An hour-! Jack gave a choked, indignant noise at that, but still could not think of any words, especially after the mug thunked to the table. He half expected a fight back, maybe even a slap, and he wouldn't have thought either unreasonable. He was being a tit and he knew it, carrying on about how Zevran handled having been dead when even brushing past the thing himself had made him a wreck for days. He braced himself as Zevran grabbed him, and found that strength doing nothing more than half-supporting a brandy-soaked embrace, propping up strong limbs gone clumsy and the weight of earnest-sounding words he could only understand in tone.

And then the apology, which bled all the fury right out of him - the apology, along with the increasingly powerful sweet-sharp smell of ethanol that came with Zevran close enough to breathe heat against his shoulder. Jack wrapped his arm around him in return, and it was terrible how much of the motion came on instinct, a desire to feel Zev snugged against him that had wormed down to the part of his brain so deep that it didn't even consider before reacting. Rubbing firmly along his back, he tucked his head in close, breathing the smell of coffee and liquor and clean skin with a guilty flush of comfort. Nothing dead, nothing otherworldly smelled like that, he was sure.

"Yeah, well. All right. But you're getting a fuss whether you like it or not," he muttered against his hair, passionless unhappiness sounding like something dangerously close to petulance. But even at the end of that he could feel a corner of his mouth struggling upwards, especially when he heard the familiar thump-thump of Eugene's crutch beginning to move out in the otherwise silent house. He wasn't sure about straight-up misery, but complicated emotional duress definitely loved company.