fandomtownies | The Perk, Tuesday Morning

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The Perk, Tuesday Morning

The island was doing that mistletoe thing again. That mistletoe thing, Sparkle remembered it vividly from a precarious situation in a stairwell back when Alec was still a part of his life, and no amount of lecturing the island on people's right to choose who the hell they kissed for themselves had apparently dissuaded it from making it tradition. But then, he supposed he wasn't surprised. This was the island with the pollen thing, after all. That pollen thing.

Either way, he'd decided that his sanest course of action was to at least get out of the vicinity of people he didn't particularly want to kiss. Not that he didn't love Atton - he did more than almost anybody, and that was the hell of it, but not like that - he just really didn't want to find himself being pestered to kiss the guy by a freaking plant.

Anyway, it was peppermint hot chocolate season at the Perk, and the mistletoe had, for the most part, kept its attention on corners of the place with more people in it than the little table by the window that Sparkle had staked out. Sure, he'd had to give the barista a quick, chaste peck on the cheek to get his drink without being tackled by a plant, but this was the price one paid for getting out of the apartment without having to, like, french-kiss one's roomie.

"You know you're considered a parasite," he informed one creeping garland of mistletoe as it slithered past. "I'm really starting to see why."

[OOC: Open for coffee or kissy, I'm easy and Sparkle's resigned to it.]

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"Don't try to pull a tone argument on me!" Tip. Tip, no. She might've been slightly less pissed off if her pet billboard hadn't spent all morning flirting with sentient mistletoe. But, well. "I get to be angry when I'm angry!" She spun back on the barista and pointed at her. "I'm sorry I'm yelling! Can I please have a non-salted caramel hot chocolate!"

Well. It was a step in the right direction?

"At this rate, she's gonna spit in it," Sparkle muttered to himself, sighing but settling back to watch the show all the same. At least he had his drink to keep him company while all of this unfolded.

The barista looked only slightly mollified, but had clearly put up with worse crap than this before and set to work making Tip's drink. She even only rolled her eyes the once.

Tip had put up with worse than spit in a drink. At least the barista probably didn't spit lighter fluid or something. And that spit-upon drink was coming over to join your table, Sparkle, lucky you!

"You know what the fastest way to rile someone up is?" Tip asked, still grumping hard, as she plopped down across from him. "Telling them to calm down."

Bill spelled an apology. Tip aimed her glare at him instead.

"Oh stay out of it. He can't even read that anyway."

Sparkle raised an eyebrow at her, but shrugged his shoulders, taking another drink from his hot chocolate. He was hardly going to apologize. The barista hadn't deserved to be yelled at. He was gonna stand by that.

"Sucks, doesn't it? Probably almost as much as it sucks to be yelled at in customer service when you can't do anything about it." Casual sip. "Shitty day, Tip?"

Look, he got you, kid, but even Sparkle had moments where he bordered on 'decent human adult' mode. He tried to avoid them in general, but sometimes they poked through.

Tip opened her mouth, but miracle of miracles, realized that continuing to argue about the barista and Tip's attitude would only just make everything worse. So she jammed her hot chocolate in there instead, and burned her tongue.

"I hate everything."

Bill drew a little bubble heart over her head and floated down to land on her a few times in a tiny little robot version of a comforting pat.

"It's December," Sparkle replied knowingly. "Usually it's either one way or the other. I don't think I've ever really met anyone who sits somewhere in the middle."

He gave her a faint, sympathetic smile.

"Stupid island gets a bit aggressive about the holiday. Sucks sometimes."

"A bit." Ah, the scathing sarcasm of the American teenager. "I think even if I liked this stuff I'd be pissed."

If the island ended up giving her a stocking, she was going to burst into tears.

"If you liked it," Sparkle echoed, nodding. "Which... you clearly don't."

Very clearly. He chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment.

"Wanna talk about it?"

"No." Tip took a petulant sip of her drink. "My world got invaded by aliens on Christmas when I was eleven."

So . . . yes. She did want to talk about it.

Apparently so. Sparkle nodded a little, setting his drink down on the table and tilting his head at her. A few years ago, that would've been his go-to reply, and he would have been entirely full of shit. He didn't think she was, though.

That just made it worse.

"Harsh," he replied. "I don't even know particulars, but that sounds like it's gonna kinda ruin the season right away, huh?"

