There is a safehouse for the team at the edge of Derbyshire. It is a cottage of a home, with cobblestone faded from time's turn and knitted throws in all the rooms. In a different scenario the space would be cozy, picturesque even in its own rural way, but blueprints spill across the kitchen table moments after they tumble inside. Ethan rips a family portrait from the wall to start drawing a map, and Degas cringes.
Later that night in the room he's allotted, he hears the doorknob fumbling and glances over. Paris slips inside.
She says, "I need a distraction," and then she's on top of him like a flu. Heavy, all-encompassing.
Hard to get rid of.
Degas says, "Oh, I, um. Paris."
Degas says, "Oh, I …"
Degas says, "Oh," and he doesn't resist when she goes to pull his shirt off.
Her meshing with the team has been as fitting as an end puzzle piece trying to insert into the middle. She snickers to herself in serious moments, and Grace moves too-carefully around her, suspicious, unconvinced. She, Benji, and Briggs championed the let that bitch rot in prison brigade, and they do very little to hide that they still share the same sentiment despite Ethan finding her useful for the mission. Their hatred is as deeply-rooted as religion.
(Earlier, Ethan had circled around the kitchen table to get to some papers. Paris quickly flitted from the spot she stood in to avoid him, clumsily knocking pots and pans down as she moved. The kitchenware fell to the floor in a clanging instrumental of second-hand embarrassment; the feeling chilled down their spines in one collective rush. Her cheeks went red. Degas thought she looked more frail in that moment than she did when he found her on the train, pulse weak, eyes fluttered to a close. He knew then that getting the team to forgive her wouldn't be half as hard as getting her to forgive herself.)
The temperature towards her has been a culmination of her getting checked on last, berated first, and remembered sparingly. Last picked on the playground and first blamed when something went wrong. And this—this is why he obliges her. Her presence in this whirlwind is just as much his doing as it is Ethan's. He sees all the potential in her that Ethan does. He advocated for her to be here too. And Jesus, she makes him feel it.
She makes him feel it on top of him, moonlight glazing her body as she rides him, hands pressed into his chest. Nails breaking skin.
She makes him feel it with her body arched in front of him. She changes positions, abrupt and unsatisfied, the lamp on the nightstand crashing to the floor with her moving limbs. He takes her from behind, and her body moves backwards to meet him twice as hard.
She makes him feel it, and feel it, and feel it.
And then she's gone, back to the attic the team gave her as a room. He hears her small footsteps as she settles up there above him, his unsteady breath and sweat-slick skin the only evidence of her presence with him just moments before.
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.
.
Grace pushes a plate of english breakfast into his hands. The motion is so forceful that a sausage link almost rolls to the floor. "Ethan said we should fill up. We've got a big day ahead and he's already out there," she tells him, not taking no for an answer. Briefly, he assesses her disposition, wondering if her aggression stems from overhearing him last night. Then she passes him a butterknife and continues, "Apricot or strawberry jam?"
Paris is in the living area too. The kitchen chair she sits in faces the unlit fireplace. Her hands are empty.
"Have you been playing nice?" Degas asks Grace.
She scoffs.
"Nice enough," she promises, and goes off to her corner of the cottage.
Paris doesn't move when he steps toward her, beside her, doesn't even shift her eyes to meet any part of him when he stands in front of her to extend his plate. It is almost as if she is looking through him. It is the same marble-hollow look he thinks he saw last night.
"Here, I doubt she gave you anything to eat."
She doesn't take his plate, but she reaches forward to grab the butterknife. She slips it into a space in her clothes, a secret between the two of them.
"They won't even let me have a goddamn weapon," she growls, eyes still unfocused and nearing a spectrum of delirium. "You think they'd give me a crumb of food?"
"Yeah, I … I know. I'm sorry."
Protocol for the mission. No piece of tech nor steel should be placed in her hands, for fear that she will disrupt the agenda with her unpredictability. In abundance of caution of the chance she is still working with the Entity, with Gabriel. Even with his knife print stamped into her skin, Degas thinks here and there of the possibility she'll up and slip away from the team, settling back into her space as the Entity's woman-weapon.
He tries not to linger on the scenario whenever it arises in his mind. Benji and Grace are making the decision a hell of a lot digestible for her, is the one fact he allows. He sets the plate of breakfast beside her feet.
(The cold and untouched food on the floor when they set out for the day is another thought he tries not to linger on.)
.
.
.
"This little puppy-dog act is gonna get you killed, kid."
Degas looks at Briggs. His superior has been talking for a few minutes now, but this is the sentence that recenters his attention. Kid—he hasn't heard that since his training days in the academy. The nostalgia earns a small and empty smile from him, the only kind he is able to muster right now. The Sevastopol is tomorrow, after all.
"It's that obvious?"
Briggs claps him on the shoulder, leveling with his eyes to assure he has full attention. His hand on his shoulder squeezes.
