a world empty of you (nikita | madeline, amanda, nikita, alex, birkhoff)

[fiachairecht]

a world empty of you. nikita, madeline, amanda, nikita, alex, birkhoff. five glimpses into the world where sean pierce sacrificed himself to save his mother. 1.8k words, rated t.

i. madeline

Mom, get out of the car! Get her out of there!

Gunfire and an engine and Sean and her training (stay quiet stay low let the Secret Service handle it don’t make yourself a target) and the memories (tied to a chair, trapped, her only hope gone with her cell phone and everyone else dead, limp in their bonds, the faces she had known for so long slack in death) and and and.

She can't think she can't breathe she just can't. Can't even cover her ears and curl into a ball like she did when she was a child because she is a senator now; a senator, yes, and she is brave in the face of trauma, of death. She closes her eyes and tries to calm her racing heart but all she can see is blood, rising up against the inside of her eyelids and it's going to drown me I am going to die, again.

Until something hits the car, hard, and her eyes fly open as she is jolted back to awareness. She knows that even though she won’t be safe outside she's not safe here. She scrambles for the far side door, adrenaline making her fingers clumsy as she fumbles with the locks. Whatever fancy electronic things the Secret Service had put on the doors were supposed to keep her safer but now they simply trapped her.

trapped, like before, boots on the floor and assault rifles filling her vision, "kill them all" and then they were all dead, all of them, and she couldn't even look away—

Sean's face at the window seems almost like a dream — impossible, run away, you can't be here you need to stay safe— but then he's there, lifting her out of the car like she weighed nothing, setting her down and staring at her with eyes full of love and terror and he says, Run, mom.

So she does, kicking off her heels and heading away, but she doesn't get more than four or five steps before she realizes he's not there. When she turns to look for him she only gets a glimpse of him trying to pull something off the car before the blast lifts her up and up and up, fire searing her retinas until she hits the ground and everything goes sweetly, mercifully black.

She doesn't have nightmares about the bombing.

You can't have nightmares if you don't sleep.

ii. amanda

Amanda has never found lying to herself to be a constructive activity, so when she learns of the attack on Senator Pierce and her son, she readily admits that she's pleased Sean is the one who's dead, not Madeline.

It's mostly to do with Sean — he outlived his usefulness some time ago, there is no loss in his death. She was thinking about canceling him herself, but Oversight's capture precluded that, and then matters with the Zetrov board picked up speed and she lost the chance. So she's glad he's dead. One less person to hunt her down, one less ally for Nikita (and oh, thinking of Nikita still hurts, hurts more now that she's looked into the woman's eyes and seen all her love and hate and fear reflected and magnified—).

But there's also Madeline — Madeline had been her first mistake, nearly twenty five years ago. Until Nikita, she had been her only mistake, when she had assumed (naively, she realizes now) that Madeline would be indebted to her for her role in the senator's election. That assumption hadn't made it past Madeline's first term in the senate, their relationship of sex, wine, assassinations, and very little romance — hadn't survived the formation of the oversight committee. 

Madeline had drifted further and further away, their weekly encounters became once a month, then once a year, and then they stopped and all Amanda had left was commands from Oversight, like she was one more errand-girl to be bossed around. Like she didn't know the dreamy look Madeline got in her eyes after sex, like Madeline didn’t know that Amanda had candles burning in her bedroom and would taste like chocolate and peppermint when they kissed.

Amanda doesn't have time for regrets, not really, not after Nikita. She doesn't regret her time with Madeline and she doesn't even really regret the loss of their relationship. She just wants to see the woman broken, burned, torn apart just like all of Amanda's plans had been. Not because of some flighty revenge fantasy, but simply because Madeline was a nuisance.

So it's good that Madeline’s still alive. It means Amanda will get to be the one to kill her. It has a certain pleasant symmetry: she made Madeline a senator, she can unmake her as well. She just needs patience.

iii. alex

Alex sleeps in Nikita's bed the week after Sean dies. Clings to the older woman like she's a life jacket, like she’s an oasis in the middle of the desert — all those cliches she had once dismissed without a second thought but now they're the only words she can think of. Because she's drowning, drowning in a sea of faces and names (the boys she loved, the boys she killed, the boys who died because of her), and she's hungry, hungry for safety and love and end to the killing, an end.