Tip didn't even need to make up smart ass answers to questions. Such was the true legacy of the Boov.

"They abolished Christmas and renamed it 'Smekday' after their general."

"Wow. Assholes and narcissists. Charming guys."

Made sense why she'd be a touch conflicted about the island rubbing it in, then.

"It was ugly, then."

She'd mentioned the alien weapon thing before. Sparkle was going to connect a few dots while he was here.

"After extensive study I've come to the conclusion that there isn't a pretty way to subjugate a native population. Though I guess the Boov were slightly nicer than the aliens who came after them."

Because why get invaded by one colonizing force when you could end up with two?

See Sparkle. See Sparkle grimace.

"Shit," he sighed. "No rest for humanity, huh?"

And yet here he was, unsurprised.

"So, some aliens came crashing in, shit all over the holidays and all over humanity, and then it got worse from there. I'd hate this time of year too, if I'd been through all of that."

And let's be real, he hated this time of year anyway. He just sometimes let himself enjoy bits and pieces of it, because it wasn't like it was going anywhere until January.

Tip nodded, sipped her hot chocolate, and sighed. "I guess at least here I don't have to watch Smekday pageants."

It was hard to watch a dramatization of the supposed events that cleared the alien threat off Earth when you not only knew they were full of shit, you were the actual hero who'd made it all happen. Though, as Tip's mom liked to point out, if she wasn't going to tell anyone what she did, she couldn't get mad at them for getting the story wrong.

"Small favours," Sparkle sighed as he reached for his own drink. "What are things like now? I mean, two hostile takeovers, obviously there's a lot going on. I'm just... I dunno. Curious. If it's not any of my business that's fine too."

"Most of the time it's actually -- okay." Tip stared down at her hot chocolate and shrugged. "I mean, we managed to get rid of both of them. We fought off the Gorg and the Boov were so happy not to get chased across the galaxy by them again that they agreed to move to Titan instead. No one can deny that humans aren't alone in the universe, and we got lots of new technology from the Boov. But -- so much of the world is still broken. So many people died. No one really knows how to deal with it all so a lot of people are just kind of . . . pretending it can all go back to how it was before. Except we still call Christmas 'Smekday' because that's the day the Boov showed up and the day we signed the treaty that made them leave. And I still have to remember watching my mom get sucked up into an alien spaceship when I was supposed to be pretending to wait for Santa."

"Ah," Sparkle replied, and he gave a heavy sigh. Okay, so it was... complicated. "And the fact that they're gone now doesn't undo the damage that was done. Doesn't bring the dead back. Doesn't make the memories any less shitty."

Even if the scale of it was something he had difficulty with, the end result? He could get that.

"How did it work out? I mean, with... you know. Your mom?"

Please don't be dead please don't be dead...

Tip smiled just a little at the look on Sparkle's face. She could guess what he was worried about. "She's fine. The Boov took her to teach them Earth languages. She speaks English and Italian. It took -- forever. And most of the continent of North America. But I found her." She rolled her eyes. "And then she got abducted by the Gorg and I had to go find her again."

And now she kept trying to be all Power Mom and Tip felt bad for not respecting her mom-authority as far as she could throw it.

Well, when your school-aged kid had to rescue you from aliens twice...

Sparkle blew out a breath of relief. Okay, shit, good. Mom was still in the picture, at least. He offered her a little smile back.

"But you did it. Hey, you're pretty damn resourceful, aren't you?"

Tip shrugged, her pride at war with her modesty. Not that that was anything new. "I had some help. Turns out some of the Boov are actually pretty cool. Well. One of them."

Funsize had his moments, but he had built a deathray.

"I mean, I'm guessing 'taking over the planet' kind of mitigates the 'pretty cool' part, some. But... painting a whole group with the same brush, all that? Glad you found one that wasn't all bad."

Ah, J.Lo. Sparkle would adore J.Lo.

"The Boov kind of just did what humans have been doing to each other forever," Tip said. "Just, you know. On a much bigger scale." And then they'd backed off, which was more than could be said for a lot of human colonizing forces. "But yeah. Once J.Lo learned what a mother actually is, he was right on board to help me find her."

"Never said humans didn't suck either," Sparkle shrugged. Seriously, he'd be the last one in the world to try playing that card. "Either way... it's good to hear something worked ou-- J.Lo??"

That reaction was never going to get old.

"He thought it was a common Earth name. You know, from the internet."

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