Chapter One: Visionaries
Honor Code Point 1: The Guards' primary initiative is to dedicate their lives to protect and serve all people.
A light wind shifts Isa's long, powder blue hair as he gazes up at the clock tower, the face of which beams proudly over Radiant Garden's central plaza, and which-Isa frowns, taking in the unpleasantly increasing numbers, as spray from the fountain he sits on the ledge of dampens his wrists-Lea has never taken the time to read in his life.
Isa shuts the book he hasn't had the peace of mind to read a sentence of yet this morning and takes another glance around the square. Glass storefronts mope, unlit, and cobblestone paths lay bare, waiting. Silence reigns. The late spring breeze ruffles the leaves of the overhanging willow trees. The overwhelming sweetness of the flowers curling through the wooden trellis wrapping the base of the fountain singe his nose. His empty stomach clenches, and his nerves buzz like static.
Of all mornings.
Today at 7 sharp, assignments will be posted for employment in the castle.
It's my own fault. Isa sighs, the briefest of smiles warming his lips. I should have been pelting his window with rocks at five a.m.
These positions are among the most honorable and coveted in the vast citadel and every recent graduate and unsatisfied apprentice would be clustered in the castle courtyard, itching for a glimpse of the lists nailed into the two massive wooden entry doors. Their instructors and peers expected Lea's and Isa's names would be among the proud few inked there, future apprentices to the king himself, Ansem the Wise.
Lea had better be dying.
A passing Shadow scuttles along the edge of the square. Isa tends to attract them. Heartless. It rises up on its hind legs and pauses mid-creep to fix him with round, vacant, yellow eyes. Isa's heart flutters in spite of himself. He's seen them before, can handle a dozen of them with his claymore, and yet, there is something unsettling in their stare, a taste like dark chocolate, a feeling like forgetting, a pressing on Isa's angular cheeks like the burn of snow.
Its antenna quiver as it tilts its head. Apparently uninterested, the Shadow sinks into its own likeness, cast black across the cobblestone and glides down the path toward the castle and the promise of a horde of hearts for the snatching. The guards will take care of it, but Isa longs to follow in its wake—to arrive at the gate, for once, on time.
"Is-a!" a voice sings from the opposite direction.
Soft pink cherry blossom petals scatter under Lea's boots like puffs of snow as he sprints, skidding to a halt in front of Isa's neatly crossed ankles.
Isa examines him. Lea hasn't taken the time to fight his spikes of flaming red hair into a bun and the untucked bottom of his nicest button down bears the faintest of iron scorches.
"You waited for me!" Lea's grin could blind, as if Isa's waiting weren't a near daily occurrence on their treks to Radiant Academy. "I'm so flattered."
"Five more minutes and it would have been another story," Isa stands to counter, but grins as well. Lea's easygoing presence alone has its way of offsetting his annoyance.
Isa tries not to let this show. Especially today, when Lea really should have made more of an effort. "For gods' sakes, where have you been?"
"Do you have to ask?" Lea catches the criticism in his friend's lingering stare.
I guess I could have tried a bit harder, he frowns, but no use in worrying about it now.
He slings his arm through Isa's, and moves to kiss his cheek. Isa dodges, expression dour.
"Lea," he rebukes.
Yikes, Lea thinks, grin slipping.
Isa pulls him along. Though impeccably dressed, Lea notes from the stiff material that Isa's still sporting his uniform blazer, despite their recent graduation.
The pair were among the least well-to-do students to grace Radiant Academy's hallowed halls. Nobodies, really, compared to the other kids. Lea's own dress slacks had been won in one of his more hysterical bets, but he had foregone a jacket rather than wear his uniform another second.
They weren't starved or desolate, but they didn't own their own weapons either. And if their parents had spent more time working and arguing than parenting them, well, Lea figured, life could be funny that way.
But if Isa receives the post he's aiming for, he'll be making more munny than he knows what to do with. Lea knows better than to worry this will put a strain on their friendship, but sometimes he still does.
"Where to?" Lea jokes, starting toward a side alley, a shortcut, he would have explained, though Isa knew better than to ask him by now. Isa doubts they have ever taken the same route anywhere twice.
