A/N: I like this chapter.

Day 8

Part 2:

The Panacea and The Associates

}~{

0917 hours

CPOV

"How many psychologists do you know specialize in retrograde amnesia?"

Well, B., don't beat around the bush.

"Come again," Linda said in a way that suggested that she had heard B. loud and clear.

"Ma'am I don't stutter. I hate to be rude, but I'm fresh out of patience," I watched the two females have a stare off over Adeline's head.

"Adeline?"

"Mhmm?" the little brown haired girl was looking at me with hazel eyes flecked with brown, snacking on a Blowpop I'd snuck her from Linda's stash.

"Is Linda your mum?"

"I don't know Linda but that lady's my Mummy." I couldn't help but laugh at that.

"How old are you, Adeline?" I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward so I could hear what they were saying better.

"Well, I'm seven, Charlie." Hmm, a smartaleck. Well, two can play that game.

"What school do you go to?"

"Church Way Academy Child Care Center," she said, steadily licking away at her technicolor lollipop.

"Where's that?"

She gave me the kind of look I usually get from B., "Up on Church Way,"

"Adeline, I-"

"Greece? You must be joking," I heard Linda say.

"Yeah, we'll go if we have to." B. answered. I excused myself and walked over to them.

"What's this about Greece?" I ask B. since, you know, she's the one in charge here.

"Linda knows somebody in Greece that can help us out. His name is..." she turned Linda.

"Dr. Orestes Tokatladis, Master of Psychology," Linda put in.

"Right. Anyways, he owes Linda big time for some irrelevant reason so he's going to help us when we get there."
"Now don't put words in my mouth, I never said I'd ask him to help you. Seeing as, you're the one indebted to me." I felt a threat coming on but Brick handled the situation accordingly.

"Please, Linda. We have nobody else to turn to, and we're teenage fugitives, for Christ's sakes! Just give us a chance to clear our names," Man, his voice is so smooth sometimes it's like he's a whole different person.

She sighed, and a bit dramatically, if you ask me. "All bloody right, fine. But if I find you hurt Tokatladis in any way, I'll tell the police everything I know, I mean it." Linda finished with a certain unfriendly something in her voice.

Brick gave B. a pointed look that clearly meant back off.

"So that's it, then? We're just going to hop borders until we get to Somewhere, Greece?" I asked. This whole plan was beyond me, really.

"Karditsa, Karditsa, Greece."

"Yeah, there." Linda was really beginning to grate on my nerves. B. flew to the computer and typed and clicked for a few moments. All of us held our breathes, too scared to ask her what exactly she was looking for. Suddenly she sighed in relief and the tense air of the room seemed to disappear instantly.

"Karditsa is mainland, so we don't have to worry about navigating the Balkans." she said. After that kind of statement, there's pretty much little else to do but agree. And then we all just sat there for a moment, nobody really knowing what to do next. The only sound was Adeline steadily licking away at that godforsaken lollipop. B., of course, was the first person to rise to action.

She rose to walk outside, Brick stopped her.

"What're you doing?" he asked gently. Nothing good can come from being rough with her.

"I have a favor to call in." she said, just as gently shrugging him off. No point in getting Brick going, either.

"What kind of favor?" Brick asks.

"What, you don't think my parents would just send me halfway across the world alone, do you? Speaking of which, does anybody have enough change for a payphone?"

And, naturally, Adeline was the only person who did.

0927 hours

BPOV

"Hey, *grunt* B.! What do you need?"

"Sweetheart, what are you doin'?"

"Th- *smack* There's been a bit of a brawl 'ere 'cause of something Luck said at Marnie's Pub."

"I thought you were in Band Camp?"

"Well, not for long, eh?" I could practically hear the grin in his voice.

"Good, you'll be free then."

"Why?"

"You know how to sail a boat, right?"

"Yeah-, oh, wait a mum," there were many loud, very violent sounds in the phone receiver.

"'Course I do, lemme guess, your getting out of the dear old damned? Ya face is plastered all over the place, B."

"You guessed right, can you do it? We just need a ride across the Channel."

He sighed sharply, "Alright, but you know you've got a package deal." Sigh, I'd been afraid of that.

"Fine, Pagham Harbour at eight?"

"Sharp." Click. I turn and walk out of the blue-accented glass booth.

"Who was that?"

"A friend of mine named Garrett Brovsky. He's sort of a jack-of-all-trades, so if he's around and I need something I can't ask anybody else for, he's the first person I turn to. Our moms were co-managers of an outsourced Tech Help center in Bangladesh." Brick nodded. He probably didn't know about the other side of 'the package deal'.

"So, I don't mean to listen in on your conversation, but who else was he talking about when he said 'package deal'?" he looked uncomfortable. The part that bothered me was not that he mildly invaded my privacy, but that he could do so between ten feet and a three-inch wall of glass.

