Just a Quiet Drink... (Private) [COMPLETE]

Kale pushed through the door, stepping into the bar and letting his eyes sweep over the place for a moment. He’d been here before, he knew where the exits were already, but you didn’t learn where the exits were in a place and then stop checking. He had to look for things like new obstructions… who was between him and a given exit, etc. Always important tactical information. For instance, the drunk man in the center of the room could be a particularly messy meeting, if he felt like making himself one… then again, Kale had a few ways to make himself a serious pain in the ass. He had come unarmed, leather jacket over white shirt and jeans, not exactly looking like the commander he was, though it wouldn’t be a leap to make him as a soldier – he looked the part of the veteran almost as though taken from a textbook. There was a hardened look in his eyes that was hard to miss, if you knew what to look for.

As for what Kale was looking for, at this point, it was the redhead at the bar, suspiciously well-armed for a casual drink, but then Sabre had always been hard to separate from her weapons. Kale lifted a hand in greeting, and started to cross to her, though the man at the middle of the room stood, blocking his path. "You’re the old man who threw my friend out of here last Thursday." he said, and Kale looked up at him, considering for a moment. The man was about four inches taller than him and probably had fifty pounds, which was fairly impressive actually – Kale was not a small man.

Kale was also, however, an exceptionally experienced fighter. The man moved to give him a shove, and the Marine simply stopped being in the path of his hands. Kale slid back almost without effort, grabbed the man by the wrist and in a single motion was throwing him over his shoulders. The man crashed into the floor with a noise that silenced the whole bar, and Kale stepped into him, planting one black combat boot on his throat, the other on his shoulder, while he pulled the arm back and locked it behind the man’s own shoulder blade. "For being an asshole. You want to be an asshole, you can go out the way he did."

The man’s size should have given him an edge, but when he struggled, a very faint light shone through Kale’s skin near his hands, lines of golden light signaling that he really wasn’t all that normal after all… the man gave up then and nodded numbly, at which Kale pushed himself back up and stepped away. "Relax. Have a drink. It’s after five." he said, tone dry, and he left the man to pick himself back up as he strode over to Sabre’s table. The bartender had left him a scotch on the edge of the bar, which Kale took before he quite made it to Sabre, and sank into the seat next to her.

"Nice place, good people. Where everybody knows your name, and so on and so forth." he said, voice almost dripping with sarcasm, before he lifted the glass to his lips and took a draw. "Been a while."

While Kale moved over and seated himself, the big man he had literally stepped on for challenging him pushed himself up to his feet, growling darkly, but he avoided Kale from that point on. There wasn’t much else he could do at that point – the way Kale had taken him down, he was at least smart enough to realize that anything else he tried wasn’t going to do any better. For whatever else he was, he had been drunk and annoyed, but he wasn’t completely stupid. Kale would give him at least that much credit.

Kale shook his head at her comment, giving a shrug. "He’ll have to get in line." was his only response – there were PLENTY of people that wanted his ass on a platter, and he wasn’t going to serve it up to anyone if he had a say in it. Thankfully, as the woman with the crimson eyes was more than aware, Kale could be a truly frustrating individual when you intended to kill him. A certain stubborn quality that had served him very well in the war – otherwise, he’d have been dead long ago.

He lifted his drink and took another sip, his eyes moving back to hers and watching her pout for a second. His responding expression was contrite in a way – she had been kidding, but… "Seven, actually. Sorry about that. Things kept coming up. Would have come and found you sooner." he said, giving a light shrug.

Now what did he say? The soldier reached a hand up, rubbing for a moment at the back of his neck, and he took a breath before looking back over to Sabre. "Hm… just catching up at the moment. Recovering somewhat… off hunting more rogue science experiments from the war. Turning out to be a rough job of late." And it wasn’t over yet… but he wasn’t going to get into THAT in public.

Kale thought about her first words for a moment, then he laughed, nodding and giving her a faint smile. It was a rare thing from Kale – he wasn’t the sort that smiled much, and you could count on two fingers the people he actually smiled at – but Sabre had earned her share. "I suppose you aren’t exactly planning on using it, are you? Probably a good thing. You’re close to the top of the list." That was probably true, in fact – she was probably the oldest one of his enemies still alive. He hadn’t killed them all, but war was war. People died, friends, enemies… whether you had anything to do with it or not.

