Waiting anxiously beside Donovan's side, Dom laid a hand on his twin's arm before turning to look at Dante. She was staring almost forlornly at the unconscious man, her eyes muddled mercury that melted as she glanced up to meet his gaze. A few stray curls hung in her face, cheeks bloodied and dark purple bruises blossoming on her fair skin. He looked to his brother again, then back to her, still disturbed by the expression in her eyes. She finally averted her gaze, hiding behind her tousled fiery veil, and whispered. "I'm sorry." Without another word she brushed past him, beginning to run from the infirmary, and he could only watch her leave.

She knew where they were going, after all. It's not as if she had to keep up. They were going the same place all of Mode's playmates ended up. The infirmary.

By the time she limped up to the entrance, the three were already inside. She didn't want to go in. That would mean facing the doctor, and dealing with Dante, neither of which she was interested in doing. Instead, she took a seat in one of the chairs outside the door, gratefully taking the weight off her injured ankle.

Dante came out and shot past her, never even noticing her. Wick watched her go with surprise and a little pleasure. She wasn't here to talk to Dante.

She wanted to talk to the other one. Dominic. That one hated Mode as much as she did, if not more, that was certain. She was hanging around to explain to him the same lesson she'd taught Dante years ago.

Dom opened his mouth to protest but the doctor just shook his head in negation, patting him lightly on the shoulder. "Go try to relax, son. You need it." He sighed then in resignation, casting a glance at his unconscious brother. Unmeasurable relief had flooded through him at the doctor's diagnosis-- Donovan would be alright. He'd survived, and his own pain dwindled as the safety of his twin was reassured. Nathan's safety, on the other hand...

"Yes sir. Thank you very much. I guess I'll see you in a couple of hours." With a final woeful look in Don's direction, Dominic turned and trudged silently from the infirmary.

Outside the door, his reserve started to crumble. He didn't want to go back to the barracks they shared; he'd only be reminded of this separation. Dante provided another distraction, but Dom wasn't altogether too sure he could manage to even speak to her, not after what had happened. It wasn't her fault, and he felt somewhat guilty for accusing her so coldly of causing Donovan's injuries. The bruises and blood on her pale cold face tormented him as he paced in the corridor, running his fingers through his spikes as he turned again and noticed a girl seated beside the door.

His face hardened then, his body straightening as his arms came across his chest and he glowered at her while she studied him.

Wick surveyed her prospective weapon.

He was a shade over six feet tall, with hair as black as her own, cut into the same spikey fashion as his brother's...and Mode's. He was handsome, his features well-formed and even...very even. His body was well-developed and muscular, and she could tell from the way he stood that he'd had at least a little combat training...but obviously not enough.

Definitely worth working with, though.

She stood and winced, favoring her right ankle as she compensated, standing almost awkwardly. He frowned at that, nodded back toward the chair with quiet feigned indifference. Something about her seemed vaguely familiar... she too bore marks of recent attack, bruises on the tops of her hands, and that caused his frown to deepen. "Sit. You can talk just as easily from there."

His eyes were a strange shade between blue and purple, and she held them with her own as she sat once again. "I want to talk to you about your brother," she said without preamble. She watched his eyes narrow a little. "I saw what happened, and I followed you here, but I don't think your friend Dante would have been happy to see me, so I stayed outside." She studied him as she spoke. There was fire in this one, more than in his twin. Fate had been kind to her, leaving her this one instead of the other.

Wick. The girl Nathan had attacked before... had beaten, bloodied, and even burned. The comment about Dante went unnoticed as he stared solemnly at her, jaw clenching slightly as he was reminded of the chaos he'd come upon in the BattleSim room. She'd seen it all. But still... what could she want?

She listened to him tell her his brother was going to be fine. That was unfortunate. A mortal or crippling injury would have fueled him that much higher...but she doubted she'd need more than what she saw smoldering in those indigo eyes now.

