We had managed to work out some sort of plan to break into the jail and bust out our partner in crime, but unfortunately they knew our faces by now. On top of that, our uniforms were just too noticeable, given they were covered in blood, silver trimming, and dirt. We were going to need disguises so we could watch the jail without immediately being tackled by fifty men in blue. With Komui's blessing (and his unlimited credit) the two of us got the chance to do some shopping for something that would render us less noticeable.

Now, if only I could find a shirt that fit me and my abrupt muscle gain. When did everything get to be so gosh-darned tight?

"Maggie, the sun goes down in an hour," Kanda complained outside the dressing room door, and I grimaced in the mirror as I smoothed the shirt. It was still too tight around my armpits. I could hardly put my arms down to my sides! I couldn't be seen in this!

"Yeah, yeah, I know, shift change is at sundown," I grumbled as I unbuttoned the shirt and grabbed another from the pile. As much as it was a wound to my pride, Kanda convinced me I wouldn't fit the last few shirts I had worn and needed to grab some in a bigger size.

There was a commotion near the door as I buttoned the next shirt all the way to the neck and rolled my shoulders. Still stiff, but definitely nowhere near as bad as the last size-

The door was thrown open, and I turned around in a hurry as Kanda suddenly made an entrance into the women's fitting room. Before I could squeak out a protest, he made a motion for quiet, crammed himself in the back corner, and muttered, "Police out there. Take your shirt off."

"You want me to what now?" I asked blankly.

This was the second time today!

There were voices outside of the dressing room as the haberdasher talked to the police, and I realized that we'd run out of time. Even so, I took a solid five seconds to stare at Kanda with my most burning glare.

"You're going to at least pay me," I mumbled as I turned back towards the mirror and started to unbutton the shirt, my face rapidly steaming as more and more skin was exposed.

Oh God, I was going to die of embarrassment before the police ever managed to set off this gambit. I didn't know if I could do this. I'd take going to jail over undressing in front of -

Fortunately, the police didn't waste their time, and one of them opened the door to my half-bare back. I gave my best indignant squeal, shouting things like "uncouth scoundrels!" and "deviants!", which was not at all difficult to do in this situation.

"W-we're sorry, ma'am! We, uh, we'll wait outside the dressing room! P-please see us at the front!"

After their footfalls were gone, I sighed and began to quickly dress again with more vigor than was necessary, staring at Kanda as I did so.

"It kept us out of jail," he stated.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I grumbled. "Well, I bought us maybe five minutes. What now?"

Kanda sighed out his nose as his eyes unfocused, and I grimaced.

"You didn't think past this, did you?"

"They walked in literally thirty seconds ago. What did you expect?"

I chewed my lip, glancing back at the skirts and things I had discarded before looking up at him.

"You're not going to like this idea, but I'm going to call it karma. Let your hair down and put this skirt on."


Luck was apparently on our side. After dolling Kanda up as much as I could with what was in the dressing room, we managed to bluff our way past the police with sheer "female" indignation and a threat that I would not hesitate to notify their stationmaster about the intrusion on my privacy. They didn't even question the extremely tall Asian "woman" coming along with me. I think they were still rubbing their necks and wondering if my husband was going to come and remove their heads himself. Once we were a safe distance away, I'd helped him get out of the get-up and into the suit we'd bought at a different store, though not without a grumble or two.

Now free and in the appropriate attire, we took up our positions and the wait began.

"Here. You look like you could use something to perk you up."

Kanda looked up at me in surprise as I held out a mug of tea to him. He took it gingerly and stared into it with a bit of a glower as I sat myself down on the bench and took a sip from my own mug. The tea warmed my hands in the cold of the evening as night began to fall. Next to me, Kanda seemed to put off waves of heat despite the chilly weather. One of the perks of being his student was that I had access to what amounted to a human radiator.

"Thanks," he muttered.

"You're welcome," I replied as I watched the street.

