Set in the aftermath of "Long Way Back," Season 3, Episode 9
Michael woke up to one of his favourite sights in the entire world: the naked backside of Fiona Glenanne. She was sitting upright in the queen-size bed with her legs slung over the edge, free of the rumple of blankets that still covered his lower half. Her face was turned toward the first dim light of the day, which was fighting its way through a thin layer of frost on the wavy glass windowpanes set in a wooden frame rough from too many coats of paint. Michael gazed up at her with his head still resting on the pillow, wanting to make the moment last. He let his eyes curve around his lover's hips to the bold architecture of her back, counting each notch of her spine until he lost it under the thick curtain of her cinnamon brown hair.
Finally, Fiona shifted, and turned. Michael met her with a lazy smile that fell the moment he saw her face. Fiona's bloodshot eyes were framed by a bloom of deep purple bruises that darkened most of her left cheek and the edge of her swollen lower lip, which was split at the centre by a burgundy stripe of dried blood. Michael's own lips dropped open as he reached for her, then pursed shut as he caught sight of his hand. His fingers and broken knuckles were filthy with dirt and blood, only some of which was his own. He thrust his hand forward to meet Fiona's skin, searching for the stability of her warmth. Yet when his bloody fingers brushed her shoulder, she stared at him as though she didn't feel his touch or didn't care, her bloodshot eyes either blank or blind. Michael gagged on a swallow as he seized her bicep and sank his fingernails into her flesh, desperate for her to be anything other than what she was—vacant, passive, and broken.
Fiona's bicep became the handle of her H&K a moment before Michael's head jerked up from the kitchen table at his mother's house. His senses were alert before his mind was, as he aimed the gun at the door and performed a rapid survey of the room. There was nothing to see or shoot; it was early morning, and the dimly lit kitchen was empty. The events of the day came back to him as he lowered the gun. He was carrying Fiona's H&K because he'd tossed his Sig Sauer into the Miami River after using it to kill Strickler. And he was sitting at the kitchen table at his mother's house because someone had killed Diego in retaliation for Strickler, and anyone might be next. That included Fiona and her brother Sean, both of whom were currently sleeping wounded in the living room, held together with stitches and pumped full of painkillers.
With an effort, Michael unclenched his fingers from around the grip of Fiona's gun and pushed it part of the way across the table. It wasn't the first time he'd fallen asleep with a gun in his hand, and he was sure it wouldn't be the last. As a rule, though, he tried to avoid it, especially when he was even more besieged than usual by the kinds of nightmares a gun did little to comfort.
Michael massaged his tired eyes as he leaned back in his chair and rolled his stiff shoulders, summoning the steadying ache of his cracked ribs. While his eyes were still closed, he listened for any disruptions in the early morning quiet. There were none; all he could hear was the faint sound of Sean's slightly laboured breathing in the adjacent room. Sean would be asleep in a makeshift bed by the window, while Fiona would be asleep on the sofa across from him; when Michael had last seen her, she'd been lying on her side with her good arm cradling the bullet wound in her left shoulder, breathing deeply against a green chenille pillow. The house's final occupant, his mother, would be in her room, where she'd either be asleep, or pretending to be.
As he got to his feet, Michael's head ignited with a sudden rush of pain; it was the spot where he'd struck the marble pillar after being hit between his shoulder blades by the beanbag rounds from Thomas O'Neill's assault rifle. Falling asleep in a straight-backed wooden chair hadn't done his injuries any favours, but retreating to the spare bedroom hadn't been an option. First, Michael had been consumed by a need to watch Fiona sleep; he'd succumbed to that need for more than an hour, hypnotized by Fiona's delicate beauty until he became too unsettled by her vulnerability. Then, he'd needed to feel useful, which he'd done by taking up his spot at the kitchen table, studying the rare pass of headlights until he'd finally surrendered to his weariness and the futility of the task. Yet it wasn't just his concern for Fiona and the house's other occupants that had made the spare room inaccessible. The room his mother now called the spare room had once been his room, and Michael had made himself a promise to never sleep there again. It was a promise he'd kept for more than twenty years.
