Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I'll see you tomorrow, man,” Juno says, clapping him on the shoulder as she passes by. He waves at her back and turns to observe the sun, sinking to the horizon beyond his nearest window.

“Huh,” he says, half to himself, “Guess you will.”

He pulls together his belongings, his coat and his bag and double-checks that he has his wallet -- he'd dropped it earlier that day and it had taken fifteen minutes to find it again -- and makes his way from his desk to the door of the ranger station. He stands half-in, half-out, and lets the fall air bite at his ears for a moment. Then he sighs, pulls his coat on, and heads across the parking lot to his car.

It's a forty-minute drive back to Henrietta, and his apartment that looks so out of place in a small Virginian town, and his cat and his model boats and his bed. He putters around in the glove box, as he does every evening, pulls out a CD, and pushes it into the player. The old engine in his older car rumbles to life as the music kicks in, and he starts on the long way home.

Duck Newton considers himself a good driver. An upstanding citizen. Weed-smoking, derby-playing teenage years aside, of course -- not that anybody but Juno knows about all that. But Juno Divine's been his buddy since they were both fourteen and still living in West Virginia, so that's a given, and it's not like she'd go spreading that, considering she was a part of it. So, yeah, teenage years aside, Duck keeps his eyes on the road and his fellow drivers all the way back to Henrietta. Of Monsters and Men tells him they’ll hold his hand as the world ends while he parallel-parks alongside his apartment.

Chainsaw -- lovingly named by her previous owners -- trots up to him as he drops his keys on the counter and tosses his coat against the rack. He bends down to scratch her head, smiling as she releases a mmrrrrrrrrggh and then attempts to fit his thumb into her mouth.

He heats up leftovers and eats them on the couch, finding himself again staring out at the now-dark sky. Chainsaw wriggles her way into his lap and leans in to steal a vegetable, and Duck shoos her off. “You shouldn't even want this,” he says, wagging a green bean at her with his fork. Her only reply is a displeased gurgle.

Duck washes the dishes, and feeds Chainsaw her actual cat food, which she should be eating, and which he knows she enjoys, and decides that bringing his clothes to the laundromat can wait, and collapses into bed at 8 p.m., still in his work clothes.

“Never get old, Chainsaw,” he groans, as she nudges his forehead with her nose. Eventually, he gets up and puts on his clothes for sleeping, which are just his softest casual clothes, and turns off the lights. Chainsaw nuzzles in under his arm and tucks her paws under her chest, releasing periodical crackly purrs, and he chuckles slightly.

“Night,” he tells her, and falls asleep.

Well -- falls isn't the right word. He's more dragged into it, by a hand on his shoulder, and then his own hands are squishing into the mulch of a forest floor. He blinks, and finds himself looking down at what is indeed a forest floor. He looks up, instead.

“Jesus Christ,” he says.

The woman laughs and extends a hand. “No, Duck Newton, just me. Apologies for the rough landing.”

“No,” he says, and then he's on his feet, the ground more solid beneath him. “No, I said I was done with this. I'm -- this isn't even real!”

“Isn't it?” Minerva asks, “You made a choice to leave, after all.”

“I--”

“Duck Newton,” she says, very seriously, her smile regretful, “You are needed. Don't you understand? Things are beginning.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I got a cat, man! That's who needs me!” As he speaks, memories filter back -- there are beasts in these woods, beasts that Minerva made a sword for and then handed to him, beasts that roared over his own pulse. He can hear a rumbling among the trees that surround them.

“You're doing it again,” Minerva sighs. Then she is whirling, whirling, whirling, a flash of metal in her hands. She neatly slices the belly of the beast that had been leaping for her, all spines and claws and stripes, and turns back to Duck.

“Remember your sword, Duck Newton?” she says, and she is in front of him, hands dripping with blood and now smearing it down his wrists. “Remember that scar on your back? You must.”

Her worn hands tighten around his. Duck stares into her dark eyes, and after a long moment, she smiles faintly.

