The Certain Stakes I Gained
Well, better late than never, I guess! Here's my Yuletide fic from this year, written for mamaesme.
Title: The Certain Stakes I Gained
Fandom: Nikita (2010 TV show)
Pairings: Nikita/Michael, maybe Nikita/Alex if you squint, but mostly gen.
Length: About 16,500 words.
Rating/Warnings: R
Summary: In which Nikita makes a deal, gains some leverage, buys some Christmas presents, and forms an army.
Notes: The title is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnet IX, from her Collected Sonnets. "Blast Hardcheese" is a reference from the "Space Mutiny" episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I did not mark the "major character death" box in the warnings, but the violent death of one secondary character (and of one original character) is depicted, and another few are mentioned. Also mentioned are torture and sex slavery, though neither is depicted. Rating mostly for violence, language, and assorted references to all that murder and mayhem that Division get up to. This story will contain spoilers up to episode 2x10, "Guardians." I couldn't recall if they'd ever mentioned Nikita's birthday in the show, so I gave her Maggie Q's, May 22. I think that's all I've got by way of notes.
Nikita had come to expect a clusterfuck whenever she tried to get something done. It seemed like every move she made these days ended in some kind of unpredicted disaster. But she certainly hadn't expected to track Ari Tasarov to the Udinov mansion, to waste precious minutes searching for him while avoiding Semak's security, and then to find not Ari, but Alex, holding a gun on...Katya Udinov?
Well. She'd worry about Ari later.
Both Katya and Alex swung their eyes around, Katya's pleading, Alex's lit with a strange, almost feral kind of fire. "The hell are you doing here?" Alex snapped. Her gun hand didn't move, the barrel still trained on Katya.
"Looking for a black box," said Nikita, pushing down all her stress and confusion to make her voice as calm as possible. "What's going on here?"
"My daughter," gasped Katya. "She's Division, she--"
"Shut up," Alex said. She was almost snarling, but her eyes were bright with tears. Nikita had seen that combination often enough, back in the day. "This--this traitor helped Semak take my father out. She's fucking him."
"You have to understand, Alexandra," said Katya, and she gulped before continuing. "I had no choice, Sergei had so many of the security on his side--"
"Don't you--don't you fucking give me that," Alex interrupted again, and her stance shifted ever-so-slightly. Ready to take the shot.
Nikita didn't know how the hell her intelligence had missed Katya Udinov being alive all these years, or how the mother that Alex had remembered with such love could have let her child be sold into sex slavery, or how Alex had made it out to Russia without Division agents tailing her--Nikita knew she wasn't infallible, but she thought she probably would have noticed Cleaners converging on the Semak house. None of it mattered now. "Alex," she said. "Don't do this."
Alex's head jerked back around, her eyes meeting Nikita's. "Are you kidding me?" she said incredulously, and there it was, the same panic and desperation and rage that had fueled Alex through rehab. "She killed my father!"
"No," said Nikita. "I killed your father."
"You know what I mean!" Her gun hand was starting to shake.
Alex didn't want to do this. Of course she didn't. If Nikita had had five minutes right now to spend with her mom, she would have forgiven her anything. Anything at all, and Nikita didn't even understand what a family was supposed to be, hadn't spent her life in mourning the way Alex had. "Alex," she said again, "I know you're angry. I know you feel betrayed. But this is your mother. Do you really want her blood on your hands?"
A tear spilled over the eyelashes of Alex's left eye, and she swiped at it angrily with the hand that wasn't holding the gun. "My father trusted her," she said, and her voice broke. It was selfish, probably, but Nikita couldn't help hearing "I trusted you" behind it, and thinking about the long, long list of ways she had failed Alex. "He trusted her, and he trusted Semak, and see where that got him? Dead. Everybody he trusted betrayed him."
"You didn't betray him," said Nikita. "And I know he trusted you." Alex didn't respond, but her hands were still shaking, and Nikita felt she had room to press her advantage. "You can't avenge your family like this. Trust me. You'll regret it the rest of your life."
"She doesn't deserve it," Alex said in a low voice.
She clearly meant "to live," but Katya had obviously interpreted it differently and grasped whatever hope she could find in the situation. "No, please, I don't deserve to die, Alexandra!"
"Shut up," said Nikita harshly. Whatever bullshit had gone down around Project Pale Fire, nobody in this room seemed to be in the right frame of mind to untangle it now. To Alex, she said, "It doesn't matter what she deserves. It's about what you deserve. And you're a good person, Alex. You don't deserve this kind of thing on your conscience." No matter how bent on revenge Alex had become since she and Nikita parted ways, Nikita knew that, side by side with her desire for vengeance, there lived a conscience inside of Alex that would never let her do the kind of things Nikita had done, not without severe consequences.
There was a long pause in which Nikita had absolutely no idea what Alex was thinking, before Alex swallowed loudly and said, "What do I do?"
Nikita hadn't even realized how tense her gut had gotten until Alex spoke and a knot in her stomach came loose. "We take out Semak," she said. "And we use her to do it."
**
In the end, taking out Semak wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Katya was willing to tell them where he was, where his guards were, anything to save her own skin. His own security was bored and distracted, burned out on false alarms, and easy to pick off and knock out one by one, even dragging along Katya Udinov as a hostage. The few Gogol operatives who actually stuck around to fight were more of a challenge, but not much more--according to Ari's tracker, he'd already taken off, and probably taken the black box and his best men with him. If ever there was a man who knew how to cut his losses, it was Ari Tasarov. Nikita never thought she'd be in a position to give up a black box, but just in the last week, she'd given up two. What was the world coming to?
Alex was good--she fought with a total lack of hesitation and a confidence Nikita had never seen from her. It should have made her proud, and it did, but it also made her a bit sad. The last thing she wanted was for Alex to turn into her. Sometimes, though, life really didn't give you an option.
Semak himself was a disappointment. Clearly he'd gotten used to being in control--when he found himself alone, all his guards incapacitated and two trained assassins facing him down, all he could do was gulp and try to hide behind his desk. He couldn't even muster the presence of mind to beg.
Alex dragged him out from behind the desk and forced him to his knees. She shot a look at Nikita and said, "You gonna tell me not to do it?" It was a challenge, as if to say that if Nikita did tell her not to kill Semak, Alex would tell Nikita where to shove it.
Nikita didn't bother. She was doing her best these days not to be consumed by anger, not to kill when she could avoid it, to keep the protection of the innocent as her number one priority. Semak wasn't innocent. As long as he was alive, Alex wouldn't be safe. Nikita sure wouldn't shed any tears over his death. "Go ahead," she said, and Alex grinned viciously and put the gun to Semak's forehead.
"You had to know this was coming," she said before pulling the trigger.
Her smile faded as Semak's body slumped to the floor. Nikita hoped she didn't regret it. Surely Alex had enough on her plate without the burden of regret to carry as well.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
Alex took a deep breath. "Like I'm ready to take back my birthright."
And so Nikita kept an eye on Katya while Alex herded what was left of Zetrov's onsite security and tech guys into the dining room. She stood silently by Alex's side while Alex explained who she was, how she'd come to rescue her mother (what a laugh) and reclaim her father's legacy, to guide his company in a new, more profitable and sustainable direction. Nikita stood behind her as she stepped forward and said, "Some of you may have been told that I've been brainwashed by Division. That I'm their plant. That they raised me. But now you get to know the truth: my family and I were betrayed by the people we trusted most." Katya shifted uncomfortably, and Nikita tightened her grip on the woman's arm. She was probably leaving bruises, but she didn't particularly care. "I was sold into slavery. I was forced into drug addiction. I had to fight every day to survive. I used Division to find the traitor who killed my father, just as Semak used Division to kill him. But I am not Division. I am Zetrov." Something in her voice--the conviction, maybe, the purpose that Nikita had seldom seen except at the most unexpected moments--made Nikita shiver. "And anyone who suggests otherwise will answer to me. My name is Alexandra Udinov. My father built this company. But I will make it great."
Half of the Zetrov employees, caught up in Alex's fervor, applauded; the other half just looked scared out of their minds. Nikita took advantage of the confusion to lean forward and whisper into Alex's ear, "You know I won't let you make Zetrov another Division."
The look Alex gave her was full of contempt. "Give me a little credit," she said. "You think I never learned anything from you?"
Nikita really didn't have the nerve to think too hard about exactly what she meant by that.
**
When she caught up with Michael and Owen, they were in Amsterdam, camped out in a hotel two floors above five Guardians--plus, as it turned out, Roan, who was kind of amazing in his indestructibility.
"They're still waiting for instructions from Percy," Owen explained. "However he got out the original message taking them to Secondary Protocol, Amanda must have caught on to him. Maybe his mole got caught, maybe he's lying low, I don't know, but anyway, they haven't done anything since they got here."
"Do they all have their black boxes with them?" asked Nikita. The Guardians were all pretty hard opponents to beat, and she, Michael, and Owen would have to be really damn creative if they wanted to take out all five of them, but the possibility of gaining control of so many black boxes at once...well. It would make this a significantly better day as far as Nikita was concerned.
"All except Miller," said Michael. Just looking at him made half of Nikita stand up and jump for joy, and half of her want to curl up into a ball and die. No. This wasn't the time for that. "I take it you didn't get that one from Tasarov?"
Nikita shook her head. "No," she said. "The situation with Alex required more immediate attention. Plus, as Owen said, without Miller, Ari can't get anything out of the box."
Owen was like a puppy, or a little boy--the least praise was enough to make him puff up with pleasure, and he smiled warmly at Nikita as he said, "If we can come up with some plan to take out the gang downstairs, that's four boxes plus all the biometric material we'll need to get into them. That'd put a pretty big dent in whatever the hell Percy's planning."
"If we could split them up somehow, pick them off one by one," Michael suggested, but Owen was already shaking his head.
