milliways_bar | (no subject)

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((OOM: June 6, 1944: night and day, and night again.))

Lieutenant Lewis Nixon steps down the three steps and opens the door, expecting a tiny pub, bursting at the seams with noisy American soldiers.

Well, he's at least a little right.

A man of average height in dark green uniform — pant cuffs tucked into the tops of heavy brown boots, jacket covered in handy pockets, M-1 rifle slung casually over one shoulder — stands just inside the door. If one knew such things, one might recognize it as the uniform of a soldier in the United States Airborne, circa 1944. It's difficult to tell too much about his features; his face is streaked with black pitch and grime.

Nixon's expression is probably funny, if you aren't Nixon. He looks like someone just punched him in the gut and he can't decide how best to curse them out. Another soldier might go for a weapon. This one seems to have forgotten that he has one.

He slowly lifts off his helmet and leaves it to dangle from his fingers in awe, his black hair flattened against his head.

Time passes before he finally speaks. "Uh. Uh, Dick, you seeing th—" He looks over his shoulder. No Dick, just a closed door.

"No—" He pauses, staring at a passing patron, and then he mutters, "No, I guess not."

Nix closes his mouth, tightens his hand on the strap of his M-1 and — does not move another muscle.

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Jack might not be able to tell the exact year, but he recognises the uniform and the insignia. That and the weapon, of course. Weapons + Newbie =/= a good thing, necessarily.

"I take it you didn't mean to end up here, Lieutenant," he says, giving him a friendly smile but ready to move in an instant should he need to. You never can tell with the newbies.

Nixon is preoccupied with staring; it's a moment before he realizes that he has been spoken to. Startled, he turns.

"Not ... really," he says, glancing around again, trying to take in his surroundings. "Not unless the place is one hell of a lot bigger on the inside than it was on the outside."

"That's assuming you're in the same place; you're not. Welcome to Milliways, the bar at the end of the universe," he says, gesturing to the Observation Window.

Thick eyebrows shoot up, and Nixon is far too preoccupied with staring at the other man to bother wondering what the hand motion is about.

A moment passes.

Then he starts to snicker. "That," he says, "might just be the craziest thing I've heard in my life."

"Turn around and look, and it might not seem so crazy," he says. "Well, maybe not that much less crazy, but more believeble at least."

Nixon shoots a sharp look at him, then over his shoulder.

It looks a little like the flak exploding over Normandy, a detached part of him observes.

His helmet hits the ground with a dull thunk.

"That would be the universe ending part. Don't worry, though, it never takes us with it; it just keeps repeating itself." Though there had been that one time they'd come awful close, but then he's not going to scare the new arrival with that.

"I'm Jack Bauer, by the way, bar security," he says, holding out his hand for when he Lieutenant notices that he still exists.

Nix swallows, dazed, and says hoarsely, "Oh. Great." It takes a Herculean effort to drag his eyes away from the wild beauty of the exploding universe, and he shakes the other man's hand with his dirty one. Opening his mouth to answer, he shifts his feet and a boot hits something. He looks down and frowns, not comprehending why his helmet is on the floor. Bending to pick it up, he says, "Lieutenant Lewis Nixon, 101st Airborne."

Jack shakes Nixon's hand, not paying much attention to the dirt. "Take a seat; you look like you could use it. Want a drink? The first one's on the house."

"Yeah," he says immediately, latching on to the familiarity. "A drink would be good." Which is, his wry tone suggests, the understatement of the year. He drops his helmet on his head at an angle, shoving his free hand into a pocket. "You don't happen to have any good whiskey around here, do you?"

"I think the bar has every kind of whiskey. Bar, whiskey for Lt. Nixon--the good stuff?" he says, placing a hand on the bar. A second later, a glass of whiskey appears, along with another cup of coffee for Jack.

Nixon's face doesn't change as the glass and the cup appear out of thin air. He simply looks at the bar, his expression blank.

And then he makes the belated, more intelligent call to look at Jack.

"Did I just see what I think I just saw?"

Jack nods, taking a sip of his coffee. "Bar's sentient. She can provide you with--well, with almost everything you could ask for. It depends on what she might think is best for you, or the mood she's in. It's a pretty good idea not to piss her off."

You know, it's not often Nixon uses his 'you are out of your mind, aren't you' look on someone twice in one day. Jack's setting records left and right here.

"Uh-huh - you know, I stand corrected. That is the craziest thing I've heard in my life." He's highly skeptical, though not maliciously so; if anything, he's a bit amused. He leeeans over the bar to see who or what may be behind it, but — nothing.

He eyes his glass of whiskey — and by extension, Jack — with new respect.

Jack just smiles; this isn't the first time someone new to the bar looked at him like he was crazy when he started explaining about Bar. And hey, he'd been an incredulous newbie once, too.

"Well some of it might be a bit more familiar. The rules, for one: no violence in the bar, no old business in the bar, no sex in the bar, no naked in the bar. And this place is an inn as well as a bar--there are rooms upstairs if you're stuck here."

