Say When (A New Year's Brunch)

[eliotwaugh]

Eliot had been warned by various people that New Year's often brings some kind of supernatural mischief to Darrow, and this news had only made him more determined to stick to his plan. No power of god or man or eldritch entity place-spirit or army of fish people will prevent him from throwing a damn party. 

It made sense, really, and part of him wishes he'd done something like this before now. He needn't frame it as a sort of surrender to this imprisonment, but rather just indulging in something frivolous because, as far as his understanding of the metaphysics goes, none of this really counts. So why shouldn't he enjoy it? He's been here long enough to decorate the apartment some, and it really is a marvel the amount of things available through Nile. There's more comfortable furniture, potted plants, and a series of apothecary cabinets and display cases for magical components that give the whole place the air of some eccentric explorer's gallery of curiosities. 

He's even managed to get enough appliances that the little kitchen is decently functional, and has spent a few days stocking up and preparing for what he hopes will a successful brunch. He has enough eggs to feed an army. There will be copious crepes. There will be mimosas for days. 

Eliot's used to working through a wicked hangover this time of year, so he built that into consideration in his prep time. Thanks to the night's adventure, though, he spends his downtime sober and scrubbing mer-blood off of himself, and still feels a bit frazzled by the time the first guests arrive.

[It's time for brunch! Brunch is a state of mind, not an actual timeframe, so please feel free to have your pups show up whenever in the day, honestly. Tag in, tag around, chase the memory of merman horror away with a mimosa, air your grievances and dirty laundry in the neutral ground of Eliot's apartment. This is a safe space. For Drama.]

Comments

[onlythebranch]

Honestly, Sweeney doesn't know why the fuck he's here.

He does know, he'd hardly been able to pass up the opportunity to fuck with the cat-man just a little and he's under the impression he and the easily flustered one who'd been carrying him around in a backpack will be here. But he doesn't know why the fuck he's been invited. Mad Sweeney isn't exactly at the top of anyone's party guest list, though maybe that had been different back when he'd been a king.

Eliot seems to like him well enough, which is usually someone's downfall, but hell, he can't be responsible for everyone else's choices. Or anyone's choices. Sometimes he doesn't even feel like being responsible for his own.

There's still some merman blood on him, a bit on the cuff of his denim jacket and some in his beard, which he scratches at idly as he takes a sip of a mimosa. A fucking mimosa. He'd kill for a bit of whiskey to dump into it.

"You know there's this brunch in Vegas where you pay five bucks and get bottomless mimosas," he comments to the nearest person. "You can just sit there and drink all fuckin' day. Get blasted on orange juice and champagne."

[loficharm]

The nearest person, as it happens, is the easily flustered one, who turns very slowly toward the unmistakable voice which appears, against all odds, to be addressing him. Martin looks at the leprechaun, which involves looking a great deal more up than he could have anticipated, and the expression of mingled disbelief and disapproval slips almost immediately from his face. Christ he's big; Martin knew he was big, but he was never standing on their first encounter, and now Martin, who is already shorter than most men, finds himself absolutely dwarfed by what must be seven entire feet of loud, muscular Irishman.

"Oh," he blurts stupidly; the actual content of what Sweeney has just said escapes him utterly. His height and unexpected proximity have all but activated Martin's flight reflex, but he manages to stay put, clutching his own drink a bit tighter than before. "It's you," he adds, disapproval making an absurd resurgence in the absence of anything else.

[onlythebranch]

Sweeney gasps, a sharp and somehow sarcastic intake of breath, then looks down at himself and pats his chest as if to confirm that, yes, it is him.

"Shit, you're right," he says, then the false expression of surprise drops off his face and he looks down at the boy as he takes another swig from his glass. Martin. Sweeney knows his name, knows John's, too, only because the two of them had been so much fun when they'd first met that he'd had to do a little digging. They'd really brightened his shitty fucking day, even if he's pretty damn sure he'd ruined theirs.

