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The sounds of the bar aren’t any different than normal tonight, but there’s something in the air that just feels off . Echo noticed it that morning, before the owner had even showed up (when Echo was out getting food still). There was a tension, like something was hanging in the faintly tobacco scented air around her, and the feeling hadn’t left her all day, even after she’d tucked herself back into her small home in a crack in the wall beneath a booth.
She’d always had spot-on gut feelings, ever since she was a child. She knew the day that her parents were going to disappear, and she knew the day that her old home would be demolished by massive ‘monsters’ (that she now knows were just construction equipment). Now the feeling is back. Dread. A pervasive ache in her bones and tingling on her skin that puts her on edge. The customers tonight are quiet, talking softly amongst themselves if at all, and for once there’s no music playing. It would be nice, if it weren’t so eerie.
Echo peers out, past the boots of the men sitting at the booth she lives under, and tries to gauge the mood based on who she sees. The bar’s owner, Justice, a tall, leanly muscled man with face tattoos and a blond beard, stands behind the bar with the main bartender, Kjeld, another blond man who looks several years younger than Justice at least. One of the regulars–a ‘hunter’ named Rowan–sits at the bar talking to Kjeld. She doesn’t trust him. Hunters are trouble–her parents told her to hide the day they disappeared, from hunters . Some of the other humans here don’t trust Rowan even, and talk about him and one of his sons like they’re monsters. There’s another man at the bar, with dark skin and dreads, another regular named Emir, talking to Justice, ordering another (he’s already had several) beer. Justice gives him a look that even Echo can read as hesitance, concern , but he hands him another bottle anyway. She reads Justice’s lips when he talks, asking if the other man is okay. She doesn’t focus long enough to figure out if he is or not.
One of the bikers sitting at her booth kicks his feet back abruptly as the group starts to get up, and his heel slams into her, sending her crashing back against the bottom of the booth. She hadn’t realized that she’d ventured out so far, but it’s too late to correct that now. She’s dazed, vision blurring. She can’t move at first, she can’t breathe, the air wrenched from her lungs from the impact. She’s surprised that she’s still standing, even leaning against the booth. Something clatters to the ground beside her, the sound loud enough so near to her to nearly be deafening.
“Ah shit, give me a minute, dropped my lighter,” a voice above her grumbles out, and suddenly a hand descends on her.
The flesh is warm against her, just for a moment before it withdraws abruptly.
“What the fuck?” The same voice mumbles, barely above a whisper.
Echo looks up, and a face fills her vision. Dark eyes, dark hair, a handsome albeit confused face–like he isn’t surprised to see her, but he’s surprised that he isn’t surprised to see her–and a thick but well-groomed beard. His expression is odd, she thinks, but she doesn’t think it for long. His fingers start to approach again, reaching slowly–slowly enough for her to come to her senses and book it. Her home is right there, so she goes to that, even though it means one of the humans will know where she lives. She throws her body into the crack, pressing herself as far back as she can go.
“Hey,” she hears a voice call out from the bar, “What’s up?” It’s Kjeld, she thinks vaguely.
“There’s something down here, a borrower or something?”
He said what she was. They know about borrowers? Humans aren’t supposed to know about borrowers. Her heart races with that realization. They could all be hunters, and all of them could want her dead . Echo sees two rough fingers enter the crack in the wall and inch towards her, landing on one of her legs. She kicks, hard , but her foot doesn’t seem to do anything when it connects with the human.
“It’s putting up a fight,” the human laughs out, doubling down on his efforts to drag her out. Eventually he pins her leg, pressing it down against the floor and slowly, excruciatingly , starts to drag her out.
She lets out a scream, kicking furiously with her other leg.
His fingers withdraw quickly, so suddenly that Echo doesn’t register that she’s free at first. When she does, she stands. Her leg is injured. Not broken, but bruised badly already, and even though she can put weight on it her muscles scream for her not to. She has to run. Her home isn’t safe anymore. She moves as quickly as she can, building up from a limp to a jog to a full-tilt sprint out from under the table. Kjeld had pulled the man out from where he’d crawled beneath the table, is talking to him angrily, and is distracted. She can leave safely, she thinks.
