08. Take a look around baby, yeah my whole crew's ugly

[dogbane]

CHARACTERS: Sirius Black, William Tsang, Sally Malik, Charles Xavier, and others TBD
LOCATION: Level 4 Lounge
WARNINGS: PG-13 for terrible language, inane violence, etc.
SUMMARY: After the lights come back on, a mild-mannered wizard is going for a quiet drink in the lounge when a medical doctor goes apeshit on him. The punchline apparently involves mutants and ghosts.
NOTES: Now also includes William in the brig.


The fourth floor lounge is one that William has almost actively avoided before. Four is an unlucky number, and he lets superstition get away with him more often these days than he did before. One of the many odd and unusual developments, post-reconnaissance, that he does not dwell on. Still, eventually, dwelling in familiar territory gets old; even for William Tsang, who prefers to be afraid of anything new, anything too old, and most of the grey shades in between.

The whisky bottle is slimy with cold condensation in his fingers. He is already fostering a mild but novel hangover headache.

The Chief Medical Officer is off-duty when he stumps into the lounge, too drunk to care for grace or a collected air, but far from off-balance, something pleasantly dead-eyed about the stare he sweeps through. He squints at the cracked mirrors, the chic luster of carpet and the glitzy vertebrate of stairs leading up to the empty stage. Each of the passenger levels' drinking establishments have a slightly different aesthetic and layout, but there is a remarkable sameness about everything, generally. Not much to be afraid of at all. He swivels his sights to the bar.

Comments

[doggedly]

Behind the bar, Sirius scans the bottles that are left to him. Space liquor is generally terrible, but if you drink enough of it, you can pretend that taste becomes significantly less important--and, eventually, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, taste indeed becomes less important, as tastebuds wither away under the onslaught.

The fact that someone else wanders in does not go unnoticed. Sirius glances over his shoulder, dismisses the newcomer, and goes back to scanning bottles. If the light were a little better, and William a little closer, he might recognise him from the network. If he recognised him from the network, he might make the connection: CMO. The CMO, brain-damaged madman who is not, as it turns out, dead from the shame of fancying Snivellus.

But even if he did recognise William (which he doesn't), Sirius would still have no earthly idea as to what he could possibly want. Retribution for what he has probably done to Snape will come. He's not stupid. It might even make it along to Tyke. Hell, Edgeworth himself would probably tell Tyke. But it's not something he's thinking about. There's no guilt haunting his steps, keeping him up at night. Nothing at all has changed, really, except he's perhaps done Snape some bodily injury. So fucking what.

Finally, Sirius selects a bottle of some greenish liquor and grabs for a glass. Good enough for now. He'll have to go up to one of the upper levels and raid for a restock. Unpredictable lifts don't stop him, not when he can just Apparate away.

"It's all yours, mate," he tells William, still without really looking properly at him. Bottle and glass on the bartop, he plants one hand beside them and vaults over to the other side. Dusts off his shoulder as he lands, neatly, totally cool and coordinated (like always). "Fairly picked over, but beggars, choosers, y'know."

lmk if too powerpoes

[dogbane]

The brain-damaged madman, not dead or at least resurrected, acknowledges Sirius' instructions with a nod. The reader should note that brain damage makes premeditation a little challenging sometimes. When William initially arrives, he has ideation and intent, but not very much of a plan. One rapidly develops, however, when he recognizes the gweilo landing silkily on the floor not far from him, very posh.

William has seen his picture before; specifically in the form of video. It wasn't so long ago that Sirius was no one to him but a cute bloke with floppy hair who periodically submitted inane polls to the network.

That Sirius. William hadn't even known he was a wizard.

Huh.

"Cheers, mate," William says. He then turns, his feet grinding through the rotation pretty fast but without anything silky at all about it, whips his whisky bottle at the back of Sirius' head. Military combat training recommends he go for Sirius' wand next, if it's ssssoomewhere in view, but a) his peripheral vision is blurryish right now and he wouldn't be able to make it out without actually ducking his head right down to the butt of Sirius' jeans or anything and b) military combat training was never really his forte. Colbert and Anderson might be proud on some level anyway, that he follows up by aiming his forehead squarely at Sirius' forehead-- there's a Snivvy cootie joke in here somewhere-- though he doesn't wait quite long enough for the shattered glass to clear.

