A/N: Rating is now M.
/
At the end of it, in a white room that is so familiar that the ghost of remembered bile rises in his throat, he finds his handler.
"47," the woman breathes, like a prayer. Her voice is the memory of a hundred missions. She is standing behind the surgery table, white knuckles clenching and unclenching, and she is older than he expected. She looks terrified, but she does not run or scream - she has been waiting for him, he realises. 47 ignores the instinct that snaps Trap! and drags into the room the surgeon he found during his rampage through the 'factory', where the man cowers against a cupboard and continues to alternately threaten and beg. 47 ignores him.
"Diana," he says, and the woman nods quickly, her eyes fixated on the gun he has levelled at her. "I forgot you," he hears himself say, and he sounds surprised. The drugs are helping in distancing the pain screaming in his head, to the point of an out-of-body experience. His own voice sounds like a stranger's on a long distant call with particularly bad reception. Hitched and strained. "How could I forget you?"
The surgeon takes a sudden and predictable dash at him with a scalpel. "You don't need him," Diana says from behind the table, watching her colleague struggle weakly in his chokehold. 47 hesitates briefly. Then years of remembered muscle memory from listening to that same voice in his ear take over and the man is down on the ground, unconscious.
Diana stumbles backwards as he crosses the room to her. "I knew you'd come one day," she whispers. There is no fresh swell of agony from looking at her, no blinding flash migraine: he has never seen her face before. Her eyes are wild, but her voice is clear. "I told them you'd remember." 47 lowers the gun.
"Remember what?" the stranger with his voice says. "What did I forget?"
"I saved the files for you," his handler says.
/
He manages to escape from the Organisation's pseudo factory quicker than it took through tear into it. It helps that the Organisation seems to have used the site only as a medical outpost for agent evaluations and experimentation rather than a training or headquartered site, which explains: one, how he is still alive; and two, why this is the place that his broken mind threw up after a week of brutal mental excavations and migraines so teeth-grindingly intense he has blacked out more than he has slept in the last few days. He thinks he recognises it as the outpost where he initially woke, after his concussion. That surgeon had been the first face he saw when he opened his eyes.
He had put two bullets in that man's head and left Diana crumpled and unconscious next to his corpse before he left. Good luck, she had told him before he knocked her out. He had gripped the files and had not known how to express the depth of his gratitude, except to catch her when the sedation took effect and lay her carefully on the tiled floor as her eyes slipped shut.
And now the files are spread across the hood of his car, glaringly white under the noon sun. There is a file on his profile breakdown, a file on the Bellicoff assignment, a file on his retrieval. There is his medical file, fat with the notes of what looks to be up to five doctors.
And there is a file on her. Nika Boronina. She has a last name, after all. A blue-tinged snapshot of his living dream clipped to the cover. She is turning her head over her shoulder to look behind her, unaware of the camera, her mouth twisted unhappily and her eyes wary. Her hair is short. One shoulder is peeking out of the fur coat, pale and bare as the tip of an iceberg. Danger underneath. She looks like she is being pulled along by someone out of the picture, by - Bellicoff, a voice in him whispers. A frisson of pain shudders warningly in his temples.
He stares and stares at the picture until the dim agony in his head loosens, settles reluctantly like sediment around this new remembered memory. He is still fairly high from the drugs. It allows him to take photo from the clip and hold it for a long while, his thumb grazing the edge of the woman captured in it. It is not much better than holding an intangible memory in his dreams. He puts the photo carefully aside.
Then 47 turns the cover of the file, and the words WANTED, LOCATION UNKNOWN blaze out at him in their red stamp across the page.
/
Dreams are just a creation of his subconscious. 47 knows this. Arguing with a dream just means he's arguing with himself. 47 also knows this. There should be logically no new information to be found. Yet it is his dreams that have burned his future at the agency and that have rewarded his desperation with files that document the agency's experiments in clinically controlled amnesia on him in neat black type. He has come this far on faith of an unfinished business stolen from him, and can't doubt now. The need to see things out to the bitter end has always been in his nature.
Ironically, the headaches are what helps keep him in the shallow end of sleep, in the space between shadow and memory.