Since then, what exactly HAD become of the two of them? It had been not long after the war that they’d met up, no longer enemies, and shared their first properly friendly drink – not the first drink they’d shared, but the first one where they hadn’t spent all that time waiting for a chance to kill one another. After the war, the tension had remained somehow… they just had ended up working it out in a very different way. It wouldn’t be the only time. In the past few years their meetings had been infrequent, however… lives getting in the way, though perhaps there had been something else there. You could only keep something like that going for so long before it became just too hard to dismiss. Still, he’d found himself… unhappy with the length of time it had been since he saw her last.

Not something an old soldier was comfortable with admitting.

Kale’s weariness was almost more mental than physical, however. Because of his… peculiarity, it had never been clear how his aging would work. His appearance marked him as something similar to his age, but he’d been gray prematurely to start with… and his strength, speed, and agility had not suffered in the least. Yet despite this, something still made things seem harder than they once had been… perhaps he was just growing tired in his head. He’d been at war his whole life. Not an easy thing to reconcile with the peace… of course, there was always something else to fight. Working for the Guard had proved that.

He came back to the present at the same time she did, looking back up to her eyes and taking another drink, before he set it down and lifted a brow just slightly. "Enticing, huh…? Well. Won’t disagree. Getting tired, behind your desk?"

Kale snorted quietly at her reply, turning to look back to those blood red eyes and incline his head slightly. "Alright, fine then. You can keep them at the back." he allowed, taking the last drink of his scotch, then setting it down and lifting a hand to signal to the barkeep that he needed another. Kale only had so many opportunities to drink, after all. When he did, he tended not to do it halfway. He had the beer as well, so he went back to that for a time.

"I’m… glad to see you again. Things have been entirely too… dull." he finally said, not quite looking at her as he did. It was a quiet thing… difficult. Just the sort of thing he had to try and make an effort about. Even if it was a bit minimal on that particular account. It was short of the ‘I missed you’ he’d thought about, but it was something.

His only response to her comment about his knowing was a faint smile and a sidelong wink, before he took the second glass of scotch from the waitress and sipped at it. "Well, you’re good at it. But there are other people who could be, I imagine. Perhaps it’s time you made a change." he offered, giving a light shrug as he did. Perhaps the old soldier had something in mind – but then again, he never liked to come out with anything too quickly.

For some time he had been almost as bad as she was. Trying to come down off his own twenty years of war had been almost impossible, and it was only being able to step on the fires the Guard had him putting out that had kept him in check. When he’d met Sabre again, they had been in the same boat… part of what they had bonded over, after all. Some days, he was still surprised that they hadn’t killed one another, or at least tried, if just for old times’ sake.

"Mhm" was his agreement to what she said, and he waited more or less silently after that while the waitress went to get the next round, though he wasn’t sure what else to say – again. For one reason or another, he just couldn’t seem to easily figure out what it was he was trying to get at… or, at least, he couldn’t figure out how he wanted to go there. Ugh… he wasn’t meant for this kind of problem.

He picked his glass up when it had been delivered, and he held his glass up to knock gently against Sabre’s, giving her a gentle smile as he did. Not many people got that… it still felt wrong on his face sometimes. He looked back away, taking a sip of his scotch and then settling back in again. Kale stayed mostly quiet again, nodding in agreement to what she said – it seemed like he was trying to gather and make sense of what it was he wanted to say, too.

She sort of hit the nail on the head at that point, so he took a slow breath and looked back over to her. "You’re aware that we had casualties on our last outing. I need people to fill the gaps. One of them was a team leader. I can’t think of anyone better, frankly you should have gotten the position some time ago, but I had a certain argument with the brass, and you were doing well at your current position, it just fell through. Regardless, I’d very much like to have you close by-" he broke off at that, realizing what he’d said, and he coughed, taking a pull of his drink, then spoke again.

"I could use you. It’s your call. You’d probably still spend a fair amount of time on analysis, but on a higher level. Mission planning. That sort of thing." Kale spent the rest of his sentence speaking short syllables, keeping tightly reined in. He usually did NOT let things slip that way. Hell, he wasn’t even sure where he had been going with that. This whole affair was getting twisted – he hadn’t had nearly enough to drink to slip up like that.

