Part 3 of the gay supervillain fic. In which we deal with fair treatment of henchmen and a wee bit of supervillain backstory. I swear I'm not obsessed with this vid. Honestly I'm not.

Title: On Finances and Private Vengeances
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Genghis Khan Music Video - Miike Snow
Characters/Pairings: Michael White (Secret Agent), Sphinx (Supervillain), Jeremy Anders (Henchman), Subramanyam (Scientist). Michael/Sphinx
Summary: Michael marvels at how Sphinx bases operate, and the subjects of money and personal vengeance take an unexpected turn
Wordcount: 3368
Warnings/Notes: Um. Supervillains. As in lasers and casual talk of murdering people. Also romance, and fair treatment of henchmen. Because.
Disclaimer: Not mine

On Finances and Private Vengeances

"... You realise you make no sense, don't you?"

Michael wasn't sure he'd meant to say that out loud. It had just ... popped out, watching as Sphinx' organisation calmly and cheerfully decommissioned the test facility in case of future AAE interference. It had always been one of the more annoying facets of hunting the man down, the fact that apparently all of his individual facilities were low-key and interchangeable enough to simply be packed up and abandoned as required. Most of them lacked all the more flamboyant features your standard supervillain lair tended to boast, making them bloody difficult to find in the first place, the loyalty of his staff made them bloody difficult to infiltrate, and then he just up and bloody packed once the infiltrators were discovered. It was bloody annoying.

It was also, Michael realised with some vague cheer, not his problem anymore. Now, he was watching it from the other side, and it was something of a fascinating procedure.

Most of what the man moved were people and information. The physical infrastructure, even large parts of the laser assembly itself, a few key components aside, were left as they stood. It was files and data and scientists that the organisation prioritised, and it was files and data and people that were moved in the most rational and low-key manner humanly possible. There were rental trucks involved. An industrial complex packing up and moving to a new site, nothing more. They didn't even go very far. With the tests largely completed for this phase, the move to a larger weapons facility could be delayed until all the data had been run through, which as a bonus meant that a large portion of the staff could maintain their local cover positions for a while longer as well. They could just ... blend back into the surrounding area, ordinary workers who might never have been involved in supervillain activities at all.

It was, really and truly, incredibly bizarre. Michael had infiltrated nearly two dozen supervillain lairs and facilities over the years, and they ... none of them were like this. Things didn't work like this. Supervillains didn't work nine-to-five, clock off and commute home to their families. They didn't pay people overtime to show up at midnight and help them murder enemy agents. They didn't run medical benefits and honest-to-god, non-horrifying private hospitals and clinics to take care of wounded henchmen. They didn't provide cover stories, and family housing, and retirement benefits for their private armies. They didn't make their facilities so normal and banal and nondescript that they could be packed up with a minimum of fuss and just ... moved out of the line of fire. The game just did not work like that.

Supervillain lairs were things like abandoned missile silos and private islands and Siberian nuclear bases and armed compounds in the middle of various wastelands. They were elaborate lairs built onto sea beds and constructed in miles of secret tunnels underneath major cities. Henchmen were disposable entities, as often killed by their own employers for failed missions as by enemy agents, temporary and often unstable hired guns with a tendency to brutalise kidnapped scientists to distract themselves from their own expendability. Not always, of course, there'd been the odd decent military-esque command structure or corrupt corporation thrown in there, but generally speaking. The kind of people who blew things up with experimental weapons and took over small countries for fun did not, usually, make for the best employers or the sanest and safest of workplaces.

Sphinx wasn't like that. His organisation wasn't either. If it weren't for the experimental laser and the whole planning to ransom various parts of the globe thing, plus the odd murder of an enemy agent or twelve, the entire operation would have seemed ... almost normal. Almost sane. Which was, in its way, almost more terrifying than any of more vicious specimens Michael had dealt with over the years.

It made sense of a few things, though. Not only the difficulty in tracking down and finding the man over the years. It made sense of the loyalty he inspired. It made sense of how his organisation was so damned difficult to pin down, so difficult to infiltrate and sow discord inside. His people never betrayed him, because almost all of them genuinely wanted to work for him.

