fandomtownies | Demon Marcus, Sunday

Entry tags:

Demon Marcus, Sunday

Sparkle was just kicking his feet as he sat behind the counter at Demon Marcus today. He had a YouTube playlist going, playing some random user's best of the Tragically Hip selections, feeling alone and kind of apart from the rest of the world today. He hadn't learned about the farewell concert until it was too late, and that was exactly the sort of thing that he would have been right in the thick of last night, getting lost in some crowd at a bar or sneaking into the CNE or the Distillery District or...

Look, it was just that there was nothing quite like finding out you spent another night alone as a fugitive in self-imposed exile in America while an entire country came together to say goodbye to a national icon back home that...

He huffed out a sigh and rested his head on the counter. He'd been feeling off ever since being grabbed on Coruscant, and things were too damn quiet with Atton away no matter what had gone on, and so help him, for a guy who had never really had a place he could call home, he'd been feeling what he could only describe as homesick lately. He'd always been one sort of alone or another, but this was different. It was a kind of bone-deep tired alone that made it hard to breathe whenever he acknowledged it.

Maybe that's why he'd been spending so much time trying to do anything but exactly that.

If anybody came into the shop today and Sparkle wasn't at the counter at the time, he was just in the back room. Doing inventory or placing orders or trying to find stuff to restock or... something.

It takes all your power
To prove that you don't care...

[OOC: OCD free, and open post is open.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Visas was in the cockpit. Atton was slouched somewhere in the dorms, feeling an entirely physicaly kind of tired.

At least she'd taken his mind off of the usual mid-August... thing... a little, but they'd been fighting a lot.

And he hadn't forgotten the other part of her ultimatum.

So now, in the silence, he was calling Sparkle.

It was not exactly quiet at the Demon Marcus when Sparkle's phone began to ring. He had Bobcaygeon playing a little too loudly, and he was opting to nope out for a few minutes in the back room again. It was comfortable back there. Slightly crowded, what with all of the boxes and whatnot, but it was the least island part of the island that he had access to.

He was going to just camp out back here for a while, maybe.

He sounded maybe a bit tired when he answered the phone, but that had been kind of the status quo lately, so it wasn't like he was obviously trying to cover anything up, either.

"Hey?"

Edited 2016-08-21 15:09 (UTC)

"Hey, Sparks," said the other tired-sounding guy. "It's me."

It was a big ol' party of tired guys, right here.

"Hey, so it is," Sparkle replied, and there was a bit of a smile in that, at least. "Still stubbornly hanging in there, huh? What do I owe the pleasure of this phone call to?"

"Warning you up front that I'm moving back in tomorrow?" Atton said. He bumped his head gently back against the wall. "Or Tuesday. Depends on the flight."

"Yeah?"

Shit, that wasn't supposed to sound so hopeful. Sparkle wasn't desperately alone, here, dammit. He was just... comfortably melancholy. Yeah.

"So," and now he was drawling a little, mostly to cover, "I guess that means I should hide the entire litter of kittens I brought home while you were away, huh?"

He'd done no such thing.

Atton let out a snort.

"If I find even a scrap of cat poop in that apartment when I come back..."

That rant would've been longer some other day, but hey, he was trying.

"Aw, come on. They shit in a box," Sparkle replied, with a soft huff of a laugh of his own. "Their nastiness is all, like, self-contained. Unless they miss or they're feeling spiteful."

These hypothetical cats were totally capable of spite. They were less capable of shitting on the floor.

"... Had your fill of that galaxy for a bit, then?"

"I could use a break, yeah," Atton said, rubbing at his forehead. "I already put in for a new class, so I'm going to be mostly out of here for at least a semester."

"Cool." Sparkle found himself a box of jeans, and just sort of flopped back against it. It was comfortable enough if you weren't picky about that sort of thing, anyway. Or if you just didn't care. "Teaching anything good, at least?"

"Gambling," Atton said. "Mostly figuratively speaking."

"Wait, what?" Sparkle blinked. "Okay, now you know I'm gonna sulk at you when you get back, right? We didn't have a gambling class when I was still in school."

All those many moons ago.

"That actually sounds like fun."

"Well, it's gonna be a little bit of cards, a little bit of roulette, and a whole lot of getting out of trouble by betting on luck," Atton ventured. "So it's not like you don't know this stuff."

"Okay, no, I'm old hat at the trouble part," Sparkle allowed, "but luck and I aren't great friends or anything. If we were, I wouldn't be in that trouble in the first place. The getting out of it part is usually... you know."

