After a ridiculously long wait, here is the next chapter of this story! It's a little slower than some past chapters, but I felt that it was necessary to have some interaction between these two characters due to the nature of this fic. After all, girls gotta stick together, right? Feel free to leave me a review when you're finished reading, and thank you so much to those who have chosen to follow me and this story since the last update! Hopefully this doesn't disappoint you!

Chapter Fifteen

Three days of sitting by his side, waiting for some kind of sign that he was going to eventually recover from his wounds. Three days of taking her own broken form and silently pacing back and forth across the floor of his hospital room so that her body didn't completely seize up on her. Three days of constantly being shadowed by a member of the team, because they all refused to leave the two injured parties to their own devices.

The older members of the team might have had some care for her, but Mikayla wasn't a fool. She was well aware of the fact that the younger recruits knew nothing about her. They might not have even known that Barney was her father. Considering the fact that she spent so little time talking to any of them there really was no way of knowing. And it wasn't exactly a topic that Mickey was interested in bringing up. She had spent years trying to push his memory aside, reminding herself almost daily that he had chosen his money-making lifestyle over living with her and her mother. He hadn't been interested in being a father then, so why would she think that things had changed? She had been sixteen years old when she had last laid eyes on him…and now here she was, sitting at his bedside and hovering constantly for the slightest sign of recovery.

She must be losing her mind.

Mickey pushed herself to her feet once more and started pacing back and forth across the floor once again. By this point she was surprised that there wasn't a groove to mark the line that she had taken to walking, having refused to leave the room while he was still unconscious in case he slipped away on her. The bastard wasn't going to get away that easily, she thought bitterly to herself. And if he thought he was, then he had another thing coming.

There was silence between them, and though Mickey didn't look over toward her she knew that Luna was likely watching her carefully. Probably with a raised eyebrow as she silently questioned the sanity of the other woman.

"You don't actually have to hover," Mickey told her quickly without establishing eye contact. "I'm sure you're just as tired of this as I am."

"I'm not the one who spends every day in the hospital sitting at his side," Luna pointed out quietly, her eyes never leaving Mickey as she paced back and forth across the expanse of the room. "And between you and me, I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one getting a decent amount of sleep."

A heavy sigh fell from the lips of the brunette, a hand reaching up to rub at her tired eyes. "Neither of us should even be here," she said, her tone a little bitter. "All he had to do was take the damn paperwork and just let me leave. He could have had whatever Mom wanted him to have and I could have continued on with my life…"

"A life kinda like his?"

"No," Mickey said quickly, her dark orbs finally lifting to make contact with Luna. "I was putting all of this behind me. I hadn't planned to start doing….whatever the hell this is…but when Mom got sick I didn't have a choice."

She clenched her jaw together as she turned her eyes away, letting them fall back to Barney. Mentally, she seemed to argue with herself. Was it worth it to tell this stranger why she had turned out like this? It wasn't like it was Luna's business after all…it's was no one else's business but her own. Mickey ran a hand through her dark locks as another sigh left her lips, her shoulders slumping forward a little as defeat began to creep into her body. She had been holding onto her anger for so long that now she felt like she was missing a part of herself.

It was the anger that had kept her going in the years since she had last seen Barney, remembering the scene that she had caused after her graduation ceremony. There hadn't been too many other people around them at the time, but there were certainly enough eyes to make a sixteen year old girl feel self-conscious when it was all said and done. She'd cried herself to sleep that night over the whole affair, letting Barney break her heart for the very last time before she had hidden it away within a steel box and refused to let it hurt that way again. And until her mother had been on her deathbed, she had succeeded. But her mother was gone, Mickey reminded herself quickly as she turned back to Luna. And that was where this whole affair had started.

"I haven't seen Barney since I was sixteen," she told Luna slowly, wondering just how much she dared to share with the girl who barely looked older than she was. "We had a falling out and I told him not to bother coming back. He'd broken too many promises."

For a moment she paused, watching the expressions on Luna's face for a sign of what she may or may not already know. It was the quiet nod that gave it away. This much the other girl knew, though from which member of the group, Mickey wasn't sure. Not that it really mattered, she supposed. It spared her from having to share all of the details of a high school graduation gone wrong.

