Sometimes she can feel him.
The wind whips through in gusts, almost toppling her over and the icy snow stinging her cheek. Nikita holds her gun out steady, her hand wanting to tremble but it won't. She's trained to hold up under pressure, and this might be the most pressure she's ever faced. Her thighs are aching from holding her stance for so long but she ignores the burning pain. The only thing in her head is him.
The curve of his shoulder as she lays her cheek on it.
Her feet are steady on the beam of steel as she balances high above the city and for a moment she wonders why she didn't decide to do this in the spring. A slight smile flickers across her face in a strange moment of comic relief. A little sunshine would make her precarious perch less slippery. Maybe she could have gotten a tan while she was being hunted and killed.
It's hard to see the men below in the dark. Far off in the distance she can hear the sound of a helicopter approaching. She expected this. It would be hard to get snipers close to her as she scaled up the side of the hulking skeleton that would someday become a looming skyscraper, full of businesses and people, bustling around, trapped like ants, just like the Division. What she's learned is that everyone is trapped. Even the almighty warrior for the righteous, Nikita Mears. She had become trapped by her crusade. Trapped by her need for revenge. Right now her trap is a little less symbolic. She's trapped on this huge frame of a building that rises up from the ground and she's not sure how she's going to get down.
Nikita's mind wanders. She knows it shouldn't years of training have taught her to stay sharp and focused, to push everything aside for the mission. But as she stands in the cold waiting for the end to finally be here, to finally have some peace, she can't stop picturing him. Michael. Can't stop feeling him, and she shuts her eyes tightly, feels her body waver a little and she remembers...
The column of his neck under her lips.
Her eyes jerk open as she starts to tip then steadies herself. The wind gusts again and she thinks it would be easy to topple her over. After all, three months off the grid doesn't leave a girl anything but paper thin. They days of Nikita the perfect combination of lethal and beauty were gone. Her skin is dry, her lips cracked, her hands covered in callouses. She'd survived in the forests of Canada, sometimes finding a small town that locked up their only store with a padlock on the back door and hadn't gotten around to installing surveillance cameras. Most of the time it was whatever she could forage; berries, bark, small animals she managed to trap. She can count her ribs and her body aches from the cold. She had also been worn down to her strongest parts. It had left her with only the the warrior who always survived. She was steel, like the girder she balanced on.
The way he kissed her, like she was the air he needed to breathe.
She can't stop the memories. They start to crowd in on her and she wonders if it won't be a bullet that ends this but her own surrender to what she really wants. Will she let herself drift downward off her perch and into her memories, pretending she's falling into his embrace and not towards the cold, hard ground.
The plan had been easy. After months of being out in the cold, it was time to fight back, to clear her name. Break into the FBI, see what they had on her, but somehow Amanda had gotten ahead of her, somehow she knew. Nikita didn't know how.
Maybe it was the drug house she'd robbed in Detroit, jamming a gun into the dealer's face as she shoveled his stash into her bag. It would be the commodity she needed to trade in order to move under the radar. Junkies didn't ask who you were if you gave them what they wanted. But maybe someone had recognized her voice underneath the Porky Pig mask, reported her. It wasn't like the whole world didn't know what Nikita Mears sounded like at this point, her image splashed across screens, old footage played of her, leaked from Amanda. She counted on certain people out there simply not to care because they were too busy looking for their next high.
Maybe someone saw her as she skulked along the side of the highway in the darkest hours of early morning, looking for a ride who wouldn't ask too many questions and was looking for another hit to keep them going. Maybe they'd seen the slender woman in the black hoodie with her arms wrapped around her as she shivered and glanced at her face and realized that they knew who she was.
Maybe…
She'll never know. What she does know is there was a welcoming party at the fed building in New York, something she hadn't expected, and she knew it was Amanda and that was when Nikita decided to run. In the old days she might have stayed and fought, her glock heavy and familiar in her hand, Michael covering her…
Michael. The way he whispered her name, ripped from somewhere deep inside, full of desperation. Full of love.
Her hair is whipped by the wind again and the strands tickle her face. It is short and unevenly shorn. She cut it the day she decided to return to the grid, a clumsy attempt disguise herself from the world, leaving the clippings scattered across the snow like some sort of Native American sacrifice. Nikita can feel her lips starting to go numb but she doesn't mind the cold. Weeks of freezing temperature with only her lean-to to keep her sheltered have made her immune to the cold.
