messages from the stars ★ vintage imagines

all roads lead back to you • robert plant

His voice did not sound as she assumed it would. The recordings failed to prepare her for his thick English man's accent.

She nodded, "I know." How could she not.

He rose a brow and smiled. "Do you?"

She hummed, "I do, but they don't." She nodded her head back towards the center of the club. A few eyes still on the three but the rest scattered away having been caught staring. "They don't know who you are."

"Really?" He took in the crowd. "I thought I'd surely been clocked."

Odella looked over her shoulder once more at the gawking stares the crowd tried and failed to disguise. A pang of either shame or mirth, of which Odella could not tell shot up her stomach knowing she had been one of the gawkers.

"They not used to a white man coming down this way." Atticus chimed.

Robert turned back to Atticus, and Odella internally cursed him for reclaiming the man's attention. "I could assume why."

"They just worried s'all, some 'ah little curious and some 'ah little scared." Odella spoke. "They just wanna know you ain't lookin' for no trouble."

A scratch rang throughout the air as a mason jar left Atticus' fingers and slid over to Robert. Robert picked up the jar hesitantly, swirling the clear liquid under his nose to smell.

Robert's eyes found Odella's once more, he gave her look of which she fought hard to decipher under the duskiness of the club. She nodded towards him, swallowing the hesitancy that threatened to show across her face. She knew it smelled like straight gasoline. "Go on, show 'em you're here for the blues an' whiskey."

Without another command, Robert threw his head back with the glass. In a second, he came back down in a coughing fit, with sucked in cheeks and clenched eyes. "That's something serious!"

Atticus' body rippled with laughter as Robert spluttered, as did Odella's. Atticus slapped a heavy hand on Robert's back, forcing the cough out of him. "There you go son!"

Though her eyes never left Robert, she could just imagine the shoulders of the crowd loosening as he threw the whiskey. He had done well at shedding himself of a few curious stares.

"What business you got being in a black man's barrelhouse anyway?" Odella leaned into him, half-tipsy audacity and half to get away from Atticus' prying ears.

Robert shrugged. "You can hear the music from across the water. I was curious."

"Where's the rest of y'all?" She thought of the papers she saw them in, there were three more. "They not lost out back are they?"

A thick, burly laugh left him, similar to the one she heard with Atticus. "No, just me."

She whistled, schoolboy like, and tilted back in her barstool with a holler. "Real bold of you coming all the way down here with nobody!" Her laughter was contagious as Robert soon fell victim to it as well. "Though probably best. 'Ion think they can handle all four of you white men in here all at once."

"Probably not." He laughed though she could hear hesitancy in it. Robert's teeth found his lip as he stared at her, "Things are different overseas. If I had known, I wouldn't have--"

"It's not like that." Odella's painted hand found the air above them, hushing that thought before it could unravel any further. "They don't care 'bout it the way you're thinkin'. You just gotta prove yourself ya know."

He stayed silent, letting her continue. "We might stare but we ain't prejudice. 'Slong as they know you here for fun like the rest of us it'll be alright." She spoke.