Author's Note: First thing, disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters or organisations described here, and make no monetary profit from the publication of this fanfiction, blah blah. The only element of this fanfiction is the character Enma-O Meido and her aliases. So no stealing her please. Below are the lyrics to Watercolour, by Pendulum. Obviously, the song belongs to them, I just listened to it, and it partly inspired an enormous chunk of Part I.

Secondly, should let you all know where this is going. This story jumps around chronologically quite a bit. Typically, anything in italics happened at least a few months previous to the main story line, but the earliest event happens maybe a couple of years after the events of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It prominently features Agent William Brandt, played by the brilliant chameleon Jeremy Renner, and also 'guest stars' Agents Benji Dunn, Ethan Hunt, Luther Stickell, and mentions other characters from the Mission Impossible film series.

The main plot concerns only the development of a relationship between Agent Brandt and my own character. A lot is never stated outright, because I can imagine that IMF agents make the best poker players. This development is shown mostly through the missions these characters embark on, either together and alone, and how these missions both bring them together and drive them apart. The missions do not have any particular continuity of plot linking them together, much like the different missions of the films.

There will be four parts to this story. This is the first, the rest are written but are currently being edited, and so I can't promise any schedule for the release of chapters, it will depend on the reaction this gets.

So, without further ado...


When I'm falling down
Will you pick me up again?
When I'm too far gone
Dead in the eyes of my friends

Will you take me out of here?
When I'm staring down the barrel
When I'm blinded by the lights
When I cannot see your face

Take me out of here
Take me out of here
Take me out of here
Take me out of here

All I believe
And all I've known
Are being taken from me
Can't get home
Yeah, do your worst
When worlds collide
Let their fear collapse
Bring no surprise

Take me out of here

Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me

Just stay where you are
Let your fear subside
Just stay where you are
If there's nothing to hide

Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me
Feed the fire, break your vision
Throw your fists up, come on with me


ANOTHER NAME


William Brandt was never a fan of his office. It was all glass in a building that had no windows. Typical. From within there was nothing hidden that you could not hide behind a good poker face, but looking from the outside, there was nothing to be seen. Right now, that was not the reason he didn't like his office. He didn't like the glass because of what it separated him from.

The years since his re-enlisting to IMF in Seattle under Ethan Hunt had been good to him. He'd broken a few ribs, taken a bullet, had even almost drowned again. Thankfully, or maybe not, all on separate occasions. All of that had just heralded his promotion. Technically a Chief Analyst once again, these days he formulated his own missions, or was the one making the recordings for the agents he selected to carry them out. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." was a line he'd used many a time now. Chief Strategist, it said on his door now. Sometimes the best strategy was doing things yourself because you know the most about it. Sometimes others were better for the role. Either way, fewer bullets with his name on.

It was a good gig. He now had an apartment that he actually lived in. There was food in the fridge that hadn't gone off. He was even thinking of getting a cat, now that he was unlikely to starve one to death or lose to sympathetic neighbours. Speaking of, his neighbours actually knew what he looked like, although they thought he was a civil servant called Jerry Menneer. The neighbour's daughter had a really blatant crush on him, but she wasn't his type. There wasn't a type best suited to IMF agents, as he knew from experience and had been told plenty of times before, particularly by Agents Stickell and Gormley. Never mind that Declan Gormley had left the field with Zhen Lei after she was injured on an operation. Lucky...

Brandt shook his head. His thoughts were too muddled, and were running away with themselves. It was late, very late, not that he could see the night sky to know. He leant his head against the glass and breathed deeply. No matter how good things were - and they were, he hadn't been shot at in three months - there was always something to complicate things.

Today he'd assigned someone to a mission. It had come from the depths of IMF's most secretive sections, from intel he'd never seen and knew almost nothing about, so 'assigned' wasn't the best word to describe it: he'd been the messenger. He didn't need to be the messenger, but the mission was, in his own words, so nasty it deserved to be delivered in person. It was a solo mission with a very specific and uninformative brief. Reading what little he had to go on, Brandt knew that it didn't really matter whether the actual mission was a success. One way or another, it would have a result, and had been calculated to do so. The fact that it was solo, without even technical support, told him one thing: IMF was not prepared to lose too many agents to this mission. Unfortunately, what little he did have to go on told him also that it was too important not to go through with. After hearing of it, he volunteered himself. The director declined, and chose for him instead.

