A/N: This chapter was a bit of an awkward thing to fumble about and type up, the contrasting bits, but we gotta get this show on the road.

Read and review, thanks in advance.

Before someone gets all antsy with me about what Beckett does in this chapter, remember in the original: They watched the maids beat this man's shit in before injecting truth juice.

It's not a justification, it's a parallel.

Section 2-15

Posted on 8/29/16

D-Day + 63

Falmart – Warlord 1-3's Unit – The Terilia Plains

The Terilia Plains.

That's where they were now. It took about two weeks for Yao to get here and then a further few days to get to Italica on the back of a trader caravan's cart. The straight shot route that Itami and Bannon had decided on was certainly the scenic route after the mass of bodies from the two warring cities. Where it had landed them had been an outcropping of rocks under the cover of night.

At night the plains tended to be a certain type of cold. A cold which Bannon knew very intimately from Montana in her youth: it was the cold of a summer's night.

One detail which all those in the Special Task Force had been totally taken off guard by had been the air quality of the Special Region: unmarred by even an industrial age. The air was, to some, sweet, pure. They felt healthier just being deployed there, and Bannon could sympathize as she and Ramirez had parked their bikes in the shadow of the rock for the night.

No use going underneath the night. They were on a mission, but they couldn't take on the flame dragon if they were beat to shit just by travelling.

The dim glow of light that emanated inside the Humvees had barely been enough to give the crusaders space to set up the Humvees in a triangle around Kingdom Come. Normally, in a regular combat deployment, it would've been a complete blackout in the name of being covert.

That was in a regular deployment however. Nothing about what the dragon slayers were doing had been normal.

Flashlights were put on as the soldiers disembarked, the Kingdom Come winding down.

Itami had been the one who called the stop however, and it had been a rather frantic call for a stop.

Anyone who had heard the shriek, the wrestling, inside of his Humvee would've known why.

"Establish a watch, I'll be right back." Bannon had hurriedly said as Doc tagged along with her in a rush over to Itami's Humvee, Lumaban already there as Itami had almost hauled Chuka out of the car.

"Why is father driving a car?! When did he know when to drive a car?!

Doc had his hard case ready as they approached, but he didn't open it. Not yet, not this soon.

The other refugees had disembarked just as hastily as Itami had almost held his daughter in a headlock, laying her back against the ground as he held her in as much of an embrace as he fatherly could. Whispering as much reassurances as he could into the back of her head as he looked to those that came and answered her cries.

Slowly the entire group of crusaders had walked up to the scene, looking over each other, looking down on an elf in distress.

"Who are you people?! Where is my father?!"

"Chuka." Bannon's voice had spoken first as they responded, her voice always made people stop. She kneeled down as she considered the words she was going to say, her gloves taken off as she had offered her hands to the elf.

Oft times, during the private conversations they had alone, she and Masterson would talk about their parents and how rich and successful and loved they were to those who knew them from the outside in. She often teased Masterson for having it within him to be an excellent lawyer because of his parents.

Masterson had only played it off in some self-depreciating fashion; saying that he didn't want to be a liar. She understood what he meant however, and so that was why it hurt when she told the lie everyone had been ordered to say.

"Your father is holding you, hun'… he's always been with you."

Lumaban had licked her lips as she also took a squat in front of Chuka. "Remember, dear, we're on a trip out to the Schwartz Forest. Nothing more, nothing less."

"Then what about those- those soldiers we saw earlier? Why'd we have to go through them?! Why are there so many of you here with your iron tanks?!"

"Well, uhm, your father cares about you so much that he asked us all to come out like this, but you know. It's really not needed, and I want to kick your Dad's ass because it's all so heavy and… and…" Lumaban had looked up to Rory, almost invisible in the darkness, her two impossibly white eyes staring down at the Marine; judging her.

It was a judgement that was too much for a woman who held her faith so close to her chest: to see an apostle of a god look at her as if she had failed. Though she was long fated for that.

"You're a terrible liar, you know that?" Rory's words had echoed in her head.

Lying was a sin, and she was guilty now as her words faltered and her eyes became half lidded in disgust in herself, covering her mouth with the keffiyeh. "I can't do this." She wanted to take care of Chuka. It was the Special Task Force's obligation to take care of her. Not like this however.

Not like this.

She walked away before she had said something disastrous.

"Shhh, shhh, dear, this is just a camping trip, right Auntie Bannon?" Itami had been sounding more forceful as he asked Bannon, but she couldn't be angry at him for that, not when she had nodded at Chuka as convincingly as she could've.

Carefully, she imitated Lumaban as she dropped her rifle entirely and opened her hands up to Chuka again. Ever gradually, hands were held and Bannon did her part in bringing the elf back to reality. "Yes, hun'. We're about to get up a few camp fires, get all warm and tired and fall asleep under the stars. Doesn't that sound nice?"

The elf sniffled as the pressure of Bannon's hands had felt familiar to her; motherly. It reminded her of years ago, a warm, happy place that existed in her mind, nestled between childhood and the life with her father that she lived now.

Up until Bannon had turned her head and screamed. "Camp fires, ASAP!"

"I dunno sarge, followin' 'round Itami seems like an awful waste of- what? Ten stone cold Rangers and five infinitely better Marines like us." One of Perla's men had bellyached around the campfire as the Rangers simply shook their heads, the man yelling loud enough to cross the distance between camp fires.

Not many of the people there had known how to make one, but sooner rather than later with a little help from Lelei, the glowing burns of light had provided sanctuary.

"Well shit Marine, you sound like you don't want to kill a dragon." One of the Rangers yelled back.

"Your sergeant doesn't look too enthused, respectfully ma'am," he regarded Bannon as she sat: before the fire and her rifle in between her knees. "she don't look too enthused about it, and she done it before."

Bannon's face had been that of a woman's, no doubt about it: round, once perfect lips long having soured in their default form. That unkindness that wretched itself out from chapped and cut lips to the bags underneath her hazelnut eyes which had given glares instead of gazes of a dying youth and fairness she had.

Her hair was down for once, bangs covering her thin, brown eyebrows that had also been slanted down in some sort of contempt.

"Resting bitch face." as she herself had described it, during one particularly drunken night out before Ginza to her CO and her counterpart in squad two.

That resting bitch face had turned into more of an actual bitch face at the commentary by the Marines.

But Bannon's face wasn't always like that. It didn't want to be like that. Her uniform and her gear turned her form into an indistinct, genderless form, more or less, but when she was dressed as a regular person, she was, by no means an exaggeration of Masterson's comments on her, starkly beautiful in her own way. Not by curves or stature outright, which she had refined anyway through her life, but by the way she carried herself in private.

She was a woman, through and through, and sometimes in the world she lived in the world forgot. She'd be lying if there wasn't some wistful dream once in a while where she had been a fair maiden in a civil world.

She had grown up like a princess, and life had turned her into the opposite.

"I'm just wondering why you folks aren't getting shut eye when you can."

She had groaned in response, picking up her rifle and around to her bike. She was going to take the rest she could.

Watch was twenty percent. Twenty percent of the people there would've been on watch for the first half of the night while the rest slept, another group would cover until morning.

The Marines were Marines, and the Rangers separated themselves form them as they spent the night as Marines did: talking, small mutterings and the comfortable silence of a world that wasn't out for their head yet. Even in the unknown Lumaban's Marines felt no fear toward the dark or the land or the people. Not now. Not yet. This land hadn't deserved their fear yet.

So they held themselves like campers, fully thankful that this night was peaceful.

The Rangers though, bar Ramirez, had been anxious with the dark surrounding them.

He noticed. "Lighten up." He said once, eating from an MRE bag. It was his first during this trip of theirs. "Back in my day, during my combat missions, we once spent days, nights, inside buildings no bigger than bathrooms, pinned down by enemy fire out of every exit. And still some of us found a way to relax."

Harris had been re-taping the picture of his son back to the inside cover of his machine gun as he looked up. "Is relaxing the best thing you can do in that situation George?"

"No, but it's not what the enemy wants, and we like to piss them off anyway we could."

"What a bunch of Rangers we must be to you then." Nutt had been poking at their fire with a stick, staring into the flickering light it gave off. As a man of explosive talent he hadn't been afraid of the flame, perhaps unwisely, the man taking the stick aflame and waving it around in front of his face for some amusement before using his glove to smother it out on the dirt. "This was how the colonial Rangers worked, you know. Into the wild of America's frontier to deal with whatever beasts that there were back then."

"Killing Indians and shit?"

"Native Americans, Black, not Indians."

"I know I know."

Before the idea of an America was beholden upon the colonies of the new world, there had been the frontiersmen of Appalachia, Green Mountain, the twisting forests of what would become the thirteen rebelling colonies come to face off against an Empire. Their enemy had been the land itself, the wilds of a world yet to be chartered by the white man, and, more often than not, the Native Americans who fought for their homes.

The DNA of those original Rangers had remained in Hitman today, and even though they felt unease in where they rested, in reality they came full circle.

For what they were doing now hadn't been too different than what Clarke and Lewis had done: treading in new lands with token representatives of the local population.

There was an exact term that described that aspect of unknowing expansion and exploration into a world that was not their own; brought on by the divine mission of saving people.

"Rangers are always supposed to be on the forefront of the missions we go on. As far as I'm concerned, you are a good bunch of Rangers." He confided in them with the moon above as his witness.

"Thanks Dad." Black had sarcastically went on, back laid out, broken leg set out for rest as Doc had looked over it with a flashlight, adjusting the exoskeleton as needed.

"George, you ever tire of this shit though? This might pinch." The corpsman had kept himself busy with work, Black cringing for a second as the exoskeleton whirred on its own by Doc's treatment. "You probably seen more action of everyone here minus Rory, and yet you came back."

Doc's questions always pinched in some way, physical and mental. Ramirez could do nothing but nod at himself in some amusement. "Sometimes it's easier to serve a country when you don't live in it."

Lumaban's dark hair had almost sparkled in the dark, almost a shade of ebony as it came against the flame. Her vision had been lost in the flame as her hands were interlocked, her fingertips playing with the golden bracelet chain with the Holy Cross on it.

"So yeah, this maid girl, one of the bunny ones that just came in, I think her name was Parna. She was working at the Officer's House and Delilah told me it was like, her first day or some shit, she I get her as a waiter with me and Poindexter here and you know we get a meal and get all that good royal stuff that they make, but then comes the time we get to pay for the meal and-" The storyteller's words had fallen out as he looked over to his fireteam lead. It was obvious she did not need to hear a story about Parna almost going down on him.