Kale had trouble enough with the brass for one reason or another, though it was something he kept quiet as much as he could. His arguments with them were not of the usual sort… they usually regarded him fighting for the people under his command, or defending his own choice of a superior maneuver over that ordered. He did what was right, every time he could, for the people under him. Superior officers didn’t always care for that, but it was one of those things he was willing to tell them to go shove up their asses. Thankfully his record of successes meant he could get away with a certain amount of that, for now.

Eventually, they would likely tire of him, but he would worry about that later. If that happened he would have a comfortable military pension… and he’d likely still find some way to stay in what fight there was. The old soldier simply didn’t know any other way to live.

As for his own little verbal hiccup, he knew she’d caught it, and there wasn’t much else he knew to say. He knew what he meant to say… he just didn’t know how to say it, or if he should say it. Their… relationship, if you could call it that, had survived long enough, and changing the way things had worked was simply not how he operated, as a rule. And yet… how long could that go on?

She did at least seem interested in his offer of a job with his own team. It would mean seeing her more… that would be something of a start. He smiled back to her, finding his own wry grin again as well, and he chuckled quietly at her wink, reaching up to take another sip of his drink. "Fairly simple, really. Based out of the same area, no need to move. You’re familiar with the organization of my teams. I’d like to have you lead one of them. We’ll figure out which one later, more privately, but you do have to agree before I can get into the more classified details, you understand."

He tossed back the rest of his scotch after that. Was he drinking too fast tonight? It was starting to feel like it. He just didn’t drink very often.

Friendly note. Yep. They didn’t always go that way. Sometimes they started out with yelling, sometimes just with drinking too much… funny that the nights usually ended the same way. He’d never figured that out.

But he was making an effort. Maybe it had been seeing his old friend and his family… not that he was looking for a family or anything, hell no, but it HAD made him realize just how old he was getting. How much time he might not have, enhanced metabolism or no. For all he or anyone else knew, he’d die early rather than living longer, even if his physical condition was still tip top. There was a sobering thought if there ever was one. Kale had never thought it would be acceptable, even for a split second, to die of old age. That just wasn’t something someone like him did. He didn’t see a way he even could until recently. How had things gotten so… comfortable?

He nodded a bit at her agreement to the knowledge, as if that had been a question. But when she finally accepted, he set his own empty glass down and offered his hand. "I’m old fashioned. Handshake it is." he said, a bit more gruffly, as if he was trying to regain some of the usual persona he’d already cost himself the way he’d been acting. Hell if he knew what to do with any of it if not that.

When she silently queried about the next round, he simply nodded. It seemed more appropriate than saying ‘oh, for the love of god yes’, after all. "I’ll introduce you around in a few days once you’ve had time to look things over. Some of them will be familiar with you, but then you won’t be the only one on the team who used to try and kill someone on the team, and I’m not the only one either. But that’s always been the interesting thing about the Guard. Funny that it’s actually worked so well… I think it’s because of that, rather than in spite of it."

He hadn’t meant it as such… but that could have been a fairly apt descriptor for the two of them, too. Not that he’d meant anything by it.

Of course, Kale was no psychic, he was unaware of Sabre’s thoughts, even if they (very) roughly paralleled his own, and he had mostly done a good job of putting aside his own potentially destructive thoughts before they got him in any more trouble than they already had. Though it would have been… interesting, had he known. Even he would have a hard time predicting his ultimate reaction to something like that.

He closed his hand around hers, smiling for a moment, and shook her hand before finally and almost reluctantly letting her go, settling back in his chair. His own order to the waitress was rather larger – but the, so was he, and no one could ever say Kale couldn’t hold his own when it came to the drinking. Hard to beat an old soldier at something like that after all.

What she said about the Guard made him laugh, and he shrugged a little, considering for another moment before he spoke. "Considering what you and I went through in the war, I can’t blame you for that. But then, everyone gets tired of it at some point. You could argue I never quite stopped fighting… but back during the war, I couldn’t very well come and sit in a bar like this. It’s more punctuated now. The stakes can be high, but there is a relief of pressure in between. And to be frank, it’s easier to know what the right thing to do is… especially when you aren’t shooting someone based solely on their appearance, or the sharpness of their ears – or lack thereof, depending."