By the time they get a little space between them, both of them might well be bleeding profusely from the head area.

[doggedly]

Wizards, as a whole, don't much go in for physical violence. Why would they, when they've a whole arsenal of spells and hexes and jinxes to injure and otherwise incapacitate any opponent that would go up against them? Sirius does better than most. Between his training with SEC and his own keen interest in being able to punch someone really hard as they're going for their wand in a duel, he at least has some basics. Good reflexes are less of a learned thing but Sirius--with his natural easy grace coupled with a few years of quidditch under his belt--both afford him some small advantage there.

And yet none of that prepares him for some relative stranger chucking a bottle at the back of his head and then taking him at a run.

So it goes like this: some extra little instinct has Sirius turn, and catch sight of the throw. Not quick enough to dodge, completely, but quick enough that he manages maybe half a sidestep and avoids the total brunt of the impact. Not that it really helps. The bottle breaks anyways; glass in his hair, and then William is right there, and Sirius struggles to shove him off but, again, not quick enough. The impact of his forehead is dizzying, compounding the dizzy feeling of the broken bottle. There's glass underfoot. It crunches under his boots as he stumbles back away from William, his hand going for his wand. See, he's a wizard after all, and he draws on him as he falls back against the stools at the bar, toppling one over and gripping at the one right behind it, keeping himself upright.

"Bloody," he manages, and it's appropriate because he is bloody, just a little, "What the fuck," and that doesn't near get at the astonished confusion he feels at the assault, but it's close enough for now. He doesn't try for a jinx or anything, though perhaps he should. And yet attacking muggles is still out of the question, even if he's in space, where half the people have magic but call it something different, and where, apparently, certain muggles just chuck bottles at him and rammed into him like a mad erumpent. "What is wrong with you?"

They're still rather close. The tension in Sirius' arm, the way he holds his wand out between them, trained on William--attacking muggles is off-limits, but defence, that's different.

lmk if u need clarifies this is 2.5 hrs worth of constipated word straining

[dogbane]

That, yes, defense for sure; no one can fault Sirius for that, no matter how righteous William's cause is. William's cause doesn't look to great right now as it is, having failed to establish a high-ground to begin with, and losing altitude fast, even as he squints balefully at the wizard and leaks a few drops of blood down from his left temple. Also, that instead of responding to Sirius' question, which is pretty clear despite its failure to fully express Sirius' feels, he says:

"Fucking fight you floppy-haired twat."

Abruptly, William's little glass-speckled frame wrenches out of its proper size. His shoulders spread like a frog's gullet, feet and shoes popping four sizes out, his head lurches toward the ceiling like one of those ridiculous gags where a great tall person kneeling behind a crowd abruptly stands up to splendid comedic timing, except that William wasn't always eight feet tall. He just is now, all at once, abruptly, and without any contributions at all from the business end of Sirius' wand.

He kicks out one of his huge feet and catches a nearby chair by the leg, sends it flying, pinwheeling toward Sirius at the same time that he snaps: "Fucking come on!" There is terrific strength behind his foot. No muggle is that strong; not even the ones who are eight feet tall.

perfect.

[doggedly]

"Fight you over what, you're," he starts, and then, finishes, "Shi-it," because--

Something is happening.

It's like a swelling solution and an engorgement charm all at once--not fat but big, and getting bigger, getting significantly bigger all at once. As William stretches taller, he manages to do a thing that hardly anyone manages for any real amount of time, and that's shut Sirius up, because what in Merlin's name is actually going on here.

Instinct lets him react even as he's staring. His wand flicks up as the chair comes at him--a careless little movement with its own heft of power, and the chair slams against the wall opposite, breaks on impact--Sirius already has his wand up again, ready for whatever comes next, and he has no idea what that's going to be, more chairs or hands swelling larger or bottles or shouting--

You know what, he decides, swiftly, fuck that, and cuts his wand through the air. Two of the nearby tables slide sharply over, between him and William--a crap barricade, eight foot tall and he'll crash right through it, but it buys Sirius time to back up and get out his next spell--

"Incarcerous!"

