"Get down!" Raphael shouted.

Tristan couldn't have processed the words if he tried; the noise was too great, the lights too bright, the shrieks and yells like harsh, piercing whistles resonating in his ears. A man had barrelled through the casino's doorway, and there were more spilling through to join him. People were everywhere. Panic was half-set concrete in their air, heavy, crushing, cracked in a thousand places.

A sharp tug on his collar brought him to his senses. Without the willpower to resist, he went down, shoulder smacking against the bar as his knees hit the floor. Raphael dragged him further forward. A bottle shattered overhead, scattering glass pieces all over the floor and his clothes and his hair. Instincts finally kicking in, he ducked his head and dived behind the bar, knees shrinking into his chest and hand shielding the side of his face not pressed into the sticky, threadbare carpet.

He couldn't hear himself breathe, let alone think. His glasses were slipping off his face. He shoved the heel of his palm against one lens to keep them pinned in place and focused on regaining control of his senses.

Gunshots ricocheted throughout the room. Things smashed and broke in great crashes, and someone screamed, agony lancing through the wailing sound. He cautiously shifted a leg, rolled a shoulder, searching for any hot stabs of pain of his own, but found none -- or nothing big enough to worry about anyway. A scratch on his cheek stung from where he guessed a glass shard had cut it. As he gingerly sat up, careful to keep himself tucked in a ball low enough to remain hidden behind the bar, he felt for the cut, his fingers coming away streaked with blood.

A hand brushed against his. He flinched, but it was only Raphael, his back pressed against the bar as he also curled behind it with knees halfway to his chest. His face was set grimly, though the light in his eyes was surprisingly soft. "First time?"

Tristan blinked. Even in that space of time, his thoughts raced, searching for a way out as if straining against a cage. "It's not yours?"

"Nope." Head ducking lower, Raphael winced at a particularly loud bang. "Alley fight. Not that I stuck around long." His gaze darted the length of the bar, where the bartender and a few other people cowered, one of which had a tray held above his head like a budget shield. "Nowhere to run here, though."

Nowhere to run. Tristan's heart pounded, his skin prickling and tongue sour with uncomfortable, dizzying fear. His fingers curled into the carpet either side of him as he sucked in a slow, subtle breath. The facts. He had to focus on what he knew, or what he didn't know, and what means there were to find out. Another yell pierced the air painfully nearby.

"Do you know what's going on?" he asked through gritted teeth.

Raphael shook his head. His hand laid atop Tristan's, some shallow, casual comfort that startled him a little. His frown drew inward. "If I had to guess, I'd assume your yellow-haired friend has something to do with it."

Perhaps the word 'friend' triggered the thought -- though the very notion would've made Tristan cringe if he were any less shaky -- but his eyes snapped to the other end of the bar again. His stomach tightened. "Constance. And Quinn. They're not there."

Raphael's hand increased pressure on his as if pinning it to the floor. "Don't--"

"I'll be back," he said, wrenched his hand free and, before his mind could catch up with the madness of the idea, set off crawling to the bar's other end.

Angry words were shouted from somewhere within the room, but any sense in them was lost to the mayhem. They were either answered or accompanied by a few rounds of swift gunfire. There were few enough weapons being fired now that each of these sparse, individual shots could be made out, but neither the noise nor the chaos were anywhere near retreating. A fist thumped against the other side of the bar, shuddering through to Tristan's shoulders. He froze up just before the other hiding group. The bartender caught his glance, staring back with wide eyes, and numbly shook his head. Don't move, he was likely conveying. Stay where you are.

A large part of Tristan was more than ready to comply; clammy sweat dripped down the back of his neck, cold and piercingly hot as icy bullets. He snatched an unsteady inhale and shook the fear away. It was of no use. "Give me that," he hissed to the nearest person and grabbed the tray they were holding, lifting the makeshift shield as he dodged past them and settled into a low crouch at the counter's curving end.

