Chapter Text
He doesn't look at her. She doesn't look away from him. Both are necessary.
Frankie figures they'd decided to try him first not because they think they can break him, but because they think they can break her. That she's more likely to give them the information they're asking for because her feminine sensibilities won't allow her to watch them beat her partner.
They've got another thing coming and Will knows that as well as she does.
It doesn't mean she loves him any less, and they both know that.
She sits silently and waits it out. They've both been handcuffed this whole time and he's hooked by the chain to a cable strung across the ceiling beams, his arms taking his weight and the toes of his boots dragging on the floor. His wrists are shining with blood. One of the men beats him like he’s a punching bag strung up to see how hard the guy can hit. Will takes every punch without any more than the occasional stifled grunt. He doesn't even talk at them like she knows he wants to, like he always does.
"What I have asked of you is very simple," Karlov says to both of them.
Frankie wants to snark at him, to say that yeah, it is a simple question, but she's sure as hell isn't going to answer it. She keeps her mouth shut because every second they can drag this out without being killed is another second bought.
She sees the punch coming from a mile away but she's cuffed to the chair and can do little more than accept the pain as she doubles over and gasps for air.
Karlov watches her pant for a moment before he turns and snaps something in Russian to the men who've been beating Will. She makes eye contact with Will but he doesn't look too worried about what Karlov said. She watches Karlov move as the other men release Will from the cable and continues to wonder how a man whose English sounds pretty damn American ended up with a Russian mob smack in the middle of Moscow. It’s inconsequential, really, and wasn't in his dossier, but it’s bugging her.
Will lands on his feet when the cable is released but staggers and falls to one knee on the concrete, reaching out with his cuffed hands to catch himself.
They unhook Frankie’s cuffs from the chair and haul her up by her jacket. Her hands, unlike Will’s, are cuffed behind her back and she knows it’s because she’d killed three of Karlov’s men unarmed. She watches one of the men hold a gun to Will’s temple as another unlocks his cuffs to resecure them behind his back. Will had gotten two of Karlov’s men. Two is decidedly less than three and she’ll hold that over him later.
They’re marched down the hallway and shoved unceremoniously into the same cell they’d been in earlier.
Frankie knows it doesn’t bode well that they’re not blindfolded.
Will sits down with his back against the wall, where his hands are hidden from the camera in the corner. He grimaces as he stretches his legs out in front of him.
“Okay?” she asks as she sits beside him, a little more than an arm’s length away. Not that either of them can reach out to measure the distance.
“Echo punches better than that guy,” he mutters, but she can tell he’s hurting. “How tight are your cuffs?” He says it low, hardly moving his lips.
“Mm… I could maybe get them off if I broke my thumb.”
He looks at her like he isn’t sure if it’s a joke. “Let’s leave that as a last resort,” he says.
“Yeah, I’d prefer to.”
He tips his head back against the wall. “Well.” After a long moment of silence that Frankie can feel wearing as thin as his self-control, he turns his head against the wall so he’s looking at her. “This is fun. What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing.”
“Hm. What about… what’s your favorite board game? I don't know that about you. And we’ve never played board games as a team. Maybe we should. But not Monopoly; that wouldn’t end well. For any of us, because Janus would obviously win. But I mean, the whole point would be for team bonding, unlike that time you cheated at Uno-- I’m still not over that, by the way; it was deeply hurtful, even if it wasn’t your idea to begin with-- but Monopoly just… destroys friendships. Even if the money is fake.”
He continues and she has to hand it to the man: he can talk. It’s a constant stream of continuous bullshit, no relevant information leaked, everyone’s call signs firmly in place as he rambles.
She sends him a sidelong glare and he just smiles at her.
She knows it’s Karlov that Will’s trying to irritate since it’s a safe bet that he’s watching and listening, waiting for any shred of information that he can glean from or leverage against them, but this stream-of-consciousness rambling is already starting to grate on her nerves.
She leans her head back against the wall and does her best to ignore him. She’s certainly had enough practice.
**
They’re both asleep, cold and uncomfortable on the concrete floor, when the door opens.
“Get up,” one of the men barks in sharp-edged English.
“Good morning,” Will says to Frankie. He’s irritated by the rough wake up and lets it show.
She just grunts in response.
They both struggle awkwardly to their feet, stiff and numb and very, very cold.