Ropes whip up out of nowhere, flying to bind William's arms. They look so bloody thin, like bits of twine--he's too fucking big--

William Is In The Brig Now As Of Some Days Ago

[dogbane]

[William's sentence is only for a night.

It helps his case that the moment he started sobering up, the vinegar started to go out of him. Really, the moment Charles showed up, he'd started to chill the fuck out, sort of coasting on self-generated inertia while the others started to ramp up. An hour in, the Chief Security Officer has been spoken to by a very responsible-looking telepath, William's past work weighed in the balance against his recent crimes and prevailing; also, Sirius' indignant questions have been soundly ignored. There is broken glass sprinkled all over the fourth floor lounge.]

---

5 hours

[Five hours later, he has a lovely hangover. His first in literally years.

Of course, he did drink enough to literally kill a man twice his size, but his liver-functioning is literally supernatural, so that is not very surprising-- just ask Milagros Gallo. He's the lump on the brig cot right now, face-down on the pillow. When he hoists his head up, there's a scab stuck to his forehead, healed but still adhesive, and a very faint smudge on his face that would match the bottom of Sally Malik's shoe if you knew what that looked like. He has swallowed three bottles of water and peed a few times in whatever facilities/buckets are available, but it isn't helping very fast.

His communicator is trying to stab him in the eyeballs with the luminosity of its tiny monitor, a new network symptom, probably the devious work of Smiley, that no one else appears to have noticed. However, they will undoubtedly all share in the affliction in time, considering how many people are posting crossly about the whatever right now. Anyway, he slaps his head back down on the pillow and says,]

Mary's sweet twat somebody kill me.

---

12 hours

[Half a day in, he'll have slept for two incredible hours and begun to look like warmed-over shit and more like, um, well hot shit is exaggerating but he looks better. He is also starving and thinks he smells food.

Sniffing the air, the Chief Medical Officer rolls off the cot, and onto his feet seemingly by chance. He walks over to the barrier. Sits on the floor, squarely, then flattens his face in between the bars or whatever barricade, optimistically. He knows they feed people down here; he just doesn't know when.]

somewhere in the vicinity of 6 hours

[darkart]

It does not take Severus long to hear about what's happened: Charles exists. For a few hours he's sure he won't go down there at all, because he's not sure he has the self control to avoid making a scene. Not only that, he's not sure who he'd be making a scene about - on the one hand, William is probably the biggest idiot barring Black himself on board, holy fucking Merlin, on the other hand, Edgeworth's post about how no one in SEC is ever in trouble even if they nearly kill people shut up shut up can't hear you Sirius Black is a precious angel post is there, which is both embarrassing and annoying.

Finally, he shows up. (If anyone from SEC is there to ask, his mild-voiced explanation is that he wants to know what in the bleeding hell Tsang's malfunction is.) Severus takes a seat across from William's cell.

And waits.

[dogbane]

For a fairly long moment, William does nothing. The top of his head is visible, black fluffy contrast against the round bulk of the pillow. The line of his back rises and falls a little bit; breathing, despite his casual effort to suffocate himself into feeling better. After some long minutes, he eventually screws his hands around the mattress and starts to make another abortive attempt at getting up.

One eye makes it out into view, squinting fuzzily around the cell, across the barrier, at Snape, along the corridor, back to Snape. Blinking once, twice, growing furtive.

Heads would have been he puts his face down again and pretend for a few seconds he saw no one and nothing. Tails results in him cupping his hands around his face, as if to funnel a whisper across the lumpy topography of his pillow, even though it winds up being fairly loud, really: "It was because tequila."

(whisky tbh)

[darkart]

That particular declaration settles an idle thought Severus has had on and off. Without saying anything, he lifts one hand to extend an index finger and draws an intricate, invisible figure in the air. William might feel something barely-there crackle across his face, or it might be too faint to be noticed through the haze of violent dehydration and electrolyte imbalance.

Enjoy not being able to cram anything alcoholic into your orifices. Until the spell wears off or another witch or wizard cracks it. Not that Severus has any idea how long it'll take to wear off.

(Or if it will.)

