Trying his luck at that seemed more productive than a) ghosting about the apartment or b) further making an idiot of himself attempting basic Negaverse procedures and failing, and so he had found a bar that looked sleazy enough to not ask too many questions, but not so disgusting that he could expect drowned insects with his booze. It was easier than he had expected to get in - he could pass well enough for 21, apparently, and the fake was fairly well-made, so a bouncer at a small time bar was not overly invested in checking too hard. Particularly not when, as he observed, the place wasn't exactly full.
The business of someone potentially underage, it seemed, was business as good as anyone else's here.
He took a seat at the bar and gave the bartender - a fairly attractive blonde (he guessed, the lighting was low and bluish and threw off colors) wearing a uniform meant to draw attention to her assets - a smile that was blatantly flirtatious when he ordered a gin and tonic. Specifics totally escaped him, for the most part, but it sounded like something he might have liked. At worst, he didn't, and it was a cheap drink either way. At best, he actually chased a distant "I think I like this" to an actual conclusion and determined that the annoying vague familiarities he had dealt with since his corruption actually meant something.
[size-10]Sundays were ‘get hammered’ days by principle of most regulars going to Church to pay their guilty dues. This meant most bars remained empty in the evening hours of the few that were open - luckily the city wasn’t so far in the stone age that they closed all liquor sources every sunday. And due to that lack of closure, Isaiah knew from small business ownership that they received enough influx of customers to justify that staying open, but he wagered there were markedly less than any typical day.
So Isaiah had his choice of places he normally considered off-limits for human capacity, and of them there were few that fell into his budgetary limits on alcohol. However, there was one particular bar that he kept trying to like despite its shoddy appearance and overall blandness in mixers and the overly extroverted bartender that was all tits and lips. He hadn’t particularly cared for her dress habits, or her conversation, or really her bartending skills, but the place offered one unique special that attracted his business nonetheless.
Half off sales on the last drink served meant that he could try new drinks without breaking his wallet.
So Isaiah chose the seedy dump instead of something classier, the bell on the door rang while it squeaked open in typical never-been-oiled fashion (which he hated, he didn’t understand this insistence that one must neglect the building), and he walked in to find only a handful of patrons in scattered locations. Only two of them sat together - an older couple sitting together with cards laid out on the square fake wood table - and the rest camped out different locations. The youngest one looked barely old enough to drink and yet he sat at the counter with Chatty Cathy yammering away about the latest suspect for her boyfriend’s cheating ways. He knew from experience that she liked to intersperse her complaints with predictions about how the person drinking alone at the bar and weathering her bullshit must be a better person somehow, like he leaves the seat down after he takes a piss or some other benign banality.
Isaiah claimed a seat with the courtesy single barstool between himself and the blue-haired boy with the impossibly long braid. Idly he imagined him using the length of braid as a beer cozy. Attention returned to the bartender when she greeted him by leaning over the counter, tits poised for attention seeking, and started in on her usual.
“Hi. I remember you. You’re always after the special, right? Gin and tonic this time.” She smiled, her Extra sticking out between her teeth in a fat wad while she pointed toward the bluenette’s drink. “Want one?”
Isaiah closed shadowed eyes for a moment while he tried to weather the mint smell. “Yes,” he answered back with a Customer Service smile. It faded the moment she turned her back and he started in on the long equation process, scribbling out multiplicatives on a bar napkin with a pen from pocket.
Afterward, he cast a side-eyed glance toward the other patron. “You look too young to be drinking a gin and tonic. I’m too young to be drinking a gin and tonic.” So look what you’re doing to me, jackass.
Damian was rapidly regretting his choice of bar, or at the very least his choice to sit in the trajectory of listening to the way-too-friendly bartender. This was far more than he wanted to know about anyone’s life story in one evening, never mind someone he had expected to interact with for the length of ordering a drink and not much longer. Were her troubles with her boyfriend really the concern of any random stranger she happened to run across? That seemed like being alarmingly open about yourself.
