milliways_bar | (no subject)

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autor

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Clara would really like to be home now. She's a bit on edge, being stuck in a time that isn't hers, with a man she barely knows (and trusts a bit too much to be healthy, she knows).

So it's fairly easy to explain her exasperation when she walks through the doors.

"Really? Really? We're going to do this nonsense now?"

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"Apparently," the boy at the bar says, his nose stuck in a book.

"Smartass." Clara replies, because after coming nose-to-nose with an Ice Warrior, boys with books aren't scary.

"So I've been told," Autor says, flicking his glance to her. "At least you know where you are, right? Cup of tea?"

"Yes, please. Felt up any bars recently?" She raises an eyebrow at him, coming over to perch on a barstool.

Autor's hands fly off the counter and up over his head. "No!" he cries, all evidence to the contrary. "Um. Tea, please, Miss Bar. If you would."

Then he turns to Clara, 'awkward' displayed on his face in full force. "So. Uh. Still making soufflés?"

"... Sometimes." She awkwards back at him, because really, what? "Is that supposed to be a distraction from bar-molesting?"

"Yes," he says, pouring their two cups. "And I'd be extremely grateful if you'd take the diversion or provide an acceptable alternative."

"Aww, bless." Clara grins at him, taking her cup. "Any other sentient furniture you've had your hands all over around here?"

Autor sips his tea in the careful manner of a man prone to choking in the company of aggravating women.

"I don't know of any other sentient furniture around here," he admits, pressing his toes together, "but if there were, and I knew about it, I would have asked first?"

He decides that it might be a good time to practice containing or fading his blushes.

"I'm disturbed that the answer was given in the form of a question." Clara concludes, eyeing him over her teacup.

"I was wondering if there were any, which derailed my train of thought," Autor says, setting his cup down lest he flail and spill it all over the place.

"Which, by the way, is fine with me," he says. "The 'Is Furniture Sentient' track is much better than the 'May Have Assaulted Things' line."

"Poor things are probably scared to reveal themselves, after what you lot put the Bar through." She huffs at him.

"What if they were?" he asks, glancing down at the barstools. "Would we not have had a revolt by now?"

"Depends on the level of oppression. There are an awful lot of patrons, after all." Clara observes. "Perhaps they're waiting for a hero."

"Does need a hero to start a revolution?" Autor muses, lifting his cup again.

"Does in the books." She shrugs, not knowing much about revolutions in general, or furniture ones in specific.

"Interesting," he says. "And... that wasn't a pick-up line. Promise."

The boy sips his tea. "Are you still being guarded by your monk cum absent-minded professor alien?"

"Guarded by, being dragged around Soviet Russia by, take your pick." She sighs, shaking her head. "I just wanted to see Sinatra sing in Vegas."

"What on earth are you doing in Soviet Russia?" he asks. "Are you still traveling by, um"--he rubs a hand on the back of his neck--"'Snog box'?"

"Well, we would be, if he hadn't accidentally sent it to the wrong side of the planet." Clara grumbles - at first it had been fun, kinda - but there's only so many untrusting, not-at-all-looking-at-her-face stares she can put up with.

"How," Autor says, blinking, "does that even work?"

He shakes his head, refills his cup, and offers to top off hers. "What is the thing, anyway?"

"Because he's sometimes an idiot, and it's a time machine. I think." She replies, holding out her cup. "I don't think it likes me."

He fills her cup and sets the kettle down on a coaster so as not to char the sentient countertop.

"No wonder you're up in arms about sentient furniture," he says carefully. "Why don't you think it likes you?"

"It just... doesn't, I don't know." She shrugs, "How do you know anyone doesn't like you?"

"I have no idea. I tend to enter into conversations with that as a baseline assumption," Autor admits, "nor do I consider liking me a requirement for the conversation to proceed."

He smiles, a bit crookedly. "Which is markedly unhelpful to you," he says. "Actually, I was wondering if you could do me a favor."

He pulls a leather book out of his pocket and whispers to it in Greek. Out of that book pops another, smaller book, which he flips through.

"Do you recognize this thing?" he asks, showing her a page.