The next day, even though it wasn't a workday, Alfred found himself stepping out of the Ford on a sunny midtown street where the Wok & Roll truck sat. Matt and Kiku backed him up as he approached.

"What's cookin', good—uh—good day to you." Alfred cleared his throat. Yao was frowning.

"What do you want, bitch?" He looked like he was in the middle of cleaning out the fryers, because everything smelled like the apocalypse was upon them.

Matt and Kiku respectfully let Alfred do the talking. "Um. Hi. Not food this time. I'm actually lookin' for a guy. Do you know an Ivan Braginsky?"

Yao threw down his rag and squinted. "Sounds Russian. Is he about this tall, blond, big nose, wears yellow gloves and scarf, got like purple eyes, really overbearing?"

Alfred blinked. He hadn't been expecting it would be this easy. "Uh, yeah, that's...that's him."

Yao nodded once, turned, and went back to working. "I do not know him."

"Oh, come on!" Alfred whined as Matthew stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Please don't withhold information from us, sir," Matt began. "This is extremely important. I'm with the police at—"

"I said I do not know him," stressed Wang. "Maybe I have seen him before. Maybe he got lunch here a few times." He clanked some metal bins together loudly, whipping his long, dark ponytail through the air.

Alfred crossed his arms, but a shot of hope spiraled through his veins. "When did you last see him."

"Dunno."

"What was he doing? What did he say when he talked to you?"

"Dunno."

"Did he ever talk about...me?"

Yao's frown intensified. "You sound like jealous lover. Go away, stupid American."

While Alfred pouted, Kiku tried. He approached the counter, folded his hands, and said only, "Please."

Yao Wang sniffed, then put his hand on the window. "I do not want to be part of this, okay? Understand? I run business. Business. So if you don't want my food, I leave me alone."

Alfred patted his pockets. "Wait, fine, fine, hit me up with some of those rangoons."

Across town—no less than three streets away from Alfred, to be precise, but none of them knew it—the target of the FBI, one of the most-wanted criminals of the era, Ivan "Vanya" Braginsky, sat in the back of a SAVE THE WHALES van. He was squished in amongst various paraphernalia: slogan T-shirts, protester signs, boxes, buttons, Raivis, and Eduard. They were on a mission to destroy the FBI. Out of context it sounded hilarious.

While Raivis made light chatter with the driver—who had no idea what was really going on, obviously—Ivan toyed around with his new laptop. Eduard had a matching one, and using it, had already gotten their clearance to get inside the building. In a lit display of irony, Ivan was going to pretend to be a custodian again. He was dressed in some old work clothes and caked in makeup Felicks had claimed looked "natural," but Ivan had seen his collection of Kylie CosmeticsSM. Nevertheless, Ivan's skin was no longer standout pale, his eyes wore brown contacts, and his hair was dyed brown and swept up into a baseball cap. He looked indistinguishable, and not just virtually.

The things he could do with a less-than-inch-thick sheet of metal. It was so much better than his old computer, which was currently sitting safely under his mattress in the group apartment, with indirect thanks to his sisters. He had moved all his intel over to the new computer and planned to destroy the old one soon so it would never end up in the hands of an agent. Ivan was filled to the brim with childish giddiness. This was the only day they had to do this; both the black and gray divisions of the FBI would be gone today, searching his apartment (finding nothing) and looking for him (also finding nothing). Alfred had no idea Ivan was right under his nose the whole time. The feeling was...unexpectedly thrilling.

"How did you get the FBI information, anyway?" Ivan adjusted his uncomfortable seating, accidentally knocking a small cascade of supplies into Raivis's lap. He jumped. "Ah, I apologize."

"Wow, look at all those...stickers," Raivis blurted out.

Eduard picked one up. "I think they are actually magnets." He tried to stick one on the back of the computer and it fell off. "Oof."

"Oof," Ivan repeated to himself quietly. They hadn't answered his question. He frowned and was about to voice it again when the driver interrupted him.

"Y'all asked for the J. Edgar Hoover Building? Well, we're here!" she cheered, parking right on the street in a once-in-a-blue-moon free spot.

Ivan stretched over his companions to gaze out at FBI Headquarters. The concrete complex wasn't tall, but the endless rows of black, black windows gave him vertigo. Was one of them Alfred's? It was strange to consider the sheer amount of information the US government had been processing and continued to process, and to think that it happened right there, in a squat building on Pennsylvania Avenue; worlds of secrets just behind walls. And today he was about to infiltrate, to discover those secrets. The giddy feeling swept over him again.

