Chapter Text
Benji had been joking about those sleepless nights and cold sweats, back in that bar in Seattle. Trying to joke. Succeeding to joke, if he was optimistic. If it was all a joke, then he didn’t have to think about how to make them stop.
Between the insomnia and the recent destruction of his fingertips courtesy of those servers in Mumbai, his expectations for his own productivity this week were just as much of a joke. Which seemed like a perfectly good excuse to hole up in the secondary breakroom with the good couch and wait for the exhaustion to catch up with him, and so off he went.
It was going rather well, until someone decided to smack him over the head with a stack of paperwork roughly the size of Ulysses.
He bolted upright, reaching for a firearm that he didn’t actually have. “Oh, Jesus fucking - Stickell?”
“That’s Christ, to you,” Stickell said dryly from on high. The brim of his hat under the fluorescent lights did grant him a sort of halo - no, no, Benji wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of extending the joke, even in his own head. “What’s up, Dunn? Slacking on the job?”
Incredible. He sunk back into the sofa, trying to channel what he liked to call his natural mediocrity into looking as pathetic as possible. “My hands are still healing, all right? I can barely even type.” He raised one palm limply in pointed demonstration. “Believe me, I’d be back at my flat with a nice cup of tea right now if Jessup didn’t need a second pair of eyes on those explosives from Berlin. She practically begged me to come in today, poor thing.”
Jessup had done nothing of the sort, and he’d have to fetch her coffee later to assuage his own conscience about throwing her under the bus - the truth was that if there was no one else around, there was no way for him to quell the sudden, intrusive certainty that would creep up on him, telling him that the world had actually ended while he wasn’t looking.
But Stickell didn’t need to know that and wouldn’t care even if he did, so. Lying through his teeth it was.
Stickell grunted in a way that had flirted vaguely with sympathy and maybe bought it a drink or two before deciding to go home with schadenfreude instead. “If you’re not licking your wounds when you need to be like the rest of us, then that’s on you.”
He tucked the file he’d been bludgeoning Benji with under his arm and laid claim to the opposite chair while Benji was busy shuddering over the absolute travesty of any combination of the words wounds and licking. “You should work on that, you’re not going to be able to hide down here much longer.”
Benji bristled. “I’m not hiding, I’m just being - talented in multiple fields - wait, what? Why? Where else would I be?”
“Ethan’s pulled your file to be on his shortlist for mission backup,” Stickell drawled. The doubtful look he aimed at Benji suggested severe opposition to said file-pulling. “Which means as soon as he’s ready to go, you’re about to get dragged behind him.”
The phone Ethan had given him back in Seattle gained about a hundred kilograms where it sat languishing in his back pocket. “Hold on, didn’t he just get released from the hospital last week? Who on earth would send him back out that quickly?”
Stickell had the audacity to laugh at that. “Man, you’ve been fanboying over Ethan since that op in ‘06. You should know that’s the wrong question to ask.”
Fanboying rattled around in his poor, tired skull for a good few seconds before Benji managed to push down the wave of red-hot embarrassment enough to retort. “Listen, Stickell, what do you want? I didn’t ask him to - to adopt me, or whatever it is you’re implying.”
Except for in Seattle, when he’d taken that phone with the full confidence that it’d be at least six months of burrowing back into his familiar desks and labs before he’d have to step foot outside again. Or that time in the Kremlin when he’d mentioned how excited he was to work with Ethan in the field.
Had he really brought that up while they were infiltrating the Kremlin? Christ, maybe he was a fanboy.
Stickell was still watching him, his gaze knowing and even in a way that made Benji feel a bit like a spatchcocked game bird. “Believe me, Ethan doesn’t need requests to start adopting people. That fool picks them up like public servers collect malware. I’m just here to make sure you know what you’re getting into.”
Ah, that was familiar territory. He’d heard some variation of those words from nearly every person between him and his authorization for field work. You’ve got a long way to go, Benji. Maybe you should stick to tech, Benji. What are you even trying to accomplish here, Benji, who are you trying to impress?
Well. He finally had his answer. He sat up straight and met Stickell stare for stare. “Okay. Tell me, then. You’re not going to scare me off. If Ethan bloody Hunt wants me to be in the field with him, I’m going to be there, and I’m not going to let him down.”
Stickell said nothing. Just sat there, not a single twitch of expression, long enough for Benji’s brief lick of bravado to sour into anxiety. Longer still, until he began to consider availing himself of the backdoor he’d hacked into the emergency systems his first month here just to break the standoff. Finally, he nodded to himself. “You got your vehicle license when you were certified?”
What. “Yes?”
“Good. Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to. Let Ethan drive.”
What. “What?”
I mean, the rest of his nonsense is pretty self evident, but that’s one you’re going to want to know before you get into a car with him.”
“I’ve been in a car with him,” Benji sputtered. “He nearly ran over a camel!”
Unrepentant, Stickell rose to tower over him once more. “And yet, he’s more dangerous outside the driver’s seat. Take it or leave it, Dunn. I’ll see you around, if you make it that long.”
He tossed the file he was holding to Benji. By the time he’d fumblingly rescued it from spilling all over the floor, Stickell had vanished into the shoddily lit ordeal that passed for night down here. Fucking agents - wait, wasn’t he an agent? Why didn’t he know how to do that?
“Let Ethan drive,” he mimicked, rather uncharitably. “Sure. Fine. Let’s see what I’m meant to do in the meantime, then.”
He opened the file. The first page of IMF’s official property damage report looked innocently back up at him, paperclipped to documentation of a BMW 1 Series with Indian plates.
Ha.