Given a choice, he'd be racing, the WRX chewing through turns, engine snarling under his hands, downshifting with precision and intent as he flew towards the finish. He'd be in the desert, where the air was clear and clean and there was no one to bother him except Black Star, playing the Benny Hill theme on a fucking kazoo in the passenger seat instead of acting like a proper co-driver but at least Black Star was the best friend he chose, at least Black Star's incredibly obvious insanity was put to good use most of the time.

Instead, Soul arrived at the run down, seedy video rental store where he worked and was offered a choice between working the back counter and processing returns, the proverbial rock and a hard place except - well. The back room was the back room, commanding probably seventy-five percent of the building's total floor space, sequestered behind a single door covered top to bottom in under-eighteen warnings and monitored by at least two different cameras. Soul didn't mind the customers, not really. Most of them were, honestly, fine. Maybe a little weird, maybe a bit awkward, maybe trying a little too hard to be friends and bond over pornography, really, why would you do that - no, it wasn't the people. It was simply that Soul had stared far too long into the abyss, sitting at a counter in a room filled with a really upsettingly varied and large collection of porn, and probably ninety-nine percent of the time staring at those covers - some of which seemed to be staring back - was a much more unpleasant prospect than sorting, checking, and on occasion cleaning DVDs.

Except.

Today the intake bin was full by the time Soul got to it, and he wasn't sure that any of the cases lacked the fluorescent orange tag marking them as adult-only titles. Unfortunately, he realized this only after making his choice, a normally safe choice except for the fact that the entire world was out to get him.

"Yeah," said his coworker, glancing Soul's way as he crossed the front of the store to the bathrooms and noticing his expression, "Sarah said something about there being a lot of guys waiting this morning when she opened. Apparently a couple of them had lube warnings on their accounts, too."

"You didn't tell me this," Soul said, gingerly lifting a stack of cases out of the bin. Lube warning meant exactly what it sounded like, though sometimes they got lucky and it was just a family with small children who occasionally brought back discs with spaghetti sauce on them. "Why. Why would you not tell me something like that."

"I've never once seen you take the back desk voluntarily, dude," came the answering call from the other side of the store. "Cut me some slack."

The bathroom door opened and shut and Soul gave the stack of DVD cases in front of him a bleak look. They were all porn. With that in mind, he procured their industrial-sized bottle of hand sanitizer, some rubbing alcohol, latex gloves, and a roll of paper towels. With luck, the worst he'd have to deal with would be grimy fingerprints. Realistically, it'd be lube, but that wasn't really so bad. Sometimes, though -

"Aw geez, there's a fingerprint of - " he spat a few minutes later, surprised and disgusted, prevented from uttering the unspeakable by the pay phone outside the shop beginning to ring.

"I take it you want to get that," his coworker said, on his way back to his post in the back room. "Considering the situation you seem to have there."

"Yeah," Soul said, setting the disc down, pouring alcohol on the offending spot, and putting some distance between himself and it. "You better go see who last rented Pirates of the Perineum and put a ban on their account, that shit is vile."

"Can do, chief," his coworker said, but Soul was halfway out the door by the time he finished the sentence.

It was convenient for Soul that he still had the gloves on when he answered the phone; the video store was hardly in a respectable neighborhood, and this particular payphone had a bit of a reputation, not to mention some questionable graffiti and even more questionable stains. That said, of all the things he was expecting when he answered a ringing payphone in a sleazy part of town, Black Star yelling "What the fuck, Soul, you live in Las Vegas, you're supposed to answer payphones with something funny, like 'Hootie's Morgue, you stab 'em we slab 'em, this is Eight Ball,' not hello like this is the fuckin' Ritz. Give me a break, I should call back just so you can try again and not embarrass yourself, you scrub."

"Star," Soul said, trying to decide between confusion and exasperation. "Why the hell are you calling the pay phone outside my work?"

"Reasons, Brovahkiin. Reasons. If it makes you feel better, I'm on a pay phone too, and let me tell you it was a pain in my magnificent ass finding one. Look. Firstly, you gave me the wrong goddamn movie last time I was in there, and I'm gonna need you to bring me a gratis rental of Titanic to make up for it."

"It isn't my fault that you somehow managed to rent Knight Ride-Her instead of Knight Rider, dude," Soul said, managing not to laugh for long enough to form a response. "And anyway, you've kept it a week past due. I think that at this point it doesn't count as an accident any more."

On the other side of the line, his friend made a dismissive noise. "You bring me a copy of Titanic, I'll give you your porno back. As a bonus, I won't tell your brother that you volunteered to take a set at the club this week. How's that?"

"Whatever," Soul said, pointedly not leaning against the side of the phone booth and definitely not dignifying the threat of a shift at the club with a response. "What do you want, Star?"

He could hear the horrible, shit-eating smirk in Black Star's voice when he laughed and replied, "Blonde English girls with ghetto names, you know what I'm saying? I love that shit," and hung up.

Soul's whole world did a stomach-wrenching record scratch.

Marie Mjolnir left prison with a plan. She sailed past the guards, collected her things, slipped back into the smart, tailored suit she'd entered the hellhole in, and settled into the plush leather seats of Azusa's gleaming Mercedes with a grateful sigh and a grin that could cut diamonds.

Azusa was as neat and collected as she'd been the day she'd intimidated the judge into giving Marie a light sentence - into ignoring entirely Medusa's disgusting insinuations that Marie was somehow abusing her foster children, that the environment in which she was raising them was somehow unfit. Unfortunately, the incredibly tawdry accusations of insurance fraud via arson had stuck, though who would burn down their own strip club for money in this day and age Marie was certain she didn't know.

"You're all taken care of," Azusa said as her outrageous diesel engine snarled to life, and if Azusa had left her car's powerhouse engine as stock, Marie would eat her eyepatch. "Liz is supposedly putting you up for the next week, at which point you'll have found lodgings and she'll be on her way to her new gig in Vegas. She's got the recordings, and knows when to call your parole officer and leave messages, though of course you're still obligated to speak to him in person from time to time. Kilik's set you up with a phone that has the appropriate area code and a very confused GPS that thinks it's exactly where you're supposed to be."

"And the kids are all accounted for?" That was, of course, the most important thing: the kids.

"They haven't all gotten on board yet, since it took me forever to locate Kid and, being as they're your children, they are damnably stubborn," Azusa said, shifting and flinging the Mercedes into whiplash-inducing reverse with hardly a glance behind. "But they'll come round."

"We've got some time, anyway," Marie said, rolling down the window as Azusa turned onto the main road, laughing into the wind and ignoring the very prim, very how-dare-you-cause-my-hair-to-be-windswept look her lawyer gave her. "It'll be a little while before we can gather enough intel to put together an informed plan."

