Disclaimer: Burn Notice and all of its characters belong to Matt Nix and the USA Network.

"I saw the evidence, the crimson soaking through.

Ten thousand promises, ten thousand ways to lose.

And you held it all, but you were careless to let it fall.

You held it all, and I was by your side,

Powerless."

-"Powerless" Linkin Park

When you're a spy, you get used to seeing the lights go out in the eyes of a mark. You get used to seeing the blissfully unaware smile of some high powered gun runner through the finely sighted crosshairs of a sniper rifle scope. To the same respect, there are some things that you never get used to. Such as seeing the woman that you are in love with with a gun pressed against her head.

Trigger fingers start to get twitchy when assets become girlfriend/ex-girlfriend/"business" partner/girlfriends, and dangerous men start thinking that they can get to you by threatening them. They think that, if they want to see you and you don't want to be seen, they can flush you out of the woodwork with a quick phone call from a burner cellphone and the well placed sound of a gun grip hitting the soft felsh of someone's temple. Turns out, they think that for one simple reason. It works.

Which was why I was engaged in a far too action-movie-cliche stand off in the middle of an abandoned warehouse. Fiona's eyes never betrayed any trace of fear. Ever. It was one of the things that I remembered falling in love with about her back in Ireland. However, when there is a pistol pointed at your skull and a mentally unstable man yelling obscenities across the empty warehouse, that's as good a time as any to be scared. Hell, in all honesty, I was terrified myself.

"Let Fiona go, Kareem. This is between you and me, this has nothing to do with her." I snarled, the gun in my hand steady.

"No, no, Michael. This stopped being about you and me when you killed my family in that compound in Pakistan." The man spoke with a thick Middle Eastern accent that I had heard a thousand times before. Jamaul Kareem and I had worked together on an op that I was sent on in Pakistan when I had first signed on for Cladestine. He had helped me get past the military check points by telling them that I was a reporter working with an American newspaper that wanted to get their side of the story on the war.

Then things had gone pear-shaped when I raided a compound, looking for the mark that I'd been sent to eliminate, and his wife and son had been caught in the crossfire. I'd chalked it up to collateral damage, until I went back to his house and he held me against the wall by my throat. I'd turned tail and gotten the hell out of country as soon as I pryed his fingers off of me and threw him through the rickety coffee table.

"You ruined my life, Michael! I helped you, and that was how you thanked me! By killing everyone that I had! Everyone that I loved!" He screamed, drops of spit flying from his mouth and clinging to his lips. Fiona winced as he dug the gun barrel deeper into her temple.

"Look, this is all a misunderstanding. It was an accident, I didn't know that they were going to be in the compound. I'm sorry, but this isn't going to solve anything." I tried, careful to keep my voice from waivering even though my heart was pounding so loudly in my ears that I could barely hear anything else. Adrenaline and fear were coursing through my veins at a hundred miles an hour, but I couldn't let him see that he was effecting me in that way. That would just mean that he was getting what he wanted.

"Oh, so it was an accident? I guess that means that I should just forget that you took my family away from me. That about right, Michael?" The sarcasm was dripping off of his words as he spoke. Anger boiled through my chest every time that he spoke.

"I'm not saying that you should forget it, I'm saying that killing Fiona isn't going to change anything. If you want to kill someone for some sort of retribution, kill me. She had nothing to do with this."

"And let you die quickly? No, no, you're going to watch her die, and then you're going to live with the guilt of knowing that it is your fault every. Day. You're going to see what I have had to deal with." I heard the click of the gun and my legs were moving before I could even conciously make the decision to do so. My hand connected with Fiona's arm, pushing her out of the way before my shoulder connected with the man's stomach. The air rushed from his lungs as we hit the ground, struggling for the gun in his hand.

The gun shot echoed off of the walls and my muscles twitched instinctively.

"Michael?!" I heard Fiona's terrified voice through the ringing in my ears and I rolled off of Kareem carefully. The warmth of blood soaking through my shirt was rather alarming at first, but I couldn't feel any searing pain in my body. I staggered to my feet and ran my hands over my torso briefly, searching for a bullet wound. Finding none, I let out the breath that I didn't know that I'd been holding and stretched my arms out to pull Fiona against my chest after scanning her for any holes as well.

"We're okay." I whispered into her hair, kissing the top of her head softly. I turned her body so that she was facing away from where Kareem's body was bleeding out on the dingy cement. "We're okay." I heard the door opening behind us and spun to face it quickly, tucking Fiona behind me and pulling my gun from my waistband.

I let out a relieved breath when Sam gave me a startled 'woah!' and held his hands up. I lowered the gun slowly and tucked it back into my pants.

"What the hell is going on here?" He muttered, glancing around us at Kareem.

"Old friend caught up with me." I grumbled.

"Mikey, I don't mean to point out the obvious, but..." He paused and gestured to the body. "Your 'old friends' tend to be more trouble than they're worth." I chose to let the statement go and rolled my eyes at him in lieu of a response to it.

"You're a little late to the party, Sam. What took so long?" I had hit the speed dial button on my cell phone when I'd reached for my gun and expected Sam to come in from where he was hiding a few streets over much sooner than he had.

"Traffic." He replied without hesitation. I stared at him a moment, before shaking my head and moving on.

"I probably don't want to know what 'traffic' means. So, now we've got to do something with this body." I sighed loudly, running my hands over my hair.

"I know a guy who knows a guy." Sam pulled out his cellphone and stepped away, whispering in hushed tones into the receiver. I felt Fiona's eyes on me and turned to look at her.

"Are you okay, Fi?" I asked quietly, stepping to her and wrapping my arms around her waist. She nodded at first, but then seemed to think better of it and shook her head. Tears welled in her eyes and she fisted her hands in my shirt, burying her face into my chest.

"That was close." She mumbled, her voice muffled in the creases of fabric. I held her tightly until the silent sobs subsided and she pulled back, wiping her eyes. She gave me a sad smile and composed her rock solid facade again before we moved to where Sam's 'friend of a friend' had shown up to take care of our...waste material, and we got back to business.

As we rode in the back seat of a crew cab pick up truck, I watched the foliage out the window and catalogued exactly when it was that I had gone soft. The closest date that I could figure was the night that I had asked a brunette spitfire drinking Guinness at the bar to dance with me and chanced a bullet in the head to make a witty comment.

Fiona had always been my weakness. She was the exception to every rule that the CIA and Special Forces had pounded into my head. She was the one thing in the world that could leave me completely, and utterly...

Powerless.