The grainy image on the 25-inch plasma screen showed a woman, 40ish or a well-preserved 50, sitting on her bottom on a concrete floor with her back wedged in a corner of a room. She had brown hair. Or maybe she didn't. Maybe it was auburn or something. The image was black and white, because SOMEbody shipped the wrong camera from central supply.

Her whatever hair fell loosely to her elbows or so, except for a couple of clumps here and a few strands there. Those were stuck to her cheeks with silver duct tape. (White tape? Hard to say.) The only targets of the tape were her lips, but someone evidently got sloppy because it was way longer than it needed to be and about 20 degrees off from horizontal.

Her head angled down a bit as she looked at her hands, which were joined by her interlocking fingers. Which were interlocked because her wrists had been unceremoniously corralled into a white cable tie (beige?) and that was the only halfway comfortable way to have them.

For a woman who was tied to herself and breathing in rubber adhesive bits from duct tape, she didn't seem distressed.

She seemed bored.

She unlocked her fingers and began examining them. When she got to the ring finger of the first hand, she actually stopped, contorted the wrist and fingers of the second hand, and removed a hangnail. She tried to console her smarting cuticle in her mouth only to remember the tape.

Now she was starting to look annoyed.

As she inhaled and then exhaled through her nose dramatically, complete with shoulder lifting and dropping and everything, she glanced up at the camera recording all of this, squinted her eyes, thrust her head forward a few times dramatically, as one would in heated conversation if one's lips weren't taped together, then returned to a normal position and started her inspection of the second hand.

A dark haired man in the viewing room next door knew those squinty head thrusts were for him, and he knew they symbolized all the bad words the woman knew in each of the eight languages she spoke.

The viewing room door opened. A white guy with a cherubic face and a completely incongruous buzz cut ambled in, letting the door close loudly behind him. He joined the dark haired man, who was leaning against one of those long, brown tables they use for bake sales and break rooms. Seven others, two women and five men, sat around another one of those tables, looking at the screen and talking quietly to each other.

The dark haired man waited for the Cherub to say something. The Cherub started blinking. He coughed once. Probably a fake cough. An uncomfortable-silence-breaking cough. Four or five seconds passed.

The dark haired man sighed – not as melodramatically as the woman, but noticeably – and pushed a button on a very techy-looking console on the table. "Fi? We're done here. You can go."

The woman heaved another sigh and scooted herself back to a sitting position. Sometime after she'd finished with her second hand, she'd stretched out on the floor, where she looked to be doing some kind of yoga something or other. Maybe elongating her spine. Lifting her Siamese twin arm unit up a little and bending her neck down a little, her fingers found the left end of the duct tape near her jaw bone. One, two, three, RIP. A loud yell flooded the viewing room through the speaker. It didn't hurt that much, really, but Fi was irritated and wanted everyone to know it. She looked at the tape and saw long pieces of her hair on it.

While she opened and closed her jaw exaggeratedly, she tightened her arm muscles, rotated her right forearm a few times, drew her right shoulder back, and grimaced. Her right wrist begrudgingly came out of the zip tie. She shook the tie off her left wrist, grabbed the hairy tape, stood up, brushed off her hands and bum, and marched to the door.

A moment later she was in the viewing room.

"Okay, FIRST of all, when you tape someone's –"

"Fi, Fi, Fi, hang on," said the dark haired man, walking towards the woman with his arms extended and his palms out, the way to tell someone non-verbally to hang on and simultaneously prepare to fend off blows to your face if the person doesn't care to hang on. "I'm supposed to be teaching these people. Offering constructive criticism. Tips for improvement. I think we've already learned what happens when you play teacher. That one guy dropped out later that afternoon."

"Michael, this baby-faced chucklehead can't even work a piece of tape." She whipped her head toward the Cherub and waved the hairy tape in his face. "Whaddya think happens to hair when you glue it to skin, you idiot?" she snapped.

"Just – just – sit down, okay? There's coffee and an ammo catalog on that desk over there," Michael said in a tempting, sing-songing voice.

Fi – Fiona Glenanne, arms dealer and tough-love educator – hmmmphed and stomped off to the back corner.

Michael was Michael Westen, super mega spy extraordinaire. You all know the story.

Michael, Fiona, and the rest of the Scooby Gang (Sam Axe, Jesse Porter, Madeline Westen, and some random CIA people) had brought down whomever they were supposed to be bringing down this time, and they had lived happily ever after for the last few months. But it'd also been a horrible time for them all, because sometime on the road to happily ever after, Nate Westen, Michael's younger brother and Madeline's other son and very much not a super mega extraordinary anything, had been murdered. His murderers were no longer of this earth, but that didn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Nate's wife, Ruth, grieved terribly. She nearly checked out of life (permanently), so she checked in to a hospital. She and Madeline agreed Ruth's and Nate's 2-year-old son, Charlie, would be happiest and healthiest living with his grandma Maddie for a year or so. After that, they'd see. Maybe Ruth would move to Miami, where Madeline and Michael and Fiona and Sam and Jesse lived, so she and Charlie could have some semblance of a family. Not a normal family by any stretch. But a family just the same.

Already bored with her ammo catalog, Fi was ready to go home. She'd agreed to do these little tactical training workshops for Michael because that was his new gig now and she wanted to support him. After twenty-odd years of traipsing around the world, the last six of which had been punctuated by assassination attempts and mother issues, Michael was tired. Not just tired. Mistake-waiting-to-happen tired. Accidentally-go-to-Burundi-instead-of-Bulgaria tired. Get-himself-killed tired. So the CIA told him to go take a nap. For a year. They called it a "restoration period." He would still work for them, but locally, and on the weekdays, and with lunch breaks and monthly birthday celebrations in the break room.

And to everyone's surprise, not the least of whom was him, he went for it. Michael's not crazy. He knew he needed the rest. Everybody knew he needed the rest. He wanted to spend some time getting to know his nephew and all of Fiona's family's rugrats. They were up to 22 or something. He wanted to have a come-to-Jesus with his mom about her chain smoking and do whatever he needed to do to help her quit. And he wanted to travel for fun, with bathing suits and golf clubs instead of GPS trackers and sniper scopes.

Fi was thrilled about the year off. It allowed time for resting, for travelling, for figuring out what was next for them. And for just playing. They deserved to play. Both of them enjoyed playing with guns, so she especially enjoyed their playdates at the shooting range. She also figured a year was a sufficient amount of time for her to reverse the brainwashing the CIA had done on Michael and finally get him to see the light through refreshed eyes and newfound clarity.

Michael and Fiona had fought off and on for more than a decade about, well, about lots of stuff, but predominantly about work. He let his work define him, consume him, she said, and one way or another it was going to kill him. She didn't understand how it felt to have your life stolen, he shot back, and so many times be *this* close to getting it back only to have someone stick out their leg and trip you as you run to the finish line.

But now he had it back. The final curtain had been lifted. The burn notice was finished and all the sociopaths and psychopaths he met along the way were gone and really, truly, he had his life back. And once he was confident of that, he was more than happy to kick back for a while. A year seemed to be the magic number. The CIA suggested it; they thought it was long enough for him to rest and really get his head back in the game. Michael liked it because it gave him at least 10 or 11 months before he'd have to fight with Fiona again.

Because Michael fully intended to go back to work.