Chapter Text
“I didn’t sign up to babysit.”
“You’re assuming a lot for a guy who’s never met me. You have no idea what I can do.”
Lash’s gaze zips down their body, as unimpressed as the previous four times. “You look like a stiff breeze could knock you over.”
“Like the one between your ears?” It bursts out before they can contain it. If Lash were anyone else, they might even regret it.
“No need to be hostile,” Lash scoffs.
“I’m not—” Pocket stops themself short. Slowly and with a steadying breath, they find their self control and uncurl their fists. “Like it or not, we’re stuck together. We need a plan.”
Lash rolls his eyes. Maybe starting with an insult was not the winning strategy. Rubbing at the gouges their nails left in their palms, they promise themself that next time, they’ll manage the situation better — if there is a next time.
Who are they kidding? There will definitely be a next time.
Once the ritual begins, they try to hang back, but Bebop hooks them in. When they escape his grasp, McGinnis’s gun pins them behind cover. Lash manages to knock Bebop out, chasing him well beyond a reasonable point, then McGinnis’s turrets take him down. Pocket follows soon after.
With both of them gone, there’s no one to push McGinnis back. By the time they return, the guardian is already falling. It’s humiliating how quickly she does it; there’s not even time for Calico to try to ambush them like she has before.
“What happened to working together?” Lash growls as they retreat.
Their side aches and they can barely hang onto their gun, blood dripping down their fingers, but some part of them finds it vital to argue with Lash. “Oh, did you want something from me?” they snap right back. “I can’t read your mind.”
“I shouldn’t have to explain this shit.”
Pocket briefly fantasizes about shooting him. “Go help someone else. I’ll take care of this myself.”
“The Lash is gonna take his services elsewhere,” he says as if it was his idea. “Don’t give them too many souls while I’m gone.”
Pocket’s jaw hurts from clenching their teeth, but at least he’s gone.
Now it’s only a matter of facing down Maggie McGinnis and her turrets and that magic that looks exactly like the kind Pocket’s been trying to keep from their dad. Without Bebop to distract them, Pocket handles her turrets more easily, taking them out as fast as she can get them operational and grinding her down slowly with barrages from the case. They even make enough space for some forward momentum.
But they’re alone out here, and McGinnis’s turrets don’t remain their only problem. They round a corner to reload, and find themself face to face with Mina Ha. “Shit.”
“That’s all you have to say?” she sneers. Her bullets sting past their defenses, tearing at them with an awful sound. They’re bleeding faster than even McGinnis’s turrets can cause, and they dive into the safety of the case for a moment, if only to get a chance to rethink.
When they burst back out, she shrieks, but it doesn’t stop her from shooting until a burst of magic rips through them, worse than any of the bullets. “You were always pathetic,” she says, darting into close range. Instinctively they back away; they know what she can do if they let her get too close. They throw the cloak back toward the Archmother’s base of operations, and they teleport to safety.
Too late, they remember the turrets and McGinnis’s gun. The walker goes down without anyone to defend it, and they don’t even have Lash there to blame.
Pocket’s mother was a better parent than their father by the slimmest margin; only by comparison to the worst can she seem any good at all. They reflect on this when the next attempt at the ritual goes better than the last. Relative terms are the only terms that save them from despair. Viewed in absolutes, it’s one more unmitigated disaster.
They hold their initial defenses long enough for Calico to try to ambush them, and Pocket defends themself well enough to send her running with her tail between her legs. It’s a near thing, but a success is a success.
In the quiet between waves of attacks, they leave Lash long enough to find some of the denizens that have been summoned into the side streets and nearby buildings. They barely have time to handle one of them before Mina descends slowly from above, gun already popping furiously at them.
They duck for cover between one building and the next, casting about for an escape route or better vantage for attack.
“Disappearing again, Arin?” she calls. “You’re good at that.”
They flinch away from her words, ducking into the lounge and dashing up the stairs. She was on the ground last they saw, but when they come out the rooftop exit, there she is at the edge of the roof, emptying her gun into their chest. Mina’s red-eyed glare follows them as they’re snatched away from death once more by the Archmother.
