Melissa

Vanguard: Calder City

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“Leaving? What do you mean you’re leaving?”

Sienna nearly dropped the martini glass she was holding in shock. When the Velvet Room’s chef, Chef Eric had emerged from the kitchen at the beginning of his shift and had asked to speak with her, this wasn’t the conversation she had been expecting to have. Not by a longshot.

“I got another job offer, I’m sorry. It’s an incredible opportunity - they want me to be the Sous at that new restaurant in Midtown. The Chef de Cuisine they’re bringing in has a few Michelin stars because they want it to be next.” Eric explained sheepishly, “Don’t hate me, Sienna. You and I both know I’d be an idiot to turn that kind of chance down.”

She sighed, knowing he was right.

“Of course I don’t hate you. As your friend I’m happy for you, that’s amazing,” The brunette paused, “But as your boss and the owner of this bar I’m devastated. You can’t blame me for that, I’m losing a good one.”

“I know, and I’m sorry to put you in this position.” His apologetic tone told Sienna that he meant every word, and after the years he’d worked there, it was justified. “They want me to start as soon as possible, but I also don’t want to leave you high and dry. I’ll still come in tomorrow and we can talk more about next steps.” With a nod, he disappeared back into the kitchen, leaving her to process the news.

Once he was gone, Sienna grabbed a clean towel from the back of the bar and screamed into it, the cloth doing little to muffle the sound. First, the whole “neutrality” situation, and now this. She wasn’t exactly having a great week. Maybe her good karma had finally run out.

“What the hell am I going to do, Marcus? How am I supposed to find a new chef that fast?” She buried her head in her hands, stress creasing her forehead almost instantly. Her head bartender paused from unloading the racks of clean glasses back onto the shelf and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“It’s going to be fine. You can always just bring someone in temporarily until you find a permanent replacement,” he suggested, “After all, you know a lot of people, Sienna. Someone ought to have some free time to come and assist until you hire someone else.”

“I do, don’t I.” She drummed her manicured nails on the surface of the bar, thinking, the sound ricocheting off the mirrors in an otherwise silent room. Marcus also was deep in thought, seeing if he could think of anyone who could provide aid in this hour of need. After a moment, a lightbulb went off and his eyes lit up.

“What about that guy who came in a few months ago? The childhood friend of yours… I want to say Logan was his name? Isn’t he a chef?”

“You mean Link?” She pondered it for a moment, considering the notion. Lincoln Darby was a Cedar Grove native like her - the two had grown up together and their parents were good friends. He’d gone off and became a successful chef right before she opened the Velvet Room and while they weren’t very close anymore, she could give him a call. He’d come in on more than one occasion to support her, so he was familiar with her bar and what she was trying to accomplish. “It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

“You’re welcome.” Marcus smirked, shaking his head, before disappearing back into the kitchen with the empty racks.

Sienna reached into her pocket and took out her cellphone, scrolling her contacts until she found that familiar name and pressed it. The phone rang, once, twice, before a deep voice responded on the other end. Sienna perked up.

“Link, hey. It’s Si. I need a favor.”

Vanguard: Calder City

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She had talked herself out of it twice already.

The first time was Friday night itself, lying awake in her loft with the deadbolt freshly checked and the lights left on longer than usual, telling herself that going to find a man she'd walked out on without a word would be its own type of foolishness. The second time was Saturday, mid-shift, elbow deep in the evening's chaos, swearing she had handled worse than one unsettling conversation and didn't need anyone's help managing it.

By Sunday afternoon, Sienna had run out of reasons.

She didn't know Wicklow well. She knew it by its reputation, by the particular caution her mother had instilled in her about certain parts of the city, and by the fact that it sat close enough to the Lantern District to feel almost familiar and far enough to feel like a different country entirely. She found the church mostly by memory - a church volunteer, Bret had said, with that easy, self-deprecating laugh, and Saint Brigid's had surfaced from somewhere in the back of her mind without her being entirely sure where she'd first heard it.

It was smaller than she expected. Old limestone, weathered in the particular way buildings got when a city had simply continued existing around them for a very long time, a single gargoyle keeping watch over the door with the kind of permanent disapproval that felt almost endearing. She stood outside it for a moment longer than she needed to, doing the quiet internal calculation she did before walking into anywhere unfamiliar, and went in.

Sienna couldn’t remember the last time she’d been inside a church - in fact, she was entirely convinced she’d be set aflame the minute she crossed the threshold. But the interior was quiet and cool, smelling faintly of candle wax and old stone, and a handful of people sat scattered among the pews, their heads bowed in the stillness of private conversations with something larger than themselves. The brunette slipped her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose, peering over the frames and searching the room, but she didn’t see that familiar face anywhere.

She was still scanning the room when a voice spoke gently beside her.

“Looking for Bret?”

Standing next to Sienna, Father Evan Riordan dried off his hands with a small towel. For all intents and purposes the man looked less like a priest at that moment and more like a handyman. He was not wearing his frock and collar, instead he adorned himself in some old overalls which he had tied at the waist and a t-shirt that may once have been white but was now the dirty sort of beige that came from a job well done. Truly, the only sign of his commitment to the cloth was a crucifix around his neck and even that wasn’t fancy, a cheap dollar store cross that you could find anywhere and everywhere.

Evan was still a good looking man in decent shape even at fifty six years old. He hadn’t seen combat in decades by this point but the old routines had been sunk deep enough that they were in his blood. He was out running before the first break of daylight. He was moving things that were probably way too heavy before the first finance bro woke up for his matcha or boba or whatever the fuck those little pricks drank. And he was out on the street, handing out supplies to those in desperate need before the Vanguard superhero pulled on their freshest pair of tights.

“Eight out of ten times, any girl whose face could launch a thousand ships that comes in here is looking for him.” Evan was all too aware after six months of knowing Bret that he seemed to have some sort of way with women. Maybe it was the English thing? Or the wounded puppy eyes? Either way it was sometimes annoying. He was a priest, not an answering machine.

“The other two are usually looking for me or want to confess they posted a racist tweet in high school.” Father Riordan chucked a little at his own joke. He tossed the towel over his shoulder before sliding his hands into the pocket of his trousers. “Sorry, a little levity goes a long way in a place like this.”

The laugh that escaped Sienna’s lips was genuine, but brief, leaving something closer to discomfort in its place. She slid her sunglasses up onto her head properly now, taking in the man standing in front of her. He had the particular ease of someone entirely unbothered by the gap between what he was supposed to look like and what he actually did. She found, somewhat against her will, that she liked him immediately.

The brunette took in the church again - the scattered heads in the pews, the way you could hear a pin drop, the particular quality of light through old glass - and felt, not for the first time since crossing the threshold, the distinct sensation of being somewhere she had absolutely no business being. A bar owner from the Lantern District, standing in a limestone church in Wicklow on a Sunday afternoon, looking for a man whose last name she knew and whose number she didn't have.

When she put it like that, it sounded considerably less reasonable than it had on the walk over.

"The levity's appreciated," she replied anyway, because she'd come this far and the alternative was turning around and pretending the last ten minutes hadn't happened. "I don’t have Twitter, so you have a good read," she added. "Though maybe I'd lose the ship metaphor."

