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charybdisTitle: Leave the gun on the table
Characters: Ethan Hunt/William Brandt
Summary: Leave the gun on the table (this has nothing to do with happiness) Written for this prompt on the M:I4 kinkmeme. NC-17, 2,500 words.
Notes: Title from Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out by Siken
Thirty stories isn't that far to fall, but he's out of practice, and when he looks at Hunt, he's still riding the edge of the buzzing adrenaline rush. He barely has time to realize that his eyes are hooded, mouth open, and he must look like he's gagging for it, fixating on the curl of Hunt's mouth for just an instant too long. Next thing he knows, Hunt's pushed him against the brick wall of the alley, mouths forced together, slick and too good.
It only lasts a second -- one thousand one -- but a full second is nothing to be sneezed at in the middle of a run like this, and he shoves Hunt off out of reflex, ignoring the deep, irritated sound that he makes, the way it grates rough and possessive in his chest.
William knows it doesn't mean anything, knows firsthand the way that Hunt's mouth twists to the side, more frustrated than embarrassed, not sorry at all.
One month with this team has taught him better than to bother with surprise -- he licks his lips just to watch Hunt track the movement, says, "Mission comes first," and watches the annoyance on Hunt's face transform into something anticipatory, hungry.
"Rendezvous Delta," Hunt says into his radio, not breaking eye-contact. Then he grins and wraps his hand around the mic before he says, for William alone, "First one there gets to top."
William has never reached a rendezvous so fast in his life.
***
The whole thing was Hunt's fault anyway -- until Hunt showed up, he'd forgotten the way that danger seared through his blood, lit him up like a chain gun, like a flame thrower -- so it only makes sense that Hunt should have to help him out.
***
William goes to Tokyo when the team is stood down. He likes Tokyo -- it's the only place in the world where you can feel truly alone, and still have access to the internet and all the other niceties of civilization.
He's Billy Takegawa, born and raised in Japan, adopted, obviously, by friends of the family when his American parents died in an unfortunate earthquake. He's a country boy making a living in the big city, right down to the repressed regional accent. Billy's adoptive family have grown apart over the years -- drama among the younger generation -- but he still sends gifts and money on holidays, cards and letters when he can. Doesn't like to drink, kind of boring guy -- ask anyone.
(The real Takegawas are a government-agency family through and through, and they are happy to maintain his identity in exchange for the occasional impossible favor.)
He's been keeping tabs on the rest of the team's locations -- technically, that's Dunn's responsibility, but William has been trained for back office too, and useful habits die hard.
Carter is in Albany, doing standard security work with New York state prison auditors -- strange, but whatever, bodyguard work is her thing. Dunn is in Florida, a fact that William only knows because Dunn visits his parents whenever he gets half a chance but he's good enough to cover his own trail -- Dunn is, for all intents and purposes, on a beach in Jamaica. And Hunt is in Seattle, watching Julia. Because that's his thing.
But by the end of the month, Hunt is on a flight to Paris. Chances are good -- better than good -- that he's going to rent a car and drive much too fast down to Monte Carlo and spend the rest of his downtime seducing beautiful women, just so he can send them home at the end of the evening. William thinks he gets some kind of perverse thrill from it.
So, when Hunt checks into the Fairmont Monte Carlo, William is already there, sprawled on the luxurious bedspread, with his shoes still on. He likes the way that Hunt draws on him reflexively, a blur of movement and staring down the barrel of the Beretta -- likes it maybe too much, but hey, hazard of the job, right? -- and when Hunt demands to know why he's there, he opens his hands in a gesture of innocence, says, "I was bored."
"There's an unbooked suite in the Hotel de Paris," Hunt says. "I'll even give you a head start." He's smiling, a slow burn of challenge -- he holds up his phone, the timer set for six minutes and running down fast. "Well, what are you waiting for?"
William rappels out of the window -- and coincidentally straight into the Mediterranean Sea -- just for the hell of it.
***
It's not a power-play thing.
Oh, they say that the one that gets there first gets to top, but last time, Hunt tricked William into thinking that he'd gotten there late, waited until he crossed the threshold to reveal himself and his cocky fucking grin, ten feet outside. This time, William throws Hunt bodily through the door, and he's naked, ass-up on the bed before Hunt has even recovered his breath.