Poindexter had looked up from his phone at the sergeant. He had been the more feeling one of the fireteam.

"Yo, sarge, you okay?"

Lumaban didn't respond to Poindexter, lost in her thoughts.

"Perla."

The second time got her as she looked up. There was a cut on her lip from her training, face first into a wooden log with a few more splinters than usual, her blasted by the weather of Iran and the dust storms caused by the orbital strikes she and her unit called down.

Her eyes held innocence lost, a frown that she didn't know was there as she tucked her legs in.

She was eighteen when she went to Iran.

She was eighteen when she made her greatest mistake.

She was eighteen when she had killed her first human being.

The draft before Open Wind had done something America's Baby Boomer cynics had often wished for the millennials, Generation Z and Generation Alpha: a movement, a war for them to prove their worth in.

The wars did not prove them however. They destroyed them.

A generation defined by hopefulness for the future, progressive thinking and a disregard for the cultures and lifestyles born from the Cold War, made possible by technology and integration into a worldwide culture was in the end, destroyed.

A generational hole brought on by 9/11 and the War on Terror that spanned twenty years.

Too many had gone to war and come back. Too many had never returned at all for that generation to be saved.

Perla Lumaban, a once aspiring medical student, born from a Filipino migrant family, was the perfect example of her generation.

"Yeah?" She finally responded, looking up, half her face illuminated, the other half covered by the shadow of her hair.

"You alright?"

She had pursed her lips downward still, laugh lines strained on her face as she scowled at nothing in particular. "My minister, he taught me before I was born again, to recognize what it feels like: the falling. He taught me to see mistakes before they happen, so as to avoid all of that. He taught me that the devils never hide in their intentions, and what they do is just what they do."

"Are you falling sarge?" Poindexter had asked delicately. He was the man to ask.

Poindexter had been a tad below average in terms of size with the rest of the Marines, however he had been more than fit all the same, he making a point to roll up his sleeves and showing off toned forearms and the tan over his light skin. His face had been a young one, handsome, and perhaps would be better off with a little facial hair, however his hair had provided enough fluff. He had figured facial hair too itchy to deal with. Still, some people had preferred it.

Yao had Wilbur.

The gunner of the Here We Go Again had a snake lady.

He had a woman of feline variety who knew how to talk to flowers.

"Do you feel like helping Chuka as Itami told us these last few weeks was a mistake?"

The Marines had all recoiled back subtly at that question.

"I don't regret a damn thing Sarge, helping her."

Perla had growled in some disappointment toward one of her men. "I ain't talking about helping Chuka in general. I'm talking about the lie."

That far in, ends did not justify means anymore. Under any pretense, that line of thinking never worked.

It was so easy to think about taking care of Chuka when they didn't think about what they needed to do to maintain that status quo that led to the events of today.

No one answered, they all maintained their silence.

"Yeah. I thought so." Lumaban breathed out, aggravated. She had opened her ruck pack, revealing the two brown bagged MREs that had been in there among the dozen other items that a soldier needed for a patrol.

They were, bar ammo and weapons, drastically under equipped.

"So, we eat tonight, or wait a night?" Poindexter had asked, his own stomach feeling something of malnourishment.

Perla had looked up in some sorrow, closing her ruck's flap, shaking her head. "Can't afford to tonight, wait until tomorrow afternoon at least."

"Fuck shit."

"Language."

"Fuck you."

As the Marines lamented in their lack of nourishment, the Rangers had dealt with the same coming problem with simply ignoring it: either trying to fall asleep or preforming maintenance on whatever they could look over.

The AK-12 had been in Loke's hand in the light of the fire, a Maglite being held by her mouth to provide honed illumination. Most notably the gun was in half as if she was servicing it. The AK-12 had been a take away from Hakone, and the very fact that any criminals had gotten a hand on the modern Kalashnikov variant had been was scary enough in Japan.

There was something more however. If weapons had history as Doc's Luger and Bannon's Enfield had, then this Kalashnikov had a story to tell.

It hadn't been the current issue rifle in Russia's armory, though it had a substantial part in it mostly in due part in its early adoption by Russian special forces during 2016. A Kalashnikov rifle like its forebearers before it, it had been a rifle that never complained when used and had every right to be out in the field with Harris as its user: his adopted backup rifle.

But now Loke held it, a suspicion from days earlier sparking her interest enough to disassemble the rifle.

"Hey Brian, do you remember what body you picked up this rifle from back at the resort?" she said as she transferred the rifle from mouth to cheek and shoulder.

"Yeah." he grumbled up into a sit, having tried to fall asleep on his back. "Yakuza I think. Why?"

"This rifle, it's lying to us."

"Huh?"

She motioned the man over, holding the trigger mechanism with the lower half of the gun rather pointedly. "The cover and the fun switch tells us it's only semi and safe, that's why we thought this was a civilian, but it ain't. Got some really funky modification stuff happening in the assembly. This thing was originally full auto."

"And…?"

"This model AK-12 is a 2015-16 variant. Only people that ever fielded this thing in full fun mode were, I think, the Russian Alfa Group who operated in, by my guess, the Ukraine or Chechnya."

The other Rangers in earshot had been tuned in when Loke had mentioned the Alfa Group. They were a part of the special forces community, and they knew their neighbors. The Russian Alfa Group had been more commonly known as the legendary Spetsnaz. Russia's SOF had been, arguably, many of the first boots on the ground when the Middle East had fallen apart, even if they contributed their portion of the blame to it. The reputation of the men who had first gone into Afghanistan in the modern era was not forgotten by the Rangers.

In a sense, the Taliban of today had been the sons of the Soviets that first tested them.

"What're you saying Tal'?" Black had groaned. He hadn't been a fan of winding conversations that late at night with possible political implications.

"I'm just saying the Yakuza either offed a Spetsnaz operator to get this rifle, or there were Russian special forces there at Hakone."

It was an AK that was worn in its metal and finish, the wear and tear on its foregrip denoting that, after it all, it had been probably some operator's personal rifle: a decade of conflict beneath its belt.

"Man, all these fucking guns of ours get caught up in some weird shit. I'm sure Doc's Luger is still in his desk back at Akusho." Nutt had also groaned. He hadn't any guns from Hakone, but his M32 grenade launcher had been at his knees, the cylinder clicking as he rotated it, hoping the rhythm put him to sleep.

"Hanging out with Peters' guitar and Masterson's Xbox, that's for sure." Doc grumbled.

The Rangers hadn't delved deeper into the mystery of that Kalashnikov, not when they were already up to their necks with Chuka. Still it served as a distraction; a suggestion of forces like them in play that they couldn't comprehend.

Perhaps it was just a natural inclination to the Rangers, but they needed their music to calm whatever nerve they had, so far into their expedition of their own, Loke clambering into the Ranger Humvee and going to the bolted on radio.

"MCR, Don McLean, Carrie Underwood, J-Lo… Why did we let Masterson put together our road trip mixtape without our input?" she groaned, flipping through the touchscreen of albums. "Ortiz, Babs! You got pick."

It was tradition that those on the watches would've picked music. In the Fromar Keep at least the Rangers would keep one or two of themselves awake at night to watch over Italica from the balcony of the keep.

"Don McLean sounds nice." Ortiz had gone off, smoking a cigarette as he sat on the Ranger's Humvee's roof.

"Go for it." His partner had asked in her usual bored tone.

Now Playing:

Don McLean – American Pie

A long, long time ago

I can still remember

How that music, used to make me smile…

That I could make those people dance

And maybe they'd be happy for a while

"Yeah boy! This is good shit!"

Itami had heard the roar of the Marines applause the Rangers for their music choice, Lelei especially looking up from her about to fall asleep state and becoming fully engrossed in an American folk classic.

Chuka, mercifully, had fallen asleep easily enough. The strain on her mind had offered an easy passage into sleep on Itami's lap as he sat near his fire. Yao had taken to Wilbur's shoulder against Kingdom Come's front slope, leaving only the original three with him.

With the flame flickering orange on all of their faces Itami had to deeply consider that thought: that he had come to be associated with these three people above all else. During the time when Kay had been in the Imperial Capital alone he had only now starkly realized he had spent a lot of time with Lelei, Rory, and Chuka as they found the roles that they were comfortable in within the Special Task Force.

With Emerson gone, he was alone to deal with them, and he became their go-to person to simply deal with in the Special Task Force.

That had only been a portion of an answer he sought when he asked internally: "Why me?"

But February made me shiver

With every paper I'd deliver

Bad news on the doorstep

I couldn't take one more step

"The Americans… why do they always play their music?" Rory posed a question in Itami in Japanese. For some reason it felt good to him that at least someone from this world did. He let out another section run its course before he answered, looking up at her pale white and black form in its natural form: in the darkness of night.

It was a question that was asked before to him, before Italica, after Hakone.

The answer had now changed.

I can't remember if I cried

When I read about his widowed bride

Something touched me deep inside

The day the music died

So

Bye, bye Miss American Pie…

Itami didn't understand the lyrics, the verses and what they truly meant, how he would understand it as a Japanese man, but he knew that this song was a classic to Americans. That was part of the reason Masterson chose it in the first place.

"They do it because they're so far away from home." He said once, softly, nodding at himself. "They truly are."

Rory had held her halberd as if a stuffed animal, cradling it in her arms as if it was as light as one. She rested her head along its metal pole as she considered what Itami said. She remembered that the Gate opened up directly to Japan, not America.

During her visit to the Diet she had caught a glimpse of a world map, the various nations of the world labeled out. For the Americans, home was an impossibly far ways away.

The idea of an American abroad was not a kind thing to think about, especially to those not Americans, however that was the duty they put on themselves to be there abroad for a thousand different reasons and treaties.

To many in the world of the Special Region it was a sin in itself to die on land that was not their own, or their home, and yet that fate had befallen many Americans in that modern age. Moreso than other countries, for better or worse.

The Koreans died on their peninsula, the Russians and Ukrainians fought over land that was both claimed as their own, millions of Arabs caught up in the wars that came to them in the last four decades, and yet the Americans, in the end, were there for them all.

Why did they do that, why did they die around the world, why did they do what they did.

Questions that had always haunted Rory ever since she had first seen them in action and saw what they had been capable of.

She had appreciated the Japanese too, Itami uniquely, but in the end she could not get rid of that one resignation that Japan in 2028 rebelled against: who they were today, was because of what America had done to them after a world war long ago.

