watched the show. liked it. decided to write something on it. here you go!

hope you enjoy! REVIEW!

read on and rock out.

Ruby D.

Traveling In Strategic Circles.

A "Burn Notice" fanfiction.

Chapter One.

There are certain people in life that you're destined to keep bumping into for the rest of your natural born life. Some, you might be happy to see. Greetings would consist of a warm smile, exchanging pleasantries, maybe even a gentle embrace or a kiss on the cheek. But others... How do you greet someone you're not exactly ecstatic to see? Especially when you know the meaning for the unexpected meeting is a ulterior motive?

As Michael Westen approached his mother's house, suddenly finding that the closer he got, the more he had to force his legs to keep walking, he couldn't help but notice something... off. He couldn't place it, but, whatever it was, had only made the slightest of differences. He stopped for a moment, stuffing his hands in his pockets and quickly adding a glance over his shoulder to see if his two watchers were following, to examine to house a bit more carefully. He came up with nothing. Yet, had he been someone other than who he was, he wouldn't have noticed anything in the first place. The outside was just as he remembered. Not a single blade of grass out of place. No. It wasn't exterior. But still...

The difference was looming inside the house in the for of Madeline racing around from room to room. He had never seen his mother walk - practically jogging, really - so fast and so frantically. She was bustling about, gathering random items from random spots and stuffing them into a duffel bag that was hanging from her shoulder. She was so preoccupied with her work, she hadn't even noticed Michael slip in the front door, and loudly close it behind him. Really loudly. As to get her attention. But, obviously, that hadn't worked. Just as he was about to thank God for this seeming miracle, Madeline called out to him, "Michael? Michael is that you there?"

He caught up with her in the kitchen, silently cursing himself that he hadn't gotten out when he had gotten the chance. "Mom?"

"Get my medications out of the cabinet." She instructed while taking the stub of a cigarette from her mouth and extinguishing it in the nearest ashtray.

Michael shuffled over to the kitchen cabinet where he knew they had kept the medications. When he was younger all that occupied that space was a bottle of aspirin and some bandages. Now, as he opened the creaking door, pill bottled overflowed from within, bombarding his feet with different sized orange cylinders. "Holy...!" He started to collect the assortment with a grim expression, a frown furrowing somewhere between his eyebrows. "You do not need all these."

"Michael, don't start! Just help me!" She snapped. Madeline was now in overdrive, rushing into her bedroom to - Michael would only assume - pack clothes.

"What are you doing, anyway?" The question came mechanically as he studied the bottles in his hands. He couldn't even pronounce some of these brands.

"Packing. My good friend, Cindy Bazil, you remember Cindy, called me up this morning and asked if I wanted to go sort of a "spur of the moment" vacation with her."

Michael rolled his eyes. No, he did not remember Cindy Bazil. "Spur of the moment?"

"Well... she just got her first alimony payment from that cheating sac of man-meat Ted, you remember Ted. God knows why she ever married that dolt. Anyway, she was positively thrilled that she had gotten it, and decided to add insult to injury and spend it all as soon as she got it. She doesn't really need it, anyhow. She got the house in the settlement..."

Michael let out a long, deep sigh. Again, no he didn't know Ted. He didn't know there had been a divorce. He certainly didn't know what "man-meat" was supposed to mean. And he didn't know that asking his mother that particular question would make him regret it so much. And he didn't necessarily like the thought of his mother taking off at a time like this, but he knew he wasn't going to stop her. Plus, it would be nice to have someplace to go where Fiona and the feds weren't popping up every two seconds. As this thought occurred to him, he realized he had completely tuned out his mother, who was now talking about Ted's forgetfulness towards taking down Christmas lights. He interrupted her just as she was snatching away the pill bottles from his hands. "Fine. I'll keep an eye on the house."

His mother stopped dead in her tracks, eyes wide and a menacing smile dancing across her lips. "You don't know? I already have somebody looking over the house, Michael. I though you, of all people, would have known. She said she's quite close to you, after all."

Michael ran a hand down his face. "FIONA!" His eyebrows now stitched together in the middle of his forehead, clearly taking all the stress and a little bit of anger in that movement. He had thought he placed the difference when he had walked in, seeing his mother scrambling about. But, as abnormal as that was, the odd feeling still lingered.