So, he gave the brief.

"This is Tom Hobbes, one of the world's most prolific biochemical weapons dealers. Two weeks ago, the IMF were successful in shutting down his operations in a massive sting operation by capturing and/or terminating all of his lieutenants in multiple locations across the globe. We attempted to pick him up in Rio de Janeiro at the same time, but he evaded capture, and is currently at large. Hobbes is considered an asset; through him, we have access to all of his buyers. Thirty six hours ago, IMF received intelligence that Hobbes is now in a Bangkok private clinic awaiting extensive plastic surgery.

"This," Brandt pointed to a photo on the display, "is his current face. Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." he trailed off for a second, cleared his throat, and continued, "is to positively ID Hobbes after his surgery. We need a picture of his actual face, and preferably DNA samples to confirm it's him.

"The surgery is due to begin in three days. After this kind of surgery normally a patient would be kept in for post-op observation for a couple of months at least, but Hobbes is renown for being paranoid, and now that his network is fully stunted, we're expecting him to be more so. He might not stay very long. IMF wants a picture that can be used to track him over CCTV cameras all over the world, so they need an actual face for the face recognition, not a post-op swell-up that just gives us an approximate render."

Brandt paused, took a deep breath. "There is another thing; we have a message to deliver to him."

And he told the agent across from him the message.

The agent stared at him for a second, laughed, and, after discussing the details for a lot longer, accepted. Strategy, point of entry, exit options, and the contact details for a back-up extraction team were memorised at that meeting. And then Brandt left the agent to pour over the plans alone for a while longer.

The agent was now leaving. Brandt lifted his head from the glass and watched.

Agent Hume earned her nickname on her very first mission: Ninja. She hadn't been a fan at first when it caught on with her fellow agents at IMF, but eventually became indifferent to it. All agents of IMF were used to having multiple identies, multiple aliases. Ninja was just another name.

She always looked so young still. Every time he saw her, all Brandt could think was how tiny she looked, barely five and a half feet tall, admittedly only a handful of inches shorter than him. Under her jacket she had a glock tucked into her black combat pants, and a knife in her boot, strapped to her right ankle. Her dark, shoulder length hair was tied in a messy ponytail to the side, with the left side falling out because her hair wasn't really long enough.

Brandt knew that 'Ninja' was an apt nickname. If anyone could do this, it was probably her... He still stared at her as though he was never going to see her again.

She stopped walking towards the elevators, turned her head to peer over her shoulder, and smiled up at him. With a wave, she disappeared.

She was beautiful. He would always remember his last sight of her from that moment.


"I like the new face, Mr Hobbes."

Tom Hobbes, aged forty-five, originally British but now a 'man of the world' as he liked to call his nationality, started and lashed out instinctively as the flash of a camera blinded him. Next thing he knew his still-aching jaw was in agony again, and he was pressed against the wall, a hand clawing his head. It had taken weeks for the swelling around his face to go down, for weeks he'd forced himself to be reasonable and recuperate in the clinic, away from prying eyes. He should have gone with his gut that told him the prying eyes would have come for him anyway.

"I have a message for you."

A woman? Standing over six foot tall, he could feel he towered over his assailant, but she had his arms twisted so far back he might as well have been only a foot tall. He knew that in this grip, if he moved he'd only break his own arms.

"No matter what you do, or where you go, we will find you. Don't let us down."

Wait... a message from... who? Them? Or a client...?

Gun shots deafened him, the pressure on his arm released, and he felt the roots of his hair being yanked out. Yelling, he lashed out again behind him, feeling freed, only for his fist to pass through nothing. He stared at his bodyguards. Where did she go?

"GET HER! KILL HER!"

She'd seen his face. Not once had he seen hers.


Three Years Ago

"...I'm telling you, this girl is the dog's bollocks, okay? She hacked IMF in half an hour. Twenty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds, to be precise. That's how fast she got through our firewalls. No idea how she did it. None, whatsoever. Do you know how long it would take me to hack IMF from outside the server? She must have been lucky, is what I say, 'cos no one, and I mean no one, is that -"

"Benji."

"Yes?"

"You're babbling."

A pause. "Oh."

