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“Faster would be good!”
Benji winces at the pitch Brandt hits and pulls his comm halfway out of his ear. “Yes, okay, right on it, at least you’re not overheating today? And you know, if you'd called me earlier this wouldn't have happened.” Benji types one-handed, stretching out the cramp in his other hand. He watches Brandt on the CCTV. He’s lunging again, not that he has anywhere to go.
Jane asks, “Update?”
“Apparently he's working on it,” Brandt answers, before Benji gets a word in.
“I wouldn't have to be working on it if someone had just agreed to—” There's a burst of gunfire on the comms. "Brandt?"
“That was me.” Ethan's voice comes over the radio, rueful and out of breath.
“Course it was.” Benji spares a glance for that camera, but Ethan's on it. “Anyway, as I was saying, I had a perfectly good plan.”
“Involving you, a mask, and a lifeboat,” Brandt snaps. “The chances of you pulling that one off were—”
“Ten count,” Jane says. “Ready.”
“Ready,” Brandt answers, although he's clearly not, given the failing seal on his door.
“Go,” Ethan says.
Benji persuades the outer lock to click into place on nine. He mutes his earpiece for ten, so he's not deafened by the explosion.
Brandt appears a few minutes later, wet. He grabs Benji by the arm. “You packed?”
“Give me— yeah, okay.” He hands the case to Brandt, who accepts it with a long-suffering sigh. Benji can hear the water rushing after them, but one click on his tablet starts them on a clear path out to the surface. He tries to take his case back from Brandt, but the man just glares at him and keeps pace as they run.
*
Benji still wonders about Brandt. There are things about him that just don’t make sense. He’s... not jumpy, but nervy, the pessimist on a team that already includes Jane (who still doubts her abilities some days) and Benji (who knows the limits of his abilities in certain areas). Brandt is a great shot, more than competent in hand-to-hand, and retains information better than anything Benji’s ever seen that wasn’t plugged into a server.
And sometimes when they’re making plans he crouches in corners and pulls his shoulders in and wraps his hands around his knees. Benji finds it distracting.
Benji says, “Brandt could do it.”
Brandt turns to look at him, his eyes fractionally wider. “I could do what?”
“Air duct. You can do air ducts, right, course you can.”
Ethan says, “He’d need to do it without making a sound.”
“Which is why Benji can’t do it.” Brandt throws in.
“But you can?” Ethan asks.
“I don’t—” Brandt says. “I can—” His hand flicks at his cheek. “Sure, I can, if you think that’s the best…”
Ethan nods decisively. “I do. You’ll be fine.”
Brandt nods back at him in helpless echo. “Fine.”
Benji looks over at Brandt. “For someone who was, you know, a team leader, you need to be specifically ordered to do a lot of things.”
Brandt glares at him and coughs. He turns to Ethan. “I should go get ready.”
“Go.”
Jane slaps the back of Benji’s head. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Ow. And also, I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just weird.”
“He’s…” She deliberately doesn’t look at Ethan, and Benji knows what she’s trying to say, but it’s still weird.
Three hours later, Brandt goes dead quiet on comms for the five minutes it takes him to cross from one side of the air vent to the other. Benji watches the room below on camera – fifty armed and angry men sitting silently watching a debriefing video – and no one moves. No one looks up because they hear a misplaced knee or a loose button or any evidence at all that they’re being stealthily invaded.
At five minutes and three seconds, Brandt says, “This is Beech, I’m in.”
“Okay,” Benji says, “So I just need you to—”
“I’m there.”
“And the—”
“Read me the numbers.”
“Six, eight, four, zero, zero, seven...” He reads out the string of numbers while Brandt types, and then he’s in.
Brandt waits, unusually quiet, for someone to call him back.
They rendezvous at the safe-house three hours later, information sent back to HQ and being pored over by analysts.
Brandt leans against the wall. Benji meets his eyes and says, “See? You’re good with air ducts.”
