A/N: What may have propelled Ethan away from active field duty toward the instructor position he occupies in MI3?
(Apologies for the awkward tense changes; first person retrospective was giving me Conniptions. Probably shouldn't have chosen that POV...)
I'm secretary Alicia Franklin, and I'm with the IMF.
Oh, I'm not that Secretary! No, I'm not our leader, whatever they choose to call him. I'm an actual secretary—I take top-secret notes for top-secret meetings. Needless to say, I've got high clearance and higher anonymity, from behind my double-sided mirror; my protection isn't in being deadly, but in being unknown. As far as anyone knows, I'm just another government secretary doing her endless work; who would target me? I don't even have to lie about my job at home!
Also needless to say, mine isn't the kind of position they want high turnover in. I've held this job for twenty years, and might well hold it for twenty years more. Hardly anyone knows me, even in the IMF, but I've sure come to know them: our Secretaries, our Agents, our scientists and analysts and spies. They're all interesting, and I love watching them and hearing their stories; but probably the most interesting is Ethan Hunt.
No surprise there, I suppose! Yes, the whole agency knows Hunt, or at least knows of him, these days. He was always astonishingly promising from his training days through his early missions. Barely any time as an agent and he was already taking point on Jim Phelps' missions—Jim Phelps! Oh, Ethan was the IMF's darling: young, charismatic, already competent due to his time in the Army yet not jaded, a prodigy at all things "impossible." His career was practically laid out for him: a few more years as Phelps' point man; several years solo; a team leader and senior agent for as long as he would do it; a trainer; and finally, maybe, the Secretary.
But nothing happened that way.
One mission, and it all went wrong. It's hard to overstate what the IMF lost then. Oh, I've heard it argued that the tragedy was necessary to make Hunt the spectacular agent he is today; it's times like that when I want to storm through my mirror and make some heads roll. Ethan Hunt didn't need a tragedy to make him the best; he was well on his way there already. No, losing his team to his leader's treachery didn't teach Ethan suspicion or ruthlessness in the field or whatever those blockheads say. No, I watched that report and all of his after; I know exactly what it was he learned from that mission. It taught him to carry the weight of the world, because his own hands, insufficient though he might think them, are the only ones that are safe. It taught him a new kind of pain, one he never need have experienced. And to the innate kindness in his character it added a core of—is it self-sacrifice, or self-flagellation?—that can be both beautiful and awful to behold.
Worse, though? Is what it taught the IMF. You see, though his trust in the agency was never the same after that mission, his loyalty didn't waver; but we couldn't forget that first mole hunt, that first disavowal. We couldn't forget how we'd betrayed him, and we're forever suspicious that one day he'll betray us in return. Yet we've taken credit for his magnificence, seen the brilliant mind and hardened muscles and steady smile, and given him our most difficult tasks.
And as his successes mounted, the IMF forgot its best agent was not superhuman.
I remember the day that became blindingly obvious.
Oh, it's not that it all collapsed. Thankfully, it's not even that Ethan collapsed, though he certainly deserved to. No, I am glad to say, for our agency's sake, that we managed to tear off our blinders in time to see the disaster coming, and so snatched him back.
"Well, you can't all have Hunt!"
It was a standard meeting of the various administrators and analysts: missions were being planned and agents assigned to them—and everyone wanted Ethan Hunt.
"Mr. Secretary—"
"Sir—"
"But this mission—"
The protests tumbled over each other, but the Secretary merely waited and eventually the room fell silent.
He sighed. "Do I really need to explain this to a pack of analysts? Agent Hunt cannot take all of your missions. It's simply impossible—and not—" he glared around the table—"our kind of impossible. We have other agents; besides, I think Hunt is due for vacation."
"He'll just kill himself doing some hare-brained stunt out of the field instead of in it," one man muttered. He was met with choked-off chuckles and half-hearted glares. I winced; Ethan fascinated me as much as everyone else, but the reports of him free-climbing on his time off were hair-raising.
The Secretary sighed again. "That's as may be. Not our call. But…"
The phone rang, interrupting, and the Secretary answered. "Yes?...Oh!...Yes, send him up." He hung up. "Well, we'll have to table agent assignments for the moment. 'Speak of the devil, and he shall appear'… Ethan Hunt is here for debrief, gentlemen. I hope you all read his report; he'll be up momentarily."
The room fell into astonished silence. Those days, Hunt rarely debriefed in person; rather, the reports he wrote up for a completed mission—usually while on transportation to his next—were generally all headquarters received. That he was there meant something unusual.