So Mikayla continued. "I was a really angry child after that. Mom put me into some martial arts classes to give me a way of channeling my anger, but it wasn't enough. So I started running, and going to the shooting range with a couple of the male nurses she worked with at the hospital. Maybe part of me wanted to know what the hell was so great about running around shooting a gun….I don't know. But I found that I was pretty good at that too."

"When Mom started getting sick, I used it as an escape so I didn't have to watch her suffer. She used to get so hopeful when Barney would come and visit, like she expected him to stay that time…and eventually a kid starts to notice the heartbreak in her eyes when he leaves. I didn't want to see her hurt anymore. But once the cancer diagnosis came in I knew that she was going to need me to help her so that we could still survive in Spain. It wasn't hard to find a job I thought I could handle."

No, the tough part had certainly been in getting someone to believe that she was capable of handling herself. Mickey had never been a big girl. Tall perhaps, but certainly not as muscular and intimidating as Luna was. It was clear just from looking at her among the guys that she was able to hold her own. Mickey was the type to stand out like a sore thumb, the one that most guys singled out as being the easy target because of her youth and sex. None of them ever counted on having their ass handed to them by someone less than half their size.

A hand lifted once more to run through her dark locks, gripping them tightly for a moment in consideration as she chose her next words. "It was an easy way to make money without becoming a street walker," she finally told Luna. "I was good at it, and it was only supposed to be temporary. I was generally the decoy…dressed as a little old lady or in an outfit that drew the male eye, if you catch my drift." She'd worn more than a few of those little numbers in the past few years. "Eventually I realized that Mom wasn't getting better. I had to accept the fact that I had basically succeeded in absolutely nothing. And when I told her what I was doing she immediately begged me to stop. She'd lost the only man she had ever loved to that lifestyle…she didn't want to lose me too."

If she had lost Luna during any of this, there was absolutely nothing on the face of the other woman to tell her so. She seemed to be listening rather intently, her eyes never once drifting away from Mickey's face as she continued to process the information she was given. Nor did she seem interested in interrupting either. If there were questions on her mind, which Mickey wouldn't have doubted at all, she was keeping them to herself for the time being.

Her body was beginning to feel the strain of her pacing now, knees shaking slightly from the effort of keeping her upright. Mikayla shifted her weight slightly and leaned up against the wall in an effort to relieve her legs a little, moving back and forth between the balls of her feet in order to stretch the muscles a little. A grimace formed on her face each time something stretched, the healing process having moved at a much slower pace than she was used to. Not that she was doing a whole hell of a lot in this hospital room, she thought to herself. After a job she would have gone back to her training, tending to her own cuts and bruises, assembling whatever she needed for the next job…but right now she was stuck.

And her body didn't like it.

"She made me promise I'd deliver all of the paperwork for the will myself," Mickey admitted in the same bitter tone that she had previously employed. "Which I technically did…"

"You just put on a disguise to do it," Luna offered.

The brunette nodded. "Can you blame me?"

At that, Luna offered her a bit of a shrug. "I don't know. If things between you and Barney were really that bad, I don't suppose I can. I don't know how I'd react if I had to go and visit my Dad after all of that."

There seemed to be no sense of judgment in her tone, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. The look on her face seemed to consider the matter though, which was something new. Most people tended not to give a shit about the fact that a girl had argued with her father, never mind the fact that she had ended up almost exactly like him. They would just brush her off as a girl with "daddy issues" and never give her a second glance. Yet there was something in Luna's face that had Mickey tilting her head a little as she scrutinized the details of the other woman's face. Maybe that was just it….the fact that she was another woman. She couldn't necessarily rely on her strength alone to survive being a member of Barney's team. She had to be smart, fast, able to think ahead of the punch that the other guy hadn't even decided to throw yet…

A long stretch of silence fell between them as each fell into her own thoughts, the occasional frown or twitch in the jaw being the only sign that they were mentally still on the same subject. It was impossible to tell how many minutes passed them by exactly. Neither bothered to look at the clock. Nor did the silence ever begin to feel uncomfortable.

Another sensation that was completely new to Mikayla.

