Chapter 35
"Hey, uh, maybe lay off the drinking a little tonight? Like… dial it back?" I—hell, all of us—were staring in varying degrees of shock as Sonar poured glass after glass into himself without so much as a wince. Not even swallowing, really. Just dumping it straight into the furnace. "Before you overdo it?"
"Overdo what?" The bat hiccupped drunkenly and sniffled, pulling in the last traces of cocaine. His ears gave a funny little twitch, and Viktor stared straight through me for a few seconds before continuing. "Happiness? Freedom? This wonderful warm feeling promising that everything's going to be okay… after what happened."
"Just make sure that warm feeling doesn't end up running down your pants." Mel slid smoothly closer to me, pressing against my side and settling in. "I'm not dragging you back to my place."
"Don't even look at me." I waved off Sonar, who had turned his gaze in my direction, and tried for a few seconds to exit the conversation entirely. But the bat kept boring into me with those eyes, making strange sounds. "Fine! Fine, damn you! And what is that noise? Are you having a stroke?"
"Possibly…" He didn't finish the sentence. His face hit the table.
"Right, I'm going to go arm-wrestle someone. Don't get lonely, sweetheart." Mel waved her tail goodbye, grabbed a beer, and was gone. The rest of them were no better—the traitors dumped Sonar on me and evaporated from the table one by one.
"Christ, Viktor, what the hell." The liquid seeping from my palms mixed with blood, working its way through the bat's nostrils. My healing ability wasn't anything impressive yet, but Dr. Connors had laid out a solid theory about it and kept drilling it into me. "What is that smell?"
I leaned in closer to my friend. Instead of his usual mild aroma of dead rodents beneath several metric tons of cologne—something in the "Double-Double" family—what hit me was a cloyingly sweet smell of lubricant.
"Mother of—did you bathe in it?" The fumes coming off Viktor were genuinely disorienting. That kind of sweetness would only appeal to a diabetic with a death wish. Or small children. "I don't even want to know."
The bat was mumbling directly into the table, smearing saliva across it, so I had to hold him upright every so often. But after a couple of minutes of examination—my healing techniques still left a lot to be desired in the speed department, unfortunately—I was at least able to confirm with confidence that this was a standard blackout from exhaustion combined with an excess of alcohol and narcotics.
"I'm going to get you on a program."
I patted my friend on the head, carefully tipped him onto the sofa, and draped the Bruiser's jacket over him as a blanket. It'd smell awful, but that was hardly the priority right now.
While I sat there in a vaguely melancholy mood, watching the team scatter to various corners of the bar, Robert navigated through the crowd of bandits and dropped into the seat across from me. Somehow still clean, unwrinkled, and unmugged—which was honestly an achievement in its own right.
I grabbed the last unopened bottle, popped the metal cap off with my fingers without much effort.
"I genuinely envy you sometimes." Robert accepted the beer from me and sat back, sparing only a single questioning look at the sleeping Sonar and the gently swaying Golem. Children's morning show at Arkham, honestly. "Don't ask." He nodded with understanding, clinked his bottle against mine, drank down a third of it in one pull, and settled back. "Although the Golem seems to be coming around already… he'll eat something and be fine."
I slid the little bowl of peanuts toward the clay mass in question and leaned back against the sofa.
"I probably shouldn't have come tonight."
"Depends how you look at it." I ran through the likely outcomes quickly and found there weren't actually that many. "On one hand—you get to open up to the team a little. And God knows you could use a night off."
"And on the other hand?" He smiled with the look of someone who already knew the answer but wanted to hear it out loud anyway.
"On the other hand…" I took another pull from the bottle of whatever technically qualified as beer, leaving only the sediment dregs at the bottom. "Odds are, a couple of hours from now you'll be standing outside the entrance. No money. No meaningful progress in your relationship with our illustrious team. Filled with shame and self-loathing over some halfhearted and failed drunk petting in a bathroom stall with a stranger—and statistically speaking, it will almost certainly be a 'stranger' of the male variety. Also probably wearing a torn shirt covered in your own blood, because judging by the general energy of this bar and this team tonight, a fight is absolutely inevitable."
"Great."
"Yep." I flagged down the swift little waiter-bartender-owner—a shifty-looking man with a clouded eye and the face of a backwoods horror-movie villain—and ordered a round for the whole team, because I knew for a fact that if I only ordered for myself, it'd be stolen somewhere between the bar and the table.
I turned the beer bottle in my hand, swirling the dregs, and squinted through the murky glass at Malévola, who had just snapped her opponent's arm during an arm wrestle. Feeling my gaze, the demoness turned, blew me a kiss, winked with a flash of delight, then crooked a finger at the next poor soul who thought he stood a chance against her on pure strength.
