Nikita. Images of her filled his mind. His golden angel, whose light had guided him out of the darkness of the self-made hell he had constructed around himself after he lost Simone. Michael had never thought to find himself in a darker place than that, but last night he had found himself tumbling into an even blacker pit.

***

He had been sure that this latest betrayal would be the final straw. All else they had been able to eventually get past, all the lies and tests and hurts both emotional and physical, drawn back together by an unspoken bond that would not let them exist apart. Through manipulations and seductions and all that Operations and Madeline and Section itself could throw at them their bond had remained, sometimes drawn thin and fragile, near to breaking but always there. Always proving them stronger together than they were apart, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. But Michael had known in the depths of the heart that she had freed that this blow would be the one to shatter that bond.

A wife and a son. Innocent pawns that he had knowingly brought in to Section's games. Innocents that were discarded, their lives shattered, when their usefulness was at an end. A woman who saw her husband and her father gunned down before her eyes. A child who would now grow up without his father. A life that he had kept hidden from the woman he would never willingly choose to lie to. Sins that not even Nikita's generous heart could forgive. She would turn away from him, casting him back to the darkness she had once rescued him from, back to the hell he believed he so richly deserved.

He had never loved Elana, not as she deserved to be loved. He freely admitted this to himself, adding the weight of this guilt to the burden already pulling him down. Elana who was kind and generous and honest, who truly loved him and who...was not Nikita. Nikita who he had belonged to, body and soul, from the moment he first laid eyes on her, deny it and fight it though he might.

But Adam, Adam he had loved from the moment he first held his son in his arms, loved him with the fierce, desperate love that only parents knew. He had missed so much of his son's life, days and weeks spent on Section missions that he would never get back and that made the memories he did have all the more precious. And the knowledge that there would be no more memories, no more moments nearly broke him when the entirety of the knowledge that he would never see his son again came crashing down on him. It had broken his control, precipitating the damage strewn around him this morning. The pain that he would not, could not show to anyone had expressed itself in the destruction of his new Section-issued apartment. He had raged, dry-eyed, wreaking havoc on the furnishings until he collapsed, bruised, aching and exhausted, curled around a picture of his son. At that moment he had longed to die, holding death as a mercy he did not deserve yet still hoped for with all of his shattered heart.

His thoughts drowning in the waves of grief rolling over him, he lay where he had fallen, mourning all that he had lost. A son. A home. The love of the woman who was his soul's salvation and completion. All lost, sacrificed by Section's plots and his own betrayals. All things that he knew would never be his again.

So far had he spiraled down in his grief that not even the sound of his apartment door opening could rouse him to action. Had the intruder been bent on murder, they would have found Michael an easy and willing target. But even before she spoke, he had known who it was, his senses humming with the indefinable presence that was Nikita. But still he did not look at her.

He heard her crouch down behind him, heard her beloved voice whispering his name, felt her hand gently tug on his shoulder to urge him to turn to face her. He had resisted for a second, not wanting to see the betrayal in her eyes. But then he relented to her quiet command, sitting up and raising his eyes to meet hers, bracing himself for her anger as if for a blow. Gray-green met blue. But in those glorious depths, which had always reflected to him her every emotion, he found no anger, no betrayal. Pain, yes. But it was pain that echoed his, hurting because she knew how deeply he was hurting. He gazed further, but all he could find in her open expression was grief for his loss, and sympathy, and love. That love, the knowledge that he had not lost her after all, did break him. He collapsed into her waiting arms, and for the first time since he lost his family he allowed himself to cry...and to begin to heal.

She had rocked him gently as he wept, murmuring soft comforts and stroking his newly-shorn hair until finally his tears had run out, leaving behind only an overwhelming emptiness and exhaustion. When his sobs quieted she helped him to his feet, leading him towards the bedroom. A distant corner of his mind found room to wonder what whim of Chance or Fate or Madeline had let her know where to find him. But his weary heart did not care how she had found him. It was enough that she had.

Once they had reached the bedroom Nikita had helped him undress and tucked him in as tenderly as a mother might a heartsick child. A hand reaching out to her brought the soft reassurance that she would not leave him, and his last sight as he fell into the arms of Morpheus was of her settling into a chair at the side of his bed.

***

He woke the next morning to the sight of her still by his side, fallen asleep in her chair as she watched over him. Michael waited for the soul encompassing ache that had greeted him every morning when he woke in this apartment, but when it finally came the pain was less than he had expected. Still there, always there, but fading as the pain of a new wound faded into a scar. He rose silently so as not to disturb the woman by his bed, pausing only to place a blanket over her sleeping form.

Michael picked is way through the shambles of his living room, allowing himself a moment of wry consternation at the sheep magnitude of the destruction. Making his way into the kitchen, he salvaged an unbroken mug and fixed himself a cup of coffee, then settled himself at the table to contemplate all that had happened the night before.

It was there Nikita found him when she emerged from his bedroom an hour later, her hair tousled and her close wrinkled but her blue eyes clear and awake. She quietly joined him at the table, both of them sitting in a comfortable silence for a time until Nikita spoke, asking the question on both of their minds.

"So what happens now?"

"We go in to Section. We work, and we survive." Michael answered her, the only answer possible now that Nikita had rescued him from his suicidal depression.

No other choice.

Another small silence, then "What about us? Is there an us anymore?" A question tentative and hurting, but not angry, not accusing. Nikita had grown in her time in Section. She had learned that blame was rarely as simple to place as she had once thought.

"Do you want there to be?" came the whispered answer. The only answer he could give to that question. Michael struggled to keep the hope he still felt he didn't deserve out of his voice.

This time the ensuing silence was filled with unspoken words as eyes met and locked, as each searched for and found in the other's eyes strength and love and the truth of their bond, battered and hard tested but still there. A bond that found its voicing in a woman's simple response. A quiet "Yes" that was layered deep with all the promises and truths and fears that still remained unspoken, echoing in both of their hearts.

Michael stood then, looking down at Nikita, his lips touched with the ghost of a smile as he reached out to take her hand. "It's not going to be easy," he warned.

Her hand met his halfway, answering his smile and his warning. "Nothing that matters ever is."

End.

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