Getting on and off the flight was easy enough- Russia hadn't been around long enough to put him on a no-fly list, after all. He probably would have thought the entire affair with Gorbachev and the Politburo was hilarious, if it hadn't literally been the end of the company he had spent almost all of his life serving.
His name was Gilbert Beilschmidt. He had only ever remembered the "Gilbert" part of that name, but that was to be assumed. He held his file in his briefcase, along with a super high tech computer he had whisked away from his office in the USSR, along with a couple other things, namely weapons to protect himself should the need arise.
America was supposed to be the land of opportunity, and that was why he was here, and not in the Southern continent, along with the fact there was no small bit of information that told him that Nazi people were still living out their lives in that region.
Of course, being in the heart of the world that he had spied on for the past 13 years was probably a poor decision, but he had the advantage of no one here knowing what he looked like, barring the CIA and FBI, and he had only really ever shown his face to one CIA agent in total- the one he had always called "Golden boy" in his horrible English.
He still had horrific English, but he could at least put together a few words in a coherent sentence.
The money he had been able to scrounge up in the airport from trading in his forged German dollars had gotten him an apartment. The real question was- how the ever loving fuck was he going to get a job? He could barely speak English and had no formal schooling to speak of- meaning that though he had formal schooling, it was best to keep what he had been trained in on the down low if he wanted to live.
He had the cyanide pill still firmly stuck in his fake tooth, so if worst did come to worse, he'd be able to pull that stunt like a lot of his other East German spies had done. However, he had come here and not died there, after all. Gilbert was never one to consider suicide as a way out.
But, now he was in fact here, and if he didn't want that pill to get any more appealing, he had to get a job to get some sort of income.
XXXXX
It took them all of a week to track him down. "Golden Boy!" He said in his fake cheerful voice, grinning madly before speaking in solid German to fuck with them. "It's been so long! And I see you brought Eyebrows with you!"
"Cut the crap, Red Eyes." Golden Boy, the American CIA agent laughed a bit at his soured face. "We've been keeping some tabs on you for a bit, Red Eyes. You speak good ol' English now, so lets here it."
"Ugh." He muttered, rolling his eyes. "Glad to see you two still in field. Small blessings."
"And you're not?" The British man he so affectionately called "Eyebrows" raised one of those monsters, gesturing for Gilbert to put his hands up.
"No." He laughed. "First the office in the Fatherland fell, then the office in the Motherland." He nodded, shrugging.
"So, you're saying that you're here on…personal reasons?" Eyebrows looked suspicious, but Golden boy looked interested as he spoke.
"Would you mind coming with us?" Golden Boy asked, gesturing to himself and Eyebrows. "We have another Soviet spy in our custody and protection."
"Which one?" Gilbert asked, laughing a bit as he walked, no longer imminently afraid of being killed. "Not all of them are trustworthy, ja? Some of them are wiggling to find another, larger bug to serve."
"Where does that leave you, then?" Eyebrows asked, still training his gun on him even as Gilbert grabbed a beer, popping the cap on the feeble table and taking a long guzzle.
The East German shrugged, before he grabbed his file from his bag. "Here, I guess." He handed it to Golden Boy's outstretched hand, the American having quickly caught on to what he was doing, and reading the first page of file quickly in a couple of glances.
"Red Eyes, your name is Gilbert Beilschmidt?" He asked, sounding incredibly surprised by the new information.
Gilbert grinned widely. "Yes! It is new to me as well. I have served them since I was young, very young. I started spying when I was…. 13?" He shrugged. "That said I was born 25 years ago, but truthfully, I don't remember anything before I was '7, by that file's timeline. I lost track of time easily under them."
"No, no." Eyebrows' face was creasing in stress. "Gilbert Beilschmidt is the name of the German diplomat's missing child- he disappeared when I wasn't even in the force yet."
"Really?" Gilbert said, teasingly, not really wanting to listen to them recount his missing childhood. "I would have placed you as having been in the M16 since WWII." And that made Eyebrows frown at him scathingly.
"Heya, Red Eyes, we don't have to get mean, I know Artie isn't really nice." And 'Artie' shot Golden Boy a surprised look.
"We are not supposed to tell the suspect our names!" He shot back, and Golden Boy shrugged.
"Don't see why not, he told us his. Yo, nice to meet you, formally, Beilschmidt. I'm Agent Alfred Jones, and this is my partner from the M16, Arthur Kirkland."
"Nice to have a name to the face, then." Gilbert said, taking another long swig on his beer. "Suppose I'll have to address you as Alfred then, but Eyebrows is keeping his nickname."
Alfred howled with laughter. "God, Red Eyes, I still have to give you serious credit for that name, it has been a source of amusement for the entire team for years." Arthur glared at the American, rolling his eyes.
"They're honestly not that big." He muttered, and Gilbert raised one eyebrow in disagreement.
"God, Gilbert, it's pissed me off for years that both you and Artie here can do the one eyebrow lift to show just how done you are with the world." He lifted up his eyebrows in synch a couple times, before giving up with an overdramatic sigh. "I cannot figure out how you get just one, because when I lift up both of them, I just look surprised!"
