Work Text:
“Why me?” He asks, and in the harsh fluorescent glow of the table lamp, Charlie’s face looks drawn and tired. She looks pained and Mike knows this revelation is the last of many she’s made about the man she loves. But he knows it won’t make a difference.
“He’s the father of my child,” echoes around him in a loop, slicing through his brain like the sharp sting of feedback blaring from two microphones close enough to touch. “I need your help, I can't turn him in.”
Briggs killed Badillo. Charlie loves Briggs.
Charlie came to him, and that’s a comfort to him, she’s here with him, despite everything, she trusts him and–
“Because you’re not sentimental, Mike.” Charlie says, and she looks up and into his eyes for the first time since she came to him for help half an hour before.
“Yes, I am?” Mike says, indignant, and he reels back, the spell she’s been casting around him breaks, violently shattering like a window pane shot through by a hail of bullets.
The glass shards fly towards Mike and even as his arms fling upwards to shield his face, the slivers cut through his defenses as if they were butter. The thick skin that Mike has spent years building, lying flayed on the ground like the hide of a bear ready to be stuffed and laid out as a rug in a hunting lodge.
His metaphors are spiraling.
The lamp’s glare creeps into his field of vision like a flare in the night, drawing his attention in like a moth to a flame. Mike has to stop resorting to metaphors to deflect the hurt he feels.
And that’s the catch, isn’t it?
Mike’s always been too good at deflecting, too good at barreling through the barriers set against him by Bello, Briggs, Sid, Badillo, but Badillo is dead and Briggs killed him and fuck.
Charlie looks at him with pity, as if she’s figured out a piece of Mike Warren before Mike himself has.
To Charlie, Mike isn’t sentimental. To Charlie, to Briggs, to Jakes, to Paige, to Johnny, Mike is driven, power hungry, wanting–needing– to impress his superiors. To Charlie, Briggs, Jakes, Paige, Johnny, Mike is a closed book.
But to Charlie, Briggs, Jakes, Johnny, Mike Warren is anything but sentimental.
They all are forced to sit at the bottom of the mountain that is Mike Warren and the outward facing facade that he puts out is all they see. They accept it as the real him.
Mike knows Charlie loves him, respects him, sees him, but lately Mike realises that no one truly knows him at all.
-
Here’s something that only his parents know about Mike Warren:
Mike Warren has ADHD
It’s a diagnosis his body and brain struggle to come to terms with even as Charlie’s eyes bore into where his own should be currently.
Factually, Mike knows it’s true, and his eyes skate over the bridge of Charlie’s nose in a delayed motion.
He should meet her eyes, offer her reassurance, tell her it was an accident, that he isn’t sentimental you were right Charlie it’s been a hard day but we do what we have to even when it hurts right.
But Mike’s eyes skirt around the edges of her features, and he can’t tell her anything but to, “Be careful…” and hope that she knows he loves her too, even if she doesn’t see him as he truly is.
At the end of the day, there’s no secrets at Graceland but God knows Micheal Warren has more than a few.
-
Here’s something that a few people know about Mike Warren:
Mike Warren is gay– or something.
Abby was someone Mike loved. Loves? It gets confusing sometimes.
Abby was brilliant, funny, smart, and sometimes Mike feels like his roommates? Friends? Coworkers? Who live with him at Graceland know him just as much as he knew Abby, as much as Abby knew him.
Mike the Pilot was a fantasy that Mike the FBI Agent lived every day with Abby adoring and devoted by his side. Cessna, Boeing, Airbus, Mike the Pilot flew them all, in fact he could tell any fact about any plane he flew.
Mike’s most visited website for a week straight was Wikipedia, and when Johnny patted him on the back for the hours of presumed porn Mike was consuming at an inhumann rate, he pretended not to lean into his fleeting touch.
Mike the Pilot loved Abby. It was true at least in that aspect.
Mike the FBI Agent wanted to crawl out of his skin. In some way, he knew that Abby was a stepping stone, a temporary relief, an escape from the household he had joined but he hadn’t really joined because he wasn’t really there for the camraderie.
Because he was there to spy, to report back to his real boss at the end of the day and pretend it didn’t dig into his core, jagged and scraping like a dull knife’s edge, hard and skipping, each new cut more barbed and less sharp than the last.
Because Abby felt like one more lie, one chance at the normalcy everyone expected him to reach for even at the cost of his integrity. But it was fine because Mike the Pilot loved Abby and liked girls.
Mike the FBI Agent was driven, walled off, green but willing to learn, to soak up new information but never return the favor so at the end of the day, he was nothing more than a vague imprint in the walls of Graceland. Easily filled in, easily replaced, loved but never known.
They loved him, saw him, trusted him, accepted him, but it was what they wanted to see in the end, Mike knew, because Mike loved and Mike cared and Mike the FBI Agent only cared about pulling off one more successful reverse.
When Abby found the guns, he was glad in some fucked up way. Maybe then he could stop pretending, if he could drop Mike the Pilot on the floor like a discarded wadded up ball of trash to be picked up and thrown out for good, then maybe he could do the same for Mike the FBI Agent.
