Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The only thing Ilsa can do to make herself useful these days is to hide and wait. And then, when she's so tired of that she can hardly stand it, as a treat she gets to hide and wait some more.

Meanwhile, Ethan's out there risking his life just as much as he ever does, working on finding the lock for their key. They talked about this, back in Venice—for all the things Ilsa wishes she'd voiced then, at least that's one thing that didn't go unsaid—and it's what they agreed on, but that doesn't make it any easier.

At least for the first few weeks when Ilsa was still healing from her stab wound, she felt like she was doing something. But ever since that stopped aching, there's been nothing to distract her from her thoughts or to let her feel like she's contributing. By now she has a full-blown case of cabin fever, and she hasn't seen the sun in weeks beyond a sliver from behind a window curtain. Luther tells her it's snowed the last two days and they're due to have a white Christmas, but from inside it all looks just the same.

She hates it. She knows this was the right thing to do, but she'd rather have Ethan crash a car into her again than do anything that gives her this much inaction. She doesn't like having time to stop and think.

At least her housemate has his computer to keep him occupied. Luther has acted throughout as if he isn't bothered by their virtual house arrest, but in the past fortnight he's suddenly become absolutely mad about Christmas. Ilsa can't decide whether he's always been a secret Christmas fanatic and nobody ever bothered to mention it to her...or whether he only cares about it this year in particular, because everything is so strange and stressful that he's clinging to childhood joys as a source of comfort...or whether he doesn't actually like it quite as much as he pretends, but he thinks she needs to celebrate. Either way, she was annoyed at first, and she certainly wouldn't tell him she's changed her mind, but it's starting to grow on her. Their cottage is so cozy now, twinkling with lights and teeming with decorations.

And when she started helping with the decorations, for the first time in a while she felt like she was actually accomplishing something.

Christmas was never something she looked forward to as a child. It was a time of napping on airport floors as her parents dragged her to visit one set of grandparents after another (divorce and remarriage meant there were four, and they were spread over half of Europe but they still complained that they didn't all get a visit on Christmas Day itself). A time of singing songs Ilsa only half remembered the words to, as at her grandmother's urging her parents set foot in a church for the first or maybe second time that year. And if no one had yelled at anyone by the time they completed making the rounds and returned home for New Year's, it was a good Christmas. With so many obligations, they were too busy to bother with establishing any family traditions, which suited Ilsa fine. It made it easier to leave Christmas behind when she became an adult. She's never paid much attention to holidays; she's never had the time.

But now she has all the time in the world, and she supposes it's nice to have something to fill it with.

Making paper chains and stringing popcorn was easy, but figuring out what she could give Luther as a Christmas present was more difficult. A brightly wrapped box with her name on it appeared under the tree nearly a week ago, and a second—also for her—a few days after that, and meanwhile Ilsa doesn't have any opportunity to shop. So she's made do, although she hasn't been nearly as on top of things as Luther was. Christmas Eve is nearly over, and she's only just now putting the finishing touches on her second present for Luther. (If he wants to give her two, then she's not about to be outdone—and besides, if it's only the two of them, if they had one present each their Christmas celebration would be over nearly before it began.) She found some old crayons in a drawer of the desk in her room (whoever owned this house before Luther got his hands on it left a lot of random junk here) and used a knife to shave them into tiny pieces that she ironed between wax paper, but it turned out a bit wrinkly, looking like the child's craft it is. So before she admits defeat and wraps up the meager present, she's trying to use construction paper (from another drawer in the same treasure trove of a desk) to make a sort of frame for it. The intent is for it to be a suncatcher, to let Luther know she appreciates how he's trying to make things brighter around here. He won't actually be able to hang it in the sun—because anything the sun sees, the Entity might see too—but she hopes he'll appreciate the sentiment anyway.

Everyone on Ethan's team is more sunshiny than they ought to be in this line of work, Ethan most of all.

The little potted flower by her window turned out orange, which isn't the right color for Ethan at all, but it reminds her of him. She grew it from a seed, setting it next to the edge of the closed window curtain so that it can maybe get a few glimmers of sunlight during the day (which scarcely has seven hours of daylight at this time of year and this latitude), and the three other flowers she tried to grow before it withered and died from the lack of light, but this flower's only reaction to that lack was to strain all the harder towards the sun.

Which is Ethan all over. It's a skill she'd like to learn, but here she is wilting and languishing in the nice cozy safe cottage that Luther (and Ethan) have provided for her, so she clearly has a long ways to go. Sunshine doesn't come pre-issued at MI6 the way it apparently does for the IMF.

Ilsa decides the frame on the suncatcher is good enough and moves on to wrapping the presents. This part, at least, is easy: Luther left the leftover wrapping paper in the coat closet where he knew she'd see it. She's not sure where he got it from and she hasn't bothered to ask; he has all sorts of sources of supplies for their little cottage and she suspects less than half of them are strictly legal. She slips the suncatcher inside a box that once held a frozen dinner and begins to fold the gaudy Christmas paper around it.

Perhaps she could have already had her presents wrapped and under the tree with more time to spare if she hadn't already wasted her time making another Christmas present that wasn't for Luther at all. But when she'd made his first present, she'd already carefully sharpened both ends of half a dozen pencils to use as makeshift knitting needles; and once she'd started unraveling a random cardigan from the coat closet—too small for either of them and with a few moth holes besides, so she hadn't bothered asking Luther before she appropriated it—it wasn't much work to keep unraveling and keep knitting.

Ethan isn't here. Ethan doesn't particularly need a hat, and by the time she sees him again it will not only be long enough after Christmas that gift giving would be awkward, but they'll no doubt be in the middle of a fight that neither of them is certain to survive.

But she got to think of him with every stitch, and that makes it worth it even if he'll never see the hat she made for him. And maybe he'll somehow be able to sense that she was thinking of him.

Just as long as he can't sense it too much. Because she's been thinking about him a lot (what else is there to do, really?) and that would be embarrassing. She never really believed the saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder—it certainly didn't with any of the cousins she saw every Christmas as a child, none of whom she's seen in over a decade now—but it seems like every time she's separated from Ethan she falls in love with him a little bit more.

She hasn't mentioned anything of the sort to Luther, not yet. She's worried he might warn her off again, tell her to at least wait until they've saved the world this time, and maybe the time after that too, and people like her and Ethan never really have a chance to prioritize themselves because they're always busy prioritizing the safety of the whole damn world, but still she wants to try.

Ilsa takes the hats out of the desk drawer. The first one she knit is a bit more uneven, as it took her some time to get used to her makeshift tools. It would probably be more fair to give the second one to Luther since he'll actually see it and Ethan won't, but she just can't. After all, the first hat was knit with Luther in mind, and it's the second hat that has her love for Ethan wrapped up in each stitch. Just because that love isn't visible doesn't mean it's not there, and it can't just be transferred haphazardly. Besides, Luther won't mind if his hat isn't perfect, not with everything else they're dealing with.

So she wraps the first hat for him. No box, just a squishy little package that probably makes it obvious what's inside it. She didn't want to try to make it fit inside a freezer dinner box, and there wasn't anything else the right size so she'll make do just like she's done with everything else over the past months.

She goes to roll up the wrapping paper and put it away, but Ethan's hat is still sitting there on her desk, and it's almost Christmas. There's no reason not to wrap it, after all. Maybe she can give it to him once they've defeated Gabriel and the Entity, and if it's too late by then to call it a belated Christmas present, she can say it's just because. Which is wishy-washy, but so many things in their relationship are.

She should have talked to him about it. But it was one of those moments where she hadn't realized it was her last chance until the chance was already over.

They'd had so little time to plan for the Widow's party, after all. There wasn't extra time for talking about anything that wasn't time-sensitive. Ilsa had thought they were both on the same page about that, and about how regardless of what feelings they might have and that might or might not be mutual, they had to push those down a little while longer and pretend they didn't care. But in the midst of all the discussion of how Ilsa could best fake her death, Luther and Benji had stepped out of the room to check their supplies, and she'd turned back to Ethan to say something—she's tried to remember since then what it was, but she has no idea, because a moment later it was driven completely out of her head when Ethan, his eyes wide and desperate, had reached out to her without a word and pressed his mouth firmly against hers.

Ilsa had returned the kiss with a great deal of enthusiasm, because that had seemed much more important at the time than asking him what he was thinking. Besides, to ask would have been to speak and to speak would have been to pull away, and in that moment there was absolutely nothing that could have taken her away from that embrace or gotten her to stop exploring what Ethan's lips felt like against her mouth.

And then, all at once, he'd let go of her, stepped away, and started talking about the plan again, with much greater calm than Ilsa would have been capable of mustering if their positions had been swapped. She should have said something right then. She should have insisted that no matter how busy they were, they could take a moment to talk about their feelings, and about that kiss...and about how she would really like to do that again at the first opportunity. But she'd decided to give him a minute and not push him, and then Luther and Benji returned with the retractable knife and a pharmacopeia of drugs and a few other odds and ends that she hadn't ended up using, and then everything happened so fast and there was never another good moment to talk about it until it was too late and they'd gone their separate ways.

She just wishes she knew exactly what Ethan meant by that kiss: whether it means that he's as willing to risk everything to be in love with her as she is, or whether he meant it as a one-off farewell, a way to bid her goodbye without having to voice the words.

But if it was too late then, it's far too late now. Ilsa tapes the gift tag in place on the lumpy little package that holds so much of her love for him, and since there's no one here to witness her making a fool of herself, she kisses the place where she wrote his name. It's a poor substitute for flesh and blood.

She puts the wrapped hat in the desk drawer, where Luther won't see it and ask awkward questions. She's tempted to put it under her pillow, with the note they got from Ethan a month ago, that Luther let her keep when they were done with it. It's just a list of coordinates and dates, nothing personal, but it's handwritten and it's definitely Ethan's handwriting, so she knows he touched it. (And now she's touched it, too. Over and over, slipping her hand under the pillow more nights than not so that a tiny part of her can pretend Ethan's not a million miles away who knows where—as likely to be on the other side of the globe as he is to be on this one.)

And that's why hiding and waiting is the worst possible mission for Ilsa to be on. It gives her too much time to think. Ethan has probably been much too busy throwing himself off of buildings to think about that kiss a quarter as much as she has.

But there's nothing she can do about it now, and it's Christmas Eve, and Luther is in the living room trying to make things cheery so she certainly shouldn't sit in here moping like a lovelorn teenager. So she picks up the two gifts he's allowed to know about, and she takes them down the hall.

Luther has a fire going in the fireplace, and Christmas music playing on their ancient CD player. Thankfully they aren't trying to conceal that anyone's living here, just the specifics of who, so they can risk a few cozy creature comforts.

