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]

"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?