Leaving the Fellowship—

Early morning mist draped the ridges surrounding Mathers Lake like drop cloths covering old furniture, hanging in smooth sheets down the forested slopes and pooling in the center of the water. The familiar breeze, nearly always whispering in the boughs and coves of the island, had not yet stirred. A line of tracks in the sand marked the path a deer had taken down to the shore for a drink.

Gabriel picked his way through the driftwood. Gabriel picked his way through the driftwood. Fallen tree trunks and broken chunks of branches covered the beach, all worn white and smooth as ivory—or bone, he thought morbidly—by the lapping waters. The stuff wasn't half-bad firewood, at least as starter fuel, but he hadn't come out here at the crack of dawn to do chores.

Behind him to the south, a lone plume of smoke stretched lazily out of the fog and rose toward the sky—the big woodstove back at the lodge, he knew, firing up for breakfast. The Fellowship were early risers, yet another thing he wasn't going to miss about the rustic off-the-grid lifestyle.

It hadn't been all bad, admittedly, and only about half as terrible as he'd been expecting. No more house arrest, no more waiting on food to be delivered because he wasn't allowed to eat with everyone else. A place to live that he'd helped build himself, sitting only a little further back in the treeline than the other cabins. And they'd taught him—for the first time in his life, there were minds around that weren't weaker than his own, that could guide him through that rush of first contact. They'd shown him how to maintain his own sense of self when he touched other psyches, how to prevent the torrential flow of energy from weak mind to strong. They showed him ways to shield that made his old mental walls look like wide-open windows.

And they'd been the first to notice that the power boost he'd gotten from Zetes' crystal was fading. It was slow, cloistered amongst ancient psychics and their lesser crystals, still strengthened by the others in his web, but it was happening, and it wouldn't be long before he'd be back where the bond he'd established left him in the first place— in the web with Kait, Lewis, Anna and Kessler, only able to reach outside of it with physical touch and so much strain that everyone in the web would have a splitting headache for the rest of the day.

A flicker of light at the edge of his awareness alerted him to someone in the web approaching. He didn't reach out to see who it was; he didn't need to. Kait in his mind was a blue haze with a slithering piccolo melody, mostly low, but with high spikes of temper. Anna was all winds, gentle or cuttingly cold depending on her mood; Lewis thought in snaps and beats, spritely as a snare drum. The sensation of light and heat—that was only ever Kessler, and Kessler was the reason he was out here to begin with.

He smirked to himself as he clambered up onto a boulder, some long-ago refugee from the rocky heights to the west, and arranged himself to wait.

True to form, Kessler tried to call him before he'd even made the clearing. Gabriel ignored the mental voice calling his name, instead focusing on the lake. Insectoid water skaters crisscrossed the still surface, tracing out gracefully expanding arrows. Every few minutes, one would vanish as a fish twisted out of the depths beneath it, leaving a circle of rougher ripples as it claimed its prize.

Fine, be that way. But I'm still coming, Kessler said in his mind, and fell silent. Gabriel leaned back on his hands, lacing his walls with a cold irritation pulled more from memory than from his current mood. Not that it wasn't easy to be annoyed with Kessler lately, when he kept finding reasons to—no, no. That was an argument Gabriel was only planning on having one more time, and there was no point in just debating it with himself when Rob was already on his way.

Within a few more minutes, the rhythm of footsteps intruded on the morning quiet, at first a regular pace, then dissolving into the erratic crunch of someone working their way across obstruction-riddled sand. Gabriel pasted a chilly look onto his features and kept his gaze fixed forward.

"You're not fooling anyone, you know," Kessler said from beneath him, tone exasperated. "If you didn't want the company, I wouldn't have been able to find you to begin with." When Gabriel just looked down at him without responding, he pressed, "So what's the deal?"

"Deal?" Gabriel echoed. "That's a laugh. Since when are you interested in deals?"

Rob blinked at him, thrown. "What?" he asked, a flash of hurt passing through his eyes before understanding chased it away. "Wait, is this about leaving again? Look, we've talked about this. Everyone agrees—"

"No," Gabriel interrupted, "everyone doesn't agree. Everyone is actually pretty sick of it here. Everyone is just letting you have your way because you're convincing. Well, I'm done with it. It's time to go, Kessler."

Anger sparked in Kessler's gaze, and disbelief, the heat of it blazing to life on the other side of Gabriel's shields. "We can't leave right now. We're just starting on the new storage building, and Olin is about to start teaching me targeted healing. Things like cancer, Gabe; think about how important—"

Gabriel cut him off again. "Cancer? Out here in the middle of nowhere? Does it look like they have cancer patients out here to practice on? And then what? They move on to the next thing, and you follow along, and you're still here, helping nobody."

"That's just—"

Feeling his own anger kindling, Gabriel turned in place and jumped down from the rock, landing in front of Kessler and straightening into a cold stare-down.

"That's the truth. They hide out in their cottages and they let the world pass them by. It's what they've always done, and you know it." He glared into Kessler's defiant gold eyes and pushed on, spilling out words he'd heard from Kait, from Lewis, even, in the last few weeks and very reluctantly, from Anna. "It's been a year. It's been over a year. That's what we said this would be back at the start. If we stay for much longer, we'll have a whole new school year to get through before we can even think about college. Have you even been thinking about that, or do you just really want to be the only forty-year-old in Pre-Calc?"

"I want to finish school, too, all right?" Kessler burst. "But we have to get what we can out of our time here. We won't get another chance like this."

