Chapter Text
Hamid held his phone between his ear and shoulder as he rushed down the (thankfully mostly deserted) street, wishing desperately that he hadn’t forgotten his headphones before leaving the house. “I’ll be fine, Saira, really. It’s only a ten-minute walk from my apartment. It’s better than most of the other jobs I could have gotten.” He adjusted the bundle of papers in his arms as one threatened to slip from his grasp.
“It’s just… You’re so far away. I worry.” Saira’s voice was muffled by the way the phone’s speaker wasn’t quite lined up with Hamid’s ear, but that did nothing to mask the concern in her voice (the same voice she used to use when he fell as a child, whenever she was watching him. The same voice she’d used after Liliana broke up with him and he’d called her in tears).
“I went to boarding school here. I know the city.” Hamid could hear the fond exasperation creeping into his voice as he spoke, turning left at the intersection, away from the few people that had been populating the main road onto a side street. “I’ll be fine, I promise.”
“I know. Just… call me if you need anything, okay?”
“I will.” Suddenly, he saw the window of the pub just down the road shatter outward as a stool went flying through it. “I… I’ve gotta go. I’m-” Hamid hesitated, considering whether he should say anything to Saira, before deciding that he didn’t want to worry her any more than she already was. It was probably fine. “I’m getting close to work. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.” He shifted the bundles of papers in his hands until he could slide his phone into his back pocket, then continued forward toward the pub slowly, being as quiet as he could.
As he got closer, he began to hear noises coming from inside the building.
(It was fine, probably just an argument between some of the pub’s patrons. Some patrons that were there at… eight in the morning. It was fine.)
“... you can’t hide from me forever, Sasha. You know you can’t; I have eyes everywhere! So why don’t you just come quietly? I’ll make your death… less agonizing.”
Hamid came to an abrupt stop, a few feet shy of the pub’s door, upon hearing those words. That sounded… much more serious than a bar brawl.
(He shouldn’t get involved; he should just turn around, take another route to work. But… whoever Sasha was might need help, or something. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he walked away.)
He placed the papers he was holding on the ground near the wall of the building, then kept creeping forward. As he reached the door, he heard the voice again. “Sasha,” it crooned in a slight singsong, “where are you?”
Hamid peeked around the corner of the door, observing the scene in front of him. The pub was a mess, broken glass strewn all over the floor, tables overturned, fragments of stools scattered everywhere. In the middle of all the chaos stood a man in a long leather coat, wearing a pair of (steampunk-esque) goggles, with a manic grin on his face. As Hamid watched, his gaze snapped suddenly over to a spot near the bar, close to the ground. “Ah, there you are, Sasha.” He started to stalk closer to the spot, and Hamid was startled to see a flicker of something like a shadow in the air there. Nothing more than that, certainly nothing substantial enough to be a person, but a flicker nonetheless. The man seemed convinced that it was the Sasha he was looking for anyway.
Hamid was at a loss for what to do; he felt like he should do something to help, but he couldn’t figure out what. He glanced left and right, scanning the ground for anything that might give him an idea, when he spotted a broken table leg well within reach. He hesitated just long enough to make sure that the man in the pub wouldn’t look in his direction, then leaned out from his hiding spot to snatch it up.
“I see you, Sasha. There’s no more hiding from me,” crowed the man, moving closer to the flicker by the bar with every second. Hamid took a deep breath, then threw the table leg, sending it flying across the room until it collided with a (miraculously) unbroken bottle sitting on a table, on the opposite side of the man from the flicker. Hamid ducked out of view as the bottle crashed to the floor, shattering, and the man whipped around to stare at it. “What the- Oh, Sasha, did you bring a friend? That seems rather rude, doesn’t it? Not introducing me.”
Hamid stayed with his back pressed to the wall by the door, trying to control his breathing, desperately hoping that the man wouldn’t think to look his way, that he wouldn’t see him. He could hear him moving around inside the pub, broken tables and stools scraping along the floor, broken glass crunching underfoot. The sounds seemed like they were getting further away, moving toward the far side of the building rather than toward him.
That didn’t mean that he didn’t nearly scream when a hand came down on his shoulder. Probably would have done, if it weren’t for the fact that another hand came up to cover his mouth at the same time. As it was, he didn’t scream, even when he snapped his eyes to where it felt like a hand was clamped on his shoulder and saw absolutely nothing there.
Then, a flicker, directly in front of him, the same one from before. He heard a voice, like someone whispering into his ear even though there appeared to be no one there (it was really quite jarring, honestly). “If I take my hand off, you’re not going to scream, right?” Hamid nodded, and the hand drew back immediately. He didn’t scream. “Good. You’re the one that broke the bottle?” He nodded again, and the person - probably Sasha - made an appreciative noise. “Thanks for that, then. What’s your name?”
