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This is a torch song. Touch me and you’ll burn. – Margaret Atwood
She’s spent so many years walking on wire and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now, peace feels like its own kind of danger. She watches her breath fog in the frigid Kashmir air. In, out, in, out, she has to remind herself. A memory of the taste of a gag and the burn of hemp rope rises to the surface, but she pushes it back down, afraid of what else might be unleashed if she lingers on it for too long.
“Ilsa, over here!” a voice calls from the distance. It’s Benji, struggling with a plastic tarp as Luther looks on, stern-faced. “Give us a hand, won’t you?” And it’s almost comical, how one moment can be death, or close to it, and the next, life, in all its stupid, terrible detail. She limps off the stoop of the medical tent, and she can finally feel everything: her back into the table, her whole body through the shelf, Lane’s hand around her throat, his fist to her face.
Ilsa picks up a steel peg and stabs it into a flapping corner of the groundsheet more forcefully than she intends. “How long do you think we’ll have to stay?”
“As long as Sloan wants us to,” Luther replies, eyeing her sullen expression. “We have to be debriefed on site. And Ethan can’t be airlifted until he’s stable.”
Right. Ethan. This man who she has walked away from again and again, only to turn around and encounter in the worst hours. It must be cruel serendipity that every time she rescues him, there is some impending disaster just a hairsbreadth away. Ethan, who leveled the full force of a car into her in Paris, who saved her, and all of their lives today, who touched her like she was something delicate.
The three of them manage to pitch the two tents after much wrangling and cursing. They give Ilsa one all to herself, complete with a damp sleeping bag and a vacuum sealed provision pack of mealy dehydrated food and coffee powder.
She’s reminded of an early assignment as a young field agent out in the Gobi Desert, how she had infiltrated an oil field taken over by insurgents, only to have her cover blown. She had never killed so many men in her life. Almost two dozen. It had taken her handler nearly a month to extract her. She ate saltines and stale jerky, and licked condensation off the walls after the water was cut off. By the time they got to her, she was near delirium, all those dead, rotting bodies – what she was capable of, what she had done.
After that, she stopped counting.
She throws the food into a corner of the tent and lowers herself onto the sleeping bag, even as every muscle protests at the strain. When she’s running, when she’s fighting, she can forget. But now, in this calm without a storm, her mind races and the memories loom large, the stench of fear, the evil she’s seen.
Ilsa closes her eyes, and the past is waiting again, London this time, a dimly lit dungeon, Janik Vinter breathing down her neck, but there’s someone else. It’s Ethan, earnest and unafraid, good luck, she proffers, half-expecting to find him in a pool of his own blood the next moment. She wonders if he remembers that night too, the first time they met. By then, killing was just a thing she did, a tool of the trade. It saddens her a little that Ethan never knew her before, when she was softer, when she believed in things like goodness, and maybe even love.
Ilsa startles at the sound of someone tapping on the door to her tent. She reaches for her gun, fuck, where is it?, before she hears, “Ilsa? It’s me, Julia.” Fuck, again. What could Julia possibly want with her? She unzips the tent flap, and Julia is outside with a flash light which blinds her momentarily.
“Come in,” she squints against the glare. Julia joins her readily, sitting cross legged on the frozen tarp. She seems far too spirited for what she’s gone through today, but Ilsa remembers that this isn’t Julia’s first brush with death.
“How is he?” she asks inanely.
“It’s Ethan,” Julia replies with a kind smile, as if that’s all the answer that’s needed. “I’m not here about him. I wanted to thank you."
For what? Ilsa thinks. For almost taking Ethan and his team out in Paris? For all the times she’s been used as a pawn to lure him and the people he cares about into danger? “You really shouldn’t.”
“What you do, I can’t comprehend it completely, but you helped save me, Patrick, all of us.” Ilsa understands now why Ethan married Julia. She seems gentle, easy to fall in love with. After everything, she still has faith in goodness, in grace, in peace.
The question is unbidden, but it feels like whatever last sliver of humanity is left in Ilsa might depend on the answer. “How did you do it? Afterward?” and her voice is a little too pleading, but by God, she needs to know.
Julia pauses, searching, a wistful sadness. “Did Ethan tell you I’d never even touched a gun before in my life? And to think I married an IMF agent.” The edges of her mouth quirk upward. “And then to have pulled the trigger, killed those men… I thought Ethan was going to die.” A knowing look passes between them. This unfortunate bond they now share. Julia turns to face Ilsa with a hardened, yet vulnerable expression, “You do things to survive, and after you survive, you have to learn to live with what you’ve done.”
