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Diana had a lot of reasons for choosing 47, out of all the possibilities the ICA presented her with. His skill speaks for itself, and his lack of any apparent desire other than to do his job and collect the reward at the end make him implacable. There's another reason she keeps to herself, though. Looking at the other files, she couldn't help noticing the names of the relatives, the people who would wonder what happened to their son or brother if he never came back from a job. Diana knows that feeling too well herself to be blasé about causing it in others. It's one thing to be paid very well to kill people who deserve it, it's another to think about the collateral damage. 47 has nothing that ties him to the world. Diana can tell herself that if anything happens, he'll just vanish back into the void that he apparently came out of in the first place, a shadow without anyone to notice or mourn him. An incredible machine she can put to use making the world a better place, as long as she keeps him pointed in the right direction.
Of course, it doesn't turn out to be quite that simple.
***
It's only been a few months, but they've done just enough jobs together for Diana to get complacent the first time something goes spectacularly wrong. She doesn't even realise it's happened, at first. The target is down and 47 is recovering data from an underground laboratory. It's full of guards, but he's swift and silent as usual and he's found a lab coat in his size so she thinks everything is going well. Her biggest apparent problem is working out where she's going to get dinner in rural Arkansas when the job is over. That's when he finds the subject room.
Apparently the project is meant to produce super soldiers. Diana appreciates the irony, given the agency's theories about 47's probable origins, but she doesn't quite seen the point. Surely if you want to fight an actual war that involves actual troops (rather than, just for example, cutting the head off your enemy with a highly-trained assassin) you need to be prepared to have a lot of them. In which case investing too much in individuals seems wasteful.
She's not sure that this particular project has any future, given that the main purpose seems to be drugging men until they're violently homicidal. Even 47's skills are tested as he fights off half a dozen of them, but of course it's over soon enough. She still thinks everything is fine, until he walks out of the room and just ... stops.
Diana is already used to sitting quietly in whatever hotel room she's holed up in, waiting for him to make his move. It can take time for a target to arrive or a guard to move away from a door. Yet, she senses something is off. The bodycam tells her that he's just standing openly in the middle of the corridor, which is extremely unlike him.
Then a man walks around the corner. She's already given up trying to predict exactly what 47 will do, but what she certainly doesn't expect is for 47 to punch him in the face, and then to keep punching, over and over, until he's a bloody wreck.
"47!" He stops, lets the guard fall to the floor. She tries to keep her voice firm and calm. "Report your situation."
It takes him a full minute to respond, and when he does his breathing is ragged. "I think I - got a dose of something. Whatever those men were on."
She bites back a curse. Panic won't help anything. “Tell me exactly what's happening to you,” she says. Perhaps it was in the air, or it spreads via touch. The documents he's meant to be collecting would let them know.
“Heart rate and pulse have sped up,” he says. "I think I'm seeing and hearing things that aren't there.”
“All right,” she says. It isn't, but she's going to make damn sure that it will be. She's only twenty minutes away if she speeds. “Just get to the exit. I'm coming to get you.”
“That's not a good idea,” he says.
“47, you are not going to exfiltrate yourself while hallucinating. Now just stay calm and find a door.” She scoops up the keys from off the desk and marches toward the van.
***
Diana stays on the mic the entire time she's driving. She gets only monosyllabic answers to her questions, but at least that means he's still breathing. She's not sure how she's going to deal with the guards, not to mention getting him into the van if he can't walk. She's trained in logistics, not how to disable hostiles and drag unconscious people around. However, luckily for her, it turns out that the remaining staff are slightly preoccupied with the fire that's broken out. The parking lot is already filling up with fire engines. She pulls the van over and begins to contemplate how she's going to find one drugged assassin in the middle of all the evacuating mad scientist minions, and then nearly jumps out of her skin when someone bangs on the passenger-side door. Of course he knew which nondescript white van she was in. No point asking how.
47 looks terrible - the dark jacket he stole from one of the armed guards almost hides the blood in this light, but he's sweating heavily and even paler than usual.
"A fire?" she says.
"I pulled the alarm first," he says. Well, he's certainly stopped the project from proceeding for now, even if the documents might be lost to their client.
