madimpossibledreamer

Teen!Klavi has a music channel and occasionally does coops with his best friend, Daryan. Apollo needs music for homeworking and stumbles across Klavier’s channel.

         “The only reason he’s still watching your channel is he’s gay,” she pipes up, grinning.
         “Athena!”
         “Well, then,” and Klavier’s grinning from ear to ear and that’s really bad, “I suppose he saw the announcement video—I’m bisexual. And single.”
         “Go get ‘im, Polly,” his sister says and shoves him at an annoyingly hot German.

         Leon can tell when Boren finally comes around, because there’s a sticker with the words ‘Proud Monsterfucker’ sitting on his desk. When the guy comes to the break room for some coffee, he just raises an unimpressed eyebrow.
         “Hey, it’s accurate,” his squadmate protests, but claps him on the shoulder. “You don’t have to be ashamed of it.”
         He sighs. “Do you seriously have no sense of appropriate time and place?” He wouldn’t even mind, too much, except given what they work with that’s way too easy to misread and Boren knows it.
         “Nope,” the guy says cheerfully, even though they both know that’s a lie or at least three people would have been hounding Leon on the way up. “Special ordered that and everything.”
         That’s touching, in a very warped way. The agent decides to tuck it into the corner of the frame of the picture of himself and Xander on his desk—that way, it’s easy to put in his desk if there’s an inspection or something. He is absolutely going to go with the fact that Boren assumed that all relationships are sexual pretty quickly, or it’s really going to start bothering him how he even knows.

         “You could carry me.”
         “Don’t tempt me.”
         Xander glances at him, wry and serious and flirty but most of all exhausted. “No, I was being serious. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll stay upright and being in your arms is, well. I like it.”

         “I wondered if you’d sleep with your shoes on.”
         “Drove you nuts, huh? Well, that was the point. They took me captive and spied on me in the shower, the least they can do is deal with muddy sneakers on their pristine white sheets.”
         “Hmm. I’d prefer you actually stabbing them, but as these things go, points for the effort.”

         “Xander, are you kidnapped or aren’t you?” Buffy growls, and he laughs even as he shifts in the seat, awkward.
         “Yesn’t?” he offers weakly. “They were worried about Evil Corp tracking them down, and they’ve been very nice about it. They’re practically running a Bed & Breakfast out here.”
         She sighs, and he can guess the kind of migraine he’s giving her, but this, all of this? It’s important.
         “Look, seriously, I was for real kidnapped to start with, and Buff, they’re pretty much the Initiative 2.0, lab coats and attitudes and all. They’re working with Wolfram & Hart, and I thought they’d known about, y’know, Ancients and Giles’ whole spiel before, so I let it slip, and they absolutely hadn’t known before now. The countdown to possible apocalypsis and another Adam has begun.”
         He doesn’t even have to glance at Rebecca or Shaun to know they’re looking at each other and making extensive notes for purposes of later searching. Given that Sunnydale had a paranoid habit of physical records, which were then subsequently destroyed by not-so-natural disaster, he wishes them good luck.
         The even longer silence is deafening. And then Buffy speaks. “Xander, did you just hand me an evil conspiracy to stab? It’s not even my birthday.”
         He winces. Sounds like her love life is...well, on par with all of theirs, still. Maybe they really had jinxed themselves years ago. That, or she’d been really worried, but by this point they should probably expect this. He can’t stay out of trouble, and she’s got better things to worry about. “Nah, but maybe an early Christmas present—and what with my paranoid B&B, I don’t know that I’ll actually be able to go out and get you anything else.”