Michael walked across the kitchen to the door and gazed out through the glass at the pitch blackness of the back yard. He didn't need to see the yard to know what it looked like. The view hadn't meaningfully changed since his childhood, when it had been seared into his brain as indelibly as anything else before or since. Michael had lost weeks of his life sitting on that back stoop, staring at the white wooden fence that separated his mother's house from the neighbour's and longing with a ferocious, bitter intensity to be anywhere besides where he was—trapped by walls and fences and his own helpless youth. Since then, he'd climbed and demolished walls and fences in places his childhood self had never known or dreamed of. Yet the fence at the edge of his mother's yard remained as sturdy as his memory of it, a defiant symbol of the enduring past.
As a child and teenager, Michael's only specific goals for his future had revolved around the things he knew he didn't want. Some of those things were practical, like a house, a wife, and a family. Other things were grander and harder to avoid, like powerlessness, and fear. To the extent that he'd had any positive goals, he'd wanted to be someone immune to the world's chaos, who could walk through flames and be blissfully numb. In his decades with the army and the CIA, he'd survived enough fires to believe he might have succeeded in becoming that person. But his forced return to Miami, along with the return of his family and, especially, the return of Fiona, had proved him wrong. Since the night two years ago when Fiona had fought him to the mattress of his own bed, Michael had found it increasingly difficult to deny how good it could feel to burn.
Michael's memory of that first time in Miami was more vivid than he sometimes wanted it to be. He viscerally remembered the way his whole body had hurt with pleasure as Fiona had licked the sweat off his skin and dug her nails into the small of his back, and how he'd drilled her deep into the mattress with his fists clenched in her hair. The second time had been even better; it had started sometime after the first with his face between Fiona's thighs, and finished with her riding him ragged, both of her hands and most of her weight pressing down hard on his gasping chest, his vision filled with the spectacle of his own saliva glistening on her hard, perfect nipples. Yet Michael also remembered how the return of passion had meant the return of fear. In the wake of his pleasure, he'd been terrified by the realization of its past and future absence, haunted by all the things he'd convinced himself he could live without during so many months of sleeping in his clothes on cave floors and under canvas tents, getting sand in places he hadn't thought sand could get. After a brief, exhausted sleep, he'd laid awake most of the night, paralyzed by the whisper of Fiona's naked skin under the sheets and a quandary he knew well, though he'd never fully understood it; some fundamental part of him could never quite accept how something that scared him so much could still seem so right.
Every month he remained in Miami, that quandary became more pronounced and unmanageable. The easier it became to let Fiona into his bed, the harder it became to manage the fear she brought with her. When he'd thought that Natalie might have hurt or killed Fiona, he'd barely been able to think. And when Fiona had showed up at the loft to tell him she was leaving, he'd been so scared he'd been angry—at himself for being scared, and at Fiona for making him that way. He'd been nearly blind with fear when he'd seen Fiona floating face down in the harbor after smacking her head into Thomas O'Neill's and jumping off the pier in a hail of bullets. In that moment, the only thing worse than the thought of Fiona's death had been the sickening certainty that it would be his fault—because he'd realized too late that he should have been even more scared.
A yellow light clicked on in one of the upper-floor rooms of the neighbour's house. Michael studied the light intently until it went off, and then mourned its loss. Just like when he was a child, he found himself longing to be anywhere besides where he was, feeling the things he was. Though unlike when he was a child, he could see the uselessness of that longing. The neighbour's unchanging fence was one symbol of the enduring past; the rebirth of McBride was another.
Michael had been genuinely surprised to learn Fiona had kept his real identity a secret for so many years. After the initial shock had worn off, he'd been surprised a second time by his own surprise. It had made sense for Fiona to keep his secret; not telling her IRA-affiliated family that he was really an American spy was better for his safety and theirs. Yet in all the years since Ireland, Michael had never truly considered the possibility that McBride might continue to exist without him. He'd tried very hard to think of McBride as dead and buried, killed the night he'd abandoned Fiona asleep in the Dublin flat they'd called home. But despite his best efforts, McBride had remained alive for people who deserved to hate him even even more than they already did.
The enduring reality of McBride shouldn't have been surprising. McBride had always been more than an accent and a set of made-up facts in a dossier. During the year that Michael had lived as McBride, he'd become a way of thinking and a way of feeling. McBride had his own way of walking and talking, but he also had his own way of experiencing the world, a world that included Fiona. As McBride, Michael had wanted Fiona in ways he'd never wanted another woman before or since. McBride had ached for Fiona throughout the day and night, thirsting for her body and starving for her touch. McBride had loved the taste of Fiona's skin misted with dew and ocean spray, and the feel of her hair curled and tangled by the wind. McBride could be hot on a cold day imagining Fiona's perfect lips turning his name into a throaty moan, and cold in a warm bed when her bare flesh wasn't twined with his. As McBride, he'd known the risks of mixing the personal with the professional, but had been too drunk on the late arrival of young love to accept the reality of those risks—until it was too late.