The door opened, and Agent Ethan Hunt, superspy, strode in—or more, more accurately, levered himself in on crutches. His face was scratched, his suit limp, and the cast on his leg tossed all hope of this man running any mission in the near future out into the cold. His smile was the same ready, brilliant thing it had ever been; but something about him in that moment beyond the obvious hurt, some subtle change in demeanor from the last time I'd studied him, made my gut clench in sudden worry.
"Agent Hunt!" the Secretary cried, rising, as Hunt dropped into a chair with respectful nods all around.
"Mr. Secretary. Gentlemen."
"Are you…all right?"
Hunt smiled. "Not entirely, but it's been repaired well enough. I've been told it should return to full function, given enough time and proper effort."
One of the administrators muttered disappointedly at the mention of "enough time" but was glared to silence by his colleagues. Ethan took no notice.
"I'm afraid it's been a while since I've done this in person," the agent continued, "and I seem to have interrupted you."
"Not at all!" The Secretary, abnormally flustered, shuffled his papers and sat down again. "Do you need anything? Water? Coffee?"
"No, thank you, sir."
"Well, then…you can begin, I suppose."
So Ethan Hunt relayed the details of his latest mission. My fingers flew. I was enthralled, but one reason I had excelled so long as a secretary was that hearing a good story didn't make me sit and stare; it made me want to write it all down, capturing every bit perfectly. And this? This was a good story.
Apparently, I wasn't the only one to think so. Hearing it from Ethan's own mouth was a different thing altogether from reading his mission reports. Sure, he was a clear and detailed writer, but from the written page the drama of his missions had to be imagined. As a speaker, though? However straightforward and unadorned his intent probably was, he was a remarkably engaging storyteller. Everyone got caught up in the action; I, with my scribbling pen, was no exception.
"…but the file was encrypted, and I didn't have the password—not yet. I went back in the next night, and I'm afraid the leg fell victim to the password retrieval. It was in his safe—I guessed that—but…"
"Wait!"
The story ground to a halt. Ethan raised his eyebrows expectantly. "Yes, sir?"
"Why did you go back in for the password? Surely the file could be broken into?"
Ethan smiled self-deprecatingly. "I know my way around a computer, Mr. Secretary, but I'm not much of a hacker. I judged it would take me far longer to break into that file than just steal the password."
By this time everyone in the room was looking slightly confused.
"No, I meant, why didn't you call tech support?"
Ethan's brow furrowed; he leaned forward over the table.
"I didn't think it was that much of an emergency. Was there more riding on this than I was told? Everything's safe in IMF hands now; did you need it sooner?"
"No—no, there was no hurry…" A bemused silence fell. Then—"Oh! The—policy change!"
"What?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, Ethan—Agent Hunt…listen. A few years ago, there was a bit of restructuring at IMF, especially because of all the technological development. We know effective agents aren't necessarily computer wizards as well, but we don't have enough field-trained techs to assign one to every team. So we've revised our policy regarding in-field support. These days, you can call for backup for several reasons, one of which is tech help, not just in emergency situations. I'm so sorry that change never got relayed to you—I don't know how we missed you when we cycled the rest of the field agents through the retraining course. That's a…terrible oversight on our part—my part."
Ethan sat back, brow still furrowed, pursing his lips. The Secretary suddenly looked nervous, as if he wondered whether this agent, the best of the best even with a broken leg, would decide it was the Secretary's fault his leg was broken and do something to hold him accountable.
But then Ethan relaxed, smiling ruefully. "Oh, well. Now I know."
The room let out its breath. Ethan concluded his story, and, astonished at the in-person hearing of it and rather guilty-feeling for keeping their premier agent ill-informed, the various administrators were rather more awed and complimentary than they usually were in response to his reports. But one analyst, who had been following along in Hunt's written report as he told the story, interrupted somewhat timidly.
"Uh…excuse me? Mr. Hunt?"
Hunt looked at the man inquisitively.
"I'm looking at your report, agent, and…well, you identified here in debrief exactly when your—" he waved uncomfortably at Hunt's injury—"happened, but…I don't see any such…mention? In your report?"
"No, you wouldn't." Ethan's tone was straightforward, though he seemed unsure of the purpose of the question. "That only contains information pertinent to the actual mission parameters. Any injuries I sustain are written up in medical reports—either by me, for anything I address in-field, or by the professionals of whichever of our liaison clinics or hospitals I end up at. If you want the details on the leg, this time it was our British contact, an MI6 surgeon, who operated. I'm surprised you haven't gotten records from him already, actually."
