Last Call

A Word: Because I was asked how Des became the bartender here, and the text worked.

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(516): id pay someone 5 dollars to tell me whos house im at right now. comfy couch though

Desmond found the Miles End after a particularity pleasant conversation with his dad over the phone. Something about getting back into college so he could move to Dubai and take part in the family company he'd never given a damn about his whole life. Not even when he was young enough to believe the lies his mom told him about dad coming back eventually.

He'd thought the name funny enough to slide in and hand the scowling bartender behind the seriously nicely stocked counter his entire wallet, "I want to drink myself back to a better childhood. Use as much of that as you need to get me there."

The bartender wastes no time in pulling out the Jaegermeister and a pint of beer and Desmond's estimation of his skills rise. The dude has a serious case of scare-the-customer-away-face, and he isn't chatty at all, blowing people off in favor of powering through their orders. Desmond calculates hundreds of dollars being wasted by his attitude before the constant pour of shots do their job and put him into the comforting embrace of a blackout.

Desmond wakes up with a pounding head, fire lancing down the right side of his face, and his ass firmly planted in the most comfortable couch he's ever had the fortune to lay on. The conflicting sensations take up all his attention so that it takes him an embarrassing amount of time to realize he isn't alone. A man sits on an armchair near his feet, coffee mug in his left hand, and an expression of mild interest on his face that Desmond's only seen on doctors encountering some new disease or stoners making a previously unknown food combination.

"Wh-" he doesn't get any further than that as something pulls uncomfortably at his lips. Rough gauze scratches at his fingers when he brings them up to prod at it.

"My apartment," the man answers immediately. Irritation coloring his dark eyes as he scowls, answering almost every question Desmond can ask in a rapid volley of words he can barely keep up with. "I'm the bouncer at the bar you nearly set on fire. It's three in the afternoon. I don't know how you got to the bar so I assume your car is wherever you left it. And," the man brings his mug up to his lips, "you asked for it."

Desmond sorts through the answers and digests them as quickly as his pounding head will let him. They all fit neatly away except the last one. "I asked for it?"

"You liked Altair's scar," the name rolls off his tongue with an accent that's lacking in the rest of his words, and Desmond places him as middle Eastern. Maybe. He'd been thinking Indian before. "You kept demanding a matching one so he sent you to me to get it."

Desmond has a vague recollection of a man with a scar and a cold stare. "Wait, the bartender?"

"You are not the first," the man continues as if Desmond didn't say anything. "I'm thinking about opening a side business in scarring people, but Lucy won't let me and insists I take responsibility for any idiots I harm."

"Hey," Desmond protests weakly, but doesn't actually try to defend himself. He got blackout drunk and asked a bouncer to give him a scar. This is, sadly enough, not the weirdest thing he's ever woken up to and is probably one of the many definitions of stupid he's perfected over the years. "Did you actually hit me hard enough to scar?"

"Yes," the man drains his mug and rises. Heading towards what Desmond assumes is the kitchen. "My brother will drive you back to finish your paperwork."

"Fuck," Desmond presses on the bandage covering the right side of his mouth and the fire solidifies into a line. "Wait, what paperwork!?"

"Oh, hey you're awake!" It's not the bouncer that comes out of the kitchen but they look enough alike for Desmond to draw the obvious conclusion. They're similar in everything but eye color, this man's being a light blue. Also, this one smiles. "I'm Kadar by the way."

"Uh, Desmond," he works his way up off the couch and swallows back several curses as the movement does bad, bad things to his head. "What, what did he mean by paperwork?"

"Dunno," Kadar is a cheerful man who is considerate enough not to make too much noise as he picks up a ring of keys. "Probably whatever you didn't finish last night when Lucy hired you."

"Hired me for what?" Desmond asks and feels a cold prickle of sweat at the base of his skull. Apprehension or the first morning bout of puking. Either one is equally likely at this point.

"For the bartender position," Kadar looks over and does a double take, face turning alarmed as he stabs a hand at a door. "Bathroom! Bathroom!"

Desmond only stumbles once on his way to the blessedly cool room. There's a towel left out on the floor and Desmond blesses messy housekeeping as it keeps his knees from cracking too painfully on the floor. He spends the next several minutes wishing he wasn't alive while praying to the almighty porcelain god.

He feels better afterwards. The first puke is always the worst. Kadar's waiting when he gets out and even has a bottle of water and some white pills he hopes is aspirin even as he swallows them. "You ready?"

"Yeah," fuck it. He needs a job anyway, rent is coming up and he's been making the unenviable decision of plain tuna or ramen for dinner for too long. At least this job is one he knows he can do, and he's already done the hard part of wowing the boss with his work.

Moving is a special kind of hell now that he doesn't have the distracting nausea keeping his mind off the pain in his face. It burns with each step he makes and seems to throb in time with his heart beat. "What the fuck did your brother do to me?"

"He punched you," Kadar says with more cheer than the sentence deserves as they walk down a set of stairs that Desmond really hopes don't go on for long. "You really wanted a 'cool' scar and wouldn't leave him alone. He got annoyed."

"So he punched me? I was drunk," it's an evil kind of person that goes around punching drunk people while sober, and the older brother apparently makes a habit of it. "What else did I do?"

"Eh, not too much," the sun as Kadar pushes a door open onto the street is blinding and makes Desmond flinch. "Aside from kicking Altair out from behind the bar, serving for the rest of the night, and making more tips than I've seen since our last regular bartender flounced off to go work for a competitor. Not much besides that."

"Yeah?" That did sound like something he'd do. Desmond gets pushy when he's drunk, and belligerent when he thinks the bartender is doing a crappy job. "How much did I make?"

"Enough for Lucy to pay for all of your licensing, and someone to find your apartment in case you tried to run before she can get you properly chained to her bar," Kadar's grin is wide for a man suggesting such casual stalking.

"Ok," still not the weirdest situation he's ever woken up to. Desmond slouches into a car and grits his teeth against the first lurch as Kadar pulls away from the curb. "Hey," Desmond frowns, once the pain and vertigo has subsided some, something nudging curiously against him mind, "does your brother only have one arm?"

Kadar laughs.

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