Scotch, Splash, and a Punch In the Face
Title: Scotch, Splash, and a Punch In the Face
Characters: Adam Monroe, Boone Carlyle
Rating: PG13
Words: 2000
Spoilers: For all of Lost. For Heroes, you just need to know who Adam is.
Summary: Adam Monroe walks into a bar and meets... Boone Carlyle!
A/N: Written for the intoabar challenge.
Adam was bored.
When he was bored, he drank.
The problem was that he was always bored. Which meant that he drank an awful lot.
LA hadn’t changed since the last time he’d visited, at least forty years ago. The same traffic problems, the same tawdry glamour, the same shocking hodge-podge of architectural styles.
Adam hated it.
Just to mix things up---as much as a four-hundred year-old man could mix anything up anymore---Adam had picked a posh nightclub for this evening’s much-needed libation. It wasn’t his sort of thing; these pathetic children trying so hard to be sexy, focusing only on the length of their skirts instead of the content of their conversation. Listening to his own thoughts, Adam shook his head.
“Oh god,” he muttered to himself as the bouncer waved him in, “I’m such an old man.”
He immediately was reminded that he didn’t look it, though, when a young slip of a girl gave him the once over, and then giggled. He got that a lot.
He maneuvered his way onto a stool at the bar in the (mercifully) quieter VIP room and ordered a scotch and splash. It wasn’t hip, and it wasn’t right for this place, but he didn’t care. Not today. Not anymore, to be honest. Recently, he’d been feeling like he was looking for something, something that would end this constant tiredness. He had no idea what that might be, though.
There was a young man next to him. Practically a boy, really. Practically a girl, he was so pretty. For all his youthful radiance, though, there was something remarkably smug about him as he glanced repeatedly over at Adam.
Adam knew smug. He was the lord of smug, and he’d be damned if he let some pretty child give him his own patented I’m-more-enlightened-than-you look.
“Is there something you’d like to ask me?” he posited in his smoothest of tones. Especially here in LA, laying the accent on thick usually intimidated these pretty types. Probably some wanna-be-but-can’t actor, was Adam’s snap-judgment.
The boy took another sip of his beer and smiled, with even more insufferable smugness. “Just wondered what that drink was. I’ve seen anyone order it before.”
“It was popular before your time,” Adam retorted, hoping to shut him up.
“You don’t look much older than me.”
“Hm. Quite,” he murmured, bored already.
Suddenly serious, the boy switched tack. “Hey, my name’s Boone. I need a favor, and something tells me you’re exactly the right person for the job.”
“You? Are asking me for a favor? You’ve got to be joking. I don’t even know you.”
“Just hear me out, okay? So, you see my sister over there? The bitchy-looking blonde.” Boone pointed towards a blond girl---bitchy-looking indeed---who was dancing with an older, beefier-looking man who moved with the grace of a log of wood and probably had the same amount of personality.
“I see her. What about her?”
“Well, I’m supposed to set her up with someone.” He checked his watch. “In like fifteen minutes. Shit.”
“Are you proposing that this someone should be me?” Adam asked, wondering what on earth any of this had to do with him and why. If Boone wanted him to seduce his sister, then fine. The girl was attractive, if vapid-seeming. Adam had been asked to do worse things in his life.
“No. Sorry. Someone else,” Boone said hurriedly. Leaning in closer, he went on to explain, “But here’s the thing, okay? So my friend is bringing the guy in a few minutes. They’re going to park the car in the alley behind the club. I need to be in the alley, getting the shit kicked out of me…”
“What?” Adam interrupted. This was clearly not going anywhere near where he’d expected. So much for thinking nothing could surprise him anymore.
“Just listen. It’s gotta go exactly like this, or else it won’t work. I need someone to beat me up in front of my sister. Then… hopefully, Shannon’ll try to save me. Then you need to hit her, too.”
“Me? You’re asking me to hurt you and your sister?” What sort of sado-masochistic…
“It’ll be all right. And to be honest, she’s been such a pain about the whole thing that she kind of deserves it. Anyway, this guy who’ll be in my friend’s car… he’s kind of a ninja. He’ll see you beating me and my sister up and, if my friend and I know him---and trust me, we do---he’ll get out of the car and probably beat the crap out of you to save us.”