That's the trade off, though. His good luck is someone else's bad.

"Relax, darlin'," he advises. "You're gonna die young you keep bristling up like that."

[loficharm]

Martin's expression hardens back into an unimpressed frown over Sweeney's display, which he might find distantly amusing had their first encounter gone any different.

"Don't—" He huffs impatiently, deciding to ignore the pet name despite his own mild discomfort; he's getting the impression this is just how the man is with everyone.

"What are you doing here," he asks, assuming he just showed up before he realizes Eliot likely wouldn't just let strangers in. "Do you... know Eliot?"

Christ, he doesn't entirely like the idea that he's being rude to one of Eliot's friends, but... well, he was rude first, as far as Martin's concerned. And he's also not totally sure he can trust Eliot's taste.

[onlythebranch]

"The fuck do you think I'm doin' here? Just wandered in off the street and decided a mimosa sounded like a good time?" he asks, then realizes that is something he would absolutely do and so he shrugs, as if acknowledging that Martin might be right in that assessment.

"Nah, me and Eliot are friends," he says. "Said he's got an affinity for tall, drunk and handsome."

He'd said no such thing, but Mad Sweeney can't help himself, and it isn't as if he and Eliot haven't casually flirted enough for there to be something close to the truth in the assumption. Mostly he just wants to see if Martin will squirm at the implication that they might actually share a friend.

[loficharm]

"Of course he does," says Martin dryly, and he takes a sip of his mimosa, scanning the room for a more familiar face. He doesn't think anything would surprise him about Eliot's taste in men—and it's not as though Sweeney is unpleasant to look at, if one sets aside the bit where he's a bit of a bastard.

To his mingled relief and trepidation, the first person he makes eye contact with is John, standing off on his own. Martin isn't exactly looking to reprise their original meeting with Sweeney, but John sees him looking and sees who he's with, so it's probably inevitable now. He also wouldn't entirely mind—he's not quite willing to just walk away from this interaction, but he'd feel better having a bit of backup, as it were.

[statement_ends]

John has been, predictably, at something of a loss since his arrival. He likes Eliot too much to sneak out at the first opportunity, but he isn't entirely sure what he's doing here, besides availing himself of free beverages and beating back the intruding conviction that Eliot's flat is an unintentional but inescapable insult to his own, which is far less... aesthetically deliberate? Nice? Homey? Something along those lines.

Catching Martin's eye provides him with about half a second of relief, before he realizes Martin's giving off 'help me' vibes and standing next to none other than the fucking leprechaun. Christ, did Eliot invite him? Does he know that they had a run-in when John was a bloody cat?

Regardless, he can't leave Martin to fend for himself. Allowing himself a quiet sigh, John makes his way over. "Martin," he greets, realizing only in the moment that he has no idea if Martin wants back-up or an outright extraction. Leaning towards the latter, he gives Sweeney a wary nod, then continues, "I think one of the items in that cabinet over there might actually be cursed."

[formicine]

"Did you, though? Not drink all day," she clarifies, because Blue's pretty sure that she knows Sweeney well enough to know he can and will do that on most days. She's still pretty sure that most of her worst hangovers have been from drinking in his presence. "Get drunk on bottomless mimosas. It seems like it would. Well. Take a lot longer for you."

As for her, she drank a touch more than she was expecting to last night, but she'd woken up with little enough in side effects that she doesn't feel like she's staving off a hangover with more of the same.

"Happy new year, by the way. Your night go okay?"

[onlythebranch]

"Might take a bit longer, but it sure as shit isn't impossible," he answers when Blue steps up to him. Vegas isn't exactly his choice of city to spend his time in, because when a leprechaun gambles, they tend to attract a little bit too much attention and while that often ends in a fight, it just isn't the same as a good and proper fight. All of Vegas reeks of falsehoods, fights included.

"My night went about as well as a night can go when fuckin' mermen crawl outta the ocean," he says with a grin. "How 'bout yours? You avoid those ugly, slimy bastards?"

