Shot or question
Who: Jaina and Valkyrie What: Jaina pulls Valkyrie out of the gutter, A game of truth or dare follows When: Recent Where: Jaina's Status: complete Rating: PG-13
Jaina had a lot to deal with. Concerns about Chloe, about the meteors, about a dozen other things and her own dreams…
Honestly she felt like she needed a drink. Or ten.
Since Neena’s was still exploded, she decided she needed to find another place, teleporting into the area to walk around and look.
Valkyrie had been on a bender ever since dreaming of the slaughter of her sisters. She tried not to sleep because every time she closed her eyes, that was all she saw, but she had slept off and on thanks to passing out. But now she was making the drinking rounds again. Or trying to, anyway.
A pub crawl wasn’t the right description since she was just staying in a bar until she was cut off. Which, well, was what currently happened. She got tossed out the door and she stumbled and landed on the ground.
“Hey! Don’t you man-handle me! I can hold my drink just fine!” She said as she got to her feet, and tried to walk towards the door only to list to one side and fall over again. “Oh fuck,” she grunted and then started to pick herself up again.
Nothing like watching the man you love turn into a genocidal monster to drive you to drink, Jaina reasoned. Her thoughts were interrupted when a woman came flying out of the bar. Jaina tried to catch her when she stumbled again, “Hey, are you all right?”
As she was helped up, Valkyrie looked at the woman. For a moment, she thought she was looking at one of her Valkyrie sisters. Pain flickered through her eyes before she blinked and shook her head a little, then realized she didn’t know this woman. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just assholes denying me some drink.” She cast a pointed glare at the bar.
“You seem to be a little in your cups,” Jaina noted, feeling herself respond to the pain in Valkyrie’s eyes, even though she didn’t know the source. This woman was going to have a hard time finding another place to drink. Most places refused service if you were already drunk.
“Maybe you should consider water.”
“Yeah well, I need to be more in my cups than I already am.” She said with an intention to get more alcohol. Sure, no bar would serve her right now, but she could get alcohol elsewhere, such as at a store.
It was then that Jaina decided she wasn’t going to let this woman be alone. Whatever haunted her had to be at least as bad as Arthas purging Stratholme, if not worse. Whatever it was, she needed someone right now, even if she probably thought she didn’t. “What if I told you I have a bottle with your name on it?”
She looked up at the woman, a grin crossing her face. “I’d say you’re my new best friend.” Which was pretty true. Anyone who gave her alcohol tended to be considered a friend. “I’m Bryn, by the way.”
“Pretty name. I’m Jaina. Now hold on, this is going to feel a little weird.”
Arcane, blue energy swirled around them in a thousand intricate patterns, and then reality popped. They were suddenly standing in the middle of a living room. Jaina guided Bryn to the couch, “So what’s your poison?”
For a moment, Valkyrie thought she was hallucinating. Or that maybe she’d had too much to drink. It was hard to tell which scenario was which there. After they appeared in a living room, she wavered a little as she was guided to the couch.
“Holy shit,” was about all she could manage to say initially. She glanced around the room for a moment before looking back up at Jaina. “As long as it’s hard liquor, I’m not picky.”
“You took that well.” Jaina opened her cabinet and looked inside, “How does bourbon sound?”
She’d pick tequila but she didn’t think Bryn needed something that strong right now.
“Yeah, well, when you dream of gods and magic, teleportation isn’t so different. Though I am neither a god nor magical.” No, she was a Valkyrie, but she wasn’t even that anymore. Her sisters were all dead now, Hela had eradicated the Valkyrie. “Bourbon’s good for me.”
“I am magic.” There was no vanity or pride in her voice, just a simple matter-of-factness to it. Jaina returned with the bottle of bourbon and some whiskey for herself. “Though magic where I’m from is basically advanced math and physics.”
