NinthFeather's Meta Archive

 

One of the most popular topics for the three of them is complaining about work, as is natural for three co-workers.  At one point this devolves into a contest of who can do the best impression of their more annoying co-workers. Unsurprisingly, Xion wins. Roxas does manage to get Demyx’s speech patterns down pretty well, though, and Axel produces something close to Xigbar’s drawl. 

 

After Xion and Roxas’s success with sharing Keyblades, Axel gets curious about whether either of them could handle his chakrams. This does not go well, partly because his weapons are sized for him, and both Xion and Roxas are significantly shorter than he is, and used to weapons with blades that only go forward. It ends in Axel scolding them repeatedly, “No, no, you don’t stab things with them, you gotta–uuugh, look, let me demonstrate again.”

 

Once, Axel comes back from two missions in a row, goes to meet the others for ice cream immediately, and falls asleep before he can even start eating. He wakes up to find Roxas halfway through his ice cream and beaming at him while Xion has his head on her lap and is tugging at his hair. He sits up, to a chorus of giggles, and realizes they’ve done his hair. He pulls the ponytail out before anyone can find a camera, moaning about how he probably looked like Xigbar. Roxas had taken photos while he was still asleep, and took one with him when he left the Organization.

 

The three of them are fast on their way to becoming a local tall tale among the kids in Twilight Town–”If you look up at the Clock Tower at the right time, you can sometimes see mysterious cloaked figures there.” The person who own the ice cream stall knows exactly who they are and isn’t about to ruin the kids’ harmless spooky story by telling them that it’s just three other kids who like ice cream and apparently also heights.

 

In Roxas’s first days with the Organization, he’s minimally verbal and has trouble with fine motor coordination. When his powers start being channeled to Xion, that starts happening again, only this time it’s accompanied by fatigue. It starts small–dropping ice cream, giving shorter answers to questions, looking confused and drowsy when he hasn’t done much to get that way, and scares the heck out of Axel, who starts avoiding Saïx when he can because he knows he’ll get a mission if he talks to the guy. He doesn’t want to be away more than necessary when he’s not sure he can trust Roxas not to fall off the tower by accident.

 

Both Roxas and Xion talk to each other when they’re “asleep,” but their approaches are different. Roxas pretends she’s awake, and holds a one-sided conversation, imagining responses for her to keep it going.  Xion gives summaries of what’s happening while he’s sleeping, making sure to focus on the things that she thinks would interest him most. 

 

Axel doesn’t visit as much when they’re sleeping; he knows there are eyes on him and that appearing too attached could have consequences for all three of them. When he does come, he doesn’t talk–he’ll adjust Xion’s sheets or ruffle Roxas’s hair, but his mouth stays shut. He has a lot he wants to say, but he doesn’t want to say it in a place where it might be heard by someone else.

 

Lyle was actually a pretty important part of Katharon–not so much rank-wise, though he did have some seniority, but in that he was one of the people who knew most of the ins and outs of the organization.  If he didn’t know the answer to a question, he knew someone who did; he was also more accessible than Klaus to to the average member.  Giving him up to Celestial Being was a loss in more ways than one.

 

He actually feels pretty uncomfortable in the Celestial Being uniform–it’s the first uniform he’s worn since boarding school.  Katharon couldn’t afford matching clothing, after all, they put what clothing budget they had into boots and body armor.  So it’s an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu, at first, to put it on.  He almost feels like a kid again.  But after he gets used to it, it starts feeling nice.  Like he’s a part of something.

 

He does realize that the rest of Celestial Being doesn’t always mean to make him feel like the odd one out.  They aren’t all falling back on history that he doesn’t share with them out of malice.  They don’t mean to leave out explanations that only he, out of the Meisters, needs–they really are just forgetting.  But it still feels like coming in second to his brother, and it’s frustrating.

 

Space is amazing, and it is not somehow less amazing to Lyle because he’s an adult fighting against an oppressive regime.  Sometimes he just spends his downtime staring out a window at the stars, and thinking about this one advantage that CB has over Katharon.

 

After he punches Setsuna for shooting down Anew, he thinks about the fact that he didn’t even once snap at the man for working with the people who killed his parents.  Somehow, he could forgive that, but not the death of a woman he’d only met a few weeks ago.  He remembers a grief counselor telling his preteen self about how grief was irrational, and tries to let that be the end of it.

 

He has possibly never been more jealous of anything his brother had than that silly little orange robot. Lyle loves the heck out of that thing, and tries hard to get Celestial Being to let him take Haro with him after the war.

 

As the son of a very traditional family, Hong Long is well-versed in Chinese tea culture and is actually slightly better than Lui Mei at most types of tea preparation.  However, she’s also the only family member that ever learned about his secret love for chai lattes–not the good kind, either, the kind one buys at restaurant chains and which have dubious amounts of actual chai in them.

 

Part of being his sister’s personal assistant/bodyguard is letting her pick his clothing, or at least guide his selections–it’s easiest if he either matches her, or wears something that otherwise blends into the background.  If things were otherwise, he’d dress much less formally.  His feelings on the whole matter are mixed–sometimes he chafes a bit at the lack of control, but sometimes he can’t help but think he wouldn’t dress near this nicely if he was the one making all the choices.

 

He’s actually a member of an internet forum where he occasionally vents–in extremely vague terms–about his position.  Everyone else on the forum thinks he’s got the worst office job ever.

 

His initial training as a martial artist happened when he was still the heir of the family.  He learned martial arts for philosophy and exhibitions, as part of being a well-rounded person with clear connections to his culture.  When Liu Mei became heir, he had to go back to those teachers and ask for additional lessons, this time with an eye to practical self-defense.

