A/N: Lila's back on her feet after the fuel depot explosion, and it's about time she got a visitor. This also explains why Vandham never showed up for Lin's feast at the start of Chapter 12.

Fluff and swears, heavy spoilers through Ch. 11. Set right after it. Everything good belongs to the geniuses at MONOLITH SOFT.

XCX PORTANDA EST.

Well, if you think about it, this makes a big difference.

"To hell with all this. I'm going to go see Lila." Vandham lunged to his feet, the momentum carrying him straight for the barracks door. His face dared anyone to argue.

"Whoo hoo, go get'em, Tiger," Lin called from the kitchen. She couldn't help but smirk.

"Good luck, sir," said Elma in her calm measured tone. But her eyes had warmed infinitesimally for the first time since her team had returned from Cauldros, bringing with them the precious data that would lead them to the Lifehold.

His bust up with Lila had been weeks ago, a very loud, very public and ugly scene, with him doing most (all) of the shouting. He had made it perfectly clear that if he never laid eyes on her, it wouldn't be a minute too soon. She'd looked pale, and guilty, and venomous, but she hadn't said a damn thing to him, and she'd kept out of his sights from that day on. Not so hard, when circumstances had landed her in the mimeosome repair center for a good couple of weeks. Walking in there to visit a wounded BLADE, to visit that goddamn viper as it turned out, he had to be very careful not to keep walking until he reached the elevator that led to her bay. The techs had gotten one thing right; they'd kept her on a lower level, at the far end, even, well away from anyone else. If he visited her, it was not going to be on accident. He hadn't been ready to unbend, not then.

Should have kept that goddamned traitor in the goddamned basement instead.

Why the hell had he waited? Damn it, he realized that he should have flowers, something. Instead, he was there, empty handed, pounding on the door of shack where she lived, a patched together shipping container on the edge of the ruins of the refueling station. It was supposed to be the office for the station's reconstruction, and he supposed that was what it was, mostly. She had a room sliced off of the tiny space. Just like earlier, she'd gone to ground in a safe hole.

"Commander?"

"Let me in."

"Of course." Lila stepped aside as he pushed past her. She looked worried and a little unhappy to see him. Well, that was better than formally polite. Was she shivering? He hoped to god she was, and that it was because of him.

Vandham looked down on the brown-haired tech. "You heard?"

"Yes, sir. I didn't know."

Which Vandham interpreted quite correctly as meaning that although Lila already knew all the ugly details about the past 24 hours, she hadn't had anything more than suspicions before.

"How much does everyone else know?"

She considered, then gave her report. Lord, how he loved how clear-eyed she'd go when reciting things. "About the theft of the Prog Ares, that's obviously public knowledge. A lot know where it was headed. General opinion is that it is one more case of mim instability. Almost no one knows what else was taken, or why. Mostly they think the Ares was the real target, sir, with bets running 50-50 whether he was delivering it, or going on a suicide run."

"Well, it's done and we've cleaned it up as well as we're going to. Opinions?"

"No, sir."

"Damnit, if you say sir one more time…"

"What would you prefer? Commander?"

"How about Jack? Or gorgeous? Or, I don't know, just not sir?"

She was staring at him with her mouth a little open. He was starting to enjoy this. "Ha! Not expecting that?"

"I'm not sure, …" she said. Without the tag of 'sir'.

"Well, screw that, screw all the Ganglion and their army of worms and parasites, here I am. You gonna forgive me or what?"

"Sir?"

Vandham growled. "Stop with the 'sir'! Do it again and I'll…"

"What, sir?" She still looked stricken, but she just couldn't repress that tiny silver twinkle in her eyes. She probably didn't realize it was there.

"Too clichéd to kiss you?"

Her eyes opened very wide, twinkle suddenly vanished, looking directly at him.

"Are you going to forgive me? We don't have a lot of time."

"You've done nothing, sir, nothing to forgive…" She shook her head steadily, hands wide open, repeating the words earnestly.

"No one ever called me original." He held her shoulders, very gently, and stooped down to place a kiss just on the edge of her lips.

"Sir!" She twisted and pulled, slightly, looking at him almost in shock.

