FIC: "Every Quarter Year" (Burn Notice, Michael/Victor, NC-17)
Title: Every Quarter Year
Author: Ark
Fandom: Burn Notice
Pairing: Michael Westen/Victor Stecker-Epps
Rating: NC-17; Slash
Beta: Yogurt and innumerable thanks are due jetpack_angel.
Summary: Seven days -- longer than they'd agreed on, before.
Once every three months a letter arrives via airmail, addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
With the address written in solid black block and nothing on the return, the letter is wholly anonymous. Inside is a blank sheet of translucent airmail paper, folded neatly into thirds, insubstantial to the touch.
If one were to send it the finest crime labs in the country, if one had contacts there, one would discover not a trace of DNA, not a smudge of a partial fingerprint or indication of origin. The flap is sealed with Elmer's school glue.
It is Michael's favorite piece of correspondence.
When the letter is delivered, he signs into an email address whose password is the superfluous-seeming series of numbers appended to his zip-code on the envelope.
A single draft is in the inbox, recently created, with a coded number in the text. Michael memorizes the number, then deletes it.
In communicating clandestine messages, saved email drafts are particularly effective because they leave no digital trail behind. A shared account can communicate effectively without either party ever having to click “send.”
He decodes the location and books his own flight. He signs back into the email and opens a new draft. He encrypts his arrival and indicates the number of days.
Seven -- longer than they'd agreed on, before.
Michael doesn't care. He signs out.
When he checks back three minutes later, the account has been deleted.
* * *
He tells Fiona and Sam and his mother that he's going to help bail Nate out of a recent shenanigan. He tells Nate that he has to go to a special spy conference Fiona and Sam aren't invited to and won't he spot him a few days of cover to spare their feelings.
Nate had caught on after the fifth special spy conference. Michael drove up to defuse him in person.
“I'm not stupid, Mike,” he said, phone an in-hand threat, “Just tell me what's really up or I'm calling Mom. I swear I will.”
It was so unexplainable that Michael actually tried the truth. “Okay,” he said, palms up. “Okay. You got me. What's going on is that I'm seeing someone, sometimes, that Fi and Sam don't exactly approve of.”
That stopped Nate in his tracks, and Michael softened his look on his brother. “You're the only one I could trust with this, Nate. I thought you'd understand.”
“You are so full of shit,” Nate laughed, tossing the phone onto the couch. “Right. Have fun at your spy thingamajig.”
* * *
Michael's plane circles Berlin and touches down ten minutes early, which is great news because he's been half-hard for the last two hours over most of Western Europe.
An interesting choice, Germany. Good thing Sam hadn't known his real destination; Sam had spent too much time here, especially in the East, and would have had too much to say. Sam still wouldn't eat sauerkraut.
Michael's been here too, but never as a tourist, and never like this. He hears things have changed.
A spy always packs lightly, with one bag only unless they're smuggling covert materials, and nothing identifiable. Michael with his neat small shoulder-bag is one of the first to deplane.
In the brightly-lit, scrupulously clean airport, his stride is steady. His heartbeat is up.
The line through customs takes about a year.
The large man at immigration glances at his passport. His vowels are heavy. Michael's ears are soaking up the cadences of German around him.
“Mr. Greene,” says the officer, “Welcome to Germany. Is your trip for business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure,” says Michael, firmly. He smiles white teeth.
They stamp him through.
* * *
A hundred thousand airports in his lifetime, but these times are always different.
He scans the peripheral of waiting people, the pushing, delighted crowds. There's nothing quite like an airport reunion.
He observes embraces and exchanges between many disparate groups, men and men, women and women, men and women and people all, and he starts to think that maybe the choice of destination was not as incongruous as it appeared to be.
By the line of guys in suits holding cards for cars there is a sign for FRIEDRICH ENGELS.
Michael doesn't try to hide his smile. He goes.
The man holding the sign has a dark suit and a jaunty chauffeur's cap on. “Good flight, sir?” he says, reaching for Michael's luggage.
Their fingers meet on the strap.
“Does this mean you've checked in as Karl Marx?” Michael asks.
“Don't be silly, Michael,” Victor says from underneath wide-brimmed gold trimming, shouldering the bag, “I'd never be so conspicuous.”
* * *
“You didn't actually get a car,” Michael says, as they cut through the bustling airport like pros. They are.
“Of course not,” says Victor. “Too traceable, plus the German public transport system makes American engineers weep, routinely, and on schedule. It's fun to be a part of that.”
He takes off the cap, rakes a hand through flattened sandy-dark hair. They look at each other in the eye for the first time since last time. “Also I didn't think we'd make it out of the parking garage.”
“Just so you know,” Michael says, pleasantly, “I'm going to fuck you first while you wear the hat.”
Victor clutches said item to his chest. “Sport, is that a promise or a threat I hear amidst your dulcet tones?”
“A little bit of both,” Michael says.
They take the bus into the city. It is a wonderfully efficient bus. Buildings and striking landmarks approach through the afternoon haze. German resounds throatily inside the carriage. A bit of the Berlin wall goes past.
Neither of them are looking. It's the most covert game of grab-hands to occur since the Stasi were in town.
* * *
“Stop whining,” Victor says. “You'll understand in a minute.”
After taking the gorgeously on-time underground train several stops, they'd walked for broad blocks seemingly away from civilization.
Now they were crossing a huge, proper bridge over water. It was the kind of bridge only found in Europe: enormous in span, heavy with wrought-iron and chipped red brick. Likely once the site of hangings and executions and pitched battles to the death. Today it's bright and warm out and tourists are posing beneath the historical placards.
Michael had merely politely indicated that they'd seemed to have left the jurisdiction of hotels.
They cross the bridge to the other side of the river, skirt several outdoor beergardens and an industrial park, and come at last to a break in the concrete siding.
Here the street goes down to the gravel waterfront, where there is a massive steamboat moored up to a permanent dock. The lettering on the side reads 'Hostelboot.'
Michael wants to laugh and kiss and kick Victor at the same time, and could. “We're staying at a hostel?”
“We're staying on a boat,” Victor reasonably points out. “The hostel part is secondary. The hippies are camped on-deck above -- they have some fantastic hash, if you're interested later -- but those of us not on backpacking allowances get cabins.”
“You got us a cabin,” Michael reiterates, for the sound of it. “On a Hostelboot.”
“I got us two,” Victor clarifies, “To avoid a Singapore. Come on, you're going to love it.”
They walk up the clattering gangplank.
Singapore's a lovely country, really. Top-notch. But they were very keen on rules and regulations in Singapore, and they had taken issue with the noise issue. It was kind of Victor to plan even further ahead this time.
They'd had fun getting out of the situation in Singapore, but it didn't call for a repeat. At least it would be easier to repel down the side of the hostel boat on knotted sheets.
Inside the “lobby” it is comfortably cramped, maritime-themed, and full of brochures. The androgynous boy behind the desk checks them both out.
Victor checks Michael in as his guest Mr. Engels. He asks for another key under the name Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
* * *
Victor's reserved the room by the emergency exit and furthest from the stairs. The extra cabin is adjacent. They have to duck down tiny staircases and low metal-reinforced ceilings to get there.
Space is tight, pressing them together by the door. Michael tries his key.
“You can pick a basic tumbler lock in two point seven seconds, but the Hostelboot's giving you trouble, Westen?” Victor says somehow.
Victor's arms are entirely around Michael now, Victor's larger body crowding him against metal. His lips and teeth are fastened onto Michael where Michael's neck dips toward shoulder. He lets his roaming hands find every favored missed part of Michael and get splendidly reacquainted.
Michael is going to break down the door in one point eight seconds if the key won't take.
But it does, because he's a master of locks, goddammit, and the door swings open and they go inside and they have a ship's cabin.
It isn't big: one large bed folded down in the corner, with extra bunks bolted upright on the far wall. A utilitarian steel table and two chairs. Tiny closet. Pocket-sized bathroom with standing shower. No gunsafe, but one can easily be made. Victor's small shoulder-bag by the foot of the bed.
It is bare and functional, nearly military. There are no hidden corners.
There is almost no space at all.
Michael loves it. Victor had said that he would.
He turns to tell Victor he was right by slamming him into the door, and thus also helpfully closing it, and they don't go outside for two days.
* * *
“Wait...just a sec,” Victor pants, somewhere between the second and third time. “Just...gotta -- breathe.”
He tries to pull back, sucking in air, but Michael doesn't let him far. “Getting out of shape, old man?” he asks, languidly, from deep under Victor.
They're so sweat-soaked they may as well have been swimming as on a boat. The small porthole windows have been thrown open to let in the breeze from the river. They both appreciate the secure bars across the windows.
“I'm younger than you are,” Victor snaps, lungs still straining.
“Then it's really rather unfortunate,” Michael says, taunts, his own breathing even. “You must be losing your edge along with your shape.”
“Michael, you bastard, I said just a second--”
“That isn't the safe word,” Michael says, and drags Victor back down.
* * *
“What was that, sport? Speak up, I can't hear you.”
Every single part and place and particular of Michael is trembling. He'd very nearly said it, nearly said “Mercy,” but cuts the word in two with the aid of an agonized gasp. He'll never say it.
“I didn't quite catch that,” Victor says again.
“Mermaids,” Michael finishes.
“Uh-huh,” Victor says, relentlessly resuming.
“Vic, gimme just a--”
“What's it that we Americans like to say? Ah, yes: turnabout is fair play. You'd think that one was Willy Shakespeare's, but it belongs to good old Uncle Sam.”
“Water,” Michael pleads.
The Germans favor several dozen brands of fizzy seltzer in varying degrees of fizzy strength, still afraid of their post-war pipes after all these years. Michael drinks down half a bubbly bottle even though his throat is raw.
“Time,” Victor calls. Michael is clenched hard in Victor's fist, too hard to let him come.
“I'm--”
“Michael Westen,” Victor tells him, with teeth. “And if you think I spent all those months at the monastery in Nepal painstakingly learning these techniques for precisely this moment and I'm gonna give you another quarter-second to gaze ponderously because you look pretty doing it, you have another thing coming.”
The hippies getting high on the deck upstairs must wonder why there's so much shouting about mermaids. Maybe they lean over the side of the railing to check.
* * *
They sleep collapsed together. Victor's arm is thrown across Michael; their bodies fit.
After the second trip that had ceased to be weird and had become a given.
