Michael woke up with a foot in his neck. Actually, Michael woke up because a foot kicked his neck, but he didn't know that at the time. He had bolted upright, and his hand had instinctively slid under his pillow to find his gun. It wasn't there, which was enough to give him a spike of adrenaline and really wake up. And that's when he remembered Charlie.

Charlie had slept between Michael and Fi. Charlie slept great. Even though his head started off at the headboard and now was on Fi's knees, he was peaceful and breathing deeply.

His bunkmates slept not quite as well. The kick to Michael's neck at 6:15 was preceded around midnight by a kick to his ribs. Fiona wasn't kicked, but she found it hard to ignore Charlie's sleeptalking. Plus, he seemed upset when he yelled, "DAS NOT YUH DOGGY. DAS MY DOGGY!" She hoped he'd dreamkicked the ass of the doggynapper.

The adults' sleep was also less than ideal because they were hypersensitive to noise. Even Michael and Fiona aren't crazy enough to sleep with guns under their pillows and a toddler between them, so the guns were locked away. Michael and Fiona hadn't locked their respective guns away in 20+ years. So they woke every time the air conditioning cycled on or off. Every time a car passed the house. Every time a branch scraped the overhang.

It was a long night.

Michael sat on the edge of the bed, gathering his thoughts. He'd called Sam and Jesse last night to tell them about the Charlie situation and to ask them to teach his class today. His two friends would have the pleasure of watching Neal sweat and twitch his way through a mock interrogation. He'd probably confess to being CIA and name 10 or 12 other people while he was at it. They were going to stop by the house after class to visit with Charlie and, more likely than not, take him out somewhere while his aunt and uncle passed out.

He wondered if his mom had told Ruth what was going on. Last he'd heard, she was off suicide watch but was still pretty fragile. Probably not a good idea to tell her anything that might worry her, like, oh, two childless spies/assassins taking care of her two year old.

Their tasks for the day were simple in concept: take Charlie to school for 9:00 and pick him up at 12:30. In the interim one of them would go to the grocery store to get actual food, and the other would do some down-and-dirty childproofing of the house. Michael and Fiona didn't need plug protectors or drawer latches. Childproofing for them meant collecting the 70+ weapons they'd placed strategically throughout the house, some hidden, some in plain sight, and locking them up somewhere safe.

Michael also needed to sit down with various people at the CIA to explain the situation and get their protection upped. The purpose of the restoration period was for Michael to rest and get himself healthy again, and he couldn't very well do that if he was constantly paranoid about any of his or Fi's scores of enemies coming around to say hello. So the CIA, partnering with any federal agency who had bodyguard-types to spare, had given them their own special detail. All told, some 20 armed government employees took turns watching Maddie and Charlie, Sam and Elsa, Jesse and whomever he might be dating, and, last but by no stretch of the imagination least, Michael and Fiona around the clock. They were quite good at staying out of sight, but boy, they could appear in a flash if they sensed a threat. Jesse's date, Gabby, found that out when she stepped outside a movie theater they were in to take a phone call. The surveillance team didn't have authorization to tap into her call – her being a civilian and U.S. citizen and all – so six of them swarmed her in time to hear an automated message telling her the recent pap smear she'd had was negative. Gabby went home after that, as did Jesse. Not to the same home.

In the afternoon, once he came home from school, Charlie would nap, and Michael and Fi could unpack his things and try to make their house feel like his home.

Michael's phone chirped to let him know he had an incoming text message. "Put C on potty when he wakes. Prob have to sit for 10-15 mins. Remember to clap." He stared at the screen for a moment, appreciating how surreal his life had become in the past 14 hours.

Noises were starting to come from Charlie's general area. His little body began to move and stretch slowly. He sat up and looked at his surroundings, blinking strongly as he got the sleep out of his eyes. He stared down at Fi's lumpy form under the comforter, then turned his head a bit to the side. Michael could see he was frowing. And then Michael saw his eyes begin to fill with water.