They’re marched through the halls, again, and Will has to admit that he hurts. He’d told Frankie that the guy punched as well as Standish, which wasn’t exactly a compliment given Standish’s often questionable form, but it was an outright lie and he’s pretty sure she didn’t believe it for a second anyway. The cold has leached into the bruises left behind, leaving him stiff and aching.
He knows they’d beat him to try to break Frankie. He knows it was just a warm-up, a way for Karlov to test the waters. Or, rather, a way for him to test the thickness of the ice.
He wonders if they’ll do it again.
He gets his answer very quickly.
They turn abruptly into a room and Will’s momentum is arrested with a firm grip on his shoulders. Frankie is shoved forward, toward the middle of the room, and Will can see the irritation on her face.
Karlov steps up and pressed the barrel of his pistol right to Frankie’s temple. She glares sideways at him. “If you so much as twitch,” he says to Will, “I'll kill her. We only need one of you.”
Will nods. His cuffs are unlocked and he is so sure that Karlov is serious that he doesn’t even attempt to roll out the stiffness that pulls in his shoulders as his wrists are re-bound in front of him. It’s a weird choice on Karlov’s part and the deliberateness of the action sparks a cold worry in Will’s gut.
“Sit down,” Karlov says.
Will sits in the chair. Frankie’s back is to him, her hands cuffed, standing straight and relaxed but ready. Until Karlov slams his boot into the back of her knee and sends her to the floor. He jerks his head and one of the men drags her forward and Will knows exactly what they’ll do.
It’s so simple that it’s almost complicated. If he shows any weakness, they’ll torture Frankie to capitalize on it. If she shows any weakness, they’ll torture him to captialize on it. Both of them have to stand on even ground, equally impassive, and let this run its course until they can find a way out.
So he sits silently and watches as they drown her.
They’ve put ice in the water, which tells Will that they know how to make it hurt. Frankie doesn’t so much as shift her weight on her knees in front of the tub as the man behind her rolls up his sleeves. He does it slowly, making her wait. Will can see her taking steady, even breaths, and then a deep inhale the moment the man seizes her shoulders.
He forces her into the tub, head and shoulders.
She only struggles a little, instinctively, and he knows she’s saving her oxygen as best she can.
They pull her out and she’s only breathing like she’s doing a cardio workout in the gym with him.
“Tell me when the shipment is,” Karlov says. The pistol is still in his hand, by his side, but Will knows he won’t use it. He doesn’t doubt that Karlov would if they gave him reason to, but it’s more beneficial to his needs to keep them both alive. To be tortured, just like this. Will says nothing. “Again,” Karlov says.
And that’s how it goes.
Will refuses to answer, and Frankie drowns.
"Again."
The first few times they pull her free she’s panting like she’s been trying to outrun him in training, which she never can because he’s taller and has the stride to beat her every time. Except when she cheats, and sometimes even then.
"Again."
By the fifth time, and he’s counting, they’re holding her in longer and she’s breathing raggedly, almost desperately. She’s soaked from the water splashing out of the tub and even a few paces away where he sits he can see her shivering.
“Again.”
She fights the hold on her this time and another man joins the first, pinning her over the side of the tub and forcing her back down. Will can tell the moment she breathes because she suddenly isn’t so much struggling as she is thrashing in their grip. She’s strong enough-- and smart enough, for that matter-- to fight men bigger than Will and win, but she has no room to move. She’s trapped.
He watches as she starts losing consciousness, movements growing weaker and weaker until she's hardly moving at all. They finally pull her from the tub and drop her backward onto the floor. She coughs a little bit of the water out onto her face, weakly, but can’t get enough air in to get the rest up.
“Help her,” Karlov says and Will is out of the chair before the last syllable is in the air. He turns her roughly onto her side, too concerned to worry about being gentle. He hits her between the shoulders and then she’s coughing up water onto the concrete floor in mouthfuls, retching it up with stomach acid that she chokes on. Will pulls her hair out of her face as she shivers and gags.
“Back away.” Will does.
Frankie is dragged down the hallway by her jacket and tossed in the cell after Will. She doesn’t make a move to get up. She’s soaked from the water splashing out of the tub and continues to shiver violently in the cold cell. Will straightens her out of the heap she’d fallen in and arranges her on her side so it’s a little easier to breathe.
“Good thing for you I took a water safety and lifeguard first aid course when I was in the Boy Scouts,” he says.
“I’ll let them torture me again... instead of you... if you agree... to shut the hell up,” she whispers, voice ragged.
“No deal,” he says.
