I've been treated so long / As if I'm becoming untouchable.

Contempt loves the silence. / It thrives in the dark

With fine-winding tendrils / That strangle the heart.

Tick. Click. Tock. Thrrrum. Tick.

Each pass of his fingers drumming along the surface of the nameplate lined up with the ticking grandfather clock in the corner of the office, and Kurama was staring hard at the engraved inscription. Party Crasher, Professional Badass. There were those words again. Did they mean anything? Would they give him a clue as to where she was?

The expedition party hadn't returned, either, and every second that they remained in universes unknown grated on his nerves. Twenty-four long hours had gone by, and there was no sign of Irie. No call, no text, no distress signal… just silence echoing through the wide, empty hallways.

Wood scraping on wood broke the quiet as Kurama roughly stood from the chair and stalked out of the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. There was only one place he could think to look for further clues, and damn it all, he was going to check: he was going to break yet another promise to Irie and pick the lock to her bedroom door, something that he had never, in his wildest dreams, had thought he would end up doing. He'd already gone through the attic. The television held no relevant secrets, as far as he was aware. This was the next logical step, wasn't it?

Duchess was lying in front of the tightly-locked door and looked up at him with disdainful eyes; she knew what was on his mind.

"I don't need any of your judgment, Your Highness," he sighed, lifting a brow right back at her. "This is to find your mistress."

She simply whined and rested her chin back onto her paws.

The lock seemed fairly regular: an antique keyhole, no sign of a retinal or fingerprint scanner, or anything else that might have been far more bizarre. This was the bedroom of a girl who used tongue print scanners to keep her weapons safe, after all. He remembered that the key to his own bedroom had been hidden behind a portrait. Maybe Irie's held her spare key? It would certainly be the most obvious method to the madness of the mansion that he'd figured out thus far.

Her face was so different, hanging on the wall and immortalized in oils. The twinkle in her eye and the knowing little smirk were unfamiliar to him, the way she held the knife seemed far too careless, and he hadn't realized how accustomed he was to seeing her with a great, fat tattoo on her face, which the portrait lacked.

What was easy was imagining her accusatory stare. "I'll apologize when you've come back home," he murmured to the painting, then slid it aside to reveal another small safe. Old-fashioned listening, aided by his sharp senses, helped him figure out the code, waiting for the dial to make that tell-tale click! that signaled he'd hit the right number. It sprang open.

The key was large and clunky, and probably original to the mansion, itself, but it did the job: it met the keyhole without resistance. Finally, the lock clicked! and popped open.

Everything in the room was the most delicate shade of powder-blue and accented with a matching off-white that gave it a crisp, calming feeling the second one stepped into it. The wide bay window set into the wall let in so much light and looked out over the front lawn with a kinder kind of view than the more austere windows offered.

To the untrained eye, it was the very normal bedroom for a very normal, if introverted young woman: lightly cluttered so as to look lived in, decorated lightly with lots of cute Sanrio characters - she seemed to have a preference for Chococat and Charmmykitty, of all things - a perfectly organized vanity mirror for applying makeup, and a mannequin dressed up in the fanciest outfit Kurama had ever seen Irie own, and not a bit of it was out of place. It was all so gentle and quietly bright, it almost seemed impossible that it would be her room, but he supposed that it was relaxing for her.

He had to stop dwelling on how it looked, and needed to get to work.

He inspected every single nook and cranny, searching for hidden panels, compartments, scanners, anything that would be one of the mansion's classic hiding places for important things. Would she keep records of her enemies here? Well, it was one of the only truly sacrosanct rooms in the building, and she was often within, so… probably.

Duchess had climbed a delicate little set of steps leading up to the bed, probably for the express purpose of letting her sleep on it, and barked at Kurama.

"I already told you, Duchess, I'm not leaving until I find something to help me."

