Notes: This is the Division 13 version of the famous pool scene from the Nikita pilot. I chose - after some careful thought - to transfer Nikita Mears' backstory directly to Myka, as no variation of Myka's canon background really worked for this AU the way I needed it to.

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To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

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Myka Bering stepped from the cool, shaded house out onto the bright, noisy patio. The hot Mexico sun felt good on her bare skin, and - for a moment, anyway - she let herself stop hating the skimpy bathing suit Lorna had put her in for this mission.

That brief moment didn't completely prevent her from feeling uncomfortably exposed, but it helped make the feeling manageable. Making a mental note *not* to tell Lorna about that - Myka was far from helpless, even unarmed and in a bikini, and Lorna would have a field day dissecting why that sensation of helplessness still lingered - Myka took a seat carefully chosen to put her in her target's field of vision.

Removing her sunglasses, she sat back and simply waited as she sipped at her drink. It didn't take long at all - she'd been sent in as a carefully crafted honey trap, and everyone involved had done their job well. Her target - middle management for some drug lord - did a double-take as he spotted her, then quickly ended his phone call and set the phone aside.

Even though the man was sitting with two other women in the hot tub - two women almost certainly drawn by his power and wealth rather than by any personal attributes of his own - he still called out to get her attention. "Chica. You. Como te llamas?"

Myka, taking her cue, smiled at the man as she walked slowly to the edge of the pool. "Myka."

"Myka." Her target smiled back as he tested the unusual name, his ego making him ridiculously vulnerable to even a minor display of interest from an attractive woman. "Never seen you before, Myka. Who brought you here?"

It took Myka a moment to find just the right blend of sexy and ditzy, so she covered by looking around as if searching for her companion. "Elena. Yelena? No - Helena. She said there was a cool party, so, uh, here I am."

There was no response over her hidden earpiece, but Myka knew that Helena was hanging on every word. She could picture the amusement in those dark eyes, and her smile became just a tad more genuine.

Myka's target interpreted that as growing interest, and sent the other two girls away in a spate of rapid Spanish before turning back to Myka. He even started pouring her a glass of the champagne sitting on the side of the hot tub. "Venga. Come. Have a drink with me."

The hot tub was on a raised platform in the center of a shallow, circular pool - not at all ideal for Myka's mission, so she tried to lure her target away from it with a little fake vanity. "I was kinda hoping to stay dry. Why don't we go to the bar instead?"

Her target just grinned at her as he looked her up and down, clearly buying the act. Unfortunately, he was too used to getting his own way for it to work as intended. "As you say, this is a cool party. If you want to stay, you're going to have to get... wet."

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes at the obvious - and tasteless - double entendre, Myka handed her drink to her target's bodyguard, easily identifiable by the fact that he was wearing a suit at a pool party. She didn't have much choice but to step into the water and cross the few steps to her target - it didn't really change much, and she'd adjusted her plan of action before she even stopped moving.

Her target, thinking he'd won, continued grinning even as he handed her the champagne he'd poured a moment ago. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"I would have preferred the bar," Myka replied, leaning in close and dropping her voice to a coo to lull her target into a false sense of security. "It's just that this is going to make taking your bodyguard out so much harder."

The target, completely distracted, didn't even comprehend Myka's words for several heartbeats. "Como?"

The next few seconds - maybe two or three minutes, tops - were so driven by training and instinct that Myka was barely even conscious of taking action. She snapped the target's neck, exactly as planned, before he'd even had time to register the danger. The bodyguard was just as easy to deal with - the knife Myka snatched up from a nearby fruit tray and threw at him sank up to the hilt in his chest, piercing his heart.

The second he was down, Myka started moving for the exfil point. She was completely vulnerable during the several steps it took her to trudge to the edge of the pool, but not one of the screaming, panicking party-goers even tried to stop her - she was out of the water and sprinting full speed across the patio before she met any resistance at all.

Myka had made it all the way to the patio door by then. Fortunately, Division believed in doing its homework, so she was ready for it when the target's second bodyguard came barreling through that door, gun in hand.

She'd always been unusually strong for her lanky frame, so it wasn't any real effort to pick up a nearby overstuffed chair and swing it around to catch the bullets being fired at her - risky, but the second bodyguard's handgun was a pretty weak model.

He'd apparently also forgotten to reload said handgun, since he only got a couple shots off before running out of ammo. When she heard the familiar click announcing that fact, Myka swung the chair one last time and left the second bodyguard in a heap on the patio.

None of the still-screaming, still-panicked guests made even the slightest move to stop her after that. She dashed through the patio door, mentally reviewing the house's layout as she ran through one of its seemingly endless corridors. Pressing her fingers to her ear, she activated her comm unit. "Target is down! I need extraction at the service entrance."

Helena's voice came back almost immediately. It was familiar and comforting for the heartbeat or two it took Myka to realize it sounded all wrong somehow. "Negative. Extraction is impossible."

Myka, having experienced her share of missions gone sideways, kept running even as panic began to set in. Surely she'd misheard, or misunderstood. "What?"

The reply was cold, toneless - almost dead - and not at all like the Helena she was used to. "You always had trouble listening, didn't you, Myka?"

"Helena! Please, I need to get out of here." Fear and confusion caused Myka to slow, then finally stop.

Helena suddenly rounded a corner, blocking the way, and Myka felt relief for the split-second it took her to realize that her handler's eyes were as cold and dead as her voice. "You still aren't hearing me, darling. I told you-"

Myka's eyes widened in stunned disbelief as Helena raised a gun, aiming it directly at Myka's head - at such close range, even an amateur couldn't miss the shot, and Helena was no amateur.

"There is no out," Helena finished with a sneer. Then she pulled the trigger - the gunshot was deafening in the narrow hallway.

Myka woke with a gasp, phantom pain shooting through her skull. It had all just been a nightmare - a horrifically real one, though, that still left her shaking and sweaty and breathless as she struggled to recall where she was and what was actually happening.

It took several minutes just to regain even a small portion of her equilibrium - mercifully, she was at least able to recall right away that she was sitting in a stolen SUV beside a snow-crusted lake in Roselle Park, New Jersey. Realizing that she also had somewhere to be, she snatched up a pair of pliers from the seat beside her and started the car - the tremor in her hands as she did so owed as much to the thought of her destination as it did to the lingering effects of her nightmare.

Some undetermined length of time later - could have been minutes or hours, for all that she'd paid attention to its passage - Myka was standing in front of a screen door she'd desperately prayed to never see again. The mere thought of reaching out to knock on that door almost made her puke all over her shoes.

Drawing a shaky breath, Myka pushed past the fear and nausea before that happened. As if to defy her previous paralysis, her hand shot out of its own volition and rang the doorbell instead. The man who answered the door looked about as old and run-down as his house.

It didn't completely negate years of fear and trauma, but it negated enough that Myka could still breathe and function. "Hi, Gary."

Gary - the man who'd made Myka's life a living hell before her attempts to escape him had ruined it completely - didn't even recognize her. He just looked her up and down with a leer as he chuckled. "'Hi, Gary'? That's a nice touch, honey, but I ain't buying anything."

Myka rolled her eyes, knowing they were hidden behind her sunglasses. "Fine. Let's try this one more time."

She removed the shades, watching recognition spread across Gary's face as she choked out the words she'd vowed never to say to her foster-father again. "Hi, Daddy."