Just Moments Chapter 12

Disclaimer: Takes place during 2x19 from Sean's and Alex's points of view. What Alex said in 2x20 also kind of informs what she tells Sean about them. So it's kind of Salex talking about Mikita lol.

Btw "Wrath" was a truly EPIC, amazing episode. I loved everything about it and Maggie Q was just phenomenal. Dark!Nikita is so badass. Ugh I just LOVE when Maggie and Shane have scenes together; they always play off of each other so perfectly. And that Mikita scene in the basement was just….words fail me. It was utterly right for their characters, and dark and tormented and full of love. FLAWLESS!

My dissertation has taken over my life, which is why I haven't updated in forever. Many apologies. And for those of you still reading my fics thank you so much and I love you all!

Michael's view will be up in the next chapter, and will take place after the events in the basement in 2x19.

Understanding

Through the grief and the anger at his mother's death, Sean surprised himself with the flash of fear that ran through him when Michael's voice reported over the Coms that Brant had captured Nikita. He felt Alex's sudden tension beside him, heard Bikhoff frantically checking every camera looking for a potential getaway car, and knew with every second that passed that their ability to get her back was vanishing.

By the time Sean and Alex took their seats and the Minister began his sermon, Michael had quite clearly realized that they were never going to find Nikita this way, and changed tactics. Division's former second in command was utterly emotionless when he ordered Birkhoff to begin a system wide search of the area and told Alex to wait with Sean until the end of the funeral. Then he signed off the Com and there was silence.

Alex whispered, "Birkhoff, he'll be home shortly. Try and keep him calm until we get there."

Sean heard Birkhoff give a choked laugh. "Yeah right. Mikey is going to be totally up a wall. You never had to deal with him when she used to get in trouble back at Division –- "

He trailed off abruptly.

Then he suddenly snarled, "God dammit! She better not be dead. This will kill him; this will honestly kill him…." They heard him take a couple of deep breaths.

Then his voice again, studiedly calm. "I'll tell you if I find anything." And then he too was gone.

That funeral was definitely not relaxing or cathartic. Sean spent the entire time with every nerve of his screaming for him to go and find the man who had killed his mother, interspersed with a vague sense of worry for Alex who looked almost sick, as though she were imagining what was happening to her mentor while they did nothing but wait.

Birkhoff didn't call them back and Sean avoided multiple tickets as he drove back to Michael and Nikita's house well above the speed limit. They entered to find Michael in full Leader of Operations mode.

Sean had always viewed Michael as reserved to the point of unemotional – an agent capable of burying any and all issues deep inside in order to complete the mission. Whenever Sean had interacted with Michael and Nikita, it had always been Nikita who had taken lead. It was Nikita who had sat before him offering him a glass of water and trying to talk him to their side, Nikita who had decided to trust him enough to watch their backs, and then to watch Alex's back in Russia. Michael had been a silent barrier of strength at her side; someone who offered suggestions and argued when he felt it necessary, but who had essentially remained an enigma to Sean.

No hint of emotion was betrayed by Michael's face even now, but Sean could clearly read the tension in his voice and in his body language. His voice was too loud, nervous energy tightly coiled in his shoulders and arms, and he looked unable to remain still as he ordered Birkhoff to widen their search area. He looked angry but Sean had never been able to understand the relationship between Michael and Nikita, and even now he couldn't tell how concerned Michael was. Sean himself would have been yelling, unable to concentrate, filled only with the need to find her if it had been Alex would had been taken, or one of his sisters…or his mother. But Nikita wasn't any of them and Sean could remain objective. He recognized that they weren't going to find her this way.

Birkhoff looked absolutely frazzled but he was shooting concerned looks at Michael whenever he thought the other wasn't looking.

"The trail's already gone cold. We have to figure out where he would take her," Sean felt obliged to point out, wondering why the others hadn't figured this out yet.

Alex, though, was obviously thinking about something else and had apparently recognized the extent of Michael's distress. To Sean's surprise she quickly went up to Michael, reached out and lightly touched his arm, and began to offer reassurances. And then Sean was completely floored to see Michael glance at her for a split-second like a drowning man being offered a rope. It was the slightest flash across the other man's face, but Alex had quite clearly seen it and known what it meant for she tried to get Michael to focus.

"Okay, what do we know about him? His habits?"

