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“… Bell, what are you doing?”
Russell’s hand tightly grips your right shoulder, a wife-beater and comfortable cotton pants serving as his pyjamas as he stares at you with concern, tired and exasperated concern. The grip he has on you - his fingers digging into your shoulders - tears you back into reality.
Your fingers flex around the door handle, feeling each nick and scratch in the metal, the surface roughened from years of chipped away paint. Slowly, you come to awareness, and you ask yourself the same question; what are you doing?
Moonlight dimly lights your face through the slats of the door, the safehouse is uncharacteristically silent - the thrum of the electricity generators are distant, nothing seems to be dripping from various leaks or faulty faucets and there’s no idle sound of work. No scratching of Russell’s pen against paper, clicks of Lazar organising and cleaning various weapons nor Park’s foot tapping incessantly against the floor.
And why would there be noise? It’s well past midnight - everyone’s asleep; you should be asleep.
You aren’t a sleepwalker, and there’s no way Russell would buy that excuse should you chose to lie - he knows you inside-out. No, you remember getting out of your bed. You remember slipping on your shoes and coat over your nightclothes and you remember walking towards the door with the intention of leaving… but… you don’t remember why.
Or rather, you fail to understand why any of it had made sense to you, just a moment ago, because retracing your logic… none of it makes sense.
With a dry mouth, you swallow. “I… I don’t know.”
Russell looks at you, face set but uneasy. You like to think you know him as well as he knows you - neither of you left Vietnam unscathed, it’d gouged out the essence of who you were - forced you to put it back yourself, consequential when you fixed yourself wrong, and inevitable in the way you could never come back with all of you. “To me, it looks like you were leaving.”
He waits for your response, but it’s not exactly something you have a rebuttal for because that is what it looks like. You’re not a smoker, you’re not stepping out for a smoke, and even then, nobody seems to have any qualms with lighting up inside the safehouse.
You blink, confused at yourself as you try to scrape together enough thoughts to produce a coherent sentence. Your hand leaves the door handle and you turn around to face him, squinting in the dim light. A horrible feeling swirls through your gut, nearly nauseating, a strange recognition flaring when you see him in the dark. An echo of a memory - the smell of burning jet fuel, pungent sharp iron in the air -
It leaves as quickly as it comes. It’s too distant, too old for you to recall properly. Somethings are better left forgotten.
Maybe you’re going crazy. No… that sounds almost right… but not quite.
“You weren’t leaving, were you, Bell?” He tuts disappointingly when all you supply is silence.
Your anxiety spikes, every issue you’ve experienced in recent memory compounds on itself and the weight becomes almost too much to bear.
He must notice how spooked you look, even in the low light, because he beckons you forth to the main room of the safehouse. Rather than turn on the harsh fluorescent overhead lighting, Russell compromises for a couple of lamps; the workspace looks less… intimidating. The mess of codes you’ve been working on spreads across the table in an organised chaos that even Russell doesn’t touch. He seems to be the only one to have looked at your organisation and made sense of it. He understood you.
He understands you.
You really should’ve said something sooner… because what is this other than a culmination of all your other fears… your anxieties? There are things you’ve noticed about yourself that you can’t ignore, not anymore, not when you’ve just caught yourself almost leaving the safehouse to- to what? You don’t want to find out, can’t afford to. It could very well jeopardise everything Russell’s been working for for thirteen years now.
You’ve got attention issues, memory issues and now… the issues aren’t contained in your head, anymore. Russell just stopped you from leaving. It’s become serious, you’ve been caught in the act of doing something and the worst part is, you don’t even know what.
There’s a strange voice… no, it’s not quite a voice, a feeling that tells you - warns you - not to trust Adler. The same feeling implores you to leave. It’d woken you up with urgency in the middle of the night and you’d obeyed the directives without question. Why hadn’t you questioned it? Why did it sound so damn familiar…
“IthinkI’mbrainwashed,” you say suddenly, heart pounding. You force your tongue to cooperate, force yourself to speak slower when Russell’s eyebrows shoot up incredulously. You're not sure what made you arrive at that conclusion, but the more you think about it, the more dread it starts to brings you, a deep truth settling in your stomach. Your fragmented memories - that inexplicably familiar something in your head begging you to be wary around everyone, even those you fought and bled with in the hell of Vietnam. "I think I'm brainwashed.”
