Chapter Text
Dan Dreiberg and Hollis Mason had spent Wednesday evening sitting at Hollis' kitchen table getting pleasantly squiffed on Red White & Blue beer (Old Money Saver, Hollis called it). It had been a pleasant visit, with Dan happily listening to Mason tell some of his funnier Minutemen stories (he'd heard them all before, of course, but it didn't matter; he loved hearing Hollis tell them anyway).
Dan sat with one elbow on the table, chin resting in his hand as he smiled fondly at the old man and thought about the fact that all of the best conversations in his life seemed to happen at kitchen tables. As a boy listening to his mother tell stories about their eccentric relatives, as Nite Owl having lengthy discussions with his former partner (back in the days when Rorschach had still bothered to talk in sentences of more than three words), and right here, listening to war stories told by his oldest hero.
Hollis leaned forward and tapped his arm, breaking Dan's train of thought.
"Danny, it's pretty late. You'd better get on home, son." He got up, gathered up an armful of empty beer cans and put them in the sink. "Tell you what, though, on your way out let me show you my latest little restoration project. Come on, I've got to take Phantom out anyway."
Dan grinned. "Sure thing, let's go take a look."
It was a warm, muggy July night. Dan slung his jacket over his arm rather than put it on as they descended into the auto yard. Phantom trotted off in search of just the right tire to lift his leg over as they strolled across the yard to take a look at Hollis' latest project. It turned out to be an old Triumph 4A sports car. Hollis leaned under the open hood to show Dan his progress. He grimaced and pointed out a nest of tangled wires, half of which were disconnected.
"Soon as I get the electricals worked out, the rest of it'll go pretty quickly. Guy uptown brought it in for me to restore. I could use the money; otherwise I'd decline. I hate working on these old British jalopies." He touched the rats nest of wires. "Damn Lucas electrical system. All the wires are color coded, which sounds like a great idea until it gets to be a few years old and they all fade to the same color. Dirty gray." He shook his head. "You know why the British drink warm beer, don't you? Lucas refrigerators."
Dan chuckled. Then he looked up, frowning slightly. Mason looked at him, puzzled.
"What is it, Danny? You forget something?" He stopped as Dan held up a hand to shush him.
Taking a deep breath of the humid air that smelled of old motor oil and rusting metal and holding it, Dan listened intently. After a few moments, he pointed up into the sky.
"Hear that, Hollis? Listen."
Hollis listened. It was a quiet night and at first he had no idea what Dan was talking about. Then over the omnipresent city background murmur (pretty quiet in this neighborhood at this time of night) he heard a faint chirping and twittering, high up in the sky. He looked at Dan.
"Is that birds I hear?" he asked. Dan nodded, still frowning. "Huh! I'll be darned, I didn't know they flew at night."
The moon was full. As they stood watching with their heads tilted back, they saw tiny winged silhouettes cross the silvery orb, standing out in crisp contrast as they moved across the pale white face. Dan wished for his night vision goggles as he watched the shapes flit across the moon.
"Hollis, this is really strange. I'd swear those are all passerines, not nocturnal birds. They do fly in flocks at night, but only during migration. It cuts down on predation and helps keep them from overheating. This is really off-season for migration, though, it's early July. They should still be nesting and raising young at this point, not migrating."
Hollis grinned at him. "Listen to you, Bird Encyclopedia Brown."
Dan looked embarrassed. "Sorry, Hollis. Once you get me going on birds, I tend to just keep going."
The older man waved his hand dismissively. "I didn't mean anything bad by it Danny, it's fascinating that you know all these things, it really is." He yawned. "But it's getting late. I think we'd both better get to bed. C'mon boy!"
Phantom trotted over with a tongue-lolling doggy smile for both of them. Dan grinned and rumpled the old dog's ears, then waved goodnight to Hollis as he started for home.
As soon as he got back to the brownstone, he took a notebook, his goggles, and his best binoculars up to the roof. He put the goggles on, switched on the night vision and scanned the sky.
A steady stream of birds was still moving across the moon. Dan made notes, trying to get a rough estimate on numbers. He turned around, scanning with the binoculars now and realized that there were groups of flying silhouettes all over the sky, moving like tiny winged cutouts across the tarnished pewter clouds. There weren't just a few dozen flocks moving, there were hundreds.
"Wow."
As he watched, his smile faltered and a slight unease took hold of him as he noticed that many of the flocks were not moving in a straight line, but instead were wheeling in large circles. Wondering if this might mean some large and bizarre weather pattern was moving in, he watched for a while, made a few more notations, then yawned and realized that it definitely was time for bed.
He'd closed the roof access door behind him and was headed down the stairs when he was brought up short by a loud thump behind him. It sounded like someone up on the roof had thrown a bag of cement against the door.
"The hell?" He walked back upstairs to the access door and cautiously opened it. At first he saw nothing, and looked around, puzzled. Then he looked down and saw a large black and white seagull crumpled in a heap on the roof gravel, its neck twisted around at a severe angle.
'Great Black-Backed', he thought, noting the gull's size, the snowy white belly and head set off by the jet black wings. Its head rolled limply on the broken neck as he picked it up and he grimaced. "Sorry, big guy. What the heck were you thinking? Poor thing." He picked it up by one wing and carried it downstairs, the feathered body swinging limp as a rag doll. Dan tossed the gull's body in the dumpster out back and went to bed.