Yup. Late update again. But I've been out having much fun with the ever-awesome Sango, and have been making it back home too exhausted to write. So, it's the morning after update!

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Ace stared out the window at the ever-shifting, never-changing desert and sighed. She could scarcely fathom why they were all dropping everything and rushing out to help that woman. Yay, she was a plant. Was that supposed to make her a better person? The woman had left them, had run off to do whatever it was that was so damn important that she couldn't come back. And now here they were, following after her like chicks after mama.

She had hoped, sadly enough, that when they found Kiley that she would at least be in jail. Hospitalized would have worked, too, but was less likely. But anything, anything that would have given her a good reason to not come back. If she had been incarcerated, or otherwise somehow unable to return to the ship then she could have forgiven her a little.

But she was working for those bastards who had tortured her, oh, excuse the hyperbole, experimented on her. As if she were a thing, some entity devoid of rights, intelligence, free will, a soul. She was working for the enemy, and she hadn't returned. And people wondered why she wasn't hot to ride to her rescue? She couldn't figure out what they saw in her that was so wonderful that the boys should put themselves in jeopardy, let alone mortal danger, to go and drag her out of the pit she had fallen into.

She was a killer, avowed and witnessed. Sure, she pretended to not enjoy that part of her life, but she still reacted to every problem with force. Her weapons of choice are pain and fear, and then she sits all alone and wonders why no one likes her. She had felt the fear that Kiley had projected at the men as she and Meryl escaped. There were so many other options available to her, so many other things she could have done to distract their pursuit. Just stimulating the pleasure centers of their brains, for instance. Few men carry the need to fight through an orgasm. Or she could have just put them to sleep and not worried any more over them. But no, she had to pick fear. Idiot.

And why was she working at the plant, anyway? And why that plant, the one she had come from? What was going on there that was more important to her than anything else, like her family? Even if she was a wage slave, didn't they get vacations? She could have come back and explained things, and maybe that would have helped. But no, she just left, leaving behind only a few crappy letters.

She knew that her family felt that her dislike of Kiley was a little extreme. Only Knives understood a little of the reason why, and it was hard for even him to understand the depth of her enmity. Meryl was human, Vash hadn't been in a bulb since his birth, and Alex had never been in a bulb. Getting out of a bulb as a person was much harder than going out of one as a baby. Being inside the bulb was so peaceful, so perfect, so wonderful that it was very hard to force oneself to leave. You needed a driving reason, a force that worked outside of oneself. For Knives, it had been the thought of putting his brother through as much pain as he had been forced to bear. For her, it was the chance to see Kiley again.

When she had left with Knives, she had hoped that action would draw Kiley to follow them. When it had, when she sensed Kiley's presence outside of the bulb, she had been so incredibly happy. They were her family, and they were together, and things were exactly as they were supposed to be. She could hardly wait to heal up enough to be able to get out of the bulb and join them. Then, she had sensed Vash and Meryl's arrival, and the erecting of the barrier, and in all the new sensations, she had missed Kiley's departure.

So when, a couple days later, Knives came and helped her out of the bulb, she had first looked around for Kiley, happily at first, but quickly devolving into something resembling frantic. She wasn't there. And then Knives passed her that incredibly crappy letter, and her heart had broken. That which had drawn her out of the bulb was gone, and she couldn't do anything about it.

She had been tempted, more then tempted to sneak out of the ship and track her down, but while she was strong enough to leave the bulb, she had still needed more than a month to fully recuperate. And at that point Meryl was beginning to have serious problems keeping the baby. So she had been drafted into the twenty-four hour watch and was unable to get away. Then Alex had been born, and she didn't want to leave while he was still just a little kid, and then when she found the time to actually be able to leave, she found that she didn't want to.

Enough time had elapsed for Kiley to have come back if she had wanted to, or she could have sent a letter, or something, but they had heard nothing from her. She obviously didn't care about the people she left behind, so Ace found herself returning the favor. She didn't want to go looking, scouring the surface of Gunsmoke for someone who could care so little that she could walk away without a backwards glance.

And now, that she was in trouble, people were supposed to care about her again? It was ludicrous, and she wasn't going to take any part in this idiocy. She had left, and let her stay gone. Good riddance.

Ace tried to ignore how her heart wept.