Disclaimer: everything belongs to SJC; just borrowing.

Author's notes: This fic is a re-write of a very, VERY old one. Which I didn't even have a copy of any more and found by Googling my own stories. And which I didn't like the basic premise of when I read it again - it just didn't really work, to me, any longer - but had stuff I could use.

Eldridge had a nasty little potted plant on his desk, which he was watering from a paper cup, but when he glanced up to see Amy in the doorway, he stopped, and returned it to the top of the filing cabinet. Zach had been right when he'd passed on the message; he didn't look to be in the best of moods. Best to jump right on in, she decided; rush this thing through while we're still civil. Throwing in a little flattery was never a bad idea.

"Grant, I honestly do appreciate this. I know I got in close to the deadline - but it was just so important. High-up corruption in the Sheriff's Department. This is a real citizen's interest story! And the A-Team being involved just makes it -"

Eldridge turned back to her, holding up one hand, cutting into her sentence with the gesture. "Makes no difference."

"Come on, Grant! Since when did a front page column make no difference?"

"That's what I hauled you in here about. We're going to have to pull the story."

All the words that Amy had had so carefully planned out; the speech she'd been ready to give him, froze and died in her throat. For a minute, she just stood there, blinking at him. Finally, she recovered something of the English language. "What?" she managed to say.

"I'm sorry," Eldridge added.

Amy drew herself up. Her jaw very, very lightly tensed as she tried to keep her emotions level, she asked, "Are you going to give me a reason this time?"

He handed her a sheet of paper.

Amy looked down at the draft copy and back up again. "Jake Landers... the soap actor? Mr. Phony Enigmatic Smile and 'Hey, being so famous is really boring'? You're running this instead?"

"Saved some girl from drowning down at Venice beach."

"Oh, Grant, come on! I read that trash when it came off the wire. The water was three feet deep! What are you running here, a newspaper or the National Enquirer?"

"He's popular. Anything with his name on gets readers." Just barely perceptibly, the editor shrugged. "It's what the public likes. Their clean-cut centerfold boy coming out a hero. Gives them something to feel good about, hold their heads up and be proud of their country's own."

"My story was about real heroes!"

"Military fugitives on the run from the US government doesn't stand right under the Captain America banner, does it?" Eldridge leaned on his desk, and ran a hand across his brow. Suddenly, he looked a little weary. "Look. I've given you a free rein with this little crusade of yours. God knows there's already been things printed that's gotten a few question marks after all our names at the Pentagon. I'm talking delicate stuff here, Allen! Articles coming out in favor of wanted criminals, showing the military in a bad light. That's risky stuff to be running on the local press, let alone a city paper! Maybe you should be thanking your guardian angel you've still got a career. And if you want to further that career with this paper, or anyplace else, you're going to have to wise up."

"Wise up?" Amy inquired, her tone laced - to the best of her abilities - with sarcasm.

"Yeah. Take what space you're given to play with and say thankyou. And don't ever start expecting your personal causes to be the number one on my agenda!"

"Grant -"

"Forget it!"

For a minute, they were squared up across six feet of carpet. Then Amy said, her words dropping into the silence, "Is that all?"

"That's all."

"Then I guess I'll be going," said Amy. Taking the draft copy of the A-Team's first and only front page from under her arm, she put the folder on Eldridge's desk. "Read it, Grant," she said, facing the editor. "It's all about three guys who were rejected by their country. But instead of becoming crooks, or
terrorists, they chose to help it. Just a little here and a little there, and all those little things added up to a whole lot of grateful Americans. Makes a wonderful story." And she turned around and walked out of the room.

"Hey, wait up!" Tawnia followed on Amy's heels as she headed for the door with her purse and jacket. "Are you leaving now? Amy, you didn't even pick up your flowers!" she lamented.

Amy paused with a short sigh. "I forgot. Will you help me carry some of this?"

"Yeah, let me get my stuff, okay, and I'll walk down with you. My boyfriend's picking me up in ten minutes."

Amy waited beside her desk, absently plucking the odd petal off one of the narcissi that had turned up at the office. The little white card with the delivery company's logo on didn't have any names, but did say, Sorry about the car. Face would be the one to make the flamboyant gesture, but she'd have liked to think that Hannibal had a soft spot somewhere. At least they did appreciate her sacrifices.

