Respect.

The word echoed through her mind-his mind-and it tortured him. Respect was-

Why did it bother him? Why did he demand it yet loathe it? Authority was something he despised, yet he was an authority.

"Let me teach you a lesson, Mireia."

She gasped, eyes fluttering open. Had someone fired a gun? She sat up slowly, putting a hand to her head, heart racing. Those strange thoughts, those weird twilight moments, were beginning to give her too much information about Vega. She'd learned a lot already, and didn't want to know much more. But somewhere between sleep and lucidity, thoughts just sort of happened, and it wasn't until they got intense that she realized something was amiss.

The sound of the gun still lingered in her mind, and she slid from the bed. Vega's bedroom was still not familiar enough to her, and she didn't like being here alone. At least in her apartment, she had her cats. Here, there was nothing. Just suffocating, terrifying silence. Chun-Li was gone, having had to leave shortly after the bullfight. It was kind of her to take the time out of her day to begin with, but Cammy was beginning to desperately wish that she could have gotten the woman to stay. She didn't like being alone.

Trying to keep her breathing steady, she approached the bedroom door, and opened it as quietly as she could. If someone was here, she didn't want them to know that she knew. And they most certainly were here, they had to be. They'd come to kill her for what she'd done to her step-dad, that awful, disgusting creature. They'd punish her for it, but didn't they understand she'd had no choice? It was one life against the other, kill or be killed. And the man hadn't died with his body, but he lived on in the despicable visages of all the other men she'd had to kill. Why didn't anyone understand her? Why were they so focused on condemning her?

She gripped the door frame tightly, focusing on reasserting her own identity. Was that how he thought? That it was his job to kill other people to rid the world of some problem? Was he so far gone that he didn't see that he was the problem? She'd heard once that a large part of insanity was not realizing that one was insane. And she'd had trouble grasping that. But now, being inside the mind of someone so disturbed, experiencing it first hand, she saw how someone could slowly be twisted into some caricature of their former self, some distorted shell, and she was overwhelmed with pity for him. But the pity was brief, and only for whatever part of him may have still known that what he was doing was wrong, if it was still in there. After all, he didn't deny that he enjoyed killing these men.

Her eyes wandered over the dark flat, familiar to his brain but a mystery to her. Where could someone be hiding? The thought frightened her, and she couldn't bring herself to move. Moving would give away her position. So now she was stuck here, standing motionless by the door frame, waiting. She could stand here all night if she needed to. Just wait for the intruder to make a noise. It was nearly a half hour of tense, silent watching before she noticed that this was irrational. Her own fear, coupled with his paranoia, left her paralyzed there, barely breathing, listening intently. With a sigh that seemed like thunder in the silence, she crept back towards the bed. Checking the phone, the time read three forty-two. She couldn't exactly call anyone she knew to comfort her. Barcelona was only ahead of London by an hour, but Chun-Li was definitely asleep by now. And Rose wasn't even the sort of person to have a telephone. There was always Vega. He could be asleep, but maybe he was her best bet. She'd feel more guilty about disrupting Chun-Li, anyway, and who knew this brain better than Vega? If there was a way to calm down, he'd know it.

The phone rang. After the third one, she began to feel a little guilty about this, and was about to hang up. Then she heard her own voice, groggy and only a little annoyed. "What is it?"

"Um, well, I'm sort of frightened."

There was silence on the other end. It really did seem quite silly when she finally came out and said it, especially with his voice. Had it come from her own, it surely would have sounded a little childish, but not quite as ridiculous. "Of what?" he asked.

"I thought I heard someone fire a gun."

That got his attention, and he sounded instantly more awake. "Where? When? Have you searched the area?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. Maybe he was only going to make this worse. "I listened near the door for almost an hour, and didn't hear a single other thing. But it sounded so close at the time, it woke me up."

He sighed irritably. "Woke you up? Did you dream about it?"

She thought about it. "Not quite, I don't think. It wasn't a dream, it was sort of inbetween. You understand?"

"Then maybe you imagined it."

She closed her eyes. Maybe she had. Thinking about it now, she wasn't so sure if she really heard the noise or not. She'd been in a drowsy state, pondering something. What had it been again? Something about authority, and respect, and-"Wait. Vega, who is Mireia?"

There was silence on the other end, and the name conjured up an intense sadness the moment she said it. Now she wished she'd never asked. But it was the last thing she'd heard before the gunshot. "Why are you asking that?"

"Before I heard the gun, I heard a man say something about Mireia. Who is she?"

"Just shut up and go to sleep!" The line went dead. Cammy was taken aback by the outburst. True, it was Vega, and she had waken him up in the middle of the night. But so far, he'd been pretty patient with her. Even when he did seem irritated with her it didn't seem like serious anger. She felt bad about it. Or was it this sadness associated with Mireia that was making her so upset? Either way she was left feeling more alone than before the phone call, which was rather counterproductive.

Looking down at the phone, she found the recently dialed numbers, and was contemplating calling Chun-Li when a different name caught her eye. Labeled 'capitán', she wondered where the nickname had come from, and why someone like Bison tolerated it. She wondered why someone like Bison tolerated someone like Vega at all. Vega was very much concerned with earning the man's approval, which she found strange. Had she not just a few seconds ago been pondering his value of authority and respect? Yet here was this weird obsession with earning the respect of an authority figure. Did he realize that didn't make sense?

She dialed the number. She didn't know the time difference between Thailand and Spain, but didn't particularly care either. It must have been more than a couple of hours-when the man answered, he didn't sound tired or groggy at all, but very much awake and refined, as usual. "May I confirm who is calling, Vega or Killer Bee?"

"My name is Cammy, not Killer Bee."

"What could you possibly want to speak with me about? Why aren't you asleep?"

"I want to ask you something about Vega."