Gabriel rolled his eyes upward. He was talking to the biggest, more stubborn idiot in the world. "The Fellowship is not going to just vanish into thin air because we decide to go finish school. Joyce has already said she'll help keep communications up, and Renny isn't leaving period." He enunciated his words with precise disdain. "They sent Tamsin out to help us before. We are not never going to see them again if we leave."

"It won't be the same. We'll get caught up in our stuff and then…"

Gabriel turned his gaze back down, surprised at the sudden flutter of—shame?—in the web. "And then what?" Rob didn't answer, hands balled into fists, eyes dark and tumultuous and fixed on the ground. "And then what, Kessler?"

"And then nothing!" Rob's head jerked back up like a pocketknife blade swinging out of its casing. "We go finish school and then we go to college and then we caught up looking for jobs and then we have bills to pay and eventually we forget all about how we're supposed to be out there helping the world."

On a flash of instinct, Gabriel took his walls down, and winced as Kessler's fear poured into his mind, hot and desperate, tinged with memory—an older sister, ideals mummifying behind her eyes as she spooled out excuse after excuse for her abandoned dreams, and how could he ever face her again either way, with the terrible understanding of how life broke you down or with a purpose and zeal that would only remind her of what she'd lost—

Gabriel clamped back a biting retort about worthless family, inwardly reeling from the contact with Rob's overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and moreso the unending depths of his compassion. Rob was staring at him, the rising waters of suspicion drawing up to drown the hapless swimmers of hesitation.

That's how it is, huh? He spoke into Kessler's mind, noting the wince—wide open. Look, if you think you're going to forget about your responsibility to the world, you've forgotten who you're dating. And bills? Did you forget about the eight hundred thousand dollars sitting in a bank account with your name on it?

That's for college, Kessler answered, his 'voice' sounding smothered and faint.

That's money in an account, Gabriel reiterated. It's set aside for college or for whatever we want to use it for. He paused for a beat, then finished with dark humor, What, you don't think Zetes got a convict like me to join him for the promise of a college education, do you?

Don't talk about yourself that way. The response snapped back instantaneously, and Gabriel shook his head internally. Some days he still wondered at the puffballs he'd wound up bonded to. Kessler hesitated.

You all really want to go?

Gabriel rolled his eyes again, less pointedly theatric this time, and returned to normal speaking. "I've been wanting to go since about the third time Lewis started whining about a new CD he just has to have and can't listen to out here. But the others too. Anna's worried about school and Kait's worried about her dad." Rob looked down again, and Gabriel put his hands in his pockets, tilting his head and giving his webmate a smirk. "Look, if it'd get us out of here, I promise I'll start heckling you every time you look like you might start wavering in your commitment to save the world from itself."

Kessler's mental presence pressed lightly against his own, questioning, and Gabriel let his expression settle into the bland, heavy-lidded look of the deeply jaded as Rob brushed up against his exasperation-traced-with-familiarity, and his deeper muted concern.

"Well, for Heaven's sake, don't put yourself out on my account," Kessler sighed after a long moment, the uncertainty in his mind easing into affection. "I'd hate for you to break a sweat from all that sarcasm."

Gabriel grinned at him toothily. "Glad we understand each other." He pushed past Kessler, bumping his shoulder as he went, and pulled thin walls back up over his thoughts as he headed back towards the path through the woods.

Moving in—

Kessler, I swear to god, if you're trying to use ugging a two-hundred pound couch up the stairs to convince me to enroll—

All I'm saying is you'd get more exercise if you had to walk between buildings sometimes instead of driving that car everywhere.

Gabriel cleared the last few steps and set his end of the load down, leaning on the railing that overlooked the living room and rubbing his arms. Anna's cat, grown into a black beast with a fondness for high, precarious napping spots, blinked at him lazily from its perfectly balanced sprawl on the railing, then dropped its head back down, ears twitching. "Screw you," Gabriel told Rob with amicable spite. "My car is amazing."

"Your car cost forty-five thousand dollars," Rob replied, appearing above the other arm of the couch. "How is that a good use of what could be tuition money?"

"Gets me and Kait into all the best clubs." Gabriel shot him a shameless grin.

His web-mate gave him a disapproving look, but leaned against the couch himself, rolling one arm at the shoulder, then the other, and cracking his back. Don't think I'm giving up on this, he warned mentally, before asking aloud, "How much more of this stuff is there?"

Bring it, Golden Boy. Gabriel shrugged. "Two cabinets, one desk, and whatever else the girls come back with. Plus the TV."

"Lewis doesn't think he's putting the TV in his room," Rob said flatly.

"No, but you know we're going to be the ones manhandling it into the entertainment center when he's done putting it together." Gabriel leaned back in the couch, raising his voice.

"I heard that!" Lewis called from the floor below, where Rob and Gabriel had left him sitting at the epicenter of an explosion of manuals, screws, and cables. "If one of you two thinks you can wire in an entertainment system with five different machines in it better than me, be my guest!"

Rob slanted a put-upon glance at Gabriel, which the other boy ignored, then turned to look down over the railing. "He's just being a jerk, Lewis. It's how he shows affection." Gabriel contemplated kicking Kessler in the leg, but decided against it—he was too sore, and Kessler was too far away. He sent the mental image anyway.

"Yeah, yeah, I know." A muffled sigh, and a listless rustle of paper, and Lewis said abruptly, "Hey, who wants to break for lunch?"

"When the girls get back," Rob said firmly. "It shouldn't be too much longer—and anyway, you're the one who insisted we had to have all this stuff."