[dogbane]

William flinches back, more of a startle to the motion than out of any real anticipation of pain. He winds up scrunched back on his elbows, blinking, a palm pressed to his cheek, which has a red pillowcase crease on it. After a long moment, he slowly, uneasily crawls backward and then pushes up into a semi-upright, looking around at the cell and them pinching the bridge of his nose.

Still pretty.

Small blessings are all one can ask for, when half the people probably cross with you are capable of flinging around debilitating curses. "What," he says, thickly, but not irrelevantly. He has no idea. For some reason they haven't left any tequila or whisky in here, with him.

12ish

[fullmoon]

[ Remus brings a small apple, but not for William—firstly because he has no idea William might be hungry, at the moment, and secondly because if he did know he wouldn't particularly care. He brings it because he's hungry, as always, and because it gives him something to fidget with other than his wand. Something a little kinder than a hex to throw at William's face if this goes poorly.

It probably won't go that poorly.

It probably won't go well, either.

His wand is still in easy reach, anyway, poking out of his back pocket when he stops and stands outside of William's cell, with one arm folded over his chest and the other elbow propped on top of it to hold the apple up near his shoulder. He doesn't look angry. He doesn't even look annoyed. If anything is leaking through the cracks in his mild-mannered shield, at the moment, it's perplexity. ]

Did you break a bottle on Sirius Black's head?

[ Before William can pin any hopes on the apple—or before any hopes he's already pinning can get too solid—Remus takes a bite. It's crisp enough to pop. ]

[dogbane]

[But William's face lights up at the sight of the apple and it has to be a little bit funny, even if he is a ruthless breaker of bottles on best friend's heads. His eyes linger on the fruit for a moment, before they cut upward to the other man's face.

A wild werewolf has appeared. Despite that William objects to Remus on some level of principle, specifically the one where he nearly killed Severus Snape as a child, there are any number of mitigating factors regarding William's relationship with him. Some of them are shaped like fruits and others are shaped like Remus' penis, but all that aside.] Can I have your apple? [he asks, never one to beat around the bush; not even now.] I'll have loads of reasonable shit to say afterward, or.

As reasonable as it can be under the circumstances. Can I, [and William tries to look winsome or at least insightful about his own problems. It's not that he's avoiding the question, exactly--

--in fact, the majority of his tortured brain cells are of the opinion Remus already knows the answer anyway.]

[fullmoon]

[ Remus crunches his way impassively through William's request, swallows, and considers his apple and its lone, neat missing bite.

He's a very compassionate werewolf. He likes children and underdogs and tries not to kill spiders, and William's hopeful eyes and charming nose do tug somewhere in the approximate region of his heartstrings. Not very hard, is all. He's a very compassionate werewolf with a body count that nearly matches his age, who would have killed Sirius with his bare hands if no one had intervened, and who will someday choose not to murder an old friend who's begging for his life only because a thirteen-year-old boy steps up and asks him not to.

There won't be any attempts on William's life today. There also probably won't be any fucking apples. But he smiles, a little. Maybe. ]

You can have whatever's left after you've said your reasonable shit.

[ He doesn't take another bite straight away—the apple is, like I said, small, and he doesn't want to eat the whole incentive before it's had a chance to incentivise—but he doesn't drop his arm to move it a comforting distance away from his mouth, either.

He does know the answer to that question. He also knows the answer to this one: ]

Were you, at any point, over seven feet tall?

5 hours!

[sweetmotherofgod]

[It's kind of exciting, really. Despite a stretch of incredibly bad choices following her father's death and her subsequent exit from Silent Hill, Heather has never been in a barfight.

It's a good thing she has someone around whose bad choices she can live through vicariously, then.

She walks quietly. Hears the comment, leans on a nearby wall and crosses her arms.]

I expected better from you,

[she says, managing to sound frosty and entertained at the same time. Perhaps she retains some strange powers after all.]

People with magic vaginas don't always have a say in it. It's tacky as hell to use them to cuss.

[dogbane]

[HEATHER.]

HEATHER. [William looks so glad to see her, all big eyes and a huge smile, nearly enough to overwrite the underlying godawful pain and suffering he's experiencing otherwise. He hasn't thrown up yet, but he probably will within the next few hours. Fortunately, the brig is equipped with those vaguely-mentioned 'facilities.'] I'm sorry I forgot about your magic vagina. Or didn't know about it.