She had gone the first place she thought would be safe when she saw the cars with the dark windows outside the building, when her keen eye had seen snipers crouched on the roofs of the buildings, guns pointed towards the entrance. She had run, scaling over the fence and dropping down to the snow-covered ground of the construction site, a shadow scurrying back into the darkness, but someone had seen her, a quick movement out of the corner of their eye and she heard her name called out loud in alarm.
Nikita. Killer.
She had come full-circle. She was nothing but a killer to the world, just like when she'd sat on death row. Only a killer. Nothing else. Not worth anything else. In her darkest moments she was worth nothing, even to herself and especially to him.
The construction site was deserted, as were most things at 2 am on a Tuesday morning. She could hear the shouts and pounding feet behind her, see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles reflecting up the walls of the buildings. Nikita had taken her climbing rope out of her backpack and started to scale up the huge steel girders, hoping to get away. She didn't realize that there would be not out this time.
This is the end, perched hundreds of feet above the frozen ground with only the wind as her companion, waiting for what feels like hours, but might be only seconds, for the clock to tick to the next second, the next minute that will be the end. Waiting for the whiz of a bullet that will smack into her skull and penetrate her brain, and her body will jerk and fall, crashing down and end up lying broken in the yard below. Waiting for it to be over.
She doesn't care.
"I am done, my love,"
Her voice is a whisper that no one will hear, but she speaks to him as if he were standing in front of her. The love of her life. The man who saved her. Michael.
"I'm so sorry."
Sometimes she can feel him.
At night she would jerk awake in the pitch blackness of the forest, only the trees rustling above her, his name on her lips and those were the moments when she would curl herself into a ball and remember how he felt up against her back, how his warm skin felt against hers, how his breathing would be deep and even, his arm heavy across her waist, how safe she felt, and that's when she let the tears flow. She missed him. She hasn't stop missing him since the moment she walked away.
At least he was safe.
She had to do it. There was no question. As long as she was near him, he would be unsafe. It was the story of her life on repeat. She destroyed the people around her, over and over again. But they never learned. They never walked away. Burkhoff. Alex. Ryan. Michael. They were full of stupid devotion, unwilling to give her the end she deserved, so she took that decision from them. She walked away, and in her head she heard the last person she expected, whispering the truth in her ear.
NIkita. The martyr. You always know what's best for everyone else. You never let them decide. You think you're the hero. You're selfish.
Amanda.
It's the truth. Strangely it's Amanda who always seems to know her best. Michael is blinded by his love, by the person she could be. Birkhoff suffers from hero worship. Alex is devoted. But Amanda has always seen who Nikita is. Underneath the heroics, underneath the conviction, underneath the love, she is always right.
It's only a matter of time.
Who knew this would be the end.
The sound of the helicopter grows louder and Nikita thinks she should just throw down her gun, give up. It's clear what will happen now. They will shoot her. She will die. She slowly puts her arms out in a gesture of surrender at the police helicopter comes closer, turning her face up to the light that is shining down like the light of redemption, and she knows that this is finally coming to an end. She takes in a deep breath, feeling the cold air sting her lungs, closes her eyes and waits….
...waits…
Then in the silence that has surrounded her she hears something that takes her breath away, and for a moment she thinks it's an audio hallucination, conjured up from the deepest part of her brain, a cry from her soul that wants to live.
"NIKITA!"
The voice drifts over the noise of the helicopter and her eyes fly open because this isn't the voice of some faceless police sergeant on a loudspeaker. It's..it's…
"NIKITA!"
Alex.
Her eyes fly open to see that the helicopter has lowered a ladder and on the end is Alex and her hand is reaching out, grasping for Nikita, and for a moment she hesitates, because she walked away and this makes things more complicated, and it's best for everyone if she just steps off the girder and into the darkness, leaving them to mourn her but leaving them safe.
Nikita squints up into the blinding light, still unable to believe that this is real, that it isn't something conjured up by her brain to make dying a little easier, and and as she looks up at Alex who is begging her with her eyes, she sees his face looking down at her.
Michael.
She's coming home.
She reaches up, reaches to him, reaches up for forgiveness and reconciliation. Alex stretches down and grabs her hand, and the moment they connect, she feels cold on her cheek but this time it's not snow but tears.
Nikita will live.
TBC