Happy Birthday was made for you

Reno's used to the gruff demeanor of his partner by now and the defensive reply doesn't faze him in the least. If he got offended that easily, he and Rude would never have managed a working partnership for this long. He eats in relative silence, his full attention on the food until he hears the tink of the glass on the table.

His eyes dart up and catch sight of the drink as it flows across the table, it's golden color lost to the dark cloth as it spreads, and he bolts upright to help. Napkins are snatched up and he pats down the drink as best he can, soaking up the liquid and succeeding in merely adding teriyaki sauce to the mix from his coated fingers.

"Oh shi'," he mumbles around the cheek full of meat he had just shoved in his mouth. He struggles to swallow it as fast as he can while patting everything down and in his haste he is forced to catch the scotch bottle he bumps with his elbow. Sticky finger prints mar the glass neck and Reno looks from one disaster to the other before trying to wipe the sauce off the scotch bottle.

His napkin is already wet with the spilled drink and it's own coating of sauce and so he frowns when his attempts to clean it only wind up smudging even more sauce on it. He sighs, swallows the mouthful, looks up at Rude with his wet napkin in one hand and the dirty bottle of scotch in the other and tries to figure out how he's going to clean this.

He knows there's a napkin in Rude's lap and his first thought is to reach over the table and grab it, but as soon as the thought hits him it is followed with the concept of how utterly detrimental to his health reaching into Rude's lap might be. His alcohol soaked brain fumbles for a fast solution so his hands won't do the stupid thing and reach for it any way which only ends up with Reno licking the neck of the bottle clean.

He pauses in a moment of clarity, his lips still pressed to the glass and his tongue half out of his mouth, and rolls his eyes up to meet Rude's impenetrable gaze as it dawns on him that his fastidious partner might not appreciate Reno licking their bottle of scotch.


Rude didn't spook when the glass tipped. He knows better than to panic over small messes, because they end up snowballing into truly ugly situations. He's never been able to explain this sort of thing to Reno, however, and watches helplessly as the man turns a puddle into a mess.

When Reno pauses for a moment with his eye on Rude's napkin, Rude begins to reach forward with it to offer a hand- but Reno, always leaping to the next viable option if the first doesn't yield within a nanosecond, has already found another way to clean the bottle. With his hand hovering over his plate clutching the almost-proffered napkin, Rude stares.

And stares.

The tongue is nature's napkin, he repeats mentally, but this doesn't seem to staunch the waves of heat rolling up his neck and over his face. He's glad the place is dim. He's glad his skin is dark. He's glad for his shades, because without all of these things, eyes wide as saucers would be very obviously hanging on a bright red face.

His napkin escapes unobtrusively from his hand to fall into his meal, but his hand remains there. He suddenly remembers why he hates to get drunk around other people- as much as he talks about his partner, they wish he'd go silent again, and so does he. ".......I... I had a- a napkin," he offers helplessly, but his tone is far from berating. His voice, in fact, is shaking just as much as his hand.


Reno takes one look at the dropped napkin in the now forgotten plate of food and immediately notes the shock in Rude's voice. His face falls and he gives it one last hesitant lick before he withdraws from the bottle slowly, setting it back down and looking away as an intense pink forms over the tops of his cheeks and makes his skin feel like it's just been lit on fire.

He's never blushed this hard around Rude before, hell, it's been a long time since he's blushed at all, and Reno lacks the camouflage of Rude's dark skin. The pink is vibrant against normally pale flesh and makes his eyes look all the more bright blue by contrast. Reno clears his throat and sits back, feeling utterly foolish and hoping he hasn't ruined the whole night.

"Uh...yeah...yeah ya did...sorry. I just....I uh.....ya know...din' wanna reach over and jus...uh....thanks." He reaches out and plucks the napkin up from Rude's plate, folds it so the juice from Rude's dinner doesn't make the situation worse and then tries his best to polish the last of the smudges off the bottle.

He moves to offer the napkin back but decides the other man won't want it now that it's dirty so he drops it back to the table instead, offering Rude a helpless shrug and an embarrassed grin in the way of an apology. There's an awkward silence that has never exisisted between them before and Reno snatches up his shotglass, pours himself some sake and downs it in one go. Maybe if he gets trashed enough, he can pretend that didn't just happen.


"It's fine," he says quickly, turning his own glass right side up again before casting about him only to realize he has no napkin to wipe it, or now his fingers, dry. He gives his hand a disparaging glare from behind his glasses before deciding there's really nothing for it but to try what Reno usually does. Tentatively, he presses his tongue to one finger as if expecting it to stick frozen like with a pole on a winter day.

Carefully, he licks his thumb and fingers clean, grimacing most of the time he does so, before giving a glance to his shot glass and giving up. Reno isn't the type to enjoy high-class things, and to be honest, they sometimes make Rude uncomfortable as well. He looks around the establishment, frowning, and his eyes light on the pool tables around the corner.

He's watched people play before. It doesn't seem that difficult. Anything to get him away from this table, where everything the redhead does distracts and mesmerizes him, is probably a boon. "...Pool," he says, half invitation and half explanation, as he stands from his seat and heads for the bar.

