Set a day after the end of "Mind Games," Season 5, Episode 3 (with references to "Bloodlines," Season 5, Episode 2)


The night Michael asked Fiona to move in with him was wonderful in all the ways Michael had hoped it would be: Fiona's eyes had gone wide with a hint of sheen a moment before she'd said yes with a kiss, and then taken him to bed.

Everything they'd done to each other while Max's jazz CD had played and finally petered out on the new stereo should have made Michael exhausted and happy, and for a while, it had; he'd fallen asleep with only Fiona's body to cover him and strands of her disheveled hair stuck to his open lips. But he'd woken up too few hours later with a pounding heart and a certainty of impending doom, his lungs aching under Fiona's weight. His wide eyes had gone first to the double-bolted steel door before landing on his box of files—the ones that held four years of research on the people who burned him. Michael knew should have given the files to the CIA, but in that moment of semi-conscious, single-minded clarity, he'd also known why he hadn't, and that he never would.

The sun had been glinting in the window above the bed by the time Michael had fallen back into a restless sleep. He'd dreamed about receipts, account numbers, and the last spark of life in the eyes of the final man on the NOC list until Fiona had woken him with a rough elbow to the ribs, demanding breakfast and an in-depth discussion of where they'd install the shelf for her snow globes and store her extensive and occasionally exotic collections of clothes and weapons. Michael had rubbed his ribs and smiled, the memory of his sleepless night overwhelmed by the perfection of the silver sunshine on Fiona's careless nudity and the even-more-perfect thought that the morning was wonderful in all the ways he'd hoped it would be.

Two weeks had passed since that day. During that time, Michael had helped Fiona build new closets and hiding places for most of her shoes and guns, impersonated his father during an interrogation, met his first nephew, and rarely made it through the night without waking up reeling with half-remembered nightmares. Worse than his sleeplessness was the fact that his dreams had begun to color his waking world. Three days before, while he and Fiona had been shopping for drapes on Lincoln Road, he'd attacked a man armed with a teddy bear, knocking his un-resisting body against the wall before he'd realized his mistake. As Fiona had pulled him off the innocent, middle-aged father and begun to make excuses and apologies, Michael had been frozen in speechless shock, unsure of the year, the city, and even his own eyes and hands. His disorientation had passed quickly, but had returned in dreams that no longer seemed like dreams. The night after the teddy bear incident, Michael had jolted awake aiming his H&K P30 at the steel door of the loft, conflicting scenes flickering in his open eyes. He'd seen the door closed and locked in between the fireball of an explosion and a black-ops strike force that would shoot Fiona and take him alive, pulling a dark bag over his head and clamping his wrists and ankles with shackles that wouldn't leave his body for the rest of his sunless days. He'd also seen the door of his childhood bedroom, closed but uselessly locked against the sound and fury beyond it.

Now, it was 5:49 pm on Friday, and Michael was standing in the driveway of his mother's house with that same mother's attempt at tuna casserole moving reluctantly through his digestive tract, squinting into the sun as he watched his brother fight to close the overloaded trunk of a metallic blue Chevy Malibu. Nate's wife Ruth was sitting in the passenger's seat, busily filing and examining her nails while the baby slumbered obliviously in his car seat. Michael forced himself to remember that the baby had a name—Charlie. He also forced himself to remember that he was Charlie's uncle. The latter fact should have been impossible to forget; even through the sun-blurred windows of the sedan, the three-month-old Charlie already looked very much like Nate—and at least a little bit like himself.

Momentarily dislocated in time, Michael nearly started at the sudden closeness of Nate's voice at his side.

"Any big Friday night plans?"

"Not particularly," Michael replied, and it was true; for once, he didn't have any pressing jobs, and when he was conscious and thinking clearly, he was fairly sure no one was actively trying to kill him.

"Fiona'll probably be looking for you, though. Gotta say, bro—never thought I'd see you tied down."

"I'm not—" Michael stopped himself when he realized the defensiveness of what he'd been about to say. "Fiona has her own things going on," he amended.

"Every woman has her own things going on," said Nate, circling the car to the driver's side. "Doesn't mean they don't want you there at the end of a long week."

Michael wanted to observe the irony of his brother giving him relationship advice, but was silenced by the fact and the reason Fiona hadn't been present at the Friday afternoon lunch that even the usually recalcitrant Ruth had deigned to attend. Fiona hadn't been there because Michael hadn't asked her. And he hadn't asked her because of what had happened the night before. Michael had spent most of that night bent over his workbench looking for new patterns in scraps of paper he'd already memorized, barely hearing Fiona's pleas to come back to bed until he'd stopped hearing them altogether, because she'd stopped calling.

"I'll try to remember that," Michael promised. He swallowed before adding something he'd rarely said to his younger brother. "Thanks."

Nate paused with his hand on the car door, his typical wide-eyed bewilderment giving way to a glimmer of wisdom that was less typical, and more than a little unsettling. Over Nate's shoulder, Ruth had grown bored with her fingernails and looked ready to start honking the horn, Charlie's slumber be damned.

