Emily Foran found herself climbing the stairs to Michael Westen's loft. It was the culmination of three years' work and a craving that has lasted much longer than that.
"It's open." Michael called out to her before she could knock on the door.
She pushed the door open and was surprised by the minimal furniture that Michael had. Because Michael was usually impeccably dressed for his jobs, she had assumed that his home would also be well presented.
"Afternoon Emily," Michael greeted her pleasantly. "Or should I call you Lauren."
"You remembered," Lauren Scone smiled.
"Yes. I had a look into you." Michael nodded. "It turns out that around three and a half years ago, records for Emily Foran disappear altogether."
"And you immediately thought of me." Lauren laughed.
"Lauren, what are you doing?" Michael sighed. "Working with Strickler. Wasting three years of your life to track me down. This isn't what your parents would have wanted."
"Don't you dare talk about my parents." Lauren shouted.
"Mike, are you in there?" Sam asked as he approached the door to the loft. "Strickler said you were in trouble."
"Sam. Leave. This doesn't concern you." said Michael as Sam came inside.
"Who is she?" Sam asked, looking at Lauren.
"This is Lauren Scone. Strickler knows her as Emily Foran." Michael replied.
"This is Emily?" said Fiona coming in behind Sam.
"Tom sent you." Lauren glanced at Sam. Then she turned to Michael. "He really does like you."
"Michael, what is going on in here?" Asked Fiona.
"He shot my parents." Lauren accused.
"There must be some kind of mistake. Michael would never do that." Sam said, defensive.
"I did kill them, Sam." Michael admitted.
"When did this happen, Michael?" Sam asked.
Michael didn't answer him directly but turned to Scone instead. "Lauren, I'm not sure what you want to hear from me. What I was able to say, I already said when we were in Bosnia."
"You didn't say anything. You just told me to hide. Then you shot them." Lauren protested.
"You weren't supposed to see that." Michael said, quietly.
"So it's alright for you to kill them then. As long as I don't see it." Lauren spat in reply.
"Michael what is she talking about?" Fiona asked.
"She was only a child so I got her to hide in a cupboard. I didn't expect her to come back out. She saw the whole thing and I had to knock her unconscious so she wouldn't scream. Then I hid her back into the cupboard where she was meant to be hiding." Michael recounted.
"You skipped the part where you explain why you had to kill her parents," said Sam.
"They would have been captured by the Russian secret service and most likely tortured to death." Michael explained.
"You bastard. We were going to evacuate with everyone else. You made us stay back and we became sitting ducks. If I wasn't a child, you would have shot me too. Now you're calling it a mercy kill." Lauren shouted and had to be held back by Fiona to keep her from punching Michael in the face (or worse).
"If you had evacuated, you would have gone out into a war zone. All the civilian planes had been grounded and they were searching vehicles on all the main roads." Michael replied. "Short of England sending in a military plane, there was no way to safely get you guys out of the country and I couldn't protect you out on the streets."
"My parents trusted you and now they're both dead." Lauren shouted. "I helped you to convince them to stay back. Now I have to live with that for the rest of my life, knowing that I contributed to their deaths."
"What happened after you shot her parents?" Fiona asked.
"I was captured." Michael replied, simply.
"Mike, that's never happened before." said Sam. "You always protect your asset. And if they get captured, you go with them and then you try to free them from the inside. What did her parents know that was so important you couldn't risk them getting captured?"
"Her father had an endemic memory. Before computers became common place, you either lug around a huge filing cabinet everywhere you went or you store your intel inside another person. Her father had a lot of intelligence that would have been damaging to the US if they were ever leaked." Michael explained.
"So that was part of your mission. If you couldn't protect him, you were to kill him." Fiona said, horrified.
"Yes." Michael nodded, avoiding her eyes.
Lauren had heard what she came to hear and felt a strong pull to do something highly illegal. Fiona meanwhile was overcome with her own grievances and she stopped holding onto Lauren.
"So you want to get back in with them to do this kind of work? You really want to be part of something like that?" Fiona shouted.
"You don't want to do that Emily," Sam cautioned as Lauren held out a pocket knife, standing over Michael.
"If you really think that stabbing me will help you to heal then by all means, go ahead. I won't stop you." said Michael, unfazed by the weapon.
"Emily, I know how you feel right now. I'd like to strangle him myself. But it's really not worth it." Said Fiona.
"Yeah, you'll get blood everywhere and it'll be extremely messy to clean up. Plus you've got two witnesses and you really don't want to go down for three homicides." Sam chimed in.
"Lauren, what you're feeling right now, I want you to remember it." Michael advised.
"You don't know what I'm feeling." Lauren replied.
"You seem to think that it's really easy to kill. Until you're actually standing here in front of me with a knife, you didn't have any second thoughts. And if you did, you just ignored them." Michael explained. "But now that it looks like you might actually have a chance to commit that act, every doubt that you've ever had is running through your head and making you dizzy. I've certainly killed more people than you have and I still get that every time."
"That's just adrenaline," Lauren countered.
"Keep telling yourself that," said Michael.
Lauren gave Michael a look of pure hatred before dropping the knife onto the floor with a clank. Then she promptly collapsed into Fiona's shoulders and started sobbing.
"What?" Fiona glanced at Michael, not knowing what to do. Calming someone who's crying was not a strength of hers.
"She's relieved. Coming here was a cathartic experience for her." said Michael.
"Michael, next time you have the descendent of a deceased asset come over to kill you in revenge, you might want to mention that to your friends." Sam said as he picked up Lauren's knife and placed it on Michael's workbench.
"She wasn't really going to kill me, Sam." Michael replied.
"How do you know?" Lauren shouted from Fiona's shoulder.
"Because that's just not how you kill people." Michael laughed. "Killing is not exciting. It's not like a sport where you have to get yourself worked up for it."
Michael picked up a small packet of tissues from his bench and handed them to Fiona who gave them to Lauren.
"If you had come here with a cold calculating calm then I would fear for my life." Michael continued. "In the state that you're currently in, you're more likely to accidentally stab yourself than you would be to stab me in the right place to make me bleed out."
"I could stab you in the right place if you want," said Fiona.
"Are you two a..." Lauren glanced from Fiona to Michael.
"Don't call it a thing." Sam advised. "They don't like it when you call it that."
"Lauren, I wasn't joking when I said that you shouldn't be working for Strickler." Michael said more seriously.
"This coming from the man who's been working with him himself." Lauren shot back.
"I don't have a choice. You do. You can walk away from this. Espionage and assassination isn't for everyone." Michael advised. "One day your job is going to get you killed, that's pretty much a given. You don't need that."
"Your alias is a doctor. Are you really a doctor?" Sam asked.
"Yes. I really do have a doctorate in Criminology. I wanted to be a cop." Lauren replied.
"What changed your mind?" Michael asked.
"The legal side of it. Law and Criminology really don't go well together." Emily observed.
"Yeah but you're not on the legal side of it. You just catch the bad guys. The courts deal with the legal side of it." said Michael.
"I just don't want to spend nine months catching a guy if his lawyer is just going to get him out again. That's not how I want to work." Lauren replied.
"You'll figure out a path." Said Michael.
"I'm not going to stop working for Strickler." Lauren announces. "Most of his associates are pretty shady. But it's a useful network to have. I was thinking that if he ever takes a vacation, I could step in and run some projects of my own."
End