DEAL

By: EV

Author's Note: Due to factors that went beyond my control, myself and my character(s), namely Shinobi, have been absent from most of the recent RPs. As I remember, I left the RP-world with Shinobi and Mach5 arrested and imprisoned by the Los Angeles' Federal Bureau of Metahuman Investigations. I sincerely apologies, as a worse spot to stop participating, I could not have chosen. Although am I sure that for the sake of his own role-playing, Mach5 seems to have dropped the idea, and I'm glad. However, Shinobi has not. While I am now able to rejoin the role-plays, I do not wish to drag out this scenario any longer. This fanfiction serves as a tie-in and ending. Please enjoy.

**PS---This fic is not to be considered cannon material.**

Thank You,

Elizabeth(EV)

Interrogation. Ever been through it? There's only two kinds: easy or hard. I've done both. But 'hard' is usually what I get. My cup of tea I guess. Easy would be a nice change of pace, should it ever come my way. As of right now, it looks like I'll have to wait.

Because, as of right now, I'm in the custody of the Los Angeles branch of the Federal Bureau of Metahuman Investigations. Nasty SOBs. Don't take any crap from nobody, least of all a metahuman. I'm almost positive that if they could, without any repercussions at all, they'd wipe our kind right of the face of the earth, just like that.

And they could do it too. They got the tools and manpower. After spending a couple of months with them, it's pretty obvious. That's why I wanted nothing to do with them...they leave me alone, and I'll do the same. But no. Unfortunately it just isn't that easy. Remember easy's not my thing.

Few months back...an old acquaintance of mine---meta-name Solaris---and I had little disagreement that turned into a rather large disagreement, and...well...I was locked up and she's...gone.

Or so I thought. Things happen when you have time to reflect, and I've had nothing BUT time. I was suppose to be interrogated when I first arrived but it never happened. Another member of my team, aka Tech Support, Mach5 had been locked up with me, on unrelated charges...BS charges, too. He was eventually let go. I had no such luck.

I'm pretty sure, or hoped as much, that they wouldn't be able to hold the charges against me and I'd be let go. But they stalled and stalled and in Federal lock-up I remained. Eventually I was transferred from the Holding enter to the FBMI prison they have right outside of LA. I know, right? Pretty crazy, especially when the building of the prison was never made public.

And then...finally, after sitting in my Junior Meta-level cell...waiting...going through the motions for who knows how long---this also included a stint in Solitary. Couple of idiots started a fight about whose power was better (lame!) and I got involved (stupid!) and apparently they blamed me for starting it. (what?!)---they called me into Interrogation.

I'll admit I didn't react appropriately when I first heard. Sarcasm doesn't go over well with these guys. Especially when you go from plain old sarcasm to hostile sarcasm. After getting cuffed again---they use Electromagnetic Inhibitor cuffs. Dampens my powers to the point where I feel pain. I swore I would never willingly let them put those things on me again, but hey. What can you do?---I decided to cooperate.

Cooperation was all I had left as I saw it. I had to deal with Special Agent Cole Rush. Not long ago I met him while he was still DEA. A kiss-ass even then, so I wasn't surprised to see him as a Special Agent in a new and...potentially progressive field. I was rude to him when he served the warrants, as I remember. He was just doing his job. Just so happens I hate his job...

And so, after months of waiting and inquest into a timetable for this...we sat face to face again. In his official black Fed suit, with his little FBMI pass clipped to his breast pocket...his dark face, with glittering black eyes, set rather smugly...I realized how much I was going to hate this.

"About time." I managed. "Isn't there some kind of law you've been breaking for the past three months by keeping me here? Pretty sure there is."

"Coming from you, a person who seems to have a perchance for breaking the law...that's pretty cute."

I leaned back in my chair, seeing the two black exoskeletoned guards, laser weapons in hand inch closer, just waiting for me to slip. No chance, boys. Sorry.

"All right. This is interrogation." I put my cuffed hands out in front of me. "Interrogate me."

Agent Rush eyed me, but didn't say anything,

"Look, either you interrogate me or you let me go. That's all there is to it."

"No, that's not all there is to it. There's a lot more."