***
"You know what your problem is, Brandt?"
William has heard it all before, so he snarls, "Overthinking," above the howling of the wind coming off the bay. If anyone asks, he's going to claim that it's the strain of catching Hunt again, twice in twenty minutes, watching his body swing out over empty air and dark water, one thousand feet up.
"Nah. You don't know how to take a risk," Hunt says. And then he lets go.
The bottom drops out of William's stomach, but he's relatively sure that the muffled curse he hears is Jane over the radio, not him.
Hunt's luck being what it is, the cobbled-together wingsuit -- there's duct tape involved, William's professional pride may never recover -- works perfectly, and he manages to make a passable landing into the bay, despite not having anything resembling a proper chute. William doesn't actually watch most of the flight, because he's enacting Plan 2, opening the safe, the code to which he's got three options for, all of them nothing more than guesses, and yes, thank you, he's aware that the lock is rigged to blow if he doesn't get it right the second time.
It's a straightforward electronic lock and William knows he has just under half a minute to get the goods or get himself blown up, twenty-seven seconds of diversion that will end with Hunt in the freezing bay water, definitely soaked and only probably unharmed. His hands move, swift and unerring, through the first code, to the muted click-click of the buttons, and he barely registers the way the red light comes on, indicating that he has just one more try.
All of William's guesses are based on a detailed and complex knowledge of the oyabun's other passwords and personal life. He'd ranked his three options in order of likely success, but he enters the lower-priority one, doesn't hesitate, because his twenty-seven seconds are running out, and Hunt isn't right about what William's problem is -- just wrong in a brand-new way. William enters the oyabun's oldest daughter's cell number, the one in college that he calls every week, even though she hasn't spoken a word to him since she stormed out of the family home.
He's thinking of the surveillance tape, the way that the oyabun touched his phone to his forehead after his daughter hung up on him, week after week -- he's thinking about the way Hunt puts the heel of his hand in the same place, after he's watched Julia walk away again, about the taut curve of Carter's mouth each time Hanaway's name comes up.
Later on -- after they've fished a sopping Hunt out of the bay and given Dunn his due for a flawlessly executed database hack -- Carter asks, "How did you know the combination?"
William shrugs, says, "I guessed," because he's wrung out, tired, pleased with himself and this team, and he can't be bothered to explain.
"Fucking good guess," Dunn says, impressed.
William grins says, "I'm a fucking good guesser." Because that's what an analyst is, after all.
Across the room, Hunt looks up from where he's cleaning the salt water out of his gun, catches his eye and smiles, thin and sharp, as if he knows exactly how William picked the code.
William just keeps smiling, the cocky grin borrowed and strange on his face, an expression that all of them are catching, a symptom of being on Hunt's team.
Doesn't know how to take a risk, his ass.
***
By the time William gets to the apartment in Singapore, they've been stood down for a week and a half, and he's woken up three nights running with a hard-on, to the feeling of Hunt's slick wrist twisting out of his hand.
The apartment is one of William's old boltholes, an address that Hunt presented him with, baring his teeth in something that might have been a grin, if William wasn't already taut with adrenaline at the idea of being caught, no matter how vague.
He only has to wait three minutes for Hunt to catch up -- any other agent would have spent hours trying to get past the traffic choke-points that William engineered. But Hunt took the rooftops instead. Any other agent wouldn't have a hope in hell of catching William, not here, not in this city.
When Hunt shows up, William bows him through the door, and follows after, casually flicking all the locks shut. Hunt raises his eyebrows, already squared up for a fight, hands loose at his sides.
William doesn't disappoint. He closes at once, attempts to throw Hunt over his hip, and gets an elbow in the neck for his trouble. Things devolve quickly into something like sparring -- if there were such a thing as strip-sparring. The bedroom door flies open, leaving scratches in the paint, reverberating against the bare walls. William loses all his clothes along the way, but Hunt crashes onto the bed, shirtless, and William scrambles after, straddles his hips and pins him.