“You have a purpose,” she says, very gently, “Just like I did.”

He cannot speak.

“And it starts here, Duck Newton.” She releases his hands and raises them above her head, indicating the forest; he truly looks upon it for the first time in over twenty years. It is as he remembers, and nothing like it at all. Trees like redwood, shadows flickering between them, a shifting backdrop of mist and daylight. The presence remains; like something is about to speak to him, and like when it starts it will never end.

But the presence only says two words, in its impossible language.

Find them, Cabeswater tells him, and he wakes up to Chainsaw licking the blood from his frozen hands.

In the humble opinion of Aubrey Little, Virginian roads at night kind of look like the cover of an old folksy rock album, if that was a genre that existed. Or the backdrop for a zombie game. It's just gravel, long stretches of grass, sometimes asphalt, and an occasional building too far away to bother squinting at. There's no one around to keep her under the speed limit, not that she’s seen a sign in the last twenty minutes, but she stays below forty anyways. It's too late to chance anything, whether to her limited vision, mild exhaustion, or the fact that Dr. Bonkers is in the sidecar and she's not sure how safe he would be if something happened. Do motorcycle sidecars have airbags? Would an airbag protect a ten-pound rabbit? These are things she probably should have known when she got a motorcycle. And a rabbit.

But for the moment, there's no one else on the road. Probably, there are no other self-supported stage magicians riding around Virginia at midnight, trying to find the nearest town without the help of a GPS because their phones are barely working. She should maybe invest in an actual GPS. She can almost hear her father's voice in her head, scoffing at this generation's reliance on their phones.

Congrats, Dad, she thinks, I'm lost in the country. You were right. She glances towards Dr. Bonkers, as if he might give her the answer or maybe a magical scroll to guide her to a hotel, and then back at the road.

Aubrey has seen a lot of weird shit in her life, but what she didn't expect on a quaint Virginian road at midnight was for a person to suddenly appear and just stand there like a deer in the headlights.

Aubrey slams on her bike's brakes the second the girl becomes visible, which is lucky, because her headlights only reach about ten feet forward. She skids to a stop with the front wheel literal inches from the person -- a woman, Aubrey's age -- who doesn't even flinch as Aubrey pulls off her helmet and stares at her.

“Shit, are you okay?” Aubrey asks, after a few seconds of dead silence. The girl waits a moment before nodding.

“Okay. Okay. Cool.” Aubrey turns to check on Dr. Bonkers, again, who is -- also luckily -- unfazed in his seat. She turns back to the girl, who is now staring unblinkingly at Dr. Bonkers. “Uh.”

Instantly, unnervingly, her gaze swivels back to Aubrey. There's something seriously off about her eyes, Aubrey thinks, and then she realizes the problem is she can't look at this girl's eyes. Her vision simply slides away from them, or they're out of focus, or something.

The girl blinks, once. Her eyes are normal and brown. Human.

“Are you sure you're okay?” Aubrey asks again.

The girl smiles.

“I am just fine,” she says. Her voice is strange in a way Aubrey can't quite pin down. “This happens a lot when I try to hitchhike.”

“You were trying to hitchhike?”

She laughs. It's nothing Aubrey has heard before, like she learned it in a different world. “Clearly, I'm very bad at it.”

Aubrey bites her lip, considering. The girl seems harmless enough, and if she's hitchhiking, she probably knows where she's going, which could be the oh-so-evasive nearby town.

She becomes suddenly aware that the girl is looking at her very intently -- less staring and more studying. Flushing, she quickly says, “We could probably give you a ride,” and then cringes. But the girl only smiles at Dr. Bonkers.

“If it wouldn't be any trouble,” she says, adjusting the strap of the bag slung over her shoulder. “I'm just headed to Henrietta.”

“That’s fine,” Aubrey says. She doesn't have a clue where Henrietta is, but they can work that out. “You can sit behind me. I don't have an extra helmet, though.”

