Author's Notes: Yeah, more bad language. Aurelie has a bit of a potty mouth...Then again, the world DID go to hell in a handbasket. Also, the words between the tild marks (tild mark being this --> ~ ) are supposed to be memories. Just little snippets. Because I can't figure out how to get italics yet.

“’Elie, wake up.”

The voice penetrated the numbing fog around her mind, and disregarding the years since her service and the hampering injuries she’d received in that time, Aurelie Derinou snapped awake, completely and instantly ready to deal with anything – enemies, allies, her twin…

“What’s wrong, Kendra?”

The young woman crouching over Aurelie with a concerned expression marring the beauty of her face was one of the few remaining people alive in the world who could inspire that question involuntarily, as well as the genuine hinting of care behind the words. Not only that, but she was also the only person in the world who would not find herself pinned to the ground with a matte black combat knife at her throat for being so close to Aurelie when she woke. Kendra was the only person in existence who could ‘control’ Aurelie with a single word or look.

Then again, Kendra Derinou was the good twin.

Kendra reached out towards her twin’s face, now that she knew the other woman was fully conscious and it was safe to touch her. “You were talking in your sleep,” she whispered, some part of her heart squeezing and breaking all over again as she felt the roughly smooth texture of the scars on Aurelie’s face. Once, it had been nearly impossible to tell the two of them apart. Now even a half-blind person could tell without hesitation. “And shifting. You…you were making faces, too. And cursing.”

Aurelie sighed, and released her grip on the knife holster she kept on her thigh (among other places) on the outside of her pants. Even so, she still did not relax her guard completely. In the hell-pit the world had become, Aurelie knew she wouldn’t last long if she didn’t keep a constant ear tuned for potential trouble. She sat up then, grimacing as other old scars pulled and protested the movement, and moved her loose black curls out of her face from where they’d escaped to during the night. The loose strands made her look unusually feminine and fragile, but only for a moment.

“I think it was a dream, ‘Elie,” Kendra said, almost hesitantly. She knew Aurelie had no memory of much of anything. That was part of why she had been discharged from the Army, after all. Honorably, of course; in fact, with a great deal of honors! And while she had more than earned those honors and the discharge, it was a bittersweet thing.

“A dream?” Aurelie blinked, raising one hand to the side of her head. She stopped halfway through the motion, her fingers curling almost sorrowfully, regretfully. “I don’t remember,” she said in a carefully neutral voice tone that broke Kendra’s heart all over again.

“Oh. Well, it seemed like a pretty…well, intense one,” Kendra finished lamely. Aurelie regarded her twin through the gray darkness of near-dawn within the small cave they’d sheltered in, her stormy eyes uncommonly emotional. For her, at any rate.

“It’s alright, Kendra,” the ex-field medic said softly, taking her twin’s hand and holding it. Aurelie knew, in that odd, unexplainable way twins had, that Kendra somehow felt guilty for Aurelie’s memory loss and her seeming inability to recover much more than basics of her life. She didn’t say anything else, but then, she didn’t have to. Kendra knew exactly what Aurelie meant, even if Aurelie herself didn’t know how to clearly express it.

The moment was broken shortly by the sudden intrusion of rumbling from Kendra’s stomach. Kendra flushed, her freckles disappearing in the rising tide of red, and dropped Aurelie’s hand to clap her own over the noisy organ. The tips of Aurelie’s lips twitched in the smallest of smiles, softening her stormy eyes to an affectionate mix of light, dawning colors. But only for a moment. That was all the time she needed to rise to her feet, her dark curls tumbling about her shoulders and hips and, in the early pre-dawn light, giving her the appearance of some epic heroine. Not in beauty (though one could call her attractive), but in the alert way she held herself, and the rolling, ready fluidity of her movement, even with her crippled hip and leg and the slight canting of her body to the left that those injuries caused. Then the moment passed, and she was merely mortal again.

Aurelie took the few necessary steps to reach her pack and then crouched down, her left leg slightly extended as the hip joint protested, courtesy of a blow to her hip towards the end of her tour that had fractured the joint and never healed properly. Along with her amnesia and other wounds, it had been a large contributor to her discharge from the Armed Services. She flipped open the plasti-leather flap and began to reach for the rations stored within.

