Author's Notes:
Okay. Here it is. :o)
A few days ago, nunquam perpetuum asked about Ethan's fight in the parking tower, and the aftermath of that. And a while back, fox4mel wanted to know what happened in the eight weeks between "Mission Accomplished" and the regroup in Seattle.
Well…here is my idea on both.
This story takes place near the end of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.
Summary:
When Benji became a full agent, his instructor told him there was still a difference between being ready for the field and being out in the field. In the aftermath of Ethan's fight with Hendricks, Benji sees the consequences of that difference.
Actions and Consequences
Benji hadn't known what it would be like. He had been prepared. But he hadn't known.
Back in training, if you had a bad day, you simply had a bad day. In training, if you went down in a fight, you went up again, and maybe afterwards you went for a beer with the guy who felled you.
But out in the field, if your opponent was faster than you, you bled.
Out in the field, if it came down to saving the mission or saving your own life, you did what it took to save the mission.
This was a mindset that the IMF trained you to embrace.
When Benji killed Brandt's opponent with a well-placed bullet – a bullet that, for the first time in Benji's life, had not been fired to harm but to kill – Benji had gotten his first glimpse at what it really meant to be out in the field.
But it was only when he finally caught up with Ethan, that Benji saw the full extent of what a field agent – particularly one as determined and skilled as Ethan Hunt – was willing to sacrifice to accomplish a mission.
-o-
They had stopped the countdown. Jane sat herself down on the ground of the TV station's newsroom, glad to be able to let herself rest now. As Brandt and Benji came bolting back into the room, and they saw the 'abort' notice blinking on the TV screens, they too exchanged thankful looks.
The mission had been accomplished.
But after a moment, their smiles of relief began to falter, as they became aware of one worrisome detail.
While Ethan had obviously stopped the rocket, and they assumed that meant he had also stopped Hendricks, neither of them really knew what Ethan's situation was.
Or if he was even still alive.
Looking at each other, not even needing any words, they all set into motion again, having come to the same conclusion almost simultaneously: They needed to find out what had become of Ethan.
As they hurried outside the TV station, with Jane steadied between Brandt and Benji, they could instantly see the commotion about one block down the street. There were several cars blocking the intersection, some of them police, some of them special squads, and lots of angry tourists all over the place to add to the general mayhem.
They didn't know what had happened there, but there clearly seemed to be some kind of situation at the parking tower. And where a 'situation' was, Ethan could be assumed to be not far away. In fact, if they had to guess, they would have bet that he was probably right in the middle of it.
Their first instinct was to hurry over there and find Ethan.
But they had several other things to consider, as well.
One of which was Jane's injury. And the fact that, technically, they all were still wanted criminals. They couldn't just waltz in there with all the police around.
Plus, whatever had happened at the parking tower - and whatever that meant for Ethan - it had obviously already happened. If Ethan had been able to get away, he would already be safely hidden somewhere nearby, waiting for an ideal moment to rejoin them. If he had been caught, he would be closely guarded, and they wouldn't help Ethan any by storming in after him, getting themselves caught as well. And if Ethan was dead – they were too late anyway.
Either way, one thing was clear: this was not the time to rush over there with their guns drawn, particularly if it meant dragging Jane with them in her condition.
So they decided to split up, and cover both ends in a more subtle way.
Brandt would take Jane to a hospital. Benji was to check on Ethan's situation and then follow Brandt and Jane, with Ethan if possible.
So, letting Brandt and Jane head out in the other direction, Benji quickly hurried towards the crowd at the parking tower. Using some of his newly-learned skills as a field agent, he managed to stay unnoticed by the police forces outside, and he was able to slip through an unguarded side entrance into the tower.
Since the whole structure was made of glass, he could soon see where the epicenter of whatever had happened was located. Down at the center of the tower, right on the concrete bottom, there were several suit-clad men, dressed with stylish MP-machine guns, standing in a half-circle around something on the ground.
As Benji moved closer, he saw that this 'something' on the ground were the bodies of two people.
'Oh no…'
Benji was afraid he had a pretty good idea who the two people were. But his biggest concern now was that he didn't know if either of the two was still alive.
'Please, don't let Ethan be dead…please…' Benji prayed to whatever Indian deity was willing to listen to him.
He still didn't know what exactly had happened here, but there were several clues that he could make out now from his hiding spot behind a pillar on the first floor. One was the crashed BMW, with its airbags released and the driver's door still hanging open. He also saw a briefcase on the floor, close to Ethan. It had to be the launch device.
Whatever else had happened, Benji could only guess. But whatever it was, it had clearly been Ethan's doing. And it had obviously been one hell of a fight.
