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Roxas adjusted the binoculars until the building down the road came into sharp focus. Several run of the mill goons were stationed out front, one of them taking this assignment as a convenient smoke break. Roxas shifted his view over a little, catching sight of the person stationed in the alley, barely visible like a glowing ember in a dying fire. Good, Axel was in place.
He didn’t bother trying to check on Yuffie’s position; that was near impossible at the best of times. He returned his attention to the building in question, running through the game plan in his head one more time.
His ear piece burst into life with a buzz of static. “Hey, Shadow,” whispered Axel. Roxas had to resist the urge to slam his palm into his forehead. “What happened to radio silence?” he growled back.
“Yea, we’ll get back to that in a sec. Listen, what’s today?”
“Thursday.”
“Thanks, you’re brilliant really. What’s the date?”
Roxas sighed, dropped the binoculars and stared dejectedly at the sky. A silent prayer of why me later, he finally responded. “The fourteenth.”
“Exactly!” came Axel’s excited reply. Roxas waited to see where this was going.
There was only silence.
And then, “ahem. Hey, Shadow. I can set your world on fire if you’ll be my valentine.”
The silence returned with a vengeance. Roxas stared, unseeing, at the alley where he knew Axel was hiding and tried very hard to keep himself from gaping.
“Really?” hissed Yuffie. “That’s the best you can do?”
“You think you can do better?” snapped Axel.
Yuffie cleared her throat dramatically. “It looks like you stole my heart, valentine.”
There is a pause. Roxas considered beating his own brains out via the stone ledge in front of him. “Not bad,” said Axel with a note of appreciation in his voice.
What followed was the most painful twenty minute mission Roxas ever experienced. Not that it was a hard job, not by any account; these were run of the mill thugs, extremely below par to be honest but the vigilante business was having a slow night. No, what made it so terrible was the fact that both Axel and Yuffie kept punning at the bad guys.
Yuffie had one pinned to the wall via a conveniently thrown shuriken through his jacket sleeve. She grinned cheekily at him. “Looks like I’m stuck on you.”
Axel had just booted one firmly in the rear. “It’s such a kick when you’re around!”
When Thug Number Seven makes a sloppy swing with a dagger, Yuffie chirps “You’re a cut above the rest!”
Roxas was only too happy to see the flashing lights in the distance, a sure sign that Squall and his force is on the way. Roxas finishes tying up his collection of thugs, resisting the urge to smile because it is finally over.
“Oh! Oh! Man, does someone have a pen? We should totally leave a cheeky valentine note for Sargent Sourpuss.”
On his way home Roxas is surprised by his phone buzzing against his thigh. Curiously, he flicks the screen to life to see a text from Xion. I Less than Three You! (because it makes a heart, see <3?) and he’s too flabbergasted and appalled to do much more than send a neutral lol :) back.
Roxas practically tromped through the front door, ignoring Cid’s growl of “yer late.” He pauses at the bottom of the staircase. “If you don’t wake me up until it’s the fifteenth, I swear to god I will do all the chores without a single complaint.”
Cid motioned with his hands something that Roxas took to mean by all means and Roxas took the opportunity to fling himself into his bedroom, throw the lock on the door and the window, and bury his head beneath a pillow with a promise that next year he would be conveniently sequestered away from all the crazy no matter what.