Benji hadn't shut up about this case since the moment he'd been assigned to it. Rumours only fuelled his drivel. It was grating on Brandt's nerves so much, he was very seriously contemplating kicking Benji out of the van.

To be fair to Agent Dunn, this was an intriguing case. They were here - here being in a van parked at the end of a suburban avenue in D.C - to apprehend a hacker. They were waiting for the hacker's relatives to leave the premises. The foster aunt - the subject's foster-mother's sister - was due to take her two middle-schoolers to a football game at their school to cheerlead. The hacker had been overheard to have made other plans, though at last sight she was still in her pyjamas when she finally appeared in the backyard around lunch time, evidently having only just woken up, and did a light calisthenics routine. So, whatever her other plans were, evidently they did not involve getting changed.

William Brandt peered over the file again. It had been compiled over twelve hours, and, remembering his Analyst days, it was sloppy work. Amongst the mass of mere facts, Enma-O Meido was twenty-two years old, and had just finished her degree at MIT, majoring in Computer Science. Her biological mother, Louise Mill, was a Columbia University student, and had died from injuries sustained when her car crashed on icy roads as she drove herself to the hospital when she went into labour. Meido's biological father was Mill's professor of East Asian languages, one Tetsuo Toyoda from Hiroshima, Japan. Upon Mill's death and his subsequent custody, he named his new-born daughter Enma-O Meido and gave her up for adoption. She was formally adopted at the age of two by her foster parents Freddy and Joanna Locke, and at the age of six moved with her foster family to Joanna Locke's native Washington D.C. Before starting at MIT, she officially changed her name to Emma Locke.

To pass the time, Brandt put Enma-O and Meido into Google, wondering what or who Toyoda had named his daughter after, having not passed on neither his name nor her mother's. He wasn't sure what to make of Toyoda's choices.

Her academic record was varied. She was the anchor for the girls' relay sprint team in high school. In Literature and Humanities subjects Meido was a high B-average student, whilst her grades were amongst the National top percentile for AP Computer Science. Once at MIT her grades varied widely again from almost perfect marks to just above average. Upon reading them, Benji surmised she probably did what he did at Cambridge; got lazy and spent more time playing around with her computer than studying for her exams.

She had no criminal record, seemingly had no political agenda, had no unsavoury connections. The only interesting detail was that one of her professors at MIT had worked for MI6 a long time ago. Other than that, once she had liked an article supporting gay marriage in the US on Facebook; the most controversial thing IMF had managed to find out about her at such short notice.

Meido, on the other hand, knew that IMF existed. Members of the CIA didn't know IMF existed.

Brandt scratched the stubble on his chin. He'd been called very quickly and unexpectedly to oversee the team instructed to take Meido/Locke in, and had never bothered to replace the shaving cream in his bathroom in his dusty apartment. At first when he found out what the assignment was he thought he was being punished for something. Then he reckoned it was just because he happened to be in the neighbourhood, so to speak. Then he was told it was a reward for nearly getting killed on his last mission, as a respite as it were. After that, he got the impression he was being tested.

Sitting in the van with Benji, also on a 'respite' after getting electrocuted by a server with a very nasty firewall, Brandt thought this didn't make much of a 'respite', he'd prefer to just go on vacation.

Then Benji suddenly started pointing at the screen in front of them. Miss Locke had just exited the house with her foster aunt and her cousins, ushering them into the Honda. She waved as the family drove away, and then stayed standing in the driveway. She peered down the road to the van, and then headed back up to the house as both Brandt and Benji held their breath. She went inside, and reappeared a minute later, a pitcher of home-made lemonade in one hand and two glasses in the other. She poured herself a glass, sat down at the porch table, and cleared her throat.

"I imagine someone's listening by now."

Brandt glared at Benji, whose eyes widened and he shook his head fervently, mouthing 'I didn't do anything!'.

"After last night I expected someone to show up," Locke said out loud, her eyes scanning over everything she could see, unsure who she was actually addressing. "I didn't... I didn't mean any harm when I hacked your system. I was just... curious." She took a deep breath, clearly very nervous, but resolute. "It would be nice to talk to an actual person, so I'll be right here. Patty and the kids don't get back until dinner time, so you've got a couple of hours or so. No rush."

