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1.
He’s the one dangling from a skyscraper this time, the 87th floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center, with his dominant arm hanging limply at his side, bone splintered at the elbow. It’s probably hurting like a son of a bitch but he’s too busy readying himself for the headlong 1300-feet plunge to notice.
“I’m not gonna let you fall.”
He’s learned that Ethan Hunt has a way of sounding invincible, even when—especially when the odds are overwhelmingly against him.
He’s not even sure how Ethan managed to catch his wrist as he toppled over. The last thing he’d seen of Ethan was the blood plastering Ethan’s shirt to his ribs. The last thing he’d heard was a gunshot.
He closes his eyes because craning his neck to look up at Ethan is tiring, and because he’s never been any good with exit lines.
The atmosphere is relentless 87 floors above ground, the wind persistently trying to pluck him from Ethan’s grasp.
“I can’t override the fucking system, the elevators are stuck, I’ve never seen firewalls this impenetrable, they’re better than military grade, I didn’t even know there was anything above military grade, Jane’s coming, she’s eight floors away. Fuck!”
He would’ve never imagined that Benji’s ramblings would be comforting, but they are. Or maybe it’s the heat of Ethan’s palm, the fingertips digging into his skin that nearly give Ethan away (he’s worried, a little hopeless, and that alone is comforting).
“I’m not gonna drag you down with me.” Will’s only the helper. Ethan’s the asset.
“Jane’s almost there, she’s nearly there.”
Will starts to slip and Ethan starts to look afraid.
“Will. Will! Don’t you fucking let go, you hear me? That’s an order.”
And it almost feels like that time Ethan told him to jump, to commit, except there’s a thing at stake now that field training didn’t prepare him for.
Suddenly he’s falling, and then watching in horror as Ethan dives out the window after him. The next moment Ethan’s stopped his fall, just like he said he would, and he’s being dragged back through shards of glass until he’s splayed on solid ground, wondering dizzily what his tally is now for cheating death and certain that Ethan Hunt is, in fact, invincible, the bastard.
He sees Jane on her knees in the corner of his eye and then Ethan is there, hovering above him, glaring a little.
“You let go. I told you not to let go.”
Actually, he had decided in that moment that he preferred to delay dying a gruesome death for a while longer, except his hand had slipped of its own accord. But he doesn’t say that.
“Keeping you on your toes.” He sounds a little out of breath, which is understandable considering the circumstances.
Ethan starts to laugh, head bowed and hands on his thighs with blood streaking his forearms. After a moment Will joins in, thinking that invincibility in this business must be synonymous with insanity, and that Ethan’s might just be rubbing off on him.
2.
He doesn’t remember how they started sparring. He’d found himself in an empty training room, pissed off at the world with a stomach full of pent-up aggression and knuckles itching for a fight. He’d been ready to punch the bag, the goddamn walls until things aligned in a way that made sense, the way they did before the Secretary’s death, before Croatia, and especially before Ethan Hunt.
But instead of breaking through walls he’s blocking Ethan’s fists, convinced now that the world has no intention of giving him a fucking break.
He strikes out with his elbow and picks up his pace, bent on ending this thing before he’s tempted to take it somewhere he’ll regret. He’s already stored up enough of those to last him at least one lifetime. (He’s the kind of man to keep a mental count, categorize his offenses.)
But even as he lashes out and grounds his feet, he knows Ethan’s the better fighter, quicker, surer, like he doesn’t live with regrets because they only weigh a person down. He thinks the circumstances could’ve been different if he’d stayed in the field. If he’d stayed in the field, Ethan would probably still be a failed protection detail, remarkable only to the extent that he remembered and regretted.
The thought makes his movements falter, just enough that Ethan catches him off-guard. Next thing he knows he’s being shoved against a wall, face first, one arm twisted behind his back and the other pinned beside his head.
“You’re forgetting you’re in the field now, Agent Brandt, not behind a desk.” The words are spoken against the shell of his ear, Ethan’s voice considerably lower than he’s ever heard it and he tries to concentrate on the pain shooting up his arm.
“Maybe I don’t belong here.” He catches what would’ve been a pitiful sound in his throat when Ethan presses closer, so indecently close that he can feel the minute shifts of muscle through their shirts.
