Jim Halpert clutched his blowpipe close and signaled his backup to move up towards the gaping hole in the wall surrounding the Kremlin. The space was curiously vacant, or it would have seemed so only a few months ago. But now Jim was unsurprised to see only a sprinkling of wildlife reclaiming the street—pigeons strutting proudly, little Arctic foxes stalking in them from the gutters, stalked in turn by feral cats—and no people. Now, of course, he had timed his incursion with the time of day when intelligence (such as it was anymore) said that Russians were least likely to be abroad, accepting an increased risk to his own team from silencers in exchange for a decreased risk of Russian detection. He glanced at Pam Beesly—his love, his life, his partner—as she shifted forward silently to a position behind a fallen statue from where she could cover his own planned rush for the hole. She too clutched a blowpipe while a knife hung from her belt: the only weapons quiet enough to avoid drawing the notice of the silencers, while providing a modicum of protection from the human element that would have ordinarily been the primary consideration for a full-blown American infiltration of the Kremlin grounds. But while Jim might have felt more comfortable on Russian soil with a standard issue pistol in his hand, or maybe an M16 slung over his back, he knew that such weapons were useless against the silencers, and using them against other targets would simply draw the silencers down upon him.

He thought back to the previous months: how the silencers had come, who knew from where, and begun targeting clumps of human population, drawn, it seemed, by sound and nothing else. Unnatural sounds, it seemed, or human sounds: the rush of waterfalls, the crash of the waves, were as nothing, drawing no attention, but even hushed voices had been known to bring bloody death upon the speakers. Perhaps humanity had finally met its natural predator. He had been working as analyst in the CIA offices in Scranton, Pennsylvania then, working on briefs that had once seemed vital and now...insignificant. He had been a good analyst: they called him the Paper Salesman because he seemed to have a white paper on every major geopolitical issue and was not afraid to push them on his higher-ups (and their higher-ups, and so on) at every opportunity. He had still had a job because he was good enough at it, and charismatic at presenting them, enough to justify his pushy ways. But when the silencers had come they’d slowly (or in some cases, horrifyingly quickly) lost field agents, one by one and then in groups, so he’d been forced out into the field.

He recognized the scars on the Kremlin grounds. Not from being there before, but from living it. There were similar scars throughout major American cities: in the Pentagon and the Capitol, in the Empire State Building and Times Square, even in the abandoned paper mill that served as his CIA base in Scranton. They were the marks of human fear: of men who had turned the mighty weapons designed to defend them upon the very buildings they lived in in an attempt to kill even one of the silencers attacking them. They also made his current task extremely convenient, but he couldn’t shake the knowledge of what caused them, and it chilled his bones.

He was lucky, he reflected, to have Pam Beesly with him. She too was an analyst in Scranton, and he had been secretly (or not so secretly: the CIA offices were very good at wrangling secrets out of one) in love with her for years. He was hardly alone: her expertise was in human intelligence, and they called her the Receptionist because her phone was always ringing off the hook with sources calling her to spill their guts, most of them because they were at least a little in love with her. What made her most wonderful, to Jim’s eyes, was that she didn’t care. Not that she didn’t know why she was so effective, but she didn’t let it go to her head: she was amazingly level-headed about the whole thing, and had a great sense of humor. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one at least a little aware of that, though, or he hadn’t been: she’d been engaged for years to one of the field agents, Roy Anderson, code name Warehouse—reputedly because you’d need a warehouse to store all the foreign agents he’d killed, but Jim had heard rumors that it was really because it was one vowel sound off from whorehouse, which he had a reputation for frequenting. He’d never brought it up to Pam, but he found some poetic justice in where Roy had been found torn apart by silencers in the early days of...well, Jim supposed it should be called a war, though perhaps the hunting would be a better term. He’d been exactly where Jim had expected him to be, in the “rooms” of the notorious Katy Moore—and the fact that Katy had survived the incident suggested that Roy was exactly as good at that kind of thing as Jim privately suspected, but had never dared to ask Pam. And never would.

