Re: [Bar: Jack & Patrick]
[It was almost funny. Jack knew that smile. Rather better than the wearer, actually. Possibly better than the wearer knew the smile. He'd worn it. It didn't matter it had been dubbed and given a title that rooted it firmly in the midwest and with a predisposition to coming with 'bro' appended to it. Jack knew all the bloody ways a smile like that could undo myriad wrongs. Patrick had probably at least once caught himself doing it in the mirror; Jack knew he had at roughly Patrick's age.]
He was. He doesn't drink much, I think. Family history. [A textbook on mental health, wasn't it? It wasn't terribly difficult to close the gap between information Jack had and the equivalent of illustrations for the information he didn't. Speaking of information he didn't, he watched Patrick disintegrate into the companionship of the device and could fill in half a dozen additional blanks if Jack so chose.]
No, before the Halloween incident I wouldn't have spent several months aged about your age, I would think, but the parties in town do have some odd favors they leave us. [He ignored Dahlia. It would probably have to be dealt with eventually, Dahlia but christ, he didn't want to contemplate the gym that opened and shut and the woman who ran it. Not today, thank you. The other side of whatever this was. He looked instead at Patrick, who was both very young and probably in this moment, neither sober nor truly hungover, very stupid and Jack shook his head.]
No. I probably know more about it than you'd like me to. [And then, pausing. Realizing.] You're not bloody serious. You, Newt and Destiny, under one roof? Christ. Are you mad?