'And one hell of a call to make,' Benji thought, as he realized what Ethan must have done to get to the briefcase.
He wondered if he himself would have been prepared to do that. But as he thought about it, Benji quickly concluded that an idea as insane as this one would probably never even have occurred to him in the first place. So he didn't know.
Cautiously, he soon began moving closer to the scene of the crash, using several more pillars to hide behind as he moved lower. He paid close attention to the guards that were only one level beneath him, making sure that none of them saw him.
Still it wasn't enough.
And he almost jumped a foot high as he suddenly felt a hand grip his shoulder from behind in a way that clearly said 'you move, you die'.
'Oh shit….'
The hand on his shoulder slowly turned him around, and Benji was smart enough to not resist in any way. He knew when his game was up – and he had been caught, no doubt about it.
As he got face to face with his captor, Benji's first thought was that the guy clearly didn't look an Indian. As his second thought, he realized that all Russians were obviously starting to look the same to him. The guy sure did look familiar.
But Benji was already too busy trying to come up with an escape plan to think about anything else any further.
'God, Ethan always makes this look so easy…' Benji thought as he frantically tried to come up with a bluff that would save his neck.
But before Benji could even open his mouth, the Russian spoke up with a surprisingly cordial voice:
"I assume you're one of his team?"
To say that Benji was surprised by that question would have been an understatement.
But then he remembered where he had seen the Russian's face before - during the mission briefing that Ethan had given them before they had embarked to Dubai. Well, that certainly explained why the Russian looked familiar to Benji. It did, however, leave Benji to wonder how the Russian had known him.
The only explanation that Benji could think of was one that almost made him stand a little straighter. Obviously, once you were a member of Ethan's team, you began to give off a certain vibe. And it was apparently something that well-trained agents like the guy before him took notice of.
So, trusting his newly-found and inexplicable perception that the Russian didn't mean him any harm at the moment, Benji answered cautiously with a slow nod.
"Yes, the name is Dunn."
The Russian simply nodded in return, as if Dunn had merely confirmed something he had already known. But the friendliness in the man's voice remained:
"We'll be taking your team leader to the hospital. You can come with us, if you don't mind traveling along in the back of the ambulance with him."
Benji was surprised by the man's offer. But he couldn't have been more happy about it. Because it presupposed the conclusion that Ethan was in fact still alive. Just then, Benji saw two pairs of medics come in through a door one floor beneath him. One of the pairs was headed directly for Ethan, and once they reached him on the ground, they immediately began tending to him.
The second team went to check on Hendricks. But in his case, the medic almost instantly got up again. Hendricks was clearly dead.
And Benji was really glad that it wasn't the other way around - that it wasn't Ethan who was the one who had lost his life here. Now the only question was how serious Ethan's injuries were. From where he stood, Benji couldn't see much, aside from the fact that Ethan was clearly not moving on his own, and the medics seemed to be concentrating on his left leg and his head.
As he watched the medics lift Ethan's body onto a moveable gurney, Benji eventually saw a glimpse of Ethan's face. He couldn't tell if Ethan was unconscious, or had merely closed his eyes in exhaustion. Either way, Ethan seemed to be no longer aware or concerned about anything that was going on around him.
The man opposite Benji seemed to pick up on Benji's sudden uneasiness, and with an encouraging gesture from his new Russian friend, Benji was invited to follow the man outside, to where the ambulance was waiting. Within moments, Ethan's gurney followed them outside through a lower-level exit of the parking tower, the medics coming over to where Benji and the Russian were standing.
When he finally saw Ethan up close, Benji almost paled.
There were cuts and bruises all over Ethan's face, some of them still bleeding sluggishly, while others were already turning a worrisome shade of purple. There was blood on the side of his face, some of it also coming from his ear. He had obviously taken a direct hit to the head at some point.
But the most scary-looking thing was his left leg. It was bend at the knee, in such an unnatural way that made Benji hope Ethan wasn't conscious enough to feel it. Or, if he did feel it, that the painkillers he was being given were at least taking the edge off the agony he had to be going through.
During the ride to the hospital, Benji then learned some more about Russian medical terms, much more than he had ever wanted to learn. He was no doctor, but he knew enough Russian from his training to understand most of the many injuries that Ethan had suffered.
The most obvious one was the badly broken knee. Then there were several broken ribs, probably from Ethan having impacted against the steering wheel of the BMW as he hit the ground. He also had another severe concussion. Benji didn't even want to think about how many times that made now in the last couple of days alone.
And as the medics' injury assessment continued, Benji began to realize more and more what had been painfully driven home to him several times already over the course of this mission:
This wasn't training. This was the difference between the classroom and the field.
