Tagging: Nikita, Michael, Alex, Birkhoff, Ryan, Sonya. More to come, but secret for the element of surprise.
Ships: Undecided. I'm going to see where the story takes me and I will listen to readers' input so let me know what you want!
Rating: T for now, for blood and language. Will change to M later on for dark and twisted themes, sexual stuffs and more of the usual.

I am finallydone with my semester finals, aka I have summer break now and updates will come more regularly! :)

You will notice that this chapter is a flashback chapter, which will be more common. Every other chapter will be a flashback one, actually, and that way we'll slowly figure out what happened in the two years that passed. Any confusion and inconsistency in the present chapters will eventually make sense.


| Chapter 2 | May 17 — June 29, 2013 / Cleveland, OH |


I'd die to be where you are
I tried to be where you are


She loses the car the first chance she gets. Eyes filled with more tears, she hands the keys to a random passer-by and tells him to drive it to the parking lot of the nearest airport. He can do with it whatever he wants afterwards, she just needs it to show up on the radar as a decoy.

That's her plan. Losing the car, before they find her through the tracker planted somewhere amidst the machinery under the hood (Birkhoff's doing when Michael started taking his cars without asking too often); that's all there is to her plan.

Everything else is still loose thoughts unable to flock together to something coherent, bouncing through her head and slicing through her.

It hurts. Leaving them, her little dysfunctional family of battered and bruised people that have been through too much in too little time—it hurts more than any pain she has ever felt.

But it is necessary, so she leaves.

After losing the car she walks for two hours, dirt catching on her skin as dust whips up around her feet, and only when she's afraid she'll collapse of exhaustion does she start hitchhiking. Plenty a man stops for her. Tall and leggy and curvy, they'd be stupid not to.

Between Washington and Cleveland she breaks three wrists, all of men who tried to feel her up as a reward for taking her a few miles further up the continent.

She ends up in Cleveland and she doesn't know the city, doesn't know any place or any person, but it works because it doesn't remind her of anything. It doesn't bring back memories of old missions, or of certain pairs of eyes. No swamp green, no baby blue, no speckled blue.

Cleveland is neutral—it's perfect.


On the riverbank of the Cuyahoga River are several abandoned buildings that seem to stretch endlessly (but are actually only ten or so floors), reach up to the horizon. She picklocks her way into the empty loft of one of them and decides that yeah, it'll do.

It doesn't really remind her of her loft in Chelsea, but it sort of does. It's spacious just the same, with hardly any pieces of furniture but the bare necessities, and she wonders for a while if she should invest in a few cans of paint just to cover up every patch of wall that screams at her, you're back to square one and you lost everything.

She spends the night curled up beneath one of the windows, with the radio in the corner sputtering top forty songs, and pulls her sweater closer to her chest.

(If she closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, the sweater smells painfully much like home.)

In the morning she begins setting up her base camp. It's like before, when it was her rogue and solo and single-mindedly focused on bringing down Division. She dips into the remnants of her private funds to afford the purchases. Whitfield's money has lasted a while now, almost six years, and finally it had winded down to three digits. She'll need to start gaining some again.

She buys a laptop, lavender-colored silk sheets (because she'll need the sleep, and there's no better investment), food to last a week, some more clothes, a burner phone and enough items to make a pretty basic first aid kit.

It doesn't take much longer than two days to settle fully into the loft, but it still doesn't feel like home when she's ready, and every time she stands still long enough the loneliness creeps up on her.

How she wishes Michael could be there with her, warm and comforting and twirling her around through the open space.

Or Alex, always with a look of adoration in her eyes that doesn't fit, because Nikita is no hero or an older sister to love no matter what, but in Birkhoff's safe houses they watched rom coms together occasionally and it surprises her how much she misses that.

She wishes she could have Birkhoff's bad jokes and Owen's hugs—Sam. (She wonders how Sam is.)

She wants Ryan's sleepy, stubbly grin in the morning and Sonya's annoyingly British everything, which stopped being annoying like seven thousand years ago.

But she can't have any of those people, any of those little quirks she loves them for, so she makes a veggie shake in a kitchen that vibrates all the sound back at her, locking her in a seemingly eternal cocoon of alone, after dreamless slumber that had her waking up and reaching for someones that aren't there.