"Santa's coming tonight, you ready for him?" Luther says with a grin. He's tacking up fresh pine boughs over the mantel, as if they don't already have more than enough decorations.

Ilsa crouches down next to the tree and tucks her presents underneath it. They're small enough that even with Luther's two packages alongside them, they still make a rather pitiful showing. Or maybe that's Luther's fault for getting such a large tree. "You still believe in Santa Claus?"

"Don't you?"

"No. I'm sorry I didn't realize you did, though, or I would have waited until you'd gone to bed to put your presents under the tree so that you would have thought Santa brought them."

"You're very kind," Luther says. "But don't worry, not believing in Santa isn't going to stop him. He'll be here."

"And neither will the fire in the fireplace, I suppose? Oh, do you want help with that?" The largest and heaviest of the pine boughs doesn't seem to want to stay in place, so Ilsa hurries over to help hold it up for him. "Luther, two presents is more than enough, you don't need to do anything more than that."

"Don't worry, I don't have anything else planned," Luther says, and winks. "But if Santa Claus decides you need more presents, then there's nothing I can do to stop him."

Ilsa laughs and sits down in the chair closest to the fire. Eartha Kitt is singing on the CD player, the lights on the tree are twinkling, and for all that they're in the middle of nowhere, this might be the coziest safehouse she's ever been in.

Finishing with the pines, Luther goes back to the couch, where he's piled a variety of greenery. He rummages through it and eventually produces a handful of mistletoe.

Ilsa raises an eyebrow. "I am not going to kiss you. Or Santa Claus."

"Mistletoe's traditional," Luther says. "And besides, I hear Santa's not bad looking."

"Not my type."

Thankfully, Luther doesn't put the mistletoe up anywhere that either of them is likely to walk underneath. He hangs it in front of the bookcase in the corner of the room, where Ilsa rarely goes more than once or twice a week. The bookcase is next to the door that leads to the kitchen, but far enough away that walking through the door won't count as being beneath it. Because accidentally ending up under mistletoe is always awkward, even if Luther just politely pretends not to notice as she assumes he'll do. "Maybe you'll change your mind if you see him. Not that you're supposed to see Santa Claus, I think; he always sneaks in when not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse."

"Because he knows when you're sleeping and when you're awake?"

Luther returns to his pile of greenery and sorts through it. Half of the remaining plant pieces he sets on top of the mantel, and the others—apparently unsatisfactory in some way Ilsa can't see—he tosses in the fire. "Something like that. So, if you don't believe in Santa, that won't stop you from helping me make cookies for him, will you?"

Ilsa appreciates that he hasn't given up on making sure she's having a good time (well, as good of a time as they can have considering they're stuck here for the foreseeable future). She gets back up from the cozy chair and follows Luther into the kitchen, giving the mistletoe a wide berth. "Of course, I'd love to help."

Chapter Text

Ilsa wakes out of a sound sleep somewhere in the wee hours of Christmas morning, not sure at first what woke her. Her hand is on Ethan's note under her pillow, but she hurriedly trades it for her gun (also under her pillow, only a few inches away, because she might be an embarrassingly sentimental fool in her solitude but she's not going to let it stop her from being practical about things) and scrambles to untangle her other hand from the covers so that she can check her watch for the time.

While she's still battling with the quilt, she hears a quiet noise out in the living room and realizes what must have woken her. She suppresses a giggle. Luther really is serious about this Santa thing, after all.

Too bad Santa isn't real; maybe he would do something about all the awfulness in the world, so that she and Ethan and Luther and everyone else wouldn't have to do quite so much of the work. Or maybe Santa Claus would be strictly hands off, the way Ilsa has always assumed God must be if he exists. The exact opposite of their enemy the Entity, which is trying to become a god.

It's a pity it isn't trying to become Santa Claus, instead. It already gave Ilsa a gift, after all: half of the cruciform key that the whole world wants. It led her to it for its own ends, but since it isn't Santa or God, maybe they can outsmart it in the end.

In the meantime, Ilsa has a different "Santa Claus" to worry about, and she really should go double-check that whoever's behind the quiet noises elsewhere in the house isn't anyone who's actually cause for concern.

Raising her watch to her eyes and squinting, she sees that it's 5 am, well before sunrise thanks to their northern latitude. Luther is an early riser, but that's rather early even for him. And when so much is at stake, it doesn't do to assume. She takes her gun and slips barefoot into the hallway. If it's Luther, they can both pretend she didn't see him (and she looks forward to finding out whether he went so far as to don a fake white beard and red hat), and she'll sleep better once she knows that's all it is. If it's an intruder, she'll handle them one way or another. And if it's Santa Claus...well, she won't worry about that eventuality, because Santa Claus doesn't exist.

Ilsa creeps down the darkened hallway, crab-stepping sideways with her back against the wall so that her silhouette will be indistinguishable unless someone looks very closely. There's no lights in the living room; Luther must have extinguished the fire and turned off the tree before he went to bed. But there's a chill on the air, cold enough that Ilsa isn't surprised when she realizes the front door is open. It would probably be even colder if there weren't someone standing silhouetted in the doorway, barely visible as it's nearly as dark outside as it is in. Ilsa trains her gun on him, just in case, but she can't bring herself to be worried. Not when she's certain she would recognize that figure anywhere.

The newcomer shuts the door, and as he does Ilsa switches on the living room light, figuring it will lend her a momentary advantage on the off chance she's mistaken—since both their eyes will need to adjust but only she knows when to expect that to happen.

But as the light flares, it only confirms what she already knew. The door closes, and the person standing in front of it doesn't have a beard or a red hat, but he is nonetheless an extremely welcome visitor for Christmas—or any day of the year.

Ethan turns around, and sees her standing there, and there's no way her presence can be a surprise yet his eyes light up with a smile to match. "Merry Christmas," he says with a delighted grin. He tosses the small duffel bag he's carrying onto the couch and starts to take off his coat, ignoring the fact that she's still half-heartedly pointing a gun at him. "We've met before, right?" he teases, an echo of what he said to her on their first meeting that is probably meant to assure her of his identity (not that she doubted it for a moment—not only is this cottage too tucked away for anyone to figure out where she's hiding, but she knows Ethan too well for her to ever be fooled by a mimic in a mask, no matter how great their skills).

She sets the gun on the mantel, tucking it under Luther's overflowing greenery, and slips forward. "I thought I was too old to believe in Santa Claus, but Luther was very insistent that not believing doesn't mean there won't be presents under the tree Christmas morning that weren't there before. I imagined whatever it was would come with a few more ribbons and bows, but you're still a much better gift than anything I was expecting."

Divested of his coat, Ethan lets it fall onto the couch and meets her halfway. "I hoped it might be a nice surprise," he says with a quiet chuckle. He looks tired, but he hasn't stopped smiling from the moment he laid eyes on her. She wants very much to kiss him, but they still haven't talked about what happened in Venice and now is hardly the time to initiate a serious conversation, so she settles for throwing her arms around him and hugging him enthusiastically. That's what they've always done before, after all, right up until that last time in Venice when Ethan changed the rules on her.

There's a split second of hesitation before Ethan relaxes into her embrace—maybe he's just tired, but she wonders if he too was trying to decide whether to kiss her. She wishes he'd just done it, like he did before. Or failing that, she wishes they'd talked about it then. Now it's been too long to bring it up out of the blue.

It's too bad Luther didn't put the mistletoe up over the front door, she could have used that as an excuse.

Still with her arms wrapped tight around Ethan, Ilsa asks him, "What are you doing here?" He's cold all over: however much his coat was aiding him, it clearly wasn't enough. Ilsa hopes her warmth is seeping into him just as much as the chill he brought with him is permeating the thin pajamas she wore to bed. Her bed has a wool blanket and a heavy quilt, but out here she has neither of those things, and neither does Ethan. She rubs her hands vigorously over his back, hoping the friction will warm him up.

"I, um, thought I'd better check in on Luther's progress with the Entity's fingerprints on that hard drive," Ethan says, without lifting his head from her shoulder. "And it turns out we might need a counterfeit of the key, so I brought some materials for him to start working on that."

"And you needed to do that in person? I hope that doesn't mean our communications have broken down; I thought Luther said you and he had a pretty good system going that was untraceable by the Entity."

"Well, yes," Ethan murmurs against her neck, "but some things are easier to do in person."

"Like this," Ilsa says. She cups the back of his head with her hand, feeling the weight of his head as he leans into her. There's snow in his hair, melting now into cold dampness, so maybe her hat will turn out to be useful after all. "You look tired."

"And there's that," Ethan says. He gently mirrors her gesture, his fingers catching in the simple plait that she wears her hair in for bed. "Benji said the same thing. He insisted that I needed to take a break, and that he could hold down the fort on the key for a few days. Besides, it will be a lot easier to bring you both up to speed on what we've learned about the Entity in person, so that makes it worth the risk."

"It would be worth the risk even if the only reason you came was so you could rest," Ilsa tells him. "People can't keep running on empty forever. Not even you. Judging from the tone of a few of Luther's lectures, I think that's why he's been going so mad over Christmas. Stringing popcorn is self-care, apparently."

Ethan laughs. The sound is muffled by his closeness, but it vibrates deliciously through her bones. "Is that the excuse he came up with so he wouldn't have to string all the popcorn by himself?"

"And considering your track record, if you're willing to admit you need a break, you must be completely worn out. How have you been sleeping?" She pulls away, realizing. "You just traveled all night, you need to sleep. You should—"

"No, I've slept, it's okay," Ethan says, burrowing his head back into the crook of her neck. "I didn't drive myself for more than the last twenty minutes—we put together a complicated network of transportation to avoid the notice of the Entity and for most of it I was a stowaway of one sort or another. So I've actually had plenty of sleep tonight."

Ilsa strokes his damp hair. "And how much do you consider plenty?"

"Well, I never get more than six hours and I've had at least two thirds of that—"

"—which is not 'plenty' by anyone's standards, even if you'd had it all in one piece which I'm sure you didn't—"

"—so if anything, I'm hungry. I ate an early dinner before I left London, and I haven't had anything since then. So if you're going to fuss, which you really don't need to, it would be much more practical if you insist that I eat something than if you tell me to go to sleep."

"Okay, we'll go to the kitchen then," Ilsa says, but she keeps her hands where they are, still holding him close. Lending him her warmth. It's been too long since she's touched him, and it's too hard to get herself to let go, and for once she doesn't have to. It's Christmas.

"Mm-hmm," Ethan says, his head still on her shoulder. She wonders, if she waits long enough, if he'll succumb to the temptation to kiss her again, or if she's going to have to be the one to bring it up.

"What do you want to eat?"

"Whatever's convenient," Ethan says. With a sigh, he pulls himself away from her. "I'm sure I can find something. Is the kitchen through here?" He pushes the door open without waiting for an answer.

