Part 2: How to draw the line between going crazy and going black

April, 1991

Marcus cursed.

He glared at the book that had just missed his foot by an inch before bending down to pick it up, still clutching a stack of volumes in his other arm. Muttering in discontent, he shoved the books one by one back into place and then treaded his way unhappily out of the base library. It wasn't that he expected to find much in the way of information about nuclear testing in Kuwait, but he'd been so sure he'd find something.

Guess all that proves is that it's a black project. Even though there were times when he wondered at the surrealism of those days in Kuwait, even though he told himself he had to let go and come back to Earth, he couldn't find it in himself to either dismiss the fact they had happened as fantasy or just … dismiss them, period. Christ, he had the sabotage reports as proof. It had happened, and it had smacked of something only kids dreamed of, and now he couldn't let it go.

Only now he found himself convinced that, rather than it being some kind of freak mutant as a result of radiation, the rat really was something deliberately developed in a lab. He'd started packing a gun no matter where he went and sleeping with one practically in his hand. He didn't care if he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to; no assassin, not even one of Uncle Sam's, was going to 'accident' him away without a fucking fight.

Abruptly he stopped short in the middle of a street, his gut clenching and his skin going hot and then cold in realization.

Then his heart restarted and he took a deep, albeit slightly shaken, breath.

No. Pa wasn't murdered. I'm sure of it. He remembered reading the autopsy report himself, as if already being in the service meant he'd spot anything suspicious even though he'd only been nineteen at the time and struggling to deal with a younger sister who blamed him for brushing his father off and a mother who literally wasn't dealing with the aftermath of a husband who, everyone said, had gone crazy in the end.

He was sure his pa's death hadn't been murder—but he still turned and changed direction, making for a nearby pay-phone to call his sister.

She'd always been close to their dad, even though Marcus had been the one to take after him the most, in his build and temperament and career. She'd been devastated when he died and had always blamed Marcus … the blond still wasn't sure why. What could he have done? Everyone had thought the colonel had gone nuts, what the fuck was a not-yet twenty-year-old meant to do to calm him down and keep him sane?

Maybe it was the fact that he'd tried, at first, to humor him, as Bethany (he'd thought) had, when everyone else had given up. Maybe it was the fact that he'd eventually had enough and brushed his pa aside, just like everyone else. And soon after that the colonel had been found dead.

Marcus took a deep breath and dialed. The phone rang and his gut tightened until he was so wired he almost hung up—before someone picked up.

"Hello?"

"Beth, 'lo," Marcus said, leaning on the pay-phone's box. He cleared his throat to get rid of the huskiness, though she probably wouldn't notice it through the static anyway. "How're you doing?"

A pause.

"What the fuck are you ringing for?"

Marcus sighed and ran a hand through his blond, crew-cut hair. Yup, that's Beth.

"Can't I just—"

"No," Beth said flatly. "No, you can't. You lost the right the day you abandoned Dad."

Idly wondering if that was what it felt like to be taken out by a semi-automatic, though he was sure his sister's words had never cut quite that badly before, Marcus rested his head on the box. "I was just wondering if you wanted to meet up some time."

"No."

Marcus pressed his finger to his eyes and resisted the urge to growl. "Christ, Beth, will you just—"

"No."

Marcus took a deep breath, then let it all out in a sigh. "I'm sorry, okay? I just …" He put his head on his arm, staring blankly at the stained pavement and trying to figure out what, exactly, 'he just'. "I think …" He couldn't believe he was about to say this, was considering saying this, but if he was gonna get disappeared he somehow couldn't bear the thought of going without his sister knowing that maybe Pa had been justified. That's if tellin' her doesn't get her killed.

"I think Pa may've been on to something." He wasn't even aware he'd said anything, for a moment; it could've been part of his own thoughts, for all he knew, except that Beth answered.

"Oh no. No you fucking don't. I don't care how guilty you feel, if you ever do, but you're not gonna try and solve this by pretending you believed him all along."

"I didn't, Beth, just—recently I—"

"I don't care!"

Marcus closed his eyes; not much he could say to that, really. It looked like he was on his own, and it was probably better that way; at least then she'd be safe and not out there going gung-ho trying to prove something nobody knew existed.

"I'll make ya proud of me, Bethy."

She hung up.

