Hey guys! I'm SO SORRY about the illegibility of the last chapter. The ficle formatting gods strike again. Hopefully this one works!
Ethan walked carefully. The corridor was dark and the ground was uneven, and he had a feeling that if he stumbled, one of the two silent men close behind him would take it as an excuse to shoot or hit him. He cast his other senses outward, picking up on the long echoes of their footsteps and the reek of dust and gravity. A tiny chill gathered at the base of his neck. Ethan swallowed. His strained shoulder throbbed, and a clamor of fear was banging on the gates of his self-control.
He couldn't think about the others. He couldn't. They'll be fine, he told himself, warding off the static. Brandt will lead them. They'll be fine.
He was on his own again. From here on out, he was the only one watching his back. And while Ethan had been in this position many times– hell, he thrived in it– there was a pit in his stomach now. It had been so long since he'd had a team to come back to. He was scared of what it would do to him if they didn't make it out–and what it would do to them if he didn't.
Focus up, Agent.
Ethan wiggled his arm minutely. The spike of pain cleared his head some. They walked on through the dark.
After a few more minutes, they turned left into an even darker corridor.
Without warning, a fist collided with his lower back.
Reflexively, Ethan grunted and arched, whirling around and throwing himself to the side of the tunnel. But the man was too quick. A kick landed hard on his diaphragm. Ethan gasped for air, and in his moment of weakness, a piece of scratchy cloth was lashed around his eyes and tied tightly at the back of his skull. His hands were yanked behind him and bound. His shoulder sang with pain. Someone ripped off his shirt, and then worked his shoes and socks off his feet. The cold, damp air of the Catacombs raised goosebumps on his exposed skin.
Ethan wheezed. He was pulled roughly upright. He coughed, struggling to breathe in. It felt like his chest cavity had been filled with fire.
"You know," he muttered, "you could've just put the blindfold on. It's not like I'm going to run out of here."
He was shoved hard from behind. They kept walking.
Ethan counted the footsteps in his head. Two left and one right turn later, at four-sixty, he was stopped again.
His hearing strained. He could hear someone else in the darkness. A soft breathing. The men shifted behind him.
Whoever was across the room moved. Soft footsteps crossed the room toward them. Ethan tensed, following the sound. After a moment, the room went completely silent.
There was the scrape of metal over Kevlar. Knife.
Ethan threw himself to the side. Air moved just to his left, followed by a snarl. Ethan tried and failed to free his hands or scrape off the blindfold. Strong arms bear-hugged him from behind and stopped him fast.
Ethan bared his teeth in a grin at the faceless attacker. "At least buy me dinner first," he said, his voice edged. "I don't usually murder on the first date, but maybe I could make an exception."
He needed time. He needed to get free. Needed to get out–
The person shifted again, and this time, Ethan couldn't move free.
Pain exploded in his foot.
Ethan had been stabbed enough to know what a knife wound felt like. But nothing in his experience had prepared him for this. He howled in the shock of it, doubling over. Nausea rolled in his stomach, and for a moment his thought whited out in agony. He forgot where he was, who he was.
Then, with each forced breath, reality crept back, and his training kicked in. Ethan took stock. The blade had gone all the way through, until what felt like the end of the hilt was pressing into the top of his foot and the tip of the blade was buried in the packed earth floor. At least three of his tarsal bones had been broken, maybe shattered.
He bit down on his tongue to keep from vomiting, and kept very still. His ears rang.
Then, someone grabbed his injured shoulder and wrenched his arm back, tearing the socket apart again.
Ethan's world whited out again, taking sound and sensation with it.
Pain came back first. It seeped like lava up his leg and down his torso. Ethan blinked, and realized his eyes had been uncovered. He was zip-tied to a chair. Three men in black masks stood around him. The room was small, circular, and dimly lit by bare yellow bulbs that flickered occasionally. His ears were still ringing, and his hands were beginning to get cold from constriction and blood loss. The dirt under his left foot was sticky. Ethan tried not to move. Nausea curdled in his stomach, alongside something more sinister: dread.
