A/N: So this is a pretty lengthy chapter in my standards. :D That's a good thing, I think. Really expanding Krish's character. If you're reading this, I just want to thank you again for your support. Some pretty intense things happen in the next little while. I can't wait.

Every review saves a sloth from mistaking its own arm for a tree branch and falling to its death. :D

-xXx-

There was no one there to see Krish off except for Thor and (for just a few minutes) Bruce. Thor insisted that KrishnaLan stay for a little while longer, maybe rest up, and THEN go. But Krish declined. She had already spent enough time in Luk's body, she'd argued, and she didn't really need sleep. Although Thor offered a few more excuses and rationalities, each of them fell vain and eventually into futility. Krish was as stubborn as Krish had always been. When she set her mind to something, even her own common sense couldn't sway her back.

But that didn't mean Thor would keep his opinion to himself. "I don't feel very well about this excursion of yours."

"Eh, neither do I." Krish shrugged. She'd decided that if she PRETENDED to be apathetic, eventually she WOULD be. It wasn't working out too well for her yet. "Better to just get it iced and over with."

"You don't seem like yourself." Thor suddenly said with concern. It was interesting how the conversation had jumped from Krish's traveling to her own personal well-being.

Krish raised a single thin eyebrow and, after looking down at Luk's body, arched it even higher. "You don't say...?"

"No, I mean, there isn't much life in your eyes anymore."

"Do you KNOW that you're making these puns or are you doing it on accident?"

"I am dead serious."

"Okay, THAT one was on purpose."

Thor cracked a smile. "Perhaps... But, really KrishnaLan. I am worried."

"Give me a few days and I'll be right as rain. Snarky, sarcastic, arrogant. Before you know it, I'll be cracking knock-knock jokes and making questionable references." Krish had a light, airy feel about her voice, but it seemed split in half. One half was a promise... the other was a hope. She hoped that she could get back to old Krish-ness in a few days; she hoped everything would patch itself up; and most of all, she hoped she could shake off this parasitic depression and be happy again. It was draining her completely, taking all of her enthusiasm and feasting on it to grow heavier on her shoulders.

It was, if such a depression continued growing as rapidly as it was, inevitably going to crush KrishnaLan.

And then something dawned on her, it came hissing and spitting acid, a question Krish had been desperately trying to avoid in order to spare herself from the venom of the answer:

Was she ever really happy at all?

She couldn't answer herself honestly.

Of course she had been happy. Of course she was. Of course.

She shoved all those problems back into their file. They didn't want to go back into the cabinet in the dark corner of her mind, but she slammed it shut before they could slither out again. They didn't matter. She could deal with them later.

"Here, I've got this..." Krish said, adjusting her feet and plastering a wide-eyed expression. "Knock knock."

"Who is there?"

"Not me." Right after those words had slipped from her mouth, Luk's body went slack and she collapsed to the floor before Thor could catch her fall. Thor crouched next to her. It was Luk who woke back up, dizzy and gripping to her head, not Krish.

"Safe travels KrishnaLan," Thor sighed, "Until we meet again."

Luk gave him one of the most 'WTF' expressions he'd ever been given. They rivaled the expressions Loki used to give him as they grew up. They even rivaled the expressions that KrishnaLan gave.

"Who are you talking to?"

-xXx-

Finding a single body among seven billion other bodies was — in the most serious way — the masterpiece of all "Where's Waldo?' sketches. Even the idea of it was unimaginable — let alone the actual attempt at completing such a puzzle.

In all of its difficulty, Krish had a few things working for her.

1) She knew exactly what her body looked like. That made it a little easier. (So, hey, at least Waldo was wearing his striped sweater. And by striped sweater, Krish means goat horns, bold henna, and a demonic tail. That narrows things down).

And 2) Krish's spirit had an instinctive draw toward her body. Almost as if she was longing to go home. Krish noticed that if she just let go of everything and let her own yearning guide her, she got much farther.

Krish didn't know anything about being a disembodied entity; she didn't even pretend to know anything about being a disembodied entity. Because she didn't know anything.

Zilch.

Despite her lack of understanding, she was grateful for how it worked. It wasn't really something you could check a book out for, take a night class on, and become an expert in. However, it seemed that long gaps between places were crossed with ease without Krish even knowing. She would space out and then find herself in a totally different country— maybe even a different continent.

To say this wasn't discouraging would have been a lie. The earth wasn't very large compared to the other realms. But when someone is sent to find a tiny fish, Midgard was an ocean. It was an ocean with reefs, deep sea canyons, caverns, shallow places, wide open water, hideaways, underwater cities...

How the actual Hel was Krish supposed to dive and look for something?

She didn't even know how to swim...

The first time Krish stopped and tingled back to awareness, she found herself in Egypt.

Of all places.

She would have recognized the bustle of a Cairo flea market from a mile away. Where peddlers wrapped up to avoid burning in the sun— and Egyptian citizens swarmed in the heat, gathering what they needed for the week. And sometimes, forsaking completely what they needed in order to have enough money for what they wanted.