It happened to Mason; you’re not as arrogant as to think you’re impervious to psychological conditioning - to brainwashing. Anyone could be a sleeper agent - that’s the appeal of it. You could be a sleeper agent, and you don’t even know.
“Bell,” Russell says evenly. He looks concerned, face taut with alarm. His tone shifts into urgency, concern layering due to the nature of the entire operation. If you’re somehow working with the Reds… Russell’s been after this particular roach since the late sixties, his work spanning across three decades. You could have compromised his work, the entire operation - everything his career has amounted to. “What do you mean, you think you’re ‘brainwashed’?”
“I’m missing huge chunks of time, Russ,” you start to explain, voice small. There’s almost an element of shame that comes along with the idea that you might be compromised, a useless asset to the team. You lean up against the central workstation, ass pressed to the edge. If you got up on your toes you could perch yourself there properly. “For example, when we were recalling Fracture Jaw. It’s like I closed my eyes and suddenly, I was there, in Vietnam, reliving it. Then, I was back in my own body, here, and hours had passed.”
You try to piece together the timeline yourself. Sometime between you’re unofficial field retirement after Vietnam, and when Russell had all but begged you to wrap up Perseus when it turned out the threat isn’t as dead as the CIA thought, you could’ve been… taken - conditioned. It can’t have been too hard, if so. You were red once, and although you’d never admit it out loud, you’re not confident it would take much to condition your subconscious to revert allegiances.
“Is that all?” Russell’s tone is flat. Your throat aches, suddenly worried that he might not believe you, that you seem overdramatic to him. He settles the majority of his weight in one foot, shifting on his feet as he continues to stand, staring. He doesn’t wear his shades, his blue eyes regarding you sharply. There’s something writhing beneath the surface there.
Perhaps he can be excused for his skepticism, you have just admitted to zoning out in debriefs, daydreaming horrific events from your past during team discussions. He needs more proof, you get that. Measure thrice, cut once.
“I’m not just missing time, I’m missing years,” you insist, urgently. “And there’s a voice,” you continue slowly, approximating the feeling as best you can, vocalising the abstract of the intuition to not trust Russell, and ignoring the intuition regardless. “It tells me ‘do not trust Adler.’”
He stares at you. You stare back, but only for a moment. Quietly intimidated, you move your gaze to the evidence board just behind his head, the profile of Perseus stares back at you tauntingly, the cadence of his voice echoes in Russian in the back of your head, words blurred, unclear. The three clocks tick in sync, monotonous.
Russell inhales slowly and you return your gaze, his shoulders rising and falling smoothly.
“I don’t know, Bell,” Russell eventually sighs. “It sounds like classic trauma, to me.”
You balk a little. “But - ”
“Do you think you would just… realise you’re brainwashed?” Russell asks, rhetorical. “Alex Mason was brainwashed for years, uncharacteristically erratic to even his closest friends.”
Right… it did sound a little ridiculous, now that Russell had put it like that. Mason, surrounded by people who knew him implicitly, plus the damn CIA, had been left brainwashed for years. If you’re in the same boat as him, you wouldn’t just… realise it one day. That wouldn’t make sense.
Sure. Trauma. Maybe you were fighting with some PTSD - you certainly wouldn’t be the first veteran to. It’s the simpler, likelier option. Besides, if you really are brainwashed, wouldn’t your programming have caused you to try and sabotage Russell’s operation? You haven’t attempted something like that.
“Trust issues, Bell, do you know a single CIA operative without them?” Russell continues, sensing your faltering composure, your reluctant acceptance. “That’s expected in our field of work, but it’s necessary to ignore them more often than not. We’re all vetted here, Bell.”
“I trust you,” you insist quietly. “I do, I really do, but… there’s just a feeling… a voice… I ignore it because I know I can trust you.”
He steps forward, softening as he takes your trembling hands into his own. “I appreciate that, Bell.”
The rough pad of his thumb runs soothingly across the back of your knuckles, grounding you in the room.
“But - I can’t - my memories - I can’t remember anything after that - ”
“What is there to remember?” Russell presses with an ordinary tone, a heavy suffocating expression weighing down on you.
You flinch, thinking back as best as you can and all you can recall is… TV. The fizz of static, repeating channels, high pitched whines of null signal.