Pieces of McBride had been haunting him since that first time in Miami, and his presence had grown stronger in recent weeks. On the night after Fiona had announced she was leaving, it was McBride who'd poured the first shot of whisky to forget how badly he missed her, and the second shot to forget the first. By the next morning, when Fiona had showed up looking for her H&K with the silver slide, McBride had left him wallowing in a hangover of sentimental longing, his bleary eyes pondering a small collection of photographs that had survived all his training and better judgement. His favourite photographs captured some spark of Fiona's essence—the hint of danger in her playful smile, or the deceptive strength of her girlish frame. One photograph, taken against his will by Fiona's cousin Rosaline on New Year's Day in Dublin, captured something that had been common in Ireland and near-nonexistent in Miami—he and Fiona kissing in public. In the photo, Fiona was standing on her tiptoes to reach his face, while he greeted her with a straight back and a smile in the wrinkles of his half-lidded eyes.
McBride had visited him most intensely, though, inside the moment he'd killed Strickler.
Michael knew he might have tried to disable Strickler instead of killing him; at that range, it should have been possible to shoot the gun out of Strickler's hand or shatter his kneecap. But when Strickler had told him to forget the past, something had happened to the part of his brain that knew killing someone always causes more problems than it solves. In rapid succession, a surge of fear had become a swell of rage that travelled up his back to his chest and down his arm to his trigger finger. Each hot release had felt good, and right, the quick pop and squish of the bullet that sailed through Strickler's ribs to his heart turning the fire in his chest into a glow of satisfaction.
Strickler was the first man Michael had deliberately killed in more than two years, and the first man in many more years that he didn't regret killing. He'd tried to regret it while staring at the broken, bloody heap of Diego's body on the pavement many floors below the former operative's apartment. But any guilt he did feel was obligatory and abstract, overwhelmed by his deep and utter gratefulness that Fiona, at least, had survived. That lack of regret was another vestige of McBride. As Michael Westen, he'd always feel guilty about the months he'd spent hiding real feelings behind a fake name. But McBride had forgotten to feel guilty for days and weeks at a time, taking his pleasure when he wanted and letting Fiona love a false man as though he were real.
Michael flexed his idle fingers while eyeing the metal handle of his mother's back door. It would be so simple to open the door, and walk out. He could hotwire a car down the street and be far away by daybreak, some place where his friends, family, and whoever was still keeping tabs on him would never find him, and where he could watch from afar as the people he'd left behind thrived in his absence, free of all the danger and heartache he'd rained upon their lives. Baring that, he'd run—as far and as fast as he could until his cracked ribs made him stop. Then he'd collapse in exhausted pain on the pavement of whatever street he'd run to, and somehow, he'd know what to do. Some of his best plans came to him that way—when his only choices were death or survival. It was a different longing for escape than anything he'd dreamt as a child. As a child, he'd wanted to save himself from getting hurt; now, he wanted to hurt himself to save someone else.
A sudden thud from the direction of the living room wrenched Michael's gaze away from the door. Within seconds, his itchy fingers were once again wrapped around Fiona's H&K, his whole self focused on the task at hand—making sure his many mistakes didn't reverberate any more than they already had. He took two quick steps toward the doorway that led to the living room before a second sound made him pause. It was the subtle, creaky sound of bare feet padding on carpet. Small feet. Fiona's feet.
Michael tucked the H&K into the small of his back and himself against the wall behind the doorway, and listened. He heard Fiona tiptoe across the room, and then stop. Near her brother's bed by the window, she uttered a tiny grunt of effort that sounded like bending over or sitting down. Sean greeted her with a louder grunt of pain as he either woke up or shifted to face her.
In a low voice, Fiona asked, "How are you feeling?"
"How do ya think?" Sean grumbled back.
"I'm sorry," Fiona said. "About O'Neill. And about Michael."
Michael sunk his teeth into his cheek. Hearing Fiona apologize for his crimes was bad enough; realizing she'd probably been doing it for years was worse. For a moment, he wondered if he should keep listening. Spying on Fiona—and her family—was uncomfortably familiar, and as unfair now as it had been a decade before. But it was also irresistible; spying had always come naturally, a state of affairs which Michael chose not to credit to his mother.