Irie had enemies; she'd said as much. Seiyu, for one, or whomever would target her for stealing alien technology. Koenma, as hard as that was to believe, but Kurama didn't want to strike him from the record just yet.

She was always so careful in everything that she did that maybe she had left something behind for just such an occasion. Instructions, perhaps, for what to do with the mansion and everything within, or a plan for how to fetch her back. Of course she would have, why wouldn't she? She'd gone to so much trouble to be the mansion's warden, she wouldn't simply let it all go to waste, right? But she was young, would she think that far ahead?

He straightened up from searching beneath her vanity - and finding nothing. A thought had occurred to him. She wouldn't…

But, alas, he realized that he wasn't giving her nearly enough credit when he stretched out on the floor beside her bed and reached beneath to pull out the cardboard box labelled IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. It was so easy to find, with almost no security around it, because who would possibly be able to find it if she subjected it to all the protections the mansion had to offer? Her secrets, she had always known, would need to be shared if anything ever happened to her, and where else would the average young woman keep her secrets but beneath her bed?

The box was full of not novels' worth of writing or journals, but of video tapes, able to be played in any VCR, and the labels were oddly specific and frustratingly vague in turn. Hashihime. That One Time I Went Missing for an Entire Year. A Basic Lecture in the Omniverse. Television. Security.

So I've Either Died or Gone Missing and You Have Questions About the Alien in My Basement.

He had to laugh a little. This woman.

This was the tape that he plucked up first. It was the most relevant, to his eyes, and the others would either have to wait until he knew she wasn't returning, or he wouldn't have to come back for them.

Just as he was closing the door behind him, Duchess darted out and into Botan's waiting arms; she straightened up and shot him the dirtiest glare while he locked it all back up, pretending that he'd had every right to be doing what he was doing. "What were you doing in Irie's room?" she demanded hotly.

"She still hasn't returned," he said calmly, "I was looking to see if-"

"What, you couldn't try calling her?"

"I did. She's not responding to anything."

"I can't believe this, you lost her!" Botan was practically spitting, she was so agitated; she had never seen Irie be fierce, only cold and as fragile as a snowflake. Telling her might have been a mistake. "How could you lose her?!"

His hand vanished beneath his hair to rub at the back of his neck, and he huffed. "I didn't lose her," he replied quietly. Holding himself together was already enough work as it was. "She's an adult, she's allowed to leave the mansion that she owns if she pleases."

"If it's not that big of a deal, then why do you look worried?"

Because maybe she shouldn't be allowed to leave the mansion whenever she liked. And because he couldn't believe that he and Yusuke both had not only let her, but encouraged her to go.

"Botan," he said forcefully, "Listen to me: I'm going to find her and bring her home, alright? Haven't I done things like this often enough before?"

"Yes, but-"

"I'm almost positive that I found a clue to her disappearance," he cut off, holding up the tape, "With any luck, this will help me figure out where she's gone off to. We just have to keep. Calm."

Easy for him to say. He sounded so still, like a stone-faced lake just before a tornado hit, that she was sure he'd murder the first person to stand in his way. Which, at the moment, was her. The realization terrified her, and she jumped out of his path.

"Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go study this tape. If you want to help, you may, but I'd appreciate it if we remained quiet while we watched."

"Y-... of course, Kurama."

… Well, she wasn't not going to watch the tape, now. She hadn't seen the title of it, but if she had, she wouldn't have been any less willing.

They set up shop not in the living room - that television wasn't useful for this kind of thing - but in the bedroom Kurama was calling his own. After he fiddled with the machinery to hook up an old VCR that he'd found in the attic to the TV mounted on the wall, he turned off the lights, hold the popcorn, thank you very much, and pulled up his desk chair to frown at the screen while Botan settled herself on the edge of the bed.

There was static, the hiss of white noise.

And then, there was Irie.

She was sitting in a hard, metal folding chair, clutching the sides of the seat so tightly that her knuckles had turned as white as her face - though the tattoo was boldly displayed beneath her eye, she was clearly a few years younger, before she'd taken the final few steps of physically maturing into adulthood. She couldn't have been older than nineteen, and she was shaking like a leaf.

