Balance Requires Motion 5/9
Jun. 5th, 2010 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nell65Title: Balance Requires Motion
Fandom: La Femme Nikita
Pairing: Michael Samuelle/Nikita Wirth
Characters: Michael Samuelle, Adam Samuelle, Nikita Wirth, OCs
Rating: NC-17
Genre: Post Series Fic
Length: 40,300 words
Chapter: 5/9
Summary: "When Michael first saw Nikita standing on his front porch, his whole world splintered and then, between one step and the next, remade itself."
Part 1, Living the Normal Life, can be found here.
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 1
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 2
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 3
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 4
*******
The next weeks were awful. The atmosphere at the house was so tense Nikita broke down and started taking acetaminophen for her headaches because it was that or lie in bed and cry from the pain, which would do no one any good at all. The tension also ushered in her first serious pregnancy-related nausea and most afternoons she threw up at least once.
Adam, who had learned at the feet of a master that the best way to deal with difficult emotional issues was to say nothing of them, spoke not at all other than the barest minimum necessary to get through the day. He also clutched his victim-of-unjustified-assault cloak tightly about himself whenever his father was around, lacerating Michael with hurt stares accompanied by an almost-but-not-quite quivering chin.
Michael also took refuge in silence, but either he was out of practice or their lives no longer gave him the same outlets that he had in the Section, because instead of being merely stony and purposeful, this silence positively radiated anger. It was impossible for Nikita to get him to talk it out, though, because he denied, even to himself, that he was angry at all.
So, she threw up her hands and repainted the basement a cheery gold and bought cheap modern furniture in bright colors from IKEA. It looked nothing like Elena or Michael when she was done. Instead it looked like the first version of her first apartment. So she found a giant print of a pair of sunglasses and hung it over the couch. Michael and Adam had each, in turn, regarded the final result with a shrug and a forced smile. “It’s nice,” they said. “Thank you for all your hard work.”
She had expected no more from Adam, but she had thought it might at least draw a real smile from Michael.
After that, she spent a lot of time at their local YMCA, burning off energy in the pool and with the weights. She also gave herself a crash course on current US racial politics, starting with the anti-racism pamphlet handed out by Adam’s high school. By the time she was finished, she had a pretty good idea how Adam had managed to fall into the conclusion he had. It also left her, as with so much else about Adam, totally at a loss about how to deal with it. Michael certainly was not a racist in the way that term carried weight in the particular history of the US. But Michael did have a pretty severe, if usually reasonably well hidden, case of French cultural pride, privilege and superiority. Adam, knowing his father as well as he did, could and did sense that aspect of his father’s character. It was a perfect storm of related ideas and emotions and so it was no surprise that as the American teenager he was, Adam hurled one of the nastiest accusations he knew in his father’s face.
Things only got worse after Adam’s soccer team lost early in the state playoffs, ending the soccer season before the second week of October. Without practice and with more time on his hands, the best outlet he could find for his energy and his anger was to come home with pierced ears and an impressive Mohawk haircut. Michael took one look at him and asked, as snottily as possible Nikita thought, “Where is your tattoo?”
The only answer he got was a volley of slammed doors.
After that, she cornered Michael and said, “Enough is enough. It’s time.”
******
Adam would have liked to stalk darkly through the hallways of his high school, but as usual they were too crowded for stalking. So he had to content himself with glowering at anyone who called his name, or jostled him, or just irritated him by being in his general vicinity.
Today had sucked even more than usual. First, he had learned that he had bombed a math test he had been too pissed off to study for. Then, when he snapped at Tasha after she had tried to console him, she cried angry tears before she stormed away. Second, he had managed to get thrown out of the lunchtime pickup basketball game for excessive force and gotten a disciplinary write up on top of it. Third and finally, at breakfast today his dad was making noises about forcing him back to the dojo, no doubt just for an excuse to kick the shit out of him some more.
He had tried complaining to his friends Jon and Paul about it, but like everyone else, they thought his dad was just fucking awesome and couldn’t understand what a fucking bastard he really was. Jon had rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, yeah. Your mean dad who gives you everything you ask for and takes you hunting and skiing and sailing and camping all the freaking time. Life’s rough, dude.”
Paul had added, in what Adam felt was a nastily patronizing drawl, “Yeah. Terrible to have a dad who has never missed even one of your games, like ever.”
Adam had snarled back, “if either of you say one God dammed word about the fucking field trips I swear to God I will put you through a fucking locker.”
So now Jon and Paul were avoiding him too.
It was like his dad had planned it that way, making everyone think he was like the most totally awesome dad ever when in reality he was a giant selfish prick who did only what he wanted when he wanted and on his own terms. Like holding out for Nicole when practically every single woman, and half the married women too, who met him slavered after him. He could have had anyone he wanted, but no, he wanted Nicole and eventually, he had found a way to get her to give up whatever it was she was doing and come to him. Adam did not believe their bullshit about corporate mergers and lost jobs for one second.
At least his dad was starting to act like the bastard he was to her too. Twice in the last week or so he’d spied Nicole making the up-yours sign at his dad’s departing back. Not that Nicole would leave him. She was as hooked on his dad as he was on her. No, she would put up with being treated like shit as a trade off to total access to his dick whenever and wherever she wanted it. Hell, for all he knew, maybe they both got off on hate fucking. The freaks.
