Word count: 2,978
Warnings: Blood, violence, swearing, some racism towards Asians, but only discussed as a past event, not something happening in the story. And it's done by antagonists.
Chapter 10-Borrowed Time
"Song for the guilty, song for the living, song for the dead." –Sea Wolf
When Irene wakes up, a drop of blood is slipping down her forehead. It slides down her temple, past her cheek, and then it hangs from the bottom of her chin lazily, like a more coagulated tear. Her nerves are aflame and her brain throbs. She leans forward, and the pain she feels in her head is like rocks bouncing around her skull, banging against the sides with loud thumps and sharp scratching. Her shoulders are stiff and her hands are tied to something behind her back-a pole, a rod, something metal and cool.
The black inky spots drag themselves out of her vision, blobs of saturated navy that appear every time she turns her neck. Hold still, she tells herself. Where are you? Who else is here?
Wait. That's not her. The CIA protocol book is whispering in her ear.
But there's a reason those are protocol. She braces herself and tries to search the shadowed room for indicators of where she is. Blueish moonlight seeps in through a window. She's entangled in a mass of pipes. A boiler room, maybe?
Across the room, someone groans in pain. Irene's head shoots over in the direction and the yanking of her muscles sends splinters of pain up her neck. "Solo?" she whispers. "Napoleon. Wake up." She can barely make out the shape, but she hears him grunt again as he stirs awake.
"Acosta?" he answers, voice hoarse and gritty.
"We got knocked out. I think we're in a boiler room."
A moment of silence passes between the two, and then Solo remarks, "Damn."
Unsure of how to respond, Irene tugs at the binds around her wrists again. The rope scrapes her skin as she struggles, chafing and bristling against her skin. She needs to cut away at it to get out, so she pulls her legs up to her chest and pivots her body, kicking out foot out in a very unladylike fashion. The ropes don't prevent her from reaching up her skirt to grab a knife, and she struggles to position it in a way where she can actually cut herself free.
She begins rubbing the blade against the rope. A moment later, two loud shots ring out beyond the door. Irene and Napoleon lock eyes for a moment, and then she starts sawing faster. She can feel it fray and tries to yank it apart. C'mon, stupid rope, she thinks, giving her arms a final, strong tug and unwinding the rope. "Yes!" she exclaims, jumping up off the ground and running over to help Napoleon. Her head throbs from the actions and she hisses, closing her eyes when she kneels down next to him. She opens her eyes when the pain subsides a little, and finds Solo smirking at her. Sort of. His mouth is twisted up into a weirdly teasing smile, but his eyes look worried.
Irene stares at him for a moment, then whips out the knife and starts to saw through his binds. It doesn't take as long as it took for her to get out of hers, and no sooner has she helped him up then he's kicking the door down and they're running down the halls. The walls are bare as they pass by. Someone's already stolen the paintings.
They have to stop them. Before they leave. Before they ruin the mission.
"Split up?" Irene asks Napoleon.
"I'll take left," he replies, and they take their separate paths down a fork in the hallways.
A man in a mask pops out of the corner with a mask. He draws a gun and Irene ducks, kicking her legs out and knocking him over. The bullet flies out of the barrel of the gun and through the wall with a pop! Irene squeaks at the noise, and then, embarrassed, punches the man in the face and takes his gun. After she's hit him over the head with it, she grips it tight in her hand. She's got her own, of course, under the dress, but she doesn't want him to wake up and start shooting again.
Irene kicks off her shoes and hooks the backs into her fingers. Another man runs by, and she swings them at him as hard as possible, knocking him out and leaving a red scratch down his face. He screams when he goes down, a bullet below his clavicle and two long marks, like claws, over his eyelids and down his cheek.
Find the paintings. Find the art. Where did they—
Irene skids to a stop in front of the side exit. Where did they go?
She pushes the door open and runs out into the mess of wailing police cars and confused rich people. They're gasping and speaking to authorities, and in the distance, a truck drives up and a woman with platinum blonde hair and sunglasses hops out. She scans the crowd until her face locks on Irene holding her shoes and a gun, and this is not what's supposed to happen, so Irene turns on her bare heel and sprints in the opposite direction.
"Acosta!" someone calls, and who is this person, why do they know who she is? "Acosta, stop." Irene jumps, tripping over her dress and wobbling in her spot, because that time, the voice was speaking calmly, directly into her ear. She's not actually there, but speaking into Irene's communications unit. Irene freezes as the woman struts over to her, calmly, with an impatient expression forming on her red-painted lips. "Get in the truck," she says. Irene recoils at the command.