Most of them, Michael had learned, had been picked up and chewed up by various other supervillain organisations over the years. The scientists and the soldiers, anyway. Private military forces tended to be a small world, and the global science community as a whole were well used to be preyed on by every megalomaniac with the budget to kidnap them. Since the war, and the explosion of supervillain activity after it, careers in most of the hard sciences were among the riskiest in the world. Almost everyone in the handful of Sphinx' facilities around the world had served or been forced to serve under someone else before, and by comparison to most of them Sphinx must have seemed practically a godsend. Hell, Michael had thought that himself, hadn't he? Somewhere in the back of his head, he'd been comparing Sphinx and his people to the AAE, and in the end it hadn't been the supervillain who'd been found wanting.

People had sensible working hours with Sphinx. They had the option to have families, social lives, loved ones that would been given covers and protected. His private forces had training and medical support and options to retire after injuries. Facilities had evacuation procedures and drills for civilians and limited weapons training for those in high-risk areas. Experiments went according to practical schedules. Relatively speaking, very few things blew up on Sphinx bases that hadn't been intended to in the first place. They were, all in all, just generally pretty safe places to be working by almost any standards, and practically unheard of in supervillain circles. As Michael had rapidly found out, you couldn't have pried some of these people away from Sphinx with a nitroglycerine-enhanced crowbar.

And a lot of it, Michael discovered, a very great deal of it, was because the man himself didn't live it up at their expense. Even beyond just not killing people for general failures and rendering his entire workforce paranoid and skittish like a lot of other supervillains, Sphinx also didn't tend to lord it over people. He commuted, for crying out loud. He worked hours alongside his people and went home to his family at the end of them. He lived in a suburban family house just like most of them, didn't spend any noticeable amount of the organisation's money on personal benefits, didn't sit up in a luxury private apartment on base and casually drop recalcitrant scientists down trapdoors for their insolence. He wore a uniform. He quite possibly washed it himself (or would do now, if his tight lipped expression after going home to his family was anything to go by). He was just ... he was ridiculously, impossibly normal. If it hadn't been for the golden prosthetic and the occasional dancing fit and the fact that he was, in fact, still a supervillain, he could have been any normal general manager in the world.

And the craziest thing of all was, it worked. It made people feel good, feel appreciated, feel safe. It made them feel like their boss was one of them, like he'd look out for them when it counted, and not even wrongly so. From what Michael had seen so far, from what he'd witnessed in six months of trying to infiltrate the organisation and a few days of being part of it, that feeling of general safety and protection wasn't false. Sphinx could and would cheerfully murder entire enemy organisations to protect even one of his own people. Once you proved that he could trust you, once you proved that you could be counted on to keep him and the rest of the organisation safe in your turn, there wasn't a lot Sphinx wouldn't do to keep you safe.

It left ... it left a warm feeling in the gut. It really did. There wasn't a lot of safety to go around in this business, not on either side of the line. AAE sent 'problematic' agents on suicide missions. Half the supervillains in the world would kill underlings as soon or sooner than genuine enemies, if only because the underlings were closer to hand and more aggravating on a daily basis. Finding someone safe? Finding a boss who'd be reasonable and practical and wouldn't shoot you the first time you dared to complain? That was the holy grail of henchmen everywhere. These people would shoot someone for even a suggestion that he meant to harm their boss. The fact that Sphinx had ... had loved him, had wanted him alive, was probably the only reason Michael himself wasn't buried in very small pieces somewhere right now.

It made no sense. It made every sense, in a rational world, but it made no sense whatsoever for who the man was and what profession he was in. Sphinx had to be the strangest supervillain Michael had ever seen, and now that the laser was back off the table (and decommissioned), he felt more than happy to say so.

His ... lover, Michael could say that now, his lover blinked at him, a little nonplussed. “What do you mean? Because if it’s the dancing, I’ll remind you that you do a mean two-step yourself--”

Michael shook his head, waving a hand to cut him off. “No,” he said, smiling faintly. “I’m not a complete hypocrite. There’s nothing like a good show dance to liven things up a little. I meant the …” He paused, gestured helplessly at everything around them. “The way you run the place. Overtime. Shared profits. Family cover stories. The fact that Anders makes almost as much out of it as you do. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a supervillain base operate like this in my life, and I’m not exactly inexperienced in that regard. You are … You are very strange. Efficient, I’ll grant you, nobody else has managed to hold onto me before, but … strange. You do know that, don’t you?”