He and Pam were not quite the last two agents alive from Scranton: Dwight Schrute (Bear: Jim couldn’t help but say every time he heard Dwight’s callsign that it stood for unbearable), Angela Martin (Cat: she had surprisingly good reflexes in a crisis), and, to everyone’s surprise, Kelly Kapoor (Ryan: fairly self-explanatory, and self-chosen) had turned out to be completely capable of being quiet when she saw an advantage in it. But he and Pam were the most effective agents: it had been Pam’s brilliant idea to contact (and then protect) the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, New York for assistance in silent communication, and to insist that all field agents be trained in sign language, both ASL and military hand signals (for those, like her and Jim, who as analysts had previously not had as much formal military training). Jim had turned out to have a real knack for planning out raids in the new, post-silencer reality, including the crucial realization that if a team was confident in their ability to avoid silencer attacks they could infilitrate enemy positions while the said enemies were cowering in their bunkers in silence.

Of course, the definition of “enemy” and “attack” had changed. He threw himself hard (but silently) against a wall inside the Kremlin, and gestured with one hand for Pam to follow past him. She slunk through the hole with extreme caution, throwing him a mischievous look as she snuck into position to cover his next move forward in turn. They leapfrogged from wall to wall through the seemingly abandoned facility, moving in perfect synch, as if their minds were on the same wavelength at all times. Finally they arrived at the giant vault that was their goal. It had been rumored for years that a giant Nazi horde had been dragged back from Berlin in the ‘40s to the Kremlin, and their sources suggested that this might be the mother lode.

Explosives would be no use for them to break in; even the tumbling of the lock had the chance, infintesimal as it might be, of bringing a silencer down upon them. But just as Jim had hoped, the massive explosion that had torn the holes in the exterior wall had not been unnoticed here; the wall beside the vault door was cracked, and Jim was an expert at the quiet, but effective, use of a crowbar. Pam spotted him, making an encouraging face as she scanned the area for threats, while Jim carefully and slowly slid the bar into place, doing his best to avoid the scrape of metal on metal. He prodded the wall to find a solid place to press against and used his lithe and lanky body to multiply the force of his strength until a portion of the vault wall slowly swung apart. Every little shriek of metal made them both flinch, but they must have seemed sufficiently like the natural decay of the building by wind and weather to avoid attracting a silencer.

Once the wall was open, Jim gestured to the hole and signed to Pam: “After you, milady.” She mock-curtsied and shot him a grin as she slid inside, hanging the blowpipe on her belt and pulling out a bright flashlight for the interior of the vault. He glanced around, wedged the bar in the gap to stop it from sliding closed by accident, and followed.

He almost bumped into Pam as he tried to slide inside, because she had come to a dead stop a foot inside the vault. He heard a soft intake of breath (please, please, let it not be heard by anyone...anything else) and pulled up short. He was momentarily distracted by the feel of her body close against his, and by the fact that he could have sworn she intentionally leaned back into him as they touched, but then his eyes swung up to see what she was looking at.

The intelligence briefings had been wrong—but only in that they didn’t fully cover the extent of the collection in front of him. He wasn’t in the same league as Pam Beesly—no one was, he was firmly convinced—but he knew a miracle when he saw it. Stretched in front of him were acres upon acres of paintings and sculptures, many of which were recognizable even to his inexperienced eye as the work of true masters. No Nazi gold here, but the looted cultural artifacts of an entire generation spread out before them. No wonder Pam had stood stock still: if it affected him this strongly, it could not help but strike her artist’s eye with wonder.

This, he reflected, justified all the hardship and the weariness: the lengthy submarine voyage up the Baltic, with cramped quarters and short tempers; slipping onshore in disguise and making their silent way into town, constantly afraid of detection from threats both human and non-; leapfrogging slowly from house to house towards Red Square, praying that the vault would indeed be where it was reputed to be, and somehow accessible. Fearing that Pam would be torn from him at the slightest sound, while reacting to reflexes that still screamed that simply being in Russia was threat enough. Here they were; it was all beyond expectation or hope.

