#sibert

"This is senseless!" I protest as the dark-haired Miqo'te I foolishly employ from time to time grabs my hand and pulls me down a Limsan street. Overhead, the sky is as close to pitch black as it can get without completely committing to the endeavor. Big, thick clouds blanket the canvas blotting out any sign of stars above. There's a faint ring of silver gray where the moon tries to peek through, not yet defeated but still clearly struggling against the clouds.

Lia, or Malika as I've heard some call her, doesn't seem bothered. She and I have worked together long enough that I have to accept that the more senseless something is, the more likely she is to do it.

"Senseless?" She asks with a laugh. "Birdy,"

My name is Sibert. She refuses to call me that- specifically because it annoys me that she won't. I wonder not for the first and certainly not for the last time why I put up with her annoying and disrespectful behavior at all.

She continues after giving me a chance to grimace at this new nickname. "What's senseless is that you hadn't asked that girl out for so long because you were afraid of looking stupid and when you finally did ask her out- you asked her to go dancing with you. When you've never danced before!"

I've no argument here. She's right, of course. The girl in question is a long time customer of my business. Well, my legitimate business, the home goods store. Not the crime one that she hopefully does not know about and hopefully does not ever know about.

"I wasn't thinking," I admit. "It just came out." I mock myself. "Do you want to go dancing this weekend? Perhaps after that we can go rock climbing? Or maybe walk a tightrope together over a volcano? Or any other stupid activities I don't know how to do and that terrify me?"

"Wow, Sibs! Great imagination! I'd take you up on those for what it's worth."

"But you're crazy."

"Fair point." Malika stops so I stop. I only now register where we've ended up. Lower deck near the water.

"No," I hear myself protest. Gods, my voice is so whiny. Who would honestly want to dance with me? It's a miracle she said yes. Or a curse. I can't dance so I'm leaning towards curse. "This is too dangerous. I can't swim. Let's go somewhere else."

Malika raises her eyebrows and grins. It's never good when she does that. "And you call me crazy! You live near a beautiful ocean and you've never wanted to swim in it? Doesn't swim, doesn't dance, doesn't rock climb, doesn't tightrope over active volcanoes…" She chuckles. "What does he do?"

"Fret mostly," I admit. "Make wooden chairs. Do math. Fret some more."

Her grin grows wider. "After this dance lesson- which is taking place right here- broaden your ambitions, Bert. Make small wooden boats. Then get in them. Stop ignoring the ocean just because she scares you. Ask her to dance next."

"That's highly unlikely," I answer. I let Malika maneuver my hands to prepare for this dance near water's edge. She's often a horrible thorn in my side- complicating just as many jobs as she completes- and I frequently think about cutting her from my business entirely. But out here in the dark she laughs, not unkindly, at my clumsy footing as she carefully counts the dance steps for me. She even does her best to protect me from falling into the water when I stumble and doesn’t make a big deal out of the effort or mock me when I’m visibly shaken.

It's a rare and surprisingly gentle side of her I see out here illuminated in the faint glow of Limsa's lamps and the sliver of the silver moon as together they fight against the darkness she has us dancing in. And I find myself thinking, just for a moment, that all the worrying, fretting, and angsting I do- and all the time I’d spent not learning to dance… well…

He had always been overlooked. It had never seemed fair to him. His older brothers had been wildly successful: they were taller than him, more handsome, had an admirable easy charm when dealing with their crushes, and had fallen into very respectable careers that came with equally respectable amounts of money. They had large, happy families. They had everything they wanted and had done, from his point of view, very little to achieve it.

Sibert, on the other hand, was a a bit on the short side, a bit more average and forgettable in appearance, he was more withdrawn in demeanor, and he couldn't keep a relationship or job to save his life. When opportunities for employment came his way he’d sometimes get the job, but he’d rarely get the promotion. Far more often than not, he was simply forgotten and overlooked.

But he really shouldn't have been. 

Because behind his awkward lack of charm and his palpable discomfort when forced to deal with aggressively extroverted individuals, Sibert's mind was always at work. He knew numbers better than anyone else he'd ever met and if given access to a business' books… he could do magic with those numbers. And regrettably for those employers who hired him only to mistreat him, forget him, overlook him, and eventually replace him… he could do magic with those numbers that businesses never caught onto.

His rather bland, sallow-skinned, tired eyed appearance that was so easy to disregard was an asset to him. He hadn't realized it at first, but he came to. For on the occasion that he'd get up to less than legal activities… no one ever thought to question him. No adjective seemed to fit him better than "boring" and he had never given anyone cause to suspect he was anything but a straight-laced, law-fearing and law-abiding man just trying to put his time in at work before going home to arrange his books by alphabetical order and eat his unseasoned dinner.

When money went missing, they didn't even notice at first. When Sibert started making more money that he then squirreled away… no one even noticed at all.

Sibert was a very serious man with very serious responsibilities and a very serious headache. That headache was named Liah and no amount of medicine would cure it.

The headache sprawled out in the chair in his office, her legs kicked up onto his desk and crossed at the ankles. The legs wore thigh high boots. The legs almost always wore thigh high boots.

The headache sat on his side of the desk and read his copy of the Mythril Eye while he stood, resigned and sighing, on the other side of his own furniture. “Liah,” he said sternly and then sighed again. He didn’t have the energy or patience for this today. “What are you doing?” She grinned, though he couldn’t see it, and dropped the paper back down onto her lap, making as much noise with it as she possibly could. 

“Hey, Sibby,” she said with a wink and smiled wider when he sighed once more. He hated nicknames. That’s why she gave them to him. “Had to read the paper because there’s no drinks here for me to occupy myself with instead.” “There’s no drinks because you have poor behavior when you are drunk.” “I have poor behavior all the time,” she answered and sat up right in the chair. “Don’t go blaming that on the poor drinks, Sibs.”

