Chapter Text
Spring in Mafia Town meant monsoon season, rain sweeping through the island and causing the native vegetation to swell with juices and bloom with life.
Monsoon season in Mafia Town also meant humid, wet weather, endless rain, and- for Madelyn, at least, although that was a name she made a deliberate effort to avoid using-, extra shifts at Seaside Spaghetti, because the last thing Mu wanted was to spend more time than she needed getting caught up in the island’s unforgiving tropical storms.
Not that she minded the extra shifts too much. Although her pride would never let her explicitly admit it, Seaside Spaghetti was one of the last standing remnants Mu had of the time before the Mafia had shown up on the island and flipped her life on its head, forcing her to trade out her childhood bedroom and three warm meals a day for a cold cave and a dying fire that she wasn’t always lucky enough to keep alight overnight. Even if her family had preferred other establishments, Mu had found herself clinging to it like a lifeline. It was the only business on the island that wasn’t run by the Mafia, overlooking empty docks, and the owner- a kindly elderly man who she’d seen many times before but whose name had always managed to elude her, even when she’d spent the last six months or so working for him-, seemed to tolerate her well enough.
If she were a little more confident in herself, she’d even go as far as to consider that maybe he liked having her around, but that was a stupid thought to consider even on the best of days. He was nice to her because she worked for him, and she was nice to him because he paid her consistently and she needed those pons. Save for the ones that went to food or clothes or the rare splurging on art supplies, every pon she made went to a chest hidden in the fringe corners of Mafia Town, hard to seek out and even harder to access when you were a broad-shouldered brute with bigger muscles than brains. Each one of those pons was dedicated to the day she could finally emerge from the shadows of the bleak existence she’d retreated to after she’d gotten… carried away with the powers of the timepieces, to put it kindly.
Truth be told, Mu wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by emerging from those shadows. She still wanted to take back her island and fend off the Mafia once and for all, but as the years had passed, it’d become obvious that dream was nothing more than a far-fetched pipe dream better reserved for fantasies and fictional worlds. There was only so much that she could do on her own, and her only likely allies- the coffee clerk, who was old and reasonably cared more about keeping his business afloat and living out his dwindling years in peace; and Cooking Cat, who had long since packed up and left after securing a long contract for her own cooking show, making a name for herself in ways that Mu could only ever dream of-, were entirely uninterested in uprooting their lives for a rebellion that had fizzled out long before it’d had its chance to become a roaring flame.
Leaving the island had been an option that had slowly become more and more appealing to her throughout the years, but Mu had absolutely no idea where she’d even go. The sentiment of her ‘getting lost’ was one that most people still held close to their hearts, and leaving behind the island for good felt like giving up on the ones who had come before her. Her home, if it could still even be called that, had very little left for her, she knew, but she was loyal to it like a fox caught in a trap, unwilling to chew off its own foot to get free before it died.
The thought of running off to another planet where nobody knew her had come to her once or twice in a dream, but she didn’t even know where to even start with that hopeless mess of a pipe dream.
So instead, she put away her pons towards a future that remained uncertain. Not that any of those options were going to happen anytime soon- business was already awful (and it’d only started hurting more when Mu had landed the job because of course it had), and tips were a concept that remained entirely foreign to her. She had plenty of time to decide what she wanted and how she was going to get to it.
Today’s shift was just like any other: slow and boring and generally awful. A couple of goons, drenched in rain, had stopped by to fuel up on lunch and coffee, and Mu had snuck off to take her own lunch after swapping out their sugar for salt and putting an obscene amount of sauce on their spaghetti. It wasn’t the sabotage she’d grown to prefer throughout the years, but she still got a kick out of watching them dribble tomato sauce all over their freshly-pressed blue suits.
Now, she ate a hastily-made sandwich, staring out of the windows of the stuffy breakroom. She had a perfect view of the docks from here, and outside, a torrential downpour of rain lashed at the sea, the salt spray and the sounds of the ocean waves crashing against each other dredging up old memories. There was something about the monsoon season that always gave way to nostalgia, taking her back to better days.