She was right about Donovan, even he could admit that through his anger. His brother had been... taken out of this equation. What remained was his vengeance burning, Dante's bitter eyes as she apologized, and this fiery pale girl with her own revenge shining in her glacier eyes. He wouldn't sacrifice the opportunity to repay the favor; not even for his own pride. Sliding his back against the wall until he sat on the corridor floor, he tugged Wick down beside him.

"Not here. Come with me."

The past few hours had been excrutiating. She hadn't gone back to the barracks, unwilling to see Nicolai or the others in her turmoil. Instead, she'd wandered the corridors, sneaking around in the hopes to avoid everyone she knew. There had been a few close calls when Rox and Swede walked by, another when she spotted Dominic, but she'd managed to stay unseen and do a lot of thinking.

Perhaps too much thinking...

As he'd lain there by himself, the fight had come back to him. "Fight" was using the term loosely...Terrence had beaten him unconscious. He hadn't even bruised the man, unless his hands hurt. How humiliating...but the girl was here now, and if she wasn't grateful, she appeared to be suffering from some other form of obligation.

And Dante's bruises were all at least that fresh.

It had been a long, long walk from where Kat had pulled her up in the Quad Hall to the infirmary, nearly half the station, and her breath was becoming harder and more painful with every limping step. Her ankle was screaming, and she felt weak and lightheaded. Interruptions to the brain's blood supply never did anything positive.

She tried to stay on her feet, but her knees wouldn't support her and she slowly sank to a crouch, her back against the wall, before she sat down on the tile at last. Her ankle didn't hurt any less when she took the weight off, and that was probably bad.

Dante had suffered because of him. There were bruises on her cheek as testament to his failure...and bruises on her wrists to remind him of what it had cost her. For the first time in his life, Donovan knew what it meant to feel ashamed, and he looked away. His social training slipped, and when he looked back to Dante it was with none of his former artifice, nothing but a pleading look that begged for forgiveness. He couldn't bear to hold her eyes for long, and looked away.

She hit the chair badly but managed to stay in it, trying to catch her breath as the pain kept stealing it. Dante was glaring at her, asking her something. Dominic was seated in the bed next to her, looking startled, his face bruised and -

Dominic?

Donovan, she corrected herself. If he wasn't bruised they'd be impossible to tell apart. Not impossible - they have a brand, someplace - but very very near. What a useful tool these Creche twins must be Earthside...why would they send them here?

Her musings were cut short as Dante's words finally filtered through the haze of pain and reached her. "What do you think you're doing, Wick?"

It wasn't until Dante called her by name that he realized who she was. But what reason would Dante have to dislike this girl? If anything, she should feel camaraderie. This was another person Nathan had horribly injured, and there had been indications that he'd done the same thing to ... Wick ... that Donovan now feared he'd done to Dante.

Wick was slumped in a chair, face more pale than before, throat gruesomely bruised. Dante was standing before her, and with hissing bitter words, she slapped the girl full across the face, knocking her head to the side. His brother was out of bed, moving to stand in front to block Dante as Dominic finally stalked over with resolute features and cold eyes.

With a strong arm he grabbed Dante around the waist, tugging her away from the pair. Donovan glanced up, startled, as did Wick, and he shook his head as he took a few steps backward, still holding Dante tight against his chest. She hissed, twisting to look up at him with smirking lips and coldly blazing quicksilver eyes. "Don't touch her again, Dante." Her gaze narrowed, and his did in response as he leaned closer. "Don't."

He passed his fingers over the bruise that was darkening on her pale cheek, but she didn't flinch, her gaze intent upon his face, as if she were looking for something. "Are you alright?" he asked gently, and she gave a tiny nod.

She turned to watch her old commander in fascination as Donovan spoke to his brother and then to Dante. When she'd first met Dante in Fox, she'd seen her fire...but this girl's fire was gone now, completely out. It hadn't been fire that made the girl strike out at her. That attack was rooted in ice. She acknowledged her role in bringing Mode into existence. This icy shell of a girl was also her creation, in a way.

"I think you'd better listen to my brother, Dante. What exactly is going on?" She scowled darkly, trying to hit Dominic to release her, but he merely grabbed her bruised wrist in tight fingers, causing her eyes to melt to puddled mercury in pain.

