This is probably going to be the last chapter for a while. We had to put my dog down, and... I'm not handling it that well.

I'll be back with the next chapter whenever it's done, but I don't have an ETA.

It's not fair.

"Meia doesn't have a replacement." BC shouts across the table. "She never trained anyone!"

It's just not fair.

"We need to prepare for the worst." Captain Magno remains calm as always. "For now, make sure everyone's on high alert."

Barnette crosses her arms. "I knew we shouldn't have let the men integrate with the crew." She grumbles. "If that idiot hadn't drawn her away-"

I smack my hands down on the table. "Mister Alien isn't an idiot!"

Barnette glares back at me, but I won't back down! I'm right!

"You two, calm down." BC says. "We need to figure out our next move."

"And I told you that Mister Alien wouldn't just leave us hanging!" I retort. Wow, I really shouldn't be yelling at BC, but she's being so unreasonable. "He wouldn't leave us if we were in danger."

"You put too much trust in someone with too much to hide." BC shakes her head sadly. "I understand that he has some convincing arguments, but he's not trustworthy. We've been out here for four months and he only just recently told us that he's got a lot of information."

"You wouldn't have believed him!" I protest.

"Dita, you trust him too much. If he told you that space had a breathable atmosphere, you'd go and check." Barnette says flippantly.

"N-no, I wouldn't. That's stupid."

Barnette turns back to the captain, ignoring me. "We've got a lot of the strategic notes Meia left behind. Jura's going over them right now. Once she figures those out, we should be alright."

"Noooope." Jura opens the door and fans herself with a small datapad. "Her notes are useless."

BC blinks. "If it's in code, I can decrypt-"

Jura interrupts the vice captain with a sigh. "That's not it. They're all in plaintext." She throws the tablet down on the table and I snag it as it passes. "Her plans stopped being plans once she figured out that the Vandread combo were far more effective than Dreads of Vanguards by themselves."

Sure enough, the paper in my hands has one of the old battle strategies on it with note for improvement here and there, but then there's a big red X through the middle with "Just use Vandread Jura" written on it instead of revising the formation properly. I click through a few more pages and they are all about the same.

Barnette snatches the datapad out of my hands and starts flipping through it. "She must have done some real work. She used to be diligent to a fault."

"Meia's still diligent." I mutter, but nobody seems to hear.

BC shakes her head. "Alright. Until we have a good plan, we're going to high alert. Gascogne?"

Miss Gasco moves the stick around in her mouth and gives a level gaze at BC.

BC seems to take this in stride. I wouldn't want that look aimed at me, but she seems cool with it. "Make sure the Reg is ready at all times. We don't know the next time the Harvesters are going to attack."

"Who even are the Harvesters? Hey, Dita." Barnette turns to me with malice written on her face. "Did your dumb boyfriend tell you who they are?"

"Hey." Gascogne warns in a low voice.

"N-no, he didn't." I begin, and I was gonna say more but she cuts me off.

"Exactly. He doesn't actually care about us Dita, get that through your thick skull."

"Barnette." Captain Magno says quietly.

"What?" Barnette snaps, before realizing just who she's snapped at. "Ah, er, I'm sorr-"

"Out." The captain commands.

Barnette grumbles, but sets down the small datapad and leaves the room. A silence descends over the room.

"Well, I guess I have to go oversee the Reg." Gascogne finally breaks the silence, "Everyone should probably get back to their positions, cool their heads."

"Yes, that's a prudent idea." BC says. Everyone else stands up to leave.

Well, Mister Alien, I failed to defend you again. Suddenly, my arms feel too heavy for my shoulders to bear and they slump forwards. Why don't they see that he's not a bad guy?

A pair of arms wrap around my torso and blond hair intrudes on my vision. Jura hums quietly in her throat.

Tears come to my eyes, but I quickly turn into her embrace and bury my face in her chest to hide my face.

"It's alright Dita." She says quietly. "I know he's not going to abandon us like that. You know it, and Zan knows it too."

"B-but, we drove him out!" I say, attempting to hold back my sobs. "I tried to stop them, but they-"

"Shh." Jura squeezes me tighter. "I know."

I tug at the frills of my Reg uniform. I just can't seem to get it right today.

Beside me, Del is sitting on the counter, looking bored while swinging her legs. "Zan, your outfit is already straight. Stop tugging on it, or you're gonna have to sew it back together."

I look at the Green haired girl. "You're right." I place my hands on the counter to remind myself not to tug. "I wonder what they're discussing in that meeting?"