What did he mean? Had they found more charges to stack up against me? More old warrants---which were, by the way, supposedly out of their jurisdiction because I didn't have my powers then, but that apparently didn't stop him. Like I said: nasty SOBs.

"Actually", Rush was saying, "We...need your help."

I'm pretty sure I laughed right about then. Just laughed. But Rush was dead serious. Just the look in his eyes told me that. But I couldn't fathom them needing my help!

"You're bullshitting me right? I mean, you gotta be. You? Need my help?"

"This isn't bullshit, EV."

"Well, ok...fair enough. But give me one really good reason, and I mean real good...why I should even consider helping you. All you people have done is hounded me, arrested me on BS charges, harassed my friends, harassed me...made life hell for everyone...and you're asking me for help."

I laughed as bitterly as I could. "You've got nerve, man."

He gave a conciliatory look and gesture. "I'll take that. I can understand your feelings. But I'm asking for your help...because it'll help you get out of here."

I stopped. Well, that changes things. "Help me get out?"

"Yeah. You help me, and I'll help you."

Still suspicious, I leaned forward. "What it is exactly you want help on?"

Rush cleared his throat and opened the file in front of him. He looked down at the contents but didn't take them out. "Was it an accident?"

"Was what an accident?"

"You know what I mean."

I swallowed. Oh yeah. The...disagreement. Its end result. I shifted in my seat.

"Well, wasn't it? I mean of course it was."

"Of course, huh. Ok. So...no planning? No little chit-chat off to the side?"

Now, yeah...I'm not the best person...nor the best hero. I don't even consider myself a hero. But when you accuse me of siding with a sworn enemy...oh-ho, brother. Watch out.

I reared up, "What the hell did you mean with that little remark? No, there's was no planning! No there wasn't any little chit-chat on the side between me and her! Look, you asked for my help, I asked you for a reason why, and right now, you're not doing too hot in that department! Either rethink your technique or I'm gone!"

"Shut up!" Rush suddenly barked. That...surprised me, actually. I shut my mouth.

Rush settled back down. His eyes no longer glittered and all the smugness was gone.

"Solaris is alive."

Wait. Say that again.

Rush tried again to get a reaction out of me.

"Did you hear me? I said, 'Solaris is---'"

"I heard you."

Christ, now the cat's out of the bag... Remember how I said that after our disagreement, I said she was gone, or though I thought, because I had nothing but time to reflect? This is what I meant.

"How long have you known." I asked quietly.

Now it was Rush's turn to be surprised.

"Wait...you...? About the same time you've been locked up. How long have YOU known? How could you've known!"

Ah...the Golden Question. The one thing I've been pondering and racking my brains on how to explain it without making myself sound nuts.

I took a huge breath. "Since about a week after it happened. As to how I knew...well. It sounds...crazy, but it's the best I could come up with. It's...like this: both of us are who we are today because the other made us that way. I made Solaris and she made me. I won't call it a Creator/Created link...that's just...I won't even go there. But, yeah...there's a connection. One I never really noticed before this. It's like a little alarm bell in the back of my mind.

"Right after it happened...I was so relieved, so happy, that I never noticed, or refused to acknowledge that little warning bell. I thought I had truly been ridden of the one person I felt threatened by. Like think of it as Superman no longer having to worry about his weakness towards kryptonite. Think on that level...and that's how relieved I was.

"And then...then that little bell just kept getting louder and louder. And I started to doubt what had happen. Was it really Solaris I saw on that bike? Was that her scream I heard? To tell you the truth, I even doubted the fighting we had done. I knew Solaris' fighting technique...and I tried to remember if it felt like hers or not. I began doubting everything. My alarm wouldn't shut off. I felt like...I had been cheated. That I had been robbed of something very great. That little alarm only meant one thing: Solaris was alive, and I had been tricked.

"I was angry...but I knew I had to go along with it, even though I didn't have a definitive answer as to why. I just knew I did...and when I saw Mach5 had a warrant on out him too, I told him to go along with it. I just knew...Solaris was alive...I'd had been tricked. And now I was going down for it."

That's where I stopped with it. I looked at Rush, to see if he believed it or not. I really didn't believe it. I just felt it. If he couldn't accept that, then I'm sorry.

Rush signed and leaned back. H did look skeptical, but there was something else there, too...