"Really, Lea, where were you?" Isa pulls his arm from Lea's, though the pair remain in step. "If we're late we won't see the posts until midday."
"Just getting my beauty rest." Lea stretches his gangly arms overhead and yawns as if he wishes he still were, lowering them in time to duck under an electric wire wrapped with vines and dripping leafy branches. "Although I take it that's not a concept you're overly familiar with."
Isa's eyes narrow, locking onto Lea's, their unnatural green, like light filtered through an emerald, subdued to gray in the alley's dim, dust-ridden morning light. But he can't hold it, and as they step into the daylight of a second block of businesses-seedier, but more expedient than the main thoroughfare-Isa laughs, startling a Moogle snoozing belly up atop her merchant cart.
The fuzzy, pale yellow creature begins to chatter at another Moogle who has begun loading her goods into a cart of his own. The second Moogle shrieks and launches the cart into the street, forcing Lea to unceremoniously yank Isa back by the collar to avoid a collision.
No one with any sense messes in the affairs of an angry Moogle, so they stand, breathing hard, Lea's hand tightly clutching Isa's collar, thumb to tag, unwelcomely warm on the back of his neck. Isa's eyes, cyan blue and wide with shock, fix onto Lea's, crinkled around the edges with suppressed laughter.
"You overslept," Isa continues, plucking Lea's hand from his blazer, "yet you still found time for winged eyeliner." Lea's laughter lines deepen, as Isa begins to tuck in his friend's dress shirt. Satisfied, he gives the black tie around Lea's throat a firm yank. "Unfathomable."
For a moment Isa thinks he's caught his friend without a comeback, but the moment passes.
Lea's brows rise and he drawls seriously, "Do you need more time to check me out, Isa, or can we go? You're going to make us late, ya know."
Isa glances past Lea to see that both Moogle carts seem to have evaporated, and the narrow road stretches forward, unimpeded.
Fury pricks his temples and fades. "Why," Isa asks, tone bone dry, "do you have somewhere you need to be?"
Lea turns down an alley of faded, crumbling stone, seemingly at random. Here the air is choked with the stench of cigarettes and the ivy climbing the walls gives the appearance of having smoked them, its leaves darkening from brown to black where the sun refuses to shine.
Isa grimaces, pale blue brows rising, as his eyes adjust to the shadows. "Dead end," he observes, sounding vindicated. They had walked a half mile in the wrong direction and he had managed to keep his complaints to a minimum, but enough was enough.
Lea waves this off, running a hand through his poppy red, spiked hair, fixing his attention on a battered wooden door to their right. It's been torn from its uppermost hinge and hangs precariously sideways from the bottom one. Yet someone has taken the time to jam the knob into a kind of alignment, so that the door can still functionally lock.
And in this part of town, Isa thinks, I don't blame them. It takes him a second to place the sign hung overhead, emblazoned with a yellow spike of lightning, but once he does, he regrets it-regrets following Lea blindly at all. I should know better by now... "Isn't this Elrena's place?"
Exhaustingly haughty, disproportionately vain, and razor-tongued, Elrena had attended Radiant Academy with them. Had being the key word. A science whiz, she was considered begrudgingly by their instructors to be quite promising, until, just a year from graduation, the Royal Guard caught her picking pockets-namely, the Royal Guards' pockets.
Radiant Academy had a stringent moral code for its upperclassmen, and once they hauled her to the dean's offices, just before battle training, she was out the front door before the rest of them had put away their weapon polish. Lea recalls the cold tightness in his chest, winding the cap on hers and replacing it on the shelf next to his where it would sit untouched until the end of the year.
So she had opened a magic shop in a shoddy part of town and mixed herself up with every kind of criminal with coin to spare.
"Yep." Lea wraps smartly on the door frame and tilts his head to get a better view of the disdain on Isa's face. Lea has dragged Isa to every ragged hole in the wall and cob-webbed corner in Radiant Garden by now, and somehow it lingers, Isa's contempt for the life of squalor they could be living if it weren't for Radiant Academy.
It's one of the few things that bugs him about Isa. To think he's somehow earned ingratitude.