"I getcha not telling mum and the others," said Sean. "But you coulda told me."
"It wasn't my secret to give."
"But it was yers to keep."
"Yes."
The sadness in Fiona's voice made Michael's jaw clench tighter. For him, trying to keep secrets from family members came as naturally as spying. It had never been as easy for Fiona; even though she and her brothers protected many grave secrets, they usually did it together—as a family.
"Mum will have a fit when she finds out," said Fiona.
"She always liked him."
"He's good at that. When he wants to be."
It was a decidedly backhanded compliment. Michael had indeed pulled out all the stops trying to win over Fiona's mother, making up for his lack of experience as a desirable boyfriend or potential son-in-law with a tireless devotion to the part. That devotion had nearly been his downfall. The first time he'd met Fiona's mother, she'd been suspicious of his too-perfect smiles and her daughter's too-perfect happiness. Later, after Fiona had learned his real name, she'd been differently suspicious of the new undercurrent of tension that Fiona routinely denied. It was one of many times he'd force Fiona to choose between himself and her family.
"So are ya still leavin'?" asked Sean.
"I have to," Fiona intoned.
"He makin' ya?"
"It's my choice."
"Back in Ireland—did ya know about him then?"
Fiona didn't say anything, but she must have nodded.
"From the beginning?"
"No."
"But ya stayed with him."
"Yes."
"And what's this compared ta that?"
"You don't…"
Fiona's low voice had risen, as though she were gearing up for an angry protest. But whatever she'd been about to say faded quickly.
"Michael's not the same person he was in Ireland," she finished quietly.
"He dresses better, fer a start."
Sean made a sound that suggested Fiona might have hit him. In the wake of that violence, there was a period of calm, which was eventually broken by Sean.
"Do ya remember Jimmy O'Connor's New Year's party?"
Michael remembered the party very well. Beforehand, he'd dreaded it for a week. The entire concept had been a nightmare; an overcrowded dancehall where decades-old friends and enemies intermingled amid copious whisky and free-flowing casks of beer was no place for the careful maneuvering required to maintain what had always been a slightly shaky cover ID. But he'd had to go, for Fiona's sake—because he'd known she'd wanted him to, and because she'd been the glue holding together his shaky ID. In Ireland, most of the people he'd needed to talk to had only talked to him because he'd been Fiona's boyfriend. And no one fucked with Fiona Glenanne—not unless they wanted to get hurt.
Within an hour of arriving, his opinion of the party had improved considerably. While most of the women in attendance had worn dresses, Fiona had thrown off her heavy overcoat to reveal a low-slung pair of black leather pants paired with a tight white tank top that exposed a generous portion of her taut, smooth midsection. She'd spent most of the night dancing and drinking at the centre of a crowd of large, drunk men, none of whom dared lay a finger on her tiny frame. Michael had watched Fiona from the sidelines, meeting the fiery flash of her hazel eyes with a steady gaze and lips that lingered on the mouth of his beer, taking deep, wet sips that had nothing to do with the drink itself.
"I remember Jake and Ros having to carry you to the car," Fiona quipped.
"I remember the way McBride looked at ya while ya were dancing."
"Let me guess—'like I was the most beautiful girl in the room.'"
Fiona's voice had been sing-song sarcastic, but Sean's was deadly serious as he said, "No—like ya were the only girl in the world."
Michael swallowed in the long pause that followed, and forced a slow breath through his tight chest.
"People change," Fiona said, so quietly Michael could barely hear.
"They don't change so much."
"They do if they're spies."
"Yet spies are people, just like everyone else."
"You've changed."
"I haven't changed so much. And neither have you."
Fiona didn't reply, giving Michael time to consider Sean's words. In some ways, Fiona had changed a great deal. The woman he'd known in Ireland hadn't owned any designer handbags. She hadn't gotten manicures or Brazilian waxes, or haircuts from salons with secret numbers and long waiting lists. She'd drunk tea instead of coffee, and had been most at home in the sketchiest bars in the worst parts of town. Yet in other ways, Fiona hadn't changed a bit. She still hated clothes without pockets and shoes she couldn't run in. Her favourite gun was still a Walther PPK, and her favourite hobby was blowing things up. And she was still brilliant, passionate, and fearless—everything he loved in a woman and had never managed to love in himself.
Sean said, "Now ya can't go back to Ireland—where will ya go?"
