So, guys, I've been reading your reviews, and sounds like everyone is bewildered by what Mai did, which is something that I did intend to some extent, but I'm thinking now maybe it's too OOC of her?

Quote of the day: When it's real, it doesn't fade away.

Mai woke up the next morning with an awful headache.

She had spent the past night at intervals hating herself and hating Naru, and then hating both herself and Naru, and then just herself, and at one point, all her anger had run out, and she was left with just a mountain of sadness that felt like it would crush her, and she had spent longer than she cared to admit crying over that boy that she loved so much.

She dragged herself out of bed, grabbed clothes at random from her suitcase, and stumbled to the bathroom only to discover a puffy-eyed, red-cheeked monster in the mirror.

And she had a pimple on her right cheek.

Great.

And to top it all off, while she was trying not to believe her life was really that bad, someone knocked on her door.

Please, please, please don't be Naru, she begged. She couldn't face him right now, couldn't face what she had said to him yesterday. It had been in a moment of anger, and now she had ruined everything.

"Coming!" she managed, hating that her voice cracked, and hurried to change.

She opened the door to find Lin standing there, solid and stoic as ever. "Hi, Lin," she said, a little breathless from her rushing.

"Hello, Mai," he greeted. "The cook has been stabbed, and the police are downstairs. I thought you would want to know."

Mai almost didn't understand what Lin was saying. The fact that he could talk about a stabbing with the same facial expression he wore while greeting her made it hard to sink in.

"The cook was - stabbed?"

Lin nodded. "Yes. Early this morning."

"By who?"

"The police are attempting to find that out right now."

"Oh, yeah. Of course." Mai tried to focus through her foggy mind, tried to breathe through the ache in her chest, but it wouldn't move. When she realized it was staying there, she shook her head and grabbed her room key and slid it into her pocket. "Let's go, then."

They walked back in silence. Mai tried to breathe again, but somehow, it felt like Naru was sitting on her chest, clutching her heart, reminding her of her awful words again and again until Mai couldn't take it anymore and covered her face with her hands and confided in the older man. "Lin, I made Naru mad yesterday."

Lin nodded quietly, and somehow, his acknowledgement made it worse, proved to her that she had done it and had really hurt him. If he had noticed a change in the silent, stoic boy's behavior, it had to be pretty bad.

"Is it - is it really bad?" she whispered.

Lin looked up at the ceiling, contemplating his answer. "Somewhat," he finally said, and Mai understood that he was understating it, for her sake. It only made her feel worse. "He is more...distressed than angry."

"Lin, I said something so mean to him!" Mai wailed. "Of course he's distressed!" Despair and shame made her stop short of the lobby, past which she could see police milling around, past where Naru undoubtedly stood, maybe thinking about what she had said the day before, maybe pushing her from his mind. Lin stopped as well.

He looked at her then, an expression that was wise far beyond what she could imagine, and she could only guess at all the emotions he had ever felt, all the mistakes and problems and words he had witnessed. Please help me, she silently begged him, begged her stupid self, begged whoever was listening.

He let out a little sigh. "All is not lost," he said to her gently, and began walking again, and Mai felt her stomach turn at the thought of facing Naru, but unless she wanted to enter the warzone alone, she had no choice but to follow.

Lin wound through the police milling around in the lobby and made his way to the kitchen, where the guard stationed at the door nodded at him and let them pass through. Mai couldn't see the cook anywhere, but there was quite a lot of blood near the huge freezer room that some unfortunate officers were struggling to scrub off the once-pristine tiles. Mai swallowed the bile rising up in her throat and tried to control her nausea. She had seldom ever seen so much blood in her life, and hoped the cook was okay.

She wondered whether or not she should join the officers kneeling on the floor. With her harsh, horrible words, she would probably be kicked off the SPR team and would need a new place to go, and there was nothing worse than having to scrub blood off the floor. She might as well surrender herself to the hard, messy work.

Then Lin moved away from them, leading her further on. "The only reason we're allowed in here is because the police finished gathering their information about half an hour ago, and because Mr. Daichi has told them we are his investigators," he told her quietly. "Naru hasn't told them what kind, and we will stay anonymous."

Mai nodded. Don't mess this up, too. Keep your stupid mouth shut, she told herself.

He was standing to the side, his pale face turned away from their direction as he listened to a short, stout officer answer his question.

