The Prisoner's Dilemma

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Weiss Kreuz characters. Siren and Hacker, however, are all mine.


Crawford took a deep breath of steam and cradled his coffee in his hands. He probably should have headed straight home after the uneventful meeting with one of his underworld contacts-they hadn't heard anything about a gaijin couple looking to pick up a few quick jobs for cash-but he needed to pull his thoughts together. Right now the quiet corner table in this little coffee shop offered more peace and solitude than the dubious sanctuary of his office. Plus, he needed the caffeine after a sleepless night.

He never should have let his desires get the better of him. He'd been so damn angry with Schuldig, searching through that raucous club. When he'd finally found him in the alley, head titled back, long neck bared, a look of pure pleasure on his face as some wannabe punk sucked him off, Crawford had been hard pressed not to kill someone. At the time, the best option to keep from destroying the telepath had been to shove his tongue down Schuldig's throat. And that taste had just weakened him. He'd seen right through the pitifully obvious seduction in Schuldig's room, but he'd gone ahead and let Schuldig distract him from important questions. He was pretty sure he'd waited long enough to get the most necessary information, but clearly, once this mission was over, he needed to take more time to work on his mental discipline. So much for fucking Schuldig once to get the telepath out of his system.

/You didn't really think a quick blow and one frantic screw would be enough, did you, Brad?/

Crawford scowled at the inner voice. The entanglement with Schuldig needed to be dealt with, but there were more important concerns he had to focus his strained processing capabilities on. Events were slipping out of his control, had been ever since he'd failed to prevent Schuldig from succumbing to that goddamned fever, but that wasn't what had made him lie awake all night. The fact that he'd broken down so spectacularly hadn't kept him poised on the razor's edge of wakefulness. Schuldig's questions had. Brad Crawford was nothing if not a man deeply in touch with his goals, and something about what Schuldig said reverberated within him.

If he'd not been so inexcusably distracted by other matters, first with rounding Schuldig up and then with finding out about his connection to the target, Crawford probably would have seen it himself. The whole scenario hit close to where Crawford, the real Crawford, lived, so perhaps that blinded him too. Although the materials the data division sent hadn't explicitly stated so, he'd immediately understood that Schwartz was sicced on Siren and Hacker because the agents had gone rogue. What he hadn't picked up on was the oddity in the strict orders to terminate the one agent but not the other. It didn't make sense. Esset rarely wasted resources, and a rare talent like Siren's was one hell of a resource. If reeducation was acceptable for her partner, why not for her? The organization certainly wasn't above vengeance, but Esset's decision-makers were shrewd. It was hard to believe they'd throw away a magnetokinetic just to settle a score with her or her partner. No, there must be something about Siren, something that made her continued existence a danger to the organization. If she was a threat to Esset, Crawford wanted to know exactly why. He knew it was too early for Schwartz and he didn't want to topple the fragile house of cards he'd been constructing for years, but his intuitions told him that if Crawford was to be successful in his bid to throw off the yoke of his masters, he should pursue this thread.

He'd roused Nagi early that morning and set the boy on the task. He told Nagi to look in to Gelb's most recent assignments, not giving the boy his reasons for wanting the information. From the sideways look he'd gotten, he knew that the days of unquestioning obedience were numbered. It wasn't the first time he'd asked Nagi to do research that wasn't strictly within mission parameters, but he feared the boy was finally itching to ask questions. Nagi's ties to Crawford were much more extensive than those to the organization, but Crawford knew his loyalty was not absolute. He'd just have to see to it that his influence over the telekinetic held a little longer.

As Crawford was finishing the dregs of his coffee, contemplating Nagi's place within his master plan, working through possible courses of action to ensure a successful mission, and telling the Schuldig-voice to fuck off until he had more time to deal with its stupid shit, he felt the familiar twinges signaling an incoming vision. He set the coffee down and discretely braced his hands on the table.

Dead leaves crunched beneath Schuldig's feet as he slipped down the trail like a ghost. He casually leaned against a park bench, no tension in his posture whatsoever as he faced one of their targets from across the paved walkway.

Crawford strained, trying to sustain the vision and see more of the scene, but it was finished. At least he had managed to glean a specific time and location. He looked down at his watch. "Fuck." There wouldn't be time to call in Nagi or Farfarello. Crawford quickly made his way into the coffee shop's small bathroom and locked the door, checking the gun he almost always carried beneath his suit jacket. He only had one extra clip, but it would have to do. Crawford had a date in the park.

