(the night before the Monday in Exposure's epilogue)

Ben.

I pulled into the lot by my mom's apartment building. It was dark enough to ignore the low gas meter, and I needed to get back soon. My mom would not be happy to come home from her shift to find the apartment still empty. But I didn't move immediately. Just twisted the ignition off and sat back for a moment, contentment sinking through me like an anchor through mud.

Tory had kissed me. Only hours before.

She'd really kissed me.

The idea was so strange: I'd imagined it for so long, it felt like I might come to my senses at any moment, and it would be just another vengeful dream, conjured by a tormented unconscious.

Not this time.

My eyes slipped closed. The feel of her lips on mine… no longer a fantasy, a torture.

After having loved her for so long, and failing to connect for five long months, I couldn't believe everything had been rectified in just a short week. Typical Tory to refuse to budge for so long, then end up falling right down the slope when she eventually edged an inch towards it.

However she panicked now – whatever might happen with our DNA – I'd be able to stay calm. Well, calmer than before. She always made good rash decisions when she made them, and I was more than happy to be one of them.

God, I sounded like a ball of mush. But it was hard to care. I could get out and go up and continue living normal life in a minute, after I'd extracted all the mushiness of feelings in the dark car. One minute of elation, then a blank face once again, once more.

Jason.

I shoved off the bed, catching myself just before I hit the floor too hard. My knees remained hooked to the top of the bed, my back on the floor. This had proven a good thinking position before now. All the extra blood pooling in the brain had to be good for something, right?

I closed my eyes and groaned. In the darkness behind them, Tory shone like stars. Or fireflies. Something bright against the black. She hadn't used to bear a place behind my eyelids, but that was before I saw the real her. How intelligent she was – with facts only, mind. Clearly not with emotions. Or comparing people.

How fierce, too. She used to let those bullies get the better of her. But now? She'd stood up to them and got the better of them, and they were worshipping where she walked like the rest of us. Acting almost nicely towards her because she was no longer allowing herself to feel weak around them.

How strong. All throughout that trial, she'd kept her cool.

Surely her strength in the face of dangers like the Game would mean that something making her skittish… like, me?... would be having more of an impact on her emotionally than she might immediately recognise? Maybe?

I groaned and gabbed a pillow off the floor, shoving it onto my face. What a wet ponce I sounded like. The truth was, I could no more ignore my pull towards Tory Brennan than stop being naturally blonde.

This week with Ella and the Gables' kidnappings might have made her short-tempered, but she needed me. We were good friends, and I'd heard she hadn't talked to Ben since the Game truth came out. It wouldn't be long, surely, before she properly saw me too?

Chance.

I slammed a fist onto the glass with a dull thud.

A small spiderweb crack appeared, although it had barely counted as a punch.

I wasn't even horrified anymore. Resigned, numb, disbelieving… not horrified. It was easy to look past the cracks and ignore them to hover at the edge of my vision, the same way that the faint red gleam on the glass could almost be a brake light beyond… or the glint of red hair on a tormenting demon.

Tory Brennan.

What had she done?

It was an obsession, true enough. I might have winded up stalking her to gain intel for Brimstone, but it certainly hadn't started that way.

She once had been just another pawn; then a devil-demon-hag that could drag me from the seventh waterlogged circle of hell; then a cryptic, mystic strongbox I'd spent months manically trying to crack.

If she'd only told me all those months ago. Father covering up more backfired, dirty experiments was old news, even when the side-effects blatantly disregarded human rights. I hadn't been interested in her, then, and thus wouldn't have cared that they'd caught some odd disease.

I might have let it go if she'd just told me how they managed to save me (at the expense of Father and Ha- no).

But Tory Brennan pushed me, told me I was mad. She covered up our dirty secret – because really, it was ours – so I wouldn't see it for all the darkness in my mind.

And in trying to prove how I wasn't mad, she was a true demon, I made may have truly proved myself mad.

Tory had bewitched me. She was too clever for our own good.

But I needed her help. And if her snooping with those boat boys had proved anything, it was how desperately she was seeking Candela's help too.

I would find her.

Tory.

I twisted under the duvet, trying to roll away from the agonising memory of how I'd kissed Ben.

Not that kissing him had been a bad experience. Not at all. But now what? I was going to spin around the potential bad outcomes all night if I didn't switch to thinking about something else.

Ella still hadn't managed to wheedle out of me how I'd "persuaded" Ben to leave. She did try for the pro-Jason stance again, though. I wasn't impressed with her arguments, satirical and funny as they were. I'd only kept the conversation up to keep her mind off the ordeal she'd been through.

Urgh. I really needed to mend that particular fence, though. Tomorrow. Jason was a puppy more certain to turn up at my side than Coop.

Topic change.

If I had even a smidgen of knowledge about the B-series files, I could've worked on that. We needed answers, and my last hope for finding out why our flares were ramping up was sat in an encryption somewhere. Somewhere we still couldn't access.

I punched the pillow, flopping onto my stomach.

Unbidden, thoughts of Ben crept into my mind. I pushed them away; there were too many problems there that I didn't want to tackle tonight.

I shifted again, just as the strange feeling returned. The shiver of awareness, being watched. I closed my mind and tried to visualise the pack, but all the Virals were either too far away or asleep for me to sense fully.

The feeling snupped out again within seconds.

I needed to know what was happening to our flares, and soon.

A/N: hey there! This is my first published Virals fanfiction, and also my first fanfic on this website, but I have spent a good three years writing Harry Potter fanfiction so I know kind how it works :)

I hope you enjoyed this and it wasn't too OOC. It was inspired a lot by "He Who Fights Monsters" by Wilfred the pickle (which you should all totally check out btw), and also I'm fed up of seeing so much Jason-hate. I mean, I hardly ship the guy with Tory, but he's not evil. He can lose out to Ben without being a terrible person.

Also! This was largely a practice for me to get into these character's heads, because I'm planning a Virals novel, and this introduces a lot of the themes I want to pick out. Hopefully it gets off the ground.

Thanks for reading, please review this newbie's new story?

Edited 6/7/14