**
Will sits with her all night. Or, all of whatever time of day it is.
She's still having a hard time breathing, coughing up a thin foam every time she inhales too deeply. Will tells her it's just her body trying to get everything up. She stays uncomfortably positioned on her side and tries to sleep it off.
Until she wakes up to a bucket of cold water being dumped over both of them.
She gasps at the sudden chill and immediately regrets it as she starts coughing again. Her chest feels stiff and painful and she knows that's probably less than good.
One of the men fists his hands in her jacket and pulls her roughly into a sitting position. He uncuffs her and steps back. Another of the men has a pistol pointed at both her and Will. "Jacket off," the other snaps. She hesitates. "Jacket off."
She peels the soaked fabric away and holds it up for his outstretched hand. He snatches it when she makes no move to actually hand it to him.
He resecures her cuffs, in front of her, this time, and repeats the whole process with Will.
"Get up," the man says.
Frankie tries to get her legs untangled. Will unfolds himself stiffly beside her, not-so-subtly trying to ease the tension out of his aching muscles. Frankie stands beside him, a little dizzy and a lot winded but surprised at how relatively okay she feels, all things considered.
"Let's go," he says, like they have a choice.
They're marched down the hallway again. Will is too sore to quite stand up straight. Frankie hears her own breath wheezing in her ears. It’s a miserable walk.
Frankie is shoved into the chair. One of the men grabs Will with two hands fisted in the collar of his shirt before kicking the back of his knee to force him to the floor in front of the tub she got acquainted with yesterday.
Frankie lets her face betray nothing.
Karlov finally comes into the room, later than she’d expected him. She’d thought he’d have been waiting. “So,” he says. “The question hasn’t changed.” He sounds like he’s from New York, maybe. Somewhere decidedly American, at least, and decidedly not Russian. She still hasn't puzzled this out.
She just waits. Coughs a little. Waits some more.
"Okay. You know how this goes," Karlov says, like he warned her.
Will uses the same strategy she used yesterday, trying to restrain his instinctive reaction, trying not to fight, trying to make his oxygen last as long as possible. Karlov's men pull him free after the first dunk and he shakes his head like a dog, spraying water in their faces just to piss them off. A small part of her wants to smile.
"Again," Karlov says.
It's worse than watching him be beaten. She knows exactly how he felt yesterday when they were in opposite places. Karlov's man shoves Will forward so his chest hits the edge of the tub. She sees him wince at the impact of the metal against his bruises and she inhales. She chokes on it.
Will only turns his head a little as she coughs, like he was going to look at her and thought better of it. It's only a fraction of a moment but Karlov takes a step forward and Frankie knows he's read the significance of it in his body language.
"Again."
"Again."
"Again."
She holds on to impassivity with every shred of strength she can. She has one play here. She trusts Will enough to not give up the intel Karlov is looking for, no matter what happens, which is the only reason she believes she can make this work. They pull Will free and drop him to the floor. He winces visibly at the force of the fall and she wonders again if he doesn't have a few cracked ribs from the beating he'd taken. He coughs some water onto the floor, the sort of watery cough he'd made after she'd dunked him at the lake, when he’d looked at her with dramatic faux betrayal. The water had been gray beneath the clouds as the rain came in but he’d smiled like it was perfect. Then he'd spit water in her face and dunked both of them.
It's a good memory. She holds onto it.
"Tell me when the shipment is."
"No." It's the first time either of them have replied. She needs Karlov to be sure that they do have the intel, otherwise she's starting to worry that he'll kill them just because he's getting bored with this.
"I'll kill him."
She does the only thing she can. She shrugs.
Will looks at her like he's surprised. She doesn't know if that's real.
"Your turn, then."
This is exactly what she wanted. They pull her from the chair, throwing her towards it so hard that she lands on her side, smacking her cheek on the tub. Will is sat in the chair and Frankie is dragged up onto her knees. Karlov gets close to her for the first time, squatting next to her. He puts his hand on her chin and turns her head so he can see the bruise erupting on her cheek.
"That's a shame, really. You're too pretty for that." He draws his thumb along her lower lip and she says nothing. Behind her, Will is absolutely irate. She can feel it. Karlov taps her face with his fingers, gently, but right on the bruise.
He steps back and doesn't give a warning before the man behind her shoves her head under the surface of the water.