It was a noisy, fast-paced place. Bargains being thrown through the air, accusations of thievery shrieked every other moment and few (if any) actually being regarded.

Krish watched as a fly on the wall, people passing back and forth through her. She watched as innocent people were accused of thievery and the truly guilty scrambled away with treasures cradled carefully in their hands. Most were stealing food with their thin fingertips and had a sheen of desperation shimmering on their faces. Krish had an issue deciding whose was the guilty party— the malnourished criminals with nothing in their pockets but skin and bone or the stingy salesmen with their fists clenched tight around their wealth. Or was it the bystanders who watched their own people starving and did nothing about it, holding their loaves of bread to their chests and reasoning with themselves? "Surely someone else will feed that man. But not I." And the burden of being a good samaritan was passed onto another, and passed off with, "Someone else. Not I."

The fed stayed fed and the hungry stayed hungry.

Krish couldn't help, as she watched the commotion, but feel like she'd been there before. The land looked familiar. It was an overwhelming feeling of dejavu. As she turned back to look at the main streets of the city, Krish was secured with an indefinite feeling that she'd walked those sandstone roads before. She could feel the memories that she was never allowed access to.

And she could feel them so vividly, that she could see herself walking along those streets in a different form.

A woman with her clothing draped over her head, whose arms were sun kissed and burned, touched by a race of warm auburn skin. A woman whose dark brown hair spilled from underneath her hood and framed her face of sharp Egyptian angles. A woman from a past time, who didn't belong in this modern Cairo world. A woman who walked silently on the side, allowing the faster citizens to walk past her. Whose feet were sure and whose steps were proud. A woman who carried several curved, sharp blades underneath her layers of clothing. A woman whose thin, agile hands would soon be dripping with the blood of a merchantman. A woman whose ambitions were darker than her coal-black eyes. A woman whose same eyes were full of evil bliss...

...but no happiness.

When the woman turned, she let a curled smile play around the edges of her lips as she made eye contact with KrishnaLan. And though they looked nothing like each other, it was certain that Krish was looking into a mirror.

Krish watched in disturbed awe as the woman jogged away, slowing motion with each step, her waves of cotton following behind her. And Krish watched her disintegrate slowly into sand. First her hair, then her face slowly fell away, and the rest of her swirled into tiny grains to be carried away on the wind.

Yes, Krish had walked in this place before, but she didn't want to walk it again. And with the images remaining plastered to her very frame, Krish let her spirit fall back into that abyss of relative-unconsciousness.

-xXx-

The second stop didn't happen nearly as quickly. Krish must have faded in and out of real awareness for an hour. Her spirit was pulling and pushing – indecisive in where it wanted to go. In a hopeful moment when she thought she was stable, she would go back into flux even more violently than before.

Then she stopped, and (still feeling on the edge of fading away) held herself together.

The landscape was a pretty massive contrast to Egypt.

Sand was traded in for snow and ice. The busy marketplace was replaced with a quiet, bitter silence. Krish was situated on top of a snow-capped hill, looking down at the picturesque town. The houses weren't of the best quality, and they had an eerie feel about them. Yellow light was filtering through their windows and spilling out onto the shadowy snow. With the depth of night approaching, the town members were all settled snugly into those wood-thatched houses.

All except one family.

That warm yellow light was flooding from their home's back door, only disrupted by the shadow of the mother who stood in its doorframe. And, crunching through the glassed-over snow was a small boy and a man. Both of them were holding a pile of firewood in their arms.

They chatted together in a language Krish didn't understand, the son shrieking happily as his father kicked snow into the air and the white powder twinkled down on them.

They all went into the house together, the door shut closed, and the yellow light was consumed again by shadow.

Maybe it was the whistling of the wind that Krish recognized first. Haunting melodies that glided over the snow, singing unhappily as the night brought its starlit sky and ethereal dark blue plains of ice.

In fact, Krish definitely recognized that wind. She'd been here before too, in a past life. And just like Egypt, she could see her previous form. She was sitting on the snow bank next to Krish with her arms around her knees casually, staring down at the same small town. She and Krish both turned to look toward each other in the same moment.

A woman with white hair, obviously unnatural, tied back sharply to keep out of her thin, fragile face. A woman bearing the clothing of a supposed carpenter's daughter, with a wood-shaving apron flung around her neck. A woman with bare arms and bare feet. A woman unafraid of the snow and the ice and the death that it represented. A woman who was carefully hiding an ice pick in the pocket of her shirt – an ice pick that would be imbedded into the skull of a serial killer, the rusted metal bearing pieces of his brain.

She didn't smile at Krish like the Egyptian reincarnation did. It was more of a smirk, centered around her piercing light blue eyes. Eyes that contained homicidal joy…

… but still no happiness.

Krish wanted to ask herself something. She wanted to communicate. But the girl looked back toward the village, went blank-faced, and disappeared in a wind-driven drift of snow.

Feeling anything but uplifted by these forced confrontations of her own soul, Krish glanced back at the house of that family. After feeling her share of envy at their beautifully simply lives, she let the flux of movement violently consume her once again.

