Mirah held the now warm metal cup in her hands, her body heat having long diffused into the up after she’d drunk the cold contents.

All the rest of the team had as well, except for Aaliyah, who had been explaining just about anything that Walter and Ajax could think to ask. Which was a lot. Mirah had just let it happen in front of her eyes, supposing that they would know what questions to ask better than her.

She’d almost tuned out at a few places, especially as the hours got later and later—but she didn’t want to up and leave the room to go sleep. She might be blind to many social situations, not really one to care about the strict levels of importance that others place on certain conversations, but even she could understand why Walter and Ajax wanted to know everything.

Mirah just wished that they didn’t need to know everything-everything. Though, she had to admit, she had a bit of a leg up when it came to Aaliyah’s past. She’d known a lot of this for a while, since she’d convinced Aaliyah to give the team an actual shot at working. What she didn’t know about didn’t really change her already formed opinion on her.

She’d know about her being the Monarch. She’d know about her sister, her father, and how she’d killed him for his crimes and the hurt that he’d sown. She knew she’d tortured him, and the bitter and hollow emotion it left behind in her soul when she did it.

But they didn’t know that she knew.

Maybe she hadn’t quite known the extent of her torture, or the lengths she’d gone to make sure that the ship he’d built sank to the bottom of the sea, but Mirah’s opinion on the matter was nigh unshakable.

Aaliyah had done what must be done. It was dirty, and horrid, and it had scarred her for life in a way far more visceral than Mirah’s torn and poorly healed flesh. But it had been necessary, and it had worked.

She’d spent hours describing how she’d done it, and with each mention of a name, or a gang, Walter and Ajax’s expressions dipped into grimmer and grimmer territory. Aaliyah had played them like a fiddle, using the rumour of the Monarch having an info link to her advantage. She manipulated gangs against each other, slowly leading her father’s wounded gang into shark infested waters, all the while claiming that they were simply being attacked for their supposed weakness.

With that tactic alone, she’d managed to manipulate powerful Linked into being slaughtered, crushing entire supply lines at the lower levels that powerful gangs like RO had spent years and millions of dollars building. But in the process, she’d inadvertently ordered the deaths of at least hundreds of people.

People that had families and friends, and gang mates; all of which would live on to hate the Monarch for the loss the name had represented to them. They would forever hate the Flinn name and anyone who might try to take the mantle of the Monarch once again.

And when Aaliyah Flinn stood in the burning, wreckage of all her father had built over ten years, billowing with black, choking smoke… she’d left to live a life of insecurity and destitution. Even if not everyone had known of the Monarch being replaced by his daughter in his empire’s final months, just the name alone was enough to block her out of any opportunity that her future might have.

She was, in a manner of speaking, totally shit out of luck.

Mirah cast her gaze around the room, watching the two men of the group struggle to process the extremely dark history that’d been professed to them. It wasn’t often that you met someone who’d been so significant in orchestrating the downfall of drug empire that they’d all heard of the legendary downfall.

Everyone had simply chalked it up to criminal empires inevitably falling to the entropy of the criminal world, picking away at their base like crows would at the eyes of a dead man. But no, it’d taken action from a girl not even her adulthood to do it.

Even while the two boys were working through their misgivings they couldn’t deny it. Everyone in the team, even Mirah, had realised that Aaliyah was pretty good at the whole social thing. Maybe not in the way that was conventional, with Ajax being a far easier person to get along with, but with being someone that she wasn’t.

Aaliyah was an actor, an astoundingly good one. She hadn’t been the cold and ruthless figure that her father had been, a necessary trait to have grown the empire that he had. So she had become that, assuming that role with enough legitimacy that she’d managed to convince an actual gang of Linked to follow her into the ground.

It was beyond impressive. It was astounding.

The rest of the team had pretty much nothing to come even close to that feat. The feat, while horrible in almost every sense of the word, seemed almost impossible for Ajax and Walter. And despite their misgivings, despite every moralistic argument they could possibly make—and had made during her retelling of the story—they were still faced with the inexorable truth.

Aaliyah had done what was necessary, rather than what was easy or safe. She had gone well and truly beyond herself to take down an entire drug empire and its constituent parts. Sure, it was motivated by revenge, and torturing her father the way she had was extreme. Maybe you could even call her orchestrating the deaths of at least ten Linked into question. But for what?

What else was she going to do? Command the police to take them in? Put them in a dark pit and try and keep them prisoner?

That was stupid. You needed money, time, skilled labour, Linked, and infrastructure to even think about holding any number of Linked. The AFP, when their Linked division was still even being funded, had enough of a problem keeping Linked imprisoned. There were just too many ways for Linked to dance around conventional understanding for it to be a reality outside of some very high-end linktech structures.

Even Walter, who was particularly disturbed by the deaths attributed to Aaliyah’s name, could see that leaving them alive wasn’t a reasonable response.

Walter knew, intellectually, that being anything even close to a Hero in today’s day and age was almost engineered to be a horrific path of death. He’d read too many comic books that played on that exact reality. He knew that causing someone’s death was inevitable as a Hero, whether by accident or by necessity.

But that didn’t mean he had to like it, even if he was forced to accept it. He felt absolutely sick to his stomach, bile and acid mockingly reaching up his throat as his jaw clenched down on itself with a massive force, his bones creaking nervously.

