straysinspace | Some meme threads

The burst of relief that hits Kai when the door opens is absurd, and he knows it. There's no reason any elfin presence should make him feel the slightest bit better. But his mind feels clearer, like his vision works a little better. It's like having a hangover wear off, except there's no way Kai drank near enough to be hungover.

It's enough to keep the usual fight or flight instincts from kicking in, along with a knowledge deeper than anything Kai's been told, that he shouldn't be surprised to see Marco now.

"You here to negotiate a surrender?" He's heard some of the mutterings of people convinced he's wasting their time and the stock to handle the situation like this.

Marco closes the door behind himself and gives a soft laughter. "For you or the brownies?" he asks mildly as he walks to Kai, lowering his shopping bags to the ground. He doesn't take a seat, yet, though, just breathes through the relief that he can feel as well building between the two of them. If that isn't enough to tell him exactly what he needs to know about this situation, what would amount to that, honestly?

"Can I buy you a drink?" he asks as he crosses the floor to the bar and helps himself behind it. He selects a few bills from his wallet and leaves them onto the counter before picking up a glass and starts to look at the whiskey cabinet. "People will talk because they don't understand why you're doing this the way you are. I find the progress very prudent, to be honest." Practical.

Kai frowns at the first part, purple eyes looking away from Marco in favor of studying one of the brownies that's currently enjoying a very generous glass of...something. He has no desire to surrender to this man, to let him have any part of Kai.

He's still surprised when Marco leaves money for the drink. Surprised because he figures most elfin would just take it. Heck, most humans would be tempted enough. It's enough to let him take Marco up on the offer. "As long as it's at least 80 proof." He ignores the complement, because it makes him feel a certain way, and he doesn't want to think about that, doesn't want to indulge the warmth of it.

"It'll get the job done, but it gets boring."

It's not so much being lawful for Marco, just understanding that people need money to get by. And there isn't a whole lot of riches and finery in this pub, he certainly can pay for his drink. He selects a potent whiskey from the cabinet, one that isn't dreadfully old but boasts an oak barrel finish, which he's come to enjoy quite a bit. Humans definitely know something about brewing fine liquors. A sizable rock goes into both glasses before a few fingers of the amber intoxication. Marco closes the bottle and returns it to the cabinet.

"Well, lucky you, I'm here to keep you company," he says mildly as he carries the glasses to the table and sets one of them in front of Kai before taking a seat at the other side of the table.

Actually, he feels intoxicated. It's been a week of living on a bed of thorns that just gets worse and worse. Pulsating headaches that aren't his own, tension, irritation, a dull ache that he knows resonates from Kai. Now it's gone and he leans back in his chair, relaxing as he lifts his glass to take a sip of it. Enjoying the relief that makes him feel lightheaded. He can only imagine how it feels to Kai himself.

"What is your story?" he asks after a moment as he nurses the whiskey against his chest. "Why are you here and not with your family? I finally figured out why you look so familiar. You and your brother look quite similar."

Kai's glass of whiskey is brushing his lips when Marco finishes talking, and Kai sets it back on the table with a force that rattles the glass and table both. The spike of fear that fills him would drive him to his feet if he didn't feel frozen in his chair with it. He wants to run, he wants to draw his gun and be ready for whatever's going to walk through the door now.

But he feels at ease for the first time in weeks , body relaxing from a tension that Kai knows damn well he's been carrying but can't quite drive back into his bones, even at Marco's words. It's like Kai's body won't accept what his mind knows, that getting close to any unsidhe will just lead to pain.

"I don't have family," he says, eyes darting between Marco and the door, expecting Valin to walk through at any moment. Kai fights the very strong temptation to dive under the table to hide. "Did you tell him I'm here?" There's an urgency in Kai's voice, and his whole body language would be radiating fear even if Marco couldn't read it from him.

"Oh, hey..." Marco is half on his feet when Kai slams the glass down and he can feel the fear rising. "Listen, I have no intentions of reporting back to your family or anyone else for that matter. I did talk with Merlin, but I didn't mention your name even to him. Or any description of you, or your family."

He's talking in a low, soothing voice, slowly lowering himself back onto his seat and leans forward a little, over his glass to try and catch those dark eyes with his own.

