Want

I. Michael

You want your old job back. You want all this Burn Notice shit to just end – you want people to know that it wasn't you that did all those things, that you aren't a traitor or a terrorist or a thief; you just want to be Michael Westen, superb, reliable agent again.

You want the simplicity of before, with all the different parts of your life in their neat, separate boxes. You want the simplicity of having a mission to do, and doing it, and getting sent out on another, without all the questions of who you are, and why you do what you do, and what for. You want your patriotism, the way it could wrap around and explain away and justify so much of what you did and didn't do, the way you could use it to push away guilt when you had to kill a man or when you dodged one of your mother's calls. You want the tactical support, the easy money and supplies and intel that being official gave you.

You want to sit in Dan's office and laugh over jokes and share your sardonic little observations about some operative or mission which he appreciated so well, even if he was your handler now, your superior (you'd trained together, years back, but he'd been recruited older and was as cut out for a desk job as you were repulsed by the very thought). You want the fourteen hour flights, the bad foods, the necessity of switching between three different languages in a two hour timeframe, the stays in five star hotels, the ease with which you bought your fancy suits.

You want Fiona, here with you, in your arms, in your bed, fighting with you, shooting at you, trying to punch you, backing you up, making bombs, in Belfast and Berlin and Miami even, anywhere, always. You want to run away from that want for fear that it will consume both of you.

You want all of these arrogant bastards to stop trying to use you. You want them to stop thinking that they can play with you. You want them to stop thinking that they can just take what they want from you, that they can rip your life apart and threaten your family, the people you love most, and get away with it. You want to figure out exactly what the hell is going on so that you can deal with the situation, so that you can put them all in their place, which would as far out of your life as possible.

You want, sometimes, not to have to do another job. You want the time and space to figure out your own problems, which are somehow never as simple and easy as solving everyone else's. You want to say no, really say no and just walk away, but you can't, because you know that they need help, that someone needs to deal with whatever the issue is properly and that if you don't nobody else will and you can't do that to them, not when ask you like that, you just can't.

You want your mother to stop smoking like a chimney; you want her to stop calling you over for the most inconsequential things, even though you know why she really does it. You want your brother to succeed with this business of his, to really get his life together this time, even though you fear that he won't.

You want to let Sam enjoy his retirement with had lady-friends and his booze, even though you suspect he enjoys doing these jobs with you as much as anything else. It lets him stay in the game, after a fashion; there's a kind of thrill to the challenge of these things that for any half-decent operative is as strong a draw as any addiction.

You want something to do, something to analyze and plan, something to focus on so that you don't have to be alone with your thoughts, so that you don't have to dwell on all the things you have seen and done and all the things that were done to you. You don't want to have to think of your father every time you need to get something out of your mom's garage, or think of old missions best forgotten every time some old (or 'dead') associate drops into town. You want some decent equipment to work out on when you need to clear your thoughts.

Sometimes, you just want an ice cold blueberry yogurt after a dangerous mission or a tough job or a long day.