2013.05.06 - Harry's: Jenny, Jack, Jim, Johnny, Pete

It may just say something about Jenny Sparks that when she went looking for a bar to drown her sorrows in, she just so happened to wander unknowingly into one frequented by one of the area's major superhero teams. That would be just her luck, wouldn't it?
At this very moment she's sitting at a table by herself. Why is she by herself? A combination of liking it that way, and the fact that she's clearly quite drunk, waving a half-empty bottle around while she's got her head down with her forehead resting against her arm on the table. She's also talking, but if there was ever anyone listening to her, they're not any more, and probably couldn't hear her anyway since she's mumbling into the table. It might be a surprise that someone hasn't cut her off yet, but who wants to try to take a bottle from the hands of Jenny Sparks?
There's a good chance that she's popped up on someone's radar with her sudden reappearance after 13 years dead, her image showing up on some security camera somewhere and coming up with flashing lights in some agency's facial recognition systems. She did go wandering through Central Park, and right past a bunch of police at a crime scene just yesterday, and she hasn't really been trying to hide that she's showed up again. She's not even sure she actually existed in this world, anyway.
 
No facial recognition systems for Pete Wisdom, just rumors. Rumors and spies and favors, the oldschool way of keeping track. For a while there, sure, he had access to that kind of chicanery, but when you get fed up with the agencies, you lose their toys. So now? Now it's a bleak month turned into ideas mixed with those rumors, and then the wild goose chase, which only turns out-- now-- to be one because Jenny is absolutely a wild goose.
Pete comes into Harry's, salutes Harry halfassedly, scans the place, and fixes on Colonel Sparks of the British Space Group. Instead of picking up his own drink-- or his own bottle-- Wisdom beelines for the drunken blonde and comes up behind her, grinning, only to ruffle her undoubtedly million-ton head and reach to swipe her bottle with his other hand. "Oi. Give us a drink."
"Hey!" Jenny slurs when a hand ruffles her head, and she's just starting to lift it up when someone snatches the bottle out of her hand. "HEY!" she repeats louder, leaning toward the bottle to try to grab it back without having even looked to see who it is. She sounds a little ticked, and sparks dance over her reaching hand. "Go get your own damn..." then she trails off and squints at Pete, noticing who he is but not entirely sure about the face. Well, maybe faces, considering how much she's had to drink. "I know you." She lifts a finger and points it at him. "I know you, don't I?"
She sits herself the rest of the way up and slouches back in her chair and tilts dangerously to one side before righting herself. "You can have a bloody drink of you've got a fag I can bum. Smoked my last 'bout twelve hours ago." She raises a hand and beckons. "Fork it over, one'r the other."
 
"You know me," Pete agrees, apparently amused as fuck as he straightens up and digs in his suitjacket pocket for his cigarettes. "And lucky you, Harry won't even kick us out. Logan smokes cigars that smell like stale Silk Cut in here." Sleight-of-hand, and the one he gives Jenny is already lit, and the bottle comes back into reach-- but he's drinking out of it. "Wisdom. The fuck is it with everyone who comes back from the dead forgetting me? I'm starting to feel insulted," the rumpled man says, finally, setting the bottle back down in front of the electrokinetic. He kicks around for a chair to hook over, then invites himself to sit down at Jenny's table. "Do you remember your name?"
Jenny takes the cigarette, leaning forward a little to pluck it from Pete's fingers, and manages not to drop it in her relatively drunken state. Some things are too sacred to be sullied that way. Placing the thing between her lips she leans back again, and as she draws in a long drag and closes her eyes it hardly seems like she's even listening to the rest of what Pete says. Until he asks if she remembers her name and she opens one eye. "Of course I remember my bloody name. I came down with a case of dead, Petey, not stupid. Why in the hell would this Harry guy kick us out, though? Drinking and smoking is what this kind of sodding place is for, ain't it?" Hey. She died before NYC made that change.
 