There’s no escaping any of it. There’s only more pain. Calico’s claws slash into their chest. McGinnis’s turrets tear them to shreds. Mina hunts them, by turns furious and mocking.
The other enemies pose a different sort of problem. Despite how much Bebop and Lash clearly detest each other, he doesn’t seem to bear any particular ill will toward Pocket. From what they’ve gleaned from everyone who isn’t Lash, Bebop’s perfectly decent when he’s not mid-bloodsport. They don’t know Abrams personally, but they’ve seen the detective around; seven feet of blue Ixian is hard to miss, especially when he’s haunting their end of the city, turning over stones that a lot of people would prefer remain unturned.
Paige is the bigger mystery. Bibliomancy is an uncommon enough talent that if they had more than this single, recurring day, they could probably do some digging on her. Nobody else knows anything about her. But from her defensive style and the slew of apologies that fumble out of her mouth when they’ve crossed paths, it’s probably safe to assume she has more in common with Bebop than with Calico.
None of them seem like bad people. Pocket can’t even find them guilty by association; they didn’t know who’d be working for the Archmother until that first time they arrived in the hideout. Did those three, like Pocket, simply show up to find their alliance already formed?
They don’t have time to ruminate on it before Abrams charges them into the side of a building and something ominous pops inside them, but the question lingers when they’re floating in the Archmother’s base, waiting for their soul to be reattached to their body.
The Hidden King’s ritualists break down their defenses until they can lead wave after wave of troopers into the Archmother’s base of operations. It takes less than a minute for them to rip apart the sentries that protect her screaming herald.
Pocket is the first on their side to return to their body. They leap in alone to defend her. They don’t have high hopes, but they do have a powerful last resort.
They unleash the affliction — just as all six enemies are yanked out of range. A moment later, they all hit the ground, and Lash follows it by diving down onto Bebop first. In an instant, a green shield appears around the golem, then green fire spreads in a line from Lash to Pocket. “Idiot,” Calico says smugly as she throws gloom bombs at them both.
A wall erupts behind them, and Pocket has nowhere to run. Before they can use any of the magic at their disposal, Abrams slams into Lash — and then into Pocket, with Lash still in tow. They’re crushed beneath him as the Ixian drains the life from both their bodies. The Archmother’s effigy crumbles again.
They wake to a live current of frustration.
They can’t keep working with Lash. What they need is someone who understands teamwork or at least uses their goddamned words.
He should have waited until after Pocket’s attack before he did anything. Or maybe if he had announced his plan, Pocket could have responded. Instead, he ruined Pocket’s last ditch effort and got both of them killed.
They can’t do it again. They can’t. It was awful from start to finish, and Lash saving the enemy is the last straw.
They shovel breakfast into their mouth faster than they’ve done before. They jog all the way to the hideout. “Arin?” Dynamo asks.
“Not now.” They wave him off. All six of the others are already here. They’ve already paired off. Pocket is stuck with the Lash again.
The following morning, they wolf down two cursory mouthfuls of eggs and dart out the door, and they push themself, arriving at the hideout sweaty and winded.
“Arin?” Dynamo asks.
“Not now.”
Everyone else is here already. Again. “I didn’t sign up to babysit,” Lash groans.
Attempt number three: they skip brushing their teeth, skip breakfast altogether, skip everything but waking up and throwing on their clothes. “Don’t forget your coat,” Ms. Flores calls, as if they would. They snatch it up before they’re dashing out the door, using the garment to teleport wherever possible.
By the time they stop at the hideout, they’re doubled over with their hands on their knees.
“I didn’t sign up to babysit.”
“Shut up,” they wheeze, too resigned to bite back.
“Rude,” Lash says, and they dig their hands into their legs until their fingertips turn white.
“You know what? I’ll pay you,” they say, no longer looking at Lash, but at Wraith. “When this is over, I will pay you if you let me work with Mo and Krill.”
With Lash muttering on in the background, Wraith studies them. “What do you think?” she asks Krill after a moment. “They good for it?”
