aterat | Imagine a fancy title here, you will

"I haven't seen you as the type to think things out that well," she said with a flash of a smirk. There was no way he actually thought through things enough to think about the ramifications of making someone else jealous. She tilted her head and then finished off the last of her beer before rolling her shoulders in a slow shrug.

"I should be a red flag all by myself," she said with a laugh that didn't obscure it's bitterness. After a slight breath she moved her hand up to her cross and started threading her long fingers through the chain.

"In my defense, I think things through a lot when it involves outsmarting something way bigger and more powerful than I am. It doesn't leave much room for thinking through anything else." In retrospect, that didn't make him sound all that great and he offered her a lopsided grin to say he knew that.

And there was that habit of hers again. She always played with her cross when she was nervous or talking about herself, but touching the symbol didn't do anything to her, at least not physically. A cross as an object of faith wouldn't do anything in his hands, but maybe it meant something to her. He couldn't quite figure out how to breech the subject, though, curious as he was.

"What you are isn't who you are, Ivy."

"So, it was a spur of the moment decision you made without any thought or intention?" A hint of disappointment slipped into her voice that she tried to hide by taking another drink. What had she expected him to say anyway? Better question: what had she expected from this anyway? That was a question she had no answer to and part of that was because she did everything possible to avoid thinking about it. Occasionally the things Watts had told her came to her mind but she usually just pushed that away. He'd probably be disappointed if he knew that. Honestly, she wondered if he'd just sigh at this entire...date? Interaction? Whatever this actually was.

Her fingers continued to thread themselves through the chain and around the cross.

"It'd be nice if that were true." But it wasn't. Maybe it wasn't all she was, but it played a large part. At least she felt like it did and she felt like there was no hiding or denying it. Despite her best attempts to right now. The urge to see how easy it would be to influence him kept pulling at her instincts. He wanted it, at least a part of him did. She could smell his interest and it just caused her to wonder if that's what this was all about. He did things without thinking, he'd just admitted that, maybe that's what this was all about. Him seeking out danger just because he liked the thrill. He was similar to Rachel after all and she constantly toed that line.

Edited 2021-11-04 01:28 (UTC)

"Not...exactly." Ivy had successfully talked him into a corner here, though. He'd honestly been looking at finding an excuse to ask her out for a while now, but some part of him had always thought better of it. He'd seen what she was capable of, or at least a taste of it, but he'd also resisted it, though. That had to count for something, didn't it?

"Okay, okay, you've got a point." He knew she wasn't talking about him, but he also knew she was beating herself up over things that were beyond her control and that there was no call for it. She might have been born a vampire, and that might end up winning out in the end, but she had right now, she had herself, and maybe with some effort he could prove that to her. "I know, I'm a wizard who does magic in his off-time. You got me."

"Not exactly, hm?" she arched an eyebrow and a small smirk tugged at her lips. "It feels like that's a yes then. Disappointing, here I was thinking you were interested in something a little more exciting," her tone was both teasing and bordering on the edge of filtration. "That maybe you had a plan. But I guess it was just a spur of the moment lunch invitation since Watts wasn't available."

She brushed a strand of hair out of her face and leaned against the table towards him. "At least you smell better than some witches I've run into," with that she leaned closer. "A bit better at least. It makes me wonder how you'd taste."

"Yeah, we can look at it the completely pessimistic way, or," and he shrugged to accentuate his comment, "we can go with taking an opportunity when it presented itself. I fully admit I'm terrible at dating. I get busy, distracted by big, nasty monsters and have to cancel plans. Sometimes they crash them. I'm a horrible date."

And he grinned, hazarding a glance toward her eyes for just a second before focusing on the bridge of her cute, little nose. "But you said yes."

"I prefer realistic," she said with a nonchalant shrug. Pessimistic was probably much more accurate but there was no reason to really debate semantics. She looked around the place they were at and then gave a coy smile. "You? A horrible date? I can't imagine it."

Ah but she had said yes. He had a point. Though, she kept wondering why she'd really said yes. The back of her mind screamed at her about how terrible of an idea this was. At the same time another part of her kept whispering about how much she wanted something more from him. He was so strangely enticing.

"Maybe I didn't want to be rude."

"Oh, sure, I could be worse, but that's not hard." A wave from the bar told him their food was up and he smiled. "Hold that thought." And off he moved through the pub like he was used to such things, bringing back both their plates with more grace than a gangly man well over six feet had any business being.

"Your lunch, my lady." Which he had paid for, because that's just what he did. He took a seat across from her, smiling. "Something tells me you're not above being rude if you don't want to do something."

"You give yourself a ringing endorsement," she said with a shake of her head as the food got placed down. At least the food didn't look bad, in fact she didn't seem to really hesitate before reaching for a bottle of ketchup and pouring it into a puddle near the fries. After she'd put enough down for her liking she delicately picked up a single fry, dipped it down, and then slowly brought it up for a small bite. This would probably be the point that Rachel would make some sort of snarky commentary about how Ivy was the only person she knew of that could make eating fries in ketchup look sexy. Luckily for her Rachel wasn't here to see this.

"I know when not to be rude, but it's something someone has to earn." To Ivy, politeness was all about hierarchy. If someone seemed like they had a stronger personality then she knew to at least pretend to be polite.

Harry certainly noticed exactly how suggestive her eating of a french fry was, so much so that it took him a moment to get around to eating, himself. He did smile, a little quirk of his lip, as she responded, though. Focusing on the words gave him something other than his libido to think about.

"Does that mean I earned it?"

"Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't," she said with a slow smile before she returned to picking up a fry. "Guess it's up to personal interpretation," she ran the fry through the ketchup and looked over at him. "It's all about hierarchy in my world."

"Yeah?" He could follow along with that one, at least. His world, the old world anyway, was much the same. "So," he said, taking up his own steak sandwich without taking a bite yet. "Where does a human wizard fit into the hierarchy?" And then he took his bite.

"Mmmm," she took another bite while she thought about that question. "In my world wizards are humans that practice magic, they're separate from witches. Witches can be both genders and are a completely different species than humans." Therefore they're automatically a tiny bit better, though she lives that little thought to herself. "We don't usually look at wizards too fondly. My partner dated one recently, slimy little scum."

He choked a bit on his sip of beer, doing his best to mask his cough as a laugh. His best was terrible.

"Well, I promise we're not all bad." He'd never heard of witches being a different species, though. That was interesting.

"Steep promise to make," she said with a smirk she didn't even try to hide. "His main problem was trying to do magic when he shouldn't be. That and making a deal with a demon," she shrugged. Maybe it was mostly that last bit. "What can I say. Rachel has worse taste than me."

"Would it be better if I said we usually only have the best of intentions?" Probably not, but that didn't make the sentiment any less true. Sure, there were hedge mages, people who either didn't know of or didn't agree with the tenets of the Council. Those...were typically shut down, and the implications that had on the Council weren't lost on him. He'd been on the receiving end of their assumptions before, after all.

He nodded, knowingly. "You should never make deals with demons, at least unless you know you have the winning hand." He'd made some dumb choices in life, though. She didn't need to know about that time he decided to summon the Erlking so others couldn't though, or...yeah. They weren't talking about him.

He chuckled, though, shaking his head. "I don't know. She seems to choose partners pretty well."

"Best of intentions usually only result in the worst outcomes," she said with way more bitterness than she'd actually intended. At least she actually realized how she sounded and tried to give him a weird little smile as she ran another fry through ketchup. Focusing on ketchup seemed like the better thing to do rather than risk having to acknowledge why she'd taken a sudden turn towards the bitter.

"You never really have the winning hand with a demon," she said with a shake of her head. "Anyone that thinks they can outsmart something so much more ancient than they are just reeks of arrogance. I bet they taste like it too." Not that she wanted to even consider what Nick tasted like. That was not a path she wanted to go down at all and her nose scrunched in disgust at the thought.

"Oh, she didn't choose me," she said with a little chuckle. "She lucked out by getting to be my punishment."

"Hey, that's not always true. Sometimes they can work out." More than sometimes, if Harry was honest. He'd been in some pretty dicey situations and had worked his way out of all of them. Okay, that wasn't fair to the people who'd helped him out, his team...his family. "And you need other people for that."