After the third trip, in the English countryside, at the cottage Victor had rented on the empty estate --
Where he'd signed in with the caretakers as Mr. Darcy and then tried to make Michael call him Fitzwilliam for the weekend, and referred to Michael as Bingley for most of it despite protests.
Two days of walking in a rural landscape painting, trying out their best BBC accents, no one else around for miles. Two days of cooking bad English suppers and fucking on the creaky wooden bed that probably dated back to Darcy. They'd broken the bed, but fixed it to be better than before.
After the third trip it had started to become harder to leave.
The big old steamship is bound to the riverside by planks and permanent walkways but it still sways a little bit on the water. They're lulled by the motion, and rest as much as covert operatives can.
Victor's lips on the nape of Michael's neck before sleep. Only that is new.
* * *
Neither can stay asleep with the sun up, despite the night's exertions, and neither liked wasting time.
They shower in the cabin's tiny shower with the water turned nearly as hot as it will go, the way they both prefer.
Somehow Michael finds enough space and maneuverability to go down on Victor in the gathering fog, but he doesn't let him come the way Victor wants.
He stands back up and offers to help wash Victor's hair instead. Victor's eyes are murderous until Michael meticulously sets about making him clean.
After Michael's hands in his hair Michael's tongue helps out with the rest of Victor's body.
Victor turns off the water and fucks Michael bent over and pressed against the sink before they find the towels.
The heat from the shower in the little room is thick and leaves them breathing hard through steam. Michael won't admit that he's weak-kneed, that the newly discovered towel-rack is what's keeping him standing.
Victor cracks the door at last, and it's a good thing everything in the cabin is only a few feet away from everything else.
Michael falls onto the bed. Gracefully, he thinks.
Victor's grinning face ducking down. “Wanna go out today?”
“Absolutely no.” Two words, but difficult to give sound.
“Me either.” Victor grins wider. “Back in a minute. I'm gonna pay a backpacker to go on a sandwich run. This city's big on sandwiches.”
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” Michael requests.
“Donuts, too,” Victor allows. “Yeah, I'll tell the kid to pick up a couple of Kennedys for us. Now don't you go anywhere fast, sport.”
Only with Victor opening the door does Michael get his head to lift. “And can you see about--”
“Try the mini-mini-fridge in the closet,” Victor says backwards over his shoulder. “My first stop was for Turkish yogurt. Don't tell Turkey but they make it better here.”
* * *
Victor's hippie runner comes back with an array of sandwiches on fresh, crusty bread, jelly donuts flaking sugar, varying strengths of seltzer, an armful of the big brown bottles that hold excellent German beer, and a small square of Moroccan blonde hashish.
They have a feast, and then Michael lifts an inquiring eyebrow. “You're really going to hotbox the cabin?”
“Maybe later.” Victor wipes plum jelly from the corner of his mouth just before Michael can. “I think you'd like me when I'm stoned. I get all pliantly relaxed and extra-horny and touchy-feely and I'll probably call you 'dude'.”
“Man, don't you just hate the federal government encroaching on the private lives of citizens,” Michael says.
* * *
He likes Victor stoned.
* * *
They won't admit to soreness or exhaustion, but on the third day the morning is spent lazily in bed.
Victor listens with interest, and sometimes with advice, to Michael's latest string of clientele.
Michael listens to Victor spin an elaborate story-web of truth and lies.
He does it so that Michael can't make a pattern of his movements or most recent destinations. Just enough falsities and red herrings mixed into the telling so that Michael can't track him. He's tried before.
Michael knows the wildest recitations of Victor's adventures often have the most veracity in them. The more mundane stuff is filler.
They snack on Turkish yogurt and drink warm beer for a balanced German breakfast. They lie close together, sheets kicked down against the heat. The first rush of early-morning hostelers banging around on the boat has quieted and the boat rocks with them.
“So, big guy,” Victor says, dangerously genial, pinned onto the tail-end of a story about Monaco that sounds cribbed from Ian Fleming but isn't, “Seven days, huh? I think we'd said four.”
Michael has been waiting for this and doesn't avoid it. “I changed my mind,” he says evenly.
Victor says, “Four was pushing it.” Naked in bed next to Michael his eyes have their persistent light dimmed. “You know the danger we're inviting to tea with even a day.”
“I know,” Michael says.
Victor says, “I have to keep moving. Especially when I've seen you. You know I have to.”
“I know,” Michael says.
Victor says, “Dammit, are you listening to me at all? A whole week--”
“Seven days,” Michael agrees. “It's nearly just like four. Three more days won't make a difference. But they will to me.”
The manic light is back on and brightens in Victor's eyes like a flipped switch. “Michael,” he starts.
Being too accidentally open has a habit of making Michael wish he'd stayed entirely closed. Defensive is better. Should be better. “What?”
“Missed you, too.” It's the least banter-laden they've ever been.
To rebound, Michael holds Victor fiercely down while he fucks him through the mattress, and Victor fights fiercely back, which is always, always the best.
They aren't so tired after all.
* * *
Their first time really outside in Berlin is the third night.
They dress casually to blend into the casual city, in jeans and t-shirts. Victor is wearing lime-green Birkenstocks purchased at the airport. He's also brought the guns they bought in Moscow.
He takes Michael to a thriving neighborhood on the old Eastern side, packed full of cafes and bars and restaurants already busy. The variety of choices is overwhelming. Michael's senses are overwhelmed.
There are so many people moving on the sidewalks it's like a spontaneous outdoor party, with open container drinking allowed and loud music coming through an open window. A wonderful parade of ages and colors goes past.
The last time Michael had gotten off at this U-Bahn stop, the neighborhood had been crumbling and abandoned, a graveyard to Soviet rule.
Now they push past beautiful young things chit-chattering in a variety of languages. Everyone is carrying a beer, and absolutely everyone is smoking. The two women in front of them in the street are smoking and holding hands.
“Before there were Nazis, this was the swinging center of Europe,” Victor reminds, as though Michael's armed combat history needed a refresher. “Swinging in the literal sense of lots of artsy types and lots of sex with lots of different kinds of people. They've pretty much reverted back to that, with some modern innovations.”
“Good for them,” Michael says.
“Good for us,” says Victor, and on that night only, in that neighborhood in Berlin, he lets his fingers brush against Michael's palm while they walk.
* * *
They finally settle on traditional German for dinner, choosing to honor their hosts.
Both of them like the open set-up of the beergarden, with its many exits and clear sight-lines of approach in every direction.
The free-for-all mixed seating is a boon. Throughout the evening they share their long picnic table with a revolving selection of friendly Germans and tipsy tourists whose presence is better than bulletproof glass.
The German beer is fast and free-flowing, and one thing that has not changed about Germany since Michael was here last is that they're not kidding around about the beer.
You can order a glass the size and shape of a boot to drink from. Victor does, of course.
He is the instant favorite of the table for it. His German is flawless, with a native ring, and he has fun teasing their bench-mates throughout the night, daring them to guess where he was born.
None of them can guess right. He takes to bumming their cigarettes to seamlessly fit in. Michael doesn't like smoking really but he really likes watching the way Victor's mouth does it.
Michael's German is passable -- not as good as Victor's, so he has a fine time after three pints coming up with the character of Igor, Victor's visiting Russian friend. They play off of each other like a vaudeville act the instant Michael goes Iron Curtain.
Michael's Russian-accented broken German does just fine, and sometimes draws broad laughs from the crowd. Victor laughs every time he says Igor's name.
They're hungry after a diet of yogurt and sandwiches and donuts and the Germans know how to eat with their drinking. They share platters of meats and cold salads, hot corn dripping butter, noodles melted with cheese and caramelized onions, thick rolls with the flavorful sausages the country is known for. The waitress keeps bringing more beer.
It's maybe the best meal that Michael's ever sat down to. He mostly blames the beer and the waitress and Victor.
Whenever the table clears out or quiets down they talk to each other. They can't stop talking. There's so much to say all the time about everything.
Their feet touch frequently under the rough wood table-top. Victor's toes in Birkenstocks to Michael's leather sandal.
They only don't talk about that.
Victor buys Michael a boot-mug as a souvenir. They take a taxi back to the boat at four in the morning, quiet now in the backseat after so much noise. They lean against each other in the seat and going inside.
Delivered from land into the cabin they're too drunk to do much of anything. They help take off each other’s clothing and lie down where the bed should be.
Before falling asleep they make out like drunken teenagers hooking up in a crappy bed at a hostel -- so, for all it's worth.
* * *
The fourth day they go sightseeing. They stroll indulgently in the sun. They join several walking-tours surreptitiously. They lie in vast green parks and commit inappropriate acts behind historic statues. They visit museums.
Victor wants to see if there's a way they can have sex without getting caught in the world-famous Pergamon museum and insists for the next hour that they could have made it through the obvious trap-door by the main altar.
They wander amongst ancient relics from too many countries they've visited for less savory reasons in the past. Before they leave Victor blows Michael in the spiraled concrete employee staircase he breaks them into behind the Ishtar Gate.
* * *
The fifth day is a Friday. It’s a day more now than planned.
Victor goes out for too long scouting and comes back eventually with bagels and coffee. They've gotten used to eating in the low bed.
They prop pillows up against the cabin wall and skim through the stack of newspapers that Victor's bought in varying languages. There are fifteen at least, and they let themselves read about the world again for a few hours. They read side-by-side, passing the most important articles back and forth.
It's a necessary debriefing, but seems strange within the quiet of the small space and the river washing up outside.
“Nothing new,” Victor sighs, putting down a page about bombings and the stock market. He pinches fingers in at the bridge of his nose, rubs closed eyelids. “Nothing ever new. It doesn't end, does it?”
He looks trapped for the first time this trip, never his good look.
“It slows down,” Michael says, touching his arm. “Sometimes.”
“This is boring,” Victor says. “I have an idea.”
His eyes flash incandescent, and though Michael never needs reminding, he is reminded then that Victor is never perfectly entirely there all the time, no matter how much Michael wills him to be.
Victor yanks down one of the empty single bunks. He picks up and dumps the collected newsprint across the sheets, spreading out the many-colored pages.
Michael gets up to observe the curious unfolding procedure, and that's when Victor flips him sideways onto the bunk in a move Michael could counter, but not without breaking Victor's wrist first.
Victor straddles him and presses Michael down against newspaper. It crinkles under the combined weight of their bodies. Soon the ink will start to run with sweat.
