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Adler hadn't expected her. 

A survivor of Trabzon, someone who clearly wasn't intended to survive. Two shots to the stomach and left for the dead. The den of a rogue, self-righteous terrorist proves itself to be a treacherous place indeed— Who could've known? 

Still, an asset is an asset, and a couple bullets to the stomach is hardly going to save them from Adler. 

It would go one of two ways. The bullet miraculously makes them see the error their ways, and they make themselves useful somehow. Or, the alternative, Adler finishes the job. No skin off his back, either way.  

Then, they take off the balaclava. 

It's a woman, her features remarkable enough that he can understand why she wears a mask. She's young, young enough to make him think about child soldiers and indoctrinated teenagers. Something deceptively soft still to the angle of her jaw, her cheek. Something that makes new possibilities arise. A daughter, a lover, a weak spot. He nurses these ideas, the two full weeks it takes her to wake up. 

And then she opened her eyes, and reduced those possibilities to nil. Put them back at square one. 

Tiger eyes, vicious against gaunt cheeks, the press of canines against the split of her lip. It's the eyes of someone that points the gun and pulls the trigger. Whatever she is, she is not a soft spot.  

Quasim begged for his life. Arash ranted and raved at his death. She said nothing for a long time. Arms tied to her sides, shoulders lax, chin raised. The most vulnerable position she could be in, and the posture she affects a posture could nearly be mistaken for something dignified. 

Park gets first stab with him out of the room, and comes up with nothing. 

"I would... Prefer for her to be unharmed," she says, after. 

Adler's mouth curls. "Getting attached, Park?" 

"She could be useful to us," she says. Nothing on her face gives her away. She's hardly green-eared, and MI6's an ally, but Adler knows better than to give up leverage on anyone. Park has a weakness for women exactly like this. Brilliant, deadly. It's caused her trouble before. 

In any case, if Park wants to play good cop so badly, he's more than happy to play bad cop. 

He slams the door open, then closed, grabs the chair, and drops it in front of her. The metal legs screech on the concrete, loud and jarring. Park had presented herself as a friendly, someone who could make things easier for her, who didn't enjoy the things they were doing. 

Adler does no such thing. He's never affected a particularly affable persona — the scar didn't help, and he's never been interested in playing nice for no reason, for any reason at all, really. Silence is an excellent weapon, and he employs it, stands in front of her, wordless. Lets his height and stature do the talking for him, the way he towers over her, especially restrained in the chair. 

Cold, inquisitive eyes track him across the room, a slither of cold amusement in her pupils. She tilts her head, and something raises its hackles beneath his skin, like a beast stirring from nap, an instinctual response to danger.

It's always easy to tell, right at the beginning, who will bend, and who will break. 

Torture won't work on her. He knows this much already. She knows this, too. 

It's too bad, that he still can't go easy on her. Won't. 

"Arash betrayed you," he says, sits onto the chair, and props himself up by the elbows on the wooden back. 

She blinks, and lifts a shoulder, as far as her restraints will allow. "This isn't personal," she says. Her voice is cool and lilting, clinical, the way she enunciates her vowels. Flawless english. American accent. He has no doubt she can emulate any accent she requires. "I didn't work with him because of his character."

"With compatriots like these, is this really something worth dying for?" he asks. This line of questioning will fail, too. Fervour and desperation can be redirected. Anger and fear. Quasim and Arash had been two extremities, but both of them had something Adler could use against them. With her, there is nothing. She is a portrait of polar apathy, austere and unmoved. 

"War is my father, revolution my mother," she says, "I wouldn't be here if I wasn't ready to die."

"Very eloquent. What you are is an ultranationalist terrorist," he says.

A smile. She's beautiful, but the stretch of her mouth slits across her face like a knife. "Just as you were liberators in Saigon?" she says. 

"Strawman's argument," Adler says, tapping his cigarette to the side. "Charming."

"I'm not here to argue with you, and you're not here to argue with me," she says. "Do what you need to do."

"Kind of you to give me permission," he says. "Do you know what CIA does to communists?"

Her smile widens, the whorling edge of the crescent moon, sharp in the sky. There's no more humour in her eyes. "No worse than what it does to its friends," she says. 

Before he gets started, he holds up an unlit cigarette to her in question. Adler still has manners, after all. 

A breath that almost sounds like a laugh sighs out of her. "I don't smoke."

"Suit yourself," Adler says, and then he gets to work.

x

"She's not breaking," Adler says. 

The team's complete, he comes out to find them gathered in a loose circle around the board in the safehouse. Sims and Lazar are chatting about one boxer or another. Mason and Woods are playing some bastardized version of Poker, with either booze or pride on the line. Park is perched in a chair in front of dossiers on the table, and he ignores the look she gives him. 

"Tough gal," Mason says, from where he's leaned against a chair precariously balancing on one leg, his cards laying facedown on his stomach.  

"Most of them are," Adler says. 

Park gives him another thinly-veiled glare that he shrugs off. He'd kept his promise. He'd made it painful, but he hadn't hurt her. Not in any way that's physically permanent. 

"Anything useful about the code, at least?" she asks. 

Ah, another problem. The code, the comms log she'd been clutching when Arash shot. He picks the file up from the table beside the blackboard. His fingers, nicotine-smudged, overlaps with the blood, as he flips through the well-worn pages, full of notes he'd stuck on in an attempt to make sense of anything. It's good, it's unintelligible. Cryptographers from Langley are still in the process of decoding it, but it has no precedence in anything they have access to. 

Fuck, an entire goddamn book of things they can't decode. So much information, tantalizingly close, just out of reach. 

It would be a shame just to kill her. 

"Alright, Park," he calls. "Let's talk."

"Finally," she says, rising from the chair. "I told you torture wouldn't work." 

She's going to be insufferable about this. 

"I'm assuming you have a solution to my problem," he says. 

Park smiles. "I do." She nods towards the backroom. 

"Not gonna loop the rest of us in?" Woods jeers from the back. They both ignore him. Sedentariness and safe houses in combination always makes him moody. 

"What do you know about the Inception program?" she asks, after closing the door. 

"Heard of it," Adler says. Another of CIA's mind control program, almost fantastical, the way it infiltrates the subject's via dreams. Then again, nothing seems impossible anymore after what happened to Mason in Vorkuta. 

"You've done any ops with it?" Park asked. 

"A couple," he said. "I'm no expert in it." He just knows what he needed to know. "The team's set. You better have a damn compelling reason for how this is going to work, if you want Hudson to bring in someone new." 

"No need for that. We don't exactly have the time for that, and the extractor I worked with is no longer in the business. We can make do with the team we have here," she says. 

"I trust these guys in a firefight and for exfil," Adler says, "not for psyops. And don't bother making that joke about Mason."

"I think you're overcomplicating this," she says. "All of the groundwork we need is done. MK-Ultra will do the heavy lifting, Somnacin will... Iron out the kinks, reinforce things she already knows." 

Ha, he's the one overcomplicating things? Adler inlines his head, sardonic, the way he knows Park hates because of how much Sherry used to bitch about it. "Go on, Agent Park."

Her eyes narrow, but she continues. "We don't need to much for this to work. There are only two things we must accomplish. One, solidify her identity as Bell. Two, find out what, or where, is behind the red door." 

"She talked about a red door to fuck with us, Park, not because there actually is one." 

"Men. So unimaginative," Park scoffs. "Dreams don't operate on logic. She talked about it, which means there is already a correlation to Perseus inside her head. Trigger it, and she will make the red door and lead you to it. All you have to do is convince her to open it. I trust in your ability to be... Persuasive." 

She's their best lead to Perseus in a long, long time. 

"Fine," he says, finally, lights a cigarette and takes a long drag, "what's one more drug to add to this shitshow?”

"Glad you're onboard," she says, yanking the blackboard over to them and begins to draw three circles. Adler barely resists the urge to roll his eyes. "Infiltrations are typically composed of three layers — three separate dreams. Each of these dreams will be dreamt by a different architect, someone on the team. And the subject of the infiltration, her, will be responsible for populating the dream with projections of people. Of course, we'll have all the dream mapped out beforehand. The purpose is to plant the ideas we need, more and more concretely in every layer, until it leads to actualization in the final layer. That's the layer that will listen to us and remember." 

"That's it? What about the parts of her that aren't willing to listen? She hasn't proven to be especially receptive of programming," Adler says. "What will you do if she does figure it out?" Once subjects realize they're in dreams, their projections will gun for intruders indiscriminately. He knows that she'll be especially vicious. "You know she'd tear all of us to pieces if she got the chance." 

"Well, making sure she doesn't realize will be a part of your job. People are more malleable in dreams, more willing to accept information that they're being given," she says. "The programming doesn't stay, but we've been able to trigger it consistently enough that there must be some part of her that believes she's Bell. That's the piece of her we'll be working with in the dream. A successful inception encompasses the entirety of the subject's psyche, even the resistant pieces. 

"We'll trigger the programming in the first layer, plant the ideas we need to proceed further. That she is one of us, and there is a door that will lead to us Perseus. In the second, we reinforce it the ideas and the bunker. Second layer will be the worst," Parks says. "Dreams will be the most vivid, and the brain will be operating at similar levels of activity as it would be awake. It's where the other fragmented parts of her psyche are most likely to emerge, parts of her that may be hostile. But if we do this right, programming should come into play here to keep her cooperative, and increased sedation should keep the dream stable.

