The Stumble Inn is a block and a half down East Colfax from the Ogden Theater. Hole in the wall sort of place, down a long, narrow exterior staircase with old wrought-iron railings. Through a heavy, oaken, iron-banded door into a narrow barspace with barrel vaulted ceilings and so many whiskeys lining the shelves back there that each of the battered little tables has a laminated three-ring binder listing them out, organized by country, state, region.
Beyond the bar, the place opens up. There's a small stage and a tight little dance floor but no one's playing tonight. It's a fucking Sunday and the hour's getting later and most folks are just have one or two, to take the edge off. Or three or four, to help them recover from last night.
There's music, though. Of course there is: it's that sort of place.
--
There's a girl at the bar with a headful of blond curls falling down the back of a well-worn leather jacket. Fishnets and heels are also visible from behind with even a spare, cursory glance. She looks, long and lean and tall, 5'9" or 5'10", though she's leaning forward, draped really, over a half-empty bottle of Stranahan's, one hand on the neck, her arm around the base as she chats and laughs with the bartender.
Alec AudenAlec was the sort of person who didn't especially care what day of the week it was when he went drinking. Or even, for that matter, whether it was night or day. Sometimes he'd spend the whole week working diligently on some project or other. Other days, someone might find him drunk and singing to himself at ten in the morning. (Just depended on the day, really.)
Denver had so far proved amenable to his needs on the latter count, and he had yet to even scratch the surface of the countless bars and clubs and gastro-pubs that dotted the city. This one seemed welcoming enough for his needs, and any bar that kept this much whiskey stocked couldn't be all bad.
If Serafine happened to look in the direction of the stairs, she'd see a tall (6'2" plus an inch and a half from the heels of his boots,) wiry-looking figure with a shock of blond hair and a week's worth of scruff on his chin a few shades darker than the hair on his head. Age-wise he was probably between 25 and 30, with sharp, pretty features. He had on a black leather jacket, which he pulled off to reveal a simple white henley and a bit of braided leather circling his neck.
Whether Serafine noticed him or not, he of course noticed her. Sera wasn't the sort of person who went unnoticed in a bar on a slow night (or any night, for that matter.) So he sat down nearby - not next to her but one seat down - and regarded her with a silent and curious glance for a moment before placing his order with the bartender for some type of obscure rye whiskey. When that was settled, he turned to Sera and said, "You look like you should be somewhere more interesting."
SerafínePerception + Awareness, you know how we do.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 5, 7) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneSera didn't feel him from miles away. Maybe just a tingle when he hit the top of the stairs; something whispering against her drunk senses. Enough that she did half-turn, shooting a glance over her shoulder as Alec walked in.
Her eyes are a bit bloodshot, and have the sort of glossy sheen one gets when one has managed to finish half-a-bottle of Stranahan's on a slow Sunday night on a cool, sharp autumn evening in a mediocre bar in a part of town that's only hip when someone cool is playing at the Ogden. Or the Stumble Inn. Or where the fuck ever Sera happens to be.
So: Alec gets a glance as he walks in and then there's cross-talk with the tender and - and and and -
"Hah!" When Sera laughs, she does so open-mouthed. Thoroughly and fully. Hed tipped back, her shoulders twisting in his direction though neither arm leaves its coil around the bottle. That looseness in her posture, in her motion.
"Where-ever I am is by definition more interesting." Her eyes are dark; and steady on him in that challenging way she often has. "Night's just starting, though. Who knows where I'll end up."
Alec AudenAt her laugh, the edge of a smile peaked at one side of his lips, growing into a broad (sharp, dangerous) thing when Sera spoke. Once his drink was poured and placed before him, he lifted the glass and tipped it lightly toward her. "Good answer."
Then he put the glass to his mouth and drank, slowly but deeply, letting the whiskey warm his throat and permeate his senses. When he finished, he wiped his lip with his thumb and relaxed his posture, leaning to one side against the bar. "Statement like that, though... I think you might have to prove it." His eyes held a soft glow of challenge as he held out his hand. "I'm Alec."
Serafíne
"Does that actually work?" The twist of her glossed mouth is wry and suggestive and scoffing all at once, though perhaps a bit flat. There is a banked sort-of spark in her as her arms melt from the crutch of that body and her body language shifts, towards him rather than away from him. See, she turns, leans her left elbow on the bar, her lean frame an angled sweep up toward bar-and-bottle, left hand still around the neck of the glass though the right hand is reaching to take his.
Though perhaps not the way he thinks.
