Author's Notes: Golly, is it late enough? I just finished and it's midnight…

I'm in college…what the hell am I doing, going to bed at midnight? Oh yeah…I wake up at six…

I both hate and love my job…


9


The makeup worked. No one looked at me twice from bathroom to ticket counter to platform to seat. My bag of effects was stored overhead and I was curled up in my seat, across from Crawford, who was pretending he didn't know me and was politely ignoring me. Schuldig was six rows down on our side of the aisle and Nagi two rows behind us, opposing side, his seat pressed against the wall by the door.

I was watching the cities and countryside and suburbia pass by the window, appearing calm, relaxed, carefree even, but my hands were gripping the insides of the jacket I wore. Once or twice I had caught myself biting my nails. I was afraid to go to sleep because I might smear my makeup. Crawford's nose was deeply planted in a newspaper, one leg crossed over the other at the knee in a rather feminine fashion. I read the outside of the open paper, the front page…

'Six Dead From Car Bombing in Iraq, Two Americans Injured.'

I turned away quickly…forget it. I didn't want to read about it. Same depressing shit every day for six billion years…

I had absolutely no idea how Crawford could read it day after day after day after day…

/This, coming from a man who enjoys Russian literature…/ Schuldig remarked with a soft mental chuckle.

Like you don't, I snapped back.

/Of course I don't, I don't read./

A depressing fact indeed…

/Crawford really needs to put you back on that Thorizane-shit…you're seeing all sorts of freaky things…/

No doubt he was looking through my recent memories and had noticed the slightly disturbing mucus-green muck monster in the seat next to me. I knew it wasn't real, even if it was breathing down my neck. I knew it wasn't real, but I still couldn't help being nervous because of it.

Are you saying the world really doesn't have it's own sound effects? Not at all like the movies?

/No, Far, it doesn't/

How boring, I thought with a smile.

/Hardly/


I didn't remember it, but I must've fallen asleep because Brad was shaking me, whispering 'wake up' at me. His eyes were hard, but a little bloodshot. He didn't wear contacts regularly, so I imagined they were irritating.

"What?"

"We got sleeper booths. Go nap there. I'll send for you in a few hours."

I checked my watch and groaned. "Midnight? Christ, Brad, you're cruel…"

"No one else will be around. Go and you can get four hours you might need."

I got up, still grumbling, and shook my legs awake, ignoring the tingling enough to walk straight. Brad had slipped me a card with the booth number on it, which I glowered at in the dim light. Damn sunglasses…I hated wearing them.

I slipped into the right booth, stooping against the short ceiling. I knew I was tall, like a lot of the Americans I assumed to have designed the train cars, so it surprised me how much I had to crick my neck down. I shut the door with a little more force the necessary and pulled off my sunglasses so I could peer about my new and thankfully temporary quarters.

I saw a black-haired boy waiting for me, all grins. For one deadly second I didn't recognize Schuldig and had almost punched him in the face. He smiled at me, unworried and waited as I struggled to pull back my momentum. I ended up falling against the opposing wall, but not with enough force to damage my shoulder.

I slid to the floor, clutching my chest as I glared at Schuldig. He flipped his hair off his shoulder, uncaring, and smirked at me.

"Nice reflexes," he commented smugly.

"I'm getting far too old for you to startle me like that, you arsehole," I snapped back.

He quirked his eyebrow at me, jet as the rest of his hair, and the smile slipped off his face like water.

"You're not old until you're well into your fifties…"

"You're only saying that because you're really a geezer," I snorted as I pulled myself back to my feet and looked for a sink or bowl to wash my face in.