Never mind that it was also exhausting - though it did sort of make him want another drink, which meant it qualified, distantly, as a clever sales tactic. He doubted sincerely that she had thought it through that far; it really felt like giving her too much credit.
On the upside: a gin and tonic was not, in fact, terrible, which was something of a sign. Of what, he wasn’t sure, but it meant something, surely. Perhaps just that he ought to chase up more of these feelings.
The arrival of another customer was a relief, if only because it deviated the bartender’s attention from him and his “adorable accent,so much nicer than how that loser talks, and I bet you’d never sleep around on a girl” (which obviously didn’t count for much since she really wasn’t letting him get a word in edgewise) long enough for him to down the rest of the drink in one quick go.
He raised an eyebrow at the other man’s commentary on his choice of drink. “I wasn’t aware there was a secondary age limit on that sort of thing,” he said, but then again what the hell did he know about any of this? He considered himself lucky that he still knew enough to make a go at navigating social encounters, because really, that was more than he could have expected. He hadn’t exactly pushed researching how far memory loss went.
Oh well, if he learned something new about bar etiquette tonight, at least he learned something. This stranger was attractive, too -- a bit skinny, and wearing more makeup than Damian would expect, but easy on the eyes, and helpfully not at all someone he knew or even felt like he might have known once in the distant ether of whoever-he-had-been.
“But I’m open to alternate suggestions.” He said, and he went for at least a little more flirtatious than sarcastic, this time.
”Everything has a secondary age limit,” Isaiah replied with mild acid. “Drinks, venues, girls… Boys.” He shot the man a sharp glance for nothing more than a breath. “Gin and tonic happens to be what you drink when you’re sitting in a retirement home waiting to die.” When the bartender arrived with his drink, he sipped it instead of responding to her more recent tirade about cohabitation. He didn’t bother to nod or smile to any of it; his indifference wore painfully clear.
I wonder what it’s like for him to ******** someone without his glasses on. I imagine that’s quite a trip. Take home someone ugly and it doesn’t really matter when they’re just a Picasso painting sitting on your lap.
Damn, maybe I should go blind.
“You look like you could use something interesting.” First he studied the boy, who he hadn’t bothered to look over in any real detail beyond the first entry. His jawlines looked strong enough to suggest he might be out of his teens, which proved fortuitous. That braid, again, attempted to draw his attention. But Isaiah rather liked the subtle strength in the profile of his nose, and glasses actually suited him. He considered making an offer on them - they looked like impeccable gucci knockoffs - but if they were prescription, then they were trash to him.
“A suggestion, then? Alright…” Spindly fingers drummed on the counter while Isaiah leaned forward to scan the displayed collection. Occasionally the owner added a few higher quality drinks to the menu, and Isaiah was unconscionably excited to discover one of his favorite brands of tequila sitting mostly-full on the shelf. “Oho, they actually have something good this time. How do you feel about worms? They’ve got a nice bottle of a Siete Leguas reposado just begging for a taste. All you need is ice.
“What’s your name?” He asked while still looking over the bar’s selection. “It’s never good to buy a drink for someone if you don’t know their name, even if you just want to ******** them senseless.”
Damian had to laugh, a little, at that. Alright, so apparently he’d been somewhat stodgy in his previous life - if his choice of drinks said anything. “And obviously we’re not decaying just yet,” he said, “so I’ll take your word that I’m making a mistake with my drinking choices.” He pushed the glass away, shaking his head when the bartender asked if he wanted a refill. That his interest was now entirely off her and on his conversation (and, it seemed, drinking) partner was fairly obvious, and he took enough notice to guess that she seemed put off.
Oh well, not his problem.
He glanced over to the bar display, considering the offerings himself. Most of the names meant nothing, because apparently brand recognition wasn’t something that stuck, or maybe he just hadn’t cared much before. Tequila, though, tequila as suggested sounded like a very excellent choice. He distantly remembered something about it being particularly good for getting drunk and saying goodbye to your inhibitions, which sounded like a good time.
“That sounds perfect,” he said, and a joke about it being an especially perfect choice if the other man wanted to get into his pants was on the tip of his tongue - but, well, he was absolutely and very well beaten to the punch. Well alright, apparently there would be no beating about the bush tonight.