Ilsa hurries after him, switching on the light switch while he's still peering about in an attempt to locate it. "You've been traveling all night, you need to rest, let me cook for you." It's colder here than it was in the living room, and she tries not to shiver too obviously. She and Luther cleaned up most of the mess their cookie baking produced earlier, but it's the shabbiest room in the house, with peeling paint on the walls, and Luther didn't get around to putting Christmas decorations in here. All in all, the room just looks dingy and uninviting. Ethan deserves better. (If she'd known he was coming, maybe she would have tried to paint in here, or at least give the walls and floor a scrub. It would have given her something to do with her time besides mope over handicrafts.)

Blithely oblivious to her concerns, Ethan is rummaging through the refrigerator as if he isn't cold enough already. "It's okay, I'm fine," he says. He's wearing a half-zipped synthetic fleece over a base layer that she hopes might be wool, but both fabrics are thin, and Ilsa worries that he shouldn't have taken his coat off, not when the snow in his hair hasn't even dried. "Don't worry about me."

"Ethan." She says his name calmly but firmly and waits for him to give her his full attention.

It takes him a moment: he's distracted by whatever he's found in the refrigerator, and he's almost certainly more tired than he lets on. But after a few seconds he turns around, a jar of pickles in one hand and peanut butter in the other, with a gentle quizzical smile inviting her to say whatever she wants. Unfortunately, she doesn't want to say it. She doesn't want to have to admit out loud how useless she feels hiding away here in this cottage, with nothing better to do than string popcorn and knit slightly misshapen hats, and she'd rather wrap her legs around him and rappel off a Viennese flagpole with him any day, no matter how precariously it's attached to its building and no matter how many polizei are after them. She'd let him run her over again—well, under is a more accurate description of what happened, but he could do it every which way for all she cares—rather than wait here, uninvolved and uninformed about what's going on. Ethan's arrival is the best thing that's happened in this cottage in months, and yet here he is acting like he's an imposition. She desperately needs to tell him how much he isn't, but she's never known how to find the words for mushy things like that.

She doesn't know how much of that Ethan is able to read from her eyes, but it's enough. His eyes soften and he doesn't stop smiling, but that muscle at the corner of his jaw pulses. He puts the peanut butter and pickles back in the fridge and closes the door. "Um, maybe oatmeal? I guess it's called porridge here. Or whatever you'd like to make. Something hot, to warm up."

"Good idea, that shouldn't take too long," Ilsa says. "Is porridge the same thing as oatmeal? Or is that one of those Americanisms where everyone claims they're the same thing but it turns out there are strange and subtle differences between them?"

"They're close enough," Ethan says. He sighs with a shrug. "And in either case it's sure to be warm."

"That's certainly true," Ilsa says. "But it would be better if you hadn't let yourself get so chilled in the first place. You need a warmer coat. I'll make you some tea too." She turns on the kettle and goes looking for a pot for Ethan's porridge.

"My coat's fine, it's just the car I was in for the final stretch," Ethan says. "We didn't want to use anything built in the last thirty years for this part, so our options were sort of limited and I ended up with a car where everything worked but the heater. But you need to warm up yourself, you're shivering. Can I grab you a coat, or a sweater, or something? Slippers? Or do you prefer to go barefoot no matter how cold it is?"

Ilsa is 99% sure she didn't leave anything Christmassy (or embarrassing) out in her room, so she crosses her fingers that she hasn't forgotten something obvious. He'll see the flower but he won't know that in her mind it's his flower, so that's safe at least. "If you don't mind. My room is the first door on the right." She turns on the electric oven, cracking the door open so that it will warm the room, and begins measuring water into the porridge pot. "There's slippers on the floor by the closet. I fight better barefoot, but it turned out there weren't any dastardly intruders for me to apprehend after all, so I think I can risk footwear. And all my long-sleeved clothes are in the middle drawer of the chest of drawers. Anything in there is fine, take your pick."

"I'll be right back," Ethan says, grinning as he ducks out of the room, moving as lithely as if he were embarking upon an actually important mission.

Once she's started the water heating, Ilsa turns to the counter next to the hob. After all of the cookie things were tidied away last night, Luther spread the fixings for Christmas breakfast (yet another tradition he has extensive opinions about, that for all of Ilsa's teasing she's secretly looking forward to experiencing) all over the counter, since he expected that to be the next meal made in this kitchen. Ilsa does her best to leave most of it where it is, but scoots the larger items aside just enough to do her own cooking. All she needs room for is oats, anyway; they don't take up much counter space.

It's a mercy that Ilsa even knows how to make the food Ethan asked for, since her cooking repertoire is extremely limited. Not that she's made porridge in nearly a decade, but she's pretty sure she still remembers the recipe. It's one of the few things her mother actually taught her to cook, all the way back when she was in primary school; and she only ever taught her one way to make it, so Ilsa hopes Ethan isn't too picky. Not that she's ever known him to be, but there's a first time for everything—and goodness knows that after everything he's dealt with in his life, he deserves to have opinions on breakfast foods if he wants to.

Ethan returns to the kitchen right as the kettle boils. He's holding a loose oversized turquoise cardigan that's probably the softest thing Ilsa currently owns. It definitely wasn't anywhere near the top of the drawer, so he must have dug through the entire pile trying to pick just the right one. And he chose well: when Ilsa shrugs it on, it feels like a warm hug.

Not that it's even half as good as her not-so-warm hug from earlier. She could definitely use another of those right now—but is it too soon? Even if they're not going to resume the whole kissing thing, hugs are still normal for them. But Ethan clearly isn't in any more of a hurry to talk about their relationship than she is, and she doesn't want to rush him into it, not when he came here to rest. Their time together here is limited (how limited she doesn't know yet, because that's another thing she'll let him get around to bringing up in his own time) but surely she can afford to let him wait until he's ready. She can let him have his space and not cling to him like a woman who doesn't know how to be independent.

Or maybe time and independence are both overrated, and she should just drag Ethan under the mistletoe Luther so helpfully provided, and have at it.

It's a tempting thought. But Ethan needs to eat, and to warm up after being out in the cold. So she'll give him at least a few minutes before she forces the question.

Ilsa finishes warming and filling the teapot, sets a timer, and adds oats to the water that is now merrily boiling on the hob. For all of Ethan's insistence earlier that he would take care of his own food, since he surrendered he seems completely happy just to watch her work. He leans against the counter by the sink, out of her way, and gazes steadily at her with a quiet smile.

Which isn't exactly stopping Ilsa from wanting to throw herself at him. "Do you like raisins in your porridge?" she asks instead, taking down two cups from the cabinet and scooting aside Luther's breakfast ingredients to make room for them on the counter. 'That's how I've always made it."

"That would be great, thanks," Ethan says. "Just no marshmallows." He gestures toward the bag she just moved.

"Oh, these? Don't worry, those are for the ambrosia salad that Luther insists is an absolutely essential part of Christmas breakfast. Have you ever had it? I haven't. I think it's an American thing."

"I think it must be," Ethan says. "I've never run into it anywhere else. But yeah, I've had it a few times. Have you ever been to a potluck?"

Ilsa shakes her head. That's another of those American things, she knows that much.

"Ambrosia is a potluck staple; if it's a big enough potluck, someone's sure to make it. Or maybe two or three. When you're a kid, the trick is to serve it so that you have as high of a marshmallows-to-everything-else ratio as possible, without a nosy busybody behind you in line deciding you're being too picky and taking too long, so she goes and tattles to your mom."

"Was that a frequent occurrence?"

"Enough that I learned how to be quick and subtle about it." He grins broadly. "My mom was never actually mad at me. Just disappointed, which was bad enough. I'm not sure I've ever had ambrosia as an adult, actually. It's probably not quite as magical as I remember it being, but I think you'll still enjoy it. And I'll wait patiently while you serve yourself as many marshmallows as you like."

"I will, too," Ilsa says, smiling back at him. He has such a contagious smile: it's easier for her to capture a fraction of that IMF sunshininess herself when it's right there for her to mirror. "So can we just solve the marshmallow question by making it with extra marshmallows, or is that against the rules somehow?"

"I don't mind," Ethan says. "But Luther might. I've never actually had a formal Christmas spread with him around; every time we've been together at Christmas we've been in the middle of a mission with no time for more than a quick stop at a bakery. So I have no idea what sort of opinions he has about these things. I definitely agree with him on ambrosia being a Christmas food, though. Are there going to be cinnamon rolls?"

"No, Luther said...um, let me see if I remember everything. Scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, ambrosia salad, coffee cake, some sort of potato casserole. And coffee of course, but I insisted that he had to let me do something and not do all the work himself, so he said I can take care of the coffee. Usually whichever of us is up first just makes a pot, but I figured we should do something more special for Christmas, so I'm finally going to get around to figuring out all the extra settings on the espresso machine so I can make mochaccinos. I figure they're kind of like hot chocolate, and hot chocolate is a wintery drink."

"You have an espresso machine?" Ethan looks around for it, but it's right behind him and obscured behind Luther's collection of foodstuffs, so he doesn't spot it until Ilsa finally has mercy on him and points to it.

"Yes, Luther's stocked this place with a surprising number of unnecessary luxuries. You really don't need to worry about me, he's been taking very good care of me. Case in point, the extensive Christmas breakfast menu. Unless he was just going overboard on that because he knew you'd be here too."

"He didn't actually know until yesterday morning," Ethan says. He steps closer to Ilsa, which might just be because she's standing next to the half-open oven and all the other sources of heat in the room—or maybe he's close to getting his act together about kissing her again. (Ilsa mentally crosses her fingers that it's the latter.) "I'd been thinking about coming for about a week, but I didn't want to reach out until I was certain I could make it work. So unless he didn't plan Christmas breakfast until the very last minute, this was all for you." He leans against the counter right next to her, still smiling brightly. He hasn't stopped smiling for a second ever since he walked in the front door. "But as awesome as it is," he adds, "it's not quite perfect. "Because the one thing that is an absolute must for Christmas breakfast is cinnamon rolls, and apparently Luther doesn't know that. He's been deprived."

"Cinnamon rolls sound delightful," Ilsa says, "but where are we going to get them? Neither I nor you can show our faces outside, much less pop out to the shops."

Ethan's expression turns slightly confused, which is adorable. "You've never made cinnamon rolls before? You can't have store-bought anyway, not unless you're so busy on a mission that it's that or nothing: if you're going to do Christmas properly you have to make them from scratch." He starts clearing off the counter, piling Luther's collection of ingredients in the dish drainer. "We'll just double-check that we've got everything before we get started, but if Luther's spoiling you with complicated espresso machines I would assume he's also stocked the place so that you have the option to go on a baking spree at any time." The pile in the dish drainer grows increasingly unwieldy as it increases in height, and Ethan carefully studies where to put the final few packages of food without toppling the entire tower. (Ilsa doesn't doubt for a moment that he'll succeed—she once spent an evening playing Jenga with Ethan and his team, during which Ethan never even came close to losing. And this is much simpler.)

