It was difficult not to be paranoid. Every human being on the planet had probably at some time or another been convinced somebody was out to get them for no good reason. The unexplained goose bumps, feeling like you were being watched, the irrational conviction that the car which had taken all the same turns for the last ten minutes was a stalker, all those things. Justin Timberlake already had more reason than most to be suspicious – perks of being a paparazzi magnet – but ever since he’d learned that the fiends of Hell were all gunning for him he had found it difficult walking around alone. There was nothing to be done for it, if he and Charmian were photographed together it would make them both targets, but it still scared him more than he cared to admit. He had some manly pride.

She had been unhappy about him leaving the protection of the sigils so often but being cooped up in a small apartment was not as comfortable or filled with distractions as Lucas’s sprawling house and gardens. He was going stir crazy and he needed air. He wasn’t doing much, only going for walks or to the store for supplies. He’d bought a small TV and some DVDs to entertain them with.  It just helped if he could leave the house and Micah had been kind enough to create a mystical panic button for him to alleviate her fears, one which would immediately call Micah or Katherine to him for a speedy getaway. The guardians were free from Michael’s authority and not kept out by the symbols so they could hang around to plot with Charmian as much as they wanted. It was only her team of avengers who were forced to stay away.

“Justin.”

“GOD!” Every muscle in his body had to strain to prevent him jumping a foot sideways. There went the manly pride. “Warning, please!”

“Sorry.” Lucas seemed unrepentant but then Lucas rarely expressed an actual sentiment. He was as bad as Charmian but in a sexist way that seemed less strange on a guy.

“This whole appearing out of thin air and scaring the crap out of me shit has to stop. I thought you weren’t even supposed to be talking to me anyway on fear of being squashed like a bug or something.” Justin adjusted the collar of his jacket, a nervous twitch.

“Michael told me I was not allowed to speak to Charmian, communicate with Charmian, attempt to look for Charmian, go anywhere near Charmian. I obey his orders, but his orders said nothing about you.”

That wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Lucky me.”

“So how is Charmian?”

Despite himself, he had to chuckle. If there was one thing to be said for Lucas it was that you didn’t have to waste time on the pleasantries.  Ostensibly nothing was much different, he supposed stress was unlikely to ever cause lines in an immortal visage, but he swore he saw a tightness in the shoulders and face which had been absent before. Lucas was in full battle gear and if the reference wouldn’t have gone straight over his head Justin would have started calling him He-Man.

“She spends a lot of time bitching about how emotions suck and she can’t even imagine what PMS must be like if this is normal but she’s okay. Nobody’s found us yet, anyway.”

“I’m more than a little pissed that I can’t help you guys but I’ve barely held onto control as it is. One excuse and Alexander’s taking over.”

“I guess she would leave a pretty attractive vacancy, huh?”

“Mmmhmm.” That was as far as Lucas would be drawn on the subject. “Do you know if she can still fight?”

“She’s worked out. It was hard to read between all the bitching about human reflexes but I think she’s still got all her ninja karate fight club knowledge, she just lost the super charge. She could still kick my ass.”

That actually raised a smirk. “So basically she’s doing a lot of bitching about being human.”

“Yep. Occasionally she throws in a few choice words about Anton.”

“Speaking of the asshole, has anybody tried to contact you? Anyone the succubus introduced you to?”

“Only my best friend and my mom but that’s normal.”

“Hmm.”

“All these non-committal phrases are kind of irritating, you know.”

“Hmm. I have to go, tell Charmian that we haven’t found him but we’re looking. Oh, and that Nate said something about her sword.”

“Her sword?”

“You remember, big flame-y sharp thing.”

Justin glared at Lucas. He did not appreciate being mocked. “Hard to forget. What about it?”

“He wouldn’t give me the details, just said it was still hers. Which makes zero sense since our weapons are mystical and part of the avenger gig but I swore I’d pass it on if I found you.”

“Uhh… okay.” He refrained from retorting that absolutely nothing about the whole sorry thing made any sense. He was still a tiny bit afraid of Lucas. In his life he’d always been one of the more alpha males in the room but there was no danger of that in his presence. Lucas was large and most emphatically in charge.