"I know you have no reason to trust me, but whatever reason you have to shun those folks, I'm not going to tell you to do otherwise or advocate for any approach you should take. I'm merely curiously about you simply for personal reasons."

"Personal reasons," Kai says, and he keeps his hand in his lap until he can still the risk that it might start to tremble. When he has, he picks up the glass again and drains it in a series of quick gulps. Maybe not how Kai should treat this sort of drink, but it does spread a warmth and numbness both through him.

"You already know I have no family." Kai's told him that, and it's true whether or not Marco believes him. Valin cuid Anbhás might call Kai brother - might be his brother by all rules of biology - but he's also always thought of Kai as more of a toy. Family is status with the elfin, it's place and power. Without either, Kai is likely of little interest to Marco.

He hates the part of him that feels disappointed about that.

His heart is still beating out a rapid rhythm, even with the effect of the whiskey and Marco's reassurances. "I'm an open book, what else do you want to know?" He's far from an open book, that much has been made obvious already, but it's only half a joke.

Marco is realising that this is a discussion they will need to take their time to have. Kai is volatile and obviously very upset about it. Marco gives himself a moment to think about it because now that he's embracing what's happening to them, he knows he's been privy to Kai's life before even seeing the man and he knows there's quite a bit of suffering in his past, it's been a steady presence at the back of Marco's mind for a long, long time.

He does put two and two together, however, Kai's horror at talking about his family and the constant terror in his past. There's a hard look in the blond's eyes for a moment, anger and disgust, but he puts it all aside for now.

"How about... I tell you something instead," he suggests then, pushing his own untouched drink towards Kai with an apologetic gesture, perhaps an apology for bringing up a topic like that. "I was not born to high status. In fact, I lived at the fringes of the my clan for most of my childhood. We didn't have much, just my grandmother, my twin sister, and me. Later I learned granny was not related to us at all, which would probably explain why she ever had very little interest towards us. We worked hard since early childhood. Sometimes Mandor, the man responsible for our birth, came to see us under a disguise. He's a weird one, Lord Sawall. I angered him around my tenth birthday and he dropped me across the world with just the clothes on my back and left me there. It was a hard trip back home. I begged and worked and was ruined in so many ways already before I got back home. Of course during the time I had been away, my sister had fell ill and not survived. Killing my father at the time seemed like a very logical conclusion to all this, so..." He huffs out a small laughter. Little boy's mindless determination had been his leading light those days.

Kai figures he knows what that look on Marco's face means, judgement and disgust directed at an elfin who had a family and gave it up. He's used to it, used to people not understanding and knowing he can't exactly explain. Knowing that people don't get to demand his explanations.

"You weren't born to high status," Kai says, "But you have it now." That would have been obvious enough from the fact that he was sent to talk to the humans, to negotiate with them, but also from a number of other details. And the fact that Kai has done what he could to ask a few questions about Marco, about unsidhe power structure, in between the last visit and this one.

"I can't imagine people viewing patricide all that kindly." One thing the humans and elfin had in common.

"Oh, yeah," Marco admits. "I have more status than I ever wanted." He shrugs mildly.

"And no, they didn't. I was fifteen when I had a chance to take him down. Obviously, that wasn't going to happen. But I tried very hard." He smiles, the expression a little crooked and one sided, amusement clear in his moon-clear eyes. "Instead of exacting my revenge, I spent the next couple of decades as his personal prisoner. A personal hell is what he calls those places. I spent some quality time in mine before we struck a bargain."

He doesn't seem like there are scars left on him due to these events, but since Kai has some extra sensory perception, he's privy to facts like elevated heartrate and blown pupils. Those are definitely not forgotten memories.

"He put me to work. Trained me, clothed me, taught me in a lot of things. But I also worked for him. I earned back my freedom through a lot of shit that he didn't want any of my uncles or cousins to handle. So, when I said I've seen danger, I meant it. I was a regular meatshield for a lot of my relatives for a while." He laughs warmly. "Now, I suppose my current situation seems a little strange regarding all this. But look, my cousin, the king, is a completely different type of case. He was put on the throne by my father and his mother, they hoped to control him, but he's proven to be a lot more tenacious than either of them suspected. I suppose you could call this a soft coup, he's going to change things. I will lay my life down for him if necessary."

