Flufffluffluff.

You knew."

"Yes." This was part of why X hadn't wanted to let Zero know that he knew. Zero was perfectly capable of tactics, strategy, trickery and so on… until the instant it became personal, and at that point he shut down and almost started spazzing. The second half of the fourth war he'd been almost an automaton, and that wasn't going into that moment of stunning idiocy in the fifth.

At least they were in Zero's quarters with the door closed, but there were cameras here. They were only looked at by a living person in case of an emergency and so on, but a conversation like this? X made a very firm mental note to avoid anything like a keyword that someone might search for.

Although, X was in Zero's quarters rarely enough that it would be easy to search the records for that. Generally, gatherings were something X set up and dragged Zero into attending, and therefore they were held in his quarters.

So X sat on Zero's bed and patted it for Zero to sit down next to him. Talking the way they had in that crowd was a much, much better idea than out loud. "I didn't want to bring it up, for several reasons."

Instead of sitting next to him, Zero went down to one knee, putting his head in X's lap. X rested a hand on his head, feeling the hair elaborately twisted up into the shapes of horns and admiring the fine coordination needed to do something that intricate. Zero had insisted on doing it himself since Alia's fingers weren't clumsy, by modern reploid standards, but Zero got a little paranoid about his hair sometimes. "I'd die for you," Zero said, and the raw honesty there showed why Zero had been drinking so heavily. He'd needed that to be able to handle this, that artificial courage.

"Yes." X managed to smile. "I've noticed. I really wish you'd knock it off, by the way." That made Zero chuckle. "It was terrible what happened with your first crush…"

"First crush?" Iris wasn't a crush.

X rolled his eyes. "And then Iris." X wasn't going to be the one to bring up Sigma. Had Zero even noticed that he'd worshipped the ground General Sigma walked on, before his betrayal? Or had he just put it down to gratitude, for that heroic rescue and the way Sigma had taken him in instead of blaming him for the deaths. "Of course I know that you care a lot about me. Everyone does, the only question has been how. I just haven't confronted you about it because I was waiting for you to be ready to deal with it."

And they both knew that wasn't what this conversation was about, but even though X was well known to be too trusting, loose lips wiped out units. Spend years in an environment where almost every single person you talked to could, at any moment, become an enemy agent, and you learned to be very careful with what you said to who where who else could overhear.

"I haven't wanted to risk hurting you. When I was found, I…" Zero shook his head.

"I'm more durable than Iris, Zero." Which was a sad comment on so many things. "And I know you wouldn't hurt me." X paused. "Aside from training sessions." And that… temporary insanity in the fifth war.

When Zero didn't respond, X wondered, "Do you know what it means to offer someone your left hand to shake?"

Zero shook his head again.

"Offering your right hand meant, 'I'm not carrying a weapon to attack you with,' but humans of that era carried their shields in their left hands. So offering that hand meant, 'I'm not carrying a shield to defend myself with.' It means 'I trust you.'"

"You're too trusting."

"Would you rather have me any other way?"

Zero's answer was to pick up and kiss X's left hand, which frankly amazed him. When had Zero learned how to be romantic? He'd been adorably awkward with Iris. Unless it was pure sincerity. "You can't put yourself at risk. Any more than you have to." Zero had to admit that last part, even though it grated on him. If Zero'd had his way, X would have stayed retired after the Sixth war, or gone back to Medical, the way he'd been medical staff when he first joined the hunters.

"I'll try not to die, Zero," X assured him. Then, he realized what to say. "For you, I'll try not to die."

Zero kissed his hand again, pulling his fingers apart and bending them, examining them. There were false fingernails, and the support struts did a good job imitating bones. Dr. Light had been careful, when it came to X's safety. He'd had a long time to work on X, or rather have the nanites in the capsule work on the fine details, since he hadn't been able to activate him right away. Zero didn't have anywhere near X's amount of verisimilitude. Zero had been meant to fight, not survive.

