"So it all started at the Vestige?"

Serah tightly hugged at her shoulders as she and Lightning slowly made their way down the sidewalk together. She felt as if she were still in a daze after witnessing Lightning create large blocks of ice with her bare hands and watching Fang throw a huge dumpster over her head as if it were a beach ball.

"And all of you are affected? Like Hope, Vanille… and Snow?"

"Yeah," Lightning confirmed with a nod. "That's how the five of us became so close."

"And how does it work? Can you hear the fal'Cie talking to you in your head or can he just take control of your body and make you do things for him?"

"It's… nowhere near that fancy. I have dreams at night. Visions. They're nothing too coherent, but they're supposed to be like messages about the fal'Cie wants me to do."

"Visions…" Serah hummed, idly looking down at the cement for a moment. "What do you—"

"Serah," Lightning cut off, coming to a halt on the sidewalk and turning to look at the younger girl. "This is really sensitive information. That's why I wanted to keep it a secret; I don't want you to get pulled into this. Do you know how much trouble you could get in just for knowing about us? The less you know, the better. So I'd really feel more comfortable if you stopped asking so many questions. That especially goes for when talking to Snow and Vanille."

Serah stared at Lightning with a mixture of mild hurt and confusion. "Ligh—I mean, Claire. You're my sister." She reached down to grip Lightning's hand. "I don't care about the consequences. If there's a way for me to help, I want to do it." She gave the hand a squeeze.

"Thanks." Lightning returned the squeeze. "But you don't understand some of the things we've been through... I worry enough about myself, and Hope, and Fang, and Vanille, and even Snow. I don't want to have to start worrying about you, too. So if you really want to help, the best thing you can do is to stay out of it and help us keep a low profile. This means you can't talk about this with anyone."

"Okay. I can do that."

Serah released Lightning's hand as the two started walking again.

"And Serah…" Lightning took a deep breath before continuing. This almost felt harder than confessing that she was a l'Cie. "About what you saw between me and Fang…"

"I know," Serah quickly interjected. Lightning's head flung around to give her younger sibling a puzzled expression. "I've always had an idea, but was never a hundred percent sure," Serah admitted with a shrug. "You don't have to explain anything to me."

Lightning felt a wave of relief wash over her as the two walked around the bend into the lot where they had left Fang. The lot, however, was seemingly devoid of all people. Lightning jogged a few steps further into the space, quickly turning her head left and right in hopes of catching a glimpse of Fang possibly lying down somewhere, but the girl was nowhere to be found. "Fang?" she called, still looking around and walking forward to investigate behind a dumpster. "Fang!" Light couldn't help the heavy feeling that replaced that previous wave of relief as she accepted the fact that Fang was not waiting there for them. "Where did she go…?"

"Sir, you wished to see me?" Colonel Farron asked as he stepped foot into Rosch's temporary HQ office.

"Colonel. Why, yes." Rosch smiled and slid his chair out in order to walk around his desk to shake his old mentor's hand. "I wanted to take some time out to just talk and get your opinions on the latest update."

"Oh. Well, it came as a shock, of course, especially after having such a quiet week." Farron released an audible breath while giving Rosch a tired look. "It's a lot to swallow. We've all done some training on how to deal with the fal'Cie problem, but I know I don't speak for myself when I say that few of us in that room ever expected we would have to use it. I am a bit concerned on one front, though." Farron was never a man to fidget, but he couldn't help but pull anxiously at his collar as he continued. "In your investigations concerning the fal'Cie's presence in the Vestige… Are there any, um. I mean, concerning the dates, times, and names—"

"Colonel," Rosch succinctly broken in, "If this is about your daughter's covered-up arrest a couple of months ago, you don't need to worry. Once we learned that the fal'Cie shows supreme favoritism to those from Pulse, I decided to dismiss the small misdemeanor as just that, a small misdemeanor. I haven't included her, or her friends, in any of the reports, even though the timing of her incident does arouse interest. Enough interest to have me call you in for this private meeting."