"Well," Nate declared, blinking free of own moment of dislocation. "We'd better take off. Ruth's got a shift at Magic City, which means I need a nap before a long night of being Mr. Mom—you know how it is."

"I really don't."

If Nate heard his brother's sarcasm, he deliberately ignored it. "Take care of yourself, bro."

Michael's tone was genuine when he replied, "You too."

Once the Malibu was safely out of sight, Michael's mother appeared in the house's open doorway. She flicked cigarette ash into her decidedly unhealthy flowerbed as she pronounced, "I still can't stand that woman."

As Michael turned to face her, she added, "We can only hope Charlie takes after our side of the family."

Michael made a show of checking the watch he'd already checked two minutes before. "Look at the time. I should—"

"Nate's right, you know."

Immediately, Michael regretted pausing to check his watch. Because he had to, he asked, "Right about what?"

"About you needing to take care of yourself."

"What did Nate tell you?"

"He didn't have to tell me anything."

Michael looked at her until she admitted, "Fiona told me."

The unexpected revelation made him blink, and drop his eyes to his T-shirt. He wanted to ask what, exactly, Fiona had said, but couldn't—because it would show that he cared, and because there was a part of him that didn't want to know.

As his mother tapped more ash into the flowerbed, she said, "If you want something to help you sleep—"

"I'm fine," Michael interrupted quickly. "Really." He tried to sound convincing, but was dismayed by his seemingly limited control over the shape of his words.

"Then make sure you keep it that way."

Another, different son might have been comforted by the way the softness of his mother's eyes belied the gruffness of her tone. But for Michael, that softness was as unsettling as his brother's wisdom. As he bid a quick goodbye and retreated to his car, Michael heard the child he'd been bristling at the presumption of his mother's love, which had so rarely helped him and never kept him safe. Thankfully, he still had enough self-control to make sure that voice remained hidden—from his mother, if not from himself.

Michael took a circuitous route to the loft, avoiding the freeways in favor of the winding side streets he'd committed to memory during his years as a teenage car thief. He was driving the Infiniti G37 he'd been leasing since the resumption of his regular government paychecks and the explosion that hadn't quite destroyed the Charger. Michael had let Jesse choose the car, a concession to the younger man's incredulity at his insistence he didn't have a preference beyond a reliable engine, a manual transmission, and a decent-sized trunk. The Infiniti matched Jesse's glowing descriptions; it was quiet on the highway with a nice growl between second and third, and handled nimbly in close quarters. Yet despite his professed indifference, Michael missed the distinctive groans of the Charger and the challenge of coaxing its bulk around the same tight corners the Infiniti tackled with ease. He even missed the way the Charger's white steering wheel would rattle under his fingers when it pushed 65.

By the time he'd shifted into fourth on the first straightaway, Michael's thoughts had also shifted, from the perhaps irreparably damaged Charger to his equally damaged relationship with Fiona. They hadn't talked about the night before. The morning had been brief and deceptively tranquil before they'd gone their separate ways, he to a meeting with Max followed by a few hours of working on the Charger and a late lunch with his family, she to a spa appointment that was likely something else. Michael hadn't pressed for details, knowing that Fiona's white lies were often for his benefit, and that he'd always kept more secrets from her.

During the morning and throughout the day, Michael had tried to be grateful for the détente. But instead, the unease he'd felt over breakfast had clawed its way from the back of his mind to the front. Difficult nights followed by too-quiet mornings reminded him of too many other nights and mornings, with Fiona and long before her. It was a pattern he'd hoped to break by asking Fiona to move in with him. Yet against all his hopes and confirming too many fears, he'd followed that pattern to where he was now—avoiding Fiona and the first place he'd ever truly called home in favor of spending time with a fancy car he didn't even enjoy driving.

For Michael, sleepless nights weren't particularly unusual. They were, however, unusual when he was lying next to Fiona, at least on those nights when he'd willingly extended or accepted an invitation to be there. A decade ago, he'd slept as soundly as he'd ever done wrapped in Fiona's warmth, whether they were in his single bed with the squeaky spring or in her too-large bed wedged into her too-small bedroom, where any overly passionate embrace might send one or both of them careening into the wall. Despite the even-more-tumultuous nature of their relationship in Miami, Michael had often slept just as soundly within the heat and rhythm of Fiona's body, sated by the rightness of his limbs twined with hers and content in the knowledge there was a second gun under the pillow and another trusted set of eyes and ears watching the darkness and listening to the silence.

Yet during the past two weeks, Fiona's presence had made everything worse as often as it had made anything better. For every night Michael had been lulled to sleep by the strong, familiar pulse of Fiona's heart against his skin, there was another night he'd laid awake paralyzed by that same pulse, disturbed as much by his half-remembered dreams as by the thought of Fiona waking up, and seeing his struggle to manage them.

