Chapter 10

362 smiled to herself and relaxed a little once they were on their ship and headed out. Watching V8 run around like a headless chicken was kinda funny. She couldn't really blame him for freaking out, though.

"Relax, V," she said amiably, patting him on the back. "It'll be okay."

The familiarity only made him more twitchy. "What're you talking about?! Sir, we're on a luxury ship! We can't outrun fighting ships that're built to catch things! I never should've come on this mission, it's been weird from the start, I just should've stayed in my lab where everything makes sense..."

She let the minor insubordination slide. "I told you to relax. That's an order," she suggested gently, and was amused to see him actually get relaxed in instinctive obedience. Such a strange kid he was. "I know we're on a big slow tub of lard. Your Supreme Leader was smart enough to compensate for it. I put my old espionage skills to good use and learned a lot about how that base does search and retrieval mission launches. The bays they use for docking and takeoff are pretty vulnerable to sabotage when tons of ships are being brought in or sent out all at once... so I borrowed some of your snoozogenic eggplant bombs and stuck them in quiet little spots that'll only go off if they send out a search team."

For some reason, Numbuh V8's face greened a bit. "Uh. You didn't use the ones in the blue container, did you?"

"Err.... yeah... why?" she asked suspiciously, wishing he'd bothered to actually label stuff in words a reasonably smart kid could understand. Half the words on the labels had been in freaking Latin, for crying out loud!

"Oh. Oh dear. Those were highly experimental. Still working out the, um, kinks, you know. They don't so much make people fall asleep when they explode as... err, give them subconscious hypnotic suggestions to go briefly super psycho crazy whenever they blink."

"But... everyone blinks! And... they have to blink even if they don't want or need to, around those horror aliens, or they go crazy anyway!"

"Yeeeessss. That would be my primary concern."

There was a significant pause as the two stared at each other. Simultaneously, they pivoted to look out the window back at the asteroid base.

"Computer, get us the heck out of here," 362 ordered with at least outward calm.

"Engines are already running at one hundred percent capacity, Supreme Leader."

"Well... keep them that way!"

"We are gonna be in sooooo much trouble if they catch uuuuusss," V8 whined, holding his head in his hands.

362 snorted. She didn't care what kind of 'trouble' she got in for retrieving an operative that was hers by rights. She wasn't going to be intimidated by a big baby! She was a kid, and any kid who let themselves be lorded over by something that didn't even know how to use the toilet yet was no real kid at all as far as she was concerned.

"I'm going to chat with Numbuh One. Call me if anyone starts shooting at us."

V8 whimpered.

She had gagged One at first for stealth's sake, but taken the silly string off his mouth once they were aboard the ship and safe from prying Galactic KND eyes. Of course she still couldn't trust him enough to untie any more than that, so he was awfully uncomfortable, even if she had put him in a nice chair with armrests and padding and everything. Just one more reason to get home asap. She didn't want to have to figure out how he was going to go to the bathroom without it turning into a 'heroic' escape attempt.

"Everything okay, Numbuh One?" she asked him politely, shutting the door behind her.

"Oh, yeah. Everything's swell. I'm being kidnapped by my former superior officer, that's all. This is just awesome."

"There's no need to be snippy. You brought this on yourself, ya know," she chided, wishing he would look at her instead of glare at the wall.

"Oh, did I?! Well, EXCUSE me for trying to protect kids everywhere from adults! I guess I'll just have to try less hard to meet your approval, 'Supreme' Leader!"

She didn't like the nasty twist he put on the word 'supreme.' Like she didn't deserve her rank, like she hadn't earned it and been doing a good job ever since. But she was not gonna be baited into fighting just because he was mad he wasn't in control of things anymore. This wasn't about him or her. This was about the KND and the GKND.

"You know everyone in the KND admires your dedication, Numbuh One. That goes for me, too. But that doesn't give you leave to go running off and doing whatever you feel like. I don't care whose approval you did have, you didn't have mine. And that's all that matters as far as I'm concerned, got it?"

He snorted, eyes rolling. "Things must be pretty sucky for kids back on Earth if you need to go to crazy lengths like these to get me back."

"Actually, things are going wonderfully," she told him with complete honesty. Except for her, of course. She couldn't be happy no matter how many successful missions she saw reported on her desk, because of that one little niggling insolence called Numbuh One sitting in the back of her mind 24/7. Other than that, things had been just fine. "Better than ever, really. A lot of our new operatives are getting seasoned enough to really show their stuff."

"Like your brother?" he asked darkly.

She coughed. Her familial trust had been one minor black mark on her record. And she couldn't quite bring herself to lie about it, either. Not when One had so many reasons to be peeved at her as it was. "Actually, Numbuh 363 was recently... well, demoted for excessive recklessness and endangerment of fellow operatives." That, and for totally freaking out whenever someone so much as tapped him on the shoulder, but she didn't see the need to reveal information that embarrassing.

