Missing parts

Jack needed a new place. Satan's had been where she would drink to destroy - for those days she decided she wanted nothing to do with herself and she knew Vito would accompany her in destroying all real grasps on their identities. The Leaky Cauldron had been where she would drink to dream - she and Nemo would drink and all of the problems would go away and they would be together, alone, worried only about holding onto each moment.

Now Jack had neither of them to drink with, and she could not seem to muster up the courage to return to either of those one dear haunts.

So here Jack sat, with, of all things, a bottle of cola before her. The Hog's Head was not the sort of place Jack usually chose. She liked the lively places where she could enjoy the chaos that made the chaos in her own mind seem orderly.The Hog's Head always seemed still, always seemed silent, always grave.

Jack shivered internally and gripped the soda before her. She regretted not picking the Three Broomsticks. Somehow, though, she felt as though no matter where she went, she wouldn't be able to escape this feeling that she was no longer whole.

The back rooms of the Hog’s Head were decorated in dark mahogany tones, the only light seeming to jolt from the aged speakers of a radio that had seen more than its fair share of history. The sideboards in the lounge had pressed up against them much of the furniture that had occupied the middle of the room and in the place of it, several young witches and wizards had taken to dancing. The sway of hips and bodies was somewhat mesmerising to watch and watch, Alistair D’Eath did from over the top of the cards he held in his ever so slightly lax and lazy grasp.

His eyes had taken on a similar weariness that his grasp wore and his hair was somewhat unkempt, ruffled by both the whirling winds outside and the thrum of his fingers through the dark locks. His shirt, a soft blue button down, was left open at the top, the buttons torn apart slightly lower than would have been acceptable yet not enough to provoke comment.

Against his chest, in the low light of the candles suspended in the air around the room, the glint of a gold cross poked through the gap in the material.

The elder man sat across from Alistair eyed it curiously, knowing his magical creatures well enough to tell that the young man had Vampire running through his veins. Yet this did not faze him and he continued on with the game of Twitch* that the pair were playing.

Soon enough though, the game came to its close and Alistair picked up a couple of chips and what little winnings he’d gotten before moving through the room towards the main bar.

Once out there, he pressed past a waitress and slid behind one of the barmaids to get behind the three-foot of mahogany that separated the bar staff from the folks that liked to sit in and stew over their drinks. Alistair tied an apron around his waist and immediately reached for a glass to pour his self a glass of rum. It was only after a swig and a refill that Alistair turned around, swallowing as he did so, and began to trade easily with a pair of bored housewives from South Hogsmeade who needed to be shown a good time.

Alistair’s place truly was behind a bar, not behind master plans or behind a desk trying to win students over to the idea of learning. He liked the banter, the flirtation and even if the Hog’s Head attracted some less than ... trustworthy patrons, it didn’t matter.

Music was soon bleating out of the jukebox in the corner of the room and Alistair was left without customers as each one was systematically provided with a drink. So then, from there, he set about cleaning glasses and it was then that he spotted a familiar looking redhead sat on her own.

“Cola?” He inquired dubiously by way of introduction. “Can’t I tempt you with something a little stronger, Miss ...” Alistair leaned down a bit to get a glance at her face as he wound the tea-towel in and out of the glass. “Dyllan.” He finished with a smirk, straightening up. “Now what, may I ask, brings you to this fine establishment?” Alistair asked, setting the glass down on the bar before flipping the towel over his shoulder. “Surely you’d prefer somewhere less... dingy.”

OOC: * I made it up, awks. :3

Jack typically liked to observe her surroundings as thoroughly as possible before deciding to mind her own business. She liked to know who was there - who had the potential to butt heads with her, and who had the potential to strike up conversation with her, two things she typically liked to avoid if it were possible. It was always good to check, too, in case there were any saps who looked like they could play as the butt of one of her jokes. And she did like to simply gauge what the room felt like. Who was drinking what, who spoke to who, which conflicting moods there seemed to be. And when Jack had begun to sink into the paranoia attached to defrauding the Ministry, abandoning the Order, and becoming too friendly with certain Death Eater poltergeists, she would never dare to walk into a room without knowing exactly what was going on inside.

But some of her fight was gone. She didn't care if she were accosted, friendly or otherwise, because she was sure she did not look like someone that would easily be engaged. She didn't think herself in the mood for her beloved practical jokes. And she simply wasn't interested in the people around her, not when she had cut the most interesting people she had ever met from her life. And the paranoia - well, Jack was almost certain another trip to Azkaban may be a bit of a vacation.