Ilsa shrugs. "I made chocolate chip cookies a couple of times." They're the only sort of cookies she knows how to make (the snickerdoodles and shortbread she made with Luther last night don't count, because she was just following his instructions) but she doesn't mention that part. It's embarrassing, kind of like how she's never been to a potluck and probably hasn't even heard of half the foods Ethan loved when he was growing up.

Sometimes, with how similar their lives are now, it's easy to forget how disparate they started out. Other times, Ethan mentions that the first time he moved homes was when he went to university, or that he'd never touched a computer prior to being trained to use one for a mission, and she can't help but realize they've taken very different paths to get here (and they're terribly lucky that those paths ended up crossing).

Ilsa stirs the porridge and tries to pretend she's the sort of woman who makes cookies all the time. The sort of woman who would fit into Ethan's old life, as well as his current one. "Luther said they were good," she adds. "That's why there aren't any left, he polished them off."

"I'm sure they were," Ethan says with enthusiasm as he rummages around the kitchen. "I haven't had chocolate chip cookies in ages." A new pile of food grows where the previous one had stood, but now it contains ingredients that Ilsa just saw last night when she and Luther were baking: flour and brown sugar and salt and whatnot.

"I don't think they really count as Christmassy, though," Ilsa says. As Ethan returns from the refrigerator with eggs and butter, Ilsa rearranges his previous discoveries to make room for them on the counter. "When you said you celebrate Christmas on missions by going to the bakery, what do you get? Just cinnamon rolls?"

"I get a cinnamon roll if they have it, and then whatever the person at the counter recommends, whether it's the bakery's specialty or just their personal favorite. That way you still get to unwrap a surprise that someone else picked out for you. That's the part of Christmas I miss the most. Y'know, my mom used to mail me a package with a gift-wrapped present every Christmas, right up until the year she died. Unfortunately I was halfway across the globe from the address she was sending it to as often as not, so I usually didn't get to them until January or even later. If I talked to her on the phone in the meantime, I had to make up all sorts of excuses about my apartment mail room misplacing packages to explain why I didn't know what she'd gotten me yet." Ethan shoves a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes with a sigh. "I didn't like lying to her, but she was safer not knowing the truth."

"I'm sorry."

"It is what it is," Ethan says. He shrugs, a light movement probably aiming for blithe and unconcerned but not quite achieving it. "I'm sure you've dealt with similar things."

In actuality, Ilsa has mostly solved that problem by not staying in touch with her parents. She's had to pretend to be dead so many times that they're better off not being informed that she's still alive. But that's hardly the tone she wants to strike right after Ethan mentioned his family to her for the first time, so she just shrugs. "We do what we must. So what was your favorite Christmas present from a bakery?"

"A pain au chocolat in Paris, a couple of years before I met you," Ethan answers without a moment's hesitation. "It was perfect. Right out of the oven, exquisite texture, just the right amount of chocolate. And nobody on the team was hurt and we achieved our mission objective, so what more can you ask? I would've liked to go back and get another one the next day, but we kind of cut a large swath through Paris and needed to keep a low profile for a while afterwards."

"It was perfect, just out of the oven, exquisite texture, just the right amount of chocolate. And nobody died and it was a successful mission, so what more can you ask? I would've liked to go back and get another one the next day, but we cut kind of a large swathe through Paris and needed to keep a low profile for a while afterwards."

"Until the next time you needed to make a scene in Paris and get chased by their entire police force."

"And one exceptional motorcyclist. The police I could handle, but I'm pretty sure she came the closest of the lot to successfully throwing a monkey wrench into our plan."

"Maybe she's glad she didn't manage it," Ilsa says softly. "Although she really wouldn't have minded putting a bullet through Lane's skull." The time goes off for the tea to be done brewing, and Ilsa pours their cups. "Milk and sugar?"

"Just milk please. Speaking of pain au chocolat, it's one of the French baked goods known as viennoiserie, because..."

"Because they originated in Vienna, I know."

"So they have something in common with us," Ethan says with a wink. "That was such a good boulangerie in Paris; I wonder if it's still there. Brandt got a muffin there, the heathen. I was surprised they even sold muffins. Jane got something French, at least, although I don't remember what it was. And I think Luther got a plain croissant. Benji was back at the warehouse doing tech stuff, so he asked us to get one extra of everything we'd gotten and bring it back with us. But then we ended up getting shot at and I think the bag from the bakery fell over the side of the bridge in the confusion. But we recovered the data we were after, so it was a merry Christmas anyway. Oh, thank you." He takes the tea cup Ilsa holds out to him and takes a sip. "Oh, this is good." He falls silent, holding the steaming cup in his hands.

Ilsa sips at her own cup and watches Ethan drink his tea. He has such a pretty mouth, lips slender and delectable. They look oh so soft, and she can remember the way the flesh there gave slightly when he'd pulled her mouth against his, firm but pliable at the same time. He smiles slightly against the rim of the cup as he drinks, and why is he smiling like that if he doesn't want her to kiss him, honestly: there ought to be a rule against it.

She should have just kissed him as soon as he walked in the door. She really should. Everything would be easier now if she had. (Well, unless he regrets kissing her in Venice and doesn't want to kiss her ever again, but if that were so, would he be sneaking into her house on Christmas morning and sipping tea with such a kissable mouth? Obviously not.) She should just set her tea down; he's only two steps away; she should go over there, pin him against the sink, and—

Ethan glances over at her as he takes another sip, and Ilsa looks away quickly, hoping she isn't blushing too obviously. Flustered, she turns back to the stove with its (slightly neglected) porridge. "This is almost ready," she tells him, turning off the burner and sprinkling raisins into it. "It just needs to sit for a minute or two."

"That's great, thank you," Ethan says. "Do you need help with anything?"

"No, it's quite simple."

"Okay, then I'm going to get started on the cinnamon rolls."

This apparently involves crouching on the floor so he can explore the contents of the lower cabinets, which makes it easier for her to stop herself from staring at him, now that he's not looking at her with magnetic green eyes above soft plush lips. His hair has dried now from its sprinkling of melted snow. He's been letting it grow out since she last saw him in Venice, and it's long enough that it brushes his shirt collar, the strands mussed and slightly wild. It's just the right length that she could easily run her fingers through it—just like the very first time Ilsa touched him, in the middle of that fight in London. Below it, his shirt pulls tight over the muscles of his strong shoulders as he leans into the cabinet amidst the sound of clashing pans. He couldn't help but notice if Ilsa ran her hands over it the way she'd like to, but if she merely runs her eyes over it instead, Ethan's too distracted to notice her admiring the graceful curve of his back and his cute pert rear. It's a very nice view.

And now she's staring, when she told herself she wouldn't. Ilsa turns back to her cooking.

She should just tell him they need to talk about Venice. He's sure to know the conversation is due sooner or later. But 'we should talk' is the worst conversation starter of all time, and at the moment Ilsa can't think of a better one. Ethan looks so happy to be here, to finally get a break and let himself relax a bit, and she doesn't want to be the one to wipe that smile off of his face.

Maybe she should just take a leaf out of Ethan's book from Venice, and skip over the talking and go straight to the kissing.

Ethan clambers to his feet, holding a mixing bowl and an assortment of measuring cups. "Everything we need is here. Luther stocked this place well."

"Have you used it as a safehouse before?"

"No, Luther's got a few places that he keeps completely secret, even from me. He normally keeps them very carefully siloed away from anything work-related, but this particular life-or-death situation was important enough to bend that rule. I think he's saving them for if he ever retires; if he's managed not to burn them all by then, he can use one as his permanent home." Ethan starts measuring flour into the bowl. "It's nice, I guess, to have plans to retire someday. I hope he manages it. Although I'll miss him."

"You could retire too, you know," Ilsa says. It's technically true—he could leave his job at any time, and there's nothing his employers could do to stop it, not when Ethan's already proven he's capable of hiding from the whole world indefinitely. But the one thing he can't hide from is himself, and Ilsa's never seen convincing evidence that Ethan is truly capable of settling down and not jumping right back into action the moment the world needs him.

"I could," Ethan says, but his slight shrug indicates just how little he's actually considering the idea. "Would you?"

"I asked you to come away with me, is that the sort of question a woman who's unwilling to retire asks?"

Ethan sets down his measuring cup and looks over at her, his gaze appraising and thoughtful. "I don't know, is it?"

Ilsa sips her tea and doesn't answer. She'll let him make the next move.

Ethan turns back to his bowl of flour, shaking it slightly to even it out. "I'm not sure this looks right," he says. "Do you know if maybe British cups are different from American cups?" He angles the measuring cup towards the light, trying to read the markings. "This says 284 milliliters, is that how much is in a cup in the US?"

"I've only ever really worried about precise measurements when weapons are involved," Ilsa says. "I'm not the person to ask."

"We can't look it up online," Ethan mutters, engaging in a staredown with the bowl that it seems highly unlikely he'll win, since it's an inanimate object and he's not. "I can't believe I miss Google this much when I was just fine without it for the first half of my life. Is there a cookbook anywhere around here that would have a conversion chart?"

Now that is a question that is full of possibilities, despite its mundanity, and Ilsa doesn't see why she shouldn't take full advantage of them. She's waited long enough. If Ethan doesn't want to make a move—and she's given him plenty of chances—then it's her turn to decide what happens next. "I don't know," she says, and sets down her tea cup. "But there's a bookcase in the living room with a bit of everything on it. You could look there."

"Okay." Ethan dusts flour off of his hands and wanders out the door of the kitchen. Ilsa follows right behind him.

Oblivious to the nearby Christmas decorations (or perhaps just pretending to be, but Ilsa suspects he's too focused on the cinnamon rolls to notice her ulterior motives quite yet), Ethan doesn't get as close to the bookcase as Ilsa needs him to be. He stands nearly a meter away from it, arms crossed, head tipped to the side to read the titles, carefully examining every single one just in case one of the skinny mass market paperbacks turns out to be a cookbook in disguise.

And that just won't do for Ilsa's purposes.

"Hmm, can you move forward?" she asks, poking a finger teasingly between his shoulder blades.

He's too strong for her to move him easily if he didn't want to be moved, but he doesn't make her ask twice before he obligingly takes a step forward. She places her hand flat and pushes ever so slightly more, and he compliantly takes a second step that brings him right up against the bookcase. "Ilsa, I'm too close, I can't see anything," he says, laughing.

"That's okay," Ilsa says. She rubs his back, since her hand is right there anyway and nobody's stopping her. "But do you know what you can see?"

