A/N: What I originally wanted was a 2k fic featuring superhero teams Printemps apprehending the triumvirate of villainy, BiBi, but then lily white happened and now everything is sad and Printemps is hardly there. ): Also I'm still trying to figure out what this is.

Also if you extrapolate (?) from the exposition and flip some angles around there's RinMaki and if you dig even deeper you'll find seeds of NozoNico for a complete BBxLW. And on a side note: what even are genres. what is this, angst? is there angst here? it's certainly not romantic. i'm not very romantic.

Eli pretends to be engrossed in the string of numbers, phrases and odd characters that take up Maki's screen. She tries to immerse herself in the chaotic stream of clacks that emanate from the keyboard and the steady beat of Nico's boots scuffing on gravel. It's a necessity for her thoughts to revolve around trivial things she won't mind forgetting—things without weight, because otherwise, she might lose the composure that her team needs to see this through.

The three of them are alone in the middle of nowhere, miles away from the closest stranger while the chill of the desert air crawls under their jackets. Above her is an endless expanse of nighttime clouds that are as suffocating as they are dark, and right beneath the ground she sits on right now—

Right beneath the ground she sits on right now—

"Eli."

She flinches. It's just Maki.

"Yes?" Eli says. Maki is frowning at her.

"Don't play dumb, Eli," she says. "Are you sure you're okay?"

For some reason, Eli feels like smiling. Only Maki is so sharp by accident. She can't let her know that, though. "Why? Do I look sick or something?"

The way Maki goes back to her laptop is somehow cold. "You know that's not what I mean," she says over her own clacking. "I know it's kind of a normal thing for you to push yourself further than what's smart, especially when it's 'because it's your job,' but this time there might be some serious problems if you go too far. It's been a year since…" She trails off. Maybe Maki can feel the look Eli's giving her right now? "…but only a year, so, you might not really be ready to go back down there. Now's your last chance to back out. I've checked everything—no one's home, but if we don't go in when I take the system, we can't just try again next time."

"That won't matter," Eli says, a little more strongly than she'd have liked, as she stands up. "We're going in. Nico, you ready?"

Nico stops pacing and huffs. "About time. I was wondering if this place was too tough for little Maki-chan to crack."

"No such place, dumbass," Maki says. "Especially not this one. Unlike you, I practically lived here before—" In the corner of her eye, Eli catches Maki glance at her before tightening her lips and looking away. "Never mind. Eli, you ready?"

Eli's hand reaches down to her thigh to pull a blocky gun out of its holster. "Of course," she says.

"What are you planning to use that for?" Nico asks. "Literally no one is in there, right? Plenty to wreck and all, but there's nothing to really defend yourself against."

With a click, the weapon whirs to life. Grooves running across the entire frame begin to glow with light the same color as Eli's eyes.

She points it at Nico, who has to squint at the brightness from what would be the muzzle if it was a real gun. "For now, it's mostly a flashlight."

Behind her, Maki sighs. "You know, maybe I'll see if I can hack the lights, too, while I'm at it. Just in case."

Her finger taps on her keyboard's Enter key, and ground before her begins to shift. Frigid underground air wafts out from between the teeth of the steel plates that slide apart, as if they'd opened the mouth of a metal giant's carcass. Eli hopes that Maki doesn't catch her swallow.

"Twenty minutes," Maki says. "Get in there."

Eli takes a few steps forward—

"And Eli."

She turns.

"Come right back here if you have to."

Eli's footsteps are mostly as they usually are in her infiltrations—fast, light, and cautious, even if there's no one to hide from and, as much as she'd like to deny it, she knows the place like a second home. Burglary, to her, is more a craft than a crime, so every mistake on the job is another stain on polished steel to snuff out immediately, and every improvement is the honing of a blade that she needs to keep from dulling. Her delicate tread had become second nature a long time ago, which makes it all the more jarring now that she finds herself wavering, wanting to slow down in some hallways and speed up in others.