"Then why don't they just go home if they miss it so much? Why do they bring themselves and all that they are wherever they go?" the Apostle responded in curiosity; curiosity for the mystery that radiated from the Rangers and the Marines.

Home was a word with a fluid definition, one lost on many Americans, many people in the world in general. But even here he saw two people at least that had no home at all but each other, three if he gave in and counted Chuka.

The lyrics went on, a few of Hitman and the Marines singing on.

I was a lonely teenage broncin' buck

With a pink carnation and a pickup truck

But I knew I was out of luck

The day the music died

I started singin'

The tankers had all promptly fallen asleep, Kingdom Come's turret gone directly to the left and raised up, Chains cradled by the gun's mantle as the rest slept in station or on the engine grill.

"I don't know, Rory. Maybe you should ask them."

He couldn't know. He didn't have the right to answer. Maybe Loke did, maybe Omar, maybe those who suffered because of American Imperialism, but not he. The words of Pops had resounded in his head ever since he left, ever since he looked around and saw that nearly all of the people that came with him had been from or attached to the 7th MEU.

"I guess you've become another American, Itami."

Helter skelter in a summer swelter

The birds flew off with a fallout shelter

Eight miles high and falling fast

He caught himself stroking Chuka's hair as she slept, tracing along her ear. She was a beautiful young woman, no matter how anyone saw her. Inside however had been a storm which had been ugly beyond words. An ugliness which Bannon detested almost violently.

It was a treatable disaster which he knowing did not let treated out of fear of losing her.

"Perhaps, for Americans, the idea of home is an idea, and not a place." Lelei had said. Even in her dozy state of near sleep, her monotone voice never wavered.

"Who gave you that idea Lelei?"

"Miss Bannon."

Why he had been so stubborn in letting Chuka go however had been within him and who he was. In the stories he read, the anime he watched, these fair maidens always had a hero; they always had a character there for them to save them in the end.

Perhaps it was the pandering to the Otakus of the world that made the industry make these hero characters more and more able to be self-inserted to create the illusion of the reader being capable of being a hero, but no matter the case Itami had seen the trap, the correlation to what he was doing now.

He was no brave knight in shining armor however. No king of a harem. No master of his destiny.

Oh, and there we were all in one place

A generation lost in space

With no time left to start again

The song had gone on through its legendary length, speaking of the marching band, the 60s, Buddy Holly and Chevys down at the Levy. Though he could not outright understand the lyrics, he could understand the tune, and it was a nice tune.

So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

Jack Flash sat on a candlestick

'Cause fire is the devil's only friend

Oh and as I watched him on the stage

My hands were clenched in fists of rage

No angel born in Hell

Could break that Satan's spell

At the very mention of a devil Itami had instinctually looked up to find the woman who looked like the embodiment of Hell the most.

Not Rory. But a woman who carried herself in battle with an almost bone cracking intensity in her step; in her gunfire.

And as the flames climbed high into the night

To light the sacrificial rite

I saw Satan laughing with delight

The day

The music died

The lieutenant had looked over to see a Ranger missing: Bannon. His gaze had darted to her bike and fortunately she had been there, her back against the side facing away from the flame.

It was easy to imagine Masterson as a cowboy, the man had looked, had been built, and had lived the part. Bannon however was capable in a deceptively graceful way. She looked, at that moment, resting after a cattle drive on the trail like the American cowboys of old, a Stetson gifted to her by Masterson reassuringly near her.

"You comfortable? Rory, Lelei?"

"Yes Itami."

"I've slept in worse places."

"Well, watch over Chuka for me, would ya? I need to go check up on Bannon."

He had brought his rifle with him as he walked up, only out of habit, closing that distance between fires. His footsteps were light, barely making any noise as he had found the motorbike Bannon used, she laying her back against its propped up frame, a finger tapping at her knee in rhythm as the muffled sound of J-pop emanated from her headphones.

She was keenly engrossed in the music, enough so that Itami had walked right next to her and only stood by, watching where her one eye had led: the moon.

The two had been in silence against Bannon's bike, looking at the green tinted celestial object that painted their faces a soft emerald. After everything, it was the most peaceful sight that Bannon had recently, the most calming light to fall upon her face and soothe. It was a sight she was engrossed in as she failed to notice Itami next to her, one of her ears being plugged with ear buds.

"Mind if I join you?" he finally spoke. The least he could do, he figured, was provide some company and conversation.

She jumped a bit in surprise. "Cam?"

By grace of learning English alongside Masterson and Emerson, Itami had spoken English in a familiar way. Familiar enough to have tricked Bannon as half her mind was devoted to the music in her ear, the other half focused on ignoring everything else.

"Unfortunately not." Itami had smoothly responded, the hope in Bannon's voice settling down in a groan, "Ah, you about to sleep? Cause if so I'll just…"

"No, no, it's fine. Have a seat, grass hasn't felt any better in years."

So he did, and the grass had felt fine for a seat, the motorcycle feeling less appropriate as a backing to their position before the stars, among the rock monoliths.

He had started for a cigarette, taking a pack out of his shirt, no lighter to be found. Bannon had noticed. "Hey! Harris! Lighter!" She patted Itami's shoulder for him to stand up and catch, none too soon as the metal tool flew through the air toward them, Itami catching it over the motorcycle, lighting his cigarette and tossing it back to the autogunner. The inscription he had on it wasn't something he would've agreed with, but it fit an American soldier such as he.

The lighter was thrown back and the lieutenant sat back down, taking his puff as Bannon looked at him, dim lidded.

Itami had caught her gaze, offering the pack of smokes up.

"I don't smoke, Youji." She waved her hands.

He realized he had been smoking right next to her, unsure of why he had come over in the first place. "Ah, sorry."

"My ex-husband…" she began, unsure of herself, but too tired to stop. "He smoked. A lot. Big Cuban cigars. Always, at the end of every day. It was just always everywhere in the house and I got so annoyed at him one day he just-"

There was a scar on her shoulder from a tear of nails, and she felt that pain anew.

She trailed off as Itami had taken one last puff before stubbing it out. She had a house, a home, once. That Itami had been hard pressed to believe from Bannon. "You alright?"

Bannon had held her head in her hands before leaning back, further up into the sky. "Gosh. I used to be so domesticated."

"Domesticated like me?" he raised his eyebrow, a smirk on his eye and his phone in his hand, the charm of a chibi on it.

Bannon scoffed once, kindly. "Heavens no." A finger looped around her eyepatch as it unfurled, falling to her lap as she continued to look up at that sky. To her, the stars looked so familiar. "Me and Cam, before we joined the military, lived a charmed life."

"What was that life like?"

"Hungry, miserable, demeaning, cold. Clawed our way out of it after seeing everything such a course of living could take us. No money, no food, no roof and clothes sometimes. Just the tenacity to acknowledge that we lived interesting lives.

It wasn't a pretty description, but something above that had stuck out to Itami. "…What do you mean before you joined the military?"

She raised her hand up once, knocking at the bike behind her. "This thing here, it makes me nostalgic. Kinda. Cam, he rode his chopper during his time without a home. Me? I had a pickup truck that I bought off one of my house cleaners… doing nothing but driving forward, it's nice, don't you think?" She was leading him on, and he had followed.

"I don't actually have a car, you know. Always used a metro or my bike."

"You poor thing." Bannon had entertained Itami.

"Have you seen gas prices in Japan? Last time I drove anywhere it was with a friend's car, and that was before Saudi Arabia collapsed."

Bannon shook her head as she recollected the "fond" memories of gas prices in America. "I guess I can justify what I personally paid for gas because my truck was also my bed."

"You know, many Japanese dream of such a life: roaming the open road. They think it'll get them away from the stress of our world." Itami responded, trying to think if he could do it, Bannon could only keep her face in something of a frown.

"How fortunate that they think that living in the back of a truck is a vacation."

Itami reeled back immediately, seeing the hurt in Bannon's body language. "Hey I didn't mean it like that."

A fist rubbed at her eye again. "I know, I know. But wandering the American Midwest isn't all that it's made out to be."

"But what is it like?"

"Sterile." She said once, sure of herself. "These long highways of desert and plains, at night, and I swear, you look for beacons of hope in the night, and those beacons turn out to be fast food joints or gas stations. No signs of life anywhere except for those outposts in our American purgatory: between Cali and the Mississippi."

She spent her youth there, on those long roads with a tendency to be traveled by soul searchers or rural families, driven to the cities or suburbia as the droughts and sandstorms came and gone.

"The Mississippi?"

"It's uh, this river that cuts down from just below Canada to the Gulf of Mexico."

All things considered Bannon should've smoked. She was the person who needed such a thing more than anyone: the escapism it provided. The bottle of Jack hiding in her saddle bag however had been enough. Alcohol being a newfound pleasure of hers ever since she came to Japan underneath Emerson's command.

"I spent a long time, you know, searching for those beacons of light, only to find a fucking McDonalds or Citgo. And because they're all modern in style nowadays they're way too clean for what they are: the floors shine, the ceilings are too white and the glass gives off too much reflection and…" she trailed off. "It never felt right, sleeping in their parking lots."

"Did you ever have a good night's rest at all? When you were out there?"

"Not until those final few days, before I joined."

The week she had met Masterson of course.

A part of her had been repulsed by that idea: that it took a person to make her feel better in a life where she had been damned by divorce, but then again, another part of her hadn't minded it all.

Shouldn't she be tougher than that? Be able to weather the world and think for her own after all that? Be happy on her own without another person in her life?

Maybe now, she could've.

But the Lisa Bannon today had been different from a Lisa Bannon who was a drifting divorcee.

She licked cracked lips, eyes staring through the ground, a warm smile on her lips as she realized how sappy what she was going to say would be. But it was true. In that year and in a hundred years since:
"Home is where the heart is, you know." She spoke once, words she believed in.

Ahh.

Itami's own heart softened as he heard it, understood it. Home had a rather tenuous meaning to him. His own childhood home had been burned down, and the apartment he had now was hardly one where a thirty three year old man was supposed to be living in (At least alone).

Though perhaps it was because he never bothered making it his home.

For a while, after he and Risa had been married, there was something of a feeling he never felt before: having someone to come back home to at the end of the day. Inversely Risa had never had someone to come back to her, to her little abode in Tokyo.

"Where do you live, Itami?" One of his SFG trainee buddies had once asked him.

There was a little pride in his answer. One that a dwindling number of people in Japan had been able to answer: "With my wife."

