Chapter Text
The Bar with No Name is slammed. That much is obvious as you climb down the stairs entering the joint, eyes adjusting to the dim lighting of a tiny chandelier, a far-off overhead light above the billiards table, and multiple mini-lamps scattered across the no-longer-abandoned subway station. Nearly every plush red chair and stool are taken by some crazily overdressed villain or another, which means there’s a lot you have to dodge just to survive on your way to the bar top.
You duck behind a graffitied pillar just in time to avoid a rogue pool cue aiming for some poor villain’s head from all the way across the subway tracks, the wood shattering and falling to your feet. After that little heart attack, you spy someone lighting another patron’s drink on fire with their hand. This normally isn’t in your wheelhouse but…
“Hey, no powers,” you call out with… pretty weak conviction.
The duo turn their glances to you, unimpressed. You awkwardly rush past them when you feel the heat of fire flaring up again behind you. Oh god why did you do that, you weren’t even on the clock yet and it’s not like you strike an intimidating figure, you are never gonna do that again you swear-
Finally, you’re safe… -ish behind the counter. But there’s no time to register anything else except punching in and throwing yourself into the fray of people crowding as close to the worn bar counter as possible.
The first half of your shift passes in a blur of clinking bottles, pulling specially-marked taps, and forgetting where the hell you put any of your utensils amidst the chaos of villainous patrons demanding drink orders and verbally measuring dick sizes with each other. It’s damn near impossible to keep track of your own thoughts in this much noise.
Okay, focus, you have an entire list of orders to take care of first. A Bière de Garde for Thumper (her giant boxing glove and Napoleonic hat are pretty hard to miss), straight absinthe for Chameleon (he’s tapping his cane, a surefire way to tell he’s annoyed), some top shelf vodka brand for Diamond Head (as long as the bottle’s as sparkly as him, his words not yours), oh and another scotch for-
A knife flies past your face and sinks into the wall centimeters away from a man leaning over the bar top, his hand having just previously been surrounded in sparks violently leaping and jumping towards you. A trail of blood drips down his cheek from being grazed. You whirl your head to look back at your boss, Delilah, where you spy an empty sheath on her apron.
“No POWERS,” she shouts, not even looking at the offender as she pours a steady stream of cosmo into a glass, “You know the drill, get the fuck out of here.”
“Oh come on, it’s my first strike and that dumbass was going way too slow-”
“Going after my employee isn’t one fucking strike,” Delilah spits through her teeth, her knifed braid raised and pointing straight at him between the eyes. ”You’re lucky I’m feeling generous tonight considering the shit you just pulled. Piss off before that generosity runs out.”
His pointed glare in your direction tells you to hurry the fuck up next time before he throws his stool across the floor and takes his leave.
The rush finally died down after that, thank god. Orders were still coming in but they were at a much more manageable pace than the opening hours before. Just as you slide another drink down the counter, you feel a tattooed arm drape around your shoulders.
“You okay?” Delilah asks, peering over the red lens of her glasses. It was hard to notice by most, but you could hear something soften in her tone behind her hardened edges. She has a habit of doing that around you.
“Yeah, yeah just… wow,” you widen your eyes for emphasis, “Never worked a rush that big before. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Practice,” she responds in her own casual way before going back to her station. “You’re not too bad yourself.”
You stare off into space between customers, head resting in your hands. You know why she took you on as her help in the first place, but you can’t help but feel like you’re constantly falling behind trying to even meet her halfway. She’s long since mastered her own flow of orders and drinks, and she’s even had to pick up your slack on worse days. You remember the multiple occasions of getting lost in watching her work.
Delilah looks back to you amidst your silence. She sighs knowingly, placing a hand on your shoulder.
“Get that set of glasses from the back for me. If I know Cap’n Doc Ock, she’ll be coming in any minute wanting her 5 shots of rum.”
"Come on, you know she hates that nickname," you laugh, reminiscing about the drunken tirade she’d gone on the first time you served her about how she demands to be indulged by her full title, Captain Doctor Octopus. Like that was any less hilarious.