It's the familiarity, she thinks, the twisted nostalgia she feels from being in these metal hallways again. She can see all the white coats and dark blue uniforms that used to go back and forth between these rooms, hear the 'Good morning,'s and 'How are you's that new employees seemed to need practice with when it came to her, recall the occasional presents that the more considerate doctors and professors gave her every now and then. The stark white ceiling she woke up to every day, the screens she lived by, the numbers on the chest of every shirt she owned…

As Eli stops in front of another door, she shakes her head. Pursuing that line of thought would only make things harder.

But as much as she'd like to avoid it, her destination was the place she escaped every other night with a jolt from her bed and a warm wetness around her eyes. It all felt like a poison needle in Eli's memory, and though every night saw new changes to how she remembered it, there was a terrible, untouchable crux in the mess of flashing lights and cacophony of alarms, machines and yelling. When everything else had been twisted beyond recognition, everything Eli remembered of her remained untampered, down to the agony in the rasping screams that somehow grated at her chest more than pierced her ears, or the steeliness in the gold eyes that never left Eli's even after the lights had—

Eli slows to a stop as she nears a door. Her heart is beating too fast all of a sudden and the spinning in her head forces her to lean on the wall just to stay on her feet. When the glow of the gun in her hands begins to wane, too, it takes all her focus not to turn around and run.

The static that fills her ears shortly is incredibly welcome. "Eli? Eli, are you okay?"

No point in lying to Maki anymore. "Just… Just a second…"

"Do you need me to send Nico in?"

"No, no, I can make it." She needs to keep Maki with her, needs her voice to hang on to. "I'm not far, right? How much time do I have left?"

"About seventeen minutes," Maki says, "but you probably need less than ten to get this job done."

The dizzying stops, and her heartbeat is starting to relax. "Sounds good," Eli says as she takes tentative steps forward. "You can see me, right?"

"Yeah. All the cameras are working for me, but with the lights dead, you're pretty much the only thing I can actually see."

By the time Maki finishes speaking, Eli can walk with little trouble aside from a little lightness in her head and the drying sweat along her brow. That should be enough of a recovery. "I'm still counting on you to watch my back, all right?"

"You don't even have to tell me."

"Good."

She decides to end the conversation there. Her strength comes back to her slowly with every step forward she takes, and by the time she's at the next turn, she decides to abandon everything she's learned over the past few years.

After entering a short command into her laptop, Maki shuts her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose.

"That idiot and her stupid noble bullshit," she mutters through a sigh. "If she was smart, she'd be running back here right now."

Everything she grumbles afterwards is too soft for Nico to hear, so she gives Maki some time to finish before she cuts in. "What's going on here, anyway?" she asks. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out you guys have some kind of history with this place, but what happened back then that would make you two start acting like Eli's walking to her death?"

Maki's hand is ablur when she hits Nico upside the head. "Don't say it like that!"

"Ow, sorry! Must be more serious than I thought."

"No shit."

They say nothing for the next few moments afterwards. Maki stares at the screen of her laptop with such intensity that Nico only looks for a second before turning away, thinking she might snap again if she stared any longer. As irritable as she is, for Maki's temper to reach a state of cold silence is rare enough to mean something, which only makes Nico worry more about having overstepped some sensitive boundaries.

She considers adding more to her apology until Maki speaks up softly.

"I'll tell you," she says. "I mean, the only reason I never brought it up before was because Eli hated talking about it, but she's not here to stop me. That, and…" She reaches to play with a lock of hair. "…well, we'd have to get it over with eventually. Just don't bring it up too casually around her, all right?"

They lock eyes. Maki's are serious and icy, so Nico feels nodding is the only safe option.

"Then listen up. Talking about it isn't any more pleasant for me, so I won't repeat anything. First off…" Her gaze becomes shallow for a moment. Arranging her thoughts? "Remember when we all met for the first time?"

"Yeah," Nico answers, voice still quiet and timid. "We were still the Navigator unit and Soldier unit back then. The higher-ups made us work together for a coordination test."