"Well, I would suspect our two absentees." Del says. "And probably how we're gonna survive without them."

"Survive? Isn't that a little... I don't know, harsh?"

Del grins that condescending grin. "I had Jura tell me about the tapes, Zan. She says that without your crush's help, we'd be dead four or five times over by now. Without him, we don't have any super powered ships. Without Meia, we don't actually have any good battle plans. I'd say that we're pretty screwed."

I look over to the spot John usually spent his time when he was working in the Reg. Then a thought crosses my mind. "Hey, Del, weren't you on the team that was trying to drive him out?"

She holds her hands out in defense. "Hold up. I was just going with Meia to get the tape from John. It was Barnette and Paiway and them that wanted to drive him out. Like I said, if we drive him out, we lose a lot of our firepower."

"Oh." I look down at my feet, slightly ashamed.

"Well, I have an idea." Del says. I perk up, and her grin become more genuine for a second as she relaxes her face slightly. "See, I put this trans-"

The door to the Reg hisses open. Gascogne and Barnette walk in. Del shuts her mouth and slides off the table.

Gascogne looks at me. "Zan, I need you to take a quick inventory."

Barnette looks more irritated than usual. "Gasco, I keep telling you-"

"Gascogne." My boss corrects the pilot.

"Fine, Gascogne. Expecting those two to return on a whim-"

Gascogne turn on the girl and grimaces, her pleasant demeanor lost. "And I keep telling you, if you hadn't driven the boy off, Meia would still be here to guide us. Go back to your Dread and stop irritating me." She looks down at the info panel inlaid in her desk.

"Don't be like Dita, I get that she's a lovestruck dolt, but you're intelligent! You should be able to see the trouble he's caused!"

"Yet, we're currently at zero casualties, we still have a lot of ammunition, and for all intents and purposes we're a lot more likely to actually reach Mejare with everyone alive and healthy because he's here. The fact that he helped Meia out of her shell is good, not some disaster. Now go before I actually lose my temper." Gascogne sighs and stops paying attention to Barnette at all.

Barnette glares in my direction, but retreats from the Reg.

I walk up to Gascogne and thank her. She shakes her head. "I only said the truth. Now, go get the inventory sorted." She puts her elbow on the table and her head in her hand. "I don't know what we're going to be fighting next, but I'm already not looking forward to it."

That night, Del invited Zan and I to her room for a sleepover party. I haven't had a sleepover since before my dome shut down, so it's kind of exciting. Not exciting enough to completely cheer me up, but it does help.

Del's room is sparsely decorated, with only a poster of a band on the wall. I've never heard of the band, but Zan and Del have a long discussion about it. Seems it was popular back on Mejare.

Zan wraps me up in a hug from behind. "Dita, you want some of the pie?"

I look down at the table. Sure enough, pie. Apple pie. I must have been really stuck in my head. "Yes please."

"Okay, I'll cut you a slice."

Del sits down next to me on the floor, propping her back against the side of her bed. "I asked the cook to make this especially for us." She comments. "I heard you like apple pie, So I got one for you."

"Thanks." I say quietly.

Del snorts. "Come on, Dita, that's it? Usually, you'd be practically jumping for joy."

"I..."

Del flops over sideways so her head rests on my shoulder. "Good god, Dita. You keep saying you trust him to come back, but obviously, you don't believe that."

"I do!" I protest. "He'll come back."

"Then why are you worried?" She says languidly. "We can just wait for him to come back. You're acting like you think he's not coming back."

"But we drove him away." I say. My shoulder start to feel heavy again, and it's not because Del is leaning on me. "What if he doesn't want to come back? What if he hates us now?"

Del sit back up and grabs my shoulders. "Dita, get a hold of yourself."

Zan sits on the opposite side of me and sets a plate with a large slice of pie on Del's low table. "You can't beat yourself up over him. Even if he decides that he hates the entire ship, your the one person he wouldn't be able to hate. After all, you always stick up for him."

Del grabs her cup of tea off the table and stares into it. "Losing someone you love sucks, but sometimes you're gonna just have to push through."

Zan turns her head to look at Del. "What, did you have someone you liked?"

"Yeah." Del sighs slightly. "She was this really cute girl I met back before I became a pirate. She and I used to go around everywhere together. I fell in love with her, but it turns out she wasn't really all that into me. When I asked her out, she thought I was joking. When I insisted, she stopped talking to me."

"That's terrible." I gasp. "Are you okay?"

She smiles wanly. "Yeah, it was a while ago. Then I met Hannah, and..."