And with that, she leaned back in her chair, and twiddled her thumbs, blushing with embarrassment.

Silence fell in the van. Benji looked from the screens fixed on the young woman to Brandt and back again. "You're not going to..." he trailed off as Brandt raised a silencing finger. Then...

"Oh, and by the way," Miss Locke pipped up, seemingly because she couldn't help it, "Impossible Missions Force is the most ridiculous name I've ever heard, it's like something out of a sixties tv show. Just thought I'd get that off my chest." And then she went silent again, looking like she felt completely foolish.

Brandt grinned despite himself. He straightened up as much as the van allowed, tucked his gun into its holster under his jacket, put his 'sunglasses' on, and got out before Benji could object.

He was glad he accepted now.


The glass smashed as a body hurled itself through it. Agent Hume groaned as the glass bit into her hands as she picked herself up and sprinted away from the building, focusing on the traffic in the road ahead rather than the screams, yells and gunshots from behind. A bullet whizzed past her ear, and screams came from ahead as people started to panic. Lifting her own gun she shot the locks in the gate and using her speed burst through and darted in-between the cars, keeping as low as possible as windshields started to explode around her. Under the gunshots she heard SUVs revving up, swore under her breath, and yanked a bewildered driver off his motorbike and started weaving through the traffic, working her phone as she did so. Blindly typing in the contact number she'd memorised, she hoped to God her back-up was ready to assist.

As she started to get ahead of the panic that was freezing the cars on the road, into the thick of Bangkok's hub, she rattled off the pass-codes to confirm her identity as fast as she could and, without pausing for breath, begged for her life. "Prize snapped, message relayed, get me out of here!"

Then her shoulder exploded in agony, splattering the motorbike with blood, and Agent Hume thought no more.


"Agent Brandt?"

Brandt blinked, confused. It was 4am, and he was in his bed, in his apartment, and he had been asleep. For all he knew, he could have still been asleep when he answered his phone and gave his pass-code.

"Yes?"

"Special Agent Hunt just informed us that his team picked up Agent Hume near the Thai/Cambodian border, sir. He's requested your assistance in bringing her home. The plane is ready to take you to Bangkok."

Now he was awake. "On my way."


Emma Locke turned in her chair when she heard the van door close. She watched as a man in a navy suit, with short dark-blonde hair and a useful-looking watch made his way towards her aunt and uncle's home. From a distance he looked young, and as he got closer his youth became more ambiguous; she hadn't the faintest idea how old he was. His hands were big, worn, like they packed quite a punch. Somehow there was nothing about his appearance that surprised her, except maybe the hint of bemusement on his face. Maybe it was her last comment. Most of all though, she got the impression that he was just as curious about her as she was about him, and that put her at ease. A little, anyway.

As he warily made his way up the driveway and up the steps to the porch, she suddenly wished she hadn't felt so self-conscious all through the morning, and wasn't so under-dressed. She'd barely slept, woke at dawn, and stayed in bed, expecting to hear the house being raided. As the sun came up and nothing happened, she remained in bed, trying to think. So as not to alarm her hosts, she finally emerged from the guest room in her over-sized graduation t-shirt and some shorts, yawned a lot, had a coffee whilst the kids had sandwiches for lunch, and did star-jumps and sit-ups in the backyard like she did everyday. She pretended she was too lazy to go for her usual run round the neighbourhood, and played Gears of War with her cousins, giggling as she obliterated them every time. She was due to go back to her parents' house in three days; she hoped - hopelessly, she knew - that 'IMF' would hold off until she left her relatives' home.

Then she spotted the van at the end of the road as she waved her cousins off, and her gut told her to stay calm. You are not a threat, she told herself. Do not act like one. So she spoke aloud, and hoped that whoever was listening was patient. The idea of showering or changing never occurred to her.

The man in front of her now looked like he could out-wait her any day. He also looked so professional that she couldn't help but feel embarrassed about the stubble on her legs, her bare feet, and the bags under her eyes.

He was pretty hot...

"Miss Locke?" She snapped herself from her silly thoughts. "May I sit down?"

She gestured nervously to the seat across from her, and watched as he carefully seated himself. "Help yourself to lemonade, if you like," she offered, and then chewed her lip, feeling foolish. She took a sip from her own glass, as if to prove she hadn't poisoned it, and before she could stop herself pulled a face at how tart it was. Maybe it was her expression that put him off trying it. Or, as she realised a split second later, if she'd wanted to poison him, she could have just put the poison in the glass. Stupid...