"I was afraid you'd ask that. Olana Rossi, they've been friends almost as long as we have. Rossi's mother and Garrett's father are both in the Criminal Relations Unit. Rossi's very intelligent and cunning and has excellent relations. She's very skilled and a serious asset in a mission,"

"But you don't sound happy to have her on the team." Very perceptive of you, Brick.

"Really, I like her fine, it's just that... Olana has a very corruptible habit of getting side-tracked and side-tracking others. If she isn't sitting behind a surveillance camera somewhere, she can be very dangerous in a mission, in more ways than one." That didn't sound too revealing, did it?

A smirk grows on Brick's face. I guess it was.

"So Olana's a flirt?" I think this is about the best humor I've seen him in for a while. I grimace in response.

"We're meeting him in Pagham Harbour at eight, so everybody needs to pee and brush their teeth before five. Oh God, I hope he calls Adrian, I lost his number." I smacked my forehead. Even though Garrett would probably contact him anyways, it had been stupid of me not to ask.

"Adrian?"

"He's our hack." I said flippantly.

"B., nowhere in your instruction manual does it say you come with your own spy squad." his frustration was edged with amusement.

"Of course I do. We're the Associates. I'm the Leader, Garret's the Meat, Olana's the Agent, and Adrian is the Wire. We used to mess around a lot when we were younger but after our relations started to get deeper, so did our skill levels.

"Although, you know who else I heard is pretty hardcore?" I added thoughtfully.

"Who?" Brick asked, his curiosity mildly piqued.

"Adrian's American cousin -Adrian's French, natively- umm, I think her name was BC? Something like that. She's kind of into the gang thing, though. Anyways, like I said, eight, i better go catch the rest of them up. We no longer have a need to keep the woman and little girl, so we'll just dump and keep tabs on 'em." I turned to walk away, but Brick's voice stopped me.

"B., wait. There's something I haven't told...well...anybody," deep breath, "Ok, so I have a bit of a problem. Well, more of a severe disorder, really. It's called IED, Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Well, that's the diagnosis. My doctor says I'm more of an extreme case," Wow, Brick, really bad timing. He looked down, caught between being scared and relieved. I struggled trying to bring myself to shock, or surprise, or even mild skepticism, but I couldn't do it.

I'd heard of IED before, a friend of mine did a project on it, and nowhere on the list of symptoms did it include developing superhuman capabilities. And, from the look on Brick's face, he was thinking the same thing. Then again, the incident with Mitch and myself on the train didn't exactly abide by the laws of nature.

"Who all knows about your IED?" I ask, it was the only thing I could think of that would be remotely productive anyways.

"Just Mitch and everybody else in Ms. Myrtle's 1st grade class."

I rose an eyebrow.

"Just a little hissyfit, Mitch wouldn't let me use his red crayons. I got worked up and sort of, umm, threw through a wall." he flushed slightly.

"Muscular first grader, hmm?" Brick looked mortified but I found it kind of funny.

"You could say that."

"Well, if we're confessing here, it wasn't all peaches and cream after you and Charlie left the train, either. Okay, so right after you jumped out the guys we were running from ran into the car and I didn't think we there was enough time for both me and Mitch to get out, and, since Mitch is a prime suspect and I'm more of an accessory, I told Mitch to jump and I'd let them haul me into Scotland Yard or something.

"But Mitch was stubborn and the men were going to get us both, so I panicked. I reached to try to shove him out of the car but he was too far away to touch and I just knew that we were both going to end up in a cell somewhere. But then there was this weird flash of a color that looked dangerously close to pink and suddenly he was rolling around on the ground outside. And then one of them picked me up and I punched him in his stomach hard enough for him to accidentally throw me off the train.

"But... the weird thing is... I could have sworn the pink thing flashed off of me. Like, from my hands. That's never happened before, and I'd like to say that it was nothing but... I saw something that looked a lot like burn marks on the back of Mitch's shirt. Burn marks, Brick. I could have killed him." I hadn't voiced any of that out loud before, and it had was having a very powerful effect on me. I sunk into a nearby bench and let my face do the same with my hands.

Brick sat down next to me. I looked up to see a rueful smile on his face as he closed his eyes and seemed to inhale the cool, damp air. There was nothing he could possibly say to brighten my mood right then.

"So you're Jekyll, and I'm Hyde." Well, I was wrong, because that brought a smile to my face.

"Red Hyde."

"Pink Jekyll." Yeah, so now we're both laughing. Hard. And then Brick fell off the bench, which made me laugh even harder. Brick looked mad, which made it even funnier. And then he couldn't stay angry and he started laughing from the weeds where he sat. It was an unnerving kind of laughter, the kind that happens during a cross between winning the lottery and entering the early phases of mental degeneration.