"We worked hard out there!" Lewis protested. "We've earned some nice things. Anyway, this'll help with studying."

"A VCR player's going to help with studying."

"Sure. Haven't you seen the VHS sections in all the libraries?" Lewis paused, then added thoughtfully, "Actually, should we get a TV/VCR for your room? I bet there'll be times you'll have to watch operation tapes or something, and you know Kait doesn't like gory stuff."

"I think we should worry about that when I'm further into a medical minor than my freshman year. Seriously, we've spent enough. We could have rented someplace." Rob frowned, his mind simmering with thoughts of social responsibility.

"Seattle's right across the Sound from Anna's parents." Gabriel lifted one hand, counting off on his fingers all the reasons the group had agreed to buy a house in Seattle in the first place. He wasn't defending Lewis, exactly, but it felt nice to argue the merits of materialism sometimes. "It's a day's drive to Lewis's place, it's close enough to the Fellowship to keep in touch, the schools are great, there are things for Kait's dad to do, Washington's—"

"Thanks, Gabe, but I remember," Kessler said sourly, and sighed. "It's just that I think there are better uses for this kind of money."

"Houses are an investment." Gabriel parroted back Joyce's words from when she'd been helping wrangle the lawyers. "Technically, aren't we something like twenty years ahead of schedule on being contributing adults? Anyway, if we decide to go someplace else, we can always sell all this stuff back."

"Or donate it."

"Or donate it," Gabriel acceded, and sent to Lewis privately, By then all the technology will need upgrading anyway, right?

Probably, yeah, the boy downstairs sent back, mental voice abashed, but his shared appreciation of nice electronics dancing on every syllable. Gabriel smirked up at Kessler as he straightened up off the couch.

"We'll just have to make sure we give back in other ways," he said, resolute. "Come on, guys; lets get back to it, and see if we can have the rest of the furniture put up for when the girls get back."

That didn't exactly look like you pushing me to keep my focus on saving the world, he added to Gabriel, the thought masked from Lewis, his look meaningful.

Gabriel pushed himself up off the balcony rail and stretched. It didn't look like you wavering in your dedication, either. Relax, Kessler. Nobody's going to believe a house full of rich college kids with no nice things, anyway. It's part of our cover. He leaned down and fitted his fingers around the corners of the couch.

"Ready? One, two, three—and lift—" Kessler lifted his end in time with Gabriel and the two of them continued maneuvering towards the upstairs study, where Kait had already put an easel and two boxes of art supplies. Cover as what?

Normal people, Gabriel replied shortly. We already stand out. If people think we're just over-indulgent teenagers, that's good for us.

We shouldn't have to be so secretive, though. As if he wanted to back up the thought with action, Kessler continued aloud. "The Fellowship doesn't want to hide forever anymore and neither do I."

Gabriel grunted as they angled the couch to fit through the door. "Unless they dig up another fire crystal somewhere to stop their aging again, people are going to have a lot of trouble taking the Fellowship seriously. Lets talk about coming out to the world when you and them both get serious about how you're planning on doing it."

"We'll get there eventually," Rob said, half-promise, half-warning, and set his end of the couch down against the near wall.

A thread of annoyance trailed up the back of Gabriel's throat and he straightened. "Hey. You know why Kait wanted to make this room a studio, right?"

"Sure. North light." Kessler jerked a thumb at the slanted roof behind him, and the angled windows painting rectangles of cool afternoon sunlight on the floor. He smiled with a sudden nostalgia. "Anna said it was the first thing she asked for at the Institute. "

"And we all know how things went there," Gabriel said, chilly sarcasm edging the words. An image of Kait hung in his mind, turning delighted circles in this very room, blue-ringed eyes joyful, the loose curls of her hair glowing red-gold as if they burned from within. As Rob's eyebrows swept down, he went on, lowering his voice. "Look. Maybe it hasn't occurred to you yet, but we've got a lot going for us right now, and for some of us, that's kind of a new thing. Maybe let us enjoy it for a little while before you drag us into the biggest thing any of us will ever do."

Knowing it was cheating even as he did it, he fed the images into Rob's mind—Kait walking stiff-backed through a whispering crowd at her old school, Lydia curled up in Tamsin's lap and sobbing, the Fellowship woman stroking her hair with weighted sadness and sympathy heavy in her eyes. The dim inside of a lock-up cell, just a scrap of it, before he throttled it back.

Kessler rocked back, the open shock on his face giving way to understanding. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and nodded.

"Yeah. I—yeah, you're right." He shook his head a bit, as if to clear his thoughts, and the murmur slipped through the web, How do I keep forgetting?

Forgetting what? Lewis asked from downstairs. Are we missing something?

It's nothing! Kessler craned his head to look over Gabriel's shoulder down the hallway, then looked back into the taller boy's eyes.

Gabriel allowed himself a small smirk, and shrugged one shoulder. "You're a big-picture type, Kessler. Us grubby greedy types need to remind you to stop and look at what's actually around you sometimes."

"And it's got nothing to do with being secretly protective of us, right?" Kessler challenged, a smile darting at the corners of his lips. "It's not that you're actually a good guy or anything."

Gabriel rolled his eyes, sent the image of kicking Kessler in the leg again, and headed back downstairs.

Unsettled debts—

The sound of the shot in the long corridor hit Rob's ears like a hammer, loud enough to lance pain through his head and bring his hands to his ears even as he stared aghast at the thread of smoke rising from the barrel of the gun.