“Vic,” Michael says, skin already streaked with typewritten words, “What are we doing here?”
“Making news, Michael,” Victor answers, radiant. “Making a far, far better news than the kinds we've made before.”
Michael had once skim-read Dickens' voluminous A Tale of Two Cities on a journey to Moracco via France. It was a fitting read, considering the revolutionary places he was going. He knew how it ended, had flipped to the last page: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
It's worth even the horrific mess of paper-scraps they find for hours, the extra cost in ruined sheets. There is a long time in the shower afterward, their bodies running with inky water darker than the river outside.
* * *
They go out dancing Friday night. It's a mistake.
Victor was already too nervous that they were past his allotted four days, and it would have been a better idea to eat schnitzel and detox with fizzy water at the hostel's miniscule bar.
But they were in Germany on a weekend and Victor said they needed to have one go at techno-music at least, that it was a required national past-time.
They wear their nicest clothes, look the part, and it's a good evening.
They dance with each other under flashing lights and amongst huge, anonymous, equally deafened crowds. Colorful flocks of people on Ecstasy shield them. They are both excellent dancers.
They agree aloud that they are both excellent dancers but they prefer real sex to its rhythmic mimicry.
Panting, laughing, they go to catch the train back.
Like any major city, Berlin has its share of gangs and street-toughs. Some fancied that they were skinheads in a country now utterly opposed to their existence. Mostly the gutterpunks took care of them in a sort of underground East-West Side Story.
But that night there is an intoxicated group of them in the U-Bahn station harassing cringing girls. Michael and Victor barely glance at each other, and it should have been a well-oiled maneuver.
Michael is going to drop the schmucks neatly in six moves total and then they'll play undercover Polizei for the girls until the train arrives.
Only Victor is suddenly in the way and says, “Let me--”
And they fight each other for a stupid, terrible second, Victor breaking Michael's approach to circumnavigate it and get there first. They nearly bungle the whole operation.
It should be child's play but it isn't.
These guys are big and mean and surpringly quick but don't have much training, and Michael and Victor are tipsy and fighting each other at first but are highly trained killing machines.
In the end they get them down without more than a cut above Michael's left eyebrow, which bleeds more than it bites. It takes a lot longer than six moves.
The train comes right on time, like clockwork. They sit out the ride in silence.
* * *
On the boat, Michael presses a clean towel to his head and hisses, “What the fuck was that?”
Victor is still silent. He knows he screwed up. He looks furious.
“I'm as good as you are,” Michael says. He gets it. “I might be better. You don't get to bodyguard me from the bad guys. You don't have to play the hero.”
“Only the be-knighted Michael Westen can?” Victor shoots back, richly sarcastic. “All of us must always watch you charge into danger, and wave our little colored pennant flags from the side?”
“Never be in my way like that again,” Michael says. He tugs off his shirt and lies down with his face to the wall and his fancy shoes still on.
It's the only night they spend sleeping apart.
* * *
In the too-early morning hours of the sixth day Victor crawls into the bed.
“I'm sorry,” he says into the line of Michael's collarbone. His hair is staticky from tossing and his eyes are red with lack of sleep. “I know you can handle a glut of Neonazis with one arm tied. I just didn't want you to have to.”
“Next time we'll do it better together,” Michael promises, pulling him up and in.
“We could go hunting,” Victor says hopefully, but then seems content to let Michael demonstrate all the ways in which his apology is accepted.
* * *
When they wake up later they have Turkish pancakes filled with delights at Victor's favorite open air flea-market stand and browse the antiques. Michael declines Victor's offer of a furred Soviet miltary hat. Victor expertly bargains the seller down anyway and gets it for himself.
They take a day-trip out of town, choosing a suburban commuter train without looking at its destination. It placates Victor's nerves to be getting out. He thinks they've been in the same place for too long.
They end up in a nondescript German village at the end of the line. They decide to stay there.
They memorize the layout of the few winding streets and make up memory-games with the hard-to-pronounce names in the tidy old graveyard. They do not discuss where the time is going, or what tomorrow is.
After dinner at the only pub in town they rent a room at the only hotel in town. There are three rooms, and they are the only tenants. Victor signs their names into the registry as Max Ernst and Wilhelm Grimm.
Like England, the bed is wide-set and old and creaky. The big overstuffed mattress feels good after the cabin bunks.
Like Moscow, Victor wears a Russian hat.
Like Singapore, they get into some trouble because of the noise.
* * *
It's Sunday, greyer outside than the other days have been.
On the train back to Berlin that day, the seventh day, Michael tells Victor he should come to Miami. It's a conversation that they have most times. It almost always goes the same way.
“It's safer now,” Michael adds. “And if we couldn't keep you safe who could?”
Victor only gives him a frank blue-eyed stare like he generally does. They both know who can: Victor can, on his own, no one else to account for or be accountable for.
“That's an awfully sporting offer, sport. But we already know the answer.” Victor looks down at his hands, at his watch showing 24-hour time against his suntan.
“We need you on the team,” Michael persists, selling harder. “Sam and Fiona will understand.”
“Of course they will.” Victor looks from his hands to the scenery speeding past. His gaze is far away, somewhere else.
Greenery and mixed buildings go by. They're faster than the fast German cars on the road running parallel.
Victor says it in a rush, like he’s thought about it entirely too much: “You really don't understand even after all this time, do you, Michael? Even if it were safe I could never join your band of merry pranksters. You're America's answer to Sherlock Holmes. Your country needs you. Sam is Dr. Watson and Fiona is Irene Adler and I'm Professor Moriarty, don't you get it? All the roles are already taken.”
Michael waits through the literary analogy. He's about to make a crack about Conan Doyle and fairies but Victor says, “I don't get to play nice with the rest, see? No matter what I do, I'll always be Moriarty. I'll always be in the way.”
Michael decides to smoothly ignore all of this. The outburst will pass more quickly than the train.
“I guess next time we could go to Switzerland, if you miss it, Professor,” he says.
* * *
They get back to the boat in the early afternoon. Michael's about to unlock the door when Victor stops him.
In a highly unsecured location, things had to be made as secure as they could be made. Every day they left traps behind inside. But for a spy, nothing was handier to travel with than a spool of opaque thread.
A small piece laid across the edge of a door, even sealed with saliva, was an effective barrier to indicate trespass.
The thread is broken.
They need to leave. Now.
Victor shakes his head with a bomber's instinct, but Michael gingerly opens the door. Has to look.
Victor tries to stop him but can't.
The cabin is completely trashed. The mattresses are all pulled down and upended, their insides slashed and torn and gutted. There are no more pillows in existence, only feathers. Their anonymous, unidentifiable clothing has indeed been rendered unidentifiable. Yogurt is spilled and trampled everywhere from the cracked fridge. Even the towels are in disarray.
It's made to look like a particularly thorough robbery, like they were searching for something. Since they left nothing of consequence in the cabin it is only a message.
Michael almost wants to laugh until he sees the smashed glass of his boot-mug and then he wants to shoot something, preferably something fast-moving and from a distance.
Victor grabs him from behind and drags him bodily away from the door. “Go. You need to go now, Michael.”
“It doesn't matter,” Michael says without emotion. He empties himself of it. Victor is trying to shove him towards the stairwell and he digs his sandaled feet in sideways against the pressure. “We have all our papers on us. Let's sweep the boat and go.”
“Going is right, sport,” Victor says again. “Going is what you're doing now.”
Michael sees how deep the panic has cut. He takes hold of Victor's pushing hands. “Vic, I'm not going anywhere. We didn't blow up and we're going to leave here.”
“Yet,” Victor says.
“What?”
“We haven't blown up yet.” He looks down at Michael and then kisses him hard enough to draw blood. Then he smacks him only slightly less hard upside the head. Michael lets him do both things. “You don't ever open the door. You don't ever, ever open the door.”
“We haven't blown up yet,” Michael echoes, moving willingly now. “Come on. I for one don't think I could live with myself with hippie blood on my hands, and I know you couldn't.”
They go upstairs and convince the kid behind the desk that they're Interpol secret police in three and a half minutes. They get the master key and start at the bottom, in the old abandoned engine room, and they make sure the boat is clean together.
* * *
They argue about it on the street outside, in hushed, heated Arabic. They leave the area quickly after the sweep.
They take trains to more trains, the U-Bahn to the elevated S-Bahn, getting off and onto buses, transferring to trams and then back underground.
If they have a shadow they shake it. Only one woman in a headscarf gives them a curious glance, overhearing a snatch of conversation.
Once Michael has persuaded him not to leave, Victor makes the case for something local: an anonymous lodging house in a lonely part of a dull forgotten district. The kind of place commuters sleep in at and businessmen take their least interesting mistresses. They'll check in speaking German and as Germans and check out before the owners are up in the morning. Victor's gaze is persuasive, his eyebrows knit. That was a fun sentence to construct in Arabic.
But Michael pushes for the opposite. They'll be expected to hide, and sometimes the best place for that is in plain sight. They won't spend their last hours scurrying like rats to be cornered amidst the dreck of the city. If they're going to be taken out, it should be in style and in the open. They need to leave a bloody mess behind if it comes to that.
Sam and Fiona will figure out what happened from the news they make.
Victor fights and occasionally kicks the whole way there, but Michael steers them to a generic high-brand hotel in the sea of hotels around bustling Alexanderplatz, Berlin's answer to Times Square. The milling tourist march conceals any approach of immediate threat but also conceals them in a giant press of people. They move faster than shadows do.
* * *
Victor has grown pale and closemouthed under the too-bright lights of the hotel. He's at a loss, scanning everything, every entrance and exit, already profiling the guests in the lobby, so Michael makes the reservation.
He has a debit card with payment from the time he helped smooth out a misunderstanding between squabbling cartels so that no one got shot. Subtly indicate that you’re ready to add a hefty tip for their trouble and upmarket concierges never care to see any I.D. He registers them at the desk as Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum, but Victor doesn't smile.
They take a faux-marble elevator plastered with too many mirrors to the top floor, exactly where spies shouldn't stay. Michael uses a smooth key-card entry to get in, and tries very hard not to think about hostelboots.
It's a large, open, airy suite. It is comfortingly sleek and featureless. There is a bed nearly bigger than their cabin had been, and a bathroom with a soaking tub. A wide expanse of wraparound glass frames a postcard view out onto the famous old Soviet TV tower in the square, lit up for the dark night.