"Looks like things are going well between you two?" Honestly, I wasn't sure how to answer that.
Not in the angsty, tortured way—nothing like "I haven't figured out my feelings" or "everything is meaningless." It was more that I couldn't quite find the words to convey the full depth of my enthusiasm without sliding into the kind of teenage-boy declarations that would give me secondhand embarrassment.
"Yeah."
"Just… yeah?"
"An enormously large, juicy, and very red 'yeah.'" I gestured with my eyebrows at Mel, who had just won again, shooting to her feet, fists raised above her head, grinning carnivorous, breathing hard with excitement. She looked over at us and sent me a new, deeply meaningful smile. "She's absolutely incredible."
Mel might have been able to read lips—or maybe she just figured it out from the way Robert gave me a fatherly thumbs-up. Either way, the demoness's eyes blazed even brighter, and she drained her bottle in one go, then shook herself like a dog coming out of water to chase off the more impure thoughts and get back to the business of "Drinking, not that other thing."
"Got it. Congratulations."
"So what about you and Miss Blazer?" Feeling relaxed in the easy company of the dispatcher, I decided to ask the return question. "Have you looked under her rock yet?"
"Pfh—cough!" Robert stared at me like I'd grown a second head and spent several seconds coughing into his fist, thumping his own chest. I had to help him along so he'd come back to himself faster. "What does a rock have to do with anything?"
"Well, I mean…" His tone was strange when he asked that, though I had absolutely no idea why. "Her power comes from the stone, right—it creates a kind of halo, an aura around her body. So if you wanted to get to second base you'd have to…"
"Stop, stop, stop." Robert held up one hand, handed the empty bottle to the passing waiter, swapped it for a fresh one. "First of all, Waterbane—with respect—that's none of your business. And second of all…"
"Second of all, I can already see you've made it to second base." The sofa deformed slightly at the edge of my vision, and I didn't need a doctorate or a Stephen Hawking-level intellect to identify the cause. "And if anyone else finds out about it, Miss Blazer will turn the person who told them into a ventriloquist's dummy using her superpower, if you know what I mean."
I cut Robert off mid-sentence. He was looking at me with a perfectly neutral expression. A silent pantomime stretched between us for a few seconds before he swallowed his signature weary sigh and mentally threw up his hands.
"In general terms you're right, though I doubt Blonde Blazer would actually go that far."
"Sure." The memory of my own experience with that particular brand of terror—that "prank"—caused me to clench up so hard I could have snapped a steel bar, but I didn't pursue the topic, seeing it made our operator uncomfortable. "Different question, then. Not about Miss Blazer."
I had to get that caveat in early—Robert had already started looking toward the bar with the clear intention of abandoning the table. But the clarification kept him in his seat. Heh.
Time to put in a little legwork for my colleague-slash-friend.
"What's going on with you and Diva? Is this like a casual flirty thing, couple nights of fun while you wait for the 'crane in the sky' to come along? Honestly, watching the three of you, sometimes I feel like you're cosplaying Bella Swan from Twilight." The reaction was identical from both of them. A freshly-taken sip of beer was spit across the table, and I had to urgently clean it up with my ability before the bartender came over and yelled at us. And Diva—she dropped out of invisibility in a fit of laughter, trying to catch her inhaler with lips stretched too wide to function properly. "Hey, Diva. Alright, kids, have fun. And Robert—don't ruin it like the Witcher would. Me and Mel are rooting for you."
I raised my bottle in a toast, grabbed two more for myself and my lady, and made my exit from the table before my two dissatisfied colleagues—who were clearly preparing to corner me, potentially with physical force—could do anything about it.
---
The moment the water-type little bastard was safely out of range, Robert turned his tired gaze on the girl across from him. She had stopped laughing and was studying him for a few seconds before turning away with her most pointedly indifferent expression.
She chewed her lip. Diva sank into her own thoughts, not even noticing the way he was watching her.
*Bella Swan. If guys are picking up on it, then girls definitely are.*
He hadn't understood the second half of what Waterbane said—the Witcher reference—but he made himself a solemn mental promise to look it up that same evening, because in the moment he'd felt genuinely old and out of touch.
He gave a quiet hm to himself, opened a fresh bottle, and briefly considered having a cigarette—then dismissed the idea just as quickly.
It was more of a distraction than anything else, and not a very effective one, because his mind kept pulling him back to the topic the watery nuisance had started.
An unpleasant but real thought—one that had visited Mechamen many times and that he had run from with everything he had, throwing himself instead into repairing his armor and his work as an SDS dispatcher.
The trouble was, it kept working out the same way: the harder he buried himself in work, the harder reality smacked him back—pulling him out of his comfortable action-movie existence and dropping him into a romantic comedy.