He shook his head and gestured with a finger for her to move out of his chair. She stared back at him as if trying to decide whether or not defying his request would lead to a more satisfying outcome for herself, then ultimately slid out of the seat and presented it to him with a low wave of her hand. “I don’t know why I put up with you,” the stern faced hyur grumbled, the fatigue of the interaction already settling into his eyes and voice. He had recently dyed his hair to cover the gray. He wondered if he’d have to do it again after this interaction.

“You put up with me because I’m good at what I do and I cost a hell of a lot less than the other people you were thinking about hiring for this job. I’ve got the right of it, don’t I?”

She had the right of it. It was a high risk infiltration job and the item in question was so unique and so valuable he needed to make sure that whoever he sent after it was motivated to bring it back to him. He wouldn’t trust the thigh highed legs in front of him with much else, but he trusted them to finish a job and run the goods back to him at a price he could afford.

Malika, or Liah rather, was an overtly flirtatious, back-talking, defiant pain in the ass with little respect for… well anything… and least of all for any power disparity that might come between jobs finder and jobs taker.  She took these high risk jobs first for the thrill of them and second for the promise of a handful of gil and her choice of “items of significance.” This usually meant she’d steal extra from the site she broke into, but occasionally meant the job givers would have to give her something of theirs in payment.

“What do you have me doing this time, Bert? Fortified mansion? Grand company supply room? Heavily armed pirate ship?”

He snickered. “A new museum, Liah.”

“Well, that sounds boring,” she furrowed her brow and made to collect her bags to leave. “Get some kid off the street to throw a rock through the window to grab your art. I don’t care about easy museum jobs, Sighs. You know that.”

“It’s not easy,” he assured her. The front door to his legitimate business, a home goods store, opened and from the dark office room that Sibert and Malika occupied they could hear the sound of multiple customers greeting one frazzled, teenaged employee who did not expect to have to do much work today and was not exactly thrilled to be proven wrong.

Sibert lowered his voice and explained in thieves cant as quickly as he could, “Need two big rounders to visit the neighborhood around Mist.”

“Two?” Malika asked. It felt like the sort of thing she should follow up with: ‘Out of the question, Sibert. I work alone.’ But she didn’t follow up with that because the addition of another thief meant this _was_ a big job. And also because she never called him by his actual name.

“The score is old yellow tin fancy booze,” he pointed to his ring finger. “Bagged flash. Second floor. Double boxed.”

“What?” Malika asked blankly. “Yeah, look. I speak the cant, Sibert.” She broke her own rule about saying his name because rules, even her own, were stifling. “But that’s not how you do it and they can’t hear us anyway. Just speak plainly.”

He shook his head. If there was even a chance that this could be heard by anyone other than himself, Liah, and Tomas the teenage employee it wasn’t worth giving away any details.

He pulled a crudely drawn map of the place from his desk and put in her hands. “Give it a visit when it opens,” he said conversationally. “New business with interesting displays. Hours are 8am-9pm. Let me know what you think when we meet up for dinner tomorrow night.”

She blinked rapidly and mouthed, “Tomorrow night?” back at him. That wasn’t much of a turn around time. Perhaps this _would_ be exciting.

“Who should I–”

He cut her off to listen to what was going on outside the office. It was a very in depth conversation about the quality of lamps.

“Hey. Since your cousin’s in town maybe grab a few drinks at happy hour at the Wench before you go and you can go together.”

“…” She sighed. If she was a headache he was becoming a migraine. “Why two boxes and what’s in it for me?”

“Just pick up a souvenir,” he said dismissively. 

“I don’t think so,” she argued and stepped closer. She was likely going to “pick up a souvenir” anyway but his behavior had annoyed her and that just wouldn’t stand. She was supposed to be the annoying one here. “Need something of yours this time. You know, as a precious reminder of the time I stood in your office and you spout charming gibberish at me. The necklace.”

She meant the Nymeian lily necklace he always wore under his suit collars. He kept it hidden from sight at all times because it was given to him by an old flame years ago…before things soured and she’d walked out on him. The ivory lily on the necklace was the only thing in their relationship that hadn’t withered and died. Besides, of course, his own one sided feelings for the elezen who had left him ato run this shitty little home goods store on his own.

“Out of the question.”

“Good luck then, boss. Hard to come by someone who’ll take on a job like that at such short notice, but I believe in you.” She picked up her bag and started to turn the handle of the door.

“Wait, wait, wait.” He sighed. Again. She was right. Maybe it was time to give up the necklace and the one-sided feeling anyway. “It’s yours.”

“Excellent.” She took off a glove to shake his hand, clinching the deal. “And what else should I know about?”

“Locked up tight outside business hours. Hired a lot of extra help to watch outside. Double box. You’ll know it when you see it. Your cousin will have more details.”

Happy hour at the Wench? She needed more details.

“Which cousin?”

Tomas banged on the door in a panic and threw it wide open, several very angry customers behind him. “Boss, they’re real mad about the lamps. I told them we don’t do discounts, but…”

Sibert moved briskly toward the door. “Bye, Liah. Have fun.”

“Wait! Which cousin??”

Fuck it. She’d figure it out on her own. The job still sounded boring, his details were garbage and his thieves cant was appalling…but she’d wanted that necklace for years.

Almost forgot to show of Serainne's sage glam! here's a lil story to go with it:

Serainne: Sibert, may I ask you a question?

Sibert: You just did, but go ahead.

Serainne: When were you planning on telling me that the "cool eye patch" you so thoughtfully gave me was the most identifying mark of a criminal wanted in every state of Ilsabard?

Sibert: o_o ...*attempts to shukuchi out of his armor*

Zantetsuken, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck: