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After the first hit of acid starts to take, Michael turns black-dark dilated pupils on his captors and tells them smilingly that he can see God and the Cosmos and both send their hellos.
After the second hit, he's more quiet, inward-turned. God and the Cosmos are indeed saying hello. Sarcasm is a strange farcical performance designed only to hide real emotion and bury true intent.
So much of his life has been a strange farcical performance.
The whole world was an elaborate lie, really, man, when you stepped back to consider it.
After the third hit he's talking, expounding, chatting, chattering wildly and on a wide-ranging array of topics. Holy shit, this shit is awesome. His spirits are much improved.
He discourses on everything and nothing.
He doesn't think that he tells them what they want to hear though because he doesn't remember it himself. They're watching, whoever it is that finally bagged him, from a tiny pinhole camera mounted in the corner of the stark white room.
Before the acid kicked in he had waved for the camera; done a little cha-cha; tried speaking Farsi, in case they were into that sort of thing.
The room they'd put him in was white, entirely, completely white, down to white-washed wooden floors, which was a bit over the top. Nobody painted wood white. Except these people.
Were they hippies? Is that why they'd dosed him up instead of beating it out of him? Terrorist hippies? Was that it?
Michael relates an ingenious theory about the nature of human existence for his watchers' benefit and then promptly forgets about it.
After the fourth hit he tells them they're being a little excessive.
When you're a spy, the threat of being drugged in a multitude of fashions is by all accounts a constant concern.
It can come cooked in your food from a Michelin-starred restaurant, or in the drink the beautiful blond hostess hands over with beguiling eyes. It can come leaking soundlessly and sneakily through your air-vent, or aggressively in the needle that's being jammed into your jugular.
When you're a covert operative, you have to know your drugs. You have to know how your body reacts to different amounts and strains, how to identify what's been given to you and what your options are even as it's taking effect and you're hooded and stuffed in the trunk of a car.
Every spy has to dabble occasionally in illicit substances as par for the course. You don't get to play undercover that you're a small-time coke dealer looking for a bigger market and then shy away from a line laid out at a club. Not when the guy laying it out has a forearm bigger than your face.
After the fifth hit is the only time he pleads for them to stop. It's more than any torturer ever got from him, but Michael is alone save for the blank-faced giant of a man who comes to force-feed him drugs every now and again so the only real torturer is himself and he's not sure if that's who he's pleading with.
He's dropped acid a few of times before, a couple of times in training so that he'd recognize the high and once on a camping trip with Sam after Sam had asked Michael not to have such a stick up his ass, for once.
One of Sam's best old Navy buddies had bitten the bullet, and Sam wanted to give him some kind of nature-bound Burning Man touchy-feely send-off based on a promise made in the '70s, and Michael had agreed to lose his precious ass-stick for the weekend.
Him and Sam on acid had been mostly about watching the way the shadows shifted and swirled in the trees and identifying the sharp sounds of bird-calls overhead and not talking about anything that had to do with clients or covert operations.
They'd had sex at the peak of the trip, of their tripping, when the shifting colors of Sam's shirt started to look too much like encrypted code, so Michael took it off. They had sex like they often did when they felt like it and always on camping trips.
It'd been good, that acid-sex with Sam, in and out of mind and body in the best kind of way, and when they got back they agreed not to tell Fiona about the drugs only because she'd be intrigued and demand a repeat performance at once and acid took a lot out of you.
After the sixth hit he knows that he's lost value, that he's a failed experiment. They're going to kill him or leave him so brain-damaged that the information lost with Michael won't matter.
He's afraid for the first time and then that stops, too.
Intellectually he knows that it's virtually impossible to flat-out overdose and die from LSD. It's a crazy mindfuck of a drug, sure, but on a chemical level it's safer to consume than alcohol.
Even after the seventh hit, which has Michael sweating everywhere and makes the big drug-giving man's face less blank and more into a rhinoceros, he knows he isn't about to die by Timothy Leary alone.
It's more about making him think he's going to die, or drive him to the point where death seems preferable, Michael decides. It's more about making him lose his mind.
