A/N: Here's the next chapter. They're not going to keep coming this fast though. :( But enjoy!

Seven Days

Day 1

Fact 1: This is Ootori Kyouya speaking, and the woman that comes with this phone is Diana Reed.

"Well then, Miss Reed, I don't suppose there is any need to welcome you to my suite."

Diana held a haggard slab of uncut fillet hanging over her fork like an umbrella top, mango rain oozing down the side.

I imagine she must never have come across a knife before, Kyouya thought.

She was apparently thinking along the same lines: "Don't mention divorcing elbows from tables right now. I keep forgetting I'm starving at this point. And I talk with my mouth full; just look at your fish and deal."

Kyouya leaned back against the chair, one foot resting on the other's knee. I don't know enough yet. My time will come. She runs the show for now.

"Kay, dis iz gedding old dow, I'be arready eaden diz exagg fish sigs dimes dow. (cough) Wow, that's a very disturbing thought. Wait...is it overcooked this time? ...Mmm, must be imagining things. Going insane already."

Kyouya looked down at his own food as she had suggested; it was even less appetizing than a minute ago, the sweet orange sauce glossing the tilapia like some sickly discharge lining the miniature valleys of its dead-white flesh.

"Last time, you were not able to be eat for the next twenty hours, maybe more," said Diana with a jerk of her fork, "so eat up. And I used to tell everything like a story, but you interrupt so much it's easier to just do this Q&A style, so shoot."

The sky outside the seventieth floor had become murky water. Shapes of black ghouls silhouetted by flashes of light, the false promise of the morning sun an abject betrayal to the city of Osaka. Haruhi. He regretted thinking of her instantly. A worn out chain of thoughts was bound to follow. Was she with Tamaki? Was he giving her hand a light squeeze under the table as he conversed with potential clients of the Ouran University? The insatiate growling in the air held the suite in the grip of a black beast, the infernal cancer that had crawled itself in the folds and creases of his brain. This was a thing to be kept in shadows, but Kyouya had switched his trains of thought off the local lines and the expressways, had driven it deep into forgotten repair sites that needed repairing, had run his white lights over the brooding, homeless amoebas that once were anger, envy, despair, now formless until the light could mold them into something. He could see the news crawl on the TV from where he sat. Forty-seven killed, one twenty-five injured-and he almost laughed to see the footage of the victims on their stretchers, their platforms to heaven or hell, as they deserved, being carted directly into the yawning mouth of the Osaka University Hospital.

"So the first time this happened," he said, "I died."

Diana nodded.

"Was I taken into one of my father's hospitals?"

"Flown out in a helicopter too. It was absurd, the whole black-suit crew carting your body through a busy lobby, standing there in the silver elevator waiting to get to the top of the Sears tower. Eighteenth Floor: Replacement Parts Division: Kitchen Appliances, Forty-Fifth Floor: Portable Electronics and Car Audio, and then the shining chopper blades drowning out what your men were saying...they'd been speaking into the mikes in their collars and were able to hear each other through the tiny speaker in their right ears, and they'd just realized I wasn't your girlfriend. You've got some newbies in that group. Might want to take care of that."

A ringing erupted before Kyouya could ask his next question.

"That should be Kaoru," said Diana. "Go on and answer it, or he'll come hunting you down to see if you're okay. Gets a little inconvenient."

Kyouya stood up and turned away from her, walked over to the full-wall window. "Kaoru."

"First you tell me to call you, and now you don't pick up?"

"What?" Kyouya checked his logbook. Three minutes ago. He dropped the English and dropped his voice. "Thunder. I didn't hear it."

"Thunder doesn't rumble that long."

"It does at my suite."

"How are you?"

"I'm—" Diana had already downed her water and was chewing on the ice leftover as she watched the news. Kyouya turned back to the window. "—fine. How did you—?"

"Tamaki called to ask why you hadn't shown up."

"Oh yes, with his limo. I sent that back."

"Are you still at the scene? I'm not seeing you in any of the shots."

"I left before the reporters got there. Preferred not to get tied up in that commotion."

"Yeah. Did you get the iPhone 4S two months early? Did something happen at the bombing?"

"What?"

"You sent me a text from the new phone, didn't you? To talk to me about it?"

Kyouya sent another look over his shoulder at the woman. She wasn't there. The shock wave that went through his body was like watching the double-decker explode again. His shoes left black rubber tracks across the floor with a tormented squeal, and he had to catch himself upon the table to keep from falling. Propelled by the sudden crash, a knife had jumped off the table and skittered across the floor, the head of the fish he had unconsciously skewered earlier sliding across the floor behind it.

"Kyouya? You there?"

She wasn't on the bed, in the bathroom, in the spa room, in the veranda, in the pool room, at the bar counter. He doubled up again. He found her curled up between a sofa and the bed, where the bedside table had been. Mesmerized by an infomercial of a laundry detergent.

"Dammit, did the call get dropped? Kyouya!"

He stood looking from Diana to the infomercial to Diana, then walked back to the windows saying, "Kaoru, give me the number of the phone."

"It's not yours?"

"Kaoru."

"Right, fine. Weren't you supposed to be at an interview right now?"

Kyouya entered the number into his address book. "Forget that. Are you hosting today?"

"At four again. Surprised the factions actually came together to pass the ordinance after all." Sigh. "That took out half of my customers, but at least I can sleep before the sun comes up, right? I guess I can settle."

