Disclaimer: These are Marvels. This is fan-fic, which meant I borrowed Sam and Rahne.

    Rahne stared at the headline and sighed. "Wonder what they were doing in that lab?" she asked Sam as she passed the paper back to her boyfriend. "The MLF just doesn't attack without a reason..." The front page was devoted to a bloody break-in at a chemical plant in Seattle.

    "What was their reason for attacking Muir?" Sam asked, surprised to see that his girlfriend was seemingly callous about a MLF-led attack that killed eight scientists the day before.

    Oh no, Rahne thought as she rubbed her head. They were going to start the Dani Fight. The fight that would not end, one where Sam couldn't understand how she could defend her friend's actions, and where Rahne couldn't understand why he didn't look at the total sum of the MLF's actions under Dani's leadership. Second verse worse than the first.

    It was almost funny, the few things they had to fight about. Dani, his leaving the toilet seat up, and Rahne's habit of kicking her shoes off and leaving them where Sam would stumble over them. Even so, Rahne got physically uncomfortable when she knew they were going to fight. "Look," she said as a way to sidestep the oncoming spat, "We're not going to agree about this.." She held up her hands in near surrender. "Can we just agree to disagree? At one time, she was our friend."

    Sam cocked his head and looked at her, feeling the wind blow out of his sails at her reasonable suggestion. "Maybe.." he allowed. "If ya would answer one question..."

    Rahne tensed, almost afraid of the question. Knowing Sam, it could be anything. "What?" she asked softly, bracing herself for anything.

    He exhaled, knowing that this was difficult for Rahne. When they'd first started dating, she would do anything to avoid upsetting him. It had taken him taking her to a vegetarian restaurant, knowing that she was extremely carnivorous in nature, to get her to start really expressing her opinions. And this question, one that he really wanted to know, was the kind that could throw her off the deep end. "Why do ya defend her?"

    Rahne smiled sadly as she tried to explain. "She's still muh friend..."

    "Even after all..." He stopped himself, knowing that he was skating on thin ice. He picked up the paper instead.

    "She's done?" Rahne finished his sentence. "Even after attacking muh mummy, even after leading an attack that killed eight scientists and blowing up a lab outside of Seattle?" She paused for a second. "Even."

    "Why?" That sounded ludicrous to Sam, forgiving carte blanch everything that the other woman had done-- especially when he took into account everything she had done.

    Rahne sat down and let the words roll across her mind as she tried to string together an answer that he would understand. "Because she needs me," she answered, knowing that the simple answer belied the complex situation. "She needs to know that someone thinks she's not gone too far and that someone will accept her no matter what."

    The pure, sweet Rahne answer made him pause. If there was one thing that she could do, it was forgive those that hurt her. She had even reconciled herself with what had happened to her as a child, something that he still couldn't believe. "Oh..." Sam said as he started to think about that. The next words drew him up short.

    "And A have so few friends as it is..." It was rare that Rahne said anything self-pitying.

    "Ya have plenty of friends," Sam reassured her with a hug.

    "Not really, not where it counts." She had done the self-analysis a long time ago. "Yer muh boyfriend and love me... that's more than friendship. Kitty's a friend that A can go shoppin' with or trade her computer help for cooking, Pete's a friend in the big brother sense." What she meant by that was that he would pick on her, sometimes dreadfully so, but in a way that made her feel better in the end.

    "Kurt is so busy with his girls and everything else that A donnea think he has time for friends, and A feel awful just talkin' ta him." Actually, that space was helpful for her at times. Being an outsider, she had started to notice stresses in his and Amanda's relationship, things that she knew were going to become critical sooner or later. But only after Kurt started reacting to them. By not being so involved in it, she'd provide a fresh ear when he needed one.

    "Celeste? Tony? Jamie? Guido?" he prompted her.

    "Jamie, aye. Guido is so sick now that A don't feel like A can turn tae him." Due to his size, Guido was suffering from chronic heart failure. Moira was trying to convince him to move to Muir, where she could keep tabs on him, but his pride was stopping him. "Tony needs me like Dani needs me-"

    "Needs you?" That was an unusual thing to say. A wave of jealousy started to form in the pit of his stomach. The man had effectively dropped off their radar a couple of weeks ago. Rahne had received a terse email explaining he needed to go back to his roots, rediscover who he was. Pete had thought it the best thing for the man at the time.

    "Aye, needs tae know that life exists outside of his dark world, and that there is hope for him... if and when he reappears," Rahne kissed Sam and added, "A know A can turn tae him when the chips are down. Celeste, aye, she's a friend but... she's busy. Her life is sae complicated, and she does most of the complicating."

    In the past couple of weeks, Rahne had come to the realization that the other woman was a hard person to help, if for no reason than the fact that Celeste put herself and her needs last and then wondered why she was so miserable. Evidently, addiction to angst wasn't a side effect of being a mutant. "There are times," Rahne tacked on wisrfully, "A want more friends A can laugh with... not take care of. More Jamies and you in my life."

    "But that's what ya're doing with Dani," he quickly pointed out.

    "Aye," she said softly. "But she's still muh friend."

    "Even though you don't get anything out of the friendship?" It was a logical and very valid point in Sam's book.

    "A get tae be needed," Rahne responded. That was one of the most important things to her. She was able to recognize some of the fallacy involved with her line of reasoning, but Dani did need her.

    "Don't you ever worry she'll go too far?" Sam said softly, trying to understand Rahne's circular and illogical logic.

    "A've been worrying about that since she told me about Amara."

    "And Berto," Sam added, thinking about that incident where Berto, Dani, and Amara had all slept together. Although he had thought she hadn't known about it, he wasn't surprised that she did.

    "Aye," Rahne quickly tacked on.

    He frowned, catching the hurried tone in her voice. And then he nodded, remembering the way it had seemed that maybe Amara and Dani were intentionally not being friends when they were New Mutants. "Dani and Amara?" he repeated, a little shell shocked. He had never figured the two women had been lovers.

    "And Berto," she hastened to add. The frown on Sam's face told her that he wasn't going to buy it. "But mostly Dani and Amara..." She frowned. "Amara thought she was Roman, and Dani's not Christian, sae A dinnea know what tae say-- and after the professor did what he did to her it was nice tae see that she trusted someone again." The last was said in an unusually angry tone of voice.

    "What did the professor do to her?" he asked, almost afraid of the answer. After living through Onslaught, he wouldn't put anything past the man.

    Rahne blushed until her face almost matched her hair. "He... well, it wasn't like he physically forced her but... he was under the control of his evil side then-back when the X-Men fought the Micronauts." Sam sat down next to her and drew her into a rough hug. "He-- Dani said he made her feel... sexual stuff and it wasn't consensual." Rahne blushed and spat out the rest. "He used the orgasm to enslave Dani to his will... and he provided rewards if she pleased him. She hated the the way he took control of her, the way he used her, and how he never said that he was sorry, only that he wasn't himself..."

    Sam was literally speechless for a long minute. "So that was why she didn't like him... If that had been Paige, Ah would have-" He trailed off, trying to figure out what he would do if that had happened to his sister. Somehow, exposing the man's innards to sunlight didn't quite seem enough.

    Rahne nodded. "She's always had a problem with authority figures, even before that... but after that, when she and Amara-well, ye know..." Rahne trailed off and sighed. "A believe-the Bible says that what they did was sinful... but she was happy... and..." She shook her head. "Dani's bisexual, Sam." This was one of the instances that Christianity and reality didn't mix well.

    Sadly, from the time Dani had admitted that to Rahne, their friendship had never really been the same. It had taken a long time for her to understand that the affection that the older girl had shown the younger wasn't sexual, and longer to accept that what Rahne felt was morally right, Dani didn't. It had put a major strain on their relationship, one that hadn't completely gone away.

    But, in the end, after a long period of prayer and Bible reading, Rahne had decided that "Loving your neighbor," meant that you loved them as her Lord loved them. The more she had learned to embrace a God of love and mercy, the more she realized that nobody, including herself, was sin-free. And if she believed that Christ died for her sins, then he did the same thing for Dani's. They were equal in the eyes of the Lord. "A jist try tae accept her, Sam, no matter what," she summarized her viewpoint.

    "Do you really know who she is?" he asked, still trying to digest what Rahne had just said.

    That she did. "Dani is verra dangerous, on a slippery path, tryin' ta do what's right. She's the head of a group that is increasingly splintered and is out of her league." She smiled at him, knowing that maybe for the first time, they agreed about their old classmate. "But she still needs muh friendship... and A need tae think of her as a friend."

    "Why?" Sam whispered, not sure if he really understood what she meant by that.

    Two tears hit Rahne's cheeks as she tried to explain, "Because a friend... A'll help them no matter what, and because Dani has nobody like that in her life." Angrily, she blotted the tears away. "And A'm sae afraid of where she's goin' and that nobody will help her... A kind of need that label in muh mind, reminding myself that this is someone A'll help, that A care about.. Because if A forget A've promised tae do that, she'll keep on like she is, thinkin' nobody cares about her... and she's tae powerful for that to happen to. "

    In the wrong person, Dani's ability to pull out a person's greatest fear would be enough to kill them. In theory, she could become a mass murderer. Already, the woman was in the MLF, which was on the verge of becoming amoral and preached hatred of normal humans. It was a real fear of Rahne's that Dani would start to justify using her powers more aggressively. And as she knew too well, from bitter experience, once someone died at your own hands, it just gets easier to move on to the next person.

    She paused, and tried to continue, knowing she'd never really truly get her point across to Sam. "And maybe, deep down, in the very fantastical sense, A understand how lucky A was tae have someone rescue me and teach me how tae control the darker side of muh personality and A can't turn ma back on Dani now." She looked up at him, "Does that answer yer question?" Hope burned bright in her eyes as she studied him.

    Sam slowly nodded as he thought through her answer. "In someways, yes..." he agreed and then paused. "Maybe Ah'm closer to understanding," he offered honestly.

    Rahne grabbed his hand. "A cannea ask ye for more," she said with a smile.

    "Just be careful," Sam whispered as he kissed her cheek. "She's involved with a lot of scary stuff. The last thing Ah want is for you to get caught up in it."

    Rahne kissed the tip of his nose, relieved that the conflict was over. "A will," she promised, pushing down the part of her soul that echoed his warning. "All we do is write letters, how much danger could A be in?" she asked, as much to reasure herself as him.

    He stroked the side of her face and then kissed her lips. "Just be careful," he repeated. If Dani was trouble, he wanted it all to stay away from her.