Humans are social creatures.

We can't help it. It's a biological survival instinct to crave a sense of belonging with your own kind. Even after getting abandoned, tortured or demeaned, we look for something —someone— to help us. To care for us. To love us. To heal us. Forgiving is perhaps the most a person can give. Persisting is perhaps the greatest power we hold.

Being completely happy wasn't something any of us were very used to. Before now it had simply been short lasting happiness, always overpowered by the order to complete a mission, or remembering how long ago it was that we were last happy.

For some of us it had been years. Which made right now so special.

Once she sank down into the couch beside me I draped my arm around her shoulders. "Hey," I murmured.

"Hi," she replied, leaning over to kiss me on the cheek.

"How're you feeling?" I asked her softly.

Adira didn't answer right away. Instead she drew her knees up onto the couch with us and rested them in my lap. "I'm okay."

I really didn't want to push her, because I knew she hated even when Cal did it, but her headache had been pretty bad. She left training today because of it, insisting that I didn't have to come, but obviously I was still concerned. So, I braced myself and asked: "Are you sure?"

She flicked her stunning blue eyes up at me to give me the inevitable look I knew was coming. "Yes."

"Just checking."

She leaned into me more and buried her face in my shirt. Then she made a noise that sounded like a sentence, expect it was very muffled by my cotton t-shirt.

"That's comprehensive," I laughed.

She picked her head up, and some light blonde flyaways wound around her face. "You showered," she commented.

"Well yeah," I said, "you were at training for the first part —you know how hard Owen was working us. I was sweating my ass off. You're welcome." She reached a hand up and ruffled the still-damp tufts of hair on the top of my head. "You know the drill, give it a few hours and I'm back to smelling like how you want me to smell," I assured her.

She rolled her eyes.

I took her hand out my hair and threaded our fingers together. "Did you sleep last night at all?"

She looked down at our interwoven fingers and ran her other hand over where my knuckles encoated hers. "Not really. You definitely did."

"Well I'm sorry I value sleep," I defended myself.

She smiled at me. "You could fall asleep anywhere, anytime."

I rolled my eyes. She was right. We came back two days ago from a mission in London, where we had been for about three weeks, so we were still getting used to the Denver time difference again. For the past three months, any missions that Zach sent us on were usually just the two of us. Occasionally there was a group, but two agents, especially two who could pretend to be a believable, inconspicuous, undercover couple, were a lot more suitable for missions.

"What did we do for the rest of training?" She asked.

"That fucking obstacle course."

She grinned. "Damn. I really like beating your ass at that, I'm sorry I missed it."

I shrugged and brought our merged fingers up to my lips to kiss her hand. "Same."

She giggled and watched me pepper her knuckles with soft kisses. "You're such a boy."

"Um, excuse me, I can now legally drink in this country."

She groaned and I felt it vibrate through my ribs. "Are you still mad at me for not getting you a birthday present?" She raised her eyebrows.

"What can I say?" I shrugged. "I'm a petty bitch."

"Where was I supposed to get a present?" She demanded. "It's not like there's an agency gift shop."

I dropped my eyes to her lips and gave her a fiendish smirk. "I dunno," I dragged out and tisked. "I could think of a couple things," I buried my face in her neck to start to playfully peck at her skin.

She let me explore for a little while before gently shoving me away. "Maybe next year," she winked at me.

Her eyes looked amazing everyday, so I don't what made today special. They seemed brighter, just more vivid today. Deep blue pools of ocean water danced on by rays of sunshine. Her dark blonde eyelashes gave them flattering depth and the light dusting of freckles across her nose was so cute it made me want to kiss her all the damn time.

"You're beautiful," I told her quietly, "did you know that?"

A drop of blush seeped into her cheeks and she smiled. Then she snuggled farther into the crook of my arm. "Only because you say it all the time."

I stroked the hair on the top of her head, then pressed a kiss to her temple. "It's true. I spend most of my life lying, and you're the one person I never lie to."

She looked up at me again.

