In the Closet

Disclaimer: The characters in question belong to Diane Duane. I own only the plot.

Author's Note: I'm sorry this chapter took so long. I've pretty much written the whole thing in the past 2 days. I'm excited at how quickly it came together once I figured out what I needed to do. Again, I'm sorry for the delay—I was a bit stalled after chapter 12, which is part of why chapter 13 took such a different direction (plus I liked the idea of seeing how the parents are coping). Anyway, we're back with Kit and Nita, and I'm ready to roll! If you'd be so kind as to let me know what you think, I'd greatly appreciate it. Enjoy!

Chapter 14: Levelheaded

Nita rolled over groggily, groping off to one side for an alarm clock that wasn't there. Her eyes shot open as she felt hands on her wrist. There was Kit, turning off the alarm on her watch after wrestling the buttons for a second. She mumbled a thank you, closing her eyes again. Then she opened them, trying to remember what they were doing in the same bed. "Nng?" was about the only articulation she managed to come up with.

Kit yawned, sitting up. "For such a tiny machine, the alarm on your watch is loud. It woke me up."

"Wasn't that the plan?" Now she remembered. She'd done some lucid dreaming last night to try to find the kernel. "I don't remember setting the alarm a second time. We did the first run and then decided not to do the second one."

He pulled himself out of the bed and started looking for his shoes. "I set your alarm so that I'd get out of here before anybody came in to get you for breakfast. I figured it was better than causing an intergalactic incident."

Nita sat up a bit, straightening out her t-shirt. "Can you find your way back to your room okay?"

Kit nodded, tying his shoe. "I should be fine. Worst case scenario I'll wander the hallway 'til someone finds me and points me in the right direction. How did you want to handle Nelaid today?"

She sighed, getting out of bed too. "I don't know. I don't think he's going to respond well to any sort of insinuation that any of his duties are being neglected. I think we do need to consider the possibility that someone is tampering with the kernel, and we need to know the last time it was accounted for."

Kit gave a half shrug. "Whether he responds well or not isn't the point. The point is that things need fixing around here. You figure out how to approach him and we'll get to the bottom of it. In the meanwhile, I'm starved. Are we supposed to go somewhere for breakfast, or do they deliver?"

"I don't know. I don't remember Dari mentioning anything about it last night. I'm going to get changed." Nita went into her pup-tent and found clean jeans and a t-shirt and put them on in private. She came out to find a girl setting out a tray of breakfast. A set of gauzy pink clothes were laid out on the bed.

The girl looked at Nita with curiosity and a little uncertainty. "I've brought breakfast, Miss. The Sister-of-the-Sun also sends these garments with her best wishes." She looked at Kit. "Shall I have your breakfast brought here as well, sir?"

Kit looked a bit uncertain. "Sure. That would be great. What's your name?"

"Myla."

"Thanks, Myla."

She did something halfway between a bow and a nod. "I'll send someone with it shortly." She left.

"Apparently we merit breakfast in bed around here."

Nita was staring at the clothes on the bed. "Pink is not my color. If I have to work, I'd really rather wear something comfortable and not feel quite so…on display." She looked over at Kit and found he was already helping himself to her breakfast at the little table. She shouldn't have been surprised.

He was taking largish bites of some strange fruit and crepe sort of thing. "This is really good. You should try it. And you'll be probably be more comfortable wearing that in the end than in your Earth clothes."

She made a face and joined him at the table. "How do you figure? These are my favorite jeans."

He nodded patiently. "Those are your favorite jeans and you're comfortable in them in here where it's just you and me. Out there," he jerked his head towards the door, "they will make you stand out even more than we're already going to stand out. It will make you uncomfortable. Besides, when in Wellakh…"

"…do as Wellakhit do?" She rolled her eyes. "Fine then. I'll be back in a minute." She grabbed her toothbrush from her pup-tent and took the pink clothes to bathroom. She came out a few minutes later, dressed. "Did you save me any breakfast?"

"No, but mine should be here soon. You can have it," he offered.

