milliways_bar | (no subject)

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thirteen

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Normally, Jacob navigates things like stairs pretty easily. It takes him a few minutes longer than your average guy, and he can't do the thing of going down them so fast your head seems to just float: not that he could if he could see either, he's never been that graceful.

But today? Is just not his day. His fingers are splayed like a pianist's against the banister, tapping in a triplet-plus-two-rhythm that he finds interesting enough to listen to, but his feet don't have the same coordination. He misses the step, and the next one down as well, tumbling in an ill-assorted sprawl of limbs to the floor, where he picks his head up once, and sighs, and puts it back down again, facing up to the ceiling. Hopefully, no one will step on him in the next minute or three.

"Hello, floor. And how are we today?"

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There's the sound of quickly approaching footsteps shortly after Jacob hits the ground. They pause at his side, and a hand gently touches his shoulder.

"Sir?" comes a feminine voice. "Are you alright?"

"I'm good," he says, lifting his head again. It takes him a minute to lever himself up, using her as a convenient post to facilitate this. Of course, it does end up with his hands holding her waist in a way that might be too intimate, if it weren't immediately obvious he's blind.

Then again, the way his hands are shifting up her sides, it might be too intimate anyway. He won't go for the boobs; just the face. She sounds like a nice enough girl. Woman. With those hips? Definitely woman.

She allows the levering, looking on amusedly as she helps him to his feet [not that he needs it].

"You know," she says dryly. "There's only a certain amount of feeling up feeling up I can account for your blindness without you buying a girl a drink first."

His fingertips have made it to her face in the quest of feeling her up, but at the dry tone so similar to his (most of the time), he pats her cheek and smiles.

"Right."

Not a fighter. But he keeps that bit to himself. "Before I feel you up, or before you account for it?"

Not a fighter, no. More healer, with a helping of protector.

She doesn't bat away the hands, like she would with anyone else she just met trying to feel her up, and for the moment, there's a general air of indulgence about her.

"Before you feel me up any further."

Hey, she works with House, she's nearly fluent in cryptic.

Edited 2011-02-25 05:22 (UTC)

He chuckles.

"I've gotten turned around. Point me towards the bar and I'll do that."

Remy laughs, and she takes his arm in her own as she leads him towards the Bar.

"Come on, I'll take you."

"Great. Just don't run me into it."

Not that he couldn't, you know, dodge, but the banter is worth keeping up. "You're a, what...doctor? Nurse?"

Especially friendly well-shaped lady?

"Doctor," she responds, guiding him through the crowd and sidling them up to the Bar. "What gave it away?"

"It was a guess. You were quick to help the blind guy on the floor," he says with a quirk of his mouth.

She smirks.

"I could have just been some Good Samaritan that just saw a blind guy tumble down the stairs ass over teakettle. You never know."

"You'd have protested more at me feeling you up."

This draws a scoff from the young doctor.

"Good looking guy feeling me up, what's there to complain about? Besides, I'm sure the whole 'tape over your eyes' didn't exactly help your coordination, either."

Edited 2011-02-25 06:47 (UTC)

"I don't know, I don't get felt up much to draw conclusions," he admits. "Not since the whole 'dead' thing turns people off to that here."

But he smiles at the tape comment. "You could say it's a way to keep people from asking why I'm staring at things."

Another scoff sounds, and cautiously, Remy lifts a hand to gently brush her fingers along the tape.

"People are idiots," she murmurs softly, echoing words House says almost constantly.

"Yeah. But even if they are it gets annoying."

He lets her fingers brush over his eyes and his lashes bobble as if he's suppressing the blink reflex; he is. "Take it off if you want." He has another roll in one of those pockets, we're sure.

"It's just one of those things you have to deal with from day to day," she says, carefully easing off the tape, taking care not to let the tape tug at his eyebrows or lashes.

"You got a name, Mr. Cryptic?"

He holds still for her to ease the tape off, and blinks dark brown eyes open, unfocused and staring somewhere below her right eye.

"Name's Jacob. Yours, Miss Tape-Hater?" His hands feel around for a barstool and he slides onto one, gripping the counter firmly just to make sure he won't go ass over teakettle again.

She has to pause for a beat or so, momentarily taken aback at the appearance of dark brown eyes that look right though her.

"Remy," comes the soft reply as the woman takes up a seat of her own. "Nice eyes."

"Don't remember what they look like," he says. He's accustomed to a world not with just imaginary sight, but without any at all. He's sure he saw them at one point or other, but since his blindness--which went total very early--and then his death, he hasn't retained a lot of memories of what it is to see.