“And he’s a friend of yours? That’s why he’ll come to your rescue?” Adam attempted to reason through this insanity.
“No, he’s never seen me or Shannon before. Technically.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s complicated. Anyway, so he beats you up, and all you have to do is stay down, pretend to be knocked unconscious.”
Something Boone said at the beginning of this ludicrous conversation came back to Adam---‘something tells me you’re exactly the right person for the job’. So he probed, searching for comprehension. “How do you know I won’t be unconscious? Assuming I go along with this ridiculous plan, if your friend is a ninja, as you say, perhaps he’ll do me some serious harm.”
And that was when that smug expression returned to Boone’s face. Seeing it was almost enough to convince Adam to say yes, if it meant he’d get to smack the look off his face.
“I have a feeling it’ll be fine,” Boone said, with meaning. But before Adam could ascertain if and how the hell this stranger might know his secret, Boone continued on, “So, then this guy and my sister will see each other and…”
“And…?”
Boone smiled. “And then we can leave.”
Adam took another sip of his drink. “This seems like an overly complicated way of setting your sister up on a blind date. Why should I agree? ”
“Because once we’re done, I promise I’ll tell you something you’ve been dying to know.”
“I haven’t been ‘dying’ anything, and I highly doubt you are in possession of any facts I may lack,” Adam remarked, figuring the private joke would be lost on Boone.
“Right... Anyway, are you in?”
Adam shrugged. What else was he doing that night? And at least he’d get to punch this kid in the face.
******
It all went according to plan. Boone took Adam’s beating like a pro---he’d probably had experience. Out of the corner of his eye, Adam spotted a gaudy yellow Hummer rolling down the alley.
“It’s them,” Boone whispered while pretending to defend himself. “Keep going.”
Whoever these friends were, they must have been made of stone, Adam thought, because he kept whaling on Boone and nothing was happening. After the first couple of punches, Adam had had his fill and he was now starting to feel twinges of conscience he’d almost forgotten he had. Boone was irritating, but no one deserved this. As if on cue, Shannon stumbled out of the back entrance, tripping over herself due to heels and alcohol.
“Leave my brother alone!” she shouted, shoving at Adam with thin and ineffectual arms.
Even after all these years, Adam still retained some sense of chivalry from centuries gone by. It pained him to manhandle an innocent woman like this, but he’d given his word, and therefore he shoved her roughly against the wall, angling his blow so that she’d break her fall on some nearby bags of trash.
Thankfully, that seemed to do the trick, because a second later, he heard the car door open. A man came barreling out, and if Adam hadn’t been a regenerator, the neck twist he received would have been the end of him. Ninja indeed. It hurt like hell, and it wasn’t difficult for Adam to stay down, as instructed.
He kept his eyes open, though, and watched the strangest confluence of events unfold in a manner of seconds. The man stretched his arm out to help the girl up, and immediately, the two of them seemed to know one another’s names. And the next thing Adam knew, they were practically fornicating in the alley.
If only everyone’s blind dates could be so successful. These two hadn’t even spoken, but they seemed instantaneously and rapturously in love in a way Adam had very rarely ever seen.
With Shannon and her new paramour now inhabiting their own world, Adam decided the game was over, and it was time to get back to his hotel. He was about to leave the alley when Boone stopped him.
“Hey, thanks for all your help back there,” Boone said. Adam hoped he wasn’t going to pay him or anything tawdry like that. This night had already been confusing enough without that.
“It was my pleasure,” he replied, relieved to only receive a handshake. “So…” He glanced over at the happy couple. “I thought you said they didn’t know one another.”
Boone simply smiled instead of answering. Infuriating. “Look,” he said. “I promised you I’d tell you something you wanted to know.”
Adam hadn’t given any credence to the promise before, and was somewhat surprised to see the subject being raised anew. “Yes, but…” He was about to tell Boone not to bother trying to make something up, but the boy was insistent.
