3. Love: Act I, II & III

Percy and Amanda stood at the window in Operations and looked down at the recruits spread out below them. Michael was standing against the wall with the other recruits as everyone watched Nikita and a young woman spar together in the center of the room.

"I think Michael is in love with Nikita," said Amanda and Percy gave her a cursory look as he raised his eyebrows.

"That's quite a jump."

"You know that they're just more than friends. Look at the way he looks at her. His body tilts towards her, his arms are loose, relaxing by his sides. Look how he tenses and shifts his body when Dana gets in a hit. He worries about Nikita."

Percy folded his arms across his chest, his eyes focused on the man below them. "What are we going to do about that?"

"He's definitely sleeping with her," said Amanda. "With all the prolonged missions…the absences…"

"Birkhoff has been speaking a little bit too much lately," said Percy.

"He's covering for them. Want me to take him in for questioning?"

"No, no. Not…yet. I'll talk to Michael myself."

"If he won't listen?"

"Then we'll cancel them both."

They were on a mission together. Hidden behind some hedges, Nikita's eyes pressed close to the scope of her sniper rifle.

"What's wrong," she muttered. "You're quiet."

"Now's not really the time for small talk, Nikita," said Michael.

She shifted on the ground, where she lay on her belly in the green grass, stretched out next to Michael. "Normally you won't shut up."

He didn't say anything and she looked over at him. "Well?"

"Eyes on the scope. Never look away from your target," he grunted. "You know better than that."

Her eyes focused back on the old man in the lounge chair in the center of a small, white patio. He sipped idly on an iced tea. He had white hair, a wrinkled face, and a protruding belly.

They watched in silence as the old man got up and shuffled towards the large mansion several feet in front of him.

"Damn it. He's moving."

"And you couldn't make the shot in time?" said Michael.

"Are you sure we need to shoot him? We could just scare him enough and he'd probably die of natural causes." Nikita's finger tensed against the trigger. A door opened in front of the man and a long legged, blond in a red bikini stepped into the sunlight. Nikita's gun lowered. "Never mind."

"It's probably better if we don't ask questions," said Michael with a half concealed laugh.

She grunted and slumped further into the green grass. The ground was cold and damp where they had stationed themselves behind a hedge in the old man's large garden about three-hundred feet away.

"You know why he's a target?"

He glanced at her and then returned to his own scope. He wasn't supposed to tell her. "He's a former CIA agent now gone double. The government believes he's been talking to the Russians."

"Gogal?"

"Possibly."

"I should have shot him when he was alone. Now we have witnesses."

"Shoot the girlfriend too. Shouldn't be too hard of a task for you."

"Just because she looks like a bimbo, doesn't mean she is one." She tensed her finger on the trigger and then the gun lowered. "What did you and Percy talk about last night?"

"Nothing."

"He's checking up on you isn't he? Making sure that there's nothing going on between us?"

He snorted. "Is there?"

He'd told her a few weeks ago that nothing had happened between them. That nothing could ever happen between them. It was a fling…he had said. He wasn't in love with her…

"You tell me." Nikita turned back to the scope of her rifle. Two seconds passed and she squeezed the trigger and shot the old man in the chest. The woman didn't even get a chance to scream before Nikita shot her too. The man lay slumped in his lounge chair as blood ran down his arm, next to the veins that no longer pulsed underneath his pale, wrinkly skin. The blond had fallen flat on her back, a pool of red mixed with the halo of yellow hair fanned against the white patio.

Nikita stood up and looked down at him. "It was just a fling, right?" He watched as she shouldered her gun and began walking back the direction they had come, through the woods on the edge of the property. Someone could have seen her, but she didn't seem to care.

He watched her saunter into the trees without him, her rifle slung over her shoulder. She wore a black jacket, black pants and boots. The wind caught her hair and it flew out behind her. The wind sounded loud as it whipped around his ears. Beautiful and dangerous was right.

He watched, a month later as a black SUV let her out on the sidewalk in the middle of DC and she walked a block to her small, fourth floor apartment. She wore dark heels and a navy blue dress suit.

