Work Text:
At the start, she can’t help but wonder what his name is.
Phillip is a shell; he’s a disguise for her, in the same way that her wigs, her gun, her false passport and her driving license are. Within him, almost like a virus, lives a real man with a real name, but he’s so utterly inaccessible to her that in having breakfast with him, she’s reminded of what it was like to have to learn English.
Every da and nyet was a blow to the stomach. Here, with this man she is to call husband, she feels those punches all over again.
She lives with a stranger who does not see her as anything other than a part of the mission, and so does he. It’s for the best that she stops wondering, even if it makes it very hard to trust him with the entirety of her life.
…
Gregory sees her. Not the husk; the inside.
He sees her the way American girls desire to be seen. She spends a little more time thinking about the lipstick she wants to apply, how she wants to style her hair, before they meet. Distantly, she wonders what her mother would think, before recalling that she only has one mother now and that mother would want her to pursue this.
If the reasons don’t align exactly right, they’re close enough that no one will notice.
The door to the apartment closes with a creak on the hinge and Phillip looks up from the newspaper he’s puzzling over. Speaking English, still, is harder than it is for them to read, and so they spend most of their time in silence, absorbing. Sponging up a culture that they are meant to reject, just so they can reject it.
“They’re losing the war,” Phillip says, articulating the words slowly and evenly, as if he’s been saying them his whole life. “Vietnam, I mean.”
It’s winter--a comfortable temperature, in other words--and she sits down across from him and knows what he sees when he looks at her. A partner; a weapon. Elizabeth.
“Johnson will not give up. Kennedy didn’t,” she says.
Those are such bland names, now. She remembers sitting in front of a projector for weeks on end, learning everything there was to know about Kennedy; why he was dangerous, an enemy. It feels like much longer ago than it was, because back then her name was … and she didn’t wear lipstick or nail polish or think about heading to the sale at Hecht’s. Even if she can justify the latter thought to herself as rooted in refusing to spend even more money than they already do on frivolous, material nonsense, she’ll still be going shopping.
“No, you’re probably right,” Phillip says, peering back at the newspaper.
Two years, and she knows nothing of him. A list of facts. She can’t even convince herself that his habits have become clear to her because she knows they’re false. Sometimes, she lies awake at night and listens to him breathe in his sleep, hoping he’ll finally give something away; but he doesn’t. He doesn’t snore. He sleeps like the dead, as if he can retreat so far that the shell of Phillip is all she’ll ever see.
“I’ve met someone,” she blurts out.
Phillip has a initial facial response to those words that she can’t read, but then he simply folds the newspaper up and looks at her evenly. “You mean--”
“An ally to the cause.”
He says nothing for a long moment, and then smiles at her in a way that makes her forget to breathe, just for a second. “I always thought I’d be the first to recruit. I guess it’s silly, now that I’m saying it out loud.”
Americans would roll their eyes and call him sexist; she knows it to simply be a question of ambition, because Directorate S has made them equal in a way that American women will never be to American men.
“His name is Gregory. He is... a black man who resents the inequalities of this country. He shares our values.”
Phillip’s smile turns broken, sharp. “Our values? Is that what he’ll be sharing?”
The wonderful afternoon she has spent with a true comrade, with a man who just wants to know about her life, about her dreams, about the world she sees for her future children--the ones that aren’t part of the mission, the ones she cannot let herself think about at any other time--evaporates. It shatters the second Phillip reminds her of the limits of her existence.
This life is all she’ll ever be, and it’s with a latent stab of fury that she realizes that she will not let him sully that for her; she is proud to have been selected for this mission.
“I’ll do whatever is necessary, as we both should,” she tells him, archly, and Phillip just picks up the newspaper again and says, “Remember to use protection.”
“I don’t need to be reminded--” she snaps at him.
He looks at her, surprise registering briefly on his face. “My only point is that no matter how much having a child would benefit us, it would be difficult to explain to anyone, let alone General Zhukov, how it is we came about a child that isn’t as white as we both are.”
For a moment, they just stare at each other, and then Phillip clears his throat and runs a hand through his hair.
“I apologize. There are better ways in which I could have addressed this ... issue.”
“Issue,” she echoes at him, and then unwillingly stares at her own stomach. Nothing about her is hers. Elizabeth Jennings belongs to Mother Russia; the reminder steels her. “Don’t be sentimental, Phillip. Children are simply a part of our cover, and when we are ordered to have them, we will.”
“Will it be--” Phillip starts to say, before exhales abruptly and shutting up.
He seems so human sometimes that it’s hard to believe that he’s no more real than she is. His ability to fake that humanity is how they’ll survive, she knows, but that doesn’t negate that it makes her want to throttle him.
“I should go to the store. We’re having lamb for dinner tonight,” she says; a conversation that’s part of a script that she rehearsed for years, both with Phillip and with others. Be a wife, Elizabeth. You must be a wife first, and a soldier second. If they see you the other way around, you will not last long.
“Great,” Phillip says, and if he sounds less than convincing, she ignores it.
