Chapter Text
The park is cold, his hands feel even colder, and the sky is as blue and bright as a piece of rusty steel rebar. Ze wouldn’t be out here at all, actively accelerating the frostbite taking over all four of his limbs, but Moe insisted that he couldn’t only go outside for his job, or how else was he gonna make friends that weren’t her?
So here he is. Freezing his fingers off at 11 AM on a nice, mildly blizzard-y Tuesday. Ze hates it here.
“Hi!” a voice says cheerily.
He looks down, slowly, to see a tiny elementary schooler waving up at him. That’s new.
“...Hello?” he replies. Pointing to himself, he asks, “Were you talking to me?”
As if there’s anyone else sitting around at this park at 1 PM on a weekday, in the middle of January. Ze looks around, but the kid doesn’t seem to have a guardian— it’s just him, standing alone, tiny boots planted firmly in the ankle-high snow.
“Yeah! My name’s Micha!” The kid says. “Hey, mister, can you help me with this Nerf gun, please?”
He brandishes the aforementioned toy gun up to Ze’s face.
Because Ze is not very good at thinking, he takes it gingerly. He turns it over a few times, trying to inspect it, not entirely sure if he’s just doing this to satisfy the kid, or if he’s genuinely trying to apply his knowledge on actual military-grade firearms on a plastic toy.
“Uh,” he starts, unsure. “What’s wrong with it?”
Micha frowns. “It won’t shoot properly.”
When he looks closer, he can see there’s a piece of bark jammed in the opening. After a few failed attempts, Ze manages to pick it out carefully. He tests the gun against the hard ground, and a small red foam bullet bounces off the dirt. The kid cheers again.
“Here you go,” he says, handing it back. “Have fun.”
“Thanks, mister!”
After Micha scrambles away, Ze returns to his moping. The wooden bench is stiff and hard, and he balances half of his sandwich on his lap, chewing on the tasteless other half.
There’s really no saving this meal. Not even the fact that he works at a diner— he’s in customer service, not the kitchen, after all. Thank god for the customers. No matter how much culinary knowledge Dice tries to impart upon him through osmosis, Ze is cursed to a lifetime of dry chicken and over-salted ham and plastic bread. The taste is fractionally better than rations, at least.
After this, he’ll go to the store, maybe. Pick up frozen pizza for Moe and him after she’s back from school. They can keep watching her show while they eat. It’ll be great.
“Hello?” The same voice pipes up again.
Ze blinks.
“Hello, hello?” Micha asks. He’s back, for whatever reason.
“Where are your parents, kid?” Ze asks.
Micha’s face drops a bit at that, and Ze winces. As if he himself isn’t deeply familiar with the concept of terrible parents. Another look around, and the kid is still unaccompanied, so of course— it was a stupid question to ask.
“I already told you, my name is Micha, not kid,” he says in lieu of a reply. “What about you?”
“I’m Ze,” Ze says. “What’s up?”
“Do you know a lot about guns?” Micha asks hopefully, clutching his plastic toy to his chest.
Does he know a lot about guns, dear god. Ze is not about to crash out to this kid for a perfectly innocuous question.
He inhales. “Yeah, a little.”
“Can you help me shoot this, then?”
Ze hesitates. His sandwich is still unfinished, not that he really wants it. But, also, he’s fairly sure he’s probably the worst adult role model for some random kid to interact with.
“Please?” Micha pleads, when Ze doesn’t respond. “Pleeeeease?”
“I need to—” he fumbles for an excuse, only to come out empty. “Uh, I don’t—”
“Just aiming!” Micha insists. “I keep missing the tree when I try to shoot it. Please? It won’t take that long, I promise!”
Ze sighs.
“Can you help me?” Micha asks hopefully.
“Yeah, okay,” he decides.
“Yes! Yes, yes okay, follow me, Mister Ze.”
And he marches away. Ze looks down at his sad sandwich, then up to the kid.
“…Please don’t call me that,” he replies, following behind him. “I’m not old enough.”
Micha peeks back at him. “Well, you look like my brother’s age, and he’s old, so you should be, too.”
“I guess I can’t argue with that. Hey, how come you’re trying to shoot trees, though? There’s a lot of better things to do in the middle of the freezing winter… sitting at home, with a nice heater, y’know?”
“I wanna learn so I can play with the guys at school!” Micha tells him.
They stop at a larger tree trunk on the edge of the park.
“This is what kids are doing now? Shooting each other?” Ze can’t help but ask.
Micha squints at him. “You sound old, too.”
“I am not. Anyway, you said you wanted help with your aim?”