He parked on a side street and followed behind her. He knew that she knew she was being followed. But he still waited a good ten minutes after she had disappeared into her building before he walked the four stories up and rang her doorbell.

She opened the door. "Come in, Michael. What a surprise."

"Something to drink?" she asked him as he stepped through the door.

"Scotch." His eyes came to rest on the photographs she had framed on her desk in the small living room. He picked one up. It was a picture of him and Nikita at a wedding they went to last month. They were dancing. Her head was against his. He remembered with a queer pang in his gut that the target had been the bride's mother.

"This one's new," he said as he held the picture out in front of him. "You understand that this goes against company policy. Inter-office dating…technically it's not allowed."

"You have the nerd to thank for that one."

"Blackmail for Percy?

She shrugged and then she stepped close. He inhaled as she traced her hand down the gray tie he wore over his white dress shirt. "I don't know. I think he just liked your tie."

Then just as suddenly, she stepped away from him. "What are you doing here, Michael?"

She went into the kitchen to get his scotch. She came back and handed his drink to him. "I take it Percy didn't ask you to check up on me?"

"Perhaps he did."

"He wouldn't have told you where my new apartment was."

His mouth quirked. "No. I asked Birkhoff."

"How is he?"

"Just fine. He's happy with his new video game design software."

She poured a drink for herself. "That must have been quite expensive."

"It was. State of the art."

She took a sip of her drink. "Amanda will find out somehow. She always does."

"Not unless Birkhoff tells her."

"He's not a very hard code to crack."

He smirked. "No."

His eyes took in her small apartment, the dust on her desk, the magazines strewn across the coffee table as he watched her walk around and straighten things. It was then he noticed the stale air of the apartment. Her face was pale. "How are you?"

"I'm rarely here, if that's what you mean."

He took a drink from his glass and then set it down on her desk. "Birkhoff said it was a close one last time."

"I'm fine." She turned away from him and straightened the magazines on the coffee table. "A lucky shot."

Michael stepped close to her and closed his fingers around her upper arm. She winced and tried to twist her arm away.

"Michael you're hurting me," she gasped.

He released her upper arm, but grabbed her wrist as he pushed her sleeve up to her shoulder. "Lucky shot is right." The bandage on her forearm was stained with blood. "You need to change this, or it'll get infected."

She pushed him away. "It's fine. I've already been to medical. I know how to take care of myself."

He grunted. "Of course."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He pushed her firmly onto the couch. "Sit."

She stood up. "I'm fine, Michael. You don't have to baby me."

"Somebody should," he muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing." He walked into her bathroom and grabbed some painkillers from the medicine cabinet. He shook two ovals pills into his palm. "Here."

"I'm fine."

"Take them." He got her a glass of water from her small kitchen and handed it to her. "You're gritting your teeth."

"I am not." But she sat down and swallowed the pills without fuss. He handed her a package of crackers. She set it on the coffee table unopened.

"Where's your first aid?"

"Above the sink, in the bathroom."

He retrieved it and sat next to her on the couch.

"Just like old times, huh?" she said as he cleaned out the wound and pressed a thick pad of gauze against the damaged muscle and wrapped some medical tape around it.

"The medic should have stitched this up for you," said Michael.

"I told you, I'm fine." She pulled her arm out of his grasp as she stood up.

"There's still a lot for you to learn," he grunted as he stood up.

"Like what?"

"Don't antagonize the one holding the bandage?"

She tried very hard to hide her smile as she turned around and faced him. "Try again."

His eyes found hers and his face was serious. "Never fall in love with the man who's teaching you."

She didn't even blink. "I'm not in love with Percy."

His mouth quirked. "That's not what I'm talking about."

He watched her stoic expression falter. It was like watching the foundation of a stone building crumble to debris at his very feet. "What are you talking about?"

"Do you remember when I left for South Dakota several months ago?"

"No."

"I had to look at another recruit. Dana. You told me before I left to be careful of young drug addicts because they could be dangerous."