He planted another quick kiss. "Damn it, this is going to take a long time if you keep saying that."

She tilted her head up at him, to give him a long, silent glance, then swiftly reached up, hands around his neck, fingers tracing the edges of his hair, and returned the kiss, in a way that was neither gentle or quick. Not just one kiss, several, ranging from hungry to amazing and back.

"Am I forgiven?" he growled into her neck.

"Yes, of course, always."

"Good." Somehow his arms had wrapped themselves tightly around her. Good for them. He gave her another squeeze, released her, then slumped onto her raggedy couch, even worse than her previous one, pulling her down beside him. Making sure she was wedged cozy right beside him.

She had other ideas. She squirmed so that she could look at him face to face. "I need to apologize to you, sir. Jack," she amended quickly. But he wasn't going to tease her now. "You were right about most things, but I never made you in San Diego. I was there to check on the project, that's it. They needed someone with technical skills to find out why it was going so badly."

"What was the deal with it anyway?"

She blinked, distracted from her confession. "Um, stupid stuff. Industrial espionage. A company was trying to put in patents for the engine. The project leader wasn't giving them much information, but he was delaying results to give them time to submit it."

"Stalling, when we were under a deadline. Literally."

"It was easy to discover. They didn't need an engineer, they needed an accountant. Then you took over and fixed everything."

"And they switched your target to me."

"No! I wasn't there for that." She hesitated, and blushed. "Well, maybe somebody suggested it. But it was stupid right from the start. Even I could tell, looking at your files, worse than pointless, downright harmful. You are not a man to wreck. Never going to happen." Her blush increased. "Especially after I met you."

Jack repressed the feelings that blush gave him. "So you're telling me, you refused a direct order. That's insubordination, woman."

"It wasn't direct. Naval Intelligence only pushed so far." A nice point, but he didn't have grounds to argue.

"And that was it. Until Exodus."

She took a ragged breath. Clearly, this was harder to say than she expected. "I never expected to see you at Project Exodus. The whole thing was really just a wild guess on my part. I expected I'd be wrong, but it was too interesting to ignore, no matter how ridiculous the chances. Once I saw you there, I knew it was something scary and huge and really important, even before I knew the truth."

"So it was just a guess, contacting me beforehand?"

"A calculation. Gravitational engineering is pretty specialized. If it was long range space flight, I figured they might be using that tech, and if they were, someone would probably know you. Besides," she paused and looked guilty, "it was an excuse to make contact. I was curious to see where you were, what you were doing…" Her voice faded away.

Again, the devil in his brain was urging him to stop talking then and there and move on to other things, but he sensed she wanted to tell him more. Worse, those weeks of anger and suspicion still lingered. He tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. "Did they keep you on because of me? Because you could get to me?"

"No, not you. I hope not, at least not at the start. I didn't want that. I really wanted to help the project. If they kept me, it was just generally." She raised her chin and said proudly, "I am an engineer, sir."

He couldn't stop himself. A quick kiss, and a muttered, "So I've noticed, occasionally. Continue."

She blinked several times, then did as he said. "I don't think they kept me for anything specific, not as part of security. At best, I was just a possibility for emergencies. They already had everything covered, at least they thought they did."

"Then it all blew to hell."

"That's what really saved me, in the last weeks or so. I was insurance, something clean from before, if you could ever think of me as clean." She looked at him, misery in her eyes. "It was useful once we launched. We brought a lot of ugliness with us, and we tried to clean it up. I checked things on the ship, you know, end to end."

"You mentioned that once," he growled. He felt her tremble, but she didn't stop her confession.

"Yes, well, I ran the lists of passengers and crew too. Checking for doppelgangers. Seeing if the person in the mimeosome matched the face and name. And voice. That was … bad …"

He could only grunt grimly and pull her closer. After a moment, he said, "No wonder you were so suspicious of people. I didn't know the whole of it until we hit Mira."

She said, surprise in her voice, "Really? You must have suspected something. All those specials you sent down to me, I usually did the lists in order but those I'd do ahead of time. Half of them were fakes."

"I just put it up to people exaggerating their skills in order to get on the project. Dumped them on you because any set of hands is useful for the crap you guys did. ECP didn't tell me the worst of it until I was made Commander." He grunted again.

