Archive of Our Own ^beta

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"Mission... accomplished," Ethan confides to the comm, tight-voiced. "Insofar as Target blew up the control panel, then his brains. No parachute that I can see, so I'm rigging up something with a tarp. If I don't make it -"

"Where are you?" Benji cuts in. In his back Ethan can make out Brandt's - Will's - voice, remote, a blurred phantom pain. He closes his eyes briefly; opens them again at Benji's voice.

"Will says you’re crossing into the Marchfeld fields. Apparently his plan E features Ethan runs into trouble halfway into Austria, because, well, because Ethan."

Ethan tries again. "Tell Will..."

There's a crackle before Will's voice takes over, his lower tones as precise as if they were detailing some price intel.

"Ethan. On my signal, jump. You'll be all right."

"You don't know -"

"Plan E," Will says quietly. "I’ve had eleven fields covered with stacks of mattresses, a supposed homage to Cristo. Stacks, Ethan. You’re not breaking on my watch."

The plane plummets in ear-splitting depths of noise, but  Ethan's blood drums louder - relaying every thump and contraction of his heart.

"Will, I..."

But it's Benji again. "Right, now would be, you know, a top-notch time to skydive. Since Will has your back. Or backside, depending on how you land." And the plane is close enough that Ethan can indeed spot a stunning patchwork of whites and pale blues on the ground.

"Why would he do this," Ethan reflects aloud. Plan A, Ethan's one and only because he hardly ever finds the time to wing variations, had him disarm Target, punch Target, then gag and tie him, then land the plane and drive over to the Gänserndorf safe house where Will & Team are waiting. It was a sound, a sober (for Ethan) plan. Now the upholstered field leaps into focus, pat when Benji's sigh coalesces in his ear.

"You utter twit," Benji is saying. "Seriously, Ethan? Jump! I'm pretty sure it will hit you before you hit the goosedown."

Hope, Ethan tells himself. He takes the leap, the tarp unfolding above his head while his heart expands into its own galvanic impulse. Hope trumps smarts in matters of the heart, however brittle and uncertain. But the tarp holds, and the fall becomes a return, and a pure streak of joy, all the way down the bright sky.

[Edit: It’s Mission:Impossible, so we’ll assume that the plane crashed into a nearby body of water instead of setting fire to the mattresses and rural Austria.]

Chapter Text

Two soft exhales into their kiss, Will pulls back and tells Ethan “I can’t be a field agent, I've got a cat now”.

Ethan smiles at Will’s rumpled face; allows that fond warmth to mob him, that odd strain of tenderness whenever Will’s inner analyst emerges mid-situation to parse the situation. Ethan knows Will well enough by now that he can extract the hidden grain of subtext - Will’s fear that Ethan won’t want him if Will stops playing an active role in his team.

“We’ll figure it out,” he says, touching his fingers to Will’s cheek in reassurance. “Just - when did you buy a cat? You never mentioned one in Dubai. Or Mumbai. Or here.“ Here being Seattle, where Ethan rose from his table once his eyes could no longer tell Julia apart from the early nighthawks, letting closure settle over him before he called a new phone number and asked “Dinner?”.

“Not buy. It is - was - the Secretary’s cat,” Will says, not quite looking Ethan in the eye. “He lived a solitary life, but he brought Kit to work on emergency nights, and Kit somehow took a fancy to me. Don’t laugh.” (Ethan, typically, is already ahead of the warning.) “Apparently that was enough for me to become the sole legatee of his cat. I just got the call. He - the Secretary - was there for me in my darkest hour, I can't...”

Ethan is back to serious. He knows the weight a mentor will carry, for better or worse: Jim Phelps still casts a long shadow in Ethan’s dreams. And he is glad that the Secretary stepped up to help Will shoulder a guilt largely caused by Ethan's actions. He nods briefly; leans forward as if to kiss Will’s parted lips again, but pauses a breath away to murmur, “Choose the mission. It’s brief, clear-cut, it will only delay you a day or two. Then… call me? I want to meet Kit.”

So far so faultless. Ethan dispatches the loose ends on his end; lands in D. C. nine-tenth sound of body, his mind wholly on Will. Amazingly they have a week to call their own, and so when Will texts him an hour and a location, Ethan, who was raised right by his mom, buys a bottle of Scotch and a toy mouse, and knocks a jaunty tattoo against Will’s door.

Only then remembering he was also raised a dog person on a farm.

“Do come in,” Will says, slouching under the black Siberian wrapped heavily across his shoulders. “And meet Kit. Kit, Ethan.”

The cat, staring malevolently from his vantage point, tucks his furry tail muffler-like around Will’s neck.

Ethan’s hunch is on mute, so Ethan draws from one of his ingrained knacks. He leans forward, all supple charm, extends a hand, palm up, and says, “Here, Kitty, Kitty, lovely Lady Kitty.” There is no person Ethan Hunt cannot become: when Kit remains impervious, Ethan tunes his voice to a purr and goes for the kill.

“Meow. Meeeeeow? Mrrrrrr. Krrr-mrr. Prr-RRR-prrr-RRR-prrrmmm.” A beat. “Krrrrr?”

“Frrrr!” the cat snarls.

“Er,” Will says.

“Nice girl,” Ethan concludes lamely, aware that his feline grace may have struck the wrong note.

“His name is Kittridge,” Will clarifies, raising a hand to rub his neck - and giving Kit’s a resigned scratch. “What can I say. The Secretary liked his little joke.”

Damnit, Ethan thinks, but risks a step forward. There is no abyss, no cliff edge or 100-foot drop, but Kit narrows his eyes and Ethan brakes to an unEthanlike stop. Abort. Abort!

“Don’t mind him, he’s a bit possessive,” Will says blithely, motioning Ethan along the hallway. “Here, sit down. Want a drink of that nice Scotch?”

Or four, Ethan thinks grimly, adjusting his body language. How do you tell a fatherless furball that you, another longhaired orphan, can relate but are not looking for a surrogate dad in Will, no, really, cross my heart. Will hands him a glass, and Ethan's fingertips linger on that warm hand. Kit hisses.

It's gonna be a long courtship.

Chapter Text

The IMF’s New Year’s Parties were, in the best IFM tradition, open game. So said the agents, admins, analysts and techies as a body. So agreed MI6 with a twinge of envy. So frowned the CIA, who prided themselves on a “No Party” line, at least when it came to New Year’s Eve.

Among the IMF’s Greatest NYE Hits, special mention must be made of 2005, after which grappling hooks were barred from any and all IMF revels; 2009, when a partygoer sneaked a self-destructing message into the countdown clock, causing the sprinklers to douse the entire espionage corps; 2015, when no fewer than six Secretary Hunleys took over the dance floor (bets are still being placed on whether the real Hunley was the one doing the jitterbug); 2016, when Benji Dunn and Luther Stickell remote-controlled all the champagne bottles to pop simultaneously, launching a stampede for the buffet; and 2017, when a rumour spread like wildfire, halfway through Hunley’s speech, that Ethan Hunt was attending the party.

Ethan Hunt never attended the IMF's New Year’s Party.

To be precise, Ethan Hunt never attended the IMF's parties, period. To Hunt, parties were part and parcel of missions. Streamlined tuxes, pigs-in-blanket and backdrop harpsichords held no appeal to him in and of themselves - not since Prague, 1996, IMF old hands would add, nodding at each other in shrewd understanding. 

Now the old hands remembered 2015 and shrugged. The young bloods dared each other to tug on this Hunt’s ears, cheeks or hair, only to cease and desist at close quarters. Ethan shrugged in turn; removed his bow-tie; unbuttoned his dress shirt, flashing the base of his throat just when Secretary Hunley was intoning about the sanctity of every life saved; and, having gained clearance (and a few wolf-whistles), turned a back handspring, telegraphing in unspoken Ethanspeak: rumors of my injuries were vastly exaggerated, asshats. 

Hunley sighed loudly into the mic, and the game was on.

If anyone had doubts about Ethan’s resolve to partake of the cheer, these were soon laid to rest. It is in the nature of an IMF agent to push himself above and beyond the call of duty until his very vitals dance to the tune of necessity. And since duty was pleasure, Ethan Hunt became the fevered centerpiece of the evening. He drank, smiled, whooped, and fielded any and all conversational curved balls thrown his way; but it soon became apparent that his mind, Hunt’s fine-tuned sixth sense, was not quite in the moment. His eyes kept scouting the festive hall until they found what they were looking for. From then on Ethan kept to his spot, and he kept his gaze on the figure - the deceptively unassuming man in a sober black tie - propped against the corner wall.

He flinched only once, when the main lights went out. But that was when the floor lit up with a cat's-cradle of electric reds and blues, thin lines criss-crossing each other, as the loudspeakers moved to a heavy bass line and the Chief Techie yelled, “Laser Maze!” 

The hype revved up. Even the Secretary leant forward, hands on his knees, to watch his best agents, the cream of the crop, rising to the dare. But it soon appeared that the techies, these bastards, had the laser wires leap along the funky backdrop, making it near-impossible to anticipate one line’s move after clearing another - especially when a good twenty dancers turned and twisted, and inevitably bumped into one another. For a while it looked like Jane Carter would reach the coveted central void, until her wedge heel slipped on a smear of spilled gin, and there the Fates met her. 

But just as the techies were about to turn off the show and crow in triumph, two figures changed the game.

The game became - a duet. A shadow theatre of what their fights at each other’s side must have been, back when Brandt was still part of Hunt’s team, before he was missioned to London as Our Man in MI6, Hunley’s guarantee against any further reveal of inter-agency fuckery. Now a visible shadow, Brandt was facing Hunt only to aid and abet his obstacle course. Hunt did a tornado spin, and Brandt extended a hand above a higher red line so Hunt could grasp it and lever himself into a leap. Hunt called out, and Brandt executed a flawless rolling evasion. They danced to each other’s pulse, their moves unpredictable except by each other. An onset, a breach, a reunion, a mating parade, that got them closer and further in, and still closer, until the beat pushed the lasers to close ranks, and two bodies moved at one into that dwindling center... pressed against each other, embracing... the intermittent neons accenting Hunt’s tense face as he bent it into Brandt’s shoulder, Brandt’s body steadfast, a presence and an oath.

They reached that safe place, and the maze went dark.

When the lights went up after a good two minutes of clapping, the floor was empty. The evening itself was far from over, and the game had held enough audience appeal that Hunt’s team, or what was left of it, had to battle ? and ! with good-natured (or, in Stickell’s case, strong-natured) rebuffs. As for Hunt and Brandt, they must have taken celebrations in their own hands. And while the IMF oldsters scoffed at the young bloods’ racy game of Clue (“Bareback, in Hunley’s office, with Hunt’s L’Oréal gloss”), it was generally agreed that 2017 would remain a banner year in the NYE archives.

Chapter Text

The Sons of Brynhildr (or S.o.B.s, their Luther-coined moniker), that wealthy but terminally inept alt-right coterie, wouldn’t have been in the IMF’s focus but for one small fact. When it was known that their recluse leader had acquired half of the formula for a new bioweapon and would be finagling a deal for the other half in his own Walhalla, the cross hairs of the IMF rose with one accord, and Ethan Hunt stepped up a gear by calling the Secretary himself.

Speed was of the essence. Which is why Ethan’s team made it to the S.o.Bs’ Secret Hideout, built into the side of a deserted cliff, one hour ahead of the deal, and why Ethan decided they should lose no time in reaching the Superly Secret Eagle’s Nest and getting the upper hand on Mr. Strømberg before his formulette met its match. There was no time to plan a masked infiltration; the central elevator system had proved impervious to Benji’s wooing (“Plus ça change”: Benji), and the stairwells were too heavily guarded. On the flip side, the S.o.Bs, being terminally inept, had neglected to safeguard the outside glass elevator. This tiny contraption had been designed to cater exclusively to the cliff owner, whenever Mr Strømberg felt like taking a stroll up his property to enjoy a Napoleonic view.

“You’re with me,” Ethan told Brandt, profiler extraordinaire, while Benji hacked the system. “We get one shot at making him and neutralizing him, I’ll need your eye.”

Brandt was eyeing the elevator. Skeptically. 

“I’m not sure that thing holds two.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Ethan’s on the petite side.”

“I’m not -”

“H minus forty,” Jane reminded them. Brandt glanced at her statuesque form; at Luther’s bulky shadow, hunkered down behind his SIG; and took a martyred first step into the cabin, plastering himself to the left-side wall. Ethan mirrored the move, leaving - Brandt’s inner analyst gauged frantically - a paltry two inches between their clothed groins. Benji closed the door on them. 

“All righty then!” he said on comm. “Sending the glass dildo up on its way, which, yes, Brandt, my little joke. Now, I’ve silenced the soundtrack, but you can still enjoy the - almighty shit! ”

The expletive came hard upon the elevator shuddering and tilting - first on the left, slightly, before it switched to a bigger angle on the right side and stopped altogether. The lurch put an effective end to their no-man’s-zone, throwing Brandt off balance and against Ethan, whose reflexes had him slap his palm to the glass ceiling while Brandt clutched at his waist. The elevator, seemingly happy with the result, killed its hum.

“Benji! Fuck!”

“Sorry! Sor - wait, why am I apologizing? You’d think the Fjord Führer kept that thing at a minimum maintenance. Hmmm, looks like the counterweight’s jammed.”

“Un-jam it, then! Benji! Un-jam the damn thing!”

“You’re panicking,” Ethan told Brandt. He dug his heels and tried to shimmy his hips aside to give his partner more room, to no effect. Brandt’s knee was wedged between his thighs, unready and unwilling to move. “Don’t. We’re on track with time to spare. If Benji can’t move us up again, I’ll have him open the door, and -”

“Oh, hell, no,” Brandt gasped, tightening his embrace on Ethan’s waist. “I’ve seen The Towering Inferno. Twice. We are not opening that door.”

“The roof trap, then -” and Ethan twisted his head up. Brandt was a body mass pressed to his chest, Brandt’s weight abandoned to their situational hug, his breath hot and fractured against Ethan’s neck. None of this was helping Ethan focus.

“Nope. No roof trap,” Benji parsed helpfully, as a blast of wind off the Baltic rocked the elevator. “Looks like Villy Vonka prized aesthetics over safety.”

“What kind of architect designs a seal-tight elevator the size of a broom closet? ” Brandt yelled. Ethan could feel his nerves practically on vibrate. “God, I hate heights.” 

Very carefully, Ethan unglued his free hand from the ceiling. He let his fingertips touch the flap of Brandt’s ear before he plucked the comm-link out and moved his mouth to the naked shell - a series of exact gestures that signaled reassurance before it took voice.

“Brandt,” he said, and then, upon murky second thoughts, “Will. Focus on me. You and me? We’re going to be fine.”

It worked - or Will did. Will’s close-quartered body relaxed perceptibly, and he pushed his cheek, slippery with sweat, against Ethan’s neck as if to pick up evidence of his pulse. Still acting on his gut - if his gut was currently stuck in his rib cage, another shaken cavity -, Ethan wrapped his arm around Will. Time stilled. Time became intimacy, a reprieve, preliminary to…

But the cabin was the first to stir.

“Got it,” came Benji’s voice in Ethan’s comm. “Er, not the counterweight, but I can move you guys up. Slanted, but up. Is Brandt okay? He’s gone incommunicado.”

“We’re good,” Ethan said, even as Will raised his head, his blue eyes visible in the penumbra, filled with clarity. There was another Nordic gust, but Will said nothing: just let Ethan have and hold his gaze. The elevator, still listing, resumed its crawl upwards.

“Could have been worse,” Benji chatted philosophically in Ethan’s ear. “I mean, you could have been assaulted by gulls, or a snow avalanche, or…”

“Next time, we get a paraglider,” Will murmured, and Ethan’s heart surged with warmth - tumescent - at the intimate quip.

“Next time, we get a room,” he parried, and took Will’s soft laughter as his viaticum when the elevator came to its final halt, and the door opened on their next possible.

Chapter Text

He stares at the face in the mirror, the creased expressive face. Strong-nosed, strong-willed face, the broad forehead and the small, V-shaped line above the nose speaking of sleepless nights, and focus, and the fear of going too far that once held every attraction for Ethan Hunt, who goes too far as a matter of course. That Ethan goes too far, falls too deep, goes without saying, but that Will used to be haunted by the potential casualties of far and deep was why Ethan fell for him once. Loved him, even. Yeah. Loved him.

He tries to smile into the mirror. Watches the straight lips twitch, half rueful. Reaches out to past memories, a grin here, a spill of laughter there while clinging to the inside of a swerving van. The hooded eyelids served Will’s subdued face, a face that could and did relax when stroked into a ceasefire of stress. Ethan’s calloused touch did the trick back when...

(Ethan’s caresses, stolen between this call to arms and that bicker over risks, limits, what if you don’t, their multiple face-offs over the years.)

The room is kept dark intentionally. It’s not easy to look at the reflected face and not look into the reflected eyes. “Blue is true,” Ethan’s words to Will on that first night, his body braced with intent above Will’s offered surrender. Close, close, close. 

Now the face feels like a close-up, but too far away to touch.

“Ethan.”

Benji’s voice in his back - hushed, a touch of rust to it. 

“Ethan, please. It’s been weeks, you can’t keep up this… this.”

He cannot, will not move - not when he can stay still and stare on.

“You’re going to get all of us in trouble. It’s bad enough that you kept his picture so you could - you do know they have to erase all traces of him, right? You’ll… Jesus God, I have the Secretary breathing down my neck!”

Stare on.

“Ethan, mate. This is not you.”

Stare.

Chapter Text

The safehouse is one of those anally bland interiors - minimum furniture, beige walls, a long-suffering leather couch on which Ethan is currently seated, one sleeve rolled up on his forearm. The coffee table before him hosts a syringe and a vial, both laid out by Brandt, who points at them in turn.

“Serum. Antidote. You, ah, know you don’t have to do this, right?”

