A/N: I've started editing Bejerot's Diagnosis, and let me tell you... that story makes me happy in the pants. I'm loving every minute of editing it! Wheeeee!

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It was only a week after the New Year when Lyna returned to Jackson's hotel room in Rome. She'd travelled with a small group from the international school under the ruse that they were on a class trip – not that it really mattered much to Jackson. He was due back in Michigan a few days later to finish up his high school career and simply took a quick diversion in route to oversee the murder of Eric Hebborn and work on the initial plans another assassination tentatively scheduled for the first week in April. It was going to be his first distance assignment; final examinations were supposed to be a bitch, so he was going to be given a break between the April assassination and the assignment after it to study and then regroup after graduation. He was sprawled across the bed with papers spread all around him when the lock clicked unexpectedly. Eyes shooting up to the door, he grabbed at a knife that he'd had with him pretty much since he'd arrived in Rome a couple of days earlier.

Lyna stepped into the room, shedding her coat as she made her way to the bathroom—her clothes were drenched in blood. Expecting to hear the shower start, he went back to work but looked up when the bathroom door creaked open. Lyna stood there in just her bloody undergarments, which, he was oddly excited about, included a garter belt and stockings. There was blood caked on her face and throughout her hair, and as she leaned against the doorframe, he noticed that her entire mouth was red with blood as if she'd bit her tongue. Perhaps Melissa had been right about her tendency to drink the blood of her victims. At the thought, he laughed.

'What do you find funny, Jack?' she purred, a trail of blood creeping down the corner of her mouth as she spoke.

Before he could answer, she'd crossed the room and crawled on top of him, the blood getting all over his finely starched dress shirt and the papers he'd laid out over the comforter. She harshly kissed him, biting his lip to mix the blood in her mouth (was it hers or the victim's?) with his own. After the terrible coppery taste filled his mouth, he shoved her off before getting up and staring at her from beside the bed with the blood from his lip running freely down his chin. With a look of utmost confusion, he slowly raised the side of his wrist to his chin, rubbing at the blood and staring at it.

As he examined his wrist, she perched herself on all fours and looked at him with an expression not unlike a tigress'. There was a moment of stasis in which Jackson stared at Lyna and she stared back, waiting for his answer. Despite discomfort and Melissa's nagging in the back of his head, when she pounced on him once again, he could only succumb to lust like he had every time prior. She drank from his split lip with fervour as he ran his hands along her soft skin, both ignoring the fact that they were slamming into furniture and spreading blood all over the carpet.

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'Jesus Christ, Jacks. What the hell happened to your lip?' asked Melissa with utmost concern when she met him at the Traverse City airport a few days later. Her eyes widened. 'Oh shit, did the target…?'

He shook his head, handing her one of his Hartmann suitcases as it came down the carousel. 'It is an injury of lust, peach.'

'She did something fucking weird, didn't she?' she said, gaping as she took another one of his pieces of luggage.

He just shrugged lightly and Melissa sighed, walking away from him as he picked up the last two bags. He followed her to her car, an old MG model, and watched her as she threw the two pieces of his luggage into the trunk. After throwing his pieces in, he went around to the passenger's side and buckled in, glancing over at her.

'I can take care of myself, you know that,' he said carefully as he placed his briefcase down by his feet. 'You don't have to be so worried.'

'You're overestimating yourself,' she muttered as she backed out of the parking space. 'You're like a brother to me, Jackson. I don't want you to get hurt, especially not by someone like Vasylyna Melinyshyn.'

'We keep it like a business transaction, if that helps ease your worry,' he replied quite matter-of-factly. 'She kills someone, gets lusty…'

'Yeah, that's enough, thanks,' Melissa said, speeding out onto the Interstate as he realised he was sitting on top of yet another non-descript manila folder.

---

A quick knock was Jackson's only warning before his dorm room door flew open and a frazzled-looking classmate stuck his head in.