He had also evaporated into thin air without as much as a word of farewell. That was rude.

On the bright side, Lucas had fortuitously caught him only a block from the apartment. Justin had a feeling he’d be obliged to report any place he suspected Charmian might be, so it was good it hadn’t been there. Being in the area didn’t mean much but being about to enter a residential building might have caught Lucas’s notice. While the avengers couldn’t get inside they could certainly surround it until they were forced to surrender or starve to death.

Wanting to get off the streets, he picked up his pace. As he walked he brooded on the absurdity of his situation for what seemed the millionth time. The closest he’d ever been to a siege before was some over zealous fans demanding autographs. He’d been scared on a few occasions when the crowds were particularly rowdy and blocking his exit, but compared to this it had been nothing. Demons wanted to kidnap him, if too much information got out a bunch of holy warriors would join the line, and he was hiding out with some star crossed lover he had no recollection of ever having dated.

He was never complaining about promotion again. Somehow radio interviews didn’t seem such a tedious prospect any more.

As he entered the building his moping once again moved to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. He took the stairs with a slow, trudging step. Being in close quarters with Charmian made it impossible not to dwell on the subject and the more he did the more he felt short changed. She remembered everything, him nothing. How was that fair? How was he supposed to understand everything that was happening to him or the woman charged with the sacred duty of saving his hide without knowing the back story? It made it impossible for him to get a grip on it all; he would have asked her but he feared setting off more waterworks. Katherine had predicted that once she got used to being human again her mood swings would level back out but thus far that hadn’t proved true.

All such thoughts flew from his mind to be replaced by a new crisis when he unlocked the apartment door and walked in to find Charmian slumped against the wall. She was covered in a great deal of blood - he hadn’t seen so much since his bungled attempt at field medicine.

“Holy fuck.” He slammed the door behind him and raced over, dropping to the floor beside her. “Shit, what the fuck happened? Where are you bleeding?”

“Most of it’s not mine.”

It was hard to believe it was the same woman. She had been so blasé, almost cavalier about the gaping wound in her torso. Now in the face of much less severe injury (or at least he assumed from her statement) her voice was cracking and strained. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, leaving streaks in the blood which covered it.

“Fuck, umm…”

Clearly she wasn’t going to direct him as she had before, which meant he was going to have to keep calm and think straight. That was going to be a problem. Ripping off his jacket, getting a hand caught in his haste, he dropped it carelessly to the ground and rushed to the kitchen. Throwing open cupboard doors and rummaging roughly through the contents, he managed to dig up a large enough bowl and a cloth for cleaning. If he could get rid of all the blood that wasn’t hers maybe he’d be able to find where she was cut. He doubted she’d manage to tell him.

It was awful. He had to make her peel off the soaked shirt so he could check her ribs and back. Pieces of her hair were sticking to the blood on her face and neck where it was drying. Within sixty seconds the bowl looked more like undiluted blood than water and he felt like heaving. More than once vomit crept up the back of his throat but he swallowed and kept going. Charmian remained silent as he worked. Justin managed to go through three bowls of clean water before he was satisfied of what was hers and what belonged to the unfortunate person she’d come up against.

Under the blood he found a split lip and a red patch on her cheek, which he believed to be the beginnings of a bruise. There was a slice along her arm which while long didn’t look deep. He might have to check Google to be sure but he didn’t think it would need stitches.

“You planning to tell me what happened any time now?” He didn’t want to be insensitive but he was more than mildly freaked out and her silence was not helping.

The tears were still ceaselessly rolling, though she didn’t sob. “Possession. I killed him.”

“You’ve done that before.” He couldn’t believe he was trying to comfort somebody with the fact that she was a mass killer.