So Julia had found medicine, and filling her life with saving others’ had saved her own. But what about Ilsa? A rogue assassin, Atlee had called her, and this is her darkest fear, that perhaps this is all she is, all she can ever be. Even as their paths have crossed back and forth, Ilsa knows that she and Ethan walk differently in the world. She doesn’t think Ethan has ever really dealt in ambiguity the way she has. When evil shows its face to him, it’s with hot breath and bared teeth. She has made too many deals with the devil, spent too long in the grey underbelly, taking a life here, a life there, until she can never wash her hands clean of the blood.
They leave Kashmir three days later. In Delhi, Ethan asks her where she is going. “I don’t know,” she tells him, and it’s the truth.
“You’re free.” He says it like she should be grateful, but there was a time not so long ago when she’d tasted freedom, but had really been in more danger than ever before. She knows now not to put too much stock in deliverance. After all, what good is freedom if all it does is return her to the world?
She doesn’t ask him to come away with her this time. She doesn’t suggest that he go looking for her either. She says goodbye to all of them, Benji, Luther, Ethan, these good, decent men, like it might be the last time. Before she turns to leave, Ethan grabs her upper arm and pulls her toward him. “Take care, Ilsa,” he whispers into the shell of her ear, and she’s not sure if the ache in her chest is something breaking or mending.
In the end, Ilsa finds herself in London, her old stomping grounds, where all the demons can settle in and learn to get along. She spends her nights roaming the city, riding her bike too fast, getting drunk, fucking strangers, waking up in unfamiliar beds. She spends her days hungover, forgetting, or at least trying to, draping herself over the drab furniture in her new flat, all sterile white walls, no photos, no memories, nothing.
She keeps a calendar on the refrigerator where she marks the days since she’s last killed anyone, like an addict sobering up, a week, then two, a full month. It’s the same number of days since their last mission, since she’s seen Ethan. She scolds herself for the thought. That part of her life, MI6, the IMF, all of it, is closed. This next part has to be about something close to atonement.
Why then, does her body still feel like a weapon? She thinks she’s weaned herself off the thrill of danger, but the slightest touch turns her into a livewire, and everybody is a threat, and every part of her is a target. She tries to fuck it out of her system, after all, for her, sex and violence are this close together, but it only complicates things more. This is another way she walks through the world differently than Ethan. Agents are expected to use every tool at their disposal. For her, that meant her body too.
How many marks had she let put their hands on her? How many had she let hurt her because she believed she was in control? So many sick men who’d liked something in her and more times than she wanted to admit, she’d liked it too. It didn’t help to dwell on this either – so many things she couldn’t think about too carefully, so many memories that were never meant to be excavated.
Once, in the early hours of the morning, she takes a young, dumb thing home, and he’s overeager, the angle all wrong, and she’s frankly more interested in watching the sunrise as he pants above her, but then he presses the heel of his palm into a bruised rib that’s not quite healed yet, and fuck, it’s good, and after she comes for the first time in a long time, she wonders why she’s wired the wrong way, if this is her life now, disarmed, waiting, wanting.
Ethan recognizes Ilsa on the Thames Embankment one morning by her familiar, determined gait. He won’t admit it, but he’s been searching for her, and she hasn’t made herself very difficult to find. Some small knot of worry untangles in his gut as he watches her; she looks well, less ashen than all those months ago, less burdened. As she approaches him, he tries to catch her attention, but her clear green eyes are distant. Perhaps, a voice in his head challenges, she is better because of and not despite his absence from her life.
Before he can contemplate all the consequences of what he is doing by tracking her down like prey, she is standing across from him, jaw set, face unreadable. “Ilsa,” – and it already sounds like begging.
At first, she thinks she is in one of those dreams again, those half-nightmares where something awful is about to happen, but she’s grateful that at least the two of them will be together when it does. But then he’s right there and his voice isn’t filled with dread, only an emotion she can’t quite pinpoint, like longing, but worse, like he has been missing her, like he wants something from her.
“It’s good to see you,” he murmurs, and he reaches his arm out as if for a handshake, and Ilsa wants to scream or slap him or do both at once. Can’t he see all this violence that’s been simmering just beneath the surface, all of her barely contained lethality? He’s not safe here, she thinks, or maybe she’s the one in danger.
She grasps his extended forearm and squeezes hard, digs her nails in so he really feels it. “Ethan, whatever it is you’re looking for, it’s not me,” she bites off every word like it burns. This time, he’s the stony-faced, unreadable one. He doesn’t try to withdraw, doesn’t even flinch as she sinks her nails in deeper, drawing blood.