Although maybe it's just fear. Of slipping back. Of accomplishing nothing, being nobodies like their fathers before them. A fisherman and a drunkard, or as they liked to call themselves, a sailor and a poet.
Isa's arms cross and he leans his back against a thicket of ivy opposite the offending entryway. "Elrena, 'If I ever lay eyes you again, I'll knock you from the top of the clock tower?' That Elrena?"
"Huh." Lea pauses, his hand, sheathed in a black fingerless glove, about to knock again. He smoothes a few spikes of his hair in thought, nose wrinkling. "I don't remember saying that to her."
"That's because she said it to you."
"Huh." Lea knocks again with gusto, and the wooden door rattles, as if as restless as Isa to be on its way. "I bet she's over it."
Lea, a former sparring partner of Elrena's, whom she tolerated more than she did most because he was easy on the eyes and ears, could not have been less surprised at her expulsion. But considering his own childhood of misdemeanors, he felt a recurring twinge of guilt as well.
Isa stares at him. The usual stare, the one that says: After all these years I still don't understand you. Lea lives for that look.
If we had gone straight to the castle we would be a quarter of the way there by now, at least, Isa's brain continues. It's increasingly clear that no one will answer Lea's knocks, but he stands firm, patient. For someone whose mouth is in constant motion, he can stand impressively still.
Isa sighs. "Lea. What are we doing here?"
Lea seems to have been waiting for this. His voices lowers, unnecessarily dramatic. "Rumor has it, Elrena can get us to the castle courtyard in no time flat."
"And," Isa begins skeptically, "if you get the job, you want your first act as a Royal Guard to be consorting with a known criminal and breaking and entering into the castle?"
"'Course not." Lea stretches an arm up the length of the door, and leans back to smirk at Isa. He tosses up his hands. "Who said anything about breaking?"
Lea has no intention of going into the castle at all, but it's fun to stretch Isa's patience thin and watch him wriggle beneath the disapproving tirade of his conscience. Lea likes to see how crazed of a scheme he can get Isa to go along with.
Although, it's been awhile, since we did anything really crazy.
Isa remembers when it became apparent to Lea that he had a real shot at joining the guard. He had bent over backwards to take it. He'd had to. If he was going to atone for his childhood of being chased around the royal gardens and courtyards for pranks and petty crime, he would have to become the best of the best.
After all, his competitors didn't have any priors, their records as spotless as the polished marble floors of the palace. On the other hand, as Lea liked to tell himself, no one knew their names. The Royal Guard had grown fond of him in spite of itself. He made small talk when they had long shifts and had an open invitation to poker night. All Lea had to do was give his friends an excuse to say he was worthy of the job.
So Lea hadn't just memorized the Royal Guard's 25-point Honor Code; he had lived it: avoiding old, toxic acquaintances like Elrena, fighting himself off of cigarettes, accompanying Isa to extra training sessions at the ungodly hours of dawn. He only had one vice left. Code point eight: Guards do not engage in romantic entanglements. But that one he would keep.
For Isa, an advocate of law and order since birth-who had always known that stringent, strategic obedience could be his only path to advancement-helping Lea turn himself around had been one of the most gratifying periods of their lives-the ultimate I told you so.
So what is this? Isa wonders. He couldn't have chosen a worse time for a relapse.
Isa decides to be straightforward. He usually does. "This is a waste of time."
Lea steps forward, as if squaring up for a fight, but he's wearing that reassuring smile that says he knows what he's doing when he doesn't. "Not if it works," he sings back.
"Because your plans always work," Isa drawls testily, but the damage is done. Lea's irresistibly confident grin melts Isa's ice solid better judgment. The edges of Isa's lips flicker up, just for a moment, and Lea knows his friend isn't going anywhere.
"Hey." Lea sets his hands lightly on Isa's hips and leans forward. "I resent your implication."
Tucking his book beneath his arm, Isa wraps his fingers around Lea's wrists. The leather of his gloves feels surprisingly cool, but then, so does the reply, as Isa bites off, eyes set on the deadend alley wall. "Well, I resent waiting for you."
