Orbit

Folkways, Goujun thought to himself, annoyed. That was the word he'd been searching for. Five nights after the day they'd told him Kenren was wanted for assorted crimes against the state, he'd found himself unable to sleep until he'd found the term, sitting at his work desk and scrolling through a sociology textbook he hadn't accessed on his screen since he'd been in school. Folkways, or at least there was a case to be made for it. He wondered what Kenren would have said to that. If he'd have laughed at Goujun for having to look it up, if he'd have given the definition that same narrow-eyed assessing look he turned on information files sometimes, before his mouth twisted in amusement. The thoughts had utterly failed to distract him from the fact that Kenren wasn't there to do any of those things, and he'd found himself changing the browsing pages without really thinking about it, clicking on autopilot until he found himself, somehow, at the authentication page for a credits transfer to a spaceline out to Aks and a half-filled-out application for leave with pay on the other browser. It had simply all felt so...dreamlike, as if he were making these decisions without thinking about them at all, but even after all of this thinking, he'd somehow arrived at exactly the same point, where he found himself packing a bag and boarding a ship and not even being a little bit bothered by his decision to follow Kenren. Because….well, because Kenren.

The bar was somehow exactly what he'd expected even if it was the first time he'd ever set foot in it. It was definitely dingy. Of the seven places on the military station where one could get intoxicating substances, this was definitely the dingiest. Oh, there wasn't any dirt, and the bar adhered reasonably well to military standards of service and hygiene, but the dimly-lit seating area and the somehow spiritually shabby furniture meant the place had an indefinable air of...dinge. It was almost fascinating. Goujun, who'd grown up in the calculatedly impersonal beauty of diplomatic quarters or in the austere aestheticism of his family mansion on Earth during his parents' rare breaks from foreign postings, was certainly fascinated. It was an odd sort of place to make a haunt of, but it fit Kenren, who was currently nursing a bottle of something alcoholic by himself, close to the bar. He didn't look like someone spoiling for a fight, but then he never really did, in Goujun's experience, even when he was provoking people into useless fits of fury. Perhaps especially then. He simply looked….at ease, as if he fit right in with the comfortably worn-in furniture and the comfortably worn-out everything else. It left Goujun feeling even more obviously awkwardly out of place in the bar. Still, he was here to...validate a hypothesis, and perhaps become better acquainted with Kenren. He steeled himself for rejection and headed over to receive it.

It took a mortifyingly long moment - or at least it felt like it - before Kenren noticed him, an inquiring sort of tilt to his head that left Goujun uncomfortably aware of the grace in the line of his neck. "Good evening," Goujun ventured hopefully, relieved he was being acknowledged, at least. It would have been unspeakably awkward if he hadn't been. "May I share your booth for a while?"

Kenren's eyebrow arched even further, but he did gesture to the other side of the booth. "Be my guest." The title was notably absent, Goujun was relieved to hear. This wasn't official, and he didn't want it to seem that way, either.

"Thank you," he said, and took a seat in the booth, which was very comfortable, while still maintaining that air of exhausted amicability that pervaded the place. ". ….I hope I'm not intruding on any plans for the evening."

Kenren smirked and took another belt of the bourbon in his glass, gesturing to the bartender for another. "You're looking at my plans. What brings you? Drink?"

"Yes, I'd like that, thank you." Goujun looked around at the bar, then back at Kenren, who was observing him as if he were either interesting or edible. It was disconcerting, to say the least. "It's come to my attention that you may have something of a pattern, and I can't help wanting to validate my hypothesis."

Kenren snorted softly, raising his glass. "Yeah? What pattern's that?"

"Your usual day for getting into fights is your second day off."

Kenren did chuckle for that, low and pleased, which was a relief. Goujun had noticed the pattern after the third time, but he hadn't said anything thus far, since he wasn't sure how he'd take it. "I thought I might attempt to provide a tempering influence, perhaps," he added, a little recklessly.

Kenren laughed outright for that, his head tipping back, the sound free and easy, bright in the gloom of the bar. "Well, I guess you'll figure it out if you try," and there was still that laughter in his eyes when he looked at Goujun again. It was oddly pleasing.

"I meant on the others, of course," Goujun said, startled to find himself smiling.

Kenren snagged a glass from the bartender with impressive smoothness, and poured Goujun a generous glass of bourbon. "Sounds like a fun experiment." He nudged the glass closer, and raised his own, in a half-toast that Goujun joined in. "Here's hoping."

There was an oddly sincere edge to it that made Goujun give him a concerned look, but Kenren's face had settled back into easygoing inscrutability. Still, it left him with the thought, not for the first time, that "...you don't enjoy getting into fights, do you? Irrespective of whether you enjoy being in them."

"Mostly not, no." Kenren was frowning at his glass, clearly thinking about it. "Sometimes it just happens."

"How does it just happen?" Goujun asked, curiosity overcoming decorum.

"You mean when I want to get into the fight, or not?"

Goujun considered that carefully, not wanting to offend. "...in either case…?"

Kenren shrugged. "Well, when I don't want to, usually someone else gets something up their nose about my face, or something I did sometime before when they're tapping my shoulder and calling me out, and once they swing, I'm all in. When I want to start a fight, I'm usually not very far from someone happy to take me up on an invitation."

Goujun took in the information, struck by the odd formality of a process he'd considered entirely random and chaotic. "I see. So there's an...etiquette to it."

Kenren laughed again for that. "'Etiquette'? Not sure about that."

"A...form, then?"

"Huh? You mean like a script?"

"Something like that," Goujun said tentatively, some vague recollection of having heard something about that in university. "A way things go. Not quite classified as mores. ...and now I regret not taking more anthropology courses."

Kenren blinked at him, as if Goujun had suddenly started speaking a different language, and then laughed, quite helplessly, the glass cradled loosely in long, graceful fingers as he gestured with it a little. "Well, there is, I guess, but you probably weren't going to figure it out there."

Goujun took another sip of his drink, feeling slightly less awkward now that the joke seemed to have succeeded. "No, I don't suppose anyone would teach the anthropology of spontaneous bar brawls."

Kenren grinned at him, bright and quick. "There's a kind of ritual, I guess? I never thought about it, but all my stuff seems pretty much to go the same way."

Goujun nodded agreement, and looked curiously around the bar, at the men (and a few women) curled around their own drinks. He'd have been able to spot infiltrators or socialites, could have told Kenren who'd received dance training from seeing them descend a staircase, but this was a complete mystery to him. Much as Kenren himself was. "Who would start one, in here?"

Kenren looked around, and it took less than thirty seconds to settle on a person, a man in a booth whose neck looked about as long as his IQ was high. "That one," he said definitively. "He's got a dick problem you could see from planetside, and if he spots me it'll be a Thing."

Goujun shook his head, bemused. "I...see."

Kenren shrugged at that, still looking around the bar. "I pretty much got the number a long time ago. Helps, if I'm trying to avoid them." His body language was as easy as if he were naming shirt colours instead of potential assaulters, and Goujun could see it for himself, suddenly - the predator, the chameleon, why he'd been shifted to intelligence despite being trained for direct combat. It was unsettling, to say the least, to realise in such a concrete fashion exactly how dangerous the man really was.

"Your file does indicate an impressive ability to read people quickly." Pointedly, he added, "whether or not you subsequently avoid them."

Kenren smiled at him for that, that sense of a half-bared blade still in the flash of his teeth, sharp and promising and just a little inviting. "I got my uses."