*****

Schuldig strolled down the street, hands stuffed in the pockets of his overcoat to avoid the chill early winter air. He let his mind drift on the currents of the people around him, hoping to pick up on a conspicuous silence within the static. It was a halfhearted search at best, looking for a needle in a haystack, and he was probably being more than a little careless in allowing the tether to his self-awareness to stretch like this, but right now, it felt good to get a bit lost in the voices of Tokyo. A mini-vacation from himself was just what Schuldig was craving at the moment.

With his mind more open than it had been since the fever, he almost didn't notice when the track of memory surfaced in his thoughts. As his feet ate up the pavement, the memory looped over and over, gaining strength with each repetition and shouldering out everything else.

They were curled up side by side on the floor, backs leaning against Schuldig's bed. Sweet, slightly skunky-smelling smoke curled through the air. There was no place for it to escape, not with Xavier's blanket shoved in the crack under the door. They passed the crushed soda can with the few clever holes punched into it back and forth, careful with its precious cargo. The boy who wasn't taking a hit worked the lighter for the one who was. Schuldig held the smoke in his lungs until his eyes watered, motioning frantically for Xavier to lean in so he could blow his smoke into the other boy's mouth. It was such a rare privilege for the Belgian to con one of the janitors or guards into scoring them some stuff, they wouldn't waste a single breath of it.

"Did I ever tell you about the cheese monster, Schu?"

Schuldig left off his mellow contemplation of the desk lamp's yellow glow, dragging bloodshot eyes to the skinny kid's face. He felt a hand settle on his knee, then a probe at his shields. "Fuck off, Xave. You're not getting in," he drawled slowly, taking the other boy's hand by the wrist and lifting it off his leg before letting go. "What about a monster?"

Xavier pouted for a moment before his face brightened, mouth drawn up in a silly grin. "Right...cheese monster. We have to smoke outside someday, because he'll only find us if we're outside."

"What are you getting on about, you stupid Belgian?"

Xavier's eyes sparkled. "The cheese monster. He spends his life running through the grass. He doesn't wear anything but old, ripped jeans. He's always searching for people smoking weed." Xavier paused in his story to take another hit, his face centimeters away from Schuldig's as he exhaled into the redhead's mouth.

Schuldig held in his secondhand smoke an only slightly shorter time than he would a hit of his own. "Sure, cheese monster," he said, blowing out a stream of smoke. He picked up a particularly loud thought from the other boy and decided to play along. "Does he have shoes?"

"No!" Xavier said enthusiastically. "His feet are green from grass stains." He leaned against Schuldig, giving him a light before continuing. "Anyway. He is always running through the grass, looking for people getting high...." Schuldig nodded, his cheeks puffed out as he held in the smoke. "And when he finds someone...he pulls these hooks from out of his pockets and jumps on their head."

"Wait, wait, wait," Schuldig said, coughing smoke. Sometimes, he couldn't believe the stupid stuff Xavier got him to talk about. Shit, it almost made him feel...well, like he'd grown up on the outside too. "How fuckin' big is this monster?"

Xavier gave him a reproachful look for wasting the smoke before breaking out in another beaming grin. "About 30 centimeters."

"That's not a very big monster. Not terribly scary."

"I'm trying to tell a story here, stop interrupting," Xavier chided, then proceeded to interrupt himself by taking another hit. After sharing his smoke with Schuldig, he continued. "Anyway, he finds you getting high, and jumps up on your head, and pulls his hooks into the corners of your mouth and pulls really hard."

Schuldig looked at Xavier, blowing his shared smoke in the other boy's face. "That's your fucking story?" Xavier nodded, grinning madly. "The cheese monster finds you getting high, jumps on your head, and makes you smile?" Xavier nodded again. "Pfftt. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." They sat in silence for a few moments before Schuldig started to giggle. Xavier joined him and they leaned against each other as they laughed.

"So fucking stupid..." Schuldig sighed, wiping at his eyes. Their giggles died down and he found himself resting his head against the bed, face once again centimeters from Xavier's. He looked down at the other boy's lips, unconsciously licking his own. Xavier smiled softly and closed the distance between them, gently pressing his warm, dry lips to Schuldig's. Schuldig had committed any number of sex acts, had plenty of tongues and cocks shoved past his lips, but no one had ever bothered to kiss him like this before. Xavier pulled back and they both starting giggling again.