"Make it through tomorrow, Degas. Watch your own back out there. Look out for Dunn too; he's a good guy. People like that girl always walk away from these sorts of things. Hey, she made it off that train, didn't she? Crazy doesn't die easy," Briggs catches himself in a dry chuckle at that. Degas tries not to take offense, swallows a defensive retort on her behalf. "People like her make it out, but people like you … you die trying to help people like her when she's already gonna make it anyway. What I'm trying to say is, she doesn't need the extra protection."
Somewhere away from them, with the team but likely tucked in her own corner of solitude, the butterknife is still on her person. She's allowed to have a gun now, but a few hours ago he swore he saw a silver tip poking out of her blazer like an extra hand. She looked impossibly young in that moment, with her too-big clothes swallowing her frame and eyes darting down whenever anyone got too close.
Degas doesn't think Briggs is wrong.
It still doesn't change the fact that, like Ethan, he values some lives above his own.
.
.
.
Briggs dies.
Well, the more accurate statement is that Briggs follows Hunt down to the Sevastopol and never comes back up. It feels worse than a confirmation. Degas stares off the side of the ship, palms gripping the edge of the boat so tightly that his knuckles crack underneath his gloves. The winter wind fights against him, blowing from so many directions that it wouldn't matter which way he turned. His eyes strain against the air, and it isn't until he feels himself being tugged backwards that he notices they had been trickling tears.
"We're gonna have to leave now," Paris grits out. The wind is a siren of a scream in both their ears. Or maybe it's an actual scream somewhere along the deck. Or maybe it's hysteria and Piblokto settling in like IV fluid to a bloodstream. Their bodies are dangerously numb; she grabs him by the arm and he can't feel a thing. "We can't be out in the open like this. Let's go."
Their rendezvous point is a stateroom somewhere below deck. Degas doesn't fully snap from his wintry trance until he sees Luther. A laptop sits before the man; he had been tracking the submersibles dispatched to the Sevastopol. His gaze drops, solemn.
Briggs dies.
It's no one's and it's everyone's fault.
Ethan rocks on the floor across the room. His wetsuit plasters to him like a second skin, and he shivers as his body expels the remaining chills that seize his bones. Grace puts a blanket around him and then her own arms for good measure.
Degas finds his own corner to rock in. Paris throws her coat somewhere near his feet, and it's almost the same gesture.
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.
The memorial service is held in Tallahassee, a hospitable city in Florida where moss hangs from the oak trees and the air holds a dampness to it. It reminds him of his own hometown New Orleans in that regard, but when he lingers too long on the juxtaposition his eyes start to water.
Uniform-clad pallbearers begin to walk the casket—empty, he remembers bitterly, because he can't forget—down the aisle. Degas slides a pair of dark shades on.
The service is grand. So many agents from his past take up space amongst the finely-shaven grassfield. Some of them look at him with pity, some with envy, but mostly they shake his hand and extend their condolences underneath the glaring sun.
The team is with him. They stand in respectable spaces behind more-important persons present, letting themselves blend into the crowd but staying close enough to clasp his shoulder should he need it. Paris circles around quietly too, head down, hands pocketed. It isn't until the service nears its end that she bumps into the wrong person.
The agent up-downs her, eyes tightening into a squint.
"I know you," he begins. Degas thinks, Jesus, not now, from where he stands, because no matter how deeply embedded he is in any present moment, there is always going to be a part of him that's fine-tuned to her. "You're that crazy bitch from the Rome footage."
Paris doesn't blink.
"I am."
The man's fist flies, and Degas is there before it connects. The next few moments are a blur of activity, with him shouting at the man to stand down, Ethan and Benji quickly coming over to calm things down, and Grace shooing the gathering crowd away. Degas mostly remembers that Briggs' two daughters are here—doesn't know their names, ages, or what they look like, but they are here and this can't happen.
When the debacle is under control, he looks up to see Paris gone, the space she stood in as empty as if she'd never been there.
It takes a moment for him to spot her across the field. She leans against a lone oak tree, pays the rest of her respects from afar. Foolishly, he thought things would be better by now.
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.
The same night, it is he who shows up at her door. She pulls him past the doorframe by his belt, and it isn't even with some sort of hunger, desire—just by mechanics behind those empty eyes of hers. He wonders who had been home in there years ago, before all of this, wonders who had taken up that space before this life happened to her. He wants to say sorry until his tongue numbs.
"Not for that," he says instead, taking her wrist into his hand gently. And the touch is too soft, too pure; he can tell it's more than she thinks she deserves. She flinches away as if she'd been burned.
Still, she lets him inside, and it means more than he can admit aloud right now.
End Notes: these two be hurting my feelingsss. I love the little Degas/Paris fandom that's sprouted, and any content for either of them I eat up. they're definitely going to be interacting a lot in MI8 if instagram bts is any indication, so this is a quick exploration of that dynamic. title is from poem Love Sonnet XI by Pablo Neruda!