It was the basic place to start, something Michael should have known in his sleep, and that question started to allow Sean to see how close the other was to losing it. He watched Michael with concern and thankfully Birkhoff had found a lead they could follow. Sean watched with a bit of awe as the lead, slim though it was, brought Michael back – cold concentration and lethal intent all fixed on finding this one woman.

And Sean, who had given up on finding Nikita almost as soon as she had been taken – something he would never tell Alex or the others – felt a tiny glimmer of hope in the face of Michael's unwavering resolve.

…..

It was on the car trip back to Pennsylvania, following a discrete distance behind Michael's car, that Sean decided to bring up the subject with Alex. What with one thing and another, he'd never had a chance to ask her what she thought of Michael and Nikita and Birkhoff. The several hours it would take them to get to the place where Michael was supposed to give himself up, seemed like the perfect opportunity. And, truth be told, Sean was a bit confused by it all. Everything had been happening so quickly lately, from believing anyone associated with Nikita was a traitor to the country to realizing that Division was the true traitor, and he just wanted to take a moment and understand some things. He wanted to know how Alex had realized what the truth was. He wanted to know what it was about these people that allowed them to take on what was essentially a highly-trained private army, and have said army on the defensive.

"He does know that there's a good chance that by giving himself up to Brant he'll end up dead, right?" He glanced quickly at Alex's profile as she stared out her window.

Alex's voice was suspiciously flat as she answered, "yeah, he knows."

There was silence for awhile

Sean had to ask. "So he's going there to –" he paused a bit over the words, "-die with her?"

Alex turned back to look at him and her voice was surprisingly soft as she said, "I don't think he would be able to live without her. I don't think she would be able to live without him." She turned away from him again.

"How the hell did that happen? I mean, I viewed the mission reports from last year. He spent months trying to track her down and kill her! Was he….was he on her side the entire time?"

Alex laughed a bit.

"I spent so much of last year trying to figure their relationship out, and even I don't know everything. But I do know that he was never trying to kill her."

Sean didn't say anything, willing her to go on.

She sighed next to him. "It's kind of fascinating isn't it? Their relationship? Kind of romantic, I've always thought; two hot, badass, brilliant assassins on opposing sides, trying to fight their attraction to one another."

Sean looked at her as though she were crazy.

"What?" she demanded, slightly affronted. "I am a girl."

"So he was in love with her while she was still at Division?"

"Yes. At least, that's what Birkhoff told me. Said that Michael was always so overprotective about Nikita since basically the day she entered the program. Said that he used to tease Michael about it whenever he had to let Nikita go off on missions alone."

There was a thoughtful pause for a moment or two.

"You know, Nikita never told me any of this before I went into Division. Anything about Michael I mean." Off of Sean's look she elaborated. "She told me that he would protect me and the other recruits the best that he could. She told me that he was always arguing with Percy about the correct way to run Division. But she didn't tell me anything about how she felt about him.

"I probably should have guessed though. I mean, she trained me the way he trained her. Her voice would go all fond and reminiscent whenever she would explain "Michael says this…." Or "Michael thinks that….." or "Michael would do this…..".

"I think she wanted me to make up my own mind about him, but from the very first moment I got there everyone was comparing me to Nikita. Everyone. Percy, Amanda, that creepy doctor, the weird guy who worked in psy-ops. Michael never told me I was like Nikita but he was very overprotective of me too and sometimes when I would say something or do something, he would look at me as though he'd just seen a ghost.

"The first clue that I got that there was something more between them though was my first mission. I was in this penthouse and these terrorists broke in to grab the guy I was with. The rest of the Division team was dead and Michael was fighting them and he got trapped. Nikita was on the opposite roof-top and she had one shot she could take – either to kill the guy they were grabbing or help Michael. She didn't even hesitate when it looked like Michael was in trouble. It was a hell of a shot. I remember him going over to the window after it was over and just staring out at her and thinking that everything was more complicated than I had thought it would be at first."

"So she saved him a couple times. Is that how she convinced him to trust her?"

Alex was silent for a little longer.

"The first Division mission that she foiled, Michael came back with a bullet in his shoulder."

"Wait,what? She shot him?"

Alex started laughing lightly. "Yup. She told me once, long afterwards, that the only thing she'd been scared off when she'd declared war against Division, was that Michael would be the one to kill her. She said that she confronted him on that first mission and she gave him a choice while he held her at gunpoint. He could either kill her, or let her go.

