Sometimes you look out the window of your apartment, and you wonder if you could be doing more. The sense that someone needs you gradually overcomes you, until you grasp your window, shaking and sweating. You should be out there helping someone. Instead, you turn on the radio, and listen to a story to keep the thoughts away.

This is Nimue's Bar.

“I'm just saying, what if another guy comes along with better horns?”

“Your horns are fine, Ernie!”

“But what if—“

“Ernie, your horns are wonderful, darn it! If you keep worrying, though, I'll make sure you don't have horns anymore, got it?”

Ernie lapses back into silence with a deep sigh, and Kaia does the same. Dirk is asleep on the bar again, and she can't really blame him. It's a slow night at Nimue's; the only other patrons are a group of bleeders in the back corner, engaged in the same whispered conversation as always. Seeing as one did not make conversation with bleeders unless absolutely forced to, and maybe not even then, the only person to talk to in the bar is Ernie, the permanently dour man with horns jutting from his forehead. Kaia guesses she can see why he is worried; other than his horns there really isn't that much remarkable about him aside from his pale green skin. Practically plain in this part of town, really.

Ernie sighs again, and Kaia buries her head in her hands. Why her?

“I really wish,” he says, the words coming agonizingly slowly. “That I had been born...” Kaia mentally prepares herself. Here it comes.

“Without the horns,” she finishes.

“With larger horns,” Ernie moans.

Kaia groans and casts a quick look around the bar. None of the graffiti eyes on the wall are looking in her direction. Dirk is asleep. The bleeders will only look at her if they want a drink or want her dead, and neither of those seem very likely. “Come on back here, Ernie,” she whispers, pushing open a door behind the bar and beckoning him inside.

“What?”

“I said come inside!” she hisses, casting a furtive glance at Dirk. Ernie picks himself up and stumps after her, squeezing his bulk behind the edge of the bar.

The back room of the bar is nothing much. Despite Kaia's repeated entreaties, Nimue's organizational scheme inevitably boils down to “throw everything in the back room and hope that we don't need to retrieve it.” If they ever do need to get something from back here, the job always seems to fall to Kaia or Dirk, so the two of them have gotten fairly adept at navigating it over their time here. She leads Ernie through the twisting maze of boxes and sits him down on an overturned crate that she and Dirk occasionally use for playing cards. After several minutes of rooting through boxes, she finds what she is looking for. She never asked why Nimue had ordered a block of modeling clay, but if it was in the back room then no one would miss it.

“Sit very still,” she commands, and begins using the clay to build up his horns so that they appear slightly larger.

“Why are you trying to hide that you're helping me?” Ernie says slowly. Kaia rolls her eyes, and when she speaks the words come out more bitter than she intends.

“Because I'm the mysterious, mean bartender. I had to work for a whole year to get people to remember that much about me, and I'm not going to risk confusing them by letting them see me do something halfway friendly.” Kaia finishes sculpting the clay and gives Ernie an appraising look. It wouldn't fool anyone who looked too closely, but from a distance it gives his horns an extra few inches. “There we go. You look absolutely stunning.”

Ernie gets to his feet, beaming. “Thank you so much! I really owe you one... um... er...”

“K,” Kaia says, looking into his eyes imploringly. She switched to just using her initial in the hopes that it would be easier to remember by virtue of being shorter. So far, she has not had much success.

“K, right! I'll remember that!” With that Ernie strides out of the stockroom, whistling as he goes. Kaia counts the sound of his steps and is rewarded by the noise of him hitting his horns on the doorframe.

When she emerges from the back room, Dirk is awake, waiting for her to return. Great, just what she needs. “Did you do his horns, K?” She nods. “Looks good. Did he remember your name?” She shakes her head, and Dirk pats her on the shoulder. “How many times is this? Three?”

“That was the seventh,” she says softly. When Dirk wraps his hairy arms around her, she buries her face in his chest.

“It'll be all right, K. You'll get there one day.”