electrocynic | The Fortress, Sarah's London, Saturday

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The Fortress, Sarah's London, Saturday

It had been decided Sarah wasn't going to the picnic. By Sarah. Because she felt she got the best quality decisions when she made them all by herself. New kids could just as well meet her during office hours next week. She wasn't portaling back and forth for that. Or the free food, even.

So, she'd already been here for a while. They'd gotten back from the retreat – finally, thank Christ – late last night, and she'd slept in, done some shopping, then retreated to the only place in London that really mattered: the Fortress.

And now she was standing outside in the street, smoking as she waited.

[ooc: NFB, and for the boys!]

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Sarah made a vague 'ugh' sound.

Mostly for her own benefit, mostly under her breath.

"'s not about the Billy Joel," Atton confided to Sarah. "Someone needs to finish what they start around here."

Yeah, that was nicely cryptic, dude.

"The fuck's that supposed to mean?"

Drunken, idle curiosity. Or just general annoyance at cryptic things.

"We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc..."

So, Sparkle's singing had gotten significantly quieter. Not that he was eavesdropping. Much. really.

Okay, he totally was. He wanted to know what Atton was going on about, too.

"Roy Khan, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, "Peyton Place", trouble in the Suez..."

If he paid attention any harder, he'd have to start making up lyrics just so he could keep on listening with Atton none the wiser, here.

"Shoulda done something. Or be dead."

And that was all they were going to get out of Atton on the matter, as he suddenly had to speed towards a nearby wall for some stability and a quick vomit.

Lovely.

"Is that the portion of the evening we're at now?" Sarah called after him. "The morbid pity party?"

Yeah she knew it had been going on for a while now, but this was the first time 'should be dead' had come into play.

"Because let me tell you, it's the fucking worst I'm not having any of it."

Sorry, Billy Joel. You were going to have to wait for a minute while Sparkle sighed and found himself torn between going over to help Atton get his bearings, and going over to smack him across the back of the head.

"We are never getting you drunk around this time of the year again," he shared, and the first option won has he offered Atton an arm so he didn't fall over or puke on his own boots or something. "Come on, man. I know you hate this, but you're alive, that's how it is. So there's not a hell of a lot of point in survivor's guilt or whatever, here."

If Sparkle thought he was getting a considerate answer from Atton to that one, sadly, he was at the wrong end of the night for it. Instead he grabbed Sparkle's arm for balance, until he was done.

"...'s disgusting," he muttered. "Never drinking again."

Sarah was already stomping down the street ahead.

Well, doing her best at stomping ahead. Some of it was a little too wobbly to be called stomping. She was feeling a very muddled kind anger and couldn't really pinpoint the reason, which just made her angrier.

She was unlikely to actually lose them, because that wasn't her intention. Mostly. (She wasn't even moving fast enough for that.) She was just being an ass in her own way.

Yeah, Sparkle wasn't going to argue.

"Considering you just got all weepy and puked all over that night out that she arranged for you? Damn right you're not getting drunk again," he agreed, nodding down the street after Sarah. "And you're going to owe her one hell of an apology once you've sobered up, shitstick."

Sparkle loved you, Atton. That was why he wasn't going to hesitate to call you an ass when you needed it.

Atton, making bad decisions and being an ass? Say it ain't so.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he muttered. "--She fried my electronics."

What a novel thing to remember right now, Rand.

"... So this whole thing was a carefully orchestrated scheme to get your revenge on her over a microwave?"

Sparkle somehow doubted that.

"Yes." Beat. "No. Wait, where were we going again?"

He needed to sleep for approximately a month.

"You turned karaoke into the most morbid thing imaginable, hid under a table, and then said you should have died and puked in a corner. We're taking you to some place where you can clean up, drink water until you feel like you're going to explode, and pass out. And then when you're sober again you can grovel at Electroclash and maybe she'll forgive you for being that kind of not-date."

Sparkle paused for a moment before adding, "Seriously. Never letting you drink again."

Because Sparkle totally made much better life choices when drunk. Honest.

Atton considered that entire recounting of his past actions thoroughly.

"Calling her Electroclash is weird," he said, and began to stagger after her.

Sparkle sighed and kept easy pace.

"So don't call her Electroclash. I was her sidekick. Calling her Sarah is weird."

Crazy the differences between being a TA for somebody and being a down-the-hall fuckbuddy, right?

"Look, I'm not saying you can't be sad or anything. That's kind of... like... normal. But she deserves more respect than that."

Electroclash? Meetra? Both?

It better not be Meetra, because Atton would've said Sparkle didn't know the damn half of that situation. Or tried to punch him, because he wasn't exactly rational on that particular topic.

"Am I getting lectured by a nineteen-year-old?" Atton asked blearily, because frankly, he didn't actually have the brain cells together right now to make the jump to Meetra in the first place.

"Yes," Sparkle said, simply. "Because even nineteen-year-olds can tell when somebody's gone and been a bit of a dick."

And really, it wasn't like Sparkle bit his tongue to anybody when he had a half-decent lecture worked up. Why should he start with Atton?

Hey, he was welcome to try. Atton's listening-to-lectures track-record wasn't so good, though, so Sparkle might have to put his back into it.

"Ugh," Atton said, intelligently. That dot in the distance he was staggering after was Sarah, right? "Yeah, yeah."

Sparkle was going to even attempt to give Atton an elbow to the ribs, here, at least partly because there weren't many times he'd be able to manage it, let alone get away with it.

"I'm serious," he added, sounding more tired than exasperated. "She's good people. There's a real big fucking shortage of those out there and at the very least you owe her an apology."

Maybe it was even that there was a shortage of those out there who had always demonstrated that they had his back, and maybe Sparkle was a bit protective of people like that, and he kind of hated that one of those people was currently (rightfully) irate at one of the other ones who had (understandably) gone and done something stupid.

Ugh, this was complicated.

Atton, being the reasonable non-nineteen-year-old adult that he was, did what he usually did in situations like this: racked his tired and scattershot brain for something Sparkle had done he could throw back in the kid's face in lieu of even acknowledging the lecture, found nothing, and instead just rolled his eyes.

But he took the elbow to the ribs like a champ, which might have been some kind of consolation. "Later."

Sparkle side-eyed him for a moment at that, and then, deciding that he could lecture all he wanted but he really couldn't make Atton do anything, just sighed and decided that was going to have to be good enough.

"Later," he agreed. "When you're less likely to puke on her feet in the attempt."

And then, after a pause:

"Come on, let's catch up."

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The Fortress, Sarah's London, Saturday

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