closed to eames;

[baisant]

It's just another night at Guilty Pleasures. Which Jean-Claude supposes is part of the problem. He has had a lot of 'just another night at work's lately. Perhaps because work is where he feels most safe, most at home, but even there he is struggling.

He has not been in a good place, as of late. Not since the loss of the election, if he is being truthful. Not since Asher blew into his life, and then out of it again, and left Jean-Claude's heart heavy with the weight of the past and his mind spinning with the loss in the present. The loss of the election, for there is no cleaning up after what happened at his fund-raiser. Asher's debacle was too public, and it left the city with too many questions with nowhere near enough time for him to address them all.

And now they are left with Cesare in the seat. And though he supposes there are worse that might have taken that place, it stings. The fact that he had wanted this. The fact that he knows he might have been able to make a difference there. The fact that he remains where he is, clawing to hold together the scraps of their nest, under a regime that will never appreciate their people. He has failed them. And he has failed himself.

So he may or may not have been hiding away licking his wounds this whole time, depressed even despite the passage of time. And he may or may not be doing a very poor job of hiding it.

Comments

[falsify]

Eames doesn't come to Guilty Pleasures for Jean-Claude; he comes because the dancers are beautiful and so very skilled. Because the drinks are good and the atmosphere is so much nicer and classier than one might expect from the phrase 'vampire owned strip club'. He's always friendly and chatty with the staff and he's here often enough that a few of them seem to be genuinely friendly with him rather than professionally so.

It's a nice place, he likes it.

Still, it's hard not to notice the owner looking so morose, even in his beautiful establishment, and so Eames takes his drink (an excellent Old Fashioned, that bartender is something,) and walks himself over to Jean-Claude's booth. He doesn't wait to be invited, just slides into a seat, still looking at the stage instead of the man he's joining.

"A horse walks into a bar," he says soft, voice low and head tilted in Jean-Claude's direction, "the bartender asks, 'why the long face?'"