“Yeah! I don’t know how to hit the spot every time, ‘cause I’m keeping my gun in the same spot but the bullet keeps going other ways.”
Ze crouches down to Micha’s height. “Try to shoot now, and I’ll tell you how you can fix it.”
Something about having years of military experience accumulated to this very moment, to helping a ten year old shoot a tree trunk, feels ironic. Yet it’s not necessarily something Ze hates. He’d much prefer this than being stuck in a tent for months on end again.
It also helps that Ze’s equally as terrible with the gun. The issue isn’t either of their aims, but the fact that the bullets are made of light foam, and are thus easily blown away by the unforgiving winter wind.
“But, but, it’s this windy every day,” Micha pouts.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Ze says, praying desperately that this kid won’t start crying.
“So how am I gonna play?” He whines. And, dear god, he’s getting there.
This can’t be. No way in Ze’s first month of moving in with Moe after being discharged is he going to make a little kid cry. He hands Micha back his gun, to which the kid’s bottom lip begins to tremble harder.
“Hey, you can play indoors, right?” He asks desperately.
“But— all my friends hang out outside. And I can never ever go out, my brother won’t let me.” Micha’s voice is getting wobblier by the second. Ze has never felt this scared in his life.
He pats himself down for something to calm the kid down with—maybe five bucks will do the job—but all he comes up with is one of those shitty generic brand mints from the diner. It’ll have to do.
Ze reaches out for Micha’s hand and places the mint in his open palm. Hopefully it isn’t expired.
Micha looks up at him, confused.
“Why?” he asks.
“You— uh, kids like candy, right? Please don’t cry?” Ze says, and he really didn’t mean to phrase it as a question.
Micha looks down at the small cube wrapped in white paper, then back up at Ze.
“This is candy?” He asks, doubtfully.
“Ye—”
“What the fuck,” a voice interrupts him.
Both of them—Ze, still crouched down in the snow, Micha staring at the thing in his palm like it’s a new species of insect—turn to the new person.
“Regect!” Micha cries. “You’re back! Look, I made a new friend, his name is Ze!”
All of a sudden, he’s back to full cheerful mode, as if the previous brush with a full on tantrum never happened at all. Ze will never understand how kids do that.
He trots over to the stranger in little hops. It’s clearly someone he knows— his teacher, perhaps? Actually, now that he thinks about it, today is a Tuesday, so why was Micha in the park instead of school to begin with? It’s not holiday season yet, or the place wouldn’t be half as deserted as it currently is.
Ze squints up towards the stranger. He’s tall. Though most of his face and body is covered for the weather, from what Ze can see, he’s scarred all over, wearing a full black outfit that does the polar opposite of camouflaging into the snow around them, and there are a few glinting specks of gold dotted around his body. Jewellery, probably. He actually looks pretty cool.
When Micha makes it to him, the person immediately grabs his hand and shifts so that he’s shielding Micha away from Ze.
“What the fuck?” the guy repeats, before Ze can say anything else. For the first time, he registers the anger in the stranger’s tone.
Here’s the thing.
Ze knows he isn’t the prettiest flower in the field. He’s springy, built like a wire carved out of an electric fence, with the perpetual, wide-eyed look of an animal hunted. He has the worst case of resting bitch face he’s ever known. His hair has been prematurely white since the day he was born. Worst of all, he’s not even that tall.
So, it doesn’t come as a surprise when the stranger’s gaze immediately shifts to hostile, his shoulders squared. It’s certainly not the first time this has happened. Back when he was in the army, the other guys had accrued upon him months of schoolyard torture, the kind of pathetic bullying Ze hadn’t expected to experience past the fifth grade. The kind he hadn’t expected to see once re-integrated into civil society. Apparently that wasn’t the case.
“What?” Ze shoots back, regardless.
The person’s eye narrows. “What?” he parrots.
“Are you just gonna repeat stuff for this whole fucking conversation, dude?” Ze asks. Because he’s a little pissed off. He’s allowed that, surely.
The stranger bristles. “There is no conversation, what the hell are you doing with my little brother?”
Oh.
So maybe Ze fucked up a little.
So this guy definitely just saw him give Micha the suspicious looking piece of ‘candy’. It’s final, then: Ze has genuinely become the guy in the story that all the parents tell their kids to be cautious of. Maybe when he turns around, his shitbox of a car parked metres away will have been transformed into a nice, sturdy white van.
Why is it biting him in the ass now of all times, the fact that he can’t afford normal candy? He’s never regretted his own poverty this much before. God, he needs that raise.
“Your—” he starts.