She and her father had always gone storm chasing during weather like this- as much as one could go storm chasing on such a small island. The world had seemed vast and endless then, and he’d taught her how to tell exactly when a storm was coming: something about bees and red sunrises and cobwebs in the grass. She never paid attention then, hardly remembered anything about how to predict the weather now, but she’d held the memories close to her heart anyways.
The door to the breakroom opening was quick to pull Mu out of her thoughts. The coffee clerk leaned against the doorway, chuckling to himself as he wiped his glasses with his apron before pushing them back onto his face. They sat at an awkward, tilted angle, having been damaged in a scuffle with the Mafia years before Mu had started working with him. He’d never finished telling her the story of how it’d happened.
“Switching out sugar for salt. That’s an old trick I haven’t seen in a while,”
“It’s a good one, right?” She perked up, grinning. “Gotta keep those brutes in place and remind them who was here first,”
“Oh, it’s a fantastic one, all right, but that attitude won’t get you far.” The clerk smiled when he spoke, revealing crooked teeth. “Besides, they’re awful to put up with when they’re… yanno, riled up.” He paused. “They left without paying.”
“Oh.” The smile dropped from Mu’s face instantly, guilt taking its place. It tasted acidic, rising to her throat and souring her mouth. She’d gone and fucked up again, and this time, she’d ruined his business with it. He had every right to tell her to get lost, just like everyone else on this rotten planet had. “Sorry.”
Instead, he just adjusted his glasses and grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “Ehh, they were stinking up the establishment anyways. You did us both a favor. Rotten fish and body odor tend to scare off the other customers,”
Mu opted not to point out the fact that the trio of goons had been their first customers of the day and, judging by the time, probably their last. It was already two in the afternoon, and nobody in their right mind wanted to make the long walk down to the docks in this weather.
“Anyways, somebody’s here for you.”
To that, Mu’s eyebrows shot up, and then she subsequently shifted uncomfortably in her seat, discomfort flooding her veins as she looked away. The last time somebody had been here for her, it’d been a Mafia Goon she’d pickpocketed who was now angrily looking for reimbursement. She’d been completely alone during that shift, and she’d opted to beat him upside the head with the bristled end of a broom and had never told the clerk about it.
Simply put, people just didn’t like her after everything she’d done- reasonably so-, and on the rare occasion people were looking for her, it always spelled disaster.
She furrowed her brows at him before feigning nonchalance, kicking her feet up onto the empty folding chair next to her and taking a too-big bite of her sandwich.
“‘M om my bake,” She said with a mouthful of rye.
“And you get paid through it. Go on, now.”
Mu swallowed before speaking, unmoving. “Who is it?”
The clerk quirked an eyebrow. “You act like you’re allergic to meeting people,”
“I think people are allergic to meeting me,” She said, setting her sandwich down. She got up, half-assedly attempting to smooth out her hair before starting to reach out for her apron. “This is a waste of my break, and also probably illegal, so maybe you should reconsider sending me out before I’ve finished my sandwich right now…”
“Yes, because you’ve always been fond of following the law,” The coffee clerk said with a certain fondness to his voice, dropping down onto the folding chair she’d been using to prop her feet up a moment prior. “You’ll be fine. She’s not even a customer.”
“She?” Mu looked over. “I barely know any girls.” She paused. “I don’t know any girls. There are literally no other girls on this island,”
“Well, maybe she’s not from this island.”
“I think I’m about to get kidnapped. Did you get a name or something? What does she look like?”
The coffee clerk pinched the bridge of his nose. “Stars, Madelyn, it’s not going to kill you to see this person. I swear. Go and say hello before she leaves,”
Mu squinted, pursing her lips. “Fine, I am, but only because I like working here.”
She opened the door to the breakroom.
“Oh, and Maddie?”
She looked back over.
“Get ‘er a cup of coffee, will you? On the house,” She frowned. “From me. She’ll appreciate it.”
She huffed and said nothing as she exited the breakroom, allowing the door to swing shut behind her as she made her way downstairs. She made a detour into the kitchen, grabbing a mug and refilling a pitcher with freshly-brewed coffee, trudging to the front of the house and stopping right in her tracks.
Well, maybe Mu had lied to the coffee clerk. She did know some girls.
In fact, she knew the one sitting in the booth right in front of her pretty well. It just so happened that she also was one Mu desperately wished she didn’t know.
