Hell, Soul thought idly, probably looked a lot like a computer repair desk.

Because really, what better way was there to torture unrepentant sinners than to have them explain to an irate soccer mom that "no, your iPhone can't have given your van a computer virus, I don't care if your engine won't turn over" for all eternity? If Lucifer hadn't modeled the circles of Hell after the retail market, then the prospect of damnation wasn't nearly quite as daunting.

Soul propped his chin on his hand, surveying the store in front of him idly. It was modeled as most electronics store would be - harsh, fluorescent lights casting a yellowish tint on rows upon rows of various, overpriced gadgets. It wasn't a large chain store, so the racks held a little less than the one across town, which of course, every employee heard about at least twice a shift. Soul had long stopped caring about retaining customers (to be honest, he probably had never even started) and would now cheerfully inform anyone who tried to complain about their patchwork gaming section that they were free to leave the store immediately and try their luck elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, Soul was quickly moved to the computer repair desk shortly after starting. Foolishly, he'd thought that might put an end (well, okay, maybe not that far, he wasn't that naive) to the stupid questions he'd have to field, and oh, how he'd been oh-so-wrong.

Now, Soul understood that computers could be complicated creatures - he'd been accepted into MI-fucking-T (but that was getting into a whole other set of issues). And granted, there were some people who came to him with absolutely valid questions. Soul didn't have anything against them; they and their virus-ridden laptops made his job a little more enjoyable. No, it was people like the lady who'd come in insisting she'd sold him a faulty laptop because it "wouldn't open" that sucked out his soul a little more each day. He'd spent a good thirty minutes trying to figure out what she meant when he discovered that she'd meant open in the simplest physical sense of the word - she'd been trying to open it on the hinge side. One would think that upon explaining this to her, the lady would have been happy to take her laptop back and leave, problem solved, but one would be forgetting that this was retail, and that of course the lady would fly into a raging fit that Soul hadn't informed her of the proper way to open the laptop.

Yeah, that day had been bad.

But, regardless of every horrific encounter, every mind-numbingly simple task he had to perform, there was one simple perk to the job that kept him clocking in week after week - he had at his disposal several hours spent at a computer each and every day, often in long, uninterrupted segments. And that's all he'd really been looking for.

The screen in front of him flickered as lines of code filled the screen, and Soul refocused from staring blankly at the store floor to the computer. His eyes flicked from line to line, dismissing what he didn't need and taking note of what he did. He frowned, brows drawing together as he began adding his own notes between the code.

For weeks, he'd chased miniscule lead after miniscule lead, snapping at the tiniest bit of information he could come across, no matter how seemingly insignificant. All of it had to do with one thing - his brother.

Wes Evans had been the joy of his mother and father, the pride of the family name. A musical virtuoso, Wes succeeded at just about anything and everything put in front of him. Soul was not so fortunate, but it had never caused a rift between the two. Wes had been genuine in everything he did… which is what made the behavior he exhibited the last few years of his life even stranger.

Yes, Wes had died. It'd been a clear, sunny day in Cambridge when his phone had buzzed in his back pocket in the middle of one of his programming classes. He'd ignored as, as he did whenever it went off in lecture, but it hadn't stopped. Eventually he'd stepped out into the hall just to stop the side-eyed glances. When he'd picked up, he'd snapped a little impatiently at his mother, only to hear a choked gasp echo from the speaker.

He could only recall bits and pieces from that conversation, but the message had been clear - his brother was gone. Soul would learn the details later, but at the moment, it hadn't mattered. Wes would never share another exasperated look at him, would never pick up the phone and start a conversation without even saying hello, never ruffle Soul's hair in the way he said he hated.

Soul had taken a leave of absence from class as he'd returned home to be with his parents for the funeral and what came after. His jaw had ached as he'd stared at the coffin they'd lowered into the ground. It hadn't made sense to him, crying over an empty box. They'd never found his body. Maybe that was what had tipped him onto the path he'd wandered down during that time.

Maybe he couldn't stand thinking about the empty room that shared a wall with his. Maybe it'd been his way of holding onto his brother's memory. Whatever the initial reason, it had shaped his life moving forward.

The more he'd learned about his brother's death in the days leading up to and after the funeral, the less sense things had made. His brother, who was normally so reliable, was suddenly missing events he'd promised to attend, or would cease answering his phone for days at a time. It had all been chalked up to his new position with the Vienna Philharmonic, but when Soul looked back at previous programs, he found multiple performances where Wes had been absent. It was enough for Soul to begin poking into his brother's life in an attempt to make sense of what had happened.

