What You're Thinking While the World Is Ending

Title: What You're Thinking While the World Is Ending
Author: penmage
Recipient:wizefics
Fandom: Burn Notice
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,933
Spoilers (if applicable): None, really.
Prompt: Michael Westen. Nuclear Holocaust - he can't stop it. Any and all other characters welcome.



The thing about the end of the world isn’t that you don’t expect it. You learn to expect a lot of things when you work with governments and bureaucrats, and world-ending disasters are just one more thing on the list of possible outcomes. The thing is, you expect people like yourself to head it off before it’s too late. That’s the kind of thing you yourself would have been doing if you weren’t stuck in Miami.

When you hear the news, your first instinct is to curse a lot. You take care of that one with a few well-placed words, but no one’s there to hear them, so it’s not as satisfying as you’d like it to be. Your second instinct is to call up the agency, laugh a little hysterically in their face, and say, “Bet you wish you hadn’t burned Michael Westen now, huh?” You guess that they’re probably a little busy right now, and besides, you no longer have a direct line, so you decide to hold off on that for right now.

Your third instinct is to eat some yogurt, and that’s what you’re doing when Fiona walks in the door.

“We’re fucked,” she announces, and your hand slides away from the gun under the couch cushions that you were reaching for without thinking about it when the door opened.

“Hello, Fi,” you say. The little voice in the back of your head that sounds remarkably like the voice-over on a lame TV show comments that you sound remarkably calm, considering the circumstances, and you should be proud of yourself. You tell the little voice to shut up—but not out loud, because then Fiona might hear.

“What are you going to do about it, Michael?” she asks. She stalks over to the fridge and pulls out a yogurt. She leans back against the bar and licks yogurt off the spoon. You wonder, idly, why both of you instinctively eat yogurt in times of crisis. What the hell is wrong with you? It has to be Miami.

“Why me?” you ask. You don’t really expect an answer, at least not a useful one, so you eat some more yogurt. “Why does Michael Westen always have to save the day? Why can’t someone else be the hero for once?” You know that you’re whining, but you can’t help yourself. Considering the circumstances, you feel like you have a right to whine.

“You’re no hero, don’t flatter yourself.” Even the potential apocalypse wouldn’t soften Fiona. Not that you had ever thought that it would.

The door creaks open, and your hand twitches towards the couch cushions again.

“What’s the plan, Mike?” Sam asks.

You relax your hand, and notice that Fiona is casually sliding her hand back from the side of the counter. You don’t want to bet on the odds that she has her own stash of violent weaponry hidden somewhere back there.

“Why does everyone always think that there’s a plan?” you say, annoyed. You dig into the cup for more yogurt, but it’s empty. Damn small serving sizes. You stand up to toss it, mostly to have something to do.

“Because you’re the guy with the plan. You always have a plan. And because I’ve got a Mercedes and a hot girlfriend, and it only took me sixty years to get to this point in my life, and I’m not going to lose it all now because some countries decided that this was a good time to go nuclear on some other countries.

“And because my good buddy Michael Westen knows that he owes me one or two, so consider it called in. Save the world and we’re even, Mike.”

And right then, right on cue, your phone rings. You don’t even have to check the caller ID. You flip it open.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Michael, have you seen the news?” she demands, as if there is some possible way you could have missed something this big. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Yes, Mom, I’ve seen the news.”

“Well?”

In the background, you can hear the sizzle of one cigarette lighting another cigarette. She takes a deep pull and exhales, waiting for you to spout the words of brilliance that everyone seems to think you have, tucked away somewhere, just waiting to be shared with the known universe.

“Well, what? Mom, I don’t know any more than you do. You know I don’t have that kind of connections anymore.”

“How am I supposed to know what kind of connections you have, Michael? You never tell me anything. You just leave me to guess.”

You roll your eyes.

“Well, we’re both guessing this time, Ma. I’ll call you back if I learn anything, okay?”

“All right, Michael, but you’d better not leave me hanging this time. Not like that time with Fort Lauderdale, okay?”

“Okay, Mom.” You snap your phone shut and glare at Sam and Fi.

“Anyone want to place a bet for how long it’ll take Nate to get in touch?”

“Quit joking around, Michael, this is serious.” Fiona says. There isn’t even the usual touch of lightness in her voice, and that surprises you. You’ve worked hundreds of jobs with her, and most of them were life and death, and she always wore the devil-may-care persona like a glove. You lean against the bar and run options through your head, the way you’ve been doing pretty much nonstop since you heard the news.