They hadn't been worth much in a fight at the end. Too slow.

[formicine]

She laughs, a soft huff, and shakes her head, wryly. "Almost, but not quite. A dog was about to be merman chow and I had to go back and help."

Blue perches on a chair nearby and shakes her head, grimacing. "Extremely ugly. I think I preferred thinking of mermen as those kitschy pinup ornaments." She grins a little. "Have you ever seen them?"

[onlythebranch]

"Nah," he says. "Seen real mermaids, though. Proper ones, not that disgusting shit, whatever the fuck they were."

If they were mermen, they're not the sort he's ever seen before and he knows that's possible in a place like this, where everything seems to meld together from a thousand different worlds, but he'd still like it known that those are not the sorts of merpeople he's fucked.

Not that anyone really gives a shit, which is fine.

[formicine]

"Really?" Her amusement over extremely gay Christmas ornaments is stifled by curiosity. "So, the ones you've seen, are they like the Disney version, or something else entirely?"

[onlythebranch]

"They're the female version," he says. "And the good to go version, if you catch my drift."

There might have been mermen, too, but he's just never encountered them. Mermaids always just seemed more interesting anyway. All things considered, Sweeney is pretty fucking certain Wednesday has had one or two encounters with them himself, but he's not sure they've gone as well as his own had.

Wednesday might be a god, but mermaids have been fucking with men since the beginning of time.

[eliotwaugh]

"Oh tell me about it, if I were a few years younger this would be a very different kind of party." Eliot smirks and nudges him with an elbow while cutting another bite of crepe with the side of his fork. "And there are worse ways to spend a day of course but...honestly, after last night?"

Eliot looks him over, but Sweeney certainly doesn't look any worse for wear, not really. "You look like you did all right, but I could take care of that--" he gestures at the blood, fingers wiggling to indicate magic, "if you want. As it turns out I've gotten...surprisingly good at cleaning bloodstains of late."

He'd really hoped to start the year without odd shit and dire business after the way the past months had been, but of course he's not that lucky. 

[onlythebranch]

"Gonna clean me up?" Sweeney asks with a grin, but it's not a refusal. Half the time he doesn't even notice the stains anymore, specks of blood on most of his jeans and his boots have certainly seen better days. He's been wearing them for decades, though, and that's decades of fighting, decades of sleeping on barroom floors, and decades of doing all kinds of things in them he ought not to be doing.

"You run into any of those ugly, smelly fuckers?" he asks. "They weren't much of a fight, were they? Honestly it was all kinda boring after the last few years."

He and Spike had still managed to have fun, but it sure as fuck hadn't been the same.

[eliotwaugh]

"I'm sure better people than I have tried, but if you'd like a little less blood on you, sure." Eliot smirks and does a quick bit of prestidigitation to fizzle away the freshest stains. He wouldn't dare do any more and disrupt Sweeney's whole look, not when he wears it so well.

He wouldn't exactly call the trouble with fish-people 'boring,' but then he isn't blessed with divine vigor, either. "Yeah," he says after a moment, "it was...interesting? And a bit annoying that it ended up being easier to just stab them with swords than anything else." Eliot sighs, quite dramatically. "not my preferred means of physical exertion at all. And of course I'd only heard that things get weird at New Year's, not any real specifics of past troubles." But if things usually get even weirder than last night, Eliot might have to rethink the whole concept of being stuck here as a lazy forced retirement.

[onlythebranch]

"Yeti," Sweeney answers, using his mimosa glass to tick things off on his other hand, miraculously managing to not spill a single drop as he does. "Flying monkeys, fuckin' cave bats, living gingerbread cookies that were bent on stabbing the shit out of anyone who got too close, Christ on his cross, what the fuck hasn't this place seen?"

The fish-men had just been so damn slow. Sweeney had been looking forward to a real fight.