The more he dug, the more discrepancy he found. Why would his brother, a supposed member of the Vienna Philharmonic, be on an unregistered flight? He'd utilized what computer skills he'd learned so far to dig deeper, and when that hadn't taken him far enough, he'd begun to teach himself what he needed to know. While his lectures might have been helpful for his classmates, they didn't contain everything he needed, and soon he was spending his days holed up in his dorm room, hunched over his computer as he absorbed everything he could. MIT had frowned on his prolonged absence from class, and so one semester after leaving for his brother's funeral, he'd returned home once again, much to the dismay of his parents. They'd tried reasoning with him, but Soul wouldn't be swayed. He knew something was off with Wes's death, and no one could talk him out of it.

His parents had little patience for his behavior, so it soon had become clear that he would need to secure somewhere to live, along with a job of his own. He'd been reluctant to abandon his investigation for so long each day, and the only skill set he really had dealt with computers anyway, so he set out looking for a position that would allow him long stretches alone with a computer. The only place he'd found that was willing to take an MIT dropout was a mom and pop electronics store that was in desperate need of anyone who knew anything about a computer and how to fix one.

And so he'd ended up where he was, still combing through pages of pages of data, using his self-taught skills to find the truth he knew was hidden. He hadn't spoken to his parents, who it went without saying heartily objected to the sudden turn his life had taken, in several months, which honestly was probably best for all parties involved. They didn't understand his obsession, but it didn't dissuade him at all. He knew his goal, and he'd get there in the end.

Movement caught his eye. He looked up from the screen and saw an older man wearing spectacles and a ratty coat approaching the repair desk. In an instant, he switched to the desktop, and by the time the man reached him, Soul was donning his best customer service face to greet him. "What can I help you with today, sir?"

The man tilted his head slightly, his glasses catching the fluorescent light hanging from above. He didn't say anything at first, leaving a silence just long enough to be uncomfortable. But before Soul could repeat his question, the man's lips curved into a semblance of a smile, and Soul wondered if he'd imagined the whole thing. "I have a USB drive," he said, pulling a hand from his pocket. He held it out, and true to his word, a memory stick lay in his palm. "I tried to retrieve some data off of it, but it seems to have been corrupted somehow. I was wondering if you might be able to clean it up and recover my file?"

Soul perked up a little. It wasn't uncommon to get that kind of request, but it didn't happen too terribly often. The task had the potential to offer a little more challenge than explaining that laptops don't actually open on the hinge side (god, that had been a really horrible day). On the other hand, the files could have been corrupted because the guy accidentally downloaded a virus off a porn site.

Eh, he'd take his chances.

He took the drive from the man and plugged it into the USB port on his computer. As the drivers installed, Soul subtly gave the man a quick second look.

His hair was completely gray, but despite that, he didn't actually look that old. There weren't many lines or wrinkles, no squinted eyes, no curved spine. He stood tall, posture good but not perfect. His clothes were worn and a little frayed; his coat had certainly seen better days. Otherwise, they were in good condition. He might have cut an entirely unassuming figure, had it not been for the scar on his face.

It cut from the top of his forehead, down his nose, and curved right across his left cheek. The line was jagged and ugly, as though it had been stitched together by someone who only knew the theory of needlework. The man's face, which might have been otherwise unremarkable, was rendered almost magnetic by the scar.

Soul, however, kept his eyes firmly on the computer screen. The last thing he wanted was for the most interesting project he's seen all day to walk out the door. He clicked on the icon for the man's flash drive, bringing up a list of folders. He tried to open one at random, and sure enough, a dialogue box popped up to tell him the file was corrupted.

"Is there a certain file you'd like retrieved?" he asked the man. "Or d'you want the whole thing cleaned up?"

The man tilted his head again slightly, considering the question. "[Insert file name here]. That's the only one I need for now. The rest I can get later."

Soul nodded and returned to the screen. He opened a standard data recovery program and ran it, watching as it sifted through the folders on the USB one by one. Suddenly, it stuttered. Soul frowned.

"Is everything alright?" the man asked.

"It looks a little more complicated than what our standard programs can clean up," Soul said. "But it's nothing I can't handle."

He closed out the data recovery program and dove into the USB itself. The smallest thrill ran up his spine - he couldn't remember the last time he'd had a chance to solve a puzzle like this. It may have been a little pathetic, but he'd take what he could get.

It took a little doing, but eventually he managed to retrieve the specific file. Soul scanned the document briefly to ensure that he'd found the right one. It was a document several pages long, with several chunks of text obscured by long, black boxes. Half the file was redacted.

Alarm bells shrieked in Soul's head. What the fuck was this guy doing, taking a USB drive with government-looking redacted files on it to a goddamn computer repair desk? He snuck a glance at the man, who, thankfully, didn't seem to notice that anything was wrong and was calmly surveying the inside of the store. Soul ducked back down, opened a text file and began typing.

"Have you found my file?" the man asked, turning back to the desk.

"Working on it," Soul said pleasantly. Muscle memory guided his fingers as he read through the redacted file carefully. To anyone else, it would certainly look like he was hard at work. In reality, he was trying to determine if what he'd done could be considered treason in any way.

He'd only seen a handful of redacted documents in his life (some of his digging into Wes's death probably wouldn't be described as strictly legal, per se), so it took a little longer than it would have normally to find the metaphorical smoking gun. But there, in the corner of a heavily blacked-out paragraph, was a simple four digit number. Anyone else might have skipped over it, but Soul knew that number by heart.

3962 - the flight number of the plane Wes had (supposedly) gone down in.

His chest clenched hard, stealing the breath from his lungs. This had to be something, didn't it? Information like that didn't just coincidentally pop up like this. But how the fuck did the dots connect? It was like he was trying to solve the world's hardest crossword, only someone kept switching the clues without telling him.

"Are you alright?" the man asked, glancing down at Soul's frozen hands.

Instantly he was smiling and typing once more. "Yeah, just thought I made a mistake in one of the lines of code. It's a funny story, actually, I knew a guy in college once who…" He started off on a pleasant little throwaway story he hoped would distract the man from the crisis currently taking place internally.

He went through the rest of the file, but there was nothing else legible that related to his brother. Maybe one of the other files? His typing went from meaningless to furious as he combed through the data on the drive, piecing together corrupted file after corrupted file. Finally, he found something that looked promising.

The seal on the top of the page didn't look like anything else he'd seen before. Three lines extended from the center of a black circle at different angles, while two half circles tilted in opposite direction sat a little above where the lines began. Soul blinked, and the shapes coalesced into something recognizable - a simplistic, stylized skull.

The document wasn't as heavily redacted as some of the others, but, regardless, the text on the page was sparse. The heading read NOC Program '15, followed by a shot list. Soul seized on an entry near the middle: WE - active.

And that was it. Nothing else on the page made sense, but Soul committed it to memory nevertheless. He exited every file he'd searched through, then began to clean up his tracks. Whoever this guy was, the last thing Soul wanted was him knowing that the computer repair guy had poked around in his collection of probably illegal-to-have redacted government files.

He was almost finished when the screen froze. A dialogue box popped up, cheerfully informing him that the file was no longer accessible, as its destination no longer existed. Blinking stupidly, Soul turned his head to the left to find an empty USB port.

He looked up just in time to see the flash drive disappear into the pocket of the man's coat. "Um, sir?" he said haltingly. "I thought you wanted your file…?"

"It doesn't matter," the man replied dismissively. He looked Soul up and down. His gaze held surprising weight; Soul barely managed to avoid squirming under the scrutiny. "I've got what I need."

And with that cryptic comment, the man turned on his heel and left.

Soul blinked after him, stunned. This morning, the only thing he'd really been worried about was if the cafe next door was going to have his favorite kind of chips stocked. Now there was a strong possibility that he could be arrested for treason, or whatever they charged people who read redacted documents without proper clearance for.

...Well, no one ever said retail positions weren't interesting.

Soul would be hard-pressed to recall anything else that happened for the remainder of his shift. He was relatively certain he must have had other interactions with customers and coworkers alike, but the man with the glasses and his highly suspect USB remained in the forefront of his mind, leaving no room for anything else. He left the store that day in a daze, walking the few blocks to his apartment off the sheer strength of muscle memory.

The second the door shut behind him, he made for his desk and threw open his laptop, opening a text file to record anything and everything he could remember about the files he'd seen. Every legible word was entered, regardless of the sense it made. When he was finished, he sat back in his chair and rubbed his wrists as he re-read what he'd wrote. Most of it was nonsense, useless without the context hidden by those lines of black ink. But there was one thing for him to latch onto, one thing he understood above all else: his brother was alive.

Because Wes Evans had died five years ago, and the list containing his initials was dated three years later. Active, it had read. Active, as in, not dead. Now all he needed to do was figure out what he was active in.

Needless to say, that would be easier said than done. Despite his reinvigorated interest in the search, the subsequent hours spent hunting through the farthest corners of the web he could reach yielded nothing. Soul still didn't know what NOC stood for, or what kind of program it was, or even what department housed it. The closest he came was an obscure message board he stumbled onto, full of the strangest conspiracy theories he'd ever come across (and considering he'd spent five years looking for proof that his dead brother wasn't actually dead, that was really saying something). One post included an incredibly fuzzy picture of what could or could not have been a stylized skull similar to the one heading the document about his brother. Most of the post was complete gibberish, full of run-on sentences missing punctuation and more typos than one could shake a stick at. But one phrase at the bottom rang eerily clear: Shibusen lies.