He speaks with the tender there and is granted a bottle of beer- another first- as well as a hail to his waiter to box up his food, as he is no longer in the mood to eat, before he turns to the game area, his face locking into an expression of determination usually saved for exceptionally grueling missions.


Reno has poured himself a new glass of sake when Rude begins to lick his fingers and this time it's Reno's turn to stare. He pauses with the glass hanging in the air above his lap and watches with more fascination than is descent as Rude's tongue flicks out of his mouth to lap over each finger. The scotch in his veins focuses Reno's attention solely on the parting of Rude's lips and the flash of exotic pink against the iced mocha skin of his partner's fingers.

The dark goatee frames the whole image perfectly and Reno can't seem to blink until Rude finally gives up his cleaning attempts. He slams back the shot as Rude looks around the room for a distraction and then lets the glass thunk back to the table. It takes a second for the word "pool" to register itself in Reno's mind but when it does, a mischievous grin splits his face and Reno is up out of his chair as if someone had just lit it on fire.

He follows behind Rude, turning back only to snag up the bottle of scotch in one hand and the bottle of sake in the other before he heads in a beeline for the pool table. He sets the bottles on a nearby chair and rubs his hands together gleefully, scanning the table as if appraising it. He'd played pool since he was a kid and was pretty damn good at it, enough to let him shark when he was younger.

The hand-eye coordination that makes him a pretty fair shot with a pistol also gives him pretty good aim with the cue. He flops the plastic triangle onto the table and begins to load the balls, alternating stripes and solids as he goes and reverently placing the black 8 ball at the pinnacle of the stack.

With the balls properly racked, he tosses the triangle aside and begins to root through the cues for one that will suit him, testing their balances and straightness by eyeballing them. He picks out one he likes and dusts the end for a clean strike, then drags the white cue ball to the opposite end of the table. "You wanna break firs' or should I?" The look on his face says it doesn't matter, he's gonna win this game either way.

His eyes follow the movements, taking in the confidence in expertise that he sees in his partner during missions as well. Rude realizes that in the face of this, he knows next to nothing about the game. Perhaps if he watches Reno play under pressure of doing it himself, he'll learn move by move.

"You," he decides, picking a cue at random. He's not entirely sure what makes a good cue; now that he thinks about it- it never occurred to him until he watched Reno weighing his options in them. Beer is consumed, and Rude shudders at the taste of it, and Rude's judgment fuzzes slightly. It looks easy enough. The cue shouldn't matter, not to a man like him. He can level buildings; he can kill men with his bare hands. He can play pool.


Reno snickers at the look on Rude's face when he drinks the beer. The redhead has never cared much for the taste of it himself but any port in a storm will work when he needs a buzz. It looks so...out of place to see Rude with a pool cue in one hand and a beer bottle in the other, like some surreal image that someone's messed with and on the list of improbable things that could have happened on his birthday, this counts right up among the top.

His partner, the unstoppable killing machine that is Rude, is standing to one side with the beer, cue, and a look on his face that is normally reserved for far more serious challenges. Reno shakes his head. Rude looks more like he's about to bludgeon someone to death with the stick rather than play pool with it.

"Ya ever play afore?" he asks as he heads to the top of the table. He's pretty sure he already knows the answer to that question but it seems polite to ask anyway. He strips off his jacket and tosses it onto a spare stool to one side but his goggles stay rooted firmly in place. Reno has always worn them and the only time they ever really come off is when he's showering. Even his long line of lovers had to deal with the damned things staying in place.

He leans over the table and lines the cue up with the white ball on his end, steadying the farthest tip with his fingers while he gauges the shot. His tongue sticks out of the corner of his mouth, a habit he has when he's thinking hard about something, and one eye squints shut as he hovers his cheek a mere inch or two above the stick.

He wiggles the stick a few times, drawing it back and forth between his fingers as his mind draws a dotted line from the cue ball to the 8 ball. He wiggles his butt once and then lets the stick snap forward, sending the cue ball hurtling into the neatly group bunch at the other end.

The balls make a hellacious racket as they scatter across the table. Two striped balls head straight for the pockets around the table and one last stripe bounces a few times before rolling casually to a corner and plunking down out of sight. Reno leans on the table and grins like a cat, that all knowing look in his eyes as he watches it fall. He saunters around, scooting past Rude to get to the other side of the table and closer to the white ball again, this time lining up with another striped one.


"No." But his answer, quiet as it is, is lost in Reno's whirl of preparations. He watches the jacket go, and pries his eyes away from the etch of collarbone disappearing behind the loose shirt collar. He then pries them away from the curve of throat tucking into the adam's apple above what he was trying to stop looking at before, and his beer seems to have vanished.

The tender slides another bottle down toward him as he watches Reno skirt the table and study it. The cap opens as Reno leans down, and from this angle, Rude can catch a plane of shaped shadows whispering the rumors of a torso Rude has refused to think about since he saw it covered in blood on a bad bomb run three months ago.

He forgets to study the game itself, and finds a good half of his second beer gone in less than thirty seconds. His brow furrows when he finally notices insignia on the pool balls. He would ask Reno what the difference between solid colors and stripes is, but Reno seems to be on his own wavelength that Rude would rather not interrupt.