(no subject)
alright, fic posting-to-journal time, take one. originally posted to ao3 for 2011's sanctuary secret santa.
fandom: sanctuary
characters: helen, ashley, will, henry, the big guy, tesla
title: Five Nights of Frivolity and Fun at Dr. Helen Magnus’s Home for Absurd Creatures
rating: g
words: a little over 3,000
notes: set sometime mid-season one. for lanna_kitty's secret santa! thankly thanks to missparker for the crazyawesome title and to cartography for the crazyawesome idea.
summary: five sanctuary game nights.
1.
At least once every two weeks, the Sanctuary gang piles into a room with snacks and popcorn and they attempt, good-naturedly, to beat each other's asses at various pastime games.
Magnus always wins at the historical knowledge ones like Trivial Pursuit (although more often than not they all forfeit the game with a groan because at least once a round she’ll pick up a card only to scan it silently and declare the piece of trivia to be ‘absolutely incorrect’ and proceed to regale them all with some account of the time Joe McCarthy or Paul McCartney or whoever it was most definitely did not do whatever it said he did and, in fact, did this instead, fascinating story actually...)
Nobody would ever agree to chess with her, either because she had nearly two centuries more experience with seeing the bigger picture than everyone else and so no matter what it was always a ridiculously unmatched game. Scrabble was a little better but she’d usually pull some bizarre Victorian word like “fogle” which had them all scrambling for a dictionary while she sat grinning like a queen on her throne.
But the game she really kicked ass at was the one that surprised no one but Will, even though it probably should have, but the novelty had worn off for Ashley and Henry and the Big Guy years ago.
The first night they’d played, Will had sat stunned and too amused to laugh as Magnus and the Big Guy ducked out to the kitchen for more tea things. She’d just (almost literally) beat all of their skinny behinds; zero zero zero and zero to a million and eleventy nine, or something.
“Did that really just happen?”
“Yeah, buddy,” Henry confirmed.
Ashley gave him a long, serious look, eyebrows raised. “Dude, I don’t think you get how obsessed with Harry Potter Scene It my mom is.”
2.
Ashley has a poker face that could stare down a grizzly bear. Sometimes Magnus will roll her eyes as she gathers up the deck of cards after a game and declare that she has no idea on earth where she gets it from, which makes the rest of them snicker behind their hands (because, Will leans over to chuckle at Henry, isn’t it obvious?).
They don’t bet for much but if you asked Henry, he'd say he’s lost more money to Ashley Magnus than he has to the people (geniuses) who invented the goddamn video game.
He’s lost quite a few items of clothing to her over poker, too, but that’s a story for a different time.
3.
Nikola Tesla watches with a vaguely horrified expression from beside the bay windows in the game room, one hand against his hip, the other wrapped around the stem of a glass of one of Magnus’s finer French wines (nearly empty).
“I cannot believe I am subjecting my superior intellect,” he says, his voice equally vaguely horrified, “to this.”
“Hey Vlad,” Ashley calls. “Didn’t your mom ever teach you the thing about not having anything nice to say?”
“Yeah,” Henry agrees, and they all chime in haphazardly for the recitation that inevitably follows: “Don’t say anything at all!”
"This is our bonding time, Nikola. You'll just have to endure." Magnus gives him a pointed look.
Nikola rolls his eyes and continues to brood.
Magnus and Will are already out of the game, although they both gave an impressive, gallant effort. Helen Magnus may be over a century old but she is just as flexible, has just as much endurance as Will Zimmerman, although she’s also a lot less drunk.
Will had learned about three weeks ago that every third Friday at the Sanctuary is Tequila and Twister Night, and had decided not to question it.
It’s become something of a game in its own right (okay not really a game, but definitely something that provides endless hours of entertainment after they’ve all had too many margaritas to stand up straight) to sit back and spin the wheel and watch the Big Guy go it alone.
He does mini-cartwheels across the polka dotted spread and all manner of other equally impressive gymnastic feats, as fast as they can call out the combos, and even Nikola peeks behind his shoulder to watch eventually.
Magnus catches him staring and smiles, but she knows better than to offer that he join in. His dignity would likely never recover.
4.
“It’s not really fair though,” Ashley whines. Okay it’s not really a whine, but her voice is definitely thinning. “Will has those creepy eyes that see and remember everything.”
Henry agrees solemnly. “Like the eye of Sauron.”
Will takes a break from looking offended to knock his shoulder approvingly into Henry’s. “Nice one, man.” Then he turns back to Ashley, putting his indignant voice back on. “Just because I have gifts, okay, doesn’t mean-“
“-all right, children,” Magnus interrupts. “It is not Will’s fault that he’s won every round of this silly flash card memory game, any more than it is your fault, Ashley, for being the least readable person in the room whenever you insist on Texas hold ‘em.”
Helen Magnus sounds as silly as the flash card memory game saying "Texas hold ‘em”, but nobody is brave enough to mention it.
5.
Sometimes, Henry makes them all play Wii. And there’s never a question of who exactly has the advantage on these nights, just like there’s never a question of who will roll her eyes for the entire two-plus hours they’ll spend in the media room.
