Sometimes in one's life there are long stretches of time when there's nothing, absolutely nothing, that holds interest for you. Just one long stretch of things that don't excite you, don't make you want to care, events that make you yawn and midnights that pass by without you even noticing.

Mostly he was thankful for the life he lived. It wasn't something he always enjoyed, but it had its ups, and he was doing pretty well for a guy who had started out with nothing. Yada yada America and all that, for people who worked hard.

But he was thinking that this might be the start of another one of those stretches.

The bottle in his hand held little interest to him. He didn't care about how sticky the bar was under his sleeves. He wasn't worrying about whether his silk tie would be damaged by the smoky interior of the bar. When he reached for a toothpick and his sleeve dunked into a little puddle of--whatever--he shrugged and stuck the little wooden splinter in his mouth.

The blond on his left was boring. He'd never seen a more boring woman in his life. The brunette on his right was ugly as hell, with a face that looked as though it had been introduced repeatedly to a copper frying pan.

Staring blankly at the rim of the bottle, looking like an empty-eyed 20s movie star in his pin-striped suit with his hair slicked back, Jay entertained thoughts of an amusing suicide.

I mean, there had to be at least one funny way to kill yourself.

"Oh, there are several."

There's a man sitting to his left, between him and the blonde.

"But then, I might be a bit biased in my opinions."

Well, probably a man.

This doesn't mean that he's effeminate, though there's a certain androgyny to his thin features. It means that, for example, he wasn't there a moment ago, and he's responding gto Jay's thoughts-- and then there's the voice. Calling it cold would be missing the point completely. It's a negative number in Kelvins. It's impossible.

Easier to deal with is his form itself-- male, yes. Pale. Thin. Cold to the touch, but we can worry about that later. White hair, long enough to be pulled back into a short tail-- which it is. It must have taken a lot of peroxide to bleach out those strands. He's wearing a black turtleneck shirt. The sleeves are entirely fishnet, and a cartoonish skull grins from the front of it. His pants are tight, black, unremarkaable jeans. He is free of piercings of any kind, though his eyes are shaded in black eyeliner, this fact only emphasized by how he's shading his lids over his eyes and not looking directly at Jay. A line of apparently tattooed dots arch over his right eyebrow.

Yes, the form may be odd, but it's a humanish odd, and certainly easier to deal with than the voice.

Jay turned his glance to the person next to him, a perfectly normal if sort of...effeminate-looking guy. One of those trendy goth kids. He couldn't place the man's age, so he shoved him in the teenager with fake I.D. category, definitely with that shirt and those sleeves and the longish hair deal.

He dismissed the level of impossibility of the man's voice and evened it out for himself, rationalizing the words into something he could understand.

"I was thinking about a clown suit, but that freaks some people out, doesn't it?" Might as well be friendly, sort of. He didn't have anything to lose right now, and he was loose enough to not mind the intrusion.

He brought the bottle up to his lips, picturing the forensics crew trying to peel a blood-soaked foam clown's nose off of his corpse, took a contemplative swig. His lips glimmered from the drink as he settled the beer back onto the table.

"Would it be funny if I hung myself from a hot air balloon?" Flying miles above towns, people waving up at him as the balloon floated merrily on its way, oblivious as to its cargo. He wouldn't be found until the gas had burned out.

No good. "Do you have any ideas?" He squinted at the man, looked more closely at him, had a distinct crawling along the back of his spine that he usually associated with creepy.

The man looks up and focuses eyes on Jay that have more in common with diamonds than with fleshy spheres used for collecting light. They're sharp and white and a look at them is almost enough to convince that they're more solid than anything else.

He grins like the skull on his shirt. His teeth are very white, as though they've never been used.

"Oh, surely-- but it depends on whether you mean 'amusing' or 'interesting.' For example, I've always been a bit amused by the ones who jump off buildings. They almost invariably say they reconsidered as soon as their feet left cement-- but by then it's too late, isn't it?"

He leans his fishnetted elbows on the counter.

"You could try drowning yourself in a toilet, if you're man enough. Potty humour packs a punch-- you don't have to be the least bit intelligent to get it, so you reach more of the public."

The man's eyes are like nothing he's ever seen before. It makes him think of glass.

But you can't have two glass eyes.

They're probably just contacts. Very, very clever. He's wearing his own blue-colored contacts right now; that's a lie he can believe.

He considers the factor of amusement in jumping off a building. "But at least they get to fly before they, well, splat, you know. And it's not particuarly funny for the people on the ground, is it?" He ignored the missing logic behind the man's statement (how could anyone know what a jumper's last thoughts were?) and focused on his beer again.

Putting the bottle back, taking a heavy gasp of the smoky air: "As for drowning yourself in a toilet, it definitely has potential."

Musing on that, he studied the man again, made the connection between his smile and the skull on his shirt. Freakish. "Except what if you clogged the toilet, or if it overflowed? It's one thing to be funny, and another to be undignified." Having shit picked out of his hair by the coroners? Not pleasant. "I'd have to be awfully--" waves his drink "--drunk to manage drowning in a toilet, anyway."

He twists towards Azrael a little on his stool, squinty-eyed again, then leans forward in a confidential manner. "Pardon my nosiness, but are you by any chance a homosexual?"

"Ah, well, most amusing ways to go involve loss of dignity. Others find it amusing..." his eyebrows lift at the other man's question. They're white, like his hair-- dyed, no doubt.

Smirk.

"Homo, relation to 'homogenous', when coupled with 'sexual', meaning someone with a sexual preference for those the same as them."

There isn't a lot of point in sex with other gods.

"Call me pansexual and leave it at that."

He's never been worried about being tied up and dragged five miles along a gravel road from the back of a redneck's pickup. That sort of thing doesn't happen to Death.

He blinked, shrugged. The answer wasn't quite good enough for him, but he wasn't drunk enough to pry any further.

"I don't have a problem with that or anything, it's nothing like that. Just curious. Homosexual, pansexual, generally sexual--whatever toots your horn."

Shaking his head, he drew deep on his beer again. "Kids these days. All of the sudden people are saying it's, you know, cool to be sort of gay. I don't get that, you know? I mean, it's just whatever toots your horn. You can't just make up your mind to be one way or another, can you?"

He has the feeling that he might be repeating himself, and he quickly puts his drink down.

There's a limit that Jay has when it comes to alcohol. He likes his words to flow, but not too freely.

Every man has his secrets, after all.

"Anyway, I think that's all bullshit. You have to really feel it for it to mean something to you, right?"

(OOC: I'm so glad I have a character who can get away with saying "toots your horn.")

Azrael, whose main goal in sex is to pick up a little quick and easy worship, stares blankly at Jay for a moment.

"Yyyyyes," he says after a moment, "That's how I've heard it works-- feeling things to mean things." Not altogether a necessarily distinctive comment, but nor was Jay's.

Glancing at the drink, he offers, "Buy you another?"

What's that line about drinking? "One can't hurt, two for the taste, three because I deserve it," something in that direction. He made a little face, scowling at the bottle, then nodded. "All right, then. Thanks."

He lapsed into silence as the bartender came over and popped the cap off a new beer, chin in his hand. When she set it down he blinked at it, slid his arm forward to wrap his fingers. The cool icewater on the outside of the bottle dripped over his fingers, creeping down into the valleys between them.

"Do you know the poem about suicide by Dorothy Parker?"

In a tipsy sort of way, this is very important to him.

The stranger pushes some cahs (did he reach for a wallet? Had he had it in his hand all along?) towards the bartender, and nods to Jay.

"Which one?" he asks.

He paused, laughed at that. "Good point. No, there's one in particular I'm thinking of..." He tried to summon the name in his head, couldn't quite remember it. "It rhymes, you know?"

Last year he'd lifted a few books from a woman for resale. One of them was an anthology of Dorothy Parker poems, and he'd flipped through it as he stopped to get a coffee.

Four cappucinos later and he'd read most of the book. He'd enjoyed a lot of them, but this one always stuck in his head as the credo for his life's experience. What was it called? Damn it.

He took a long draught from his beer, tilting his chin to swallow. The first line hit him as he drank, crawling back from the deep recesses of his memory, and he quickly put the bottle down and wiped his lips with his sleeve.

"Razors pain you, rivers are damp..."

He fished for the next line, snapping his fingers impatiently.

"Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live," recites the stranger, giving Jay a curious look.

"She covered most everything, didn't she?"

Jay nodded emphatically, was left feeling rather dizzy. "Exactly. That's probably the only reason why I'm still here." He lifted his beer in a little cheers to that, though he wasn't exactly sure what he was cheering about it.

"Hey, that was pretty good, by the way. You read a lot of pottery?"

No. That wasn't right, was it?

Poetty? Pokey? Petty?

Maybe he should've stopped at that last beer. He wasn't sure he deserved the alcohol anymore, and that usually meant he was on his fifth bottle. Never a good thing.

"Poetry?" he tried again, wrinkling his brow in a confused frown.

"Sort of."

He smiles again. It flashes chilly in the gloom of the bar.

"I like to keep up to date on things that involve Me."

"Oh, are you a poet then?" he asked, curious despite himself.

It was habit to ask personal questions.

If he could find a weak spot in his victims, he could exploit it, so his first step was usually the sort of questions that a stranger could ask without seeming too rude--
"You look like an artist, are you?"
"Wow, that broach looks heirloom--did you inherit it?"

Stupid questions like that, things that required answers with a little bit of information. If he couldn't milk a good answer from them, it was unlikely that he'd be able to get anything from them.

"A poet? No." He seems amused by the prospect.

"No, I'm not known for my c reaitivty-- which I've always thought a bit unfair, but ah, well, what can you do."

Can't you just see a book of poems published by Death?

He says 'not known for' in the confident tones of one who is known, if not for creativity.

"Yes," he nodded understandingly, "some people just don't know how to appreciate what you give them."

What would Death write poems about, anyway?

Flowers?

Baby kittens?

He finished off his beer quickly, in a few long gulps, settled it awkwardly back to the bar with the care of the inebriated. "You know, I never liked poetry very much. It's just sometimes things stick to me, like that poem, and then I can't help but thinking that they must be good, right?"

His question sounded whiny and pathetic to his ears, and he wished there was some way he could inject convidence into his voice, like injecting Botox into a pair of withered lips.

The man's lips were actually quite pretty. His fingers itched for a tube of lipstick.

There's a sound that a plastic tube makes when it rolls across a counter.

There's that noise now, and this is because a small plastic tube is rolling slowly towards Jay, as though it's been dropped and the counter is on an incline.

it's a lipstick tube, but there's no woman in sight.

The stranger watches with interest.

Jay blinks at it, snatches it up before it rolls any further and further defies the laws of physics. "The..."

He looks around.

"The b-bartender must have r-rolled it," he stammered, flipping it in his hands and pausing to glance at the label. Saucy Red. He started to uncap it, stopped, threw a cautious glance his newfound acquaintance.

He shoved the tube into his pocket. "It's strange how things sometimes just...happen!"

...when you're thinking about it.

"No, it's not. Things rarely just happen." Speaking as one of the ones who make coincidences, he knows.

He lays his head down on the bar counter, giving Jay a true sideways glance. His smile's a crescent moon.

"Why would the bartender have lipstick, anyway?"

Jay thought about that, staring at the man.

A change of subject was in order.

"By the way, I never caught your name if you offered it." Safe ground! "I'm Jay Quintetti. Thanks for the dwink." Pause. "Drink. And the conversation and all."

Hah.

Head still horizontal on the counter, the stranger offers his hand to Jay.

He quickly took his hand, grip firm. He had a handshake that many a man had admired.

The stranger's grip isn't firm to much as iron. This impression is only enforced by the chilly skin, as though refrigerator fluid runs through his veins.

"Death," he says casually, and it's an introduction. "At your service-- if you like."

He stared at their hands for a moment, slowing, then smiled shakily.

"This is the reason I don't usually go beyond my second glass," he says apologetically. "Are you a Wiccan, too?" He chuckled. "What a night. It isn't often that I meet someone like you."

He was starting to feel like he was running up against a wall. Eventually he'd be stuck with nowhere left to go, shoulders pressed up to the bricks and helpless.

His survival instincts weren't dead yet, though.

"You know, going toofar beyond your second glass will make you see Death-- but you're not at that point yet."

He sits up, and then prop his chin on his hand.

"Wiccans don't believe in me, usually. Well, they do-- like everyone does: small 'd'. But they don't believe in big 'd' Death, so I give them about as much thought as, say, Christians. On a whole."

Pause.

"I'd say most people meet me only once, but honestly, I get out an awful lot more than you'd think."

"So."

Death versus death, Christians versus Wiccans, tipsy versus getting very drunk.

He lifted a hand to ask for another drink from the bartender.

"You're saying you're actually, really Death. As in, you are the physical embodiment of the process of leaving your body." He crossed his arms, leaning forward onto the bar and letting out a low breath. "This is one damn weird dream, I'll say that much."

"Yes-- actually, really Death. Dreams, too," he smjiles at the irony-- though he smiles at a lot of tihngs. "The power signatures are similar."

He takes a deep breath, and it's this that makes it suddenly obvious that he hadn't been breathing.

"It's not a dream, but even if it were-- has it really been that weird so far?"

He sighed, dropped his head down so that he could run his fingers over his slick hair. When he looked up again, a few strands had fallen out and were making the gradual journey down to his face. He looked a little younger like that.

"Just because there aren't any pink flying horses in drag doesn't make it any less weird of a dream," he informed grimly. "In fact, what makes it so weird is the fact that I could've sworn that all this was actually happening. I must've fallen asleep at the bar, or maybe I'm really at home."

He tapped his fingernails against the bar a few times, annoyed with himself.

"I wonder what the symbolism of this dream is."

"You want pink flying horses in drag? I could get pink flying horses in drag. I could get them more easily if I were to make you fall asleep, but I'm sure I could get them anyhow."

He raps his knuckles on the counter.

"Have another drink-- can't hurt if you're asleep, can it?"

He nods absently, still frowning. "I suppose it won't hurt. I'm not going to wake up and find this on my bar tab, am I?" What a nightmare that would be.

"I really don't need any more debts." He leaned back and patted his pockets, searching for a toothpick or something to put in his mouth. He had smoked a lot when he was younger, had managed to stem his habit with the sort of things that he could suck on without getting lung cancer. "Especially with no steady income or..." He couldn't think of another word for what he was trying to say, was left treading in still water.

He sat there for a moment longer, gave Azrael an agonized glance. The problem with having nothing to care about meant that every once in a while, when he tripped or couldn't remember something or lost his cool...

...he would just want to crawl under the table and die.

"You might."

The stranger grins.

"Have another drink, anyhow."

He couldn't take his eyes of the man for a long moment. All the things that he'd made sure not to really take into account were beginning to stand out again--his eyes, his voice, the shocking mass of white hair, his grim taste in clothing.

"You really are Death, aren't you," he sighed, looking down at his perfectly manicured nails. "So is jumping off a building really the funniest way to die?"

He lifted a hand to order another drink.

"It's always amused me," Death says, his face splitting into a grin with Jay's acceptance.

"Thyere are a lot of interesting things you could try, though."

Jay fidgeted, leaning his head down over the bar again. He could just barely see his face in the reflection of the reddish wood, one eye and cheek marred by waterstains.

"I honestly have nothing to live for, but no good reason to die." He looked up as the bartender knocked her knuckles on the table to get his attention and passed him his drink. He started into it quickly, settled back with a deep breath.

"I'm not in a relationship." He started ticking points off on his fingers. "I'm not living with anyone. All my close family members are dead or not speaking to me. I don't have a job, I'm not making any money, I'm not smart and I don't have any ambitions, and I have nobody to talk to about any of the things that bother me."

He paused, looking at his hands, then glanced up. "Except for you, of course, and who knows how long you'll be staying--don't get me wrong, I'm not looking for pity, just...it's easier to consider these things when you say them out loud."

"Oh, I'm always around." He frowns at Jay, briefly.

"You're melancholy when you're drunk."

He reaches over and strokes the man's glass, as though curious to see what would happen-- though it's the same as always. The condensation freezes into ice crystals behind his fingers, and he smiles indulgently at it, then glances back to Jay.

"No reason to live and no reason to die... seems to me you need to find one or the other."

He lifted his hands quickly away from the glass, watching it frost over with an expression of puzzlement.

"And here I thought you wanted me to drink more."

Twisting in his seat again, he looked steadily at Death, his expression hard to read.

"Do you freeze everything that you touch?"

"Sometimes."

His gaze isn't on Jay, and the undertones to the world hold... well, who knows what they hold.

"Drink. I just frosted the outside."

"No, no," he turned away, pressed his hand tight against his mouth. He wouldn't drink another drop. "I don't care if this is a dream or not, I want to know something."

He pushed the bottle away from himself, dropped his palms to the bar, grimaced as he felt his balance wavering. He knew where dead center was, he was only having difficulties keeping it. "I've thought a lot about death all my life, I've seen someone die, I've wanted to die, and you never showed up them. Why are you here now?"

It couldn't be just to get him drunk.

"I'll take a sip if you answer, I swear, just tell me that."

"Because I feel like being here," he answers, and gesticulates at the drink, smiling like a skull emblem emblazoned on a tee shirt.