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Chapter Text

Something happens to a man the instant he becomes a father. There is a radical change, an abrupt shift in gears that no one, no matter how eager or involved or obsessively studied in the mundane practicalities of fatherhood as relayed by those who've experienced it before him, can ever truly comprehend until he is struck by it himself and only then realize the magnitude of it, and its many lasting effects.

Mothers feel the child for what it is long before they hear its first cry. They cradle it constantly for months on end, feel its warmth as their own, its every tiny motion, share their very heartbeat with it, but during that time all a father sees is an ever-growing, somewhat comically round lump on their partner's belly. Nothing can ever prepare him for that single moment after all the panicked rushing and the screaming and the crushing agony of idle helplessness, when suddenly things quiet down and someone places a small bundle of cloth in his arms and congratulates him; like he'd know how to hold it right, or have the presence of mind to remember even if he did.

And then he's staring down at this soft, fragile, miniscule creature he's told is his child, this fresh being who hasn't even been around long enough to form a thought yet, and for a while he's every bit as dumb as it is. Then it does something, it always does something –might be a frown, a little whimper of protest because this new thing doesn't smell like mom, a meaningless little shuffle within its cozy nest of towels or even just take a tiny breath, it doesn't matter- it always does something, and all at once it clicks.

His child.

His boy, maybe; or, and especially for some, his daughter.

Viktor Vasko had had one such moment too and recalled it all too vividly, because nothing was the same again after that first encounter. The air smelled different. A lovely, bright midsummer day might have been too bright so that the toddler at his side had to shield her eyes, at which point the sun was to be glared at. Perhaps that older boy next door once made an offhand comment on how obnoxious his neighborhood's kids were, and he too was to be glared at, to a much more powerful effect. Strangers on the street who Viktor thought looked at her funny, unmannerly little would-be Don Juans who were still far too young to understand exactly why they were teasing her, a family friend who remarked how beautiful a woman she would turn into one day; all of them had become instantly familiar with the brawny Slovak's pointed stare, and even those close enough to him to laugh it off would actively avoid receiving it a second time.

There was no thought whatsoever involved in any of this. It was simple instinct, pure and strong and irrefutable; and Viktor, having always been a man of impulse, might have followed that instinct somewhat overzealously, but he never once regretted it. He was a perfect fit to that role, he thought. He was good at it, and that quickly became his point of greatest pride, what he would consider his most defining feature and be content with the state of things.

Then some archduke halfway across the world went and got himself shot, which apparently meant that millions of young men had to be put through Hell on earth. That, too, changes a man, in all the wrong ways.

The War rattled his brain. It squeezed out the calmness of him, the civility and restraint, forced him to shed it all in the mud of a dismal trench somewhere in France, and when finally it was time to return home, he could not for the life of him remember where he left it. What he brought back instead was machinegun fire and screaming men, a cacophony of death and violence forever stuck inside his ears which he could not rid himself of until eventually he was acting it all out, exploding time and time again like the countless shell blasts that had often come so close to claiming his life. And thus his losses began to mount.

He had returned with all four working limbs still attached, but in the long run, the War had cost him his right eye and both his knees. It had cost him the esteem of friends and family who had known the man he was before he was shipped off to the trenches. It had cost him a loving wife who could no longer excuse all of his mistakes, try as she might. It had cost him his little kňažná.

He could no longer be an ideal father, or even a decent one, and he knew it. So he had done the next best thing and stoically resigned himself to his chosen life of trouble and poor decisions, trusting that the girl was safe and happy somewhere far away without him, because this was truly for the best. And that was to be the end of it.

Except, not quite. For despite everything, Viktor still bore the indelible mark of parenthood, that primitive, mystical endowment with all its attendant roughness and sensibilities. It had left a soft spot in his heart, one that no war, no amount of rage, bitterness or loss could ever encroach upon or corrupt. It just so happened that, perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the people surrounding him in the gnarly bootlegging enterprise he found himself involved in were a right fit for it.

Until one day, out of nowhere, someone came along who was. A dainty little girl showed up at the dirty garage that he had made his domain, wearing an expensive frilly dress that made her look like a slightly oversized doll at the shop window of the local toy store. The girl stepped inside without a moment's hesitation, seemingly oblivious of how jarring her presence was in such a place, and very openly stared at the huge man's worn-out eyepatch the way a hardcore baseball fan might have stared at a real life Ty Cobb. She said something aimed to peeve him, he responded in kind, and by the end of that momentous exchange the girl had, for whatever reason, decided she would attach herself to this grumpy one-eyed lunk with the perpetual temper who seemed to favor grunts over full sentences.

Everything from that point on just sort of happened.

Ivy Pepper wasn't much like his daughter, truth be told. For one, she was infinitely more spoilt. Viktor also didn't remember his kid ever having as extensive a vocabulary as this one; though in all fairness, he seldom understood half of the youngish jargon she so liked to use, and it could very well be gibberish. But this didn't seem to matter all that much, in the end. She was a plucky, brazen and incorrigibly garrulous little thing, headstrong to a fault and dangerously cute, with mischief to spare and an uncanny ability to charm her way out of any due punishment at the very last minute. She was a smart-mouthed, trouble-seeking, floor-flushing bundle of sunshine, all in all the kind of kid one couldn't help but smile at.

Discreetly, that is. On occasion.

She was great, really. And she was a little girl. And, against all the good sense she seemed to possess underneath that ditzy exterior, she somehow appeared to enjoy him with his curt manner and his myriad pointed glares.

Viktor never paused to consider if it made sense. It didn't have to; once again this was all plain instinct, and once again he was simply following impulses.

Furthermore, it gave the Slovak tom an unhoped-for opportunity to see what form that instinct would take at a later stage, when the girl inevitably went through that so called "rebellious phase" of hers. He used to dread that with his own daughter, back in the day. But Ivy's teen years rolled around and she was just as chipper whenever she vacationed in town, always eager to rush in and share with him all her news and receive his indignant snorting in return, as per their unspoken contract. Then she hit eighteen, at which point a college admission brought her in St. Louis all year long, meaning she could now freely linger around her favorite speakeasy just as it was hitting rock bottom. A worrying development, to be sure.

But worse yet, it brought with it a new, fresh Hell for Viktor: boyfriends. More specifically, healthy, consensual relationships with appropriately aged, promising young men currently in the process of receiving tertiary education.

Viktor had some objections.

One day he had decided to accost that Cecil boy (ugh) and politely voice those objections. He figured he had done a decent enough job of it, because Cecil never showed his face around the speakeasy again- so that was good. Then this Claude character appeared in his place, and one look at the stupid, sleazy look on his face as they danced was enough to convince Viktor that his services would be required a second time.

No good, no good.

He didn't make a habit of breaking them, of course. He didn't need to. It was mostly mean looks and some growling that did the trick, maybe punctuated with a solid wallop or two to ensure the message got across as intended. Anything beyond that would just be gratuitous.

It's just that Chad, whose own instincts of self-preservation were clearly subpar, had attempted to indulge some sort of unworldly boyish pride and actually talked back to him. Viktor found his subsequent walloping to be a particularly cathartic one.

But now, in an instance of pesky cosmic irony (or otherwise an act of divine retribution, if indeed those do exist) Viktor is the one who lays bedridden, sprawled over an armchair and cushioned footstool by the window of his modest ground floor apartment, a thin blanket thrown over the bandages wrapped around his torso to press shut the spot where a buckshot's worth of lead had found its mark in him just the night prior. His fervent hopes for an afternoon of peace and quiet have long been squashed, first by the strident sounds of a godawful banjo emitted by the radio speaker and then by a boisterous trio of irreverent interlopers who stampeded up the building's front steps and barged into his resting space.

One of them was Ivy, so- eh, what could he do. The second was a cheery, thunderously eccentric youngster with a memorable set of eyebrows and characteristic pasta-like physique whom Viktor fantasized about throttling on a regular basis, not least at that very moment. The third one, though, he did not recognize.

