Work Text:
Rain hissed softly against the neon outside.
Pan-Pacific never truly slept anymore. Too much construction. Too many transports moving toward the Himalayan works. Too many men suddenly pretending Terra had always belonged to the thing now rising at its centre.
The street outside McEvers smelled of wet concrete, fryer oil, machine coolant, and humanity packed too tightly together.
Inside was warmer, cosier, easier.
Old cedar beams crossed the ceiling overhead, darkened by decades of smoke and hands. The torii between the two rooms stood slightly off-square because the floor had shifted sometime around the Third Uralic War and Liam had never bothered fixing it properly.
Kenji was at the far end of the bar with his back mostly turned, working a cloth along the glass of the Longford jersey case with the focused attention of a man who took the jersey seriously and always had.
The door opened.
The thing that came through it was doing furtive.
Furtive, on a frame that cleared the doorway by not much and filled the width of it considerably, required commitment. It had committed. Shoulders drawn in. Head angled down. Moving in the careful way of something that had learned through extended experience that the space it occupied was often considered other people's space and that advance apology through posture was the most efficient approach.
Two seventy-five, maybe. Built like a structural problem.
Doing furtive like its life depended on it.
Which, Liam noted, watching over the rim of the teapot he was drting, it possibly did.
The giant stopped just inside the door. Scanned the room once with the speed of something that had been scanning rooms for a very long time. Registered the exits. Registered the people. Registered Liam behind the bar with an expression that was not quite relief and not quite resignation but somewhere in that county.
Then, carefully, as though the words required some excavation:
"A drink. Food, maybe?"
A pause.
"I can pay."
Liam set the teapot down.
"Yerra I hope so. Else we'd have to throw you out wouldn't we Kenji."
Kenji turned around.
He was halfway through agreeing before he'd completed the turn, the automatic response of a man whose boss had never once set him up for something that wasn't manageable.
Then he saw what was standing at the door.
Oh.
The cloth stopped moving.
Something moved across Kenji's face that was involuntary and completely honest and lasted approximately one and a half seconds before the family inheritance reasserted itself, smoothed everything back down, and left him standing there with the cloth in his hand and an expression of professional neutrality that his great-great-grandfather would have recognised.
"Kitchen's open," he said.
Then turned back to the jersey case.
Liam had already looked away.
The weapon was under the left arm. Good coat, repaired badly, but the weight of it sat wrong on that side and the way the giant moved his arm when he walked kept a careful inch of clearance. Old habit. Bone deep.
He said nothing about it yet.
The giant crossed to the counter and lowered himself onto a stool with the caution of a man who had broken furniture before and found it embarrassing. The stool held. He looked briefly surprised.
Liam poured a whiskey without asking and set it in front of him.
The giant drank it the way he'd walked through the door. Purposeful. No ceremony. The glass back on the counter before the warmth had properly landed.
Liam poured another.
Kenji arrived from the kitchen end and set a paper tray down beside him. Chips. Fried peppers. Something from downstairs that smelled considerably better than its description would suggest.
The giant looked at it briefly.
Then ate with the focused efficiency of a man for whom food was a system requirement and hunger was a variable to be managed rather than a thing to be enjoyed. Clean. Fast. Methodical.
The second whiskey went the same way as the first.
Liam watched.
Nothing.
No slackening around the eyes. No softening of posture. No warmth moving up through the chest the way it should. The whiskey was going in and being consumed by whatever was already running in there, leaving no trace.
He poured a third.
The giant wrapped both hands around the glass this time. Massive hands, scarred white around the knuckles. One sleeve of the coat had been repaired repeatedly with thick black thread by somebody who understood durability but not tailoring.
He drank the third slowly.
Or slowly for him.
Every few seconds his eyes moved to the windows. Checking reflections. Checking movement. Checking for people who hadn't arrived yet.
Liam watched the fourth whiskey land the same way the first three had.
Nothing.
If anything it merely revealed the exhaustion underneath. Like clearing brush to find the same flat ground.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
He reached under the bar.
The tea arrived in a thick ceramic mug, slid across the counter without announcement.
The giant looked at it.
"Didn't order that."
"Whiskey's clearly not doing the job."
For a moment the man's face changed.
Not emotionally exactly.
More like something old and tired briefly stopped pretending otherwise.
"Doesn't usually," he said.
Flat. Matter-of-fact. A statement built from long experience.
He picked up the mug.
Paused.
Drank.
Then went very still.
Not relaxed. Never that. But lower somehow. Like machinery running below operational temperature for the first time in years.
Outside, somebody shouted down the street. A bottle broke. The usual underhive arithmetic of frustration and alcohol.
The giant's head turned automatically toward the sound.
Then stopped halfway.
He looked slowly around the room instead.
The old beams. The low music near the back. Steam rolling from the kitchen hatch. Rain against the windows. People talking quietly without fear.
"There's something about this place," he said eventually.
Liam kept his expression neutral.
"Ah sure we've good ventilation."
The giant ignored that completely.
"Noise is quieter here."
Liam wiped the counter slowly.
Outside another burst of shouting rolled down the street.
This time the giant barely reacted at all.
Liam nodded toward the front windows.
"Tell ya what lad."
The giant looked over.
"Why don't ye do the door for me this evening."
A pause.
"The door."
"Aye. Congratulations. You're on the job now fella."
That almost caused an expression.
"That's the interview."
"Mostly. If ye don't kill anyone we'll discuss longer-term employment after closing. If ye do kill someone we'll probably have to revisit matters administratively."
The giant studied him carefully.
Trying to locate the angle.
There had to be one.
Nobody looked at things like him and saw employment.
"What are the rules."
"No weapons in the pub." Liam's eyes moved briefly, precisely, to the left side of the coat and back. "Pulse pistols included. No skinning anyone. No cults. Throw trouble outside, not through furniture. Kenji tells ye something, assume he's right. Saves time."
A pause.
"Oh and Kenji. Would you ever go down and find that power maul. The good one."
From somewhere behind the jersey case, without looking up:
"Already on it boss."
The giant looked at Liam.
Liam looked back pleasantly.
The giant nodded once. He reached carefully into the coat, produced the pistol with two fingers, and set it on the counter without drama.
Liam put it under the bar.
The giant stood.
"Aoto"
"Liam McEver"
Even trying not to loom he loomed.
The old floorboards creaked under the shift in weight.
Then he stopped beside the door without turning around.
"What if they come looking for me?"
Rain against the windows. Oil crackling in the kitchen. Kenji's footsteps already on the cellar stairs.
Liam wiped the counter once more.
"Everyone comes here eventually. Question is what they do here, isn't it. They want to come back, the rules apply."
A beat.
"That includes you."
The giant stood perfectly still.
A long moment passed.
Then:
"...Right."
And took up position beside the door like he'd been standing there for centuries already.