"Hey, Charlie," Michael said quickly. Charlie turned to in the direction of the voice. "Hi. There you are. Good morning. Do you know where you are?"

Charlie just stared at him.

"You're at Auntie Fi's and Uncle Michael's house. Do you remember you came home with us last night to sleep here?"

Charlie furrowed his brow for just a second, then smiled. "Yah! I seep yuh housh!" Then he jumped into Michael's chest. That's right; from a stationary, sitting position, he sprung up effortlessly and leapt onto Michael, reaching his arms out as he did. Michael put one hand behind him on the bed to brace himself to keep them both from falling over.

"Wow. Okay. Hi, Charlie. Good morning again. I'm glad to see you." Michael ran out of things to say at that point, or so he thought, so he just kept saying versions of those things while patting Charlie's back. He said them increasingly louder, hoping Fi would wake up. No luck. Fiona, unbeknownst to Michael, had self-medicated with a liqueur around 5:20, hoping to get a couple of hours of solid sleep. He did know, though, that she looked to be sleeping soundly. And he would feel bad if he ruined that. So he stopped trying to wake her up.

Michael took a deep breath and thought about Fi's words to him the night before. Every member of a social group has his role to play, and Michael was well-understood in the Michael/Fiona/Sam/Jesse group to be the brilliant covert operative and strategic thinker who had no idea how to talk to his family. That role is fine for Fi, like she said, and even for his mom, he supposed. But she was right. That role was not okay for Charlie. He needed to do whatever he had to, no matter how uncomfortable he may be, to try to keep this little boy's life as stable as possible. And if that meant cheering for bowel movements and having morning cuddle time, then so be it. Even he couldn't credibly suggest those things would be harder than the time he was hung upside down for four days for an interrogation in Afghanistan. Or nearly beaten to death in Nigeria. Or waterboarded in Indonesia.

He could do this.

"Charlie, you know what? Auntie Fi is still sleeping, so you and I are going to have to be really quiet and whisper. Can you whisper with me?" Charlie nodded, smiling.

"Good. Are you ready to get up? Do you want to eat breakfast?"

"Yah y -" he shouted until Michael quickly put his hands over Charlie's mouth. "Whisper, Charlie, remember?"

"Yah yah yah yah yah," whispered Charlie, climbing down from the bed and then running, full steam, to the kitchen, all the while whispering, "yah yah yah yah yah."

Already in PJ pants, Michael grabbed a white t-shirt from a clean pile on the floor and pulled it over his head as he headed to the kitchen, closing his bedroom door behind him. He stopped short when he got to the living room. Charlie was sitting in the middle of the room – in the middle of all the luggage, more precisely – and was already opening bags and dumping stuff out. Michael was stunned. It'd been maybe, maybe, 10 seconds since Charlie'd bounded out of the room.

Michael had to admire him. That took some talent.

"Charlie, buddy, please don't empty everything out. We'll put it away later. Come on in the kitchen and we'll find you some breakfast."

Charlie grabbed whatever toy was closest – a tiny basketball, it turned out, a giveaway from one of the local radio stations – and followed Michael into the kitchen.

"What would you like to eat, Charlie? We have toast, yogurt, oranges," said Michael, surveying the fridge. "Some leftover Chinese stir fried vegetables, some leftover rice and beans - "

"Rybee!" shouted Charlie.

"'Rybee'? Rice and beans?" Michael confirmed.

"Yah, rybee!"

"I knew you would've liked Carlito's," Michael muttered. He took out the poor-man's-Tupperware box housing the rice and beans and put it in the microwave. At around the :48 mark, Michael realized a two-year-old boy probably shouldn't eat food as hot as he did. He stopped the microwave, then stirred up the food. He transferred some to a cereal bowl and took it to the table along with the smallest spoon he could find in the drawer. "C'mere, Charlie. You can sit here," Michael said warmly, pulling out a chair. Charlie scampered up and put his hand over the bowl.

"Hot," he said. "I wait."