He’s right. You didn’t do anything important beyond paper-pushing for the CIA, mundanely decoding and decrypting the odd intercepted signal until Russell finally pulled you into field work again. You watched TV for what must be years, avoiding and repressing the trauma of Vietnam. You’d prodded Sims for the very same thing, wondering why he let Vietnam weigh at him so much - you’re letting it drown you.
“Nothing,” you whisper, embarrassed. Years at the office. Years at home doing nothing at all, numbly staring at the television, a slave to its programming. “I didn’t do anything. There’s nothing to remember.”
Your worries start to dissipate, because nothing makes more sense than when Russell’s in the room with you - when he’s holding you so gingerly. His hands are warm, shielding the skin of your palms from the expansive cold room.
“It’s alright,” he soothes when the tears slip down your face. You’ve wasted so much of the past decade that you can hardly remember any of it. Is this what you betrayed your country for? Left mama and papa to face the state alone so you could watch western TV, indulge in western comforts? You did right by the west in Vietnam and then… squandered your second chance. You remember Berlin, how locked down every entrance into the city had been, the walls that enclaved the people there. There are some who would kill for the chance you’d been given, and you wasted it watching fucking TV. “You’re traumatised. That was a trauma response - it isn’t your fault. Do you hear me, Bell? Your trauma will never be your fault.”
The way he ‘diagnoses’ you is gentle, you think. He doesn’t give it a name, something all clinical-like that makes you feel ‘othered’ from normal people. He frames it like an issue anybody could have, given the same circumstances as you. Not everyone can be like Adler, you muse. You’re sure he hasn’t stopped working since he enlisted, constantly on the next project, devoted to the free world that he works tirelessly to protect it.
“… can you fix it?”
Russell gives you a plain look. A grimace pulls at his expression. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Bell.”
You repeat yourself, and maybe you’re not saying the right words to convey your meaning properly, maybe a fix is not what you want, what you need, but rather to be able to cope like Adler does. How did he go on after Vietnam? Everything about you had changed then - your allegiances, your personality… the essence of who you are. Are you even the same person, anymore? You can’t remember the girl before then, and you don’t try to, either; you’re scared you won’t like what you discover. “Can you fix it?”
Officially, he’s only field-medicine trained. Unofficially, he effectively handles a variety of issues that should technically be outside of his expertise. Your superior officer is a jack-of-all-trades, always has been. Perhaps that’s part of why he hasn’t stayed down for long despite facing horrific warfare, letters from his wife that she doesn’t want him back home, that she’d found a pacifist without a violent bone in his body to marry. Perhaps that’s the key here, to focus your attention otherwise so you don’t give yourself a chance to think about it all, because when you think, that’s when things start to look bleak - hopeless.
“You just need to trust me,” he settles for when you eye him so earnestly. His fingers around your hands tighten, holding onto you securely. The pressure doesn’t hurt, and if it did, you’re not sure you would mind. “If you ever need anything, and I mean anything at all, you come right to me, understood?”
“I trust you,” you promise again, biting your lip nervously. The problem, you suppose, is that you fail to trust yourself. Your own intuition seems faulty, these days. Maybe it’s the years of retirement weighing you down, maybe everything goes back to normal the moment you get used to this again. The violence. Russell. “But… what if I wake up, uh, disorientated again? What if I feel the need to leave?”
You give him a terribly vulnerable look, ready to accept whatever suggestions he has of locking you in your room, handcuffing you to the bed or even moving you into Park’s room so somebody can keep an eye on you.
“I’ll sleep in your bed with you,” he offers easily, as if your bed isn’t an uncomfortable single. He’s not a small man, either; there’s no way both of you will fit in your tiny bed without touching each other. “If you get up, I’ll know.”
… in the end, with the lack of a better solution, it’s not a choice, not really.
You pretend it is, your body pressing flush against his after he slips under your sheets. His warm breath fans your face, almost making you forget what you’d even worked yourself up over in the first place. Your body is squeezed between his and the cold brick wall of the safehouse, if you so much as move in your sleep, Russell will know.
It’s strange how such an obscure fear - a delusion, really - had even made its’ way into your head. Your days working with the Reds, willing or otherwise, are over. That chapter in your life is closed, and the only chapter you need to worry about is Russell and the end you’ll write together.
He’s right. Russell’s always right. Why would he lie to you?