Wasn’t hilarious anymore when she used her 4 tentacled snakes-for-hair to start a bar fight. Her blunderbuss skills were just as dangerous drunk as they were sober, meaning lots of stray shots into paraphernalia of failed battles against Spider-Man. Sweeping up the broken glass took forever…
You shake yourself out of your reverie and start towards the back when Delilah stops you in your tracks. The shot glasses turn into replacing a beer keg, which turns into restocking produce which turns into a whole other list and you soon realize that a balancing act isn't going to cut it. Back-and-forth trips, hooray.
It makes the most sense to start with the heaviest item on the list, the beer keg. At least it did before you actually had to heave the damn thing out of the storeroom. Your mind is just absolutely brilliant you swear-
Your screaming muscles are enough to distract you. Right, just focus on getting the keg over to Delilah’s station and sort it out from there. Every step is agonizingly slow as you make your way back to the counter trying your damnedest to cheer yourself on. Just a few more steps, some more deep breaths, c’mon you’re almost there- finally. You drop the keg on the floor, maybe a little too hard but hey the keg’s fine. As you catch your breath, you kneel on the floor and open the cabinet under the bar counter where the empty keg awaits you. Simple enough, just turn off the gas and disconnect the coupler-
A new voice piping up over the noise of the Bar and your own inner monologue makes you turn your head.
"Look, look over here, watch, you're gonna love this-"
This chalk-white man stands out like a sore thumb in the Bar, spindly limbs and bulky torso dwarfed between Grizzly and Jack O'Lantern even with his impressive height. Splotches ebb and bounce along his body as he moves, like splattered ink that never quite meets the paper. You’re mesmerized by them until you nearly knock the empty beer keg over. He doesn’t even notice, his back facing you as he focuses on…
What is he trying to do?
He’s hunched over, straining every muscle in his body. The blots scattered along him flow and converge to his arms, turning them pitch black. They’re released in a burst of energy that throws the man backwards into the counter as a supermassive black hole appears in front of everyone. It’s like staring into the abyss, a completely opaque, oily blackness revealing nothing but inviting you to explore what could be inside. You peek your head over the counter, straining to hear what he’s excitedly explaining to the patrons siding him with lower volume but wilder hand gestures.
“You see, my holes… dimensional juice?... never my strong suit… can cross space and… Oh oh, and-”
Delilah slams something down on the bar top, scaring the shit out of both you and the mystery patron, the black hole dissipating and reforming back to blots on his body. You quickly return your attention to replacing the beer keg as fast as possible while you hear your boss chew the guy out. It’s the regular spiel you always have to give to new customers that break the rules for the first time, no powers allowed, you only get a few warnings, yadda yadda standard stuff you zone out of until-
“C’mon, just a little something with a kick, pretty please?”
… You gotta admire his persistence. Even if this is the last place you wanna push it.
Delilah rubs her face to hide her exasperation. You can almost hear the internal monologue she’s giving herself about this being his first time and not really knowing any better, he didn’t cause any damage to anyone or anything in the Bar, she’s dealt with worse after all.
“Look buddy, I can’t serve you anything. We have rules in this bar for a reason, you break ‘em you pay the price,” Delilah explains, her voice collected if a little bitter.
At least she’s being courteous about it. You’ve given that same talk yourself plenty of times before and it wears a person down.
You watch the paper-white man slump down on his stool, defeated and silent for the first time since he came in. You can’t help but stare at him, wondering what his deal is.
Before you can process these developing feelings, your blood runs cold at the tell-tale hisses and stomping boots echoing through the subway tunnel entrance.
Fuck fuck FUCK you forgot about Cap’n Doc Ock-
You run like hell to the back where those shot glasses are, sifting through other odds and ends until you unearth the particular set. A roaring laugh bursts through the thick walls of the station as you nearly lose your grip on it. You quickly recover from that nasty shock, wondering what the hell’s going on outside. Upon your re-entrance, Grizzly and Jack are clearly coming down from something they think is just hilarious. The man between them is nowhere to be found.
Delilah takes the shot glasses from you and you’re back to carrying out the other errands, but always making sure to slow down a little when you come back to the counter, watching and listening.
“What an idiot. ‘Ooo look at me I can make portals’,” Jack mimics with an exaggerated whine to his voice, “Yeah well I can set him on fire, oooo. Throw some bombs in those portals, see what happens.”
“I can crush his head in my fist, ooo,” Grizzly added with a guffaw and a swig of beer.