Gregory’s tone, she can think about. Phillip’s is simply one more part of a man that she would die for, but cannot ever live for.
…
Less and less of her feels like …, the young girl from … who had been recruited at age 17 after losing her father to … and her mother to …, until the … was the only family she had, the … her only home.
She stares at the swell growing in her stomach and hates it. It degrades her; it makes her less capable. Phillip looks at her with barely repressed concern as she insists on going on stakeouts. Refuses to let her make first contact alone anymore. Not in her condition.
“You did this to me,” she yells at him, when he forces her to stay by the phone as he goes and meets with Gabriel, about gathering some tactical information from a leak in the DoD. “Don’t act like you care now; you did this to me.”
He looks at her like she’s crazy, and then seemingly decides that even if she is crazy, it’s not his problem. He simply turns on his heels and walks out of the house, wig on his head, glasses on his face, even more of a shell than he normally is.
If she cries, later, alone--it’s hormonal. The doctor told her it might happen, and she chooses to consider it part of her expanding arsenal of roles. First wife, then mother, and when that’s all over and done with, she guesses she still gets to be a soldier.
When Phillip returns, even later still, it’s with an address and a phone number and a box of chocolates.
“If I could have the baby--” he says as he hands them over, which is so ridiculous a thing to say that she throws the phone--cradle and all--at him.
If she eats the chocolates anyway, it’s simply because it’s what an American woman would do.
…
Seeing Gregory helps.
He puts a soothing, warm hand on her stomach--right where the baby grows--and tells her that she’ll figure it out. That this is going to be okay for her, somehow. That it changes some things, but not everything.
“Mothers just love their kids, Elizabeth. It’s how it goes.”
His apartment smells cloyingly of weed, and for the first time, she looks at Gregory and realizes that as much as he understands all the parts of her that have been knitted together to make up the very American Elizabeth Jennings, there are other things that he will never understand.
“Yes,” she says, staring at the ceiling fan overhead, listening to Mick Jagger croon about never having satisfaction. Another spoiled Western boy, always wanting more and more. “Mothers do love their children.”
“So you’ll figure it out; you and her.”
Her. The baby is a her. Phillip has been trawling through baby name books, looking for something quintessentially American. What he means is that he wants a name that has no Russian equivalent. Nothing to confuse them. No Katherine who could accidentally be called Yekaterina. No Alexandra who could be called Sascha, unthinkingly and fondly.
The baby will be a stranger, a mission part, the flesh and blood of Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings.
The baby will also be real, and she nearly bites through her lips as Gregory keeps on rubbing her stomach, as if the horrible truth that lies within can be quieted down with just a touch.
…
The child changes Phillip, and so she does not let it change her.
He brings home stuffed animals, dolls, little booties that he saw in a store window on his way home. He walks around the house humming songs to her--always American ones, of course, because he’s an exceptionally good agent--and tells her about the travel agency; tells her about the vacations he’s planning for real people, who have the luxury of being able to leave this godforsaken country.
Even when a mission goes wrong, and Elizabeth spends an hour bandaging his ribs as he silently weeps and throws back shot after shot of vodka, purely to dull the pain, he still drags himself to the nursery and puts a hand on Paige’s hair.
“My love,” he says, softly. Softly enough that anyone not trained to listen would have missed it.
It’s not the shell talking, either, and Elizabeth turns away from the sight; unwillingly, she wonders why it makes her stomach feel like it’s trying to crawl out of her body.
Nothing good has ever come from wondering, however, and so she shuts the thoughts down. She goes downstairs and listens to an American news program on her American radio and makes some American toast in her American kitchen, and reminds herself of who they are, what their purpose is.
…
The only vacation she’ll ever have is Gregory, who calls her Elizabeth in a teasing, questioning way, as if to say, it’s okay if you want to be someone else here.
Sometimes, it’s almost enough.
…
“Paige--share with your brother,” she says, firmly.
Sharing is alien to these children. In a world of plenty, there seems to be little point.
She wants to sit them down, stiffly and with straight backs, and tell them what it means to work towards a common goal; how the individual is nothing in the face of the whole. She wants to make them understand true equality is the only goal worth pursuing, but is stopped in her tracks by Phillip wandering into the kitchen with a broad smile on his face, in his ludicrous white tennis shorts and a headband that makes him look like a fitness instructor.
“Do you guys want to see something swell?”
His children--and if she flinches at the thought, it’s because the notion of them belonging to either of them is unbecoming--crane their heads at him.
He beckons them out into the driveway; shows them a new car. Part of their cover, of course. The travel agency is doing well, but there is something about the boyish grin on his face as he touches the hood, trails his fingers over to the windshield, that suggests that he actually likes the car.
She folds her arms over her chest and watches as he lifts Henry and points at various functions on their new sedan, and then looks down at Paige, who rejoins her and leans into her leg and says, “It’s pretty.”
