fandomtownies | Demon Marcus, Sunday, All Day

Entry tags:

Demon Marcus, Sunday, All Day

Sparkle was having another slow shift at Demon Marcus. Everything that needed to be put out was out, everything that needed to be chucked into the back room and hidden away from humanity for the sake of good taste was hidden away... Hell, Sparkle had even swept and mopped the floors early out of sheer boredom.

Clearly, the only thing to do at this point was to slump melodramatically over the counter and lament how boring today truly was. Maybe while painting his nails in rainbow colours.

"Why is it so damn hard to find a good, solid yellow?"

Sparkle's life was so tough.

[Open, OCD-free!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In case Sparkle wasn't aware, Alec did not love being at this store. But he had told Izzy that he'd try to have a conversation with Sparkle, and although he didn't know his boyfriend's work schedule by heart, this was his best guess as to Sparkle's whereabouts, and it turned out to be right.

He had a shopping bag in one hand and a tray with two coffee cups in the other, but Shadowhunter coordination meant that he managed to open the door without spilling or dropping anything.

"He-- oh, I should have gotten you a drink that comes with a straw." Oops.

"Hm?" Sparkle blinked up from his nail-polishing, and then broke into a little grin. "Oh, you don't have to worry about that. It's not like I put up a sign saying I was paining my nails or anything. You brought me coffee?"

He waved his hands around a little, letting his fingers dry.

"Best boyfriend."

"Well, I owed you for watching me last weekend," Alec explained sheepishly, setting the cup down on the counter. "Oh, speaking of which."

He held out the bag he was holding. But then he remembered that Sparkle's nails were wet, so he ducked his head and just took out the gift that was inside.

"I saw this and thought of you."

Well, he had. But he also thought it would make this conversation less tricky.

Edited 2013-11-03 17:40 (UTC)

Oh, that was a nice scarf. And for a moment, Sparkle couldn't help but wonder if maybe he was starting to train a sense of good taste into his boyfriend, or maybe he'd asked someone if it was hideous or not. He didn't say any of that, of course, because he was too busy breaking into a grin, and then leaning clear across the counter (mindful of the coffee) to solicit a kiss from Alec.

"It's great," he informed him. "You didn't have to, babe, but I love it."

"Well, I wasn't going to wear it," Alec joked. It was a lame joke. But accurate. Because it wasn't black. "You're welcome. I'm glad you like it."

He figured he couldn't go wrong with yellow.

"So are you, uh, really busy here?" He was guessing no.

"Drowning in work to do, can't you tell?" Sparkle straightened up with a little smirk, drumming his fingertips once on the countertop. "Why, you wanna get out of here?"

"Well, I wanted to talk to you about something," Alec said carefully. "But it can be here. Or not, if you want to go on break." See, Sparkle had options!

Ah. Sparkle looked at the scarf, and then back up at Alec, and he raised an eyebrow.

"This is totally a sucking-up-to-Sparkle-before-a-shitty-conversation scarf, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Alec confessed. "Is that okay?"

"Kinda ruins the scarf a bit," Sparkle pointed out, raising an eyebrow. "The rest depends on how shitty this conversation is going to be."

The eyebrow was staying raised. Alec was welcome to elaborate whenever, and Sparks would just be drumming his fingertips on the countertop some more in the meantime.

"Well," Alec said, suddenly very preoccupied with how he should hold his arms and settling for awkwardly clasping his hands on the counter, "I was wondering what happened with you and my sister on Saturday. You seemed really, um, angry at her."

Sparkle just crossed his own arms, mirroring Alec's pose.

"She fed you a chunk of cow shit calling it a birthday cake," he pointed out. "You were trying to get that taste out of your mouth for how long that night? You'd think she'd taste that first or something, it was your friggin' birthday."

That... actually wasn't Sparkle's issue with Isabelle at all. But it was a start.