This was not the Dante he'd imagined before, not the silent girl they'd first chosen in the observatory. Within the hours of their acquaintance, she'd shifted, freezing more. Even when he'd approached her before in the commons to talk, there'd be a hint of fire beneath her shield, a little warmth that he sought to release. He couldn't find any sign of that now as she mocked Wick, her quicksilver eyes glaring at him and his brother, voice liquid accented ice.

Well, Wick was in no shape to explain. He'd have to give Donovan the details later, once the two girls left. Until that time, he had to keep Dante from attacking the other girl again, as he was sure she might do. The angry light in her gaze distracted him for a moment as he stared down into her face, her quiet shell shattered as raging glacier broke through.

"I do know..." he leaned to whisper into her ear, his words making her muscles stiffen as she stopped fighting. "I know everything that happened with you and Nathan, I know what Wick did. Stop fighting me." She turned her head to gape up at him, eyes wide and muting to an odd flash of violet he'd never seen before. Looking toward his brother, Dominic nodded curtly, his eyes saying what he didn't want to voice aloud. I'll tell you later, my brother. Until then, don't say a word.

"Look, Donovan, there's a lot you don't know, obviously. Wick and I had a little... chat... and here's how things stand..." He began to explain, looking every once in a while toward Wick for confirmation before continuing onward. Donovan was unable to hide his surprise, constantly glancing between him and the girl while he repeated her story. Even as he told it, he found himself growing angry again, renewed disbelief as his eyes hardened, Donovan's returning glance all the silent acknowledgement he needed.

Fury at the pale, fragile girl before him made him clench his jaw, his fists. Dante was right; Wick was responsible for all of this, responsible for Mode and everything he'd done under that name, responsible for the ice Dante carried instead of a soul. Before, he'd been ready to keep Dante from attacking her further. Now he wanted to wound her himself, punish her for all the damage she'd done to Dante, to Nathan, and to himself.

Even through his anger, he was unable to shake a small tug of respect. At thirteen, this girl had very effectively dealt a smashing blow to her enemies. If they had iced Nathan instead of sending him to the Institute, there wouldn't have been this backlash. Dante would still have suffered, but not...not like this.

Sliding from the bed, he eyed her bruises for a long moment, the smile fading from his face. She was staring at him passively, those pale ice eyes locked with his intently, and he tilted his head, the corners of his lips twitching upward despite himself. "Don't get yourself killed before we have time to finish, Wick. We don't need you out of commission either. I'll continue to do my part, as will he. Perhaps Kat and I will have something to report soon, eh?" The wicked gleam in her eyes assured him of her approval, and stepping away, he called loudly as he exited. "Doctor! Fix this girl up!"

Right.

A footstep to her left made her turn and instantly regret it as her neck twisted. She would have screamed, but her throat was too swollen to manage a whisper, and the doctor had only the pain in her eyes to gauge her discomfort by.

Dr. Muraida stepped out from behind the divider where he'd been for most of the previous conversation, and looked down at the girl, his features dark as he helped her up and guided her to the nearest table. He made her lie down and began to examine her neck. "Is what he said true? About what you did?" His voice was low and hard. He had seen what Terrence had done to her first hand. Was what she had done to him better or worse?

She gave a very small painful nod, and he paused in his exam, looking down at her.

He had two options. He could turn her in, and have the administration clear Terrence's Charybdis files and give him a clean record while she iced. The problem as he saw there was that Terrence was obviously unbalanced. If he hadn't been when he was iced, he was now, and to leave him loose would be to invite destruction on the next person who angered him enough.

It was possible he could make a private appeal to the Major...but he had no proof, and he'd recently had an uncomfortable reminder about how little deviance from regulation the Major tolerated. Asmodeus would very likely go without restraint or punishment, and that gave him a very bad feeling.

The other choice was to say nothing, and hope she and her unwilling allies could do what they were planning successfully, without anyone other than Terrence suffering a fatal injury. He hated not going by the book, but under the circumstances, it seemed a grim possibility.