"I remember after that first night. Masterson, he'd been hot off of his last rotation with the migrant crop workers near the border, living with them in hot little shacks in the fields where they worked. He saved enough money to, as far as I knew, to have a little fun for that last week before he signed his life away into the service."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." Bannon had nodded, going back into her memory of years ago. "Do you know, how me and Masterson met, Youji?"

"Kay told me something like, you met at a motel or something in town."

"We're both creations of coincidences, me and him." She trailed off, feeling her dog tags rest on the skin over her sternum, cold in feeling. "Yeah. We were just beginning to invade Iran and, well, because I didn't want to be fucking drifting forever, I thought I was just better off as cannon fodder."

Itami had noticed her voice had dropped into her accent: that Western twang that was all so rare to hear. The way people like them spoke had been an indicator of how comfortable they were; Emerson himself hardly falling back into what, out of lack of better words, Itami had described as "hood speak". Emerson was supremely capable of it as much as Bannon had been liable to speak like Masterson.

However they hid their true voices; hiding as well the subjects they used to talk about with them.

"I figured that having an Iranian knock my head off was better than my other plan."

"Like what?"

"I dunno, take my truck and speed into Area 51, see what was in there. Or maybe donate my body to science while still living. Wasn't too happy with life, back then." One of her hands had gone up to the saddlebag on the bike, taking out a glass bottle of Jack. It was almost as if she needed to drink to talk to Itami. "I love this shit. Lucky I didn't have this back then or else I'd really be a washed up bum."

Bannon had taken a swig of the stuff before offering it to Itami, satiating whatever thirst it quenched. He had waved off, she taking another sip before placing it back into the bag.

"You're a lightweight when it comes to drinking, you know that, right?"

"Yeah, I know, I know, but officially I'm also a very by the books trooper who would never go out of line to help several others go AWOL while saving a PTSD stricken elf have some closure."

Itami had taken the hit. "There's the Bannon I know."

Bannon had blown air out of her mouth, making a flibbing sound. "Shit, sorry. I don't mean it."

"As far as special operators go, you're not that bad. It's cool."

The stigma of the special forces of the world; the cigar chomping, forty year old male who had been in the service for far too long and was cool and collected had died along with the special operators themselves.

That notion of invincible warriors gone away when put chest to chest with villagers with rusty Kalashnikovs in occurrences and fatalities that, were once rare, but now common place as the Middle East finally adapted to American War in a way the Pentagon could not answer.

Bannon sniffled at that. "Cam told me once, "We are not men who dress like dogs; we are wolves disguised as men.""

Itami had known what Masterson was quoting: another anime. Jin-Roh.

"Is that why you called me a wolf, the other day?"

"Yeah, mostly." She admitted, almost ashamed. "That and you kinda look like one, with that bushy hair and the mid-thirties thing."

"Is it too late for that Jack?"

"Yes."

The music of Don McLean had tuned out for another country folk song to the tune of someone walking five hundred miles.

"How'd you and Masterson meet again?"

Perhaps it was the night or the suggestion of Jack Daniels slowly making its way through her system, but she spoke of it easily.

"Well, he kinda just heard me fucking crying from the balcony one night. I don't know why I was crying, but I just was… Maybe because it was because I was literally just giving up on my life at that point, or maybe shit was just too much, but yeah, I was crying, and well, with my voice being the way it is, the way I cry is kinda hard to miss."

"Didn't know you cried Bannon." Itami said dully.

Bannon had snickered in some response: the way Itami had thought of her had always been interesting. "Oh I do, I do. Hell, he was banging on my door because he thought like, some guy was beating up a prostitute."

"Is that really how you first met?"

"What? You expecting something else?"

"I expected, like, I dunno, more horses." He gestured toward her Stetson.

"You stereotyping prick." She had spit some of the phlegm in her throat on the ground before she continued. "Shit, well, he just sorta wanted to see if I was alright. I said, yeah, I was okay, and he told me upfront that I was lying."

"Pretty direct when you're talking to a crying woman, don't you think?"

"Sometimes being direct is all you need, and Cam is usually good about that. Besides, how do you think you're supposed to comfort a woman in distress?"

"…You leave her alone?"

"Sure, that's an option, but it sucks Youji."

"Well what did Cam do?"

"Hold me till morning and all that. I think I threatened to throw myself off the building at one point… probably why."

It struck Itami as, at first, odd, and then horrifying, that Bannon had been suicidal once. Of course loose lips sunk ships, and he had questioned whether or not it was right if he actually talked to her as she came under the influence.

Not that she had given him an option.

"In the morning, he didn't leave my side, even when I told him to go and git'. Oh god, I was so mad at him, but he just told me upfront, "Lookie here Miss, your stomach was growling all night and I ain't letting you off without treating a lady to a meal."" Bannon had tried to fully imitate Masterson's serious swagger in that voice.

"What did he do?" Itami asked.

"He took me to a Waffle House." She said fast.

"What…?"

Her fingers opened as she listed. "Then he took me to a water park, then to the park, then bought me a dress the next day to go out to a restaurant, then to a ranch he used to work at to break in some of the new horses, then… then…"

"Sounds like it was a fun week."

"Best damn week of my life." She seemed distant, Itami had noticed. Then again this week, or the last six months for that matter, hadn't been exactly providing contenders to that week. Her hands had been constantly fidgeting, as if reaching for something that was beyond the grass, the air, the hat, and all things that Itami could observe. "I thought he was doing that all out of pity, which was why I never called him after all that time, but… well- fuck, I wish I could get that time back."

The older (barely) man had smiled as he considered what he felt for another woman. "You guys care for each other so much it reminds me of me and Risa, really: that ideal of love that I have."

"Hrmm?"

"You love him."

"No shit. Course I do" Bannon had almost laughed, but kindly. "But you try declaring that kind of stuff in the open, here. It digs into your head, forces you to remember that you became invested in the life of another as you're doing away with hundreds of others only because they're on the other side."

"You also constantly worry about them." Itami had continued to Bannon's surprise. "You want them to have a good life with you, at the end of the day, and you can't help but feel slightly selfish for keeping them to yourself."

"Eh." Bannon had doubted in earnest. He might've been talking about Risa or Chuka, but she wouldn't understand. "Cam, he told me once, we're all looking for love. We are. But what we don't know is that we're looking for our love, for our specific type of love that we share with someone."

"Then what do you have with him?"

"Why am I telling you?"

"Because I feel like you deserve to tell someone. I know you can't tell the rest of the squad because it's frowned upon. I know you can't tell Kay because he won't understand completely."

"Why should I tell at all?"

Itami had shuffled his own form as he got ready to tell of his intimacy. "Me and Risa, we have a counselor that tells us saying what we feel out loud is really good for a relationship."

Bannon's mouth was held open for but a second in disbelief. "Get the fuck out," she said softly. "You two went to a shrink?"

Itami smiled, expecting Bannon's response as he rolled his head. "Not because we were bad at the time as a couple, it's just that we kinda were married pretty snappily, out of the blue… We wanted to make sure if it was going to be something, we saw help."

"You wanted to be a good husband, huh?" There, for once, was an approval behind Bannon's whispers.

"To her? Of course. I've known her all my life and nothing can take that away, not even divorce papers or an alimony… as draining as that may be."

Bannon had seated herself back more for a second. Even when divorced Risa and Itami were very amicable. There was no lie, no padding, no sourness in something so pure. For once, Bannon thought, Itami sounded like a man.

"Cam, he doesn't complete me, no, but, well-" her grip involuntarily shifted to the Stetson. "He makes me feel comfortable with who I was. That I wasn't really alone in what I dealt with for years. He understood, he understood…" Bannon's voice had grounded as she struggled with herself, finding the words for an answer to a question she never thought she would be posed.

"Understood what?"

"Waking up from the American Dream."

Itami held his head back, thinking about what he knew of that dream. The entire world who knew America had known the dream of their people at the very base: the stereotypical 1990s life of a two story house, a white picket fence, the nuclear family and a dog.

He himself had gaffed at that idea once or twice. He wasn't meant for that sort of life and thought it nothing more but a fanciful ideal that came from national rhetoric.

But now, he realized, after talking with so many Americans, becoming their friends in this new world, that, even though it was a dream, it was also a standard.

A standard which many Americans had failed to attain and had suffered because of it.

"We can't all have childhood romances, can we?" Itami tried to lighten the mood, and it had elicited a chuckle from Bannon at the very least.

"I'm sure Risa sees something in you most of us don't. Now stay still."

Ever gently Bannon had leaned into Itami's side, dozing off, not minding the shoulder Itami had provided. The man couldn't argue as his stiffened form relaxed with a woman on his arm.

He had opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came but a squeak which Bannon recognized. She had shuffled casually, but not removing herself.

"Did you know how long I was homeless, Itami? For five years."

"Uhrhm. Kay told me something like that, but I don't know much else."

She had nodded her head. "Yeah, I was. I got married at twenty one, divorced at twenty two when the Chinese bubble popped. It took me five years to ever consider joining the military. Half a decade on my own in the back of my truck."

"You certainly look well now."

"Mmm. Perhaps." she had said tiredly. At her very quietest did her voice take on the sound of somewhat normal. "In those five years, I could never afford to pass up a warm bed, no matter how that bed was warm."

"…What do you mean?"

"I'm used to… nights like this, you understand? With men I don't know underneath stars I don't recognize." she had said in some familiar shame.

It took a few moments, the barrier of language that English had with him present, but it all broke away once he remembered his fellow SFG members. He remembers the day after the completion of training: men on top of the world gone into Tokyo and buying bodies to keep their beds warm the night after in celebration.

Bannon had known what that was like on the other end.

"Warmth is warmth to me, Itami. Nothing more, nothing less."

"I'm sorry." he had said, quietly, for having Bannon explain herself.

"Cameron?" she spoke his name with a fond tone, the sound of it pleasant to her own ears when her voice was not grainy. "He lets me feel something more, and I love him for it like no other."

"I see." Itami responded softly, staring up into the stars as his unease went away. "I think I understand now. No biggie."

"Besides, apparently battle buddies used to huddle for comfort back in north eastern Afghanistan during the nights."

"But you're not my battle buddy."

"Well I'm not your enemy. Now shut up and sleep."

D-Day + 64

The Special Task Force had breached and cleared the Officer's House early in the morning. By lunch the entire place was cleared out, ran upside down in the name of evidence.

What they found had been damning, but no stranger than what the Marines who had been to Iraq had seen in Baghdad after the final battle for it.

Two dozen bodies of the worshippers of the God of the Harvest: their cloaks taken and used in the attack. A letter imprinted with the seal of the Fromals. A shrine to the gods of war and combat.

