Thanks for sticking with me this far...

Warnings: Same as before

Spoilers: (duh) See prologue

Disclaimer: You know the drill...

Quick note: I've made Lin slightly younger than he is in the anime. I'd put him around 27 there, but for the purpose of this story, he's around 24. And while I realize his first name is Koujo, there is in fact a reason why everyone calls him Lin, even his love interest. ALSO, I'm editing this chapter so soon because I got a review (which has not shown up yet...) that it seems like Evie and Naru may be or have been together or had feelings for one another.

NO. LORD NO. Never even crossed my mind. In my head, they're more like siblings, even if Evie has a sort of flirtatious personality. Sort of like Bou-san asking Mai to marry him, or taking her out on 'dates'. It's all to get a rise out of him. Mai and Naru are just too adorable. It was hard enough breaking up Lin and Madoka, and normally I wouldn't but it seemed like an interesting plot development. Sorry, had to clear that up...

Chapter One

"Where is he?"

Mai wasn't entirely sure how this happened, but as per usual she decided to just go with it.

"My name is Mai. I'm Mr. Shibuya's assistant. Maybe I can help you," she managed to grind out in her rather broken English. Odd, considering she was in Shibuya and the only people she knew of who spoke the language fluently were currently hiding…well, working in the room next door. On the bright side, she sounded half-way polite. Her grasp on her explosive emotions was getting stronger.

"Where. Is. He," the woman growled deliberately, the slightest hint of an unrecognizable accent coloring her words. Curiosity warred with her increasingly flared temper. After all, she'd been napping innocuously when the door slammed open and this vibrant-haired harpy had violently squawked her way into the office. She wanted to know who the demanding stranger was. Mainly, she wanted to toss her onto the street.

Despite herself she could feel the….colorful words bubbling on her tongue. "I—."

"You shouldn't scream so. You might wake the dead." The air she'd gathered left her in a heavy rush and she whirled around to identify the source of that amused voice.

No freaking way.

Lin stood in the doorway. Well, stood was too strong a word. He leaned against the doorframe casually, arms crossed, a gentle smirk on his lips. I think he's been spending too much time with Naru. But the laughter in his eyes was definitely all his own. It's still weird.

The woman's coal black eyes shot to him in fury, and almost immediately softened. The look was gone in a moment, replaced with something notably more feral. "Would you prefer that I scream another way?"

Now, she could only understand about half of what they were saying, but Mai knew people, could read their intent the way a bear read fear. For all intents and purposes, she knew Lin, even without his background, and knowing him she could say with utter certainty that never in their time as colleagues and friends(?) had she ever seen him act so warmly towards someone. Except maybe Naru. She might even go as far to say he was flirting with her.

What the hell?

He chuckled and turned to Mai, her confusion probably very evident. In Japanese for her sake, "Taniyama-san, this Evelyn Naoki, an old friend of mine."

Naoki? She doesn't look Japanese.

"Forgive me," a new voice chimed in, sweeter with the more familiar language, but the inflection was the same as the angrier tone from earlier, "I let my temper get the best of me. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Naoki-san held out her hand and she stared at it, momentarily forgetting what exactly she had to do. Her skin was pale and luminous, and seemed to sparkle the longer the younger girl stared. Was she a ghost? But then she coughed delicately and Mai shook herself awake.

"Oh! I know what you mean. Naru likes to push my buttons." Her grip was loose and delicate, unlike John's firm and jarring shake that was apparently a Western custom. More interestingly, a jolt jumped from the stranger's palm to hers, so minute she wouldn't have noticed it had her focus been otherwise occupied. Mai's hand tingled, not unpleasantly, but she wondered still if she should inform Naru.

"Naru?" she asked, confused, if her head quirking to the side was any indication. She looked like a puppy, for a moment. A very elegant puppy in a mid-thigh white dress. A shiny black crucifix for a collar.

"Taniyama-san has named Oliver Naru. Short for narcissistic," Lin explained, though it was less robotic than it normally tended to be. He was still smiling, albeit his smile, the half-smirk-half-grimace that somehow looked warm and happy. She wanted to know more about this woman who could make a mountain move.

Naoki-san blinked theatrically to dispel her surprise. "Fitting."

"I thought so."

She watched them speak with what could be considered an unhealthy level of interest, but they were fascinating. It was obvious they'd known each other for a long time, even if she couldn't understand the majority of the language tripping from their mouths. They must not have wanted her to hear. Instead she honed in on the mystery woman's face. She wasn't Japanese, that much was clear. Her hair looked softer than Mai's, finer, and colored a shocking coppery-gold. It fell down her back in curls to her waist and she wanted to braid it. Her own hair was too short. She couldn't be older than Lin, maybe a year or two older than Naru.