"Well, Mr. Kessler?" Simone inquired. The woman's hands flicked the gun towards Rob, steady and unflinching, with no sign that they ever slipped her control. "Are you still going to walk out the door?"

A stream of cursing filtered into Rob's mind—Gabriel, on the ground and clutching his knee, his already pale face overtaken with pallor. Blood welled out through his fingers and ran down the sides of his hands, falling in vivid splatters to the white-tiled floor. Rob dropped to his knees at Gabriel's side, heart pounding in his throat so hard he couldn't force words to his lips.

Easy, Gabe, easy! Rob lowered his hands towards Gabriel's, but his friend flinched away, hissing at the movement. Pain and fury pinched his features taut, the line of his jaw knife-sharp beneath the skin.

That bitch. That bitch.

Gabe! Come on, man, let me see it. Behind him, he heard Simone pull out a radio and call for back-up, but that would have to wait. He couldn't feel any pain from Gabriel in the web, but Gabe was good at hiding pain, much too good, and stubbornness about it here would only make healing the wound harder.

This is what my power's for, Gabe. He glared at his friend until Gabriel's stormy eyes tracked up to meet his. After a long moment, Gabriel looked down, fixing a poisonous glare on his leg and slowly peeling his hands away.

Rob slipped his hands up in their place, opening himself up to Gabriel's aura. Its normal cool silvers and glowing greys flickered and pulsed, resentment roiling his energy like a beast hidden in fog. Snaking red lines of pain crackled around his leg, pooling to a sucking nearly-black pool of carmine overlaid with the torn hole of the entry wound, just above his knee. No snarl of disrupted life-force below the skin, though, meaning no bullet—small favors.

Rob barely touched his fingertips to the wound and cupped his other hand under Gabriel's knee, thumb circling until it landed on a transfer point, clouded by the swirling murk. Here goes, he sent, his friend's hatred seething outward from his corner of the web. A wordless flash of frustration answered, and Rob closed his eyes, opening his channels.

Heat rolled through him in circling waves, following the circuit of his circulatory system, and flowing out through the open transfer point beneath his hand. Faintly, he heard Gabriel hiss again, muscles tensing. The reaction threatened to shut him off, and Rob fought not to tighten his hand.

"Easy," he muttered instead. "Easy does it, Gabe." He rubbed his fingers in slow circles, directing the energy into Gabriel's wound and out past it, channeling it into his system, where it circled back on its own, echoing what Rob knew was the body's own defensive response, flooding platelets to the area to clot blood and close the wound. It would be a slow process unaided, the kind of thing that needed medical attention or it might not close at all—but medical attention was on its way, he was sure, and in the meantime…

Under his direction, the jagged red lines began to disperse; starting at their farthest edges, they dissolved into a loose haze drifting around Gabriel's leg, the ends unravelling back towards the injury itself, the knot of withered-rose-red slowly brightening as he poured in more of his own shining gold life force. Gabriel's hands clenched into fists, his breath starting to come deeper and more ragged. Rob ejected a clipped, sharp gasp, feeling short of breath himself, and twitching away from the touch on his shoulder.

A mutter of words behind him, and the touch solidified into a hard grasp, pulling him forcefully. His fingers tore away from Gabriel's leg—he could hear his friend's choked-back cry—leaving his energy streaming into nothing before he snapped his hands closed and sealed himself back up. Fury and fear clamoring through him, he opened his eyes.

The hall had filled up. Cole's handler had been the one to pull him away, and still had his hand wrapped firmly around Rob's shoulder. Simone stood to one side, gun lowered but not holstered. Dr. Holt and his assistant crouched at Gabriel's side with a first aid kit, with Andrew hovering uncertainly above them. The project lead gestured down at Gabe's leg—Gabe was holding still, thank god, but the sense of hatred bubbling in his mind as he glared at the man was so strong that Rob couldn't believe he wasn't projecting it—and said, sharply, "Close the transfer point. Lets not waste Kessler's good work."

Andrew—TRI-Tech Incorporated's own channeler, and Dr. Holt's younger brother—nodded unevenly and knelt down, gripping one of the lab's vat-grown crystals in one hand and reaching down for Gabriel with the other. When Gabriel bucked under his hand, transferring a glare like a fistful of needles from one brother to the other, Rob sent, Let him close you up at least! Or you'll bleed out just the same!

He could see Gabriel grinding his teeth, but he didn't move again when Andrew ran his hand under Gabe's knee, lingering for a moment then pulling away and fleeing back down the hall towards the labs. Laurie Frost walked back up the way he'd gone, glancing at Rob before turning an impassive stare on Gabriel.

Dr. Holt looked over his shoulder at Rob as Keandra went on taping up Gabe's leg. "We'll keep the dressing clean, Mr. Kessler, but I'm not going to expend lab resources on this." Gabriel's hands twitched, but so did Simone's, and he stilled. His eyes, Rob noted through the clamor of his own fury, were starting to go glassy, his feel in the web more muffled. "Leon, please take Mr. Kessler back to his own room."

The man holding Rob's shoulder nodded and tugged—not hard, but insistently. Rob resisted, taking a step back towards the trio on the floor.

"What do you mean, mine included?" he demanded, ignoring Leon's tightened grip. Dr. Holt sighed hard through his nose, running a bloodied hand through his hair before pulling it back and giving it a disturbed look, like he didn't quite recognize it. His eyes were red-rimmed, and exhaustion dragged at the corners of his mouth; a memory of his sister swam behind Rob's eyes like bile.