If evidence constituted guilt then Delilah had been guilty as sin. Guilty as sin of being ordered by Princess Pina Co Lada, via the Fromar Household, to assassinate Noriko. It was in writing, it was in blood, and the bodies that had once again accumulated on Arnus Hill had been a testament to that effort.

What happened next was simply the systematic response to an insider attack. A road trod on by the Marines for years since the Obama Administration.

The men in black had been accompanied by JSDF and Marine MPs altogether, the Marines having warranted this response: fully armed, fully prepared for another fight.

"We have confirmation that all the Rangers are gone?" Beckett had throated into his headset as the Little Birds that his operators were on had circled the castle, numerous Humvees surrounding the castle. No one in, no one out. A few of the maids that had tried to step back in immediately, as politely as angry Marines could, ziptied and put back into the castle as the security teams breached the castle.

"Affirmative. Half are at Crety, other half are egressing towards Schwarz." Although they hadn't realized it, the Rangers had been playing as the watchers of the Fromars by just being housed within the keep: the finger on the pulse of the Fromars.

Beckett had to admit, Emerson had run a tight enough ship to make sure no real funny business had happened underneath him or his squad during their tenure in Italica. His Rangers were professionals he could respect, and he could've only hoped that RCT3 had fallen under that same influence.

For the second time in its history, helicopters had laid siege to Italica as the police towers had been full alert.

The Special Region – Italica – The Fromar Keep

"Assassin Actual to Grey Fox Actual, how copy?" Sevson had asked for the CIA Operators. He wasn't briefed as to who they were, but he had been given their callsign and Pierce's word that they were in charge of this operation, and with that, he had only assumed who they actually were.

"Grey Fox Actual, copy clear Sevson."

The Marine Major had only been offended for a second as his name was uttered to refer to him. The CIA spooks however, they were beyond such regulation.

"We have the Formar Keep's perimeter locked down. MPs and Rory's police are searching for the maids not on the property. We're waiting on your go Grey Fox but the JSDF are trying to pull us off of this."

Wherein one perimeter was formed around the castle by the Marines, two others had formed: one had been of the JSDF, surrounding the Marines, the other had been the citizens and Rory's MPs that had come out to watch.

The JSDF had come out to deescalate the situation that the Marines had responded with. The second that Delilah's doors had come down and the evidence was put before the feet of Marines, this was the response that was warranted after decades at war.

Overreaction that the JSDF did not appreciate, but wanted the Marines to stop as officers on both sides argued, papers and orders in hand and no way in hell they would back down.

"Keep them occupied Sevson." Beckett had yelled out into his radio, he using his hand to signal to the Little Bird pilots to touch down in front of the castle.

They had landed as if they were in combat, and the eight or so operators that Beckett had brought had certainly seen their fair share.

Heidegger had come from the Force Recon, Chuck and Roger former SEALs, the rest plucked from American SOF and, in two cases, mercenaries. The rules for being a SOG in that world had been changed, and at the end of the day Beckett had been the de-facto CIA Station Chief of both Tokyo and the Special Region.

He needed men that did their jobs well.

The Little Birds had dusted off, their job done and their passengers where they needed to be. "Heidegger you take lead, sweep the building and bring them to the basement. Subdue any Fromar and staff you see and get anyone that isn't us or them on the main floor only."

The blonde, former Force Recon Marine had nodded as he had raised his rifle, his right hand up in a sweeping signal pointing toward those grand doors.

They went one way, Beckett went another: toward the Marine stockade.

Sevson had greeted him personally as his Marines were looking both ways, shouting and yelling over them all. He had been as tired as Pierce, the gunfire from Arnus Hill seemingly reaching out all the miles to Italica, across the Corridor.

Word from the top down, to everyone's ears, was that Delilah had tried to murder a Japanese citizen and she had help from throughout the Corridor for coin or other promises.

Delilah had been something of a good representative of the people in the Corridor, and in the times they lived in for one to speak for the many, was for one to also be able to cause the many to be blamed for. Some had felt Delilah had sold them out on some objective that no one had known about. Some had been fearing the Hell that had been supposedly been taken out on the bunny warrior to be placed on them (that is to say having their legs ripped off and shot if Ryolu was to be believed).

Sevson's face had been the human equivalent of a Rottweiler's: angry, but rightfully so as his eyebrows bordered a scowl he did not mean. That widened face had tilted as he looked at Beckett walk up to him, the CIA man dropping his face protector.

"Do you mind telling what in God's name is-"

Beckett bypassed any sort of pretense as he pointed out to the Men in Green. "JSDF. Give me three of their MPs."

"What?!"

The CIA Agent pointed again, his other hand still around his MCR. "I said give me three of the Jap MPs, should keep this ruckus down."

Sevson had threw his arms up in the air "Sir, I'd be happy to oblige but our golden boy is back: Lieutenant Yanagida is among them."

Mitch had been long used to surprises at that point in his life, but this was something new, something else. Of course who was he to doubt the tenacity of a man? He had survived Dubai after all.

"How the hell is he up and walking so fast?" Beckett knew the answer, he just wanted to say it aloud, to make sure that Sevson hadn't been screwing with him.

"Man is mad as hell. Is all."

And that was all there was to it as Beckett leaned over Sevson's shoulders, over the Marines, and looked at a familiar man with a crutch and fire on his tongue.

"How the fuck did he get out of the hospital and this far out already? Doesn't he knew he was just stabbed in the hip?" Modern technology of course had been the answer. It was only a flesh wound after all, and men and women had suffered much worse while still being able to operate, whether out of stubbornness or the will to go on.

The CIA spook and Yanagida had locked eyes and that had sealed his decision. "Whatever, just get him and a few other of the MPs. Send them inside the castle."

Sergeant Major Freeman had taken hold of the Marines that had already taken stock of the situation inside of the castle, some of the Marines reluctant to hand over the maids to the men in black. Regular GIs in the military had seen, on occasion, the spooks of the agency, the special forces which acted on their behest. They simply existed, supposed to be unacknowledged by anyone else who saw them.

However here they were now before the Marines, ordered by them above the purview of rank, but rather agency.

Freeman had been a sun blasted man from New Mexico, he having grown a brown goatee during his time here in the Special Region, that goatee framing a mouth that had been yelling constantly at the maids and the staff of the Fromar Keep to keep their heads down.

The Marines MPs that had went in had gone in with balaclavas even, hiding their faces from the Fromars.

"Don't look at me! Keep your heads down!" One of them had yelled, barely muffled by his mask. The MPs of New Kabul and New Baghdad had often worn such coverings, to shield their faces, to deny whoever was beneath their boots the view.

At some point, somewhere down the line between the September 11th and the end of the War on Terror, those that had waged that conflict had ended up not only otherizing the enemy, but otherized themselves.

In the end they took after people like Beckett: the Men in Black.

When push came to shove, the Marines had remembered this as they shoved maids down onto their stomachs, the staff of the Fromars onto their knees and with their hands behind their heads:

Those that welcomed them today, that opened their arms and waved and fed and let themselves be fucked, would, maybe, dance on their corpse tomorrow.

"Where's Myui?" Beckett had asked for, fiercely, having walked in after squaring away his deal with the JSDF. On his heels had been those JSDF responders, faster than he expected.

His men had started to pick the maids up after they bound their hands with zipties, dragging them up even as they cried, they asked and begged to know what was happening as they were led to the basement.

"Where are you taking them?!"

It was Yanagida's turn to yell at an American, bandage padding underneath his pant leg and his crutch being held by his other arm. He hadn't the time to use such a thing as he limped along, a wound on his outside thigh with two JSDF MPs with him.

"Down stairs." Beckett had turned with a precision, an aggressiveness, which had stopped the footsteps that approached him. He wasn't any more imposing than the Rangers, or any other special forces operator, but it was how he held himself that had made Yanagida freeze as who he yelled at took him up, and put his chest out to him. "I'm glad to see you're on your feet so soon, Mister Yanagida."

"Mister? That's Lieutenant Yanagida to you-!" The Japanese lieutenant had been at the front of the two MPs that came with him, bobbing his head around to try and find a name, a rank on the black and grey attire and equipment of the man before him.

He didn't know who he was.

"Who are you?" He stopped in all frankness, almost in a disgusted allure.

Beckett had rolled with the role he had been assigned to use ever since he had been stationed in Japan. "Military Police. Attaché to General Chigurh Andrade, USFJ."

"What is your name?" Yanagida stressed, his growing anger barely suppressed as he mentally grappled with who he was standing before.

"Beckett. Mitchell Beckett."

Yanagida had reeled himself back. This man was different. Different from Itami, he fought in a different way against him, and he was no slacker obviously. Different from Emerson, he was an older man, a man who hadn't gotten caught up in the wars that came to him.

He was, with his men, different.

Dangerous.

"Why are you taking these people downstairs? To hold them prisoner? For what?!"

There were papers in Yanagida's hand, but it was no bother to Beckett as he turned back to Freeman. "Wherever Myui is, keep her away from the basement and keep her complacent. Same goes for your Marines. No one goes downstairs."

"Is that an order?" Freeman had tried to dare the CIA agent.

"It's a warning."

The way Beckett had said those words had meant something to Yanagida. What they had meant was that, if he was an extension of the law, then American justice was about to be enacted.

American justice distinctly.

He looked at the bottle of water in one of his pockets, used for the painkillers that had made any movement of his bearable.

The captured staff had all disappeared downstairs at the gun point of the SOGs, leaving Beckett behind as the Marines looked on like a circus crowd at the man in black and the JSDF.

"What? Are you going to yell at me, Yanagida? Going to tell me how I'm doing things wrong? How you JSDF would do this in a much nicer, much more humane way? Perhaps just a table meeting with someone who barely knew Delilah and a few shakings of hands and smiles?" Beckett had pressed in, steps toward Yanagida suddenly numbing the lieutenant's leg in a way that pain hadn't been able to.

"Mister Beckett." Yanagida grit through his teeth as he tried to step back. "I fully realize the magnitude of what is happening here today, Delilah stabbed me, so I want to get to the bottom of this no doubt, but this is all needless overreaction by you! You're scaring the daylights out of all the people here!" His arm outstretched to the doorway leading to the basement, papers ruffling as he still held onto them.

And yet Beckett stepped further still, chest to chest, chest touching chest as he smelled what a man who had been stabbed, shoved into a hospital, and, above all, took his first life within the last twenty four hours smelled like.

