A/N: This is a missing moment between the end of 6.16 "Odd Man Out" and the beginning of 6.17 "You Can Run" from Sam's POV. Sam's concerns for Michael herein turn out to be well founded unfortunately.
As Burner Club comes to the end of Season 6, there will hopefully be two more chapters of "While Fiona Sleeps," covering the beginning of "You Can Run" and the aftermath of "Game Change" in the coming weeks and then a series of lyrically enhanced stories for Season 7. Maybe music will make it better?
I never get tired of saying thank you, thank you, thank you for everyone's continued support of Burn Notice Fan Fiction, #BurnerClub and all the love and appreciation out there on Twitter. Thank you!
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"I ever tell you that you're the reason I drink, Mikey?"
Some days it was just a plain pain in the ass being Michael Westen's best friend…
"That's not the point. Since when do we send people to their death to save our own asses?"
And he'd been accumulating a few too many of those days lately.
"Oh Jesus, Mike, what the hell are you doing?"
He had watched in horror as the ex-operative had marched Calvin Schmidt towards a certain and most unpleasant end at the hands of a rival smuggler. Sure, the guy was annoying, a whiny little shit, but no one deserved to die like that, even if he had turned Vanek over to the Feds and thereby endangered their escape plan and possibly their lives as well.
"I can't believe you talked him into doing this." The Irish firecracker might have mellowed some during her time in Miami, but she had still been plenty vocal about her preferred solution to the problem of a bunch of pissed people with automatic weapons who'd had them surrounded, waiting to kill them.
"I didn't talk him into anything. It was the only option and you know it."
Unfortunately, that was true. He was real sure it wasn't her little pep talk that had inspired his buddy.
"Yeah, well, leaving a man behind should never be an option."
Nope, it was another source, another devil that had whispered in Mike's ear long ago for far too long.
In the other room, he could hear Madeline talking to the volatile redhead about what had gotten them into their predicament today and from a room closer to him came the sounds of his pal discussing their passports and the day events with their travel agent and Sam didn't like what he hearing one bit.
"You can—you can say all that with a straight face? You're good…. You're good. Is that the same load of crap you shovel down your team's throat?"
"All anyone needs to know is that I didn't want you to die and you didn't die."
The ex-SEAL looked down at the Heisler in his hand and realized that it was no longer cold. That was never a good sign. But neither was what had been going on with Mr. Westen ever since they'd been put on the trail of the man who'd killed his brother, worse still since they'd found out who'd ordered the hit.
"Jesus, what happened?" There was never any real love lost between him and Tom Card, but coming into that hotel room and seeing Mike standing motionless over the body of his former training officer with a smoking gun in his own hand and absolutely nothing in the other man's grasp had made him sick.
"Mike, what'd ya do?"
"I did what I had to, Sam."
Sam took another slug of his lukewarm beer as he heard the guy in question join the ongoing discussion over their next move. The older man was seeing it in his head again. The look on Mike's face as he had turned and started to walk away like it was nothing… that was a look he didn't want to see again and those words were ones that the former Navy man was coming to hate. He understood duty, but this…?
"Had to? How d'ya figure that? Card's gun is still in the damn holster."
"He killed my brother, Sam. He was going to get away with it. I had no choice."
"I was right outside that door, Mike. Why didn't you come and get me before you made that call, huh? Because you know damn well I would have had something to say about it!"
It had sounded too much like another guy Sam had worked with, a guy he thoroughly detested, especially whenever he'd heard that man's words coming out of his buddy's mouth.
"We did what we had to do, Sam. How else were the three of us going to past an army like that?"
First time he'd heard Mike use that particular phrase had been in Bajina Bašta in the winter of '93.
"Sometimes we have to do things, things we'd rather not have to do, but it's all part of the job, Sam. What we did... what we did was necessary," the former military man had declared. "We're spies. Sometimes you have to do bad things for good reasons."
Mike had been down that dark path before and sometimes Sam'd had a helluva time keeping his friend from going down it again over the years. Yeah, see, that was the thing. You keep doing enough bad things for good reasons, you become the bad guy. Doesn't matter what you were trying to do anymore.
And then, as if capping Card hadn't been bad enough, things had managed to go from bad to worse…
"Well, I thought we were screwed 7 ways from Sunday, but you can go ahead and make it 8 and 9."
"That better be the last time you lie to me today, Mr. Axe."
"It just became my mission in life to put you behind bars, all of you."
Sitting out on the back porch of Schmidt's bolt hole staring at the hot tub, Sam sighed heavily, feeling like it had been a hundred years ago since he had sat there sipping a mojito before offering to do something insanely dangerous yet again with the man he'd trusted to have his back for decades.
"You want this data, Mike? You're gonna have to steal it yourself because I'm not gonna give it to you. And, hey, if that makes me the Boy Scout that you and your friend Larry think I am, man, I'm OK with that. I'm not gonna help you any more until you get your head out of your ass."
Now, how the hell was he going to be able to Mike's head outta his ass this time before it went too far?
"Whoa, Sammy, you had better call in an ambulance or put that bad boy outta its misery, man, cuz you have nursed that beer long enough."
He shrugged and drained the remainder in one go as the younger man handed him another cold one.
"That was some crazy-ass shit Mike pulled today, huh? I couldn't believe it."
"Yeah baby! That's our ride… You had me going there, brother."
"I'm just glad it worked."
"Yeah, me neither…" he echoed.
"Sooooo, what's up, man? Was there like some, um, tension, going on in that warehouse between you and Fi about that thing with Schmiddy?"
"Something like that, yeah, Jess. Tinkerbell was all ready to send Schmidt out to meet his maker. Those passports hadda little surprise in them that our travel agent forgot to mention and she was pretty pissed, pissed enough that she would have traded the little guy for a free pass outta the circle of death."
"Whoa, thought she was jiving about that. Seriously? So, Mike let 'em think he was gonna do that?"
"Yeah, seems like he had us all fooled." Sam took another long pull of his beverage.
"What's up with you two, man?" Jesse lowered his voice as he posed the question. "Fi said you might not be coming back when you left the other night. I thought you and Mike were tight, brothers in arms and all that, from like the dawn of time. I mean, I know better than anyone what a prick he can be—"
"You don't know the half of it, brother."
"So why don't you enlighten me?
The older man took another drink instead of answering right away.
"There's a lot about Mike you don't know and, believe me, you don't want to know," Sam stated finally.
"Don't be all holding out on me, man. This is some serious shit here. We are all about to go on the run for who knows how long. You got something to say, then spill it, dude."
"You remember that Larry guy?"
"Larry…? Oh, you mean, Dead Larry, the one Mike worked with when he first got outta spy school?"
"Yeah, that guy…" Sam's loathing for the other operative was apparent in his tone. "Well, after a while, Mikey wasn't just following Lare's lead, he was all in. You can't keep wallowing in the muck without getting dirty after a while, you know?"
"What are you saying, Sam? Far as I know, Mike was through with that guy even before Fi toasted him."
"I'm saying there was a time when Mike was just like him and the way Riley is pushing us…" The ex-SEAL paused and then shrugged his shoulders. "Just… you know, be ready for anything, Jess…Cuz this could get real ugly real fast."
The voices in the other room, rising in pitch and volume, caught before their attention for a moment.
"Hey, c'mon, man… yeah, Mike can be bat shit crazy sometimes, but he's always got your back. I mean, he busted you outta Riley's paddy wagon, right? The man put himself in the line of fire to do that. And the dude told me he drug your ass six miles through the desert in a wicked sandstorm back in the day."
Sam nodded absently, remembering when he'd had words with Mike about sharing a few too many of his personal stories with the younger man when the ex-CIFA agent had first joined their crew. Mike's intention might have been to help Jesse understand who his new friends were, but putting him in a position to have to pimp his SEAL cred to a criminal in the middle of mission kinda pissed him off a bit.