He thought she looked frightened. Nikita. Frightened.

His fingers found a strand of stray hair next to her jaw, which had slipped out of her bun. He was surprised at the tears he saw in her eyes. He pulled his hand away. "Well, they are."

"What are you talking about? Michael…" Her eyes were growing heavy. Suddenly her head spun. "What did you give me…"

He helped her sit down on the sofa before she could collapse onto the floor. She slumped over onto her good arm with a groan.

"I thought you could use the rest."

"You drugged me," she mumbled.

"I gave you painkillers. You were in pain."

"I should shoot you," she said, almost unintelligibly.

His smile was sad as he watched her eyes flutter closed.

She woke up, hours later with the scattered remembrance of a dream in her head. The apartment was dark. She pushed off the blanket from around her legs. Michael must have draped it across her. If he hadn't, she would think that all that went on between them was just a dream. Her high heels were on the floor next to her bare feet as she pressed her toes into the soft carpet. If it wasn't a dream, then where was he?

This was how their love was…she wrote in her notebook as she sat on her bed minutes later as she tried to remember the dream in her head.

It was need. It was desire. For one impetuous act they could learn to forget themselves, forget the world...

She shut her notebook suddenly and then crammed it underneath the mattress of her bed. What garbage. She'd tear up the pages later. She pressed her head into the wide pillow and tried to crush down her sudden anxiety. She could feel the tears on her face. She couldn't help it, when she shut her eyes, she could smell his scent. In her dreams, he was still there.

She walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water. She passed her bedroom and her door was open. Michael lay there stretched out on his back, fast asleep.

At the creek of the cupboard door, she could hear him stirring.

"Feel better?" she heard his voice from her bedroom, a smoky, sleepy rumble.

She smiled to herself. She walked into the bedroom and handed him a glass of wine. She clutched the stem of her own wine glass. She set it on the stand next to her bed.

"Yes, much, much better," she said as she sat on her knees in front of him and ran her hands down his chest. Her pants and jacket had turned into a dark silky nightgown, the color of the wine they sipped on.

"What about your arm?" he said. He reached for her upper arm, but the bandage was gone, only bare, smooth, coppery skin. "A fast recovery," he remarked with a shaky laugh, because she was pulling his shirt out of his pants.

"I talked to Percy," he purred in her ear as she ran kisses down his bare chest, his stomach, the tender skin on his neck.

"What did he say?"

"He doesn't care if we're together anymore. In fact, he told me that we work better that way."

Her eyebrows rose. "Oh?"

"Birkhoff wants to know when the wedding is."

He grunted and laughed when she hit him in the chest. "I didn't hear a proposal," she said.

His eyes were warm. "I didn't think we were ready for that yet."

He pushed her gently down on the bed. She gasped as he kissed the skin on her collar bone, ran his hands over her breasts, to rest at her slim waist.

His kiss was long and deep and he traced the skin next to her eye with the tips of his fingers. Her tears made his hands wet. He was surprised that she was crying. "What's wrong?"

Nikita woke with a start to the harsh ringing of the telephone. She gasped as she slapped angrily at the tears on her cheeks. The clock beside her bed told her it was 2:30. Her stomach ached. She had yet to eat something.

Her hand felt blindly in the dark for the telephone. "Hello?"

"Niki…Time to return back to the world of the living," said Birkhoff.

She sat up. "What?"

"Percy wants you to come in. He's got another assignment for you."

"Why didn't Michael call me?"

"This one's personal." The line went dead.

She stared at the white receiver in her hand before slamming it back onto its base. For some reason, she couldn't get the tears to stop. Was everything just a dream?

She flicked on her lamp and there was a sticky note on the alarm clock next to her bed. She recognized Michael's small, block lettering.

"OTHELLO: I, i, 42," it read. Shakespeare.

She didn't even have to look it up. She knew what it meant.

"I follow him to serve my turn upon him."

AN: Thanks for reading! We probably have Inception to thank for the dream sequences here, lol... but dreams really are fun to write. Hope everyone had a nice holiday!

~AJM