"Sienna Mercer," she introduced herself, "I own a bar in the Lantern District. Bret came in a few nights ago." She paused, choosing the next part with care, the words sitting awkwardly in her throat. "I wanted to speak with him. I wasn't entirely sure where else to look." The admission cost her more than she'd anticipated and she silently hoped that he was the kind of man who didn't press too hard on the parts of a story that had been deliberately left thin.

Evan mulled over her words for barely a few seconds. “Father Evan Riordan. Humble representative of this here pile of rubble and crap.” He leaned back against one of the old limestone pillars and folded his arms. “I’d shake your hand Miss Mercer but I’ve just been cleaning out our ancient gutters, you don’t want none of that I promise you.”

He examined her face with a little more detail now. She had spoken of Bret going to her bar in the Lantern District. That was certainly not his usual scene, too fancy, too upmarket. Wicklow was a beautiful gothic shithole and that’s just the way the Englishman likes it. Father Riordan had only known the man six months but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was a creature of habit and comfort. This in itself set off a little flag in his brain. It made him believe that Sienna was not one of Bret’s usual girls from the pub. She wasn’t actually looking for Bret at all; she was looking for The Pilgrim.

“Well believe it or not, what with it being a Sunday but today is his day off.” Riordan pushed his round glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Though that usually doesn’t stop him from coming in. I can try and give him a call if you’d like?”

Very quickly, Sienna backpedaled.

"No," she blurted, the answer arriving far faster than she'd intended. "I mean..." She caught herself, pressing her lips together for a moment as though she could reel the word back in.

The last thing she wanted was to inconvenience anyone, especially when she'd been the one to arrive unannounced. Father Riordan had offered without hesitation, a kindness she wasn’t sure she deserved as a stranger, but she'd already imposed enough by walking through the church doors looking for someone she barely knew.

Besides, she wasn't that desperate. At least that’s what she kept telling herself.

A small, apologetic smile found its way onto her face.

"Please don't interrupt his day off on my account." She tucked a loose strand of dark hair behind one ear, glancing toward the heavy wooden doors, as if briefly entertaining the possibility of making a graceful exit. But her gaze settled again on Father Riordan. "It's just..." Her jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "I was hoping to find him because I need to ask him something."

Saying need tasted sour. After all, Sienna Mercer had built an entire life around not needing anyone. Yet, here she was, standing in a church on a Sunday afternoon when she should have been sleeping. Pride had a cruel sense of humor.

"But if he's not here, that's alright. You can just tell him Sienna stopped by. No message, no urgency." She hesitated, the faintest crease appearing between her brows. “It’s not life-or-death.” A beat passed.

“At least I don’t think it is.”

Father Riordan took a pause.

That last part she said, that started to penetrate his brain like a worm. He had seen too many people come to Saint Brigid’s looking for help. Too many that needed something that others in Calder City just could not give. Wicklow was not known as a generous place, nor even a very safe place. Yet Riordan had worked tirelessly to make the church feel that way. Bret had helped immeasurably in that. His youth and his enthusiasm had helped propel them a little further than they were before. His clandestine activities, the ones that involved the boy getting the ever loving shit beaten out of him on a nightly basis to protect the people of these fine streets, whilst Evan could not fully condone them, he also would not judge them because Bret, for all his faults, was helping and that was the whole damn point.

“Why don’t you take a seat over there, sweetheart? I’ve got some coffee on the go, I’ll pour you a cup. Tastes like shit but it’ll keep you going.”

Riordan didn’t really ask Sienna this so much as tell her. He crossed the room to the rectory and moved towards the coffee pot. He glanced up at one of the windows, something catching his eye, like a wave in the distance or a reflective glow. Shaking it off, Riordan pulled out his phone and sent a text.

Bret - You might want to swing by, got a girl here. Sienna. Something’s not right. Bring cheese whiz.

Dropping the phone back into his pocket, Evan quickly poured two cups of coffee and grabbed his last pack of shortbread biscuits before heading back out into the church. He nodded his head towards the quiet parishioners, most of whom were in their own worlds of prayer and reflection before taking his seat opposite Sienna.

“Here you go. Drink, eat up. Unload if you want, otherwise, we can just chat shit until you don’t want to anymore. No pressure.”

“No, really, you don’t have to-” Sienna began to protest, but Father Riordan was already halfway across the church fetching them something to drink. She tutted, knowing she should have just left without saying anything, but it was too late now. So the brunette let out a quiet sigh through her nose and resigned herself to the inevitable, and by the time he returned, she had settled into the seat he’d gestured to.

"Thank you," she replied appreciatively as he handed her the beverage. It smelled burnt and yet she wrapped both hands around the cup anyway, the warmth gave her something to hold onto besides the knot that had been sitting in her stomach since Friday night. She took a sip, and tried her best to steel her expression into something more neutral, but couldn’t help the smirk that graced her lips.

"...You really weren't exaggerating." Sienna commented, but nonetheless, went back for seconds. For a minute or two, neither of them spoke, but the silence wasn't awkward. Around them, the church simply carried on in its own subdued rhythm - the creaking sound of the pews as the parishioners moved ever so slightly, the crackling of a candle nearing the end of its wick. The brunette found her gaze drawn to the long shadows cast along the walls and tiled floor from the stained glass windows, the afternoon light shifting as the day ebbed.

"I haven't been inside a church in years," she admitted eventually, her voice softer than before. "Not since I was a kid, I think. My mother used to drag me when I was younger. Every Sunday. She was convinced that if I sat through enough sermons, something would eventually stick." Sienna glanced over at Father Riordan, taking in the overalls, the stained shirt, and the complete lack of ceremony about him. A faint smile tugged at her lips.

“No offense, but I think I was expecting someone a little more… priest-like.”

“Most people do.”

Father Riordan smiled warmly at the young woman before lacing his fingers through the handle of his mug. “You know, sometimes I do wear the whole frock and collar gimmick, even add a rosary if I’m feeling fancy but not that often.” With his free hand, Evan once again pushed up his glasses. His eyes weren’t what they used to be but you didn’t need to have twenty twenty vision to see that Sienna was absolutely stunning. Young Bret had exquisite taste.

“Though to be honest with you, I think sometimes that whole, traditional visual scares people away. Which is understandable, there’s a lot to be afraid of if you read the news. Not all my brothers in Christ are as saintly as they pretend. So I try not to give people any more to be scared of.”

The Catholic Church had not done itself any favours over the last few years and Father Riordan was not blind to this fact. Even years prior, before he refound his Faith, he did not fully trust those that stood at the altars and preached the word of God. Which was why he didn’t do it. Evan Riordan was a Catholic, he had been all his life but he did not want his church, Saint Brigid’s to be a place that housed fear, it was a place to house hope. Which was why it was welcoming to all colours and creeds. It was why he said good morning to the Rabbi every day, it was why he didn’t hold traditional sermons or fuel hateful rhetoric. It was why he let the Pilgrim walk through the door.

“Take Bret.” Riordan began. “English guy, stands out like a sore thumb. Every day, walks through those big oak doors and looks like he’s gone ten rounds with Tyson. Yet everyone is drawn to him. They listen to him and they feel safe with him. Why?” He raised the piping hot mug of magma to his lips and blew softly for a few seconds. After letting the black tar coat his throat, he continued. “Because he does stand out. Because you can tell, he’s not from here. He’s strange, yeah but he’s warm. Something about him just radiates it. If I could bottle that energy, those pews would not be so empty.”