And even that moment was broken by the faint sound of gunshot, carried to them on the light morning wind.

“Fuck!”

~~Gunfire, shots, screaming, shattering, tearing things apart! Fire, flames, plumes of dirt and mud and earth and blood and people. Shells shrieking through the air, near subsonic ripples of the before and after explosion rocking through her brain, the ground unstable beneath her feet. Pain, death, blood, wounded. Soldiers. Faces, blurring, blurring, blending into one, into none, into shadows.~~

Instantly, Kendra found herself shoved unceremoniously into the small cave they’d found the previous night (if one could really call that rocky hole a ‘cave’), Aurelie at its opening, knife ready and eyes focused with deadly intent. The brief spurt of gunfire had long since passed into memory, or so it seemed to the two women.

They waited there for what seemed an indeterminable amount of time. Neither of them voiced any complaint, however. With the way the world had turned out after the War and the subsequent release of the Pandemic, no one still surviving ever complained about waiting to make sure the coast was clear.

Kendra shuddered inside the stone protection of her ‘cave’ as she thought on the Pandemic. An unknown biological agent, it had been unleashed towards the end of the Final War, a decade long struggle between countries started for God knows what reason. But the Pandemic ended it, and definitively. There simply weren’t enough people to fight with each other when that disease came sweeping around like a scythe through the harvest. There were no warning signs to its appearance in your home; by the time you knew it was there it was already too late. It was an efficient killer, though by no means an invisible or solitary one.

But then Kendra was jolted out of her thoughts as Aurelie made an exasperated noise deep in the back of her throat before shoving the combat knife back into its thigh sheath and straightening from her protective stance in front of the cave opening.

“Robert!” Aurelie’s voice rang out through the cold dawn air, clearly carrying the angry vibrations to the ears of who ever she was speaking to. “You fucking idiot! Leave a goddamn note when you go out so I don’t fucking try and kill you!”

Inside the small cave, Kendra winced at the blatant evidence of her twin’s irritation. Aurelie only really swore when upset in some manner; the rest of the time she was rather well spoken. Then Kendra perked up and crawled toward the entrance, shifting a bit behind the blockaded opening, trying to peer around her twin’s body to catch sight of the young man currently on the receiving end of Aurelie’s notorious temper. The man in question was coming up the side of the small outcropping, a wide grin on his face and a hand sheepishly scratching at the back of his blonde head. Aurelie moved out of the way then, letting Kendra crawl out of the cave completely. Robert’s grin grew when he saw her, and he winked one cornflower blue eye before focusing his attention back on the irritated ex-medic beside Kendra.

“Aww, Aurelie, if I knew you cared that much I’d have done it sooner!” Robert quipped, those same cornflower orbs sparkling up at the woman. Aurelie crossed her arms over her chest and glared down at him.

~~Wet, hot, sticky blood…everywhere. …A dream?~~

“Robert,” she began, “what the fucking hell am I supposed to do if you go and get your sorry ass killed because you went off hunting alone and didn’t leave a goddamned note!” Roiling silver eyes stared into deep blue ones. “What the hell am I supposed to do then? Huh?”

Robert had the grace to look sheepish in the face of the woman’s anger. He knew how very dear he and Kendra were to Aurelie. He had been a little shocked to find out that he was even thought of in the same breath as Aurelie’s twin sister, but it left his heart feeling so very warm and full when he did think of it. So he understood very well where this sudden burst of irritation was coming from.

Aurelie cared. So very, very much, though she would swear up and down that she didn’t, vehemently deny any kind of suggestion that she might actually have a heart and be capable of functioning as a normal human being instead of only as a stone-cold fighter. Both Kendra and Robert wished she wouldn’t think like that, that she would see herself through their eyes instead of the dark lenses the world had given her. But even that darkness was a part of her, and they loved her all the more for it.

