The bar was called the Rusted Kettle, and it smelled like one, too.
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Oliver had sworn up and down the whole walk over that it had the cheapest pitchers in the 7th District, and for once he hadn't been exaggerating. A long table sat crammed into the back corner, close enough to the fireplace that half the group had already shed their coats, and a mismatched collection of chairs had been dragged over from three other tables to fit all seven of them around it.
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"To the Gumshoe Office," Oliver said, raising his glass high enough that beer sloshed over the rim and onto his own knuckles. "And to our four newest recruits, who solved more cases in one afternoon than Kraus managed in his entire first month!"
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"That's not true," Kraus said.
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"It's mostly true."
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"It's not even a little true!"
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"To the Gumshoe Office!" Roby bellowed, already three-quarters through his first mug and not remotely interested in the accuracy of anybody's toast.
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Glasses met in the middle of the table with a clatter, and for a moment the whole booth was noise and warmth and the particular kind of laughter that comes easiest right after a genuinely bad week.
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Mori sat wedged between Yuhuan and Saoirse, his own mug barely touched, watching the whole scene with the quiet, slightly stunned expression of someone who still hadn't gotten used to being allowed to just sit somewhere and be happy.
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"You're staring," Yuhuan said, not looking up from peeling the label off his own bottle.
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"I'm just—" Mori shrugged. "It's been a while since I did something this normal."
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"Normal's good. Get used to it while it lasts."
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"WHAT DA HEEEELL?!" Angelika yelled suddenly, loud enough that half the table jumped.
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Everyone turned to look at her. She was staring, appalled, at Roby, who had just attempted to stack four empty shot glasses into a small pyramid on the back of his own hand.
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"What?" Roby said, not moving the hand. "It's a skill!"
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"It is not a skill, it is a liability," Angelika said. "You are going to put someone's eye out."
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"With shot glasses?"
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"With shot glasses, with the pyramid, with your entire personality. I have seen this exact trick end in a hospital visit twice already this year, and I am not exaggerating either of those times."
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"She's not," Kraus said, without looking up from the small potted fern he'd apparently brought with him and set gently in the middle of the table, safely out of splash range. "One of them was me."
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"You brought a plant to the bar?" Roby asked, momentarily distracted from his pyramid.
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"I water him on a schedule," Kraus said, with the flat dignity of a man who did not consider this a strange thing to admit out loud. "The schedule does not pause because I am drinking. His name is Grover."
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"You named your fern."
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"I named all four of my ferns. And my fish."
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"How many fish do you have?"
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"Seven, currently. Six, if my guppy doesn't pull through from his sickness."
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Saoirse, who had been quietly working her way through her second mug with Arnold's mouth clamped firmly around the handle, perked up at the word fish.
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"CAN I MEET THE FISH?" she asked.
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"Absolutely not," Kraus said. "You would name one of them Gerald, and I already have a Gerald, and it would cause an identity crisis in my tank."
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"...There's already a Gerald?" Stuffy asked, deeply suspicious.
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"He's a very good fish."
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The night went on like that for a while, loose, warm, and easy, the kind of evening with no troubles at all. Oliver told a long, increasingly implausible story about the time he'd been the top-ranked singles player in his entire high school district, which nobody believed until he arm-wrestled Roby to a draw one-handed and left the whole table more impressed than they wanted to admit.
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"See, that's wrist strength," Oliver said, flexing dramatically. "Years of serving. I keep the old racquet on the wall back at the office. You've probably walked right past it."
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"I thought that was just decoration," Mori said.
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"It is decoration. It's also a trophy. Both things can be true."
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Angelika, meanwhile, had gotten deep into an argument with Roby over whether or not a certain lolita brand from the 1st District was "actually good," or just expensive, a debate Roby had absolutely no business being part of and somehow still refused to lose.
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"I'm just sayin'," Roby said, "if it costs that much and it's still itchy, that ain't fashion, that's a scam."
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"It's not itchy if you buy the right undergarments," Angelika said, with the weary patience of someone repeating herself. "Which you would know if you'd ever purchased a single piece of clothing that wasn't 'whatever was closest to the door.'"
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"Hey, closest to the door is a valid strategy!"
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"It's a good strategy for a man being chased."
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"Roby, are you bein' chased?!" Saoirse gasped, whipping around with both puppets raised.
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"I am not bein' chased!"
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"THEN WHY ARE YOU DRESSED LIKE IT?!"
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By her fourth mug, Saoirse had gone from loud to genuinely concerning, and by her fifth, the whole table had quietly, unanimously agreed to stop refilling it, a decision that arrived several mugs too late.
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"I feel," Saoirse announced grandly, standing up on her chair for reasons nobody had asked for, "like I could take on ANY ARCH in the whole entire Ring, right now, with my bare—"
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She did not finish the sentence.
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What followed was loud, sudden, and involved most of the table's used napkins in a heroic, but ultimately doomed, defensive effort. Kraus snatched Grover the fern up off the table and held him close. Roby, to his credit, didn't even flinch, just leaned back out of the blast radius with the calm of someone who had clearly seen worse.
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"...I feel better," Saoirse said, once it was over, wiping her mouth on Stuffy's sleeve while Stuffy made a sound of profound betrayal.
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"I do not," Stuffy said.
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"There it is," Oliver said cheerfully, waving down a very tired-looking waitress for a mop. "Every celebration needs a sacrifice."
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"HEY! Saoirse, that was MY good sleeve!" Arnold shrieked.
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"IT'S FINE! IT'S BASICALLY A BADGE OF HONOR NOW! YOU CAN TELL EVERYONE HOW YOU SURVIVED MY VOMIT TSUNAMI!"
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Yuhuan, who had spent the last several minutes very carefully not looking directly at any of it, finally set his drink down and stood.
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"I need air," he said, and made for the door before anyone could say anything.
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Mori, half-laughing and still holding a fistful of ruined napkins, glanced at the small stack of empty glasses piling up at their end of the table.
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"I'll grab another round," he said, mostly to have a reason to stand up and stop breathing in whatever Saoirse had turned the tablecloth into.
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He made his way toward the bar, dodging a waitress and a man arguing loudly over the jukebox, and didn't notice, as he went, that the door swinging shut behind Yuhuan and the stool he was about to sit down in both belonged to the same night's real story.
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The cold hit Yuhuan, sharp and clean after the noise and the smell of spilled beer, and he leaned back against the Rusted Kettle's brick wall and let it do its work, breathing slowly, one hand pressed briefly to his own chest like he could push the last hour back out of it.
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"You always did run outside when things got loud."
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Yuhuan's head snapped up.
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Qiang stood a short distance down the street, hands resting perfectly at his sides, unhurried, like he'd been standing there for a while and was just waiting for the right moment to speak.
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"Qiang?" Yuhuan pushed off the wall. "What are you doing here?"
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"Looking for you." Qiang closed the distance between them at his own pace, never rushing, the way he did everything. "Haddler passed something along. I thought you should hear it before you heard it from somebody worse."
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Mori leaned an elbow on the bar and waited for the bartender to notice him, drumming his fingers against the wood to the rhythm of the music.
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"Rough table?" a voice asked from the stool beside him.
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Mori turned. A man sat there with blonde hair slicked back and a green-eyed, easy smile, sleeves rolled to the elbow, nursing a glass of something pale gold and fizzing inside. A slice of peach sat speared on a toothpick, balanced across the rim.
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"You could say that," Mori said. "My friend just threw up on the tablecloth."
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"Ah. A classic." The man raised his glass an inch in salute. "Charlie."
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"Mori."
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"What did Haddler find out?" Yuhuan asked, arms crossed against the cold.
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"Vance's real reason for cutting you loose." Qiang leaned against the wall beside him, matching his posture, the two of them staring out at the empty street instead of at each other. The topic they were discussing was easier said sideways. "It wasn't the charges. Those were mostly lies. Vance wanted a Fixer with a high-tier contract, badly enough to put you guys through hell to get one, and now that he's got what he needed out of Mori, he doesn't need any of you around anymore."
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"What he needed," Yuhuan repeated. "What does that mean?"
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"I don't know the whole shape of it," Qiang said. "I know it's connected to Script. Vance thinks Mori's contract with Gun is too similar to the Death Spinner's power. Way too similar. He's not sure if he can hold on to the leash of Mori if he were to... Well, I'm sure you know what I mean."
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"That yours?" Mori asked, nodding at the peach garnish. "The drink."
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"Bartender's suggestion. I asked for something with fruit in it." Charlie plucked the peach slice free and turned it over between two fingers before biting it clean off the pick. "Funny thing about peaches. Everybody remembers the flesh. Sweet, easy, gone in just a few bites... Nobody remembers what's actually holding the whole thing together."
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Mori huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh. "You always talk like that to strangers at bars?"
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"Only the interesting ones." Charlie's eyes flicked, briefly, to the small tin badge now pinned crooked to Mori's coat, GUMSHOE OFFICE stamped into it in cheap block letters. "Detective work suit you?"
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"It's new."
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"New's a good word for a lot of things you've got going on, isn't it?"
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"Too similar," Yuhuan said, low. "So he's scared of him? Scared of what Mori might become, and instead of helping him, he just—"
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"Cut his losses." Qiang's voice stayed level, but something behind it had gone tired in a way Yuhuan had only heard once before, in a different room, a different life ago. "It's not complicated, Yuhuan. Vance doesn't think in loyalty. He thinks in liabilities and assets, and the four of you stopped being worth the risk the moment you started grasping your abilities. He liked that you didn't know anything."
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Yuhuan's jaw tightened. "That's not fair... None of this is fair! Mori wouldn't—"
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He stopped himself.
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Qiang turned his head, just slightly, and waited.
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"You know," Charlie said, swirling the last inch of his drink, "most people who get handed a bad hand spend all their energy resenting the dealer. Never once looking at the cards."
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"What's that supposed to mean?"
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"It means you keep talking about what got taken from you." Charlie set his glass down, empty now except for the last soaked ring of pulp at the bottom. "Never once about what you're holding."
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Mori didn't have an answer ready. He turned it over in his head instead, the way he'd turned Sam's question over in the Viscoso hospital lobby, and something about its shape felt uncomfortably familiar, though he couldn't say why.
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"Wait!" Yuhuan's voice cracked, just slightly, the cold air catching it before he could smooth it back over. "I take it back. What I told you back then... About Mori. I take it back, Qiang!"
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Qiang went quiet for a moment. When he finally spoke, his voice held no anger, which made it worse.
⠀
"You can't take back something when it's already been set in stone," Qiang said. "I never needed your permission to want it, Yuhuan Lau. I told you that day I'd end this eventually, and I meant it before you ever raised your blade to my throat. Nothing about tonight will change that."
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"Then why tell me any of this?" Yuhuan's breath fogged in front of him, sharp and quick. "Why come find me at all, if you're just going to—?!"
⠀
"Because I don't think I'm finished yet," Qiang said, cutting him off, gentle in a way that didn't match the words. "Not as a mentor. Mori doesn't need a teacher anymore, not really. But something's coming for him. I can feel it in the part of me that's still an ARCH. And when it gets here, he's going to need someone at his side who isn't afraid to die. For when I do..."
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⠀
⠀
"I should get back," Mori said, straightening up, the untouched second round finally arriving in front of him in a small forest of fresh glasses. "My friends'll wonder where I went."
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"Probably," Charlie agreed, already sliding off his stool, tossing a few crumpled Nanum notes onto the bar without counting them. He paused, halfway turned toward the door, and looked back at Mori with that same easy, unreadable smile.
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"One question before I go," Charlie said. "What do you think of the pit? Of a peach, I mean. Everybody's got an opinion on the peach. I'd like to know your thoughts on the middle... the part you're not supposed to eat."
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Mori opened his mouth.
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"Die?" Yuhuan repeated quietly, like the word tasted strange in his mouth when applied to someone he'd once threatened at swordpoint and now, somehow, couldn't stand the thought of losing. "Qiang, that's not—!!"
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He turned to look at him fully for the first time since the conversation started.
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The street was empty.
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Mori blinked.
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The stool beside him was empty too, spinning gently on its base, the crumpled Nanum notes still sitting on the bar where Charlie had dropped them. Mori turned in a full circle, scanning the crowd, the pool tables, the door.
⠀
No light-haired slick-back. No green eyes. No easy smile anywhere in the room.
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"...Charlie?" Mori called out... To no one.
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⠀
⠀
Outside, Yuhuan stood alone on an empty street, breath fogging in the cold, staring at the space where Qiang once stood, his verdict now solid as stone.
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Inside, Mori stood alone at the bar, one of the man's half-eaten peach garnishes drying out on a napkin in front of him, turning an unanswered question over and over in his head.
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Neither of them said anything about it when they found each other again, back at the table, back in the noise and the warmth and Saoirse loudly apologizing to the tablecloth. Neither of them had the words for it yet.
⠀
Somewhere, though, across the Ring, or maybe even right outside of the bar, Script smiled to himself as he washed away his makeup and removed his blonde, slicked-back wig, replacing it with the hood of his coat. He let out a long sigh, letting the aroma of peach liqueur run along his tongue once again, stinging his throat and his nose.
⠀
He chuckled to himself.
⠀
"Mori. We're so similar, you and I... And yet, you have no idea who I am."
⠀
He took out his notepad and carefully wrote GUMSHOE in red ink, underlining it twice.