Maid Marian

by Raine Wynd

She shouldn't be here.

Here was the grave of a man who'd simply asked, "Really?" when she'd threatened to expose the whereabouts of his team to the military police who'd been chasing them for over a decade. Hannibal had called her bluff, then upped the ante, daring her to prove herself worthy of being on the team. For eighteen months, she had proved herself, in spades. Then, she'd left, taking the assignment of a lifetime, only to discover how much she'd missed the life she'd had. It hadn't been enough to read the news secondhand, to hear the snippets of adventure Tawnia told her, and even the postcards Murdock kept sending her had only been that: postcards from places she might never go with them, signed largely by Murdock, but sometimes someone's scrawl -- maybe Hannibal's, maybe BA's, she never was entirely sure -- would take up the page, or she'd get an actual paragraph written in Face's careful script.

Over the years, the postcards stopped. She changed employers and took increasingly more dangerous reporting assignments. A decade passed where her address of record was a post office box in LA, and her memories of being in the US were largely trips to renew her passport or settle various visa requirements, with the occasional stops for American fast food. She learned how to speak French, polished her Spanish, could curse in Russian and picked up conversational Arabic. She obtained a license to carry a weapon anywhere in the world to go along with the international driver's license that listed her name as Mandy Peck and the passport that said Mandy was Canadian. She was grateful to Face, BA, and Murdock for teaching her that sometimes the art of the bluff was more important than the bluff itself, that even in the best of circumstances one had to be prepared for everything to go to hell in a handbasket on a moment's notice, and especially to Hannibal, who took her aside one evening when they were on the road headed back to LA after a job down in Birmingham and taught her to shoot the biggest gun she'd ever held in her life.

He didn't do it so she could kill people; he was adamant in his explanation about gun safety and his objection to murder. He just wanted to be sure she could handle a .44 magnum pistol, saying that if she could handle the recoil of that, she could do anything. It had made her wrists hurt for days afterward, and there'd been a shouting match between BA and Hannibal about it, but in the end, Hannibal won. He'd been the leader, after all, and his word was final. There had been little that the team wouldn't have done for Hannibal.

After that, she hadn't been surprised when the rest of the team took turns teaching her something new. She learned how to con people, how to work a blowtorch, how to be crazy, how to inject sedatives, and how to lie to the US military with a straight face. She learned, too, how to live with her heart breaking every time she was away from the team, out of contact for fear that the military was tapping her phone lines. Most of all, she learned how to be addicted to the rush of danger, the thrill, the "jazz" as the team called it. It had led her away from the men she'd grown to love, men who wouldn't hesitate use some insane method that usually involved blowing up something using improvised weaponry to get their point across. In their own way, the A-Team saved her.

She hadn't wanted to take the assignment in Jakarta the first time. She'd told the team when they stopped for the night in a motel in some town off of Highway 101 in Missouri. Hannibal asked her to see about doing some laundry while they discussed it; in hindsight, she remembered she hadn't even hesitated at the suggestion. She'd simply gathered up the bags of laundry, rolled her eyes at Face's suggestion that she find a decent drycleaner's, ignored BA's usual comment about Face's choice of clothing, reassured Murdock that she wouldn't lose his favorite socks and that she'd take Billy out, and promised Hannibal that she'd be back in two hours.

Any shame or discomfort she'd had over doing the team's laundry had vanished the day the second trip she'd taken with them. The way they treated it, it was simply a fact of life on the road; someone had to, and if she wanted to be in on the action, she had to take her turn. So she washed laundry, and waited, and when everything was done, she went back to the motel, clean clothes in hand.

Hannibal and the others were waiting in the room she was sharing with Face when she arrrived (the motel had been nearly full, due to the fact that it apparently doubled as long-term residences.) They went through the routine of separating out which laundry bag of clothes belonged to whom, with the usual comments on small town laundrymats, and the equally usual comments on what to eat for dinner that night.

She'd been expecting Hannibal to say something; she could tell they'd reached a decision. But it wasn't until after they'd eaten -- in the Mexican restaurant that apparently was the only restaurant in the center of town -- and were headed back to the motel that she had any indication what the decision was.

Murdock stopped her before she entered the lobby of the hotel. "Can't you tell your bosses you want to stay?" he asked. "Tell them you have to watch Billy for me."

"I'm sorry, Murdock, I can't do that," she said gently. "They won't believe me if I don't actually have a dog with me."

"But he's real!" Murdock protested.

"Murdock," Hannibal said warningly.

Murdock looked at Hannibal, appeared about to protest, then slouched and pouted for a moment. Then he walked up right past her, calling out his invisible dog's name as if it had run ahead.

"Damn fool," BA muttered. "You'll be happier not having to listen to his nonsense anymore." Then he, too, was past her, clearly intending to rein in Murdock before he caused a bigger stir than he was.

"Or his," Face added. "BA!" he called, then sighed. "Why, oh why, do I have to spend my life trying to keep those two from killing each other?" he asked in a tone of aggreviation.

She chuckled at the familiar complaint, knowing it was simply part of the routine. For a moment, she ached at the thought of not hearing it anymore. "Better hurry," she advised, knowing that was her part of the routine.

Hannibal strode up to her, cigar smoke trailing behind him as he smoked the last of his cigar. They watched Face break up the impending argument, then shoo his teammates upstairs to their rooms. Then, he ground out the cigar and picked up the butt, tucking it in a pocket with the habit of long practice. Finally, he looked at her.

"Take the job, Amy," he told her. "You're not our Maid Marrian, and you deserve better than us."

"Hannibal," she started to argue, but he held up a hand.

"Let's just pretend we went through the whole 'you don't want to go, you're a great asset to the team' argument, shall we?" he suggested calmly. "We know that already, or else you would have left six months ago, when your boss offered you an assignment in New Zealand. Oh, yes, Face overheard you talking -- he's good at not saying anything when he needs to be, or haven't you noticed?" He waved a hand to underscore his words. "But the heat's only going to get worse for us, not better. The press you've been giving us has made you a target for the military, too. If you left now, you might still have a shot at a normal life -- one where the government isn't bugging your phones or tailing you in hopes of catching us."

He waited a moment, then added, "And there's enough regrets in the van without adding yours to them. How many years of this can you take, Amy, before it breaks you? We've been at it for seventeen years. We'll keep at it, too, until it kills us." More gently, he said, "Don't throw away your life for us. Please."

She swallowed hard, blinking back the tears. "And if I said it was my life to throw away?"

He reached out to her and drew her in, holding her close. For a long minute, he said nothing, just held her while she shuddered to control her tears. He so very rarely held anyone like this, and she knew, deep in her heart, that he was saying goodbye. "Then don't do it," he told her finally, releasing her and stepping back. "Don't make me order you away, Amy. You know you'll stay away just to spite me, so don't make me sedate you and put you on a plane back to LA with a note to your boss saying we now considered you to be a security risk."

Reluctantly, she agreed.

The next morning, she found herself waking up in her own apartment, groggy from sedative, dressed in the pajamas she'd been wearing to sleep in while on the road. She had a moment to curse Hannibal for his plans, Face for drugging her, Murdock for flying her, and BA for probably enjoying being able to get some revenge for the times she'd been the one with the needle and sedative. Then the headache kicked in, and she staggered towards the bathroom for some pain relief.

It was only later, when she went to find her purse, that she saw the card propped up against it. "Sorry for the drugs, but we wanted to be sure you got home without spending the rest of the trip arguing yourself into staying," it read in bold script. "Besides, we needed to get Murdock back for his therapy session." It was signed simply, "H."

Something told her that if she were to call either the van phone or Face's 'Vette phone, it better be because she needed the help, not because she was lonely and needed to talk. Something also told her that if she were to go looking for the A-Team, they'd find a way to bring her back to LA in much the same manner as she'd arrived. So, with a heavy heart, she took the job in Jakarta, then another in Australia, then yet another until she'd bounced around that side of the world so many times she'd learned to do time zone conversions in her head.

Consequently, she hadn't even been around when the A-Team's long-awaited pardons had come through. She'd been in one of the former Soviet republics -- she knew the name, but they'd still be former Soviet republics in her head -- following up a lead on a story about something she'd thought terribly important at the time. She'd read the story on the wire, then called Tawnia to congratulate her on getting the byline. She'd ended up talking to a very sloshed Hannibal instead until Face had come on the line, apologizing for his superior's inebriation, and saying that unlike the other members of his team, he was completely sober. Then Murdock had grabbed the phone, and called Face a liar, and then she'd heard BA's familiar roar for Murdock to shut up, fool. For a moment, Amy felt like she was a part of their lives again, as if nothing had ever happened, and indeed, she'd managed to help them out with one more mission before she'd been called back to her job, her life. They'd been impressed with her abilities, teased her about what she knew, and been grateful when her improvised Molotov cocktails had helped save the day.

Flash forward a handful of more years, and she was in Algiers, interviewing someone who claimed to know a guy who knew a guy who knew where the infamous missing weapons of mass destruction had vanished to, and she'd gone back to her hotel, frustrated because the guy had only wanted to talk about his glory days in World War II to someone from North America. She was getting ready for bed, checking her voicemail on her cell phone as she always did before calling it a night, when she heard a voicemail she hadn't expected to hear.

"The guys are wondering where you are. Hannibal's dead. He's being buried with honors in a national cemetary in Houston," Tawnia said, sounding frantic. "Amy, I don't know where the hell you've gone, but...please, come home. I can't deal with the guys on my own; my husband's starting to ask me if I slept with them and I can't explain how it is. Murdock's freaking me out -- he says you're in danger in the mountains and he's begging Face for a plane and BA's all pissed. Oh, God, you know how it goes with them and with Hannibal gone I don't know if Face can keep a lid on them and Frankie's -- oh, you don't know about Frankie, but Frankie helped them after I left to get married and the military arrested him for it -- anyway, Frankie's pissed too because he's not allowed per his parole to be anywhere near them which means he can't be in the funeral and I can't deal with all of them, not alone. Please, please, if you get this message, call me at 555-555-555."

That had been four days ago.

With a sigh, Amy laid the flowers she'd brought onto the grave, and turned to face the woman whose call had brought her here. Somehow, she wasn't too surprised to find Face standing there instead.

"He would have been touched you came," Face said quietly as she closed the distance between them.

"What about you?" she challenged.

For a moment, she thought for sure he'd act in that old self-depreciating routine of which he was fond. Then the mask slipped, and she knew she was looking at the man behind the nickname. "I've missed you," he admitted. "When we stopped running, we did exactly that: we stopped, and had time to think about how many times we nearly killed each other." He offered her a quick, self-mocking smile. "Which, if we don't get back to the van soon, BA may well succeed in doing to Murdock."

"Hannibal was your glue. He made you guys work together."

"Yeah, well," Face said, sticking his hands in the pockets of his slacks, "that was something he was good at. You were always better at making sure we didn't squabble like ten-year-old boys."

Amy smiled. Some things in life were easier to slide back into than others, she thought, and decided that she'd worry about the fact she was thinking in accented English later. "Oh, so now I'm your mother?" she teased, taking the arm Face gallantly offered as they walked back to the van.

"No," Face corrected her, "you're a part of the team."

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