It had only taken them a few minutes to realize that Serenity had no idea what the map was, and no amount of unintelligible hand gestures and one-syllable word explanations could make her understand.
"Home!" Rei jabbed her finger at the depiction of Japan again. A telling red flush was creeping up Rei's neck as she tried not to explode.
"Rei..." Ami put her fork down, ready to stop her friend.
"No, she's going to get this and she's going to tell us where she's from!" Rei glared at the blonde girl, who stared back at her with a somewhat frightened expression. Rei pointed at her, then at the map, asking "Home?"
Serenity bit her lip, looking like she might cry.
Mamoru was leaning back in his chair, eating his food and doing his best not to become as frustrated as Rei. He pointed to Colombia on the map, then made a vague gesture to everything around them. "Here," he tried. Repeating Rei, he pointed to North America on the map. "Home."
Ami bit down a sigh, pointing at the same spot. "Home," she agreed.
Serenity smiled, apprehension dawning and pointed one finger at America and another at Japan, smiling "Home."
"Does she actually get it, or is she just copying us?" Mamoru's hand itched to go through his hair for the hundredth time. He settled for putting his hands up against his forehead.
"She could be a dual citizen..." Ami had too much faith in this girl.
"Or an idiot." Rei folded up the map, shoving it back into her bag with extra force. "She was just parroting us."
"The idea was sound," Ami said trying to lighten the tension.
"Well, we still need to figure out if she wants to stay here or sneak back with us to America."
Serenity glanced between them as they spoke, lips moving silently as she repeated words she didn't understand.
"We could do the dog test," Mamoru proposed, an amused smile making its way to his face. "Stand on opposite ends of the hotel room and all call her to see who she comes to."
"But how would we know if she wants to stay here?" Ami asked.
"We leave her in the room, all walk out of it and see if she follows."
Serenity had stopped trying to follow their conversation and had returned to eating.
"Of course she'll follow," Rei said, taking another sip of her soup. "She's been shadowing us for days. She'll think we're just going to visit more of the natives looking for her family."
"We can't leave her here, even if she wants to stay," Ami said, her practical mind already having realized the truth of the situation. "She has no money, no job, and can't communicate with anyone who doesn't speak English. And even if they can speak English, she only knows enough words to barely get by."
"Please let her fucking stay," Mamoru begged, dropping his head onto the table. "I don't think I could handle having to take care of another person."
"We don't really have any other choice," Ami said, sympathy in her voice. "Rei is flying a public airline, so there will be security checks to go through and she has no identification. We're her only viable option." She finished off her rice dish, setting her napkin down beside it.
"I still don't see why we can't just turn her over to the authorities," Mamoru offered.
"Because," Rei said, lowering her voice. "There is clearly something unnatural about her and it would only be a matter of time before they figured that out."
"Maybe it was a one time thing? Not something from her but some miracle jungle plant she ate or something."
"It wouldn't have lasted for more than a week then, it typically takes only two days to digest food," Ami said. "And if it weren't something she ate, but something she drank or inhaled it would have lasted even less time."
Mamoru lifted his head off the table, giving the blonde who was still shoving food into her mouth a flat look. "I wish I'd never noticed that hair."
"Mamoru!" Ami reprimanded. "She would have died if we'd left her in that tree."
"Would saved me a lot of trouble," he muttered. Rei whacked the back of his head. He rubbed at the sore spot, glaring at her.
Serenity reached over to Rei's bowl, helping herself to the soup. Rei grabbed at it, but only succeeded in splashing some of it down the other girl's front. Serenity didn't seem to mind, and continued to drink the soup straight from the bowl.
"Try that when I'm not already full," Rei warned, folding her arms over her chest. Ami smiled.
"Great, she's a food thief too. She'll probably eat me out of house and home." Mamoru stood up and went to pay their bill while the other girls finished off their plates.
"Lets head back to the hotel, I want to go back to translating those glyphs." Ami pushed back her chair, stopping to stare at Serenity as she let out a loud belch.
"Why am I not surprised she has no table manners. This just keeps getting better," Mamoru had returned to the table to collect his hat off the corner of his chair.
When they re-entered the hotel lobby, an elegantly-dressed woman stood up from one of the chairs. Her hair was almost as long as Serenity's, but instead of blonde locks, it was obsidian. She moved towards them as soon as they were through the door.
"Serenity!" She smiled, rushing forward to intercept the girl. Serenity's eyes widened as she saw the woman, a huge smile appearing on her face. They met each other halfway, hugging tightly.
Mamoru, Rei and Ami stepped up beside the woman, who had another taller redhead beside her now. "Do you know Serenity?" Mamoru tried to keep the hope and desperation out of his voice.