When he finally made it out the front doors of the school he would have turned around and fled, only the crush was too great. His dad and Nicole were parked right in the front of the parent pick up line, and were leaning up against the SUV, looking like an advertisement for fucking REI.
One of Adam’s soccer teammates nudged Adam and pointed. “Look man, there’s your dad and his hot girlfriend.”
Adam muttered, “yeah,” and headed for the truck.
When he got there, he saw the dogs were in the back and so was the camping gear. He slowed to a stop a few feet away. “What.”
His dad said, “We’re going up north. Get in.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
Nicole answered. “Nobody asked if you wanted to. It isn’t optional Adam.”
He was outraged. “What?”
His dad broke in. “I’ve kept a lot of information from you, because you weren’t ready for it. But you need it now.”
“Like what?”
His dad said, “Who we are, who you are, and why you grew up here and not someplace else.”
Adam spit out, “Who you are? I already know who you are.”
Nicole was suddenly hovering at his side. “You don’t have the slightest idea who we are.” The menace in her whisper was almost as painful the iron grip of her fingers above his elbow as she steered him toward the open door of the car. “Get in.”
Adam got in the truck.
Once they were in traffic his dad nodded at a take out food sack between them. “I thought you might be hungry. There’s a sandwich and chips in the bag.”
Adam almost told him he could take the food and shove it, but he thought better of it and ate the sandwich. By the time he had finished eating they were on the highway speeding north up the interstate.
“Where are we headed?”
His dad named a state park; one Adam wasn’t very familiar with. “Why?” he asked.
“No interruptions, no distractions.”
Adam muttered, “No where to go.”
“That too.”
“We’re camping, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have to share a tent with you?”
“No. I got a second tent.”
Adam nodded, then wondering at how quiet Nicole was being, looked into the back seat, only to discover that she was so sacked out she was actually snoring softly. After taking a long sip of his drink, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tried to change the subject. “So, why does Nicole sleep all the time these days anyway?”
“She’s three months pregnant.”
Adam swallowed against the sudden rush of nausea that crept up his throat. He began to regret eating the sandwich after all.
After that they rode mostly in silence. It was dark by the time they made it to their campsite and they set up the tents and started the fire by the light of the headlamps. Nicole pulled supper out of the coolers and re-heated it on the portable stove. They sat on logs around the fire, and ate without talking.
Once his dad had finished eating, he set his dish on the ground, cleared his throat, and looked searchingly at Adam. Adam had no idea what his father expected to see, but the silence grew so long and so uncomfortable Adam found he couldn’t swallow any more food without feeling he would definitely throw up, for real this time. So he put his plate on the ground too. His dad must have taken that for a sign, because he started talking.
“I was a deep cover agent sent to seduce and marry your mother. The goal was to smoke out her estranged father, who sponsored both terrorism and criminal activity throughout Europe and the Middle East and whom we could reach no other way. When his daughter’s wedding was not enough to lure him out, we decided a grandchild might. You were conceived for that purpose. But your birth was not enough either. He finally broke his security protocols to visit your mother while she lay in the hospital, nearly dying from an illness given to her by my organization. Members of my team murdered her father right in her hospital room. And then they shot me in the chest. In front of her. While she screamed.”
After a hazy minute or three, Adam heard Nikita’s voice. “That’s jumping to the middle of the story, but you needed to know why you should listen to the first part.”
Adam coughed, then managed to croak out, “okay.”
So, they told him. About his father’s days as a student bomb-making, child-murdering terrorist, about his time in prison and then his recruitment to a shadowy agency that trained him to hunt down and kill criminals and terrorists that evaded more conventional agencies and organizations. His dad told him how he had learned quickly that he was very, very good at what they wanted him to do. He told him about falling in love with and marrying a fellow operative, and the way his fake courtship and fake marriage to his mom – though it had been real to her – had corrupted both his marriages.
Then the story switched to Nikita’s life and things started getting really bizarre. She turned out to be the child of another operative left to grow up with a drug-addled mom and then as a homeless street rat as some sort of crazy nature vs. nurture experiment gone on steroids. When she was more or less grown, her father had had pulled her into the same agency as his dad and she had been assigned to his dad for training. Not long before Adam had been born, in fact.
The story picked up speed and the details began to blur, but somewhere between the missions and the killings, Adam understood that his dad and Nikita had found themselves neck deep in a passionate love affair as dangerous as it was forbidden. It had been so bad Nikita had tried to escape more than once, only to be caught and dragged back in. Their love affair had become even more painful as it became more apparent to those around them. Enemies and allies alike used their relationship to force each of them into action by threatening the other. The lies and betrayals started coming thick and fast and only then had Nikita finally, and by accident, learned about Adam and his mom. At which point she got roped into the whole scheme to bring down his grandfather.