Basically, the word Jack did not think to apply was the scary d word, the one that had seemed so ill-fitting for her goofy, if suicidal roommate : depression. Jack did not know how to identify it, so she took her mood as it was, just a mood. Something that would pass, something like the tide which would eventually reverse when it was natural to do so. Jack simply could not see happy being a natural feeling when the Omaras were so far away from her.

But life did not let things happen naturally. It arranged fate to direct two people so they could run headlong into each other, especially when one of them (it was usually Jack) was not looking forward to the collision.

A voice spoke, and Jack assumed it to belong to the bartender who had first served her, but on lifting her head, she found herself being spoken to by one of the head Death Eaters. If anyone in the faction were to know it was by her hands that Nemo Omara was saved, he was sure to be one of them. Perhaps Jack had overestimated his position or overestimated the flow of communication among the group, but her insides liquified.

She had not yet protected her memories of where she had placed Nemo and his daughter. They were not yet safe. She felt like the biggest fool in London to have risked coming to a bar tonight.

But perhaps he didn't know her. He had not said her surname- Oh Merlin. He recognized me.

And out trotted the little buggar that was the smug feeling of information. She could see it on his face. He was loving the irony, wasn't he? Jack looked down at her drink, almost wishing for something harder at this moment, but she wouldn't give him the opportunity to handle her drink now.

"I'm fine with my own drink. I'm detoxing."

She stated this mechanically, not looking at him. Jack, who used to hold eye contact under all circumstances and who always spoke with a fire and passion in her voice, was now a robot. Ice ruled her voice, and stone reigned in her heart.

"I hadn't noticed it was dingy until you pointed it out. I'm much too well settled to uproot now, though."

Jacquellene Dyllan had not escaped the notice of the Death Eaters quite as she had intended to, Alistair expected. Though he was on no mission to retrieve the redhead or anything of the like, he did find it quite ironic that he had managed to find her. But as mentioned, he wasn’t exactly looking for her and it was for that reason that Alistair decided he’d bend the rules a bit. It would have seen him bumped up the ranks a good couple of places if he were to capture and torture her for information on the whereabouts of Omara. But until he actually had the order to go and do so, Alistair didn’t think it worth his while. He wasn’t your normal run-of-the-mill opportunistic Death Eater in that respect.

Leaning against the bar, Alistair raised an eyebrow at Jack. He reached behind him and found a bottle of whisky close to hand. His hands then found two shot glasses and laid them out between them before topping both up with a dabble of the whisky. He then set down the bottle and nudged one of the glasses towards Jack before grabbing the spare.

“Detoxing is no fun.” He told her with a sly smile. “Live a little. I’ll drink if you do, eh? And maybe we can have a little heart to heart because whether you like it or not, this place is dingy and your type don’t belong in here. It’s too dodgy. Take for example, the bloke over there... in the cape. He’s selling defective sleep potions that are illegal highs. Tasteful, no? Sounds just like what you’d get in the Leaky Cauldron. Drink up, love. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.” Alistair licked his lips and raised his eyebrows suggestively before knocking back the whisky.

Though Jack had claimed she was choosing to stick away from alcohol, she was not so passionate on the subject that, were it offered to her freely, she would reject it. Besides, something inside her was goading her towards it, promising that brief period where she could forget what led her to drink in the first place. Though she fought against this voice, knowing it was not the saint it paraded as, she still found her hand drift forward for the glass.

Jack had a bad habit of asserting herself in such a situation by showing off what Vito and Nemo had both taught her, and taught her well they had. Without a change of expression, she swallowed the entire shot of whiskey, and set the shot glass back down. Her liver scowled in indignation, but she was not one to play the part of the innocent. She did not have a refined taste for alcohol, but she had accumulated a tolerance for it much above the norm for her age. It wasn't, however, something she could claim to be proud of. It was merely a side effect of the life she had so far led.

She almost smiled at his words, but kept it to herself. He was under the impression she was one of the good guys, that she had done all she had done in the name of Good and Honor. What he did not realize, was she had abandoned the good guys the moment she had defected from the Death Eaters. And all the good she had done before had been just the same as her drinking tolerance - a side effect. It had always been for herself and for those she loved - she was either making up for her own wrongs, or acting to protect those she cared about.

Well, she no longer regretted her own wrongs. All those tied to her failures were dead, and all she cared about were gone. Jack no longer had an ally, no longer found herself bound to anything.