"Um, a surprisingly extensive collection of Agatha Christie murder mysteries that is filling my entire field of vision?"

"No, higher."

Ethan tips his head back to look at the top shelf. As his center of gravity shifts, he leans further into her hand, the muscles of his back warm and solid. "Um, there's a dictionary and a Bible and a Lord of the Rings omnibus and a lot of smaller books...if you want me to read the rest of the titles to you, maybe I could take a step back so I can see them better?"

Ilsa slides her hand up, just a tad, to the back of Ethan's neck where his hair is still dangling so temptingly, and gives it a little tug. "Ethan, look higher."

Ethan goes up on tiptoe but isn't quite tall enough to see the top of the bookcase, so he does an adorable little bouncy hop that is just enough to get his head above it for a split second. He half-crashes into Ilsa on his way down, but she doesn't mind. "Dust? There's nothing else up there."

He sounds puzzled enough that it confirms for Ilsa that he literally hasn't noticed the mistletoe directly above his head. (Which is good—she's glad he feels safe enough here with her that he doesn't have to be constantly aware of his surroundings.) "Ethan," Ilsa says, and starts to laugh. "Ethan, look." She threads her fingers through his wonderfully soft brown hair and pulls gently on it until he tips his head back enough to see what she's known was there all along.

"Oh," Ethan breathes. "Ilsa..." As she lets go of his hair, he squirms away from her just enough to manage to turn around, even though she hasn't really left him enough room against the bookcase to do so, so their legs end up tangled together.

Or maybe that's because Ilsa's in the process of—well, if she's honest with herself, she's not too proud to throw herself at a man like Ethan Hunt. She doesn't wait for an invitation or even for him to finish turning around before she lunges forward and sends him crashing against the bookcase as she presses her lips firmly to his.

Ethan responds with equal enthusiasm, wrapping his arms around her and clinging to her steadfastly as he returns the kiss. His warm soft mouth presses so intently against hers that his nose ends up squashed against her cheek, but he doesn't seem to mind because he just keeps pulling her towards him, trapping himself between her body and the bookcase and clinging to her with every inch of him: his legs still tangled between hers, one of his ankles hooked around the back of her knee for balance; his arms enveloping her and his hands clutching at her back so that she can feel the press of each separate finger against her shoulder blades; and his mouth desperately seeking hers. It's good—even better than the kiss in Venice, because this time she isn't caught by surprise. She can savor it while it's happening and not just in her memories.

When Ilsa pulls away for a moment to breathe, Ethan leans forward frantically, his lips chasing hers, and she only makes him wait half a second before she's back at it, shoving him further into the bookcase. She can't help being afraid that any moment he could stop like he did in Venice: she knows from what happened there that he can shut this part of himself—the part that actually cares about himself as a person and not just as a tool for saving the world—off like a light, but this time she isn't going to let him. She clings to him, kissing him over and over again, half on top of him as he leans against the bookcase for balance, and her heart is pounding harder than it ever does in a fight. Her fingertips dig into his shoulders. This time she's not going to let him go.

This time he won't get to walk away without talking about it.

Ethan holds onto her just as tightly, kissing her much like he'd kissed her in Venice, desperately and incessantly, not the soft gentle kisses she'd always imagined him favoring but ones that feel like they could swallow her whole—as if he's afraid she'll melt and disappear the moment he lets her go. Perhaps even more so than in Venice, because after their separation these past months, he knows what it is to have the one he loves snatched away. And so does Ilsa.

A hair catches at Ilsa's eyelashes, trying to work its way into her eye. There's no way for her to tell if it's hers or Ethan's, not when they're so tangled up in each other. She swipes at it but that only makes things worse, so she backs off from Ethan to sort herself out.

Ethan takes advantage of the respite to stand himself up a bit straighter instead of being completely sprawled all over the bookcase. His shirt collar is askew; she doesn't remember that happening but she wouldn't mind messing it up further. He's breathing fast, and staring at her like she's something worth looking at.

"Merry Christmas," Ilsa tells him. She brushes his hair out of his face, just so it won't get in her eyes again. "I should have kissed you as soon as you came in. I don't know why Luther didn't put the mistletoe over the front door, it would have made everything so much simpler."

"I'm sorry," Ethan says softly. He sets his hands on her waist, holding her much more gently than before. "I thought you...I wasn't sure if you wanted things to go back to the way they were before. I thought maybe I'd misjudged things in Venice. There wasn't time to think things through there, so I just—"

"Jumped without thinking? You're good at that, you know, you always have been. I've seen you do it over and over again, and I've let you drag me into doing it alongside you. In Vienna, in Casablanca, in Kashmir. You always trust your instincts, and you always land on your feet. Why would this be any different?"

Ethan doesn't answer right away, just gazes silently at her. His eyes look tired regardless of how much sleep he claims he's been getting lately. They're still pretty though, and always will be—Ilsa reaches out on impulse and brushes her thumb over the winsome crinkles that radiate out from the corner of his eye. Maybe it would be better if she didn't push him (she's fixed her hair and she's caught her breath so there's nothing stopping her from going back to the kissing, which was much more fun than talking), but she's known ever since his lips first touched hers in Venice that they were going to need to discuss it sooner or later. And since they didn't manage to do it sooner, she doesn't think they ought to push it off to much later. Not when his visit here might be her last chance to talk to him.

But they have time. It's the middle of the night: Christmas has barely even begun. So Ilsa listens to Ethan breathe, and she waits.

As he stays quiet, Ilsa reaches out and pulls him into another embrace. He buries his face in the crook of her neck, raining feather-soft kisses on the muscle there.

"Isn't it obvious?" Ethan says, leaning against her, his voice muffled by her flesh. "Usually it's for a mission. Something I've done a thousand times—the exact details vary but I know the rules of the game. This time it was you."

Ilsa strokes his hair. Her fingers catch on a tangle, and she raises her other hand to coax it loose. She can't bear to hurt him unnecessarily, even if she's certain that his own approach to tangles involves nothing more than yanking a hairbrush through it in a hurry. "And I'm different?"

"You're not just a mission, that I'll never think about again once it's over," Ethan says, his lips pressed against her neck, the vibration of his voice reverberating through her rib cage. "I don't want you for now, I want you forever. And that's not something I should have just jumped into. I'm sorry."

"Would it have been better," Ilsa says, stroking her fingers tenderly along the base of his scalp, "if you'd just swallowed up all the feelings like you did the last half dozen times, and like I did the last half dozen times, and said nothing? That way, when we eventually get ourselves killed, we won't have to mourn a tragically ended relationship, and we can just be full of regrets for everything we didn't have and all the kisses we didn't taste. Better to regret the things we didn't do than the things we did: is that really what you think our best option is here?" The words taste bitter on her tongue and she hopes they sting Ethan's ears just as much. Why did she have both the misfortune and the best fortune she's ever had in her life, to fall in love with a man like him: someone who's such a good person—too good, really—that he can't stop sacrificing himself and will never stop sacrificing himself, for a world that doesn't appreciate him and scarcely even knows he exists.

Ethan goes back to kissing her neck and doesn't answer. Ilsa gives him a minute, savoring the feeling of being held, of warm lips caressing her skin. She was right, his hair is a nice length to run her fingers through, and she wishes he'd keep it this long all the time.

Only once he moves his head away from her, kissing his way along her collarbone towards her arm, does Ilsa tighten her hold on his hair so that he stays where he is. "Ethan," she says firmly.

"You said there will always be another Lane," Ethan murmurs. "So there always need to be people like us to face him. What if, while we're distracted with each other, people die? That's why I can never come away with you if you choose to retire." Ilsa tightens her hands in his hair, holding him close, letting him say the words no matter how much they hurt. "That's why I don't know if this is a good idea," Ethan whispers, and kisses the top of her shoulder. "That's why I thought maybe you didn't think it was a good idea."

Ethan moves again to kiss his way lower, and this time Ilsa lets him. "Ethan, we're already compromised," she says. "I've been compromised from the day you stepped up beside me on that balcony in the opera house." Ethan's kisses find their way to her collarbone, only a few inches above the scar she received when she faked her death. He unbuttons the top few buttons of the cardigan he'd brought her earlier, and pushes the V-neck of her pajama top slightly to the side until the scar is visible. It's healed into just a small puckered line, insignificant to look at despite the weeks she spent waiting for it to heal. "Maybe even from the day Lane told me to question you and I let you go instead," Ilsa forces herself to be honest and add. Falling in love at first sight is embarrassing: it feels like something a little girl would do, not a professional spy. But there was definitely a spark from the moment she first laid eyes on him. That's the truth, and pretending it didn't happen hasn't worked for her so far. "Whether or not I've kissed you or not doesn't make one whit of difference how distracting I'm going to find you." And he is very distracting, crouching in front of her, his lips pressed up against that nearly-healed scar, gentle fluttering touches that don't just touch the skin but somehow sink through it, past flesh and marrow, and into her soul.

"Oh, really?" Ethan murmurs in between kisses (just as annoyingly good at multitasking as he's ever been). "So you're saying you found me just as distracting on our first meeting as right now?"

"Mm, I suppose that could be argued either way, but somehow I think I have better things to be doing right now." Ilsa cups her hand around the back of Ethan's head, pulling him towards her, and kisses the top of his head. "We should have done this as soon as you got here."

"I didn't want to make you uncomfortable," Ethan says. "I'm sorry." He straightens back up and smiles at her, his eyes bright and full of contentment, and places his hand on her cheek. His fingers are warm, so much warmer than when he first came in from the cold less than an hour ago. "So, do you want to cancel the cinnamon rolls?"

Ilsa kisses him again, because too many seconds have passed since the last time she kissed him, and there has to be some sort of rule against that when they're both still standing underneath the mistletoe. "I thought you said cinnamon rolls were essential for Christmas," she tells him. "If you still want to make them, I think we can take a rain check here." She wants Ethan's Christmas to be perfect, and if that includes cinnamon rolls then she needs him to have cinnamon rolls.

Ethan's eyes are shining, so she made the right choice. "They won't take too long to put together," he tells her. "And then they'll need to rise so we'll have more time to kill then."

"I know how to kill people, but time is much harder," Ilsa says. She means it as a joke, and Ethan clearly takes it as one because he laughs—but it's also an admission, one she wouldn't trust most people with. She hates to show vulnerability (the only thing it's ever achieved for her is to let other people know how best to target her), but a part of her wants to admit to Ethan just how difficult their plan has turned out to be, even the last few months that were supposed to be the easiest part, of just resting and healing and waiting. She wants him to know what it's really been like, to be her, here, missing him.

Ethan reaches out, takes her hand, and tugs her towards the kitchen. "That's just because you haven't been doing it right," he says.