"Who the hell are you?"
The woman's face scowls behind her enormous sunglasses. Irene squints at her accusatorily.
"I'm Mary. Get in the truck."
"Who do you work for?"
"Same person as you. Now get in the truck."
She wraps a hand around Irene's forearm, digging her manicured hand into Irene's skin, and starts dragging her over. Flailing around, Irene tries to break free, but her nails are like knives and they bite harder into her skin.
"Stop struggling. Napoleon is in the truck, and if you don't follow right now I will arrest you."
Irene scowls, and then delivers a swift kick to the woman's achilles.
"Shit!" she hisses, leg giving out under her for a moment. She lifts a stiletto-clad heel up and bowls over for a moment, not releasing Irene's arm for a moment.
Irene twists her arm around like they taught her—spin, spin, spin, yank—until the barrel of a gun is pressed against her side.
"Get in the truck, or I swear to god I'll pull this trigger."
Irene gets in the truck.
Napoleon is sitting in the back, like the woman—Mary—said, but he's conscious and there's another woman tending to the wound on his forehead. The sight of him sends waves of confusion and relief through her. He's okay. She's okay. They're okay. Unless, of course, these are just really hospitable kidnappers.
Mary crosses around the outside of the truck's back and heads into the driver's seat, where she grabs a handful of hair and pulls. Irene inhales sharply, wondering what the hell is she doing? That is, until the wig slides off and reveals waves of dark hair. She ties it up into a ponytail using a ribbon from the dashboard. She turns around to wink at Napoleon, who is still lying on the ground without his suit jacket.
"Mary," he says simply, smooth as ever even when he's bleeding.
"This is the second mission you've messed up in the past two months," she remarks bluntly as she enters the key into the ignition and starts to drive down the streets of Florence. "First Rome, now this?" She clucks her tongue judgingly, but then tosses a playful smirk over her shoulder.
"As if you've been doing any better. How was that undercover op in Greece last month?"
"That was my partner's fault and you know it. Irons can balk all he wants about me but we both know he did it so he wouldn't need to work with an Asian girl."
Napoleon offers a mere you-have-a-point shrug, before taking one of the cloths the girls offered him and dabbing his forehead with it. He asks for another, and hands it to Irene, who is still standing in the back of the truck, bracing herself on an empty crate. The adrenaline is fading, and now she feels her head begin to throb again. Taking the cloth, she wipes some of the blood from her forehead. She probably looks like a mess. Even the nurses look polished with their little pumps and tan stockings. And here she is next to them, face bloodied and hair amiss, dress tattered and feet bare.
"I'll take you in through the utility entrance of the hotel. Waverly is waiting for you in your room."
Irene's stomach begins to sink. She can't get fired. It isn't an option. Now that she thinks about it more, if she's fired, she'll have to go back and explain her disappearance, but Drew might have already reported her to authorities, which would mean that the police could be waiting, to take her back across the ocean to Cuba. To the others. She's been gone for so long, but Irene has no doubt they'll remember her. No doubt they'll know who she is. What she's done. Where she'll be staying. If she gets sent back, and they find her, Irene's body will be dumped in a trashcan by sundown.
She's so stuck in this contemplative state that Irene doesn't notice Mary putting her sunglasses back on and parking the truck.
"Don't worry, Solo," she says. "You won't get fired." Then she turns to Irene. "But I'd be careful with her."
Irene despises her tone, speaking about Irene in the third person while she looks right at her. Irene grew up murdering people, and even she knows that's bad manners.
"Ready?" she asks, slipping out of the truck.
Irene tosses a nervous glance at Napoleon. His expression is unreadable.
Goddamn spies, she thinks to herself. Tell me what you're thinking.
The others are a group of men, twelve in all, who knew Irene's father. Who depended on Irene's father. So when she killed Man #6, and the police stormed their house and found tokens from all the others, and Irene's father took the blame, it was they who suffered. The hero they depended on was gone, away, in jail. Locked up. Safe from their wanton hands and sharp-toothed smiles. Safe from them. Safe from her. Safe.
Napoleon Solo met Mary Wu on a mission three years ago in Paris.
And like most of his undercover lovers, she had a lot of secrets.
Like, first of all, her wigs. They're all blonde. And she wears them all the time, to hide her black hair. Just like she wears sunglasses. To hide her face. People are far less likely to question a rich blonde woman than they are to question a petite Chinese one travelling through Europe with a technically-illegal husband.
She copes.