When you're a spy, few situations are as dangerous as having your own personal limits tested and it's even worse to be forcibly introduced to self-doubt. Spies are trained to be competent above all else, since signs of weakness indicate that you're weak and thus exploitable. There's a reason why the bleeding hearts of the world aren't in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Sure, Michael concedes, with seven hits of acid in him, the rules for being a covert operative were a little ridiculous, all things considering.
Everyone was really part of one world family, really, brothers and cousins, all spiritually bound at the core, and here for centuries they'd drawn lines in the sand and made tribes and faceless enemies and played big elaborate expensive ruses to find the best ways to steal and kill one another. It was pretty silly.
Flat on his back in the middle of the small all-white room, Michael groans. One world family spiritually bound?
It's working, his faceless ememies' plan. He really was going to lose his fucking mind.
After the eighth hit, Michael watches a debate between God and the Devil as moderated by Richard Dawkins with great interest.
An all-white environment to someone wrecked on acid is torture enough, since colors are so interesting. Unfortunately Michael's linen pants are off-white, and someone had taken away his shirt, a few hours or years ago.
So he starts letting his mind run off and show what it will since he can't stare at birds and trees or troll the internet for pictures of paintings that dance or amusing cats.
After the ninth hit, the small white door of the small white room opens and Victor walks in.
Michael is glad to see him, as he generally is.
Since Victor's here it's a good sign. It means that Michael's slipped into unconsciousness at last, even if it's a very awake-seeming sort of unconsciousness, but acid thrives on breaking down rules.
Sleeping, he runs less of a risk of giving up the information his captors want from him, or edging closer to acute psychosis.
Sleep is good.
Or it means that they slipped him something else along with the last dose and he's dying, at last, which is frankly more appealing than the current status of jacked-up guinea pig.
He feels a little bad about dying without telling Fiona and Sam, but he knows they'll have to forgive him and feels smug about that.
Either way, it's always good to see Victor.
Victor looks good, too. His hair's been recently trimmed, his color shows time in the sun, and his arms are pumped-up and and strong although his outfit is unfitting. He wears bright white hospital scrubs, totally impractical for a hospital, but blending well with the room's interior décor.
Victor looks down at Michael, Michael shirtless and sweat through with drugs and the effort to hold his brain together.
Victor looks more anxious than he usually does, though anxiety on Victor manifests more like annoyance, so Michael grins to show that it's all fine now that he's asleep.
“Have you been working out?” he asks Victor's arms, which are broader than before.
Victor blinks -- first at his own biceps, then back at Michael. “You don't seem surprised to see me, big guy,” he says. “I thought I'd get a special hello at least. I want a Hallmark card when this is over.”
Michael shrugs noncommittally. “Surprised? Is that the game today?”
But then Victor only looks confused, and confusion on Victor manifests as anger. Michael guesses that must be the game this time, Victor pretending not to know.
He likes when Victor's angry, so he doesn't play along. “Vic,” he says, gently, “I saw you just the other night.”
“You did.” Whatever intentions dream-Victor had upon entering the room, he's been momentarily thrown off.
But Victor's too good. He's like Michael, nearly just like Michael, which is why they liked each other so much after getting over the whole hating each other thing. Victor's face recomposes quickly. “Why don't you tell me about that?”
“You know,” Michael answers, coy. Even dreaming the acid's at work, and the white room and Victor in white are doing a fine ballroom dance together. “It was one of your favorites, where we set up shop in Cuba, instead of on the boat like usual. Frankly--”
Victor scrubs a hand across his forehead, the motion cutting him off. “I'm talking to a man with an elephant's dose of acid and expecting a straight answer,” he says, mostly to himself, Michael decides, since Michael's been relegated to a lesser clause.
“Frankly,” Michael goes on, at a pointedly higher volume, “You know I'm partial to the boat, or to the one where we turn farmer and learn how to grow sugarcane. Overalls are a great look for you.”
Victor is processing. Michael always likes watching Victor's face process information, quick as a computer, and he rather wishes Victor would drop this game now and say beep bloop bleep and they could play a different game where Michael's chess champion Garry Kasparov and Victor's Deep Blue, the cunning chess computer.
