldwork, and my math didn’t interest them. They asked me to retire, and I did so, gladly. My last few missions… they hadn’t gone well. I was tired of it.
They don’t keep tabs on you?
I worked for the NSA, so they didn’t have to. Now, I’m not so sure— the house across the street’s for sale, though, so they’ve got an easy way in, if they cared enough to bother.
Will they try something?
You mean kill me? After so long? I highly doubt it.
Amita has nightmares for weeks after he starts talking. She’s lucky— Charlie sleeps like the dead, which means she can gasp out a startled sob or two without much more than a sleepy grunt from the other side of the bed before she rolls over to muffle her sounds in her pillow. She doesn’t want him to see this— this weakness, because Charlie, lovely, sweet, sorrowful Charlie, won’t understand it, and it will hurt him.
(She doesn’t cry because she’s scared— though she is very, very scared. She cries because Charlie’s telling her everything he can think of and all she can think is you were only thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. You were too young for them to ask these things of you.)
(He would shut down if she said those things aloud, though, so she keeps her peace and stays quiet. He’s always been sensitive about his age, and she doesn’t like to think of the ugly expression that she knows he’d make if she tried to use it as an excuse— even if it’s less an excuse and more an explanation.)
“I love you,” she promises him in the dark. “I love you Charlie. I love you.”
“I love you too.” His voice is raw and raspy in the dark, but his answer comes quickly, like he couldn’t bear to leave her in doubt for even a moment. “Amita…”
Charlie is a mess of a good man with a guilty conscience, undeserved as it is. And if he thinks he needs penance in the form of this little rebellion, well, there’s nothing Amita can do except make sure he’s still standing by the end of it… if there ever is an end.
The NSA doesn’t restore its clearances lightly, after all.
*.*
Charlie shows her the lockbox he keeps hidden under the loose floorboard at the back of his bedroom closet, the hiding place cleverly disguised by a much bigger and flashier fire safe settled right on top. Inside, he has a number of things— driver licenses from ten different states and passports from America, Canada, Israel, and Germany, all with different names but his photograph. Money— mostly American, along with a dozen others— plastic-wrapped in tight rolls of hundred dollar bills and stacked according to country, An address book, listing safehouses in fifteen different countries as well as the United States. A phone, loaded up with the numbers of everyone who’s ever owed him a favor. A notebook, listing in detail each of these apparent favors.
He has passports and licenses with Don’s face on them, too, and it’s shocking enough that Amita can’t help the expression she makes when she looks at him, her hands full of forged documents.
Charlie shrugs, looking sheepish.
“After Crystal Hoyle…” he trails of, shaking his head. “I thought it best to prepare for the worst. He doesn’t— he doesn’t know, though. About the passports, or— or anything else.”
Amita swallows, looking down at the passport declaring Don to in fact be one Jonathan D. Carruthers in her hands.
“Does that mean you’ll be having some made for me, too?” she asks, meeting his eyes carefully from under her loose hair. “Since it’s best to prepare for the worst.”
Charlie’s mouth twists.
“I’d like to,” he says. “But I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”
Amita nods, gingerly replacing Don’s passport back in the box.
“You’re not using my school ID photo,” she tells him, sitting back on her heels. “It's awful. I’ll go and get a picture taken tomorrow for you to use. Something better.”
Charlie smiles, and it’s all relief.
“You look great in every picture,” he tells her, replacing the lid on the box and locking it before slipping it back into the space under the floorboards. “But if you insist…”
“I do.”
He doesn’t stop smiling even when he leans in to kiss her, easy, like he hasn’t just shown Amita a dozen items that could get him locked up for a very, very long time if anyone learned he had them, and Amita…
Amita kisses him back. Warmth blooms in her chest, the same way it always does when he touches her, and privately, she makes a note to maybe have Charlie take her to the shooting range.
Just in case.