"That's...quite a story. Expect me to believe it?"

I shrugged my shoulders, "That's all I got. Sorry you don't believe it."

He put his elbows on the table, "And your friends back there in Tech Support never...noticed?"

"How would they?"

"Aren't there, uh...aren't there people who can...I dunno...sense these kind of things over there?"

If I could have, I would have stood up and walked out. Screw Rush, screw the whole lot of 'em!

I stayed cool and calm, steady as she goes..."Don't be stupid, Rush. It's not very becoming." Pretty good deadpan, I'd say.

Rush screwed his face up and pushed away from the table.

I sighed. Yeah, see. He wasn't buying it. Straight-up then.

"I don't know why I bothered doing this. Should have just...locked you up and thrown away the key... I mean, Christ!"

"All right. Fine." I guess yelling wasn't the best choice at that particular moment, but whatever. "You asked me how I knew. I told you. You don't believe me. How about this. Just answer me yes or no: when you were a kid, did you ever have a friend...a best friend you always palled around with, one that everyone could have sworn was your brother?"

"I don't see how this has anything---"

"Yes or no, Rush."

He stopped and sat down again. "Yeah. Yeah, I did."

"Ok. And did it ever seem to you...that just sometimes...you knew what that friend was thinking, or what he was going to say, before he even said it? Did it ever seem like everything you did together just...fit. Somehow. Like you two were a well-oiled machine without even trying? How about that?"

I could tell he was curious now, his brows knotting together slowly, "Yeeeah. I guess. Sometimes."

"All right. So you know how it feels then. Solaris and I--before the powers, before all that---we were like this." I put my middle finger on my pointer finger and held it up. "Sisters. Together til the end. Where one was, the other couldn't be far behind. If I started a sentence, she could finish it. Man, we took the streets together. And I'll tell you what, you could never have a better back-up in a fight than her. That's why we made as long as we did. She wasn't book smart, but she had plenty of street smarts to make up for it.

"So, you gotta understand, there came a time where each of us knew the other better than themselves. And I can tell you: the person I fought on that highway, the person I saw crash head-on into that semi...that wasn't Solaris. Solaris wouldn't have let it end like that. We promised this fight would end when the other decided it would." I shook my head. "Face-planting on the grill of a semi...isn't the way she would have ended it. And she's not that stupid either, to let herself wander into oncoming traffic unless she meant too. And the way that person---whoever it was---on that bike, screamed? Did NOT plan for that."

Rush stared at me, then slowly wet his lips.

"Ok. Ok, fine. Tell me this: you got on the back of that bike. You sat behind this person. And you didn't get a good look at them?

I shook my head, "You try getting a good look when somebody's trying to throw you off or shoot at you."

"Ok, fair enough. But we've got the team files from after that incident. It's well-documented, how you acted: like a person who knew the enemy was dead and gone."

"Oh, c'mon! Don't tell me you never tried to fool yourself into believing something you KNOW couldn't be true!"

"How about the body."

"Are you serious right now? Look, it wasn't her, ok? You know she's not dead, I know she's not dead...can we just...get on with this, please?"

Rush looked down at the papers and shuffled them.

"By the way?" I asked, suddenly suspicious...and I can't believe I didn't ask this sooner..."How'd YOU find out she was alive?"

Rush stopped the shuffling and looked up, actually appearing surprised. "What?"

"I said, how did you know?"

And then I noticed the little bit of red creeping up in his cheeks. Like he was...embarrassed! And then, quite suddenly,

"She's hacking our system."

Ok, now it's my turn again, to be surprised. Let me just say...Solaris hacking anything, successfully, is a joke. A real, freakin' knee slapper of a joke.

"...What?"

"She's hacking our systems."

"Yeah, I got that part. But, remember what I said: no book smarts? I'm sorry, but she's just not bright enough to hack anything, let alone a federal database. I mean, I had a supercomputer do it for me and it still took some doing."

"Yeah, about that supercomputer..."

I ignored that, because that's one thing these people will NEVER see, or get.

"How's she doing it, then? Assuming it is actually her doing the hacking..."

"What, so now you don't believe me? God, everything's a no-win with you, isn't it?"