She can't hold her breath this time. Her chest burns and she fights the hold on her because she knows she can't outlast this. He pins her to the tub with his body weight behind her and after a long minute of resisting the impulse as best she can, she breathes. She coughs that out and breathes again. Her chest aches and she coughs and breathes.
She doesn't realise they've pulled her from the tub until her bruised cheek hits the floor. She gags on the water her chest is struggling to force out, a wet, gurgling sound.
"Don't move," Karlov barks behind her. She guesses it's directed at Will because she's sure as hell not feeling inclined to move. "Find a snowbank and throw him outside," Karlov says, in English, and she knows he wants her to understand.
Frankie swallows back every shred of fear and anger as they haul him to his feet and march him out of the room.
Karlov himself is the one who drags her back into a sitting position this time. He's squatting behind her, his chest against her back, and he wraps his fingers slowly around her throat. "You'll tell me," he says into her ear. He sounds so sure of it that she laughs only to choke on it. There’s a sickeningly wet sound that crackles in her chest. Karlov tightens his hand around her throat, squeezing brutally as though she wasn't already struggling to breathe. She realizes that he's deliberately leaving bruises. Bruises for Will to see.
Spots start dancing in front of her eyes but she refuses to fight against the hold Karlov has on her.
She's spent a lifetime fighting. Sometimes, though, sometimes the smarter choice is not to fight. It was never a choice she'd have made before Will, but he's taught her constantly to fight smarter, not harder. Another cliche. He always seems to drag them along in tow. It might be a lesson she learned from him, but it's her own stubbornness that she can use as an asset. He'd said it grudgingly once, and she'd smiled. Maybe he really is her better half. Maybe she should tell him that more.
Now she knows she's starting to get delirious.
Karlov finally lets her go and she goes boneless in his grip, struggling to breathe. He keeps a grip on the collar of her shirt. She's wheezing and Karlov leans closer. He draws a knuckle down her cheek, trailing over the bruise she'd gotten earlier, beneath the curve of her jaw, and down the column of her throat until he meets the line of her collarbone. He blows a soft breath against her ear. She's freezing and sick and there's nothing she can do to fight the instinctive shiver that runs down her back.
Karlov chuckles, a vibration she can feel where his chest is pressed against her back. Then he does it again.
She wants to kill him for making her feel so violated with such a simple action.
She will, if she gets the chance.
Karlov jostles her as he stands and nods to the man standing by the tub. Karlov strolls out of the room, unhurried, as the other man drags Frankie to her feet. She staggers along beside him and focuses on keeping her legs beneath her. He shoves her into the cell and the door shuts with a solid clang as she hits the floor. She sighs in relief, the sound half strangled.
There’s no voice beside her, no warm concern, no gentle hand on her shoulder. Will’s not here. She tries to position herself like he’d put her before, but it doesn’t seem to make it much easier to breathe.
She waits, trusting that he’s tough enough to survive whatever they’ll do to him.
**
She's just started dozing off when the door is opened, Will is thrown into the room, and the door is shut again. She barely has time to blink. The room is so small that she only has to scoot forward a few times to be by his side. He's still, but breathing, lips blue. He's shivering faintly. His shirt, which had been soaked from his dunk in the tub, has frozen stiffly against him.
She manages to slip her arms over his head so her cuffed wrists are in front of them and lays them both back down on the concrete, his back tight to her chest. He hooks a finger with one of hers and she knows he's at least somewhat conscious.
He's absolutely freezing and she's already shivering. She presses her face to the back of his neck, tucks her knees up behind his, and tries to ignore how miserably cold they are.
**
"Hey. Hey, wake up." He doesn't say her name but he shakes her shoulders to wake her.
"What."
"You don't sound good," he says. "Maybe you should sit up."
"You don't look good," she wheezes out.
"Yeah I feel awful. And you look terrible too, but nice try."
Will is pretty sure that she looks even worse than he feels. Her face is flushed and the shadows under her eyes are dark. The bruise on her cheek has settled into a burst of night blue fading down her face. There's a ring of black and blue around her throat and Will knows exactly how it got there.
Frankie rolls her eyes at him with much less drama or enthusiasm than she usually does. It seems more like habit than anything. "Go back to sleep," she says.
"Can't. You're breathing too loud."
"Fine."
He closes his hands around her arm and helps pull her into a sitting position. She coughs with a sharp wheeze on the edge of each. She starts gagging on it and Will stretches his cuffs as far as the chain will let him to rub her shoulder. He knows he shouldn’t if there are cameras but it occurs to him after the fact. He shows his concern for her so much more easily than she does. It doesn’t mean he loves her any better than she loves him, though, and they both know that.