I'm bad, Nikita, don't you see? she cries. I love them and then they die because I kill them. I'm poisonous.

Nikita doesn't say anything for a long, long time, just lies there stroking Alex's hair, like it's two years ago and they're back in the loft when Alex was trying to get clean. Nikita had seemed like an angel back then, offering her a way out of the death and drugs that had comprised her life since she came to America. But she knows better now. Nikita's not an angel because Alex doesn’t deserve an angel. She doesn't deserve anyone to protect her, to comfort her, not after Thom and Sean and probably even Nathan are all dead because they tried to do just that. 

She doesn't want any of it anymore. She wants to be done with the death and the destruction and the running and the hiding, wants to stop spending every spare moment looking over her shoulder for a Division thug. Wants to stop wondering who's going to die next because of her.

Nikita kisses her forehead and Alex wraps her arms around her even tighter, like maybe she'll be able to slip into Nikita's skin and maybe that’ll be enough to chase away the memories of the dead boys (her dead boys).

You're stronger than anyone i know, baby girl, Nikita murmurers into her hair, and Alex wants to believe it, she really does, but Nikita's the strongest person she's ever met, and she knows she's not that strong. Her only comfort is that here, in Nikita's arms, it’s okay to be broken for a little while.

She had wondered when she decided to infiltrate Division if she would survive without going mad. She thinks now that she didn't.

*

iv. nikita

Sean's death doesn't hurt. People come and help her for a while and then they leave — because they betray her or more often they just die or sometimes they leave because life with her is just too much. And it hurts, usually, because it reminds her of the life she could have had if she and the world weren't both so fucked up.

But Sean was a tool, in the end, no matter how much he helped Alex. So it's not Sean's death that hurts but watching Alex wither away in the aftermath. Beautiful, brave Alex, who never deserved this life of treachery and death and destruction. Alex was supposed to have been her one truly good legacy, was supposed to grow up happy and thrive. Instead, she shattered under the weight and rebuilt herself in front of Nikita's eyes. 

She had let Alex get drawn into this war, had lied to her and paid the price, had even smiled with a perverse sort of approval when Alex had suggested becoming a Division agent even as she hated herself for being proud of that. She wants to do more to help, wants to say something like It'll be okay or one day it won't hurt anymore or it wasn't your fault. But the first two aren't true, and the last one isn't something Alex will believe.

Nikita knows.

People have tried to tell her that, too, and no matter how much they believed it, she never could.

So she does what she can: holds Alex, soothes her, reminds her that she's not alone and that she still has a safe place to come back to, after all the bodies and the blood and the guilt.

And then Brandt takes her, and the only thing she can think of is how she's left Alex all alone, too; just another face in a long line of failures. 

*

v. birkhoff

Birkhoff's always known that the good guys die sometimes. There's always that point in the movies, right near the end, when the hero has to prepare themselves for the one decision that will save the world but destroy them. And they always make the choice to save the world, and sometimes it means they die, so yeah, he's always known it was a possibility — an inevitability, even, when he was still with Division and they were still the good guys, because those personality types tended toward flash-bang glory-filled deaths.

But he's never lost one of his own before. Those agents at Division — they didn't count, not really, they were just blips that couldn't be his because otherwise their deaths would hurt too much. And Carla — Carla was only ever Nikita's, but in the end even that hadn't been enough for her, and she betrayed them (he still remembers how she was down, she was supposed to stay down and the gun was shaking in his hands and he wanted to aim but then it just went off—)

But Sean was one of theirs, he sat in the beach house and pledged to help take down Division, he went to Russia and helped Alex and made Nikita smile and now he was lying on the ground in D.C., a charred corpse while his mother was too shocked to even scream. He wasn't a blip and he wasn't a betrayer, he was real and he was part of their team and one moment he was chattering about Percy and nuclear weapons and then he was shouting at the Secret Service and there was gunfire and the explosion—

—and it wasn't like the movies, it wasn't like the games and it wasn't even all that heroic in the grand scheme of things. He was just there and then he was gone, because some whack job thought that killing Senator Pierce would get Nikki's attention.

Birkhoff thinks maybe part of him's gone now, too.