"Fifty percent. I told you it didn't matter that the girls didn't get out of their waitressing work until two in the morning." The words were far away from him. A constant drone was going through his head in the background. "That young head of police is well-beloved," he was saying. What the hell is she doing? "If he says minor nighttime prostitution because host clubs keep people out drunk this late is not something he is going to tolerate, then no one will." Why is she watching infomercials? "I told you to get out of that industry before the ordinance kicked in." Where is she supposed to be right now? "I can't believe I'm saying this to you. To you, not Hikaru." She made it a choice to save my life. "How is design coming for him?"

"As in is he actually doing his homework?" replied Kaoru. How did she know about the explosion? "Yes. He got the internship." How did she meet me first? "Kyouya, are you all right?" Was I dead the first time? "I mean, you almost got killed." When was the first time I met her? "Seriously, how could you be so calm right now?"

"I run a hospital." What is she doing here? Why is she here? "I can't save everyone." What does any of this have to do with me? "Call you later." And if it is her choice to save my life, what do I have to do to keep it that way?

"Kyouya." Kaoru was silent for a moment at the other end. "Never mind."

"That was an unusually long phone call," Diana said when he joined her watching the TV set. "Didn't happen before. But you know what did?" She pointed to the windows. "Paparazzi. That's why I'm..." She cleared her throat. "Here. You got in a sticky mess with your father, took you out of commission for a full day. I can't have that."

"All right." Kyouya folded his arms. "I don't know why you are here. And I don't know what you want from me. But it is very clear to me that you have something in mind."

"Yes. To stop the bombing. No collateral."

Kyouya gave the TV a sidelong glance. She had switched it back to breaking news. "That's already happened."

There was a sly smile on Diana's face. "You know," she said softly, "it's these little twists in the way this week unfolds that I'm living for nowadays. 'That's already happened.' Really, Kyouya, I'd like to tell you something about that. To stop the bombing, no collateral, that's not what I wanted. That's not how I originally dealt with this, um, problem. That's actually what you said, the first time I met you. That's what you wanted. Lie down on your bed so it doesn't look like you're talking to me; we're being watched."

Kyouya sank onto his bed, his head slipping between two pillows. A migraine was coming. "And where does what I want fit with what you want?"

"Well, Kyouya, I hate to have to spout out all these disgusting clichés, but they're clichés because they get the point across beautifully. Let's see, uh, what time is it now? Ten thirty? A bus explodes right in front of my eyes, and forty-four innocent people die in it. Then I find it in my power the ability to turn back time, to start over, to step in with a helping hand and alter the course of...fate, history, destiny, or what-have-you. To the woman I was two hours ago, this was, how to say this...appealing...but I didn't know it yet. Clearly, I could not save everybody, but with this power, I could save someone. Some of them. Then the trick became making sure to find the right people." Her eyes took on the glaze of memory as her words trailed into a whisper. "Isn't that what the world deserves? Here is a chance to reward goodness." She chuckled humorlessly. "It becomes a natural responsibility to be the hero."

"So you're being the hero?"

"Let's say that."

"So what do you want me to do? I'm afraid your explanations make little sense to me, so I don't imagine I could be particularly useful, Miss Reed."

"Oh, that's right," she said, suddenly switching to fluent Japanese. "I should be calling you Ootori-san, shouldn't I? Well, Mr. Ootori-san, last we were together, we were trying to uncover who was behind this whole mess. You can check out the spoils in here."

The cell phone came flying into his vision and landed on his face. He muttered a curse and checked his glasses, then picked up the black phone. Sleek, black buttons with numbers glowing in green Tahoma, the center TM on the grand button centered at the top between Call and End was not the logo of T-Mobile as he had previously believed. He dialed one. Voicemail. Skip new messages. Skip first saved message. Next saved message. There were three more "facts," as he had apparently decided to designate them, and three more in the next saved message. He listened to them both, redialed voicemail, listened again, redialed voicemail, listened again, redialed voicemail, snapped the phone shut before it could play again.

He was leaning over his personal bar counter now, tapping half a wineglass of Cognac on the glass and hissing at Diana to stop swiveling in circles on the bar stool beside him. There were ten calls unanswered on his cell, from his father's butler, from Tamaki, from Mori, from the department of young volunteers at the hospital. (What the hell did she have to tell him right now?)

"I should be making a public appearance," he had said to Diana at some point, though he could no longer pinpoint when. "I should be attending some conference to vouch the support Ootori Medical will provide in the days coming as the culprits of the tragedy are brought to justice." He lit a cigarette. "Or something like that."

Diana was absorbed in ringing music out of the half-empty Cognac bottle and his glass with the corkscrew. "You never needed to do that because your father did. And about the cigarette," she pointedly stood up and returned to the living room, "it'll be an irony just for you and me, but that doesn't mean I approve of it."

"I don't understand."

"What isn't there to understand about cigarettes being gross?"

"All these messages. How did you get a hand on this? How did we discover—" Unable to find an appropriate word, he resorted to shaking the cell phone at her. "Stop being so damn lazy and just start at the beginning like you said you would!"

Diana intercepted the phone on its one-way trip to the flat screen television. "Kyouya! Careful with the merchandise, or we'll be stuck in this reality forever!"

"I meant to..." Kyouya looked at the wineglass he had meant to throw. "Wait, what?"

"You want the beginning?" She held out the phone. "This is it. Everything starts with this."

Research is my friend. :) Until next time!