Hat Kid, clad in a purple turtleneck sweater, had squeezed herself into one of the booths at the far end of the establishment, propping her head up with her hands as she watched the downpour through the window, fat drops of rain lashing against the glass. Despite her height, her wiry build speaking of a lifetime on the move, the way she’d squeezed herself into the booth made herself seem small and innocuous, both of which were things Hat Kid was absolutely not.
She was also not a Hat Kid anymore, which made sense when Mu used more than a single brain cell but still pissed her off to no end anyways.
She marched right back to the breakroom, tray of coffee still in hand, only to find that the door was locked. Or conveniently jammed, as if it often liked to be. Or both.
“I am going to quit if you make me talk to her!” She hissed through the door.
“That’s a shame, because I like having you around. You’re great to work with,”
“If I’m so great to work with, then tell me why you’re sending me out to my certain death!”
He chuckled. “She is not going to kill you,”
“She kicked my ass when I was like, twelve! Stars know everybody else wants her to finish the job!”
There was a brief silence behind the door- the type of awkward silence that always came when Mu said something like that, the clerk unsure of what to say and Mu wishing that she could unspeak her words but unwilling to break that habit of self-deprecation just yet-, and then the clerk sighed, pulling it open just enough to that Mu could see his face. “From what I remember you telling me, that ass-kicking was deserved.”
Mu frowned, biting the inside of her cheek.
“But I’m an old, senile man. What do I know?” The clerk softened his voice. “Listen, Madelyn… she asked me kindly, and I owe her this favor from years ago. She saved me from the Mafia countless times, and I know she’s saved you too.”
“I cannot stress how little I want to see that hat-wearing brat,”
“And I cannot stress how badly she wanted to see you.”
Mu opened her mouth to speak, the words she was going to say laced with venom, but then something in her faltered, the words dying in her throat.
She had half a mind not to march downstairs and pour hot coffee into that girl’s lap. She had another half a mind not to wring out her boss and only coworker by the neck for putting her in this situation.
She groaned dramatically, digging the tip of her sneaker into the floor. “Fine, but if I accidentally pour this coffee into her lap, I don’t want to hear anything about it.”
She marched off before he could reply, feeling his eyes on the back of her head as he chuckled. Something something moody teenagers, she was sure. Mu scanned the room for any other customers before she made her way over to Hat Kid, or Hat Teenager, or Hat whatever, settling down the small mug so hard that it rattled on the table and caused her to jump.
Hat Whatever met her gaze instantly with wide eyes, and Mu refused to meet them. She could if she wanted to. She just… wasn’t going to, frowning at the mug as she poured coffee into it. It spilled over the sides and she didn’t apologize, setting the pitcher down and sliding into the other side of the booth. If it bothered Hat Thing, she didn’t say anything, taking a long sip of her black coffee.
Outside, the rain continued to pour, silence stretching thin over the two of them. Hat Creature- okay, this was getting old- was silent as she looked outside and Mu folded her arms, leaning back into the booth.
It was Hat Kid, all right, silent as ever, with the same impossibly blue eyes that had always made Mu squirm under their scrutiny. She still had the same face, although her features had shifted, her face slimming out and her cheekbones having become more prominent with age. She still wore that same awful top hat, but her hair was shorter, stopping at her shoulders and framing her face in a curled brown-to-blue ombré.
There was something about her now, with her new hair and her stupid hat and the way she slowly drank her bitter coffee without a care in the world that made Mu shift uncomfortably with feelings she’d never been willing to address, something awful fluttering tightly in her stomach. The most prominent feeling of them all was inadequacy, and that was a feeling Mu was already well acquainted with. She turned her gaze to the window as she ran her fingers through her own hair in a half-assed attempt to brush it out. Her reflection was vague in the glass, but she looked awful. That was nothing new.
The thing was, though- she never really cared about that before. She’d cut her hair out of convenience a few weeks ago, and the only thing about it that had bothered her was that it felt weird to have the nape of her neck exposed, but then the monsoon season had begun and she’d regretted chopping it all off. The bitter cold bit at her exposed ears and it didn’t matter how short her hair was because it always took ages to dry.
Letting out a satisfied sigh, Hat Kid set the mug back down on the table. Mu stared out of the window for another minute before finally meeting her gaze.
