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The shockwave almost knocked her off her feet. She looked back as the others ran past, faces blank, legs pumping in effortless precision. The blast had obliterated almost every vertical object within a quarter mile, the flames rose towards the gloom overhead in white, yellow and a sickly chemical green.
He wasn’t there.
She looked back at her fleeing team and counted. She shook her head - she was sure that he had been behind her anyway. The mission lead was always the last one out. She yelled out to the closest team member - some guy named Andersen that she had never seen before. He looked at her blankly like he didn’t know whom she was talking about. He probably didn’t. The agent attrition rate was getting pretty high these days. Sometimes it seemed a statistical impossibility that she, Michael, Birkoff and Walter had all managed to live as long as they had in Section.
“Birkoff, where’s Michael?” She thumbed the comm. unit in her ear, trying to sound neutral.
“Unknown.” Birkoff’s voice was so flat that she could almost feel Operations standing behind him back at Comm.
She knew better than to react. She knew how they’d all read volumes into it but she just couldn’t help herself. “Resists authority” - it was right in her personnel file and yet they still thought that she’d make a promising agent…
“Where was his last comm. signal from? I’ll double back. It won’t take- ”
“Negative, Nikita. Get to the extraction point. Now.” She wondered if Operations used that pissed-yet-blasé tone for every conversation that he had, or just saved it for when he was writing off collateral mission damage.
“But sir…”
“Now.”
She suddenly heard her name - not over the comm. - in that familiar three syllable tone: Na-kee-ta. He was loping towards her, just a silhouette against the strange iridescent dance of the plant. The way he moved told her that something was wrong but he pointed to the direction the team had taken.
“Go.”
She defied him until he got close enough so that she could make out his face, trying in vain to read something from him, and then they both sprinted to the extraction point. They swung into the van and she shot Andersen a dirty look. This is him. Maybe you should take note because he might save your life one day.
Michael sat closest to the van door; face grimy with soot and sweat, typing out a preliminary account onto his tablet. Her eyes flicked over him quickly as the van lurched and they all held onto their seats as it took a hard corner. He appeared to be… steaming. She swung around the other team members as they tried to keep equipment and gear from tumbling around the van. Someone grumbled that nothing screams suspicious more than a black, windowless van careening through the countryside. She came up behind him silently amid the chaos noting the scorch marks that had eaten away sections of his clothes. He moved away from her without looking back, his eyes fixed on the tablet in his hands. As he moved she thought she saw blisters, shiny and pink, peeking out from the blackness in which he shrouded himself.
“It’s fine.”
“You should get it looked at.” She said to his back.
“I will. When we get back to Section.”
End of conversation - it's none of your concern. She’d heard that tone so often that she could mimic it perfectly. And she hated it. She hated that they spent nights in incendiary consumption of one another, bound up so tightly that she felt torn and shredded when he finally left. But those nights didn’t exist anywhere else. There was no recognition in his eyes, no acknowledgement of anything in daylight. That tone was how he spoke to her most of the time. Not when he looked at her like she might be the thing that would save him, not when he moved in her with the wonder of a man who suddenly remembered the instinct to grip another body tightly under fur pelts by firelight… but most of the time.
How many more times would she let him in, let him break her, and then walk away? Michael had a talent for survival that was almost mythic in nature. Perhaps that’s why Operations had ordered her to the extraction point. Michael was an arrow pointing forward with unerring accuracy in whatever he was pursuing: a mission, a target, a mark. He approached everything with the same fervor, the same intensity, but once he’d passed it by he never looked back.
Its just sex, she tried to tell herself time and again. The passion was a by-product of their precarious existence, and one that Section encouraged. It bled off excess anxiety, frustration, and adrenaline - it was cheap therapy and an effective form of control. Very few lived long enough or were capable of feeling enough to become a problem. She imagined that Oversight had run the numbers and the risk assessment came back with a stop/loss ratio that was acceptable in their eyes. She wasn’t sure what she found more disturbing: that her sex life had been calculated for its resource management effects, or that she had allowed herself to fall for someone who never let anything touch him. Whatever entered his life, Michael moved relentlessly forward. Nothing grabbed hold of him for too long and nothing distracted him from his single-minded need to survive: not Simone, not Adam, not the forgotten family in Marseilles who thought him dead, and certainly not her.
Sometimes she tried to imagine the future as far as she could push it. She peered down the murky path and saw them running. It was never too far, she couldn’t imagine them much older than they were now, and at some point the imagined future-she just disappeared. But Michael was still there, slashing and hacking at the darkness as he ran never once turning to see if she was still with him. He would go on; it was how he was built.
