milliways_bar | (no subject)

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"Just leave me alone, I'm not doing anything to you."
"You're in the way Sandy."
"Let's put him out of the way."

The door swings shut - a gym locker door today - with an eight-year-old Guppy with his coat and jumper hooked neatly onto the peg so that his legs dangle. He looks surprised to say the least that he's ended up back in the bar he was in the other day, but right now is more concerned about what his mum will say about the stretched jumper. He squirms, trying to lift himself up on the peg so that he can unhook himself.

And then sighs, because being stuck on the inside of a locker door is just plain embarrassing.

Little help over here?

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"Thanks... Katara."

He fidgets and smiles awkwardly.

Too cute for words.

"What's your name?" she prompts, since he doesn't seem inclined to give. And is also, totally subtly, leading him toward the bar. Growing boys who are bullied and hung on doors need cookies.

"Gurpreet miss."

He follows cautiously.

"Well, it's very nice to meet you, Mr. Gurpreet." Opposite tactic: if he calls her 'miss,' she'll just be equally formal!

Doesn't stop her from sitting at the bar and ordering a plate of cookies, though. Or from offering him one.

He looks confused at that.

Tempted as he is by the cookie, he shakes his head.

"No thanks. Daddy says I can't have sweets off strangers."

Daddy sounds like a jerk.

Frowning a little to be denied, Katara sets the cookie back down and gestures to the bar. "You know Bar, though, don't you? I mean, it's totally okay if you just dont want one."

He looks confused.

"Know Bar?"

Uhm. Wait.

Katara blinks at him for a second before settling back in her chair, glancing around the room before settling back on the boy.

"...do you know where you are?"

She'd just kind of assumed he did, what with the not-freaking-out and all.

"I'm in a pub off The Mists that turned up in my locker the other day."

The Mists part flies over her head but people get a lot of strange ideas of what and where Milliways is - Katara just stopped questioning it a while ago.

"Oh. Well, this is Bar," she says, patting the bartop gently, "and she can get you anything you want. And talk to you, too, she writes on little napkins and gives them to you when you ask a question or something. But... well, I guess you don't know her since she didn't say anything to you last time you were here.

"...but you can order something yourself and put it on my tab, if you want to."

"Thank you miss." he says, not really getting all that.

"Katara."

Because he should get that part.

"Miss Catarrh, sorry."

"No, no - Katara. Just Katara, not miss-anything." Stealing a cookie to munch on herself, Katara smiles at him. "You're not that much younger than me, you don't have to call me anything special."

"Daddy says it's rude to call grown ups by their first names. And I'm eight and seven sixteenths."

Katara opens her mouth-- and decides to bite back her comments about Gurpreet's Daddy. She's spent enough time with Zuko to know not to touch that.

Instead, she picks at her cookie and shrugs a little, glancing to him again. "Well, I'm not much older. And a lot of people tell me I'm not a grown-up. And I'm definitely not any better than you! So it really wouldn't be rude if you just call me by my name, without title or anything."

"Oh, okay. Thanks."

He watches the cookie.

"Normally older kids don't want to talk to me. Not nicely anyway."

"Sure."

She totally knows he's watching the cookie. It's how to give him one that's an issue.

"Bullies?" she asks, like she already knows the answer - he was stuck to a door, after all.

"Differences in opinion." he says mechanically, as though rehearsed.

Not everybody can be bullied into admitting they're being bullied (and, no, Katara does not get the irony in that statement) and she isn't about to force it out of a little boy. So she smiles in a way that lets him know she knows he's lying.

"So... what do you like to do for fun?"

"I read. And I skate." he says, grateful for the lack of interrogation.

"Skate?"

She won't interrogate him unless absolutely necessary-- and it may become so later on.

"On ice. Nana takes me."

"How do you do that?" she asks, blinking in surprise.

"I don't know, I just sort of do it."