#and in a cruel twist of irony nine who does not survive their stint in intelligence and is unable to remain

[ebitenpura]

I've been debating whether to make this idea canon for his backstory or not, but it's heavily suggested that Eight was the main executioner for a large portion of the previous iteration of ImpIntel before Keeper takes office as...well, Keeper. He was the youngest of his predecessors, but that made him what they viewed as the only person to carry on their future work when they'd all lived out past their primes as agents; their careers had matured into retirement territory and they were already far too dangerous to not be under permanent suspicion, but Eight was fresh. He was new. He was non-existent, even if he was set to directly replace an old Cipher designation, which granted him both entry into the old guard and a strange status as a fledgling agent that put him apart from other green officers.

As such, they entrusted him with the rest of their work and their legacies. The role of Cipher Eight is to be the last resort, the reserve, the one who carries out the final act. He personally took the mission to kill them when it was time. Even still, most asked him to. There was such a degree of trust between the old Ciphers and his supposed role that they could leave this world satisfied that whatever forbidden intel they left behind and any loose ends they couldn't take care of while alive would be taken care of by him, because he was one of them. In this, they found more peace than an end at the hands of their masters. He was their hope for the future, the culmination of everything they chose to safeguard, and the carrier of their last wills; their secrets died with them and in him.

Once gone, the Sith would change faces and hands and Intelligence would be dramatically overturned and redone, as it always did with every new cycle. Not once would they look at the last remnant of it and think the traitors' plans still survived, because to kill so many of his own fellows surely meant Eight had no part in their work. No Sith suspected him, and no agent trusted him for the betrayal of his own people, but this was the legacy he had wrought.

No one knows the truth, save for Keeper, that wily old man who found an empty office waiting for him after an up-and-coming young agent had cleared his predecessors out, and Lokin, the other old man who seems to have made it his personal duty to regale such deaths to the successor, Nine.

In some way, Eight secretly hoped he would be the one to eliminate Nine when the order from the Council came.

Fate had other plans, and so it was never to be.