"You two are among the most powerful psychics Mr. Zetes could find in a five year national search," he said, the words slow and deliberate. "Since we don't have his crystal to work with—"

"Mr. Z's crystal was evil," Rob burst, his frustration overflowing. "Why don't you get that?!"

"Because evil is not scientifically verifiable," Dr. Holt snapped. He stopped himself, taking a breath. "Mr. Kessler. Rob." The room watched him struggle to articulate; Rob's anger twisted itself into a knot with his fear and stubborn rebelliousness.

"We are going to do so much good for the world." Gabriel snorted faintly, his rage still beating a thready pulse in Rob's head as the project lead went on. "Mr. Zetes' crystal was a clean, self-sustaining energy source. Do you have any idea what that could mean on a wide scale? For the environment, for the underprivileged, for scientific advancement? It would be the next step in human evolution—here, in our own time. But without his crystal to study, we have to make do with comparative study between the ones we've seeded from his, and our own independently created ones."

Rob's mouth went dry on a wave of nauseated understanding. The miasma in the labs, the staff's irritability and paranoia, their psychic's instability—he'd seen all of it before. Behind him, Laurie slumped against the wall and slid slowly towards the floor.

"That's why we need people with direct experience with—"

"Mr. Z's crystal," Rob choked. "You give your brother shards from Mr. Z's crystal?" The heartbeat in his ears sounded like the bass line on one of Lewis' CDs, almost subdermal, reverberating through everything. Andrew was a good kid. Rhea wasn't a bad one, and even Simone and Cole had their motivations. And here was their boss, putting pieces of the dark crystal right into their hands…

Dr. Holt took his glasses off to rub his temples. "Leon, please." He waved vaguely, and the hand on Rob's shoulder rematerialized, steering him around, this time, without gentleness. Laurie sat in a heap against the wall, her breathing jagged; behind him, Gabriel's breathless, bitter laughter snaked through the halls. Something in the back of his mind screamed at him, and he staggered numbly in the direction Leon pressed him, unable to focus on it through the whirl.

That's Kait, you idiot, Gabriel sent savagely. Kait! Kait, they have other psychics and new crystal shards here! It's too—

He stopped when Kaitlyn cut in, her mental voice sharp and hard as blue diamond.

They shot you, Gabriel. I know it's dangerous. That's why I went straight to Renny and Joyce.

How did you—

She must have drawn it, Rob realized, and rallied himself. Gabe's right, Kait. One of their psychics is a firestarter; one has suggestion. You can't just—

He realized, suddenly, that Gabriel wasn't backing him up.

Sorry, Kessler, Gabriel sent, and Rob could feel the fishhook smile. I know by now when there's no arguing with her.

I'm sorry, Rob, Kait said. But we're coming in.

Practice—

Gabriel scowled down at the pages spread open on his bed, its dots and lines looking back up at him, innocent and arcane at the same time. Why had he ever thought learning to read music was a good idea? The greats had probably never bothered with it. You never saw Hendrix or Clapton crouched over a page jotting down every key change; that was for song writing, and he was no song writer. Something about lyrics was too soul-bearing, too intimate, and Gabriel had had enough experience with unwanted intimacy to last him several lifetimes.

The practice CD came to a precise halt and a dry voice announced that the practice would now run from start to finish. Gabriel rolled his eyes and patted around under a stray pillow until he unearthed the stereo remote, turning the whole system off with an irritable button press and flopping back onto the bed.

How the resolute have fallen, he thought, and smiled to himself, half-sardonic, half-annoyed. He closed the practice book and shrugged off the neck-strap of his guitar—a Yamaha RGX 821, brand new, with a body like a gout of black flames and a voice like an angel halfway through falling. A gift from Kaitlyn for his last birthday. None of the rest of the group had even known he played, but trust Kait to have an unerring memory for embarrassing personal details. She wasn't the one who'd suggested learning the formal way, though. That had been Kessler, grinning at Gabriel like a poker player laying out a royal flush.

"So what if you haven't played since you were a kid? We're on a college campus, boy. Go buy a music book."

The kidnapping last fall and all the business afterward had distracted him some, but the reveal that Gabriel liked music had renewed Rob's determination to get Gabriel to enroll. But Gabriel was reluctant, and moreover, stubborn. Like hell was he was going to start a music major without even knowing how to play a guitar competently. It wasn't like Seattle was hurting for a music scene, anyway; who said he even needed a degree?

He shifted the guitar upward in his lap and plucked at the strings restlessly. An art club trip had Kait out of town for the weekend, and Anna had roped Rob into a beach clean-up. Lewis and Lydia were out celebrating an informal anniversary with dinner, a movie and a poetry recital. It had seemed like a good opportunity to practice while he had the house to himself.

But for two hours, nothing had seemed to gel. He was distracted, antsy—paranoid, if he had to admit it to himself. The TRI Industries mess proved that destroying Mr. Zetes' crystal hadn't put an end to all the possible threats out there. Mr. Z had allies out there that could intrude into their lives at any time; not even Lydia knew about them all. It had been Gabriel and Rob last time, but what if it was Lewis' PK someone wanted next time, or Kait's drawing? What if it was someone with more greed, more guns and less scientific idealism? Tremors in his knee a few times a month could be getting off easy.

A noise from downstairs sent him jackknifing upright—but before he even made it to his feet, Anna's voice came down the web, shaded with concern.

Gabriel? Is everything all right? Just now, you felt—

It's just us, Gabe. Rob's voice followed Anna's, a note of understanding in it that warmed Anna's confusion into compassion. They knew he'd been jumpy since the kidnapping. God.