“Uh, Hamid,” he whispered. “Yours?”
She took a moment before responding, and Hamid couldn’t help but wonder if she was coming up with a name off the top of her head (he honestly wouldn’t blame her). “Sasha. But you probably heard that. D’ya think you can help me a little more, Hamid?”
“Y-yeah, sure. What do you need from me?”
Sasha pressed a pile of small, smooth objects into his hand as she spoke. “I need you to keep him distracted, just the way you were doing. Just throw one of these if he ever seems like he’s spotted me. I’d change position every few throws, though. So he can’t figure out where they’re coming from.”
Hamid took a deep breath, then nodded again. “I can do that.” Sasha hummed quietly and he (just barely) heard her move away, back into the pub. Looking down at his hand, he saw that she’d given him a handful of small disks shaped like coins, but with none of the symbols or imagery you’d expect on them.
He peeked around the doorframe, tracking the flicker that was Sasha as she moved silently across the room. He couldn’t tell exactly what she was headed for, or what she was planning to do once he finally got there, but he supposed that it didn’t matter. He just needed to keep the man in the pub distracted.
Hamid kept an eye on Sasha’s whereabouts as she moved throughout the room for the next few minutes, periodically chucking a disk into the room (to his surprise, the moment they contacted the floor they let out a noise not unlike someone tripping, then dissolved into nothing). He changed his position every few minutes, just like Sasha had said to (though it didn’t seem like the man had any idea that the noises the disks made were anything other than Sasha stumbling over some piece of debris or other).
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the man called in the same sing-song from earlier, his body turned to face the place where Hamid had thrown the most recent disk, while the flicker-that-was-Sasha moved silently past him behind his back. He seemed to have completely forgotten his earlier suspicion that Sasha had brought backup, instead solely focused on the prospect of catching her.
Or so he thought. At least until, about twelve minutes after Sasha initially asked for his help, he tossed a disk into the pub only for the man’s gaze to whip toward where Hamid was hidden rather than the noise. He tried to duck back into cover before the man could see him, but it was too late; the man held out one hand, and an arc of electricity lanced from his index finger over to Hamid. Hamid felt his entire body stiffen as it hit him, every muscle in his body spasming as he fell sideways, away from the partially broken table he’d been crouched behind.
“Ah, there you are.” The man stalked toward him, lowering his hand, though the electricity (which Hamid now realized was probably actually some kind of taser) continued to arc between it and Hamid. With his other hand he drew a knife from his belt, adjusting his grip on the handle as he moved to stand over Hamid. “You must be Sasha’s little friend. What an annoyance you are.” He crouched down, positioning the tip of the knife over Hamid’s right eye as Hamid continued to shake uncontrollably. Behind him, Hamid thought he might have seen a flicker, so brief he almost missed it, and he hoped more than anything that it was really Sasha, and not some trick his eyes were playing on him. “I think I’ll have some fun with you. Maybe that will convince Sasha to-”
He was cut off as his goggles were ripped off his head and thrown across the room as a thin wire was wrapped tight around his neck. He clawed at his throat, mouth working as he tried to draw in a breath that wouldn’t come.
“Shut up, Barrett,” came Sasha’s voice as the flicker that had been behind him finally solidified into the shape of a person; a woman with pale skin, dark eyes, and dark hair. She held the wire taut against the man’s - Barrett’s - struggling, until he finally stopped moving. Sasha shifted his weight until he was lying on the floor as the taser finally shut off and Hamid stopped shaking, panting for breath.
Sasha flipped Barrett’s limp body over, taking a pair of handcuffs off her belt and restraining him, patting him down as she did so (removing a few gadgets that Hamid couldn’t identify in the process). Then, she turned to face Hamid, still lying on the floor, and offered him a hand. He took it and let her pull him up. “You alright there?”
“I- I think so. Or… I will be alright, at least. That taser was really something.”
Sasha looked him up and down, slowly, like she was sizing him up. “You did good, really good… What’s your name again?”
“Hamid.”
“Full name?”
Hamid hesitated (did he really want to give this random woman who’d just choked a man to unconsciousness his full name), but… Barrett had seemed like he was a bad guy. And she was still staring at him, her expression perfectly neutral, not a hint of malice in it. “Hamid Saleh Haroun al Tahan.”
She nodded, seemingly content with that. “Alright then, Hamid. We’ll be in touch.” With that, she turned and moved toward the back of the building, dragging Barrett’s limp body behind her. Hamid almost called after her to ask what she meant by that, but decided not to. Given the expression he saw on her face in the split second before she turned to leave, he wasn’t sure she would react to any sort of interruption to her work well.
He supposed it didn’t really matter anyway. Whatever was going to happen would happen.