She was beautiful (go Lin), but moreover, she was familiar.

"What are you doing?"

The frame clattered from her grip. Please don't break. It didn't.

"S-sorry, Naru. I was just cleaning out this old desk and….." she trailed off, because he'd never had patience for excuses. The frustration she'd seen in his face retreated and he stepped closer, picking up the picture she'd so carelessly dropped. Avoiding his gaze, she lowered her head in shame. She had been snooping. Two years she'd worked here and she never opened the drawer in her own desk.

He inhaled, and she prepared for the reprimand. "I'd forgotten that was here."

"I'm sor—what?"

"Where did you find this?" He didn't sound mad, only curious. Well, it was still demanding.

"I-in my desk," she stuttered, a habit she'd been working on breaking. It wasn't working. He nodded, but he was gone. His blue eyes were focused on the picture, skipping from point to point, no doubt analyzing the angle and the lighting, maybe avoiding the eyes she'd only caught a glimpse of. She remember the shape had been pretty.

He turned his shoulder, a silent invitation for her to look. Without touching him, she still managed to invade his personal space.

It was a girl. She was smiling, a soft smile that touched her eyes and made the deep black of them look less endless and more like crushed velvet. The cross around her neck stood stark against her pale skin.

"Who is she?"

For a moment he looked like Gene, his lips turned up warmly. "You remind me of her sometimes, when you yell at me."

As per usual, he avoided answering so skillfully had she been anyone else she would've fallen for it. In any case, she rephrased her question. "How do you know her?"

He sighed and put the picture face down on the tabletop. As he walked away, she thought he wouldn't answer. She would've been less surprised if he hadn't.

"My parents."

"Mai! I asked for tea twenty minutes ago." There were footsteps, but they stopped. She didn't need to move her gaze from the chatting pair to know it was Naru. If his restrained anger hadn't given him away, the cat-like tapping of his feet certainly did.

When she did look at him, though, she couldn't look away.

His eyes were wide, something that happened often in cases but only fleetingly. Now they were wide and seemed disinclined to regress to their normal state. His mouth had fallen open a little too, and if it had been anyone else (maybe Bou-san) she would've teased about catching bugs.

"Close your mouth, Noll," Naoki-san said playfully, maybe a little exasperated, but then her expression shifted, as if she remembered that she'd been angry, and she marched up to him with murder in her eyes. Mai's stomach was screaming. Stop her.

"You bastard."

She felt like she should gasp, then thought better of it. Her life was already too wrought with complex, barely comprehensible melodramatics as it was. Plus she'd internally called him much worse, so it would be hypocritical of her.

"Evie," Lin warned, right foot sliding back to better his stance. Like he was about to fight something. Someone. He seemed unusually uneasy, at least he was emoting said unease physically, which was more than enough warning in her mind. The air around them was siphoned of warmth, cold seeping into her clothes and under her skin and she wondered if Lin's shiki were reacting to the tense atmosphere. Or maybe….

Naru was still, posture rigid as always but he was bent at an odd angle. Around him hovered a sort of film, wavering, but when she blinked it was gone, like those specks in your vision that disappear when you try to look at them directly. Could it be Naru? She remembered last time he'd used his powers, the same film and the clammy air. The resulting hospital trip. This situation now was too similar. If Mai didn't know any better, she'd say he was panicking.

Stop her!

Mai didn't figure it out in time. Before she could move, a hand shot out and cracked across Naru's cheek. He didn't awaken from his dazed state, in fact he seemed to sink deeper into that void, a red handprint pulsing angrily on his face.

Naoki-san recoiled, as if he'd been the one to slap her. "You didn't tell me."

Naru stared wordlessly, his mouth opening and closing, searching for words he'd never lost before.

"I found out two days ago. How could you?" Tears glistened at the corners of her narrowed eyes, but her glare didn't waver. "I loved him too."

"E-evie?" Naru stuttered. He actually stuttered.

Who the hell is this girl?

"Why didn't you tell me Gene was dead?"

Mai set each teacup down, careful not to disturb the perfectly brewed warmth inside. Steam curled in delicate, undulating swirls and she watched it, distracted, waiting for someone to move first. She hated moments like these, the suspension in anticipation, the reticence of stubborn people. They made her skin crawl and her impatience pique. The silence was too constricted.