"Yeah, but... I think part of that might have been that panthers aren't supposed to eat cake," Alec said gently, but that wasn't really his point, so he moved on quickly to the next thing he had to say. "And I just meant... being a bad cook isn't something I think you'd normally yell at someone about, so I was thinking maybe there was more than that."

Like how she was a complete and utter psycho, and a bully?

"What, you figure she can't take a little yelling at? I thought she was made of tougher stuff." Sparkle was trying not to scowl, now, and failing. "I mean, that's the impression she always gave me on the visits she paid me here at work."

"I don't..." Okay, clearly Alec needed to ask some more about those visits. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and said, "Visits?"

"You know," Sparkle shrugged. "Visits. Coming in. Making sure I'm behaving myself. Really getting well-acquainted with the fact that my boyfriend's sister is here on the island and watching, and all."

Flat. That came out sounding super flat, and he'd been going for casual.

Alec felt a twinge of irritation at the vagueness, so his tone was a little sharper than he meant for it to be when he asked, "And did anything happen that you want to tell me about, or...?"

"If I wanted to tell you about it, you don't think I would have?"

If you were going to get sharp with Sparkle, Alec, he was going to get snippy right back.

"She doesn't fucking do anything, if that's what you want to know. She comes in, she makes damn sure I know she's here and she can snap my neck if she wants to, and she leaves again. I'm not really your sister's biggest fan, for some reason."

Alec blinked once. And then a second time.

"I don't get it," he said.

And because he recognized that that statement was just as vague as anything Sparkle had said, he clarified, "I get why she would... alarm you, and I talked to her about that," because he knew his sister and the intimidating air she could project, "but you're describing her being protective of me, when the other night you accused her of poisoning me on purpose."

"No," Sparkle snapped, "the other night I accused her of being an irresponsible bitch who wasn't paying attention to what she was doing, and yeah, maybe it was a coincidence that you turned into a panther at the same damn time, but maybe her cooking was just that fucking nasty, I don't know."

He shoved the scarf back across the counter toward Alec. Trying to bribe him into playing nice with a pretty present was a shitty move, anyhow.

"Either way, I don't like her. I don't have to like her. I've been given no reason to like her, and I don't have to play nice with someone who gets her kicks out of coming in and playing 'intimidate the mundie' whenever she feels like I might need the reminder."

Weirdly, Sparkle didn't take well to being bullied.

"Well, she told me she wouldn't do that as long as you don't insult her," Alec paraphrased. "But I don't know what to say, since you don't seem to be willing to... not do that."

He crossed his arms over his chest, and he didn't touch the scarf. "She's really important to me. And I know you know that sometimes the island just turns people into animals for no reason that's anyone's fault. Blaming her just seems like..." He trailed off, shaking his head to abort that line of thought.

"So," Sparkle ventured, "she comes in here and makes sure I know my place as the lesser life form on this planet's face. It's happened more than once, even. But I'm the one being unreasonable for getting pissed off at her over something that's, yeah, stupid, fine, but what do you expect me to do? Make nice, pretend everything's okay? It's great she's told you she's not going to come in here and make me a-cute-ly aware that she can powderize my bones with no effort at all, but it really doesn't change the fact that she already has."

... Made him aware. His bones weren't powder quite yet.

"Maybe there's some kind of magic Shadowhunter brother-sister bond going on that I don't grasp, here, but I'm pretty sure there are ways to stand up for your brother that don't involve making pit-stops to terrorize the boyfriend before he's even done anything, too."

Alec kind of hated this conversation. "Honestly," he said carefully, after a longish pause, "I don't know what she said to you exactly, but if Isabelle was dating someone right now whom I didn't know, I can't tell you that I would do anything differently."

It was just how they were. Not Shadowhunters in general, but Lightwoods for sure.

"I am sorry that she threatened you, or did whatever it is that she did. But protecting each other is all we've done for our entire lives, so I can't blame her for looking out for me when she didn't know anything about you."

"So, like, learning about me wasn't an option? Fucking seriously?"