“I want to,” Ethan says, laconic as ever. He looks weary, his head lolling back on the couch’s backrest as if in rehearsal of that loose vulnerability. “I trust you.”

Brandt wants to match Ethan’s show of confidence, but the truth is that while he is Ethan’s man to the bone, he doesn’t always trust Ethan. Ethan is impulse incarnate; turns thought into action off the cuff, and, as per his file, has been known to give his heart to the wrong person. Ethan would put his neck out for Brandt the way he did lately for Benji, but hé keeps his heart close to the vest. Keeps his fears and doubts in the shadow; keeps his ethos there, his commitments half spoken, belatedly, his feelings a no-visibility zone. Six months of separation have not made Brandt unfaithful, but they have left his belief shaken and cobwebbed by Ethan’s silences, plural, regarding in no particular order: his temporary death, his unceasing obsession with Ilsa Faust, and his choice of a plan that cast his lover (ex-lover?) as the traitor selling his family out for the greater good.

Ethan digging his taciturn heels had soured their reunion. Brandt had retaliated by inserting himself in Ethan’s scheme of cosplaying a British MI6 bigwig so he could “coax” the truth out of Britain’s First Gentleman and use it to free Benji. Benji, when told about the particulars of his rescue, had laughed himself silly.

“And then you roofied the British PM? And he hit on Our Will?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny -”

“Oh, this is priceless. Priceless! Good ol’ scopolamine, always up for a lark.” Benji’s eye had strayed over to the leftover vials, waiting to be packed and sent back to Luther’s BFF in the R&D division. “Hey, what about a souped-up round of Truth or Dare while Hunley sorts out the paperwork? We could dilute the stuff, and -” 

“Absolutely not.” (Brandt)

“Yeah, no. Ethan would pick Dare every round and get bored. Brandt would pick Truth and bore us.” (Luther)

“Huh.” (Ethan)

They’d left it at that. Until today, when Ethan had come to Brandt and laid his cards down, offering no-barrels-held openness with an iron guarantee. Brandt had turned the proposal down. Ethan, being Ethan, had pressed his ground. Brandt, as always, had yielded. 

With a proviso. “I've no idea how to mess with that stuff,” he says now, dimming the lights. He checks the nearby bottled water; picks up the syringe. “So I’m giving you half of the dose. My guess is, it will make you less woozy, but still inclined to... I don’t know, say whatever comes first to your mind.”

Ethan says nothing, only holds his forearm out. 

“Fuck,” Brandt says, feelingly, and waits the next minute out. “You good?”

“I’m good. Unaltered.” Ethan begins a sigh that goes “Huh” in the next second, as a warm flush creeps up his face. He swallows, once, his body sinking into the pliant, top-grain leather; kindling a memory that Brandt will not allow himself to chase. 

“You still good?”

“Yeaaah,” Ethan says. His speech flow drags a little, though a far cry from the British PM’s solemn slur.  “Bit… warm, not uncomf’table. I wanna do this.”

“Good,” Brandt says, and tugs up his own sleeve so he can push the needle in. Ethan’s eyes widen and he struggles up, but his limbs are too loose to retrieve verticality before Brandt has pressed down on the plunger.

If he’s learnt one thing these past four years, it’s to keep up with Ethan’s momentum.

“That’s - not really - hygienic. Why d’you do it, Will?”

“Because… this is no int’rogation,” Will says. His posture mirrors that of Ethan on the couch; he can feel his face, never the tautest composure, slackening further. “No makin' you dance to my tune. Not I. Not ever.”

“So we dance together.” And Ethan pivots his shoulders gingerly, then his knees, a two-step maneuvering of his long form so he can face Will on the couch. “I lead.”

“‘Course you do,” Will mutters. 

“Why are you mad at me?” 

Three answers bubble up from Will’s still-sore heart into Will’s dry mouth. Parting his lips, he takes the shortest route between pang and truth. “You died. I wasn’t there.” The next sentence tumbles out past his caution, but not against his will. “Only saved you next, well, my four-by-four did, and the moment I disin…crust…”

“Crus’ted,” Ethan provides helpfully.

“Whatever. Got you out of that wreck, got a good-boy pat for my pains, and, pat on it, you chased after her. On a bike. Christ.” Will goes for a shake of his head, thinks better of it. He still hasn’t met Ethan’s gaze.  “Look, I… our three months. Before London, Paris, Vienna, before you died on me and I lied for you. Our you’n’me time, when I walked at your side. Took point for you, Ethan Hunt’s man, in and out of bed. Comrade-at-arms, not at arm’s length. Now it’s been six months, and I... I can’t read us. I don’t know, I don’t know where we stand on the, the, the continuum of... our... partnership? Some analyst. So... here goes nothing."

(A beat. A breath. Will summoning his clarity for the money shot.) 

"Is Ilsa the brand-new Brandt?”

“Ilsa asked me to run away with her. I said no.”

“What if she’d asked to stay?”

Ethan’s hand misses Will’s face, tries again, on a mission to tip up his chin. Will lifts his gaze at last, finds Ethan’s burnt green. It burns Will; and out of the fire comes the raw, the drug-driven release of emotion, battling the focus enabled by the drug’s low dosage. Ethan is speaking, is answering, but Will can no longer hear him. You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine, their cyclical gambit. Now Mine spills out of him: Will’s heart, pain layered over fear of not knowing if his bluff had kept Ethan away from Hunley’s claws; Will’s solitary nights; his thirst for even a peep of Ethan, monkey-paw'd by the Viennese CCTV when it showed him Ethan clasping a lovely brunette to his heart as they Tarzaned down the Opera façade.

“I fucking love you,” Will says, rough-spoken and humid, and stops in time to catch the tail end of Ethan’s confession. It must have gone on for a while: Ethan’s face is downright open, and he is waving his hands in the air between them, intently, because Ethan is never so intent as when he argues with Will. (Whether the argument is about duplicating nuclear codes or Ethan squeezing the toothpaste everywhere, which Will rightfully complains makes a mess of the tube.)

“... and it wasn’t her face I drew.”

Will frowns. A truth hiccup?

“Of course it was. I used that drawing to find you.”

“No, I mean, yeah, but. All through those six months. I drew your face, that face” - his hands framing Will’s flushed, helpless features - “every morning. Bought a stack of papier Canson in Paris so I could sketch Lane and Ilsa from memory, but after that, first light of dawn, I drew you. Then I had to burn the paper in the sink, but for those twenty minutes, I had you. I couldn’t draw your voice, couldn’t draw the ghost of your peppermints or the tang of your sweat, but I had your face. I didn’t have you, but I had you. To grip me hard and save me from free-falling. Again.”

The sweat is in Will’s eyes now, but he keeps his gaze steady. 

“As you do. Will, you’re the only person I’ve wanted to... stick around... since Julia.” Ethan’s head tumbles back onto the couch, the toll of speaking added to his overall fatigue, his hands reaching out for Will’s shoulders. “No missions. No masks. Just - around.”

Will doesn’t say You’re my person, too, but he takes advantage of the gravitational pull and bends his mouth to the back of his leader’s hand.

They wait the drug out. The antidote is at arm’s length, but neither of them reaches for it, perhaps because of Luther’s BFF telling Luther that it tastes “like chickenshit on nettles, man” and their mouths want a first go at lovemaking. The lethargy is being lifted with every passing minute, their filters sliding back in place, honesty an added layer. Will pulls back to say “Hunley is GrandJurying us all over again, wants me to back him up. I want two weeks with you.” Ethan says “Three” and “I want those warm, warm hands”. One of their phones rings, and neither of them even thinks of glancing aside at the screen.

Everything’s going to be alright.

Chapter Text

10 Things You Need To Know About Cooking With Ethan

1. Plan for a tight schedule. Yes, both of you cling to your patchwork domesticity, and yes, your Swedish grandmother (still convinced you’re an accountant with endless downtime) did trust you with her Gravlax recipe. Alas, by the time you’re flipping the salmon for its second luxury cure massage, odds are the Syndicate will have toppled the Eiffel Tower and Ethan will already have one foot out the garden window.

2. Instructional rundowns are a lost cause. Never mind that the Internet holds remarkable soufflé intel: while you’re still pondering the pros and cons of spatula vs. spoon, Ethan will have cut a corner and started cracking all the eggs, confidently mixing yolks and white.

3. On that note, double any and all recipe ingredients. Ethan will succeed at Beef Wellington, but only after trying. And trying. And once more.

4. Expect him to notice your inclination to cook in a tie. Teasingly. It’s all right - Ethan knows you are an old hand at disarm wrestling, and will expect a quip about hair ties.

5. He'll look adorable in that Mr Good Lookin’ is Cookin’ apron Jane gave him last Christmas. Won’t care if he does. (You will. Don't let him regift it to you.) Just make sure he puts a shirt on before he starts deep-frying the shrimp.

6. Most people look at an egg whisk and see an egg whisk. Ethan sees an exhilarating contraption of steel, electricity and multiple speeds. Consequently, he will start at high speed and splatter foam everywhere.

7. In the interest of continued domestic peace, avoid the following:
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“This taco looks like a deconstructed lettuce. I’m just saying.”
"Didn't know MI6 had upgraded margarine to a priority threat."
“Four minutes to the ding, and we forgot the salt.”
“Beer in a soufflé? Who are you, Guy Fieri?”
“There’s being practical, and there’s hanging upside down from the range hood to rewire the motor with a paring knife, Ethan!”

To say nothing of
“Let’s just order pizza.”

8. He will surprise you. He is Mr Adapt and Overcome, who will stop at nothing, not even repurposing the IMF’s Multi-Function Thermal Knife to prise oysters. Which you cannot authorize. No, really. Not when R&D are still tearing their hair over Ethan using their state-of-the-art Molecular Torch to caramelize his onions.

9. Keep an eye on his phone. The moment you turn your back, Benji will be texting about “the Bangkok issue”. Ethan will text back. Pat on cue, Benji will call. Ethan will switch to folding the whites one-handedly while musing aloud on surveillance drones. When the phone rings again, you’ll snatch it and yell into the speaker What part of we’re making a soufflé do you not get?, only for Hunley’s raised-eyebrow voice to reply, “Actually, I was wondering if either of you has seen the news  about the Eiffel Tower”.

10. Eat the result. However long past the ding, whether you’re facing each other over your dining-room table (complete with candle) or sprawled on the kitchen floor, your tie and his hair faintly singed, this side of exhaustion. The kitchen will be warm and messy, the core of togetherness. The washing-up will wait. The world will wait. Ethan will feed you a spoonful of soufflé, chased by a mouthful of wine. And you will, finally, finally! taste it, as will Ethan, who thought he could only have it with Julia and now shares it with you. However raw, or burnt, or transient…

... you will taste contentment.

Chapter Text

To his superiors William E. Brandt is an asset wrapped in a riddle inside a paradox.

He is, as his instructors instruct him, a man who can turn his short-cropped hair and putty face into a blind angle; make a child's play of hiding in plain sight, the moment he puts on a grey sweater and blends into these or those decrepit surroundings. It is telling that his fellow rookies have to ask who he is again after he briefly steps out of the shadows and kicks Trevor Hanaway’s ass at the gym six ways from Sunday.

And he, the forgettable man, is endowed with an eidetic memory. An ingrained facial recognition app. A gift that had Analysis perk its collective ear lately and put out a career relocation offer worth a king’s ransom.

The Secretary has another offer. One that begins with “Croatia” and ends with “You’re not the only one with total recall. And Hunt won't take kindly to our keeping an eye on his canoodling if he makes his babysitter. So... you're it. Just, er, do your thing and blend into the sea coast, will you?”

Will does, and Hunt never has an inkling of his presence. Even on the day he and his missus throw the day’s planning to the wind and veer off to a crowded little inn, where Will crowds along of necessity, Hunt’s bright eyes merely browse Will’s hooded lids and lined forehead, the briefest call before they pause again on his sunny wife. And the crowd’s benign curiosity makes it easy for Will to take in their radiance. Hunt: the man beneath the myth, gentle, avid for his companion’s joy before his own, a man who, Will knows, has suffered the unseen but palpable hurt of watching hers. And she, a nurse taught in the body’s secret funds of resilience, now summoning her own to give him that reprieve. Julia Hunt, so tender and translucent in her affections that she stirs a pang of vicarious love in Will’s chest.

The thought that they are his protégés, unknown to them, fuels the pang. It is easy to admire Hunt, whose exploits are the talk of Spytown, but Will can prize other agents like, say, Hanaway, whose stunts are just as smooth, if less lauded. It is the vulnerability in Hunt, matching Julia’s subdued strength, that gets Will. He watches over them for three days; watches them watch the waves break and glitter over the pebbled beach, and something unnamed but Adriatic takes hold of him. They are beautiful and they love each other with a raw devotion that makes Will’s heart clench with a difference. It is not professional; it's not the done thing, to treat assets from the heart, but he does.

Still, Will is a field agent. And his hooded eyes are sharp enough to pick on the two men whose interest in the American newlyweds rings a less-than-benign note. Will turns himself into the dust and cracks of the inn’s walls, and works the note. And feels riled enough that he reaches back to his analyst homies, who do not lay his nerves to rest. Hunt’s romantic choice to get married under his and Julia’s actual names (seriously, Ethan?) is doing him no favour with the late Davian’s clientele. When the analysts finally intone Serbian hit squad, the nightmare hits Will fair and square.

He meets it with protocol. Secures the access, briefs his team, prepares for the worst. And, above all things, keeps the assets in the dark. But deep down his fear endures, that protocol doubles as his superior's unspoken Don’t let Hunt know his IMF status is jeopardizing his wife, lest he choose her over us. Will watches Ethan play skipping stones across the brilliant sea, Ethan’s hands aiming each pebble with tranquil surety, and his Adriatic love washes over him.

“... Are you all right?”

It lacks a quarter to midnight and he is huddled in his corner. Ethan has gone upstairs, where Will is reasonably certain he will be safe for the night, and Will thought Julia gone along. Instead she is leaning into the shadows, forcing his gaze up.

“Why are you asking?” he asks, too shocked to pick a foreign language.

“You don’t seem well. Sorry, I don’t want to intrude, but it’s my job to notice when people are hurting and… I noticed you. I’m Julia, by the way. Julia Hunt. Is there any way I can help?”

Her face is like a lamp, lit from the inside, an open book of care. Will finds he cannot speak. The Croatian growl of voices rises in her back while he stares at her. It is her care that undoes him and pieces him back together, Brandt redux, a man who'll stare protocol in the face and remind the fucker that they all survive by situational ethics.

“Take me to Ethan,” he says, getting up. “He’s not going to like what I have to say, but he’ll trust me. And I’ll help. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.” 

If anyone at her engagement party had told Julia that her honeymoon would see her in another man’s arms, the two of them entwined on a stone ledge, in a sea cave three-quarters submerged… she would have laughed her socks off. Or, if “anyone” was Rick, locked up the vodka.

Then. Not now—one abduction a while back, another narrowly averted by Ethan and Will Brandt, the man whose soggy gray sweater now holds the two of them together. Will spotted the ledge, but it was Julia who said their best chance to beat the odds of hypothermia lay in sharing body heat. Now they share that chaste, all-embracing intimacy: her tits crushed against his chest, his leg hooked onto her calf to prevent her from slipping past the wet rock edge, his warm breath mingling with the two hot tears coursing down her cheeks.

“He’ll find us,” Will murmurs. He has been saying this for the last fifteen minutes. She knows he’s trying to distract her, nurture her, even, with his Ethan anthem. He’s been spinning the tallest tales about her husband, all of which sound (impossibly) true in his mouth: Ethan had begun to tell her about the missions, bits and bobs let out very, very carefully of the bag, but Will can tell Ethan chapter and verse. Which only underscores the strangeness of Ethan not knowing him. When she first ushered Will into their room earlier that night, Ethan greeted him with a gun barrel and a volley of curt questions, met head-on by Will. Then, but only after yanking the stranger into the bedside lamp’s glare and looking at him closely, did Ethan nod and release the ally.

The ally he told to grab Julia and run when they made their way out of the inn only to find Will’s men unconscious, and the night became enemy fire. Running took Will and Julia to the sea, to a stolen little dinghy, to more gunfire, to a leak, and finally to their blind, freezing swim into this cave.

She’s exhausted. And scared: what if the gunfire holds out until the water hits the roof of the cave? But most of all, she is grieving. She was naive enough to think that she could be with Ethan, and the big picture apparently won’t have it.

At least they’re above water and moderately warm, courtesy of Will's blessedly ugly sweater. Waterlogged sweater. Swater?

“Undercover sweater. I usually wear a tie,” Will says, his tone the only dry thing about him. But it does the trick: she laughs, and, miraculously, her shoulders relax in his arm’s custody.

“There you go. Close your eyes, sweetheart. He'll be here soon.”

“What if he isn't?”

“Then I ’ll find him,” Will says, his voice stripped of doubt. It sounds like an oath; and, because the human psyche will cling to any slippery hold, it puts Julia in mind of her wedding vows, back when toy rings and a hospital Padre were all it took to have faith.

She closes her eyes and follows the ups and downs of his breath.

Six Serbian nationals are dead or dying a few miles away, and Ethan Hunt would love to claim the credit. Not to steal Brandt’s share of thunder (how did Brandt find him anyway?! Ethan was the one who gripped his ally’s neck and marked him conveniently with a nano-tracker, before he cleared a way out for him and Julia), but to spare him a roasting.

“A roasting might be nice,” Brandt deadpans. “I’m still feeling the cold.”

He and Julia, Ethan thinks, the beat freezing in his heart. But Brandt has sworn up and down that she's fine; is being flown home by the Zagreb team Ethan had instructed to locate the dot. Why Brandt didn’t go with her, or back to his men, but chose instead to retrace Ethan’s path of sound and fury - arriving in time to confiscate the sixth Serbian’s gun and put it to good use - is beyond Ethan’s knackered mind. But feels like the silver lining to his personal dark cloud.

