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

[fullmoon]

[ Why would it? says Remus' face, all innocence, though the innocence comes in the form of a frown and raised eyebrow instead of blank misunderstanding and, also, is faked. Clocking William might make him feel better. It's made him feel better before. The day he arrived on the Tranquility wasn't the first time he'd ever put his fist in Sirius' face, though it was certainly the most public one, and after the Prewetts died he passed on using stunning spells a few times when they might have been perfectly serviceable, trading up for things that would hurt.

But that's not something he's proud of. Definitely not something he's going to schedule ahead of time. He says, ] I think we've had enough of that for a while, don't you? [ and doesn't move back from the barrier, watching William devour the apple with what might look like amused interest in his ill manners but is actually amused interest in the faint wisps of magic Remus can feel coiling off of him. ]

Hmm.

[dogbane]

[William whittles the apple down to its core in just a few bites, obscurely concerned that Remus is going to try and accio his fruit away. He's too busy enjoying the taste and the feel of something going in his stomach to notice that the wizard is looking at him funny. However, he does eventually notice. Squints back at him, his gnawing slowing gradually as he seriously thinks about not chewing around the seeds and talking instead.

He does decide to talk.] What? [he says.] I didn't take the piss out of you for not wanting to get a lick in on behalf of your friend. [Not that William really thinks the situation does need more punching. But he could have made fun. He's being very restrained.] And I'm really hungry, [he adds, a little more irritably.] I don't understand why you only brought one sodding apple.

[Me me me. Memeeemee.]

[fullmoon]

You broke a bottle on my best mate's head, [ Remus reminds him. He's focusing on that detail instead of the flung furniture or tackles off bartops or concrete giants out of good manners and nonhuman-to-nonhuman sympathy, after William's fussy reaction to being asked about his variable height. ] It didn't occur to me to bring you treats.

[ Maybe he should have brought him a drink, though, he thinks, absently trailing his fingers in front of William's face like he's playing with an invisible pool of water in the air between them. If William doesn't already know he's been charmed, Remus might have enjoyed being the one to help him find out. Much more satisfying than hitting him.

He doesn't say a word about it. Giving him the apple was enough of a favor. ]

Are you all right?

[ An afterthought. But he does sort of care, now that he understands what might have triggered it all, only a little less than he cares about spiders. ]

[dogbane]

[The last vestiges of apple disappear into William's face. He winds up with a palm full of seeds and a bitten-off stem, closing his hand, pointing his forefinger at Remus in a eureka way.] Point. [He did break a bottle over Remus' best mate's head, although he hadn't exactly known they were best mates.

Things are looking up from William's vantage point, even if he is inside of a cell. The apple juice acid has eaten away most of that cottony feeling on his tongue, which should last at least a few minutes. Remus asks him if he's all right, and he thinks he must be: he feels normal enough, for himself. His soreness and fuzziness counterbalance each other pretty well.] Yeah, [he says, after a moment spent thinking about his sore parts, his fuzzy brain, how that works out, and also realizing toward the end of that thought process that Remus probably doesn't care very much anyway.]

Probably be a bit better if I spend awhile as something else, but that might look dodgy to the coppers, like I'm trying to get away. [It's a careless comment, mumbly, but it's not like William is really trying to be secretive about his powers. They just don't seem like much to talk about, with wizards being considerably cooler. William isn't even thinking very much about his demon these days, vigilance gone crusty with disuse. His leg parts feel kind of the same way, gritty and off, when he finally extracts himself back to standing up. He starts to step back toward his cot, but curiosity stays his step.]

Can I ask you something. About you lot, before.

[fullmoon]

[ The casual spend awhile as something else makes Remus lips purse, to hold back questions and a smile (mostly successfully; the strain at the corners is visible). Not asking is a struggle. He's not nerdy the way Hermione is, or the way Severus is, but by Marauder standards he's a geek, and this—nonhumans, he thinks now, magical creatures, and he'd be even more interested if he knew anything about the demon—is his thing. He fights to stay quiet and goes right up to the edge of bursting.

And then William says before and the shutters slam shut.

Remus first thought is of the war. He's been out of school for four years now, and sometimes it feels more like eight, or twelve, and he hasn't tried to explain what came after school to anyone here except Ilde, who didn't know him or like him and only wanted to know how to avoid inadvertent fights with Severus. She told him to hit the highlights and not tell me the intimate details of every personal struggle. That wasn't very sensitive of her, maybe, but it was all right. Lily is dead; Sirius is imprisoned; Severus made mistakes, tried to right them, and hasn't repeated them here; Remus doesn't want to talk about it—

So that's the impulse behind the slight lean-away shift in his posture, the way his face closes off, and his politely noncommittal answer. ]

You can ask.