One smirked, not looking at all surprised. "Heh."

"The rest of his team has gone on to do great things, though," she continued on hurriedly. "Just last week they blew up a coffee creamery. And we've managed to get more direct cooperation from that Tommy, who can be surprisingly helpful as a diversion once you bribe him with enough candy and video game rental coupons."

"Glad to hear it. How's Abby doing with my old team?"

"They'll still be your team, if you ever get your head screwed on straight. You know they'd be glad to have you back. Numbuh Five's doing fine. She takes on her missions a lot different from you... she's a lot more relaxed and a bit more careful... but the team works with her fine, and they've done particularly good with diplomatic missions lately."

"That's about what I'd expect. Abigail's pretty hard to not get along with. You really should consider making her your second instead of that bossy redhead."

It was 362's turn to roll her eyes. She added a sigh along with it. Just went to show that as good as Numbuh One was, he still didn't know nearly as much as he thought he did. Especially about being Supreme Leader. "When you're the highest one on the food chain, you want a second who barks loud so you don't have to," she explained. "As a leader, if you get mad too much and try to intimidate people all the time, then they'll be scared but they'll also start to think that maybe you're weak because you have to yell so much. You need them scared, a little bit, or else they won't do what they're supposed to do. But you need to keep your cool most of the time, too. So you get someone who yells as your second, so you don't have to, and you keep on acting calm and stuff while people look nervously at the dog you're just barely holding on a leash. It helps that Numbuh 86 is in charge of decommissionings, too. She's totally the best second I could ask for."

"Ruling by fear? Is that really the way you wanna go, Rachel? Sounds pretty Fatherlike to me. I hope you don't start asking people to call you Mother."

"Not all by fear, just a little bit!" she snapped, annoyed over the personal name use as well as the totally inaccurate and unwarranted 'Mother' dig. "Don't look at me like that. It's not like you'd know anything about leading. You've got a lot of great qualities but you're more loose cannon than leader and you know it, so don't act like you know how to keep control over hundreds of operatives."

"Maybe not. But I do know enough about missions and diplomacy to know that what you're trying to do right now isn't going to work," he said in such a calm, patient tone that it had her skin crawling. "And if you're better than me at dealing with people, then you have to know it too."

"I don't know what you're talking ab-" she started, only to be interrupted.

"Yes, you do!" he snapped sharp as a whipcrack, glaring at her. Despite herself she actually shifted backwards a little at the intensity of it. "Come on, Rachel, who're you kidding with this harebrain kidnapping idea? What happens when I get back to Earth? The GKND come knocking and try to get me back, that's what. Then the KND will split between those who want to help the GKND and those who want to keep me, and frankly most of the best operatives will be on my side with the GKND because my team is top notch no matter what kind of new rising stars you've got on the roster now! It'll be a war, and it'll be over quickly if we're lucky. If it's not and you somehow keep up a solid defense for more than ten seconds, the adults will hit you while you're busy with the GKND and we'll lose everything. This whole idea is stupid! You'll lose everything, Rachel, and it's not like you'll even get me back in exchange! In the end it'll just be you, alone, and decommissioned if you're really lucky and don't land a worse punishment."

Numbuh 362 had known all that, in the back of her mind, when she'd snatched him. She had known and ignored it in the hopes that it would somehow all work out. Because she wanted the universe to be nice and just give her a break for once, to give her this one thing and let it be okay, and she wouldn't ask for anything else. Her best bet had been to just hope that Numbuh One wouldn't be valuable enough for the GKND to bother with, once he was back on Earth. And it wasn't too farfetched. But it was a gamble, and it was a gamble with awful consequences if she'd guessed wrong. The fact that she couldn't rationally justify any of it to herself, the gain compared to the risk, just made her angrier.

So many months of being tired. Of wading through paperwork, of herding lazy, OCD kids like a bunch of cats. Of getting 86 to scare people and then getting her to stop scaring them, at just the right times. Of organizing things, of keeping everything together. Including herself. Especially herself. She just... she had to stop and do something impulsive for a change, for the first time since the tag game. Something really... thoughtless, like a regular kid would do. Why Numbuh One, though, of all the things to fixate on and go crazy over?

She couldn't look in his eyes anymore, but she felt them on her anyway, worse than needles. But although his eyes were needles, his voice was really soft when he spoke again.

"What's this really about, Rachel?"

She really wished he would stop calling her that.

She hadn't been Rachel to anyone that mattered for a long, long time.

"You and I both know I'm just not worth that much," he continued still in that tender kind of voice she couldn't bear to hear, except she couldn't bear to walk away from it either. "You have to risk an awful lot to outdo even my ego, but the whole Earth KND is what you're risking right now, and one operative isn't worth that no matter how good he is. There's gotta be something else to it. Please, stop hiding behind your Supreme Leaderliness and tell me what's really going on. I deserve to know. And I think you need to tell me, because you look really stressed out."

