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Demon Marcus, Sunday

The best part about working in a clothing store, if you were to ask Sparkle today? The full-length mirrors. Seriously. Sure, he was getting work done today, too, putting a shipment of tank tops out onto the racks and occasionally wandering back over to the counter, where he had a book open to a page of math problems that he was steadfastly trying to avoid finishing. But now and again, he'd pass by the mirror by the dressing room, and he'd have to strike a pose. The new hair kind of demanded it.

Demon Marcus was open, and your clerk for the day was definitely working on putting credence to the theory that blondes really did have more fun.

[Open, OCD-free, and I'll be gone for a few hours in the afternoon, so SP around there.]

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As agreed upon, Éponine arrived with Alouette -- the kitten was riding on her shoulder, much to her indignation (and had been informed she would be paying for repairs or replacements if her claws tore holes in any of Éponine's clothes).

"Goodness," she exclaimed, sounding as if she were caught halfway between laughter and surprise. "What on earth happened to your head?"

"Bleach," Sparkle laughed, running his hand through his hair and hanging up the last of an armload of ladies' shirts. "I probably won't keep it this way for long, but I was bored the other night and thought, hell, why not?"

Generally, this was Sparkle's reasoning for pretty much everything ever. It served him well.

"At first, when I peeked in, I thought you'd had some kind of dreadful fright, the way it happens in some stories," Éponine told him. "I never thought of doing anything like that just because I felt like it."

Then again, it wasn't as if she could have before, and anyway shampoo was a novelty to her.

She drifted a few steps closer to get a better look, humming tunelessly as she did. "I'm not sure if I like it more this way than the other, but it suits you well enough."

"Thanks," Sparkle laughed. "I'm still getting used to it. Like, I catch sight of myself in the mirror and there's that moment of, 'Whoa, is that even me?' And then I'm all, 'riiiiight.'"

He grinned for a moment more, and then nodded to Alouette.

"This is your cat, huh? Velcro's somewhere around here. Probably in one of the boxes these shirts came in. Cats, man. They love cardboard, can't get enough of it, it's crazy."

"Good lord, yes, I can't keep her out of the mailroom whenever I bring her to work," exclaimed Éponine, which prompted Alouette to mew indignantly and hop down off her shoulder. "I can't decide whether she likes chewing on it because it's so tough, or if it's how satisfying it sounds when it tears."

She meandered over toward the counter, immediately drawn by the sight of books, to take a look. "What's this, now? Some of what you're trying to study?"

"Little bit, yeah," Sparkle agreed, watching Alouette plod off. He'd know if she found Velcro easily enough, he imagined. There would probably be hissing. "Math stuff. I don't entirely get it, doing math with numbers missing. Like... it gives you the answers and then wants you to work out what the question is. It's weird."

Sparkle, Éponine, meet algebra.

Éponine put both forearms on the counter and leaned forward, her hair falling into her face as she looked over the problems and read equations in a guttural half-whisper.

"That's a very silly way to go about things," she declared, "but we can't really expect everyone to have common sense anyhow."

"I know, right?" Sparkle stared down at the page, shaking his head. "Like, it wants to know what the value of A is, if the answer is five and it's thirty minus the square root of A. And I think, and don't quote me on that, but it'd be like... thirty minus five equals twenty-five, right? But it's a... square root, so it'd be that squared. Which is... I don't fucking know, I can't do this in my head. But that's one of the easy ones, and it's just making math suck. A lot."

Algebra, asking math questions inside-out since like Babylon. Dammit, Babylon.

"What in hell is a square root?" Éponine hadn't even made it all the way through learning her multiplication tables, and from the way she grimaced as she asked the question that was a bit embarrassing. "But the rest of it is a bit like a puzzle, I think."

She liked having the chance to prove she was clever, so she was already determined not to let this confusing new mixture of numbers and letters (honestly, letters, who thought of that?) discourage her just yet.

"A number squared is what you get when you multiply it by itself," Sparkle dutifully shared, because if he'd managed to pick up anything in all of his years of skipping classes, at least there was that. "So, a square root is kind of like the opposite of that. Like... four squared is sixteen. Which means the square root of sixteen is like, four."

And then Sparkle blinked. Because he really hadn't figured he'd be able to explain anything about math to anyone without standing around stupidly and stuttering for a while, first.

That was simple enough to understand, and she could get as far as figuring out that 7 was the square root of 49, at least.

"Well, there's something new I've learned," Éponine told him. "What's got you startled?"

