Griffin Tail

Thirteen: They Live Among Us

In this nightmare vision, she watches her best friend in battle. She watches carefully every move he makes and studies how his blade clashes with the enemy's. Behind him, two fallen allies lay. The girl is certain than only one of them is breathing. Her best friend is not an adept swordsman and is being forced back by the enemy which surrounds him. When he disappears from sight, she only assumes the worst has happened.

<~~~>

It was a rather quiet day at The Cup; the odd customer wandered in, bought a coffee and hurriedly left again. Business had been slow since the scares of war that had been going around for the past few weeks, and now that it had been made official, business was even slower.
   This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, Danny figured. With Tris having ran off and Scarlet refusing to get out of bed, the shop's staffing had been halved, so they were lucky, really, that there weren't many customers.
Brian seemed to have something on his mind as he went about his coffee-making duties.
Danny waited until the shop was empty before confronting them.

"Oi, Baker-B." Danny pulled up a chair and sat.

"What makes you think you can use that nickname?" Brian sighed. "What do you want, Daniel?"

"I wanna know what's on your mind."

"And why do you care?"

"Because you're my colleague and my friend."

Brian stood behind the counter, busying himself with cleaning some mugs. "Nothing's on my mind."

"Don't you tattle to me, Brian. C'mon, I know something's up."

Brian said nothing as they continued washing mugs.

Danny sighed and got up to give him a helping hand. Brian didn't object. It only took a few minutes of awkward silence for them to get through the mugs; there really weren't many to clean.

Danny returned to his chair and sat back down at a table. This time, Brian joined him.

"You've met my cousin, Jared. He wants me to join the Hunters." Brian confessed. "He text me earlier before he went out on what he called a 'high importance mission'. He told me that he and a group of other Hunters were going to go around later, recruiting people to join the war efforts, now that it's official."

"And?" Danny raised an eyebrow.

Brian propped their elbows on the table and sighed. "I don't see the point in fighting the Abnormals. They're living peacefully enough even with the Hunters killing them left, right and centre. I say we just let them go about their quiet lives. It's not as though they live among us or anything."

"Yeah," Danny leant back in his seat. "I see what you're saying. But try telling that to the government and the rebel Abnormals. Apparently they're causing a great commotion down in Swifthail and that's what sparked this all off."

"That's what I heard, but how much of that is even true?"

There was a moment of quiet between the two men.

"You think we'll win this war?" Danny asked.

"I don't know," replied Brian. "Hunters are developing a lot of technology to fight against Abnormals, but nobody really knows all that much about them to be able to fight them confidently. Our best bet is to just nuke them all, but that would kill us as well as them."

"Yeah... It'll be an interesting one, won't it?" Danny sighed.

"Indeed."

As silence begun to settle once again, the delicate door bell chimed. In walked Jared Head. Danny noticed a faint limp in the man's stride, and new, dark marks on his white coat. He looked disturbed.