Title: Distance is not the Journey

Author: hungrytiger11

Fandom: Full Metal Panic!

Warnings: minor language

Prompt: #136 - Again the pressure pushes me in the chair, shuts my eyes. I notice the dark red tongues of the flame outside the windows. I'm trying to memorize, fix all the feelings, the peculiarities of this descending, to tell those, who will be conquering space after me. -- Valentina Tereshkova (born March 6, 1937), Russian cosmonaut, aerospace engineer and first woman in space. Orbited the Earth forty-eight times in three days in 1963.

Summary: Kaname's coming to the conclusion she might just be the smartest person in the room. And if you're smart, you don't play the victim a second longer than you have too.

Author's Notes: Originally written for the Femgenficathon over on Livejournal. It is a multifandom ficathon focusing on stories about female characters. This story is AU after light novel Continuing on My Own. Kaname-centric.

Hitting the rewind button, Kaname listens to the repeating track. Her voice, sure enough. What she was saying though…not her words. Not even a little a bit. She sounded like an alien, or a robot, or some nuclear physicist. Or maybe some weird combination of all three. An alien-robot-physicist.

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas, anymore, she thinks, mind flashing back to her father's favorite Americanism.

The recording is tinny and blips in and out. Words are blurred or missing, though whether from a pillow muffling the noise or from the cheap recorder, who knew? Kaname is pretty sure it's not just her recording herself either, which at least could be passed off as paranoia, her own silliness, nothing more. They were recording her too.

Everybody wanted something.

Kaname just isn't sure why anyone would want her, to waste their money on in a not-so-nice hotel with no cable, no soaps, and no news at six to tell her where she is. But she's here and so are they and it came to her two days ago, staring at the length of her hair, unnaturally long, that maybe, just maybe, she's losing chunks of time. She thinks- she thinks, maybe she's been asleep.

It's okay, Dorothy, it was just a dream.

This is how she got to this moment, with a recorder in her hand, listening to a manic mumble of math-on-steroids: She'd thought of dreams. Some memory had been jarred loose with that thought, an odd conversation, a million years ago, with Melissa Mao, mysterious agent of the even more mysterious pseudo-military that had once-upon-a-time been mucking about in her life. She'd told Kaname to stop studying so hard; she was starting to recite formulas in her sleep. She'd thought it a joke, not even a very good one, since, as she'd told Melissa, it was a Japanese test they'd had that day in school, not math. Sousuke was horrible at Japanese, they'd been studying almost nonstop-

No.

She wouldn't think of that.

Jindai High did not exist. It did not. What exists is the recorded voice, and the player in her hands and the fact that they are probably recording her listening to her recording. A maze within a maze, and lab rat with no idea how to get out.

She wonders if they're writing down every word she said in her sleep, like she is going to do right now. She wonders if they understand what she said when she slept.

Because she does.

They are not her words, not her ideas, but she can puzzle out instinctually what they mean, what the formulas could mean. She was always pretty good at science; hers were always the highest test scores. Kyoko'd been jealous-No.

No, no.

Kaname pushes that thought away.

Unlike Jindai High, a person named Kyoko did exist right now, in a hospital room millions of miles from where a recorded tape is being played. A girl named Kyoko went to a school that did not exist and use to be best friends with a person who apparently moonlights as an alien-robot-physicist. A girl named Kyoko is also being watched every day, every night. Kaname knows because Leonard tells her what they see.

She hits 'Rewind' again, picks up a pen and notebook and presses play. Numbers and symbols begin blooming out on the page like drawings of demented flowers.

A minute later the tape makes a strange lurching sound and she's done. But no- that isn't right, she thinks a little distractedly, she'd only started; how can she be done? Losing time- again? And eyes wide awake too. She looks outside, trying to confirm this wild thought one way or the other. The light is low in the window and, staring down, page after page is full of-Focus!

Focus.

If the light is low, someone is going to walk through that door any minute. But if they watched her all the time, where could she hide a notebook?

"What were you expecting to accomplish with this?" Leonard asks after dinner. Kaname looks up from the room service, and a spiral notebook, all scribbled over forming page after page of black ink squares, is dangling from his hands. He's smiling as he asks, and Kaname quickly forms a conclusion.

Watching. Definitely watching. On tapes, and now, he's watching in person too.

"I was hoping to win a coloring contest," she deadpans.