Michael closes the door and locks all the locks and creates some new ones. Victor moves to the window and draws all the blinds to block out the skyline.
He's still too overwrought, much too quiet, pacing and checking the room with frenetic efficiency, so Michael starts the water in the bathtub. He makes it too hot on purpose. He pours in the whole bottle of fancy-smelling stuff housekeeping left by the rim.
In the water, he holds onto Victor. It's a tight fit for both of them in the tub but they fit.
He holds onto Victor. Victor hasn't said anything since the lobby but once they're immersed he can relax, minutely. Finds his way back to agitated speech and then Michael wishes that he hadn't.
“This is the last,” Victor says.
He doesn't say it loudly, or at his normal breakneck speed. He says it like it's cut loose with a serrated boot-knife. “This has to be the last, now.”
Michael shakes his head. He presses his scratchy chin into the back of Victor's neck for emphasis, so that he'll feel it.
Victor says, “We knew what we were asking for with even a day. Seven? We practically begged them. We've gotten sloppy, buckaroo. Thought we were too good. Thought we'd let enough time go by. Thought we were sneakier.”
“We are,” Michael points out. “We're here, aren't we?”
“You saw the writing on the wall clear as I did. Next time we'll be the mattresses,” says Victor.
There are a lot of speeches on Michael's mind. He wants to say how much better they are, how they'll stay two -- five -- steps ahead next time. How it doesn't matter anyway, how they can counter whatever is sent. It's what they're best at. Why learn the things they knew, do the things they did, if not for this?
He wants to tell Victor he doesn't have to be afraid because Michael isn't afraid of anything except this being the last time.
So he tells the truth. That's always the hardest speech of all. “I wait for a letter that comes every quarter year,” he tells the back of Victor's neck, which is easier. “And it's what gets me through the rest of it. Victor, I--”
Victor turns over on top of Michael in the water. The wet heat has slicked down his hair and made it darker, and his bold eyes are brilliant in an illuminated face.
He looks at Michael with an intensity that finishes Michael's sentence for him and stops him from finishing it.
“Yeah,” Victor says, forming the word with his mouth against Michael's. “Me too.”
And if they had been other regular people Michael would have said the two other words too and Victor's affirmation would have affirmed the other part aloud, too.
But they aren't other regular people, so they kiss instead with the water closing over their heads and quieting out the rest of it. They stay under a very long time, to see how long they can.
* * *
On the seventh night in Berlin, Victor makes love to him, and it's something apart from fucking.
Michael had thought he'd known the difference. He's lived long enough. He's lived many lives. He has shared many beds.
He learns something new every day.
* * *
They're buried and wrapped up in each other in a way that is entirely new.
Damp from the bath despite fluffy white robes, an uncountable luxury, they have the biggest bed they're ever had.
Victor is different with Michael now.
He is deliberate and lingering in some places, worshipful upon approaching others. He charts and maps the complete outline of Michael's body with his mouth, with supporting help from his tongue. He rushes nothing, running out their bare remaining hours.
Victor is different with him, so Michael responds differently, lets his barriers lower. He doesn't play or posture. He plays himself.
He lies under Victor and follows the lead Victor lays. It's new for Michael.
Victor kisses him a lot and when Michael makes a comment about going Harlequin Victor takes that as an issued challenge to make him swoon.
Swooning isn't a thing Michael thought happened outside of romances. But Victor is very good at being right.
When they're together and Victor is within him it's different than before. It's something different than all the times before and it might be the last time. Maybe that's what does it.
They've never been so turned on, so tuned-in, so aware of nothing else at all but this. Victor makes every centered thrust look and feel like it's his favorite one. Michael agrees with him.
They smile, sometimes, and laugh, which they've done before but this time is different. The sounds are different.
But they are also quiet for long lengths of time, and they kiss in ways that are off the books, that should be banned. Their mouths and bodies are extremely good at communicating messages that cannot be vocalized. They're trained the same.
Then Victor seizes onto him, holding Michael with the bruising grip he'd used to drag him clear from the doorway on the boat.
He proves that he has only just begun to show Michael about all the new and variant things that he knows how to do with them. They're not so exactly alike after all. Michael is a little older but Victor has been in the field longer, and longer out of it.
Victor knows a lot.
It's dark in the room and there are too many hidden corners but light is starting to sneak in from the window. Glistening, they move on the bed against the approach of day.
Victor's sure hand on the back of his neck, Victor's strong body in him and on him and an extension of him, Victor's eyes and lips locked to Michael's tighter than his hips are. Their eyes sting with sweat and that is why they're wet, their eyes explain.
Victor draws them out to the point of no return and past it. Every trick in the book and others that he wrote and is writing.
“Mercy,” Michael whispers.
But Victor only gives him that when they come together. They don't have far to go.
* * *
For an hour, Michael persuades Victor to open the heavy hotel curtains.
For an hour, they make the large bedspace small by holing up on one far side. They hold on.
For an hour, they watch the sun rise and spread over the city.
* * *
He wakes up to a head full of cotton and to Victor gone. It's much too bright beneath the blinds.
Michael knows the fading signs of a sedative extremely well and tosses back a furious Aspirin. He drinks deeply from the faucet in the bathroom instead of the treacherous seltzer-bottle Victor had offered him while bathed in sunlight.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” Michael says, standing naked in the empty suite, wiping water from his mouth. There are absolutely no traces. Even Victor's hair is gone from the pillowcase. Michael remembers tearing out some.
“Fuck,” he swears again, loudly, to no one at all.
He's paying a lot for the room and in a moment of angry indulgence Michael looks for something to throw. He could break some stuff, even. The cartels will pay for it.
There is a brand new boot-mug sitting on the marble countertop next to the coffeemaker. It is thoughtfully encased in bubble wrap for the trip.
His flight leaves in fifty-eight minutes, and he only makes it because of the goddamned German trains.
* * *
There have been too many recent breaks in cases, and Nate not quite sturdy enough to avoid Sam and Fiona's calls, in the passing of seven days.
In the end Fiona had driven out to see him herself, and it was a wonder Nate was still standing, as proven by frantic voicemails. Michael gives his little brother credit for delaying as long as he did.
They're waiting for him when he arrives at the loft like they've been practicing waiting.
Michael soundly shuts the door, new untraceable travel-bag slung over his shoulder. It's his loft. They shouldn't look at him like he needs to check in. He's had enough of that.
“How was your spy conference, Michael?” Fiona asks pleasantly from the kitchen. Sam is nearby, ready with a beer.
Both of them posed perfectly, everything in its place, all of it somehow looks exactly the way he'd left it a week before. They're completely unchanged. His team waiting for him at the loft to regroup.
Michael reads their faces, figures out they're planning to good-cop-bad-cop it out of him.
Fiona and Sam read his face and change their plan.
“I don't think Mike's gonna tell us just now, Fi,” Sam says, shifting from his bad-cop stance like Michael's expression might detonate and do some injury.
“Bingo,” Michael says, smiling and giving them a thumbs-up, and then he climbs the stairs and doesn't come back down until he forgets what it is to be jet-lagged from crossing the ocean.
* * *
Days, then weeks, then months.
Clients come and go. Clients seek them out or fall into their laps like clockwork. They help some second-degree friends and neighbors out of tight spots and sometimes make Miami safer with well-timed explosions.
Nothing ever new. It never seems to slow down.
Michael knows he's been blank and sullen, more than usual, and so for a while he tries not to be.
He takes Fiona out to dinners at nice noisy restaurants and goes quietly fishing with Sam. He sits with them at Carlito's, smiling. He finds reasons to fix things at his mother's without her needing to call or break anything first.
He drives up to help Nate out of a real jam, the least he can do for attempting to give Michael seven days' cover.
When they've gotten most of Nate's money back from the loan sharks they speed around for a while on the backroads out of town to lose the most persistent tails.
“Thanks, bro,” Nate says.
“Owed you one.” Michael's hands are expert on the wheel. Dark sunglasses cover his eyes. He hasn't taken them off.
Nate's known him longer than most people, Nate's whole life in fact, and Nate doesn't have to see his whole face to see Michael.
“You look like shit,” Nate says, cheerfully. Nate with money in his pocket can be cheerful again.
“Excellent,” Michael returns. “Just the look I was going for. Illegal loan sharks who carry lead pipes really hate this look.”
Nate shuts up for the rest of the ride, but when they pull in at Madeline's he says, because he isn’t stupid, “You were telling me the truth before, weren't you? You actually told me the truth. Mike, that's so cool. So who's the hot piece of covert action?”
“Get out of the car,” Michael says.
Nate does, swiftly and without argument. Nate knows him too well. Knows very well the threat-levels in his voice. Nate isn’t stupid.
Michael leaves him at their mother's opening door and drives around the block for twenty minutes until he can compose his face enough to go inside the house for a gauntlet of a dinner. Damn them both for knowing him the way they did.
* * *
Months and days and hours. When the last month comes and is going Michael knows what he's been like.
Fiona and Sam have begun muttering with mutinous ill-humor about starting up their own outfit if he doesn't snap out of it. He knows they won't, but they aren't wrong. He was too distracted yesterday and it almost cost him an arm and Sam a leg.
Sam is still annoyed about the leg. Fiona is annoyed that she's had to literally snap her fingers twice today to get his attention. Michael keeps looking at the hallway, at nothing.
Sam finally throws up his hands, like Fiona had. Their frustrated posture is nearly a mirrored pantomime. “Earth to Mikey. Come in. Alpha, bravo, charlie, over. Did you hear what Fi said? We're heading to the cafe to meet up with Barry's buddy. He's in a bad way, and we can help out.”
“Yeah,” Michael says. “Right. We'll take care of it.”
“Some people will,” Fiona says pointedly. “Come on, Sam. Michael knows how to drive. He'll meet us there when he remembers that bills are due today.”
“I remember,” Michael says, half-absent. “I mean, I'll remember. I'll be there soon.”
They share dubious looks between them and then at Michael. Sam sighs, and Fiona tosses away an empty yogurt cup with conviction.
But they go, one or the other slamming the door home along the way.
Michael sits propped against the green vinyl of his favorite chair. After they leave he sits in the dark, as much as the bright Miami sun through the many windows will allow.
It's been two months and thirty-one days since the seven, 91.25 in rough approximation. Far more than two thousand hours.
Hundreds of thousands of minutes of Michael waiting, of trying not to let himself wait and failing.
A quarter of a year gone.