Eldridge said that people wanted to read about knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress. They were still out there, if you went searching, but most people didn't recognize them when they saw them, just because their suits needed a polish. The knights didn't care. They went right on killing dragons anyway. But she cared. A whole lot.

"So what's wrong?" asked Tawnia, as the two girls descended the stairs, carrying
flowers and groceries between them. "Don't tell me Eldridge had a problem with your story again?"

"Well, I guess he did," said Amy, through lightly gritted teeth, "seeing as how he just pulled it."

"Oh, I'm real sorry!"

"Tawnia, will you answer me a question? And I want the truth."

"You got it."

"You know you're the only one who I've really talked to about this... working with the A-Team and everything, I mean. Elaine means well, but she's got a bigger mouth than my sister. And do you think I'm wasting my time trying to build a career on the back of these stories?"

The other girl's neat brows puckered. "I'm not sure," she finally decided to say.

"Neither am I," Amy admitted.

"But, Amy, I do know it's something you have to decide. You should kind of listen to your heart, I think. Then everything works out in the end."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence!"

They both laughed a little, ironically, as they crossed the lobby and stepped outside. The afternoon was heavy and humid, but the breeze coming in from the bay was still pleasant after the recycled air of the building. Along the parking lot, Amy opened up the rental car's door, and they deposited the flowers on the back seat.

"Now you take care, huh?" said Tawnia. "I have a couple days vacation, and then we'll do lunch over the weekend. Take in a movie or something?"

"Sounds pretty good."

"You okay?"

"Yeah. I'm fine. I'll call you."

Sliding into the seat, feeling the vinyl tacky-warm against her legs, Amy tugged the car door shut behind her. She'd been so optimistic about the day when she'd set out that morning. It was hard to believe how quick her spirits seemed to have taken a nosedive.

She played the radio while she drove, deliberately avoiding anything Top Forty and tuning back to a news broadcast. Crime and murder and world famine, that was what she needed right now. Make her feel there was somebody worse off than her, somewhere. She had a house, a paycheck, and a hell of a lot more adventure than most twenty-something year old women. But she was still pushing, going onwards and upwards looking for that horizon; that real breakthrough, getting more dissatisfied every time she took a step forward only to take another two back. Amy wanted to feel complete. Like she'd done the best and been the best and she was never going to need to be any more than she was at that moment in time.

She was so wrapped up and hunkered down in her thoughts, so on automatic pilot, that she almost missed the turn off for Wilshire Boulevard, and the car behind her honked as she slowed too abruptly. Stopping by the VA after work was another duty in a way, but on the days that she did it, it never felt like one. It was the ultimate test. If Murdock couldn't make her laugh again today, then she'd know she was a hopeless case.

The hospital in Westwood was fronted by lawns and trees. It was a pleasant approach that belied the function of the psychiatric unit, and Amy always felt a strange little tug inside of her seeing the grilles and locks on the doors inside, the subtle yet perpetual tension of the orderlies prepared to not only nurse, but physically restrain if necessary. "I'm visiting," she said at the desk, "Captain HM Murdock?" and as she was escorted down the hall past the line of rooms all the same, she thought, for the hundredth time, Murdock shouldn't be in this place. He doesn't belong here. Yet he did seem to think of it as home, albeit a dysfunctional one. There was always that faint look of relief hanging about him when they took him back after a mission, to his safe place where he didn't have any more responsibilities for a while, or have to make any more decisions; a place where there was only now, and the moment after.

Murdock's latest thing was calling Amy his girlfriend. Not all the time; not in front of the other guys. But since one of the new nurses had gotten suspicious and on her case about exactly who she was and why she was at the hospital so much, and Amy had told her on the spur of the moment that she was Captain Murdock's girlfriend, right outside of the room where he could hear it, she'd been his darlin', his sugar, his honeybunch, or any one of a whole string of pet names and endearments that eventually settled down into just muchacha or chiquita again.

It was only after he stopped teasing her each time that she always realized that she'd liked it. She liked that about him; how he was unpretentious and unpredictable, and she never quite knew what she was going to find when she arrived. It buoyed her. Sometimes Amy thought that she'd forgotten how to play, but Murdock always reminded her.