[ He holds his hand back down near the food slot in case William is willing to part with the apple seeds and stem. ]

[dogbane]

William sticks his tiny hand out of the slot and deposits the garbage into Remus' hand, his fingers uncurling carefully, so that he doesn't accidentally send anything over the edge of the wizard's palm. He wipes his own fingers on his pant leg afterward, attractively. He's all gross anyway. When he looks up again, he looks like he might have missed some of Remus' squeamishness, blinking wearily in the cold light of the brig, his whole expression pleasantly blank. This is a peculiar encounter, but what is one more peculiarity to it.

The intimate details of every personal struggle and highlights would probably be more practical, but not too many people accuse William of being that.

"Was there a moment when it all got fucked?" he asks. "Not that you could do something about it. Now, or ever. Suppose you had one of those-- what're they. Turn-timers." William waves his hands around. "Suppose you could give it a go, without risks. Was there a thing you'd set right?" William has no context for the vast majority of Remus' life, of course; for Severus', nearly as little. But he's wondered, since he heard about the time-turners.

They all seem to have such regrets.

[fullmoon]

Remus raises his eyebrows and smiles beneath them—small and sad, not flippant, maybe a little relieved at the largely hypothetical nature of the question—and says, "I'd change everything."

He doesn't have to think about it. And maybe it sounds like an attempt to cheat, but it would only take one night, a very long time ago, and then—he doesn't know. He can't say what would have happened or who he would have become, if he'd have been a braver person or only a less empathetic one, if his friends would have trusted him more or never been his friends to begin with. Maybe it all would have found a way to happen the same way regardless. Maybe it was written in stone.

But it couldn't have gone worse than it did. Nothing's as bad as how it ended.

He takes a backward step, with his fistful of seeds. It's the beginning of a departure. His smile twitches wider.

"There's no need to be so melancholy, Chief. You're hardly the first person to try to beat the shit out of Sirius." He's joking, with the same brisk and faux-dignified tone he took when asked if he liked question ten. He doubts William regrets it much, if at all, and certainly not enough to spur this line of questioning. Good-humored intentional obtuseness: sometimes useful for slipping out of uncomfortable conversations.

[dogbane]

"I look melancholy?" William sounds a little quizzical. He shuffles backward a few steps. Enough steps that he can fall on the cot-- kind of slowly, not wanting to bounce his head around too much, landing on his butt to sit. Fuzzy-eyed and weary, he doesn't really think that his current presentation could pass for sad. Concerned about wizards, maybe, at an arm's length, where wizards would appear generally to prefer to be. The mattress squeaks as he shuffles his butt, slouches a little, an arm pressed tentatively to his belly. The stinging jinx fortunately doesn't hurt anymore, even if it's left him misshapen still.

Dogfuckin joke here. Anyway it's no great stretch to tell that Remus doesn't like to talk about it; that he probably wasn't lying, either, even if it was a rather cheap response. Sitting back is William's way of letting Remus go, even if he couldn't think of a way to make him stay if he wanted.

"How old was you?" is something he chooses to ask anyway. Arm's length is something that he's getting used to himself, but he has observed that it does make some things easier. Maintaining an uncharacteristic silence, sometimes. Asking uncomfortable questions at others. What's the worst that could happen. They'll catch him if he turns William into a toad here, probably.

[fullmoon]

Punitive transfiguration isn't Remus' style, and if it were he wouldn't want a toad. Maybe an owl. He's never had his own owl, and he'd take very good of one. But he isn't annoyed, in any case, and his second step away stalls with his weight balanced on his back foot's toes and is then aborted, turned into a fidgety rocking motion on his feet that doesn't ultimately move him further away.

He crosses both arms low around his middle, more like he's cold than like he's wary or defiant. One of the seeds in his fist is turned around longways and poking into his palm. He was joking, about melancholy, though this is certainly odd, not what he would expect from William if he had the right to expect anything from someone he knows so little about. He thought he knew boisterous and funny and shameless, but he didn't know eight foot tall concrete bar-brawler, so expectations are right out.

"When?" he says, and it's a credit to Severus that he doesn't even worry William might know what he is, like he would if someone asked him that question at home. If Severus hadn't told Charles, of all people, surely he hasn't told William. "When I would start changing things? Four. If that didn't work, eleven. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty-one. Something would be bound to stick eventually."

It's a shame that keeping a catalogue of his mistakes isn't enough to keep him from repeating them. He's still smiling, sort of, faint and distantly friendly and only defensive in purpose, not appearance.

"Why? Is there something you'd change?"