21:49 on a Wednesday night. The beginning of October. Bayfield, Ontario.

The sky above the city is glowing vaguely with light pollution, and the air has a crisp, crunchy quality that just smacks of Halloween to come. Outside of the Loblaws, there is a display of maize, pumpkins and horrific 2-D plastic ghosts, witches and scarecrows. The supermarket is closing in eleven minutes, but it's currently still pretty busy. The illuminated A is flickering slightly, but the store is mostly contributing to the aforementioned light pollution.

It's fucking freezing.

Well. Not really. Any good Canadian knows that fucking freezing is actually a whole lot colder then the sevenish degrees that it currently is - but after a long hot summer, Diane feels pretty bloody cold. She just got off work, and has learned a few things.

Firstly, just because it was sunny when you left the house does not mean that you shouldn't take your coat.

Secondly, it's sometimes worth it to pay your phonebills. She's spent five minutes trying to call someone on the pay phone, just because she can't be arsed to keep up the phone at home.

Thirdly, payphones are evil. This one has just eaten five dollars (strengthened Canadian dollars) and she's just given up.

She crosses her arms against the cold - all the hair on them is standing up - and stares up at the miry sky and says, "fuck this."

It's not like the person she's trying to get a hold of even wants to talk to her.

So now her main goal in life is to get home before she freezes to death, and also before someone she knows comes along and sees her in the awful green polo that she's forced - as an employee of Loblaws - to wear. It even has a tag pinned to her ample chest, which reads "Hello! My name is Diane! Proud Employee since 2007!" and also a smiley face button.

Her tatty streaked hair is pulled back in a messy knot at the back of her neck, and she looks very tired - mostly because heavy make-up is not the mark of a good cashier, and she has limited herself to kohl (a lot, by normal standards, just not hers) and lip gloss. She can smell it, pungently 'strawberry'.

Scuffing one booted foot against the sidewalk, she sighs.

The walk home seems inordinately long.

((I'm it! :O ))

Sometimes when people are walking home alone they begin to become paranoid. They hear noises that aren't there and see flashes and shadows out of the corner of their eyes. Often times when they hear the sound of footsteps, but it is only the echoing sound of their own. They know that the need to calm their nerves because it's just their overacting imagination. And sometimes it's not.

Sometimes the footsteps come closer moving at a different quicker rhythm than yours and then there are two arms around you giving you a bear hug like you're some sort of long-lost relative. And there is definitely a distinctive scent of something alcoholic on the whoeverthehellitis's breath. Like now.

"Hey! I know you!" He says leaning his head in the crook where her neck and shoulder meet. She's not as skinny as most of the girls he bugs so he revels in how comfy it feels. He's pretty sure her large chest would be even more comfortable, but he only vaguely remembers meeting her at a bar and showing off tattoos.

"You've got the name..." He says, and usually he is a bit more eloquent, but not by much. If you already have issues with finishing sentences quickly and finding the right word alcohol really doesn't help, but it's usually not that super noticeable. "The one.. that's the Roman version of Artemis."

He is pretty much snuggling up against her. Possibly because he's also in so-not-this-weather type of clothing in his college team tank-top and a simple pair of not-so-thick ripped jeans. His stubble is almost a full beard at this point, but it has moved from the sandpapery rough of the first few days to unbelievably fuzzy and ticklish.

Sometimes when innocent girls are walking home through the (not really) darkness and then strange, inebriated men sneak up behind them and grab them, said girls shriek impressively.

Diane definitely does. Just briefly. It's more surprise then actual fear, because by the time she gets over being startled the guy is already snuggling up to her. Rapists, murders and muggers - as far as Diane knows - do not snuggle.

Before the split second it takes her to realise who this is - Stephen, Stephen the good looking, Stephen of the naga tattoo - her body has already relaxed into his. She can't help it. Even if the whole touching thing sometimes makes her awkward, he's got body heat.

"I know you too," she agrees, "you've got the tattoo."

Tattoos, actually. There's that nice one on his chest, too. His nice chest.

"Yeah, I'm Diane."

Mind, anyone with half a brain could have figured that out. She is after all labeled. "And you're Stephen."

Just in case he'd forgotten.

"I think you're also drunk," she remarks, "which really isn't fair, because I'm not."