“So that’s me.” Aaliyah said finally, having let the silence sit for much longer than she’d expected. She sipped idly at the remains of her chocolate milkshake, finally reaching the bottom of what was now a lukewarm mixture, the sudden and acerbic sound breaking any contemplation that the others could have been doing.

“Jesus.” Walter said, rubbing his hand against his face with a mix of frustration and disgust, “I’m going to bed.”

He didn’t stop to say good night, nor did he tell them to get out of his room either. He just wearily walked into his room, shutting the door gently behind him, and leaving the other three of his teammates to sit in an uncomfortable silence.

“I guess we should all go to bed.” Ajax mused wryly, looking to the two women tiredly.

“It is three AM, yes.” Aaliyah said, putting her spent cup to her side and leaning back on her pillow, pressing up against the wall. She rotated her neck gently, stretching it out and letting herself relax after the pouring out of her heart. Or as close to it as she could get anymore.

But when she lowered her eyes to focus back on Ajax, she realised that he was looking at Mirah, eyebrows furrowed.

“You’re not surprised.” He stated to the woman, before turning back to Aaliyah with questioning eyes. “You told Mirah?”

“Well, not quite.” Aaliyah laughed, resigned to the strange occurrence that’d granted Mirah with her literal memories.

“I was her for a while. When I was sleeping.” Mirah continued, which made Ajax reel back and clutch against his head, looking back towards Aaliyah, almost begging to be given a context where that wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever heard.

“It was an effect of my link. Depression, dreaming, or remembering… maybe. Some weird emotion made it happen, but I can apparently share memories with other people. Might need to be sleeping, though.” She grimaced light-heartedly at the man, who was now running his fingers through his hair in distress. The explanation had, in fact, only made the whole idea of it even more batshit insane.

“Fucking links.” Ajax groaned as he wrested himself from his chair, quickly leaving the room altogether without another word—leaving only the two girls of the team to sit near each other in silence.

Aaliyah couldn’t help but deflate a little with the two boys gone. She’d expected more accusation, more disgust, but the amount that Ajax and Walter had displayed was paltry in comparison to the warnings of death that she was sure she was going to get. They were more accepting than she’d thought, and that was almost more concerning than not.

Mirah though… Aaliyah had thought that her mind would change. She’d gone so far to say that Aaliyah was a Hero when she’d been in her memories. Seriously? A Hero? After all that pain and suffering she’d caused, she was a Hero?

She had thought it was a lie. A convenient lie to give her hope, that her sins could have some morality in the face of the destruction it’d wrought and the people it’d killed. It’s what she would have done, to give someone like her hope.

But when she returned her gaze to Mirah, fearing the worst… but her face was almost entirely unchanged. Starkly unchanged in comparison to Ajax and Walter. She could see now how Ajax had realised that Mirah had already known about her, and what she’d done. But knowing that, and actually believing that someone could have their opinions of someone so thoroughly unchanged by knowing the specifics of how a teammate had killed probably in the realm of hundreds, if inadvertently.

“Why are you so…” Aaliyah blurted out, unable to stop her mind from pushing the question out of her mouth, but halting when she couldn’t quite find the right word immediately, “unflappable?” The woman in question scrunched her eyebrows slightly, the fine, dark-brown hairs making her much lighter skin seem almost pale.

“I am not.” She replied, words drier than a desert. Aaliyah wasn’t fooled by the overly tacit responses. Mirah had a way with words when she actually spoke, though that was restricted by her rather boring vocabulary in the beginning. But now, she’d been around others and talking intermittently for months—slowly building her vocabulary to something more than dry words.

“You are.” Aaliyah countered, though she also didn’t bother to continue on. Her words were self-evident, and Mirah seemed to give up on the argument altogether. Whether that meant that she conceded, or she just didn’t care to continue to argue, Aaliyah couldn’t possibly know. The other girls’ expression was a maze of dead-ends.

Aaliyah suspected that, unless she could find a telepath, she might not ever know what the other girl was thinking. Not to the more exact readings she could get from Walter and Ajax. It was perturbing how good the other girl was at obfuscating her emotions and thoughts, and it was likely never going to not be.

“Anyway,” The blonde sighed as she stiffly rose from her cushion on the ground, stretching a little while she did, “We can’t really stay in Walt’s room for the night.” She left their teammate’s room, Mirah following just behind her quietly like a baby duckling. A very stoic baby duckling.

Aaliyah walked slowly down the hall, wearily looking at the patterned, dark grey carpet and following the with her eyes as she walked forwards. She trudged towards her door dreaming of resting in her bed and loathing the idea of waking up on time in the morning.

She heard Mirah’s door open, making her turn her head to meet with the girl’s open door and those green eyes staring back at her. She gulped a little, hating that the girl’s gaze was able to be so ludicrously striking. Mirah held her gaze, piercing through her tiredness and somehow managing to wake her for just a moment.

“They didn’t say it, but they thought it.” Mirah intoned gently, making Aaliyah scrunch her face with confusion, “You did what needed to be done.” She completed, before nodding gently and disappearing into her room, leaving Aaliyah standing outside her own door, a little dumbstruck.

“I did what needed to be done?” She repeated, though the words were sour in her mouth, almost painful against her tongue. She couldn’t quite trust herself to believe those words. Not right now. But someday in the future, she might even be able to say the words proudly. Like a Hero could.

She scoffed, “A Hero. Sure.” And opened the door to her room, and quickly sought the bed.