I'm sorry some of them are so short, I just like to keep differing events in their own chapters. That's why I update a lot :-] Enjoy.

Part 5

Grace had thought that Adrian was doing better; that all he needed was to get some decent sleep. But it turned out that he was still not the same man from before the attacks. He was better than he'd been upon returning from Antarctica, yes. But he wasn't the same Adrian Veidt the news reports always raved about. He was withdrawn, depressed, and most of all he was in pain. She could see it. It may not have been physical, but sometimes psychological pain is much more severe. Physical pain can be treated; whether it be with antibiotics, painkillers, or any other kind of medicine. But emotional pain… that was far more difficult to cope with.

After eating a small amount of cereal, which Grace deemed as hardly close to enough, Adrian sat down with a note card and began scratching out annotations for a speech. Grace didn't know when she was going to attempt to ask her questions again, but now didn't seem right. He had far too much on his plate already. So she sat on the leather couch, watching him as he wrote. He barely acknowledged her presence while he worked, but when she tried once to open the curtains and let some natural light in, he nearly had another panic attack.

Her questions were quickly piling up. Why in hell wouldn't he look at New York? Sure, it depressed her too, but this was something… personal.

When he was finished, he sighed and stood, looking at her as if surprised she was still around.

"Don't you have something… more pressing to attend to?" he asked as he wrapped a white tie around his neck, flipped the collar of his black shirt down, and began to knot it.

"Well, my apartment building is gone, and so is everything I own. What exactly would I have to attend to?" she said, trying to tame her mane of hair.

"Valid point," he remarked as they both made their way to the elevator. They were to meet Mr. Campbell on the helipad on the roof at 11:30, where they would be flown to Ground Zero for his speech. If she weren't as fine tuned to his little quirks, she would have missed his reaction to that statement. But she didn't; his fists clenched ever so slightly, and his jaw set in anxiety.

The whole flight, he was jittery. He refused to look out the window, and he rapped his fingers anxiously on his knees. The bandage had been removed, and he was doing his best to keep people from noticing the healing wound on his inner palm. Grace had never, not in the history of all his television interviews, seen him like this. He was the picture of perfection, and he usually had this way of sitting statue-still. Not now.

The helicopter descended onto a spot cleared of debris right at the heart of the destruction. A few feet from the helipad was a raised platform, which accommodated a few foldout chairs, and a microphoned podium with a purple drape that read Veidt Enterprises. Solemn men in black suits were lined up in the foldout chairs, and only a few managed to even greet them as they arrived. In front of the podium, resembling a crowd gathered to watch a concert, was a massive group of reporters, media cameras, and amongst them, a few regular civilians looking for some answers. Despite the utterly dismal appearance of the razed city, the day was perfect. The sun hung high in the sky, but the breeze made it a day that required a coat. The wind blew at the little group of people, and virtually no one spoke; they just waited.

The first to get out of the helicopter was Mr. Campbell, and he immediately pushed back the hoard of other reporters that had already started throwing questions at Veidt. Next was Adrian, and he made getting out of a helicopter with windblown hair seem totally natural… like everyone should be doing it.

Grace was next, and as she cradled her own replacement clipboard, she realized that Adrian had frozen in place, staring wide-eyed at the destruction behind his gathered crowd.

Shit, Grace thought. He was really looking at it for the first time. He'd seen it a bit from the helicopter when they arrived from Antarctica, but not like this. Now he was standing in the middle of it, tasting the dust that still gathered in the air, looking at the people whose lives had been destroyed, staring right back at him.

Another executive, whose name Grace couldn't place, began rambling to Adrian, but it was obvious that it was going in one ear and out the other. As Grace watched, she noticed his hands slowly start to tremble, and his breathing getting increasingly quicker.

Shit, she thought again. Those were signs of another panic attack. Do something, she told herself. She couldn't let him fall into that phase while in front of all these people. After all, that's what personal secretaries do, right?

She scurried forward, grabbing Adrian under the arm and peering pleasantly at the executive that was tediously going on about "tried to limit the amount of questions."

"Excuse us, would you?" she said, and pulled Adrian, still white-faced and staring straight ahead, back toward the helicopter, where their words would be muffled by its still-spinning blades.

"Easy, okay. Breathe," she said, shaking him slightly to get him to look away from the devastation. He blinked several times, as if just now noticing that he'd gotten out of the helicopter, and looked at her. It was obvious that he was still shaken. "What are you going to talk about in your speech?" she asked, trying anything to distract him.

"Um," he stammered, and his hand fumbled in a jacket pocket for his note card. Never in her four-year career at Veidt Enterprises had she ever once heard Adrian Veidt say "um." That worried her. "I… I was going to compare the cities to Rome. Rome, when it was sacked, and then rose again."

"Good," she said, noticing that his breathing was returning to normal. "What else?"

"The funding," Adrian said, looking down at the note card in his hand like it was a phantom limb. "I'll address the funding of reconstruction."

"Wonderful," she said, laying a reassuring hand on his arm. He took a deep breath, and his hands slowly steadied.

"And Adrian," she said, leaning close and lowering her voice as low as she could and still be heard above the slowing helicopter blades.

He looked into her eyes uneasily, obviously still a bit unstable.

"Don't look at it," she said. "Look at the reporters, the cameras, your note card, anything. Just don't look at the city. You'll be okay."

He looked a little taken aback, and then relief suddenly washed over him, and he visibly relaxed.

"Mr. Veidt!" Mr. Campbell called from over by the podium. "It's time."