Brandt manages a half-hearted glare. “Never said I wasn’t.” He shrugs one shoulder, and looks back at the floor. It could be eight months ago, Brandt looking like there are ten unstable countries he would rather be in running ops solo than in a room in Croatia with the three of them. He’s made his peace with Ethan, one way or another, but it doesn’t seem to have helped.
*
“You’ve got thirty-four minutes.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to take thirty-six,” Brandt elaborates.
“Okay,” Ethan says, “who left him in charge of the clock?”
Brandt, sitting beside Benji in the van, furrows his brow and says, “Thirty-three.”
Jane laughs under her breath. “He has a point, you know.”
“I’m working on it,” Ethan says.
Reaching across Benji to steal the spare laptop, Brandt says, “If Jane flubs her security check the—”
“Whole mission falls apart?” Ethan asks.
“It buys you three more minutes,” Brandt corrects.
“I don’t need—” Ethan says.
“Benji?” Jane asks.
“I can put up a flag,” he answers. “Enough that they’ll run a full scan.”
“Thirty-one,” Brandt says.
“Stop talking.” Ethan goes quiet for a moment. “Fine, do it.”
Benji turns his screen towards Brandt and pulls up the other. “Going now.”
Brandt says, “Adjusted time, thirty three minutes.”
“Stop talking,” Ethan repeats.
Benji is pretty sure that Brandt isn’t capable of stopping talking when he’s watching the mission go off track. He’s a man who likes plans. He’s biting his tongue now, because Ethan is a man who likes to adapt his plans as he goes, and tells Brandt to stop talking at least once per mission. (He tells Benji to stop talking more often than that, but usually for other reasons.)
Benji elbows Brandt. “Look at that.” He needs another eye on the cameras while he watches Jane.
Brandt rolls his eyes. “How do I always end up your helper?” Then: “What’s he doing?”
“Who?”
“Spence. He’s—” Brandt raises his voice. “Change direction. Left, now.”
Jane turns on her heel and heads left. “Okay?”
“Fine, Spence is in on it, he’s not being played, he’s the one who started this. Wait.” Jane stops walking.
Benji says, “Ethan, it seems like we’ve hit a little—”
“I can hear that. What do you see?”
Brandt says, “He’s making another call, from the car. Just give me a... He’s planning a coup, to take the territory, he thinks he has the support.”
“Does he?”
“If that was why he was talking to Georges’ man, if it wasn’t about the meet, maybe. We need to intercept now, we can’t just watch.”
“Okay,” Ethan says. “Can you get to me?”
Jane says, “I’m five minutes away.”
“Fifteen,” Benji says. He starts the van. “If we hurry.”
“Fifteen,” Brandt says, still distracted by the screens. He takes a beat and then shoots Benji a glare.
Benji holds his hands up – before remembering that he’s driving and needs them on the steering wheel – “Count away. Fifteen minutes.”
“Fourteen,” Brandt says, and Benji snorts. He’s not laughing at Brandt, really, or at least not at his need to keep time, but he can feel the atmosphere change over on the other side of the van.
*
Benji is always a little worried, when he has to be back in HQ, that they'll decide not to let him out again. Brandt doesn't express that worry, although he probably has more to worry about. Hordes of junior analysts come bouncing around him when he passes through the bullpen. Brandt brushes them off fairly gently and disappears into the Operations office.
Benji wanders back to his own domain once he's done being questioned about their last mission. (He thinks that mostly they just wanted another firsthand account that didn't make it sound like they were making a habit of infiltrating submarines. What can he say, it worked the first time, and it gave him an idea.) This bullpen hums, with servers peaceably crunching all the numbers a man could possibly want.
Benji drops by Yusuf’s desk. “Miss me?”
Yusuf rolls his eyes. “How can I miss you, you’re asking me for help every ten minutes.”
“Hey, it’s difficult out there. No decent hardware, terrible download speed, you don’t know how good you have it in here.”
“Oh, you’re coming back then?”
“No. Well... No.” Nothing they’ve done has been as mad as the Cobalt mission, Benji was right about that, though a few have come close. Not nuclear missile close, but Ethan Hunt is never exactly comfortable to work alongside. “I have a team now. They’d be lost without me.”