"Remy. Nice name," he says, after a breath of pause, where his fingers come back up and almost unerringly find the tip of her nose, and one cheekbone. "Suits you."

Remy sits still, letting his hands find her face with that previous air of indulgence.

"Thanks. And they're brown. Dark brown. Very nice."

"Brown," he says, half murmured as if he's trying to remember something associated with the word. "Dirt is brown, chocolate is brown. Used to remember what brown was like."

He blinks with long lashes, squinting a little as he thinks back, as his fingers skate over her cheekbones and jaw and eyebrows and against her hairline with the lack of hesitancy that only comes with the very bold.

Bold, she can deal with, she's dealt with much, much worse on a day to day basis.

"Been a while, has it?" she asks, letting his fingers brush over her face.

"Oh, you could say that," he says, finally drawing his hands back and toying with the ragged cuff on one wrist.

"Been dead a while. Been blind longer than that. Years." This dead thing does not, oddly enough, mean he's bound to the bar--he didn't belong to the world of the living when he stumbled into here int he first place.

He's piqued her curiosity now, and Remy tilts her head to one side as she mulls this information over. After all, she's heard about Milliway's dead patrons, but she's only met one other than Jacob.

"So you ended up here after you died?"

"Nope. Been dead a while in my world too." It's difficult to explain this part to people, but he usually gives it a shot.

"I'm a Pathfinder. It's..." He can't think of a good way to finish that sentence. "Hm. Let me ask you a question first. Do you dream?"

The question draws a puzzled blink from Remy, but she nods all the same.

"Yeah, I do."

"Storytellers, in my world, are the people who give you good dreams. They can't be seen, and don't affect the physical world. On the other hand, there are things called Incubi that give you nightmares. And in the middle," he says; though really he's far more on the side of the Storytellers, "Are the Pathfinders. We retain the ability to change the world of the living."

Think of it as a poltergeist, if nothing else.

She listens to him intently, making a soft pondering noise as she absorbs things afterwards.

"So what, you and Storytellers keep away the boogeymen?"

That's one of the better descriptions he's heard out a live one about what they do. He'll accept it.

"Close enough." He pauses, and his fingers tap on the bar. "Watch. Listen."

It's easy to pick out a beat, any of a hundred that all cross here and all affect it equally; Jacob listens and finds it as easy as he'd find his own heartbeat, and his hand taps it out on the bartop. And all around them things fall into the rhythm, and elaborations on the basic beat are all too easy for the mind to conjure.

Remy can't help but watch in awe as things around them start moving in time to Jacob's beat, starting close to them, and slowly rippling outwards.

"Woah."

Eloquent Remy is eloquent.

Jacob smiles the tiniest bit at her incredible eloquence. He can, in a manner, see the world falling into place, and hear all the little sounds lining up and falling in.

"Kinda cool, isn't it."

"It is," she agrees, looking around slowly as she takes things in. "What is it that you're doing, exactly?"

"It's hard to explain exactly..." he says. "There's a beat, music, a song to every world. When you cue in on it everything falls into place. We're all part of the song, you just have to know what to listen for."

There's another soft noise, and Remy takes the liberty of ordering the two of them drinks.

"So, Milliways' beat is different than, say, mine would be?"

"Not as much different as more complex. Milliways' music contains yours," he explains, "And mine and the ones from every other world people come in from. It's like taking a melody here or there and making it a symphony."

He feels for her hand, and because they've already gotten pretty intimate as far as things go for him, taps out a simple heartbeat rhythm. It's hers.

Remy lets him take it, her hand soft in his, with long fingers. Doctor's hands.

She watches curiously as he carefully taps out the beat on the back of her hand, feeling...something resonate in her as he does so.

Slowly, the beat begins to build and encompass more, resonating louder and in more places as it grows ever more complex, reaching almost a feverish, stuttering pace against her palm before it calms back down. It makes it all the way back down to just her heartbeat again before he speaks.

"More like that. If you get me."

"Yeah," she says, her voice a little unsteady as Remy scrambles to collect herself after feeling so laid bare under Jacob's scrutiny. "I think I got that."

Beat.

"You hear that all the time?"

"Pretty much."

Jacob smiles very gently, almost unnoticeable, but it's there. "You could say my head gets a little busy sometimes. But I can tune it out." Sort of.

"Probably a good thing. I can't imagine what it'd be like to be constantly aware of that."

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