Along Came a Spider ...

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Were Han another kind of man, he might be concerned that "the plaza" is not all that specific of a meet up point. The thing is, he has all types of rendezvous with people where he comes from that are planned only in light details. Sometimes on even less than what he and Nat agreed upon yesterday. At least he got a time in this case.

One of the few instances where the Captain puts faith in something beyond himself ... when two people are meant to find each other, they do. And when they aren't meant to, they won't. A lot of bitter pills of all kinds were swallowed in learning that particular lesson, but it's one he knows to be true.

She said she would be there. With the strange qualifier that she might be busy needing to 'save the world'. Something he didn't really know how to interpret truth be told - a joke maybe? Hard to tell when nearly all the things she says comes in that difficult to discern tone. Even then, she said she would find him later.

That makes him generally more optimistic that he'll see her here, then not.

Han is trying to look casual, while leaning on the outside of one of the shops in the plaza. His eyes weaving though the crowd looking for that person he found drifting in and out of his thoughts ... like wisps of smoke since he met her.

Comments

[red_room]

Nana wanders back about then to take their order. Natasha settles on a pancake with eggs and toast (hey she had a hell of a workout earlier the extra carbs aren't gonna kill her figure). She gets a stern talking to about a balanced breakfast and adds a small fruit cup to Natasha's order that she will eat whether she likes it or not. Then it's making sure Han gets enough food--and she will nag him if he tries to go light on his breakfast. It's the most important meal of the day don't ya know, hon. She refills their coffees and heads off to hand her husband the order.

Natasha is polite and smiley and ....altogether not herself around Nana. The face she puts on when she tries to be normal. Tries to fit in. It's a very convincing face because Natasha can be anyone or anything the job demands of her. But it's a lie. The real Natasha is the one who looks empty when Nana walks away to her husband before looking down into her coffee cup when Han comments about lifestyles.

"I'd agree with you, but the nineteen year old I'm housing escaped a mountain full of monsters that ate people and disemboweled them and he wakes up screaming more nights than not. So. All the more reason I do what I do. So that doesn't have to happen to other folks."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

It will be a plate of over easy eggs, potatoes and bacon. Which is way more than usual for the Captain and any encouragement to eat more from either female is going to get them a look. He mostly agreed to breakfast so he could soak up more time with Nat, not because he was actually hungry.

He might have been able to dismiss that if he hadn't have known she was talking about Chris. Hard to be so instantly dismissive when it's someone you care about. Han shakes the image of the kid having nightmares out of his head.

"I suppose someone has to do it."

[red_room]

"Sorry, that was kind of a downer." Natasha sighs long and through her nose in between long sips of coffee. "He's a good kid. Doesn't deserve the shit he was put through."

All because of that fucked up psycho out to humiliate his so called friends. And what hurts the most is knowing Chris is from a different world. That there are innumerable worlds out there she can't help. She can't even keep her own from falling into chaos.

"I put down bad people. Aliens. Magic users. They try to hurt my world--so I hurt them back worse. That's what being an Avenger is about. That's my job. I was assigned here to keep an eye out for potential threats--and potential allies." She looks up at Han when she sets down her mug.

"And if you think that's fucked up, you really don't want to know what I did before I decided to help protect the world."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

'You could say that most of the people don't deserve what they've been through if it's something that was out of their hands.' Though, in the case of bloodthirsty, literal monsters might get you some sort of special consideration. Either way, he's not going to say that out loud. Just seems like ... insensitive maybe.

"It's just so far from what I know that it's hard to appreciate." The idea of magic. One singular planet that all humans have to share. It's all a bit hard for him to quantify.

[red_room]

"Luckily for you then, most of our day is gonna be teaching you how to use communications tech." Natasha shrugs easily, prepared to let the subject drop.

"Also luckily for you, you don't have to really worry too much about my world." She isn't in the habit of taking anyone there, really.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"You know it's funny that you should say that." He says taking another sip from the bitter brew in his mug. "I do feel pretty fortunate today."

It's all well and good that there's a subject change. He was ready for one. Though he will add, "it seems like your world is in good hands anyway." One smugglers worry about it one way or another can't effect the fate of it to strongly.