"And once you're past the second layer," Park continues, "you should have built enough of a rapport that anything you say — as long as you do it carefully — will keep. But the dream will still be delicate. The most delicate, at the deepest layer. "

Adler waits. 

She doesn't give him anything else. "Well?" she asks, raising an eyebrow. 

"There's something you're not telling me," he says. The strange urgency to this entire presentation. She wants him to say yes, first. To work out the details later, after Hudson gives them green light. Once it's too late to stop— She only does that when she knows he won't like the details. "Park, work with me here." 

"I think Vietnam should be the setting of one of the layers," she says, finally, crossing her arms. 

Jesus fucking Christ. 

"And how, exactly, will we make Vietnam work, as one of the dreams?" he snaps. 

"Sims will be the architect of the dream. Both you and her will populate it with projections. It's unconventional, sure, but it's been done before."

"Sims can barely talk about Vietnam without having a breakdown," he says. "You think he can handle recreating it in a dream?"

"He'll have to," Park says. 

Adler stamps out his smoke with more force than necessary. "Wonderful fucking idea, Park," he says. "You're just full of them, aren't you?"

"MK-Ultra was my idea, too," she says, "that worked well enough, didn't it?" 

"It didn't work well enough, that's why we're here," he says, sharp. 

"Look," Park says, expression placid, her displeasure evident only in the downturn of her mouth, "you wanted me here because you want Perseus, and my expertise can get you closer. She's the key to this. You said it yourself. I'm telling you, this is what we need to do."

"Starting drawing up the maps for the layers," he says, "I'll have Sims start sourcing the Somnacin. You're taking lead on this." It's your head if this fails.

"Of course." Park straightens, pleased. "I knew you'd see reason. Eventually."

"This better be worth the extra work, Park."

"It will be."

"I would hope so, seeing how confident you are."

x

"You sure about this?" Sims asks, quiet, leaned up against the wall of the armoury. He's been letting himself put his hands in his pockets more, recently. But some of that military rigour has never left him. For one, he can't hide his emotions for shit. Trepidation laces his brows, his temples damp with sweat. Langley doesn't suit him. Half their life spent waiting, anticipation will kill Sims first. 

"We survived real Vietnam, we can survive the fake one," Adler says, waving his hand. 

Sims' mouth presses into a thin line. "You know I'm with you, Doc," he says. "But... Some of us would like to be able to sleep at night."

"I'm sure you'll get plenty of sleep when you're dreaming," Adler says, sardonic.

Sims is unamused, of course. 

"Alright," Adler acquiesces. "Go get some shut-eye then, while you still can. I got this under control." 

Sims isn't happy, but he does what he's asked. He's more loyal than he should be, certainly more loyal than Adler deserves.

They complete prep and set-up, source enough goddamn Somnacin to put a herd of elephants to sleep. Of the team, only Mason has done an infiltration via dream once or twice, in line with his history of being lab rat for all sorts of brain-fuck ops. Adler can trust the rest of them to roll with the punches, but CIA's employs experts on its roster for a reason. The manpower and time it takes to draw up maps for the dreams and memorize them isn't insignificant. Sims looks vaguely grey around the edges every time he has to talk about Vietnam, and it's going to be extra work making sure that he doesn't just snap on them in the dream, or out of it. 

Time is limited. They manage three test-runs before the real thing.

"How come it's always us getting injected?" Woods asks, settling into the chair, rolling his eyes. 

"People pay millions for this shit," Adler says, stamping out his cigarette. "You get to do it for free." 

"Yeah," Woods scoffs, "because they're dreaming about hookers and money, not fuckin'—" He waves his hand. "—Ultranationalist terrorists." 

"Why not all three?" Lazar says, a syringe in his hand, tastefully out of sight of Woods. He's allocated to stay awake and secure the safehouse. Adler may or may not have made the assignments like this because he knows it'll piss Park off. But hey, that's a part of the job. You don't have to be happy, you just have to do it. 

Woods barks out a laugh. "This guy's a joker," he says, nodding his head back at Mason, "hear that, Mase?"

"Hookers and gulags," Mason says, smile wry. "You really know what gets a guy going." 

"Hey, I don't judge," Lazar says, raising up a hand in surrender. 

"Yeah, because you're fucked in the head, too," Sims says. "You want to going to bed and waking up on an operating table, Lazar?"

Lazar laughs. "If that's what the lady wants." 

"Whatever you say, you goddamn sucker," Sims snorts. "I'm ready."

Park, of course, ignores him. "You all remember the maps?" 

Adler takes a walk around the safehouse one more time, looks over at the chair in the other room. She's already been sedated, both hands strapped to the sides, nearly serene. The heartbeat monitor pulses steadily. 

"Yeah, yeah," Woods says, in the distance. "Couldn't forget Trabzon Airport if someone hit me over the fuckin' head." 

"Good," Adler says when he returns to the room. "Settle down. Wouldn't want you to wake up with a sore neck." 

Woods laughs. "Like you give a shit." 

"Happy dreaming, boys," Park says.

The world goes dark. 

x

It never feels like he's dreaming.

That's what fucks with him. 

Trabzon Airport has been recreated with near perfect precision. The light drizzle of rain, the dark dusky evening. Wood's memory is remarkable. His ability for observation still surprises Adler, sometimes, for all that it shouldn't. Frank Woods, the persona, is all brash muscle with no finesse. It's his weapon of choice, the way people perceives him. His eye of detail and ability to disarm hidden save for a scant few occasions and for people he dislikes immensely. (Hudson, namely.)

There's the truck on the taxiway, in the midst of the asset, or Bell' projections of people in the airport. And then— The loud pop of gunshots in the distance. 

That's the signal. 

Woods, in the distance, wearing the face of Arash as he waves his gun. He goes down with the sound of gunfire and the use of a blank. 

Showtime.

Adler opens the door to find a gun pointed at him. Her eyes meet his in the dark, startlingly bright in the shadow, the only part of her face visible behind the balaclava. They narrow. 

Something inside of him stills again, despite himself. His tongue heavy in his mouth as he goes to speak the words of the script, and then to stop. It's a standstill, man in front of the tiger. No sudden movements.

The muzzle lowers. Recognition blooms across her gaze. 

"You," she says.

Shit. She recognizes him. Is the plan a bust? 

"Me," Adler says, steady, his heart pounding. No sudden movements. 

"I know you," she says slowly, her voice the flat edge of a blade. He sees himself in her eyes now, fossilized in burnished amber. 

Of course. Hours and hours spent together in that room, first making sure she didn't die, and then making damn sure she would want to. There's so much you can learn about a person from what they don't say. So much to know about someone when they're pushed to the very limit. Resistance is a paradox of human and animal nature. Rational and irrational, simple animal desperation and the nobility of philosophies trumping the innate avoidance of pain. And in counterpoint, so much you can learn about someone from what they want to know, the questions they ask, the ways in which they inflict pain. The incongruity of it from the other side. Animals are brutal, but humans are cruel. 

( "You should just kill me," she says, conversational. 

"I could," he says, "I will, if you just give me what I want."

"This isn't for my sake," she says. A sigh comes out of her, and there's a delirious sheen to her eyes that disappears when she blinks, shrugging off the pain. 

"No?" He entertains her. 

"You and I both know I won't talk. You're wasting your time, with me," she says. "The longer you spend here, the less time you have to catch your true prize."

He chuckles. "Wouldn't that still benefit you, in the end?" 

"You and I are not so different," she says. "That frustrates you."

"Does it?" he asks, eyebrow raised. 

"Because you are convinced that you can force something out of me that I don't want to give," she says, always so quietly, forces everyone in the room to stop talking in order to hear her. "That you can outsmart me, that you can be cleverer than I am. Than he is." She laughs, sudden and short. "That's how Arash got me, you know. I was assured in my ability to use him, to leverage his enmity, that I forgot what was obvious." 

Amusing. 

Briefly, Adler wonders if she's gone insane. "And what's that?"

"Those with nothing to lose behave in ways comparable to caged beasts. You can't reason with wild animals, and, if you can take out the instincts, too, what's left to leverage?" 

"Plenty, I find," he says. "People usually overestimate themselves. Anything else to add?" 

Her eyes glitter. "That scar on your cheek— They're claw marks, aren't they?"

Unease begins to stir in his stomach. Her eyes, dark in the low light and dagger-like, pin him to place, like an butterfly upon a board. 

"Yeah, I know better than to go after girls with a long nails now," he says, snuffs out his cigarette. 

Her eyes are amused. "You spent time in Vietnam, didn't you? The width of claws of Indochinese tigers matches the space between the scar tissue. Seeing as you're still with us, I'd assume that the tiger is dead. Got a little too close to the kitty, did we?"

Rookie mistake of interrogations is letting the subject take control of the conversation. She's right, this entire thing has been frustrating. That she hasn't broken, that she's still lucid enough to be making jabs like these. That she's right about his stubbornness. His sin of the seven has always been pride, been his refusal to give up, even when it costs him. The more he's told no, the more he wants to do something. The more the puzzle denies him, the more he wants to crack it. 