The better, rational part of him knew he shouldn't be afraid of looking weak in front of Fiona. In the ten years he'd known her, Fiona had already seen some of his worst and weakest moments. Fiona had seen him beaten, shot, and hurting; she'd watched him cry, bleed, and lie for days in a hospital bed dependent on nurses and her own strong shoulder to help him empty his bladder and move between the bed and a wheelchair. Amid those physical traumas and elsewhere, Fiona had also seen him make mistakes and disappoint people who deserved better, including herself. Fiona had seen all of those things, and forgiven him—not unconditionally, but honestly, and with a depth of love that could be humbling, frightening, and confusing, sometimes all at once.

Michael also knew, however, that Fiona's forgiveness presented its own challenges. Fiona didn't forgive with comforting words and her own apologies; instead, she forgave with new and increased demands upon his strength. Sometimes, Michael was eager to meet her challenges. But it was always hard; both of the times Fiona had devotedly guarded his broken body, she'd kicked him awake to air a litany of grievances, making plans and threats while he'd still been struggling to swallow instead of vomit.

Three nights ago, when he'd woken up pointing his H&K at an imaginary strike team, Fiona had very clearly been out of her element. That night, though Fiona's fingers and lips had been tender nuzzling his hair and the nape of his sweaty neck, there'd been a hint of frustration in her voice when she'd told him it was just another dream. After Michael had finally convinced himself to believe her, that frustration had disturbed him almost as much as his nightmare had done. Something in Fiona's words and tone had reminded him of the way a weary adult might speak to a child—or, to a man who'd lost his mind.

Fiona's presence had disturbed him even more when she'd woken up to find him bent over the files she'd thought he'd destroyed. Even after the incident with the imaginary strike team and the scene with teddy bear, Michael hadn't truly believed he might be crazy until Fiona had looked at him like he was. When he'd torn himself away from his files long enough to reassure Fiona he wasn't losing his grip on reality, the sight of himself in her eyes had left him barely able to reassure himself.

The summer sun had started to set by the time Michael finally pulled the Infiniti into the driveway next to Fiona's Genesis and climbed the rusted stairs to the loft's bomb-warped door. As he turned the key in the lock, there was a piece of him that hoped Fiona wouldn't be there—that despite the presence of her car in the driveway, she'd confirm what he'd said to Nate, and be busy with her own schemes and hobbies. But when he opened the door, there she was—sprawled across the crisply made bed just like she'd been so many times before, propped up on her elbows above the pages of a magazine with her bare feet kicking the air behind her head. She was wearing a creamed-colored, lace-trimmed romper that should have made her look her look childish, but didn't, something in the lean, hard muscles in her calves and arms and the frown that creased her lips revealing a bit too much of who she was—a woman who'd seen and survived everything the world could throw at her, and then kicked it in the crotch for good measure.

As usual, she looked at home in his bed. During Michael's first weeks in Miami, when he'd been so certain everything was wrong and no one was where they should be, Fiona's confident intrusions had often unnerved and even angered him; he'd hated the way she'd so easily accepted the loft as her home and Miami as his, not understanding or appreciating all the very good reasons he'd left. In the four years that followed, he and Fiona would fight as often as they fucked and nearly die a hundred times; once, they'd almost die in each other's arms. They'd also work together to save dozens of lives and bring down a massive, decades-old network of double agents. It would take all of that to convince Michael there might be as many good reasons to stay as to go, and to finally ask Fiona to share his space and his life—a life that was thoroughly unlike anything he'd ever imagined, yet also infinitely better, in no small part because Fiona was in it. As Fiona looked up from her magazine, Michael tried to remember that truth and everything he'd nearly lost before he'd found it, while trying even harder to ignore the frightening implications of the fact he needed reminding.

He offered Fiona a small smile of greeting before dropping his eyes and proceeding toward the kitchen. On the way, he walked past signs of the recent merging of their lives, and its lingering debris. Fiona's snow globes were displayed inside a new shelving unit where the workbench used to be, and half-full and unopened boxes were stacked and clustered along more than one wall, waiting to be sorted through, argued over, and finally integrated into his living space's erstwhile starkness.

Fiona shoved the magazine away from her face and herself off the bed to follow him. "You're later than I thought you'd be."

"Sorry. I had to put in some time at my mom's house, visiting Nate and Ruth."

"And Charlie, presumably."

"And Charlie," he agreed, wondering why he suddenly needed so many reminders about the basic facts of his life.

"You should have called. I could have come with you."

As Michael opened the fridge to retrieve a blueberry yogurt, he said, "I thought you'd prefer not to be subjected to that much of my family at one time."

Fiona shrugged as she leaned against the slatted table. "Family's family."

Michael watched her across the table while pretending to concentrate on his yogurt. He knew from experience that Fiona's family was hardly The Waltons, though they were also very unlike his own family. Where the violence in his family had been cruel and pointless, the violence in hers had been passionate and purposeful, united around a cause and the sometimes-painful love and loyalty it required.

Fiona nodded at his yogurt. "Didn't you eat at Madeline's?"

"Not more than I had to."

"You know, if I hated cooking, and I was bad at it, I think I'd stop trying."