"Is that right?" Lea's sarcasm burns through the chilly pull of the wind as it brushes hair from the back of their necks, and Isa meets his eyes to judge whether their argument has strayed from playful to painful. Lea could flip through six emotions at the rate most deeply felt one. Isa finds their green intensity tempered to gray, softened by the dark, Lea's grin smaller, but still in place.
Lea seems a different person at times, in the shadows, alone and uninhibited, his coloring subdued but his expression realer, fiercer. Less like a matchstick and more like the sun. It could burn them both up. Sometimes Isa likes to watch the sparks. Not today.
"No," Isa mumbles shortly. He tilts his head a fraction closer to Lea's. "I trust you."
Lea leans back, caught off-guard by the apology spelled on his friend's face, in his eyes, cyan blue. Bluer, Lea has always thought, than a cloudless autumn sky. He doesn't really want to argue anymore.
Lea's thumb runs across the side of Isa's hand, and he tilts his face closer again, tone softening, "Isa…"
"Jesus," a man's voice complains from just a few feet off.
They separate like torn paper.
"Just make out already, would you?" His voice is smooth but jeering, old but familiar. "Haven't got all day."
The way they fall away from each other reminds the newcomer of a drip of water hitting a glass pane. They stare at him, back to the wall of ivy at the mouth of the alleyway, blatantly spying on them, as with a perfunctory flourish of the hand, he lowers his hood.
Braig?
"Braig?" Lea's boots click as he edges a few steps closer.
Isa and Lea exchange a look, a question really. Did you know he was back?
This man's brown hair is swept into a ponytail like Braig's had always been, but his face and voice are weathered, like they had been left out in the sun to dry. Teenage girls lunching in the square when they were kids used to call Braig dashing and debonair, which had made the boys giggle until they thought they might puke. Isa wonders idly if they still would.
Striking, maybe.
Isa and Lea have never seen Braig out of his navy guard's uniform and scarlet scarf. Here, clad in a long black coat with silver drawstrings and a silver chain across the chest, he looks more menacing, foreign, even, like the criminal element in the comic books they used to read. What's more, Lea's pretty sure no shop in Radiant Garden sells anything like it.
So the rumors were true, Lea muses. He's been off-world. Lea had asked Dilan about Braig once. Dilan, a castle guard, bragged a strong, formal accent, dark cords of long hair, and more prominent sideburns than any man Lea had ever met, and for these reasons, he radiated intimidation, but he had a quick laugh and an easy smile, if you knew what to say.
Lea had been at the pub, sloshing and crashing tankards with him and a few other guards after duty, but Dilan had shut that question down and he hadn't pushed it. He had just been making conversation. Just trying to make peace with an old childhood boogeyman. What had or hadn't happened to Braig was no skin off his back.
Or it hadn't been, anyway.
"Braig," Lea forces his gritted teeth into a winning grin, "back in town at long last! We have to catch up sometime." As fondly, unrelentingly sarcastic to his friends as Lea is, sometimes it surprises Isa that he can be downright charming to strangers, how they beam and drool over it, and promptly eat it up.
But Braig's never been a fool, and he isn't eating something if he doesn't know where it came from.
"My, my," Braig sneers and that much of him is exactly the same, "Flamesilocks and Little Boy Blue. Aren't you a sight for sore eyes."
More like sore eye, Lea thinks, noticing the black patch covering one of Braig's. He would have dubbed it a fake, if it weren't for the broad white scar clawed into his opposite jaw. Lea could imagine it all happened in one brutal swipe.
What kind of heartless tried to eat you?
But Lea keeps his mouth shut. Despite his face of aged leather, Braig has muscle definition that can be seen through the shapeless robe and a stance that says he'd knock you flat as soon as look at you.
Or maybe it was just that Lea already knew he would, could taste the blood in the back of his mouth as if it weren't just a childhood memory.
"Little Isa and Leah, right?" Braig's tone has grown unexpectedly nostalgic, considering the amount of times he had lifted them by the scruffs of their necks and threatened to toss them in the dungeon.
Lea felt an unexpected urge to draw a step closer to Isa, to brace against each threat together, arms linked, as they had as kids. As if two half-pints were somehow more intimidating than one. But Braig would laugh. He certainly had then.
