A/N: Had some free time and thought... ah why not. I'm probably just writing to an empty fandom by now but if I'm not, feedback is always appreciated.
Not part of the Courtship universe.
/
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree
I travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody's looking for something
- Eurythmics, Sweet Dreams
/
She's becoming bolder in his dreams.
She could be a past target, just a ghost surfacing in his crystalline memory, except she doesn't feel like one. There is too much weight to her, everything in his dream dipping towards her as if she has gravity collapsed under her skin, more than just an image composed of facts and files. Her hair is dark and fierce, her skin is pale to the point of luminosity, and as she stretches above him, all naked curves and knowing body, he has to remind himself not to touch her. She has bait written all over her.
"Like that's ever stopped anyone." She smirks and pushes him down when he tries to raise himself up on his elbows. There is something shockingly red floating around her waist, trailing like silk or spilled blood. She rolls her eyes at him. "God, you're so morbid," she says. "Not everything is about firearms and shooting shit up, you know. By the way, I'm not wearing any panties this time either."
She moves her hips in a very deliberate way to make her point and Christ, but it feels impossibly real. Her smirk grows wider. "Enjoying yourself?"
He raises a hand to either push her off or pull her down, he doesn't know, because suddenly there is something in his hand that wasn't there before. They stare at it.
"Who are you?" he says. The woman looks back at him from the syringe. Her smile doesn't reach her eyes this time.
"Try again," she says, and then her hand is hot and urgent around the base of his head, pulling him up towards her or perhaps it is the other way around, and 47 wakes up.
/
His stack of notes is starting to grow.
There are ones on neat sheets of beige hotel paper: Female, Eastern European, late twenties. Also: Five foot eight, brunette.
There are ones on plain squares of notepad slips: Green eyes, tattoo on left cheek. Also: Knows my number.
And now he adds one more, a pale pink scrap he's found in the glove compartment. It was once part of a takeaway menu, and the ink stipples onto the other side when he writes on the blank face: Sexual overture, syringe. The moon is swollen tonight, a bleached searchlight in that filters through the windscreen and turns the cheap paper translucent when he lifts it up so that he's seeing two things at once. Tofu dishes and a woman that his mind can't let go of. He wonders if he defused her with death or sleep.
He's still half-hard, the dream shifting restlessly under his skin, so he gives up on sleep for the night and goes to the boot to take out the two suitcases there. He disassembles and reassembles the M15 and .45s three times, and counts all the cold-shelled ammo three times more before dawn finally smears itself across the horizon in a dull blood-orange. He's a lot calmer when he starts the car up, but when he closes his eyes briefly before he turns the key, he thinks he still sees the outline of her, waiting.
/
He suspects that these dreams fall under the broad category of post-traumatic symptoms, but 47 has a stronger suspicion that actually reporting these night-time trips would push the Organisation over the strained limits of their patience. They have already been surprisingly tolerant with failure and Christ knows he has cost them enough in terms of rehabilitating him after his humiliating disaster in Moscow. The least he can do is to treat his mental deficiencies himself. He's not so ungrateful (or suicidal) that he is about to tell his employers that their investment has randomly developed a highly selective conscience in the shape of a dead woman who haunts him when he sleeps.
"You're so sure you killed me," she says. She sounds amused, but there is a bitterness that betrays her in the twist of her lips. She pats the ground next to her. "Come lie here with me."
He stands awkwardly over her, then compromises by sitting beside her, the flat of his palm on the ground next to her ear. They're on a roof, the concrete cool and smooth beneath his calluses. The dim shapes of other buildings peak around the edge of the roof in clustered smudges – Hong Kong, perhaps; or Bangkok.
Something oily and spiced lingers at the back of his throat like an itch, a precision of detail that is startling in this vague landscape.
"You and your perfect memory," the woman says, but she's smiling up at him. She is exquisite in detail as always, of course; his subconscious is tediously unsubtle when it comes to her. "I always wondered how you did that, remember everything. Don't you get tired?"
"I don't remember everything."
