yuletide FIC: Notes from the Frontlines (Sidelines) (Michael Westen, Sam Axe, PG)
TITLE: Notes from the Frontlines (Sidelines)
RATING: PG
FANDOM: Burn Notice
CHARACTERS: Michael Westen, Sam Axe
SUMMARY: Michael misses his yearly “Happy birthday, Mom!” phone call. Sam helps.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for sarahbritishness (Sildominarin) for the 2010 yuletide. Set pre-series, referencing episode 2.08, “Double Booked.”
THANKS: As always, I am indebted to my intrepid beta reader, myhappyface.
Michael was in trouble. The field hospital had sixty beds, and every one of them was full, which meant that his bandages-heavy and dark with blood again, already-would be changed between When I Get a Minute o’clock and You Have All Your Limbs So Shut Up thirty. Of course, being stabbed in the gut was a problem in and of itself, but it was an occupational hazard and certainly not his first time.
No, the real trouble was his mother. You could leave the hemisphere; you could become another person. You could kill people and destroy places. You could turn your mind and body into weapons. And yet somehow there was no transfiguration that could completely sever your ties to family. Because of Madeline’s skill at crafting and applying guilt, and because you could escape the present and future laid out for you, but apparently nothing could be done to shake off your past, Michael had broken his radio silence every year to call his mother on her birthday and Christmas. (It had begun as her birthday, Christmas, and Mother’s Day, until Madeline had suggested Michael call Frank on Father’s Day; he had never called in May again. He would sometimes send a greeting card, though, if he was in a country where greeting cards were readily available, and he remembered.) The field hospital did not have a telephone, and Michael was three days into bed rest and at least three more from getting out.
Michael thought about writing a letter, instead. It would be late, but he could put the date on it, and then she would know he had been thinking about her on her birthday, and that would be better than being forgotten. He began to compose the letter in his head, automatically adding the military censors that would surely accompany it.
Dear Mom,
Happy birthday! I’m sorry this is late, but I was in XXXXXX, facilitating a XXXXXXXX, and I was XXXXXXX, so I had to XXXX XXX as soon as possible. Don’t worry; XXXXXX was XXXXXX by XXXXXX XXXXX upon our arrival.
Unfortunately, there’s no phone in XXXXXX, or I would have called you as usual. I hope you and Nate are okay.
Love,
Michael
Michael sighed. That wouldn’t do.
***
Nothing was worse than inertia. Michael could take the pain. He could take the rigor and discipline of military life. He could take near-inedible foreign foods, and intestinal parasites. He could take crash-course language learning and forty-eight hour briefings that made him feel like his skull was caving in under the pressure of so much new information. Hell, these things were almost comforting. But this, this impotence . . . there was nothing worse.
Weighted by his bandages, tethered to his IV, Michael lay trapped in the dark and disquiet of the field hospital. Sixty men, saddled with pain, do not sleep quietly, but even if he had been alone, Michael could have heard the siren’s song of the battlefield beyond. The sound stirred up his blood and made it impossible to sleep. Like a fox in a trap, Michael wanted to run back off into the wild, sacrificing his own body for freedom. Luckily, Michael was smarter than a fox, and had a better grasp of long-term battle strategy, but still. It was infuriating.
Michael laid beneath the weight of his bandages, heavier than the scratchy, standard issue blanket covering him, and listened to the battlefield music. His chest ached with wanting.
***
Michael spent several hours disassembling and reassembling his sidearm. He knew the pieces by touch, like instinct. Magazine, hammer, firing pin. The familiar weight and shapes in his hands, like picking up the steps in the middle of a dance. It was comforting, knowing what each piece did and how to handle it. Even if there was an aberration, something that went wrong, there was an immutable order that you could fall back to. Michael loved rules. Even when things went to hell, the chaos all things tended toward, if you knew the rules, you could adapt. Most people didn’t realize it, but adaptation was contingent on the understanding that usually things stayed the same.
