Hallway to MCA #5, Monday Afternoon

[electrocynic]

Ugh.

Sarah had been away for a while, back in London. For reasons. Nothing very good, though nothing very horrible, either. She'd ducked out this morning, though. It would've been otherwise fine to spend her birthday in dear old London, except her parents had threatened to pay her a visit, and she just wasn't feeling up to her old favourite game of disappointing her dad extra hard by pretending to be even worse than he thought. So, she'd come back.

And once she'd come back, she'd realized she'd missed graduation. Sparkle's graduation, to be exact. So now she felt like shit. And she had no plans for her birthday, and she was spending it alone, and she found herself missing Guy and April and who the fuck ever she'd ever managed to care about only to lose touch.

Yeah.

This all probably explained why she was making her way towards her apartment with a great big bag of groceries, where bottles of Green Lamp Ale clinked together, packets of crisps made crisp-packet noises, and there was enough ice cream to probably get a class of first-graders into a sugar coma.

[ooc: Oooopen post! Of birthday frowning.]

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[electrocynic]

By virtue of that alone, it counted as friendly, really. "Me, I'm a big old ray of sunshine," she rasped, dryly. The door opened, and she bent down to pick up one of the bags. "Can you at least make yourself useful and pick up the other bag?"

Instead of judging her amount of groceries.

[suitably_heroic]

"Do I look like your packing mule?" Atton asked.

As he picked up the bag, because it wasn't like he had anything better to do right now than sit in his apartment and think about his life, which was not a fantastic option.

[electrocynic]

"No, which is why I asked instead physically trying to hoist it onto your back." Duh. She walked through the doorway. "|Lights, turn on.|"

The lights turned on. It wasn't a lame party trick, either, but rather how she was used to doing things because she was lazy.

[suitably_heroic]

That might've been impressive for a lot of people. Who weren't used to Force powers. Or droids. Look, he could produce lightning from his fingertips if he really wanted to. "Where do you want me to dump this?" Atton asked.

[electrocynic]

"Just follow me."

For the many, several steps it took to get from the door to the kitchen, where she unceremoniously dumped her bag on the counter, on top of a bunch of back issues of New Power Express.

[suitably_heroic]

This place was a lot tinier than his place, but Atton was going to be nice... ish... and not point it out.

He put the bag down where she'd put hers. "There, I've done my good deed of the day," he said, "You can go get drunk."

[electrocynic]

Please, like she cared. It was still a bigger place than what she'd had back in London. And it had a 'bedroom of happy', whatever that was.

"Great," she said, extracting packages of ice cream from one of the bags while she looked up at him. "And you can go... do whatever the fuck it is that you do, I s'pose. I don't know."

[suitably_heroic]

"Important stuff," Atton assured her. "Sit in my house, watch bad holos," agonize about staying, "It's a break week." Beat. "You have any snacks?"

He still hadn't done any shopping and all the breakfasty stuff he'd gotten for Sparks was gone.

[electrocynic]

"There's crisps in the bag." And... cookies, and assorted other random snacks, probably. It was what happened when you let a newly-minted
34-year-old go to the store unsupervised. While feeling down. "The fuck's a holo?"

[suitably_heroic]

"It's like one of your movies, except then not hopelessly backward," Atton supplied, because he was nice like that.

[electrocynic]

"Technically or contentwise?"

It was actually not a very important distinction. The ice cream got stuffed in the freezer – for now – and a few packets of crisps were plucked out of the bag.

[suitably_heroic]

"Technically," Atton said. "The technology's better." He shrugged. "The quality varies about as much as anything does. Ninety percent of everything is poodoo, and so on."

[electrocynic]

"I don't know what that word means, and yet I still do." It was pretty easy from the context. She dug out the beers and stuffed all but two in her fridge. "As long as there's still an equivalent of shit quality reality TV, I think I'm okay whatever the technical quality is."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton blinked.

"I could go grab one," he said. "Did a whole scan for the terrible ones to entertain some teenagers the other week."

Look, she wanted to share snacks and watch bad holos with him, he wasn't going to say no right now. "You want historical or terrible future fiction?"

[electrocynic]

"Terrible future wins every time," Sarah replied. And that statement worked on so many levels.

And yes, if he was willing to watch bad holos with her while partaking of her snacks (and thus probably keeping her from developing any immediate health problems), well, she also wasn't going to say no right now.

[suitably_heroic]

"Right, we've got us an optimist," Atton said. Not that he had any right to talk, really. He shrugged. "Be back in a second."

Did he even take the holo equipment back out of the Ebon Hawk...? He thought he did.

Anyway, he was ducking out of her apartment to go dig it up.

[electrocynic]

Hey, sometimes her pessimism worked in her favour! Less room for disappointment, and all that.

Whatever. She nodded at him as he went, then went to gather up some of the various snacks and beverages to carry them to the living room, where she dumped them on the coffee table before plopping herself down on one end of the couch.

Well. It was more like one half of the couch. It wasn't very big.

[suitably_heroic]

Hey, he got that. In fact, he employed the exact same strategy. Didn't mean he was going to let up on snarking on people about it.

Atton was back ten minutes later, carrying some equipment, which he put down... somewhere over there. Whatever, wasn't like he was worried his eyes would fall out if he stared at the holo for too long.

"Space," he said, as he turned towards the coffee table. "Were you planning to cram a football team this big," he gestured at the snarks, "on a sofa that small? Now that's ambition."

This was him doing the nice snarking. If he'd actually wanted to piss her off, he'd have hit on her, but he didn't actually want to spend the afternoon alone this once.

[electrocynic]

Sarah made a face at him, but it wasn't half as heartfelt in its annoyance as it would usually have been. This was a bad afternoon to spend alone, okay. It was that kind of day. "Smartarse. I was going to make them sit on the floor."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton collapsed on the half of the sofa left to him. "Oh, so you're a 'make them wait on hand and foot' kind of woman," he said, giving a vague little wave in the direction of his equipment, which flicked on.

[electrocynic]

"No other kind to be," she replied, reaching for her bottle of Green Lamp while giving his... technical stuff an idly interested look. As usual, most of her interest was more along the lines of how she could command such a thing with her voice. "Otherwise they might get the wrong idea."

[suitably_heroic]

Much of the tech from Atton's galaxy was already voice-activated, so it wouldn't exactly make much of a difference. The holo had already been primed and started playing-- something about wars and apocalypses and devastation and a lot of really hot young people who were somehow involved.

"Like what?" he said. "That they're around to be more than a footstool?"

[electrocynic]

"Lest they think there'll be sorrow when they fuck off," Sarah drawled, with a pointed look at the label on the bottle she was uncapping. Total coincidence. "But that footstool thing as well. That sounds great."

[suitably_heroic]

Atton snagged a bag of chips off the table and opened up. He wasn't a beer guy at the best of times, least of all this time of the afternoon, but he'd probably put in a show of drinking it later.

"Are we day drinking to anything in particular here?" he checked. "I mean, I'm not asking for your whole tragic backstory or anything, it's just so I know when to look in the other direction."

[electrocynic]

Sarah offered up a sigh to accompany her eyeroll, before fixing her gaze on the really hot young people. Because, hello, really hot young people, probably doing shit that common sense should keep them from doing. "I'm officially one year older today. That's the entire tragedy."