Sera's right hand bristles with rings and tattoos, dark ink crawls over the knuckles and sides of her hand, though in the light and with her jewelry the details of the tattoos are lost. Some sort of text, all black-and-gray. There is also the dark scrawl of ink on the pale skin of her left hand, the palm itself, magnified and distorted by the lens of that half-empty bottle. A spiked leather cuff is tight around her right wrist, peeking out from beneath the cuff of her right sleeve as she reaches for that hand he offers her.
This is how she takes his hand: index finger beneath the curl of his hand, thumb above, as she bends rather ironically over them, brushing her mouth over his knuckles. Leaving behind a slightly viscous smear of lip gloss, and the scent of her hair - all smoke and whiskey.
"The challenge shit." Her eyes find his as she straightens. Dark shadow and liner rings them, and she's too good with her make-up to let him see the hint of shadows beneath them, or maybe that just adds to her allure. "I mean, if so, fuckin' kudos, but I've got nothing to prove. Doesn't mean you can't tag along, long as you can keep up."
An edge to her, tonight. That feels ever-so-slightly self-destructive.
"Serafíne. Call me Sera."
Alec
The manner in which Serafine took his hand, kissing the knuckles in some ironic imitation of bourgeois etiquette, seemed to both confuse and amuse Alec (if his expression was any indication,) but he let the moment pass. There was a story written on his hands - though his was not so deliberately scrawled or decorated (armored) as Sera's. The bones and muscles were hard-etched by labor, the skin rough and dotted with burns and small scars. When Sera pulled away, he glanced down at the smear of lip gloss she left behind and gave a reflexive roll of his knuckles.
She asked if the challenge shit actually worked for him, and he smirked. "Used to."
(Once upon a time and far, far away.)
Alec grabbed his drink and slid casually to the next barstool, taking up proper residence beside her now. "I can keep up," he answered without affectation or bravado. As much a statement of fact as Sera's assertion that her presence made the world around her more interesting by association. (And oh, were the pair of them ever in the wrong company if they had any desire for safety or sobriety.) In response, he finished off the remainder of his whiskey, smiled at the bartender and silently slid his glass across the bar for a refill.
"If I'm lucky, maybe you'll tell me the stories behind your tattoos."
Serafíne
Sera's hands are fine. She's never worked a day in her fucking life. Even when they go on the road, she gets out of the slog of setting up and breaking down their kit by dint of who she is or whatever she's ingested over the course of the show. So: fine hands, calloused yeah, but not from manual labor of any sort, ever. The nails are painted a reflective, starry-black. The peeling enamel has a deep undertone of crimson if you spend long enough studying it beneath the lights in the place.
Which she does sometimes, though not just now.
He can keep up.
"Well alright," she returns, drawls really, the vowels all drawn out, lifting the bottle by its neck and tipping the base in a pendulum arc out to clink it against his refilled whiskey in a wordless toast. Then she drinks another finger or so of her own whiskey, straight from the bottle. Hardly the proper way to drink whiskey, but she does not give a fuck. Breathes in afterwards, though, sharp and deep and savoring as the whiskey thumps back onto the counter, so maybe she does give a very slight fuck. It is, after all, very good local whiskey she is drinking. Hipster-fucking-approved. "Welcome the fuck aboard."
He mentions her tattoos. Sera gives this lazy shake of her golden head, mouth twisting into a mild smirk as she shoots a glance across the bar. The shelves full of whiskey bottles are backed by a mirror as in an actual old-fashioned saloon, and she can find her reflection there, broken into pieces like a second-hand, third-rate would-be Picasso. Her profile is sharp and is not classically beautiful. Brows too straight, nose too prominent, face too narrow, eyes too close together.
And yet: when she's in the room, who can look anywhere else?
There is a brief, far-away look that ghosts across her face. Then she looks back at him, flashes him the most-absurd of her tattoos in the form of a left-handed peace sign. Sharkscissors. The blades on her index and middle fingers, the handles on her palm, one of the loops turning into the shark that curves down her hand and onto her wrist.
"You might get lucky." The smirk is still immediate on her mouth; the far-away look, though. That is also there, still, this implicit sense of distance in her eyes. " - but I don't think you'll that lucky."
Alec
Alec laughed at her response - an easy, good-humored thing. "Fair enough, then." (He, after all, was no stranger to the intimacy of shared stories.) The soft lights of the bar left a glossy sheen in his eyes, warming their normally icy cast. Perhaps Sera's beauty was not of the classical variety, but there was certainly no lack of interest - not on Alec's part, and not from the other men in the bar that night. She was, indeed, impossible not to notice. (And unconventional beauty was beauty nonetheless.)