Sitting at the counter with everyone, fighting DJ for his orange juice, spoon stuck in his strawberry yogurt, while Johhny cooked up an Octopus with a huge dick and Charlie leaned into Briggs, both observing with a warm glint in their eyes.
See me. He wanted to scream. Know me.
He tried sometimes, to let some last vestiges of Mike escape and fill the cracks left in Mike the FBI agent’s impeccable mask.
“Oooh, Levi, who’s the lucky lady?” Johnny would leer playfully, flicking him once or twice on the bruised collarbone some time after Abby ran.
“Lucky guy, actually,” would bubble up in his throat and his mouth would open but he would stop in place, cuff Johnny on the head and grab his yogurt from the fridge.
There was no fear of being known but rather fear of changing the path he had set for himself.
“If it aint broke don’t fix it.” Jakes had said once when Mike was dead set on replacing the doorknob on the main door.
It wasn’t broken, that much was true but sometimes it jiggled and came loose. In the wake of Bello’s homicidal rampage, Mike needed something, anything, to be right in the world and if that was the fucking doorknob then that’s what it would be.
When the doorknob refused to relinquish its hold on Graceland’s front door within five minutes, Mike abandoned his task.
When his cover as Mike the Marine became more solid, more real, the thought of fixing the not-broken doorknob was left to collect dust in the graveyard of Projects Mike Warren Will Never Finish.
Somewhere in that cemetery was a headstone that read “Be Mike”.
But that pipe dream was already covered under miles of Mike the FBI Agent colored dirt.
-
Here’s something Mike Warren knows to be true:
He loves the team with his whole heart. He’s loyal to a fault, too loyal sometimes so when things get tough, he shuts it off. Mike the FBI Agent doesn’t care about people when they’re in the way of the job he needs done.
Mike the FBI Agent only needs people to help him move up the ladder and his heart pulses DC, DC, DC, and he’s happy to let whoever take the fall because he will win.
Is this even what he wants? Mike Warren doesn’t even know any more.
Somewhere along the line, Mike Warren has become the character and Mike the FBI Agent has crawled out of the pages tooth and nail, ruthlessly shredding any hope of Being Mike that was left in his heart.
-
Here’s something Charlie DeMarco knows about Mike:
Mike is the most sentimental bastard she’s ever met.
When Briggs joined he was angry. He did his job with fervor and spite, efficiently removing all those in his way while cursing the house and those who put him there.
When Charlie arrived she was scared.
When Jakes joined he was silent. He did his job and let others do theirs, he never moved further into the kitchen than the counter until a year in, and even then he was biting, sarcastic, territorial.
He opened up eventually but before then he was colder than ice, more resolute in his silence than a statue.
When Johnny came, he broke the ice that froze him out, the group became a family, the house became less of a chore, more of a home, to come home to.
Mike Warren cemented that change. Suddenly the jokes were sharper, the laughs were warmer, the smiles more real than anything Charlie had known in years.
Mike is sentimental.
When Abby mentions a perfume she’s been eyeing for weeks and then promptly forgets about it in the months that pass, Mike gifts it to her before she leaves for DC.
When Badillo gives him a picture taken by his grandfather, Mike places it on the nightstand directly in his eye of sight. It’s the last thing he sees at night and the first he sees in the early California golden sun.
When Briggs praises Mike for the first time, he captures that memory and freezes it in amber, and she knows when he revists it because he gets that look in his eyes and she knows with every scathing comment Paul is erasing the hero that Mike Warren so desperately needs.
When Johnny mentions some new gadget for his board and months later at Christmas, when the air is colder in California than it has been in years and the water is nowhere near safe, Mike gets it for him and then promptly digs out two cold water wetsuits just so they can test it out together.
When Jakes forgets to write on his orange juice one morning, years after he stopped caring who drank from the bottle, Mike writes a stark “OJ” in black sharpie on the bottom of the container.
DJ laughs and laughs and laughs.
She doesn’t know why she came to Mike about Briggs and the tape and everything in her life that’s been pulling her down. Maybe she figures he’ll understand with all the hiding he does and maybe he’ll help her do the same. Maybe so that Charlie can teach herself to not hate the man who gave her a child she already loves with everything she is and ever will be
-
Here’s something that no-one knows about Mike Warren:
Mike Warren is sentimental.
He remembers birthdays, he sends emails, cards. He calls his family, religiously.
Because being seen is important to him, because he knows that when someone remembers something you don’t expect them to, that rush of shockjoygratitude is a feeling that is found nowhere else.
But Mike the FBI Agent doesn’t love like he does and so he only celebrates birthdays he’s told about or parties he’s reminded of and he never says anything before someone else has gone before him.
Because Mike the FBI Agent doesn’t care about people in the end. He cares about what they can do for him, not what he can do with them or for them. It hurts but he moves forward.
Charlie has a baby. Briggs is the father. Briggs killed Badillo.
In, Out, Focus on the task at hand.
He has no room for discomfort as the black eye settles in the deepest corner of his mind. Mike is busy, normal, driven, he’s not sentimental.
And Sid clamps down on the tube.
and
The Adirondacks gleam in the corner of his eye and he’s free.
Mike Warren misses home.
-