After that, their story only got more convoluted, with violent internal politics broken by hairbreadth escapes from near certain execution and more frustrated attempts to run away. Weaving through all of it was the way their organization had continued to exploit his mom to bring down other bad guys, and to hold Adam’s life over his dad’s head, which had in turn made Adam a kidnapping victim after still more bad guys figured out what made his dad jump. When they finally got to the end of it all, and told Adam his dad had nearly ripped the organization to shreds to force them to give up his location, and how it had been Nikita’s father, the man who had kicked much of it into motion in the first place, who had traded himself for Adam’s life in exchange for Nikita’s promise to take over and fix the whole mess, right before he was gunned down, Adam raised his hands and said, “Whoa. This has got to be utter and total bullshit.”
Nikita stood up and laughed sympathetically. “You have no idea how often I said that, while it was all happening.” She sobered up though, and said quietly, “I really wish it had been.”
Nikita whistled for the dogs and headed for the latrines, and Adam was left alone with his dad.
His dad looked up at him and said, “So. Now you know. My entire relationship with your mother, and your life, were part of an elaborate plot to kill one man. It was all a lie.”
Adam’s heart was pinched in his chest as he asked, “all of it?”
“All of it. Except the part where I came to love your mom, and I love you.”
Adam didn’t know what to make of this, so he ignored it. “If this is all true, you could have dumped me with another foster family and stayed with Nikita. Why didn’t you?”
“I could have dumped you even if it weren’t all true. But I chose not to.”
Adam couldn’t argue with that either, so he asked, “Then, why is Nikita here now?”
Nikita dropped down next to his dad and wrapped her arm around his shoulders. “Go ahead Michael. Tell him.”
His dad looked down at his hands. “I had planned to leave you when you were done with high school, and go back to Nikita.” He raised his eyes to Adam’s face. In the low light of the fire his expression was impossible to read. “I realized several years ago that I couldn’t leave you again. So I sent a message to Nikita, and I hoped she would see it as an invitation to escape the organization and come and find us.”
Nikita smiled at his dad. “Which, I did, more than a year ago.” She looked at Adam. “After I was as sure as I could be I had really made it out, I started looking for you, and here I am.”
Adam nodded, then stood up. Without a word to them he headed into the dark woods.
******
Nikita watched Michael’s profile as he stared into the cherry hot coals of their fire. Eventually he asked, in a hollow voice, “What do you think?”
Nikita patted his arm, stood up and started picking up the remnants of their meal. She said, as briskly and calmly as she could, “we wait. We put faith in the relationship you have with Adam.”
She scraped the leftovers into a bowl and added dog food. “And in the woods on a dark, cold night with a new moon, light cloud cover, and no visibility.”
“You guys suck.”
Adam was standing at the very edge of the firelight. Nikita caught Michael’s eye and shrugged. “I told you.”
Adam plopped down in front of the fire again. “So,” he said, in a conversational tone, “you two are stone cold killers, that’s what you’re saying.”
Michael nodded in agreement, but said nothing.
“And you gave it all up to protect me.” He kept his eyes on his father, and skepticism dripped from him.
Nikita sat down again next to Michael, pressing as close to him as she could without actually sitting in his lap. One of her deepest and most secret fears about this scenario was that it would be Michael who bolted, and not Adam. When Michael slid his hand over her knee and started drawing loose circles against her thigh with his thumb, some of the tight bands in her chest loosened a little bit. She said, “That life sucked, Adam, and most people in it dream of the day they leave it behind.”
Adam looked directly at her. “You said they kept tracking you down, no matter how hard you tried to escape.”
Nikita nodded, at once pleased and yet full of jagged regret that Adam had heard what they wanted him to hear. She said, “Most of my escapes were set-ups, on my part or someone else’s. Yes.”
“So, why is this one any different?”
“It might not be.”
Adam’s voice cracked. “What?!”
Nikita and Michael exchanged glances, and Michael answered. “It’s possible that Nikita is being set up as a threat to one or another layer of the organization. That she was allowed to flee to support the implication that she is planning on carrying out some sort of internal coup. Rejoining me, given our past, would only reinforce that idea.”
Nikita added, “It would be a version of the way they set up your mom after your dad left, made it appear she had been living as a super-double-secret undercover sleeper as a long term plot to take over her father’s organization.” Nikita held up her hand to forestall Adam’s telegraphed outburst, “She was completely innocent of any such thing, of course.”
Nikita leaned forward, trying once again to reconnect with the open, loving child Adam had been. Trying to see if she could find him still, however deeply he was buried in the angry, pierced, Mohawk-sporting teenager in front of her. “When that mission finished, that’s when men came and helped you and your mom move in the middle of suppertime one night. Do you remember that?”
Adam scowled. “Yeah. A little.”
Nikita sat back, sighed and explained the rest. “The way it would work in our case is that eventually one of the groups watching us would move in to pick us up, probably based on some planted information that we were about to make our big move to seize power, and then the other group would crush them.”
“If that happened, what would happen to us?”
Nikita shrugged, and smiled over her nightmares. “It would depend. But,” and here she looked quickly at Michael, saw his small nod, and went on, “Most likely we would die, in the crossfire or afterward. None of the groups involved would want us alive after it was all over. ”
When Adam didn’t say anything else, Michael said, “It is also possible that Nikita is running that same profile, as the primary agent rather than as the framed target.”
Adam gaped at his father. “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“You think she could be setting us up – to DIE – and you just sit there?”