Sienna looked down into the coffee in her hands, watching the dark surface tremble slightly with the movement of her fingers. Father Riordan had both hit the nail on the head and somehow also deduced the underlying reason she was here without even realizing it. Sure, shit may have hit the fan the other night at the casino, yet there wasn’t a single moment that the brunette had felt uneasy in his presence.

“How long has Bret volunteered here?” She asked, not able to offer much else up about the Englishman that the older man didn’t already say.

“Six months.” Father Riordan responded fairly swiftly. “The problem with old parishes like this? Most people who actually care about them are old!” He raised his hands like his words landed as some big surprise. “They die out pretty fast and that was happening here. We don’t really have a young base here, so I sent word through the church that I needed help. For whatever reason the outreach program call went across the pond and our boy Bret responded.”

Evan glanced towards the stained glass above them, fractured light beginning to pour through in various resplendent swatches against the pale internal walls. It was a sight he could never tire of. “I didn’t really have any other takers so I brought him over. When I picked him up at the airport all he had was the clothes on his back, his passport and cell phone. The boy is quite nuts.” He decided to reach for a biscuit. Whilst Sienna didn’t strike him in any way as malnourished, she did look slightly down. Sugar, he found, often helped, even just a little bit. “Hadn’t even organised a place to stay, so I had to do that for him too. Once I saw him in action though? I didn’t really mind. Kid’s a machine and all he’s done since being here is make it better.”

Sienna listened, and let the picture that Father Riordan was painting settle quietly into the space beside everything else she already knew about Bret Lowther.

Which, she was realizing, was considerably less than she assumed.

She thought about the man she’d met across the bar - the easy confidence, the charcoal suit that fit like it had been made for him, the particular quality about someone entirely at home in whatever room they happened to be standing in. She hadn’t pictured him arriving anywhere with nothing. It didn’t fit the version of him she’d been carrying around since Friday morning.

The brunette wondered how much of that version was accurate and how much she had made up to fill the gaps. She reached for a shortbread without really deciding to, the way you did when someone put something in front of you and the conversation was doing more work than your hands were.

Father Riordan clearly knew the Bret that showed up to the church everyday - the one who added value, the one who made people feel seen. She wondered how much he knew about the other one. The one with the gun, the one who’d sat at a table full of people trading intelligence and put one of Directorate Nine’s most sensitive assets in the center of it without blinking. The one who had spent years working for one of the most selective and clandestine organizations in the world before leaving to, apparently, do this.

She kept that particular thread to herself.

“Seems like he was flying by the seat of his pants.” Sienna laughed to herself, before looking up from her coffee and meeting Father Riordan’s eyes with an easy, open expression. “He didn’t mention much about what he did before,” she lied through her teeth, phrasing things carefully in the way she normally did when she wanted information without asking for it outright. “Before he came here, I mean. To Calder City.”

“Yeah, service will do that to a person.”

Father Riordan traced the rim of his cup with the tip of his index finger. His eyes drifted down to his own rippling reflection in the dark liquid, lost in fogged thoughts or perhaps memories of times gone by. “A lot of people find it hard, you know. Coming back to the world after seeing the worst parts of it.” He didn’t raise his eyes as the words left his lips. “I could see in him the same thing that I’ve seen in so many Vets that just don’t know how to rid themselves of their ghosts. I mean, heck, I see the same thing in my own mirror everyday.”

When he did move his eyes back up to Sienna, they were far more somber, mournful compared to the way they were before. “It’s why we do what we do. To fight back just a little beat each day, however we can. For Bret, I think helping out here and in…other places is his way of fighting back against his ghosts.”

As if on cue, the side door at the back end of the church hall opened and in stepped the topic of the duo’s conversation, Bret. He looked tired and had even more bruises and cuts than before. His walk towards them was slow but had a subtle hurriedness to it, this was undoubtedly down to some unseen ache or pain. He arrived at the table and placed all of his fingers down on its flat surface, almost as if steadying himself.

Before he even uttered a word, Bret’s face quickly lifted into that easy going smirk that it always seemed to be in when someone was looking. “Miss Mercer, always a pleasure.” His eyes shifted to Riordan. “Old man.” He greeted.

Sienna heard the door first - the particular creak of old wood that didn't quite fit the rhythm of the church's quiet - and looked up in time to watch Bret Lowther make his way toward them with the careful, deliberate pace of a man whose body was filing several formal complaints about the request.

She took him in properly as he crossed the room. His bruises had multiplied since the casino, his cuts too. He looked like someone had taken the version of him she'd seen at Ma Kelly's - already worse for wear - and put him through several more rounds of torment. She felt something tighten in her chest that she elected not to examine too closely.

Then Bret gave her that smile - that infuriating, entirely unbothered smile - and she felt the tightness shift into something else entirely. Something that might, under different circumstances and in a different building, have been relief.

She didn't let that show.

Instead, she looked at Father Riordan, who studied his coffee with the innocence of a man who had absolutely sent a text message while he was supposedly fetching biscuits.

"Is it socially acceptable," she exhaled, with the measured calm of someone choosing their words very, very, carefully, "to curse out a priest?" She let the question hang in the air for a moment - genuinely uncertain, given the setting.

"No message, no urgency," Sienna repeated her words from earlier, giving the older man a look that was approximately forty percent reproach and sixty percent something she didn't have a clean name for. "I believe those were my exact words, Father Riordan.”

“I would say I’m sorry but I’m not.” The older gentleman shook his head. “You’ve had a look in your eye from the minute you walked in here. Pretty hard to ignore really, so I did what I needed to. It’s what we do here.” Turning his head to Bret, he continued. “I’m gonna leave you two crazy kids alone.”

Sienna sighed before glancing back at Bret.

"You look like shit," she stated simply by way of greeting, giving him a once over. "Considerably worse than the last time I saw you." Her eyes moved briefly over the fresh cuts, the new bruises, the careful way he was holding himself, and then back to his eyes. “Is that a regular occurrence, or did this weekend hold a particular grudge against you?"

Father Riordan got to his feet, coffee in hand. “She’s right though, you do look like shit.” The priest casually took one more sip from his mug before peeling off towards the scattered congregation of Saint Brigid’s.

Bret cocked an eyebrow for a moment, it seemed like those five words had become the common greeting for him. Still, they weren’t wrong, he had spent the last week or so getting his arse handed to him by thugs, killers, hyper human monsters. He’d like to think the fact that he was still standing at all was some form of divine intervention but in spite of his beliefs, Bret knew better. It was more stubbornness and hard headiness that was keeping him on his feet.

“I’d say semi regular? Honestly I’ve been hit too many times in the head this week to really think about it.”

The Pilgrim took the now empty seat opposite the brunette beauty, albeit slowly. “Ooh shortbread.” He reached for the sweet treat with an almost childlike glee. “Fucking love shortbread,” He inhaled the buttery goodness of the biscuit like a starved animal before smelling back into reality.

“So what’s going on, Miss Sienna?”

Sienna opened her mouth with every intention of saying something measured and vague, something that would buy her another thirty seconds or so to decide how much she wanted to hand over across a church pew.

“The coffee here is terrible.” she replied instead, “You should really do something about that.”

Bret looked at her.