The two of us had decided to sit and wait outside the jail, seeing as we were at least half sure there'd have to be a shift change sometime. We were sitting in front of an ice cream shop with a fairly good vantage point, and now all we had to do was watch. We had a tentative plan figured out, though it took several minutes for me to argue that barging in guns blazing would probably yield less fruitful results than we'd like.

At the moment, though, we were biding our time, and I couldn't help but notice that Kanda's typical silence now had a tinge of melancholy. Granted, he'd been emasculated about thirty minutes before, but I figured his pride was a little more resilient than that. There was that man who made a pass at him, and it took every ounce of strength I had to hold him back and keep him from blowing our cover...

Reading his mood was still sometimes a challenge, but it had become second-nature enough that I could generally tell something was bothering him. Ever since this morning, he'd been restless. While the fact there was an Akuma loose poisoning people with what was essentially lighter fluid probably didn't help matters, there just seemed to be this discomfiture that made him seem as if he were constantly balancing on a chair with an uneven leg.

"Is something... wrong?" I asked, glancing over at him.

"No. I'm fine," he muttered, despite his hand resting firmly on his sword's hilt.

"Oh, it isn't nothing. You haven't been able to get comfortable since we woke up."

"Got a lot on my mind."

"Penny for your thoughts, then?" I asked, jokingly offering a single penny to him from my pocket.

He didn't meet my gaze, though he took the penny and examined it with undue drama. He turned it over in his left hand before glancing around him at the busybodies going about their day, though traffic was winding down now. He flipped the penny and caught it, before taking a pensive sip of his mug. Finally, he spoke.

"People live like this," he muttered. "Exposed. Naked."

I licked my lips, nodding my head in agreement. The lack of security that had followed stepping out of my uniform pants had grated on me. I hadn't considered just how much that uniform had become something like a second skin, a barrier that stopped what seemed like damn near everything. I'd been pelted with baseball sized bricks and whole buckets of railroad spikes, and it had done little, if any, damage to the coat, though I'd worn the bruises for weeks after. The civilian get-up we were currently sporting had all the resilience of tissue paper.

"It sometimes makes me wonder how I managed before this. It's hard to believe I used to just wander around, without a single clue what was actually out there," I said, holding the mug to my chest as I leaned back, sighing.

"This is the first time I've worn a suit," Kanda muttered into his mug before taking a long drink, and I glanced over at him.

Hold the phone, what? I had known that Kanda had been in the Black Order for a long time, since childhood even, but it had never occurred to me that he had never had a reason to wear a suit to anything. Even the twins had had to wear a suit jacket on occasion to a christening, or church service.

"I guess you don't get to wear civilian clothes often," I said after a stunned pause, knowing better than to reveal the mountains of pity I felt.

"Hm. I don't like it anyhow. Too stiff," he conceded. "You seem to take to it a lot easier."

"I probably have more practice than you. I got to spend time as a normal human being," I jabbed playfully.

"Yeah. You did," he murmured, and I could have kicked myself in the back of the head.

"It's not really all it's cracked up to be, you know," I quickly said, leaning towards him. "You've got to worry about things like paying rent, and working in factories, and paying doctors when you get sick. Those are things I definitely won't miss."

"What do you miss, then?" he asked, still watching the jail house ahead of us.

I licked my lips trying to think back to that time. What did I miss? I was a bit surprised to find that for all the problems I had to face - up to and including potentially having my face removed with a Gatling gun - life right now wasn't really so bad. I hummed a little as I thought, and I sipped tea to buy time. I saw Kanda glance over at me from the corner of his eye - amused, I recognized, from the microscopic smirk - and I held up a finger in a bid for patience.

"I miss the freedom to go where I please when I like. I miss the possibilities I could have had, doing what I love, though the chance I would have ever achieved them were pretty much nil," I said slowly. "And I miss the bliss that comes with ignorance. I'm not sure I could go back to it now."

"We rub off on you?" he drawled.

I smiled a little and bobbed my head this way and that as I considered it. I lifted my eyebrows at him and admitted begrudgingly, "Maybe a little bit. This job certainly has more prestige and excitement."