"I'm getting a little tired of our conversation, stimulating as it's been," he says, steady. "You wanna get to the point?"

She shifts in the chair, against her restraints. "What's the harm in wasting a little more time?" she murmurs, and then quiets even more, the words whispering out of her like a secret, intimate. "And, as for the point: only that you seem to be fond of repeating old mistakes, Russell Adler. What is it that you Americans say? Don't let me rain your parade." 

He makes that one hurt. )

"Yes," Adler agrees. "You know me."

MK-Ultra has already implemented everything we needed to. You just need reinforce it. Give her a little extra jolt. 

"You know me, Bell," he repeats. "We have a job to do." 

x

It's the heat that hits him first, always. 

Vietnam. 

Fuck. 

He never thought he would have to be back in this hellhole again

Sims is beside now, distinctly unsteady, looking a little queasy. And Christ, is that Jenkins and fucking Scotty, in the distance? The last time he saw Scotty— There hadn’t been enough of him left for the coroner to identify for sure. All they had was the dog tag, and there was no one to send that back to, either. 

"Hey, " he says, voice low, "Sims."

"Doc," Sims forces out, looking at Adler and then abruptly snapping his head to the left, to look away from him. 

The raised edges of the caking war paint digs into his cheek, the muggy heat clinging to his clothes, yanking him down. "It's not real," Adler says, shouldering the M-16 further up his shoulder. And then, again. "It's not real. You know what we have to do, Sims." 

"I do," Sims says, and Adler's not sure if he's talking to him anymore. "I do."

Mason appears, in the distance, transformed into some nameless base commander or another, generic and forgettable. He's trailed by a slighter figure, just a step behind. Her. Bell. A handkerchief tied around her face in the absence of the balaclava, obscuring everything below the eyes, a matching boonie hat perched on her head.

"Adler, MACV-SOG," Mason says as introduction, nodding at Adler. "I trust you'll take of each other."

"What he said," Adler says. "Welcome to Camp Haskins." 

"Sir," she says. Her eyes on him, clinical, tracing his silhouette like scalpel on dotted lines. 

"What'd I call you, kid?" he asks.

A blink, and some of the intensity dispels as her gaze lowers and her brow furrows, like she's fighting it. 

"What, don't know you own name?" he asks. "Better make on up fast, we have a job to do." 

"Bell," she bites, finally, almost like she's angry at herself for saying it. 

In Vietnam, he would've laughed, asked for the origin of the name without really waiting for the answer. Here, it's different. All of it. "

Bell," he repeats, and pretends it isn't victory in his voice.  

"I'll leave you to it," Mason says, before retreating back where he comes from. His job for the dream is to observe, take care of any projections in the dream that starts getting too hostile. Bell hadn't been in Vietnam, and with how unsteady Sims is looking, this makes this layer the most likely out of any that she begins realizing she's in a dream. 

Adler picks a direction and starts walking. The air is hazy in the heat, the green lines of the trees swim against the sky. 

"What have you heard about Perseus, Bell?" he asks. 

"Not much," she says, her answers short and nearly monosyllabic. A far-cry from their conversations during the interrogations, long and languid. A tiger toying with its prey, he realizes. 

"Well, you're about to hear a lot more," Adler says. "And you better start learning a lot more, tell you fuckin' what." 

"Of course, sir," she says. They keep walking along the length of Camp Haskins, filled to the brim with ghosts so old that he surprises himself remembering them. He surveys them, men covered with grime, so much younger than he remembers yet so much older at once. Some ubiquitous pop song playing in the distance, peace signs drawn in war paint hanging from the corner. 

"You, I've heard a lot about, sir," she says in the quiet, volunteering the information in the way she never does. Clever, changing the subject. 

"Gossiping already?" Adler asks, pointed, raising his eyebrow at her. 

She returns his look with cool eyes, tilts her chin, waits for him to answer. 

"The stories are all lies," he says, stopping in front of her, "I'm worse."

Her eyes curve faintly. "I see. Why am I here, sir?" she asks.

She shouldn't be so lucid, not already. The characteristic of people in dreams is to take things, words, places at face-value, and then become more suspicious from there. It's so like her, to make even this inconvenient for him. 

"Because I need you to find what we want," Adler says. There's an art to it, to persuasion, suggestions, especially in dreams. The feedback loop of planted ideas, regressing and reinforcing each other. You have something I want. 

"And what would that be?"

The truth is always best. Some version of it. "A soviet bunker," he says. "Whatever's in it will lead us to Perseus." 

"A Soviet bunker?" she asks, it's not doubt in her voice, she's too good for that, but it's close. "In Vietnam?" 

"That's what the intel says." Tone firm. Repeat the laws and norms established in the dream. You are Bell. There is a bunker that will lead us to Perseus. 

She says nothing. That's not the answer she wanted. "I see," she says. 

x

Some part of it might have been envy, about the type of loyalty Perseus is able to cultivate. It's only to be expected. Desperation is the lifeblood of revolution, and desperation is easy. Easy to breed, to find. 

Adler prefers methods that are... More exact. Desperate animals lash out in ways that can be unexpected and unproductive. A beast is a beast. Still, there is nothing erratic about her. She is exacting and poised, no movement wasted. A tiger, prowling in its hunt. There is no reckless abandon, only the prey, the kill, the forgone conclusion. 

What would it take to tame a tiger? 

"It would be a lot easier if you could stop fighting me," he says. 

It's all small things, designed to see where his limits lied. He might've almost missed it, if he didn't know what to look for. Questions designed to deflect, misdirect. A command to move east becomes southeast, then south, and then southwest, until their bearings are entirely skewed.

"Now, why do you think I'm fighting you, sir?" she asks, voice light. A bang. A VC falls in the distance. She's a good shot. More than a good shot. 

This is a test, for him. Laws of the jungle, whether or she'll respect him or kill him instead. 

Adler has always prided himself on his rationality, his ability to ignore impulses, to reign in his body's natural responses to stimuli. The way he approaches ops is void of those animal instincts; all of his brutalities are human. But never let it be said that Adler didn't rise to a challenge. 

x

"Found something," she says, on a raid in Da Nang.

It's the comms log. He was wondering if it would pop up, sooner or later, with how much he stared at the damn thing. There's a singular line of code inside. She doesn't question it. A sequence that he remembers on the back of his goddamn eyelids. 

"Good find, Bell," he says. 

"Looks important," she says, gaze fixed on the cover, the bloodied handprint. Intrigued the way she never is. 

"It is," he says, carefully. "Think you can decode it?" 

"I can try," she says, but the look in her eyes tells him that she will. It's the look of a dog with a bone, eyes glittering black in excitement. 

She spends hours on it, long enough that she takes the handkerchief off of her face, bent in concentration over the papers on the desk, calculations and cyphers strewn in piles around the dossier. 

Where the hell did Perseus find her? You spend long enough in the field and you become adept at most things, still specialization is encouraged more than well-roundedness, better do one things well enough than know a bunch shit that you can only half-ass. But there's a terrifyingly large number of things that she's competent at. Such an inconvenient coincidence, that terrorists always seem to be get lucky with the people they find. 

Three hours later, she holds up a piece of paper with a name on it to him, wordless. Satisfaction rolls off of her. A quiet hound returned from the hunt, muzzle pink with the kill. 

Anton Volkov. 

That name is familiar, some European arms dealer or another, familiar enough that it makes his pulse skitter. The hunting dog in him stirs its head at the smell of the trail, too. She knows the code. Of course she does. But Bell knows the code, and Bell is willing to decipher it for them, which means that the dossier can still be of use. Which means that she can still be of use. 

He's always hated discarding something needlessly.

"Not bad, Bell," he says, taking the sheaf of paper from her, "Not bad at all." 

x

It a surprise even to him, when it happens. He doesn't anticipate how much his mind would remember.

Scotty dies in a spray of bullets and pieces of flesh, his blood raining down on them. 

Fuck, he forgot about this. The first go-around, he dreamt about this every night for three years, the way Scotty screamed, the way chunks of his body landed, still warm, all around them. Over a decade later, but all that the sight evokes is a tired sort of grief. Nothing will ever top the hell that Vietnam had been, but somehow in the years since Da Nang, since Saigon, Adler's seen worse, done worse. 

Sims is pale, even under the grime, and barely standing on his feet. In a move that shocks Adler, because the dream was full of goddamn surprises, Bell yanks Sims out of the gunfire in the aftermath, and keeps him in her line of sight all the way until they got back to camp.

"Sims," Adler barks. 

He jerks. "I—" Sims' forehead sheens with sweat. He won't look at him.  "I can't," he says brokenly, hands shaking. "I gotta tap out, Doc, I'm sorry."

Adler'd expected this, since the beginning. Known that it'd been a bad idea the moment Park brought it up. They're built differently — something about Sims, the part of him that follows rules and frowns when he see the things they do to prisoners, the things they'd done to Bell, something fleshy and soft, that isn't cut out for any of this.

"I know. Go, take a rest," Adler says, patting him on the shoulder firmly, but he doesn't release his grip. Not just yet. They have a job to do. Adler can play the bad guys, however long and however many times it takes. "I need you, Sims. This can't fail."

"I know," Sims says, squeezes his eyes shut, teeth clenched. 

Mason's emerged in the distance, and Adler gives him a look that he nods tightly at, as he hands Sims to him. 