Not the smile this time, just the look - steady, unhurried, the particular quality of attention she first noticed across her own bar and hadn’t been able to shake since. The kind that didn’t demand anything and somehow got everything anyway.

She exhaled slowly.

“Someone came into the bar on Friday night,” she explained, her voice dropping into the register she used when the room needed to be small. “Alone, around 11pm. He knew about the casino and what happened. He knew about you - not by name, but by your accent. By what you gained at the table.” She turned the mug in her hands without even realizing she was doing it.

“He knew where I lived.” Sienna paused, letting that sit, and a subtle chill danced up her spine at the mention. “My loft, above the bar.”

“He came to remind me that neutral ground only stays neutral as long as the right people agree it should.” Her eyes stayed on Bret’s. “Apparently my recent extracurriculars have given some important people pause.” Her jaw tightened. “Then he mentioned the missing Grays. The ones that have been turning up dead and drained. He knew I was a Gray. Somehow.”

She sighed.

“He mentioned my staff too. That’s what’s bothering me the most.” Sienna revealed, “I can manage a threat against myself. I’ve done it before. But the people who work for me didn’t sign up for this. That’s not something I’m willing to let sit.” She took another sip of the awful coffee, mostly to give her something to do with her hands.

“I don’t normally rattle this easily.” The brunette acknowledged, “In case that wasn’t already apparent. But I’ve been running this conversation back in my head for the last two days and I can’t place his face. A man like that, in my bar, and I can’t even figure out who sent him.”

Guilt.

Guilt hit Bret far harder than any Gray ever could. Sienna had built herself a safe haven; a term here that stretched in various different directions. In one night, in his single quest to find Tae Park, he brought some type of danger to her door. That, of course, was never his intention. She was now coming to him because, in her own words, she was rattled. A less terrifying way of saying that she was scared of what had happened at the Velvet Room.

“I’m sorry.” He said with delicate honesty, “I didn’t mean to bring something down on you.” Bret tried to take in her words in detail, tried to do the mental arithmetic and work out who it could be that approached her. There were some logical leaps to make. Calder City was not a place that was short of criminal organisations. The question at this point was which ones, if any, they had crossed on their previous meeting.

“We can figure this out…” Before he could say anything else, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. This wasn’t the Pilgrim, there was no overt warning of anger or trouble. It was a feeling, one honed from years of avoiding bullets, of avoiding violence and fear itself. The temperature of the room, which was already low, dropped considerably, Bret looked up at the stained glass window above them and narrowed his eyes slightly before the feeling vanished.

“Colder than a witches tit in here. You wanna get out of here?”

Sienna looked at him for a long moment after the apology - long enough that it might have appeared she was considering what to do with it. In actuality, she was regretting her decision to come here to find him. She could hear the guilt in his tone and it wounded her to know she was now someone else’s problem. A burden on his shoulders. This was why she normally handled things alone.

“Don’t be, please.” She replied finally, “I made my own choices on Thursday night. You didn’t drag me to the casino.” She meant it. That was the thing she kept on coming back to in the two days of running the conversation with the man at the bar back in her head - she’d gone willingly, she’d used her abilities willingly, she’d walked out of a room with intelligence in her bag and a man she barely knew by her side and had found, somewhere in the middle of all of it, that she didn’t regret any of it. That was its own complicated fact to sit with. She was still sitting with it.

Then she watched his eyes go to the window.

She felt something then too - a shift in the air, subtle enough that most people would have written it off as a draft sneaking through old stones. She didn’t write it off - she had spent too many years being attuned to the way a room moved to dismiss it as nothing. The brunette could have sworn she’d seen the light refract differently in that split second her gaze met the stained pane of glass.

“Yeah,” Sienna quickly rose to her feet, trying to shake off the sudden unease that had come over her. “Let’s go - I need caffeine that isn’t jet fuel.”

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Collaboration with @BrutalBx}

Vanguard: Calder City

Checking in folks - we’ve been up and running for roughly a month now and are sitting pretty with 85 posts. I’m both impressed and excited for the future of this RP.

If you had a character accepted and have not posted yet, let us know where you’re at/if you’re still interested in participating. No pressure, but just gauging where our cast is at.

Vanguard: Calder City

If anyone is interested in some deep character research I've done this afternoon, I've started the list of food and drink consumed by the characters.

I may have missed some, please let me know. I will continue to update this for reference. xx

Coffee is currently the number one enjoyed item.

Eve - Spaghetti, Red Wine, Midori Martini, Cappuccino, Coffee, Tablespoon of Tiramisu, Pad Kee Mao (is not seen eating it), Sazerac, Cognac Sazerac

Ace - Coffee, Stray Fries, Stick of Beef Jerky

Joanie - Rum and Coke, Coffee, Lavender Tea

Brett - Tea, A Pint, Whisky, Beer

Dani - Coffee, Topo Chico, Fresh Mujudarra (is not seen eating it)

Marth - Lavender Tea, Creamy Sugar Violets

Dusk - Bacon Cheeseburger and Fries, Earl Grey Tea

Qing - Chicken Burger and Fries

Lucie - Tea

Archie - Coke Zero and Amaretto (3, possibly 5), Two Eggs, Bacon, Sausage Link, Ham, Home Fries, Orange Juice, Coffee

Pica - Crisp Packet, Tennis Ball, Brick, Glass, Loose Bolts, Foam Packing Peanuts, Piece of Flag, Traffic Cone Piece, Street Sign. Omelette, Cola, Coffee

Sienna - Black Coffee, The Mercer Cocktail, Beer, Pancakes, Black Coffee, Coffee, Cocktails

Solomon - Coffee

Currently red plumbob/no food or drink
Paladin -
Yulian -
Michelle -
Rock -

@Stormyx

This is the boots on the ground journalism this RP needs.

Vanguard: Calder City

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Sienna had always liked Fridays. They asked something of her, but never more than she had to give.

The beginning of the weekend had its own particular rhythm at the Velvet Room. Busier than Thursday, though not yet the controlled chaos of a Saturday - the kind of night where the bar filled steadily as the evening went on, the energy building in increments rather than arriving all at once at the door. She’d already made plenty of drinks - a pair of gin fizzes for the couple in the corner booth, something dark and complicated for a regular who liked to make her work for her tip, a round of beers for a group of University students who were definitely underage - when the man took the stool at the end of the bar.

She hadn't seen him come in. That, more than anything else, was what caught her attention. She prided herself on knowing the room the moment someone entered it - the particular quality of awareness she'd spent years cultivating, the kind that let her clock a stranger before they'd fully crossed the threshold. She didn't know how she'd missed him. He simply was, suddenly, sitting at the end of her bar with his hands folded in front of him and an expression of mild, patient interest, as though he'd been there for some time and was simply waiting for her to notice.

The brunette didn’t hesitate, or let her surprise show on her face, as she nimbly placed a cocktail napkin in front of him.

"What can I get you?"

"Whatever's good," he replied quickly. "Surprise me."

She poured him something without thinking too hard about it - a habit she'd built over years of reading what people actually wanted rather than what they asked for - and set it on the napkin. He thanked her with a small, unremarkable smile and took a slow sip, and she moved on to the next order, and that should have been the end of it.

It wasn't.