"Just never thought I'd be able to explain something like that," Sparkle admitted, scratching his head and looking perplexed. "But then, I don't really sit down and talk about math with people, either."

This was what being an attentive student felt like, wasn't it? Weird.

"It isn't as if most of us have the time to do that, good lord," Éponine declared. "There's other things to be concerned with, after all, much more practical than silly old imaginary riddles about numbers, as if what sum ought to go there is going to buy dinner when one's too hungry to even add one plus one!"

As dismissive as she sounded, the truth was that at the moment she found her lack of mathematical education somewhat mortifying.

"Right?" Sparkle frowned a little more. "I can count change at a till, that's about all I'm going to need, isn't it?"

He poked at the textbook, wrinkling his nose. "I can't even imagine when I'm gonna need this. I haven't needed it yet."

Yeah, Sparkle was feeling it too.

"And to make sure you haven't been cheated on your pay." Éponine had such faith in humanity. "Goodness, I managed to puzzle out how to count money properly here, isn't that enough?"

She said, as if Restoration-era currency made so much more sense.

"I used to deliver letters about the Quartier Latin every now and then," she added, in a slightly more distant voice, "and sometimes I'd go into some of the wine shops and taverns thereabouts. People talk, you know, ever so much, when they've been drinking. There was one boy, once, who went on and on, some nonsense about old dead Greeks and mathematics and of civilization being built on all that. That may be so, and God knows if it wasn't just more idle chatter -- young men like that can afford to do nothing but drink away their family's money and make grand useless speeches, after all -- but what do I care so long as I can make use of the streets?"

"Dunno," Sparkle sighed. "I mean, yeah, I got two jobs here, and that's two jobs more than I ever figured I was gonna have. But what's the rest of it got to do with us? We get by. Like, day by day we get by, and knowing about ancient civilizations and how to find the value of Q aren't really things that are going to influence where my next meal comes from."

All right, so maybe their perspective was a short-sighted one.

"I don't see how either," Éponine agreed. "But I spend so much time a day sitting about waiting, in case customers happen to come in, and I do get bored, and it does make one look awfully respectable to know things like this."

She glanced around to see if she could spot either of the cats (she couldn't, and whether that was a good thing or not was -- it probably wasn't a good thing, actually) and made a thoughtful-sounding noise. "It still seems silly, though."

"That everything depends so much on stuff like this?" Sparkle tapped the book a few times with one finger to illustrate his point. "I don't get it. I really don't. But some of it... doesn't suck too much to study. I mean, I might even like some of the stories in the lit materials if I wasn't being made to learn them."

Because Sparkle was also very contrary.

"Stories I don't mind at all," Éponine said quickly. "I don't mind reading as many of those as I can."

It was probably a good thing nobody made her discuss those in a class setting, though.

"It must be important, if people are expected to keep learning it all," she said, shrugging. "I'd like to understand why, though."

"Maybe that's all it's about," Sparkle suggested. "They want to know that we understand. Like... I dunno, my reading comprehension isn't complete shit, I understand stories and how they apply to me. What else do they need?"

"As if I would know!" Éponine laughed, a touch too loudly. "I almost think I'm glad I never have to study until I know things to someone else's satisfaction, now."

Which was a complete lie. Under better circumstances she would have been perfectly happy to be a bookworm for the rest of her life.

"You can study things to your own satisfaction, instead," Sparkle offered, along with a little twitch of a smile. "I'm not gonna use these books forever, you know? And if you keep showing up we can... I dunno, bitch about math problems until they start to make sense. Why not?"

Truth be told, he appreciated having someone around who understood that this kind of thing, and the time and means to make use of it, were all a bit of a luxury.

"Oh, d'you think that might work?" asked Éponine, half-joking but interested nonetheless. "Ordinarily I'd say that no, that's silly, of course it would never work otherwise my --"

She broke off and snorted. "This place is so strange, though, I wouldn't be surprised if it did. But anyhow! You know more about it than I do. Perhaps if you help explain what I'm missing, it might start to make more sense to you?"

"Can't hurt to try, right?" Sparkle grinned a little. "Me, I've got to do good enough to at least pass the freaking test at the end, otherwise Karina's gonna be pissed. If I can explain it so it makes sense to you, then that means I understand it, right?"

He tilted his head a little, looking up at the ceiling in thought.

"Either that, or we'll both be wrong because I went and fucked it up."

Also a possibility.

"If you do," said Éponine, exaggeratedly solemn, "I'd be quite displeased but then, it's not as if I'll know, is it? And then I won't be able to correct you, so see that you do get it right."

She was teasing. Mostly. 99%.

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