“That’s what I hear,” Yusuf says, very dry. He nods at the woman beside him. “This is Dina, by the way. She knew your analyst.”
“He’s not my— you worked with Brandt?”
She smiles. “I did, yes.”
“Was he seriously the analyst God? Because every time we come to HQ, it looks like someone in your bullpen is going to kidnap him and tie him to a desk to look at chatter.”
She’s struggling not to laugh, but says, “He’s very good at what he does.”
“He’s good in the field too.”
“He does, like, worst cases,” she says.
Benji flicks his hand. “That, I already knew.” Brandt is all about worst cases.
“No, I mean, that's his thing. That's what the Secretary— anyway, that's what he does. Tracking how the dominos fall, all the bad things that happen twenty steps down the line that nobody else thought of.”
“Probabilities,” Yusuf says, “yes?”
“Something like that. Best we had.” She grins. “That why they let Ethan Hunt steal him? No one else could calculate odds of success that small?”
Benji shrugs. “Ethan's not really a numbers guy.”
Laughing out loud now, she says, “Maybe he's there to protect the rest of you then. Oh, there he is. Will?”
Brandt stops in his tracks, where he was passing between the desks. “Dina? Why're you— Benji.”
Benji nods at him. “They're telling me all about your days preventing catastrophes with math.”
Something in that surprises a weird expression onto Brandt's face. “Yeah, well. Tends to be a longer term solution than the other stuff.”
Benji supposes he can’t really disagree with that.
*
Brandt's hand-to-hand is all sharp, economical movement. It's more textbook than textbook. It was a bit terrifying, the first time Benji saw it, coming from Brandt who a lot of the time doesn't look dangerous. Benji had passed all his own field exams but he knows his combat scores were nothing to write home about. He's a decent shot and he can hold his own in close combat but he's on the team for other reasons. Usually, so is Brandt, because his fighting tends to come out by instinct - when he has the time to think about it or panic, his probability counting must kick in.
Today, adrenaline is apparently ruling, because he descended out of nowhere, firing his fifteen rounds and then kicked the last goon in the chest. He turns his head towards Benji. “You good?”
“Yeah. Great. You heard me then?”
He nods. “I heard your comm go dead.”
Benji had made sure they found the comm, grabbing it away from him and drowning it. As good as a cry for help, that one. Or so he had hoped, and must have been right, because here was Brandt, breathing too hard and tying the wrists of their assailants.
Brandt asks, “These local guys or— they were after the Veil too?”
“Apparently it's on everyone's Christmas list this year.”
Brandt shakes his head at the nearly-joke but leans down to offer Benji a hand. “You're good.”
“You did that one already. You?”
“Fine.” His eyes go unfocused. “Yeah, I've got him, he's off comms. Hang on.” He takes out his earpiece. “You take it, Jane's asking for you. Let's get out of here.”
He waits for Benji's nod, for Benji to relay that message and confirm the reply, before swinging open the door again. He follows Benji all the way out.
*
Benji tracks down Brandt's home number, because that's not difficult from inside HQ. He should really devote some of the brainpower he didn’t need to use hacking into phone records to examine why he wanted the number in the first place. Brandt’s just on his mind more than he should be. Benji doesn’t usually fixate – the opposite, actually, his attention span has never been impressive – but for whatever reason, Brandt’s weirdness is keeping him occupied. When he calls, the phone rings for a long time before Brandt picks up. “Hello?”
“Hi.”
“Benji?” They’re both stateside right now, bouncing around with no mission, so it’s not as though it’s so surprising that Benji’s there to call him at home.
“Yeah,” Benji says. “So, you drink, yeah?”
“I'm— what?”
“I was going to say we should get drinks after work, but you tend to react badly to surprises. So, I don't need you to decide right now. If you fancy a drink tomorrow when you're done, come find me. They’re demoing these new cameras, with the remote control and the ball, I’ll be there all day.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Great.” Benji hangs up.