Sienna felt him watching her work the bar for the better part of twenty minutes, not intrusively, not in any way she could have pointed to and called a problem. He was just present. Attentive. The particular quality of someone who had come in with a specific purpose and was taking his time getting to it.

She knew him, somehow. That was the thing that wouldn't settle.

Not his name - she was fairly certain she'd never heard his name. But something about the line of his jaw, the way he held his glass, the particular stillness of him when he wasn't actively doing anything at all. She had seen this man somewhere. Recently, she thought. The certainty of it sat in her chest like a word on the tip of her tongue, present and useless in equal measure.

"Busy night," he commented by way of invitation, glancing around the bar with the interest of someone trying to start a conversation rather than simply observing. "Nice place you’ve got here, Ms. Mercer."

"I try." Sienna stated, not disagreeing with him, but the way her name sounded coming from his lips felt wrong in a million different ways.

"More than try, I'd say." He turned his glass slowly on the bar, the golden overhead lighting catching the amber liquid inside. “It’s the one room in this city where nobody picks a fight. People keep their heads down.” His gaze shifted, examining the booths along the wall, “Good business, a place like this. Keeps things smooth for the people who need them smooth."

Sienna kept her expression exactly where it had been.

"I just pour drinks," she replied. "Whatever else happens in this room isn't really my concern."

"No?" He took a slow sip, unhurried, his eyes never quite leaving hers even as he drank. "Funny. I'd have said that's exactly your concern. A Gray, running the one place in Calder where nobody asks what anybody else is."

She didn't react but was instantly unsettled as he read her like a book. Two stools down, one of the university students laughed too loudly at something, and the ordinary noise of the room continued around them, oblivious. She was grateful for it without examining why.

"Plenty of people drink here," she countered. "Doesn't make their business mine."

"Mm." He set the glass down, "You know, people are disappearing lately. Grays, mostly. You hear about that?" He asked it lightly, conversationally, the way someone might mention the weather. "Not to mention, there’s a lot of new product on the street. Rumor has it, it’s moving through here."

Something in her chest went very still.

"I hear all kinds of things," she responded, reaching for a cloth she didn't need, giving the counter in front of him more attention than it currently required. "None of it's mine to repeat."

"That's interesting," he started, "because I heard something more specific than rumor. A casino, last night. A man with an English accent who walked away with rather a lot more than he sat down with. And a woman who helped him do it." He let his words settle, unhurried. "Quite the performance, from what I'm told."

She didn't let anything cross her face. It cost her more than usual.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No," he agreed, with the same small, unremarkable smile. "I wouldn't expect you to. But it does raise a question." He turned his glass once, considering it, before leaning forward slightly, lowering his voice - not enough to seem secretive, just enough that it was clearly meant for her alone. "Here you are, every night, telling yourself this place stays out of things. And yet there you were, last night, very much in business that is not yours." His eyes held hers, frank and unblinking. "Makes a person wonder how neutral this 'box' of yours really is. Or whether it's just neutral when it's convenient."

"You're bluffing," she whispered. "You're here to see if I'll flinch."

“You keep telling yourself that." He said it simply, without raising his voice, and something underneath the pleasant tone thinned just enough to show what was actually holding it together. "But you should know - that box only stays safe as long as everyone agrees it should. There are people watching this place who've started wondering whether it's still earning that agreement."

She didn't move.

"Is that supposed to scare me?"

"I’m just here to inform you." He turned the glass once more, unhurried. "This building. Your staff. The loft upstairs you think nobody's bothered to notice." He let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to. "None of it has to become anyone's problem. But the day you decide your conscience matters more than the arrangement, that changes. Quickly. And not in a way anyone would be able to undo for you."

The room around them carried on, warm and oblivious, someone calling her name for another round two stools down. She didn't look away from him.

"Get out of my bar," she stated, low and even, though her pulse had found a rhythm she didn't like at all.

"I will." He left a folded bill beside his untouched drink and rose from the stool without hurry. "Think about the casino, Ms. Mercer. About what happened to the people at that table who stopped being useful." He smiled, small and unremarkable, the same one he'd worn the entire conversation.

"Have a good night, now."

He turned and disappeared into the thickening Friday crowd, swallowed easily by the same noise and warmth that had let him sit there, in plain sight, for fifteen minutes nobody else had noticed at all. Sienna watched the door close behind him and stood very still for a moment, a glass in her hand that she had been polishing without registering it.

Marcus appeared at her elbow then, glancing toward the door.

"Friend of yours?"

"No." she snapped. She set the glass down, hand shaky, and reached for the next order.

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Vanguard: Calder City

Just like that?

@Roman

Don't make me regret my choice.

Vanguard: Calder City

@Roman your new character is accepted.

Vanguard: Calder City

<Snipped quote by Melissa>

If this is still on the table, I'll work on a sheet over the coming weekend. If I don't manage to get anything up before JUne 22nd, I'll just take this one as a by-gone.

@IAmTheIsland

So long as you feel as though you'll be able to keep up with the pace we've set in the IC, by all means feel free to submit something.

Vanguard: Calder City

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Cedar Grove was the kind of neighborhood that took quiet pride in its own orderliness.

The townhomes sat in neat rows behind iron railings, window boxes still holding the last of the season's colour, the streets wide enough that two cars could pass each other without either driver holding their breath. Sienna had grown up here. She knew every pavement crack between the bridge and her parents' front door, knew the particular way the light fell through the oak trees on a Friday morning when the rest of the city was still deciding what kind of day it wanted to be.

She’d hailed a cab from her apartment, and the driver had inadvertently taken the long way over the bridge. Normally the ride was a breezy 20 minutes, but today, it had taken upwards of 35, which she didn’t seem to mind.

She hadn't called ahead and her mother answered the door with the expression of someone who was pleased and slightly suspicious in equal measure - the particular combination Sienna had been navigating her entire life.

"Sienna." A brief assessment, the kind her mother had never quite learned to make less obvious. "This is a surprise."

"I had the morning," Sienna explained, which was true, as well as succinct.

Her mother held the door open.

"Come in then."

The house smelled the way it always had - fresh flowers in the foyer and living rooms, coffee already made, along with the faint suggestion of something baked earlier in the week that her mother was quietly proud of. Sienna followed her through to the kitchen and sat at the island the way she had sat there a thousand times before, shrugging her leather jacket onto the back of the stool with the ease of someone returning to a place that still held the shape of her.

The kitchen was the brunette’s favorite room in the house, though she had never openly admitted it. It was the least curated - her mother's eye for composition extended into every other corner of the townhouse, every surface considered, every object earning its place. But the kitchen had always been slightly more forgiving, a little less arranged, the kind of room that had absorbed too many ordinary mornings to maintain any particular pretension about itself.

Her mother set a mug down in front of her unceremoniously and moved to lean against the counter.

"You look tired," she commented in the tone she reserved for observations that were intended to be neutral but weren't entirely.

"I'm fine," Sienna replied, with a raise of her brow.

"You're always fine."

"And I'm always right."

Her mother made a sound that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite argument, which was as close to a concession as she generally got, and poured the coffee. She was immaculate, as always - dressed as though the day had been planned rather than arrived at, her hair set with the kind of precision that suggested she had been up for several hours already. Sienna had inherited her mother's eye for a room and her father's talent for walking into one, and she was aware, not for the first time, of exactly where she had come from.

