"A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once." (Ocean Vuong)
A collection of outsider perspectives on Ethan Hunt.
The Cop
A/N: Spin-off from a certain scene in MI: Fallout. (Italicized dialogue is in French.)
Emma Michel was young, and eager, and right now (though she wouldn't admit it) just a little bit bored. The great things she would do when she joined the police force—well, those were in her future. Far in her future. And she understood, really, she did. First of all, despite her training she was nowhere near good enough for really difficult or dangerous things, not yet, not without time and experience. And besides, someone needed to keep public order, right? Write parking tickets?
It was fine. Really.
The doors of the garage next to her rolled open. She glanced casually up, preparing to move out of the way once she finished writing the ticket in her hand. Her eyes took in the three men…four…
Her heartrate kicked up. She turned, unsure of her next move, adrenaline flooding her veins because what is this this is a kidnapping isn't it what do I do I don't know what to do—
One man in the tableau in the garage moved, and her gaze focused on him. Slowly he walked around the car door, closing it behind him. He stepped toward her.
"Stop!" she cried, drawing her service pistol, heart pounding in her throat as she pointed it at the man. "Stay where you are!"
The man, though watching her carefully, didn't obey. They all started moving, and some tendril of her mind grasped at her training. She told them to stop moving, get their hands up, trying to cover them all, knowing it was impossible, knowing she needed backup, knowing it wasn't coming because she couldn't call for help.
But the first man to move continued to walk toward her, slowly, unthreateningly, hands held out in placation. "Walk away…please," he said in accented French, gently, carefully, lines of worry creased in his forehead, and something about him…the way he spoke, the look in his eyes…
Crack!
Pain. She fell, she was falling, she was on fire. She gasped, and it burned, and her mind blanked with it. The world swirled around her, until it focused in on a man, walking up to her, gun in his hand, gun aimed at her…
Then the ringing in her ears was split by more gunfire, but it was him that fell this time, not her. Beginning to sob in terror and pain, she looked over at the first man, the one with worried eyes, as he lowered the weapon with which he'd just shot her aggressors. He came over to her and knelt at her side, all calm competence and careful hands. At his instigation, she put pressure on her wound and called in her location.
He cupped the side of her face with a calloused, gentle hand, the hand that had just shot a man to save her.
"I'm so sorry," he whispered, sincerity in all the lines of his face, in the brush of his fingers on her cheek as he stood and ran back toward the car. She collapsed further, the pain overwhelming, and her vision faded with the roar of his car as he drove away.
Emma woke in a fogged stupor, the echo of a rough-whispered I'm so sorry in her ears. She blinked her eyes open, slowly turning her head to find, hovering over her, a relieved, smiling face.
"Oh, Emma, you're awake," Rupert breathed, tracing her cheek with his smooth fingers. She felt the ghost of the rasp of a gun-worn grip underneath his touch. "I was so worried."
Emma reached toward him with a shaking hand, and he obligingly grasped it, holding it between his tightly.
"He saved me…" she croaked, stiffening as pain shot through her side.
Rupert's face creased in confusion. "Who?" he asked, but then a nurse bustled in, and her parents, and she continued gripping Rupert's hand as things happened around her, and always she heard a voice echoing in her ears, I'm so sorry.
Emma honest-to-goodness never thought she'd see him again.
Her recovery was long and painful. Things had been broken and torn inside her that were reluctant to heal, and she knew some of them never would. The scar, at least, would be hers forever. But her family was there for her, and Rupert, and her comrades on the force, and the end was in sight.
But she didn't know what to do next.
She was sitting in the park, catching her breath during a solitary walk. She had shaken off her familial nursemaids gently but firmly; she had talked to them, and would talk to them more before she made any decisions, but for now she wanted to think things through on her own, for a bit, and that wasn't going to happen in their smothering care.
But the wind was chillier than she had expected, and she shivered a bit as she sat, habitually ignoring the dull ache in her gut.
"Can I offer you a jacket?" said a voice.
She looked up, and froze.
Standing before her, black leather jacket hanging from his outstretched hand, was her savior.
Her lips parted. She nodded wordlessly, hardly knowing what she was agreeing to.
Slowly, as slowly as all his interactions with her had been that fateful day, he stepped closer, draping worn leather around her shoulders. It was clearly his, and newly-removed; latent body heat still clung to it, and she instinctively sighed, curling into the warmth.
"May I join you?" the man asked.
Again she nodded, this time coherent enough to scoot over slightly as he sat with her on the bench.
For few moments they were silent.
"I'm sorry, Emma," he said at last, simply. She turned toward him a bit, taking in the familiar gentle eyes and creased forehead, the unfamiliar healing scrapes and shadows of bruises.
"Who are you?" she whispered, not even questioning his knowledge of her name.
A sad smile crossed his face.
"A friend, if you would count me as such."
Suddenly she laughed, breathlessly. "You saved my life! I think friendship might be the least of what I owe you."
"You should not have been there—should not have been involved at all. You don't owe me anything, Emma."
Seeing that he didn't appear liable to vanish immediately, Emma leaned back, drawing the jacket more snugly around her, settling into the conversation.
"I don't suppose you can tell me what it was I stumbled onto?"
He smiled at her more cheerfully. "I'm afraid not."