Again I ignored and pressed the question on him again, "How is she hacking?"

Rush pulled out those black and white surveillance photos you usually see in the movies and those detective TV shows, and shoved them toward me.

"She's got friends, now."

They were of different people, with some doubles and triples of the same people on different angles. There was a rather large man with sparse hair and dressed sharply in what I guessed to be a black suit. He looked really familiar, honestly. Then there was a super-model-esque chick, looks like they got her while shopping...and I also noticed the photographer was quite...gratuitous with the photos of her...um, backside and...frontside? Ugh...see, guys ARE pigs, I'm tellin' ya…

And then there was a shorter, dumpier woman, who was smoking a cigarette and sipping some coffee at a little cafe somewhere...and another two guys who looked like brothers. Wore glasses...looked like that typical geek stereotype...

"Do you recognize any of them?" Rush asked after I had time to look them over.

I looked back at the shot of the large man in the suit, "Yeah. Yeah, kind of." I laid it down and pointed at it. "Him. I think...I think he worked for the ORGANIZATION. A...dealer or something. I don't remember his name but I remember the face."

Rush took the photo back to look at it, "Yeah, I'm not surprised. This is Androv. Russian mob. Dangerous. Your people would have wanted him, for sure." He set it down, "Anybody else?"

I shook my head, "No...no, I don't know anybody else." I handed the photos back.

Rush took them and shuffled through them, showing me the only respectable shot of the model chick. "Avriel Non---mistress of disguise. Any make-up job, any costuming job...anything at all, that you need to effectively disappear, she's the person to go to. We've had our eyes on her for awhile..."

I raised my eyebrows...double entrendes are everywhere, nowadays.

He held up the shot of the dumpier woman, "Androv's partner and wife, Natashia Androv. Her connections can make any job easier."

He held up the last shot, "These are the Pisary twins. You think Tech Support's got the best computer people in the world? Ha...Tech Support's are amateurs compared to these guys. That's how Solaris is hacked into to our database." He tapped his finger on the photo, "These two."

"Yeah, ok...if you know who they are, then why haven't you swooped down and arrested them. And how did Solaris meet these people anyways?"

He held up a finger, " I'm getting to that, hold on. We think Solaris probably met them when she made a little European excursion some time back."

I blanched. "She went to EUROPE?"

He laughed, "Yeah. Why do you think it was so quiet and then suddenly the huge fight and you ending up here and everyone thinking she's dead? Solaris needed time to get everything together and you would have plugged things up. So she probably had Avriel dress somebody up like her, put her on the bike and set her on her way.

"Faked her own death and blamed it on you. The only person who could have caused her any major trouble when she came back, was locked up by the Feds, and she could do what she had to do without worry because she was supposedly dead. Looks like to me, she took a leaf from your book."

Yeah, true….it did. Well, great minds think alike…

Rush looked excited now, hands folded on the table and leaning forward towards me. "We know she's back in LA now, via her hacking. She doesn't know that we know she's hacking us, so we've been using it to monitor her."

"Cool. Where do I come into all this?"

"EV, you asked, if we know who these people are, then why we haven't rounded theme up already? Simple. We want them all for the price of one. We find one, and the others will come soon enough. You pretty much said it yourself: you and Solaris share a bond. You are the only one who knows her well enough to catch her.

"We're offering you your freedom in return for your services. We'll give you everything you need to track her. You find Solaris, or any other member of her gang, and I'll personally make sure this freedom sticks."

"And if I don't?"

Rush sneered and opened the folder again, going to the bottom of the pile of papers inside. He half-pulled another series of photographs just far enough out for me to see them and understand what they were.

They were, again surveillance shots, detailing a Girls Night Out between me and some other woman at Tech Support. The Chippendale Ordeal. If it ever got that members of Feedback's Golden Tech Support went to a female entertainment club…

I just stood up. So it was blackmail. I should have expected that from him.

"I suppose this will also make sure what happened last time, doesn't actually happen this time, right?"

"What do you think?"

I looked at him and at the two guards, then back to him. He smiled that white toothy grin of his. "I'll have your release papers drawn up immediately. Congrats, EV, you're a free woman."

Yeah…freedom with an asterisk, is more like it. So much for Interrogation…