He waved a hand around, staring up at the ceiling as he picked at words.

"... People."

"You need one kind of luck to avoid trouble and another to get out of it," Atton said sagely. "The first kind mostly involves being kind of dull."

"And the second kind involves knowing people who aren't?"

Sparkle didn't sound entirely convinced, but then, Sparkle was also spending his day being a sad sack because he was starting to really realize just how many bridges he'd burned.

"The second involves giving in to being really, truly stupid," Atton said.

He let out a sigh. "I'll have to work on the syllabus later."

".... Oh god, am I the second one? I'm the second one."

He certainly wasn't boring, after all. He hoped. Dammit.

"Can I see the syllabus when it's done? I know I can't take the class, but... you know. Can't hurt to see if there's anything I'm missing. All that good stuff."

"Sparks, you're absolutely nuts if you think I'm not making you come up with stuff for this thing with me," Atton muttered. "Next semester's in a week and I feel like I could sleep for a month."

"Well, as a guy who totally falls under the 'second one' category, I think I can come up with a few good scenarios," Sparkle replied. "I have 'taking stupid chances' down to an art form, I mean."

This much, at least, was true.

"Maybe we should co-teach one of these days," Atton mused.

He shut his eyes for a second.

"'m looking forward to sleeping somewhere Jedi won't show up without warning."

In other words, MCA #4, where he had a Sparkle for companionship and nobody else to make his life miserable.

"... Oh god, the school doesn't need me teaching for them," Sparkle half-choked. "I mean, shit, I've, like, slept with at least one of the students there."

And at least one of the teachers there. Sparkle's position in Fandom society was a confusing one at the best of times.

"... But it'll be good to have you back here. It's been weird without you."

'Weird' was Sparkle shorthand for 'wrong.'

"Have you forgotten about the year I was a teacher and you and Sia were still students?" Atton said. "Like, if you need helpful tips on how to deal with that poodoo, have I got some for you."

They mostly involved looking very uncomfortable and praying the end of the semester showed up, like, right now, but still.

He cleared his throat. "Anyway," he said. "Back tomorrow. Everything'll go back to normal. Blah blah boring, the usual."

Atton didn't so much linger on 'wrong' anymore, but if he'd been entirely honest, which he avoided at all costs, he would have said he'd felt distinctly unmoored spending as much time in a Sparkle-free environment. It just wasn't home.

"I've missed the usual," Sparkle sighed. "God, I'm listening to The Hip and contemplating placing orders for winter gear today just so that there's something, like, familiar around here. Also because it's almost fall, but mostly because I apparently need a toque in my life for sanity reasons."

It was okay, Sparkle. One third of the population of Canada watched that concert last night, you were allowed to feel left out.

"But... hey, maybe we could teach something together sometime. I have no idea what the hell would teach, but it could be fun."

Also, weird. Seriously, he had no business teaching shit to teenagers.

Neither had Atton, and yet that'd never stopped him.

"You're going to have to fill me in on whatever The Hip is when I get back," Atton said, sighing. "Unless that's weird Canadian-speak again."

"The Tragically Hip," Sparkle supplied. "They're a band. Were a band. They had their last concert ever last night, and, like, I'm listening to a playlist of their stuff and half these songs I end up doing a double take and going, 'That was them too?' They've been around since before I was born."

Basically, there wasn't a Canadian alive who didn't know their stuff, even if they didn't know it was their stuff.

"I dunno, I think you might like 'em."

"They're probably not as good as Metallica, but fine, sure, we'll see."

Atton sighed. He felt his energy levels waning already. The sooner they got out of August, the better.

"Anything else important going on that I need to know about?"

"Important? Not really... there are dinosaurs on the planet the island is parked at? But that's about... it. It's been quiet again."

Sparkle didn't trust it. That much was probably clear in his voice.

"Well, it's gonna stop being quiet soon enough," Atton said. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Sooner or later."

"It always does," Sparkle agreed with a sigh. "Just, maybe hopefully this time, whatever it is that bites us in the ass is easy to get rid of."

But honestly, were they ever that lucky?

"With any luck I'll actually get to sleep in for the next week before something explodes in our faces," Atton said philosophically. "That's all I ask."

"Seems like a reasonable request to me," Sparkle decided, nodding. "Sleeping in. Like. It's break week, right? So we should be able to have at least that."

Come on, Island. Do them a favour, here.

"I say we do nothing for the rest of the week besides eat, sleep, and watch trash on Netflix," Atton said. "I think we've earned that."

After... everything.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Demon Marcus, Sunday

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

no subject