They fell silent a moment, because it really had been bad. On the Whale, any number of trained specialists had proven to be completely incompetent in their fields. Turns out, shortly before launch dozens of screened candidates had been quietly and ruthlessly replaced by strangers, with mims that duplicated the originals. The ECP hadn't made a fuss about it, even once they'd realized how many passengers were compromised. Not much you could do, really. There was no way to go back, nowhere to go back to, and they desperately needed every body, even the worst of them. He didn't want to think too hard about the methods that must have been used back on Earth, to persuade people to give up their identities. No one would willingly give up their berth on an ark ship.

She swallowed hard. "I checked the defenses of the Lifehold. Broke through it eventually, towards the end. That was … worse…"

"Ah." He'd never imagined this part. He considered apologizing to her, about the gross deception the ECP had felt was necessary. He could explain, maybe make it better. Somehow, he didn't think she'd approve of his breaching security, even at this late date, even to her. Anyway, she was already speaking.

"I wasn't the only one to see what wasn't there. There were signs." She gulped again and pressed herself tighter against him.

He could feel her fighting the urge to melt into him. Might as well help her spill it all. "So what about when we reached Mira?" he prompted.

She gave a soft rueful laugh against his chest. "I'm pretty much useless here. Can't walk ten paces without freaking out, right? So I stayed here and listened. About the only thing I can do is pay attention to rumors around the station. It's not by accident we serve the sketchier BLADEs."

"And report back to…"

"People."

Goddammit, all this drama, and she still wasn't going to tell him everything. He smiled. She didn't need to tell him anything. A spike of cold slid up his spine. The hell she didn't. He had one real question, the same one he'd asked before. "Your job was to report back to 'someone.' Swell. How much of your job was getting to me over coffee?"

She pulled away. If there was guilt on her face, he missed it. "That was not important to anything." She hesitated. Still no guilt, but a little regret. "No, I'll be honest. The Thursday mornings were a way of feeding you information indirectly, weird stuff no one wanted to acknowledge officially. I was supposed to become somebody reliable but unverifiable. I did that. The coffees weren't supposed to be anything more." She took another deep breath. "But I liked them too much," she finished quietly. Finally her face flushed guiltily.

"And you never told me because…?"

"Well, security, of course," she said with surprise. "Also, it was pretty clear there was a leak, there had to be. No one was sure who it was."

He frowned. "You thought it was me?"

For a second, he thought she might laugh. "Don't be silly. But maybe someone close to you."

"Who?"

"Elma, maybe?" Vandham growled. Lila went on in a hurry. "No, not her, not really. But maybe H.B."

Jack considered this. "Huh, I can see that. Clever bastard, thinking he was somehow getting the jump on the enemy..."

"… and getting himself played," she finished his thought for him. "Honestly, I can play him, sometimes."

"And then somebody asked you to make me."

"That's just it. No one ever asked me. I just let it slide closer and closer and then I couldn't stop myself."

"Because I'm so damn gorgeous." The bitterness had finally gotten control of his voice

Her eyes were filling with tears, but she wasn't giving in to them. "Please, Jack, I had to keep doing what I could. I am so so SO sorry." Dammit, she'd been hanging around those fool Ma-non too much. "What else could I do? Please, you need to understand … I had to protect NLA … I had to protect you …"

At that, the bitterness evaporated. He found his breath with effort. "Lila," he cut in.

"Sir?" Habits die hard, so very hard.

"Did you ever want to hurt New LA?"

"No!" she responded sharply, with an instant steel in her spine. If a woman could cuddle at attention, then she was doing it. Her tone was shocked. "Never! I told you. You know that, please say you know that!"

Dammit, he'd known it the moment the accusation had left his mouth, all those weeks ago. Jack closed his eyes for a second and willed away the wave of guilt. Then he looked down at her again. "Did you ever want to hurt me?"

Surprise turned to fervent denial. "Never, never, I never wanted to hurt you, I knew it would be a disaster but I just couldn't stop, I wanted…, I …., I am so sorry…" Her hands fluttered against his chest, too shy to land, yet unable to stay away.