"I'm IMF Agent William Brandt," he introduced himself. "Do you know who I am?"

She frowned, shook her head. "No, I don't," she said. Then she flinched, remembering. "I did get to the gateway for personnel, but I thought that would be too intrusive, so I didn't look," she admitted.

He didn't react. "So what did you look at?"

She shrugged innocently. "You mean, like secret files and stuff? Not a lot." She cleared her throat. "I took a wander through the systems, but I didn't actually peek at anything. There were a lot of code-names for different things, I tried to steer clear of those. I didn't cover myself, so your server should have a history of my viewings. You can look at my computer too, I didn't download anything." She smiled despite herself. "That would have been really difficult, if I'd tried that though. It's a pretty good system. I just..." She shrugged. "I just found the right holes at the right times, and just went for them. If I'd tried to cover my tracks, I would never have made it through; it would have taken too long, and I probably wouldn't have gotten through the first set of firewalls."

She suddenly realised she was talking too much, and stared at her hands in her lap.

Brandt studied her through his sunglasses, knew that Benji was studying her through them too. "Why did you do it then?" he asked.

She looked up again, and smiled weakly. "Job hunting." She sat forward a bit, intent. "One of my professors said he reckoned I had the right mind for Intelligence, I think he was a retired spook or something. He said I should 'scout around', see whether or not I wanted to apply for the CIA or... something. IMF was mentioned in a file on their network, so I decided to take a peek. Wasn't expecting what I found..."

Brandt suppressed a smile. "And? What do you think?"

She looked him right in the eyes, straight through the glasses. "If you'll have me, I... I want in."

"Brandt?" Composing himself, Brandt didn't react to the annoying voice sounding in his microphone, and continued to the study the girl before him. "We've just had an update on her file. That professor of hers she mentioned, he recommended her for recruitment to MI6. One of their headhunters actually met her, she's in their records. Apparently she turned them down."

Thank you, Benji, Brandt wanted to say, for interrupting. He remembered his mission: to assess Emma Locke for recruitment.

No agent of IMF ever looked like the same man or woman that they were before they joined IMF. None of them, himself included. He himself was a Marine, a kid who went off to war with a happy-go-lucky attitude. That was a whole other story.

Reason told him that this girl had proved pretty reckless, risking a lifetime in prison for her curiosity, that that wasn't always a trait most admired by the IMF. But he also didn't know a single agent who wasn't reckless when they needed to be. They all risked plenty every day of their lives working for IMF, whether they worked at a desk or in a supply chain or in the field on operations. Reason also told him that if IMF didn't take her, someone else would. MI6 might try again some day, or the CIA would get whiff of her.

His gut told him her professor was right. She'd need to be trained, but they all did when they joined IMF. His gut told him that when she passed - when, not if - things would never be the same for her.

Or that things would never be the same for him.

So he helped himself to a glass of lemonade, put his glasses down on the table, and took a sip. "Tell your aunt before you leave to use more water, not more sugar."


Brandt jogged across the tarmac to the hangar, spotting the silhouette of Agent Stickell up ahead, and slowed as he approached. The usual humour in Luther Stickell's face had been drawn out, and he looked tired and weary, but he shook Brandt's hand all the same.

"Brandt. Ethan had to go, something came up." He turned to look over his shoulder. "She hasn't said anything yet, but the medics think she's mostly all there still. She did give us this though." He handed Brandt Hume's iPhone, chipped and sticky with blood, but intact and still alive. "We've already got a copy, it's on the system now. She got us hair samples too, from when he checked in and when she took the photo." Stickell sighed. "Get her home, man. She deserves it. The Ninja did good." And he started to leave.

"Luther!" Brandt called after him, stopping him in his tracks. "What happened?"


The bullet speared itself into her shoulder, splattering blood everywhere, and she gripped hard on to everything as she screamed. The bike swerved for a moment, and then she bit down. Mind over matter, mind over... shit, this hurts! She focused on the road, focused on not looking back. Using the reflections on the abandoned cars, she counted two SUVs, and another man grabbing a motorcycle off of a civilian. She accelerated and yelled into her phone again. "I repeat, prize snapped, message relayed, being pursued, need immediate evac to secure the package!"