Gabriel grimaced at nothing. It's fine, he sent back, and glanced at the clock. Just wasn't expecting anyone back so soon.

We finished early, Anna answered; a swell and fall from Kessler suggested she'd cut him off from saying something. So many more people came than we'd been expecting! So Rob and I went grocery shopping afterward. How was practice?

Gabriel pushed himself off the bed and dropped the guitar down on the mussed sheets. Don't ask. Don't even start. He headed downstairs.

All right.

In the kitchen, he found Kessler and Anna rummaging around in fabric bags—Anna kept a whole stash of them in the back of the kitchen closet—and putting away groceries. The black cat had come to investigate, and sat at the outside ring of bags, watching them with a steady, intent gaze.

Rob unearthed a pack of kitty treats and tossed it to Anna before moving towards the fridge. He shot Gabriel a sympathetic smile. "Guitar not cooperating?"

"Didn't I say not to start?" Gabriel lifted three bags at random and took them to the closet.

"Suit yourself." Kessler sounded a little amused. Gabriel channeled back annoyance, sliding it through the connection with just a whisper of an edge, a letter opener under the flap of an envelope. Pettiness was never much of a deterrent these days, but it was better than raising shields over the smallest thing or just letting Kessler's familiarity go without protest.

"Did Lewis and Lydia get off on time?" Anna opened the pouch and clicked the tip of her tongue at the cat. When it perked up, she smiled and flicked it one of the fish-shaped treats.

Gabriel shelved a jar of sweet and sour sauce and paused to send them both an image. Lydia at the door to the house, dark hair swept into an up-do with gem-studded hairpins, her green eyes shy and brightening into a smile, dressed in a girlish black party dress and flirtatious heels, her legs bare. Sleek pearl-colored gloves gave her outfit a touch of elegance, and she unclasped one hand from her silver clutch to take the arm Lewis had offered her.

Hem above the knee and three-inch heels? he filled in with needling pleasure. Pretty sure they're going to be getting off all night.

"You pulled that off of Lewis, didn't you?" Rob frowned, though behind him, Anna's shoulders were quaking, corners of her lips pursed against a smile. "You shouldn't—"

"Lay off, Sandra Dee." Gabriel went back to groceries, sliding two boxes of cereal—one plain corn flakes, one the Cookie Crisp stuff that Lewis liked and Kait sometimes nicked as comfort food. "He was projecting it to the whole world. I even told him to have a good night." This got him a "hmph" from Kessler accompanied with a grudging mental assent, so Gabriel made sure to put extra bite in the grin he turned on Rob as he passed over a gallon of milk.

Rob shook his head at him reproachfully, but took it and traded off a bag of egg noodles. "Hey, so if you want to do something actually productive tonight, I've got a test Monday in social psychology you could help me study for."

"Sorry," Gabriel deadpanned. "I already did the dishes tonight." And sociology makes you even more insufferable than usual, he added internally, careful to keep the thought to himself.

Anna chuckled, standing up from where she'd been putting away boxes of teabags and coffee filters. She flipped one of her dark braids over her shoulder. When Kessler aimed pleading eyes her way, she shook her head. "I'm sorry, Rob, but I have a test Monday, too. Marine biology. I think you're on your own tonight."

Rob sighed, reaching up to rub his hair. "All right, I see how it is. Guess I'll go break out the textbooks alone, then."

Anna smiled at him, eyes fond, and, as he ducked in to press a light kiss to her forehead, wrapped her hands around his elbows in a quick, supportive squeeze. "Good night. And to you, Gabriel." She folded up the last of the bags, stuffed it into the closet, and followed Rob off towards their rooms at the back of the house. The black cat gave Gabriel a long stare and, when he failed to produce any more treats, lifted its tail into the air and padded after her.

Left in the empty kitchen, Gabriel sighed. The movies out right now all looked like garbage, and joyriding wasn't as much fun without Kait's hair snapping and tangling behind her in the whipping wind. The books around were almost all someone's school texts, and while the TV was free, he'd never latched onto it the way Lewis had. Maybe he'd just better call it a night.

He plucked a can of soda out of the fridge, wishing idly that they were old enough—or that Kessler would relax enough—to keep beer in the house, and popped it open as he headed back upstairs.

The guitar still sat on his bed, gleaming and faintly accusatory. He managed to ignore it long enough to clear the workbook off his bed and drop it by the guitar stand in the corner, but as his fingers closed on the strap of the guitar itself, he paused. Sure, the book learning was mind-numbing, and he hadn't played since he was fourteen, but—and it was surely his arrogance talking, that "but"—he'd been good back then. Or not bad, anyway. And he hadn't been learning from sheet music back then, either, just teaching himself from the radio and his parents' old cassettes.

What had he liked back then? What did he still like beyond the veneer of bitter memory? The angry, rebellious garage sound didn't have the same appeal once you'd actually been on the run, or in prison. Lewis' fondness for pop-punk and the more irreverent strains of alternative rock overlapped more with Gabriel's tastes than anything the rest of the web really liked, but he still preferred the rock from a little further back.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and shrugged the guitar on again, tentatively picking out chords—old riffs from his would-be rock star days, a bit of Alice Cooper here, some Clapton there. Downstairs, somewhere beneath the sensation of strings on yet-uncalloused fingertips, Anna's mental presence tinged faintly sweeter, a scent of distant flowers on the wind, and Kessler's simmering heat softened into a warm, even glow. Letting out the last of a breath he hadn't been quite aware he was holding, Gabriel slumped back against his pillows and let rusty but functional muscle memory settle him into the chunky opening chords of Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times.