“I’m open to ideas, if you’ve got any. Sam?”

“We might be able to scrounge together the materials to make this place into a radiation-free zone for long enough to make it through. I know a guy who has a supply of—“

“And then what?” Fiona demands. She is twitchier than usual. You watch her stalk the length of the loft like a lioness in heat as you go through your mental rolodex of contacts, scanning for one that might get you in to the right place at the right time. There’s got to be one. There’s got to be some way you can stop this. There’s always a way, the trick is finding it.

“We hole up in this prison until the radiation is at a safe level, and then emerge to what?” Fiona is spitting the words.

“No fancy cars and no Veronicas, that’s for sure. And no single malt. I’m not sure I’d want to live a life that didn’t have single malt in it.” Sam looks glum. You knew he wasn’t seriously considering that idea anyway.

“There’s got to be a way.” The gears in your head are turning frenetically, uselessly. They have been since you heard the news. The niggling voice in your head tells you what you know is the truth—that there is nothing you can do to stop it. That you can’t change things, no matter how hard you try. That this is too big for even you. That this is too much for even Michael Westen to stop.

But you have never been very good at listening to the sensible thing. If you had been, you would never have become a spy in the first place.

***********

Sam goes home, or to Veronica’s, actually. You know they were fighting, but like everything else that seems to have fallen to the wayside in the face of the end of the world.

Fiona doesn’t leave.

She sits there on the bed, staring at you. You don’t notice at first; you’re busy rummaging through your stash of random things. You’re not used to not having an idea. You’re an idea man. You always know how to fix things. But not this time. This time, you can’t think of a single thing, and it’s killing you.

Then you turn around, and Fiona’s staring at you. You recognize the look in her eye, but you instinctively don’t trust it. You learned years ago how to protect yourself from getting hurt, and by now, it’s kneejerk.

“I thought we broke up,” you say finally. You know it’s stupid, but you had to say something.

“Michael.” Fiona sounds so annoyed that you forget for a moment that you’re not arguing about a job, and you drop your guard. “It’s the end of the world, Michael.”

It’s the way she says your name the second time, the way her voice almost but doesn’t break. Fiona has never been desperate, and you can’t remember the last time she flinched or showed fear, but you think that maybe now, maybe this time, she’s a little afraid. You only think so because if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re so scared you can barely think.
And so you join her on the bed.

You don’t talk a lot after that. After all this time, you know each other well enough to say everything that needs to be said without words.

***********

You wake up to the door opening. For a moment, both of you scramble instinctively for a weapon. You freeze in mid-scramble and meet Fiona’s eyes, and Fiona laughs, a low giddy giggle. Did it really even matter?

It’s Sam, anyway, and he doesn’t seem even a little surprised to have walked in on the two of you in bed together. You’re surprised, though. You thought he’d want to spend the end with Veronica. You raise an eyebrow at him as you pull your shirt on, and he shrugs.

“Veronica has a cousin who has a place in the Bahamas. She thought they might have a better chance if they were somewhere else.”

“She didn’t want you to come along?”

You wouldn’t have asked it, but that’s why you keep Fiona around. One of the many reasons.

“She asked, but you know how I feel about boats. I didn’t want to spend my last hours on earth seasick.”

You think you know the real reason. Sam doesn't think he could handle watching Veronica die. The three of you, you're old hands at death. You've been running alongside it for long enough that it's only a little more inevitable now than it was before. But Veronica, she's a civilian.

You do the only thing you can think of, and offer Sam a beer.

***********

Your mom comes over soon after that. She didn’t want to be alone in the apartment, she says, and you don’t blame her. She tells you that Nate holed himself up in some bunker somewhere with some of his friends. You surprise yourself by wishing that you had at least had a chance to say goodbye to him.

After that, there’s not really much else to say. Sam totes your supply of beer up onto the roof, and your mom surprises you all by contributing her stash of the hard stuff to the pile.

You crack open a beer and take a long pull.

You should have been able to stop this. Nevermind that it’s too large for you, on too grand a scale, too huge and overwhelming a disaster. Nevermind all that. You’re Michael Westen, and that’s what you do. You stop disasters.

You take another drink. Soon, you’ll finish the beer and start on the scotch. With any luck, the four of you will drink yourselves silly enough to dull the pain of knowing.

At the very least, you think, meeting Fiona’s eye for a long moment, there are worse ways to go than having a cold one on the roof with the only three people in the world you care about.

And that’s what you’re thinking when the bombs start falling.