Fic: City of Eagles, Part VIII
Previous Chapter: Part VII
Elizabeth had insisted on leaving the military hospital as soon as the doctors cleared her, despite the fact that every bone and every muscle in her body ached in ways she didn’t even think were possible. John had virtually refused to leave her alone since they had crossed back over the border into the American Sector. She had practically had to shove him out of the room just so she could take a shower.
Elizabeth had been taught to carefully regulate the image she presented to the world since she was a young girl. Someone had always been watching her, be it her mother, her sisters, or the other girls at debutante balls. Her professional training as an agent had only re-enforced that social mask, and it was only with John that she let it lower just a tiny bit. Yet there were things she did not want even John to see. Alone in the shower, leaning against the cold tile wall, Elizabeth Weir finally let herself cry. Her tears were uncontrollable and mingled with the water washing the grime of the experience from her body. Part of her wondered, though, if she would ever feel clean again.
**~**~**
General Hammond had given them a day to recover before calling them all in for a debriefing at Allied Headquarters. John helped Elizabeth settle into a chair just as Cameron and Sarah came through the door. He looked them over with a mischievous grin, suspecting that the two spent a great deal of time together. Elizabeth for her part managed a small smile at the English woman.
“Thank you, Dr. Gardner, for all of your help. I’m sorry you had to break your cover for me.”
“Don’t be. When the truth is told, I make a very bad double agent.”
“You fooled me.”
General Hammond nodded, “My friends at MI-6 speak very highly of you, Dr. Gardner. They tell me they have plans to send you to Near Asia.”
Sarah laughed, a warm and vibrant sound that carried well like a songbird’s voice. “Where I should have been working to start with.”
“Carrying on the grand tradition of spying archeologists? Be careful, the Arabs have never been all that fond of that profession,” Elizabeth teased.
Sarah returned with a smile, “Well, I can’t work in Berlin anymore, and it makes a certain amount of sense. This isn’t always the case in His Majesty’s Secret Service, so I take it when I can get it.”
Elizabeth nodded, and John felt a pang of jealousy for the camaraderie of these two women who shared a dark world he had never and would never understand. How could they laugh about this sort of thing? How could Elizabeth be so friendly with this woman?
“I’m afraid that applies to you as well, Elizabeth.” Hammond added, “You will have to leave Berlin before nightfall. I’ll arrange for the things in your apartment and at your university office to be shipped to you.”
“But, sir…”
“Elizabeth, at the moment you are number one on the Russians’ hit list. You probably won’t be allowed to even travel to this city again for a very long time.”
“You can’t tell her where she can and can’t go,” John objected.
“Yes, we can. She is a CIA officer and travel restrictions are part of the job. And part of your job too, Major. Do you know how many people I’ve had screaming in my phone lines about a crazy air force officer with A-bomb clearance running around East Berlin? If you hadn’t saved a senator’s daughter-and my best field agent-I would personally have you facing court martial and sent off to … Antarctica or wherever. Am I clear?”
“As crystal, sir,” he said quietly, reluctantly accepting the rebuke.
“Good.”
Just then a bald sergeant with glasses stuck his head into the office. “That phone call you were waiting on, sir.”
“Thank you, Walter.”
“We should leave,” Elizabeth said.
“Actually, the call is for you.” Hammond smiled, sliding the phone across the desk to her. “The rest of us should leave.”
As the older man was shuffling all of them out the door John looked back at Elizabeth as she picked up the phone. She was trying to hold back tears. “Daddy, is that really you?”
**~**~**
When Elizabeth finally finished with her phone call she walked out of Allied Headquarters to find John sitting on the steps watching the people walk by. She smiled at him, thinking idly how much he looked like a little boy. “I have a few hours before my flight. Would you walk with me?”
“Of course. Where are we going?”
“Just around.”
John nodded, and offered her his hand. Instead she slid her arm through his and settled her head against his shoulder.
“Are you okay?”
“Hmmm?”
“You’ve never been big on public displays of affection. It’s not like you.” John wasn’t objecting. He had always liked to tease her about how proper she always was. One of his sisters had even gone as far as to call her a cold fish when he had taken her home to meet them.
“I’m not feeling very much like myself.” They walked for a while in silence before Elizabeth spoke again. “I can still hear the echoes of the gunshots. I … I had training for this sort of thing, but I never thought I’d ever have to do it.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Do you, really?” Elizabeth doubted it. John was trained to kill at a distance, to drop bombs on cities from three miles up. There was quite a bit of a difference between that and picking another woman’s brains out of your hair.
“Elizabeth… I want you to leave the CIA.”
“Don’t ask me that today, John. I would say something I’d regret.”
Again they walked in silence, finally stopping at an Allied guard post looking East through the Brandenburg Gate. There wasn’t much cross city traffic here, and American soldiers and Soviet soldiers stared at each other across an arbitrary line that represented no-man’s-land.
“They won’t be able to sustain this blockade forever. Sooner or later they will realize that we will not give up on Berlin, and they will probably decide to build a wall. I wonder if Berlin will be an island… or a prison.”
“Or both.” But John continued to listen to her speak.
“Across that line. Across the Iron Curtain are the great capitals … the great universities of central Europe. We didn’t liberate them, John. Those people don’t get to simply walk away because life is hard. I feel like I have a duty to them. To those people who deserved freedom after the war, and had it stolen from them by the wheels of politics.”
John looked down at her, admiringly. “You know I love you?”
She looked up at him and for the first time in ages her smile wasn’t a mask.
“I know.”
“Will you marry me?”
Elizabeth wanted to say yes. She wanted to be in his arms forever. She had wanted to do so the first time and every time he asked. She had said no always because on an intellectual level she understood perhaps better than he did what her life would be like in post-war America. It wasn’t that she was afraid of marriage. She was afraid of being a married woman, of having to go to faculty wives’ parties and being a modern 1950s woman. She knew she would grow resentful, and she was terrified that she would begin to resent John for that. But what the head knows, the heart does not.
“Ask me tomorrow, John.”
John grinned. “Count on it.”
Fin.