onlythebranch | (no subject)

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lucy

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It's a bar, which is the first point in its favour, but it's also under a fucking sex shop, which delights Sweeney in ways he knows he can't explain. Despite liking being bitten or punched and otherwise hurt during sex, he'd never think to describe himself as having particularly kinky tastes and though he can't imagine there's any man in the world who wouldn't like a good pegging if he allowed himself to get over his bullshit fragile fucking masculinity, he's never done much shopping for the occasion.

Still, it's a bar under a sex store and the promise of alcohol alone is enough of a reason to head inside. The idea of there being whips and handcuffs and fucking gimp suits overhead while he drinks just makes it all funnier to him.

It's possible his sense of humour has never matured all that much, even in the past seven hundred years.

He heads around to the entrance off the alley, walking heavily down the stairs, but he's in a good mood and he's got no reason to get into a fight tonight. A place like this might be the sort of place he wants to head back to in the future and unless someone really pisses him off, he'll try to be on his best behaviour tonight. Usually when he smashes the shit out of a place, no one wants to let him come back to drink anymore.

When he sees a familiar blonde behind the bar, he can't help but grin. Now more than ever he doesn't want to piss off the management -- not much, anyway -- and he drops onto a stool and leans heavily against the bar, his arms draping over the top as he waits for her to turn and see him.

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He stands out rather quickly, of course. Someone that tall, with hair that color, there's no way for him not to draw attention. From behind the bar, Lucy can't help the way her mouth curves — not quite a smile, not quite a smirk, but somewhere between the two. At least he doesn't appear to be actively bleeding this time, seeking her out to patch up yet another bullet wound. This, if she had to guess, is probably a coincidence. For all that he may have been more than a little irritating in enlisting her assistance before, there's no getting around the fact that it had been an interesting encounter, and God knows she could use a break from the monotony of fixing drinks. She's good at it, she likes it, likes having something to throw herself into when it feels like her life is falling apart, but she's been spending most of her waking hours working of late, and she could use a change of pace.

"No gunshot wounds this time, I see," she says, voice lilting up almost into a question, a slight edge in her voice. "At least, you better not be bleeding all over my bar." She doesn't usually get possessive about it, but right now, she thinks she's entitled. She doesn't exactly have anything else to her name — her brother's gone, her boyfriend is now her ex-boyfriend, she's sleeping until her office until she finds a place to live, all but one of her friends are gone. This, though, she gets to keep. "What can I get you?"

"No blood, darlin', I'm injury free," Mad Sweeney answers with the sort of grin that makes it clear that's the type of thing that's bound to change on a dime. While he has no intention of starting a fight here, especially now that he knows it's her bar, as she's said, he can't always help what other men do. They see someone of his size and they gets their balls all up in a twist, determined to prove some level of masculinity they feel must be off the charts impressive.

It's never a fight they can win and men like that are the type Sweeney puts down fast, but he does put them down instead of just backing off. A fight's an awful thing to waste, after all. But so far no one here has looked at him and maybe it'll stay that way if they see he knows the owner.

"Southern Comfort and coke," he says, then points at her with a smirk. "And don't give me shit about it. I've heard it enough fuckin' times over the years and it sure as fuck hasn't changed my mind yet."

Lucy can't do anything but roll her eyes at the look on his face and the implication it carries, shaking her head even as she starts fixing his drink. "Yeah, well, I'd really like for it to stay that way," she says dryly. Were a fight to break out, it wouldn't be the first time any significant damage has been done in here, but that's all the more reason for her not to want to deal with anything of the sort. Now more than ever, it seems important, when being here has been, in a lot of ways, all that's kept her afloat for the last while. Besides, she kind of needs somewhere to sleep, and her office is the best place she currently has for that.

"And don't worry," she adds, setting the glass down in front of him. "I've worked in bars too long to give you any shit about it."

"I'll do my best, love, but a certain type of man gets drunk and sees the size of me..." He trails off and shrugs, as if to say there's nothing he can do about it and that's at least partly true. If he wanted to prevent the fight, he could simply walk away, but that seems as impossible as going without air, without food. A good fight is one of the necessities of this particular man in order to thrive.