“Of course,” Krill says.
“I suppose I can be benevolent,” she says with a shrug. “I won’t shoot Lash until the ritual’s over.” Lash grumbles in protest, but nobody’s paying him any attention. “Have at it,” Wraith continues. “Don’t forget you owe me, though.”
“Never,” they say as solemnly as they can. Most of their gratitude is entirely genuine anyway.
She saunters Lash’s direction, and she’s already saying, “If you do anything stupid, I’m cutting my losses and ditching you.” Lash looks as annoyed as she sounds.
Relieved, Pocket turns to Mo and Krill. This is going to go so much better; they’re sure of it.
“We weren’t expecting to see you here,” Krill says.
“I could say the same to you. What are you doing here?”
“The Hovel could use a facelift.” The Hovel has seen better days, but it’s a shallow reason to show up here, and Krill sounds cagey.
Pocket chooses not to push it. It’s too nice being free of Lash.
Out in the street, things are different. Here they face Calico from the beginning, squashing down the way their chest clenches and their jaw aches.
“Relax,” Krill says while they take down the Hidden King’s troopers. “We’ve got this.”
Most of their energy goes toward convincing themself they won’t die simply by existing in front of Calico. By the time they get into the flow of the fight, she lunges, and they’re yanked back into the Archmother’s embrace, getting their soul stitched back into their body.
They have to return. Mo and Krill are out there struggling against Pocket’s would-be assassin. Their chest squeezes and every muscle feels tense, but they go back.
She lunges in like before. This time, Mo catches her. “Help us with this!” Krill commands. Pocket is too slow to react; she gets away again, but at least now it’s a retreat.
“I never thought I could hate cats,” they say mournfully.
“I’ve never liked the things,” Krill answers.
Without Calico to back her up, Paige backs away. Her primary contribution to the Hidden King’s alliance is how very hard she makes it to fight back against them, or to do enough damage to knock Calico out of the fight for good. Suppression is the best they can manage so long as Paige is there.
Calico returns, but this time when Mo tries to grab her, Pocket doesn’t even have time to respond before they’re getting trampled by ethereal horses. They return to that strange stasis in the Archmother’s chamber.
They don’t win this one either.
The second time they try to work with Mo and Krill, they ask to speak with them privately in the hideout. The moment they’re alone, they ask bluntly, “How many times have you done this Ritual?”
“This would be the first,” Krill says. “How old do you think we are?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Eighty?” Pocket answers dryly.
“Children,” Krill scoffs. Mo echoes it with an amused huff.
It leaves a dent in their burgeoning theory that the Archmother’s resurrection caused this. They light a cigarette, scowling at the floorboards.
“Something’s wrong,” Krill says.
“I’m just going in circles. Nothing I do makes a difference. Tomorrow’s going to be exactly the same as today.”
Mo almost knocks them over as he leans comfortingly into their space. Krill pats their arm delicately. “You make a difference, Pocket.”
“No, I—” It’s not funny, but they almost laugh. “I mean literally. I’m reliving the ritual over and over. It’s some kind of curse or hex or something, but this ritual isn’t my first. It’s my tenth? Twelfth? I’m losing track. And I don’t know what to do or how to stop it.”
Krill is quiet a moment, though he and Mo share a glance that they seem to think is subtle. “Perhaps you should approach it like any other puzzle. If you’re stuck, change one thing at a time. Figure out the pattern.” Krill shrugs, having dispensed the last of his wisdom.
They need more than a vague methodology. They need answers. But what did they expect? Krill wasn’t going to have the solution conveniently scribbled on a note somewhere. He’s only helping the best way he knows.
Besides, his advice isn’t wrong. They need to determine a method, change one thing at a time, then keep trying. They’ll find the pattern or find the absence of one. Either way, it’s more information than they had before.
It can’t hurt any more than anything else. They’re starting to believe they have all the time in the world.
Learn something. Find the pattern. Easier said than done.
The following morning, they take a right instead of a left out of Ms. Flores’s apartment. The route is slightly longer, but if they’ve learned anything so far, it’s that it seems impossible to get there early enough to make a difference. Time to try getting there late.