In the beginning she had just wanted her freedom, and when that had proved toxic to her life expectancy, she had just wanted to remain herself. When the killings and the lies and the ceaseless, casual betrayals ended that, she just wanted to feel human some of the time. And as if sensing that it was her last straw, Michael suddenly appeared and gave her what she wanted. And she had been so thankful; clinging to him like a piece of driftwood afloat over a drowned world. But it wasn’t enough and she knew now that she’d made two serious mistakes: she had underestimated how far Section would go to control their agents, and she had confused lust with love. Michael said and did all the right things - his performance was seamless - but she’d seen him give it too many times before in a wide variety of unwinable scenarios. And Michael always won. When he turned his focus to her, everything else fell away. It was intoxicating. But it was the same intensity that he brought to interrogations, or mission briefings, or recruit training, and when he moved on the void was so wide and desolate that all she could manage was to scream into it like a terrified child waiting for the echo that would never come.
They separated at Intake. He went left to Medical and, eventually, a mission debrief with Operations, and she went right to Walter and Birkoff and a bottle of wine in her apartment. Madeline was there as they arrived. Her gaze flicked over Nikita quickly and then she smiled in that way that made the uninitiated feel like she was a kindly big sister. Then she walked with Michael as they discussed the mission outcome. Nikita knew exactly what that was about: she had earned their attention again. Madeline had given her a warning as well as conducting a soft, chestnut-hued analysis. Sometimes the Fibonacci spirals of plots and counter plots made her head feel like it was splitting to pieces.
She sat quietly in the apartment that she had given up trying to redecorate when she realized that it would reveal too much about her, and waited. He was coming; she could feel it - if only to warn her about her lapse in the field today. She rolled the stem of her wine glass between her fingers and drank in the finality of her decision with calm detachment. She thought about the skip of friction, the roll of conflicted elements circling each other for a fraction of a picosecond before giving in, combining into the brilliant, brief destruction that mesmerized. Anyone got a match? I’m gonna burn this motherfucking bridge…
He knocked softly and the terrified child inside her leapt to her feet with joy before she could stop it. He came back! She checked her view screen at the door but it was more to give her a chance to settle herself than anything else. Who else would it be? She hadn’t had the luxury of friends in years. He walked in without a word - like he belonged there - and she went to the kitchen to pour him a glass of wine just to have something to do with her hands. She handed it to him, their eyes met and they clinked glasses in silence. She sipped cautiously as she watched him move through the apartment as if it was a puzzling art installation. He seemed to be searching for meaning in her sofa and her book shelves, but was coming up empty. She bided her time; it took patience to wait out a silent man who wanted to speak.
“I felt sure that today was the day.” He murmured eventually.
“The day for what?”
“For it all to end.”
She peered at him over the rim of her glass. As always, his statement could be interpreted in a number of ways.
“You mean… this?”
“My life, yes.” That wasn’t what she’d meant but he nodded assuming that she had. “It was almost a relief.”
He lifted his glass to his nose and luxuriated in the bouquet. Just an arrow slipping through space - he would extract the most from each moment, even while discussing what could be construed as a suicidal wish. She suddenly felt watched and very, very afraid. The little girl was yelling at him to shut up, she couldn’t make it back without him, but another part of her was smiling sadly at him, rolling a match between her fingertips.
“But you didn’t die. You made it out. And by all accounts, you shouldn’t have.”
“No.”
“Then you must have had a reason.”
He stared at her - a patented, unreadable Michael stare. She swallowed back the urge to throw her wine at him and try to pierce his carotid artery with the shattered glass.
“If you don’t want to be here, then why fight to survive?”
He looked away as if something more interesting had caught his eye, but he moved towards her placing his glass on the countertop with care. His hand found hers and fingers traced over, through, and around it slowly, his eyes falling to them in fascination. She breathed out in despair as her head dipped a little closer to his: they fell back into attraction so easily, as if their whole relationship was a function of amnesia and magnetism. He’s so good at this. How did he ever get so good at manipulating me?
His free hand cupped her neck, a callused thumb lightly running along her jaw. It pulled her in gently, slowly, and then she closed her eyes and waited. His lips brushed her temples, her eyelids, and then the corners of her mouth with aching reverence. She wanted to strike that match and burn him out of her for good but the destructive impulse just circled in a defective loop searching for the missed connection to complete the circuit. She waited for the kiss, like the safe word that released everything that she kept locked down day after day. Sometimes he just whispered her name and it set her free; they’d end up on the floor, a throw rug bunched under his knees and hands as he moved, the burn of it leaving marks on her body as well as her memory. She waited for it, giving herself over to one more time before she laid waste to the last part of herself that she cared about - but it didn’t come. She opened her eyes just as his slid away and he pulled her painfully against him. She’d seen something there: something wide and open and almost afraid. She held her breath at the possibility… and that’s when she felt the trembling against her.
“I’m not leaving you behind.”
His words breezed past her ear, more felt than heard. She wrapped her arms around him instinctively and he hitched as her hands landed across his back. It would be the only concession he’d make to the burns, and only to her. The trembling suddenly became shaking, and then, to her great surprise, she heard it mirrored in his breathing. She lowered one arm away from his burns and pulled him in as tightly as she could while burying her other hand and her face in his hair. They sighed into one another and held on fiercely; two shaking, scared children who needed each other as armor against the void.
And just like that she knew that she’d have to wipe the slate clean and start over with him. Again.