"What do you do for R and R? Or are you the type that forgoes that?"

[red_room]

"It feels lately like being here is my R&R. Meeting folks. Chatting them up. Taking stock of events and and enjoying myself." She gestures around them.

Being in a place like this is most certainly relaxing to her.

"Though I do enjoy a movie now and again." A good one, not the garbage that Clint watches usually. "What about you? Does lugging around rusted relics help you pick up all the ladies or what?"

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Some of that is R and R, sure, but is sounds like she doesn't completely relax when she's around here either. There was an implication of drilling, training and practicing that was disclosed to him earlier and if he had to guess, he'd put her as someone who probably doesn't relax enough.

That's just his best guess though. It's the intensity she has about her that makes him think that, anyway.

"To be fair, if someone wanted to know the real me, hypothetically. Running into me while I was pushing around a rusty bike would give them a clearer picture of what they're getting into then most of the other ways one could meet me."

Having dropped that nugget of honesty on her, he comes the second part of that answer.

"I don't get a lot of time to stay in one place, but when I do have spare time, it's usually having a few drinks to unwind and playing cards for me. Movies seem alright, but I haven't seen many."

[red_room]

Relaxing and Natasha are certainly strained acquaintances, rather than friends. This much is for certain. She imagines Han must have a lot of free time when he's en route to anywhere in space. That's just part of the reality of it.

Most of space is well. Empty.

A smile quirks at the corner of her mouth and she nods.

"A hobby is a hobby. So long as you steer clear of tetanus it's probably fine." She taps a finger against the laminate of the table, watching Han carefully with interest.

"You good, or good at sharking?" The smile grows a bit. "Cheating, I mean."

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Depends on what you mean by free. It's not as if Han thinks of being on the Falcon as 'confinement' or anything, but it is an enclosed space with a lot of time where you're drifting from one place to the other. In that time he reads, tinkers with something mechanical, plays holochess with Chewie, sometimes he'll dig out a remote and practice his marksmanship.

It's fortunate for him traveling can be done with such high speeds that he's rarely ever flying for more than a few days at a time. It keeps him from being static for too long - in the air and on the ground.

"Both." He says as his lips curl into a smile. "These days I'm getting good enough that I don't have to cheat anymore. Matter of fact, I won my ship in a high stakes game."

[red_room]

"Really." Natasha quirks an eyebrow and now she's grinning. All out grinning and it is a dangerous smile on her lips.

"Now that's a story I'd like to hear." Natasha loves meeting a good cheat at cards. it's good practice for her sleight of hand and bluffing, and even better to study someone else's technique.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"It was a ten thousand credit buy in." He says, smiling faintly at the memories welling up in him. It seemed as if so many of his were bad that ... it's nice to remember something that makes him feel good.

"Took me months just to save enough and still the biggest stakes I'd ever played in to this day. Someone, who had caught me cheating before, accused me of being a dishonest player almost as soon as I got on planet; but I had money that they didn't want to turn away and a ... friend at the time, was willing to vouch for me."

Han takes another swig of coffee and then, continues.

"We played for four days to get to the finals and at the end it was just me and the guy I knew, Lando. I had the second best hand in all the game and pushed all my chips in. He didn't even have enough to call, so, he offered me the choice of any one the ships on his lot as collateral."

"My heart was pounding in my chest. I'd flew the Falcon before and there was the moment - I knew if I beat him, she'd be mine. I never want to lose, but I never was so desperate to win in my whole life. My heart dropped when he started revealing his cards, his face unreadable, it seemed like he was gonna have the hand that beat me. Then he turned over the last card and ... turned out my old friend was going for the big bluff."

[red_room]

"Oh my god, what would you have done if you'd had a bad hand? During any of that. Ten grand isn't chump change to the average person." She's assuming by the way he tells the story at least that it's at least as much as a dollar per credit and she doesn't even have ten grand sitting somewhere unless she takes it out of Tony's account.

As though he'd even notice that little was missing. Pepper might though.

"You had a plan B, right?" Natasha finds herself leaning closer, eyes alight with mischief.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"I never really did figure out exactly how many credits I had on the line when I made that wager, but it would have had to have been more than what I bought in with."