"In the space between shadow and soul," his dream corrects. She's sprawled with her head on his lap, the cover of a book raised in his face and blocking hers from view. The bench under him is metal, and verging on burning: the sparse tree over them does nothing to warm of the dry heat shimmering up from the gravel around them. His shirt collar is already damp with sweat. He finds himself watching the thin silk of NIka's dress move with her breathing with something close to envy. "As the plant that never blooms, but carries in itself the light of hidden - oh god, oh god, I'm so bored. When is this train coming?"
She drops the book on her face, where it lands on a muffled curse. 47 removes it after a beat. The face under it does not look grateful.
"I am going to die," says Nika. "This fucking heat. This fucking book. I swear to god-"
"You chose this," 47 feels compelled to point out. Her hair still stops just past her shoulders, but she has a fringe, this time. This time? The ghost of a thought, whatever it was, melts under the heat. He cards Nika's damp fringe back. "You wanted the long way round."
"I wanted to spend more time with you before you leave me again," Nika snips. "Are you even listening? I feel like I'm reading to myself, sometimes."
"I'm listening."
"No, you're not," Nika says, clearly in a mood to sulk. "You're just sitting here trying to see if my dress will go see through. You know, it's too hot to fuck again."
"I wasn't," 47 says guiltily, pulling his eyes away from the way the silk clings to the woman with her head on his lap. Unfortunately, this does nothing to relieve the fact that Nika's head is on his lap, and the heat is leaving very little to the imagination.
Nika makes a scoffing sound and rubs the side of her head meaningfully against him in a spot that is either meant to be a particularly tortuous comeback - or perhaps the first step into what could be a very pleasant afternoon after all. 47 tries not to hope. But instead of taking the book back or her clothes off, Nika's green eyes grow pensive. "I wish you would just stay," she says. "Can't you-"
"No," he says. He draws his hand back.
"You're not one of them anymore. You don't have to keep answering their contracts, there are other jobs-"
"Nika-"
"No, don't Nika me. Why won't you talk about this? When you come back to the vineyard, you're always look so, so… It always takes a few more days before you really come back to me. Why won't you just tell me why-"
"There's nothing-" 47 stops. The ground is starting to tremble, to shimmer. It's the heat. It's the train coming, from the distance: he thinks he can hear it rumbling. The sound of metal groaning. A storm looming. "There's nothing to-" he tries again. But the words won't come out. His voice is locked.
Nika watches him, then sits up. He can feel the heat from her as she leans in, hooks her arms around his neck; can feel the way she breathes through her nose. As always, she is so terribly, imperfectly real. He can't move. Nika seems to sense this - she leans in closer, the way that he can't, and the heat between them grows even more, as if cradling a small sun between them.
Run, he wants to say. But where to? The earth beneath his feet is shaking. It feels like a nightmare.
This is a nightmare.
"It's our nightmare," Nika says. Her eyes are green and serious. "I told you - it always takes longer than you think to come back to me. Ask me."
Where are you, he tries to say. Nika's mouth twists in an unhappy smile.
"Or maybe you never do come back," she says. Behind her, the background is starting to tear itself apart with a horrible noise, the earth groaning. Nika closes her eyes. "Maybe next time." She starts to pull away.
The sudden fury that knifes through him is shocking, swift and sharp as fear. At least I'm doing something, he tries to say. Rages, trapped in his frozen body as Nika moves off him, already half turning away, disappointment clear on her face. Are you even looking for me!
The world stops shaking abruptly.
"That," Nika says quietly, into the sudden silence, "is the right question."
47 wakes up.
He pulls out the files without turning the lights on. It takes a while for his eyes to adjust to the dim light but it's there, at the end of the thin file that makes up Nika Boronina's background. A few lines that hypothesize her possible origins before her appearance as Bellicoff's whore. From the countryside, suggests one bullet point. Like a vineyard.
It's enough for a start.
/
He begins sending flyers to Russian villages and vineyards, the smaller and more rural the better. There are hundreds of thousands of them, widely scattered. He pays for posters to be plastered in country towns and in glass-and-concrete municipalities; he puts up online adverts on websites for missed connections, searching singles, lost goods. Just a few words, in Cyrillic: Needle. Cairo. Contracts. Sonnet XVII. And in the last line: What are your favourite things?