It is at this point that Viktor is first introduced to Calvin (Freckle?) whom he immediately registers as the latest in the long line of C-something inadequates Ivy saw fit to involve herself with. He glares at the boy from under his brow, watches him stiffen up and recoil away from this freshly wounded middle-aged cripple who cannot even breathe right at the time, and Viktor can scarcely fathom how such a pathetic creature could have ever caught the attention of a girl like Ivy. He has a weak face, the face of a sheltered milquetoast pretty-boy from the suburbs, complete with a set of wide, timorous eyes and a nervous bearing that makes the older tom's skin crawl as he sees him standing there with the girl wrapped intimately around his arm, averting his gaze and trying to wiggle out of her grip like he is anything less than abjectly grateful to be given the time of day by someone like her.

And worst of all, as Viktor will soon find out, this sorry excuse for a suitor is also a close cousin of the crazy one.

So Viktor keeps glaring at him for a few more seconds until the next distraction comes tottering down the stairs to whisk the young couple away; and he inwardly hopes that this one, too, will find it in himself to talk back to him.

Chapter Text

He enters the garage again nearly a full month earlier than Dr. Quackenbush instructed, much to the dismay of both his boss and the establishment's resident flapper girl, who evidently can't stay so mad as to neglect to pester him about his reckless behavior and failing health. Viktor grunts, lets out a wheezing breath that no one present finds especially reassuring and sets off to toil over the car's open hood with a curt proclamation that "he is fine". He's made it this far with one eye, hasn't he? Who ever said he needed both his lungs?

(Although he will add later, in a private conversation between him and Mitzi, that he feels the bar downstairs is sadly more than he can manage in his current state. He doesn't like that she laughs, but is relieved when she agrees.)

He doesn't see the two cousins until the day after his official return to semi-active duty. They saunter into the garage en route to the club, this entrance being the safer, more inconspicuous option during the daytime hours, and find him quietly sizzling in the aftermath of yet another heated argument with Ivy. There have been plenty of those these past few weeks, and that seemed to put him in an even more irritable state, if one could imagine.

Rocky is genuinely worried for a second when his inordinately verbose greeting fails to elicit the appropriate response. He wonders why the encounter as a whole feels so drastically different from what he's used to; then he realizes he is not being glared at for once, and the toothy smile broadens. He tips his hat and strides toward the cellar door with a blithe remark on Freckle's ever growing usefulness, but the shorter tom at his heel doesn't pay attention because his cousin rarely makes much sense anyway and he is preoccupied with the baleful stare that follows him all through the garage and down the wooden steps to the ancient limestone caverns that so graciously accommodate their unlawful employment.

Thus concludes his second encounter with the terrifying one-eyed giant Ivy has been complaining to him about. The two have yet to exchange a word, and a pattern is already being established.

Chapter Text

The pattern holds unchanged for a while. The first indication that it may develop into something different, for better or worse, comes about a week later, when one of the boys' nighttime exploits results in the violent acquisition of yet another vehicle that the operation might have a use for: a battered old commerce lorry, red with rust and bullet-ridden roof to tire. Mitzi takes note of this, to which Freckle begins twiddling his finger and mutters an apology, like he does. His boss pats him on the arm with that mellow smile of hers, like she does, telling him that it's okay honey, they both did a great job tonight. Now they simply need to have the thing fixed, preferably on a budget.

Viktor remains skeptical. He sees the holes for himself, of course, but he hasn't entirely bought into what everyone claims of the boy's qualifications. He can hardly imagine this peaceable pipsqueak serving any purpose in a gunfight other than making for an embarrassingly difficult to hit target. Still, there has to be something more to him than meets the eye, same as his screwy cousin, for against all odds the Defiance job had ended up being a messy, bloody, but ultimately successful affair, as had most of the other assignments they'd been handed since. The liquor was beginning to flow in again, one way or the other, and so Lackadaisy had kept limping along for the time being- not unlike himself.

Having the lorry fixed on a budget turns out to mean that Viktor is to effectively take it apart and put it back together again, if he judges that it can be salvaged. He voices no complaint over this, like he does, but Mitzi won't hear of it; climbing up and down this huge thing, with his injuries…! So she turns to Rocky, sweet, ever-eager Rocky, and asks: didn't you mention your cousin was something of a handyman, honey…?

This time Viktor does think to protest. He's about to, but then notices the wide-eyed panic on Calvin's face as he listens to his cousin enthusiastically oversell his middling mechanical know-how, and decides to view this whole ordeal as more of an opportunity.

Freckle darts a look at him at some point, a furtive glance brimful of dread, and sees that Viktor's fangs are showing. He figures that's him smiling.

He prefers the glaring.

Chapter Text

Freckle is less than thrilled with this new arrangement, but Rocky talks him into it on the ride home. Rocky always talks him into it.

"Oh, ease up, Freckle-face!" he says to him, cutting a very sharp turn at a very wide intersection. "There's nothing to feel anxious about! Ol' Vinegar won't lay a finger on you- at least not now. Between debilitating injury and the prospect of further provoking Miss Pepper's ire now that she's caught on to his hijinks, his great shovel-ish hands are fortuitously tied. Besides, this is a splendid opportunity for some quality bonding time between you two knuckleheads! It'll be swell!"

Rocky's right on the mark on that first point. Even Viktor recognizes the need for subtlety here. He cannot deal with this new boy in the conventional manner, at least not if he and Ivy are to remain on speaking terms for the foreseeable future. But what the brawny tom also knows, and what Rocky failed to mention to his hapless cousin, is that he possesses far more devastating means of assault than even his infamous walloping. Freckle finds that out the hard way.

Viktor berates him constantly, over mistakes real or imagined. He yells at him, declares him a useless little leprechaun (his pronunciation of the word is something Calvin might have found amusing under different circumstances) and gruffly directs him to his next task with a stern warning not to fuck that up as well. But he always does, even if he doesn't, and the cycle begins anew.

Tormenting the boy quickly becomes Viktor's most gratifying pastime, the most enjoyable part of what he's come to view as his daily responsibilities, and he commits to it with gusto for the five long afternoons it takes before the lorry is finally deemed unsalvageable and promptly broken down for scraps. Viktor expected him to have run off with his tail between his legs long before that point, but much to his surprise, this spineless whelp endures his abuse all the way to the end with nary a word of protest.

It would seem he has more sense than Chad, this one. How unfortunate.

For his part, Freckle comes out of that harrowing workweek with sore arms, callused hands, a modest amount of residual engine grime under his claws that won't fully come off until another week of intense scrubbing and several fatal blows to his self-esteem, yet strangely enough, he finds he has mixed feelings about reaching the end of this tentative collaboration. The ceaseless intimidation and extensive Slovak cursing are some things he could happily do without, of course, but at the same time this is the kind of work he prefers to be engaged in, the kind that doesn't start eating away at him the second he puts his tools down. It's repairing rather than breaking, creating rather than destroying; it is tiring, useful work blissfully devoid of manslaughter, and in a vacuum he would even go so far as to call it honest.

Indeed, his experience in that garage has been damn near wholesome by recent standards, when he thinks about it that way; and God knows he could use a little wholesome in his life right about now.

Perhaps this is why, when Mitzi pulls him aside the morning after and asks if he could keep helping out in the garage when he's not too busy running errands together with his cousin, just for a little while longer until poor Viktor can fully recover, he reluctantly acquiesces. As for the man himself, he's simply thankful for the opportunity to finish what he started and scare this unexpectedly tenacious whippersnapper away like he had the rest of Ivy's misbegotten flings.

So Freckle continues to visit the garage every other day or so to spend a few hours tinkering with failing motors and being relentlessly glowered at, until eventually it becomes routine. By the time Viktor finally removes the last of his bandages for good, there is a tacit understanding that this uneasy partnership of theirs has been extended indefinitely, injuries notwithstanding.

There will be no more saving bells from this point on. Now it is a battle of attrition.

Chapter Text

It becomes clear early on that, beyond being intimidated into silence, Calvin is just naturally the quiet type.

This means something special to Viktor. It means that, in a business where everyone seems to actively go out of their way just to speak in longer, smart-sounding and exhaustingly turgid sentences when fewer words would suffice, this kid alone knows to keep his yapper shut unless he has something important to say. There's no bloviating or superfluous verbal flourishing with him; just short, simple statements between interims of wordless labor, quick and to the point, oftentimes accentuated by traces of that slight brogue he retains.

