LFN: Do You Remember (5/9)
Title: Do You Remember (5/9)
Series: One Line (1/26)
Character(s): Michael Samuelle, Walter, OC
fanfic100 Prompt: 47 - heart
Length: 1,878 words
Rating: PG-13 overall
Disclaimer: I don't know you. You don't know me. Let's keep it that way.
Summary: “You wanted to see me, Michael?”
Notes: this is a pre-S1 story. I have a rudimentary timeline for the series. If you would like to read the other stories in this series or the other fanfic100 stories, my prompt table is here. You can read the other parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9.
§§§
Though she’s been effectively immobilized for some time she has the adrenaline and endorphin equivalent in her body for someone in a fight. Her breathing is as erratic and unsteady as the man with the submachine gun trained on her. There is sweat tracing prickly paths down her face and pooling under the black fabric of her clothes. Her body wants to move, is tense with inactivity, thrumming with potential energy. She says, “What do you want to know?”
Walter took the panel from Amana. “If ya don’t mind me saying, you don’t look so good, Sugar. Don’t sound so hot either.”
She gave him a weary half-smile and rasped, “That’s cause I didn’t sleep so good, Walter.”
“Not staying up worried about handing in your panel late, were ya Sugar? You know I wouldn’t write ya up for something like that,” he purred.
Amana pulled the cuffs of her black turtleneck sweater over her hands as she leaned forward on the high counter in front of her. “If you were…thirty years younger, Walter...”
“Don’t tempt me, Amana,” he said with a chuckle. “You’ll give this old man a false sense of hope. Now tell me why you couldn’t sleep last night. Seemed like a pretty straightforward mission. Figured it’d be enough to send ya right off.”
“Maybe, but I got bruised ribs from where the hostile got me with his sub.”
“And what was Helmsly doing?”
Amana smiled. “Eric shot the guy.”
“And your voice? You sound like you’ve been livin’ a hard life, girl.”
“Already been down in the infirmary. Said I’d inhaled too much dust from the collapsing tunnel. I ran into Eric and he sounds pretty rough too.”
“Well I saw Helmsly too, Sug, and he didn’t sound like you.”
Amana frowned. “Walter…you’re starting to sound like my mother. Better. She wouldn’t’ve cared.”
He snorted and turned away. “Take an interest in a body and they go and turn you into a mother hen.”
Laughing again, she stood up from the counter. “I just came in to return the panel, Walter. I’m headed out. I’m pretty sure I have some down time so I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
“Yeah, yeah. Rile me up and leave me flat. Just like a woman.”
That got another smile from her. “See ya around, Walter.”
“One second, Sugar. Before I forget…”
§§§
“You wanted to see me, Michael?”
He looked up from his computer screen. “Yes. Come in, Amana.”
Dipping her head slightly, she tugged at the hem of her black turtleneck sweater, closed the door behind her. The swish-swish of her long denim skirt was loud in his small office as she took a seat. Her eyes tracked him avidly as he reached into his desk and pulled out a small device. He touched it.
They eyed each other: Michael calmly, Amana… He wasn’t sure what he saw.
She leaned forward so that her elbows rested on her knees and her mouth was hidden behind the curled fingers of her fists. “Why didn’t I die in Tangiers?” There was a rough quality to her voice.
“You were expecting to,” he said calmly.
Amana pressed her lips together and nodded. She brought a hand up to smooth hair that was lying perfectly flat.
“Why?”
“Why not?” she demanded, pulling on the sleeve end of her turtleneck.
To Michael she looked more like an anxious collegiate than a skilled killer. But he knew better than many how easily looks deceived. “How did you come to be in Section?”
Her expression changed instantly. Her hoarseness became more pronounced. “Can’t you find that out on your own?”
Michael slid a yellow manila folder off his desk and held it out for her to take. Half rising from her seat she reached across the open space and did as he began to speak: “When you were sixteen you were charged with the second degree murder of your father and his lover.”
Amana looked up from the contents of the file to give him sharp, weary eyes. “You did read my file. The whore my father was sleeping with killed my baby brother, Julio,” she said softly around the roughness of her voice.
Ignoring her, he went on: “You were found to be temporarily insane and were sent to a low profile juvenile detention center for five years. During the last two years of your sentence you were transferred to a comparable women’s detention center. While you were there your mother was sentenced to three years for embezzlement.
“Through some clerical mishap the family relation was not noted and you were placed in the same detention center. Some four months after her sentencing, six months to the day of your release, you attempted to kill her without apparent reason. The clerical error came to light and you were evaluated by the prison psychologist. You were declared to suffer from mild psychosis but nothing that would warrant the attack on your mother. Due to the premeditated nature of the attack, the mother-daughter relation and your history, you were sentenced to life imprisonment. Section recruited you a month later. You had just turned twenty.”
