Aaliyah woke in a cold sweat to a series of loud banging at her door.

“Aaliyah!” Her name was called out with the distinctive bellow of Ajax’s voice, his voice a uniquely powerful one, capable of travelling further than any of the others in the team.

She briefly considered not answering the door, before thinking better of it. She might want to distance herself from the rest of the team as much as she could, putting their budding idealism at an arm’s length, but ignoring Ajax outright would be about as disastrous as you could get when it came to committing social suicide within a group.

She wearily rolled out of her bed, walking through her lounge and opened the door, eyes bleary.

“What’s happen–” She began, but before she could finish, a pair of powerful hands grabbed at her shoulders and began to pull her out of her own room and down the hallway. Aaliyah yelped in surprise as the man puller her along, even letting some of the indignation and surprise colour her with a warning red. She tried to pull away, but Ajax was too strong for her to break his grip fast enough before she was pulled into his room, door clicking closed behind them.

She looked up at the man, ready to lambast him with any number of insults and anger, but when she saw the usually unflappably smiling man ‘s expression of pure exhaustion and worry, it stopped her dead.

The man took a moment to sigh, and then gestured to his living room, which was a mess of cloths, buckets, cleaning supplies, over the counter medicines and more. Not to mention Mirah laying down on the couch panting heavily looking as if she’d caught a terrible fever as well as a thousand spent tissues soaked with blood that was just now seeping from her nose and eyes once again.

“Help.” Ajax said simply, his voice a defeated shell of the man he usually was. It wasn’t a command, but almost a plea, one that made Aaliyah almost viscerally uncomfortable. As she stood in the entranceway of Ajax’s apartment, standing next to a man who looked like he was aging before her very eyes and a woman that was seeping blood from her eyes, nose, and mouth, Aaliyah was stuck with no choice.

With a low growl she walked forwards to the restless woman on the couch, giving an eye to all the things that Ajax was doing to try and get her comfortable.

“Have you given her–” Aaliyah began, but saw Mirah’s gut lurch and her throat bulge. In a moment of heightened senses, she grabbed the nearby bucket which Mirah promptly expelled the contents of her stomach into. “Well, I’ll assume that whatever you gave her just came back up.”

Ajax chuckled dryly, totally lacking any humour, but was again interrupted by another retching sound coming from his bedroom. Ajax raced into that his room and the sound of splattering sick was disturbing, managing to scratch against Aaliyah’s composure like nails on a chalkboard.

Moments later, Ajax walked out of the room with the bucket a moment later, looking to Aaliyah and holding out a hand for her own with such a distillation of exhaustion that it even made her feel tired.

“Have you called Tracker or Willem yet?” She called out form the loungeroom, making Mirah groan with the volume, though she ignored it for the moment.

“Not yet, Mirah just came in half an hour ago. You might want to, though, there’s blood in her bucket.” Aaliyah sighed frustratedly, the strange panic of the situation already wearing on her, memories of the past she’d tried so hard to repress pulling at her conscious.

“On it.” She called, not in the mood to argue that the man should have went for Tracker instead of her as soon as Mirah had come in. Aaliyah moved quickly over to the phone that was present in each of their rooms in just the same place, picking it up and dialling the extension for Tracker’s room.

She’d never tried calling any of the other rooms yet, but she’d read up on how to call the right extensions, and if Tracker were as diligent as she said she was…

“Tracker speaking.” The phone had rung twice, after which it had clearly switched lines and after another ring Tracker’s voice was on the other side of the phone.

“I have no idea what’s going on, but Mirah is sick now too. Fever, bleeding from eyes, nose, mouth, vomiting some blood. Get here quick.” Aaliyah slammed the phone back into its holder as she rushed back to Mirah’s side, grabbing some of the tissues to dab at the blotches of blood around her eyes and nose, keeping her head tilted so that she couldn’t choke on the blood or that none of it leaked down the back of her throat.

Quickly Aaliyah developed a process the best she could, trying to ease as much of Mirah’s discomfort as she could. As she did so, she caught herself slipping into the mindset she’d abandoned so long ago, one that she’d assumed for her sister after their mother had abandoned them. It almost made her angry that it has to be Mirah of all people to bring up those emotions again, just salt in the wound to her discomfort around the woman.

Only a minute or so after Aaliyah had made the phone call, there was a click from the door behind her, and Tracker strode into the room as professionally attired as ever.

“I don’t know what happened to her–”

“Don’t worry, I quickly called around and figured it out.” Tracker interrupted, pulling out a blister package strip of pills, each of the pills a clear bead of blue and green within them. She quickly popped one of the pills from the package and snatched a glass of half drunken water from the kitchen table. In moments, the woman was crouching at Mirah’s side, sitting her up to then forcing the pills down Mirah’s throat with practiced ease.

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Mirah swallowed the pill and water painfully, and looked as if she were going to reject the addition along with what was left of the rest of her stomach contents. Bothe Tracker and Aaliyah waited for a pregnant moment before the scarred woman’s face eased ever so slightly, having left the moment of danger.

“Okay.” Tracker sighed with relief, wiping at her forehead idly before turning to Aaliyah and holding up the blister package. “Once every three hours till they’re gone.” She commanded, and Aaliyah nodded hesitantly.

“You know what happened?” She asked quickly as Tracker got back up and walked into the kitchen area.

“Mirah managed to find a new aspect, I think.” Tracker replied as she rummaged through the cupboards to find a cup of her own and filling it with water.

“A new aspect? Isn’t that really rare?” Tracker shrugged as she downed the cup of water, then doing the same with a second cup.