10k was just the buy in, after all. We're talking four days into the tournament for the finals, after amassing other people's chips. He wouldn't be surprised if it was 30k or more that he'd pushed in on that bet. He left that tourney with a Millennium Falcon and more than 50k in galactic standard credits when all was said and done.

Man, it would be nice to have some of that money still around ... at least he's got his ship.

"It's pretty tough to cheat at sabacc and not get caught, especially at a days long tournament held at a fancy casino. And by fancy I mean they had security everywhere." He says with a easy smile. "I was playing honest the whole time, but I'd been scheming to get that ship for a while. I would have found another way if that one didn't pan out."

[red_room]

"Doesn't matter if you're just going to win more."

Natasha agrees and grins and for a split second it's genuine. More genuine than any expression she makes ought to be. Not when every breath and blink is calculated. The crack in her mask is small, but there all the same.

"You didn't have a Plan B." Natasha tsks but she's still smiling, chuckling softly into her cup before she sips at more of her coffee. She's interrupted from her question by the arrival of their food and a refill on their coffee, and Nana knows a date when she sees one so she's brief.

"So sabaac's the card game. How do you play?"

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"Not that time, no." He admits. Perhaps he earned her tsk, but he trusted himself to go in there and play his ass off. He was pleased with the end result. There were times he did go in to games with the intention to cheat and the end result didn't turn out nearly as well.

Han, with food now in front of him, reaches immediately for bacon and takes a few bites. After chewing, he will do his best to explain sabacc.

"What makes the game so difficult to learn and master is the fact that the values of the cards change while you're playing. You're trying to get to a score of 23, positive or negative. If you go over, it's a loss. The unbeatable hand is called the idiot's array."

Han takes another slug from his coffee cup.

"72 cards in a deck. 4 suits. One to eleven with four cards of rank. Then there are 16 cards mixed in that don't belong to any suit."

Is she getting all of this?

"Two pots, a hand pot which is where most of the betting and exchanging of chips happens for each hand, but there's also a game pot, which you can only win with the positive 23 or the idiot's array."

[red_room]

It sounds like a more complicated marriage of Black Jack and Baccarat. Natasha's interest is piqued, gaze narrowing as she follows along with the explanation.

"How do the values change while the cards are in play? Is a card positive and negative at the same time?" Natasha spears a few pieces of her fruit cup and eats them carefully off of her fork while she listens.

Food is secondary to the card game being described.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

Han pokes at one of eggs with his fork so that the yolk starts to run all over those potatoes - his favorite part of earth chicken eggs. That yolk makes everything delicious.

"So, in a galaxy as big as mine, no territory plays their sabacc exactly the same way." Not that he knows earth well enough to make the comparison himself, but it's like the different variations of poker.

"A lot of the time, when the cards change, as well as how many you can place in the neutral field - which is the zone where the values of the cards don't change - depends upon what version of the game you're playing. Sometimes there's a shifting phase between calling and drawing. Sometimes you have no idea when it's coming."

Han takes a few more bites of his breakfast, noticing he's a little bit hungrier than he thought and goes on to add, "Many of those negative cards are in the mix with the unsuited ones."

[red_room]

This makes sense to Natasha. She nods along, scooping up some of her scrambled eggs onto her toast and taking a bite out of it. Regional rule differences makes a lot of sense, especially if one's taking an entire galaxy into account.

A galaxy.

A whole galaxy. Crazy.

"So cheating at a game like this means being able to know when the switch comes or forcing it at your whim." She'd assume. She has no idea how that would be accomplished. Other than the typical sleight of hand and swapping.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"Do you want to learn my game and how to cheat at it?" He says with a sly smile. "I'll teach you sometime."

He hasn't really thought of the greater implications of the fact that she seems most alive around him, so far, when she was thinking about the ways to manipulate. He's kind of wired that way too though. He ought not to hold that against her.

Right now, he's just thinking of excuses to keep her close.

"Basic slight of hand. There's a device called a cheater that can be used to change things around in moments that are beneficial for you. Skifters are rigged cards that are inserted into the deck. And people with false eyes can have them rigged to see other people's cards."

