Work Text:
*
Michael Westen is sitting in an office in Washington DC when the Greenland Ice Shelf falls into the Atlantic Ocean.
*
He is a polygraph, an interview, and a psych evaluation away from being reinstated. He's still on TSA's no-fly list and he's probably still on DHS's terrorist-watch list, but he's so close to getting his life back that he's filed both away under "can deal with this later" and he smiles, more genuine and unforced that he thought he had in him, at the polygraph tech.
They've moved on from state your full name and date of birth to are you now or have you ever been married? to what is your favorite color? (don't have one) food? (blueberry yogurt) football team? (the 'fins) to, have you ever sold state secrets? (no) and have you ever aided and abetted a known terrorist? (no) and were you involved in the death of Philip Cowen? (peripherally) when the door opens and a woman who walks so stiffly Michael immediately recognizes her as Army Intelligence says, "Sir, the capitol is being evacuated. We expect a massive tsunami in less than six hours."
*
Michael was not in southeast Asia in 2004. He did not spend the days between Christmas and New Year scrambling to make contact with his handler.
He knows people who were, and he knows better than to trust the city's administration - to trust his country's administration - to get him safely to high ground.
Even four hours between now and the coming wave mean eight to ten more before it hits Miami. Michael doesn't pick up his cell from where he checked it in; all the networks will be jammed anyway. Instead he grabs his spares from the charger, heads downtown, borrows a motorcycle and drives east until he runs out of gas.
From there he finds an empty house, leaves the three containers of chocolate mousse yogurt in the fridge and uses the landline to make a call.
*
Five rings gets him the answering machine at Fi's apartment. "Pick up the phone if you're home, Fi," he says, "This is not the time to be petty."
Three more rings and she picks up. She says, "I was in the middle of something important, Michael."
"You need to find a boat, preferably a sailboat, and go as far out to sea as you can."
"I need to what?"
He hears the front door opening and wishes he had taken the yogurt. He says, "Turn on the news, and track down Sam if you can. I can't get ahold of him. You have about six hours."
Click.
*
The cell network is down completely. Verizon would like to thank him for his patience. So would AT&T, Virgin Mobile and TracFone.
*
He borrows another motorcycle and heads south; when he stops for gas he hears a radio broadcast reporting a hundred-foot high wave.
*
Michael gets to the Georgia-South Carolina border like that, before the gas runs out, and from there he starts walking.
He doesn't think about the number of deaths.
He doesn't think about Fiona and he doesn't think about Sam.
His mom is in Nevada for Christmas this year and tried to get him to come along. And because Nate doesn't have a landline and the cell network is still down he doesn't think about his family, either.
*
Four weeks after the Greenland Event, the Antarctic Ice Sheet breaks off into the Southern Ocean and starts drifting toward Madagascar.
Michael is pretty sure that Miami doesn't exist anymore. He keeps walking.
*
Pro: The rest of the world, Management included, appears to be too busy to Michael's life miserable.
Con: They're providing relief for a disaster he couldn't have stopped even if he had never been burned. This was so far out of his hands and so long in coming that he couldn't have stopped it even if he had been President of the United States.
Pro: The human race is more likely to survive this than a full-scale nuclear war. You can't have a nuclear winter without a nuclear detonation.
Con: Almost all of the news Michael has heard is predicting the Second Ice Age.
Pro: He's still alive. He's walked halfway down the length of the state of Florida.
Con: He does not get to go back to Washington (because Washington probably does not exist anymore, because it has probably been swallowed whole by the Potomac) and tell his old bosses, "I told you so."
*
The second-worst part, Michael thinks, is that when he is between vestiges of civilization he genuinely has no way of knowing or learning anything.
The worst part is that when he passes through those last vestiges of civilization the only thing he can be absolutely certain of is that everything he hears is a rumor. That every piece of information he passes on is unverifiable and unreliable.
The longer he walks, the more he thinks about his mom and Nate and Fi and Sam. He goes over the declension and conjugation patterns for every language he knows even a conversational amount of, then goes back to fine-tune his Iraqi accent.
No one who isn't a native Iraqi ever perfects it. Doesn't mean he won't try.
When his mouth is dry and his throat is sore and his voice is gone, Michael wishes he had stayed in Miami. It's fleeting and bitter and won't do him any good now, but if he had stayed he knows that he would either be dead or he would know something first-hand.
Either one would be better than this.