Which may explain why he turns his body, propped against a silver fir (they’ve made it to the Gorski Kotar forests, nature’s gracious gift to agents in need of extraction), and, on a hunch, starts to confide in Brandt. Ethan’s higher-ups view him as an isolated system filled to the brim with entropy, to be unleashed wherever disorder calls for more, rectifying disorder. They ignore the fact that chaos leaves Ethan bruised, chipped and tenderized; hankering for the love and stability once bestowed by Wisconsin’s sun-flecked meadows. Ethan thought he’d found them in Phelps’s jaded solidness, later in Musgrave’s offer to manage him with charm and empathy. Twice fooled, shame on him. But Julia… Julia was a fool’s gold made true. Julia’s sunniness brought back his childhood, the same promise of unconditional love, only for Ethan’s hankering to blight her. And now blight her again.

He doesn’t know why he gives Brandt a halting, condensed version of this. Ethan Hunt has no BFF and no confessor. No designated listener, if you except his occasional catch-ups with Luther, and they're both old hands at masculine reserve. But Brandt proved himself Ethan's and Julia’s guardian angel by flouting orders, down to taking his own unsanctioned hit for Ethan’s sake. He’ll be lucky if the IMF doesn't give him a leaden handshake on parting with him. 

As far as Ethan can remember, no one has done him a solid of this magnitude.

Mentally, once again, he reviews the scraps of data - dates, names, one of them the Sesame to a treasure cave of intel - he overheard the Serbians toss about before he mowed them down. Doesn’t share the scraps, but he does tell Brandt that Julia was only the first pawn in a next-level game of checkers. And might be again, which is why he intends to twist the Secretary’s arm… (Ethan pauses. Brandt pushes.) All right, Ethan will go deep undercover, in jail if he must, to chase that grain of intel. And in exchange, he will ensure that Julia is never put on the chessboard again. 

“... Dead? What do you mean, dead?”

Ethan presses the back of his head to the fir's bark, too drained to care if the sticky resin mats his hair. The next words fall like pebbles from his mouth, but instead of gliding beautifully across the waves, they plummet down an endless depth.

“This all - stops here. Us. Our marriage. Our… everything, because she can never be associated with me. As long as I live, and she does, I might as well pin a target on her back. But say she died, here, today…”

“No! Hell, no, that's way too -”

“Brandt. You’re IMF. Do the math.”

“I do, and I’m better at it than you, apparently. You wanna destroy her? Huh?”

The outrage jolts Ethan alert. And he would get in Brandt’s face, only Brandt is already ahead of him, facing him, the filtered sunlight falling across the broad slope of his forehead and down the ridge of his nose. Ethan can see both why Brandt’s face escaped his notice before (and Ethan has twenty-twenty acuity) and why it no longer does. If Brand tucks his chin in and lowers his eyelids, his face becomes a rugged sum of blurs. But here, now, his gaze nailing Ethan’s soul, it reshapes itself around the luminous blue eyes with their flecks of grey. Will’s eyes are a close-up of nerves and clarity, and Ethan can only stare back.

“Pronounce her dead, and she can never see her folks again. Her friends. Patients. Co-workers. She’ll be torn, alienated, alone , stranded in a mental crumple zone. And how safe can she be, anyway? Think, Hunt. Think. Facial recognition. DNA tracking. What if they don’t buy it? What next, does she wear a mask 24/7? Undergo surgery? That way lies murder.”

“I can’t see any other way!”

“I can.” Brandt rubs the heel of his hand across his brow. Stubborn, a grounding force, even as a rhythmic thumping breaks the trees' silence, proclaiming the rescue helicopter’s arrival. “Do you trust me?”

Ethan looks at his ally - friend - unsanctioned confidant. Glances down at Brandt’s hand on his arm, the touch now kindling another premonition of loss. Julia, Brandt. Found only to be mourned at short notice, both of them.

“Yeah” - spoken at close quarters, eye to eye. “I trust you.”

Brandt tells his ear: “She dumps you. Moves on. Moves in with a forgettable guy, grows forgettable by proxy. Soon, she’s an accidental crack in your history. For all purposes and intents your paths have diverged. Make her a zero-gain stake, and the enemy will roll his dice elsewhere. And then, you and she can -” 

Ethan raises his head. “A forgettable guy?”

Brandt - Will - shrugs. “I’m pretty good at nondescript, I’m told.”

I couldn’t forget you now, Ethan thinks in a scalding jolt of clarity.

“I’m sorry you can’t have what you had,” Brandt is saying, his voice husky but intent above the rumble. “But I’ll be damned if you and she don’t have what you still can.”

“By using you? She wouldn’t, and I -”

“Not using. Not if I offer.”

“Why?” Ethan shouts, a man of shortcuts and acceleration, cramming every implied meaning into the ask. Give me something to hold onto. Give me commitment, real, actual, this once, against the chaos that is my life. A tether line other than the helicopter’s hoist cable now being dropped, a neat little landing, into their dark clearing. Silently, Brandt grabs the line.

Ethan grabs the shapeless sweater, pulls him back, his ask a command. 

“Why, Brandt!”

The IMF trains its agents as polyglots, not merely to navigate their ways abroad, but as an additional means of escape during interrogation. Brandt doesn’t shun Ethan’s grip: he looks straight at him and mouths “Le coeur a ses raisons*” against the engine’s roar, before he anchors himself to the line. Leaving Ethan with a fractured future and a strange clue.

Sergei Yuriev will have six months to parse it.

*”The heart has its [irrational] reasons”, French philosopher Pascal’s musing about faith and love.

Against all expectations but his own, Will is not disavowed. He never doubted Ethan’s bartering clout, and thus greets the Secretary’s “The only reason I’m not booting you out, Brandt, is that if I do, Hunt walks. His words. Oh, and Analysis still wants you for their poster boy” with a mere

“Sir.”

Will gives himself three months to live up to his name and climb his new tether to the top. Makes it in two. Eidetic memory a plus, to say nothing of Ethan Hunt’s request that Brandt, and only Brandt, liaise with him. Four months in, Will is Chief Analyst, moonlighting as Ethan's operation manager and Ethan’s and Ethan’s ex-wife’s love courrier.

It’s complicated.

It’s further complicated by Will’s realization that both Ethan and Julia are clinging to him for reasons that exceed his self-appointed role as the decoy that will help devalue Julia as top hostage currency. Not that Will doesn’t play the part. As he rises to become the Secretary’s braintruster, so does he sink into the insignificant Erik (his middle name, the Swedish Brandts' hand-me-down). Erik it is who steers Julia's announcement to her nonplussed family that, yes, she is divorcing Ethan by default because he’s a sleaze who skedaddled and neither she nor the Virginia Department of Transportation have a clue where he is. It’s hard, Will knows, for Julia to sell Ethan as the crook who hoodwinked them all. The Meades are good people, but the more “who’d have thought” and “marry in haste” pontificating they pile on, the more excruciating they make it for her. As soon as is plausible, Will lets her take "Erik" to the family dinners so he can deflect some of that negative attention upon himself.

“They think you’re the anti-him,” she says later, seated in Erik’s new kitchen. (Will pulled rank the moment he could and commandeered the IMF’s safest house, an off-off-the-grid bulwark of a flat, packed with every security gewgaw. But well-proportioned and surprisingly cosy, once Julia moved in and went fabric-shopping.)

Will clinks his mug to hers. “Well, Ethan got first dibs on charisma.”

“ Bullshit,” Julia says, one bare foot kicking him lightly under the table. She showered while he was making their nightcaps - lemon balm leaves for her, mint and honey for him - and the legs and arms of her flannelette pajamas are rolled up, because she likes the comfort of an extra size. “You’re birds of a feather. Falcons, the two of you, crossed with sacrificial pelicans and a dash of yellow warblers - sweet-sweet-sweet, I’m so sweet.”

Will starts laughing. It’s happening more often than not, these days - and, once started, he cannot stop for love or money. When he shakes the tears out of his eyes, Julia’s face shows that strange proud joy, whenever she helps Will let go of the day’s tensions. He’d thought their 5-to-9 routines, nurse and spy facilitator, would ensure easy cohabitation, with himself the blip on her radar. He hadn’t foreseen the fierce care she would bestow on him, or that her curiosity about Ethan’s life would extend to his own. She simply refuses to view him as “the helper”, Will’s moniker for himself, which she forbids him to use at home.

He takes her out on regular dates, normal dates, to help move the divorce scenario along. Only to find that they both enjoy Shakespeare, karaoke evenings (“I knew it, you warbler! Now try Dean Martin, he's Ethan's favorite”), gravlax tartare, conferences on floriography, and racing each other to the top of Julia’s favorite climbing wall. (If Will thought he was entering a new, sedentary phase by renouncing fieldwork, Julia made short work of his illusions.) To the casual observer, it would seem that she has well and truly moved on, but Will knows better. Five months in, when her divorce and his extraction plans are - finally! - finalized, Erik sends Julia peonies at the hospital; Will arranges a drop in Moscow, masked up as a governmental health visitor sent to gauge the risks of a TB spread in an overcrowded prison. From there, it proves uncommonly easy to arrange a one-on-one with Ethan, who obliged by exhibiting textbook chills the moment Will paused before him.

“Hello, blue eyes,” Ethan rasps out in Russian, and Will, who deliberately forsook contact lenses, tries and fails to contain his smile. He had Ethan laid out and handcuffed to an examination table before he shooed the two burly male nurses out of the isolation facility. Now he bends over the bed-like structure and lowers his medical mask, so Ethan can read You are missed on his lips. The odds of a security cam in this sanitized nook is pretty low, but Will isn’t taking any chances.

Something shifts in the prisoner, some heart-deep surge of longing that fills the dark pupils in Ethan’s eyes as he strains up to meet Will’s gaze. And something in Will answers back, of equal tidal strength. He places his hand (“Warm-comfort hands”: Julia) on Ethan’s neck as if checking a pulse, and mouthes, You’re getting out. Any night next month, you’ll get the signal. Pay attention - here’s how.

“How’s your wife, Doctor,” Ethan asks instead, an insolent drawl belied by the anxious pupils.

Will shrugs him off, but his lips answer. Safe. I saw to it. 

I know, Ethan mouths back, slowly, so Will can parse the earnest words in his head. Back in the field, Will could Morse-code with the best, but lip reading was never his forte. Thank you. It helps me sleep at night, knowing she has you.

The Chief Analyst in Will pulls on his mind’s sleeve, a stark reminder that they're running out of time. The tide in him pulls stronger. She sleeps in my arms. I sleep over the bedsheets. We talk of you. He never told Ethan how Julia got inside his sweater to save her life, and now walks, sleepwalking if she must, to Will’s bed and embrace. He knows Ethan knows nothing else happens. Contrary to popular belief and the James Bond mythos, the IMF personnel welcome a good night’s sleep after a day spent pushing their bodies and/or minds to the brink of exhaustion.

What Ethan should know is that he haunts and cements their nights, down to Julia’s good-night kiss, that tastes sometimes of wet salt, most often of toothpaste. Will always returns it twice, once on Ethan’s behalf.

“Oh” - Ethan, soft-edged, reading him. “That’s… good. Good visual. Not that I would mind, should you two choose to -”

“Mr Yuriev, there’s no cause for alarm,” Will says loudly, and proceeds to explain in detail to the green-eyed nuisance smiling up at him why, and how, there will be cause for alarm within the next month.

When the alarm takes the form of Dean Martin’s Ain’t That A Kick In The Head, Ethan allows himself a few seconds’ lie-in to savour the wink. He's not sure who the winking party is - Brandt chose the tune, obviously, but he and Julia once danced to it in the hospital’s break room. Ethan pictures Brandt’s blue-eyed wink, Julia’s breath on his cheek, until the visuals flip roles, and it’s Brandt’s palm on his jaw and Julia throwing her head back in delight.

Then he gets up and gets out.

His gallant rescue goes hitch-less, if zig-zaggy, to the risk of pissing Will off if he is among Ethan's rescuers. Sadly, Will isn’t; as it turns out, what the Rannkow cameras recorded for future archiving was Ethan kissing his hand to Benji. Ethan resigns himself. Perhaps, once he’s infiltrated the Kremlin and fixed that minor nuclear alert…

He knows Brandt is a genius when Benji imperils his own kickoff mission by lamenting over Julia dumping Ethan (“and for a total dullard, I'm told!”). If the rumour has permeated the IMF’s small world that Ethan suffered a bad break-up, he can only hope that myriads of henchmen, minions, flunkies, thugs, e tutti quanti have been relaying it to the Adversary. Ethan has had six months in which to replay Brandt’s plan in his mind, throw it at the wall with the ball in his hands, and every time the ball bounced back but the plan, against all reason and logic, stuck. Now he’s seeing the payoff.

It’s not as if theirs is a rational world, is Ethan’s last thought before an exploding Kremlin catches up with him.

He doesn’t bat an eyelash when a limousine and chauffeur answer his call for extraction, and Brandt waves him in from the back seat.

“Blue eyes,” Ethan greets him, grinning, his heart pumped by relief, adrenaline, and a few unidentified tremors. He slides into the seat. “You took the boss’s car for a spin out?”

“And hello to you too.” Brandt’s long-suffering glance makes Ethan glad, as does his outstretched hand. That hand. Still warm, still speaking Brandt’s… Brandtitude. Ethan clings to it. “Told the boss to lie low and wait for his own extraction. We’re disavowed, by the way. So if that was you lashing out post-divorce, good show, but maybe tone it down next time?”

Their hands are still clasped below the chauffeur’s line of sight when the firing begins. They duck, but a bullet finds their driver and the car gets its own ducking into the Moskva river. Next thing Ethan knows, they're resurfacing in a pocket of breathing air, coughing and sputtering. The water is icy. And Brandt is saying, “Confined space, rapidly filling with water. Ah, déjà vu.”

They’re in too much of a hurry for Ethan to weigh the analogy. But he wraps an arm round Brandt’s soggy form after they escape, and Brandt clasps his waist, and that’s how they tumble à deux into the IMF’s safe car. Jane and Benji gape and gawk, all the more when Ethan introduces his companion. Brandt lowers his eyelids and morphs into another shapeless sweater (seriously, does he collect them?), but Ethan catches his sly smile while the other two confer in frantic hushed tones.

“Wait, Brandt? As in -”

“Shhhh! Must be a coincidence.”

“Or a removed cousin - I mean, he looks the type. Clerk-ish.”

And, yes, the threat of a global nuclear war is down the road - but Ethan gives in and burrows his face into his palms. He lets his shoulders shake in helpless silence, once, twice, before he wipes the extra water from his eyes and asks Brandt (no, Will, better call him Will) to update them all on Cobalt.

It’s a wild ride from Moscow to Dubai, and Ethan enjoys it more than an IMF agent locked in a tussle with Armaggedon should. There’s something exhilarating about cruising down the Emirates road with his new team, who are meshing like anything. While Benji and Jane still fail to connect the Erik-and-Will dots, they have warmed up to the latter. It helps that Will turns out to have been Hanaway’s gym buddy, or that he will play I Spy With My Little Eye with Benji, describing a camel in such excruciating detail that Ethan cracks up again and nearly drives their van into the herd. He catches another smile in the rearview window - crinkly, not Will’s wry usual - and marvels at his own pride in causing it.

They’ll need to talk, Ethan thinks. There’s a time to run, and there’s a time to pause and make sense of the confusion in Ethan’s heart (le coeur a ses raisons), the great thirsty hope that can no longer tell Will and Julia apart. He’ll do it right, Ethan thinks, do it fair, he won’t scare Will away or hurt Julia, he’ll just do what Ethan does best, stare the situation down and extract the best possible outcome. He’ll...

... bash his head once too many and feel the crushing blow of defeat, before Will grips his ankle, rushing into a windswept abyss to save him.

Time slows down to a snail’s crawl. Ethan’s breath stops altogether. Painfully, he pushes himself back into firm ground; spots Jane, recumbent on the floor, and Will’s face, all tan and sweat and unguarded eyes. Ethan gets up after a while, mouths in his direction, Get me a shirt.

He is stripped down to the waist and splashing cold water on his face when Will enters the en-suite bathroom. Only the mirror records their embrace - the tugging, pulling force between them directing their arms until there’s not an inch of void left between them. Ethan’s wet mouth finds Will’s chin; sucks in the rough sensation; pours thirst, gratitude, and the sheer high of being alive to feel and return the touch, before Will rights the kiss and repeats it. And again, a brace of kisses turning into three, five, six: a long moist rhythm that will never be enough, a vein of freshwater care in the great salted oceanic want mobbing Ethan.

Ethan never stops wanting after that. The entire mission feels like a repetition of that moment when Ethan fell, and Will fell with him, for him, after him, turning the undefined branch of their triangle into a glorious vertical. Ethan jumps to Will’s help after Moreau makes him; later, Will leaps on Ethan’s command, and Ethan plummets down the last leg of his mission with two names in his heart.

He ends up in a Mumbai hospital, courtesy of his Russian frenemy. No handcuffs, this time, and no broken spine that he can tell, although Ethan feels as if he just pureed himself through his mother’s old hand-cranked grinder. He is going through the routine of rotating each body part (left ankle excused) when a nurse comes in.

“Hey” (his warmest smile). “Any chance I can get my stuff back?"

She doesn’t give any indication of hearing him - nurses never do, at least in Ethan’s four-continent experience with hospitals. Instead, she checks his IV line. Ethan asks for his phone, to no avail. Having given his right elbow a pass, he is levering himself up when she stops him, one hand on his chest.

And one toy ring on the hand, adorned with a tiny panda bear.

“We need to talk,” comes Julia’s clear voice, as she draws the curtains around his bed.

Seattle is charming. Nothing like the Croatian coast, but what Elliott Bay lacks in turquoise shallows, it makes up for in misty allure. To Julia, who loves water in every form and flow, the moody, choppy waves are an easy challenge: she leans over the railing at the ferry’s bow, smiling at the perpetual motion of water taxis, cargo ships and sailing boats. The nocturnal wind feels good on her face. It was only four months ago that she wore a mask, one of the many stashed by Will against the years to come, and marvelled at its unexpected comfort.