"And we nearly screwed up thanks to a mistake in the intel," Maki says. "I got stuck in a room with one of your old teammates—Rin—for about six hours until you guys could fix everything, and there was nothing in there but eight corners and a locked door. We decided after a while to pass the time by telling stories since we didn't have many other options. Technically, it was against orders. Telling other units about your own was prohibited, but that was the first time since we got lumped into this farce that we weren't under surveillance, and my transmitter was broken, so we got carried away.

"Rin told me about what the Navigator unit did. You guys were something like a stealth-reconnaissance team. You went places to bring info back, and Rin was trying to understate it, but it didn't take too much for me to figure out that by 'places', she meant 'everywhere', from deserts to underground parking lots to bomb test sites. Navigator usually stayed out of the facility weeks at a time for each of their jobs, and Rin said she loved doing it no matter how tough things got. Thanks to that, she's been places that she was sure she'd never be able to go if she'd stayed human. She said she was grateful for meeting you and Hanayo, too, and that if it were anyone else, it wouldn't really be as good a deal. All in all, she came off as a huge sap to me, but I couldn't really pretend I wasn't convinced.

"So then my turn to talk came around, and really, it wasn't much. I ended up comparing Soldier to Navigator. Our jobs were a few days at most, and for every day we had out of here, we spent a week in. None of us really got a kick out of it—mostly it was things like stealing, kidnapping, breaking stuff, even assassination on really bad days. Sometimes as a team, sometimes not. Everything was bad, sure, but the worst part was that we were damn good at it. They called our work 'clinically efficient' so often I got sick of it, and we coordinated so well I started to think they messed with our brains. It was impossible to convince them that we weren't fit for the job, and throwing it wasn't an option—everything was always too life-or-death to try.

"By the end of it all, Rin could tell I was a little jealous of you guys, so before you broke the ceiling and picked us up, she told me she'd try to help me. She'd break out and find a way to combine Navigator and Soldier outside the project. Three months later, she thought she found it, but then her escape copter crashed somewhere in the ocean, she was declared dead, and Navigator, as a unit and as a program, was terminated. They decided Hanayo could be recycled and kept her awake for modification, but they couldn't say the same for you, so they put you in cold sleep, only to be woken up when—if—they found another use for you.

"Things were messy for a while after that. The lab coats tried to act otherwise, but Eli, Umi and I weren't idiots. They were lost after just a few weeks without Navigator, and we spent a whole month underground with nothing to do but sit and watch them run around like blind mice. I didn't say anything about it, of course—none of us did—but I knew that things were going to change. I just didn't know if that meant I'd go back home or wind up in a pod just like yours. And then the next month came around, along with the results of their investigation of Rin's little adventure.

"I'm not sure how I never noticed, but looking back, I think they might've kept it a secret from us. When Sasahara called us in, she showed us in detail what they'd learned about Rin. She crashed in some pretty shallow waters, enough to find the remains of the copter and the stuff left in it. And they found this." From her pocket, Maki pulls out a small metal plate with two slit-like holes running through it, and holds it toward Nico. "Do you know what this is?"

Nico looks at it for a few seconds, and shrugs. "Not really," she says. "I know you have two of them, though, and you put them on the back of your hand before you get into fights. Right now you're wearing one on your right hand."

"Yeah, that's about right." Maki clicks the plate in place on the steel of the back of her left hand. The grooves connect flawlessly with the lines along her hand and forearm, and they mimic the violet of her eyes when they begin to glow. Unlike Eli, though, Maki's eyes are only similar in color—they don't have the same mechanical light as Eli's eyes and their weapons.

Maki inspects her hand for a moment, and without warning, a pair of blades about the length of her forearm juts out, fitting snugly in the slits of the metal plate. In the same motion, her wrist jerks straight, and while the blades are out it seems to be locked in that position.

"I've never told you this before," she says as she pulls the blades back in, "but weapons for Soldier have to be activated by the person they were designed for before they can be used. These things—they're like a key for me, since my weapon's built into my body, but Eli and Umi only have to touch theirs to activate them. Second thing about Soldier weapons: they basically give us telepathy—"

"What the hell—"

"—because when they're activated, they have a second function as a transceiver between other Soldier members who have their weapons activated, and only to them, since the messages are all in here." Maki taps her temple. "We talk for real, but there's no actual sound when we 'hear' it—just science. I only told Rin about that part when we were stuck together, which is probably why she thought it would be enough for her to bring one with her. She thought she'd at least be able to give one-way messages with this if she brought one with her.