“What does he think he’s even doing?”
“Just trying to be one of us, I guess.”
Other villains gather at the bar top to join in on the mockfest, all patting themselves on the back in a circlejerk of how they were all “real villains” compared to anything they could taunt him about. It’s all you hear coming back from your remaining trips to storage. He apparently ran off into the subway tunnels after accidentally falling through one of his own holes, only heightening the superiority the others felt over him.
A pang of… something hits you in your gut at the way you hear people talk about him. Yeah, he broke the rules and tried to get out of it, that’s kind of shitty. But you can’t understand how people dressed up like 8-balls and clams and whatever inanimate objects or animals find someone like him so out-of-place. One man he just spoke to wore a full-body bearskin and the other a flaming pumpkin on his head for crying out loud. There’s a man across the Bar in a full-on rhino costume with graffiti from Spider-Man; no one in here deserves any say on what a “real villain” is.
Besides, you only saw a tiny peek of what he could do and you’re beyond fascinated. He carries a different energy with him than the other patrons you’ve served in the Bar, and surely he’s gotta be new to this whole thing too, right? … Are you overthinking this?
It’s on your last trip with a crate of lemons that your wrestling thoughts reach a boiling point and you decide to hell with it, that guy needs a drink. You don’t know how the hell you’re gonna pull it off but if you don’t, who will?
When you drop off the lemons, you’re surprised by Delilah leaning towards you.
“Go take your break,” she murmurs as she pats your back.
…Well, here goes nothing.
“I will after I finish up this last order,” you say with as casual a smile as you can muster.
You nab a tall glass off the drying rack and throw it down at your station while rushing off to gather everything else. Salt, vodka, juice, sauces, skewer, garnish, and... lemons. Thank god Delilah had you get more then.
You cut a lemon in half and rub it around the rim, dipping it into a fancy spiced salt mix.
Now where was that jigger... Oh right.
You made sure to grab the fancy pepper vodka from one of the upper shelves even though you could hear your wallet cry out in pain. He did say something with a kick, after all.
Okay, mental checklist review. Vodka, 2 ounces, jigger, cocktail shaker. Tomato juice, 3 ounces. Lemon juice, freshly squeezed from the other half of the lemon. You think long and hard before settling on 4 dashes of worcestershire sauce straight into the shaker. As for the tabasco sauce... you lose track after 10 shakes. Spoonfuls of celery salt, black pepper, and cayenne help the bloody mary mix go down and next comes the tricky part.
Well, kind of. You've been practicing this technique in your apartment but you weren't sure if it was up to snuff yet to try here of all places. Eh, this was a low-risk operation so might as well. You secure the strainer over one tin of the shaker and pour it back and forth in clean, steady streams between it and the other tin. Wow, this was usually the part where you'd miss the mark and spill something. Even Delilah threw a curious glance in your direction. You repeat this back-and-forth about 5 times before you leave it in one tin and get some ice. One full glass of ice later, you pour in the mix and watch the cubes disappear in red. You slide a stick of celery in and breathe a sigh of relief when nothing overflows. Stick some peppers in there for good measure and…
Okay, now that skewer. Once it’s securely pinched between your fingers you slide on a cherry tomato, cocktail onion, cheese cube, and olive to place across the rim. Maybe you went a little overboard but hey, at least he has something to munch on... If he can even munch on anything. Fuck it, you already skewered everything, no going back now.
With the perfect night-time cocktail in hand, you sneak your card out of your pocket and ring up the drink like any other order, making sure to hide said drink behind the register and out of Delilah's line of sight. With your card secured back in your pocket, you throw another quick glance in Delilah's direction.
She's engaged in an arm-wrestling match. Perfect.
You move backwards, sliding the drink alongside you. One smooth circling the drink to your back later, you stick to the shadows along the walls as you move towards the platform. How the hell are you gonna get down to the tracks? Simple, just stretch your limbs to their absolute breaking point and trust that gravity simply won’t screw you over. It actually works this time, only a few drops of the bloody mary managing to slide down the glass. You wipe away the drops as you walk down the subway tunnel, only realizing in the near-darkness that you are completely lost on where to even start with finding this guy.
… All while balancing a full glass with a shitload of garnishes. Great thinking on your part.