Author's note: I'm grateful for the positive responses I've gotten on these ramblings! Especially Talons. The idea of dragon!Kenshin has always delighted me. I think it is likely there will be more 'Talons' scenes in the future; but since I still cannot find a plot to string together a full story, they're likely to be just little snippets. Anyway, enjoy this next one-shot.

Title: The Hostage

Setting: AU

Characters: Kenshin, Kaoru

Type: One-shot

Genre: action, scifi

Word Count: 2,693

Kenshin called the team to attention when his commanding officer strode into the briefing room. With a quick clatter of chairs, the elite, hand-picked team of five stood, eyes forward, chins up.

"At ease," the general said, and they sank back into their seats. Kenshin remained standing off to the side, as was his place as first lieutenant and the leader of this small group, but relaxed into parade rest.

He hadn't expected a general to be the one giving this briefing; that such a high-ranking officer was making it his business to brief the team on this mission meant that the hostage they were going to extract was high-profile.

That Kenshin's orders had called him to pick only five of his best told him that it was a politically sensitive hostage situation. He listened intently to the general, curious as to what this mission would be about.

The general called up the holo-screen but left it on its default home screen—a rotating image of the Earth Defensive Force Special Division's crest. He cleared his throat, looking out over them.

"This mission is highly classified," he told them. "That Lieutenant Himura has selected you five means that he trusts you to understand what that means. Since Lieutenant Himura has an exemplary service record, I trust him to know his people. Because of that, I will not stress the matter over-much. However, I will say this: This mission," here he brought a finger down on the manila folder on the platform in front of him, staring at them and pausing a moment for effect, "is not something you will be at liberty to speak of even to your buddies at mess. Even between yourselves once the objectives have been met. Is that understood?"

"Yes sir," chorused the team, their curiosity evident in the sidelong glances they shot at each other.

"Very well," said the general gravely, then punched a button on the holo-screen's controls. Two iDents popped up, the shoulders-up 3D models of an older man and a young girl slowly rotating as the text beside them burned bright and steady.

Kenshin felt his eyebrows rise as he recognized the man immediately, without having to read the particulars.

"Koshijirou Kamiya," the general said. "Senator of the East Asia District. His private home was attacked early this morning by extremists from the Neptune colonies. He was one of ten Earth Senators targeted in a set of concurrent attacks. The other nine were thwarted by local district law enforcement, but there were mitigating circumstances in Mr Kamiya's case. While he was successfully evacuated from the premises, his daughter was not."

There was a startled silence from the Special Division soldiers, Kenshin included. He hadn't been aware that Senator Kamiya had any children, let alone a daughter.

Kenshin looked more closely at the iDent of the girl. She was maybe twelve. Long black hair cut with bangs, large blue eyes that seemed to stare warily out of the model capture. There were hints in her father's features in hers.

"Kaoru Kamiya," the general said. "Age fourteen. She is her father's only child from his marriage to a Martian colonist called Jubilee, no last name. The mother died soon after the birth, but the daughter survived. Mr Kamiya controls who is aware of his daughter's existence very strictly due to the… unique abilities she inherited from her mother."

Kenshin was about to have a conniption in the corner. Kamiya hadn't just kept the fact that he had a daughter under wraps; nobody had known that he'd been married either, or that he was in any way involved with Jubilee. She didn't have a last name because she didn't need a last name; there was only one Jubilee of the Mars colonies.

And if her daughter inherited her 'unique abilities'…

God damn, she was a precog. And if she was Jubilee's daughter, she was probably a strong one.

"Sir?" one of the team raised a hand in the dazed silence. The general nodded. "Sir, if the girl is a precog, why did she allow herself to be captured?"

"Mr Kamiya was drugging her to suppress her abilities," the general replied. "In fact, Mr Kamiya had not registered Ms Kamiya as a precog or even as his daughter. Her whole existence was a secret. Until now. Mr Kamiya judged it better to let the government know about her so that we would be invested in extracting her."

There was a definite note of disgruntlement in his voice. Kenshin couldn't blame him. They were being used. Kamiya had kept his daughter secret from the government, when he knew that precogs were required to be registered by law, until he needed the government to save her from terrorists. But Kenshin couldn't blame Kamiya either; the reason it worked was because the government was greedy for precogs, who could be used to navigate the tricky waters of the future. The government wasn't going to leave a valuable resource like Kaoru Kamiya in the hands of terrorists. But after she was saved… she'd become a ward of the government, as was the law. Her father would lose her one way or the other.