His rendition of the solos came out sloppy and slurred and, Gabriel was almost certain, mixed in with a countermelody from the wrong song entirely. But he persevered anyway, humming as he returned to the more familiar ground of the verses, and running off an improvisational solo of his own when he realized that he hadn't the faintest recollection of how the song actually ended.

Yeah. Not perfect, but much more satisfying than sheet music.

It's coming along real well. Rob's voice, low-toned and appreciative. I like having someone around who can play.

Gabriel stilled the strings and tipped his head back against the wall. Feeling more resignation than annoyance at the intrusion, he sent back, You used to know someone?

Not really. The band came to games and all; there was one guy who used to play in the commons. But the football guys, they… Embarrassment seeped through the web. They used to think it was kind of sissy. Dumb macho stuff, he added hurriedly. I think it's great that you—

Kessler. Gabriel closed his eyes, knitting his fingers together over his stomach. Stop blabbering. I know what you mean.

We gotta find you a band. You could be the next Waylon Jennings.

Gabriel snorted, but laughed around it too. Is that going to be before, after or during all the world-saving?

We'll play it by ear. Rob answered in the light tones he used when he was doing his best to keep up with Gabriel's banter. Maybe have you play some benefit concerts to help get crystal energy off the ground.

I don't think I'd make a very spokesman, Kessler. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not much of a role model.

Those were accidents. Gabriel's fingers twitched at Rob's tone, unyielding and resolute. He felt his walls drawing up and tamped them down—he lived with the idiot; this was a conversation that would continue over breakfast, if it even took that long. And they'll be sealed once you turn twenty-one, and maybe you can finally get your life back.

He smiled bitterly. They weren't all accidents, Kessler.

There were extenuating circumstances. Dissatisfaction stirred in Gabriel's belly, serpentine and dark; at the shift, Rob's voice turned gentler, though still threaded with sternness. The past's the past, Gabe. Nothing's gonna make it better except paying it off with the future. I know you don't like hearing that, but—

But it's the truth? Gabriel asked sourly.

Well… Rob's mind went yellow-gold, resolve flickering with a teasing affection. I mean, you could run away, or go start doing drugs or something. You could try and just forget about it. Gabriel cracked one eye open, feeling affront building, and down below, he could sense Rob laughing. But you could have done that years ago. Face facts, boy: you're just too good a man. And anyway, we'd all come drag you back anyway.

He wanted to argue—it was practically his signed duty to argue. But a treacherous something glowed in his heart, small and fierce, and almost too hot to endure. Relief. He let Kessler taste a moment of it, just a moment, before he pulled up his walls and got up to get ready for bed.

Sick—

The door to Gabriel's room was closed. Well, of course it was. An open door would feel too raw, even if Gabriel were the only person in the house.

Rob shifted a glass of orange juice into the crook of his elbow, eyeing the bowl of soup in that hand to make sure it didn't slosh, and knocked—twice, barely more than a top on the wood. When Gabriel didn't answer, he gripped the knob and turned it, slow and controlled, only opening the door when the latch had slid fully back behind the faceplate.

Gabriel, unfortunately, was still glowering at him, sitting up in his bed but pressed into the far corner, elbows laid over drawn-up knees. As Rob slipped into the room—unlit, save for the mid-afternoon sunshine filtering past the shade—he dropped his forehead onto his crossed wrists and grumbled, "Can't you be any quieter?"

Judicious in his silence, Rob closed the door as quietly as he'd opened it, rescued the slipping orange juice, and turned to face his patient.

Psychic overload—one of the drawbacks of the web. It happened to one of the five of them now and again, usually when stress was high in the web and he or she stretched their power too much, and then there was nothing for it but to go stay with Lydia for a few days. Rob would come around to check on the sick person and channel them a little bit of energy, but any psychic contact left a sense of abrasion, so mostly time was the best cure. Gabriel, between being a telepath and the herculean effort it took him to use that telepathy outside the five of them, got it the most often.

And gets the crabbiest over it, Rob thought, walls up high to shield Gabriel from the mental interference. He walked over to the bed and set the soup and orange juice down on the nightstand. Gabriel ignored it, pale face still downturned.

"Don't let this get cold," Rob told him at a low volume, gently chiding. "I called my mom for the recipe and everything."

His friend raised his head just enough to slant the bowl an unimpressed glance, but he straightened up a bit and took it into his lap, stirring at it gently. Fresh-cut carrots and celery floated in steaming broth, with cubed chicken and finely sliced onion surfacing and sinking again as the spoon moved past.

Rob allowed himself a small grin. "I got bones for the stock off the butcher. I don't think he'd ever had a college boy ask for them before—he looked like he thought I was going to use them for some prank." Rob had, in fact, had to show the man the card with his mother's recipe carefully copied down on it, complete with finicky details about how often to strain off fat.

"Gruesome prank," Gabriel commented. From anyone else, Rob would take a quip like that as a sign of returning humor, but you could hit Gabriel with a cement truck and his sarcasm would be the last thing to go.

"And the juice is fresh-squeezed. Got the oranges from the market and made it downstairs just now," Rob finished, and sat down at the very edge of the bed.

Gabriel stiffened, barely visible except for the twitch in the rhythm of his stirring, and hid it by taking a careful spoonful of the soup. He didn't comment on it, but he had another spoon, and Rob made a note to tell his mother next time he called home that yes, his friend had liked the soup very much, thanks Mom.