That didn't make much sense, but dreams were as confusing as acid, even more unhinging and unpredictable.
Michael stretches languidly as he can on the painted wood floor, annoyed that even asleep the landscape won't shift away from the white room.
Victor says, slowly but clearly, “Michael Westen, you're hallucinating. I'm a hallucination, sport. I'm gonna have to ask you a few questions, and after that all of this can go away.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” Michael says. “Of course you're not a hallucination.”
“You're on your ninth hit of lysergic acid diethylamide,” Victor helpfully observes.
“Spy resistance,” Michael says, tapping a finger against his temple.
“I'm dead,” Victor points out.
Michael shrugs. “I know. That's how I know I'm unconscious. I never get to see you otherwise.”
Victor kneels next to Michael on the floor. “And you see me often?”
He hesitates, then touches Michael's bare shoulder. The touch is deliciously solid, hot against sweat-cooled skin, before Victor's hand moves away. Then the back of Victor's hand is taking his forehead's temperature.
“Sure,” Michael says. “Most nights, if I'm lucky.”
“I see,” Victor says, but he says it like he still doesn't. “How do you explain that you can feel me touching you, sport, if I'm not the product of your funny fried-egg brain?”
“Victor,” Michael says, low and teasing, because the dreams are usually happier than this, and if he's dying and Victor's some kind of screwy guardian angel, he'd really rather get on with it and die. “You're never not touching me, man.”
He goes on when Victor stays quiet and Michael doesn't die. He's not acid-tongued, but has an acid-laced tongue, loose and oddly freeing: “I mean, I hate the other dreams, too. I'm sorry about those. The first part in the boat is always the worst until I save you.”
Victor is sitting very still. “I'm dead, Michael,” he repeats. “I died. They got me.”
When Michael doesn't answer, Victor rolls his eyes, makes a gun-shape with his thumb and forefinger. “Remember? Bang-bang?”
“Yeah. I know.” Michael's getting impatient; this dream-Victor is going nowhere and talks even more than usual, and usual was a lot. “How many times have I apologized for that? It's like I told you the first time we made it all the way to Cuba -- I would have taken that bullet gladly, and the one I had to put into you I thought about taking myself for a good while after.”
Victor doesn't say anything. Then he says, “The first time we made it to Cuba.”
That gets Michael back into a smile. “One of my all-time favorites, too,” he agrees. “And my teachers used to tell me I lacked imagination. The way we hid the boat, and kissed the sand when we reached it like we'd made it to the moon; and then you fucking me into the sand with the surf washing up and not caring that anyone could be watching -- jeez, that was super-fucking great.”
Super-fucking great is not an expression Michael had been aware was amongst his vocabulary but Timmy Leary was right, this shit opened your mind right up and taught you all kinds of new things about the universe, and descriptives too.
“Me fucking you,” Victor echoes, with such exquisite slowness Michael hopes the dream's finally going to get good and Victor will put phrase to action.
“In your dreams I fuck you,” he says, as though seeking further clarification, which is a little redundant, sure, but Michael always appreciates the sound of Victor talking dirty. His body is already more than responding.
If he could move without the room flipping over upside down and dropping Michael from floor to ceiling he would.
OK, so that maybe didn't make much sense again, but neither did Michael, or Victor, or Michael and Victor, or dreams or acid-dreams.
An angry noise, like a siren, issues from somewhere, and Victor jerks back from his reverie. The sound stops. Michael wonders if he made it up.
Victor's expression has been suddenly reset to smooth and knowing, with the frank, smug smile that Michael half-hates and half-wants to suck straight off his face.
“Of course I do,” Victor says, smiling even more now, venturing fingers up Michael's collarbone into his hair. “Of course. Tell me more. I like to hear you say it.”
“Ha,” is Michael's ingenious response, but he relaxes now that Victor's dropped the confused act and is back into their games. “That's what you said about making me say your name, and you had me tied up for hours. It isn't fair that they teach you even fancier knots when you have higher clearance.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Victor concurs, and now his hands are hungrier and bolder on Michael the way they both like it.