You can see how it must've creeped Charlie out when he came across us rolling around in the not completely traffic-free road, appearing no doubt suicidal.

}~{

Karditsa, Thessaly, Greece

Karditsomagoula

Hospital of Karditsomagoula

West Wing

Office of Dr. Orestes Tokatladis, M.D., PhD

June 21st, 2011

Day 8

1025 hours

TPPOV

(for the benefit of the reader, the following conversations will be translated into English)

"Father." The dark-haired boy entered the ornately decorated room, his greeting being more of an announcement of his arrival than an actual request for permission. He slumped into one of the wooden chairs in front of the wooden desk, the seats padded with memory foam encased in a durable forest green colored leather, all upholstery with mahogany origins.

"Nikkos." the fair-haired older man did not bother to look up from his desk as he addressed the apprentice in front of him. His fine ball-point pin never ceased its endless dance across the paper. There were no painting, no acquired knick-knacks to give the room a false personality. Just a a deep green chaise lounge, a desk, two chairs, a computer, a few cabinets, a few drawers, an office phone, and a single, solitary image of a smiling dark-haired woman, and a smiling dark-haired baby.

"Have you spoken with your mother yet?" the fair-haired man looked up beneath a pair of patent steel, lined bifocals to expose dark brown eyes, hazy with age and wear, his bearded mouth framing the words that left them. The dark-haired boy looked up as well, tussled brown hair giving way to large, pale greenish-gray eyes.

"Umm, yes. She called me." the brown, bespectacled eyes waited expectantly at their meeting with the somewhat trepidatious Laurel green ones.

"Well, what did she say?" the fair-haired man spoke, his agitation becoming apparent. The Laurel green-eyed boy feigned innocence.

"She said she wants to know if you want Moussaka or Pastitsio for dinner, she's stopping by that place you like," The dark brown eyes narrowed at him, but the younger boy was all wide eyes.

"Nikkos, you know that is not what I mean. Now what did she really say, Nikkos?" His voice had hardened, the boy was trying the older, well-built man's nerves.

"That is what she said. Well, not all of what she said, but she did say that." The fair-haired man was angry, the boy made it blatantly obvious that he was not telling his father all. The reason why he was doing this remained to be seen. The sharp silence seemed to bounce off the walls, despite the room's terrible acoustics.

"Nikkos-" he began angrily, but the rather dated black office phone on his desk rang. He checked the caller-ID, he recognized the number. With one last frustrated glare at the dark-haired boy, he picked up the phone.

"Linda?" he asked, his voice slipping into that bored tone it ascertained whenever he spoke on the phone with a person -besides his wife- and it was not business related. Not exasperated, just bored, like anything that didn't beg for his immediate attention didn't really beg for his attention at all.

The dark-haired boy watched suspiciously as the fair-haired man's eyebrow raised at whoever was speaking to him. And then his lip curled in a not altogether pleasant way, positioning his blunted angular features in an odd light.

His surprisingly straightforward English rang out painfully clear through the room.

"Yes, Linda, we will be ready for them. Why, me and Nikkos of course." The dark-haired boy seemed to visibly disagree with that statement, but he seemed to deem it a bad time to voice this opinion.

Silence.

"Now, why would Ms. Merangue have an objection to that seeing, as I would be the one aiding a person on the wrong side of Detective Rossi's dayplanner." Now it was the dark-haired boy's turn to raise an eyebrow.

"Well, please inform Ms. Merangue that Nikkos very much is on the inside. He wouldn't tell a soul, would you Nikkos?" The dark-haired boy looked very confused as to whether or not he should answer.

"He confirms my statement. Oh? Well put her on!" The fair-haired man's excitement was met with a disturbed sense of foreboding by the darker.

"We would be more than happy to assist. Naturally. Alright then," he put a large, mildly hairy hand to the end of the phone, and whispers "it's for you, Nikkos." This whole conversation put Nikkos in a bad mood, but that wasn't exactly a difficult thing to accomplish. He glared at the phone, already resenting whomever would be on the other side.

"Yes," he made his exasperation clear, his accent much thicker than the fair-haired man's. How dare this woman demand to speak with as if she knew him? Meanwhile, the fair-haired man stood back, already very amused with the conversation in which he was not a part at the moment. He tried to gauge 'Ms. Merangue's' reaction to the dark-haired boy's startling rudeness.

By the six different emotions the boy passed through after her supposed response, he assumed she'd thrown him.

"Excuse me?"

…

"How old are you?"

…

"I asked you first."

…

"You're a teenager!"

…

"What does that have to with anything?"

…

"That's an offensive question."

…

"Okay, yes I can keep my mouth shut! Goodbye!" he then hung up the phone. The fair-haired man was beside himself, but his face was still rather stony. The dark-haired boy began muttering obscenities under his breath.