"When don't I look stressed out," she mumbled shakily, pacing around in a tiny circle just for the sake of something to do with her body to get rid of all the nervous energy building up. And words started to just spill out of her mouth, words she had no idea where they were coming from. "I know I was mean to you and all but you did fail in that cake mission like every single time, and you never seemed to feel bad about it or anything, you just keep on walking around like you owned the biggest candy store in the world... if everyone acted like that, it would've been, I don't know, chaos or something. No point in having a KND at all if everyone was like you! But don't get me wrong, I like you for being you, you're great and all. I want and need one of you around. But just one of you. I can't take more than that. I thought maybe after you left that I didn't even need that one you, but I was wrong, because it kept itching at the back of my head, every time I assigned your team on a mission and you weren't there to assign! And... and, you didn't even say anything to me before you left, you didn't ask permission or even wave or leave a note or anything, you were just gone, and people aren't supposed just go away like that without telling everyone something first... and... I don't know..."

There was a painful pause as 362 fought to swallow the lump in her throat.

"I guess I can be pretty mean sometimes, too, without meaning to," One finally said. There was absolutely no way she could look at him, but she couldn't stop from hearing, and the words hurt without her knowing why. "We're both pretty thoughtless sometimes. Part of being a kid."

"I guess." Her voice was a hoarse thing, half-croak half-whisper. She hated it.

"Maybe... maybe you just needed a chance to say goodbye," he suggested, like he was thinking out loud.

Completely without her wanting it to do so, her body jumped at him and she buried her face in his chest, arms wrapped around him. She didn't dare speak. She definitely didn't dare look up at him, see whatever expression was on his face. It wasn't something she could stand. Instead, she just kept herself like that, quivering, ashamed to feel tears leak out through her clenched eyelids and dampen his shirt. His hands wrapped around her loosely, one patting her back in that awkward way boys did for girls when they wanted to be comforting but didn't really get what was going on. Then she realized with a start that that meant he'd gotten his flipping arms free of the silly string, but couldn't bring herself to care. That was just so Numbuh One. He'd escape out of anything, fight anything, do anything. He was Numbuh One. Even Father couldn't hope to contain him, and she was no Father.

Once 362 had actually done it, the hardest part was stopping. She didn't straighte herself up until she was completely sure she had stopped crying and that there wer eno obvious signs of tears to humiliate her further in front of him. Then she forced herself to let go and straighten up, becoming Supreme Leader again. Because she had a job. Even if it was a lonely one.

"I'm sorry," they both said at the same time, and looked at each other in surprise.

"That was kinda cliche," she pointed out with a bittersweet twist on her lips.

"Yeah." He smiled at her. "So... look, we can turn this whole thing around. You have a right to be mad about all the authoritorial... circumventigation stuff. We definitely need to work out something more consistent between the GKND and the planet KNDs. Tell you what, if you turn back now, I can help you make your case in front of the Grand Brat, and we won't mention the whole tying me up with silly string thing."

He was already out of the silly string, too. Blasted dumb super-competent operative. She could have forcefed him veggies and put him in a coma for the trip, but nooooo, she had to be nice about it!

Then things she'd done to delay the GKND crossed her mind... sabotagey things involving experimental vegetables that didn't have quite all the kinks worked out yet. She gulped, knowing that she was in a place with no way out and no happy ending now. All her fault. She could have stayed behind her desk, been a good little Supreme Leader, swallowed her pride and never seen Numbuh One again...

No, she couldn't have.

She couldn't even imagine not seeing him again, and maybe that was the real problem.

When the annoying computer's voice announced an attack, 362 didn't have to listen to the details. She closed her eyes and let out a soft sigh that seemed to move through her whole body, draining it of tension. There was nothing to look forward to, just total despair. She'd lost the game no matter what. But at least she didn't have anything left to lose, either. Numbuh One's panicking was almost funny, ringing in her ears as if from a distance.

She knew the attack would be aimed at their engines, because the GKND would want One back, and herself and V8 captured to humiliate. And she knew their own ship didn't stand a chance, so there was no point in even trying to defend. And she knew Numbuh One needed to calm down, because he was gonna be alright at least, jeez...

The yelling in her ears got loud enough to snap her out of her funk, and she actually understood what she was hearing.

"DON'T JUST STAND THERE, FATHER'S GONNA MELT US TO SCRAP!"

Crud. And Father had been so quiet lately she'd just plain forgotten about him. 362 didn't really have anything left to lose, but she didn't want poor V8 and One burn to rice krispy treats, either.

"Darn," she said with such bored calm that One stared at her in shock. "I guess we'll have to mount some kinda defense. You ready to perform the impossible on cue, Nigel?"

It took a moment, but he grinned at her. His usual devil-may-care grin that didn't give a spitball for whatever happened next so long as he had fun. "Same as usual, Supreme Leader."