((Sorry getting distracted by a new show on TV called Pushing Daises.))

"Yeah. I'm Stephen Morris." He says and wraps one arm around her waist and starts moving slightly to coax her into walking with him. He's not sure where they're walking.. they're just walking forward.

"I'm only kind of drunk. Not really drunk." He protests with an emphatic nod. He brings up the arm not around her and holds his thumb and forefinger an inch or two apart.

"Only.. like this much drunk. I'm not really drunk. Just buzzed. You're right. I got tattoos. I got a few tattoos." He laughs and smiles and leans his head against hers.

"Your skin is pretty. You should wear less make-up. It looks really nice on you.. So, where are we going?"

Diane wonders, allowing herself to be propelled down the street, if she knew his surname before and then just forgot. "Diane Kent," she says, slipping an arm around him, "pleased to meet you. Again."

"Yes, but you're so much drunker then me... It's just not fair." She's well aware that it's 'more drunk' not 'drunker' but honestly, who cares about grammar? The English language is to her mind a living, evolving creature. Always moving forward. Change is essential.

She could even phrase that cleverly, if only she'd graduated highschool.

"I've got tattoos, too," she tells him, "but there I do have the advantage. You haven't seen all mine."

She laughs at his compliment, laughs it off. She knows he's right, of course. Her usual amount of foundation has never been attractive on anyone. "I don't know where we're going. Where are we going? Nowhere anyone else will see me in this horrific top."

"Well if it's unfair tha' 'm drunker than you, then why don't we go and get you as drunk or drunker than me. An' then you can show me your tattoos. It'll be fun. Do you want to go buy some from a store or would you rather go to a bar?" He grins and moves in closer. He sniffs deeply.

"Mm. You smell good." He mumbles.

"Like strawberries... Hey, what do you think my next tattoo should be?"

Diane pulls up the front of her shirt a few inches - an odd gesture which is in fact to establish whether she's wearing anything under the godless polo. She is, in fact, wearing a thin black vest. "You can't buy alcohol in stores this late, silly," she tells him, "so I think it'll have to be a bar. And I'll have to lose this tragic shirt."

"Mmm, thanks. 'Strawberry.' You could get the name of your one true love tattooed on your arm. Or rather, the list of them. It's probably long. Like the telephone directory for Mexico City, actually." She grins, teasingly. "Scratch that idea."

"I got stuff in my apartment. I took it from one of our water polo team parties. But I bet you don't want to go to a strange man's apartment." He pauses and blinks rapidly.

"An' I don't mean strange like you don't know me, because you know me. I mean strange like I'm really weird. But, you wouldn't want to come to my apartment alone. I'd probably do terribly naughty things to you." He starts giggling. Mostly because he's feeling good and also because he wouldn't sleep with Diane. At least not with all these ghosts around him.

It's really unnerving to know spirits of the dead are watching you get it on. And Diane really wasn't his type. He hated to be shallow, but he was a nineteen year old boy and he tended to like his girls(and his very occasional boy) a bit fitter.

"So. So. Where should we go? Because I really wanted to stay outside because it's so pretty, but it's really cold too and that's pretty stupid, because I think it shouldn't be so cold. And I don't think that I would get a name tattoo, because what if the tattooist spells it wrong? That would be bad. And then I could only date people with that name with that particular spelling." He was rambling on joining together sentences that should have ended a long time ago. He was being a drunk Stephen.

"Sweetheart," Diane says, "I think you'd better hurry up and ply me with some alcohol," He's a bit too tipsy for her to be sober, she suspects, "And if you have to take me home with you, so be it. It's not like you can be any queerer then me."

The queerer could have been a joke, or it could just have been Diane sticking to an older meaning of the word. It's hard to tell.

"And we could always sit on the back step," she suggests, "because if we something to drink, it would make us warmer. And even if you're cold, you're warm to me, so you could warm me up. So it would be less cold, but still pretty... 'specially 'cause I'd be there... and you could admire the glowy clouds."

She doesn't think he's likely to try and sleep with her. She's surely not going to try and sleep with him. She's at a stage in her life where mostly she ends up getting wasted, pulling whoever, pulling them some more and then waking up the next morning in someone's living room minus several articles of clothing but quite sure she didn't actually do anything. Mostly she doesn't sleep with people except in the non-euphemistic sense.