Zan moves one of her hands from my shoulder to one of Del's. "Well, at least you still have Hannah!"

"Mmhmm." Del mumbles, but I think I hear a small bit of regret in tone. "That's something for the future though, since were stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. The point is, life moves on." She says more firmly. "I get that right now it feels like the end of the world, but it will eventually get better."

"You're talking as if he's already gone for certain." Zan says quietly.

"He might be." Del shakes her head. "But I trust Meia to do her best to bring him back." She sets down her mug with a sharp bang. "Okay! No more moping. Tonight, we're going to talk about happy things, and we're going to have fun, and then in the morning everything will be better. I have snacks, I got a nice comedy, so let's leave this depressing stuff behind."

"You know, Earth's plan really sucks." I grumble to nobody in particular. The Vanguard is feeling really stuffy again, and I want to get a breath of fresh air.

Meia answers me anyway. "What do you mean?"

"Alright, so I told you about their plan, right?"

Meia hmms. "Well, I know that Earth is harvesting organs, or something?"

"Yep." I fiddle with my phone, playing one of the few mobile games I had that didn't require an internet connection. "So, the story goes that Earth stagnated and they couldn't produce viable offspring anymore, of something like that. So what do they do? Divide the population all over the galaxy."

"...Okay. So what?"

"Well, if they had saturated the gene pool to that degree, recessive genes might have started surfacing like the entire populations was all brothers and sisters."

"Yech."

"Yeah, well, that's what uniformity breeds. What I don't get is why they sent everyone all over the galaxy." I say. Damn, this puzzle doesn't want to be solved. "It makes the relative gene pool for everyone even smaller since there's less potential mates. There's less of a chance that a now-rare dominant trait is actually on the same planet or even the same star system."

"Maybe they thought that by sending people to new planets, the gene pool would be more diverse? Evolving based on the environment?"

"That's just as likely to go horribly wrong as it is to work at all, let alone work out well." I say. "Besides, back on my Earth, we've know for hundreds of years that the idea of sending a small portion of your populous away is only going to cause problems genetically. We knew this before we understood what genes were."

"I don't know how different our world is from yours, but maybe we're not the same genetically?" Meia poses.

"That's a disturbing thought. I need to have Duelo look at some of my tissue under a microscope or something. How do you even look at genes, anyway? It's a bundle of DNA, right?"

"Yes, a bundle of DNA that makes up a chromosome." Meia affirms. I hear the scrape of a nail file through the mic.

"Anyway, let's say we are similar genetically. that means that the populations of places like that ocean planet only have each other to breed with meaning that any good spines that are generated by some miracle of circumstance can only be shared with a limited number of people, and the good organs are grabbed before they can proliferate."

"I see what you're saying." She says. "Maybe they clone the organs."

"You're familiar with transplant rejection?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Well, the cloned organs would only work in one out of hundred cases, best case scenario in my estimation. That means that to be viable, they'd have to be able to modify genes, which would mean sending people to far off planets is completely unnecessary! They could just change their genes back home!"

Meia sighs. "Maybe they just got a lot dumber over the years, John. Too much inbreeding or something."

"Then how would they construct large robot fleets and the whole harvester operation? How did they come up with FTL travel and AI and all these really advanced stuff?" I grumble. "I bet some politician proposed this and forced it through without consulting anyone knowledgeable on the subject."

"That's a scary thought." Meia says. "So, Earth is killing us for no reason?"

"Not really no reason, but not a good reason. I mean, if they... could..." I trail off as a thought strikes me.

"...John?"

"Oh my god. On Mejare, they splice two ovum together to make children. On Tarak, they do the same thing. This means they have to be able to splice genes. They have to know they could do it, or Mejare and Tarak wouldn't work at the concept stage."

"...That's concerning. I don't think I like the idea that we're all some imbecile's terrible plan."

"Speaking of, what the hell was the guy who decided separating the planets by gender thinking? So, now that the gene pool is severely limited, let's divide it further! And while we're at it, let's add the risk of discovering more recessive gene pairs by mixing two sets of Y-chromosomes together. I'm sure this can only end well."

"You lost me."

"Ah, guys have an X and a Y chromosome, while women have two X's. It's physically impossible for a guy to get another guy pregnant, so there's a zero percent chance of having two Y's. At least, unless there's a serious problem." I amend. "So, I think this entire thing doesn't really stand up to any sort of scrutiny."

"It does sound pretty bad." Meia says. I can hear her blow onto her fingernails. "So, what's the point?"

"Honestly?" I turn off my phone and close my eyes. "If I was back home, I'd say excuse plot to have a space drama over gender politics. Here? I have no idea what anyone was thinking."