"I am not old!" he snapped. True thing, that, he wasn't even thirty, but the stress of our lives had given all but Nagi one or two gray hairs…

/I know what you're thinking…/

"You don't just tell a severely mentally unstable person that, Schuldig. It sets them off," I warned kindly, voice sweet as I found a little sink in the wall. Nice booth, with plumbing…For once Brad actually splurged on the team…

Schuldig didn't answer, still feeling sore for the old comment. When I finished peeling off the thick layer of makeup from my face and looked at him, curious at his silence, he was flicking his hair back and forth, expression sour as lemons. I briefly missed the old length of his hair, disappointed with the new, shorter version (which to most men was enough to drive them crazy, myself included), but he cut my thoughts off with a glare.

I sighed and sat down next to him on the tiny bed, reached out to touch his hair in apology. He pulled away, effectively snubbing any attempts with an icy set to his face.

"If you aren't going to be sociable, could you move? I'm tired and Brad told me to get some sleep," I growled tartly, annoyed. His eyes narrowed slightly into the kind of look I assumed one got before he shot them, but he silently, slowly got off the bed. I didn't bother thanking him and rolled onto my side, facing the wall and shut my eyes.

I felt the bed sink, Schuldig sitting down again, his fingers in my hair and lips against my ear, but refused to acknowledge him. He knew I noticed, could read it right out of my head. He reveled in it and my stubbornness to pay him any attention.

"Funny how your hair hasn't fallen out, with all the shit your put it through…no doubt you'll bleach it to death when we're done…"

I would indeed. Seeing myself like this was terrifyingly normal. I shocked myself every time I looked in a mirror. I felt rather like a pigeon, attacking my own reflection.

"You know how hard it was to find a shade of makeup light enough for your face? Nearly drove me crazy…" he whispered as he ran a fingernail over my cheek and down my neck to my shoulder. I could barely repress the shiver it gave me every time his breath ghosted over my ear.

I shut my eyes tighter, trying to block him out without moving.

"You looked beautiful, though, so nice without a flaw on your face…not like yourself, but defiantly fuckable…"

"Is there something you wanted or are you just being a prick?" I finally snarled. He just smiled and ran his hands over my face again, eyes hungry.

"Not that you're fuckable now…" he murmured.

"Go away."

His mood shifted again, angry. I could see in the line of his body just how pissed he was…shit…

Mental explosion…it was a shoddy way to go, I knew. I'd seen it…

"God, Monica, what is your problem?!" he shouted, fists gripping the sheets.

I blinked.

Who the fuck was Monica?

Schuldig?

He took hold of my shoulders, fingernails digging into my shirt as he shook me.

"You can't say 'no', not after leading me on all this way, you little bitch!"

Schu, you're projecting someone else…

"Stupid whore…"

"Schu!" I snapped and broke his hold on me. I gently smack his cheek. "Wake up!"

He blinked…as if coming awake from a long nap, shivering very slightly.

"Far?"

I snapped my fingers in his eyes, "You all here?"

"Yeah…Oh, man, that guy was fucked up…I think he's going to rape his girlfriend…"

I started. Schu wasn't the type to give a crap about other people's problems…

"If he kills her, we'll get noticed," he explained as he got up, his legs weak. I shook my head and sat him down.

"Tell me where and I'll take care of it. You stay here, okay?" I said. Schu just nodded, tired.

"3D. Next car down."


Even through the door there were shouts loud enough to understand…I knocked, hard, and waited a moment before someone hideous jerked open the door. I was wearing the sunglasses again, but none of the makeup. He looked about as shocked to see me as I was to see him.

He looked exactly like the kind of person one would place as a landlord of a halfway house. My mind supplied the word 'convict' for me, even before I noticed gang tattoos on his thick neck. He was built like a bull and I was surprised to find that he did not, in face, have cloven hooves for feet. He might as well have, though, with the way he was snorting at me in not-so-silent outrage. He face was orange, just a shade or two away from tomato red.

"What do you want?" he demanded, his voice rough and savage. He looked and sounded like a killer, but hardly the graceful, professional kind. I wondered belatedly if he was packing heat.

There was a woman in the room behind him, hurriedly pulling her ripped shirt together over her breasts, her face smeared with tears and snot. There was a rising bruise on her cheek, but there didn't seem like any more damage to her.