"Clearly, you're not my mother."

"Clearly."

Their eyes met quickly, and parted awkwardly.

Fiona propelled herself away from the table to initiate the change of topic that they both suddenly needed. "Well, the important thing is, you got here just in time."

"In time for what?"

"To make a decision. I got you two presents today, and you get to choose which one you want first."

"Okay..."

Fiona sashayed her way to the floor-to-ceiling window framed by square glass bricks on the South wall of the loft. From behind a stack of unpacked boxes, she pulled out a large ream of fabric with a loud print of interlocking green and yellow banana leaves.

Unfurling the fabric over her arm, she declared, "Behind door number one—our new drapes, which you get to help me hang."

Withholding his opinion of the tropical spectacle that was destined to consume almost an entire wall of his home, Michael asked, "And behind door number two...?"

Fiona dropped the drapes onto the nearest pile of boxes and walked back to the bed. Half-expecting a gun or a throwing knife, Michael blinked at the very different item she withdrew from under the pillow: a medium-sized, orange-yellow bottle.

Fiona cocked her hip and stoked the bottle like a Barker's Beauty as she said, "The home version of the massage you turned down the other day."

Michael took his time swallowing his final mouthful of yogurt, then just as slowly lowered his spoon. In the long moment he studied her, Fiona continued to pose, her thin, sharp index finger scraping down the length of the bottle and up again before swirling seductively around the cap.

What Fiona was suggesting wasn't her style. Fiona was a sensual lover, but not a particularly patient one. Once they started, she usually liked to sprint to the finish with an eye on the rematch. But that wasn't the only reason to be suspicious of her invitation. It didn't take three decades in intelligence for Michael to know he was being manipulated. Choosing the massage would mean admitting Fiona was right, and he was wrong—about his burn notice investigation, and about needing outside help to manage his nightmares. And that was something Michael wasn't ready to do, especially after learning that Fiona had betrayed his trust by discussing his mental state not only with his Sam and his brother, but also his mother.

Flashing a cool smile that he knew would annoy her, Michael said, "Let's do the drapes."

"Fine," Fiona agreed, her voice tightly sweet as she met his cool smile with one of her own. "But we'll need a climbing harness."

Michael's smile acquired a hint of rueful admiration as he realized it was what she'd been planning all along. Unnecessarily, he asked, "For you, or for me?"

"For me. Unless you have a ladder I don't know about...?"

"I'll get the harness."

While he retrieved a tower climbing harness and a spool of black nylon rope from a storage bin behind the wardrobe, Fiona assembled supplies—a cordless masonry drill, a measuring tape, two wall brackets, and a handful of screws, which she dropped into the breast pocket of her romper. When he handed her the harness, she accepted it wordlessly, and immediately but unhurriedly began putting it on. Michael eyed her progress as he attached a utility belt to his own waist and tied sturdy carabiners to each end of the rope. He wasn't sure if Fiona was trying to look enticing, but she did anyway. With skill and gusto, she cinched each fastening tight around a different bare or barely clothed body part, until the sharp edges of the straps dented her tanned flesh and the softer, padded back and seat caressed it.

When Fiona was done strapping herself in, she jammed the orange drill into her belt, completing a strange picture that was also exactly her. Her wavy auburn hair was loose and tumbling around her narrow but determinedly square shoulders, while the delicate edges of her white romper tangled in the severe black shapes and angles of the harness. The weight and bulk of the harness should have threatened to swallow her tiny frame, but didn't. Which made sense; for as long as Michael had known Fiona, she'd never been anything less than irrepressible.

Craning her neck, Fiona said, "I think the beam above the window should hold me."

Michael followed her gaze to the beam in question. "Are you sure?"

"No."

Knowing there was no point in arguing, Michael unspooled enough rope to reach the beam. With the weight of the carabiner to propel it, the rope found its way up and over the beam and down again into his hands.

He attached the carabiner to his belt before attaching himself to Fiona. Their eyes met as he snapped the clip onto the front of her harness, then pulled the rope taut across the beam. There wouldn't be a safety lock on the rope; if anything went wrong, only Michael's strength and weight would keep her from falling. The look they shared acknowledged the danger, and that it was the last moment to call it off—the last chance for one or both of them to back down from the dare they'd started. Neither of them did; Fiona was determined to make him take her weight, and Michael was equally determined to prove that he could.

Michael stepped back, filled his lungs, then heaved backwards on the rope. Fiona jerked into the air then climbed steadily with each slow, hand-over-hand drag. Once she arrived at the top of the window some twenty-five feet above the floor, Michael braced the rope with his foot, grateful to relieve the pressure on his arms and back. His muscles were tenser than he would have liked them to be, a state of affairs he blamed on the relative inactivity of the past month and the person at the other end of the rope; though Michael had lifted heavier bodies up higher walls, he'd rarely lifted anybody he wanted so badly to keep from falling.

Fiona seemed to take her time measuring and marking the location for the bracket. That done, she made four deep holes, the masonry drill roaring and vibrating down the length of the rope.