He presses Hunt's wrists over his head, says, "Keep 'em there," not because he expects it to happen, but because he likes the way it makes Hunt's eyes light in challenge.
William grabs the lube and gets to the business of working himself open, fingers slippery. He traces the thin scars along Hunt's ribs with his free hand, doesn't bother asking. He's seen enough of Hunt's file that he can track the mission history in the unmarred space between ribs and hip, as much as in the scars themselves. Like reading from someone else's notes, a secondhand memory.
"You just gonna look?" Hunt asks. He writhes, somehow managing to suggest obscenity, even with his pants still on. His hands come to rest on William's thighs, hot and wanting.
William presses a third finger in alongside the other two, watches Hunt's mouth go slack, barely even notices the edge of pain at the stretch. He kneels up to give Hunt a better view of his fingers, pushing into his ass. Hunt's fingers clutch convulsively at his thighs.
Eventually, William gets up to find a condom, and Hunt's pants disappear to some far-flung corner of the room. The curtains are still open, but they're twenty stories up, and there are no clear sightlines into this apartment -- that's why William chose it in the first place.
Hunt jumps him as soon as the pants are off, of course. But William knows what he wants, and he's not above fighting dirty to get it.
He slides a hand between them as Hunt wrestles him the ground, conveniently situated between William's legs, hips too high, completely distracted by William's hand on his dick -- William would be concerned for Hunt's career, if he'd ever seen Hunt make this mistake in the field. It takes almost no effort to flip their positions so that William ends up on top, pinning him down, pressed all along his body. Hunt is a hand-to-hand expert, but William has a height advantage and all the leverage. Besides, Hunt knows better than to fight a good thing, and he stops trying to gain the upper hand once William lines up and pushes back onto his dick, takes him in one slick slide.
"I'm not looking forward to rug burn on my ass," Hunt says, but regardless, he's doing that full-body undulation that makes William see stars of pure lust, writhing enticingly when William shoves his shoulders down and starts riding him, fluid and slow.
"Should'a thrown me on the fuckin' bed, then," William growls. "Should'a -- unh, " he sits up to get that last fraction of an inch of Hunt's dick inside of him -- "planned ahead."
"You're seriously still pissed that I -- fuck, do that again." It takes Hunt a few more seconds to finish his thought. "I didn't follow the plan?"
William says, "Shut up," bears down until Hunt's eyes cross, until Hunt grabs for his hips, and -- yes -- he's going to have bruises there in a few hours, finger-shaped ones that fit Hunt's hands. In another life, Hunt would wake him up in the morning, fitting his hands over those bruises and biting a mark onto the angle of his collarbone.
Instead, Hunt thrusts up into him, and William holds Hunt down by the throat, uses his free hand to grab for his own dick, jerk off. Hunt hits his prostate on the upstroke, and William swears, bites his own lip, and comes all over Hunt's stomach.
"Oh-- fuck," Hunt slams into him once, twice, and that's it -- his hands go tight- tighter- on William's hips and he arches like he's been hit with an iron brand, searing heat, all the breath going out of him at once.
William eases off and settles onto the bed, a little to the side, avoiding the mess of come on Hunt's skin.
"Not about the plan, huh?" Hunt rubs the place where William's hand wrapped around his throat, but the red marks are fading already, no sign of bruising.
William sighs, drapes his forearm over his eyes and can't quite decide how to answer that.
It's never been about the plan. William has been IMF for almost a decade -- if he couldn't come up with options on the fly, he'd be dead by now -- dead or worse, disavowed. He's just tired of people thinking he's got a problem, tired of being read all wrong, as if he's not self-aware enough to know what his own fucking limits are. It's not his job to make Hunt understand this. And anyway, Hunt gets it already, in his own way, the way that he looked up William's file before he decided to trust him with the lives of his team.
"I got the job done," William says, instead.
Hunt is still rubbing his fingers over his throat, but he's looking at the prints of his hands on the pale skin of William's hips. He runs his tongue over his teeth, and William thinks about the way he is with Julia, not desperate but resigned, lost and enjoying it, not like this, sharp and always on edge, burning with challenge and adrenaline.
