Title : By Its Cover

Author : Dùlin

Characters : Schwarz

Rating : M

Warnings : Rosenkreuz team get-together ficcie. Crawford POV.

Disclaimer : Weiss Kreuz belongs to the lovely Takehito Koyasu and Project Weiss. Who are not me. bawls

A/N : Gift fic for guiltyred, feypuck and the gunboy, because those are the people who made me love Schwarz before I even knew what Weiss Kreuz was all about. And just so you know, I didn't want to write this bunny, but it wouldn't let me go.

O.O.O.O

I Saw them before they were given to me, of course. It only goes to show that the Sight is not infallible, as my teachers took great care to remind me over the years.

I had read their files, too. Standard Rosenkreuz forms, several inches thick of them, recording pretty much everything from the day of their arrival to the day they had 'graduated' and been allowed to enter field training. Physical records, a quite impressive number of disciplinary reports in both cases, progress reports from teachers, recommendations to their prospective team leader. Me, as it happened.

Nothing could have prepared me for this meeting. Not the many times I read each file, not the vision. I knew that this first time we would all be together would be crucial. I had heard other team leaders speak about the shock of meeting the other Talents they would work with and command, of creating that essential bond between teammates and asserting their authority on the group. They talked about it like it was a drug. I had thought them fools until that very moment.

Nagi was there when I walked into the office, of course. It was a given that when the time came, he would be mine. I had found him and brought him back. For a long while I had been the only person who could physically touch him without sparkling panic attacks that unleashed his Talent at unawares and destroyed everything he perceived as a threat, be it walls, machines, or people. His power was one of the greatest ever seen, and his shielding was impressive for someone so young and who had never had any kind of formal training before I had picked him up from the streets.

He had not grown-up very well physically, his first years of malnutrition having taken their toll on his body. More than ten years of intensive training at Rosenkreuz had not helped either and at fifteen, he was too small for his age, and looked too young. And no matter what had been drilled into his mind by his trainers, he still only answered to me. He had been a special case at Rosenkreuz, too gifted to follow the same classes as other telekinesists, and indeed far too dangerous to be allowed more than fleeting contact with anyone but me and his teachers.

Guarded as he was, it would have been too much to ask of him to bond with his new teammates while waiting for me. He was sitting in a chair with his back to a wall, away from the other occupants of the room. I was not very surprised to see him get up and come to stand just next to me when I came in, although whether he sought to protect himself or me I was not sure.

Farfarello did not have any kind of physical or psychic Talent when he had arrived at Rosenkreuz. Nor did he manifest any after years under their tutelage, because it was not exactly a Talent that had led Rosenkreuz to Farfarello, but a congenital DNA defect. One that could have been easily cured given an appropriate treatment with the appropriate drugs, but no one had ever seen fit to even mention it. Rosenkreuz had no use for a 'normal' human being.

How they even knew of his existence and tracked him down, I do not know, but his insensitivity to pain naturally led to intensive training in physical combat. That was were he gained his reputation and what would become his code name : Beserker. He was wearing at least some sort of physical restraints at all times, which never prevented him from killing a fair number of his sparring partners. He whose body failed to feel pain could inflict it with surgical precision, and he had an almost clinical interest in the matter.

Every inch of his livid skin was scarred, from self-inflicted injuries to training wounds to whatever they had done to him while they were experimenting on him to discover the limits of what he could bear, which they never did. I had seen pictures of his first year at Rosenkreuz, when he was not much more than a lab rat being dissected alive almost every day. They had come close to killing him so many times, and I think that deep down he knew it, even if his body did not. It was during that period that he had gouged his left eye out, for reasons unknown. This macabre relic was being kept by the Torture Department and they used it as a practical example during class. So was the body of the lab tech that had been with him at the time.

His file had come with a four-page long list of instructions. I had glanced at it, memorized what seemed important just in case, and torn each page in two clean pieces.

The Team Assignment officer looked nervous, and I could not blame him. Farfarello was intimidating, both because of his formidable appearance and because of the aura of barely contained fury that seemed to envelop him.

"Crawford," the officer said, looking relieved at my sight, as if I had the power to stop anything should one of my newly-acquired operatives decide that they wanted to blow the place. "Glad to see you decided to join us."