Braig had been too smart to fine their families for munny they didn't have and too amused or, more likely, too lazy to enforce real consequences. So he scared the spit out of them and smacked them around just a bit and then set them free.
But they hadn't hero-worshipped him the way they had the other guards. Braig had a mean streak, more prominent than the lock of pure gray in his hair or the scar across his face. Nobody'd be surprised to see him kick a puppy.
"Lee," Isa corrects neutrally, and he, for one, does not look impressed.
Internally, he's reevaluating the width of the alleyway, maybe a yard across, doubting they could make it past Braig at a dead sprint. We both have too much pride to turn tail, regardless.
"That's it." Braig nods, tone still taunting, folding his arms to contemplate them. "Isa and Lea. All grown up and still looking for trouble, eh?" He spreads his hands and Isa wonders if he's referring to the kiss he'd almost witnessed, their proximity to Elrena's place, or this entire block of town.
"We don't want any trouble," Isa levels, blue eyes and tone cool, though Lea sees his shoulders tense. "So whatever you think you just saw, you had best put behind you."
It wouldn't be the first time someone had seen them together, caught on that they might be more than friends, and there were people they had told, but those were trusted friends, family, a tight-lipped classmate or two, and Braig was a stray bullet.
"Psh," Braig dismisses with a swish of his hand. "I ain't totally blind. Looks like the two a you could take me down easy these days. You stay out a my business, I'll stay out of yours. Besides," the sneer returns in stark contradiction to his every word, "who would believe me?"
Lea settles back on his heels and glances at Isa, deeming the former guard enough of a non-threat to take his eyes off him. "He has a point."
If the rumors Lea had heard were true, Braig had broken at least seven points of the honor code, and even if the Royal Guard weren't coming after him for treason, they would not be welcoming him back with open arms, either.
"I don't like it," Isa mutters. Lea squeezes his forearm in a "trust me" kind of way, and Isa winces, watching Braig watch them the way he used to watch Unversed-the hellish, serpent-faced, hungry little beasts that overran the town before the Heartless came-as they cornered bypassers in the courtyard. With detachment. As if Braig were thinking, just once, he might not rescue anybody. He might just sit back and watch.
Braig's not about to wait for Isa to convince Lea he's not to be trusted. "So, what brings you gentlemen down to my neck of the woods?"
Lea removes his hand, eyes still on Isa, mind still processing that wince. We're awfully hands off this morning. He waves the hand toward the shoddy door. "We're here to see Elrena."
"Ahh," Braig hums, as if he should have guessed as much. "You wanna see the bitch or the witch?" he pockets his hands. "Because I might be able to save you the trouble."
Isa hooks his thumbs in the loops of his trousers and can't resist a glance to Lea, a smirk, and a fast, "The prior."
How had he aced diplomacy? Lea's elbow collides with Isa's ribs, his expression cautionary: We still don't know what he's doing here.
"I'm a friend," Lea offers lightly, authentically enough.
Braig chuckles and it sounds like someone kicking up gravel. "Friend, my ass."
He's clearly met Elrena, then. Isa manages to keep his smile tucked in his mouth..
"Okay," Lea concedes with a more discerning nod, pinching his thumb and forefinger together and raising them. "So she owes me a teensy favor."
"Oh?" Isa breathes, close to his ear, disapproval loud and clear. Lea doesn't have time to glance beside him and see how rigid Isa's face has gone, despite whatever neutral expression is pasted to it for Braig's benefit.
Braig's brows rise and his sneer says his imagination has traveled somewhere unpleasant. "For?"
Braig really does know Elrena, Isa muses, surprised. No one's seen him in years and he's a good twenty years their senior, at least. So how…?
"Nothing interesting." Lea flips his hand to indicate it wasn't as serious as it actually was. "I just cleaned up a heartless infestation in her shop."
He can still see hovering Emblems bumping out the ceiling tiles and showering them with a chalky paint-scented, throat drying dust-can feel the ground vibrating underfoot as a Fire Plant pushed its roots through the cheap floorboards, its spit reducing an entire shelf of spell books to half a dust pan of ash. If it weren't for Lea's quick thinking with a sleek vase of buttercups, the entire shop may have gone up.