"You need a hospital," she says, already thinking about the logistics of getting him in and out of the system without anyone getting hold of the very interesting biodata the ICA has been studying since he arrived, not to mention the experimental drug in his system. She should probably be getting a blood sample out of him to preserve what data they can.
"No," he says, "no doctors."
"Don't be ridiculous, we don't even know what you've been exposed to."
"Mostly PCP, according to the notes," he takes them out from under the bloodstained jacket. Of course he still managed to retrieve them, how could she have doubted? "Some methamphetamine, some LSD. I'll be fine."
"I'm sure they'll be able to determine that at the nearest hospital."
"No."
He's never outright refused to do anything she's asked before now, but she has no doubt that he could stop her if he decided to. She hesitates. He accepted every medical test and vaccination the ICA put him through with perfect equanimity - but that was when he was in his right mind. It occurs to her that he's actually afraid. Which is - fascinating, if a bit alarming. And while he's clearly unwell, he doesn't seem on the verge of death. Perhaps they should keep a low profile for now.
"All right," she says, "we'll find somewhere to lie low and see if you get worse."
"Aren't you meant to stay at least twenty miles from me when we're on a job?"
"I'm just going to keep an eye on you until I'm sure you're not going to fall into a coma and die," she says. Or go on an axe-murdering rampage, for that matter, but she doesn't say that part out loud.
***
Plainly, they cannot go to the ICA safe house. Seeing your handler face-to-face during a job is indeed an agency no-no. It's only luck that she was running this op alone, because nobody else wanted to drive to the middle of nowhere just to sit in a substandard motel and monitor a laptop.
She drives until she sees an entirely different substandard motel from the one she left all her luggage at, and checks them in with a credit card under a name she doesn't believe the ICA knows about. With any luck, if they do find out they'll just think that she and 47 are fucking. That would be somewhat explicable. Her going off-mission to cover for him accidentally being high as a kite is not. Yet it's only now, sitting on the bed with her agent in the bathroom next door, that she stops to wonder why she did it. If he's not her enemy, he's certainly not her friend. She could have just let him get himself out, or not. If the ICA blamed her - well, she's good at talking her way out of things. She didn't have to dive in and rescue him.
The documents are a bit beyond her A-level knowledge of biology and chemistry, but the gist is that the experiments haven't been going well. Too many subjects who engage in self-harming behaviour (an interesting euphemism for beating your head against a wall until you die) or have heart attacks, not to mention that you can hardly trust them not to turn on one another. She wonders why the ICA's client even bothered to pay to get this shut down. Perhaps he didn't have access to the interim reports. The only thing they have mastered is delivering the drug as an odourless, colourless gas. Inconveniently for her and 47.
She gets up to check on him. He's sitting in the shower, cold water pouring down on his head, still fully clothed. Given the behaviour of the test subjects, it's amazing that he's not screaming and trying to climb the walls, but then, that's 47 for you. Crawling out of his skin, he still barely has a facial expression.
This motel bathroom is marginally worse than the other one. She makes a mental note that when they both survive today and the ICA starts to understand what 47 is really worth, she'll make sure they only take jobs in places that have decent accommodations. Or at least find a way for the bodycam and microphone to send a feed to another continent in real time so that she can work somewhere that has functioning air-conditioning.
"How many fingers?"
"Three. I'm hallucinating, not concussed."
"Who's the Prime Minister?"
"Of where?"
She smiles. “All right, fair point.”
She reaches over to check his temperature, and then realises it's the first time she's actually touched him. She lets her hand linger a moment longer than it takes to establish that he's burning up. “I could still go and find a doctor.” The ICA has people everywhere, she could spin her decision to extract him as taking a small risk to retrieve a valuable asset in unusual circumstances.
“No,” he says. “I just need to wait it out.”
He sounds as if he's speaking from experience, not just hope. “Has anything like this happened to you before?”
“I don't know.”
“Sorry,” she says. “Stupid question.”
“I know that I was drugged. Lots of times. This – almost feels familiar.”
Diana sits down with her back to the bathroom wall, arms around her knees.
