Chapter Text
...All the arrows that you've stolen Split in half, now bum and broken
Like your heart that was so eager to be hid You can't keep them all caged
They will fight and run away...Forest walls and starry ceilings
Barren curtains that you're weaving Like the stories that you keep inside your head
She can't keep them all safe They will die and be afraid...
- Harpy Hare, Yaelokre -
Enjin leaned back against the rear of the jeep with one boot heel hooked on the bumper, his shoulder pressed into the cooling metal as though anchoring himself there might keep the ball of anxiety welling up in his chest at bay. The air around them was already thick with grit. Dust skittered across the dirt road in nervous spirals, dragged forward by a storm that hadn’t fully arrived yet but was close enough to make its intentions clear.
He raised the cigarette to his mouth and flicked the lighter. The flame caught for only a moment until the wind snapped it dead.
“Tch.” He exhaled through his nose and let his gaze settle across the street.
The shop was small. Unassuming. A third tattoo parlor, third repair joint, third whatever it needed to be at any given moment. Its windows were fogged and smudged with age, the glass bearing the faint ghosts of old fingerprints and dust that never quite washed away. A hand-painted sign hung above the door, swaying slightly as the wind toyed with it.
Tattoo and/or Repair it read, the lettering uneven but deliberate. Beneath it were stamped and carved symbols, marks of the Cleaners and a handful of other organizations, each in varying stages of wear. A quiet and clever way to state; ‘if you fuck with us, these are who we can send after you’.
The building’s paint had seen better days. It blistered and peeled in thick curls, chipped in a way that reminded Enjin unpleasantly of cold, moldy cream cheese smeared over an equally cold bagel.
He flicked the lighter again, cupping his palm tight around the wisping flame. Dust bit at his knuckles, stinging like a reprimand. Somewhere above them, the sky had taken on that specific sickly yellow-brown hue that meant the storm was coming in faster than forecasted.
A few feet away, Rudo stood with his boots planted uncertainly, posture stiff in the way people got when adrenaline finally began to drain out of them. His gloved hands were tucked close to his chest, cradling something fragile with an almost reverent care.
A plant.
A tiny succulent, stubbornly alive, nestled in a previously cracked in half tea cup. It had been carefully glued back together, the seam still visible despite the effort taken to mend it. Twine had been wrapped around a few times for good measure.
He watched Enjin struggle with the lighter for another moment before finally speaking.
“So,” Rudo squinted across the street, “If she works for the Cleaners… why’s the shop in town and not part of HQ?”
Enjin finally got the cigarette lit and took a drag. The smoke barely made it past his lips before the wind stole it away.
“She doesn’t work for us,” he said, tone easy, almost lazy, even as his eyes never quite left the door.
“But Bro Santa said–”
“Yeah,” Enjin cut in, tapping the cigarette against the jeep. “He says a lot.”
The wind gusted harder, rattling the shop’s shutters as sand scraped along Enjin’s cheek. It caught in his hair, settled into the seams of his clothes. He barely noticed.
“Ves- Vesper helps,” he corrected himself, unsure if the shortening of her name was a familiarity gifted to him anymore, “Does repairs. Touch-ups. Teaches. It’s different.”
Rudo frowned, lifting the succulent slightly, as if it might help make his point. “Okay, but that still doesn’t explain the plant.”
“This,” he gestured vaguely between Rudo’s gloves, the plant, and the shop beyond, “is part of the deal.”
Rudo blinked. “What deal?”
“If the things we love could be fixed with no effort and no cost, we might stop paying attention. Only notice something needs fixing once it’s already past the point of saving.”
Rudo looked down at his hand. The tear along the seam was so small it would’ve been easy to ignore. Easy to pretend it was nothing.
“Vesper doesn’t just stitch things up,” Enjin went on. “She makes ‘em stronger. Reflects what you put into them. Care. Time. Attachment. Love.” The last word slipped out before he could stop it, hanging between them like smoke that refused to dissipate. “Besides,” he added quickly, voice lighter than it had any right to be, “it’s always nice to bring someone a gift.”
Rudo’s fingers tightened around the cup turned planter and adjusted the twine. Careful not to press too hard against the ceramic.
“Has she fixed Umbreaker before?”
“Yeah.”
The wind howled again, dragging grit along the pavement in long, hissing waves. The shop’s sign creaked more impatiently overhead. The storm wasn’t going to give them much longer.
Rudo glanced at the door once more. Then back at Enjin.
“Then why aren’t we inside?”
Enjin’s jaw tightened.
Because the last time he’d seen her, she hadn’t looked at him. Because every interaction for years had been brisk, professional. Needles and thread, ink and silence. No eye contact. No room for the things that still sat heavy between them. Questions she would keep asking that he’d keep skirting around.
She treated touch-ups to his tattoos like an obligation. Not an act of–
The cigarette went out again.
Enjin laughed under his breath, rough and humorless, and straightened, tucking the cigarette behind his ear. Another gust slammed into them hard enough that Rudo stumbled a step, making the decision to move for them.
