He feels his eyes open, staring at an orange light being cast against his ceiling from a space in his curtains of his bedroom. After a few blinks of his eyes, he's awake, the memories quick to come back to him, with happiness one second and guilt mixed with disappointment the next.

They fell asleep together and it was around six in the evening. Now it's around one in the morning and he's wide awake, while she's still passed out next to him, weighing him down with an arm draped across his chest and her head resting on his numb arm. She did say she's been having a lot of trouble sleeping. Admitted that she has nightmares. She's looked exhausted more than a few mornings when he's seen her over the past couple weeks. God only knows how much longer she can sleep, and he doesn't have it in him to leave her in bed alone, and at this point, going back to sleep is way past out of the question. All it takes is a few seconds and he can't go back to sleep. Side effect from Ranger school.

He takes a deep breath and looks over to her, reaching over and brushing her hair out of her face softly with his finger and smiles. The image of her shaking her head right as her memories came crashing back flashes in his mind, followed by her crying herself to sleep into his shoulder. He promised to help her. He wants her to get better. A girl like her doesn't deserve to feel that kind of pain. His own pain he can manage because at this point, he's been tempered. But he knows what he went though and what it took so he can simply feel nothing. It's not something he wants to see anyone, especially her, go through if he has a chance to help.

He brushes her hair behind her ear with a gentle finger and lays back against his pillow, going to caressing her arm mindlessly with his thumb. His mind flutters through memories aimlessly, thinking of how he got here. His last days in Hillwood, those few days when he thought he could manage the boarding house on his own with all of the regular tenants gone, and only one or two temporaries. Until his mind starts playing through his very last day in Hillwood, and what he had to do before he got on that bus to Basic Training.

It's so peaceful up there, nice and quiet. He looks over to her, seeing she's still in his 'ARMY' t-shirt and boxer shorts she sleeps in that she slipped in on her way back from the bathroom about an hour after they fell asleep. He slowly takes his arm out from underneath her head and stands up, throwing on a pair of jeans, a black t-shirt, and an old long sleeved flannel shirt before going to her side of the bed and gently hoisting her up in his arms, wrapping her in a thin blanket before he does.

With skill, endurance, and finesse, he makes his way out the door, down the hall and toward the elevator. She stirs a few times, but she falls back asleep every time, and after a few minutes he's at his car, and puts her in the front passenger seat. Amazingly, she's still fast asleep. He closes the door and then gets in the other side, pulling away and heading north down the deserted streets, passing out of the city after only fifteen minutes. He continues up the coast for about an hour until the pair of headlights that have been following him for the past twenty minutes or so start getting closer and closer.

He hasn't paid them any mind, but he's going eighty, and it's only two-thirty in the morning. He takes a deep breath, reaching over the passenger seat to the pocket on the back, grabbing his normal carry piece. The headlights approach his rear, and his thumb presses against the safety, ready to act. He sees the headlights go into the other lane and start to speed around him. His hand grips tighter on the cold steel of his grandfather's 1911 as the dark red, late nineties Lincoln sedan reaches his side. He lets off the gas and lets them pass, which they do with a quickness, speeding off ahead of him at at least ninety-five. His grip loosens and he takes a deep breath to relax himself.

He closes his eyes to get a grip on himself. After his heartbeat settles back down to normal, he brings his arm back around and puts it on the headrest of the passenger seat, playing with a strand of her hair. He drives for another ten minutes or so until he goes over a dip in the road, making the car jump a bit, enough to finally stir Helga awake. He sees in his vision as her head starts to lift and her eyes start to flutter. Once they do, she jumps awake, gasping. "Ah!" She exclaims.

He quickly reaches down and puts his hand on her head. "Whoa, hey." He says softly, petting her scalp with his thumb. "Hey, it's alright, you're okay."

She looks over to him, eyes wide and breath quick. "Wha..." She starts, looking out the windows, "Arnold, where are we? What's going on?" She asks, panicked but knows he can soothe her.

He looks over to her with a smile. "We're about an hour north of Hillwood. I thought we could both get away from the city."