After a moment, so did Marcus. Funny, what kind of armor certainty could give you; he didn't recall any of their conversations being quite so painful before. Now nothing was certain except his state of mind—he was definitely sane, he knew that. Then again, insane people never thought they were, did they?

Wondering if this was how his father had felt all that time, Marcus made his way slowly home. When he got there—walking, head down, through the streets—it was mid-afternoon. Usually, on coming home (at least coming home more recently) he'd stop and case the area before entering, always so aware of the gun under his jacket and the possibility that this could be it. He'd left a letter in a deposit box with the key willed to Ian if anything should happen, though he was acutely aware of how much it sounded like the ranting of a madman. He should know; his father's journal had read just the same.

That day, he felt far too weary to bother with his characteristic caution—or paranoia, whichever shoe fit best. He dumped his keys in an empty ashtray on a table in the hall and, stripping off his coat, shuffled into the kitchen. He stopped short several feet in.

There was a yellow mutant rat sitting on his counter, eating cookies.

He peripherally noted that they weren't his cookies, because he usually didn't buy cookies, but that just lent credence to the fact that he was probably hallucinating because how the fuck had the rat managed to get from Kuwait to America and Jesus but he was fucking nuts, wasn't he—

The rat looked up and saw him. Instantly its ears perked up and it did that weird sort of bounce-shuffle animals did when they were happy to see you.

"Pipipi!" It bounded from the counter to the table and its paw shot out, offering him a cookie.

For a moment Marcus could only stare, before taking the cookie a little dazedly. The rat looked better, he saw: it was clean, fur no longer matted and now sleek and shiny, and body filled out with muscle and fat. And, he realized as he crumbled the cookie slightly in his hands, inescapably real.

"Interesting."

The cookie dropped to the floor as Marcus spun around, his Glock in his hand and a round chambered even before he could register that there was someone behind him.

A very significant someone, Marcus realized belatedly and without lowering his gun. The man was maybe a little shorter than normal, at least compared to Marcus himself. His short black hair was swept back but kind of spiky, his slanted eyes calm, his build average. In other words, he was remarkably nondescript, and Marcus's heart pounded.

This is it.

"Who the fuck are you?"

The stranger inclined his head slightly. "You may call me Koga."

"But that ain't your name." It wasn't a question, but the only reply he got was a slight raise of an eyebrow and an actual question.

"Won't you lower your gun?"

It wasn't even a decision, really. "No."

The stranger nodded once, as if in understanding, but a second later Marcus's gun was yanked out of his hands. Instinctively he whirled away from a person that wasn't there, avoiding several shiny threads that fell glittering to the table, and rounded on the biggest fucking spider he'd ever seen.

It was two fucking feet long.

Its sheer size made him freeze, his skin crawling in primal fear as its mandibles clicked and it shot glittering silk at him.

"CHU!" Something yellow flashed past him on the table and he flinched back as a bolt of lightning collided with the wall where the spider had been, the monstrous bug having used its silk to swing away. There was a second flash and the light bulb blew in a shatter of glass, along with the lights in the rest of the house. Marcus's stomach and chest clenched viciously at the thought of a spider that size lurking somewhere in the dark around him; blindly he stumbled back until his butt hit the sink, breathing hard, his heart and veins pounding with adrenaline.

"Pi?"

"Very interesting."

Something snapped, making Marcus flinch and a glow erupt across the table, illuminating the stranger's sallow face and—Marcus shuddered violently—the massive spider hanging over the man's head.

Jesus.

"Chu!"

Movement between them turned out to be the rat, light on all four of its paws and ears twitching in readiness. Marcus stared dumbly, his mind struggling to catch up through the darkness and acrid smell of burned brick and mortar.

Abruptly and unexpectedly close there came the sound of someone pounding on his front door, and Marcus jumped, the quiet and surrealism of the scene shattering. He cast a glance at the stranger, half-hidden in shadow, and the mutant rat, and hurried out of the room, his thoughts scrambling in circles as he wrenched open the door to be faced with one of his civilian neighbors.

"Lieutenant Surge! Are you okay? I thought I heard fighting, and the lights in your house suddenly went out."

Marcus shook himself mentally, focusing on the man's broad, anxious face.

"Yeah," he grunted, and it seemed as though the words came more easily after that. "Yeah, something just blew my electricity out when I plugged it in, is all." The lie came automatically; the idea of telling the truth didn't even occur until he'd already said it, and even then he didn't think he'd have been able to.