"Yes yes of course! Serenity is my sister, I've been looking for her for so long..." the woman raised a hand to rub at the corner of her eyes. Her voice was thick with a French accent. Serenity was still smiling, already gushing in the foreign language to the other woman. The woman paused as she noticed Mamoru's face, but quickly shifted her gaze to the others before he noticed.
"So you know what's she's saying then?" Ami asked.
"Oh of course. Its a made up language from when we were children." The woman nodded at something Serenity said, replying in kind.
"That makes sense," Rei said, even while she wondered if this woman was lying. She had always had a knack of ferreting out the truth, and her instinct was rarely wrong. Right now her gut was telling her that this was wrong.
"Yes, Oh Serenity I'm so glad I found you!" The woman gave her a watery smile. "I was scared I'd lost you forever!"
Serenity, not understanding the string of English, just continued to gush excitedly in her language.
"How rude of me!" The woman extended her hand to the others. "I'm Nehelenia, this is my assistant Beryl."
"Ami, Rei, and I'm Mamoru." Mamoru pointed to the women in turn.
"Thank you so much for finding Serenity!" Nehelnia clasped both her hands over Mamoru's in a grip that was almost painful. "I am so grateful!"
Mamoru extracted his hand from hers, giving her a forced smile. "It was no problem, really. You have no idea how glad I am that she's found her family."
Nehelenia paused when Serenity said something, before replying in the same language, holding up a hand to pause the girl in her babbling and saying something to her.
Ami was studying the sisters with a scholar's curiosity. "Pardon my asking, but are you twins?"
"We are! Almost no one notices though, because of this," she held up a lock of her dark hair. "Only identical twins are very obvious in similarities...its uncommon for people to realize we're actually twins."
"This is wonderful. We were so worried that we wouldn't be able to find Serenity's family. Do you live in the area?"
"Yes, I own a villa not far from here." Nehelenia gave them a bright smile, and Mamoru couldn't help but notice that even with the disturbing familiarity of seeing that smile on Serenity, this woman's smile didn't reach her eyes.
Nehelenia snaked her arm through Serenity's, tugging the girl to stand beside her. Serenity didn't seem to mind though, and clung to her sister's arm. "You must want some compensation for your trouble, a reward for finding her?"
Rei glanced at the others, and noticing the gleam in Mamoru's eyes shook her head, smiling at the woman. "No that's not necessary, we are more than satisfied that now she will be with family." Mamoru glowered at her.
"Well, I'm late for a meeting, so I really must be going." Nehelenia gave them all one more smile. To herself, Rei thought that her smile was similar to that of an animal baring its teeth. "But thank you so much for finding Serenity!"
As she left with Serenity and Beryl trailing after her, Mamoru felt a twinge of foreboding.
After an awkward moment of silence, Rei spoke what they were all thinking. "Well, that was certainly odd."
"Fortunate, is what I'd call it." Mamoru said. "We're only a few days from flying out of this place, and her sister finds us in the nick of time."
"She was waiting for us at the hotel, so she must have heard we were looking for Serenity's family." Ami supplied. "It is odd though...that she would be waiting here at the hotel for us if she was late for a meeting...especially if she knew we'd found her sister, why would she not cancel the meeting or call to tell them she wouldn't be attending?"
"Yeah...and why didn't she ask where we found Serenity? Or about the condition we found her in or anything else? She could have assumed we were the ones that took her in the first place. It was almost as if she didn't care..." Rei frowned at the door they had disappeared out of.
"Maybe she was just so excited to find her sister she forgot to ask?" Mamoru said.
"No, I think..." Rei paused. "It felt more like she already knew."
Mamoru shrugged off the sense of dread he felt. "Better not to question our good luck. We've been searching for her family for days, and we finally found someone who knows her, and understands her. Serenity clearly knew her, and the woman knew the language Serenity spoke, so she wasn't lying. The resemblance between them was also clear. They were definitely related, so its not like we just handed her off to a stranger. Considering what the alternative was going to be, I'd say we got extremely lucky."
"Mamoru, Rei's right. If Nehelenia knew that her sister was injured and abandoned in that forest, then shouldn't we wonder if she was also involved in leaving her there?"
"No, because she clearly came here to get her back." Mamoru crossed his arms, his stubbornness rising. Now that he was in the clear to go back to his bachelor's pad in America alone, he was not willing to give up on the notion that they had done the right thing.
Ami sighed. "I'll postpone translating the ceramics and do a bit of research into Nehelenia, see if I can find anything. Just to be sure that Serenity is actually her sister and that we're not aiding a criminal."
"She's not our responsibility," Mamoru insisted.
Rei was still frowning at the lobby doors. "Still...I would feel better to knowing she's safe."
AN: Thank everyone for the reviews! I'll try to keep juggling this story with my website updates. You guys are competing with my website userbase for my attention (an unavoidable tug of war is going on for who gets updates more often).