“Oy, Kjeld,” Emir calls out, speech slurring ever so slightly.
She feels eyes on her, all the eyes in the room.
“ Shit ,” Kjeld’s voice booms softly above her, and she tries to pick up the pace.
She hears the thuds of impossibly huge footsteps following her, slowly enough to think that whoever it is (and she knows it’s multiple people now) is trying not to accidentally crush her. That’s something, but not enough. They’re likely just planning something worse. She thinks that until a boot slams down in front of her and the man it’s attached to (the one who’d first found her) staggers and topples over. He nearly lands on her, his stumbling body colliding with Emir at the bar instead. She falls back, the impact shaking the floor below her enough to throw her off balance.
“God dammit, don’t move,” Kjeld growls out, and the anger in his voice scares her enough to spur her to get up and run.
Fingers brush her hips, but she slips past them and keeps running, legs screaming in pain now but fear urging her forward despite it. She needs to just get out , she can’t stay here anymore. She realizes that she’s going to have to leave behind everything , the last remaining mementos of her life before with her family, her clothes, her tools, everything . She won’t survive. She’s as good as dead already. She course-corrects, starts heading towards the door, keeping close to the bar at first, thinking that maybe she can find a crack in it to hide in. One of Emir’s shoes lowers a second too late to stop her, planting down on the ground behind her surprisingly lightly–he doesn’t seem committed to stopping her.
Echo looks over her shoulder in time to see Rowan approaching her, and her own mortality becomes so startlingly apparent all at once. She isn’t going to die outside, alone, she’s going to die here. He’s going to kill her. The older man starts to approach her, and she realizes that she’d stopped running, that she’s backed herself against the bar instead. She can’t do that, she can’t give up yet. Rowan kneels down on the floor, and his hands start to close in on her, and she darts away, ignoring whatever quiet little platitudes he’d started to say to her. She wouldn’t have believed any of them if she’d bothered to stay and listen. He turns, she can hear the rustle of fabric, his soft voice, and she knows he’s going to grab her, that he’s following her. She bolts towards the door–she knows there’s an opening at the bottom, where the weather strip has worn away enough for her to get out if she wants to (it’s how she’d gotten in, after all). She glances over her shoulder, long enough to see that Rowan is standing, that he’d stopped chasing her, when she finally collides with something.
Echo falls back at first, dazed once more, wondering dimly if maybe she has a concussion at this point, then is promptly lifted up off the floor.
The fingers that close in around her are slender, and calloused around the fingertips. The hand is warm and soft and even though it’s closed in around her, holding her in place, it feels more like an embrace than a prison–than a death sentence. It’s only when the fingers unfurl and reveal the face of her captor that she starts to panic again, realizing that she’s still in the hand of a human and that no matter how nice it is (surprisingly) that it’s not safe .
The man holding her now is another bartender, a man in his early 20s, a bit younger looking than Kjeld, with long almost white hair and a scar circling his neck. Aleinn. He’s always polite with the customers, even the ones that give him grief for whatever reason (ones that even the regulars don’t seem to like). Echo scrambles towards the edge of his hand. She can’t trust him. She can’t risk letting him do whatever he’s planning on doing to her. His eyes widen and he draws in a breath, his fingers closing around her just before she can fall.
“ Hey hey hey ,” he coos out, trying to calm her, shaking his head lightly so that his wavy hair bobs slightly around his shoulders. “No, hey, it’s okay.”
“You’re going to want to hold on tight,” Justice says, watching with a mix of interest and pity. “She’s just going to keep trying to get away.”
Echo tries once more to writhe free of Aleinn’s grasp, but his fingers squeeze her gently, all but securing her fate. She can’t escape. They won’t let her. She wants to make this quick, she wants control of the situation, however she can get it. She bites Aleinn’s finger. His grasp tightens slightly more, but just for a moment. She isn’t crushed, like she’d expected. He doesn’t draw attention to the action at all, instead trying to hush her again, calm her like she’s a child.
He tries talking to her, asks her her name, but she owes him nothing so she gives him nothing. He talks over her then, which is almost more infuriating.