He put his hands back to her throat and continued his examination. Mode had bruised her windpipe and most of the major muscles, veins and arteries in her throat. He could bring the swelling down this time, give her some pain killer...but next time she might not be so lucky. Next time she might end up iced anyway, on medical disability...or something less animated.

Retrieving the hypodermic, he made the injection directly into the swollen tissue of her throat, ignoring her wince. "You're playing a very dangerous game, Wick," he said quietly. "What's to keep your co-conspirators from killing you the moment your plan is complete, if you complete it successfully?" Her gaze left him no doubt that she thought she could handle it. Fifteen suddenly seemed like a long time ago for him. He'd seen so much blood since then...but this girl wasn't exactly innocent when it came to violence. Perhaps she deserved what she got. He found that hard to reconcile with, looking at her.

She looked back up at him as he completed the injection, guileless blue eyes staring up into his, and he clenched his jaw as he administered the pain killer. He wouldn't turn her in, couldn't, not with Mode still free. Perhaps afterwards. "I just hope you can make it back here next time, Wick," he said coldly, and retreated to his lab, her treatment complete. He didn't bother to watch her leave as he heard her rise from the table and limp away. His decision was made.

A word about this von Starnburg: He was tall and lean, with a fine military figure, brought out even more by the perfectly tailored uniform of the IA. Black suited his slightly pale features, providing an interesting contrast. His age was indeterminate; by virtue of his rank one could assume that he was in the midst of his middle age, but if that were true, then he had aged remarkably well. Coal gray hair with streaks of white and black covered a lean hard face that still bore the scars of the schlager - traditional Prussian fencing scars, worn as a badge of honor. They framed eyes as hard as diamonds, pinpricks of intelligence that looked alternately gray and blue. When he moved, it was with a long, light step; the type of man who can somehow appear at your elbow when you least expect it, wearing a disturbingly knowing smile. Johan von Starnberg was not a man to feel comfortable around.

He had come to Command School on routine business - making the rounds, inspections, staff interviews, etc. Johan already had a long list of procedural inefficiencies and personnel issues to work out with the School CO; that was one meeting he particularly looked forward to - he took a fierce satisfaction in his job, and approached every interview as if it were an interrogation. It kept him sharp.

But that was a meeting he could leave for later. In the process of his rounds, von Starnburg had discovered that one of his old Academy comrades held the position of school doctor - Gerard Muraida. Not a bad sort, he remembered, a bit sentimental, perhaps, but no fool for it. Doctor Muraida had sent him a message over the school's communication network, asking him to pay a visit. It had been a rather over-pleasant reminiscence of their Academy days, and hadn't fooled Johan for a moment. That Muraida wanted something from him was obvious, but what? What possible use could a doctor have for an IA spook? For once, von Starnburg allowed curiosity to get the better of him, and so rearranged his schedule to give higher precedence to the Infirmary inspection.

It had been nearly ten years since they'd last seen each other, and with good reason. Gerard was a doctor; when something went wrong enough to require his services, he was usually finished and gone before the IA deigned to place their hand into it. He dealt with the superficial wounds that conspiracy often yielded. The IA employed people like von Starnburg to find the real source of the infection and excise it.

Gerard had seen more blood than his old military school comrade had by far, but he still felt his work was far cleaner.

The man rose as he approached with the same unfurling, sinister grace he'd possessed at the Academy. They seemed exaggerations of their former selves. Gerard's occupation had given him a slightly more kindly aspect than he'd had as a young man, long years of healing broken people adding a depth to him that he had lacked before. Johan von Starnburg had gone in the other direction, his gaze even more cold and unreadable, his features the picture of icy, intelligent reserve.

He might have been happy to see his old friend if the reason for his summons was what he had claimed in the letter he'd sent. A single glance told him von Starnburg already knew it wasn't what he had included in the missive. Another man might have let it drop and declined the invitation, but Johan was IA to the core. Curiousity was part of what made him good at his job. Intimidation was another part.

Gerard needed them both.