"Oh, and I suppose you have?"

"Not really. Not without you there." And right there, there's the sort of vulnerability Ilsa was trying for a moment ago but couldn't fully manage: it seems to come to Ethan as easily as breathing.

Or maybe it's a skill developed from long practice and Ethan just pretends it's easy, like jumping off of buildings and killing people.

Ethan keeps tugging on Ilsa's hand but she makes herself an equal but opposite force and doesn't let him leave. "You still don't know the conversion amounts for British and American cups," she points out with a smile.

"Am I allowed to stand more than six inches away from it now?" Ethan asks as he makes his way back to the bookcase. (He doesn't wait for a response before settling himself a more reasonable distance away, out from under the mistletoe that made the last few minutes so entertaining.) He puts his hands on his hips and tips his head to the side to read the titles. "I'm really not convinced there's any cookbooks here," he mutters.

"To be fair, you haven't spent much time actually looking for them," Ilsa says. She stands behind him, resting a hand on his shoulder, and glances desultorily over the spines herself, although she'll let Ethan take point.

"I suppose not." Ethan glances up at the mistletoe. "That stuff is dangerous. I suppose we're lucky it's only out at Christmastime or I don't know how any of us would ever get anything done around here."

"Dangerous?"

A blotchy pink blush paints its way across Ethan's cheeks. "A very potent threat," he says. "Nearly as lethal as you, just slower acting." He reaches out and pulls a thin book—more of a pamphlet—off of the shelf. "Well, it's not a cookbook," he says, frowning at it.

Ilsa tips her head up to nestle her chin on his shoulder, so she can read it too. "Black pudding?" she reads as he flips through the pages. "That's not something anyone cooks at home in this century, why is it in a fifty-page cookbook?"

"Probably because it wasn't written in this century." Ethan laughs. "So much for Luther having this place well stocked."

Ethan is flipping the pages too quickly for Ilsa to get much out of the cookbook, so she turns her head and nuzzles his ear. "I guess he just had too high of trust in me and my cooking abilities. Completely unwarranted, I assure you. Whenever I'm on my own I live on frozen meals and takeaway and three different ways of cooking eggs."

All too quickly, Ethan reaches the last page of the pamphlet and lets it fall closed. "Too many soups and stews, must have run out of space for a conversion table. Oh well, I guess I'll have to just use the measuring cups in the kitchen and hope they aren't too far off from the American cups I'm used to."

"All that time in here wasted," Ilsa teases. She nips his ear. "We could have just stayed in the kitchen."

"We could have," Ethan says, turning to eye her. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and kisses her, soft and warm and gentle. "We would have saved so much time. I don't know what we would have done with all that time, but I'm sure it would have been something important." He kisses her again, touching her as tenderly as Ilsa always imagined he would.

"Nearly as important as what we're doing right now?" Ilsa whispers.

"I don't know," he says as he dives in for yet another kiss. "I'm not sure if anything could be more important than that."

Ilsa laughs, joy bubbling up because it's Christmas and just for today she can have everything she ever wanted. "Well, right now those cinnamon rolls are still pretty important," she says. "Come on, before we completely forget about them and ruin your Christmas breakfast."

This time she's the one to take his hand and tug him towards the kitchen, and he biddably follows her lead.

The kitchen is even warmer than it was when they left it—or maybe that's because it's impossible for Ilsa to feel cold right now. She feels so cozy straight through to her soul that she could dance barefoot outside in the snow right now, as long as Ethan was there doing it alongside her.

The one thing that's exactly the same about the kitchen, though, is that Ilsa's abandoned pan of porridge is still sitting there, slowly congealing into inedibility exactly where Ilsa left it.

Ethan makes a beeline to the bowl of flour and starts measuring sugar into it. "This won't take long," he says.

"You still haven't eaten," Ilsa says. "I'll make a fresh pot of porridge."

"What?" The measuring cup Ethan's holding freezes in midair. "No, I'm sure the one you already made is fine. It hasn't been sitting that long." He dumps the sugar in the bowl and moves on to the salt with a slightly confused frown. "I mean, if you really want to you could heat it back up a bit, but I'm sure it's fine as it is."

"After you've been out in the cold with a broken heater? Not likely."

"I'm plenty warm now."

"I'm sure you are," Ilsa says, and can't suppress a slight blush. "I'll heat it up anyway."

She isn't quite sure how best to go about doing so; she wasn't exaggerating earlier when she told Ethan she had little experience cooking. There's a few meals she's made from scratch in safehouses that she would have been very embarrassed to have to share with Ethan or anyone—thankfully, Luther's been happy to do most of the cooking here, and whenever she's joined Ethan's team on missions, Benji and Luther have a routine that somehow ends up with one or the other of them being in charge of meals ninety percent of the time, and Ilsa has never had to do more than help peel potatoes or other simple tasks.

She settles for running a bit of water into the pot from the tap, in hopes that it will make it less likely to burn, then she turns it on to a very low heat and keeps stirring it.

Ethan steps up next to her and begins to heat butter in a pan. "You should know," he says, "you've never been far from my thoughts these past few months, no matter how far we've been from each other. I haven't stopped thinking about our kiss—the first one, in Venice, not all of the ones just now although I'll definitely think about them plenty from now on. I'd wanted to do that for so long, but I shouldn't have. We knew perfectly well by that point that Gabriel was going to target the people I cared about in order to throw me off balance and split my attention, and then I went and did it to myself."

At least that makes Ilsa feel minutely better about feeling like a lovesick fool these past few months, if Ethan's been in the same boat. "Except you shouldn't assume that just because Gabriel thinks something is true, that that has anything to do with whether it's actually true," she points out. "Isn't that the whole point of what we're trying to accomplish here? If Gabriel were truly the arbiter of truth, I wouldn't be here, and everything we've done since he came on the scene would be for naught."

"Well, yes, I know that, but what does that have to do with...this." Ethan waves a hand between her and him as if to indicate the invisible string that she's always felt drawing her to him—or maybe he's just referring to their kiss.

"Gabriel thinks that your and my...feelings..." (which feels like such a childish word, far too simple to describe the experience of two adult secret agents, but she doesn't have a better one) "make us more vulnerable. But being able to indulge those feelings in a way that Gabriel never will, to keep our humanity in the midst of an inhuman vocation..." Ilsa reaches out, tucks a strand of hair behind Ethan's ear, and kisses his cheek. "I think that's what makes you better at this than anyone else I've ever met. And I think that being each other's vulnerability pays off in more ways than it costs us. So in the end it's a net positive. And you should always trust my mathematical calculations over Gabriel's."

"Even though Gabriel is the only one of the three of us who has access to the conversion factor between British and American cups right now?" Ethan teases. He crouches down so he can carefully check the markings on the side of a liquid measuring cup as he pours milk into it, although his concern for precision is overkill at this point, since they've already established the inaccuracy of their measurements.

"And if we somehow managed to get him to give it to us, we couldn't trust that the Entity hadn't messed with it," Ilsa says, perhaps more seriously than his comment warrants. But even here, hidden away from the Entity, she doesn't feel safe from it. Nothing will make her feel completely safe until it's destroyed, which is why they have to succeed.

"Yeah, I wouldn't put it past him to give us the wrong numbers just to ruin our Christmas."

"But he's not here, and you are, so nothing's going to ruin my Christmas," Ilsa says. It isn't fully true—not when Gabriel and the Entity are out there, not when they're probably looking for Ethan right at this moment and not when they could discover any time now that Ilsa isn't actually dead like they meant her to be—but if she says it out loud, it's easier to pretend it's true. "Ethan, we're stronger together than we are separate. We always have been, and we always will be. Even if you'd never kissed me, that would still be true. So I'm glad you did, because it's better that way."

"I wish you'd told me that back in Venice," Ethan says, taking his pan off the heat. "I was worried maybe you were upset about it. I thought you might prefer if we both pretended the kiss hadn't happened and tried to go back to the way we were before."

As Ethan fusses with the contents of the pan, Ilsa rubs her hand over his forearm. The fleece he's wearing is soft under her fingertips, almost as cozy as he deserves. She can feel his muscles flex slightly as he adjusts his grip on the pan, and she wraps her hand more firmly around his arm so that she can better appreciate the muscle there. "Ethan, you're one of the most intelligent people I've ever met."

"Really?" Without stopping stirring, he leans over and kisses her on the forehead. "Thank you."

"But that was not smart. Please don't do something that stupid ever again."

That provokes a blush from him, pink smudging its way adorably over the tops of his cheekbones. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to make you uncomfortable." He takes the pan off the heat and leans closer to her. "Like you said earlier, I jumped without thinking, but unfortunately I was jumping to conclusions," he adds wryly.

Still stroking Ethan's arm, Ilsa works her way down to his wrist, until finally he lets go of the pan and turns his hand over to interlace his fingers through hers. "I'm sorry too," Ilsa tells him. "I should have said something, but I was avoiding it the same as you were. I thought we had more time."

"We do have more time," Ethan says firmly. "It's Christmas, for today we have all the time in the world."

"We do," Ilsa says, raising their intertwined hands to her lips to kiss his knuckles. "We do, and it's already the best Christmas I've ever had. But since we unfortunately don't literally have the ability to stop time, if we don't hurry up and make these cinnamon rolls they're not going to be ready for Christmas breakfast, and neither will we. Tell me what I can do to help." Without letting go of him, with her other hand she retrieves a spoon from the drawer and taste-tests the porridge. It's hot but she doesn't think it's quite enough, not when Ethan deserves everything to be perfect. "This is almost ready."

"The dough's almost finished, but unfortunately I think I'm going to need two hands for this next part," Ethan says, rubbing his thumb gently along the side of her hand.

"Are you sure?"

Ethan laughs lightly. "We could try doing it with one of each of our hands, but there's a good chance we'd manage to knock the bowl on the floor in the process, and all this work would be for naught. We'd have to either start all over, or give up and go back to kissing." He doesn't look too bothered by the latter prospect, despite his enthusiasm for the cinnamon rolls.

Ilsa smiles. "Two highly skilled secret agents? I should hope we could manage to work together to any extent necessary." She squeezes his hand and strokes her fingers slowly over the back of it as she lets go. "If not, we should probably practice, in case our lives end up depending on it someday. But maybe when we're less pressed for time. So what happens after you finish the dough?"

Ethan pours the contents of the pan he'd been heating into his original bowl of flour from earlier. As promised, as he stirs it gently with a wooden spoon—and Ilsa knows from experience how gentle his hands can be, and that mix of softness and competence is something she finds just as attractive when he's performing a simple task like this as in every other part of her life where she's falling in love with him over and over and over again—a dough starts to form. "Then it needs to be kneaded," he says. "I can do that, unless you want to?"