"No, no, come on, I was a Guardian for years, they're not that fucking stupid!"
Nikita let them butt heads for a bit while she thought. Miller was a scary bastard clearly not overburdened with conscience, but his loyalty to Percy wasn't the kind of devotion to duty that had governed Michael or Nikita (in her early days) or even Owen--it was the kind of self-interested indifference that she suspected had kept Birkhoff at Division for so many years. In the end, looking back on it, getting Birkhoff to switch sides had simply been a matter of giving him something he'd wanted more than technological gadgets and free room and board: a purpose that made him feel like a good guy, and people who cared about him. Miller wasn't looking for that, but the way he'd talked about Division...Miller wanted money. God only knew what the other Guardians wanted, but if even one of them could be turned, the way Owen and Dana Winters had been, then maybe there was an easier way of neutralizing them than a head-on confrontation.
"Maybe we could recruit them," she said. Their heads whipped around in stereo to stare at her, and she snorted out a laugh at how similar their confused frowns were.
"What are you talking about?" Michael asked.
"The Guardians." She shrugged. "They're isolated from the rest of Division. They have a lot of power over Percy, and I'm pretty sure some of them know it. Find out what they want and give it to them...who knows. It worked with Dana, didn't it?"
"Sure, and that black box was booby-trapped with a biological weapon." Michael's eyebrows drew together. "You don't think they're just going to up and ditch Percy and join our anti-Division crusade, do you?"
Our crusade? Was it still "our"? Whatever, she'd think about it later. "Why not? At least as a plan A--I think our chances of turning them are at least as good as our chances at taking them in a fight."
Owen laughed at that. Michael said, "Nikita, I don't think this is a good idea," thus guaranteeing that she'd have Owen's support. "The Guardians are recruited from the best of the Cleaners, they're not necessarily people you'd even want to work with--"
Oh, that was a mistake. Owen's face hardened. "Hey."
"No offense, " said Michael, not even looking in Owen's direction.
"Yeah, well, I might take some, anyway." For a moment, Nikita was afraid that their macho posturing would lead to actual violence--the expression on Owen's face didn't bode particularly well, anyway--but then Owen stood and gave Nikita one of those earnest looks he was surprisingly good at. "I like it. I don't know any of the other Guardians, but from my own experience--it's a lonely job, and they've been more cut off than usual since Percy's been out of commission. Some days I would have sold my left nut just to talk to somebody besides the grocery store clerk. The idea of being part of something big like taking down Division has gotta be appealing to at least one of them." He gave Michael a challenging look. "If you don't want to be a part of it, well, I'd understand."
Michael looked like he wanted to give Owen the finger. Then he looked back at Nikita, searching her face like he was trying to figure out what she was thinking. Good luck, she thought. If you work it out, fill me in. Finally, he nodded. "I guess it's worth a try," he said. "But we prepare for the worst. If this doesn't work, we need a plan to take them out."
**
In the end, the plan was for Nikita to go in alone to the suite the Guardians were sharing, with Owen and Michael listening in from the rooms on either side, ready to jump in with smoke bombs, machine guns, and small explosives the second they were needed. Michael didn't like it, but as long as he was willing to cooperate, he didn't need to like it.
Nikita paused outside their door. Gun by her side, another in a holster at her shoulder, extra ammo in her pockets. A knife in her sleeve and another in her shoe--never let it be said that she couldn't learn from her opponents. It was hard to tell from the outside whether her game face looked convincing, but she felt pretty good about it. She wasn't going to get any readier. She pushed the door open.
They reacted instantly, all of them pulling their guns out near-simultaneously. Roan was the only one to actually pull the trigger--of course, the bastard probably spent his free nights shooting at a target with Nikita's face pinned to it, so it wasn't surprising that he was quick to shoot. Nikita was quicker. His bullet only winged her; hers hit him right between the eyes.
She'd like to see him come back from that.
"Now, why don't we all put our guns down and play nice?" she said, giving them her best "don't fuck with me" smile. "I'm just here to talk, honest."
"The hell you are," said one of the Guardians she didn't know, a white guy built like a brick shithouse with a face that looked like it had been smashed in a few too many times.
Miller, who seemed pretty unflappable, raised his eyebrow at her, his gun hand steady. "And what can we do for you?"
"Well. A little bird told me that you've all been put on Secondary Protocol. Must be nice--have a little get-together, trade stories, sit around and wait for Percy to let you in on the plan. As much as he ever lets anyone in on his plans."
One or two of the other Guardians looked confused, but they had pretty good poker faces for the most part, and as far as Miller was concerned, she might as well have just told him the day's weather forecast. "Have you got a point?" he asked.
"You and I had an interesting conversation the other day," she said. "About the sides we'd chosen."
"I'm still happy with mine," said Miller. "You looking to trade teams?"
"Not hardly," she said. "But since my recruitment pitch didn't work so well on you, I thought I'd try out the latest version on your friends. You don't mind, do you?"
That got a frown out of him. "That was your recruitment pitch? Wasn't much of one, if you ask me."
Five of them. She thought she could probably take out Miller, now that she wasn't bound in the back of a police van, but she didn't know about the others. She felt good about her chances with Brick Shithouse--she'd had good luck in the past with big guys, who tended to be a lot slower and less agile than she was--but the skinny blond guy, the short woman, and the South Asian guy who looked like he could be an Abercrombie and Fitch model? Hard to say. "Well, if you didn't like that one, maybe you'd like to hear this new version."
"Maybe we wouldn't," said the male model.
The woman looked from Miller to Nikita and said, "Recruitment? Really? What makes you think we want to join your little vendetta?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Nikita. "Maybe the fact that you've got every major criminal organization in the world after your asses? I've just come from a great little party with Zetrov and Gogol, and they're working together to take out as many of you as they can."
The blond guy made a contemptuous noise, and Miller grinned. "They've done such a good job so far," he said.
"Oh, I know they haven't," she said. "But Zetrov is under new leadership as of, oh, forty-eight hours ago. Alexandra Udinov. If you don't know who she is, you should know that Division took out her family eight years ago, and she's spent her life since then devoted to revenge. Semak wanted Division gone to cover his own ass--Udinov wants to burn the place down and piss on the ashes." She looked at her watch with exaggerated patience. "I'd imagine that, by now, she's relocating the bulk of her forces specifically to tracking you down and getting the black boxes by any means necessary."
That took a little starch out of their sails, she thought with satisfaction. Good to know she hadn't lost her touch at bluffing. "Plus," she added, "you've made yourselves a hell of a lot more conspicuous with this little shindig. Your chances of lying low were pretty good on your own, but now?" She shrugged. "Hell, the Gogol agents tracking me could have already figured out that you're here. And given the power shifts at Division lately, I wouldn't expect too much help from Division."
"What are you getting at?" asked the male model.
"If I know Percy--and let's face it, nobody really knows Percy, but I know him as well as your average person is going to know Percy--then he's called you all together to put him back on the throne. Take out Amanda, put himself back on the top of the heap."
Miller nodded, rolling his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, could've figured that out. Get to the point."
"Tough crowd," said Nikita, with feigned nonchalance. "My point is this--without your cooperation, Percy's got nothing. You've got all the proof, all the evidence of everything he and his cronies have ever done. And what's he going to give you for it? Well, if past experience is anything to go on, he's going to kill anybody you hook up with and probably kill you for good measure. But me?" Another elaborate shrug. "I can get you actual money for it. You wanna keep living in the ass-end of nowhere, guarding a box, or do you wanna see a little bit of reward from the company your labor helped build?"
"What, are you forming a union?" The woman laughed. She was pale, with slightly oily skin and messy hair. She sort of looked like she'd been carved out of cheese, and her close-set, dull eyes didn't make her look terribly bright. It was probably a great disguise--just about anyone who saw her would underestimate her. "The Assassins' union. I'm sure AFL-CIO would go for it."
"Mmm, of a sort," said Nikita with a smile. "Though I don't think unions typically take out the CEOs of their companies. Here's the thing--Division has a shitload of money. Right now, they spend a lot of it spying on you."
"Not us, per se," said the blond guy. He was dressed in a polo and khaki pants--he looked like a preppy college boy.
"Not you, per se," Nikita agreed. "Their employees in general. Which gives you, per se, an edge that your average agent doesn't have."
Miller cocked his head at her curiously. "What, exactly, are you proposing?"
"A mixture of blackmail and exposure. We take it mission by mission--they give us money not to air some of their dirty laundry--we air some of it anyway and sell the stories to the media. The more we release, the more their position is weakened, the more they give us." They'd worked it out in a phone conference with Birkhoff; some of the stories were too dangerous ever to be released to the public, the kind of stuff that took out governments, but some of them were simply the kind that took out individual House Representatives or moderately powerful CEOs. It was a riskier, broader-reaching game than they'd been playing so far, but Owen for one was more enthusiastic about it than he'd ever been about their small-scale missions, and Nikita had to admit it would more satisfying to release some actual truth than to spend all their time creeping around in the dark. She wasn't at all sure that Amanda would play this particular game--wasn't even sure if they should even try the blackmail thing--but Birkhoff was more than capable of getting the money to satisfy the Guardians, if they decided to go along with it.
"You really think they're just going to pay us off?" the blond guy asked skeptically. "You don't think Percy or Amanda would just have a hit put out on us?"
"Oh, come on," said Nikita, giving him a contemptuous look of her own. "You're world-class experts in lying low, you're Division's best assassins, and you're all on a drug that gives you superhuman strength and speed. What makes you think you have anything to be afraid of from Percy and Amanda?"
"Stroking our egos," said Miller with a grin. "I like it."
"I don't," said Brick Shithouse. "I think I've heard enough from this traitor." His hand moved. Nikita ducked instinctively as a shot rang out.
