Author's Notes: An ending is in sight! I'd say there's about 7-10 more chapters left before this baby is wrapped up. I've got my conclusion settled on, now I've just gotta write it all out.

"Who do you think would last the longest out of all of us?"

"What the hell kinda question is that?" Zelos choked out a startled laugh, looking at Regal with raised eyebrows. "A little dark for poker game chatter, don't you think?"

The blue-haired older man shrugged, lifting his hands up so his palms were visible. His head tilted as he considered Zelos's reaction and how to explain himself.

Lloyd's nose scrunched up, but he seemed curious enough at Regal's inquiry. "A little out of place too," he agreed with Zelos despite himself.

"Our lives seem to be naturally chaotic and we are all proven to be incredibly reckless," Regal explained, the only noise behind his calm voice was the shuffling of cards coming from the corner that Genis occupied and the impatient tapping of fingers from Zelos's spot beside Lloyd.

"It raises the question, who do you think will last the longest? Just hypothetically, of course," Regal smiled warmly as if to assure them the conversation was harmless.

"Who cares," Zelos scoffed but Lloyd was soon speaking with an urgent tone in his voice that showed that the conversation hadn't sparked a hypothetical train of thought in his mind at all.

"What happens then? If we die! Who handles all the change we've started!" Lloyd was suddenly concerned and Zelos turned to look at him with an amused smirk on his lips. He could almost see all the threads that held Lloyd's mind together start to unravel as he realized that he wouldn't always be there to keep the peace. "We've seen what happens if somebody can't take orders correctly or misunderstands them—chaos!"

"Lloyd, it's just a question," Regal was coaxing him now, smiling warmly at his good-natured friend's needless worry.

"I dunno. It's perfectly reasonable to ask, given all of our histories," Zelos commented, giving Lloyd a side-long 'get over this now' glance, even though his statement was backing the red-cladded hero one hundred percent of the way.

"I think Lloyd would last the longest," Genis spoke up now.

"Oh, do you? I can feel your confidence for me oozing from your pores, so why lie about it?" Zelos's blue eyes rolled to accompany his sarcastic gibe.

"Why me?" Lloyd asked, his apprehension now replaced by thick layers of familiar confusion.

"You always last the longest," Genis laughed. "You're the strongest-"

"I resent that."

Genis continued as if Zelos hadn't spoken at all, "And you're the most stubborn." The teenager looked at Zelos with a smirk, "You can resent that," he informed him.

"Ohoh, thank you, kind sir," Zelos sneered.

The teenage half-elf chuckled before standing to his feet. "I'm going to get us some more goor goor, guys."

Just as fast as the moment appeared, it was gone from his memory once more, making Zelos feel chills rocket down his spine.

He had forgotten how Genis hadn't been there at the funeral. For a long time, while he rotted in prison, Zelos had assumed everybody was dead, even the teenager.

Genis had been as absent as Lloyd or Sheena, after all. They were all equally dead to him. Zelos pressed his head into the cold wall that ran adjacent to his bed and let out a shaky breath. His hand reached up to his shoulder and he began to feel for a blanket, as if the chills were caused by something physical he could control. He felt the scratchy wool from the blanket and tugged it tighter over his body.

"Zelos?"

An involuntary grunt came from his chest at the sound of a young male voice, and he pressed his forehead harder into the wall, the pressure becoming the only real thing connecting him to the world his body lived in. Although, with every second that passed, he felt himself pulled gently back into reality.

"… Zelos?"

There was a new voice, but it wasn't really new at all. It was more familiar than Fang's voice in fact. There was a tone of youth in this voice as well—a young boy of a smaller build than Fang was.

"He's not with us right now."

"Does this happen often?"

"Often enough since I've known him."

What the hell was that supposed to mean.

"I wish I knew healing artes," the younger voice sighed. "My sister specialized in that. I'm not… I'm not of any help to him right now."

"That's okay."

"Are you sure?"

"You being here, with your history and whatever, is enough," Fang sounded so much older compared to the voice of the other boy. "It's a lot more than he had when we got here a week ago."

A week? They'd only been in Triet for two days, tops. Zelos opened his eyes into slits, turning his atrophied neck-muscles so he could see who was speaking in their small hotel room.

A tall and very familiar boy with olive-skin was looking back at him. His dark brown eyes widened only a little at the sight of Zelos looking back at him. Fang wasn't usually one to look as emotional as he felt. His lips pursed to form a puckered line of worry. "Zelos, are you feeling better?" they opened to ask.

"Was I sick?" his voice sounded strange in his throat, like he hadn't spoken in ages.

"You've been in bed for five days," the new-but-not-really-new-at-all voice said and Zelos struggled to figure out from where it was coming. "Sounds pretty sick to me, idiot."

Zelos's eyes shut from the exertion. He couldn't find the owner of the new voice at all. He was there, probably only a few feet away from where Fang was standing, and yet he was out of Zelos's line of sight. His chest heaved, "I'm not… I'm not sick," he informed the two boys in the room.

"I think you just exerted yourself too much by coming here," Fang was speaking again, sounding so oddly reminiscent of Kratos that it made Zelos's stomach ache. (He would kill for Kratos's help right about now.) "It was a pretty long trip. That, on top of the heat and your injuries? Well, you just got into bed and never really had the energy to move since."