“Are you?” She responded, looking at Jaina. “I have no idea if magic in Asgard is the same as yours, but something tells me you would’ve gotten along with some people there.” She took the bottle of bourbon and took a drink. “Thanks. I wasn’t ready to go home and pass out.”
“If you’re going to drink like that, better to do it in a place where you won’t wake up in the gutter. Or twisted up in someone’s car,” Jaina said, twisting open her own bottle but having the dignity to pour herself a glass.
“I wouldn’t mind a gutter. I’ve been in worse places.” She said with a shrug. She’d seen a lot worse, and a gutter here was far better than gutters in some places in Africa that she’d been in. “So, you’re magic. Got some fancy tricks up your sleeve other than teleporting?”
“I can make muffins,” Jaina joked, as a mana muffin materialized on the table. “A lot of magic is offensive in nature. Elemental. Or time based. I can make books float and turn the pages on their own too.”
“Muffins?” She asked, arching an eyebrow at Jaina, then looking at the muffin that appeared on the table. “Seriously. You can do cool shit like teleport and so forth, and you can also instantly make muffins? Guess that comes in useful if you’re in the middle of something that you can’t stop and take time to cook or something.”
“It’s really rejuvenating for energy too. Which helps because it would take a longer time to be able to cast again if I cast too much without it,” Jaina explained. She took a sip from her glass, “I can’t do alcohol yet.”
“So basically you could be self-sustaining in being able to rejuvenate your ability to cast spells.” That definitely seemed really handy. “That’s a pity you can’t do alcohol yet. Oh well, there’s probably better things for you to use your magic for than that.”
“Usually I do it just to study. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake. And to help people.” Jaina knocked back half the rest of her drink. “At least until you run into something you can’t cure and can only burn.”
“Ah, well, helping people’s all well and good. At least there’s people willing to help others.” She looked at the bottle, debating just downing the entire thing in one breath, but it would be rude to drink it all and only want another, so she just took a normal drink.
“Well, it’s that or watch the world end. I don’t think I could do that.” Jaina topped her glass off, swirled the glass around and stared into it. “I’m going to assume you had more than a bad night.”
Valkyrie could sit by and watch the world end. She’d mostly been doing that ever since her family was killed. Save for the times when she’d helped Freya do some good. But those were temporary lapses of judgement, in her opinion.
“You could say that,” she responded and took a long drink of the bourbon.
“You don’t have to talk about it, I won’t push. But I do think you should have some water too or you’re going to have regrets in the morning that even my hangover cure won’t help with.”
And at that, Jaina conjured her a glass of water. “I’ve never actually tried conjured water while drinking. Maybe it’ll work better.”
“When I wake up with regrets, I tend to just start drinking again. That stops it.” She said with a shrug. She looked at the glass of water and tilted her head a bit. “Water difficult to figure out how to conjure, too?”
“I’m not sure magic while intoxicated is safe. I can imagine trying to teleport and ending up inside a wall somewhere.” Jaina grimaced. “Or an out of control water elemental on a rampage.”
She cast another spell, creating, in fact, a water elemental. A very small one, no larger than a mouse. It looked like a whirlpool given form.
“Maybe try something that doesn’t involve the chance of ending up inside a wall. But I suppose magic while intoxicated isn’t all that different from trying to do anything while intoxicated. At least anything that requires someone to think clearly.” Such as driving and such. Valkyrie may not necessarily care if she lived or died, but she definitely didn’t try to drive while drunk. She wasn’t that stupid.
“I did once do… shots while doing math challenges,” Jaina said. “I think I made it to 3 shots before I made my first mistake.”
She prided herself on her math skills, even while drunk. “I passed out at 10.”
“That’s definitely impressive. Did you make a drinking game out of the math challenges?” Valkyrie didn’t exactly think of math challenges as being something fun to do while drunk. But that was just her.
“Yep, I did! Once I got over the hangover I checked my work. I would have gotten a C.” Jaina tapped the edge of her glass, “Sometimes I wonder if I tried again I’d get a better score.”