Farron slowly nodded as Rosch took a seat on the edge of the desk. The silver-haired man reached back to pick up a small, velvet box that was sitting on the desk's opposite corner and placed it in his lap before intently staring at Farron again. "Colonel, I respect you. I respect you enough to leave your familial matters alone and not have one of the only remnants of your lovely, late wife dragged into this very building to be questioned on acts of treason against Cocoon. But I also hope that you respect me enough to let me know, right now in this office, if there is any information from that arrest that may relate to this fal'Cie problem."

Farron's thoughts began to race a mile a minute. There were two very big pieces of information that related to the fal'Cie problem, but they were two big pieces that also seemed to be very related to both his daughters. It was impossible for him to know just how much Claire could be embroiled in this ordeal, if there was an ordeal for her to be embroiled in at all. She wasn't being called into questioning now, but who knew what acts she could be incriminated for later if something was indeed amiss. So, with an uplifted head and a heavy conscience, Colonel Farron looked Rosch straight in the eyes and answered, "No."

Rosch stared back at Farron critically. His disapproval of Farron's answer was apparent on his face, but he wouldn't voice it.

"I see," he finally replied. "In any case, since you will be a leader of one of our new task forces, I thought it would be important to give you this." Rosch flipped open the top of the box in his lap and reached in to pull out a shiny, metallic bracelet. Without a word, he lifted it and dangled it in the air for Farron to take.

The colonel accepted the bracelet and immediately held it up in the light to examine it. "What is this?"

"A suppressor cuff. If you latch one of these around a l'Cie's wrist, it should inhibit him from using his powers. They are quite expensive to make, so we've had to be choosy with who we hand them out to."

Farron looked down with furrowed brows to give Rosch an inquisitive look. "And you thought that I would be a deserving candidate?"

"I thought that you are a man of action," Rosch replied firmly. "And that you have a teenage daughter who seems to be sitting on the outskirts of this investigation. I know teenagers can be rebellious and they can sometimes find themselves in questionable situations with questionable people. I also know that good parents do what they can to help their children avoid such questionable situations. So I want you to keep that one. And if something questionable just so happens to arise… You can give it a definite answer."

"A little help would be nice!" Snow shouted as he lifted one purse-snatcher over his head with one hand and flung the crook's accomplice into a plastic set of outdoor restaurant tables with the other.

"Looks like you're doing fine by yourself," Lightning replied distractedly, twirling her phone between her fingers while not even attempting to move from her seat on top of one of the nearby benches. The only reason she had even come to this week's Superhero Night was because she thought there was a slim chance that Fang would show up. Obviously, that chance was much slimmer than she had hoped…

Apparently while Lightning had been off talking to Serah during the meet, Fang had gone back to the stadium to pick up Vanille and high tail it. Fast-forward a number of missed phone calls and unanswered texts later… and Lightning was now stuck wearing a black hoodie and mask that she had been argued into putting on, playing sidekick to Snowman in hopes of getting an audience with the girl. In the back of her mind, she just couldn't help but wonder if she had gone too far while Fang had been in such an emotional state.

"That's it!" Snow lifted his arms to conjure the best wind spell he could muster at the moment and used it to send a barrage of plastic furniture to swirl around and assault the two criminals until they were laid out across the ground in unconsciousness.

"Wowwwwwwww."

Lightning turned her head to spy a young girl, her eyes wide in wonder, gawping at Snow's heroism through the lens of a camera phone.

"Mister! Mister! That was awesome!" She chirped excitedly, bouncing up and down.

Snow grinned and reached a hand around his head to adjust his bandana-mask so that his eyes could clearly shine through its eyeholes. "Why, thank you, Little Miss," he said in his raspy, imitation-hero voice. "It's all in a day's work for… Snowman."

"Ugh, this is nauseating," Lightning muttered, pulling herself from the bench to tiredly march over to the gloating Snow. "And stop that. No cameras." She reached a hand out to block the lens of the child's phone and push it down.

"Heyyyy!" the girl squeaked in an aggravated voice.

"Yeah! Heyyy!" Snow parroted as Lightning ushered him away, quite upset about the interruption of his photo op. "She was just a kid!"

Lightning sighed as she came to a stop. "Why do I feel like I'm always repeating myself with you? Any publicity is bad publicity, got it?"

