dearest kay: if you can spare the time i would love to hear all about the swissalps security detail, who have certainly seen some Things and Events during their tenure
Good news ! I survived the dentist
Bad news ! I live to run my mouth another day.
Anyways I love them your honor and I am thrilled to shine the spot light on my favorite little security couple for a bit 🤍
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Sidequest: Twenty After Two
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Phantom is on bar duty tonight, which is to say Phantom is supposed to be wiping down the bar and is instead leaning against it with a damp rag in one hand and a maraschino cherry between their teeth, watching Swiss flip chairs onto tabletops with the bored efficiency of someone who's done this exact motion ten thousand times.
It's twenty past two.
The house lights are up. The music's off. Tempt at this hour belongs to the staff in a way it doesn't at any other — softer than daylight, quieter than service, the velvet still warm from the night. Every seam visible. The poles catching the overheads. The kind of hour where the club stops performing and just sits there with you, spent and a little loose-lipped.
Mountain is sweeping methodically with his whole body, like the broom is a tool he respects and the floor is something he'd like to do a good job by.
"So," Phantom says, around the cherry stem.
Swiss doesn't look up. Flips another chair. "No."
"You don't even know what I was going to say."
"You were going to ask a question."
"No, I was going to ask a question."
"Same thing."
Phantom plucks the stem out of their mouth — tied, naturally, they're not going to waste a perfectly good party trick — and flicks it into the trash bin behind the bar. "What's the wildest thing you've seen here? As a security professional. For posterity."
Swiss flips another chair. "No."
Phantom sets their sights on Mountain instead.
"Mountain. Your turn."
Mountain looks up from his sweeping. He has a smudge of glitter on his cheek that nobody has told him about. Phantom is going to let him keep it.
"Hm?"
"What's the wildest thing you've seen while working here?"
Mountain considers. He leans on his broom in a way that suggests he is taking this question with the gravity it deserves.
"Swiss," he says after a moment.
Phantom blinks. "Swiss what."
"Swiss is the wildest thing I've seen here."
Across the room, Swiss goes very still over a chair he was halfway to lifting.
Mountain, oblivious, goes back to sweeping. There is now, somehow, an even softer expression on his face than there was thirty seconds ago. The ghoul looks like he's remembering a sunrise.
Phantom sets down the rag.
This is, they decide, the most important moment of their professional life.
"Mountain," they say, deeply calm, the way one approaches a feral cat one wants to befriend.
"Explain."
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Here is what Phantom learns, over the next fifteen minutes of cleanup, which they will stretch into thirty because Mountain is talking now and Swiss has accepted his fate with the resignation of a ghoul who has been outed by his husband in front of Lucifer and the bar runner turned baby dancer:
Swiss used to be on the other side of the pole.
"Three years," Mountain says, like he's reciting a sacred number. "Three and a half if you count the last few months when he was mostly training the new hires."
"He was a dancer," Phantom says, dumbfounded.
"Headliner," Swiss says, dryly from across the room.
Phantom, who has not dropped a glass in all their years of service topside, picks up a clean rocks glass and almost — almost — fumbles it onto the bar. They recover. Barely.
"Swiss."
"I know."
"Swiss —"
"Phantom, I am asking you, as a colleague—"
"You were a headliner."
Swiss flips a chair with what can only be described as repressive force. "It was a different life."
"You're predominantly earth."
"Yes."
"You did strip routines."
"Yes."
"As an earth ghoul."
"Phantom." Swiss finally looks at them. He has the calm, faintly haunted expression of a ghoul who knew this day would come and made his peace with it long ago. "I have a little fire. A little quint. I made it work."
"He did fire routines," Mountain says, dreamily, to the broom.
Phantom turns to him so fast their tail nearly clips the bar.
"He did what?"
The fire routine, as Mountain tells it, was less a routine and more an event. Swiss had a signature — Mountain calls it that, signature, with the reverence other people reserve for vintage wine — that involved a length of black silk, a controlled flame, and what Mountain describes, with his hands, as "the part where he goes—" and then stops, because the gesture he's making cannot be reproduced in mixed company, or any company at all, for that matter.
Phantom is staring.
Swiss is stacking chairs at a rate that suggests he would like to leave this dimension.
"Earth predominant," Mountain continues, sweeping a careful arc around a sticky patch near the rail seating. "So the grounding was insane. He could hold a pose for like — minutes. And then the fire'd come up through the silk and the quint'd carry the static so the whole room felt it—"
"Mountain," Swiss grumbles.
"What? They asked."
"They asked about security."
"This is about security," Mountain says, with the unshakable confidence of a ghoul making a point he's going to win. "I'm explaining why you're good at your job. You know the room from both sides."
Swiss puts a chair down very gently and pinches the bridge of his nose.
"You're not wrong," he admits, to the floor.
Phantom feels themself ascending.
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There is, eventually, a story.
Mountain tells it while Swiss visibly resigns himself to it. He's stopped lifting chairs. He's just leaning on a stack of them now, arms folded, watching his husband from across the room with an expression Phantom is logging for later use against him.
It was Swiss's last night.
"Not planned to be," Mountain says. "He wasn't quitting. He just — that's when it happened."
A bachelor party. Loud, drunk, the kind that thinks the velvet rope is a suggestion. One of them — the groom, naturally, because the groom is always the worst — decided halfway through Swiss's set that he was going to climb up.
