Rose –

After I graduated from the Academy, I was immediately turned over to the Risk Prevention Department for further training. The RPD didn't just hand me a red belt as soon as I swore my oath to uphold their principals. My superiors had made it clear that I would have to earn my place among the Investigators, which involved developing a set of particular skills.

On the first day, I had found myself sitting in a straight-backed metal chair in the center of a bleak looking stone room. At first, I had been amused by the strange situation I had found myself in. It was clear that someone had gone to great lengths to create an intimidating environment. A single fluorescent light bulb hung from the ceiling, and it dangled on a rusted chain over my chair. It would flicker every few minutes, which was more annoying than anything else. I sat slumped in the chair with one leg crossed over the other in front of me, and I had been staring at that stupid bulb for what felt like hours, when the door to my tiny cell had burst open.

I had rolled my head around reluctantly to find Investigator Ozera standing in the doorway, looking as smug as he ever had, his icy blue eyes glinting with a mixture of amusement and anticipation.

I had tried to look as disinterested as possible. "I should have known you were behind this," I said holding out both arms to gesture to the dank room. "It has your charm."

Christian Ozera had graduated from the academy a year before me. He was every bit as arrogant and entitled as his aunt was. He and Executor Ozera shared many things, from their black hair and blue eyes, to their predisposition for terrorizing others. Christian was also responsible for hazing me back in my days at the academy, and we had never really warmed up to each other.

"Rose Hathaway," he said, ignoring my comment. "I never got the chance to congratulate you on passing our little test."

I had yawned. "You say that like it was hard."

If Christian had been angered by my flippancy, he hadn't shown it. His sharp eyes had regarded me carefully. "We usually wait a few days before starting this phase of your training; we want the recruits to get acclimated first, but since you are so obviously bored with our curriculum, I think it would be in your best interest to start right now."

He had stepped out of the room without offering an explanation; the whole display had been rather dramatic. I was sure that this had been done on purpose to scare me, but I had been taught that being afraid made a person weak. Even as a child I had sworn off anything that might impair me, and that meant training myself to be fearless.

Christian came back into the room a few minutes later, with two other investigators in tow. Each of them was pushing a metal cart. The first cart was wheeled behind me, and on it was a box. The box wasn't big, but it was covered with a series of dials and a needle that looked like it was used to measure voltage. The first investigator had secured a padded headset to my temples, but I had not flinched as my skin came into contact with the cold metal. The headset was attached to the box by a long wire, and when I had reached up to adjust it, the investigator had swatted my hand away.

"Don't touch," chastised Christian, "Or I'll have you restrained."

I didn't respond, and had settled for glaring at him while the second investigator began attaching a cuff made of some plastic material to my forearm. Two rubber coils were stretched across my chest and a series of wires had been attached to the tips of my index and ring fingers. All of the wires were feeding back into a machine that sat on the second cart. It took me a moment to recognize that it was a polygraph machine. I had tried to remember everything I had learned about what my instructors had referred to as a lie detector. I knew that it measured autonomic indices, like blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity, but I had been taught how to administer a test, not how to be on the receiving end of one.

Once I had been decked out with wires and cuffs, one of the investigators left the room, but the other remained standing at attention behind me. Christian stood behind the polygraph machine and smiled at me, but his smile was not meant to be kind.

"Alright Hathaway," he had said with a smirk. "This little machine is the latest technology NAAMA has to offer for deception detection." He sounded like a traveling salesman. "I'm going to ask you some questions, and I want you to answer them to the best of your ability."

I took a deep breath and fixed him with a steady gaze. I had refused to betray any emotion. "Get on with it then."

Christian flipped a switch on the polygraph machine and it whirred to life. I couldn't see the screen but I could picture the way the lines would move across it, and how they would rise and fall in peaks and valleys as I spoke, measuring my body's responses.

"What is your name?"

"Rosemarie Hathaway," I had said in a steady voice.

"How old are you?"

"18."

"What is your sex?"

"Are you hitting on me?" I asked in the same neutral tone.

"Answer the question," he demanded.

"Female."

"Now for the fun part," said Christian maliciously. "Have you ever hit anyone?"

"Yes," I told him automatically. "Many times."

"Have you ever cheated on an academy administered exam?"

"No," I said mechanically, even though I had once written the names of notable military personnel on my hand for one of my exams when I was 11.

