18th September, 1888 — Chance D'Amour

He'd forgotten what it was like, living with people. In a town. He'd managed it before, of course, at various intersections of his life; but it turned out it was a learned skill, one that could grow rusty. Or lost entirely. (Maybe he'd not ever learnt it to begin with.)

There were good points about Irvingly. Eavan, the Walshes, a cosy sense of being. He was growing fond of the zoo and its inhabitants already. He'd explored the nearby Hollow extensively, was grateful for the forest and the highlands on all sides. The middle of Irvingly itself was... questionable. Perhaps it was how he'd started off with it, plunging into the expedition in the fog, into hailstones and fire and a pall of unease - the strangeness of all that - but now that it had turned back to tidy straight streets and neat brick houses and a square at the centre, Conall was no less unsettled.

There was also that matter of people, again. His circle of acquaintances had not gained anything in girth, really, since the expedition (though he'd be glad, certainly, to see none of those blokes again for the next fifty years), but the place was compact enough that certain faces were growing familiar around and about. He'd not taken to many of them.

Which was why he had all but bolted at the sight of a neighbour with whom he'd already gotten into a tussle or two (though not physical, yet), clenching his jaw and speeding up his striding until he'd crossed the porch of the closest building in the square with false purpose, doing his best to pretend they had not crossed his sights at all. He'd flung open the door with some gusto and hurtled in like a charging bison without bothering to look first: it was this which saw him accidentally ramming right into the nearest table with far too much force, everything upon it rattling perilously and a bruise already sprouting on his side. That embarrassment was almost secondary, however, for the moment; primary was the look of horror on his face as he took in the rich amber fabric everywhere, the dainty teacups and posh clientele, the fancy little tea menus lettered with some ridiculous pretentious name.

The Irvingly Arms? He could handle. This? Not likely. Conall was spared only from bolting back out by the recollection of what he was trying to avoid, and by his gaze awkwardly falling on the occupier of the table he'd just assailed.

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The ladies of her church group were, Temperance feared, not quite as devoted to the Lord as she might have hoped them to be. They said all the right words of course, and she would never be seen in public with them if they were not the most respectable sort of attendees, but she could not help but question why they thought it necessary to meet in an establishment that was quite so frivolously decorated. The wallpaper was acceptable enough and even Temperance could find little fault with floral arrangements – these were a little garish perhaps, but flowers were one of God’s finest creations in her estimation – but the candlesticks were almost popish and the curtains looked machine sewn.

And that was not to mention the appalling availability of alcohol in the middle of the day. Temperance sniffed as she sipped her tea, her back deliberately to the bar, and glanced towards the clock by the door to confirm to herself that she was a solid twenty minutes early and had ample time to prepare herself for contradicting whatever waffle Mrs Goodacre was about to unleash about unnecessary fetes.

She had built up a fairly satisfying refrain, in which she planned to quote Revelations for good measure, when the table before scraped against the tiles underneath with an unpleasant screech and set Temperance reeling backwards and to her feet. She held the cup steady in her hand and just about avoided the saucer hitting her foot as it shot over the edge; it shattered on the ground – good riddance, Temperance thought, eyeing what remained of a pattern that looked Moorish – and she lifted her severe gaze to the wild man who had interrupted her quiet musings, glowering silently.

  

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Wonderful set by Lady <3

He put a hand to the edge of the table he'd just bashed into as if to steady it, but he was a few moments too late - the woman had already been forced to her feet, and she had not been able to save the saucer. Conall could feel a few eyes swivelling towards the disturbance - he did not need to look to feel the sensation - but he only looked, impassive, at the woman he'd disturbed, supposing he might congratulate her on managing such a schoolmatronly glare.

He didn't. Instead, he was wondering whether it wouldn't be worth pivoting on his heel and bolting back out to face his - probably equally affronted - neighbour in the street, though as he weighed this up, his gaze fell upon the broken saucer. Knocking the table was one thing (not a big enough travesty to bother apologising for, since no one had been hurt) but the saucer might well prove a harbinger of further doom, and he had not contrived to see anyone slip and break their back on the pieces.

"Bollocks," Conall muttered to himself, disregarding the woman and her glare of fierce affront in order to drop to his knees and gather up the shards of saucer. This was what you got for having fine china in the first place. Straightening up with the smashed bits in hand, Conall awkwardly placed them back on the table in a delicate pile, glancing wordlessly at the woman as though to say, with a mental shrug, great, your problem now.

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The uncouth reaction from such a dishevelled individual was far from a vast surprise but still Temperance bristled at the language, as was her wont in life. The toes of her boots crunched against the shattered porcelain as she re-adjusted her feet, finding a steadier stance before she took in the man who had so disturbed her afternoon. He was precisely what she might have imagined if she had been asked to describe a ruffian posing as a respectable member of society; from his mended but clean clothes to his lined, healthy face he was exactly the point where vagrancy met respectability.