As she popped out the drill bit to tackle to screws, she asked, "What happened last week—when we were interrogating Takeda?"

Michael was surprised it had taken her so long to ask, but less surprised she'd asked the way she had—when they were literally tied together, and he was holding her fate in his hands.

Recognizing he'd been outplayed, Michael inhaled a long, silent breath, and released it. "When I had to scare my mom during the interrogation, I used my dad."

Fiona paused with the drill in her right hand and the bracket in her left. "You were playing your father?"

"Yeah."

"But it was just an act—Madeline knew that."

"It didn't feel that way. Sometimes."

The drill whirred to life as Fiona screwed in the top half of the bracket. In the quiet that followed, she asked, "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not really."

"But—"

"My psych evals have covered it, thanks."

Michael cursed his quick rebuttal and the petty edge in his voice. Both things had been instinctual, rather than planned. Where his father was concerned, his defensiveness was so practiced it was natural—like breathing, or how he imagined sleep must feel for someone who wasn't beset by nightmares.

Fiona proceeded to fasten the bottom half of the bracket to the wall, then replaced the drill in her belt.

"So what did they say?" she asked.

Michael knew exactly what the evaluations had said. For weeks, he'd been hearing the long-ago voices of his doctors and superiors echoing in his mind, talking about him like he wasn't there, and describing him like a machine that needed fixing, but might not be worth it.

"Apparently," he began, "I'm scared of becoming my father and in denial of that fear, which manifests in a borderline obsessive need for order combined with a paradoxical flouting of authority."

"'Flouting'?"

"According to my file."

"And what do you think?"

"I think you'll have to come down before you can move to the second bracket."

A short, heavy stillness ended with Fiona yanking down hard on the rope. It wasn't enough to dislocate his shoulder, but it was enough to make him lose his grip. Fiona zipped downwards at a dangerous clip until he wrapped the hissing rope around both his hands and threw all of himself into stopping her. Her body bumped to a rough halt three feet from the floor while his own body jerked and trembled with effort, the taut rope thrusting his hips forward and sending a jolt of heat up his lower back. The rest of her journey was mostly smooth, and ended with her stepping gracefully to the floor on the balls of her bare feet, seemingly heedless of the previous danger.

Michael's breath was short as he unwound his rope-burned hands and rolled his abused shoulder. But Fiona was just as heedless of his injuries and exertion as she'd been of her nearly disastrous fall. Before Michael had properly collected his breath or re-organized the rope, she was already standing under the other side of the window with the drapes slung over her shoulder, looking up at her next destination.

Without complaint, Michael accommodated her. His hands were warm and faintly throbbing on the rope as he raised her up again to the top of the window. With each long haul on the rope and each new current of strain running through his back, biceps, and forearms, Fiona's indignant oblivion became more and more exasperating. His reluctance to discuss the past felt minor compared to her recent crimes. Fiona, after all, was the one who'd gone behind his back to tell his family and closest friend he was halfway to the loony bin, a charge that had already prompted a surprise intervention and something even worse—his mother offering him sleeping pills. As Michael watched the calm way Fiona handled the drill, his exasperation become anger. Her focus seemed unconscionable at a time when the distracting pain of his raw hands and wrenched shoulder was at war with a very different physical reaction to the sight of her firm legs dangling in the air, each movement and flex of muscle squeezing the straps ever-tighter into her flesh and her romper ever-deeper into her thighs.

Over the roar of the drill, he said, "I'm surprised you didn't ask my mom about the Takeda thing."

Fiona finished the holes for the second bracket, and withdrew the drill. "Why would I—"

"The two of you have been so close lately."

Fiona kept her eyes focused on the drill as she carefully changed the bit. "What did she tell you?"

"Funny—I found myself asking the same thing an hour ago."

With a sharp, hard flick of her wrist, Fiona clicked the bit into place. "Madeline asked how you were doing. She practically cornered me. What was I supposed to do?"

"How about not telling her you think I'm losing my mind?"

"I don't think you're losing your mind."

In the prolonged silence that followed, Michael contemplated the unexpected note of hurt in Fiona's voice. When she resumed drilling the screws into the bracket, that hurt felt heavier than her weight on the rope, and more painful than his still-throbbing hands and aching shoulder. He wanted to apologize, but knew that from his lips to Fiona's ear, the word "sorry" had been overused to the point of meaninglessness. So instead, he gripped the rope tighter and pretended it was her, feeling his distant connection to her body in each twist and pull.

Without looking down, Fiona jammed the drill back into her belt, and announced, "I'll take that curtain rod, now."

Unable to help himself, Michael observed, "You might need another bracket to hold—"

"I know what I'm doing."

Their eyes met as Fiona accepted the end of the long, heavy curtain rod he handed up to her. Out of necessity, their direct contact was brief; Michael needed both hands and all his concentration to hold the combined weight of Fiona and the curtain rod, and to keep her steady as she mortgaged all her own improbable strength to slide the grommet drapes onto the rod, and the rod into the brackets.