Amana nodded. She was clutching the sleeves of her turtleneck sweater in her hand and biting her lower lip. Clearly she had something to say about Michael’s cut and dried recitation of her history but was debating whether or not to do so. Michael sat back and waited.
Not very long.
“My mother didn’t want anything to do with Julio. I was the one up in the middle of the night with him. I changed him. I fed him. He was mine. She didn’t want him in the first place. She thought she could keep my father interested with a son,” she sneered. “It was why she’d had me, but she’d screwed up having a girl. But he never wanted my mother, he just wanted the prestige that came with marrying her so he slept around all the time.”
The first rush of it out, she paused as if giving him space to object to her outpouring of vitriol. Michael waited.
Not long.
“I don’t know what possessed her to try again. I was fifteen when she had Julio.”
“His birth certificate says his name was Ignatius.”
Amana scowled. “Ignatius Julio, after my father. No one called him that, just her when he was around. Even my father called him Julio when he thought of him at all. She was just so…” Amana shook her head slowly. “Julio was my heart. Do you know what that means?” she asked, eyes narrowing. When he didn’t respond, she went on, “Where I’m from, when you say someone is your heart you mean …they’re everything. Different from a lover, more than a friend. Like a part your body you can’t live without. You’d do anything for them just like you’d do anything for yourself. ‘Cause that’s your heart. And when I found Julio dead in his crib, when I knew the babysitter and my father were just upstairs I made up my mind that they had to die too. My baby, my heart, was not going to go cold in a crib and them not suffer.”
She took a moment, sucking in her bottom lip to compose herself.
Michael watched. And waited.
“I can’t believe the lawyer got me off. I thought…first degree for sure. I didn’t want to die but I didn’t care either. Then my mother was put in that center with me and I had a purpose. But I screwed it up. Then Section came for me and I had a new purpose. I needed that.”
Michael let silence fill the small office, focusing on his breathing, reviewing what he knew of her file in his head. “Elsa Perlov is your handler.”
Suspicious, she nodded. “She’s good people.”
“What happened to your original handler, O’Neal?”
“Died on a mission.”
“You cancel him?”
“You’ve got my file,” she said, seeming more composed. “I was never written up.”
“You cancelled him.”
They stared at each other from across his desk.
“He was killing us,” she rasped softly.
“How so?”
Amana shifted in her seat. “He was a bad team leader. He took unnecessary risks with our lives.”
“You could have had him written up.”
“Did.”
“Then you took matters into your own hands?”
“No…a terrorist cell did that for us.”
“So you convinced the other members of your team to abandon O’Neal and let him be cancelled.”
A half-smile tugging at one side of her mouth, she rasped, “I didn’t convince anyone to do anything. Why do you wanna know?”
“Madeline thinks you could make a good team leader. She thought I should study your profile and that I should study you.”
The half-smile faded as Amana’s brow furrowed. “I know Madeline wants me to move out of Field Op status. She wanted you to…review me?” To his silence she said, “She was the one that took me off the Algerian mission to Tangiers?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t…”
“No.”
“But you let me believe-”
“You believed what you wanted to.”
Amana slumped back in her seat. “But what about the whole thing with my family? With Julio? Why did you let me go on like that?”
“You needed to say it, so I let you.”
He watched her mull over his words and, now, her feelings. Her jaw clenched. She frowned. He waited.
“So you let me vent…because I needed to…so we could get on with the rest of this...whatever it is?”
He waited.
“That’s exactly what you did, isn’t it?”
Michael touched the small device on his desk. “How did you get the rest of your team to help you cancel O’Neal?”
She slapped the arm of her chair. “I didn’t kill O’Neal,” she rasped shrilly. “I didn’t get anyone to kill him. Cancel him. We didn’t protect him, but that was a group decision. I wasn’t the only one who saw how he was. He was dangerous to everyone. He’d already got August killed. I’m so sorry that none of us wanted to be next!”
Michael regarded her coolly. Her golden skin was flush, eyes flashing and body rigid as she sat forward in her chair. Dealing with Operations and Madeline would take more finesse than she had, but it was her ability to lead that was in question. Not in very much question. Everything else could be taught.
She was still sitting stiff in the chair when he said, “I’m going to recommend you to start Cold Op training.”
Amana narrowed her eyes. “I don’t want to be a Cold Op. I already told Madeline that.”
“That will be all, Amana.”
Eyes flashing, she stood slowly, favoring her left side. “I’m no one’s team leader,” she said softly around her rough voice. “And you’re not as cold as you like to think you are.”
Michael’s hand hovered over the small device.
“I saw you, remember. You have that file that says in some roundabout way that I got eight people to turn on one guy-”
He touched it.
“-well I’ve got a mental picture of a half-crazed father desperate to protect the family he loves. You’re heart’s not dead. And I am no one’s team leader.”