“So, I once met this guy…”
Adam cringed, hoping that the scene with Shannon was not going to turn out to be simply a long con orchestrated by Boone to set himself up with Adam.
“Yes…?” he asked hesitantly.
“He seemed like he knew what was going on in a time when I didn’t. I latched onto him. He taught me a lot of stuff. He taught me how to tap my own potential. He pretty much taught me how to be a man. But then, in the end, he kind of sacrificed me to what he thought was his destiny.”
“You seem fine,” Adam remarked, but his mind was busy thinking about a long time ago, halfway around the world, when he’d experienced something similar.
Boone nodded his head, obviously trying to figure out the best way of explaining what was turning into his second crazy story of the night. “Yeah, but I wasn’t. I really wasn’t fine after what happened. But you know what? I saw him again recently, when he was at his lowest. It was like the reverse of the first time. This time, he needed me to make him feel better, to make him feel like a man.”
“Why are you telling me this?” If he’d suspected before, now he knew that somehow this boy knew a lot, knew everything. Adam wondered what his power was---telepathy? In that case, he might keep him around. Telepaths were always useful.
“Because as soon as I forgave him, and helped him the same way he helped me… I understood.”
“Understood what?”
“I’m not allowed to tell you, but it’s something really really important. Anyway, if what I’m saying rings a bell about anything… and I think it does… You know who you need to find. And you need to forgive him. Trust me. You won’t feel tired anymore.”
Adam didn’t know what to say. For the first time in at least eighty years, he was speechless. He still didn’t know how Boone knew everything that was worth knowing, but he was right. “I… I will.”
“Look, I’ve got to get back to my friends,” Boone continued, pointing over his shoulder at the couple, who were now talking to an enormous man in a suit---the driver of the Hummer, Adam assumed. “We’ve got another appointment.”
“Another matchmake?”
“Nah, this is something different. You won’t see us again. At least not here. But hey, we’ll catch up sometime, I’m sure.” He proffered his hand. “Thanks again.”
“It was nice to meet you,” Adam said. “And thanks.”
“No problem.”
Characters: Adam Monroe, Boone Carlyle
Rating: PG13
Words: 2000
Spoilers: For all of Lost. For Heroes, you just need to know who Adam is.
Summary: Adam Monroe walks into a bar and meets... Boone Carlyle!
A/N: Written for the intoabar challenge.
Adam was bored.
When he was bored, he drank.
The problem was that he was always bored. Which meant that he drank an awful lot.
LA hadn’t changed since the last time he’d visited, at least forty years ago. The same traffic problems, the same tawdry glamour, the same shocking hodge-podge of architectural styles.
Adam hated it.
Just to mix things up---as much as a four-hundred year-old man could mix anything up anymore---Adam had picked a posh nightclub for this evening’s much-needed libation. It wasn’t his sort of thing; these pathetic children trying so hard to be sexy, focusing only on the length of their skirts instead of the content of their conversation. Listening to his own thoughts, Adam shook his head.
“Oh god,” he muttered to himself as the bouncer waved him in, “I’m such an old man.”
He immediately was reminded that he didn’t look it, though, when a young slip of a girl gave him the once over, and then giggled. He got that a lot.
He maneuvered his way onto a stool at the bar in the (mercifully) quieter VIP room and ordered a scotch and splash. It wasn’t hip, and it wasn’t right for this place, but he didn’t care. Not today. Not anymore, to be honest. Recently, he’d been feeling like he was looking for something, something that would end this constant tiredness. He had no idea what that might be, though.
There was a young man next to him. Practically a boy, really. Practically a girl, he was so pretty. For all his youthful radiance, though, there was something remarkably smug about him as he glanced repeatedly over at Adam.
Adam knew smug. He was the lord of smug, and he’d be damned if he let some pretty child give him his own patented I’m-more-enlightened-than-you look.
“Is there something you’d like to ask me?” he posited in his smoothest of tones. Especially here in LA, laying the accent on thick usually intimidated these pretty types. Probably some wanna-be-but-can’t actor, was Adam’s snap-judgment.