You see, Alec was rather fond of sharp and dangerous things. He himself had a hardened edge to his cast, though it was tempered by the soft beauty of his natural features. A youthful face, prematurely weathered by experience.
His other hand - the left one - had a long scar running across the back of it. He'd offered her his right hand earlier, but seemed to have switched to his left to drink. "Whiskey's not bad," he commented off-hand, offering tacit approval of the bar's selection. Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he added, "What if I offered something in trade? A story for a story?"
Alec
He compliments the whiskey and Sera, she laughs. Her eyes are bright and there's a certain sort of light sheening across them, the many-layered lights of the bar in scattered reflection over the surface of her half-focused gaze.
"There's a certain time of night when all the whiskey's good whiskey," the creature declares, watching him with a slightly tented expression, her brows peaked above her gleaming gaze. " - though I guess you aren't there yet if you're still being discriminating."
They are standing close now, or at least: closer than they were. He has taken up the barstool next to her and Sera, she's standing. Leaning really, holding up the bar, as they say, her long arms settling around the base of her whiskey bottle as she drops it back to the polished wood.
"Story for story," she seems to be agreeing.
There's a hook to her smile, and her posture is loose and her eyes have that sheen but oh, they are right on him. Her attention layered, and multipartite.
"Drink for drink." Or maybe it is a challenge. When he drains his second and she leans forward rather drunkenly, wielding that bottle with expertise and care and pours him two generous fingers of her Stranahans. Toasts him again, wordlessly, and tips that bottle back once more.
"Truth for truth."
Or maybe it's a spell.
Except no, she breaks the spell-of-it with a quicksilver little grin. "I'll take the trade, though I still can't promise that you'll get lucky enough to hear the stories you're looking to hear."
Her eyes drop from him to her left wrist, then. The shark's body in black ink nearly following the dark line of her vein beneath her skin. Tracing the lines of that tattoo with her eyes.
Sera cannot - and does not - promise him the story of her tattoos.
She doesn't remembering getting any of them.
Alec
Alec @ 6:35PM [Per+Awareness - I can haz dice now!] Roll: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 6, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) VALID
------------------------------
Alec grinned broadly when Sera poured him a drink from her own bottle, giving a little nod of thanks as he lifted the glass to return her toast. She warned him that he may yet be disappointed, but he tipped his head to swallow another mouthful of whiskey and said, "Lucky for me, I'm not picky."
(Which was, in fact, patently false, but in this instance at least he could claim it honestly.)
Truth for truth, she'd said. But stories were not the same as the truth. Perhaps, then, he would offer both. Alec paused a moment to contemplate, turning the half-empty glass in his hand. The liquor inside caught the light and glowed burnished gold. Finally he set the drink down and reached to unhook the two remaining buttons on the collar of his henley. The bartender shot a glance their way, as though briefly concerned that one of his customers might be attempting to strip down, but Alec just pulled the shirt to one side, stretching the fabric over his left shoulder until the line of his collar bone was visible. Beneath it, there were no tattoos. What was there was a pink, rounded scar about the size and shape of a bullet wound.
"When I was about... seventeen. My brother thought it'd be fun to rob a convenience store. Only see, he didn't tell me he was gonna do it. So we went in there, and I go to grab a bag of doritos, and suddenly he just takes out his fucking gun and points it at the guy behind the counter. And I know. I just fucking know this shit is gonna go wrong. You could see it in the dude's eyes, you know? The clerk was this old bastard war veteran I'd met a few times. Fucking crazy.
So my brother points a gun at him and yells at him to empty the register. And my brother - he's a big guy. Taller than me by three inches and built like a mac truck. Most people are scared shitless of him. But not this guy. This guy opens the register and puts that money in a bag and just stares us straight down the whole time. Then, just as we're leaving, he pulls his own gun out from under the counter and starts shooting at us. Hits my brother twice in the arm and then gets me in the shoulder. My brother drops the fucking money cause his hand won't work right, and we bolt the fuck out of there cause by this point we can hear the cops coming."
Alec laughed at the memory and pulled his shirt back into place. "Mick always was a fucking idiot."
Serafíne
So they exchange toasts. He drinks and she drinks and she may drink more than he and she may have been drinking for some time already, but the liquid goes down with a sweet and smokey burn that tastes like the crisp autumn air, the dissolving dusk, the half-remembered sound of a name you've long since forgotten, which will never-the-less be always on your tongue. Something melancholy about that smokey burn on a Sunday night in October, when the world is folding back in on itself. When they can be no more fooling oneself that summer is in any way still hanging on.
