"It's a little bit funny. This feeling inside."

Dean's head rose as AJ skipped into the room, his lips turning down into a semi-scowl. It was just enough pressure to show her his dimples, which was just enough to bring an even bigger grin to AJ's lips. Her Converse squeaked across the tile floor, then came to a skidding halt at the visitors side of the desk. "The hell are you talking about?"

AJ shrugged. "Have you never seen Moulin Rouge?"

"No," he said tersely, "and you're not going to make me watch it, either."

She put her hands flat against the desk and swayed slowly from side to side. "Oh, I don't know. A little bit of Sodium Pentathol and I could probably have you doing just about anything."

An instant look of shock covered Dean's face before it quickly turned into consideration. AJ loved the reactions that she was able to get out of him. Most of the time, he was so laid back and chill, watching everything with the ease of a predator, awaiting the appropriate time and place to strike. But, every once in a while, AJ threw just enough crazy his way to make him sit up and really react. And sometimes, she threw just enough sanity at him to get the same reaction.

AJ knew what they said, that if you know you're crazy, you're not really crazy, but she didn't believe it. She was aware of herself to know that there wasn't something quite right about her. Oh, she may not have been as crazy for cocoa puffs as she led people to believe, but it wasn't all an act. She was off balance enough that the company shrink stopped trying to talk to her. He didn't want to see inside of AJ's head. He just kept her prescription filled.

That was another thing. AJ was cognizant enough to know that she needed the small hexagonal pills that were filled regularly. She knew that they were the only reason she wasn't truly batshit insane. Because she'd been very close to that when Trish first brought her into Shield. Most of the people in there had been rescued from jail, and while yes, AJ was technically a convicted ward of the state, it wasn't from a regular concrete jail cell that she was plucked. She was taken from a nice little facility for the Criminally Insane, from a room within said nice facility that was all rounded edges and free of anything she could hurt someone with. Because they weren't ever afraid of AJ hurting herself. She was a strictly homicidal type of crazy.

"Fine," she said, "I wouldn't drug you to get you to watch a movie," she said, rolling her eyes. "I would just use your greatest weakness against you."

Dean snorted. "And what would that weakness be?"

"Your complete and total inability to turn me down when I stick my bottom lip out super far and give you the most adorable little sad puppy dog eyes in the whole wide world."

Dean rolled his eyes and snorted again, but AJ knew that she was right. With just the right level of sadness, she knew that she had Dean Ambrose by the short hairs. He was a tough guy, sure, and he was a cold-blooded killer, but he was also a human being. And unlike Roman, Dean did actually have heartfelt emotions. Dean could sympathize and empathize. She didn't have to spend too much time with Dean before she was able to distinguish his psychopathy from his partner's sociopathy. There was a very thin, fine line between the two conditions, and that line was blurry as hell, but Dean made sure that he was firmly on the side of psychopath.

Dean groaned, but there was a playful light in his eyes, a brightness that let her know that, no matter what he said, he wasn't completely annoyed at her company, that he might actually even be enjoying it. "I've got work to do, AJ," he said. "Can we get to whatever the point of your visit is?"

A tick in the corner of his lip told her that she still had a little bit of time to play with him before his patience had all run out and AJ got a good glimpse of the Dean Ambrose that most of the company was afraid of. Right now, his lip was just jumping. But, in a little while, the ticking would stop, and his lip would hitch up. She knew when she saw his canine, when his lip rose in a snarl, that it was time to get to the point.

And AJ did have a point to bothering him. She knew that Dean was busy. With Trish and Paul out of commission, Stacy and Mike had to make some pretty important decisions, and one of those decisions was whether or not to shut down all activity. To kill or not to kill, that is the question, and the answer had originally been not to kill, at least for the time being. But, there were people in too deep to pull out now. They were in more danger if they were suddenly called home than they were if they stayed in place. Those covers were so deep that it was entirely possible that whoever was out for Shield blood didn't even know they existed.

That was where Dean came in. In most cases, the most trusted would be people with the most seniority. However, the opposite was the case in Shield. Trish had personally vetted every new person in the last year and a half to two years, and those were the ones that had the truth. They were the ones that Trish and Paul had believed to be the clean, the uncorrupted, so those were the ones that Stacy and Mike gave the most important jobs. And Dean's current job was to tactically go through and make the logical choice of who to call home and who to leave in place. Every Shield base had someone doing this job, and when they made their choices, Dean went through their choices to make sure they were accurate. He already had a stack of files on his desk and, from the look of his computer, a full inbox in his email. Dean Ambrose went from street stalking killing machine to riding a desk, and he hated it. No, he fucking hated it, as those were the words he used when he told AJ how much he wanted to strangle the person behind all of this, just for making him get stuck with the paperwork.

