BOND

50.

She's gonna give you her heart, oh,

And it's gonna feel like you stole it

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.

"I can hear you, Daniel," Elena said in a muffled voice. She didn't have to pick up the duvet from her head to know that he probably looked like a deer caught in the headlights.

He gave up all efforts of silent walking and thumped up to her. He didn't sit down and she realized why he was there at all. It was time for a trip to Illinois. Not for her obviously. She just needed to make it down the stairs, almost as long as the road trip with the condition her leg was in.

Looking at him, grinning down at her, she gaped at how much he had grown. He had taken up charge around the house, from handling groceries to people and done a whirlwind job of it. He was also hugely responsible for keeping Taylor in a good mood, a job all of them unanimously agreed was one of the hardest.

More than that, he had remained level headed among everything when all of them had descended to chaos.

"I don't want to go," she pouted at him and grasped why he had come to take her down. To be the silver lining. She had to go, no way around it, but there was no harm in delaying the inevitable for another few minutes.

"Okay," Daniel shrugged and propped himself by the headboard. He looked exhausted but he was doing a better than average job of hiding it. "I don't want you to go either."

She pulled the blanket up over her head and let out a loud groan, "Pull me up."

Adjusting into a snug position to be able to walk in took them a while and even then they used the better part of ten minutes to get to the foyer in a single piece. This would have been Nathan's job but he had been put out of duty till the Joey and Michael left and came back. A murder mission wasn't the greatest thing to carry out with a law man in the house. 

Two people went from the kitchen to the room on the left and Daniel didn't wait for Elena to ask the question.

"Nicholas brought them with him. They are his sidekicks," he moved around the bottom of the stairs till he could pick her off, just a couple of inches, and set her down on the ground. 

She pushed him away and leaned on the wall, catching up on lost breath. "Does he call them sidekicks?"

Nobody had told her much about Nicholas, not at all actually, and all she really knew about him was from eavesdropping on conversations between Michael and Chase. Joey had been avoiding her to the best of his ability, although in his defense the only place she had been in for the past day was her bedroom and Chase had banned him from going within a foot of the stairs.

"I don't," a tall, brown haired guy walked past them, with not even a side look. "Only he does." 

If Daniel had not pointed at his back and whispered his name she would not have thought that this was Nicholas. That this was the man that all the buildup had been for. He looked bored but strangely not out of place. 

She had thought about what she needed to say to him and though he seemed very unenthusiastic, she still did need to talk to him. Daniel wasn't having any of it so actually getting into the room was hard for her without the impending talk.

She waited a few feet back from the table in the room beyond the one she was in Nicholas and the other two people were hunched over. There were bags strewn over all the place, even the table was practically overflowing with papers and even a blueprint in the middle.