Viktor appreciates it. He hates that he appreciates it.

He begins to slip. Sometimes he will neglect to scold him for hours on end, letting entire afternoons pass under the tranquil sounds of clanking metal and revving car engines, only to realize his mistake near the end of the shift and beat himself up over it for the rest of the night.

Do čerta.

This is not a good silence, not at all. It's an inconvenience, a nuisance- the boy is a nuisance.

So Viktor grinds his teeth and redoubles his efforts, realizing he cannot afford to be pulling punches. He must deal with this blasted mick as soon as possible, before any more unforeseen complications present themselves.

But for all his resolve, he will keep on slipping.

Chapter Text

Freckle's irregular work schedule, courtesy of Lackadaisy's flaky rumrunner whom he is tasked with keeping alive through the unholy mayhem that habitually manifests around him, occasionally has him taking lunch break with Viktor.

Viktor's meals are appropriately simple: a half loaf of bread, a hefty slab of some salty Italian cheese whose name he could never pronounce, a generous serving of various cold cuts and whatever sweet fruit he could get his hands on at the time. Canned peas and potatoes also make a frequent appearance. The whole course is packed in a bundle of plain cloth, sizeable enough so that a man of his stature may find it filling, which he unwraps over his lap and empties in a matter of minutes. Hard work builds an appetite, his late father used to say after a long morning drudging on the family's hardscrabble farm back in the Old Country, and Viktor is inclined to agree.

Freckle's lunch is somewhat more orderly, and certainly less diverse. It always comes in a small rolled-up paper bag, and always consists of only one single sandwich. Granted it's a thick, meaty thing, with layers of ham and cheese and mayo and tomato and some greens between a pair of hand-cut slices of fresh white bread, so it looks pretty damn delectable to Viktor. The boy sure seems to enjoy it, and matches Viktor's speed in wolfing down his food.

Lunch breaks are a universal concept, be it America, Czechoslovakia or Ireland, so the whole process is handled with a kind of due solemnity. They pick opposite sides of the garage, set themselves down on whatever flat surface is available at the time and indulge in roughly ten minutes of gluttonous sustenance, each stifling their own silent groans of pleasure. Some lingering glares from the Slovak make Calvin try to chew as quietly as possible, but other than that it is a welcome respite to the both of them. A brief, temporary truce.

Viktor does not wonder about the origins of that impressive-looking sandwich. For one, he genuinely doesn't give a shit where the kid gets his meals; and furthermore, somewhere in the back of his mind where subconscious thoughts take form unnoticed in spite of his waking interests, he believes he has the answer figured out. There's been mention of some mother of Calvin's, apparently the strict type, who would nonetheless care to keep her son fed through his daily grind, as mothers do. That has to be it.

So he does not dwell on the sandwich, and certainly doesn't ask about it. The answer, somewhat different from his reasoned guess, is eventually revealed to him by pure happenstance.

It's early morning and he's just arrived at the garage. He is banging out the dents on some spare car panels they have lying around when the two cousins walk by on their way to the fordor, which was brought to him for some rudimentary maintenance the day prior and is now parked on the street outside and ready to go. Rocky offers a chipper greeting and Calvin ventures a meek wave in his direction, and in acknowledgement Viktor snorts at the pair, glares down its shorter half and goes on with his work while they prepare to set off.

Then his ears twitch at the familiar sound of a perky girl's voice as it approaches the garage, accompanied by an also familiar crinkling. He lifts his head from the dented panels.

Ivy catches up to them before Freckle can enter the car. She makes a joke, eyeing him teasingly with that lip-biting grin of hers, and draws a bashful chuckle out of him. His tail quivers at the tip when she leans in to peck at his lips, and he smiles back in gratitude as she hands him the bag he forgot to pick off the café counter. Deeply satisfied with his reaction, Ivy gives her boyfriend one final wink before rushing back to her unmanned post.

She does not spare a single glance for Viktor, to whom she's not speaking that particular week.

Freckle stares at her as she walks away, his silver lining, his sole corner of warmth in this dark criminal world that has by now swallowed him whole, and keeps staring for a moment after she has vanished into the narrow alley connecting the two streets between the garage and the café. Rocky calls out to him, and he turns to leave.

But before he does, something compels him to cast a cursory look into the garage just as he takes his first step towards the car. He does not take a second one.

The instant he catches Viktor's unblinking gaze he is struck by a fierce, laser-pointed wave of undisguised animosity the likes of which he hasn't felt since their very first encounter in that dusty apartment all those weeks ago, back before he was made aware of how certain looks could exert actual physical pressure. Hate radiates off that single iris with such force that Freckle staggers under the weight and freezes in place, fur bristling stiff under his green pinstripes. For a while he can neither move nor look away.

Rocky helps him out of his trance with a timely honk. Freckle starts, manages to finally avert his eyes and nearly breaks into a sprint to the car, still feeling the Slovak's menacing glare setting the hair on his nape aflame. A weight lifts off his chest the second he steps away from the garage and out of view, but an ominous air still hangs about the open gates.

Freckle pauses outside the passenger side door and looks back once more, brows furrowing in puzzlement. It's strange; Viktor has walked in on him and Ivy exchanging various degrees of affection before, but the effect has never been quite this extreme. He's certain- he would remember. What could have brought this on now…?

Suddenly, it hits him. He looks down at the paper bag in his hands, then back towards the garage and the loud, furious banging that has now resumed with added vigor, and finally at the bag again.

Oh.

"I can appreciate the fascinating tribulations of your love life, cousin, but we're supposed to be professionals with a schedule. Would you mind hopping in so we can get it underway?"

Rocky never betrays his style; there is an overtone of mirth even to his impatience.

"Sorry."

Freckle gets inside, and the tires are already screeching before he can pull the door shut.

The next morning Rocky pulls his cousin off to another misadventure on the club's behalf, so Viktor resorts to glaring at soot-coated exhaust pipes and greasy engine compartments for the rest of the workday. It's just not the same.

Ivy shows up at the garage shortly before lunch break, taking Viktor by surprise. They share a defiant, challenging look and he figures she's here to pick another fight; then he notices the paper bag she's holding in her fist, and realizes the boy must have forgotten his lunch again. She's come looking for him.

His face screws up into an angry grimace and he prepares to respond to her coming question with a rude sendoff and a churlish declaration that he's too busy to bother answering her. He doesn't know where the kid is, and couldn't care less. This ought to irritate her.

Ivy opens her mouth, but no question comes. She simply huffs, rolls her eyes and strides resolutely towards him, taking him aback yet again; not least because what Viktor took for a scowl turns out to be more of a coy, stubborn pout. She thrusts the bag into his chest, smacks him with it almost, huffs at him once more and promptly turns tail, exits the garage and disappears back into the alleyway on a haughty gait, all without uttering a single word.

Unprecedented.

Viktor blinks at the empty space where she stood, completely at a loss to what just happened. A crinkle draws his eye down to the bag, so comically tiny inside his enormous hands, and he feels the weight of the sandwich it holds inside- or is it sandwiches...? Yes, there seem to be two of them in there, maybe even three. This is meant for him.

He almost smiles. His lips begin to stretch, his frown abates and his shoulders relax, paving the way for that mild simper, that characteristic absence of foul temper and hostility which constitutes his truest smile. He is alone then, and it nearly takes form.

Then he is struck by a sudden clarity, and just like that the little bag and its delicious contents become another thing to be glared at instead.

This is his doing. It has to be.

Viktor lunches on his standard meal that day. His mood, considerably worse than average, lasts well into the end of his shift and has him opting to spend the evening at home rather than boozing it out in the underground facilities like usual, arguing with Mitzi about when he'd be ready to take on bartending again. As he closes up and gathers his things he is surprised to realize he has neglected to throw the bag away, and picks it up with plans to amend that oversight on his way out. Yet the bag sticks with him on the ride home and somehow makes its way to his living room table, all crumbled up and mishandled but decidedly not-disposed-of.

He's not exactly sure why that is. Perhaps he just likes something to glare at in the absence of the boy; so glare at it he does.

…

Well. It's food, and it's free.

And the sandwiches always looked delectable.