Ilsa decides the porridge is hot enough for her to serve, and she begins to spoon it up into a cereal bowl. It's burnt onto the bottom of the pan: only a little bit, but she still carefully avoids scraping the edges or bottom of the pan as she serves it, so that Ethan won't realize just how bad of a cook she really is. "I'd love to," she says, because Ethan came here to take a break so he shouldn't end up doing all of the work. "That will give you time to eat your breakfast. But I've never done it before, so you'll have to tell me what to do."

As Ethan keeps stirring, the contents of the bowl start to look more and more like actual dough. "You'll want to wipe down the counter and wash your hands," he says, "and then you're going to put flour on both, so that the dough won't stick to everything. You've seriously never kneaded anything? Like, even just bread or something?"

"When would I have done that?" Ilsa asks, and hands him the bowl of porridge as she goes to wash up.

Ethan rummages through his collection of cinnamon roll ingredients and produces milk and brown sugar, both of which he pours generously on top of the porridge. "When you were growing up? You weren't born a spy any more than I was, or at least I hope you weren't." Ethan stares into Ilsa's eyes, trying to read the truth there in lieu of an answer she's unlikely to give him. They've never talked about their pasts. She's never thought it mattered. "I had a normal childhood," Ethan says. "I guess I've always assumed that you had one too."

In a way, he's right. Ilsa's always considered her childhood to be relatively normal—she went to school, she read books, she played with the neighbor children: all the same things that the other girls her age seemed to be doing—but she wonders how different her definition of normal is from Ethan's. Because her childhood certainly didn't involve kneading, of bread or anything else.

"Isn't that how most people learn to cook?" Ethan adds in between bites. "By helping their parents in the kitchen? This is delicious, thank you."

"You're very welcome," Ilsa says. "And I wouldn't know." She's not used to talking about her childhood, but she forges ahead anyway, because it's just Ethan and she knows she can trust him. "I don't think my parents enjoyed cooking," Ilsa tells him. "They ended up in far too many arguments about it. So I wasn't about to volunteer to join them in the kitchen and put myself in the middle of that. My mealtime chores were to set the table and wash up afterwards. No kneading required." She decides the counter is clean enough and wipes it dry.

"When did you learn to cook, then?"

"Well, my mother did teach me a few things. You saw that I know how to make porridge. She taught me that and coffee and a few other breakfast foods as soon as I was old enough to be trusted not to burn the house down. It let her sleep in a few more minutes, and it gave me more control than I was used to having, as an only child outnumbered by grownups. Whatever I decided to make for breakfast, that was what we were having. Which is magical as a seven-year-old. Now, where do I put flour, and how?"

"There's no particular technique, you can do it however you like. I usually just scoop some out of the bag with my hands and sprinkle it over the counter as evenly as I can manage. By the time you're done with that, your hands will be pretty well dusted too, so you don't have to do anything special for them. There's plenty of flour, and unless the Entity is way more steps ahead of us than we think it is, your supply chain isn't in any danger, so don't worry about needing to conserve. So you only know how to make breakfast food, then?"

For a moment, Ilsa is tempted to say yes—it's close enough to the truth. But she's never liked the idea of lying to Ethan: he doesn't deserve it from her, not after all he's done and all the ways he's trusted her when he shouldn't have. And as much as she hates making herself vulnerable, it feels nice, in an unfamiliar sort of way, to share little pieces of herself with the one man in the world who knows her too well. If she can kill a man she was assigned to protect for Ethan...if she can make herself the target of a nuclear bomb for Ethan...and on the less deadly side of things, if she can stick her tongue in his mouth and kiss him until she runs out of breath...then surely she can trust him with inconsequential pieces of her biography. (He might even already know all of them, depending on how extensive the Americans' file on her is.) "Well, I did a year of university before I was recruited by MI6. Did you know that?"

Ethan's eyes light up, as if the events of Ilsa's life over a decade before he met her are actually interesting. "I didn't. What were you studying?"

Ilsa takes a handful of flour and begins to sprinkle it on the counter, the way Ethan had explained. "Education." Ilsa laughs. Those decisions had all felt so big at the time, but with the benefit of distance and hindsight it all seems inconsequential now. "Could you see me as a teacher? I can't, not anymore. But that was what my parents suggested, and I didn't have any better ideas. I had a flatshare that year, it was the first time I'd lived away from home, so I had to figure out how to feed myself. I got a couple of cookbooks from the library and I found a few websites, and I just taught myself from the words on the page and a lot of mistakes. There were no video tutorials back then. It was in the very early days of Google—that was how I taught myself to use Google, actually, by looking for cooking websites. I remember it seemed such a fascinating new tool, back before I was trained to recognize all the ways such technology could be dangerous."

"And back before it was so dangerous, either," Ethan adds. "Those were the good old days."

"You would have already been an agent by that point, weren't you?" Ilsa doesn't normally draw attention to the difference in their ages—it's not something that's ever bothered her, but she worries it might bother Ethan. But she's curious. "Before the internet was widespread?"

Taking one last bite of porridge as he sets his bowl aside, Ethan thinks for a moment. "Just barely. There were already precursors to the internet, and the internet itself had already probably been created in some university computer labs I never got to set foot in, but the average person walking down the street wouldn't have heard of it yet, much less have a device in their pocket that could access it at any time. I have not-so-fond memories of hunting down an arms dealer on Usenet. I would much rather have been looking for cooking tutorials."

"And that's the thing, we didn't know we were in the good old days back when we were in them," Ilsa says. "I didn't appreciate what I had back then. Not that I was ever likely to enjoy cooking; I quit that as soon as I could. I don't need my food to taste good when I'm on my own, just as long as it takes as little work as possible. Though I must say, I've become a fan of joining a team where everyone else is better at cooking than I am. I should have done that sooner. Luther's been spoiling me."

Ethan laughs. "I'm not sure everyone on the team is better at cooking. Remember when Brandt burned that pot roast?"

"You should see the number of things I've managed to burn," Ilsa teases back. "I burnt that oatmeal, you know, I just carefully picked out all the parts that were okay to hide my shame."

"Yes, but it's my fault you had to reheat it; I'm sure it was fine the first time around."

"Your fault, huh? After I had to lead you step by step under the mistletoe and even then you were still oblivious?"

Ethan looks even more adorable than usual whenever he blushes. She's really been missing out in all the years before now when she didn't know that little piece of information. "It's not my fault Luther hid it so well," he says, dipping his head, which does nothing to conceal the pink spreading over his cheekbones.

"Of course he did," Ilsa says with a laugh. "He must have known that putting the mistletoe in plain sight on the ceiling, where it was visible from the moment you walked in the door, was the last place you'd ever think to look."

Talking about mistletoe reminds Ilsa that she hasn't kissed Ethan in far too many minutes, so she leans toward him once again. (She's tempted to grab his hair with her floury hands and dust it all through his tresses just for fun—it's sure to be adorable and maybe it would make him laugh—but if she did that, she'd have to wash her hands and start all over on flouring them for the kneading, and that would take valuable time away from kissing Ethan later on while the rolls are in the oven.)

Kissing Ethan comes as easily to her as breathing: she can't remember anymore why they both waited so long for this, not when they fit together so well, like two halves of something bigger than themselves—something she'd never known to look for since she hadn't realized it existed, but now she has it. Ethan presses up against her, his lips soft and yearning against her own, and she doesn't need to reach out and pull him closer because he's right there.

He's always been right there, and it just took a while for her to understand what that meant for her.

"Okay, I'm ready," she says, pulling away finally. She brandishes her well-floured hands and continues to resist the temptation to muss Ethan's hair with them. "What do I do?"

Ethan holds out the bowl of dough. "Pick up the dough in your hands—I think I mixed it well enough that you can pick it all up in one big piece, but it's a soft dough so you're going to have to support it, and it'll stick to your hands a bit. If it sticks too much, we'll add more flour, but we don't want to add too much. That's it," he adds as Ilsa eases the unwieldy lump out of the bowl. "Set it on the floured part of the counter, and then start to press it out flat. Not too thin, just flatten it out a bit. Push it away from you, so that it gets longer but not much wider."

The dough gushes up in between Ilsa's fingers with the first press, and the flour she had previously thought was more than adequate suddenly seems inconsequential. "Is this, um—" she asks, nodding her head towards the mess beneath her. "Is it supposed to do that?"

"It takes a little bit to get it under control," Ethan says, and although that's plausible Ilsa wonders if he's stretching a point to make her feel better. (It's the sort of thing she could picture him saying in the middle of a mission, that it's going to take a little bit to get things under control, but don't worry, just as soon as we finish kidnapping the prime minister, everything's going to be fine. Don't worry, I know what I'm doing.)

Unfortunately, Ilsa does not know what she's doing. "So I add flour?"

"Here, I'll do it." Ethan reaches offhandedly into the bag of flour and scoops up a handful. "It's the sort of thing you just have to get a feel for," he says, letting the flour fall onto the dough and Ilsa's hands alike—his movements apparently effortless, and yet the dusting of white powder lands far more evenly than when Ilsa was doing it. "That's why it's easier to have someone teach you than to learn from a cookbook. You're a fast study, you'll probably have the hang of it before we've even finished the cinnamon rolls. Don't worry about unsticking every last bit from your hands," he adds as Ilsa attempts to extricate herself from the dough. "That's good enough for now. Once you work in a bit more flour it'll be fine. Okay, now fold the dough back onto itself. Yes, just slide your hands underneath it."

Once again, what had seemed more than enough flour a minute ago is now not nearly enough, and Ilsa has to scrape her fingernails against the counter to free some of the dough. As soon as she picks it up, Ethan moves into place without a word, sprinkling more flour everywhere her previous application had been lacking.

"Okay, good," he says, even though it's all a mess. "Now turn it a quarter turn and do the same thing again."

She's tempted to ask him to take over. This is the most incompetent she's ever felt in front of Ethan, and even though he's pretending not to notice, she still hates letting him see her stumble. From the first day they met, when she killed as many men as he did, or maybe more (she's never bothered to keep a close count of all the lives she's snuffed out, because it would just keep her up at night and she needs her sleep), she's only really let Ethan see her doing things she was good at. (Even when it turned out they were things Ethan was even better that than she was, enough for him to come out on top, like when they both went after Solomon Lane in Paris.)

Doing something she's this clumsy at in front of Ethan is a much more vulnerable act than killing people in front of him ever was.

But they can no longer pretend that the feelings that connect them aren't romantic, not when they've finally acted on those feelings. And if they're a couple now, then that doesn't just come with kissing but it's also about being able to let herself be vulnerable around another person. And Ilsa knows she trusts Ethan, more than she's ever trusted anyone else in her entire life. So she stands at the counter with her hands covered in flour, and she doesn't stop.