The injuries that Ethan had suffered weren't ones that you got from stumbling in a practice fight. Nor from fighting for fun. These were injuries that you got from moves that were meant to incapacitate. Moves that were meant to kill. Intended to take out your opponent in the most deadly way you could find. And that realization was something that made Benji keep pretty much to himself all the way to the hospital, trying to digest his new appreciation of what the life of a true field-agent was like.
Once they arrived at the hospital, Ethan was taken directly to surgery for his knee and anything else that needed fixing, patching up or other forms of medical care.
While Ethan went into surgery, Benji took the time to give Brandt a call, to let him know that they were now at a hospital as well. Unfortunately, they realized quickly that it wasn't the same hospital that Jane and Brandt had landed at. So it was decided that Brandt would continue to stay with Jane for now, while Benji was to look after Ethan.
That settled, Benji sat down to wait.
And the time of waiting also gave him time to think.
One thing he thought about was the fact that today he had made his first kill out in the field. It was probably not something that the rest of the world cared much about, but to him, and at that moment, this was something he had to wrap his head around. For a moment, he even wondered how that point in life must have been for Ethan, probably many, many years ago. How had Ethan been affected by his first kill?
Benji knew he would probably never get an answer to that question. Not from Ethan, in any case. But he guessed it was probably different for everybody anyway.
In the end, Benji was pulled out of his musing by the ringing of his phone.
And to his surprise, it wasn't Jane or Brandt on the other end of the line. It was the IMF. Or whatever was left of it at that point. Apparently, their little mission had left quite a ripple effect.
And now they were being called back in.
All of them. ASAP. For debriefing.
Apparently, things were running rampant back home, and some people higher up in the picking order than Benji even wanted to think about, were now desperate to get their hands on some first-hand information to start finding out what the hell was really going on.
On some level, Benji could even understand that wish. What with nuclear bombs flying around the atmosphere, and people getting shot, blown up or plain killed all over the globe, the IMF was probably wondering if maybe, just maybe, Ethan's rogue team had now gone dark side for good, or if it was the opposite. If Ethan Hunt had perhaps just saved everybody's necks once again.
To get to the bottom of that question, the best source of information was obvious. They wanted to question each and every member of Ethan's team. Which, as far as orders were concerned, meant: Get your asses back to headquarters, ASAP, and we'll figure out the rest from there.
Benji was informed that Brandt and Jane – whose injuries were not as serious as they had appeared - had already been picked up by a med-evac team. Benji was to follow on another flight as soon as Ethan was out of surgery. Since Ethan was most likely not ready for transport immediately after the surgery, another IMF team would stay behind with Ethan, until he, too, would be flown out on the next available flight, to receive his remaining medical care back home.
It was at that point that Benji lost track of everyone for a while. And what with the debriefings and reports that they all were put through after that, neither of them got much of a spare moment to breathe, let alone a chance to get in contact with each other.
In the end, Benji – who had been parked in tech support until his status as a field agent was to be reviewed again – eventually chose a radical way to satisfy his need to know how his friends were doing. He used his temporary old-new workplace to hack into some files.
After some careful searching, he found out that Brandt and Jane had safely made it home. After their debriefing, however, the IMF had obviously sent them straight out again, separately, to go on prolonged fact-finding missions in locations that were so far off the map, they didn't even have satellite phones.
In Ethan's case, things got even weirder.
Ethan had indeed made it home the day after the surgery. But from what Benji could see in Ethan's medical files, no outside contact had been allowed for the first two weeks after the follow-up surgery on his knee at a local hospital somewhere near Boston. Ethan had then been slotted for some medical recuperation and physical training at an undisclosed IMF medical facility.
But that's where Ethan's paper trail mysteriously ended.
Off the bat, Benji could think of two possible explanations for that.
One was that the IMF had suddenly found a hack-proof way of hiding Ethan's whereabouts from other nosy IMF agents. Considering that this was Benji doing the hacking, an unlikely option. The other explanation was that Ethan had simply checked himself out somewhere between the hospital and the IMF facility, and was now laying so low, that even the IMF didn't know where he was. Far. More. Likely.
Either way, the IMF was obviously in no hurry to get the team back together.
In a way, it made sense. The IMF had always preferred to keep its agents in mixed rotations. It was a good way to ensure everybody played well with each other, with whatever combination of skills was necessary for a team on a particular mission. It was also a good way for the IMF to prevent team members from developing bonds that the IMF might consider too strong, or too efficient for their liking.
It was simply the way the IMF worked.
