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]

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?"