The boy took another sip of his beer and smiled, with even more insufferable smugness. “Just wondered what that drink was. I’ve seen anyone order it before.”
“It was popular before your time,” Adam retorted, hoping to shut him up.
“You don’t look much older than me.”
“Hm. Quite,” he murmured, bored already.
Suddenly serious, the boy switched tack. “Hey, my name’s Boone. I need a favor, and something tells me you’re exactly the right person for the job.”
“You? Are asking me for a favor? You’ve got to be joking. I don’t even know you.”
“Just hear me out, okay? So, you see my sister over there? The bitchy-looking blonde.” Boone pointed towards a blond girl---bitchy-looking indeed---who was dancing with an older, beefier-looking man who moved with the grace of a log of wood and probably had the same amount of personality.
“I see her. What about her?”
“Well, I’m supposed to set her up with someone.” He checked his watch. “In like fifteen minutes. Shit.”
“Are you proposing that this someone should be me?” Adam asked, wondering what on earth any of this had to do with him and why. If Boone wanted him to seduce his sister, then fine. The girl was attractive, if vapid-seeming. Adam had been asked to do worse things in his life.
“No. Sorry. Someone else,” Boone said hurriedly. Leaning in closer, he went on to explain, “But here’s the thing, okay? So my friend is bringing the guy in a few minutes. They’re going to park the car in the alley behind the club. I need to be in the alley, getting the shit kicked out of me…”
“What?” Adam interrupted. This was clearly not going anywhere near where he’d expected. So much for thinking nothing could surprise him anymore.
“Just listen. It’s gotta go exactly like this, or else it won’t work. I need someone to beat me up in front of my sister. Then… hopefully, Shannon’ll try to save me. Then you need to hit her, too.”
“Me? You’re asking me to hurt you and your sister?” What sort of sado-masochistic…
“It’ll be all right. And to be honest, she’s been such a pain about the whole thing that she kind of deserves it. Anyway, this guy who’ll be in my friend’s car… he’s kind of a ninja. He’ll see you beating me and my sister up and, if my friend and I know him---and trust me, we do---he’ll get out of the car and probably beat the crap out of you to save us.”
“And he’s a friend of yours? That’s why he’ll come to your rescue?” Adam attempted to reason through this insanity.
“No, he’s never seen me or Shannon before. Technically.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s complicated. Anyway, so he beats you up, and all you have to do is stay down, pretend to be knocked unconscious.”
Something Boone said at the beginning of this ludicrous conversation came back to Adam---‘something tells me you’re exactly the right person for the job’. So he probed, searching for comprehension. “How do you know I won’t be unconscious? Assuming I go along with this ridiculous plan, if your friend is a ninja, as you say, perhaps he’ll do me some serious harm.”
And that was when that smug expression returned to Boone’s face. Seeing it was almost enough to convince Adam to say yes, if it meant he’d get to smack the look off his face.
“I have a feeling it’ll be fine,” Boone said, with meaning. But before Adam could ascertain if and how the hell this stranger might know his secret, Boone continued on, “So, then this guy and my sister will see each other and…”
“And…?”
Boone smiled. “And then we can leave.”
Adam took another sip of his drink. “This seems like an overly complicated way of setting your sister up on a blind date. Why should I agree? ”
“Because once we’re done, I promise I’ll tell you something you’ve been dying to know.”
“I haven’t been ‘dying’ anything, and I highly doubt you are in possession of any facts I may lack,” Adam remarked, figuring the private joke would be lost on Boone.
“Right... Anyway, are you in?”
Adam shrugged. What else was he doing that night? And at least he’d get to punch this kid in the face.
******
It all went according to plan. Boone took Adam’s beating like a pro---he’d probably had experience. Out of the corner of his eye, Adam spotted a gaudy yellow Hummer rolling down the alley.
“It’s them,” Boone whispered while pretending to defend himself. “Keep going.”