"Not Fiona, Michael," Madeline sighed.

But she didn't have to state it. He knew it wasn't Fiona just as soon as the true odd feeling made itself known. And she was standing at the bottom of the stairs.

She had been staring at him the entire time, watching him walk up and into the house and proceeded to observe him as he entered the kitchen. He had been too preoccupied with the cylinders to notice and was now, not so silently, cursing himself for not noticing.

Her soft, gentle face smiled at him. Her sharp facial features were hiding the true evil inside, though, and he felt a sudden need to protect his "man meat" in some way. Her smile seemed like a nice enough gesture - Madeline seemed to be endeared by it - but Michael knew better. He only saw that smile one other time, and he had then crumpled to the floor in agonizing pain afterwards. She gave him shivers which he couldn't shake. God, was this woman the exact opposite of what she looked.

He gave her a once over, anyhow. He started from and the floor traveled up her long, somewhat lanky, legs in the pair of jeans he knew as her favorite. He continued following her curves up to her torso, where the abruptly stopped at the waist due to the kind of baggy white t-shirt she was wearing. His old t-shirt, before he left for the military. Poking out from the top of that t-shirt was the thin neck that seemed to stretch for ages but, at the same time, was still just a normal sized neck. Of course most of it, as usual, was blocked by the cascade of curly black locks flowing freely from the top of her head. Her eyes, piercing sapphire and as steely as metal, never faltered from his. She knew just the cloaked expression that unnerved him in so many ways.

"Ughh...wow...Riley..." His hand moved to encompass the back of his neck where he found beads of cold sweat forming.

Riley almost giggled as she brushed passed him and into the kitchen. First, though, she made sure to lightly touch his arm with her slender fingers. A second ploy to unnerve him. He watched her glide up to the counter, pull a chair back, and seat herself elegantly in front of a cup of steaming hot coffee and the newspaper. Opened to the political section, of course. "Good to see you, too, Mickey." Her voice was high, but she might as well have been snarling at him.

"Alight, kids! I'll see you in a couple days, I guess!" Madeline was already half-way out the door as she waved to them, breaking Michael from a sort of trace state. He turned just in time to see her light another cigarette and get into a waiting cab.

He tried chasing after her yelling, "Wait...woah! Where are you going?!", but he only made it to the threshold before the cab disappeared around the corner. And there he decided to stay for the moment. In the doorway. Rubbing his temples. He could feel a particularly nasty headache coming on.

Riley sauntered up to him, her arms crossed and the menacing smile still dancing at her upper lip. "Think she said something 'bout Vegas."

He pivoted to her, the frown on his face deepening. "Riley, what the hell are you doing here?"

The smile wiped from her face, her once teasing gaze now stony and full of distaste. For a second, he thought she was going to spit on him. "You bastard!" she bellowed, returning inside the house as to not disturb the neighbor's with her oncoming rant. After all, she was going to have to get along with them for the next couple days. "How dare you! How dare you ask me such a think when you're just standing there acting like nothing happened. Nothing at all. You left me in Nigeria, Michael. High and dry. I had no transportation, no contact, nothing! You said you'd meet me just after the job and you never showed up. So...just maybe... I think I should be the one to be a little upset here. Don'tya think?"

"Riley," Michael ran another, now shaking, hand down his face to try to keep his composure, "I'm going to ask you one more time. What are you doing here?" Despite the rage he was feeling, he managed to keep his tone quite nicely. She was accusing him of leaving her, but had he really any other choice? How did he know that she wasn't behind the burn? How did he know that she didn't know about the burn beforehand and didn't bother to mention something. And, given that she knew about his situation at all, where was the sympathy?

Instead of answering him, though, she continued to go off on her own raging spiral. "And you know what? I wasn't mad that you just up and left. I was dead set on killing you, but not mad. Very vindictive, but not mad. But when I finally got back to civilization, I happened upon a interesting tid bit of information. Know what it might be?"

He was growing more irritated with every passing second. Finally, he just reached out an grabbed her shoulders, pulling her body so close to his that their noses almost touched. "Riley...!"