Hat Kid said nothing, folding her hands on the table and watching her with that same intense gaze that had always made Mu squirm when they’d been kids.
“Seriously?” Mu scoffed. “You dragged me out of my lunch break just so you could silently drink some coffee and watch the rain? You didn’t need me for that! I was having a really good sandwich!” She exclaimed. “He was going to get you free coffee anyways!”
“He- that was free?” Came Hat Kid’s quiet voice, vaguely raspy, as if she didn’t speak often.
She opened her mouth to shoot back something snarky, but then she paused. Come to think of it, she’d never actually heard Hat Kid speak. “Uh, yeah. That was free. You’re welcome.”
A small smile teased at the corners of Hat Kid’s lips, but it failed to form fully. “Oh. Thank you,”
“Don’t thank me. I would’ve charged you extra. I should’ve,” She added the last sentence with a huff. “Why are you here, anyway?”
“I was looking for you,”
“And now you’ve found me, so… what gives? What do you want?”
Hat Kid shrugged, her shoulders shifting up. “I don’t know,” She admitted. “I didn’t think that far. I just happened to be in the area and I wanted to see you,”
Mu snorted bitterly. “‘In the area’. You travel through space and time, dude.”
“And I just so happened to be near the timeline,” She said with a shrug, twirling a blue curl around her finger. “So I decided to stop by and say hi to my, um, old friends.”
“We’re not friends.” Mu shot back instantly. “We're enemies. Rivals. And, full offense, you’re the last person I think I’ve ever wanted to see in my life. I haven’t forgotten what’s happened,”
“Well, I really wanted to see you,” Hat Kid said with a hesitance that bordered on bashfulness, a flicker of hurt running through her expression. “I didn’t like how everything between us… ended,”
“Maybe you should’ve made it end in a way that didn’t involve beating me upside the head with an umbrella, then.”
“Hey, that’s- you’re not being fair right now! I wasn’t the only one involved,”
“I-”
“It takes two, and you weren’t very nice to me, either. I saw the things you were writing about me,”
“‘Very nice’, what are you, twelve?” Mu began, but her heart twisted at an odd angle to the dejection that slowly crept its way into Hat Kid’s expression. “I was a jerk, you were a jerk. We were both… huge, selfish jerks,”
“I didn’t want to be a jerk. Look, listen, can we-” She wrung her hands, struggling to put her words together, and then she looked back up at Mu. “Can we start over?” She asked suddenly. “Introduce ourselves to each other? Try again?”
Mu stared at her, squinting as she scrutinized her, and Hat Kid watched her with those same, adoring blue eyes. They were so pretty, and everything about her expression seemed genuine and honest. Someone she could easily trust.
Someone Mu could not, in any circumstances, allow herself to trust.
After all, what had happened the last time she’d trusted her? The last time she trusted anyone? That last person she’d trusted had been Hat Kid, and she’d shown her that she had the power to change the world right in her grubby little hands and just… didn’t care enough to do anything about it. She’d seen the state of the island, all dilapidated buildings with caved-in roofs, overrun by goons who actively set out to make what little remained of her home worse, and had decided that it wasn’t worth saving. She’d seen Mu’s home of all things- she knew it’d been Hat Kid that had been snooping around in her cave all of those years ago, doing stars knows what in there- and had decided that there was nothing more to Mu’s living conditions and, if there was, it wasn’t something that she cared about knowing.
She’d turned a blind eye to so many things that were so clearly, obviously, painfully wrong, and for what reason?
Mu had spent so much of her life ruminating over that question, and she’d never once been able to put a clear answer to it. Now, Hat Kid was sitting right in front of her, staring at her with such a sudden intensity that Mu felt like she was moments away from ripping time and space apart with her gaze alone.
She shifted. This was probably the closest thing she was ever going to get to an apology.
Throwing her head back and playing up her hesitation, she groaned, sinking back into the old, worn seats of the booth. She was doing this because she wanted to be a better person. Sort of. Somewhat.
She was doing this to entertain Hat Kid. She straightened up and held out her hand.
“Hi.” She deadpanned. “Nice to meet you. I’m Madelyn. You’re going to call me Mu.”