When she looked up, Brick Shithouse was dead on the floor, a bullet hole in his forehead, and the greasy little woman was looking at his body in exasperation, her gun still pointed at him. "Such a dumb fuck," she said. "Probably couldn't find his own dick unless Percy told him where to look." She put the gun in a holster at her belt and stepped over to shake Nikita's hand. "Celia Carver," she said. "I'm gonna need some more details about this plan of yours, but it sounds like a hoot."
**
As Nikita later explained to Birkhoff over the phone, Celia and Kevin, the blond guy, were both interested in working outright with them. For them, the appeal wasn't so much the money as the opportunity to get out of the podunk towns where they'd been hiding the black boxes, and the idea of sticking one to Percy ("That creepy motherfucker," as Celia, who had a mouth like a sailor, called him). Pranav, the male model, thought the plan sounded suicidally stupid, and he'd wanted to take his black box and work with Zetrov. Nikita was okay with the Zetrov plan, but she wasn't about to let him walk off with the box. The threat of facing Celia and Kevin as well as Nikita, Michael, and Owen was enough to make him hand it over before vanishing. Miller, predictably enough, wanted money in exchange for a bit of his blood and for his not going to Division to report both Percy's and Nikita's schemes to Amanda. A lot of money. Birkhoff complained, but eventually he coughed it up. Nikita thought it would probably be worth it to keep Miller at some island resort somewhere and out of their hair.
"Hah," said Owen, looking at the black boxes spread over his bed in the hotel. It sounded less like a laugh and more like a noise of disbelief. "Anyone know how we can get in touch with Percy right now? I would love to see the look on his face when we tell him we got four of his black boxes."
"Tasarov's still got the fifth," said Michael in dampening tones. "As long as he does, we're going to have to be really careful about how we release that information. We can't just sell off the stories by the dozen and send our new Guardian friends a check in the mail."
"'We,' he says," Owen muttered. "Because we did so much today."
"If I recall correctly, I saved our asses in Switzerland," said Michael, looking seriously pissed, but before he could get too far into the rant he was almost certainly brewing, his phone rang. "It's Cassandra," he said after pulling it out of his pocket.
"Cassandra?" Owen's expression went from sullen to murderous. His protectiveness was kind of cute, Nikita thought, but pretty much the last thing in the world that she wanted was a conversation between her and Owen and Michael about just what Michael's relationship with Cassandra was at this point.
"Of course," she said. "You should talk to her."
Michael shot her a grateful look and disappeared into the hallway. Owen made a scornful noise in his general direction and fixed Nikita with an incredulous look. "You kidding me?" he said. "Who the hell is Cassandra?"
"It's complicated," said Nikita, hoping she looked calm. She sure didn't feel it. "He's not cheating on me, if that's what you're thinking. Cassandra's..." The mother of his son? The woman he's currently living with? "A friend," she concluded.
"A friend. Right."
Suddenly, the hotel room seemed a lot smaller than it had a minute ago. "I'm going to get some air," she told Owen. He raised an eyebrow in her direction but didn't try to stop her.
Michael looked at her as she shut the door, a bit harder than necessary. He was smiling, but not at her--it was the kind of smile you gave someone who was talking on the phone with you, even if they couldn't see you. Maybe because they couldn't see you. "I'll call you when I land," he said before hanging up.
"Is Max okay?" Nikita asked, already knowing the answer.
"Yeah," said Michael. His smile was broad and open, nothing like the quiet, secret smiles he'd shared with Nikita. "Cassandra says he misses me. Can you believe that? He asked about me last night!"
Nikita could believe it. From what she could tell, Ovechkin had been a possessive father, but distant--interested in Max as an heir but not as a person with wants and thoughts of his own. Michael wouldn't be like that. Even in Division, Michael had had a way of making every recruit feel like they mattered. "You're a good father," she said.
He sighed. "I hope so."
It was like someone was stepping on her heart with a high-heeled shoe. "Michael. This can't go on."
And there went the smile. His eyes on her were as sharp as a hawk's. "What can't?"
"This back and forth. Me one night, Cassandra and Max the next. You know that. You and I have people after us, people who aren't going to stop until we're dead. Cassandra's got enemies of her own. Every time you come to help me out, you're leaving her and Max unprotected; every time you go back to her, you're taking our enemies with you. I never wanted to make you choose, but...."
"Nikita." His voice was hard. "You know me. You know I don't respond well to ultimatums."
She huffed out a breath of air, frustrated. This was the problem with Michael--once he'd made up his mind, he could be as stubborn as anyone Nikita'd ever known, and it took drastic things to get him to reconsider. She could respect that, being something of a stubborn person herself, but she liked to think that she didn't shut the smarter part of her brain off whenever someone disagreed with her. "This isn't an ultimatum," she said. "Think about it. You and I know both know that the life we lead isn't safe. You can make a safe place for Max to grow up, but it sure as hell isn't going to be with someone Division regularly tries to kill."
"He's my son," said Michael, like Nikita didn't understand that. Hell, maybe she didn't. God knew that her first response if she ever found out she had a kid would be to run away as far and as fast as she could, because being around her was dangerous. "I'm not just going to leave him."
Nikita had to take a moment to make sure her next words didn't come out with a sob or tears or something. "I'm not asking you to." She swallowed. It seemed like all of a sudden her throat had started hurting. "Michael. I love you. You know that, right?"
His expression softened. "Of course. I love you, too."
"But I don't..." Despite her best efforts, she could feel tears burning in her eyes. "How do I say this? I don't need you. Not the way Max does. I'd do just about anything to have a father who gave a damn about me, I'm certainly not going to deny Max his."
"Nikita...." He reached a hand out for her face, but she caught it before it could get there. If things got too...intimate here, it would make what she was trying to do impossible.
"Look," she said, "in five, maybe ten years, Max will be old enough to understand all this. If you still want this fight then, I know you'll figure out a way to get in touch with me. But for now, just stay with him. Okay? I don't call you, you don't call me. Division can't trace calls that we don't make. Cassandra and Max will be safer, and if you stay off the radar, Division can keep its attention on me."
Michael blinked a few times, staring at her like he was trying to see the inside of her mind. He did that a lot. She'd never really thought of herself as all that inscrutable.
"Nikita," he said, "Do you ever think that maybe, just maybe, other people might be able to decide for themselves what's best for them?"
What did Michael know about letting other people make decisions? If it had been up to Nikita, Alex sure as hell wouldn't be at the heart of Zetrov right now. "Sure," she said. "And sometimes they're wrong and I'm right."
He laughed at that, kind of a weak and watery laugh. "I think if you'll take a moment and think about it, you'll remember that just last week I was the one who was right, when you and Birkhoff pulled that dumbass op against Oversight."
He didn't get to talk about that. He didn't. He wasn't the one who'd had to set Birkhoff up with a doctor and finally coax him into sleeping that first night and watch him try to type one-handed . She was going to have to live with the guilt of that for the rest of her life, but Michael would never have to deal with any of the aftermath. He didn't get to talk. "Well," she said shortly. "I'm right this time, and you know it."
They were silent for a long time. Michael's eyes slid from her and he focused on some place on the floor. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "Nikita. I would have gone with you to the end. You should know that."
She wasn't even going to get a goodbye kiss out of this. If she kissed him now, she would never let him go.
**
Birkhoff's new safe house was in Oregon, and it looked like a log cabin from the outside but on the inside was the kind of contemporary, open-layout building he liked. He greeted Nikita with a crooked grin. "Come on in," he said. "Mi casa es su casa, or whatever." The scabs on his face looked better, but the glasses made him look like somebody's kid brother who'd taken a beating at recess. Nikita guessed it was difficult to put contact lenses in with a crushed hand.
"Did you go to your doctor's appointment?" she asked.
Birkhoff rolled his eyes. "Yes, Mom," he said, wiggling his bad hand at her. "She called a surgeon out here. First operation was last Thursday, the next one's in three days."
"Well. Good." She didn't really like the idea of Birkhoff recovering from surgery out here all on his own, but it wasn't like she had any room to talk. Anyway, with any luck she'd be around later this week to help him after the next operation.
After ushering her and Owen in, Birkhoff stuck his head out the door like a dog sticking its head out the window, turning it side to side like he was looking for something.
"Expecting somebody?" Owen asked.
Birkhoff drew his head back in with a frown. "I guess not," he said, turning back to Nikita and Owen. "What, you're trading Mikey in for a new model?" He gave Owen a dubious look. "Can't say I approve."
Nikita knew she'd have to talk to him about it sometime, since they were actually kind of friends at this point, but she really, really couldn't handle thinking any more about Michael right now. "Please, Birkhoff," she said, "Don't. " She wondered if she sounded as pathetic and desperate to him as she did to herself.
Birkhoff looked sort of taken aback. He darted a quick look between her and Owen before sighing. "Okay, yeah, whatever, your room's the first one on the left upstairs, and Blast Hardcheese here can have the one at the end of the hall." He gave them one last look before scurrying down to the house's lower level, which was presumably where he kept the computers.
"What the hell did he just call me?" Owen asked.
"I don't know," said Nikita. "It's probably from Star Wars or something."
"Have you ever actually seen Star Wars?" Owen grinned at her. "I'm pretty sure it's not from there."
Nikita shrugged. She didn't get half of the references Birkhoff made, but she'd never really cared enough to devote that much thought to them. "Whatever." They lugged the duffel with the black boxes upstairs. One of the black boxes went into Nikita's closet, another into her dresser. They put a third in Owen's room, in a chest under a window seat, and the last went into what had to be Birkhoff's room, on his nightstand. Unsurprisingly, the room was full of computers. Nikita wondered if he had a storage unit somewhere where he kept all his computers when they were on the run, or if he simply bought new computers everywhere he went.
"Hey," said Owen. "He looks okay."
"What?"