"Johan," he said quietly in greeting as he shook the other man's hand. "I appreciate you coming to see me. I have a favor to ask of you." It would earn him nothing to delay with pleasantries; Johan hated to waste his time. "Rachel?" he called out to his assistant, and she appeared in the doorway. "Could you excuse us for a bit?" Rachel stiffened a bit, but replied promptly enough. "Yes, doctor." She disappeared into the lab and reappeared shortly with her desk in hand, nodding to von Starnburg politely on her way out.

Gerard locked the door behind her.

"There are some matters we need to discuss. I have attempted to bring them to the attention of the Headmaster, but he was...less than receptive. This concerns a girl named Moira Callenstrom I recently treated for severe injuries inflicted by another student." He briefly outlined Terrence's attack on Wick, her implicating him and then withdrawing that implication, the subsequent injuries he'd treated that Terrence had been responsible for, and, lastly, the information he'd overheard about Wick's role in the BattleSchool fiasco that had ended in Terrence's relocation to the Charybdis Institute for rehabilitation.

By the time he was finished, he was sitting down across his desk from Johan, his arms crossed against his chest, his face dark. "Terrence is unbalanced. That much is obvious. Callenstrom withdrew her testimony, and I need that to bring Terrence before courtmartial. Once Terrence is out of the way, it will be easier to deal with her own punishment. And THAT is what I need your help with."

"So as I see it, Gerard," he said quietly, with the faintest hint of an accent, "You want me to, ah, persuade our young friend to come forward with her information? You want her little playmate to face justice? I'm surprised. You didn't seem the crusader type when we were in school." This last was said with a hint of a mocking smile, gone almost before it arrived. Before the doctor could respond, he kept talking.

"Very well. I'll do this for you Gerard," he leaned closer, finger tapping out each point on the desk, "but I'll do it my way, and shall brook no interruptions," Johan leaned back and showed his teeth.

As much as he disliked it, he would have to be present at the interrogation. He'd seen Johan's work before, and it wasn't pleasant, but he had to get Mode locked away and off the station before he injured anyone else, and Wick's testimony was the only way to do it.

He didn't feel sorry for the girl, especially. He knew what she'd done. He felt sorry for Jor...but there wasn't anything else to be done, and it had to be done. Gerard was a good soldier. When something had to be done, he did it.

He'd spent the first part of the night in dreading anticipation, and the last in disgusted fascination as Johan had reduced Wick to tears, burned her and beat her unconscious. He tried to enter then, and stop him, but the MPs wouldn't let him past, and he'd already agreed that Johan would get no interruptions from him anyway.

Sickened and disheartened, he left instead.

Not bothering to go by his quarters, he went back to his infirmary and fell asleep in his little office there.

Rachel shook him awake almost five hours later. A look at her drawn face told him something was very wrong, and he followed her out into the main room. A student lay on a dolly, his face ghastly pale, his jacket bloody. Another stood beside it, and she helped him transfer the boy from the dolly to the bed before he realized who it was.

His niece, Rebecca Solenis.

She was bleeding also, but this boy required all of his attention, and he waved at Rachel to take care of the girl as he unzipped the boy's jacket, removing the sodden bandage and cutting away the undershirt. Knife wound, a deep one. He activated the sterilization field and dragged the rolling bed into the surgery. "Rachel, I need you in here." Rebecca was already shoving her away as it was, and Rachel hurried into the surgery and shut the door behind her. The larger and more powerful stasis field came online with the familiar brief tingling sensation, and the doctor got to work.

The injury was fresh, and the anesthetic had only been in the boy's system forty-five seconds when he inserted the suction tube into the wound in the boy's chest to remove the excess air. Rachel had already set up a transfusion to counteract the massive blood loss, and he sponged away enough of the blood to see what he was doing. The boy's lung was punctured in two places, and he used the microsuture to seal these. Delicate work, but Dr. Muraida had steady hands, and this was quickly finished.

The suction cycle completed and he removed the tube and applied a bioseal, restoring the airtight state of the chest wall. It would dissolve slowly over the next few hours and give him plenty of time to stitch the wound. The knife had been twisted. The boy would have a scar...but he finished the stitching without any complication. His medscanner informed him of a small pocket of air in the pleural cavity, and he used a needle to remove it before he put a dressing on the chest wound and took a breath.