"I'm not that queer." He is sticking to the new meaning of the word. His judgment on what is okay to talk about is usually pretty clouded so there is very little keeping him from going off into great detail on all the enctounters he has had with men. Alcohol really doesn't help that much. Where booze can lower the inhibitions on the most uptight of people to eventually get them stripping, Stephen tended to get pretty naked sober. Well there is nothing but his short attention span to keep him from talking about it.

"An' I also have a sweatshirt or a blanket we could use and then we would be warmer just in case the vodka doesn't get us warm enough. That's what you want, right? Vodka. It's what we had last time." He moves his hand from around her waist to wrap around her arm so they're joined like the characters on the yellow brick road from Wizard of Oz.

"I really like strawberries." He adds unexpectedly, keeping his head leaning against hers so that he can still smell her scented lip gloss.

"Only a little," Diane says, cheerfully. She would be perfectly happy to listen to a detailed account of what Stephen and some other guy(s) had done, if he really wanted to get into it. It could be entertaining. "If you want to swing the meaning that way."

"Yeah, vodka's good." She's gone nothing at home. As usual. For someone who works at the grocery store, her ideas of shopping are pretty limited and her fridge is pretty empty. But vodka's good. Not quite as high as tequila on the list of dangerous substances, but high enough. Enough to get Stephen's clothing off - although she's starting to suspect that it really doesn't take much to do that.

She vaguely wonders where he lives, and if it's far. Because it's cold, or rather she's cold. And they're not going to get anywhere fast because there's only so fast you can move with your head on someone's shoulder. "I don't think it actually bears any resemblance to actual strawberries," she tells him, "but I guess it smells good anyway. And it's really yummy, too."

It's hard to tell if that's meant to be a flirtation, an invitation or merely a comment.

"Really?" He asks and leans over slightly to lick the edge of her lip. It could be interpreted in multiple ways. He was either flirting with her, being his normal self, or just very curious as to what her lip gloss tasted like.

"You're right. It does taste like strawberries." He smiles and moves her body with his slightly so that they turn to the right.

His apartment building is now visible in the horizon. It's large and fairly drab; it's not too outstanding, but the rent is cheap and the location is close enough to the university that he can get there for ridiculously early finals, but far enough away that school was not his entire life.

"I live over there!" He says raising his arm and pointing forward to the large gray building.

Diane giggles. This isn't because drunkenness is contagious. She's just naturally one of those people who giggles. "See? Told you it tasted nice," she tells him, rolling her lips together to even out the lip gloss and cover the patch that just got licked off. She obligingly turns to the right. "But it doesn't taste like actual strawberries, does it? Just like the flavour that's called strawberry. Which is really a totally different thing."


Her teeth - very straight, small teeth - are chattering slightly from the cold as she talks.

"Mmm, nice."

This is a perfectly sincere remark on his apartment building. It's nicer then hers. Hers in an ex-project house, and a disgusting shade of band-aid pink.

"Time me." He slurs out waiting a few moments before he sprints off to the building. He moves faster than most guys his age. Not as fast as people that take track mind you, but still fairly fast. Right now he has a lot of pent up energy and a very trained body from sprints during football season.

He fishes out the key to the building and the key to his apartment while still running. He tries to pause as little as possible, stopping only to unlock and open both doors and for half a second or two when he contemplated taking the elevator.

It would have been a six or seven minute walk to the building at the pace they were taking. Instead he's back in front of her panting heavily with a sweatshirt tossed over one shoulder, a bottle of vodka, and two shot glasses before the six minute mark is up.

"Time?" He asks between heavy pants for oxygen.

Diane is sitting (and shivering, a little bit) on the steps up to the apartment's entrance by the time he comes back. She looks suitably impressed with his speed. "Three hundred and fifty-six hippopotamuses," she tells him, looking up at him. She eyes the vodka, or perhaps the sweatshirt, somewhat greedily. "Which is a whole lot better then I could do." Then again, he's quite fit, not some pudgy girl who wouldn't know exercise if it jumped up and hit her with a lacrosse stick. Though she does walk a fair bit - courtesy of it being cheaper by far then the bus.