Usually Magnus refuses flat out, and often she is polite enough, but sometimes she only excuses herself after giving a long, hard, basilisk stare to the Yoshi in her Mario Kart, like it was his fault for spiraling out of control because she’d taken that last curve like a bat out of hell.
Sometimes Henry and Ashley try to give her a pointer or two about the controller, to improve her technique, but she really doesn’t want to hear it. She’ll snap, say something like “I am a hundred and fifty eight years old, all right, I think I can handle a bit of simple machinery!” but it really just makes her sound like she’s eight years old instead, and so they just shut up and leave her to her bottle of Riesling.
The Big Guy is surprisingly deft with the slender Wii remote, and it’s kind of beautiful to watch, in a weird way.
Will plays for a while, too, pretty damn decently, but at this point he’s new enough to feel more obligated to the paperwork Magnus gives him than he does to having fun with them, even though Magnus herself tries to give him the excuse to unwind like this fairly often.
So the media room fills with Ashley and Henry and the Big Guy’s laughter and alternating shouts of rage and triumph for a few hours, while Magnus sits with a raised brow and observes quietly like this is one ritual she will never understand. Well into her second glass of wine, though, she lets her lips curl gently upwards.
Will sits across from her with a beer and a brown folder full of inventory data. After a while they catch each other's gaze, and lean forward to clink their glasses together without a word. Ashley and Henry end up inching closer together on the couch and they lean against one another under the pretense of flailing their controllers around (for leverage, you see, it totally helps). The Big Guy grunts amusedly, knowingly, and this all carries on well past the two-hour (two-o’clock-in-the-morning) mark.
When they all depart for bed, finally, Magnus smiles widely at Will and ruffles the hair at the nape of Henry's neck and kisses Ashley's temple and gives the Big Guy's shoulder a squeeze. She's relaxed for once and they're relaxed for once and this right here is the entire point of these game nights. Tomorrow they'll be up for the morning's meeting at eight AM sharp (and whoever's lucky enough to be on call for the 6 AM feedings, obviously earlier) and they'll make all the rounds, they'll go out bagging and tagging and they'll do mountains of paperwork and every other painstaking and exhausting thing it takes to keep this Sanctuary network up and running.
But it's okay, because next week they'll order flat bread pizza from the city and gather around to play Monopoly and they'll stop thinking about work stress again for awhile. They'll enjoy each other's company and they'll be fondly annoyed by each other, like always. Magnus will talk about the real estate like it's not theoretical, Ashley will complain about how boring said real estate is, Will and Henry will try to steal extra fake cash from the bank and the Big Guy will slap their hands away but in the end they'll all remember that it was never really about the game, anyway.
-
fandom: sanctuary
characters: helen, ashley, will, henry, the big guy, tesla
title: Five Nights of Frivolity and Fun at Dr. Helen Magnus’s Home for Absurd Creatures
rating: g
words: a little over 3,000
notes: set sometime mid-season one. for lanna_kitty's secret santa! thankly thanks to missparker for the crazyawesome title and to cartography for the crazyawesome idea.
summary: five sanctuary game nights.
1.
At least once every two weeks, the Sanctuary gang piles into a room with snacks and popcorn and they attempt, good-naturedly, to beat each other's asses at various pastime games.
Magnus always wins at the historical knowledge ones like Trivial Pursuit (although more often than not they all forfeit the game with a groan because at least once a round she’ll pick up a card only to scan it silently and declare the piece of trivia to be ‘absolutely incorrect’ and proceed to regale them all with some account of the time Joe McCarthy or Paul McCartney or whoever it was most definitely did not do whatever it said he did and, in fact, did this instead, fascinating story actually...)
Nobody would ever agree to chess with her, either because she had nearly two centuries more experience with seeing the bigger picture than everyone else and so no matter what it was always a ridiculously unmatched game. Scrabble was a little better but she’d usually pull some bizarre Victorian word like “fogle” which had them all scrambling for a dictionary while she sat grinning like a queen on her throne.
But the game she really kicked ass at was the one that surprised no one but Will, even though it probably should have, but the novelty had worn off for Ashley and Henry and the Big Guy years ago.
The first night they’d played, Will had sat stunned and too amused to laugh as Magnus and the Big Guy ducked out to the kitchen for more tea things. She’d just (almost literally) beat all of their skinny behinds; zero zero zero and zero to a million and eleventy nine, or something.
“Did that really just happen?”
“Yeah, buddy,” Henry confirmed.
Ashley gave him a long, serious look, eyebrows raised. “Dude, I don’t think you get how obsessed with Harry Potter Scene It my mom is.”
2.
Ashley has a poker face that could stare down a grizzly bear. Sometimes Magnus will roll her eyes as she gathers up the deck of cards after a game and declare that she has no idea on earth where she gets it from, which makes the rest of them snicker behind their hands (because, Will leans over to chuckle at Henry, isn’t it obvious?).
They don’t bet for much but if you asked Henry, he'd say he’s lost more money to Ashley Magnus than he has to the people (geniuses) who invented the goddamn video game.
He’s lost quite a few items of clothing to her over poker, too, but that’s a story for a different time.
3.