Kenshin's brow furrowed and stayed that way for the rest of the briefing.

The stealth ship breezed over the mountains like a shadow, carrying Kenshin and his team toward their target. Inside, his people were quiet, checking and rechecking equipment, poring over maps of the building, or the details of the terrorists. Malek was praying, as he did before every mission.

Kenshin sat with his arms crossed over his chest (and the thick armor over his chest and the various gear strapped there, too), running scenarios in his mind. From the information they'd been given, he had constructed a base plan for the extraction, but if any of the elements he'd assumed while forming that plan changed, he needed to have alternatives.

"Lieutenant Himura, we're five minutes from the dropsite," the pilot let him know. He acknowledged and pulled himself standing. His team looked to him.

"We're five minutes out," he said. "Do a final buddy-check then line up for the drop."

Kenshin checked Malek's kit over before he returned the favor. Malek, a sergeant and the next in command after Kenshin, grinned at him, a flash of teeth in a dark face. "You're all set, sir."

Kenshin nodded, as the pilot's voice came back to him over his mic again. "Coming up on the dropsite."

The ship slowed before halting completely, hovering over the dropsite silently. When the light next to Kenshin's head turned green, he flashed some hand signals at his people. The lights in the cabin went out, and they slid their goggles over their faces. There was a slight hiss as the door opened, and some very quiet rustlings as the soldiers threw out their cords and began rappelling out the side of the ship.

As soon as Kenshin's feet hit the ground, he detached his cord and ran, low and silent, toward the copse of trees that bordered the Kamiya property.

Intel had shown that the Neptunian terrorists were running a regular patrol around the perimeter every half hour; Kenshin and his team had dropped within the five minutes after the patrol had passed their position.

The terrorists were amateurs. The only reason they had managed to capture Ms Kamiya was because nobody had known she would be there. It was pure accident.

But that didn't mean it wasn't dangerous. Any hostage situation could easily turn deadly, and the terrorists, though poorly trained, were well-armed. Kenshin scowled, remembering the briefing on the firepower these extremist jerks had.

Somebody had been arming them. It didn't take a genius to know it had to have been one of the Purist parties; the conditions for Ms Kamiya's release included the demand that all negotiations with the Centauris be cut off.

It might have been a powerful demand, if the other nine abductions had succeeded.

It was both fortunate and unfortunate that they didn't know Ms Kamiya was a precog. If they knew, they probably wouldn't be trying to ransom her. Since they didn't know, they were sticking to their demands. However, since they likely knew their other attempts had failed, they would also know that the demands were foolishly high for the return of a girl nobody had known existed, and that might make them desperate.

This situation had all the makings of a cluster-fuck. Kenshin knew it, his team knew it, and the brass knew it.

But he and his people were the best.

They ghosted across the lawn, picking through a tastefully traditional garden, and reached the outer wall of the house. Kenshin signed a few orders to the others, and waited at the two specified men disappeared around corners. Within two minutes, they were back, and signed back to him the locations of most of the terrorists. There were two holed up on opposite sides of the house with powerful automatics, one in an upper room with a rocket-launcher, five that kept changing locations within the house in apparent patrols, and one guarding the girl in a room upstairs, down the hall from the rocket-launcher.

Kenshin nodded; that fit with the intel they'd been given. He signaled two of his best climbers—both, incidentally, women—to split off with him. The three of them would scale the wall and secure the hostage, while the others got into position to take out the terrorists. Once Ms Kamiya was secured, they would execute their orders and eliminate the hostiles.

Up they went, silent as spiders, finding the room where the girl was being held with ease. Kenshin gestured to his teammembers, slipped up his goggles, and then slowly eased around the window sill to peek inside.

Within, the room looked like a typical young girl's room—posters of popular music groups plastered the walls, ranging from a bubblegum-pop idol to a death metal band Kenshin recognized from the European District. The bed was covered in fluffy stuffed animals. The girl was on the floor beside the bed, sitting upright. Kenshin stared.

She was sitting on the chest of a very unconscious terrorist, a wooden sword across her knees. There was a goose-egg the size of a golf ball on the terrorist's head. The girl was directly facing the window, and waved cheerfully when she saw Kenshin.

He fought the urge to rub his eyes and look again. As he stared incredulously, the girl stood up and came to the window. She opened it—the sash moving as smoothly as if oiled—and smiled at him.

"You can come in; he was the only guard with me," she said. "And the others won't check in for another five minutes."

