A/N: First of all, I want to give all my reviewers a great big bear hug squeezes--you guys know you rock!!! Secondly, I want to apologize for this chapter not being very D/B-centric. Well, it is, but it's through the eyes of Alexis. She just fascinates me when she's not being all Jekyll-and-Hyde on the show. I know I promised you genuine D/B for this chapter, but the next one will have it, I promise. I just had to indulge the muse for this chapter. So, as usual, please review and I hope you enjoy!

Alexis Meade had never been one for sentimentality or nostalgia. She'd had no use for it, no place for it, no heart for it, evident when she came stalking down the runway in sparkly couture, panther-scary and militant, out for Bradford's blood.

So she was vaguely surprised at where her thoughts wandered as she stood in the hospital corridor and blankly observed Betty through the glass partition, lost in a vine-like network of tubes and a sea of stark white linen; stark white was so unBetty-like that she half expected Betty to wake up and gag at her swaddling and ask in her squeaky, insistent, sweet, bossy little way for Jello. She didn't, of course, and more than likely wouldn't, according to the doctors. But just the same, Alexis sincerely hoped she would, for the sake of rainbows and lollipops and fuzzy blue bunnies and all that was good in the world, sentimental things that Alexis had no use for but liked knowing they existed. Except for the part about the bunnies being blue. And for the sake of Daniel, who had lost too much, some of it her fault, some of it not. She'd thought they'd removed her capacity for guilt along with her Adam's apple, but she could've sworn she felt a twinge. Damn.

Through her own pre-coming-out research (she had always taken Wili's reports of the outside world with a grain of salt) Alexis had expected that Betty was a smart girl who, by all accounts, was being groomed as Sophia Reyes's protégé at MYW until all that bad business with Daniel and the crock engagement went down.

But Alexis had not anticipated or calculated, in all her wildest schemes, her shock and the strange, foreign, long-dead tightening in the chest area when she returned from her "grave" to discover her rakehell brother wrapped around the little finger of a tiny, unconventional, uncompromising Latina girl that barely came up to his shoulder. It had been Fashion Week, Alexis recalled, and she had been waiting for the moment to drop the bomb of her true identity on Daniel, alternately trying not to laugh or gag as he hit on her.

But when Betty came tearing through, clothed in an oversized Mode t-shirt that made her look all of about twelve years old, Daniel's entire demeanor changed. His face held an expression of gentle, un-jaded pleasure that Alexis had not seen since they were boys, before their father's affair with Fey had come to light, before their mother's resulting loss of all but a few of her marbles and the burning of a thousand copies of Mode, before the deluge of pills and booze and drugs and women that, as far as Alexis knew, started in full force for Daniel when he was sixteen.

Or that first face-to-face (or shoulder to face, as it was) encounter in the elevator—Betty's small, enthusiastic chirp of introduction, her neck craned upward to look her in the eye. Not many people looked Alexis in the eye, not even a stone-cold bitch like Wili had quite the nerve anymore. Not sure what they'd find there, she guessed. But there was Betty, openly curious but not insultingly so, and she had to keep reminding herself that it wouldn't do to befriend the girl who was so unashamedly, unflaggingly loyal to her brother. But with one attempt at a regal, condescending look into that open, earnest, bespectacled face, before she knew quite what she was doing, she found herself describing, admitting, venting the pain, frustration and ultimate victory of her transformation from Alex to Alexis, the whole bone-breaking, flesh-searing story.

Betty never flinched; no disgust, no judgment, not even awe, just curiosity, a genuine, matter-of-fact inquisitiveness of what made her tick, her thoughts, her feelings, her reasoning, her mind. She was the first, maybe the only person since the bandages had dropped away who didn't treat her like a freak, the Queen of the Borg Hive, freaking Seven of Nine, a product of a skilled scalpel to be admired, even held in awe, but never truly seen as anything, anyone real.

Alexis had had to forcibly wipe off the small, quizzical smile that had unconsciously crept onto her face as she stepped off the elevator that day and replace it with a predatory take-no-prisoners one.

Alexis knew that if Betty died, Meade Publications would be hers. Daniel wouldn't even try to contend with her for it after the loss of his life force, would fly off to some remote location to break in peace, and would turn the company over to her lock, stock and barrel, by telephone and signed, Fed-Ex-ed documents.

She found that the thought gave her no pleasure.

Motionless except for her eyes, as still and outwardly serene as the exquisite Grecian statue she'd been modeled after, she glanced at Daniel. In his vigil by, practically on, Betty's bed, he, too, was without movement except for his eyes.

They dazedly roamed over the blood-encrusted pearl necklace woven through his fingers.

The "B" was face-up in the palm of his hand.

Okay, well, that was depressing. Sorry. But please review just the same.