"Yes, about that," Azusa said, drumming her fingers on her steering wheel with a sigh. "Preliminary findings would indicate that things are - rather a bit more complicated than we first thought."

"Trust me, Azusa," Marie said, smile disappearing, "I've been in prison. I know that Medusa didn't have me framed and thrown in jail just because she had a crush on my husband."

"Well, Stein is a rather exemplary fence, to say nothing of the money laundering - "

"And I'm sure he has served her well in that capacity," Marie said, remembering the day the divorce papers had come in the mail. "But it's more than that, Azusa, and I intend to find out exactly what."

Azusa sighed, slowed to turn onto the highway onramp. "So long as we're on the same page," she said, accelerating hard enough to press Marie back into her seat a bit. "My rifle's in the trunk, ready to go whenever you say the word."

That earned her a thin smile. "Let's ride, then. And let's find a steakhouse with the biggest bar possible, prison food is so bad."

'Blonde English girls with ghetto names' meant that within twenty-four hours Soul found himself in Florida, grappling with a humidity level that felt incompatible with life and waiting poolside while an old friend cleared his schedule for an unexpected visitor.

"So," said a distinctly amused-sounding voice, and Soul turned to see Kid heading his way, somehow immaculate despite the fact that he was in all black from hair to hi-top Chucks, pale eyes gleaming in the afternoon sun in that unsettling way he'd always had. "I haven't heard from you since Miss Marie's trial, and now you turn up on my doorstep without warning." He stopped carefully on the edge of the shade cast by his porch, a glass of neat scotch in one hand, dark brows raised to a level that Soul interpreted as 'polite suspicion.' "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"You do know that the reason you haven't heard from any of us is because we can't find you, right," Soul said, abandoning his nascent idea of stripping down to his boxers and jumping in the pool in favor of joining Kid in the shade, grinning while his friend set his drink down and indulging in a back-slapping hug once Kid's hands were free.

"Which, again, begs the question," Kid replied once they broke apart, reaching for his drink and smiling a little in spite of himself. "What are you doing at my house, Soul?"

"We have some family business to attend to," Soul said, which made Kid's brows climb up to a level that was more 'did you just say what I think you said.'

"Extenuating circumstances have seen fit to provide you with my whereabouts, then," he said, smoothing over his surprise with admirable aplomb. He motioned Soul into the house, giving him a meaningful Look that meant Soul followed him without a word, padding across plush carpeting and meticulously-laid stone floors to a back room that he supposed must qualify as a library, whereupon Kid did something complicated to one of the back shelves and it swung inward to reveal a set of stairs leading underground.

"Really," Soul said, unable to come up with anything even slightly more articulate.

Kid gave him a look that was simultaneously smug and exasperated. "Impressive, I know. It's taken me years to put together even this modest of a collection. Would you like to see my Dostoevsky firsts?"

Before Soul could even respond past blinking at Kid in utter confusion, his significantly shorter childhood friend had more or less kicked him down the stairs, reminding Soul that while Kid had always been small, he had also always been wiry, long-fingered and fast, with a certain tensile strength to him that had made him Nygus's favorite when it came to combat training.

Which brought him full circle back to the reason he was there, windmilling down slick mahogany stairs into some kind of hacker's wet dream of a basement room, something like a six monitor setup with a cot and a server rack in one corner and a drafting table in another and about a thousand freaking houseplants, and - what on earth, really.

"So," Kid said as he strolled down the stairs, the bookcase-door swinging back into place behind him with the kind of echoing noise and sound of bolts shooting home that Soul would have expected from a bank vault, "Miss Marie is out of prison, then?"

"Not that I believe for a second that you don't already know that, but yes. She had Black Star and me on 'medical leave' from our respective jobs almost as soon as she got to Vegas," Soul said, staring around the room and finally, gingerly, settling onto the cot in lieu of appropriating Kid's plush computer chair, which experience told him might well end poorly. "Apparently I have mono."

"Been kissing Black Star, then?" Kid drawled, and Soul sort of twitched with the not-so-latent urge to punch him in the face. "Anyway. What's this got to do with me?"

Soul sighed, glanced around the room again - took in what was apparently a wet bar and equally apparently about a thousand cans of Monster Ultra arranged in a precise pyramid, and one of those many screens was dedicated to Kid's security systems feed, which explained some things - and, after a moment, said, "Do you want the stated reason, or do you want to know what's actually going on?"

Kid gave him a considering look from the base of the stairs, the hand not holding his drink buried in his pocket, somehow elegant even in the halfhearted goth hacker chic that was an old NIN t-shirt and worn out black jeans.

"What?" Soul said after a minute of silence had passed, rolling his shoulders, wondering if Kid was still as particular about his things as he'd been when they were kids. "I haven't upset your feng shui, have I?"

"You're fine," Kid said, smile thin but nonetheless present as he wandered over to the bar. "You tell me the 'official' story, and I'll make you a drink."

"Well," Soul began, watching Kid drop ice into a shaker and uncork a silver-chased bottle of clear tequila, "our foster mother would like to politely request your services as a consultant on the finer points of - security."

"Yeah?" Kid asked, opening a bottle of something so electrically blue that Soul found himself slightly worried about its safety as a consumable. "Would that be contingent upon the fact that I designed Medusa's casino vault? It's completely inaccessible, you know. My designs do not cut corners, and our childhood full of questionable education has taught me very well how to foil thieves."

"You asked for the official version," Soul said, maybe pouting a little, and accepted the drink Kid offered him.

"I did," Kid agreed, and settled into his computer chair, glass of scotch firmly in hand once more. "Drink that. It's called a silver bullet, which should tell you everything you need to know. What's really going on?"

"Medusa framed Miss Marie, that's just a fact," Soul said, blunt because there was no other way to put it. "She framed her for fraud and she turned Stein against her and she told everyone that our own foster mother had been abusing us. So - naturally Miss Marie must satisfy her honor."

"Oh ho," Kid said, a little gleam of vengeful avarice in his eyes. "So it's revenge and not just a con, then. I must admit, it was a neat bit of work on Medusa's part. She's well and truly ruthless when she's after something she wants, though it's a bit funny that it was apparently easier for her to burn down Miss Marie's strip club and frame her for insurance fraud than use any of the actual crimes she's committed."