Ensuring the tray hid most of his face, he peered past its rounded edge, checking his surroundings. There were maybe ten hostile figures, the tallest of which seemed to be holding the card dealer from before at the barrel of his gun as he made demands intelligible at this distance. Trickles of battle still took place at the room's edges. There was a distinct divide between those who fought back and those who hid, the unarmed players cowering under tables or pressed into the corners, all shooting frantic glances towards the door. Another newcomer blocked any exit, and Tristan guessed that if there was a back door, it was unusable. No-one was going anywhere until the argument was settled.

Wounds, too, shone like spotlights from both parties, some smaller scratches and some gaping and bleeding. Red rivulets sparked in the dazzling crimson floodlights. It looked somewhat unreal in here, something foreign, lacking in worldly consequences. Tristan's cheek stung with countering knowledge, and an unwelcome stone dropped into his gut. He hurried to look the other way.

There. In the very corner, beneath a dusty, forgotten table, Constance was curled on the floor. Her entire body shook as if she were freezing to death. The path to her was straight, but riddled with far too many unfriendly eyes.

Someone tapped his shoulder, but when he ducked and whirled around, it was only Raphael, crouched right behind him. Cradled against his chest was a sleek black pistol. He nodded in Constance's direction. "Go," he whispered. "I'll cover you."

Tristan nodded and, without giving himself time to acknowledge how ridiculously stupid this was, sprinted out into the room.

At the same time, he saw Raphael stand fully in the corner of his eye, gun aloft. A bullet snapped free. It hit nothing but a black window, which shattered in a clattering crash, but its noise reverberated throughout the room. The heated argument between the group's tallest member and the card dealer -- the loudest in the room -- fell silent.

Heart pounding and blood spiky with electric heat, Tristan skidded towards the table and dived under it, thrusting the tray out to shield Constance's head. His arm, more by lack of space than design, slid awkwardly over her back. Her side pressed into his. He chewed his tongue and looked out to the room, to where Raphael stood small and alone at the counter's end. There was no time for regret now.

Constance shifted. "T-Tristan?"

"Well!" The group's leader's voice rang out like an explosive, shockwaves rolling a thicker sheet of quiet throughout the ruined casino. Almost carelessly, he pointed his gun downwards and pulled the trigger, a far more malicious bang which was tailed by the card dealer's whimper. He collapsed to the ground, his foot limp as rock and trickling blood. "Well," the man repeated, jarringly delayed after the first, and turned to face Raphael. A mess of tattoos crawled up his arms and the back of his neck, stark against his pasty skin, as if he were cracked apart all over.

He lumbered a step forward. "I'll be damned. Is that another Ratliff boy?"

Raphael's chin lifted, his jaw set against a response. His gun's barrel pointed straight at the man. The muscles in his arm were taut as straining wires, though his other hand hid behind his back, curled in a shaky fist.

The man laughed, a terribly rough sound. "Say hello to your brother from me. I remember him well." His nose wrinkled. "You're a scrawny lad in comparison."

"I can still shoot you just fine," Raphael said without any flicker of emotion.

"Right." Another throaty laugh.

The safety clicked off Raphael's pistol. "Right."

His hidden thumb bounced, a minute movement that caught Tristan's eye. He could've dismissed it as nerves, but the gesture seemed too odd, too off-rhythm, to be subconscious. He edged right an inch, and the faint bluish glow seeping between Raphael's fingers became visible. The light of a phone screen. He was dialling a number.

His thumb stilled, and he inclined his head towards the door. "Get out, Sampson."

"Tristan," Constance whispered again, the barest distance from his ear, urgency racing her voice. "Tristan, I'm so sorry."

"For what?" Tristan murmured. He pressed his glasses right into the bridge of his nose, a futile attempt to zoom his vision in on the name written in shining white letters on Raphael's phone. It was too hidden from view anyway. Frustration and antsy fear knitted an ache in the base of his stomach.

Constance clamped hurriedly down on a panicked, shuddering exhale, and he twisted to cast her a glance. Dark eyes peered at him through dust-red strands of hair. "I should've realised sooner."

Questions bubbled to Tristan's tongue, pieces in his mind fighting their scattered cascade to connect with one another, but Sampson's voice dragged chipped fingernails through his train of thought. "I'm tiring of you, Ratty," he spat.