“C’mon, kiddo.” Enjin rounded the jeep, grabbed Umbreaker from the backseat, and started across the street before he could continue to overthink the interaction he was about to have. “Storm’s not gonna wait for me to have a smoke break.”
When he reached it, the bell above the door gave a dull, uneven jingle. The sound was swallowed almost immediately by the low, constant hum inside.
Pleasant warmth and contrast to the outside is cold hit first – mixed with ink, old fabric, metal shavings, the faint sweetness of incense burned down to ash. Cleaning solution lingered underneath it all, the kind that had already done its job but refused to leave.
The space looked like someone had taken a perfectly respectable tattoo parlor and a scavenger’s hoard and shaken them hard before letting everything fall where it pleased. Fixed clocks hung on nearly every wall, none of them agreeing on the time. One ticked backward; another had a cracked face and bent hands but stubbornly kept going. Between them were framed flashes of tattoo designs – flowers, calligraphy, sigils, abstract shapes that almost looked like faces if one squint it the right way.
Shelves bowed under the weight of spools of thread in every imaginable color, jars of ink labeled in careful handwriting, old bolts and screws sorted into repurposed glass bottles, broken treasures waiting patiently for the right hands.
A lucky cat sat on the reception counter, porcelain chipped, one ear repaired with gold-veined glue. Its paw moved in a slow, hypnotic arc, clicking softly at the end of each cycle.
It felt lived in.
Loved.
Rudo hesitated just inside the doorway, eyes wide as he took it all in, the succulent clutched a little tighter in his hands. There was a childlike wonder in his very much child eyes that hinted that, if revenge weren’t on the docket, he could find a rhythm in a place like this.
Off in the back, a Frankensteined tattoo chair had been dragged away from its station and repurposed into a different sort of seating. Two teens crowded onto it, leaning close over a mahjong table balanced precariously on their knees.
Clive took up most of the space by sheer presence alone – broad-shouldered, solid in a way that spoke of strength forged by necessity rather than training. They couldn’t have been much older than Zanka. Their posture was relaxed, almost lazy, but Enjin knew better than to mistake that for ease. Their forearms rested on the table, palms angled as they shuffled tiles with careful precision.
Where fingers should have been, there were reinforced mechanical replacements that resembled hinges mixed with something that should have been within a typewriter. They ended on the fleshy nerves of their palm. Instead of meeting raw mangled scars, they melded into tattoos.
Heavy black linework framed the blunt ends of flesh and metal alike, bands and angular shapes that followed the structure of Clive’s hands rather than hiding them. The ink accentuated what remained, giving definition where the eye might otherwise stumble. It made the absence feel intentional. Purposeful. Less like something taken, more like something claimed.
Enjin knew how recent it all was. Too recent.
Crushed in machinery while working under a mechanic who’d treated them like another interchangeable part of a modded car. No safety cutoffs. No apologies. Just blood, a screaming child, and a door shut behind them once they were no longer useful.
Across from Clive sat Umi, smaller, all sharp lines and narrow shoulders from a childhood of malnourishment that it ended only a handful of years ago, his legs tucked awkwardly beneath him like he was never quite sure where they belonged. He leaned forward while studding the tiles; tongue caught between his teeth in concentration.
One side of his face was open, unguarded. The other, which was closer to the door that would have noted who entered, had no eye to do so.
No glass replacement. No patch. Just a smooth hollow where it should have been, ringed with soundwave like circles of black ink. The tattoos radiated outward from the socket like a target, each ring precise, deliberate – turning absence into focus. Drawing the gaze exactly where most people would instinctively avoid looking, then holding it there long enough for the discomfort to fade.
Enjin had been told the story once, quietly. Infection as an infant. Fever that should have killed him outright. Doctors who didn’t think he’d last the night, let alone keep anything of himself intact. The fact that Umi had survived at all was a miracle; the fact that he’d grown into himself afterward was something else entirely. There was no wonder in Enjin’s mind why Vesper was so productive of the boy.
“You’re doing it again,” Clive muttered, nudging a tile into place with the padded edge of a mechanical finger. “You already got a good hand, you don’t gotta cheat.”
The muscles required to squint were still in place and when Umi did so the linework around the socket rippled subtly, the ink responding to muscle and motion. “You’re bein’ paranoid.”
“Nah,” Clive replied. “I’m being correct.”
“And,” Umi shot back, “You’re bein’ a sore loser.”
From the opposite corner of the shop came a laugh - warm, unguarded, threaded with a half-hearted plea for them to behave with a reminder that they now have a customer.
Enjin turned toward the voice, already knowing, and still his breath caught.
She stood near one of the worktables, weight settled comfortably on one hip, sleeves of an oversized sweater pushed back just enough to keep them out of her hand’s way. The thin knit hung off her frame, faded burgundy and softened by years of wear, stretched comfortably at the shoulders and worn thin at the elbows. It was his. Or it had been, once – slung around her on a night when the cold had crept in faster than they’d expected but they were too stubborn to leave.