"Wha..." She starts again, sitting up and removing the blanket she has wrapped around her, "where are we going?"

"It's a place on the coast I know about. It's kind of special to me. It's a nice place to just sit and listen to the ocean. We're almost there."

She nods, but still looks confused. He decides to leave it be until they arrive. After another ten minutes of silence, and passing the same dented rest stop sign for a rest stop that was torn down years ago, he pulls off to the side of road. He parks and gets out, waiting for her to come around to his side to start explaining. "It's just through here." He says, pointing toward the tree line and taking her hand. He starts guiding her through the small path he carved the last time he was here, overgrown with thicket but still recognizable.

He smiles when he sees the light from the full moon bouncing off the oceans surface through the trees. He pushes down the branches and lets her go ahead of him. She slowly meanders into the clearing, mouth agape at what she sees. He stays behind to watch his vision of beauty glow in the moonlight. This vision of her standing in front of the ocean being set aglow by a full moon with her long beautiful hair flowing in the soft breeze is a memory that will flash in his mind right before he dies. That he's sure of. "Wow." She says softly, coming up to the edge of the cliff that goes straight down to the coast. "How do you know about this place?" She asks, turning around to see him standing at the tree line with a soft smile on his face.

He nods over to his right and walks over, hoping they're still where he left them. He goes over and kneels down to the brush, moving the thicket to his relief, showing her two urns, one only slightly larger than the other. He stops as the grief tries to sting him, but he doesn't let it get too far. He hears her approaching him and looks up to see her coming to his side, kneeling down next to him. He looks into her eyes and can tell that she just knows. She was always intuitive. "I came here right before I was shipped off to basic training to scatter their ashes."

She looks over to him, looks like she wants to say something, but decides to simply reach over and grab onto his hand, massaging his knuckles with her thumb.

"I did it right as the sun was setting. I just spent the whole night sitting right over there," he says nodding toward the cliff, "just thinking about them."

They sit in silence for a moment as he looks at the two urns, that amazingly lay undisturbed after a long five years left unattended. And after that moment, mostly concentrating on the tender feeling of her hand in his, he stands up and moves toward the cliff, sitting down on the edge, letting his feet swing down over the steep drop off, which Helga follows. She sits a little over a foot apart, but he isn't having any of it. Once she's settled, he scoots himself closer to her and wraps his arm around her, putting his hand on her side and gently tugging her into him. She gives in without a fight and places her head down on his shoulder.

He smiles and places a kiss on the top of her head. They sit in comfortable silence for a long while, each just watching the moonlight bounce off the movement of the mirror surface of the ocean. After a while, she looks down to their enjoined hands, with her fidgeting with his fingers mindlessly. "I don't want you to think I regret last night, Arnold."

He looks over to her, somewhat confused as to how to respond. He knows it didn't end up being what she hoped or wanted, but he also didn't think she regretted doing it either. "You don't?"

She shakes her head against his shoulder, "No. I mean I know I... had an episode, but... I don't regret it." She says. She stops when he moves to entwine their fingers and he holds in a firm grip. He can feel her smile. "I just didn't want those memories to infect what we have. But then I started having... flashes of what happened to me and... you and me was the last thing I wanted those memories to infect."

"You're trying to act like it never happened." He states plainly.

She shrugs her shoulders. "Maybe a little. I wish it never had happened, Arnold. I would be so much better off if it never happened."

"But it did." He interjects. "And if you're worried about the way I'm going to see you... that I'll look at you as if you're... broken or something, you can squelch that fear right now. I've been through some shit too, Helga." She chuckles despite herself. "But what happened to me happened. And pushing it all down and burying it isn't how to deal with it. Trust me, I've tried."

It's then that two incidents pop into his head. The Yucatan and that bar in Honduras. Only a few people know about Honduras and they were all there, but no one knows about what happened in the Yucatan. In a way, she is right, because that's buried so far down he can't recall everything about it without effort. But as the memory comes to mind, he knows that's not true. He can picture every last detail, down to the scared expressions in the photos.

"You have?" She asks, looking up to him from his shoulder.

He hardens himself and moves his arm out from behind her, but still keeps a hold of her hand. He opens his mouth to tell her, but at the last second, against what he was going to tell her.

"We were at a stop off in this tiny village in Honduras. They kept us in Central America instead of flying us back to the States because our next mission would be near that area and in the hostage crisis business, time is everything. But we were staying in this tiny village over night, waiting for the all clear to move, and there was just a bus stop, a crowded motel, and a bar, in the middle of the jungle basically. Couldn't have been more than forty people living here. But I was sitting at the bar next to this... attractive woman. I didn't think anything of it until some guy started hitting on her, and even then it wasn't any of my business, so I just tried to tune it out.

But it was clear that this guy wouldn't leave this woman alone, and I didn't step in until it was clear he was going to get physical. She yelled at him to leave her alone, but he just started grabbing at her. I turned around and said 'if this is the way you treat women, I can't imagine what your mother must think of you'. He got in my face and told me to mind my own business, to which I replied 'you obviously can't give this young women that same luxury, so why should I?' His face hardened and he stepped up to me and got in my face, but I wasn't scared. I knew he wasn't going to do anything.

He turned and walked out of the bar with a few other guys and I turned back around. The woman thanks me and we started talking. I told her I was a geologist working for a logging company, surveying the foliage so they would know what to replant. I paid for her drinks and after about an hour, she invited me back to her room. I was alone, drunk, and in a country I'd never be in again so I agreed. But when we were walking out, this guy was waiting for us. He was holding a small pocket knife, and the other two guys behind him just had pipes. Said they were going to teach me a lesson.

I said 'you have no idea what you're getting yourself into'. Behind them, I saw Eddie stand up with his hand on his sidearm he tucked into his jeans, but I signaled him to stand down. This guy lunged at me, but I dodged, grabbed the knife and put it right where I was taught." He takes her hand and presses her fingers in between his lower ribs. "Right there, punctures the lungs. This guy grabs onto my shirt, but I'm looking at the guys behind him who are just standing there, not knowing what to do. To them, I was just some gringo. I let him fall to the ground and just stand there, holding a cheap pocket knife with my hand dripping with blood that isn't mine.

The two guys still there drop their pipes and run off down the dirt road. I see Eddie sit back down in front of the motel we're staying at like nothing strange even happened. Everyone around just stared... like it was normal. They weren't even scared, or even shocked... they just stared as this guy drown on his own blood. I dropped the knife and felt the woman next to me take my hand. She didn't even say anything when she led me to her room."

He can feel something in Helga shift just then.

"I just felt... numb. Like a walking shell, just hoping that for once, I'd feel something again. Instead I just felt emptier than I had before. I never even found out her name. She never said a word. I just... left the room, got back on the plane the next day and went onto the next stop."

He lets his head fall forward, dragged down by humiliation, guilt, regret, and shame. And he can tell, he's not the same person to her anymore. She's stone silent now, feeling cold sitting beside him.

"It's memories like that that make me question who I even am anymore."

Helga reaches over and puts her other hand on top of the one she's still holding. "You're still the same old Arnold I fell for." He looks over to her, seeing her smiling over at him softly. "You're still the same knight in shining armor you thought you had to be when we were kids." She says with a joking undertone that makes him smile. "You're just a bit jagged now."

He smiles sadly, closes his eyes and leans his forehead against hers, pressing his lips to hers after a few seconds in a sweet, emotional kiss. She presses a hand against his curved jaw line and responds in kind. They lean back and return to their original positions, with her head on his shoulder and his arm around her, looking out onto the ocean. He looks off to the side, where the two empty urns sit, an anonymous tribute to his grandparents. He really misses them.

As he feels her arm go around his back to mirror him, he realizes something that actually makes him feel like he has something brighter ahead. He has her.

A/N: Long hiatus, no excuse really. Loss of inspiration, I guess. But I still remember the plot. Any guesses as to what Arnold found in the Yucatan?