“Like a glove,” she told Ethan on that day, her hand on his cheek. Letting him feel the faint, stubborn press of her ring, hidden in plain sight. “It doesn’t itch a bit!”

He’d said nothing, though she could sense the words' struggle to take shape on his lips. I’m sorry and You shouldn’t be here, and again I’m so sorry . (“It’s what he does,” Will had told her on their last phone exchange. “Fixate, fixate, fixate. You’ll have to jolt him off course or run ahead of him - not the easiest task. But he’ll listen. He loves you, and so he’ll listen.”)

“There’s two things - no, make that three - I want to tell you,” she said, sitting on the side of his bed. “One, I’ve enrolled on a NP program, that’s Nurse Practitioner to you, with a focus on emergency and trauma care. My choice. My calling. I’m going all in, Ethan, and I don’t care if I end up running a field hospital or the IMF’s medical evacs -”

“Julia!”

“Well, they clearly need a coordinator. What are you doing in an Indian hospital?”

Ethan’s eyes were brimming, were glistening, a tell-tale sign. She'd once fallen in love with his gentleness, his wish to keep everyone under the sun safe, and it was that which she now addressed, bending her soft-hearted mouth to his. She knew that he knew what her choice entailed - her facing bombings, gunfire or kidnapping, whether as a combat medic or his new ally. He had opened her mind to that choice the moment she had fired his gun and he’d asked “You did that?”, and while she was still, always would be vulnerable to danger, her mind would not be changed.

Will understood, because Will, too, had chosen to leave his safe ancillary zone to commit.

“Two. I love you. I can’t be your wife in name, I get that, but I’ll never not be your wife in deed.”

She watched the flush creep up his face even as he shook his head.

“My call. My choice. Anyway, I’ve started training with Will. You know - hand-to-hand combat before the Tonight Show, target practice on Sunday. And Luther’s agreed to temp as a bomb disposal instructor. Which brings me to Point Three.”

“Bombs? ”

“No” - laughing, kissing him again. It was always Julia’s delight that her laugh could soothe and brighten his mood, revive the impish young man he must have been in his debut years, before they grew into relentless years. This time he kissed her back, and something in the play of warmth and muscles told her he'd caught up with her - that he was, in fact, pushing her to make her point.

“Will. He’s been… a wonder.”

“Eighth Wonder of the world.”

“Right? It’s so strange, Ethan. He’s like a chameleon, only instead of changing colours he’ll go entirely colourless, if you know what I mean? And then nobody sees how colourful he is on the inside, how funny, and clever, and strong. And - loving.”

“I know,” Ethan said quietly.

“And… I can’t picture a life without him either. I’m sorry, Ethan. I’m so very sorry.”

“Shhh,” Ethan said, and when she looked past her emotional onset, there he was - the impish man, his face so radiant it was battling the hospital’s stark fluorescence. “I kissed him. In a bathroom.”

“You…”

He had let slip half-confidences about his Army days. She suspected that if she hadn’t met him on the shore of Lake Wichita, Musgrave’s betrayal would have struck twice over, shaken him out of all possible trust in a heart’s connection. Somehow his words didn't startle her; only coaxed out her inner imp, equally subdued as a rule.

“Wait until you try a disarming grapple with him. He's that hot."

"Oh god, Julia. Don't - I think I'm buck naked under that sheet."

"But loyal to you. Loving, loyal to the bone.”

“No chameleon heart?”

“Babe, I had to talk him out of keeping that sweater in bed!”

Finally they were embracing, only one laughter between them, that was close to a sob. “He loves you,” Ethan was saying, “I know he does. Nobody mouths your name as he does. Julia. Julia.” Mouthing it too, lest anyone outside that frail tent catch his renewed vows. “Julia, can we really have this?”

Now, eight weeks later, the Elliott Bay ferry approaches firm land, the scent of coffee reaching out to the ocean salt. Julia scans Pike Market Place and its jumbled camaraderie of shops, passers-by and seafood stalls. It doesn’t take long to spot them, seated at a table and shaking hands. Good. That means Ethan has agreed to Will’s plan with its thousand and one provisos and subclauses, because Will is a maniac when it comes to love and protect. Of course this best-laid plan will meet with bumps and snags, some (“Happy fifth concussion on the mend, babe. At least you bashed the other temple.” - “Will wanted the package off the plane!” - “It doesn’t follow I wanted you ON the plane!”) less serious than others.

But they’ll make it through. They’re survivors, as she told Will during one of their midnight confabs. Lovers and survivors, all three of them. And before anything else, before they tally up a rota of masks for Ethan to wear on his way to the bulwark, or celebrate the Secretary crushing their kangaroo trial by Hunley, that’s where they're headed. To the unobtrusive hotel room booked by Will, where they willl love tonight so they can survive tomorrow, rising at dawn to play skipping stones on Alki Beach.

She smiles at them and walks on, the sea’s great murmur of promise about her.

Chapter Text

Five Times Ethan and His Tie Parted Ways, and One Time Brandt Made the Call

1. A Good Man Is Hard to Find: America’s elusive ideal, although Ethan Hunt ticks all the boxes and fits the (admittedly costly) bill. Will knows this. The IMF knows it - and would gladly choose Ethan for their face if they could afford public exposure, and if Ethan could be persuaded to pose for the photo shoot without ripping his tie off at some point.

Will tells Ethan this for the fickle pleasure of triggering his defensive move. And Ethan meets him head on, as he does in each of their verbal games of squash - for which Will’s sass provides the fast-paced, high-bouncing repartees that Ethan returns with gusto (“Try crawling atop the Eurostar with a piece of fabric flapping into your eyes!”). When Benji attends one of these jousts, he turns his head this way and that as if following an actual rubber ball with his eyes, and pretends to keep score.

Will loves the game, the thump-thump-thump of it. Loves how it has lifted his saturnine mood, Croatia’s long-shadowed legacy, to a more vibrant worldview. He is less sure how the game benefits Ethan, who would find a more accommodating banter partner in Benji and a true challenger in Luther. But Ethan, ball-bouncer extraordinaire, meets Will’s every rally with a smile.

As he proves after one dire capoeira of a fight, where Will ended up on the wrong end of a suplex - flat on his back, his opponent’s knife too close for comfort… until the man fell sideways in a heap, wheezing like a Buick with a clogged exhaust, and Ethan replaced him in Will’s upward-gazing view. One hand stretched out, the other holding a now limp bow tie.

… “How did it go?” Luther asks kindly enough later.

“Got the codes. He got to flash his Adam’s apple,” Will says, his thumb aimed at Ethan to set the ball bouncing.

Ethan’s smile reveals bona fide dimples. Will feels as if his ball just struck the bell in a funfair attraction.

2. Jane gets married on a Spring day, in green. No, not that sultry emerald gown. A lovely shade of willow, that compliments the warm undertones of her complexion and the golden ring on her finger.

Since she, like so many IMF agents, is a fatherless child, many expected her team leader to give her away. Will and Benji, who know better, are not surprised when she strides into the aisle on her own, Ethan one sedate (for once) step behind. “Choose to be my man of honor,” was what Jane said, adding that she would have all three of them if she could, but she and Milo have agreed to keep the revels low-key (and Benji prefers to play wedding DJ anyway).

Will is among the small circle of guests listening to Jane as she quotes “the heart has its mountains”, but his eyes are on Ethan. They watch Ethan holding Jane’s bouquet in a death grip, his throat swallowing around a nameless emotion. The collar on his dress shirt is impeccably tight: Will finds himself choking up in sympathy. Yes, they are losing Jane to happiness, incarnate in Milo Reyes from Interpol at her side. And it’s the best possible loss. But when Ethan’s eyes grow too brilliant above the apricot roses, Will clears his throat until Ethan’s gaze is his to have and to hold, then taps a finger to his own tie knot.

Ethan hesitates, but Will mouths It’s all right, and Ethan lifts the bouquet so that his other hand can operate undercover. When he lowers it again, the silk grey tie has vanished and his collar button is undone. Ethan’s eyes are still humid, but he is breathing more easily now.

Will mouths Nice Adam’s apple and is relieved to see both Jane and Ethan biting down on their smiles.

3. The mission is so mundane that Will could yawn. They’re patrolling a drug baron’s estate, dressed up as security guards so they can storm the tiny pavilion where His Lordship is cozying up to terrorism’s Who’s Who. What makes this an IMF rather than a CIA or a FBI mission is a conundrum to Will. Really. If Hunley wants to regain some prestige with his higher-ups, so be it, but Will expects to bump into a rival team any minute now.

He does not expect Ethan, of all people, to bump into a sprinkler.

Three or four things happen next. Ethan swears. There’s a Pshhhhhh kind of sound. Benji’s “oh, my” breaks their radio silence. And Luther bursts out laughing.

Luther Stickell is a man of strong and sober opinions, but Will has to admit that even his funny bone is being tickled. Ethan’s tie is no longer to be seen; it appears to have dissolved, leaving his shirt and his face dotted all over with tiny black spots. While Ethan's face holds pride of place in Will’s memory palace of fetching male countenances, right now it looks like something out of a Disney parade.

Will looks at Ethan, looks at Benji (looking uncommonly sheepish), and puts two and two together. 

“Ethan. Was that R&D’s Invisible Ink Tie? The one still in the beta phase?”

“... Benji needed a tester.”

“Not tonight!” Benji retorts indignantly. “And you’re supposed to take it off before you water it, not get it wet so you can remove it faster!”

“It was an ACCIDENT!” (Ethan, justifiably incensed)

“Whatever.” Luther, being Luther, secures the last word. “Lead the way, Pongo.”

The arrest goes swimmingly, mostly because the terrorists can’t take their eyes off Ethan. The drug baron is so mesmerized he doesn’t even resist arrest. Will wonders if Hunley will consider water transfer tattoos as a cheaper alternative to masks; wisely forebears from pursuing the hypothesis aloud.

4. The invitations secured by the IMF mention “White tie”, two words guaranteed to kindle an ecstatic sigh from Benji and a groan from Ethan, whose high-octane style is fatally cramped by having to wear a tailcoat. Will would commiserate but for the fact that they’re playing second fiddles. Team A it is who will check the White Widow’s tip that maybe, maybe, the Nobel laureate for Chemistry proclaimed two months ago will be kidnapped mid-December banquet. Ethan’s reduced team is limited to surveillance.

“This is stupid,” Ethan repeats ad nauseam, until Benji tells him to stop wriggling, take one for Team B, and let Benji knot his bloody tie for him. Ethan opens his mouth, only to drop into silence as Will enters their limousine. Benji lets out a long, appreciative catcall. 

“Somebody cleaned up nice,” Luther echoes.

Will is baffled. Yes, he shaved, and yes, Wardrobe got his measurements right this time. So what? But he starts getting the idea when they join the long rows of tables in the Blue Hall, and the laureate, a dishevelled Scot with a known penchant for his fellow men, kicks protocol in the nuts and calls dibs on the seat next to him.

His earpiece comes to life with a crackle. “What’s this?” Team A’s leader asks sharply.

“Nothing.” (Ethan, sharper)

“I mean, I could be wrong, but from where I sit, this is Gravlax scoring with the asset.” (Benji)

“Copy that,” the leader says. Then, after a pause: “Gravlax, play along. Get him to take you back to his room, it’s secured and we’ll have Lutfisk and Smorgasbrod covering you.”

“I can feel the chemistry tonight,” the asset interjects coyly. Will smiles back. He’s beginning to enjoy himself - there’s been no sign of danger so far, and it’s been a while since he’s had a mild bout of flirtation. His libido was nonexistent post-Croatia, and his downtime as one of the IMF’s finest is usually spent catching up on sleep and restoring his cardiac rhythm. 

“A hit, a palpable hit!” (Benji)

“Nice work, Gravlax. Now hold his gaze, let him take the line. Oh, good, they’re starting you on oysters. Tell him that’s -”

“- a known aphrodisiac,” the laureate ends, oblivious to the prompt. Will blinks at him slowly; makes a show of gulping the oyster down his throat. In the corner of his eye, across the starched tablecloth, a set of white knuckles are holding a fork. Apparently, Ethan has declared war on his mollusk. 

The oysters are followed by Swedish venison with an exemplary Tuscan red. Will toasts his neighbour. 

“Wait, they’re signaling suspicious activity in the gallery. Gravlax, I need your A-game.”

Disregarding Benji’s gleeful “Pun!”, Will lowers his eyelids and trails his napkin sensuously across his mouth. The laureate looks like he’s just been awarded another million dollars.

“What do you say we skip pudding -”

“Shit!”

The polite brouhaha comes to a halt as every head turns to where Ethan Hunt is getting up from his chair. His white tie now a dark, dripping red - a sight that has Will’s heart contract in a lethal systole until he spots the half-empty glass in Ethan’s grip. In that millisecond, even as Will’s warm blood floods his heart again, he faces an inner truth and sees it reflected in Ethan’s face. 

Then his one true leader excuses himself.

“Crude fella, that,” Will’s neighbour comments before turning back to him with a roguish smile. “Now, where were we?”

It’s a good thing that Ethan stumbles upon the kidnappers’ gang in the restroom, bringing the mission to a speedy, single-handed end. Team A’s leader is (understandably) pissed, but Ethan has got his groove back and even praises his elastane-enhanced tailcoat, that served his punches well. 

Wardrobe never sees the tie again, but Will reroutes their complaint to “Classified”.

5. The IMF’s annual Memorial Ceremony was among the first functions reinstated by Hunley. And Will, who felt like Hunley’s very own Jiminy Cricket, had totted up the number of agents still to be honored, due to the IMF’s on-and-off status these past two years. As a result, the present Ceremony promises to be twice as long and, in all probability, twice as poignant. 

But Will has made sure that Hunley’s predecessor will be named first, if only because Hunley has deputized him to do the naming.

“So… you’re an agent-slash-admin-slash-analyst-slash-chief-mourner now?” Luther asked him two days ago, his concern audible under the barb.

“One-time mourner,” Will replied. Because the truth is, he isn’t getting any younger. Now that he’s been extracted from his Slough of Despond by Ethan and found that he could still need, and want, and hope (again, courtesy of Ethan), Will is ready for the next step. But the Secretary was there in his Slough days, and Will won’t fail him on naming day.

He is reading Jane’s text when Benji and Luther show up in his office, both dressed for the occasion. Will extends his smile to them.

“They’re ready and waiting, Brandt.”

“I’m so sorry Ethan couldn’t make it, I mean, it’s Ethan so he probably tried to stowaway his way back on a Supersonic, and when I say ‘on’ -”

“It’s fine, Benji. I’m the one who sent him to Sakhalin.”

He is rising from his desk chair when the door to his office bangs open, the papers flutter on his desk, and a figure comes to a halt, sending a few droplets over his report du jour.

“Am I late? I’m not too late, am I? I thought I’d better shower first -”

“...”

“Tell me I’m not too late,” Ethan rasps out, his breath still catching up with his words.

Will is about to answer no, never, heck no, and let the subtext take care of itself, when Benji utters a wail. 

“You’re not wearing a tie!”

“I’m wearing a shirt,” Ethan parrs, perplexed, and Will could kiss him right now. Sakhalin is, what? Six thousand miles from HQ, and that’s a straight-line distance. But Ethan remembered. 

He remembered.

“Benji’s right, Ethan. You’re a front-row guy, for God’s sake.”

“Hey,” Will cuts in, groping for one of his multiple desk drawers. “Don’t worry, we’re good. I think I've still got… yeah, here you go.” Here is a fistful of ties, most of them dark-hued, all of them magnificently silky. “What about this one?”

“Thanks.” And it’s a testimony to Ethan’s probable levels of exhaustion that he doesn’t push Benji’s hands away as the tie is lassoed round his neck. Only when Benji says “Oooh, Savile Row” with something akin to reverence does Ethan jolt back into focus.

“You order your ties from London, Brandt?”

“No, Luther.” Will sighs. He hadn’t meant to out that piece of gossip, but time and memorial wait for no one. The quicker they’re done here, the better. “The, ah, Prime Minister sent me these to convey his personal gratitude for the Lane arrest. Now, if we could -”

This time, the papers actually rise half an inch into the air when Ethan slams the tie back onto the desk, ripping it off his neck so fast it’s a wonder he doesn’t pinch a nerve. Next thing Will knows, Ethan is saying “I’d rather wear a garrote” in his darkest, end-of-mission lower tones.

“... Or you could borrow one of mine,” Benji, bless him, segues feebly. He burrows into his pocket. “Here. My Nan lived in Cornwall, and she always made me carry a spare, ever since a seagull - well, you don’t need to know about that.”

They don’t, Will agrees inwardly. But he needs to, and will, definitely will, ask Ethan out the moment they leave the Memorial Wall.

+1. Helsinki, Will once learnt during his stint in Analysis, leads the world in per capita coffee consumption, with the average Finn consuming about 26.4 pounds of the stuff annually.

It’s a pity the surveyors did not factor the IMF in their survey, because any of their agents would beat Mr. Finn hands down. Which is why Will skips the coffee stage altogether and chooses a restaurant for his date. He gives the choice his undivided attention, weighing every mote of data - distance, size, noise level, swank level, wine menu vs. beer list, vintage vs. minimalist, the odds of a rowdy clientele distracting Ethan vs. the risk of fiber-optic lighting and an aluminium theme casting a chill over the date… 

Will is nothing if not thorough when it comes to wooing Ethan.

He checks again that their team is off rota (the world, thankfully, seems to have gotten the memo that today’s not the day for Doomsday) and texts Ethan the address. It’s close enough to both Ethan’s flat and HQ that Ethan won’t feel pressured to leave too early, and early enough that they can enjoy a stroll together post-dinner. It’s casual, but not too casual; it’s American, because Ethan must have eaten in eleven different time zones these last six weeks and his stomach may enjoy a chance to reconnect with steak and beer. And it’s got an outdoor patio because, well. It has.

