Title: Smoke & Ashes

Rating: PG-13 (ish) some mild cussing and the implication of smut.

Genre: Spy stuff with a side of adventure, a hint of fluff and a dash of humour because Sam's a funny guy.

Warnings: Not really any, this is all made up after "Good Soldier". You might want to read the other two (Before The Burn and Burned Bridges) first to figure out who the heck some of these people are.

Characters: Michael, Fiona, Sam and some OCs for flavour.

Word Count: 19,107

Author's Note: Yeah, I'm back. I can't get Mike & Fi and Sam out of my brain. So because of the overwhelming number of people that asked for more of Michael & Ray's story (yes all two of you) I kept it going. Plus I was bored at work and needed something to do. If you haven't read the two prequels yet you might want to before going any further or you won't have a clue what is going on. Or you can just make it up as you go along, whatever, who am I to tell you what to do? Anyway, this picks up immediately after the end of Burned Bridges and goes from there. And hopefully this will answer some of the questions you (two people who read the other ones) asked me to clear up.

Disclaimer: I don't own Burn Notice or the characters of it, I just imagine that they have more to their backstories than we've been told. I'm not making any money off this so suing me is a waste of everyone's time.

XxXxXxXxXxXx

The heat of the Miami afternoon slammed into Michael Westen as he walked out of the deserted building towards his car. Sam and Fiona were standing in front of it arguing over something, probably him. Fi was waving her arms wildly and stabbing her finger in the air towards the building. He could just imagine her reluctance to leave him alone in there; she didn't like anything that could possibly mean that she wasn't the center of Michael's world. Her possessiveness of him was endearing at times but it had started to get overwhelming recently, but asking her to tone it down would be like asking his mother to stop being a hypochondriac. Sam was gently reassuring her that everything would be fine when Michael walked up to them.

"See? Told you he'd be all right," Sam said with a grin.

Fiona huffed angrily and flipped her hair over her shoulder before leaning against the hood of the Charger and glaring at him. She was obviously waiting for an explanation as to why the man that up until an hour ago had constantly reminded her that he wanted nothing to do with a relationship, now had suddenly had a wife that he hadn't bothered to mention before. Michael smiled at her nervously and dangled the car keys in her face, "Let's go somewhere a little more comfortable. Shall we?"

Sam nodded, always eager to smooth the waters, "Can we get something to drink? I'm dying here."

Fiona was still tapping her foot and glaring so Michael leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, "Relax Fi, I'll explain everything." He did have every intention of explaining things to them both, minus some of the more intimate details of course. Fiona still didn't move so he peered over the tops of his sunglasses with a pleading look, "Please Fi?"

Her face softened a tiny bit, "You will explain everything to me or else Michael."

Michael held his hands up in surrender, "Fine, I promise, now can you get in the car please?"

She did, and as she was climbing in the back seat of the Charger Sam looked across the top of the car at his friend with a nod towards the building and then a look of surprise, "Whoa!" he mouthed at Michael, obviously intending to convey his appreciation of Raina's looks. Michael smiled back and shrugged before getting in the car.

~*~*~

Fiona shot nasty comments to Michael the entire way to the bar that Sam suggested, reminding him about their previous conversations where he'd declared that she was the closest he'd ever gotten to a real relationship. She kept up the spiteful act until her phone rang and she read Campbell's name on the readout. Then she was all sugar and sweetness and it was probably a good thing that she couldn't see both Sam and Michael rolling their eyes and making gagging motions.

They drove along quietly, each lost in their own thoughts for a while, then Sam frowned and glanced over at Michael, "Mikey, where do I know her from?"

"Who?"

"Her, your…whatever she is. I know I know her from somewhere."

Michael looked at his friend in question, "Well, she was in the business too. Maybe you saw her on an op?"

"No," Sam shook his head slowly, "I think I'd remember her if I did. I know I never worked with her but damn it there's something really familiar about her."

"Well, stop thinking about it and it'll come to you."

"Yeah, you're right Mike. It must not have been that important if I can't think of it."

By the time they'd reached the bar, Fiona had calmed down considerably. Perhaps it was because Campbell had asked her out to dinner at a restaurant she'd been dying to try, or because she'd had time to realize that Michael had, in fact, walked away from Raina. Whatever the case, neither of the men with her wanted to rile her back up. As they took a table on the patio under the shade of a strip of palm trees Michael mulled over how to explain to them what had happened in his life before they were a part of it.

They ordered some food and Sam ordered a round of drinks, and they waited until the waitress came back with them before anyone said anything. Fiona was the one to break the silence, "So you're really married?"

"More or less," Michael replied after taking a sip of the ice-cold beer in front of him. "It's not on any books. At least not in this country, so only…" he counted in his head quickly, "four, maybe five, people know about it."