"Yeah, sure, that's what you say, and then it's all dorogoi, you moved the gun three inches from where I left it; dorogoi, didn't I say stay clear from the balcony so why are the doors unlatched; dorogoi, my ties are blue, tell me you did not replace all of them with blue." She pauses. "Well, maybe I wanted you to notice that last one," she smirks.
"You changed my ties?" he says inanely, before the rest of him breaks out of shock and asks the far more urgent question, "I called you dear?"
Her eyes are innocence ringed in black. "Or milyi. Or solnyshko. Or kotyonok." She looks up at him demurely through her eyelashes. "My favourite," she says, "was when you called me moya zain'ka."
His horror is wordless.
When she cracks, he can't tell if he's more relieved or exasperated. Her hair is longer this time, one dark strand curling close to her open mouth. He pulls it away unthinkingly, the easy familiarity of the gesture only jarring when he realizes, too late, what he's done. The woman subdues, her eyes still laughing. "I'm glad that entertained you," he tells her dryly. His ribs are suddenly tight around his lungs, and yet there is a strange desperate lightness caught inside, gunpowder and sparks. He watches as she turns her head, brushes her jaw against the edge of his knuckles.
"Yeah, well," she smiles against his fingers. "It's not often I remember things you don't. And you thought I was the impressionable one."
He had. He had thought he had thought he had thought she was– but he can't go further, his head is buzzing like the aftermath of a blow. He can't stand it anymore.
"What were you?" he demands. A wrench low in his gut; he tries to sound calmer. "Target, cargo, bait – anything. Tell me. What were you?"
But his memory only closes her eyes. "Everything's fucked up," she says. "And you're still not asking the right question."
/
Before his coma, he was a lesser agent. He carried out his contracts but made mistakes, the most inexcusable of which was broadcast over international networks and which prompted him to spend three weeks on sniping practice in the period after he woke and before they gave him the clearance to leave. He still watches the Moscow footage sometimes, watches how the bullet grazed the target's temple, and thinks wind pull and adrenaline shakes and poor control and other speculative, futile corrections like this that leaves him restless and angry. He never misses now, but his past failures itch at him in the same way that substandard bullet casings or inadequate scope specs irritate him: he wants to clear it from his inventory, rewrite his history. He knows he owes the Organisation everything for giving him a second chance that he wouldn't have granted himself.
He wonders now if they knew about the woman from his dreams. If she was a rival contractor, or perhaps just information – perhaps just a way to get to a buried target, too minor to be worth killing. 47 knows he is deluding himself – if he was as deeply involved with her as his dreams imply, then she was either a unstable leak at that had to be maintained for a critical time, in which case she is now dead; or she was a play, in which case she is now dead. Or it could have been purely personal. It is the least likely of the possibilities.
He just hopes he was the one that did it. He would have done it swiftly, as bloodlessly as possible; perhaps by lethal sedation. Then he thinks about the dream of her golden-lit and grinning wickedly down at him, the look in her eyes when she saw the syringe, and the sickness in his stomach is nearly a physical thing.
/
When he sees her in a street in Cairo, the shock hits him with all the force of a percussion grenade. Then the paralysis passes and he's after her, a swathe of spilled oranges and shouts behind him, subtlety and stealth be damned. It's just a side-glimpse of her by the corner of a stall, her head tilted back and laughing up at someone else, someone else; but it's in the way she holds her head: it has to be her.
47 pushes past the fools in his path, but when he gets there, there is nothing waiting but an empty space and a heart like a clenched fist pounding. The stall keeper stares at him, alarmed. It's one of those stalls for tourists – full of useless trinklets and the same hyper-coloured bracelets he sees everywhere in this district. It means nothing and there is nothing; he's chasing a ghost and there is nothing left to fucking find-
- Isn't there?
47 stills. The noise of the street fades out, grows subdued under his heartbeat. And 47 doesn't think, doesn't think at all; he moves one step to the right, two steps forward. He keeps his gaze focused on the table, the bright beads, his mind precisely blank – and then for a blink, a photo-flash, a drawn breath: he sees her. Blurred and radiant and laughing up at him.
I was here with her, he thinks. The thoughts come violently, a drill splitting his head – It was me, I was here with her, she was happy, it was the first time we – the first time – the first –
"Help!" someone shouts. "Someone call a doctor, this man needs help!"