“Charming.” She said sharply, placing her teacup on the table with a clank that sent liquid spilling over the sides, irritation that he was doing the practical, useful thing rather than making pathetic excuses bubbling inside her. She would have crouched down herself, cleaned up the mess rather than let him do it himself, if only to have the satisfaction but he seemed an unfortunately practical sort of man. If a terribly rude one.

“If the owners try to charge me for that monstrosity of china I’ll be sure to pass the bill along to you.”

  

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Wonderful set by Lady <3

He cast his eye up and down the woman, on a cursory check to see whether she could possibly have injured herself - it didn't look like she had, since she had kept her balance, just about (it'd be something of a ludicrous achievement, too, to get hurt in a lavish looking coffeeshop, of all places) - but even so, she seemed rather irritated.

And now she'd gone and made almost as much mess herself, sloshing her teacup about like that, foolish woman. That was more than enough to see Conall decide - in true Conall fashion - to disregard her opinion of him entirely, however great an effort she had made to utter it aloud. Charming, not charming, who in their right mind had the time to waste on charming?

Not her, indeed. Conall mightn't be an expert in good manners, but he didn't think scathing criticisms were usually a hallmark of them, either.  

She did, apparently, have a lick of sense in her, which took him by surprise in the next moment when she turned her judgemental eye to the china. Pass the bill onto him, though! "You do that," Conall said, before he could help himself. Good luck to her with that, since she didn't know him - and if she didn't know who he was, and he promptly took his leave, she'd have a hell of a task finding him to saddle him with it. He might be long gone by then.

It occurred to him, belatedly, that he had intended that merely as a mental reply, because it was his fault, and he probably ought to be making empty promises to mend these fences before he hopped 'em. Instead, he changed tack. "But if it's the monstrosity you say -" Conall might well agree with her assessment, but he didn't pretend to consider himself an especially deft judge of china patterned teasets - "then I s'pose I'm doing them a service, aren't I?"

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His gaze, which lingered and pierced and was all the more unusual for remaining steady in her presence when most of her acquaintances flinched away at the first lash of her tongue, unnerved her and, irritatingly made him rise in her estimation. When one walked alone in the world it was rare than they met with somebody who didn’t approach them as though they were a block of ice that could not be approached and must only be navigated around.

Pulling her wand from her pocket she quickly and silently dried the tea on her dress, glancing with pursed lips at the table before flicking her wand towards that too. The tea dried, the china reformed neatly and the table was quickly more or less as it had been with the exception of the tablecloth being, in Temperance’s estimation, quite a bit cleaner from her own wand work than it had been when left to the mercy of the idiot serving girl.

“You would have been. I however cannot abide leaving a mess, even if it was less abhorrent to the senses,” she said coolly, retaking her seat primly. “I wouldn't say no to another pot though,” she added purposefully, lips almost, almost twitching. “Consider it your penance.”

  

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Wonderful set by Lady <3

Service it might have been, service she had agreed it was, but she had cleaned up his mess all the same - with a briskness and surety that might have been impressive, if it was not so irritating.

Conall couldn’t resist rolling his eyes at the demand that followed, well aware this would pin him down once more as rude and ungallant. She had pinned herself neatly to ridiculously schoolmatronly again, her talk of penance and all!

Still, he hadn’t forgotten that he had bolted in here to avoid picking a fight, not to be starting more, which he told himself was the reason for his heaving an exaggerated sigh and jerking his chin down in a nod. “My pleasure, ma’am,” Conall said dryly, thinking it best he swallowed his snort. It was needless effort, to be sure, but not the worst atonement he’d ever had to make; he glanced around for some sign of a server to intercept and be done with this endeavour, but there was no one in range, which left him to go approach the -

“Oh, there’s a bar!” Conall exclaimed to himself in pleasant astonishment, watching as a patron there was passed a drink that was most certainly not so staid as tea and cake. Perhaps this odd establishment was not so redundant as he had first imagined. Gesturing at the woman in a silent one minute, Conall strode over to the bar at the back of the room with a great deal more enthusiasm than he had previously displayed.

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Of all the insolent, ill-mannered…!

Temperance, far from prone to impulsive actions, found she couldn’t help herself from following him, abandoning her table completely as she stalked after him towards the bar she had sneered at earlier on. She didn’t really disapprove of alcohol in moderation, a fact that coupled with her name had given her brother a rather easy topic of gentle teasing, but there was a time and a place and in public while the sun was still in the sky was certainly not one of those times!

“Do you expect me to wait patiently while you become inebriated?” She hissed at him archly, not waiting for a reply before turning to the served behind the no doubt sticky-topped bar. She had thought the foolish girl who delivered her tea seemed simple but apparently the young man in an ill-fitting waistcoat was determined to one-up his colleague – honestly, why in the Lord’s name had she ever consented to coming here at all? It was truly terrible. But at least his idiocy might serve her well.

“This ruffian has already broken some of your china and I certainly wouldn’t serve him anymore if you value your position here.” She insisted to the server, eyes flickering between the baffled boy and the man who, in all fairness, looked far too annoyed to be drunk. Still, she had no interest in being fair after being dismissed in favour of a tipple. “I doubt your employer would approve at all.”

