Chapter Eleven: Forever isn't Long Enough

"Let's go," Natsume said when he reappeared beside Shizuka back down at the underground headquarters. Narumi was stuffed inside her cell, bound and gagged, purple eyes looking wildly at Natsume as though asking him to think twice about what he was doing. The boy looked in no condition to leave; his face was bloody, and he was speaking only with great effort. Using all that power exhausted him—especially after suffering from the rebound of Chiaki's barrier. Chiaki was, after all, a prodigious barrier manipulator.

Shizuka looked unrepentantly at her cousin.

"It isn't nice to be in there, is it?" she asked him softly. "And I was there for a whole week until I managed to hone my powers to a point where I could escape. I'm afraid that you won't get your just punishment, but this is a little measure of what it was like."

He looked at her, his gaze pleading. "No, I am not," she said, her voice growing heated and impatient. "I suppose that's what you tell yourself at night so that you don't have to face the guilt. But I chose to join the Anti-Alice organization. I had a lot of other alternatives, Narumi, but I never gave them a second thought because I had to fight the good fight."

Angry tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. Oh Narumi I wish I could tell you that I loved you once… you're my cousin, after all, and blood is not water.

She held her hand out to Natsume, noticing that the boy was swaying unsteadily on his feet. "We have to go."

"Ruka… and the others…" he muttered to himself, running a hand through his hair. "You promise me that you really can take care of Persona if he does anything to them?"

"Yes," she answered. "My Alice could reach here if I made a real effort." She glanced at Narumi. "Oh well, I can always erase that information from his memory if I want to. I'll be able to tell whether he's torturing them or not, or something like that. I could use my Alice to help them—to a certain extent."

"All right," he said. "And you swear to God that we can contact them?"

"Yes," she said again. "But as I said, we have to leave now, Natsume. I already contacted the organization, and Seishiro is right in the next room waiting to bring us to headquarters."

She blew a kiss to Narumi. "I'll be waiting for the day we can send our regards to the Academy," she said sweetly. "Even if you've broken the pact, the rest of us are keeping it alive."

Shizuka, listen to me, do what you like, but don't interfere with my students! He thought furiously at her. I'm sorry for what happened when we were students, but—

Enough, he heard her voice in his mind, her luminous eyes staring at him. I'll never ever forgive you.

But forever is too long a time for any of us, he thought with a wan smile.

Not for me, cousin. Not for me.

It was a sorry sight that greeted Persona down at headquarters. He was sure that Natsume would still be there or something like that, and he'd been keen to vent some of his fury on the boy. Landing Hatori Chiaki in the hospital—what was he thinking, hurting one of the undercover agents?

But all he saw was Narumi, bound in Shizuka's cell, which only served to double his fuming. "Oh great," he muttered under his breath as he pointed a finger at Narumi's ropes, which fell apart immediately. "Budge up, Narumi, you soft-hearted lump. How did you find on that Nagasaki Shizuka was being held in here?"

Narumi pulled off his gag and gingerly felt his chafed wrists. He was a little shaken, but none the worse for the wear. "I… overheard about it," he said evasively. "Around. Here and there. She… she, ah, contacted me telepathically…" His face flushed a violent scarlet. He knew that Persona knew that Shizuka would never have sent him a message. Never.

"Chiaki has a big mouth."

Paling, Narumi said quickly, "It has nothing to do with her—"

"She's a terrible gossip," Persona continued frankly. "You know how it is—pretty teenage girl, brimming with lots and lots of those hormones seething in her blood, well; she has to find an outlet somehow. I'm sure the news has circulated to all the undercover agents already."

His face changed, contorting slightly. "They felt no love for Natsume, as I'm sure you well know—they were aware that he was my favorite, besides being the youngest ever to join the ranks and having limitless powers."

"You had no right to be down here, Narumi," he said, tone cold. "I didn't tell you because I knew quite well that you would do something stupid. And I was right, wasn't I?" His eyes swept the room.

"So she's escaped… and to think I'd planned to use Natsume as a guard. I didn't think that she could have affected him so readily. She might not have, if you hadn't come along, Narumi. She brought Natsume with her, didn't she?"

At Narumi's nod, Persona started back up the stairs. "Where're you going?" Narumi called out after him.

"Now that Natsume's part of the Anti-Alice organization, I have to set some students to recapture him. Hopefully bring him back to the Academy. If not, they're going to have to eliminate him."

