Nikita:

I kissed him.

I couldn’t help myself. I had to do it.

What he did for me, what he risked for me, it astounded me.

It was the kindest, most loving action he had ever shown me.

And I had to kiss him.

Looking back, I’ve realized, over these past few years, how much Michael truly has done for me. I don’t always like admitting that. I mean, hell, the feelings that I have had to live through when I realized the deceptions and the lies and the omissions, they tore me apart, scarred me up, in some ways more than the streets ever did. I could live with what the streets did to me, it was impersonal, it was anybody, it was never directed at me.

Living through the pain the one person you love causes you is a lot harder to deal with, even if in the end, their intentions are good.

The end justifies the means, the unwritten but prevalent code of Section 1.

Michael has done a lot for me, but even with everything he has done, I’ve always had a sense that it wasn’t entirely all for me. Even after the Shays mission, when he gave me my life and my freedom, I’ve come to realize that he did it partly for himself also. He couldn’t live in a world that didn’t have me in it.

I love him for that. I felt -feel- the same way. Anyone but him, and I would be dead by my own hand right now.

Anyone but him.
Still, nothing was purely for me.
But this time…

They would have killed her, my mother. They would have killed her without a second thought. To anyone looking, she was nothing. A recovering alcoholic, an ex-junkie, an ex-whore, whose daughter was a murderer and committed suicide in prison. There was nothing about her that would make anyone care if she lived or died. Sometimes I almost didn’t care if she lived or died.

Michael could have tried to remind me of my life before, what my mother had done to me. I had told him something of my mother once, after a mission where I had to pretend to be a woman’s daughter, pretend to be Helen’s daughter. She thought I was her daughter, and she gave up her life to protect mine. I told him my mother would have let them keep beating me….. my mother would have let me die.

My mother, the mother I knew growing up, would have.

Michael could have tried to make me see that. He could have talked only of the risks. He could have given me that blank stare and told me to let it go, Nikita, like he had done so many times in the past.

He saved my mother, and in doing so he helped heal me, bringing light into the darkest place in my heart, lifting a burden that had existed in me for so long that I couldn’t have even imagined my life without it.

My mother and I waltzing. That memory cannot take away all the ones before and after, the ones of abuse and neglect, of hunger and the cruelty of the other children. Of my mother’s indifference, which was somehow worse than all the other horrors combined.

Now though, I have one memory, one good and beautiful memory where none had existed before. It is that memory, combined with the power of my mother’s words to me, which makes all the difference.

My mother loved me, I have proof of that in both words and actions, and I can face all the other memories because I have the knowledge of that love. If my mother had been stronger, maybe I would have had that fairy tale existence I had always dreamed of. Because for that life to exist, you need love, and she did love me.

Michael gave me that memory.

He gave it purely. There was nothing to benefit him. There was nothing to benefit Section. This gift is mine alone.

Mine to treasure, to hide away deep inside me, not letting anyone else come too close to it for fear that they would try to destroy it. Mine to take out and examine on those cold nights where I am numb almost to my soul, and let the power of it warm me again.

I kissed him.

I wish I always could.

Michael:

She kissed me.

It happened so quickly, I barely had time to register it before it was over. It was one of those incidents where the small details, the sensations and the feelings, come to you as you are remembering it, reliving it, rather then when it first happens.

She kissed me, and then a hint of a smile touched on that perfect mouth, fleeting, yet undeniably there.

She walked out of my office, but still she looked back at me through the window, almost as if she couldn’t help herself, almost as if she was seeing me in an entirely new way.

The kindest thing…
If only she knew, if only she realized.

I would do anything for her… I have done anything for her. For no one else have I risked so much, schemed so much. I would have been cancelled a hundred times over if the true extent of my disloyalty had ever been found out.

I use my position as ruthlessly as Operations has ever used his, to protect her, to give her whatever I can. I have sacrificed the lives of other operatives to keep her alive. I now play this game of power and control in Section, because I must reach the highest levels of authority here, so no one can ever question me about her, so I can keep her in the safest places possible.

Yet, I don’t do these things entirely for her.

In my selfishness, I do them for me.

It is very simple. I can not endure without her.

She is not the other part of me. She is, instead, the very center of me, the core without which nothing else exists, nothing else functions. Parts of me have been damaged with the other losses that I have suffered, but as long as she remains, I can survive with that damage.

Without her, everything else dies. Without her, there is no me.

If Section had cancelled her mother, a large segment of her soul would have shriveled away and died.

My beautiful Nikita… what would I do if I ever looked into your eyes and saw only emptiness?

I did not do it out of kindness for her.
I did it for the survival of me.
She kissed me.
I wish she always could.