"Are we ready?" Eduard asked in Russian. "Know the plan?" Ivan and Raivis nodded. They had been working on it all morning.

"I'm gonna steal it," Ivan said to himself over a small smile, adrenaline building up inside of him. "I'm gonna steal the Declaration of Independence."

Raivis glanced rapidly between them. "Uh. Was that...um. On...the plan?"

Eduard laughed nervously. "M-Maybe we should go over it one more time."

The plan was this: Ivan and Raivis, in their disguises, would step out of the truck. All the cameras watching them would blip for this, and for the fifteen seconds it took for them to reach the front doors. (Ivan only looked up once he was inside.) A security guard would scan their faked IDs. (Raivis was asked, perhaps in jest, whether he was a little young to be cleaning the trash bins of some of the most informed people in the world, and he responded with a "Yes, yes I am.") Ivan would then make to itch his ear, which turned on the headset that connected him to Eduard, who remained in the back of the van. After suggesting the driver take a coffee break, Eduard would boot up his systems and map their route to the spy division headquarters.

"You're going to get into the elevator and turn the key for the negative two-hundredth floor," he said.

Ivan was confused. "Negative two-hundred? All I am seeing is ground and lobby levels…"

Raivis ducked around him, standing so his back blocked the elevator camera, and inserted something metal into the key slot that wasn't a key. Then he pressed a button. "Oh," remarked Ivan as, after a second, the numbers changed and they began to fall.

"It's secret," Eduard explained into their headsets. "The agents take different elevators, I think, but they have their own security to get through. You're just maintenance."

Raivis was taking deep breaths. "My ears are popping," he whispered, then coughed.

Ivan had been caught once in an elevator, and didn't want to be caught again, but right now he just felt hot. Swampy.

When the doors opened, Eduard instructed them to leave immediately if they saw anyone, but the negative two-hundredth floor was empty as predicted. Ivan inhaled. He didn't want to say it looked exactly as he imagined it to look, but it was close. Dim lighting, clusters of cubicles, dark chairs. The occasional beep from some machine deep within. This was where it all happened.

Eduard's voice came to them. "One second...now. The cameras will run loops, but you should still be fast and look inconspicuous. Anything and everything you can find. Record it."

Ivan knew what he wanted to find first. Heart pounding, he ignored Raivis and walked along the cubicles. Which one was Alfred's?

There was one with two recycling bins and a desk that was spotless save for three separate photos of three separate dogs. Not Alfred's. Too neat. Another one, equally neat, decorated with nothing but another SAVE THE WHALES magnet taped to the wall carpeting. Suspicious, but not Alfred's. And another one, with—

It had to be Alfred's. Ivan stopped and gawked. The superhero posters, the faint food dust on the chair, the labels on the file cabinets marked out in the same handwriting as the fortune cookie phone number...the NASA star chart. Ivan's lips curled at that. He was well aware of Alfred's space passions. Unmistakeable.

He could almost picture his ex-boyfriend here, spinning around, laughing to his work friends over the walls, annoying his British boss and fabricating fun stories to translate and tell Ivan. Ivan felt suddenly lonely. He knew Alfred had used this place to watch him. Did he laugh at Ivan's antics and pull in his secret agent pals to make fun of him? Did he fall asleep due to the not-so-exciting excitements of Ivan's friendless life? Did he—did he once text Ivan from this seat and watch his reactions, studying them to practice how to act in front of him later? Had he once maybe smiled to himself because of Ivan?

Ivan felt a wave of shivers trace through his limbs. He didn't want to know any of the answers. Alfred had breached both his life and his trust, and no matter how wonderful their little time together had been, Alfred had spent it knowing that all Ivan's information was just a screen away.

There was a monitor on the desk. Ivan hooked up his new computer to it, sat right down in Alfred's chair, and hacked into it.

There wasn't hacking software on the monitor itself, so Ivan guessed Alfred had used a laptop or some other device to watch him. A laptop was portable, and probably easier that way. What Ivan did find, however, with almost zero effort, were the FBI black and gray division statements and codes of conduct.

Sickened, he skimmed through them. They outlined the purpose of each division and highlighted the details of phone-hacking, as well as other types of hacking the FBI used to watch people. Ivan was disgusted, but he copied and transferred the data to his computer for future use as evidence. All those privacy laws...completely bypassed. Eduard breathed out a "Wow," into his ear. Then, Ivan searched up personnel files. He found many names, including the one of Agent Alfred F. Jones. Copying those as well, he tried not to stare too long at Alfred's bright and charming ID picture.