Whoever these friends were, they must have been made of stone, Adam thought, because he kept whaling on Boone and nothing was happening. After the first couple of punches, Adam had had his fill and he was now starting to feel twinges of conscience he’d almost forgotten he had. Boone was irritating, but no one deserved this. As if on cue, Shannon stumbled out of the back entrance, tripping over herself due to heels and alcohol.
“Leave my brother alone!” she shouted, shoving at Adam with thin and ineffectual arms.
Even after all these years, Adam still retained some sense of chivalry from centuries gone by. It pained him to manhandle an innocent woman like this, but he’d given his word, and therefore he shoved her roughly against the wall, angling his blow so that she’d break her fall on some nearby bags of trash.
Thankfully, that seemed to do the trick, because a second later, he heard the car door open. A man came barreling out, and if Adam hadn’t been a regenerator, the neck twist he received would have been the end of him. Ninja indeed. It hurt like hell, and it wasn’t difficult for Adam to stay down, as instructed.
He kept his eyes open, though, and watched the strangest confluence of events unfold in a manner of seconds. The man stretched his arm out to help the girl up, and immediately, the two of them seemed to know one another’s names. And the next thing Adam knew, they were practically fornicating in the alley.
If only everyone’s blind dates could be so successful. These two hadn’t even spoken, but they seemed instantaneously and rapturously in love in a way Adam had very rarely ever seen.
With Shannon and her new paramour now inhabiting their own world, Adam decided the game was over, and it was time to get back to his hotel. He was about to leave the alley when Boone stopped him.
“Hey, thanks for all your help back there,” Boone said. Adam hoped he wasn’t going to pay him or anything tawdry like that. This night had already been confusing enough without that.
“It was my pleasure,” he replied, relieved to only receive a handshake. “So…” He glanced over at the happy couple. “I thought you said they didn’t know one another.”
Boone simply smiled instead of answering. Infuriating. “Look,” he said. “I promised you I’d tell you something you wanted to know.”
Adam hadn’t given any credence to the promise before, and was somewhat surprised to see the subject being raised anew. “Yes, but…” He was about to tell Boone not to bother trying to make something up, but the boy was insistent.
“So, I once met this guy…”
Adam cringed, hoping that the scene with Shannon was not going to turn out to be simply a long con orchestrated by Boone to set himself up with Adam.
“Yes…?” he asked hesitantly.
“He seemed like he knew what was going on in a time when I didn’t. I latched onto him. He taught me a lot of stuff. He taught me how to tap my own potential. He pretty much taught me how to be a man. But then, in the end, he kind of sacrificed me to what he thought was his destiny.”
“You seem fine,” Adam remarked, but his mind was busy thinking about a long time ago, halfway around the world, when he’d experienced something similar.
Boone nodded his head, obviously trying to figure out the best way of explaining what was turning into his second crazy story of the night. “Yeah, but I wasn’t. I really wasn’t fine after what happened. But you know what? I saw him again recently, when he was at his lowest. It was like the reverse of the first time. This time, he needed me to make him feel better, to make him feel like a man.”
“Why are you telling me this?” If he’d suspected before, now he knew that somehow this boy knew a lot, knew everything. Adam wondered what his power was---telepathy? In that case, he might keep him around. Telepaths were always useful.
“Because as soon as I forgave him, and helped him the same way he helped me… I understood.”
“Understood what?”
“I’m not allowed to tell you, but it’s something really really important. Anyway, if what I’m saying rings a bell about anything… and I think it does… You know who you need to find. And you need to forgive him. Trust me. You won’t feel tired anymore.”
Adam didn’t know what to say. For the first time in at least eighty years, he was speechless. He still didn’t know how Boone knew everything that was worth knowing, but he was right. “I… I will.”
“Look, I’ve got to get back to my friends,” Boone continued, pointing over his shoulder at the couple, who were now talking to an enormous man in a suit---the driver of the Hummer, Adam assumed. “We’ve got another appointment.”
“Another matchmake?”
“Nah, this is something different. You won’t see us again. At least not here. But hey, we’ll catch up sometime, I’m sure.” He proffered his hand. “Thanks again.”
“It was nice to meet you,” Adam said. “And thanks.”
“No problem.”