"You know, I'd held out hope you'd come get me, but this is a little much," Lavi said as Kanda sawed through the lock on his cell.

I threw my hands into the air and griped, "Well if someone had waited for me to finish talking to the guards -"

"Time was up, and I came in," Kanda grumbled as he sawed through the bars on the door, and I glanced behind us at the carnage we'd left behind.

The jailhouse office was a wreck of rubble where Kanda had rudely interrupted my attempts to sweet talk the guards into letting me see my "beau". I'd even got sugar cookies and everything to hand out, but instead, an overzealous swordsman couldn't wait to make a grand entrance through the back. We'd had to take the poor guards on post and stuff them in the nearest closet.

"All I asked for was ten minutes!"

"I gave you ten minutes," Kanda griped back, digging around in his pocket. "Blame your watch. It runs fast."

"My pocket watch runs at exactly the right time, thank you. It is a Mowitzer antique," I retorted as he slapped it into my hand, and I inspected it just to be sure he hadn't somehow put a dent in the cover or knocked a cog out of place.

"Boy, it sure is great to have the gang back together again," Lavi mumbled facetiously as he calmly sat on his bunk in his cell, though there was a slight smile on his face.

"Are you alright? Let me see you. Do you think your nose is broken? Do we need to go to a doctor?" I asked as I beckoned him towards me, and he complied, letting me turn his head this way and that. He still looked like his hangover had taken a billy club to him. His skin was warm, and he refused to meet my eye.

"Had someone look at me last night. Their doctor said it wasn't broken, though I guess it doesn't matter, because it sure feels like it is," Lavi sighed.

"Where's your hammer? Why didn't you knock down a wall and save us the trouble?" Kanda asked as he completely cut through the lock, the door swinging open.

"Um... well, see, that's an awfully long story-"

"You lost it," I squeaked incredulously, dropping my hands into my lap. "I don't believe it."

Lavi shrugged his shoulders, as if he'd just misplaced his house keys, instead of a weapon handed down by God himself. Sure, I sometimes left my bangles on the coffee table, but I never left the headquarters without them!

"It takes a lot of effort to be this perfect all the time! Besides, I know exactly where it is, I just... don't have it with me right now."

Kanda, not one to stand on ceremony, quickly headed towards the entrance, and we followed, realizing that it wouldn't do to dally around.

"Where next?" Kanda asked tersely as he checked if the coast was clear through the hole into the alley, while Lavi quickly riffled through the personal affects boxes for his things.

"Next, we find the nearest hawker. I'm starved. The stuff they serve here shouldn't be called 'food'," Lavi said as he picked up and examined a gold necklace with an appraising tilt of his head. He wouldn't!

"Lavi! That's not yours," I said in a warning tone.

"They'd never know! ...Okay, fine, fine, I'm putting it back, see?" he assured me, dropping it back into the box, and I shook my head, sighing.

"You're worse than Violet..."


Nighttime had already begun to fall on the city when we picked a spot to hide out. After stopping at a cart for something to warm our bones, we'd picked a courtyard to while away the time in, though at the moment Lavi and I were the only two there as Kanda had an odd hatred for pea soup and went searching for something else to eat.

"So what did you two do while I was gone?" Lavi asked, setting down his finished bowl.

I grimaced, rubbing my face.

"Well... not much. We woke up in a fancy hotel room - stop looking at me like that!"

He already had a lecherous grin plastered across his face, a keen look in his eye, and some smart comment on his tongue. He sat down on a bench in the courtyard and patted the seat.

"What? Okay, I won't say anything, I promise. Go ahead and finish."

I sighed heavily as I plopped down beside him, hands in my lap, as I filled him in on everything he had missed thus far. He rubbed his chin, rolling his shoulders, not saying a word, though he looked somewhat amused. He glanced at me sidelong, and for a moment, I thought I saw something like melancholy on his face. Despite our familiarity with each other, I still had trouble reading his expressions, but there was something about how he rubbed the back of his neck and wouldn't meet my gaze that put me in mind of someone who was forced to swallow an elephant-sized truth.