“You really don't remember a single thing, do you.” It's not that she didn't believe him - the ICA certainly hasn't been able to dig up anything that suggests he's lying - but there's an edge of frustration in his voice now that lends his improbable story verisimilitude. As best as anyone can tell, he's told them absolute truth, but since his honest answer to most personal questions was 'I don't know' that isn't saying very much.
"I suppose this is a golden opportunity to interrogate me," he says wryly.
Well, he's not wrong. "Can you blame me? I like solving problems."
"Which is why you chose me in the first place."
She doesn't entirely disagree. He's a problem and a solution, all in one. "Is it?"
"You also like your assassins expendable."
She hadn't really thought that he might have been analysing her while she's been doing the same to him. She shifts uncomfortably.
"You remembered something," she suggests, more to change the subject than anything else. "Did that place remind you of you past? The place where you were trained?"
"No." For a moment she thinks that's all she'll get, but he takes a mouthful of water from his cupped hands and continues. "I have - muscle memories, from before. My body remembers what I did even if my mind doesn't."
That doesn't really add anything to what they know.
"The ICA hasn't been able to find any more like you, and believe me, they've been looking hard."
They all understand the implications of his name. Somewhere out there, there must be forty-six more. And yet, in her heart, Diana doesn't believe that there are. She can't help feeling that he's singular, unique in the truest sense. The only one that walked away. If the facility was anything like the one he destroyed tonight, perhaps it's not surprising.
“It's like – it's all on the other side of a wall, and I can hear things, see shadows moving, but I can't -” he shakes his head.
“If you could remember,” she says, “would you even want to?”
“Yes."
The quiet emphasis in his word is so unlike him, she goes quiet for a minute. “I'm sorry.”
“What for?”
"If I'd worked out they were delivering it as a gas -"
"I'm the one who was in there. Stupid mistake."
"We live and learn, I suppose."
“Why are you helping me?"
"I'm on your side," she says. “We're partners.”
"Why would you not tell the ICA I made a mistake? Cut me loose? What do you want?"
She's almost offended. Almost. But then, as far as he's concerned, it must seem that nobody does anything for nothing.
"I'm the one who vouched for you. What do you suppose happens to my career if they get rid of you?"
"You could find another assassin."
"Not one like you," she says. "You know you're the best."
"Do I?"
Perhaps tonight bruised his ego a little. "Don't be modest, 47. Not many people could have accomplished their mission in your current state. You know exactly what you're capable of."
“Yet you're not afraid of me.”
He's hardly at his most intimidating, sitting in a shower sweating through his clothes and hallucinating, but that probably isn't what he means. Besides, a sick tiger is still a tiger. He could probably kill her right now, if he wanted to. There are enough lethal objects easily in reach.
“No,” she says. “Is there some reason I should be?”
“Everyone else who knows what I can do – I've seen the way they look at me. But not you. Why is that?”
She thinks about it. It's not that she thinks he wouldn't kill her. If he had a reason, she has no doubt that he would. It's just that, since her one close brush with death, she's learned not to look over her shoulder. Her own appointment in Samarra will arrive in its own time, there isn't any need to hurry it along.
“47, if you decided to kill me for some reason, then I trust that you'd be efficient enough about it that there wouldn't be anything I could do. In which case, it doesn't seem as if there's much point expending energy worrying about it, does there?”
She doesn't ask if he's afraid of her – if he worries that trusting her is a mistake. All she knows is that she'll try to make sure it isn't one.
***
She leaves him alone for a few minutes to go to the vending machine. They have Pressure Original Flavour and Pressure Blue, neither of which explain what they taste like on the label. She buys one of each, which takes long enough that she can't be sure how long he's been convulsing on the bathroom floor when she gets back.
Diana swears, loudly, then finds the presence of mind to get a rolled-up towel under his head. He does not need to add an actual concussion to their list of problems.
She's just going into the other room to find her phone and call an ambulance when he comes out of the seizure.
"That's it," she says, "hospital time."
He breathes deeply, clearly trying to get himself back together. "What do you think the ICA will say about that?"
"What do you think they'll say if you die on a motel bathroom floor?"
"Nothing much, if you wipe down the surfaces to remove your fingerprints."
"I'd say that your lack of concern for your own safety was a symptom of the PCP," she says, "but I'm not sure that's actually true."
"I am not going to hospital."