“I think you’re exactly where you belong.” He’s almost sure he hears Ethan’s smile and that they’re no longer discussing his line of work. He feels Ethan’s breath against the back of his neck and the heat of Ethan’s mouth, feeling more dangerous now than a gun to his heart.
He grinds his teeth, the sheer effort of keeping his body still making him a little light-headed, a little weak.
“So much tension,” Ethan murmurs, thumb stroking the inside of his left wrist even as the other hand remains a vice around his right. “You just have to loosen up and focus on what you want.”
He wonders what Ethan would do if he started banging his head against the wall. He’s pretty certain self-inflicted injury is the only thing that might divert this impending disaster (glorious disaster, the treacherous part of him supplies).
“Do you know what you want, Will?” Ethan’s mouth has traveled again, to the sensitive spot right below his ear, and it speaks as if they’re in the dark, tucked away where only Ethan can hear him stutter and break if that’s what he wants. He thinks it’s what Ethan wants.
“No.” He twists out of Ethan’s hold and shoves him with enough force to wedge a safe, sensible distance between them. Ethan backpedals and windmills his arms a little in surprise. “No, I don’t know.”
He doesn’t pause to assess Ethan’s reaction before he walks out the door, rubbing his wrist and wondering what the reminder will look like in the morning.
3.
They don’t make it back to the hotel. Hell, they don’t even make it to the van.
The adrenaline kicked in an hour ago when they intercepted the hitman assigned to make the drop and discovered that said hitman had his own team of assassins. Japanese, armed with katanas. He still hears his blood roaring in his ears, burning tracks through his veins, and Ethan exploits the circumstances shamelessly, punching the emergency stop button on the elevator and shoving him backwards with a palm against his chest.
“Ethan, you’re bleeding, we need to get out of here.” It’s a feeble protest that dies pitifully in his throat because there are already hands under his shirt, fingers tracing his ribs, and a clever persistent tongue in his mouth making his knees buckle.
Ethan pulls away for a moment, as much as he’s able with Will’s hand gripping his tie (he doesn’t remember how it got there).
“We’re both bleeding.” The bastard’s smiling like he’s just commented on the weather, even as his thumb ghosts over a long shallow cut down Will’s side, marking the curvature of a sword. “But not profusely enough to require immediate medical attention. My professional opinion.”
And he leans in again before Will can respond, biting into his lower lip and dragging his teeth a little, fingers deftly going to work on Will’s belt and torn, blood-splattered Armani trousers. Will holds onto Ethan’s tie for dear life and thinks he might’ve made the sound of a wounded puppy, the anticipation of Ethan’s callused fingers already overbearing.
When Ethan flips him over and wraps those long fingers around him, he bangs his head against the wall with a groan, caught between the damp heat of Ethan’s hand and the chill of metal against his cheek.
He doesn’t remember when he starts to beg, in incoherent, incomplete sentences, but it’s somewhere between Ethan’s fingers in his mouth and the feel of Ethan sliding home, deep enough that he draws blood from his lip and sobs.
And still it’s not enough, not even when Ethan fucks him so hard he’s sliding up the wall with every snap of Ethan’s hips.
“Ethan, I—please.” He sounds absolutely wrecked, voice shredded. Fingers slide through his hair and pull, and then Ethan’s mouth is on his, claiming like Ethan knows he owns him, in these rare moments where his defenses are striped down to the bone.
It’s when he clenches around Ethan, right before he comes, that he hears it.
“Will,” spoken into the curve of his shoulder like he’s finally found the one loose thread that unravels Ethan Hunt, and it’s wound remarkably, beautifully around his fingers.
4.
He knows he’s in a hospital bed. He just doesn’t know how he got there, although he suspects a whom. He hears machines beeping and his own breathing, whooshing in and out like there won’t be enough oxygen in the tube to sustain it for much longer.
He’s seen the same nurse check his vitals, every hour or so, or maybe it’s every five hours or every five minutes; he finds that time feels the same, whether he has his eyes opened or closed. He’s seen Jane and Benji, then Benji, and then Jane again, but never Ethan. He wonders if his brain is lucid enough to construct accurate memories. He’s pretty sure his mental image of Ethan is way too flattering.