Ugh. Sparkle didn't even want to be near Alec or his stupid scarf just then. He pushed himself away from the counter, throwing his hands into the air.

"Jesus, Alec, you don't know what the hell happened, but you know you'd do the same thing. That's great. It's okay because it's Isabelle, right? She can't do any wrong, and I'm the irrational dick here."

Sparkle was thinking right back to the reunion weekend too. And how the same sort of bullying had gotten so bad that he had just decided it wasn't worth it anymore, and had taken off back to Toronto.

"That's not what I said," Alec said calmly. "I told her to stop what she was doing, and she agreed. I'm talking to you second, Sparkle."

Suggesting that this was the less pressing of the two issues. But now that Sparkle was getting so worked up about it, while Isabelle had required much less persuasion, Alec was wondering if he'd underestimated how easy this would be.

"To Isabelle," he said, "and to me, approaching a greeting like it's a confrontation is a way to learn about someone. I don't... I don't know how to explain that any better." Which he sounded slightly apologetic about, actually.

"Well, it's a fucking shitty way of doing it," Sparkle growled, leaning back against the wall with his arms firmly folded across his chest. "There's this thing called first impressions, heard of those? I managed to shake the one I got of you back in Skywalker's Ethics class, but then, you weren't threatening me or just outright treating me like dirt."

That sort of impression kind of stuck.

That stung, actually. Not the mention of the first impression -- the first part. "You know what we're trained to be," Alec said, almost coolly. "And you know that we weren't raised in an environment where we went and made friends with mundanes. Or anyone."

If Sparkle didn't see how that kind of training would lead to taking a hostile approach with new people and regarding them as threats, Alec didn't know how to explain it. It was his worldview; it was pretty hard to step out of it. Especially since he would have thought that Sparkle would understand that, at least.

"Yeah, well, I wasn't raised in a fucking environment where I was taught to be terribly forgiving of people who come in here, fucking corner me, and make me feel like something subhuman. She gets her kicks off of it, Alec. She mentions you, but it's not like she's not enjoying herself when she does it!"

He wanted to start grabbing things and throwing them. He wanted to start screaming. He wanted to just walk out of the fucking store and not look back.

"It's like cat and fucking mouse, and I am so fucking tired of everyone making me into the vermin and then calling me a fucking worthless punk for not liking it! That's how I grew up, Alec! Remember that?"

It was getting hard to stay calm when Sparkle was like this, and Alec really wanted to stay calm. He exhaled slowly, shutting his eyes for a moment.

"You're blowing it out of proportion," he said finally -- aware, in fact, that that was probably the last thing Sparkle wanted to hear. "And you're -- she's never spoken about you the way you've been speaking about her. I'm not okay with you talking about my sister that way."

His back was perfectly straight, his chin upright. He felt awful. "I don't know what you're looking for from this conversation, but I don't think I can give it to you."

"Then get out," Sparkle growled. "Get out of my store. Get out of my face. I hope you and Isabelle are super happy together, Alec."

He was going to get completely fucked up on something maybe seventy or eighty proof if he could get his hands on it. Today seemed like a great day for horrible life choices.

Alec didn't say anything else. What could he say? He'd come in here to ask Sparkle if he could agree to an olive branch from Isabelle, and it had turned into a lot of shouting and insulting Izzy. Alec knew he let himself be led around a lot by the people in his life, but that was well over a line that he had convinced himself he didn't have.

He took his coffee with him when he turned on his heel and exited the store without a word, but he left the scarf.

That was fine. If Alec honestly couldn't see the difference between someone intentionally and repeatedly hunting someone down to bully them and someone simply being protective of a sibling, Sparkle figured he was probably better off. An olive branch that came without any acknowledgement of wrongdoing by the person clearly in a position of power when being handed to the kid on the receiving end of the blatant bullying wasn't actually much of an olive branch at all.

And Sparkle, good and done with everything, took the scarf and threw it at the door before closing out the till and closing up shop for the day.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Demon Marcus, Sunday, All Day

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject