an evening of socialization. [in progress] [samir]

Kiara

El Chapultepec, great jazz.

That had been the Verbena's recommendation of where Samir should come to meet her on Saturday night. In actuality, the bar provided very little to recommend itself to any passersby on its corner downtown. The exterior brick painted a dull cream with tiny blockish windows and earthy brown writing spiraling across it declaring JAZZ and its date of establishment. Still, there was a regular stream of patrons that seemed to enter and exit the premises via a door jutting out on the corner most point of the block beneath a green awning; a neon sign erected above it pointed toward to the entrance.

A small green cactus was illuminated beneath the glaring white bar sign, it cast a sickly glow over the windows and emitted a low level electrical hum as pedestrian traffic wound along beneath it.

Inside, the atmosphere of the bar was, if nothing else, lively. At a little after 8PM, it wasn't yet as full as might have been expected but the row of bar stools that ran along one side of the narrow interior were all occupied, as were several of the old, diner style booths situated across from them. Conversation was loud enough to make comprehending any one out of the midst a challenge but (perhaps a small mercy) the small stage tucked back into a corner at the far end was currently empty; a piano stood awaiting its player, as did a lone saxophone, stationed against its legs.

Kiara, as seemed evidenced by the bottle of beer at her fingertips and a plate of food in front of her she was already in the process of sampling, had given up any notion of Samir joining her. She was in occupation of the furthest booth from the door; her dark hair wound up in a chignon that left her angular features in starker regard; mouth painted its usual glossy red and a thumb licking a trace of salsa away.

There was a book open on the table in front of her and the brunette seemed engrossed enough in whatever she was reading to have paid little attention to the door in the past several minutes.

SamirThey haven't reached the stage of their acquaintance where Sam is willing to make jokes about his mental illness with Kiara. Doesn't matter that she picked up on it the first night they met. He's banking on the fact that she wrote it off as generalized weirdness and then didn't think about it or him again because of his tendency to disappear from people's recollection.

Quiet could happen to any one of them. It's awful rare that it does though. If something traumatizes one of them it tends to have a ripple effect. That requires involving other people in their lives though. Samir is a solitary creature. Well-connected and thought of quite highly by Grace which seems to be a glowing recommendation among their kind but still: solitary.

Suffice to say Sam has given Kiara no indication as to why it is he's loathe to commit to social engagements. It's fine and dandy when he barely knows the person. He can treat it like a business arrangement. But she'd used the F word in their email exchange.

So he doesn't show up to El Chapultepec until almost nine o'clock at night. The less said about what took him so goddamn long the better.

Maybe she senses his resonance before she sees him. He paces the front door four fucking times before he takes a deep breath and hauls it open. Lets himself in off the sidewalk and wipes the hand that grabbed the handle on the thigh of his jeans. Stands with his back to the wall so he's out of the way as he scans the room.

Oh there she is.

Kiara[Awareness, ya'll.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

KiaraIt's hard to tell with Kiara just how quick she is to make use of that word with regards to people.

Especially those Awakened few in Denver. Her encounters with the man known to her only as Samir have been limited enough that what she knows of him cannot be extensive. However it probably said enough that the pagan was willing to put her hands on him in the middle of a very public place and mend his injuries.

Maybe that was what constituted trust to the Verbena, it was honestly hard to know.

She doesn't appear distressed by his reluctance to appear (or at dining alone on a weekend), but then she's interrupted, not infrequently, by passing regulars or chatty staff asking if she wants more hot sauce or a refill on her beer; half consumed as it is. She's offering some off hand answer to one such interruption when a familiar sensation prickles over her skin; almost, it feels, like a knife sliding between her ribs; a precise pressure.

Piercing.

Her dark eyes tick across the bar, searching for the source before she finds it (him). His back to the wall, searching her out. She waits for his eyes to meet hers and smiles; this flash of white teeth and bright red lips, inclines her head to beckon him over and closes the book open in front of her; sliding it into a bag tucked down beside her. The brunette's wrists are gleaming tonight with adornments. There's a ring on one of her fingers bearing an ornate stone of some caliber and a pair of earrings glint in the brunette's lobes along with a second set of studs.