"Need a hand?"

"Nah, I'm good, got some candles." A blatant lie, but he did have some searchlights, a habit from when he and his pa had gone camping.

He didn't know how he did it—he sure as hell wouldn't have believed himself—but he managed to convince the man that everything was fine and he could leave. He was thankful when he could shut the door, and leaned back against it with a sigh and a thunk of his head. He didn't want to go back to his kitchen; he wasn't sure why the mutant rat hadn't done it, but the appearance of that truly grotesque spider had made his world tilt on its axis and frightened him in a way he hadn't thought he could be frightened anymore.

It should all have been surreal—the two weeks in Kuwait were surreal—but suddenly, with not just one but two mutant animals before his eyes—in his house—and a stranger who was apparently comfortable enough around them not to care if one dangled itself over his head … something had broken, something that hadn't quite broken before.

When he finally did come back to the kitchen, the blinds were drawn enough that the room was no longer dark. The mutant rat had seated itself back on the table, nibbling on cookies while keeping a wary eye on the spider crouched in a corner of the ceiling. The stranger—Koga—was sitting calmly at the table, elbows on its surface and hands clasped before him. He was watching Marcus before the blond had even entered the room again, it seemed.

"Why did you not let him in?" Koga asked, and there was a genuine air of curiosity about him, coupled with a slightly amused one.

Marcus gave him a blank stare. "Would you still have been here if I had?"

Koga nodded, conceding, as Marcus came forward to lean on the table with both open palms. He stared at Koga.

Koga stared back.

Marcus was acutely aware that had Koga wanted to kill him he would have had plenty of opportunities by now, that or discredited him outright, and if his words were any indication he was taking as much interest in merely observing. So in that case …

"Is this a recruitment?" Marcus asked bluntly, because he couldn't think of any other reason why a black operative would reveal more of the mutant pets to him if not to test his reactions.

Well, I fucked that up.

"Of a sort," was Koga's only reply because lapsing again into silence. Marcus refused to look away; he'd be damned if he let the bastard intimidate him more than he already had.

"What are they?" he asked next, indicating the rat and the spider with his head. "Experiments? Mutants?"

Koga's black eyes seemed to glitter. "They, Lieutenant Surge, are what is real."

---

Marcus stared.

The sky was blue and clear that day, and he gazed up at it with unconscious intensity. He'd never really paid much attention to the sky; it had never been important. Now, though, it was one of the few stable things in a world turned mad.

It was past noon, two days after. Marcus's stomach growled, but he couldn't find it in himself to move from his not-so-lazy sprawl against his father's headstone, not even to light another of the cigarettes he really shouldn't have been smoking. Funny, how the day before yesterday all his uncertainties and all the unknowns had meant he'd rather face his sister than the memory of his father. Yesterday, as he drove to Norfolk, and then today, as he walked the distance from his hotel, watching people pass him by and wondering if that person was one, or that person, or how they could not fucking know, he could only think that this was what his pa must have felt like, except his pa had never gotten the confirmation that Marcus had.

"What d'you fucking mean, they're 'what's real'?" Marcus demanded.

"Sit down," Koga said. Marcus debated: he had a black operative sitting in his kitchen along with two mutant animals. Whatever he was about to hear wasn't going to be about tomorrow's weather forecast. He sat.

"Very good," Koga said implacably, and leaned forward. "Tell me, Lieutenant Surge, how much do you know of this planet's history?"

Marcus frowned. That seemed like a loaded question. The pilot settled for answering, "About as much as anyone else, I guess."

"And more than you realize, if the 'anyone' you refer to are your peers and neighbors," Koga noted, before seemingly changing the subject. "And do you read much fiction? Fantasy, perhaps?"

There was a glint in the man's eyes which told Marcus he should tread carefully, but at the last he couldn't help but snort. "I don't have time for fantasy."

"Then," Koga said with a slight curl of his lips, the kind that spoke of disdained amusement, "you had best make the time for it, Lieutenant."

He had shown Marcus pictures, then, photographs of animals he was sure couldn't possibly exist—or would have been if not for the rat sitting right in front of him.

The first had been an image of a creature, humanoid—sort of—or maybe like a monkey, with a build like a sumo wrestler and a squashed face and massive, massive hands and feet. On the back, beside Asian letters, was a list of names: Bigfoot. Sasquatch.