“No. Separately and together,” Michael flashed Nikita a quick smile that made her cheeks flush in a way she was glad the dark and the fire would hide, then he turned back to look at Adam, “We have a number of fail-safes in place, hoping to gain enough margin to run if we have to.”
Adam stabbed an angry hand in the air. “You just told me you guys have had a fucking legendary love affair, and you still think she could be setting us up to die?”
Michael nodded. “It’s one possibility.”
Adam stared helplessly at them. “Dad?! How can you love somebody you don’t even trust?”
Michael reached over and took Nikita’s hand between his. Lacing their fingers together, the rough pads of his fingers warm against her skin, he said to Adam, “I do trust her. I trust that if she made that choice, then, all the other options were worse.”
Adam scrubbed his fingers across his face. He looked at Nikita and said, “and then you go and get knocked up in the middle of it all?”
Nikita squeezed Michael’s hand, and was glad to feel his warm grip in return, as she answered. “Yep. It’s either a sign of how committed I am to the profile, how much I’m prepared to risk, or,” and she shrugged, “it’s a sign that I really do believe I walked away successfully, and after more than a year out without sign of watchers, we think no one there cares what really happened to me. So your dad and I are seizing the day, and living the life we want.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “Are you really pregnant?”
“Yes. By December at the latest you’ll be able to see for yourself.”
Adam started shaking his head. “This is insane. You guys are delusional. It’s all bullshit. All of it. I don’t believe any of it.”
Nikita smiled sadly. “Yes. You do. You believe most of it, because it makes better sense of all of the details of your life than any other story your dad ever offered you before.”
“Does not!”
“Think about your life here, Adam, and not just your life before. What kind of skills and knowledge has your dad made sure to teach you?”
She watched, her heart cracking, again, as denial, comprehension and shock chased their way across Adam’s face. Eventually, Adam crossed his arms over his knees and demanded, “How much of this could I prove by googling it?”
Michael said, “Not much, but some.”
Nikita added, “If you want to do that, will you please let one of us teach you how to make sure your search queries are randomized, and randomly distributed across IPs so that your word strings don’t flag any sort of trace?”
Adam thought that one through, then he said, “So, you’re telling I shouldn’t just go to the school library and start roaming the web looking for info because that could get us all killed.”
Michael answered. “Yes.”
“Of course.” Adam pursed his lips, and said, “What did you say my grandfather’s name was?”
“We didn’t.” Michael answered. “And we won’t. Not until we think you’re ready to handle the information.”
*****
Nikita woke up just before dawn, when Michael came into the tent. She stretched as she asked, “Is he still here?”
“Yes.” Michael finished pulling off his boots and started to roll into his sleeping bag. He paused briefly to stroke he hair back from her face and kiss her forehead, then he lay down on his back and closed his eyes with a sigh.
Stepping out of the tent a few seconds later, she headed for the campfire, smiling when she saw that Michael had made coffee for her. The ground was damp with dew, so she set up one of the canvas chairs and sat back to watch the day come, sipping at her coffee.
About an hour after sunrise she saw Adam’s tent shiver as he woke up and started to move around. Adam crawled out with his boots in his hand, his patchy unshaven beard dark against the morning pallor of his skin, and with a bad case of bed-head, his defiant hairdo squashed and lopsided. He gave her a cool stare as he jammed his feet into his boots, then he headed off into the woods without bothering to tie them. When he returned he found a bottle of juice in the cooler and sat down on the opposite side of the fire, the dogs pushing at his hands and trying to lick his face. “I still think it’s all a load of crap,” he said.
“All of it, or just some of it?”
He shot back, “all of it!” but it lacked conviction and he seemed to hear it himself. He shrugged and corrected himself. “Well, some of it.”
“Which parts?”
“Well – the whole super-double-secret organization that does whatever the hell it wants to just because it can. I mean, who pays for that kind of shit outside of the movies?”
Nikita smiled. “Honestly? Fewer people than used to. The major funding bodies have reprioritized their interests and our old organization, and it’s lack of loyalty to any agenda but its own, has been successively downgraded.” She shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong. They still have a lot of resources and remain an extremely dangerous organization, but their scope has become more limited in the last five years.”
“So, why would they come after you?”
She saw the fear in his eyes and she offered what reassurance she could. “That’s actually one of the reasons I think they won’t. Possibly alive, but not found, I’m a useful ghost in the machine. If they actually were to find me….” She spread her hands wide, “I would be much less useful.”
“And that frees you up to come play house with my dad.”
She nodded. “Yeah. It does.”
Adam finished his juice, dropped the bottle and stamped it flat. He picked up the flattened plastic and started turning it through his fingers. “So, you win.”
“It isn’t a contest.”
Adam gave her a sour look of non-agreement. “Sure.”
“For what it’s worth, I always thought you won. He left me in hell to take you to freedom in the world outside.”
“Well. I’m obviously not free anymore.”
“Adam, nothing has changed since yesterday.”
“Yeah, well, except – everything!”
“Only that you know things you didn’t before.” Nikita sighed, and then offered him a twisted smile. “I don’t expect you to suddenly start liking me, or being nice to me if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Good.” Adam gave her a tiny smirk in return. “I wasn’t planning to.” He stood up, shaking out his limbs. “Anyway,” he went on, staring out into the woods somewhere far beyond their campsite, “I don’t not-like you.”
