The Man with the Golden Gun [Organization XIII]
Canon Status: Shameless, shameless AU.
Genre: Drama, adventure.
Rating: PG-13.
Characters: Organization XIII.
Pairing: None.
Warnings: Contents may contain Xigbar.
Notes: Like so much of what I write, this is all kazaera's fault.
Summary: A day in the life of Agent 002.
The apartment building had very good security, as befitting the residence of some of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful. There were embassies less well protected than the tower of metal and black glass that loomed over the city. Men and women with costly secrets brought them home from the office, and they demanded the best security.
The doors were watched, doubly so at night, and no one admitted except in the company of a resident. The people in this building did not have parties in their apartments, luxurious though those might be. They were the kind of people who gave parties in centuries-old wonders of architecture as a matter of course. The windows were alarmed. These people kept the city at a distance, their windows always shut. No building stood near enough and tall enough for anyone to come over the rooftops. There were no balconies. The fire escapes were unreachable from the ground and carefully designed in any case to be extremely noisy in the climbing. These people did not have children with them to play on the fire escape. The only way onto even the roof was to climb the walls themselves, thirty stories straight up.
The man in black had been climbing since nightfall. At the corners of the building, a small rectangle seemed to have been taken out of the corner. It was artistic, distinctive. It was where the man in black was climbing. He braced arms and legs against the corners and attached an emergency line wherever he could find a crack to wedge the pin into, which was seldom. There were no windows looking onto this particular corner. Nobody saw him.
The thing about the security consultants for this building was that they had made it all but impossible to reach the roof unnoticed. They had presumed that no one would ever be desperate and reckless enough to climb the walls. Having done so, they had neglected to place the same precautions on the door onto the roof as onto the ground floor doors. The man in black pulled himself over the edge of the roof at last and rested his tired, cramping muscles in its shadow for a few minutes, and then padded on silent feet over to the door. It was locked, but the lock quickly yielded to the picks expertly manipulated by the man in black.
The penthouse apartment was quiet. Its single resident was out for the evening, winning friends and influencing people. He would not be back until late, if at all. The man in black had the place to himself. The door in was alarmed and locked, of course, to keep the people who might come in from the stairs or elevator out. Disabling the alarm required a six-digit random code. The man in black entered six numbers from memory, and the alarm clicked off. The mechanical lock itself lasted scarcely longer than the one on the roof had.
Inside the apartment, the man in black trod carefully, disturbing nothing. He made directly for the study where, its door ajar, papers could be seen strewn about the desk. It was an old-fashioned desk, undoubtedly custom-made. There were, however, only a limited number of places to hide a secret compartment in a desk.
The man in black found the catch after a longer search than he might have expected, and the secret compartment slid open. It was full of documents. The man in black pulled from a secret pocket an almost microscopic camera and took a picture of each and every document. The words would be legible in the photographs. Then he replaced the papers and slid the compartment closed, replacing as he did so the single dark hair that had fallen out when he had opened it.
Climbing down the walls, in the dark, was as hard as climbing up them had been. The man in black climbed carefully until he was level with the roof of the nearest building, then shot a jumpline across. He went the rest of the way down the quieter, less important fire escape of the neighboring building. Undoubtedly the people in the apartment whose outer wall he had swung into would, if they were home, wonder what had made the noise, but they would have no reason to think anything of it. There had been no burglary, after all, no reason to remember strange coincidences.
The man in black passed through the night streets like a ghost until he came to an area where his clothing would excite little if any comment. Beyond the conservative echelons of the rich, people dressed far more strangely than he on a Saturday night. Hopping casually from subway line to subway line, he eventually arrived on the outskirts of the city, where apartments and office buildings faded into private houses. One of the last city buildings, in the deserted no man’s land between city and suburb, was a squat, gray edifice that looked almost oppressively boring. The man in black walked from the last subway station toward that building, a grin on his face and the bulge on one side of his jacket discouraging trouble.
He opened the building’s front door with an ordinary key, but once through the entryway and in an office utterly innocuous save for its complete lack of windows, he tapped on three wall tiles apparently no different from their fellows, and a small screen appeared on the desk.
“Vocal identification requested,” said a mechanical voice.
The man in black said casually, “Code name Freeshooter, designation zip-nada-deuce, passcode ‘stop playing games and let me in already’.”
“Vocal indentification confirmed. Welcome back.”
The desk, and the man in black perched on top of it, sank smoothly and silently into the floor.
* * *
Xigbar pulled off his gloves and cracked his knuckles loudly. Marluxia, passing by with a sheaf of reports, winced. “Must you?” he asked plaintively.
“Hey, you get your hands dirty, then you get to complain about mine,” Xigbar replied.
Marluxia huffed in annoyance. “Well, when you get arthritis, don’t come running to me to complain.”
“If I live long enough to get arthritis, I’ll be thanking you. How’s the puzzle coming, anyway? Down to the annoying bit with all the sky yet?”
“Two, your metaphors-! I think I may be on to something. It needs to be confirmed, though. I may want you for that.”
“Send it through Xemnas, like always. Speaking of Xemnas, I gotta go be debriefed like a good little minion. See ya.”
“Mmm.” Marluxia barely acknowledged him, his mind already far away among the scattered reports and tenuous conclusions of his ‘puzzle’. That was Marluxia’s way; he dismissed most people when he had no need of them, which infuriated some people, like Vexen, but Xigbar didn’t mind much.
Xemnas was waiting for Xigbar by the time the latter made his way down to the Superior’s office. “What did you discover?” he asked as soon as Xigbar was in the door.
“What, no ‘Gosh, Xigbar, it’s good to see you safe and sound and not a splat on the sidewalk’, boss? I’m crushed.”
“Obviously you survived,” Xemnas said, waving the statement away, “or you would not be here now. The question at hand is not ‘Did you succeed?’ but rather ‘To what degree did you succeed?’. Well?”
Xigbar leaned back in his chair with a smile. “He’s our pigeon, boss. Not so great on the imagination, either. Secret compartment in his desk, yet. And a hair shoved in the crack. Cheap stuff.” He produced his miniature camera. “Got it all here. Plus a little extra; looks like he’s having an affair with his secretary’s husband. Kept letters with the rest of the stuff. Too stupid to live, if you ask me.”
“I do not recall asking you. If he is a stupid man with much to fear, he is an easily controlled one as well. He can be made use of. That will be all, Agent Two. You are dismissed.”
* * *
Xigbar knew Vexen well enough to knock on the door before entering the lab. The scientist could be impressively paranoid even by their standards and had invented more variants of knockout gas than they could possibly use.
“One of these days, you’ll succeed in giving the computer a synonym for ‘zero’ or ‘two’ we haven’t thought to tell her to recognize and cause an emergency.”
Apparently, Vexen was in a fairly good mood. “Aw, I have faith in you,” Xigbar said. “You can keep up with me.” He tugged on a piece of Vexen’s hair to punctuate his statement.
Vexen yanked his head away impatiently but said nothing, returning instead to his work.
“What’re you working on?” Xigbar asked when no explosions seemed impendent.
“The adhesive I told you about,” said Vexen. “I’m almost positive I have the formula correct this time, but producing any quantity is going to be difficult. It could suspend a human being, or even two, from an area as small as one fingertip, but I very much doubt that you would want it to.”
“I maintain that proper clothing could distribute the force sufficiently even so,” Zexion said. He was not, strictly speaking, assigned to the laboratory, but when he was not busy ferreting out secrets he was often to be found disputing with Vexen there. All of those who had been there from the start of the Organization tended to gravitate towards the laboratory, out of habit formed in those days when they had had very little else.
“I’m with Zexion,” said Xigbar. “I would’ve been a lot happier tonight with just a little bit of your gecko tape, even if using it would’ve popped my finger out. Rather that than being street pizza, I gotta tell you.”
They both stared at him. Zexion said, “You didn’t-you did, didn’t you? You climbed the Olympus Building.”
“All thirty floors of it. You can trust me on that. My body remembers every single one.”
Vexen’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, then he burst out, “Are you out of your mind?! You climbed thirty stories on your own without a safety line!! Do you know what happens to bodies that fall as few as five stories?! Were you trying to get yourself killed?!”
“If I was, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” Xigbar replied, not surprised by Vexen’s explosion. At least this one was only verbal so far. “But it’s nice to know you care.”
“You are the most infuriating-!” Vexen threw up his hands in aggravation.
“Xigbar, go find Lexaeus, get some medicine for the excruciating pain you’re going to be in when all your muscles cramp at once from climbing a thirty-storey building, then go to bed before somebody becomes compelled to knock you out.”
“Yes, sir!” said Xigbar, offering Zexion a mock salute.
They were already bickering again in low voices before he was halfway down the hall.
* * *
“Was it really necessary to take such risks?” Lexaeus asked.
Xigbar shrugged, a futile gesture since Lexaeus’s back was turned as he pulled medicine out of a cupboard. With most people, he would have passed it off with nothing more, but it was natural to confide in Lexaeus, even for them. He was probably the most dangerous member of their Organization just because of that. “We could’ve planted someone in the maid service eventually, but that takes time to set up when they really do check references. It’s not worth it for one night. I got in and out okay, right? Short and sweet.”
“One mistake would have killed you.”
“Then it’s a good thing I didn’t make one, right? I own the heights, man. They love me.”
“Someday they’ll kill you,” Lexaeus said, not censuring, merely stating a truth.
Xigbar grinned. “I know. I’m not scared of falling. And up ‘til then, it’s gonna be awesome. They’ll be talking about this one forever.”
“Your true motives show through at last,” said Lexaeus with one of his sudden flashes of humor. “All right, these will last you until you wake up. Then come see me again.” He passed Xigbar a small box of pills. He no longer gave out entire bottles, not since the fourteenth and youngest member of the Organization had come back from a successful mission wounded, requisitioned a bottle of strong painkillers, and taken every last one. They never had found out why.
On his way out, Xigbar bumped into Saïx coming in. “Hey, Agent Bond. How’d it go?”
Saïx ignored the nickname. He never reacted; if Xigbar had not found the joke amusing in itself, he would have given up on it as a failure long ago. “Successful,” he said instead. “His bodyguards were as good as advertised for once. One of them cracked my wrist before I killed him.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to tell us that,” Xigbar said. “Evidence, and all.”
The corner of Saïx’s mouth turned up a trifle. “After all this time, I have no doubts about your loyalty.”
The slight emphasis Saïx put on the word ‘your’ led Xigbar to say, “As opposed to, say, Axel’s?”
It was a shot in the dark, but, like most of Xigbar’s shots, it came off. Saïx inclined his head slightly. “He is a professional traitor. A double agent is never trustworthy. You know this.”
Lexaeus shook his head. “I trust Zexion. As,” he said with his usual insight, “do you.”
“I suppose I do. But then, I know to whom Zexion is personally loyal. Whom he loves. And you are all here.”
Xigbar chuckled. “Dude, if you don’t know who Axel’s personally loyal to, you’re even closer to blind than me.”
“Roxas.”
“Looks that way, anyhow, and not even Axel’s that good of an actor.”
“And Roxas…has few other ties within the Organization. If he were to leave, Axel would follow.”
Xigbar blinked at Saïx. “You don’t really think the kid’s gonna quit, do you?”
“I hope that he does not, but I have been trained to observe at all times.”
“Careful; you sound like you’re after Zexion’s job. He wouldn’t be happy to hear someone was encroaching on his role as the suspicious one.” Saïx didn’t react at all. Sometimes Xigbar thought the man had no sense of humor whatsoever.
* * *
“I heard that you did your level best to leave me without a partner last night,” Xaldin said by way of greeting when Xigbar turned up again the next day, Lexaeus’s painkillers doing their level best to prevent each and every muscle cell in his body from telling him in detail how displeased they were with him.
“Again?” Luxord asked idly, shuffling the deck and dealing.
Demyx looked at his cards and made a face. They all knew this meant nothing; Demyx’s poker face was second to none, the more so because he could fool the unwary into thinking he had no poker face at all. “What’d you do this time?” he asked. “Me and Luxord just got in.”
“Luxord and I,” corrected Xaldin absently.
“Me and Luxord,” Demyx said, sticking his tongue out childishly.
Xigbar snickered. “Gentlemen, one of the best secret agents of our time. Deal me in?” Playing poker with the rest of the Organization was always a challenge; they used it half as practice for removing the little tells that could get them killed in the field. “I dunno what the gossip vine told you, but I went out to do my ninja thing last night on our new best friend Zeus.”
“You really climbed Olympus Tower solo?” Xaldin asked.
“I really did.”
“I have said it before, and no doubt I will say it again, but you are the craziest man it has ever been my pleasure to work with, and I include Larxene in that statement, as inaccurate as it may be.”
“She has balls enough to count, anyway,” muttered Luxord to his cards.
“If she has this room bugged, I said nothing,” Demyx announced. “But seriously, Xigbar, what was it like?”
“Like doing the chimney climb for hours, what d’you think? I’ve never ached this much without being actually beat up in my life. It could’ve been worse; it’s a pretty even climb, no overhang, just long as fucking hell.”
Xaldin smacked him lightly on the side of the head. “It is just as well you did not manage to get yourself killed, all things considered. If you had, I would need a new monkey.”
“Not it!” Demyx called. “I’m staying with Luxord.”
Luxord grinned at him over the top of his cards. “It would hardly be fair to ruin our chances of outdoing you two by abducting my partner in crime, now would it?”
Xigbar finally looked at his cards: a decent enough starting hand. He swore. “Luxord, I swear you stack the deck. What’m I supposed to do with this?”
Xaldin was unsympathetic. “Ante up or fold, Xigbar.”
“You expect me to play poker on painkillers?”
Xaldin grinned and said in his most dramatic voice, generally used for those occasions when he had to be particularly menacing, “No, Mister Freeshooter. I expect you to lose.”
Genre: Drama, adventure.
Rating: PG-13.
Characters: Organization XIII.
Pairing: None.
Warnings: Contents may contain Xigbar.
Notes: Like so much of what I write, this is all kazaera's fault.
Summary: A day in the life of Agent 002.
The apartment building had very good security, as befitting the residence of some of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful. There were embassies less well protected than the tower of metal and black glass that loomed over the city. Men and women with costly secrets brought them home from the office, and they demanded the best security.
The doors were watched, doubly so at night, and no one admitted except in the company of a resident. The people in this building did not have parties in their apartments, luxurious though those might be. They were the kind of people who gave parties in centuries-old wonders of architecture as a matter of course. The windows were alarmed. These people kept the city at a distance, their windows always shut. No building stood near enough and tall enough for anyone to come over the rooftops. There were no balconies. The fire escapes were unreachable from the ground and carefully designed in any case to be extremely noisy in the climbing. These people did not have children with them to play on the fire escape. The only way onto even the roof was to climb the walls themselves, thirty stories straight up.
The man in black had been climbing since nightfall. At the corners of the building, a small rectangle seemed to have been taken out of the corner. It was artistic, distinctive. It was where the man in black was climbing. He braced arms and legs against the corners and attached an emergency line wherever he could find a crack to wedge the pin into, which was seldom. There were no windows looking onto this particular corner. Nobody saw him.
The thing about the security consultants for this building was that they had made it all but impossible to reach the roof unnoticed. They had presumed that no one would ever be desperate and reckless enough to climb the walls. Having done so, they had neglected to place the same precautions on the door onto the roof as onto the ground floor doors. The man in black pulled himself over the edge of the roof at last and rested his tired, cramping muscles in its shadow for a few minutes, and then padded on silent feet over to the door. It was locked, but the lock quickly yielded to the picks expertly manipulated by the man in black.
The penthouse apartment was quiet. Its single resident was out for the evening, winning friends and influencing people. He would not be back until late, if at all. The man in black had the place to himself. The door in was alarmed and locked, of course, to keep the people who might come in from the stairs or elevator out. Disabling the alarm required a six-digit random code. The man in black entered six numbers from memory, and the alarm clicked off. The mechanical lock itself lasted scarcely longer than the one on the roof had.
Inside the apartment, the man in black trod carefully, disturbing nothing. He made directly for the study where, its door ajar, papers could be seen strewn about the desk. It was an old-fashioned desk, undoubtedly custom-made. There were, however, only a limited number of places to hide a secret compartment in a desk.
The man in black found the catch after a longer search than he might have expected, and the secret compartment slid open. It was full of documents. The man in black pulled from a secret pocket an almost microscopic camera and took a picture of each and every document. The words would be legible in the photographs. Then he replaced the papers and slid the compartment closed, replacing as he did so the single dark hair that had fallen out when he had opened it.
Climbing down the walls, in the dark, was as hard as climbing up them had been. The man in black climbed carefully until he was level with the roof of the nearest building, then shot a jumpline across. He went the rest of the way down the quieter, less important fire escape of the neighboring building. Undoubtedly the people in the apartment whose outer wall he had swung into would, if they were home, wonder what had made the noise, but they would have no reason to think anything of it. There had been no burglary, after all, no reason to remember strange coincidences.
The man in black passed through the night streets like a ghost until he came to an area where his clothing would excite little if any comment. Beyond the conservative echelons of the rich, people dressed far more strangely than he on a Saturday night. Hopping casually from subway line to subway line, he eventually arrived on the outskirts of the city, where apartments and office buildings faded into private houses. One of the last city buildings, in the deserted no man’s land between city and suburb, was a squat, gray edifice that looked almost oppressively boring. The man in black walked from the last subway station toward that building, a grin on his face and the bulge on one side of his jacket discouraging trouble.
He opened the building’s front door with an ordinary key, but once through the entryway and in an office utterly innocuous save for its complete lack of windows, he tapped on three wall tiles apparently no different from their fellows, and a small screen appeared on the desk.
“Vocal identification requested,” said a mechanical voice.
The man in black said casually, “Code name Freeshooter, designation zip-nada-deuce, passcode ‘stop playing games and let me in already’.”
“Vocal indentification confirmed. Welcome back.”
The desk, and the man in black perched on top of it, sank smoothly and silently into the floor.
* * *
Xigbar pulled off his gloves and cracked his knuckles loudly. Marluxia, passing by with a sheaf of reports, winced. “Must you?” he asked plaintively.
“Hey, you get your hands dirty, then you get to complain about mine,” Xigbar replied.
Marluxia huffed in annoyance. “Well, when you get arthritis, don’t come running to me to complain.”
“If I live long enough to get arthritis, I’ll be thanking you. How’s the puzzle coming, anyway? Down to the annoying bit with all the sky yet?”
“Two, your metaphors-! I think I may be on to something. It needs to be confirmed, though. I may want you for that.”
“Send it through Xemnas, like always. Speaking of Xemnas, I gotta go be debriefed like a good little minion. See ya.”
“Mmm.” Marluxia barely acknowledged him, his mind already far away among the scattered reports and tenuous conclusions of his ‘puzzle’. That was Marluxia’s way; he dismissed most people when he had no need of them, which infuriated some people, like Vexen, but Xigbar didn’t mind much.
Xemnas was waiting for Xigbar by the time the latter made his way down to the Superior’s office. “What did you discover?” he asked as soon as Xigbar was in the door.
“What, no ‘Gosh, Xigbar, it’s good to see you safe and sound and not a splat on the sidewalk’, boss? I’m crushed.”
“Obviously you survived,” Xemnas said, waving the statement away, “or you would not be here now. The question at hand is not ‘Did you succeed?’ but rather ‘To what degree did you succeed?’. Well?”