When she shifts upright against the booth, the dark jacket she wears gaps open on a checkered shirt; fine silvery threading interwoven with tiny glittering beads.

"You're just in time for the first round of shots," this, his greeting, when he nears. Kiara slides a plate of what might have been nachos toward him; fine eyebrows rising. "Hungry?"

SamirAs he approaches the booth Sam does so with his hands in his pockets. The weather is growing cooler but he is wearing the same outfit she has seen him in multiple times now. The Los Angeles transplant has a punk-bohemian sense of fashion because it is easy enough to throw together and easy enough to clean. Wine-red Doc Martens and black jeans and a black leather jacket. A dark henley shirt. His hair is tied back in a knot at the nape of his neck. He didn't wear jewelry when she met him and he hasn't started now.

The threat of shots and a decimated plate of food greet him. His eyebrows raise in affected shock and the shadow of a smile crosses his lips.

"Nah," he says. "I ate already. I just figured, you know." He clears his throat. Indicates the seat across from her with a tick of his eyes. That's as close as he comes to asking if he can join her. No point asking. She invited him here and now she's offering her foot. When he sits down he only takes one hand out of its pocket and that's just so he can maintain his balance. He doesn't touch the seat as he settles. Doesn't touch the nachos either. His eyes settle on her face. "We're not shooting tequila, are we? The last time I drank tequila I woke up in a pyramid."

Kiara[Does Kiara notice these little tells of Samir's? Per + Alert, I guess.]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )

KiaraI just figured, you know.

Her eyebrow rises again, just the one this time, above long eyelashes and a lid painted in smokey tones of silver and black. "You wouldn't stand me up entirely?" There's a jibe in there, but the way the brunette delivers it, there's no real fire behind it; the edge of her mouth flexes at the corner and she watches him settle down across from her with a degree of consideration that attracts her eyes to his hands.

She lets them rove over his posture; tick back to his face and the way she scans his features; it almost feels as if she's searching for lingering signs of his ordeal. The marks are long gone, there's no trace of them where she'd fed her working beneath his skin and knit his pattern back together but she traces her eyes over the place she knew they'd existed, angry and gaping, once.

Whatever she does (or doesn't) find there, she doesn't outwardly comment on it, the pagan, instead her eyes shift away, down to the menu half buried under the salt and pepper shakers; her bowl of food; the bottle of corona sweating in the warm atmosphere at her elbow. "I'm glad you came," she offers instead and pushes a menu over to him; there were drink prices littered at the bottom, a vast array of beers (local and otherwise) and an offering of shots.

They featured, naturally, tequila.

"That's a story I want to hear." How he wound up in a pyramid. Kiara's eyes run down the menu, flick back to him after a beat. "What are your thoughts on vodka?" Then, as a waitress heads toward their section, adds: "Survive the first round and I'll tell you about my recent interaction with a dragon in an Umbral realm."

SamirWhen she pushes the menu towards him Sam reads it but he doesn't touch it right away.

"Challenge accepted."

That didn't take much effort. He says it with some hesitation so the effort may well all be on his part.

If she wants to sit and compare her own notes on his body language and his personality quirks over the last several times they've been in each others' company then Kiara might be able to convince herself that he's always like this. In a way he is always like this. He's not comfortable being out in public. Some of it has to do with the presence of other people but he is not a basement-dwelling neanderthal.

He has always been like this. Quiet and whatever put him there didn't have anything to do with it. It's just more pronounced because of how much time he has been spending alone. Not exactly trapped in his own head but close enough to it. You spend enough time by yourself you start to forget how to relax in a throng.

"I've, ah... never had vodka before." He rotates the menu so Kiara can read it right-side up. Now comes the part where he practices not slathering his hands in sanitizer because he touched something potentially crawling with germs for two seconds. "I'm totally at your mercy, here."

Kiara"You'll love it."

She attests with an admirable amount of authority as a waitress bustles up and the brunette orders them a round. She waits until an acceptable amount of space has been put between them and the woman, Kiara, before her focus ticks back to Samir and she's leaning back; her movements punctuated by the quiet jangle of jewelry she's given to wearing in any combination, at any given time.

The pagan's fingernails are painted blood red tonight, in a shade that matches her lipstick.

Bold slashes of color that seem, as far as their encounters so far are concerned, to be a recurring trademark of the earth witch. "It doesn't really taste like anything, but you'll feel it on the way down." Kiara's mouth moves into a supple little expression of humor and her eyes are bright as she toys with the edge of the bottle; twisting it slowly in a circular motion between her fingertips.

"That night at the park, when Elijah called me. He mentioned he was meeting his dealer." She offers the last in a softer tone, her eyes thoughtful on Samir's face. She sits forward a little. "That being you, as it turns out." A beat. "Elijah's a good kid."

A kid who really, was not a kid at all. "He has a tendency to get himself in over his head, though."

SamirThis may well be a trap into which he's walked. He wouldn't put it past most people to use 'hey let's hang out let me make sure you're okay and get you super drunk' as a pretense to interrogate him as to his relations and intentions towards one of their impressionable brethren.

This may also be Kiara just trying to get to know him better. Alert the fucking media. Someone is trying to get to know Samir better.

It is worth mentioning that it takes him a moment to realize that Kiara is driving at something. That that something has to do with the night that landed him in Quiet and inadvertently brought them to this moment in the first place.

"Yeah," Sam says. No small amount of hesitation but he sounds almost amused. As if he has a new understanding of what she means. As if he wouldn't have understood if they had had this conversation a month ago. "I, ah... I've noticed that. How did you...?" Oh right. Elijah and he weren't on a first-name basis that night. Chagrin comes for him quiet but dawning. He shifts in his seat. Tries to crack a joke: "So... is this the 'Stop selling drugs to my friend or I'll turn your balls into a change purse?' talk, or...?"

KiaraIt's about this time that their tray of shots arrive and Samir has to endure the uncertainty of Kiara Woolfe's eyes on him, her mouth turned up at the edge on one side in this frustratingly enigmatic fashion. It's next to impossible to deduce what she's thinking as it relates to Samir's relationship with regards to her friend but it's evident in her voice when she mentions Elijah and the way it seems to soften a touch as she admits he has an unfortunate tendency toward trouble that she's invested in his well being.

"I don't really care if Elijah takes drugs." That might not be entirely accurate, given the pause before she speaks but she's not meeting his eyes as she says it, the Verbena, focused instead on setting out a row of tiny glasses full of clear liquid. "Or that you sell them. I suppose I just - " she meets his gaze, then. Holds out a glass carefully for him to take. "Wanted that out there. That I know it's going on."

She chinks her own glass against his and raises it to her lips, swallowing it back and setting the glass on end on the table top.

"Plus I could think of way more interesting things to turn parts of your anatomy into." This, with a little gleam. "How'd you get into that line of work, anyway? It doesn't exactly strike me as the sort of occupation you wake up one day with aspirations toward."

Samir
Well shit. Time to swallow a substance the human body doesn't recognize as anything but poison in vast quantities. He wears a frown as he picks up the clear glass and taps the edge to the Verbena's.

It's obvious the Mercurial Elite doesn't often ingest substances that he can't smoke. The burn catches him by surprise and he does nothing to conceal the fact that he is not accustomed to it. Most people would laugh at the way he grimaces and exhales and holds a hand up over his mouth as if expecting fire to fall out onto the table.

"Fuck," he says in a hot outward gasp. The only thing he could use to cut the burn would be Kiara's Corona. This is not a bold young man she's invited out for an evening of socialization. Sam leaves her beer alone.

A new and affected grimace when she jokes about what she would turn his balls into besides a change purse. Only half joking. Witches are not bitches with whom one ought to fuck.

As to how he got into that line of work:

"I bought some weed off a neighbor when I was like... sixteen, maybe seventeen," he says. "After I'd Awakened but before we left Cairo -- Jesus, what does 'vodka' mean in Russian, 'battery acid'?" He clears his throat again. "And, ah, the two friends I had who were Sleepers, they started buying more off me than I really wanted to part with, since I was, you know, buying it to smoke, so I started buying more, and then they started referring their friends to me, so I had to buy more, then they started in like--" He adopts an Egyptian Arabic accent here. "'Hey, man, you got any cocaine? My girlfriend's cousin blah blah.'" Drops the accent. "Then we moved to L.A. and I learned how to create new data arrays... ah, conjure shit out of thin air. So if someone called me up in the middle of the night wanting ketamine or something." Nasal Midwestern American accent here: "Pot's a gateway drug, you know."

KiaraShe does laugh a little, at his reaction to it. It's a quiet, throaty sound. More a little breath of laughter than anything and she's pushing her jacket off her shoulders as he gasps and struggles to come to grips with the burn of the vodka. The shirt the Verbena has on beneath is long sleeved and the brunette pushes both up to her elbows; her wrists jangling; beaded bracelets sliding together with a hollow, clinking.

Minus the jacket, the necklaces Kiara wears are easier to identify too; one a simple piece of crystal that hangs from a fine silver chain (a scrying tool, by any other name), another an assortment of blue and white stones and a third housing a small black figurine with its arms outstretched in some grand gesture of invocation, this one attached to a thin piece of leather.

"Need some water?" There's an element of friendly challenge to that, the way she poses it, the brightness to her dark gaze where it settles on his face. Evidently, the pagan across from him doesn't prescribe to drinking anything to diminish the intensity of the burn - that, or she was just messing with him - either one seemed equally possible at the moment.

"I think there's something about burning in its origins, actually." Then, he launches into his history with drugs and Kiara's expression sobers a little. She's listening, her eyes roving over his face, dipping again to his fingers and returning. "I grew up in Manhattan," she offers after a minute where she seems to be digesting his words, her voice and the curl of her mouth betraying some degree of dispassion for her former stomping grounds. "West side, Ivy League schools, you name it. I was into the club scene pretty young."

A thin shoulder lifts, the smile growing a touch nostalgic.

"I've known a few guys who do what you do. Most of them were assholes, though." There's a flicker of something there, in the brunette's eyes, the trace of a memory, a certain tiny flinch at the edge of her mouth. "One in particular, but - " Kiara's eyes tick to him. "You're ahead of the curve. Kudos to you for that." She reaches for another shot, her fingers curling around the glass.

"You said 'we', you moved here with family? After you woke up?"

SamirNeed some water?

He pulls a face that translates as exaggerated denial and shakes his head. No way in Hell or any other underworld anyone would ever look at him and accuse him of being a tough guy. The burn lingers in the back of his throat and he doesn't feel the effects right away.

Their experiences with drugs and the experimentation within have little in common but he doesn't open his mouth to elaborate. At some point long before he came to Colorado he reached the conclusion that the less he told other people about his life the better off everyone would be. Doesn't mean he doesn't feel a slice of sympathy when Kiara hints at the somewhat lofty origins from which she descended.

All it really means is he would rather listen than talk.

Up until he joined her in tossing back vodka Sam had had both of his hands beneath the table. That was then. He started twisting his empty shot glass like a radio tuner as he listened to Kiara but once he started doing that he had to keep doing it until he had twisted the fucking thing as many times as he had been alive in years and by the time he realizes he's doing it she's confessing to one particular drug dealer and he's only twisted the fucking thing eighteen times.

He's ahead of the curve.

Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.

The last two rotations he executes fast as he can without sending the little vessel skittering to the floor and lets his hand rejoin the other beneath the table. He said we.

"Ah..." Heh. "Actually... no, my--" He clears his throat. Fuck it. Sam takes up his second shot and throws it back. Instant regret. "... fuck me sideways. Why. Why is this a thing people do." Sam runs his hand down his face like that's going to do anything to clear the lingering layer of booze out of his esophagus. It doesn't. So he starts rotating the second empty shot glass twenty-three times. Gives him something to look at intermittent when maintaining eye contact during self-disclosure gets to be a bit much. "My mom's... we're from Vancouver, she's a physics professor, so we moved a couple times when I was a kid. I left home after I woke up. Moved in with a bunch of other hackers. When I say 'we' I mean me and them. Ah..." Good thing he's got this shot glass to fuck with. "... we're not really a 'we' anymore, one of them is dead and one of them isn't talk to me and I kind of made the other one cry. And the other one... I mean, I see him on the 'Net all the time but we don't really talk, so." He clears his throat again. Purposeful look up from his shot glass tuning and then a change in tone. Brighter and less sincere now. "Anyway, I prefer 'parallel economist' to 'drug dealer,' so..."

KiaraShe draws one of her knees up at some point during his story.

Hooks an arm around it and sits there looking for all the world as if they were kids seated around a campfire re-telling ghost stories to see who could conjure up the most gasps of shock and awe from his fellow camper. Nothing that Samir tells the Verbena will outright invoke any sense of dismay or horror, but at points he can certainly feel her eyes on him, when he's twisting the glass a certain number of times as if to crack a universal combination and when he mentions who the 'we' of his story is.

One of them is dead.

One isn't speaking to him.

He sort of made the other one cry.

He prefers parallel economist to drug dealer, he adds and there's a definite quirk at the corners of the dark-eyed female's mouth at that. Her cheeks betraying the faint flush that was probably as much to do with how warm it was inside the bar as the shots they've been downing (but then, the Verbena was a student of Life, who knew how much control she could muster to keep her system carefully balanced, on the precipice of too intoxicated and slightly relaxed).

"Is that what you put on your business cards?" She feigns scratching it out across the table; her fingernails idly looping the letters; stabbing downward as if to dot the 'i' in economist. A beat, Kiara's eyes drop to the shot glass in his hand, her expression gentling, somewhat, as she watches the progress of the repetition. "Sorry, about your friend." She says friend as if it's not the word she precisely wants to use, but feels the easiest way to define her intention.

"That's tough." She turns her attention to her own empty shot glass and twists it once between her fingers - or begins to, then seems to think the better of it - and slides her hand away. "So, I think I promised you something about the Umbra, right?" It's purposeful too, in it's own way. A shift away from his life, from whatever demons haunted his memories.

Samir'Friend' isn't the word he would have used for Jason Perez either. They had known each other for years and they had plenty in common and they had each saved the other one's neck at least once but Perez was a cocky alcoholic and Lakhani was... well. Kiara is starting to get to know what kind of man Sam is.

And she can see that he not only would not have referred to the dead cabalmate as a friend but that he feels bad about not thinking all that highly of him. He flicks his eyebrows to try and play it off. An unspoken It's alright.

He doesn't want to talk about it. Everyone in this city has some sort of tragedy in their life before Denver. Most of the ones who stay around pick up fresh ones over the course of their tenures. Sam hasn't lost anyone since he settled within the city limits but it's hard to lose anything if you don't take responsibility for it in the first place.

Kiara thinks she promised him something about the Umbra.

Sam is grateful for the diversion. But he also looks confused. Spending half a month in Quiet will make a guy doubt his own mind.

"Did you?"

KiaraBetween his recent stint in another version of reality and the shots they've been taking, nobody could fault Samir for possessing a little trepidation about what he believed had or hadn't taken place. The Verbena seated across from him seems to understand that with the way her smile grows momentarily and she nods, straightening and pushing her bowl of food out of the way so she can set her palms down on the table.

Around them, more people have spilled in the door to the bar, laughter rising behind them, the vibrant scents of fresh cooked spicy foods and the whirl of cigarette smoke that floods inside with every new entry. There's still three sets of the shots on the table between them, but the brunette doesn't touch her next just yet.

Instead she smooths her hands over the table; mapping some unseen picture in her minds eye.

"So, I guess I should start with the most important thing. This might not be the best place to divulge it, but - " dark eyes tick over their location, the noise, the atmosphere, the utter normalcy thrumming around them, " - on the other hand, I doubt anyone is going to be listening. So, the Avatar Storm. The first time I stepped across, I felt it. Or what was left of it, anyway. It was ... " Kiara's expression shifts, becomes a little more muted, a little less airy. " ... like being torn apart from the inside. The second time I stepped across, to the other side, with others, with Elijah," this, with a tiny gesture, a quick smile, "The storm was gone. There's no sign of it."

A beat, Kiara's voice, if Samir understood nothing else she'd just told him, would betray the significance she seems to believe that information holds. Her fingers drawing patterns once again, brows constricting.

"I was there mostly to make sure Elijah and the others got back in one piece. We were searching for an artifact. A crown, actually, that belonged to one of my ancestors. We found a path across, or Henry did, anyway - " she pauses there, Kiara. Takes her next shot, her lips drawn together against the burn and coil of the vodka as it snakes down toward her stomach. "That's Elijah's mentor, older guy, Hermetic, sort of has a very Gandalf meets Indiana Jones vibe about him. Anyway - " The pagan's eyes glint. " - we crossed over, found a bridge between realms and when we found the crown we also found what was guarding it.

A dragon. I've heard a lot of stories about things that once were. That are, still - out there. But I'd never imagined standing there and seeing - " Her smile fades a little, she turns the shot glass between her fingers. "We lured it there, once. Long ago and it remembered.

It wouldn't have allowed us to remove the crown, though. So we - " She meets Samir's eyes, searches them a moment. "It was close. We only defeated it and made it back because we made a treaty with some wolf spirits of the same realm who wanted it gone and stepped in to help us."

She stops turning the shot glass between her fingers.

"The crazy part is, I nearly died there and you're the first person I've told."

SamirOh. Third round of shots. Alright.

This is not the first he's hearing of Henry or the excursion into the Umbra in order to find some sort of lost artifact but given that it's coming from Kiara and not from Elijah he puts forth more effort to behave himself. Guys talk to other guys different than they talk to women. At least guys who like women. The impression Samir is starting to gather about not just the other guys but all of the other traditions is that the default sexual orientation of the Denver contingency is Anything With A Pulse.

Correction. He's heard rumors. Anything That Moves.

Sam tosses the shot down his throat and grimaces rather than flinching this time. Like he's passed the point of questioning his decisions. Kiara wanted to get drunk. They're getting drunk and he is not busting her balls the way he busted Elijah's balls when Elijah gave him the story's prologue.

Then she says the word 'dragon' and his eyebrows flick up. Not because he doesn't believe her but because he just remembered that she lured him out of his apartment with a promise of a story about fighting a dragon in the Umbra. Their eyes meet when she searches his. He's intent but does not appear concerned.

Not concerned. Baffled. Okay. Treaty with some wolf spirits. He frowns a frown that looks as if the rest of his face wants to smile and waits for the denouement. That smile never happens. Sure as shit dies before it draws its first breath when she concludes her story.

"I..." Now it's his turn for his eyes to search hers. "Really? Why...?"

KiaraThere are moments where it becomes quite evident exactly who and what Kiara Woolfe is. They're subtle, at times. Just a side-long glance through dark lashes or a bright, sharp-edged little smile full of teeth that injects a very visceral, raw idea of the woman as her namesake suggests: a predator, a wild thing somehow condensed and carefully housed inside skin and bone and human constraints.

Perhaps that's the glory and ruin of the Verbena now and then: they were the ones who sometimes wore their belief on their sleeves and etched in their skin and with fire in their eyes.

At other times, under a full moon with her dark hair loose and tumbling around her shoulders or when she directs a look like the one she does now, at Samir, it seems very clear and easy to see: the touch of something nature-hued and querulous; the remote gaze of the creature that did not outwardly contain itself to human notions of right or wrong. Her eyes hold his for a very long moment, there and there may be, conscious or not, some buried slice of challenge there.

As if she wanted him to ask what he does.

Her mouth shifts; a shoulder rises in a brief, unfettered shrug. It might be dismissive but for the real impression of some quiet sense of regret in Kiara for it. "It's easier to lie to the people you're close to." She offers eventually, gentler. "Or not even lie in my case, but - the more they know. The harder it is every time we have to do what we have to, to survive."

Her smile turns too bright. "Why worry them, right? Besides, it turned out okay." This time, she doesn't add but Samir can read that in her expression, too.

SamirWhen she smiles at him Sam does not return it. Some part of him is concerned for her. Like of all the people in this bloody city she could tell him about her brush with death she had to choose the one she knows hardly at all. Who for all she knows could be a giant sack of shit who lacks empathy and could not care less about her continued existence.

They don't know each other very well. They are beginning to. They know each other well enough to recognize archetypes in the other one. He trusted her enough to go out into the desert and sit still while she wrenched back the curtain between worlds.

But she could make a coat out of him if she wanted to.

He could hack her entire life and put her out on the street if he wanted to.

Neither one of them truly understands the other but Samir can appreciate how much easier it would be for a normal person to talk to someone who is a relative stranger about an unsettling event than it would be to talk about it with a lover or a companion. He is the opposite. It doesn't make one way right and the other wrong. Those are concepts to which Mercurial Elite barely adhere anyway.

Sam does not lack empathy. He could care less. The reason he spends so little time around other people is that he has to live with what giving a shit about people does to his brain. No one else does.

"Yeah, but I mean..." He starts to dig a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. A yellow plastic pack full of cigarettes he rolls himself but a pack all the same. He doesn't sound as if he's judging her. "How close can you be to anyone if you... I mean, it's kind of their prerogative, to worry or not worry." A beat. He flicks his eyebrows at himself and returns to the task of lighting a cigarette. Sincere: "Sorry. It's none of my business."

KiaraKiara's getting drunk tonight because some part of her, likely the same part that just admitted how much easier it was to omit the truth from the people she cares about, doesn't want to discuss what happened to her the other day in the Umbra without the benefit of duller senses.

She could fight against the burn of alcohol in her veins; could articulate and press her will against the way her skin has a slight flush to it the more shots she takes but - perhaps remembering the seconds before an avalanche buried you alive and you woke up, pinned and suffocating under a deluge of Umbral snow just isn't something easily done stone cold sober.

(And she's seen death and she's closed eyes that no longer saw but somehow, it was different when it was your own body, your own mortality on the line)

Samir lights a cigarette, asks her how she can be close to anyone if she doesn't allow them the truth and Kiara's smile shifts gears slightly into something less forced; her eyes moving beyond him, over his shoulder to a couple who have taken up residence at the bar. They're draped over one another with the overly public physical display of the newly enamored. "I shared so it's sort of your business by default," her eyes tick back to his face and her smile grows, anchors there.

Then diminishes a touch as she fiddles with the glass, tracing the edge of a red-tipped thumb around the rim.

"I know it's sort of fucked up. To keep things like that from people. I guess you just get accustomed to keeping things to yourself." She watches his fingers handling the cigarette. "Can you really teleport things?" It's a deliberate shift away from herself, this time. A re-calibrating of their discussion.

Samir"No." Sarcasm. It doesn't suit him well. He's too soft-spoken. Too self-aware. If he could really commit to being a sarcastic piece of shit he could pull it off but there's a kindness and a hesitation in Sam that means he doesn't have an inkling of a desire to do anything than tease a little bit to try and lighten the mood. "I just said that to get you to go out with me."

They aren't on a date and he isn't the one whose idea this was in the first place. He does not have graceful fingers. Eighteen hours a day pounding away at a keyboard has given them a knobby sort of quality and he holds the cigarette like an afterthought. Smoke crawling tendril-thin up towards the ceiling. When he exhales he does so through his nostrils. He does not think he looks cool.

If anyone could understand the fear and alteration of perspective that comes along with almost dying in the Umbra it would be a young man who has gone into Quiet at least once in his life. Kiara knows what Samir looks like when he is terrified. Covered in blood and unwashed and ready to run from his friends. They aren't the same thing and yet he hadn't landed in Quiet because he grabbed the wrong milk at the grocery store. He'd come very very close to Death the night reality went sideways on him.

"... why?"

KiaraThe sarcasm doesn't quite fit him and Kiara's eyes are bright with the awareness of it.

"Well, that's anticlimactic." She sighs and reaches for another shot, nudging the others in his direction.

"I've never seen things being changed or - shifted, like that." She makes a small motion with the other wrist; her bracelets clattering as she does. The female's hands are fine boned, delicate with long, thin fingers. In another life, in another city, Kiara had almost been a surgeon. Could have been, with the right direction - with a desire for it.

She has the steady hands of one. They haven't shaken, even when she was discussing her near death experience.

They're the hands of a woman capable of healing now in another way, in a manner that would terrify and have branded her a heretic and witch in another time (perhaps it had already once). That would still frighten those she left behind. Scientists and surgeons who found comfort and reassurance in machines and their precise, certain actions with a scalpel.

"I suppose I'm curious. About how it works." She downs the shot, running the edge of her tongue over her lower lip. "For you."