She made the crude sound of a buzzer. "Errrrrr! sorry, Johnny. That's the wrong answer, but we have a wonderful consolation prize. A nice ass kicking by the short - and mildly crazy - chick who found out you got burned! A burn notice, Michael! I still wasn't mad. I was furious! Why didn't you call me?!" Her voice got more booming with every word.

She finished her spiral by shoving him away. Even though she was smaller than him , Riley was not about to let him intimidate her. True, she couldn't really kick his ass. But she could damn sure try her mightiest.

Michael, jolted back by her shove, started a frustrated pace across the width of the floor. In the process, he had pushed objects out of his way that his mother had knocked down in her rush. "Goddammit, Riley. You realize you're risking everything just voluntarily standing in the same room with me, right? I have feds on my case. If they see you here and leak it back to...whoever...they could issue one on you, too!" He let it all out in one breath that he hadn't noticed he had been holing in.

Riley let all her anger go, her shoulders falling with the lost tension. "I know."

Michael just glared at her with those two simple words. He really should have called her, and he wasn't sure why he hadn't anymore. He stopped his pacing, placing his hands on his hips and directed his eyes to the floor. He had gotten to uncharacteristically angry at her just a minute ago and he was somewhat ashamed of that.

Riley just started laughing out of no where. Not a nervous laugh, but a real one. A light, fluttery laugh. The one thing that Michael could, and would continue to, vividly remember about her. Riley loved to laugh. "Is this how you treat all your house guests?"

"Technically, I'm your house guest...I think...," He slightly smiled as he sat down at the kitchen counter, extending his arm and offering her the chair she had sat in before. "So... how do you know my mom?"

"I don't." He didn't need anymore explanation from her. Riley was they called a "mixed breed" in his former organization. While each spy knew much about electronics (how they worked, ways their systems could be augmented, etc.), Riley was the queen about them all. (Her father was an engineer at a naval depot when she was young. She used to spend the weekends with him, taking computers and other gadgets apart, then putting them back together. The fastest she had ever assembled a make-shift bomb out of a cellphone battery, 33 seconds.) But, instead of being confined to the computer labs or any other technically applied position, Riley loved fieldwork. She was also an expert at picking locks, but had a mouth that wrote checks her muscles couldn't cash. Her lack - and a drastic lacking it was - of social skills made Michael make her promise that he would be the one doing any bargaining during a job. Or talking, rather.

Michael realized he was staring.

"I was worried about you, Michael."

He shifted in his chair uncomfortably. He might have been able to handle people better, but she definitely had the emotional edge on him. "Thanks."

A few more uncomfortable, silent moments passed between them before Michael couldn't take it anymore. "Rie, what are you doing here?" Emphasis on the right word was everything.

She wrapped her hands around a no-longer-smoking cup of coffee, her entire demeanor changing with that one question. She now stirred the cold coffee with her pointer finger. One. Two. Three times counterclockwise. I, ugh, came here to help you?"

He didn't believe her for a second. Not that she wouldn't help him, but that wasn't exactly the sole purpose of her extremely unexpected visit. "You came to help me?" An old interrogation technique. Repeat everything the 'interviewee' was saying.

She knew what he was doing. And she knew that he saw right through her. It was because she was a bad liar. Really. Just horrible. It made her wonder why she even tried anymore. "Uh huh."

"Uh huh?"

"Yep."

She had caught onto the technique. Damn. "Riley?" his brows couldn't help but mockingly arch at her.

"Alright! Fine! Okay! Whatever," she yelled as she threw her hands in the air. "I was hoping that in return for helping you in your ... situation..." She gestured around the room, but he understood that she meant the whole 'Miami thing', "You could help me?" Her voice grew smaller with the last words.

He squinted at her. "Help you with what?" Again, not that he wouldn't help her. It was the trade of services that she had put on the table that made him a bit uneasy.

"See...Jack called me last night and..."

But he had interrupted but raising a hand to her, "Who's Jack?"

"Fox and TJ's dad."

He raised his other had so he was copying her stance. They both realized they looked ridiculous and put their arms down, but Michael gestured towards another question. "And they would be?"

"My kids."