"To tell you the truth," Soul said, remembering Marie and the look on her face when she'd talked about Stein, "It's definitely revenge, but it's also definitely about her and Stein. I don't really know what happened between them, and I thought - at first I thought they'd planned it, you know? Like, Stein would pretend to work with Medusa so they'd have an in on her or something, but - more than anything she seems like she wants to redeem herself to him, so I really don't know, Kid. But she asked for our help, so."

"To say nothing of the inevitable millions of dollars that would come of success," Kid said, lifting his glass in a mock toast. "If she wants my advice, I will be happy to take a vacation in Las Vegas and advise, especially concerning Medusa's - extracurricular activities, shall we say."

"And what would you know about that?" Soul asked, surprised enough that he forgot what was in the drink he was holding and took an absent-minded swallow of what was apparently berry-flavored battery acid.

"Enough to feel obligated to warn Miss Marie to her face," Kid replied, so pointedly not laughing at Soul that he might as well have given up on the charade entirely. "Besides, I did design that vault. It might be impossible for mere mortals to crack, but it has no gods before me."

"...so I told him to quit making excuses. I mean, if anybody knows what it's like to make excuses for bad behavior it's me, after all. I said, 'Stein, you gotta own up to this, man. I'm gonna need you to get it together and bring it back to me, pops.' And then I left, because after that kind of real talk a man needs to be alone while he reevaluates his life and his choices, you know? Also, I really can't be seen talking to him."

"Of course," Tsubaki said, grinning into her screwdriver. "I can't believe you said that to Stein, though."

"Tsubaki," Black Star said, adjusting the beanie that was currently hiding his distinctively blue hair, "the man tried to use Plato to justify the fact that he betrayed Marie. 'Medusa is my dark horse, Star,' he said, like that gives him a pass. You know that look he gets when he's twisting shit around to make whatever horrible thing he's doing sound legit? Yeah, that was the look he was rocking. I can cram feathers up my ass, but it won't make me a chicken."

She blinked at him and shrugged. "Well, he has a point? I mean, as far as the chariot allegory goes - Medusa is definitely dragging him far, far away from righteousness, you know."

"Yeah, Tsu, sure, but the man ain't weak. He just pretends he is when he's having fun and knows he's doing something bad. I didn't realize that without Miss Marie to set his dumb ass in the corner with a juice box and a blanket he just automatically defaulted to that kind of scrub-ass baseline, though." He took a swig of cheap beer and scoffed at it - surely for the price he'd paid he could get something better than whatever it was he'd been given, but then again, he was in a casino.

"So," Tsubaki said, leaning one elbow on the bar. "Us having deadbeat father figures in our lives is hardly news, Star, and neither is you doing questionable things with feathers - "

"That was one time, and it's not my fault that Soul decided we needed a bottle of Southern Comfort in our lives, okay? It's definitely not my fault that his brother is a hot mess who drives him to drink." Black Star drained off half the beer in vain hopes of discovering that it had an actual flavor and sighed. "If you must know, I'm here gathering intel on Medusa. And, hopefully, recruiting you, since Stein's making things difficult and we can always use some assistance blowing things up. And possibly cracking what I'm told is the world's most uncrackable safe. How's your brother, by the way?"

"Masamune is currently in the wilds of Texas trying to convert a 1970 Mustang into a drift machine because he thinks it's Art, if you must know," Tsubaki said in a tone that made it very clear that no further discussion would be allowed. "I'm flattered that you tracked me down, Star. Lucky for you that I was in town for legitimate demolitions work to begin with. And I've heard things about Medusa," she continued after a moment, mouth curled into a smirk as she leaned in close, confidential-like. "They tell me she uses the bones of cheaters as dice."

Black Star looked up from his beer and grinned at her. "Yeah? I heard she feeds them to the snakes in that reptile museum she's got in the back of the casino."

"I heard," said the new bartender - Black Star had timed it on purpose, so that he could get a drink just as the shift changed - setting a much more expensive-looking beer down in front of Star, "that she's actually a witch, and she and that weird boyfriend of hers are sacrificing guys who owe her money to Cthulhu. They say late at night you can hear the screams in the elevator shafts."

"Makes sense," Tsubaki said, not missing a beat as she looked up and gave Harvar the kind of smile reserved for friendly strangers that one has totally never met before, no sir. "Heard she's a Parseltongue, too."

Black Star took the beer with a nod and a grin and didn't make fun of Harvar's ridiculous glasses by way of thanks. He waited for him to leave before saying anything further. "Look, Tsubaki, rumors aside? I'm pretty sure Medusa actually does feed people who cross her to those bigass Nile crocodiles she has in her menagerie back there. I haven't been here long enough to have proof, but I might just sneak in one of these nights and go looking for bones."

"I'm sure Marie would be touched to know that you're willing to wrestle giant crocs for her," Tsubaki said, setting some bills on the bar to pay her tab.

"I'm the Black Knight, baby, they don't stand a chance," he retorted, following her lead and sliding off his bar stool.

"Oh, so you really are working at that tacky Excalibur place?"

"Excuse you, I am a knight," he reminded her, and even held the door open as they left.

Azusa got them to Vegas in impressive time, in part because she, as a sniper and a lawyer, was accustomed to laying in supplies that could be consumed on the go with no interruption of the task at hand. It helped that the Mercedes had a back seat large enough to serve as a rather decent bed - certainly no worse than she'd had in prison - and Marie took her turn as a driver without complaint. Las Vegas was, outwardly, as she'd left it, glitz and glamour the thinnest of veneers over a truly seedy interior that was at least honest about its character.

They went to see Black Star's show, and while Azusa and everyone else seemed to think it was a bit ridiculous, Marie ate her gloriously delicious and messy meal with her fingers while she watched her boy tear up the other knights in the joust, puffing up with pride when he got in a few full-on back handsprings in heavy armor before allowing the white knight to win their duel. He whooped with joy and mischievous delight when he saw her waiting for him after the show, standing still only long enough for Azusa to explain that they needed him to start gathering information on Medusa before enveloping Marie in a crushing hug and literally bounding off to find a pay phone.

The truly ridiculous thing was Spirit Albarn, whom she found passed out on a couch in the back of the club the next day, half drunk and mostly naked, built like a debauched Greek god despite the fact that he was pushing forty, had a grown daughter, and by all accounts lived on cheap booze and cheaper sex. The routine he did once she and Wes had tipped him off the couch gave no hint of his age or the habitual abuse he inflicted on his body, though. He gave the whole club bedroom eyes as he moved in perfect time to a really filthy remix of Pour Some Sugar on Me, a crowd of girls younger than his daughter squealing every time he removed an article of clothing or rolled his hips with particular flair. When Spirit came backstage his rhinestone-studded thong was full to bursting with bills and he pulled one free so he could tuck it into Marie's bra, giving her a blinding smile and a crushing hug before pulling her into an expertly-done dip, at which point Marie remembered that Spirit was a really great dancer of all types.