So it was a much more subdued Robert that clambered over the crest, eyes shadowed. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely, slipping his gun back into its holster. “I… just… I’m sorry.” He was close enough to the women that when he reached out his hand to Aurelie, he was able to lay it on her upper right arm, a mix of several emotions carried with that simple movement. Aurelie tolerated the contact for several moments before dragging her gaze away from Robert’s and shrugging his hand off uncomfortably, as one might to a blanket they wanted very much to just wrap themselves in, but couldn’t.

“Just don’t forget next time, dammit,” she muttered, turning from him. A vaguely embarrassed expression crossed over her face, as if she were a schoolgirl being flirted with for the first time. But the expression was quickly masked by her usual one, though if Robert looked close enough, he could still see the remnants of it in the very backs of her eyes. Kendra smiled softly at her sister’s back, though the expression was tinged with sorrow. Oh, how Kendra wished she could turn back time and change the place where that final blow landed! If Aurelie’s captors had only hit a different place…but then, that different place might have killed her. That’s what the original blow was meant to do in the first place. And it did succeed, after a fashion – it killed the woman Aurelie had once been, but gave birth to this new one. Kendra shoved those thoughts aside in favor of doing what a civilian like her could do, and started towards Robert to check him for injury, but Robert laughed and waved away her concern, ruffling her hair affectionately.

“Ah, I’m okay, K.D. No worries!” He flashed her a bright, happy grin as if he were twelve years old and showing off a brand new toy. Kendra smiled right back, though hers was out of relief. She always worried about her two companions. She’d worried about them when they were in the Army, during the War. She’d worried when they’d come home, Robert with old wounds still healing and Aurelie fighting the pallor of death. She’d worried as they’d healed, when it became painfully obvious that Aurelie had lost more than just blood and bone and flesh, and had worried when the world went to hell in a hand basket. She worried even more now, because she felt so very useless next to Robert and Aurelie with only her paltry civilian medical skills to offer.

“Alright, Robert. What the hell caught your attention this morning?” Aurelie said, derailing Kendra’s train of thought. Aurelie was many things now – lame, crippled, cold and vicious, but what she was not was stupid or blind. She knew that look on Kendra’s face, the way she nibbled on her lower lip and her eyes darkened. While Aurelie might be good only for war and bloodshed now, a necessary evil to return the world to a safer place for angels like her older twin, she knew – and puzzled over – the fact that Kendra somehow managed to find some way to belittle herself and her contribution to their small group.

That, and she really did want to know just what the hell had distracted Robert from his normal morning watch.

“Oh, that,” Robert said, with another grin and a sheepish scratch to the back of his head. “Ah! Oh shit!” he yelped, dropping the hand and scampering back in the direction of where he’d returned from earlier. “You can come out now, it’s safe!” he called to…someone, apparently. Whoever – or whatever – had pulled him away.

Aurelie gave him a flat look, and her voice as she spoke was deceptively – almost frighteningly – calm.

“There’s someone out there – someone healthy – and you forgot about them?”

“Eh heh…” Robert laughed sheepishly.

“Fucking idiot,” Aurelie muttered, glaring at the blonde. “How the hell you survived boot camp is some kind of damn miracle.” Robert only grinned back at her.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said. “But I got distracted by you.” He winked one deep blue orb at Aurelie who returned the flirtatious gesture with a deadpan but slightly flushed expression and undisguised glare. Once again, Robert just laughed it off.

“E-excuse me?” came a small, trembling voice. All three travelers turned to face the speaker, each with a differing expression. Kendra with polite curiosity, Aurelie with indifferent but blatant suspicion, and Robert with a large inviting grin. “I…I…” The speaker, a young man (quite young by the looks of him – he barely had an Adam’s apple) stammered, twisting his hands before him.

~~He was nervous, that was obvious. Kept twisting his hands and licking his lips, beady little rat eyes flicking to every possible exit, but there were none. Not for him. Not for her. Not for them.~~

Aurelie blinked. A memory? Triggered by the simple motion of hand wringing. She wasn’t sure she liked that. And the boy’s stammering was starting to get on her nerves.

“What? Get on with it already, dammit!” Aurelie rolled her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest, giving the boy a heavy stare. He jumped at the barking sound of her voice, flinched, and then wrung his hands even harder as he stumbled over his next words.

“I-I-I heard y-y-you could help us!”