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Any good spy could tell you that there were advantages to being dead. Chief among them is anonymity. No one looks for you unless they have a reason, and no one has a reason to believe Claire Phelps is anything other than ash drifting down the Vltava River. She still has to take precautions—though the sunglasses and scarves that she adopts when she leaves are somehow always effortlessly chic in that old Hollywood way—but it does grant her certain freedoms that Ethan doesn’t have.
Ethan hasn’t been outside in five days. Not since the short train ride from Prague to Dresden, where Jim kept a small safehouse, off the books from even the IMF. It was Claire’s suggestion—Jim never told Ethan, either. It stung him a bit, in a small, petty way that Jim felt the need to conceal it from even him, though he didn’t tell Claire that.
Ethan spent most of the trip staring out the window, thinking about all the things he’d never know he’d never known about the man who’d been like a second father to him. Claire sat at his side, looking similarly introspective, and Ethan constantly found his hand twitching with the desire to reach out to take hers. Whether it was for her comfort or his, he couldn’t say. Instead, he white-knuckled the armrest. It was almost a relief to arrive at the safehouse.
It definitely wasn’t beachfront property. Boarded on the outside, planted on the corner of a mostly empty street. The front door, Claire explained, was rigged with explosives, but there was a window in the back with a loose board that they could slip through. The inside was a bit nicer, consisting of a sparsely furnished bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom, though there weren’t any doors, which made privacy another luxury they couldn’t afford. Ethan flicked a lightswitch experimentally and the kitchen light and fan came on.
Electricity, running water; it would do the job. Everything else was secondary.
Ethan threw their bags in the bedroom and got to work. He hasn’t stopped since. They had limited access to IMF databases—neither Ethan nor Claire were hackers by any measure, but Ethan obtained Sean Ambrose’s credentials months ago as part of a planned elaborate prank with Jack that never came to fruition—which they used to access and download the Langley specs and the IMF’s black book of the disavowed back in Prague. The blueprints are spread across the table, so heavily marked that they’re almost illegible. Not that it matters; he’s stared at them long enough that they’re practically burned onto his eyelids. Claire sits at the other side, blearily scouring personnel records.
He’s spent the last five days planning the break in, refining his pitch, and pacing back and forth. The only breaks he takes are to sleep. It’s a form of mania he’s neared before but never reached, and the feverish, relentless way he approaches the Langley job worries even him, in a far off way. There’s nothing to be done about it now though, not when there’s so much at stake.
It’s easy to get so fixated when there’s nothing else for him to do. Claire might be able to come and go, but Ethan is rooted firmly in place. It’s possible he’s being overly cautious—Ethan is a literal master of disguise—but they don’t have the materials to make a mask every time he wants to go on a milk run and he knows that every ID is being watched under a magnifying lens. If he knows Kittridge as well as he thinks he does, he’s probably got agents actually canvassing on every corner. So he stays inside and he plans and he plans and he plans.
He might be going a little stir crazy. That’s what Claire tells him, anyway. She tells him she feels it too, and then they get into a fight that turns into a screaming match because they’re not the same at all. Claire can leave whenever she wants. She’s dead. She’s free. Ethan is the target of an international manhunt. If he doesn’t clear his name, he’s going to spend the rest of his life at the bottom of a very dark hole.
Their argument lasts twenty minutes before they go off to lick their wounds in different corners. They sheepishly make up in the next ten—it’s hard to stay mad at someone when you can see them sulking thirty feet away. Claire caves first, telegraphing her approach as she comes behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder. Before she says anything, Ethan pulls her into a hug, pressing a kiss to her forehead. He’s always had a hard time staying mad at her.
It’s not fair for Ethan to act like Claire is much better off, because she really only leaves to pick up food and supplies. Cheap takeout, a constant across the universe as far as Ethan is concerned, once or twice a day. Climbing gear, rope, a couple of floppy disks, a mild emetic. The rest of the time, she’s with him.
At times, it’s almost domestic. They take their meals together, snatching food out of each other’s boxes with chopsticks. Ethan only really sleeps when Claire physically pushes him to the bed, then curls up next to him like it’s nothing. And maybe it is nothing now. A week ago, Ethan wouldn’t have been able to sleep with the heat of her warming his side and the scent of her shampoo in his nostrils. Now he passes out and wakes up to the smell of brewing coffee, and comes out to see Claire already sitting at the table going over the Langley specs for the nth time, trying to find what they might’ve missed. Ethan takes his cup and stands over her shoulder and they talk and plan until it’s time for her to make the lunch run.
The sick thing is, Ethan had always kind of wanted this. He had dreamed, actually, literally dreamed scenarios that involved the two of them tucked away in a secluded place. No Jim, no deadlines, no pressure. Just the two of them together and Claire smiling, beautiful and full of promise.