She died before they made that change, and it's been thirteen years or something, and Pete /also/ still looks the same as the last time she saw him. Well, healthier, but no older. Because /this universe is fucked up/. "Hell if I know what gets jogged loose when people buy the farm," he says easily, then lights one of his own. "Bunch of places've been outlawing smoking in public places. Fucking uncivilised. Can't even fucking smoke on the Helicarrier. So what's you do? Why did you even bother coming back? World's still a shithole, I'd think a vacation would last longer."
"They what?" Jenny asks, looking a bit stupified by this revelation. "That settles it. I'm still dead, and I've been sent to hell. That's the only thing that can explain this place being so bloody screwed up." She pauses for a breath, which in this case means she pauses to take a drag from the cigarette, and reaches for the bottle with her other hand. "Unless," she says. "Unless I'm dead and my totally jacked up personal view of heaven is a place so screwed up and full of overpowered super villains that it needs my bloody help." She takes a swig right out of the bottle, and then another, and leans forward against the table, her head on an elbow by the hand holding her cigarette. "I didn't bother coming back. In a way, I think I was looking forward to my sodding retirement finally coming." She tilts her head so that she can peer at Pete from under her hand. "But hey, the last thing I told those gits when I kicked it was to do better or I'd come back and kick someone's bloody head in. Maybe someone didn't listen, so I've got my head-kicking boots on."
 
"Right? Because bars are health spas," Wisdom scoffs at the law, as he is a veritable scofflaw. He reaches to pull the ashtray closer and taps in it, and he's analyzing everything Jenny says and does, and how she sounds, and how she says things, and what sort of mood's underneath all the pickling. "And I doubt this is heaven, they wouldn't let me in. No one accepts bribes there." He's drinking decidedly less than he could be, but it *is* Jenny's bottle, and has to be paying attention. So instead, he just slouches in his chair, loosely dropping one arm across his chest and propping the cigarette-hand's elbow on it. "You put your head-kicking boots on /on purpose/," he says slowly, clearly looking for confirmation. "Didn't someone have you in a headlock to get you to agree to put them on last time? Or is it sort of-- I don't know-- a kneejerk reaction to coming back from vacation. Business, I mean. Because shitkicking is business."
Jenny lowers her hand from her forehead to her mouth to put the cigarette between her lips, then leaves the smoke there and returns the hand to where it was. Closing her lips around it she inhales, then blows the smoke back out through her nose when she admits, "they're the only boots I've got right now. I woke up yesterday morning in someone's bed with the mother of all hangovers and the worst need for a smoke." She doesn't admit that the only reason she could afford the bottle was some kid in spandex giving her a twenty. "Anyway, I don't know what you remember about me, but I'm not the Jenny you knew, Petey boy. Last I remember was from another world. I was on my way out anyway, so I sacrificed myself to kill God when he came around to take his planet back. Seems to me that didn't happen here, did it? No Authority?" As if that question is going to be meaningful in a world that didn't have it. "How the bloody hell did I die here, anyway? Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know."
All this is said with the cigarette dangling from her lips, but she reaches down to pull it out again, ashes it into the ash tray, and leans back again. "Seems to me," she continues, "that this brave new world I'm in is full to the sodding brim with superheroes. Not sure why the hell it needed to wake me back up."
 
