Disclaimer: Nope, don't own Rockman: Dr. Light does. But Capcom owns Dr. Light's soul, so I suppose that's fair. I certainly don't own either of them: human slavery's illegal and Rock should be emancipated too. Then he can get a salary for the games Capcom puts him in. Though if they make him freeware they might not put him in any more things, and that would be sad, so never mind.

Yep, you're getting stuff right now. Not stuff that I consider high quality, but I'm writing it for stress relief and hence don't care. This is where things start getting weird. Well, weirder. For X, anyway. He was well aware that Zero was an irregular so that wasn't too odd, and Kilroy's really being Kilroy, from his perspective, just a new aspect, as he don't know from Shadowman.

Finally X broke the silence. "Come on, Zero: we're missing training."

Zero never, ever, missed training. "Okay, okay, just let me change." His armor had torn up the mattress and there was fluff all over it and everything else. He was not looking forward to cleaning it up. And with that, normalcy returned and all was right, or perhaps a little more right than usual, with his world.

"Hurry up, okay?" X sounded affectionately amused, happy that Zero was back to his old self now. The target of so much hate, Zero was used to a teasing tone meaning someone was about to amuse themselves at his expense: the sound made him tense a bit, but this was X. X only laughed with. "Kilroy's been quietly waiting for us to finish and I'm afraid the strain might break something."

Kilroy was here? "Don't tell me he heard all of that!" Zero fumed. "Goddamn security voyeuristic bastards!"

"Big Brother is watching you!"

Zero snarled something unprintable and slammed the off button on his door intercom: the anti-noise field would prevent him having to listen to any more of that…

Well, at least Zero was angry at someone else now. That was an improvement. X looked around, then up. "Oh, there you are Kilroy."

"I just had to say it. It was too good to pass up."

X had to think about that. "Oh, I suppose that is appropriate." It was from a pre-Cataclysm book where everyone was being watched constantly by an organization named 'Big Brother.' The book had been on actual paper, and hence some copies had survived. Nothing on any computer hooked up to any sort of network had. "How are you doing that?"

"Doing what?" Kilroy did a marvelously 'bad' job faking innocence.

"That thing you're dong that lets you stand on a tree trunk vertical to the ground. I don't see any wires, you're not using hidden electromagnets in the branches, there's no moving air…" X couldn't see Kilroy's readiness state with even Dr. Light's sensors, so he couldn't tell what he was using from that. If you wanted to do stealth, you had be able to control infrared and system noise as well as human-visible light. Kilroy always seemed perfectly at ease to anyone's attempts to read him, even when he was all geared up to throw paint at them. He could even alter his heat signature and system noise enough it seemed nothing like his for purposes of getting in close to someone without them realizing who it was until too late.

Now that he thought about it, what on earth was someone with Kilroy's stealth capabilities doing in security? A field hunter would cheerfully give their right arm to be able to sneak up on Irregulars like that and deploy a capture net without them being able to fight back and get anyone hurt. If he was guarding the hunters (and X), then of course he would want the job he had but why would they let him? Oh, chain of command. He'd joined Rho's group, and there was no way Rho would let Sigma poach his right hand and best friend anymore than Sigma had wanted to let Theta have that analyst for the legal department.

"Oh, this?" Kilroy waved at his feet dismissively. "It's a ninja thing."

"Okay." Oh! "You'd better not be using spikes, though. The gardeners go ballistic when people damage the trees."

"Nope, I'm not."

"I'm really wondering now." X told his scientific curiosity to please go back into the box. He was no longer the second-greatest scientist in the field of reploid systems. He was a hunter now: he was only interested in the practical now.

"Come to the dark side, we have cool tricks?" Kilroy said that offhand, not actually offering. "The original version was, 'Come to the dark side, we have cookies,' but we were lying. It's actually the Light side that has cookies. They're very good, too."

Zero's door slammed open. "Kilroy! What are you doing here?"

"Keeping an eye on X. Want to lend a hand?" Kilroy was utterly unphased.

"Then why would you want my help? Aren't you supposed to be protecting him from me?" Kilroy was failing to make sense, and that meant that something was going to make all too much sense soon. Zero really did not like that.

"Well, personally, I'm all in favor of my opponents deciding they'd rather work with me than against me. Professionally, three out of the big four are worried about the mavericks so much more than you. You're yesterday's news." Kilroy paused. "And today's, and at least the next week's. We'll see how long it takes to die down. Glad I decided not to join Theta's department, although I'd love to be handling PR." He grinned fiendishly.

Dear lord no.

"Okay Kilroy, that's enough buildup, hurry up and drop the bombshell," Zero growled.

"Okay, then." Kilroy shrugged. "Congratulations! You were on candid camera. And now you're on tabloid covers."

Zero lunged at Kilroy, who let himself be tackled down from his odd position without giving X any clues as to how he had done it in the first place. "If you leaked the tape!"