"Eliminate him?" Narumi spluttered in disbelief. "That's too much! How could you just say that when he's your…" The word slave flashed briefly in his mind before he diplomatically said, "protégé?"

"But of course," the other man said coolly. "That's exactly why he has to be stopped—I trained him to a point where his skills are beyond almost any of the students here. What did you expect? Natsume's quite dangerous. Now that he's fallen into enemy hands, we have to make sure that he doesn't use his powers on their behalf. Even if he was alone, he could take down all the students in this Academy. And he won't be alone, Narumi, you can be sure of that. He'll be corrupted by the other Anti-Alices. Then he could destroy the world."

"But he wouldn't hurt his friends—!"

To his surprise, Persona smirked. "I know," he said. "That's what I'm counting on."

"So this is the infamous Black Cat."

Natsume looked resentfully back at the circle of people goggling at him. He wished they wouldn't goggle at him like that, like he was an animal in a zoo cage, and clearly Shizuka was still reading his mind, because she looked meaningfully at the rest of them—most likely passing along a telepathic message, he supposed. They dropped their gazes immediately.

"Reo," he said in disgust, wrinkling his nose when he recognized the singer sitting in the middle of them all. Reo inclined his head slightly, but backed off.

"You don't look too well," a girl with long brown hair said, words tumbling out of her mouth. Then she blushed. "Sorry, that isn't my business."

"He's injured," Shizuka said. "Blew up his room, from what I saw, anyway. Too bad you weren't able to get Persona straight on," she added regretfully to Natsume. "That Chiaki person shielded him."

He snorted. "She was always a bit of a loyalist idiot anyway," he said darkly.

A sleekly-coiffed boy with an arrogant air regarded him with frank disdain. "We should get him cleaned up a bit. Saiko's right. I mean, we can't have him bleeding all over the floors, can we?"

"That's enough, Kazuo!" the girl with brown hair—presumably the one called Saiko, said warningly, glaring at the other boy. "He was hurt fighting the good fight." The words didn't seem quite so trite and stupid when she said it; she had an air of absolute faith in the resistance movement that made Natsume wince slightly. She turned her smoky-hollowed eyes back to Natsume. "I can take you to a spare room, if you like."

"It wouldn't do for your friends to see you in this state when you contact them," Shizuka added. Natsume shrugged and followed after the girl.

"How long have you been here?" he asked her, words echoing on the walls.

She glanced back at him as they navigated through a series of corridors. "As long as I can remember," she answered. "I don't know what happened to my parents, but Reo told me that they were Alices too. I dunno, maybe they're still alive out there, possibly in a branch of the organization. At least, I hope they are."

He swallowed a lump in his throat. His family was all dead. At least she had some semblance of hope.

"My Alice is a Dangerous type too," she explained. "I'm an Air user. At first I could only conjure up hurricanes and things, but now I can work on breezes and things like that. It's a bit weird, being able to do the powerful stuff more easily than the weaker one. Shizuka told me that it's because it's extremely difficult to control my powers, because I'm the fourth type of Alice—the more I use it, the worse I get. That's why I was always thankful that I ended up here instead of the Academy."

Natsume blinked at her and cocked an eyebrow. "But it isn't like there's really much of a difference. You have to fight here too. You still have to use your powers when they command you."

She turned surprised eyes at him. "Only if I want to. Shizuka, Reo and Yamazaki all told me that I had a choice. They could let me go if I wanted to, that's what they said, and I wouldn't be hurt or anything. But of course they told me all about the Academy beforehand. It doesn't sound very pleasant to me. What was it like?"

He looked sharply at her, wanting to snap that it wasn't any of her business, wanting to tell her that she was probing around and he really didn't want to talk about it. But there was something in her eyes that made him stop. She really doesn't know. She really wants to know. And she wouldn't tell the others what I tell her.

He thought back to the times when he had been used on missions as security for whatever it was they were taking care of. "Painful," he said slowly, remembering nights when he couldn't sleep because of all the medicine he'd had to take and of missions that made him collapse afterwards (he never admitted that he fainted, because he swore to himself that that was one thing that was on his This-Is-Something-I-Don't-Do list, and in any case he usually managed to retain some vestige of consciousness). "But…" He thought of Ruka and Yoichi. "I had some friends there, just a few. And I didn't want to leave them behind."

"Then why did you?"