"All that shit was plenty of fun," he says with a sigh that's almost wistful. "Even the cookies were a better fight than the fuckin' mermen."

[eliotwaugh]

Eliot listens to him list off the parade of nonsensical horrors and tries to imagine what each of those must have been like, and can only shake his head in disbelief. "Shit," he says finally, and takes another bite of crepe. "This type of thing keeps happening and I'll actually have to get in shape, ugh."

"Though I suppose," he smirks at Sweeney's reminiscence, "the cookies also probably didn't smell so fucking bad. The mermen were too wet for me to set on fire, hugely disappointing. It really felt like...doing community service litter pickup, in the end."

Honestly they should be getting paid for this. Some kind of tax break at least. "I'm sure you were like some force of nature, or something, slow monsters or no."

[onlythebranch]

"Oh, me and Spike had a bit of fun," he agrees with a cheeky grin, very much enjoying being referred to as a force of nature. It drags up memories of war from long ago, of a giant painted with gold, a god who made Sweeney look like a small man. And yet Sweeney -- Lugh -- had still take off the giant's head.

"Hard not to revel in even the littlest bit of violence," he admits. Hard for him, anyway, the urge and the itch for it sometimes so deep it feels as if it's woven into his skin. He understands it better these days with the memories that have surfaced.

He's a bloody god of war. How could he not enjoy violence?

[andhiswife]

"And it would take you all day, wouldn't it?" Greta drawls with a fond smile, though her gaze sharpens a little when she spots the blood on his cuff and — ugh — in his beard. Her fingers itch with the urge to pull a handkerchief out of her pocket and just start dealing with it, but she's wary of mothering him in a crowd. Besides, she doesn't think a little blood about his person will make a bad impression on the person she's introducing him to.

Goodness knows if Anne will like him, of course, but she likes to think Anne and Sweeney would get on. And she has a vague but persistent suspicion that Anne is both short on friends and not terribly adept at making them, so if she can lend a little assistance, so much the better.

So she glances back at Anne, her eyebrows ticked up hopefully — come meet the enormous bloody leprechaun — and then turns back to Sweeney. "You look a mess," she informs him mildly, "but it's good to see you. Have you met Anne Bonny? Anne, this is Mad Sweeney."

[annebonny]

There's too many people here and Anne has negligible interest in meeting any of them, so she's both grateful for and wary of Greta's pointed summons. Best to stick close to those few here she knows, even if they're going to make her meet more people. What surprises her is that the man Greta wants to introduce is... not the sort of person she'd ever think to find among Greta's associates. He's enormous, bigger even than Teach or any of those lumbering fools Vane brought back with him to take Nassau. He's got blood on him and a look about him like he could be dangerous, not just down to his size. Not necessarily in a bad way, neither. It's almost familiar. But she wouldn't have expected Greta to know him, and as Anne draws near, she even hears her chastising him mildly for looking a mess.

Greta has never quite ceased to surprise her, and yet Anne still ain't used to it.

"Mad Sweeney," she echoes, sizing him up, slow and ponderous. Sounds like a name earned, something he had to be given, and that's familiar, too. She has to tip her head back to see beneath the brim of her hat; beside him she is dwarfed even more than usual, but that don't bother her. "Who calls you that?"

[onlythebranch]

And ain't this interesting.

Sweeney drapes a casually affectionate arm across Greta's shoulders, one of the few people here he's comfortable touching in a manner that's not remotely sexual or violent, and he cocks his head a little, grinning at the woman who walks over to join them.

Anne Bonny. He wonders if she has the slightest fucking idea who she is.

"Ain't had the pleasure yet," he tells Greta, looking right back at Anne as she sizes him up, finds himself grinning down at her when she has to tip her head up to see out from under the hat. "Most people call me that, but I guess you can pick and choose if you'd like, darlin'. Mad Sweeney, Sweeney, Lugh, Suibhne. Up t'you, really."