The following 1 user Likes Temperance Fairchild's post:1 user Likes Temperance Fairchild's post
   Conall MacKay

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Wonderful set by Lady <3

His spirits were much improved by the notion of drinking, well, spirits - although Conall had not made it any further than actually getting to the bar when he was interrupted by the very same woman, who evidently had no patience to wait for her new pot of tea.

And further - evidently, Conall observed - her stern manner beforehand had been her in a good mood, because now she was hissing at him with all the venom of an affronted basilisk. He stared at her rather impassively for a moment, brow furrowed in befuddlement, but she did not seem to have that basilisk power in her look... although the poor boy at the bar looked petrified enough.

Conall cleared his throat in resolution, and straightened up a little further (whether in offence or pride at being called a ruffian to his face, he did not deign to admit), although he turned more directly to the server. "Ignore her," Conall said cheerfully to the boy, not usually the one to soften a blow - but in this case... "What she means is she'll have a tea, if you will," he instructed, half-expecting the woman to try drowning him out with complaint, in spite of the fact that he was catering to her impatience, and all! "I'll have something a bit -" stronger, he finished wordlessly, rounding off his order with a conspiratorial gesture at the nearest bottle of whiskey displayed.

Conall would leave it down to the boy whether his employer would be worried about him spending money on a whiskey. What else was the bar for, eh? (Besides, if he were the boy's employer, he knew which insufferable patron he'd want thrown out of the place first - and for once it wasn't him.)

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It was a sad state of her existence that Temperance was all-too familiar with being overlooked by a variety of people but she bristled to hear herself so dismissed by this odd man. Ignore her indeed! Who was he to ignore her? He was clearly little more than a vagabond - although admittedly one with quite a bit more bearing about him than she would normally associate with such a creature - and he had summarily disregarded both her and his own barbaric behavior.

If she wasn’t a Christian woman, and the setting wasn’t quite so public, Temperance thought she could very easily strike him about the face!

“How dare you dismiss me, I am not a child to be put into a corner and told to be quiet sir,” she seethed, looking between the boy and the bottle of whiskey, eyes daring him to serve the man before her. She starred the intruder down, almost willing him to behave worse - she did so love to be proven right about a person.

Conall MacKay
Elias Grimstone
so sorry!

  

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Wonderful set by Lady <3

Jesus, it felt like everything he was doing just so happened to be poking the bear, because whether or not he was trying to get her that apology pot of tea (he was, in a roundabout way), with every second that passed she seemed to be spitting with more anger. Conall honestly didn't know what had done it to her. Probably the decor.

Nor was he certain if he ought to find her anger alarming or merely hilarious, but the latter seemed the stronger instinct. "No," he blurted out in wry reply, cracking an eyebrow raise, "I imagine they couldn't pay you to shut up." Possibly shouldn't have listened to that instinct, Conall realised in haste; the moment he spoke, he could swear he heard a voice in the back of his mind (a voice not entirely unlike Nola's) tsking at him in resigned disappointment. Shit.

No doubt the woman would not find that remark, joke or not, remotely amusing. (Even if she was as bad as a bloody Fwooper.)

Who knew, he might've already earned himself a bottle cracked about his head. To shut himself up before he made things any worse (if that were possible) - and indeed to spare the boy over the bar - Conall reached across and hurriedly began pouring out the whiskey into a glass himself. A pre-emptive measure against the headache coming on, you could say.

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The crack of her palm against his cheek was as satisfying as anything Temperance had ever imagined. Except for once in her life the deepest craving of her heart was not merely that and it had actually happened - she was probably more surprised by her actions than he was although she assumed it was not the first time he had aroused enough irritation in a woman to force her into violence for her own sanity.

She had never allowed herself to indulge in anything quite so thrilling. Even the dumb face of the bartender as he stared wide-eyed at the two of them was not enough to ruin the moment.

“How dare you,” she snarled, grim enjoyment unfurling inside her as she got into her full indignant stride, smoothing out her skirt as she retreated to her table with its hideous covering. The thought of drinking tea with the other good women of the church suddenly held precious little interest for her - she had to get out of here.

She needed to relive the moment alone.

  

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Wonderful set by Lady <3

And there it was. He had anticipated something - she did not seem, in the least, the sort to let things lie - but that was... well. Dazed and a little dumbfounded, Conall did not immediately react, except to acknowledge quietly to himself that he probably had deserved that.

Fortunately, he cared little enough what the rest of this frilly coffeeshop was thinking; his pride was made of sturdier stuff than that, though his cheek was red and smarting from the force of the motion. Fortunate, too, that the woman seemed satisfied with her handiwork, and spared him the accompanying lecture. (The lesson had perhaps been digested better this way.)

So he said nothing as she stalked off, and offered nothing to the barkeep either, just swallowed down a gulp of the whiskey with a slight wince. Once he was finished, he dug a coin out of his pocket, left it there and turned on his heel wordlessly, determined to avoid that first table as he went off - in his own time, not driven out by the likes of her.

(That said, he'd not be coming back here again if he could help it.)

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