There appear to be few things one can think about when hanging upside down from a ceiling beam, and Stacie is currently aware of the fact. The hook attached to the rope digs painfully into her back, and all the blood in her body is rushing to her head, which really doesn't help the fact that she is supposed to be coming up with a plan right about now.

"I thought you already had a plan?" Cynthia Rose whispers, voice sounding panicked "Because this is really not the time to tell me that I've been dangling in the air ten minutes for nothing!"

Stacie grits her teeth. Her head aches. And so does her back. Her neck. Her hands do too, and with them every other vital part of her body needed for launching a full frontal assault into a stronghold of the deadliest criminals, who were currently holding half the students of a high school hostage.

"CR," she whispers back "Shut up."

"Did you just tell me to…?"

"Shut up," she cuts into her junior's indignant cry "So I can concentrate."

"On?"

That is the exact moment three DSM operatives turn the corner, and in the dark, pass through where Stacie and Cynthia Rose are. With a silent and deadly hit of her hand to one man's chest, Stacie knocks him unconscious, while her companion, catching on, quickly kicks the second one in the nuts, and muffles his groan, by stuffing her left glove in his mouth. The third goon does a roundabout, and tries to flee, but before he can take one step or make a sound, Stacie releases the harness, drops down, and sweeps his feet out from under him, with Cynthia catching him as he falls, and dragging him over to where his friends lay.

"That," Stacie says then, an answer to a previously asked question, and Cynthia grins at her in the dark.

They split up, going different ways, and carefully checking and clearing each room. Stacie moves on autopilot, gun at the ready, not really thinking about what she is doing. Instead her mind is consumed with a million thoughts. She thinks of Beca, Chloe, her mother. Of Aubrey. She wonders if that was where it all started. When Aubrey walked into Barden High, with her pencil skirt, painfully professional shirt, an attitude that faintly screamed "Mess with me and you die" and a face that might as well have had 'Stacie Conrad is going to fall in love with this' tattooed on it. Or maybe it was before all of that. When Officer Beale summoned her into his office to present her with a new mission.

She is so lost in her musing, that she misses the man hidden behind the door, and nearly gets killed for it. He moves suddenly, using the dark to his advantage, and holding her at gunpoint before she can do a thing. There they stand, in an abandoned room, guns pointed at each other.

Stacie takes stock of the situation. She stares him down, looks into his cruel eyes, at the face tattoo that extends from above his right eyebrow, across his cheek and down to his neck. One sudden move and he could raise the alarm. There was no way she was going to risk shooting him and making any sort of noise. She was out of options. Except if…..

She suddenly looks at a point on the wall right behind him, and allows her face to fall into a puzzled expression. To her extreme surprise, it actually works. The man falters for a second, torn between keeping her in his line of sight and turning to access the apparent new threat, and it allows her to twist around the gun, and wrestle it out of his hands. With a swift kick to his solar plexus he goes down silently, and she stretches her hands over her head, pops the joints in her shoulders, and looks at his body strewn on the floor.

This was where it all started, she thinks. With death.

Hospitals are crappy places to have intense conversations in. There are always snooty nurses entering to tell you to "Keep your voice down, dear", doctors asking for peace and quiet for the patient or your colleagues telling you to "Calm the fuck down, Conrad", though what they mean by telling you to calm down when your father essentially says he is going to die, Stacie doesn't know. Maybe there is some kind of handbook on Hospitals and Grief she should have gone through.

"Don't be an idiot!"

"Do I need to remind you that this is your senior officer you are addressing thus?"

She raises her eyebrows at him till he grins weakly, because she knows that no matter how imposing he seems in uniform, there is no way he could ever pull rank over his daughter.

"Stacie, listen to me…"

"No, I'm not going to till you stop being ridiculous. Of course you're going to be fine. We just need to talk to the doctor, maybe think about alternative solutions or something…"

"There are no alternative solutions, sweetheart. Not anymore."

She hears the words clearly, and for a while her face crumples. Then she sees the pain on her father's face, and pulls herself together. Not now, she thinks, and with what seems like a massive effort, composes herself. Smiles tightly, and waving her hand as if waving the matter away, tries to change the topic.

"Did I tell you about today's stakeout? Five hours in the cramped car with Officer Ryder glaring at me every second of it. I spent all of that time fighting the urge to apologize for existing."

Not that shutting pain down and keeping it inside does any good. But she looks at her father's relieved face, and thinks that if not permanent, it's a pretty good alternative to facing it head on right now.

She visits every day. Well, most days. There are some days she can't tear herself away from the duties her country requires of her, so she sends one of her friends in her place, and the next day she comes armed with his favorite donuts. They talk of things that don't have anything to do with cancer, hospitals or death, and she immediately switches to something else when her father says "Stacie, listen, sweetheart…."

That is a conversation for later.

There are bad days, and good ones. There are times when their conversations consist of her father's delirious ramblings and her trying to make sense of them. On other days, her father talks with perfect clarity, telling her of his old missions, and asking her about her current ones. Today started off as one of the bad days. Most of the things he's said since the morning have been unintelligible mumblings of names and places, so she doesn't put a lot of stock into today. Just sits beside him and listens.

When he falls asleep for a while, she goes up to the cafeteria for a bottle of water. When she comes back, she sees her father struggling with two nurses in his bed. Leaving the half-drunk bottle on the table, she rushes to his side.

"Dad! Dad! It's okay, it's okay…."

"Stacie!" he's saying, repeatedly, eyes roving all over the room, and waving his hands around in his confusion. She grabs his hands, and looks him right in the eyes.

"Dad, I'm right here. Look at….look at me. It's me."

"Beca," he says, with more clarity than he's displayed today "Beca."