'Jackson, holy crap! The Secretary of Commerce was just killed in a plane crash in Croatia!' he said quickly, his eyes wide. 'Come on, man, we're all watching it on the television in the common room!'

'News travels fast,' said Jackson's new personal assistant over the phone line.

'Hey, Greg, I'll have to call you back later,' Jackson said, trying to look terrified and surprised about what his peer had just told him.

'Come on!'

Jackson set down the phone and followed the classmate from his dorm room to the commons. There was a large television set up on one end of the room with most of the dorm had gathered around it. For safety's sake, Jackson kept his face delightfully emotionless as the reporter gave wonderfully erroneous second-hand witness testimony of the plane crash. There were little murmurings around the room as Jackson leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, but he didn't pay attention to them until one of the other students, a freshman, caught his attention.

'It was a set-up. Someone paid for Brown to be killed.'

He tensed ever so slightly, looking over at the freshman with an uninterested glance. 'What do you mean?'

The freshman turned his attention to Jackson sharply. 'Isn't it obvious? It's a conspiracy.'

'A conspiracy,' Jackson said, his lips curling up into a patronising smile. 'Enlighten me.'

'Do you actually think that President Clinton didn't want Brown dead?' the younger boy asked, his hands on his hips. 'Do you know how many people connected to him have been killed in the last ten years?'

Jackson scratched his nose, looking at the ceiling, feigning thought. 'Forty-four?'

The boy gave him a worried look. 'G—good guess.'

The dark-haired eighteen-year-old shrugged. 'I try.'

'Do you watch these things carefully or something?'

'You could say that,' he said with a hint of mystery. 'I have a vested interest in the goings-on of the political world.'

'Are you going into politics?' the boy asked, raising an eyebrow.

'No, management,' he said with a little laugh. 'I have better things to do than waste my time trying to make myself appealing to voters.'

'Oh, but all the women would vote for you, Mr Rippner,' said Melissa, coming into the room. 'Jacks, I looked in your room for you, but I guess someone already told you abou—'

'You're Jackson Rippner?' interrupted the freshman, but it wasn't the usual excited tone that Jackson expected from the people who met him at Leelanau.

'Yeah, he's Jackson Rippner,' replied Melissa, narrowing her eyes as she stepped between Jackson and the freshman. 'What of it?'

'You killed your parents when you were little,' he said, glaring over Melissa's shoulder at Jackson. 'It was all over the news. And then you tried to kill your cousin and they sent you to a mental institution for like four years.'

Melissa reached back and instinctively grabbed Jackson's forearm. The people who had previously been watching the television were now all focused on the development near the wall, everyone looking nervously between Jackson and the freshman. Jackson's jaw was set, and anyone could tell it was taking everything in him not to just reach over Melissa and choke the boy in front of him.

'Quit talking out your ass, Kevin,' said one of Jackson's classmates from the couch.

'I'm not talking out my ass!' said Kevin, holding out his hand at Jackson, flailing it towards him emphatically. 'I went to the same school as his cousin. He tried to kill a couple of kids at the psychiatric centre too. It was all over the news!'

It was very uncomfortable in the room as Melissa backed up and pulled Jackson's arms around her waist in an attempt to diffuse the almost palpable anger emanating from him.

'I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue,' Jackson said in a warning tone from behind the redhead. She craned her head to see him staring Kevin down.

Kevin gulped audibly before backing up some. 'Of course.'

Melissa pressed herself harder against Jackson to take a better grip on him, but the shorter man didn't make any attempt to move towards the freshman. Most of the other people in the room were carefully trying to return to watching the television, a couple remarking loudly about something the reporter had just said. The freshman ran his hand through his hair nervously, almost inadvertently taking a step and a half away from Jackson. Melissa intervened again.

'Jacks, why don't we go for a walk, okay?' she asked softly, turning to face him with a pleading look.