Don't surprise me you've got one though. I mean Ned's suffering he hasn't been to the promised land ages, I've loads of compassion. [He half walks, half stumbles over to the barrier, grasping the cold frame of metal to peer at her.] You're my first visitor. I'm really fucking bored.

[sweetmotherofgod]

[Pause while she tries to find a way to twist am if you build it, they will come joke out of this. Fortunately for all parties involved, she fails, and moves on.]

Am I? Shit. I was trying to hold out. Play it cool, you know? Let you stew a little so you could appreciate how fucking mad I am about this.

[Frown.]

How are you bored? You're hung over. Don't argue, I know you are 'cause you look like shit. You should be trying to sleep it off. Doesn't matter if you're here or in your room, right?

dibs on 8.

[forgodssake]

[ It won't be the first time Charles has swung by while William is behind bars, but by now, perhaps he might be sober enough to recall. He himself has had a cat nap and is returning. His clothes are different. He is bearing gifts.

Gifts in the form of some painkiller tablets, for all that he isn't sure if William's type even gets hangovers and if they do, then maybe a simple dose of aspirin won't cut it. Oh well, thought that counts. Personally, Charles is on an upswing. Tidier hair, if not as tidy as it was before he suddenly backslid into dirty hippie territory for a while back there. He's awake, sober, sympathetic.

And he's never been on the wrong side of the brig.

The cup of water he's brought with him is knocked tinnily against a bar to announce his arrival. ]

[dogbane]

[It's nice that somebody is on the upswing, although William wasn't well-acquainted enough with Charles during the mutant's nadir to really appreciate the improvement. William is happy to see him, though, as soon as he rouses from his drowse from the tik-tik sound of tin rapping on bars. He sits up on his bed, blinking hard. Swings his feet off the edge and finds his feet with only a moderate amount of difficulty.

Ooh painkillers. He finished puking an hour ago, so he feels fairly confident he'll be able to keep that down.] Cheers, mate. [William comes over, stretching his fingers through his food tray slot to take the gifts, if that is indeed what they are. His hair is standing up a little insanely.]

[forgodssake]

[ They are gifts, freely given, and Charles goes about transferring them via food depository. He's the patron saint of hangovers, just ask anyone. ]

Alright?

[ This done, Charles waits, hands on hips, for William to finish and give him back the cup. No rush, though. ]

around 10 hours. the most popular prisoner ever!!!

[pushfall]

Claire waits until she's sure that no one else is down to see William, that all interested parties are elsewhere and she doesn't run the risk of running into anyone, friendly or otherwise. She's never been down to the brig before and consequently finds it somewhat intimidating for what it is, though thinking of it as a drunk tank for the time being makes this less like an episode out of space horror reality. The truth of it is, William is down here for a good reason. Taking a bottle to the back of someone's head isn't an activity that should be applauded in any sense of the word.

Still, Claire comes down with her jumpsuit and boots, electing not to travel under the guise of walking a dog or anything like that. Her steps are purposeful, and the only thing that she carries with her other than the nanite tattoo resting in stark contrast to the pale exposure of the skin covering her forearm is a water bottle large enough that her fingers don't wrap all the way around it and, in the other hand, a sandwich. Plastic crackles in her fingers long before she reaches the threshold of William's holding cell, so maybe he hears her coming, and maybe he's too hungover to notice or care, but when she arrives she taps on one of the bars with the business end of the bottle.

It's true: of course, you should never celebrate a bar brawl or any sort of encounter in which someone could have been seriously injured or killed, no matter who they are. But maybe you should show respect where it's due, and acknowledge that someone did something terrible and now you don't have to.

"Well, it's not a greasy hamburger and fries, but they say the only real cure for a hangover is time anyway."

[dogbane]

When he hears feet in the corridor, William is sitting up in his cot, rubbing the groggy haze and metaphorical cobwebs his eyes and trying to determine if the ache between his temples, spreading over his forehead and scalp is parallelogram-shaped or more of a triangle. When Claire shows up, though.

