Mission: Impossible 6: Deep Tides

Chapter 6

Los Angeles. He

Wait.

She.

She stared up at the huge buildings, dwarfing her, dwarfing the motorbike and almost everything around them. Up and up they grew, like trees reaching up towards the sky, the people the ants scurrying around the insides of them... They were so much more, so much more important than her, her problems. That was why they had to be destroyed. That was why they had to go. Ethan, in contrast, was more important than them. No matter how much he'd tried... She'd tried, she'd still been in love with him, she still was in love with him and, well it didn't look too much like she'd be falling out of love soon.

Their importance made Rebecca Eleanor Flash seem small, and whilst she was perfectly willing to let Ethan be more important than him, she wasn't happy with the rest of the world being more important, more happy, too. Anyway, Ethan Hunt was a good man, wasn't he?

***

Ethan was a man on a mission, in more ways than one. He sat in stony radio silence on the way to Los Angeles, despite irregular inputs from his team telling him which road to take. He had to get to the Flash, find out what she was doing and not kill her, as much as he could. Assuming the average old CIA hadn't been flown in as boring old backup guns. They were all useless hand-maidens, machines with cold hearts, hardened by their masters who froze them with ice. Sometimes quite literally... Ethan thought, remembering once being thrown in a freezer overnight. They'd been expected to get out by morning or die trying. He'd known the sergeants wouldn't have left them to die, but the pneumonia wasn't worth it. Tom Jackson had died that night. As it turned out, he had a weakened immune system due to a virus just the week before and the cold conditions had triggered fatal lung failure. That was when Ethan had realised he could never be just another machine gun, just another dummy. So he'd stumbled upon the IMF and after illegally reading up a bit, had presented himself at the Secretary's door, at which the Secretary's PA had swooned slightly and he'd never looked back. The IMF had a bit more heart than the other secret services. Although, the flashy cars had also stood out to him...

He shook his head to clear the memories. Tom didn't need his help right now. Tom was long gone. Who needed his help the most was the Flash. But all he could see in his head were memories of deaths. He felt like his brain was working something out for itself. A final neuron fired. His tyres squealed as he took the bike beyond its limits and bombed towards L.A.

Once he'd made that connection, there was no going back.