When it abates a bit she scoots backward toward the wall until they're both sitting propped against it. The concrete is brutally cold behind them and it occurs to Will for the first time that he can see his breath even in the dim light. He shifts so that he can get his cuffs over Frankie's head and pull her against him. She looks up with a question on her face.
"I'm going to need your body heat," he says, "and right now you've got more than enough to spare."
"Yeah," she says mildly.
"How are you doing?"
"I'm fine."
He nods. She's too warm against him even in the cold cell. He still hasn't quite gotten the feeling back in his fingers and his whole body is painfully stiff with cold.
He's asleep before she is.
**
She's cuffed with her hands behind her back this time. It's flattering for them to assume she's in any kind of shape to be fighting back, but she's not really sure what they think she's going to do to them besides cough aggressively in their direction.
Karlov's men throw Will against the side of the tub and Frankie wonders just how much more of this they're going to have to take before someone finally figures out where the fuck they are. As a spy she knows the only person she can count on is herself. That now extends to Will, too, of course. It was part of the deal. But the whole point of working with a team is to have ground support when it's needed, because running tactical missions is not exactly espionage, even if it is meant to be done covertly. In a situation like this, they're supposed to have support. It's just really late. Really, really late. She's not sure they're going to get out of this one without help.
Will can barely sit up. One of the men is holding him up with a grip on his shirt but he's slumped against the hold like a marionette with its strings not quite tense. She's sure he's hypothermic even though he’s had her body heat against him for the past few hours. He's a lot less coherent now than he was when he'd woken her up; he hasn't spoken to Karlov, but she can see the difficulty he's having just focusing on his surroundings.
Karlov slaps Will across the face in what she assumes is an attempt to rouse him into a state of better lucidity. She must be struggling to focus too because she hadn't even noticed Karlov raise his hand.
Will doesn’t rouse at all and Karlov signals his man with a flick of his wrist to drop him in a heap. Frankie resolves to kill him.
“Throw him outside,” Karlov says, making eye contact with Frankie as he says it. Two of the men drag Will away. Karlov jerks his head and Frankie is hauled from the chair and dropped carelessly to her knees in front of the tub. Karlov looks down at her. “If you don’t tell me when the shipment is, I’ll leave your boyfriend outside until he freezes to death.”
Frankie wheezes out a laugh. “He’s so not my boyfriend.”
“Do you have so little regard for his life anyway? Boyfriend or not, friend or not, he must have someone who loves him. Think of how they’d feel if he died.” She doesn’t have to think very hard. She knows exactly how she’d feel. “If you tell me when the shipment is, I’ll let him live.” She snorts. “You really don’t care about him, do you?”
He’s so pitifully predictable. Cautious, yes, in a way that’s prevented them from escaping, but predictable in a way that’s let her sell this gambit. She shrugs.
“Then do you not have any sense of self-preservation?”
“Not really,” she snarks. She knows how to wear apathy like a shell, so she pulls it tight around herself.
Karlov himself shoves her in the tub this time. It hurts even worse than it had before, every inhale of the water slicing through her chest like the stroke of a knife. She tries to shake his grip free, instinctively fighting against him, but she’s sick and exhausted and he leans his weight into her even more. The edge of the tub is digging into her chest. The pressure in her head is almost unbearable as the lack of oxygen starts to chip away at consciousness.
Karlov pulls her from the tub and she blacks out before she even hits the floor.
**
Will has been a spy long enough to know that when things go pear-shaped, they go really pear-shaped. So pear-shaped that they barely even resemble a pear anymore. He and Frankie were supposed to be in and out, recovering the data and back at the Hive in time for dinner, and yet here they are being held as prisoners at a secondary location.
Definitely not odds that still look like a pear, considering they’re also now separated. He doubts Karlov will throw them back in the cell together this time.
He worries about Frankie as he lies in the snow. He’s so cold that it hurts across every inch of his body, his chest aching as he tries to breathe the frigid air into lungs that have already been abused over the past couple days. Or however long it’s been. He’s not really sure at this point.
His one solace is that at least she’s not out here with him. She’s definitely come down with some kind of pneumonia, and although he’s well on his way there too, he’ll always put her life first. That was part of the deal.
