milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Thor thought he was leaving his chambers for the palace hallway. (He also thought that the only doors to Milliways seemed to be on Earth, and not Asgard.)

And yet: Milliways.

The Thor that casts a look across the barroom looks notably different than anyone here will have seen him before. He's clad in armor, and carries a large war-hammer easily in one hand. And there's a subtle radiance to him that wasn't there before -- not an actual glow, but as if the light is hitting him differently, so that all the colors of his body and clothing are just a tad more saturated than those of anything around him.

Other things Thor looks: weary, and heartsore.

Thor wouldn't necessarily mind companionship right now, but this -- this brightly lit room full of bustle and strangers and curious faces and lives untouched by his brother's life and his brother's (probable) death -- is exactly what he doesn't want. That one look done, he heads straight for the back door.

You'll be able to find him out back, striding alongside the lake, or sitting on a rock some ways away from the bar with his forearms on his knees and his hammer resting beside him.

Or, perhaps, you'll just see a strangely isolated thunderstorm moving rapidly over the lake towards the mountains, with what the keen-eyed might perceive to be a humanoid form in its midst.

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Huh. Interesting.

You know, in a distant kind of way.

"They have many delicious foods," he agrees, half-answering what he hasn't actually realized was a question.

A clue!

Sort of.

Maybe.

Look, it's a start. She avoids sulking through strength of will.

"My partner... my latest partner, who gave me a door out of here, he has no sense of good food. I have been trying to teach him, to varying degrees of success." It's a project! Except less of a project and more of something for them to give each other grief about that doesn't mean much and blows off drama.

If a cat and a bird were to make a home, they would make it somewhere within easy reach of half-a-dozen markets.

Thor half-smiles, though it's small and sorrow-dimmed.

He's thinking of Volstagg, and of Erik and Darcy and Jane, who gave him pancakes and coffee and hospitality, and whom he may never return to visit during their short lifetimes.

"A kindly act. Is he willing to learn?"

"Eh. He will eat fish roe now, which he would not before, but he still buys Wonderbread. The only wonder of it is that anyone would eat it willingly twice." She snorts - this is something of a long-standing debate.

Probably only still going on because both participants are having entirely too much fun with it.

Thor is confused as to why anyone wouldn't eat fish roe. It's perfectly standard food! Also delicious, in a not-terribly-substantial kind of way.

But: people are weird. Especially people from other worlds.

So he goes for the more bemusing part, after a moment to try to parse it himself, which is: "Why would they not wish to eat a bread of wonders?"

It's a genuine question, because clearly she feels there's good reason to not.

"Because I can grab the loaf," And by loaf she means the tragically pre-sliced monstrosities (or whatever's left after Skellig has some), "And I can squish it. Like this."

Hand gesture demonstrations for the win! Though she's probably over-stating her claim as to Wonderbread's squishiness, there. That's a tiny ball.

"I make little squished bread animals. It is a better use than eating."

...Uh.

"It is full of air?"

It is actually modeling clay? Help him out here, Katya.

Thor is vaguely picturing something like angel food cake. Maybe.

"Air, empty promises, and evidently tradition?" She scrunches her nose. "It is... very popular. Where I am from, it would be more suitable for filling mattresses."

Of course, not everyone likes their bread black and hearty enough to be a meal into itself.

"Tradition is important," Thor acknowledges, serious about this as only an Asgardian prince can be.

If her partner's tradition is weird squishy bread full of air, what can you do?

Well, mock him about it, clearly, but that's just what friends do. (Unless the custom is too serious to mock. But it clearly isn't.)

"Da, da, but this one needs to die a swift and brutal death. They have so many better... like apple pie. Mmm." She hums happily - apple pie might be one of the best things.

Especially with cheese. It makes little Russian tigers happy.

Thor's never going to be bothered by talking about swift and brutal death, but it's a little harder to find fierce humor in it than sometimes.

Though, to be fair, that's mostly just because humor is far away from him right now on every subject.

"Perhaps you will convince him yet."

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

(Thor has had apple pie on many occasions, although not any modern Earth version. Instead he's had the dishes of hundreds of years ago and of Asgard and various other realms, none of which are spiced quite as Katya might expect of her pie. But he has yet to encounter one he didn't find tasty.)

She shrugs, a loose-limbed gesture that makes her look almost gangly.

"I have time. And a lot of stubbornness."

Thor, who has rightly been accused of both these things himself, looks a little amused.

He'd look a lot more amused on another day, but vague approval's still there.