“Well,” Michael considers, warming quite to Victor's closeness, “Since you asked, and you're in my dream, and I'd rather stay asleep than meet whatever bastards have me, I may as well be honest. We have sex a lot, sure, and it's always great, but I also like the times when we're just hanging out, you know? Like the dream where you read old case-files to me in bed -- that's a good one. Or the time you over-picked from the garden and I made us enough dinner for a week. Or the time we decided to claim Cuba for America and did it, and then took Castro out for lunch afterward. Or the--”
Victor's laughing a little, but only a little, so Michael finishes the speech. “Don't get me wrong about the sex, though, I'm not complaining. You said you were good and you are. Fi and Sam complain, sometimes, if I say your name by accident or asleep; but even highly trained spies can't be cured of sleep-talking. But, y'know, a little jealousy with the two of them is just fine -- makes them step up their game. If I'm being honest.”
Victor laughs even harder, and his hands knead hard and confident into the tensed muscles of Michael's shoulders, then make mischievous trails downward. “You're quite the busy bee, Mikey.”
Only Sam ever really calls him that; but he'll let Victor get away with it this once.
“Guilty as charged,” Michael allows, since he's never not busy. “Buzz, buzz.”
He'd closed his eyes on instinct when Victor's clever fingers dipped under his waistband. He lifts a lazy eyelid. “Can we have sex now? You're normally not so chatty.”
“I'm never not chatty,” Victor says, and expertly fists Michael's cock.
Michael's been hard since the moment he started dreaming and Victor came in, and his relief must show because Victor's giving his cock quite a bit of close attention. “We have a lot of catching up to do. After entertaining two full-time sex partners and a third while you're sleeping, it's a wonder you can get to any cases. What're you working on?”
“Bor-ing.” Michael yawns for emphasis. “Won't you do that thing you do with your mouth? You know, the other habit you have besides incessantly talking?”
There's a long pause, and then Victor's head, the shiny cut of his sandy-brown hair, ducks lower. His much-too-clever tongue swipes a tantalizing stripe up the length of Michael's cock.
“Tell you what,” says Victor to Michael's cock, “I'll do that thing with my mouth, and you can talk. C'mon, Michael. It's more boring being dead, believe me. They don't have much need for spies in the afterlife, and I need a little action.”
“I give you plenty of action,” Michael protests, but he knows what Victor means.
For a spy, boredom's a fate far worse than death. Victor is accommodatingly starting to suck his cock, and it seems like a fair deal, so Michael starts talking.
The details are all fuzzy and muddled up from L.S.D. and unconsciousness and watching Victor's full lips stretch to take all of him in, but Michael talks and once he's started finds it hard to stop. A lot has happened since the last time he and Victor talked shop in a dream.
There're a bunch of cases, some new, some old, some borrowed, some blue. He tells Victor about various clients and shoot-outs and shoot-ups, the recent barroom brawl that Sam staged, Fiona's triumph in finally getting to blow up a Miami city bus (they had the police's permission, but Fi chose to leave that fact out whenever she told the tale).
Victor hums a comment or two sometimes against Michael's cock, and sometimes he pulls back and asks a considerate question while his fingers tug gently on Michael's balls and his other hand strokes considerately.
Michael keeps on talking, building to an increasingly fevered pleasure-pressure-point, and when he pushes up his hips and pushes his cock deep into Victor's mouth and comes it's good.
Really, really, really good, better even than his as-til-then favorite blowjob dream, the one where Victor goes down on him in the front seat of the little classic car they stole in Havana while Michael drives the scenic backroads.
Victor starts a little when Michael comes, like he hadn't been expecting that quite yet. But he swallows with aplomb, and Michael groans appreciation, using the sounds and pitches Victor likes best.
Then Michael tenses up: sometimes in a dream Victor will vanish too fast, before they can do more. Michael's fool brain will downshift into other dreaming, or Fi or Sam will accidentally kick him in their jumbled bed, and then Victor flicker-fades away. Michael never likes that part at all.
