with a match in one hand (and my heart in the other)

Chapter 4

Akira

Let it go, she tells herself. There's no room for her in his death war, and there never will be. Move on, have a meaningless fling with someone, concentrate on learning her way around London. Find an apartment, get out of this backpacker's, leave behind the lumpy little bed that she only imagines smells like him.

Hasn't she done the same with everything else that threatened to waylay her big dream? And it was easy, oh so easy, even when the dream career was only a near-impossible glint on the horizon.

She knows, now, why he looked like she'd just shot his favourite puppy when she told him she was in love with him. She's got the lead pellets in her stomach to prove it. And maybe it's made her a little gun-shy, for the first time in her life, because she's still sitting here in London telling herself to let. It. Go.

Enough. This isn't her. Akira fears nothing, not even broken hearts. Dreams can change, and if hers has left London to roam free across India with a camera in hand and the possibility of seeing him one more time before the end, she'll chase that too.

Singh

The boss is back, but they're still debating exactly what it is he's left behind.

"His temper," Deewan says again. "You see the way he reacted when Prakash told him we were on stand-down for another week?" He sweeps a hand past his face. "Nothing."

It's true; before London, being forced to sit back while someone else took his bomb calls would have had Sir fuming and stomping off into the forest to throw knives at trees or glare at rabbits or whatever it was he got up to, but all he's doing now is moping about the edges of their campsite with that distant look stuck permanently on his face.

"As long as it's not his brain," Krishnan offers, grinning. "Not saying I mind the vacation, but you know they're still going to call us if something big's going down."

Singh glances across the clearing to cast a critical eye over the man in charge of telling them where to put their feet when the shit's hitting the fan, then shakes his head at the other two. "Rather be with him at his least competent than anyone else at their best." And that's true too; maybe Anand really is divinely protected like the rumours would have it, or maybe it's just the protective instincts hidden in his self-sacrificial streak, but Singh's two years of standing behind him have proven that anything coming at them will have a hell of a time blowing its way through Anand first. Ninety-nine safe deactivations and counting don't come from nowhere.

Deewan raises his mug in agreement, and Krishnan nods and settles back on his elbows.

Singh studies their newly lonely-looking boss again, and tries to come up with another suggestion that isn't Akira.

Samar

The hollow feeling that first yawned open inside him as he lay in a stolen bed refuses to dissipate, and he begins to recognise it for what it is; the empty crater that used to hold his fury. Fury that had roared into being at Meera's quiet words so many years ago and swiftly swallowed up enough of him to make itself a permanent home there. Or, semi-permanent. Because - all that time spent loitering about on standby before they'd let him return to normal duty having set time and history properly back into order again - he now realises this, also; much of the rage that spurred him into that ugly showdown at the church was a thing out of time, a ghost thrown forward into the present by peculiar quirks of circumstance. Impossible, but true; somehow, before that ill-fated trip back to London, it had already been a weakening, dying thing. And everything he'd wrung out of it that day must have been its final death throes, because it's gone now.