"Stand by, Ninja," Special Agent Hunt replied calmly, and the phone went silent once again.


"Hobbes sent his entire team to chase after her," Luther told soberly. "We couldn't get a secure link to her phone to extract the pictures, so we directed her to a safe house about twenty miles outside Bangkok. She couldn't drop her tail; Hobbes' men are amongst the best in the world, and she was injured. She thought she'd lost them after a while - we thought she had as well - and she headed for the rendezvous. But the location had been compromised; by the time we got there to pick her up, it was in flames, and she'd gone again."


Her gun spat out the empty mag, and before it even dropped to the floor she had a new one in and was firing again. She counted two dead already, another bleeding out. She ducked as machine gun fire tore the wooden wall of the beach hut she was hiding behind to shreds. She waited for the pause, and rolled out of cover, aimed and fired. Three dead, fourth on his way. Bullets spat sand up in her face and she was on the move again, sprinting towards the car she'd hot-wired from the city, spraying covering fire behind her as she went, and dived into the beaten Mercedes. She sped into the Jeep in front, making it spin into the men who were covering behind it, crushing them into the stone wall behind, and drove away into the dark.

This time she didn't call for back-up.


"We managed to track the GPS on her phone, and started catching up with her, took care of her tail, and managed to get to her just in time..."


The gunshots in the distance had stopped, or maybe her hearing was on its way out. The road ahead in the dawn was bleary, and her hands on the wheel were starting to shake.

Tears of disappointment streamed down her face. She'd actually got what she came for, and now she was going to die. All over a paranoid arms dealer the IMF had been trying to push over the edge. It didn't seem like enough somehow.

She'd done her best, but she was finally bleeding out. If she'd had time, she could have bandaged herself up enough to last until she could get the bullet out, but she'd never had time that night. They'd been relentless, chasing after her, sniffing her out again when they'd lost her. She wasn't a failure, she told herself, she knew how to lose a tail. She got rid of the bike, changed clothes, double-backed in her new appearance to cover her tracks, even faked a disability to disguise holding her arm to steady her bleeding shoulder. But this... this wasn't anything she'd been prepared for. They just hadn't given up. They had eyes all over the city, and they picked her up again and again.

She hadn't given up either though. But sometimes that isn't enough.

She thought about her parents, and the happy, solid childhood they'd secured for her. Of the state-of-the-art computer they'd given her for her fourteenth birthday after finding out how she was acing her Computer Literacy classes. Of her friends at her high school's computer club, and the girls she ran with in the athletics team. Of her friends at MIT in her dorm and on her course. Of the handful of guys she'd had crushes on, and the few she'd ever had any fun with.

She thought of meeting Agent Brandt, her recruiter and mentor, of how handsome he looked the day she met him in his suit and IMF glasses. She thought of the reluctance that he'd tried and failed to hide from her as he told her the brief for this mission face-to-face, rather than on a recording. She thought of seeing him leaning against the glass in his office, looking at her like he knew she was going to die.

And with that thought, she passed out, unaware that her car was still going at full speed, heading more towards the ditch than to salvation.


"Her car flipped when it came off the road. Medics reckon she'd already lost consciousness by then, never even noticed," Luther told Brandt. "She's lucky, really lucky, to be alive at all. She got pretty bashed up, and her car blew not long after we pulled her out of it." Luther took a deep breath. "I haven't seen even Ethan look that bad before. We all get wounded, that's normal. Just not that much in one helping, that usually just tells us we're coming home in a body-bag."

Silence fell between the two men. Then Luther came back and clapped Brandt on the shoulder. "Take care of her, man. Get her home." And then he vanished into the shadows again.

Brandt couldn't bring himself to look at her as the medics wheeled her across to the jet. He went on ahead of the stretcher so he didn't have to follow it, sat with the pilots during take-off, and when he went out to the fuselage he stayed at the front, lay on the bench, and tried to sleep, reminding himself he was still on Eastern time. At first he didn't really think he would sleep. But then...