Now, Ethan dreams about his team dying in front of him, Jim’s waterlogged corpse pointing an accusatory finger. Ethan doesn’t sleep well next to Claire, but without her, he doesn’t sleep at all.
If there’s any consolation (is it a consolation? He’s really not sure) Claire is just as affected by the grief and isolation as he is. They don’t talk about it, maybe because they don’t know what to say or maybe because talking about it would make it all sink in, but he can tell all the same. He’ll catch her crying sometimes, staring out cracks in the boarded windows at the street beyond, watching the people go by. Privacy does not come easily with two rooms and no door to divide them, but he does his best to give it to her, standing in the kitchen looking through dusty shelves for nothing in particular.
When she’s done, she comes to him and leans her head on his shoulder. He slips his arm around her and tries desperately to think of anything other than how much five days ago all he would’ve wanted was to cradle her face and kiss the tears away. How he still wants to now.
And that’s the worst part, really. Ethan’s feelings for Claire had always sat with him like a knife in the gut. Throbbing and ever-present, and all with the knowledge that the worst possible thing he could do is remove the blade and let everything flow free. He never gave voice to it, never confessed how he felt to even Jack, who knew Ethan better than anyone save Jim, and he tried his best to not even think of it in the hopes that it would just go away. Claire is beautiful, intelligent, and competent, but she was also his mentor’s wife and as unobtainable as world peace.
Saying he hoped might imply conscious thought, but Ethan would be lying if he said that, somewhere between finding out Claire was alive and sealing the deal with Max, it hadn’t occurred to him that maybe the wound would scab. That they could grieve together. He was wrong. He knew back in Prague, when she made the choice to stick with him. She’s still present in his mind, it just… ebbs and flows now. Sometimes he can forget completely, so focused on the next move, and sometimes the full force of it would knock the wind out of him until he can’t think of anything else. It’s perverse, obscene. Jim hasn’t been dead for more than a week.
Five days of this. Anyone would go crazy, wouldn’t they?
But time is running out. As much as Ethan wants to iron out every possible kink in the plan, there’s only so much they can do in the window Max has given them. Tomorrow is the big day. Their bags are packed and stacked neatly in the corner. In the morning, they’ll board the earliest train to Berlin, on which they’ve booked a private cabin, and pick up the final two members of their party. When they accept the job, because Ethan can’t afford to think in ifs these days, the four of them will continue to the airport for a direct flight to Virginia. All goes well, they’ll be heading back to London in less than 24 hours with the NOC list in their pocket.
It’s precisely all the ways that it can’t go well that are keeping Ethan awake that night. He’s not sure if it’s the same for Claire, but he knows she’s not sleeping either; he can tell by the sound of her breathing. If Ethan’s internal clock is correct, and it usually is, they have a little over three hours before they have to leave. Not ideal, but he’s operated under more stressful conditions with less sleep. That didn’t mean it would be fun. He stifles a groan and tries to subtly shift into a more comfortable position without disrupting Claire. The mattress, or rather the ancient springs in the mattress do not cooperate.
He winces at the sudden, loud squeal. Next to him, Claire huffs a small exhale of a laugh. When she speaks, he can hear the smile in her questioning, “Nervous?”
Ethan allows himself a smile too. He aims for a light tone when he responds, “Just thinking. You?”
“Same boat,” she replies, though she sounds more preoccupied now. They sit in companionable silence for a few minutes, and Ethan is halfway to drifting off when she suddenly speaks again, asking “Are you sure we can trust Stickell?”
Ethan looks over at Claire, surprised. Luther Stickell might’ve been Ethan’s first choice for cyber ops for sheer geographic convenience alone—he was living in Dresden too, but in an inarguably nicer penthouse—but the guy was also a living legend. The Net Ranger, the gray hat hacker of the virtual Wild West. Everything Ethan ever heard about him suggested that he was exactly the right man for the job. Ethan attempts to articulate this as such.
“He’s a hacker. All those guys care about is being the first to climb Everest. He won’t ask questions. Besides, he’s the best. It’s Krieger I’m worried about.” Ethan had been more than a little surprised by Claire’s suggestion to bring in Franz Krieger. She claimed that she worked with him before in her DGSE days, and that she could draw on that shared past to get him to fall in line. Ethan was a little less convinced.
Claire offers her rebuttal. “He’s a scumbag. All those guys care about is money. He’s not the most pleasant person, but he’ll do the job.” Ethan hums noncommittally, but there’s no real bite to it. It was too late to find an alternative now anyway, and at the end of the day, he trusts Claire’s judgement implicitly. He grabs her hand and squeezes it gently. She says, “It’s going to be okay, Ethan.”
