(Untitled)

[winewomenand]

Robin Goodfellow sat on a stool at the bar in the Catscratch, though not particularly well. He would have been weaving on the small seat if it weren't for the fact that his head was morosely pillowed on the bar-top over his folded arms. His green eyes were dull stones, brown curls damp and plastered to his grimly pale forehead on a face in need of

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[steedtoherpeel]

Giles knew better than to come to the bar, really. He knew better than to let himself get drinking and maudlin. And yet, here he was, three fingers into a bottle of Scotch himself and writing bleary lyrics and chord progressions on a scrap of paper with a fountain pen, wearing down one of his precious few nibs that he had left.

The sound of a respectable language -- Greek, at that -- perked up his ear, and he tilted his head towards the man spouting epithets. "The real hell of this place is that it's so damned close to paradise," he opined in the language, his accent a bit stilted from years of studying the classics.

[winewomenand]

Lolling his head to the side, Robin picked himself up out of his chair. Shuffling a few seats to the side, he wobbled slightly before plunking himself down judiciously in one much nearer to the person speaking to him in Greek. He rested his pointed chin on the other man's broad shoulder, taking a long, deep breath before speaking up.

English was the very best language for swearing, Robin thought, but Greek would always be his favorite.

"I was born in paradise," he intoned with a good helping of melancholy. "This isn't it. I will never see it again. You smell good." He paused, taking in what the man was doing with a wrinkled nose and searching his paper for stray blots and spots of ink. "Few of us can have as many virtues as the fountain pen, although many of us can manage half its cussedness."

[steedtoherpeel]

Company! Drunken, interesting company. Giles felt his mood improve by just the slightest hint. It was more than the scotch had done. "I was born in Kensington," he replied mournfully, "So by comparison the world has only gotten better the further I go."

He glanced down at his shirt -- his somehow partially pressed button down shirt, a proper decent one with buttons at the collars and nary a hole in it. It wasn't the most attractive pattern he'd ever seen, but some judicious overwashing in hot water had taken the worst of the color out of it. "Thank you," he managed. "It's likely ink and sand."

He wiped the pen tip on a separate bit of paper he'd torn off to use as a blotter and capped it carefully. His writing was almost obscenely crisp for a man in his cups. He'd been using proper pens since he was a schoolboy and it showed. "I'm rather fond of the little blighters. I'll be quite put out when I run out of ink."

[winewomenand]

"I was born on a supercontinent," Robin drawled, a peculiar combination of anger and longing mixed into his alcohol-slurred words. "When the moon filled nearly the entire night sky. The dragonflies were big as ravens. The ocean water was drinkable and sweet." He paused, eyes slightly crossing. "But I've been to Kensington once. Dreadful. Awful. Small."

He finally pushed his weight off of the other man's shoulder, pausing to press the tip of his nose into his hair for half a second. He sat back in his chair, almost tipping over in the other direction from the force. He held himself up with one hand clutching the table.

"I miss Englishmen sometimes. They had a cheerful fashion. Not like New York at all."

[steedtoherpeel]

Giles peered at him through his glasses, trying to decide if he were mad, simply out of his mind with drink, or honest and peculiar. He settled on the last, if only for the accurate description of Kensington.

"You wouldn't happen to be some sort of demon, would you? They have this habit of popping up wherever I go." And that would explain the sniffing, although he wouldn't put it past the continentals to have that as a way to say hello. "Where on earth were you in England," he asked with some incredulity, "that you'd call it cheerful?"

[winewomenand]

Robin leaned back in his chair, folding his arms over his chest and blowing a curl off of his forehead, where it was tickling his drink-sensitive skin. The look he favored the other man with was the look one would give a child spitting gum out on the floor.

"A demon?" He snorted. "That's ridiculous. Those don't exist." He knew better - he knew that they did exist, but 'there is no heaven and hell' was the party line he verbally toed for simplicity's sake and he stuck to his guns. "Although I do tend to appear if one speaks my name too often. I have good ears and believe that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

With that said, he took another peak at the words on the other man's paper. Lyrics? In a distracted voice, he added, "Not where. When. For a few hundred years. Very prosaic; had a particular smell about it. Moldy reeds."

[steedtoherpeel]

"A demon," he said, "which do exist, I'm afraid, and in mass numbers, in wild varieties, and occasionally in my living room. Although to be fair," he added thoughtfully, "those were in the majority human-demon hybrids, and most of them had a soul of some sort."

He took a minute to consider the news that the man was magical of a sort. Not really shattering, but still interesting. "What name do they have to speak?" He lifted his head and added, with some small dignity, "If you say Beetlejuice, I shall be quite put out. I've never quite recovered from being exposed to that particular dreck."

They were certainly lyrics on the paper, nothing of any particular genius. Anyone with any musical sense and the ability to make out the chord progressions under the lines of unrhymed, free-metered words would know that Rupert positively reeked of the seventies. "Moldy reeds?" He frowned and hazarded a guess. "Blackpool?"

[winewomenand]

The descriptions of demons had the corner of Robin's mouth twitching, a muscle jumping in his jaw. If there was something Robin didn't know, he wanted to know it - it was his nature. Still, if he was going to learn the intricacies of non-human life in different universes or dimensions or whatever-the-flying-fucking-fuck, he was going to do so sober. So that he remembered them.

