AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am SO SORRY about the delays!!!! For the past week or so, the site's been wigging on me pretty badly, not letting me upload my documents AT ALL. I was going fairly mad, but it seems to be fixed now, thank God. On the upside of it all, I've got a few chapters stocked up, so you get 'em all at once, hooray! Thanks for hanging with me, and I hope everything works this time :)

All we need is a little bit of momentum/
Break down these walls that we've built around ourselves/
All we need is a little bit of inertia/
Breakdown and tell, breakdown and tell/

Peter saw a man standing in the center of the room, like the eye of a storm that had yet to start. He saw bones glowing like Halloween novelties, straight through muscle and skin with intense lantern light. He saw the curve of the Oval Office, and the pencil behind the President's ear, the small-but-expanding mushroom cloud that ate up wood and metal and flesh and kept going, burning against the backs of his eyelids until the heat was too much to stand and he was on fire with the rest of it, burning to ash—

Peter woke up screaming in a lurch of forward motion that was becoming all too familiar, with the taste of residual terror in his mouth. He bit his fist to keep from crying out again, not wanting to wake Katie or Claire, who were sleeping serenely on either side. He bent over his knees, trying not to shake and trying not to think about the things that had made him scream. He wondered if it would be like this the rest of his life, the dreams of the world ending and the obligation to save it. He heard Claire's voice in his head: What if you there's a power that you don't want?

He rubbed his hand across the back of his mouth, trying to rid himself of the taste of nightmare, and watched Katie sleeping on the floor beside him, her slow steady rise-and-fall of breath soothing him back to normalcy. The suite they were staying in had three rooms, but after a few fretful minutes of monsters-in-the-shadows aloneness, they had all piled into one room, dragging mattresses in to sleep beside each other. He looked down at her with shameless admiration, following the curve of her cheekbone down to the hollow of her neck, taking advantage of the only time he could look at her without hiding or sneaking sidelong glances.

She looked like some enchanted fairytale princess, haloed by shimmering witchspell and waiting for someone to kiss her lips, and oh, Peter wanted to be the prince who woke her. But he couldn't shake the way that her dark curling hair reminded him of another girl he had unspelled, the way his mind twisted her to look like the first girl he'd said 'I love you' to and the first girl he'd killed. He couldn't push her picture out of mind and he couldn't stop himself from flinching ever so slightly every time Katie touched him, or from wishing she'd touch him no matter how hard it made him flinch. He felt like he was poking at a sore tooth, tightening his hand around a knife just to know that he was alive from the pain that it brought and the way his blood ran out like red liquid satin.

Without warning, he saw her eyes abruptly flutter open, drawn up from sleep perhaps by his gaze, or the feeling that something was amiss. Suddenly she was no longer a spun-sugar sleeping princess but something very alive, a thousand times brighter and more animate by virtue of her dragon-green eyes, a thousand times more beautiful, lit to the level of a work of art. He felt her beauty catch in his throat like the sight of a miracle, unfolding like a morning glory as she rose from the ground, dark glossy hair sheeting around her in appealing waterfall tangles.

Before he knew what he was doing he was sliding his hands behind her neck and pulling her in, moving slow and silent like they were underwater but with a terrible urgency. She seemed to understand what drove him and her mouth met his with acceptance and a burning building pressure of her own, cool against his skin and tasting of cinnamon. He pulled her closer, suddenly finding it very important for them to be touching more than they were, and she leaned into him so that her hair fell around them and he couldn't see past her but he didn't care.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Claire sit up from her mattress and look straight at them, and he reacted like he'd been set on fire, scrambling to get untangled from Katie before he scarred his niece for life. Released and hastily pushed away from him, Katie fell off the bed with a bit-off scream and landed in an unattractive heap on the floor. Claire looked at them blearily, yawning with the last vestiges of sleep.

"What?" she said blankly, seeing their edged awkward expressions. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," Katie assured her hurriedly from the floor. "Nothing, everything's fine, Claire. Go back to bed."

"I heard noises," she said suspiciously

"Noises?" Peter said, airily innocent. "I didn't hear any noises, did you, Katie?"

"Nope," she agreed. "No noises whatsoever."

"Definitely not," Peter said, slightly drunk on pheromones and beginning to wonder if he was making any sense at all. "You must have been, um, dreaming."

"About noises," Katie finished lamely.

Claire looked at them like she was having deep misgivings about their sanity. "Right," she said, in the tone of humoring a person who was clearly out of their head. "I'm going back to sleep." She laid back down and turned to face the wall, apparently planning to ignore them until they made more sense.

That left Peter with Katie, who wouldn't look at him, and his memories, which were worse.

---

Claude didn't sleep well in strange houses—he was beginning to get used to this one, slowly but steadily, the feel of the beds and the sounds of the city outside, but he doubted he would ever feel truly safe. There was a deep-rooted twitchiness in him now, a mistrustful paranoia that turned every night noise into a murderer or a memory, and it came home to him most at nighttime, when the sounds were more startling compared to the silence. He'd managed to shake the fear partially in his years apart from The Company, but he'd honed himself to the Devaux building and now he was somewhere else, and he just couldn't lay still without wanting to turn invisible.

He was accustomed to three or four hours of sleep, to wandering places that turned graveyard in the dark. However, he was surprised to find Angela up, standing at the library window, staring out at what stars could be seen through the strident city lights. He came up behind her and put an arm around her shoulder, careful not to startle her out of whatever reverie had kept her there.

"This house is empty so often," she said absently, barely seeming to notice him. "We should have gotten a smaller house, those seem less drained when there's no one in them."

"Ah, so I'm no one, is that it?" he teased gently, pulling her away from the window and the thoughts of her sons that he could see her thinking like a neon marquee over her head.

"Of course not," she said, finally responding to him, slipping her hand down to his. "I meant my family. David was away so often, and Peter and Nathan have always taken after him, in their separate ways. We don't like to stay still, is what it is, we feel like we need to keep running faster and faster, but sometimes I wonder where we're running to, and how we'll know when we get there. I wonder if maybe we'll wake up one day and realize that we've been running so fast that we've missed the things we thought were important, as well as the things that really were." She smiled wryly at him, seeming to come out of her trance. "I'm sorry. I'm being awfully depressing, aren't I?"

"Not at all," he assured her with a grin. "I like your realism, I've told you that."

There was a pause, and then she said. "Do you think Peter's going to die?"

He had a second of better judgment, a small voice screaming something unintelligible about tact and white lies, but he'd never been any good at discretion, and his answer was out before he could dilute it. "Probably," he said.