"What do you do? Track, fencing, cross country or soccer? You're too cute to play football. And why don't you give me that?"

Again, hard to tell if she's after the vodka or the jumper.

She pats the cement step next to her, suggesting that he should sit down. She's quite glad she's wearing jeans, because the cold of the steps is seeping through the denim and it'd be worse if it were just 'nets.

"I didn't know hippopotamuses was a unit of measurment." He laughs and sets down the bottle of clear liquid on the steps and places a shot glass in front of her keeping his in his left hand.

"Water polo and soccer. I don't play american football, it's not fluid enough for me. Too much starting and stopping all the time. It's really annoying." He says with a grin sitting down next to her and offering her a sweatshirt.

"Right. Promised to get you as drunk as or drunker than me." With that he opened the bottle and poured her a shot.

"Oh, do you work in Mississippis?" she asks, laughing. "I hate American football. Icky, and like you said... all those stops. More of a proper football fan. Man United, though they've been highly mediocre this season. The Beautiful Game, they call it." She gives him a gentle poke, "and with guys like you playing, I suppose we can all see why."

She picks up the glass and tilting her head back, throws the vodka back. Then she smiles - rather like a cat that's got the cream. "Straight to the head," she announces, with a tone of satisfaction. "Which is good, seeing as I have some catching up to do."

"And what's the point of all that damn padding? They don't wear any of it in ruby. Makes it much more fun to watch and play. Have you ever seen a water polo match?" He's talking about sports. That means he can continue this conversation one-sided for a good forty or so minutes. He is, after all, a guy.

"Oh, here you go." He pours her another shot. He's being a gentleman and waiting for her to catch up a bit before he starts knocking back shots. He pauses and looks over to his left where Diane isn't sitting and furrows his eyebrows in concentration.

"No, you may not." He mumbles under his breath. Stephen is just quiet enough to not be understood by Diane, despite their close proximity. "You're dead. You don't get to drink anymore."

"I know," Diane agrees - she can ramble for a while about sports. Sports, after all, include hot guys and that's one thing (along with hot girls) Diane really can't get enough of. And she understands that one must let guys talk about sports. It's the only real way (well, and food, oh and oral sex) to get on their good side. "The padding sort of obscures the point. But rugby's a bit sadistic."

"I don't know anything about water polo. But it sounds like you play it on seahorses. I guess not. But you should."

She throws back the next glass of vodka. "You don't have to wait for me," she assures Stephen. She's perfectly oblivious of the ghostly conversation going on beside her. "I'll catch up fast. I'm a lightweight."

"No, you tread water. It's kind of a combination of basketball, hockey, swimming, and I'd say a bit of soccer. Kind of. I don't know. It's fun." He pours himself a drink and right when it's done a small gust of wind comes out of seemingly nowhere and knocks it over,

"Damn it." He growls out at the invisible-to-Diane force. "Stop it." He hisses as he pours himself another drink, this time holding the shot glass in his hand before knocking it back and pouring Diane a shot.

"Seven players, you can only touch the ball with one hand, except the goalie, the goalie can touch with two. The goal, like most sports, is to score on the other team. It's sort of a by any and all means necessary thing. That's where I broke my nose and dislocated my right shoulder."

"It seems like it would be an interesting-to-watch sport," she says. She's trying to imagine what this would look like, and how close the resemblance is is to a Level One swimming lesson ball-game. "I failed my Level One swimming," she confesses, "twice."

"Have you got a poltergeist bothering you?" she wants to know. It's a perfectly innocent remark. Diane firmly believes in poltergeists. Also witches, pixies, naga, brownies, boggarts, Bean Sidhe and anything else you can come up with. She reads too many fantasy novels, her mum says. "

"I think broken noses add character. At least in guys. But you lot can get away with some many more physical irregularities," she sighs exaggeratedly at the unfairness of the world, "they just tend to make you look dashing and heroic instead of flawed. Maybe it's cause you're all so flawed to start with."

"It's a very fast action-packed sport. I think it's fun to watch. And all the guys wear Speedos." He nudges her slightly on that comment. Di isn't the only one who enjoyes the male form on occasion, but Stephen tries not to advertise it too much. His team mates might think he is weird. Stephen just loves beautiful people, whether they are male, female, or in between.