“Damian,” he said, “and I suppose it’s only polite to ask the name of the person paying for my drink, especially if I’d like to ******** him senseless.”
While he may not have much interest in her conversation this evening, Isaiah made it a point to learn the names of bartenders that agreed to serve him at any given establishment. “Caitlyn, two Siete Leguas over ice.” The gin and tonic near his elbow sat mostly full - and he didn’t mind, since he didn’t want to budget his remaining calories toward a drink he didn’t care for.
But if he factored the increasingly probable exercise to end his evening, he could probably do something more calorically significant.
After serving the pair with a huff, Caitlyn rounded the bar and started the rounds of chatting with the few remaining customers. More filtered in as evening wore on, which meant she had more choices of actually interested parties to chat with. The older couple he spotted earlier sounded particularly interested in visiting with the young bartender, although as most old people were, they found more interest in telling their own stories than listening to hers. He assumed it put her off by the look on her face and the change in her posture but it must not have been terrible enough to discourage her from hovering around them altogether.
Isaiah swirled the glass as habit dictated, then took a slow swig of the tequila. It tasted smooth, rich, and much more palatable than a watered down gin. And how many calories are in any given glass of tequila? I suppose it doesn’t matter if I can make up the difference tomorrow.
Isaiah stood in the peculiar, nearly rehearsed manner that he always did, gathered his drink with the napkin beneath, and moved over to the stool that originally sat between them. “Damian it is.” He spared the boy another glance - strange he thought, how some people don’t really look like their name. But no one’s ever said that I don’t like like a Brian or a David or a Matthew. Maybe no one really looks like anything, and all this talk of matching names and faces is just some shitty social construct. I could give him any name I want by the time the night is over. I won’t remember it anyway.
He took another sip of tequila, felt the burn keenly, and leaned over to deliver his own perfectly straight-faced introduction. “Nicki Minaj,” he volunteered.
Damian considered the drink set in front of him - clear, and when he lifted it to his nose and swirled a bit he detected a faint hint of an almost minty aroma. ‘Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ he thought, and he took a sip. It tasted entirely different from the gin and tonic, except for the familiar flavor of alcohol, but even in that it diverged - the gin had tasted sharper. Ultimately, it was definitely more pleasant, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how easy it would be to overdrink on this and make an idiot of yourself.
That wasn’t the plan, of course, but the plan when he’d come in certainly hadn’t been to pick up a handsome stranger, and that had changed fairly quickly. There was no way he was going to let this slip by him; he had few memories of anything approaching intimate encounters, and none of them were exactly mindblowing. One was boring and came with an ugly tangle all twisted in that awful, shitty future, the other deeply awkward. Making a few new ones seemed well and in order, all things considered.
So his grin definitely widened a little when the other man moved a stool over, because that felt like a step in the right direction in and of itself. He took another sip of his drink, and it was an actual effort for him to not choke on it a little on the introduction. It took a moment for it to click - and he was fairly certain that was a consequence of the drinks - but he was familiar with the rapper.
“Nicki Minaj, hmm?” His tone was slightly incredulous, but then, it wasn’t as if he was technically giving out an entirely real name either. Damian Howe didn’t really exist except as just enough documents to get an apartment lease.
The boy looked fairly receptive, this Damien - the grin was proof enough. It looked genuine, the way it crawled up to his eyes like a faint hint of competition with victory on the horizon. But there wasn’t much competition to be had in a game like this, unless he compared himself to the wiles and conquests of his friends. No, between the pair, there existed only cooperation.
“Yes, well, I wasn’t feeling particularly Taylor Swift when I got up this morning. Nicki Minaj seemed an acceptable compromise.” Another sip. He paused to look at the way his metacarpals stood out from the skin like defiant mountains on the barren plains. A bead of condensation rolled off the glass and crossways down the back of his hand before dripping onto the counter. “You’ll thank me later, you know. There’s not a lot of people in these parts that can say ‘I ******** Nicki Minaj’ and actually mean it. It’s quite a story.” Everything’s a story. And what am I selling it to you for?