He escorted her out into the club proper after that, sat her down at the bar, made sure she had an umberella'd cocktail, and then just gestured expansively towards the stage.

"Wait'll you see this," he said, and his grin had gone from sunny to evil.

That was when Jack Off Jill's cover of I Touch Myself started blaring from the speakers, the bass line alone enough to get the female anatomy in gear, and Wes Evans strutted onto stage in some kind of bondage cowboy getup that nearly made Marie spit her drink directly into Spirit's laughing fuckboy face.

"This is illegal," she said, staring at Wes's gyrating form with a dry mouth and the distinct feeling, for maybe the first time in her life, that she was probably going to hell.

"He's twenty-five," Spirit said, calmly taking a sip of his gin and tonic. "This was legal before you went to prison. Still, though," he continued, leaning back against the bar with a leonine grin, "they do grow up so fast, don't they?"

"Spirit, I cannot watch this, I raised that boy," Marie said, taking a desperate, huge gulp of her drink. "Please tell me that Soul isn't doing this too."

"Oh, definitely not," Spirit drawled, eyes still glued to Wes's increasingly-bare chest. "He just DJs here part time and lives in one of the upstairs apartments. Star takes a turn once in a while, though. Always does quite well, too."

"Well, isn't that lovely," Marie said, realizing abruptly that half her drink was gone. "Look, Spirit, we've got work to do. I'm gonna need you to stay sober - comparatively sober - until we pull this job off, all right?"

"You know I don't let my vices interfere with my work, Marie," he said indulgently, voice warm and eyes fond; Marie blushed and remembered just why Spirit was so good at his job, which primarily consisted of charming sensitive information out of people.

"Good," she said when she'd stopped feeling like a teenage girl with a crush, which, at her age, thankfully didn't last too long, even in the face of Spirit's considerable charm. "Here's what we need to do first, so we can put together an informed plan…"

Maka Albarn was sitting at the bar when Soul walked into the neon-shadowed main room of the strip club a few days later, and Kid actually swore at him when Soul stopped dead in his tracks and the shorter man collided with his back.

"I'd have thought you'd have grown past the point of being immobilized by bouncing tits," Kid snapped, pushing Soul to one side so he could head for the back door. It was when he'd gotten about three steps past Soul that he noticed Maka, nursing a Coke and staring with bored indifference at Blair's skull-pastied, outrageously massive boobs, and paused long enough to give Soul a sympathetic look before continuing backstage with perhaps more haste than he'd displayed before.

"Some things never change," Soul grumbled to himself, watching Kid walk away before taking a steadying breath and turning to face Maka, who was, herself, watching Kid go with an amused lift to her eyebrows as she took a long swallow of Coke.

Then she canted her head back to see who Kid had come in with, and the affection on her face disappeared so quickly that Soul could have been convinced it had never been there in the first place. Before she could outright get up and leave - which would, Soul presumed, be her default reaction given how things had been between them the past several years - he sidled up to the bar, taking the seat next to her but very carefully keeping a polite distance between them. For a moment he considered taking a page from his brother's book and pasting on an ingratiating smile, trying to charm her into relaxing and acting like things were fine, but this was Maka Albarn and he'd known her most of his life. Not only would she see through the attempt, she wouldn't appreciate it at all, not even from the perspective of Soul having good intentions.

Besides, taking Wes's advice had literally never had good results for him. With that in mind, he just settled onto the stool without comment, doing his best to ignore her stare despite the fact that it nettled his skin the same way that leaving the video store after midnight did, when there were guys eyeing him from the corner and he had to walk his coworker to her car. "Hey, Maka," he said, waving the bartender over so he could order a screwdriver. Between the rapid-fire flights to Florida, spending a few days in close quarters with Kid while they drove back to Nevada, and now this, he really needed something to steady his nerves.

"Soul," she replied at length, once the drink was mixed and Soul had wrapped grateful hands around it. "I suppose you've kept up with your driving, if Marie's brought you into this."

Well, yeah, he and Black Star won races all the time, but - "It's good to see you," he said, very carefully, letting his eyes warm, letting his mouth slip into a tired half-smile, hoping she'd decide to take it as a peace offering. "It's been a long time."

The look she gave him said 'not long enough' so clearly that there was no reason to voice the sentiment. Instead, she contented herself with "At least you're not dead, I guess," and told the bartender to bring her some rum for her Coke. "If you're going to insist on talking to me and I'm going to have to work with you, I'm going to need it," she added when Soul raised an eyebrow.

"Oh," he said, stung, perhaps a bit in anger, "it's me that drives you to drink? It's not your father next door, stripping for girls younger than you?" The look she gave him was like staring into the sun, so he added, "I know that Wes doing the same thing drives me to it," in an effort to not find out if she had any knives or guns hidden under her ancient bomber jacket. He didn't know what she did for work these days, but this was Maka, so - for her not to habitually carry weapons would be the strange thing. Kid might have been one of Nygus's favorites when it came to combat training, but Soul had seen Maka beat him in a one on one fight.

"There's a reason I'm on the ladies' side with Blair," she said, voice clipped, "and I'll thank you not to bring up my father's current profession unless you absolutely must. There's also a reason that I was the only one at the bar until you showed up."

Soul shrugged and grinned a bit in the face of danger. "I figured that was more because Blair's mostly naked and all these guys wanted a better view," he said, which made Maka roll her eyes and shift just enough to give him a glimpse of a knife on her belt. "Also, give your dad a little credit - the stripping isn't really his primary job, you know."

"Which is exactly why, if he had any sense of decency, he wouldn't be doing it," she snapped, and snatched the shot of rum the bartender had brought over out of his hand, foregoing any pretense of mixing it into her drink in favor of pouring it down her throat with alacrity.

"Hey," Soul said, leaning a bit away from her, surprised and yet not, considering.

She gave him a disgruntled and suddenly very tired look out of the corner of her eye, holding out her glass so the bartender could actually add liquor to her Coke. "It's because he's my father," she said by way of explanation. It wasn't, Soul knew, an excuse; Maka was disinclined to indulge in those. "I'd be lying if I tried to act like it didn't bother me. Your brother stripping doesn't bother me. Much." She took a determined swallow of her now-spiked drink. "It's not like I'm judging them for being strippers, it's just - "

"Awkward," Soul supplied, and she nodded, the standoffish cast to her expression softening for a moment into something almost familiar until she remembered that they weren't on good terms. "Anyway," he continued after a moment, when he'd had a moment to enjoy some of his own drink and Maka had schooled her expression back into studious dislike, "I assume you're here to help us gather intel? Marie won't be contacting most of the others until we have a full idea of the situation and a working plan."