When he turned to face the man, the man lifted a brow at him.

"Tell anybody I know about that conversation? They'd probably be bored to death with the sheer idiocy of it!" he exclaimed, collapsing into a chair, the squeak of the chair was the only sound to fill the room. And then the pen began it's smooth dance again.

}~{

Pagham, Bognor Regis, Great Britain, UK

Pagham Harbour

Harbour Road

The Outskirts of the City

Dock 9

Day 8

2000 hours, exactly

BrPOV

As we walk in, another group of people walk in at exactly the same time as us. B. insisted that we should be there at eight exactly, but I guess I should have known better than to doubt the punctuality of anybody that B. chooses to associate herself with. I see, in the front of them, a meaty brunette guy. He was pretty big, taller than Charlie, and Charlie's actually about six feet.

A girl, about the same height as B., walks in behind him. She has her hair in long, thin braids. She has medium brown skin, but that was all I can tell from a distance. They're both dressed in black, the girl has a black baseball hat turned backwards on her head. They both have huge duffel bags, the guy has a dark-colored backpack that looks kind of heavy but it's hanging from one of his fingers.

All of us, as in me, B., Mitch (still sleep), and Charlie, followed the brunette in front of us. I guess they don't like open spaces, because she moved us into the woods where they were headed. We met up right at the edge of the woodsy area, leading off to the boathouses and separate docking lanes. I don't know how I expected them to meet up but they certainly didn't do it in a conventional way.

"Does anyone need to go the loo?" The beefy boy asks once we're in earshot.

"No," B. answers for all of us, "where's Adrian?" she asked shortly.

"Elsewhere. How long's blue boy here been out?" he tilted his head toward Mitch that Charlie was holding behind me, shifting the duffel bag slightly.

"Only about-" And here she was on the brink of a serious mental breakdown. She fell down on the ground, on her stomach, and began to actually hit the ground with her fists, growling in a rather intimidating way.

He crouched down to her level and she turned to look at him. He raised an eyebrow at her. She rose up to sit on her bum. She wasn't crying, but she looked like she wanted to.

"B.," I ventured to ask, "what's wrong?" I crept towards her, hoping she wouldn't snap at me.

"Mitch is going to die and it's all my fault." her face was buried in her hands.

"How so?" Charlie that time.

"I forgot, he's been asleep for too long without eating. If he ever wakes up he'll die shortly after from starvation, or dehydration, or both. I can't believe I forgot something like that. I'm not supposed to forget things like that, things that can be the difference between life and death!" Somehow I was starting to suspect that cared a bit more about how this affected her credibility rather than Mitch's actual possibility of taking a serious dirt nap.

And for that reason I suddenly wanted to blow up on her. Or Beef for looking so unaffected. Or Mitch for just being such a spastic. Someone. As I opened my mouth to say something that would probably land me in the morgue before it did France, Beef cut in.

"Anyways, we need to be quick and get a boat. If the bloke dies before then, he's gone anyways. Olana, please pass out the comms and give Beezus her set." The girl, whose braids are black, streaked brown, now that I can see her, with a black cap turned backwards on her head, took the backpack off his arm and opened it, giving everybody some little black things that looked a lot like smooth little stones.

'Olana' passed B. the rest of the pack, or rather sat it down on the round next to her. B. then picked herself up along with the bag as if nothing had just happened and started calling out orders like normal.

"You alright, mate?" Beef asked me. I turned to look at him, I'd finally gotten enough cool back that I could respond in a halfway decent manner.

Blinking, I answered, "Yes, why?" I rubbed my face.

"I don't know, you looked a little freakish there for a mum. Anyways," at this point he was no longer just talking to me, "everybody ready to go?" Everybody nodded yes. He paused as B. got up to come to the front, he followed her, and Olana followed him, brushing up against me in a halfway suspicious way. B. turned around briefly.

"Charlie, drag Mitch with you, take turns with Brick. Oh, and those black things Olana gave you? Put it in your ear, it's a bluetooth walkie talkie. We'll wake Mitch up when we get to the boat. And, Olana?"

"Commander?" drawled a thick voice.

"Leave Brick alone, he's off limits."

"Yes ma'am. And Charlie?"

"Sigh. Yes, Oliviera, Charlie is off limits, too."

"Really?"

"Really, Oliana."

" Sí, en serio,Oliana."

"It's nice to hear you too, Adrian."

A/N: So, we all know I'm pathetic, right? Okay, awesome. Shoutouts to 1000GreenSun and dragonroses, you guys know I appreciate it. What do you think about Nikkos? It's okay, you don't have to review, just answer it in your head. Although it would be sweet if you did review, but, you know, you don't have to. Also, I'd say that reviewing makes me update faster, but I'm not going to lie to you. However, they do inspire me to update at all.

Sincerely,

She