So even though he had told Isa he wasn't talking to people like Elrena anymore, even though he sometimes walked straight past her at the tavern without so much as a nod, when he heard something was going down, he had sprinted there.
Nobodies like us have to stick together.
Lea's lack of embellishment turns out to be a mistake, because Braig sings, "And…?"
Which forces Lea to think about the rest of it. "Oh…" His mouth twists, his hand on the back of his neck, as he tries to think of an easy answer that will satisfy Braig's curiosity and pacify Isa.
"There's more?" Isa hisses, and now Lea's a little afraid to catch his narrowing eyes.
Nothing comes to mind. "And I helped her chase off an unwanted male caller or five while I was at it." He says it casually, voice wrapped in its usual sarcasm, gently deprecating all parties involved, as if he were admitting to just knocking over the flower pot.
Isa rolls his eyes. Or five. He's not sure whether to be impressed or furious. Five and Lea rarely carries around a weapon. At least when he's a guard he will be armed. Maybe then I can worry less.
Lea hadn't known who the men who came pounding on Elrena's door were or what they were doing there, just that they started breaking and taking things the second they launched in and there were too many of them to constitute a fair fight. Since he'd cut class to come, he still had a couple hours to kill. Figure I may as well put them to good use.
Lea had gone home to his apartment, hair seeming pink through the layer of dust, gloves scorched, ribs bruised, bleeding heavily from a gash in his shoulder. And Isa, already there and used to Lea sparring in and out of the classroom, had cleaned him up without asking where it came from. He had just sighed, called him a damn fool, and pressed his lips to Lea's shoulder. Then he fetched rubbing alcohol that would make Lea curse and yelp and clutch onto Isa's shirt front in all the exact wrong ways.
"And then you reported it?" Isa asks, because this isn't about Braig anymore, it's about the promises they made each other when Isa moved out on him, to avoid shit like this until they got jobs.
"Huh," Lea's expression lacks any real surprise as he eyes Isa and wonders what the right answer was. "I must've forgot."
He thinks of something the headmaster had told him, just the two of them in his office for the fifth time in a month. A really good guard reports but a really good bad guard doesn't get caught. Pick one, son.
And then, of course, Elrena had been clinging to his arm, her long pointed fingernails unwittingly jabbing, begging him not to spread any of this around-bad for business-vehemently thanking him while insisting she hadn't needed his help in the first place.
What exactly had she said? Witches and bitches take care of themselves.
"Is that right?" Braig chuckles, hand covering his mouth. He's dimly aware that he shouldn't be making as much fun of them as he used to. Now that they're both over six feet to his five seven and muscular to boot-Isa outright brawny and Lea in a lean, easier to miss way.
"Well," Lea amends, reflective now, conversational even, "I think she could have handled them herself, but seeing as I was already there and all…"
Braig looks ready to drop the subject, but Isa turns to face Lea, smacking his arm with his book. "And why were you already there, Lea?"
Lea glances at the dirt below. The answers aren't there, just his shoes (he should have polished them) and a bottle cap (he should have done a shot this morning). He raises his gaze and offers up an evasive grin. "...Grocery shopping."
Isa rolls his eyes, one hand on his own hip and another landing on Lea's, just above the belt, pushing him a step away. "Oh please."
"Uh-oh," Braig chuckles, "trouble in paradise."
At this rate, Braig thinks, I'm going to recruit these two just for my own personal entertainment. With stiffs like Dilan and Aeleus, the Royal Guard's dead boring these days.
Lea scoffs, feeling his skin heat up beneath Isa's grip, and gestures with his opposite hand. "She was my sparring partner!"
"Yes." Isa shuts his eyes. He can feel a migraine coming on. "Was."
"If I don't have her back," Lea gestures out toward the world at large, both hands this time, "who's going to? This is what being a guard is all about! Helping people—all people."
Braig had seen Lea's fiery temper reach detonation before, flippancy traded for raw emotion, volume carrying through the city streets, Moogles bobbing swiftly away. So he's impressed now when it doesn't. Boy's learned some restraint at least. That will come in handy in our plans for him.
What plans? He asks himself. The voice that had put the thought in his head wasn't quite his own. It doesn't reply. Fucking Xehanort.