Next Part
Series: One Line (1/26)
Character(s): Michael Samuelle, Walter, OC
fanfic100 Prompt: 47 - heart
Length: 1,878 words
Rating: PG-13 overall
Disclaimer: I don't know you. You don't know me. Let's keep it that way.
Summary: “You wanted to see me, Michael?”
Notes: this is a pre-S1 story. I have a rudimentary timeline for the series. If you would like to read the other stories in this series or the other fanfic100 stories, my prompt table is here. You can read the other parts here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9.
§§§
Though she’s been effectively immobilized for some time she has the adrenaline and endorphin equivalent in her body for someone in a fight. Her breathing is as erratic and unsteady as the man with the submachine gun trained on her. There is sweat tracing prickly paths down her face and pooling under the black fabric of her clothes. Her body wants to move, is tense with inactivity, thrumming with potential energy. She says, “What do you want to know?”
Walter took the panel from Amana. “If ya don’t mind me saying, you don’t look so good, Sugar. Don’t sound so hot either.”
She gave him a weary half-smile and rasped, “That’s cause I didn’t sleep so good, Walter.”
“Not staying up worried about handing in your panel late, were ya Sugar? You know I wouldn’t write ya up for something like that,” he purred.
Amana pulled the cuffs of her black turtleneck sweater over her hands as she leaned forward on the high counter in front of her. “If you were…thirty years younger, Walter...”
“Don’t tempt me, Amana,” he said with a chuckle. “You’ll give this old man a false sense of hope. Now tell me why you couldn’t sleep last night. Seemed like a pretty straightforward mission. Figured it’d be enough to send ya right off.”
“Maybe, but I got bruised ribs from where the hostile got me with his sub.”
“And what was Helmsly doing?”
Amana smiled. “Eric shot the guy.”
“And your voice? You sound like you’ve been livin’ a hard life, girl.”
“Already been down in the infirmary. Said I’d inhaled too much dust from the collapsing tunnel. I ran into Eric and he sounds pretty rough too.”
“Well I saw Helmsly too, Sug, and he didn’t sound like you.”
Amana frowned. “Walter…you’re starting to sound like my mother. Better. She wouldn’t’ve cared.”
He snorted and turned away. “Take an interest in a body and they go and turn you into a mother hen.”
Laughing again, she stood up from the counter. “I just came in to return the panel, Walter. I’m headed out. I’m pretty sure I have some down time so I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
“Yeah, yeah. Rile me up and leave me flat. Just like a woman.”
That got another smile from her. “See ya around, Walter.”
“One second, Sugar. Before I forget…”
§§§
“You wanted to see me, Michael?”
He looked up from his computer screen. “Yes. Come in, Amana.”
Dipping her head slightly, she tugged at the hem of her black turtleneck sweater, closed the door behind her. The swish-swish of her long denim skirt was loud in his small office as she took a seat. Her eyes tracked him avidly as he reached into his desk and pulled out a small device. He touched it.
They eyed each other: Michael calmly, Amana… He wasn’t sure what he saw.
She leaned forward so that her elbows rested on her knees and her mouth was hidden behind the curled fingers of her fists. “Why didn’t I die in Tangiers?” There was a rough quality to her voice.
“You were expecting to,” he said calmly.
Amana pressed her lips together and nodded. She brought a hand up to smooth hair that was lying perfectly flat.
“Why?”
“Why not?” she demanded, pulling on the sleeve end of her turtleneck.
To Michael she looked more like an anxious collegiate than a skilled killer. But he knew better than many how easily looks deceived. “How did you come to be in Section?”
Her expression changed instantly. Her hoarseness became more pronounced. “Can’t you find that out on your own?”
Michael slid a yellow manila folder off his desk and held it out for her to take. Half rising from her seat she reached across the open space and did as he began to speak: “When you were sixteen you were charged with the second degree murder of your father and his lover.”
Amana looked up from the contents of the file to give him sharp, weary eyes. “You did read my file. The whore my father was sleeping with killed my baby brother, Julio,” she said softly around the roughness of her voice.
Ignoring her, he went on: “You were found to be temporarily insane and were sent to a low profile juvenile detention center for five years. During the last two years of your sentence you were transferred to a comparable women’s detention center. While you were there your mother was sentenced to three years for embezzlement.
“Through some clerical mishap the family relation was not noted and you were placed in the same detention center. Some four months after her sentencing, six months to the day of your release, you attempted to kill her without apparent reason. The clerical error came to light and you were evaluated by the prison psychologist. You were declared to suffer from mild psychosis but nothing that would warrant the attack on your mother. Due to the premeditated nature of the attack, the mother-daughter relation and your history, you were sentenced to life imprisonment. Section recruited you a month later. You had just turned twenty.”