Ethan is already standing before the entrance to Masseria when Will parks his car ten minutes ahead of the agreed time. Will quickens his step, but slows his pace when he reaches Ethan. Ethan smiles at him and straightens up a little self-consciously. He’s wearing a dark jacket and a buttoned-down shirt, Will can see, and dress trousers above his dress shoes.

And a tie. 

Ethan glances at him, waiting for Will to motion him into the patio.

Will pauses.

He smiles, then - the warm, unconstrained smile which only a chosen few among his friends and relatives are privy to -, and starts on Ethan's tie knot. When the tie is loose, Will tugs it gently off. He opens the first two buttons on Ethan’s shirt and pushes each collar leaf aside, carefully, watching Ethan’s throat take in the air in grateful release.

“Now I’m dating you,” he murmurs.

Ethan places a hand in the small of Will's back, their second touch of the evening, and together they step into the patio.

[A/N: someone should make a YouTube montage of all the scenes where Ethan starts with a perfectly knotted tie or bow tie only to rip it off the moment there's an explosion or a villain to chase. Seriously. It's kinda hilarious.]

Chapter Text

Unlike the poet, Ethan has never experienced an intimation of immortality. Doesn’t think himself above the dents and dings of being human; doesn’t fling himself at the impossible trusting that it cannot harm him. Just, Ethan knows his probabilities. He knows the maths are honor-bound to grant him that 1 chance, and the fate of millions is worth going all in on 1. Ethan also knows that any success will be followed by try again - another fast-paced, high-stakes round of Guts, clouding the winner's horizon into a no-visibility zone.

Only once did he raise the stake to ever after, and learnt the bitter taste of losing. 

After Julia, after Croatia, Ethan flips his heart's ethos. He will fall in love again, that's a given: somehow, Ethan’s heart never learnt to harden post-failure. Once made tender, it only ever aches to ache again. But Ethan sets a rule for himself - that, since so much of his life is of the moment, his heart's affairs should be too. Ethan will in all likelihood endure love, and give it his all, but it cannot, must not be an enduring love. 

So he tells himself when William Brandt enters his life, and Ethan’s heartbeat finds a new purpose.

So he reminds himself a year later when Brandt kisses him, the Moroccan tan fresh on his cheeks, his kiss an absolution for Ethan’s plan before Will goes off to play Judas in a telephone booth. 

So he is forgetting, right now, as Will’s mouth stirs and excites places left uncharted until now on Ethan’s pleasure map. All the way down, and then all the way in and around, until Ethan has no more to give and Will still crawls over him as if bent to fill every resilient pit and gash in Ethan with his presence. Will’s breathing fills the shell of Ethan’s ear like the high tide mobbing a Pacific beach, and some hazy what if surges along in Ethan’s consciousness before sleep obscures it, sweet and shared.

It’s still there in the morning.

It endures.

It lasts all through their andante breakfast, a lazy Espresso-and-bagels affair. Ethan, a high-definition man by choice and nature, is opening his mouth to clarify the what if of what they have, when a small drone breezes in through his open window. The drone utters a polite greeting to Ethan, followed by an invitation to shift his ass up a gear for the greater counterterrorist good. The moment it does, Will and Ethan shoo it hastily towards the kitchen sink, still filled up with yesterday’s washing-up. Then they trade a mournful look.

Ethan, and that's a first in a railroad track of missions, stalls. It feels to him that in leaving now, he is leaving something undone, as urgent and vital as the drone’s voulez-vous. But Will only smiles - wistful but steady - and says “See you at home, then.”

When Ethan waddles home five weeks later with one foot in a cast, a tin of Turkish coffee under his arm, and a tentative “Miss me?”, Will is napping on the couch. He struggles up, his hair tufted and his face slackened by sleep - exposed, unable to hide Will’s relief. Will rubs the sleep off his eyes and mutters, half wryly: “Missing… accomplished”.

This, then, is when Ethan's what if becomes could be.

Back when Ethan believed he could have his half-and-half life with Julia, he’d run the proposal gauntlet twice. First time was as corny as it gets, with the proposal etched in tiny fondant letters on Julia’s favorite cupcake. Second time was a Hail Mary: Ethan’s flawed, frantic bid on Julia’s waning trust, a gesture that felt like the peak of romance, but was really - as he soon realized - Ethan putting his happiness before hers. 

His sacrifice, as the then-Secretary called it, didn't erase the wrong. Once burnt, twice shy, Ethan now sticks to could be,  his new middle ground. One that has Ethan renounce his former skepticism without taking advantage of his growing commitment to enforce Will’s. It’s enough, Ethan tells himself, that he can have another day, and still another, and one more, of this vibrant understanding between them, fuelled by their common dedication to the IMF - even if their higher-ups tend to regard Ethan as Mr. Supergrunt and Will as their bureaucratic blue-eyed boy. At least Will gets to handle Ethan’s missions, which helps maintain the status quo.

Until a day - in itself a mundane, boring, paint-by-number day - when Ethan returns from HQ to find home in the dark and Will on the floor, lost-eyed, rigid with the shock of learning that his father, whom he’d phoned only the day before… 

Bacterial meningitis, Ethan pieces together while still in his coat (March is on its last legs). He drops down to his knees on the hardwood floor and puts his arms around Will; gathers him tight, tight; listens to the thick hum of his breath, Will's plea for Ethan to track him down all the way to Grief’s punishment cell. Will loved William Brandt senior and hid from him in equal parts; and, as he lifts his hands to grip Ethan's coat like a lifeline, the latter can sense his fear that in concealing so much of himself, over so many years, Will discouraged the old man from reaching out to him in the end. (The ghost of the late Secretary, another good man reaped before his time, hovers by.) 

Ethan knows all the sensible answers as does Will, a man of better sense that Ethan will ever be. Knows, too, they won't lockpick that cell. Instead he goes with his gut. He tells Will what he never told Julia: how his own father’s protracted death was the only time Ethan knew he couldn’t win, and how much he’d feared and hated that thought. Had flailed against it, riding his Honda Rebel at full pelt on every dirt road until he'd reached the crumple zone of acceptance - that Dad, and only Dad, could deliver himself to the the rest that was his due. "And your dad's." (And all good men's, Ethan's heart adds for him, clinging to Will all the tighter.) 

“I’m crumpling,” Will says, his breath jammed. “Ethan, I’m -”

So Ethan covers Will's mouth with his; breathes for him, pushing the life air from his own lungs, until Will's grip can melt into the heavier surge of his tears. Ethan kisses his running cheek, aware of another change as Could be, deep inside, becomes Will. “I’m here,” he tells the man whose name spells out his resolve. “I’m here for you, with you, I've got you.” I will stand by you every day for the rest of my days.

And they live happily, if recklessly, ever af-

Not so fast. 

Because today, eleven weeks after Ethan declined a mission so he could stand by Will at a funeral, he still has no idea if their agendas are aligned. For a while, Will was raw-skinned under all his layers, and Ethan tabled his own suit until Will had begun to heal. Then came the mission, strike that, THE mission that Will - oh, frabjous day! - said he’d manage. Off ran Ethan to Kamtchatka, resolved to pop the question in the high of victory, after they extracted the asset. It was hardly his fault that Luther and Benji accidentally hacked a key Russian oligarch’s workout vlog. Or that the asset fled with Ethan in hot pursuit and a hot-air balloon... and, okay, across a volcano.

I fucking swear to God, Ethan is not the oath Ethan had in mind, and so he waits until their next halcyon days. Spring being reinstated, Ethan buys steaks and a bottle of Pomerol; sets the table on his balcony. Once the wine has mellowed them to their easy, lovely entente of two, Ethan leans forward across the table. He gives Will a look curtained by his eyelashes, before he slowly raises one hand, palm up. He wasn’t quite up to writing the words, but he’s drawn two rings, very carefully, with a question mark underneath for good measure.

Time slows to an exhale of seconds while Will stares at the proposal.

“Ethan… are you sure? You want - you really want this?”

Ethan nods, too choked up to speak. 

“Then…” Will says, beaming, before he literally sweeps Ethan off his feet and back into their bedroom. The next moment finds Ethan handcuffed to their bed, too dazed to protest, and then too dazzled by Will’s expertise in erotic teasing. (It re-involves the Pomerol at one point.) A very good time, all in all, but Ethan makes a note to work on improving his drawing skills.

He still can’t bring himself to say the words - it’s some sort of ingrained failsafe by now.

Instead, he infiltrates Will’s office five minutes before his lover’s debrief with Hunley. Since the final item is, as always, “How do we persuade Hunt to cut down on tech expenses (Hunley) and risks (Will)”, Ethan opens Will’s document folder and scribbles MARRY ME. PROBLEM SOLVED! across the last page. 

Problem would be solved, Ethan thinks later, glumly, if Hunley hadn’t arrived early and left his folder in Will’s custody while popping into the restroom. Hunley is not amused. And his answer, delivered verbatim, is an unequivocal NO.

It’s June and they’re in Paris, incommunicado - else it wouldn't be a vacation, would it?

Will’s notion of a holiday is to sit on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower in his three-piece suit before a three-course meal. Ethan agrees on principle, but says he’ll join Will for desert, not being the type to indulge in entrées. Will, who knows Ethan, books a table close to the large bay window looking out on the iron lattice.

As Ethan slowly works up an appetite, hoisting himself across the beams and crossbars (the huge rivets make splendid handholds), he plans his next move. Pare down any mission, even a proposal, to its bare bones, and the M.O. becomes evident. Identify Target among the diners. Cut Target off from his langoustine risotto with a well-executed, if much toned down, armlock. Having possessed yourself of his arm and his attention, drop down to one knee and kiss his hand. Take the ring out…

(Ethan lets go of one handhold to pat his hip pocket. Yup. Still here.)

He avoids another patrol, refrains from waving to the surveillance camera, and climbs nimbly over the second-floor parapet. His backpack yields Ethan’s best jacket and his least intrusive cologne: Ethan freshens up. Then he flips the pack inside out so it becomes a stylish messenger bag, and steps into the restaurant.

The love of his life is here, seated in a corner - but he’s not alone. 

“Le soufflé pour deux, je vous prie, ” Will is saying. “Ah, et mon fiancé prendra un café serré .”

The waiter smiles, nods, leaves. Ethan stares.

“Have I made a bad call?” Will asks softly, motioning him closer.

Ethan can only shake a head swirled by the moment's euphoria. He takes it in, all in - the grace and strength of the Tower, gloved in the sun. Will’s own strength, never so potent as when he rushes to Ethan’s help. And the long uninterrupted view behind Will, the tourist's clichéd Mecca, that they’ll still go and watch together after dessert. And store in memory, a vista to bank against the days when their blow-by-blow life takes its toll.

He takes off his bag; slips into the empty seat and lays his hand on the table, palm up, an open invite.

“So,” he says. “Got a ring for me, Will?”

Chapter Text

"I mean, you're Ethan Hunt," Benji says, his voice fervent with the fanboying awe that no amount of Ethan-led missions seems to abate. "So my advice is, be you. Be Venus, just, Ethan-style. Be... Ethanus. Er. Venethan." He hiccups. They're on a post-mission bender, and Benji's always been a lightweight compared to Luther, who's calling the skols.

"Yeah, do your shit," an obliging Luther translates. "Sweep his feet from under him, brother."

"Though not, you know, as when you actually sweep a bloke's feet from under him and then knock his lights out," Benji edits, warming to the theme. "More like... surprise him."

Ethan nods, but his doubts resurface with the beer foam as Luther tops his tankard. Brandt looks happier these days - less secretive, less of an origami man in a  three-layered suit. Still. Ethan's pretty sure that, were he to hide in Brandt's terminally spare living-room and pop up from behind the sofa, buck naked and yelling SURPRISE!, the odds of his continued survival would be those of a hamster in a cat’s birthday party.

"He's always got eyes on you when handling your missions," Luther says. "So give him a little wave. Or mouth his name - if you're underwater."

"Or use sign language," Benji adds. "Sign language is great! You know, when you do your fight-to-the-death thingie with the bad guy, twisting his arm in his back - just wave the arm first to sign DATE TONIGHT? or somethin'."

Luther nods approval. "Or CARE TO HANDLE ME TONIGHT? Get the adrenaline goin'."

"Oh yeah," Benji choruses, beaming. "Brandt loves puns."

"Especially mid-mission."

"The racier the better."

"Preferably shirtless, if there's a security cam around."

"And before you light the fuse -"

"We don't know that there'll be a fuse, Benji."

"It's Ethan! Of course there'll be a fuse! So, Ethan, make sure you look at the cam and say, "This one's for you, babe". Then - BOOM!"

"BOOM," Ethan agrees docilely, and calls for the next round.

"At least you did not blow up the VX." Will Brandt turns over on his side, one hand raised to take the joint from Ethan's lips. Will was never one for a post-coital smoke or even a smoke tout court, but Ethan's body still sports the bruises from his extempore landing ground. Hopefully cannabis will help.

Ethan grins up at him from the pillow.

"Got the package off the plane, just like you wanted, too."

"By clinging to a plane door five hundred feet off the ground. And waving to me."

"Means, results." (Ethan, typically cutting corners.) "You liked the pun?"

"Let me see. Did I like having my, ah, package referred to in the presence of four technicians, six rookies, the entire Belarus Special Section and our current Acting Secretary? Oh yes, Ethan, the pun definitely won me over."

"You still kissed me post-extraction."

Will inhales, exhales, considers a few zingers guaranteed to take the self-congratulatory bloom off Ethan's voice. But Ethan is all smiles, his face an open window to the younger, un-bruised, inexhaustible self he must once have been, and Will settles for another kiss.

"What can I say. Unlike you I give myself very good advice, but when it comes to you... I very seldom follow it."

Chapter Text

People who know Ethan from a distance think his body fits him like a glove. That it was tailored once and for all into that strong, supple self, that will run every gauntlet only to ask Please, sir, I want some more. 

They have no idea how much time and effort go into piecing Ethan’s self back together, time after time. How sinews and muscles are put through learning their alphabet once more, a gruelling task that Ethan nonetheless complies with because age and ache wait for no miracle. Everyone knows he was never a young pretender vying to become top dog (jokes about Secretary Hunt still abound - Luther collects them on the sly, his favorite being Secretary Hunt just disabled the office elevators. If you can’t rappel up to your floor, you’re obviously not cut out for this job). But they’re content to think of him as IMF’s Wunderkind - until there’s no IMF and Ethan is limping out of a London phone booth, a bullet lodged too close to his intercostal artery to be removed without risking his and the world’s continued survival. 

The bullet stays. The wound closes in time, but as Ethan limps on from London to Cuba his body raises red flags at every step. He can walk, but even a cautious jog proves both dolorous and unstable. He stops working out - the strain is agonizing. Hard impacts, he reads on medical sites, will trigger internal bleeding more often than not. His torso is not to be twisted, punched, hit, or even poked - another one-on-one with the Bone Doctor would sign off Ethan’s quick and painful demise. 

By the time he reaches Paris, his will is still into the mission (Make it count) but his mind is fraying. The pain is chronic, and Ethan lacks his ordinary stock of adrenaline to keep it at bay. 

His body is a broken clock that’s wrong at any time of the day.

In Paris there are stairs to grapple with - his chambre de bonne, a nook of a room, lies under the roof. Ethan’s wound grows a lancing tempo to the up-and-down climbs that seem to parody his former parkours. He lies low, but doesn’t lie down; stands stubborn, if slouched. Intel still finds his email box, his last if abstract connection with Brandt. 

Brandt.

Brandt, left to hold what’s left of their fort against Hunley’s battering ram. Brandt - Will, Ethan’s thoughts plead, swapping the curt plosive for the intimate glide, turned over on his tongue and in his heart like a balm. Pain is tenderizing; is making Ethan all too aware of isolation. A solitary by trade (never by choice), Ethan Hunt chose his missions because they came with the warmth of fellowship. He found it only to lose it time and again - to death, to betrayal, to sundering when necessity forced his hand. Until Will. Until Will’s presence unfolded in Ethan’s orbit, made palpable from Ethan’s first grab at him underwater to Will’s derring-do grasp of his ankle, right when Ethan was plummeting from the highest manmade point. 

He is close to freefalling now, even as he leaves his room at night. Ethan loses  himself to the crowd that ebbs and flows Paris’s ancient core, looks for the Seine waters to refresh the hot fringe of pain and the extra cabin fever. He’s clinging to memories of Will - flashtills - Will’s smile, caught and returned in a rearview mirror; the elusive turn of his hip under Ethan’s palm, back when Ethan challenged him for a gun and a confession; Will’s concern, the strong pure focus of it reaching Ethan’s ear even with five thousand feet between them (... that door RIGHT NOW!). 

The sweetest, haziest recall: Will’s presence in Dubai, when Ethan woke up in a hospital bed and a dazed sense of feeling good against the combined odds of crash and concussion. Waking to find Will’s face towering above his, creased in relief as if Ethan’s well-being had become Will’s personal score and he’d just hit maximum score, a feat confirmed by the Indian medic’s puzzled but optimistic diagnosis. Which may be why Ethan gave in to impulse and called him first thing after the wound, staggering into a blood-red telephone booth.

And got Will’s viaticum in return, that mixed blessing of our and last, followed by a silence growing thicker - sicker - with every day added to their separation.

The Seine is quiet, too. A dark pooling appeal, a view from the bridge (any bridge) that Ethan loses himself to a little longer every night, instead of dragging himself back to his lair. 

“Ah” says a voice behind him, but Ethan is past turning around. An adversary wouldn’t signal himself.

(He wants, he wants from the heart, to hold on. But the fall… silent, barely a splash in his mind…  the fresh, friendly waters closing over his head… darkness a mercy…)

“Plus ça change,” the voice says, and Ethan could swear he’s heard it before. “Let me guess - you have lost a dear one. No -” A pause. The velvety hush of a step forward. “Not quite. You are losing a quest, and he is part of it.”