"I told her that that had been a really stupid thing to do. It had been three years since she'd last seen him, who knows how he could have changed in the meantime." Alex smiled. "Nikita always used to say that Michael was incorruptible; that Percy had never been able to take the boy scout out of him. Amanda told me once that that was why Percy made Michael his right-hand man. A good right-hand man is someone who will argue with you and whose views are different from yours.

"Anyway, Nikita said that she gave Michael that choice in the alley because if he had killed her, it wouldn't have mattered anyway because she would have lost him either way."

Sean's eyes flickered rapidly away from the road and over to Alex's face. She looked incredibly sad.

"When he let her go, she shot him in order to make sure Percy never found out how much she cared about him. I think he would have had no qualms about killing Michael if he'd ever found out they were in love.

"Michael holds her together Sean, can't you see that? He was the one who took the broken pieces of her former life and helped her rebuild herself. Percy and Amanda like to think that they did that – that they made Nikita who she is – but it was Michael. The only times I have ever seen her about to break, are when she thinks she's lost Michael.

"And she makes him alive. She teases him Sean. I know they haven't been very open when you're around, but let me tell you, it is adorable. She's the only one who can get away with it too. She'll say something funny or provocative and give him this little challenging look out of the corner of her eyes and he'll honest-to-god smile.

"She can get through all his detachment so easily. Even back at Division, he was always so angry at her, so intense about anything to do with her."

"So Percy never found out? How could he not see it?"

"Birkhoff didn't even see it. He thought that it was just an attraction on both their parts. He told me that he thought that up until the moment when Amanda discovered that Nikita had planted a tiny transmitter in one of his teeth."

"Wait, one of Birkhoff's teeth?"

"Um hm. She'd captured him and knocked him out and placed it there in order to throw them off my trail. Birkhoff said that Michael and Percy walked in and that when Michael heard that the mole inside Division was actually inside Birkhoff's molar he started laughing. Birkhoff said that he realized later that evening that it had been the first time Michael had laughed since Nikita had vanished three years before. And that's when he started to suspect that Michael was in love with her.

"Amanda always said that Percy never really understood Michael. That he thought Michael was more like him, and that the dalliance with Nikita had been just a dalliance. He suspected something though, because he kept testing Michael." Alex shuddered at bit at the memory. "Let's not talk about that though…..wasn't pleasant," she muttered.

"They've both lost so much and yet when they're together…they're happy. She challenges him, makes him feel alive and he's her moral center, the one person who can get through to her no matter what. They balance each other perfectly and sometimes they're so similar that it's really funny; both so stubborn and principled and tough…I never thought…I mean you read about a love like theirs, but I never thought I'd actually see it take place in front of me."

Sean heard the awe in her voice and a faint undercurrent of longing and he wanted to reach out to her; tell her that maybe, just maybe, she could have something like what Michael and Nikita obviously shared. But now wasn't the time for that conversation. They had a mission to complete.

"We can be there in ten minutes," Alex told Birkhoff over the coms as Sean hit the accelerator.

"They might not have ten minutes," the other returned, "so move." And they made it in eight.

Sean pulled over to the side of the road some ways down from 52 Willow Lane, uncertain of whether Brant would be able to spot them from the house.

As they excited the car a woman's scream rent the air, filled with anger and fear and pain, and Alex stiffened. "Nikita," she breathed. "Oh my God," and then she was hurtling down the street, Sean right beside her. The next few minutes passed in a blur. Sean kicked down the front door, scoping out corners, Alex covering his six.

They heard the fight coming from the basement and moved quickly towards the rear of the house.

And then Sean's vision crystalized, everything coming into agonizingly cold clarity. His breathing calm and steady he looked down the stairs and saw Michael tied to a chair and lying on the ground, struggling to move. He moved down, saw a huge man he knew was Brant with his arms around Nikita's neck chocking the life out of her.

There was no hesitation in him when he pulled the trigger.

Brant spun towards him at the impact and Sean fired again until the man went down. In the sudden silence he heard Nikita's gasping breaths and watched as she fell to her knees and crawled over to Michael, her shaking hands reaching for his face. He felt Alex run around him to help them. He walked slowly over to the psychopath who had killed his mother in order to hurt someone else, and looking down into those soulless eyes, Sean fired one last time.