aftermath

Today is the perfect day for sea-salt soft serves and dollar-store lollipops. Lili gets both because she’s just been paid. Payday money was invented to be spent on minor frivolities and not saved for future investments. Besides, if she fucks up, she’s still got the veteran benefit in her savings to look forward to.

She sticks her lollipop into her soft serve. She’s not just out for funny snacks. She has to get repairs done on her gear—it’s just her blaster, and she doesn’t quite prefer it over her blade, but broken gear is broken gear. And she absolutely dislikes getting caught with her pants down in an encounter.  

Some pedestrians give her weird looks as she pivots on her heel and into the garage of a random repair shop. This one looks classy, kind of like a cross between a grungy workshop and a modern-day science lab. The storefront looks presentable, and there’s a loveseat sitting behind a coffee table in the foyer.

As she walks up to the counter, she catches the flutter of her melee specialist cape in a side mirror. It’s not like she has to wear it anymore, but she’s grown fond enough of the stifling material that she’s just taken to wearing it wherever she goes, even on Therius. Weird how that works, but at least no one bothers her about it.

The foyer is empty. Lili takes this chance to slam her blaster onto the counter and go, “You guys do mods too, right?”

She glances into the room at the back. There’s a woman—a Kattish woman in a spaghetti-strap tank top—and it looks like she’s talking to someone sitting down. Then she saunters out of the doorway and behind the counter.

The Kattish woman is pointing to the sides of her head. Which is weird because the Kattish have their ears on the tops of their heads. She looks… not mean, but not accommodating. Like she doesn’t have the time nor the patience for Lili. It’s probably her melee specialist cape.

The bass pounds somewhere deep inside her eardrums. Lili shakes her head. “I can read your lips just fine.” Asshole, she thinks about adding.

“We don’t do mods.” She folds her arms. “We’re not that kind of—”

Lili doesn’t care about what she has to say next. The cool thing about lip-reading is that she can tune out whenever she wants, so she slides her blaster over to the woman and looks elsewhere. The pipes look kind of cool and industrial.

The woman grits her teeth when she realises she’s not listening anymore. Lili looks back at her. “I think the battery chamber’s busted. It won’t be that long, right?” Her ice cream is starting to drip down her cone. She gives the edge a lick right in front of the lady.

“Sure. Shouldn’t be more than an hour.” Then she turns and says something—presumably the name of the guy inside the room—before taking the blaster and leaving Lili to stand by herself. They’re definitely having a conversation back there. It’s definitely about her.

She stuffs the rest of the ice cream into her mouth and looks into the mirror. There’s a ring of blue cream around her mouth, so she takes the napkin in her left pocket and wipes her mouth aggressively before shoving the lollipop into her mouth.

She turns back to the counter. And the lollipop nearly falls right back out of her mouth.

The woman’s brought out the man from the room, who is also Kattish. She’s hanging from his shoulders, and from the look of them, she knows that they’re not soft, not exactly, but there's a masculine hardness in there that’ll yield to her touch at a moment’s notice. His eyes are a beautiful copper. He’s dressed smartly.

Lili doesn’t know what to do. She turns to the side, takes out her lollipop, and slaps on her face mask in one easy action. It’ll only cover the bottom half of her face, but it’s obscured her face and saved her ass from security cameras multiple times before.

She tries her best to look as intimidating as her cape makes her out to be: chin tilted up, squared shoulders, and her arm by her side. Avett is telling her to take off her headphones. It doesn’t seem like he recognises her… not yet, anyway. She wonders if he’ll recognise her voice. He’s heard it in all sorts of crazy pitches before.

Feigning annoyance, she rolls her eyes and slips her headphones down to her neck. “Sup,” she says. The face mask muffles her voice.

“Good.” He takes the blaster into his hands. “Now that you can hear me, I can tell you exactly how you’ve busted it. You messed up on the reload, got too rough with it, and snapped the spring mechanism. Now the release is stuck.”

Oh, how she’s missed this man. Her face heats. Actually reddens. Avett grins when he sees her discomfort. “Why you were being rough with the battery chamber is anyone’s guess. Maybe you missed one too many shots in the middle of a shootout. In your panic, you ran out of charge mid-fight and had to reload. That’s when it broke.”

Fuck, she has to stay mad. But she can’t, not in front of Avett, not in front of his girlfriend, and certainly not because of some petty disagreement. “Can you fix it?”

He slides that damnable gaze over to his girlfriend. Lili’s eyes follow. At her hip, underneath her ass-length ponytail, is the faintest glint of silver. Then he looks back at Lili. His eyebrows are raised in mockery.

Thinking on her feet, she says, “You can’t just threaten me in broad daylight. Whatever happened to 'the customer is always right?'” If she was a dancer, she’d be a shit dancer with those two left feet of hers.

“Maybe you didn’t get the memo.” Avett leans down onto the counter. “We don’t serve killers. Get out.”

“I see.”

Lili slides the blaster back over. The battery gauge is a slight blue. One shot left, and they know it.

The woman narrows her eyes. She’s expecting her to fire back. It’s more than a common occurrence here, she realises.

With her finger hooked around the trigger, Lili twirls the blaster around and brings it up to Avett’s heart. The woman’s draw is quicker. Her arms are a blur in the air as she unhilts her own weapon and fires at Lili’s dominant arm. The blast shreds a tiny hole through her cape.

That’s about it, really.

And with that, Lili puts her blaster back into her pocket. Avett looks on at her, a thousand emotions whirling through his features with every passing second. The woman still has her blaster trained onto Lili, but she knows she won’t win. Her barrel quivers in the air. Their threat might've worked on the average street thug, but Lili isn't really average. Or a street thug.

The radio is playing a weird indie song from seven years ago. Lili knows all the lyrics.

"I think I've overstayed my welcome," she jokes. No one laughs. "Guess I'll just ask the next store down."

She turns to leave. As she's about to pass under the garage door, she stops to put on her headphones and to say, with conviction: "Goodbye, Avett."

Lili is gone before Avett can stammer out his answer. Good for him. She's no good for a good man like him.

No good at all.