Even in his current condition, she's not sure she could force him. Well, there's still another option. An ICA deployment van has all sorts of things in the back, none of which she's ever had to use before.
"Stay there," she says. Hopefully not a necessary instruction, but you can never be sure with 47.
It takes her five agonising minutes to get to the van and find what she needs in the medical kit. When she comes back, he's seizing again, so she doesn't hesitate, jamming the needle deep into his thigh. It's not elegant, but fortunately it should work even when delivered into muscle by a complete amateur.
She stands up and turns away to put the syringe down on the counter, and has just long enough to start wondering if she should call an ambulance after all when she's grabbed from behind, 47's arm around her throat like an iron bar. She flails and kicks for a long moment, but of course it's pointless. Nothing has prepared her for how shockingly strong he is. Just as she's starting to grey out, he relaxes his hold just enough that she can speak. "It's diazapam. For the seizures," she chokes out. They're both breathing heavily, the whole length of his damp body pressed against hers. She gave him enough tranquilliser to knock out a horse, but his grip doesn't slacken any further. "47, please ..."
As abruptly as he attacked her, he lets her go. She leans against the counter for support, then turns to check on him. He looks completely betrayed, in the moment before his expression falls away as he slips into unconsciousness. She's just quick enough to grab him and lower him to the floor gently this time.
She stays there for several minutes, trying to stop shaking and decide what to do. The sensible choice would be to call that ambulance after all, then walk out of here and tell the ICA an extremely edited version of what happened. But apparently she's decided not to do the sensible thing today, so she climbs to her feet and turns to the logistics of dragging him all the way to the motel bed.
***
Agent 47 is even heavier than he looks, and by the time she's managed to drag his dead weight onto the bed Diana is exhausted and it's gotten dark. Her work has only just started. She checks his pulse - which is still much too fast - and puts him into the recovery position, then goes to get an unused burner phone out of the van. She's got a lot of phone calls to make. It would almost feel like a normal after-action night, except that every now and then she has to come back to the bedroom to check on her patient and carefully pour a few mouthfuls of Pressure into him whenever he stirs. Over the next few hours, 47's temperature goes down steadily, his pulse returns to normal, and he doesn't have any more seizures. Given the chance, the perfectly tuned instrument that is his body is apparently retuning itself. Somewhere around three in the morning, she drifts off to sleep in a chair next to the bed.
When she wakes up an hour or so later, he's missing. She's briefly both terrified and furious, until she realises that the shower is running again.
She doesn't barge in on him, but waits until he comes out, wrapped in a towel.
"You burned the clothes I was wearing?" he says, without preamble.
"It seemed like the most sensible choice in the circumstances," she says. Undressing him had been the least of her problems, although it did make her wonder how he always managed it so quickly. The van will have to be disposed of, too, but there's time for that later.
"It was," he says. "But -"
"Oh, don't worry." She goes to the wardrobe and takes out the suit bag that was delivered a few hours ago. They're only a hour's drive out of Little Rock, and it's amazing what a few phone calls and a discreet wire transfer can accomplish. "It's off the rack, I'm afraid, but it should all fit."
He stares for a moment before he takes it from her, and she realises that she's actually surprised him, for the second time tonight. "I know you could rifle through everyone's luggage until you found something in your size, but if we're trying to keep a low profile - well. I'm going to take a shower." She ordered a change of clothes for herself, as well, including a turtle-neck that should hide the livid bruise forming on her neck.
When she comes out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, he looks himself again.
"You seem much better. How are the less visible symptoms?"
"Resolved."
She reaches for his wrist and takes his pulse, which he doesn't resist. Fever gone, heart rate back to normal. "No more hallucinations?"
"No."
Well, she can safely let him go. They only have one car, but it's not as if he can't get himself out of here. And yet ...
"Are you hungry?"
"Starved." He's using the term precisely. She's seen him eat after a mission, god knows what all these extra hours of only blue-flavoured sugary water for sustenance have done to his appetite.
"Come on, then," she says. "I'll drive."
***
It's too early for most people to be at breakfast, but IHOP is always open, and its surprisingly full. Two truck drivers, an exhausted-looking couple with a squalling baby, and a group of drunken twenty-somethings that the waitress keeps shushing. Diana has eaten worse things, and at least there's coffee. She wonders if anyone else here is really an international assassin.