"Is he alright?" she asks quietly, from behind him. He barely stops himself from startling. 

"He's just needs a breather," Adler says. "He'll walk it off."

It's not sympathy in her eyes, he finally realizes, just detached observation. 

"You and Sims," she says.

"Known each other a while," Adler says, "been through hell together. Scotty over there is, was, friends with him. Back in basic, if you'll believe it," he says. "Poor sucker was waiting to get married to his sweetheart back home. She left him, couple weeks before you came. He did't get over it." 

"Ah," she says. "A shame." Something that along the ilk of pity swims into her gaze, now, her brows drawing down. 

"You have someone waiting for you back home, Bell?" he asks, suddenly curious. 

"No," she says. "Do you?"

"I did," he admits and thinks about how truthful he should be, then, of how long it's been since Sherry came up in the conversation. 

"Hmm," she says, and doesn't ask further. 

"Not going to apologize about it like everyone else?" he asks.

"I didn't do anything, why should I be apologizing?" she says, with something sharp in her mouth like amusement. Her interest in the conversation has waned, though. "You think Sims'll be okay?"

"He has a heart," Adler says. "Beneath all that shit talking. It's what'll give him nightmares." 

"And what do you suggest he do instead?" she asks. "Rip it out?"

Strangely symbolic, coming from her. 

"Guess there's nothing you can really do about caring too much," he says. "Find a better line of work, maybe. You don't seem too ruffled about this, huh, kid?" 

"I'm not a sentimental person," she says. "Don't get nightmares much." 

"Good answer," he laughs. 

A smile. Full of teeth. "It's the one you wanted," she tells him. 

x

They see the bunker, two weeks in.

Tall, concrete walls of an industrialist complex rise out of the treeline, distinctly out of place in the jungle greenery. It's impenetrable, no entrances or exits from the sides. Nothing, except the front door. A red, metal door. Taunting. All of her secrets, right there.

He gets as close as five feet before the explosions start going off. 

"Why is there a fucking Soviet bunker in the middle of Vietnam?" she hisses.

He barks out a sharp laugh. "You tell me, Bell!" 

The resistance is heavy, twice-fold what it usually is. Just as Park had predicted. The bunker's bizarre enough that it's set some sort of alarms off. Bell's projections are trying to to kill him, and his, presumably, are trying to kill her in self-defence. Fuck, he's going to have a talk with Park after this, about how he's always doing her dirty work. 

They're out-numbered and out-gunned, and retreat is really the only reasonable option. 

Bell has a concussion— He can see it in her eyes, and she's taken her handkerchief off, jaws clenched, grime smearing with the bruises beneath her eyes. 

He drops his shades on her eyes, and she startles. He has to grab her wrist so she doesn't fire her pistol against his sternum. 

"Listen to me, Bell," he snaps. "Follow me. Don't do anything stupid." 

The pain on her face is naked, and she bares her teeth at him, the sharp amusement or the neutral apathy she wears like armour nowhere to be seen. 

"Bell," he yells. "We have a job to do."

She fights it. Him. He can see the vein jump in her jaw, her instincts demanding her to resist, her hands clenching around her gun and her chest taking heaving breaths. The look in her eyes tell him she wants to tear him to shreds, and he debates on knocking her out. He can't— 

This is make or break. The dream isn't real, but she'll remember. If even the most cooperative version of her doesn't respect him, then it won't matter in the end, any of it. 

Don't look a beast in the eyes— Except he's not fighting to survive. He's fighting for dominance, for authority. He looks her in the eyes and raises himself up to full height, so that he towers over her. A vein in her neck jumps, and for a moment, he thinks that she'll go for the jugular, she'll break his spine with her hands, if it's what it takes. 

But then her grip on the gun loosens.

She relents, ducks her head, follows him further into the trees without protest.

They walk for a long time, long enough for the gunfire to fade away.

Eventually, the shadows of the jungle melts away into blue skies. It makes him pause, squinting up at the sky, faintly hysterical. Nothing makes sense anymore. Forget her or Sims. They'll be lucky if Adler comes out of this sane. 

She tips his shades up to peer at the sky briefly, before wincing and dropping the sunglasses back over her eyes.

"Keep 'em on, kid," he says, "wouldn't want the concussion to give you brain damage." 

"Yeah, I'm sure it'll be the concussion that does it," she says. It speaks volumes to how out of it she must be, to be giving him attitude. "Not anything else."

"Getting smart with me?"

"I would never."

The cornfields run in trails of endless, even lines of green bushels, as far as the eye can see. Midwest, the damnable setting of his childhood. It's been a long time since he's been back. In his heart, he knows that there is a little house at the top of the hill, lonely in the long miles between neighbours. He doesn't check to see if it's there. Maybe he should see a shrink after he gets back. 

"Where's this?" she asks.

"Somewhere safe," he says, finally, ignores the weariness that seeps into his voice. 

She takes it with a doubtful silence. The sound of her laboured breathing is loud, and she drops onto the ground beneath a tree heavily. He joins her. 

"Where're you from, Bell?" he asks, after a long time, after he gets tired of watching the clouds drift off the sky. 

"Somewhere cold," she says, sounding not entirely lucid. The concussion must be doing a number on her.

Somewhere cold. That hadn't been the cover story they'd made for her. "That's it?" he coaxes. 

"Not much to say. My parents are dead," she says, blankly, mechanical, like she's reciting from a script. "...I did ballet and I liked hunting." A hum. "I'm tired."

He considers the risk of intracranial bleeding. Dying here wouldn't be good, with how heavy the sedation is. It might kill her in real life, too. He sighs. "Don't do that, Bell," he says. 

"Fuck you," she says, without any real heat. 

He chuffs. "It's for your own good." 

"You going to keep me awake, then?" she asks, droll. 

"Guess I'll have to," he says.

"Where're you from?"

"Here," he says. 

"Makes sense," she says, like she's thinking about it. 

"Yeah?" He humours her. 

"You're like a good little American boy. Cornfed and played football and married his high school sweetheart." 

"You sure? Sims thinks I came out fully formed and heartless," Adler says. 

She shrugs. "Both can be true."

She's right. "You're right, I played lineback and I did marry my high school sweetheart."

She snorts. "Poor girl. What's a linebacker?"

He spends an hour trying to explain the rules of football to someone with a concussion. His mistake, probably, but it's just as likely that she's being obtuse on purpose. More likely, if he's honest with himself. In retaliation, he pretends not to know who Tchaikovsky is when she tells him about ballet. At the end of it all, she looks ready to shoot him, and he knows not to test his luck further. 

"What made you come to 'Nam, Adler?" she asks.

"There's a draft," he says, dry, "in case you haven't noticed."

"You're CIA," she says. "I'm sure there's plenty of other places to go, if you wanted to." 

He thinks about it. "Duty, maybe," he says. 

"Duty?" she echoes, faintly sardonic.

It's not untrue. His father was army. So was his before that. It had seemed like the only way to go. 

"Places like here is where the line gets blurred. They need people to cross the line to make sure that it's still there in the morning," he says, "people like you and me."

"And how do we agree on where the line is?" she asks. 

"Compromises have to be made, it's how the world goes around," he says. 

She laughs. "Compromise?" she echoes. "People like you and me?" 

"I thought we had something of a working understanding with each other, Bell," he says. "Am I wrong?" 

"This is not a compromise," she says. "If we weren't on the same side and I wasn't useful to you, you'd shoot me." 

"Sounds like a compromise to me, kid," Adler says, because he knows she'd wring his neck if she ever got the excuse to. "We are on the same side, and you are useful to me. And I'm sure we can continue to be useful to each other for the near future." 

"So you say." 

"Smoke?" he asks, patting at his pockets. 

She thinks about it. "Sure," she says. 

He lights the cigarette, and lets her have it first. 

Her mouth closes around the cigarette, a hint of her teeth against the paper, lashes flutter close as she takes a puff, and the smoke slips loose from her lips like silk. His blood pulses hot at the sight of it, white phosphorous in his veins. 

Hours and days and weeks spend in the mud changes a person in ways that people can't fathom. The jungle darkness swallows you, the eye of the Abyss, gazing back at you, the stain on your soul. There's a monster in the woods, trailing him, snapping at his heels, except, except— That's him, isn't it? That's her. There becomes a thrill to it, to hunt and to be hunted, the adrenaline of the gamble. 

She passes the smoke to him, and he passes it back, He doesn't realize it, until he does, that he's hard, straining against the cotton of his pants, as her mouth folds back around the imprint of his on the cigarette. Adler looks up to see her eyes on his, like she knows exactly what he's thinking about, the ghost of a smile on her lips. 

Fuck.

He needs to get out of here. 

x

He gets himself a bottle of Johnnie Walker when he's back in his tent. Even he can do some indulgences— That's what Vietnam does to a person, even if it's just a figment of what it had been. 

In the twilight, he drinks straight from the bottle, relishes the way it burns, and stops thinking for a while. Tries to. There's always been something fucked up about him, Woods and Mason. The things they've done, the things they're willing to do. He has his reputation for a reason. There's very little that he's not willing to do for a mission. Everyone has a limit, someone in Langley told him. It's a very good thing for him and for the CIA, that Adler hasn't reached it yet. 

