Early Birthday Wishes

[catch22girl]

(Icon from cinesister in case I haven't used it before)

A huge happy birthday and best wishes and good luck in the next year to beautifulcynic!
HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
And here's some birthday fic.

Title: A Little Bit of Sunshine
Author: catch22girl
Fandom: 24
Rating: R
Pairing: Michelle/Tony
Spoilers: Post season two
Summary: Sometimes life is more than fair.
Disclaimer: Characters aren't mine and the title is from Chicago.

For Beautiful Cynic (Jen). Happy Birthday, hope there are many more and that you
get everything you want.

Sometimes, it is hard not to smile.

Tony looks out the window and sees Michelle lost in monitoring, her fingers flying over the keyboard. Without looking he knows she's biting her lip slightly and her eyes are narrowed in concentration. Her legs are crossed and he knows that she has a cut right above her ankle from a shaving experiment gone awry.

He smiles and thinks about how life is finally fair.

Then, she turns around and grins broadly, and life suddenly isn't just fair, it's miraculous.

Sometimes, it is hard not to wonder.

Michelle lies against Tony, feels him breathe against her cheek, and needs to know about what happened before they met, before that terrible beautiful awful day that brought them together. Nina Myers had escaped custody a few days earlier and they'd been working to find her without any success. Tony, however, seems obsessed with finding her, making her wonder if maybe those scars never really healed.

"How serious were you and…" she begins, but the words get caught in her throat, and suddenly she doesn't want to know.

He never talks about Nina, someone who she began to think of as her polar opposite, but how to reconcile that with the proof that at one time, he was involved with her too.

She'd seen her in the room, all sharp angles and cruel smirks and could not figure out what Tony had seen in her, but at that point she had no right to ask or even really wonder.

He looks away, almost ashamed and then cups her face with his hand. "I only thought I loved her." He says, and she grabs his other hand, holding it tightly. He squeezes back and then wraps his arm around her. "I knew I was wrong the first time you kissed me."

"We're not to going to find her, are we?" She whispers against his neck.

"I still haven't told Jack," he admits softly.

She looks up quickly, her eyes widened in surprise, "You have to tell him. He has to know that she's escaped."

"I wish that I didn't know!" He sits up slightly and then lies back down. "He finally has his life in order, he's happy, Michelle, and I can't ruin that…not after what he's been through."

She sees his expression and knows exactly what he means. But, this isn't the place for this conversation and she wants to keep work out of bed. There's also something about the way he's holding her, and the look in his eyes that makes her want to stop talking, and not start again until daylight.

Using his chest for leverage she raises herself up and kisses him, feeling that familiar shiver through her body. His arm tightens around her, and they're wearing too many clothes. His boxers are too thick, her sleep shirt, like a sweater and she removes his boxers, sliding back up his body.

She licks down his from his neck; enjoying the feel of his chest against her lips and the beating of his heart almost matches hers. The satin of her shirt slips against him, and she sits up and pulls it off quickly, and thinks about how even after months he still has this effect on her. At the office sometimes she has the urge to run upstairs and push him down on the desk, and have her way with him. She laughs softly against his stomach at the shocked expressions of her coworkers in her mind.

"Michelle?" He asks.

She feels him already erect against her chest and she looks up after a moment, "I was just imagining Division's reaction if we ever actually closed the blinds to your office and took some us time." She grins widely, and he laughs slightly.

She kisses down his stomach, feels his muscles contract under her fingers and his laughter stops quickly.

His hands are in her hair, and she looks up again to see that his eyes are closed tightly.

"Tony…for right now, for tonight, lets pretend that Nina hasn't escaped, and we don't have to go back to finding her tomorrow. Just…let me make you feel better," She places a soft open mouthed kiss on his left hip and growls softly.

"Okay," he moans.

Mine, she thinks as she caresses him.


Sometimes, it is impossible to forget the past

"She's in that building, sir." The agent says to Tony, and even now it's hard to get used to being called sir, and not his name. It's cold outside, and the leaves have been swept away from the path. This is her hiding place, and he wanted to talk to her before she was transferred back to prison. He's learned that she brings disaster with her.

He's decided to handle the interrogation himself, but knowing that Michelle will be listening is comforting. Knowing that he will hold her hand and go back to their apartment afterwards is enough to get him through the afternoon.

Nina's sitting in the living room on her couch, her hands cuffed in front of her and the look she gives him reminds him of the way she used to look late at night when they were trying to break a code -- it was a look of annoyance and exhaustion.

She is tired and the knowledge surprises him. Her hair is longer and her hands are covered in little cuts. There's swelling around her eye and she's almost docile as she sits and waits for him to speak.

"Nina," Trying to be cold and distant, because he still doesn't hate her and that frightens him. Even with Michelle listening, even though he loves her and trusts her, his body still remembers the way Nina touched his face and the feel of her skin under his lips. She was gentle, he was in control and he knows now that was just a ploy to get him to believe that she was harmless and innocent.

"So, you're the new boss of CTU," she says, unimpressed.

"Why did you escape?"

She shrugs slightly, "I wasn't supposed to get caught." A flash of a smile and she visibly straightens, eyes suddenly alert.

"Who do you really work for?"

"Isn't that Jack's line? Listen, Tony, we both know you're not good at this,"

"I've changed, Nina, so why don't you tell us, what were you planning?" He's closer to her now.