X let him, touching Zero's hair. There was still a lot of it left unbound, and it didn't feel anything like silk. Silk was an insulator, cool and smooth to the touch. Zero's hair was warm, and felt almost like holding a tail, holding something living that could decide to move.

"There are two immune people now," Zero said finally. "And Sigma's gone."

Two, not three? Zero not counting himself was one big Freudian slip.

Unless it was entirely deliberate. "We still don't know about Axl," X told him, sadly. "Whoever built him appears to have used the method Dr. Light used on Protoman and I, from the surviving literature. Program a basic framework, build a starting shell and create a stable environment for it, and allow the constructed intelligence to do its own fine-turning and fix its own problems. Axl was turned loose to see if he would get infected or not, without any idea what he was or what he had to do to keep running. He's still doing the beta testing for his species, right now, and what if he goes into one of those immune analysis comas, or some other bug catches up with him, while someone is shooting at him? He may wear that scar as a trophy, but… For all Alia, Lifesaver, or any of us knows, he could drop dead tomorrow. Unlike Lumine, he wasn't meant to survive, he was built with the assumption that he would be tested to destruction. If his systems weren't doing their own upgrades and replacing their own materials by copying better models and continuing to constantly analyze their own structure to check for infection, he'd be burning out by now."

That was why X kept trying to figure out how to get Axl to copy him and Zero, every time he had a spare moment to look into that. X and Zero had vastly superior systems, and it could only help Axl to incorporate parts of their technology into his structure.

"No one knew what he was when he joined the hunters, let alone how to repair him. If anything goes wrong with his self-repair systems? His copy matrix is everything from his self-repair system to his skeleton. If anything, anything at all, significant goes wrong with Axl, anything that he can't pull out of on his own with access to e-tanks and raw materials to work with, then there won't be anything we can do."

That had been the case with the mass-produced duplicates of Lumine as well. It had been cruel to mass-produce newbuilts that no one could fix if anything went wrong, but even X had thought it had been less cruel than mass-producing newbuilts with no defense against the virus. Then it turned out that they'd had the worst of both worlds. There was nothing to save them from industrial accidents… or Lumine.

"So I can't retire just yet?" Zero sighed. "I've been trying to get him trained up."

"As your replacement. Yes, I noticed. You were very adamant about having him as your second-in-command instead of giving him a unit." Signas wanted Axl fast-tracked to command training, because if Signas was taken out it was the immune hunters who would have to take over until another reploid with a high resistance to the virus was built to take his place. The Maverick Hunters definitely couldn't have a list of candidates for Signas' replacement: they'd be infected practically the day the list was created.

Lives would be lost with a rookie in charge of a unit, but more would be lost in the long run if Axl didn't learn how to command by the time the next war broke out. Often, it was not just tactical decisions but strategic that the hunter in the field had to make.

"You know me so well… I don't know if I want to say I love you. That's such a… fuzzy thing, for humans too. You're X." To Zero, that was a very precise thing, a very important thing, not something that should be described with a word that could mean anything and too often was a lie.

He'd loved Iris, and yet he'd killed her. X had talked to Zero not long after that and asked Zero to kill him if he ever became maverick. Zero had been able to kill Iris, but he'd realized then that he'd never be able to kill X, and the contrast had just made him feel like even more of a traitor to her.

"Ze…" X tilted his head forward, hair falling around them. "…One second?"

"Sure?" Zero watched as X got up, found a wire tie to put his hair back with, and began to remove the spotter armor from his legs.

"I'm definitely seeing why you wear a ponytail. It gets everywhere when you have it loose."

Zero didn't mention that his did what he wanted it to, regardless. Like staying in one neat bundle instead of flying all over the place in the wind.

"And it's odd to be wearing armor that isn't hooked up to my systems."

"You wear clothing all the time, and it isn't hooked up to anything."