“She’s hurt,” he says, almost like an accusation rather than a statement. “I saw her leg.”
“Farris tried to drag her out of the wall,” Kjeld says, shoving the man who’d first found her lightly. That man has a black eye starting to swell already, where he’d hit his head when he’d collided with Emir (and the bar too apparently), she assumes.
“ Shit ,” Farris hisses out slowly, extending the word so that it almost sounds like two syllables. “She okay?” He sounds more drunk, maybe dazed now from when he’d hit his head. His concern sounds so… so genuine. It surprises Echo.
After the silence sets in around her, Echo realizes that everyone is looking at her. She tenses up again, and tries to squirm her way out of Aleinn’s grasp, his fingers tightening slightly to keep her from plummeting out of his hand.
Farris lets out a laugh. “Looks fine to me,” he says, Kjeld smacking the back of his head lightly the moment the words leave his mouth.
Kjeld approaches quickly, too quickly, and she freezes. “Kjeld,” Aleinn starts softly, almost reproachfully.
Kjeld gives him a hard look that softens when his gaze falls back down on her. “Hey, sorry about that,” he says, but the words barely register at first. “We’re just going to keep an eye on you until we know you’re not hurt too bad, alright?”
Aleinn nods, shifting his hand, setting her on Kjeld’s rougher open palm instead. “It’s not safe for you here,” he starts.
“It was until tonight,” she spits out, surprised by her own anger.
She expects Kjeld to get angry too, lash out, but he looks barely annoyed by her outburst. He looks up from her, and she follows his gaze, realizing that Aleinn has gone to the bar to start working, and Rowan has been watching them but hasn’t come closer (thankfully). Kjeld lets out a breath slowly, looking down at her again.
“Got a name?” He asks, motioning to Rowan with a nod of his head as he heads over to a booth on the opposite side of the bar. Rowan follows too, sitting across from him just after Kjeld sets Echo on the table.
“Echo,” she answers quickly, staggering across the table, closer to the wall, hunkering down with her back against it. She feels so much more exposed out on the center of the table.
“I’m Rowan,” the older human replies with a smile.
“Kjeld,” Kjeld says with a small wave that’s mostly a small movement of his fingers. “How long have you been here?”
Echo shrugs, and falls silent for a moment. The eyes on here aren’t unkind, she realizes, tired maybe but not angry and not hiding any sort of malice. Her shoulders lose their tension, and she pulls her legs up close to her chest (as much as she can comfortably manage right now). She starts to talk, revealing more than she should more easily than she should, but nothing in the mens’ behavior makes her think that this is strange to them or that it’s something that they would use against her (or other borrowers).
By the time she’s done, Kjeld is carrying her back to her home across the bar with food and water in a bottle cap. The bar is mostly empty now, just the other bartenders and Rowan and Kjeld and her. It’s quiet, the music turned down, nobody other than Kjeld paying her any mind now.
“If you need anything, ever, just let one of us know. Try to avoid other people still, but we can help you,” Kjeld says, trying to make her feel some sort of comfort despite everything that just happened.
Echo steps down off of his palm, and hesitates before going back into the crack in the wall leading to her home. “Wait,” she says quickly, just as he starts to scoot back out from under the now empty booth.
“Yeah?”
Echo pauses, shifting her weight slightly uneasily. “You didn’t try to kill me,” she says bluntly. “I thought humans did that. Especially humans like…”
Kjeld watches her for a moment, then sits on the floor, crossing his long legs. “Nah, not all humans,” he says. “You aren’t the only person here who isn’t human though. Even if you were, you aren’t hurting anyone. Just surviving, same as most of us here.” It’s a good enough explanation, even if Echo doesn’t completely understand. There’s something left unsaid there. Is Kjeld one of the people who isn’t human? It’s a thought that Echo mulls over as she looks up at him.
“Alright,” she says finally, voice slow and unsure.
Kjeld grins a slightly lopsided grin down at her, but it’s warm and genuine. “Get some sleep,” he insists, making a slightly ‘shooing’ motion with his hand. “See you around?”
Echo shrugs with a grin of her own. “Maybe,” before she retreats into her home once more, safe for now.