Nikola Tesla watches with a vaguely horrified expression from beside the bay windows in the game room, one hand against his hip, the other wrapped around the stem of a glass of one of Magnus’s finer French wines (nearly empty).
“I cannot believe I am subjecting my superior intellect,” he says, his voice equally vaguely horrified, “to this.”
“Hey Vlad,” Ashley calls. “Didn’t your mom ever teach you the thing about not having anything nice to say?”
“Yeah,” Henry agrees, and they all chime in haphazardly for the recitation that inevitably follows: “Don’t say anything at all!”
"This is our bonding time, Nikola. You'll just have to endure." Magnus gives him a pointed look.
Nikola rolls his eyes and continues to brood.
Magnus and Will are already out of the game, although they both gave an impressive, gallant effort. Helen Magnus may be over a century old but she is just as flexible, has just as much endurance as Will Zimmerman, although she’s also a lot less drunk.
Will had learned about three weeks ago that every third Friday at the Sanctuary is Tequila and Twister Night, and had decided not to question it.
It’s become something of a game in its own right (okay not really a game, but definitely something that provides endless hours of entertainment after they’ve all had too many margaritas to stand up straight) to sit back and spin the wheel and watch the Big Guy go it alone.
He does mini-cartwheels across the polka dotted spread and all manner of other equally impressive gymnastic feats, as fast as they can call out the combos, and even Nikola peeks behind his shoulder to watch eventually.
Magnus catches him staring and smiles, but she knows better than to offer that he join in. His dignity would likely never recover.
4.
“It’s not really fair though,” Ashley whines. Okay it’s not really a whine, but her voice is definitely thinning. “Will has those creepy eyes that see and remember everything.”
Henry agrees solemnly. “Like the eye of Sauron.”
Will takes a break from looking offended to knock his shoulder approvingly into Henry’s. “Nice one, man.” Then he turns back to Ashley, putting his indignant voice back on. “Just because I have gifts, okay, doesn’t mean-“
“-all right, children,” Magnus interrupts. “It is not Will’s fault that he’s won every round of this silly flash card memory game, any more than it is your fault, Ashley, for being the least readable person in the room whenever you insist on Texas hold ‘em.”
Helen Magnus sounds as silly as the flash card memory game saying "Texas hold ‘em”, but nobody is brave enough to mention it.
5.
Sometimes, Henry makes them all play Wii. And there’s never a question of who exactly has the advantage on these nights, just like there’s never a question of who will roll her eyes for the entire two-plus hours they’ll spend in the media room.
Usually Magnus refuses flat out, and often she is polite enough, but sometimes she only excuses herself after giving a long, hard, basilisk stare to the Yoshi in her Mario Kart, like it was his fault for spiraling out of control because she’d taken that last curve like a bat out of hell.
Sometimes Henry and Ashley try to give her a pointer or two about the controller, to improve her technique, but she really doesn’t want to hear it. She’ll snap, say something like “I am a hundred and fifty eight years old, all right, I think I can handle a bit of simple machinery!” but it really just makes her sound like she’s eight years old instead, and so they just shut up and leave her to her bottle of Riesling.
The Big Guy is surprisingly deft with the slender Wii remote, and it’s kind of beautiful to watch, in a weird way.
Will plays for a while, too, pretty damn decently, but at this point he’s new enough to feel more obligated to the paperwork Magnus gives him than he does to having fun with them, even though Magnus herself tries to give him the excuse to unwind like this fairly often.
So the media room fills with Ashley and Henry and the Big Guy’s laughter and alternating shouts of rage and triumph for a few hours, while Magnus sits with a raised brow and observes quietly like this is one ritual she will never understand. Well into her second glass of wine, though, she lets her lips curl gently upwards.
Will sits across from her with a beer and a brown folder full of inventory data. After a while they catch each other's gaze, and lean forward to clink their glasses together without a word. Ashley and Henry end up inching closer together on the couch and they lean against one another under the pretense of flailing their controllers around (for leverage, you see, it totally helps). The Big Guy grunts amusedly, knowingly, and this all carries on well past the two-hour (two-o’clock-in-the-morning) mark.
When they all depart for bed, finally, Magnus smiles widely at Will and ruffles the hair at the nape of Henry's neck and kisses Ashley's temple and gives the Big Guy's shoulder a squeeze. She's relaxed for once and they're relaxed for once and this right here is the entire point of these game nights. Tomorrow they'll be up for the morning's meeting at eight AM sharp (and whoever's lucky enough to be on call for the 6 AM feedings, obviously earlier) and they'll make all the rounds, they'll go out bagging and tagging and they'll do mountains of paperwork and every other painstaking and exhausting thing it takes to keep this Sanctuary network up and running.
But it's okay, because next week they'll order flat bread pizza from the city and gather around to play Monopoly and they'll stop thinking about work stress again for awhile. They'll enjoy each other's company and they'll be fondly annoyed by each other, like always. Magnus will talk about the real estate like it's not theoretical, Ashley will complain about how boring said real estate is, Will and Henry will try to steal extra fake cash from the bank and the Big Guy will slap their hands away but in the end they'll all remember that it was never really about the game, anyway.
-