"Yes, but it's not anywhere near as thick or heavy. I can feel things through it. It's just a little extra padding, not rigid dead weight." X didn't kick it off the way Zero might have, both because that made a mess and because there were breakables in here.

"…You say rigid dead weight like armor isn't like that normally."

X paused. "Well, armor is supposed to dampen the sensory signals we take in. It wouldn't be good if we felt pain when our armor was singed." Distracting. "But it's supposed to take in data and give it to us, in a limited fashion." To hook up to their systems, not with wires since that invited electrical attacks and power surges, but nanites conveying information and instructions. "Armor is supposed to be a part of a reploid's body."

Zero laughed, leaning back against the bed. "Another way I'm weird, huh? Probably because I'm not working the way I'm supposed to. Wearing this is weird for me because there isn't much of a barrier between…" He shut his mouth.

"You and the world? You and me?" X sat back down and pulled Zero's head onto his lap after disconnecting the color-change device. The fabric of his costume returned to its default color, a sort of shimmery white.

"Blond hair in a ponytail… you look like me."

"I think that was part of Alia's idea, really. You know how much she likes your looks. If she had to make you look like someone else, then she was going to make someone look like you."

Zero chuckled. "Devious. It's weird, isn't it? Alia and Signas have been around such a long time, and now there's Axl. After so long, it's weird to have friends who aren't you." Friends who lasted more than one or two wars, who lasted enough not just for Zero to learn their tricks but to learn tricks of their own in the first place.

"The virus is weakening. Sigma's attempts to replace it may have been more desperate than we realized at the time. Now he's dead, and while Lumine spread the virus, he was making a copy of it in his own systems, it wasn't reproducing naturally. He may have weakened it further."

"What do you think, of trying to build more reploids with resistant systems?"

"If we build too many, we'll start breeding a stronger virus again." By giving it challenges. "But there isn't an intelligent opponent behind the virus' choices anymore, just its own programming. We've made good guesses at its target selection algorithms, among other things. Right now, the barriers to overcoming the virus aren't the virus itself, but the limits of current technology and the fact that some people, reploid and human alike, have started to believe the virus' propaganda about humans and reploids being enemies, thanks to Lumine."

"And Repliforce," Zero added glumly. "We were having a romantic… thing, and then we ended up talking shop."

"When don't we end up talking shop?" X found a couple of hairs that had managed to escape Zero's coiled horn arrangement. "We can't even watch a movie without thinking of old times and having to try to avoid scarring Axl for life. Again." Zero would have wondered what X was talking about if he hadn't quickly figured out that X was saying that for any potential listeners.

"There's so much stuff that I don't even try to explain anymore. It only makes sense in context, and it's like they get… more and more ignorant every year."

"We're getting older, so they seem younger by comparison. Part of it may be that… In the beginning, reploids were created with copies of my nanites. Over the years, people have been editing the design more and more, creating different batches with different modifications in case diversity helped stop the virus," which it had, sort of, by breeding it to be less targeted, forcing it to generalize and become less deadly in the process, "so they're not starting from the same… frame of reference, which they can then choose to ignore or alter, the way the first generation was. There's a lot more initial diversity of mind, which is wonderful, but it makes it harder for them to learn to understand each other and they have so little time."

"They're still managing to hook up."

"Yes. By getting drunk at parties, or having crushes and ignoring the faults of their partners instead of loving them for them. It makes them happy, but that's not going to give them anything lasting." X sighed, lowering his head. Whether or not it would be a lasting relationship didn't really matter for most hunters. They wouldn't last that long anyway.

"Don't knock getting drunk at parties. 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.' We wouldn't be here right now without Axl's forfeit." Zero laughed. "Surprised me when he picked something besides the dress. It's not like there aren't enough altered images of me out there already." He'd thought Axl would consider it a coup while Zero wouldn't really care: best of both worlds, to give the kid a sense of accomplishment without Zero having to actually embarrass himself.

"Apparently your unit thought you seriously needed it. I agreed, when he asked me about the medical aspect."