“Oh, I'm sure we'll be fine,” the girl says. Aubrey shifts up on the seat slightly so she can slide on. “Empty roads for miles, you know.” Her hands hover by Aubrey's sides, like she's unsure where to put them.

“You can hold on to me,” Aubrey says, and she does. “Shit, what's your name, anyways? I'm Aubrey. Little. Aubrey Little.”

“Dani.”

“Just Dani?”

The engine roars back to life when Aubrey taps the pedal. She jumps, and Dani laughs from just behind her, voice still smiling as she responds.

“That's all I've ever needed.”

*

Dani presses her fingers into Aubrey’s shoulder. She slows as they reach a wood-built, cabin-adjacent building at the end of the rough road. A sign above the door lit by a small lantern reads, “AMNESTY LODGE.”

“Amnesty, huh?” Aubrey says, only midway through pulling off her helmet. Dani laughs.

“I don't know what it means, either,” she tells her as she slides off her seat behind Aubrey on the bike. Her hair is curling and wisping wildly around her face, and Aubrey struggles to remember if it had been like that when they'd met.

“Well,” Aubrey says, “See ya.”

She doesn't really mean it like that, just an open goodbye, but Dani grins at her, all freckles on dark skin and too-bright teeth and strange eyes. “Maybe I will,” she says, and disappears into the building, and Aubrey thinks she might be right.

In the back room of a somewhat shabby-looking building between an antiques store and an ice cream parlor reside artifacts of possibly very great value. In the front room are bits of junk being sold for twenty dollars apiece as great historical items and evidence of something out there, with a capital S, O, and T. Behind the desk sleeps an elderly man with a sticker of a cartoon rat firmly adhered to his forehead by a fondly-disgruntled assistant before he took his leave, and cold coffee by his hand.

In one particular corner of the back room lie instruments covered in dust, untouched for years, by all logic out of battery. And at three-oh-five a.m., they shriek to life, blinking wildly, piercing the double doors and jolting Ned Chicane out of his sleep. He barely misses whacking his coffee to the ground in his bleary fumbling, rubbing his face and grunting in confusion as his fingers meet the rat sticker. He scrabbles at it for a moment, then gives up, swearing as he follows the racket to the back room.

Pushing open the doors, he pats around shelves with one hand and holds the other over his ear. At last, the lights draw his attention, and he shuffles over to the instruments, squinting at them in the dark.

“What in the hell…?” he says, and picks one up. It flashes a series of numbers at him that thoroughly confuse him, and after a moment he groans.

“Jeez, Vicky, how'm I supposed to turn these damned things off?” he grumbles, mostly to himself. He slaps at a few buttons on the one he holds, but no change occurs, and he leans back against the wall to wonder if anybody else can hear it and whether they'll complain about the noise. God knows he doesn't need the town on his back for anything else.

“Maybe I'll just throw ‘em in the trash,” he mutters, and a few minutes later he's gathering the pile into his arms and heading for the back door. The shrieking only seems to get louder as he walks, and as he steps outside it rises to a near unbearable crescendo.

Ned Chicane considers himself a clever man. He spends some free time doing sudoku, which he knows requires at least half a brain, and, well, his past speaks for itself. By all rights, he should know better than to get too curious about an old lady's paranormativi-whatsit detecting bullshit.

And yet. He hesitates, turning to the right. The sound quiets just slightly; the lights dim. He turns to the left, and they rise again.

Probably, it's magnets and all that. But, Christ; if he could find something for the Cryptonomica? People eat that shit up -- maybe not here, but they'll travel, he knows. He did, though that was more for the money. He takes one step, two steps. A third.

On his fourth, the devices fall quiet and dark. He stares down at them, turns in a circle, walks backwards. Nothing happens.

“Pieces of shit,” he says, and goes inside to put the instruments back on the shelf. He finds Victoria's files, her old records -- they're all that's in the cabinets back here, because Ned Chicane will commit tax evasion until the day he dies. He digs around for anything not-money or hospital-related, and only comes up with two folders after a good half-hour. PHENOMENA OF VIRGINIA AND WEST VIRGINIA, says one, in neat typewriter font. EVIDENCE FOR SOMEDAY, says the other, in Victoria's familiar shaky scrawl.

