A/N: A huge, huge thank you to everyone who's patiently waited for this chapter! It's incredibly minimalist and post-modernist in style, so feel free to draw your own conclusions. If you're heartbroken by what seems to be a sad ending, I helpfully direct you to Chapter 17, The Ghosts of Christmas Future, for some relief. :D

Beta'd by the lovely glory_jean.

Post-Ground Zero, at the End-or-Beginning

"Where did he go?"

It is a question she has been asking, over and over again, these past few months. She asks variations of it too, questions like did I just miss him and how long ago did he leave?

The answers are always different.

It is a wholly different world for her now, one tainted by double-lives and people-she-knew-and-forgot-and-knows. It is, really, a brave new world. She just wishes he was there to face it with her. Quiet words and stilted conversations that had stuttered between them when she woke are not enough, any more than his slipping away in the dead of night had been.

There are many things she wants to ask him, but the main one is: why?

"Away," Mickey answers, and runs a tired hand down his face. "I don't know where he is."

She frowns at this, tired and heart-sore and - just tired. He leans towards her across the tiny table they share in a quiet cafe somewhere in Eastasia, and takes her hands in his. They are warm and grounding, reminding her that this is reality, that this is life.

"But really," he continues, "I think the question you should be asking is -" Mickey stops, and eyes her speculatively. "Will you go after him?"

Her answer is immediate. "Of course," she replies, and bristles that he thought he ever had to ask.

"Why?" The question is short and direct, and she flounders and grasps for an answer to give. Why. Three letters that form a weighty, considerable word.

"Because -" the words stick in her throat, like too-sticky honey and serrated knives. "Because I have to." She shakes her head at that, bites out a frustrated noise. The sentiments and emotions behind this, behind them are too complex to articulate. "Because I want to. I need to."

"So is this about the search or about him?"

It is a good question. It is also one that she doesn't have the answer to, no matter how much she wishes she could provide one. Three months have passed since a distant resurrection in a foreign land, since she was yanked back into a body that is no longer really hers. Three months is a long time in their short lives.

"It's about us," she breathes. "About everything, I suppose."

Mickey is puzzled, and she notes the way a vague line of confusion mars his brow.

"I have to go," she injects before he can speak. "There's somewhere that I need to be."

As she pushes away from the quaint, iron-wrought table, she tries to ignore the lingering question that hangs in the quiet wind.

Where?

X-X-X-X

"Sometimes," she says to no one in particular, "I feel so alone."

The ocean is crashing and churning in front of her, a seething body of beauty and destruction. There is no one around, not for yards and miles, and she faintly recalls a beach that wasn't real, in a mind that wasn't really hers.

Bad Wolf, she remembers, and the taint of the two words needs more water than all the seas and water bodies the planet possess to wash away.

Little Red, she thinks, and there is not enough time in the entirety of eternity to make the pain of the two words fade completely.

She likes Eastasia. It is hushed and mostly calm, and the language spoken here is one she does not understand, and so she does not need to speak. Instead, the wind and the sun and the stars and the earth and everything she never appreciated before calls to her, like guiding stars to a fallen Bethlehem.

"Sometimes," she repeats, "I feel like I'm dying."

What about today? the wind screams back.

"Today?" she laughs. "Today, I'm already dead."

What about yesterday, the earth hums.

She bends down, and scoops up a handful of sand. It scatters in the breeze. "Yesterday," she murmurs, "I wasn't alive."

Are the two things so different? The world is at once in motion and at rest around her, like the deadly quiet-stillness in the eye of a storm, in the centre of a whirlpool.

"They are," she sighs. "When you go to sleep and wake up a different person, they are."

What about tomorrow, then?

She flings a pebble into the greedy ocean. "Tomorrow, well, that depends on who I want to be." Straightening her shoulders, she pulls her windswept hair from her face and begins to walk away.

"But Death," she calls over her shoulder, to no-one and the world. "Death and Time are the best of friends."

There is no one around for miles to ask her what she means.

X-X-X-X

Today, she is in Eurasia, in a city called Leningrad. The whispers of revolutions no one remembers caress her too-pale cheeks, like ghostly fingers from a watery, murky past.

She doesn't know why she is here. There has been no trace of him, not for several weeks. She is a Watcher, and he is an Operative, and Operatives will always be one step ahead. Watchers, after all, see but do not act. They wait for the action to unfold, cosseted and safe in their knowledge.

If he does not want to be found, she will not be able to find him, no matter how hard she tries, regardless of how many seas she crosses. But she can -

She can follow his path, lovingly trace the steps of his journey that she gathers like scraps; muttered locations from voices overhead in low-hanging alleys, in back streets and dingy pubs, in secret dens.

And maybe, just maybe, when he finally stops running, she will be able to catch up with him. When she does so, she can ask him why.

It is something she has often thought about, on her own Odysseus trail. In the vicious dark of night, her heart will clench as her mind insidiously stabs; he left you because you became a liability, he's sick of you now. On her better days, when the sun is out and the radiation levels are lower, her heart will sing; he left you because he only brought you pain, he thought it was better for you this way.

She doesn't know which answer she prefers. The first is painful and crushing combined with the weight of her insecurities and worries, the second is almost worse.

But then again, she did kill herself for love, so she supposes she forfeited the right to judge a long time ago, when her heart stopped beating (thrice).

The streets of the city are muted but bustling, historical in a striking tableau of chronological suspension. There is old and new, and the dichotomy appeases the fissure in herself that she is still attempting to mend.

Occasionally, she wonders if her search is futile, if they have reached the end of the road, is if she is the ostrich-in-the-sand. She dismisses these musings easily.

The not-knowing is a far greater fear of hers than the need to move forward. She thinks it has always been one of her key follies.

And even after that, she cannot help but wonder if, in the end, it is the journey that is more important than the final destination.

She needs this, maybe. Time to herself, to discover who she is now, combined with who she was before and even before that. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise, from a God she doesn't believe in, doesn't want to believe in.

She hears whispers of him sometimes, not just his locations. The Rogue Operative, they call him, in reverent tones or under breaths of haughty disdain. Crazy fucker. Best one they ever had, and bam, he just went MIA, just like that. Weird shit, I tell ya. It makes her want to laugh and cry.

She slides onto a dimly-lit side street, away from watchful eyes. Her breaths need to steady out, her pulse needs to calm down. The world is a different place for her now, and she cannot predict how she will react to things that should be familiar but aren't.

The wind rushes past, silent and swift. What about today? it carefully words.

"Today," she answers. "Today, I'm alive."

FIN.