Christian's eyes, which had been fixed on the screen, flicked over to me. "You're lying," he said viciously.

A bolt of energy suddenly shot through my body and my limbs jerked violently in all directions. My skin was on fire, it felt as though a hot, thick liquid was rippling through my body, starting at my temples. My whole body was rocked with spasms for what felt like years, and then it was over. Christian was saying something to me, but I couldn't hear him over the buzzing sound that had filled my ears. My heart was racing and my hands were trembling. The backs of my eyes had stung, but I kept my face as still as possible.

"Rose!" snapped Christian. "Now you know what happens when you lie."

He had waited for my pulse to return to normal, and then continued his interrogation, shocking me whenever he felt that I was lying. This went on for days before Christian had explained why he was torturing me. He had told me that being an Investigator for the Risk Prevention Department meant telling lies. I would have to lie to civilians to get information, to pacify them, to disarm them. Knowing the truth didn't always make things better. He had told me that lying was human nature, but that despite how instinctual deception was; most of us were very bad at it. He was going to teach me to fabricate truths, to weave intricate falsehoods without having to think twice.

I learned to regulate what should have been the most automatic of bodily functions. I was eventually able to deceive the polygraph machine, and lying became second nature to me. My fellow recruits and me were encouraged to lie to each other on a regular basis so that we could practice. It was a sort of sick game we played with each other, one that would help us avoid being electrocuted.

I have been classically conditioned to lie. It comes as naturally to me as breathing, but I hadn't been able to lie to Lissa. At the first mention of her parents, I had spilled my guts to her, and to Dimitri. I had told the truth, expecting that it would make me feel lighter, but the look on Lissa's face had shattered those hopes. I had watched as my words broke something within her, and then I watched again as she remade herself into something harder.

Dimitri and I stare at the place in the black curtains where Lissa had disappeared. He is clutching the bandages to his chest so tightly that his knuckles are white. He turns to me with an expression I can't discern, and I am too drained to try.

"How long did you plan on keeping that to yourself?" he asks. I can tell he is straining to keep his tone from sounding accusatory.

"I…well, I was going to – I don't know." My shoulder is throbbing, and the pain pulsing through me is hindering my ability to form coherent sentences. "Why does it matter?" I finally manage to say. "Now you both know the truth."

"Is there anything else we should know about?"

The Dimitri who had written about my kindness and had kissed me in the flickering candlelight has been replaced by the one who asks hard questions and is fiercely protective of Lissa, the one he had been when we'd first met.

I let out a long breath. "No," I tell him quietly. "That was everything."

His dark eyes wash over me, searching for any sign that I might be hiding something else. I want to tell him that even if I was lying to him, he wouldn't be able to tell.

"Okay," he says finally, "I just wish you would have said something sooner."

His words catch me off guard, but I do my best not to react. "Should I have told you before or after I was stabbed?" I ask deadpan.

"Rose –" he starts.

"Or maybe I should have told you right after I killed that guard so we could escape?" I say bitterly. "Wait! I bet telling you while I was bleeding out in the back of that train would have been the most effectual."

"Rose, stop, please," his tone is pleading. "I didn't mean – "

"Don't you get it?" I ask, cutting him off. "There was no right time to tell you, and even if our plan had gone off without a hitch, I still wouldn't have known how to tell you or Lissa about Victor. This is all so new for me," I say gesturing to him. "To have people in my life that I want to protect. Did you see Lissa's face after I told her the truth? It destroyed her. She was better off not knowing."

"It's not up to you decide what truths a person is better off knowing and not knowing," he tells me in a surprisingly gentle tone. "I would rather know the truth, no matter how horrible, than live a lie. I think Lissa would too. She'll be okay," he adds as an afterthought.

I consider his words carefully. Is that what I would want too?

"You did the right thing," he tells me, walking over to where I sit in the rickety wooden chair. "Now turn around so I can change your bandages."

I do as he says and turn so that I am straddling the back of the chair. I shrug my bad arm out of the shirt sleeve and then lean forward, my chin resting on the chair. I feel Dimitri peel the strips of cloth away one by one. His hands are steady as he presses fresh bandages over my stiches, but my shoulder still aches.

"Lissa said she's going to help me find my parents," I say softly, hoping that my words will distract me from the pain.

"We both will," he tells me firmly.

"What about your parents?"

The hand that Dimitri had been pressing against my back falls away. "What about them?" His voice is taught as a wire.