"You shouldn't have attacked him," Kenshin told her, even though he climbed through the open window. "The others might have heard you, or he might not have been knocked out."

She rolled her eyes so hard it was nearly audible. Behind Kenshin, Beckerman snorted a laugh as she came through the window, likely finding it hilarious that this little girl was sassing her boss. "At eleven twenty-three and fourteen seconds one of the others knocked my daddy's Ming vase off the side table in the living room. I hit him then, so they wouldn't hear him fall. And I know how to knock someone out."

Kenshin rubbed his forehead. Koshijirou Kamiya had been kendo champion of the East Asia District seven times in his life. And there were all kinds of legends about Jubilee. Of course their kid would be… this.

"The two person patrol that goes around the garden will leave in thirty seconds," Kaoru said. "The other three who are moving around the house will all be in the kitchen in two minutes, and the east-facing machine-gunner is getting up to go to the bathroom."

Kenshin blew out a sigh, but keyed the mic at his throat. Usually his team only communicated with hand signals, perfectly silent, but with distance and walls between them, the wireless was necessary. "Cut in from the east and take the kitchen first. We'll take the package out over the roof toward the north."

He turned to Kaoru, looked at her bare feet, and said: "I'm going to carry you."

He glanced at Beckerman and Walker, "Cover."

Kaoru shifted when he slung her over his back, neatly tucking herself against him to balance perfectly. She clung to him like a monkey, but didn't foul up his range of motion. He was more grateful than he could express for her practicality and cleverness. The number of times he'd nearly been shot because whomever he'd been rescuing had tearfully draped themselves over him…

He keyed his mic again. "Go in five, four, three, two, one. Go."

The still night erupted into motion and action. Kenshin and the others were already clear across the roof by the time the first shots rang out, a swift popping one-two-three that Kenshin could tell from the sound had come from his team's guns.

Kenshin dropped from the roof to the ground, his boots absorbing the shock. Beckerman and Walker dropped beside him, each with their weapons raised and ready.

They'd just reached the treeline when Kaoru said: "Duck!"

When a precog told Kenshin to do something while he was in the middle of a mission with active gunfire, he obeyed without question. He dropped to the ground, rolling Kaoru under him so that anything that hit her would have had to get through his armor and him first. The tree in front of them exploded. The rocket-launcher.

"Walker!" he hissed.

"Got it," she replied, rolling over and sighting along her rifle. The gun barked once, and Walker coolly lifted her eye away from the scope. "Cleared, Lieutenant."

Kenshin got up. "Right, let's go. Rendezvous site is a mile that way."

Kaoru held out her arms as he turned to her and he scooped her up once more. They double-timed it to the rendezvous site.

The ship flew back to base smoothly, the gravity engine the merest hum. Kenshin's team sprawled across the cabin, relaxing after a successful mission. Kaoru curled in a seat, barefoot and in her pajamas, eyes flicking from person to person with bright interest in her eyes and a slight smile.

Kenshin draped a blanket over her and sat down in the seat beside her. She gathered the blanket under her chin and smiled fully at him. "You're all gonna get decorated for this."

Kenshin lifted an eyebrow. "I thought that you were given drugs to suppress your abilities."

"They don't work for very long," she said. "And I didn't take any all day."

The 'duh' was unspoken but clear as a bell.

Kenshin brushed his fingers over his mouth to hide his smirk.

When they reached the base, Kaoru's father was waiting with the rest of the 'welcoming' party. Kaoru flew into his arms with little regard for the smart, suited people waiting behind him—the Precognitive Institute's retrieval party. Kenshin grimaced mentally; the situation didn't sit right with him, and never had. It wasn't that precogs were treated poorly by the government—they were well paid for their work, and enjoyed extensive benefits—but… they weren't allowed choice in the matter. A precog worked for the government in the Institute whether they willed it or no.

Kenshin didn't think the restriction would sit well with Spitfire Kaoru.

He turned to follow the rest of his team as they tromped inside to divest of their equipment, but was stopped when Kaoru called out to him: "See you later, Kenshin-san!"

He half-turned his head to reveal his smile, and lifted a hand in farewell as he passed through the door into the base. Whatever else she did, Kenshin was sure Kaoru would land on her feet. It wouldn't surprise him if she pulled off her mother's tricks and evaded her 'destined' position. Considering she was only fourteen now, she was likely to only grow in craftiness and power.

Kenshin stopped suddenly in the middle of the hall.

…Wait a minute. Had she said 'see you later'?