Relationships. Complicated subject. For most of his life he hadn't given it any serious thought. Casual flings. Quick encounters. Great sex with no strings attached.
But since joining SDS… a lot had changed. And all it took was one look into the eyes of certain people to read—even a blockhead like him could read it—the desire for something more than just momentary heat.
The familiar look—that habitual defiant armor she wore, the heavy, melancholy gaze aimed at some middle distance. All it was missing was a sad song playing softly in the background and a blood-red sunrise.
"I'm never getting that out of my head now."
"Pff—trying to dodge the subject?" Without fully turning her head, Diva caught him mid-flight and made him bite his tongue. She waited a few seconds—maybe for a continuation, maybe for some kind of reaction or move—and getting nothing, she exhaled sharply with frustration. "Forget it. I wasn't expecting anything different."
"Diva… What do you want me to say? I'm your supervisor. You're my subordinate."
"Funnily enough, that seems to work just fine the other way around." She puffed up like a child and took a sharp pull from her inhaler, folding her arms under her chest and drumming her fingers nervously against her own arm. "Let's just drop the subject. Obviously there's no point."
Despite her own words, she'd thrown in those little clarifications for the second time now after attempting to close the conversation—which left the dispatcher with no real option but to keep the strange, uncomfortable dialogue going.
"Diva, listen. Right now, first and foremost, I need to get my suit repaired—and only after that do I start organizing a personal life for the entertainment of nerds like Herman." For the first time, a tentative smile appeared on the girl's face—though it faded quickly. "After that comes tracking down my father's killer. And only once all that garbage is behind me will I be anywhere close to ready for something resembling a normal life."
"Like Geralt in the vineyard?"
"Who?"
"The Witcher. Ginger already mentioned him."
"What the hell is a Witcher?!" Mechamen waved his hand in irritation, splashing a little beer onto his shirt. "Brilliant."
"God, you're ancient." She stopped burning a hole in the wall with her eyes. This time she decided to let the subject go rather than wreck the evening that was shaping up around them. "Even I know who he is. Have you at least read Harry Potter?"
"I read Harry Potter." He was brushing at his shirt under the girl's amused stare, irritated at everything—because the beer had hit not only the shirt but part of his pants too, leaving a fairly recognizable wet patch in an unfortunate location. "For what it's worth, when I was a teenager, my best friend got free access to the neighbor's cable with a certain black-and-orange website, and after that reading kind of fell by the wayside."
"I am never shaking your hand again." Diva scooted closer to get a better look at the dispatcher attempting to blot the beer from his crotch region, and pointed at it helpfully. "Though I will say—very well-practiced technique. Look at that determination."
"What did you expect?" He set the beer down and mimed several different grip techniques in the air, displaying the full breadth of his wit—having already forgotten that it was exactly this kind of conversation that had gotten him into trouble not so long ago. "Thousands of hours of dedicated practice."
"That would explain why your right hand is slightly bigger than your left." She grinned, filched a handful of napkins from the neighboring table while its occupants weren't looking. "Want some help?"
"And I'm the degenerate here?"
"I was offering a napkin, not—"
A sharp, loud crunch of peanuts interrupted the flirting-arguing pair, yanking them out of their private little world and dropping them back into reality.
They turned in unison. Both looked at the third wheel with matching expressions of embarrassment, though in Diva's case the embarrassment was beginning to mingle with an irritated resentment at being interrupted.
"Golem—how long have you been sitting there?!" Mechamen buried his face in his hands, which also helped conceal the smile spreading across his lips.
"From the beginning." The clay giant kept his eyes fixed on his two flustered colleagues and tossed a couple more peanuts into his mouth. He was speaking quietly—almost in a whisper, or at least he was attempting something in that direction—while actually producing a volume that turned heads at neighboring tables. "I appear to have… unlocked a new ability. Complete stillness… so I become… invisible."
"We can see you." Both of them watched as the enormous mass—which, they now realized, they had genuinely failed to notice for quite some time—raised one great meaty paw and slowly deposited a single solitary peanut into his mouth. The dissonance hit Diva and Robert at exactly the same moment, and they spoke in perfect sync with identical intonation. "You're crunching peanuts."
"Slowly… smoothly…" Another peanut disappeared into the bottomless maw. "Completely undetectable."
"No. Big guy. We can see you." Diva twisted a napkin into a tight roll and flicked it at the creature's head. It did not react, continuing to maintain its performance.
"No… I am essentially… invisible… Like Diva…"
"Golem, you're back!" Colm appeared, clapped the giant cheerfully on the shoulder, and was met with a disgruntled rumble.
"Oh for the love of—"
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