"Birkhoff. He looks okay." He shrugged. "I've definitely seen worse. Are you okay?"
She'd sent Michael off to London for the last time. For all she knew, she'd never see him again. It was a harder, more painful break than when she'd left Division, and at that point she only ever saw him when he was trying to kill her. It was like a wound she couldn't touch without breaking open some stitches and bleeding out on the floor. "Fine."
"Right," said Owen skeptically. He was way too sarcastic these days. They'd have to work on that.
"Really," she said. "I'm fine."
"Whatever you say, Boss," he said, poking dubiously at what looked like a disassembled hard drive on Birkhoff's desk. "Whatever you say."
Birkhoff actually had a huge kitchen, which of course he never used. His freezer was full of frozen pizzas and Fudgsicles. Owen took one look at it and said, "Yeah, I can work with this," before vanishing to the grocery store for over two hours. Nikita had been about five minutes away from going after him with all the weapons in her arsenal, but he'd eventually reappeared with enough groceries to feed an army. Well. That was sort of what they were. A little army.
Owen cooked dinner for them, lasagna with spinach and pine nut cream, and a side salad with wild greens and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing. Or something like that--Owen could wax as rhapsodical about food as Birkhoff could about electronic equipment, and Nikita was getting really good at listening to both with half an ear, just to get the important points. Whatever it was, it was delicious. Birkhoff was extremely uncertain about the food at first, but after his first bite, he'd eaten with gusto, and after they'd finished, he'd leaned back in his chair and said to Owen, "Okay, Brute Squad, you can stay."
"Hey, I know that one," said Owen. "It's The Princess Bride, right? I've seen that."
"Oh, good for you, you've seen one of the biggest cult classic phenomena of the last thirty years." Birkhoff rolled his eyes so hard Nikita was afraid he might strain something. "What, did you get a degree in film studies or something?"
"No, I got a degree in killing people who piss me off," Owen said, wielding his fork in a vaguely threatening manner.
Nikita really, really wasn't in the mood to mediate another dick-measuring contest, but lucky for her, Birkhoff just smirked in Owen's direction and said, "Yeah, whatever. You made dinner, I'll make the margaritas."
"Margaritas?" Owen looked nonplussed.
"Dude, we've got four black boxes," said Birkhoff, gesturing expansively. "If you can think of a better reason for a celebratory alcoholic beverage, I'd sure like to hear it."
Birkhoff had gotten surprisingly efficient at making margaritas one-handed. Nikita didn't make a habit of getting actually drunk--nursing one drink the whole evening and then faking drunkenness was more her style--but the margaritas were good, and of all the people in the world that she trusted, half of them were in the room with her, and thinking about the other half made her want to be drunk.
So between the three of them, they went through an alarming amount of tequila.
"Man, Michael is a dick," said Owen, punctuating his statement with a finger jabbing at the air. "He just, he just has a kid with this other woman? Dick."
"He's not a dick," Nikita said. The inside of her head felt fuzzy, and it was blunting the edges on some of her grief. Which was nice, sort of. "He's a family man, okay? We weren't even dating then, okay, and Cassandra was just a mission. But Max is really cute."
"That's true." Birkhoff nodded as if she'd said something profound. "Max is really cute. Kind of a pain in the ass, but cute."
"And. Whatever." Nikita's head was already killing her. She didn't even want to think about what her hangover was going to be like. "Some people are good at, like, normal, healthy relationships, right? And then some people are not. Like me."
Owen's finger jabbed again. "Bullshit."
"No, seriously," she said. "This is totally how I fucked things up with Alex, too. Well. No, 'cause she doesn't have a kid. But I pushed her away, you know, I didn't tell her things. I wanted to keep her safe. But that's not...it doesn't work, when you want to trust people. Or you want them to trust you. Or, you know."
"No. No, no, no," said Owen. "'Cause I am all about the truth. You know that. But! Cassandra didn't want Michael to be involved, or she would have told him. And that's, that's her business. Her kid, too. That's not your fault. It's not like everything would be fixed if you'd told him sooner."
"Wait," said Birkhoff. "Back up a sec. Were you and Alex dating?" His eyes looked sort of glazed-over behind his glasses. "That's...a mental image."
Nikita punched him in the shoulder. Not too hard, because he was still recovering.
"If Emily were here right now," Owen said, "I wouldn't ditch her for some woman I screwed on an op. When you love somebody, you don't just leave them like that."
"It was my idea!" said Nikita, louder than she'd really meant to. "I told him to! He didn't want to! But he has to be Max's father now. If he could just leave his son like that--if he made Max feel like there was something wrong with him, or like he was less important to his dad than...me, or taking down Division, or whatever, he wouldn't be the man I loved!" It kind of sounded like she was crying now. Oh, yeah, she was definitely crying. She hated when this happened.
After a long, awkward pause, Owen said, "Too much tequila?"
Nikita nodded and wiped away tears, leaving her face feeling raw. "Way too much tequila."
Birkhoff burped.
Somehow after that they made their way to the living room. Nikita collapsed on the couch; Birkhoff sat on the other end of it while Owen took the armchair. Owen, being the kind of guy that he was, started telling a long, involved story about his last break-up. Apparently, pre-Division, he'd been a cocaine dealer, and his girlfriend was in the business, too. She'd constantly been on him to expand their sales, to bring in more money, "to grow up, like it was totally immature of me to keep our cocaine dealing to a minimum!" Eventually, she'd taken a huge chunk of their merchandise from under Owen's nose and brought it to one of their competitors, effectively ending both their business and their romantic relationships. "And the worst thing is, I don't think she even cheated on me with him--like, I don't think they ever dated. She just legitimately thought he was a way better cocaine dealer than me."
"Oh, ouch," said Birkhoff.
Nikita laughed, and told the story of her last pre-Division breakup, back when she was nineteen and dating a music school dropout who divided his time between busking and begging money off his upper middle-class parents. He'd been distressingly close to his ex, who apparently became his ex-ex on Nikita's bed while she was at the mall one afternoon.
"Jesus, Nikita," Owen said, "are all the guys you date complete idiots?"
"Well, Daniel wasn't," said Nikita, and Owen winced.
"Ah. Yeah." Nikita thought maybe she'd have to cut off a guilt trip before he got too into it, but instead, he cleared his throat and started another story, this one about his complicated love life in high school. Nikita found herself drifting off partway through, but Owen didn't sound pissed when he said, "Tired, huh?" and Birkhoff's couch was really comfortable.
She must have woken up at the end of one of Owen's stories, because Birkhoff was barking out a laugh, and when she sat up, he said to her, "Holy crap, this dude sucks at romance."
"Hey," said Owen, "we ever gonna get an embarrassing breakup story out of you? Nikita and I have been laying our love lives out all night, I think it's your turn." He gave Nikita a conspiratorial grin.
Birkhoff shifted uncomfortably. "Eh. Nothing that interesting to tell."
"Oh, come on," said Nikita. She was actually curious; she knew that Birkhoff had some kind of life when he wasn't providing tech support for missions, but she had very little idea of what was in that life other than a lot of computer hacking.
"No, really," said Birkhoff. "I dunno, I never actually had a relationship. I mean, I had sex, don't get me wrong, but, like...girls really weren't into me in high school, and then of course there was prison, and once I was in Division, I didn't see the point of going to all the effort to date or whatever when I could just watch porn online or hire a call girl."
Owen snorted. "Wow. How'd Percy feel about you hiring pros on the company dime?"
Birkhoff shrugged exaggeratedly. He was clearly still a little drunk. "Didn't care, as long as I kept doing my job." He stared into his margarita glass, which he'd apparently retrieved while Nikita was dozing off, and his expression got more melancholy. "And I did, no problem. Man, I watched you guys do some fucked-up shit on closed-circuit camera. And I watched...." He trailed off, but the look he darted at Owen and Nikita before taking another sip of his margarita made Nikita think the sentence probably could have been finished "I watched some fucked-up shit happen to you."
It was weird to think of Birkhoff carrying the same kind of guilt that Nikita and Owen did. He'd always seemed pretty untouched, emotionally speaking, by all his time in Division, but Nikita really ought to have known better than anyone the kind of turmoil someone could hide under a snarky mask. "Aww, Nerd," she said, too fuzzy-brained to think of something smarter to say to him. Her head felt really heavy, so she laid it on his shoulder. She could almost hear him rolling his eyes, but his good hand came up and stroked through her hair once or twice.
"Whatever. I just...do you ever look back at yourself and really, really not like what you see?"
"All the time, dumbass," said Owen. "That's why we're here and not at Division."
**
"Hello, Jill."
Jill Morelli obviously hadn't clawed her way up the ranks of respectable journalism because of a pretty face. "Nikita," she said, sounding like she couldn't decide whether to be thrilled or angry.
"I told you I'd call if I needed your help."
On the other end of the phone, Jill sighed. "What do you need? Is this...payback, or something?"
"Hmm. You could say that." Nikita couldn't help but smile. This was the kind of 'payback' that turned respectable journalists into Woodward and Bernstein. "I think you'll be able to help us both with this."
"Well?" asked Jill. Whatever attempt she'd made at anger was obviously over now; she sounded like a kid awaiting a present.
"What would you say if I could give you enough stories to last you the rest of your life? Government cover-ups, corporate cover-ups, tax payer dollars used to fund senators' sex lives--you name the conspiracy, I've got the e-mails, the videos, the phone records, and the names of who gave the orders."
"What's the catch?"
"No catch. I wouldn't mind some money--taking down government conspiracies isn't exactly cheap--but I'm willing to negotiate. I'm not going to give you every story, so you'll have to live with me keeping some secrets, but I'll give you more than enough to bring some really terrible people to justice."
"Well," said Jill gravely. "Let me think. What would I say?" She laughed suddenly, bright and happy. "I'd say, let's do it."