Her large eyes stared at the camera. Her hands nervously folded themselves in her lap. She took a deep breath, opened her mouth-

And promptly burst into tears.

The tape cut there, but only for a moment. When she returned, she had a leg tucked beneath her, forcing her knee to jut out at an awkward angle, and her eyes were red and tear-stained. They darted away from the camera lens, and she gave a great sniff.

"Sorry, I…" There was a deep breath to steady herself. "I'd promised myself I'd make these, and I'm going to. Okay. So, if you're watching this, it means that I've either died, or you can't seem to find me. First and foremost, if you haven't already been in the basement, you will need to go there once you've finished with the tape - the lab is your first priority. There will be a binder in one of the locked desk drawers labelled with the letters Gamma and Beta. It will provide you with instructions for what you find.

"Secondly, you're going to want to know where I… well, how I acquire what you find down there. And, I guess this'll probably answer another question."

She stopped talking to rub her face, and take another deep breath to steady herself again, but there was something more behind it. Like she was making a decision in that moment. "If I am missing, then I have not left of my own accord. I have been captured. It's either going to be a demon, or, more likely the Wal*Mart corporation - Seiyu, if you need the specification. But you shouldn't bother trying to find me, I'm sure by the time anyone thinks to look for me, I'll already be dead."

There was a bitter laugh that followed. "That… that sounded really melodramatic, didn't it? I didn't mean for that, I just… that's the truth. And you're probably wondering why I just listed a supermarket as a probably kidnapper. And, I just… you have no idea. The things we saw there. The things we did - what I did… oh my God." This time, she buried her face in her palms. "Oh my God, I can't believe this, how has everything gone to fucking shit?"

It took five extra minutes for her to calm down on tape - clearly, she hadn't had either access to or the ability to use editing software, because none of this was cut beyond the camera turning off - but she finally stopped hyperventilating. Her eyes burned into the camera lens, and slowly… so slowly, Irie started to give her account of how she'd come to steal Jelly Bun away from Seiyu.

At some point, she'd become numb to the shocks, and they'd started other methods: first sleep-deprivation, then straight-up beating her when she started snoozing through literally everything. She made for a frustrating target of torture, and she was determined to keep it up. This time, when a hand shot out and cracked itself like a whip across her swollen, bloodied cheek, it wasn't the man who'd tried interrogating her before, this time, but an employee.

"Wake up!"

"Was that supposed to hurt? Please, you shouldn't have used electrocution for your opening move."

This is what Toriaka had taught her. Not resourcefulness, not the ability to smoothly lie her way through any situation, and certainly not compassion.

Snark in the face of pain. Stubbornness until the end.

A foot buried itself in her abdomen, forcing every last bit of air from her lungs, and she started coughing. But she was laughing, too, a horrible, rattling sort of wheeze.

"Ooh, a little harder~" she egged on, once she caught her breath again. "I almost liked that one." Just to throw them all for a loop, she let out a small but wanton moan the next time she was hit in the mouth. "Mm, that's it~"

That had been a mistake, though, or at least gave them ideas to do worse things over the hours that followed. The best thing she could do was lie back, go limp, and silently take it until it was over; if there was one thing she could do 'correctly' under duress, it was not give her captors satisfaction of any kind. She simply put her thoughts elsewhere.

A warm summer day. A walk in the woods. A hand holding on tightly to hers. Gold eyes turned into green ones as they smiled at her.

But that eventually stopped, too, when she still refused to talk. The following isolation, when they dragged her broken, beaten body into a dark and empty room and locked her inside, wasn't for mind-breaking, but because they were working out what to do to her, next, and it was the only time that she let herself shut down. She slept on and off, drifting in and out with her eyes perpetually closed, wondering vaguely if she wasn't hurting because she was in shock and already dying. In her sleep, she dreamed of so many things.