Suddenly, Michael was sure he'd heard enough. He backed away from the doorway and walked boldly into the room, advertising his disinterest in the conversation he was pretending not to have heard by ignoring Sean and Fiona and heading straight to the front door. He took his time inspecting the view before finally turning his attention to the Glenanne siblings.
"You should be sleeping," he said. "Both of you."
As he walked toward Sean's place at the window, Sean shot him a defiant look that Michael had seen before, several times in the past two days and many more times before that, every time he'd tried to offer an opinion about anything—especially when that opinion concerned Sean's sister.
"And what about you, Westen," Sean returned, unsubtly emphasizing Michael's real last name. "O'Neill musta clipped you good as well."
Sean's tone was gruff, but the words themselves bore a note a conciliation, suggesting that Sean's earlier forgiveness of Michael's long deception had been mostly sincere.
Michael opened his mouth to say he was fine, but when he looked down at Fiona, the automatic words died on his lips. She was sitting on the floor next to her brother, wearing nothing but the white tank top and brief shorts she'd fallen asleep in. Her good arm was wrapped around her bent legs, and her injured arm was tucked close to her body behind the protective cage of her knees. She looked impossibly small, and uncharacteristically lost, her drawn face creased with indecision. Michael forced down another hard swallow as he realized that despite everything he'd done and her own painful wounds, Fiona was actually worried about him.
Michael addressed himself to Fiona as he said, "I'm okay."
He forced himself to meet her gaze long enough to make sure she heard what he hadn't said. A small twitch of her tight lips confirmed that she did—okay wasn't fine, but it was good enough.
"What time is it?" Fiona asked.
Michael checked his watch. "A little after four-thirty."
"Westen's right, Fiona," Sean chimed in. "Ya should be sleeping."
"Me?" she returned, shooting a glance over her shoulder. "You're the one with a hole in his damn chest."
Michael almost smiled, grateful for the hint of familiar fire in Fiona's voice, and to Sean for stoking it.
"Which means I'm too sick ta argue," said Sean. "Get out of here—go."
Sean shifted in his makeshift bed and scrunched his eyes shut, making it clear that his participation in the conversation had ended.
"Go where?" Fiona questioned. "We're stuck here until—"
"I know a place," Michael interrupted. "C'mon."
He crouched and extended his hand to help Fiona to her feet. She needed the help; she was shaky getting up, her face blanching as her feet shuffled. Michael held her steady until she she made a not-totally-successful attempt to square her stance. Then he dutifully released her, hands retreating toward his own body.
Michael moved slowly through the living room and into the hall, closely tracking Fiona's movements behind him. Though she occasionally used the wall to aid her, she managed to follow him down the hall toward the spare bedroom.
For Michael, sneaking around in his mother's house conjured plenty of bad memories. It was also, however, one of his best skills. He successfully steered Fiona around every creaky floorboard before finessing the stiff hinge on the spare room into opening quietly, if not quite silently.
Flicking on the light switch in the room that used to be his felt like turning a page in a photo album to reveal a snapshot of the past. All of what the army or the prison system would call his "personal effects" were long gone, either destroyed by his father, stolen by his brother, or packed into boxes by his mother. Otherwise, the room was exactly how Michael remembered it, with the same double bed in the same brass bed frame next to the same white wicker chair facing the same varnished pine dresser surrounded by the same baby blue walls. Growing up, Michael had hated those walls almost as much as he'd hated the view from the back yard. More than once, he'd tried to deface them. When he was five, he'd used markers, and when he was seven, he'd used matches, finally burning enough of the paint and drywall that his mother had been forced to move the bed to cover it. Ever since, the bed had occupied an unattractive and tactically disturbing position between the door and the window, with the window at the foot of the bed on the left side, and the door at the top on the right. Michael had never slept well after that; he remembered spending many long nights lying awake and listening for intruders, tortured by the impossibility of watching both the door and the window.
Suddenly thankful for the consuming distraction of Fiona's injuries, Michael turned and saw her surveying the room with dazed fascination, as though encountering a strange and puzzling museum exhibit.
"I've never been in here before," she observed.
"This is my room," Michael explained. "I mean—it was."
"It doesn't look like you."
"Yeah, well, I haven't lived here in a while."
Fiona nodded slowly as her eyes finally landed on the bed. It took all of Michael's self control not to extend a helping hand as she climbed stiffly into the place he made for her. Her face blanched again when she lowered herself to the pillow, but calmed quickly once she was settled.