Fortunately, Lea and Isa are still going at it, and haven't noticed Braig's momentary mental absence.
"She hasn't got anyone else looking out for her, Isa," Lea carries on, softly, uncharacteristically grave. "I shouldn't have to tell you what that's like. Nobodies like us have to..."
Isa massages his thumb against his temple, tone equally forceful, "She hasn't got anyone else because she would sell her grandmother for a nice jacket. And starting today, when we read our names on the palace doors we won't be nobodies anymore. So we have to stop acting like it. If Radiant Academy stops taking in broke kids, it'll be because of people like her. Ninety percent of her business is below board. And she is a hundred percent using you, you…" he looks up just in time to see a pained expression darken Lea's face, and his voice softens, "pretty fool."
Ugh. Braig thinks he tastes bile rising in his throat. Who would have thought they'd grow into such saps?
On the other hand, they aren't the harped angels Elrena keeps dragging either.
"That's more like it," Braig jeers, breaking into a self-satisfied grin. "Consorting with low lifes, hidden romance, willful withholding of evidence… And I'd heard you two had graduated and straightened out your acts."
They stare in unison, masked frustration echoing on each other's faces. Braig forgot they could do that. He's always found it a little disconcerting.
Braig shrugs and nods knowingly, stepping closer now to lean against Elrena's battered door, and, apparently unconcerned it will give in, fishing a cigarette from his pocket. He sets it between his lips as he rummages through a different pocket for a lighter. "Guess it's true what they say. You can give a stray dog a bath and a collar, but it'll still be a mutt."
A choked noise escapes Lea's throat, his manicured red brows leaping up his face and his mouth stretching, chewing on the insult.
Braig notes the fury with amusement. They're still too damn easy to rile up.
I can fix that.
Braig takes the cigarette and holds it out to Lea. "Can I get a light, hothead?"
Something dark flashes across Lea's face. I haven't been working my ass off to clean up my act to have this old punk come back, make a mockery of our secrets, and bad mouth our fucking families.
"You," Lea hisses, and Braig decides he doesn't like the lower volume after all, "don't know the first thing—"
Recognizing the firm set of Lea's shoulders and the clench of his fists, the scent of ash hanging on the air, Isa steps in front of him to interrupt, before Lea can wipe the old man's scowl from his face for him, "What are you doing here, Braig?"
The last thing this wasted morning needs is to end in shackles.
Braig raises his hands as if in surrender. "Decided to make an honest man of myself." He turns to examine the door and it's the first he's looked at it since arriving. "I'm a, uh, handyman." He gives the middle a firm knocking. "Just here to fix this unfortunate hunk of tree."
"Of course," Isa drawls, fingers tightening against Lea's hip, trying to cue him that they ought to leave before the situation gets any further out of hand.
Lea runs his hand along Isa's side, again intending to comfort, but Isa scowls at the missed signal. Lea drops his mouth open, just a bit. I'm really striking out today.
Tiring of their bickering, Braig bangs so heavily on the door that the bottom corner lifts from the ground and the upper corner swings in. "Elrena!" he booms, and then says casually to them, over his shoulder "So, I take it you're not here to arrest anybody?"
They go still, confused mainly, and exchange a look that, though their expressions remain confident, lets Braig know better. They watch as Braig stretches an arm out and downward, spreading his palm reflexively.
The air surrounding it flickers like a shadow, and a weapon materializes in his grasp. Its shape and size resemble a long sword, its hilt a fan of silver projectile spikes, its shaft a long-barreled pistol. They had seen a less glamorous version in the academy armory. He remembers it mainly because of all the pointing people did to the heavily fortified case and all the recitations of the poorly written description card: Arrowgun. Highly illegal.
Freaky magic arrowgun, Lea's brain corrects. None of their academy instructors could conjure that. So where had Braig learned how?
Braig swings it up as if examining its weight, then levels the gun barrel at them and smirks. There's something else about Braig that's changed, something besides the eye patch and the hair and the coat.
His iris, Isa realizes, remembering the absent stare of the Heartless earlier, just before it skittered off. It's yellow.
Lea can taste it again as his fingers twine with Isa's. Blood in the back of his throat.
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