He stopped shivering a while ago and it’s getting hard to focus. He thinks of Frankie and the time he’d thrown a snowball at her with questionable aim; as she’d turned, it had nailed her right in the face. She’d paused just for a moment, just long enough for him to start fearing what she’d do to him, and then she’d tackled him. She’d been mad as hell, but she’d also laughed. Snow was melting down his collar and into his hat but she was smiling and warm above him.
It’s a good memory. He holds onto it.
**
Frankie wakes to the sound of gunshots. She digs a heel against the concrete to force herself onto her side. Her head is hazy and her chest is burning, but she struggles up onto her knees and then staggers to her feet, coughing.
She presses her back against the wall beside the door, her cuffs cutting into her skin at the pressure, and waits. She hears yelling outside in the hallway, then the click of something in the lock, and she kicks out at the first person through the door.
He’s little more than a shadow in the dim room, all clad in black, but he falls to one knee with a swear in Russian. There’s another man behind him and she lunges forward so she’s too close for him to shoot her with the rifle he’s carrying. It doesn’t leave her much room to strike, though, since her hands are still bound, but she forces him back a step. The man she’d just kicked grabs her from behind and throws her to the floor.
“Stand down!” someone yells as the man raises his rifle. Frankie struggles to her feet and lunges toward him again. “Fiery Tribune, stand down!” It’s the man in the doorway, the third figure, and she knows his voice. She halts immediately and he steps in. “Are you okay? Where’s Whiskey?” It’s Ray. She hadn’t identified him at first because he’s wearing a ski mask over his face like the Russian soldiers.
“Fine,” she wheezes. “Get these fucking cuffs off me.”
Ray steps behind her and fiddles with a lockpick to free her wrists. “Where’s Whiskey?”
“I dunno. They separated us.”
One of the cuffs releases and Frankie shrugs her shoulders with a wince. Ray comes around so he’s standing in front of her, working on the other cuff. “Is he okay?”
“He’s hypothermic.” She wheezes for a moment. “Last I saw him he was alive, though. I think they took him outside.”
“No one outside,” one of the Russian soldiers says. It surprises Frankie to find that it’s a woman. “We walked around building first.”
“He must be inside, then,” Frankie says.
The other cuff releases and Ray lets them clatter to the floor. “Okay. Come with me; these guys’ll go find him.”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?!”
“I mean no. Give me a gun.”
“You’re in no shape to--”
She takes a threatening step towards him. “I’m going to go get my husband, and I’m going to go put a bullet in Karlov’s head. And if you tell me the kill order was rescinded I’ll shoot you too.”
“It wasn’t,” Ray sighs. He pulls a pistol from his belt for her. She rolls her shoulders again as she takes it. There’s a painful, stiff pull along the top and across her shoulder blades. She just wants to find Will and soak in a hot bath until she’s less stiff. She follows Ray out the door and coughs as quietly as she can into her elbow. He hands her an earbud. “Fiery’s on coms,” he says softly.
“Welcome back,” Jai says.
“You okay?” Susan asks.
“Fine,” she whispers.
“Well you sound great,” Standish says.
She coughs again.
“Really great,” Jai agrees.
“How about you all shut up,” Frankie wheezes.
They move quietly through the compound and Frankie struggles not to cough. Every breath is like a suckerpunch that makes her feel like she’s suffocating. A searing ache is burning behind her eyes. She ignores it. Finding Will is the most important thing.
They sweep the building room by room. They stumble on the room with the tub after what feels like forever. Frankie knows it can’t have been very long, but the knowledge that Will’s life depends on them finding him really exacerbates the slow passage of time.
The concrete is still damp, the water that had splashed from the tub not having dried in the cold air. “Looks recently used,” Ray says.
“Yeah,” Frankie says. “We’ve been acquainted.”
“Do you think Will was here after you saw him?”
She studies the water on the floor and thinks about how long she might’ve been unconscious. “No. It was me.”
“Okay.”
They keep looking.
Frankie knows they’ve found where Will is being held when shots ring out, embedding themselves in the concrete just above the Russian man’s head. They press against the sides of the hallway and the woman pulls a flashbang from her vest. “Cover ears,” she says softly. She throws the grenade into the room and Frankie sees the flash even with her eyes closed and her head turned away. They storm the room, the two Russians first, then Ray, and Frankie bringing up the rear. She knows she’s slower than she needs to be right now and is better off letting them take lead.