Add the all too familiar pulse in her stomach, and Mai was writhing internally. There was something about Evie-chan that didn't sit right with her. The feeling was different though, not the cut-and-dry 'bad' or 'good,' but something teetering between the two. Something inherently good, creating evil. Something evil pretending to be good. It's growing, the voice in her heart that wasn't really a voice insisted.

She really wished someone would speak.

Naru, as if accepting her unspoken challenge, claimed his cup first, letting the steam waft over his face before he took a bold sip, heedless of temperature. If it burned him, he didn't flinch. He never did.

"I humbly accept," Naoki-san muttered formally, tripping over her pronunciation slightly but nonetheless clear, before taking a tentative sip. Lin ignored his cup. As per usual.

Thus the floodgates were opened. Mai, not to be outdone, spoke first. "So, Naoki-san—."

"Call me Evie. Or Evie-chan, if the suffix drop is uncomfortable," she interrupted half-automatically. Mai smiled warmly, though it was lost on the pensive woman staring intently at the coffee table.

"Evie-chan, how do you know Nar-Oliver?"

A hesitant smile stretched her lips. "Call him Naru. I know I will." Some of the tension seemed to melt from her shoulders, and she sat up taller, smiled more confidently. "As for how I know Naru, we grew up together." The look on her face turned soft, wistful. "Our parents are good friends."

Somehow, Mai couldn't picture them as children together, playing, teasing each other. It didn't help that she suspected Naru had never at any time in his life been a child. They just seemed too distant, too reserved to have shared a past. He wouldn't even look at her.

Then she thought maybe they were actually very close. Evie had slapped him, and that of itself was an act of intimacy. There was too much tension buzzing in the air for them not to have history.

"Are you…like him?" Us, she corrected in her mind. "A spiritualist, I mean?"

Evie's brow knit together in confusion, and she glance at Naru, who simply nodded, as if she would magically understand by the gesture. "Yes, you could say that."

What? Another one?

"I have what's called ESP-HE, or extra-sensory perception of human emotions. Otherwise known as empathy," she explained mechanically, like reading from a textbook. She seemed bored with the idea. Naru was suddenly watching her, smirking at her. She's hiding something, the not-voice said, or maybe it was Naru's look.

"What does that…entail?" The words sounded too formal to Mai. Like she was speaking with a client, rather than the friend of a friend. Naru was already looking at her uncertainly from his spot beside her on the couch, though beside was a generous term. He managed three feet of space between them on a four foot couch.

Evie didn't seem to notice. "There are several different manners by which someone reads emotions. I tend to feel them on my skin first, but if I'm either abnormally reckless or the situation calls for it, I 'read' them, which really means I feel them firsthand. I try to avoid that. Sometimes, if they're strong enough, I see them as colors."

"Post-cognitive?" Something like pride layered Mai's voice. Lin gave her an impressed quirking of the lips from his seat across from her, not quite enough to be called a smile, but she cherished it anyway.

Evie hummed in assent. "Limited, though. In that case it's more like psychometry, but without the physical senses. My gifts exist more in the present. For example, at the moment, Naru is feeling, something he apparently does from time to time, a combination of happiness, guilt, and bewilderment." She paused, tilting her head pensively. "And now he's irritated."

Mai giggled behind her hand while blatantly ignoring the scathing glare sent her way by a visibly bristled Naru. When that seemed to fail, he turned his fury to Evie, who merely shrugged. You asked for it.

"If we're done playing Twenty Questions, would you mind telling me why you're here?" he asked (demanded), pinching the bridge of his nose. Failing composure meant he was either tired or frustrated. Probably both. Mai pushed her untouched cup of tea towards him, and he took it without question.

"I was mad, I got on a plane, I bitch-slapped you. My not-plan has been for the most part fulfilled," Evie rattled off, smirking. She beckoned to him with that smile, challenged him. She's worse than Madoka.

"I gathered that much," he deadpanned. Evie had enough sense to sober, hands twisted on her lap as the room fell silent. Mai wondered if she felt the confusion humming in the air, the irritation. If it crawled along her skin too. Probably more so. Emotions were not abstract to her. What a baffling thought.

"I'm going to pick up lunch," Lin declared in as awkward a tone as he could manage and turned to her, "Taniyama-san, join me."

Sometimes she wished he and Naru would actually ask questions. Then she could at least pretend to say no once in a while. Regardless, she rose to her feet and skittered after him, only pausing to wave goodbye. Naru wasn't watching her, not that she expected much in way of a dismissal. His eyes on were on Evie.