"I think you need work on that particular skill."

He smiles. Silver strands of hair fall over his shoulder as he reaches out to clear off the table. Kaname watches his hair catch the light. It flashes from dull to gleaming, from inoffensive to attractive. He isn't mad, but he never is. They might be talking about what she did that day (nothing), or the weather (hot), or about Kyoko (still being watched. As well.)

They might be talking about any of these things, and later they will. They always do.

But right now, between words that don't mean anything, they are talking about something more important than Leonard's disturbing tendencies towards reverse-Stockholm syndrome.

"In fact, not to crush any dreams, Kana-chan, but I don't think an artistic career is in your future. As for any other skills, however…"

Leonard doesn't like to be blunt, but Kaname has never been anything else. In for a penny, in for a pound, right?

"Why does it matter what I was doing? You have recordings. You know what I'm talking about anyway. You probably have scientists working out exactly what all means right now."

Leonard smiles at her. It's that rainy-roof-I'm-going-to-kiss-you-now smile. But instead of kissing her, he straddles a chair and leans in close.

"Right on two out of three, Kana-chan. Must be slipping, only two out of three." His voice is soft. "We are recording you, of course. Nothing in the, ah, lewd sense you understand, but you are an asset to Amalgam, aren't you? Likewise, we do have scientists working on these formulas you have, but no, we don't know what you're talking about. Not really, anyway."

"Is that why you let me have the recorder I asked for?"

"Yes."

It could be a weapon he's giving her.

"What do you want me to do?"

It could be one she's handing him.

Leonard smiles.

"I thought you'd never ask, Kaname-san."

As it turns out, Amalgam wants information.

Not surprise there, Kaname supposes, though she does manage to hold her tongue when informed about this. Amalgam doesn't appreciate smartasses much, as it turns out. Once again, no surprise there.

Some things change and some things don't.

They give her a laboratory of her own, eventually. Leonard still stops by to pick her up after work most days, and his touch still might linger- on her shoulder, on her hip- a moment too long. But she can deal with that, because after sharing a meal together at his insistence every night, he let's her go back to a hotel room of her own that they give her too.

Right next to his, true, but it has cable. The Late Night Show let's her know its America, and the weatherman with the too-cheery smile tells her it's L.A.

They are still recording her too. She knows, because she watches each new tape with a roomful of scientists first thing each morning. Scientists are caffeine addicts, she learns. Good coffee is about all that keeps most awake, as they slouch down in their seats, listening to the endless mutters of mathematical symbols, to numbers that keeping adding and adding and adding up to nothing at all, so far as they can tell.

They are also still watching Kyoko, a fact only somewhat less mentioned, but always in any undertone of dinner conversation. In fact, Leonard is getting almost predictable about when he'll mention it, (right before talking about her latest recording which she'll pretend to understand nothing about, but right after talking about the weather).

But what changes least of all, is that she still dreams.

There are technologies, knowledge, that shouldn't exist. They sit locked in her head, leaking through her dreams. She tries to remember who first told her this, but while she can conjure up the memory of the shiver those words brought, the voice speaking is unrecognizable, unknown and unremembered. It could have been Tessa, with her starched, crisp uniform, sleeves brushing against Kaname's bare arm as she talked, or Commander Kalinin, now called Mr. K, making idle conversation while she lay strapped to a medical table with lights shining in her eyes so that she was unable to make out the face but could see the smoke rising from his cigarette. It could have even been Kurt, telling her as she stared up at the Arm Slaves in a towering fight of metal crashing against metal, hardly believing one could be piloted by such an idiot as-

Wait.

No.

It couldn't have been Kurt, because if Kurt knew then Sousuke would have known. And he didn't- couldn't -have known. That is a humiliation she doesn't want to consider.

So who knew that her thoughts were not hers? Who knew that if they hit her just right she'd pop open like a piñata, spilling the secrets of military might? That she was just storage space for blue prints for weapons of mass destruction, to make Llambda drivers, A.I.s, Arm Slaves, Palladium reactors, Electronic Conceal Systems, submarines and-

Oh.

Oh.

It's like in her dreams, where she'd been reciting equation after equation, looking to balance them out, only to realize she's never come across an equal sign yet. She's been looking for the answer before even knowing what the question is.

