I swear, when I started this story I was like, "Oh, that should only take three chapters. I'll be done in a month.

HA.

070

Kaname paced and fretted.

Tessa paced and sniffled, her chin wibbling intermittently. Her hands trembled around a cup of tea, and she spooned sugar almost blindly into the cup without even bothering to stir.

Melissa paced and drank and smoked and swore.

And she yelled.

"YOU SENT HIM OFF WITH THAT FUCKING LUNATIC?"

That was the best of it.

"What in the name of Jesus motherfucking Christ is wrong with both of you!" she exploded, a cleverly concealed can of beer slamming down onto the table in lightly-carbonated protest. "Captain, no disrespect, but are you fucking insane? That psychopath took you hostage at gunpoint, made his best attempt to blow up a military submarine full of military specialists and military secrets and unarmed civilians - let's not forget taking an entire student body hostage - and please God, don't start me on what he's done to Sagara alone, even if Sagara wasn't my friend, I'd shoot the fuck out of that fuckface and rip his internal organs out through his -"

"Major!" Tessa yelped, probably just in time. "We appreciate the gravity of the situation -"

Mao's fist clenched around the can. "Really, do you?" she gritted. "That's my team, Captain. My team. Sagara. Weber. I approved Sagara's name for that mission. I practically sent him undercover myself. Any intel gathered indicating that he was alive should have come directly to me. The team assembled to cross into hostile territory for a covert snatch-and-grab should have been hand-pickedby me. The risk of saving one of my men should have been mine alone. Under no circumstances should fucking Weber have trotted his dumb ass off into the middle of goddamn nowhere with a terrorist fucking serial killer for any reason -"

"I never ordered Sergeant Weber to go with him!" Tessa cut in with a futile cry. "Never! I could never have - not even if I was certain he was reall alive, there's no -"

Kaname's guilt coughed delicately.

The other two women turned to her. "Miss Chidori?" Tessa prompted, clearly relieved that Melissa's wrath stood to shift away from her. "You're being incredibly quiet over there."

Melissa's stormy eyes narrowed. "Actually, yes. You are."

"Well," she started lightly.

They waited.

"Well what?" Mao snapped after another few moments of quiet.

"The thing is," she started again. "I mean, it's kind of funny, really. This, um, you know. The other day. When Kurz left."

"When Kurz left, in secret, without telling anyone, or even speaking to anyone after Sagara's service," Melissa prompted. "Yeah, then. What about it?"

"Kurz may have talked to - well - I mean, I saw - he was here," she admitted, chomping down on her thumbnail nervously.

Melissa leaned forward, looming a little bit. "Who was here?"

"You know who."

That earned her a pregnant silence.

"He was on my ship?" Tessa shrieked. "How could he - no one even - I - how could you not tell me this earlier?"

"And what the fuck could he possibly have wanted, do you think?" Melissa asked coldly, her voice alarmingly calm but rising measuredly. "To pay his respects? Leave flowers? Or could it have been the most likely option, which was confirmation that Sousuke was stone dead? He's a big-picture sociopath, Kaname, not some honorable holdover from the old days, paying his last respects to his fallen foe. If he was here, he's most likely in the middle of something. If it involves us, it's really about you. And if it's really about you, then I bet money he's creating some kind of decoy to isolate you now that his biggest obstacle is dead. And with Kurz out of the picture -"

Kaname's hand came down on the table, hard enough to hurt; vehement enough to startle her. "He was telling the truth!" It came out almost as a scream, anything to drown out Melissa's anger, and crushingly reasonable logic. But it came out in a stream suddenly, down to little things that she'd pondered in passing, fragments of a dream from the night before, and generally nothing to prove that she was right - but dammit, she was a Whispered. Even if she had no proof, she knew.

"He was right," she confessed breathlessly, "I don't know how he knew, but he did. I knew. I knew it was wrong the whole time, but I didn't want everyone to think I was crazy, but I - I felt him. Sousuke. I thought at first it was just me being hopeful, or delusional -" She swallowed and looked at Tessa for a long moment. "But we don't get to do that, do we, Captain?" she said boldly. "You can tell when it's real, can't you?"

Tessa looked uneasy under her gaze. "Well I - Miss Chidori, I can't necessarily agree with you there. I can't simply be hopeful and chalk it up to my extra-sensory tendencies, certainly you understand -"

"I knew he was alive," she said flatly, some of her confidence returned to her. "I've, um - I've tried to contact him. But I can't... he's not responding. He's pulling back from me. Originally he reached out to me, and I could feel him -"

"Kaname!" Tessa yelped. "That is so incredibly dangerous -"

"I was careful!" she assured her. "He was there, I've only ever been able to kind of sense him abstractly, and literally never before this - I guess because he was looking for me. But now it's like I'm being shut out. So I'm not even getting close enough to worry about not getting back out."

Mao cleared her throat. "You've both lost me. But since I don't really give a shit, please don't bother filling me in."

"The point is, he's alive," Kaname insisted. "Kurz is with him, and he's bringing him back."

Mao's frown deepened. "Yes. But in what kind of shape, is the next question. You didn't hear his voice when I talked to him. I don't have all your Whispery shit, all I have is my gut, and it's telling me that he's hiding something, and if Kurz is worried enough that he's not blabbing everything that crosses his mind, then it is something bad. Otherwise he'd be wallowing in his laurels or whatever, playing up the hero card until we killed him."

Tessa's eyes lowered. "I don't have that particular... the... your proclivity, Miss Chidori. My own capabilities go in other directions. And every time you attempt to do that… you know the risk involved."

That was an understatement, and she knew all that stuff already, but still. She was always subconsciously keeping some kind of an eye on him, even in a crowd with no direct line of sight - although that was mostly just so she'd know which was to run when someone inevitably found out he was heavily armed at all times and she had to come to his rescue because he was an idiot.

She closed her eyes and thought about the meticulous order he kept his mind in; the dusty crevices where he filed away information that he found mostly useless but held onto just in case - such as proper attire for the junior class dance and the common courtesy of a corsage, for pete's sake -

The small ripples he left in his wake as he moved and thought, as opposed to the splashes of other people -

She fanned out a little, trying to create her own ripples just in case he was paying attention. It was yet another one of those things she had never done, or even thought about, but it came quite naturally to her. And she had exactly no basis from which to assume that he would be there, except that he had been before, and perhaps might be again, and if he was, she would find him.

A shadow flickered across her mind, quiet and familiar - distant, but receptive.

Sousuke?

Her awareness of him blossomed, but stayed hazy and uncertain. His mind buzzed with a million different emotions – fear. Sousuke was never afraid -

"Miss Chidori!" Tessa burst in, her eyes wide. "What are you doing? You can't just -"

And then he swept in, razor-sharp and unmistakable, swirling around and behind Sousuke like they were braided together.

Then nothing.

The connection went quiet, the soft patterns of Sousuke gone, but the third party remained for a moment, blocking her.

Back off cracked like thunder in her head, and she reeled physically as well as psychologically, her chair tipping over backwards and taking her with it.

And then nothing. Just silence and emptiness.

Tessa looked as shell-shocked as she felt. "What in the world - "

"Who in the world," she corrected. "And the answer is bad. Like, seriously, really bad." She swallowed and tried to find the words to explain the feeling. The permeating feeling of not alone, the way Sousuke nearly radiated it.

"How bad?" demanded Melissa.

For a lack of words, Kaname grabbed the cream from the table and dumped every inch of it in Tessa's tea.

Tessa's face dawned with understanding. "Oh my God."