"I mean, you guys have known each other, what, like twenty years?"
"Twenty five," Sam corrected. "We met in a hotel outside of Kandahar back in—"
"Whoa, back up a sec, I thought Mike said you guys met down in Bolivia on some hostage rescue."
Mr Axe laughed for the first time in what felt like forever. "That's the first time we worked together." Typical Mike… always thinking about the job and still keeping the details vague, even when he was trying to share something. "The first time we met was in a hotel lobby in Afghanistan."
Suddenly, strident sounds from the adjacent room cut through their conversation, the unseen participants engaged in heated debate.
"I can't believe you're even considering this, Michael!" Fiona voiced her vehement objections.
"The man trashed my house! He even broke the urn with your father's ashes in it," Madeline added.
"Ma, it only had some of Dad's ashes in it."
"That's not the point, Michael!"
Neither one of them needed to be able to see what was going on in order to imagine the look on Mrs. Westen's face at that moment.
"I think Mike needs some back-up," Jesse announced before rising and turning away from his older friend, leaving the former military man to continue to contemplate the nature of his relationship with the ex-Ranger turned spy he had been friends with these past two and half decades.
Mike was forever sticking his foot in it with the ladies…
Sam sighed again, now thinking about his lady, the woman who really meant something to him.
"You know, Mike, last time I kissed my lady, she was crying. I left her to be interrogated by the CIA so we could escape."
As incensed as he had been over what Michael had apparently planned to do to Schmidt, abandoning Elsa to the clutches of the CIA and Olivia Riley in particular had been worse than a sucker punch to the gut. It had burned a hole in his heart knowing what he had left her behind to face alone.
He had left that night not sure if he was going to come back the next day. Elsa had resources. He could have jumped on the G6 and found himself on a cozy little private island to share. The entire West Indies might be off limits to Jesse, but he had plenty of other options. Except he didn't, not really…
As his lady love had pointed out to him after brief but intense reunion… He smiled at the memory of surprising the former Mrs. Dearborn in her safe house suite, the existence of which was only known to certain intensely loyal members of the hotel security staff who were guaranteed to turn a blind eye to his stealthy exit from the hidden access tunnel into the facility during the late evening hours.
When he'd convinced the hotelier to remodel portions of the old maintenance tunnels into the equivalent of a luxury bunker, he'd honestly had hurricanes in mind. Who knew that Hurricane Olivia was going to blow into town? Well, just let Riley try and pry her way into this place…
"Hey, baby…" The brunette had jumped out of her skin and into his arms. He had silenced all of her half formed questions with a kiss of such passion that it had left them both weak in the knees. Sam had only one mission in that moment: to let Elsa Dearborn know in every way possible what she meant to him.
So, it hadn't been long before the only thing touching them besides each other had been the 800 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets on the king-size bed. He had made love to her, cherishing her with his words and his actions, the thought of nearly losing her forever again after his previous close call with Rebecca spurring him on and leaving them both exhausted but basking in a warm afterglow.
Holding Elsa close to his side, Sam hadn't wanted to spoil the moment, but couldn't get it off his mind.
"Once we bust out of here, that CIA team is gonna be all over you…so just… tell 'em that we stole your car and just tell them that—that you don't know me anymore. Okay? Can you—can you tell them that?"
As much as it had hurt, Sam had been happy to discover the lady love had obviously taken his advice and heeded his warning, since she wasn't in a CIA interrogation cell. Elsa hadn't seen the logic of setting up a distress word at the time months and months ago, but the ex-SEAL had finally convinced her that 'stay beautiful' was more than one sort of advice.
"Were they rough on you, baby?" he'd whispered, afraid of the answer.
"She tried," Elsa had assured him with a bitter little laugh. "But I'm a lot harder to intimidate with a fleet of lawyers on retainer and my own private security detail on call. I had David on speed dial before you barreled your way out of the marina." She had shrugged and kissed his shoulder. "The lease was almost up on the Jeep anyway, so you did me a favor."