And on the last day of the last month, with Michael watching from the chair, a letter slips under his door addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Author: Ark
Fandom: Burn Notice
Pairing: Michael Westen/Victor Stecker-Epps
Rating: NC-17; Slash
Beta: Yogurt and innumerable thanks are due jetpack_angel.
Summary: Seven days -- longer than they'd agreed on, before.
Once every three months a letter arrives via airmail, addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
With the address written in solid black block and nothing on the return, the letter is wholly anonymous. Inside is a blank sheet of translucent airmail paper, folded neatly into thirds, insubstantial to the touch.
If one were to send it the finest crime labs in the country, if one had contacts there, one would discover not a trace of DNA, not a smudge of a partial fingerprint or indication of origin. The flap is sealed with Elmer's school glue.
It is Michael's favorite piece of correspondence.
When the letter is delivered, he signs into an email address whose password is the superfluous-seeming series of numbers appended to his zip-code on the envelope.
A single draft is in the inbox, recently created, with a coded number in the text. Michael memorizes the number, then deletes it.
In communicating clandestine messages, saved email drafts are particularly effective because they leave no digital trail behind. A shared account can communicate effectively without either party ever having to click “send.”
He decodes the location and books his own flight. He signs back into the email and opens a new draft. He encrypts his arrival and indicates the number of days.
Seven -- longer than they'd agreed on, before.
Michael doesn't care. He signs out.
When he checks back three minutes later, the account has been deleted.
* * *
He tells Fiona and Sam and his mother that he's going to help bail Nate out of a recent shenanigan. He tells Nate that he has to go to a special spy conference Fiona and Sam aren't invited to and won't he spot him a few days of cover to spare their feelings.
Nate had caught on after the fifth special spy conference. Michael drove up to defuse him in person.
“I'm not stupid, Mike,” he said, phone an in-hand threat, “Just tell me what's really up or I'm calling Mom. I swear I will.”
It was so unexplainable that Michael actually tried the truth. “Okay,” he said, palms up. “Okay. You got me. What's going on is that I'm seeing someone, sometimes, that Fi and Sam don't exactly approve of.”
That stopped Nate in his tracks, and Michael softened his look on his brother. “You're the only one I could trust with this, Nate. I thought you'd understand.”
“You are so full of shit,” Nate laughed, tossing the phone onto the couch. “Right. Have fun at your spy thingamajig.”
* * *
Michael's plane circles Berlin and touches down ten minutes early, which is great news because he's been half-hard for the last two hours over most of Western Europe.
An interesting choice, Germany. Good thing Sam hadn't known his real destination; Sam had spent too much time here, especially in the East, and would have had too much to say. Sam still wouldn't eat sauerkraut.
Michael's been here too, but never as a tourist, and never like this. He hears things have changed.
A spy always packs lightly, with one bag only unless they're smuggling covert materials, and nothing identifiable. Michael with his neat small shoulder-bag is one of the first to deplane.
In the brightly-lit, scrupulously clean airport, his stride is steady. His heartbeat is up.
The line through customs takes about a year.
The large man at immigration glances at his passport. His vowels are heavy. Michael's ears are soaking up the cadences of German around him.
“Mr. Greene,” says the officer, “Welcome to Germany. Is your trip for business or pleasure?”
“Pleasure,” says Michael, firmly. He smiles white teeth.
They stamp him through.
* * *
A hundred thousand airports in his lifetime, but these times are always different.
He scans the peripheral of waiting people, the pushing, delighted crowds. There's nothing quite like an airport reunion.
He observes embraces and exchanges between many disparate groups, men and men, women and women, men and women and people all, and he starts to think that maybe the choice of destination was not as incongruous as it appeared to be.
By the line of guys in suits holding cards for cars there is a sign for FRIEDRICH ENGELS.
Michael doesn't try to hide his smile. He goes.
The man holding the sign has a dark suit and a jaunty chauffeur's cap on. “Good flight, sir?” he says, reaching for Michael's luggage.
Their fingers meet on the strap.
“Does this mean you've checked in as Karl Marx?” Michael asks.
“Don't be silly, Michael,” Victor says from underneath wide-brimmed gold trimming, shouldering the bag, “I'd never be so conspicuous.”
* * *
“You didn't actually get a car,” Michael says, as they cut through the bustling airport like pros. They are.
“Of course not,” says Victor. “Too traceable, plus the German public transport system makes American engineers weep, routinely, and on schedule. It's fun to be a part of that.”
He takes off the cap, rakes a hand through flattened sandy-dark hair. They look at each other in the eye for the first time since last time. “Also I didn't think we'd make it out of the parking garage.”
“Just so you know,” Michael says, pleasantly, “I'm going to fuck you first while you wear the hat.”
Victor clutches said item to his chest. “Sport, is that a promise or a threat I hear amidst your dulcet tones?”
“A little bit of both,” Michael says.
They take the bus into the city. It is a wonderfully efficient bus. Buildings and striking landmarks approach through the afternoon haze. German resounds throatily inside the carriage. A bit of the Berlin wall goes past.
Neither of them are looking. It's the most covert game of grab-hands to occur since the Stasi were in town.
* * *
“Stop whining,” Victor says. “You'll understand in a minute.”
After taking the gorgeously on-time underground train several stops, they'd walked for broad blocks seemingly away from civilization.
Now they were crossing a huge, proper bridge over water. It was the kind of bridge only found in Europe: enormous in span, heavy with wrought-iron and chipped red brick. Likely once the site of hangings and executions and pitched battles to the death. Today it's bright and warm out and tourists are posing beneath the historical placards.
Michael had merely politely indicated that they'd seemed to have left the jurisdiction of hotels.
They cross the bridge to the other side of the river, skirt several outdoor beergardens and an industrial park, and come at last to a break in the concrete siding.
Here the street goes down to the gravel waterfront, where there is a massive steamboat moored up to a permanent dock. The lettering on the side reads 'Hostelboot.'
Michael wants to laugh and kiss and kick Victor at the same time, and could. “We're staying at a hostel?”
“We're staying on a boat,” Victor reasonably points out. “The hostel part is secondary. The hippies are camped on-deck above -- they have some fantastic hash, if you're interested later -- but those of us not on backpacking allowances get cabins.”
“You got us a cabin,” Michael reiterates, for the sound of it. “On a Hostelboot.”
“I got us two,” Victor clarifies, “To avoid a Singapore. Come on, you're going to love it.”
They walk up the clattering gangplank.
Singapore's a lovely country, really. Top-notch. But they were very keen on rules and regulations in Singapore, and they had taken issue with the noise issue. It was kind of Victor to plan even further ahead this time.
They'd had fun getting out of the situation in Singapore, but it didn't call for a repeat. At least it would be easier to repel down the side of the hostel boat on knotted sheets.
Inside the “lobby” it is comfortably cramped, maritime-themed, and full of brochures. The androgynous boy behind the desk checks them both out.
Victor checks Michael in as his guest Mr. Engels. He asks for another key under the name Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
* * *
Victor's reserved the room by the emergency exit and furthest from the stairs. The extra cabin is adjacent. They have to duck down tiny staircases and low metal-reinforced ceilings to get there.
Space is tight, pressing them together by the door. Michael tries his key.
“You can pick a basic tumbler lock in two point seven seconds, but the Hostelboot's giving you trouble, Westen?” Victor says somehow.
Victor's arms are entirely around Michael now, Victor's larger body crowding him against metal. His lips and teeth are fastened onto Michael where Michael's neck dips toward shoulder. He lets his roaming hands find every favored missed part of Michael and get splendidly reacquainted.
Michael is going to break down the door in one point eight seconds if the key won't take.
But it does, because he's a master of locks, goddammit, and the door swings open and they go inside and they have a ship's cabin.
It isn't big: one large bed folded down in the corner, with extra bunks bolted upright on the far wall. A utilitarian steel table and two chairs. Tiny closet. Pocket-sized bathroom with standing shower. No gunsafe, but one can easily be made. Victor's small shoulder-bag by the foot of the bed.
It is bare and functional, nearly military. There are no hidden corners.
There is almost no space at all.
Michael loves it. Victor had said that he would.
He turns to tell Victor he was right by slamming him into the door, and thus also helpfully closing it, and they don't go outside for two days.
* * *
“Wait...just a sec,” Victor pants, somewhere between the second and third time. “Just...gotta -- breathe.”
He tries to pull back, sucking in air, but Michael doesn't let him far. “Getting out of shape, old man?” he asks, languidly, from deep under Victor.
They're so sweat-soaked they may as well have been swimming as on a boat. The small porthole windows have been thrown open to let in the breeze from the river. They both appreciate the secure bars across the windows.
“I'm younger than you are,” Victor snaps, lungs still straining.
“Then it's really rather unfortunate,” Michael says, taunts, his own breathing even. “You must be losing your edge along with your shape.”
“Michael, you bastard, I said just a second--”
“That isn't the safe word,” Michael says, and drags Victor back down.
* * *
“What was that, sport? Speak up, I can't hear you.”
Every single part and place and particular of Michael is trembling. He'd very nearly said it, nearly said “Mercy,” but cuts the word in two with the aid of an agonized gasp. He'll never say it.
“I didn't quite catch that,” Victor says again.
“Mermaids,” Michael finishes.
“Uh-huh,” Victor says, relentlessly resuming.
“Vic, gimme just a--”
“What's it that we Americans like to say? Ah, yes: turnabout is fair play. You'd think that one was Willy Shakespeare's, but it belongs to good old Uncle Sam.”
“Water,” Michael pleads.
The Germans favor several dozen brands of fizzy seltzer in varying degrees of fizzy strength, still afraid of their post-war pipes after all these years. Michael drinks down half a bubbly bottle even though his throat is raw.
“Time,” Victor calls. Michael is clenched hard in Victor's fist, too hard to let him come.
“I'm--”
“Michael Westen,” Victor tells him, with teeth. “And if you think I spent all those months at the monastery in Nepal painstakingly learning these techniques for precisely this moment and I'm gonna give you another quarter-second to gaze ponderously because you look pretty doing it, you have another thing coming.”
The hippies getting high on the deck upstairs must wonder why there's so much shouting about mermaids. Maybe they lean over the side of the railing to check.
* * *
They sleep collapsed together. Victor's arm is thrown across Michael; their bodies fit.
After the second trip that had ceased to be weird and had become a given.