He was obviously trying to impress upon her the degeneration of the location, but this was a girl who had spent the last few years in Satan's. "It is dingier than Satan's, I'll give you that, but I prefer the Firewhiskey here to the Limping Hippogriff. Besides, this place has fond memories for me. I may or may have not secured my illegal spectral pet here, but we'd best keep that between us.." She pushed her empty shot glass towards him for a refill. She glanced at the man with the cape, a bit curious as she really registered the information. If someone was dealing, Nemo had known them, and if Nemo knew them, Jack had met them. "Oh, you're talking about Carl? Did you know he can tap dance? I didn't believe it, but he was classically trained for three years in his youth. He's a doll."

Redheads hadn’t been something Alistair had dabbled in. His penchant was for blondes and he enjoyed the rowdy company of brunettes but he had never dealt in redheads. It hadn’t occurred to him and they certainly had never crossed his path until Jack. Redheads were trouble, he realised. Blondes were foolish, got themselves in and out of problems more often than not. Brunettes fought their way out. Redheads seemed to revel in their own despair. Now, while Jack didn’t exactly strike him as one of those, from the information of those he knew, that was the opinion and Alistair couldn’t really gather enough of his own opinion on Jack to determine whether it was true. But she did look glum, that he had to admit.

But the girl clearly was not to be done in and Alistair’s eyebrows rose as she took the whisky, poker face intact. Chuckling, Alistair complied to her gesture and refilled the glasses. He indicated slightly with his hand: her turn. Smiling to himself, Alistair sat down on one of the stools behind the bar, bringing him down to Jack’s level, and he leaned across the mahogany, closing the space between them as he unabashedly began to search her face, intrigued by the way the shallows of her cheeks seemed to absorb the flickering candlelight, giving a flush in contrast to her otherwise rather sickly pallor. This girl needed a holiday, Alistair realised with mild amusement.

“Satan’s is pretentious,” Alistair brushed any mention of the Knockturn Alley club away. “Always tried to be something it wasn’t, I found.” Alistair tapped the bar idly and looked over to the cloaked figure he’d spoken of moments before. “Carl, eh?” He responded, coyly. “No wonder he wears such strange footwear. Tap dancing. I should’ve known it.” Alistair smirked and shook his head. “Did you do any horrendously embarrassing dances when you were younger? Muggles are into that stuff, aren’t they? We got taught ballroom dances and how to play various card games. Oh, there was also a crash course on how to smoke a cigar like a total arsehole. There are some interesting things about Pureblood culture that you Muggleborns miss out on.”

Jack always hated when people stared. She should have grown accustomed to the stares sometime in Hogwarts really. With a prank a day, and a major detention a week, she had not flown under the radar the way she wished she possibly could have. It didn’t help as she rose to the joke that was elementary fame as a leader in Potter’s Army, Quidditch captain, and Triwizard champion. And it wasn’t just school – people in Knockturn knew her as the strange redhead always seen alongside the irritable club owner. And her career outside of school had not been the quiet retirement of one seeking to be unseen. Though Jack had chosen each fate on her own, she had never really grown to be fond of the side effects. In fact, she was bloody sick and tired of people’s eyes.

But she was also a woman, which meant she knew how to be spiteful. People knew it was impolite to stare, and yet they did it. She rewarded them with a blank, passionless expression in return. Her eyes did not move from a fixed point of his face and yet she was making her own observations. She could smell a trace of parchment and some sort of liquor on him, the latter seemingly obvious for the location. His eyes, though dark, were striking on his face. He seemed to be well suited for a sullen expression, and it seemed natural on him. However, she was not budging.

He broke the silence first, by knocking Satan’s. Say what he would, but Jack had seen people die in that club. Unless there was a bar that featured a portal to hell, she could not think of a bar more suited in danger. “Unless it was trying to be a nice little joint, I don’t know what you’re referring to. Most people who find comfort in a dingy bar like this typically wouldn’t even get a chance to die there.” She shrugged.

He looked over at Carl and seemed amused by the tidbit – she doubted Carl would be amused that she had told someone else, but Carl was an oaf anyway. She had not, however, expected the conversation to find a way to her own life. She frowned a bit, before saying, “Oh, was it not obvious that I was a classically trained ballerina?” He continued on, sharing his own experiences, before highlighting the difference that anyone versed in social language would notice, the difference in their blood. Having shared his own bit, Jack felt led to say, “Shame. Surprisingly, muggle parents don’t try to force their witch daughters into anything for fear of being turned into a beetle. And before that, well,” she thought briefly, trying to figure out why she had never been forced into anything. “Huh. I must have just been a difficult child.”