Wisdom waves a hand. "I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, and fuck if I know. I don't think I'm from here either-- see above note about dead people forgetting who I am. It doesn't much matter, because we're both here /now/. Only what, three? people know what I'm talking about when I mention the Skrull Beatles, even." He briefly leans forward to ash, himself, then goes back to being slouched and basking in the toxic air. "No idea what you remember about me, either. Not asking. Everyone remembers I'm horrible so that's probably a constant. The *thing* is--" and here's where he sits up again, but it's to point at Jenny with his cigarette, "--the thing here is-- it's full to brimming with superheroes, but not a fuckton of practicality, right? And precious little in the way of actual investigation before slamming something in the face. Worse still, except for the bloody spandex, there's nearly no actual organization except for SHIELD and la, and they've gone silly in the head. Possibly something in their air recyclers." It's almost like he's leading up to something.
"What the fuck's a Skrull Beatle?" Jenny says, in a way that suggests the point is to irritate Pete more than because she cares what the answer is. "And yeah, horrible, but then so am I sometimes. The thing about it is this, Petey... someone's got to be, don't they? There come times and places where the person who wins a conflict is the one most resolved to being willing to do whatever it bloody well takes, and some of those conflicts can't afford to be lost on account of idealism." She starts to take a swig from the bottle of whiskey and then seems to remember something else to rant about. "Idealism. You know, I can understand it. I've lived through it. I've lived it. But it's a damned fragile thing, and if you can't be willing to smash your own to pieces sometimes to get the job done, then someone else gets to pay for your bloody ideals." She takes another drink and mutters, "someone always pays in blood." The ranting suggest that she might be a little *too* drunk for a thorough conversation, though she's only slurring her words a little.
 
"Cow," Pete mutters with affectionate hate at the initial question, but doesn't otherwise answer. Because she be trollin'. "And yeah. I know. But if you want to fix shit, then you're still an idealist, even if you know the cost and you're willing to pay it. Practicality doesn't mean giving up, does it. It just means doing what needs doing hurts more, a lot of the time." He finally reaches to nick the bottle from Jenny again, take a swig of his own. "But it still needs done, always. And if /we/ do it, then someone else doesn't have to. Trick is making sure everyone who signs on knows what they're getting into. Telling them straight up that they'll be used up if it's necessary. And then trying to dampen the guilt afterwards with the knowledge that if someone says they'll give their life to protect what you're protecting, then you didn't actually kill them if you tell them all right go do it."
Jenny lets the bottle go, since at least now there's conversation, and she's too drunk to remember that she can't afford another one when this one runs out. "I don't really care if someone else does it. That'd be a nice bloody change for once," she mutters. "I do a pretty shite job of it when I go out to save the world, and the only reason I kept trying is because nobody else was putting in the sodding effort." As her cigarette finds its way to her mouth again she leans across the table toward Pete for the bottle. "Gimme that thing back, anyway. This place has got plenty of its own damned heroes, and it sure doesn't need me. I do need a drink, though."
 
"Yeah all right," says Pete totally reasonably, pushing the bottle back over to Jenny. "You got someplace to stay?" He's done prodding and pushing for now, apparently; he taps ash into the tray and then power-smokes the last inch of his cigarette. "I've got an emergency bedsit in Chelsea that doesn't even have silverfish, and I took a cab here. Still have business in Westchester, so I can pay him off and give you the key. None of this shit you're drinking though, just good Scotch and some lighter fluid."
"I've only got someplace too stay until..." Jenny glances around, then squints at Pete. "What time does this place close?" So that would be a no, she doesn't have a place to stay. "So yeah, that'd be good. Thanks." And that's not something that Jenny says all that often. She takes the bottle and swigs from it. "You aren't going to show up in the middle of the night and creep out on me or something, are you? Because I can and will kick your ass from here to next next Sunday."
 
"You're not my type until you try to kill me," Wisdom answers with a perfectly straight face. "Also it's the only key, so don't fucking lose it." No reference to the thanks. One does not speak of these things. He pats down his pockets and pulls out a keyring, which has... altogether too many keys on it. But at least it's very obvious that none of them are the same. Nevermind if he tried to creep out on her she'd try to kill him which would make her his type. So confusing. ANYWAY: spiraling the ring until the key's off it, he adds, "don't puke in the cab, I'm not tipping him THAT much."
"Hey," she protests, reaching for the key. "Some of us can hold our liquor." She starts to get up, still holding her bottle. In her particular case she seems to be holding an awful lot of it, too. That's a pretty significant portion of the bottle that's missing. "Stop talkin' to me like I'm a kid," she mutters. "I've been drinkin' since before your grandparents were in diapers." There's a short pause. "The first time," she amends. "When they were babies."
 
The expression on Pete's face after /that/ comment bears scrutiny, but unfortunately, the camera fades out.
Category:Log