Ethan turns around. Slow, painfully slow. 

“What have we here?” the strange man says, a smile dangling from his corner mouth. (His face is oddly moonlit; too pale, as if the man, like Ethan, foreswore daylight.) “A bad loser.”

This has to be a fever dream - that pallid, familiar face under a mane of too-blond hair, as if Ethan's feverish mind had taken stock of his own features and printed out a negative of them (minus the beard). The man's gaze sharpens under the moonlight. He's seen it too.

“Ah,” comes his low growl, before the silence resumes, quietly unquiet. Then something shifts in him - an imperceptible tilt of the inner axis that directs every turn in a resolute mind. When the man speaks again, he makes it easy for Ethan to read him, because his voice is shot with a wistfulness of regret that is all too known to Ethan.

“Well, my bushy Doppelganger. How is going underground going for you?”

A dream. Likely brought on by Ethan's fever, the last six months of nursing an abdominal wound and a wild terrorist goose chase. But Ethan has been fighting a losing battle for too long. He wants a reprieve. He’ll take even an Ersatz out. He needs answers and solutions from his haywire mind.

“Not that good,” he says, leaning onto the stone parapet. It’s four a.m., a narrow deserted loophole between the tourist-heavy hours. They have the old stone and the new moon to themselves - a scene as drained of colour as the two of them, fantastical and confusing.

Suddenly the man is a close-up, so close that Ethan’s reflexes have his arm up and jammed against his counterpart’s windpipe before he can think. The quickening of muscles jolts a grunt out of him. But the man - the creature, now he’s seen at close quarters - only smiles. He wraps one hand around Ethan’s arm and the mere intimation of strength is like none ever bestowed upon Ethan, even by Janik Vintner. He braces himself for more pain.

It doesn’t come. Instead… “My name is Lestat,” the creature says with a nonchalance belied by his grip. Another expectant pause. A sigh. “Not a connoisseur of rock, then. Never mind. Well met under the moon, Mr Hunt.”

As his hand drops again to his side, Ethan takes a step back.

“How do you -” He cuts himself off; finds himself rehearsing a six-months-old query. “We haven’t met before, have we?”

“Cher, I would remember it” (Lestat, his hand to his heart. Ethan is struggling for focus; is struck by a sense of the absurd, of a figure stepping right out of Benji’s Gothic film library to target his smooth tones at him).

“Although you look shockingly pitiful for a version of me. A man with a plan, yes - but the shreds of them.” Lestat pauses, his gaze narrowing. 

“And a pit in his multi-orphaned soul. Father. Mother. Uncle. Your first mentor - your maker, as it were - who killed himself under your eyes, the better to desert you. We do share a history, you know.” 

“He didn’t actually -”

The man holds his hand up, his nails pearlescent under the moon, as he continues to flip the entries in Ethan’s past. “Your wife. And now, your… Impossible Mission Force? A perfect name for a post-rock band ten years ago. Ever heard of Explosions in the Sky?”

Ethan, whose past fifteen years feature enough blow-ups to fill the exosphere, says “Shut up” through gritted teeth.

Lestat riposts a laugh. “I will, for now. But I’m not done with you, my aching lookalike. I’ll see you tomorrow night, same bridge, same hour.”

“You won’t.”

“I’m your last resort,” Lestat says, his face hardening in anger. Ethan has faced worse, but the sight of his own features made ugly by that sudden rage acts like a paralytic. “Look at me! Look at me! Yes, you look just as he did - a man in agony. And I healed him. Louis wouldn’t admit it, but I did!” His lower tones darker - Lestat shifting their antagonism onto another context, a former time, a previous interlocutor. The tones speak hubris, but they also, as far as Ethan can tell, speak of a crack, a rogue in that porcelain cynicism. Another inner wound, hidden and nursed. 

“You’re all the same, you romantics. You crave the peace that I offer, the end of pain, the termination of your solitude, but your fastidious ethos insists on battling my bid. Well. We'll see!”

His face morphs into a warped representation of Ethan’s doggedness, and then, as one second topples into the next, he’s gone.

The night lets go of the day. Ethan tells himself he’ll stay in.

There was no new intel today, no silver fish tugging at the end of the - too few, too spaced out - lines he’s been casting, claiming favors he’d never thought to call in before, because Will moved his dominoes for him. But Will’s end is silent, raising a lump of fear in Ethan’s gut that the CIA traced the line and made an example of him. He turns to his evidence board - less detailed than the one he left in Cuba for Will to parse - and stares at it. It stares back.

Meanwhile, Lestat (another rogue agent, Ethan’s gut insists) beckons from the night.

The garret room at day is pain and stasis. 

And the thing is - Ethan can stay put, but he never had it in him to stay still. 

He waits until midnight has struck three before he hobbles down the stairs and makes his way to the Left Bank. The picturesque once again erased by darkness, as soon as he leaves the bright-lit Saint-Germain cafés behind him. The Seine fans out under his eyes, tossing and turning from the subsurface currents that never leave it quiet, much like Ethan’s too-human heart.

And not-human Lestat is there, looking delighted.

“You couldn’t resist me,” he crows. “You hypocrite - mon semblable - mon frère ! I could kiss you, if it wasn’t for the beard. And for scenting your fever at ten paces.” He sniffs elegantly. “That whiff of steel. Corrosive. Making you sluggish, making you - ineffective.”

Every word a turn of the screw. Only Ethan’s pride holding back the groan he was taught to let out with each blow, to trick the adversary into thinking him short of breath. (He used to dream of sex with Will turning groan into moan, redeemed not only by the peak abandon of orgasm, but by the joy of Will’s absolute closeness.)

Instead he lets Lestat’s hand palm his cheek, a liberty taken and conceded for the cold comfort it brings to Ethan’s fever, better than any off-the-counter meds.  “I can take it all away,” Lestat segues as if he’d read his thoughts.  “Not just the pain. The frustration. If I’m your maker, then I’ll break and remold your impossible, strike it into a truly endless perspective.” Another beat; the moveable touch of Lestat’s fingers  to his jaw. “Ask me.”

“I’m not without an ethos myself,” he continues, and Ethan’s next exhale is caustic, but Lestat shakes his head at the scoff. “I feed on evildoers. You do, too - one grand feat at a time. But they’re too fast for you, Ethan Hunt, they’re outrunning you and you hate it. Ask me to turn you, and I’ll make you the best version of ourselves you’ve ever been. No more hurdles. No more pain. Ethan, be with me.”

“When you say feed on evildoers…” Ethan turns away from the touch, onto the handhold of sanity that, so far, has proved resilient even in the absence of any other anchor system. “... what do you mean exactly?”

Lestat’s smile sharpens. And the sight pumps Ethan’s heart with a jolt that could be the very terror he’s dedicated himself to fighting - or could be arousal. The old vein of excitement never lies still in Ethan, and there have been times when its pulse fed on a darkness that he alone can acknowledge in himself. Julia only saw the good man in him, as does Benji, but Ethan doesn’t fool himself that he is innocent. He lost that privilege the night he looked Jim Phelps in the face and yelled Red light! against a chaos of steel and speed, all of him exulting in Jim’s demise. He knew it then; but he pushed the knowledge away, let the pure blue sky of Utah wash over him and feed his smugness in battling gravity. He cruised close to moral smugness; found his alibi in Julia’s purity, until he faked his own crime scene - like Phelps, like Hunt - and used Will in the exact same way he'd been used: as the eye witness, the fall guy to Ethan’s self-interested trickery. 

(The ancient Greek tragedians called it miasma - the spiritual contamination arising from one unethical act only to inhabit another.

Ethan, a former theatre kid, should have known better.)

Lestat’s smile grows wider, framed by his white-edged canines. Suddenly that strong hand is up again; is clamped to the nape of Ethan’s neck, forcing their foreheads together - one burning, one night-cold - before a tumble of hard images takes over Ethan’s mind. It becomes the silver screen on which Lestat can project the arrogant film of his latest hours. It starts with a sensation of flight, of Lestat unplugging gravity as he shoots up in the sky in an eerie inversion of Ethan’s numerous falls. Then, the ease of Lestat bending the night air to his course. Ethan is made to see where Lestat’s run across the upper spheres takes him - every sordid niche where Lestat lands in time to tear a predator off his prey and sink that white smile into his neck. Again and again, a repetition with variation, a penumbra patchwork of crime averted. 

“Speed is of the essence,” Lestat whispers, calm, cajoling. “You like that, don’t you?” And the next image is Lestat’s body being fast, fast, faster than Ethan could ever run. Dancing up and down the vertical plane of a wall. Ethan, an old hand at vertigo, closes his eyes. He can sense his pulse answering the bait, beating even the fever’s relentless rush.

“Think - think what a change you could make. Think how safer the world, how many deaths averted, if only you were more capable. Ethan Hunt - a predestined name. That evildoer you’re chasing right now? I’ll teach you how to find him. You won’t master the Mind Gift at first, no fledgeling does, but I can teach you how to nurture it, how to attune yourself to every stir of mortal mischief, down to the crack of a match over a lighting fuse.”

“What price?” Ethan makes himself ask. He’s split apart, a man half on sufferance, half on a vicarious adrenaline shot. 

“A price? No. You’re not to be bought,” Lestat muses - a mix of smooth and sincere. “A sacrifice; now we’re talking.” 

He must have checked some invisible tell in Ethan’s slumped figure, because he laughs. “Look at you - a Pavlovian dog to the word. Well, I’ll lay it out for you now. And you’ll listen to me, because you are obsessed with that quest of yours. Trust me, I know - how a soul can torment itself...” He pushes Ethan away, too late - not before Ethan caught one last image, a small house in the old Saint-Germain area, and a man’s form silhouetted against the window, deep in a book.

“... and coffins are the new lounge chairs, really,” Lestat is saying two minutes later, having “laid it out” as promised.

It’s a quip, but to Ethan it comes as a pang. It raises Will’s ghost, hair dirty blond and matted with sweat, slumped against him on a post-mission flight to D.C. Will, his eyes puffy from dedicated vigilance ( Where’s Ethan? ), entrusting his head to Ethan’s shoulder while  Ethan’s hand lingered on his knee. To his team it must have looked like Ethan grounding Will, not Will’s catnap providing Ethan’s anchor.

The sigh is Lestat’s, tinged with impatience. The grief is all Ethan’s.

“Oh, very well. I’ll let you sleep on it - and rise on it,” the former says. “Enjoy your day out in the sun, even if there’s nothing new for you under it. Nothing.” He gives Ethan his back, then his face, proud, restless, over his shoulder. “Think on it, but think fast, if you can still do that. And shave the beard. You wear a face I happen to think deserves better, so I’ll give you the proverbial third time. But it will be the last.”

Once more he turns gravity inside out and plummets upwards out of sight, leaving a stranded man.

Ethan’s fever spikes that night, burning not only his blood but his boats. What’s a broken man to do but go for broke? Ethan, recumbent, gutted, grabs his phone and calls Will. The phone too is a burner, since Ethan knows enough about masks and misdirection to shield his call, but the call goes nowhere. Will can’t be joined.

(Can’t? Won’t?)

(Has Will given up on Ethan making it count?)

Six hours into daylight he tries again, then, in a figurative last stand, tries Langley. He’ll hang up the moment Will’s voice comes in, Ethan tells himself in a daze, the second Will’s breath becomes the audible, endearing proof that Will still holds that safe space of existing outside of Ethan’s chaos.

But Will’s office phone rings on, and the voice that finally puts it out of its misery asks for Ethan’s designator in alien tones. Ethan hangs up. Whatever is happening on Will’s end can’t be compromised, even if Ethan’s gut is fairly convinced by now that something’s wrong. Well, everything’s wrong, but something’s Will wrong, which is enough to drag Ethan back into three- quarters verticality. He drags himself to the bathroom - a Lilliputian affair - and finds a razor. Doesn’t look at the too-pallid face he creates, after six months of hiding it from the sun. Then back to his laptop, tugging at his lines. All hooks come up empty, but for the friend of a friend of Luther’s who may have caught wind of a dead operative living the life somewhere between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but could not say for sure. 

The sun sweeps a reddening semi-curve past the Paris roofs. 

Lestat frowns upon spotting him. “You look ruined,” is his opening gambit. “No man with this face has any call to look so bleak and fractured. You remind me of my father’s castle in Auvergne.”

Ethan only looks at him. 

Lestat gentles his voice, tunes it to patience and understanding. “You won’t do it for yourself, that I get. But you’ll do it for others, for their global sake. And of course, you’ll do it for Will.”

Hearing Brandt’s name in a voice so entwined to his own has Ethan almost recoil. But Lestat is right. Ethan’s commitment, ingrained in him since his novice days, has been gloved for two years in another dedication, so absolute, so primary that it takes on a selfishness of its own. Ethan has never put a mission above the people who carry it out, but he would put Will’s safety on equal footing with the world’s, even if it meant never seeing Will again.

He and Lestat stand in the semi-circular recess at the middle of the bridge that French architects call a refuge . Once it was used as a safety alcove for pedestrians to avoid the hooves and wheels of horse-driven carriages. Now Lestat leans against the curved stones, his face radiant, offering him a death-defying pass back into the fray. Into the fight.

“Can you make me fast enough that I’ll cross oceans? Climb walls, climb ceilings on my own? Read people’s thoughts, not just their lips?”

All this and more, Lestat assures him. He hovers close, closer, closest, one arm enveloping Ethan as if of its own motion, while his other hand tilts Ethan’s face to the left. Somehow the gesture mutes Ethan’s pulse; brings the fever to a ceasefire. He senses how Lestat’s canines grow and sharpen while Lestat murmurs hold close , murmurs in the shadow. Some dulled intimation of danger, that seems to have taken on Brandt’s voice (Ethan?! ), stirs up at the featherlight contact. The teeth touch the curve where Ethan’s neck meets his right shoulder, Will’s voice hardening (Ethan!), even as Ethan calls for his last morsel of obstinacy. 

He’s crossing the line. He’s doing this - his neck running the first trickle of blood - because it’s the only way he can force the Syndicate out of the shadow and throw the enemy to Will’s feet (Ethan!Ethan!) trussed and tied, so Will’s hands can be untied. Untied, Ethan tells himself as he surrenders to an odd, an overwhelming haze of pleasure, so the IMF mantle can fall on Will’s capable shoulders as it should have, the moment they were reinstated…

“ ETHAN! ”

The charm shatters when he is grabbed and wrestled out of Lestat’s grip. Ethan cries out, the pain reinstated; then there are hands, strong but human-strong, bracing him against the stone alcove. He finds himself looking - once more -  into a face he knows as minutely as his own, though not his own. The lion’s wrinkle on Brandt’s broad forehead is deeper-carved than eight months ago, when Ethan was carted back from Belarus in a plane but on a stretcher. He’s without a tie, a rare Brandt occurrence, and the moonlight fringes his solid face, his textured crop of hair, adding to the atmospheric surreality of it all.

“What the hell is wrong with you,” Will yells, and the familiar, high-pitched note of exasperation strikes a match that flickers all the way down Ethan’s hollow self.

“Everything,” he whispers.

He lets himself be taken in, the empty sum of him, even as he struggles with the impossibility of Will at his side. How? and Are you safe? jostle up for passage on his lips, but before they can part again Will is turning around, just enough so he can place his hand, palm up, on Lestat’s velvet jacket. “No,” he says, raucous, impervious to Lestat’s fury made visible in his face. “No, god damn it, back off. He’s not your chewtoy, Lioncourt.”

Lestat stills, his eyes suddenly cautious. “You know my name?”

Ethan expects more words; expects Will to be Will and state the obvious, even though nothing is obvious or even sensible about this situation. But Will only lifts his head, letting the moonlight wash over him. It picks up the flecks of gray in his eyes and makes them silver, even as the blue flashes vivid, a kingfisher blue, and Lestat stumbles back.

“A Mayfair,” he growls. “Julien Mayfair’s eyes - you’re his scion.”

Will doesn’t answer. He gives Lestat his back, his focus once more on Ethan, Will’s body a sentinel between Ethan and the night. 

“Ethan,” he says. “Ethan, keep your eyes on me” - and with that he does a gesture that belongs to Ethan’s fever-ringed dreams: he brings Ethan’s hand to his own cheek and covers it with his palm, making himself - Will’s analytical, long-suffering, invaluable self - Ethan’s fixed point. Refuge within the refuge. 

“This is a vampire you’re committing to.”

No shit trembles on Ethan’s mind, the phantom of a laugh. Will shakes his head.

“He won’t fix you. He’ll make you strong, yes, immortal, yes, but that won’t be you. Not the you I know and… not the human you. The you that I know is scared right up to the millisecond before he carries the day and stops my heart. He turns you, you won’t be scared anymore - mostly. You won’t doubt yourself. You won’t need a team. Why would you? You’ll be perfect.” Raw-spoken, the cords on Will’s neck tensing, one of his many vulnerable tells. “The Dark Blood will burn every flaw out of you. That little mole on your left cheek, that’s as much you as your idiotic, your masochistic impulse to   -”

“What a paean of love,” Lestat jeers. “ Mais oui, let’s convince the crippled man his true beauty lies in letting a bullet rot his gut out while his civilization totters on the brink of destruction.”

“Shut up,” Will says fiercely. “Ethan, listen to me.”

“But he’s right. I can’t… I’m no use to…”

“I thought,” Brandt says, his voice cracked but intent. “After Belarus. I told myself, six months from now, after we’d cleared ourselves, I’d talk you into returning to India with me. You love the desert, don’t you? And the sun, the goodness of it. I thought, hell, we’ll go for a run at dawn, a normal run, and this time we’ll match our strides. See those camels again. Laugh, on a break, in the brilliant air.”

“Brandt. Will, I -” Ethan has to speak around the warm, wet premise of tears. “I can’t even walk straight these days.”

“Then let me ask this - and given the number of times you’ve shoved my back to that wall, I think I’ve earned my go. Do you trust me?”

It could be the pain, playing organ-grinder again and making a monkey out of his most secret emotions. It could be a trick. For all Ethan knows, it could be the Syndicate playing him from the start with another mind-numbing  gas. 

Ethan looks into Will’s face; takes the plunge. 

“Good.” And Will, finally, smiles back, though he looks wistful too. Ethan’s mind, not numb, lets a memory frame the sight. You tell me your secrets … Will looks hopeful, but he also looks like a man resigned to strip off his last layer of reserve, come what cost. “Can I touch you?”

The new question eddies down Ethan’s mind all the way to his groin, stirring up what lay half dormant, half despaired. Yes , the sum of him thinks. The circumstances couldn’t be any worse, but Ethan Hunt never let context stop him. He’ll take Will’s touch, any touch; even Will mapping and measuring the waste in Ethan’s body, because Ethan couldn’t fix himself in time.

Dimly, he senses Lestat’s aura of curiosity as Will tugs Ethan’s shirt up with careful fingers. Ethan’s spine clenches in expectation , but Will only lays the warm span of his hand above the wound's dominion. Skin to skin, murmuring, “Shhh now. Just let me. Ethan - let me in.”

Strange words, but they make Ethan pliable - more than he’s ever been at Will’s request. He closes his eyes and nods.

(A near-impossible task. Even Julia only got that pass in the eleventh hour, followed by the midnight of their parting. But Ethan, eyes closed, wills himself open and the patch of warmth becomes a conduit; becomes a shortcut between Brandt and himself, letting Will into the patterns and dynamic of Ethan’s vitality, or what’s left of it - Ethan’s core, bruised, ragged, but Will’s for the asking.)

The warmth takes over his vitals. It circles the wound, the dolor; it gathers, a force, eerie, oddly electrifying. Once, he’d heard Benji say “You have to understand: Ethan is a fuse box without a main switch” to some poor techie come to retrieve what was left of their equipment post-mission. Julia had switched him off, once, to rescue him; a brutal if necessary act. Will, though - Will is accessing him from the inside, his patient force healing every fuse and circuit on its progress to the bullet, the enemy within, still entrenched in his connective tissue with license to kill.

Ethan brings his fist to his mouth - his coping mechanism when hurt meets worst. 

But his fist is taken, is rerouted to Will’s lips - a mere touch, before the lips turn to Ethan’s ear. They murmur a husky solace - of sunlight, and friends, of world peace and freerunning, until (as Ethan lets his head fall forward to be shouldered by Will) the murmur grows inaudible and warm, live-feeding Will’s care to the force within. The force rises, and the bullet retracts; is belittled; a blip in Ethan’s consciousness, lulled by Will’s voice - a mote - a zero, its presence negated by whatever Willpower is unlashed on it.

Ethan’s next breath is a heave and a sob - his first deep breath in months.

It feels dazzling. It feels reborn. It feels...

“Who’s Julien Mayfair?” 

The words are blurted out of him before Ethan has resumed actual thought. It’s not that Ethan is inconsiderate; rather, it’s that he’s never known how to stay put in a resting-place, even one framed by Will’s arms and his voice. It’s instinct, kicking in whenever Ethan finds a team member harbouring a secret that threatens to become a partition between them. It’s need-to-know, it’s Ethan demanding clearance into Will’s humdinger of a past, partly to shoulder the weight and partly from the jarring realization that Lestat was made privy to it first.

“Well, he’s not a terrorist,” William answers, ignoring Lestat’s “That remains to be seen”. “He’s a ghost - and my mother’s great-grandfather. I think.” He sighs. “My family tree is… complicated.”

“And he told you about me,” Lestat says, though with a more guarded complacency.

“Among other things.”

“So Julien’s a ghost.” Ethan, one finger raised, is trying to retrace what appears indeed to be a tangled web. “And you’re…” 

A pause. Brandt, still looking exhausted, looks away. 

“A Mayfair witch. Complete with Julien’s eyes, Julien’s taste for waistcoats, and quite a few of his abilities - now stretching to elemental telekinetic healing.  Did he mentor you himself? Julien always looked after his own - when he wasn’t murdering them, that is.” 

“I asked him if he could raise the dead,” Brandt tells Ethan, half for himself. Being Brandt, he’s already regained his composure, but his voice remains hoarse. “After - after Croatia. He said no, and I told him to fuck off into the Light then because he was no help to me, none of this was.” 

“Will…”

“It’s all right now.”

“But it wasn’t then. Will, I’m -”

“Anyway, he was crazy,” Will cuts in, “and he stayed. Said as a male scion I was pretty safe from the family curse, hurray, and if I really wanted to join some Inner Mystical Fraternity (he never quite grasped the concept of IMF), I’d find it to my advantage to learn how to infiltrate a man’s mind and body. I told him to fuck off - redux - that I wasn’t interested in the first and, ah, already proficient in the second.”

Ethan nods slowly. “What made you change your mind?”

“What do you think?”

The silence that lingers between them is anything but quiet. Ethan doesn’t need a psychic to pry the answer: it is spread out in the file Will must have accessed even before India, that would have given him chapter and verse on Ethan’s multiple assignations with a hospital bed. He remembers the Mumbai medic’s incredulity after learning of his car-driven swan dive; the IMF surgeon cancelling his operation post-Belarus (“It seems the rumours of your compressed spine were vastly exaggerated”) , while Will leant against the doorway, shadowed in a smile. 

It’s the smile that does it - that fleeting crispation of Will’s mouth, as familiar to Ethan as his own bright grin, even when overshadowed by the night. Ethan surges up, every nerve and sinew revived, his own man again - and pushes his mouth up against that smile. He kisses so as to make it count, it a multitasking pronoun: Ethan’s gratitude, his confessed vulnerability, his embrace of the human in him, in Will, his reassurance that Will is Will is still Will, that Will’s inheritance makes him no less in Ethan’s eyes. Ethan mouths I’m sorry against Will’s lips, aware of the one-size-fits-all amends for past and present, only to be pushed against the curved parapet by Will’s body, blazing like a haystack, the warmth of Will’s hand palpable through the fabric of Ethan’s shirt. 

They would lose themselves to their reunion if it wasn’t for the ironical clapping in their backs.

“I could have loved you better,” comes in Lestat’s typical velvet tones. “It took him five months to admit you were in need of a cure. A glance was enough for me, and I hadn’t heard your voice.”

“I heard the hurt,” Will answers Ethan. “But I was still feeling my way around telekinesis, and it took all of Julien’s coaching to keep Hunley satisfied I was his best ally. Luckily for you, my ancestor also keeps his enemies close” - a significant glance, that’s enough to make Lestat recoil. Dead, alive or deadalive, it seems that Julien Mayfair is not to be underestimated. "Told Hunley I’d picked up your trail in Istanbul, flew a beeline to Paris. Still, I’m sorry it took so -”

“No - no, it’s on me. I should have taken better care -”

“Oh, enough with the Passion Play! I get it, you’re both saints.” And there’s this in Lestat’s voice, beneath the salt, that would get him Ethan’s attention but for Will’s warm presence reclaiming it. “Saints with licence to lie, and trick, and kill to achieve their providential design. I’d have strived for that with you, Ethan, and you’d have thrived at my side. Living in the shadow for those you hold close, and never dying.”

Will opens his mouth, intent on editing the motto, but Lestat is too quick for him. One second there and the next gone, probably to the deluxe coffin he was praising the other night. Time is wheeling the day in, one turn at a time: it’s November, with the sky still layering chiaroscuro over dark, but Ethan can hear the nearest café’s shutters being opened. Soon the string of coloured lights will be lit up, a tourists’ frail beacon, and the percolators will get going - the lovely human bustle that Ethan Hunt is on oath to preserve.

There still lacks an hour to daylight, though, and the mission’s siren call that will part them again.

As if reading his mind (is he reading his mind?), Will says, “I have a four-star hotel room I haven’t checked in yet, and you’re welcome to it. I also have some intel to share - not much, because Uncle Julien did fuck off in the end, probably to bother another scion, but he agreed to roam Europe for me first. I have a name for your man and I’m pretty certain, as per my own ghost protocol, he’s brewing trouble in Vienna. You’ll need Benji for this one - I can’t leave Hunley out of my sight for too long.” Will sighs. “Ethan, the reason I didn’t tell you about my, er…”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Ethan tells him. More pieces fall together as Will shakes his head, signaling his continued trust. Ethan is no mindreader, but he learnt early on how to parse a man’s face, especially one as expressive as Will’s, whose “putty features” (Benji) spell out his anxieties like a beginner reader. 

“And I won’t abuse it. I’ll… I can’t promise you I’ll be careful, but I won’t be careless because of you. I won’t take your gift for granted, and I won’t, I couldn’t, I’ll never look on you as the mere extension of your gift. I swear, Will.”

Will looks into his eyes, his own quiet, their pellucid blue filled with a love Ethan isn’t quite certain he deserves, but knows for sure to treasure. 

“I believe you,” Will says at last. “Look, I’ll just… I’ll ask if we’re good, okay? If you ever - and I know you will, goddamnit. I’ll ask, and if you so much as wince, I’ll know what to do. But I won’t always be here to check on you, Ethan, and - and I can’t raise the dead. Keep that in mind.” A beat, before Will’s voice clears up again, sincere but strained. “Which I’ll never read unless you ask me too. I swear to it, Ethan.”

Ethan tilts his head to the side. Most of the time that’s “eh” in Ethanspeak; at this moment, it’s so he can kiss Will’s cheek, Ethan’s thanksgiving for Will's very existence. Then a thought comes to his mind.

“Read it now,” he tells William Brandt, chief analyst, fellow rogue agent, and witch.

Will gives him his patent long-suffering glance, dented by his current smile.

“Read it,” Ethan says, grinning back.

It’s a crude mental drawing, because Ethan, while an excellent draughtsman, needs time, paper and a human model to show his best work. But Will reads, and smiles, and then he chuckles, his shoulders shaking with mirth, while Ethan’s grin grows irrepressible. The joy is sweeter when shared between them;  when made tangible in Will’s arm, embracing Ethan’s shoulders as they begin to retrace their steps on the bridge. Matching steps, Ethan’s stride quick and purposeful again.

“Camels?”

“Camels,” Ethan vows, and grins all the way to the morning-end of night.

Chapter Text

"Forgive me, Father, because I'm about to sin." Will's head is duly bowed, his voice on the husky side of humble - though Ethan can spot the shade of amusement at his own wordplay.

The tenderness wells up in Ethan, concealed by his hands joined before his breast. The buttoned-up cassock fits him as tightly as it had during the Vatican heist - the heavy gabardine, meant to impart dignity to a dedicated celibate, slowing his moves. Still, he paces to and fro in their bedroom, each volte lifting the heavy robe ever so slightly, to Will's corresponding snag of breath.

(When it comes to Ethan, Will has an ankle fetish. Which he denies. The Burj Khalifa and Ethan know better.)

"Quod peccatum?" the latter now asks, tuning his voice to the intimacy that will get Will warm and swollen, quicker than any obscenity.

And he pauses, close enough that Will, still kneeling, can catch the swinging black sash and bring it to his lips, and mime an open-mouthed kiss along its length. Ethan’s groin tenses exquisitely.

"Te..." Will begins, only to falter because the IMF does not provide Latin tutoring; not in today’s world, where the bad guys are more invested in live casualties than in dead languages.

"Te fellaturus sum?" Ethan prompts, somewhat breathlessly.

"Yeah, something like that" - diving under the gabardine. There's acting, and there's poor acting, and then there's acting upon Ethan's cue, which has been Will's fate ever since the former drew a glorified stick figure on his palm and demanded that Will give it a name. Now he lets his senses be suffocated not so much by the gabardine, which smells of mothballs, as by the fact that Ethan (for once) heeded Will's caveat and went commando under the cloth.

"Jesus Christ," Will says, and carries on, a muffled litany soon to morph into a half-sobbed, entirely profane trail of sounds around Ethan's too, too solid flesh, while Will's hot palms grip and knead the defrocked upper thighs. He may have stopped breathing at one point, and they definitely end up on the floor, the cassock a lost cause. Will, his breath catching convulsively as he resurfaces for fresh air, makes a mental note to refund Wardrobe.

Then feels Ethan's hand on his head, an absolving caress.

"... Good job," his lover says, in the tone he uses whenever Will hoodwinks Hunley as to the exact scope of their, quote, "adaptive field improvisation".

"Next time," Will pants, his head lolling bac on a black-draped lap. "Next time, you get to corrupt the pious guy."

Chapter Text

Here’s a thing about fiasco, global, local or personal: it’s pretty much like baseball. Meaning, it ain’t over ‘till it’s over. 

Ask the IMF (once re-avowed).  Ask Will, who ruminated his greatest hit until even the Secretary couldn’t take his self-corroding angst any longer and packed him off to Moscow (“The cryptocurrency laundering fractals will have to wait, Chief Brandt”). The old man knew that Ethan would act on his superior’s cue and confront both Will and his part in Will's history, which Ethan did, taking their chaotic meeting to every next-level next level (always a daunting prospect with Ethan) and topping it with his Seattle confession.

And... it’s worked. To be precise (Will’s work mantra), it has worked for the last five minutes. Will, dazed by Ethan's rhetoric, has taken the phone, his clean bill of conscience, and is walking off. And yet… because it is in his nature to dot the very i of calamity before he can move on… he pauses in his tracks and turns his head.

Neither Ethan nor Julia notice him. They didn’t a year ago, when they were still happy; they don’t now. Ethan thinks himself shielded by the night and the cement pillar he’s hovering by; Julia thinks him alone in watching her. Will’s eyes are trained enough that he can pick the slow-gestured adieu on her part - and while Ethan’s face is obscured from him, Will knows it must be made poignant by regret, before Ethan lets the distance between them engulf him again. Julia walks past a door; only Will remains. He has seen it all: the pang of mutual recognition, the wordless, wistful parting of ways - a shadow image of their last morning in Marušići, when Ethan had jogged back to hug her where she stood on the threshold of their rented cottage, laughing, enveloped in the early morning sun. 

The two pictures slide together; together, they shatter Ethan’s absolution.

(He might have vowed to protect Julia. But it was Brandt’s mission, taking precedence, to safeguard their peace. He’d accepted it. He’d made himself answerable for it - to himself in the first place. Ethan can talk himself raw and ragged over it, the consequences are still Will’s to call, and he calls them as he sees them. Julia was taken, and Ethan, who would challenge the Biblical odds and squeeze himself  through that needle's eye before he shot anyone dead, killed six times over to get her back.

All because of Will. All because Will made a choice that morning, watching Ethan flex and stretch, the Croatian sun fountaining around his arms and shoulders.)

The can hails back the worms. The guilt rears up, in fantastic shape. “You’re the helper,” Will tells it sarcastically, as its black searchlight flushes out his original sin. And all the sins that followed, a bruising tally to his ego.  Couldn’t save Leonid. Couldn’t hold Jane back from a revenge that Will is pretty sure will take its own toll. Couldn’t trust Ethan, Benji, couldn’t fell Winstrom, couldn’t even get the goddamn power on. Failed them, failed himself, failed Ethan - the bastard sin in Will’s little black book,  turning his conscience into a necrotic area.

He fights the necrosis on his own terms. He didn’t before; he let the Secretary dictate what he thought was penance and now sees as the old man’s attempt to cushion Will’s fall without failing his best man. Well, the man is gone. His successor will appoint Will where he best sees fit; in the meantime, Will is staying on for Ethan’s sake. Ethan, now he’s launched on his Apostolic quest, has been signing them up for every mission within range. And he's leading them with gusto, but also, Will realizes, with the unconcealed intent to change the IMF's premise (teams come and go; agents, as a species, are not gregarious) and make good on ending up together. And Will… Will is currently torn between giving Ethan what he needs and punishing himself for the fact that Ethan wouldn’t need workplace domesticity if Will’s Ur-sin had not ruined his marriage.

It’s the reverse side of simple. But then, Will never was a simple soul. 

He is, however, an old hand at combining guilt with resilience. And for a while he rests assured that he’s done the trick. He takes point for the team, plans with them, covers them, has their backs and lends them his ear; laughs along, argues back, puns forth, consoles - on one occasion he keeps his arms around Jane until they go numb, after they gatecrashed a small vestry to attend Hanaway’s anniversary Mass incognito. He toasts Benji’s beer and, more prudently, Luther’s across various tabletops. Luther, his own man, only orbits around them occasionally, but he’s Ethan’s man too, and as such makes it clear that he has a vocational interest in keeping Ethan safe and sound.

Ethan…  

Well, Ethan is doing his best to destroy Will’s balance point. 

The point is, Will allows his guilt to simmer even if, no,  even as Ethan appears to be moving on. Ethan is allowed to heal, not Will. Ethan’s ally he may be, and, by and large, his “first lieutenant”  (Jane and Benji). But he must not, will not become Ethan’s friend. His punishment (decreed by Will, enforced by the same) lies in keeping himself shuttered off from Ethan’s increasing warmth, more palpable as each new mission seals their team into a tighter unit. Ethan is giving his all - his faith, his smile, his unique charisma and boundless measure of care - to his team, seemingly keen on turning every fly-by-night safehouse (or motel room, or, in one case, terminally damp houseboat) into home. 

And it's becoming harder and harder for Will to stay aside.

It’s another version of their sparring bout, with Ethan tackling Will’s solitude from every angle, and Will giving him the slip time and again. And suddenly - Will couldn’t say when or how - it’s not just a matter of dragging Will, kicking and flailing, into the domestic fold. Oh no. No, it’s tenfold more dangerous, once it becomes apparent that Ethan has found a balance point of his own. He'll still court death for a mission - hell, he'll fall down on one knee and sing That’s Amore, preferably off key so death has no choice but to notice him. But then he’ll come through and come back, however chipped and dented, because he has a reason to. And the reason, Will realizes with a scalding jolt of fear, is no longer just the team - it’s Will.

Ethan, freefaller extraordinaire, is falling for him.

Jane hasn’t seen it - yet. Benji, Will suspects, is getting there. Will himself grits his teeth and braces himself to keep Ethan at arm’s length while rushing to Ethan’s side at every turn. Ethan gets impatient; gets careless (in Will’s estimation) or possibly (in Ethan’s estimation) gets cunning, his carelessness forcing Will’s heart into the open.  

Will’s equilibrium comes to tipping point after he’s had to rescue a very bruised Ethan from “Dracula’s lair” (Benji), a Transylvanian gorge doubling as an Apostolic  bio-weapons facility. The rescue involved harnessing Ethan to Will’s body before they could both be hauled up into the IMF chopper sent by Jane. A close call for Ethan, an even closer one for Will. Thankfully, his guilt has unplumbed resources. Having found the harness and bruises quite inspiring, Will's guilt whispers to him that his penance can be turned up another notch, every time Ethan renews his bid for intimacy and Will is tempted to match the bid. 

This is nothing Will hasn’t done before, after all - until the Old Secretary noticed him limping into Analysis and had him pack a bag for Moscow. 

And it still works. Sort of. Or, it would work if Ethan kindly agreed to give up and let Will regain his balance with a little help from The Surrender Suite, DC’s seediest, no-holds-barred BDSM haunt. Sadly, Ethan is not made of renouncing stuff, and Will is getting too frayed at the edges to keep up his guard. Ethan pushes, and Will parrs, and the air between them becomes laden with frustration, until the balance point of their team quivers in sympathy.

“This can’t go on,” Ethan tells Will, both of them reaching the end of their tether. “I don’t get it - I told you she’s alive, she’s moved on, I’ve moved on. I’ve told you the truth, chapter and verse, and you’re still acting as if none of last year happened. Will, talk to me.”

“There’s nothing -”

“Oh, but there is” - and that is when Ethan does the unthinkable. 

They’ve been arguing at full pelt, something that started small, Will’s refusal to join Ethan for a post-mission beer, and didn’t take long to flare up into one hell of a showdown. Ethan has been getting in Will’s face with every spark, and now he lights the final, fatal fuse by letting the back of his fingers brush against Will’s plaquet - swollen and suffocating, because their quarrel, topped by Ethan’s bare-knuckled claim of his erection, is the hottest torment Will could picture.

The next millisecond has him grasp and hold up Ethan’s wrist - and speak, every word jagged as Will outs his sin.

“That day she was taken - the day that blew your marriage. I knew about the hit squad.”

“Yes, I'd guessed -”

“And I knew you. Knew, if they came at you, the odds would favor you. And - no, shut up, I’m far from done. And I knew my strength. Krav Maga, Cali, Muay Thai, name it and I’d go through the moves with my eyes shut. I knew the right thing was either to fill you in or stay with Julia myself, and I chose neither. Didn’t want to. Chose to tail you instead, to have an hour of you for myself. Didn’t give a shit that she was underprotected, that she might be jumped, hurt, taken or - yeah. Why should I care? I had your ass smack in my line of sight, every curve and constrictor muscle picked up by your running shorts. So. You wanna tell me we’re good, Ethan?”

His voice hoarse, he forces his gaze up. Ethan’s face is frozen, is stricken, but he doesn’t move; his hand still held up between them. Will glances at it, and the devil on his shoulder speaks up, newly inspired, a repetition with variation.

“I was a coward not to tell you. But now…”

“What would it take?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What would it take,” Ethan repeats, all honed emphasis, as dogged as when he’s battling Will over means and ends. “For us to be good.”

And - that’s it. Why can’t he let up? Why must he always be Ethan, clinging to a lost cause the way he clung to those panes of glass thousands of feet in the air? Something is giving in within Will, some DO NOT TOUCH red switch in his inner site of conflict. Something must have given, or else he wouldn’t be...

“You want good? You want good, Ethan?”

... low-voiced, the dangerous, desperate man cornered too closely not to lash out...

“Then here’s a mission for you - and it’s been chosen quite willingly by others before; but they were not you, and so they failed.” Will chuckles dry; pushes the next words out. 

“Any hotel room will do, as long as it’s cold, impersonal, and hasn’t seen clean-up for a while. Get me there. Then get me naked, stripped from the waist down, and make me wait, bare-assed and shivering. Have Jane and Benji watch us, if you like. Or you can live feed the next part to the IMF for good measure. Next part, incidentally, is you tying me up. Feel free to use anything, ropes, zip ties, wire. Make it tight - make it hurt. Then step up before me. And look at me, the way you did after I surrendered that briefcase - remember? - or fought Moreau’s thugs. The same look, and whip your belt out of the loops on your jeans. Fast and sharp, as you did in Sidorov's face.”

He doesn't miss Ethan’s sharp inhales; smiles grimly in return. “What, you think I can't access Russian cams?”

No answer. Will drops his voice to a rasp, aping the intimacy Ethan’s craved for months.

“Next step - around and behind me. That's when you use the belt. Use it good.”

A beat.

“I mean it. Think, sanctioned hit. Payback, punishment, a belting by any other name. Just… give it your all. As you do. Flog my ass until I’m ten, fifteen, twenty strikes out and blubbering. Flog my thighs, my calves, beat my entire verso to a pulp, and then, Ethan, but only then, tell me we’re good.”

A beat, a silence.

“But you won’t do it. No, you’re too good a person to do it. I’d trust you to save the universe, Ethan, but you can't... you can't save the core of me. The rest is yours, though. Can’t fight you any longer on that count. Use me - any way you like. But leave good well alone.”

When the silence has become an expanse, a wintry stretch between them, Will turns to leave. It’s past six in the nondescript East European town, but he still puts his dark glasses on, then puts one foot in front of the other until his legs are surrendering and it’s time to liaise with the extraction team.

IMF walks them through the usual cha cha - report, health check, debrief, the post-mission triple step - before it clears them for a week off. Will texts Jane and Benji jovial nothings and stays home. He’s still struggling with a complicated sense - call it angstception if you will - that in asking Ethan to punish him he has piled wrong upon wrong, a move deserving of its own punishment.

The week shuffles by. The sun makes a comeback, and Will readies himself for the nothing new. Ethan will never ask for him again, let alone seek him out: Will turns his mind to internal affairs. If he is to help Ethan from afar, the best he can do is reroute his efforts to diplomacy. IMF’s allegiance to the CIA has always been a tightrope act between freedom to strike while the crisis is hot and awareness that it should be accountable to the mother ship. And the CIA has always hovered between Sooner you than us and resentment at being shown up by the pod. There’s a new command officer, name of Hunley, and it’s obvious to Will that he’s got IMF as a body, and Ethan in particular, in his crosshairs.

Then Monday comes, with Will’s landline phone ringing at dawn, once, twice, a sound gone oddly unfamiliar in the Mobile Age. Will picks up; a recorded voice, with an equally outdated human grain, politely asks him to save the date for Ethan Hunt’s next mission, please to let them know if he can attend. No warning about delayed self-destruction - the voice probably knows it’s redundant in his case.

Will is… 

Okay, Will is flung off kilter. All of his calculations have been thrown, utterly wrongfooted, and what the hell is Ethan’s game? Ethan’s not one to play deaf and dumb; the chances are nil that he’ll let the whole matter RIP if he means to confront Will again. On the other hand, Ethan using a mission to enact Will’s hardcore folie à deux? Unthinkable. Unless… And so Will’s mind, another zone of turbulence, tosses and turns during his flight to Morocco, even as he strives to focus on the mission. He is to meet up with his team, and, together, they are to intercept and neutralize the prototype for a cutting-edge assassination drone. A drone, Will learns, currently targeting a liberal prince with an equal passion for wealth redistribution and polo. 

When Will pauses on the threshold of the Moroccan safehouse - a few rooms in a dilapidated-looking dar -, his nerves are on high alert. He all but jumps out of his linen suit when Ethan opens the door on his second knock and greets him with a side hug, lifting his other arm to usher him inside the quiet, whitewashed walls. Will, further thrown, grapples for a clue. Jane and Benji appear equally nonplussed, their body language a mix of ? and !, which would amuse him if he wasn’t so nervous himself. For the next half a minute their shelter hosts three very cautious people, one elephant and a beaming team leader. 

Then Ethan lays his leader plan down and Will slips back into his team persona. He blocks every brittle scheme, down to Ethan impersonating the dark-haired prince for the drone’s benefit, he blocks and blocks and blocks until Ethan’s hand is on his arm, Ethan leaning into his space.

“Meet me halfway,” Ethan asks quietly, and, when Will stares, “please. I promise, I will if you will.”

And his voice echoes down Will’s consciousness - one promise hiding another - tensed between past and present, a warning and an indistinct vow, that shakes Will’s last remnant of certainty.

They find a compromise, and the mission, impossibly, proves a piece of cake. A disguised Ethan lures the drone away to where it can deniably assassinate him; once isolated, it is “neutered” (Benji) by the firm of Dunn and Stickell, while Jane and Will guide, guard, repel and monitor in turn. Will’s laptop shows him Ethan on a Barb horse (only Ethan) winging it beautifully at polo, until the drone buzzes in and Ethan canters off, pushing the Barb to a 30 mph gallop across streets, gardens, alleys, and what looks suspiciously like a rooftop, albeit a low one. 

It is the memory of Ethan’s toned arm, rising and falling like a young Thor’s as he wielded his mallet, that revives Will’s nerves. He himself is practically on vibrate when he texts Ethan & Team not to wait for him, he’ll be taking care of the diplomatic wrap-up and joining them in DC. A coward’s out, because Will was always good at differing his face-offs. He takes his time: lets the afternoon drag on even into evening, before he retraces his step to the Moroccan safe house. Dimly, he longs for these white walls; for something, too, that they might express but that Will cannot find in himself to articulate.

There is a fire in the main room’s hearth when he comes in. There is a warm shadow cast on the walls, that steps forth into volume and Ethan’s inescapable presence. 

Will takes in Ethan’s sleeves, rolled up, and Ethan’s face, every whit as intent as it was in his hour of action. Will himself has ceased to escape. He stands transfixed, and in the next moment he feels. Feels the firm, fleshly planes of Ethan’s body as they come at close quarters, feels Ethan’s arms enveloping him in their embrace. The hug is a forerunner to the kiss, given by Ethan’s intent mouth. Will makes a faint noise, only half non sum dignus, and surrenders. He receives the fullness of the kiss, all muscle and urgency, then its gentling, its parting into a number of shorter kisses pressed to Will’s cheek, the space beneath his left eye, the root of his nose, the curve of his chin. He tries to mould a word; finds his parted lips requited by Ethan’s - sucked lightly into the humid seam of Ethan’s mouth, once, twice, the slow imprint of an absolution. 

By then Will’s mind has been overcast by a perplexity of claims and counter-claims. He wants, and fails, to resent the kiss that Ethan surely intends as his seal of forgiveness. Can’t resent, can’t resist it. Yet his mind (“You’ve got a brain like the Tardis, y’know, bigger on the inside”: Benji) is already stocking up on reasons why the kiss, Ethan’s non-violent move, won't work. Will has to tell Ethan this - but just as he is taking in the warm air between them, the prelude to his protest, Ethan pulls back and rests a hand on each of Will’s arms. Next thing Will knows, they’re tracing the line of his forearms, then regrouping - Ethan’s strong hands, that have held fast to dozens of tethers - on Will’s waist. Ethan stops; Will keeps still. And still again, as Ethan unbuckles, not his own belt, but Will’s - and the buttons on his placket - and, with gentle, almost imperceptible tugs, guides Will's pants down his tightened thighs and calves. 

Ethan pauses again, his own breath expelled in a sigh, inaudible but for their closeness. 

Will, later, won’t be able to say what drove his own move - panic, acquiescence, or a stab of perverse curiosity. It ends with his underpants on the floor and the hem of his black T-shirt bunched up in his left hand, made into a fist, before it is caught and cupped between Ethan’s hands. Ethan does not want Will naked; wants him half his own man still, covered from the waist up. 

When he is turned gently so he will face the white wall, Will understands that he is to brace himself against it, the fingers of each hand splayed against the lime. The fire and the low-angled light pouring through the only window have made the lime a warmer white; its powdery grain soft under Will’s palms. He can feel Ethan’s foot coming between his own to adjust them, Ethan’s hands maneuvering him into stability; making sure of Will’s vertical poise before he positions himself. 

It won’t work, Will’s mind protests, not that way, finish to start, it doesn’t make any sense, yet recalling what Will should have factored in: that Ethan always picks up the mission, only to change the blueprint entirely and still achie-

The sting jolts him forward.

It’s neat, wide enough to feel generous, the entire width of Ethan’s hand slapped across Will’s buttocks. It’s sensation first, sound second, a cross between matt and loud. Ethan leaves it in the air a couple of seconds before he takes the sting to the downcurve of Will’s left cheek. Will’s buttocks pinch involuntarily, which is when Ethan’s hand shifts course, tracing a line of warmth up the runnel of Will’s back - Ethan’s unvoiced I’ve got you. 

You have, Will admits, forcing himself to relax. He lets the wall support some of his weight; uncoils the tension deep down, as the next slap finds him struggling to offer more of himself. Ethan spanks him at a more rapid pace, unabated rather than punishing; each close encounter between skin and skin hot upon the previous one, spelling out a series of tiny explosions. Then they stop altogether and Ethan’s voice is at his ear, a warm rise and fall of “You with me? Will?”

Will can only nod, too submerged in the heat fringed, but merely fringed, by pain. The newfound, overwhelming sense of self that doesn’t crush, doesn’t negate; that feels like a hundred prickling calls to his blood, alive and rising to the occasion. Ethan’s lips salute the dip under his ear, and then Ethan is speaking. Hand still busy, fingertips grazing up, down and across his cheeks, now and then punctuating Ethan’s speech with the softest pinch of Will’s chafed flesh.

“You made a selfish call. I did, too. Marrying her. Making you the casualty to my plan. I’ve rued it, Will; I’ll never not rue it. But that’s us, IMF's men. It’s what we do, failing, falling, getting up again. You did before, and I need you to do it again, I need you standing up, Will, because that’s who we are. We’re strong” - the hand underlines, stamping strong across Will’s upper thigh - “and we’re kind” - again - “and sometimes we’re a mess. But I fell upwards when I fell for you, because that was when I was able to decide I’d do better. You helped me up, Will. My turn now.”

The spanking resumes. It never quite stopped - when did Ethan ever let up? - but now it feels more forceful: Ethan putting more swing into it, each slap focused, far-reaching, sent out to find and jolt his emotional core. “You’re worth it,” Ethan tells him, his breath quickening - Ethan making himself part of Will’s journey. “You’re worth every pardon. Strong, kind, and the world needs… Will, please, I need... you have to…” Only his hand forming sentences now, slapping each patch onto the next, a breakthrough syntax. Will, his mind blurred, thinks Ethan’s palm must be stinging like hell, but it’s Ethan’s voice saying worth, saying care, that does it. White-hot clarity blossoms up in Will, from his soul’s hidden clench to his eyes, and in the next flash of Ethan’s relentless hand he cries out - half a sob - and braces himself one-handedly against the wall, so he can turn and face Ethan, let Ethan see Will’s cheeks running with his tears' release.

They’re hot and fast, the tears, momentarily blinding him. Ethan lets them run their course; doesn’t attempt to wipe them, although his hands are back in Will’s field of touch, holding him steady. Will throws his head back, taking in as much air as he can, until he half chokes and laughs a little on the exhale. This is him, here and now - the most unlayered he’s ever been, his junk exposed and his ass either crimson or getting there, his face dripping wet. And he feels reborn. 

He can see how Ethan’s arms drop back to his sides and the tilt of his head, Ethan’s apologetic tell whenever he realizes how far he’s bent circumstances to his goal. Will watches, as Ethan holds one hand out, palm up; wavers; glances down, as if to give Will the time to settle, or, possibly, to punch Ethan.

Will is still feeling that lovely fresh looseness of being. The ancient ground feels new beneath his feet, steady and open to any direction he might choose.

Good thing he has Ethan standing right north of him.

“Are we,” Ethan begins. “I mean, uh, do you. That is…”

Will grins, the adrenaline washing over him, as pure and sweet as on the day he brought his first mission to a win. Yes, IMF must be tearing their leftover hair over two missing agents, and Hunley remains the dark horse on their domestic chessboard. But, what the hell. He waits until Ethan’s hand is once more on tentative offer, and then he takes it, turns it up, and blows on the reddened flesh to share some of that freshness. 

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Yeah, sweetheart, we’re very good.”

Chapter Text

"Thirteen concussions, eight broken legs - which, by the way, makes you the rightful heir to Spider-Man - and too many bullet grazings for the count. But this? Unprecedented." Brandt spread more cream on his fingertips; went back to work on Ethan's right buttock. They had reconnected two hours earlier in London: a frantic, messy embrace, their words melting into grunts, short of breath, until Will had all but torn Ethan's pants off, and... "Remind me to update the tally."

"It's not that bad."

"It's red, rough, and has to be sore as hell. Seriously, Ethan - I'm touched that you kept Grace non grata to your ass, but I'd rather you were thoroughly warmed up the next time you go skinny-dipping in the Arctic. As you do."

"... I'm sorry." Ethan raised himself on his elbow - sore he was, and sorry, but still limber enough that he could arch his spine and search Brandt's gaze over his shoulder. "Will, this is not how I'd plan - huh. That feels nice. What is it?"

"Brylcreem," Will said, deadpan. He grinned at Ethan's plain horror and tapped his fingertips lightly to the red cheek. "Kidding. Only the best Vaseline for IMF's chief ass-et. Turn the other cheek?"

"Just so you know, I hate you just a little right now," Ethan muttered. Except he didn't, and, as Will's hand moved to his left cheek, warm-palmed and caring, he finally, finally let go of the cold.