N/A: According to google docs, I had finished this chapter in October but for some reason, despite it being finished, I had forgotten to upload it. With recent events happening within the KND fandom, I rediscovered this and decided there was no better time to upload this than now. Enjoy.

Mitsuya Ice Cider

Usually Rachel was the one to arrive after Patton at The Mocktail Spritz, but this time was different. The very air these days were different. It was a clustershuck, one tumble after another the last couple of months.

Nigel Uno was officially docked as Missing In Action.

Patton had a feeling that his Supreme Leader would be here to escape the KND press sector whose singular job it was to heckle and create all sorts of problems sticking their noses into top secret business. They were almost as worse as the KND Inquirer.

Her back was to him in their usual booth, slumped over a bunch of forms that took almost half the table. When he pulled the tea candle way from the paperwork, he found that she was less working and more nursing her third glass of soda, staring at some random paper, lost in thought.

"Hey," was all he could say.

She said nothing for a moment and instead lifted up her glass to examine it. It looked like she was already getting into the hard stuff and was doing a fine good job holding in her fizz this time. She seemed to be more clear headed here than anytime else the last month and a half.

"It's always the best operatives that blow," she smiled nonsensically at her drink. "Why is that?"

Patton raised his hand to signal the barkeeper over, mulling the question over in his head. "I think I need a definition on 'blow' first before I can answer that, sir."

She giggled and slurred out, "I'm serious. Cree I get. It's the boys that bother me. No offense."

"None taken." She seemed so on edge, he tried to balance it out by slumping back and taking over his side of the booth. "Guess you're sad about Uno and Dickson again?"

"I'm not sad!" she snapped, finally locking eyes with him. He barely jumped when she slammed her glass back down on the table. Some of the liquid splashed onto some of the papers. "I'm cheesed off! Off the kilt! A bull in a china shop!"

He gestured to her drink, "And if you keep that up you'll be pushing up daisies."

"I just can't... arrrgh!" she slumped onto the table, her fingers pulling at her blond hair in frustration. "I'm supposed to be the Supreme Leader and they're treating me like some kind of cadet with all of these secrets! Chad Dickson's parents filed a missing person's report on him a month ago and Sector V refuse to say anything on the record about Numbuh 1's disappearance. What the heck's going on?"

Patton's eyes narrowed. "Did you threaten them with decommissioning?"

"Fanny suggested the same thing," her voice was muffled and helpless, "but I can't do that. It just seems so petty. I know Sector V and I know how Numbuh 5 works. She wouldn't disobey orders without good reason."

But yet here she was having to suffer the backlash of all this strange secrecy. Patton had no patience for senseless intrigue. "If she really respected you, she wouldn't put you through all this stress!" he growled. "You're drinking yourself straight into the pits with all this damage control crud."

Just who did Dickson and Uno think they were breaking rules to suit their ends, Patton wondered darkly. He had looked up to Numbuh 274 in his youth, aspired to be like him until he dropped them all like a stack of bricks.

Numbuh 1's disappearance, the one boy Patton had the absolute honor of training, was the cherry on top of the shiz cake. Anger coiled in his belly. Anger and something else worse.

Despair. Absolute despair. But where Patton was trained to hold his emotions on the battlefield save for the anger that fueled his punches, Rachel was a politician who was allowed to whine and cry in dignity over lost soldiers.

She began to hiccup and slump into the next stage of grief. "I guess everyone leaves."

He looked up because the light bulb in his head started to light up. She bit her lip and started to shuffle her papers up in a moment of clarity. "I have to finish this paperwork... I gotta..."

Before she could leave the booth, Patton climbed over and grabbed his hurting superior. "I'm not going anywhere," he promised. "I won't abandon my duty for anything." The Kids Next Door was his life and Rachel was his Supreme Leader.

She stiffened in his arms for a moment before she practically melted into his winter fatigues, finally given the proper outlet to grieve into. "You're a darn good soldier, Drilovsky," she said softly. "You always had my back."

"Always will," he muttered. "I'll follow you to heck and back, Commander."

She pulled away, just a bit, in order to smile. "Even if I ordered you to jump into a giant vat of nacho cheese?"

"With or without jalapenos?"

"Both."

"Yeah."

"Or stick you in the ball pit trenches for days on end?"

"I wouldn't move a muscle until you ordered it."

She squeezed his middle once before pulling away. "Soldiers like you are a dime a dozen, Patton. What would I do without you?"

"You'll never find out." He still had at least a year and a half to serve her and keep her safe. "Numbuh 1 might be gone and heck, maybe more will follow. But you're not losing me. Not for anything save decommissioning."

Then, with a strange look in her eyes, she asked, "What if I ordered you to turn traitor on your thirteenth birthday?"

His mouth parted, unsure of whether she was testing him or actually considering turning traitor. "Is this some kind of loyalty test?"

"Does it have to? Maybe I'm selfish and don't want to lose the only thing loyal to me. That a bad thing?"

"Not particularly."

She was mindgaming him for certain. It wasn't exactly one of his greatest strength. Toss him a weapon and he can make it dance. Give him a chess set... and he'd probably substitute the pieces for emergency bullets.

There was expectation in the way she looked at him. "You're asking me to choose between you and the KND."

She leveled a hard stare. "I am."

"I respect everything the KND stands for," he straightened his shoulders and moved into parade rest. "I also respect my chain of command, especially my Supreme Commander."

"That's nice," she said and mirrored his stance, "but you're dodging the issue."

"I think..." he said slowly, deliberately meeting her brown eyes, the perfect symmetry of her shoulders in parade rest, and the way she could stand so tall without physically being so. "I might end up incriminating myself otherwise, Commander."

She got her answer.

numbuh 362

FUGITIVE: SEARCH UNDERWAY

numbuh 60

FUGITIVE: PRESUMED DANGEROUS

[STOP THE G:KND]