There were three personnel files that piqued Ivan's attention, however, and none of them were Alfred's. An "Antonio Fernandez-Carriedo," a "Gilbert Beilschmidt," and a "Francis Bonnefoy" were all declared "MIA," and all three were field agents in the gray division. Ivan chewed his lip. Searched some more. "Gilbert" had a younger brother who was also in the FBI, and this "Ludwig" was marked as working "presently" for the gray division, but that statistic had only been updated recently—a few days after Gilbert's MIA status had been updated. When Ivan checked, he found that the gray division only had two members, while the black division had three. So they were short-staffed. Scrambling.

A thought occurred to Ivan, dropping into his mind like a stone. He went back to the personnel catalogue and traced it for disturbances. It took awhile, but sure enough, he found a mistake. His own mistake, in fact. All three of the MIA files had been copied and transferred previously—by Ivan himself, on a Thursday afternoon, on the National Museum of Natural History's server. The data he had stolen; the data that had ended him up in jail.

"Who are these three people?" he breathed to Eduard.

There was a little wince from the other side of the line. "...Lovino can explain b-better than I can."

"You're holding them in that room, right?" Ivan questioned, and immediately knew he was correct. "Kidnapped."

"A-A bargaining chip for when we need to use it," Eduard answered.

Ivan thought. His wig had been snatched. The circle had abducted three FBI agents and had been holding them for weeks. That was kind of scary, combined with the fact that if the circle really wanted true justice for a privacy breach, they wouldn't have done something so risky to further condemn themselves, and they were already doing pretty risky things. Perhaps they suspected that they wouldn't win in court against the US government, and were preparing to use other means to ensure they gained their freedom, such as trading hostages. "Does the FBI know?" he asked.

"Hard to say," answered Eduard. "We don't think they've realized we're connected yet. But again, crimes that are...physical...are not my area of expertise."

And besides, those three agents were criminals, too. Who knew how many people they had hunted, spied on? Maybe even Ivan himself. Maybe Ivan's sisters as well. He was overtaken by another bout of the shivers.

He disconnected the computers and wiped all traces of himself from the monitor, then closed it back down. As he searched through the files Alfred had on him in the cabinets, he felt unbearable anger. He wished people could just love one another and get along and not feel the need to poke their noses in places they didn't belong. He wished the world would just be friendlier.

He pulled out a thick folder of jumbled notes and flipped through them, sighing to himself. At the top of each page were the words IVAN BRAGINSKY written in Alfred's drawl, and a date and time. It was a log. Ivan's already sick stomach began to clench up even further. Alfred had been keeping an actual log of what Ivan did. As he flicked through, he read some of the entries. "Woke up, looked at memes, posted memes, went to work, came home, made dinner, watched Vines, did laundry, looked at memes, went to bed." It could have been any day in the life. He looked through more and more log pages, and a lot of them were verbatim identical. Ivan really was that boring. He wanted to cry.

When he flicked through more recent logs, however, it became clearer to him. On the day they had first met in the park, a Tuesday? Nothing was marked except for the usual. That Thursday Ivan had been "late?" The usual. Ivan started to grow confused. The logs said zilch about "FaceTimed Alfred for three hours in the middle of the night" or "went on date with Alfred in the park" or "texted Alfred," all of which were highly questionable actions to report. The more recent Ivan got in the log, the more censored Ivan's "life" became. Sometimes Alfred would throw in an exotic detail here or there like "took out the trash" or "went grocery shopping" or "played board games with sisters," but other than that, Alfred's made-up life for Ivan had become a lie.

Ivan sat back down and fingered his scarf, staring at the misprints. "Why you always lying?" he hummed to himself in a quiet, distorted, far-off tone. It didn't make any sense.

Raivis's voice brought him out of the reverie. "I found something!" the teen alerted from a little ways across the room.

Ivan arranged the log back into the condition it had been in and shoved it back into the cabinet. He brought himself and his computer over to a desk in a cubicle that was set slightly apart from the others. Embroidery patterns and stacks of old Christie novels decorated this one.

Raivis and his lock-picking kit sat on the floor; all the desk drawers were unlocked and open. In his right glove was a slip of stationary with some words written on it, and in his left was a cell phone. "I think this is the desk that belongs to the Chief of the black division," he explained. "And look at what I just found."

Ivan marveled. The cell phone was his. The one they had confiscated from him and had probably searched through by now. He reached out to touch it, and then pulled back, stopping himself.

Raivis gulped. "What's even more interesting is this." He offered Ivan the slip of paper. Ivan squinted. It was information about a cell phone, but one that wasn't his.