Somewhere, in that foggy thing she called a memory, she found a Nerf gun.

A foamy dart pelleted against her temple, bouncing away and she laughed. She turned - there was no one in the aisle behind her, and that was perfectly fine. She readied her weapon and closed one eye to aim, then waited until she saw her target's elbow sticking out from behind a shelf.

"Say your prayers, Noir~" she growled from the corner of her mouth. She'd been keeping count. She knew exactly how many more hit points were left. The second her friend's face peeked out from its hiding place, Irie pulled the trigger.

"No!" Her victim dramatically fell the floor, clutching her face. "You've done it! You've killed me!"

Irie let out a victorious laugh, hand on her hip while she held the Nerf gun against her shoulder. "Ha! Black team wins!" she chortled. "Hear that, Storm?"

"Aw, yeah~!"

Masa rounded the corner of the shelf, "gun" in hand, grinning and quickly followed up by Mitsu and Ayame; they also sported the fake weapons, goggles, communication sets, and big, bright smiles. This was the most fun that any of them had had in ages, and it just… it felt so right for Irie. Like she was enclosed in that enchanted circle again, loved, and the group was whole. Unbroken. Unbreaking. She could still pretend that for a little while; they were still friends, and she could see it on Shinjuko's face when she helped her back to her feet. Hell, even running for their lives from Seiyu security, when their game was discovered, was fun.

Divide and conquer was their favorite strategy in all things; while the others scattered throughout the store, Masa and Irie darted to the offices. No one ever checked there. Unfortunately, as they peeped through door windows, they discovered that most of the rooms had occupants: an employee lounge, a meeting room, a laboratory, a-

A laboratory?

"Holy shit."

The door had had no window, only a sign that read in cold, blocky letters AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Of course they had to open the damn thing and see what was inside - maybe it was an even better hiding place. In reality, it was dimly-lit, the only light coming from a large, empty, cylindrical set of tanks in the corner and lazily blinking screensavers, all of it reflecting off of the metal surfaces…

And there was a body.

It was stretched out on a table in the center of the room, covered by a thick, plastic sheet and smelling strongly of preservatives; of course they were going to pull back its covering. Though, on second thought, that probably wasn't the best decision, because there were some things that, once seen, couldn't simply be unseen. Both of them recoiled, and neither could tear their eyes away.

The flesh was dried and withered beneath thin, parchment-like skin the color of ash, and stretched out across bones that were far too knobbly to be human. As if that was the dead giveaway that the creature wasn't. It's cranium was bulbous and gigantic, but it dramatically tapered into a tiny, beakish mouth and a chin so miniscule that it was practically absent. The eyes were closed, but it was obvious that open, they would have been massive.

Masa and Irie slowly looked up at each other, sobered. "They've been testing on it…" Irie whispered. The torso had been cut open and stitched back together for some unknown purpose, but it almost looked like an autopsy. "Augh, gross."

"Why, though?" Reaching for one of the binders, Masanori flipped it open with a frown and started reading while Irie took a look around.

She was drawn to a rack full of petri dishes, most of them untouched, though a handful contained cell clusters, labelled with crisp, black marker. 2.9, 3.14, 12.30. Dates.

"'Subjects acquired from northern Siberia have had reproductive cells successfully harvested, which are now being prepared for fertilization,'" Masa read out loud, "'March sixth - Test samples C, J, K, and P are still stagnating, but alive, unlike their siblings. Preparations for further zygote samples are underway, hopefully in the next fortnight.' Shrimp, they're growing things."

"... Growing aliens?" Irie asked, glancing back at the body before turning back to Masa. "What would they want to do that for?"

"Nothing good," Masa replied grimly, solidly shutting the binder. "There are instructions in here for how to grow more, plans for… for making fetuses."

Irie shuffled through loose documents, then blanched. "Shit…" she breathed. "Shit, Storm, look at this: genetic modification, alien civilizations and diplomacy, hostage negotiations. They're going to use these alien offspring as… as…" She couldn't bring herself to say it.

"We need to go." Suddenly, Storm was in high-gear, spurred on by the realization that they had stumbled upon something that went way beyond anything they'd ever had to deal with before; the Multiverse, Spirit World, demons, anything. They'd watched plenty of those alien-doomsday movies, he knew exactly how this went. "Shrimp- Shrimp, what are you doing? Put that down!"

She didn't know what was compelling her to put them in her bag, but Irie found herself shoving petri dishes deep into the bottom, carefully, then snatching away the binder containing instructions for their care. "Destroy it," Irie said brusquely, picking up some heavy, plastic box from a nearby table. It looked like a battery pack. "All of it. They can't be allowed to do this."

"Shrimp, this is the real world - our world! You can't just-"

"All those other worlds are real, too," she protested hotly. With a mighty swing, she smashed the battery pack into the tank and the glass shattered. Water rushed out of it in a large burst, flooding the floor. "But I'm going to do something good for ours, dammit."

Masa looked like he was ready to punch his friend right in the face until she came to her senses, but he sighed. "Fine. Fine. But if the fallout from this is-"

"We'll be fine, we always are - contact Noir, have her destroy the security tapes."

The call was made, and in the end, not only did they destroy a significant amount of the technology and research in the room (destruction truly was their specialty), but they'd also managed to squirrel away bits of mechanics. Irie wanted them for her own study. She felt exhilarated, too: they had uncovered an evil plot contrived by Seiyu, of all places, and they'd managed to thwart them! Well, to some extent, anyway. Who knew how wide the scope of this scheme truly was?

As they ran away, the store was in chaos; people were being evacuated, security was being mobilized in a way that wouldn't have been expected from a megamart squad, and as Irie and her friends drove away, a sleek, black car pulled into the parking lot. Four men in navy blue suits and sunglasses stepped out, and one of them turned to watch Masanori's SUV speed away with a clear frown.

She couldn't have known then how damaging her actions had been, staring out the back window with that bag of contraband clutched in her arms. Not just to herself, but to all of them. They wouldn't find out for a few hours afterwards.

We have to change our names.

But hadn't she done the right thing? Putting this dent into their nefarious plans?

We have to go into hiding.

Wasn't this what they wanted to do when they formed their band in the face of the Omniverse? Play the hero?

We have to erase all traces of our existence.

Play God?

We will never be able to stop.

"And it's all my fault."

On the tape, Irie had broken out into tears again, and curled into herself while she struggled to find words; she was unable to look at the camera any longer, too ashamed of everything she had done.

"And now everything's gone wrong, and I can't… I can't… Koenma should have just killed me." Her voice was barely more than a whisper, and Kurama swallowed down the lump that had risen in his throat, watching her. Was he finally going to hear the story? The whole, goddamn story?

But the tape cut off there.

"Oh, that poor, sweet girl…" Botan murmured, holding a hand to her mouth, and Kurama ignored her every word.

His heart started racing, and he bolted from the room and made a beeline for Irie's room, again. He went back to the box, sifting through them, desperate to find the next one in the sequence. Her next confession. But which one was it? Not Security, probably, and certainly not A Basic Lecture in the Omniverse. Hashihime, perhaps? That name rang a tiny, faint bell. His knuckles were white on the sides of the cardboard as his nails pierced into the edges, and he had to force himself to focus on the issue at hand. He couldn't worry about the Koenma problem, now, he wasn't the one who took her. Otherwise, his minions would have invaded the damn mansion, by now, stripping it of its treasures and taking them away under the guise of "protective custody."

They were. Seiyu. Wal*Mart. Whichever name they chose to use. As bizarre as that sounded, and he genuinely had never believed that he'd ever be thinking vicious thoughts towards a grocery store, but here he was, already formulating the most efficient, most brutal punishment he could think of for her captors if he found that they had touched so much as a hair on her head, and they were sure to be doing far worse. But he couldn't find her alone. He needed numbers, and he needed eyes.

He needed to wait for Yusuke and the others to return.

"C'mon, wake up you little…"

Irie awoke from her dream with a gasp as ice-cold water poured horrifically over her head and into her lap, trickling unpleasantly down the back of her neck and freezing against her bare skin.

"Wake up!" he snapped again, backhanding her face so she would look up at him, exhausted but not defeated.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered sarcastically, her voice creaking and cracking with how raw it was, "Where are my manners? How can I help you?"

"My colleagues and I," he began, pulling up a chair that hadn't been in her cell before and sitting just two feet before her, "Have decided that maybe you'll respond better to something else. A trade of information, of sorts - honey, instead of vinegar, and all that."

This was the single best look she'd gotten of him since her capture; unmarred by black eyes or pain, he was middle-aged, greying, but sharply dressed in his perfectly tailored, navy suit and with a cool, calculating, infuriatingly likeable sort of expression that had likely gotten him many a promotion. There wasn't a single hair or garment out of place, and such a subtle, perfect cologne hit her nose that even she couldn't find a way to think of it as offensive. In spite of this, all she saw was a cobra with its hood flared out.

"If you think bribing me's gonna-"

"'Bribery' is such a dirty word, I think," he interjected, and he tried to smile amicably. "Really, the way that I see it, it's more of a mutual gift-giving."

Sneering, she snapped, "I don't want any gifts from you. That you've even offered tells me you're far more stupid than I thought." Or desperate.

"Oh, you'll want this one," he assured, and he leaned back in his chair while he licked his forefinger and started flicking through a file folder. "Irie Endo… alias: Shrimp. How adorable, a childhood nickname. But- ah, yes, neither of those are your real names, are they?"

"Fuck you, my name's always been-"

He leaned forward and whispered something in her ear. "... I said that correctly, didn't I?" the man added, a little more loudly and with a smile that knew she'd been shaken.

"My name," she insisted darkly, angrily, "Is, and always has been Irie Endo."

Ignore it. There must have been backup files that Shinjuko missed.

"Suit yourself," he smoothly said, and sat back in his chair. "Whichever you demand that you be known by, one thing is certain: there's someone you've been searching for for quite a while, isn't there?"

Her eyes narrowed just a sliver. "I've looked for a lot of people," she murmured hostilely. It was obviously a dodge, but it was also true.

"Then allow me to be more specific: a very tall, very handsome man in his early thirties, white hair, missing an eye-"

Her heart sank into her stomach. "Stop-"

"Ah, and what was his name, again? Perhaps you remember, little bird?"

"Don't-"

"Oh, right. Gentoka. That's it. What an unusual name." The man sat back as if he had a steel rod in his spine; he knew he was close. "Of course, he's quite an unusual person, isn't he? He insists that he doesn't know who you are, but we're still detaining him. You understand. Your circle was always so good at lying."

She went rigid in her seat, refusing to look him in the eye while she pursed her lips and tried to will herself into not bursting into tears. After everything else, this couldn't be the thing that broke her.

How did they know about him?!

"You're bluffing," she whispered, so quiet that almost no sound came out and her captor had to rely on reading her lips. "You don't have him, you've never seen him before-"

His laugh sounded like nails on a chalkboard, and garnered a similar reaction from her. "Are you willing to call that bluff?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "I can easily reunite you with him; we have him in our custody, and he's only two doors down. All you have to do is tell me everything you know about the technology you stole from us, Miss Endo, and hand it over."

That did it: a single tear streaked down her cheek, and she smiled sadly, bitterly at him. "And I'm supposed to expect that you'll let us walk out after all this? Alive? Fuck you. You know his name, you know what he looks like, but you don't fucking have him. You're a lying, manipulative, sick sonovabitch, and I wouldn't tell you anything if you brought him to me BEGGING."

Spittle flew into his face as he watched the screaming, enraged girl; naked and bludgeoned with long-running makeup. matting curls, and crazed eyes, she was still terrifying for the information she held and the threat she'd been posing to the Corporation for years, but it was hard to take her seriously when her raving broke off into a nasty, thick cough. He almost thought that it was simply a side-effect of the torture, but then he noticed speckles of blood dotting her chin and lap where it had fallen.

"What's wrong with you?" he demanded, driving the toe of his shoe into her shin.

She just laughed. "Wouldn't you like to fucking know?" she chuckled before being sent into another hacking fit.

He let out a frustrated grunt while kicking at her leg again, and he growled over the sound of her fresh cackling, "Fine. You want to obstinately call my bluff? Let's see how you feel when you find out you've made a losing bet." He turned on his heel and threw open the heavy, metal door, saying to someone out of her line of sight, "Set it up."

Twenty minutes. Time enough for her laughter to cease and her coughing to ease up, but from the now-continuous (though sluggish) drip of blood from her lip, Irie knew she didn't have much more time remaining to her. The longest she'd ever gone was forty-eight hours, and it had been how many, now? She'd lost her sense of time, here.

She wasn't showing it, nor would she: there was a crack in her resolve. A moment of weakness made her whimper very quietly, under her breath.

"Masa," she croaked to herself, the first name that came to her, "Kurama. Help."

Kurama was at his wits' absolute end when the team finally tumbled back through the television, laughing, cajoling, raucously praising one another for their performance, and completely unsuspecting the way he jumped to his feet and glared at them all.

"Well, look who's returned," he said icily. "Don't bother sitting down, gentleman, we have things to do."

"Hey, buddy," Yusuke snickered; his amusement was still dying away. "What's gotten your ponytail into a knot? Get into a fight with Irii aga-?"

"Stop talking. Listen." He released Yusuke's shirt collar, which he'd snatched up into his fists faster than any of them could blink, but didn't back down. "Irie's gone missing, and I know who's taken her, I just don't know where they went. I've been waiting for you to get back for nearly an entire day because I don't have the pleasure of being able to be in more than one place at one time, and Koenma doesn't care if she lives or dies."

"You're being ridiculous." Yusuke's brown gaze was dark and hard as he pushed around Kurama. "Seriously, you know as well as I do that he'd send you help if you needed it."

"Oh, please, he hates her."

"I know they're not exactly friends," Botan countered; she was sitting on the arm of one of the chairs, idly swinging her legs back and forth while her concerned eyes swept over the lot of them. "But I don't think he wouldn't care if she died."

"He'd only care about to whom she'd leave the mansion in her will!" he snapped back. "Now seriously, Irie's in actual trouble and I am not going to let you sit back for this one."

"Hey, cool it. I didn't say I was sitting back." Yusuke's glare was exactly as steady and even as Kurama's, and he held it, well. It was the kind of expression that reminded him that he'd been Raizen's heir, and not just a human pink. "Of course we'll help you, now calm down. She's probably fine."

"Pro'lly just stayed out with her friends," Jin pointed out. He was infuriatingly unconcerned, and it was grating. "The lass doesn't get herself into trouble."

"She also doesn't make a habit of staying away from the mansion for more than a day," he replied. His irritation flared a little stronger for Jin - this was his level of caring, and she'd chosen to sleep with him? "If you want to stay behind, then please do. But I'd feel better if I knew where she was and why we can't contact her."

"Okay, okay, calm down."

"I am perfectly calm."

"Sure you are."

They'd all been friends for long enough that even they could tell when the normally inscrutable Kurama was stressed. It wasn't often, but it was certainly clear: the subtle way his fingernails dug into the fabric of his sleeve, the sharp way in which his eyes pierced into everyone's faces in turn, how he remained perfectly, inhumanly still. This was his version of tearing his own hair out.