Pam was signing to him: “how do I choose?”

He realized that while to him this was simply a victory, to her this was also an unutterable loss. They were tasked with retrieving cultural artifacts: in the time of the silencers, the quiet practices of appreciation, analysis, and simple absorbtion of the visual arts had become intensely valued. Music, film (other than silent films, which had also experienced a renaissance), and even the live theater (mime having somehow still failed to connect with the majority of society, possibly because it now struck too close to their day to day lives) had faded, and painting, sculpting, and engaging with those arts had risen to a renewed prominence. This meant that Pam Beesly was the perfect agent (she was, he still felt, perfect in many ways, but this one was generally acknowledged). She could run, shoot, and think with the best of them, but she was also a genuine, A-one artist and art critic. So he was just the muscle and the courier on this mission: she was the payload and the brains. They could only take so much with them, even assuming they could make the rendezvous and fill their pick-up submarine (running, as ever, on silent electric engines) with their loot. And that meant that where he saw a treasure trove, Pam saw all the art she couldn’t take. She could and would obtain her pick of the litter, but the sheer size of this haul meant that she would inevitably leave beloved, unique, irreplaceable works of art behind. No wonder she had frozen.

He indulged himself with a hand on her shoulder, and was gratified to feel her brush her cheek against his hand. She half-turned to him (still keeping, he noted, a careful eye on the artworks before them) and he signed back: “this was all lost. What you choose, we save. Think of it that way.”

She nodded, gave him a small smile, and signed back: “thanks.” He smiled too, their eyes met, and they held a beat too long. She reached a hand up, squeezed his on her shoulder, and turned back to the vast array before her.

An hour later (a brief hour being the longest time they were authorized to stay, given the analyst’s—aka their own—estimates of how long the Russians would stay down because of the heightened silencer activity at this time of day), they were back out, bags carefully packed with Monets and Donatellos, Rembrandts and Renoirs, all wrapped in special fabric so they wouldn’t clink or rub, simultaneously protecting the pieces and their own lives. Pam took a last look at what they couldn’t take, putting a Reubens miniature down regretfully, then—to Jim’s surprise—turned and buried her head in his chest.

His arms came up instinctively and he let his hands do the talking his voice couldn’t—not in the way they so often had since the silencers came, with formal sign language, but through gentle circles on her back. She relaxed under his hands and gave him a quick squeeze around the middle before taking a deep, quiet breath and preceding him out through the hole. He lingered a moment staring out into the vault, before turning off the flashlight she had handed him and following her, blowpipe in hand.

Their journey to the rendezvous was surprisingly uneventful. Their training stopped them from freezing at every sound, lest it should be Russians and not silencers who responded to it, but they sought cover frequently, and progress was slow. Still, they made it to the pick-up site unharmed, having seen only a few easily evaded Russian patrols and, thank god, no silencers. Not that they would truly have seen one had it swooped down upon them or their Russian foes; but avoiding them entirely could hardly be counted anything but a victory, especially over so long a distance.

Then it suddenly occurred to Jim that the plan they had so carefully worked out in the office at Scranton was missing a key component: the water-solubility of paintings. It called for them to swim out to the submarine a few hundred feet offshore, but with backpacks full of stolen art they could hardly risk it. He communicated this to Pam by signs, and was a little disturbed that she was minimally responsive. They camped out to wait—they were early by about three hours, which was an intentional buffer left in case of incident—and he attempted once again to interest her in this dilemma. This time, however, he could see her face, outlined in the light cast by the moon, and he realized he had once again slightly misread her reaction. She was not ignoring him; instead, her face was cast in the lines he could well recognize as registering intense concentration and deep thought. It was this face she had shown before the silencers came when planning out a new prank on Bear; this face that he had seen when she had heard about the silencers themselves and begun plotting the NTID initiative; this face that had accompanied her response to his initial proposal that they sweep into Moscow in this particular raid. She noticed his inquiring eyes upon her face—and how did she always seem to know when he was looking at her?—caught his glance, and smiled, which eased the lines on her face somewhat.

