Oh my beautiful liar...
Despite the sub-freezing weather, there are still a few people out and about in Chicago.
There's a whore walking the streets of Chicago, but not for the reasons you'd think. A blue-haired demon who goes by Indigo Jones has spent the day shopping, and is in a pretty good mood. She's locked her bags in the trunk of her car, and now she's searching ( Read more... )
There's a whore walking the streets of Chicago, but not for the reasons you'd think. A blue-haired demon who goes by Indigo Jones has spent the day shopping, and is in a pretty good mood. She's locked her bags in the trunk of her car, and now she's searching ( Read more... )
There's this suite of problems Owen is facing at the moment. The first is that America has no conception of sensible weather, and he gets the feeling that if he goes for a walk anywhere, he'll be discovered the next day frozen through. The second is that there's no real public building which particularly interests him within walking range in the weather except for pubs.
The third is that, as much as he'd like to start drinking now and not stop until he doesn't have to think of anything, his often-absent sometimes-psychopathic ex-but-possibly-only-in-name boss has showed up in the Tower again, and he can't quite shake the feeling that some sort of catastrophe will follow close enough on his heels to make anything other than sobriety a very bad decision. If he's going to be patching anyone up - and every once in a while he pulls out his mobile just to make sure he's not missing an urgent text or something - he shouldn't be drunk while doing so.
As a result, he's just sitting here with his mostly-uneaten meal, acting twitchy in a pub full of people more blissfully inebriated than he is.
He hates this week.
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Her gaze alights on Owen. He looks unhappy, and while she's not working tonight, it's kind of sad to see some guy so miserable. Only one thing to be done about it.
"Here. Have some." And with that, she sets the fruity concoction in front of him, and steals one of his fries, chewing thoughtfully. "'Cause the thing is, most people, they come into a bar, they're there to drink. If they're not there to drink, they're there to eat, but you're not doing that, either. And you don't look like you're here to be social. So. Have some. Just a little to take the edge off."
She plops down in the seat across from him and grins brightly. No, Owen, she's not going away until you feel better.
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"Maybe I'm here because it's fucking cold outside," he says. And then shakes himself out to what the beginning of this conversation was supposed to be. "I'm sorry, do I know you?"
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"Also, you don't know me, I'm Indy. It's short for Indigo and not Indiana and that drink isn't going to bite you. Or maybe you think I poisoned it or something." She tilts her head slightly. "You could be that paranoid." She takes it back, takes a deep drink and follows it with green Pixy Stick, then sticks out a slightly green-stained tongue at him and winks.
Silly human. What would she have to gain by drugging him?
"Honestly, that's it." She shrugs, spreading her hands. "You seemed mopey, I brought alcohol. Does that not happen to you much?"
The thought that there are people who just don't get random offers of company or alcohol when they seem depressed just doesn't occur to her, apparently.
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He passes right by mopey and paranoid in his unsuccessful bid to get out of what the fuck, and ends up somewhere in the vicinity of "...no, actually, it's usually drugged or someone knocking my face into the table." Which kinda slips out before he thinks about it, and then he follows it up with "and I'm not drinking because there's a possibility that an insane madperson will snap and try to murder all of my friends, and I really need to be on call for dealing with that."
That probably doesn't help anything. And it's not as if whatever bright fruity thing she's pushing at him would have enough alcohol to make him more than potentially tipsy, but...
"Do you just..." He stalls out for a moment. "...find people to give drinks to?"
No, it sounded exactly that dumb in his head.
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She takes another drink, steals another fry -- hey, he's not eating them, and it would be a waste to just let them get cold -- and raises an eyebrow. "So, insane madperson... That's kind of redundant. A little bit. I like that word. Redundant. But I'm just going to nod and smile and guess that you're a Wanderer, because most people don't have lives that interesting," unless they work for the Organization, and she's pretty sure he doesn't, "and if you were a coldblood, I think I'd have noticed by now." She holds a hand above Owen's, not quite touching him, but enough for him to feel the heat radiating from her.