They’re like a bad tableau, hurt and hurting. Finally, finally he takes his hand to cup her face, and he wouldn’t know it, but she remembers a time when Lane did this to her too, and Ethan forces out through gritted teeth, “Please, Ilsa.”
She can’t possibly give what he’s asking of her. Five little pink gashes dot his arm, and his hand is still cupping her face, hard. They are not good for each other, she realizes in a moment of clarity, but then she looks back into his eyes, and she recognizes that haunted expression like it was her own. No, maybe they aren’t good for each other, but even this has to be better than whatever she is now, alone, a ghost in corporal form, and barely there at that.
She brings Ethan back to her flat and he blanches in the doorway. “You live here?” She doesn’t dignify it with a response, just slams the door shut behind him, and makes her way to the refrigerator for drinks.
Ilsa’s apartment reminds him of an untouched dollhouse, the matching furniture, empty walls, cool daylight filtering through vertical blinds like a jail cell. She pops the lids off two bottles of beer and hands him one. The caps go into a waste bin beside him which is as white as the wallpaper. On the inside, a broken wine glass, an apple core, a used condom, an empty blister pack of painkillers. “This is how I come home,” she’d said to him once, almost hopeful, but what kind of a home is this?
They’ve been through hell and back together, but the two of them sitting here in each other’s company feels far more treacherous than anything they’ve ever done in the field. One wrong move, and all of this might implode. Ethan notices the calendar on the fridge marked up in red pen, the ascending numbers in the corners of each crossed off date. Days since what?
Ilsa notices. “It’s how long I’ve been good for.” The way she says it, like she’s disciplining a child or a dog makes him feel sick.
What happened to you? he wants to ask, but he’s afraid of the answer. She knows him, what he is and what he’s done, but he can’t say the same of her. Elusive is one thing, how she’s always been, but this new brittleness, a little hollow, like she can’t come up for air, frightens him.
She can’t stand the way Ethan looks at her, wide-open and generous, too sincere. She wants his eyes off her, so she reaches out and cups his face in a mirror of his earlier gesture and presses her open mouth to his. Good. Now she can’t feel his gaze on her at all. He tastes hoppy and sweet and nervous, and maybe this doesn’t have to be such a bad idea.
The last time she was with Ethan, she had been prepared to die. So the animal part of her brain remembers that distant threat, and the adrenaline ratchets, bitter and buzzing. She takes his lower lip between her teeth, nibbles gently then bites down hard enough to make him gasp. He’s already better than any of the nameless, faceless men from the last few months.
He’s responsive in all the right ways, groaning when she sucks at the skin beneath his earlobe, tightening his grip on her thighs when she runs her tongue over a scar on his jawline. It’s exciting that he’s very much alive, right here with her, after all the times she’s seen him near death, or nearly killed him herself.
Ethan’s hands drift up under the hem of her shirt, his fingers cool against the warm flesh of her abdomen. He doesn’t know it yet, but there are other fingerprints there, purple and green and yellow, other men who have been here, other hands which have touched her. She wishes it wasn’t this way, wonders if they can wait until nighttime and she can turn off all the lights and close the blinds, but then his teeth are on the pulse at her throat and he’s palming her through her bra, and who cares if it’s cloudless midday in London, he’ll figure it out soon enough.
Ilsa guides Ethan to the adjoining bedroom, and those same eggshell walls, the starched linens, the fluorescent lights, remind him of hospital rooms he’s a little too well-acquainted with. The bed’s been made like she might have gone to boarding school, but she flings the covers off and pushes him down so that she’s straddling him, and God, she’s gorgeous and lithe and he’s actually out of breath.
She tilts her head down for another bruising kiss before she takes her top off, and that’s when he sees it, the patchwork map of bruising across her torso and the fresh welting just above the line of her hipbones, and Christ, what has she done to herself. Ilsa doesn’t seem particularly concerned, grasping his hands to place them at the bra clasp at her back, tugging at his pants, grinding down against him with short gasps.
She can feel his eyes on her again, and for good reason this time, but what does he want her to say? That she won’t be able to come unless he hurts her? That sex is violence and violence is punishment and punishment just might be absolution? Instead, she paws at his shirt until he relents and reassures him with “I’m fine,” as she drags her fingernails across his chest, and it’s not until he grips both her wrists that she has to stop, aching and inscrutable.