They were discussing ways to approach Nelaid when there was a knock on the door and a man entered bearing a breakfast tray as well as another set of clothes. Though they weren't gauzy, they were approximately the same shade of pink as what Nita was wearing. She had a hard time not snickering at the look on Kit's face. He tried to cover it up by thanking the man for breakfast and asking for his name.

"Tefsul, sir. Will you be needing anything else?"

Kit shook his head. "No, thanks."

The man left, taking Nita's empty tray with him. She sat down and started working her way through his breakfast. "I guess someone got the message that you were in here," she offered. "You're right, this fruit and pancake thing is good." She noticed that Kit was looking down at the pink clothing he'd been presented with and she tried not to snicker at him. "You'll blend in with everyone much better in that than your pajamas."

He looked at her with a wry grin. "Sure, throw my own logic back at me. I'll brush my teeth and go change."

Nita ate her breakfast, wondering how exactly she was going to approach Nelaid. Gee, Mr. King of the planet, when is the last time you bothered checking on your planet's kernel? Have you ever even actually seen it? She was sure that would go over real well. She looked up as Kit came back in the room.

He grimaced and asked, "Honestly, is it as bad as I think?"

She grinned. "Be glad Carmela isn't here."

"Oh, trust me, I am." He sat down and helped himself to a little more breakfast. "Any strokes of brilliance while I was gone?"

Nita shrugged. "I think we're just going to have to play it by ear. I think we need to ask him about the kernel before we go trekking around the planet looking for it. It's going to be awkward, and he's not going to like it—"

"—but we're supposed to be on the same side and we need to know about it if we're going to be of any help here, and as it is, we don't have a lot of time."

Nita nodded, leaning back in her seat. "When I talked to Millman the other day, he said even a single extra day of missed school at this point is going to cause problems for us—big ones. We have to be back before school on Monday."

Kit groaned. "There's something severely wrong with being expected to save the world and study for a history test in the same weekend."

Nita grinned at him. "Fortunately, we've got the whole saving the world thing down pretty well at this point I think."

He laughed, leaning over, and kissed her soundly. He ran caressed his tongue along her bottom lip, tasting the breakfast fruit on her skin. His hand was in the hair at the back of her neck, pulling them closer together. His breathing was a little shallow, but he didn't want to stop kissing her. Seriously, was there a better way to start the day than this? He scooted his chair closer to her, thinking that chairs were far too awkward a place to kiss. All the same, he wasn't complaining. He felt like he could kiss her forever.

"Oh God. I'm going to be sick."

Kit and Nita sprang apart guiltily and looked at the doorway. There was a petite redhead there, and of course she hadn't bothered knocking.

Nita's face flushed crimson. "Dari, I'm going to kill you."

"That'd speed up entropy." She shuddered, wondering if that's what she and Roshaun looked like when they were kissing. She turned behind her. "Roshaun, it's more or less safe to come in." She wrinkled her nose and looked at her sister, folding her arms. "I left him in the hallway in case you were getting dressed or something. If I'd have known you were doing that I'd have sent Spot instead and saved myself the emotional scarring."

It was hard to say who was winning the glaring contest at Dairine; Kit and Nita both had murderous looks on their faces, tinged with embarrassment.

Dairine waved them both aside as inconsequential as Roshaun came in. "Are you ill?" he asked. She rolled her eyes.

"Not yet. But let's get to business before they start playing tonsil hockey again." She strode across the room and flopped herself onto Nita's bed, then stood up with a look of revulsion. "Is this safe to sit on, or have you too defiled it?"

"Dairine!" Nita choked out.

Her little sister shrugged and sat on the bed, taking her older sister's embarrassed frustration as a "no." Roshaun came and stood next to her as she started to speak. "Good, then we can get started. Did you have any luck with the lucid dream kernel hunt last night? I assume you did try to find Wellakh's kernel?"

"We did try, and we didn't have any success," Nita said tersely. "Everywhere I looked felt the same—the kernel's presence was tremendously weak and never got any stronger no matter where I went."

"Roshaun, we have to talk to your father about the kernel. If nothing else, we'll need his authorization for the kernel's history to appear in our manuals," finished Kit. "Where can we find him?"

Roshaun looked at him impassively. "I do not know, but I can send someone to find him. Shall all five of us convene in my study?"

Nita looked at Kit, then shook her head. "We want to give this a try on our own. I don't want him to feel like we're all ganging up on him. It'll be counterproductive."

"Did you two have any luck with the underwater spring?" asked Kit. His face hadn't quite returned to its normal skin-tone yet, but he was doing his best not to sound as annoyed as he felt. Under normal circumstances he wouldn't mind tearing into Dairine, but now was not the time. They had work to do. He noticed the muscles in Roshaun's face get slightly tighter.

"No. We lacked some pertinent information. We plan to speak to one of the wizard's from that region shortly," he replied.

Kit and Nita looked at each other and Nita gave a slight nod. "You need to be careful. We think that a wizard might actively be interfering with the kernel as a means to destabilize things here. They might want to cause a problem, knock your family out of power, and step in as the new savior."

Dairine raised a skeptic eyebrow. "The two of you have barely been here more than twelve hours."

Kit took over. "It's a working theory, and if we're right, it means that you could end up walking into a trap today."

"I think the two of you should wait until we've got more information about the kernel."

Dairine's nostrils flared. "I'm not spending all day sitting on my hands. We need to fix this, the sooner the better."

"Dari, you asked for our help. We've looked at this situation. I think you need to stay here today."

She clenched her teeth. "You're not my mother."

Nita felt like she was close to crossing the two feet to her sister and shoving her. She took a deep breath to restrain herself and felt Kit take her hand. "Of course I'm not. But we're both wizards who have been at this a little longer than you have. You've got the worldgate set up—you can come back anytime during the week if we don't get this sorted out in the next two days. One wizard to another, I'm giving you advice. Take it or leave it."

"Great. I'll leave it." She started to get up, but was then uncharacteristically silent. Roshaun had put his hand on her shoulder. After a moment, some of the tension went out of Dairine. "I'm not making any promises," she said, to no one in particular.

Kit tried to keep his face neutral and said silently. Wonder what he said to her, Neets. Whatever it was, it worked.

"We'll go find Nelaid for you and come back and tell you when and where to meet him," Dairine said, sounding almost bored.

After Roshaun and Dairine left Nita's room, Dairine wrinkled her nose. "I guess I'll have to start knocking when I go in her room."

Roshaun's mouth turned up in the slightest of smiles at her discomfort. "Does the recent development between them displease you?"

Dairine shrugged, "No. It's not like it's a huge surprise or anything, but at the same time, I wasn't exactly expecting it now. There's more important things to be doing."

His eyebrow arched slightly. "Shall we postpone all such related activities until the crisis here has passed?"

She rolled her eyes at him and would have grabbed him by the front of his shirt and probably kiss him…if they hadn't been in a corridor well trafficked by the various palace servants. "Of course not. It just caught me off-guard. I don't like being surprised."

He nodded. "You and I have that in common." As the rounded the next corner, they saw his mother.

"Dhairine, Roshaun, how are you?" She came and greeted them both with the now familiar hands to the forehead gesture, taking one of each of their hands, and smiling at them.

Roshaun's voice was firm. "We're fine, Mother. Nita and Kit wish to speak alone with Father. When and where can they expect to find him?"

"He is meeting with the council now, where you should be. Will two hours from now in the garden be acceptable for them?"

Roshaun nodded. "I will join them now."

His mother gave him a severe look. "No, you will not. The council has been informed that you did not attend the meeting because you are participating in the intervention to help end our present drought." Her expression softened and she turned her attention to Dairine. "Did your sister and her partner sleep well? I have not been to see them yet and see if they needed anything."

"They're fine. We just saw them just a little while ago. They were having breakfast. Thank you for taking them in this weekend."

Lady Miril smiled. "Really, it was no trouble. I'll check on them when I have a moment. If there's anything I can do to assist any of you…"

Dairine smiled and reached out to hug her. "We'll let you know. Don't worry, we've got this under control."

With another smile, Lady Miril left and Dairine and Roshaun remained alone in the corridor, trying to decide how they might fill their time most productively.

Kit and Nita were still in her room, reading their way through as much of the information about Wellakh as they could. He was sprawled on the large bed on his stomach, and she was sitting at the small breakfast table with her manual propped in front of her. When anything looked particularly important they pointed it out to one another ad made notes on it. They were reading through separate sections to cover as much ground as possible.

