The Beach, Saturday Afternoon

[hoorayimrich.livejournal.com]

After his usual run (maybe a little longer than normal) and usual amount of coffee (borderline caffeine overdoes levels), Tony came to a stop on the beach for some relaxation time. Well, something like that.

He flopped down on the sand, hands back to brace him in an upright position as he watched the waved roll in.

A guy could only spend so much time sublimating his rich, orphan angst working in the lab before he got this weird craving for that mysterious orb in the sky that illuminated the world. Whatever it was, it looked 'shopped.

[[Open like a beach!]]

Comments

[ultron_junior]

Victor flashed a quick, only slightly defensive grin. "Yeah, but mostly I'm just whining. It wasn't that bad."

Usually there was Kool-aid with the ramen!

"You ate a lot of ramen too, though, huh?"

[myownface]

"You get creative learning how to stretch a buck, too," Sparkle agreed with a shrug. "Buy that stuff in a dollar store, that's four meals on that dollar, no tax. Need some roughage, you can get a can of veggies or something to throw in there, or just raid a neighbour's garden if the weather's right."

[ultron_junior]

Victor nodded along in recognition. "I don't remember if I said," he explained apologetically. "After my mom died, I just stayed with some friends. People back home are picky about hiring minors" -- especially minors who were running around illegally playing hero -- "so ... we're creative."

[myownface]

"So, you steal or beg?" Sparkle smirked a little. Yep. He'd totally danced that dance, there.

... Both. Both dances.

[ultron_junior]

"That and use up stuff we kind of inherited," Victor said. "And we have a free place to live, so we get by."

[myownface]

"Yeah, getting by is always easier with a roof over your head," Sparkle noted. "You guys at least got an inheritance, huh? Guess it would've been easy enough to blow without really having any experience with making it stretch, though."

[ultron_junior]

"I guess," Victor said, stretching his legs out on the sand. "By the time I came on board, everybody else had been making it work for a while. Plus, Nico -- she's kind of our leader -- is good with a budget to start with."

He shrugged apologetically. "It's a long story."

[myownface]

"Hey, I'm not going to shake you down for a complete autobiography," Sparkle replied, shrugging dismissively. "If you say you made it work, you made it work. It isn't like you came here wearing rags and smelling like gutter or anything, I mean."

[ultron_junior]

Victor snorted. "Nope, wasn't begging for another bowl of porridge either," he said. "So what's your story?"

[myownface]

"Good question, isn't it?" Sparkle scuffed at the sand with the toe of his shoe, and then flopped down to take a seat right where he was. There was a crooked grin to go with that statement, and then Sparkle idly dug his fingers through the sand, leaving little trails behind them.

"Hiding up on the roof, listening to the screaming downstairs, and sometimes it'd get so bad that the cops would come. But mostly, they just didn't. It happens enough, and they stop bothering, you know? Up on the roof in this housing that's so bad it might as well be condemned, probably is nowadays, I remember knocking shingles loose with my feet and almost slipping off and all of us clinging together, Carla crying crying crying and us trying to get her to be quiet, it was actually kind of fun, you know? Like we were secret agents up there on a mission and if we got caught maybe we'd all die or go to prison or worse, and one day we did get caught up there, it was the social worker come to make it better for the lot of us and we haven't seen one another since."

All with a completely straight face.

Some of it might even have been the truth.

[ultron_junior]

Victor let that hang in the air for a long minute. "Well, now I feel like a tool for complaining about one year that had a couple rough spots in it," he said. "Sorry, man."

[myownface]

"Hey, don't be," Sparkle's straight face melted away, and in its place was something of a crooked grin, punctuated with a quick bark of a laugh. "Sometimes I tell people my folks just up and took off, pair of deadbeat losers, you know?"

And sometimes he bragged that he killed them himself, and that he'd do it again in a heartbeat, no shame. No regrets.

[ultron_junior]

"Good riddance?" Victor said, with just the slightest hint of that question mark at the end. "I usually tell the truth. I'm not exactly a great liar."

He could do it, he just didn't like to outside dire situations.

[myownface]

"Hey, I could teach you how," Sparkle replied with a wink. "Keeping a straight face, not stopping to think, but keeping track of what you said. It isn't rocket science, it's just, like, words."

[ultron_junior]

"Problem isn't not being able to say the words," Victor returned. "It's more a Catholic guilt thing."

And having been programmed to be a hero.

[myownface]

Ah, programming. What a complicated bit of business that was.

"Oh, yeah? I never had that problem," Sparkle mused. "But then, my folks weren't all that big on religion, either."

Or... anything remotely healthy, generally.