And Ivy made these ones for him. Ivy made them, for him. She put them together with her own two hands for him to enjoy; and who's this Freckle kid to keep him from enjoying Ivy's gift, anyway? What does it matter what he did or what he said? Fuck him.

Yeah. Fuck him.

Satisfied with this conclusion, Viktor reaches into the bag, pulls out one of the sandwiches (there are two inside after all, which is just as well for dinnertime) and takes a generous bite out of it. The bread has gotten a little stale since noon, but the taste is still all there. He goes through it in less than a minute.

He decides to wash the second one down with some whiskey. Right now his home stash contains but one single bottle provided free of charge by his thoughtful employer as a get-well-soon present, and Viktor is pleased at the opportunity to sample it. It's some of the first decent alcohol Lackadaisy had seen in a long, long time; part of the salutary Defiance batch.

Viktor pops the cork and pours himself a glass. He takes a hearty swig first, sighs through the burn, then drops heavily on his favorite armchair by the living room window and reaches for the remaining sandwich. This one he munches slowly, taking his time, gazing listlessly out the cracked glass at the dimly lit neighborhood, the few pedestrians sauntering down the sidewalk and the passing vehicles making their sputtering way down the street, headlights casting large shadows into his dark apartment as they went by. At this hour, the drivers may well be headed to one of the town's many illicit watering holes; perhaps even his own.

Yeah, Viktor thinks to himself, taking another long sip. Fuck him.

He stops chewing for a second, then scoffs into the darkness.

Freckle.

(Munch, munch)

What the hell kind of nickname is that, anyway?

Ivy keeps making these sandwiches for Viktor, and he keeps savoring them down to the last crumb, either at the garage or at home. At times he will get chagrined remembering how this arrangement originally came about, as if he has ceded something to the boy by endorsing it as he has. The thought makes him feel a little guilty, like he's somehow shirking an important duty of his.

But he makes sure to glare at him extra hard to make up for it. So it's okay.

Chapter Text

Ivy and Viktor maintained their own little pattern during the two turbulent months following the Defiance job. As it turns out, no amount of lunchtime sandwiches, however tasty or lovingly crafted, are enough to keep that pattern from repeating itself all over again.

The pattern goes as follows: having just agreed to bury the hatchet, they enter into a brief period of reciprocal mollification- catalyzed in this instance by "the sandwich incident", as Rocky has pompously dubbed it. Ivy will eventually take to hovering about and pestering him with her incessant chatter like she used to, very much to their shared, if unspoken, delight.

There still remains some tension between the two, of course. Viktor gets teed off and hurriedly shoos her away whenever she drops by the garage while Freckle is around, which doesn't go unnoticed. Ivy also scolds him for supposedly working her boyfriend too hard, stating that between him and Rocky, he is always either too busy or too tired by nightfall to escort her down to the club. Freckle, for his part, appreciates this handy excuse to keep avoiding the dreaded dancefloor she has been trying to lure him into literally from the moment they met, and is glad Viktor seems to still consider it a disservice.

And of course, there are Ivy's numerous subtle efforts to dig into Viktor's long-estranged family. She knows better than to press too hard on the subject, but even the most allusive reference is enough to make Viktor glum and unresponsive, immediately bringing whatever lighthearted exchange was being had to an abrupt end. Ivy always regrets it, but never enough so to stop her from bringing it up again a few days later at the next seemingly auspicious opportunity, invariably to the same effect. It can't be helped; the battle against curiosity has always been a losing one for her.

Still, things are better. Good, even. They steadily warm up to each other anew and rekindle that unique chemistry of theirs, this weirdly endearing contrast of blunt, ornery grit and bright, youthful effervescence, to the point where their more seasoned colleagues almost forget there was ever a falling-out between them in the first place.

Then the next great altercation inevitably comes, and it all breaks down in a flash. All at once their rupture is back in full effect, hanging heavy over the speakeasy and causing varying levels of discomfort to its owner and remaining employees alike who now end up questioning that it was ever truly in abeyance. There's no shortage of stubbornness between the two, so it'll be another week before they speak again and another yet before their next honest attempt at reconciliation.

Fittingly, the pattern itself is fairly turbulent that way.

These cataclysmic arguments are not centered around Viktor's unsolicited intrusions into Ivy's romantic affairs, as one might expect. Her current boyfriend has been working with him for well over a month now and has reported no misbehavior (for it's been hammered into him from an early age that it's no good being a snitch), and while Ivy doesn't buy it, she can at least appreciate that a sort of shaky balance has been established between the two.

No, what sets her off every time is his mulish insistence that she should leave, distance herself from the failing speakeasy, its motley crew of half-competent miscreants and ideally St. Louis itself. Ivy waves off his importuning for some time, but there always comes the next bloody shootout, the next rumor of some raid in another part of town, of incarceration and criminal records and on-the-spot killings of bootlegging scoundrels, and among them all the next faint indication that their short-handed establishment may require her assistance again in one of its risky nighttime ventures; and then Viktor will begin to get pushy, preachy, desperate in his reproach and impossible to keep ignoring.

He worries about her. Ivy understands that, and doesn't hold it against him- how could she? But when advice turns to demanding and reasoning devolves to plain browbeating, she feels she needs to draw the line. At its core, it's the exact same issue she took with him chasing off all her college sweethearts behind her back: a question of boundaries, and of respect. She never argued that her continuing involvement with the Lackadaisy isn't a terrible mistake, as Viktor repeatedly avers; just that it is her mistake to make, and she has chosen to make it, and that's that.

So, Ivy lashes out; and Viktor, whose arsenal of non-combative retorts is admittedly quite limited, lashes right back almost by habit. And the pattern holds firm.

Dammit.

Freckle looks up despite himself, glancing across the garage at Viktor's massive, heaving back. It is evening and the Slovak is busy running a checkup on a freshly stolen motorbike, but is handling it so roughly that he may as well be dismantling it; and Freckle, himself not a stranger to the cathartic effects of bashing in inanimate objects, has resolved to keep his distance and let things run their course like they always do. But still, he looks.

He breathes out a sigh and once again buries his arms elbow-deep into the open car hood to fumble with this or that faulty compartment, hoping work will get his mind off a bad, stupid, horrible idea, but to no avail. He still hears the loud banging, and beneath it the stream of Slovak obscenities Viktor is maundering out under his breath, many of whom by now sound alarmingly familiar to Calvin though their exact meaning still escapes him.

Stupid girl must be somewhere in there, he reckons. It's the kind of thing a concerned parent would say about their obdurate child.

No, no. Head down, come on-

Because Viktor cares about her.

He's made it abundantly clear that he hates Calvin's guts, and Calvin can't say he's particularly fond of him, either. They're both fond of Ivy, though, so here they are in agreement: it would be for the best if she weren't aboard this rapidly sinking ship. Soft-spoken Freckle never pushed hard enough to get into an actual argument with her, but he did make her promise to at least try and steer clear of unnecessary danger outside her standard cashier work; and most importantly, to never let Rocky wangle her into any more of his dicey, harebrained schemes no matter what. The irony of this last request was somehow lost to him at the time.

But this is different. This is akin to a familial dispute that he has no say in, so he shouldn't butt in. He should just stay quiet and work the rest of the shift away like usual.

That's right. Head down, head--

(Bang, bang)

Freckle knits his brow inside the open machinery. This is supposed to be a checkup; what's he even striking so hard?

(Bang)

And Ivy cares about him, too.

She wouldn't become this upset after every fight if she didn't. She wouldn't get chocked up with ire and teary-eyed, venting out her frustration at Calvin with long-winded rants on stupid overbearing gangsters whose stupid opinions really didn't matter, even though they clearly did. She wouldn't get this sad over it all.

It'd be nice if that could stop happening already.

(Bang)

Freckle shuts his eyes, grits his teeth, exhales. He should stay out of it. It isn't his place.

(Bang, bang)

It'd be dumb. It'd be awkward. Viktor would just get madder- madder at him, no less. Nothing good could come of it.

Yeah. Bad idea.

(Bang)

Just keep looking down.

(Bang. Bang)

They'll work it out themselves, eventually. It's their issue, their relationship. He's no right--

(BANG)

Freckle's eyes dart upwards. He'll break it.

He shouldn't do that.