"Tell me, Lieutenant Yanagida." He said huskily, his palm put to Yanagida's chest as he pushed him back, the two other JSDF MPs with him at a loss for words, their own feet stayed as they realized more men like him were around them. "What will you do with the guilty, if you find them? If you see them downstairs? Will it be as easy as killing your first person? Was it easy? You think you can make this little, oh I don't know what to call it, show, work out with how you are right now?"

Yanagida had been disgusted as he heard the words first, only seeing the man who had shoved him back last, hands in his pocket as his eyes looked at those high ceilings. Blackburn's Seabees had gone to work in there and helped fortify the structure after Italica.

"Who are you to judge? What the fuck are you doing?" he answered back, anger brewing. If the Americans had to give him shit, it was now of all times: a time where they had no right.

Beckett didn't answer, not as he looked back to Freeman, his Marines looking on in some mortified curious. "Mister Freeman, I have a delivery of sandbags inbound any moment now. I leave it to you and your men to bring them in here while also apprehending any other staff to the Fromars. Yanagida, and you two, come with me."

Being almost intimately physical with people had often been a show of authority for Beckett, so he had pushed himself past, almost through, Yanagida as the other SOGs followed down into a door leading to the lower levels of the keep.

The JSDF had no choice but to follow.

Beckett was no white rabbit, but down the hole they went.

"When Delilah took those orders last night this Land of Milk and Honey became a Land of Wolves."

"What do you mean?" One of the MPs said as they continued down the steps, LED lights installed providing bright to what would've been a dark and damp environment.

The Seabees hadn't installed them however: the basement, past a certain point, had been the playground of the Rangers.

With the new and improved luxuries of the Special Task Force set up in Italica alongside the local economy booming back up, the cellar space had become underused following the occupancy of the Rangers. Emerson, being as astute as he was, motioned for some of the rooms be repurposed for Hitman's benefit.

A firing range in one room, a kill house in another, electronics and equipment in one room for Loke to play around with, and so on and so forth.

One room that the Rangers had kept clear however had been one that they knew they had to keep, only because of the world they worked in: the dungeon.

"No matter why Delilah did it, who forced her to do it, it doesn't matter. She proved that we are vulnerable by stabbing you and Blackburn. She proved that we have flaws in our etiquette here."

"At the cost of thirty co-conspirators! I think they learned their lesson."

Beckett had stopped and turned around, an accusing finger raised, but his voice was leveled into an almost deceptive calm. "Of those conspirators, none of them, according to our interviews being conducted at this very second, held much ill will against us. Sure, there might've been a former legionnaire or two, but they lived here and sucked from our tit. And yet there they are, taking up a blade for her against us."

"They might've been coerced." The MP shot back.

"Do you know how much an insurgent was paid by the terrorist groups over there to attack us? I know the going rate in Baghdad was eighty USD to attack a US soldier, five thousand for a kill. I think that'll properly coerce any man with a blade in this world in the Corridor, especially since we are using the American dollar as a base."

The MP's eye twitched. "Well who knows why those people did it?!"

"Well I don't know about you, but a dead American is a dead American to me, it don't matter why that trigger was pulled." At the end of the hall was the dungeon, two of the SOGs ready and waiting, guarding the door as the sounds of the staff were murmuring behind it.

The door to the dungeon was opened and they had all walked inside, the Japanese feeling as if they were dragged in on leashes. Their feet had told them to slow down, to not keep pace with these strange men, but they did not and they walked in their footsteps.

The dungeon was one fit for a town the size of Italica, pre-rebuilding. It was large, enough cells to store a tavern if one so happened to break out into a brawl. Enough space in the middle for any guards that would've been to easily mosey about out of arms reach of any prisoner reaching out from the bars.

Along the back wall had been the maids and the staff, all of them being forced by lethal suggestion. On the opposite side had been the people who had given that suggestion: coming to sit on tables and chairs as if relaxing, albeit with fingers on the triggers.

"Why are we being held like this Yanagida?! What's going on?!" One of the maids had yelled out, her tail alert and up, her claws drawn, even while bound. It was Persia, her sleeves rolled up and the spot pattern on her fur revealed. She might've been like a domesticated cat to some, but she had the blood of a leopard.

The beast maids had always been more perceptive of the people around them, just by having the blood of animals within them, so they had seen Yangida's limp and weariness as he stepped in. Something had happened, and above it all, it had happened to him.

However they noticed something else, something intensely familiar in the way the leader of the men in black walked. The swagger, the way his breath left his lips and the way his eyes traced each and every one of them without effort.

They'd seen that walk and talk before.

They lived with it.

Yanagida didn't lie. "This is for our safety. Persia. There are more of you here than us now and, and…-"

The lieutenant couldn't bring himself to say.

But one of the MPs he brought with him had been more willing. "We believe an accountant of the Fromars, Bartholomew Poyea, has stolen an official seal of-" Beckett had grunted once, interrupting the MP. That wasn't what was important. Delilah and Parna attacking Arnus Hill's sanctum and who ordered her had been two different subjects.

One had a punishment already set in stone. Another was yet to be fully investigated.

"The bunny women known as Parna and Delilah led a band of raiders within our base at Arnus Hill and attacked Special Task Force personnel. That is why we have you all down here like this." Beckett had said it in English. He had learned enough languages in his lifetime, that and he couldn't be assed to bring himself down to their level.

"Delilah and Parna did what?!"

"Those damned bunny whores! We never should've taken their like in!"

"Bartholomew, what did you do?!"

Half knew, half didn't and eventually in that mass of twenty so people, jammed against each other by a stone wall, had thrown one out two them:

The PXs had provided the modern clothes of a businessman, so perhaps it felt weird to the JSDF that an older man was cast out with a suit vest and pants, a white handlebar mustache disheveled by his treatment as the Fromars had all so willingly sold out one of their own.

"According to debriefings of the surviving raiders, Delilah was given an official order from the Fromars to assassinate a Japanese citizen from Princess Pina Co Lada. We have these testimonies in writing and we found your finger prints on the kill order." That was the purpose of the papers, Yanagida throwing them down at the man as he still on the floor, old bones keeping him down.

His prints were there and in ink, the faces of those that gave testimonies having been taken from their mugshots.

Yanagida had kneeled down and picked the man up by his collar. He almost regretted being on painkillers at that point. It would've been nice to feel the pain.

"But Pina was hoisted on a cross and condemned by the Empire following the Earthquake, so there was no way she would've given a stupid order like this." He throated hard.

"What the hell are you talking about?" the old man groaned as he was lifted up by Yanagida.

"Who gave you this order, Bartholomew. If you answer me I promise you will be given a fair trial by Japan's order of law, not Rory's."

"Why would I ever conspire to hurt you people or portray the Fromar family poorly? I've served them for years!"

"Put him down, Yanagida." One of the MPs forewarned. The considerations of a Geneva Convention existed here still. A consideration of course. There had been a table in the room that some of the SOGs sat on, they waiting patiently.

Yanagida did not however. "Listen to me! Right now you are a coconspirator of over thirty deaths right now! Delilah murdered that many people to get their garb! Last I checked murder is met with a likewise punishment by Rory."

"I didn't kill anyone! And you can't prove shit!"

"We have your fucking finger prints!"

"I didn't do it! I didn't do it! You fucking Japanese are all liars and small dick hypocrites! Just like the Americans say!"

"He obviously doesn't plan on talking, Lieutenant Yanagida." Maybe, in another world, it would've been the JSDF saying that to the Fromar maids as they beat the same man to death for his silence and lies. Though this wasn't that world, and Mitch sure as hell hadn't been acting on behalf of the Japanese government. "You're just wasting your time."

Yanagida knew Beckett was right as he felt a wobble in his left leg, the pain slowly returning from hoisting a man up, but he had looked into the man's face and saw all that he needed to. Without the evidence, without the blood, without the personal injury he had sustained, he could've known that this man was guilty just by the look on his face when confronted with a force that meant harm:

He was guilty as sin, and Yanagida couldn't do anything about it supposedly.

Just like how Beckett wasn't supposed to be there.

"The City of Italica, as a self-governing city state, and it still is in the eyes of the international community, has not signed any papers of our laws and rules of war, gentlemen. So go ahead, throw that punch, from one MP to another. I won't judge."

Beckett was no hypocrite. He couldn't be when he didn't hold any self-imposed mystery on what he had to do in his job.

So, setting the man down on his feet, Yanaigda had felt that anger; that propensity to hurt someone that went beyond war and military service.

He wanted to hurt him because he was in the wrong, and he was in the right, and no one had the right to call him out on it.

He had forgotten when his first curled beneath his waist, he had forgotten when he had let the man go to stand on his feet, but that fist had raised up in a resound thwack before the two other MPs had known what was happening.

Soon enough that man was on the ground with a blood nose.

Soon enough Yanagida's boot had been raised and came down again and again and again.

A hand from one of the JSDF MPs had touched Yanagida's shoulders hard, but he had only turned around.

His eyes had been cold. "We have Rory executing people in broad daylight! We've killed thousands of people! And you're gonna pretend that I'm not on their level?! They would've probably just beat the shit out of him too!" A hand had darted to the maids and staff, silent as the stone around them as they saw how civil the JSDF could be.

The sound of a boot coming down on a form of a human was a sound that normal people would never have to hear, to identify, but no one there had the right to be normal after it all.

The sound was a blunt one: of the rubber on Yanagida's sole finding dampened impacts against the man's shoulder side, the sound of a shoulder blade cracking finally eliciting the first screams.

Screams of a man filled the room as the SOGs simply looked on as Yanagida beat a man half to death.

One of the MPs, torn between inclination and what was right had looked worriedly at Beckett, the man's face without emotion as he nodded at him.

"If you people want answers, then go ahead."

"Tell me who the hell you're working for and I'll stop!"

Lips had fluttered, as if talking, but unable to vocalize sound until an invisible glass wall was cracked. It was the sound of resentment and resistance.

"Can any of you just talk to us like human beings?!"

"Of course, but I don't want to waste battery." Beckett had said fast in response as he sat in his chair, and only moments later an almost digital voice rang out as he held a finger on the side of his neck.

"Sere noro pereve altiliuvuru."

As was the norm with special forces, the SOGs had gear that wasn't common place with the rest of the military, and that had ranged from the disc-like speakers that had been on a wire wrapped around their throat.

The Operators had spoken English, and the devices on their throat had translated seamlessly in a machine like emulation. In the private sector these devices had been in use with international enterprises, real time translating software having come to a head in those last few years, but Falmartian was a new language and it was only fit that the CIA used the first rendition of the technology here.