[andhiswife]

Casual affection is a rare enough thing from Sweeney that for a moment, Greta wonders if he noted her rather critical examination of his shirt, and has slung an arm around her just to be obnoxious — to give her cause to surreptitiously duck into Eliot's bathroom, later, and check her blouse for any shared mess. Then again, it's equally (if not more) plausible that he's just in a good mood thanks to a night of spirited monster-slaying, and either way, she's not about to shrug him off. It's nice to think she's earned this sort of thing, exchanged for something a little less tangible than a steady supply of offerings set on a windowsill.

So she grins, giving him a gentle bump with her hip before rolling her eyes in response to his other names. "Just go with 'Sweeney,'" she advises Anne. "Lugh was far less fun." She'd only met him the once, and she'd kept leaving out offerings because she was frankly terrified of what might happen if she stopped, but she vastly prefers this version of her friend.

[annebonny]

That thick brogue is familiar in a way Anne hasn't felt in a long, long time; old, mostly faded memories of distant childhood, of being so young she hadn't learned what hurt was. She thinks her mother might've sounded like that. That memory's so far away it don't feel like hers anymore. It ain't just that, either; it's not like meeting an Irishman sends her back down this path on an ordinary day. It's something more precisely fitted to him, almost like his presence alone is enough to stir up that old shit. The names he gives, Lugh, Suibhne, these are also familiar, touching somewhere so deep it's past recovering. Maybe she heard the stories before that world was gone, that person she was and might have been was gone, and she became something else.

And if Mad Sweeney is the Mad Sweeney from the half-remembered dust of those stories, the Lugh, the Suibhne, the names that may have been whispered to her before she slept her quietest nights away, then this man is something more than a man, and that shouldn't be possible.

All that's one thing. The rest is smaller, and yet it arrests her just as much. Seeing Greta approach this great dangerous figure was unexpected all on its own, but the way he slings an arm around her like—she don't know what. Greta's smiling and nudging him back, easy, casual. Ain't never seen a husband treat his wife like this, or a wife answer like that; closest thing she can even imagine is from drinking in the brothel, watching the men idle with whatever whore'd been chosen to entertain him that night. And this don't even come close.

It's like the way men lean on each other, like friends, like there's shared trust and shared respect. And she's gone through life believing she and Jack were the only ones in the world who knew what that was.

She just stares at them both for a long while, and then she says, "Right." She keeps her eyes on Sweeney, on his face, narrowing as she considers this wealth of new information. A lot of people have known her and Jack from stories; Eliot's got his impossible magic, Greta's little one has her strange draw to the sea. There's plenty here she don't understand, but this?

"Maybe I know those names," she says after a moment. She stands her ground, but her fingers twitch a little from the uncertainty of what that means. She's not sure how to be. Greta is so easy with him, and she don't know if that means she ought to stand down, or stand twice as guarded. She proceeds with caution, stepping more delicately than she's accustomed: "Stories from a long time ago." She juts her chin up at him in a slight nod. "So what does that make you?"

[onlythebranch]

"Besides really fuckin' old?" he asks, then looks to Greta, almost as if he expects her to have the answers he can't give. It's true he doesn't know the extent of his background, the memories still unclear most of the time, coming to him as sharp flashes when they come at all, but Greta doesn't know any more of his past than that either.

"These days I'm mostly just Mad Sweeney," he settles on. "Used t'be a god, then a godking, then just a king, and now..." He shrugs and grins and then reaches out toward the air about a foot in front of Anne's face. With a shifting of the space around them, just the slightest shimmer of it, he plucks a coin from the hoard. Even indoors, it sparkles like it contains the sun.

"We've settled on leprechaun, yeah?" he asks Greta before he unwraps his arm from around her shoulders so he can take her hand and press the coin into her palm. It's Greta who leaves him offerings these days, Greta who, in essence, keeps him as full a being as he is.

Well, Greta and General fucking Mills. Even Darrow has its equivalent of bloody Lucky Charms.