He couldn't run. How was he going to get out of here if he couldn't run?
The men around him were silent. Ethan scanned the room. There was one entrance, straight ahead. It was small and opened onto darkness.
"Isn't the whole 'underground lair' a little cliché?" Ethan asked the men. There was a camera in here somewhere. Maybe he could find it. "With the flickering lights and everything? Very Bond villain, don't you think?" He tried not to think about how hoarse he sounded, or how his mouth tasted like iron.
The men stayed silent, but a voice came from the ceiling: "You would know all about villains, wouldn't you, Agent Hunt?"
Adrenaline pushed out some of the pain. Ethan didn't let it show in his voice when he answered, "I suppose I would. Though something tells me we may have a different definition of the word, given my current position."
There it was: a tiny crevice above the door, and a miniscule red light within. Ethan stared at it, unblinking. "But I wouldn't call someone who speaks behind a camera and lets their men do all the dirty work a villain."
"Oh? What would you call me?"
Ethan let slip a feral grin. "A coward."
Silence. Ethan didn't look away from the camera.
In the darkness before him, through the entrance, came the sound of a door opening. Footsteps sounded down the hallway.
A man entered the chamber. He was slight and tall, with pale skin and long, bony fingers. He looked at Ethan with a quiet, potent hatred in his washed-out blue eyes. Ethan couldn't stop the soft sound of surprise that escaped him.
"Jonathan Fitzpatrick," Ethan said. "You're supposed to be dead."
He hadn't seen the ex-IMF agent in at least four years, since he'd been declared MIA and disavowed on a mission somewhere in the Middle East. Ethan had kept his eyes open, but never picked up any rumors when he was in the field. He was more than a little surprised to see him here.
"I could say the same for you, Agent Hunt." Fitzpatrick approached Ethan and stopped about two feet away. "Less than a dozen people even know you're alive at the moment, so I suppose, to the IMF, you are very dead."
Ethan sighed, trying to tamp down on the mind-numbing pain. "Wouldn't be the first time." He looked around the room. "So what, you're the orchestrator of all this? Seems a bit over the top."
Without warning, Fitzpatrick lashed out. His punch caught Ethan on his optic ring, and Ethan's head snapped back. His ears rang louder.
Right. Okay. This kind of asshole.
"You never could shut your mouth, Hunt," Fitzpatrick spat. "Ambrose was right about you. You're a fucking pain in the ass."
"I get that a lot," Ethan muttered, working his jaw to try and dispel the ache in his head. "You knew Ambrose, huh?"
Fitzpatrick scoffed. "Before you shot him? Yeah, I knew him. I know a lot of things, Ethan. Like how your agency uses its people and then throws them away like broken toys."
"The agency you swore allegiance to," Ethan spat back. "You knew what you were getting into, Fitzpatrick. They keep a lot of secrets, but they didn't keep that one. It's a terminal career path."
"They could be better!" yelled Fitzpatrick. "They could care!"
"And this is how you're going to change it?" Ethan scoffed. "By murdering Berns and Harvey, two agents fresh out of field school? By kidnapping my team, and killing me in a sewer where no one can see? I'm sure that will be very effective."
Fitzpatrick started to pace. Unstable energy vibrated around him. He gnawed on his thumb. Ethan had seen enough agents lose their equilibrium to this degree to know what he was dealing with. Fitzpatrick had snapped long ago.
"Who did you lose?" Ethan asked. "Who was it, Fitzpatrick? Friend, sibling?" Ethan lowered the pitch of his voice. Time to see if his hunch was correct. "Lover?"
Fitzpatrick sniffed in, hard. He looked around, looked down, shifting and snarling like a rabid animal. Despite all of his training, a primal aversion crept up Ethan's senses at being tied down and injured like this in the presence of a person this deeply unhinged. He started to flex his one working wrist. The zip tie didn't give at all.
Time to find something else that would break, then.
"How did it happen?" Ethan pressed. "Did it start small? Just a passing glance, a bump in the hallway? Maybe you bought them coffee?"
Fitzpatrick stopped moving. He stood a foot away from Ethan, eyes fixed and empty on the floor.