"I'm a security officer on this train and loud noises were reported to be coming from this room," I moved to peek into the room further and he moved in my way, "Is everything all right, sir?"

"Yeah, fine. Go away." He made as if to slam the door in my face, but I slid my foot into the door jam and discreetly forced him to back up. I was inside before he even realized it. I smiled softly.

"I'm going to have to ask you to come with me, sir. We have policies about disruptive behavior," I said.

I felt rather like a cowboy in old black and white westerns I'd once watched as a kid.

'We here've got rules about disturbers of the peace'

"I'm not goin' nowhere with you, so fuck off and get the hall out of my room."

My smile widened a little more and I struggled to keep it from going manic.

"I thought you'd say that," I purred. There was a lot of posing with this man, but he was far from expert, I could see. My eye picked up subtle details about his body language that I knew he couldn't get from mine, both because he was an idiot and because I rarely, if ever gave my movements away.

It was like zen, how easily I could see his flaws, how he shifted his weight to accommodate a punch, not using all of his potential power, even as I brought the side of my hand against his neck, jamming a pressure point with one swift move. He went down with a crash, eyes rolling. I had barely moved, barely exerted effort. It felt kind of unfair, fighting someone untrained.

His girlfriend was watching me with horror. She knew I wasn't at all security.

I wondered if my mother had once looked like this broken woman…I turned away to drag the man into the hallway.

"Wait! Where are you going?!" she asked, his voice high and sad, "Don't take him!"

I turned, surprised.

"You want this man to abuse you?" I asked.

"He wasn't…he…"

There was a moment's silence, then I dropped the man back into her arms.

"Stupid," I muttered and left.

I'd wasted thirty minutes I could've slept through.


"People are so stupid…why are we bothering to help them again?" I growled as I ripped off my socks and lay down on the tiny bed. Schuldig's arm slid over my waist and he placed his head on my shoulder with a sigh.

"Because Brad tells us to?"

"Well…" I said, "That's reasonable…But when we're free, when Esset's dead, can we stop taking orders from him? I think he's going senile with all the nice shit he's making us do."

"Think about that woman, Far. You saved her from potential rape."

"Not really. They'll be other times. It's a hopeless cause," I said.

"You don't care? Not after…Ruth was…"

"Ruth and that woman are different. At least Ruth was smart enough to leave the situation, even if she wasn't smart enough leave me well enough alone. That woman, she'll never leave because she thinks she loves him, or she's too scared too. Yes, it's a terrible thing, what happened or what will happen, but we, as the makers of our own fates, don't need help if we don't' bother helping ourselves."

Schuldig propped himself up on his elbow to smiled at me.

"You're so inspiring…"

"I am not, lay down so I can get some goddamn sleep…"

"And you're adorable when you're angry."

I sighed and turned on my side. Schuldig laughed softly and lay down again, chest tight against my back.

"Good night, liebe."

"Shut the hell up, Schuldig," I growled with a little less force than usual. He laughed again, against my neck and went to sleep.


The heady scent of musk was so deep in my nose it was part of my being, sweet and disgusting at once, utterly and irreplaceably human and nearly enough to make me deny existence of God forever…almost.

Once Catholic, always Catholic…no matter what you did to snuff it out, there was always that irresistible urge to fight the one thing you knew didn't really exist.

I sighed and pressed my face harder against Schuldig's shoulder, nose nearly in his armpit as I came awake. He muttered softly in his sleep, something in Chinese, and moved against me. I smiled, pleased at this moment of peace. It was like early mornings in the Takatori days, where he and I would lay in bed past noon, napping and watching one another sleep. But for the motion of the train below and around us, I might've thought we were back in Japan, at those contented times.

