milliways_bar | Happy Hour

Entry tags:

Happy Hour

It's apparently that time of year all over the multiverse, as evidenced by the Special's board.

Specials:.
Finals Night
Maestro
Nutty Professor

If you catch the bartender while he's stealing a minute or two to himself, you may notice the boy has several books piled up behind the Bar, one of them open. He also has some papers he's writing on. He also has a couple fading bruises and scratches and a split lip.

[ooc: sorry about running late; mun got a headache and may be slightly slow, but happy hour's open now, so.]

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Grace snorts. "I don't know. Makes me feel better."

She shakes another cigarette from the nearly crushed soft pack she keeps in her back pocket.

"So. What's his problem?" she repeats.

"It doesn't make me feel better."

That he can think of, anyway. Throughout his life, he's destructive enough that the results of that rage always leave him rather sick inside.

And then he shrugs again, that rolling motion. "We have... distinctly incompatible perspectives."

On just about everything, really.

Grace is good at escaping that feeling.

Too good.

"On what? Not football," she tosses in with a quick smile. "What set it off?"

Tavi never escapes that feeling, and it's a trait he values.

He opens his mouth to answer, then closes it--and suddenly he smiles, and it's the most normal expression that's been on his face yet.

"Nothing really needed to," he says ruefully. It's him and Brencis, that's all.

"Nice smile."

It is.

After commenting on that fact, however, Grace rolls her eyes toward the ceiling and blows smoke at the rafters.

Not smoke rings.

There won't be any more of those for a while.

"Sometimes I feel like that with my sister Paige. Never punched her for it." Not recently, anyway. "Okay. What was it about this time?"

She waves her cigarette at his face without looking down.

Tavi starts coughing when she waves the cigarette in his face.

That is so very much not something he's used to, and he decides in that instant he doesn't like it. At all.

She also gets a momentarily startled and rather confused expression at her first comment. Tavi's not the one who gets complimented on his looks, after all. (Despite actually being quite pretty.)

"I don't have any siblings," he remarks almost absently before sighing.

With another fluid shrug he answers, "Truthfully? I'm not even sure. We disagree on just about everything, and there's... social reasons for him to dislike me on principle."

If either of them knew they've inherited their father's schoolyard feuding, at least one of them--and not Tavi--would be even more enthusiastic about the business.

She calls them like she sees them, when she doesn't have reason to lie.

"You can have Paige," she says, quirking an eyebrow at the cough. She takes a moment to determine if it's real or one of those annoying fake coughs non-smokers -- especially her mom -- do rather than ask you to put out a cigarette, then crushes hers in an ashtray. "I'll keep all my brothers."

Even Leo, as much as he rubbed her nerves raw today.

"What're those?"

"I don't think I'd know what to do with a sister," he says half-heartedly. "Or brothers, for that matter."

Only partially true, really: he remembers Adie and baby Petra.

He gives her a little half-smile and vague, dismissive gesture which say absolutely nothing at all. "Again, simple disagreements, family, geography, history, friends, associates... anything and everything, really."

"Amazing," Grace comments. "Not a lot of people do that well."

She tilts her head.

"Say so much but not actually say a damn thing."

A smiles dashes across her face.

"Geography. Like us and Longhorns, I guess."

Tavi looks at her, his expression genuinely puzzled. "I don't follow."

Beat.

"What are Longhorns?"

The confused look is utterly real--or it looks it, anyway. Tavi can lie to Isana and watercrafters of her skill; he can pull that off without trouble. He's utterly disregarding the first half of what she said.

"Football team. University of Texas," she explains.

Unhelpfully, no doubt.

Grace's eyes run over his face, then she taps her index finger against Bar and asks, "Ever seen a map of the US, on Earth? Texas and Oklahoma are right next to each other. Got a good rivalry goin'."

"N-no," Tavi says, expression still puzzled and a little wary.

Yeah, she's being unhelpful in a special way. He almost admires it--or he would, if it weren't so irritating at the moment.

"And football's... a sport. And this matters enough to cause regions to have huge rivalries."

Butch, another member of the squad, played ball for Texas. Their captain calls him Benny.

For Benedict Arnold.

Yeah, it matters.

"Hell yeah it does. Trust me," she snorts, "drunk football fans are scarier than half the crap I see on the job."

