Re: [Evans & Peel: Jack & Holly]
It mattered very little if a few nuances of language were lost in translation through a pint or more of bad whiskey. Jack rather suspected a lot more would get lost in the transition between drunk and sober, not the least the cracking hangover Holly was going to go through. As firsts went, it was one hell of a showing. But he hadn't quite translated an other place that was gone into a world that had vanished completely, which was probably bloody unfair in the grand scheme of things.
"So you came here somehow, but there's no return journey?" Jack said carefully, and then fuck it, Holly was so wasted he wouldn't remember straight, and Jack was blunt: "Magic, science or somewhere in between?" It was after all, what Jack's experience of Repose boiled down to, given all options on the table. If there was a blend, he hadn't seen it yet. "I imagine there may be options, depending on which ticket you arrived on."
But all right, the major arse. Gear-shift, and Jack followed with the greased logic of the not-terribly-sober, along the track Holly had grooved. The music played, and Holly sipped and Jack finished the contents of his own glass midway through the explanation of the money. Jack shrugged, when he said it, because all right, it probably was. Particularly if the kid wasn't parked in a trailer on the edge of town, that had looked peculiarly miserable when he'd dropped by.
"Er, is it? All right," Jack glossed over the distinction between nuances of sex-work, largely because he didn't know. "I don't pretend to know the language. But presumably, if you're interested in him that makes a difference to you. A version of you?" Jack finally, bloody caught on.
"Ah. That makes it different. All right, a different version of you was here. Christ, what a bloody show." He looked at Holly's empty glass, "I think pitching up in a different world and conducting a business transaction with someone you'd presumably like it to be something else with at the same time as establishing who every bloody is deserves a moderately larger bar-tab. It's Glenfiddich, which I don't expect you to remember, but you can be told again. Another, two please," to the bartender.
Jack looked at Holly with significantly more sympathy than the scale of his eventual hangover now. "Thank you. I have no intention of dying from it." Which was true now, but it hadn't been and Jack returned bluntness with bluntness. It was after all, a source of considerable familiarity.