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The first thing Red always taught him was to choose his battles.
But Axl's thought long and hard about it, and the more he considers it, the more he thinks that yes, this really is worth risking Zero's wrath, and so he watches the transmissions from command closely and cross-references deployment coordinates with levels of relative Maverick activity and when a multiple-day deployment finally comes up for the 0th Unit, he makes his move.
Pallette got him the codes, after swearing him to absolute secrecy, and he's into Zero's quarters in half a second, with twenty-something rolls of tin foil cradled in his arms. He starts big, with the largest items of furniture, working his way down to each individual pencil stored in the desk (and why would Zero even own pencils in the height of the electronic age, anyway?), the desk drawers themselves, the pictures on the wall...
When he leaves the room a good eight hours later, every single item has been individually wrapped in tin foil.
And when the 13th's own deployment orders come in half a day later, he can sit back and bask in the knowledge that when Zero finally finds what he's done, Axl won't be anywhere in the vicinity to get what's coming to him.
—he'll have to ask Pallette to pull the security feeds for him, too. But he'll make it up to her somehow.