aterat | Imagine a fancy title here, you will

"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."

He'd made the mistake once of trying to assume he knew the inner struggle Thomas faced every day, but he'd only had to make that mistake once before learning he didn't like the taste of his foot.

"Oh, wow, I'm glad I found you on a free afternoon, then." Was that a subtle way of calling Bullshit on the idea that she went out with others? Maybe. "What sort of catalog?"

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