if you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch
He lingers at the dimly-lit bar with a bottle of whiskey clenched in his teke, hovering just a few inches above the scarred wood -- every so often, he could be seen to take a swig of the liquor, his pale eye staring down into the stained surface. There’s just enough shadows to cover him, to dim the gleam of torch-light off the dented iron of his armor, and the buzz in his veins is enough to relax the tension in his muscles, if only for the night.
“Stop being so fuckin’ stubborn,” He grouses to his unwillingly-obtained companion, swinging his gaze to fix @Teiran with a single-eyed glare from beneath his faceplate. He plants the bottle on the bar in front of her with a sudden ‘thump,’ the liquid inside sloshing around from the force, and it’s likely a small miracle the bottle itself doesn’t crack or shatter. “Just take the damn bottle and drink, or go fuck off somewhere else where you’re not killing my buzz.” It was starting to get annoying, now, the mare just standing there and silently watching, seemingly unable to be shaken off even when he’d tried to lose her amongst the crowd of Night-Court partiers.
it coils like a molten snake,
and cuts you like a sharp knife.
this desert heat is a hunter—
it will ruthlessly take your life.
Teiran didn’t know why she was here in Denocte at this masquerade they were throwing. Hadn’t she once said that she disliked parties? The Solterran soldier wasn’t dressed up, no mask or any other sort of finery draping across her body. She stood by and her sage green eyes moved over the bustling crowd filling the court. Most if not all seemed to have taken the masquerade very seriously, and she found it difficult to discern if any were also Solterrans at a distance. Masks shielded their faces and scarfs and other clothing covered the rest of them. She wondered again what she was doing here, where she so clearly did not belong.
“Stop being so fuckin’ stubborn.”
Ah, right. She remembered now. Parties meant drinking and drinking meant recklessness, and Mathias, of all she thought, was as reckless as you could get. He would drink himself to death if he got the chance she was sure, as he so often and willingly seemed to put himself into downright stupid situations. Her gaze flickered back over him as he slammed a bottle down in front of her. The equine next to her startled at the sudden noise, cursed and wandered off, drink clutched in their hand. Anyone else might have sighed, but not Teiran.
She took ahold of the bottle and lifted it, watching the way the light gleamed through the slightly golden liquid inside. It wasn’t full, since Mathias had been nursing it for awhile, and without ceremony or announcement, Teiran put the bottle to her lips and tipped it back, downing a few gulps before setting it back onto the bar. “Are you satisfied?” she said, her voice as flat as it ever was, her expression still as steel cold, while the whiskey warmed its way from the back of her throat and down to her stomach.
if you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch
There’s a moment of smug self-satisfaction as the equine beside him startles, unable to help the smirk that pulls over his mouth. He’s been… alive, ever since the battle with the elk, in a way he hasn’t been for a long time -- still underfed and ill-kempt, unable to see caring for himself as a priority, but a certain life had returned to him, especially once they had crossed the threshold of the bar. It might have even been okay, if he wasn’t a raging trash fire of a person… and if he had been seeking out any other vice rather than alcohol.
Whiskey always had made him want a good fight, and it seemed his target was the long-suffering soldier next to him. “About fuckin’ time,” He mutters beneath his breath with the words just barely slurred, grabbing the bottle back and taking another swig, breathing through the way it burned the entire way down his throat, before pushing it back towards Teiran. “See if we can’t get ya to fuckin’ relax for once.” She had him on edge, too ready for something to happen -- if anyone needed a vacation, it was the girl with the silver collar.
it coils like a molten snake,
and cuts you like a sharp knife.
this desert heat is a hunter—
it will ruthlessly take your life.
Teiran didn’t think she was the one who was up in arms, so she wasn’t sure why Mathias thought she needed to relax. If anything, she thought he was the one out of the two of them who needed to do exactly that. In all the time she’d known him, ever since that first day out in the snowstorm, he’d been looking for a fight, wanting to start something. Teiran did not go looking for fights, she just knew they could happen at any moment. Especially when there was alcohol involved. Better to be prepared than caught off guard.
He pushed the bottle back toward her after taking another swig from it and she regarded it for a moment. What exactly was he hoping was going to happen if she kept drinking? Teiran wasn’t here to enjoy herself; like she’d said, she hated parties. She was here to make sure he didn’t do something stupid to himself or anyone around him. “You didn't really come here just to drink, did you. You can do that in Solterra.” she said to him as she gripped the bottle again. Maybe if she drank some of it he would get less drunk. At least, that was her plan as she took another drink and set it down.
if you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch
There’s a buzzing in his ears that drowns out the voices whispering in the background of his mind, a constant old-paper rattle he can barely decipher, the call of that thrice-damned vulture whenever it lands near him, and he wonders sometimes if this is what going mad consists of -- if his mind has been poisoned from the beginning, a ticking time bomb, a loaded bear trap just waiting to spring -- did he ever really have a chance, when he was playing against a loaded deck?
The alcohol makes those thoughts slip away, a scoff leaving his lips at the soldier’s question. “Sure, I could drink in Solterra… but then I can’t watch people make asses of themselves in shitty costumes.” He smirks, his attention turned towards a passing party-goer, and he leers after her for a few moments -- she was passably pretty, and hey, if he couldn’t find a fight tonight, he wouldn’t oppose trying to find some other way to entertain himself.
“Maybe I just got sick of being surrounded by fuckin’ sand, ever consider that?”
it coils like a molten snake,
and cuts you like a sharp knife.
this desert heat is a hunter—
it will ruthlessly take your life.