He forged ahead, because God knew Gabriel was too stubborn to make this easy.

"Everyone said to say hi. Kait says she'll call tonight at eight so to make sure you're by a phone." When Gabriel nodded acquiescence, Rob went on, "And she said that you can use her paints if you want."

"…What would I want to use her paints for?" Gabriel asked, quizzical, after a few seconds to process the statement.

"Lydia told us that painting helps her sometimes, when she's having trouble with her empathy. Just loops and swirls." Rob drew a loose omega loop in the air with his first two fingers. "Watch the brush, she said, not the picture."

Gabriel's brows lowered, one corner of his mouth drawing out into a skeptical hitch. "You think that'd actually help?" he asked, almost an accusation.

Rob shrugged. "I think her power's the most like yours of all of us, so it couldn't hurt to try something she says works. Unless you think it's more cool to just suffer until this rides itself out." Gabriel flicked him a glower, which Rob answered with a steady stare, as if to say, Well, do you? until he looked down at the soup again and nodded shallowly.

"Joyce called," he said, inflectionless, and pushed forward before Rob could ask what she'd called about. "The Fellowship finally agreed to send someone out to meet Aaron Holt."

Joy flared inside Rob's chest, and he was sure it showed on his face for an instant by the sour look Gabriel gave him—Gabriel, who still hadn't forgiven TRI Inc. for much of anything, even as he grudgingly admitted that yes, finding a way forward for them probably was going to do a lot of good for a lot of people. Rob tempered his grin with sympathy and reached out to pat Gabriel's ankle.

"I'll call and let them know and we can set up a time. How's your leg been doing lately, anyway?"

If Gabriel acknowledged this as an end to beating around the bush, Rob was still shielded too tightly to know, but he put the soup back on the nightstand and reluctantly stretched his leg flat on the bed. "Same as always."

Stiff when it had been raining for too long, Rob translated, which was more a problem in the winter than the summer—and here they were in December, early rainy season. Seattle mostly just got light showers every other day during the winter, but the humidity would be high enough to bother Gabriel some just the same.

Gabriel winced, hissing softly. "Shields up, Kessler."

"Sorry, Gabe," Rob answered, dropping a hand down over Gabriel's knee. But he didn't bother to pull his mental walls all the way back up around the ache of guilt that the place they lived caused Gabriel seasonal hurt, because now—

He closed his eyes as his fingers worked around Gabriel's knee for a transfer point. His friend's energy channels looked to his inner eye like bared tree roots, tangled, white and vulnerable. A shadow lay over the bullet injury from last year, a persistent hurt that, now that the wound had healed, Rob could only drive away, not eliminate for good.

But he could drive it away, when Gabriel let him, and that was as good a place to start as any. Rob's hand stilled, finding the faint beat of Gabriel's pulse against his fingertips through cotton knit pants. He steeled himself and opened up—

—and above him, Gabriel's head hit the back of the wall as his friend went rigid, gasp ragged and harsh and too loud, sheets clenched between his hands, eyes closing against the suddenly too-bright room, the smell of onions and broth and oranges suddenly spinning a pounding nausea into his stomach. His leg throbbed like it had been shot just yesterday, and everything in his mind burned, fire licking down the insides of his limbs and roaring in his chest like a burning building.

Rob jerked himself out of the mire of sharing Gabriel's senses, belatedly aware that he was whispering, rapid and insistent—easy, easy, easy—and concentrated ferociously. His energy pooled inside of him, heat and light, screaming like a newborn baby to flood through the transfer point to Gabriel, but letting it would burn Gabriel out like—like the dark crystal, that was how the dark crystals got warped to start with, by pushing energy into a place that couldn't take it, that didn't want it, so he had to be careful, just the tiniest bit of energy at a time, feeding it into Gabriel like thread being unwound from a spool, gentle, gentle, gentle….

Slowly, Gabriel's breathing evened out, though the edges of his gasps still shuddered in his lungs. Linked but shielded—like people on opposite sides of a wall passing tokens and bated whispers through the smallest of gaps—Rob could distantly feel him begin to relax as the shock of new energy faded, drawn into his own system like water absorbed into dry earth. He still trembled beneath Rob's hand, the shaking fine and uncontrolled. Rob lifted his other hand to rest atop Gabe's knee—not to transfer energy, but just to ground him, in the knowledge of closeness, and friendship.

"It's okay," he whispered. "It's gonna be okay, Gabe."

I know that, you idiot, Gabe's voice whispered in his mind, wavering and thin. Stop talking to me like I'm a little kid.

"Sorry." He pulled out slowly, measure by careful measure, leaving Gabriel feeling tingling and thin-skinned, like the wrong move could send him spinning back into overextension, but with his migraine faded and his channels less throbbing raw.

Finally Rob peeled his fingers away and opened his eyes to the real world again. His chest ached—using his power always felt like running a marathon, but using it like this was like trying to run a marathon while holding his breath—and his throat felt like he'd swallowed a rock and it had gotten stuck halfway. He flopped back onto Gabriel's bed, lifting his hands to scrub at his face, holding in a groan.

After a few seconds, something bumped against his knee. He lifted one palm to peer down the bed. At the other end, Gabriel held the glass of orange juice out to him, then dark lines of his eyebrows wry and raised.

Rob returned the nod from earlier and sat up to take the glass. "Thanks."

Gabriel hitched up one shoulder. "You too," he said and leaned his head back against the wall again, leaving them to sit in the companionable silence.