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Lux was quieter these days. For most of Rory’s life she had pendulumned between avoiding it as a protest against her absentee father’s legacy, and revelling in it as though she could outdo her father’s reputation which even two decades after his vanishing still lingered in LA. Many a night’s debauchery had been had in this club. The rage fueled rebellion of a daughter with daddy issues, and then the use of her absentee father’s apartment as a convenient hook up space in her teen years.
Grandad help her mother, but Rory was an awful teenager.
Usual teenage hormones and maturing sexuality were a minefield, but the daughter of the devil? The embodiment of desire and free will itself? Combined with the stubborn driven personality of her mother? Aided and abetted by her literal demon aunt Maze and her naive debauched wife Eve who often encouraged all of her teenage escapades?…Yeah, Rory was in awe of her mom’s patience in those tumultuous teen years.
But now? Now that Rory knew the truth of her father’s absence? Now that she visited him regularly in hell, and he even popped topside semi-regularly in a desperate attempt to make up for lost time?…Lux felt like increasingly like it could be hers some day. Like it could really be her home. It still throbbed faintly with the pulse of its past, the hum of old jazz, the glitter of light through crystal, and that faint, unshakable undercurrent of temptation baked into its bones.
Yet now it wasn't a mausoleum to her absent father, now it lives again with his charisma when he occasionally visits, when he comes to give Rory a piano lesson. For her whole life she had refused to touch the instrument despite it seemingly calling to her and an instinctive talent. Growing up she had heard everyone speak of her father’s love of the piano and his talent…it had made her hate the instrument and point blank refuse her mother, sister, aunts and uncles attempts to get her to take lessons.
Now though, the piano and Lux both bring her comfort. While Rory loved Lux, it still often felt like her fathers, and even then, without him, it felt a little less like sin and a little more like memory. Right up until he walked back in the door in recent years like he had never been away, and the very walls seemed to vibrate with his charisma.
Aurora Morningstar sat alone at the bar, nursing an espresso martini she didn’t really need. Mazikeen taught her all the best recipes for cocktails years ago, so even now that Eve and Maze have joined her parents down below counseling and punishing the residents of hell, she can make those marvelous drinks with her eyes closed. As Lux brings her close to her Father, a good cocktail makes her feel close to her aunts.
Her father’s piano stands silent in the centre of the room still, and the neon “Lux” sign no longer buzzes tiredly overhead, but has been upgraded with a sophisticated LED sign with more functions than a NASA switchboard.
She lifted the glass about to down the Martini and wing her way to check in on her sister when the front door burst open before she could take a sip.
A woman stumbled in, dark hair, leather jacket torn at the sleeve, a small scorch mark across one shoulder, and a bullet scar across her cheek. She looked like she had been ten rounds with a bear and won, but was still smoking hot in her disheveled badassery…so naturally Rory was intrigued. The mystery woman’s eyes flicked around the room, assessing, sharp, just like Rory’s mother used to…law enforcement maybe? Rory found herself even more disposed to helping this mystery woman. Late petitioners for favours were rarer under Rory’s caretaker heirship of her father’s favour business but not unheard of.
No harm in some gentle teasing though. Rory arched an eyebrow, sipped her martini and calmly stated. “We’re closed,” with a dry smirk worthy of her father.
Daisy blinked, breathless but smiling quickly in corresponding amusement, “Yeah, that tracks. My luck tonight’s been... spectacularly bad,” Daisy sighed with a self deprecating amusement.
Rory tilted her head. “Bad night or bad choices?” she asked hopefully, a teasing lilt entering her voice.
“Bit of both,” Daisy admitted, glancing back at the door like she expected someone, or something, to follow her. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to barge in. Just... needed a second to catch my breath.”
Rory nodded toward the bar stool before her. “Lux has seen worse, and been a sanctuary for a range of…colourful characters. Sit.”
Daisy hesitated, then seemed to think better of refusing the opportunity to catch her breath. She pulls the locking bar on the door behind her and then strides with a slight limp across the dimly lit bar before sliding onto the stool, grimacing slightly as she did.
“Drink?” Rory offered as she evaluated her unexpected interloper into her dull evening. Up close the mystery woman was even more striking to Rory’s eyes.
The offer made Daisy aware of how sore and tired she was. The sugars from any of the expensive liquors arrayed behind the gorgeous woman would help, not that the alcohol could do anything for her with her inhuman genes and serum metabolism. Daisy is pretty sure she would do terrible things for the caffeine in the rather impressive looking Espresso Martini the woman herself is drinking however. “Please. Surprise me,” she entreats.
Rory smirked, glanced at the martini her beautiful invader was eyeing covetously and reached for the bottles behind her, and quickly started mixing a Revolver. After practiced motions she set the brimming crystal tumbler down with an elegance that felt inherited.
Daisy eyed the glass with a raised brow at her sinfully hot bartender and unexpected saviour.