“Not like this.” Her face screwed up, pain etched in the lines. “He… I was so weak and slow and the technique wasn’t enough without my strength… I wound up just hacking at him until I got lucky. There was so much blood…”

“He was a demon, you had to. Wait…” Suddenly he was confused. “Hacking at him? With what?” The unspoken question was what she could have possibly been using to drench herself in blood that way but he couldn’t ask that. If she didn’t throw up at the mention he would. Whatever it was it must have hit some major vessels.

“My sword. Not sure how I even still have it and yet there was some innocent man inside probably screaming while I… oh God…”

“Still your sword…” Suddenly that made more sense. Not much more, but in the current insanity even a little was a lot. “I bumped into Lucas before I got here; he said that Nate said to tell you that the sword still belongs to you.”

“Don’t see how,” she replied. “It’s part of the avenger gig and I’m not one any more.”

“That’s what he said. He also said they’re hunting Anton but haven’t found him.”

Charmian wasn’t absorbing the information, otherwise she’d have been asking about Lucas. She was numb to everything but the fight. “I killed him.”

Briefly Justin stopped to panic about a messy corpse lying in the street, but then remembered how the demon had burned up the last time taking its human disguise with it. At least they weren’t going to have to worry about that.

“You had to,” he repeated. “He only would’ve killed you first. And didn’t you tell me the soul inside gets a big compensation package or something?” It was weak and he knew it but he had to try to get her out of her reverie. She looked half dead herself.

“I was useless. I must have caused him so much pain.”

“The demon caused him pain and you ended it.” All the while he was searching for stray smears of blood and wiping them off. Idly he wondered if they had any bandages or useful first aid supplies for her arm. There wasn’t much he could do for her lip.

“I’ve killed so many people: thousands of people, sometimes at once, and felt nothing. This is the first time I’ve even felt bad about it. What kind of monster does that make me?”

He tried not to choke on the breath he’d taken. Had she just confessed to genocide? What was really perturbing him was that she’d walked in looking like something out of a horror movie having murdered somebody, confessed to thousands more, and yet it was her he felt sympathy for. She might be one of the good guys but that was a lot of innocent people to be bumping down the priority list.

“Nate spent a lot of time explaining to me that you avengers are purposely made into people who can do that without feeling anything. You have to, it’s a nasty job but somebody has to do it.” He wasn’t at all sure this was helping, but it was the best he had. “That demon would have hurt people and damned their souls. Maybe that’s hard to remember when you got all these new emotions and you had to do something really ugly but you’re not a monster. You’re kind of a hero.”

The corners of Charmian’s lips raised themselves softly. It wasn’t a happy smile. “Some hero.”

“Well you saved my ass a bunch of times so far.”

“Let’s see if you still say that after I get you killed. Again.”

“Seriously, you have to quit this self pity shit.” Justin dabbed a little too hard at her arm and got a hiss in response. “You did nothing new, only this time you have to feel it like a human being and we got more delicate stomachs. That’s it. There’s not a person on the planet who would think you’re a bad person for it so quit making out like you’re the fuckin’ demon here. You found out that you still got the scary fucker sword and that ought to be good news for a change.”

“You’re telling me if you’d done what I did you’d feel okay about it?”

She had him there. After a moment’s pause and failure to dream up a comeback, Justin took her face in both his hands and slowly kissed her forehead.

“Charmian, you’ve been saving humanity from unspeakable demons since before any time I even learned about in history class. You just did it again, without any of your superpowers and when that thing could’ve actually killed you this time. And you’re sitting here worried that you’re a bitch for it?” His thumb brushed over her cheek.

Her skin hummed where he was touching it. Maybe it should have been a pleasant sensation but his proximity was making her anxious. Funny that he had moments before been scrubbing blood off of her chest and yet an innocent kiss was the thing that felt uncomfortable.

“Have I mentioned lately that I hate being human?”

“Not since this morning.”

“I just want to switch it back off.” The words came out small and weak. “It hurts.”

What Justin couldn’t admit to her was that he’d felt that way himself before. Sometimes he still did. He was feeling it right that second, wishing he could look at her without feeling that tugging in his chest or that overwhelming anxiety which continually threatened to engulf him these days.

“It gets better.”

It was a white lie.