He exhales slowly, closing his eyes, and nods.
Claire shuffles, turning on her side to face him. He returns the favor and regrets it; their faces are only a few inches apart. Her hair tickles his nose and he lets go of her hand.
She bites her lip, looking away, and for a moment Ethan thinks she’s about to roll back over again. But then she says, “You know, it’s strange. Right now, you’re the only one who knows I’m alive. It’s like I don’t exist at all outside of you.”
Ethan can’t swallow around the lump that appears in his throat, so he doesn’t say anything. Her tone is light, like this is some funny observation she’s just put together, but Ethan doesn’t feel like laughing. Only Claire can do this to him, short circuit his brain with a sentence or two.
There were times where he was certain that she knew how he felt. She’d say something like that, or she’d give him a particularly penetrating look and Ethan would feel his heart stutter and jolt in his chest, the way it never would in the field. He’d diffused bombs with seconds to spare and hung off the sides of buildings with only his fingertips keeping him from a 40 story fall, but Claire would look at him from under her eyelashes with a sudden unreadability and all he could think was, “Oh, God.”
The truth was, Ethan wouldn’t know what to do if Claire returned his feelings. He could live with it, kind of, when it was him alone. It meant the burden was solely on him, which meant that nothing would happen. But if Claire ever told him she wanted him back or God forbid, made an advance of her own… Ethan swore to himself that he’d never ruin Claire or Jim’s happiness, but they didn’t always seem happy.
Jim and Claire went through a rough patch last year. It was—well, it was bad, there was no way around it. Jack called it “the two-and-a-half year itch.”
Ethan didn’t know if it was a symptom or an inciting incident, but Jim started taking more and more jobs outside their team, training jobs and recruitment missions and other things above Ethan’s not unimpressive clearance level, and was blatantly dissatisfied when he was present. Ethan couldn’t speak for their home life, at least not at the beginning, but he’d bet real money that he wasn’t just like that work, because he started dragging Claire down with him.
From an outside perspective, the team functioned the same as it ever did. Missions still went off with the typical number of hitches (more than anyone liked, but hey, the world hadn’t blown up yet), and were ultimately written off as successes. Internally, it was another story. Briefings, mission prep, even travel were all nightmares. Claire wielded her passive-aggressive comments like a scalpel, slicing and slicing, primarily at Jim, but once she really got started, everyone was a fair target. It left them all a little frayed, but Jim… Jim was the kind of outwardly unflappable that came with 30 years of experience in the field. Jim met her snide remarks with cool condescension, which only served to heighten her hostility. Ethan would watch and feel the tension heightening the way you could feel a storm on the horizon by the change in pressure and brace himself for the hurricane.
Despite his indifferent facade, it was always Jim who would break first. Claire would tease out a soft spot and hit it just so and a change would fall over his face like a solar eclipse. He wouldn’t yell exactly, but he would suddenly get hostile and intense and crowd her space and then they were off. Sometimes they’d have the presence of mind to take it somewhere private, but if they were too caught up or if there was simply no place to go (a particularly hellish cross country roadtrip in a packed VW Bug came to mind) they’d have it out right there in front of the team.
They were rarely loud, but they could get very personal very quickly; neither Jim nor Claire were afraid to go low. The only bright spot was that they ended very quickly too, though they were all a little worse for wear.
When they cooled off, they wouldn’t speak for the rest of the day unless absolutely necessary, tight and restrained. That was almost worse for Ethan, because the resulting tension was so thick it sat on his chest like a physical weight and as Jim’s unofficial second in command, it was his job to make sure things ran smoothly. Maybe it was because of his position that he was appointed their conversational middleman. Maybe it was because no one else was as comfortable around Jim or as close to Claire. Whatever the reason was, Ethan spent months dedicating his free time to traversing that particular minefield, back and forth.
It was breakfasts with Claire, bright and early—she had the distinctly European ability to sniff out a good cafe, like the world’s poshest bloodhound. They’d snag a table inside, positioned in a corner so that they could both have a back to a wall and watch the exits, even though every single time Claire would sigh mournfully as they passed tables on the patio. Ethan would pick at an egg white omelet and Claire would get a fruit bowl and light up a cigarette. He would try to keep conversation light, talking about the weather or sports, but things would inevitably turn to Jim. Claire’d say that he was gone all the time, and when they were together she wished they weren’t because he clearly didn’t. He was unhappy, but he wouldn’t tell her why and he wouldn’t let her help. She’d run her hands through her hair or take a drag and tell him, “Sometimes I wish he was more like you.”