“What is this, Ilsa?” he whispers as he traces the line of a belt mark down to where it disappears beneath her waistband. She exhales at his touch, the way he treats her like she’s someone worthy of reverence, and she hates that he understands her like this, knows it’s not just rough sex, not just some kink fulfilled, that she’s actually gone looking for atonement and found it in all the wrong places.
She peels her pants and underwear off in one long motion, and the rest of the map reveals itself, blue mottling between her thighs, a bite mark’s full set of teeth in the tender flesh just above her pelvis. She can feel the hard edge of his arousal against her leg, but the rest of him is still, hands at her waist, breath shallow.
It’s strange how he can crave her and grieve her all at once, and he wonders how many men have looked at her and only seen something breakable, something to be used. He is intimate with her capable and lethal strength, with all the ways her resiliency and resolve have saved his life. Whatever this is, he decides, committing the shades and scars on her pale skin to memory, it cannot be the sum of who she is or what she has done.
Ilsa unbuckles Ethan with quick fingers, focused but impatient, and then they’re equals in their nakedness as he finally unclasps her bra and runs his fingers over a rosy nipple which pebbles under his touch. She wraps her hand around his cock and he has to stifle a groan, his control crumbling at the sight of her biting her swollen lower lip as she tests him.
He’s clearly ready, and she’s been more than for a while, so she’d really rather not faff about when he could be inside her right now, and – fuck, he’s worked his hand between her thighs and his fingers graze over her clit and she’s so keyed up that she wants to grind down harder and get him away all at once. In one swift move he has her beneath him and her legs tangle with his for purchase, but he’s moving down her body, nipping and teasing and tasting as he goes. He doesn’t even touch her, just blows cool air onto her cunt, and she’s bucking her hips up to meet him.
She cards her fingers through his hair as he runs his tongue over her and a keening sound escapes her when he slips a finger into her, stroking gently. It’s so fucking good, Ethan’s mouth, the ratcheting tension low in her stomach, his deft fingers, and she’s so close – but that shadow part of her just won’t let her. She wants to tell him, just find a tender spot to sink your teeth in or take an open hand and slap me or a closed fist and hit me, but she can’t bring herself to do this to him. He’s not some drunk stranger from a seedy pub who likes to watch her flinch; he’s Ethan, who she trusts and wants and cares for, more than she can admit.
Every nerve ending in her is alight, and she feels like one wide open wound. I need you. Ilsa tugs at his hair so that he looks up at her, “Ethan, please,” she begs and her voice is distant and frantic. The wait feels like forever as he braces above her and lines himself up, but then that first thrust is delicious and sore and friction in all the right ways. She likes that his steely resolve is gone now and all that’s left is his uneven rhythm and glassy eyes looking into hers.
He’s holding back, she can feel it in the thrumming energy beneath his skin, wants her to come first, but maybe it has to be enough that they’re together like this, and they can save the romantic idealism for another day. “It’s okay,” she murmurs into the cut of his jaw, urging him on, wrapping her legs behind his back, meeting him thrust for thrust. He goes still, tense and carnal, and then he groans, low and desperate, trying to bury the sound in the hollow of her throat, but she thinks she can make out her name.
He collapses onto his forearms above her, and inside her, he’s warm and wet and languid. Ilsa brushes a stray strand of hair off his damp forehead and when he lifts his head to look at her, his pupils are dark and blown-wide, and his breath is ragged. He slips out of her and rolls over onto the other side of the bed inelegantly. She already misses the hard weight and force of him against her.
She moves to get up, but he grasps her left wrist, “Ilsa,” he starts, and he sounds almost afraid, like the two of them might be out of second chances. She wonders if this was a mistake after all, if sex is never just sex, if they are doomed to repeat this again and again, walking into each other’s lives only to leave wreckage behind when they go. “Why?” he whispers, brows furrowed, but from the way he asks, she knows it’s not really a question. His hands drift over her body, barely caressing, until he reaches a bruise in the shape of a handprint on her stomach which is healing yellow at the edges.
She remembers the man the handprint belongs to, or at least the smell of danger on him, how she’d gone looking for it that night, how he’d sidled up to her at the bar counter, maybe smelled the wanting on her too. It wasn’t hard to find men like that, men who liked cruelty, who liked to hurt her. Lane, Atlee, even the man from the bar, all of them with their sick delusions of power and violence had seen something in her. And what about Ethan? What did he see in her?