“So what, did you take a shot everytime you thought you got a problem right?” That was...an odd drinking game, but Valkyrie didn’t quite judge based on how alcohol was consumed.
“Yes. Otherwise I’d never get drunk because I’m never wrong,” Jaina replied, smiling at Valkyrie. One didn’t graduate from MIT in her field and get math wrong all that often. If at all.
“But math is basically my career, I’m a physicist.”
“Ah, that explains the love of math.” Valkyrie said and took another drink of her bourbon. “So, where do you work?”
“Still looking for a more permanent position,” Jaina admitted. “There’s a lot of tech companies but not as many that are pure research. I’d almost rather not work for a for-profit at all. That would piss my dad off, which is always a bonus.”
“Hopefully you find something. Whatever makes you happy, of course.” Valkyrie lifted her bottle in a toast to Jaina. “I’m going to assume that means your dad is kind of an asshole?”
She would clink her glass against Bryn’s bottle if she was closer. Jaina loved what she did she just wished she could do it, “Retired Admiral. Supreme asshole, terribly racist and a member of Trump’s cabinet if you want a level of how awful he is.”
Valkyrie nodded a bit. “So he’d probably hate me, considering I’m from one of those so-called shithole countries.” She rolled her eyes. “If you ask me, the whole world is a fucking shithole, and those dream things don’t make it any better.”
“You’re not white, so he’d hate you anyway,” Jaina replied, gripping her glass tighter. He hadn’t just voted for twitler, he worked for him. Jaina never wanted to speak to him again.
“Everything is falling apart. And when the dreams are falling apart it’s like happening twice over.”
“Him and all the other privileged white boys.” Too bad those kinds of people didn’t realize that in the bigger picture of the world, whites were a minority of the population. “It’s been falling apart for a long time. A lot of people, particularly in America, just haven’t seen it.” She had extreme experience with terrible governments, genocides, terrorists, all of it. Africa had all of it rolled into one.
Jaina nodded. “Instead of joining the Navy, I joined the Peace Corps, and a few other organizations. So I traveled around a lot before I went to get my degrees. I knew I needed to see the world, to help people, first.”
“Good for you. Plenty of people need help in this world.” Valkyrie took another drink. “There’s too few good people in this world. Seems like you’re one of them.”
“What about you? What do you do?” Better to talk about the real world than the dream one, if it was the dream one that reduced her to this state. Besides, Jaina was curious and tipsy enough to not care.
“I don’t exactly have a specific job. I do most anything that pays for my vice and a place to stay in.” She said with a shrug. After her family had died, she hadn’t had any direction in her life, and she didn’t give a shit about any of it. She tried not to help people, except for the times Freya had managed to convince her to do the right thing.
“That’s fair enough.” Jaina got to her feet, wobbling as she did so. She made her way over to her liquor cabinet, opening it and pulling out another bottle. She brought it over to Valkyrie, “Tequila?”
Valkyrie was careful to say ‘most anything’ because she didn’t sell herself. And she didn’t do anything involving people smuggling or killing or things of such a nature. She had a heart underneath it all, she just liked to pretend she didn’t. “Oh fuck yes. Hey, you wanna do some shots of it? Make some sort of drinking game of our own?”
“I’m game.” Jaina put the bottle on the table and hopped up to get the shot glasses. She nearly tripped over her own feet, catching herself on the couch and snickering. “What game are you thinking about playing?”
“We’re probably a bit too gone to properly play something like beer pong. How about truth or dare, but instead of a dare, you have to take a shot if you don’t want to answer the question?” She suggested. It was something, anyway, and maybe they could get to know each other. Whether they’d remember it in the morning was another matter entirely.
That was a dangerous game, but it wasn’t like Valkyrie knew her. And Jaina wanted to make more friends. Chloe counted, though their relationship had evolved into something a little more mentor. Jaina tried not to think about how that relationship had started or else she’d go down a tunnel of ‘I am a terrible person.’
