Re: In-person: Zee/John
[He smiled over at her, with the prodding toes and sly youth. Zee was one of a kind in any universe, and he took her cheerful rib with a delighted lack of shame.] Don't blame me for your taste. [Charmingly self-deprecating per usual, dangerous and easy on the tongue. He kept the cigarette between his lips as she extended her soft hands and placed them in his. He knew her private smile and her downy dark eyelashes. He didn't forget her, but, then again, he didn't usually forget the people he fucked over. They tended to matter to him most anyway.
If she was expecting a large scale light show she would be sorely disappointed, but John had never been that kind of magician. He liked seances in the back of butcher shops and grit-swept summoning rituals in desolate noodle houses, musty basements and derelict office buildings. He liked the sweat and blood side of the magical world, the kind where payment in good earthly things mattered, where there was appeasement, cajoling, negotiation, and a hard set list of rules that could be plucked loose, improvised, and twisted like threads into a knot to hold the enemy. Intelligence, rock salt, charcoal, sugar, candle wax and death. No sequins, no pretty lights, no rodeo clowns. His own magic flowed out from his pores like radiation, multiplied over and over with years of use, sunk into his bones and corrupting him with overexposure. Why he'd stayed none the worse for wear was anybody's guess. He didn't have her pedigree to back him up. Boys from Liverpool and girls from Atlantis - Eastern boys and West End girls. What a universally odd pair they made on this couch together.
He flipped her hands over with calloused, nicotine-stained fingers, holding them cupped in his own and looking at her palms.] Learned how to do this from a Traveller, once. Big man, called himself 'Junius'. Think he thought it gave him some old fashioned authority. [He slid his thumb over her life line, looking for inconsistencies, tender as a lover, looking for cracks. He would never say that he was trying to find some sign that this wasn't really Zee, that this woman wasn't the same one whose body he could have mapped out in silent, blind sleep with the pads of his fingers alone, but he trusted her to get the gist. He trusted her. That, in and of itself, was dangerous as a true name. He shifted the cigarette and smoke drifted from his nostrils. He leaned in a little closer and shuffled her hand in his, inspecting, finding significance. His hand drifted up to her wrist as he looked more closely at her palm.] Love, I see you'll be meeting a tall and handsome man sometime soon. Someone familiar, with good dress sense.