Stacie freezes, her heart throbbing with the sudden clench of pain that overcomes her every time she hears her sister's name.

"Beca," her father says again.

"What about Beca, dad?"

"After I'm….after I'm gone….."

She starts shaking her head, but he pushes on "You'll find her, won't you? Find Beca….and tell her I'm sorry I couldn't," he's started crying in the middle, and she tries to shush him "Tell her I loved her. Always."

"I think she knows," she tells him, an empty consolation, but he's already drifted off to his delirious mumblings.

She holds his hand as he dies. She supposes that, to an outsider, it seems pretty anticlimactic. He falls asleep at night, and she falls asleep in the uncomfortable chair at his bedside. She wakes up to the sound of the beeping machines, and is pushed out of the doctors as they try to revive him. They succeed, but she knows that it's not a victory worth celebrating.

The doctor breaks it down for her. He tells her that it is almost an impossibility to come back from the deterioration the tumor has put his internal organs through. That he happens to be in pain. A lot of pain. That it might be better if she just…

She goes for a long, long walk. Sits on a bench for an hour, and feeds a stray dog the remains of a packet of biscuits lying in her jacket. After a full three hours she goes back, and sits beside her father for a while, committing his features to her memory. Then, abruptly, she gets up, signs the required papers, and holds her father's hand as the machines are switched off.

Then, she goes home and cries.

Officer Beale gives her a whole month, before he calls her into his office. She is thankful for that much, because she knows that crime waits for no one, especially not for the grieving daughter of a military officer who dedicated his entire life to eradicating it. She hears him out, and is unpleasantly surprised at the end of it.

"You want me to go…..babysit your daughter?" she asks, disbelief lacing every word "Sir, considering my qualifications, and the fact that I have been a part of the DSM Committee for almost three years now, I'd have thought….."

"I know all of that," he tells her, a hint of steel in his voice that warns her against crossing over to the territory of insubordination "And I'd like it if you listen to the whole thing before you start protesting."

She stays quiet and allows him to speak. He continues.

"As you very well know, I have been a part of the DSM committee since it was formed. I was recruited for it along with your father, and have had a pretty important role in deciding most of the moves we've taken against them. A month after I was appointed to head that particular division, I was informed of a death threat they had sent my daughter," at this point his voice trembles a bit, and Stacie thinks of her own father, feeling a familiar dull ache in her chest that always accompanies the thought of him "Obviously they were planning to either hold her as leverage or…I asked her to come live with me, so I could provide her with protection, but she refused."

"What? Why?"

"Things between the both of us are…tense, at best. She blames me for ruining her childhood, like I don't do enough of that to myself already."

"At the cost of her own life?"

"You don't know how stubborn Chloe is," he says, a wry smile twisting his face "She'll do everything she can in her power to avoid asking me for help."

She must look uncertain, because he starts speaking again after the short pause "You look like you're hesitating."

Stacie wonders how to say "But this is a babysitting operation"without sounding like an idiot recruit and possibly without being sent to Siberia or Iceland "It certainly sounds…interesting, Sir."

He sees through it easily "What if I tell you something that will sweeten the offer?"

She stares suspiciously at him, eyes boring into his suddenly twinkling ones.

"What if I told you that you could find your sister in the same school where my daughter studies? That interesting enough for you?"

Stacie tries to take a deep breath, and finds that she can't. It suddenly seems physically impossible for her lungs to do something she's had no trouble doing since she was born. She ends up gasping for air in an imitation of a fish very much out of water.

"Beca? Beca's there?"

"I'm sure you knew how hard your father tried to find his daughter all his life after his ex-wife….shifted homes without informing him. He confided in me about his hopeless search, which is how I knew of her. Imagine my surprise when her name came up in the list I pulled up to analyze potential threats, the list of students attending Barden High. You knew her well, I take it?"

Knew her? Stacie thinks of the tiny three year old toddler that came along with her stepfather on a twice-a-month, who loved climbing enormous trees and picking fights with random toddlers in the sandbox, and generally existed to drive her crazy on the times she was babysitting her step-sister. She remembers the rare but blinding smiles she was rewarded with when she played a rather catchy song, of the impromptu dance they would start doing in the kitchen. She thinks of the first time she thought of Beca as anything other than "that stepkid always bugging me", the first time she acknowledged her as her sister, even with the lack of an actual blood connection (both the times being when that snotty pest, Bobby pushed a five year old Beca off the monkey bars, and she went in all guns blazing to rescue her; not that it was needed, Beca pushed herself up, and punched him in his stupid face, much to her amusement).

She nods, slightly, and notices Officer Beale turn away respectfully to give her time to wipe her tears away "We, lost contact when she was eight. I was eighteen."

"And you want to find her, of course?"

"More than anything, Sir," she replies, squaring her shoulders and looking him in the eyes. He doesn't seem at all surprised by the expression of fierce intensity she knows she is wearing; she supposes that is because they are both fighting for their family in some way, Stacie to find that which was lost, and Beale to hold onto that which was forgotten "I'll do it."

They shake hands, and for the first time since her father's death, she doesn't feel quite so lost. She has a purpose now. She is going to find her sister, protect the crap out of Chloe Beale, end as many DSM operatives as possible and hopefully, get out of high school alive.

(The last part seems more formidable than the rest of her tasks put together; based on her own experiences, DSM operatives have nothing on mean girls, who cut, wound, and slice with mere words.)

(Okay that line was an exaggeration. But by only, like, a tiny, tiny, minus infinity bit.)

And that is how, Stacie Conrad finds herself at the gates of Barden High, for the first time in her extremely dangerous military career, more than a little terrified of what comes next.