*****
Fandom: La Femme Nikita
Pairing: Michael Samuelle/Nikita Wirth
Characters: Michael Samuelle, Adam Samuelle, Nikita Wirth, OCs
Rating: NC-17
Genre: Post Series Fic
Length: 40,300 words
Chapter: 5/9
Summary: "When Michael first saw Nikita standing on his front porch, his whole world splintered and then, between one step and the next, remade itself."
Part 1, Living the Normal Life, can be found here.
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 1
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 2
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 3
Balance Requires Motion, Chapter 4
*******
The next weeks were awful. The atmosphere at the house was so tense Nikita broke down and started taking acetaminophen for her headaches because it was that or lie in bed and cry from the pain, which would do no one any good at all. The tension also ushered in her first serious pregnancy-related nausea and most afternoons she threw up at least once.
Adam, who had learned at the feet of a master that the best way to deal with difficult emotional issues was to say nothing of them, spoke not at all other than the barest minimum necessary to get through the day. He also clutched his victim-of-unjustified-assault cloak tightly about himself whenever his father was around, lacerating Michael with hurt stares accompanied by an almost-but-not-quite quivering chin.
Michael also took refuge in silence, but either he was out of practice or their lives no longer gave him the same outlets that he had in the Section, because instead of being merely stony and purposeful, this silence positively radiated anger. It was impossible for Nikita to get him to talk it out, though, because he denied, even to himself, that he was angry at all.
So, she threw up her hands and repainted the basement a cheery gold and bought cheap modern furniture in bright colors from IKEA. It looked nothing like Elena or Michael when she was done. Instead it looked like the first version of her first apartment. So she found a giant print of a pair of sunglasses and hung it over the couch. Michael and Adam had each, in turn, regarded the final result with a shrug and a forced smile. “It’s nice,” they said. “Thank you for all your hard work.”
She had expected no more from Adam, but she had thought it might at least draw a real smile from Michael.
After that, she spent a lot of time at their local YMCA, burning off energy in the pool and with the weights. She also gave herself a crash course on current US racial politics, starting with the anti-racism pamphlet handed out by Adam’s high school. By the time she was finished, she had a pretty good idea how Adam had managed to fall into the conclusion he had. It also left her, as with so much else about Adam, totally at a loss about how to deal with it. Michael certainly was not a racist in the way that term carried weight in the particular history of the US. But Michael did have a pretty severe, if usually reasonably well hidden, case of French cultural pride, privilege and superiority. Adam, knowing his father as well as he did, could and did sense that aspect of his father’s character. It was a perfect storm of related ideas and emotions and so it was no surprise that as the American teenager he was, Adam hurled one of the nastiest accusations he knew in his father’s face.
Things only got worse after Adam’s soccer team lost early in the state playoffs, ending the soccer season before the second week of October. Without practice and with more time on his hands, the best outlet he could find for his energy and his anger was to come home with pierced ears and an impressive Mohawk haircut. Michael took one look at him and asked, as snottily as possible Nikita thought, “Where is your tattoo?”
The only answer he got was a volley of slammed doors.
After that, she cornered Michael and said, “Enough is enough. It’s time.”
******
Adam would have liked to stalk darkly through the hallways of his high school, but as usual they were too crowded for stalking. So he had to content himself with glowering at anyone who called his name, or jostled him, or just irritated him by being in his general vicinity.
Today had sucked even more than usual. First, he had learned that he had bombed a math test he had been too pissed off to study for. Then, when he snapped at Tasha after she had tried to console him, she cried angry tears before she stormed away. Second, he had managed to get thrown out of the lunchtime pickup basketball game for excessive force and gotten a disciplinary write up on top of it. Third and finally, at breakfast today his dad was making noises about forcing him back to the dojo, no doubt just for an excuse to kick the shit out of him some more.
He had tried complaining to his friends Jon and Paul about it, but like everyone else, they thought his dad was just fucking awesome and couldn’t understand what a fucking bastard he really was. Jon had rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, yeah. Your mean dad who gives you everything you ask for and takes you hunting and skiing and sailing and camping all the freaking time. Life’s rough, dude.”
Paul had added, in what Adam felt was a nastily patronizing drawl, “Yeah. Terrible to have a dad who has never missed even one of your games, like ever.”
Adam had snarled back, “if either of you say one God dammed word about the fucking field trips I swear to God I will put you through a fucking locker.”
So now Jon and Paul were avoiding him too.
It was like his dad had planned it that way, making everyone think he was like the most totally awesome dad ever when in reality he was a giant selfish prick who did only what he wanted when he wanted and on his own terms. Like holding out for Nicole when practically every single woman, and half the married women too, who met him slavered after him. He could have had anyone he wanted, but no, he wanted Nicole and eventually, he had found a way to get her to give up whatever it was she was doing and come to him. Adam did not believe their bullshit about corporate mergers and lost jobs for one second.
At least his dad was starting to act like the bastard he was to her too. Twice in the last week or so he’d spied Nicole making the up-yours sign at his dad’s departing back. Not that Nicole would leave him. She was as hooked on his dad as he was on her. No, she would put up with being treated like shit as a trade off to total access to his dick whenever and wherever she wanted it. Hell, for all he knew, maybe they both got off on hate fucking. The freaks.