-xXx-

Krish's spirit was taken to several other places. Some of them were only for a few seconds, where she was allowed a small glimpse of who she was in that world – what her disgusting mission was in that timestream. Some of them were longer experiences. In a select few, Krish watched the flashback of her previous forms attacking their target.

Like an animal. Like some sort of elegant, poised animal. But an animal nonetheless.

Blood had never looked so unappetizing before. When Krish was forced to watch herself kill – when she was given a bystander point of view – she'd never wanted bloodshed to stop so much.

Time after time, she would make eye contact with herself and see a million different emotions.

None of them were happiness.

None.

When KrishnaLan felt that she couldn't take any more of this self-inflicted torture, she found herself in the place she had been begging her spirit not to go.

France.

"No." Krish pleaded desperately with herself. "Anywhere but here. Anywhere. Gods, please, take me away. I don't want this! I don't want to be here! Take me anywhere else, make me watch anything else! But not this! PLEASE." And in the midst of her frenzied denial, she saw herself. Krish stopped and moved back, an aching pain riveting through her – without so much as a single nerve ending.

She was beautiful here. Her face was so similar to that face that Krish was so familiar with, the one framed with black goat horns. This one was devoid of the horns, instead the face was framed with waves of dirty blonde hair. Her eyes were warm and sweet, but Krish avoided looking at them. Her face was conflicted, eyebrows crooked inward like she was thinking about something, trying to think through something. Her dress was just as simple as her face, and just as beautiful. Victorian, corset, with beautiful laced details in the rosy tan fabric.

She reached out one dreamy, porcelain hand to KrishnaLan, nearly reaching her, nearly touching her skin. But Krish turned away sharply, hoping this was all she had to see. She could leave now, couldn't she? Krish finally made eye contact with her French Victorian counterpart. And she was shocked to see the emotion that was so lacking from everyone else.

Happiness. There was happiness in those eyes. It was light, it was fragile, but it was there.

Those used to be her eyes, that used to be her happiness. Where did it go in the lives between this one?

Krish looked back, in the hopes of seeing that happiness again.

It wasn't herself there anymore. In that small, modern-French street made of cobblestones was lying the body of a man. He was completely, utterly, dead. Slouched over unnaturally, head bent painfully, neck obviously severed and internally bleeding.

Krish's spirit dropped down and exclaimed as much as a spirit could have. She screamed and cried, angry that she couldn't hear her own painful wails.

He was so handsome. Perfect. Young. His hair was a gorgeous mess of brown and red, and small locks of it fell down into his gray face.

"I'm so sorry!" Krish screamed, still unable to hear herself. But she screamed anyway. "I'm so sorry! I didn't want to! I... I really didn't want to! It's all my fault! Cristophe, I'm sorry! I am so sorry!" She clawed at the cobblestones, but she couldn't feel anything. Everything was futile. He couldn't hear her. No one could. "You didn't deserve it!"

His eyes, clouded and filmed over, held absolutely no emotion. But in her delirium, Krish thought she could see his painful realization of betrayal.

Krish finally left that bitter scene, just like all the others. The flux eventually yanked her into its grip. She didn't have to look at his dark blue wounds or his perfect face that she remembered so well. Krish left the scene, but the scene didn't leave her.

-xXx-

The time it took Krish to reach her final destination was only a few days, in reality. Some of that time had been spent in sheer instability, where Krish was just trying to get a grip on reality. And the handful of past lives that she was introduced to seemed like decades of time.

KrishnaLan, her spirit stabilized on the desert of an African plain, was wearing down. She wouldn't be able to take another deep spiritual shot to the head. The next one, she felt, would finally reach her skull.

Sitting dejectedly on the vast, cracked ground of Africa, Krish slowly looked up to be face to face with another KrishnaLan again. This one was dark skinned and beautiful. She was sitting with her legs crossed and a cloak of natural colors draped over her shoulders.

Her head was hairless and her face was stunning. Her rich, dark skin was a definite contrast to the barren scene around them. But her black eyes still held dark motives.

And no more happiness.

"I don't want anymore," Krish said to her drowsily. The African incarnation tilted her head to one side as Krish talked. "Please, don't put me – don't put us – through anymore. I don't want it."

In response, Krish's past form raised one henna-scarred arm slowly, and pointed off to the side.

Krish followed her arm, looking past her finger to where she was directing.

It was KrishnaLan's body.

Her goat-horned, demon tailed body. It was lying lifeless by a twisted African tree, nearby a watering hole where a few animals were dipping their heads. A zebra shook its ears and water sprays flittered from its mane.

Krish looked back to thank herself, but the other incarnation was completely gone. Only the heat-wavering landscape was there to greet her.

Krish willed herself (will was difficult to conjure up) to move toward her body. This was the easy part. She'd made it through the nightmare, hadn't she? This was the easy part. Easy. It was over. Krish could relax. No more reincarnations, no more pain, no guilt, no Cristophe.

Right...?