I pressed my face against his skin for another long breath and wound my fingers into his thick hair, bushy from sleeping on it. It was almost at his shoulders again, falling into s blunt cut, barely styled but for old layers left out of laziness. His bangs were to his cheeks now, in his eyes at every moment…

I sat up slowly, sheet around my waist as I leaned over him, counting freckles on his white face, watching his thin lips as he spoke other people's dreams like a man in rapture at a church. It was beautiful…I had no idea why someone like him would love me, but I was pleased that he did…

I couldn't have picked a better mate myself…

He slowly came awake, stretching slowly, almost lavishly, like, of course, a cat, and scratched his scalp. His eyes came blearily open and his mouth curled in a soft smile at me. I reached down and stroked his cheek with a rough fingertip and he stretched again.

/Are you two awake yet?/ Brad's voice snapped through the link, breaking the moment like a grenade in a shop full of mirrors. I ground my teeth in annoyance.

What?! I snapped back.

Brad's voice was viciously cool/Get dressed and report back to my seat. Ten minutes/

That was it; he was gone, leaving us to pick up the shattered fragments of one of the most goddamn romantic moments of my life. I hated him more than anything for the ten minutes it took for Schuldig and me to drag ourselves out of bed and pull on our clothes. The minute it took Schuldig to slap on my makeup was tense with mutual agitation, then we were moving along the tiny hallway through the car and into the group of seats Crawford and Nagi occupied, both reading their own sections of newspapers. Crawford was doing a crossword and Nagi was flatly reading the comics. Schuldig immediately stole the sudoku puzzle and sat down. I followed, taking the front page, but not reading it.

"The car is empty for the time being. This is a good time to discuss our plans," Brad said as he filled in the boxes.

"Which are," I asked coldly, still annoyed with him. He barely even looked at me.

"We're moving north, briefly, south, then west. We're going to hit every Esset outpost in America we can, gather an army, and then move them to Europe for the grand finale."

So it was in sight, the end…sooner than I'd thought.

"What about South America?" Nagi asked. I remembered that there were a lot of faculties in Brazil, where I'd one trained, and wondered why I hadn't asked that question myself.

"We've got agents working there undercover. When the time comes, they'll move in and disable any potential threats. At the moment, though, they aren't necessary."

"But we've got everything else covered?" Schuldig countered. Brad nodded.

"To the best of our ability, yes. We have enough agents planted around the world to stop anyone from coming to back up Headquarters. Once we get through America, we're moving on Austria."

Austria…I shivered the same moment Schuldig there. Our telepath and leader had trained there, gone through the worst imaginable tortures, surviving solely by chance. I'd heard Schuldig tell tales of the faculties there, which were almost as bad as the death camps from Nazi Germany and occupied Poland in 1944, where children were starved within an inch of their sanity, beaten, cursed beings. There had been two sectors a trainee lived in, the strong and weak. The weak were fair game to all the strong, raped and murdered at will of any childish leader clawed his way to the top. Schuldig told me about one of his childhood friends, a little empathy boy who'd been raped and strangled in the faculty.

Crawford never talked about his training; let us assume it had been worse. He'd gone to an officer's camp where boys and girls were picked apart like bread in the beaks of ravens. Most were said to go insane or kill themselves. Of course, most of the trainees of Schuldig's degree also committed suicide. Even Schuldig admitted to almost hanging himself from his bunk, only to be cut down from a supervisor and beaten for it.

Schuldig clapped his hands together in front of my face and I blinked out of my thoughts.

"Sorry…"

He was smiling, eyes flickering with malicious glee.

"Don't be. By all means, remember…Remember everything horrible they did to us and let it lead you. We're finally going to give them hell for it," Brad said, his voice soft, gentle even.

Nagi was sitting stiff in his seat, his page of newspaper crinkling in his grip.

We had no idea what they'd done to him…We knew it was worse.

He'd only been a child…his whole life had been horrible.

He was still a child…

I placed my hand on his shoulder, smiled gently when he looked up at me, fear warring with fury in his eyes.

"I'm okay, Far," he whispered, "I'm glad…I want to kill them."

