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.]

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[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.

[andhiswife]

Greta's well past presuming that any given scrap of myth or legend or superstition exists across multiple universes. Some things seem to crop up over and over, but it still doesn't seem wise to just assume anything is universal — especially when being a bloody pirate feels about as far from Greta's old life as someone might get.

So it isn't until Anne expresses some guarded familiarity with Sweeney's names that it occurs to Greta that Anne might actually know, not just about leprechauns, but about Sweeney in particular. She perks, eyebrows ticking up as she looks between Anne and Sweeney. Her rather charged scrutiny lasts until Sweeney plucks a coin out of the air and then presses it into her hand, at which point she gives him a level look of fond exasperation: a sort of nonverbal must you? No point in actually voicing it when she can guess what the answer would be. He must, whether it's to show her a bit of favor or to simply show off.

"Leprechaun," Greta confirms, her fingers curling around the coin automatically. It's not exactly like his lucky one; it doesn't feel as warm as if it'd been sitting in direct sunlight for an hour or so. But it is solid and real, and moreover, it'll stay that way, as opposed to turning into a scrap of bark or a river stone when her back is turned. Not that she has any intention of spending it — or pawning it for spending money. Maybe it's not atypically lucky in and of itself, but it only seems right that she guard it, instead.

"Did you have tales of them back home?" she asks Anne. "I know Saoirse and I both grew up with such stories, but beyond that..." she shrugs, glancing up at Sweeney. She might not be the only one leaving him offerings, but she's guessing the list isn't terribly long.

[annebonny]

Anne snorts, vaguely appreciative of Sweeney's quip, but she sobers again when he lists his vocations. God, God-King, King. She don't know what to think about any of that, how to even begin to believe it; and then Sweeney reaches toward her, and her shoulders twitch and her weight shifts back a fraction from sheer reflex. She stays herself, watching with slowly dawning incredulity as he produces a gold piece from thin fucking air. Ain't a trick of his hands, either. She can see the way the air sort of moves around him. It's all wrong, and she's seen Eliot do things like that. She's seen enough now that, mad or not, she's reasonably confident in knowing magic when she sees it.

And then, he says leprechaun, and he asks Greta to confirm it as he puts the coin into her hand. She takes it like it's no great surprise, like this happens plenty, like what looks to Anne to be a proper doubloon — something Jack's told her is seen as surprising here — is nothing to her. Gives Sweeney a look and agrees: leprechaun.

Anne blinks at Greta's question, glancing between the two of them, quiet for a long time.

"Yeah, I... yeah," she says, her gaze fixing on Sweeney with intent. "But they're stories."

That doesn't matter so much. Not when she's seen all Eliot can do. Not when all of this is so impossible. She wavers for a moment, and then she says, "You're tellin' me you're all those things, a king, a god, and you're also a leprechaun?" She looks him up and down again, like there's somehow something she's missed. "You're too fuckin' tall," she protests finally.

[onlythebranch]

"Now, darlin', that's a very narrow view of the world," he answers with a grin.

There are stories he can tell, stories he's not even sure Greta knows, and if he's honest, he doesn't know if he knows them all either. The details are still fuzzy in some of them, memories he can't quite grasp, but he knows enough to be able to at least tell her why he's so bloody tall.

"Lugh was grandson of Balor," he says, the grin fading a touch. "A Fomorian. Giants. T'be honest, I don't remember all the shifts. It was so fuckin' long ago..." He trails off and shrugs his broad shoulders. For a moment, he looks almost sad, trying to reach for things that are long gone, lost to a past he knows he's never going to be able to fully grasp.

"I remember they tried to drown me. A transition. I remember bein' Suibhne, king of the Dál nAraidi, and a curse. Wandering for a long, long fuckin' time, mad with it all." He doesn't mention Eorann or Moira. He'll not mention them, not now, perhaps not ever. "And I remember Mother Church movin' in and those of us who were left bein' turned into somethin' else. Fairies. Demoted gods and goddesses of the Tuatha Dé Danann."

[andhiswife]

Greta can't help but snort at that last comment, though there's sympathy in her grin. She's known Sweeney for a long time, but hasn't yet forgotten how startled she was to find him towering over her as much as he does. Some of the stories she was raised on did suggest that the fair folk could look like any number of things — like birds, or hounds, or even ordinary people (unless you knew just what to look for) — but they never specified 'bloody enormous.'

She notes the shift in Sweeney's expression, and lays her hand on his arm for a moment in quiet sympathy. It's only natural to forget pieces of your past — goodness knows there's plenty she doesn't remember, and she's had far less time in which to lose things — but it must be unnerving, to know that what you don't remember might be important.

"I don't think any of the stories I was told as a child included all that," she muses. With a little more deliberate lightness, she adds, "Certainly not enough for me to expect you to be so enormous."

"I'd only just heard there was a leprechaun in the city, at first," she says, this more for Anne's benefit. Sweeney knows this part of the story just as well as Greta does. "I didn't actually meet him until I'd been leaving out offerings for a little while."