Karim already has a headache, but before morning, he’s bound to have a migraine.

The image of the kid as he left is stuck in his head, the barely-hidden fear in their countenance and the white-knuckle grip they had on the edge of the exam table. A silent plea was there, he’s sure of it, but he’s not sure what else they would want him to do. There’s a bit of guilt in him for leaving them there like that, but he’s sure Sira will be grateful to be out of clothes and have something to eat before the ordeal of what the doctor needs to do is over.

Some would call him soft-hearted for navigating these situations in the way that he does. One particular person has said it outright, but Karim chooses to see it as not letting the things he’s dealt with in his two-decade career kill off some of the more human parts of himself.

Which, he admits, is going to make this entire process all the more difficult.

Their assigned quarters are situated on the second story of what was once a dingy motel. F-6's personnel have done their best to touch up and maintain the place, but both the interior and exterior walls show clear signs of wear and tear. Most of the places Karim has been to outside of headquarters are like that. It's not as if there aren't diligent and skilled trade workers among the CPC's construction and engineering division, but their energy is better directed at keeping buildings and the outer walls of their outposts intact and as sturdy as possible, rather than getting things to look as pristine as they might have been before the world ended.

‘Might have’ being key - from some of the personal accounts he’s stumbled upon from the ‘old world,’ places such as this usually weren’t kept in the best condition.

The upstairs halls are quiet aside from faint chatter from inside some of the rooms. It’s almost curfew for those who aren’t part of the on-shift Garrison squads, so the majority of F-6 is winding down for the night. The warm glow from the mounted lamps spills over the walls’ wood paneling, creating a warm and cozy atmosphere, but he’s far from relaxed as he stops at the door to room 206 and wraps his fingers around its brass handle. Unlocked.

As Karim expects, his subordinates are still awake.

Most of the motel's rooms have been rearranged to be more like quarters - the large beds traded out for Army-style bunks, and a small area with a couch, table, and chairs for eating and leisure. There are more bunks than there are members of his team, but luckily for them, one of the many perks of their division is always getting a room to themselves.

Rani sits on the couch, facing the door, her arms crossed over her chest and one leg folded over the other with its foot impatiently bobbing up and down. Therese’s hair tumbles over Rani’s shoulder, where her head rests as she intently scrolls through something on a small tablet. Lionel paces about one side of the room, and through the glass doors leading to the balcony, he makes out Mikael’s silhouette leaning against the railing.

As the door opens, Rani jerks to attention, Therese shoots up off her shoulder with a faint darkening of her cheeks, and Lionel comes to a stop. Karim’s gaze, however, lingers on Mikael’s figure on the balcony a moment longer. He lets out a small sigh.

That boy isn’t making nearly as much progress as he thought he would.

“C-captain,” Rani breaks the brief silence, placing her hands on the edge of the couch cushions as she tilts forward with interest. The look in her eyes is eager, but uncertain, and she’s holding most of it back. “Um, any updates?”

Lionel doesn't say anything, but the glimmer on his face is unmistakable. Therese's lips are pursed, but her focus is locked on him, mentally on the edge of her seat instead of physically. Karim's trepidation turns into an easy grin as he gently shuts the door behind him.

It’s been a while since he’s seen them like this. Not since they were bright-eyed recruits. Aside from Mikael, that is, but that would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone. It’s refreshing, but he picks up on the unease that’s been in the air since he met up with them back at the observation post.

After all, this whole thing does seem too good to be true, and he can't shake that feeling no matter how hard he tries. It's not only the fact that it seems far too convenient, but there's this vague sense of wrongness underlying the whole thing that makes his head hurt worse than it already does if he prods at why that might be.

But he’s a leader. Letting something like that get to him isn't an option. Regardless, the feeling has progressively lessened since returning to F-6 and getting to talk to Sira a little more. It might just be in his own head, but he's always been in tune with how his team is feeling, and they come off as experiencing something similar.

“I’m having the doc give Sira a once-over to make sure they’re alright, then we’re hopefully going to run a...test or two,” he explains, “Lionel, you’re the smallest one here - do you have any clothing to spare? I’m trying to hunt down something for our new friend to wear. Storage doesn’t have much in the way of things that might fit.”

Color rises into Lionel’s cheeks as he averts his gaze from Karim, but the implications about his height and build were inevitable no matter how the request could have been worded. Too much muscle for someone with Sira’s body type to not still be swimming in his clothes to an extent, but he has the least bulk to him compared to the rest of the team. “Uh, y-yeah boss, I’ll check.”

Lionel dips down to the end of one of the bunk beds, where a duffle bag’s contents are half-strewn across the floor. Rani clears her throat as she stands from the couch, arms loosely folded behind her back. “How are they doing?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Karim gives her a light shrug. “Not too sure yet. Gonna hear what Dr. Pareira has to say first, but I imagine they’ll feel a lot better once they get some food in them, some rest, and maybe a shower. We’ll have to see.”

“Then after that, it’s the Director?” Therese asks.

"Correct. I still need to get ahold of her. If our suspicions are correct, she'll be the one to decide what's going to happen after that."

Rani’s shoulders slump. “Right...shit.”

“Hey, seeing the Director means going back to headquarters, yeah?” Lionel rises back up to his feet from the duffle bag and approaches Karim, clutching a plain black shirt and pair of gray joggers in his hands. “Been a while since I had the noodles from that one place.”

Rani rolls her eyes at Lionel as Karim takes the clothing from him. “Of course you would say that. She’s the only one you don’t run your mouth around, so you don’t have to worry about getting on her bad side. And that’s if we even need to go.”

