A Bar on the Mainland, Monday Night

[not_a_whiner]

Yeah, okay. Kaidan had planned to save this as a kind of 'thanks for letting me bunk in your house' thing for his new housemates. Somewhere near the end of the term, once he was sure whether Alliance brass was going to make him stick around for a while or not.

Last week, though? Last week was enough of an emergency to move this up a little. More than a little.

He didn't particularly nurse his bottle; he'd been in here for not-too-long and half of it was already gone. "At least they serve Canadian lager here," he said. "That was the one upside of being called back to Vancouver and then to here, I guess. Decent drinks and decent food."

As far as icebreakers that danced around the point went... that was a doozy.

[[ for the housemates, SP, and me putting this up early in case I crash soon and forget. ]]

Comments

[bitten_notshy]

Jack was still in no, really, how glad am I that I'm alive? mode, helped along with a heaping spoonful of denial about the more troubling aspects of the last week. The combination had him reasonably cheerful, if tired. He'd never spent much time thinking about Canadian beer, but talking about it with his housemates in a mainland bar was about his speed for the night.

"I don't know if we stock this brand at Devil's Nest," he said, tilting his bottle up to examine the label. "We should, if we don't."

[not_a_whiner]

"It's good," Kaidan agreed, and promptly polished off his own bottle. "Definitely beats batarian shard wine. You never know what you're going to miss about Earth until you spend a while out in space."

[bitten_notshy]

"I'll take your word for it," Jack decided, making a mental note to ask what batarian shard wine was ... perhaps never. "I'm not sure I could get over missing gravity and the sun, myself."

[not_a_whiner]

"You can find suns everywhere," Kaidan said, gesturing towards the bartender to get him another one. "Gravity, too. The people, the things made by those people... that's different."

[bitten_notshy]

"But not the right sun." Jack was a lightweight; he got more vociferous about things two beers in. "But I do know what you mean. Even when I've liked a new place, it's never the same as the last place I was in."

[not_in_the_book]

"You mean there's a bar on the island that doesn't stock every alcohol known to man-, mutant-, and alien-kind?" Ronan asked. "Colour me shocked. And appalled. Shocked and appalled."

Or, y'know, drunk. One of those.

[bitten_notshy]

Jack laughed. He was still in a mood about Emma, but drunk Ronan was cute enough to lure him out of it.

"Not our fault," he said. "There are too many kinds of beer, and we only have so much space. Perhaps we could expand into the shop next door."

[not_in_the_book]

Drunk Ronan was THE ADORABLEST.

Or. Something.

"Hmm, or maybe you just need to expand your storage space," Ronan pointed out. "Lots of ways to do that without actually needing to take over other shops -- I can't be the only person on the island who can build spatial pockets."

[bitten_notshy]

"I'm sure you aren't," Jack said, thinking about the issue a bit more seriously. This took some effort. "I'll bring that up with Eric next time I see him, all right?"

[icecoldfrost]

"Who headquarters the future of the world in Canada?" Emma asked, shaking her head before taking another long drink from her own beer. Given the traumatizing implications of the week, she was willing to forgo her usual beverages in favor of something completely different. "You could get over-run by wild moose at any moment."

[not_a_whiner]

Kaidan chuckled. "Don't think we've had any wild moose attacks so far," he said, "But I'm sure a couple are conspiring as we, uh, speak."

[icecoldfrost]

"Or bears. I'm rather sure Canada has bears," Emma quipped. "How do you manage the needs of a city and giant intergalactic space-force with local wildlife?"

[not_a_whiner]

"Setting up preserves, mostly," Kaidan said. He smiled wryly. "But that doesn't sound as exciting, I guess."

[icecoldfrost]

"Not really a fan of zoos," Emma confessed. "I don't like seeing the animals confined."

Mostly because it made her think of the mutant-camps that people at ESU were advocating for at home.

[bitten_notshy]

Jack glanced over at her coolly for a long moment before he said anything. He understood the things the other version of her had done were not her fault, but it was still hard to get back to normal when you realized your lover would be complicit in imprisoning you in some world.

Even harder, perhaps, when you could clearly see the steps that would lead her there.

"You just think everything important should be in New York," he teased, though his teasing had a cool edge. "It's provincial of you, you know."

[icecoldfrost]

Emma? Was just going to ignore Jack's surface thoughts. Because they were insulting, and if she had to hear his inner woefully emo monologue all night, she was going to dump a beer in his lap.

"Please, there's not enough land left in New York unless we actually annex New Jersey," Emma pointed out. "But you have to admit, Mounties aren't the most intimidating police force, given how polite they are."

[bitten_notshy]

"Have you ever actually met a mountie?" Jack asked, with raised eyebrows. "The one who used to work at the school not counted. They're police. All police are bastards if you come at them wrong."

She could ignore it all she liked, but Jack's inner monologue was likely to stay just as emo for the rest of the night. She might find it tiresome, but the one who'd been locked up for a week had the right to be tiresome as far as he was concerned. Let her shift to diamond if it bothered her, because he had no intention of trying to shield.

It was possible Jack was having a bit of a tantrum.

[icecoldfrost]

Right, because she could totally shift in front of all these normals. Duh.

"You might as well say all humans are bastards if you come at them the wrong way," Emma replied mildly, but she wasn't going to blink or look away, one eyebrow raised in silent challenge to her Jack.

[not_in_the_book]

Ronan shook his head. "Moose are too solitary to take anything over," he explained, perfectly seriously. "It's the black squirrels you need to worry about. Those things aren't afraid of anything."

[icecoldfrost]

"Any squirrels are fucking terrifying." Emma was going to give you a dirty look, Ronan, and steal your beer for making her think about killer squirrels.

[not_in_the_book]

"Hey, now, get your own!" Ronan said, grabbing his beer away; it sloshed almost over the edge, but he was an experienced-enough drinker to avoid spilling it.

"Or, well. Do you want another? It's my turn to buy a round, isn't it?"

[not_in_the_book]

Ronan better late than never looked up from his glass of something bright pink and fruity.

Shut up, he'll be drinking Guinness later.

"One thing you generally never have to worry about around me," Ronan pointed out, "is the quality of the food and drink." He grinned at Kaidan. "So, do they still have Guinness in the future?"

[not_a_whiner]

"Course they do," Kaidan said, lifting his glass of not-Guinness. "Prime human export."

[not_in_the_book]

Ronan blinked. "Cool. I hadn't even thought it'd get that far off-planet. Mind, I'm also used to a lot of aliens who think we're morons for consuming what's basically poison."

It's true. But remind him later, and he'll share some of the blue fizzy alien euphoric.

[not_a_whiner]

"Hey, if the batarians can manage to sell shard wine to people on the Citadel," Kaidan said philosophically. "...Don't ever drink batarian shard wine. Shepard tried it once, it... didn't end so well."