Michael was careful to disguise the pain in his own bones and muscles that he didn't want Fiona to see as he took a seat in the wicker chair next to the bed. For a while, they both avoided each other's eyes and tried not to listen to the silence. Fiona's expression was either meditative or vacant, though the half-remembered dream that woke him made Michael hope for the former. Michael's own thoughts were dominated by the strangeness of the scene. He'd never seen a woman he'd been intimate with lying in that particular bed; in high school, his encounters with the opposite sex had usually taken place in cars and bathrooms, or at the house of a particular college freshman whose major attraction had been how often her parents were out of town. Briefly, he wondered how his teenage self might have reacted to the sight of Fiona Glenanne, explosives expert and former IRA guerilla, nursing a bullet wound in his bed. The thought was brief because the answer was obvious. His teenage self wouldn't have been ready for Fiona; too often, his adult self still wasn't ready.
"Can I get you anything?" he asked.
"Not right now."
Michael nodded as he fell back into silence. He knew Fiona was deliberately withholding what he wanted, which was some definite indication of what she was thinking, and how she was feeling.
Fiona was staring at her fingers resting on the blue and orange-patterned comforter as she asked, "How much did you hear?"
"I don't—"
"You're a spy," said Fiona. "A girl comes to expect these things."
Her words had the semblance of humour, but none of the passion.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"For what?"
"Everything."
He meant it. He was sorry for the present and sorry for the past—sorry he wasn't good enough and never would be, and sorry that she loved him in spite of it.
"O'Neill was my problem," she said.
"And Strickler was mine."
"What happened to him? Strickler, I mean."
She asked the question almost casually, still studying the comforter.
"He's gone," Michael replied.
"Did you kill him?"
At the end of that question, Fiona's eyes flicked up. As he met her gaze, Michael hoped his own studied blankness would both dissuade further questions, and tell her what she needed to know.
"And Diego?" she asked.
"You should try to sleep," he replied.
Fiona blinked her gaze away, head sinking wearily into the pillow.
"I'm too tired," she said.
Michael was very familiar with what it felt like to be too tired to sleep. But it was also clear that sleeping wasn't the only thing Fiona was tired of. In the wake of recent events, Michael was tired of many of the same things she was—including arguments, lies, secrets, and the weight of the past.
Without giving himself a chance to think twice, Michael stood up.
"I'll be right back," he promised.
Once again making use of his perfect memory of the house's every creaky floor board and stubborn hinge, Michael made a quick, quiet trip from the spare room to the garage and back again, carrying one of the two boxes his mother had asked him to look through the day before, when she'd still been planning to sell the house.
He sat down at the foot of the bed near the shape of Fiona's feet and set the box next to him. Fiona pushed herself up on the pillows, enough to peek over the lip of the box. Her eyebrows puckered at the objects that greeted her.
"Model airplanes?" she questioned.
"My mom wanted me to go through these boxes," Michael explained. "It's stuff from when I was a kid."
"Okay…" she offered.
Michael reached through the tangle of airplane wings, toy guns, and half-finished circuit boards to retrieve the item he was looking for: a trophy with a gold steering wheel framed by a pair of sharp-edged gold wings, mounted on a dark wooden base.
"Here."
He handed the trophy to Fiona. She accepted it with her good hand, fingers running over the inscription as she read it.
"Frank Westen, First Place, Smithson Memorial."
"My dad used to race stock cars," Michael told her. "He wasn't very good at it. He only won that race because the top three cars knocked each other out."
"And you're showing me this because…?"
Michael took back the trophy and raised it to his face, placing the gold wing on the right side into the scar below his left eye.
Fiona's face darkened quickly and seriously. "How old were you?"
"Six," he replied, lowering the trophy and returning it with ironic gravity to its rightful place amid the pile of junk.
"Why?"
"He didn't need a reason."
"But you do."
"Yeah."
Michael wanted to believe the difference more than he currently did; when he blinked, he saw flashes of Strickler's blood on his hands, and Fiona's cheek red with pain, her eyes hot with tears.
"Why are you telling me this now?" Fiona wondered.
Michael lifted the box to the floor, and then used his foot to push it under the bed.
"You asked," he said. "A few days ago, after we…"
He'd always had trouble naming his physical intimacy with Fiona. Describing it as sex or fucking seemed too crude, yet he was just as incapable of calling it love.
Fiona's eyes fell. "I didn't think you'd remember."
"I remember," he assured her.