New trainee Emma Locke reputedly had a computer for a memory: they told her anything once, and it was filed away and organised with everything else they taught her, and then tag words would make everything crop up, complete with their connections. Her athletics background gave her a basic foundation for all of her physical training, and she'd willingly pushed herself up to the gear she needed to be in. She was a quick thinker with quick response times; her martial arts instructor wrote that she fought like the best of chess players, that she could strategise her moves at lightening speed.

No more the modest, nervous hacker.

Brandt met her only twice during her training, which was typically far more than most active field agents met recruits. The first time was on the running track, running in opposite directions, a handful of months after their first ever meeting. It was early, just after full dawn, and he'd just finished a night of watching CCTV footage to research on a target and was trying to wind himself down. She looked fresh-faced and focused, quite a different woman from the girl he'd met in the suburbs. She didn't seem to notice him at all, or recognise him.

The second time she did remember him.

She was a month away from being passed for active duty, a few ticks away from a perfect examination. She'd been cleared on technical a long time ago, and could have joined the technicians team immediately if she so chose, but had continued. Over the last two years she'd trained with the best, with Special Forces to get into peak physical condition and to attain combat experience, and then when they gave her the go-ahead, with IMFs best instructors on tactical, espionage, and action. A few weeks ago she'd passed her explosives test, disarming a live unit and using the components to rearm it on a specified target. She'd learnt how to be visible and invisible, unforgettable and instantly forgettable in a crowd. She had steady hands for sharp-shooting, a calm head with all firearms, and had set the fastest time for compiling an M82 sniper rifle blindfolded. The only thing she was lacking, and knew she was lacking, was, in the words of her instructors, 'punch'.

The gym in the IMF's lowest levels was accessible to all agents, was encouraged to be used. People stagnated behind desks, so the gym, swimming pool and firing-range was open to all. Late one night Trainee Field Agent Locke snuck in, and was letting rip on the punch bag. She'd been at it for a while, and her arms were aching from her efforts, but something in the bag would not relent. She blamed never having gotten into a fight before, on having no idea what it felt like to really punch someone. She excelled at minimal-contact attacks and counter-attacks, on blocking and defending herself, but actually beating someone to a pulp so they were not a threat was something else entirely.

"You have to mean it."

Startled, she turned, instinctively moved towards her concealed pistol in her sweatshirt on the bench. Forgetting that the punch bag was swaying, it nearly knocked her off her feet as it swung back. Regaining her balance, she blushed. She knew him... how could she forget...

"Agent Brandt," she acknowledged, standing straighter, respectfully at attention.

He chuckled. "No need for 'agent' in here," he told her, gesturing to the walls of the gym. "When we're in here, we're all 'training', my instructors used to tell me."

She smiled. "They tell me too."

He unzipped his hoodie, stuffed it into his duffel bag and dropped it in the corner. "You have to mean it," Brandt repeated to her, pointing to the punch bag behind her.

She looked at it uncertainly, and looked back at him. "My instructors tell me I'm not 'mean' enough to mean it."

The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. "I highly doubt that." As she frowned, surprised and bemused, he studied her for a second and then gestured her over to the sparring ring. "Come, sparr with me."

He went and put some gloves on to protect his knuckles, stretched for a moment, and climbed up into the ring. She was already there. He never heard her move. That was another thing written on her reports: silent as an owl.

Brandt allowed himself a second to admire the creature before him. She was twenty-four now. In a sports bra and loose Adidas bottoms, she didn't slouch, was poised, light on her feet. Her stomach was flat and toned, her forearms and shoulders built stronger. Even her face seemed more defined now, the left over child's fat and extra from her student days of living on pizzas and beer were long gone. All she needed was a bit more colour, she'd spent too much time underground in the IMF maze, not enough in the sun.

Looking at her made him feel old. He had over ten years of field experience over her, and the time when he was a young recruit, a little younger than she was now, felt like far too many missions ago.

He bounced on his feet, signalling his readiness, and got into a start-off stance, watched as she did the same. Immediately he noticed the difference between himself and her: his fists were closed, ready to attack; her fingers were loose, ready to deflect. So, he stared her down for a moment, and then lunged. She vanished, and next thing he knew he was on his back, her grip tight on his arm. The air in his lungs coughed out of him in pure surprise, and he stared up at her as she extended a hand to help him up.