Jane’s here now, hovering maternally with concern drawing out the lines around her eyes and mouth. She still looks lovely, though, and he says as much.
She just smiles and settles down gently on the edge of his bed, cool hand covering his battered, bandaged one for a moment.
“He’s here. He hasn’t slept since he carried you through the doors.”
Well, fuck.
“Don’t tell me he cares about me in his own way.”
“He cares about you in his own way.” Jane smiles again, faintly, as if there’s something a little tragic about their story. “He’s afraid to see you like this, you know. Afraid of what he might do.”
He imagines the last time Ethan Hunt had been afraid was the day he lost his wife.
“I assume he has no idea you’re telling me this?”
“He needs me to tell you this.” Jane’s eyes plead with him a little but he turns away and stares at the steady green line of his heart rate.
“Tell him to go home and get some sleep. I’m not going anywhere.”
The next time he wakes, Ethan is there, hunched over in the bedside chair with his elbows on his knees. The shape of him is so familiar that Will nearly reaches out.
Something gives him away, the pace of his breathing maybe, and Ethan looks up. His eyes, the train wreck in them, make Will swallow, hands curling in his sheets to stay his weakness.
“I’m—” He imagines it’s meant to be an apology or an excuse, and that Ethan knows it’ll sound useless. He may be physically incapacitated, but that doesn’t make him any more delusional or forgiving.
He closes his eyes, which doesn’t do anything to banish the image of Ethan in that chair beside him but helps him breathe a little more easily.
“Will.”
It’s a sudden, shattered sound that makes his eyes fly open. He watches Ethan slip a hand under his and cradle it gently, running a thumb over each of his knuckles (broken and reset, although they’ll probably still ache in cold climates). He watches Ethan smile, in a way that reminds him of Croatia.
5.
They’re skydiving above the south of France, by a little town 100 miles east of Avignon. He hasn’t put his French to use in some time and he thinks he might’ve said salt instead of sky, but it feels irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. He grips the side of the aircraft and searches for a word in the seven languages he’s learned in his lifetime to do justice to the expanse before him, streaked with the light glow of early evening.
“Ready?”
He turns to see the slow, easy spread of a smile across Ethan’s face, the kind that makes him wonder if there’s an eight-year-old boy trapped in that body with a head full of crazy notions.
“Catch me if you can!” he hollers, tugging once on the straps of his parachute, and jumps.
The air catches him like a cushion and he closes his eyes, imagining like he used to do as a kid that he’s flying, passing jets in the sky towards a destination only he knows how to find. When he opens his eyes, he imagines this is as good as it gets, this absolute sensation of weightlessness. For 60 slow seconds, he’s carried by the world.
He hits the ground first, releases his parachute, and flops down onto the grass, inhaling the sharp sweet scent of the changing season. He sifts his fingers through the tender blades and waits with his eyes shut.
Seconds later he hears a thump and thwaaccck before sensing a warm body settle down beside him. A firm shoulder pushes against his.
“A nice change of pace, isn’t it?”
“If by nice change you mean no shooting, bleeding, killing, or dying, then yes,” he answers, smiling at nothing and no one in particular.
He inhales deeply again and curls his toes, wondering if this is what peace of mind feels like. He hears crickets and Ethan’s breathing, an indolent in-and-out that lulls him to the halfway point between sleeping and waking.
And then Ethan’s rolling on top of him, bracing his body with both arms so only their hips and thighs meet. He feels like a furnace and Will figures it’s all the adrenaline. He doesn’t think Ethan’s heart ever slows down, even when he’s still.
“You’re missing the view, Will,” Ethan murmurs, the sound and weight and proximity of him reminding Will of the time they downed that bottle of Scotch and Ethan, intoxicated against him, told him that his eyes were something else and sounded just a little bit insane.
That’s when he opens them and looks past Ethan’s shoulder at the sunset, hues warm and magnificent. He’s seen plenty of sunsets in his lifetime but this time he pays attention.
“I had no idea you were such a sap.” He studies the shadows molding to the planes of Ethan’s face and the flutter of eyelashes as Ethan leans in until their cheeks touch.
With his mouth to Will’s ear, he tells him, “it’s my best-kept secret.”