         A bunch of staring was getting him nowhere. And it might be a little dangerous, and reckless, and a bad idea, but it's not like he'd never had any of those before. He narrowed his eyes at the rock before getting up.
         If any rock thought it could outsmart him with its illusionyness, it thought wrong. He would beat this thing if he had to throw all of his power at it. Now, he thought he'd grabbed it, where was it…
         Aha!  Orange cottony fabric, just what he'd been looking for. They wouldn't mind if his stuff got all over the place. He'd put it back eventually, and they were kind of on a deadline after all. He headed out of the office and smiled apologetically at the pretty lady. "Sorry, is there somewhere to change?"
         She blinked, several times, and for a moment he wondered whether he'd managed to break her brain. Eventually, though, it restarted. "Uh, yeah, it's…" She pointed. A bit vague, but good enough.
         He grinned at her. "Thanks."
         She stared after him wordlessly. Bet that doesn't happen often. Not a bad record, if he had to say so himself.

I forgot I already mentioned W&H in a future part (i.e. this one).  I don't remember if this is entirely wrong or not but I got the feeling they also took on a few clients who were just scumbags when it suited their purposes and left them in the dark about the supernatural, and Abstergo would fit their portfolio perfectly.  (Although they'd probably be spying on them and trying to take Isu artifacts when they could get away with it too.)  If not...eh, it's a fanfic.

         “We can’t—” Lucy’s arguing, probably because he’s weird and he’s an unknown and that makes her uncomfortable.
         “He saved my life, or tried to. He’s blue, Lucy! We’re not just going to leave him here—” Desmond is arguing, and man, that’s sweet. Xander hadn’t even been trying to make a friend, just do the right thing. Although he’s trying to get his brain back from the music tangent, because he’s pretty sure that’s not what Desmond is talking about. Maybe something about that Eagle Vision thing they talked about.
         “I messed up,” he interrupts them both bluntly, shutting their argument up. Because no other ways around it, these guys did work with W&H, Lawyers of Evil, but they didn’t get the package with the pamphlet about demons, and they’d been far too interested in that for it to mean anything good. “I thought they’d already known about something, turns out they didn’t, and they’re going to do something bad with it. We don’t have the time to stand around here arguing, and like hell am I going to leave you to clean up my mess. Sure, they couldn’t get much of anything useful out of my DNA, but they’re working on it, and when they do, it’s bad news bears for everyone.” Sure, he could try to fix this on his own, with his own people, and it might even be faster, but he’s worried about the immediate consequences to these people, and yes, he cares. They’d still be in danger, still, sure, but not from demons and magic and they’re not ready.

        “Just saying, you’re barely making my top 10 of adultnappings, here.” He probably should stop quipping but he’s never been good at that. His mouth tends to do things without permission and he’s given up trying to keep it leashed. There’s the slightly funny way the evil scientists—seriously, evil scientists—keep insisting he’s an assassin, because excuse you what sure he fights for his life on a regular basis, but, like, decapitations are kind of public and most people wouldn’t go for that, not that he knows anything about that kind of thing, no siree.
        It goes downhill pretty quick. He makes yet another quip. They beat him up a little more. One minute the Vidic guy is explaining, with enthusiasm, they’re hardly demons, they’re working for the good of the world and a noble goal and all that shit, when suddenly he seems to put together that when Xander asked about demons, it wasn’t a metaphor, he was being entirely literal, and then there’s sudden friendliness and interest and they remind him uncomfortably of the Initiative.
        Hell, they didn’t know about demons and now they do and I am firmly in Camp That’s of the Major Bad, here.

         “I just wanted to give you a head’s up. So I was running my mouth and not thinking…”
         “And that’s different from normal how?”
         “I told Souji we both didn’t like our bodies.”
         “…You owe me steak.”
         “Fair, but it’ll have to be later this week, after I get paid.”

         Xander tries to ask Giles about it, but that gets shut down really fast. The librarian tries to take the attitude of ‘it’s already fixed so why worry about it’, which is far more a Xander attitude than a Giles one and probably means he’s hiding something. So instead Xander has to puzzle it out himself. For a culprit as methodical as Ethan, he has to wonder, why a costume shop? Maybe the transaction counted magically as a consent form.