*
He reaches the refugee camp outside of where Cape Coral used to be eleven weeks after Greenland and seven after Antarctica.
The camp serves the greater portion of south-west Florida; they have a satellite internet uplink and a four-day wait to access it. Michael uses the time to skulk around the edges of the camp, listen and blend in and exchange rumor for rumor. It takes him two hours to track down Harold Grening and make him for the best source of information in the camp.
Grening is the former sheriff of Hendry County, a tall guy who used to be rounder than he is now. Within twenty minutes Michael learns that he used to dress up as a Confederate colonel and drive around the South doing battle reenactments during the summer and that he's de facto head of security at the Cape Coral refugee camp. That Before, he never left home without his cut-throat razor and that he's camp barber as well.
The barber part is where Harold collects the bulk of his intelligence, such as the fact that Felicia and Bruce Thomson have set up a still on the south edge of camp, not that that's much of a secret. That he lets it go because it's better to know where the liquor is coming from than not; it'll come either way.
Michael welcomes the shave and, for the time-being, the older man's offer of friendship. After Michael stands but before he has the chance to wander off toward the medical tent, Grening asks, "Hey, I know you from somewhere?"
It's certainly possible that Grening is among the police Michael has evaded over the course of the last year, but the man looks about the right age so he says, "Probably not. Unless - were you in the Gulf in '91?"
Grening was, and one of the easiest ways to begin building someone's trust is to have fought in the same war.
*
He's treated for heat exhaustion, dehydration, second-degree sunburn and assigned to a cot. Michael sleeps lightly; he wishes he were armed and knows that a moderate increase in his own potential safety isn't worth the corresponding suspicion he would draw.
*
Someone's put up bulletin boards, really just pieces of plywood nailed dying trees or stakes in the ground. As Michael drifts in and out of consciousness he can't shake the memory of a capitol dome sailboats tucked behind faces he doesn't know labeled missing, and last seen Sarasota/Port Charlotte/Port Meyers/Naples/Everglades City/Miami.
*
Instead, when he wakes up, he finds that he's been invited to drinks with Grening and the Thomsons and the camp security detail.
Two days until he can check the FEMA and Red Cross lists. He knows Sam would give Charles S. Finley and Fi any number of aliases (Michael is composing a list in his head) but possibly also her given name.
When he logs himself as alive, seeking friends or family, he's decided that he'll give Westen for his mom and Sam's sake and McBride for Fi's.
It's a risk, but he thinks it's one worth taking.
*
It takes full hydration and rest for Michael to realize that he's been running at quarter-power since Columbia. It's too easy to push himself too hard with no checks and no outside force of duty to require he take adequate care of himself.
"I'm surprised you're still alive," the Red Cross nurse told him just before he passed out, and, "You need to stay right where you are. Give yourself time to recover."
He arranges for the camp's supply of pain medication to disappear temporarily and slips away in the subsequent chaotic search for it.
*
Security is made up of the Hendry County Sheriff's Office, the remains of several local police departments and ten Florida National Guardsmen.
And Diego Garza, who gives him a look that's equal parts, Of all the people I thought I never had to deal with again, and Don't even think about acting like we know each other.
"Diego!" Michael says, "this really is a surprise."
"I thought you were dead," Diego replies, and Michael grins at that and the implicit, but that would just be too easy, tacked on at the end.
"It really hurts that you would think so little of me," Michael says, raising his glass, "Getting rid of me is not that simple."
Grening raises his glass as well, before anyone can read too much into the building tension. It's a skill that someone picks up when you're stuck in an uncomfortable place with people you may or may not know or like. "To old friends!"
They drink to getting the hell out of here, to the lost and the missing, to the hope that family and friends are safe somewhere. One of the guardsmen raises his glass to not having to drink California fucking orange juice in his tequila sunrises for longer than is absolutely necessary.
"My granddad has a couple of groves up north. Had. Had a couple of groves," the young man explains when the laugh dies down. There's a silence that follows and Michael knows they're all thinking about how long they'll be correcting to the past tense.
He's been nursing the same glass of moonshine for almost two hours, letting his body keep up with where he wants his head to be. He says, "To tequila sunrises, period. I may have drunk paint thinner smoother than this."
When you sit down to drinks with friends or contacts in Russia, you don't leave until you have finished the bottle of vodka. And while Russian vodka certainly tastes better than paint thinner, the net effect is much the same.
