The bartender was accustomed to strange customers; just last week he'd had a man claiming to be a werewolf, and his girlfriend, an alleged alien abductee. But those sorts of people were certifiable, and not really out of the ordinary in this part of town. You saw a lot of crazies out here in the slums, and it was best to just give them their drinks and keep your mouth shut.

This guy, though, this guy took the cake. Even more than the...person...with one arm and six eyes (three of which were fake, he was sure of it), this guy was just plain strange. Oh, he looked normal, but the normal looking ones were always the worst, no doubt about it. He just sat there at the bar, looking glum. There was no word for it but glum- you look up 'glum' in a dictionary, and you'd see that guy, neatly diagrammed and labelled. He was wearing a black three piece suit- Armani, by the look of it, and the bartender had learned to spot money at thirty paces with unquestionable accuracy. Money, like sane people, was rare around here. But instead of a nice, expensive, tasteful tie to go with his neat, three piece suit, the guy was wearing this bright yellow thing with smiley faces all over it. And sunglasses. The mirror-reflective kind that kept you from seeing the eyes.

He was pretty creepy, actually, but the bartender figured he wouldn't have seemed half as scary if it weren't for that stupid tie. And he just sat there, not drinking anything, looking like someone had just drowned his puppy. Or his sister. The guy's face didn't seem like the type given to many nuances of expression.

"Hey."

He sounded normal, but you never could tell with these people.

"What can I get ya?"

"You got any of that cocktail sauce, the kind with horseradish in it?"

Certifiable, no doubt about it. "Yeah, but you gotta order somethin' with it. And I hafta give it to ya in those little plastic cups, customers ain't allowed t'have bottles."

"Gimme some cocktail shrimp, then, with extra sauce. And a spoon."

The bartender shrugged. He'd been asked for weirder things. At least this was legal, and not too disgusting. There was that one guy who asked for the worms in the tequila bottles- no tequila, just the worms. He paid for 'em, but the bartender had to watch the guy slurp down half a dozen of 'em, right there at the bar. Horseradish sauce was quite tame, comparatively.

The shrimp had seen better days, but they'd been in the freezer so long that anything living in 'em had gone into cryostasis. Happy-Tie didn't look like the type to suffer from food poisoning, anyway; the food wouldn't dare.

The guy picked up the spoon and the little cup of horseradish, still looking glum. "Can I get, say, ten more of these? It's been a long day."

"Sure, man." What the hell. He looked harmless.

--------

Mordant found him at the bar, looking glum, which was odd for Solneki. He usually just looked pissed. Six or seven empty little plastic cups littered the countertop around the blond. He was (glumly) working away at another little cup full of cocktail sauce.

"Man, I thought you were fucking pathetic before, but now you've hit an all time low. Hey, bartender- you got any limes lyin' around, like for tequila?"

"You want the lime, you gotta order the tequila."

"How 'bout I just give you ten bucks, you give me the limes, and I don't fucking blow your head off, huh?" Mordant was a very big fan of the 'walk softly and carry a big gun' mentality. Freud would have said he was compensating for something, carrying a magnum in his pants, but he would've shot Freud's head off, so that was alright. Most things were, to Mordant.

"What are you doing here?" Solneki looked glum, but he sounded pissed, as usual. Mordant grinned.

"Gimme a fork, too." The piece of cutlery hit the bar with a clang and bounced; Mordant caught it neatly by the handle before it stabbed him in the eye. His grin widened as the bartender made himself scarce. "Can't a man get a drink wherever he wants?" He stabbed the lime, squirting a thin stream of caustic juice at Solneki. It spattered across his sunglasses. Solneki reached for another cup of cocktail sauce as Mordant sucked happily on his lime.

"You're not drinking anything. Get out of here."

"What, afraid I'll interfere with your monopoly on the cocktail sauce? Man, I knew you were fucking weird, but this fucking takes the cake."

"Fuck off."

"Bite me."

"Blow me."

"Lick me."

"Eat me."

Their eyes met for a single, tense moment- or rather, Mordant imagined their eyes were meeting, since he'd never actually seen Solneki's eyes.

"You're asking for it."

"Oh, am I?"

In a clatter of cutlery and no small amount of elbow jabbing, he grabbed for Solneki's spoon just as the other man lunged for his fork. In the ensuing struggle, one of the limes rolled off the bar and beneath a table, and a cup of cocktail sauce was lost to the void beneath the bar, where countless beer tabs and dusty peanuts resided.

Solneki glared at Mordant, or rather, he imagined Solneki was glaring, as he viciously stabbed at a lime with his fork. Mordant saluted his sometime friend and sometime partner with the spoon, and helped himself to the cocktail sauce.

A rather glum silence formed between them.

"So," Mordant said after a few moments. "You do this often?"

"Yeah. Still looking for really good cocktail sauce. You?"

"You know how hard it is to find fresh limes in this fucking city?"

"Yeah."

"Fuck, yeah."

The settled back into glum silence, lime peels and empty cups of cocktail sauce littered between them.

-------------------------------------

Uh...no, they're actually not gay. I swear. In the alternate universe, where Solneki is an insane, human/plant hybrid scientist and Mordant is a scruffy, world-weary assassin-with-a-heart-of-gold, I'm pretty sure they are, but in this particular universe, where Solneki doesn't take off his sunglasses, not even for sex or sleep, and where Mordant is exactly what his name describes him as, only cruder and with a fouler mouth, the only thing between them is a business partnership of sorts, and they like it that way.

Amazing, for me. *snort*

I dunno. I like these two. They make absolutely no sense, and they have absolutely no plot, but they amuse me.

Whee.