Despite the message's ominous tone, Soul couldn't make heads or tails of it. No manner of searching could reveal what Shibusen was. Despite the forum's incredibly questionable validity, something in Soul's gut told him it connected to his brother. The unregistered flight his brother was supposedly on, the redacted documents holding just the information he was looking for, the list containing his brother's initials… the pieces were there. It was just the question of making them fit.

And in the center of it all, the man with the flash drive. Soul had gone over the encounter again and again, and could only come to one conclusion - he had to be involved, somehow. No one just had documents like that lying around on a USB, and they certainly didn't bring them to a computer repair desk at a second-rate electronics store. No, he had meant something by coming there, but Soul didn't quite know what.

The shift of numbers on the digital clock beside his desk told Soul it was much too late to continue considering that question, especially if he wanted to avoid being late for tomorrow's shift. He saved the pages of notes he'd curated and shut him computer down, mulling over the incident with the man one more time. Tomorrow, he resolved. Tomorrow he'd start looking into the man to see how he fit into all of it. Because he knew something, and Soul was going to find out what that something was.

He owed his brother that.

As it turned out, Soul didn't need to look into the man with the glasses, because the man with the glasses apparently decided to look into him.

Somehow, Soul was unsurprised by this.

He was taking his lunch break at the cafe next door when the man dropped into the seat across from him without a word.

They eyed each other silently as Soul finished chewing a bite of his sandwich. He swallowed and asked, "How did you know my brother?"

"That's the question you want to ask first?" the man countered. "Not who I am, or what I want?"

Soul shrugged. "It's the question I want answered the most."

The man's mouth turned into what some would optimistically call a smile. "Fair enough. And we'll get to that. But first I think I'll start with who I am and what I want."

"Do what you like," Soul said, feigning a casual air. Inside his chest, his heart pounded such a heavy rhythm it was honestly surprising one couldn't hear it from across the room. This was it. Five years, and the answers he'd been looking for had simply taken a seat at his lunch table.

"My name is Stein," the man began. "I'm a recruiter."

"Recruiter for what?" Soul took another bite of his sandwich.

"The CIA."

"Oh, naturally," Soul replied. When Stein didn't contradict him, Soul leaned forward, his eyebrows shooting up. "Wait, you're serious?"

"Of course."

Soul slumped back in his seat. He pressed the palms of his hands against his eyelids until colors bloomed across the back, but when he opened them again, Stein was still sitting across from him, waiting expectantly. "Then why are you here?" He gestured vaguely at the run down little strip mall the electronics store resided in.

"Recruiting," Stein answered simply.

"And you thought you'd pull a Chuck and try the computer repair desk employee? Sorry to disappoint, but I haven't gotten any weird emails recently." Soul gathered up the remains of his lunch, his appetite suddenly gone. "Look, Stein, or whoever you are, if you're looking for spies, you've come to the wrong place." He pushed his chair back and stood up.

"Born in Florence, Italy. Spent your childhood moving around Europe attending the best preparatory schools offered before settling in one of the most affluent areas of New England. You speak five languages fluently, are passable in another two. Talented musician with the capability of moving in circles most people only dream of approaching. And that's before I've even mentioned your skills with a computer. You've appeared on our radar several times during your search, Soul. And that's without the consideration of your brother."

By the time Stein's speech was over, Soul had slid back down into his seat, eyes wide and mouth open in surprise. "How - what - I'd ask you how you know that, but, CIA."

"You fit the criteria we look for, so here we are."

Soul shook his head. "That can't be all you want in a recruit."

"Soul, I'm not offering you a full place in our program as you are. I'm offering you a chance to apply, and if you pass, a chance to train. Not one of our recruits comes in with a full set of skills. Our job is to see the potential and give you a chance to fulfill it."

"No, I still don't - there's plenty of people out there with skills like that. You talk about potential, but that's not me."

"Really? Anyone else would be able to piece together documents our own cyber team corrupted? Anyone else would decide to go hunting through every other file on there, figuring out the false leads from the truth? Anyone else would know to keep the mark distracted while they extracted information under his very nose? Because in my experience, those are things only a rare handful ever decide to do."

Soul picked at the label on the packaging of his half-eaten sandwich, unable to meet Stein's eye. "Computers are one thing. What you're proposing sounds like a whole other game."