A rustle of movement in the distance, and he sets the bottle down, squinting at the night, not sure how long he's been lost in thought. The heat gathers in whorls, as the last light disappears in sheens, makes everything look vaguely foggy, and he tries to make sense of the shape slowly convalescing towards him. 

It's her. 

Of course it is. 

In her cargos and a white tank top half-transparent from the humidity, emerging from the dense darkness of the jungle. Boonie hat and handkerchief nowhere to be seen, her hair plastered against her forehead, mouth parted from exertion.

Did he dream of her here, too, along with everything else here? He wonders. Something pulled out of the tar pit of his darkest and deepest fantasies, unintelligible even to himself. Maybe he's finally lost it. Livingstone would be pleased. 

"You gonna come in or stand there for the rest of the night?" he calls, when she stops at the sight of him.

A long pause. She trawls closer. Even-width steps, a dancer's gait, doll-like in the dark, against the backdrop of the trees. Beautiful, deadly. "I didn't want to intrude." Her voice a whisper of the breeze. 

"Learned manners, Bell?" he asks. 

Her eyelids dip, unimpressed. "I was just leaving," she says, beginning to twist on her heels. 

"Won't keep me company? I'm hurt," he says, wonders what it is that he's saying.

Her eye catches the bottle in his hands, and her mouth curls. She shifts her weight to one foot, hip cocked. "What's in it for me?" she asks.

He extends the glass towards her, whiskey sloshing, amber bright. She comes closer, a stray lured in to nip at his palm. She takes the bottle and then a swig, he looks away so he doesn't have to see her mouth slotted against the glass, the bobble to her throat as she swallows. Instead, his gaze falls to her fingers, curled in delicate talons around the glass. 

"Not bad," she says, after, lips slick. "Could use something stronger."

He doesn't drink enough vodka to be able to replicate it. "When we're out of this shithole, maybe," he says. 

Out of here. It hangs in the air, just as foolish, whether applied to the dream or to Vietnam. 

"Maybe," she says, her eyes knife-like. 

The ire from the beginning has melted out of her, he thinks. She seems faintly contemplative, looking down on him, maybe pitying. The nearness of her akin to feeding a stray from his hands, finally rewarded as it follows him home. Except that might just be the heat of the whiskey in his chest. There's a story his mother told him as a child, the fable of the farmer and the snake — a man who keeps a half-frozen serpent warm against his breast in winter, just to be bitten in the end. Don't feed wild animals, Russell. 

She takes a swig, and he reaches his hand out for it back. She hands it to him, fingers curved around the neck of the bottle. When he moves to take it, she doesn't let go of the glass. 

He doesn't let go, either.

She was right, before. That had been what pissed him off. Nearly two decades that he's been with the CIA, over a decade since 'Nam, and it was an ultranationalist shot by her own that saw right through him, slit him in halves with her eyes. 

It had been a tiger in '68, too. 

Man-eating monster, they'd called it, a myth in the barracks to scare fresh recruits, kindling for gallows humour. The COs knew better than to laugh. The tiger had stalked a unit in Quang Tri, killed most of them before anyone realized it was there. For a long while, it raised an innate fear of what else was in the jungle, hysteria about divine retribution, that the land itself was trying to eat them alive. 

Adler didn't believe in shit like that. A shotgun had done the job fine, and the tiger, a different one, died like anything else. But he had gotten too bold, and it had swiped at his face one last time in a feat of fearsome, dying rage, caught his jaw between its claws. 

You're lucky you still have that half of your face, son, the base commander told him, after the medics were done with him. 

The ladies'll dig it, Sims laughed. 

( Arash had been a tiger, too, wasn't he? ) 

There was a lesson to be learned there, he thinks, because there's a tiger in front him again. Tiger eyes watching him, sculpture still in the shadows, waiting to pounce. 

You learn, or you die. But Adler has always preferred unconventional routes, has always taken risks that people called impossible, a death wish. Did what others wouldn't, couldn't. And—

She's not the only beast here, is she? Tiger eyes, tiger wounds, tiger stripes, the war paint caking on his face. Perhaps what this is, is a communion between monsters. 

A sigh comes heavy out of him, scores his lungs on exit, and his limbs are leaden. She watches him for a long time, before she lets out a puff of air in amusement, and goes in for the kill. She steps close, forces his legs to part to fit her, and sets herself on top of him, in his lap. Looking down at him, preternaturally lovely in the darkness, her hair curtained around them, chest pressed against his, a thin shroud of cotton between the two of them.

He's frozen, breathless in anticipation, waiting for the tiger to maul him. Tenses, when he feels her fingers at his ribs, braces for the blow. This is it, he thinks. 

She doesn't tear him to pieces, just pets at his pockets until she finds what she wants. 

Pulls his cigarettes and the lighter out, lights it, and takes a long draw. There are hints in her, of wealth, an expensive upbringing. She'd talked about ballet, and Adler can see it in the sylph-like lines of her shoulder, the cigarette perched between her fingers, delicate, nearly elegant.  

"Getting comfortable, Bell," he says, trying to decide if the tremor in his hand is from the smell of the cigarette or from her. It's her, of course. There's never been any question. 

Her lips quirk. "You wanted me to keep you company," she says. 

"Mm," he says, blinks with heavy eyelids. 

"Well?" she murmurs. 

"You gonna share?" he asks, not sure what he's asking for anymore. 

She gives him the cigarette and the whiskey. 

He takes a long, slow drag of the cigarette, and then the whiskey. When his hand drops, it brushes the back of her shoulder, the jut of bone. He raises his hand up, expecting his palm to be wet with blood, cut against her bones, only to find it bare.

They stay like that for a long time, before she shifts against him, against his cock, thick against his thigh. 

"Are you going to do anything, or are we just going to talk?" she asks.

He huffs. "You have something in mind?"

"A few things," she says, hands smoothing across his shoulders, "but what do you want, Adler?"

"What do you think?" He looks her in the eye. Animal eyes reflect in the dark. Hers do not. 

"Talking to you is like pulling teeth," she says, shaking her head, patting him on the cheek mockingly. "I can be nice, and take a guess." 

"Give it your best shot."

She takes the cigarette from him, other hand sliding up his neck, stopping at the base of his skull, and she kisses him. She taste like fire, like smoke, like some type of nuclear carnage. Adler yanks her close by the hips, bites away a groan when his teeth collides against hers, and he tastes blood. 

The cigarette falls somewhere, maybe the whiskey, too. Probably a fire hazard, the combination. He's more interested in getting her out of the goddamn tank top, sliding his hands up the sides of her spine, the curve of her breasts. There's no scar at her stomach, where Arash's bullets had been, and he doesn't anticipate her— Any of her, the gossamer soft of her skin, how sweet she mewls when he sucks at the place just below her ear. 

It's barely more than a fumble in the dark, he grinds against her like some unexperienced teenage boy, laving at the space between her breasts, as she rucks up his shirt to have at his belt, yanking his cargos down to his hips, just enough to free his cock from his pants. 

It's the dream, too, probably, that she can take him without prep. He nearly blacks out from the stretch of her around him, fever hot, nails digging into the back of his shoulders, sharp enough to wound. She rides him in slow, sinuous circles, rutting against him, her fingers dipping low to pet at herself, it might be enough for her— But it's not enough for him. 

She glares up at him, a hint of reproach when he stops her.

"Forgetting something?" he asks. 

"I'm doing all the work," she grunts. 

"Are you now?" he asks, hands fisting white around her waist. 

"You're a big boy, I'm sure you can deal with your problems by yourself," she says. 

"I thought the deal was you scratch my back, and I scratch yours," he says. At that, her nails claw a stinging line down his back. He slams his hips up, buries himself to hilt, hands on her shoulders pressing her down as she snarls, jerking against his grip. Makes her take it, makes her take him. He bites her. She bites him back, worsens the cut in his mouth, nails dug into his shoulders, and maybe what she is, is a different type of disease, because somewhere between right now and the weeks that came before, he's gone well and truly insane. 

When all of this is over, he thinks, he'll be scraping her out of his marrow. 

x

The heat clings to his skin, beneath his lashes, at his temples. Vietnam takes its toll.

"Still with me, Bell?" he asks.

"Shut the fuck up," she grits out as she takes out another VC. 

Adler would laugh, if it isn't in such bad taste. Still, it's a treat, to be able to see her out of sorts. They never get so close to the bunker again, and Adler runs her through the old missions. 

In the jungle thickets, waiting is half of the torture. 

Rapport is built upon small talk and morale. They spend lengths of time skirting around politics, talking about miscellanea (Adler again, tries to explain football the way she tries to explain the difference between Petrushka and Pinocchio; all of it is futile in the end, of course), and books. James Baldwin, James Ulysses, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Vladimir Nakabov, she's well-read in American literature. More than him, even, although Adler's never been much of a reader.

"You read The Bourne Identity?" he asks, one day, when the thought strikes him, carefully gauging her reaction. Maybe this is testing his luck, the book came out last year, maybe, 1980. A little too on the nose, with the plot.

"Haven't been reading much lately," she says, recognition doesn't flash across her gaze. "Haven't exactly had the time." 

"What's the last thing you read?"

She frowns, mouth pursing down as she tries to remember. Then, a memory sparks in her eyes. "Atlas Shrugged," she says.