And topping them all, in capitals and underlined:

'Slaking'.

Marcus stared at the word, and took a moment to unstick his throat. "This is Bigfoot?"

"Indeed it is."

Koga flipped another photograph over the top of the one Marcus held, and the blond caught it reflexively. This picture showed another beast, also man-shaped, but smaller and slighter of build and covered in long white fur. Marcus didn't think he needed to look at the back, but he did anyway. Yeti.

'Vigoroth'.

They had seemed to come thick and fast, then: a horse with a mane and tail of fire, and a horn jutting from its forehead (unicorn. 'Rapidash'.); an odd blue duck-like thing with hands and a red jewel between its eyes (kappa. 'Golduck'.); an image of what looked like purple mist until he realized it had eyes (poltergeist. 'Gastly'.); a long snake with fins and whiskers and shiny blue scales (sea serpent. 'Gyarados'.); a creature that no one on Earth had the right to have photographs of, poised against the sky with its cream-colored wings spread (dragon. 'Dragonite'.).

Marcus lowered his head to his arms, staring blankly through them at the table.

"They're called 'pokémon'."

"Poe-kay-mon?" Marcus's voice was muffled and exhausted.

"Poh-keh-mon." Koga sounded the word out slowly and clearly, and without any disdain or patronism whatsoever, though at least if he had Marcus could have clutched at straws that this was one big joke—at least until he looked up again. "It's short for 'pocket monster'; first coined in the late '40s, I believe. Rather degrading, in my opinion, but there you are."

Marcus was watching the electric rat eat. "They don't look pocket-sized," he observed inanely.

"Indeed not. They only became publicly known so after the advent of genetics and the discovery of DNA. If a salmon is a fish, a falcon a bird and a possum a mammal, then these," Koga indicated the pair of 'mutants', "are pokémon. Previously they were nearly collectively known as youkai or oni—or demon—or simply 'monster'."

"But why 'pocket monsters'?" Marcus questioned rather single-mindedly, as if focusing on the one thing gave him more control over everything else.

"Because," Koga answered calmly, "with genetics, it was discovered that these creatures had a common genetic trait which allowed them to be broken up into mere energy and stored on an atomic level. No other being in the world can have that done to them and survive—and they did try, in those days. Pokémon can be stored in a device less than the size of your fist—one of these, in fact."

He tossed something at Marcus and the blond reflexively caught it. It was a ball, a sphere, rather gaudy, really, white on the bottom and red on the top and with a button set in the middle. When he pressed it the top flipped open suddenly, revealing a smooth, braced inside, but webbed with some soft material Marcus didn't care to try and identify.

"That is a pokéball—a 'pocket ball', as it were. It's fairly advanced technology by your standards. A creature that can be reduced to energy and stored by this device must therefore be a pokémon. Like so." He raised another of the odd-looking spheres and with a casual toss bounced it off his mutant spider's body. As soon as it hit it burst open—Marcus jumped—and the spider literally dissolved, like sugar in water, and in a beam of red light was absorbed into the ball, which snapped shut and zoomed back to Koga's waiting hand.

Marcus swallowed and croakily asked a question which suddenly seemed horrendously important. "Why the fuck are you telling me this?"

Why indeed, Marcus mused, stretching his arms and legs out without moving from his seat again the headstone. At that point he'd fully expected to be offed; clearly the existence of pokémon was meant to be a secret, though how the world's collective governments had kept it a secret for so long—and why—had been beyond him.

Koga had seemed to read it in his face, what's more.

The black-haired man smirked before pointing at the mutant rat as if that would explain everything.

"That," he said slightly mockingly, "is a pikachu, a kind of electric rodent, as you have no doubt realized." Marcus's eyes flashed towards the burn crater in his kitchen wall. "Most species live in forests, but there are some which are desert-dwellers—this one's colony was in Kuwait. It's policy to keep watch on pokémon populations in war-zones, to make sure they remain undiscovered by those not meant to see them."

"So you're with the CIA, then?" Marcus guessed.

Koga's lip curled. "Idiot. I am not with any government you've ever heard of. No government you've ever heard of is aware that these creatures exist: that is the point of keeping them secret. Now shut up and let me finish."