"That's what matters," Hunt agrees.
Characters: Ethan Hunt/William Brandt
Summary: Leave the gun on the table (this has nothing to do with happiness) Written for this prompt on the M:I4 kinkmeme. NC-17, 2,500 words.
Notes: Title from Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out by Siken
Thirty stories isn't that far to fall, but he's out of practice, and when he looks at Hunt, he's still riding the edge of the buzzing adrenaline rush. He barely has time to realize that his eyes are hooded, mouth open, and he must look like he's gagging for it, fixating on the curl of Hunt's mouth for just an instant too long. Next thing he knows, Hunt's pushed him against the brick wall of the alley, mouths forced together, slick and too good.
It only lasts a second -- one thousand one -- but a full second is nothing to be sneezed at in the middle of a run like this, and he shoves Hunt off out of reflex, ignoring the deep, irritated sound that he makes, the way it grates rough and possessive in his chest.
William knows it doesn't mean anything, knows firsthand the way that Hunt's mouth twists to the side, more frustrated than embarrassed, not sorry at all.
One month with this team has taught him better than to bother with surprise -- he licks his lips just to watch Hunt track the movement, says, "Mission comes first," and watches the annoyance on Hunt's face transform into something anticipatory, hungry.
"Rendezvous Delta," Hunt says into his radio, not breaking eye-contact. Then he grins and wraps his hand around the mic before he says, for William alone, "First one there gets to top."
William has never reached a rendezvous so fast in his life.
***
The whole thing was Hunt's fault anyway -- until Hunt showed up, he'd forgotten the way that danger seared through his blood, lit him up like a chain gun, like a flame thrower -- so it only makes sense that Hunt should have to help him out.
***
William goes to Tokyo when the team is stood down. He likes Tokyo -- it's the only place in the world where you can feel truly alone, and still have access to the internet and all the other niceties of civilization.
He's Billy Takegawa, born and raised in Japan, adopted, obviously, by friends of the family when his American parents died in an unfortunate earthquake. He's a country boy making a living in the big city, right down to the repressed regional accent. Billy's adoptive family have grown apart over the years -- drama among the younger generation -- but he still sends gifts and money on holidays, cards and letters when he can. Doesn't like to drink, kind of boring guy -- ask anyone.
(The real Takegawas are a government-agency family through and through, and they are happy to maintain his identity in exchange for the occasional impossible favor.)
He's been keeping tabs on the rest of the team's locations -- technically, that's Dunn's responsibility, but William has been trained for back office too, and useful habits die hard.
Carter is in Albany, doing standard security work with New York state prison auditors -- strange, but whatever, bodyguard work is her thing. Dunn is in Florida, a fact that William only knows because Dunn visits his parents whenever he gets half a chance but he's good enough to cover his own trail -- Dunn is, for all intents and purposes, on a beach in Jamaica. And Hunt is in Seattle, watching Julia. Because that's his thing.
But by the end of the month, Hunt is on a flight to Paris. Chances are good -- better than good -- that he's going to rent a car and drive much too fast down to Monte Carlo and spend the rest of his downtime seducing beautiful women, just so he can send them home at the end of the evening. William thinks he gets some kind of perverse thrill from it.
So, when Hunt checks into the Fairmont Monte Carlo, William is already there, sprawled on the luxurious bedspread, with his shoes still on. He likes the way that Hunt draws on him reflexively, a blur of movement and staring down the barrel of the Beretta -- likes it maybe too much, but hey, hazard of the job, right? -- and when Hunt demands to know why he's there, he opens his hands in a gesture of innocence, says, "I was bored."
"There's an unbooked suite in the Hotel de Paris," Hunt says. "I'll even give you a head start." He's smiling, a slow burn of challenge -- he holds up his phone, the timer set for six minutes and running down fast. "Well, what are you waiting for?"
William rappels out of the window -- and coincidentally straight into the Mediterranean Sea -- just for the hell of it.
***
It's not a power-play thing.
Oh, they say that the one that gets there first gets to top, but last time, Hunt tricked William into thinking that he'd gotten there late, waited until he crossed the threshold to reveal himself and his cocky fucking grin, ten feet outside. This time, William throws Hunt bodily through the door, and he's naked, ass-up on the bed before Hunt has even recovered his breath.