That's a lie.

Especially since she's usually one of the drunk fans.

That just earns her an utterly skeptical look.

Rivalries like that, in Alera? Tend to be resolved at swordpoint and often on a battlefield. With more dead, afterward, than were strictly necessary.

"Job?"

"I'm a cop."

Beat.

"Police detective."

Beat.

"Keeper of the peace."

She does what she can to make sure the football field is as close to that as they get, and busts those who think differently.

Tavi can understand that job. He's a great believer in enforcing justice and peace and Crown law.*

It almost makes him a little more charitable towards her.

He nods a little, filing the terms away in his head. His eyes flick to her badge and then to her gun, noting them and what they likely mean.

He may not have a coin yet, but he's already got a couple knives being stashed away sometimes. Not as many as Ehren tends to carry, but... well. He's got them accessible, anyway.

*And where the law is unjust or inconvenient, changing so he can keep upholding it.

She shifts on her stool a little, going up on one hip to give him a better view of both badge and service weapon. A weary look crosses her face and settles in; as if feeling it, Grace presses her lips together and nods at his books.

"What're you studyin'?"

Grace doesn't want to think about what she sees on the job, or off it. She doesn't want to think about the photo-

(There's a photo of you and your father that was published a lot. Did he say anything to you in that moment?

I... I didn't even know it was him.)

-or the fact that her dead father is having a firehouse dedicated to him today. She especially doesn't want to think of Earl.

(She is anyway.)

Tavi looks at her thoughtfully for a moment. He gets the sense she needs some kind of a distraction, and although--despite his tending duties--he is honestly loathe to help with that, he figures after a moment he might as well.

So it is that a pair of frank green eyes is studying her. "Modern literature," he says with a bit of a shrug. "We're sort of at the end of the semester, so some of the really recent works have come up. Things dealing with the last fifteen or twenty years, the changes in the Realm, that sort of thing."

Some Aleran writing has gotten a lot more depressing, with civil war on the horizon and their golden prince dead without an heir, Tavi has noted. Really depressing.

He sometimes feels it's like they're giving up the fight before it's started.

"I always liked the gritty modern stuff over the classics," she tells him. "What kind of changes?"

For her part, Grace gets the sense this kid doesn't like her much. Too bad. There have been moments when he almost reminds her of her nephew Clay. And Grace loves Clay. She'd do anything for him, even tell off an angel.

It's not that he dislikes her, it's just... he's not entirely in a mood to be friendly, and cop or not, she's not the kind of personality he entirely gets along with.

Honestly? If she were on the job and needed help, he'd probably like her better. He has respect for law enforcement.

He seems to be considering her as he watches her face. "Princeps Gaius Septimus died in battle fifteen, sixteen years ago," he says after a moment. "And he didn't have siblings, and never married. Even before that, the House of Gaius hasn't been... particularly numerous, in any of our history, but this last branch was pretty much a single line. There's been quiet undercurrents of unrest for a while, and it's been getting worse now that there's no heir to the Crown."

The narration can pause for appropriate laughter points in that whole statement.

Honestly? If she were on the job and needed help, she wouldn't ask for it anyway.

She's only asked for help once in recent memory, and just look where it got her. Or who, to be accurate.

"Any action or just a lot of talk?" she asks, her cop face on.

Tavi's eyes grow hard--clearly not at her, or anyone present. It's an odd expression on him: he looks young still, but the expression is oddly mature, and not one that'll change in the years to come.

"Not much action that I know of until recently," he says candidly, "and still all rather... covert and unprovable, where action has happened. People are moving into place."

"Hell."

That look in his eyes tells her something.

It says he's extraordinary; maybe in ways she can't recognize yet, but he is. It also says he's seen too much, and that is a look she recognizes.

"Your leader any good at playing chess?"

Which is, of course, her way of asking if he's staying one step ahead of the dissenters.

Tavi's first reaction is to give her a mildly puzzled look.

"Chess?"

No, he hasn't heard the term before.

"Yeah."

Eyes dropping, she sneaks another look at his clothes and appears to address her explanation to them.

"It's a board game. Uses a checkerboard. There's two players, each trying to out strategize the other. You start with a certain number of pieces and try to," she looks up, snapping her fingers, "capture them. Checkmate."

Happy Hour

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