@bellemcrte made the mistake of befriending me 🍇
Calling this place a bar is a little like calling a tomato a fruit: you might technically be right, but you’re definitely fighting the vibe it gives off. Tomatoes are to fruits as naXos is to bars, an in-name technicality at best. That’s probably why, despite being in fucking Boston of all places, it’s one of Dio’s favorite businesses. Top five for sure—maybe up to top two or three, all things considered.
Dio stubs out his cigarette and approaches the rowdy “bar” (all but a club!), winking at the doorman on his way in. The people in line grumble, incensed, but the doorman says nothing. (The guy with the strange eyes is always to be let in, no matter the circumstances. His job depends on it, and he doesn’t question it. He doubts he’d get answers, anyway.) They settle down when Dio disappears from sight.
He saunters into naXos and right up to the bar, already tipsy off the energy of others. He orders a dark red wine with a smile, and the bartender doesn’t charge him for the same reason the doorman didn’t stop him. He’s given his drink and left in peace to soak in the atmosphere—writhing bodies, pounding base, intoxicants of all kinds in the air, inhibitions lowered—despite seeming to be a world away from it, calm and languid like the cool night outside.
The lights strobe along with the music for a moment, all of it syncing up to his heartbeat, and in the fraction of a second before the beat dropped—in that moment of suspense when the music gives out at the ear freefalls before the beat hits—time stops. And they see each other. Wine-dark eyes meet oceanic ones from across the room and like a tide he’s pulled in, knows she is, too. Fate’s fingerprints are all over this moment. It’s significant like little else is these days. And then—
The next breath, the drop of the beat, the blink of an eye, the strobe of a light, time resumes like it had never slowed and stopped in the first place. Dio continues to stare at her, though he doesn’t bother leaving the bar. (Why should he? The Moirai ordained this, they’ll be drawn together now whether they like it or not—at least until whatever it is they’re meant to do together is completed.) Why are heroes always so fucking short?
“Come here often, cupcake?” he says instead, smiling a bit at his own awful line. Gods!, he’s old enough to be her father or worse, and that’s only counting this incarnation. Party atmospheres are the only things that get him high these days.