She knocked on the half-open door lightly, and looked around it to find him lying on top of the sheets on his belly, engrossed in a re-run of The High Chapparal on TV. When she opened her mouth to say hi, he immediately tsked at her, and held up an index finger in the gesture for wait. Politely, Amy waited, arms folded, until the closing theme played. Murdock continued to stare at the screen for another minute or so, as if making absolutely sure there was nothing more coming. Then he rolled onto his back and swung his feet off of the bed.

"Everything turn out okay?" Amy enquired.

"Oh, yeah. Victoria got rescued. I already knew how it finished."

"Then why did you want to watch the end?"

"I wanted to see it happen," Murdock explained, as though this ought to be obvious. Moving to stand in front of her, he considered her for a moment, head tilted.

"Come on, then, sweetheart," he said, "gimme a hug."

She blinked at him. "Why?"

"'Cause when you walked in here, you looked like you were looking for one."

Amy let him squeeze her as hard as he liked, enjoying the fresh-minty scent of gum and the warmer, more base smell underneath it that was just him. She wondered if he got hugged as often as he really wanted to be. Suddenly she felt strongly as though she didn't get anything like enough of it herself.

"So," he said, "you wanna tell me why you look like you got run down by a trailer truck? And smile!" he added, as if with a sudden afterthought. "You don't smile around here, and they think you haven't taken your medication!"

Amy told him about the story being dropped while he made sympathetic noises. Nobody had really said very much one way or another, but they all knew how much she'd had riding on this. Her eye for a scoop got her into trouble on occasions, but Amy had the feeling that she was being taken at least halfway seriously now, even by Hannibal. If the paper shared his opinions, she'd be set.

"Sometimes I think I should just do exactly what Eldridge says - forget it. Move back to San Diego. Get married! Work in a grocery store!"

Murdock drew back a little. "You been saying things like that a lot lately. And it's starting to sound like you might mean it."

"Maybe I do." Amy let her arms slip from around his shoulders, and he immediately picked up on the cue, releasing her, but still remaining close. She tried to set her jaw, but it didn't really have the effect that she wanted it to, and when she glanced up again and caught the look on his face, she found herself sighing instead. "Okay, maybe I don't. I don't know any more. Should I just be doing whatever I have to, and writing whatever junk I have to, to get a foot in the door?"

"Doesn't sound like you to me. Does it sound like you to you?"

"No," she admitted.

"You got to find your own mojo. Ya know what I mean? You got to listen to that beat inside of you and keep dancing along. Nobody can take that away from you. It's yours. When you roll with it, everything just comes right along and drops into your lap, 'cause there's no way you can get it wrong."

"My friend Tawnia said something like that, when I asked her the same thing."

Murdock nodded, approvingly. "She understands the jazz."

"I thought the jazz was more like playing Russian roulette."

"Chica, when you're on the jazz, somebody else might've loaded the bullets, but you always know whether to spin the barrel or just take the next shot."

Against the odds, Amy could feel herself starting to smile. "How do you always know exactly what to say to me?" she asked.

"Oh, that's easy." A matching grin split his face. "I just say what you're already thinking."

When she hugged him again, he hid something away in her hair which might have been a kiss and might not, but a little voice inside her told her not to think too much about it, in case she ended up being disappointed. "You hear anything?" he said, after a while, against her ear.

"All I hear is the air con."

"You sure?" Murdock shifted against her, and she felt him begin to sway; just a gentle switching of his weight from one foot to other, catching her up in the momentum. "I could swear I hear music. Something real sweet. Makes you feel like dancing close with a pretty girl."

"Murdock, you're crazy."

"You know, I think I remember the doctor saying something about that this morning." He stepped off, taking Amy with him as he moved across the room, as easy as breathing; as natural as the laughter welling up inside her. She could have danced with him forever; gone on feeling the comforting pressure of his arms around her and the steady rise and fall of his chest against hers. "Keep listening to it," he instructed her. "Keep rolling with it." If Amy listened hard, she thought she could hear him humming, low down in his throat. She couldn't quite figure out what the song was, but it was already one of her favorites.