milliways_bar | (no subject)

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A pirate walks into a bar.

Sounds like a funny joke, right? It's even funnier if you were paying attention and noticed that right before this pirate walked into the bar, it was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and brown jumpsuit.

Wash doesn't realise anything's amiss until he absently scratches his forehead. He stops. Then both hands are frantically groping at the bandanna tied around his head, and he looks down at himself and gapes at the outfit: boots, sword, vest, frilly shirt and all -- not to mention that his hair's suddenly grown at least a foot and a half. When he gives it a cautious tug, it's affirmed that no, this is not a wig.

"Oh, come on, how is this fair?" he complains to no one in particular. "I can't pull pranks on the ship anymore, but you can pull 'em on me?"

The Bar helpfully adds some earrings and a necklace.

"Gorrammit all to...."

And grumbling in both English and Mandarin, he shuffles toward his booth, costume clinking merrily with each step.

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As a coherent explanation, this lacks something. Alain's face says this, politely.

Noting the look, Wash switches over to Slightly More Coherent mode.

"Stuff called mudder's milk. Looks like a normal drink, but is, my hand to God, the most awful thing you will ever taste in your life. It's basically a turkey dinner stuck in a blender with fifteen percent alcohol added in. Had it in this town where a guy on my crew was being hailed as a genuine folk hero." He shakes his head at the memory, a faint look of disgust on his face. "I think we all had a really good excuse to get well and drunk then."

He snickers.

"Gods. It sounds... an experience."

"It'd be disconcerting to have a friend called town hero, I suppose?" He thinks of children playing Wolves and Gunslingers after Roland and the others saved the town, of the places in the Outer Baronies where gunslingers of Gilead are greeted with the awed reverence of those who tell stories of the city of legend. He doesn't really think that's the sort of experience Wash is talking about, though.

"Jayne," he says with an emphatic eyebrow raise, "isn't a friend. He's a xiōngmĕng de kuángrén whose one step away from dragging his knuckles on the ground and picking lice out of his hair. Which makes the whole folk-hero thing even more violently disturbing."

The Mandarin goes straight over his head, but the gist is quite clear. He snickers.

"Oh. Gods-a-glory. Yes, I see. How the hell did he manage that, then?"

"He lifted a bunch of money off the magistrate of this little moon way out on the Rim, and when he was taking off, his ship took a hit and started going down. Had to jet the crates with the money in it so he'd stay skybound. They landed on this town," he makes a flopping gesture with one hand, "and the poor kids thought he'd done it intentionally, was trying to 'liberate the mudders' or something like that. Got a statue put up in his honour and everything."

Wash makes a face. "And a song. They even wrote a song about it. I need to find some backwater moon that'll write songs about me."

Alain just shakes his head, laughing.

"What a ka," he manages eventually. "That's a tale, now."

"Something I'll be passing onto my kids, that's for sure. Though whether it'll be a bedtime story or a campfire tale's yet to be decided." He rubs the back of his neck and smirks.

He grins.

"Why not both? A part of the tale for this and a part for that, and phrased as the occasion demands. Leave out the mudder's milk and the lice for the cradle stories, perhaps."

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