"I'm not in touch with my old contacts anymore," she says, looking down at her hands and although he knows what she is, he steps closer to her, and it almost seems impossible that the woman sitting and staring at him is the same one who used to wipe off all her lipstick before opening her door because she didn't want to ruin his shirt.

He blames himself, but it's a different kind of guilt, a distant one, because, no one he loved got hurt, just himself. But he knew, he always knew, that they were casual, a rebound from the start and if he just could have resisted, could have had enough self respect to not return her grin, to not want to touch her, well, maybe things would have been different.

She's waiting for him to speak again.

"We both know that you're more dangerous than your contacts,"

She laughs and almost falls off the couch.

"That just shows how little you really know. They may have made you CTU Director, but you didn't earn it, you just got it by default. So tell me, how does it feel to be one of Chappelle's lapdogs?"

Her tone is pure malice, she wants to injure and draw blood.

"There's a reason he's not here now."

"I bet you wish you had the balls to kill me, but that's why you're just a lapdog; you don't have Jack's natural talent."

"Would you rather have him here?"

Nina looks horrified, close to tears and for a moment he wants to reach out and comfort her, and does reach his hand towards her lap, wondering if she'll respond better to kindness. Even after all the dead bodies, he still believes that he's seen her true personality somewhere along the way.

She smiles and is suddenly standing, her arms wrapped around his neck, a gun in her hand.

"I need to get out of the country, you understand," she whispers and drags him towards the back door. He thinks that he could overpower her, but she's a fast shooter and so he goes along quietly, figuring she won't shoot him if he doesn't know too much about her plans. She tends to kill people who figure her out.

"I'm not going to fight you," he tells her as they slip into her car.

"If Jack was here, I'd have to kill him…but you won't come after me, will you?" She looks at him, waiting for an answer, but she's slightly desperate.

"No," Tony says, and all he wants is to see Michelle again. So this is what it feels like, he thinks, to live for someone else. He starts the car and drives off and doesn't care about the agents following them, he only wants to get out of it alive.

"They didn't check the car," she laughs and gets a key from under the seat.

"They'll catch you at the airport," He says, although if anyone could escape, it's her.

"I don't think so, they don't really want to catch me," she says, and reaches up to her hair. Suddenly, she's a blonde, and the agents are still far behind them.

He's silent, looking at the gun in her lap, wondering if she'll shoot him anyway.

"If I hadn't gotten away, they would have raided and no one would have survived," she says.

Tony looks at Nina, unable to believe he heard her correctly.

"You should have arrived a few hours later." She says casually.

He drives but isn't really paying attention anymore.

"This is my stop," she says after an hour. "I'll get out, just slow the car down."

He thinks it must be terrible to live like her, but, she touches his hand and he remembers how he used to confide in her, and how her hand felt in his, delicate but not fragile. He remembers being surprised by the first handshake, and the way she was unafraid to stand up to anyone. He looks at the damaged but somehow still beautiful blonde about to jump out of the car and still can't hate her.

"Just keep driving and you'll never have to see me again," she smiles slightly but there's some kind of emotion in her words that he hadn't expected, had never even considered.

There's regret.

"I would have let you hold me," she says as a motorcycle slides next to them and she opens the door and gets onto the back. They're gone across a grassy field and she's holding onto a man he doesn't recognize.

He keeps driving, unable to say why he isn't stopping and waiting for the agents, but he's tired and he's too far away to hear Michelle's voice, but he drives until he sees mountains, and his mind is blank.

He's above reproach, but a tiny part of him wanted to grab for her, to say, take me with you, and then he remembers Michelle's perfume and the feel of her curls against his cheek and is brought back to reality.

Later, he arrives back at CTU and tries not to look at anyone as he makes his way to his office.



Sometimes it is important to look to the future

Michelle runs to Tony when he opens the door and holds him tightly. He strokes her hair and wonders how he could have ever thought of leaving.

"She let you go," she whispers against his chest and breathes against him because she doesn't care what anyone thinks and his heart beats against her and he's alive.

And she kisses him and he tastes like exhaustion and stale air but she doesn't mind because she never got that close to losing him before, after all, director of CTU wasn't always a field position.

She wipes away the tears on her face and backs them up to the desk.

"I've closed the blinds," she says unnecessarily and licks her lips.

He shakes his head, "I still need to be debriefed. I just had to see you. I told Chappelle…" And she kisses him again and holds his hand in hers.

"We'll continue this at home," he says and she blushes slightly, and loves that he can still have that effect on her, just the way he looks at her, and the sound of his voice still can thrill her.

"I'll go find out what's going on in the field, maybe they have a lead…" And she wants nothing more than to pull him out of the office, but, it doesn't work that way, and they knew that after the first kiss. She heard Nina's whisper and knew that he was in trouble but she was unable to do anything.

"Michelle, there was nothing you could have done,"

"She's killed or helped to kill so many people, I should have done something."

This time he hugs her, and she feels the line of his back and kisses the side of his neck.

"At home," he repeats as he lets her go.

"At home," she says and walks downstairs, unable to stop beaming, unable to feel anything but lucky.

He opens the blinds and looks down at her and she turns around and watches him.

To her, life isn't just fair, it is miraculous.