a/n: In light of some of the Chapter Four reviews (and thank you all for those wonderful, wonderful reviews!), I've been spending some time reworking Chapter Five. But I felt bad for leaving you guys so long without an update, so I give you my very first interlude. This was actually the original beginning to the monstrously long Chapter Five, so I'm really interested in hearing what you have to think. Read, enjoy, and review!

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Interlude # 1

The locked door stared Derek in the face like some great monument to his failure, a permanent reminder that he couldn’t get Casey to snap out of it.

He’d been trying for the past half hour to get her to talk, or at least to quit sobbing because it wasn’t like the rest of them couldn’t hear her too. The latter campaign had succeeded, but his only reward was the knowledge that she was probably just crying in her closet instead, or smothering the sobs with a pillow.

He couldn’t believe it, but he was actually feeling compassion for Casey. Again. If the circumstances had not been so serious, he was pretty sure that Edwin would have been recording this to use as blackmail. Actually, Derek wasn’t so sure that Edwin still wouldn’t do that. The only difference was, this time he wasn’t ashamed of it. Stalker trumps petty rivalry, even in his rather skewed moral book.

Eventually, though, he gave up. There were only so many things he could say to that irritating locked door of hers, and he had the feeling that if he didn’t quit then he probably would have knocked it down and have to deal with angry parents on top of everything else. Besides, he had other priorities.

Derek stole down the stairs with all the silence of someone intimately familiar with his task; he had been sneaking around this house since he figured out how to unlatch the baby gates. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for, namely two of his old hockey sticks. They were languishing in the back of the coat closet, surrounded by other odds and ends of the Venturi-MacDonald household that had been too out of the way to get auctioned off at the school fair. He couldn’t help gloating at his luck. There was no way he would ever let Nora even think of selling his hockey gear, no matter how old it was. He might like her, but it was no where near the level of affection he had for his sport.

Hockey sticks triumphantly gained, he went back upstairs and crept into Marti’s bedroom. Besides his own room, this was the one bedroom in the house he could navigate in the dark. He knew it all, from the discarded sweaters balled up behind the door (green, last week’s “favorite” color) to the pile of stuffed ponies and coloring books stacked on top of her child-sized play table. He had spent more time in this room than in all his other siblings’ combined.

He switched the hockey sticks to his right hand and held them high, out of the way of Marti’s small form. Then he reached down and shook her awake, more gently than he would have had it been anyone else.

“Smarti,” he whispered.

She mumbled something and pulled the covers over her head. He grinned in the dark. She really was his sister.

“Come on, Smarti,” he said. “It’s time to wake up.”

“Smerek, it’s dark,” Marti said, finally opening her eyes.

“I know, but I promise you can go right back to sleep in a few minutes. Just come with me.”

Marti moved to shake the covers off, but Derek placed a hand on her shoulder to stop her. He slung the hockey sticks over his shoulder and held them there with his chin, before grabbing the blanket off the bed with one hand, and taking hold of Marti with the other.

“We’re going on an adventure,” he whispered.

Even in the dark he could see the way her eyes lit up in excitement.

“Really?” she asked quickly. “What kind of ‘venture?”

“Remember when we went camping?” he asked. “That summer right before you met Nora?” When she nodded, he continued. “Well, we’re going camping again, only this time it’s going to be right here in the hallway.”

He felt her start to tug his hand, urging him to walk faster. There was a bit of quick thinking involved when he tried to maneuver through the door, the tilted hockey sticks and the fluffy comforter serving to make it an unwieldy task. Marti was giggling by the time they got into the hall, something that had to be stopped before she alerted the rest of the household to their “adventure.”

“Shh, Smarti,” he whispered quickly. “We’ve got to be quiet. It’s all part of the adventure.”

“It is?” Marti said doubtfully. “This sounds like one of Casey’s adventures.”

He pasted an offended scowl on his face.

“Are my adventures ever like Casey’s?” he asked, pretending to be fierce.

Marti shook her head.

“This is a super-secret adventure,” he told her, lowering his voice confidentially. “It’s just for you and me to do. We’re going to camp out here and protect everyone from the alien invaders.”

Marti’s eyes became so wide he was amazed they didn’t just pop out of her face. It was no wonder she was so cute, though. After all, she was his sister.

Derek leaned the hockey stick against the wall by Casey’s door and swung Marti onto his back.

“But first, Lieutenant Marti,” he said. “The Venturi Hallway Space Cadets must retrieve the Protective Pillow Floor-Cushioners.”

“Right, Captain Smerek!” Marti said, before remembering his command for quiet. She swiftly lowered her voice to a whisper. “I mean, right, Captain Smerek!”

Derek grinned, even though there was no one who could see it. With any luck, no one would be able to sneak up on them without going through him – and his “magical space hockey sticks” because even he had to admit that he was scrappy – first.

That pleasant thought was enough to keep the grin on his face as he snuggled up with Marti against Casey’s door, the mission to retrieve the Protective Pillow Floor-Cushioners having been successful. He had no idea that someone else had heard the execution of the Venturi Hallway Space Cadets’ first mission, despite his efforts to keep his voice down. But inside her bedroom, Casey MacDonald smiled through her tears.

Just when she’d thought things couldn’t get any stranger…