Set up –Life after death

When you're burned, you've got nothing. No cash, no credit, no job history. You're stuck in whatever city they decide to dump you in. You do whatever work comes your way. You rely on anyone who's still talking to you. Bottom line: as long as you're burned, you're not going anywhere.

As it turns out, being dead isn't much different. You still have no cash because all of your past assets are in the process of being distributed by the courts in accordance with the last will and testiment. You have no credit because well a) You shouldn't need it and b) No one expects you to be around to pay it back. Your job history no longer matters because an invalid social security number makes you unemployable. You are stuck in whatever city you wake up in because, you were supposed to have already "moved on" in a big picture kind of way. Pretty much you rely on anyone who has denied the overwhelming documentation of your passing to continue seeing you.

That's the bizarre status Michael found himself living eight months after bringing down an organization lead by a man named Vaugn and clearing up his Burn Notice. He found himself holding a unique perspective on what it meant to be the living dead. All sarcastic subtext aside, Michael was very much alive despite what the United States government had to say on the topic.

(Read a fan fiction titled A promise to say goodby for that part of the story.)

Chapter 1

Michael lay against the cotton encased mattress with a deaden lifelessness. The digital clock on the bed table counted down the early am minutes before his open eyes. The dim light cast from the readout flickered over the uneven rise and fall of his chest. He lay pinned between muddled recent memories that tortured his sleep and the bleak prospects of his future.

Michael Weston had succeeded against all odds. He had found the people that had burned him, put Vaughn out of action, cleared the false accusations that had put his career on hold and left him stranded in Miami. He had regained classification as an asset and had been re-deployed to the international playing field. The life he had lost to the burn notice had been returned. In other words he had finally gotten everything he thought he had wanted and never had the cliché, beware what you wish for, applied more.

He was alive. It was about the most positive thought he could summon. Fi lay curled asleep against his back. The soft sound of her breathing cut Michael with guilt. The first time they had met, he had left Fiona because he hadn't known any other way to live. He had minimized his regret with the rationalization that her returned affection had been for his cover, Michael McBride, a man with similar beliefs and cultural background. He hadn't realized the impact of having Fiona come to Miami. He hadn't considered the consequences because he focused every action, every choice trying to escape Miami and everything it represented. Fi had pursued him all the way to Miami and what really destroyed him was that she hadn't taken one look and bolted.

But six months deep undercover in Kyrgyzstan, fresh from clearing his burn notice, had proven how incapable he was of being the man he had been. Even worse, he realized he wasn't capable of getting over Fiona a second time. The mission objective had been completed but Michael knew in his gut that he had lost focus and mishandled the situation. His performance was so poor the US government had chosen to bury him beneath a few thousand pounds of munitions and declare him dead rather than attempt extraction from a politically charged fiasco. The wounds, mental and physical, had yet to heal. The stitches still itched. Sam had pulled a miracle just to keep him alive, but he had Fiona to thank for his sanity.

Michael wondered how long he could cling to Fi before his proximity cost her more than she could pay. She deserved someone more, someone with options, someone less likely to get her killed. In his business, what you don't know is frequently what kills you. His ability to predict people's actions, to manipulate situations enabled him to be an effective spy. Fi had tracked him down, seen who he was, what he came from. A journey he hadn't made himself for fear of what he would find. But what she saw hadn't made her run and he couldn't understand why.

It fed his self doubt. A lack of self worth whispered his fear that Fi's attraction was just a continuation of her fascination for dangerous situations. But she had found her way past the walls of his reserve and now he was too selfish to make her choose a better match. For better or worse, Fiona had him until she decided otherwise.

He was a fighter, not a lover. A damning sentence that had haunted him from the moment his father had made the classification. Michael slowly flexed his wrist to feel the sutures in his skin burn. His thoughts slide sideways to another exemplary father figure of his, Larry Sizemore. Larry was complicated, a tangled mix of creator, destroyer, and walking cautionary tale. Larry had taken an angry, dangerous young man with an inability to follow orders and taught him how to contribute on a global scale. The US government had written Michael off, dropped their bombs and delivered notification and certificate of death to his mother but Larry had had other ideas. Michael wondered what those other ideas were. What was Larry playing at? He had stopped trusting his mentor years ago. Michael closed his eyes. He could feel a storm building on the horizon. He needed to sleep.