Finally, she was done, and he was able to begin lowering her. Her second journey down was routine, but fast, and ended with her dropping heavily into the orbit of his body, her feet slapping the concrete floor. They paused there for a moment, breathing and listening to each other's breath. When Fiona began to pull away, Michael felt her slipping through his fingers, and held on, stopping her with a soft tug.

Looking down into the close space between their bodies, Michael said, "I want you here, Fi—I do. But sometimes..."

"Sometimes, you don't."

"That's not what I was going to say."

"So what were you going to say?"

"Just that it's hard. Sometimes."

"Don't you think it's hard for me, too?"

"I know it is."

"Then you need to take it more seriously."

"I am taking it seriously. There's something wrong with the investigation—I can feel it."

"Or maybe—things are too right."

His mind understood, but his heart rebelled, too certain that nothing was right. The rope seemed faraway in his sore hands and Fiona seemed even further—just like she'd been four years ago, when he had believed in the rightness of his world, but had never been more wrong.

"I need to tell you..." he began, "about the thing with Takeda..."

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the tension of the rope as he swallowed, and then continued. "I didn't want my mom to act out the escape. I kept telling her it was too dangerous, but she wouldn't listen. And I got angry, so angry I almost..."

He trailed off helplessly. Despite his intended honesty, he wasn't able to name exactly what he'd almost done, in part because he wasn't sure. He only knew that when his hand had closed on his mother's shoulder, he'd wanted her to feel it, and fear what he was capable of.

"You've never gotten heated with your mother before?" Fiona asked.

"Not like that," he said. "You know me, I'm not..."

"Emotional...?" she supplied.

Michael struggled to respond, ironically silenced by a surplus of conflicting emotions. "I guess," he managed at last.

The rope twitched in his hands as Fiona leaned back, and deposited the drill on the stack of boxes. Michael unclenched his fingers to let her go, only to have his open hands fill with slack as Fiona dropped forward, her belt clanking against his.

Her breath was warm on his neck when she said, "You're not your father, Michael."

Bad memories of comforting platitudes made him meet her gaze with a frown. "How can you possibly know that?"

"Because I know you."

The pure confidence in her tone and hazel eyes seemed ridiculous until he realized it wasn't. Among the many basic truths he shouldn't have forgotten was the fact Fiona would never try to comfort him with platitudes, and the reason she wouldn't. Fiona withheld comfort not because she was callous, but because she didn't believe in lying—not when it mattered, and when he needed to hear the truth. Which was exactly why he wanted her there, sharing his space and his life.

Wordlessly, Michael slipped his hands under the padded straps of Fiona's harness. Their belts clanked again as she folded her hands into his back and tucked her head under his chin, her lips brushing his collarbone while his own lips brushed her hair, and kissed her through it. As her hands climbed his back, a tangled piece of rope tugged him deeper into her body, conjuring a visceral flash of a memory that had been simmering all evening, ever since the first pull of Fiona's weight on his hips.

"Do you remember... the McCracken job?"

The pressure of Fiona's hands on his belt confirmed that she did. The McCracken job had been in Ireland, when Fiona's hair had still been cinnamon brown, and he'd still been Michael McBride. To take down an informant who'd been caught selling secrets to both sides, he'd needed to pretend to be Fiona's prisoner. That meant she'd had to bind his wrists, well enough to be convincing, but loose enough to let him free himself when he had to. They'd rehearsed in the kitchen of Fiona's flat, with her tying his wrists behind his back and him pretending to struggle with her handiwork, slipping out of a loose handcuff knot being well within Michael Westen's abilities, but beyond those of McBride. The real struggle had been remembering his cover ID with Fiona's lips ticking the back of his neck, her nimble fingers walking down the front of his body toward the site of a far tighter knot.

In the present, Fiona said, "I also remember it didn't last."

That was true. In Ireland, Michael had only let himself enjoy Fiona's hold when he'd been sure he could escape it. In the kitchen of her flat, that escape had taken the form of him too quickly freeing his hands to fill them with her body, then bending that body over the kitchen table to fill it with his. Eight months later, he'd escaped making a real choice about his loyalties by abandoning Fiona's flat to spend the next six years at least an ocean away. For much of the past four years, the escape had been his burn notice, and his continued attachment to a job that had abused his loyalty and taken too much of his soul.

Michael slipped his hands out of Fiona's harness and himself most of the way out of her grip as he said, "That was then."

Fiona let her calloused fingertips trail down his bare forearms to the wrists he offered her. For a moment, she lingered there, watching her thumbs stroke the texture of his veins while she wet and pursed her lips.

"I don't want you tied down," she said. As her fingers slid past his wrists to his sore palms, she added, "Not when you're so good with your hands."

She raised her gaze as she said it, her eyes sparkling with a look he'd only ever resisted by pretending not to see it. Just as she'd done so many times before, she was forgiving him with a challenge. For once, though, it was a challenge he was willing and ready to meet.