“Last time I did truth or dare I ended up naked in my best friend’s tub…”
“There are worse places to be than that. And so long as you like women, it can’t be so bad because I like women, too.” Valkyrie said with a grin. “So, have a freebie truth from me.”
That made Jaina blush as she poured them some shots, “Well free for free, that’s something we share in common. So question or shot, guys too?”
“I like the sound of that,” she said with a grin. “Yes, guys, too. I’m equal opportunity. Question or shot, how old were you when you first kissed a girl?”
“Seventeen,” Jaina replied. “She was the daughter of a conservative senator. Shot or Question, have you ever been in love?”
Now that question made Valkyrie hesitate. She could be truthful and admit to having been in love once, or she could try to bury the thoughts with alcohol. Ultimately, she went with a shot. “Shot or question, what’s your dream job?”
Interesting. That was a shot and no answer. But Jaina was willing to answer that one. It was kind of an easy one, “I want to be Stephen Hawking, basically. Shot or question, wildest time you’ve ever had?”
“Ambitious, I see.” Not to mention that there was a void left by Stephen Hawking’s passing. “Oh god, that has to be the time I was getting busy with a lover and there was a stampede of wildebeests that nearly trampled us. A couple lionesses had frightened them while hunting.” She grinned. “Shot or question, most exotic place you’ve ever had sex in?”
“Very ambitious. I met him once. Brilliant mind.” Jaina sat up straighter, “You nearly got trampled while mid-coitous?!”
That was just a little hysterical and she laughed just a little too drunk-like, “Oh, uh...I don’t think I can beat the Serengeti or wherever you were, but does a layover on Guam count?”
Yeah, the stampede was definitely a story, and one that she could laugh at. Though honestly, Valkyrie had also laughed about it at the time because it was kind of hilarious in its own right. Sort of. “Hey, if you consider it exotic, then it counts!”
“Shot or question,” Jaina replied, taking a drink as she thought about what exactly to ask Valkyrie next. She was the kind of person who didn’t get too dirty without a lot of drink.
But she’d had a lot of drink. “Favorite position?”
Valkyrie grinned at the question. “Now that depends on whether I’m with a man or a woman. With a man, I prefer against a wall. With a woman, also depends on whether or not toys are involved. With toys, either cowgirl or doggy style. Without, sixty-nine is always good.” She took another drink and eyed Jaina. “Shot or question, what’s your favorite position?”
Normally she liked choosing different questions, but right now? She was rather curious about Jaina’s response.
Jaina casually crossed her legs, because honestly all of those positions sounded really good and she was reminded of how terrible her sexlife was. Chloe had been the first in while and was the most recent, but their relationship had shifted and she didn’t like to think about that.
“I suppose I deserve that one. I’ve never tried against the wall....but with a man, doggy is probably my favorite. With a woman, face sitting or cowgirl, depending on toys being involved.”
Christ had she just said that out loud?
Valkyrie raised her eyebrows. “You’ve never tried against the wall? Clearly you should try it sometime.” She then smirked a bit, running her gaze over Jaina. “There’s not much that’s better than someone’s head buried between your legs.”
“Are you volunteering?” Jaina asked, then covered her mouth and covered with, “Shot or question.”
“And what if I was? Shot or question.” Valkyrie countered, gazing at Jaina. She was definitely volunteering.
“I’m not sure if I’m too drunk or not drunk enough for this,” Jaina murmured. Louder, she replied, “Shot or question, can we even make it to the bedroom?”
Valkyrie chuckled and shifted closer to Jaina. “There’s only one way to find out the answer to that,” she responded with a smirk.
Challenge accepted. Jaina got to her feet, “We’ve got...three positions to try?” Four, if they counted against the wall.
She took one last shot, for courage.
“My kind of woman,” she commented as she also took another shot before getting to her feet. “Now, to the bedroom,” she prompted as she stepped up to Jaina. She was going to climb her like a tree.