He grins as she sets down his glass, pays her for it, then holds his empty hand over her tip jar and rubs his fingers together, dropping a few gold coins into the glass. They clink merrily on top of the other tips that have been thrown inside and then he takes his glass.

"So this is your bar, then?" he asks. "Nice location."

"It is my bar," Lucy confirms with a nod, finding it as strange as she did the first time when he makes those coins just appear, but not bothering to hide the appreciative look that flickers across her face even so. "Believe it or not, I owned the shop upstairs, too, for a little while. Inherited both when people I knew disappeared." That she can say so without flinching or her voice changing speaks only to how long it's been, much more so in one instance than the other. Neil left and came back a long time ago now. Max's disappearance is a little more fresh, a wound that hasn't fully healed yet. Where he's concerned, she doubts it ever will. "Trying to manage both was a pain in the ass, though, so."

Flustered as she might have been at first, she's long since stopped being fazed by Whiplash. If anything, there had been a strange sort of thrill in imagining what her parents would have had to say about her running a sex shop, something that she can only guess would be even more disappointing than her staying in New York with her brother instead of going to college like she was supposed to.

"And so you picked drinks over dildos," he says, considering for a moment before he takes a sip of his drink. It's good, well mixed, the perfect blend as far as he's concerned and he gives her a grin. "I'd've picked the same, given the chance."

Of course, had he ever decided to run a bar, the damn thing would have only managed to stay open due to his tendency toward exceptionally good luck than through any effort of his own. If he were running a bar, he'd end up drinking most of his stock and spending evenings face down on the floor. These days it wouldn't amount to much for him, but not all that long ago he could have counted on his luck to carry him through.

He really misses his fucking coin.

"Well, I have more experience with one than the other," Lucy says, her voice deliberately light, shoulders lifting in a shrug. A decade ago, she probably would have found the subject alone mortifying. A decade ago, though, she was someone else entirely. She'd thought, back then, that moving to New York and no longer being in a sheltered, suburban bubble had rid her of her earlier naïveté. Maybe, in a sense, that was true. It barely has anything, though, on the last ten years of her life, ones marked predominantly by loss of one sort or another. She never used to be cynical and jaded. Now, she's not sure if there are any other options. "So it wasn't a very difficult choice."

Besides, she has an emotional attachment to this place that she never would have to the shop upstairs. It is, like her, a transplant from another life, albeit in a new setting now. Whiplash was Neil's and later Brian's and then Max's, but McCormick's means something to her.

"Not half bad experience either," he agrees, nodding toward his drink before he swallows the remainder down and then sets the empty glass on the bar top.

She must do enough business to keep the place open and in a world of modern conveniences, Mad Sweeney knows that's not always easy. Half the time now it seems like people would rather buy a bottle of whatever they prefer to get plastered, then head home to do so in front of their television.

All hail fucking Media.

"You got regulars that keep this place goin'?" he asks. "Seems like you'd have to with an entrance off an alley. Unless that's the charm of this fuckin' place. Have the hipsters found it? Called it underground and subversive and claimed it for their own? They fuckin' will yet."

"...Yeah, I think my idea of what a hipster is might be kind of different from what your idea of a hipster is," Lucy says, wrinkling her nose, though she smiles through the words. She's used to this — references that go over her head, things that have changed and developed and evolved in the nearly fifty years since she was back in what she used to think of as the real world. None of what he's talking about, except for maybe the subversive part, would have been particularly noteworthy to he hippies she used to hang out with in New York. Granted, she was never really one of them, or never really felt like one of them, but she still spent a lot of time around that crowd. A lot of time has passed, though, and she's willing to bet that that word is one thing that's changed with so much else. "The last time I was... well, home, I guess, it was 1968. If that helps."

Shrugging, she adds, "And yeah, we've got a good few regulars. Some people who were friends with the guy who used to own this place before. A lot of other people who came from outside Darrow. Others, too, but I think that's mostly what keeps it going."

"Fuck," he says with a wistful sigh. "I miss the fuckin' sixties."

He'd spent most of that decade and the two following in some sort of altered state, high on whatever what popular and easy to get at the time. In the end he still prefers alcohol and he knows a good number of people'd call him a drunk, but he doesn't much give a shit one way or the other.