Jack was an enigma to Alistair. He was used to the womanly woman. Not that Jack wasn’t womanly, of course. He’d clocked her backside before, had examined her hips and her breasts with the stare of a man that knew women inside out twenty times round. He had seen what he had expected. He had wondered about what lay beneath the clothes that were ill-fitting and hardly flattering. Of course he had wondered. He was a man. Yet Jack struck him like too much like hard work. He loved a good challenge though and she was a feisty one. Hard work or not, time and energy or not, Alistair was sure that she would be a reward and a half. To hell with torturing her with spells and goodness only knows what else, he knew there was a better way to have fun with Jack Dyllan.

Smirking, Alistair continued to stare at Jack and put down his shot glass momentarily. He reached out and fingered a lock of her hair, rolling one of the tendrils around his finger before letting it go. He noted the way it fell back into place and resisted the urge to plunge his fingers in. He loved that feeling, the feeling of raking his fingers through his lover’s hair, smelling the sweet scent that it would give off and revelling in the way she would move against him in great pleasure of the feelings it invoked. Truly, there was nothing better than another person’s hands in your own hair.

“You should wear your hair up more often,” He mentioned, picking up his glass. “And wipe that surly look off your face. You’ve got quite a nice smile. There’s no use replacing it with a face like that; I know what I’d much rather look at.”

He winked at her and leaned back, just in case she felt the need to hit him – any other woman would have done.

“The women weren’t very nice in there,” Alistair responded in turn, pertaining to Satan’s. A blatant lie, but one he was now determined to stand by. “Too boisterous.” He pretended to shudder before downing his shot and picking up the bottle again. “Refill?”

Alistair laughed a little and pretended to look at Jack dubiously. “You know... no, it never occurred to me. I’ve been missing out then, clearly.” He grinned at her and shook his head, refilling both of the glasses. “I like that. I like how the Ministry fill the Muggles in on everything bar the trace so they live in fear of being turned into toads, or yes, beetles. So what did you do with your time, my ballerina, while you weren’t doing swan lake?”

The staring contest pressed on, with seemingly no intentions to ever come to a stop. She was incredibly comfortable with it so long as she considered it a challenge, a battle of some sort. She had always liked to snicker with her friends (alright, her friend, whoever it happened to be at the time) at those couples with interlocked eyes, gazing at each other. And she would have hated to be mistaken for one of those fools, but she was pretty sure the 'sod off' stamped across her forehead was a dead giveaway that this was definitely not the case here.

He reached out and suddenly plucked at one of her strands of hair. A look of angry indignation flooded her features before she waved a hand, swatting at the empty air that had once before been occupied by his hand. As quickly as his hand had been there, it was gone.

Jack briefly fancied the idea of pulling out her wand, pressing it to his hand, and delivering some hex to humor herself and warn him against any further motions. As she thought it, however, a familiar smirk of approval seemed to unfurl in the impressionable canvass in her mind, and her insides turned cold. Who else would respond so viciously to an affront to something as trivial as hair? Jack chewed her lip for a moment, before deciding she would rather give up this one small fight, than pay the consequences of a tormented mind all week. Instead, she turned to her shotglass, and downed it.

In his infinite wisdom, the d'Eath man began to suggest to her changes in her lifestyle and appearance. "As trusted as your advice may be, I must pass. My face and hair have other duties to attend, and keeping them a certain way for your viewing pleasure just doesn't cut it on my list of priorities."

She could not argue with what he had to say about Satan's women. Sure, they all seemed to be easy lays, but there was a general greed in the eyes of each one. And boisterous aptly described Vito's eager dancers, always eager to find the big tippers and plaster on the fakest smiles Jack had ever seen. She tilted her head in mild agreement, but added nothing. He asked to refill and she nodded, pushing her glass towards him.

He refilled and she drew it near her, ready for another drink. "I don't know why they don't mention it, but I was grateful it was omitted, that was for sure." She raised her glass to her lips to drink, but never got the chance.

His... what?!

She spluttered, trying waste as little of the drink as possible, and attempting not to spray it anywhere. Choking it down, she managed to stare at him in disbelief.

There he was, smiling as though he had not just called her a ballerina, his ballerina, in fact. She steeled her expression, deciding she could play him better. "I don't know. It was so long ago. Perhaps I was wishing I was in a land where they taught you ballroom dancing and cigar smoking." Finally, finishing off the rest of her drink, she added, soberly, "Mostly just trying to escape."

It was the side effect drinking gave her. Though she was able to continue on joking, snide as ever, every drink seemed to require one nugget of truth out of her, however much she hated to include it.