Just like any other Saturday in the blue underbelly of midnight New York, it's as loud as mid-day and backlit by hot pink neon lights advertising lurid, All-American concepts like apple pie moonshine, procedurally generated fizzball, and seediness. "Stop spitting those out on the sidewalk, Max," Sam says, nearly digitigrade to avoid stepping on the sunflower seed shells his little buddy is supplying. "For one thing, it's against litter ordinance, and for another, you'll never build up your stomach's immunity to sharp objects that way." Unlike every other Saturday in the blue underbelly of midnight New York, Sam and Max are out and about without any case to focus on.

Max gives him a look that suggests neither of them have ever cared about litter ordinances unless they can ticket some high-and-mighty piggy bank for breaking them. "That's what I eat all your coffee grounds for," she informs him haughtily, and another barrage of cracked yellow seeds spill out of her mouth and into the recesses of the brick crosswalk beneath their feet.

"That doesn't mean they'll grind other things up for you."

"Not with that attitude," she sniffs, and Sam decides to leave it be. They'd been cleaning out their guns when Max had looked at the clock and announced that the ammo store would be closing soon, so they'd better go and stock up now. Sam was pretty sure the ammo store had closed several years ago, on account of all the theft carried out by some unknown, handsome rogue and his equally mysterious yet undeniably beautiful compatriot, who needed to load their guns without constantly unloading their pockets. Sam could relate, not that he would ever do such a thing. He did let Max push him out the door without his blazer on, just the once, since they'd only be going a little way down Narrow Road and wouldn't be seeing anybody important. Besides, the handsome rogue had allegedly been wearing a full three-piece suit, and it'd be a real problem if Old Marty Lockheed saw them coming and got the Freelance Police confused with the sort of lowlife to steal from an innocent arms dealer. He might try to take cover behind the establishment's counter and shoot them, and Sam can only imagine how embarrassingly that would turn out, what with his complete lack of establishment, counter, or bullets.

Max hammers the crosswalk button until Sam scoops her up and strolls across for expediency. "Say—" he almost gets them run over by one of those ghostly taxicabs before thoughtfully bashing his little buddy through the spectral windshield while all the other cars play them a beautiful fifty-eight honk sonata— "this trip to the Ammo Store sure is a different route than usual. Don't we usually just walk three screens to the right?"

Max shrugs as he sets her back down on the sidewalk. "Different strokes for different mediums."

"You're sure it's not just budget cuts?"

"Who'd cut the budget of a multi-million dollar property, Sam?"

"Anybody who knows it's actually multi-millions of dollars in the negative, thanks to somebody's spending habits."

She sticks out her tongue and blows a magnitude of raspberry at him that even Abraham Lincoln's stone head would be impressed by. Or, y'know, would have been, before that accident at the quarry with the hydraulic breaker and some handsome rogue's unintentional (yet well-aimed) shoulder-check. The neighborhood watch really ought to put up some kind of wanted poster that Max couldn't immediately tear down. "Then aren't you glad to hear that you're the one covering my tab tonight?" Sam starts to say that he's always the one who covers her tab, and that's exactly the problem he'd been referring to, when he notices that the building they've stopped in front of is absolutely not the Ammo Store.

"This is absolutely not the Ammo Store," Sam says.

"Nope!" Max says, already latched onto his ankles and pulling.

"Max," Sam says, looking at the people in line, "this is a gay bar."

"Gee, who'da thunk!" Max says, not bothering to look up at the lush green sign declaring the squat building in front of them Poppy's, complete with a clip-art flower for the O.

"Max," Sam says.

"Max?" The bouncer says, pushing a dinky little beret further up his oversized hominid brow and squinting out over the flamboyant sea at the marginally-less flamboyant rabbity thing in question. "Hey, it is you!" The line caterwauls their complaints at the blatant favoritism, but Sam doesn't have time to agree with them before he realizes Max is making her way right for the entrance and has to stumble after her lest he be left alone with them. "Hey, man, I haven't seen you in ages; how've you been?"