“Not in undefined classified Linked. In fact, it’s almost one to one. Not to mention that she only just had a Remembrance a month ago.” Tracker let the glass cup clink against the stone countertop as she placed it down. She sighed weightily, leaning against the bench while facing Aaliyah, “We don’t know what triggered her finding the new aspect, or what the aspect is, but I’d say it’ll be a weird one.”

“So she’ll be fine?” Aaliyah asked, letting out a little more worry than she’d have liked in her voice, though Tracker pointedly ignored it.

“She’ll be fine, yes, though she’ll have a rough time of it in the next few hours. She’s effectively got a severe form of link burnout, like what hypercognitives get if they push their brain really hard. Hence why I have a strip of those pills.” Aaliyah nodded briefly before looking back at Mirah’s slowly easing face, the tightness in her muscles slowly loosening as the drug did whatever it did.

“The pain and the fever will ease in the next hour, but she’ll be trying to throw up for a few more yet, and then after that she might wake up. When she wakes up, make sure she drinks a lot and I’ll get Chef to send up some food for her if you give him a call.”

Aaliyah nodded again, letting the cloud of grey cover her as she slowly took care of Mirah. After that, she heard Tracker and Ajax talking to each other, though their voices were warped and distorted to Aaliyah, her mind focusing its entire attention on the girl she had come to despise.

The hours passed just like Tracker had said they would, almost to the minute, but the feeling of the cloud bearing down on her shoulders and her mind never went away. If Aaliyah had been of any sane mind, then she’d have noticed that grey, stormy colour that had begun to propagate across her skin, though she didn’t.

She wouldn’t be experiencing the depths of her own emotions if she could.

Aaliyah reached out a hand and brushed gently at Mirah’s hair, stroking her hand through the short brown mess of curls. Not too long ago they had been a haphazardly cut to the sides of her head, focused entirely on practicality rather than any looks, yet now Aaliyah could see the beginning of the beautiful hair that Mirah could grow.

She slowly traced her fingers down Mirah’s face, finally arriving at the scar that was featured so prominently. That was the thing that broke something deeper inside Aaliyah than she’d thought was possible anymore.

Aaliyah was unable to stop herself from seeing the face of her twin sister overlap with Mirah’s, the scar almost glowing with the harsh contrast. Her sister had looked nothing like Mirah, not even close to the same features, but she had been beautiful just like Mirah. And she had the same eyes as Mirah.

Not the same colour, but the same shattered, broken eyes that Aaliyah now secretly wore. Aaliyah’s hand shook as she traced the scar, her finger almost feeling as if it were being cut by the viscousness of the tear in the other girl’s flesh, the small ridges of the scar ever so prominent against her fingertip.

“Halina.” She whispered, almost like it was a lullaby. The ghost of her sister’s face disappeared from within her mind as she spoke the name, leaving only Mirah’s behind, but the tears were already rolling down her cheeks. Each one of the droplets falling down the same path over and over, dripping down her face and nose, prompting her to wipe at them with the sleeve of her long-sleeved t-shirt.

Her sister had been the first to wear those eyes, though Mirah had probably wore them even earlier than that. The partying and drugs had been a way to escape from her life, from what she knew her father was, and the terrible rage she felt towards her mother. Aaliyah had felt the same but she couldn’t make herself follow in her sister’s footsteps, some small part of her resistant to the idea.

She’d tried to help her so many times. Halina had asked for that help just as many more, but it only ended in her eyes growing a little duller, a little more dead behind them.

She could never possibly count the times that she’d helped her sister recover from a bender, just as she was doing for Mirah now. She’d tried to help her quit many times, but the withdrawals always proved stronger, eating away at any semblance of what had once been her twin sister.

And then she had died, choking on her own vomit.

Their father had never known. They’d been so terrified that he’d find out about Halina’s drug use that they’d hidden it from him entirely, an easy task when he was always so caught up in conducting evil as Monarch.

He’d found out on the day that she died. And he’d also found out that the drug she’d used, that had killed her, was the very same drug that he’d proliferated throughout Melbourne for years.

He’d killed her.

And they both knew it.

Maybe that was why he let himself fall to her punches so easily, willing to be hit and wailed upon. Maybe that was why he let himself be tied up and thrown into their basement, never to see the light of day again. Maybe that was why, as she crushed his empire and all of his partners along with, his face was so dead as she recited it all to him every night, not even screaming as she told him the fate of everything he’d done.

Maybe that was why it was so easy to slit his throat and leave his corpse to rot, not even doing so much as beg, leaving Aaliyah to run away in the night—hoping to never be found by those that wanted her dead for her crimes.

And maybe that was why she was here, at this training centre and in this team. This was the last lifeline that she had to cling to, the only one that could bring her out of the dark recesses of Melbourne and into the light once again, maybe even making it possible for her to move somewhere nicer. New Zealand, with their seven Maori Brothers, protecting their country from any who might threaten their people.

But she looked down at the girl that so resembled her sister, taking care of her like she had so many times before, she felt that uncomfortable pull. The pull of people, of friendship and family, of a future apart form one that wholly considered only her.

A future where she discarded every misgiving she had and fell into lockstep with the others of her group, knowing better than all of them the darkest pits they could be thrown into. And as soon as she considered the possibility, the cracks in the veneer she’d created for herself, so good that even she’d believed in it, started to spiderweb across the entire structure.

The bright light shone through the cracks, filling her with an unease so potent that it almost floored her for a moment before she began to adjust to the light of hope that began to shine through with a greater intensity. She’d bottled it up for so long, but now it was out of the bag again. It might only be small, relative to the monolithic doubt and fear she possessed, but it was enough to notice and to feel.

And with it, maybe…

Just maybe.