Viktor bangs on for several seconds before noticing that the lighter clanging behind him has ceased. He glimpses over his shoulder at Calvin to find the boy still bent over the hood, arms lost deep inside the greasy engine but no longer moving and eyes fixed squarely on him. He doesn't speak, but the look he's giving him is very much deliberate.

"Vhat?"

"You shouldn't do that."

Viktor blinks at him. It's probably the first time that's ever happened.

"… Vhat?"

"She's not stupid," Calvin says flatly, calmly, without looking away. "She knows the danger. She's seen it up close, and she does worry. But she stays on, because-" He pauses, frowning at his own words like he doesn't really get it himself. "… because she really likes this place, I guess.

"Her mind's made up. She's not going to quit, and you can't make her. You'll only get her to cut you off for good if you keep like this." He allows his attention to drift back to the engine and shifts into position, ready to resume his work. "And you shouldn't do that.

"She really cares about you."

Freckle's arms begin to twist and jerk somewhere within the exposed bowels of the automobile, metal parts once again clattering under his touch, and he doesn't say another word. As always: plain, quick and to the point.

Viktor, on the other hand, does not continue with his overzealous checkup. In fact, in the hour or so they have left before closing up for the night, he barely gets any work done at all. He simply glares. He glares hard, harder than he ever has before, and does not let up for a second. He glares Freckle back into submission, gets him feeling from uncomfortable to jittery to downright terrified, so much so that he too finds it impossible to concentrate and winds up with his own tasks half-finished. He expects to be chewed out over this, but disturbingly enough, Viktor doesn't even comment on it. He just keeps on glaring.

By the time they separate, Viktor is sure the boy thoroughly regrets ever opening his mouth. And well he should.

That night Viktor pulls out his bottle of Defiance whiskey again. He doesn't bother with a glass this time; he takes his first swig straight from the bottle then carries it over to the armchair, sits down with a grunt and proceeds to stare off sullenly into the darkness, half-lid eye resting on a random spot somewhere on the aged paisley pattern of his living room wall without really seeing it. There is nobody to glare at now, and his instinct has gone silent.

About halfway through the bottle, after mulling over things at length without reaching anything resembling a satisfying conclusion, Viktor suddenly recognizes an unbearable craving for some more of those heavenly sandwiches to go with the booze. He figures that to be his answer: he simply requires more sandwiches, and should try to get some come the morning. He cannot really do without them at this point, anyway.

Yeah. That feels right.

He settles back into the armchair with a throaty sigh, like a great weight has just lifted off him. Blissfully relaxed in this newfound contentment -and the inadvisable amount of alcohol coursing through his veins- he begins to doze off where he lays, and the last somnolent thought of the night springs forth amid his drowsy stupor.

She really cares about you.

Viktor knows this. He figured it out a long time ago, so long that it doesn't even surprise him as much anymore. He doesn't need some clueless greenhorn stripling telling him. Yet tell him he did, this one; this insufferable, inexplicably resilient and just occasionally bold inadequate who, against all odds and Viktor's own best efforts, continues to hang about his workplace two months later with absolutely no sign of leaving.

Viktor glares drunkenly at the half-empty bottle on his table. The Arbogasts' stuff is potent as always, rich in flavor, smooth and with a pleasant punch to it, a clear cut above the bathtub-brewed, watered-down pigswill he has gotten used to as of late. It really is some damn fine booze, especially in these dreadful times of Prohibition, and he glares at it for as long as he can keep his eye open. He knows exactly why.

No other inadequate has brought him good whiskey before. He doesn't think they're supposed to, either, just as he's not supposed to be taking advice from their sorry ilk. Surely no Chads, Claudes or Cecils would have ever dared try to give him any in the first place.

But this Calvin boy is, by far, the worst of the lot.

Chapter Text

Viktor stands at the entrance of a spacey riverside cabin some ten miles south of the city's borders. The cabin is simple, modest enough to pass as abandoned to the numerous steamboats moving up and down the river during daylight, who would all doubtlessly miss the short, conveniently inconspicuous wharf extending from its side into the muddy waters of mighty Mississippi. To a knowing observer such as he, the cabin's position is patently ideal for housing a perfectly functional -if somewhat meagre- speakeasy for the lowest clientele available, with the little wharf facilitating transactions with the many Kehoes of the world to help keep it afloat. Overall, a good solution for bottom feeders of the trade- and shouldn't he know.

In Viktor's enormous hands is an empty shotgun that was briefly repurposed as a makeshift bludgeon after having fired its last shot, as evinced by the dented butt on its non-smoking end. It's actually the exact same gun which gravely wounded Viktor not too long ago, brandished then by one of the four vengeful rubes in their ill-fated assault on the speakeasy. Viktor is sure him wielding it now has some abstract poetic quality to it, if only he cared to pin it down.

He swings the gun over his shoulder and takes his time looking over the interior of the cabin with the critical eye of a seasoned artist inspecting a freshly-painted canvas.

What he sees is a haphazard jumble of corpses and upturned furniture. One dead man is collapsed right by the entrance, chest shredded with bullet fire; another is sprawled over a table near the far end of the room, held in place by a small knife impaling his wrist against the table's surface; and the third one, a portly, thick-chested tom in a tight-fitting shirt, lays amid the splintered remains of a chair by the bar counter in a crimson puddle of his own making, face hideously disfigured by several stabbing wounds and the neck of a broken bottle sticking out the side of his throat.

This bloodbath is messy enough to be Viktor's own handiwork, but his contribution to the evening lies elsewhere. More specifically, it lies by the bushes a few feet outside the cabin in the form of two more brutalized bodies who will not be getting back up. Together with the one they ran over upon arrival, this makes for a total of six liquidated hoods. That's the entire gang accounted for.

The gang in question was little more than a group of local delinquents who thought to independently enter St. Louis' ever lucrative bootlegging scene, their activity going back no further than the middle of summer. Its members were young, driven and hopelessly ambitious, so inevitably they sought to elevate their fledgling operation to new heights. In the business, this means more alcohol of better quality; and the market in town being as chockingly saturated as it is, they could only hope to appropriate existing supply lines from another rival. They had enough sense to avoid impinging on Marigold territory, but the down-at-heel Lackadaisy and the few routes it had painstakingly managed to secure these past few months must have seemed like an easy enough target at the time.

Mitzi had despaired at the loss of an entire cargo's worth of liquor, but an inexcusably thrilled Rocky was there to console her. He assured his boss that this was no disaster but rather an unhoped-for opportunity, and that these audacious neophytes' horseplay might just end up putting Lackadaisy back on the map if they played their cards right. What they needed now was a powerful response, he reasoned, a show of force: a good old-fashioned hit job.

That said, Lackadaisy currently employs all of two rookie field agents one of whom has been expressly banned from attempting to operate any kind of firearm, while their targets would purportedly be six hard, street-grown thugs in their thieving, cutthroating prime. Boundless optimism alone could not make up for such a numerical disadvantage, so Rocky turned to the far more experienced (if somewhat less agile) Slovak who would probably rather shoot himself in his semi-functional knee than assist Crazy Brows again under any circumstances. He'd said so, actually. Repeatedly. To his face.

Even so, Viktor agreed to join the two cousins in their nighttime assault, in no small part because he was bored. Life away from the action didn't sit right with him after all this time, and there were only so many thrills one could derive from mundane garage work and begrudgingly tending an unpopular underground bar when called upon. Besides, Viktor still thought of all this – the skulking, the racketeering, the murdering and the violence- as his job, and having someone else do it for him made him feel all the more like some old invalid living off of pensions and his associates' pity.

You know you can't do anything- you're falling apart at the seams.

He'll help this smiling idiot stir up a thousand blistering maelstroms before consigning himself to such a fate. So here he is.

Viktor lingers at the threshold for a minute, piecing together what had transpired inside (a tossed chopper, signs of struggle, striking, stabbing, shouting) then finally enters the room, carefully limbs past the blood and circles around to the back of the bar where there's a door leading to an adjacent room. Its panel was recently swung off its hinges as someone barged through to join the action; likely the portly man, judging by his position in the room.

