38 Weeks: The Twenty-Sixth Week

A/N: Burn Notice romantic fluff with a side of angst. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Week Twenty-Six

It was becoming increasingly clear that going into hiding sooner rather than later was a good plan. They'd hit the point where Fi was undeniably pregnant, which meant enemies were likely to start popping up soon.

They were having lunch at the Carlito, where one of the waitresses had just told them someone had been asking about Mike, when Fi said, "Madrid?"

"I don't speak Spanish, Fi. New Orleans?"

"New Orleans... maybe. Same country, no language issues, plenty of corruption so we wouldn't be out of work long."

"I think part of the idea of running is to get into a new line of work so we don't end up with even more people hunting us."

"What could we do? I really doubt we'd be good at office work."

"Translation? I speak eight languages, and you speak, what, four?"

Fi's expression says exactly how likely that is. They'd both be bored to tears after two days of doing nothing but repeating someone else's words in a different language. 

"Legitimate security? Have companies hire us to break in and test what they do? It'd be safe and a bit boring, but we'd be good at it, it would pay well, and we wouldn't have to worry about drug dealers trying to kidnap Abby."

"Abby?"

Michael shrugs, he's been testing out baby names for a few weeks now, and Fi never knows what will come out of his mouth when he refers to their daughter. "Well, for this week, anyway."

"I still like Irene."

"Okay... Quebec?"

She sips her ice water. "Too cold. I might want to visit snow on occasion, but I don't want to live with it. Montenegro?"

"Still don't speak Spanish."

"How is it you were born and raised in Miami and can't speak Spanish?"

"Almost everyone here spoke English when I was a kid. And, it turns out, if you've got the kind of tongue that can handle Russian, Pashtun, Farsi, Japanese, Arabic, Urdu, and a little street Gaelic, you end up sounding like you're torturing a cat when you try to speak Spanish. The sounds just aren't the same."

Fi shrugs.

"Johannesburg?" Michael asks.

"South Africa?"

"Yeah. Good climate, they speak English, no one we know is there, and there's enough unrest that they'll want security people like us."

"How about here?"

"Fi...?"

"Stop looking at me like I'm insane. We'd make a big show of moving and keep some sort of residence wherever it is. But for the most part we'd just quietly live here. A new place. Probably not right in the middle of Miami."

"What would we do for work?"

And back to the same problem again.

Fi rested her hands on her belly. "I hate the fact that we basically have to stop being the good guys if we're going to raise this child. It's not supposed to work that way. You save the day, make the wrongs right, and then go home to your family."

Michael kissed her. They've been over it before, and will again. "We can meet with more adoptive parents."

"No. I hate the way they look at us, even more.  Like we're the answer to all their hopes and dreams, and I know we're just going to disappoint them."

He nods. Neither of them are good at having people stare at them like they're holding the lifeline that will make everything better, and then turn around and say, "Nope, can't help."

A thought hits. It's nicely warm, properly metropolitan, and people from all over the world go there. "How about Sydney?"

"I like Sydney."

Michael stares at Fi. "You've been there? What were you doing?"

"Nothing anyone will ever trace back to me." She swats his hand playfully. "I was just there for fun, as a tourist."

"Oh."

"Yeah, you know, some people do travel, just for the sake of seeing new places and eating new foods."

"How interesting." He's grabs his computer and begins typing Sydney into the search engine, starting to figure out if there might be anywhere they'd like to live in there.

Fi scoots her chair next to him, and turns the computer a little so she can see what he's bringing up. It's a picture of the harbor, gleaming water, the orchestra in the background. It looks like a nice place.

He staring in the direction of the screen, but not really seeing it. She squeezes his hand. "What are you thinking?"

"I don't want to be the sort of person who stopped doing what was right. I don't want to tell Abby about how we used to save people and make the world a better place, but then we stopped because it was too dangerous."

"Then let's not! We'll stay here. We'll save the day. We'll keep the baby. And sure, we'll be the insanely paranoid parents who are always looking over their shoulders, and we'll drive her crazy when we swoop in with a tactical retrieval team when she's ten minutes late coming home from school. But we aren't the only people in Miami with high-risk kids. And we aren't the only ones with enemies. We can do this."

"We'll never sleep again."

"Like we would have if we ran."