“C'mon,” he says when he has breath enough to speak. “Hurry up before I wake up. Have a feeling if they give me much more I'm going to drop out entirely, and they can forget about me turning on or tuning in.”
Victor's lips are wet and red from blow-job-giving and his eyes are wide and wild. “Michael,” he starts.
“Come on,” Michael says. It would be exceedingly helpful if his body would obey imperative orders to move more, but he can barely lift his head. Whatever's in his bloodstream is pulsing strong enough now to invade even sleep. “What the hell is wrong with you? You look like you're debating asking me to prom. Would you just fuck me already?”
Victor starts to pull free of the bizarre white scrubs he's in.
Michael loves Victor's body. Victor's body has Sam's hard rugged strength and Fiona's toned tempting angles all rolled together.
The place where the bullet entered Victor's abdomen has long since scarred over and healed. The spot lower on his belly where Michael's gun had pushed and emptied is rougher, with faded stitches and twisted remnants of once-smooth skin that will not be smooth again.
Michael frowns, since in dreams he never likes to revisit that moment on the boat: his and Victor's hands together on the gun, killing Victor together.
He revisits it enough while he's awake.
At least it looks like it doesn't hurt anymore, Michael thinks. He always hopes it hadn't hurt.
“Sorry about that,” he tells Victor's belly. “I'm really sorry.”
Victor looks down at himself as though he hasn't done so in a while. “I know,” he says. “Me too.”
Then Victor says, “Forgive me.”
It's the most un-Victor thing he's ever said, so laughable Michael would take it for a joke if it weren't for Victor's eyes.
But it's still funny regardless, especially since Victor is asking for forgiveness while freeing Michael entirely from his pants and starting to do truly wonderful things to his body. So Michael just laughs.
It's always excellent when they're naked together at last; despite whatever wacky adventure has slipped into Michael's dreams of Victor, he knows he can count on Victor to be up for fucking somewhere in the course of it.
For a spy boredom's a fate worse than death, even while asleep, but in dreams Victor is never boring.
This time's no different, except for the room and Victor persisting to spin. Michael remembers that sex on acid with Sam was pretty freakin' great, a one-world spiritually blended brotherhood precisely, and he feels himself getting excited again. Would almost thank his faceless captors, then, if he could.
Low against his ear, Victor says, “I don't think there's any other way. Otherwise, I'd --”
Michael laughs. “Don't be silly. We've done it plenty of ways.” He rubs the stubble of his chin into Victor's shoulder, which depending on mood usually gets a grin or an aroused shove. “I'm sorry I can't be more engaging here, Vic, but the ceiling is doing a waltz. I want you, though. You know that. You've always known.”
“I didn't, precisely,” Victor says. “I wish I'd been that good at our job but I wasn't.”
“You wanted me,” Michael points out. He finds he can lift his hips a little to help, the weight of Victor settling heavy between his thighs.
“I did at that,” Victor says.
“I knew,” says Michael.
This time sex with Victor is maybe actually kinda a little different and a lot surreal because Michael's drugged up to his eyeballs and can't respond with the precision he'd prefer. But it's so visceral he excuses the fact that he's captured and unconscious and lets himself enjoy it and be enjoyed.
There's an urgency to Victor's actions and in his eyes, and it's a odd combination of slow careful sex and frantic frenetic fucking.
Victor apologizes again when he can't do much more for moisture than spit-slick his own cock, and he spends a while trying to make Michael ready.
Michael brushes him off, makes a wide grab that thankfully lands on Victor's upper leg, near enough to where he'd been aiming. “You're such a cock tease,” he accuses, because anger in Victor manifests as arousal, too, and it works because then Victor's easing in and then pushing and then Victor's nailing Michael to the floorboards with his dick.
It hurts a little at first, which is surprising, but Michael will show his former teachers who lacks imagination around here. The pain he doesn't try to hide turns them both on, and Victor's thrusts are rough and deep and thorough.
Through it all they haven't kissed. Victor's head is down and pressed hard to the crook of Michael's neck. His breath is ragged. His fingers dig in tight where they're anchored on Michael's hip-bones.
He fucks Michael like a drowning man coming up for air, or a man who's long been dead and then not.
It's glorious, heart-pounding, room-spinningly good sex, and with all the psychedelics in his system Michael thinks he should be forgiven the cheesy cliché of not knowing where he ends and Victor begins.
Victor keeps talking, though, which is as annoying as it's endearingly predictable. Keeps talking with that same offbeat edge and urgency that's in his eyes.
“Michael. Michael. God, Michael.” Michael likes that sentence at least, delivered with a shuddering thrust that nearly sends them into the far wall. “Michael. Can you hear me, sport? You have to listen now. Tell me that you're listening. Michael.”
“You never say my name enough while we're fucking, even when I beg you,” Michael hazily observes, rising to meet the momentum of Victor's cock. “Even though they're my own goddamned dreams.”
Sitting up a little doesn't make the world blur and swirl and bleed away like he'd half-feared, so he puts his arms around Victor and holds on more securely.
Victor feels solid and smells different than he should, which is like ocean breezes and bananas and white sand and those drinks with the funny little umbrellas. Victor smells like fear, like the sweat-stuff of fear with sex and lust overlaid. Victor smells wrong.
Under him, Michael blinks once. Victor is still saying, smelling wrong, “Tell me that you're listening, Michael. Tell me that you can understand what I'm saying. Michael. We don't have much time. You're gonna have to snap out of -- Michael, Jesus.” That last one's because Victor's cock goes particularly deep and hits just right and Michael moans and bites his shoulder in happy retaliation.
Victor says, “Michael, listen to me. The scrubs are wired. There's no other way than this.” His breath is hitched as he drives them forward. There is only their bared skin, their shared skin between them.
Victor rocks more slowly now, staving off orgasm and separation, and Michael blinks again and some part of him somewhere, he thinks, starts to listen.
“They need you for something. Need something from you. I don't know if they have it now. Michael. Are you listening? They needed you enough to haul me away from my hard-earned retirement and fly me halfway around the world so I could make you talk in a drugged-up box. Michael. Listen to me.”
Michael shakes his head. There's still far, far too much acid and nothing makes sense, and it's hard enough to clear his thoughts with Victor giving him the best fuck he's had in months.
No offense to Sam and Fiona's considerable combined efforts, of course.
He smiles. When he tells them that they're going to go crazy trying to one-up themselves and each other and it should be an excellent start to the new month overall.
Victor is still refusing to shut his mouth, but he's also panting through it now. “Michael. When I come I'm going to have to stand up and put my clothes on and leave. Their little trick to send me in as a friendly hallucinatory ghost went a little haywire on account of whatever's been happening betwixt us in your teeming brain there, Romeo. I'm flattered, really I am, but if you're not listening to me we're dead.”
He punctuates each of these various fascinating sentences with a well-aimed, well-timed turn of his hips, quite literally driving the point home. “They'd rather have us alive to play with, but if they know I've warned you we're both screwed. Well. So to speak.”
Even with the information Victor seems so intent on whisper-hissing against Michael's ear, even Victor can't resist a little smile, a quick, errant quirk of lips at his own choice of phrasing. He's balls-deep in Michael and shaking with it, the corded muscles of his arms straining with the effort to hold himself up and drive down at the same time.
Michael is half-listening now, not that listening much helps to make sense out of Victor.
“But you're already dead,” he points out, catching up with some of it.
Victor's groan is nondistilled exasperation, and he rams his cock home so hard that Michael gets a painted-floor burn across his back from the momentum. “Do I feel dead to you?” he demands.
“You never do,” Michael says.
“Son of a bitch.” Sweat carves wet from Victor's hairline down the long length of his back. “I asked you to forgive me and everything, and you won't even remember. We're fucking dead.”
“I have,” Michael says, somewhat affronted, “An excellent memory. Top-rated.”
“Remember this, then, sport. Remember that this happened.” Above him Victor's face, his handsome, expressive, possibly psychotic, probably dead face, contorts in a way all men know is the best way.
Then he pushes harder into Michael and comes like that, the way Michael likes best, Victor's open seeking mouth finally pressed to Michael's and his eyes brighter than an explosion.