People die. He doesn't. They can call him whatever the fuck they want during the mere seconds they spend in his life.

"Maybe I'll become a regular," he says with a slow, lazy grin. "Do my best not to get in any fights or take 'em outside when they become inevitable." Because they often do.

"You lived through the sixties?" Lucy asks, leaning forward a little, clear interest in her voice. It's rare that she comes across anyone for whom that's the case; in fact, now that she thinks of it, she can't remember the last time she knew anyone who did, aside from her brother. Raven was close, but still from considerably earlier enough that it made a difference. She tends to feel out of place when and wherever she is and she knows it, but it's just one more way in which she's never really quite fit here. However well she may have adjusted to the future — has had to, after spending a decade in it — the things she lived through, most people know from history books. They weren't there. They didn't live it. "I don't think I know anyone anymore who did. It's... weird, sometimes."

She shakes her head a little, not wanting to dwell on it too much. "Hey, as long as you take them outside, works for me. I need customers just about as much as I don't need property damage."

"The sixties, the fifties," he says with a wave of his hand before he nudges his glass toward her. If he's going to be here, he's planning on getting drunk. Very drunk, if he can manage, if she'll let him. There are some places that won't, places that stop serving when he gets to a certain point and it's then he has to go home and drink to Media and all her hours of distracting colours.

"The twenties," he continues. "The century before that. The one before that. You want tales of the 1660s, I can give those to you, too, so long as you pour me another drink and find a few ways t'loosen my tongue."

He says it with a grin and a lift of his eyebrow, not entirely meaning to be lewd, but seeing no point in avoiding it either.

"You know, I'd really like to say that I don't believe you," Lucy replies, already refilling his drink as she does, "but after fuck knows how many years here, and after having seen you pull gold coins out of thin air... Yeah, I guess I do." The strangest part, maybe, is how unfazed she is. It just casts into sharper relief just how long she's been away from the place she used to call home, how much things have changed, how much she's changed. She isn't sure if she likes the idea of that or not. Mostly, it makes her think again that she could really use a drink herself, but drinking on the job is one line that she won't cross.

Gently pushing his glass back towards him, she arches her brow in turn, arms folded across her chest. "Well, that's the another drink part covered," she says. "Just how loose would your tongue have to be?"

Just what she's doing, she hasn't really got a clue. She's long since had a self-destructive streak a mile wide, but she can't really categorize this as that; she doesn't know if she'd call it flirting, either. There's an obvious sort of suggestion behind those words, though, and she's feeling reckless enough to try to see just how much of one it is.

His head tilts, a simple expression of who knows? as he takes the glass and drains half of it in one go. Without looking, he aims his hand toward the tip jar and flicks his thumb, a coin sailing through the air to click softly against the others inside.

"Not very," he admits. "If you've not guessed, I'm a bit of a talker, darling."

But she's taken his comment and maybe she's not exactly run with it, but she hasn't run from it either. These past few months, Sweeney has done everything in his power to steer away from anyone without a cock, simply because the last woman he wanted to fuck had been dead at his hands and he'd like to not think on that very hard. Hild stands apart from everyone, set aside from the world as he's come to accept it, but Lucy is so very much entrenched in it, despite being out of her time, too. It stirs a heat in him he's not entirely reluctant to stoke.

She's not fucking dead, after all.

"It's easy to get me goin'," he adds, then finishes his drink.

"Really? I couldn't tell," Lucy says dryly, though there's no real bite behind the words, rolling her eyes at him as she does. From the time she met him, talking her into patching up a bullet hole in his fucking arm, she's figured that he could drive her seriously fucking crazy, but for as much as he might be obnoxious, he's amusing, too, and she's — well, she's feeling reckless. It's hard not to when her life has gone to pieces around her once again, and when it's once again been circumstances outside of her control. People disappear. They want different things. She may have a history of fucking up good things, too, but she and Steve had been drifting apart long before she slept with someone else. Mostly, it's things she can't help: Daniel's death, her brother's draft letter, a whole fucking slew of disappearances, the fact that Tommy wanted a family and she didn't.

With nothing to rail against, no system to fight, nothing to direct her anger towards, all that frustration, that energy, has to go somewhere. Occasionally, that involves some questionable decisions.