Fiona was once again studying her own fingers on the comforter as she said, "I never really had my own room growing up. Until Claire was born, I shared with Sean. Then I shared with Claire, until… After that, it was time to go."
"How old were you when you left?" Michael asked.
"Eighteen. You?"
"Seventeen."
"I haven't slept in my mother's house since."
"Me neither."
"Until now."
She looked up, and Michael looked back. He studied her eyes, her posture, and the lines around her mouth, trying to decide if he understood.
Sometimes, he knew exactly what Fiona wanted. When they were working, they often slipped into an almost magical synchronicity. When he was naked and needful with Fiona's hard curves twisting and tensing in his hands or under his weight, that synchronicity could be just as strong, and even more magical. Fiona never needed him to hold back, and never wanted him to. Instead, she wanted everything, and made him want to give it to her, even things he held dear, like his autonomy, and his self control. Yet between work and sex, when his heart wasn't racing and his life wasn't on the line, he'd always struggled to read her. He knew how to excite her and please her, and the best ways to utilize her skills in concert with his own to get the job done. But he didn't truly know how to make her happy, not without pretending to be someone else.
There were times, though, when their chemistry penetrated the quiet moments between crises and climaxes. The part of Michael that felt most alive in Fiona's presence very much hoped the present moment was one of those times, because he was fairly certain that Fiona was inviting him into bed.
Every rational fibre of his being told him to decline the invitation. Two men were dead, and Fiona and her brother had nearly joined them, all because he couldn't manage the quandary of Fiona's closeness.
But even as the rational part of him pictured standing up, flicking off the light, and walking out the door, his hands were busy undoing his belt and the buttons on his shirt.
Once he was down to his undershirt and boxers, Michael slipped into bed on the side by the window. Fiona laid on her good side facing the door while he laid on his back, close enough to feel her warmth, but not quite close enough to touch it.
"If I hadn't found out…" Fiona began. "Would you have told me?"
Michael's heart pounded in his chest as he stared at the window and recalled the escape route he'd mapped there so many years ago, from the window ledge to the drainpipe and onto the roof of the garage.
"I don't know," he admitted.
In the quiet that followed, it occurred to him that they'd moved the drainpipe several months before, after Sam had exploded the sunroom.
"Where will you go?" he asked.
The sound of his own voice almost surprised him; the question sounded strangely rhetorical, as though he were asking himself as much as her.
"I don't know," Fiona replied.
The next minutes were as tense as any that Michael had spent in that room and that bed, wondering where the next attack would come from, while knowing that, no matter how much he thought and planned, he'd always be unprepared. Yet the choices were different than they'd been twenty-five years before. Now, the window was still at his left, and the door was still at his right. But Fiona was between them both, so close he could feel the beat of her pulse through the mattress and hear her muffled breath against the pillow.
Michael's own heart raced fast enough to hurt a moment before he took the only escape he could face. Trapped between death and survival, he rolled toward Fiona's warmth.
He contemplated her spine and the texture of her tangled auburn hair before he touched them, marveling at the sight of his hand filled with something that had seemed impossible to grasp mere minutes before. Fiona laid very still as his fingers wove through her hair's wavy knots to the curled tips. As he gently swept her hair aside to reveal the nape of her neck, her breath was quick but steady under his fingertips, her pulse beating a high, even rhythm. Michael lingered in that rhythm as he fingered the soft roots of her hair, the wisps of cinnamon brown that weren't dyed or bleached by the Miami sun. When he inhaled her scent at the spot where her hair met her neck, she smelled like cordite, antiseptic, and sweat. She also smelled like the ocean.
"Michael…"
Before she'd finished whispering his name, he was already granting her unspoken plea, hands sliding down her back to the hem of her tank top. He peeled the fabric carefully up her spine to her neck, then scooped it over her head and down her shoulders. Fiona shifted to help him, then gave him enough space to slip out of his own white undershirt. Finally, they were nearly as close as they wanted to be, Fiona's bare back molded to his bare chest while her brief shorts mingled with his boxers, her firm thighs pressed tight against his groin. Michael's right arm slipped into the space between her neck and the pillow while his left hand circled her hip, index finger resting in the puckered dent of her belly button. His face remained buried in her hair, smelling and remembering.
Sometime later, Michael woke up to one of his favourite sights in the entire world: the mostly naked backside of Fiona Glenanne. She was sitting upright in the bed with her face and bare breasts pointed toward the closed door, the first light of the day laying yellowish stripes across the planes and angles of her back and shoulders. Where the light touched her hair, it fuzzed the edges with glints of red.