Those are the basics of how people usually cheat at sabacc.

[red_room]

"I want to learn your game. And how to cheat at it." Natasha takes another bite of her food, eyes shining with delight at the prospect of learning a new game. "If not for myself then for how to avoid being the victim of it."

Just as important to her, being able to stop other people from pulling a fast one on her. Arguably more important, even. Being the sneakiest and best is important to her. Or at least faking it if she's not. She can't magically disappear and reappear like Loki does, and she doesn't have robot eyes. Girl's gotta work with what she's got.

"And if you're good?" She knows basics when she hears them.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

"How to not be the victim only matters if you're going to make a habit out of playing the game." Unless. Wait. Are they still talking about cards? He thought they were talking about sabacc, but now he's got this feeling like he's no longer sure.

Anyway, he's glad she's willing to take him up on the offer at least.

That overview he gave at the cheating, brief as it was, really covered most of it. Now he has to think, as he's picking at his breakfast to come up with more for her, lest he let her down. If so far the most impressive he's been is at talking cards, damn if he isn't going to try work that angle as hard as he can.

"If there's no professional dealer or droid to do the dealing, you can employ an overhand shuffle to watch the cards and float the ones you want in strategic places in the deck or reverse the order, but that only helps so much when the values of the cards change mid-game. Same goes for trying to mark the deck."

But ...

"When you can put two people at the table and they're two people who know each other well, you can signal things to each other as well as work multiple strategies at once."

[red_room]

Standard operating procedures then. Natasha nods, seemingly satisfied with that answer. There's a lull in conversation as she turns her attention to her food but it isn't a particularly heavy one. Her face is less intense than it usually is, almost thoughtful.

"It sounds like a lot of fun, with the right group of people." Natasha doesn't care quite so much about money--she doesn't have to-- so fleecing strangers isn't interesting to her. But being able to beat someone supposedly good at the game, especially if she can use it to leverage for information, could be all kinds of fun and useful.

Says the woman who lets herself get beat up to interrogate someone else. That was all kinds of fun.

Fun. Romanov, your sense of fun is quite different from other peoples'. She can't quite bring herself to care, either.

"Also sounds like something I'd be pretty good at with some practice." Says the world's best spy to the galaxy's best thief. "Imagine how much fun you'll have once I teach you about modern tech." Did she just wink at him? Yes, yes she did.

[twelve_not_fourteen]

The potential, after she learns how to play his game, for a game of truth stakes would be very interesting. Although, with out a polygraph or a droid specializing in lie detection, there's nothing that would keep them from lying to each other, but their own sense of integrity.

Strip stakes would be fun too. He wouldn't say no to that.

"It is fun." He murmurs and he's of the opinion, right or wrong, that when you master a game as complicated as sabacc you can play just about any card game in the multiverse. It's the metagaming - the bluffing and manipulating of the other players - that Han is really going to start to get good at over the next few years.

It's old Han Solo habit to let a wink bring out the more confident and cocky side of him, but he was warned to play it cool with Nat. When emotion touches her eyes he finds that she looks ... it not just good looking, she's always that, but maybe pretty. He's not sure how to describe it.

He holds that observation to himself for now, but he does let the smile spread across his lips. "I'll imagine for now, but look forward to the experience much more."

Oh. There's breakfast isn't there? He supposes he should take a break from talking and eat for a while.

[red_room]

Somewhere along the conversation while Han hasn't noticed, Natasha has managed to eat almsot all of her food. When you operate on a 'may have to get up at any moment', you learn to be really quick about personal needs like eating, sleeping, and hygiene.

"Better get done then. I'm going to go settle the check." Natasha slides out of her seat, leather slipping on leather booth seat, before she heads over to the counter where Nana is. They share a few words and the older woman gives a full bellied laugh before shaking her head. Han gets a very prying curious motherly glance or three while Natasha is walking back to the table.

The proprieties really does take in all of her customers and treat them like family, for better or for worse.

"She wants to know if you do deliveries." Natasha says when she sits back down. "So she can stop sending her husband off to the markets to get their supplies every day."