He's not sure what he's expecting, which is just another way he and Brandt are not much alike. But they've literally saved each other's lives a few times by now. And that’s what people do, with the people they work with, when their jobs get a bit much. They go and get drunk together. Benji has spent all of his adult life doing work he can’t talk about with anyone other than the guys he works with. Brandt isn’t much for actual conversation, or hasn’t been so far, but Benji wants to know what’ll happen if he tries.
Brandt – given time to evaluate Benji’s reasons for asking and potential consequences – decides to turn up. Benji swallows a yell when he turns the corner and Brandt is just there, waiting for him.
Brandt nods at him. “Where’d you want to go?”
They wander out together, Brandt in a suit and looking like any other tired businessman at the end of the day, Benji in jeans and a t-shirt with a robot on it. He might not have thought this through. Brandt just walks alongside him until they find a likely bar, and Benji orders them both beers.
Brandt asks, “How were the cameras?”
“What?”
“You said— it was cameras you were testing for them, yeah? The ones to roll down corridors?”
“Ah. Yes. Well, aside from their tendency to occasionally roll up walls unexpectedly, they’re working well.”
Brandt’s half-smile is equally unexpected. “Okay.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“They got you doing anything interesting or are you raring to get back out there? Fieldwork.” He waves his fists, demonstrating. “Yeah.”
Brandt tilts his head. “It’s fine.”
“You know,” Benji says, “Before this, Ethan didn't really stick with one team. He worked with Luther a lot - we met Luther, you remember yeah? - but he was sort of notorious for not keeping the same guys around. Team leaders pick their own, you know, but he was so— anyway, him asking for us again and us saying yes was a big deal.”
Brandt blinks a little at the non sequitur but nods. “Yeah. Okay?”
“I think we do okay.”
“We came pretty close to allowing a nuclear war.” He mouths the last words, but Benji knows what he’s saying.
“But we didn’t! And we’ve been good since then.”
“We nearly—”
“But we didn’t!” Benji says again. “That’s how it works.”
“I know,” Brandt says. “I know that, I do.”
He knows, Benji thinks, but he also knows every way they screw up and how easily ‘nearly’ would tip over into reality. Brandt’s head must be a bloody exhausting place to live. Benji sighs, and goes to get them some more beer.
*
Benji is watching the cameras, so he’s the one that sees Brandt come to a decision in his mind, and topple his chair sideways. Brandt pushes his feet off the ground and moves the chair forward on the ground, towards something too small for Benji to see. He zooms the camera but the quality’s shite and all he can see is a flash of metal. “Ethan!”
Ethan comes running in. “What?”
“Hypothetically speaking, is Brandt the kind of guy who thinks he can break himself out with a loose nail and no weapons?”
Ethan stares at the screen. “No. But he might be thinking about—”
“What?”
“He might be thinking about making sure he has a plan if... making sure he can’t give anything away.”
Benji says, “What do you— anything like what?” He hunches low and keeps his eyes on the screen, not sure he wants to look at Ethan’s face and see an answer.
Ethan shrugs. “He was Chief Analyst. He knows a lot of things IMF wouldn’t tell a field agent. You knew this wasn’t a random grab.”
“Yeah, but I thought it was a random ‘let’s grab one of Hunt’s team only not Hunt because he’d probably kill us’ and Brandt was the one in the field at the time. Not—”
Brandt is testing the nail, not against the thick rope tying him to the chair, but the fragile skin of his palm. On the black and white screen, the blood blossoms dark.
“Do something!” Benji demands. Ethan must have a plan to fix this.
“I am doing something. You buy us some time.”
“I— what? I can’t get in through the doors, they have no— Ethan!” Ethan has disappeared out through the door again.
If you were Brandt, Benji thinks, and determined, really determined to protect what was in your head, how long would it take you? If the only thing running around your head right then was ways this ended badly? Benji looks at the screen again. Not long. He doesn’t have Brandt’s sense of time moving but suddenly all he can see is a countdown.
He cycles through the other screens in the compound. There has to be something. There.
One of the security guards turns the dial on the radio, fiddling with channel or the volume. Probably a sports fan. He’s only just down the hall from where they’re keeping Brandt. Benji can work with that. Who needs a PA system to hack when you have public radio and the ability to broadcast on all frequencies?
A minute later, Brandt’s head jerks up, turning to the source of the noise. His lips move.
Benji loops the line of the song, over and over again. If you fall I will catch you.
Brandt’s shoulders roll back and he drops the nail.
When the goons come back in, they right his chair and knock him over again. Brandt keeps his eyes on the camera and Benji nods, stupidly, since no one can see him.
It’s another forty-five minutes before Ethan’s in and out, Jane providing covering fire, and Brandt still locks his gaze on Benji the moment they load him into the van. “Cyndi Lauper?”
“I was in a hurry!”
“And that was the first song you thought of?” Ethan asks. “Time after Time?”
“Again, in a hurry, and it needed to be clear to Mr. Self-Sacrifice over there that we were literally right around the corner and, I don’t know, that he should stop thinking about whatever he was thinking about doing.” He exhales.
Brandt’s teeth show a little in his smile, despite the blood and the bruises. “I got the message.”
That’s great. Benji still can’t get enough air into his lungs, but Brandt has chosen this moment to direct the nicest smile ever seen on his face right at Benji. His sense of timing, ironically, is questionable.
*
Benji’s not ten words into his question before Ethan’s grabbing him by the arm and dragging him halfway across town. They sit at an outdoor table at some neighborhood café and then Ethan nods.
“You know about—” The thing is, they’ve never actually talked about it. He knows – he assumes – Brandt and Ethan talked about it, sometime between Ethan setting the phone on the table and Brandt picking it up. But Benji doesn’t know what was said, because Brandt has never mentioned it again and Ethan shutters at any mention of Julia. And it matters, because it’s the reason Brandt left the field, and he’s in the field again now. He gets beaten up, and they nearly drown, and he unbends a very little at a time but never quite relaxes no matter where they are. This feels like a missing piece that might make sense of that.
“What, Benji?” Ethan asks.
“Do you blame him? I mean, you know what happened, he did his job, but do you?”
Ethan looks around, casually casing the surrounding crowd.
Benji blinks. “You know we have anti-surveillance tech, right? If that was the reason for the trip, a bit of privacy. We’ve got whole rooms set up for secret chats.”
“No agency is impenetrable,” Ethan says, and sure Benji knows that a little paranoia can serve a field agent well but this is—
“Julia’s alive.”
“She’s— what?”
“I had to keep her safe.”
Benji lets that thought settle. “And Brandt—”
“He knows. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t.”
“But he still acts like...”
Ethan doesn’t react. “I told him. I’m telling you now. I’ll tell Jane, but it can’t go further than that. There would always be someone.”
Benji nods. He understands that – he gets that – what he needs to allow himself to process is that Brandt has known this for months and sometimes he still looks just the same as he did in the safe house in Dubai. Ethan talking to him or not talking to him isn’t the deciding factor. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t know that but he doesn’t need to be here either way. Benji wonders if he knows that. He wonders if he’s going to change his mind, realise that he could go back behind a desk and no one would blame him. Benji just thinks that what they have at the moment is working. The team is good. He’s good working with Brandt, and no matter how easily Ethan deals with new people, Benji likes the way Brandt has so very slowly become a person he would miss, if he ever had to do this without him.
*
Benji, by and large, hasn’t been in the field long enough that he minds where they send him. Jane is grumbling vaguely about having spent too much time in Eastern Europe in the winter, but Benji is also noticing that they’re a man short in the car to the airport.
Benji leans around the seat to ask but hasn’t said a word before Ethan says, “We're picking up Brandt en route.”
“And why does he get the special treatment, eh?”
“He's been out of the country the past few days, there was a situation.”
Benji drums his fingers on the car door. “A resolved situation? Or should I be watching the sky for falling missiles?”
Ethan smirks. “Under control. But it led to why we're out again so soon.” He pulls the car up to the side of a building with a screech. Luckily, Benji and Jane were both holding on – they’ve been driving with Ethan long enough by now.