She gave him a Look. "You're here to help gather intel? Does Marie know that you're technically in Medusa's employ at that horrible little porn shop?"

"Can you please not say that out loud, no one is supposed to know," Soul hissed, startled - that she knew, that she didn't know well enough not to talk about it, that she apparently held it against him somehow. "Of course Marie knows, why do you think I work there? Were you actually under the impression that I had lost all ambition and resigned myself to cleaning questionable liquids off of porn DVDs for the rest of my days?"

"Well," Maka said after a moment, looking down at her hands on the bar before grabbing a stack of coasters and soft of shuffling weirdly through them, cardboard clattering against the bar. "You didn't - "

Suddenly as that, she was gone, slipping off the barstool with abrupt speed, drink in hand and striding determinedly towards the back room while Soul blinked in blank confusion at the space where she'd been.

He was still blinking when a tall, very muscular man dropped his weight unrepentantly onto the bar stool on his other side, a beer already sweating in his hand, and growled, "Chicks're crazy, man, let that shit go or you'll go nuts."

"Yeah," Soul said, somehow managing to ignore the way his skin was prickling, because Giriko was not on his list of people he was willing to make small talk with, ever. He'd thought that was mutual, but apparently Justin wasn't around and the man was feeling lonesome. "Who knows what the fuck goes on in their heads, right?"

"Damn right," Giriko responded, voice a bass rasp, and clinked his beer bottle against Soul's glass before shotgunning what was left of it and yelling for another.

Soul downed his drink in one long go, slapping a bill down on the bar so he could make a hasty retreat and slipping backstage, but definitely not by the same door Maka had used. Blair winked at him as he passed the stage, hips swiveling in time to her current song - literally titled 'Strip Tease,' earning her zero points for originality but definitely full credit for pertinence.

At least Marie's strip club was clean, Soul thought as the door shut behind him, remembering his current workplace and a few poorly-thought out excursions circa age nineteen. It was tasteful, even. The back hallways were nicely lit and nicely decorated; nothing seemed cheap, including the employees. It helped ease his nerves a bit, being in familiar and comfortable surroundings after days of cheap hotels and Kid's dagger-sharp elbows in his sides at night because of reasons, including but not limited to having to stay at the kind of ramshackle establishments that didn't look too closely at their IDs and only took cash but which also charged a hefty extra for more than one bed.

At least now he could go up the back staircase to the apartments on the third floor and pass out in his own bed, thick with soft blankets and familiar, clean sheets that weren't the health equivalent of Russian roulette, to say nothing of Kid's absolute skin-crawling loathing of them that meant everything had to be rewashed immediately -

"Hey, little bro, welcome back," said his brother's voice, and Soul's thoughts stuttered to the same abrupt halt that his body did, pulling up inches from Wes. His brother was grinning at him from his very slightly superior height - the same infuriating, vaguely mocking but nonetheless affectionate grin that Soul had spent his entire life trying to wipe off of his brother's face by any and all means necessary - and he had to take a deep breath to quell his instinctive reaction of you wanna go. At least Wes was merciful enough to be clothed, sporting his 'I'm respectable I swear' strip club manager outfit instead of his actual stripper ensemble. "Did you and neo-Neo have fun on your road trip?"

"Firstly," Soul snapped, and okay, maybe he hadn't quelled his sibling-inspired urge to start a fight, "that's insulting to Kid, Neo wasn't even really The One. Secondly, shut up. Thirdly, why are you standing between me and my bed?"

"You drew the short straw, baby brother," Wes said, grin widening if anything, and Soul felt his shoulders slump in preemptive defeat. "Marie's here, everyone else is here now that you've brought us Kid, and you and I need to go procure food for everyone so we can have a comprehensive meeting. Azusa's getting kind of twitchy about it, between you and me, so let's get this over with before the lack of proper bureaucracy drives her insane and we all get capped."

"You're telling me that I can't have a nap because you somehow lack the strength to wrangle takeout?" Soul asked, too tired to really protest. "You didn't even warn me about Maka."

To his credit, Wes dropped the grin and gave him an apologetic half-smile. "Look, Soul, I tried, but - it isn't my fault that there's not a lot of cell signal in the middle of the desert, you know? Pick where we're going, and I'll buy you something to make up for it."

"Marie gave you money to buy food, you wouldn't be buying me shit," Soul said, letting his brother steer him towards the club's staff entrance. "I accept your offer of a favor, though, the details to be decided at a later date when you actually have something I want."

"Sure," Wes said, as if promising a favor with no stipulations didn't bother him in the slightest, giving Soul a weary but very genuine smile that he didn't see on his brother's face very often any more.

"We're getting Chinese," Soul said a minute later, once Wes had guided him outside and over to his ancient diesel Mercedes that had formerly been Azusa's. "Especially since your car is going to give me whiplash when it tries and fails to shift into drive."

"Get in the car and be glad I saved you from Marie cornering you and Maka at the same time about just why you two don't talk any more," Wes said, settling into the creaky leather of the driver's seat and somehow finessing his prehistoric transmission into gear instead of into dropping onto the pavement. "We'll go to Jade Palace, how's that?"

"Perfect," Soul said, half asleep as soon as he sat down, daydreaming about dim sum.

Barely an hour later Soul found himself crammed into the club's usually locked back meeting room with something like two thirds of his extended adoptive family, scarfing down unhealthy amounts of Chinese takeout in what he knew was an automatic stress-related reaction. He wasn't about to stop, though, because free food was free food and it was delicious, and anyway it gave him an excuse not to talk to Maka and not to acknowledge the knowing smirks Black Star was giving him over a massive plate of chow mein.

"All right, kids," Azusa said, standing to address them once she'd finished her food - well ahead of everyone, in part because of her much more advanced skill with chopsticks and in part because Azusa never ate what Soul would consider a normal quantity of food - "let's get down to business. As you probably know, Medusa's casino sponsors one of the largest off-road races in the country. This year's race is set to kick off approximately one month from today, so we need to move fast if we're going to get our hands on all the extra cash the casino will have on hand for the event. You are the preliminary team, along with Liz, who is our inside contact and who is presently at work so that she can have an alibi. We have a lot of information to gather in a short period of time, and you're the ones we picked to do it. I'll be working with Kid, Harvar, and Kilik on getting into Medusa's security systems - we need all of her video feeds, preferably access to her security comms, and, in a perfect world, her in-house servers."