A nurse stopped by his cot and poked at his sallow IV bag. Michael was hoping she would change his bandages, but she just said, “MI’s coming to see you,” and walked off.
Michael was of two minds about military intelligence. It was, as the joke went, an oxymoron. On the other hand, there were some decent operatives, and a few of them had saved his life more than once.
“Thanks,” he said, but she was already at the next bed.
Michael put his gun down, and he closed his eyes. The medicine in his IV and a night unsleeping left him fatigued, but he was still too vigilant to sleep, with the battleground score still audible in the background.
“Hey, look sharp there, Mikey. It’s debriefing time, buddy.”
Michael’s face broke into a smile before he opened his eyes.
“Sam,” he said. Sam Axe, in stubble and fatigues and his omnipresent smile, was seated beside his bed. “You’re my MI contact?”
“For this show I am. Don’t worry; I’ll try to make this as painless as possible.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Yeah, well, you can trust me on this one. I don’t like paperwork, and there’s no trigger-happy Serbians in the mix this time.”
Michael smiled, and reached out. Sam clasped his hand.
“It’s good to see you, Sam,” he said.
“You too, Mikey. So, you wanna talk about this transport, or you wanna shoot the breeze a while? If I remember correctly, you never have a lot of breeze to shoot. Mosta your breeze is classified.”
“Occupational hazard,” Michael said. “Hey, you know, while you’re here, you can do me a favor.”
“Here we go,” Sam said, but he was smiling. “I’m here ten seconds, and already you got a favor for old Sam.”
***
Sam’s hands were quick as ever, and Michael couldn’t help but smile as he deftly lifted some gauze and tape from a nurse’s cart as she walked by.
Michael had already asked for assistance once, so admitting that he needed help getting his shirt off wasn’t that hard. Sam’s hands were unsentimental; he undressed Michael like assembling a gun.
Sam frowned at the corset of bandages circling Michael’s abdomen. “You sure you don’t need a doctor for this, Mikey?”
“Everything’s all sewn up in there,” Michael said. “I just need a new outfit.”
Sam shrugged, and began unwrapping gauze, his rough hands tickling Michael’s cloister-raw flesh.
“Okay,” he said, “but if you stroke out or something, I wasn’t here.”
“Never saw you,” Michael said.
Sam hummed as he worked, tinny and off-key. Michael didn’t recognize the tune, but wasn’t as though he was often afforded the opportunity to listen to pop music, and Sam loved rock and roll. It was strange to realize, sometimes, that this whole bright, shiny, American world-the world they were protecting-went on while they were in the trenches. And Sam-Sam somehow seemed to live in both worlds simultaneously. That was never a skill Michael had. He wasn’t sure he wanted it, but he was impressed by the ability nevertheless.
Sam clicked his tongue as the wound was finally revealed.
“Geez, Mikey. You oughta be more careful out there. I mean, what am I gonna do if you get offed? I’ll have to break in a new guy if I want eyes only info, and you know I’m getting too old for that crap.”
“Sorry, Sam. I should have considered your feelings before I got stabbed.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
Sam finished with the tape and began to unroll gauze around Michael’s middle. His hands weren’t clumsy, just big and rough, and Michael found himself very aware of their presence on his body. It was strange; on the whole, his physical interactions had to do with inflicting pain, or avoiding it, and to be touched like this was rare and unexpected.
Sam finished with the bandages, and he helped Michael back into his shirt. Michael exhaled slowly; he felt much better.
“Thanks, Sam.”
“Anytime, Mikey. Anytime.”
***
The field hospital was quieting. As the desert sun set, the unbearable dry heat faded away. Michael laid in his cot, in the cool night and his clean bandages, and listened to the battleground symphony not so very far away.
He tried recomposing the letter to his mother. Sam had invited him to a little civil unrest in Peru, and he could probably buy a greeting card there.
Dear Mom,
I hope you had a nice birthday. I’m doing really well. Love to you and Nate.
Michael