Napoleon has only worked with a handful of other agents. Kuryakin, Teller, Acosta, Wu, Stone, Hemmings, Morgan, and Richard. He's younger and not married, so Saunders liked to send him to the corners of the earth for missions nobody else was willing to do. Lucky for him, Napoleon has no say in the matter. Which is great for the CIA, but terrible for the CIA's enemies, and of course, for Napoleon Solo.
Sometimes he'll try to get fired. Not with threats to national security (international now, he supposes), or with terrorists; more likely with people who own too much money and would be sad to see it lost. He's not stealing anymore—not like he used to—he just…doesn't try as hard on those particular missions.
He still tries, though. Because he's always wanted to be a "hero." It's why he left his mother at sixteen and enlisted. It's why he chose the CIA over rotting in a cell. At least this way, he's doing some good.
Only, it's not really good if he gets his partner fired. Or is it? She must miss her husband. Drew something or another. She has an entire life in the States, and instead she's running around Europe with him and a gun.
Actually, Irene was not what Napoleon expected. Which was: a faithfully devoted wife on the path to redeem her criminal past.
In reality, Irene seems to have a lingering gaze and analytical eyes. He glances over at her sometimes when she isn't looking, and Irene always seems to be thinking hard about their surroundings. She doesn't mind sharing a hotel room with him, or accidentally stumbling into him with nothing but a towel around her body, and she never wears the ring. Even when he makes a point of leaving the phone free in the evenings, she doesn't call him.
Napoleon asked Julie to look in the records and make sure Irene's husband was real.
(He was. He owned an insurance company and had reported her missing four times in the past two months.)
Napoleon can't seem to figure that aspect of Irene out.
Honestly, he can't seem to figure any aspect of her out.
Wait—that's not true. She's yet to learn how to disguise her emotions. He knows she's afraid of Waverly and admires Gaby and hates Illya.
But he doesn't know why she panicked during the mission, or how she managed to stumble out of that building alive after days of torture without food or water, because he was decently sure that most housewives wouldn't know how to do that. Hell, on an off day, he probably wouldn't be able to do it.
Napoleon does know that he'll stick up for her if Waverly tries to fire her. That's the only thing about Irene Acosta he's sure about.
Waverly is angry. It hasn't been long since they met, but by the way his brow creases and he stands tensely, Napoleon can tell he's angry.
"You had one mission," he says when they step into the room. Irene is frozen in her place, looking scared and brave at once, unwavering in the sense that she refuses to flinch, but still petrified. "Solo, what was that mission?"
He sighs. "To stop the paintings from getting stolen."
"Very good. And what did you not do on this mission?"
Napoleon gives him a withered look, because answering that question will get them both yelled at, but it didn't feel all that rhetorical.
"Sir, I've got my team down there gathering up evidence," Wu announces. Napoleon's almost grateful that she's pulling the attention away from them. It's a cowardly feeling, but he doesn't try to fight off the waves of relief that result from it. "They think that the heist was pulled off because of a leak in the gallery's staff."
"Any observations as to who this could be?"
Napoleon raises an eyebrow, waiting for Wu to open her mouth and answer. But it's Irene that speaks up. "It was a woman," she says confidently. "Red hair. She claimed the collection was hers, and offered to show us part of it. And it would've been unnatural if we hadn't gone. So. We followed her. And then she and a few more men knocked us unconscious and tied us up."
Her voice wavers at the end, and Napoleon finds the inside of her cheek pulled in as she chews on it. She's worried. And nervous. Does she hate her husband? What is she doing?
Waverly looks exhausted. "I've already got Kuryakin and Teller missing my calls. I can't afford to have this mission go south." He stares pointedly at them. "Fix. It. Or I'll send you both back where you came from."
Napoleon knows this means Saunders and the C.I.A., so he isn't too upset, but Irene's posture goes ramrod straight as soon as the words leave Waverly's lips. Her face is carefully apathetic, but the muscles are tensed just so, so Napoleon knows it isn't real.
Irene is silent all of that evening. She doesn't recoil from Mary's bantering or get that confusedly amused look she usually does when Napoleon smirks at her. Instead, she drags her heeled feet up to their room, bathes, changes into pinstripe pajamas, and lies quietly in her bed. She has the covers over her head, at first to shield herself from the light, but when he's flipped off all the switches and heads over to his own bed, she still has them protecting her.
He can hear her exhaling on the other side of the room.
Napoleon wonders what she dreams about.
a/n: I am the worst, as per usual, but I'd still love a review. What were your favorite/least favorite parts? How do you guys feel about Mary? Or Napoleon's perspective? Are you interested in Irene's past? Thank you so much for sticking with me through all of this you're all the best.