Michael knew exactly where to start. His hands curved confidently over her hips to the nylon loops around her thighs, loosening them one at a time before wandering up through the wrinkles of her romper to the padded straps that pressed her chest flat. After observing the satisfying rebound of her pert breasts, he worked his way back down to her belt. One quick pull later, the whole harness clunked to the floor at Fiona's feet.

He leaned in closer to reach the back of her romper. With her hair collected in his left hand, he used his right hand to slide the zipper all the way down, from her neck to her tailbone. Then it was just a matter of unwrapping her—of peeling the straps off her shoulders to expose the smooth, sweeping curve of her stomach beneath the narrow shadow of her breasts. The remainder of her romper slipped easily off her hips and fluttered down her legs to join the harness.

For a long moment, the type of moment they never would have made time for a few months before, Fiona stood amid the wreck of her harness and clothes, and let him admire her. And he did admire her—every part of her. Fiona wasn't as curvaceous as Samantha, or as statuesque as the women whose endless legs and stern lips had so often seduced him during the earlier years of his life. But what she was was perfect. Michael had never met a woman who was so much herself, whose every part and posture radiated with the same meaning and purpose as her eyes. He'd also never met a woman who was so wonderfully, beautifully incongruous—whose visible strength was so finely formed, and whose passions were so shamelessly innocent yet not-at-all naïve.

Standing at the altar of Fiona's naked glory, Michael wanted to try harder to give himself to her; a flush of longing saw him prostrate on the workbench with Fiona riding him backwards, his hands filled with her ass and his chest splattered with sweat from her tossing hair. But it wasn't what she'd asked for, and wouldn't meet her challenge.

From the spectacle of Fiona's sun-darkened nipples, Michael raised his gaze to her darkly shining eyes. "Turn around."

Fiona's hesitation was brief, and mostly for show. As Michael stepped away, she dutifully stepped out of the pile at her feet and turned to face the window, which was now fully covered by the banana leaf drapes. The same woman who'd been preternaturally calm manipulating a power tool while suspended twenty-five feet in the air was visibly anxious in her nakedness on the ground; at the edge of Michael's vision, Fiona fought to remain still, but failed to fully corral the current of nervous energy that trembled up her legs through her back. Sympathetic to her predicament, Michael didn't make her wait long; it only took a moment to collect the massage oil she'd abandoned at the foot of the bed.

Back in Fiona's orbit, Michael warmed the sandalwood-smelling oil between his hands and returned to the place where he'd started, moving slowly down the front of her thighs before circling to the back. Fiona's breath caught ahead of a long, deep exhale as his fingers kneaded the softness, strongest part of her, and then sank into the space between her legs—shallowly, and then deeper, though not as deep as she wanted. From there, he re-oiled his hands that were no longer sore, and traveled up, thumbs registering each notch of her spine before curling over her shoulders to descend the front of her body. His fingers mirrored her ribs on their way through the rivers of her midsection to the jutting crests of her hips. Then he climbed again, over her softly panting chest to the divinity of her breasts, which he circled with his thumbs and shaped with his fingers to the in-and-out rhythm of her lungs. Finally, his hands swept down again, to the place where her increasingly noisy breaths and slowly rotating pelvis wanted him most. Fiona succumbed to an almost angry moan when his fingers slid inside her, her hands clenching and grasping the air at her sides.

Still wearing his jeans and T-shirt with his hands full of Fiona's writhing flesh and slipping in and out of her pulsing, slippery depths, it was all Michael could do not to join in the needful sounds that wrenched her open lips and filled the otherwise empty silence of the loft. When Fiona's anxious hands stroked down her own legs and up the center of her chest, it was only his certainty of her fractious patience that kept him sane. Within moments, that certainty was rewarded; in the wake of an especially violent moan, Fiona spun in his grip to just as violently devour his lips, clawing his neck and smearing his shirt with oil.

They fought through sloppy kisses for the right to remove his clothes. Michael won the battle for his shirt, but Fiona possessed his lower half, her rough but welcome hands jerking his jeans over his hips and his cock out of his jeans. Soon he was slick almost everywhere she was, his skin dissolving in a slippery communion with hers, her liquid flesh pouring into every curve and hollow. The first time she stroked down the underside of his cock with her wrist threading his balls, Michael half collapsed against her body. On the fourth stroke, he did collapse, knocking her back against the window as she threw herself around his waist. He thrust into her weight while impaling her mouth, hands seizing her thighs and a fistful of drapes.

Michael didn't last much longer with all of Fiona's weight and warmth bearing down on him, her arms and legs knotted around his neck and hips while the rest of her crashed in short, heavy thuds against the window and the drapes and the urgent, heedless center of himself. But he did survive long enough to hear her growl into his ear, and feel her tense and shudder around every slippery part of him. His own shuddering release was swallowed in a loud crack and a slap of fabric against his face, as the drapes broke free from the wall and tumbled down around their heads.

The sudden impact of the drapes and the clattering curtain rod sent their tangled bodies cascading to the floor.

