The sky is low. Heavy, grey and overcast. Threatening rain.

If it rains Diane will personally hunt down the responsible deity and beat him to a pulp the consistency of baby food. She's been rained on one too many times this week. Her jeans - which have been left home - still haven't dried out from yesterday's downpour.

The sand is soft and slightly squishy under the soles of her boots and the waves are lapping in, making the otherwise dusty leather shine where the water's touched it. The toes will be crusted with salt when they dry.

In one hand she holds a pop bottle. The label has been partially ripped off, but it's still identifiable as Diet Coke. There's a piece of paper rolled up inside it - which she must have put there. The bottle is otherwise too clean and too dry to have come out of the water.

The wind is pulling through her striped hair and she looks completely out of place on the beach. She's a dark figure against the pale of the sand and the water. Her coat - coming down to mid-thighs and hiding her hemline - is black and entirely too urban for the beach.

She pulls her arm back and throws the bottle. It arches through the air and lands without a visible splash, to be towed away by the outgoing tide to god-knows-where.

Diane sighs.

Levi feels like shit.

It's not especially unusual for him, but that honestly doesn't help. He's only built up a slight tolerance for bad days. He reeks of grease and bad food and is clad in the ill-fitting uniform of a fast-food worker. Levi's been working all day-- as usual-- and really needs a chance to relax.

He's hoping a little sea breeze will clear the bitter aftertaste of rude customers from his mind.

It would help if it weren't so overcast. Now he's pretty much marching down the beach, trying in vain to relax and praying it won't rain. If his uniform gets soaked, he has to shell out a couple of quarters to run it through a dryer. (And that's a couple of quarters he could spend on a more worthy pursuit-- roulette, anyone?)

He's surprised to see someone else standing on the beach, the wind tugging at her hair. It's not a nice day for anyone to be out, and she stands out against the expanse of sand. Tucking his hands in his pockets, he wanders closer.

A tiny smile tugs at his lips as he watches her toss the bottle into the water.

"Pen pal on a desert island?" he calls, veering ever-so-slightly towards her. "Or are you waiting for a rescue chopper to get you out of here?" Levi can sympathize with that.

Diane pushes a strand of blonde hair - the platinum piece that frames the left side of her face - behind her ear and offers the man a small smile. There are lines of red on the peeling surface of her lips, but her lipstick is mostly worn off and the spray from the water is mottling her foundation to interesting effect.

"One or the other," she agrees. "Convential means of communication sometimes fail me. I'm left trusting such things to the hands of the elemental forces. Which, honestly, don't seem all that friendly today."

If it rains, she thinks again, there will be hell to pay. Although she's not quite sure who she'll be making pay it. Someone. Someone, somewhere.

He stops within speaking distance, but hangs back far enough to keep his clunky fast-food-worker shoes out of the surf.

"Elemental forces, hmm?" It does look like some kind of weather deity is in a bad mood. "Hope it doesn't rain," he says, more to himself than to Diane.

His eyes (today they're a nice shade of golden-brown) rove over the waves, searching for the bottle. He wonders where it'll wind up-- somewhere better than this gloomy windswept beach, probably. "What did the message say?" That's assuming there was a message, and Diane wasn't just littering.

The bottle seems to have disappeared into the sarky water.

"Yeah, rain would kinda suck," she agrees. His eyes are pretty. Creepy. People with colour contacts creep the hell outta her. But it is a nice colour. "It was just chatter," she tells him. "For someone I know. Knew. Something or other."

Most people try and find an address, or a phone number. Failing that, they'd probably give up. Diane however, seems to have found her chatter pressing enough to send it by the road less travelled.

He raises an eyebrow, shooting a sidelong glance at her. "Chatter is therapeutic." So is watching the waves roll in and out, and seeing the clouds shift restlessly in the wind.

"What happened to 'em?" It's none of his business, what happened to an acquaintance of a stranger, but maybe talking about it will be therapeutic, too. He's curious, anyway, in a halfhearted sort of way. "Shipwreck? Lost at sea?"

Maybe Diane's just fond of unconventional modes of communication.

"Maybe. Sometimes."

Lost at sea," Diane repeats, thoughtfully. "Lost at sea." Like she's tasting the words - testing them for some deep flavour or meaning that she thinks they might have. She finds none.

A drop of rain has landed on her nose, but she hasn't noticed. She's standing to close to the water to tell it apart from the salt spray that's been splashing on her.

"I don't know."

He feels like he should say something profound-- like 'we're all lost at sea'-- but it's hard to put the right feeling into it. It's not even appropriate, seeing as they met a couple of minutes ago.

It does seem a little fitting, though.

"Who was it? I mean, if you want to say." A lover, Levi would guess-- but that's just his inner romantic. Not that he should even be guessing. He doesn't know Diane at all.

Diane laughs - wild laughter that tumbles across the wet sand and into the waves. "Someone I met on a bridge," she tells this strange man. "For lack of a better name. Met on a bridge and then misplaced... like a key or something. Things are meant to be in the last place you expect, but it's a hard place to find."

She pauses, wondering if that made any sense at all, and then adds, "I think it's raining on us. On me, again. I thought it was England that it always rains on. Apparently not."

Her laughter unnerves Levi. Just a little, but it's enough to make him shift uncomfortably.

"Weird place to meet someone." Like a gloomy, mostly empty beach is any better. "Misplaced?" He supposes they just lost touch, but misplaced sounds foreign when talking about people.

The rain makes him fidget, too. It'll mess up his clothes and his usual routine. "Does it usually rain on you?"

"Bridges," Diane tells him, "are safe places. Over running water and such. Lots of people stand on bridges. Hookers stand on bridges. I suppose it's because you need to cross the bridge to get to the other side..."

"I'm sorry. I'm babbling, aren't I? It's rained a great deal this week. Wet laundry everywhere and not a thing to wear."

It's an interesting remark, given as she's not obviously wearing anything besides her coat and her fishnet stockings. Presumably the coat conceals something - but not nessacarily.

"Oh."

It's raining on him, noticeably. Maybe he won't get soaked to the bone, and maybe he'll be able to keep those couple of extra quarters. Probably not.

"You're not babbling." Not that Levi would really care. She's an excuse to stay on the beach for a while longer instead of going home to deal with real life. "Don't you have a dryer?"

Diane shakes her head. "Nah, no dryer. I, like most everyone else, must fork out quarters for the money-eating machines at the laundromat." She laughs, apparently not mind the prospect too much.

"I wasn't really planning on standing around in the rain," she tells him. "Are you going somewhere?"

"No quarters for the dryer, then? Or just too lazy to go dry all your wet laundry?" He figures there's a reason she' got nothing to wear. Besides, laundry is a safe subject (if a little odd).

Levi shrugs. "I should be going home-- chores and work and shit." Standing around in the rain isn't the best idea, especially since he's going to get soaked. As long as he's out here, he's avoiding the responsibilities that he doesn't want to deal with. "How 'bout you?"

"Quarters, like most other forms of currency, are in short supply," she tells him. "In my life at least."

She turns her salt-streaked face up to catch raindrops on her tongue. "Work and chores," she says. The 'aren't much fun' is implied. "I don't know. I suppose I was gonna walk around, 'cept now it's raining. I could go home and have a cup of tea, I suppose."

He smiles-- faintly, but it's still a smile-- and nods. "I know the feeling."

"Why is there never anything to do on rainy days?" There's not much to do other times, either, but it seems so much worse now that he's considering going home and working just so he can get dry.

"Well," Diane says, "normally I'd go do a rain dance or something, but like I said - running out of clothes. So I guess I'll just have to do the cat thing and curl up with a pile of comics."

She has a big stack of Sandman from the library that are just begging to be reread. She loves libraries. They're so wonderfully free.

"Sounds fun," Levi comments-- more fun than working more and cleaning up his wreck of an apartment.

He watches the waves a moment longer, lifting a hand to brush wet hair out of his eyes. "What's your name?" he asks abruptly upon realizing he doesn't know it. "You haven't said."

"It's not quite what I'd call fun, but I suppose it'd pass time until something better came along." She's watching the waves. Her bottle's long gone and she doesn't see anything else interesting floating around out there.

"I'm Diane."

Just Diane. No last name given and no handshake.

"It's better than actual work, anyway." Then again, what isn't better than work?

"Speaking of which, I should probably get going," Levi says, shifting his weight restlessly. "It's nice meeting you, Diane." Still, he doesn't really turn to leave.

"It's not far to where I live," Diane suggests. It's spontaneous - but then again, she does tend to drag home strange men. Unsafe, but so tempting. "Why don't you come out of the rain and have a cup of tea or something?"

Tea is one of the few things she actually has in her cupboard.

Levi gives her a strange look-- kind of brave of her, inviting some stranger over. He's not normally one for tea, either, but it sure beats responsibility.

"Yeah, sure," he says finally. He hopes she isn't some kind of serial killer who preys on innocent young men. With his luck, she will be.

"Don't worry," Diane assures him, starting down the beach. "I don't usaully murder people. My flat's so small, I've nowhere to store the bodies."

Her boots leave deep prints in the sand along the edge of the water - but by the time she's two steps away the waves have lapped it smooth again.

"C'mon. It's very unsafe to invite strangers home for tea, so you'd best tell me your name. Or have I just forgotten it?"

"But if you had room to hide the bodies, you'd be a murderer?" Levi asks wryly. Is it really that obvious what he's thinking? Probably-- he fidgets a little too much.

He follows Diane, careful to stay out of the water (even if he is already wet from the rain). "I didn't say. Sorry." He should've mentioned it when she provided her own name. "I'm Levi." No last name, no handshake.

Their circumstances don't really require formality.

"Only on required occasions. I wouldn't make a habit of it. Although I do have a neighbour who's just begging for arsenic in her non-alcoholic beer..."

She turns up towards the grassy stretch between the beach and the road. "Levi, nice name."

Maybe Jewish. Or like jeans. Which is obviously the same. But still, it has a nice sort of sound to it.

ooc// 'Partments and houses?

He chuckles at that. "I know the feeling-- whoever lives above me wouldn't know quiet if it waltzed nude in front of 'em." But then, what is he supposed to expect from cheap housing?

"Yeah, it's nice. Nice enough there's a while brand of jeans with the name." Levi's just a little annoyed about that. "I think, secretly, my parents hated me. Or had a thing for denim."

{You want to make it, seeing as it's her apartment?}