"Something went wrong," Ethan continued. "Something happened to them."
"Her," Fitzpatrick said. "It was…her. She was married. She wouldn't listen to me. Said she wasn't interested."
"And you couldn't handle that, could you?" Ethan pressed.
"Then they sent her on a mission," Fitzpatrick went on, as if in a daze. "And she didn't come back. And then they killed her husband, and abandoned her children. And I– I had to take care of them. I had to avenge her."
And just like that, it clicked into place.
"Elena," Ethan said. "You were in love with Elena Williams."
"And they promised me I could do it," Fitzpatrick straightened. "No one from within the IMF would see it coming. A dead agent and a rogue organization, going after their golden boy." Fitzpatrick suddenly lunged down, planting his hands on the arms of the chair. His face was inches from Ethan's. "I proved them wrong. I proved them wrong, because here you are, and here I am. And they kept their promise."
Ethan's head was reeling, his blood was leaking out his foot, but he had to know. Something Fitzpatrick had said. "Who promised you? Who helped you do all this?"
Fitzpatrick breathed in harshly. "Them," he answered. "The Syndicate." He grinned maniacally. "How poetic, wouldn't you say, Hunt? The rogue nation you've been after all this time, under you very nose? What you think is dead will always come back to bite you, Hunt. You of all people should know that. And I am your ghost, your reaper, coming to collect what is due. This is where the road ends for both of us."
There was almost too much for Ethan to process. Days of running injured, blood loss, fear, and now this– the Syndicate was real. And it was looking less and less likely that he would live to tell about it.
Footsteps echoed outside. Another man entered, and Ethan recognized him as the one who had escorted his team out earlier.
Which meant, if they had followed protocol correctly, that Brandt, Benji and Jane were watching right now.
Ethan wanted desperately to signal to them, tell them what Fitzpatrick had just told him, but he dared not give away his single tiny advantage. Maybe Fitzpatrick would out himself. Ethan refocused– his vision was getting fuzzy– and he realized that Fitzpatrick had retreated behind the man who had just entered, out of his line of sight.
Of course. He was ex-IMF. He could anticipate many of their moves.
A new voice sounded in the darkness, coming from the camera. It was unfamiliar. "Thieves must be punished, Agent Hunt."
Ethan rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "Oh, so another agent, are you?" He and the voice went back and forth for a few seconds. Fitzpatrick looked on, seemingly amused. Ethan flexed his wrist again. This was deteriorating quickly.
He was fairly sure Fitzpatrick intended to kill him and then kill himself. But if there was another party involved here, somehow linked to the Syndicate, then even if Ethan managed to escape, he wouldn't be able to get very far.
His team. He just needed to get out, and get to this team, and they could figure it out from there. Like they always did.
The new voice fell silent.
"The IMF took what I love," Fitzpatrick said. "They killed her and cast her aside. Yet every time you died, you came back. They took you back. They love you. They love you."
One of the men had moved behind him. Ethan tensed as a knife was held to this throat.
Fuck.
"So I take what they love," Fitzpatrick continued. "Their golden boy. And from your team– who I know are watching–I take their leader. And with him, their hope."
A veil settled over Ethan's consciousness. He recognized it, though it was rare. His humanity had just stepped aside and yielded fully to his instinct. And then he knew what he had to do.
Just as the knife was yanked over his throat, Ethan gathered all his remaining strength and hurled himself and the chair backward.
Fresh pain flared at his throat, and true hell was unfolding in his foot. The back of his head caught the man on the nose. The man dropped the knife and wheeled back, yelping. Ethan landed hard on his back, the chair cracking but not breaking apart.
Suddenly, from down the tunnels, came a rumble.
The smell of sulfur and dust and a blast of heat roared through the room. The floor shook.
For a small, bright second, every living thing in the room froze as the ceiling above them cracked. Dust showered Ethan's head and stung his eyes.
The ground rumbled again.
And then, with a sound like breaking bone, the room caved in.
The last thing Ethan saw was darkness.
The last thing he felt was pain.
And the last thought in his mind was: Sedona.