Amana nodded. She was clutching the sleeves of her turtleneck sweater in her hand and biting her lower lip. Clearly she had something to say about Michael’s cut and dried recitation of her history but was debating whether or not to do so. Michael sat back and waited.
Not very long.
“My mother didn’t want anything to do with Julio. I was the one up in the middle of the night with him. I changed him. I fed him. He was mine. She didn’t want him in the first place. She thought she could keep my father interested with a son,” she sneered. “It was why she’d had me, but she’d screwed up having a girl. But he never wanted my mother, he just wanted the prestige that came with marrying her so he slept around all the time.”
The first rush of it out, she paused as if giving him space to object to her outpouring of vitriol. Michael waited.
Not long.
“I don’t know what possessed her to try again. I was fifteen when she had Julio.”
“His birth certificate says his name was Ignatius.”
Amana scowled. “Ignatius Julio, after my father. No one called him that, just her when he was around. Even my father called him Julio when he thought of him at all. She was just so…” Amana shook her head slowly. “Julio was my heart. Do you know what that means?” she asked, eyes narrowing. When he didn’t respond, she went on, “Where I’m from, when you say someone is your heart you mean …they’re everything. Different from a lover, more than a friend. Like a part your body you can’t live without. You’d do anything for them just like you’d do anything for yourself. ‘Cause that’s your heart. And when I found Julio dead in his crib, when I knew the babysitter and my father were just upstairs I made up my mind that they had to die too. My baby, my heart, was not going to go cold in a crib and them not suffer.”
She took a moment, sucking in her bottom lip to compose herself.
Michael watched. And waited.
“I can’t believe the lawyer got me off. I thought…first degree for sure. I didn’t want to die but I didn’t care either. Then my mother was put in that center with me and I had a purpose. But I screwed it up. Then Section came for me and I had a new purpose. I needed that.”
Michael let silence fill the small office, focusing on his breathing, reviewing what he knew of her file in his head. “Elsa Perlov is your handler.”
Suspicious, she nodded. “She’s good people.”
“What happened to your original handler, O’Neal?”
“Died on a mission.”
“You cancel him?”
“You’ve got my file,” she said, seeming more composed. “I was never written up.”
“You cancelled him.”
They stared at each other from across his desk.
“He was killing us,” she rasped softly.
“How so?”
Amana shifted in her seat. “He was a bad team leader. He took unnecessary risks with our lives.”
“You could have had him written up.”
“Did.”
“Then you took matters into your own hands?”
“No…a terrorist cell did that for us.”
“So you convinced the other members of your team to abandon O’Neal and let him be cancelled.”
A half-smile tugging at one side of her mouth, she rasped, “I didn’t convince anyone to do anything. Why do you wanna know?”
“Madeline thinks you could make a good team leader. She thought I should study your profile and that I should study you.”
The half-smile faded as Amana’s brow furrowed. “I know Madeline wants me to move out of Field Op status. She wanted you to…review me?” To his silence she said, “She was the one that took me off the Algerian mission to Tangiers?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t…”
“No.”
“But you let me believe-”
“You believed what you wanted to.”
Amana slumped back in her seat. “But what about the whole thing with my family? With Julio? Why did you let me go on like that?”
“You needed to say it, so I let you.”
He watched her mull over his words and, now, her feelings. Her jaw clenched. She frowned. He waited.
“So you let me vent…because I needed to…so we could get on with the rest of this...whatever it is?”
He waited.
“That’s exactly what you did, isn’t it?”
Michael touched the small device on his desk. “How did you get the rest of your team to help you cancel O’Neal?”
She slapped the arm of her chair. “I didn’t kill O’Neal,” she rasped shrilly. “I didn’t get anyone to kill him. Cancel him. We didn’t protect him, but that was a group decision. I wasn’t the only one who saw how he was. He was dangerous to everyone. He’d already got August killed. I’m so sorry that none of us wanted to be next!”
Michael regarded her coolly. Her golden skin was flush, eyes flashing and body rigid as she sat forward in her chair. Dealing with Operations and Madeline would take more finesse than she had, but it was her ability to lead that was in question. Not in very much question. Everything else could be taught.
She was still sitting stiff in the chair when he said, “I’m going to recommend you to start Cold Op training.”
Amana narrowed her eyes. “I don’t want to be a Cold Op. I already told Madeline that.”
“That will be all, Amana.”
Eyes flashing, she stood slowly, favoring her left side. “I’m no one’s team leader,” she said softly around her rough voice. “And you’re not as cold as you like to think you are.”
Michael’s hand hovered over the small device.
“I saw you, remember. You have that file that says in some roundabout way that I got eight people to turn on one guy-”
He touched it.
“-well I’ve got a mental picture of a half-crazed father desperate to protect the family he loves. You’re heart’s not dead. And I am no one’s team leader.”
Next Part