Brandt opens the opposite door, sliding in beside Benji. “Okay.”
Ethan starts the car. “All good?”
“Fine.” He shakes his head. “Not used to doing that any more though.” He leans back against the seat. “Good to be home.”
Benji turns. “You know we’re flying out in about forty-five minutes.”
“Good to be back to normal, then.”
Benji meets Jane’s eyes in the mirror, checking his reaction against hers.
Brandt looks tired, but that’s not new. His shoulders drop into a sprawl, and then he turns around in his seat, curling one arm around the back of Ethan’s, facing Benji. Which is, now Benji thinks about it, the way he always sits when they’re driving in non-lethal situations. So the next thing he’s going to do is:
“Fill me in,” Brandt says, raising his voice so Jane and Ethan can hear him.
“You probably know this better than I do,” Ethan says.
“Probably, but I’ve been doing the— fill me in on what you know.” He taps Benji’s knee, looking to see the images that go along with Ethan’s words. Benji slides them onto the screen and moves closer to Brandt, so they can look at them together.
*
Jane and Benji had worked a few missions together before the last one with Hanaway. She’s better now than she was right after it happened, her anger more focused, but she still hasn’t recovered completely. Looking at her, looking at Brandt, Benji wonders whether any of them will ever recover completely.
He speaks without thinking about it, which he is self-aware enough to admit happens a lot. It doesn’t happen so often on missions any more though. “You think I’ve changed?”
Jane gives him an odd smile. “Sorry?”
“Sorry, don’t worry about it.”
“In the field, you mean? I didn’t really know you before. You’re different in the field now than you were at the beginning.”
“Different how?”
“More confident,” she says. “Faster. It’s experience.”
“And Brandt?”
“What about him?” she asks.
“I like being in the field. Apart from all the screaming terror. And he doesn't. Or doesn't look like it.”
“He's getting better,” Jane says.
“I know that, but I don’t know how. Everybody says he’s all numbers, all scenarios, and everything we do spins completely out of control but he won’t—”
It’s not that Benji doesn’t trust Brandt. Apart from a few minutes in the safe house in Dubai, Benji trusts Brandt with his life, with the mission. It’s not even that he thinks it’ll necessarily help the team if he understands Brandt better, although it couldn’t hurt. Truthfully, Benji’s not exactly sure what it is, except that knowing why Brandt puts himself through this might make it easier to understand how to keep him here. And Benji thinks their team works.
“It’s his choice,” Jane says. “He thinks it’s better for him out here.”
“Is that why—”
“Why I stayed in the field?” she asks. “Maybe. I’m good at it, I didn’t do anything else first. And I didn’t have time to think about it, the first time.”
“You would have done something different if you’d thought about it more?”
“Maybe.” She looks at him steadily. “Why don’t you just ask Brandt?”
*
Benji does think about asking Brandt. He’s known the man a full year now and still doesn’t want to start a fight with him, which is almost certainly what’ll happen if he just asks outright. He might have taken Brandt’s example and thought through the options first, but the mission gets in the way.
Brandt is undercover, infiltrating the nondescript high-rise that may or may not be the cover for some not very legal technological espionage.
He’s working on the floor above, ducking into an empty office and waiting for the call to go straight down through into the room below. Ethan gives it, and all Benji can hear is the hiss of the carpeted floor being eaten away.
Ten minutes later, things are going surprisingly easily on Benji’s end. Then Brandt coughs. “Benji?”
“Yep.”
“In about ninety seconds, I’m going to need a hand.”
“What? Brandt!”
Brandt goes quiet on comms, for exactly ninety seconds. And then he says, “Okay, so now I’m stuck.”
“Stuck where?”
“Presley’s office. At his desk. You want to get me into the computer?”
“The plan was—”
“He left early, I didn’t have time.” The tension is only just starting to creep into his voice.
“Okay,” Benji says, “Adaption, good, okay. Let’s do this.”
If Benji was going to have to instruct anyone on his team, Brandt is the best. He follows them to the letter, missing no steps, and not arguing.
He does say, “Running out of time. I need to be out and away before anyone notices the hole in the roof.”