The colony of the mutant rats—the pikachu—had been inadvertently destroyed in a bombing, Koga told him. The man had arrived there too late to save any of them, though he had tracked some fleeing the territory and, as he found their remains one by one, was left to follow the single survivor. He hadn't been quick enough to find it before Marcus did, however.

"And that is where you became a nuisance." Koga eyed him, and Marcus stiffened. "You did not reveal it to anyone, thankfully, but you took it back to your camp. Despite the idiotic risk of discovery, you took care of it. And when the opportunity arose, I captured it to take away safely."

"This still isn't answering my question."

The look Koga gave him then was distinctly impatient. "Surely after all the time you've spent with it you don't seriously believe it is merely some dumb animal?"

Marcus watched the mutant ra—pikachu, thinking about the way it had seemed to understand the urgency for escape when they were attacked, and the way it had tested his locked trunk, and managed to evade detection despite its thefts. He shook his head.

"No," Koga echoed Marcus's unspoken word. "These beings are intelligent, far more intelligent on average than nearly any other animal. Some match humans themselves for intelligence. Some are outright sentient. And this pikachu bonded with you. For its sake alone, you have the right to know."

"Oh."

"That is, if you choose to remain in the know."

Marcus had been singularly confused by that comment and by the odd, almost amused glint in Koga's eye, followed by being supremely wary. And then he had been singularly disbelieving as Koga told him bluntly that if he didn't want to know, they'd just have a psychic wipe his memory.

"A … what?"

"A psychic," Koga repeated, and this time his amusement was evident. "Psychic power exists, Lieutenant, and not only among pokémon. People are psychic also."

Marcus swallowed hard. He was going to sound like a complete idiot, he knew, but he had to ask. "What—what about—y'know, vampires and—werewolves?"

"No," Koga said flatly, and Marcus couldn't help the surge of relief. "Ghosts, ghouls, psychics, yes. Though I daresay pokémon have had something to do with the legends that arose about them—there is a rather vampiric species of bat pokémon which can grow to several feet in size, for instance—vampires and werewolves are only myths."

Marcus nodded almost absently, still staring at Koga. Sometime during their conversation the mutant r—pikachu had finished eating and was curled up against Marcus's arm, enjoying the lieutenant's absent pats.

"Where are you from?" Marcus asked finally. "If you're not part of any government I know but still have people to study fuckin' genetics, then …"

"As I said, Lieutenant, I am not from any government you're aware of—although that is perhaps inaccurate, as you could very well be aware of it as a concept, simply not of its existence."

He had sighed, then, at Marcus's blank look, and asked what he knew of the story of Atlantis. Marcus never had been one for myths and stories; all he had been able to answer was that he thought it was some city that had sunk. Koga had been unimpressed.

"It was a continent, actually," said the black-haired man a little sourly. "And most of it did sink, some thousands of years ago; that is true. But that is not the end of it."

"It's not?" Marcus asked, a little weakly if truth be told.

Koga smirked grimly. "Oh no. You see, the continent you would call Atlantis—though it does, admittedly, bear other names—was, and still is, the Motherland of all the beasts and fables men like you believe are fantasy." He nodded at the rat. "They came from there and spread across the world alongside mankind. And, of course, there was conflict. By the time the Empire fell there were colonies all over the world, but they no longer trusted men—except occasionally the men like them—the psychics.

"In time, they had kept so well hidden that no one except those who had kept the truth alive from generation to generation—the druids, for example—believed they existed. Such was the world that we met, when the people of the Motherland returned centuries later; we have kept watch since then, against the day that the Outside world at large would discover the truth."

Marcus shook his head, not in denial, but as though it would help him think clearly. "Why?" he asked, unable to think of anything else to say. Koga raised an eyebrow, and this time there was no amusement, only faint surprise and a look as though Marcus should have already known the answer to his own question.

"Surely you did not just ask that? I would have thought that you, among the many who have discovered the truth on their own, would understand our reasons. Did you not attend to history as a child, or has history already forgotten the name 'Salem'?"

"The witch trials?"

"Yes. None of those people were witches, obviously, but a number were psychic and others were Hidden, nonetheless." He said the word 'hidden' as though it had a capital: Marcus could practically hear it.

"But it's not like that anymore," Marcus pointed out. "We don't discriminate based on—"

"Based on what?" Koga breathed, the words quiet but cutting enough to silence the blond. "Based on race? Religion? Ethnicity? You would not execute us, true, but the only reason you do not discriminate against us is because you do not know we exist. In any case, that is only half the issue; it is not only humans we are protecting. Or have you already forgotten what that—"he gestured at the rat—"is capable of?"

Marcus was silent, staring down at the now dozing mu—pikachu. He thought of the way it had electrocuted those two men and still had enough juice left to power his helo back into the Coalition's territory, even while starving and injured. He thought of what his superiors would have done or how they would have used it had they known. Without meaning to, he shuddered.

"Ah." Koga's lips curled in bleak satisfaction. "I see you do understand."

Marcus nodded.

A breeze drifted over the grass, but Marcus couldn't pretend that was the only reason he shuddered this time either. He'd been prepared to die for Uncle Sam and all, but the idea of creatures like that in his government's hands—in any government's hands—made his heart chill. And according to Koga the pikachu was only the tip of the iceberg, and given that he'd held a picture of a dragon in his hands …

If any country in the world got control over those kinds of powers it would be a whole new level of war. Maybe not as instantly destructive as using nukes, but almost worse: just weak enough that they could pretend or trick themselves into thinking they had control, but strong enough as everyday weapons to wipe out thousands in a month.

That, Koga told him, was why the Motherland had no conventional military force. In the first place, the secrecy they held was enough that they didn't need to defend themselves against an outside threat. In the second place, for the most part the older families—the ones with considerable political power—remembered what happened millennium ago, and they knew that an army of pokémon risked the existence of a power that could easily spiral out of control. The oldest laws reflected this knowledge, such as the one which barred a person from carrying more than a certain number of pokémon at any given time.

Marcus sat digesting this for a moment. The comment about outside threats had sparked something in his mind. "Where is the Motherland?" he asked. "And why hasn't anyone found it yet?"

"The former is something you not need to know—yet. As for the latter, they do not find it because they cannot see it."

"But we have satellites—"

"—which can be tricked into not seeing things which are there. No one has done an underwater survey of the place where the Motherland is—not in person. And because they have not done it in person, they do not find what is truly there."

"But how—?"

Koga waved a hand. "A concept you will find difficult or impossible to comprehend, no doubt: even our scientists are unsure how it works, and they have had years to study the phenomenon." He tilted his head. "Then again, research is so rarely allowed to be done on it, for fear the researchers will accidentally break something and reveal us to all."

"That's not answering my question," Marcus pointed out.

Koga raised an eyebrow. "As it please you, then. The Motherland is hidden by what our scientists call a 'dimensional variance'."

Marcus's brow furrowed. Koga's lifted higher. "Dimensions," Marcus said at last, ignoring Koga's expectant air and wracking his mind for everything he'd ever learned about Einstein. "You mean like—a fifth dimension? Other than length, breadth, depth and time?"

Both of Koga's eyebrows climbed, this time. "I admit, I am impressed, Lieutenant. I did not expect you to be so learned in such a specialized field."

"I'm a pilot," Marcus said brusquely. "I use or try to defy physics on a weekly basis. Can't break the rules properly if ya don't know 'em." The truth was that he did vaguely recall a theory about it, but it had crossed the border into astrophysics and out of the field he was in, so his knowledge was limited beyond the existence of the theory itself.

Koga smirked, but this time is wasn't at Marcus so much as at some inside joke he hadn't expected Marcus to be in on. "Indeed. Yes, some physicists consider space-time itself to be a fifth dimension. If we are in a box, then what is outside the box?"

"The Motherland?" Marcus guessed, and Koga held up a finger.

"But not entirely. The Motherland's 'box' is almost entirely within this one, but is just slightly out of sync—just enough that, with the proper application of energy, it can be hidden from sight altogether."

"What kind of energy?"

Koga spread his hands. "Psychic, perhaps? We do not know. This variance is a result of the war so long ago—perhaps the threshold itself was a result of the cataclysm and so will, in time, fade and draw the Motherland in sync with the rest of the world. Or perhaps it was a deliberate move to protect what remained of the Motherland by some exceptionally intelligent and powerful pokémon—there are a number within popular legend. However it was done, that is the state of things now and it has allowed us to flourish as a nation in unison with such creatures and apart from the world at large."

Idly Marcus scratched behind the pikachu's ear, and the yellow rat snuffled and stirred, snuggling closer to Marcus's arms.

