The relationship between herself and Rabastan was a strange one and certainly a tenuous one at its very core. There was something in his personality that fundamentally aggravated her, which had done ever since they’d both been at school and she had been too young to really recognise that her crusading ways were not the greatest way to avoid making enemies. Despite that, Rabastan had never seemed like an enemy and she trusted in him more than she was sure he knew. Her glass raised with his and she clinked the glass together with a brilliant smile before sipping the drink.
“Yes, I’m that bored. Perhaps he’d even spit in your face and then I’d get to see you look surprised. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you look surprised. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you with an expression which isn’t smug or bored.”
The smirk growing upon his lips curled upward in a display of false pleasantry, for there was nothing he liked better than proving Marlene wrong. He maintained the smirk artfully, keeping lips upturned over the rim of his glass as she spoke, the bubble juice within keeping all characteristic snark deep within the pit of his stomach -- along with the pink fizzies at the bottom of his glass. Were it not for that drink he might have been much more eager to jab, for there was no surer way of showing his respect and camaraderie than through a little bullying. Genuine compliments were not his style, anyway.
“Well, I’m smiling now, Blondie,” he grinned, a hyena’s smirk, soon to be followed by a harmless jab -- but the swift approach of another diplomat stopped him dead in his tracks. “Come on, we’re dancin’,” he muttered, setting his drink aside before quickly taking her arm and giving her a great yank toward the dance floor, “Not shaking another bloody bureaucrat’s hand; I’ll owe you one.”
