She hadn�t even had to look over her shoulder to know he was standing behind her this time, her misty blue eyes staring ahead as ever, her arms hugged around both leather-clad knees tucked up neatly under her chin. She�d felt him there, stood over her, his muscled form blocking the gentle breeze that had been stroking along her back and through her auburn hair. Jared gave a chuckle as he lowered himself down beside her; his legs sprawled out in front of him and his hands neatly in his lap between the two. He cast a tired side-glance to Kayla and she eventually returned it, silently noting the heavy dark patches lining each of his emerald colored eyes below the darker rings around the irises.

�You should quit stalking me during the nights too, and catch some rest.�

He chuckled again and, still having not said a word since his arrival, he lay back, letting his head rest in his hands, his body spread out on the concrete beside her. He watched keenly as she turned her head with an air of nonchalance, watching as always the busy Freedom Court in daily action around her. He felt them going by, heroes; The Ominous Circle, granted strange shadow powers by a freak accident at the age of seven� The Pink Leotard, or naturally gifted gymnast Kim Strang� The Crystal Crusader� once no more than an archeologist until he found the ancient crystal of Akoazia. Then there were the innocents who such heroes as Jared Anders, known in costume as The Hive-Mind, and Kayla Matthews, or The Crimson Psibolt, were sworn to protect. His mind automatically reaching out, he felt the thoughts of them walking by, unaware as Kayla had pointed out of all the dangers swirling around their simple lives; Daniel Redding, an architect� Nisha Chowdry, art student� Aaron Heath, currently unemployed but looking for a career in engineering close to his girlfriend in Galaxy City�

�I wasn�t stalking. I had a busy night, actually� gate-crashing a Circle of Thorns ritual.�

�Must have been tough.�

�They have minds like the rest of us.�

She gave him a sideways glance, having suspected there might be something of an implication in his comment, but quickly her glimpse was deflected to elsewhere when she found him staring squarely back at her, his head cocked to a side to rest on his shoulder and his jade eyes gazing through the dark mask that covered half of his face and she had never seen him without, to an extent that she secretly wondered if he ever took the ridiculous spandex costume off. The auburn-haired heroine found herself pondering on that thought a little too much and, thankful for the mind-block she had very strongly put up against his psionics, she diverted her thoughts as she had her glance.

�You�re being as quiet as ever.�

�So?�

�Just pointing it out��

�What does it matter?�

Shaking his head and sitting up slowly and deliberately, he didn�t bother gracing the question with an answer, having heard her mutter it literally countless times in the past few days since meeting her. He didn�t understand how he was supposed to answer the effectively rhetorical question� because to him it did matter. For all her silence and ignorance, the more he wanted to talk with her, to be with her and to hear the answers to all his questions; loving the fact that he was never knowing if what she said was truth or a bluff.

�Will you ever open up to me, or are you going to always keep me guessing?�

�I prefer it when you�re guessing, actually.�

He grinned slightly and she noticed him sidling towards her, the small action drawing a scowl to her lips that passed unnoticed to him; a result of the crimson mask that she wore almost permanently. Kayla ignored him though, keeping her eyes peering ahead, trying to lose herself back into the thoughts that had consumed her before his appearance, her slender fingers absently unclipping one of the many straps on her leather pants, only to reclip it again and repeat the action completely subconsciously.

�Well then, my guess is that you don�t hate me as much as you pretend to��

�Don�t be so- hey!�

Her eyes jerked suddenly down as she felt his fingers dragging along the leather tightened to the skin of her right leg, feeling the shape of her knee beneath his fingertips before hooking them around one of the straps holding the pants to her lean legs. She took in a sharp gasp of breath and glared at him, going to swat at the hand without holding back any force, but was stopped abruptly as she felt his fingers cupping her cheek, slowly curling at the ends to slide beneath her facemask. She tensed under his touch, leaning away, but as she did she felt him leaning in to close the gap considerably, closer to her, his fingers pulling the strap on her leg open, revealing just a small glimpse of flesh should his eyes have wondered off hers. She glared back at him, a twinkle in her clear eyes that was his warning, his only warning, and a warning he either failed to see or chose to ignore. By the will of his daring fingers, her facemask fell down to her neck, revealing to him only for the third time her small nose and lush red lips, parted in surprise at the feeling of air, and his breath on them so close, as he leaned in against her.