“Have you seen the Solterran nobility?” and if it’s a joke, she doesn’t laugh, but she thinks of some of the nobles and their ridiculous attire, for what realistic individual would ever wear half the things they did beneath the unforgiving light of Solis. Truly, it was an accomplishment they didn’t drop dead from heat stroke. Maybe that’s why they stayed inside so much and had servants do their work for them.
Teiran watched Mathias as his eyes followed a woman as she moved through the crowd, and she too looked at the stranger. Was he familiar with her? She didn’t know, but she didn’t recognize the mare either, which meant she likely wasn’t Solterran. To be completely fair, she hadn’t seen anyone she knew here, except for Mathias of course. How many Solterrans had even made the trip here?
There were other things the soldier could be doing, like patrolling. If she didn’t do them, she knew that nobody else would. Her sage green gaze slanted back at Mathias as he spoke again. “No,” she said flatly but honestly. She had grown up, practically raised, right out in the desert. It had only been in recent years that Teiran had really started being among the court and its citizens, “If you hate it so much why do you call it home.” It never occurred to her that anyone could get sick of their home.
if you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch
“I try to avoid being in the same room as stuck-up vipers in stupid dresses,” He replies, his smile as cutting as the knife he knows she carries, the hint of mania boiling beneath the surface -- held back by the alcohol for the moment, but always there, always a bomb waiting to be triggered. He was built of eggshells, his mind ready to crumble beneath his own mistakes, and sometimes he wonders if it might have been kinder had someone fulfilled Adriana’s bounty.
“She had a nice ass,” and his gaze is wicked when it lingers for one last second on the mare before his attention shifts back to the soldier at his side, casting away his thoughts of the past. There was nothing but tragedy there for him to sift through, nothing but a wave of coursing anger that set fire to his blood. “....you do too, you know.” It isn’t just the compliment it might appear to be -- his gaze is keen, seeking for any signs of discomfort, probing for any weakness in the stoic soldier. If he can’t knock her off-guard in a physical fight, he might just be able to verbally.
“It’s not my home. It’s just a place to sleep at night.” He rolls one shoulder in a half-shrug before taking another swig of the bottle, scowling at how quickly the liquid seems to be disappearing.
“So -- you ever fucked anyone, or are you as boring all the time as you seem?”
it coils like a molten snake,
and cuts you like a sharp knife.
this desert heat is a hunter—
it will ruthlessly take your life.
Teiran couldn't help the glance she spared to the crowd around them, full of equines in dresses and other finery. Some of them, no doubt, vipers in their own way. Regardless, she said nothing, allowing him to believe as he wanted, that getting drunk here was any different than getting drunk anywhere else.
Her sage green gaze settled on his grip on the bottle, seeing that he'd nearly finished it. All by himself, considering she had only taken two swigs from it. She was too busy gauging his level of drunkenness to hear him correctly, but once she'd played the spoken words over in her head the turn the conversation had taken wasn't any clearer.
“I don't see what that has to do with anything,” Teiran said, finally looking at Mathias again. The compliment (Was it even a compliment? She couldn't be sure, really. Compliments and her never meshed well), seemed strangely out of place to her even though he had just blatantly been staring at another mare's butt a moment before. Having or not having a nice ass, as he put it, had no bearing on her job as a soldier of Solterra.
He didn't stop there, however, and her brain brushed over the comment about Solterra being a bed and nothing more for Mathias. She couldn't comprehend it, but that wasn't even what caught her attention. Teiran had never been asked such questions before, by anyone, and she was finding it difficult to discern whether he was serious or not.
Oh, the ways in which her ability to read social cues could be improved.
“No,” she responded at first, because it was true and if he really wanted to know then he would know. There was almost a frown to her lips, because in her mind he seemed to be saying she could do better at her work. “I take my job to do what is best for Day Court seriously. How would that improve upon it at all?”
if you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch
The alcohol is starting to burn in his veins, twisting and turning with every beat of his heart and chasing away the voices that lingered in the back of his mind. He regards her with shadowed eyes, and when he breathes out he almost imagines that there is smoke curling from his nostrils, an old ache for the magic he had once possessed and that had been ripped away from him.
All at once, he feels so very tired and so very old, and he wonders if he ever truthfully had a rightful place in this world at all -- the bastard prince, the godslayer, reduced down to a drunkard and a fool.
“Not everything is about duty,” He answers with a shake of his head, tangled hair falling over the missing eye, the empty socket turned towards the wall as though to hide the weakness there. “Trust me. Solterra will be standing long after you or I have been picked clean by the vultures. Don’t waste your life chasing after something that doesn’t exist.”
The words are bitter on his tongue, and he gestures for the bartender to hand him another bottle to wash them away.
it coils like a molten snake,
and cuts you like a sharp knife.
this desert heat is a hunter—
it will ruthlessly take your life.
He said not everything was about duty, but Teiran wasn't sure she agreed. Was not everything she did about her job? Her duty to Solterra? Is that not precisely who she had been manufactured into, what she had been made to do? If others found her repetitive life boring, they had kept it to themselves.
To Teiran, her patrols of the desert and surveys of the streets were normal. In fact (although she could not, or perhaps would not, admit it to herself), they were also a comfort. She had been orphaned and raised in the desert to kill and then the man who had done it to her had been murdered. Her job was the only thing she knew how to do, with or without instruction.
Her duty gave her purpose. "I don't think I am chasing after anything," the soldier responded then. She watched him wave down the bartender for more to drink and felt a little like maybe he was chasing the alcohol looking for something himself, though she didn't say it. Didn't even know how to.