This time, when she pulls the dough away from the counter and folds it back on itself, it doesn't stick nearly as much as it did the first time. "Do I keep going like this?" she asks.

Ethan kisses the back of her neck, a feather-light touch, the sort of thing she could almost tell herself she'd imagined, if she was a different sort of person. (But she's a trained spy who's never had much of an imagination, so she knows it's real.) "Yes, just like that, I knew you'd pick it up quickly. Just keep doing that over and over again, rotating it every time, for around three minutes until the dough stops looking so shaggy." He kisses her neck again, leaning gently up against her back as he watches over her shoulder.

As Ilsa continues, she can see that the dough is starting to smooth out, but it still feels vaguely awkward under her hands, not nearly as at home there as a weapon would be. She doesn't know how Ethan can manage to feel equally at home here in the domestic sphere as he is on missions, not after everything he's done. Goodness knows it's not a place Ilsa will ever feel she belongs to, not after everything she's done.

"That's great," Ethan says. He ambles away, leaving her to manage the dough, trusting her not to make a hash of things despite how little instruction she's had. After all, in their line of work that's practically a requirement—sometimes Ilsa has had to work with far less, from far unkinder teachers.

The dough settles under Ilsa's hands. As the extra flour finds its way into the mix, it fights her less and less. Which leaves her with more attention to spare for keeping an eye on Ethan as he putters about the kitchen. (Not that she wouldn't have watched him even if the dough still wasn't cooperating, because she always has—she isn't sure she knows how to stop paying attention to him even if she wanted to.) He washes the flour off of his hands and dries them with quick efficient movements, not nearly as gentle with himself as Ilsa would be if she were holding that towel. He rummages through the pan cupboard for a while, and finally emerges with a round glass baking dish that he sets on the counter. He arranges ingredients—a dish of butter he set out earlier to soften; brown sugar; and the rolls' namesake cinnamon—on another part of the counter, then wanders back over behind her again.

"I think I've got the hang of it," Ilsa tells him, as he watches over her shoulder, his warm breath ghosting against her cheek.

"I can see you have," Ethan murmurs. His hand brushes her shoulder and wanders over to her neck, digging into the long-neglected muscles there with just the right amount of pressure. It's not as if they really need the attention: nothing Ilsa does lately requires much of her muscles except when she purposely works out. It's nothing like what Ethan's surely been up to, exerting himself out in the cold. Ilsa could tell him it's not necessary, that he shouldn't overwork himself catering to her when she's just been lazing about for weeks...but his tender touch is one of the best things she's felt in her entire life, and it's impossible for her to bring herself to tell him to stop.

And it's his choice: he wouldn't be doing it if he didn't want to. Maybe he wants to take care of her just as much as she wants to take care of him. Ilsa arches back into his touch, remembering the very first time he touched her neck—cupping her head as he crouched in front of her in the car after the opera, when he'd been searching her, every touch more respectful and gentle than she'd ever expected.

Even back then, she'd been tempted to kiss him, just to see what he'd do, because he'd been terribly unpredictable up to that point, and she was curious whether the waveform of his infinite options would collapse back down to the typical male spy's playbook, or whether he would manage to surprise her yet again. Or at least that's how Ilsa chooses to remember it, although it's easy to allow memory to blur over time into a more flattering shape. She'd been lonely for so long and he was the nicest person she'd met since she'd gone undercover, and the truth is, she was tempted to kiss him simply because she was attracted to him and she didn't want to be alone anymore. She didn't realize yet what a treasure she'd found, but she knows now...and that certainly hasn't lessened the desire she feels for him.

She can't go back in time and do things over again, but she can take advantage of the blessings her past self didn't have. Keeping her floury hands behind her so she won't make even more of a mess than she's already made all over the counter, Ilsa turns around and steals a quick kiss. "I missed you," she says, even though she knows he already knows that. (Sometimes, she thinks she missed him even before she ever met him for the first time.)

"I'm here now," Ethan whispers back. As she turns back to her kneading, he leans in again and kisses her cheek. "I'll stay as long as I can. I know it's not enough."

"But it's much better than nothing," Ilsa assures him. "That's close enough to three minutes, don't you think? What do I do now?"

Ethan grabs a bowl off of the counter and holds it out to her. "We'll leave the dough to rest for a few minutes while we make the filling. Some recipes let it rise fully at this point, but not the way my mom taught me, and it's just so much easier this way."

Ilsa scoops the dough up in her hands—she doesn't have to work to scrape it off the counter this time: it's docile and complacent under her fingertips—and she sets it in the bowl. "Do I still need my hands to be floury for this next part?"

"No, you can wash up," Ethan says. "The next part isn't as messy. And it tastes better."

"Oh, does the dough not taste good?" Ilsa is suddenly terribly tempted to taste the remains of dough that are stuck between her fingers, even though the possibility hadn't even occurred to her until a second ago. "I wasn't sure if it was safe to eat."

"It isn't," Ethan says. "There's the risk of salmonella from the raw egg, and apparently uncooked flour is dangerous nowadays too."

"We've gone undercover, been shot at, and rappelled off of buildings...but flour's going to be the thing that does us in," Ilsa says, and licks the dough off of her hand. "Oh, that doesn't taste good enough to die for." It's slightly sweet, but mostly it just tastes doughy. Which she probably ought to have expected.

"Wait till after it's baked, then it's worth it," Ethan says. "But if you're going down, we're going down together." He reaches into the bowl and takes a taste. "Yeah, that's...not great. If it doesn't have the filling, it's not cinnamon rolls, it's just 'rolls.'"

"So how do we do the filling, then?" Ilsa asks as she washes her hands.

"We mix a bunch of delicious things together and spread it on the dough. Then we'll roll it up, which creates one long spiral that we slice into individual rolls. Then we'll leave those to rise, go make out under the mistletoe some more, and then put the rolls in the oven at some point."

"Oh, I like that plan," Ilsa says. "That's a very good plan. What sort of delicious things are we mixing together?"

Ethan gestures to the counter where he'd set his ingredients earlier. "The butter's softened for long enough; why don't you put it in that bowl while I measure the brown sugar and cinnamon."

Since the ingredients in question are right next to each other, he and Ilsa end up standing side by side at the counter, their shoulders brushing slightly. It's cozy and comfortable. No matter how close Ethan gets to her, Ilsa has never felt like he's invading her personal space—instead, it's like he belongs there, a piece in the puzzle of her life snapping into place.

"It doesn't matter for this part if the British measuring cups are slightly off," Ethan adds as Ilsa sees to the butter. "We can just taste-test it and adjust accordingly."

He dumps the brown sugar on top of the butter in one big clump, and hands Ilsa a wooden spoon that she uses to stir the sugar in with the butter. Although "stirring" might be overstating matters since the butter isn't that soft, but she does her best to encourage the two ingredients to combine. Ethan returns to the bowl with a spoonful of cinnamon, and he brushes up against Ilsa's side as he sprinkles it all over the surface of the butter mixture so that it isn't all clumped in one spot. Enough of the fine powder enters the air that suddenly the room smells of cinnamon.

Maybe, for Ethan, that's what Christmas has always smelled like. Ilsa wouldn't mind having this be what every Christmas she celebrates smells like for the rest of her life. It's a nice smell, and even better company.

"You don't have to follow the recipe exactly on this part, it's really a matter of taste," Ethan says. "I've always figured the filling needs plenty of cinnamon because it's going to be toned down by all the bread wrapped around it. On the other hand, my mother always wanted to make it with barely any cinnamon at all."

"So that they were just 'rolls'?"

"Exactly." Ethan laughs. "That was actually a joke my dad came up with, in just that context. Neither of us dared say it around my mother. But we usually averaged out to a relatively normal amount of cinnamon—more than she wanted, less than I did."

He goes to wash his hands, and by the time he tucks himself back against Ilsa's side, she's managed to stir the filling enough that it's all one color, nice and even.

He swipes some up with his finger and tastes it. "This seems good, it's a nice middle ground," he says. "I might add more cinnamon if I was going to be the only person eating them, but this is good for general company. Certainly more than my mother would ever have condoned. Do you want to taste it and see what you think?"

Ilsa turns to face him. "Yes, I'd like to taste it."

Ethan looks at her expectantly, waiting for her to take a taste the same way he did. Ilsa raises an eyebrow at him—well?—and he's always been good at reading her without her having to say anything. (Well, except for that one kiss in Venice, but they'd both been under a lot of stress at the time.) So it only takes him a moment to get the picture.

Ethan takes another swipe of the frosting with the same finger, and holds it up to Ilsa's mouth for her to lick it off of him. It's good: sweet and rich and just a little bit spicy. Even better is the way Ethan's smiling at her. She flicks her tongue along the sides of his finger a few more times than is absolutely necessary, because she likes the way it makes his eyes widen.

"It's good, but I think you're right," Ilsa says, pulling away once she can't even pretend that there's the tiniest speck of filling left anywhere on Ethan's finger. "It needs more cinnamon, or it won't be able to hold its own among all that bread dough."

It's the right answer. Ethan's eyes light up, half surprise and half excitement.

He rummages through the measuring spoons and picks up the smallest one. "Let's start with this. It doesn't look like much, but it'll be enough to make a difference."

"A little goes a long way," Ilsa agrees. It's a maxim that's been true of too much of her life. She doesn't want it to be true of their relationship any longer. (But it can still apply to cinnamon. Cinnamon isn't hurting anything.)

Ilsa resumes her previous place at the counter and begins to stir the contents of the bowl while Ethan sprinkles the cinnamon evenly over the surface of the creamy filling. It doesn't take long for all of it to mix in, and Ilsa promptly decides it's her turn: she sticks her finger into the bowl and holds it out to Ethan, who greets it with a gleeful smile.

He leans forward and takes her finger in his mouth, laving it with small flicks of his tongue—gentle but enthusiastic.

"Is that good enough?" Ilsa asks.

Ethan smiles cheekily up at her, and sucks on her finger instead of responding.

"I'll take that as a yes," Ilsa says, her own smile growing wider.

After another few heartbeats, Ethan releases her, and Ilsa slowly takes her hand back, loath to loose that closeness even though he's still only a few inches away, close enough that she can feel the warmth of him.

"It's very good," Ethan says. "I think we should go with this. Does it meet with your approval?" He holds out another taste, and places it on Ilsa's tongue as she opens her mouth to him.

Ilsa savors it. She savors the touch of his hand against her jaw and his fingers between her lips. She savors his eyes on her, warm and soft and loving. She savors the spicy-sweet taste of the cinnamon roll filling on her tongue, this tiny piece of Ethan's past that he's chosen to share with her. And she savors the feeling of safety, of finding a place where she belongs, here with the man she loves.

"I think it's the best thing I've ever tasted," Ilsa says.

It tastes like coming home.