Viktor pushes the askew panel aside and peers inside the short-lived speakeasy's store room, a much smaller space half-filled with the stolen crates that were the cause of this entire conflict. Rocky is there also, along with someone else- someone who is not his cousin. Viktor has a moment of alarm, but quickly settles down once he gets a better look at the new face. He's a lank tom in his early twenties, dressed in a clean jacketless tux with sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a bowtie wrapped around the collar of his shirt; the signature getup of a barman. The thieves must have hired this one to run the place, but Viktor guesses he's not part of the gang. He doesn't look too dangerous.

At the moment he is curled up in a corner, shaking like a leaf and pleading with Rocky not to hurt him, explaining how he has nothing to do with those guys, he's just working here and he swears he won't say a thing to nobody if they let him go. Rocky is crouched before him, telling him that of course they'll let him go with all their best wishes, except he'll have to retract his noble vow of silence first. It's quite the gruesome thing, what happened here today- surely folk around town ought to hear about it, no?

Rocky was the driver for this operation. The plan was for him to swerve around the cabin, the cars parked outside and any possible guards so as to give a clear shot to the other two gunmen riding with him and let them thin out the enemy as much as possible before getting off to finish the job up close. What happened instead was that the single lookout they had at the back road leading to the riverbank took notice of the suspicious vehicle a moment earlier than he was supposed to, and at the same time happened to line himself up perfectly with the car's momentum; so Rocky improvised. He slammed the gas, ran the guy over, lost control and nearly upturned the car before finally crashing it on a tree just twenty feet away from the cabin's entrance. Viktor lost track of him afterwards, but he must have ducked behind the car to wait out the fighting and then snuck in ahead of him to check on his cousin.

The creak of the ruined door wasn't enough to distract him from his work, so Viktor grunts to get his attention. Rocky turns his head and beams at him.

"Viktor!"

A thin rivulet of blood is trickling down his nose, likely from banging his head on the steering wheel at some point during the crash, but he doesn't seem to have noticed. He's still wearing that infernal grin of his, and seeing it now Viktor thinks it bears an unsettling resemblance to the icepick look, if the icepick look could ever be described as vehemently gleeful.

That poor, poor barkeep.

"All's well in the premises, I take it?" Rocky asks, as jolly as if he were inquiring about the yield of a recreational fishing trip. "Have all our intrepid brigands been made to see the folly in their hubris?"

"Yah."

"Splendid! All that's left then is to load up the car and call it a night… if, uh, it still works, that is. Well, no matter; I believe I glimpsed a couple more sitting just outside. Spoils of war, as it were. Say, Vinegar, could you get started with it while I finish up here?" He turns back to the barman with what was likely meant to be a reassuring smile. "I'll be over in a jiffy."

Viktor doesn't move. He looks around the stuffy room, checking for more small figures huddled up against the wall, but spots none. There is another door, however, this one intact, seemingly leading outside to where the cabin's wharf should be.

"Vhere is the short one?"

The grin abates somewhat, finally. "Oh. Uh- Freckle's out back, catching his breath by the great ol' Mississippi. A romantic soul, that boy. But you should probably leave him-"

Viktor crosses the room with three gimping strides, pulls at the doorknob and steps out into the night before he can finish.

"… be. Aw, fiddlesticks." Rocky sighs, shakes his head and focuses back on the enervated barkeeper.

A single lantern hangs burning by the other side of the door, illuminating the entirety of the tiny wharf Viktor is now standing on. There, right on the edge of the wooden planks swelling with moisture from the river below, he finds Freckle sitting cross-legged and staring down into the shimmering waters. Viktor pauses a moment, wondering what exactly he has come out here to do, then steps to the side to get a better look at him.

He's in a sorry state. Splinters are snagging his trench coat, and it must have ripped somewhere because it drapes down his shoulders like it doesn't fit him. His vest is missing a top button, the sleeve of his white shirt is soaked in red from a bullet that grazed him in the arm and he must have been wiping whatever blood wasn't his on the leg of his tattered pants. From where Viktor stands, he can make out in the half-light a black eye, a swelling contusion on his cheek and a bloody nose similar to his cousin's, no doubt coupled with myriads other bruises and lacerations on the rest of his body. Only the fedora on his head seems relatively unscathed, save for the faint crimson splatter on the playing card he has tucked in the band.

He definitely looks like someone fresh out of a brawl, though not quite one that he has won.

Viktor was riding shotgun during the attack, with Calvin wordlessly relegated to the back seat. Viktor had thought he looked funny with that Tommy gun in his hands, like the world's smallest, most unconvincing hardass wannabe, and was curious to finally see how he carried himself in an actual gunfight. Between what he'd heard and what he'd seen, he honestly didn't know what to expect of him.

But then, during that brief moment after the crash while Viktor was still contemplating shooting the face off the careless driver at his side, Freckle hopped out of the car, slid across the rumpled hood and sprinted away towards the cabin. Viktor barely got his head out in time to see him shoot down a man at the other side of the door before he could swing it open and then leap through a window and out of sight, all without breaking his running pace.

Viktor couldn't cover that distance half as fast with a limp, and luckily so, because he was still near the car when two of the hoods came dashing out of the roadside bushes in a state of frantic confusion, guns in hand and belts unbuttoned; presumably they'd wandered off for a quick piss in the underbrush just as the attack commenced. One went down with the first shot but his friend put up more of a fight, and by the time Viktor was done with him things inside the cabin had already gone quiet. The sight that welcomed him as he entered spoke for itself.

Now he stands over the coursing river under a cloudless firmament of stars, basking in the fresh, fishy scent and ambient serenity just two doors away from that scene of utter carnage together with its unlikely perpetrator, and he contemplates all of this in silence. He contemplates him.

Viktor wasn't particularly impressed with the sudden acrobatics. He remembered seeing the kid effortlessly climb up and down that huge lorry, scaling its sides and hanging off the roof to reach whatever part he was pointed to like some nimble circus aerialist. One of the very first insults Viktor coined for him was Irish monkey, though he most likely never understood that.

The quickness with which he sprang into action wasn't unheard of in tense situations, either. An adrenaline rush can make a beast of even the most inexperienced combatant. Viktor had seen it happen countless times, both here and in Europe, and had almost come to expect it in his line of work.

The laughter was a surprise.

That full, explosive shriek of rage and feral delight that seemed to merge seamlessly with the sound of machinegun fire was the last thing Viktor expected to hear coming out of Freckle's mouth. It gave the roughened Slovak the creeps, as well as an insight on the boy which he did not previously possess.

This kid is a complete fucking nutjob.

He may not look it at first glance, but in truth he's every bit as unstable, unhinged, insane as his older cousin. This explains all their recent accomplishments too, which Viktor has been wondering about for the longest time: their approach isn't professional by any stretch, or meticulous or skilled or even just plain lucky. Together, these two Irish-born tenderfoots from Missouri are simply crazy enough to somehow make it work.

Their diminished joke of a speakeasy could not have asked for more a more fitting duo of enforcers.

Viktor gives a wan chuckle at that last thought, causing Freckle to finally look towards him. The murder is long gone from his eyes and he looks as meek and pathetic as Viktor's used to seeing him, doubly so with all the sizeable bruises and the torn clothing.

Suddenly, Viktor knows exactly what to say.

"You look like shit."

Calvin lowers his head again and makes a face, as if to say fair enough. "Yeah. I know." He gingerly runs a finger over his swollen cheek. "I dropped my gun. The big one gave me some trouble."

It would take a keen ear to make out the cold terror in his voice for what it is. He should be able to conceal most injuries under his clothes for a while until they heal, but nothing can be done about his face. Nina will be asking some questions.

Viktor hums. The next line comes to him just as naturally.

"You should go for the neck."

"Huh?"

"Those big ones, you vill vant to go for the neck... eeh, the throat," Viktor corrects himself, lifting a hand to point at his windpipe. "Doesn't matter how big. You punch once in throat- boom. Can't breathe, can't stand. Fight is over."

The boy blinks at him and nods vaguely, unsure how to respond. This is the longest Viktor's ever spoken to him without a threat or a curse.

"Or even better, just use a knife," he continues. "There vill not be alvays bottles lying around."

Calvin looks to the side and clutches his elbow. "I, uh… I kinda dropped my knife, too."

Viktor squints down at him. "Maybe next time try not drop all your weapons, then."