"What?" I asked. "Too Robert Frost?"

She leaned up and kissed me softly.

And cue the fireworks. My life didn't used to be this cliché, but hey, I was getting kissed, so it didn't matter.

A sudden jumble of Kurdish swears blared in everyone's eardrums.

Adira pulled away from me. "How long has he been like that?"

"About a half hour."

"When do you think he'll faze out?"

"Two hours, give or take."

"Awesome."

We turned to look at the drunk Iraqi agent sneering at us.

"How's it going over there Barnes?" Adira called.

"Fuckin fine," Quinn slurred back. He tipped the last trickles of his drink into his mouth from the bottle and then slammed it down on the coffee table beside him and got up to stumble over to the foosball table.

"I'm sure," I nodded at him. I turned back to Adira and lowered my tone. "Not our fault he's single."

"Axel that's mean!" She elbowed me in the ribs a little.

I rubbed where her elbow had impaled me. "Owen and James are all over each other, why isn't he complaining about them?" I pointed to the two agents sitting on the couch opposite to us.

"Owen," James was chuckling, while leaning away from Owen. "You're like a dog, seriously." He continued trying to wriggle away from the German but since he was a lot smaller it wasn't really working out for him.

"So?" Owen asked, scaling all over the redhead's neck and jawline with kisses.

"So I take it you don't care about other people seeing anymore?" James started shoving at his chest. He glanced around nervously at all the other agents in the rec room.

"Everyone can go fuck themselves for all I care," Owen paused to grin before dipping back down to softly nip James all over his neck. "Unless they're looking a little too closely, then we have a problem."

James still didn't look convinced but he made no effort to try and duck away as Owen practically pulled him into his lap and started devouring his lips.

"See?" I looked back to Adira.

"If you want to go tell Owen to back off, be my guest," she raised the hand that wasn't clasped between mine.

I rolled my eyes because obviously I would not be doing that. Owen was like a dragon guarding treasure sometimes, James being the treasure. James used to be the outcast, the laughing stock, he would get bullied and mocked and beaten. Except now if an agent so much as looked at the redhead wrong, Owen would bash their face in. He was like an attack dog/dragon hybrid. Which was why Hunter Martin and Samuel Harding were in the infirmary a suspicious amount of hours now. Not that I was complaining about that one bit.

Ever since we all came back, and Zach dethroned his uncle all Lion King-style and took over as Director, all of us agents could relax. The bullshit "no relationships" rule was the first to go. Now that Flagg wasn't around to torture Owen every time he even looked at James, they could be together in front of the entire agent body.

Zach had changed the agency a lot in his three months of being Director. When the ten remaining Basilone mission agents came back to Denver, the first thing we did was wrestle Flagg down to the basement prisons. Once we'd all gotten a few good licks in, Owen and Zach dealt with him. I don't know how the oldest agents killed him, or honestly, if he's actually dead. All I know is that they came upstairs, hands stained in blood, and a wordless pact was made to never speak of it again.

Fine by me.

After that we contacted the government. We told them what Flagg had been doing to us and how the agency had basically become a concentration camp. Federal agents from a variety of different agencies, including homeland security, the US Defense Security Service, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and even the secret service were sent in to sort out the future of our agency. Having a bunch of stony adults come barging in with authoritative voices and seemingly no empathy whatsoever was a little frustrating, especially after what we just went through. They only consulted the oldest of us —Zach and Owen. Which was fine, they were the ones who had been here the longest and knew the most about how this place had been running. The adults just didn't pay a flying fuck to the rest of us.

But it all worked out, so I wasn't too pissed. They asked if bringing in an entirely new Director to run the agency would be best, but Zach and Owen weren't comfortable making that decision themselves, sourcing that it was better to ask the very agents who would be under the jurisdiction of whoever the new director was. And it ended up being completely unanimous. Director Patterson it was.

Owen wasn't even a candidate. He didn't want to be. After all the shit he went through in the Director's office alone, he definitely didn't want to be at the agency for longer than he had to. So he was waiting for James' 12 years of service to be up, and took over Zach's job as level 8 trainer.

