Van jolted awake, unsure as to why. He reached automatically for his sword and gained a firm hold on it. Then he squinted into the darkness around him, stilled his breathing until he could barely feel it, closed his eyes to attune his inner senses....

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP

There! That was it!

But what was it?

He jumped out of bed, trying to remember the source of the sound. It was coming from the western corner of the room. Strange, the only thing there was Hitomi's duffel bag, the one she had forgotten to take with her when she returned to the Mystic Moon. He kept meaning to ask her if she wanted that back...no, that was a lie. He wanted it with him.

What could have been beeping in that bag? He pulled back the zipper and began carefully taking out one item at a time. Her track clothes and shoes. A hairbrush. Some odd Mystic Moon toiletries. He smiled. It was for the best she didn't remember that he had these things. A little black box...what could that be?

He turned the black box over and almost dropped it. There were words on the other side, scrolling across the surface.

"If you get this, I love you. – Hitomi"

More mystified than ever, he began prodding various buttons on the box. The message changed.

"Of course, if you don't get it, I still love you. – H"

He frowned, perplexed. There was only one way to settle this. He closed his eyes and concentrated.


Hitomi counted down the minutes after the white feather materialized on her bedspread. She had had an awkward conversation with Van not long after she returned to Earth about how he needed to give her a little notice between his call and his appearance (awkward because she had been wrapped in her shower curtain at the time), and now there was usually about a ten-minute warning.

She wrapped her arms around her knees as Van appeared before her.

"I love you, too," he said, and she smiled. "What's this?" He held out the black box.

"My pager," she said.

"Pager?"

"It's an Earth device that allows communication from one place to another."

Van grinned. "We can do better than that, can't we?"

"Yes," she said. "But I thought I might as well take advantage of it...I get great coverage."

His forehead puckered in confusion again, but she cut off any further questions with one of her own.

"By the way, did you at least wash those track clothes?"