Stein inclined his head in acknowledgment. "And maybe it won't be for you. You won't know the answer to that until you've tried, now will you?" He paused, then added, "You also won't be able to find the answers you want."

Soul's head shot up. "You do know my brother!" His hands clutched the plastic wrap tightly. "Did you recruit him too?"

"I might have approached him with a similar offer." Stein's face was unreadable. "Whatever the outcome may have been… I'm afraid that's classified."

"Bullshit." Soul spat the word out, ignoring the sharp plastic digging into his palms. "You said we'd come to this, and we're here now, so why won't you tell me?"

"Any operation involving the CIA in any official or unofficial capacity is considered top secret unless one has the required clearance level." Stein recited it like he was reading from a manual. "And I'm afraid that can only be obtained-"

"-If I decide to join," Soul finished bitterly.

"-If you pass training and become a fully qualified agent," Stein corrected. "I'm afraid accepting my offer is only step one."

Soul sighed, releasing the balled-up plastic wrap. Of course. Of course getting the answers wasn't that easy. Five years of searching and he'd really believed they would just fall into his lap like this?

...But still. He was closer than he'd ever been, and sure, he wasn't going to get them the easy way, but for the first time, he had a clear path to get them. Granted, that path was fucking applying to the fucking CIA…

When he met Stein's gaze again, the man was regarding him with that piercing look he'd had the day before, as though he could tell exactly what Soul was thinking, but didn't want him to know what he thought about it. Soul scowled. "I don't suppose you're gonna give me time to think about it?"

Surprisingly, Stein nodded. "I'm only in town for another twenty-four hours. Make your decision by then, or the opportunity passes." He stood, pulling something small and square from his pocket. Soul picked it up. It was a business card, all matte black with a small string of ten numbers in white. There were no other embellishments on it.

"So do you-" But when Soul looked up, Stein was gone.

"Of course. Goddamn spy just has to disappear…" Soul muttered under his breath. He looked back down at the card and ran one finger across the smooth surface. One telephone number, one call, and his entire life would take the U-turn of all U-turns.

The question was… would it be worth it?

Soul spent the rest of his shift in a similar haze as the previous day, and before he knew it, he was back in his apartment, sitting on his thoroughly secondhand couch as he stared at the little black card. One question, one choice, and everything would change.

Part of him wondered why he was even bothering to hesitate. This is your brother, he told himself. This is the first chance you've had to actually find real, true answers.

By joining the goddamn CIA? another part asked. This isn't the road we planned on. Who knows if Stein is even telling the truth?

And that was the real sticking point, wasn't it? Stein could talk all he wanted, throw around cryptic comments and empty promises, but who said he was really able to deliver, or even if he was telling the truth? Anyone who knew that much about him would know he had a dead brother, and that he'd been digging into it. A few well-placed sentences, and Stein could make it sound just sweet enough to tempt him.

So… did he trust Stein enough to believe him?

Not entirely, if he was being honest. He wasn't stupid, he knew the recruiter was keeping things from him. But some gut instinct told him it wasn't a lie, that there was something there. The documents, the information about his brother, the idea he'd been recruited into some spy program some five years ago - it made sense, in some kind of strange way. His brother's odd behavior, Stein having information about him that no one else would have. Some little voice said this was real.

Which was all well and good, but that still left the question of whether to make the call. Even if Stein was telling the full, unembellished truth, that still left the tiny, not insignificant matter of committing himself to an arduous, brutal training program that he was very likely to fail out of, leaving him with few options and no answers.

He suddenly let out a sharp laugh. An MIT dropout, recruited by the CIA. A computer repair geek, asked to join the nation's elite. Someone in the universe had a warped sense of humor. He could hardly believe it, and if the card weren't grasped between his fingers, he'd think it all a dream.

But no, the card was real, and the number printed on it was (presumably) real, so that left him a choice: did he call or not?

The question kept him awake through the night, burning like a beacon on his nightstand. It weighed down his pocket the next morning, growing heavier and heavier with every step he took. His fingers brushed against it every other minute to reassure himself he hadn't lost it, even as the deadline Stein had given him ticked closer and closer.

A customer approached him with a question about wi-fi on their phone, one that dragged out longer than Soul would have liked. When the man had finally left, Soul looked to the clock, only to choke on a breath. Stein's deadline came in four minutes.

Soul yanked his phone from his pocket, fingers tapping the keys frantically. The number rested unassuming at the top of the screen as his finger hovered over the call symbol, still unsure even as time ran out.

He watched, almost detached, as the top of his finger fell and hit the screen.

A click as the line picked up, then:

"I'm in."