I'm glad Dimitri can't see me chewing on my lip nervously. "Where are they?"

"I don't know," he says, resuming his work. "Probably dead."

"You don't know for sure?"

He lets out a sigh, "If I told you to let this go, would you?"

I turn my head to peer over my shoulder at him. "No."

"I came to America with my mother and my sisters when I was nine," he starts off.

"What about your father?"

He hesitates before continuing. "My father was not a good man…he liked to hit my mother."

I tense beneath him. "Is that why you left?"

"Yes," he says quickly. "My mother thought that we could start over in America. We had been here for three weeks, staying in a hotel on the West coast when the Pulse happened."

I take a sharp breath. "Do you remember it? The Pulse, I mean."

"I will never forget that day. We were on the subway when it happened."

"A subway?" I ask, not sure what he's talking about it.

"It's a train that runs underground," he says mechanically. "All of the power went out and it stopped running. We were trapped, with no way to call for help. The phones were dead; there were no first responders, no emergency services. Pretty soon people started to panic, it was dark and our air was running out in the train car. We had to find a way out, and we wondered the underground tunnels for hours until we reached a station."

"That sounds awful," I breathe.

"It wasn't even the worst part," he says bitterly. "My mother and my sisters made it to the surface only to discover that the city was burning…there was an airplane that had fallen out of the sky; it was lying in the street. People were screaming, and Viktoria was just a baby. She wouldn't stop crying."

"Dimitri," I say, turning around to face him. "You don't have to keep going."

The look on his face is far away, his eyes are hollow and his mouth is set in a straight line. "There's not much left. We made it out of the city, to one of the refugee camps. Soldiers came in the middle of the night; they took me away from my mother. They put me on a train with a few other boys my age, and I've been here ever since."

I blink back my surprise, "Did you ever find out why they took you?"

"No," he says hanging his head. "Victor thought that it could have been for any number of reasons, redistributing the population, balancing out male and female ratios within compounds."

"You were nine!" I couldn't help but shout. "You were a little boy!"

"Rose," he says calmly. "It's done. Getting angry isn't going to change what happened. This is my life now." His gaze is steady, and the vacancy I had seen there earlier has vanished. "You should get some rest."

I clamp my mouth shut at his suggestion. A million questions are swirling around in my head, but I know that Dimitri has already revealed enough to me, probably more than he had ever intended to. I want to comfort him, I want to wrap my arms around him and tell him not to worry, that we'll find his family too. He's already straightening up the pile of pillows and blankets though, and so I fold up the words like a piece of paper, and tuck them back into the corners of my mind.

"I'll be out here if you need me," he says, turning to go.

"Wait," I say quickly. "You don't have to go; you could sleep in here…if you wanted to."

He hesitates for a brief moment. "Okay."

We lay next to each other on the floor of the scorched unit. The candles are burning off the last of their light, and the only sound I can hear is Dimitri's steady breathing. He had been careful to fall asleep in such a way that our bodies didn't touch, which is strange considering that a few hours ago we had been pulling off each other's clothing. Now I try to consider what has changed since then.

I wonder if my revelation has made him reconsider his feelings toward me, maybe he doesn't think I'm good any more. My thoughts drift to what might have happened if Victor hadn't interrupted us. Perhaps that had been for the best. I have no idea how relationships between men and women function. I don't know how to express my own feelings, but that's partly because I have no idea what I'm feeling most of the time.

I roll over onto my good shoulder so that I can watch him. We are separated by mere inches, but he still seems a million miles away from me. I don't know what to do, and I have never been so unsure of what will come next. Lissa says we're leaving, but I don't know where we're going. Dimitri had stayed with me, but I don't know how he feels about me. I find myself wishing that he would just tell me, and I realize that he had been right; it is better to know the truth, even if it hurts.

Hi! So this was a lot of background, but it was all necessary and I hope you enjoyed it! Also I received a lot of messages about reading the rewrite with the original characters! You can find it on my tumblr account, shadowkissed-rachel, then just click on the Pulse link. If you like it, don't thank me, thank shayisaslytherin, who is a magical goddess and edited most of it. I also realize that I'm a crazy woman and I have four different active stories, but I just love them all so much so try to be patient, I update them when I can. In the meantime, you should go read GiGi256's new story, Meet Me in the Memory, because it's already beautiful and wonderful. Okay, I'm done. Leave me a review; they give me life, bye!