"You're not going to tell our employers about this," 47 says, after they've ordered.
"The job was done. What else do they need to know?"
"You broke the rules."
She's breaking the rules right now, in point of fact, but who's counting at this point?
"I backed you up. That is my job. Beyond that, it's not their business."
The ICA aren't picky about what their operatives do between jobs, and unless there's some particularly urgent reason they have to catch a target right away, she likes to give their rising best asset plenty of downtime. It gives her a chance to do research and fill in all the paperwork, while 47 is free to train or ... well, everything he does is training, one way or another. Nobody will be looking for them today.
"It was still a risk."
She shrugs. "We're in a risky business. If they do find out where we've been, I think there are a few alternative explanations for what we were doing in a seedy hotel room all night that will occur to them long before the truth." That's not really allowed either, but everyone knows it happens.
"That doesn't bother you."
Of course he has no reason to think about it - he hasn't spent years with people making innuendo about who he fucked to get that mark or that job or that promotion. Honestly, of all the people she's ever been accused of sleeping with, this scenario bothers her the least.
"No," she says. "Let them think what they like."
The pancakes arrive. Diana watches 47 pour maple syrup directly onto his bacon and suppresses a smile. Take Your Assassin To IHOP Day. It'll never catch on.
"Why did you help me?"
They've circled back to that again, it seems.
"I'm your handler. It's in our mutual interest to help each other."
"You think that I would help you?"
It sounds like a genuine inquiry, not scoffing. Sometimes she wonders if he was raised by wolves, except that wolves would have taught him what kindness was. He's neither apologised for trying to choke her, nor thanked her for helping him, but then, who ever taught him those rules of human behaviour? He expects nothing, and doesn't know what to do when he receives more.
"I suppose we'll find out if I ever accidentally drug myself and need someone to stab me with diazepam. Until then, I'm willing to take it on faith."
"Really."
"Everyone needs allies. Even you. If you didn't learn that today, I'm not sure that I can help you."
Just then, her phone rings. Not the burner, the ICA phone she turned back on once they'd left the motel.
"Yes?" she says.
"A fire? Really?" Soders doesn't even bother to say hello. Across from her, 47 goes back to his breakfast. She pushes her unfinished pancakes in his general direction and he starts eating those as well.
"Sir," she says, "I'm not sure what the problem is. The job was done to specifications."
"The client assuredly did not specify that you burn down the building. Why do you let him do this - nonsense?"
"This employee works best when allowed to make his own path to the goal," she says. The target is dead and the data retrieved, anything else need not concern Soders.
"And the property damage?"
"Not really our problem, sir," she suggests.
"Do you ever consider telling him not to set things on fire?"
"With respect, sir, I find that giving him his head leads to the smoothest results."
One of the first things she learned is that 47 responds far better to praise than to criticism. Tell him he's clever and he'll keep on being clever. Suggest that his plan is ill-advised, and he'll double down out of spite, as he's amply demonstrated in the past twelve hours. Next time, she'll know to just call him a doctor instead of asking. And to stand out of the way when holding the syringe.
"So what, exactly, is your job, if not to control him?"
"I see myself as his facilitator, not his boss." She glances over at him, still finishing his meal. "I'm here to do the groundwork and point out potential avenues of approach. You have to admit that we get results."
"We'll have more words about this later," Soders says, and hangs up without saying goodbye. Diana isn't worried. The board will come to see it her way.
"He isn't happy," 47 says.
"He never is," Diana agrees. "I wouldn't concern yourself. The board will approve my report."
"Of course they will," he drains the last of the coffee. "You're good at your job."
It's the first time he's paid her a compliment. Possibly the first time he's paid anyone a compliment. She feels herself flush slightly in a way that has nothing to do with the restaurant being too warm.
"I'll take the van," he says, "you should call a car."
She'll have to work out how to explain what happened to the van and its contents, but compared to spinning the fire, that shouldn't be a big problem. Inventory goes missing all the time.
"Drive carefully," she says.
"Always," he replies.
Then he vanishes into the dawn, leaving Diana to her coffee and her after-action report.