"The guys investigating figured as much, too, and they came to the conclusion that Navigator and Soldier were working together to escape. The next thing we knew, Soldier was terminated. They decided what they'd do with us before they called us in, because me and Eli were the only ones back in our rooms after that meeting. Umi was on her way to joining you in a cozy little cryostasis chamber."

"But if she was in cold sleep," Nico says, "then why didn't you guys bring her back?"

"Because she never had any intention of staying," Maki says. "Umi gave the scientists hell every time they put her in a new chamber. When they put her in a pod just like yours, it only took her three hours until she woke up and broke out. They moved her to a better one that they had just for things like this—broken in seven hours. After a few days, they developed a new one, better than the last, deeper underground, in a room reinforced with titanium walls four inches thick and a door with three different locking mechanisms. The day after they put her there, the white coats checked on her to find her arm reduced to scrap metal and the chamber door with a deformed crater just a centimeter away from being a hole. Umi herself greeted them standing steady on her feet, and that's probably when they decided that cold sleep wasn't enough to put her to rest.

"It would be almost impossible to kill Umi without shutting her cybernetics down, so they had to get it done in her own room, which happened to be right across Eli's. She happened to catch them while they were bringing Umi in, and they couldn't stop her when she forced herself inside."

Maki pauses, her eyes taking a somber aura when she looks at the facility gate.

"That's the only part where I don't know what happened. I don't ask Eli what she saw or why she decided to wake you up. All I know is that to Eli, Umi died right in front of her that day and took this whole place with her." She chuckles, but it seems bitter and doesn't fit Maki. It sounds wrong. "Pretty good way to go out, not that I'd ever say that to Eli."

Nico watches in silence as Maki slumps over with her head in her hand and sighs.

"I guess you can tell I've been thinking about this for a while, huh?" she says, her voice a strange, sullen rasp. "Umi and Rin really made a mess of things for everyone, but…" A sigh seems to set her tone back to its usual gruffness. "…there's still a bit of cleanup we have to do. Whatever happened back there might've damaged a ton of important systems, but a few of the most important drives survived and the main computer still works, so we're trying to take the data for ourselves."

"So Eli's going into the main computer room," Nico says after a pause. "I've never been there."

Maki shrugs. "We stuck around in there way longer that you did. A little exploring was inevitable. Agh, anyway, that's the story. Make sure she doesn't figure out I told you, or that you even know anything more than you should, got it?" Nico gives her a sure nod, and Maki goes back to focusing on the screens. "Would you look at that. Eli's… done… where the hell is she going?"

Nico leans in to get a look at the screen. As she moves from the view of one camera to another, only Eli's bright blue eyes and the light from the gun in her hand are distinguishable in the darkness. "She's supposed to be going back here, right?" Nico says, wondering how Maki can see enough to be confused.

"Yeah, she's got about seven minutes left and I already saw her finish up with the computer, but it looks like she's going further in." Slowly, as if realizing something unpleasant, Maki's brow furrows and her eyes narrow. "She's going all the way to the bottom level, isn't she? Dammit, we don't need this!" She leans forward as urgency takes over her voice. "Eli, turn around right now! You can't go in there! Eli!" Her fist clenches and she growls. "Why isn't she listening?"

They watch Eli slip into another doorway before the screen turns completely black, save for a white cursor slowly blinking at the top of the screen.

"What is it now?" Maki tries to type something in, but the cursor doesn't respond to her, and neither does it when she tries combinations of keys. Nico is sure that Maki's about to punch the laptop when a short line of text appears in the cursor's place.

I am at the computer room.

The intrigue at finding this message quells Maki's frustration enough for her to discover that she can respond.

Who are you?

It answers within seconds.

If you come down and talk to me, I will disable the entire security system and help you save Eli.

"'Save Eli?'" Nico says. "Is this about the time limit?"