"Did you know that there's been no recovery of the burned side of the planet? No plant life or anything has come back, even after all this time," Kit offered, rolling over onto his back and propping the book up on his chest.

"I can't believe that Roshaun's family line has continued unbroken, even with all the assassinations. Cousins, uncles…they always found someone to carry on."

They were surprised by a knock at the door. "Do you think it's Dairine again?" Nita asked. Kit shrugged. She raised her voice to make sure she could be heard through the door, "Come in."

Lady Miril glided into the room, smiling at the pair of them. "How are you, Nita? Kit? Did you rest well?"

Kit sat up, closing his manual. "Very well, Lady Miril, thank you."

"Yes, thank you very much for your hospitality," Nita added.

Lady Miril motioned for Nita and Kit to stand as she looked at their Wellakhit clothing. "Do the garments fit comfortably?"

"Oh, yes, they're excellent, thank you," Nita told her, turning so Lady Miril could see the fit.

"I'm glad. When I requested them made, it was necessary to guess at the proper fit. I knew you had more pressing matters than to attend a fitting."

Nita could only imagine if they had had to stand around with someone pulling at their clothes with straight pins and measuring them. She'd only had to do that sort of thing once or twice and never had any particular desire to do it again. "We've been researching as best we can. Does the Sun-Lord-That-Was have time to see us today?"

She motioned for them to sit down again, satisfied that their clothes fit well enough. "Someone will be here to guide you to your appointed meeting place with him in about half an hour. Are you finding everything okay? Is there anything you need?"

Kit shook his head. "Everything has been great. Breakfast was delicious, and the clothes are very comfortable."

"I'm glad. Are those books where you find your wizardry?" she asked, looking curiously at Nita's manual and Kit's. Nita turned it for her to see more clearly. "It's different from what we use here."

She looked at it curiously for a moment. "I'll leave the two of you to prepare for your meeting.

Nita watched her leave, reminded of her own mother again. Kit got off of the bed noiselessly and came and put his arms around her before she'd even realized he'd moved. She leaned her head back against his chest, breathing deeply. "I miss her so much sometimes, Kit," she said softly.

He leaned down and kissed her forehead, increasing the pressure of his arms around her. "I know, Neets. When all this is over, let's see what we can do about getting to Timeheart again. We're long overdue."

She nodded.

By the time Tefsul knocked on the door to lead them to their meeting, Nita and Kit were both ready. They carried their manuals openly and followed the attendant out to the gardens where Nelaid was waiting for them. As they passed by various people in the halls, Nita found herself grateful for her Wellakhit clothing and sandals. Even though they were shorter than everyone and their hair was the wrong color, at least with the clothes she didn't feel as out of place as she might have. She still wished her clothes weren't pink though.

The garden had gravel lined paths and the occasional bird bath.

Nelaid's hair was shining in the late morning light, but when he turned around to face them, they could see that he looked tired. He dismissed Tefsul with a wave of his hand. He wasted no time with pleasantries, acknowledging Nita and Kit's presence with a nod. "What did you wish to discuss with me?"

"We need to know about Wellakh's kernel, it's heart."

He tilted his head at them. "Why?"

Kit and Nita looked at each other. "We have reason to believe that someone may be tampering with it for personal gain. In order to rule out that possibility, we need to know where it is and who cares for it. You're the closest thing this planet has to a Planetary Advisor and we need your authorization to access the information."

"As aliens here, it is doubtful that such a vital element of my homeland would respond to you," he said dismissively.

Kit locked eyes with the taller man. "You haven't answered our question. Do you know where the kernel is? Are you the one who takes care of it?"

Nelaid raised his eyes up, looking over Kit's head, as though trying to maintain the upper hand while breaking eye contact with the Earthling. "It has not been necessary for me to interfere in the workings of Wellakh's kernel."

Nita took a steadying breath, trying not to lose her temper. "But do you know where the kernel is right now?"

He didn't respond, merely opening his hand and summoning his version of the manual.

They waited while he looked for what he needed to know.