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For a brief, shining moment on a rooftop in Venice, she can pretend that she did it: convinced Ethan to come away with her—to walk away from a life that takes and takes and leaves them dead or disavowed—to settle into a life of ducking into alleyways, hands entwined, because the best gelato shop is tucked away there rather than because that’s where the nearest safe house is.
The sun begins its slow dip behind the cityscape and all Ilsa can feel is the warm, comforting weight of Ethan against her—his hand splayed against her back to pull her closer, lips brushing against her temple, his thigh pressed against her hip. She’s long since come to terms with her life on the run—alone and unable to return to her country—but she thinks maybe this man, this team, are her home.
She pushes herself onto her tiptoes to get closer to him, to bask in that feeling of warmth and home and comfort. Ethan chuckles, the laugh rumbling through his chest and against her like a gentle purr, and tugs her closer.
“Which one of them called you in?”
The resigned, slightly exasperated tone of his voice makes her smile more. She tries to pull back from the comfort of his arms, but he doesn’t let her go far. His arm around her is like a vice grip and she leans back into him, biting her lip. After what feels like a lifetime of being forced apart, it’s a comfort to know he’s reluctant to let her go any farther from him than she has to.
She’ll never tell him that she, Benji, and Luther long ago worked out a system of drop communications to check in on one another, to signal for help if something were to ever go wrong for their family.
“Maybe I was just in the neighborhood,” she teases, hand sliding down his chest to settle low on his belly. He seems to sag against her in resignation, giving up on whatever resistances he’d held. She knows she’s won.
“Ilsa…”
But she’s already there, her lips brushing along his jaw, the stubble reminding her of another time, another place, when their frantic kisses were tinged with gritty sand. He sucks in a breath and draws her closer, his fingertips slipping beneath the hem of her blouse and finding warm, smooth skin.
“You worry too much,” she murmurs softly, pressing herself against him impossibly further, nudging her leg between his thighs and fisting his shirt in her hands to keep him near. Not that she need worry—he’s not going anywhere.
“You don’t worry enough,” he counters with fond exasperation, his free hand coming up to brush the back of his fingers along her cheek and jaw. There’s something grounding about the way he touches her—reverent and real and anchoring. She stumbled into this world of secrets and spies, where mobility and detachment were imperative to success, where feeling adrift and unmoored was a requirement. But Ethan Hunt’s fingers on her jaw, his lips on her skin, his smile, his earnestness and goodness have become her touchstone, her anchor.
She leans in and lets her lips brush along his, soft and gentle and comforting. They’ve had their moments of passion—frantic and desperate nights in Paris when they’d needed to remind themselves they were alive, rushed and frenzied afternoons in creaking ancient beds in safe houses long since forgotten about, urgent nights together because she’s wearing his shirt and he brought over her favorite kind of ice cream.
But on a rooftop in Venice, there is tenderness and affection and routine about the way they touch each other. She kisses him the way she knows he likes—slow and unhurried and soft, no teeth nipping at his bottom lip or nails digging into his scalp, just the languorous brush of her tongue against his, the pull of his bottom lip between her own lips, pressure and heat and silky soft wetness that has him turning into liquid beneath her hands.
“Ilsa.” It’s a sigh and a plea and a warning all at once. She watches him through pleased, half-hooded eyes as he pulls away and peppers gentle kisses to the bridge of her nose and cheek and forehead before nosing along the long line of her neck to press a single, gentle kiss to her pulse point.
She buries her fingers in his hair and strokes the short strands, holds him close as he buries his face against her neck and breathes her in and crushes her body against his—as if he could hold her close enough, tight enough, keep her with him always.
There’s tension along his shoulders, knots she can feel in his back and arms. She rubs at them absentmindedly and presses barely-there kisses to the side of his head, sighs softly when he returns the favor and lets his lips travel along the sensitive skin of her neck and collarbone and his hands wander along her sides and hips.
Ethan takes her hand in his, runs his thumb over her knuckles, and sighs. She’s always liked their hands together; liked the way his calluses and bruises and knuckles match her own. He lifts their joined hands to his mouth and presses a soft, reverent kiss to the place where their hands meet and then holds their joined hands over his heart.
When she looks at him, she sees the anguish on his face, the worry, the fear. Her fingertips dance along his brow, smoothing the lines of anxiety and worry. It’s unlike him to be so rattled. She wants to press about Gabriel, about the life he had before her, before the IMF. But if they only have these few hours together before the world rips them apart again, it will not be spent chasing ghosts.
The city’s noise—cars honking and wine glasses clinking and the rise and fall of conversation along the street—blankets them, protects them.
“I don’t want to lose you—any of you,” he tells her, dropping his forehead to rest against hers, eyes closing. “I won’t.”
She checks the time on his watch and nods. “Then we have a little less than six hours to come up with a plan to ensure we all come back to Venice next year.”
“Plans aren’t really my strong suit,” he teases, skin crinkling around his eyes as he smiles at her, brushing the hair from her face.
“Benji and Luther are already working on a few ideas,” she tells him. There are definitely plans that she knows he will be less receptive to—the ones that place her in greater danger than he’d prefer. But that is a fight that will be had in a few hours when Luther and Benji lay out the logistics for him, show him it’s the only way to fool an all-seeing entity: show it exactly what it thinks it wants to see. He will huff and flex his jaw and run every scenario through his mind—the Entity has nothing on Ethan Hunt’s tactical mind—and then he will cave.
He will cup her face in his hands, fierce and desperate and speak like his words of reassurances are promises written into stone, and tell her to be careful. And she will tilt her face into the curve of his hand and feel his pulse beneath her fingers and remind herself of the reason she has to be careful (him, her, a future they define on their own terms) and she will nod and promise him that she will survive.
But that is later. Now, he kisses her forehead and tucks her beneath his arm and against his side and rests his chin on her head like she is a piece of him that has been missing and is now slotting back into place.
He echoes her words back in question: “Next year in Venice?”
She nods against his chest, holds him tighter and lets them dream for a moment. “Well, this can’t be the only memory we take from Venice. I want to see what the city has to offer when we aren’t holed up in old IMF safe houses.”
“I thought you liked our safe houses?” His voice is teasing, but there’s something else laced in it too—a memory of her thighs wrapped around his head and his mouth working against her sex and one of her hands buried in his hair and the other wrapped around the creaking old bed’s headboard in the backroom of a safe house in Brazil.
“I’m daring to dream a little, darling,” she teases right back. He drops a kiss to the top of her head and holds her closer.
“Okay, sweetheart,” he concedes, relaxing against the railing along the rooftop. “Paint this dream for me.”
She paints a picture for him: the two of them hand in hand wandering along the canal, lounging in gondolas and driving too-small cars to the country for vineyards with good wine and better pasta; tells him of gelato and espresso and the basilica and market stalls and art that will never be hung in galleries but could hang in a little flat they call their own.
She dreams for them both and he holds her close.
They are beings made up of moments—stolen and curated. There is no happily ever after maybe, no tomorrow that can be promised. But here and now they have a moment on a rooftop in Venice in each other’s arms and a dream of next time in Venice, and it will be enough to get them to fight for tomorrow, for a future of other moments to get them from that point to the next.
It has to be enough.