Its been a while, I know. It would appear that my streak of quick updates has gradually slowed itself so be prepared for a few days until the next chapter. I hope you all enjoy this update. There are only two more chapters to go, I think. I haven't written them yet so I'm not entirely sure. And please try to review, anything will be appreciated, good, bad and ugly (LoveConquers: I'm gonna e-mail you about The Prophecy once I've finished some schoolwork...I have a lot to say about it, most along the lines of 'I'm very happy that people are finally acknowledging the thing between Brennan and Shalimar but they have only got two more episodes in which to make Brennan and Shalimar acknowledge that there's a thing between them').

Brennan pushed open the door. He was no longer as tentative as he had been. As soon as he had realised that nobody was planning on stopping him he had given up on the stealth option that he and Lexa had believed would be necessary. He had run through countless corridors, all exactly the same as the last, pushing open various doors, finding different things behind each. Some were labs, some holding cells, some were the organised Dominion equivalent of a broom closet. Eventually he found a door with a lock on it. The holding cells had had those too but this one was locked and it peaked his interest. He stood back before taking a huge kick at the metal. The door flew open suprisingly easy and he saw into a smallish room. It had lights on all four walls but no windows and the light was intimate and warm. There didn't appear to be much furniture from the angle at which he was looking at it. A bed was next to the wall opposite the door, neatly made but bare, the few blankets adorning it clearly not designed to provide much warmth.

He walked further into the room and saw a chair in the middle of the floor, a blonde woman sitting on it, her back to him. She didn't look up as he entered and he was infected by the stillness of the situation. He knew he should have been moving faster, he should have been stopping her from doing whatever it was she was doing. It wasn't like he felt any doubt about her identity. But the calm of the room stopped him, he didn't want to disturb it.

Unfortunately the choice was taken away from him as Shalimar stalked through the doorway. Her eyes glowed in the relative darkness and she pushed the door closed with her hip as she walked further into the room. The corners of her mouth lifted slightly in a cruel smirk. She knew she had Brennan trapped and he knew that she was not going to lose as easily as she had before. There was no plan let alone a back up plan. He had nothing with which to face the beast in front of him. And she knew it.

'You want her to stop me from being who I am?' Shalimar asked, gesturing to the woman in the chair.

'This is not who you are Shalimar,' Brennan answered.

'How do you know that? Maybe I've always been like this. Cruel, sadistic, maybe that's just who I am and we've all been deluding ourselves that that could ever change.'

'No. I know Shalimar Fox and she is strong, aggressive, courageous. She's many things but cruel and sadistic are not two of them.'

'Strong and aggressive can easily become angry and dangerous if the situation requires it.'

'The situation doesn't. Your mind is being screwed with and you can't see it.'

'Wrong. I can see everything so clearly.'

They glared at each other, both as passionate for their own cause as the other. Brennan's eyes blazed as did Shalimar's. He wasn't angry at her. He wanted her to be Shalimar again because, no matter who she thought she was right at that moment she was not the woman he had known and fallen in love with.

She smiled at him. He didn't realise that she knew what she was doing. He thought he could turn her by whispering sweet nothings into her ear but he was wrong. She finally felt liberated. After all the years of hiding who she was from the general public and hiding her personality from the rest of the Mutant X team she felt free at last.

'You're Brennan.' They both turned to look at the owner of the voice. The woman in the chair had turned around to face them. Her gaze was directed straight at Brennan and her stare bore into him. He looked away nervously before replying.

'Yeah. And you are?'

'My names Halle but that's hardly important,' she replied, standing up as she spoke. She walked across the room towards him, neatly avoiding Shalimar and her extended claws. 'What is important is that I can stop this anytime.'

'Why are you telling me this?' Brennan asked, confused as to her intentions.

'Because I don't want to hurt anyone.'

'Well, you've done a bang up job so far,' Brennan said, meeting her gaze with a bitter look of his own.

'Its not my fault. You've met Charles. You honestly believe that I had any choice in the matter,' she bit back. She had been held for so long in confinement that her ability to communicate with people was somewhat stunted and the emotions she felt weren't helped by the fact that she was feeling those of Shalimar and Jesse.

'So why can't you stop it? If you don't want to do this then finish it.'

'I don't want to hurt anyone but I'm only human, I'm not a saint. I need a guarantee that you won't hurt me once I let them go.'

'Done,' he said without hesitation.

'I also need to be sure that Charles won't be able to find me. I won't get you out of trouble just to put myself in even deeper.'

Brennan looked at the scared woman in front of him. She looked terrified despite the facade she was holding up quite well. He would have been scared of Charles if he had been facing the man, and she was his little sister. All the things she was feeling about Handon were intensified by the relationship between the two of them.

'Done,' he said with certainty, wanting to reassure her that he wasn't going to get what he wanted and then screw her over like her brother had.

Lexa coughed and felt some of the dust from the ground which her face had just been slammed into slip from her tongue. She could taste the grains of dirt but could do nothing to remove them from her mouth. She felt Jesse's knee dig further into her back and she grimaced as the pain shot up her spine. She could feel herself getting weaker. Physically she could barely stand but mentally she was unable to think about anything but the fact that she was getting the crap beaten out of her. If it hadn't been so painful she would probably have been incapable of remembering that.

She hated that he was watching her lose. She had never been a very gracious loser and having him watch her was the last straw for her but she didn't have the energy to get up and do anything about it. Besides Jesse weighed a couple of pounds more than her so it would have been somewhat difficult.