"But please, sir." It was the Head Maid of the Fromars. An old woman. Almost as old as Bartholomew or any other Victorian-esque maid. "If you would please just allow us to clarify our stance of what is happening here, to recollect ourselves, we can aid you in this investigations.

"You don't get to assist us in this way, ma'am." Beckett had ground out, his translator unable to translate the contempt. "Delilah was the head of your little spying game and we have a headcount on how many staff from the Officer's House took part in the attack. The entire Fromar organization is underneath our microscope right now."

"We don't even have correspondence from Princess Co Lada! She only talks to Itami or Emerson!"

"You have correspondence from the Imperial Capital at least if this order is anything to go upon! And if that is not the case you have forged a letter from Princess Co Lada and it is the Fromars that gave the orders entirely!"

"But we don't have correspondence from them and we don't gain anything from killing Noriko!"

"And yet you gain something by spying on us? I don't get your fucking game, lady."

Every period in every sentence Beckett had spoken had been ended with a scream from Bartholomew, the JSDF beating the life, or the answers, out of him.

But he had no answers in reality.

He was just the middleman.

And for that he would pay.

But Beckett knew better. Needless suffering was hardly something he sought. Part of this was discovery, the other half was work.

Work required tools, and he had dropped them in Yanagida's hand expectantly, pulling him off. "I think you can put two and two together. This'll… quench a certain thirst."

A rag and his hydration pack fell into Yanagida's hands. Those items had been a suggestion. A suggestion which Yanagida should've brushed off, thrust back into Beckett's hands with the idea that he and the other men in black with him were simply Military Police or Pierce's security.

He did not though, not when the man was numbed to the pain, Yanagida dragging his boot across his shoulder to put him on his back, he wheezing as he felt the sharp pain from that shoulder come alive again.

"Tell me who gave you those orders, Bartholomew."

"Or else you'll what? Give me a drink and wash my face?!"

And Mitch had simply stood by as the Japanese had pulled out the old trick, as if they were going to impress him.

All this time Bartholomew had still be ziptie'd, his hands held behind his back as he was forced onto the ground as flat as he could, water splashing from Beckett's hydration pack onto the rag before being applied to the man's face. As the man's gasping became muffled, it became entirely hidden by the running of water over his rag covered face.

Throughout his career with the Agency, first in the Middle East before several CIA spooks had been whacked by the insurgent cells, and then in Pyongyang before the Korean War rebooted, torture was an art he had to partake in for the greater good, as Langley had often told him.

He himself had gotten results. Enough drugs, bamboo, rusty nails, and people buried alive in coffins had usually helped him in his occupation, but this old trick was one that the CIA had often referred to as "vintage" an old trick from an old dog that was still as applicable today as it was in 2001.

It was the trick that Beckett had held close to who he was, as absurd as that sounded. In the end, after the sleep deprivation, the covering of shit in their cages, and the thousands of other things that he did to those who fell under him, it was this particular technique that had got him the information of a three story building in the middle of a Pakistani neighborhood.

The CIA had little wiggle room for such acts anymore. The wars had taken a toll on the Agency almost as hard as it had America, and, in the last, literal sense in context with the CIA, Beckett was the final connection from one era to another.

Across eras though, the old saying still rung true:

There are fates worse than death.

Before the accountant had known what was happening his world had turned to black underneath the fabric, and then it had gone to the depths of suffering as a stream of water was slowly, meticulously, drained over the man's covered face.

The maids had looked on, unspeaking. They too had suspected Bartholomew, the snippets of information they had gotten from the operators detailing why they were all there had pointed to him.

They would've beaten the truth out of him, but to the SOGs, this was him being made an example of what they really were capable of, even if it was through the JSDF.

The before and after was needed though to truly appreciate it.

The other MPs had uneasily went to his legs and held him down straight as they could as Yanagida began. The first few seconds were fine, mysterious in nature to Bartholomew. The cold dampness that went through the rag first had drenched his face before it started to pool over the crevices where fabric rested over opening.

That's when the leaking started, the drip drip drip and then constant stream of water.

It went through his nose of course, clogging that in its unkind sting before he tried to breathe through his mouth. But he couldn't. Not when the water pooled in such a way that seemed impossible until now:

Head and body held back the water had rested in this throat, unmoving, staying there like a weight as what air in his lungs were thrown out trying to expel the liquid in his system. Some had come rocking out in a geyser from his mouth, through the rag, but it was replaced soon enough as more water came.

The drowning torture was another name for this, and it was literal: the act of keeping someone at that very point where all they felt was perpetual drowning.

It was known by another name though. An unforgettable name that had been associated with America as much as Ronald Reagan and McDonalds were: Waterboarding.

The accountant was convulsing madly underneath the grip of the two MPs, the look in their eyes dead as they fought with themselves and what they were doing. Americans were hated throughout the world for doing exactly what they were doing, and yet, knowing this fully, they were doing the same thing without question.

But they justified it. They were getting answers.

They weren't torturing a man. They weren't holding his body down as Yanagida poured water into his lungs. They weren't making him suffer.

They were just getting answers.

manifest destiny

"I've said to the people that we don't torture, and we don't."

US President George W. Bush, on torture of suspected terrorists, 2006

"Where did this order come from?!" Yanagida had yelled at the man over and over, every time a geyser erupted from the man's face.

"Where did this order come from?!"

"Where did this order come from?!"

"Where did this order come from?!"

"Where did this order come from?! Answer me!"

One of the maids stepped forward as the rest looked on horrified, Beckett getting up out of his seat to meet her.

"What is the meaning of this?! Are you enjoying this?!" The maid's answer was a backhand across the face that sent her to the floor. The surprise that writ itself on the rest of the maids and the staff had painted them white and silent.

These men in black, they walked so much like the Rangers, smelled so much like the Rangers, the beasts and the humans had not seen them as any different.

Persia had been the one that took the punch, she bowed down on the ground in shock and pain as she was forced back by the suggestion of Beckett's foot.

One of the black masked operators yelled out. "Why do you care? Huh?! Are you with him?!"

"Oh that's what it is, isn't it?!" Another joined him.

"Hey, you two. Easy." Beckett had finally spoken up as two his SOGs barked at Persia, he walking back to his seat. He might've punched her, but he wasn't about to waste his breath.

Persia's hissing from the ground had come alive in a sharp shrill sound, the fur on her arms raising and her tail going rigid as she had pushed the two SOGs away. Beckett had warned them, and now he had to waste a breath as the maid lunged at him.

Even with her hands tied behind her back, she tried to physically lash out. Beckett couldn't help but be impressed as he had used his rifle as a club, swinging into Persia's charge and breaking her onto her back.

"You've got some spunk Miss Persia, no wonder you've actually stepped up and are screwing one of Itami's men."

"Don't you dare talk about Kurata behind his bac-!"

As the JSDF had continued their session, engrossed in the act they were doing, whether out of denial or morbid realization, they did not fully see Beckett ball a fist and deliver a punch to Persia across her face, silencing her.

"I'll talk about whoever I want to, Miss Persia."

He didn't hate her for lashing out. He didn't hate anyone anymore. No one had deserved his anger anymore, because that anger was never used in a way that was right by his standards. It never was.

The hit had hurt, that much the blood filled spit that Persia had sent up to Beckett's face had said.

Though she played stupid games, and got a stupid reward.

He beat her face in, again and again, the steel ball bearings in his glove's fists making sure each hit had broken something, his other arm barred against her throat as the man kept pummeling.

"Come on, pussy cat, tell me to stop!" Beckett had yelled into her face, her gaze gone limp as her hearing was hollow. He had looked up to the maids and the staff. "Any of you! Tell us to stop! I dare you! I fucking dare you! Tell me that she and him are innocent of this spying! Tell me that any of you are without blame and I'll blow my brains out right here!"

There would've been silence, but in the end the only thing there was was a gurgling of a man trying his best to escape the drowning.

Persia had been kicked back into the group of maids and staff, some of them willingly chaining themselves to the wall in complacency. It was clear at this point what they all wanted to hear and see: the innocent don't resist.

Persia had a fang chipped from her beating, her senses and numbed and dull in a groan and ache she had never felt before in her life as the first feeling that returned to her was the drip of liquid from her own nose: the warm sickening feeling of blood erupting from her nose, as it felt like her mouth was shattered.

Her own gagging and coughing in pain had joined the cacophony of an example being made.

"This is how it starts anyway. Isn't it?" Yanagida had said darkly as he basically rode the man: sitting on his stomach as he continued to trickle down on his covered face. "How you get the people to hate us, for them to form states and groups meant to end us. I always heard it was your CIA that started ISIS in someway or another.

The SOGs had barely flinched at the name of the agency.

Beckett had known what Yanagida was inferring to as he cracked his knuckles, returning to the other side of the room as Persia coughed up the pain in loud hacks. "ISIS doesn't mean shit to us, Yanagida. It was so easy to call it just, ISIS, Yanagida. It was so easy to just group every single group of Islamic terrorist and insurgent under that banner when we went to war."

"That was your mistake. You provided the conditions necessary to let the group grow."

Beckett couldn't help but agree with the lieutenant's observation as he wrung out the rag over the near lurid face of Bartholomew, a white froth coming over his lips before being smothered again.

"ISIS as we knew it? When we went back there it was just a shadow of what it once was. We had bombed them to Hell, but they never died. The only people left to pick up the pieces were those that lived there, in Iraq, and from the corpse of an Islamic State arose dozens and dozens of groups that were born from the same hatred and malcontent against America and her coalitions that had spawned ISIS."

"It was a mistake to start that war. It wasn't a mistake to make them pay for their transgressions." Yanagida rationalized.

"We called them all ISIS because it was easy. We went in there to fight a single monster, not a hundred. The same way we're grouping them all as just Imperials right now…. Besides, we're not the one interrogating at the moment, are we?"

"Fuck, Yanagida, what are we doing?" One of the MPs had said. He was an officer above the rank of Yanagida, but he was lower than him at that moment.

This was personal. The old sayings always had merit.

"Where did this order come from?!" Yanagida had made the basest question, the only one that they needed answered as he ignored his comrade.

At first the man didn't realize what was happening to him, but that had been the trick to the act of torture: it came from within, not from out.

Half an hour. That was how long it went on.

In the business, Beckett knew, that these sessions went on for days, years even, in the most devout cases, but that was only because the people that America brought to him had expected it and had been numbed to the idea of being tortured.