Rory offered a crooked grin as she pushed the heavy glass across the bar, “I think you look like someone who needs something stronger than a mere martini…it’s a Revolver. Quad Bourbon, single Coffee Liqueur. Trust me…I have a sixth sense you could say for meeting people’s desires."
The woman asking her in that husky voice to trust her sounded like a sinfully bad idea to Daisy, but none the less she lifted the glass in a salute and offered her name,“Daisy, Daisy Johnson” as she slugged a healthy portion of the drink in a single swallow without a hint of a flinch.
Rory tilted her head, begrudgingly impressed as she replied in kind, “Aurora Morningstar, but you can call me Rory.”
As Daisy set her glass down, Rory’s gaze caught the faint scorch on her companion’s jacket and the metallic sheen of her gauntlet peeking from beneath the cuff. “That’s quite the accessory,” she remarked.
Daisy followed her gaze and gave a wry smirk. “A gauntlet. Long story. You wouldn’t believe it.”
Rory laughed reflectively, just barely containing a snort, “Oh, try me,” Rory said, setting down her own glass. “You would be surprised at the things I believe in.”
Daisy tilted her head, sizing her up with the thousand yard stare that had taken the measure of gods, aliens and metahumans of all kinds. “You the owner?”
Rory shrugged. “I’m the daughter of the owner.. He’s... on sabbatical. Although…I probably am the owner now that I think about it.” Rory looks slightly perplexed and a bit but out at her own realisation.
Daisy chuckled. “Yeah, I can relate. My old bosses had a few... identity crises too. You get left holding the keys to the castle and the staff looking at you for directions often enough and you realize, shit, I’m actually in charge of this circus.”
They stared at each other for a beat too long, Daisy taking in Rory’s skin that was just a bit too perfect up close. Rory in turn was reading the faint vibration in the air around Daisy, the telltale hum of vibrating atoms coiled tight beneath her surface.
“Your aura’s... loud,” Rory said softly.
Daisy frowned, stilling with her glass half raised to polish off the last of her drink. “My what?”
“Your power. It hums. Like the bass line before a drop…No, that’s not right either. I’ve seen bright aura’s before, my aunts and uncles are like looking at the sun, but yours is more like an Oscilloscope.” Rory leaned over the bar invading Daisy’s space, “You vibrate reality. That’s not human.”
Daisy crossed her arms, a defensive tic at Rory’s matter of fact declaration. “And you’d know what’s human?” she challenged.
Rory smiled, slow, knowing, dangerously charming. “Intimately.” The single word a sinful promise.
That earned a startled laugh as Daisy fought an uncharacteristic blush. She hadn't blushed involuntarily in years! She is a spy damn it!
Yet, her sense of threat vanishes at the coy innuendo. “Wow.” Daisy husked, “You flirt like it’s a superpower, rather than aura reading neo pagan nonsense.”
“Maybe it is,” Rory said with a challenging glint in her eye.
Daisy grinned, shaking her head, squinting calculatingly at the woman more seriously. “You sure you’re even old enough to be serving drinks in this place?”
Rory arched an eyebrow. “If I don’t look old enough to serve the drinks, then you certainly don’t look old enough to be drinking them.”
Daisy repressed the instinctive flinch at the unwelcome truth. She had been avoiding speaking to Jemma about that particular issue, but even she couldn’t deny that in recent years she hadn't just stopped aging, but had even begun looking younger. Her scars had started fading, her skin tightening. Whether it was the Kree genes, the serums or some of the other transdimensional universal nonsense she had dealt with…she didn’t look as old as she once did. She hit 27 and seemed to age backwards for every year after until she almost looked like she was the age she was when first recruited by SHIELD.
“Touché,” Daisy said, still smiling, although it had a more forced quality now. “You’d be surprised I think, I’ve been around longer than I look.”
Rory’s tone turned dry as desert sand. “So have I darling.”
In the dull light of Lux, Rory’s eyes almost seemed to shimmer from red to brown like a luxury car covered in chameleon paint. Laughter layered over something older and private, told Daisy that Rory’s comment wasn’t just a quip. There was an inside joke buried in there, one she wasn’t quite in on. The same inside joke she was making herself perhaps. And suddenly Daisy’s curiosity raised its head and she wanted to know the truth…old habits die hard.
Daisy opened her mouth to pursue that truth, the breadcrumbs of the stranger reading her aura and the unspoken laughter of being older than she looks. Yet before she can draw breath, Rory interrupts her with a gesture toward the faint scrape on Daisy’s hand. “You’re bleeding.”
Daisy glanced down, surprised. “Damn. Didn’t even feel that.”
With a challenging grin and a casual flick of her hand behind her back, Rory reached out to Daisy with lightning, inhuman speed, her hand a blur. A hand that suddenly held a metallic red feather that she tapped against Daisy’s wound before she could react. A wound that sealed up before her eyes.
Daisy blinked, snatching her hand back. Even with her reflexes she hadn’t been able to stop Rory,...was she concussed from the portal?