Sera's eyes cut from Alec's to his shoulder as he unbuttons the henley and pulls it aside. Dart back as he begins to speak, and there's this moment where she seems caught on the spine of her inebriation, between this clarifying awareness and something else, which feels raw and rather more dark. She's listening though. She's listening and even drunk there is something about her that feels quick: not fast but alive, skin-bound assuredly but not base for it.
Her eyes do not leave his while he's telling the story. Not once, but then his brother is dropping the fucking money because his hand won't work right and they are bolting the fuck out of there and her eyes drop to the scar and she uncurls an arm, reaches out without thinking to touch the scar, to run the tips of her callused fingers over the puckered skin. Her fingers are warm and tapered but the pads are a bit rough, and the nails cut rather short.
"Shit." She's breathing out, quiet, though the word is backed by a low whistle. "Shit. Here I was going to tell you about the guy who did me a chainsaw carving of a frog. Now I think I need to come up with something a damn sight better than that.
"Were you guys thrown in jail? Or did you get off for being kids?"
Alec
Alec didn't seem to mind the touch. If anything, there was a quiet energy to the way he responded, as though the contact made him feel more alive and present in his own body. It was a subtle thing: a shift in the expression around his eyes (like a dawning alertness and hunger) and a faint uptick in the rhythm of his pulse. The small knot of scar tissue sat just above Alec's collar bone in the sinewy shoulder muscle, and if Sera happened to inspect the other side, she'd find a second scar where the bullet had made a clean exit.
Here I was going to tell you about the guy who did me a chainsaw carving of a frog.
Alec laughed and downed the rest of his drink. "And here I thought you didn't have anything to prove." This time he didn't wait for Sera to offer him a refill. He just grabbed the bottle and poured himself another glass. When he spoke next, his voice was lowered.
"Nah. Friend took care of the cops." He looked Sera in the eyes and tapped the side of his skull knowingly, as if to imply some sort of telepathic manipulation. Likely as much of an 'I know what you are' as they were likely to achieve in a public space. "We had bigger shit to worry about."
Serafíne
Sera does not go looking for an exit wound. Sera doesn't even think about what happens to bullets after they hit, tear through skin and ricochet off bone. The trajectory, they way they slice right through. But she is more than a bit fascinated by the flaws-in-things, and the borders, and the places where we have been torn open and how those wounds have closed, so yes: the contact is meditative and thoughtless and aware. She senses those minute changes in his physical presence: the subtle shift in his focus, the beat of his pulse. Her nostrils flare with that awareness and her gaze ticks brightly over him as she finally lets him go. Shifting out of his way as he pours himself a drink before reclaiming the bottle and downing another shot-equivalent all at a go.
Oh, she likes it when the room starts to spin and there are lights without sources and sources without lights. Likes the way the booze burns all the way down her throat and laughs at/with/by/for his needling comment about things to prove. The smile she gives him is coruscant,
this lovely, burning thing.
"Not a goddamned thing," she agrees, with flash of her teeth, over/under his laughing retorn, leaning in to hear his assurance that a friend took care of the cops. She has blue eyes that skew to shadow in the demi-darkness of the mostly empty bar. Sunday night, nothing much happening. Ordinary people have to work on the morrow; or go to school or get the kids up or maybe sleep off the weekend, if they are lucky. There is something glassily reflective about her gaze as it darts to follow the movement of his hand against his skull, all I know what you are and she knows, too. Of course she knows. He can read that knowledge in the sly curl of her mouth as her eyes slide away.
"Don't remember his fucking name." She's going to tell him a story, and goddamnit having called her on her shit he is going to get the story about the guy and the chainsaw frog. "In North Carolina right? We were going to this festival, Get Out Way Out up in the mountains. So many two-laned roads I can't even -
"And like on one of those roads that's all - " her golden head bobs and weaves in intimation of a circuitous route, coiled around the ridges and low valleys, " - he was just off on a clearing on the side of the road. This old truck and a bunch of lumber and some bears and shit he'd carved up. And eagles. Fucker said the eagles sold really well.
"Looked like he was about a hundred and fifty two though I figure he wasn't that old. Skinny as shit with a plug of tobacco in his cheek and these blunt, stained hands. Missing parts of these two," here she takes Alec's left hand and grasps his middle and ring fingers, just above the middle knuckle, "fingers. Said he lost them in the war thought I didn't ask which fucking one. Said he could do anything with a chainsaw but I didn't believe him.
"I asked him to make me a frog, when we came back through it was done. Fucking amazing. So we got high together and I sat there while he whittled my name into the frog's arm-thingy. Do frogs have fucking arms? Legs, what the fuck ever. That dude was so fucking cool."
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