Copyright © 1997 By Sapphire Dove
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Michael, Nikita, Walter and Seymour Birkoff are all the property of their respective creators and producers, as is the actual television show. No copyright infringements are intended, neither will I ever receive any profits from this work.
Author's Note: Post "Mercy."
Spoilers: For the last scenes in "Mercy." Hardly any detail, though, so don't worry.
Gone
Sometimes, Michael wondered if she had ever truly existed.
He wasn't given to hallucinations, at least not in his conscious hours, but sometimes Michael just couldn't fathom that Nikita had ever walked and breathed and lived within the obdurate confines of Section One. It was as if, in his memories, he was watching some fairy tale princess passing through; diaphanous and pure. Her presence just the wisps of heavenly beauty and magic.
And, oh, how he longed to reach out and cling to that precious magic. . .
In his more rational moments - when he would torture his spirit with the recollections of all the times that he had sought to destroy hers - he would admit repeatedly, as if attempting by admission of his guilt to redeem himself for her sake, that Nikita had never belonged, it had been some cruel mistake that one such as she could ever have been condemned to reside in the haunted halls of the damned.
Michael's heart, what he fancied was left of it, had no reason to continue beating without her; where it had swelled and warmed only for her, it would now wither and freeze. He knew that when the day came that the memory of her, fictional or not, would cease to symbolize comfort and torment for him, it would be the day when his heart would lay as hard as a stone in his breast, still in his lifeless corpse. Then, he liked to hope, it would be Nikita, a bright angel who would carry him down into the writhing bowels of Hell. Surely, a just compensation for what he had done to her over and over again. Surely . . . he hoped.
And continually Michael questioned whether she had ever been real or simply imagined....
Then Michael would see Walter.
He had always admired Walter's ease with Nikita. The way the man could speak to her with such familiarity, such playfulness...
Walter grieved for Nikita. She had been a real, if misplaced symbol of goodness in his life, softening the jagged edges of his crusted soul. Making him smile, when Section told him that it was a wasted expression of insignificant emotion. Insignificant because he, like all the ghosts who haunted the halls of Section One, was not allowed to have it. Nikita sweet as sugar and tougher than nails, had reminded him of what it was to be alive.
Then Michael would see Birkoff.
Birkoff, who had bloomed like a flower trapped in the dark suddenly feeling the heat of the sun for the first time with Nikita, was someone whom Michael admired. Seymour had let himself grow under her care; something that Michael had never been allowed to let happen to himself ...
Frightened, angry -Seymour didn't know how to grieve. Nikita had been the only one who had ever made his life seem more like -a life. Coloring his stark existence with warmth and vivid humanity, she was the flame in the darkness. He did what he was supposed to do, now, to survive, but Seymour realized that the game he had made of it all was only a paltry facade that she had torn down with every defiance, every cry of agony, and every moment that she had suffered because of the betrayal and manipulation of her heart and mind. Nikita had breathed oxygen into his soul after Section had long ago suffocated it.
Seeing these two men, Michael could not deny her existence and the injustice of her past. And though he knew that Walter and Birkoff both blamed him for her absence, he at least knew, or feverishly hoped he knew, that she was free. Section couldn't hurt her anymore, he couldn't hurt her anymore, and that was the only balm on the searing pain of the wound that her going had torn within him.
Nikita was free ...
But he had been left behind.