When he finally made it out the front doors of the school he would have turned around and fled, only the crush was too great. His dad and Nicole were parked right in the front of the parent pick up line, and were leaning up against the SUV, looking like an advertisement for fucking REI.
One of Adam’s soccer teammates nudged Adam and pointed. “Look man, there’s your dad and his hot girlfriend.”
Adam muttered, “yeah,” and headed for the truck.
When he got there, he saw the dogs were in the back and so was the camping gear. He slowed to a stop a few feet away. “What.”
His dad said, “We’re going up north. Get in.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
Nicole answered. “Nobody asked if you wanted to. It isn’t optional Adam.”
He was outraged. “What?”
His dad broke in. “I’ve kept a lot of information from you, because you weren’t ready for it. But you need it now.”
“Like what?”
His dad said, “Who we are, who you are, and why you grew up here and not someplace else.”
Adam spit out, “Who you are? I already know who you are.”
Nicole was suddenly hovering at his side. “You don’t have the slightest idea who we are.” The menace in her whisper was almost as painful the iron grip of her fingers above his elbow as she steered him toward the open door of the car. “Get in.”
Adam got in the truck.
Once they were in traffic his dad nodded at a take out food sack between them. “I thought you might be hungry. There’s a sandwich and chips in the bag.”
Adam almost told him he could take the food and shove it, but he thought better of it and ate the sandwich. By the time he had finished eating they were on the highway speeding north up the interstate.
“Where are we headed?”
His dad named a state park; one Adam wasn’t very familiar with. “Why?” he asked.
“No interruptions, no distractions.”
Adam muttered, “No where to go.”
“That too.”
“We’re camping, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have to share a tent with you?”
“No. I got a second tent.”
Adam nodded, then wondering at how quiet Nicole was being, looked into the back seat, only to discover that she was so sacked out she was actually snoring softly. After taking a long sip of his drink, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tried to change the subject. “So, why does Nicole sleep all the time these days anyway?”
“She’s three months pregnant.”
Adam swallowed against the sudden rush of nausea that crept up his throat. He began to regret eating the sandwich after all.
After that they rode mostly in silence. It was dark by the time they made it to their campsite and they set up the tents and started the fire by the light of the headlamps. Nicole pulled supper out of the coolers and re-heated it on the portable stove. They sat on logs around the fire, and ate without talking.
Once his dad had finished eating, he set his dish on the ground, cleared his throat, and looked searchingly at Adam. Adam had no idea what his father expected to see, but the silence grew so long and so uncomfortable Adam found he couldn’t swallow any more food without feeling he would definitely throw up, for real this time. So he put his plate on the ground too. His dad must have taken that for a sign, because he started talking.
“I was a deep cover agent sent to seduce and marry your mother. The goal was to smoke out her estranged father, who sponsored both terrorism and criminal activity throughout Europe and the Middle East and whom we could reach no other way. When his daughter’s wedding was not enough to lure him out, we decided a grandchild might. You were conceived for that purpose. But your birth was not enough either. He finally broke his security protocols to visit your mother while she lay in the hospital, nearly dying from an illness given to her by my organization. Members of my team murdered her father right in her hospital room. And then they shot me in the chest. In front of her. While she screamed.”
After a hazy minute or three, Adam heard Nikita’s voice. “That’s jumping to the middle of the story, but you needed to know why you should listen to the first part.”
Adam coughed, then managed to croak out, “okay.”
So, they told him. About his father’s days as a student bomb-making, child-murdering terrorist, about his time in prison and then his recruitment to a shadowy agency that trained him to hunt down and kill criminals and terrorists that evaded more conventional agencies and organizations. His dad told him how he had learned quickly that he was very, very good at what they wanted him to do. He told him about falling in love with and marrying a fellow operative, and the way his fake courtship and fake marriage to his mom – though it had been real to her – had corrupted both his marriages.
Then the story switched to Nikita’s life and things started getting really bizarre. She turned out to be the child of another operative left to grow up with a drug-addled mom and then as a homeless street rat as some sort of crazy nature vs. nurture experiment gone on steroids. When she was more or less grown, her father had had pulled her into the same agency as his dad and she had been assigned to his dad for training. Not long before Adam had been born, in fact.
The story picked up speed and the details began to blur, but somewhere between the missions and the killings, Adam understood that his dad and Nikita had found themselves neck deep in a passionate love affair as dangerous as it was forbidden. It had been so bad Nikita had tried to escape more than once, only to be caught and dragged back in. Their love affair had become even more painful as it became more apparent to those around them. Enemies and allies alike used their relationship to force each of them into action by threatening the other. The lies and betrayals started coming thick and fast and only then had Nikita finally, and by accident, learned about Adam and his mom. At which point she got roped into the whole scheme to bring down his grandfather.
After that, their story only got more convoluted, with violent internal politics broken by hairbreadth escapes from near certain execution and more frustrated attempts to run away. Weaving through all of it was the way their organization had continued to exploit his mom to bring down other bad guys, and to hold Adam’s life over his dad’s head, which had in turn made Adam a kidnapping victim after still more bad guys figured out what made his dad jump. When they finally got to the end of it all, and told Adam his dad had nearly ripped the organization to shreds to force them to give up his location, and how it had been Nikita’s father, the man who had kicked much of it into motion in the first place, who had traded himself for Adam’s life in exchange for Nikita’s promise to take over and fix the whole mess, right before he was gunned down, Adam raised his hands and said, “Whoa. This has got to be utter and total bullshit.”