She felt Jesse grab the back of her top and pull her up from the floor. He turned her round and her tired eyes looked into his aggressive and confrontational ones. She wished he would just look at her like her Jesse had. She used to be able to tell that he loved her, and she had known that that was what it was. He would have died for her then and now he was going to kill her. She felt the tears building up inside her again, threatening to spill over the edge just like her. She knew she was sliding away from the world and she couldn't do anything to stop it. It was ironic that she had never loved her life quite so much as she had in the past few weeks. Before then she had lived a half existence, one where her job was pretty much everything to her and she had been desperately unhappy. And now she had friends, ones she could count on in anything and she was going to lose it all. Her head began to loll on her neck and her eyes closed. The only thing stopping her from falling to the floor was Jesse's tight grip upon her top. She felt her head drop down to her chest and she felt every muscle within her body relax. She gave herself up, hoping that her death wouldn't linger for too long and that she would be able to get it over with quickly.

'I won't let you.' Her voice rang out in the small room. They both turned to look at the blonde feral. Her eyes flashed momentarily before she stepped forward and lashed out with one hand. Unfortunately for her she was too slow for Brennan. He grabbed her arm at the wrist so she swung out with her other arm and slammed it into the chest of Halle. She flew across the room, landing on the ground a few inches before she reached the wall. She slid slightly on the smooth floor before coming to a stop. Brennan watched her for a few seconds but she didn't move. All his hopes were slowly disappearing before his eyes. Lexa would be facing Jesse and Charles at that point and she was still a little woozy from the tranquiliser. If he didn't wake Halle up from her Shalimar induced sleep he would never get Jesse or Shalimar back and after everything that had happened over the past months he was not prepared to lose any more people from his life. He grabbed Shalimar's other wrist but she flipped herself over his head. She landed behind him, their backs to each other and he was forced to let go of her slim arms as his own twisted. He turned quickly but felt the air of her movement rushing over his head for the second time. She was behind him again and this time she stomped her foot into the back of his knees. He dropped to the floor and breathed deeply, knowing that if Halle didn't get up soon he was a dead man.

'You thought you could change me,' Shalimar said as she walked around him. He looked up from his position on the floor and saw the blonde looking down at him. In that moment he knew exactly how he felt about her. She was so strong and beautiful. It killed him that he had to see her like this but he knew that if he ever got her back he would give her everything she wanted. If she wanted to be left for a couple of hours so she could do the feral hunting thing then he would let her and if she wanted to fight the bad guys alone he would swallow his grievances about the subject and would let her do that as well. And if she wanted to be held in his arms while they talked to each other about the past and the present and the future he knew he would let her and he would love every minute.

He smiled as he pushed himself off of the floor. He rolled his shoulders back feeling the clicks of his joints as they dropped back into a more comfortable position. He would fight her now because he wanted to do all of those things. He wanted to love her so much that it hurt and in order for that to be achievable he had to take her out now. He had to change her.

They stood facing each other both prepared to act completely on instinct atleast for the next few minutes.

He dropped to a crouch as her leg sailed over him. He grabbed her other leg and pulled. She fell to the floor and he grabbed both of her arms. She slammed her head into his and he fell back, the pain stunning him temporarily. He landed on his back but got up quickly as she recovered. Her eyes flashed at him and he smirked right back. She frowned as he held out his hand. The electricity seemed to summon itself, it was like he didn't even have that much control over it. Before it filled his palm however he received a swift kick to his side. He stumbled back and slammed into the wall behind him. She walked towards him, eyes blazing.

'No water here,' she said raising her eyebrows.

'No water but who said I needed it to hurt you,' he spat out as he grabbed the sides of her face with his hands. The electrical impulses shot through his arms and he saw her eyes widen as it reached her temples. She yelled out in pain and he immediately cut the power. He felt her body collapse into his arms, her energy spent, the fight lost for her.

He laid her on the floor and rushed over to Halle. She was waking slowly and he grabbed her under her armpits and pulled her to her feet. He knew he was being rougher than he needed to be but he had to get her to stop the world she had created. He wasn't entirely sure how the illusionist thing worked. She clearly didn't need to be awake for it to carry on functioning without her so he assumed that she had to give a direct order for the world she had created to shut itself off.

'You have to let them go,' he pleaded with her as he searched for eye contact he knew he would have to have if he had any chance of making her trust him.

She looked into his deep brown eyes and she nodded. She breathed in deeply and closed her eyes. She immersed herself in the world that Shalimar and Jesse had been trapped in. She felt it slowly fading away, slowly disappearing into nothing. Everything went black and she opened her eyes to see Brennan looking at her questioningly.

'They're free,' she said quietly, her hand reaching for her forehead where a drop of blood had been making its slow way down towards her right eyebrow. She wiped it away and looked over Brennan's shoulder. Shalimar was standing up slowly, looking extremely disorientated. Brennan looked in the direction of Halle's gaze and after checking that she was okay to stand by herself ran towards the blonde. As soon as he got there she looked up, the old looks and mannerisms back, the cold cruel Shalimar gone, he hoped for a long time. He reached out his hand and brushed it gently against her cheek. As soon as skin touched skin a small blue spark appeared and Shalimar pulled away sharply.

'I'm sorry,' Brennan said immediately.

Shalimar smiled gently, trying to reassure him that she was okay and not really doing a great job. The truth was she didn't mind the spark of electricity. It was refreshing, feeling that kind of contact between them. And it was a manifestation of the real connection between them. She felt her bottom lip begin to quiver under the pressure of a seemingly effortless smile and a couple of hours of being electrified, beaten up and now confused as to what exactly had happened over the past day.

'We have to help Lexa,' he said breathlessly.