It isn't like there's any harm in playing along with him, anyway. He's tipped well, there will be a bartender back on duty in a while, and she might as well see just how far he intends to take this.

"So when you say going, do you really just mean talking?"

"Well, not only talking," he answers with a grin. "In the interest of honesty."

Most days he'd rather fight than fuck, he'd rather fight than just about anything else, but there are alternatives when it comes to getting riled up and some of them do the job just as well as being punched in the face a few times. Hell, at this point there's no saying Lucy won't be happy to knock him around a bit.

A woman her size, it might not quite feel the same, but sometimes he's pleasantly surprised by the strength behind a nice, solid punch thrown by a woman who otherwise looks unassuming. She runs a bar, she has to be tough.

"I may not always start the fights, for example, but I sure as fuck enjoy finishing them," he says, then flashes another grin. "Among other things."

"So you just wait for other people to start things for you?" Lucy asks, a crooked smile on her face and her head tilting to the side. There's no way he's not talking about something else here, she'd bet actual money on it, but there's an odd sort of thrill in skirting the edge here, waiting to see who'll be the first to fall, maybe because she knows she shouldn't be doing it. It's been less than a month since she and Tommy broke up, since she moved out and brought her shit to her office here and started sleeping there while she looks for an apartment. Of the two of them, she's the one who's sober, but that doesn't mean her judgment is particularly sound at the moment.

She's playing with fire. She thinks maybe she's looking to get burned.

"I guess they'd just have to take your word for it, then, that you'd follow through."

Oh, he likes her. There are a few people he's met over the years who skirt a line between not taking any of his shit and being good-natured about it and here she fucking is, doing exactly that. He had liked Laura for different reasons and hated her, too, for most of the same, but this is something unlike that.

Not even Essie had been something like this, but then, he hadn't much real contact with Essie beyond the prison and the day of her death. There have been others, names and faces like distant shadows, the edges of their memories blurred by time and drink, and he should know better, but he never fucking learns. Seven bloody centuries and he never learns.

"Don't think I'm capable, love?" he asks. "Of following through?"

There's a reason she's doing this. He can feel it. He doesn't much care what it is, people have their reasons for making decisions and he's a leprechaun, not a bloody guardian angel. They can do whatever the hell they like and if they need his help, he's happy to lend it.

"Well, you did say you're a talker," Lucy says as easy as anything, her shoulders lifting slightly, as if they could be talking about something as simple as the weather. They aren't, though, and she's fairly certain that he knows it just as well as she does. It's just easier like this, playing along but not being the one to break. If she doesn't suggest it, if she doesn't ask for what she's increasingly certain she wants here, then she doesn't have to feel half as bad about it.

She shouldn't in the first place. It isn't as if she'll be cheating on anyone this time; she's been single for weeks. Still, part of her feels like it's a betrayal of a sort. She'd loved Tommy — loves him still, as much as she tries to ignore that when she knows they broke up for a good reason and that it wouldn't have worked. She hates herself a little for that, which makes the idea of doing something like this all the more appealing. It's also all the more reason she needs a distraction.

"How do I know you're not all talk?"

He stands then, his height making it so that he towers over her, even with the bar between them, and when he leans forward it's easy for him to close the distance between them. With both his hands planted on the bar, he leans in, moving into her space and it gives her the chance to back off, but he doubts she's going to. Whatever it is she's running from, he knows he's a good thing to hide behind, at least for a little while. He's seen all sorts of people with all sorts of things they want to forget and it'll be far from the first time he's used to do it.

Unlike many people, Mad Sweeney has never had much of a problem with it.

"Suppose you'll just have to take my word for it," he says with a smirk, leaning closer still. She smells like the bar, like she's been here for awhile, but also divinely human, a scent most people don't even know they carry and he closes his eyes for a moment to breathe that in. "Whatever it is you want me for, lass, I've had centuries to learn how t'do it."

It could easily be intimidating, someone as tall as he is leaning over her like this. Lucy has never even been particularly short, but he's still got about a foot and a half on her, which seemed significantly less noteworthy when all she was doing was patching up a bullet hole in his arm. Still, she isn't half as fazed as maybe she should be. Whatever this is, she's already mentally committed to it, not about to be the one to back down now. She's in her own damn bar, anyway. While she may not be entirely sure what she wants here, she isn't going to give any ground, either, especially not when she's just made a point of mentioning that he might be all talk.

