I had never intended to actually spend the evening with Azrael. As it turned out, my expectations or intentions were entirely off base, and I spent the better portion of the day and night fighting the idiot's battles for him. While these battles turned into a hangover-style adventure over the expanse of our city, I could find much less humor in our circumstances than the characters of the movie might have found in their own. Then again, I would have been entirely pleased to have seen a tattoo on Azrael's face, rendering him far less pristine than he might have liked. The thought had brought an amused smile to my lips, more likely than not offending the hunter when I had been with him that evening. Whimsical as my attitude might have become, it was obvious neither one of us would admit to mildly enjoying the mayhem we had caused as a wrecking pair.

I hadn't expected the man to accept his end of our deal; I really hadn't expected him to demand being my grand chariot to our destination, either. In all my time in the United States, never had I touched the establishment we had discussed eating at. While sharing a meal with him in the little café late at night as we had had been enough for me, the hunter insisted on his end of our deal. Why, you might ask? The absurdity of our pairing seemed obvious enough, but perhaps there was something inside the hunter that made him value integrity â€" enough to allow himself to be subject to the horrors of a fast food joint. And it was this integrity that made me liable NOT to lash out with some kind of volatile explosion and pop the hunter's head off, even if that was the comic-relief animation reel running through my mind at all times in the idiot's presence. It was for this reason that I managed to find myself publicly presentable and stepping out of my home at the precise time that Azrael and I had agreed upon. Astonishingly, (read: not at all surprising) the man was slumped against his car with an expression that resembled a cat getting dunked in a bath and somewhere between a child being forced to eat vegetables; both scenarios were enough to brighten my eyes with a twinkle of mischief that might let the hunter know I was in a mood to tamper with his patience.

Wasn't that every mood?

As the door to his rather flamboyant car opened with a flourish of my hand, thanks be to the affinity for metal resting in my magical blood, I slid into the passenger seat of what might have otherwise been a death trap, had I not believed in the integrity I had mentioned in a former ramble of mental word vomit. A wry, probably immature grin began to form over my lips, tickling the edges of my mouth in an upward way.

"I didn't touch your radio," I said, the drawl evident in my voice. "And I don't know. You do realize I was merely humoring you when I said I worked there, don't you?" There. The tone was a tad too smug, but it amused me all the same as I allowed a slow, Cheshire smile to draw my lips further.

Lazily did I recline in the passenger's seat, absolutely loathe to give Azrael any information regarding our destination. This was mainly because I had no idea where we were headed myself, to be honest. A fast food restaurant wasn't my first choice of cuisine, especially when I was an adept cook and I had a wallet thick enough to venture into any fine dining establishment in the city. Begrudgingly I shot Azrael a sidelong glance, alerting him to the fact that I had no idea of where we were going either, before laying my eyes on the strangely colored building that was surely inhabited by the minimum wage employees of my nightmares. With a shudder of distaste I slipped out of the car as he did, blinking back disdain as the smell of chemically tainted metal trickled from every open pore of the building. I think my nose began to crinkle, unbidden, but it was an expression of disgust I didn't mind displaying as the cackle of a banshee met my ears once we'd opened the door. Oh, wait. Child. Not banshee.

"Ugh, humans and their procreation."

My words were little more than an irritated mutter as the electrical buzz from the building began feeding on whatever energy I might have possessed. Rarely did I suffer through bright, neon lights but this was an experience I wasn't willing to surrender, even if my ears felt like they were bleeding. Maybe that was a lie, and as a parade of strangely clad little humans teetered by to play in a cess-pool of plastic balls scattered in a pit, I began to realize that I would have truly enjoyed just basking in my defeat of the hunter's expectation during our adventure the night before.

"And they wondered why Ebola was nearly an epidemic."

In a fashion that could only be described as docile did I follow Azrael to the seat he chose, drumming my fingers against my knee as it moved regardless of my desire to sit still. When he began to speak, my eyes raised from the floor as they attempted to shield themselves from the bright lights and narrowed to fix upon his own and attempt to focus on the words he was blabbering.

"...Honestly?" I trailed off, thoughtfully blinking back the discomfort that was building in my head. "These people don't seem happy. Perhaps it's the former."

With that thought in mind did I watch a child drop their personal Happy meal, and immediately begin what could only be described as a pitiful wail of a dying animal. "Scratch that, maybe it's a marketing gimmick." With a blank stare, I moved my eyes from the wailing, dying, mini beast and began to look back at Azrael, finding only the briefest moments of amusement in his disdainful expression as it so easily matched my own. And suddenly, I found it in my power to stand and watch (helplessly, I might add) as my Shadow began to trot in a very menacing way towards the wailing child, and begin scooping the shadows of the fallen French fries off the ground, absorbing them in some very, very strange shadow-ly way.

"uh, what?" I asked, clearly devoting my attention to the strange display my Shadow provided us with before tilting my head with narrowing eyes at Azrael as I realized what he was asking. "Your shirt?" Another blank stare. Before I answered, though, I offered a survey of the room to find numerous women more or less salivating over the hunter who seemed clad in a tinsel thin shirt. "You're basically walking Mommy porn. Now, I'm going to vomit or break something if I don't get some French fries soon. I couldn't give two shits about being here, but now that I am I want French fries and I'm going to get them in a socially unacceptable manner if you don't stop talking about your shirt."