And they were sad.

He looked like a weather-eroded statue. One more storm and he'd crumble. Evie tried to recall if his eyes had always looked so flat, or if they'd quietly ignited. If his posture was that precise or if he slumped over a book. The door slammed shut, and his shoulders fell minutely.

She reached out, tasting the air around him, and searched his second skin for pores, cracks, gashes, anything she could slip through. Long fingers probed haphazardly, uselessly. He didn't want her reading him. She needed to.

Evie sighed. "Just tell me why."

His gaze was steady. Voice silent.

"You should have told me," she tried again. Find the nerve. Pluck it. Hate yourself later. Nothing about his expression gave him away. It was his eyes, the silent implosion, flickering to the right then to the left. Uncertainty was his enemy, but her ally.

"I didn't realize I was a chaplain," he said monotonously. Cold.

"Gene wasn't a fallen soldier and I'm not a faceless next of kin."

He should have shifted. He used to do that, when he was uncomfortable, too graceful to be called squirming, more a purposeful repositioning. She prodded further, sought what he felt because she'd never know otherwise.

"What do you want from me?" There was his shifting, from flat to teetering along the edge. His glare burned along her cheekbones. "An apology? I don't see the purpose."

"I should've heard it from my brother."

"I'm not your brother." She was expecting it, but it stung regardless. He was cruel when he was cornered. She was too. Something she'd learned from him. Or he learned from her. "Your parents told me." He flinched with his eyes. "I felt everything. Luella touched my hand."

Noll shut down. "I touched his shirt." No trace of self-pity, a statement of fact. Her gut twisted.

"I know." I'm sorry. She didn't even assure herself that given the opportunity, she would've taken his place. It would be a lie. His was a burden no one else could handle. Evie wasn't sure that he could, not this time.

The fingers retracted from his mind to skim along his skin. There wasn't the sharp pulsing she'd felt from Luella and Martin, rather a slow undulation, a rippling. He had too much self-control. So much that he could diffuse his emotions throughout his body, feel them in every nerve, make them tangible and real and not the abstract things he had no hopes to understand. He could torture himself in the effort.

Evie felt sick with self-loathing. In her own grief, she'd ignored his. "Let me in."

He eyed her disgustedly. "Why? You already know what I feel."

"No," she insisted, her voice twanging with desperation, "No I don't know. I need to know. Show me."

A twisted sneer contorted his beauty. I don't smile. Gene smiles. I sneer. He was wrong, of course, but neither Gene nor Lin nor she could tell him otherwise. "You're pathetic."

"Maybe. Probably." Her stomach screamed at her. "Show me."

The sneer was gone, so suddenly she didn't see the transition, the slacking of his muscles into blankness. It was too old a look for an 18 year-old. When he spoke, his voice was the raspy droll of an old man. "No Evie." He looked at her with flat eyes. She could imagine a film glossing over the deep, clear blue. "You are not using me to punish yourself. Don't waste me like that."

How poetic, she thought, before all connections snapped. Her mind broke. Her body slumped into the couch. She was suddenly very tired. They made their professions in death, but it seemed neither had been prepared to wallow in it.

"I didn't say goodbye," she said stupidly, sentimentally. They were useless words. No one lets go of someone so young, or anyone who dies, really. But the cliché was comforting, and right now she wanted nothing more than to curl up in a closet and sleep. Maybe a hug, but this was Noll. An insult to her intelligence and a withered stare were about all he could manage in the way of affection.

"Neither did I," he said simply, an unemotional fact, "but then, Gene never said goodbye to anyone."

She almost smiled.

"No, follow the rhythm, not the melody," Evie insisted, once again repositioning his hand on her back, just below her shoulder blade. It had fallen low, not out of some perverseness, but because he was lazy, and being difficult was his equivalent to whining. Their feet tapped against the polished marble, little clicks that were swallowed by leather and dust.

"Steady now. One-two-three, four-five-six."

It was their third lesson together this week, while the parents chittered on about spirit cultivation or psychic seeding or whatever it was they did when the children weren't around. Thus they were under strict orders to read over Doyle's essay and discuss the classification of a 'Perfect Medium,' and were granted use of the Davis' private, enormous(ly expensive) library in order to accomplish said task.

"No fooling around," Dahlia had warned, and it sounded dangerous through her heavy French accent.