"It's so weird that I can just accept that there's another universe where I'm just a drawing." Meia says. "I wonder if I could ever see your universe?"

I laugh. "Yeah, let's not find out."

Her voice becomes offended. "Why not?"

"Because I don't want to go back." It's kind of a revelation all to itself to say it out loud, liberating almost. "Besides, I only know one way of universe hopping and I don't think it has a high success rate."

Meia puts on a arrogant tone. "Sure. And what is this method?"

"Well, to get myself here, I had to swallow enough sleeping pills to kill me." I say. "And I'd rather you didn't kill yourse-"

"You WHAT?!"

"Er... I swallowed a bunch of sleeping pills?"

"You killed yourself?" Meia sounds like she can hardly believe her ears. A moment later, I see her Dread swoop in close to my Vanguard, and suddenly the merging process starts.

I barely land on the seat before Meia twists me around by the shoulders and stares me in the eyes. "What possessed you to kill yourself?"

"I-It's alright, I died, but the Fixer dude I told you about grabbed me and sent me here. If he hadn't..." I purse my lips. "Actually, then none of this would have happened, and everything would be going according to DVD."

She winds her hand back and smacks me.

"Ow."

"Don't..." She's trembling slightly, the only reason I can tell is because she's gripping my shoulders. "Don't you ever dare try to kill yourself ever again."

"No duh. I'm not likely to survive a fourth time."

"A fourth time?" Her grip tightens to painful levels. "You tried to kill yourself three times?"

I look away, but neither her grip loosens nor does her sharp gaze ever leave my face. "I... I wasn't doing well at home." I finally admit. "I had just finished a semester at college where I barely slept the entire time, and I was so burned out from working on this and that and three extra credit projects that... well, I guess I just didn't feel like it could get any better. So I took a bottle of my sister's sleep meds and... ended up here."

Meia's grip slackens and she reaches out to pull me into a hug. "I will never forgive you if you try that again."

I try to laugh, but it's pretty strained. "Well, as stupid as it sounds, my life out here is better. I have a lot of downtime, I have people who care about me, and I have a cheat sheet." I tap the DVD case. "Here, I don't feel like I need to kill myself to keep up or escape."

"You had to have had people back home who cared." Meia insists.

I shrug. "My parents, and maybe my sister- we never got along- but I think I'm less of a burden on them now."

She slumps back in her seat. "You... You said you were fine with always being on the front line of the fight, even with the low odds of you surviving."

"Yeah, but that's different." I say. "Everyone's lives are important, so-"

"Yours is too." Meia insists. "So if I catch you doing anything stupid, I'm going to... lock you up without entertainment." It takes her a few moments to come up with a suitable punishment. "I'll torture you with boredom until your realize how much value your life has."

"I got it." I say, putting my hands up in surrender. "No suicide."

She leans back in again and pulls me into a tight hug, her forehead resting on my collarbone. She's been a lot more physically intimate since we've started this voyage away from the Nirvana.

"I... I want you to stay here." Meia says slowly, quietly.

"Hmm?" I don't quite understand what she means.

"I want you to stay here, in this universe, right here with me. Please don't go." She's started to shake again.

"I won't." I assure her.

"Dita won't forgive you either. Or Zan."

"Not planning on leaving."

She brings her head up and moves towards my face, planting her lips on mine in a kiss. It doesn't feel right, desperation clearly expressed through the intensity of the act.

I worried her. I worried her a lot.

I wish I could stop doing that.

I come back to reality to find that Meia had pulled me even closer, wrapping her legs around me, our bodies pressed together and was slowly moving up and down on me in a suggestive manner. I can't see her face anymore since she put her chin over my shoulder, As I try to figure out what to do, she lets out a soft moan.

No no no. I am not going to- I refuse to have sex with someone who's just been crying. She's not- Okay, maybe she does want sex, but I can't be 100% sure, and since I just told her all that stuff, I doubt she's thinking straight.

She rubs herself against me once again letting out a soft moan and I wonder exactly how I'm getting out of this one.

I realized that the primary antagonist of my story is probably Barnette at this point.

Which is a shame. I like guns, and Barnette's the one with the guns.

Also: for anyone worried, I'm a lot better now. The day I took the bottle of pills, I decided to write a chapter of a fanfic instead. This fanfic. Obviously, I survived that, or this fic would be one chapter long.

Man, this entire chapter, including the Author's notes are depressing. Go eat a cookie or something to cheer yourself up. That's what I'm going to do.