Chapter Text
There is a quiet sense of contentment that fills his bar. Vander is not quite so mushy today as to say he is entirely at peace, but he is certainly calm as he idly cleans glasses and watches his kids.
Mylo and Claggor are both off playing small games in a corner, laughing and dancing. On stools across the bar, Ekko and Powder are raptly discussing something over what looks to be several dozen individual pieces of blueprints. The strange tension between the two of them that’s been making appearances the past few weeks has dissipated for the moment, to Vander’s relief. It doesn’t make him antsy, Silco, but it does make him… slightly uneasy, to know one of his kids is upset and he can’t help.
To see the group of them all now settles him.
“Kids,” he calls, and the group of them all turn eventually. “What are we thinking for dinner tonigh-”
Ekko’s chair clatters as he kicks back in it with a startled shout. Vander whirls around to him, sees him grasp at his head like he has a terrible headache.
“Ekko?” He asks, already vaulting the counter to head over. He makes it all of three steps over before there is a truly deafening crack in the air along with a bright, bright flash of light. It takes only a few practiced seconds to clear the white-red spots out of his eyes while breathing through the sudden rushing panic and adrenaline, and though his ears are still pounding with his own heart rate too loudly to hear much of anything else, something distantly roars.
It sounds monstrous.
It sounds like something dying.
Head-count, as quick as he physically can - Ekko is still on the ground and grabbing his head, but his other three all look entirely fine other than panicked and still blinded by the light.
The sound-
The body.
No, no, no-
Vander’s neck hurts with the force of which he snaps his head back over, but-
Powder is fine. She is kneeling over by Ekko, still, eyes scrunched up and blinking rapidly, a hand scratching at an ear. His daughter is fine. He is staring right at her, had been watching her before the noise had even sounded.
But when he looks back over, in the middle of the bar floor, there’s a crack in the floorboard like something had crashed into it, and atop it is Powder.
It takes only a few more disorienting seconds for information to continue filtering through. This is Powder. Vander could not imagine a hell he could go through that could keep him from recognizing his kids when they are right in front of him, even if they are… different.
This Powder is covered in dirt and blood, thin and small. Curled into a tight, rigid ball in the center of the floor, her hair in astonishingly long braids spread across the floor behind her. Vander’s Powder hasn’t let her hair grow much past her shoulders since Vi. It’s been so long since he’s seen her with it braided.
It takes a moment to distinguish the even tinier form of bruised and bright blue curled against Powder’s chest, and oh-
Vander can feel something pained escape his throat.
“Powder?” He calls, and his kids are all making noises too, but they’re all okay, they’re safe, so he allows himself this moment.
His steps are clumsy as he stumbles closer to her, loud where he usually manages silence despite his size. Powder does not stir, nor the child nearly hidden by her grasp. Vander watches a narrow, bony spine rise in a shallow breath and it settles something that had been raging a storm inside his chest. She’s breathing.
She’s breathing.
(It’s been so long since he’s been in blood and violence. A blessing, and he is so damn grateful, but he is clumsy here where in the past he knows that these few seconds could have been the difference between saving this daughter's life or not.)
“Wait,” Ekko says, something shaky and unfamiliar in his tone.
Vander barely hears it, drops heavily to his knees once he is within range. He calls her name once more and is given zero response. His brows furrow and he desperately hopes to find no head wound.
“Wait, Vander, don’t touch-!”
His fingers just barely graze her shoulder, meaning to inspect her head for injuries, when Powder simply… moves.
He is no slouch. His reflexes may be slower now in age and retirement than they were in his fighting prime but they are hardly slow, and he knows that they are certainly not addled enough to account for the amount of reasonable time missing in the actions that Powder takes. He doesn’t even blink.
One instant, she is unconscious and entirely still. There is a momentary flash of a bright pink or purple light, what could conceivably be the movement of her shoving herself up on an arm and twisting around, and the very next instant Powder is sitting on the floor halfway across the room with the child cradled tightly against her front and a gun pointed directly at Vander.