Willful ignorance, I suppose.
“What part of England are you from, Damien? The London area? Doesn’t sound particularly Cockney to me. Though if it was, I suppose it’d be just as well; I could imagine you’d be telling me the best pickup lines in the world since no one could understand you anyway. So it goes.” He set his drink down momentarily to grab another napkin, and use his pen to write the simple subtractions based on his estimate for the caloric content of a tequila on the rocks. Ice alone helped bring the count down from one of the higher caloric drinks, much like his favorite whiskey and coke from bars like these. He circled the final number and left it out as a careful reminder to avoid getting too hammered with someone who would wind up all over his sheets.
He still had to at least walk from the bar to the curb, and from the curb to his apartment. Some dexterity required; locked doors didn’t open themselves when positively drunk.
“Actually - before you answer, let me explain the game. We’re both drinking, so it goes without saying that common sense won’t apply shortly. The game is this - I don’t care if you lie to me or you tell the truth, because we probably won’t be seeing much of each other outside of bars. Here, I’m just Nicki Minaj. whoever I really am doesn’t exist in this space. He won’t exist in the next space either. Whoever you are, Damien, doesn’t exist here either. You are whoever you want to be. The only requirement here is, with any answer you decide on, make it interesting. The more interesting it is, the more inclined I am to put out.
“It’s simple, and everyone wins.”
The blunette’s grin became less victorious and more amused. Alright, he could play along with this, it would make the whole evening much more amusing. And besides, wasn’t making stories believable sort of what he did? Besides, building a history for himself would be good practice; he was going to have to lie about that a lot, if he wanted to get anywhere and build the illusion that he was a real person, and not just a constructed face for a Negaverse officer.
(God, he did not just want to be a constructed face for an officer. That sounded so boring.)
“Alright then, Nicki,” and he gave a bit of a teasing lilt to the name, “yes, I am from London. Or, well, I grew up in London. More properly, I’m from Lancashire; reasonable relations of the Earl of Derby, which means about jack s**t here,” and if he wondered why he could pull the peerages out of memory the way he could lines from Shakespeare, he pushed away the wondering by taking another sip of tequila. “My mother caused a bit of a scandal running off from her first husband and marrying a commoner, and we had to set up in London for a while to get away from it. Evidently, it wasn’t far enough, and it was across the Atlantic next.”
A completely made-up scandal in the nobility might not sell everywhere he went, but it was a decent start here, and it was certainly a story. Maybe “Nicki” would go for it, and maybe not, but he was feeling bolder with further addition of tequila from his system, though he was conscious of the fact that he did want to remember this in the morning. He had no idea of his own tolerances, and in a bar with a stranger seemed the worst possible place to push them.
Isaiah frowned softly, and his naturally imperious gaze grew threefold. “I give you free reign to invent any story you want, and this is what I get? Distant relations to some earl and some tired drivel about caste clashes? For ******** sake, you could’ve used dragons. Fiction makes our lives more interesting where reality fails to be so bizarre.
“Now. I’m going to assume you’re not actually that boring and you’re just inexperienced with the game, else I’ll assume that you’re just as painfully vapid in bed. I’ll even be nice and write one for you.” He offered his best Customer Service smile without any feigned emotion behind it - which looked slightly more like a grimace that translated his slight frustration almost too well.
Isaiah sat back, changing his body language as well as he could by straightening his back and leaning with one elbow on the bar. He tossed his hair to the side with a dramatic flip and cleared his throat to begin. When he spoke, he used a British accent, although he was not nearly so practiced in the art of it than anyone who studied theater. For an amateur, it was evident he had experienced a legitimate British accent on numerous occasions. “I might be from Liverpool itself, but I grew up in London until I was about eleven years old. Quite a fright I had, really, and it all started with the London train systems.”