The one about pheno-whatever is just printed documents, photos, pages torn out of books and newspaper clippings. Ned finds a few maps that look to him perfectly normal, with what he assumes are longitude and latitude lines, mostly centered on Virginia, but they're labeled with things like “ley lines,” “fairy roads,” “vortexes.” “Corpse roads.” That last one settles something unpleasant in his throat, and he closes the folder. Someday he's going to have to stop putting so much stock in Victoria's word.

The evidence folder is… mostly photos. Written records. Stories of trees that oozed blood instead of sap, and patches of ground that burst into bloom when struck, and people that were just a little off, or a lot off. He finds one grainy picture of a woman's back, sprouting what looks like a pair of wings.

“Crazy old woman probably figured out Photoshop,” he mutters, mostly to shake off the feeling crawling up his spine. He turns the photo over. It's dated 1983.

“Alright,” he says to the empty room, as if there is a ghost listening, “Real funny, Vicky.”

The ghost does not answer. He gathers up the folders and tucks them into one of his coat's many large pockets, closing and locking up the file cabinets before he leaves.

“Well,” he says as he climbs into his Lincoln Continental, “I suppose it's been an entertaining night. And no hope of traffic.” He pauses, and sighs. “I've got to stop talkin’ to myself.”

He peels away from the curb and starts jerkily down the street. The dashboard clock clicks to three-oh-six.

Chapter Text

“Okay, Harris,” Aubrey whispers, “You have to be very quiet now. I promise it'll be quick.”

Dr. Bonkers twitches his nose up at her from his nest of blankets inside her largest backpack. She stands there in the chilly night air in front of the hotel for a bit, just cooing at him and telling him he's going to do a great job, and then very carefully zips up the backpack, leaving a hole for air and light. Even more carefully, she slings both straps over her shoulders, hoists her other bags into her hands, and slowly makes her way to the door. She dutifully ignores the sign on the window explicitly banning animals, and pushes open the door.

“Hi,” she says to the exhausted clerk at the front desk, “Do you have any rooms open?”

She gives her name and pays forty dollars up-front, and the clerk hands her a key for room 3C. “Just go up the stairs to the third floor,” he says, pointing around the corner to where Aubrey can see three wooden doors and one heavy, chipped, steel gray door with a sign reading ‘STAIRS’ taped to it. “I know it kind of looks like the start of a murder scene.”

“Fantastic, thank you,” she says, and heads for the stairs. The clerk sighs from behind her.

The stairs are not fantastic, and kind of do look like a murder scene. She reaches the third floor door and gratefully pushes through it, arriving in a short hallway that looks exactly like the one on the first floor.

“Fantastic,” she says again, completely genuinely. Aubrey is, normally, an enthusiast of all things strange, but this late at night she just wants somewhere normal to sleep. Room 3C delivers; it’s an unremarkable beige square with a twin-sized bed right in the middle, a single window, and a small bathroom squeezed into a corner. She locks the door, releases Dr. Bonkers into the room -- with his bed, some food and water, and a collapsible litterbox, because she may break rules but she's polite about it -- plugs her phone into the highest available outlet, and flops onto the bed.

“Dude,” she says to Dr. Bonkers, “Does this town seem kinda weird to you?”

He flops his ears around and goes back to sniffing the carpet.

“Don’t chew on it,” she tells him, “They have to pay for that, you know.”

He stares up at her. She shrugs. “I can’t tell them it was your fault. They’ll kick us out and I dunno how long we're staying here.”

Dr. Bonkers seems satisfied with this answer and hops away to investigate something else. Aubrey rolls her eyes and rests her head back against the pillow.

“Brave new day tomorrow,” she says to herself, and gets up to sort her stuff out.