***
"You know what your problem is, Brandt?"
William has heard it all before, so he snarls, "Overthinking," above the howling of the wind coming off the bay. If anyone asks, he's going to claim that it's the strain of catching Hunt again, twice in twenty minutes, watching his body swing out over empty air and dark water, one thousand feet up.
"Nah. You don't know how to take a risk," Hunt says. And then he lets go.
The bottom drops out of William's stomach, but he's relatively sure that the muffled curse he hears is Jane over the radio, not him.
Hunt's luck being what it is, the cobbled-together wingsuit -- there's duct tape involved, William's professional pride may never recover -- works perfectly, and he manages to make a passable landing into the bay, despite not having anything resembling a proper chute. William doesn't actually watch most of the flight, because he's enacting Plan 2, opening the safe, the code to which he's got three options for, all of them nothing more than guesses, and yes, thank you, he's aware that the lock is rigged to blow if he doesn't get it right the second time.
It's a straightforward electronic lock and William knows he has just under half a minute to get the goods or get himself blown up, twenty-seven seconds of diversion that will end with Hunt in the freezing bay water, definitely soaked and only probably unharmed. His hands move, swift and unerring, through the first code, to the muted click-click of the buttons, and he barely registers the way the red light comes on, indicating that he has just one more try.
All of William's guesses are based on a detailed and complex knowledge of the oyabun's other passwords and personal life. He'd ranked his three options in order of likely success, but he enters the lower-priority one, doesn't hesitate, because his twenty-seven seconds are running out, and Hunt isn't right about what William's problem is -- just wrong in a brand-new way. William enters the oyabun's oldest daughter's cell number, the one in college that he calls every week, even though she hasn't spoken a word to him since she stormed out of the family home.
He's thinking of the surveillance tape, the way that the oyabun touched his phone to his forehead after his daughter hung up on him, week after week -- he's thinking about the way Hunt puts the heel of his hand in the same place, after he's watched Julia walk away again, about the taut curve of Carter's mouth each time Hanaway's name comes up.
Later on -- after they've fished a sopping Hunt out of the bay and given Dunn his due for a flawlessly executed database hack -- Carter asks, "How did you know the combination?"
William shrugs, says, "I guessed," because he's wrung out, tired, pleased with himself and this team, and he can't be bothered to explain.
"Fucking good guess," Dunn says, impressed.
William grins says, "I'm a fucking good guesser." Because that's what an analyst is, after all.
Across the room, Hunt looks up from where he's cleaning the salt water out of his gun, catches his eye and smiles, thin and sharp, as if he knows exactly how William picked the code.
William just keeps smiling, the cocky grin borrowed and strange on his face, an expression that all of them are catching, a symptom of being on Hunt's team.
Doesn't know how to take a risk, his ass.
***
By the time William gets to the apartment in Singapore, they've been stood down for a week and a half, and he's woken up three nights running with a hard-on, to the feeling of Hunt's slick wrist twisting out of his hand.
The apartment is one of William's old boltholes, an address that Hunt presented him with, baring his teeth in something that might have been a grin, if William wasn't already taut with adrenaline at the idea of being caught, no matter how vague.
He only has to wait three minutes for Hunt to catch up -- any other agent would have spent hours trying to get past the traffic choke-points that William engineered. But Hunt took the rooftops instead. Any other agent wouldn't have a hope in hell of catching William, not here, not in this city.
When Hunt shows up, William bows him through the door, and follows after, casually flicking all the locks shut. Hunt raises his eyebrows, already squared up for a fight, hands loose at his sides.
William doesn't disappoint. He closes at once, attempts to throw Hunt over his hip, and gets an elbow in the neck for his trouble. Things devolve quickly into something like sparring -- if there were such a thing as strip-sparring. The bedroom door flies open, leaving scratches in the paint, reverberating against the bare walls. William loses all his clothes along the way, but Hunt crashes onto the bed, shirtless, and William scrambles after, straddles his hips and pins him.