So of course they were doing exactly that. Well, Noll put forth a valiant effort to remain focused. It wasn't until Evie blackmailed and bullied him into dancing that he actually abandoned his task. Even Lin, formidable for his fifteen years, was happily plucking tunes from the piano, his attention span admittedly as fleeting as Evie's for the moment.

Gene was laughing from his perch on the back of the couch. "Looking good Noll!"

The young boy shot his twin his patented glare, but it did little to dampen his mirth. Evie seemed not to notice as she tugged him about on the floor, insisting that he lead but not relinquishing her control. Noll wondered if she'd notice him slip away. Or if Gene cut in.

He refused to give him the satisfaction of a pleading stare. Absolutely not. She stepped on his foot. Not happening. Gene's smile was positively, viciously delighted. He'd always known his twin was less the charming philanthropist and more an amoral sadist.

"You need to feel the music more," Evie scolded, her fingers absentmindedly keeping time on his shoulder. His mind, starved for distraction, picked apart her vowels, the equal stress of her words. Her accent was different from those of his adoptive parents. More a mix of an Irish brogue and South London lilt. Slightly more musical than Luella's. It made him sleepy, to hear Evie speak for any extended period of time, though half the reason could be equated to boredom.

"What the bleeding hell does that mean?" Gene declared raucously, his mouth forming a clumsy imitation of her accent. He'd been mimicking colloquialisms and such since they'd arrived in London a year ago, and Noll's hypothesis that it would become less irritating with time was proven invalid as time went on. Gene grinned obnoxiously, jovial even as her narrowed eyes honed in on him. He'd been on the receiving end of Noll's contained, imploding wrath too many times to be bothered by Evie's contempt. Besides, with her big black eyes and princess curls she looked a little too much like Bambi to really pose a threat.

"You're nine years old. Don't use such language," Lin reprimanded imperiously from his seat at the piano, not missing a single note as he coaxed a minuet from the seldom used instrument. His smoky brown eyes skimmed over the music before him, half-reading, half-playing from muscle memory. So distracted, he didn't catch the childish hand-puppet and stupid contortion of Gene's handsome young face in mockery.

"I wonder, if I slap you, will your face stay that way?" Yet, as always, Lin possessed a strange sort of omniscience when it came to the twins and their respective mischief. And then there was his habit of completing a task with no more direction than his name. Evie had a running theory that by simply calling his name, he was granted a telepathic connection to the speaker, particularly Noll. Lin, of course, denied such a theory, but nonetheless it seemed plausible. At least in their world.

"Fine, sorry Lin," he mumbled, and had the decency to actually appear ashamed. It was difficult to tell, even to his own brother, whether there was any sincerity in that downward look. Probably not.

"You're hopeless," Evie declared, releasing Noll unceremoniously in favor of skipping about on her own, vastly more graceful without the burden of her unschooled partner. He wasted no time in returning to his work, knees drawn to his chest on one of the crushed velvet armchairs, book cradled in his too-small hands.

"I'm heartbroken," he deadpanned, turning the page idly. They fell into their respective activities in relative quiet, save for the more haunting melody reverberating behind the shut lid of the piano. The silenced unnerved him. When Gene was around, silence was a myth, something one heard about in dreams and stories but never actually experienced. He looked up from his book. A cursory glance around the room, listening for his clumsy footsteps, and he came to the conclusion that his twin was no longer in the library. They hadn't heard him leave.

"Where'd Gene run off to?" Evie asked, no doubt reading the unease he unwittingly projected. Lin said he'd go over mental shields next time, though his would be less effective than Gene's due to the physical nature of his powers. Noll shrugged.

"He didn't say anything. That's weird." She looked to him in confusion. "That's weird, right?"

He didn't answer for a moment, too absorbed and apathetic to remember the rules of social etiquette. Only as her impatient tapping began did he oblige her. "Not really. Gene never says goodbye when he leaves." Doyle certainly had a whimsical writing style, he thought as he read over the assigned essay.

She twirled on her toes. "Why not?"

"Probably," he explained with no small amount of agitation, "because he knows he'll see you again."

I almost forgot about Madoka. She might be in this, if not in a flashback. In which case she's around 29/30. Her age change would also serve a purpose, if she makes an appearance...

Also, the language thing shouldn't be too much of a problem, as everyone speaks fluent Japanese, but should the need arise, would you prefer me to distinguish the languages by English and Japanese? If I were to continue in my current fashion, you'd assume that whenever Lin and Naru and Evie are in a room together alone in any combination, they'd be speaking English. That sounds exhausting.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think, if you want more!

Please, I need help with motivation. Really bug me about updates. I really want to finish this story!