*

She wakes up with her heart pounding to a dark room. There is a sense of dread, of terrible inescapability, filling the air around her, as if dripping down her neck and shoulders. She scrabbles for her phone where she'd set it on the windowsill and presses it on, squinting at the screen until it resolves into something recognizable. 3:05 a.m.

She glances to Dr. Bonkers motionless in his bed, to the silent nighttime outside the window, to the firmly closed door. Her heartrate slows; she exhales long and shaky, and checks her phone again. 3:06 a.m.

She grimaces and turns her phone back off, flopping back down against the bed and pressing her face into the pillow. Her fingers find the stone on her pendant, tracing the faceted edges.

It will keep away the monsters. You're getting too old for them now.

“There really is something fucked up about this town,” Aubrey mumbles, and falls back asleep.

Moira, perhaps, feels the ley line shudder before anyone else.

She leaps to her feet on the floor of Amnesty Lodge -- it's hard, the floor, the wooden floor, she'd almost forgotten -- and dances in a few tight circles, maybe laughing, maybe not. The floorboards creak underneath her dance -- how strange! How odd to carry a weight with you, how unfamiliar to feel so close to alive. She accidentally hits her hand against a lamp; the lamp doesn't even tremble, but her hand stings a bit, and she loves it. She makes her way to Mama's office, softly sing-songing all the way, and invites herself into the chair before the desk.

“You're seeming awful lively,” Mama says, eyebrows raised. “Anything I should know about?”

Moira hums a little tune, nothing anyone in this lodge knows, and experiments with poking one of the knick-knacks Mama's got all over the desk. “Ley line's being pulled from -- not much, not much, but much more than it has been.” Then she is behind the desk, tracing her fingers over the books on the shelves. “A dreamer, I think, or two. That big forest's quite happy to be of use again. I'm going to go to the supermarket,” she says suddenly, already at the doorway.

“And you feel the need to tell me ‘bout it because?”

“Oh, I don't,” Moira says cheerfully, “You'll hardly miss me. I just thought you'd rather like to be reassured I'll be back before midnight.” Then she is gone, but not before she hears Mama's rough laughter and Dani's indignant shout. The living are so easily entertained; it almost makes her sad, for a moment, that singing is the height of her expression now, but she shakes it off. Nothing to be done about that; she has a supermarket to haunt. Perhaps it's the unfinished business everyone keeps talking about.

Sunlight filters in through the front windows as Moira strolls around. An analog clock in the poultry aisle proclaims it eight a.m., on the dot, and she's rather proud of her accuracy. She waves to a cashier, who blinks and hesitantly returns the greeting, as if unsure she's seeing a real person. Moira would love to put her fears to rest, but saying things like “I'm real but dead” has only worked with about four people so far. So she keeps on browsing.

In the frozen foods section is an interesting young woman. Moira considers her interesting for several reasons, least of all her bright hair and fashion sense. She also has a large white rabbit perched on one shoulder, who turns to face Moira with ears pointing straight upwards. Moira smiles at it and drifts a little closer, until the woman notes her presence and glances at her.

“Hi,” says the woman.

“Hello,” says Moira, “Your rabbit is staring at me.”

“Oh, he just does that. He's nice, though.” She tosses a box of Pop-Tarts into her basket. Moira catches a slightly better glimpse of her face -- gold-colored piercings litter her ears, and a few in her eyebrows. A red streak accompanies winged eyeliner, bright on her brown skin.

“I was just thinking you looked a bit familiar, but I think I was wrong,” Moira tells her, thoughtfully. “I haven't seen anyone quite like you yet.”

The woman raises her eyebrows. “Really? Weird.”

“Everything's a little weird here, dear.” She pauses. “Do you have a motorcycle?”

“Uh, yeah, why?”

“Oh, I heard one around last night.” She flaps her hand dismissively, leaning in to pretend to peer at a package of frozen waffles. The rabbit is still looking at her -- clever little thing. “You seem like a motorcycle kind of girl. It's all the red, I think.”