He nodded in agreement, though. "I don't summon demons lightly, and only if I'm willing to make a deal with them before I summon them. I'm not slouch in the power department, but overconfidence gets you killed." And those around you. So does arrogance, and it had. More than once.

He grinned, raising his beer to accent. "I'll second that. She'd damned lucky."

"Sometimes, hmm?" it was clear she was pretty skeptical of it working out. "Finding people to trust so that it works out isn't so easy. My kind aren't..." trustworthy. "We learn early to look out for ourselves. Among...other things. Even my own mother..." well, that wasn't really a story he wanted to hear. Nobody needed to hear about her own family drama. She probably wanted to talk about her family drama even less.

"And I'm sure overconfidence has never gone wrong for you?" she gave him a little wry smirk. Somehow she couldn't really bring herself to think anyone could make deals with a demon that didn't end poorly.

"Mmm, would you now? I appreciate the agreement. It was a pretty uneven trade. Though...my master insisted it wasn't a punishment so much as a gift."

Harry did what he always did when people were telling stories: he watched her body language. There was clearly a lot she wasn't saying about her people, and about her family, and that didn't take someone skilled in the art of reading people to figure out. Vampires in his world tended to be pretty messy, too, and have really complicated familial disputes that sometimes resulted to people being chained to rocks as sacrifices so he could follow along with what she was implying.

He could also recognize she didn't want to talk about it, and he could relate. His own family was pretty damned complicated, he had an actual faerie Godmother for instance.

He grinned at her comment, though. "Nope. Not even once." He tilted his head to the side, though, curious. "A gift, huh? To you or to your partner?"

Ivy let out a laugh that was laced with deep resentment at his question. It wasn't necessarily directed at him but more at the question itself. She turned her focus back to the last bit of her fries and the ketchup there. A bit of it stayed on corner of her mouth when she finally gave him an answer.

"Me. At the time I wasn't taking blood. He thought her..." she trailed off as she thought of how to phrase it. "...recklessness would be too enticing for me to resist. She's...stubborn. When she sets her mind to something she does it, no matter who or what she's going against. I suppose you'd call her strong willed. To someone that can smell emotions and pheromones, it can be alluring."

The same could be said about him, and it would be stupid to suggest he hadn't been tempted before when around her, and at first he wasn't sure whether it was his own attraction or something she was doing. He'd since learned she tried her damnedest not to use her abilities against others, but that hadn't always been the case.

"Is it...uh...healthy? Not to take blood, I mean." He realizes how insensitive that might sound, but he really is just curious. He wants to know more about her, and he knows how detrimental something similar is to his brother, whether or not Thomas wants to admit it.

"You really are like her," she snapped and narrowed her eyes at him. Temper, Ivy, she thought to herself. Temper. Getting this defensive gave him a much better answer than anything she could say would have.

"It's not a big deal." Maybe she could still recover from it.

He frowned at her response, nodding but wisely not saying anything at first. In a shining instant, Ivy reminded him of his half-brother, which was pretty awkward considering he was ridiculously attracted to Ivy, but now that idea was in his head.

"Yeah, okay." That topic wasn't over, not by a long shot, nor were any of the questions that sprang to mind afterward. How do you eat here? Do you not feed here? Do I need to be worried about you? It wasn't really lunch conversation.

"So. What do you do when you're not having surprise lunch with annoying wizards?"

Had she recovered? No. She could still smell something on him that was distinctly familiar, a kind of unease. Or maybe a curiosity. Or...maybe a bit of both. If he really was anything like Rachel then it was probably a mix of both. There was a fear in that thought, a fear that maybe he really was a bit too much like Rachel. If he was, would he offer to help like she had? That was something she didn't want to deal with. She'd barely been able to turn Rachel down. Shit, it wasn't like she'd wanted to turn her down anyway. Not like she hadn't thought about how much she wanted him in that same way.

No. No Ivy, stop now. She shook her head as if it'd get some sort of invisible cobwebs off her.

"Planned lunches with others. Or just by myself." Mostly by herself. He didn't need to know that though. "I've also been trying to catalogue everyone. Natives and non-natives."

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harrythelizard - 2022-02-09 00:17 (UTC) - Expand