"No, the other cook came in later. Mr. Masaru managed to call in the police himself; otherwise, I'm not sure he would have lived," the police officer said gravely. She threw a questioning glance at Lin and Mai, who had been edging closer.

"They're with me," Naru told her briefly. "And what about security cameras?"

The officer shook her head. "Someone went into the security room and destroyed the tapes."

"And there was no one on watch?"

The officer shook her head once more. "Mr. Daichi didn't think he needed that much protection."

If Naru found this foolish, if he found it stupid, if he found it good or bad, Mai couldn't tell. His face was drawn with that same curtain she had seen come down last night. She resisted the urge to hold Lin's hand, to clutch at anything warm and human, and tried to breathe through that persistent ache.

"Was there any camera found near the kitchen?" he asked. Mai caught on. She and Yasu and Makoto had placed one camera in the kitchen just yesterday.

But the woman shook her head. "Is it lost?"

Naru shook his head. "It's nothing. Anything else you can tell me?"

"That's about it," she said. She hesitated, then said, "There was one odd thing, though."

Naru stared at her, waiting for her to continue, but she didn't, only stared back at him, hesitating, thinking. "What is it?" he finally spat, and the anger in his voice scared Mai. He wasn't like that. Again, something gripped her lungs, making it hard to breathe.

The officer's eyes changed and she shook her head. "Nothing. I'm needed at my post at the front now, if you don't mind."

Naru dismissed her with a wave of his hand. Rude, much? Mai thought, and then realized she had no right to be saying that. She looked away from his beautiful face as he turned to Lin, carefully avoiding looking at her, and somehow, that hurt the most.

"Lin, interview Mr. Daichi. He was one of the first people here this morning and may know something."

Lin nodded and walked away.

Mai raised her eyes to see if he would ask anything of her, but Naru was already gone.

She wandered through the now dwindling police officers, gleaning bits and pieces of information that she managed to piece together to form a coherent story. The cook had been down earlier than was usual, had called the police from the phone at the kitchen, and had been found unconscious with two stab wounds - one to the chest and one to the stomach. He had lost a lot of blood and was in critical condition at the nearest hospital, in surgery for his wounds. Mai remembered the blood and swallowed hard.

She noticed Naru walking among the police, and the way he carefully avoided her. Tears rose to her eyes every time she thought of Naru, but she pushed them away, down, down to some pit in her stomach. Eventually, she couldn't bear to be in the same room as him any longer, and left the kitchen.

Her wandering brought her to the front door, where the short, female police officer was standing, an indomitable mask of strength and security. Mai brushed off her nervousness and walked up to her.

"Hi," she said tentatively, and when the woman smiled, she found the strength to go on. "My name is Mai, and I'm with SPR, investigating at this hotel."

The woman nodded her recognition. "Hello, Mai," she said pleasantly, in contrast to how she had responded to Naru's coldness. "What can I do for you?"

"I -" Mai's throat clogged up for no reason and she yanked everything that was coming up to her eyes down into her toes. She had no right to cry. She had brought this on herself.

She began again. "I had a question about the security room, where the tapes were destroyed. Was the lock on the door tampered with?"

The police officer shook her head. "No. The assailant may have swiped a key off someone, and we're still investigating that right now."

If the lock on the door hadn't been tampered with, it may have been something supernatural. Then again, it could also have been a swiped key.

Mai nodded. "One other thing - about this morning?"

The police officer smiled in understanding, and Mai had the thought that she was really very pretty. "About what I was going to say, and then didn't?"

Mai nodded again. "If you could tell me, it would mean a lot to me."

The policewoman nodded again, and Mai suddenly had the irrational feeling that she knew about all the awful things she had said to Naru yesterday, that she knew what it meant to Mai to recover even a little bit of information for him so she could help him out a little, even if he didn't want it.

"I saw someone this morning," she said quietly, leaning into her a little confidentially. "Behind Mr. Daichi's desk. I dismissed it at the time because it was a police officer, but now I can't remember that I've ever seen him before, or seen him since then."

Mai frowned. That hadn't happened before. People had seen doubles but not strangers. "Did he look like any of the police officers with you here?"

The policewoman shook her head. "He had a moustache and beard like one of my colleagues, Shou Jorou, but it wasn't him."