“Just need to tidy up,” Benji says. “Don’t want them to notice the hole in their security either.”
“Okay,” he answers easily. “What do I need to do?”
Benji talks him through the rest, tracks him all the way out the building and back to the van. Brandt bumps his shoulder from the passenger seat. “Thanks.”
“What was that?”
“Thanks?”
“No, what was the— you didn’t even ask, you just went straight to plan z.”
“I knew you were there.”
“And?”
“I thought you'd probably pull it off.”
“Probably?” Benji asks.
“Yeah, probably.”
“And you did it anyway?”
“You seemed like the safest option at the time.”
“That may actually be the nicest thing you've ever said to me.”
Brandt shakes his head but then grins at Benji’s reflection in the rear-view mirror.
“What?” Benji asks. “Brandt?”
“How long have we known each other now?” he asks.
“More than a year?” Benji answers. Brandt probably knows.
“That’s right,” he says. “So – when we’re not using codenames – Will is fine.”
*
He still hasn’t asked the question. Which, at the point that both of them have been sent undercover at a worryingly posh party, is probably a mistake.
They’re sidling down the corridors that lead to the offices when Benji hears footsteps coming towards them. And it seems like, when Brandt takes a look at the not quite dark enough hallway and presses Benji against the wall to kiss him, that maybe they should have talked first.
He hears someone cough, and then cough slightly louder, and then footsteps heading the other direction again. Will breaks away and looks over his shoulder. “They’re gone now.”
“What is it about people kissing that makes security guards just walk away?” Benji asks. “Like we can’t be here for nefarious purposes and making time for a quick snog?”
“They’re underpaid,” Will says, “not military trained. This isn’t exactly Fort Knox.”
“Yeah, but—”
“It worked,” Will says, “Isn’t that what you keep telling me?”
“I’m not usually the one in the middle of... except this is two in a row now. Did this just seem the safest option too?”
“No. But it wasn't the worst.”
“Oh, well, I'm glad that fake-seducing me wasn't the worst thing you've had to—”
“I don’t need to seduce you, Benji.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s been fourteen months now, I’m pretty sure we’re moving towards the same page.” He looks at his watch. “Speaking of, fifteen minutes. Ethan’s going to be halfway to the bridge, we don’t have time to miss this.”
“You’ve been doing that the whole time?”
“It matters,” Will says. “Knowing where everyone’s supposed to be.”
“I know it does.” Benji looks down the hallway, towards where they need to be two minutes from now. “I’ve never said different.”
*
They’re back on US soil before he makes a move. Daring and romantic as it may be, Benji doesn’t want to get shot in the middle of their second kiss.
He waits for Will outside the offices at HQ. Will takes a moment to be surprised but rolls with it fast enough. “Hi.”
“Hi. Drinks?”
“Sure.”
The few times they have managed this, they usually walk together until they spot a likely bar. Benji still doesn’t know if it’s that Will doesn’t care, or just that he’s happy to let Benji make those kinds of decisions. If he had thought about how to approach this, planned it as a romance rather than as an attempt to understand what the hell was going on in Will’s head, he might have done it differently. He probably wouldn’t have taken so long. He probably would have fucked it up, come to think of it, missing the bits that he picked up along the way.
He might still do that, surprised as he is that this worked, that Will thought this was what they were doing all along and didn’t stop him. He asks, “When did you...?”
“What?”
“I didn’t know. For months, I didn’t know.”
Will’s eyebrows come together. “I looked at what you were doing.”
“I’m not saying you were wrong, I just didn’t. I didn’t notice. But I suppose you’re better with the— that.”
Will laughs, just loud enough that Benji can hear him, out here with no comms that have let him pick up every sound Will makes when he’s alarmed or frustrated or waiting for one of them to come rescue the other.
Benji has apparently given Will more than a year's notice of what he's planning here, but he still moves slowly - seconds will be enough with the distance between them - to let him decide if he doesn't want to be kissed.
Will looks back at him and then leans forward to meet Benji halfway, easy like it’d been the plan all along.