Calvin's ears flag at the rebuke, but then he hears a deep rumble echoing in the Slovak's massive chest. He's chuckling again. Bemused, Calvin smiles along sheepishly until the rumble dies down.

"So, you get alvays, eh… like this?"

Calvin swallows what feels like a ball of lead. "Y-yeah. Pretty much."

Š ialenec.

Viktor eyes him closely for a moment. "You do not like it."

"I… no- well." Calvin scratches the back of his head. The answer is far more complicated than it has any right to be. "I mean, while… I do get, you know-"

"But after, you do not like it."

His shoulders sag another inch. "Not very much. No."

"So then, why you do it?"

The muffled sound of loud, inappropriate laughter suddenly reaches the wharf through the shut door behind them before Calvin can respond. He looks back toward its unmistakable source for a few long seconds, then goes back to staring out into nothing without a word. Viktor does the same. A tacit understanding passes between the two; Calvin won't answer him, and Viktor will not ask again.

They stay like this for a while, both committing to the silence like they are wont to.

A wood duck cries out into the night, some bug stridulates in response, and Viktor has to admire how the river's steady flow can instill such perfect calmness in him mere minutes after the fierce truculence they had come out here to enact. He wishes he could set himself down and enjoy it to its fullest, but knows better than to try; his knee would kill him without a chair or something else he could comfortably sit on.

And he realizes, rather abruptly, that were it not for this confounded impairment he would have already sat down there on that flat piece of rotting timber, right next to the despicable inadequate he's been struggling to chase away the entire summer without ever making the tiniest bit of headway.

Viktor doesn't like that.

"Okay, enough rest. Get up," he says sharply and turns to leave, berating himself for nearly slipping once again. He can't afford to let his guard down for even a second. "Ve must go. Help me to load the-"

"Viktor?"

He pauses with one hand on the doorknob and glances over his shoulder. Calvin has lifted his head and is staring at him with a troubled, hesitant look that he cannot quite construe.

"Ya?"

Calvin opens his mouth, dithers, swallows. It takes him a few seconds to finally make up his mind, and then he blurts out the question in a single breath, like pulling off a band-aid:

"Do you think you're a good person?"

Viktor says nothing. He slowly lets go of the doorknob and turns to face him properly, shotgun still in hand, giving the kid a long, searching look. There was something in the way he spoke just now, in the way his eyes sheened in the lantern's light and the quiet affliction shading the contours of his bruised face, that gave pause to the older tom. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Viktor makes the conscious observation that Freckle, battered and bleeding and hunched over as he is on the rim of that tiny pier in the black of night, looks very, very small indeed.

He just watched him go on a deranged, murderous rampage, vaulting over cars and crashing through windows, laughing like a madman as he gunned down the members of an enemy gang. The massacre from earlier was all his doing, and Viktor saw for himself the mangled remains of the three dangerous thugs that were left dead in his wake.

Yet in that moment, for the first time ever, the grizzled Slovak looks at the boy and he does not see a threat.

What exactly he sees instead, he cannot say; only that it takes him way back, back to vast fields of dirt and mud and endless hails of lead, where cruel circumstance had crammed him for months on end in narrow trenches together with countless other unfortunate young men. Some of them were tragically younger than others –children, really, still in or fresh out of their teens- and something in his size, his age or his heavy, somber bearing must have fooled them into thinking that he somehow knew what he was doing, because many of those kids naturally gravitated towards him during those harshest of days, as if to seek a form of safety in his company.

Many a time their eyes crossed his, in the nauseating tension just before an advance or after having repelled a new wave of attackers, right after they'd lost another friend to a nearby blast or struck down some faceless figure that had sprung out from within the clouds of dust; and every time there was this anguished quality to their gaze, this silent plea for assurance, for guidance, for a look or a word or a gesture that would put them at ease, give them their feet back, help them understand.

Horrified youths, all of them, desperately clinging to the hope that experience may hold a clue on how to cope with it all.

Viktor keeps staring wordlessly for a long time, face locked in a scowl but otherwise inscrutable. So long he stares that Calvin begins to worry that he's once again spoken out of line and overstepped some invisible boundary, but eventually Viktor's eye drifts away from him and out into the thick darkness surrounding the pier. Calvin then has a realization of his own.

He has a pensive glare, too.

"No."

Brutally short, and brutally honest.

Calvin waits for him to add something, but it looks like this one word is all he's getting. He lets out a sigh and averts his eyes, sinking deeper into the mire of his gloom.

It's okay. He gets it. What more is there to say when that's one's answer, after all?

"And you?"

Calvin lifts his head again and eyes him warily. "And… me?"

Viktor turns to meet his gaze. "Are you good person?"

Calvin gapes in awkward disbelief, like he's being told the world's most tasteless joke. He frowns, shrugs, then finally gestures back toward the cabin where the victims of his latest fit lay, judging that to be sufficient answer.

Viktor nods. "Mm. And the other one?" he asks again, cocking his head in the same direction. "Your cousin?"

Calvin's face darkens. This answer is also pretty clear by this point, yet his first instinct would always be to lie about it. There really is no point now, though; not with Viktor.

"… No. I guess not," he mumbles.

"And Mitzi? Zibowski?"

He simply shakes his head.

"… Ivy?"

Calvin opens his mouth, ready to give yet another obvious answer. It never comes to him.

He staggers. His eyes widen, drag from Viktor to his hands to the dark stream rushing below the rickety planks, and for a while he is left staring at it in puzzlement.

Because as they both know, Ivy is simply wonderful. There's no disputing that. She's pretty, and shrewd, and witty and strong-willed; and she smells so nice, smiles so bright, is so unfathomably cute when she bursts out laughing or giggles into her palm, trying her hardest not to snort. She's tough as nails, a real crack shot with the rifle, exudes endless vivacity wherever she goes, and it is Calvin's experience that just being in the same space as her can instantly brighten up your day- to say nothing of those divine sandwiches of hers. She's great, really. Just the best.

Yet at the same time, she very knowingly runs the deceptively unassuming front of an underground criminal organization. Every day the girl consorts with its gang of bootlegging scoundrels as they unabashedly break the law in pursuit of cold, dirty profit, most often acquired through the direct harm of another. Her friends regularly fight off rival gangs and smuggle contraband alcohol, by night serve it in their illegal establishment away from the eyes of local authorities, play and sing on its stage for untaxed wages, and her boyfriend in particular is a psychotic, trigger-happy killer-for-hire at the heart of it all. All of this Ivy readily abets out of an old attachment to the Lackadaisy speakeasy, a somewhat misguided thirst for adventure and an ardent passion for glitz and dancing.

But she is wonderful.

Viktor waits patiently for Freckle to look his way again. The confused uncertainty on the boy's face tells him that he understands.

"Ya. Exactly." He looks away and scratches absently at a spot on his chest, taking a moment to articulate himself. It is not often that he feels the need to transcribe intuitive thoughts into actual speech.

"… There are no good people, I think," he says slowly, cautiously, testing the words against his tongue to see if he had picked them right. "Just people. And mistakes."

HIs voice bears the wistful edge of one who might know a thing or two about mistakes, and about the people making them. Its solemnity hangs in the air for a long time after he's spoken, pervades the little wharf and seeps further outward into the amorphous darkness beyond until the night itself seems to have taken on a different palate. Freckle takes note of this shift in the quiet that follows and, unable to determine whether it's a pleasant one or not, decides he wants to try and describe it to himself.

It feels… sad, yet somehow soothing. Like a peaceful, accepting melancholy.

Like the bleak, horrid concept of a world without genuinely good people in it, coupled with the promise that in this world of just people and all their innumerable failings, the wonderful, the eccentric, the pious and the criminal alike may all yet have a place under the sun.

It's rather homey.

He is taken out of his musings by another wave of hysterically joyous laughter from inside the cabin, followed by creaks and rustling signifying movement. Rocky must be just about done with whatever it is he's been working on back there.

The two gangsters glance in synch at the door behind them, then at each other. Break's over.

"Alright. Come on, naow," Viktor says gruffly, squaring his shoulders and taking a step towards the boy. He bends down with a grunt and seizes him by the arm. "Ve have still work to do."