Gilbert sighed, sitting down again, finishing off his beer before he tossed the thing to the side, the glass bottle making a loud thump on the carpet. "So, now that we're done with pleasantries, you had to be after me for a reason- I know your government, after all those years of spying on it."
"Toris told us that the head of your spy network had taken you with him out of the Satellite states and deeper into Soviet controlled territory when the Wall fell." Alfred admitted. "We knew that you were here, and you were with the head at the last time we have a frame of reference for his location."
"That, he did." Gilbert agreed easily, gesturing for Kirkland to grab him another beer, and the Brit firmly refused. "Why are you looking for Braginsky? His spy network entirely collapsed. A few, like Toris, turned to you, and others turned to their own people to help retake land, like the lovely Erzebet and Vlad the Impaler- did you hear what he did to the leader of his nation?" Gilbert laughed.
"Yes, we heard of Ceaușescu's…. unfortunate end." Arthur said, distastefully, taking out a notepad and writing down the Russians name, undoubtedly. "But why did you stay with this…Braginsky?"
"I didn't choose to, if you must know." He chuckled. "Good ol' Braginsky was scrambling. I could have – really, should have- left the night the wall fell, but in all honesty, I didn't have a chance- Unlike a lot of the other places where the spies were running left and right to get away from the fucker, I didn't have anyone to turn to. So, in my hesitance," He gestured getting tranq'd. "…And I woke up in Moscow."
"You were kidnapped?" Alfred said, confused. "Man, that sucks balls."
Gilbert laughed. "No fucking shit. But, it wasn't the first time the Russians got me, according to that file." He made a face at the thought. "Too bad I don't remember anything in it before I was, apparently, 7."
Alfred nodded, thoughtful. "Anyway, will you stay here?" He asked, trying to gauge Gilbert's trustworthiness, and the albino shrugged in compliance.
"I don't got anywhere else to go." He muttered. "I took what I had from Moscow, and just stopped running here. Even awesome Red Eyes runs out of funds without support of an all too willing Soviet Union, you see."
Alfred nodded, holding up his file. "And do you mind if we examine this?" Gilbert nodded again, sighing.
"Yeah. I also have a computer I nabbed, but I can't get into the fucker." He took it out of his bag, handing it to a flabbergasted Eyebrows.
"And…you're just giving it up?" He asked, confused as he took it, eyeing it mistrustfully.
He snorted. "Like I said, I can't get into it- I was hoping to see if I could figure out how to find my fellow now ex-spies, but, heh, is that not the funny thing? It has a better code than most of my previous hacks, plus it's been years since I hacked anything that important."
Arthur looked at him, still clearly suspicious. "And it won't explode upon opening it?" He asked, green eyes staring hard into Gilbert's, clearly not being as nice as Golden Boy was. Gilbert supposed he only had himself to blame for that, since Arthur had been on the receiving end of a lot of Gilbert's work.
The German huffed, and took it back, opening it up and displaying the locked screen, typing onto it a few times for good measure. "I told you, I don't have anywhere else to go, and if you can help me, I will help you."
"Seems fair." Alfred said, nodding. "I'll bring the computer, and your file back to base- and you will stay here until we have further instructions for you."
Gilbert nodded tiredly, yawning a bit. "Still jetlagged?" Arthur asked, condescending, and the German sighed but nodded in agreement.
"You can stick around the town area, and we'll have someone keeping an eye to make sure you're not getting away!" Alfred said cheerful. "Have any favorites?"
"Bring the Frenchie! He's always funny." Gilbert said with a sardonic grin towards Eyebrows. "Plus, he's open to drinking with me."
"The Frog?" Arthur said, like the word tasted bad in his mouth, and Gilbert just laughed, agreeing once again.
"Yeah, Eyebrows. Now scram. I want to get shitfaced."
The two left with the only ties Gilbert Beilschmidt had to his former life- well, perhaps leaving out the weapons, but they hadn't needed to know about those in case things went south with the American Government.
So Toris had made it out, he thought to himself, thinking of the others he was regularly paired with. Lizzy he knew was fine, so was Vlad, the others- Natalia, Irunya, Feliks, Eduard, Raivis - they were unknowns.
He had left Ivan in a tizzy, struggling to keep the very last of his "loyal" spies from chewing down on their cyanide pills the moment that Russia declared its independence from the USSR, and the remaining communist governments in Europe collapsed around them.
And so, he drank, and drank, and drank. He really just wanted to forget this whole mess, the fall of the wall and everything he had ever taken for granted.
It was the winter of 1991, he was 25, and he had literally nowhere else to go in his life- no schooling, no money, no friends or family, and he was quickly losing hope in his ability to adapt.
Was it really so bad to want to forget that it had all changed?
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A/N: AND ANOTHER pruhun au that absolutely NO ONE asked for. HAHA.
Anyway, this au is set just after the fall of the USSR. Basically all the countries that are currently canon are into some sort of espionage. haHA
Anyway, jus' so you younglings don't look up the gruesome pics of Ceaușescu's death at the hands of the Romanian people, just know he was hunted down and brutally killed- rightfully, most likely, but it was still absolutely gruesome.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this (semi-historically accurate) fic!