Part 2
Title: The Certain Stakes I Gained
Fandom: Nikita (2010 TV show)
Pairings: Nikita/Michael, maybe Nikita/Alex if you squint, but mostly gen.
Length: About 16,500 words.
Rating/Warnings: R
Summary: In which Nikita makes a deal, gains some leverage, buys some Christmas presents, and forms an army.
Notes: The title is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's Sonnet IX, from her Collected Sonnets. "Blast Hardcheese" is a reference from the "Space Mutiny" episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I did not mark the "major character death" box in the warnings, but the violent death of one secondary character (and of one original character) is depicted, and another few are mentioned. Also mentioned are torture and sex slavery, though neither is depicted. Rating mostly for violence, language, and assorted references to all that murder and mayhem that Division get up to. This story will contain spoilers up to episode 2x10, "Guardians." I couldn't recall if they'd ever mentioned Nikita's birthday in the show, so I gave her Maggie Q's, May 22. I think that's all I've got by way of notes.
Nikita had come to expect a clusterfuck whenever she tried to get something done. It seemed like every move she made these days ended in some kind of unpredicted disaster. But she certainly hadn't expected to track Ari Tasarov to the Udinov mansion, to waste precious minutes searching for him while avoiding Semak's security, and then to find not Ari, but Alex, holding a gun on...Katya Udinov?
Well. She'd worry about Ari later.
Both Katya and Alex swung their eyes around, Katya's pleading, Alex's lit with a strange, almost feral kind of fire. "The hell are you doing here?" Alex snapped. Her gun hand didn't move, the barrel still trained on Katya.
"Looking for a black box," said Nikita, pushing down all her stress and confusion to make her voice as calm as possible. "What's going on here?"
"My daughter," gasped Katya. "She's Division, she--"
"Shut up," Alex said. She was almost snarling, but her eyes were bright with tears. Nikita had seen that combination often enough, back in the day. "This--this traitor helped Semak take my father out. She's fucking him."
"You have to understand, Alexandra," said Katya, and she gulped before continuing. "I had no choice, Sergei had so many of the security on his side--"
"Don't you--don't you fucking give me that," Alex interrupted again, and her stance shifted ever-so-slightly. Ready to take the shot.
Nikita didn't know how the hell her intelligence had missed Katya Udinov being alive all these years, or how the mother that Alex had remembered with such love could have let her child be sold into sex slavery, or how Alex had made it out to Russia without Division agents tailing her--Nikita knew she wasn't infallible, but she thought she probably would have noticed Cleaners converging on the Semak house. None of it mattered now. "Alex," she said. "Don't do this."
Alex's head jerked back around, her eyes meeting Nikita's. "Are you kidding me?" she said incredulously, and there it was, the same panic and desperation and rage that had fueled Alex through rehab. "She killed my father!"
"No," said Nikita. "I killed your father."
"You know what I mean!" Her gun hand was starting to shake.
Alex didn't want to do this. Of course she didn't. If Nikita had had five minutes right now to spend with her mom, she would have forgiven her anything. Anything at all, and Nikita didn't even understand what a family was supposed to be, hadn't spent her life in mourning the way Alex had. "Alex," she said again, "I know you're angry. I know you feel betrayed. But this is your mother. Do you really want her blood on your hands?"
A tear spilled over the eyelashes of Alex's left eye, and she swiped at it angrily with the hand that wasn't holding the gun. "My father trusted her," she said, and her voice broke. It was selfish, probably, but Nikita couldn't help hearing "I trusted you" behind it, and thinking about the long, long list of ways she had failed Alex. "He trusted her, and he trusted Semak, and see where that got him? Dead. Everybody he trusted betrayed him."
"You didn't betray him," said Nikita. "And I know he trusted you." Alex didn't respond, but her hands were still shaking, and Nikita felt she had room to press her advantage. "You can't avenge your family like this. Trust me. You'll regret it the rest of your life."
"She doesn't deserve it," Alex said in a low voice.
She clearly meant "to live," but Katya had obviously interpreted it differently and grasped whatever hope she could find in the situation. "No, please, I don't deserve to die, Alexandra!"
"Shut up," said Nikita harshly. Whatever bullshit had gone down around Project Pale Fire, nobody in this room seemed to be in the right frame of mind to untangle it now. To Alex, she said, "It doesn't matter what she deserves. It's about what you deserve. And you're a good person, Alex. You don't deserve this kind of thing on your conscience." No matter how bent on revenge Alex had become since she and Nikita parted ways, Nikita knew that, side by side with her desire for vengeance, there lived a conscience inside of Alex that would never let her do the kind of things Nikita had done, not without severe consequences.
There was a long pause in which Nikita had absolutely no idea what Alex was thinking, before Alex swallowed loudly and said, "What do I do?"
Nikita hadn't even realized how tense her gut had gotten until Alex spoke and a knot in her stomach came loose. "We take out Semak," she said. "And we use her to do it."
**
In the end, taking out Semak wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Katya was willing to tell them where he was, where his guards were, anything to save her own skin. His own security was bored and distracted, burned out on false alarms, and easy to pick off and knock out one by one, even dragging along Katya Udinov as a hostage. The few Gogol operatives who actually stuck around to fight were more of a challenge, but not much more--according to Ari's tracker, he'd already taken off, and probably taken the black box and his best men with him. If ever there was a man who knew how to cut his losses, it was Ari Tasarov. Nikita never thought she'd be in a position to give up a black box, but just in the last week, she'd given up two. What was the world coming to?
Alex was good--she fought with a total lack of hesitation and a confidence Nikita had never seen from her. It should have made her proud, and it did, but it also made her a bit sad. The last thing she wanted was for Alex to turn into her. Sometimes, though, life really didn't give you an option.
Semak himself was a disappointment. Clearly he'd gotten used to being in control--when he found himself alone, all his guards incapacitated and two trained assassins facing him down, all he could do was gulp and try to hide behind his desk. He couldn't even muster the presence of mind to beg.
Alex dragged him out from behind the desk and forced him to his knees. She shot a look at Nikita and said, "You gonna tell me not to do it?" It was a challenge, as if to say that if Nikita did tell her not to kill Semak, Alex would tell Nikita where to shove it.
Nikita didn't bother. She was doing her best these days not to be consumed by anger, not to kill when she could avoid it, to keep the protection of the innocent as her number one priority. Semak wasn't innocent. As long as he was alive, Alex wouldn't be safe. Nikita sure wouldn't shed any tears over his death. "Go ahead," she said, and Alex grinned viciously and put the gun to Semak's forehead.
"You had to know this was coming," she said before pulling the trigger.
Her smile faded as Semak's body slumped to the floor. Nikita hoped she didn't regret it. Surely Alex had enough on her plate without the burden of regret to carry as well.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
Alex took a deep breath. "Like I'm ready to take back my birthright."
And so Nikita kept an eye on Katya while Alex herded what was left of Zetrov's onsite security and tech guys into the dining room. She stood silently by Alex's side while Alex explained who she was, how she'd come to rescue her mother (what a laugh) and reclaim her father's legacy, to guide his company in a new, more profitable and sustainable direction. Nikita stood behind her as she stepped forward and said, "Some of you may have been told that I've been brainwashed by Division. That I'm their plant. That they raised me. But now you get to know the truth: my family and I were betrayed by the people we trusted most." Katya shifted uncomfortably, and Nikita tightened her grip on the woman's arm. She was probably leaving bruises, but she didn't particularly care. "I was sold into slavery. I was forced into drug addiction. I had to fight every day to survive. I used Division to find the traitor who killed my father, just as Semak used Division to kill him. But I am not Division. I am Zetrov." Something in her voice--the conviction, maybe, the purpose that Nikita had seldom seen except at the most unexpected moments--made Nikita shiver. "And anyone who suggests otherwise will answer to me. My name is Alexandra Udinov. My father built this company. But I will make it great."
Half of the Zetrov employees, caught up in Alex's fervor, applauded; the other half just looked scared out of their minds. Nikita took advantage of the confusion to lean forward and whisper into Alex's ear, "You know I won't let you make Zetrov another Division."
The look Alex gave her was full of contempt. "Give me a little credit," she said. "You think I never learned anything from you?"
Nikita really didn't have the nerve to think too hard about exactly what she meant by that.
**
When she caught up with Michael and Owen, they were in Amsterdam, camped out in a hotel two floors above five Guardians--plus, as it turned out, Roan, who was kind of amazing in his indestructibility.
"They're still waiting for instructions from Percy," Owen explained. "However he got out the original message taking them to Secondary Protocol, Amanda must have caught on to him. Maybe his mole got caught, maybe he's lying low, I don't know, but anyway, they haven't done anything since they got here."
"Do they all have their black boxes with them?" asked Nikita. The Guardians were all pretty hard opponents to beat, and she, Michael, and Owen would have to be really damn creative if they wanted to take out all five of them, but the possibility of gaining control of so many black boxes at once...well. It would make this a significantly better day as far as Nikita was concerned.
"All except Miller," said Michael. Just looking at him made half of Nikita stand up and jump for joy, and half of her want to curl up into a ball and die. No. This wasn't the time for that. "I take it you didn't get that one from Tasarov?"
Nikita shook her head. "No," she said. "The situation with Alex required more immediate attention. Plus, as Owen said, without Miller, Ari can't get anything out of the box."
Owen was like a puppy, or a little boy--the least praise was enough to make him puff up with pleasure, and he smiled warmly at Nikita as he said, "If we can come up with some plan to take out the gang downstairs, that's four boxes plus all the biometric material we'll need to get into them. That'd put a pretty big dent in whatever the hell Percy's planning."
"If we could split them up somehow, pick them off one by one," Michael suggested, but Owen was already shaking his head.
"No, no, come on, I was a Guardian for years, they're not that fucking stupid!"