Nikita stood up and laughed sympathetically. “You have no idea how often I said that, while it was all happening.” She sobered up though, and said quietly, “I really wish it had been.”
Nikita whistled for the dogs and headed for the latrines, and Adam was left alone with his dad.
His dad looked up at him and said, “So. Now you know. My entire relationship with your mother, and your life, were part of an elaborate plot to kill one man. It was all a lie.”
Adam’s heart was pinched in his chest as he asked, “all of it?”
“All of it. Except the part where I came to love your mom, and I love you.”
Adam didn’t know what to make of this, so he ignored it. “If this is all true, you could have dumped me with another foster family and stayed with Nikita. Why didn’t you?”
“I could have dumped you even if it weren’t all true. But I chose not to.”
Adam couldn’t argue with that either, so he asked, “Then, why is Nikita here now?”
Nikita dropped down next to his dad and wrapped her arm around his shoulders. “Go ahead Michael. Tell him.”
His dad looked down at his hands. “I had planned to leave you when you were done with high school, and go back to Nikita.” He raised his eyes to Adam’s face. In the low light of the fire his expression was impossible to read. “I realized several years ago that I couldn’t leave you again. So I sent a message to Nikita, and I hoped she would see it as an invitation to escape the organization and come and find us.”
Nikita smiled at his dad. “Which, I did, more than a year ago.” She looked at Adam. “After I was as sure as I could be I had really made it out, I started looking for you, and here I am.”
Adam nodded, then stood up. Without a word to them he headed into the dark woods.
******
Nikita watched Michael’s profile as he stared into the cherry hot coals of their fire. Eventually he asked, in a hollow voice, “What do you think?”
Nikita patted his arm, stood up and started picking up the remnants of their meal. She said, as briskly and calmly as she could, “we wait. We put faith in the relationship you have with Adam.”
She scraped the leftovers into a bowl and added dog food. “And in the woods on a dark, cold night with a new moon, light cloud cover, and no visibility.”
“You guys suck.”
Adam was standing at the very edge of the firelight. Nikita caught Michael’s eye and shrugged. “I told you.”
Adam plopped down in front of the fire again. “So,” he said, in a conversational tone, “you two are stone cold killers, that’s what you’re saying.”
Michael nodded in agreement, but said nothing.
“And you gave it all up to protect me.” He kept his eyes on his father, and skepticism dripped from him.
Nikita sat down again next to Michael, pressing as close to him as she could without actually sitting in his lap. One of her deepest and most secret fears about this scenario was that it would be Michael who bolted, and not Adam. When Michael slid his hand over her knee and started drawing loose circles against her thigh with his thumb, some of the tight bands in her chest loosened a little bit. She said, “That life sucked, Adam, and most people in it dream of the day they leave it behind.”
Adam looked directly at her. “You said they kept tracking you down, no matter how hard you tried to escape.”
Nikita nodded, at once pleased and yet full of jagged regret that Adam had heard what they wanted him to hear. She said, “Most of my escapes were set-ups, on my part or someone else’s. Yes.”
“So, why is this one any different?”
“It might not be.”
Adam’s voice cracked. “What?!”
Nikita and Michael exchanged glances, and Michael answered. “It’s possible that Nikita is being set up as a threat to one or another layer of the organization. That she was allowed to flee to support the implication that she is planning on carrying out some sort of internal coup. Rejoining me, given our past, would only reinforce that idea.”
Nikita added, “It would be a version of the way they set up your mom after your dad left, made it appear she had been living as a super-double-secret undercover sleeper as a long term plot to take over her father’s organization.” Nikita held up her hand to forestall Adam’s telegraphed outburst, “She was completely innocent of any such thing, of course.”
Nikita leaned forward, trying once again to reconnect with the open, loving child Adam had been. Trying to see if she could find him still, however deeply he was buried in the angry, pierced, Mohawk-sporting teenager in front of her. “When that mission finished, that’s when men came and helped you and your mom move in the middle of suppertime one night. Do you remember that?”
Adam scowled. “Yeah. A little.”
Nikita sat back, sighed and explained the rest. “The way it would work in our case is that eventually one of the groups watching us would move in to pick us up, probably based on some planted information that we were about to make our big move to seize power, and then the other group would crush them.”
“If that happened, what would happen to us?”
Nikita shrugged, and smiled over her nightmares. “It would depend. But,” and here she looked quickly at Michael, saw his small nod, and went on, “Most likely we would die, in the crossfire or afterward. None of the groups involved would want us alive after it was all over. ”
When Adam didn’t say anything else, Michael said, “It is also possible that Nikita is running that same profile, as the primary agent rather than as the framed target.”
Adam gaped at his father. “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“You think she could be setting us up – to DIE – and you just sit there?”
“No. Separately and together,” Michael flashed Nikita a quick smile that made her cheeks flush in a way she was glad the dark and the fire would hide, then he turned back to look at Adam, “We have a number of fail-safes in place, hoping to gain enough margin to run if we have to.”