"I don't feel like I'm going to flip out and start killing people." That was a relief. Zero somehow managed to shift around so he was looking up at X: he really was incredibly agile.

"That's always a good thing."

"What would you do, if…" Zero shrugged. "If Axl could break down someday, what about me?" 'Break down' – go back to the Irregular he'd been when he was found? That was the least of Zero's dangers. As an Irregular, he hadn't been sentient, and an opponent who couldn't think wasn't much danger. No, a maverick Zero was the real danger.

"Didn't Eurasia answer that? I'd fight you, Zero. If I had to. That was half of why you fought me then, wasn't it?" When X had said that he would fight Zero to take him back to base and make sure. The other reason had been so that X would go back, where it was safe.

Well, with a lot more Zero-logic involved.

"…I guess." Zero didn't like to think about that time too closely. He hadn't quite been himself then.

Even if he had been close enough, in the end.

But, anyway, "It's your birthday, isn't it? What do you want?"

X wondered about asking for world peace as a joke, but that was one of those things that just wouldn't be funny. "Ran out of gift ideas after all these years, did you?"

Actually, Zero hadgotten X the newest-model (according to Alia, since he was not going to have anything to do with Lifesaver willingly and the feeling was mutual) multi-setting field emergency surgical tool. X would have already bought one for himself, of course, but Zero was well aware after all these years that they broke. Often.

"Today has been fun. And it's nice to get this, well, somewhat cleared up." X was trying to think of a way to say that, 'regardless of the virus, we're still friends,' that would sound like 'regardless of whether or not we end up lovers, we'll always be friends,' which was also true, when Zero reached up, pulled X's head down by his ponytail and kissed him again.

Which was nice, but an incredibly awkward position. "Come up on the bed?" X tugged at him.

Zero raised an eyebrow. "You aren't wasting any time."

"How long have you loved me?"

Zero had to wonder, especially since he'd said that he didn't want to use that word, until he realized the incredibly obvious and incredibly frustrating answer. "Always."

"Then I think enough time's been wasted." X put some muscle, or motor power, behind the next pull, enough to easily drag Zero up onto the bed with him.

Finding himself put on his side next to X, Zero ran his hand up X's side, sort of liking the way the fabric slid against X's 'skin.' Touching armor had always seemed impersonal to Zero, who had almost no feeling in his. "I suppose there's something to be said for human clothing." He could feel the quiet purr of X's system noise through it. "It's… nice, I guess."

"This is nice. Being here like this." It would be nicer if the lights were off, X thought. Then there would just be the lights of their eyes, and Zero's clock and other various electronics casting soft shadows everywhere, forcing them to reach out to examine each other, confirm that they were real, with touch instead of sight.

Zero seemed to already be doing that, though, with a particular focus on X's waist, hips, shoulders, the places where clumsily-made joints often made a reploid's artificial nature obvious. Trying to build Sigma and the reploids that followed him had made X thoroughly aware of just how much work Dr. Light had put into him. It was humbling and touching at the same time. His father had cared about X, and it showed in the care he had taken with every aspect of his construction.

Feeling Zero's hands on him and thinking about that, suddenly X was struck by the need to make sure that Zero was alright. To touch him, not with the silent, peaceful contemplation Zero caressed X with, but with a terrible urgency, a need to make sure that Zero's power, meant for destruction, wasn't destroying him as he lay here with X.

It was an entirely irrational urge, but he didn't want to lose Zero.

Zero probably had the right idea. They should take this slow, and he should let Zero lead. Zero was the one who knew what he was doing, after all.

And yet X's hands cupped Zero's face, X's mouth kissed him desperately, and X's body pressed against him.

They had more than three hours until midnight.

It didn't seem like it would be enough. It didn't seem like any amount of time with Zero would ever be enough.

Zero was surprised by X's forcefulness, and almost shocked by how far X wanted to go, but how could he possibly refuse?