"It sure sounds like you two are getting on well," Lavi finally said after a heavy pause.

I scoffed and muttered, " 'Getting on' is a bit generous-"

"Oh, come on. Maggie."

"What?!"

Lavi shook his head with a wide smile, before wagging a finger in my direction and stating, "Do you know I watch you two in the training room? You've both improved a lot. I mean it. Before Road took you for a ride, if someone had told me you two would be slaughtering target goals in tandem, I would have said they were smoking something I wouldn't mind trying. But now, since he's loosened up a little... Kanda isn't used to working with someone else, but the way you two work together - magic. You've come a long way. Other than Marie, you're the only other person I've ever seen work with him who he hasn't hated."

Something about that word - magic - seemed to catch my attention, reawakening a vivid recollection of my fingers tracing a tattoo written in a foreign tongue. I shivered a little, holding my cup of soup closer. The thought had stirred something in my gut, like I had swallowed a barrel of oil and dropped a match down my throat.

A warm coat descended about my shoulders, and I looked over at Lavi, who brushed a few crumbs off his rumpled shirt.

"Thanks... Are you only trying to bolster my self-esteem, or was there a point to your praise?" I asked suspiciously.

"I'm just saying you two like each other a lot more than you let on."

"We make for thorough partners," I conceded, though Marianne's words circled about in my mind like mocking Cupids.

"You're selling yourselves a little short there," Lavi mumbled, and I gave him a warning look as he glanced back at me.

He leaned his head towards me and gave me a look of his own, one of his few sincerely serious expressions.

"You need to open up to someone," the redhead stressed, tapping my nose with a long finger. "You can't keep denying that you want a warm body's company. And I already know I can't reliably give you mine. I am not even suggesting you go right for the prenups and hire out a priest and a chapel - but you'll find a friend somewhere inside that grumpy Japanese blowhard, and I think he wouldn't mind having a friend himself."

He punctuated the last comment by gently chucking my chin, lingering a moment, and I brushed him off with a halfway unwilling smile.

"Or," he continued, shrugging, "you two could just continue pussyfooting around it. It's all the same to me. You'll entertain me either way."

"Well, I'm glad someone's enjoying all this beating around the bush, then," I complained, nudging him.

"Speaking of beating..." Lavi muttered, gesturing to a tall, dark, and glowering swordsman walking back towards us with something in a brown bag.

The three of us got comfortable on the bench, and Lavi quickly started into his story of what had happened the night before.

"Keep in mind that my memory is only as good as the brain its in, and my brain was pickled last night, so some of it is a little bit fuzzy-"

"Get on with it."

"Alright, alright, you can put the sword down! You were the first person to figure out someone, or more accurately something, spiked our drinks. At around the same time, a bar fight started over Maggie somehow, and we were separated from Charles. Now, Maggie being Maggie, she didn't want to leave him behind, but things got a little too hectic for our own good. Kanda, you threw her over your shoulder, and we hiked it to a chemist I knew, Sir Humphrey Dagget. While there, he managed to make an antidote for whatever it was that had got into our blood, but he only managed to make one batch before his place caught fire. Now, unfortunately Dagget's daughter, Janine, thought we were arsonists there to burn a heretic for his work, so she called the bobbies. I left Little Hammer back there... but I'm not sure where, exactly. We ended up going through a railyard, I think Maggie got winged by a stopped train, I ended up tripping on some tracks and busting my nose, and the rest I couldn't tell you."

"Wait... how did we manage not to spontaneously combust, then?" I asked, frowning. "We all had our drinks spiked, didn't we? If he made one batch, who took it and how did we survive?"

Lavi winced and said, "I drank the only antidote in the jailhouse, and Kanda had combusted already at Humphrey's-"

"Huh," the swordsman muttered, looking down at his very much un-burnt self.

"-so that leaves you, Maggie. I don't know how you got out without looking like a crispy critter."

I was starting to figure it out. I vaguely remembered Kanda catching fire at some point, but I had thought that to be some weird fever dream. And I remembered that I felt so, so hot later that night, which would explain why I would have stripped down...