He looked to her, his smile turning somewhat wry, but when she offered her toast, he lifted his glass and clinked it lightly against hers, his look turning a great deal more genuine as he smiled. "Together it is then…" he agreed, nodding once slowly, then taking a sip and setting his glass down. For once, the ‘what are you doing’ part of his brain decided to shut up. Good – he was getting sick of it anyway.

Kale gave her a look and lifted a brow at what she said. "Well, well… so have I. So I suppose there will always be a bit of a chace. But no, I haven’t talked to anyone else about it. I make my own calls about the team – oversight largely only comes into play when there’s a failure. You know how that goes."

He shrugged lightly – people were always happy enough while things went well, but the Guard had made something of a rule of it. Their people were expected to be the best, and that being kept in mind, they preferred to make it hard to become part of the organization over having to watch their people too closely. The expectation was that once you were within the Guard, you had earned enough trust to look after your own affairs. Oh, sure, there were enough people who liked to micromanage, but considering who was leading the Guard, such people didn’t make it far.

All in all… it was a good place to work for an old soldier who still happened to specialize in black operations.

"They’ll find out. It’s not a security issue, considering you have had clearance just about from the start. I’ll keep things taken care of." He gave her a look that said she should know better, but it was underlined with a faint smile, and he glanced away afterward, cheeks just a touch warm. He drowned the feeling with his drink, and left it at that for a few moments. The night was still building momentum… it was going somewhere it had gone before, but he had a feeling there might be a little more momentum behind it from this point on than there had in the past… and he still wasn’t sure what to make of it. If there was anything else he could make of it.

Kale laughed after the first thing she said, almost leaning over the table, though the audible part of his laugh left him fairly quickly. He’d spent too long being quiet to make a great deal of noise even during leisure time. "A bit of a chase… yes, and ours lasted what, ten years?" he asked, lifting a brow slightly, then he finished the last of his drink, setting the empty glass aside and considering.

"To tell you the truth, believe it or not, I hadn’t thought too far beyond that. I think I intended to handle this business, and then stalk off, maintaining a detached, professional demeanor, and perhaps a bit of a buzz. So I’m batting one for two." He was quiet again, for a few moments, considering again, and then scowled.

"This is stupid."

His words were abrupt, and he pushed his chair aside almost angrily, turning on Sabre and stepping closer, before he pulled her up to her feet as well and up closer to him, and kissed her. It had been going there all night, he’d been an observer of people for too long not to know that, but here he’d just been screwing around like some kind of idiot, and…

Kale LOATHED being indecisive. So, here he was.

He kissed her hard, it wasn’t the first time after all, but it wasn’t without a certain gentleness… and there was feeling in it. ‘Ah, screw it’ could sometimes be a handy feeling.

Kale finally let her down a little, lifting a brow. "You don’t know much about baseball. A five hundred batting average is almost unheard of. And I didn’t think you’d be particularly interested in baseball tonight. Or ever, for that matter, but tonight in particular…" He trailed off a bit, leaving the rest unsaid, though his smile was rather less reserved than normal. Not that she needed to see that. By this point, he’d finally gone and made his intentions clear. Beating around the bush for too long was just getting stupid.

"That being said. Baseball was never my specialty." he added, kissing her again and ignoring the man creeping up behind him… the same one he’d struck down from his path earlier in the night. Almost slowly Kale pulled back, glancing for just a moment to Sabre’s eyes, just as the man lifted a heavy, mostly filled bottle – and Kale wheeled on him in an instant. His impact was open-palmed, almost casual, but delivered with utterly crushing force into the man’s solar plexus. He gasped, breath practically exploding out of his lungs, and collapsed gasping some six feet away. Kale stretched his hand a moment, opening and closing it twice as though against some stiffness, then he turned back and offered it to Sabre.

"You know… I have a sneaking suspicion that we might find more entertainment elsewhere. In fact… I think I can fairly well guarantee it."

((sorry this is so short!))