"So," Schuldig said once his giggles had died down, "wanna fuck?"

The memory brought a bitter little smile to Schuldig's face. He was filled with a sense of Xavier, like the lingering smell of smoke on a jacket, a half-remembered song looping through his head. He wasn't at all surprised to find himself veering towards an empty park across the street as if a beacon were glowing in the wooded area. He shook his head and worked to settle firmly back down in his own mind. It didn't feel like Xavier had done any digging, just some highly effective broadcasting that left Schuldig feeling mellow and peaceful-a little high, really. The Crawford's bitch voice reminded him that good telepaths were capable of inducing feelings of well being to make targets lower their defenses-it was a trick he even used from time to time-and that he shouldn't trust the feeling. Schuldig took a deep breath of cold air and looked up at the leafless tree branches framing the trail in front of him, skeletal fingers reaching for the gray sky. The image was sobering, grounding.

He reached out for Xavier's mind and felt that he was very close now, just a little farther up the path. As if sensing he'd been discovered, Xavier stopped his broadcasting and pulled up his shields, withdrawing his presence from Schuldig's mind like a gentle caress. Schuldig nested under his own shields, his consciousness still permeated with the feeling of Xavier. He drew up to a bend in the path with wrought iron benches on either side. Xavier stood behind the far bench. He was bundled in a puffy jacket, his arms resting on the bench's back. A small, enigmatic smile graced his face. /Told you I'd keep in touch./

Schuldig drifted over to the other park bench and leaned against its side. /Hey Xave. Twice in forty-eight hours. What are the odds?/

The smile didn't leave Xavier's face, but his eyes hardened. /Given our current circumstances, I'd say the odds were pretty good./

Schuldig smirked. "So what's with the trip down memory lane, Xave? Feeling sentimental? I gotta tell you, I'm impressed at how much better you've gotten at projecting."

Xavier's smile widened, a touch of the car salesman creeping into his expression. "Well darling, once you moved up and the beta instructors lost their star pupil, I guess they just decided they'd have to make due with whipping me into shape." /Let's cut the bullshit banter, Schu. You're hunting us, aren't you?/

"Where's your little partner?" Schuldig asked, casually moving his hand behind his back, where his gun was tucked into his waistband.

"Around." /Don't bother. She'll kill you before you can even get your hand on the grip./

Schuldig felt a push from Xavier, probably a compulsion to stay still. Now that he'd pulled his shields back up at full force, the suggestion had no effect. He flung out his arms in an exaggerated stretch to prove the point, trying to pull Siren's location out of Xavier's mind as he yawned. Like the other night in the club, he couldn't get in. Schuldig searched for Siren's mind and felt the solid wall of her shields in the vicinity, but couldn't lock down where she was.

Xavier's smile wavered and he scrubbed a hand over the bristles on his head. /Look, Schu...I just want to talk to you./ "Are you hunting us?"

Schuldig tried to form a response, but never had a chance to voice it. "Yes, we are hunting you," a strong voice said from the woods behind Xavier. Schuldig watched as Crawford emerged from the trees, gun trained on Xavier's head as he confidently strode towards the other telepath. He stopped less than a meter away, intense eyes focused on his target, long dark coat flowing gently around his ankles in a slight breeze. Schuldig bitterly suspected Crawford knew exactly what kind of image he cut. Prick. "Where's Siren?"

"He one of yours?" Xavier asked, shark-like smile back in full effect as he cocked his head toward Crawford, maintaining his relaxed posture. Without waiting for an answer, he turned toward Crawford and looked him up and down. "Lemme guess...Bradley Crawford, team leader of Schwartz?" Xavier shook his head and made a little tsking sound. "One thing I always hated about you precogs," he said, "you're constantly crashing parties."

Schuldig's gaze flickered to Crawford, wanting to gauge his reaction. He stayed calm and cool, gun never wavering from Xavier's head, but Schuldig knew he must be a little rattled. Schuldig had mentioned his team to Xavier, but how the fuck did he know names and abilities?

Xavier must've caught the shift in Schuldig's attention, because he looked back and forth from him to Crawford a few times before his expression took on a leering quality. "Jesus, Schu, you are such a fucking clichŽ! Sleeping with the boss? I'd really expect something more interesting from you," he said, smile bright and dangerous.

Schuldig saw Crawford's jaw tighten and felt his own smirk falter. He quickly shored up his defenses, casually shrugging his shoulders. "Just a fuck," he said, reinforcing his shields, looking for evidence that they'd been breached. Xavier sent a painful probe his way, but Schuldig deflected it, proving that the other telepath hadn't gotten in.

