Author's Note: Finger's still broken. Chapter 3 of All Together Now will be up next week. In the meantime, there's this!
A gust of snow blew into the bar, closely followed by a woman. The brunette dashed inside and slammed the door, leaning against it with a sigh of relief. She brushed hopelessly at the tiny drifts of snow that covered her coat.
A drink. The world would be all right again if she could get some alcohol inside of her. She looked up, hoping to find someone who would buy a poor girl a drink.
The bar was empty, save for one man slouched on a barstool. Green pants, black buttoned shirt - not the snappiest of dressers, but the shoes were Italian. Whoever he was, he had money. Oh. They were scuffed and the heels were worn down as if he'd run a marathon in them. Maybe he'd had money once. That would certainly explain what he was doing in this dive. No one who could afford to drink anywhere else would stay here.
Oh, the hell with it. She slipped into the seat next to him and draped her coat on the back of the chair. "Hi," she said.
"Mmm," the man grunted, not bothering to look up at her. Instead, he scowled into his glass as if it contained the lowest of low lifeforms.
"Rough day?"
"You could say that." He tipped the glass into his mouth and deposited it on a rapidly-growing pyramid stacked up at his elbow. "Yeah, you could say it's a rough day. Any surly aversion," he muttered to himself, irritably pinging a glass with a flick of his finger.
What was that supposed to mean? Had she even heard him right? "Want to tell me about it?"
Suspicious blue eyes examined her. "Why do you care?"
She shrugged. She'd always been nosy, which is why taking a job at the tabloids had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Of course, it took more than nosiness to make it to the top, which was why she was still languishing at the bottom of the food chain after seven years of working there. "Just curious. Does it matter? It looks like you could use a friendly ear."
The bartender appeared in front of them, silently bearing a trio of refills for the man. He paused for a moment, disappeared around the corner, and returned with something electric green in a glass with a brownish lime clinging to the rim. He placed it silently in front of her and disappeared into the back room.
Well, it wasn't her usual, but any drink was better than nothing. She swallowed half of it in one gulp and grimaced at the oversweetened apple taste that left a revolting sugary film on her teeth. Who put a lime on an apple-flavored drink, anyway?
"A friendly ear, huh?" the man next to her asked, staring into his new drink. "You first. Did he get anything important?"
"Huh?"
He didn't even bother looking at her. "Smudged mascara. You've been crying. No purse, but you're in office clothes, so you probably got mugged. That scratch on your neck's probably from that, too. Looks like it's from a knife. No ring, and no tan line from a missing ring, so you're single, which means you're at the bar because you don't want to go home alone." He took a short swallow of his drink. "So. Did he get anything important?"
"Just my wallet," she shrugged, impressed at the accuracy of his guess.
"Any money?"
"Can't lose what you didn't have."
"I'll drink to that." He did, enthusiastically, and clacked his glass down carefully atop two others.
"So what'd she do to you?"
"She?"
"No one drinks like that because they're happy. Girl run out on you?"
He snorted scornfully. "No. Wish they would. She. Whatever." He spun his next glass idly with his fingertips. "No. You know what's wrong? Fifteen years ago today - to theday - the Riddler robbed a movie theater. Fifteen years of heists and riddles and do you see him up there?" He gestured crossly to the television, where a perky reporter was narrating the life story of a surfing squirrel. "Zip."
"The Riddler, huh?" There were many reasons that she hadn't progressed in her career. One of her most glaring faults was the inability to take obvious galaxy-sized hints when they were hurled directly at her forehead. "What do you care about him?"
"The Riddler," he snarled, puffing up angrily. After a moment, he deflated back into his morose slump. "…ruined my life," he said softly.
"He's ruined a lot of lives. I mean, you remember that time when he tried to steal all those silent movies? He bankrupted that bakery and started a brawl at that party. Half the people there had to go to the hospital!"
His lip twitched into half of a smile. "Yeah."
"And remember those two guys last week who opened that bar in their apartment? He torched it just because they named it 'Puzzles'!"
"What do you expect? They were clearly just trying to make a quick buck off his image!"
"Just because the one guy looked like him -"
"And wore that green suit," he added viciously.
"It was Mardi Gras!"
"In January?" He took another sip of his drink. "How'd you know about that, anyway?"
"I was there. See this burn?" She pulled up the short sleeve of her silk shirt, displaying an angry red burn splotched over her shoulder.
"Looks pretty bad. You should put some silvadene on it."
"Yeah? What are you, a doctor?"
"No. I get a lot of burns in my line of work."
"And what is your line of work?" Flirtatiously, she traced the outline of his ear with one long pink fingernail. "Doctor, maybe? Lawyer? Observant guy like you, maybe you're a cop."
His lip twitched into that little half-a-smile again. "No, I'm not a cop."
"So what do you do, Mr…"
He didn't offer his name, and he didn't tell her his job. Instead, he raised his second drink to his lips and drained it.
Whoever he was, he'd been right. She didn't want to go home alone. She didn't want to go home at all. Walking into her empty, dark apartment, twitching at every noise, and spending the night all by herself with the lights on and the television blaring was no kind of substitute for company. Any company. And since he was the only one here, he'd have to do.
She slowly slid her hand on top of his and gave it the most gentle of squeezes. "Got any of that burn stuff at your place?"
He looked at his drink, back up at the television, which now featured a two-shot of the squirrel with its handler, and shrugged. "Sure."
She wasn't quite certain what had happened next. There had been more drinking - oh, yes, she remembered that - and…they'd eaten sushi. She clearly remembered the tiny blood-red baby octopus perched on its ball of rice like the world's saddest circus animal. She couldn't remember anything after that.
And now here she was, in a strange bed in who-knew-what part of town. The morning sun glared harshly at her through the uncurtained window. She blearily rubbed her eyes. Her clothes were still strewn in crumpled piles around the room. His were gone. Her shoulder, when she touched it, was bandaged with the kind of skill that spoke of too much experience with open wounds.
When she finally made it home, there was a small plastic bag dangling from her doorknob. She reached inside and pulled out a tube of the burn ointment he'd recommended.
There was a card taped to it, a simple little two-by-two To/From card that looked like it came out of a bunch of flowers. To Suzy, it read. But in the From line, all that he'd written was a single green question mark.
Author's Note: 'Puzzles' and its owners are from 'How I Met Your Mother'. The Riddler's infamous bakery robbery and temper party are from the 1960s Batman show in the episode titled 'Death in Slow Motion'.