Max kicks out a delicate garnet heel that's been stuffed onto an enormous unlucky charm. "Ladylike!"

"Don't lie to the nice space gorilla," Sam admonishes. He clarifies to the nice space gorilla, "She may be a lady, but her sense of decorum is only on par with that of underdeveloped protozoa and those cockatoos at unlicensed flea markets." Her odor's only marginally better, not that Sam thinks he needs to point that out. The poor ape's got a nose.

The poor ape's staring at him, probably owing to how obvious it is that he doesn't fit in with this particular crowd. "Uh. Would you happen to be... Sam?"

Sam blinks. "Sure am. How'd you know my name?" It's not like he's the only dogman in a shirt and tie who speaks mainly in elaborate metaphors. There's at least three more of those around Manhattan, but they stay away from Straight & Narrow because they know what's good for them.

Max tugs discreetly at his pant leg and he bends down so she can lift up his ear and whisper into it, "Don't check the bathroom stall grafitti." That doesn't bode well. He can't imagine what kind of threatening stuff Max must've scribbled in there to make such an impression.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

[and the bouncer's like OH. HAHA. YUP. PLEASE GO INSIDE WHERE I'M NOT. HAVE A GOOD NIGHT MA'AM AND SIR.]
[Sam has so many feelings about bear night]
[Birdbear (politely and gently) flirts with Sam which both heals something in him without him quite realizing, makes him freak the fuck out internally, and makes Max BLINDINGLY jealous]

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Grateful to be away from the sweaty crush of bodies, even if it means having the undivided attention of Max after an experience he'd much rather remain at least anonymous if not completely scoured from the collective consciousness, Sam leans hard on the bar top. "I don't think I caught your name," he says in the vague direction of the gentlebird who helped escort him back to the safe pretense of being a good sport who was dragged here by someone else.

"Kalar," answers Collar. At least, that's what he thinks the bird said. Certainly sounded like it.

"Max threatened to collar me, once," Sam manages, drunk and attempting to keep up polite conversation.

Max, almost up to Sam's chest in her heels, grabs him by the tie and yanks hard enough that they're eye-level. "I'm buying a leash after tonight!" It's hardly the first time she's said it— though at the moment, Sam's too overwhelmed by everything to cuff her upside the head the way he usually does when she starts yanking him around. She tends to lose interest quicker if he doesn't hit back, anyway.

"Oh-kay!" Collar flaps his wings together in a big clap, like he'd be politely clasping his hands if he had hands instead of a few individually long feathers. Sam and Max both turn to look at him without doing anything about how they're angled towards each other, which makes Sam's neck crack disconcertingly. "I have made a mistake, here; sincerest apologies, have a lovely night, uh— Sam, if I may say so, you were a wonderful dance partner."

"Thanks," says Sam.

"Fknpllyrfthrsout," says Max through the nonexistent gaps in her most menacing grin. Sam does hit her for that, and her eyes light up with reflected spotlights over the dancefloor like some mad, multicolored disco ball has taken up residence where her brain is meant to be.

"Don't be rude, Max. I might want another pity dance, later."

(She shakes the stars out of her eyes pretty fast, but Sam's not looking at her. He's looking at Collar, who, just at the edge of the dance floor, stops before getting lost in it again. "It wasn't pity," Sam sees him say more than hears anything at all, what with the thudding music and roaring people, but then he's gone and Sam can pretend he didn't see anything, either.)

"No way!" Max declares, grabbing him by the jaw and yanking his attention back to her. "I'm not walking home by myself because you're too sauced trying to salsa! C'mon, Sam, pay my tab and let's get outta this dump." Sam looks around for the gentlemen who were keeping her company earlier in the night and only finds half-dressed strangers and a distinctly unhelpful amount of dizziness, so he passes some cash over to the bartender with a nod, and follows Max back out the door. The bouncer waves. Neither of them wave back as they start the seemingly-infinite trek to the office.