There are ways in which Paige looks like both of them; ways in which Paige looks like neither of them. The red hair is a mystery; the kind she would ask after, if she was anyone other than Elizabeth Jennings. It isn’t her side of the family; ….’s parents had both been dark-haired, of a hearty, sober peasant stock.
Phillip turns to look at her and raises his eyebrows, and she smiles at him in the way that ten years of shared cover enables so very easily. The wife smile.
It’s all so very meaningless, much like this car.
…
Sometimes, Phillip touches her like she’s actually his wife.
It sends her running to Gregory, who scoops her up and humanizes her and reminds her that she’s more than just a mission part; and perhaps that’s exactly what Phillip hopes to do, but he has no right.
She spits out those words, “He has no right” in Gregory’s bed, late one night--bitching about how he almost got himself killed chasing after a DoJ informant without letting her know what he was doing--and Gregory looks at her quietly for a long moment and then slings a long arm around her back and says, “No, he doesn’t.”
“If he goes and gets himself killed--”
“Then he dies, Elizabeth. And you’ll spend a few years alone with your kids, and Directorate S will send his replacement--”
“Oh, it’s that easy, is it?” she asks him, turning over to look at him; his always-sympathetic eyes. She owes him a decade of his life; has made him a traitor to his country, and all he ever does is smile at her and tell her that it’s worth it.
Sometimes, she thinks that what he means is that she’s worth it, but after ten years, she finds it hard to believe he’d be that foolish.
“He’s only your cover, Liz--”
“God, don’t call me that,” she says, shuddering, and watches as he starts to smile knowingly. He knows her well enough to know that the nickname for a false name will chafe more than the false name itself.
Until his smile starts to fade, it’s a pleasant moment, as all moments with Gregory are pleasant in the same way that all moments with Phillip are false; but then it does fade, and he looks at her abruptly seriously.
“What would you like me to call you? I mean, shit, girl--it’s been ten years. You call me Greg, sometimes--”
“Virtually never,” she corrects him.
“Don’t you have--anything you actually like being called? Because I know Elizabeth’s not it.”
He stares at her, probingly--searchingly--and she feels...
“Elizabeth’s fine,” she says, shorter than she wants to.
She kisses him before he can protest; uses her body to communicate in a way that she’s been trained to do since she was seventeen years old, before questions of Phillip and Paige and Henry diluted her ability to function. Back when Elizabeth was nothing at all yet; nothing at all but potential to prove her love for her country.
…
Phillip’s hands wrap around Timochev’s neck and squeeze, depressing his larynx, until with an almost-silent gurgle, the man goes limp in her husband’s arms and then gets lowered to the ground again.
Whatever she’s seeing now--breathing heavily, looking at his own hands with barely any comprehension--is not the shell; it’s whatever lives inside of Phillip, and she feels herself react to it unwillingly.
“We should get rid of the body,” she says, because for now, he needs her to be the agent while he is the husband and the father.
It takes him a few more deep breaths, and then he nods, moving to the head of the body and saying, rough and distracted, “Get his legs?”
This is what their marriage is: disposing of bodies, staring at each other and seeing strangers, caring about children that never should have been brought into this.
On the drive to the docks, street lights keep on catching her wedding ring, like the lights on an airplane getting ready to land; and Phillip’s fingers wrap tight around the wheel, his face expressionless, but his eyes completely open to her for the first time in fifteen years.
…
He’ll never ask her what her name is.
He’ll give her guns, wigs, mission orders, syringes with poison and paralytics, bandages, bloodied rags, make-up pads, groceries, fluoride toothpaste, brownie mix, report cards, teeth for the tooth fairy, hands to hold, and for the first time ever, he also gives her an orgasm that washes over her so fully that it’s like every identity she’s ever had is suddenly lost to her--but he’ll never ask her what her name is.
She reaches for his hand, for once, and watches as he studies her quietly; the shell, Phillip, but within him lies a man that guides the hand she’s holding, strangled Timochev with it, touched her with such unerring accuracy that she could feel her body melt and her heart gallop without her permission.
Nadezhda sounds foreign on her new tongue, now; she sounds like a spoiled American girl learning about a different culture and tripping over all of its indigenous traits. The story comes out clumsy, stilted, and it feels less real than it actually is, but she tells it in full and watches as Phillip absorbs it all, silent but there.
Eventually, he rolls over on top of her. He’s not gentle, the way Gregory has been all these years; like she’s a treasure to shield, a glorious gem from a distant utopia where everyone and everything is equal.
No, Phillip rolls on top of her and slides hands up her arms, captures her wrists, brings her hands to the top of her pillow and pins them down there, because he knows the parts of her that can flip out of this gentle hold; knows that if pressed, she will forget that she is mother and wife and Elizabeth Jennings and will be nothing more than KGB agent, ready to gouge out his larynx with the pen that she used to complete the Post’s crossword earlier this morning.
He looks at her, and she knows that he sees her the way she sees him now.
“It’s a beautiful name,” he says, not daring to repeat it back at her, but acknowledging it all the same.
“Yeah. It was,” she agrees.