So, Benji was not happy, but didn't think twice about it when one day, about 8 weeks after the end of the last mission, he got an order to report to Seattle, for a meeting with some IMF official.
When Benji arrived in Seattle, however, he was surprised to bump into Jane at the airport. He was happy to see her well, and that she had recovered from her gunshot wound with no problems. As it turned out, she, too, had gotten a text message on her IMF phone, with the order to report to Seattle, but no further details beyond that.
Their mutual meeting was too much of a coincidence to be taken as pure luck. They began wondering if maybe, just maybe, the IMF was willing to allow at least the two of them to be teamed up again on a new team. They had thought the chances of that were slim, but one could hope, right?
Then they ran into Brandt at the cab station outside the airport.
He too had gotten a text message ordering him to report to Seattle. But his message had included a little more information. The three of them were to report to their new team leader. Apparently, they had been reassigned.
They didn't know yet who had set up the meeting, but they all agreed on one thing unanimously: Whoever it was, he could never be as good as Ethan.
They missed their team leader.
And they wished that they knew what Ethan was doing wherever he was, or whether he was safe.
So, without too much happy anticipation for their new team leader, they all took a cab together to the location that they had been given in their orders.
The drive to the harbor didn't take too long. They were equally quick in finding the location of the restaurant. They had a table number and a time, and they were still a bit early. So, walking side by side, not in much of a hurry, and keeping their eyes out for trouble as always, they went down the boardwalk that led to the Pier.
From afar, they could see a big guy already sitting at the table that had been mentioned in their messages. The man was nursing a beer. And somehow, he looked not particularly happy to be there.
Benji, Brand and Jane exchanged uneasy glances.
'Well, I hope he is good,' Benji thought cautiously.
But just as Benji was about to move forward again, Brandt held his arm back.
"Look."
Benji looked. So did Jane.
There, a few feet behind the big man, and obviously just getting a beer at the bar, was another person, this one visible only from the back so far. But somehow, that person looked familiar.
It couldn't be, could it?
"Is that..?" Jane was the first to ask.
Brandt remained silent, suddenly appearing almost a bit anxious.
Benji for his part, tried to squint his eyes.
They all watched as the familiar-looking man walked – with his back unfortunately turned in their direction – back over to the table, where he pulled out a chair directly across from their new team leader. As the man sat down, his face became visible.
"That's Ethan!" Benji realized with joy at seeing his friend again.
"I wonder what he's doing here?" Jane asked a little bewildered, but pleasantly surprised as well.
"He's probably telling our new team leader that the guy better not break us or Ethan's gonna take it out of his hide," Benji joked, suddenly feeling better already, just from the knowledge that Ethan was apparently alive and well.
"Yeah, well…let's get over there and say 'hello', shall we?" Brandt concluded a bit more subdued.
So they walked down the rest of the Pier, and over to the restaurant. Slowly, almost hesitantly they then approached the table.
Wary of their new team leader, but glad to see Ethan.
Then, they were completely taken by surprise, when the guy that they had taken for their new team leader suddenly got up - giving Ethan the finger, no less - before moving out and past them like it was the most normal thing in the world.
They were even more surprised when Ethan didn't even blink at the gesture, and simply smiled after the guy with a chuckle.
But their biggest surprise came when Ethan asked them to sit down.
And when he asked them to become members of his team again.
A permanent one this time.
'Ethan's team,' Benji concluded more precisely, as it occurred to him that Ethan must have not only convinced the IMF that they were allowed to work together again, but that Ethan had somehow managed to handpick them as his own, not just as occasional replacements.
And he'd obviously done all this even while he had still been recuperating himself.
'He must have pulled some pretty damn impressive strings behind the scenes,' Benji realized.
As far as Benji knew, the IMF couldn't be threatened or bribed.
But he also knew that Ethan could be subtle if he wanted to be. And if a subtle warning of 'mess with me and you will regret it' didn't do the trick, then perhaps a subtle insinuation had been more effective. One of the kind that let the IMF know it might lose its best agent to a sudden discontinuation of contract, if said agent wasn't granted a little leeway in this matter at hand.
There were ways to outplay the system. Few, rare ones, but they were there. If you knew where to look. And if you were prepared to play the game on a level as high-risk as Ethan was willing to go.
Whatever Ethan had done, his actions had resulted in bringing them all back together. They could be a team again, if they wanted to join him. It was his offer, and their decision to make.
Eight weeks ago, Benji would have simply smiled and taken the phone.
Now however, he smiled, took the phone, and actually understood the consequences of that action.
It was a lesson that he had never learned in training.
But he had learned it from Ethan.
And for that lesson, Benji would always be grateful.
THE END