This takes place shortly after "Enemy of my Enemy" ends.

3 am

The problem with living on a military base — well, it wasn't really military, but amounted to pretty much the same thing — was that there was never any chance to be alone. Never that quiet moment in the middle of the night when everyone else was sleeping and you could just be alone with your thoughts. And for someone whose brain was increasingly permeable to the thoughts of everyone else on base, April really missed those moments.

The Shatterdome status screen on the opposite wall may have been in its muted nighttime mode, a reassuring "all clear" green, but that didn't stop her laser-corrected vision — funny, she'd never considered that you couldn't have a nearsighted Jaeger pilot — from having no trouble picking out the "3 AM" at the top of the screen.

Sighing, she pushed back the blankets and slipped on a pair of tennis shoes before clipping her ID to the hem of her tank top. Sleep wasn't coming any time soon, and her boxers and tank top were good enough for anyone else insane or unlucky enough to be awake at this hour. She briefly thought of waking Donnie, but he'd been up till the wee hours the night before yelling at Gottlieb again, and he needed his sleep. Her thoughts also drifted toward Casey for a moment, but that… that was still too new.

So instead, her restless feet led her to the deserted kitchen. Murakami had given her the freezer combination for just such an emergency, and she was looking forward to spending some quality time with Ben and Jerry…

…and Leo?

He blinked at the sudden light as April flipped the switch before giving her a sheepish look and sticking his spoon in his mouth so he could pat the counter next to him.

Pausing to grab a spoon on the way, April hoisted herself up beside him, digging her spoon into the proffered container of "Shell Shocking" — a specialty flavour the company had made in flagrant defiance of the rationing, which contained chocolate, peanut butter swirls, and chunks of caramel-pecan "turtles". The twelve donated crates of it were the Shatterdome's only source of chocolate, which was why Murakami had had to start locking the freezer.

Speaking of…

"I know for a fact that Murakami hasn't given the combination to anyone else," she mumbled around her spoon. "How did you—"

He raised a brow at her, and she gave a soft, exasperated snort. "Right. Ninja."

It was funny, but no matter how many times she saw it, she still wasn't used to seeing him without the mask. It still seemed wrong somehow. "You're naked," she pointed out. He'd clipped his ID to his dog tags, and they were his only attire.

He shrugged, and gave her a little grin. "Still not used to the clothes thing, I guess. Never occurs to me this late."

"You know it ticks Takahashi off when you guys run around in the buff."

"Good thing Takahashi has more sense than to be up this late, then." Leo dug his spoon into the ice cream again, nabbing one of the prime chunks of turtle before April's spoon could get to it and earning a cry of protest from her as he popped it smugly into his mouth.

Sticking her toungue out at him, she whacked him on his scarred shoulder with her spoon before dipping it back into the ice cream. "Speaking of," she said, and raised a brow at him. "Dreams again?"

His gaze went ever so slightly distant at that, and April winced inwardly. She'd only drifted with him once, but that had been enough to get a sense of exactly what had happened to him during the brief time she and the guys had been separated after the first kaiju attack, and it was more than enough to give anyone nightmares. The record of it was still written across his skin, which remained marked with far more scars than his brothers. But he just nodded and shrugged again. "Not bad enough to get Mikey up. But bad enough." He tapped her lighly on the forehead with his spoon. "And you? Still hearing things?"

It was her turn to shrug. "Yeah. Can't get my brain to shut up, and I can't tell if it's me or the poor schmoes on the night shift. Donnie has some theories that it might get worse in cycles correlated to the breach, but I actually think it's gotten a bit better since we started Drifting. His brain is, like, crazy regimented to help him keep all that stuff he's got crammed in there from overwhelming him, and I think some of that is rubbing off. It helps, a little."

"I've been meaning to ask…" Leo took another spoonful, uncovering another massive chunk of turtle. This one he scooped up and offered to April instead. "How are things with you two?"

She accepted the turtle before he could change his mind, chewing on it thoughtfully as she considered his question. "Is this brother-Leo or leader-Leo asking?"

"Both."

April sighed, her free hand drifting up to toy with the Shell Shocker pendant she wore constantly. "Confusing. Amazing. I still catch him being sad sometimes, and I hate that he is, but at the same time, since Quantum Bravo, we're just so… so…."

"In the Drift?" Leo supplied.

She grinned. "Yeah. And it's, like… I haven't felt this happy since the war started."

Her grin faltered a little, and her eagle-eyed leader didn't miss it. Of course. "April?"

"I just…" She looked down, her gaze tracing over the scars on his arms. "Sometimes I still feel like the war is my fault. The Kraang wouldn't have sent the kaiju if they hadn't been so focused on getting me back…"

Leo took her spoon from her hand and set it and his own aside in the empty ice cream container. "You know that's crazy talk, right?" He shifted on the counter, eliminating the distance between them. "You're pretty much the only thing that's limiting them to sending one kaiju at a time and not flooding the whole planet with them all at once. The Kraang have been working on this a long time, April. If not you, there'd be some other diabolical scheme they'd be using to try to terraform the Earth. Only now you get to get in a Jaeger and fight back."

As his arm went around her, she gave a quiet laugh and leaned into his shoulder. "You're the only person I know who can use a phrase like "diabolical scheme" and make it sound natural."

"I have many talents," he said. "Hero dialogue is just one of them."

She shook her head and let out a long breath. Leo may have a lot of seriously messed-up stuff in his head, but being around him was like being in a room full of wind chimes and scented candles. It didn't make the crowding in her head go away, exactly, but it put a kind of soothing blue buffer between them. His right arm hugged her close to his side, but his left was draped across his lap, and she reached out to trace the scars left by the circuitry burns. His skin was a road map in many ways, the circuitry scars crossing old ones from his confinement, and older ones still from various fights with the Kraang and the Foot.

"…do you ever regret meeting me?" she asked quietly.

"Not for a second," he said, and she loved him for the fact that there was no hesitation is his voice when he said it.

She felt the warmth of his breath stir her hair just before he dropped a kiss on the top of her head. "Come on," he said, pushing himself off the counter and moving in front of her. "Let's get you back to bed."

Grabbing one of her arms, he tugged her off the counter onto his shell, holding her efficiently in place with one hand as he courteously dumped the ice cream container into the sink.

His hands now free, he hitched her into place and wandered out of the kitchen with her on his back, turning off the lights with an elegantly outstretched leg on the way past.

"Showoff," she muttered, and earned a laugh from him in return.

She wound her arms around his shoulders, and her fingers rested only a moment on the riveted hole in his shell.

Not for a second.

Some days, she knew, it was a lie, albeit a kind one. But today was not one of those days. She knew that as surely as she knew that once he'd seen her safely back to bed, her big little brother would stay to watch over her, his soothing blue presence surrounding her until she finally fell asleep.