A close thing, but the boy's heartbeat was strong and even, and that was something. He would be kept on oxygen for the remainder of the evening and much of tomorrow as the internal tissue benefited from the regen units and his lung began to re-expand, but he was out of danger.

The doctor left the surgery with instructions to Rachel to keep him on oxygen and leave him in the surgery room until she'd set up the oxygen tent, and went out into the main room to face his niece. She remained in the same place he'd left her, in exactly the same position, her arms crossed across her chest, and she was staring at the doors when he came out. Her eyes focused on him after a second or two and she studied him fiercely as he gave her his best reassuring smile. "You got him here fast. He's going to be alright."

At those words, something seemed to fall away from her, whatever it was that had been holding her so straight and precise and locked in place dissolving, and she let out a shaky sigh and fell into the chair behind her. Tears ran down her cheeks and she put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, wiping them away and pushing her hair away from her face with a long motion.

Gerard smiled a little. He could remember Teresa performing a very similar motion at Rebecca's age. His sister and her daughter shared much in face, form and nuance.

She did not speak, and he sat down in a chair across from her. "What happened?" he asked gently. Her gaze flicked to his own, and when she dropped her hands her face was blank and unreadable, and he could almost hear her mind working as she tried to choose what to tell him. He sighed and decided to tell her what he already knew, to keep her from embarrassing herself with a lie, when she began to speak.

"I found him the way he was in the Storage Bay. I heard footsteps, but I didn't see anyone, and I didn't want to waste time chasing them. He...it looked very bad." More tears escaped, but her tone remained unaltered and her face free of emotion. "Maybe he can tell you what happened."

The doctor just nodded. He knew better than to try to push for information now. He wasn't like Johan. He remembered the way the man had struck Wick, a slow practiced motion, and his jaw hardened. His niece would not be subject to such treatment. "You know him?" he inquired softly. She gave him a strange look, as if he'd asked her the color of the sky, but then her face fell, the blankness turning a little bitter and very sad.

"Yes."

They sat there for a few minutes in silence until the surgery door opened and rolled the patient out. The white gauzy fabric of the oxygen tent decreased visibility, but the boy's face was easy to make out. Rachel had washed him and given him a soft set of hospital scrubs, and the white of the bandage across his chest was visible only near his neck where the shirt didn't cover it.

Rebecca stood and crossed to him as Rachel hooked up the rest of his IVs. Gerard could not see her face from this angle, but the rest of her was absolutely still as she looked down on the boy. "May I stay?" The question was quiet, but it carried to him anyway, and he was startled by the depth of pleading in those words, masked only slightly by her calm demeanor.

"He might not wake until tomorrow," he began, and she looked up at him as if waiting for him to finish. He sighed again. "Alright, yes. You can stay. But only until lights out." She looked at him a moment longer and the nodded as she turned back to her friend.

The doctor plucked the chart from the end of the bed and realized he did not yet have a name on the top. Rachel had taken his uniform with the tags when she got the blood for the transfusion. It would be easier just to ask than to go look it up. "What's his name?"

Sol did not turn to face him again.

Gabe felt like he was floating. It was a strange sensation, because he'd spent a lot of time in the battleroom back and Battle School, and he knew what floating felt like, and this was not it. He wasn't weightless, necessarily. He could sense up and down, could feel gravity's pull on his body. And yet, nevertheless, he was floating.

He couldn't quite decide what his surroundings were. Every time he thought he had it figured out they changed without changing at all -- they were different, any yet had always been that way. That he could remember them differently didn't seem to make any difference in this place. He drifted through clouds, through oceans, through deserts, through space. They were all so very real. The clouds left dew on his skin, and the currents beneath the waves pulled at him in diffent directions. The sand of the desert brushed across his skin, and the cold emptiness of space chilled him to the bone.

