As Ellie crosses the room, Phineas watches Ray like a mean kid watches ants with a magnifying glass. She curls her fist and finds she’s still holding the marble; she’ll have to give it back next time Ellie comes by.
The space around Ray is an ugly gravitational pull that Ellie tries to avoid. She doesn’t slow down near the other table on her way to the kitchen, but Ray’s arm thrusts in her direction and he manages to get his fingers around the tie of her apron.
“Hey hey,” he secretes, loud enough for Phineas to hear it. “Where yuh goin’.”
He tugs her off balance and gets his hands tangled in the fabric around her hips, pulls her clumsily into his lap. Ellie squeaks and Phineas weighs the consequences of starting shit after she was explicitly asked not to.
Over his stupid sunglasses, Ray makes eye contact with Phineas as he snakes his hands around and up the front of Ellie’s dress, sets his chin on her shoulder, mumbles something so foul it stains Ellie’s halo a rotten grey.
Ellie’s on her feet so fast Phineas can hardly track it; fury blazes across her face like a struck match before she takes the metal serving tray in both hands and smashes it into Ray’s face. The sound of the impact is definitely a certified cartoon effect, and so is the way Ray topples from his chair and hits the wooden floor. His sunglasses skitter to a stop somewhere beside him with perfect comedic timing.
Phineas’ holler of a laugh careens off the walls, and every piece of glass on Ray’s table explodes.
The cold woman sets her radio down.
The presence of a commander is like an ambient electricity in the air, and the texture varies depending on how they carry themself; sometimes they make people feel nostalgic, or hungry, or giddy, an extra layer over the imposition of their moment to moment emotions onto others. Whatever flavor it is, it’s never more intense than during a spontaneous outburst of raw feeling, and that means a laughing commander has been the final image reflected from many, many expensive surfaces. Mirrors, windows, eyes.
Phineas feels like sunshine and the grit of sawdust and, as it happens, laughter itself. She’s always the brightest thing in the room whether anyone else can see the halo or not, but when she laughs, her emotions go from a hearty suggestion to a fist around the throat.
Ray, on the floor blinking away canaries and too pissed off to be dragged along in her wake, doesn’t see what the hell’s so funny. Neither does the glass woman in the feather boa, now literally flocked with glass shards. The sleeping man in the corner, shocked awake and still getting his bearings, makes the mistake of focusing on Phineas. She’s still losing it, and the man huffs an awkward, aborted laugh before he can get a hand over his mouth.
“What the fuck you laughin’ at!” Ray snarls, jerking to his feet in drunken increments. Phineas can’t catch her breath to talk, but she manages to see well enough to notice that Ellie has disappeared.
Ray makes a crazed noise in his throat, reaches into his waistband and produces a handgun.
“Woah, hey!” the sleeping man, now an extremely awake man, gets to his feet. “Wait-!”
Ray fires in Phineas’ direction but it’s a bad shot; it strikes something that shatters and the sound that makes is scarier than the bullet. Phineas has plenty of experience laughing while she fights, and her reflexes give her plenty of time to slide under the table and shove it onto its side to use as cover. The table is made of wood and one of the legs hadn’t survived the fall; hiding behind that bead curtain would probably work better, but the cover is mostly for show anyway.
“You don’t talk to me like that!” Ray screams. “I have the gun! I am in-!”
Another sound tears a hole in space somewhere outside Phineas’ foxhole, and it takes her an extra instant to twig that it’s a whole second gun going off rather than the entire roof caving in. She tracks the slower projectile’s kinetic energy as it sails neatly through one of the saloon doors like a pencil poking through paper. This one’s a lot beefier than Ray’s toy, enough that Phineas peeks over the side of her table to see who fired it.
There is a massive rabbit man completely blocking the doorway to the kitchen, wearing a grease-stained apron and holding a gun that might be a cannon he ripped from the deck of a pirate ship. Ellie is there with him, safe behind his elbow but looking no less worried. The man’s nose scrunches just the same way hers did earlier as he grinds his teeth.