They arrive five minutes late, which isn’t late enough not to hear it: “I didn’t sign up to babysit.”
The next morning, they try ten minutes, then fifteen. The later they arrive, the more likely they are to find their fellow ritualists in varying states of distress. They lose every time regardless, and often faster than before. It’s clearly not helpful to stress their teammates out before the ritual; that only distracts them and makes their performance worse.
Having pushed their lateness to half an hour with no positive results, they try something else: they avoid the ritual entirely.
A pink neon sign sits unlit in the window of a psychic. On a whim, they knock anyway. They’re greeted by a sunken-eyed old woman in a sensible sweater. She scowls at the sky before she lets them in and locks the door.
“Sit, sit,” she insists.
There at the table is the expected: a deck of cards, a crystal ball, enough candles to make them worry about the fire hazard, all carefully aligned on the tattered silks draped over the table. They’ve never felt like reading the future held much purpose, even in a world full of other wonders. But it can’t hurt, right? Maybe it will give them a sense of the problem they’re trying to solve.
She shoves a deck of cards into their hand unceremoniously. “You shuffle,” she says. “Think of question. When ready, you give back.”
It’s harder to focus on a question than they thought it might be; skepticism is one hell of a hurdle. But a general What’s going on here? is easy enough to cling to. They decide at random that they’re finished shuffling and hand the cards back.
The first card she flips is upside down from their side of the table. It depicts a figure in a cloak, five goblets strewn at their feet. “Your past,” she says. “Five of cups. Grief, loss.” She stares hard at them. “A loss of self, I think. Is right?”
It takes work to suppress their cynicism enough to keep their face smooth. Who hasn’t lost something? “Right.”
She places the next card. This one faces them directly: an angel pouring one cup into another. “This is present. Temperance. Your life out of balance. Maybe because of a careless choice.” Again, she squints at them. She only nods this time, not bothering to ask if she’s right. An eerie feeling settles on their shoulders like a blanket.
“Future now,” she says. She pulls the final card, but it lands face down, the simple stars on black pattern on its back winking up at them both. Her brow wrinkles, and she turns it over, only to be met with the same. Her mouth flattens. They get the distinct impression she’s quite intentionally not looking at them now. “Means nothing. We try again.”
She flips another. Her bony hand spasms, sending it drifting off the table and down, where it slides neatly beneath one of the many shelves of trinkets.
“We come this far. Should see it through,” she says almost as if to herself as she goes searching for it.
Guilt slithers through them at the sight of this old woman crawling on hands and knees. “Let me help,” they say.
There is just enough space between the floor and the arching bottom edge of the furniture to fit their hand, as long as they roll up their sleeve. With the tips of their fingers, they manage to seize the card and slide it back out. The card they retrieve comes out with its long side parallel to Pocket and the old woman alike, neither upright nor inverted.
“Wheel of Fortune,” she says. “Cycles, fate. As future, big changes coming to you.”
“Good changes or bad changes?” they ask, unsure why their throat is suddenly tight.
“Hard to say like this.”
Loss, life out of balance, cycles. Nothing they couldn’t have figured out for themself, if any of the reading is even real. Big changes coming. They scoff. Maybe when it’s sideways it means no change, or it means they’re stuck repeating the same day over and over. And what does it mean when it’s on the floor? they want to ask.
The whole thing feels like a cruel joke.
“I have to go,” they say. “What do I owe you?”
“That is only beginning. We have to discuss,” she protests as they help her to her feet. Hazel eyes search their face, then she sighs. “Three dollars.” Wordlessly, they surrender the cash.
Outside on the curb, they light a cigarette, shielding it from the wind and the mist that’s steadily becoming a drizzle. “Highway robbery,” they mutter to themself. Three whole dollars to learn nothing. They’ll get it back when the day resets, but they’re offended on principle.
They didn’t think the reading took that long, but they can hear gunfire in the distance. A brilliant blue light gleams uptown at the Archmother’s base. The nearby buildings obscure it, but they know if they got a good angle, they’d be able to see the Hidden King too.