"Sure… Got it. What crawled up your—"

Lightning glared at him.

"I mean, uh, not feeling too hot today, huh?"

Lightning sighed. Snow was the very last person that she wanted to be having one of these conversations with. The only problem was, that despite her never usually wanting to talk about her feelings, she just felt as if she needed to voice her concerns about Fang. Keeping it to herself was beginning to physically ache.

"It's Fang. After Serah found out about our powers, she just ghosted on me and hasn't returned any calls or texts since. I'm worried about her."

"Oh. Yeah… Well, she did have a rough day with the whole having her hopes and dreams chewed up and spit back into her face thing," Snow began sympathetically. "And I know she may seem like Wonder Woman from the way she's always joking around and never letting the heavy stuff weigh her down, but she's still a young woman who inside is as delicate as a flower. Trust me. I've been reading up on the intricacies of the feminine mystique."

Lightning's lips curled downwards into a disapproving frown. Okay. She did need to talk to someone about things, but conversing with Snow was obviously not going to work.

"Snow, I need a ride to the reservation."

When driving into the reservation's living area, Snow and Lightning were met with the same guarded and suspicious looks that they had received the first time, but at least it was dark outside and not as many people were out and about to give them. They also now knew where Fang and Vanille lived, so it was much easier for them to evade public eye by hurrying to knock on the trailer door.

Neither Fang nor Vanille answered. Instead, they were greeted by the surprised stare of Dane, the tall, lean boy who had given them such a hard time the last time they had been in this part of the reservation. Lightning and Snow must've looked just as surprised as he was, because before anyone could get a word out, he raised his hands and said, "Don't mind me. I was just leavin'." He squeezed out the door, past the two Cocoonians, before turning one last time to look into the trailer at Vanille, who had been standing behind him when Light and Snow had first knocked. "And 'Nille? Just remember if either of ya need anything, give me call. Ya hear that, Scruffles?!" The boy raised his voice on asking his last question and loudly knocked his fist against the side of the trailer, lifting his eyes up as if trying to spy something over the doorframe. His question received no answer and he just sighed before giving Vanille one last, subdued smile and descending the trailer steps.

Lightning curiously watched him go before following Snow into the trailer and closing the door behind her.

"Hey, guys," Vanille welcomed in an unusually low voice. She looked tired. Not tired in the sense that it was almost time for her to go to sleep, but more in the sense that she looked emotionally spent. "Sorry. I wasn't expecting to see you all again today. Is something wrong?"

Snow glanced over to Lightning, who uncomfortably shifted her weight from one foot to the other. All the bravado she had felt in the car ride here had spontaneously combusted into nerves the moment that Dane had opened that trailer door.

"Uhh, no. Nothing's wrong. We just wanted to check on Fang."

Vanille looked over their faces apprehensively, but then released a breath that made her shoulders sag. "She's on the roof." She pointed a slim finger to the trailer's ceiling. "Sometimes she goes up there to think. I'm sure she'd appreciate the two of you coming to visit though. If you want to get up there, you'll have to climb up through the window."

Snow's vision darted from Lightning to Vanille to the open window located in the wall above the trailer's small kitchen table. "Vanille, it looks like you could use some company too," he finally said. "And I don't think I could fit through that window anyway. Lightning, you go ahead."

Lightning glanced gratefully in Snow's direction before climbing on top of the table and beginning her crawl through the window. She turned when she was halfway through to sit on the still and peer upwards. There was a clear view of the sky from here, unshielded by trees. She raised her body to then reach up and grab at the top of the trailer while planting her feet down onto the sill.

When she had finally pulled herself up onto the trailer's roof, she immediately noticed Fang, stretched out and staring at the sky with her arms lying flat at her side. She did nothing to acknowledge Light's presence on the roof with her, just continued to stare up. Lightning could feel her own nerves begin to pick at her once again. She was sure that she had had some sort of speech or game plan thought out for how everything would go, but now she couldn't remember a single thing. So instead, she just sat down before stretching her legs out to lie beside Fang and stare into the sky as well.