"I think we just tried to keep me cool," I said, locking eyes with the Japanese man to my left.

"I didn't run you a bath. I filled the tub with ice from downstairs," Kanda slowly said. "You were -"

"- about to burn up, I remember," I said, the recollection beginning to come back.

But along with it came other memories, most notably the smell of sword polish and lavender soap, and I did my best to shove the memories back into whatever holding pen they'd originally been locked up in. I swallowed as I glanced at his face. He didn't seem to realize that I was beginning to finally put all the steaming pieces together. I was going to beat Lavi like a decade-old rug for that conversation earlier.

"So, the next place we need to head to is Humphrey's," I said, quickly steering the conversation back on track.

"Yup! I'm sure he'll be glad to see us. He was about to piss himself in his excitement showing us his chemistry set-up, even though we were drunk. His daughter... well, I hope she's taken a long walk off a short pier, I'll put it that way."


"Well this explains the peacock," I muttered as we walked through the menagerie that led up to the massive mansion lit up in the distance.

"You wait here and I'll go and get Little Hammer. It'll be easier if only one person heads in, especially if Janine's still poking her mile-long nose around Humphrey's place. I'll be back in a little bit, I promise!" Lavi shouted to us over his shoulder as he bounded up the steps towards the mansion.

"Alright! We'll keep watch!" I shouted back, and with that, the two of us were left alone in the middle of a sleeping menagerie.

The silence was only ever broken by the brief sounds of insects or night animals rustling in their pens, the heavily pregnant quiet accented by the soft hoot of an owl. The two of us stood there, waiting, in the dark, and my mind fell prey to my thoughts. Ever since Lavi had uttered that single word - magic - it was as if someone opened the floodgates to a sewer. I kept pawing through my recollections, obsessively reviewing the little I remembered. While we were walking, I could drag my mind up from the gutter, but the minute I was doing nothing - like now - I ended up right back into the thick of it, chewing over my half-formed memories like a dog on a bone.

"Okay, I can't take it anymore," I professed, gripping my hair with both hands. "I remember last night. And I can't stop thinking about it. It's just on repeat in my mind, and I have to say something."

Kanda's sigh spoke encyclopedic volumes. In just that one breath, he somehow managed to express frustration, forbearance, resignation, and maybe even relief. I grimaced at him, waiting for him to say something. He took his sweet, sweet time before finally stating, "You said it yourself. It doesn't mean anything-"

"Yeah, the problem is, I lied," I groaned, covering my face and pacing. "I'm sorry. I-I-I feel the worst. I feel like this is all my fault. I shouldn't have gotten drunk, I shouldn't have taken you to a cabaret, I shouldn't have taken advantage of you-"

"Excuse me?" he spat, and for the first time, he looked absolutely flabbergasted.

"I did!" I insisted, spluttering. "You were drunk, I was drunk, I was half-naked in a tub of ice-"

"No, no, no, I make my own decisions," he growled, poking a finger at me. "You didn't 'take advantage' of me, I wanted- ..."

He abruptly stopped as the realization hit us simultaneously. I stared at him as the two of us seemed to reach a mutual, earth-shattering conclusion. For some reason, the fact that he'd acted out of his own volition seemed an alien concept to me, and the fact I considered my actions coercive seemed just as strange and unfamiliar to him. My brain was doing gold-medal-worthy Olympic gymnastics inside of my skull as it finally dawned on me what all this could possibly mean. It seemed to strike me with the force of two trains hurtling toward each other on the same track.

The feeling went both ways.

"Can we forget it happened?" I blurted. "I mean, I know that I won't be able to, but just- for the sake of work, and everything that we've managed to do together, can we just... go on like it never happened?"

His face could have been mistaken for marble, but his mouth seemed poised to say something, his eyebrows halfway between sad and angry, his shoulders slumped in something like disappointment or maybe relief or some kind of frustration-

"You again!" a voice gasped, and the two of us looked to our left.

There stood a woman with what I can only think of as a tent for a nose. It was so long, it could keep a colony of ants dry in a rainstorm. She sneered at us in the half-light of the lanterns in the menagerie, and Kanda and I glanced at each other.

We dashed for the woman at the same time, no doubt the long-nosed daughter Lavi had talked about beforehand, and she immediately took off running. We managed to circle the small lake, the pen full of flamingos, and an enclosure holding what looked to be a cross between an elephant and a pig, before tackling the surprisingly fast bugger. Her screams were abruptly cut off by Kanda covering her mouth, while I tried to contain her kicking legs.

"Shhh, shhh, look, we don't mean any trouble, we just want to get something back from your father!" I hissed.

"You do that again, and there won't be anything left of you to find," Kanda growled at her.

"Kanda!"

"She bit me!"

Something raced by in the dark, and I couldn't help but think that, of all the times it could choose to strike, this would be it.

"Oh, bother," I muttered under my breath as something attempted to pounce on us.

A blue hemisphere burst around us on the ground, and the thing smashed into it instead, unsurprisingly revealing the Akuma that had been doing its best to kill us for the past two days. I'd actually been wondering when exactly the thing would show its ugly mug again.

"All yours," Kanda grunted as he passed off the struggling woman to me, leaping to his feet as I scrambled to give him an opening in the shield.

I stared with unabashed, deadpan annoyance as I sat there and tried to control the screaming, clawing, shrill woman trying desperately to get out of my grasp. Given the awkward angle, she managed to get free, and instead found that the inside of the shield around us was just as impermeable as the outside. She smacked her face right into it, the resounding crack of her nose hitting the field ringing in my ears. I winced, leaning back from the groaning girl.

"I was going to warn you, but-"

There was a smack! against the shield as the Akuma flew into it, a sword quickly following up with a slice that would normally have relieved me of my arm and head. The Akuma scrambled back and over it, bleeding on everything it touched, as Kanda dashed around me, and I shrugged my shoulders, raising my hands.

"Don't mind me, I'm just chopped liver," I mumbled as I got up and went to see if the girl, Janine, was alright.

"Wh-what... was that?" she asked, looking back at the monstrous "nurse" Kanda was fighting.

"That, love, would be a demon. We came to your father for help last night, apparently, because it poisoned us, and you... reported us to the police for arson," I sighed.

"Well, if you had said something, I might not have!" the girl shrilly shrieked, holding her bleeding nose in both hands. "Lord have mercy, this hurts..."

"Tilt your head forward and just let it drip. There's a good girl..."

I looked back to the fight, only to find that it had ended, as was usually the case where Kanda was concerned. It was a rarity that I ever got a solid smack in the fight, though if anything could give Kanda trouble, it was not something I wanted to mess with. Our roles in battle had become much more clearly defined after a few weeks of catch-up in the training room, and I was purely for support, a fact with which I was completely, one hundred percent in agreement. I watched his back so he could hack away to his heart's content, and he stabbed the pointy bit into the demon so I didn't have to get too close.

Kanda reappeared out of the dark, sword gleaming and brand-new suit soaked in blood (my stomach cramped - we just bought that), and I sighed with relief.

"So, is it dead...?" I called out, and he shook his head as he approached.

"Ran off before I could get a hold of it. Damn thing is fast," he growled, peeling off his suit jacket and throwing it on the ground with irritation.

"Hey, I got it! I hid it on top of the toilet!" Lavi shouted at us from an open window in the mansion, waving the hammer at us with glee before noticing that Kanda looked like he'd taken a bath in a slaughterhouse and there was a groaning woman at my feet holding her bloodied face.

"The Akuma came back, didn't it. Did you kill it?"

Kanda mumbled to himself some rather unfriendly words, stomping towards the house, as Lavi looked on in confusion, holding a hand out in plea for answers.

"Well, did you?!"


A/N: Hello, hello! I hope you have enjoyed Maggie's latest escapade! The awkward is tangible, and the hilarity will continue! A big thanks to karina001 for betaing and reviewing, and thanks to DGMFan as well!

Thank you for reading, and God bless you all!