"I'm so sor- "
But his lady love had stolen his apology away with a kiss. "No, don't… just tell me how long we have."
Sam finished off his second beer, remembering how shocked the brunette had been when he'd finally let her know that maybe he didn't have to go and maybe there were other arrangements that could be made that would get him off the Agency's radar but still keep the two of them together. Mike had been getting in over his head and dragging them all along with him ever since Anson Fullerton had reared his ugly mug. He'd stuck by his friend, trying to keep him on the reservation while Fiona was in prison.
But Mike had lost it when Nate had died and when the hunt for his killer had let to his training officer…
Elsa hadn't said a word until he'd finished laying out his misgivings. Taking a deep breathe, she'd hugged him tight before rising up on one elbow to look him in the eyes.
"Sam Axe, may I remind you what you said to me when you came back from that little adventure in the Everglades that almost got you killed? When I asked you why you kept hanging around with Michael?"
"That Mike was my best friend… and that SEAL's don't leave a man when he's down," he'd mumbled after a moment's contemplation. "Even if it means putting their necks on the line..."
"That's right. You told me about how he had saved your life in Kuwait and again in Poland and…"
"Well, to be fair, we kinda saved each other's asses on that one," Sam had amended.
"But he went there to get you out when you'd volunteered to stay behind with that wounded man," she had reminded him. "And he saved you from that heroin dealer…what was his name, Harrick?"
Sam had decided not to mention his close call with a different heroin dealer at that point.
"And how he helped you with that friend of yours in that hostage situation in the bank or the time he went to prison to protect that friend of yours in jail and how he helped you with that dirty cop that killed your police buddy and helped his widow. You told me all of that when all I could see was Michael getting you into one tight spot after another and endangering the man I loved."
He'd had to smile at the beautiful woman who was turning his own words against him, reaching up to press his palm to face and stroking his thumb over her cheek bone.
"Most of all, you told me how working with Mike had given you a purpose again, to be more than a lecherous old boozehound, after the Navy showed you the door."
Sam wiped a hand over his own weary brow then, as he recalled how her beautiful blue eyes had misted over and she'd laid her own hand to his stubble laden countenance.
"When Evan died, I forgot how to live. I threw myself into work and shut out everything, even my son, until I met you. You reminded me what it was like to enjoy life. You… you just throw yourself into everything… you live your life to the fullest and relish every little pleasure because… I know…I know you must have seen so much pain and death, so much more than I could have ever dreamed of."
And she had kissed him again more soundly than before, smiling at him down at him afterwards.
"And you are the most kind and loyal person I know. It's who you are and it's why I love you. So, as much as it hurts me to know that you're going into danger with him again, if you abandon your best friend now, then you won't be the man I fell in love with."
And he had made love to her all over again… until it was time to go…and he had promised her that he would make it right… someway… somehow… they would sit down and figure it out and make it right.
The squabbling in the living room pulled him out of his trip down memory lane. They were in it for the long haul, him and Mike… His buddy was loyal too…to a fault sometimes… cuz, sometimes Mike was loyal to the wrong things… Being loyal to Larry had almost turned him into a heartless monster.
As the former military man slowly got to his feet, he thought about how close Mike had come to falling into the black and never coming back in Chechnya. That led to thoughts of the woman who he'd had to cajole into helping him save Mike's soul and then how their subsequent disagreement years later over the cause of her death had put them at odds like never before and had almost ended their relationship.
Kind of ironic… seeing how Mike had almost blown his career over Fiona and then almost lost it over trying not to lose her… that the two times they had almost stopped being friends was over a lady friend.
"So, you're gonna trust Jason Bly to let you walk in for a chat and waltz out?" He heard the incensed Irish pixie yell. "SAM! Get in here! Someone needs to help Michael get his head out of his ass!"
That was his cue… Duty calls.