"And is…" another analyst, too disturbed at the potential implications here, took up the questioning, "…is that how all your reports are? Separate mission and medical records?"
"Yes, that's right. Don't tell me I've missed another administrative change around here!" Hunt's self-deprecating humor went mostly unacknowledged, and he cocked his head. "Did you…not know that?"
"Just how often are you injured, Ethan?" the secretary jumped in urgently.
"Well, there's something almost every mission, though it can be pretty minor: a mild concussion, or stiches I put in myself. Cracked ribs. Obviously nothing's been this bad, but I've spent a month or two in the hospital, a few times these past years, for gunshots, stab wounds, broken fingers." He took in everyone's horrified faces, and for the first time the smile he tried to flash looked a bit more like a grimace. "I'm no more invincible than the next agent, you know."
No one knew quite what to say to that. The appalling oversight of not checking an agent's medical records before sending him a new mission was bad enough; the fact that the agent had assumed they knew he sustained injuries almost every mission, and kept him on constant active duty rotation anyway, was even worse.
Eventually Ethan sighed. "Well, I'm afraid this time it might be as much as a year, gentlemen, before I'm field-ready again. Pins can only do so much to fix a bone that ended up in multiple pieces."
The Secretary snapped out of his horror, nodded frantically. "Yes! Yes, well, you can have as much medical leave as you want, of course! Heal, and…relax! And, I'm sure there's plenty for you to do around HQ, too…to start with, this might be a good time to catch you up on the specifics of those policy changes? If you want?"
Ethan shrugged, smoothly ignoring the Secretary's apologetic stumbling and the rest of the room's guilty stares. "Absolutely. I'm happy to come in for classes. I can rest in a chair here as well as in a chair at home."
"Oh! Well—I suppose…" the Secretary dug out a paper from his stack. "Yes, actually, starting next week there is a course being taught on available in-field assistance. It'll be all rookies, though…I was thinking I'd just assign someone to explain it to you personally…"
Ethan smiled. "No need—I'll attend the course. I have the time—and besides, I haven't hung around HQ for a while. It will be nice to see who's here now, meet the new agents."
"If you're sure…then, good! I'll get you the course details before next week?"
"That's fine, sir, thank you." Ethan stood, reaching over the table to shake the Secretary's hand. He smiled at the room (though few of them could return his courtesy without flinching away), retrieved his crutches, and limped out.
For a moment the room was silent.
"We've done him dirty," someone finally breathed. Everyone murmured in agreement.
"How did we miss this?" the Secretary exploded at last. "Every other field agent rotates back to HQ for a few months every year! For supplemental training, sure, but also to teach the recruits, test stuff for R&D, whatever! To heal! And why has no one been reading his medical reports? Did we assumed he's just too good to get hurt? Even aside from that, it's totally unacceptable that Ethan—Agent Hunt—hasn't been back here for over a year, and then for barely a few days. None of our other agents have that schedule. None. We've been sending him from mission-to-mission, unrested, barely healed…we'll burn him out, or get him killed, or he'll—"
He fell silent, but everyone heard what he didn't say. Ethan Hunt might go rogue was an often-pondered but never-discussed worry in IMF HQ. The room collectively winced.
With a sigh, the Secretary pushed away his pile of agent requests. "I'm not answering these now. No one's getting Hunt, obviously. So. All of you, read our active field agent lists—and everyone's medical records, please!—and come back with requests I can actually grant. We have other agents than Ethan Hunt; it's time he got a break, even apart from that leg."
Unseen, I closed my eyes and nodded. The thing that had clenched in my gut when I first saw Ethan hobble into the room had grown tighter and tighter throughout the debriefing; but now it relaxed, just a little. And I knew, with sudden and desperate relief, that we were in time. This could be salvaged, after all.
A/N: If you were getting (to quote Mr. Darcy's hilarious criticism of Jane in P&P) "[he] smiles to much" vibes from Ethan in the first half of the debriefing, that was intentional: a smile like TC's is an effective piece of armor to cover the heart of a dangerously vulnerable spy.
Depending on whether my inspiration goes where I want it to, this may be followed by some more stories from the same time period: Ethan attending the rookies' class, taking over teaching duties himself while healing, meeting Lindsey, staying on as an instructor instead of resuming active duty...