When he comes, instead of moaning Victor forces out another whisper in the moment when he moves his mouth away. “Remember. Tell Fiona it's the Hungarians. It isn't, but that may help. Michael. Please remember.”
Beyond exquisitely fucked, vision still swimming with colors, tripped up more now with orgasmic bliss than even acid can trip, tripping the light fantastic, Michael lies enjoying the full naked press of Victor on top of him.
“Since you said please so nicely,” he says. “I'll try.”
After that Victor does what he said he was going to do.
Gets up and out of and away from Michael. Wipes himself down with the jumble of scrub-material before putting them back on. Talks loudly, now, jibes for the camera about being dead and needing to get going for his racquetball game with Saint Peter, and about Michael's overly-enthusiastic imagination, and about how acid is one hell of a drug.
Michael watches him leave with a detachment he knows is unnatural, is synthetically-based. It's always hard to watch Victor go. Always.
Victor looks back from the doorjamb. “Next time in Cuba, then, sport,” he says. “Don't forget.”
He closes the door, and Michael closes his eyes, and he only forgets most of it.
Sam and Fiona tell him that he's been gone for three days.
They'd been arguing for seventy-two hours and counting over the co-propositions of being worried sick at Michael's disappearance or vengefully furious (vengeful was Fi's word, Sam put in) that he might have taken off on a dime without alerting them.
So it's a relief all around when they find Michael dumped dirty and half-naked in off-white pants but breathing, at least, halfway up the steps going to the loft.
Fiona tells him how it all went down after that as soon as he's marginally conscious: how Sam had gingerly carried him inside; how they'd checked him over together with the combined experience of decades of field-medicine; how it was obvious that he'd been drugged, but didn't seem much worse for the wear besides.
She, Fiona, had personally bathed his fevered brow, and sat with him until it broke, while Sam, reluctant to leave now that they had Michael back, sat chain-drinking beers in the kitchen and kept on calling every buddy he had in fifty states and a few U.S. protectorates and several operatives still under deep cover in far-flung countries.
He'd chased down every lead in the Sam Axe catalog looking for a tidbit on who took Michael, but had come up dry, and his frustration had been considerable.
“We've been having a lot of angry sex, Sam and I,” Fiona tells him, describing some of it with her hands. “That part was fun, but I'm really glad you're back, Michael. Didn't you get anything about who it could be?”
Michael listens calmly throughout Fiona's recitation. His head and body are throbbing, aching, the fever barely broken, and he only wants to go back to sleep. “No. I don't know.”
“Which one?” Fiona knows him well enough to know how close to the edge he is, but she and Sam have their bloodlust up, and all she wants for is a clue to send her scrambling on the chase.
So she pushes him, her voice a teased edge. “Which is it? Either you remember or you don't.”
Michael looks at Fiona and tells her, “It's the Hungarians.”
He stops. Blinks. He's supposed to tell her that, but he doesn't know what it means or why.
Fiona's eyes go wide with pleasure -- his kind of woman, happier with the barest of leads than with gifted chocolates -- and she springs to her feet. “But that doesn't make sense. I don't know any Hungarians doing any big trade in the black in Miami, and as a whole they've been rather vanilla this decade with the E.U. breathing down their necks.”
Michael's head feels like it's about to split open and maybe that will be a welcome relief when it happens. “Fi. I don't know. I'm sorry. All I know is that I was supposed to tell you that.”
“Well, then.” Fiona looks even more excited. “That's something, isn't it? The game is afoot, my dear Michael. I'm off. Take care.”
She presses a kiss to Michael's forehead on her bustling way out to hunt, which tells Michael a lot about how worried his friends have been.
Sam brings him a beer.
Michael waves it away. Sam knew he would, so he keeps the beer for himself and produces the yogurt hidden in his pocket. Michael wants to smile but can't.
“I think I had sex,” he tells Sam.
He knows he had sex. His body is proof positive enough of that. But his head still isn't making sense about it.
It's a strange situation, so Sam swallows down his instinct toward ribald suggestions and dirty jokes and just waits him out.
Michael realizes he's never felt quite so profoundly grateful to have his team.