"I've got a friend who's a genius with this stuff," Harvar said when Azusa paused, wiping crumbs from his mouth and rolling his eyes at Black Star, who had taken that opportunity to loudly cram an entire eggroll into his mouth. "You might remember him - Ox? He has this miserable call center job and he always loved Miss Marie, I'm sure he'd love to get in on this."

"Oh, I remember him!" Marie said brightly. "Very smart kid, very loyal to you." Spirit made a face, opened his mouth to make what Soul assumed was going to be some kind of teasing comment about puppy love, and Marie elbowed him into silence without missing a beat. "Let's get him out here and see what he can do, then. Kid already told me that he'd like someone to help him with the comm taps. He's going to have his hands understandably full with the vault systems."

"Absolutely," Harvar said. "Ox and I can handle the topside security system taps."

"I can help go through some of that data, too," Kilik volunteered around a mouthful of dumplings, using his chopsticks to push his glasses back up his nose. "At least until you need me to go convince a supercar that it's in Alaska or that its engine is actually a two cylinder or something."

"Right," Azusa said, nodding, pleased - right up until the moment that Black Star swallowed his eggroll and said "Yo," loudly enough that everyone turned to look at him.

He scoffed at the multiple 'how dare you interrupt while grownups are talking' looks he was receiving. "I just wanna reiterate here that Medusa is a problem, all right? I can already tell you after like three days of keeping an eye on her casinos that this isn't going to be the simple job that Miss Marie was hoping for. She is seriously feeding people to crocodiles. The guys she has guarding her shit aren't your run of the mill muscle, they're fuckin' scary. Any of this getting through to you?"

"Black Star," Marie said, with a gentle, understanding smile, and Soul blinked in surprise when his friend stood up with an annoyed sigh.

"With all due respect, Miss M," he said, dredging up diplomacy and calm from the depths of his loud, insane soul, "you tagged me into this to help gather intel personally. Not to do hacking or wire taps, but to watch people and report back on what I see. What I see implies that we are getting into something a lot scarier than just pissing off a crooked casino owner who will find and ruin us if she can ID us."

"About that," Kid said, loudly enough to run over top of Spirit saying "We know about the drugs," which had everyone in the room staring in surprise at one or the other of them in an instant. They blinked at each other for a few seconds, one of Kid's dark brows quirking upwards before Spirit shrugged and gestured for him to speak.

"So," Kid began again, and Marie got up and stood beside Azusa, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and giving him a look like she'd caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. "You know about the drugs."

"We were about to tell you this," Marie said before Azusa could get confrontational. She had, Soul knew from experience, never appreciated being interrupted.

"About what," Kid said, on edge, pale eyes very, very cold. "The fact that Medusa owns half the city on account of the drug deals she has going on and the attendant political corruption she's created, or about the fact that her sister Arachne is in the process of taking over and consolidating a bunch of cartels? Do you know what happens when you antagonize cartels?"

The room went suddenly very still, Tsubaki gaping with a forkful of Star's noodles halfway to her mouth, Kilik blinking in obvious and uncharacteristic shock, Wes looking like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over his head -

Azusa took a step forward, eyes slitted, in a motion Soul recognized: it was the way she moved when she was about to go for her pistol, and he lowered his chin into his chest, scowling, almost muttering 'snitches get stitches' under his breath in Marie's lilting singsong before stopping himself. Kid recognized her intent, too - he'd grown up in her precise shadow as well, learned to field-strip a gun in the dark and blindfolded under her sharp stare - but he didn't flinch, just leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, waiting.

"Azusa," Marie said, trying and failing to catch her arm - but it was Sid who grabbed her, Sid who'd been stationed so unobtrusively by the door that Soul hadn't even noticed him until he put his broad frame between her assassin's reflexes and Kid.

"I wasn't going to shoot him," Azusa snapped, elbowing the much larger man out of the way. "But I need to know how he has that information, given what we've been going through to piece it together."

"You didn't know?" Kid queried, the tilt of his head quizzical. "I was afraid of that."

"We knew," Azusa replied, voice clipped. "But what we also know is that Medusa and her dear sister are not exactly on the greatest of terms. Their current alliance is definitely one of convenience, at least as far as Medusa is concerned, and Arachne knows it."

"Marie," Spirit said before Kid could put words to his dubious expression, fingers drumming on the table, expression far from his usual facade of charming confidence so that for once he looked like the competent adult Soul suspected he might be, "I still don't like this, what if - "

"I'm not letting the cartels have my husband," Marie interrupted, and in that moment there was no trace of the mother figure Soul had grown up loving.

That was when Kid stood up, hands automatically at the collar of his t-shirt despite there being nothing to adjust, and Soul noticed then the death's-head rings he wore on either hand - rings he couldn't remember his friend ever having before, not even during their road trip of enforced space-sharing. "I'm not saying you should give this up, Mom," he said, mouth twisting into a wry smile. "But you're going to need backup. My father is amenable to coming out here to speak with you on the matter. He thinks, of course," he added when Azusa took another surprised step towards him, "that this means that you want to work with him to bring down a serious threat, and maybe you do. I just assumed you'd help him out to get backup and make sure that Medusa wasn't in a position to retaliate. It's none of his business what we do with the money, right? Especially if he doesn't realize we've done anything with it until after the fact."

"My son," Marie said, beaming, chest swelling with pride in a way that was beginning to strain the seams of her shirt when Spirit slapped a pleased hand down on the table and ruined the moment by saying, "See, I knew he'd say that, and you kept insisting we couldn't factor that into the plan - "

"Shut up," Wes said from his seat beside him, whapping him lightly on the back of the head. That jarred Spirit into silence for all of about two seconds before he rounded on his attacker, growling about respecting one's elders.

That, apparently, was the cue for everyone to have a total meltdown. Star started yelling loudly and repeatedly that Marie better explain what the fuck Kid was on about while Kilik tried to reach across the table to shut him up, Tsubaki discreetly digging fingers into his ribs to achieve the same; Harvar made an attempt to grab and corner Kid, who caught his wrist in a grip designed to discourage with an irritated cast to his face; Azusa grabbed Spirit and Wes by the scruffs of their respective necks and literally shook them. Meanwhile, Soul saw Sid press one massive hand to his face in total exasperation for a moment before shifting into swift motion; Soul grabbed his drink just before the man slammed one massive, tattooed arm down on the table so hard that Soul was worried he might break the poor cheap thing.

Most of the drinks on the table tipped over, and as everyone else stopped trying to murder each other and started frantically attempting to mop up spilled soda, Maka spoke into the abrupt silence.

