A/N... Hello again! :) I know I should be working on 'Love's to Blame, but this story's been sitting around for a while, and I figured maybe someone might enjoy it. This picks up a few days before graduation, the night before the girls (and Zach) have to make the final decision on who they'll be working for. So... Happy reading!

"Don't let the fear become the hate; don't take the sadness to the grave.

I know the fight is on the way when the sides have been chosen...

So tell me you're strong, tell me you see.

I need to hear it. Can you promise me...

Show me your fire, show me your heart. You know I'll never let you fall apart."

~NEEDTOBREATHE

I shuffled through the pamphlets spread out across my duvet for what was probably the seventh time that hour. (Well, actually it was the ninth, but only Liz would count.) I swear, each time I looked at them again, they changed. Looked a little more menacing and... Well... Final.

I looked up, glancing at the lovely ladies that had become closer than sisters to me over the years, and a pang of sadness swept through me. It was almost over. All of it—what my life had become—was almost gone.

Three days.

Three days was all we had left.

I watched as Liz bit her lip and pounded her laptop's keys a little harder than usual (which, considering that Liz is... Well... Liz... Meant that the pounding wasn't very hard at all). She seemed to be working even harder than usual on her senior thesis, which only meant one thing. She was holding back tears.

Of all of us, all of the girls (well... and Zach) of the Gallagher Academy's Senior Class, Liz was the only one who had dared express the feeling coursing through all of our veins. Everyday at dinner that week, she had sobbed into her creme brûlée. (Much to Zach's dismay, because while he normally ate her leftovers, he refused to eat those with a high probability of being covered in snot.)

Seeing Lizzie so close to tears yet again nearly made me cry myself, so I looked away quickly.

Macey was painting her toenails a deep shade of purple, flipping through the newest issue of Cosmo as if nothing was different about that week at all, and Bex was sitting on her bed staring at the wall. She looked like she was on another planet.

I'm sure she was thinking about choosing just like I was. Whether or not to follow in the footsteps of her parents; wondering if it would be the best decision to accept her role as a MI6 prodigy. I was feeling the same way. We could either accept our parents' expectations and embrace them, or set out on a new adventure to define ourselves without such pressures and obligations.

The latter did, in essence, sound much more appealing. The only problem was that Bex and I were both very obligation-driven people. I guess that was what was making the decision so difficult for the both of us.

Liz was decided; she was accepting FBI Intelligence's offer, totally okay with the concept of sitting behind a desk all day (once they pulled out the cookies at her interview, she was sold. Note: obtain sample of FBI director's chocolate chip morsels and test for any signs of a lace of Dr. Fibs's new persuasion serum).

Macey was still hanging in the balance between accepting the CIA's offer and having to explain the whole your-daughter's-really-a-spy thing to her parents or going on to attend Yale (Note: Further investigations proved that Preston Winters also has applied and accepted early-admission offers from Yale for the upcoming fall semester. The Operatives (Baxter, Sutton, and Morgan) found this to be very suspicious). Despite our protests that she already has learned everything they could possibly teach her, she seems intent on at least considering the idea of the Ivy League.

And Zach... Well... No one really knew anything certain about Zach anymore.

But one thing was certain. We only had three more days.

And we only had 12 hours to choose what the rest of our lives would be like.

I didn't even like the thought of making such a decision, much less like knowing that it was imminent and would most likely be permanent.

After shuffling through the brochures once again— CIA, MI6, FBI, Interpol, and every other possibility for a student as "extraordinary" as the daughter of Rachel and Matthew Morgan would "have to be"—I finally couldn't take the shared silence any longer.

I needed a silence of my own.

Abruptly, I stood up and tugged on the first warm thing I saw in my closet, which randomly happened to be Zach's jacket from junior year. But as my mind immediately processed the likelihood of such a random selection, the Liz in me whispered that the decision wasn't random at all.

Muttering something hastily in excuse for a departure, I rushed out of the room as fast as possible. And even though it was a room full of trained spies, I don't think that any of them truly noticed.

The halls were quiet, and the slaps of my bare feet echoed through them as I walked, enjoying the sound and ignoring my mind's insistence that my steps be silent.

The Grand Hall was particularly abandoned that night, though for what reason it seemed that way, I'm not sure. When I walked in, I stopped for a moment, taking a long time to take it all in.

The ceilings seemed higher than normal; the marble floors seemed chillier than normal; Gilly's sword seemed shinier than normal; the family tapestry seemed heavier than normal. But above all, for the first time in a long time, the epicenter of my school seemed older than normal.

And I did to.

I seemed to be floating on a cloud of confusion and anticipation and sorrow; I was cold, heavy, and a little too grown up. And afraid. Mr. Solomon would have been ashamed. Or very, very proud.