“Thank you, I think? I try my best.”

There's brief silence.

“I'd like to give you a bit of advice,” Moira says.

The woman blinks at her, curiously. Good. “Trust your hunches, dear. I can tell you're a sharp one.” She pauses. “You'll figure things out rather soon like that.”

She slips away before Aubrey or her strange little guardian can respond. She finds herself in the kitchen at Amnesty Lodge, perched on a counter. Barclay hardly glances up as she appears.

“How was the supermarket?” he asks, slicing up some radishes. Moira weighs the pros and cons in her head.

“Tiring,” she says at last, “But enlightening. That Aubrey is very quick.”

Barclay frowns, still not looking up. “Aubrey?”

“Oh, Dani's red gal. You were probably asleep. She’s got a motorcycle and a rabbit.” She taps her tune on the countertop. “Enlightening. Truly.”

She’s gone before Barclay can ask any more questions, off to wander the Lodge at some other time. Beginnings have always been boring to her.

Generally, Duck's solution to a weird beginning to a day was to make the rest of it as normal as possible. So after he unfreezes in bed, he gets up and washes the blood from his hands like it was dirt. He dries his hands on a towel. He stares into the bathroom mirror.

It’s Saturday. So he calls Jane.

It rings three times before Jane picks up, groggy and fumbling with something. “Duck?” she says. “It's -- it is three a.m.”

He checks the clock. 3:09. He checks the windows. Dark. “Ah, man. So it is.”

“What -- why.”

“I didn't, uh,” he says, pacing in the kitchen, “Didn't realize it was so early. I woke up and realized it was Saturday, so. Y'know.”

There's a long silence on the other end. Duck almost thinks Jane fell asleep, and then she says, “Three a.m. doesn't count.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Was there -- like, is there somethin’ urgent?”

“Nah, nah. Sorry, Jane. I'll call you back, uh, at a better time.”

“Dumbass,” Jane says, fondly, and hangs up.

He stands in the kitchen with his phone still at his ear for another minute, just staring at the window. Find them, Cabeswater had said. Find who? Minerva? Monsters to fuck up?

Chainsaw headbutts his calf, and he places his phone on the table to scoop her up. She wriggles until her face is at shoulder level, and then presses it into his neck. Duck rolls his eyes and carries her back to the bedroom.

“I don't wanna hear shit this time,” he tells the empty room, and goes to dreamless sleep.

*

Saturday, as well as being Call Jane Day, is Errands Day. By twelve, he's back up and out of the apartment, and he stays out until three, when he drops off the groceries, says hello to Chainsaw, and pulls together a late lunch. He's halfway through his sandwich when Jane calls, and she just sighs and waits for him to finish chewing after he picks up.

“I wish you wouldn't do that directly into my ear,” she says, and then steamrollers on over his attempted defense. “Anyways, hello again.”

“Hey.” Duck takes another bite, and Jane fake-gags.

“How's Henrietta?” Jane asks, and Duck can tell she's at her desk because he can hear her spinning chair rattling over the wood floor. “Not entirely on fire yet?”

“No’yet,” Duck mumbles, and swallows. Voice clearer, he says, “Only a matter of time, but hey, we got about fifteen years fire-less now, at least.”

“Mm, that's good. Well done, Smokey.” She pauses. “Thinkin’ about visitin’ again soon.”

“You should,” Duck says, “S'only two hour's drive. Things get weird here without you around, y'know.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah.” He thinks about telling her about his dream, like he thought about it when he was a teenager. But she was too young then. And she's too young now. “Me an’ you an’ Juno could hunt around for fun shit to do.”

“Mm,” Jane hums again.

They talk a while longer, and eventually agree that Jane'll be down sometime by the end of the month. The call ends, and Duck sets upon getting his clothes to the laundromat.

*

Duck ends his Errands Day with a trip to Nino’s. And maybe he mistakes making a day weirder for making it more normal, because at Nino’s there’s a really handsome dude his age and it can’t hurt to try to make conversation, right?