Sam is Sam, so Sam only looks back unblinking when Michael says, “I think I had sex with a ghost.”
“Now, that's new,” Sam says. Sam doesn't look at him like he's crazy, which is nice of him.
Sam just drinks more beer. “You want to talk about it, Mikey?”
“No,” Michael snaps, then dulls his sudden temper when Sam's face falls. “Yes. No. Maybe later.”
“L.S.D.'s a hell of a drug,” Sam shrugs, like a half-echo of something Michael has heard recently. “It's okay, buddy. It'll come back to you. Let Fi do her underworld-Fi thing and by the time she's found something for us to follow, you'll be ship-shape again.”
Ship-shape.
Michael opens the yogurt so that Sam doesn't see how unsteady his hands are, and makes a big show of eating half of it under Sam's watchful guard.
“Gonna sleep now,” he says, more than a little slurred. His eyes are closing. “Gotta go to Cuba.”
“What's that, Mike?”
Michael's back in the space between sleeping and awake, so Sam moves the yogurt and pulls the blanket up over him and sits in the chair nearby with one gun cocked and loaded and a second spread out to be cleaned.
Michael is going to sleep, and he's going to dream, he decides, halfway there already. He's going to be on a boat when he opens his eyes next.
The boat they had last left moored up by a small island in the vast green water.
The boat bobs as the wind catches full sail and tosses it a little against the waves.
Everything here is perfect. Too perfect, but Michael has never quite taken in the extent of his own escapism before.
The day shines but not with heat, tropical birds call and answer musically, and Victor, shirtless, is coming up from below deck, his arms full of coconuts.
His chest is bare, the wide-shouldered, well-sculpted chest Michael has touched so many times and so often, here. The tall proud length of him is mahogany-tan, and his hair has been minted brighter from constant exposure to the sun.
Victor smiles brighter than his hair when he sees Michael. “There you are, sport. Was just gonna call you.” He moves to Michael where Michael's standing starboard and puts down the coconuts. “Look what washed our way for dinner.”
Michael watches Victor, the perfect moving lines of him on their perfect boat with a perfect green-brown coconut in his hand.
Victor never needs Michael's help to carry a conversation; he often does it all on his own. “I'm thinking curry, the spicier the better. Did I ever tell you about my time in India? I mean I can't tell you much that isn't classified, but needless to say I make a mean curry, and whatever you might have heard about a conflagration in the Embassy's kitchens had nothing to do with me. Help me with this, won't you, Michael?”
When he turns to give Michael a coconut the breeze from the water stirs his hair.
When he turns to Michael, there is only one once-angry wound marring the expanse of Victor's chest. In the dream it has long since healed.
Only the one that Carla had given him, the one that made Victor fall. In his dreams, Michael always makes it up to him after that.
There are many scenarios as to how he and Victor make it out alive -- he's gone over those countless times enough -- but they never stay around to replay the way it had really ended.
Victor's and Michael's hands on the gun, killing Victor together.
In dreams Victor is dead but alive with Michael at night and he has one wound only.
Only one scarred-over bullet hole. The only one Michael could imagine healing, the only one he ever lets himself see, in dreams.
And Victor's once-shot perfect torso in the perfect dream is the most beautiful thing Michael's ever seen, because it means that he saw something else today while awake.
Michael accepts the coconut. “I think we need to talk,” he says to Victor. “There's a chance you may not be dead. It's a weird chance, but--”
Victor looks more concerned about the curry, and annoyed about the fruit situation. “Can't you, Michael? We'll need all the milk you can get from that to do this thing all proper-like.”
“I said,” Michael says, terrified and aching at once to disturb the false-front perfection of the boat. “You might be alive.”
“Well now,” Victor says, shrugging sun-gold shoulders, “If there's anyone in the world I'd want investigating my half-life if I myself were unavailable I guess that'd be you, sport. So why don't you scamper on and do that, and we'll call it a draw.”
Michael's hands and Victor's hands on cold metal. Fingers together on the trigger.
“We could call it that,” Michael agrees, and he wakes up, like he always does, before the gun goes off.