The stranger barrels on with all the tact of a lump of coal. “Who even are you, ‘cause I swear to god I have never seen you around this neighbourhood before.”
“Uh—”
“In fact! In fact, Micha, gimme that.”
He takes the candy from Micha’s pocket, and the kid is looking more confused by the second at what he’s hearing. He tilts his tiny head to one side, staring at Ze who, in turn, shakes his own head rapidly.
Stop looking at me, you’re making it worse, he mouths to Micha.
What, Micha mouths back.
“Yeah, what’s in this, huh?” His brother is saying, incensed. “Holy shit, I fucking caught you, I’ll call the police, I will, do you even—”
“Wait,” Ze says, but the guy barrels on.
“—trying to kidnap my brother, what the fuck is wrong with you? I’ll beat the shit out of you, dude, square the fuck—”
“Time out,” he tries again. He’s floundering, he can hear it, but the situation is spiralling out of control so quickly, and the person’s voice is so incredibly loud, and Ze thought he escaped this sort of bullshit when he escaped the army.
“—yeah, you’re too pussy now, huh? Huh? Fuck you! I swear to—”
“Shut up!” Ze screams. Micha’s brother pauses at that, and Ze takes the opportunity to continue, at a slightly more reasonable volume. “I’m not— kidnapping him, what the hell? I swear I wasn’t. Please chill out. I’m not kidnapping your brother. I don’t even have a functioning getaway vehicle, and— wait, no, that’s besides the point. It’s a breath mint.”
“A— a what?”
“Look.” Ze leans forward and snatches the mint back, making a show out of unwrapping it slowly before putting it in his own mouth. “A mint. From Wakafante’s diner down the road. Straight from the bowl on the counter near the register. I swear on it.”
The stranger pauses at that, then squats down to whisper something to Micha. Micha shakes his head at whatever the question was, and his brother looks back at Ze with an unreadable expression, before slowly getting back to his feet.
“So you weren’t trying to kidnap Micha?” he asks.
“No!” Ze yells. “Why the fuck would I do that?”
Micha’s brother shrugs, like it’s obvious. Ze takes back what he said earlier— he doesn’t look cool at all. He looks like a loser, actually. Grade-A asshole material. No actual cool person would wear an all black outfit with gold accents like that. He probably thinks he looks suave and everything.
“Hey, don’t swear around him. He’s only ten.”
“Like you weren’t doing the same thing.”
“Yeah, but—”
Micha tugs on his hand.
“Dude, what?” The brother whispers down to him.
“Be nice,” Micha whispers back. To which, of course, his brother decides to glare even harder at Ze for.
“Yeah, be nice, Micha’s brother,” Ze mocks.
“My name is Regect, asshole. Uh. I didn’t mean that, Micha, I’m sorry.”
“Well, it’s been great meeting you, Regect,” Ze says. He can feel his own hands shaking in anger, twitching for the familiar trigger now more than ever. “How is it that your elementary schooler little brother has better manners than you do? Do you go around cussing out and threatening every person that interacts with him, or am I the first?”
And maybe— Regect is, well, a little justified in trying to look out for his baby brother. But Ze’s lived his whole life being treated like a walking time bomb for how he looks, and he’s sick and tired of this, of this treatment following him like a curse no matter what he tries to fix it.
“That’s not what I meant,” Regect says. For the first time, he looks unsure.
“Really? Really? For your information, Regect, I was actually teaching him how to shoot his toy gun. And I was doing pretty good, too. I’m definitely a better teacher than you could ever be. You're the asshole. Fuck you.”
Regect crosses his arms. “Yeah, yeah, real mature. You look like you’re my age, so why are you acting like you’re Micha’s?”'
How did he even know to say the exact same thing as his brother did, not five minutes ago, only a thousand times more obnoxiously?
“Oohhhh, got me there,” Ze fires back, waving his hands in the air. “You got me. That was so good, dude, I’ll cry myself to sleep tonight thinking about that one.”
He rolls his eye. “Shut up.”
“No, I mean it, I will. Top five worst moments of my life, number one, and it’s this exact moment,” Ze says, before sighing. “Fuck, whatever. I had to leave about now anyway. It was nice meeting you, Micha. That's not a joke this time. Good luck with your friends.”
Micha waves at him as he leaves; Regect pauses, before turning around and walking away.
“What a dick,” Ze mutters under his breath.
“Heard that!” Regect shouts from behind him.
Ze can feel his facial expressions stuck twisted into a scowl for the remainder of the afternoon. The cashier at the grocery store definitely thought he was going to start mugging her when he checked out with his singular frozen pepperoni pizza.