Calvin winces upon contact, for the Slovak's handling is rough as ever and with no consideration for the numerous bruises hiding beneath his rived shirt; yet something about this particular grip feels vaguely off, like noticing a misplaced item in an otherwise familiar room. He is not given a chance to process it as Viktor snarls at him to move and pushes open the door to the cabin's storage room. Calvin rushes after him and they hurry back inside, only now realizing that they've been far too relaxed these past few minutes for red-handed malefactors still dawdling around the scene of their crime.

Calvin is promptly put to work carrying crates out to the front of the cabin, and the peculiar sense of incongruity slips to the back of his mind. It was but a fleeting impression anyway, already difficult to recall, most likely all in his head; so he thinks nothing of it, and has forgotten it entirely within seconds. It can't have been anything too important, surely.

Only the subtle, near imperceptible difference between yanking someone upright and helping them to their feet.

Chapter Text

There is a curt, heavy, distinctly bearish sound, and Freckle looks up from the car seats he's supposed to be scrubbing clean. Viktor is staring at him in disbelief from the other side of the vehicle, green eye wide as the boy had ever seen it.

"Shaved?"

Calvin nods.

"All of it…? As like baby?"

An embarrassed simper dances at the corner of his lips. He nods again.

This time it's a long, loud, booming laughter, strong enough to shake the entire car and him along with it. Calvin keeps silent as it rages on, positively mortified as with every time he shares that particular story, yet somehow cannot help but smile along. Ivy often makes him feel that way, too. It's the weirdest thing.

It had taken the Slovak nearly three whole months, but on that slow midsummer afternoon of idle wash work he had finally asked the dreaded question: this nickname, it is stupid. Not scary, or- eeh, intimidating, at all. Vhy they call you that, anyvay?

Just as Viktor's laugh begins to bed down, his eye rests back on the kid. He forms the mental image, then doubles over to a new wave of ragged howls.

Calvin thinks, absently, how incredibly nonsensical it is to be feeling proud over having caused this.

"So he does good things too, vhen he is small. Hah!"

"My mom didn't think it was very good," Calvin interjects. "She nearly killed him that time." He pauses for some more of that rare, violently raucous laughter. A little mean-spirited, but enjoyable nonetheless. "He actually didn't dare come home for the night. He slept by the bushes." Viktor lets out a wheeze. "And I wasn't allowed outside for a month. I still remember her face every morning I-"

He is interrupted by a heavy slap that lands square on his back, knocking the air out of him. For a moment both are left wheezing amid the wetness and bubbles.

"Okay, Decko. It is done," Viktor declares as he straightens up, still coughing out tiny mirthful noises that are not quite as tiny as they'd be coming from a smaller man. "Now I must see it."

Freckle shakes his head at that. "Ha, I… I don't think so."

"You try to stop me! Next time you are slow to work, I grab a razor."

Viktor smiles at him broadly as he says that, and now it is that smile, his usual one. This one definitely is scary, and intimidating, and all those other things a gangster's smile ought to be; just not as much as Freckle recalled it being when he had first started out. Perhaps this is why these next words find the grit to escape his lips, almost without his consent.

"If you can catch me."

Viktor freezes mid-crouch, just as he was dipping his sponge in a nearby bucket of soapwater. He turns his head towards the boy, and for the time being there is only genuine surprise on his face. "Vhat you say?"

A shiver runs down Freckle's spine and up his tail. It's out now, though, so he figures he may as well go all the way.

"I'm… I'm much faster than you, Viktor."

Viktor eyes him in silence for a second, unmoving. The second becomes two, then three, then four; and Calvin is staring right back at him, not daring to look away, feet bracing to dart away from the car and hopefully prove his point.

Mistake, mistake, mistake-

"Hmph!"

In the end, Viktor is the one to look away. He stands up with a grunt and starts calmly rubbing the sponge across the dirty windshield. Freckle breathes again.

"Ya, vell, I can still corner you, Decko. I am good hunter. You vill see."

Decko. He's been calling him that from the beginning, among many other things, but lately he appears to have settled for this particular one. Freckle hasn't asked what it means –he fears the answer won't be too flattering- but somehow, it doesn't sound as hostile as it used to. Might be he's just heard it so many times now that it simply lost its sting.

In any case, it sounds a lot better than that "opice" one, that's for sure.

Freckle leans inside the car and resumes with brushing the back seats, filled with relief and entirely satisfied with himself. He feels exactly like someone who has just fed a wild bear out of their hand and lived to tell the tale.

"I dunno. Rocky says I'm slippery," he quips, emboldened by this new sense of camaraderie which he had previously thought impossible.

"And yet, he catch and he shave you," comes the response from the front of the car, along with rough, grating chuckle.

"No, he… he talked me into it, I think. I was very little."

A pause, followed by a scoff. Freckle cannot see it through the soap-covered windshield, but Viktor's hard-won smile has morphed into a wan, knowing simper.

"… You are still little, Decko," he says to the boy on the inside of the car, and the shift in his tone gives him away. "A little man. And he still talks you into things."

"…"

Another brief pause, filled only with the sloshing of wet sponge against glass and the scratching sounds of a hard brush as it diligently, almost compulsively, runs up and down the leather seats. Viktor doesn't need to look inside to know the kid is no longer smiling. He frowns at the distorted reflection on the windshield.

Suddenly he is thinking back to the words of another battered, world-weary old tom, a sagely figure from a literal lifetime ago, imparted upon him then in a different language and on a different continent. The wistful smile returns at the memory, and before he can realize it he hears the words echoed aloud in his own hoarse, gravelly voice.

"It is okay to be simple. But you cannot be stupid."

Calvin shuffles out of the car, brush still in hand, and juts his head over the roof. He looks troubled, but there is no offense to his expression. Only question.

"Am I stupid?"

Viktor drops the sponge in the bucket with a splash, and doesn't pick it up again. He stares back at the boy, but gives no answer.

Calvin lets out a sigh. "That's fine, I guess," he says, circling around to the front seats to continue his work. "There are worse things to be than stupid."

Viktor follows him with his eye as he approaches. "Oh? As like?"

Freckle thinks on it a moment, then faces the older tom with a tentative smile. "… A criminal?"

Viktor barks out a dry laugh.

"Or a coward."

The boy lingers outside the driver's door, brows furrowed in thought, lips set tight as if he's just tasted something bitter. Viktor observes him wordlessly.

Finally Calvin shakes his head and goes back to brushing. "I didn't like being a coward," he mumbles as he works. "I don't like being a criminal either, but… I don't think it's any worse, really."

Viktor reaches for the hose he had left running by his feet. He aims it at the hood and windshield, letting the stream of clear water wash away all the bubbles and goop. "Mm. Coward is no good," he says in a neutral voice, as if conceding a point. He can see Calvin through the now transparent glass, and waits for the boy to stop brushing before he continues. "It is a mistake, all this. For you, as well. You know that?"

"Yes."

Their gazes lock. "That is okay?"

Calvin doesn't answer right away. He considers the question deeply, earnestly, even though he's been telling himself nonstop, for the longest time now, that it isn't okay, and knows full well that this is true. But in the end, he decides, he might really be just a dumb, stupid little man who lets himself get talked into things. And so be it.

"… Yeah. I think so."

Viktor stares on for a long moment, then gives a single, slow nod. "Okay."

And with that he turns away and limps over to the hose's valve at the nearby wall while the scrubbing behind him resumes, noticeably less frantic than it was a minute ago. There's nothing more to add, he knows; it's the best one can do to simply choose their own mistakes, especially when they're little, and simple, and a complete pushover who's somehow far too stubborn and single-minded for their own damn good.

But then another thought crosses his mind, and he turns back to Calvin.

"You tell Ivy this?"

Calvin looks up at him and blinks. "Hm?"

"About the story. The nickname." Viktor gestures to his face. "She must have asked, yes?"

A bashful chuckle bubbles out of Freckle's throat. He's smiling again. "Oh. Oh, yeah, early on… she's been saying that if I don't get around to dancing with her soon, she'll shave it off herself to compensate."

"Hah!" 

Viktor smirks to himself as he bends down and grips the rusty valve. He twists it off in a single motion, and immediately the water stops flowing.

"Good girl."