Maki shakes her head. "I've only messed with the security enough for what's necessary to get the job done. If Eli takes any detours, she'll trip it and send the place into a lockdown I might not be able to get through." She stands and sprints to the entrance. "Watch my laptop! I'll be back as soon as I can!"

Before Nico can even yell an answer, Maki's already disappeared into the darkness. Left on her own, she sits there in silence, resting her chin on her hand until she finds a new message on the screen.

Look behind you, Yazawa-san.

Losing contact with Maki means losing track of the time, so Eli makes do by racing down the halls and hoping for the best, shoving down the nagging in her mind that insists this is a terrible idea and Maki's going to kill her for it if the lack of ventilation doesn't get to her first. In the first place, twenty minutes was more than enough time—she could probably steal from the computers thrice over with a few minutes to spare.

Eli doesn't fear time and danger. As her pace stutters at the end of a staircase, she only thinks about what she might find in the room. How well did they clean up in the few minutes they had to evacuate? Could corpses even rot in conditions like these?

Is she really willing to find out like this?

She shoves open a heavy steel door, nearly the last thing physically between her and her goal. The hallway through it is narrow compared to the rest of the structure—wide enough for most of their sets of machinery to pass through without an issue, but just barely. Six equidistant doors line the walls at her sides, making for thirteen when Eli counts the large one that stands at the end across from her. They're all distractions, though. Eli has interest in only one.

Her limbs feel like wood as she reads the nameplates she passes by along the right hand wall. 12: Kira Tsubasa, 10: Toudou Erena, 8: Hoshizora Rin, 6: Yazawa Nico.

4: Sonoda Umi.

The air falls ten degrees. Eli stares at the name for much longer than she should. Her breath makes her shudder uncomfortably, so she holds it and steels herself before getting a grip on the handle. A little pull, and the door slides open with a harsh creak.

She's hardly even looked inside when she freezes.

In the dark of the room, a single, glowing golden eye stares back at her.

Eli should know who it is, but a part of her slowly-blanking mind insists that no, the stranger looking back at her from across the room with her fingers rested delicately on a broken panel cannot be Sonoda Umi, the person Eli watched die in this room a year ago. Her dark hair is the same, as are her sharp eyes and strong shoulders and regal posture that, with the right words, should be as fragile as the composure on her face. The resemblance is uncanny, but it's only that, a resemblance, even when Eli stands right in front of her and brushes her thumb along the curve of her cheek, where she can see faint suture scarring below the eye. The skin warms a little, and Eli wonders what it is when—

"Eli."

It stops being a resemblance.

A breath catches in Eli's throat, and before she lets Umi see her eyes welling up she throws her weight onto her, clutching her in her arms as if Umi would turn to dust and crumble the instant she lets go.

"Where did you go?" she chokes out between gasps. Umi doesn't smell like machinery anymore. "I-I thought you were dead! I kept thinking about it for so long I—me and Maki—all we did the whole year was try to stop the Idol project after it killed you... if I knew you were alive, I would've looked for you and brought you back instead, I would've—"

She feels pressure on her back, flesh and metal. Umi's arms. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Eli." Her voice quivers. "I wanted to find you, too, as soon as I learned you and Maki escaped safely. But the way things are... the way things wound up, I shouldn't even be seeing you right now."

Eli's grasp around Umi slackens and her eyebrows knit in confusion, but her fingers only clutch harder at Umi's jacket. "Why? What are you talking about?"

They're silent, and then Umi draws a deep breath that she lets out over Eli's shoulder. She lets go and steps back. There's a myriad of heavy emotions swirling in her eyes when she moves a hand up to Eli's face and brushes the tears off with a gloved finger. "A lot of things have changed," she says. "Please don't take this wrong, but I've met someone—people, actually, and what I'm doing now, you would never approve of after everything that's happened." Her hand withdraws. "But I can't let you stop me."

Eli's hand rises to catch Umi's. "Why are you telling me this, then, if you know I wouldn't let you?"

That's when Umi's stoic facade breaks. She looks down and smiles softly, but there's a contrite crease in her brow. "I can't lie or keep secrets," she says, "especially in front of you."