The neon signs swim through Sam's vision like half-dead betta fish in a too-small bowl: stubbornly, slowly, and (despite it all) soothingly. "I think I see why you like the place." He's carrying Max's stilettos for her, and she's determinedly wobbling along in her heels. They're both absolutely coathangered. He's happy they left, but more than that, he's happy— he's just happy, period, end of sentence, no caveats or clauses required. The world didn't end like it has so many times before. Nobody even laughed at him.

"Liked the place," Max corrects with a scoff, "I don't know how other girls go to bars like that for fun. I had to fight off half the club!"

Every time Sam had looked back at the bar for her, she'd been gossiping or laughing with the same small group of guys. Up until she noticed Sam was dancing with someone and had to come to his rescue before— well, before something. Sam couldn't say what.

"And then I had to fight the other half off of you!"

Aside from that Collar fellow and maybe (that's an awfully hard maybe, mind you) a few of the looks he'd taken for secondhand embarrassment on his behalf, most of the club-goers seems pretty intent on their own night's revelry without infringing on Sam's.

Max's first love will always be licking foreign objects, but embellishment has certainly worked its way up onto the tier list over the years. Sam shakes his head fondly and wonders where "grabbing Sam by the belt and backpedaling frantically to try and keep him upright" lands on that list, and then decides that as long as he keeps landing on his feet instead of his ass, it doesn't particularly matter how much she likes it. Once he's steady, she huffs, "See if I ever go back!"

"I might," he says without quite wanting her to hear him. She does anyway, which Sam attributes to her particular combination of inconsideration towards others and having ears like satellite dishes. She grabs his wrist and pulls hard, stopping him in his tracks at the curb just before the crosswalk. A small herd of monster trucks barrels through the red light and whips both their fur in the artificially generated wind, engines howling maniacally into the endless night sky as they disappear down the boulevard. Sam looks away from the blinking white WALK sign and finds Max staring at him without blinking at all. Her eyes are beady and dead like a shark's, and her smile is barely wavering, but she's looking him in the eyes and holding onto him like she's scared to let go. He tries, "Nobody'd put the moves on either of us if we danced together, right?"

Her grin stops wavering, and somehow, Sam thinks he chose the wrong thing to say. Somehow, he doesn't think she'll let him try it again. "Don't be ridiculous, Sam," Max laughs, dropping his arm like the lime-green paper wristband is a corrosive agent, "why would you want to go to a gay bar just so I can stomp on your feet in public? You don't even like men!"

"You're not a man," Sam says instantly, which isn't the right part of that sentence for him to focus on and he knows it. He's drunk, but not so drunk he doesn't know what he sounds like. He sounds like someone who desperately needs to sober up before he says something he'll regret in the morning, which is usually what he sounds like when he and Max drink together, which is part of why he doesn't drink much since they destroyed the Devil's Toybox. Or since they became Freelance Police. Or since college. Or since sophomore year of high school, when Wally Marn suggested an awful combination of Spin The Bottle and Seven Minutes In Heaven and Sam had to walk home with Max afterwards, swaying, inanely wanting to apologize for playing without her. Maybe if Sam drank more, he wouldn't be such a lightweight with no idea how to stop himself from saying things he'll regret later. "And I almost tolerate you, sometimes," Sam adds, not instantly enough for it to be the same sentence.

Max is making direct, horrible eye contact again. "Like you tolerated the birdbrain?"

"No," Sam says. "You're not nearly as nice as he was; all that gloves-on handling of my fragile sense of identity gave me the heebie-jeebies." Max opens her mouth, and the only thing more grotesquely terrifying than admitting to the various feelings sloshing around in his gut with the whiskey is the idea that Max might say something about any of them. "It's late, Max."

"Sam," Max says so quietly she shouldn't be audible under the city's unsleeping cacophony, hand closing around his like an iron manacle.

"We ought to go to bed."

