Kane and Adrienne - pre-curse Hallowe'en log

[x-adrienne.livejournal.com]

Before going on the hayride, Garrison and Adrienne talk about their costumes and the party.


The bottle spun four times in the air before being snatched back at the last minute to the appreciative sounds of wonder from adults and children alike. A healthy measure was poured into a shaker already filled with ice, and as the top went on, it too was spun on the palm of a hand, sideways so that only the inertia kept it from smashing to the ground. A fourteen year old in an Incredibles costume giggled as the drink was poured four feet into a glass, garnished with an oversized fruit salad and umbrella, and passed over.

Garrison took his next order from a very solomn boy, who had peered at the list of Halloween drinks as if evaluating colleges. He was actually glad that Wade had mentioned the idea of food at his strange party, since it gave him an easy costume idea. Kane wasn't very good with costumes, usually buying a handful of cheap accessories and fobbing off the usual suspects - cowboy, rocker, vampire. This year, the guy at the costume shop had pushed hard for him to rent a Green Lantern outfit, as if Kane was a comics fan or something. Instead, he'd borrowed a shirt from Harry's storage, from back in the day when the Hideaway had attempted to reinvent itself as a sports bar. The transformation had only lasted a few months before Harry's switched back to the pub they all knew, but as a result, he still had three boxes of green and black bowling style shirts moldering in the back. Whoever 'Monty' was, he'd been gone from the pub long before Kane's time, but the shirt fit perfectly.

It was easy to pretend to be a frat bartender since Kane had been one while in university, and his preternatural reflexes allowed him to toss bottles, glasses, and garnish in high, impossible looking loops. The list of Halloween themed 'mocktails' he'd taken right off the internet, and had picked up a little crowd of watchers as he prepared them.

Cowgirl Adrienne sidled up to the bar, clad in a pink frilly shirt, brown cowboy hat with a pink star, jeans, chaps (the cowboy-hallowe'en-costume kind, not the dominatrix kind) a lasso, and a plastic revolver. She'd even added a blonde wig to the ensemble, just for fun. "Howdy, Pardner," she greeted Garrison with a tip of her hat and a grin, "I've been wranglin' and ropin' youngsters all night and I'm plum tuckered out. I was wonderin' if I could trouble ya for somethin' to quench my awful thirst? Like a... Screaming Banana Banshee?"

"You realise you can't buy the ingrediants for that outside of the Carribbean, right? Buggered if I'm going to press dark mango rum." He jerked his thumb at the mocktail list, with the 'Witches Brew' and 'Vampire Martini' and 'Frankenstein Fizz' markered on them. "This bar is strictly what you see is what you get, cowgirl."

"Dark mango rum? What? It's creme de cacao, my friend," Adrienne informed him with a pointed look. "If I recall correctly, it's creme de cacao, banana liquer, vodka, cream, and a cherry. The virgin is like, pineapple juice, banana, cream, cherry, or something? Also, I'm pretty sure when I did the organizing to set up the bar, I put more on the sign than those three things." She remembered putting a Screaming Banana Banshee on the list, and raised an eyebrow at him. "You replaced my sign. You realize I'm armed, right?" A corner of her mouth turned upwards in a smirk.

"Yeah, you might shoot me in the ass again. Remember that? Good times." Kane casually whipped a bottle in the air, behind his back, seeming to pay no attention to it. "It's Halloween, Frost. Not martini night at the Roxie. So you'll drink your darkly suspicious purple non-alcoholic drink with the silly name and the dry ice smoke roilling off it to get into the spirit of middle school fun." At the last moment, his hand shot out, catching the bottle upsidedown by the neck, a shaker already under it as the centrificual force equalize and the liquid started to flow.

Adrienne shot him a look, moved her lasso from over one shoulder to the other shoulder in a pointed fashion, and stuck her tongue out at him. "If you tell anyone I really will shoot you in the ass again, but I'm actually having a lot of fun," she murmured as her eyes stayed on the airborne bottle. She whistled through her teeth as it came back down to earth into Garrison's hand. "That's a pretty slick move. Where'd you learn how to do that?"

"I tended bar for a few years in college. A couple of my frat buddies once bet me a hundred bucks that I couldn't learn the bottle flipping shit from 'Cocktail'." A bottle was rolled across the back of his hand and back into his palm. "Turned out to impress the girls, so I kept it up."

"You mean you moonlight as a bartender occasionally?" Adrienne asked. She pursed her lips. "See, what's more surprising to me about this story isn't that you learned how to do this thing to impress girls, it's that you had frats in Canada."

"Yeah, we just got electricity and everything up there around the same time. It's really great." Kane said wryly. "This is the first gig I've worked since college, to be honest. But it makes for an easy costume, eh?"

"Yeah, this is true. Although I would have liked to have seen you dress up as Dave Steib or one of your other throwback ball players with the powder blue uniform," Adrienne grinned.

"I was a little tempted to try Jim Acker. Or maybe shave down to Buck Martinez' epic porn'stache, but it would scare the kids." He said, nodding. "Tell the hayride people I'll bring a tray of drinks for the ride. If you're lucky, you might get one with my secret ingrediant. Or not so secret ingredient. Oh, fuck it, you might get one with booze."

"I thought scaring the kids on Hallowe'en was expected? Or you mean, traumatize them?" Adrienne grinned. She took the purple thing he'd given her and knocked it back. It was time to go back to work. "Booze would be very much appreciated, thanks. I think my cowgirl alter ego is a bit of a boozer. She's being very 'Calamity Jane' from Deadwood in my head right now." Yes, Adrienne had far too much free time last year to watch old tv shows. "Except that doesn't really work for me, what with not wanting to traumatize the kids with f-bombs and see-you-next-tuesdays. Except if I have to be traumatized by going on a hayride, I think it should be only fair I get to use an epic amount of profanity!" she joked.

"Hey, if I get stuck going on the hayride, you're not getting out of it. But if you want to explain to the Professor why Molly suddenly keeps using the word 'cocksucker' every sentance, that's your choice."