Michael experienced a brief, anxious case of déjà vu until Fiona turned and greeted him with a small, bright smile, made brighter by the warmth of the dawn.
"Sorry," she said. "You were getting distracting."
Michael encountered his distraction for himself as he shifted onto his back and pushed himself upright. McBride might have made a joke about the fittingness of his body's seeming reversion to teenagerhood; the joke would segue into a flirtatious challenge that Fiona, despite her wounds and weariness, would find a way to meet. But Michael Westen wasn't willing or able to move so quickly from pain to pleasure; in the first light of the present day, his fears had returned to keep him honest.
"How's your arm?" he asked.
"Better than my head."
"Do you want some more pills?"
"I'd prefer a yogurt."
Michael smiled inwardly, recalling a time when Fiona had hated yogurt.
"I could go to the—"
"But I'll settle for the pills. And some water."
Michael kicked his legs over the side of the bed and got to his feet. He took his time buttoning his shirt and slipping into his chinos, hoping to calm his distracted body before venturing back into the main thoroughfares of his mother's house. He was mostly successful, though the spectacle of Fiona's unselfconsciously naked breasts and her hint of a playful smile stirred a brief, bitter nostalgia for the relative carelessness of McBride.
With the bedroom door cracked open, he inspected the hallway, paying special attention to the slightly ajar door of his mother's room. Though she may have been listening, his mother didn't appear, allowing Michael to return quickly with a glass of water and two blue pills. He handed both items to Fiona as he resumed his seat in the wicker chair next to the bed. Fiona had crawled back into bed while he'd been gone, but was propped up enough to let her swallow the pills and several sips of water.
In the lull that followed, Michael stared at his hands resting on his knees, and then asked the same question he was asking himself.
"What now?"
Fiona's voice was quiet but light as she said, "It's still early."
For once, he knew exactly what she wanted—because he wanted it, too. Without another word, Michael slipped back out of his clothes and into bed, where he sighed into the press of Fiona's cheek on his chest and the weight of her injured arm across his ribs.
Fiona fell asleep quickly, surrendering to her painkillers and exhaustion. But Michael remained awake, looking up at the popcorn ceiling but seeing somewhere else.
He'd laid with Fiona's body draped across his many times, in many different beds. After Jimmy O'Connor's New Year's party, they'd laid that way in Fiona's queen-size bed under a quilt stitched by her grandmother. Then, too, Fiona had slept while he'd stayed awake—thinking, and scared of his own thoughts.
From that night, Michael could still remember the tickle of Fiona's sticky hair on his bare skin and the boozy dampness of her breath against his neck. He also remembered how, even in sleep, Fiona's tiny fist had remained curled against his chest. At the time, it had struck Michael as a strangely protective gesture, very unlike the woman he'd known an hour before, who'd thrown his body against the wall and herself against his body, wrenching kisses from his lips and trying to make him beg. That Fiona had been fearless, but the Fiona who slept with her hand in a fist was vulnerable—more vulnerable than Michael had ever seen her, or imagined she could be. Realizing that, Michael had suddenly been scared in a way he hadn't been when Fiona had cocked a loaded revolver in his gut, or when her brothers had watched him leave the dancehall with the sister that nobody fucked with drunk and practically undressing him on the cold January street. Partly, he'd been scared because he'd been undercover and engaged to another woman, and had never meant to end up in Fiona Glenanne's bed once, let alone often. But Fiona's fist against his chest had also scared him because he'd understood it, and knew that he always would.
Just as he'd done a decade before, Michael kept his thoughts to himself as he wrapped his arm around Fiona's shoulders and pulled her deeper into his body, determined to hold her close until the day made him stop.
~END~ (for now...)
A/N: Sorry it took so long to get this chapter out there—but at least I just managed to make it in time for the holidays!
I'm hoping you'll grant some artistic license with a few of the practical details in this one. Among other things, I'm pretty sure that in the episode, Michael uses the H&K to shoot Strickler; it's also pretty unclear how much time is supposed to have passed between the scene where Fiona gets shot and the last scene at Madeline's house. But hopefully these and other possible diversions are worth it.
Absolutely no clue what I'm going to write next, but I'll look for inspiration in all the wonderful suggestions you've left in your reviews :) 'Til next time—have a safe and happy holiday, and an even better New Year!