"Okay, that's a good idea. Do you want something to drink?"

"Milk."

"Uhhh, lemme check, but I don't think we have any right now," Michael replied, walking to the refrigerator. All they had was sugar-free hazelnut-flavored powdered coffee creamer. "Nope, no milk right now. You want some water? Or some iced tea? Wait, are you allowed to drink iced tea?"

"I tea!" Charlie shouted.

"But are you allowed to drink tea? I don't know if little kids can drink tea," Michael worried. For a moment, he considered waking Fiona to see if she knew. He immediately dismissed asking his mom. Fairly quickly, he remembered he was a very smart guy living in a constantly connected world of information. So he Googled it.

What Michael found next fascinated him. In just the first 15 results, no fewer than 10 message boards addressed the question, and each had probably 80 commenters voicing their opinions. Icy Chicken Wing said it is "perfectly safe and harmless" for young kids to drink iced tea, but jbubz, abbeyej, and Jumping in Puddles cautioned it should really be decaf. Sissy33 thought it helps them go to the bathroom. Michael had never been part of a group where people who didn't know what they were talking about still offered their opinion. In the Army, in the CIA, everywhere he'd worked – if you knew, you spoke up; if you didn't know, you shut up.

Michael made an executive decision that a few glugs of caffeinated iced tea mixed with a cup of water wouldn't kill his nephew. He fetched the pitcher from the fridge and mixed up Charlie's mocktail in a freebie plastic cup they'd gotten from somewhere. A street festival, maybe? It's funny, the things you think about. He brought Charlie the drink. Charlie lifted the cup to his mouth, tipped it, and spilled some down his shirt. Michael reacted with sudden movement, which scared Charlie, which caused him to cry, which caused him to fling his arms up to reach for Michael, which caused him to dump the rest of the drink out onto himself and the floor.

Michael felt that same fight-or-flight anxiety he'd always had. He forced himself to breathe and remember this anxiety involved a crying kid and wet PJs, not an abusive drunk and broken cheekbones.

"Hey, Charlie, it's okay. C'mere," Michael said tenderly. "Ooof!" he laughed, picking him up under his armpits. "You're heavy. And wet! And look. Now I'm wet, too!" Michael shifted Charlie to his left side and pulled his own white shirt away from his chest so Charlie could see the damp cotton. "See? Look at that. We're like tea twins. It's like we took a bath in iced tea." Charlie giggled and sniffed up his drippy nose a few times. "Hey, you know what we should do? Our shirts are already wet. Let's take them off and use them to dry off the chair and the floor! Whaddya think about that?" Charlie smiled hugely and moved so quickly to jump down from Michael's arms that Michael almost fell.

Michael really had to admire this kid's physical prowess. He was going places.

The big Westen took off his shirt, then helped the little Westen get his off. Then they both kneeled down and used their respective shirts to mop up the liquid.

"Hey, no fair, you're taking some of mine!" Michael whined in an exaggerated way. "I'm gonna take some of yours!"

"No!" Charlie was laughing so hard he was cackling. "My tea foh me!"

"Oh, all right, I guess you can have all that tea. Just this once," Michael said faux-sternly. On all fours, Michael stretched his arm to wipe up the last little bit of liquid. He was just pulling his arm back when Charlie jumped onto his naked back, like a body slam. Michael felt Charlie's warm, baby-soft chest on his bare back and felt . . . something. He didn't know what he felt, but he felt, and that made his eyes well up for just a moment. Michael was grateful for his 30+ years of martial arts training that gave him excellent body control as he carefully maneuvered away from the table, reached behind his back to hold on to Charlie, and somehow managed to come to a sitting position without him falling off. Michael sat Indian style, and Charlie quickly balled himself up in the safe nest of Michael's legs.

Michael heard a sneeze. He turned towards the bedrooms to see Fi, who'd flown out of bed when she heard Charlie crying. She was leaning against the wall, smiling with her lips closed, a tear streaming down each cheek.