Hat Kid blinked, and then she smiled, revealing sharp fangs that Mu could’ve sworn hadn’t been as intense when they’d been younger. She shook her hand, shaking it with a cold but firm grip.
“Hi, Mu. I’m Kid.”
“That’s not your real name, is it?”
“No,”
“What is it?”
“Stars, take me out to dinner one day and maybe you’ll find out.” She let go of Mu’s hand, smiling brightly as she pulled away and got up. Mu frowned at her, processing, and then the meaning behind her words clicked and blood flooded her freckled cheeks.
“Wha- you- I- me-” She spluttered, stumbling over her words. “I’m not even-”
“I’m glad I got to see you today,” Kid continued, looking down at her with warm eyes. “It was surprisingly hard to hunt you down. I always thought you’d be causing more trouble for the Mafia than you… are, I guess, right now,”
“I-” Mu put her hands over her cheeks, only slightly aware that it made it even more obvious that she was blushing. She slouched into the booth, staring at Kid with furrowed brows. “What did you want to see me for, anyways? To learn my name?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were still alive.”
“Ugh, yeah, I’m alive. Just about. No thanks to you and your weird, gay flirting.”
“My gay flirting? It was just a joke,” She laughed, and again, Mu’s heart did that uncomfortable weird twisting-at-an-angle thing that she despised. “Thank you for the coffee. It was really good,”
Mu lowered her hands. “The coffee was free,”
“This is a tip,”
“Oh. Okay. That’s…” She stared at the pons. She wasn’t exactly sure how much it was- just about under a hundred, maybe-, and for a moment, she almost considered turning it down… but she needed those pons. She wanted better for herself. “Was that all?”
“Um…” Kid pursed her lips. “It doesn’t have to be. I’m going to be here for the rest of the week. We could hang out more if you want,”
“There’s not a lot to do in this weather,”
“Well, I’ve got a spaceship and the whole planet to explore, so…”
Mu shifted back into an upright position. She stared at Kid, drumming her hands on the table, and then she slid out of the booth and adjusted her shirt. “Fine. Okay. Meet me here. Tomorrow.”
“Okay, when?”
“At six. It’s just me working tomorrow and that’s when I close. You can help me clean up.”
“That’s really early to close a restaurant,”
“Well, you know… the guy that runs this place is old and nobody really comes here,”
Kid tilted her head, smiling. “Too busy getting food poisoning at the Mafia HQ?”
Mu snorted. “Yeah. Thankfully,”
“Then the rebellion still lives on,” She smiled. “Okay, well… bye. I’ll see you tomorrow. Promise,”
“Okay. See you then.” Mu shoved her hands into her pockets. Kid waved as she left, pausing only to pull out her umbrella before walking out into the rain. Mu waved only when her back was turned, and Kid didn’t turn back once.
That awful fluttering in her stomach- or was it her chest?- didn’t feel as awful as it had before.
That evening, after closing, Mu made a brief detour on her way from home. The storm had only gotten worse after Kid had left, flashing zigzags of light cutting across the grey horizon as the rain poured, lashing at the earth. The rain jacket she wore now was old and worn and her hood did nothing in maintaining her body head or protecting her from the awful weather, and she yearned for her mostly-dry cave and the fire that would keep her warm throughout the evening, but this was an important stop that she had to make.
Hoisting herself up onto a rotting, wooden beam that had once been the skeletal structure of the old, dilapidated building that had once been her childhood home. Mu felt across the walls in the darkness until her fingers brushed against an old grey brick that shifted slightly to her touch, wiggling it around until she could just barely slip her fingers behind it and another brick, and then pulled it out.
This building was entirely unsafe to use as shelter now- not that it would’ve been a good one anyways, the roof caved in and the floors underneath her feet unstable and caked in bird waste-, but it was the perfect place to hide things.
Behind this brick was the small box that she kept all of her savings in. She pulled it out with a sigh, barely noting that it seemed heavier than normal as she dug through her pockets. With one hand, she held the handful of pons that Kid had left for her, and in her free one, she opened the box.
Her pons were untouched, just as she expected them to be, but there was something new in the box that hadn’t been there before. A sign that somebody else had found her belongings.
A single, glittering timepiece, shining radiantly in the night.