This could easily enough be a trick. A plan to make Kai trust him, words twisted deliberately make that happen. But that doesn't really make sense when Kai stops to think about it. His brother and father never cared about fooling Kai's mind, didn't need that control to accomplish everything else they wanted.

So Kai has to seriously consider the possibility that Marco is telling him the truth. Even if that still doesn't leave him clear on why he's sharing that much.

"I have no desire to get involved in elfin politics," Kai says with an apologetic shrug as he picks up Marco's glass. He sips at it this time. "If you're looking for an ally you could do much better." And Kai can't exactly see himself as being much use to Marco, or Merlin, even if he were wiling to play meatshield himself.

"I'm not looking for an ally," Marco replies with a shake of his head. He probably was sharing too much. "I'm just offering you a story," he says this with a quiet look at Kai. "Nothing else."

He steps up again, this time with a quiet sigh as he makes his way around the bar and again pulls out a few bills before he pours himself another serving. Kai still has his glass.

He fixes himself a drink and returns with it, taking a seat again.

"So, that was me," he says brightly. "What about you? You've obviously been here long enough to know the human ways a lot better than I do."

Kai manages to look amused, to offer a sheepish smile. "I've got a story, but it's up to you to decide if it's true or not." He's used to being greeted with a certain amount of disbelief from humans, can't imagine an unsidhe having much more sympathy. Better by far to make it something that can be laughed off, even if that might make Marco annoyed.

"Grew up in a cell. My mother was...a sidhe prisoner. I didn't know her, but one day one of my guards snatches me and takes off running. Don't know if he thought he could get reward money from the sidhe side of my family or what, but I don't think they were interested. The guard ends up losing me in a poker game to Dempsey, an asshole human Stalker." Kai's voice is touched with fondness for Dempsey, despite the words.

"Dempsey more or less raised me, to follow in his footsteps." Kai decides this is a great time to finish off his (Marco's) glass.

"So..." Marco says thoughtfully, eyeing Kai curiously with a new kind of understanding. "You're half and half." It's a surprise to be honest. He had expected something else. Maybe there's a fleeting chance that he's not dying his hair after all.

"And then raised by the third," Marco observes. He can feel that fondness, the bitterness that might come from facing so much disbelief, and plenty of anger, which doesn't surprise him in the least.

"That sounds like a rough beginning for a life," he says quietly.

"We all come into life screaming and naked," Kai says. "We move past it." He wants to avoid any risk of recapture, but he doesn't feel like dwelling on the pain of his past.

"If you're in a sharing mood, do you want to say how it is you happened to come by while I'm the only one here." Kai lifts and eyebrow and leans back in his chair to keep an eye on Marco.

"In this bar right now?" Marco asks. Then shrugs easily, a bit of a smile curving over his lips. "I sought you out. I assumed it would be obvious." Why else would he be here right now?

"And before you lose your marbles about stalking you, yes, yes, I did that. I have no ill intentions towards you, Kai. But you know as well as I do that ignoring each other will only increase the suffering. I'd like to know you rather than apply my own guess work in place for the facts."

Marco is right, Kai doesn't like that at all. He tightens his lips, pursing them into a frown and glances over at the brownies to see if they've settled down yet, if he can call this job complete.

"I don't think I know that." Which is either a way to say that he doesn't care, or expressing his genuine ignorance about all things which are elfin customs - especially the sort that they don't talk to humans about.

Marco quiets as he considers that. Then he nods. "Alright, if that's how you feel about it. You aren't going to see me forcing your hand."

He smooths his sleeve as he stands up, taking a last sip from his drink before he pushes the chair back under the table, tidying up.

"It was a pleasant enough afternoon with you, Kai Gracen. I would imagine we'll see each other again. Until then."

Kai is starting to think that he doesn't understand Marco at all, certainly hadn't expected someone who admitted to stalking him to simply leave when asked.

It's a surprise, too, that there's a certain steadiness in Kai that fades as Marco gets further away.

Some meme threads

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