It figures. "What'd you think of it?"

"What does anyone ever think of Ayn Rand?" she asks. 

"Fair enough," he says. "You should try it out— Bourne." 

She tilts her head. "What's it about?"

"A man with retrograde amnesia and the skills of an assassin trying to remember his true identity, and his ties to the CIA," he says, eyes fixed on her face. 

She gives him nothing. "You think it'll be helpful to our spy-hunting crusade?" she asks. 

The irony makes him laugh, almost. "Maybe," he says, "you never know." 

"How optimistic of you," she says. "Frankly, I'm shocked." 

He scoffs. "You know me, the optimist," he says. 

x

Bracketed between her hips with the tent closed, she unties the handkerchief and lifts his boonies hat off his head. 

"Bell," he says, curling his fingers around her hips

"Sir," she acknowledges, dipping her head. 

The sunlight coruscates around the top of her head, leaves everything a smear of rainbow gold. The dream shifts, the world is a lazy afterthought. Sims is somewhere in the back of his mind, Park, the mission. Time passes dilated in a dream, he knows, has known— Has felt it. But it's nothing like this, cotton in his mouth, impossibly long. Something's fucked, between the synchronization between hers and his.

"Russell," he corrects. 

The game's changed. He's been thinking about it, what he wants from this, about what happens after the dream ends. The primary objectives remain unchanged. You are Bell. There is a bunker with a red door that will lead to Perseus. But If he plays his cards right... There's room for an ancillary third.

She laughs, a purr deep in her throat, and ignores him as he noses at the line of her shoulder, pretends he's ten years younger than he is. Maybe this much has never changed about him, he'd been wilder in Vietnam, sure, but insanity and impossibility are the cards that he deals in, are what the CIA uses him for. Sure, he chases the tiger for duty, for thrill, to see what happens, whatever fucking purpose they see fit to utilize him for. But he chases the tiger because the day he stops chasing it is the day they bury him. You miss it, Sherry said to him when she left him, full of tearful accusation, you miss Vietnam more than you miss me.

The women in his life have such an annoying habit of being right at the worst times.

She tastes like gasoline. Briefly, he thinks that this might be immolation, buried in the wet heat of her, burning up from the inside out, and then going back for more. It combines together, her, the jungle, the fever. How hot can a flame get before you simply stop being able to tell the difference? 

"...Sometimes I want to rip your throat out," she says, after, eyes half-lidded, tucked against his chest, hands fisted right over his heart. 

Maybe the jig is up. Maybe she knows. 

He should tense, he should be afraid. A beast is a beast, a tiger a tiger. There is the blunt of her finger nails against the base of his skull, fingers cradling around the skin, thumbing through his hair. 

Adler takes her other hand, and presses his mouth to her wrist. She lets him have it, but he feels the muscles tense beneath her skin, the skitter of her pulse. Her nails crusted red with his blood. And— Nothing happens. There's no teeth that follows, no swipe of claws. Just the faint scent of her pleasure, geosmin, the hazy, ever-lingering gunpowder, and the warmth of her against him. 

He's chased the tiger, tamed it, defanged or declawed or whatever it means.

The challenge's done, the puzzle's solved. 

He should be disappointed. Except he's not.There's a new hunger, sudden and terrible, pleasure lighting at the base of his spine. Adler slides his hands up her body, tender, like she's the raw edge of a wound that will scar, his fingers tracing along her stomach where the bullets had been, fits his own hand comfortably around the back of her neck. She lets him. The tiger is his. 

"Come with me to the CIA," he says into her hair, "after this."

It had always been a possibility, a very slim one, because the programming hadn't been taking. Success of the programming would be the panacea that the psyops division had been working towards for a very long time. Being able to have her as an asset would be a happy byproduct of that. A very happy one, indeed. There's no denying how effective she is the field, and how effective she is outside of it. She has the skills, enough of them that he knows he can convince Langley that the payoff is worth the risk. 

"You think we're going to live long enough to find out what happens after this ends?" There's no fear in her voice, no starry-eyed romanticism, just an impersonal note of curiosity, and maybe a trace of judgement towards him for thinking about things like this. 

"We will," Adler says, draws a line down her back, tapping at the ridge of her spine. "Think about it."

"Why? What's in it for me?"

"Because I'm asking," he says, "you know me. I'll make it worth your while." 

She blinks, long and slow, the sweep of her lashes against her cheek. "I know you," she echoes, amused. He wonders if she'll ever understand just how much she does. "I'll think about it." His work is done here, he thinks. 

Night falls, the jungle thickens, the shadows pool on the ground. 

She mumbles in her sleep when Adler shifts, reaching for the sedative from a box beyond the cot. His hand pauses for a moment, and he cards his fingers through her hair. 

"We have a job to do, Bell," he murmurs. 

x

It's fucking cold. 

That's the first thing he registers. 

This dream must be hers. In its entirety. The architecture formed of her base subconsciousness, all of the people her projections. There is nothing they can control here. Yet another risk, but they needed to give her enough freedom to create the bunker herself. 

It's Moscow at night, cold, the wind full of bite. He looks down to find himself in a goddamn suit. That's new. Crowds in formal wear and black tie disperse from the brightly lit building in front of him, the architecture a remnant of the Russian monarchy. White, extravagant. marble columns line the entrance. 

It's the Bolshoi Theatre. Ballet. 

He searches for her in the distance, and pauses, when he finds her. She's in a dress beneath a fur coat, hair loose, cheeks red from the cold, mouth red with lipstick. It confirms his theory, that she came from affluence, somewhere cushy and soft. This one must be the pliable one. The youngest version of her he's seen so far.

"Bell," he says. 

"Adler," she says. Doe eyes nearly stops him in his tracks, and the wrongness of her soft jaw and soft cheeks and soft eyes. 

A sudden, cavernous ache forms inside the maw of his chest.

He misses her, misses the war, the sweltering heat, the tang of copper on his tongue. Her, of the jungle, the darkness. The pointed jut of her shoulders beneath her skin, her eyes sharp like daggers, every part of her razor sharp, cutting himself on her edges. 

"We have a job to do," he says, as the crowds swim past them. Then quieter. "We're looking for something, Bell, do you remember?"

"...Perseus," she says slowly. 

"That's right," he says, coaxing. "Where is he?"

Her teeth dig into her lips. Blunt. "The bunker. Behind the red door."

"Where's the red door, Bell?" 

A breath. "...Somewhere safe," she says, at last. "Sanctuary." Mnemonic buzz words, things she associates with the red door, with the place that Perseus is.

"Take me," he says, almost not daring to breathe, offering her his arm. She takes it. "Take me somewhere safe."

She blinks. Long, slow, drawn-out. "Okay." 

"Good girl," he says. 

They start walking away from the Theatre. The bright lights of Moscow slow fades in the distance. She leads him into the woods, trees with pale barks, lightly dusted with snow. Above them, the skies lighten into a dusty, powder blue and mountains begin to sprout in the distance. Along with it, a set of tall, impenetrable walls. It's the bunker, once so out of place in the Vietnam jungles, slotted perfectly into the cliffs. A red door, searingly bright against the snow.

"Open the door, Bell."

She steps forward, wraps her hand around the handle carefully, and pushes. It doesn't budge. She looks up at him, and shakes her head. 

"I can't," she says, frowning. "I—" 

"What's behind the door, Bell?" he snaps, can't help the impatience that threads into his voice. They don't have much time. "We need to know. 

Her face twists in concentration. She swallows, jaw clenching as she struggles with herself. "I—" she says. "I can't tell you." 

"Sure you can," he says, grabbing her at the shoulders, looking her in the eye. She jerks against him, and he can feel the fight beneath her skin, beneath his palm. "You know me, Bell. Show me." 

"I—" She shakes her head. "No. No, I can't." 

They don't have the time for this. 

"Bell," he says. "Tell me."

Above them, the sky crackles, and flashes lightning blue. There's a bang in the distance, and then another, so loud that it leaves his ears ringing. Gunfire. Fuck. they shouldn't be encountering hostile resistance in this layer. They both drop to the ground, and he yanks her to cover, looking for the source. 

"Don't you dare tell him anything." Russian. It's her voice, but it's not the version of her in front of him, on the ground, eyes-wide in rabbit terror. 

His head snaps towards the sound. 

It's her.

Her from Vietnam, her from the war, her from the jungle. The tiger, prowling out of the darkness, teeth bared in a snarl, out for blood.

"Bell—" he says, a gun materializing in his hand. 

"That is not my fucking name," she growls. Her face splits in her rage, mouth pulled into a snarl. She fires again, and he ducks back behind cover. 

She knows. 

She knows. 

In the distance, the woods they'd come through is collapsing like dominoes, entire trees snapping apart, clean in the middle. The Bell beside him whimpers, face pale. 

"Who—" she gasps and shrieks, as the gun goes off again. 

Park warned him this would happen. Park also warned him that the third layer of the dream would be the most delicate. They can't afford a firefight here. They can't afford to fail. 

Except, except— 

She figured it out. Clever, vicious girl. His beautiful beast, stalking towards them, a hunting rifle in her hands. It's pride the tears through his chest, for a moment, that makes it hard to breathe, to think clearly. 