"Does your mother know?" Fiona asked with a smirk as she sipped at her frozen daiquiri.

"God no, and don't you dare tell her! So help me Fi, if you mention a word of this to her, I'll kill you myself." Fiona grinned, baring her teeth at him and he knew that there would most likely be blackmail in his future if he didn't cooperate with her for a while.

Sam rolled his eyes at the woman and wondered what exactly it was that Michael saw in her. "So get to the good stuff Mikey, where did you meet this vision of…mystery?" he had seen the glare from Fiona suddenly shift from Michael to himself so he quickly changed his phrasing to keep her happy.

Michael leaned back in his chair, playing with the label on the bottle of beer, "Met her in Turkey." He smiled as he remembered, "She was pretending to be a student and I was pretending to be a white collar lackey."

"So you didn't know that she was a spook too?" Sam's question had a tinge of amusement to it.

The younger man shook his head and smiled at the waitress who was returning with a plate of quesadillas for them. "Nope. I think both of us were good and fooled. But we were both young and still pretty new to the game so there's that. So, we played our parts and spent some time together and I guess we kinda found something. You know, it was nice pretending to be normal." He took a bite of the quesadilla on his plate and chewed thoughtfully for a minute. "Well, about six months after that, I ran into her again, this time we both figured out what the other one was doing, it was pretty obvious that time, and…uh, one thing led to another and we ended up together." He hadn't sugar coated it, but there was no point in antagonizing Fiona any more than necessary.

Fiona was rolling her eyes as he talked. Apparently the idea of him falling for someone other than her still irked her. "Fi, your eyes are going to roll right out of your head if you don't cool it," Sam joked.

She threw a piece of lettuce at him and turned to Michael, "I can't believe you are the type to buy into that hokey 'love at first sight' crap."

"I didn't say I do, I just said that there was an attraction there." He watched as her face fell a little and she glumly picked at her food. "I think it took us quite a while to realize there was something other than just that whole physical need thing. Anyway, we danced around for a long time and then I realized that she was a part of my life I didn't want to let go of. So I asked her to marry me."

Sam snorted around the bottle of beer he was draining, "What on earth made you think that two spooks could have a marriage?"

Michael looked pensive and chewed his food slowly, then took a long swallow of his beer, "I don't really know. I guess Ray didn't think it would work either because she turned me down." He smiled at the memory and, at his friend's reaction to his statement. "She kept turning me down too, but I guess I finally wore her resolve down. Then we ended up in Fiji for six days when we were crossing job paths and it just sort of happened."

A wistful look crossed Fiona's face for a moment and then she went serious again, "Well I'm sure it was a wonderful marriage, full of white picket fences and whatnot. Anyway, skip ahead to the part where she dies."

Michael glared at her and then went on, "Fine. I got assigned to an op in Afghanistan. I was supposed to be a German gunrunner and when I got there I found out that my contact had been replaced. Unfortunately when I met my new contact it just happened to be Ray." He trusted that their backgrounds would lend them enough information that he didn't need to explain any more than that. "She was supposed to be infiltrating a cell that was possibly linked to Al-Quaida at the time. Anyway, long story short, she was seen talking to me one night, which is a big no-no for Afghani women, and her 'keepers' started digging. They figured out that she wasn't who she said she was and things started to get hot."

He paused again and looked over at Sam. The other man's eyes were wide and full of pain and Michael knew that Sam understood exactly what he was about to say. Sam had spent plenty of time in the Middle East also, and when a covert op's cover was blown, it usually resulted in a very messy, very painful death for the exposed agent. "So I was trying to find a way get us out of there when they grabbed her."

He stopped for a full minute, trying to collect his thoughts and get past the pain that he still felt every time the thought of Ray being captured and tortured came back from the place he'd locked away in. Even though he knew she wasn't dead, it still ached in his soul because that was the moment that he realized that nothing in his life would ever truly be his to keep. "They held her for a few days in some jail they'd put together, I'm sure it wasn't pretty because you could hear the screaming for a mile. Then they trotted her and a couple of others they'd labeled as dissidents and traitors out on this street in the middle of the day and executed them. Mahsood was the one that did it and he took a great deal of pleasure in his methods."

"Jesus Mikey, no wonder you hate the guy."

Michael looked over at Fiona, whose eyes were wide with horror at what he was describing. She'd seen some awful stuff in her time, but the tales that came out of Afghanistan put them all to shame. Even though Fiona had never been to Afghanistan, she did spend some time in the surrounding countries and the atrocities were legendary. Michael swallowed around the lump in his throat and continued, "I guess that because they wouldn't allow women out in public without a burqa on, it was easier for them to hide the fact that it wasn't really Ray they killed, but whoever it was, she looked a damn lot like her."

