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If Finn had noticed that Zia was coming unhinged in their previous interactions, he was being polite and not saying anything. Instead, he picked her up at seven-thirty like a good friend and drove, as quickly as was safe, to the slightly-ironic nautical themed bar near campus. "Okay," he said, looping an arm through hers as they walked across the parking lot. "I'll buy your first round. Or two. Or seven." He was 90% certain that Vanya was under-charging him on the rent, or else the housing market in Destiny City was just that s**t, and being newly-employed had the perks of being able to buy your friends cocktails on their birthdays.

One inside, Zia made her proclamation about being five years from thirty, and Finn handed the bartender his credit card to open a tab. Drinks arrived shortly thereafter, and he settled beside her on a barstool.

"So, uh," he said, playing with the garnish on his glass. "Happy birthday! Did I pick a good place?"

It was pretty crowded. He thought there might be a band playing. "Anyway, this is your night. Have as much as you want and I've got it covered. My roommate under-charges me on rent and you get to reap the benefits."

"You definitely should," said Finn, who planned on fully encouraging anything Zia said tonight that approximated humor, optimism, or good cheer. Anything else, his strategy ran the gamut from smile and nod to agree that that ******** sucks and move on to something better. Today was Zia's birthday, and he was not going to let her spend it moping.

"We're all having a rough time lately," he agreed. Finn supposed that his own personal set of tragedies hardly amounted to there's a bitchy alternate-universe cat inside my head, but my best friend is dead and her zombie doppelgänger wants to either kill me or corrupt me which is really the same thing was probably pretty up there.

Maybe, he thought distantly, alcohol was not the best salve to apply to Zia's ego, but it was what she'd specifically said she wanted. It wasn't his responsibility to police her that way - the best he could do was drink with her and try to keep anything awful from happening.

"Hey, what are friends for," he said, tilting his glass to her. "Let's finish these and go dance."

"I'm a really bad dancer, too," Finn assured her, because being short and stocky with overly large feet did not exactly make one graceful. "But that doesn't stop me." Still, he made the decision to ask her again in another drink or two. No point in pushing too hard and getting pushed back.

"We could... people watch," he suggested, scooting his chair a bit closer to her. "Try and figure out people's stories? Like, those two." He gestured subtly to a young woman in a tight, short dress, on the arm of a much older man in a suit. "Overdressed for the establishment," he said. "I bet they're going somewhere else later. D'you think he's paying her?"

He glanced back to Zia, trying to see if the game was taking hold with her.

Finn hesitated for a moment, considering that he was going about this all wrong and what he'd meant to be a fun game was not going over very well. Then, he leaned in to tell the bartender to keep Zia on his tab all night. No doubt he'd regret it at the end of the night, but for now he slipped a five dollar bill into the tip jar and watched as Zia was presented with a fresh glass. "That beard should have stayed in the 1980s," he said lamely.

Okay. This wasn't fun anymore.

"Do you want to go over to, I don't know, there's a pretty good seafood place attached to here. Do you want to go over and grab a bite? See if we can find something they'll stick a candle on?" Which was, he knew, floundering, and maybe he should just let Zia drink until she got a little bit happy-drunk.

"Or we can just stay here," he added, finishing his cocktail. He stared at the empty glass and decided not to go for a refill just yet. If he was going to drive them home at the end of the night, then he needed to pace himself. "Your call, really. I'll keep the rounds coming."

Well, thought Finn, it was always nice to be appreciated. For whatever demonstrative value of appreciated was on-tap. "Nah, um," he said, blushing. Maybe it was the booze and maybe it was the flattery. "I don't see why you can't do both? Like, I don't see why you can't eat tuna and make out sloppily with some random dude?" Lady? He didn't want to rule out options here.

"So why don't we go get something delicious and grilled that used to swim," he suggested, closing his tab with her latest refill. She was going through cocktails pretty quickly, Finn noted, but then he'd kind of brought her out here with the promise of drinks and anything less could likely be called treason.

"You are super hot," he agreed, slipping a totally platonic arm around her waist and leading her across the bar. "And it's his loss, okay? Because you are super hot and we're gonna find someone in this bar who agrees because seriously it's an easy opinion to have, like, if I were anything approaching straight and single I would date you but I'm not, so, sorry."

"It's her birthday," he told the waitress as they sat down, like that explained anything about the situation. "Okay. So," he said brightly to Zia. "Grilled tuna and then maybe we can approach the Find You Someone To Suck Face With problem from a different, better-fed angle."

"And by the end of the night," Finn replied, flipping through his menu, "You're going to have so much alcohol on your breath that no one's going to notice the tuna. So get the dinner that makes you happy. In your soul. And yes, they have french fries, they have the best most ridiculous most fancy french fries served with frikken artisanal ketchup, let's get them."

On the subject of boy problems, Finn nodded sympathetically. He'd had his fair share over the years, but it didn't really seem to him that this was sharing hour. "You can do way better," he assured her. Not that he'd ever met this Pascal guy, but anyone making Zia this miserable was probably a bag of dicks. Zia was a nice person who deserved nice things!

"So yeah, let's get a basket of fries and drown our sorrows in hipster sauce," he said, going back to the subject of food. "And get the tuna, Zia, I swear to god, it is your birthday and no one is allowed to judge you one way or the other and at least you got stuck at legal drinking age and not like, just short of it."

Twenty was such a bogus birthday, anyway.

"Hipster sauce," he repeated, trying to make it sound enticing. "It probably comes from a bottle with a rooster on it."

Finn didn't understand everything there was to understand about Zia and Zirconia, and he was sober enough to determine that the details were better hashed out in private and sans alcohol. Whatever Zia's deal with her aging being suspended was, he'd get to the bottom of it later. For the moment, a giant basket of fries had just been set down between the two of them, accompanied by a little rack with no less than four different little bowls of fancy dipping sauces.

"This looks super fancy," said Finn, appraising the fries. He wanted to try one, but Zia sounded like she needed a heck of a lot of reassuring first.

"I like you," he said, reaching over to pat her on the back. "Platonically. As a friend. But if I were not totally solely into dudes I would probably like you in other ways because my understanding is that you are hella attractive as far as that is measured, and you're also smart and funny and decently nice when I'm not being a ********."

"Also," he added, breaking down and reaching for a fry, which he dunked determinedly into what looked like mustard. "I don't think anyone can possibly make Chris mad more than I make him mad, and he and Paris flew to Fairbanks on like two day's notice to drag me back here, so I don't know what's up with that. Maybe they want a threesome. Which, uh, I'm gonna have to say no."

It was, in fact, mustard. "Which brings me to point C," he said, refraining from gesticulating with half a french fry. "Which is that you're not gross, and Chris is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his a**, in two weeks you'd have a diamond, so ******** him." Thank you, Ferris Bueller. "So, like, in short, don't let the b*****d get you down. His dumb opinions have like, zero bearing on your personal worth, and if I gave Chris Gallo's opinions about me as much credence as he thinks they ought to have, I'd have killed myself by now, so there's that. Here, have a french fry."