Ethan would smile wanly and try to tell her that was just how Jim got sometimes. Ethan had actually known Jim longer than Claire by a couple of years—Jim recruited him straight out of college, and they’d worked together almost the entire time since. In an ironic twist, Ethan had actually been jealous of Claire when Jim first introduced her, some latent only child instinct kicking in. Still, it didn’t take long for him to start to like her, somewhat born out of a protective instinct for anyone so important to Jim, but also because Claire was effortlessly magnetic. It’s what made her great at what she did. It hadn’t even surprised him really, when he started to develop something of a crush. But that’s all it had been: a small crush.
Horribly, it was during times like these, when it was just the two of them, when Claire was bathed in the soft light coming through the window, when he managed to eke out a small, hard-won but sincere smile that made her face light up like Christmas, that Ethan felt the crush deepen into… something else. Guilt would entwine with attraction like snakes in his stomach and he’d tell her, he’d swear that it would get better, Jim just needed time. He didn’t know who he was trying to convince.
When they paid the check, Claire would kiss his cheek and thank him for listening to her. He’d tell her, and he’d mean it, “Anytime.”
Then it was dinners with Jim, all meat and potatoes. Jim would get a steak so rare his teeth would practically drip blood when he smiled, which he did when he ribbed Ethan about getting his well done—Jim called it ‘uncultured’, but it was how Ethan’s dad cooked them growing up, so it was how he liked it—and nurse a whiskey or three as he alternated between complaining and trying to pump Ethan for information.
Jim had a vicious possessive streak. This had been the case long before he’d even met Claire and extended to more than just her. Ethan had long since accepted this as just another facet of Jim’s personality, and truthfully, it stopped bothering him a while ago. Now, it prickled at him uncomfortably. Jim would saw at his steak so aggressively Ethan would worry about the plate and ask, usually more than once, “Is there another man? Is that it? I know you two are friends, has she told you anything?”
Ethan would swear up and down that, no, there wasn’t anyone else, and he would do so honestly. Claire never talked about anyone else and Ethan had not and would not actually make any advances. That didn’t mean he didn’t feel guilty about thinking about her, Jim’s intense gaze making Ethan’s neck burn with heat like Jim could read his mind. If anyone could, it was Jim.
Once Jim had been assuaged, he would slump back in his chair, his age uncharacteristically showing on his face. He’d pinch the bridge of his nose and say, “I love her, but I swear to God she drives me insane.”
Ethan could relate.
To hear Jim tell it, Claire was ungrateful, unrealistic. She wanted too much from him but she wasn’t happy with anything he could give. That didn’t sound like Claire at all to Ethan, something Jim might admit at the end of the night if he was particularly burnt out. The thing was, Ethan did believe Jim about one thing: he did love Claire. And Ethan knew that if he could isolate exactly what was making him unhappy they could recover, because he knew she loved him too.
As they left the restaurant, Jim would clap a hand on his shoulder and swing him around so that they made eye contact. Jim would say, with that quiet intensity Ethan knew so well, “I know you’ll look after her when I’m not here,” and Ethan would nod and tell him, “Of course.”
It did get better, eventually. Ethan never found out what made the difference, since Jim was still gone as often as not, but the fighting stopped. The two of them were able to share a room again, even occasionally displaying some rare PDA, much to the oohing and aahing of the team. Ethan compartmentalized the pangs in his chest and decided to be happy for them. He stuck to his word, taking care of Claire when Jim was away. If he allowed himself an occasional lingering touch, well, it was all he allowed.
And now here Ethan is. Still looking after Claire. Jim is dead, no matter that he still feels so present at times that he could be sitting on the edge of the bed. Claire is still watching him; he can just make out the shine of her pupils in the dim light, the way her lips are parted. Ethan wants…
But Ethan can’t. He can’t allow himself to bridge the gap. There’s too much behind them and too much in front of them, and Ethan is desperate or selfish, but not enough to make a move on a grieving widow. Maybe in the future, after his name was cleared and they had room to breathe, he could tell her and they could take the time to process it. Maybe she might even feel the same way. But not now.
So he turns back on his back and simply says, “Yeah, strange.”
He can feel the weight of Claire’s eyes as she watches him. The mattress creaks as she pushes herself up on elbow to press a kiss on his cheek. He closes his eyes and lets himself think about breakfast on the Seine, the smell of cigarette smoke and Claire’s perfume. Then he opens them, and the moment breaks.
Claire lays back down and they don’t speak for the rest of the night. When her breathing slows and steadies, Ethan knows she’s finally asleep.
Ethan doesn’t sleep, doesn’t even bother to close his eyes. He just makes himself comfortable and looks after Claire for the rest of the night. It’s better this way.