"Listen to me," he says, raises his hands up in placation, drops the gun. 

"I'm not here for you," she hisses, and aims the muzzle of the gun at herself, the one behind Adler, "I'm here for her." Her fingers curl around the trigger, but then the ground collapses beneath them, and she stumbles, eyes wide, hair whipping behind her. 

The dream is fracturing. The road they'd come from is bent in half, perpendicular to the sky, and then collapsing back on itself, the asphalt falling over them. 

"Get out of here," he says, at the Bell behind him. "Go!" he shouts, at her wide-eyed look. "Go!"

She darts off, feet light over the fissuring ground. 

"No—!" A roar, and Adler lunges forward. She slams the butt of the rifle against his jaw, and the force rattles his teeth, snaps his head back, but she can't do anything about his weight pinning her to the ground. He doesn't know how she followed them down into this layer, but she's tired and exhausted, too exhausted to be cleverer than his strength. He wrestles the gun from her and pins her down as her hands claw at his face, erratic and angry, yowling as she struggles in the snow. An angry beast would sooner gnaw off its legs than die in the trap. 

"Fuck you," she spits and then a flurry of angry Russian curses, her saliva hitting him on the cheek. 

He's well and truly lost his mind. The sight of her rage elicits a rush of heat that scorches through him, makes him nearly light-headed. Beautiful beast, vicious beast, tiger with blood-red fur, blood-stained maw. 

Maybe the correct decision would be to... Kill her. Prune the uncooperative part of her away, there's already no telling what the Somnacin and MK-Ultra will do to her together, so they might as well take every precaution. But this one is his, she's his. She's his. 

"I'll see you soon," he murmurs, nearly gentle, or what would be gentle, if he were capable of it still. "We have a job to do." 

x

"Did it work?" Park asks, on her feet the second he opens his eyes. 

Sims is throwing up into a bag that Lazar is holding up for him, and Woods is bitching about something or another to Mason on the other side. 

Adler pulls out his cigarette and his lighter, his totem. Counts the number of cigarettes, seven and a half, three matchsticks on the bottom. Good. He isn't dreaming anymore. He's woken up. 

"Adler?" 

He ignores her, and rises unsteadily from the chair, stumbles into the other room. 

She's right there, eyes still closed, hands restrained beside her, nearly peaceful. Her heart still charting a steady rhythm on the monitor. 

"Adler?" Park asks, again, from behind him, a pinch to her brows. "Did it work? Did she tell you?" 

"No," he says, once her words registers, and lights a cigarette with shaky fingers. "She didn't tell us what was behind the door." 

It renders Park to silence. "...Oh," she says, at last, for the first time, sounding off-guard. "I... I see. I would've thought—" She sighs, cutting herself off. "She's much more resilient than I expected. It's impressive." No one could expect her. "We'll, well. I'll take her vitals to update the MK-Ultra notes, and we can dispose of the asset." 

"No," he snaps, sharper than she should be. Park jerks in alarm. "I'm keeping her."

She looks at him, eyes-wide. "...What?" 

"I said, I'm keeping her," he says, "as a part of the team."

Park opens her mouth, thinks better of it, and closes it. 

"You were right," he says. "MK-Ultra laid the groundwork, Somnacin filled in the holes."

"But..." Park asks, perplexed. "She didn't tell you what's behind the door."

"She will." The one that wakes up will. 

"You think it'll keep?" Park's turned thoughtful again, although she's put herself between him and the door. "The programming?"

"I do." That's his bet. Another inhale of smoke, and his hands stop shaking.

"Take the restraints off," he decides, nodding at the ties around her wrist.

"Adler." There's a note of warning in Park's voice. She'd told him about a a type of dream shock that plagues people who've just woken up from long dreams. Poor impulse control, unreasonable demands, inability to think logically. The look in her eyes is wary, and she's still between him and the door. 

"Take 'em off," he says. "If I die, you can tell my dead body I told you so."

Park raises her chin, the equivalent of an eye-roll for her, and does it. "I don't know why I bother," she says, and walks out of the room, slamming the door behind her. 

It takes almost an hour for the sedation to wear off. 

She opens her eyes slowly. It's not recognition that flashes across her eyes. It's distrust, her pupils constricting as she looks from him to the room, and then back. Adler stills beneath her gaze, barely daring to breathe. Steady, no sudden movements.

"Bell," he says, roughly, "how do you feel?"

Another blink. Finally, recognition swims in, and the hostility dissolves. Her shoulders relax as she swallows. 

There she is. 

"Like hell," she croaks, voice hoarse, "what the fuck did you do to me?"

"...Kept you alive," he says, reaching out with his hand, and pulls her out of the chair. She's lighter than he remembers. "Come on. We have a job to do. I'll catch you up."

She pauses, and frowns, eyes fierce even beneath the haze of nausea. "I—"

"Bell," he says. Her back straightens at the command in his voice. "It's alright, you're just a little confused right now." 

That's not the answer she wants, it's obvious. She wants to fight it. "What are you—"

"You trust me?" he asks. 

An exhale. Her eyes snap to his. So sharp, sharp enough to draw blood, to flay the flesh from his bones and then scrape it clean. "I know you," she corrects, quiet.

"You do," he agrees.

x

They explain away her confusion and amnesia as head trauma sustained after an unfortunate run-in with Perseus in Turkey. She seems to accept it. A part of him is always wary that one day he'll wake up with her knife at his throat, that she'll remember what he did to her, what she had been before, but it never comes. 

( "You've gone and done it now, you fucking son of a bitch," Hudson says over the phone, that night. Oscillating between satisfaction that the thing had worked and annoyance that it was Adler that made it work. "The shrinks has been blowing up my phone nonstop asking for updates." 

"Don't sound so sad," Adler says. "Told you I'd do it, didn't I?"

"You better keep a tight fucking leash on her," Hudson says, but spares him the lecture, ultimately. Reward for good behaviour, maybe, colour Adler impressed. "If this goes sideways, it's on you."

"Pleasure speaking to you as always," Adler scoffs, and hangs up. )

Bell, as she is, settles into the team easily enough, and things fall into place from there. 

Sims and his half-bleeding heart, always too squishy for Langley. Vietnam of the dream was not real, but real enough that it made him balk. Scotty had been a real low point for both of them. Real enough to draw her into his imaginary camaraderie. Real enough that he ignores the ways she reminds him of Adler. They spend hours talking about football as Bell pretends not to understand the rules again, complaining about Adler, and reminiscing about rations. Sometimes, Sims seems to catch himself, and remember that she hadn't been there, but she smoothes it back over neatly, tying the loose thread close. She's good at playing nice the way that Adler has never been bothered to. 

Lazar, is of no worry, of course. He had been brought on partially for his ability to get along with the teams he's assigned to, and spares no shortage of appreciative glances at her and Park. 

On the subject of Park, well— Weakness for dangerous women aside, Bell is practically her baby. Which gives her the type of incentive that others don't have to be particularly friendly with her. Ally doesn't mean friends, especially with her and Adler, and Park also has plenty of her own self-interests to pursue. So really, it's no one's concern other than his own that Adler strokes Bell's suspicions a little bit, warns her off of Park, the same way Park's warned her off him. Some part of Bell knows to be on wary, despite the part of her that's intrigued. Park had been present for the entirety of the interrogations and the injections, after all, and their relationship hasn't been strengthened by the rapport of going through Vietnam together.

Mason and Woods can be trusted to roll with the punches, both of them worked long enough with Adler to not question things. They respect skill and grit, and she has no shortages of both. She's also damn good at Poker and bullshitting her way through conversations, which is enough for both of them to treat her like the rest of their old war buddies within the week.

"You're fucking crazy," Woods says, after a game of Poker that he lost to her, rather brutally, "you know that. You're crazy, she's crazy, and... The other thing is true, too, huh?" The smile he gives him is crass and leery. 

Adler smiles, humourless. "Glad to see you in a good mood, Woods."

Mason drags a chair over. He'd folded early on in the game and called it quits. "Defensive much, Adler?" 

"You're feeling chatty," Adler observes. 

"You're not?" Mason asks, raising an eyebrow. "You're usually more talkative than this. Thought you'd be all for showing off your brand new toy like you usually are. Be insufferable. Rub it in everyone's face. Give Hudson a fucking aneurysm."

Woods shakes his head and tips his Corona back. "Guess I'm not surprised, you've always had a thing for people that can kill you," he says. "Wouldn't be too shocked if you don't wake up one day, though. She's damn good with that gun."

"And with her hands, too, I'll bet," Mason says, both of them playing off each other like the worst fucking game of monkey-in-the-middle. Except the two of them are the apes. Face-eating ones.

Adler sighs. 

"Alright, alright," Mason says, after they get tired of jibing him, "we're just yanking your chain, you know that." 

"I'm the stand-in while we wait for Hudson?" Adler asks, dry. 

"I'd go for Park, but unlike Lazar over there, I don't want to wake up on an operating table," Woods says. "So you, it is. And Bell." He frowns downs at the cards leftover from the game. 

"I'd say I feel bad for her with your shitty personality, but... Maybe I should be feeling bad for you, instead." Mason laughs some more and pats him on the shoulder, as both of them make themselves scarce. 

x

Somewhere along the way, she finds a copy of The Bourne Identity in German and works through it while she's on mandatory field-leave, as they've called it. 