Sphinx narrowed his eyes at him, crossing his arms warily. "It's not a problem, is it?" he asked, a little defensively. "I mean, if the money is going to be an issue, or--"

"No!" Michael said, very quickly. And then, more gently: "No, it's not a problem. I don't need ... Well, I'd like to think I didn't need luxury to choose to be with someone. I wasn't looking to be your kept man. I'm not ... The money isn't a problem. Really, it isn't."

Sphinx' shoulders eased down from where they'd been tightening up under his ears. He looked more relieved than Michael would have expected, until he remembered that the man had spent a large portion of the last four days having 'discussions' with his wife. Which Michael was trying to stay out of, because he didn't think there was anything he could do except make the whole thing a whole lot worse. It wasn't ... he'd played the other man before, for the job, but this wasn't ... this was different. This was real, it was personal for him as well as them, he knew he'd already damaged enough that he didn't want to make things any worse.

Also, if Barbara was anything like her husband, there was the distinct possibility that she'd actually just shoot him the second he showed his face in her vicinity, which Michael had an inkling would end badly for more than just him. That wasn't the kind of thing he wanted to happen in range of Sphinx' kids. As introductions to the family went, he'd really like to try for something less traumatising and less lethal, if at all possible.

So he understood, a little, why Sphinx looked both hunted and relieved that Michael wasn't going to take issue with ... with their take-home pay. God. That wasn't something Michael had thought about in years. He hadn't had a home to take pay to in years. He lived in a hotel between missions. A variety of hotels, usually, depending on who he'd pissed off most recently and how likely they were to be able to track him down. He wasn't ... This wasn't an issue for him. Mostly because he didn't know what the hell he was doing, but still. Of all the things he was concerned about right now, money was very far from the top of the list.

"Are you sure?" Sphinx asked him, eyeing him a little hesitantly. Michael blinked, and the villain tentatively uncrossed his arms to move closer to him. "Look, I know ... I know there's a certain amount of glamour in the life of a secret agent, I know AAE provided a lot of ... If it's problem I--"

"It's not," Michael said, very firmly, and reached over to catch Sphinx' hand gently and tangle his fingers through the other man's. "It's not a problem, Sphinx. The glamour was all ... It was all a lie. Just another lie. I didn't own any of it. I'm not sure how much I owned of anything. And, well, I was paying for it with my life, wasn't I? So it was a rather expensive lie as well." He looked down at their linked hands, held them a little harder than he meant to before he caught himself. "I'd rather something real. A home. I don't care how much it costs."

There was a pause for a second there, a beat in which Sphinx apparently didn't know how to answer that, and then ... then the villain tugged Michael forward abruptly, brought his arm up around him and pulled Michael down into ... into a hug. Just a hug. Not even a kiss, nothing remotely sexual or seductive at all. Sphinx pulled him down into a hug, and before Michael knew it he was wrapping his arms almost violently tight around the other man in turn, clinging to him fiercely and blindly. Sphinx' hand was warm in his hair, the hand that had been poised to kill him or free him a few days ago, and right this moment Michael wouldn't care if it never let him go again. Not in all the rest of his life.

"I really am going to kill those bastards," his villain growled quietly in his ear, rubbing a hand up and down Michael's back. "I know, I know. A lot of them are only doing their jobs. I'll research it first, all right? I'll make sure they're complicit before I get Subramanyam to shoot them with some of his more interesting inventions. He's been wanting to field test some of his smaller, more interpersonal work anyway."

Michael hiccoughed around his laugh, squeezing his villain gratefully and ignoring the couple of 'Awwws' from Sphinx' personal guard behind them. He leaned in, hid his face in Sphinx' neck, despite having to stoop a little to manage it.

"Do you promise to do that for everyone you pull out of someone else's organisation?" he asked lightly. "Do you murder everyone who's hurt one of yours?"

He didn't entirely expect an answer, but Sphinx straightened a little in his arms, a stiff, angry strength to his spine. "When I can," the villain said, low and cold and entirely serious, and Michael pulled back a little bit to look at him, to blink down at his lover in bemusement. Sphinx looked right back, one eyebrow arching stiltedly beneath the gold of his prosthesis. It wasn't a joke, Michael realised. Not even close.

"... You really do, don't you," he said, feeling a strange swooping in his belly that was somewhere between guilt and horror and warmth. He'd no excuse. He'd had an idea, listening to the stories around the base the past couple of days, remembering that first night and how dangerously close Sphinx had come to simply wiping AAE off the map altogether. He should be horrified. He should be a lot more horrified than he was. It was just that it did leave a warm feeling in the gut. It really did. The world they lived in, supervillains and agents alike, there was something ... so guiltily wonderful about being defended on that level. It didn't happen often. It just wasn't a regular feature of their world.

"I do," Sphinx said, casually icy. "It's good for business, of course. Getting rid of the competition is always useful. We take private requests, though. It's not easy being a henchman out there. Villains tend to take liberties." He smiled, a cold little curl of his lip, and reached up to tap the metal across his face gently. "My first employer gave me this. Golden Solomon. Eritrea, '54. The man was very free with molten metal in a temper. Almost got everyone on the base killed with his little melt-down during evacuation. Some people deserve to be shot in the head and dumped in their own crucibles, you know?"

Michael opened his mouth. Probably to agree, that was a sentiment he didn't think a lot of people would argue with, but for a second he ... he was too caught, just for a moment, with that image. Gold on Sphinx' face, next to his eye, and 'molten metal in a temper'. Michael had spent a fair bit of his career strapped down on various people's tables, threatened with a whole variety of interesting fates, but just that thought, that image, Sphinx ...

"... I know," he said, very distantly, his hands curling delicately into fists as his sides. "I know exactly what some people deserve. I really do."

Sphinx squinted at him a little, apparently not quite following that. Maybe he thought Michael was still thinking about his section chief at AAE, the man who'd sent him to die, but really the bastard was one of the furthest things from his thoughts. It was another bastard entirely, one apparently almost a decade dead, that Michael was currently imagining rendering down into very, very tiny pieces. He wouldn't even follow it up with something pithy and smart. Some people weren't even worth a smart comment while they died.

"... All right then," Sphinx said, still confused and slightly wary, but willing to go with it for Michael's sake. He offered a little smile, a shy, affectionate thing, and patted Michael on the arm. "I'll go tell Subramanyam to pick out a few things for field testing, then. He'll probably thank you. He doesn't get half the chances he really wants for his more personal projects. I mean, we do try, but in between operations there just aren't a lot of spare targets ..."

He wandered off, shaking his head as he visibly tried to think of ways to give his scientist more interesting opportunities for testing lethal oddities on people, and Michael stared almost dazedly after him. His hands were still flexing gently in and out of fists, vague murderous impulses humming under his skin and oddly not conflicting in the slightest with the other, softer impulses that even just the thought of Sphinx was beginning to inspire. Michael wondered distantly if that was what it was like to love a supervillain, or if it was just what it was like to love Sphinx. He wasn't the usual supervillain, after all. He was very far from it indeed.

"So," Captain Anders said, moseying up beside Michael and smiling almost sympathetically over at him. "Tell me honestly. Just how many AAE agents would you murder right now to keep him safe?"

And Michael blinked at him for a second, and Michael looked back to follow Sphinx' absently dancing figure across the remains of the base, and when Michael finally answered, it was with complete sincerity and only the smallest twinge of guilt.

"... All of them," he said, and wondered if he should be worried at how much he truly meant it.

Captain Anders, though, just clapped him cheerfully on the back as he moved past, and called back over his shoulder as he followed the boss:

"You might as well call me Jeremy, Agent. It's what everyone who sticks around does."


A/N: I have decided that head-boppy scientist in the chair is Subramanyam, purveyor of oddball lethalities, who doesn't necessarily get on well with chief laser scientist guy (grey-haired with the remote). Because why not.
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