If the question is, 'What do they want?' it's not a very interesting one. Amalgam- and Leonard, and Mr. K and who knew what other spooks that made up this crazy organization that was so like Mithril and yet so not- were waiting for the secrets of this technology that should not exist, so they could make more A.I.s and Lambda Drivers and death.

They have, quite literally, handed her a weapon and they are hoping she will hand one back, bigger, better and just more than before. But sitting in that room full of scientists everyday, day after day, sipping on weak Folgers and saying nothing, has taught Kaname this: She might just be the smartest person in that room.

It is an epiphany that comes like getting a slap in the head (an irony that'd make Sousuke laugh if he was here- but he's not, she reminds herself).

She's the one with the knowledge. That makes her the one with the power, right? She tells herself that's so, and when she doesn't believe it, she says it again with more force.

She's the one with the knowledge. That makes her the one with the power. They want her to make weapons, but that doesn't mean she can't make something else.

A memory flashes on staring down the barrel of a gun in the pouring rain. She'll have to save herself, just as, whenever it has really mattered, she's always had to do.

So she tells them the next morning, while nursing a burnt tongue from too-hot coffee that she knows what the numbers mean.

"Do you want to write to her?" Leonard asks at dinner one night, index finger tracing idly along the rim of his glass.

Kaname chokes a little on her spaghetti, and looks up in surprise.

"Write to who?"

"Kyoko-san, my dear Kana-chan. Please keep up. We were just talking about the poor thing's health. Off the respirator now, though I understand her health will always be somewhat sickly now. Reading the reports on her progress is like one of the those up-lifting tales about the 'triumph of the human spirit.' Only there's very little triumph from what I can tell."

"Like you'd ever read anything like that." Kaname mutters, not quite able to resist the bait, and picks up her fork again. Time to start the count down to the pointed questions about her "progress" in the lab. In three, two, and-

But the expected question doesn't come. Instead, he says, "But Kana-chan, you haven't answered my question."

Leonard stands up and leans over the table. For a second, Kaname thinks he's going to pet her arm or something disgusting like that, but instead he drops some sort of purple paper on her plate. Sauce flicks upward, and he leans back, heading to her hotel room's door.

"Think about it, Kana-chan."

And then he's gone.

Picking the paper up carefully with one hand, she finds it's an envelope. Opening it with one hand and licking sauce off the other, she's not prepared for what's inside, and drops it again. Staring up at her from on top of her half-eaten meal is a cheery Bonta-kun with sauce on his cheek and a word bubble above his head.

'Get Well Soon.'

Habit is about all that gets her up from her chair, and moving towards the phone to call room service to get the plates. Replacing the phone on its cradles, she walks back over to the table and stares down. Bonta-kun stares back up. In a swift swiping motion, she knocks over her Diet Pepsi, and watches the cartoon face drown in carbonation, before grabbing up Leonard's unfinished wine. Sure, she's under aged in both Japan and America- but, really, who's going to tell? Amalgam, the cooperation that kidnapped her? Or the room service people who are on Amalgam's payroll?

The answer is 'C'- none of the above.

Collapsing back onto the couch, she does not lift her head when the door opens, when the trays are piled up, or when the door clicks shut again. The card, she considers, could be a sincere gesture on Leonard's part. After all, even if she could communicate with people from her past, they know she wouldn't dare put anything down about her location or her current situation. They'd hurt Kyoko if she did that. But just what would she even say on it, if it she did send a card? 'Hey! Hope you're feeling better! Sorry you got life-altering injuries because militaristic mercenaries were after me and the other militaristic mercenaries who were suppose to be protecting me, fucked up on that count?' Yeah. That's just what you write in those things.

Still. The possibility of communication is tempting.

On sudden impulse, she jumps out the seat and yanks open the door.

"Wait!"

The busboy's head jerks up from where he's waiting at the other end of the hall. Thank goodness for slow elevators! She waves her arms, gesturing for him, and he dutifully turns around the cart to start wheeling back towards her room.

"I left something on the table that I need," she explains and opens the trash bag. A moist, rotting smell wafts out as her digs for a second before pulling out Bonta-kun's smiling face. She grins back at the busboy a huge, hundred-watts grin.

"Thanks!"

There is one thing she can write on the card, and it's not 'Sorry.' She'd had enough of being that.

