A/N: Thank you for all the reviews! I hope this chapter is good enough for you…

I don't own them…

Chapter 10

The room was blissfully quiet, the atmosphere in it being unusually cosy. Jane and Ethan had had the first night of proper rest since their mission, and the stress of the past few days had added up to it greatly. Now they were sipping coffee and reflecting on the recent events in silence.

"I can't believe you thought I had actually… done it," Brandt uttered, taking a mug for himself. For a while the other two didn't know how to answer, and the silence reigned again, accompanied only by the sound of Benji typing on his laptop. Unlike the others, he didn't have any coffee. Nobody even knew when he had gotten up, since he had been already there when Ethan, the early bird of the group, had walked in. Besides, they weren't sure how the tech would respond to caffeine so they didn't want to take that risk.

"You were quite realistic," Jane replied in a low voice, glancing at the technician who seemed to be oblivious to the whole conversation.

"Still…" Brandt remembered Jane's expression when she had arrived. So full of pain and anger. And now he understood the reason. He tried to put himself into her place. If he had found out that she or Ethan had… had killed Benji… He would have probably reacted just like that, to say the least. He decided not to dwell on it any longer and change the topic instead.

"Got anything, Benji?" he asked, walking up to the Englishman and leaning down to look at the screen over his shoulder. Benji jumped a bit, startled, as if surprised to see there were people in the room, and blinked forcefully as he looked away from the screen. Brandt noticed how red and puffy his friend's eyes were. This had happened way too often for comfort.

"Yeah…" Benji replied after a long pause. "In fact," he motioned for the other two to join in, "it looks like there's a bit too much".

"What do you mean?" Jane raised a quizzical eyebrow.

"There are too many arrows pointing at Lovett," the Brit explained, flinching barely noticeably at the name. "Too many clues screaming his name, if you get me. It's just weird… Is he really that bad?"

"Someone as good as Lovett should be better at cutting the loose ends," Ethan continued the thought and received a nod from his friend.

"You mean there's someone standing behind Lovett?" Brandt was looking from Ethan to Benji in bewilderment. The team leader nodded.

"There might be".

"Ethan, do you understand what we are talking about?" the analyst started pacing the room. "It's the IMF Secretary. And not with his own motives and aims as we thought. That was bad enough. Now it suddenly turns out that, as you think, someone can have control over him?"

"How is that worse than him acting on his own?" Ethan argued. "He still has the entire IMF at his disposal".

"But he might be manipulated as well," Jane suggested. "What if… what if he's being framed?"

"He's definitely not," Benji growled coldly but quietly. The hoarseness of his voice made Jane bite her tongue.

Brandt rubbed the back of his head.

"Who can it be then? Who can have influence on the IMF Secretary?" he looked at Ethan incredulously, as if waiting for him to give an immediate answer.

"So you choose to believe that Lovett is just that stupid?" the team leader increased the volume of his voice.

"I know about as much as you do!" Brandt replied even louder.

"And Lovett was so careful to dispose of witnesses consisting of IMF agents and went through the bother of making the only survivor's credibility questionable using drugs and deception, and then suddenly failed to cover up at least some of his traces properly?" Ethan went on.

"I don't…"

"Can you just shut up!" Benji suddenly yelled, rising from his seat. "Both of you!"

Everyone in the room froze. They weren't used to seeing the Brit like that, which made the outburst all more intimidating. Without saying a word, Benji stormed out of the room, leaving the other three in startled silence. After a short pause Jane gave Brandt and Ethan a stern look and also went out. Brandt let out an exasperated sigh, looking at Ethan, as if to point out what things had gotten to.

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Benji was standing in the doorway, looking outside, his shoulder leaning on the wall. The daylight was too bright for his tired eyes, and he pressed his hand against them. He heard footsteps behind him but didn't bother to look who it was. The footsteps stopped before reaching him, as if the person was hesitant whether to approach him or not.

"Jane, I know you're there," he said quietly, still not looking back. "Are you going to stand there forever?"

"How did you know it was me?" Jane asked, walking up to the Englishman once she was sure it was okay to do so.

"Nobody else in the building uses female perfume," he replied. "Unless you let me switch it with Brandt's aftershave…"

"No way," Jane replied with fake outage, and the two chuckled.

"Are you alright?" she asked after a silent moment, studying his features carefully.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Benji looked down. And yet, even while examining the floor under his feet, he could feel Jane's glare on him. He sighed, knowing that he couldn't hide anything from that glare.

"I just," he swallowed, as there suddenly was a lump in his throat. "I just feel so angry. All the time. And it's so tiring, you know… I want to go back to normal. I want to be able to sleep without the fear of waking up in… that place, with Lovett standing over me with more drugs… and questioning what is real and what isn't…"

He clenched his hands into fists and gritted his teeth. Jane could feel a lump in her throat, too. She knew first hand that destructive anger. She knew what it felt like to be burned from the inside by it. But it seemed so out of character for Benji, the always smiling and happy Benji, to feel something like that. She knew he could get angry at times but this was just so different from anything she had even seen him express.

"I sometimes think that maybe I'm still there," the tech went on. "That maybe you guys are just a long hallucination, you know… I've had a lot of them…"

Jane didn't know what to say. Her vision was blurred because of the unshed tears.

"How did you get rid of your anger?" Benji suddenly asked. "When Moreau had…" he paused, not wanting to remind about Hanaway.

"I threw the bitch out of a window," Jane gave him an incredulous look. Conscious or not, he had still been there when it had happened.

"And did it make it go away?" he asked timidly.

Jane fell silent. She wasn't really sure. Everything had been going so insanely fast, and she hadn't had the time to reflect on her feelings.

"I don't know," she honestly replied. It certainly hadn't brought Trevor back but at least it hadn't let Moreau kill Benji, too. As if reading her mind, Benji spoke up awkwardly.

"Jane… I never thanked you… for saving my life back then…"

"Don't," Jane waved her hand. "It's okay".

"No," Benji looked up at last. "It was my fault. I got us all in trouble and you had to kill her because of me. And we lost an asset. So… I just wanted to…"

"Look, what happened, happened," Jane cut him off. "Everything turned out fine in the end," she took a pause and looked into her friend's eyes. "And everything will be fine this time, too".

There was another pause, after which Benji nodded and smiled a tiny bit.

"Thank you," he almost whispered.

"Listen, I told you you don't have to…"

"No," he shook his head a little and smiled again. "Thank you for this conversation. For listening. And for hearing".