After the third trip, in the English countryside, at the cottage Victor had rented on the empty estate --
Where he'd signed in with the caretakers as Mr. Darcy and then tried to make Michael call him Fitzwilliam for the weekend, and referred to Michael as Bingley for most of it despite protests.
Two days of walking in a rural landscape painting, trying out their best BBC accents, no one else around for miles. Two days of cooking bad English suppers and fucking on the creaky wooden bed that probably dated back to Darcy. They'd broken the bed, but fixed it to be better than before.
After the third trip it had started to become harder to leave.
The big old steamship is bound to the riverside by planks and permanent walkways but it still sways a little bit on the water. They're lulled by the motion, and rest as much as covert operatives can.
Victor's lips on the nape of Michael's neck before sleep. Only that is new.
* * *
Neither can stay asleep with the sun up, despite the night's exertions, and neither liked wasting time.
They shower in the cabin's tiny shower with the water turned nearly as hot as it will go, the way they both prefer.
Somehow Michael finds enough space and maneuverability to go down on Victor in the gathering fog, but he doesn't let him come the way Victor wants.
He stands back up and offers to help wash Victor's hair instead. Victor's eyes are murderous until Michael meticulously sets about making him clean.
After Michael's hands in his hair Michael's tongue helps out with the rest of Victor's body.
Victor turns off the water and fucks Michael bent over and pressed against the sink before they find the towels.
The heat from the shower in the little room is thick and leaves them breathing hard through steam. Michael won't admit that he's weak-kneed, that the newly discovered towel-rack is what's keeping him standing.
Victor cracks the door at last, and it's a good thing everything in the cabin is only a few feet away from everything else.
Michael falls onto the bed. Gracefully, he thinks.
Victor's grinning face ducking down. “Wanna go out today?”
“Absolutely no.” Two words, but difficult to give sound.
“Me either.” Victor grins wider. “Back in a minute. I'm gonna pay a backpacker to go on a sandwich run. This city's big on sandwiches.”
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” Michael requests.
“Donuts, too,” Victor allows. “Yeah, I'll tell the kid to pick up a couple of Kennedys for us. Now don't you go anywhere fast, sport.”
Only with Victor opening the door does Michael get his head to lift. “And can you see about--”
“Try the mini-mini-fridge in the closet,” Victor says backwards over his shoulder. “My first stop was for Turkish yogurt. Don't tell Turkey but they make it better here.”
* * *
Victor's hippie runner comes back with an array of sandwiches on fresh, crusty bread, jelly donuts flaking sugar, varying strengths of seltzer, an armful of the big brown bottles that hold excellent German beer, and a small square of Moroccan blonde hashish.
They have a feast, and then Michael lifts an inquiring eyebrow. “You're really going to hotbox the cabin?”
“Maybe later.” Victor wipes plum jelly from the corner of his mouth just before Michael can. “I think you'd like me when I'm stoned. I get all pliantly relaxed and extra-horny and touchy-feely and I'll probably call you 'dude'.”
“Man, don't you just hate the federal government encroaching on the private lives of citizens,” Michael says.
* * *
He likes Victor stoned.
* * *
They won't admit to soreness or exhaustion, but on the third day the morning is spent lazily in bed.
Victor listens with interest, and sometimes with advice, to Michael's latest string of clientele.
Michael listens to Victor spin an elaborate story-web of truth and lies.
He does it so that Michael can't make a pattern of his movements or most recent destinations. Just enough falsities and red herrings mixed into the telling so that Michael can't track him. He's tried before.
Michael knows the wildest recitations of Victor's adventures often have the most veracity in them. The more mundane stuff is filler.
They snack on Turkish yogurt and drink warm beer for a balanced German breakfast. They lie close together, sheets kicked down against the heat. The first rush of early-morning hostelers banging around on the boat has quieted and the boat rocks with them.
“So, big guy,” Victor says, dangerously genial, pinned onto the tail-end of a story about Monaco that sounds cribbed from Ian Fleming but isn't, “Seven days, huh? I think we'd said four.”
Michael has been waiting for this and doesn't avoid it. “I changed my mind,” he says evenly.
Victor says, “Four was pushing it.” Naked in bed next to Michael his eyes have their persistent light dimmed. “You know the danger we're inviting to tea with even a day.”
“I know,” Michael says.
Victor says, “I have to keep moving. Especially when I've seen you. You know I have to.”
“I know,” Michael says.
Victor says, “Dammit, are you listening to me at all? A whole week--”
“Seven days,” Michael agrees. “It's nearly just like four. Three more days won't make a difference. But they will to me.”
The manic light is back on and brightens in Victor's eyes like a flipped switch. “Michael,” he starts.
Being too accidentally open has a habit of making Michael wish he'd stayed entirely closed. Defensive is better. Should be better. “What?”
“Missed you, too.” It's the least banter-laden they've ever been.
To rebound, Michael holds Victor fiercely down while he fucks him through the mattress, and Victor fights fiercely back, which is always, always the best.
They aren't so tired after all.
* * *
Their first time really outside in Berlin is the third night.
They dress casually to blend into the casual city, in jeans and t-shirts. Victor is wearing lime-green Birkenstocks purchased at the airport. He's also brought the guns they bought in Moscow.
He takes Michael to a thriving neighborhood on the old Eastern side, packed full of cafes and bars and restaurants already busy. The variety of choices is overwhelming. Michael's senses are overwhelmed.
There are so many people moving on the sidewalks it's like a spontaneous outdoor party, with open container drinking allowed and loud music coming through an open window. A wonderful parade of ages and colors goes past.
The last time Michael had gotten off at this U-Bahn stop, the neighborhood had been crumbling and abandoned, a graveyard to Soviet rule.
Now they push past beautiful young things chit-chattering in a variety of languages. Everyone is carrying a beer, and absolutely everyone is smoking. The two women in front of them in the street are smoking and holding hands.
“Before there were Nazis, this was the swinging center of Europe,” Victor reminds, as though Michael's armed combat history needed a refresher. “Swinging in the literal sense of lots of artsy types and lots of sex with lots of different kinds of people. They've pretty much reverted back to that, with some modern innovations.”
“Good for them,” Michael says.
“Good for us,” says Victor, and on that night only, in that neighborhood in Berlin, he lets his fingers brush against Michael's palm while they walk.
* * *
They finally settle on traditional German for dinner, choosing to honor their hosts.
Both of them like the open set-up of the beergarden, with its many exits and clear sight-lines of approach in every direction.
The free-for-all mixed seating is a boon. Throughout the evening they share their long picnic table with a revolving selection of friendly Germans and tipsy tourists whose presence is better than bulletproof glass.
The German beer is fast and free-flowing, and one thing that has not changed about Germany since Michael was here last is that they're not kidding around about the beer.
You can order a glass the size and shape of a boot to drink from. Victor does, of course.
He is the instant favorite of the table for it. His German is flawless, with a native ring, and he has fun teasing their bench-mates throughout the night, daring them to guess where he was born.
None of them can guess right. He takes to bumming their cigarettes to seamlessly fit in. Michael doesn't like smoking really but he really likes watching the way Victor's mouth does it.
Michael's German is passable -- not as good as Victor's, so he has a fine time after three pints coming up with the character of Igor, Victor's visiting Russian friend. They play off of each other like a vaudeville act the instant Michael goes Iron Curtain.
Michael's Russian-accented broken German does just fine, and sometimes draws broad laughs from the crowd. Victor laughs every time he says Igor's name.
They're hungry after a diet of yogurt and sandwiches and donuts and the Germans know how to eat with their drinking. They share platters of meats and cold salads, hot corn dripping butter, noodles melted with cheese and caramelized onions, thick rolls with the flavorful sausages the country is known for. The waitress keeps bringing more beer.
It's maybe the best meal that Michael's ever sat down to. He mostly blames the beer and the waitress and Victor.
Whenever the table clears out or quiets down they talk to each other. They can't stop talking. There's so much to say all the time about everything.
Their feet touch frequently under the rough wood table-top. Victor's toes in Birkenstocks to Michael's leather sandal.
They only don't talk about that.
Victor buys Michael a boot-mug as a souvenir. They take a taxi back to the boat at four in the morning, quiet now in the backseat after so much noise. They lean against each other in the seat and going inside.
Delivered from land into the cabin they're too drunk to do much of anything. They help take off each other’s clothing and lie down where the bed should be.
Before falling asleep they make out like drunken teenagers hooking up in a crappy bed at a hostel -- so, for all it's worth.
* * *
The fourth day they go sightseeing. They stroll indulgently in the sun. They join several walking-tours surreptitiously. They lie in vast green parks and commit inappropriate acts behind historic statues. They visit museums.
Victor wants to see if there's a way they can have sex without getting caught in the world-famous Pergamon museum and insists for the next hour that they could have made it through the obvious trap-door by the main altar.
They wander amongst ancient relics from too many countries they've visited for less savory reasons in the past. Before they leave Victor blows Michael in the spiraled concrete employee staircase he breaks them into behind the Ishtar Gate.
* * *
The fifth day is a Friday. It’s a day more now than planned.
Victor goes out for too long scouting and comes back eventually with bagels and coffee. They've gotten used to eating in the low bed.
They prop pillows up against the cabin wall and skim through the stack of newspapers that Victor's bought in varying languages. There are fifteen at least, and they let themselves read about the world again for a few hours. They read side-by-side, passing the most important articles back and forth.
It's a necessary debriefing, but seems strange within the quiet of the small space and the river washing up outside.
“Nothing new,” Victor sighs, putting down a page about bombings and the stock market. He pinches fingers in at the bridge of his nose, rubs closed eyelids. “Nothing ever new. It doesn't end, does it?”
He looks trapped for the first time this trip, never his good look.
“It slows down,” Michael says, touching his arm. “Sometimes.”
“This is boring,” Victor says. “I have an idea.”
His eyes flash incandescent, and though Michael never needs reminding, he is reminded then that Victor is never perfectly entirely there all the time, no matter how much Michael wills him to be.
Victor yanks down one of the empty single bunks. He picks up and dumps the collected newsprint across the sheets, spreading out the many-colored pages.
Michael gets up to observe the curious unfolding procedure, and that's when Victor flips him sideways onto the bunk in a move Michael could counter, but not without breaking Victor's wrist first.
Victor straddles him and presses Michael down against newspaper. It crinkles under the combined weight of their bodies. Soon the ink will start to run with sweat.
“Vic,” Michael says, skin already streaked with typewritten words, “What are we doing here?”