Yusuke crossed his arms over his chest. "So, where do we start looking?"

Kurama let out a long, heavy sigh. "Keep an open mind, Yusuke, because I can guarantee that you're not going to believe me at first when I tell you."

They didn't let her see the face; the uncertainty was what made it worse. The camera was focused solely upon the snake who'd tried and failed to unnerve her, his hands behind his back and a calm, even sort of smile on his face, standing confidently beside an occupied chair. Only an arm, strapped down to the furniture, was visible, pale, toned, and naked. The fingers trembled, and she could hear the shaky breathing: another man. It was intimately close, with a headset pressed deep into her ears so that she couldn't even try to pretend that it was far away.

"Miss Endo."

The voice didn't crackle. The technology was too smooth, too sophisticated for such a thing - would the corporation accept anything less?

She sat perfectly straight in her own chair, with as much pride and dignity as a woman in her position could manage. There was a camera blinking mockingly in her direction, and she knew he was watching for her reactions.

He didn't wait for her to greet him. He knew she wouldn't. "Miss Endo, so far, you have not responded to our asking politely for the information that we seek. Unfortunately, this means that we will have to use some of the less... kind means at our disposal. As you can see, we have a certain friend of yours willing to assist us in this matter-"

"I've told you before," came a weak, exhausted voice, "I don't know who-"

There was the muffled sound of a fist against flesh, followed by a grunt.

She didn't even move her eyes.

"Like I said: he's more than happy to help in any way he can."

There was a brief flicker in his gaze; her burning glare was boring into him, unnerving and promising him the worst vengeance for daring to bring another person into this sort of battle of wills. This was their business. Not that of this poor man, whoever he was, whoever the executive claimed him to be.

"I'm not telling you jack. Shit." she muttered venomously.

"Then he will suffer for your insolence." It wasn't even a threat, it was a simple statement. "One more time, before I start using coercion: where is the technology that you've stolen from us?"

"Fuck you."

The man lifted a hand and waved for someone to come join him onscreen, some faceless worker drone who probably had done this a hundred times before. His expression was blank: this was simply business as usual.

The knife painted a slow, long, red line along the side of the captive's arm, starting from the crown of his shoulder and dragging downward until it reached his elbow; his scream was blood-curdling, and personally heart-wrenching. He wasn't used to this kind of pain, not like she was. The worst he'd probably ever had to deal with was a broken bone as a child. This wasn't his world, and this wasn't his punishment - he was just some poor bastard caught in the middle of all this.

A single, straight lock of silvery hair fell over his shoulder and caught itself against the spare bit of chest that had writhed its way onto the screen. Irie's breath caught in her throat, and she gasped when the blade gleamed in the fluorescent lights, ready to keep going; then, suddenly, it paused.

A question and an answer passed between executive and drone, and the tip of the blade sunk down a single millimeter.

"Where are you hiding it?"

It wasn't him. It wasn't. She kept telling herself that over and over again - they could have found anyone in the country with his muscle tone and slapped them into a realistic-enough wig to fool her for a single heartbeat, but it wouldn't be enough. She wouldn't talk.

"Fuck off."

"If you insist."

The knife twisted, and dug in deep. Watching the screen without breaking eye contact while his screams pierced through her ears was the hardest thing she could remember doing in a very long while, but if she was going to die here, she might as well do it defending her mansion and her alien until her last breath.

"Let's continue, shall we?"

Author's Note: How many chapters can I apologize for being ridiculously late on updates before it gets old? Because I'm going to keep doing it.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this one! It's gotten more intense than I'd ever intended for it to be, and I'm really digging it. And I hope you're liking that we're finally getting into more of Irie's backstory.

Special thanks to users owlloveyou, CassieL, and redrosesandfullmoons for reviewing! And thank you to all of my readers, I really appreciate you all. Until next time!

Lots of love, GrisailleDreams