Nikita let them butt heads for a bit while she thought. Miller was a scary bastard clearly not overburdened with conscience, but his loyalty to Percy wasn't the kind of devotion to duty that had governed Michael or Nikita (in her early days) or even Owen--it was the kind of self-interested indifference that she suspected had kept Birkhoff at Division for so many years. In the end, looking back on it, getting Birkhoff to switch sides had simply been a matter of giving him something he'd wanted more than technological gadgets and free room and board: a purpose that made him feel like a good guy, and people who cared about him. Miller wasn't looking for that, but the way he'd talked about Division...Miller wanted money. God only knew what the other Guardians wanted, but if even one of them could be turned, the way Owen and Dana Winters had been, then maybe there was an easier way of neutralizing them than a head-on confrontation.
"Maybe we could recruit them," she said. Their heads whipped around in stereo to stare at her, and she snorted out a laugh at how similar their confused frowns were.
"What are you talking about?" Michael asked.
"The Guardians." She shrugged. "They're isolated from the rest of Division. They have a lot of power over Percy, and I'm pretty sure some of them know it. Find out what they want and give it to them...who knows. It worked with Dana, didn't it?"
"Sure, and that black box was booby-trapped with a biological weapon." Michael's eyebrows drew together. "You don't think they're just going to up and ditch Percy and join our anti-Division crusade, do you?"
Our crusade? Was it still "our"? Whatever, she'd think about it later. "Why not? At least as a plan A--I think our chances of turning them are at least as good as our chances at taking them in a fight."
Owen laughed at that. Michael said, "Nikita, I don't think this is a good idea," thus guaranteeing that she'd have Owen's support. "The Guardians are recruited from the best of the Cleaners, they're not necessarily people you'd even want to work with--"
Oh, that was a mistake. Owen's face hardened. "Hey."
"No offense, " said Michael, not even looking in Owen's direction.
"Yeah, well, I might take some, anyway." For a moment, Nikita was afraid that their macho posturing would lead to actual violence--the expression on Owen's face didn't bode particularly well, anyway--but then Owen stood and gave Nikita one of those earnest looks he was surprisingly good at. "I like it. I don't know any of the other Guardians, but from my own experience--it's a lonely job, and they've been more cut off than usual since Percy's been out of commission. Some days I would have sold my left nut just to talk to somebody besides the grocery store clerk. The idea of being part of something big like taking down Division has gotta be appealing to at least one of them." He gave Michael a challenging look. "If you don't want to be a part of it, well, I'd understand."
Michael looked like he wanted to give Owen the finger. Then he looked back at Nikita, searching her face like he was trying to figure out what she was thinking. Good luck, she thought. If you work it out, fill me in. Finally, he nodded. "I guess it's worth a try," he said. "But we prepare for the worst. If this doesn't work, we need a plan to take them out."
**
In the end, the plan was for Nikita to go in alone to the suite the Guardians were sharing, with Owen and Michael listening in from the rooms on either side, ready to jump in with smoke bombs, machine guns, and small explosives the second they were needed. Michael didn't like it, but as long as he was willing to cooperate, he didn't need to like it.
Nikita paused outside their door. Gun by her side, another in a holster at her shoulder, extra ammo in her pockets. A knife in her sleeve and another in her shoe--never let it be said that she couldn't learn from her opponents. It was hard to tell from the outside whether her game face looked convincing, but she felt pretty good about it. She wasn't going to get any readier. She pushed the door open.
They reacted instantly, all of them pulling their guns out near-simultaneously. Roan was the only one to actually pull the trigger--of course, the bastard probably spent his free nights shooting at a target with Nikita's face pinned to it, so it wasn't surprising that he was quick to shoot. Nikita was quicker. His bullet only winged her; hers hit him right between the eyes.
She'd like to see him come back from that.
"Now, why don't we all put our guns down and play nice?" she said, giving them her best "don't fuck with me" smile. "I'm just here to talk, honest."
"The hell you are," said one of the Guardians she didn't know, a white guy built like a brick shithouse with a face that looked like it had been smashed in a few too many times.
Miller, who seemed pretty unflappable, raised his eyebrow at her, his gun hand steady. "And what can we do for you?"
"Well. A little bird told me that you've all been put on Secondary Protocol. Must be nice--have a little get-together, trade stories, sit around and wait for Percy to let you in on the plan. As much as he ever lets anyone in on his plans."
One or two of the other Guardians looked confused, but they had pretty good poker faces for the most part, and as far as Miller was concerned, she might as well have just told him the day's weather forecast. "Have you got a point?" he asked.
"You and I had an interesting conversation the other day," she said. "About the sides we'd chosen."
"I'm still happy with mine," said Miller. "You looking to trade teams?"
"Not hardly," she said. "But since my recruitment pitch didn't work so well on you, I thought I'd try out the latest version on your friends. You don't mind, do you?"
That got a frown out of him. "That was your recruitment pitch? Wasn't much of one, if you ask me."
Five of them. She thought she could probably take out Miller, now that she wasn't bound in the back of a police van, but she didn't know about the others. She felt good about her chances with Brick Shithouse--she'd had good luck in the past with big guys, who tended to be a lot slower and less agile than she was--but the skinny blond guy, the short woman, and the South Asian guy who looked like he could be an Abercrombie and Fitch model? Hard to say. "Well, if you didn't like that one, maybe you'd like to hear this new version."
"Maybe we wouldn't," said the male model.
The woman looked from Miller to Nikita and said, "Recruitment? Really? What makes you think we want to join your little vendetta?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Nikita. "Maybe the fact that you've got every major criminal organization in the world after your asses? I've just come from a great little party with Zetrov and Gogol, and they're working together to take out as many of you as they can."
The blond guy made a contemptuous noise, and Miller grinned. "They've done such a good job so far," he said.
"Oh, I know they haven't," she said. "But Zetrov is under new leadership as of, oh, forty-eight hours ago. Alexandra Udinov. If you don't know who she is, you should know that Division took out her family eight years ago, and she's spent her life since then devoted to revenge. Semak wanted Division gone to cover his own ass--Udinov wants to burn the place down and piss on the ashes." She looked at her watch with exaggerated patience. "I'd imagine that, by now, she's relocating the bulk of her forces specifically to tracking you down and getting the black boxes by any means necessary."
That took a little starch out of their sails, she thought with satisfaction. Good to know she hadn't lost her touch at bluffing. "Plus," she added, "you've made yourselves a hell of a lot more conspicuous with this little shindig. Your chances of lying low were pretty good on your own, but now?" She shrugged. "Hell, the Gogol agents tracking me could have already figured out that you're here. And given the power shifts at Division lately, I wouldn't expect too much help from Division."
"What are you getting at?" asked the male model.
"If I know Percy--and let's face it, nobody really knows Percy, but I know him as well as your average person is going to know Percy--then he's called you all together to put him back on the throne. Take out Amanda, put himself back on the top of the heap."
Miller nodded, rolling his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, could've figured that out. Get to the point."
"Tough crowd," said Nikita, with feigned nonchalance. "My point is this--without your cooperation, Percy's got nothing. You've got all the proof, all the evidence of everything he and his cronies have ever done. And what's he going to give you for it? Well, if past experience is anything to go on, he's going to kill anybody you hook up with and probably kill you for good measure. But me?" Another elaborate shrug. "I can get you actual money for it. You wanna keep living in the ass-end of nowhere, guarding a box, or do you wanna see a little bit of reward from the company your labor helped build?"
"What, are you forming a union?" The woman laughed. She was pale, with slightly oily skin and messy hair. She sort of looked like she'd been carved out of cheese, and her close-set, dull eyes didn't make her look terribly bright. It was probably a great disguise--just about anyone who saw her would underestimate her. "The Assassins' union. I'm sure AFL-CIO would go for it."
"Mmm, of a sort," said Nikita with a smile. "Though I don't think unions typically take out the CEOs of their companies. Here's the thing--Division has a shitload of money. Right now, they spend a lot of it spying on you."
"Not us, per se," said the blond guy. He was dressed in a polo and khaki pants--he looked like a preppy college boy.
"Not you, per se," Nikita agreed. "Their employees in general. Which gives you, per se, an edge that your average agent doesn't have."
Miller cocked his head at her curiously. "What, exactly, are you proposing?"
"A mixture of blackmail and exposure. We take it mission by mission--they give us money not to air some of their dirty laundry--we air some of it anyway and sell the stories to the media. The more we release, the more their position is weakened, the more they give us." They'd worked it out in a phone conference with Birkhoff; some of the stories were too dangerous ever to be released to the public, the kind of stuff that took out governments, but some of them were simply the kind that took out individual House Representatives or moderately powerful CEOs. It was a riskier, broader-reaching game than they'd been playing so far, but Owen for one was more enthusiastic about it than he'd ever been about their small-scale missions, and Nikita had to admit it would more satisfying to release some actual truth than to spend all their time creeping around in the dark. She wasn't at all sure that Amanda would play this particular game--wasn't even sure if they should even try the blackmail thing--but Birkhoff was more than capable of getting the money to satisfy the Guardians, if they decided to go along with it.
"You really think they're just going to pay us off?" the blond guy asked skeptically. "You don't think Percy or Amanda would just have a hit put out on us?"
"Oh, come on," said Nikita, giving him a contemptuous look of her own. "You're world-class experts in lying low, you're Division's best assassins, and you're all on a drug that gives you superhuman strength and speed. What makes you think you have anything to be afraid of from Percy and Amanda?"
"Stroking our egos," said Miller with a grin. "I like it."
"I don't," said Brick Shithouse. "I think I've heard enough from this traitor." His hand moved. Nikita ducked instinctively as a shot rang out.