He could tell when a man was breaking, and Yanagida had making it prolonged longer than it should've been. This process was a routine that needed to be done right, else it becomes just a messy, reckless foray into a trial and error checklist that he had gone through before.

"Enough." Mitch had said simply, the man garbling, fighting, all the way despite being drowned time and time again.

The bag was heavy, but it sounded shifty, grainy.

This was a technique his team had used before they all died in the sands of a buried city.

Same principle, different technique, different application of the smothering substance.

He spoke English as he dragged the bag over to the man, his mouth frothing through the towel as he laid his head on his lap. "Amateurs." he looked up at all of them. "Do you even understand what it's like to be tortured?"

Beckett had given an ultimatum: the man keeps suffering until more information was given up.

But the JSDF were amateurs, and, although it was still excruciatingly painful to Bartholomew, it wasn't productive.

There was such a thing as productive pain, and Beckett had excelled as he touched the shoulders of the JSDF softly.

"You're time is done here. We'll handle the rest and give the information gotten here today over to you ASAP. From there this investigation is yours."

The other JSDF MPs had been more than glad to walk away, before they realized what they truly were doing, their fists balled white, finger nails digging into their palms as their nerves barely sustained themselves.

Their clothing had been as wet as Bartholomew, and, on some measure, they suffered the same indignities. They had tortured, and he was the one being tortured.

This was the path they had walked on and desperately tried to scamper away from.

Yanagida knew better as the last of the water had been dropped over the accountant's head in a giant splash.

"No way in Hell I'm leaving this up only to you."

"Why not?"

"Because we have an obligation to dictate the procedure of what happens here. These people are under the jurisdiction of Japan."

The justice of Japan. The responsibility of Japan. The mistakes of Japan…

The dare, the challenge of men who fought with policy.

Beckett accepted.

"You want to play hardball Yanagida, alright, we'll play fucking hardball. Shake my fucking hand." The request had come hard and fast for Yanagida, so he had grabbed the man's hand, but the grip that he received was beyond cold. It was petrifying as Beckett stared into Yanagida's eyes, spare glasses on his face. "You gotta tell me straight in my face if you accept the consequences."

"I accept."

Beckett shook his head in disappointment, but keeping the grip. "I didn't even say them yet Kiss Ass."

"Fine, go!"

"Yanagida if you say a word, a speck, of what we do in this room here today, I will end you."

Yanagida. I know your record. You and Itami were in the same class at the National Defense Academy, and you were the salutatorian and you gave a damn good speech about how your fellow classmen had to be as strong as they ever had been in order to shake off the oppression of American chains for Japan to find its own way in the world.

It was a good speech and I don't believe a lick of it, but that's beside the point.

Point is with enough padding you can be painted as a nationalist who joined the military because you wanted to fight us: the big bad Empire.

Let's say in five years, after we're out of this region and another group of soldiers is in our place, cleaning up after our shit, you suddenly want to go back on this agreement we might make and start spouting on a forum or with a journalist on how we, and I won't sugar coat it, tortured these people to get them to give up what's inside. You start making a stink about it, hell, maybe a few news stations might catch on. But by that time we catch wind you broke our promise.

You know what we do with people who break promises?

…

I'm sure you can imagine. Maybe your brake line is cut. Maybe your house blows up because of a gas leak. Maybe a two bit Yakuza gangster puts a bullet in you when you're withdrawing cash one day. I won't personally be the one with the knife, the gun, or the hammer, but I'll be the one who made that promise and gave that order.

So tell me, with all your heart Yanagida, if you break the silence of what happens in this room, break my promise, are you willing to be just a right wing nut who, tragically, one day, dies because of a freak accident?

We are men on a mission like no other, and we are not to be tested or underestimated. Do not try us.

"Don't let the door hit your ass behind you." Yanagida had offered no response from the taunting Beckett, and nothing had come after the slam of the door closing. He had his taste.

A taste was the only thing, he rationalized, that he wanted to have.

Best to leave this to the professionals: the Americans who knew how to make people feel lesser. Let the men who knew evil do their evil things so good men like him could sleep with himself.

Beckett had walked around the room, right in front of the maids, as he saw the walls of this cellar, converted into a training space for the Rangers. All the gunfire they sent downrange here, zeroing their guns and training their target acquisition had not been heard upstairs. None of the maids had noticed.

No one would notice now.

This cellar was still preforming its assigned duty. The Fromar Keep was a keep, after all, and the criminals of the town needed to be kept somewhere secure: chained to the wall and left to rot.

"The clamps on the wall. Chain yourselves if you haven't done so already.. There are enough." Beckett turned around, motioning limply with his gloved finger to the assembled party and the walls.

The remaining unbound had rattled in resentment. "You think we'll honestly just chain ourselves up like some petty criminals?"

"As far as I'm concerned you people are. The way I work is that you're guilty until proven innocent, and even then I'm a lot more generous than some of my people who served under me."

"But we didn't do anything."

"You're guilty by association. Read it and weep, but don't waste my time." It was a Colt Python which Beckett had slid out of his holster. It was gear that was grossly out of standard issue, but it was his revolver, having survived Hell with him.

Its finish was sand blasted, burnt; wooden grips charred. In the end however it survived, it still worked.

He thumbed back the hammer as he held it at his hip, an eyebrow up, still waiting for them to do as they were told.

"Why are you doing this? We've never done anything to deserve this!"

Beckett rolled his eyes as he looked at the Head's protest.. "Nice to see you're including all of your employees in this plot."

"Yes, I admit, for the safety of the Fromars I sent maids into the Corridor to spy on the Special Task Force but I-"

"Admission of guilt. Chain yourself up or I blow your brains out. You've lived your life."

"If you could just let me explain-!"

The sound of a .357 caliber gunshot in such close quarters had been almost as painful as being shot to the was the most painful thing that resulted from that gunshot, the bullet having hit the stone wall behind them and shattering that brick.

The medusa maid, Aurea, had trembled, eeks uttering out of her mouth as she shook, her snakes vibrating in their own fear in this senseless affair.

"I don't get it with you fucking people. I tell you to do something in your language, and you don't do it. I expect better from people who served lords and kings. See, the thing about Arabs, Muslims, if you've gone so far to understand where we come from, is that they always respect the power to destroy. I thought you, residents of Italica, would appreciate the power us Americans wield and why you should be listening to us, but I'm mistaken. Roger, Chuck?"

The two CIA operators had taken the cringing Head Maid as she kneeled, hands at her ears and hearing that distinctive ringing no doubt, her gaze distant as she was chained to the wall. The other maids getting the point, even at gun point.

Beckett had a point however. Playing bad guy was never always the CIA's go-to option, putting any persona at all was a failure of planning and operation that required CIA SOGs to go into the field. Where they had gone however necessitated a certain kind of evil that had been painted onto the CIA in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He didn't remember who, or why they did, but Beckett remembered the very first peoples to invade Afghanistan, so long ago: The First Persian Empire, five hundred years before Christ. After so many years in the Middle East he had learned the history lessons of the ancient civilizations that came before them.

Controlling Afghanistan was not a dream just for the sake of dreaming. Controlling Afghanistan in terms of geopolitical power meant controlling South-East Asia, the trade routes during the times mankind flourished in the Cradle of Civilization. The Persian Empire intended to control Afghanistan for that reason, and they did:

They went in there, as Beckett recalled, "With, not promise of ability to conquer the people and the land, but the intention to do so, and they did."

So Beckett had come here with the intention to get what they wanted, by any means necessary; to make known the capacity of punishment able to be wrought, not against warring armies, but men and women who would wrong them, individually.

One of the SOGs had opened up again, a wheelbarrow full of sand bags brought in. Beckett had motioned for one to be brought over and opened, a knife slicing it open and revealing its gritty contents.

"What's that?" the mouth of the bag was opened and the viewers had seen what was within as Bartholomew's question had been answered.

Mitch had answered as he ran his hands through the substance, the tan, gritty substance that dug into his skin and became a part of him. "Sand from Dubai." he spoke of a memory.

He spoke of the storm wall. He spoke of a failed mission to bury the evidence of American failure. He spoke of a crazed colonel and the soldiers that were sent in after him; a guerilla war waged by his team by aiding the populace kill themselves.

Officially in the blacked out records there had only been thirty four survivors pulled out of Dubai as the US Army made one final sweep of the dead city after a distress signal was sent out. Only one of them had been acting on behalf of the US government, the rest civilians who had weathered the storm and the collapse. That person had risen in the ranks to mold America's new special forces.

However unofficially there was another survivor. A man who had seen Osama bin Laden hunted down. A man who had been the only man in the CIA to understand the war in the Middle East absolutely and survived the internal purging in the agency.

That man had carried the taint of a Middle East here in a way that Pierce's Marines could not.

Perhaps it really hadn't exactly been sand from Dubai, but it gave the grittiness, the same horror in how it was used. It might as well have been. The sand that coated Dubai at that point had been the same sands that blew all the way across the Middle East and drowned the dream of peace in its grit.

"Death is not a promise, it is a luxury, in torture; interrogations." the man had tried to jerk away but Mitch nearly broke his neck as he had kept him still on his lap, sprinkling his face with the particulates. "Drowning him gets us nowhere. But how about dipping his body in acid? Shaving off the layers of his skin with a heated scalpel? Digging out his fingernails and making him breathe salt? It's not death that makes people talk, it's having death look at them and promise them that it won't come without pain."

The man was dropped to the ground as several more CIA operators had appeared from the dark, each of them taking a foot forward into the light as Mitch stood over the accountant. The operators had dropped further bags of sand at their feet: a seemingly endless supply as more men in black came from nowhere, the maids disturbed beyond words as they bore witness to one of America's greatest sins in the twenty first century brought out again.

"The Rangers would not allow this!" Persia had yelled out from the wall.

Beckett had only looked up at her as they prepared, his jaw clenched and his face contorting in an almost understanding way.

"Sweetie, the Rangers are capable of everything I'm doing, and more."

"How do you know that?!" Persia screamed out at them.

"Because I was one."

His head was again lowered as one of the CIA operator's began, Mitch keeping him in the grit as the contents of the sandbag spilled over, his arm in a lock as he was brought to the floor and held there, two of his fingers gone into the man's mouth and forcing it open.

As that was happening the remaining SOGs had picked out, at random, maids and staff, unshackling them and proceeding to perform the same with them. Those that remained chained had the bags put over their heads to blind them (or, perhaps, to make them extra aware) from the horror.

The concept of sandboarding was something this world had learned today as a man was buried alive from the inside out, his head smothered with the contents of the sand bags.