Diana leaned against the kitchen counter, some fancy thing made of granite that could have been a picture in a magazine. In another life, she would have been thrilled to be here, looking at the inside of "Toddifer's" celebrity crib, with it's perfect color scheme and tasteful paintings, but now, all she could do was look at the impressive collection of knives hanging on the wall over the sink and imagine all the bloody things she could do with them. Featuring prominently in her visions was the alluring prospect of picking up the biggest, sharpest one, a vicious looking cleaver, and stabbing herself straight through the heart with it.

It would be so easy. And Caine was liable to do it himself anyway, the mood he was in, so why not beat him to the punch? Diana was already bruised, beaten, and scurvy-laden, so what should stop her from adding one last injury to the lot? Diana could imagine the headlines, "Girl Found Dead in Toddifer's Kitchen, Scorned Mistress?", or, "Was Diana a Freak? Katie Couric Investigates" "Did The FAYZ Push Diana Ladris Over The Edge? New Studies Show..."

So easy. So very easy. Except for Caine, who was just across the hall, looking for supplies. He was always in the other room. And try as she might, Diana couldn't ever bring herself to leave him. She'd jumped off cliffs, even, and had her brains bashed in by a boulder, and yet he always managed to swoop in just in time to save her. So now here she was, trapped on the private island of quite possibly the most famous couple since Brangelina, wondering what to do about her megalomaniacal, telekinetic almost-boyfriend.

Diana could remember a time when it was so much easier to understand him, before pain and starvation and the madness that was the FAYZ had warped Caine almost beyond recognition.

When Caine had first come to Coates Academy, before the gaiaphage had tormented his mind and before weeks of canned spinach had sucked away all the flesh from his face, he had been blisteringly handsome, with the sort of charisma that could even attract the damaged, messed-up kids of Coates. Within the first week half of the girls at Coates had a crush on him, and yes, he had even caught Diana's eye. Icy, you-take-your-hands-off-of-me-before-I-break-them-off Diana. Not that she really liked him, per se, he never featured in her daydreams or made her heart beat fast when he came near, but even she couldn't deny he had a sort of magnetism. Early on, she had pegged him for one of those kids that had been sent off to Coates by his parents for a fairly innocent reason, for something silly like letting his grades drop, or getting friendly with the "wrong crowd", whatever that meant. She had seen him, seen through him, then filed him away in the "not worth bothering with" file in her head and gone on her merry way.

But he had to go and get infatuated with her, always nodding in his smooth way at her whenever they passed in the halls, and making conversation at every opportunity. If he were anybody else, he would've have seemed like a creepy puppy dog, but Caine could pull it off, and even though Diana never showed him the slightest little bit of genuine affection, only carefully calculated smiles and touches to keep him dancing to her tune, they eventually came to know eachother well enough that when Caine first discovered his power, she was he first person he told.

Looking back, Diana was certain that the day he pulled her into an empty classroom and threw a textbook across the room without touching it was the day everything started to go wrong. At first, it was exciting, like she was a star in some supernatural T.V. show. Diana would detect the kids with powers, and Caine would sidle up to them and invite them to test out their powers with the rest of his freaks, and they would have another kid join the ranks of Caine's superheroes.

Then the grownups had gone, the wall appeared, and the FAYZ was born.

Even then, it was sort of an adrenaline rush to rule over Perdido Beach with Caine, even if she had to put up with that little nutjob Drake. She had felt like a queen, co-ruler of the FAYZ, and somewhere along the way she had found herself getting attached to Caine a bit more than she had intended. Diana couldn't make herself just cut and run when things got bad, and even after the battle, standing in the ruins of the church, little kids screaming and those ungodly wolves running about, wreacking havoc, she found herself leaving with Caine, even when Sam gave her the chance to stay in Perdido Beach and live as normal a life as she could manage in the FAYZ.

Diana knew she should have regretted leaving with Caine, but she had known even then that the bad boy and bad girl had to stick together, even when times got tough. Because that was what they were, the two of them, weren't they? Villains. Even now, stranded, hurt, screwed up, and with every last one of their followers gone, they were still together, for some reason Diana was afraid to admit to herself

And when, not an hour before, she stood on that cliff outside and told Caine she loved him, and stopped him from crashing the escaping helicopter, and he levitated her back onto solid ground, she knew she would have stayed with him even if they weren't trapped together. Even if she hadn't known where those fateful three words had popped out from, she knew they were true, even if the utter sappiness of them made her feel a wee bit nauseated.

So there she stood, a girl in love, eyeing a knife collection and wondering if she should be watching out any sort of mutant animals lurking somewhere on the island. Diana sighed and walked away from the shelf of knives. Not today. She wandered into the other room and flopped onto the designer couch, not caring about the remnants of Cheeto dust still lingering there, not worrying about where her next meal would be coming from, and let herself sleep.

She woke to Caine's murmered "Wake up."

"What?"

He looked as tired as she felt, oddly vulnerable with the giant shadows under his eyes. "I found some vitamin C. That Sanjit kid said you needed it for your scurvy." He thrust out a platinum white bottle that rattled.

"Thanks."

And then, ever so carefully, Diana squeezed his hand, and then he, ever so carefully, squeezed back.