Adam stabbed an angry hand in the air. “You just told me you guys have had a fucking legendary love affair, and you still think she could be setting us up to die?”
Michael nodded. “It’s one possibility.”
Adam stared helplessly at them. “Dad?! How can you love somebody you don’t even trust?”
Michael reached over and took Nikita’s hand between his. Lacing their fingers together, the rough pads of his fingers warm against her skin, he said to Adam, “I do trust her. I trust that if she made that choice, then, all the other options were worse.”
Adam scrubbed his fingers across his face. He looked at Nikita and said, “and then you go and get knocked up in the middle of it all?”
Nikita squeezed Michael’s hand, and was glad to feel his warm grip in return, as she answered. “Yep. It’s either a sign of how committed I am to the profile, how much I’m prepared to risk, or,” and she shrugged, “it’s a sign that I really do believe I walked away successfully, and after more than a year out without sign of watchers, we think no one there cares what really happened to me. So your dad and I are seizing the day, and living the life we want.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “Are you really pregnant?”
“Yes. By December at the latest you’ll be able to see for yourself.”
Adam started shaking his head. “This is insane. You guys are delusional. It’s all bullshit. All of it. I don’t believe any of it.”
Nikita smiled sadly. “Yes. You do. You believe most of it, because it makes better sense of all of the details of your life than any other story your dad ever offered you before.”
“Does not!”
“Think about your life here, Adam, and not just your life before. What kind of skills and knowledge has your dad made sure to teach you?”
She watched, her heart cracking, again, as denial, comprehension and shock chased their way across Adam’s face. Eventually, Adam crossed his arms over his knees and demanded, “How much of this could I prove by googling it?”
Michael said, “Not much, but some.”
Nikita added, “If you want to do that, will you please let one of us teach you how to make sure your search queries are randomized, and randomly distributed across IPs so that your word strings don’t flag any sort of trace?”
Adam thought that one through, then he said, “So, you’re telling I shouldn’t just go to the school library and start roaming the web looking for info because that could get us all killed.”
Michael answered. “Yes.”
“Of course.” Adam pursed his lips, and said, “What did you say my grandfather’s name was?”
“We didn’t.” Michael answered. “And we won’t. Not until we think you’re ready to handle the information.”
*****
Nikita woke up just before dawn, when Michael came into the tent. She stretched as she asked, “Is he still here?”
“Yes.” Michael finished pulling off his boots and started to roll into his sleeping bag. He paused briefly to stroke he hair back from her face and kiss her forehead, then he lay down on his back and closed his eyes with a sigh.
Stepping out of the tent a few seconds later, she headed for the campfire, smiling when she saw that Michael had made coffee for her. The ground was damp with dew, so she set up one of the canvas chairs and sat back to watch the day come, sipping at her coffee.
About an hour after sunrise she saw Adam’s tent shiver as he woke up and started to move around. Adam crawled out with his boots in his hand, his patchy unshaven beard dark against the morning pallor of his skin, and with a bad case of bed-head, his defiant hairdo squashed and lopsided. He gave her a cool stare as he jammed his feet into his boots, then he headed off into the woods without bothering to tie them. When he returned he found a bottle of juice in the cooler and sat down on the opposite side of the fire, the dogs pushing at his hands and trying to lick his face. “I still think it’s all a load of crap,” he said.
“All of it, or just some of it?”
He shot back, “all of it!” but it lacked conviction and he seemed to hear it himself. He shrugged and corrected himself. “Well, some of it.”
“Which parts?”
“Well – the whole super-double-secret organization that does whatever the hell it wants to just because it can. I mean, who pays for that kind of shit outside of the movies?”
Nikita smiled. “Honestly? Fewer people than used to. The major funding bodies have reprioritized their interests and our old organization, and it’s lack of loyalty to any agenda but its own, has been successively downgraded.” She shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong. They still have a lot of resources and remain an extremely dangerous organization, but their scope has become more limited in the last five years.”
“So, why would they come after you?”
She saw the fear in his eyes and she offered what reassurance she could. “That’s actually one of the reasons I think they won’t. Possibly alive, but not found, I’m a useful ghost in the machine. If they actually were to find me….” She spread her hands wide, “I would be much less useful.”
“And that frees you up to come play house with my dad.”
She nodded. “Yeah. It does.”
Adam finished his juice, dropped the bottle and stamped it flat. He picked up the flattened plastic and started turning it through his fingers. “So, you win.”
“It isn’t a contest.”
Adam gave her a sour look of non-agreement. “Sure.”
“For what it’s worth, I always thought you won. He left me in hell to take you to freedom in the world outside.”
“Well. I’m obviously not free anymore.”
“Adam, nothing has changed since yesterday.”
“Yeah, well, except – everything!”
“Only that you know things you didn’t before.” Nikita sighed, and then offered him a twisted smile. “I don’t expect you to suddenly start liking me, or being nice to me if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Good.” Adam gave her a tiny smirk in return. “I wasn’t planning to.” He stood up, shaking out his limbs. “Anyway,” he went on, staring out into the woods somewhere far beyond their campsite, “I don’t not-like you.”
*****