"I didn't get under your shields, Schuldig-" Xavier began. Crawford cut him off, stepping forward and shoving his gun in the other man's face. Schuldig saw Crawford's finger twitch over the trigger. Xavier lifted an eyebrow. A small, startled sound escaped from Crawford's lips as his gun twisted viciously in his hand, bending his trigger finger at a painful angle as the gun seemingly glued itself to the park bench's metal back. A fire blazed in Crawford's narrowed eyes, but he allowed no further sounds to escape as the gun continued to put what looked like painful pressure against the joints of his trapped finger.

Xavier smiled at Schuldig brightly. "Now, as I was saying...I didn't get under your shields. See, that's the problem with telepaths like you. It's so easy for you. You're so wrapped up in your talent, you don't bother to learn how to use your other senses to read people. I don't have to get in your head to know that you and tall, dark, and handsome over here," he cocked his head towards Crawford again, "are fucking. I can tell just looking at you." Xavier's eyes momentarily lost their focus and the gun twisted further against the bench. Crawford's finger was probably being dislocated. /And I can see you don't like that we're doing this to him now, Schu. Your poker face isn't bad, but your body language sucks. Being out of Rosenkreuz is making you soft./

Xavier's eyes went unfocused again. Schuldig recognized the signs of an involved telepathic discussion. He took advantage of the distraction and looked to Crawford. /Brad?/

His mental voice was tight but controlled. /We need her. Can you get a lock on her position?/

Schuldig tried again. /No./

/We take him, and she's likely to bolt. Bringing down the secondary target without the primary will be considered a failure./

Schuldig was about to ask what they should do when Xavier's eyes cleared. "Well gentlemen, it's been a pleasure, but my associate and myself have another appointment." Xavier's hazel eyes softened marginally as they settled on Schuldig. /Another time, Schu./ "Unless you want boss man to lose that finger, I'd suggest you keep your piece in your pants until we're well on our way."

Schuldig smirked at the choice of words, inclining his head to Xavier. Xavier gave him a last sparkling smile, almost maniacal in its intensity, then took off into the woods at a loping run. Schuldig watched his retreating back a few moments before turning to Crawford. His hand was still pinned to the bench.

"Want me to go after them?"

Crawford tried to use his free hand to pry the gun away. It was like the thing was welded to the spot. Through clenched teeth he said, "Can you track her? Got anything to use against her besides your gun?"

Schuldig knew Crawford already had the answers to those questions, so he crossed the pavement for a closer look at Crawford's hand. "Think she fused the metals?"

"No," he gritted out, hissing as he tried to flex the injured finger within its prison. "They're just magnetized. Get Prodigy out here. He should be able to do something about it."

Schuldig was just reaching into his coat pocket for his cell phone when Crawford's gun suddenly slipped free. It dangled sickly from his finger; the joint of the second knuckle had swollen, trapping it between the trigger and its guard. Crawford used his free hand to pull the gun off, tensing a little as the abused flesh was forced through but making no sound. Oh yeah, definitely dislocated. Crawford took a few deep breaths and then pulled the finger back into place. He grunted when it settled in its socket. Schuldig could see perspiration collecting on Crawford's hairline, but the man's voice was steady as he asked, "Are you compromised?"

"What?"

"Can he track you?"

Schuldig wanted to make an immediate denial, but knew Crawford would want a thoughtful assessment. Xavier had managed to worm his way in enough to lead Schuldig here, but Schuldig had been wide open at the time. He carefully took stock of the state of his shields. "No."

Crawford leveled him with a steely gaze. "Ok. Take precautions in returning to base. They could be waiting to follow."

Schuldig nodded. He doubted Xavier would be the type to tail, but he knew Crawford was right to be cautious. He watched as Crawford shut his eyes, brows furrowing in concentration. Pushing a vision.

"When you get back, I want you to take Farfarello out shopping."

Schuldig's lips quirked. "Are we looking for anything in particular?"

"Yes," Crawford grinned coldly. "I know he's been admiring a set of ceramic knives for some time now. I think it's about time he got them."

"Ja," Schuldig said, turning away to head back to the street. Crawford's hand on his arm stopped him.

"Don't be long. There are some things we need to discuss."

"I look forward to it, Brad," Schuldig said, brushing off Crawford's hand before he took off down the path.