The fabric slipped low on one shoulder as her laughter faded, revealing the clean line of her collarbone and the beginning of the tattoos spilling down her arm. Black ink morning glories bloomed there in careful layers, petals overlapping with intention rather than excess. Every line was placed with the same certainty she brought to everything she touched. Nothing rushed. Nothing wasted. The flowers moved when she did, alive in a way that made Enjin think – irrationally, stupidly – that if she stood still long enough, they might finish growing.
She wasn’t as thin anymore. Not the sharp, hollowed thing she’d been when they were kids – when hunger had been constant and bodies had been reduced to something functional rather than cared for. There was strength to her now.
He remembered her as she’d been then, all angles and stubborn defiance, eyes too big in a too-small face. Remembered nights spent counting breaths, days spent fighting for scraps – food, space, safety – while others looked through both of them like they were already ghosts. She’d learned early how to take up exactly as much room as she needed and no more. That had long since stopped being the case.
Vesper brushed a loose strand of dark hair back behind her ear without thinking, the motion practiced and faintly impatient. For a second, she existed entirely in that moment. Laughing. At ease. Untouched by the weight of things unsaid and unremembered.
Then her gaze lifted.
The laughlines faded as her amber eyes found Enjin’s face and slid past it with practiced precision, landing instead on Rudo. A thinner smile replaced it. Polite. Professional. Carefully contained.
“Ah,” she said evenly, as if his presence didn’t rearrange the room around her. “You must be the gloves. Rudo right?”
Rudo startled. “Um – yeah. I mean. Hi, yes that’s me.”
Enjin realized, distantly, that he’d been holding his breath.
“Let me see this little guy.”
Vesper stepped forward before Rudo could second-guess himself, weaving through the clutter with the ease of someone who knew exactly where every loose cord and half-fixed object lived.
Rudo placed the succulent into her palm like it might bruise if mishandled. And for the briefest moment, Enjin saw something in her falter.
By holding her hand out the knit of the sweater was very much front and center. Her thumb brushed the rim of the tea cup, then lingered, as if grounding herself through the texture of glue and twine and soil. Vesper’s jaw tightened just enough for Enjin to know that ‘shit shit shit shit shit’ was being played on loop in the back of her head.
The sweater sat heavy on her shoulders all of a sudden, no longer just warmth or habit but evidence. A relic she’d never meant to explain. The confidence she’d been moving with – sure-footed, unthinking – dimmed for half a heartbeat, replaced by something closer to self-consciousness. She adjusted her grip on the plant, careful, overly so, grounding herself in the small, solid weight of it. Then she straightened, composure sliding back into place.
“Nice mend,” she said, focus still on the plant. “String was smart. Gives the glue time to actually do its job.”
“I fixed it myself,” Rudo blurted.
“I thought so.” She glanced up then, meeting his eyes. Her tone gentled without losing its steadiness. “You did good.”
Rudo straightened with the praise, some of the tension leaving him.
Vesper moved deeper into the shop, succulent held close, already speaking over her shoulder as if this were any other afternoon. As if Enjin hadn’t just noted she kept and continued to wear a piece of his clothing.
“Storm’s going to lock us in for a bit,” she continued. “You can set the gloves on the workbench when you’re ready. No rush.” Her voice threaded through the shop like her tone was the metronome the clocks were supposed to be ticking by.
“Y’hear that?” Enjin murmured to Rudo. “Hospitality.”
Rudo shot up a look sharp enough to make it clear he didn’t miss that Vesper gave him the same attention as one would a door frame, then he turned follow her, careful as he navigated the maze that she trailed through with ease.
Enjin lingered near said doorframe.
Now with his entry into the space announced, the disapproval on Clive’s face had time to harden into something more personal: resentment. Their jaw was set, shoulders rigid, posture tight despite the casual slouch they hadn’t moved from.
“You look better than last time.” They said flatly.
Enjin blinked, then let out a short huff, “Guess I’ve been eating my vegetables.”
“Mm.” Clive’s gaze flicked – not accidentally – to the sweatshirt on Vesper’s shoulders then back to him. Sharper now. “You break somethin’ again?”
“Not yet.”
Umi snorted as he gathered the mahjong tiles back into their pouch, the sound quick but not unkind. “Give ‘em a few minutes, he just walked in.”
There was a beat of silence that stretched after. The storm rattled the windows, punctuating the space like a warning.
Clive leaned back slightly, arms folding across their chest. “You make her cry last time or was that just coincidentally timed with your exit?”
Enjin didn’t answer right away.
Umi’s expression softened just a little, his gaze flicking between them. “Clive–”
“Nuh-uh,” They cut in, eyes never leaving Enjin. “I wanna hear the answer.”
Enjin swallowed. The words sat heavy in his throat, tangled with too many memories and not enough forgiveness. “I didn’t mean to,” he said finally. It wasn’t a defense. Just a truth. “But I did.”
That earned him a slow nod. “Don’t do it again.” Clive said. Simple. Unyielding.
Umi glanced toward Vesper’s back, where she stood adjusting a lamp over the workbench, her focus on explaining something to Rudo. “Storm’ll be bad tonight,” he added, gentler. “No one’s goin’ anywhere so why don’t we all just play nice.”
Enjin followed his gaze.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Okay.”