"He was really broken up when you left, you know?" Luna finally asked her, voice quiet as if she were afraid that her boss might wake up in that instant and overhear their conversation. "He wanted to go after you. He really wanted the chance to talk to you about things. Lee told him that he needed to let you go."

"Lee?"

Luna nodded firmly. "I think he saw just how much the both of you were hurting, and he knew that as long as Barney continued to relive the past and question his choices, he was going to go mad. I mean…this job requires your attention at all times or you'll get yourself or a teammate killed. Getting yourself killed would hurt your team, but getting one of them killed would hurt the team and haunt you for the rest of your life."

Mickey closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose a little. "What's your point?"

"My point is that Barney never forgave himself for walking away before. And he was willing to die if it meant there was even the slightest chance that Church would let you go. It's the kind of sacrifice that a father would make for his daughter without a second thought…because he sees it as his job. And because he loves you."

She paused for a moment, her eyes narrowing slightly as she folded her arms over her chest and looked across the room at Mikayla. "You can pretend all you want…but if a part of you didn't still care for the old man, you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't have tried to help him when he was dying, and you wouldn't have stayed to see what happened afterward. If you really hated him, you'd have gone as soon as we landed."

Again, there was a silence that fell into the conversation, but this time it wasn't nearly as comfortable as the previous one had been. Loathe as Mickey was to admit it, she knew that there was a ring of truth to the words that Luna spoke. How else could she explain the fact that she had been hovering by his bedside for the last three days? She could have put thousands of miles between them and hidden away so that she would never see Barney Ross again in her lifetime. She could have been out hunting Church to get revenge for the fact that the bastard had abducted and used her as bait. She could have done absolutely anything…yet there she was.

Her jaw tightened a little as she thought about it, slightly irritated at being called out by this total stranger who knew nothing about her and yet seemed to know her so well. She tried to tell herself that it was simply a lucky guess, but she knew that it would be a lie. Luna had pretty well hit the nail on the head.

"Do you know why I chose to use Valdez as my last name?" she asked Luna.

The other woman raised an eyebrow. "Because you were pissed off?"

Mickey shrugged a little. "Partially…but with my mother dead, there was no one else to find. No one would think to look at Barney Ross. So if I got caught on a job or killed-"

"Nobody could use you against him," Luna finished.

Mickey's dark curls bounced a little as she nodded. "It was supposed to protect us both. I always told myself that I didn't really care, but I did. I wanted to avoid the very thing that Church managed to do." Now it was her turn to feel her gaze narrow a little, standing back on her own two feet as her hands began to curl into tight fists. "Is Drummer tracking him down?"

"He's trying," Luna admitted, giving a bit of a nod. "But he knows how to avoid the agency. The information we had on his alias was information that he planted for them to find. We might not find him again, unless…"

"Unless?"

"Unless he finds out that Barney is alive and comes after him again."

Damn it, that wasn't quite what Mickey wanted to hear but she couldn't deny that the thought had crossed her mind a time or two in the last few days. If Church had been desperate enough to hunt her down in order to lure Barney into his trap, he wouldn't be satisfied to learn that he had failed to kill the old man. He would come after him again as soon as he had figured out where he was. And Mickey had an awful feeling that he would figure it out sooner rather than later.

Barney wasn't going to be safe in the hospital for too much longer.

"He can't stay here."

Luna's head instantly nodded in agreement. "We're trying to figure it out. The agency is apparently a little reluctant to move against one of their own-"

"Like I give a shit," Mickey hissed."

"But the team is determined that they're going to find something. Tool's been on this since he left," Luna continued as if Mickey hadn't interrupted her at all. "And I think he's getting close to something."

"Good. I'm getting really sick of looking at the 'hospital green' on the walls."

At this, Luna laughed for the first time since Mickey had met her. "I think we can both agree on that one."

Mickey returned her smirk with a small upturn of her own lips. In some strange way it felt like she had discovered a kindred spirit in Luna, the only other woman she had encountered…and certainly the only one who looked tough enough to handle the jobs that Barney and his team took on. She was tough, she'd already proven that much. But she wasn't hardened by the years of blood that would inevitably stain her hands in time. She still had some spirit in her. It was no wonder the old man had recruited her to the team.

She and Mikayla were a lot alike.