"Onto the stage?" Phantom asks.
"Onto Swiss," Mountain says.
Phantom puts the rag down again.
The bouncer at the time, Mountain can't remember his name, was three steps too slow. The groom got a hand on Swiss's ankle. Swiss was mid-routine. The silk was draped along his jaw, smoldering soft against his cheek, the kind of slow drag he was famous for.
"And?" Phantom prompts.
Swiss says, without looking up: "I slapped him."
"With?"
"My hand."
Phantom blinks.
"Swiss."
"He was on my ankle, Phantom."
"Swiss."
"Phantom, what was I supposed to do."
"He was fondling himself with fire," Mountain says with the awe of a ghoul witnessing miracles. "He had the silk against his jaw and the flame was doing the thing and then this guy grabs his ankle and Swiss just —"
Mountain makes a gesture with his broom that approximates a backhand of devastating elegance.
"— didn't even break tempo."
"It was a clean hit," Swiss shrugs.
"It was perfect," Mountain sighs fondly, like he's remembering a dream.
"Mountain." Phantom can't help the giggle that bubbles out of their chest.
"He didn't even drop the silk."
"I didn't drop the silk," Swiss confirms, faintly proud despite himself.
"Aether came out from the back," Mountain says, "and he watched the whole rest of the set before he called for medical. Just watched. And after, when Swiss was off-shift, Aether walked up to him with a coffee and offered him a job on the door."
"On the spot?"
"On the spot."
"Aether said—" Swiss starts.
"Aether said," Mountain interrupts, because he is going to deliver the punchline himself if it kills him, "'I think you'd like the view from this side.'"
Phantom exhales a long slow breath into the cool club air. "Iconic."
"He took two weeks to think about it," Mountain says.
"I took two weeks to negotiate," Swiss corrects.
"Same thing."
"Different thing."
They look at each other across the room. Mountain is openly smiling now, soft and crooked. Swiss is doing the thing he does where his mouth doesn't move but his eyes do, the small private dimming that on him counts as unbearably soft.
Phantom looks away. Some things aren't for them.
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The cleanup is mostly done.
Phantom is restocking the well, mostly so they have a reason to stay close enough to keep prompting. Swiss has gone back to chairs, but the resignation has lifted. He is, Phantom notes with quiet delight, in the post-confession glow of a ghoul who didn't want to talk and now sort of does.
"Okay," Phantom says. "Security stories. Real ones. Hit me."
Swiss flips a chair. Considers.
"Couple proposed from the rail seats once."
"To each other?"
"To Cirrus."
Phantom pauses with their hand in the ice bin.
"Like — together?"
"Together. Got down on one knee in tandem. Brought a ring."
"And?"
"She said no."
"Gently?"
"Cirrus said no the way Cirrus says anything. They went home crying but they tipped on the way out."
Mountain hums in agreement from across the room.
"What else?"
Swiss thinks. The pause is long enough that Phantom suspects he is editing — picking the one he'll actually tell, out of a much larger archive he never will.
"Two guys got into a fight at the bar," he says, eventually. "Long while ago."
"Over?"
"Whether Cumulus's bourbon list was alphabetized by distillery or by region."
Phantom stares.
"It was alphabetized by distillery," Swiss adds, like this is an important footnote.
"They fought?"
"Full on threw hands."
"Over—"
"Over the bourbon list. One of them had a printout. He brought a printout to the bar to prove a point. Apparently they had argued over it before."
Phantom is laughing now. They're trying not to, but they're failing.
"What happened?"
Swiss flips the last chair onto the table. Sets it down. Leans on his forearm against the seat back and lets himself, finally, smile — small and crooked and entirely for Mountain.
"Mountain picked them both up."
"Both at once?"
"One in each hand."
"By the collar?"
"By the jacket."
Across the room, Mountain leans on his broom and looks at the floor with the modest pleasure of a ghoul whose husband is bragging about him.
"Held them like that," Swiss continues, "for about — what, six seconds?"
"Ten," Mountain says.
"Ten seconds. Just held them. Off the floor. Made them apologize to Cumulus and to each other and finish their drinks at separate ends of the bar."
"And then?"
"They tipped Cumulus a hundred each and left in the same cab."
Phantom looks between them.
Mountain is still studying the floor with that small modest smile. Swiss is still leaning on the chair he just stacked, watching his husband across an empty club at nearly three in the morning, glitter on Mountain's cheek that still nobody has told him about and a sweep mark on the floor in a careful arc around the rail.
Phantom has spent years in this club. They know what a love story looks like in this room. They have catalogued every variation.
This one, they decide, is their favorite.
"Hot," they say, decisively.
Swiss turns red from the collar up.
"Phantom."
"What. I'm just saying. The man picks people up like grocery bags. Acknowledge it."
"Acknowledged," Mountain says happily, to the floor.
Swiss puts his face in his hands.
Phantom finishes the well, hangs up the rag, and leaves them to lock up — pausing at the door to glance back one more time at the two of them across the empty club, the lights still up, the chairs all stacked, the music off.
Mountain says something Phantom can't quite hear.
Swiss laughs.
It's a quiet sound. Phantom has heard it maybe three times over.
They let the door swing shut behind them and head home through the cool dark, tail flicking, already composing the text to Rain.
Babe.
You'll never guess who used to be a stripper.
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