They eliminate the four men in the room before they can fire back. There’s smoke clinging to the floor, rising to waist level, obscuring the room. Frankie can just barely make out a shape on the floor that isn’t one of the dead mobsters. She takes a step forward and someone grabs her from behind. She lands an elbow to Karlov’s solar plexus, knocking the breath out of him, and throws him over her shoulder. He hits the concrete with a grunt and then stands, hands held slightly out from his hips, palms toward her.
“I’m unarmed,” he says.
“So?” Frankie grunts.
“You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man.”
“Says who.” Karlov might be a fool, but she hadn’t pegged him as a complete idiot.
"Don't you have any morality at all?"
As far as manipulation goes, it's maybe the shittiest attempt as she's ever heard. "Sure," she acknowledges, jerking her head toward where Will lays on the floor. "You've met." Karlov reaches behind him but can’t draw his weapon before hits the concrete with a round in his head.
Her orders had been to bring Karlov in alive if possible, but only if they were easily able to take him down. Otherwise, they had permission to eliminate him, free and clear.
She kneels next to Will, pressing her fingers to his throat. He coughs a little, opening his eyes and looking up at her. “Hi,” he wheezes with a smile.
“Hi.” She can’t help but smile back when he looks at her like that.
“As far as ways to wake up, a flashbang isn’t the best,” he says weakly. He looks terrible.
“Did you look at it?”
“I didn’t see it, but I heard it,” he says. “So I have no idea what you just said.” She runs a hand over his hair. “Wow, now I know I look like hell. You’re being affectionate.”
“Shut up,” she says and knows he read her lips when he smiles. She tries to help him sit up, but the two of them together aren’t strong enough. Ray grabs ahold of Will’s arm and helps until Will’s mostly sitting.
“Hey, man, come help me,” he says to the Russian man. They get Will standing with his weight distributed between them and the woman helps Frankie stand.
“Walk to truck,” she says.
“Great,” Frankie mutters. She coughs into her arm again, grimacing.
“There is blankets,” she says helpfully.
“Thank god.” The woman smiles and Frankie follows her out of the room.
**
Frankie finds that the woman wasn’t joking at all when she said it was a walk to the truck. They’re walking through a field, leaving footprints behind in the snow. Frankie watches as the wind blows drifts and the powder twists in the air. She coughs and her breath steams in the air.
“Okay?” the woman says, touching Frankie’s arm in a way that makes her think it wasn’t the first time she said it.
“Yeah.”
Ray and the man are beside them with Will between them. He’s stumbling along but his chin is on his chest and he only seems conscious enough to move on reflex. “You sure?” Ray says.
She registers the words but doesn’t think to reply.
“Is she shivering?” Ray asks the woman.
“Shivering?” she says, mimicking the word.
“Yeah, like, uh, brr,” he says, miming a shiver.
“Oh. She-- no.”
There’s a ring of shadow dancing around the edges of her vision and she stumbles as her chin hits her chest and startles her awake again. The woman ducks under Frankie’s arm, pulling it across her shoulders.
“Is close,” the woman says. “Just there.” She nods toward the crest of the hill.
“Yeah,” Frankie says.
She ends up trudging most of the way up the hill with her eyes closed because it’s too much effort to keep her eyes open and her feet moving at the same time. The soldier bears her weight without complaint.
She finally does open her eyes when she hears the door of a truck being opened; it’s a utility van, and the male soldier jumps into the back to lay a blanket on the floor.
“Is cold,” he says. “No heat in back.”
He helps Ray get Will inside and lay him on the floor before Ray and the woman haul Frankie inside as well. They lay her down and she tucks herself against Will’s back, pulling him close with a numb arm around his waist.
“Don’t suppose there’s another blanket,” she says faintly.
“Yeah,” Ray says. “One more.”
The engine starts and Ray lays the second blanket over the top of them.
“Thanks,” she says. She coughs. “And thanks for coming to get us.”
“I know you’re sick and all, but stop thanking me. It makes me feel weird.”
Frankie doesn’t have enough breath to laugh, but she does smile.
**
Will wakes as he’s being pulled from the van. There's a man he doesn’t recognize beside him, propping him up. “My wife,” Will says hazily. “Where’s-- where’s my wife.”
“Wife is fine,” the man says. “Over there.” Will follows the man’s nod to where Ray and the other soldier are walking with Frankie between them toward the transport plane.
“She okay?” Will asks.
“Yes, okay,” he says. “Not good, but okay. You also okay.”
Will just grunts at that. “Okay” is a generous description of how he feels. “Thanks for helping us.”