I smiled wider. "You do that, kiddo."

His lips moved in a smile and he went back to his paper.


From Washington D.C. to New York city. From there to Chicago to Atlanta to Dallas. From Texas north to Kansas to Colorado. Then north to Seattle and south again to Los Angeles.

It was hot, dead in the center of July and so dry my nose bled every time I sneezed from the smog. We'd destroyed over twenty faculties in eighteen states, freeing well over six hundred man, woman and child talents. Well over half of those were coming with us to Europe, traveling separately or in small, discreet groups by boat and plane.

Brad, Nagi, Schu and I were still in California, covering our tracks from the most recent hit and celebrating with a scoop of ice cream. I hadn't had ice cream since Japan almost a year since Takatori. It was nice, laughing with them as we told jokes and prodded fun at one another like family.

Brad was the first to go silent, Schuldig following close behind. Nagi and I looked up, surprised at their sudden tenseness.

"Shit," Brad whispered just before something like super-powered static electricity lunged down the block in our direction, taking out cars and anything electrical on it's way.

Eletroshock wave…Esset agents, strong ones, were controlling it.

They'd found us…

Fin Chapter 9

Please Review

Author's Notes: How's that for a cliffhanger?! HAHAHA!

Mmm…comments…

I can't believe I actually made Farfarello and Schu play 'the heroes'. I am beyond disappointed with myself.

I'm listening to Gorillaz 'White Light' at double speed. It's hilarious…

I'm clearing some stuff for my own benefit:

Schuldig's hair is shoulder length now, cut for disguises Brad puts him in, and dyed black and gothy. His eyebrows are also black now.

Esset headquarters are in Austria now, since I don't know where it is really. Austria was under German occupation…why not, eh? Other faculties are in Brazil, Denmark, Spain, the UK, Japan, Congo, India, plus various spots in America and China. There are others, but they aren't as important to the story.

Electromagnetism is the control of magnetism in all metal objects. It's the same thing Magneto from X-men has.

Electroshock is the control over electricity in and around objects. There is little doubt that I will mix these two up.

The new villains are friggin' awesome and I haven't even developed them yet!

Also…I'm kind of in the last two weeks of the semester. Exams are coming and I really, REALLY need to study. This means you either won't hear from me until Christmas or you'll get something every day from my sheer insane refusal to do something productive like actually working.

I changed my shampoo and now my hair smells fantastic…(smells hair) I'm getting high off it…

To My Readers:

TheInflictedFinger:

Changing Currency Chapter: I liked how your reviews got progressively stranger. It was entertaining. I shall be continuing the weiss fic and I hope to continue to hear from you (hint, hint)

Sleep of Sinners Chapter: No worries. I like psychotic fangirls. Makes sense, though, having a psychotic fangirls for a fic about a psychotic misfit. I'm rather psychotic myself (of course I seem to have calmed down a bit since leaving high school…hmm). As it is, I still giggle like crazy whenever I see anime murderers…Alucard and Farfarello are my favorites.

Cello Prose: Raw like a slab of beef in a butcher's freezer.

Dandelions: I update anywhere between three times a week and once every six months depending on my personal interest on the story, creative flow, and the amount of reviews I get. Swear to God, reviews help.

StarTrekObsessed Yeah, I know what it's like living in a homo-bashing family. Both of my parents are ultra-conservative. Lucky me, I've kept my writing from them. Considering how much Yaoi/Shonen-ai I actually write, they'd turn me out if they ever found out. You have my sympathies. And thank you for reviewing.

I couldn't decide on the word emigration or exodus and even now I'm not sure what I picked was better.

'Farf' always seemed kind of degrading, or if not that, at least exceedingly familiar in the uber-polite nation of Japan. Also, for the Farfarello I was portraying, it was too damn cutsie…

I'm a lazy speller.

This mistake of shutter and shudder was entirely unintentional and thank you for catching that. I will try to be careful next time.