Daisy eyes Rory with open suspicion now. The woman grinning challengingly but not moving threateningly, instead cockily sipping the last of her martini, her slender neck working sensuously as she tips her head back to lap up every last drop of her espresso Martini.
Daisy forces herself to untense, healing isn’t a threat….usually. “Okay. You’re definitely not a paramedic,” she sarcastically jibes.
It feels like a game now between them. Things unspoken. Neither threatening, but both prodding.
“No,” Rory replied, grinning. “I’m what happens when a failed topless actress turned Homicide detective and the King of Hell fall in love.”
Daisy blinked at that discombobulating sentence. “You’re kidding.”
Rory’s bladed, blood red wings flickered into view for a heartbeat, their unique metallic trill echoing through the empty club.
Daisy exhaled, eyes wide. “Okay. Not kidding…um, you don’t happen to know Robbie, Ghost rider?” At Rory’s blank look Daisy sighs, “And I am definitely not in Kansas anymore…fuck.”
Rory watched Daisy like a scientist studying a sample, curious, surprised and intrigued, “You’re taking this …remarkably well. My childhood best friend had an existential crisis…after she woke up the third time from passing out, when I showed her.”
They stood there for a long moment, silence heavy with the hum of neon and possibility.
Finally, Daisy broke it with a soft, half-laugh as she finished her own cocktail and met Rory’s eyes with a challenge. “Fuck it. So you’re used to the weird then?”
Rory’s grin returned. “Exactly. And you? Who is enjoying my $2000 Bourbon tonight and why?”
Daisy refused to choke at the idea of $2000 bourbon. She exhaled, shoulders dropping as if she’d just decided to stop pretending. “Meh, I’m what happens when a vet falls in love with the immortal result of an alien experiment. As to why I am here…where the hell even is here? Because I have no idea why I’m even in L.A. tonight…or if it’s even my LA the portal spat me out into, which…I am increasingly second guessing and leaning towards an alternate universe of? Am I here because of the time machine? Or the aliens? Or the shady government agencies that keep thinking I work for them again? Or maybe if I go back enough it's all the jack booted penguins pretending to be nuns fault?”
Rory blinked. “The... nuns?”
“Don’t ask,” Daisy said, waving it off. “And if you go back far enough, there’s also monstrously complicated daddy issues in there that might explain the chain of events that lead me here. Even you wouldn’t believe it. Turned out he was actually a great dad, but, you know—circumstances shafted him.”
For a moment, Rory just looked at her, and then she laughed, a low, warm sound that filled the empty bar.
“Oh, I believe you,” Rory said. “My dad is the Devil afterall, and he’s actually pretty lovely, my own monstrously complicated daddy issues aside…that is, if I ignore how I accidentally time-paradoxed him into promising to stay out of my life so he could save all the souls in Hell. So yeah, I get complicated.”
Daisy blinked as her mind processed that word salad of doom, then let out a genuine laugh. “Okay. You win. My life suddenly feels normal. That…that is an unexpected first. Uh, nice.”
Rory smiled. “I am here to fulfill all desires, pleasure to be of service.”
They sat there for a moment, sharing an easy silence that felt like understanding, two women who’d seen too much, done too much, both carrying the weight of fathers who’d done their best under impossible circumstances.
Daisy looked down at her empty glass and grinned. “So, I’m actually a spy, sometimes a superhero… what are you, exactly, other than a half fallen angel? Owner? Bartender? Resident therapist?”
“Caretaker,” Rory said quickly, her voice soft but certain. “Of clubs, mortals, and recently time.”
Daisy chuckled. “That’s... vague and ominous. You should put that on a business card, but I supose it beats 'The Destroyer of Worlds' hands down.”
Rory cocked her head at Daisy’s title before dismissing it. Titles were bogus, afterall they called her dad the Prince of Lies and she knew that was some BS. With a flick of her wrist she pulled a card from somewhere,“I have,” Rory said dryly, and Daisy could tell from the amused glint in her eyes that there was another inside joke there, one she again wasn’t quite in on. Yet, at least. Suddenly Daisy had the desire to know all this woman's secrets. Daisy took the card of heavy card stock, gold gilded and all. She read the indented elegant script:
Aurora Morningstar.
Caretaker of clubs, mortals and time.
Occasional fulfiller of desires and doer of favours.
1 (310) 555-2666
Daisy snorted a laugh. A literal card. Hilarious.
Rory fought to maintain her straight face even as she made a mental note to thank her Dad for the cards. Turns out he was right, a good business card is essential after all. She poured herself and Daisy another drink, and raised a toast,
“To complicated fathers, complicated names and bad timing.”
Daisy raised her glass. “And to meeting people who might actually get it.”
Their glasses clinked softly, and for the first time, Lux felt like it was Rory’s, laughter curling through the dim, golden sunlight breaking through the high windows as dawn crept over Los Angeles.
Two daughters of chaos, of misunderstood monsters, toasting to survival, understanding, and maybe, just maybe, something new.
The End.