Cleveland might not have her people, but it does have people. Plenty of them. Enough to go around. Enough to make the city the seventh most dangerous one in the States.

It shows.

Nikita hates herself for it but when trying to track down The Shop doesn't work she falls back into her old habits; killing under assignment. Becoming a mercenary is the last thing she wanted, but she does need the money. And, to calm down her conscience, she only takes the jobs that have targets that deserve it.

Two.

She does two jobs; the leader of a drug cartel that smuggles mostly ketamine and meth, which is one of the most cathartic kills she has ever done, second to Percy probably, and a money launderer for some shady organization on the uprise.

If she can help prevent a new Division from rising, she sure as hell isn't going to pass on the opportunity.

Both times she gets paid in cash and doesn't get a proper look at the men assigning her the task but that's okay. She doesn't want to be recognized.

To balance out the bad she has done though, and because she doesn't sleep well anyway, she walks around at night, through the dark, stepping out of one shadow and disappearing into the next.

She follows a trace through alleyways that seems random but it doesn't feel that way, it grows into her, like muscle memory—she beats up men that try to rape women, breaks up fights and occasionally takes a hit to the stomach just to feel alive.


Somehow the city grows on her. She doesn't make friends, never goes to the same bar twice, hardly talks to people unless it's business or general ass-kicking; still, the accent and the smells and the streets grow familiar within a month.

Maybe she has been there for too long. Maybe she has been enjoying multiplying her money with the equally dishonorable tricking guys into betting their money in a game of pool with her—slurring speech, stumbling a little, giggling and twirling her hair around her finger, "I've never played this game before," and "your arms are so strong" and then she wins five hundred bucks from them, fair and square—a little too much.

When she realizes that she is slacking too much she puts her burner phone to good use with the three numbers on her flash drive she's willing to dial.

The first one is an old ally she didn't think would be willing to help her again, but she figured she could try. News, apparently, spreads fast and knowing she has kept to her word and brought down Division apparently wins her new respect. He is one of those people that's eager to serve the Nikita Mears that killed Percy.

(She makes a mental note for when she needs favors again.)

She loves her new KIA and the trunk is spacious enough to be turned into an armory slash infirmary.

They order in pizza and fill her loft with memories that aren't of her counting money, tending to wounds or biting her cheek until it bleeds to keep from wallowing in agony.

Then comes Cyrus. She takes him to the one restaurant she actually digs because they have amazing vegetarian food.

The setting is awkwardly romantic that night but he is easy to be around and it only gets easier when they crack open their second bottle of wine. In the pleasant buzz the candles and the wallpaper and the music fades to the background and all she sees is his smile and the solemn twinkle in his eyes whenever he catches her gaze.

She pays well for a load of guns and ammo and they sit against the front of her building with a brown bag passed between them. She hasn't been drunk in so long, but it feels nice.

He pretends not to see it when tears blossom in her eyes and she takes a moment to let them fall because it's been since that day, since that damn drive, that she has allowed herself to cry and it's both liberating and suffocating.

When she wakes up the next morning she has absolutely no recollection of how she got in her cot.

Cyrus is like a wake-up call and she invites Whitfield over. He offers her a log house in Canada, in the woods, close to a well-known hub for travelers of their world.

She takes it.


Nikita scans the room—the walls radiate warmth back at her.

Cleveland has treated her well. It's not the head start to a wild man hunt she expected, but exactly what she needed. She feels recharged now.

The space looks empty now her stuff isn't scattered around anymore. Everything is packed in the suitcase that stands at her front door, waiting.

She allows herself a minute to breathe in Cleveland and breathe out agony, and then she's out the door, hauls her luggage into the backseat of her Kia and gets going.

Six weeks. It's been roughly six weeks since she left them behind in downtown Washington and now she's traveling even further away from them.

(Only because Alex has become an even bigger media figure will she ever be able to track them down again, but she knows that by now those thoughts shouldn't be there anymore.)

She adjusts her blonde wig, checks her fake ID and visa, and then starts driving. Again.

[In Washington, they discover her pattern in Cleveland days too late. When they show up and get themselves beaten to within an inch of their lives for picking a fight in a bar, she's long gone.]


Hidden companion
Phantom be still in my heart
Make me a promise that
Time won't erase us
That we were not lost from the start