"No. Poltergeists are just teenage hormones. This one is a ghost." And his features are completely serious. He might be joking, but mostly he is just drunk.

"..You're right. Guys do get away with a lot. No girl would get away with having stubble." He scratches the small beard on his face and shrugs.

"I should probably shave this. It's been two weeks."

"Lots of splashing, then," Diane says. She nudges him back, "you know you like it."

The guys in Speedos, that is.

"You really should either move closer, or give me that sweatshirt. Or both. I'm gonna freeze, vodka or not. Or possibly I should just drink s'more of it? That might work too."

In order to find out if this is the case, she downs her current glass of vodka and then pushes it towards Stephen. It's rude to help oneself.

"Ah, okay. I thought it was poltergeists that were always knocking things over. But I guess ghosts could just as well. Especially if they were pissy. I mean, it's got to be annoying, not being able to drink."

She runs a thoughtful finger - careful to keep the black varnished nails from doing too much damage - across his cheek, feeling the beard. "Stubble on guys is kind of sexy, but I agree... This is tending dangerously towards being a beard. Or rather, it is one. Masquerading as stubble, but it's not quite Halloween yet."

"Mm. I do enjoy wearing Speedos. I get a taste of what it must have to have huge tits, because no girl can keep eye contact." He smirks. What did she say about his sweatshirt? Oh. He still had it on his lap.

"I could have sworn I already gave it to you. Oh well." He drops the sweatshirt in her lap and then proceedes to pour her another shot..

"Of course he's angry. He's an alcoholic." He rolls his eyes as if it was the most obvious thing in the word and then starts giggling like it's all just some big joke. It's not. But it would be better if she thinks so. He doesn't need another psych evaluation for "paranoid delusions."

Diane giggles. It's a perfectly acceptable sound to be made by an undereducated, generally over-madeup young woman of no particular distinction. "It's a sad lot of guys that can," she says, draping the jumper over her shoulders and pulling it closer around her by means of the arms. She holds it in position with one hand and holds her glass in the other. She's sipping the vodka like it's champagne now. The world is already looking light a much brighter place then when she started the evening (engaged in a dispute over the pricing of pineapples).

"Oh, the poor thing! That must be hellish," she says, looking over to Stephen's left as though she's got some vague idea where the ghost is. "I'm so sorry."

Diane is pretty easy-going. Stephen could be drunk, he could be insane, he could be delusional. He could even actually be communing with a ghost.

It doesn't really matter one way or the other to her.

"You know. I think I will shave. It'll probably be a good idea. I think this is well past the sexy stubble stage." He runs his hand over all the facial hair. He looks good with a beard, but he'd have to take care of it by trimming it and stuff. That is not an option.

"Well past the sexy stubble stage." He lets out another laugh and pours some more drinks before placing the bottle down in between the two of them.

"I think I'm going to take a break." He slurs out before laying backwards to look up at the night sky.

"Yeah, pretty much," Diane agrees. "Can you see any stars? If you can see stars it's a good time to stop, cause there sure ain't any stars here. Light pollution and all that shit."

She tilts her head back to look up at the hazy sky and laughs, and then she drains her glass again. She can feel her judgment and sense of propriety following her worries down the drain. "It's a good thing I'm with such discerning..." (meaning, doesn't sleep with fat chicks) "company," she says, "because I could definitely be compromised otherwise. Only, it may stop counting after the nth time. What d'ya think? Can you get more compromised, or is a ruined reputation just a ruined reputation. Like, no degrees of ruination?"

She wonders if she's making any sense at all.

"Well I can see stuff that looks like moving stars. But it's mostly just landing airplanes and stuff." He mumbles closing his eyes and enjoying the cool night air wash over his entire body. Stephen has spentblocking out the voices of spirits that it is not really that hard to just start igrnoring the living voices when they are right next to you making absolutley no sense.

"...Fucked if I know." He responds.

"I really have no idea what the question even was."

"I'm always horribly jealous of airplanes," Diane remarks, vaguely. She looks back up, pulling the jumper closer around her, but she doesn't see anything in the sky except clouds and light. "Yeah, I don't really know what the question was either. It may have been white noise."

She leaves it at that, knowing that she doesn't really have anything more to say and that she can just let it be quiet. Well, quiet, except for the sound of cars and the occasional shouting and banging from within the apartment building. Stephen's charming neighbours are apparently working out some issues.

"When I was little I wanted to be a fire truck." He mumbles absent-mindedly. He arches his back until he hears a satisfying pop and then lets himself rest again on the cold cement of his porch.

"It didn't work out very well though." Stephen picks up his glass and considers drinking some more before he sets it down again. He has a late-morning practice and he doesn't want to be hung-over for it.

"I could totally see you being a fire-truck," Diane tells him, "you'd have little sirens and ladders and hoses and everything and you'd run around making obnoxious high-pitched wailing noses. It'd be cute. Kind of like having a baby around, really."

She's trying to imagine it and ends up breaking down into a fit of giggles. "I think it'd be cool to be a lorry. Lorries don't have to man the cashiers at Loblaws, for starters. But then again, neither do you, so you're probably good."

"Weeooo weeeooooo." He squeals out mimicking a fire truck siren to the best of his ability. He starts giggling too because all of this is just ridiculous.

"You can't be me, though." He says completely serious in his tone.

"Because if you were me then there would either be two of me or I wouldn't be me. And the world can only deal with one Stephen Morris, and it's me. So you can't be me. If you don't like your job you should get a new one."

It takes her a minute to recover herself, because his fire truck imitation is just too silly. When she finally stops giggling, she nods. "Yeah, of course. One of you is way more then enough," she tells him teasingly, "and I'm pretty okay with being me anyway."

Oh, wow. Deep and meaningful statement alert. She winces mentally and makes a memo to try and avoid it in the future. "I could always take up waitressing, I guess," she says, mostly to herself. "Probably better outfits, at least."

"You know what?" He asks, his lips curling into a smile. "If there was two of me? I'd so do me. I'm that hot." He let out a half-snort of laughter before he starts talking again.

"Career waitressing sucks." He yawns out.

"Get a real job where you don't have to walk around so much. That like ruins your arches and gives you varicose veins and stuff. It's gross." He knows his opinion really won't matter, but he loves talking anyway.

Diane laughs. It would indeed be - to her mind - pretty hot.

"I don't do career anything," she says, "Mostly I do something until I stop doing it, and I don't think that makes up a career. Career grapefruit-bagging? Perish the thought. But real jobs require other real shit like talent and credentials and eurgh..." she shrugs "way too much trouble, honestly. I had a job working in an antique shop for a bit, but... I sorta quit that one, too. And I worked in an ice cream parlour once."

Which was actually pretty cool.

"Oh." Stephen comments as noncommittally as possible. His face is flushed slightly from the cold and drinks.

"What time is it? Because I should probably walk you home before it gets too late. Unless you want to sleep on my couch or something." As much as Stephen tries to be a gentleman he is not going to give up his bed.

Diane yawns, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. "Do you know where I live?" she asks, "'cause if you don't, we'll probably never find it. But I can just crash on your floor, if it's not too annoying."

Even at home she doesn't actually have a bed. She just sleeps in a mess of blankets, which she persists in saying it more comfortable.

"I don't think I know where you live. Floor probably is the best option." He lets out a long sigh before sitting up and grabbing the bottle.

"Nah, don't worry, it's cool. I think my roommate is out. You can sleep on the couch. It's pretty comfortable actually." He stands up slowly and fumbles around for his keys before he finds them and starts unlocking the door.

"You coming?"

Diane pulls herself up, somewhat unstably, and then bends to pick up the empty glasses. "Thanks," she says, waiting for him to unlock the door. "For the vodka and the couch." She suddenly feels absolutely shattered tired. "I think I needed it, the vodka, that is."

She vaguely hopes she doesn't have to work tomorrow morning, because that'll be a pain. Although they're used to her looking zombified by now. They've decided it's her natural state.

"You're welcome." He slurs out managing to unlock the door and holding it open until she walks in and then leading her up the stairs to his apartment. He was pretty sure that his roommate would be out. He thought he had mentioned it, but Stephen had a bad memory.

"It's cool. I wanted someone to hang out with. You're pretty cool." He starts unlocking the door to the apartment.