It's abstract enough that it could be passed off as yet another hype-building marketing campaign, though anyone in his field with half a brain could probably guess it for what it is: a signal. Keywords like a lighthouse, beckoning in a world clouded with too much noise. It's as much as he dares to give away without revealing himself in the process - and it might still not be enough.
He gets messages almost every day, but it is all meaningless, from hopeful idiots, spambots, even other trackers. Still, he agonises over each new entry in the inbox he's set up for this purpose - quite literally, though his headaches lessen everyday. He has memorised the files liberated from the Organisation, and relives his memories in his dreams more and more each night, mostly recurring but sometimes new, but he still doesn't know what he is looking for. He doesn't know how the target named Nika Boronina will answer, if she will answer at all. It's becoming clear from his dreams that he often left her, and the target - she was getting tired of waiting.
"When will you find me?" Nika asks him, looking lost on an open-air train station platform and clutching a small carrier bag. 47 wakes and tries to remember the name of the platform, so clear in the moment when he gives her a non-answer, when I've finished, in the sign behind her pale face. He never manages to.
"Can I come?" she asks him in Warsaw, through the crackle of two re-routed connections and a patchy phone line to begin with. He's in Warsaw, according to the hotel pad by the phone; she's at her home. The vineyard. He misses her. It's an observation rather than a feeling, something that only comes distantly from being a spectator to his own memory. He did not know it then, but it seems so obvious now, embarrassingly so. He listens to her chatter on the crackling line, to the sounds of her moving about a kitchen, the muted groan of old pipes and rush of water. She's called to tell him about the frost cracking one of the shed's windows even further, about one of her neighbours trying to sell her yet another goddamn hand-knitted jumper, about how she wore one while trying to make her own version of a stolla rabbit pie last night and ended up having to throw both out. It's small talk, blatantly nothing worth using the emergency line for, but he doesn't hang up. 47 closes his eyes and listens to the sound of her voice.
It's been over a month, she says after a while. Maybe she could come see him?
He says no. The call does not end well.
"Will you stay?" Nika says. It's on the edge of a field this time, the sky ashen and vast above them like a vast grey tarp stretched from the tips of the long grass at one end to the dark silhouettes of scattered trees rising stoutly around them. She's leaning back against the trunk of one of them, her dark hair braided loosely and falling over one shoulder, her face turned up to the sky instead of him. She looks braced for the answer, resigned.
He can stay but the answer gets lodged in his throat. It is hard to live like this sometimes, in the same place for weeks, cut off from the world. He chose the vineyard precisely for this reason but it still grates to live so completely against what he has been ingrained to do, the restlessness building and feeling of blindness growing until he has to leave again, if only for a while.
Nika seems to take his silence as answer. But she only smiles, serene and faint. She doesn't sulk when he goes to her, puts his hand on her waist and waits for resistance, for any resentfulness; she doesn't swear at him when he traces the tie of her wrap dress up to its knot and starts to loosen it. She puts her arms around his neck and lets him open up her dress, lifts her face to kiss him back, sweet and deep. As always, Nika's loveliness in moments like this is nearly unbearable, and he has to remember with some effort to slow, to pause every now and then to check if she's happy to continue, genuinely happy.
She's already wet when he slips his fingers in her though, and when he starts to kneel, she pulls him up again by his shirt collar instead and pulls him closer, insistent. He lifts her up against the trunk and she wraps her legs tight around his hips, both of them sighing at the perfect pressure, and there is only one fleeting moment when it seemed like it might go bad, when he stopped them both to clumsily shrug off and pull his coat around her, between her thin back and the tree, and Nika's face crumpled suddenly. But then her face had smoothened almost as immediately, back to that faint, calm smile again, and then Nika had pressed the soft naked line of her body against him and he stopped thinking very shortly after.
He thinks back now on this memory, that smile. Will you stay, she'd asked. He'd given her silence as his answer and then he'd fucked her as if that might comfort her, despite her unusual quietness, that damnable smile. Perhaps that was the last time he saw her before they found him. And now, in the inane chatter from strangers in his inbox, in the dead ends of his networks on the streets, perhaps she is giving him the same answer too.