The rabbit man is so furious it takes him a moment to get the words out, his bushy salt-and-pepper mustache twitches and bristles against his deep navy fur. Nobody seems inclined to rush him.
“You…” His Russi accent is thicker than Ellie’s. He might be addressing everybody, but he’s looking in Ray’s direction. “You will leave.”
The glass woman stands. Ray doesn’t move. Phineas watches his bleary eyes jump between the two anthros in the doorway and tries not to giggle at his sunglasses-shaped tanline. He seems to have already forgotten about his own weapon, it’s hovering threateningly above his foot.
“Ray come on.” The voice from the waking man is surprisingly gentle, given his size. He’s already got his back to the door, holding up two empty hands. He is completely sober, Phineas realizes. She’d assumed he’d passed out.
“Let’s go back, Ray.” The way he keeps repeating the name reminds Phineas of someone trying to get the attention of a loose pet wandering towards a busy road.
Ray’s face twists, pulled between whatever cocktail of personality traits got him here in the first place and the barest humankind instinct of self-preservation.
“Raymond,” the glass woman says. Her voice is a pinch in the fabric of the room, drawing everyone in to listen. Here in the middle of the desert, her breath comes from her in clouds, like there should be snow on the ground around her. “We’re leaving now.”
Raymond shoves his gun back into his waistband and Ellie visibly flinches. He glares at the workers huddled in their kitchen.
“This don’t change nothin’,” he says, shoving both hands through his greasy mullet and closing his eyes, no less drunk than he’d been two minutes ago. “When I want it, I’ll come take it.”
Phineas snorts again, she can’t help it. Ray snarls-
“Wait wait,” Phineas says, leaning on her arms on the upper edge of the overturned table. Ray’s will folds under her command so easily he doesn’t seem to realize his feet have been nailed to the floor until he nearly trips over them. Phineas grins lazily at him, draping further over the table like a lounging cat. “Let’s you ‘n me have it out, guy. Outside?” She glances meaningfully at Ellie, unsure if the linecook cares to have this conversation. “No broken furniture that way. Er…” she shifts guiltily behind her busted table. “No more.”
If Ellie gives an answer it’s drowned out by the event of Ray lunging in Phineas’ direction, the clumsy momentum interrupted by the waking man’s arms wrapping around his waist and lifting him off the floor. He drags him backwards out of the bar and into the street, spitting and snarling like a cat who is doing the opposite of lounging.
The wooden doors creak gently in the hinges behind the men, and the amount of presence in the room remains the same despite their exit. The glass woman turns to look at Phineas, more visible now that she’s unfolded from her seat. Her eyes are narrow, her dress is shiny and sharp, her nails are fantastically manicured. There is still that lotus flower comb tucked in her hair, a shimmering oil spill against the bright blue strands, throbbing against Phineas’ senses like a toothache.
The woman touches the side of her face and a frosty blue visor hushes across her eyes. Phineas is being examined.
“Yeah?” Phineas asks, still leaned over the fallen table, not sitting up to talk to her.
The woman frowns delicately. She flicks her wrist, like swiping away eraser shavings from a page, and all the glass dusted across her clothes bubbles out and falls into a neat semicircle around her feet. Then she leaves too, her severe heels clacking against the wooden floor.
It’s only three of them now, Phineas and the pair in the kitchen doorway. The rabbit man hasn’t relaxed an inch; his gun is still readied, which kind of sucks, but Phineas perks up like a dandelion anyway.
“You got any sunflower seeds, Ellie?”
The question flits curiously across Ellie’s face. She already seems much calmer now.
“Hm?”
“I’d really love a little dish of sunflower seeds after this, if you got ‘em.”
The man, who Phineas is pretty sure now is Ellie’s dad, asks Ellie a question in quiet, stern Russi. Ellie responds in kind, then nods at Phineas without further comment. She seems resigned, but a yes is a yes, so Phineas gets to her feet, grinning
“I’ll be right back, ‘kay?”
It is difficult to tell from the outside but Sergei’s bar actually has three floors, not just the one. There’s the ground floor, then a cellar and living quarters that are easy to miss because they’re underground, and finally some space above the dining room makes a third. The third floor is easy to miss for no real reason at all, and used as overflow seating when things get busy, normally. Things have not been normal for some time so the tables and chairs here have been gathering dust. A set of windowed doors leads outside to an equally dusty widow’s walk, and tucked away in the single sliver of the balcony unrazed by the moonlight is a man eating his last candy bar.
Ulrich is tired. Some other adjectives are “dirty” and “hungry”, but the important one the audience should remember is “armed”.
Trying to trick himself into thinking he’s eating more than he is, he takes comically small bites while the sounds of angry voices and occasional gunshots float up from the bar. At one point somebody fires a blunderbuss and Ulrich watches as a pellet the size and shape of a plum makes it all the way across the empty street before shattering the window in the opposite building. He finishes his pathetic meal and stares with open disgust at the chocolate melted on his fingers, tries not to despair about the fact that he briefly considers licking them clean. He can’t deny now that his clothing has started to loosen around him, the usual layer of thick fat he comes by naturally is starting to evaporate and every time his tightened belt digs into his belly he is angry all over again. He is so fucking sick of being hungry, dirty— he is so fucking sick of being in the goddamned desert.
Ulrich watches as two of the men stumble out into the street below. The smaller one wriggles out of the other’s grip, shoves away from him and nearly puts himself off balance. He’s still spitting abuse at his coworker, drunk and incoherent, but Ulrich’s seen enough of him to know nothing he says is worth paying attention to. Regardless, Ulrich reaches under his outer shirt and wraps his hand around Glückssache, holstered at his side under his ribs. It is not a sniper rifle by any means and that’s a shame, but the revolver will do for now, for this. From nowhere, a waft of gin like a brush of familiar fingertips against Ulrich’s face. He’s out of sight, so Ulrich lets himself lean obligingly into the empty air. The touch disappears somewhere in his hair, near his temple, nudging his attention back to the present.
Rook is heard before she’s seen, in those heels. The men turn to her when she appears but she doesn’t slow down to give them any orders; of course, she expects they should fall into step behind her on their own. Same as ever. Ulrich rises soundlessly and moves to the railing, aligning with the shadows.
Shooting people isn’t as enjoyable for Ulrich as people tend to think. It’s loud, it makes a mess and ammunition is not always easy to find or fabricate in the sorts of places he ends up needing it. A gun is not a toy, it’s a magic wand that, waved correctly, makes people behave in ways that help you avoid having to shoot them. But the trick only works if you really are willing to pull the trigger when it doesn’t. Right now, it helps that he has never been so furious to see another person in his entire wretched life.
Ulrich takes aim.
Someone else breathes in and presses the heels of their hands to their mouth.
A rude sound from the porch creates a vortex of indignity that consumes the attention of everyone in the street. The volume is impressive, but it tapers off prematurely because the person making it decides to start giggling in a way that raises the hair on Ulrich’s neck. He can’t tell from here which part makes Rook and the rest angrier, the person themself or their audacity, but he can feel the steam rising all the same.
On the porch underneath Ulrich’s feet, the noisemaker is blocking out a person shape in the bar’s yellow light to cast a long black silhouette across the road, the dirt lighting around the head like the halo of a religious icon. Something about that makes him hesitate, and he’s only stayed alive this long by listening to his instincts. The two trade places; she (he thinks) moves into view as Ulrich slips back into the lucky shadow, confident even in the exposed position because the girl pulls attention like cast dice. She’s still giggling, Ulrich feels it in his teeth. She wipes her spitty hands on a hideous orange coat as she bounds down the porch stairs and into the road. She’s smaller than Ulrich had expected, the light had made her look much taller.
“Yeah you feel real stupid when people don’t play your game, huh?” She steps fully into view, right in the middle of the street. Her movement is strange, loose and fluid like she’s a flag tied down by her feet. If he were less experienced with weapons, Ulrich might mistake her for clumsy. “Y’all are awful rude for how easy it is to get you riled up. You’re really askin’ for it.”
The amateur with the gun stumbles a few steps towards her. Notably, Rook lets him act without interfering. It puts him between Rook and the girl, who appears to be doing runner’s stretches.
The noisemaker shakes out her hands and gets them up in a low, almost lazy imitation of an orthodox guard; her lower elbow is pulled back near her side rather than in front of her chest, the fingers of her forward hand splay out rather than curling into a fist. Ulrich’s been to enough boxing matches to tell it’s a bastardization of that and some other martial art he can’t name. But he knows enough to check her feet, and it pings the part of Ulrich’s brain that keeps him from getting caught in crossfire. Fighters who move like this are either new students or so far along the curve they’ve come back around to the other side, and if her bizarre demeanor feels like anything it’s confidence, only getting stronger as she warms up.
“I’m frustrated.” Her huffed laugh comes with a shower of golden sparks that leave streaks in Ulrich’s vision. “I’m feelin’ mean and you’re an asshole. Let’s go, buddy, come on.”
The silence stretches like a tripwire.
She grins behind her guard, and Ulrich is too far away to make out the exact details, but the physical wave of aggression that washes through him feels like she’s laughing right in his ear. She says, “I’ll let you go first, if you’re scared.”
In his line of work Ulrich has seen plenty of morons get their finger around a trigger and think it will make up for the places they fall short. Almost invariably, they are the types of men who fly off the handle when other people commit sins like threatening their authority by smiling too much, or not enough. They are usually a danger to themselves more than anything, but a gunshot wound will bleed out whether or not it’s intentional.
It’s funny from up here, watching one of Rook’s lackeys froth at the mouth over what may be the least intimidating taunt Ulrich has ever heard, but he isn’t looking forward to watching an unarmed person get clipped. There is no position on the bell curve that would make Ulrich bet on fists in a gunfight. He switches off his hearing aid before the shooting starts.
“Eisse-” the gun lackey snarls, clenching a fist around nothing. Ulrich rolls his eyes at the alias Rook had apparently taken on while she sizes up the girl through her visor. Something she sees is bothering her, something heavier than schoolyard teasing. Rook’s not nobody, she probably sees the same kinds of things that made Ulrich elect not to interrupt. The conclusion she comes to is different.
“Yeah alright, Ray,” Rook says, folding her arms and stepping back, leaning against a stretch of storefront with no uncomfortable trash tacked to it. “Take her out.”
She is hardly out of the way before Ray is making an inhuman noise and firing in the rude girl’s direction.
The rude girl moves.
There’s a shift in the light. The moonsoaked air is etched with angles, lines of symmetry that Ulrich has only now become aware of, because that thing in the street has just wrapped her fist around every one of them and pulled. The space around her fractures with yellow that carves out from the bullet’s impact in her palm, winds around her chest and arcs down through her feet, billowing the dry dirt into a cloud. It all happens instantly, between heartbeats, but Ulrich is very comfortable with operating in half-time. He even has room to admire the fireworks.
The dust dissipates, she opens her hand and he sees the round catch the light as it falls, lancing straight through his rage at Rook to light up an old, old machine stretching down and down into the depths of Ulrich’s memory. Its gears have long since ground to a halt, it’s been sitting in the dark for ages. In the dark is not the same as dead.
Ulrich holsters his gun and sits back to watch what she does. No one notices him because they are watching her, too. She’s still smiling.
“Wanna try again?”
Ray does, fires again, again, missing her completely even as she bounds towards him with the insistence of an oncoming train. Her steps flare with light Ulrich can’t stand to look at, brighter and brighter until she crouches low just ahead of where Ray is getting ready to fire another round. She launches into him like a skyrocket, complete with a resplendent trail leading to the report of her fist slamming into his ribcage.
Ulrich doesn’t look away to see where Ray lands. The girl has settled back into her bizarre stance but still glows like she did before, a spot of daylight. The air around her is scattered with sparks, rising through the strands of her hair and curling up the edges of her long coat.
He tastes lotus petals, a voice whispers in his ear and the machine dominating Ulrich’s mind groans in the shadows, straining to move.