"How is the bar?" her mother asked, in the careful tone she had developed over the years - not warm, not cold, the particular register of someone who had made peace with something and yet still hadn’t come around entirely.

"Full," Sienna asserted, a smirk tugging at her lip. "Every night this week."

"Mm." Her mother reached for her own cup. "And you're sleeping?"

"When I get the chance."

"Which is?"

"Enough."

Her mother looked at her for a moment and then looked away, which was her version of letting something go that she had perfected over the years. Sienna simply drank her coffee.

Her father appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, the Friday paper folded under one arm. He looked at her the way he always did - with the particular warmth of a man who had learned, over many years, that his daughter came and went as she so pleased and that the best thing he could do in either case was simply make sure she felt welcome. He had never pushed. She had always been grateful for that, more than she had ever told him.

"Morning, sweetheart." He settled onto the stool beside her, opening the paper with the unhurried ease of a man who had nowhere more important to be. "To what do we owe the pleasure?" Sienna leaned over and kissed him on the cheek by way of greeting.

"Does there have to be a reason?" She asked, and he glanced at her over the top of his glasses.

"With you? Usually."

Sienna picked up her coffee. "The oak tree looks better," she commented. Her father folded the paper, eyebrows raising.

"Don't get your mother started-"

"It was overdue," her mother interjected from across the kitchen without turning around.

"It was perfectly fine-"

"It was not perfectly fine, Richard, it was a liability. The Hendersons agreed with me."

"The Hendersons agree with whoever spoke to them last."

"Which was me," her mother indicated with the quiet satisfaction of someone closing an argument they had been winning for a while now.

Sienna felt the corner of her mouth move. She hadn't meant to smile and didn't try to stop it. Her father caught it and gave her a look that said he had noticed but was choosing not to make anything of it, which was its own small kindness. He reached over and refilled her cup from the pot without being asked, the way he always had since she was old enough to drink coffee, and turned back to his paper.

"Council meeting this afternoon," he said to no one in particular.

"The new Docks development ?" Sienna asked.

"The new Docks development." He sighed in the way of a man who had been having the same conversation in different rooms for the better part of six months. "Sterling Silver has opinions."

"Sterling Silver always has opinions," her mother stressed.

"Loudly," her father agreed.

"I told your father he should bring it to Alderman Pruitt," her mother continued, moving to the refrigerator with the efficiency of someone who had already decided what needed doing and was simply executing the plan. "He has considerably more pull with the planning committee than Silver gives him credit for, and he knows it."

"I know, dear," her father said, in the tone of a man who had also been having this particular conversation for the better part of six months.

Sienna sat at the island with both hands around her cup and let it wash over her - the gentle, familiar friction of a household that had been running at this frequency for her whole life. The docks development. Sterling Silver. Alderman Pruitt, whoever he was, and his considerable pull with the planning committee. The oak tree, still apparently a live debate. Her mother refilled her own cup and set a plate of something on the counter between them - small, neat, the kind of thing that looked effortless and wasn't - and the morning arranged itself around the three of them with the ease of long practice.

Nobody asked why she had really come. She was grateful for that.

Her father finished his paper and folded it with particular care, still believing a newspaper deserved to be treated as an object of value, and set it on the counter before looking at his only daughter over the top of his glasses.

"You good?" he asked. Just that. Two words, the particular shorthand they had developed over the years for the longer question he never pushed her to answer.

She looked at him for a moment - at the lines around his eyes that hadn't been there ten years ago, at the reading glasses he still refused to admit he needed full time, at the man who had watched her choose the Lantern District and the Velvet Room over their life Cedar Grove and had never once told her she was wrong, even when she suspected he wasn't entirely sure she wasn't.

"Yeah," she replied. "I'm good." He held her gaze for just a beat longer than the question required, the way he sometimes did, and then nodded and reached for the coffee her mother had just poured for him.

Outside, a car moved slowly down the street. The oak tree cast its trimmed shadow across the pavement. Somewhere in the house, a clock marked the half hour with a sound so familiar she had stopped hearing it years ago.

She stayed for another hour and left just before noon.

Her mother saw her to the door, pressing a small container of something into her hands that Sienna didn't argue with, straightening the collar of her jacket in the way she had been doing since she was seven.

"Next time call first," her mother insisted. "I would have made something proper."

"This is proper," Sienna said, meaning it. Her mother looked at her for a moment, then nodded once, which was as close to pleased as she generally allowed herself. Her father appeared behind her mother in the doorway, paper still in hand.

"Get home safe, sweetheart" he expressed.

"Always do."

The door closed behind her and she stood on the front step for a moment, the late morning air cool and Cedar Grove doing its quiet, orderly thing around her. Then she pulled out her phone and called a cab, which arrived in four minutes. She spent three of them on the front step watching the oak tree cast its shadow across the pavement and not thinking about anything in particular, which was its own kind of achievement given the previous twenty four hours.

The ride back over the bridge took the usual twenty minutes. The city changed register as it always did on the Lantern District side - the streets narrowing, the buildings thickening, the particular energy of a neighbourhood that never quite switched off pressing in at the windows as the cab moved through it. Familiar. Hers. She paid the driver and stepped out onto the street in front of her building, the corner quiet in the way it only was in the hours between sunrise and sunset, and stood for a moment with her key in her hand.

Then she felt it.

Not anything she could point to - no sound, no movement, nothing that would have held up as evidence of anything. Just the particular prickling awareness at the back of her neck that she had learned, over the years, to take seriously. The sense of being the subject of someone's attention without being able to locate the source of it. She let her gaze move across the street - the parked cars, the windows, the narrow gap between the laundromat and the coffee shop that had always been slightly too convenient a place to stand if you didn't want to be noticed.

Nothing. Nobody.

She looked a beat longer than she might have otherwise, then turned and let herself in through the front door of the building, the lock clicking behind her.

She stood in the dim stairwell for a moment, one hand still on the door, and listened to the street outside settle back into its ordinary frequency before going upstairs.

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Vanguard: Calder City

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The neon sign outside Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon buzzed with all the enthusiasm of a dying insect.

At half past two in the morning, the diner sat wedged between a shuttered laundromat and a pawn shop in the heart of beautiful, gothic Wicklow, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that most sane people were asleep. Rain streaked down the windows in uneven rivers, smearing the city lights into blurs of red and gold across the glass.

Bret looked like he’d been dragged through most of those streets personally.

His suit jacket had long since disappeared from his shoulders after the chaos at the casino, having offered it to his late night companion. The collar of his shirt was slightly torn, dried blood stained one sleeve, and every muscle in his body seemed determined to remind him of decisions made over the previous six hours. Cressida was going to kill him. A deep bruise was already darkening along his jaw where Miss Sauvage had introduced him to a superpowered right fist.

He sat heavily in a booth near the back of the diner, cradling one last pint between battered hands. The waitress hadn’t even asked what he wanted. She’d simply seen his face, sighed heavily, and disappeared into the kitchen muttering something about “that poor bloody church boy again.”

Bret wasn’t entirely sure whether he should find that comforting or concerning.

Across the table sat one of the few people in Calder City who currently knew exactly how strange his evening had actually been: Sienna Mercer. The casino fight had answered several questions neither of them had asked aloud. Unfortunately, it had also created a dozen new ones.

Bret took a careful sip of his beer and immediately regretted it as pain flared through his split lip.

“They do great burgers here.”

The waitress had looked at Sienna the way people did when she turned up somewhere unexpected - a quick, involuntary assessment, the kind that clocked the dress and the jewellery and the jacket that was clearly not hers and arrived at a conclusion that was probably half right. Sienna had smiled at her with the particular warmth she kept for people she wanted to like her immediately, and ordered a beer without consulting the menu, and that had apparently been sufficient.

She sat now with both hands around the bottle - no glass, she hadn't asked for one - Bret's jacket over her shoulders, the fabric smelling like his cologne, which she was finding harder to object to than was strictly convenient. Her hair was now up, thrown haphazardly off her shoulders somewhere between the casino and here, and yet somehow still looking like it meant to be that way. Wicklow at this time of the night had its own particular atmosphere, and Ma Kelly's seemed to suit it perfectly.

She took a slow sip of her beer and looked across the table at Bret - at his torn collar, the dried blood caked on his arm, the bruise darkening along his jaw that would look considerably worse by morning - and then looked back at her beer.

"I'll take your word for it. You look like you've earned the opinion." She turned the bottle slowly in her hands. "How often does your evening end like this?"

“Realistically?”

He pondered the question as it bounced around his tired brain for a few seconds. This was not so he could come up with a suitable lie but actually because he realised he didn’t know the answer; and there was an answer. It had become all too common for him to venture out into the night, get the shit kicked out of them and then go and do it again the next evening. There were too many people in Wicklow who needed help, too many that needed hope. It was a place that had more often than not been let down by the system that was meant to protect it, and its people. Bret couldn’t sit idle and let it continue, so he helped where he could and it usually ended with him in this exact position.

“At least four nights a week.”

His mind drifted back to the night's events. From meeting So-Mi and finding out about Tae and tracking Tae to the warehouse where he vanished into thin air. Which nicely led to Bret promptly being accosted by generic henchmen numbers forty five and forty six. Those two idiots leading him to the Velvet Room and meeting Sienna before winding up at the casino and avoiding the deadly loogie of Miss Sauvage. If he was gainfully employed, tonight would be the night to ask for a raise.

“I imagine you have questions. By all means, you can ask me anything.” He reached for his beer and pressed the cold glass against his burning shoulder. “Oh fuck that’s nice.”

Sienna took a slow sip of her beer and let the invitation sit for a moment, turning the bottle in her hands the way she had been doing since they sat down. He was expecting Directorate Nine. Or the drive. Or what she had seen him do before Sauvage moved, the way he had known before any of it happened. She could see it in the particular quality of his stillness - the bracing, the readiness for the obvious question.
She looked at him across the table.

“Is it worth it?” she asked quietly. “Four nights a week.”

“Every second.”

Bret did not hesitate when he responded. It was almost urgent. He had asked himself the same thing many times and every time he did, he always ended up at the same place. He had never done this for thanks or for any kind of applause. That's what the men in spandex tights were for. Bret did this because it was the right thing to do. He did this because he was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man, to believe in the goodness that one put out in the world, that said goodness would spread and would guide people to something bigger than themselves.

“I may not be from here but that doesn’t mean I have the right to look the other way when people are in trouble.” Bret moved the bottle away from his shoulder and decided to take a swig from it. Having been pressed to his skin, it had turned slightly warm. He hated warm beer. “Can I grab two more?” He called to the waitress who didn’t bat an eyelid. She simply did as she was asked because she had seen this scene way too many times already.

His eyes moved back towards Sienna. “It may not be for everyone but it works for me.”

She listened to all of it without interrupting. The waitress reappeared with two fresh bottles, set them down without ceremony and disappeared again with the particular efficiency of someone who had stopped being curious about the conversations in her booths a long time ago.

Sienna had met a lot of people across her bar. Politicians who talked about the public good and meant their approval ratings. Philanthropists who gave generously and loudly and kept careful track of who was watching. People who did the right thing when it cost them nothing and called it virtue. Bret Lowther was getting the shit kicked out of him four nights a week and had answered her question like it was the simplest thing in the world.

She found that she didn't have an immediate response to that, which was unusual enough to be worth noting.

The brunette took another sip of her beer before reaching into her bag unprompted, setting the paperwork - neat despite everything - and the pen drive on the table between them. She smoothed the edge of the papers once with the flat of her hand, an automatic gesture, and then sat back.

"The names of every Directorate Nine agent active in the United States," she stated, her voice low and even. She looked up at him. "Is that actually what's on it?"

“Yep.”

He answered plainly, having another mouthful of his drink.

D9, Bret’s former employers. A clandestine section of British intelligence, tasked with monitoring, containing and investigating anomalous phenomena like the Grey situation in Calder City. To release the names of any operative, let alone ones hidden and embedded in US society, would be absolutely catastrophic on all fronts, it would be a security risk unheard of since those misogynistic spy movies of the 1970’s.

He reached over and took a hold of the drive, placing it into the pocket of his pants. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Sienna, in fact he likely trusted her more than she should given that they had only met several hours before. It was more of a case that Bret knew just how valuable that information was and even when he put it at risk, it was always going to find its way back to where it belonged. And that wasn’t the Pilgrim talking, that was him.

“I needed a way to buy in. Had to be something no one could turn down.” Bret wiped a strand of loose hair from his forehead, sweeping it back into his, admittedly, slightly too long shaggy mane. “Do you know any dickhead worth his salt, would turn down an entire list of spies? I don’t think so.”

Sienna studied him for a long moment across the table, propping her head up on one closed hand and drumming her manicured fingers of the other on the table.

“Yes, but how did you even get that list of spies, Bret?” She dared ask, watching his expression intently for any inkling of an answer. When the set of his jaw and his steeled gaze didn’t immediately reveal anything, she leaned back into the booth, crossed her arms over her chest and sighed.

"That's not something someone just accidentally acquires." Her eyes flicked briefly toward the pocket where he'd stashed the drive, and then back upwards. "So from where I'm sitting, there are only two explanations."

She held up one finger.

"Either Directorate Nine is staffed entirely by idiots, which I find hard to believe." A second finger joined the first. "Or you used to be close enough to them that getting your hands on something like that was possible."

"So which is it?"

Bret smiled. She was very cute when she was playing detective. Well, she was very cute the entire time but he had to digress. “I used to work for them.” He answered casually, like he wasn’t saying he used to work for one of the most selective and secretive spy organisations in the world. Instead, answering as if he had once worked for Ben and Jerry’s. Which he obviously couldn’t, being lactose intolerant.

“I was recruited out of the Royal Marines. They liked what I could do. Worked with them for a few years and then left on good terms.” There wasn’t an ounce of chicanery or false charm in any of Bret’s words. He spoke honestly and truthful, yet it was damn near dangerous how nonchalant he was throwing this around. “Still got friends there, they help me out occasionally. Usually four nights a week.”

His grin faded a touch, as he moved away from her eyes and looked through the rain streaked windows of Ma Kelly’s. There was a certain dark beauty to behold on the other side of that window pane. It had suckered him in when he first arrived and had continued to do so ever since. He returned his attention to her, back to her eyes. “One of said friends, begrudgingly, gave me the list.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

Royal Marines. She turned it over quietly, the way she had been turning things over all evening, and felt something slot into place with the particular satisfaction of a theory that had been close but not quite right, correcting itself. The way he had moved in the casino - the chair, the tackle, the economy of it - she had originally clocked it as something extraordinary, something possibly Grey. She had been wrong. Or at least, not entirely right.