"Wasn't him?" Mai's curiosity piqued. Many people had said that previously to her, during the interviews, and even Naru had seemed interested in that phrase. "In what way, if you don't mind me asking?"

"It wasn't," the policewoman said simply. "In the way you don't look like me, though we both have brown hair. Anyone can put on a beard and moustache, but that doesn't mean they'll look the same, yeah?"

"Yeah." Mai had the feeling that this was something important, and filed her words away for future use. "Well, thank you for your time!"

The woman smiled. "You're welcome."

Mai asked questions to a few more officers in the area, including Shou Jorou, who had been one of the men scrubbing the blood from the floor all morning and had not stepped foot near the lobby until much later, and then came to the conclusion that she would find nothing more there. She tried to find Lin, but he was preoccupied with helping Naru, and she didn't want to disturb them.

She spent the day doing her homework and moping about and trying to think up ways to apologize to Naru, though she thought for sure she would never be able to apologize to him for what she had said. While she did her english essay, she thought about it. While she did her math problems, she thought about it. While she tried in vain to eat lunch by herself in the hotel dining room, she kept seeing him sitting there

Eventually, she realized she wasn't going to eat anything and returned upstairs, where she fell into a fitful sleep.

Naru returned to base after finishing interviews and a brief visit to the town's police station to find Mai curled up on the couch, a myriad of textbooks and notebooks spread out on the table before her.

It was better when I hadn't kissed you!

She hadn't meant it, had she? It had been in a moment of anger, in a moment of tension. Her heartfelt confessions during their last case had meant something, hadn't they? And she had kissed him so recently while he sat on that exact couch.

His heart twisted and he tried to shield it from her face, from her presence, tried to block out the thoughts and feelings he had for her. It had been easy this morning, with the stabbing and the police and the multiple interviews he had to conduct and the information he had to collect. It had been easy to turn away from her, to turn his heart away from her so she wouldn't see how much her words had affected him, but now, alone here in the room with her, he couldn't cut himself off from her. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't create those barriers again. In just a month, she had settled on his heart in a way that he couldn't remove her affections.

He turned his face away from her and wiped the grimace from his face. Emotions lead to loss of focus, and loss of focus lead to decreased performance. It was as simple as that.

And yet…

"Naru," said Lin as he walked in. "The bartender is ready to talk to you now."

Naru nodded robotically and turned back to her. She looked tired, frail, small. "Lin," he said abruptly.

"Yes?"

Naru pointed to Lin's coat jacket, carelessly thrown over the back of a chair. "Are you going to wear that?"

Lin shook his head. "It is too warm in this hotel."

Naru took Lin's jacket and hesitantly approached Mai. He swallowed all his sadness, regret, confusion, his emotions, and carefully draped it over her, shielding her from whatever may want to harm her. His hand lingered on her arm, and he had to forcefully pull himself away. "Alright, Lin. Let's go."

Her dreams were haunted by her mother and Hayate Sato and a demon with a cowl covering his face and at the end, Naru was there, his face pale and drawn and sad and then angry, angry and upset at her for those harsh, terrible words. She tried to apologize, but he wasn't listening, and he turned away from her, and she felt something break between them, and when she reached out for his arm her hand passed right through, and it was then that she knew she had lost him.

She woke up in a cold sweat, panicked and breathing uncomfortably. Her muscles hurt from being curled up on the couch. When she sat up to stretch her limbs, a black coat jacket fell to the floor.

Mai's heart leapt to her throat in hope, but when she realized it was just Lin's, that it didn't smell like Naru, her heart fell. She sighed and stood up and brushed off the coat and picked up a note written in Lin's handwriting that fell to the ground when she rose. At bar. Will be back soon.

Well. There was nothing else to do. Mai draped Lin's jacket carefully over the back of the couch, pocketed the note, and walked over to the bar.

She made her way through the people, more people than there were the day before. She tripped over a stool and stepped on the back of someone's shoe and apologized profusely when someone glared at her and finally spotted Naru and Lin at the counter, speaking with the bartender.

As if he knew she was there, as if he could tell she had entered the room, as if he always knew that she would be there with him, Naru turned to look in her direction, and his eyes met hers.

And then the lights went out.

Naru is so cute. Sigh.

For next time: cute stuff mostly, probably not too much plot. What do you guys think? More plot or nah?