The 6 Greatest Errors of All Time | ?

XXIX. over my dead body

K2 transmitted me a peculiar look as he folded his arms across his chest. "Are you talking to yourself because you're deranged?"

"Did you pretend to fly the helicopter because you're insecure?" I saw him crack his neck and knuckles like he was willing to punch me to my death in a boxing ring.

"You're not going to drop this little incident, are you Risa?"

"Over my dead body."

After a moment, silence finally settled. I laced my fingers through my hair with my eyes shut. K2 noticed my abrupt, quiet manner and leaned forward with his elbows propped up on his knees, eyeing me carefully. "But hey, are you okay? You didn't even sleep that long. The exhaustion will get to you, no matter how strong-willed you are."

I opened my eyes slowly and tilted my head to gaze out the window. "No need for the warning old man, it already happened. When Asao... explained about DID, I remembered someone."

"Someone, huh," K2 nodded in thought, "You're not talking about one of your teammates, are you?"

"Maybe I am," I found difficulty in shrugging my shoulders, like the heavy weight in the pits of my stomach had somehow been relocated to my shoulder blades. "Maybe I'm not. Was he a teammate, or someone else? I can't pinpoint a clear-cut answer. Asao mentioned we had a past Commander but he didn't remember who, and neither did the rest of the team. My alter... I'm sure he would've known."

My head rose to meet K2's eyes as I blurted out with a hint of hesitation, "Do you know who our past Commander is?"

He thinned his lips. "I know him."

There was an electric spark that shot throughout my body from head to toe as my eyes widened. "Then—"

He held up his outstretched hand to halt me, then dropped it and rotated his fist in a circle, the other palm cupping and rubbing the wrist's circumference absentmindedly. "I know what you're about to ask. I know I could. But I strongly believe this isn't the best time to stir your memory any further when you have a disorder that can take advantage of that at the party, where I won't be with you. You're going to overload."

I tensed up in my seat and set my jaws firm. I knew he saw my opposition, my disagreement, and my resentment towards him all in one split second. The man simply maintained a leveled eye with me to ensure that I knew he was the stable one in the conversation at the moment, and that by questioning his motives, I was going to bring harm to myself.

"Focus on Serenity for now. When the night's over, I promise I will hunt down that man for you. I've been looking for him for a while now anyways, it'll be a good next assignment we can take on afterwards."

"Can I really trust you?"

There... I said it. We've only met him the other day, but it felt like an eternity the more the team interacted with him. It was so natural, too familiar, but all this feeling was of the past. And I was wary of everything and anything in the past. The disorder, the memory wipe, the foggy image of a man that still left a dark, permanent after-feeling engraved on my skin and in my memory.

My heart remembered it all. But it was my mind that didn't. A part of me hoped that we never fully regain our memories. I was content with life right now. We knew enough to understand who had done us wrong, and who we were, but I had no further interest in reliving the memories of what life had been like before Pierce.

K2... he was a dangerous link to the past and the present that I had come to accept before only because Pierce needed him. Now, I just wanted to know if I could accept him as a person that I could put my and my team's faith in.

The director's reassuring smile in one corner of his lips caused my eyes to soften. He pointed to my red locket and I peered down in a broken trance, forgetting it was there.

"Looks like Pierce delivered it to you," he smirked, observing me re-position the necklace on my neck. "My guards found it in your apartment. You need to clean up your room though, like, rummaging through that pigsty was ridiculous—"

"You ever heard of ruining the moment?" I glared the man up and down before shaking my head with a defeated sigh. "Forget it. I was trying to be serious."

K2 observed me bemusedly before a chuckle echoed out. "I am too, Risa. I was going to say, we found something interesting buried in your backyard. The soil patch looked a bit sketchy— like someone tried to replant it— and our metal detector went off, so we dug the area up and found not only your locket, but an old journal along with it."

I squinted my eyes at the newfound information. "Journal. What the hell?"

"A system's journal. To my knowledge, some people with DID establish a rule book that they use to communicate with their alters if they can't automatically do that in the headspace. You seem to not be able to freely connect with Leigh and J.J., so I'm guessing the journal helped the three of you out in the past to come to terms on certain things."

I remained unusually silent, so he continued. "I didn't look through it. No one knows about it except me, and now you. I thought I should give you the choice of keeping this away from Pierce and the rest of them if you wanted to, since it's personal."

When I spoke again, I caught the man off guard. "No, I want Pierce to know. I have a feeling when I do get a chance to look in that journal after all of this, I won't be right in the head."

"You already think that lowly of yourself?"

"It's inevitable," I forced an aimless smirk. "I have my limits. I'm full aware of them too. When we took on this assignment, I was prepared that things may change for the worse. The only thing I was under-prepared for was that it was going to be me, but I wouldn't have it any other way. My heart would break if they felt what I'd been feeling tonight."

"What exactly are you feeling, Risa?"

"A little sad. Oddly childish, right? But I can't think of the right word."

Without realizing our direction or our destination, we've arrived at Serenity. Then that meant that it'd been several hours on the aircraft already, and that the time zones only made the illusion that it was an eternal night. Below, Serena Heatherine's property expanded larger in surface area the closer we hovered towards it. We landed safely and securely behind the towering mansion.

Just before K2 shut the power off and blasted into the speaker for the team to wake up, he looked in my eyes and asked genuinely, "Would you like for me to contact a doctor for your DID?"

I was in the midst of waking T6's Commander up from his slumber when the sudden question threw me completely off guard. My throat and lungs became deprived of cycled oxygen as I held my breath. With lips slightly ajar, and eyes dazed, I mouthed my answer to the older man.

"... please."

•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••

K2: Wow, we really just had a whole chapter dedicated to us.

Venus: I'm... going to go cleanse my eyes after what I just read. You being soft is on a whole new level of taboo that I don't appreciate.

Beta: Then what are we waiting for? Let's put him up for adoption.