Hmm. That's a bit of a more natural look for him, isn't it? She stretches languidly, then frowns at her surroundings.
"Would you like some vodka?" Because bottles of vodka should just happen, and somehow they aren't. It behooves her to fix that oversight.

Thor considers that.

And then shrugs.

She seems a good enough companion. And it's rude to refuse without a better reason than I'm not all that enthusiastic about anything right now.

"I can offer you little merriment tonight. But very well, if you wish it."

Human strength vodka, he wonders idly, or Asgardian strength? Either way, he's good for it.

She grins, and disappears, gone to have a chat with Bar.

She returns more conventionally, with a messenger bag full of clinking bottles. When she explained what she was up to, she was presented with quite a few more bottles than she expected, some with labels she couldn't read.

That trick -- the sharp smug grin, and disappearing into thin air -- strikes at his heart. Because it's Loki's trick, Loki who will never smirk his way into illusion for a prank again.

It looks different; her grin isn't Loki's, and her vanishing looks as if she dropped into a shadow and it swallowed her like a portal. But Loki is on his mind, and the swift disappearance is just close enough to hurt.

He has control of himself and his expression again by the time she returns.

...Maybe mortal alcohol, if she's brought that much!

Edited 2013-02-04 05:32 (UTC)

"She gave me bottles. Many many bottles." Katya announces cheerfully, dropping the bag carefully between them and digging out one of her favorite brands, snapping off the cap and drinking.

"I haven't the faintest what some of that is. Experimentation is good, no?"

Luckily, the Allspeak works on writing too! Well, on reading, at least. It can't reshape Thor's own script for anybody else, but he can understand the words he's looking at.

He scrutinizes a bottle accordingly. And, hey, this script he actually knows anyway.

"Ah -- liquor of Vanaheim."

They make good stuff.

"Vodka," he adds, in case context didn't make it clear, and cracks open his own bottle. Apparently they're forgoing cups. Fair enough!

"Vanaheim?" Katya echos questioningly, curling up neatly on her rock again.

Katya is terribly distressed by unfinished bottles of alcohol, so really, cups are only necessary if you only have one bottle and quite a lot of people you don't trust sharing it.

"One of the Nine Realms of the cosmos. As we count them where I'm from."

Vanaheim is the closest to Asgard, both geographically and culturally. So Thor's visits there, while inherently carrying a certain diplomatic weight (like Thor's visits anywhere), have always been more genuinely visits than anything else.

He takes a sizeable swig, and offers her the bottle politely to try.

She will find that it's excellent, very smooth vodka, with a subtly unearthly flavor. She will also find, especially if her metabolism is more or less human, that despite the smooth taste it's really really really strong.

She will never, ever be prepared for a gesture like that. It would never happen in her Moscow, the old stories still told in too many places to allow many to be that unwary. She's no Olga, but the things she could do with an advantage like that...

She smiles, shaking her head.
"You offer me an advantage I do not think you mean to - I will try that with the next open bottle, da?"

And it might just become her favorite.

Thor retracts the bottle, studying her with new thoughtfulness.

"Where I'm from," he says, "it is comradely to share, and rude to do otherwise."

Though Thor is adaptable to different customs. If she doesn't want to share -- even without that implication of magical consequences -- he won't offer again.

"Da, da," Her smile turns a little wry as she realizes she explained rather poorly. "It is the same, in Russia. But..." She hesitates, and then with a slightly frustrated flaily hand gesture she goes on in Russian, since the concepts don't translate well for her in English, and she still refuses to let the Bar do the translating for her.

(She still hasn't caught on, not really, that he isn't exactly a Russian speaker himself. Oops. Poor form, Katya.)

"The old stories, told by grandmothers for generations, about burning baby teeth and hair being used for hexes, they are true... for me, for my world, yes? I have been trained for... oh, since very little, very young. I probably could not do much, with that... maybe bad luck for you, for a time, I do not think I could to more, but it is worse than a little rudeness to not give warning, no?" She stumbles a bit through the explanation, because it has been so very long since she's had to.

Edited (Closing HTML tags is awesome!) 2013-02-06 05:36 (UTC)

To Thor, this just sounds as if her accent has shifted a bit. He knows that means she's switched languages, but he has only the vaguest idea of what that means, or why she might have done so.

He listens, anyway.

"I do not know your realm's tales," he says at the end. "We have our own, and many of them have truth to them. But I thank you for the warning of your powers."

He's really just as glad to not see what more bad luck would do, after the last few days' events.

Friendly and wry: "I would rather not learn what bad luck you could give me if you tried."

Hey, another hefty swig of Vanaheim's vodka. Still tasty.