Xigbar leaned back in his chair with a smile. “He’s our pigeon, boss. Not so great on the imagination, either. Secret compartment in his desk, yet. And a hair shoved in the crack. Cheap stuff.” He produced his miniature camera. “Got it all here. Plus a little extra; looks like he’s having an affair with his secretary’s husband. Kept letters with the rest of the stuff. Too stupid to live, if you ask me.”
“I do not recall asking you. If he is a stupid man with much to fear, he is an easily controlled one as well. He can be made use of. That will be all, Agent Two. You are dismissed.”
* * *
Xigbar knew Vexen well enough to knock on the door before entering the lab. The scientist could be impressively paranoid even by their standards and had invented more variants of knockout gas than they could possibly use.
“One of these days, you’ll succeed in giving the computer a synonym for ‘zero’ or ‘two’ we haven’t thought to tell her to recognize and cause an emergency.”
Apparently, Vexen was in a fairly good mood. “Aw, I have faith in you,” Xigbar said. “You can keep up with me.” He tugged on a piece of Vexen’s hair to punctuate his statement.
Vexen yanked his head away impatiently but said nothing, returning instead to his work.
“What’re you working on?” Xigbar asked when no explosions seemed impendent.
“The adhesive I told you about,” said Vexen. “I’m almost positive I have the formula correct this time, but producing any quantity is going to be difficult. It could suspend a human being, or even two, from an area as small as one fingertip, but I very much doubt that you would want it to.”
“I maintain that proper clothing could distribute the force sufficiently even so,” Zexion said. He was not, strictly speaking, assigned to the laboratory, but when he was not busy ferreting out secrets he was often to be found disputing with Vexen there. All of those who had been there from the start of the Organization tended to gravitate towards the laboratory, out of habit formed in those days when they had had very little else.
“I’m with Zexion,” said Xigbar. “I would’ve been a lot happier tonight with just a little bit of your gecko tape, even if using it would’ve popped my finger out. Rather that than being street pizza, I gotta tell you.”
They both stared at him. Zexion said, “You didn’t-you did, didn’t you? You climbed the Olympus Building.”
“All thirty floors of it. You can trust me on that. My body remembers every single one.”
Vexen’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, then he burst out, “Are you out of your mind?! You climbed thirty stories on your own without a safety line!! Do you know what happens to bodies that fall as few as five stories?! Were you trying to get yourself killed?!”
“If I was, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” Xigbar replied, not surprised by Vexen’s explosion. At least this one was only verbal so far. “But it’s nice to know you care.”
“You are the most infuriating-!” Vexen threw up his hands in aggravation.
“Xigbar, go find Lexaeus, get some medicine for the excruciating pain you’re going to be in when all your muscles cramp at once from climbing a thirty-storey building, then go to bed before somebody becomes compelled to knock you out.”
“Yes, sir!” said Xigbar, offering Zexion a mock salute.
They were already bickering again in low voices before he was halfway down the hall.
* * *
“Was it really necessary to take such risks?” Lexaeus asked.
Xigbar shrugged, a futile gesture since Lexaeus’s back was turned as he pulled medicine out of a cupboard. With most people, he would have passed it off with nothing more, but it was natural to confide in Lexaeus, even for them. He was probably the most dangerous member of their Organization just because of that. “We could’ve planted someone in the maid service eventually, but that takes time to set up when they really do check references. It’s not worth it for one night. I got in and out okay, right? Short and sweet.”
“One mistake would have killed you.”
“Then it’s a good thing I didn’t make one, right? I own the heights, man. They love me.”
“Someday they’ll kill you,” Lexaeus said, not censuring, merely stating a truth.
Xigbar grinned. “I know. I’m not scared of falling. And up ‘til then, it’s gonna be awesome. They’ll be talking about this one forever.”
“Your true motives show through at last,” said Lexaeus with one of his sudden flashes of humor. “All right, these will last you until you wake up. Then come see me again.” He passed Xigbar a small box of pills. He no longer gave out entire bottles, not since the fourteenth and youngest member of the Organization had come back from a successful mission wounded, requisitioned a bottle of strong painkillers, and taken every last one. They never had found out why.
On his way out, Xigbar bumped into Saïx coming in. “Hey, Agent Bond. How’d it go?”
Saïx ignored the nickname. He never reacted; if Xigbar had not found the joke amusing in itself, he would have given up on it as a failure long ago. “Successful,” he said instead. “His bodyguards were as good as advertised for once. One of them cracked my wrist before I killed him.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to tell us that,” Xigbar said. “Evidence, and all.”
The corner of Saïx’s mouth turned up a trifle. “After all this time, I have no doubts about your loyalty.”
The slight emphasis Saïx put on the word ‘your’ led Xigbar to say, “As opposed to, say, Axel’s?”
It was a shot in the dark, but, like most of Xigbar’s shots, it came off. Saïx inclined his head slightly. “He is a professional traitor. A double agent is never trustworthy. You know this.”
Lexaeus shook his head. “I trust Zexion. As,” he said with his usual insight, “do you.”
“I suppose I do. But then, I know to whom Zexion is personally loyal. Whom he loves. And you are all here.”
Xigbar chuckled. “Dude, if you don’t know who Axel’s personally loyal to, you’re even closer to blind than me.”
“Roxas.”
“Looks that way, anyhow, and not even Axel’s that good of an actor.”
“And Roxas…has few other ties within the Organization. If he were to leave, Axel would follow.”
Xigbar blinked at Saïx. “You don’t really think the kid’s gonna quit, do you?”
“I hope that he does not, but I have been trained to observe at all times.”
“Careful; you sound like you’re after Zexion’s job. He wouldn’t be happy to hear someone was encroaching on his role as the suspicious one.” Saïx didn’t react at all. Sometimes Xigbar thought the man had no sense of humor whatsoever.
* * *
“I heard that you did your level best to leave me without a partner last night,” Xaldin said by way of greeting when Xigbar turned up again the next day, Lexaeus’s painkillers doing their level best to prevent each and every muscle cell in his body from telling him in detail how displeased they were with him.
“Again?” Luxord asked idly, shuffling the deck and dealing.
Demyx looked at his cards and made a face. They all knew this meant nothing; Demyx’s poker face was second to none, the more so because he could fool the unwary into thinking he had no poker face at all. “What’d you do this time?” he asked. “Me and Luxord just got in.”
“Luxord and I,” corrected Xaldin absently.
“Me and Luxord,” Demyx said, sticking his tongue out childishly.
Xigbar snickered. “Gentlemen, one of the best secret agents of our time. Deal me in?” Playing poker with the rest of the Organization was always a challenge; they used it half as practice for removing the little tells that could get them killed in the field. “I dunno what the gossip vine told you, but I went out to do my ninja thing last night on our new best friend Zeus.”
“You really climbed Olympus Tower solo?” Xaldin asked.
“I really did.”
“I have said it before, and no doubt I will say it again, but you are the craziest man it has ever been my pleasure to work with, and I include Larxene in that statement, as inaccurate as it may be.”
“She has balls enough to count, anyway,” muttered Luxord to his cards.
“If she has this room bugged, I said nothing,” Demyx announced. “But seriously, Xigbar, what was it like?”
“Like doing the chimney climb for hours, what d’you think? I’ve never ached this much without being actually beat up in my life. It could’ve been worse; it’s a pretty even climb, no overhang, just long as fucking hell.”
Xaldin smacked him lightly on the side of the head. “It is just as well you did not manage to get yourself killed, all things considered. If you had, I would need a new monkey.”
“Not it!” Demyx called. “I’m staying with Luxord.”
Luxord grinned at him over the top of his cards. “It would hardly be fair to ruin our chances of outdoing you two by abducting my partner in crime, now would it?”
Xigbar finally looked at his cards: a decent enough starting hand. He swore. “Luxord, I swear you stack the deck. What’m I supposed to do with this?”
Xaldin was unsympathetic. “Ante up or fold, Xigbar.”
“You expect me to play poker on painkillers?”
Xaldin grinned and said in his most dramatic voice, generally used for those occasions when he had to be particularly menacing, “No, Mister Freeshooter. I expect you to lose.”