As he floated, he could see events of the past playing out around him. The dunes would give way to tile flooring and toilet stalls, among which Gabe stood holding a bloodied towel around Sol's hands. Atop a cloud Sol and Gabe stood sparring, Gabe deflecting Sol's attacks as she came at him, punching and kicking and laughing happily. On the ocean floor the two of them sat on either side of a painted desk, playing chess.

And in space, there was a tree. A large, snow-covered pine. Gabe could see the tree, but he could also see inside at the same time, almost like the two images were overlayed except not exactly. Inside he and Sol lay asleep.

He drifted forever, through countless environs, through countless memories. These were not the memories of all the terrible things he had done to people; these were not memories of all the pain and misery he had caused. Nor were these memories of his own pain, or his own misery. His bad memories were absent. These were memories from the past eight years. These were memories of his time with Sol.

Until he got to the end whatever path he floated upon. It ended over a pond, perfect glass from shore to shore, surrounded by towering pines. On the bank ahead of him, a rotting dock extended out over the water, atop which sat a just-as-rotted boathouse. His eyes immediately went to the spot in the tall grass a few meters from the shore, where the underside of a rusting old rowboat was visible.

Gabe floated foward, past the shore, past the boathouse, past the little modern cottage about fifty meters back from the pond. He floated up the path, towering pines lining one side and a sturdy white wooden fence on the other.

And then he was in the center of the field, having bypassed the gates and fences altogether. The sun was setting, and the sky was red. The grass looked almost black.

Against the impossibly flat horizon, silhouetted against a sky clearer than Oregon had ever seen on it's driest day, was a majestic black mare, standing statue-still, looking right back at Gabe.

Gabe had never given much thought to the concept of religion. Nevertheless, his thoughts right that moment were quite clear.

God could not have chosen a more perfect form.

He was floating still, about a meter above the grass. The mare regarded him, and then started forward, walking slowly toward him. The whole way, its eyes never left him.

I know those eyes.

The horse stopped right in front of him, and again stood as still as stone. Gabe reached out a hesitant hand, toward the horse's face. There was something that had not been in any of his memories before. The horse he had seen had been completely black, nose to tail.

This horse had a white forelock.

Gabe's fingers touched the forlock, gently, and the horse raised its head again, so that its eyes held his. And right then Gabe knew whose eyes they were.

There was a soft pulsing. Steady. Gabe could remember waking up to that very same sound twice before, both a long time ago. And he knew, immediately, that he was not dead.

Before he do much as tried to open his eyes, his lips formed that single magic syllable. "Sol," he whispered, his voice thick and slurred with anesthetic unconsciousness.

Forty-five minutes left before lights out, and Gabe was still asleep. It didn't matter. She could wait another four hours if it was necessary. She wouldn't leave until he woke, and if her uncle had a problem with that, he could either have her arrested or leave her in peace, and she imagined he probably wouldn't want to go to that trouble, not for his own blood.

Gabe's chest rose and fell with gentle rhythym. He was still pale, too pale, copper lashes resting on his cheeks in vibrant definition, but his heart was beating evenly, had been the entire time she'd watched over him. Her muscles were stiff from not moving, but she didn't really notice anymore. When his breathing pattern changed a minute amount, she took a step forward to bring her to the very edge of the bed.

It stayed that way for almost a full minute, and her hope was beginning to dwindle with his face twitched. A tiny frown appeared between his eyebrows, and his lips parted, and he said her name, his voice thick with drugged stupor. She slipped her hand under the flowing material of the oxygen tent and took his hand in hers, tears beginning to fall down her cheeks again. He wasn't awake, precisely, but he was quickly reaching it.

She waited until his eyes flickered open before she smiled through her tears and replied.

The corners of his mouth twitched. It was as close as he could come to a grin. His eyes rolled sideways, so that he could see her, and then he did manage a grin, even if it was pretty weak.

There were a thousand things he wanted to say. There were a thousand things he wanted to tell her, to share with her, to make her understand so that she would know him, truly know him. So that never again would he leave unfinished business behind.

Unfortunately he was very weak, and his mind was very fuzzy. So he settled for saying the three words that pretty much summed up everything else he wanted to say.