“Ruble for your thoughts,” he signed.

She laughed silently—but he could imagine the sound, music to his inner ear—and signed back “don’t waste your money.” His “it’s never wasted” received what he could not be sure of in the moonlight but suspected was a blush, and limp handwave pushing his compliment away. He almost looked away, but noticed at the last moment that she mouthed “thanks.” He smiled.

After a moment, she started signing, first slowly and then furiously.

“This is a naval base, right? An abandoned one? So there are abandoned ships. So there are rafts. Dinghies. You know what I mean. Let’s take one.”

He nodded. “Sounds reasonable.”

“Do you know where to find one?”

“Don’t you?”

She shook her head in frustration. Fortunately, this was one area he had always excelled in: memorizing blueprints was like second nature to him, so he knew the various Russian craft likely to be in this anchorage by heart. “Beesly, I’m surprised at you,” he signed, using the sign he had come up with for her last name (a modified verison of the sign for bees) back when they learned the language together in Rochester. “I know all these ships.”

She grinned. “I know. You gonna help, Halpert, or what?” It warmed his heart when she used the sign she’d invented for him: not a version of “help” or “pert,” or “hall,” but of “heart.” He was afraid to ask her how she’d come up with it, or why she used it so often, for fear of disappointment, but a small part of him—OK, a large part of him—thrilled whenever she used it.

He pretended to deliberate, but they both knew where this was going. “Help.”

They briefly debated through pointing which of the various vessels anchored nearby to poach from, then slipped onto a cruiser nearby. This was an old design, one of the loud, oil-driven ships that was no longer viable near shore in the world of silencers (it could still be used if towed quietly out to sea by an electric tug, since silencers did not seem to be extensively nautical in nature, but the difficulty in making sure no human noise was generated by such a jury-rigged system was sufficient to ensure the obsolesence of such noisy craft). They found an inflatable rubber dinghy exactly where Jim’s copious memory said it should be, then crept back ashore. On deck they saw the remains of multiple crewmen who had obviously been struck by silencers—or, in one gruesome example, by .50 caliber bullets obviously aimed at silencers by panicked countrymen—and bowed their heads by mutual agreement in a silent prayer for the dead. Even enemies deserved better than such an end.

The dinghy proved difficult to inflate: Jim remembered just in the nick of time that this sort of device usually inflated with a loud sound of sucking air, and they were almsot forced to resort to blowing air into it by the alternative method of using their lips until Pam thought to inflate it inside the cruiser, in a mostly soundproof hold, before walking the now-silent but somewhat unwieldy dinghy back into the outside air. They were extremely relieved when they once again ventured outside unharmed, despite the necessity of passing the horrible corpses again.

Their extra hours were now up, and they floated out into the harbor in the dinghy silently, with only the minimal splashing of oars to reveal their presence. By mutual agreement, Jim jumped into the water to trigger the signal to the waiting sub—two long flashes and then two short on his flashlight underwater—and they waited in the water together with the art floating by them in the raft.

The raft almost foundered when the sub rose to meet them, sending a great bow wave out from its hull, but its very weightlessness (even with the art upon it) saved it, as it rose and fell without tipping over. Jim and Pam exchanged quick signals with the sub commander by flashlight, then bundled themselves and their loot into the open hatch before closing it behind them and letting the sub sink silently into the water once more.

On the submarine, life was a little looser. The soundproof nature of the vessel—once an advantage in sub-vs-sub combat to avoid sonar, now a blessing in the fight against the silencers— combined with the stress everyone was under to create a somewhat boisterous atmosphere. Jim and Pam kept a little apart from the genial camaraderie onboard, however, she for her own reasons that Jim was not entirely sure of, and he because it allowed him to stick closer to her. They and the art occupied a space that he strongly suspected had once been a missile storage space, if not simply a torture chamber (if they used those on submarines, which he had to admit he doubted). It was long and low and round, but also out of the way of the rest of the crew. This was ostensibly so that the art could be kept under close watch at all times, but Jim suspected it was also intended to prevent the two of them from ruining everyone else’s fun.