47 straightens up. He smiles at the stall keeper through the dim fog of pain, hopes it looks vaguely reassuring. From the look on the man's face, it probably isn't.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm fine, just a bad headache. If you'll excuse me."
He manages to walk away without really staggering.
Later that night, when he can think again without wanting to throw up, 47 considers the afternoon as carefully as executing a recon of enemy territory. It's time for him to deal with this problem.
/
He sees her again that night.
"You want to forget me," she accuses, before he even starts. She's hugging herself, her arms like barriers. Her hair is longer than he's ever seen it, dark strands brushing angrily across her collarbones as she shakes her head, "Fine, go ahead. Leave me. I'm sick of trying to get your attention all the time anyway!"
The conversation feels familiar; they've had it before. The words he had prepared when he was awake fall away without 47 even noticing. A forgotten anger opens up in him.
"Don't be dramatic," he says flatly. "You can't keep up, and I can't keep making allowances. You aren't my only priority."
"Priority? I'm not a fucking contract!"
"No," he says before he can stop himself. "I deal with targets, not messes. It's always damage control with you."
Her mouth falls open a little. Then she shuts it and turns her head away, a simple movement that removes the bottom of his stomach and hollows him out. This is familiar too: he's done this before, to her. The emptiness in him sharpens unpleasantly.
"Wait," he says. He reaches out to touch her, to ground himself, but she flinches and there is suddenly a distance between them in a way beyond mere geography: a treachery of his own dream. His hand falls back to his side, useless. "Listen-"
"You probably should forget me," she says quietly, still not looking at him. Her dragon stares at him, a fierce injury of black on her pale skin. "It's safer this way."
"I won't," he says. "Listen to me-"
"You already have."
"Nika," he says desperately, and will she just look at him – "Listen to me. I'll find you."
She turns back to him finally, and her green eyes are wet and resigned. "That's the second time you've told me that," she says, and then
47 wakes up.
The suddenness is like landing after a fall.
"Nika," he says, mouth dry. No one answers. Just a secret wrestled from darkness and memory.
He knows what he has to do.
/
All he has is a name, his dreams, and a conviction – no, a blind faith that a woman named Nika is real. It's not much of a lead – technically, unstable mental obsessions aren't leads at all – but giving up is not an option either. There is a furious energy thrumming under his skin and he has to do something. He has to at least try.
First, her background. Russian, if the language of her pet name teasing is anything to go by. How many times has he been to Russia? Three times, if his concussion hasn't eaten any more memories beyond that. The first was a basic civ hit, one of his earliest missions; the second was an air-to-ground interception; the third was his infamous failure where he missed the target on the first attempt and sunk himself in an twenty-four month coma when escaping from his second attempt. He can't even remember how he went down, as if his own memory refuses to accept the enormity of such humiliation. They've told him that he at least managed to terminate Bellicoff before he did. He hears that they've finished rebuilding the church now, a towering testament to his past incompetence.
47 knows what he has to do: it's what he has been avoiding for nearly half a year now. It's what he was very specifically warned not to do, from the first day he woke with an grey agony throbbing behind his eyes and a scream caught behind his teeth – don't think of the past. Nothing in the two years or so immediately before his coma, on pain of his brain bleeding out. His last mission to Russia scarred more than his pride.
His constant headache is a bearable thing now, crouched low enough in the back of his mind that it doesn't interfere with his work, but 47 has no illusions of what awaits him if he does this. He thinks of the possible consequence as he stripes off the tie, pushes down his shirt collar and sleeve. He thinks of it as he swipes ethanol across his shoulder. He imagines his brain unravelling, neurons swelling and bursting red; he pushes a syringe of amphetamine and oxycodone into his veins. The drugs hit almost immediately, numbing and focusing him at once, and in the second before he takes the plunge, 47 sees himself as if standing outside the car: a man in an expensively dishevelled suit with a syringe in one hand and a gun in the other, and enough firearms stockpiled in the passenger seat next to him to start a small war. He looks desperate.
Then 47 puts his foot down on the accelerator to smash through the bulletproof glass of the reception of the car factory ahead, and there isn't very much more thinking after that.