The bittersweetness of it all was killing me inside. The feeling in my gut that I had taken all of the years at Gallagher for granted was growing and growing inside of me as I stood in an empty, silent hall that spoke stories of years of my midnight visits— times when I had scarcely paused in thought about the beauty of it all, much less stopped to smell the roses.

It wasn't until my eyes started burning with an unbearable heat that I realized that I had finally let all of my pent up tears go.

I didn't sob.

I didn't panic.

I just did what every Gallagher Girl does when emotion gets the best of her; I hid. One last night in my favorite secret passage way for old time's sake.

As I closed the entrance behind the tapestry and slid down the wall, I quickly sensed that I wasn't as alone as I would have liked to have been.

Unable to stop the sigh of frustration building inside me, I plopped onto the ground against the wall, nearly on top of him by accident. "Zach, what are you doing here?"

"I should ask the same thing to you, Gallagher Girl," I could just feel his smirk in the blackness, but his tone wasn't as agitating. He sounded tired. It was an emotion I had come to associate with Zach quite often my senior year.

We sat in silence for a while. Somehow that silence was different than the one in my room. There was much more weight hanging in the passage's stale air, which was truly saying something considering the elephant back in my dorm room.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," Zach finally broke the silence and I almost did a double take when I heard his voice crack. I didn't have to ask what he was referring to; we both knew good and well.

"Who wants you?" I asked quietly, almost a whisper, thinking that if I said it too loudly, his already-slim chances might deplete completely. He found my hand in the darkness with his and laced our fingers together silently, letting the question ring for a while.

"Not many people want a kid who's had a past and a record like mine. Not many people think they can trust a sniper that was brainwashed by terrorists." He tried to sound flippant and nonchalant as he played with my fingers, but he wasn't fooling me. It almost sounded like he was reading off lines of commentary from some sick book of his future. It made me very nervous.

"Zach, don't say that. You're the best one here. You've had offers al—"

"Oh yeah, Gallagher Girl," he cut me off, laughing bitterly, "I've had offers." I sensed that these were not the offers that I wanted to hear of. "Here's the thing, Cammie," he started, and both by the sarcastic tone of his voice and by him calling me by name, I knew he was upset. And serious. "I don't exactly want to spend the rest of my life killing people for a living.

I don't want to live my whole life reminding myself of how to deal with the guilt. I don't want to be a monster. And being a monster seems to be the only thing anyone believes I can do. Or at least it's the only thing they believe they can trust me to do."

His deep voice had risen so quickly that I feared we would disturb others and be found out. But when he spoke again, it was barely above a whisper. Pained. Forced. Determined. "I will not be my mother."

It hung in the air for what seemed like ages as I tried to think of something—anything—to say to make it all better. To make it all more fair for him. But there was nothing to say. "Zach, I..." I started, but trailed off. I felt him shake his head in the blackness and the air was cold as it hit the hand he had been keeping warm with his.

He got up and walked a few steps away, and before the words even came out of my mouth, I knew they were the wrong thing to say. "You aren't like your mother, Zach."

I felt the rush of the air as he wheeled on me, and my eyes suddenly adjusted to the darkness. His face was shadowed with pain and fury. "Really? Are you sure?" It was more like a hiss than a question. "Look me in the eyes and tell me that you trust me. Look me in the eyes, Gallagher Girl, and tell me that you aren't scared of me. That you aren't scared of what I could do." He was mad, but he was pleading.

I had told Zach that I trusted him before. I had trusted him with my life on numerous occasions, but I knew that somehow, he was asking something much different of me this time. He was begging me to lay something much more valuable on the line.

And I couldn't lie. I was scared of him. I think I had always been just a little bit scared of him. Who in their right mind wouldn't be? The whole highly-trained-assasin-slash-son-of-a-terroist-lor dess thing kind of threw a kick into the fearable meter. But he wasn't really worried about my ability to be brave; he was worried about my ability to trust that he would never hurt me.

He'd told me last fall that he wasn't scared of me. That even though he knew I was screwed up and brainwashed, he knew that I wouldn't hurt him. He wanted to hear the same from me about him.

In the broad scope of things, it was the same thing the CIA or MI6 would have to be certain they could answer yes to. In the small moment in our favorite passageway well past midnight, it was completely and utterly opposite.

To the intelligence agencies, he would just be an asset.

I knew what he was thinking.

Was that all he would ever be to me?

I didn't have to answer. My hesitation said enough. I could hear the progress and understanding we'd built between us over the past months falling and cracking on the stone floor between us.

"That's what I thought," he muttered, and then he was gone.

Hm... Wonder how things will play out for the last few days... The pressure's definitely on... heh.

Lovely disclaimer... I do not, nor will I ever own the Gallagher Girls series. In the event of me finally convincing Ally to trade me the rights for pop and unlimited Panera, I'll let you know. Until then this will be my only disclaimer because things won't change. Also, I regret to inform you that I will never own any of the song lyrics I include, nor their titles (which are also the titles of the chapters).

Review? Tell me what you think?

~Inez