He picks up the glass, rolling it in his hand and watching the whiskey swirl, and he nods consideringly with each point. "Makes sense." He pauses with the glass halfway to his mouth. "Relatively. Does the door to this place always open from a pub in France?" He takes another cursory glance around at other patrons, resting most of his weight on one leg in an attempt at casual.

"I'm guessing not."

"Not for most of the people here. I know a couple from France, but then they're not from the same time you are."

He cradles the mug in his hands, saying casually, "Sometimes people come in clumps, but most people are from a different time and place. I'm from Los Angeles, in the year 2012."

Once again, Nixon doesn't actually drink the whiskey; he sets the glass down quickly, hard, on the bar, eyes snapping to Jack. "2012." Well, says a traitorous part of his brain, that does explain the clothes.

Then he chuckles darkly, resting his elbows on the table and scrubbing his face in his hands, and he mutters something like, "Ohhhh boy," still laughing. He looks up, letting first one hand, then the other fall away from his face. "You know, you can tell me that I've snapped and you're a figment of my imagination, Officer Bauer. I promise, I won't bite."

"It's just Jack, unless you really want to use my Army rank, which would make it Captain Bauer. I haven't been in the army for at least fifteen years, though. And no, I'm not a figment of your imagination," he says, laughing a little. "Trust me, you'll believe it eventually. It takes some getting used to."

"...Right." Nix takes a sip of whiskey and immediately his eyebrows fly up. He holds up the glass, studying it in wary bewilderment. Without looking away, he asks, "Did I ask for Vat 69?"

"Not specifically, but Bar tends to know these things. I've never had to tell her how to make my coffee either." Well, not that there would be much to say other than "strong" and "black", but she always managed to find a nice blend.

He lifts off his helmet and sets it on the bar beside his elbow. "What are you saying, it can read minds or something?" He gives a snort of laughter, but it's less certain than it would have been a moment ago. "As convenient as that might be, I'd rather keep mine to myself."

"I don't know about reading minds exactly," he says with a shrug, "she just knows things about the patrons sometimes. What they might want; or what might be best for them, not always the same thing. She tends to mother people."

He looks at Jack a moment.

Then Nixon throws back his head and genuinely laughs.

Some of it may be thanks to exhaustion and the stress of being shot at, of seeing people killed and wondering if you and yours are next, but mostly, Nixon is laughing at the absurdity of it all.

Jack just smiles a little wider, watching Nixon bust a gut. Considering the guy was coming in from France, obviously during the Second World War and covered in filth, he could probably use the laugh.

"Would you believe me if I told you that's not even the weirdest thing around here?"

"Should I?" he asks, laughter slowing enough that he can take a long drink of whiskey.

"Yeah, probably. Though you won't until you see it for yourself."

"Yeah?" He eyes him warily. "Should I even ask?"

Jack just grins. "Oh no. I wouldn't want to spoil the fun of you finding it out for yourself. So where and when did you come in from, exactly? Or approximately, if you can't really say, though I'm not sure you need to worry about that in here."

He shoots him a look, though there's no animosity behind it. "Thanks a lot. I'm not supposed to give specifics but—" He looks around, and his mouth twists wryly as he says, "You're probably right. Normandy, France, June 1944."

Jack's eyebrows go up a little with interest, not that he hadn't been expecting that answer, or something close to it, considering the little Nix had mentioned and the insignia on his uniform.

"D-Day? You must be in the thick of things, then."

He nods, leaning back in his seat. "The battalion is. Jumped in two nights ago."

"Wow." He's a little stunned, as he can't really imagine it. Not that jumping out of a plane into a war zone is foreign to him, but it's been about ten years since he last did that and it was never on the scale of the D-Day invasion. Quite the opposite, really.

"You could probably use the break in here, then. Can you see the door where you came in, by the way?"

He twists to look back over his shoulder. "Yeah. And yeah, but—" A thought strikes him, and he groans. "But shit. They're going to wonder where the hell I disappeared to." He drains most of his glass of whiskey in one go, and to his credit, he makes it look effortless. He swallows and then downs the rest.

"Maybe," he says with a shrug. "Time can move pretty funny outside while you're in here."

Nixon had taken a half step back toward the door, but he stops with a frown at that. "Funny 'ha ha' or funny 'stranger than everything already is'?"

Jack just gives him a wry smile. "Take a wild guess."

"Yeahh, I thought as much." Nix releases a breath. "I'll take my chances, then." He offers a hand again. "Thanks for all your help."

"You're welcome," Jack says, giving Nixon's hand a firm shake. "I'll see you around, I'm sure."

He gives a flash of a smile, teeth bright against his face. "You probably will. My grandmother always liked to say, where there's a bar, there's a Nixon man." Though this, he's almost sure, is not the type of bar Grandmother was thinking of.

Nixon picks up his helmet and sets it on his head, and he nods to Jack before making his way back through the bar.

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