Kilroy shook his head calmly. "Nope, not me, Rho. No one else knows, though, except I told X. Proving it would involve revealing how I know, and I like not being in jail."

This was rather… odd, wasn't it. Zero would never, in a million years, have done anything seemingly violent or even expressed anger, especially not to another hunter. Or that was what X had thought. He was always so paranoid about self-control, both because he worried about that control and because even raising his voice would trigger old memories in many people. He worried about losing control, they worried about him losing control, and many wanted an excuse to declare that he was about to lose it and kick him out of the hunters or worse.

Yet, Kilroy was Kilroy, he made everyone lose their cool, so that made it look to the hunters like Zero was, was normal? There was more to it. Kilroy had referred to Zero's irregularity as 'that' and though he'd made inappropriate jokes related to sexual practices reploids simply didn't have the parts for, he'd said that Zero, well, the lion version of Zero, turned him off when Zero was far from unattractive. He didn't like Zero's irregularity, but he seemed utterly fearless when it came to Zero himself.

Of course, if Kilroy's father had been killed by an irregular, than of course he would not like an irregular that had killed so many of his friends. Yet he was willing to arrange things so that Zero could use him as a target for the justified anger he couldn't show towards all the others that hurt him.

And X had thought he and Sigma were the only ones helping Zero deal with this. No wonder they'd wanted to give Kilroy an additional salary for doing this, back in the days when they'd set a budget for parties. Now, though, when they desperately needed to boost morale, they didn't have the resources to 'waste' on it.

Dr. Cain really didn't understand much but medical issues, Rho's department wasn't on the front lines and hence were doing mostly fine, Theta's department was insanely busy as the legal and public relations issues grew more and more complex (it wasn't just getting permission to capture and pressing charges anymore), and Sigma's department was the one being hit hardest but although he was in the middle he was in his element. Sigma thrived on finding ways to do the impossible. He didn't like this situation, but he'd never liked how irregulars were treated, he'd dedicated his life to fixing it, and so he was stressed out but knew he was doing the right thing.

Sigma was the strategist, the leader of the four, the visionary. He had originally been in overall command. Now he had ended up having to look after the field hunters in addition to telling them what to do. Ceta was the one who had managed the field hunters. Vava of Special Ops, who from what X gathered after looking him up was essentially a department head in his own right despite the old-school lack of a title, had gone down with her even though he lingered on. Sigma didn't have anyone looking after morale, he personally didn't have morale problems, and he had so much on his plate what with having two departments dumped into his lap and the situation changing so rapidly he hadn't had the time to fix what didn't seem broken.

X really should hurry up and finish training. He'd done this to take Ceta's place, and it looked like it needed to be filled even more urgently than he had thought.

When Zero pulled away from Kilroy and hung his head in hopeless defeat when he found out that the person who had done this to him was a department chair it just confirmed it. Without proof, with Zero's hated status, and with Sigma so busy, there was no way for him to get any sort of justice. "Bastard. He'll comfort me about it, too."

"Why would Rho do something like this?" X finally asked Kilroy.

Kilroy answered as he stood up and brushed off leaves. "He still hasn't gotten over Nobody and Razor Pinion."

"The Garm's commander? And who's Nobody?" No, the right thing to say was 'who was Nobody.'

"Yep. As for Nobody, he was a hacker. Worked with Garm all the time, but he was technically in Vava's bunch because otherwise he and Pinion would have been against regs. I met the guy because I ran the course on how to make proper use of stealth systems until I got too busy and Sting Chameleon took over."

Kilroy spent almost all day wandering around base and he was too busy while a unit commander wasn't? "A lot of people lost friends then, but that's no reason to do something like that to Zero." X couldn't get cross with Sigma, who was his commanding officer, but Rho was another story. He had to start taking responsibility.

"Who said friends? Unless you mean friends with benefits. Just with Nobody, though. He and Pinion got along like a house on fire, but Rho's not into avians and since his redesign's like Sigma's, he's too heavy for midair sex." Kilroy poked Zero with his foot to see if he got a response.

Zero's only response was a groan of frustration as he let himself collapse to the ground, utterly tired of this.

"Kilroy?" X could take insinuations about himself or reploids that weren't his personal children, but that made him blush. "Too much information."

Kilroy looked down and shook his head, clearly regretting Zero's sucky amount of HP when it came to psychological warfare. "No such thing. Knowledge is power, and you can never have too much power." He stepped over him, heading towards X.

"Power corrupts? Absolute power corrupts absolutely?"

"Dude, dark side, remember?" Kilroy leaned against the tree trunk in a normal manner, sadly not giving X another demonstration of that puzzling technique.

"Oh, right. Are you another Star Wars fan?"

