Chapter 36
"Put your head on my shoulder, baby…" Gripping the microphone with both hands, our team's Eggbreaker sang a popular last-century Paul Anka number with genuine heartfelt conviction. "…I want you to kiss me, baby…"
Hooking a thumb under one of his suspenders, Bruiser let it snap loose and left it dangling against his side. He danced with restraint—mostly working his hips—though every so often he'd spin a full rotation, apparently surrendering to whatever emotion was clawing its way out of him.
Freeing one hand from the mic, Colm stretched it out toward Kupé at the table, as though trying to take her hand from twenty feet away. His eyes were half-closed, and his shirt was unbuttoned a little further than usual—putting a hairy chest on display.
"Not bad." The former assassin gave her lover a spare compliment, carnivorous teeth sinking into a piece of fried cheese, stretching the hot, molten interior into strings between her lips and fingers. "I need to step away for a moment."
She shoved the rest into her mouth and, without waiting for the song to end, practically levitated on her power over to the little man and swept him off his feet—carting him in the direction of the bar's aggressively aromatic bathroom.
The place was, frankly, a hellhole. The far stall had a hole in the wall—a hole for exactly that. Technically the bathroom was unisex, but I had strong doubts that the hentai-inspired promises of that arrangement worked in real life. Most likely what waited on the other side was good old-fashioned trouble, like that old joke about the barrel and the sailors.
"Lovely couple." I raised my bottle in their honor and swept my gaze across the assembled group at the table. "Who's next?"
"Me!" Mel slapped the table confidently and, ignoring the complaints of everyone around her, marched toward the karaoke setup.
A minute hadn't passed before an upbeat pop melody started pumping from the speakers—the kind more suited to a teenage emo girl than a demon milf.
"God, her taste has gotten even worse." Prism didn't even pause to deliberate before clamping a pair of headphones over her ears. Everyone else scattered—some moving to tables further from the stage, others drifting off around the bar to find something better to do.
"I'll go next. When this is over." Unable to find kinder words, Flambe watched a couple of guys heading toward the bathroom and, without overthinking it, followed them. "Back in a bit."
I couldn't leave, given that my girlfriend was firing glances at me every few seconds. So I stayed put and waited patiently. At least Malévola had a beautiful voice—though again, that voice was deep and languid and full of mature sensuality, and hearing it sing a song made for teenagers made her look exactly like the drunk mom who was supposed to be chaperoning the party but couldn't help herself.
"At least she's having fun." Robert reappeared at my table with a glass of whiskey, setting it across from me. The pour was generous, and even just by looking at it the whiskey was clearly not the cheap stuff. "Your health."
"Heh." I took a sip. Surprisingly decent for a dive this beaten-down. I went back for another. "Your attempts at bribery are genuinely charming."
"Uh… I don't know what you're talking about." Thrown off, Robert scratched the back of his head, messing up hair that never looked combed to begin with. "Just figured I'd buy everyone a drink."
"The entire Team Z? Good luck." I drank half the glass and felt the warm, fragrant heat spreading through my chest. I shrugged at the dispatcher's piercing but exhausted stare. "What? It's obvious. But don't stress about it, Robert. I like you anyway—and working with you has gotten a lot more productive."
"Than—"
"On top of which, some of the female attention has shifted onto you, for which I am doubly grateful." I finished the glass and flagged down the waiter for another round.
"Thank you," the flustered-but-surprised dispatcher managed, still not quite sure how to react. "I think."
"Don't mention it." At that exact moment, I spotted over Robert's shoulder a particularly unpleasant individual whom our little band had already had the pleasure of dealing with once before. "Oh, hell. And here we go."
"Hey there, you little water bitch." The man who stopped at our table was… how to put this. Take a Mexican tough-guy physique, graft on a pair of stubby little baby hands straight off a Deadpool figure, and throw a set of mechanized limbs over his shoulders—heavier and more brutal-looking than anything his original equipment could compete with. "Got yourself a new boyfriend? Decided to find someone your own size?"
"Not bad, Armstrong—you clearly spent all night working on that one while your little baby hands were busy." Robert and I both laughed loudly and deliberately at the pathetic excuse for a joke, because it was obvious how much being reminded of his own hands enraged this clown. "Anything must look big in those tiny palms… you'd know, right? You've seen plenty. Come on, tell me—maybe mine's not as small as I thought?"
"Little bastard." The tiny fingers curled into fists, and the mechanical arms behind Armstrong's back rose with a threatening thrum, settling into something resembling a combat stance. "Without your demoness around, you're not so—" He choked. "Ugh—pfth—"
I'd shot a small ball of water straight into his face. Robert and I waited patiently while our opponent finished coughing.
Honestly, this was dragging on. In an actual fight I could have already riddled him full of holes, to say nothing of more lethal and efficient approaches. A pressurized stream of water should have no problem slicing through those mechanical grabbers of his.
Armstrong spent nearly a full minute spitting and shooting furious, almost rabid glares at us before deciding to relocate away from the table—because Mel's song had just ended, and unlike me, the demoness was not particularly known for patience. She'd cut something important off with that terrifying sword of hers before you could blink.
"Sweetheart, let's step outside." The girl was breathing hard. Her cheeks—already permanently red—managed to look even more flushed. Beads of sweat traced their way down her throat onto her chest, and her gold-filled gaze was moving over me slowly, drifting from my face down toward my belt every few seconds.
"Of course." I finished the new pour of whiskey and raised my bottle in farewell to Robert. A quick and passionate encounter in a grimy back alley awaited me. No sense in keeping a lady waiting.
---
The moment Waterbane was out of sight, Robert turned his tired gaze on the girl sitting across from him. She had appeared out of thin air as soon as the two left—Diva watching the couple go with something genuinely envious in her expression, mouth curving in something between a smile and a grimace as the horned girl grabbed Ginger by the ass on the way out the door. Tired of waiting, apparently.
"He's a clever one, though." Mechamen had seen it too, and wasn't hiding his smile now. His relationship with most of Team Z hadn't exactly warmed into anything, but certain members of the group gave him reason for optimism. "Hard to believe he's the same guy who…"
He caught himself and decided not to finish the thought. But the argumentative girl across from him couldn't resist the little jab—by the look on her face it was more reflex than intent.
"Might kill someone? Might be a villain?"
"Yeah." He stretched the word out and scanned the room one more time. Team members were threading through the bar, slipping easily between tables, buying drinks for some people and letting others buy for them.
"Hey, don't get stuck on that. I was just…" Not finding the words to finish, Diva lit a cigarette instead. One leg pulled up close to her chest, foot resting on the cushion. "You two are actually a little alike."
"How so?"
"He used to sit in here looking over his shoulder every ten seconds like he was seeing enemy combatants around every corner—just like those unhinged old veterans with PTSD." She tapped the side of her head and blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. "And now look at him. He's settled in."
"Please. They see me as a snitch." A large, lizard-jawed man who'd drifted past their table squinted down at them and stopped—but one look at Diva's face, which radiated pure contempt and challenge in equal measure, made him snort under his breath and move on. "That's all."
"Obviously. You reek of hero." For demonstration purposes, Diva leaned in and took a deliberate sniff—cheap cologne, end-of-workday sweat, alcohol layered underneath. "To them you're the enemy. Heh. Although honestly, you smell less like Mechamen and more like a dad who stepped out for cigarettes and never came back."
She murmured the last part under her breath, leaning even closer, but pulled back immediately when she met the warning look on the displeased hero's face.
"You'd know something about men like that, wouldn't you?" The retort he'd started came to an abrupt stop when the girl began rolling her eyes and extended a middle finger. Robert waved away the smoke that had settled on the table and tightened his fists—that being about the most he allowed himself to show in a place like this. "I bought them all drinks. What more is there?"
"Well, you can buy them drinks, you can make sure they don't get fired…" Diva took slow, unhurried drags between sentences, picking away at her companion's composure with precision. "You can line them up and take turns with all of them… It won't matter. They'll still think you're some hero who ruined their lives."
"The people I go down on aren't typically in any condition to think about anything." The dispatcher's chin came to rest on his folded hands on the table. His mood was sinking fast, and not even a couple of cheerful exchanges and some decent drinks could reverse the trajectory. "But I hear you."
The conversation went quiet for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, the karaoke queue had reached the Golem. Holding the microphone extremely carefully between two fingers, the clay giant stood nearly motionless, terrified of accidentally demolishing the stage.
"I will not lie, I love big butts…" His monotone, basement-deep voice rolled across the bar, briefly silencing the room—but the moment the other patrons got a look at who was singing, everyone collectively decided to simply wait it out.
"Ahem." Robert cleared his throat, mirroring the smile on the invisible girl across from him as he returned to the interrupted topic. "I still think most of them brought it on themselves. The way they threw their lives away."
"See, that's exactly what I mean—you even talk like a snitch." Diva reached out and swiped a glass from Sonar as he wandered past. She blew him a kiss; the stoned bat responded with profound emotional devastation—eyes rolling back, shoulders slumping in defeat—before pivoting and shuffling back toward the bar. "Thanks! …Guess he didn't hear me. Where were we?"
"Discussing my oral habits and Team Z's relationship with life?" Mechamen muttered darkly, swirling the whiskey in his glass. The liquid clung to the sides, sliding back down in slow rivulets, and Robert was so absorbed watching it that he almost missed what the invisible girl said next. "Hm?"
"I said…" Diva swallowed her irritation, reached over, swiped the glass from his hand, and drank it in one long pull, dragging her tongue along the rim in an extremely undignified way. "Just tell them who you are."
"After everything we just said about my oral skills?"
A quiet shared laugh was cut short by the front door banging open. Both of them automatically craned their necks toward the entrance, where Waterbane walked in—looking disheveled and thoroughly pleased with himself, arm in arm with the crimson-skinned demoness. Malévola looked no better, and was hastily wiping her mouth as they came in.
"That was fast." Robert glanced at his watch, noting that not quite twenty minutes had passed. For a quick alley encounter, that was actually respectable.
"Lucky bitch." Diva waved off his questioning look and gave the passing couple a light-hearted salute, then turned back to the interrupted conversation and fixed the dispatcher with a demanding stare.
"I'm not going to any alley." Robert even scooted away from Diva for dramatic effect—and was immediately forced to dodge the glass she hurled at him. "Hey! Watch it!"
"Stop changing the subject!"
"All right, all right… It's just not that easy to come out and say."
"What could possibly be complicated about it?" Diva suppressed a weary sigh and managed—barely—not to roll her eyes all the way back. She scooted back in to close the distance between them. "You're talking like there'd be real consequences from coming clean. As if."
"Well. I did arrest a few people on this team."
"Ha-ha-ha! Legend!" She slapped him on the back hard enough that he nearly went face-first into the table, then settled back into the sofa, beaming. "Who was it? Let me guess!"
"Waterbane." Robert took a deliberately smug sip of his drink the moment her face curdled with disappointment, enjoying this thoroughly.
"Oh, please." The initial pang dissolved into boredom the second she heard the name. "About him you do not need to worry. The horned one said he's got your laminated posters hanging on his wall at home."
"How charming." Flat delivery. Completely dead-eyed. "But there was also someone else."
For just a moment, an odd mixture of embarrassment and regret crossed the dispatcher's face—but before he could continue, a new contestant took the karaoke stage. Another member of Team Z.
"And I'm a bitch, first name Robert! Such a bitch, my name is Robert!" Flambe's grating, slightly off-pitch voice cut across the entire bar, and Robert's mood plummeted to its absolute lowest point. In the gaps between lyrics, the dispatcher jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the pyromania enthusiast currently defaming him on stage. "I've got no hope! I've got no dreams! And a tiny little member just for decoration it seems!"
Mechamen exhaled a long, suffering sigh—which was so genuinely funny that Diva couldn't hold in a loud burst of laughter, which Flambe interpreted as an audience approval rating of one hundred percent and accordingly turned up the volume on the filth.
"And it doesn't even do its job." He snapped his fingers a few times while fumbling for a rhyme worthy of the moment. "Because I have… erectile dysfunction."
"Wait—seriously? Him!?" Diva pointed directly at their preening colleague on stage, who was now singing his rewritten ballad with the brightest smile imaginable—though admittedly, that might have just been his power. "So you're the one who took his fingers? I always figured the idiot cut them off himself making kebabs or something."
"Racist," Robert declared firmly. "But seriously—I hope you can see now why I don't feel like coming clean. Or more accurately—why I'm terrified of being set on fire."
"Oi—who let a superhero piece of crap into this bar?" The male voice behind Robert was unexpected. A familiar voice—belonging to the large man who had already tried to start something when the dispatcher was sitting with Waterbane. "Hey. I'm talking to you, asshole."
"Oh God, is that the idiot with the mechanical arms?"
"Yep." Diva narrowed her eyes, setting her glass aside and sliding her inhaler out of her pocket, clearly preparing for the worst. "And he's coming this way."
"Damn it—Herman warned me."
"About what?"
"That tonight was definitely going to end in a fight."
She didn't get to answer. Armstrong crossed his small human arms over his chest and clenched the mechanical ones into fists, stepping right up to the table and forcing the dispatcher to turn and get to his feet.
"I'm talking to you, asshole. Not so brave without your little water friend, are you?" The screech of metal from the extra limbs cut through a sudden near-silence. Somehow all the ambient noise had evaporated—leaving Armstrong's loud voice and the SDS dispatcher's response ringing out with perfect clarity. "Wasn't there another bar you could've gone to? What the hell are you doing in ours? Got a last request?"
"I was just leav—" Armstrong didn't wait for the answer. He caught the dispatcher across the face, and then a mechanical arm launched him across the room.
Robert flew a good ten meters, clipping a couple of patrons on the way and flipping a table over with his body when he landed. He'd barely started coming back to himself when he saw Diva thrashing in a steel grip—and then a blow to the head sent him into a brief, unwelcome darkness.
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