The rain comes harder now, pelting them with fat, stinging droplets. It’s not this bad at the part of the city cordoned off for the Ritual. They’re in the eye of the magical storm there, a fact which Pocket has taken for granted until now.
They glare at the sky when the water puts out their cigarette, and the wind squeals in their ears. Above them, an air conditioning unit shakes violently in its fifth-story window before it unlatches.
They wake with a start, grateful, for once, for the miserable cycle they’re trapped in. Better than dying to an air conditioner. They can picture the headlines now, the puns some yellow press asshole would make with heir and air.
They brush their teeth, creating an imaginary list of objects that could be more humiliating to die to. The scatological come first, then the sexual. It makes them feel slightly better about the AC unit, at least. They spit out their toothpaste and stare at their own reflection, marveling at how quickly they’ve turned to morbid absurdity. It only took a baker’s dozen of full-blown disasters.
The obvious hits them only afterward: they died outside the ritual, and they’re still here.
When their hand stops trembling, they shave the fuzz off their top lip and wonder how many times they’ll do this. Three hundred and fifty-something more of these, and they’ll be a year older. Will they keep waking to this same weedy mustache, this same tired body, while their mind careens off into either insanity or senility?
They rub their face clean. Comb their hopeless hair. This can’t go on forever. They’ll find a way out before then.
They eat Ms. Flores’s cooking and wonder how long it will take to tire of the same breakfast every day. It’s a good thing they’re not picky. A good thing she’s a good cook too. They might already be sick of it otherwise.
“Don’t forget your coat,” she says kindly.
“Thank you,” they call as the door swings shut. They sling the gun over their shoulder and fish a cigarette out of their coat pocket. Now they know how much time they have to get there before their fellow mystics start to panic.
At least they’ve learned something. It’s a start.
When they arrive at the hideout this time, they suffer the same as before: “Arin? What are you doing here?” Dynamo asks.
“We can talk about it later,” they say, appeasing him with a later they don’t believe will come.
“I didn’t sign up to babysit,” Lash groans.
“I’ll pay you,” they say to Wraith again, ignoring Lash entirely. Only this time, they try to change a new variable. “I’ll pay you to work with me.”
Even with her eyes half hidden by the brim of her hat, they can sense Wraith’s amused calculations. “If the boys will allow it, why not? Might be nice to have a Fairfax owe me a favor.”
Pocket wants to hide inside their coat. Embarrassing to be figured out so easily, but it shouldn’t matter. However it is she knows, she knows. She can’t get paid if she betrays them, and she’s willing to work with them now to let them avoid Lash.
“You’re gonna keep me in mind, right, kid?” she asks.
They nod, resigned to owing a favor to a crime lord. If that’s what it takes to stop their father, then that’s what it takes. How bad could it be? It certainly can’t be as bad as the war profiteering. “Sure. I’ll remember that you helped me.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” She smiles, a real one with teeth and all, and for a moment, they’re taken aback by how pretty she is for someone so ruthless.
Working with Wraith is enlightening. There’s the aforementioned ruthlessness, but that’s for the enemy. For Pocket, she’s amicable, even funny sometimes, and chatty in a way that isn’t demanding they cater to some meathead’s ego.
When she’s shot down Calico and the librarian has to retreat, Wraith pushes one of the dying candle-headed troopers with a shoe that’s both sensible and stylish. “What are you here for, anyway?” she asks. “Daddy’s fortune?”
Under ordinary circumstances, it would seem unwise to share with her. Under these circumstances, they’re not terribly concerned about what she’ll remember tomorrow. “Close enough. I’m taking the company. How did you know who I am?”
She grins as she fires into the guardian, and only answers once it’s crumbled and her noisy gun has spun back down. “Nothing happens in my city without me knowing about it.”
“Sounds exhausting,” they say.
“That’s power for you.” She shrugs. “We all want it. Some of us get it. Takes work to hold onto, though.”
“Is it worth it?”
Her smirk arrives more slowly this time. “Ask me again when we’ve won.”