milliways_bar | (no subject)

Grace saunters out of Captain Perry's office, already tapping a cigarette from her pack, and tries not to smile. The guys are all looking at her, thinking she's in trouble with their new boss. Quite the opposite. Perry's an old friend from Vice and if Grace loved laughter any less, she'd warn Butch about being all UT in her face, at least for awhile; but he’s been a big boy in a unit full of Sooner fans for years now. It'll be entertaining.

She shoulders open the door to Major Crimes, then the stairwell, and mutters a half-hearted curse. Milliways. A few days without Earl’s making her soft. Whatever, it’s still a bar. Better to smoke with a drink than without one.

When Bar gives her the note, Grace tosses back her head and laughs. She looks at it again; laughs again.

"Sure thing. I could use time to think."

Because pouring drinks in between drinking her own will help her figure out why the motel manager got dead in one of his guest rooms. Obviously. Pushing her hair back, she pulls some not-so-random drink ideas from the proffered book and goes to work on the specials board.

HAPPY HOUR!

Absolut Hell
Holy Water
Jack and coke
and
Shots of Yukon Jack

Dance with the bartender, get a free shot. Bartender's choice.

Smirking, Grace rummages around behind Bar until she finds the sound system remote and cranks the volume to almost too loud. The classic rock already playing suits her fine. Time to shake up this place, she thinks. Time to shake Earl loose.

"Belly up, people. What'll be?"

(tiny tags: Grace Hanadarko, Cal Chandler, Michael, the Pirate King)

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"Mmm."

Her voice is carefully noncommittal.

"My brother excelled at that. Excels."

She shifts again, folding her arms across her breasts.

"I'm the obedient one."

"That's Paige."

The stick up Paige's ass might just be a whole Goddamn tree.

Noting Michael's body language, Grace stops openly eyeing her and leans down on Bar, purposefully relaxing her own stance. She flicks ash in the general direction of an ashtray and laughs quietly.

"I've got four. Brothers."

"Ah."

Michael picks up her coffee again, holding it cupped in her hands. She waits to take a sip.

"Are you the eldest?"

Grace makes a similar move with a bottle of Jack, but takes a drink before replying.

"Nope. You?"

"We're more like twins, really. Or it feels that way."

One corner of her mouth twists halfway between disgust and old affection.

"And it's been a long time since that was a bone of contention."

Several seats down, someone asks for a beer. Grace jerks her head in acknowledgment, reaches for a mug and works the appropriate tap.

"What's your brother do now?" she asks Michael, though it might be somewhat hard to understand with the cigarette dangling from her lips.

"He mostly seeks to upset the applecart. Any applecart, really."

She flicks her fingers in another of those dismissive gestures, this one sharper than the rest.

"Some of his cronies are worse. At least he seems to have a purpose in mind, obscure though it may seem."

"Sounds fun," Grace replies.

Somewhere, Earl rolls his eyes heavenward.

Lowering her head to Bar's level, she makes a few practice motions before sliding the full mug down to her new customer. She grins when it doesn't spill and gives a thumbs up.

"But yeah, family businesses are hard. My line of work, I see a lot go sour. My brother Leo became a fireman like our dad. I'm a cop. That was close enough, you know?"

Edited 2009-04-23 03:26 (UTC)

"I see some of that, too. Though I'm pretty sure the perspective is a lot different."

Michael taps the fingers of her left hand against the bartop, the rhythm short and complex.

"And -- I think I know what you mean. One of my -- associates? I'd say friends, but he's not particularly fond of me. Anyway -- he's a cop, too. And a good man. But he's afraid of burning out someday. I can see where he's coming from on that."

"Not me," Grace declares, giving her words the weight of a promise. "You need the heart of a cop to stay in long term."

Watching Michael's fingers, Grace taps her own and tries to pick out the rhythm.

"You've got expressive hands."

"I'd think, to stay in long term and make a difference, you'd need to have a heart at all. Some people separate things too much; they lose the meaning. Politicians for one. The brass."

She flattens out her hand, studying the back of it, skin smooth and scarless, before looking up at Grace.

"They're what I do all my work with."

And perhaps, just perhaps, they make up for the lack of varied expression on her face.

"Some separation's good," says Grace, who has a fast and rough memory of Yukon's blood spraying her face. "It's hard if you let yourself feel each case, start to finish. Stuff builds."

Something in her voice suggests she's good at both: separating herself from the pain when necessary, and then remembering it later.

But sometimes distancing herself is impossible.

"Hands say a lot about a person," she notes absently.

Edited 2009-04-23 04:09 (UTC)

"Mmm. I could stand to be better at compartmentalization."

Especially when it comes to her brother.

Michael reaches out with her unoccupied right hand and picks up her coffee cup again.

"What do my hands say about me?"

Grace glances at Michael's hand flattened out on the bar top, but it's the gestures the other woman has made over the course of their conversation that inform her answer.

"You're efficient," Grace answers rather quickly, looking up. "Sometimes impatient. You hold in a lot. Capable of strength and..."

She starts to say beauty and has no idea why. Laughing it off, she finishes:

"You don't smoke."

Grace crushes her cigarette in the ash tray and glances at her own nicotine stained fingers.

"You have a good eye," Michael says, calm and unruffled and perhaps, under all that, a bit amused.

"Though I think most of the people that know me very well would say often impatient. And arrogant."

It's not untrue.

"I say if you don't know who you are and what you're capable of, you'll never stand a chance."

"Cop," Grace says by way of an explanation.

To be fair, she based her assessment as much on the rest of Michael's body language as she did on her hands.

Except for the smoking bit.

Grace nods at Michael's words and shrugs out of her green jacket. In her head she hears classic rock blaring on a car stereo and the squeal of tires before metal crunches metal.

"Most people that know me would call me a smartass," she says eventually, flashing a quick grin.

And complicated.

"You've said."

Michael reaches up, tucking a few strands of dark hair out of her eyes.

"It's hard to believe, maybe, but a lot of the people I know could be described pretty much the same way."

Like Lucifer. And Fionnghuala. And that so-very-troublesome Kit Marlowe.

"Though I think you may outperform a few of them."

"I make it a habit," Grace laughs.

Outperforming. Living loud. Pushing buttons.

"No sense doing anything small." She taps her bottle against Michael's coffee cup. "Might as well live it up."