Jim tried his best to avoid inappropriately touching Pam in such close quarters. This was somewhat difficult, because his height gave him relatively little room to maneuver, and she did not seem interested in cooperating with his gentlemanly inclinations. He found himself stretched out on the bunks provided to them with her sitting by his midsection on the edge of the bed. She leaned back into his stomach and casually trailed an arm over his leg. He was...not uncomfortably, but perhaps extremely and intensely aware of how close this placed her to his crotch. In fact, it would have been better, he reflected, if it had been uncomfortable, because maybe then he wouldn’t have had quite so much to worry about her noticing about that particular part of his body. She didn’t seem to notice, however, or if she did it did not bother her, because she just kept leaning into him.

She raised a hand up to sign, and he laughed at her—the first real, out-loud laugh he’d been able to direct her way since the last sub dropped them off several days before. They were in the sub. They could talk now, he reminded her. Out loud. She laughed too, but more quietly, and he instantly went on mental high alert, asking what was wrong. She glanced down and didn’t answer, and he felt his arm instinctively reach up to her shoulder before he even realized what was happening.

“Seriously, Beesly, what’s up? Our first chance to talk out loud and you don’t want to take it?”

She fidgeted and looked up into his eyes, and for the first time in a long time he wasn’t sure quite what he was supposed to read in hers. She still didn’t speak—but he saw her hand come up.

“What if I don’t want to talk?”

He looked at her in concern. “Why not?”

She stared into his eyes like she was going to ask a question and suddenly grinned. He realized he was way out of his depth. Not just because he was on a submarine, but because if she was going to lean on him that way and grin at him that way, and just generally be that way, he was never going to be able to be the gentleman she needed in this time of crisis. But something in his concern for her, or in his eyes, or in the whole situation, must have told her some part of what she originally wanted to know, because the question she asked him—still in sign, even though he was now speaking—was one he had never truly imagined he would ever see or hear from her, though it had haunted his fantasies for years.

“What if I have something better for our mouths to do?”

She turned beet red the moment she signed “mouths,” and it was the most adorable thing he’d ever seen. He would never be sure whether she or he moved first, but they were kissing, and it was everything. He was intensely glad she had made the first move, and even happier than that that she had done so in a soundproof submarine and not, say, anywhere on land, because he was in no way in control of the sounds he was pretty sure he was making, and while he would have died happy if he had died like this, he was much more interested in continuing to live and getting to experience it again. Preferably, a lot, and soon.

As they came up for air, he wasn’t sure of what to say, but once again she beat him to it, taking his breath away for an entirely different reason. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” she whispered.

“Me too,” he signed.

“Then why didn’t you?” she asked, returning to sign.

“After what happened with Roy, I...”

She rolled her eyes. “Roy was an asshole.” She repeated the last sign, vigorously. “Did you think I missed where they found him?”

“Oh.”

“Yes. By the way, if you do that, I will...”

“I would never do that,” he whispered, just as she finished signing “destroy you.”  “I’m sure you will,” he finished. “But I’m hardly afraid.”

“Good.”

She lay down facing him and whispered in his ear. “Now, where were we?”

He kissed her softly. “Right here.”

“I think it was more like this.” She kissed him, and the world faded entirely away.

By the time they disembarked at Norfolk for transfer to the Smithsonian and then Scranton, he was pretty sure the crew was just as glad as he was that he and Pam were as far away from the rest of them as possible. Only now it was so that the rest of the crew could get some sleep.

Strangely, despite his own lack of sleep, he felt quite rested, and was very much looking forward to his return with Pam to Scranton. Together. Finally.

But he was definitely going to have to figure out how to soundproof his bedroom.