FILE III
Characters: Bartie Stork (Numbuh 35), Virginia Sims (Numbuh 23)
File Under: POST-SERIES TIMELINE – post-g:KND
Archive Label: They still have nightmares about seeing each other destroyed. Virginia can't live with that for the rest of her life.

two years
from now

"Are you saying…you don't want us to be going out?"

Even if his voice hadn't cracked on the last part, Bartie guessed he probably sounded pathetic. Virginia let out a huffed sigh that confirmed his fears. He thought that he could probably guess what she was going to say next before she started: Numbuh 35's mind had accepted it before he completely understood, already detaching itself the way it did sometimes now when upsetting things happened. He wanted to speak up now, maybe tell her that it was fine using the reassuring leader voice he was getting better at. But instead he found himself staring blankly at her in silence.

"What I'm sayin' is," Virginia continued, "if you really care more about me and us going out than you do about rebuilding Moonbase Zero, you should quit tomorrow morning and call in a game of tag."

Okay, maybe he'd guessed wrong. Numbuh 35 stared at her dumbly and wondered why it was so much harder to talk to the girl he liked now than it had been in the midst of life-threatening peril.

"I know it's scary, but we can't just keep doing things to protect each other," Virginia said, halfway rambling, something she almost never did. "It ain't just you and me in the universe. We're all home now, and…" It had been just their group for the longest time. "You've been handling communications for Earth's KND for like, four years. You don't need me here to play your secretary."

He still stared at her, not exactly sure what to say. It felt wrong. What she said was true, how it wasn't so much about how he liked her as…that it was terrifying even now just to be separated. Not knowing what might happen when she wasn't there. Thinking on the fate of the former Sector V, maybe she was rightfully scared they were codependent.

Virginia's eyes were sad, but eventually her smile dropped. Bartie tried not to think about the scars on her arm that would have been holes in his lungs, or the bright blue mark of an alien ideograph emblazoned on his own right temple that stretched down and sideways across his forehead to nearly his brow. That mark still shone sometimes, at night, when he felt subtle shifts in a new, internal barometer that hadn't been there before the planetary decommissioning.

"Either reassign me back to artillery design back at Deep Sea Lab," Virginia was saying, "or I'll ask again whoever's here tomorrow. Either way…

"I guess the answer is, yeah, Bartie. I'm sorry. I think we should both go home."

They both did. Bartie lay awake in his bed late that night, considering all she'd said and refusing to let any of it make him cry. Earth's Supreme Leader didn't cry anymore. No consideration crossed his mind for the suggestion she'd given, and there was no call for the scattered KND to meet at the remains of the convention center when the sun rose.

But he did get up at one point to scribble a half-thought-out note on a piece of notebook paper, which he stared at a long time before crumpling it up and throwing it into the trash.

OK I get it but just so you know you're still It to