When the sandwich shows, he's off his ass and over to the barrier fairly quick, his nose hovering a fraction of an inch from the metal, his fingers scratching at the food tray slot of his door in a manner that's rather reminiscent of the dogs that Claire didn't walk down here. William's eyes flit fast between the girl and the sandwich, a lopsided smile starting up on his face. "You know this does absolutely nothing for my obligatory sense of resentment," he says. "My self-concept's imploding as we speak."

But he smiles and shows teeth, and even if he's been without a good brushing for a few hours, there isn't visible fuzz on it and he looks sincere besides. "Come on," sounds like a plea; it is. "Let's have it. My mouth tastes like the wrong end of a dog who had bad Ruby the night before." The water would probably help as much as the food. His right eye is slightly smaller than the left-- photosensitivity, clearly.

[pushfall]

"The horror," Claire responds immediately, trying her hardest not to smile. She moves over to the slot in which a tray would surely fit through and juggles the objects in her hands to allow them to slip through one at a time. The bottle fits just fine on its side and the sandwich, cloaked in a stretch of thin plastic, goes through without any difficulty whatsoever. If William's breath stinks, Claire can't tell, and she only lingers so close to the bars for as long as it takes William to snatch up the food before she moves back again, which, given how quickly he had scrabbled up from the cot, sees her back to her original position quickly enough.

She moves to cram her hands into her pockets and remembers halfway through that she's not wearing jeans. Her palms and fingers smooth down the material on her hips as a result and she searches her brain for what she came down here to say, coming up with, "It's definitely not my best sandwich but I figure it's probably better than brig food. I imagined brig food was like some gruel mixture and a piece of stale bread, but then I remembered this isn't the sixteen hundreds."

11 or so hours idk

[regulatingpressure]

[ raven rolls in pretty late in the game, having spent the first half of the day waist-deep and head-first in a questionable shuttle with an armful of tools and no real way to know that something went down or where or when.

but she absolutely heard once she finished, so here she is, casually beelining for the cell with the guy mashing his face through the front. ]

Heeey, [ she greets, her mouth quirking in a suppressed half-grin, because after living on the ark where any and all crime's a death sentence, spending a little time in a cage is pretty much just public embarrassment as far as she's concerned. not at all something to be any kind of upset about.

then she sinks down crosslegged in front of him, her knees barely brushing the bars of his cell. ]

Now, I'm gonna have to ask you to refrain from any kind of declarations of love, [ she says as she reaches into the pocket on the inside of her coat and starts pulling out snacks, crackers and then some kind of space-fruit and then what looks like jerky. each of these are funneled in through the bars one by one. ] I just don't look at you that way, I'm sorry. [ and she's pulling something out of the opposite pocket now, what is that - it looks like a bag of mush?? off-white with yellow mixed in. but now she's pulling a fork out too, and he might recognize them as scrambled eggs. cheesy scrambled eggs.

on a much less teasing note: ] Do they give you water? I brought some of that, if you need it.

[dogbane]

Oiiiiiii. [It takes William a moment to recognize her because her face is blurry, but a couple blinks and it sharpens again; his smile is immediate. He's a little surprised to see her, honestly, and feels increasingly popular. Maybe he should beat up people more often. No that's terrible and really against his nature. Anyhow, William gets up from his bed again, incentivized by both food and of course manners.] I'll say anything you want, Ms. Reyes. I wonder if all SEC's brigged miscreants get Raven's nosh delivery service.

[He's greedy sticking his hands out the food tray slot. His eyeballs are on the cheesy eggs and they will not be retracting short of broken fingers. And even then, he does have ten whole fingers, he could stand to sacrifice a few in the name of grub.] Word of advice, though. Whichever bloke or girl you do look at that way, weigh the cost-benefit of defending their honor while in a state of skull-splitting, totally fucked up inebriation.

[William smiles like it's a joke; the kind that's funny because it isn't exactly a joke.]

[regulatingpressure]

[ actually, only one brigged miscreant has ever gotten raven's nosh delivery service pre-william, but she doesn't bother correcting him. instead, she's grinning a dry grin as he makes his not-joke joke. ]

Dropped planetside in a half-built shuttle for a guy, if that counts. [ but she absolutely weighed the cost-benefit of that one. it wasn't even a close race. ]