He shifted in his seat to lean more toward Damian to emulate excitement. “You see, the train systems have been built into London proper for hundreds of years, and they had recently expanded it at the time. I was to take the train on my own to the eastern side where my auntie lives, and I got on the train right well and went through all that rot to transfer at one of the stations. Then I was to use one of the new additions that left from central London to the east. Not a terribly riveting venture, you would think.
“But as I was riding on it, we got pretty far out from central London and curved around to avoid the sewer pipes and that rubbish. But the strangest thing happened - the train detoured through a part of the city where all you could see looking out was bones. Over two miles of nothing but human remains, packed one on top of the other to make a wall so thick and impenetrable that they had to blast through some of the remains with dynamite. Just think about that s**t - thousands of people just discarded there, blasted through, and now you’re running a whole train of people through it like nothing’s the matter. They didn’t even bother to cover over it with concrete or anything.
“And it didn’t help that the train broke down a bit in there when they had a power failure back at the station. So here I am, eleven years old, all but shitting my drawers while I’m looking back at all these human skulls and spines and pelvises. And the train’s sitting there with its emergency lights on, everything’s dim, people start getting freaked out because it’s bloody morbid in there, the conductor’s trying to calm everyone down but he’s pissing nervous and no one actually knows what’s afoot here. Even on the news later, they explained that they didn’t know why the power went out.
“So as you can imagine, I get to my auntie’s house and I’m wailing ‘til I can’t breathe about what just happened and she’s not believing me, and my parents don’t believe me, and I’m shitting myself for about a week straight on this before they finally decide to relocate. We tried Liverpool for a few years and that went alright, then my pop decided it was a better idea to split for this gorgeous swinger he met at a lupus support group so my mum and I hopped over the pond to start afresh.”
Finished, Isaiah returned to his original posture (though less uptight with some tequila working through his system). “Not my best material, but it’s more interesting than generic scandal.” He smiled more genuinely this time, though it looked a margin cheshire. “Oh, cheer up.” The tip of his index finger pressed to the bottom of Damian’s chin. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you.”
Damian wrinkled his nose at first, obviously less than pleased with the reception his story had gotten. Alright, so it wasn't exactly incredibly fantastic, but it had been what he pulled out in the fly, in a bar. Apparently he needed more tequila and less inhibitions before he would be able to match “Nicki’s” fairly extravagant level of storytelling. But he should have realized he was dealing with someone who tended towards the extravagant fiction - after all, he’d chosen Nicki Minaj for his alias for a bar hookup. Obviously he wasn’t particularly concerned about believability.
And the story he spun was good, entertaining, if a little morbid. That, and his British accent was just on point enough to bring an amused smile to Damian’s face. He was fairly certain there were no London Underground tunnels like the one described, but the truth was obviously the farthest thing from the point here. And a better understanding of the rules of the game would make it much easier to play.
He took another sip of tequila, well aware that he was drinking it far slower than he had his first drink (but it was better, more worth savoring, anyway.)
Apparently, some of his disappointment showed on his face, given that Nicki went out of his way to “reassure” him.
“More interesting and your accent is excellent,” he said, and he laughed a little. “No, now I know the rules of the game a little better. And I know what you find interesting.” So that was something else, then. “Do I get a second shot, or have I botched that completely?”
Isaiah took another sip of his drink before requesting a lime from the bartender. She accepted, noticed that they were still engrossed in conversation, and decided better of butting in with the latest text message she got from her boyfriend. The lime wedges were delivered, Isaiah squeezed one into his drink and kept the second, then offered the other two to Damian on a small plate.
“Thanks.” Isaiah offered a wry smile. “I’ve been told I sound like a north Londoner with a bad cold and mild mental retardation.”
The question concerning a second shot earned a stern evaluation, complete with ‘Nicki’ humming and lowering lids in intense study. He looked between his drink, Damian’s drink, and the londoner himself for a good thirty seconds before responding. Long nails drummed against the counter a handful of times. “Make me a deal and I’ll consider it. How about this - you trade me your glasses for a few minutes, and I’ll let you tell me another story. If you pass, you can walk out of the bar with me without your glasses on, everyone will think you’re drunk, and we can have a grand time elsewhere. Deal?”
Noir Songbird