"Yeah, you're human. I'm a Behemoth. Not gonna eat you, either, before you get jumpy about that. I've got Pixy Stix." She holds up the tube of flavored sugar. "Also, your fries. Are you going to eat any of them, you know, ever?" She steals yet another. "Because I think it's a crime to let these go to waste, but if you're planning on eating them before they get cold and gross..." She gestures with a fry anyway.
"And just how much does your job suck that you're not even sounding that freaked out about insane madpeople?" She tilts her head and peers at him curiously. "You don't have to answer that. But you can if you want to."
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It has not prepared him for happy friendly demons offering him drinks and stealing his food.
"...yeah. Wanderer," he says, because he's still trying to process, oh, any of that. ...an ordinary person would probably be concerned more by the fact that she's a demon, but an ordinary person probably didn't get stuck on the demon side of the last big Chicagoland war. Number of archangels who have tried (or succeeded) to kill people in Torchwood: Lots. Number of demons: Probably not that many.
How is he expected to respond to any of this?
"I'm not very hungry," he says, and picks a chip off the plate anyway. Maybe he should have thought of that before ordering an entire meal, but this is how his day is going. "And as for insane madpeople, they seem to happen to me more often than you might expect."
This is possibly a case in point.
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He's still obviously at a loss. "Here. Have some. Or some sugar!" She pushes the drink towards him again, as well as the Pixy Stick. "It doesn't really fix anything, but at least sugar helps you hate the world a little less?"
She steals another fry and considers him. "Thanks for, you know, not running away or anything. Some people do. Given the demon thing." Her expression makes it completely obvious this is ridiculous. Just because she's a Behemoth it doesn't mean she eats people or anything. Much.
Not unless they deserve it.
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This is probably a point at which he should be telling her that he really doesn't need the company right now, but they've passed over that invisible threshhold where she's already dragged him into half a conversation and telling her to take her drink and leave would seem a delayed reaction if not completely out of the blue. Somewhere in trying to figure out the next step his muscle memory kicks in and registers that if he's holding a glass he might as well be drinking from it, which he does.
And then immediately pulls a face, because his muscle memory was convinced it'd be getting a swig of beer, and puts the glass down in front of Indy again. "I'm... not... really one for sweets," he says by way of explanation.
This is not the best conversation he's ever had, so far as convincing the other person there's actually a brain involved somewhere has gone.
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"I mean, I'm not trying to force booze on you, but really, if you look like that when you say demons aren't your problem? It sounds like your problems are pretty bad. Alcohol helps." She gives him a decisive nod, then steals another fry.
Hey, those things are tasty. And even with Behemoth metabolism, a bit of food with her alcohol helps for the drive home.
"You never mentioned your name," she says, turning on the charm just a little. The grin's just shy of flirty, but she knows where the line is. She's not crossing the line. There's business and then there are friends, and while Owen may be a bit alarmed to find himself put into that category, that's just how Indy operates.
And if she gives a friend freebies, there's a chance of them thinking they can just scam working girls, and that makes them not friends anymore. Then they're assholes and then she can eat them, but she'd rather just avoid it, because eating people she thought were friends just gives her heartburn and she'll spend hours moping about it and no one wants that, do they?
"So are you going to tell me, or do I just call you 'mopey and kinda paranoid guy who inexplicably doesn't like sweets'?" She wrinkles her nose at him, still grinning. Look at her, Owen. Is she not adorable? Don't you want to be her friend?
...Right. The narration asks that all present forget that question came up.
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After a moment, he pushes the entire plate across the table so it's sitting in front of Indy. Hell, he's already paid for it, someone might as well eat it. And she seems to be getting more enjoyment out of it than he is, anyway.
"Owen," he says. She doesn't need to know his last name. "And a beer is sounding better and better."
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A minute later, she's back, with a beer in hand. "Just sharing, right? Unless you want more, but you said you had to be on call, so..." She takes a sip of the beer, and offers it to him with a wink. "Still guaranteed safe."
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He finishes that by appropriating the beer and taking a good slow drink. It's either an left-handed attempt to seem badass or a surprisinglysubtle way of indicating that he trusts her. Probably it's an attempt to seem badass.
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