“Making news, Michael,” Victor answers, radiant. “Making a far, far better news than the kinds we've made before.”
Michael had once skim-read Dickens' voluminous A Tale of Two Cities on a journey to Moracco via France. It was a fitting read, considering the revolutionary places he was going. He knew how it ended, had flipped to the last page: It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
It's worth even the horrific mess of paper-scraps they find for hours, the extra cost in ruined sheets. There is a long time in the shower afterward, their bodies running with inky water darker than the river outside.
* * *
They go out dancing Friday night. It's a mistake.
Victor was already too nervous that they were past his allotted four days, and it would have been a better idea to eat schnitzel and detox with fizzy water at the hostel's miniscule bar.
But they were in Germany on a weekend and Victor said they needed to have one go at techno-music at least, that it was a required national past-time.
They wear their nicest clothes, look the part, and it's a good evening.
They dance with each other under flashing lights and amongst huge, anonymous, equally deafened crowds. Colorful flocks of people on Ecstasy shield them. They are both excellent dancers.
They agree aloud that they are both excellent dancers but they prefer real sex to its rhythmic mimicry.
Panting, laughing, they go to catch the train back.
Like any major city, Berlin has its share of gangs and street-toughs. Some fancied that they were skinheads in a country now utterly opposed to their existence. Mostly the gutterpunks took care of them in a sort of underground East-West Side Story.
But that night there is an intoxicated group of them in the U-Bahn station harassing cringing girls. Michael and Victor barely glance at each other, and it should have been a well-oiled maneuver.
Michael is going to drop the schmucks neatly in six moves total and then they'll play undercover Polizei for the girls until the train arrives.
Only Victor is suddenly in the way and says, “Let me--”
And they fight each other for a stupid, terrible second, Victor breaking Michael's approach to circumnavigate it and get there first. They nearly bungle the whole operation.
It should be child's play but it isn't.
These guys are big and mean and surpringly quick but don't have much training, and Michael and Victor are tipsy and fighting each other at first but are highly trained killing machines.
In the end they get them down without more than a cut above Michael's left eyebrow, which bleeds more than it bites. It takes a lot longer than six moves.
The train comes right on time, like clockwork. They sit out the ride in silence.
* * *
On the boat, Michael presses a clean towel to his head and hisses, “What the fuck was that?”
Victor is still silent. He knows he screwed up. He looks furious.
“I'm as good as you are,” Michael says. He gets it. “I might be better. You don't get to bodyguard me from the bad guys. You don't have to play the hero.”
“Only the be-knighted Michael Westen can?” Victor shoots back, richly sarcastic. “All of us must always watch you charge into danger, and wave our little colored pennant flags from the side?”
“Never be in my way like that again,” Michael says. He tugs off his shirt and lies down with his face to the wall and his fancy shoes still on.
It's the only night they spend sleeping apart.
* * *
In the too-early morning hours of the sixth day Victor crawls into the bed.
“I'm sorry,” he says into the line of Michael's collarbone. His hair is staticky from tossing and his eyes are red with lack of sleep. “I know you can handle a glut of Neonazis with one arm tied. I just didn't want you to have to.”
“Next time we'll do it better together,” Michael promises, pulling him up and in.
“We could go hunting,” Victor says hopefully, but then seems content to let Michael demonstrate all the ways in which his apology is accepted.
* * *
When they wake up later they have Turkish pancakes filled with delights at Victor's favorite open air flea-market stand and browse the antiques. Michael declines Victor's offer of a furred Soviet miltary hat. Victor expertly bargains the seller down anyway and gets it for himself.
They take a day-trip out of town, choosing a suburban commuter train without looking at its destination. It placates Victor's nerves to be getting out. He thinks they've been in the same place for too long.
They end up in a nondescript German village at the end of the line. They decide to stay there.
They memorize the layout of the few winding streets and make up memory-games with the hard-to-pronounce names in the tidy old graveyard. They do not discuss where the time is going, or what tomorrow is.
After dinner at the only pub in town they rent a room at the only hotel in town. There are three rooms, and they are the only tenants. Victor signs their names into the registry as Max Ernst and Wilhelm Grimm.
Like England, the bed is wide-set and old and creaky. The big overstuffed mattress feels good after the cabin bunks.
Like Moscow, Victor wears a Russian hat.
Like Singapore, they get into some trouble because of the noise.
* * *
It's Sunday, greyer outside than the other days have been.
On the train back to Berlin that day, the seventh day, Michael tells Victor he should come to Miami. It's a conversation that they have most times. It almost always goes the same way.
“It's safer now,” Michael adds. “And if we couldn't keep you safe who could?”
Victor only gives him a frank blue-eyed stare like he generally does. They both know who can: Victor can, on his own, no one else to account for or be accountable for.
“That's an awfully sporting offer, sport. But we already know the answer.” Victor looks down at his hands, at his watch showing 24-hour time against his suntan.
“We need you on the team,” Michael persists, selling harder. “Sam and Fiona will understand.”
“Of course they will.” Victor looks from his hands to the scenery speeding past. His gaze is far away, somewhere else.
Greenery and mixed buildings go by. They're faster than the fast German cars on the road running parallel.
Victor says it in a rush, like he’s thought about it entirely too much: “You really don't understand even after all this time, do you, Michael? Even if it were safe I could never join your band of merry pranksters. You're America's answer to Sherlock Holmes. Your country needs you. Sam is Dr. Watson and Fiona is Irene Adler and I'm Professor Moriarty, don't you get it? All the roles are already taken.”
Michael waits through the literary analogy. He's about to make a crack about Conan Doyle and fairies but Victor says, “I don't get to play nice with the rest, see? No matter what I do, I'll always be Moriarty. I'll always be in the way.”
Michael decides to smoothly ignore all of this. The outburst will pass more quickly than the train.
“I guess next time we could go to Switzerland, if you miss it, Professor,” he says.
* * *
They get back to the boat in the early afternoon. Michael's about to unlock the door when Victor stops him.
In a highly unsecured location, things had to be made as secure as they could be made. Every day they left traps behind inside. But for a spy, nothing was handier to travel with than a spool of opaque thread.
A small piece laid across the edge of a door, even sealed with saliva, was an effective barrier to indicate trespass.
The thread is broken.
They need to leave. Now.
Victor shakes his head with a bomber's instinct, but Michael gingerly opens the door. Has to look.
Victor tries to stop him but can't.
The cabin is completely trashed. The mattresses are all pulled down and upended, their insides slashed and torn and gutted. There are no more pillows in existence, only feathers. Their anonymous, unidentifiable clothing has indeed been rendered unidentifiable. Yogurt is spilled and trampled everywhere from the cracked fridge. Even the towels are in disarray.
It's made to look like a particularly thorough robbery, like they were searching for something. Since they left nothing of consequence in the cabin it is only a message.
Michael almost wants to laugh until he sees the smashed glass of his boot-mug and then he wants to shoot something, preferably something fast-moving and from a distance.
Victor grabs him from behind and drags him bodily away from the door. “Go. You need to go now, Michael.”
“It doesn't matter,” Michael says without emotion. He empties himself of it. Victor is trying to shove him towards the stairwell and he digs his sandaled feet in sideways against the pressure. “We have all our papers on us. Let's sweep the boat and go.”
“Going is right, sport,” Victor says again. “Going is what you're doing now.”
Michael sees how deep the panic has cut. He takes hold of Victor's pushing hands. “Vic, I'm not going anywhere. We didn't blow up and we're going to leave here.”
“Yet,” Victor says.
“What?”
“We haven't blown up yet.” He looks down at Michael and then kisses him hard enough to draw blood. Then he smacks him only slightly less hard upside the head. Michael lets him do both things. “You don't ever open the door. You don't ever, ever open the door.”
“We haven't blown up yet,” Michael echoes, moving willingly now. “Come on. I for one don't think I could live with myself with hippie blood on my hands, and I know you couldn't.”
They go upstairs and convince the kid behind the desk that they're Interpol secret police in three and a half minutes. They get the master key and start at the bottom, in the old abandoned engine room, and they make sure the boat is clean together.
* * *
They argue about it on the street outside, in hushed, heated Arabic. They leave the area quickly after the sweep.
They take trains to more trains, the U-Bahn to the elevated S-Bahn, getting off and onto buses, transferring to trams and then back underground.
If they have a shadow they shake it. Only one woman in a headscarf gives them a curious glance, overhearing a snatch of conversation.
Once Michael has persuaded him not to leave, Victor makes the case for something local: an anonymous lodging house in a lonely part of a dull forgotten district. The kind of place commuters sleep in at and businessmen take their least interesting mistresses. They'll check in speaking German and as Germans and check out before the owners are up in the morning. Victor's gaze is persuasive, his eyebrows knit. That was a fun sentence to construct in Arabic.
But Michael pushes for the opposite. They'll be expected to hide, and sometimes the best place for that is in plain sight. They won't spend their last hours scurrying like rats to be cornered amidst the dreck of the city. If they're going to be taken out, it should be in style and in the open. They need to leave a bloody mess behind if it comes to that.
Sam and Fiona will figure out what happened from the news they make.
Victor fights and occasionally kicks the whole way there, but Michael steers them to a generic high-brand hotel in the sea of hotels around bustling Alexanderplatz, Berlin's answer to Times Square. The milling tourist march conceals any approach of immediate threat but also conceals them in a giant press of people. They move faster than shadows do.
* * *
Victor has grown pale and closemouthed under the too-bright lights of the hotel. He's at a loss, scanning everything, every entrance and exit, already profiling the guests in the lobby, so Michael makes the reservation.
He has a debit card with payment from the time he helped smooth out a misunderstanding between squabbling cartels so that no one got shot. Subtly indicate that you’re ready to add a hefty tip for their trouble and upmarket concierges never care to see any I.D. He registers them at the desk as Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum, but Victor doesn't smile.
They take a faux-marble elevator plastered with too many mirrors to the top floor, exactly where spies shouldn't stay. Michael uses a smooth key-card entry to get in, and tries very hard not to think about hostelboots.
It's a large, open, airy suite. It is comfortingly sleek and featureless. There is a bed nearly bigger than their cabin had been, and a bathroom with a soaking tub. A wide expanse of wraparound glass frames a postcard view out onto the famous old Soviet TV tower in the square, lit up for the dark night.
Michael closes the door and locks all the locks and creates some new ones. Victor moves to the window and draws all the blinds to block out the skyline.