Michael barely felt his messy impact with the floor or Fiona's impact with him. A wonderful numbness subsumed every distant throb of pain as he pulled Fiona deeper into places she'd hurt him, and stole another moment in the thrall of her pulse. He kissed her on the concrete floor amid the snarls of banana leaf fabric, not caring care where he was, or how he'd gotten there. He only cared Fiona was with him, which meant he was home.

They were panting when they finally dug themselves out of the drapes, and breathlessly laughing when they cleared them, Fiona hanging and partly falling from his oily shoulders as they stumbled away from the window and collapsed onto the bed. There, Fiona teased his ribs and nibbled his ear while he continued to grin at her antics, giddy in a way he'd never been in his youth.

Once he'd collected himself enough to speak, Michael said, "I told you it needed another bracket."

He smiled through the hard fist to his shoulder he'd known was coming; Fiona never pulled her punches, even in jest. But a moment after hitting him, she fell back into his body, smiling against his chest.

Michael dropped his arm along her spine and nestled his fingers in the small of her back. He knew he should get up, or at least peel back the covers to slip inside the bed. But for the second time in an hour, his heart rebelled, rendering him incapable of doing anything besides indulge the rare joy of letting himself do what he wanted. And what he wanted was to be with Fiona, and think about nothing at all.

It was Fiona who finally broke the silence. "I'm sorry I talked to Madeline."

Reluctantly, Michael opened his eyes onto a view of the ceiling. He returned her rare apology with one of his own. "I'm sorry you had to."

"I didn't have to. I did it because I was worried. And because I was angry."

An hour before, her confession might have angered him. But in the wake of what they'd shared and the reminder of all the benefits of her honesty, forgiveness came easy.

"It's okay," he assured her.

"So it is okay to be angry. Sometimes."

That statement did make hesitate—not out of anger, but out of regret for all the messiness that would always be there, threatening his ambitions for a well-ordered mind.

Still looking up at the ceiling with Fiona's cheek on his chest, Michael said, "Nate thinks I'm addicted to my burn notice."

For the second time, Fiona asked, "And what do you think?"

"I think I don't like taking advice from Nate."

"He'll be okay, you know. With Charlie."

"Nate can barely take care of himself."

Michael still wasn't angry, but he was tired—of his fears, his memories, and his premonitions, and the sickening combination of those things that had been keeping him from a good night's sleep for far too long.

"You only think that because he's your brother," said Fiona.

"I think that because I spent ten years taking care of him."

"That was then."

Fiona's repetition of his own words had the desired effect, producing a note of doubt about whether he was still being too hard on the brother whose adulthood he'd largely missed. He also found himself thinking about the determined, reckless look in his mother's eyes when she'd insisted on acting out the escape with Takeda. Decades of mistrusting his mother had blinded him to the familiarity of that look. Now, he realized he'd seen the same expression on his own face reflected in Fiona's eyes, each time he'd tried too hard to fix the present in atonement for the past.

"Nate also thinks I should see it through," Michael said. "Even if it's just to know if I'm crazy."

"You're not—"

"I need to be sure."

Fiona didn't say anything. For several heartbeats, neither did Michael. On the fourth heartbeat, he asked, "Will you help me?"

"Haven't I always trusted your feelings?"

Michael didn't answer, because it wasn't a question.

"I know it's early," he said, "but do you think we could—"

"I want to sleep until Sunday."

When they slipped between the sheets, Fiona's skin was still faintly slippery with oil, but her familiar scent managed to tame its cloying sweetness, just like her finely formed strength had tamed the bulk of the harness.

Michael was almost asleep when he was possessed by the need for another confession, one he feared his fully conscious self wouldn't have the courage to voice.

"Fi."

"Mm hm."

"There's something else I need to tell you."

"What is it?"

"I really hate those drapes."

"So do I."

Michael would have laughed for an unprecedented second time in a single day if he weren't so tired, and so truly relieved. As he shifted onto his side, he knew Fiona would follow him, and that he wanted her to. He fell asleep tied up in her arms, her chest spooned against his back and her lips tucked behind his ear.

He didn't quite sleep through the night. But when his eyes shot open in the dark before the dawn, they ignored the door and his box of files, and went straight to the pile of tangled drapes. When he closed his eyes, his mind and all of his body sure about where he was, and at least one thing that was real.

~END~ (for now...)


A/N: Thanks to everyone who recommended doing something with "Bloodlines" and "Mind Games"; I've been wanting to tackle both eps for ages, but needed to work up to it, I guess! Additional credit for inspiration should go to the wonderful Valentine's Day chapter of "Reconnecting" by Jedi's Pal, which helped me find the courage to follow through with some ideas I'd been batting around for a while :) Also, if you're worried about practical details like the precise timeline of events or the exact geography of the loft—don't be! Goodness knows the show never worries about these things :P

As for what's next... "Hard Out" is another episode I've been meaning to do something with for a while... But, as usual, I'm liable to be sent in another direction should I receive a particularly intriguing recommendation ;)

Guess that's it for now, but before I go... Another HUGE thank you for all of your generous reviews, recs, and favs—I couldn't do it without you!