Zach had changed the agent serving time to 12 years. Previously it was you were released on your 26th birthday, but some agents had been here since they were 10, and Zach thought that was insane. So now it was whenever you had been an agent for 12 years, or longer if you chose to, but you couldn't stay past 26 years old. And once you were out, the government gave you whatever you wanted. Passports, money, a name cleared, an alias created, the government set it all up so you could be officially and finally free.

The only exceptions to that 12 years rule were Owen, Cal, Adira and I. Cal was 25 and had already been here for 13 years, but Zach said he could stay on as a doctor at the agency for however long he wanted. Owen could stay until James was 25 and he could leave. And since Adira came here when she was 19, there wasn't a way for her to physically get 12 years in, so she would just leave when she was 26 and I was 27 since she literally couldn't sleep without me. Then when we were out in the real world... well, that was for another seven years or so down the road.

For now, I was actually happy where I was. For once.

Zach had gotten rid of all the extra security shit Flagg had imposed, like the fingerprint scanners, cameras in the dorm rooms, the triple guards, the automatic lights off and locked doors at 10pm. He had shortened training times and opened up the weapons again, except the machine guns. Those were locked away and never used.

But the best thing —the rec rooms were back. We were in one now, with a bunch of other agents. Even Cal was here, just because it was a Friday and agents wanted to get drunk or high and it was always good to have a professional medic around when boys with guns were chucking their sobriety out the window. Yep. Drugs and alcohol were around too. But only for those over 18, and nothing hard. There were four rec rooms in total, and usually the youngest stayed in one where there weren't any substances. There was foosball, pool, table tennis, even some board games that got a lot more use than was expected. Monopoly and Jenga were the favorites.

Adira's hand suddenly grazed delicately across the scar that sliced through my eyebrow. I blinked out of my thoughts and focused on how her fingertips brushed over the thin white line I knew was there.

"The hair is finally starting to grow back," she commented.

I shifted a little so her knees slid more into my lap. "You said that exact same thing yesterday."

She retracted her hand back to herself and tilted her head at me.

I would have smiled at the expression. But it seemed genuine, and it worried me. "You don't remember?"

She shook her head. I shrugged it off. She'd been forgetting things recently, but they were just little things. Nothing huge. "All that blond dye is officially gone too?" I dipped my head for her to glance through.

"Thank god," she confirmed. I cracked up and leveled by head again. "Everyone's hair is back to normal."

"Now everything can go back to normal," I smiled at her.

"Okay if we're being honest here, what was normal before all of this?" She kept her head tilted at me.

I blinked. I really didn't know the answer to that. Until she had showed up normal had been... just being at the agency I guess. Going to training, listening to Harrison gossip, getting into a fight with Sam every once in awhile, getting called up for a mission once a month or so, Flagg slapping me every time I hesitated.

"What the hell is our normal?" I asked her.

She shrugged a shoulder. "Fair enough. Let's invent a normal then."

I looked around. Across the rec room on another couch, Owen never took his eyes off of James, and the redhead accepted the arm that the older boy slung around his shoulders as he laughed with Cal who sat on his other side with a coffee table between them.

Quinn and Harrison were on a team playing foosball together, against another team of two agents, all four of them drunk. Things were getting wild as the ball was flying all over the place and the wooden players were getting violently dented and chipped. But the agents were having fun. And up until now that hadn't been normal at all. Quinn's arm was still in a thin sleeve that Cal made him wear 24/7, but that didn't stop him from twirling the foosball handles like batons. His eye patch was gone too, but there was still faint violet bruising where the patch had covered. The scars on Harrison's face were rapidly fading too, but not completely. They weren't red anymore, just thin white lines of upturned skin. Cal says that he'll have them for the rest of his life. At first my friend had been very self conscious of them, but by now he'd gotten over it and embraced how badass they really were. He also had his tags back, since Zach had found them in a random drawer in Flagg's old office with all the other personal items he'd stolen from agents.

Lucky was caught up in a gambling ring in one corner of the room, agreeing to do crazy-ass stunts on the obstacle course and on the buildings of the Street tomorrow, for money or food or whatever else agents had snuck in from their last missions. His hip was obviously much better. Lautaro was passing around a new toy he'd made, some sort of a remote control car he'd crafted out of spare batteries and wires. His ear wasn't much better than it was, it still bled sometimes and he couldn't hear out of it, but that didn't stop him from breaking agency street racing records. To be fair he had set all the previous records anyway.

And the agent that never came back, he was with us too. In mind, in spirit or whatever other-worldly word it was that describes how it felt to carry someone's memory with you. Blitz would never truly be forgotten, I knew that for sure. We would tell stories about him sometimes, usually at breakfast when there was more coffee around since we all remembered how much he loved coffee.

I turned back to Adira curled up next to me. "You know what?" I said. "I like this normal."

"Me too," she said.

-

"Axel," I whispered, poking his bare chest. He barely moved. "Axel," I whispered again, louder. This time he fidgeted but didn't wake. "Axel something's wrong," my voice shook. "Come on, please wake up!" I pressed, shaking his shoulder.

He groaned, finally opening his eyes. "What?" His voice was basically a growl it was so deep and gravely.

"I think I'm bleeding," I whispered.

"From where?" He suddenly sat up.

"My face?" I said, confused. I skimmed my fingers over my chin and they came back with some form of substance on them. It was too dark to see. "My shirt is soaked."

I felt his warm hand feel my ribs where my wet shirt was now sticking to my body, and then he skimmed the back of his hand over my neck. "The hell?" he whispered, retracting his hand. "Does anything hurt?"

I swallowed. "I—I don't know. It hurts to breathe but that's just because I'm freaking out because there might be blood all over me!"

I felt him scramble out of bed and cross the room. Light bathed the place and then he turned to me and froze. His eyes bugged out and he covered his mouth with his hand.

Any normal person would have screamed, but luckily Axel was somewhat professional and had handled shocking emergency situations before.

Unlucky I was not. I glanced down at myself. I was drenched in blood. And so, like any rational person would, I started to scream.

Axel sprinted across the room and clamped his hand over my mouth before my screech could reach its climax. "Get up, we're getting you to the infirmary."

I nodded and he took his hand off my mouth. I took his hands and he helped me off the bed and stumble forwards towards the door. Suddenly my legs felt weak.

He put one of my arms around his shoulder and yanked the door open, flicking the switch on the way out and shutting it with his foot behind us. It was a miracle none of the other boys in the dorm had woken up.

I started coughing when something came up my throat. More red hot blood dribbled down my chin.

"Axel...." I breathed.

His grip on me got tighter. "You're okay, you're okay," he whispered. "Come on, let's keep going, you got this."

Despite his words I felt my breathing increase to the point where I couldn't feel my chest anymore. Everything felt numb and I started to panic as breathing got harder. I collapsed to my knees before we could get to the stairwell at the end of the hallway.

I didn't have the breath to say anything. My heart was hammering so fast it felt like it wasn't there at all. My hands started twitching. I started to panic more as my lungs kept trying to desperately take in air, and my fingers clawed at the strings in the carpet as I coughed and gasped.

Axel got down on his knees too, scooping his arm under my legs and back and picking me up. Even with my wet shirt against his bare chest warmth flooded my body. With me in his arms we made it down the stairs and the infirmary was luckily right to our left.

The corners of my vision started to blacken.

I felt myself getting transferred out of Axel's warm grip.

I turned instantly cold again.

I felt my back hit a hard mattress.

My head started to feel fuzzy but I managed to tilt it to the side and see Axel standing still, frozen in the doorway, my blood staining his hands and forearms and splattered across his chest.

Wait, take me back! I wanted to shout. But I still couldn't breathe. Axel come with me! I tried to say, but nothing came out.

I'm so cold without you.