There was a brief silence. "You realize his mind is at your disposal? Simply ask it what you want to know."

"That would be disrespectful."

"I don't understand why you would rather call me than simply ask him yourself."

"It seems to upset him. So I don't want to be an ass and violate his privacy and well, sometimes his mind is sort of...um..."

"Disturbing."

"...Yeah," Cammy said, almost feeling defeated by admitting it. "But, just tell me, please, who is Mireia?"

"Mireia was his mother."

The name carried with it another immediate pang of sorrow, guilt, emptiness. It was overwhelming. "Why does the thought of her make him so sad?"

"She's dead."

Now it was almost difficult to breathe. It was his body's fault more than her mind's, but it was uncomfortable all the same. "Why?" she whispered. There was that awful sensation again as she felt so depressed she wanted to cry but wasn't able to. "What happened?"

"The man she married ended up murdering her."

She wanted to vomit. These sudden, vivid thoughts, she could hear this man's voice, see his mother's blood on the wall, the floor, hands squeezing his throat, so hard to breathe, that pig, that monster, eliminate anything like him, all those ugly bastards destroying the few beautiful things in this world and-!

"Oh," she whispered, wishing she hadn't pursued this topic. She put a hand to her head, rubbing her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. "Why did I-" Her heart was racing, breaths coming quicker as it felt suddenly impossible to satisfy her need for air. She tried to steer her thoughts from this woman's death-she had no connection with her, so why was she letting it hurt her so much? "Why did this have to happen?" she wailed suddenly, unable to stop herself.

"It didn't happen to you. It is important that your identity remains distinct from his," Bison warned.

"But he killed her!" Cammy blurted. "I didn't want her to die! They didn't know what they were talking about, I didn't want anyone to die!"

"Killer Bee-"

"No!" she cried, grabbing her hair with her free hand. "Don't call me that! Yo no soy, no soy, me llamo Vega-"

"Cammy," Bison said sternly, acquiescing to her terms in the hopes of finding a way to ground her to her identity. Cammy's idea of her own self was fairly fragile, and mixing that with Vega's inner turmoil didn't yield favorable results. "Remember, you aren't Vega. You're a separate person. You have a life of your own, and his is not it."

"La maté, yo la maté, mi culpa, es mi culpa-" she babbled, tears finally springing to her eyes as she rocked back and forth, pulling her hair. "Tienen razón, fue mi culpa- " How could he have been so useless? So pathetic and weak? Why couldn't he have saved her? If he really cared about his mom, he would've found a way to keep her from being killed. No, this was the proof, this was evidence of his worthlessness. He could tell himself all he wanted that he was perfect, but here was the flaw, the chink in the armor. No matter what he did to improve on himself, to convince himself he had some kind of value, his mom's death would always be there to remind him what a lie it all was.

"You never had a mother," Bison said. "You never had any parents to lose, Cammy. You are not Vega."

"Cammy? I'm-she..." There was a sudden calmness, a brief lucidity. Cammy-she was key in this. His second chance. If he saved her, protected her, it was proof he wasn't a failure, he could save someone. If she was happy and he did everything right then-"What is this freak's obsession with me?" she screamed.

"Isn't it obvious to you?" he asked, confused that she wondered about it.

"Don't condescend to me!" she cried.

"I have no obligation to deal with any of this," Bison said, now freely showing his irritation. "So enjoy your sleepless evening." He hung up, and instantly she regretted her outburst.

"Wait, no, I'm sorry! Come back!" she cried pathetically, but he was gone. She was alone here again. She didn't want to be alone. She wrapped her arms around herself, fingers digging into the fabric of her shirt. She was completely miserable, trying desperately to ignore the fears and sorrow and lingering anger. She wished, for once, that she'd kept her mouth shut.

In a few hours, many miles away, Vega woke up. Glancing at the clock beside Cammy's bed, he sighed. Was it really that late? This body of hers absolutely hated waking up early, but he couldn't stand sleeping in late. It was already eleven, all that time wasted. He pulled himself out of the bed, rubbing his eyes and checking the phone. Hadn't it gone off sometime in the night? Who had been bothering him? He checked the missed call notification, and recognized the phone number as his own.

He almost returned the call. But then he remembered her probing questions and irrational fear, and he thought little of it. Where did she get off asking questions like that? Why did she even pretend to care? Could she even really do so? She was created, not born. Practically a machine. A machine with a very dirty past.

He scowled at the thought. Few of her friends knew that she was manufactured in a lab. Even those that did never brought it up. It was even upsetting him, just thinking about it. The sorrow it caused her to think that she was nothing more than a science project was too strong for him to ignore. Why was she even alive? What was her purpose, now that she'd gone rogue? She had nothing. Building these friendships were her efforts at becoming her own person, but she knew that she was still very different. These people had families, had pasts and memories, personalities built up from their life experiences. What did she have?

He didn't want to think about this. Some weird feeling was beginning to manifest in the pit of his stomach, some sort of anxiety. She felt so useless and lost, like she was no one. Did she want to remember what she'd done in her life? Part of her said absolutely not, that it would be awful to even think about. Didn't want to remember the names and the faces, the cold and emotionless way in which she went about destroying their lives. But another part of her believed that it was something.

"You don't need that part," he muttered to her reflection, looking it in the eyes only briefly. As much as it pained him to be forgotten by her, it also pained him to know that the thoughts of the murders she committed tortured her like that. As sick as it was-and it was sick, he could see now, from this relatively normal brain-he enjoyed the deaths he caused. He couldn't place why. Maybe it made him feel alive, made him feel less awful about his own past. It was wrong. He could see that now. But how long, once he returned to himself, would he still realize that? And how long, if this awful body-trade kept up, would it be before Cammy started adapting to his malfunctioning-perfect?-brain?