He presses Hunt's wrists over his head, says, "Keep 'em there," not because he expects it to happen, but because he likes the way it makes Hunt's eyes light in challenge.
William grabs the lube and gets to the business of working himself open, fingers slippery. He traces the thin scars along Hunt's ribs with his free hand, doesn't bother asking. He's seen enough of Hunt's file that he can track the mission history in the unmarred space between ribs and hip, as much as in the scars themselves. Like reading from someone else's notes, a secondhand memory.
"You just gonna look?" Hunt asks. He writhes, somehow managing to suggest obscenity, even with his pants still on. His hands come to rest on William's thighs, hot and wanting.
William presses a third finger in alongside the other two, watches Hunt's mouth go slack, barely even notices the edge of pain at the stretch. He kneels up to give Hunt a better view of his fingers, pushing into his ass. Hunt's fingers clutch convulsively at his thighs.
Eventually, William gets up to find a condom, and Hunt's pants disappear to some far-flung corner of the room. The curtains are still open, but they're twenty stories up, and there are no clear sightlines into this apartment -- that's why William chose it in the first place.
Hunt jumps him as soon as the pants are off, of course. But William knows what he wants, and he's not above fighting dirty to get it.
He slides a hand between them as Hunt wrestles him the ground, conveniently situated between William's legs, hips too high, completely distracted by William's hand on his dick -- William would be concerned for Hunt's career, if he'd ever seen Hunt make this mistake in the field. It takes almost no effort to flip their positions so that William ends up on top, pinning him down, pressed all along his body. Hunt is a hand-to-hand expert, but William has a height advantage and all the leverage. Besides, Hunt knows better than to fight a good thing, and he stops trying to gain the upper hand once William lines up and pushes back onto his dick, takes him in one slick slide.
"I'm not looking forward to rug burn on my ass," Hunt says, but regardless, he's doing that full-body undulation that makes William see stars of pure lust, writhing enticingly when William shoves his shoulders down and starts riding him, fluid and slow.
"Should'a thrown me on the fuckin' bed, then," William growls. "Should'a -- unh, " he sits up to get that last fraction of an inch of Hunt's dick inside of him -- "planned ahead."
"You're seriously still pissed that I -- fuck, do that again." It takes Hunt a few more seconds to finish his thought. "I didn't follow the plan?"
William says, "Shut up," bears down until Hunt's eyes cross, until Hunt grabs for his hips, and -- yes -- he's going to have bruises there in a few hours, finger-shaped ones that fit Hunt's hands. In another life, Hunt would wake him up in the morning, fitting his hands over those bruises and biting a mark onto the angle of his collarbone.
Instead, Hunt thrusts up into him, and William holds Hunt down by the throat, uses his free hand to grab for his own dick, jerk off. Hunt hits his prostate on the upstroke, and William swears, bites his own lip, and comes all over Hunt's stomach.
"Oh-- fuck," Hunt slams into him once, twice, and that's it -- his hands go tight- tighter- on William's hips and he arches like he's been hit with an iron brand, searing heat, all the breath going out of him at once.
William eases off and settles onto the bed, a little to the side, avoiding the mess of come on Hunt's skin.
"Not about the plan, huh?" Hunt rubs the place where William's hand wrapped around his throat, but the red marks are fading already, no sign of bruising.
William sighs, drapes his forearm over his eyes and can't quite decide how to answer that.
It's never been about the plan. William has been IMF for almost a decade -- if he couldn't come up with options on the fly, he'd be dead by now -- dead or worse, disavowed. He's just tired of people thinking he's got a problem, tired of being read all wrong, as if he's not self-aware enough to know what his own fucking limits are. It's not his job to make Hunt understand this. And anyway, Hunt gets it already, in his own way, the way that he looked up William's file before he decided to trust him with the lives of his team.
"I got the job done," William says, instead.
Hunt is still rubbing his fingers over his throat, but he's looking at the prints of his hands on the pale skin of William's hips. He runs his tongue over his teeth, and William thinks about the way he is with Julia, not desperate but resigned, lost and enjoying it, not like this, sharp and always on edge, burning with challenge and adrenaline.
"That's what matters," Hunt agrees.