"Of course. I'm the club skit director. We used to do these scene reenactments, and scenes we made up, and parodies of scenes, and all sorts of stuff, remember? It was a blast. Didn't you ever see one?"

"I kept having emergency surgery to do. I don't think there have been any since I joined the field hunters."

"We need a new Han, Leia, and Yoda. I could take some paint to 'Vile' and that would free up our Boba Fett, but that's not much help since he always flubs any lines now. Sigma's the only guy we have now good enough with a beam saber to do Yoda but he's too big and he's perfect for the bald badass Jedi Council member. I've had this one guy doing Anakin and Vader the whole time. He wanted to do it when we were starting up, but he said he couldn't act, and I was all, 'perfect!' Sadly, he had natural talent and though I did my best to stifle it he was forced to master the innocent look because he keeps playing video games on duty. I'd like to move him to Han, but Zero here refuses to play Anakin and Vader."

"Do you play anyone?"

"I have dibs on Darth Sidious." Kilroy gave him a look. "Are you volunteering? You could do Leia..." Which very few around here could: hunters were combat reploids, and since humans didn't like the idea of females or female models in combat, all the reploids purpose-built for the hunters were male. Not to mention that most reploids had their armor integrated with their main and life support systems, due to lack of space, while X only kept his defenses and weapons in his, and thus could remove it to pass for human without ill effects.

"…I'll think about it." He'd decided to help fill Ceta's role, yes, but in the hunters, not in a dress… Wait! This was a perfect opportunity to get Zero involved in social activities! "Zero, what do you think?"

No response from the prone figure. "Zero?" X walked towards him, intending to shake him a bit to wake him up if necessary. "Zero?" Zero had two OSs. They interacted oddly with each other and his body as it was. Zero had to be so fanatical about training because his OS's incompatibility with his atypical body meant his motor functions were extremely difficult to control with the level of precision necessary to capture an opponent alive. If he didn't wake up, this could very well be something very bad.

He had to go around Kilroy to get to him, and he realized that Kilroy's nonchalant position hadn't been blocking his view of Zero by accident when Kilroy reached out and snagged his arm. "Don't touch."

Looking past Kilroy, who still had his back to Zero, X's magnified vision saw that several thin strands of Zero's hair were defying gravity. They were almost invisible, and X realized that the blond color wasn't just for vanity's sake any more than the rest of that mane was. "He's not going to hurt me. Let me try to snap him out of it."

"Don't." The 'don't touch' had been slightly humorous, a mother's admonition to a child to keep their hands to themselves. That, though, was firm.

"Why not?"

Kilroy's tone changed again. "He's not going to 'snap out of it' right now. He's listening." Vague and distant? Kilroy? Kilroy wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying now. Kilroy always paid attention to what he was saying, chose his words carefully, but now it seemed as though he spoke without thinking, focused on something else. Something urgent, something that had come up in the second since X had spoken last.

"Listening to what? Did Dr. Cain find out more about his sensor strands after the meeting?"

Despite the eerie distance still being there Kilroy's next words were spoken jokingly, as usual, and yet… The tone that gradually crept into Kilroy's voice and tainted his enjoyment was one that X had never heard from him, or even from Rho at his worst. Normally, thought Kilroy might joke about the dark side everything he said and did was so very lighthearted, even the cruel words meant to help get things over with. Yet as each word passed his lips it became more and more possible to imagine him playing the role of Darth Sidious, the 'insidious' one who had toppled the Republic from within.

That tone gloated that X had done something foolish, made a mistake, given an opponent an advantage. "I didn't know Dr. Cain had realized already that he had 'sensor strands' at all, thank you for telli-" Yet the distance grew along with the darkness, and finally his voice stopped altogether and X had to quickly adjust his balance when Kilroy froze in place and his hand on X's arm and the tree he leaned on became the only things keeping him vertical.

"Kilroy!" Whirling around, X slid loose from Kilroy's fragile grip and held him firmly upright, shaking him. "Kilroy!"

"Don't bother calling him: he's not in at the moment." From behind him X heard another voice tinged with the same darkness that had crept into Kilroy's. Yet when Kilroy's darkness had risen the affection that was always there for his conversational opponents had dwindled to almost nothing, replaced with a veteran's cold seriousness. This new speaker's words contained equal amounts of dark mockery and affectionate amusement.

When X turned to look, leaning Kilroy against the tree more stably, he saw that Zero had risen as Kilroy fell. Someone had, at least. A regal figure regarded something that lay towards the northeast. X followed his eyes and saw a building, but that wasn't the target of that gaze, just something in the way. What this person looked at was hidden behind the curve of the earth to X, but not to him. "Zero?" This wasn't Zero, he knew that, but how did you address a strange person in your friend's body? The Lion was hard enough to deal with, and you couldn't really have a conversation with him.

"Don't you hear it?" Not-Zero answered, still focused on something X could not perceive even with all the sensors Dr. Light had given him.