The man nods. “You helped us, so we helped you.”
Will nods in return.
Ray returns after a few minutes and he and the soldier haul Will from the truck. He can do little more than sag limply between them and try to keep his feet beneath him.
They drag him up the ramp of the plane and past the cargo that’s strapped down. “Not a comfortable ride,” Ray says, “but it’ll get us back to the States pretty quick.” They sit Will down in the seat next to Frankie, who seems to be asleep with her chin on her chest. “Thanks guys,” he says to the two Russian soldiers.
Both of them smile. “Goodbye,” the woman says. “Maybe we work with you again.”
“But better situation,” the man adds.
They leave and Ray wraps Will in a blanket before helping him secure the harness. “It’ll be cold,” Ray says. “We’ve only got emergency supplies, but there’s some heatpacks in the kit.” The ramp shuts slowly, hydraulics groaning. “Here.” Ray hands him two of the shaken heatpacks to press between his hands. They haven't warmed up yet. Will knows he’s so cold that they’ll hurt whenthey do. “Frankie,” Ray says, trying to rouse her. Will can hear her wheezing even under the sound of the engines. He shakes her knee. She blinks awake. “I’m going to put this on you to make the flight a little easier.” Ray holds up an oxygen mask. She doesn’t bother disentangling her arms from the blanket to put it on, so Ray does it for her. He turns the valve on the tank just a little bit. “You too, buddy,” he says to Will.
“Yay,” Will says joylessly. Frankie smiles. He knows the cargo bay will be pressurized, hence the fact that there are jump seats back here, but that the air will get thinner than it does on passenger airplanes. Ray’s actually thinking.
“Buckle up back there,” the pilot says. “We’re approaching the runway.”
Ray buckles himself into the seat on Frankie’s other side.
Will reaches out to take Frankie’s hand, trapping one of the heatpacks between their palms. She squeezes back.
**
Contrary to popular belief, spies do, in fact, get sick days. At least, when they’re recovering from pneumonia, recently released from a multi-day hospital stay, and still benched from duty they do.
“Okay,” Will says, climbing back into bed with his laptop.
“Fool’s Gold,” Frankie says, adjusting her palms around the mug of tea he brought her a few minutes ago.
“I hadn’t even asked yet.”
“I knew what you were going to ask. And you keep choosing the really sad or really dramatic ones. I want a comedy.”
“I knew you’d like romcoms eventually.”
“I don’t,” she says quickly. “But I do like this movie.”
“Me too,” he agrees. “Kate Hudson and Matthew McConahey are so good together. Ooh! We could watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days!”
“Will, play the movie or you’ll be sleeping by yourself tonight.”
He clicks on Netflix and wraps an arm around her waist. “But you’re warm,” he says with a smile. She laughs and he presses a kiss to her lips. “I love you. So much.”
“Ugh, I know. I love you too. Even when you’re gross and phlegmy and smell like Vick’s vaporub.”
“God, you're such a romantic. And I’d certainly hope so, considering you married me.”
“No, that was just for the inheritance.”
“See, maybe I’d believe that if there was one. And I only had to ask you once. You didn’t even make me work for it.”
“I knew you’d just keep asking.”
“That’s absolutely not at all why, but you’re right; I would’ve.”
She laughs and he kisses her temple. He pulls her a little closer and kisses her on the lips again.
She leans away. “If you stick your tongue in my mouth, I’ll punch you.”
He smiles. “But me being able to kiss you all the time is kind of a perk of being married.”
“Sure, but you put on so much Vicks that I can almost taste it. It’s gross.”
“Fair,” he says and kisses her on the cheek, right at the corner of her mouth.
She draws in a slow breath as he lets it linger and then turns away from him to cough. He runs a hand over her hair. She sets her mug on the nightstand and turns so she’s tucked against his side with her head on his chest and her arms around him. He strokes her hair again and then draws his hand over her shoulder until his arm is resting over her.
She wiggles in an effort to get a little closer to him even though she’s already pasted herself against his side. “You’re so warm,” she mumbles.
“So are you,” he says with a smile that tells her he doesn’t mean physically.
“It’s the fever,” she quips.
“Oh, I know,” he says easily, giving her an out. He always does.
“I love you,” she says, looking up at him with her chin on his chest.
“I know you do. I love you too.”
She smiles. “I know you do.”
She lays her head back on his chest and he rests his cheek against her hair as he clicks play.