He's still too overwrought, much too quiet, pacing and checking the room with frenetic efficiency, so Michael starts the water in the bathtub. He makes it too hot on purpose. He pours in the whole bottle of fancy-smelling stuff housekeeping left by the rim.
In the water, he holds onto Victor. It's a tight fit for both of them in the tub but they fit.
He holds onto Victor. Victor hasn't said anything since the lobby but once they're immersed he can relax, minutely. Finds his way back to agitated speech and then Michael wishes that he hadn't.
“This is the last,” Victor says.
He doesn't say it loudly, or at his normal breakneck speed. He says it like it's cut loose with a serrated boot-knife. “This has to be the last, now.”
Michael shakes his head. He presses his scratchy chin into the back of Victor's neck for emphasis, so that he'll feel it.
Victor says, “We knew what we were asking for with even a day. Seven? We practically begged them. We've gotten sloppy, buckaroo. Thought we were too good. Thought we'd let enough time go by. Thought we were sneakier.”
“We are,” Michael points out. “We're here, aren't we?”
“You saw the writing on the wall clear as I did. Next time we'll be the mattresses,” says Victor.
There are a lot of speeches on Michael's mind. He wants to say how much better they are, how they'll stay two -- five -- steps ahead next time. How it doesn't matter anyway, how they can counter whatever is sent. It's what they're best at. Why learn the things they knew, do the things they did, if not for this?
He wants to tell Victor he doesn't have to be afraid because Michael isn't afraid of anything except this being the last time.
So he tells the truth. That's always the hardest speech of all. “I wait for a letter that comes every quarter year,” he tells the back of Victor's neck, which is easier. “And it's what gets me through the rest of it. Victor, I--”
Victor turns over on top of Michael in the water. The wet heat has slicked down his hair and made it darker, and his bold eyes are brilliant in an illuminated face.
He looks at Michael with an intensity that finishes Michael's sentence for him and stops him from finishing it.
“Yeah,” Victor says, forming the word with his mouth against Michael's. “Me too.”
And if they had been other regular people Michael would have said the two other words too and Victor's affirmation would have affirmed the other part aloud, too.
But they aren't other regular people, so they kiss instead with the water closing over their heads and quieting out the rest of it. They stay under a very long time, to see how long they can.
* * *
On the seventh night in Berlin, Victor makes love to him, and it's something apart from fucking.
Michael had thought he'd known the difference. He's lived long enough. He's lived many lives. He has shared many beds.
He learns something new every day.
* * *
They're buried and wrapped up in each other in a way that is entirely new.
Damp from the bath despite fluffy white robes, an uncountable luxury, they have the biggest bed they're ever had.
Victor is different with Michael now.
He is deliberate and lingering in some places, worshipful upon approaching others. He charts and maps the complete outline of Michael's body with his mouth, with supporting help from his tongue. He rushes nothing, running out their bare remaining hours.
Victor is different with him, so Michael responds differently, lets his barriers lower. He doesn't play or posture. He plays himself.
He lies under Victor and follows the lead Victor lays. It's new for Michael.
Victor kisses him a lot and when Michael makes a comment about going Harlequin Victor takes that as an issued challenge to make him swoon.
Swooning isn't a thing Michael thought happened outside of romances. But Victor is very good at being right.
When they're together and Victor is within him it's different than before. It's something different than all the times before and it might be the last time. Maybe that's what does it.
They've never been so turned on, so tuned-in, so aware of nothing else at all but this. Victor makes every centered thrust look and feel like it's his favorite one. Michael agrees with him.
They smile, sometimes, and laugh, which they've done before but this time is different. The sounds are different.
But they are also quiet for long lengths of time, and they kiss in ways that are off the books, that should be banned. Their mouths and bodies are extremely good at communicating messages that cannot be vocalized. They're trained the same.
Then Victor seizes onto him, holding Michael with the bruising grip he'd used to drag him clear from the doorway on the boat.
He proves that he has only just begun to show Michael about all the new and variant things that he knows how to do with them. They're not so exactly alike after all. Michael is a little older but Victor has been in the field longer, and longer out of it.
Victor knows a lot.
It's dark in the room and there are too many hidden corners but light is starting to sneak in from the window. Glistening, they move on the bed against the approach of day.
Victor's sure hand on the back of his neck, Victor's strong body in him and on him and an extension of him, Victor's eyes and lips locked to Michael's tighter than his hips are. Their eyes sting with sweat and that is why they're wet, their eyes explain.
Victor draws them out to the point of no return and past it. Every trick in the book and others that he wrote and is writing.
“Mercy,” Michael whispers.
But Victor only gives him that when they come together. They don't have far to go.
* * *
For an hour, Michael persuades Victor to open the heavy hotel curtains.
For an hour, they make the large bedspace small by holing up on one far side. They hold on.
For an hour, they watch the sun rise and spread over the city.
* * *
He wakes up to a head full of cotton and to Victor gone. It's much too bright beneath the blinds.
Michael knows the fading signs of a sedative extremely well and tosses back a furious Aspirin. He drinks deeply from the faucet in the bathroom instead of the treacherous seltzer-bottle Victor had offered him while bathed in sunlight.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” Michael says, standing naked in the empty suite, wiping water from his mouth. There are absolutely no traces. Even Victor's hair is gone from the pillowcase. Michael remembers tearing out some.
“Fuck,” he swears again, loudly, to no one at all.
He's paying a lot for the room and in a moment of angry indulgence Michael looks for something to throw. He could break some stuff, even. The cartels will pay for it.
There is a brand new boot-mug sitting on the marble countertop next to the coffeemaker. It is thoughtfully encased in bubble wrap for the trip.
His flight leaves in fifty-eight minutes, and he only makes it because of the goddamned German trains.
* * *
There have been too many recent breaks in cases, and Nate not quite sturdy enough to avoid Sam and Fiona's calls, in the passing of seven days.
In the end Fiona had driven out to see him herself, and it was a wonder Nate was still standing, as proven by frantic voicemails. Michael gives his little brother credit for delaying as long as he did.
They're waiting for him when he arrives at the loft like they've been practicing waiting.
Michael soundly shuts the door, new untraceable travel-bag slung over his shoulder. It's his loft. They shouldn't look at him like he needs to check in. He's had enough of that.
“How was your spy conference, Michael?” Fiona asks pleasantly from the kitchen. Sam is nearby, ready with a beer.
Both of them posed perfectly, everything in its place, all of it somehow looks exactly the way he'd left it a week before. They're completely unchanged. His team waiting for him at the loft to regroup.
Michael reads their faces, figures out they're planning to good-cop-bad-cop it out of him.
Fiona and Sam read his face and change their plan.
“I don't think Mike's gonna tell us just now, Fi,” Sam says, shifting from his bad-cop stance like Michael's expression might detonate and do some injury.
“Bingo,” Michael says, smiling and giving them a thumbs-up, and then he climbs the stairs and doesn't come back down until he forgets what it is to be jet-lagged from crossing the ocean.
* * *
Days, then weeks, then months.
Clients come and go. Clients seek them out or fall into their laps like clockwork. They help some second-degree friends and neighbors out of tight spots and sometimes make Miami safer with well-timed explosions.
Nothing ever new. It never seems to slow down.
Michael knows he's been blank and sullen, more than usual, and so for a while he tries not to be.
He takes Fiona out to dinners at nice noisy restaurants and goes quietly fishing with Sam. He sits with them at Carlito's, smiling. He finds reasons to fix things at his mother's without her needing to call or break anything first.
He drives up to help Nate out of a real jam, the least he can do for attempting to give Michael seven days' cover.
When they've gotten most of Nate's money back from the loan sharks they speed around for a while on the backroads out of town to lose the most persistent tails.
“Thanks, bro,” Nate says.
“Owed you one.” Michael's hands are expert on the wheel. Dark sunglasses cover his eyes. He hasn't taken them off.
Nate's known him longer than most people, Nate's whole life in fact, and Nate doesn't have to see his whole face to see Michael.
“You look like shit,” Nate says, cheerfully. Nate with money in his pocket can be cheerful again.
“Excellent,” Michael returns. “Just the look I was going for. Illegal loan sharks who carry lead pipes really hate this look.”
Nate shuts up for the rest of the ride, but when they pull in at Madeline's he says, because he isn’t stupid, “You were telling me the truth before, weren't you? You actually told me the truth. Mike, that's so cool. So who's the hot piece of covert action?”
“Get out of the car,” Michael says.
Nate does, swiftly and without argument. Nate knows him too well. Knows very well the threat-levels in his voice. Nate isn’t stupid.
Michael leaves him at their mother's opening door and drives around the block for twenty minutes until he can compose his face enough to go inside the house for a gauntlet of a dinner. Damn them both for knowing him the way they did.
* * *
Months and days and hours. When the last month comes and is going Michael knows what he's been like.
Fiona and Sam have begun muttering with mutinous ill-humor about starting up their own outfit if he doesn't snap out of it. He knows they won't, but they aren't wrong. He was too distracted yesterday and it almost cost him an arm and Sam a leg.
Sam is still annoyed about the leg. Fiona is annoyed that she's had to literally snap her fingers twice today to get his attention. Michael keeps looking at the hallway, at nothing.
Sam finally throws up his hands, like Fiona had. Their frustrated posture is nearly a mirrored pantomime. “Earth to Mikey. Come in. Alpha, bravo, charlie, over. Did you hear what Fi said? We're heading to the cafe to meet up with Barry's buddy. He's in a bad way, and we can help out.”
“Yeah,” Michael says. “Right. We'll take care of it.”
“Some people will,” Fiona says pointedly. “Come on, Sam. Michael knows how to drive. He'll meet us there when he remembers that bills are due today.”
“I remember,” Michael says, half-absent. “I mean, I'll remember. I'll be there soon.”
They share dubious looks between them and then at Michael. Sam sighs, and Fiona tosses away an empty yogurt cup with conviction.
But they go, one or the other slamming the door home along the way.
Michael sits propped against the green vinyl of his favorite chair. After they leave he sits in the dark, as much as the bright Miami sun through the many windows will allow.
It's been two months and thirty-one days since the seven, 91.25 in rough approximation. Far more than two thousand hours.
Hundreds of thousands of minutes of Michael waiting, of trying not to let himself wait and failing.
A quarter of a year gone.
And on the last day of the last month, with Michael watching from the chair, a letter slips under his door addressed to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.