 

He doesn’t voice personal opinions on the job, ever.  It’s a standing policy, because there’s a conflict between his place as older sibling (which shouldn’t hold any weight anymore, he thinks, since he was passed over as heir, but–) and his place as his sister’s employee.  Anything he says would either carry too much weight, or too little. 

 

He does wonder, sometimes, if he should rein Lui Mei in.  Or at least offer some kind of guidance.  But he never quite gets up the courage to do it.

 

Early in their acquaintance, the arguments between them (mostly over the morality of proposed intervention strategies) were very one-sided.  Tieria would argue his position with calm logic, blocking every single argument Allelujah comes up with, while Allelujah, who ran away from the SSI far too early to have had any formal eduction in such things, just appealed to emotion or attacked Tieria’s character over and over.  But the thing is that Allelujah lacked education, not aptitude.  So after four rounds or so, he started picking up Tieria’s tricks, but doing a lot better at mixing emotion into the arguments.  Even four years later, Tieria doesn’t realize that Allelujah more-or-less learned rhetoric from him.

 

Since both of them are sheltered in different ways, neither realizes that the other’s coloring is odd until other members of Celestial Being remark on it.  

 

Allelujah wasn’t quite sure what to make of the Tieria who rescued him from A-Law prison.  The Tieria he knew before would have left him behind, found a new, better, pilot…clearly, something had changed.  He was curious, from the moment he emerged into Ptolemaios II, about exactly what that was.

 

Tieria is much quieter about it than, say, Milena, but he enjoys seeing Allelujah and Marie happy as much as anyone else.  It’s nice to see their laughter chase away the ghost of Allelujah wandering the ship with shadow-ringed eyes, rubbing at wrists just now freed from a straight-jacket  or standing alone in shadowed rooms, clutching his head.  

 

Allelujah, in turn, spends a lot of time among the reformed CB smoothing things over behind the scenes for Tieria, who has gotten a lot nicer but still has some issues with sounding vaguely dismissive almost all the time.  Tieria is trying something other than blind devotion to Veda; Allelujah figures that he deserves the time and space to figure it out without having to smooth out a dozen interpersonal conflicts.

 

Kati and Leesa’s grad school cohort was pretty tiny, so they ended up talking a lot during orientation, but mostly about their hometowns, what classes they were taking–just introductory stuff. Billy spent most of his orientation hiding in corners and hoping no one would notice him–he was a shy kid.

 

The point when they actually became friends was the second day of class.  They were discussing a reading, they had completely opposite opinions, and it turned into a full-out debate.  No one else got a word in edgewise and the teacher had a hard time stopping them so the class could end.  They scared their classmates with that, but the two of them were just thrilled that the other was countering their points so well.

 

Kati met Billy before Leesa did–the two of them were in the library looking for sources for projects.  Billy was writing a mock grant proposal, Kati was doing a paper on a historical war, and they both needed information on how the UN funding process worked in 2107, so they ended up in the same section of the library stacks, passing each other books that looked useful.  In the end, Kati got Billy’s email so she could send him any web sources she found.

 

Leesa was in the habit of stealing Kati’s computer–not surreptitiously, in full view of Kati, usually out of her hands.  The point wasn’t having the computer.  The point was watching Kati sputter and maybe sending a couple of weird messages from her accounts.  She was careful–she never did anything that was more than annoying.  But it was fun watching Kati’s eye twitch!

 

One day, not long after meeting Kati in the library, Billy got an email from her that just said, in all lower case, no punctuation: “so are you kati’s new boyfriend now or what because i need to know i’ve never given a shovel talk before and it sounds fun,” and that was how he met Leesa.

 

Leesa never got to give a shovel talk, either.  Kati didn’t date anyone at all, for the entire time they were in grad school.  None of the men there interested her, or so she told Leesa. Leesa would tease back that her first love was her extracurriculars.  And she had a point–Kati was president of three different clubs and a member of two more.

 

Billy and Leesa did date, for about a year, right before Leesa graduated.  Kati didn’t end up feeling like a third wheel too often, though she did end up in the middle of their fights a few times.  That was not pleasant–Leesa was direct, Billy was passive-aggressive, and Kati actually had to draw them a flowchart once.

 

Leesa broke up with Billy when she graduated.  She said she wasn’t ready for a long-distance relationship, or the kind of commitment it implied.

 

Dr. Eifmann knew all three of them because they spent half of their free time in his office once Billy started working with him formally.  He liked them, too, and thought they all showed great promise.

 

Leesa didn’t drink much in college.  None of them did.  When they did drink, it was socially, usually at department mixers or the like.  Leesa’s alcohol tolerance wasn’t what it later became, but it was still exceptional, while Billy could barely get through more than a single beer without getting tipsy.  No one knew how quickly Kati got drunk, because she never drank enough to get near that point.

 

Socially, Kati mostly just spent time with Billy, Kujo and people she knew from extracurriculars.  Billy’s other friends consisted of the kinds of engineering students who lit chemicals on fire to see what colors they would burn (which, really, should have prepared him for Graham).  Leesa somehow knew at least a little bit about every other person in her classes, but she still liked the time she spent with Billy and Kati best.

 

After Fallen Angels, Kati got invited back to the school to speak with the tactical forecasting program about the battle.  When the A-Laws rose to power, Billy was invited to speak with the robotics and engineering students about GN Drives.  After the war with the A-Laws, Leesa–Sumeragi–had her turn, but she spoke to the whole student body, about pacifism and the future.  And wondered if, next time, maybe Billy or Kati would be willing to stand on the same stage and talk about that, too.