"Not bad?" Adler asks, despite himself. 

Her shoulders jump at the sound of his voice. She smoothes a finger over the page as she looks at him. "You have shit taste in books, Adler," she says. 

He laughs, dropping onto the seat beside her, folding his leg over his other knee.

She's probably right, but he'll never tell her that.

On the other side of the room, Park gives him a careful look that he catches out of his periphery. 

She traps him outside, a couple days later, for a talk that he knew they'd have eventually. 

"I thought I should warn you again about..." Park struggles for the word. "Aftereffects of dreaming. People... Forming rapports as a result of what happens in the dream is normal, expected. But spending so long at that level of brain activity has been known to, affect people in abnormal ways, shall we say. I just wanted you to, be aware of it." 

Ah. She thinks there's something wrong with him. Maybe he would think the same, if positions were reversed. But the time to fix whatever's wrong with him is long passed. It's also decidedly outside of CIA's best interest to fix him, which is why Hudson always waives mandatory psych evals for him. 

"Duly noted, Agent Park," he says. 

"So long as you know," she says, still watching him like he's about to snap, not at all unlike the way she used to watch Bell. He suddenly gets the feeling that if it ends up being Bell that snaps, Park would be inconveniently indisposed, and then jump for joy if it's him that Bell kills. Throw a party, swoop in right after to whisk Bell away, straight to MI6. 

"I'm sure you're telling me all this out of concern and the kindness of your heart," he says, gesturing with his cigarette.

"Concern, for the objective at hand," Park says cooly. "Catching Perseus." 

"I got this under control," he says. 

Park nods, slow. "If you're sure," she says. Her voice tells him she doesn't believe him. 

x

You've been off-kilter, recently. 

A blow to the head left with you unconscious for two weeks and relegated mostly to paperwork. No brain damage, Park said. Not much difference, Sims snorted.  Should've left you to die in 'Nam, you said, darkly. Too late for that now, Sims laughed.

"Alright, Bell?" Adler asks, after the memory exercise, a cigarette permanently attached to his hand. "I need you in working condition."

You offer a shrug and a vaguely worded answer. 

It's your first time in this safe house, but not your first time in Germany. Strange, that you still can't remember getting here, being assigned the mission. Almost like you're in a dream— Except if you spoke this out loud they'd send you right back to a psychologist in Langley. 

Adler's taken to hovering for some reason you can't discern. The attention is... Well. It is what it is. He's hiding something from you, but he's always hid things from you. Things are need to know, you've found over your career that it's best not to be burdened by knowledge you don't have to be. Especially if it's information that you can't use. 

Maybe as compensation for not letting you back on field, Adler takes you out to East Berlin under the pretext of reconnaissance, also known as an excuse for a long-winded smoke break, the type that the two of you used to take in Da Nang. 

You break into places you shouldn't be in, kill some Stasis and other people you probably shouldn't have, and end up at a shitty hotel for the night, the walls painted in graffiti. 

The door's barely shut before he has you pinned against him. Mouth hot on yours, but his hands still utilitarian as he shucks off your clothes. 

You laugh against his cheek as he shoulders off his jacket. "Miss me?" you murmur, sliding his shades up by the metal legs. How long has it been since you last saw him? Since 'Nam? It hasn't felt like that long. 

He doesn't deign to respond to that and just lays you flat on the shitty bed, rough hands along your sides, noses at the seam between your legs. He laps at your cunt until your teeth punches straight through your bottom lip. And then he fucks you into the mattress until you're sobbing, bullying his cock into your cunt. You burn from the contact, his mouth at your pulse, his hands around your wrist, until he releases your hands to grip the headboards instead, and your score your nails down his back the way you used to, along the skin of his back that have healed since you tried to slit him open last. 

"My back hurts," you complain, after. The mattress creaked all the while. The integrity of the headboard might also be up to debate. At some point, next door had pounded on the wall in protest. 

"Better than Vietnam," he counters. 

You shrug. 

The room is becoming too warm, and you slip your shirt back on to perch against the balcony outside. 

"Nice night," he says, joining you. 

"You take me to the best places," you say, dry. 

It's a view of the city rooftops, not bad, all in all, if you ignore the constant spotlights from the Berlin Wall in the distance. You spend a long time looking at the the buildings, the windows lit in activity. The silhouettes of couple cooking dinner, a child being tucked to bed. Like if you look long enough, you can peer past the curtains and see the mannequins being posed to fit their caricature, and the buildings will unravel into facades, set-pieces designed only to seem real, and the world, the unnerving, unrealness of it, will make sense.

A thumb at your hip, just at the stretch of skin at the hemline of your camisole. Familiar, him, the sillage of smoke, a wordless murmur against your hair as his hand dips further along your skin.

You want to snap his hand clean off when he touches you.

Something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong. ( This is your first lesson, this has always been your first lesson— Trust your instincts. )

A flicker of fire, and then his lighter snapping closed. Adler hands you his cigarette, and you duck your head to take a puff instead of taking it, like old times, as you pretend that your hand trembling the way that it is, gripped around the metal railing. 

Adler steps close, replaces the distance of the cigarette, hand searing warm against your back. 

"What's wrong?" he asks, the sound rumbling out of him. It's an intervention, you realize, and the the concept of that nearly makes you laugh. With anyone else, it'd be a succinct get your shit together or just the shovel out back. But Adler's soft on you, nearly sweet, if you blink. It's Vietnam, seven years together out in the jungle. He can claim he's not sentimental all he wants, but he goes easy on you and Sims, easier than anyone else. 

He's hiding something, from you. You look at him, and ghost your fingertips along the stiff outline of his scar. For a moment, you think to crack him open in the middle and peel it out of him, as your nails begin digging into his cheek, because it's your nature to press advantages, to test limits, to take the mile, and he's no different. But, he gives you nothing. It's just his naked eyes looking at you, a dark amber, unreadable, piercing right through your cranium. 

Something has been off ever since you've stepped foot in Berlin. You can't shake the feeling, can't even remember not feeling off. 

A pounding headache behind your eye, a twinge of pain at your temples after trying too hard to recall something. You don't know. There's a sense of haziness, the world blurring at the edges, time drawing together, waking up with panic clawing at your throat, water filling up your lungs, wanting to scream. You hands ache for a gun, for blood. 

"I don't know," you say. "Bad dream. Da Nang."

"Didn't think you were the type to have nightmares," he says.

"Me either," you say. The thought curdles, the idea that you're disappointing him.

"It's been a while, since Vietnam," he says. 

Five years. But it feels like yesterday. So terrifyingly clear that you can see it when you close your eyes. It's not that it scares you, the gore, the brutality, the violence. No, it's the ever pervasive feeling that it's something more, a symptom of something worse, bleeding into everything. Something is not right. Something is not right. The wrongness of it permeates your every waking moment, ripples under your skin. 

"Good time for a break," he says, suddenly, "after this."

That's not what you expected. You look up at him, searching. The monolith that is Adler gives you no answers. 

You'd left him behind, after Vietnam. You must have, to have stayed away all these years — the summons from Langley, from him, had come as a surprise. You're not sure how you did, how you scraped him from your bones, but you had. And now he's wormed right back into the gaps. 

"...You're thinking far ahead," you say, turning away.

"We're close," Adler says, follows you in the space left behind, relentless, "closer to him than we've ever been." The culmination of a thirteen year long chase for him, the ever-illusive Perseus. 

You crave a cigarette, suddenly, another twinge at your temples as you chase the smoke, fingers spasming. Adler humours you, lets you take the cigarette with your shaky hands, steadied by his own. His other arm draws around you, warm in the chilly evening, pressing you against him. 

Intimacy is discouraged in the trade. This is— Not that. A tool, leverage. The result of going through hell together, some type of fucked-up codependency. What isn't fucked up about the two of you? Asset and handler; you and your commanding officer. He should've known better, you should've known better. 

So what is this then? Why are you here? Why is he here? 

"Why..." The uneasiness stops the word at your throat. Dread pooling in the pits of your stomach. There's something important that you're forgetting, something screaming for you to remember. Why are you here? Why is he here? Your instincts have never led you wrong. You have to remember. You have to. You must. But what is it? 

There's the spotlights in the distance, West and East Berlin, a memory sparking along your synapses. It's on the tip of your tongue, close enough for you to taste it. Remember, remember, you have to remember. 

"What is it, Bell?" he asks, cutting right through your train of thought. Close, again, closer than before, his words quiet between the breath-wide space between your lips and his. 

"Nothing," you say, finally, the thought is gone, vanished in a breath, you think he reads it from your eyes. The feeling is still there— But, if you chase everything that has ever bothered you, you'd go insane. You look at him, and he looks back at you, steady, wordless. You look at him, take in all of the familiar lines of him, the scar on his face, the swipe of a tiger's claw. (Have you ever been attacked by a tiger, Bell?) The tang of nicotine, his favourite brand of cigarettes, the silhouette of his figure, towering over you. You know him. You know him. You know Adler. Things that are known — variables, places, people — are expectable, manageable. You're in control. "It's nothing." 

"Mm, well," Adler says, a curl pale smoke by your ear, tapping his fingers against the dip of your spine, almost like consolation. "If it's important, it'll come back."