It listed Alfred's phone number and password, along with a few notes of things the Chief had found inside. So the Chief had searched Alfred's phone, as well, but Alfred had gotten it back. It wasn't here. Alfred probably had it right now.

Another thought occurred to Ivan.

A not-so-good thought, but a curious thought indeed.

And after reading Alfred's fib-filled log, he was curious.

"Put my phone back. I won't need it," he ordered Raivis, who obliged with a nod. "But record what's on that piece of paper."

Eduard chimed in through the headset. "What's going on?"

"How are we on time?" interrogated Ivan.

"Er—you've got at least an hour, but I wouldn't stress. The driver hasn't even returned from lunch yet. The FBI are still occupied with other things right now. I think they're interviewing the heads of SAVE THE WHALES right now." A tiny laugh. "Like that'll get them anywhere."

"We've found all we need," he declared. He was itchy anyway, and perspiration had been coagulating under his armpits and across his back. "It's time to go."

Raivis, when he was done copying down Alfred's phone information, raised his curly head. "What?"

Ivan just stared at him, forcing him to listen with his eyes. Or pleading, rather. Raivis eventually popped up.

"Let's make sure everything is how we found it," Ivan suggested, making one last sweep of the premises. He passed a refrigerator full of tomatoes and a conspiracy corkboard that held pretty pictures of Feliciano Vargas connected by strings. Although it was tempting to examine the rest, Ivan didn't feel a wanting to anymore. He truly felt they needed no more. The enigma of the FBI and the hackers was beginning to untangle. It wasn't all the way there yet, but it was close.

He and Raivis stood in the elevator, listening to smooth jazz. The ride up was long. "Do you miss being a gardener?" Raivis squeezed out.

"Yes," Ivan admitted. It felt like years since he had been pruning bushes. The nostalgia weighed on his shoulders and made him tired. "What did all of you do before you were felons?"

"Felicks and the Italians joined later on, but, well, when we were younger, some of us wrote fanfiction online," he replied shyly. "We became friends on the Internet."

"And then?" Ivan prompted.

A drawn-out pause. "A-And then we discovered what else the Internet could do for us."

Typical. The elevator took them back up, up, and up into the life of the city above.

The sunflower had been watered. Recently. Alfred, feeling like a detective, pressed into the wet dirt with his glove-covered fingers. Wetness.

"What are you doing?" asked Arthur Kirkland from Ivan's living room, also wearing gloves and holding an empty trash bag.

"Still looking for clues," Alfred mumbled back. Maybe one of the cops had watered it when Ivan was gone, wanting to be nice. Matthew's group was pretty nice. Alfred, not really thinking, decided to continue the streak for the heck of it. He filled one of the glasses by the sink and tipped it into the soil. The flower would probably be dead soon anyway. Probably.

Kirkland walked in. He looked frustrated and defeated, his tie undone, his messy hair even messier than usual. "Well, this is brilliant. What a complete waste of a day. Wang Yao is noncompliant and SAVE THE WHALES are a bunch of clueless buffoons. Three hours and I've found absolutely nothing, and the apartment is completely torn apart. You?"

"Same." Alfred felt weird standing in Ivan's hollow kitchen, especially when everything was covered in sheets and CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape. He hadn't been able to stand the bedroom worse. "I don't know where else he would hide it. I'll bet he moved it somehow before."

Arthur sat down on one of the wooden chairs and just groaned.

Alfred turned around and leaned against the cabinets. This was where Ivan used to set his phone where he cooked, and this was a version of the view Alfred had gotten. Only Ivan wasn't anywhere in sight. "Is it time to message him yet?"

Arthur lifted his head out of his hands, pulling them down his face. He groaned again. "...Yes. Then if he turns the tables and tracks us, then your phone will only lead him back here."

Alfred pulled out his cell phone and opened up the meme account. It hadn't been updated since before the arrest, the last meme a classic "tag yourself." "I'm the one that looks dead," Alfred mumbled. Then he had a sudden bout of insecurity. "Um. What should I...what should I say?" Talking to Ivan had always been so easy before. He...kind of wished to go back.

Kirkland crossed his legs and put his arms behind his head, closing his eyes. In a calmer, nonchalant voice, he responded, "Anything that warrants a response."

Alfred shifted his weight, contemplated for a second, and then began to type.

red flag - gwen

Y'all gotta know the drill by now. This time though derevosky (derevoskymusor on tumblr) made an entire panel comic thing for chapter 15. Hear that? An entire panel comic thing? Yeah. That's right. Hit me up at rebels-advocate before school starts and this story ends and I fade into the mist...