"Do you want to take me to bed?"

That's not what he said. "That's not what I said." That's not what he meant, either, because he doesn't think about that. He never thought about it before Max was a girl because he only likes girls, and he never thinks about it now because she's still Max, even if she's not his Max, and it'd be some kind of betrayal or another. "That's not funny," Sam tells her. They keep that ampersand between their names for a reason. Sam doesn't think about Max like that. "We've been drinking," Sam adds desperately. "I really don't think—"

"We can joke about it later," Max says. (Pleads? Is he projecting? Does he want her to plead with him? There's a tension in his chest that suggests the fact he's not sitting at her heels and begging for table scraps is a deep injustice, but that's just the rest of the reason he doesn't drink.) Then, lighter, like she's telling a story ten inches away from an audience: "Remember the time we got so drunk you danced with a birdman, and I tried to kiss you?" She's grinning at him so hard it's gone right around the other side to end up a snarl. "Haha. Can you imagine?" She's still holding his hand. "Sam?"

Sam says, "Remember the time we got so drunk you threatened to pluck a grown manbird, and I let you kiss me?" His knees must've hit the sidewalk at some point because they're eye to eye again. He looks up at her by maybe an inch and feels his spleen do something so acrobatic it needs a net.

Max's other hand is on the side of his face, just under his ear, fingers curling to scratch at the fuzz of his jaw. "I try not to remember it," she whispers. "I mean, it was awful."

"Right," and Sam's got one hand laid carefully at the small of her back, not pulling her closer, just– his hand is there. She's warm. "Completely intolerable."

"Way worse than trying to kiss some idiot with a beak. Sam."

Sam twists a bit, only enough that she lets go of his wrist and he can tangle their fingers together like they're about to go for a waltz. She lets him. She leans a little further in, sheltering them from the rest of the grimy street, the rest of their grimy reality. Sam murmurs, "Really hung up on that fella, aren't you?" There's something close to dumb wonder in his voice. He didn't mean for it to slip through, but he didn't mean for most of tonight to happen, and look where that got him. On his knees on the concrete, sunflower seeds scattered like shotgun shells around them.

"Remember the time I bit your lips clean off your face?" She's close enough that she could do it even if he didn't want her to.

Sam can't help but smile and lean in closer still, eyelids drooping of their own accord. "Remember the time you shut me up mid-sentence even though I really wanted to viciously mock you for how much—"

"Sam!" Max snaps.

"Uh?" Sam manages, blearily re-opening his eyes to find weak sunlight fighting its way through slats in their bedroom blinds, and that he's helpfully smothering himself in his own pillow while Max furiously shakes his shoulder. Oh. Nightmare. Right. Sam tries to triumphantly yell, "It was all a dream! Thank goodness!" and instead lets out a long, muffled groan of exhaustion and pain. The only thing that hurts worse than his head is his everything else.

Max gives him one last good shake and then scrabbles away before his blind groping can land him a handhold firm enough to give her several much better shakes. "You were kicking in your sleep! It was so pathetic I laughed until I peed. Are you getting up or what?" Sam's going to stay in this bed until Judgement Day, and he'd tell her that if the thought of looking Max in the face didn't make him want to roll right out a window and hit the ground as a crêpe. He'd skip trying to look at her first and straight to doing it if he weren't still in his good dress shirt and shoes; he needs to clean those off first so— wait a second. Why's he not in his pajamas? Sure, he dreamed about an unwelcome outing, but everything should still be in the closet. Everything he's wearing should still— shut up. Sam squints at the floor over on Max's side of the bed and sees her garnet heels atop the puddle of her downright diaphanous get-up from his dream. And you were there, he thinks at them.

And you were there, he thinks at the smell of some machine-grade alcohol on his dress shirt collar.

And I was there, he realizes at the exact moment he feels a crow feather stick him in the waistband.

"Or what," Sam says, like the lyin' coward he is, and takes the whole blanket with him when he rolls over.