the quiet before you /mars

It’s the same thing again and again.

He wakes in the evening around five or six, always just in time to catch the sunset. The sand is warm beneath his bare feet, baked by the sun and he scratches the back of his leg with his foot while the last golden rays from the day lay low over the water.

Mars sits eventually and shoves the heel of his thermos full of coffee into the sand, waiting out the steam until it’s cool enough to drink. He works through a tomato and egg sandwich and watches as the horizon blurs into the sea, the sky darkening by the second.

When the moon starts to rise, he goes home, just up the beach to his little house along the spit and does chores to keep him busy before his shift.

Work starts at Nine but he likes to be there a little early to get the bar just the way he likes it before then. Alex stacks her cups weird and when Vin helps out, she hides sugar packets all over for Mars to find. It’s annoying, but to be fair, the day shift is pretty boring.

The Styx, unassuming and dingy from the outside in the day, comes alive at night.

If he’s ready early, he just starts mixing drinks for whoever’s on before him. It often takes him a couple drinks to find his rhythm, he flips a bottle of tequila once in his hand and forgets to catch it. Tequila goes everywhere and Mars promises to pay for it, but when Bastille hears about it he only shakes his head and smiles.

Alex and him spend the next month or so pulling glass shrapnel out of their shoes but that’s nothing new.

Mars spends his shift laughing and cleaning and mixing drinks and at once point he gets up on the piano but that’s a one-off. He stops having to think when he mixes drinks, his hands know them better than he does and now while he works, he makes grocery lists in his head, or replays the sunset.

There isn’t much to think about.

Sometimes, when he doesn’t focus and catch himself, pieces of memories play and for awhile, Mars goes along with them. Long dark hair pulled over a bare shoulder in a braid, his hand, supporting, holding another hand, then a jaw, kissing his cheek.

Then water.

There’s always water.

"Mars, three shots of Clouded Fate at table three.”

And the memory slides away again. He mixes liquors, drops maraschino cherries into drinks and slides slices of cucumbers onto toothpicks. Then he puts the tray back in the fridge for when they need them. Orwen throws up at the end of the bar and Mars is always the one who has to clean those messes up but first he gets Orwen out and on his way. He tosses wood chips onto the spot and stands a wet floor sign up but someone will step in it anyway, they always do.

The last hour of his shift is spent sobering patrons up and getting them out so he can mop but he often lets some patrons stay awhile longer than they should. It's easier than finding them passed out outside on his way home. He makes a game of mopping around tables and people and lets Old Heron tell him about the old days in the port for the hundredth time.

Eventually, everyone goes home, including Mars. He drops the night's earnings in the slot that goes to Vin's office and makes sure all the lights are out and when he locks the front doors, he gives them a careful tug to make sure he did it right.

Then he walks home, up the alley along the canal to the beach. As he goes, the summer sunrise cuts through the buildings in Four and he raises a hand as it hits the side of his face to hide from it, exhausted. The world wakes up slowly in soft greyish-blue tones and Mars sits down on the sand, a take-out box with leftovers from the bar sitting cold and a little limp in his lap.

The waves hit the shore but it's done gently.

His body, sore from a full shift, bends forward and he gazes at the surf, false feelings of familiarity always keeping him there longer than he should be.

Sometimes he feels so vast inside, it's hard to tell where he ends. Four moves around him, people wake up and greet each other and fall in love and know each other deep. Mars has no one, not really. He's the night bar man at Styx, but outside of that he doesn't really have a life. He crawls home to an empty house and nobody waiting.

All of his happiest memories that he has only go back to a year and a handful of months ago, when Bast fished him out of the surf and decided to let him live.

He still wonders about that sometimes.

Because sometimes he feels like there's no room within him. He can feel exactly where he forgot, knows that the wave of sadness that comes with thinking about that day isn't normal. With no memories from before then, no back story, not even a last name, sometimes Mars doesn't feel entirely real.

He pushes his feet into the cold early morning sand, boots discarded beside him and watches a couple walk their dog along the beach.

Mars can't remember the person he was before he was killed, doesn't know what he liked to do in his spare time. When he looks in the mirror, he sees a stranger but when he tries to think about what he thought he looked like, he always draws a blank.

A foreigner in his own skin, he stands and slips his fingers into the heels of his shoes to carry them home.