"I'm a bit further along than the foundation stuff, Brandt," she teased. She grabbed his other hand and yanked him to his feet. "Want to actually sparr now? I want to see how I fare."

He grinned, nodded, and got ready again, focusing. She lunged instead, he blocked, twisted her attack, ducked under her counter, tried to off-balance her with her own first lunge, attacked, and ducked away as she countered that too. In a couple of seconds, he failed to knock her to her feet, and she'd almost had him back on the floor again. Her instructor was right: she fought like a chess player. But as she grinned, assuming they were pausing again, he swung his leg out at her ankles, knocking her to the floor. She landed on her back too, spluttering as the air forced itself out of her lungs too. Realising her mistake, she swung back to her feet herself, ready again.

And then they were off.

He remembered fleetingly that she had studied self-defence at MIT, and it showed in her style, had helped her when she was learning CQC. Not trusting the force of her attacks, she used the force of his to disable him. He could just imagine trying to fight her in a confined space, and she'd have thrown him against the walls, used tables and chairs, cabinets, whatever was around to batter the shit out of him without ever needing to actually punch him for the KO. If he'd actually been fighting her he would have used that reluctance to his advantage though. There were a few times when he could have knocked her out; to her credit she always seemed to know she'd shown a weak spot or a window to attack, and closed them the moment she realised. To an outsider, their sparring match was fairly brutal even though they never actually hit each other, but sadly he was going easy on her. In the field, she would not have such luck to correct her own mistakes as she went along.

Finally, after she'd flipped him over onto the floor again, twisting his arm behind him he slammed his palm on the floor to signal a break. "Time-out!"

A moment passed, and finally the pressure on his arm, and subsequently everywhere else, was gone. He rolled on to his back, watched her sink down to sit next to him, breathing hard. Then he realised how tense she was. "You alright?" He asked. She nodded unconvincingly, and retied her messy hair to occupy her fidgetting hands.

Then he really looked at her. No wonder she was tense. She was tiny, and she was young, and she was a woman: a world of bigger, older, rougher men faced her. Her life thus far had been stable, despite its macabre beginnings. What did she know about willing to kill more experienced men than she with her bare hands?

He let the silence calm her for a few minutes, and then spoke gently. "I lost a friend today." Her head lifted and she turned to look down at him, the tension paused. "Agent Carter was killed in action in Madrid a few hours ago. She was trying to save a fellow agent's life." He scratched his nose. "She was never quite the same after Agent Hanaway was killed in Budapest, even after Mumbai," he thought aloud. "I always thought she hoped killing Moreau would help. Never really works that way though."

Emma nodded sympathetically. "I read the file on Cobalt... and Croatia. The official one, and the actual one."

He frowned. "How the hell did you read about Croatia?"

She smiled innocently. "How did you think I passed my technical tests? It's always easier to root around from the inside."

He laughed uncomfortably. "You know I could get you into all kinds of shit for that?"

"Only if the boss didn't know," she teased. "Director Brassel wanted the systems tested, so I did. That's how the firewalls got improved, I gave in my report, and that passed my technical exam."

Brandt snorted with amusement. "Okay. What did the file say?"

"On Croatia?" Hume shrugged. "The official one ends with Julia Hunt's death. The actual one effectively says you quit the field for nothing."

He sighed. "Yeah. Yeah, I did."

"Do you regret it?"

He glanced up at her. Ever curious. "I did. Now, not so much. I had good days as an analyst after I quit the field." He glanced up again. "I did miss it though. I'd gather all this intel, pass it on to someone else, and know that someone else was risking their life. Not the best feeling."

She nodded understandingly. Silence fell again. Then...

"I'll get there," she said confidently. "I think things'll be very different once I get out there. Then I'll really 'mean' it. People's lives will depend on it. Until then..." She shrugged. "Until then it's just a punchbag, we're just sparring, and the instructors aren't the 'bad guys'. Once I'm on duty, I'll mean it."

She smiled down at him, and stood up fluidly. "I'm sorry about your friend." Then she left the ring, and returned to the punchbag.

"Me too," Brandt said quietly. He watched as Locke kicked the punchbag so hard the chains holding it to the ceiling creaked ominously, and smiled. He had every faith in her.

A few weeks later, she passed her last test, and changed her name again: Agent Emma Hume.


RE-EDIT: Aug 10th 2012