"Are you seriously trying to tell me that none of you ever realized that Kid is Shinigami's son?"

Kid's head whipped around so he could stare at her, but the intimidation factor of said stare was reduced to near zero by the fact that he was shuffling frantically to keep Coke from dripping on his shoes. "Are you telling me you did?"

"Well, I wouldn't really be very good at my job if I didn't pick up on these things," Maka said, rolling her shoulders a bit uncomfortably when everyone managed to stare at her and Kid while simultaneously scrambling to save the food from the spilled drinks. "No need to kill me, I never told anyone."

"I'd know if you had," Kid said, voice edged a bit, eyes flicking over everyone in the room. "I'm going to trust you all with this, but if you speak of this to anyone else without my consent, I can't - "

"No one here is enough of a scrub to tell your secrets, bro," Black Star interrupted. "Are we talking about Shinigami, also known as He-Who-Is-Not-To-Be-Named, the guy who's probably in charge of every governmental investigative agency that we know exists and probably as many that we don't?"

"The guy who goes around in a skull mask so his enemies can never identify him?" Kilik asked, procuring a roll of paper towels from who knew where that Soul nonetheless accepted gratefully.

"I heard he's immortal," Tsubaki said, handing Black Star a huge pile of sodden napkins.

Harvar was nodding beside her. "I heard he doesn't leave fingerprints."

Star threw the napkins across the room in a dripping arc, where they landed perfectly in the trash can - but not before nearly hitting Wes in the face. After a brief check to make sure that no further projectiles were incoming, Wes said, "I heard that he knows the answer to every single one of Fox Mulder's questions."

Soul stared into his drink and, in that moment, wished: that there was rum in his Coke, that he was in the WRX headed out of town, that Maka would stop giving him the murderous side-eye, that things could just be simple.

"Kids," Marie said just as Black Star opened his mouth, in a tone that included everyone in the room and had the merciful effect of making everyone shut up and remember to respect others' personal space. She waited while Kilik let go of Star and sat back down, while Harvar backed off of Kid with his hands raised in supplication, while Azusa reluctantly surrendered her sidearm to Sid with an eyeroll, and at last spoke.

"I had every intention of contacting your dear father, Kid," she said, giving him a warm smile that eased some of the whiplash tension in his shoulders, softened the tightness lurking around his eyes and the set of his mouth and made him stop eyeing Harvar as if deciding which bones to break first. "After all, he visited me while I was locked up, trying to entice me into helping him with exactly this. At the time, he was offering me early release and some generous parole terms if I promised to work for him once I was out, but you all should know by now that I'm not about to owe the likes of him any favors."

"Which is wise," Kid said on an exhale, eyes half-closed, clearly doing calculus in his head or whatever it was he did these days to calm his frantic mind.

"No fucking kidding," Spirit muttered, earning him a raised eyebrow from Wes, who was currently perilously close to sulking, arms crossed over his chest, chair tipped back, mouth in an almost pouting line.

"Anyway," Marie continued, "I want to get a good stock of information over, say, the next week, at which point I will get in touch with dear Lord Death and offer him my assistance in return for certain favors and dispensations. I had some inkling of just what Medusa was into before I even left prison, the clink being what it is, but now I'm certain that we're going to need his help - to say nothing of the fact that she needs to be stopped, and not just because she's a homewrecker."

Maka and Azusa both started to say something, and were cut off by a sharp gesture from Marie. "Not that I am placing the blame only on her shoulders," she added, the light gleaming off her gold-embossed eyepatch in a way that mirrored the less-than-amused glint in her good eye. "But I am definitely blaming her for taking advantage of my husband's - unique mental workings."

"Fair," Maka said, settling back into her chair and resuming her interrupted meal.

"The man I was before you got framed would have never forgiven him," Sid intoned, tucking Azusa's gun against the small of his back while she rolled her eyes at the room in general. "But the man I am now understands forgiveness, and that sometimes we all make bad choices. Have you spoken with him?"

"Not yet," Marie said. "I've been weighing my options. Harvar, if you don't mind terribly, please go call your friend while everyone finishes eating. Once you're back we can begin."

"Sure," he replied, and went; Marie went to the room's whiteboard, grabbed a marker, and started filling it with neat script.

"As you report, we're going to put everything we know on this board," she said, and Soul reached for the crab puffs with a resigned sigh, figuring he might as well enjoy them while he still could. "And over here," she continued, switching over to the far side of the board for a moment, "is what we're trying to achieve. By the end of the week, I expect us to have finalized who we need to pull this job off, and once they get here we can set up the master plan. Kid, start us off."

Soul listened to Kid describe the vault he'd designed - he'd even come prepared with floorplans and a list of modifications that Medusa had made on her own after the fact that Soul didn't even want to know how he'd obtained - and sank progressively lower in his chair, stuffing crab puffs into his face while he resigned himself to the fact that his insane family was, unsurprisingly, going to be the death of him sooner rather than later.

They filled up the board before Soul managed to finish off the crab puffs. Sid brought in another, and Kid immediately covered it in eerily precise drawings and timelines of how, in his estimation, the plan would have to proceed. Before he could start in on the other side, Marie stopped him, having flipped through his blueprints and conferred with Black Star and read the accumulated notes on the main board.

"The food's gone and we've put together a lot of information, so let's call it quits for today," she said, giving Soul an amused look. For his part, he was giving Kid and his technical drawings the most glassy-eyed stare of his life, because the man talked fast and drew fast and had apparently already set up a functional plan in his head before even having all the information he should have needed to do so. "I think we've established that this is a doable job, but we definitely need more people and more time to plan it out. We'll only get one chance, after all."

"One chance," Spirit echoed, feet on the table and a mostly-empty box of Chinese donuts in his lap. "You say it like we'll survive if Medusa catches us."

"Please do not become old and crotchety before your time," Wes said, eyeroll apparent in his tone without requiring Soul even glance his way, and Spirit made a deeply annoyed 'hmmmmph' sound that made Maka glower preemptively.

"Spirit, please," Azusa said, cutting into the conversation before it could escalate. "Don't pretend that you think it's an unreasonable amount of danger, I know what you've spent your entire life doing for a living. If you're concerned about your daughter, just say so."

Although, Soul reflected as he flinched sympathetically at the killing glare Maka turned on her father, Azusa might have just been trying to avoid one fight so she could start another.

They were, mercifully, interrupted by Tsubaki clearing her throat. "Miss Marie? Have we made sleeping arrangements? It's getting late and if we're going to be finding hotel rooms, we need to go ahead and do that since I checked out of my work hotel room this morning and that leaves us all without a place to stay."