Koga had offered him a choice, then: the chance to know and learn about this strange new world that was in actual fact far older than Marcus could even comprehend, or have his memory wiped and go on with his life without ever knowing the truth. He would have to leave America if he chose the former; because of his career it was considered too much a security risk to just let him stay, at least in the beginning, and even if he could the pikachu couldn't have stayed with him. There had been some who felt that Marcus's training was enough reason to just wipe his memory offhand, but it was policy to offer the choice in situations like this and Marcus had shown himself to be uncommonly discreet.

But after having been given said choice, Marcus hadn't known what to do with himself. How the hell did a person make a decision like that, knowing that their circumstances were unusual even to the standards of people for whom this was the norm? He couldn't.

Fortunately that seemed to be factored into their standard operating procedure: Koga had given him a week to make a decision and handed him the business card to a community centre in LA for him to go to once he'd made the choice. There wasn't really an issue of security, despite bureaucratic concerns; Marcus had no proof that everything was real except for the card and the hole in his kitchen wall, since the pikachu was going with Koga. Even if Marcus spoke out, no one would believe him, especially given his family history. Which was why he was sitting, slumped, against his father's headstone.

And that brought him to a matter infinitely more important to his decision that anything else.

Koga had already risen by the time Marcus got up the gumption to ask his final question. He figured he already knew the answer, because they had frikkin' psychics who could wipe a person's frikkin' memory, so why would they bother with such extreme steps as he was wondering? And if there had been no proof, why would they bother even with that?

And yet he had to ask.

"Jacob Surge," he said bluntly, and Koga paused while Marcus fought down the clench in his chest and strove to make his voice even. "Ostensibly committed suicide ten years ago—shame, maybe. He kept claiming he'd seen things, creatures that couldn't exist. People thought he'd gone insane." A pause, and then Marcus fixed Koga with a searching stare he didn't intend to let the man get away from. "Did you do it?"

Koga turned to face him squarely and never broke eye contact as he said, quietly and firmly, "No."

He could have been referring to himself, loopholing Marcus's question—'no', he hadn't done it personally—but Koga had never been patronizing or disdainful about the most important things and he didn't bother to dissemble further as someone else would have. That fact alone made the pilot believe him.

Marcus nodded once. "Okay."

Koga bowed slightly. "Good evening, Lieutenant Surge."

"Yeah. 'Bye."

Koga had left, and Marcus's night had remained almost entirely sleepless, and now he was loitering in a cemetery as though that would help him make his decision.

He'd considered calling someone. Ian had sprung to mind, and the sniper knew him well enough to go along with him if he told him he'd discovered a conspiracy. The actual circumstances of the conspiracy … probably not; but he'd back Marcus up if Marcus couldn't tell him the details and yet needed to do something about it. But that would ruin Ian's career, and possibly their friendship if things went too far and Ian wasn't convinced or things blew up in their faces, and Marcus wasn't sure he wanted these people to be exposed anyway. He'd have to ring Ian eventually at any rate, if he chose to go along with this: Koga had told him they'd set him up as having been recruited for a black ops unit, just as he had first suspected, and Ian was one of the people that Marcus just couldn't disappear on without the Ranger getting suspicious.

Beth had been next in his thoughts. It was strange to think that he'd only called her two days ago: he just couldn't reconcile the time before he'd met Koga with everything that had come after. Still, calling her twice in nearly as many days? Practically unheard of. And yet he felt that, somehow, he owed it to her; he still didn't know if she had actually believed Pa or if she'd just been going along with it out of support and the fear of what might happen if she didn't, but either way they'd both been right and it felt like he at least owed her an explanation—or a justification.

But that thought also chilled him because he knew it wouldn't mend the gap between them; if anything it would make it grow wider. It didn't matter how sorry he was, how much remorse he felt—he'd only be giving her the solid justification to hate him more, because she—and their pa—had been right and Marcus had been wrong, and he couldn't change that now.

No. There was really only one person's forgiveness he needed, only one person who had the right to grant or deny him that, and that was why he was sitting in the middle of a deserted cemetery and had been since he'd made it to Norfolk. His pa was the only one he owed anything to anymore, and that was probably why the decision didn't seem nearly as hard as it had been two days ago.

"I believe ya, Pa." Closing his eyes, Marcus leaned his head back against the coarse gravestone, and patted the ground beneath him.

"I believe ya."

~ finis