"Call me sir again."

"What?"

Vandham gave an angry growl. "Can't stop when I ask, can't do it on command, what the hell is wrong with you?"

"I'm sorry, I'm a bit overwrought," she replied, a touch pointedly. Still, her hands were now on his chest, to his satisfaction.

"No shit. I'm not having the best day either."

"I suppose you aren't."

Pause.

"Sir."

xcx2xcx2xcx2xcx2xcx2xcx2

[What followed was a detailed if slightly hurried discussion on the redevelopment of the Auxilary Refueling Substation 1.02. If anyone has the nerve to ask.]

xcx2xcx2xcx2xcx2xcx2xcx2

Vandham kept inching towards the door. Well, at least his brain was trying to. His hands kept moving back around Lila, and his mouth kept meeting hers, and well, if she wasn't inching towards the door along with him, he'd still be on the couch with her.

"I've got to go."

"Yes."

"Twenty minutes ago."

"Yes."

"Stop saying that."

"You asked me to, earlier," she whispered against his lips.

"Damn it, cut me a break."

She sighed, and leaned her head against his chest. "Yes." Then she pushed him away, not hard, but clearly. "I will see you when the tower is green."

His turn to say it. "Yeah."

"And not before."

"Maybe before. If I can manage it."

"Not. Before. You have too much to do."

"We'll get it done. If I have to beat every BLADE into a puddle."

"I doubt that will help."

He paused, right at the door. Then he dug around in his front pocket. "I need you to hold on to this." He passed her a small metal object.

"Oh!" For a moment, her eyes were as round as her mouth. Were as round as the ring.

"Keep it safe. We'll talk about it later."

"You should keep it." She darted it back towards him.

"I might lose it. Something might happen."

She looked lost, and clutched the gift to her chest. He liked how it twinkled there, between her breasts. Gave him an excuse to look that way. "If something happens, I won't want it," she said somewhat wildly.

"If it stays safe with you, I won't care either way. If it isn't, well, I'll find out what worms I've got in my head. Probably best if I never find out. So I guess I'll have to make sure the job gets done and fast." His smile gave the lie to his grim words. Confident, even a little excited, and very sure that he'd do his best.

Lila gave him a look full of judgement and the smallest silver twinkle, and then nodded shortly. "I will keep it safe. Do not do something foolish, or I will track you down and kill you." She paused a beat. "Sir."

He was on his way, laughing even as the door closed behind him.

A/n: This story is the official close of this arc. I think we can trust them to figure out all further problems. Lila managed to tell the truth, so so so now I think she can do anything, okay? Jack was patient, same for him. I've loved writing it, and I hope you've enjoyed it too. Thank you for reading. (Incoming shameless plug is shameless.)

As I may have said elsewhere, all the other things I've written came from these two dorks. I was too scared to put it up a year ago, because I LOVE THESE TWO DORKS, so I started practicing on Lin and Tatsu, the sweeties (Homework). Then came the bromantic chaos that Ch. 6 & Alexa's birthday created (Dances with Saltat, Noctilum Picnic, Bromance 1 & 2, Do a Test, Piece of Cake). Filler characters needed personality. Hence, Gino (Twitchy Tales of the Whale), which led to Rosalee & Diego (Tales, Rosalee, Day of the Dead), which led to Case (unnamed in Rosalee, Skell Robbery, much more coming). Once I'd built the station, it needed more staff, and they needed lives. Hence Ricky Bobby and Twyleth (Shield of the Ma-non & Happy New Year). By that time, I was in so deep, it seemed natural to jump to Wolf and Duna (New Faces and Three Sapphire Horns).

I've got no excuse for the utter weirdness that is Warawa (The Golden Nopopotomus). That's all on Monolith Soft. Bless them forever and ever.

HOWEVER … The arc should be done, but there are 3 not quite official stories, things that don't fit or are more head canon than actual story. Explanations & fluff, explanations & Eleonora, and flufftastic explanations & green-piggy's fun AU. So I'm not marking this as complete just yet.

Next up: EX01 (oh mercy is that not the best track of the OST, er, ahem, yes): Jack has yet another argument with Lila, so tedious.