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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"Yeah, ew," Sparkle muttered, wrinkling his nose down at the smear he'd left on the floor.

Okay, in fairness, he'd kissed teenagers since he'd graduated, but Dante was Dante, and Tip was... tinier than Dante.

"This crap almost smothered me in the dorm stairwell once. While my now-ex and I were in a really weird place. It does not know when to quit, and it isn't making me like this stupid holiday any more than I did before."

The mistletoe, properly chastened, hurried to the farthest part of the coffee shop it could reach.

"Teenager" was a very broad range. And Tip was at the young end of it.

"It does this every year?" Tip asked, still eyeing that smear. Bill bobbed indecisively in the air, wanting to zip off after the mistletoe, but also not wanting to leave Tip when she was in a Mood. Even if Sparkle had already helped mitigate that Mood more than a little robot spelling with bubbles ever could. "I mean, the whole nine, but also the gross PDA plants, specifically?"

"I mean, maybe the plants don't do the thing every year," Sparkle replied, sighing. "But they've definitely done it before. It'd be one thing if it was just hanging in doorways for people to ignore, but nooooo, it has to take its lessons from that gross fucking pollen we get from time to time."

Which he also didn't mind in the right company. But this was not the right company.

". . . Pollen?"

"Oh... you... uh. You don't know the pollen."

Sparkle was about to make your day a whole lot worse, Tip.

"Like, once a year, for a few days to a week, there are these flowers that put off this pollen? That is... some kind of fucking crazy aphrodisiac."

Tip blinked at Sparkle silently. You could practically see her trying to process that information.

"WHY THE FUCK WOULD ANYONE EVEN BUILD A SCHOOL HERE?!"

Pardon her language.

"I HAVE BEEN ASKING THAT FUCKING QUESTION SINCE I WAS FIFTEEN."

Five years, Tip. Sparkle has been asking that question for five years.

"Oh my god I was starting to think I was the fucked-up one for thinking this place was fucked-up thank you for being sane."

"Well, I mean," Tip said. "You are still living here."

So were you, Tip. You could transfer out. Go home to Dan Landry High School maybe.

. . . She could deal with a little apocalyptic hell dimension and horny flowers.

"... Said the pot to the kettle," Sparkle replied, raising his eyebrows at her. "Anyway, you do not want to get me started on why I'm still living here. Living here again. You do not want to get me started on why I came back."

Seriously, it would involve a lot of swearing, and then listing off his other options, which mostly involved places that strongly recommended you get insured against supervillains, or ones that he'd nearly been executed in.

"I've barely even been here half a year," Tip pointed out. "And, um. Okay. But . . . I kinda do? I just -- right now things seem kind of nasty. But we also got to see some other planets this summer. Does the good stuff outweigh the other stuff?"

Sparkle blinked, and then frowned and sighed, reaching for his hot chocolate.

"Sort of," he settled on, not making any move to actually take a mouthful. "I mean, it's gonna be different for everybody. I knew people who were pretty happy here but then went off to a fucking zombie apocalypse, so, like, it's all relative. I came back because my other option was ten to twenty in prison. And here you see some horrifying shit. You do some horrifying shit. But eventually we always come out on top. I don't know anywhere else where you can really say that. Since I was, like, your age, I've been turned into a vampire and back, like, twice. Been kidnapped to alternate timelines at least twice, there was an alien abduction but they were completely fucking inept and we got out in a few days, an elder god tried to steal people's souls and there was the murder circus I told you about and I will not even tell you how many times I have died here."

Deep breath. Exhale.

"But I'm still... like... here. And I have a roof over my head and a job and my freedom, so, I mean, I can hate hate hate what this place does and still say, yeah, for me it's worth it."

Wow, that was a lot. "Died?" Tip asked, her voice small. "Like -- near-death experiences?" He was clearly still alive, after all. Right? Maybe he was a very, very corporeal ghost. . . .

"Like, in order to become a vampire they pretty much have to kill you, first," Sparkle sighed. "Like when I say murder circus I mean they scraped me out of the wreckage of this freak fucking ferris wheel accident. Or the time this crazy corporation set up shop in town and brought, like, flesh-eating psychopaths but hey, it was okay that they wanted to make sausages out of my eyeballs because you get a get-out-of-staying-dead-free card when you get resurrected in these weird, like, telephone-booth looking things. Dead."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"But there's always something going on. It gets... like... undone, or you get better or..." He sighed. "I'm scaring the shit out of you right now, aren't I? Look, I'm alive and in one piece, I swear."

Just a bit, yeah.

"I'm . . . starting to think sanity is maybe not actually a thing, here."

Not because she doubted what he said was true -- she turned into a pony this summer, then an orange, and just a couple weeks ago she helped smash another version of herself to little pieces. But simply because nothing about this place seemed remotely sane.

"It's mostly just a really nice thought you hold on to when you come through the door, and then you forget where you left it until it's time to leave," Sparkle confirmed, huffing out a little sigh. "But, I mean, for the most part this place is boring. You can have months on end where the weirdest thing you notice is that there's a moose working in the office at the school. Oooor there's December."

He shrugged. Paused to actually take a drink of his... peppermint chocolate milk, by this point.

"If you ever want somebody you can hate on all of this with, I am so there. I've been bitching about this bullshit island since I was in school myself. I have been running and hiding and losing my mind around here for years. And if there was somewhere else I could go, maybe I would. But for as fucked up as my luck is here, everywhere else it's been worse. So..."

"So you're sticking around," Tip said. "I think I'd like that. I didn't even know there was a moose in the office." That might have been a joke, but Tip was betting on 'no'. "And you don't seem like you're all wrapped up in how things are supposed to work. Most grownups I know would just say 'that's how things are, kid, deal.'"

It was possibly because Sparkle was still a very young grown up. Seemed like only the really young ones or the really old ones could see around the piles of bullshit that were being a grown up.

"Doing things the way they're supposed to be done really isn't my style," Sparkle replied, shrugging. "I mean, I can tell you that's how things are, because fucking believe me I know how things are, but I'm not gonna tell anybody they have to suck it up and like it. That's bullshit. You don't say, 'shit sucks, deal,' you say, 'shit sucks, now what the hell do we do about it?'"

And maybe sometimes it would involve arson. But for the most part the solutions were less criminal, honest.

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The Perk, Tuesday Morning

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