It strikes him that he might never set foot in Russia again, and Michael finishes his drink and asks for another.
*
Grening catches him as they disperse and asks if he's interested in helping out with security and peacekeeping, when he's up to it. They have too many people, he says, and not enough staff to keep them in line, though the flow of new refugees has evened off over the last month.
Michael gives a noncommittal response, watching the back of Diego's head disappear from sight. He doesn't plan on staying any longer than he has to, which isn't a good reason to deliberately destroy an asset.
*
Fi isn't in the database under any name Michael remembers. She wouldn't be, though, because he did not leave on speaking terms with her (again), and because Ireland was among the nations hit first and hardest, with least warning. She wouldn't make herself visible unless she knew someone she wanted to find her was looking.
Sam shows up in Albany and again in Macon, unless there is another Charles Samuel Finley floating around the South.
His name turns up on the missing persons list out of Las Vegas. Michael stares at the laptop screen, and maybe if he had a way of knowing whether he really is safe enough for the time being he would type in his given name - but he doesn't.
He doesn't know anything; just that the collective population of the East Coast has been killed or picked up and moved elsewhere, or hunkered down in makeshift camps like this one. Michael could return to his old life under a new name, as a freelancer, and no one would be the wiser.
He never did work directly for the CIA. The don't have a copy of his fingerprints on file, save a couple imprints of his right thumb for visitors' badges.
Nate is smart enough to check for Westen comma Frank. He thinks.
It's still a risk.
He promised he wouldn't disappear again, not if it wasn't absolutely necessary.
*
The oceans are expected to rise thirty-seven feet above their pre-Greenland levels.
*
He's been at Cape Coral for two and a half weeks, and it didn't take half that long to know that this was almost exactly the same as every other refugee camp he'd ever acted his way into for the job. There isn't enough space and there aren't enough supplies and security is rougher than they have to be, only this time it's FEMA writing the check and it's his backyard that's the disaster area.
Not that Michael has never been stuck without power for a couple of weeks, post-hurricane. That kind of worst-case scenario involves replacing your roof and dealing the state beaurocracy to get their insurance program to pay for it.
You clean up, you move on, you park your car in the garage afterward because you walk outside when the eye passes over to find that there's a tree sitting on top of it. You lie upstairs with a pillow pulled tight over your ears and try to block out the sound of your parents fighting about it, and then you move on and bide your time until the next one.
Now refugee is a word that carries the weight of an indefinite timespan.
*
Cornering Diego is harder than Michael would have thought - the other man is using every instinct and every skill he has to avoid the meeting.
"I know why you're here," Diego says, preempting him, "And they weren't going to let you back in. You're flashy. You leave messes behind you that people like me get to clean up. It doesn't matter what side you're on, Westen, you're more of a goddamn liability than you are an asset."
Michael has made himself enough of a thorn in Diego's side that while the speech itself is a surprise - a fellow-spy should know better - the content is disappointingly predictable. "That wasn't what I tracked you down for."
"Fuck."
"I need to know what Miami looks like," Michael says evenly. Then, because he knows Diego will balk if he doesn't, "You're the most reliable source I have right now."
Most people will exaggerate or downplay the events of a story, because they haven't had to learn how to relate an accurate account.
"It's under water," Diego says, then turns and walks off.
*
Grening tells him there's going to be a power-vacuum once the world gets back on its feet, if the world gets back on its feet. It's nothing Michael didn't know in the back of his mind, but he's tucked "decline and fall of the Western world" away among the things he does not think about.
"The Mediterranean nations might be worth keeping an eye on," he says, because he's making small-talk and he doesn't think they will. Russia, certainly, and China. India if they avoid revolution and collapse in the wake the Antarctic Event. The US will probably relocate its capitol to the Midwest, if Potomac acted anything like the Miami River.
"You're looking restless," Grening says, then, "Someone comes along with some job security for you, you should take it, if you're gettin' ready to leave. Friend of mine told me that, used to have a pair of glasses like yours. Don't know what happened to him, come to think of it."
*
It rains. The bulletin boards have looked pathetic for a long time, but now even moreso as paper ripples and ink bleeds into the muddy ground.
He pauses by the one near the medical tent and pulls a damp flyer from the plywood, capitol dome and white sales and captioned, Visit Madison!
There's a compass rose on the back, pointing north-east.
Michael doesn't know who put it there, but he knows that he can't go home and that he won't find anything in Washington.