"So how did she get out of there?" Fiona asked. Her voice was soft and low like she finally understood why Michael never talked about this with her.

"I don't know, she never said. Whatever happened doesn't really matter now. She was listed as KIA and written off about three months later." Now he was at the part that they hadn't been there for, "So somehow she got recruited into this shadow group that seems to be pulling a lot of strings. Turns out, they were the ones that burned me."

Sam burst out laughing, nearly spitting a mouth full of food across the table, "Oh that's classic! Mikey, your own wife burned you."

"Well, it wasn't her specifically, but yeah, she's the one." Michael's eyes crinkled a little in humor at the thought of what he'd been through since he got his notice. If only he'd had some indication as to what they had wanted in the first place, it wouldn't have been such a pain in the ass to get to where he was now. When he glanced over at Fiona she was smothering a giggle in her napkin, "It's not that funny Fi."

"Oh yes it is. The more I hear about her, the more I think I like her."

Michael rolled his eyes at her, "Nice, after you held a gun to her head too. Great first impression there Fi."

"Oh get over it Michael, she's in the business, she understands." She watched his face slide into a scowl, "She didn't even flinch, it's not like I scared her."

Another eye roll and he stopped scowling, "She's been watching you too." He waited for Fiona's eyes to go wide in surprise, "Yup, thinks you're pretty high on the list of demolitions experts out there." A smirk of pride crossed the Irish woman's face, "Yeah, thought you'd like that."

"So she's been keeping an eye on you all this time?" Sam questioned. His implied question was 'Does she know about you and Fiona?' but he certainly didn't want to ask that out loud and upset the tiny Irish woman.

Michael nodded, "Sounded like she's been keeping an eye on all of us. She mentioned that thing with the Jamaican's specifically." The other two people at the table nodded in remembrance of that mess. "And, she also said that Victor wasn't actually one of theirs. Seems he's been a very bad boy recently. He was the one that blew up my place. Anyway, she sent Mahsood to clean up that problem."

"Sounds like Victor is going to be spread a little thin now," Fiona's joke wasn't lost on the men and they all wondered if there were going to be parts of his body washing up on a beach anytime soon.

Sam blanched and tossed his napkin on top of his plate while reaching for his beer, "So what now? Are you back in or is there another option?"

"Well, Ray said that the reason they'd burned me was because they wanted me here. Makes sense if you think about it, there's an awful lot of nasty stuff going through this city and if they've got a local player in place, then he can keep an eye on stuff and get in before they even know they have a problem."

Fiona looked confused, "So… you're just going to accept that? I thought you wanted back in to the g-man club."

"I did. But, now that I know what's behind the burn, well, it's not that bad. I'm still doing what I'm good at, just now I'm going to be taking care of people I can see." He saw the understanding register on Fiona's face, they had talked about how they were satisfied doing jobs in Miami. They were fighting the good fight and that made them both feel better about all of the nasty things in their past.

"I don't know Mikey, sounds like a lousy pay cut to me." Sam had a valid point; the pay that Michael had been taking for the jobs they were working wasn't at all close to what he'd been making for the legitimate covert ops. The people they were helping tended to be poor and their expenses ate up most of what they were actually paid.

Michael shrugged, "Probably so but Ray said Carla would still ask me to do some stuff from time to time. She's paid me before. And paid well if you remember."

"Well, as long as you don't come knocking on my door looking for a place to stay," Fiona said as she got up from the table. "Boys, it's been enlightening but I have a date to get ready for. If you'll excuse me." She leaned over and kissed Michael on the cheek before sliding her sunglasses on and flouncing off.

"And Miami's full time hurricane departs."

"Sam!" The dismay in Michael's voice was offset by the grin he gave his friend.

"Gimme a break Mike, I've seen the wife now. Makes me wonder what you saw in Fiona. There's really no comparison."

Michael's face turned serious and carefully blank, "I saw a lot in Fi. Mostly, I saw someone that was strong enough to go on without me."

Sam seemed to consider that for a minute, "So… you were planning on leaving her when you hooked up with her?"

"In a way, yes." Michael sighed and put his empty bottle on the table. "The thing with Ray taught me that normal isn't ever going to happen for people like us. I found out how much getting close to someone hurts and I really didn't want to repeat that. I still don't ever want to repeat that particular hell. So yeah, I wasn't planning on being with Fi forever."

"I see." Sam nodded and looked serious, then confused, "Why'd you hook up with her in the first place then?"

Michael's smirk could only be termed as rueful, "Have you ever tried to say no to Fiona when she wants something? Plus, she made all the emptiness and the hurt go away."