As his fingers slipped into the parting the strap had left in her pants, his fingertips touching down tenderly on her skin, Kayla had finally felt enough and in a blur of movement her hand struck his temple, her arm straight and stiff, her fingers balled into a tight fist. Jared�s hand shot off her leg as if her smooth skin had burnt it, stars springing before his eyes to distract him from every intention to get closer to her, and his hand left her mask, allowing her to furiously tug it back up over her lips and nose, concealing the mutation markings that lined the one side of her face and neck. Jared tried to focus clearly on her, to see the expression on the upper-half of her face but no amount of squinting put an end to the blur. He managed to mutter her name in his shock, or he thought he did at least, as she began to vanish from his sight completely, consumed by an overwhelming darkness and a haze of color.

Jared saw the figure leaning over him, reclipping the strap in place that he had managed to undo with his struggling and frantic fingers, securing it and him in place once more. There was no moving now, no escape from the balded man, dressed in overalls of strange silver color somewhat resembling tinfoil. Jared groaned, the dizzying colors and darkness fading away slightly but the blurred cloud not clearing from his eyes. He could feel something heavy, pressing into his head from all sides, an oppressing helmet of weight. He did not remember how or why the weight had become there, or how the stinging like a thousand pins had scattered all along his arms and chest. He struggled with every limb to move but not even a finger could so much as wiggle. He tried desperately to scream out, but there came no voice and his protests existed only in his head. There was the buzzing of static all around him, the hissing of bubbling liquids, clattering of machinery and apparatus and a voice� somewhere, distant, a voice, as if an echo in his already throbbing head�

There were images, hundreds of them, like lights flashing and bulbs breaking before his very eyes; eyes which he found he could not open, for his eyelids were like the rest of his body, as heavy as lead. He saw things he thought long ago had been forgotten, all memories, snapshots of his past that moved so fast he could not focus on even one and he wept deeply inside, wishing to grab just one such thing that he might hold it to keep him sane, to remind him who he was and why he was here, now, like a lifeless form of living flesh that did not move or think but only breathed. Each breath� followed only by a second� and a third� a fourth� fifth� The smell of a thousand chemicals made his nostrils burn, like the scent of acid but stronger, enough to make him wish he might never smell another aroma again� but his pleas were his own, silent screams that none but he would hear�

�Jared?�

He opened his eyes suddenly at the sound of his name, different from the rest in that it did not echo or thunder through his conscience, the faint yet muffled sound playing like music to his ears to bring him back to reality. It dawned on him all too slowly that he was sprawled out on the concrete block in Freedom Court where he had spent so much time sat with her, The Crimson Psibolt to most and Kayla Matthews to him� her face stared down at him now, those same clear blue eyes roaming over his face a moment and, as she saw him stirring back into consciousness, she quickly sat back up, looking away again and muttering to him, words that echoed around his skull for a moment before finally making any sense at all.

�I didn�t hit you that hard� serves you right, though.�

Bringing a trembling hand to his sweat-matted head, Jared groaned out loud and slowly brought himself to sit upright. His every limb ached and throbbed to the extent that, were his eyes not slowly refocusing, he might have thought the Vahzilok had used his body for their morbid experiments. Lifting his mask just enough that he could pinch the bridge of his nose between his eyes, trying to rub the mist from his sight, the alleged Hive-Mind of heroes turned his attention to Kayla now, showing no surprise in the slightest to find her staring stubbornly away from him, watching every civilian and hero pass as if their comings-and-goings actually interested her in some way. As the last few moments of his life pieced themselves back together, and along with it much more of his past he had long thought forgotten, Jared found himself resenting that she had not let him touch her even that much, that she had allowed him only as far as he had gotten before she had held true to her threats of promises of so many days gone by. He had not been able to read her thoughts, to know as he had with others that touching her would anger her in that way, yet he also wondered why that had been the case, and sighed to realize he was wishing it hadn�t been. But even all of this was of little concern when balanced with the recollection of his unconscious experience, and within the complex string of scientifically mutated brainwaves, Jared Anders wondered more so than ever how The Hive-Mind had come to be, how much of what he had witnessed had also been witnessed by the woman sat now inches away, and what part in the reminiscence of images she had played.