"Sorry. About earlier," Fang finally croaked, still staring straight up. Lightning turned to look at her. "Didn't mean to offend ya. Especially with the Guardian Corps stuff."

Although she knew that Fang wasn't watching to see, Lightning nodded as she thought of a reply. "I meant what I said back there, you know," she stated. "Or what I was going to say. When all of this is over, me being in the Guardian Corps won't change anything. I'm joining to uphold justice. And that doesn't mean promoting prejudice and foul play. It means doing right by you and your people, too. Maybe all the GC really needs is more people on the inside willing to work for what's right."

"Hphhh…" Light could hear a soft puff of air being exhaled from Fang's nostrils. "When all this is over, aye?"

Light wasn't sure how to interpret Fang's murmur. It sounded plagued with disbelief, but in a distant, almost indescribable way…

"But Light," Fang started again, a perturbed look on her face, "The stuff I said to ya was outta line. Wish ya didn't have to see me like that. I… just things…" Fang closed her eyes hard before opening them again. "Everything's a mess. I really am sorry."

Lightning turned her gaze back to the stars. It would just be too easy if they would spell out the perfect thing to say to Fang at this time, but life didn't work like that. Or maybe it sometimes did… "See that clump of stars right there? The ones that go up and down with those two sticking out like that?" Lightning pointed up and moved her finger to trace around a random, group of stars. "That's a constellation that we like to call Irene."

Fang stared at the scattered dots attentively. She couldn't really see any recognizable shape to them. "I thought you didn't know any star stories."

"I know this one," Lightning answered. "Pretty well, actually. It's about a girl named Irene. Irene lost someone she cared about when she was young, and it hurt her very much. Not just her, but everyone around her too, so much so that it caused everyone and everything around her to change… change in ways that made Irene angry. And as time passed, Irene held on to that anger. She could've tried letting it go, but deep down she didn't want to. It was so much easier to just carry that anger around and use it as a shield. So even though she lived in the sky, surrounded by so many other beautiful stars, she still couldn't find it in her heart to just, I don't know... I guess be happy."

"She sounds like a handful."

"She is," Lightning confirmed, squinting at the stars with a bit of a contemplative look on her face. "At one point, almost everyone just wrote her off as a lost cause. That is until one day, when the Drunken Knight appeared in her sky." She then moved her hand across the sky to point at the constellation that Fang had told her about on their first Superhero Night. "The Drunken Knight is considered to be the joke of the sky. No one knows too much about its personality or history, they just know it as a drunkard whose sword is always drooping, and they treat it like a lesser constellation because of that… but the Knight still goes on shining as bright as ever. And every night, when Irene would look across the sky and see the Drunken Knight shining so brightly, it would change her because she wanted to shine like that too. So no matter how many times the Drunken Knight's stars may flicker, it doesn't matter to Irene. Because she's seen, over and over again, how bright of a constellation the Knight really is."

Fang made a soft chortling noise and her face relaxed into a faint smile as she switched her gaze between the Drunken Knight and Lightning's clump of stars, mostly thinking of how ironic it was that she got cast as the drunken one in this story. But just as quickly as it had emerged, the soft smile on her face faded. "Ya know, you don't have keep going out of your way to do things ya think I'd like whenever I'm in a mood. Like the stars… and earlier today at the meet."

Lightning could feel her heart picking up speed. Fang was referring to the kiss, or the multiple kisses, that they had shared in the lot earlier today. She took a calm breath before tentatively letting her hand creep across the small distance between herself and Fang until her pinky and ring fingers were wheedling their way to loosely entangle with some of the slender digits on one of Fang's hands. "It hasn't felt like I've been going out of my way. Everything I did today, I did because I've really wanted to do it."

Fang turned her head away from the sky, for the first time since Lightning had gotten on the roof, to stare at their barely conjoined hands. She slightly lifted their hands to further study the loose grasp. Her face gently scrunched at the brows as she thought over an idea in her head, weighing the pros and cons and trying to guess the imminent consequences. Her brow relaxed as she came to an answer, and she raised their hands a bit higher before slightly twisting her own so that all of her fingers intertwined with Lightning's.

"Light…"

Green eyes moved up to meet blue.

"I wanna go on a date."