"No hotels," Kid and Azusa said in terrifying unison, then gave each other speculative stares.

"O-kay," Tsubaki said after a brief pause to make sure that chaos wasn't going to break loose again. "So where are we all sleeping, then?"

"There are apartments upstairs," Spirit said with a negligent wave of one hand that made Soul's blood pressure spike.

"There are occupied apartments upstairs," he snapped, and saw Black Star put an arm around Tsubaki's shoulders out of the corner of his eye, leaning close to say something that was no doubt grossly inappropriate in her ear.

"I'll be staying in Blair's extra bedroom," Marie said. "Azusa and Sid have their own places, so the rest of you will have to sort yourselves out." She gave them all her most sunny smile. "Should that prove problematic, rest assured that I will take it upon myself to see that things are arranged to my liking."

The silence that followed was as horrified as it was profound, at least in the few seconds that elapsed before Black Star, at typical megaphone volume, said, "We pick Maka and Tsubaki," and the last crumbling vestiges of Soul's will to live went up in smoke.

Spirit's feet hit the floor with what at the time seemed a thunderous - and outraged - crash, but Maka beat him to the punch by saying, "Excuse you," in tones that made Soul's skin go up in goosebumps.

"What," Star drawled, favoring her and Spirit both with his best grin, "did you want to bunk with big daddy over there?"

Spirit looked stricken when Maka's mouth snapped shut and she made no further objection than fixing Soul with a glare like death.

"Guess Harvar and I are with Spirit and Wes, then," Kilik said philosophically, though Harvar looked less than pleased, even behind his omnipresent sunglasses. Soul was, honestly, impressed at how well they took that bit of news, given the way Spirit lived his life and, really, everything about his brother.

"I'm sleeping downstairs," Kid announced, back to the room as he took pictures of the various whiteboards. "I'll set up a cot."

"There is no downstairs," Soul said, and only then noticed the studiously nonchalant look Spirit was giving the wall while Wes gave him a stare that translated to something like resigned betrayal.

Azusa cleared her throat. "There's a server room downstairs," she said. "We added it when the club was rebuilt. It's going to be our base of operations for the duration. How Kid knew about it is a matter that I will have to investigate."

"He knows when he's near his own kind," Soul said from where he'd buried his face in his hands for what felt like the millionth time in the past hour. Not that it helped: Maka's glower still felt like fire on his skin and he was still anticipating his death at her hands, but at least he couldn't see her this way. "Just tell him and the rest of us where the entrance is and let him set up his cot, it'll be easier."

"There's a condom vending machine in the bathrooms," Azusa said, clearly reluctant to even speak such words aloud.

"Everything makes sense now," Black Star shrieked, on his feet in a flash while everyone in the room flinched away from the sheer volume he was producing. "That's why you have those fucking vibrating Hello Kitty condoms in there, isn't it."

Spirit sighed heavily, pressing long fingers to his temples, and before Azusa could collect herself said, "Kid, I'll show you how to get in. Everyone else, we'll get to you. I can't be conducting field trips into the damn bathrooms, all right? Go get your stuff moved upstairs or something."

There was a chorus of dutiful assent, and everyone got up, crowding towards the door. Soul didn't object when Black Star threw his arms over Maka and Tsubaki's shoulders, steering them towards the exit so he could help carry their things upstairs with the clear intention of making Soul do all the emergency cleaning. He just turned the other way, headed up the back stairs, and stood with his head pressed to his apartment door for a minute. His overwhelming urge was to lay down on the floor and give up because the place was a wreck, which was to be expected of anywhere that Black Star lived, and there was no hope of getting it habitable quickly. Unfortunately, the alternative was being judged harshly and repeatedly by Maka and Tsubaki, which put him between, he supposed, the proverbial rock and its accompanying hard place.

He unlocked the door, not bothering to remove his forehead from its dark wood until he'd fished his keys out of his pocket and slotted them into the lock. He'd start with the living room, disinfect it and clear out all the debris of two unattached young men living together so that at least Maka and Tsubaki would have someplace to sit while everything else was made habitable. Then the single bathroom, because between the two of them there was so much product all over the place that it was hard to find the countertops sometimes and Star had managed to dye the tub and sink a permanent shade of off-sky blue with hair dye, to say nothing of the general state of the place.

Well. Nothing was going to distract from the fact that their shower curtain was a stunning depiction of grumpy cat as Ariel from The Little Mermaid, but Soul had every intention of blaming that on Black Star, considering he'd really had nothing to do with it being there and the fact that it made him laugh on a daily basis wasn't relevant.

He marshaled his strength, stepped through his door, and came to a full, shock-induced stop on the threshold.

When Black Star, Maka, and Tsubaki came in, Soul was still gaping in mute disbelief, though he'd managed to sit down on the couch at least. It was just - the place was clean, spotless even, spotless somehow, someway that Soul assumed involved black magic or a deity.

This, of course, was painfully hilarious to Black Star, who started cackling as soon as he caught sight of Soul's face, struck a pose that showed off his biceps to their best advantage, and said, "Sneak up and hit'cha like a fuckin tornado."

Behind him, Maka cracked a smile, despite her apparent efforts not to, and Tsubaki indulged in an extremely unladylike snicker.

Soul was preparing a witty comeback when the vase on the coffee table started beeping.

There was a sort of breathless moment in which Soul dropped his head into his hands, Black Star sprang at roughly the speed of light to the defense of his gizmos, and Tsubaki, utter bewilderment apparent in her tone, asked, "Is that a tree full of Tamagotchis?"

"Yes," Soul replied, giving Black Star a baleful stare as he checked every one of what had to be a few dozen virtual pets hailing from the 1990's.

"Excuse you, this is art is what this is," Star said, gesturing to the entirety of his creation: a large decorative glass vase, filled to the brim with pogs, into which he'd jammed what Soul assumed was a decorative branch of some sort, hung all over with keychain e-pets. "By the way, Soul, Kilik stole the only air mattress that doesn't leak, so unless you wanna bunk with me you're sleeping out here."

"You gave them my bed?"

Star finally located the beeping scourge, thumbs flying across decades-old buttons and not even looking Soul in the eye as he signed his death warrant. "Think about the options here, champ. I think you'll find that my flawless reasoning has already found the best solution."

They weren't good, Soul had to admit: without an air mattress, there were only three places to sleep that weren't the floor - his bed, Star's bed, and the couch. Soul wasn't about to consign anyone to sharing a bed with Black Star, and he sure as hell wasn't going to invite doom by bunking with one of the ladies, and so -

"Yeah, fine, I'll sleep on the couch," he said, sighing. "Just give me a minute to clean up my room."