His tone had swung a note too low and dripped with danger. Tristan tensed, but this situation's controlling strings were far from his grasp. Sampson's gun fired without resistance, and Raphael choked on a scream. He smacked his spine against the counter and went down. His phone slipped from his fingers, tumbling to land screen-down on the carpet. Hot pain flared around him in a heavy halo and skittered like sand into his scrunched expression, his hand pressed to his side and chest heaving as he clearly struggled to suck in his next breath, and a cold prickle scaled the insides of Tristan's lungs in tandem. He didn't understand it -- his thoughts were a sludge, dragging one another down -- but it hurt.

Sampson lowered his gun with a grunt. He turned to the rest of his group. "I'm sick of this place," he said, though his smile leered through the spite, not hidden well. "Let's go. I think we've made our point."

Constance inhaled, but the sound was muffled and suppressed, and no words followed it. Tristan couldn't wait for her to find her voice. He needed his answers, and he needed to wipe that delight from Sampson's face. He'd seen a hundred laughing eyes like those and they made his blood burn, cutting through the rigid shock of fear. He pulled himself out from under the table and snapped to his feet.

He didn't run this time. His pace was steady as he marched over to Raphael, ignoring the wide, warning look in his eyes, and teased the gun from his limp grip. It wasn't Tristan's, but it would do. He adjusted his hold on it and trained it on Sampson. The trigger was cold against his finger.

A split-second before he fired the shot, Sampson looked back. Realisation flashed over his face and he dived aside. Noise exploded in Tristan's ears, and a second window shattered -- harmless in the end, but loud, screamingly loud against the backdrop of breath-held silence. His bones shook with the force of it.

Slowly, Sampson pushed off the unmarked door he'd thrown himself against and straightened, surveying Tristan. His smile flickered away, then came back wider. He might as well have worn fangs for the bite in Tristan's skin.

His head cocked. "Now this one I don't know." The gun lifted again, the dangerous note sliding back into his voice like a twining serpent. "And who might you be?"

Words were a faraway concept. Tristan's heart pounded, a ticking clock bashed out of sync.

"A mild warning: you have roughly twenty seconds to give me a reason not to shoot you."

A storm performed rolling pirouettes in his mind, whipping everything around in circles until his feet barely felt as if they rested on solid ground. Strange as it sounded, he'd never felt more like a person. Flesh and blood, nerves and bones and tendons, and a desperate whirlwind of feeling, wrenching at his heart with jittery force. Fear soured his tongue. It cost him a few of those precious seconds before he remembered his reason for being here.

The game. The answers. He breathed in deeply and let distance settle over everything once more, a barricade against the storm. The gun in his hand remained achingly cold, firmly real, despite it all. "You're working with Sally Fletcher."

Sampson raised an eyebrow. "Working with is a stretch. She tipped me off." He moved a step forward, ensuring Tristan stared directly down his gun's barrel. "What's it to you?"

"I'd like you to lead me to her."

Faint amusement danced in Sampson's eyes, but it was hardly enough. It darkened into boredom's dust within a moment. The look promised his next words would be weapons, but they never emerged.

Instead, a smaller figure sauntered out from behind him, reaching up to lay a reassuring hand on his arm. "Not to worry, Sammy. You did good, but I'll take this from here."

That voice. It leapt from one note to the next in a near-singsong pattern, forever tiresomely moving, with an unreadable undercurrent that meandered like a river of opaque colour and oily texture. The laugh that followed it was terrible and pleasant all at once. Tristan wished he didn't recognise it so fiercely, longed for it to fade and take on a more foreign malice, but truth was an impossible thing to deny.

Strolling into view, a casual smile on their face and impractical, indigo-dyed hair brushing each shoulder, was none other than Quinn Fox.

Chapter Wordcount: 2333

Total Wordcount: 33620

And there we have it :)

I don't know what's happening anymore but at least the conclusion to our mystery has finally arrived. Maybe I actually will finish this thing in time??

- Pup