When she looked up, Brick Shithouse was dead on the floor, a bullet hole in his forehead, and the greasy little woman was looking at his body in exasperation, her gun still pointed at him. "Such a dumb fuck," she said. "Probably couldn't find his own dick unless Percy told him where to look." She put the gun in a holster at her belt and stepped over to shake Nikita's hand. "Celia Carver," she said. "I'm gonna need some more details about this plan of yours, but it sounds like a hoot."
**
As Nikita later explained to Birkhoff over the phone, Celia and Kevin, the blond guy, were both interested in working outright with them. For them, the appeal wasn't so much the money as the opportunity to get out of the podunk towns where they'd been hiding the black boxes, and the idea of sticking one to Percy ("That creepy motherfucker," as Celia, who had a mouth like a sailor, called him). Pranav, the male model, thought the plan sounded suicidally stupid, and he'd wanted to take his black box and work with Zetrov. Nikita was okay with the Zetrov plan, but she wasn't about to let him walk off with the box. The threat of facing Celia and Kevin as well as Nikita, Michael, and Owen was enough to make him hand it over before vanishing. Miller, predictably enough, wanted money in exchange for a bit of his blood and for his not going to Division to report both Percy's and Nikita's schemes to Amanda. A lot of money. Birkhoff complained, but eventually he coughed it up. Nikita thought it would probably be worth it to keep Miller at some island resort somewhere and out of their hair.
"Hah," said Owen, looking at the black boxes spread over his bed in the hotel. It sounded less like a laugh and more like a noise of disbelief. "Anyone know how we can get in touch with Percy right now? I would love to see the look on his face when we tell him we got four of his black boxes."
"Tasarov's still got the fifth," said Michael in dampening tones. "As long as he does, we're going to have to be really careful about how we release that information. We can't just sell off the stories by the dozen and send our new Guardian friends a check in the mail."
"'We,' he says," Owen muttered. "Because we did so much today."
"If I recall correctly, I saved our asses in Switzerland," said Michael, looking seriously pissed, but before he could get too far into the rant he was almost certainly brewing, his phone rang. "It's Cassandra," he said after pulling it out of his pocket.
"Cassandra?" Owen's expression went from sullen to murderous. His protectiveness was kind of cute, Nikita thought, but pretty much the last thing in the world that she wanted was a conversation between her and Owen and Michael about just what Michael's relationship with Cassandra was at this point.
"Of course," she said. "You should talk to her."
Michael shot her a grateful look and disappeared into the hallway. Owen made a scornful noise in his general direction and fixed Nikita with an incredulous look. "You kidding me?" he said. "Who the hell is Cassandra?"
"It's complicated," said Nikita, hoping she looked calm. She sure didn't feel it. "He's not cheating on me, if that's what you're thinking. Cassandra's..." The mother of his son? The woman he's currently living with? "A friend," she concluded.
"A friend. Right."
Suddenly, the hotel room seemed a lot smaller than it had a minute ago. "I'm going to get some air," she told Owen. He raised an eyebrow in her direction but didn't try to stop her.
Michael looked at her as she shut the door, a bit harder than necessary. He was smiling, but not at her--it was the kind of smile you gave someone who was talking on the phone with you, even if they couldn't see you. Maybe because they couldn't see you. "I'll call you when I land," he said before hanging up.
"Is Max okay?" Nikita asked, already knowing the answer.
"Yeah," said Michael. His smile was broad and open, nothing like the quiet, secret smiles he'd shared with Nikita. "Cassandra says he misses me. Can you believe that? He asked about me last night!"
Nikita could believe it. From what she could tell, Ovechkin had been a possessive father, but distant--interested in Max as an heir but not as a person with wants and thoughts of his own. Michael wouldn't be like that. Even in Division, Michael had had a way of making every recruit feel like they mattered. "You're a good father," she said.
He sighed. "I hope so."
It was like someone was stepping on her heart with a high-heeled shoe. "Michael. This can't go on."
And there went the smile. His eyes on her were as sharp as a hawk's. "What can't?"
"This back and forth. Me one night, Cassandra and Max the next. You know that. You and I have people after us, people who aren't going to stop until we're dead. Cassandra's got enemies of her own. Every time you come to help me out, you're leaving her and Max unprotected; every time you go back to her, you're taking our enemies with you. I never wanted to make you choose, but...."
"Nikita." His voice was hard. "You know me. You know I don't respond well to ultimatums."
She huffed out a breath of air, frustrated. This was the problem with Michael--once he'd made up his mind, he could be as stubborn as anyone Nikita'd ever known, and it took drastic things to get him to reconsider. She could respect that, being something of a stubborn person herself, but she liked to think that she didn't shut the smarter part of her brain off whenever someone disagreed with her. "This isn't an ultimatum," she said. "Think about it. You and I know both know that the life we lead isn't safe. You can make a safe place for Max to grow up, but it sure as hell isn't going to be with someone Division regularly tries to kill."
"He's my son," said Michael, like Nikita didn't understand that. Hell, maybe she didn't. God knew that her first response if she ever found out she had a kid would be to run away as far and as fast as she could, because being around her was dangerous. "I'm not just going to leave him."
Nikita had to take a moment to make sure her next words didn't come out with a sob or tears or something. "I'm not asking you to." She swallowed. It seemed like all of a sudden her throat had started hurting. "Michael. I love you. You know that, right?"
His expression softened. "Of course. I love you, too."
"But I don't..." Despite her best efforts, she could feel tears burning in her eyes. "How do I say this? I don't need you. Not the way Max does. I'd do just about anything to have a father who gave a damn about me, I'm certainly not going to deny Max his."
"Nikita...." He reached a hand out for her face, but she caught it before it could get there. If things got too...intimate here, it would make what she was trying to do impossible.
"Look," she said, "in five, maybe ten years, Max will be old enough to understand all this. If you still want this fight then, I know you'll figure out a way to get in touch with me. But for now, just stay with him. Okay? I don't call you, you don't call me. Division can't trace calls that we don't make. Cassandra and Max will be safer, and if you stay off the radar, Division can keep its attention on me."
Michael blinked a few times, staring at her like he was trying to see the inside of her mind. He did that a lot. She'd never really thought of herself as all that inscrutable.
"Nikita," he said, "Do you ever think that maybe, just maybe, other people might be able to decide for themselves what's best for them?"
What did Michael know about letting other people make decisions? If it had been up to Nikita, Alex sure as hell wouldn't be at the heart of Zetrov right now. "Sure," she said. "And sometimes they're wrong and I'm right."
He laughed at that, kind of a weak and watery laugh. "I think if you'll take a moment and think about it, you'll remember that just last week I was the one who was right, when you and Birkhoff pulled that dumbass op against Oversight."
He didn't get to talk about that. He didn't. He wasn't the one who'd had to set Birkhoff up with a doctor and finally coax him into sleeping that first night and watch him try to type one-handed . She was going to have to live with the guilt of that for the rest of her life, but Michael would never have to deal with any of the aftermath. He didn't get to talk. "Well," she said shortly. "I'm right this time, and you know it."
They were silent for a long time. Michael's eyes slid from her and he focused on some place on the floor. "Yeah, maybe," he said. "Nikita. I would have gone with you to the end. You should know that."
She wasn't even going to get a goodbye kiss out of this. If she kissed him now, she would never let him go.
**
Birkhoff's new safe house was in Oregon, and it looked like a log cabin from the outside but on the inside was the kind of contemporary, open-layout building he liked. He greeted Nikita with a crooked grin. "Come on in," he said. "Mi casa es su casa, or whatever." The scabs on his face looked better, but the glasses made him look like somebody's kid brother who'd taken a beating at recess. Nikita guessed it was difficult to put contact lenses in with a crushed hand.
"Did you go to your doctor's appointment?" she asked.
Birkhoff rolled his eyes. "Yes, Mom," he said, wiggling his bad hand at her. "She called a surgeon out here. First operation was last Thursday, the next one's in three days."
"Well. Good." She didn't really like the idea of Birkhoff recovering from surgery out here all on his own, but it wasn't like she had any room to talk. Anyway, with any luck she'd be around later this week to help him after the next operation.
After ushering her and Owen in, Birkhoff stuck his head out the door like a dog sticking its head out the window, turning it side to side like he was looking for something.
"Expecting somebody?" Owen asked.
Birkhoff drew his head back in with a frown. "I guess not," he said, turning back to Nikita and Owen. "What, you're trading Mikey in for a new model?" He gave Owen a dubious look. "Can't say I approve."
Nikita knew she'd have to talk to him about it sometime, since they were actually kind of friends at this point, but she really, really couldn't handle thinking any more about Michael right now. "Please, Birkhoff," she said, "Don't. " She wondered if she sounded as pathetic and desperate to him as she did to herself.
Birkhoff looked sort of taken aback. He darted a quick look between her and Owen before sighing. "Okay, yeah, whatever, your room's the first one on the left upstairs, and Blast Hardcheese here can have the one at the end of the hall." He gave them one last look before scurrying down to the house's lower level, which was presumably where he kept the computers.
"What the hell did he just call me?" Owen asked.
"I don't know," said Nikita. "It's probably from Star Wars or something."
"Have you ever actually seen Star Wars?" Owen grinned at her. "I'm pretty sure it's not from there."
Nikita shrugged. She didn't get half of the references Birkhoff made, but she'd never really cared enough to devote that much thought to them. "Whatever." They lugged the duffel with the black boxes upstairs. One of the black boxes went into Nikita's closet, another into her dresser. They put a third in Owen's room, in a chest under a window seat, and the last went into what had to be Birkhoff's room, on his nightstand. Unsurprisingly, the room was full of computers. Nikita wondered if he had a storage unit somewhere where he kept all his computers when they were on the run, or if he simply bought new computers everywhere he went.
"Hey," said Owen. "He looks okay."
"What?"
"Birkhoff. He looks okay." He shrugged. "I've definitely seen worse. Are you okay?"