He nodded and let her lead him out of the building to the muddy landscape of post-winter northern Michigan. They went down the hill leading to the lake, Melissa looking back every now and then to assure that no one from the dorm was following them. Her hand stayed attached firmly to his forearm until they came to an outcropping of trees and the school grounds disappeared into foliage. His body relaxed as they got into deeper woods and Melissa let go of his forearm, going ahead of him to cross her arms and look into the darkness beyond them.

'What did you want to talk about?' he asked her back.

She turned. 'Are you okay?'

'Why would I not be okay?' he countered, giving her an odd look.

'You did a good job in there,' she whispered self-consciously, pressing her hand to the back of her neck. 'Kept a very even temper.'

His face changed from emotionless to vaguely angry. 'What did you want to talk about, Bayley?'

'My dad called. He was in a meeting with the head of the organisation when the news came in about the Brown assignment going through, and he said that the Head was really pleased with the finesse you showed in planning. Dad thinks you're well on your way to being the golden boy of the society,' she said, her tone a bit perturbed. 'I just wanted to congratulate you on a job well done.'

'Thanks,' he replied, his voice icy.

She seemed upset at his response, rubbing her left arm with her right hand as she looked down at the ground. Usually in their fights, she always came out with the upper hand, having more experience in their world despite having the relatively low-rank job of forger. But this time, she hadn't been able to break him in her normal fashion, and this sudden change quite honestly hurt her as much as he could have hurt her by reeling back and hitting her across the face. She looked up as his footsteps squashed across the muddy ground, expecting to see him walking away from her, but instead came up to his lips. He locked his lips to hers harshly, holding the back of her head tightly as he forced open her lips and kissed deeply.

Melissa was caught by surprise and opened her eyes widely, giving in to the kiss before realising what was going on. Forcing her arms between them, she pushed on him strongly before he finally took his hand from the back of her head and she thrust herself away from him a few steps, her hair out of place and her hands in fists at her sides.

'I'm not Lyna!' she screamed, angry tears falling down her face. 'A random display of lust after a fight or a kill or anything isn't going to smooth things over with me!'

Jackson's expression didn't change at all, and that just upset her more. Her face contorted before she started taking heavy, breathy sobs, running her hands through her long auburn hair as tears ran unabashedly down her freckled face. He just stood there watching her, nothing betraying any feelings besides his left hand, which kept flexing uncomfortably to his side.

'Can't you see what she's done?' asked Melissa fervently through her tears.

'Made me a better employee of the organisation?' Jackson asked sharply, but he choked mid-way through the statement. 'Sharena said that the best…'

As he stopped speaking, she paused with her hands holding handfuls of hair at her temples, a hopeful look on her face as she tried to see if Jackson's face had broken into a nostalgic smile or something, but she was just faced with the same unemotional look she'd seen when she first entered the common room of his dorm. If he had any real emotions regarding the matter, he was doing a great job of masking them.

'She's made you into a drone,' Melissa said weakly, dropping her fingertips to cover her mouth lightly. 'Just like her.'

'Stop talking about her that way,' Jackson said in the same warning tone he'd used with Kevin. 'I swear to God, Melissa, if you keep talking about her that way, I'll—'

A fresh wave of sobs began, stopping his tirade. 'Jackson—'

'We're finished here,' he said, giving her a disgusted look. 'I don't want to see your face again until I need you.'

She looked at him, stepping forward to reach out and brush his upper arm. 'Jackson, please. I'm… I'm just worried about you… you know I'm always worried.'

A flicker of sadness crossed his face before resigning itself just to his eyes. Looking into them deeply, she could see that he wanted to just hug her like the sister she'd become to him over the last three years, but he held back. They stood staring each other down for a few minutes, Melissa visually urging him to show some affection, some recognition of the bond they'd formed, but he gave nothing except the little sheen hiding in the depths of his clear blue eyes. Dropping her hand, she stepped past him, neither saying a word as she walked back towards the lake, leaving Jackson alone in the clearing.