The guy’s name is Virgil, and he’s a nice enough guy. Sweet smile. Then the kid manning the cash register hands him his to-go mozzarella sticks and Virgil gives him an apologetic shrug before walking out the door. Fair, honestly.

There's a kid sitting in the booth just beyond Duck’s who he's pretty sure was eavesdropping on the whole thing. But she seems more concerned with dropping napkins on the… table, assumably, than shouting rude things at him, and also utterly doesn't seem the type. So Duck isn't actually that worried about her. Killer hairdo, though.

Duck’s phone goes off. His first thought is that it’s another call from Jane, but when he pulls it out, the caller ID reads, STUPID OLD IDIOT MAN. Ah, right -- Ned.

“Duck!” Ned Chicane all but yells in his ear the second he brings the phone to his ear. “I don’t know if you’re, ah, off work, but I have -- a small issue. Just a small one. Concerning… the wilderness?”

Duck wrenches the phone away from his head just slightly. When he's recovered, he gets up from his booth and moves slightly closer to the exit. “And you couldn't ask the people who are working… because?”

“Well, they’re less likely to get me arrested,” Ned admits. “You see, Duck, I am… in a pickle.”

“Get to the point, man.”

“Yes, yes. I'm being chased by a bear in the cemetery.”

Duck takes a moment to absorb that. “Being chased by a bear.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“In the cemetery.”

“It's not a, uh, your standard bear, either. It's… oh, Christ, one moment. Think it saw me again.”

“In mid-day.”

“Listen, I promise you I can explain later,” Ned says, whispering now. Duck can hear twigs snapping on his end. “But, you know, I thought you might know a thing or two about strange bears? What with… the sword.”

“Don't,” Duck breathes, “Bring up that goddamn sword. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don't fuckin’ die.”

He ends the call, and turns to grab his shit from his now-abandoned booth. He'll have to wait on the pizza. But as he does, the kid from the other booth is staring at him, wide-eyed, looking like if she leans any further she'll topple from her seat and hit the floor.

“Oh, God,” Duck says, just as the girl squeaks, “I'm sorry! I didn't mean to eavesdrop that much, I just--”

“Alright, keep your voice down,” Duck says, and he doesn't really know why -- a bear is normal. A bear in a cemetery chasing some dude is less normal, he supposes. The sword… was probably the most interesting bit. Damn. “I don't want people in a panic about a lost bear.” At least that part was the truth.

“Oh, for sure, for sure. Um. Are you actually going to go, like, fight a bear?”

“Jesus, kid, no.” Her face almost seems to fall, and he adds, “It's probably just a scared cub. M'friend Ned's just a dumbass.”

“Oh.” She glances towards the other people in the restaurant -- there's just a couple in the far back, and the very-obviously-not-listening cashier.

Duck sighs. “Are you going to ask me if I can bring you with me to see the freaked out bear, teenager I don’t know?”

“I'm twenty-three! And… maybe.” She flashes Duck what he's sure is meant to be a winning smile. “I'm a traveling magician! I could help make your secret bear disappear.”

“Fun,” Duck says, and then, “Fuck it, sure. You're an adult. You're your own responsibility. C'mon.”

He turns to leave, and he's significantly past the door when he hears it swing wildly back open and quick, light footsteps on the concrete behind and beside him. He glances to his side and has to stop in his tracks. “Miss, are you holding a fucking megafauna?”

“Don't be mean to him! His name is Doctor Harris Bonkers.” The kid pauses, then adds, “PhD.”

“O’course.” Duck eyes the large white rabbit in her arms. It eyes him back. He decides to leave it alone. “And you?”

“Aubrey Little,” she says, with some measure of pride, “Or the Lady Flame. That's my stage name.”

“Hm. I'm Duck Newton.” On reflex, he adds, “It's a nickname.”

“Cool.” Aubrey grins and shifts Dr. Bonkers further onto her shoulder. “So which cemetery are we headed to, exactly?”