"Classified?" She cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. He could have been merely a tender-hearted criminal, of course; but there was a reason she had fudged a few details that might have helped her colleagues find him when giving her report of the incident.
He hummed in acknowledgement. She took it as confirmation of her instincts.
"CIA?"
His smile broadened, but he shook his head.
"MI6?"
He shook his head again.
She gave up. "At least tell me if it was successful, whatever it was?"
His smile faded slightly, but this time he nodded.
"I'm glad."
"Me, too," he intoned.
They sat in silence again. She felt comfortable, and safe, and he was quiet but attentive, and she had a sudden desire to talk to him about all the things she'd come here to contemplate.
"Can I ask you something?"
He gestured invitingly.
"I'm sure there was a…first time—" her hand strayed to her side— "for you. But obviously you…figured it out. Kept going. How? I mean…I don't want to leave the police force. It's been my dream since…oh, forever. But I'm scared." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I don't want to stop. But I'm scared."
He leaned forward, nodding slowly. "Yes, I remember the first time I was shot. It's not quite the same, Emma—you're not in the same position I was in. If you want out, right now, you can get out. I'm sure no one would think less of you for it."
She glared at him out of the corner of her eye.
He chuckled a little and continued. "But you don't want to quit. No, I understand. In a way, there's nothing you can do about being scared. Of course you are, and it'll be worse out in the field again. The question is: will it hold you back, or drive you harder?"
She frowned, considering.
"Now, don't take that as me telling you to figure things out on your own," he warned. "You have people around to help you, everyone from your family to professionals. Let them help. But, in the end, your way forward is your responsibility." He sat back again, smiling at her. "I'm scared in the field to this day. But I trust my team and my own skills, and then it's just a matter of doing what needs to be done."
"Or what should be done?"
He his eyebrows at her inquisitively.
"You probably 'needed to' shoot me, to safeguard whatever you were doing. Or at least let me be shot. But you didn't."
He nodded. "My job, or yours—there aren't always easy answers. But there shouldn't be, with the things we deal with. I don't take the responsibility of this—" he brushed his hand against what she now saw was the outline of a hip holster beneath his shirt— "lightly. We hold lives in the palms of our hands. Don't ever lose sight of that."
"I won't," she said, solemnly.
He smiled at her, and she warmed with the approval in his gaze.
They sat a few minutes longer, but eventually he stood, and she did as well.
"I'm sorry again," he said, in farewell. "Your duty and mine intersected, and you got caught in the crossfire. Unavoidable, perhaps; but I'm still sorry."
Impulsively, she reached forward, pulling him into a hug. "Thanks for saving me," she sniffed into his shoulder, sudden tears springing to her eyes at this obvious goodbye. She stepped back, shrugging the jacket off her shoulders. "And thanks for the loan of the jacket."
He took it from her, smiling again, this time a brilliant grin.
"I don't suppose I'll see you again?"
He shrugged. "Probably not, but you never know. But good luck—with everything." He nodded at her once more and turned away.
"Wait!" she said, after he'd taken a few steps. He stopped and glanced back. "At least tell me your first name? So I don't have to awkwardly think of you as "that man" forever? I won't tell anyone."
Grinning again, he stepped forward and whispered, "Ethan," in her ear, then walked away, vanishing into the gathering evening darkness. She sighed, smiled, and turned for home.
Maybe she could convince Rupert to get a leather jacket.
Never, in a million years, would she have expected her life to lead to this.
The years had passed. She had returned to the police force, tempering her fear into dedication and determination. She worked on improving all the skills she might need—marksmanship, situational awareness, hand-to-hand combat. She learned to read suspects' eyes, or perhaps merely began to trust instincts she'd always had, once they had been so spot-on about Ethan. True to prediction, she hadn't seen him again, but she thought about him every so often—hoping he was well, still out there saving young police officers and smiling his brilliant smile—and about his advice. She became well-respected in the force, and she did good, she thought, always remembering the responsibility of the lives in her hand. She lived through the normal ups and downs of life: she married Rupert, but they couldn't have the children they wanted; her dad finally retired with great fanfare, only to be diagnosed with cancer; she got promoted and had to work on her marriage, solved and didn't solve cases, caught and didn't catch criminals. Rupert was seriously considering a transfer to a United States branch of the engineering company he worked for, and she was sitting at her desk, trying to decide what her honest answer was to his query of whether she wanted to leave her job, because if you don't that's obviously the end of that, darling.
She was contemplating these things, when a parcel was delivered to her desk. Absent-mindedly she opened it, rather surprised when a burner phone dropped into her hand, and even more surprised when it almost immediately rang.
She stared at it a second, then answered, warily. "Hello?"
"Hello, Emma," said a warm voice in English. She frowned, not immediately placing it.
"I'm sorry, who is this?" she replied.
"You can think of me as 'that man,' if you want."
"What? Eth—" she lowered her voice, almost whispering into the phone. "Ethan?"
"You don't need to whisper this time, but yes, it's me."
"What…why…are you calling me? Not that it's not good to hear from you! But…"
"Would you be interested in answers to questions you once had? Combined, perhaps, with an offer?"
"…offer?"
"Job offer."
"Mon Dieu."
Ethan laughed, gently, warmly. "The agency I'm with is called the IMF—the Impossible Mission Force. We're an American agency, but we recruit from all over the world…"