She'd sent Michael off to London for the last time. For all she knew, she'd never see him again. It was a harder, more painful break than when she'd left Division, and at that point she only ever saw him when he was trying to kill her. It was like a wound she couldn't touch without breaking open some stitches and bleeding out on the floor. "Fine."
"Right," said Owen skeptically. He was way too sarcastic these days. They'd have to work on that.
"Really," she said. "I'm fine."
"Whatever you say, Boss," he said, poking dubiously at what looked like a disassembled hard drive on Birkhoff's desk. "Whatever you say."
Birkhoff actually had a huge kitchen, which of course he never used. His freezer was full of frozen pizzas and Fudgsicles. Owen took one look at it and said, "Yeah, I can work with this," before vanishing to the grocery store for over two hours. Nikita had been about five minutes away from going after him with all the weapons in her arsenal, but he'd eventually reappeared with enough groceries to feed an army. Well. That was sort of what they were. A little army.
Owen cooked dinner for them, lasagna with spinach and pine nut cream, and a side salad with wild greens and a raspberry vinaigrette dressing. Or something like that--Owen could wax as rhapsodical about food as Birkhoff could about electronic equipment, and Nikita was getting really good at listening to both with half an ear, just to get the important points. Whatever it was, it was delicious. Birkhoff was extremely uncertain about the food at first, but after his first bite, he'd eaten with gusto, and after they'd finished, he'd leaned back in his chair and said to Owen, "Okay, Brute Squad, you can stay."
"Hey, I know that one," said Owen. "It's The Princess Bride, right? I've seen that."
"Oh, good for you, you've seen one of the biggest cult classic phenomena of the last thirty years." Birkhoff rolled his eyes so hard Nikita was afraid he might strain something. "What, did you get a degree in film studies or something?"
"No, I got a degree in killing people who piss me off," Owen said, wielding his fork in a vaguely threatening manner.
Nikita really, really wasn't in the mood to mediate another dick-measuring contest, but lucky for her, Birkhoff just smirked in Owen's direction and said, "Yeah, whatever. You made dinner, I'll make the margaritas."
"Margaritas?" Owen looked nonplussed.
"Dude, we've got four black boxes," said Birkhoff, gesturing expansively. "If you can think of a better reason for a celebratory alcoholic beverage, I'd sure like to hear it."
Birkhoff had gotten surprisingly efficient at making margaritas one-handed. Nikita didn't make a habit of getting actually drunk--nursing one drink the whole evening and then faking drunkenness was more her style--but the margaritas were good, and of all the people in the world that she trusted, half of them were in the room with her, and thinking about the other half made her want to be drunk.
So between the three of them, they went through an alarming amount of tequila.
"Man, Michael is a dick," said Owen, punctuating his statement with a finger jabbing at the air. "He just, he just has a kid with this other woman? Dick."
"He's not a dick," Nikita said. The inside of her head felt fuzzy, and it was blunting the edges on some of her grief. Which was nice, sort of. "He's a family man, okay? We weren't even dating then, okay, and Cassandra was just a mission. But Max is really cute."
"That's true." Birkhoff nodded as if she'd said something profound. "Max is really cute. Kind of a pain in the ass, but cute."
"And. Whatever." Nikita's head was already killing her. She didn't even want to think about what her hangover was going to be like. "Some people are good at, like, normal, healthy relationships, right? And then some people are not. Like me."
Owen's finger jabbed again. "Bullshit."
"No, seriously," she said. "This is totally how I fucked things up with Alex, too. Well. No, 'cause she doesn't have a kid. But I pushed her away, you know, I didn't tell her things. I wanted to keep her safe. But that's not...it doesn't work, when you want to trust people. Or you want them to trust you. Or, you know."
"No. No, no, no," said Owen. "'Cause I am all about the truth. You know that. But! Cassandra didn't want Michael to be involved, or she would have told him. And that's, that's her business. Her kid, too. That's not your fault. It's not like everything would be fixed if you'd told him sooner."
"Wait," said Birkhoff. "Back up a sec. Were you and Alex dating?" His eyes looked sort of glazed-over behind his glasses. "That's...a mental image."
Nikita punched him in the shoulder. Not too hard, because he was still recovering.
"If Emily were here right now," Owen said, "I wouldn't ditch her for some woman I screwed on an op. When you love somebody, you don't just leave them like that."
"It was my idea!" said Nikita, louder than she'd really meant to. "I told him to! He didn't want to! But he has to be Max's father now. If he could just leave his son like that--if he made Max feel like there was something wrong with him, or like he was less important to his dad than...me, or taking down Division, or whatever, he wouldn't be the man I loved!" It kind of sounded like she was crying now. Oh, yeah, she was definitely crying. She hated when this happened.
After a long, awkward pause, Owen said, "Too much tequila?"
Nikita nodded and wiped away tears, leaving her face feeling raw. "Way too much tequila."
Birkhoff burped.
Somehow after that they made their way to the living room. Nikita collapsed on the couch; Birkhoff sat on the other end of it while Owen took the armchair. Owen, being the kind of guy that he was, started telling a long, involved story about his last break-up. Apparently, pre-Division, he'd been a cocaine dealer, and his girlfriend was in the business, too. She'd constantly been on him to expand their sales, to bring in more money, "to grow up, like it was totally immature of me to keep our cocaine dealing to a minimum!" Eventually, she'd taken a huge chunk of their merchandise from under Owen's nose and brought it to one of their competitors, effectively ending both their business and their romantic relationships. "And the worst thing is, I don't think she even cheated on me with him--like, I don't think they ever dated. She just legitimately thought he was a way better cocaine dealer than me."
"Oh, ouch," said Birkhoff.
Nikita laughed, and told the story of her last pre-Division breakup, back when she was nineteen and dating a music school dropout who divided his time between busking and begging money off his upper middle-class parents. He'd been distressingly close to his ex, who apparently became his ex-ex on Nikita's bed while she was at the mall one afternoon.
"Jesus, Nikita," Owen said, "are all the guys you date complete idiots?"
"Well, Daniel wasn't," said Nikita, and Owen winced.
"Ah. Yeah." Nikita thought maybe she'd have to cut off a guilt trip before he got too into it, but instead, he cleared his throat and started another story, this one about his complicated love life in high school. Nikita found herself drifting off partway through, but Owen didn't sound pissed when he said, "Tired, huh?" and Birkhoff's couch was really comfortable.
She must have woken up at the end of one of Owen's stories, because Birkhoff was barking out a laugh, and when she sat up, he said to her, "Holy crap, this dude sucks at romance."
"Hey," said Owen, "we ever gonna get an embarrassing breakup story out of you? Nikita and I have been laying our love lives out all night, I think it's your turn." He gave Nikita a conspiratorial grin.
Birkhoff shifted uncomfortably. "Eh. Nothing that interesting to tell."
"Oh, come on," said Nikita. She was actually curious; she knew that Birkhoff had some kind of life when he wasn't providing tech support for missions, but she had very little idea of what was in that life other than a lot of computer hacking.
"No, really," said Birkhoff. "I dunno, I never actually had a relationship. I mean, I had sex, don't get me wrong, but, like...girls really weren't into me in high school, and then of course there was prison, and once I was in Division, I didn't see the point of going to all the effort to date or whatever when I could just watch porn online or hire a call girl."
Owen snorted. "Wow. How'd Percy feel about you hiring pros on the company dime?"
Birkhoff shrugged exaggeratedly. He was clearly still a little drunk. "Didn't care, as long as I kept doing my job." He stared into his margarita glass, which he'd apparently retrieved while Nikita was dozing off, and his expression got more melancholy. "And I did, no problem. Man, I watched you guys do some fucked-up shit on closed-circuit camera. And I watched...." He trailed off, but the look he darted at Owen and Nikita before taking another sip of his margarita made Nikita think the sentence probably could have been finished "I watched some fucked-up shit happen to you."
It was weird to think of Birkhoff carrying the same kind of guilt that Nikita and Owen did. He'd always seemed pretty untouched, emotionally speaking, by all his time in Division, but Nikita really ought to have known better than anyone the kind of turmoil someone could hide under a snarky mask. "Aww, Nerd," she said, too fuzzy-brained to think of something smarter to say to him. Her head felt really heavy, so she laid it on his shoulder. She could almost hear him rolling his eyes, but his good hand came up and stroked through her hair once or twice.
"Whatever. I just...do you ever look back at yourself and really, really not like what you see?"
"All the time, dumbass," said Owen. "That's why we're here and not at Division."
**
"Hello, Jill."
Jill Morelli obviously hadn't clawed her way up the ranks of respectable journalism because of a pretty face. "Nikita," she said, sounding like she couldn't decide whether to be thrilled or angry.
"I told you I'd call if I needed your help."
On the other end of the phone, Jill sighed. "What do you need? Is this...payback, or something?"
"Hmm. You could say that." Nikita couldn't help but smile. This was the kind of 'payback' that turned respectable journalists into Woodward and Bernstein. "I think you'll be able to help us both with this."
"Well?" asked Jill. Whatever attempt she'd made at anger was obviously over now; she sounded like a kid awaiting a present.
"What would you say if I could give you enough stories to last you the rest of your life? Government cover-ups, corporate cover-ups, tax payer dollars used to fund senators' sex lives--you name the conspiracy, I've got the e-mails, the videos, the phone records, and the names of who gave the orders."
"What's the catch?"
"No catch. I wouldn't mind some money--taking down government conspiracies isn't exactly cheap--but I'm willing to negotiate. I'm not going to give you every story, so you'll have to live with me keeping some secrets, but I'll give you more than enough to bring some really terrible people to justice."
"Well," said Jill gravely. "Let me think. What would I say?" She laughed suddenly, bright and happy. "I'd say, let's do it."
Part 2