The card stays in the back pocket of her bag, and Leonard doesn't mention writing to "Kyoko-chan" again. Whether it's because he figures he got his point across, or thinks she's not interested, Kaname can't tell. Quite frankly, she doesn't care either way.

She continues pretending to make something in the lab, and Leonard, who is after all a genius of sorts, continues to see all the flaws she deliberately put in every blue print that crosses his desk. But he does nothing, just their usual routine. Into the labs by seven every morning to watch her tapes, coffee break at ten, lunch scrounged up from vending machines when you get two minutes and at five, back to his room or hers for their nightly meals.

In the lengthening silences between her and her capturer's oh-so-delightful mealtime tête-à-têtes Kaname plans.

In truth, these dinners have begun to seem like the tea party from Alice in Wonderland (We're all mad here), and she's Alice, an Alice who's been following a gun-toting, socially –inept, annoyingly endearing White Rabbit into places where most definitely everyone is mad. In fact, they're totally certifiable since, from what she can tell, these people are honest-to-goodness bent on world domination, and things have gone from bad (kidnapped and having seizures) to worse (kidnapped again and being blackmailed-Kaname wouldn't have thought that was worse, but it is). Only now, the rabbit's gone and things are a whole helluva of a lot more messed-up than some pack of cards wanting her head.

Well, except for the head part. That's pretty bad, really, and they do want it. They want every thought that her synapses ever fired off. Well, boo-fucking-hoo for them. They think, just cause they got Kyoko under their eye they got her too.

Wrong. Because, like Alice, she dreams.

In her dreams, in recordings of the nightly mutterings that they watch each morning, she listens to herself recite equation after equation. She watches as they scurry about trying to balance them all out. Only, nobody seems to have noticed. They haven't gotten to the equal sign yet. It's all connected like one long idea being whispered into her head.

Whispered.

Yes, that rings a bell. That's what whoever first told her about all this called her and the other people who had black technology rattling around in their skulls. There are technologies, knowledge, that shouldn't exist, they said (and she can't, for the life of her recall who told her this, but she remembers the next part clear as day). These ideas sit locked in her head, leaking through her dreams. What she dreams is knowledge that shouldn't exist, that couldn't exist yet.

But it did.

Time travel is possible, she knows. They were, everyone, moving forward through time second by second, a journey most didn't even notice. One could travel to the future even faster, if you found a way to slow your journey, while everyone else kept on as always. Cryogenics did this, she knew. Sleep did this too. She knows that from personal experience, since every so often she finds herself missing chunks of time and waking up strapped to surgical tables unsure of how she got there. But something that shouldn't exist doesn't come from a past barreling itself up into the future. It has to have come from the future, pushing its way back.

Still, this isn't Back to the Future. Paradoxes are for science fiction, emphasis on fiction. Her dreams, like a voice whispering in her ear, tell her this much. Logic fills in the rest of the gaps. Time paradoxes do not exist. Well, except for whatever had them become Whispered in the first place- that might just have been some sort of paradox. But you couldn't alter the past, not really. You could be in the past (which, just to make it extra-fun headache-wise, is actually your present, but that's semantics when it comes down to it), but something stops you from making the changes you want to make. Because the past has already happened. It's a story you know the ending to, and no matter what happens you can't change the ending of a story that's already been written. The kanji just won't rearrange itself on the page for you. She knows all this from looking at those equations, hears it in the numbers she's reciting in her sleep.

Sipping her half-and-half each morning, it's a continual amazement the others don't hear the numbers talking like this. But then, she is the smartest person in that room. Its not hubris that makes her say this. Well, not just hubris. It's facts. She's the only one who speaks the Whispered language, as it were. She's the only one who understands what these numbers mean.

Even if, she thinks one day while sitting in those same uncomfortable plastic chairs she's sat in every morning for the past four months, only half an ear on the recording being played, travel to the past is sketchy logicistics at best, Einstein called it "time-space," didn't he? She's heard that from some movie. And suddenly she realizes, she's been asking the wrong questions. Again.

If time and space are the same thing then-

If time travel is theoretically possible then-

Then.

She smiles, because what she has is not the bigger, better weapon they want her to make. Not at all. The lab rat has found a way out of a maze with no exit. Sure, she's got to refine and tweak things before theory can become fact, but she will. And when she does Amalgam will be up the creek without a paddle. And then all she has to do is cut the one last cord they've got holding her to them.