The mention of Beetlejuice had a stricken look come to Robin's normally pleasant face - as if. He quickly corrected the monumental inaccuracy of the joke. "Goodfellow." Green eyes stared dolorously out from below dark, pointed brows. He amended his statement. Better to not give the wrong impression in this case.

"Puck. Pan. Faunus. The green man. The herdsman. The piper. All me, at one time or another. All one in the same. Robin Goodfellow is simply the latest." The last, he thought mournfully. "And it was London, mostly."

[steedtoherpeel]

Sober was likely a better time to ask Rupert about demons as well; half-drunk you got ramblings about just how much of a bastard each and every one of their languages were -- and not to put too fine a point on it, how much it correlated with how much of a bastard the individual demons tended to be. Sober, at least, he would pretend to be objective.

Ah hah! He brightened considerably at the name. "I am Rupert GIles. I believe you've befriended my lover." He offered a hand genially. "And driven him to my bed almost nightly. So, I thank you."

He nodded. "London, I do miss. Particularly the London of my boyhood. It's hardly England."

[winewomenand]

Sauced or otherwise, there was one thing Robin absolutely wasn't slow on the uptake concerning, and that was relationships - especially those of the sexual nature. His mouth formed an 'o' of comprehension before he allowed his eyes to trace Giles' form. He was aged; humans got that way quickly. He was not at all what Robin was expecting.

But he wouldn't have kicked the man out of his bed, of course.

"I refuse to sleep on rags," Robin muttered, less by way of explanation than by way of announcement. "And I don't sleep in rooms with more than one bed unless for orgiastic purposes."

He suffered a grim look at his empty tumbler.

"So, lover-boy, what the fuck are you that you are sitting here in a bar drinking and composing? Not that I disagree. I am of the personal opinion that no great poetry was ever written by water-drinkers."

[steedtoherpeel]

Giles nodded in grim agreement. "No one should sleep where he doesn't wish." It was one of the unbreakable Giles rules he'd always kept for himself, alongside 'keep calm and carry on' and 'never suffer anything with 'ilte' in the name, be it music or food'.

"I," he pronounced with all due British gravity, "am a librarian. I am also, on other occasions, a remarkably poor amateur musician and a remarkably excellent professional Watcher."

[winewomenand]

"Sleeping where I wish is one thing. I wish to sleep on a bed of oiled sodomites." He lifted one hand, splaying his fingers to examine his failing two-week-old manicure. "I tolerate sleeping on Egyptian cotton and silk. Anyway."

He lifted his gaze again, zinging a smile Giles' way that would have lit a pine forest on fire. "A watcher. What do you watch, Rupert?" Two neat rows of white teeth showed with four blunt canines.

"I am a used car salesman."

[steedtoherpeel]

Oiled sodomites? Good lord. He couldn't help but look a touch offended at the abuse of the language (though not at all at the concept). He couldn't help but think that this man reminded him just a touch of Ethan, long before he'd gone as dark as he did, and that made him cautious.

"Most people in this age use a bit more euphemistic language," he noted, trying not to sound too terribly stiff. "I find the phrase 'a party' suits nicely."

He folded his hands neatly around the glass. "Strictly speaking, I used to Watch all that was supernatural on behalf of the Vampire Slayer herself. But as time went on, I spent half my time watching her." He considered that. "And half, I suppose, Watching on behalf of my own interests. Vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, warlocks, spirits of all varieties and the occasional garden variety madman."

[winewomenand]

"A vampire slayer," Robin said, face serious for only a moment before he let loose with loud, snorting laughter. It took a few seconds to die down, at which point he wiped tears from his eyes with a crooked finger. "You kill vampires. Oh, Hermes bless you. You, sport, are doing the universe a grand favor, getting rid of those glorified leeches making a grab at actual predation."

There was a second, softer aftershock of laughter.

"I cordially invite you to watch me, then. Maybe you will learn a thing or two about what I consider a party." There was a prehistoric flash in his eyes, the kind that stalked things through thick trees.

[steedtoherpeel]

"With a few notable exceptions, I feel you're quite correct." He tried not to bristle too much at the laughter, but it was rather difficult considering his emotions were closer to the surface than usual. "At the time I left home, at a rough estimate, we'd put down three thousand, seven hundred and twenty-seven. Give or take. I should say," he added, "that that number was merely the primary Slayer's work. Anyone outside of Buffy I kept a much less precise count on."

He drank the last of the scotch from his glass and put the cup down delicately. "I hardly think your parties would shock or teach me." He didn't precisely react to that dangerous flash, but his motions were much more careful. Deliberately chosen, the way a man moves when he's suppressing something. "I have known a few gods in my day, and not the kind ones."

Demons. Gods. It all ended up amounting to the same.

[winewomenand]

Ignorant of Giles' irritation at his laughter, either because of intoxication or natural mule-headedness, Robin laughed again. "I don't think there are even that many of them alive right now, at home. Man is breeding their kind to an early grave. Offspring every nine months versus every ninety years, it does make a difference."

He sobered at the man's next statement, though. "The kind ones don't exist."