"I've been coming here for the past four days to make sure you didn't decide to die while I'm working in town," that new-old voice was speaking up again in a warm yet bossy manner. "You made an appointment. I know you usually don't keep well with dates and times, given your dirtied reputation, but I like to maintain a bit of order around here."

"You are… such a brat… Even now… after all of this has happened…" Zelos's voice faltered and faded, sleep overcoming him from so much exertion yet so little action. Fang felt sorry for the man who was ten years his senior, yet unable to move his neck more than a few inches without exhaustion overcoming him. Fang's eyes then went to the silver haired teenager standing across the room from him.

Genis Sage had obviously never been extremely close to Zelos. It was clear just by how the two always seemed to have a default amount of buffer space between them, even when one of the two was unconscious, that the relationship had never been reminiscent of real friendship. There had been a joint situation, Fang had gathered over the past week, which had been all-inclusive in many ways but had caused separation among their group. It had caused relationships with other people that were of common acquaintance of the two men, but it had never caused the two of them to get to know each other due to how large of a group they had traveled in. Zelos and Genis were of the same circle of friends, but something told Fang that, if left in the same room with one another, it was only bickering that transpired between them.

The silver-haired teenager didn't seem to notice Fang watching him. His clear sky-blue eyes were locked on Zelos's weak form and his young expression was weary. "I had assumed they had gotten him a long time ago. What with his heavy influence in Meltokio politics, it just seemed natural that he would be one of the first to get hit…" Genis was mainly talking to himself, Fang gathered. The prodigy half-elf seemed to have a habit of it.

"Until you two got here." Genis turned his attention to his fellow teen with narrowed eyes. "I thought that Zelos was why everybody else got possessed. I mean, the only people who are gone are the people who have come in contact with him on a regular basis… Although, I stand corrected, seeing as how he's here."

There came a tsking noise from Genis clicking his tongue against his teeth, his eyes going back to Zelos with distaste evident in his expression. "Well… however much of him is here, I mean."

Fang straightened up a bit, pressing his back into the wall while staying relatively close to Zelos's bedside. "You said 'possessed'." Genis's gaze lifted from the red-head. "Zelos said something like that when I first got here." Fang's arms uncrossed from over his chest so he could pull his hair out from in front of his eyes, giving Genis his firmest of looks. "Do you know what this thing is?"

Genis shrugged, putting one hand in the air— palm up—while the other hand mirrored the action at a lower altitude, keeping it closer to his hip than his shoulder. The half-elf shrugged once more, looking like an uneven scale. "I think it's a parasite. I'm not sure if it's a biological kind or if somebody is remotely controlling the parasite components with a new kind of technology, but there is another thing I've thought of. The idea that our friends have been cloned does occur to me occasionally."

"What makes you so sure it's a parasite as oppose to a replica?" Fang asked.

"Convenience," Genis admitted, his hands dropping. "I mean, if the technology to clone is out there then it stands that the technology to possess somebody is as well. I've seen possession on a minor scale before, too. And…" His expression fell into one of sadness and his eyes turned to Zelos, "And to think that all of our friends are dead and cloned…" His face hardened into the contours of anger. "It makes me sick," he snarled. "I don't want to think of that option. Not yet. Not if there is anything else to consider."

"Yeah…" Fang looked up at the ceiling. "You're right."

"Whatever this is, I won't know until I get close to somebody who is possessed and examine them," Genis said.

"What?" The taller teenager was back to giving Genis all of his attention.

"I don't want to assume forever," Genis scoffed. For all their bitterness towards one another, Zelos and Genis were actually rather similar, Fang noted inwardly.

"I need to look at one of them, to make sure. If there's any chance that it's a physical type of possession, than it can be cured. Getting this cured is my top priority."

"Oh…" Fang said oh-so intelligently.

"Don't worry," Genis sneered, "I'll wait until Zelos is better before I consider those details further."

That caught Fang off-guard. "What?" he gawked.

"You're obviously more preoccupied with his health than you are with everything else going on right now," Genis commented, his hands on his hips obnoxiously. "I'll need your help and his for when we've apprehend one of them. It'd be better for all of us if you were focused too."

"Oh," Fang repeated. He suddenly felt an urge to explain himself to Genis, who seemed to think that he was in awe of Zelos's elder status when that wasn't the case at all.

"It's not that I'm preoccupied because… Look, you—" Fang's tone took a pouty sort of intonation and he quickly made sure to get rid of it before he continued. "He's my friend, and he's the only real friend I've had since I've gotten here so I want to make sure he's okay and stays okay for as long as I can help."

"So you can get back home to Earth. Yeah, I heard this story the first time I talked to you," Genis rolled his eyes.

"It's beyond that now," Fang snapped in irritation of Genis's assumption. "At first, it was just to get home, but now… Now he's in need of some help. Just like you are," he accused.

"I don't know about you, but I'm fine," Genis commented, turning and leaving the room in a swift and graceful movement so that silver hair and the back of his blue outfit was the last thing Fang saw of him.

"That makes one of us," Fang mumbled as he plopped onto his bed, turning back so he could look after Zelos's sick form.

His friend's eyes were open. "It's not a parasite," he told Fang in a hoarse whisper.

Fang was so surprised to see Zelos awake, that the words took a moment to sink in. "What?"

"It's… It's an alien…" Seconds passed before Zelos was unconscious once more.

Fang reclined back onto his bed and stared dumbly in front of himself.

Well, that just cleared everything up.