"I have an office in the back," she says, jerking her head quickly in that direction, deliberately not answering the unspoken question of what she wants. She's got enough of an idea, and that much, at least, ought to have spoken for itself by now. "You should settle up and come meet me back there." She's half-tempted to say that the second drink is on her, but there's a potential implication there that she doesn't much like, and she doubts it makes any real difference. If he really isn't all talk, he'll do something about it.

"You're not gonna buy me a drink first, love?" he asks, pulling back enough to be seen, enough that she can see the glint in his eyes, the grin at the corners of his mouth. He's teasing her, he doesn't expect a free drink, not when money is one of the few things he's never once worried about, but he can't quite seem to help himself.

Maybe he's not only talk, but he still is a talker. The sort to run his mouth. It's ideal for getting into trouble whenever he wants.

"Go," he says, taking a step back and moving in the direction of her register. He'll dump ten fucking pounds of gold in her tip jar if that'll make her happy, not that he's generally that concerned with pleasing people, but he's got a damn good idea of what she wants out of him tonight and he'll be happy to provide.

"Maybe later, if you're lucky," Lucy quips, a tight, teasing smile on her face as she steps out from behind the bar. This is probably a bad idea, but at least as bad ideas go, it isn't her worst. She hasn't gone on a bender like Max would have, or gotten herself seriously hurt in a fight like Tommy did once, reeling from the loss of his brother and nieces. Of course, thinking of both of them only seems to deepen the pit in her stomach, making her need all the more to do something. She can't blame herself for the deterioration of this relationship, but she does, and if she's going to feel like shit, she may as well own it.

Exactly what she wants, she may not be sure of, but she does know that she isn't looking for anything soft and sweet and tender, which she thinks he'll know already. She wants, maybe, to feel that much worse, and in so doing release some of this tension, clear her head a little. Somehow, despite all of her teasing, she gets the sense that he'll be good for that.

One of her bartenders takes over as soon as she's started walking away, and she glances back only once as she heads down the little side corridor where her office is, unlocking the door and then leaving it just slightly ajar. The room is something of a mess, with boxes in the corners and a few pillows and blankets shoved against the wall, but she can't bring herself to care. She isn't trying to impress him or any shit like that. Even if she were, it wouldn't be worth it to try.

She's been sleeping here. That's the first thing he notices when he pushes open the office door, nothing the pillows and blanket that are pushed aside. They've been shoved out of the way, but they still paint a picture, a fairly obvious one, he thinks, but he's not enough of an idiot to comment on it. There's a reason he's been invited back here at all instead of having his ass kicked out for hitting on the owner and he's fairly certain he knows what that reason is, but to draw attention to it is probably just going to end with him getting kicked out now instead of before.

And he's not exactly here out of the goodness of his fucking heart.

"No free drinks, no rose petals strewn about the floor," he says with a smirk as he closes the door behind him. "Christ, lass, what's a man got t'do to get a little romance around these parts?" This has nothing to do with romance and they both know it, but he's still wearing that same grin as he approaches her. "And after all those coin tricks I done for you."

"Yeah, if you wanted romance, you've definitely come to the wrong place," Lucy says, an undisguised wry edge on her voice, all but rolling her eyes as she speaks. "I don't do romance very well." That's just a fact, even if she says it as easily as if it weren't. Not all of her relationships have ended because of her, but it's hard not to feel responsible for at least the last two. She'd lost two good men, one because her own discontent led her to someone else's bed, though they'd already been drifting apart before that, the other because she couldn't bring herself to want what he wanted, to settle down and start a family. Maybe that's just logical. It isn't as if she doesn't have reasons for not wanting to take a chance on something like that. That doesn't stop her from feeling like it's a failing on her part, that she could have kept him if only she'd tried a little harder.

It's been nearly a month, though, and Tommy is not who she wants to be thinking about right now, except inasmuch as she's been left with this restlessness under her skin, needing an outlet of some sort. This is the best sort of bad decision she could make. Given that he's here in the first place, she doubts he's anything less than willing.

"So do you want to fuck me or what?"