Just a man who had been very well trained to do very dangerous things and had apparently decided that wasn't quite enough to keep him busy. Her eyes moved briefly to his jaw, the sleeve, the shoulder he had been pressing the bottle against all evening, and then back to his.

“That’s a generous friend you’ve got. Awfully trusting too.” She picked up her bottle and took a slow sip, setting it back down with quiet precision.

"So the Marines, Directorate Nine," she repeated quietly. "And you left all of that to do this." Her eyes stayed on his. "On your own." A pause, shorter than the ones before it.

"Well, to end up in a diner at half past two with a woman you met four hours ago."

“There’s worse places to end up.”

Bret’s mouth curled into the same, tooth, sweet, slightly goofy smile that he had given her when they first met at The Velvet Room. As good as he was at predicting where things were going, he had very little idea what was going to happen next. There were way too many variables in play. Tae was still in the wind. El Jefe was still a ghost and King’s Blood was still on the street and likely to expand beyond Wicklow.

Then there was Sienna.

She may rightly be the biggest variable of the entire equation. A Grey, that much he was sure of at this point. And she was the owner of a place that was notorious in all Burroughs of Calder City. Notorious for being the kind of locale that didn’t care what kind of business one was in. Neutrality was its own kind of moral compromise and it seemed that for the most part, Sienna had chosen it. She had shown as much when he first asked her about the King’s Blood yet, she still agreed to help him. To follow a stranger into the night and face the unknown. If she was morally grey, then it was on the lighter shade.

“And technically, I didn’t leave to do this. I left to volunteer at a church.” He chuckled a little bit, the first sign of laughter from him all night. It soon dropped back into his usual steadiness, the quiet calm that seemed to be his default setting. “With those routes…” he motioned to the papers she had laid down. “I’ll be able to track the King’s Blood distribution network and find Tae.”

Sienna looked at the papers for a moment, then back at Bret with the expression of someone doing quiet arithmetic.

“I suppose that’s my cue,” she announced, with the tone of someone who had already decided it wasn’t.

She reached for her beer instead.

Bret followed her lead and reached for his own beers. Bringing the bottle to his lips, only pausing for a moment. The Pilgrim remained silent. No warning. No path opening before him. No escape route revealing itself. Whatever was about to unfold, Bret was on his own and for some reason, talking with Sienna felt more dangerous than a foxhole in some foreign country with heavy artillery flying overhead.

“I suppose at this point, I’m probably meant to ask you questions too.” He placed the bottle down and leaned further back in his booth seat, draping his arms across the back of it. “So I guess I’ll only ask the one that I think matters the most.” There were several that floated between his mind and his lips. Some even almost made it into his throat. But even with all of the thoughts he was processing, only one question, just one, made sense in that very moment.

“What do you want for breakfast?”

The brunette looked at him for a long moment across the table - at his muscular arms draped across the back of the booth, the easy steadiness of him, the question hanging in the air between them like it was the most natural thing in the world to ask after everything that had just happened.

The smile she gave him in return settled into something warmer than usual.

"Pancakes, obviously," she replied. "And coffee." A beat. "Black."

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By the time the pair had finished their beers, it was half past three.

As they departed the diner, it became evident that Wicklow had slipped into the late-night hush where the streetlights seemed dimmer and everything was softer at the edges. Sienna had intended to head home to her loft and pop by the Velvet Room to see how Marcus fared closing the bar for the night, though every step reminded her exactly how long she had been on her feet. Her heels - tolerable at first - had long since turned on her, and she shifted her weight carefully as she went, trying to not make it obvious.

Unsurprisingly, Bret had noticed anyway.

By the time they reached his building, it no longer felt like a decision so much as an inevitability. He had insisted it was too late for her to venture back to the Lantern District, and Sienna was beginning to run on empty in a way neither of them needed to argue with - the adrenaline from the casino long gone and replaced by exhaustion. A pause became agreement without either of them needing to say much at all.

Inside, his apartment was quiet in that lived-in, late-night way, with the faint hum of the city pressing in through the windows. Bret offered her the bed without a second thought- a proper gentleman - and Sienna hesitated only briefly before accepting, too tired to insist on anything else. He took the couch. There was no awkwardness in it, only practicality and the unspoken understanding that the night didn’t need to become anything more, well, complicated. Sienna disappeared into the bedroom, and for the first time in hours, she allowed herself to sink into stillness.

Sleep came easier than expected, but morning did not arrive gently. The gravity of the situation followed immediately after she opened her eyes.

She shouldn’t have been there.

Sienna pushed herself upright, suddenly far more awake than she wanted to be. The previous evening had felt harmless enough while it was happening - a few drinks, helping Bret find clues she wasn't entirely sure she should have been helping him collect. But distance had a way of restoring perspective, and perspective quickly reminded her that this was indeed a risk.

He was following the trail of King’s Blood and she operated a bar that sat directly in the path of the people he was looking for. The Velvet Room had become neutral ground not by choice, but by nature and she knew enough to understand that neutrality only worked when it actually looked neutral. The longer she lingered, the harder that became to explain - to others and perhaps to herself.

Her decision had been made before she even left the bedroom. By the time she slipped quietly into the living space, she knew what she had to do.

Bret was still asleep on the couch, the apartment quiet around him, and for a brief moment as she watched his chest rise and fall, she considered leaving a note, offering some explanation. Instead, she headed for the door.

The lock clicked softly behind her.

Bret stirred at the sound of the door closing but didn’t open his eyes. He knew that sound all too well. Not the sound of the door but of someone choosing to walk a path that diverged from his own. As he lay there silently, he felt no judgement, no sadness for what could have been. Instead, he simply smiled, looking back fondly on the night he had shared with a beautiful stranger.

He couldn’t blame her and he wouldn’t either. Sienna worked in a world that he had no right being in. Bret, for all his sins, refused to operate in an area where moral bankruptcy was the norm. He couldn’t do that again. He was certain, without a shadow of a doubt, the Lord had put him on this planet to help people. That the All Mighty had gifted him The Pilgrim to help people. Sienna, well she had her own reason for doing what she was doing and, at least for the moment, their paths were to diverge. Yet roads were funny things and sometimes they came back together.

When he finally decided to awaken properly, Bret opened his eyes and began sitting up slowly from the couch. Though the speed was not really much of a choice as everything from his nose to his toes ached as if he had been hit by a speeding truck. He swung his legs off the couch and made his way to the window. Grey clouds hung above, another fine day in Calder City. He looked down at the fruitbowl.

No note. No number. Well, it was a shame but that’s just a curve on the road. Still, he owed her pancakes. He wouldn’t forget that.

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Elsewhere in Calder City, the cameras zoomed in on Sienna’s face as she left the apartment and began to cross the street.

The figure remained cross legged on their seat, seemingly had been all evening. The room, which was cramped and small beyond the many screens pinned to the wall, smelled of stale coffee and microwave pizza. Their eyes widened, staring at the beautiful face seen from different angles on every screen.

“A new player.”

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Collaboration with @BrutalBx}