It takes a lot for someone to really catch Tao’s attention in a crowded club like this one. There’s far too much going on for him to focus on any one individual person for long unless he’s thinking about making a move on them. However, when he finds his eyes inexplicably drawn to the same man near the bar for the third time in the span of about ten minutes, he stops his eyes from wandering and really focuses on him.
There’s something familiar about him, but he just can’t place it. It’s possible they’ve simply crossed paths at one point, but that doesn’t feel right because Tao can’t see himself recognizing some random stranger he’d bumped into once, or even twice. He meets far too many people on a daily basis to really remember them, let alone feel any sort of connection to them, however tenuous that connection may be.
Sipping his drink at a cocktail table across the room, he struggles with his recall, too curious to just let the subject drop. So finally, as he reaches the bottom of his glass, he sets it aside and heads toward the bar itself, hoping a closer proximity to the mystery man might help him quench his curiosity.
He slots himself into a space next to the stranger, brushing his shoulder as he raises an arm to flag down a bartender. Dropping a sizable bill into the tip jar as he receives his second drink of the night, Tao casts a glance down at the man’s forearm to examine the tattoo he’d seen out of the corner of his eye. And there it is: the piece of the puzzle he’d needed to figure out why this man looked so familiar.
He’s one of the Umbrella Academy kids Tao had been interested in as a child.
“Nice tattoo. Any particular meaning behind it?” he probes from behind the rim of his vodka cranberry, eyebrows quirked upward as he turns his full body to face the man that--through a process of elimination--he assumes to be the one known as the Séance.