She remembers Morocco, water in her lungs, the dead weight of Ethan’s body, the bright relief when the defibrillator had revived him. Her purview was killing, so why had she saved him? The answer has to be somewhere here, in the way he touches her, allows her pensive silence, sees something redeemable in her. She closes the space between them, nestles beside him, a little cold without the warmth of sex and his body. “What I went searching for, Ethan, it’s not here, not like this.”
He knows what it takes for Ilsa to confess this to him and wants to get it right. “You’re out now. You made it out the other side.” She smiles at him, wry yet beautiful.
“What it’s like to kill someone, feel them die because of you,” she says with a shudder, and he pulls her in closer, wraps his arm around her narrow frame. “All the things I’ve done to people, all the things I’ve let people do to me.”
As if he hasn’t lived it too, hasn’t also maimed and killed people? But even without this self-flagellating display, Ethan knows it’s not the same. “Ilsa, you’re alive. You survived. You’re here. With me.” The way he says it, as if it’s the most self-evident thing in the world, like it really, truly matters, begins to thaw that numb and aching thing inside her. Yes, she’s alive, thrillingly, wonderfully alive, and so is Ethan, real and breathing and irrefutably corporeal.
She had returned to the world all those months ago, but she had forgotten how to return to herself. She had thought she was a monster, an assassin, something totally other, but in the end, she was only human, maybe even a little too much so, just flesh and bone and blood. The sight of her body is proof enough of that.
It was incredible, wasn’t it, what the mind could withstand and not break, what the body could endure and not bow? She had spent so long being unkind to herself, when all she needed was healing. She had wasted so much time looking over her shoulder, trying to read the encroaching darkness, when the path ahead of her was clean and patient.
“Say it again,” she whispers, placing her hand over his, still splayed over the discolored handprint on her stomach.
“You’re alive, Ilsa,” he replies, fervent. The idea of being alive, of life itself, is electrifying beyond words. She wants to live, wants to fight and fuck and fall in love the way living people do. She guides Ethan’s hand down her body, to the apex of her thighs, where she’s still ready and yielding from earlier. She gasps at the first touch of his fingers on her, raw and rapturous.
She remembers, years ago, staring Lane down, daring him to kill her, even handing him the gun. What had there been left to fear from death when she knew what happened to the living? But back then, she hadn’t known this: Ethan’s fingers curling inside her, the heel of his palm pressing against her clit, her pulse pounding where his mouth is on the jugular at her throat.
Fuck, she’s so close, and this time it’s ardent instead of agonizing, and she just needs to let go. And then he twists his hand just so, and his thumb grazes right there, and she’s coming apart at the seams but in the best kind of way. She can hear herself moaning, feel herself thrashing against Ethan and the bed, but she’s somewhere a little outside herself, floating above. His voice rumbling sweet nothings brings her back down, and she’s dazed but sated, twitching with an aftershock as he slips out of her.
Ilsa offers her open mouth up to Ethan for a bruising, breathless kiss. He startles when she releases what sounds like a sob, and he pulls away, but as he cups her jaw to look into her eyes, he is surprised that she is actually laughing, bright and delicate.
She wonders: perhaps this is joy.
Some days are better than others. Sometimes her thoughts still blacken, returning to memories of the stench of fear and death. Sometimes, when she itches beneath her skin, she dreams of hands closing around her neck, of being thrown against the wall, of a belt cracking across her back until she bleeds.
But most of the time, she is just ferociously alive, trying to find her freedom in the things that matter. She shows Ethan around her London stomping grounds, her old neighborhood, the MI6 building, and his fresh eyes breathe new life into a city she thought she might never feel at home in again. All those nights she spent roaming the city like an animated corpse, reveling in the danger, only to forget all the beauty that showed itself in the light of day.
Of course, there are some places he knows even better than her. When Ilsa takes Ethan to the Tate Modern, he jokes that he can give her a guided tour up the elevator shaft. His eyes twinkle as he says it, but the thought of him dangling high above the ground isn’t particularly funny. She finds that she likes being with him just as much, maybe even more, when there’s no running or shooting or fighting involved.
One night, maybe a week later, they are curled around each other, post-coital, on the sofa in Ilsa’s living room. He presses his lips to her hairline. “I have to go back to Virginia soon. Sloan, the team, they’re starting to wonder.” She tenses. Is this the beginning of the end? She remembers all those other endings, asking him to come away with her, telling him to find her.
But now, there is no one stopping her from going with him, no where she needs to disappear to in order to be found. The possibilities stretch out ahead of her, wide open. Ethan reads her uncertainty and tilts his head down for a kiss, but when she closes her mouth over his, she tastes only sweet and buoyant and hopeful.