"Well," AJ said as she turned around and skipped across the room, "that brings me back to my song." She found a small stool and ran it back across to Dean's desk, her hands flat on the seat, her Converse sneakers shuffling quickly. She sang again, "It's a little bit funny. This feel—"

"This feeling inside," he said, cutting her off. "Yeah, yeah, I get it. What's this feeling? Gas?"

"It's not gas, dummy." She rolled her eyes as she sat down on the stool. AJ hooked her ankles behind the steel legs of the stool, pushed off from the desk, and spun in circles. She spoke every time she faced Dean. "And my feeling…" Spin. "…is that something…" Spin. "…isn't quite right…" Spin. "…in the land of Oz."

AJ let the spinning slow down and stop on its own. The spinning stopped, but nobody told her head as the world went around a few more times before settling down. She looked up and she was facing the door to the left. AJ turned the stool seat slowly, until she was facing Dean. "Well?" she asked.

"Well, what?"

"What do you think?"

"About what?"

"About my feeling."

"I think it's common sense, Cray J." He rolled his eyes and AJ stuck her tongue out at him. He was the only person who could get away with calling her Cray J. She didn't necessarily like the nickname, but it didn't sound quite so malicious when he said it, thus making Dean the only person would could say it without losing an ample amount of blood.

"Well, a feeling as all I have to go on 'cause I haven't found a damn thing in all the mess I had to go through, and it's making me antsy. It's making me wanna kill somebody, and Stacy already said I don't get to go on any missions right now, and Mike followed that up by telling me I'll get decommissioned if I kill anybody in here without express permission."

Dean's lip turned up into a snarl for less than half a second when she mentioned being decommissioned, but it was enough for AJ to see it. Aw, did he actually care? Or was AJ just his amusement and he didn't want to have to work at finding anyone else that didn't annoy the hell out of him? Either way, it didn't really matter to AJ. It was just nice that she could get that kind of reaction out of him.

His face went slack again, and she could see in his eyes that he didn't care for his own reaction. She could also see the truth, that in the end, he wouldn't do much if she got decommissioned for going on a killing spree inside of Alpha. Mainly because, he knew that she would have deserved it. The only thing that either of them could hope for was that Dean wasn't the one chosen to do the job.

"You went through Barrett's stuff."

AJ sighed. "Yes, I went through Barrett's stuff. And I went through Summer Rae's stuff. And I went through Slater's stuff. And none of them are giving me any leads on where we should be looking. Barrett was good, and I could tell that he was the lead on all of this. If he hadn't already been dead when Orton called in, he probably wouldn't have survived." She sighed again. "I don't know," she said. "I'm getting nowhere, and it's making me frustrated. Worse than that, it's making me serious."

Dean smirked and said, "And we don't want a serious AJ, now do we?"

"Hell no, we don't!" AJ pushed against the desk and sent herself spinning again. The crazy always felt better than the sanity. Because the crazy had fun. The crazy only had memories of the stuff she wanted to remember. Serious AJ had memories long ago, back when she was with people who called her April if they were being nice, and bitch right before they hurt her. Everyone at Shield had a past, and they all had their ways of forgetting that past. Long before she was recruited into Shield, AJ had found her path to ignorance, and she had learned how to make that path more fun than any trip to Disney World.

"If I said I might have somebody that you can kill, would that help get rid of serious AJ?"

Her head popped up at his words, a huge grin stretching her lips. "Really? Are you just funnin' me, Ambrose?"

"Would I do that?"

"Yes."

He snickered. "Yeah, I would do that, huh?" Dean gave a low chuckle, then ran his fingers through his hair. AJ made note at how long his hair was getting and reminded herself to remind him later that he needed to get a haircut. "But, no, I'm not funnin' ya, short round."

"Uh huh. So, if you're not funnin' me, who do I get to kill?"

"I said I might have somebody for you to kill," he told her. "But, going through all of this shit here—Somebody's undercover work is kind of suspicious. He reported back exactly thirty-six hours after Orton disappeared. Then again thirty-six hours after the call that Orton put in. And, oh, look at that! Thirty-six hours after Blondie and the Walrus were blown up."

AJ shrugged. "Could be a coincidence."

"Yeah, and I could be going to heaven when I die." He shook his head. "I don't believe in coincidence, short round. I just believe in patterns, and that's a pattern. Roman's gonna do a little snooping, a little stalking, and if he agrees that this guy is dirty, then he's gonna bring him back here. And if he brings him back here, Legs is gonna interrogate him. And if Legs finds him guilty, well, he won't be useful to us anymore after she gets the information out of him. And you know what that means."

"It means somebody needs to be decommissioned. And I get to do it."

"Exactamundo! Somebody give that lady a prize!"

AJ laughed and spun herself in three fast circles before stopping and facing Dean again. "Alright! I like it! Now, are you gonna tell me who it is that I'm gonna get to play with?"

Dean turned to his computer and hit a few keys before turning to the screen to AJ so she could see the possible traitor's face, then said, "You might have actually come across him before he went into deep cover. Tell me, AJ. What do you know about Michael Cole?"