I ignored him and walked straight to Farfarello. The white-haired man had not acknowledged my presence yet. He was sitting down on the floor next to the door, a small, razor-like dagger clasped in his hand, and he looked like he was trying to cut the sunlight again, and again. I squeezed Nagi's shoulder lightly, and the boy carefully took a few steps back. Then I came closer, and made sure to position myself so as to block the light falling on the edge of the blade.

I got an immediate reaction.

"You're in my sun."

"How perceptive of you," I said, and I dropped the torn pieces of paper I'd been carrying at his feet.

They never touched the ground. The knife left his hand so fast I only felt the air it moved as it passed me by, caught the papers on which the 'Proceed with caution' stamp was clearly visible, and embedded itself in the wood of the officer's desk with a dull thud.

"No one wants me in their team," he whispered as he slowly got up, sliding up the wall.

"I know. If I were them, I probably wouldn't want you in my team either."

He looked intrigued. Point for the Oracle. I dropped the file that bore his name on the floor, and all of the reports and pictures scattered in a thundering noise. The officer let out a strangled, outraged noise.

"The man they described in this file … I don't want him in my team," I said. "I want you in my team."

There was a low chuckle and exaggerated clapping behind my back.

"Twisted words coming from a twisted mind," a voice said, and only then did I feel the slight pressure on my shields. "I can't dig very deep, Far, but he's tellin' the truth … or so he thinks."

I heard plastic being ripped, the sound of a lighter, and smelled the acrid scent of tobacco. I did not turn around. Farfarello was not looking at me anymore but above my shoulder, where the voice had come from.

"Then I'm his," he said, and he slid back down, sitting right on what had been his file.

"Schuldig !" the officer's voice had gone from outraged to indignant. "There is no smoking in this office !"

I knew I could safely turn my back on Farfarello and concentrate on my last team member now, but I was too slow, or he was too fast, and by the time I was facing the officer, he was there already, slamming his hands on the wooden desk top, cigarette insolently dangling from his mouth.

"Do you by any chance see 'pupil' tattooed on my forehead or any other part of my anatomy, Herr Professor ?"

The pictures did not do him justice, and his fashion sense was terrible. For some reason, those were the two things that came to my mind when I first set eyes on Schuldig. Then, I realized that I had not noticed him when I had come in. I knew he had been in there because it was expected of him to be there, but no matter how many times I replayed the scene in my mind, I was unable to place where exactly he had been and what he had been doing.

Every field team had its own telepath. The whole team dynamic depended on them. Time and close contact would strengthen the bond, but they were the ones who created and sustained it in the beginning.

It was a delicate thing to handle a telepath. The very nature of their Talent made the building of shields a priority, but impenetrable shields were completely out of question. Telepathy, like empathy, was one of those powers that needed room to express themselves no matter what. While it was important to reduce the flux of incoming information so that the operative retained a sense of self, cutting it off completely was as damageable in the long run as letting it run free.

This explained why telepaths were never team leaders. They needed to control their own balance every minute of the day and even in their sleep, and they were trained to do it until it became as natural to them as breathing. Until they were broken enough to ensure that hearing only their own thoughts became a source of immeasurable anguish. Then, there was the conditioning. We all went through it, but telepaths were more tightly controlled than any of the other students, which tended to turn them into obnoxious little bastards who broke the rules at any occasion, just to prove that they still could. I had yet to meet a telepath whose head I did not want to bash into a wall. Apparently, Schuldig would be no exception.

The officer had fallen into his chair and was pretending not to be shaking from head to toe. He was more afraid of Schuldig than he was of Farfarello, which was probably wise at the moment. There had been one survival rule when I had been a student myself : don't go near the telepaths. As far as I knew, it had existed as long as the school and was still in effect.

"If I don't have 'pupil' tattooed on my forehead, then what the hell makes you think you have a right to order me around, Herr Professor ? He's the boss of me now. Not you."

A flick of his cigarette in my direction. He took his time turning around to look at me.

"Can I trash my file too ?" he asked, pointing at the papers I had left.

I smirked.

"No, you can't."

He huffed, took a last drag of his cigarette and threw the still lit butt to Farfarello. The Irishman caught it and crushed it in his palm.

"Crawford !" the officer all but squeaked. "You …"

"Consider my team complete. We will be awaiting our first mission in our quarters."

OWARI