Disclaimer: I don't own anything affiliated with Covert Affairs except for some DVDs and a passion for writing fanfiction! Story title is from the Florence + The Machine song of the same name (however this is NOT a songfic.)

Rating: T for now.

Characters / Pairings: Auggie/Annie (eventual, or at least that's the plan), some Auggie/Parker, and others can be expected to appear as well.

Author's Note: I've been watching the show from the start but haven't felt compelled to write fic for it until now... like everyone else who saw the season 2 finale! So what the heck, I'll take a crack at it too! Hope you enjoy it and I will try to warn for anything squicky that may come up. Thanks for reading and feel free to review, but no flames please! =)

Heartlines

Prologue

Auggie stared upward, seeing nothing. Strange that while he should be so used to it by now, in the wake of losing his last hope of regaining his sight, it felt fresh all over again. Sure, there were medical advances happening all the time, but he couldn't afford to pin his hopes on maybes and somedays anymore. He had to move on.

He wondered if that was really what he was doing with Parker. By committing to a real relationship, wasn't he stepping foot into the future with her? But only with one foot grounded in the past. When he thought of Parker he also thought of Tash, another woman who might have been more than a one-night stand if he'd had his way about it. It was something so basic, so fundamental, that most of the time he could be looking right at it, metaphorically anyway, and still deny it was true.

He knew what they looked like.

All the women since he'd lost his sight had one thing in common: he couldn't see them, and never would, and the fact that he didn't bother connecting deeply with them had more to do with his compensatory need to prove his independence. Sometimes, late at night when sleep wouldn't come, he was able to confront that, and the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if it was fair.

It wasn't. Yeah, he knew that, too. It wasn't fair to Parker and it wouldn't have been fair to Tash, either. Nor was the fact he'd shown up here in Africa, knowing that Parker wouldn't have the heart to reject him again when he'd flown halfway around the world to be with her. And what really wasn't fair to Parker, to whom he'd made love passionately only a few hours ago, was the other woman who lingered at the edges of consciousness when he had these thoughts late in the night.

Because the reality was that in spite of his blindness and the endless parade of one-nighters, one woman had somehow gotten through. He'd connected with her, and hadn't even had to take her to bed to do it. That was a truth he couldn't shake, and part of him, a not insignificant voice in his head, insisted quietly but insistently that he owed it to her and to himself to find out what that meant.

Annie.

He didn't know what she looked like; that was and would always be true, at least to the standard his life before his sight was taken had instilled in him, but he still dreamed visually and she was often there. Granted it was in the way that dreams will sometimes simply generate a nondescript person who represents someone you know, but she was represented frequently enough, especially considering how few people he had met after losing his sight found their way into his dreams. Mostly if they did, they were voices only. Not Annie; he dreamed of her voice, of course, and the way he could hear her smile when she spoke, and there was the smell of her, but sometimes, too, there was a flash of blonde hair, a shapely figure, a face that almost turned enough to see it clearly… but never quite.

That just such a dream had woken him up meant something too. This one, though, hadn't been happy. He dreamed he'd lost her on her last mission, that instead of taking down her opponent it had been Annie who had taken three bullets, Annie who lay on the ground dead, and God alone knew why Auggie was even in the field in that dream but he was, cradling her limp, lifeless form with her blood on his hands and her name a scream on his lips.

And he knew what it meant: that she needed him, that he had known she needed him when he left but he had gone anyway, and that he regretted it. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that she hadn't been smiling at all when he gave her his car. More and more, he thought what he'd really heard was the sound of a heart breaking open. He didn't know why, exactly… but he thought, just maybe, he owed it to her to find that out, too.

But where did that leave Parker?

Before he could answer that question, the subtle sounds of the night were shattered by gunfire, and everything went straight to hell.