“Hey, it works, doesn’t it?”

"Now, now." Karim isn't worried about the shirt, but he inspects the joggers. The waistline is elastic - hopefully it fits. He'll have to pick out several pairs of the boots they have in stage to see what size will work. "I'm obviously the Director's favorite, so bickering amongst yourselves isn't going to get you anywhere. Also, yes - you all are definitely going to go with us back to HQ, because this is going to call for some pretty intense debriefing."

A cryptic expression comes over Rani’s face. “So then...do you really think this is what it looks like? That this might be...it?”

That gives him pause. He decides to haphazardly roll up the clothes and tuck them beneath his arm, remaining silent. The question weighs heavy in the air, with no one else moving or speaking.

He’s not able to look Rani in the eye as he threads through the complexities in his mind. There’s far too much there, far too many interwoven details, variables, factors, and contingencies, and he hasn’t had nearly enough sleep in the past few days for him to process that much. That is on top of the ‘wrongness’ he’s been feeling about the whole thing. If he dwells on what exactly all of this might mean, he worries that he’s going to give himself something worse than a migraine.

However, it’s not something he can avoid altogether. He’s not that lucky.

“It’s too soon to tell,” he decides to say. “As you probably know, there hasn’t been any case like this before. I’m doing preliminary testing here, to show her we aren’t being reckless about this, but the Director is still unlikely to be happy with just that and will want to do a whole lot more before she feels able to make a decision. And what she’ll decide to do after that, I can only guess. Sira’s claims about amnesia and their unknown origins complicate things. I doubt the Director is going to take them at their word.”

“It’s bizarre though, isn’t it?” Therese says from where she sits on the couch, taking care to keep her voice down as she switches the tablet screen off and places it in her lap. "This person comes from nowhere, doesn't remember anything about who they are or where they came from - other than their name, and conveniently they can breathe in tons of the mist without presenting any symptoms of infection? Something isn't right here. And it's not just me that thinks so, right?"

Karim shakes his head. “No, you’re not the only one.”

“And as much as some of us might want it to be just some wild coincidence, we can’t be sure until...” Rani trails off. He can’t help but notice how her hands clench into fists at her sides.

It doesn’t need to be said aloud. The amount of caution he pictures the Director taking with their new arrival, while rigorous and discompassionate in a way that makes his stomach churn at the thought, any other reaction would come off as irresponsibility.

The world has been dead for longer than anyone he’s personally met has been alive. It is impossible to accept any sort of revival of its corpse that would be as ‘easy’ or ‘simple’ as what Sira possibly represents without that kind of scrutiny. ‘Too good to be true’ is an understatement; The Director is more likely going to look at Sira like they’re a Trojan horse, not the salvation of mankind.

Despite that, Karim is still human. And so is Sira. He’s never fully fallen into the cold and calculating way of thinking that most of Command have taken on, even with the brutality he’s witnessed in his career. He’s cut himself off from just enough of the pain to function without his mistakes weighing him down, but those mistakes haven’t lowered him to the point of seeing those beneath him in rank as means to an end more than people.

After that particular stain on his conscience that he still sometimes sees reflected in Rani's eyes, even six years after the fact, it's the least he can do.

Which is going to make dealing with the Director on this matter very, very difficult.

Karim smiles, but he can feel how it doesn’t quite reach his eyes this time. “Let’s just hope for the best and leave the specifics up to the experts. Until we figure out what the plan is with our new friend, I encourage you all to try to take it easy and act as normal, not work yourselves up into a frenzy.”

Rani sighs, Therese stares down at her hands in her lap, and Lionel fidgets with one of the buttons on his jacket. The silence that settles over the room tells him that relaxation is going to be a tall order, especially at such a sparse base of operations as F-6, but he knows them well enough that they’ll work through it.

Karim's eye drifts to the figure standing outside, who now has his head half-turned to keep an eye on what’s going on inside. The faint glow of a lit cigarette clenched between Mikael’s fingers forces Karim to repress a sigh. Out of all the bad habits he could’ve picked up from me, it had to be that one.

Not as if there’s anything Karim can do about it. It’s Mikael, and there isn’t a long life expectancy associated with their line of work anyways. At least he knows Mikael isn’t one to be as on edge about this as the others...at least not outwardly.

“Anyway, the clothing is what I came here for. Lionel, I’ll be sure to give these back to you once we find something better for Sira, and I will update you all again once we’re through at the clinic,” he says, placing his hand back on the doorknob, “until then, try to rest up as much as you can. You’ll probably need it.”

Rani nods dutifully. “We’ll do our best, sir.”

She turns away from him, attention back on Therese, and starts to say something as Karim lets himself out of the room and closes the door again. The smile drops from his face and, being careful to not let the clothes fall out from beneath his arm, he gently massages his temples as he tries to empty his mind of all the noise in his head that the conversation dredged up.

It’s not bad that they think about things in this way. Most definitely not. His little Lambda-9 are all bright kids and he’s always ensured that their training encourages that brightness to flourish. It’s that he’s ready for today to be over with already, but he still needs to tend to Sira, and then he’ll have to make a call to Madame Director before he can allow himself to turn in.

Karim slips his hands back in his pockets and makes for the stairs. If there’s even a small amount of grace for him in this world, he’ll find something that’ll be easier on Sira’s stomach than the cafeteria’s gruel. The mental image of having to deal with the poor kid throwing up, on top of everything else, is enough to quicken his pace.