(no subject)
Who: Sebastian Han (WICKED WITCH) and John Tracey (KAA)
What: A pseudo-villainous encounter, 'principal's office'-style
When: Shortly before these two scenes
Where: The waiting room outside Patricia's office
Rating: PG13 for venom
John: It was just another building on the Upper East Side. No reason, no reason at all, to feel delicate prickles down his spine like an army of spiders as he walked up to the door, dealt with security, and passed inside, into the venerable building that was just like any other in the neighborhood. Sure it was. John shook his head, tried to shake the nerves away, tried to reason them away because, for God's sake, he was just running a couple of errands in the Pentamerone, like any other Tale in the community.
Sure he was.
He hadn't called ahead to get a formal appointment with Patricia, so he wasn't surprised at having to wait outside her office. The room was comfortable enough; his chair certainly was, easing that kink in his lower back from another late night at the computer, fighting with Haloscan and the new moderating software he was trying to get working for the blog's comments. He scowled at the memory while poking through his leather satchel on his lap, past the student papers and file folders, in search of his checkbook. He had brought it for dropping off his dues, hadn't he? Dammit. Not about to get back on the train and ride all the way back home just for that. He didn't want to be late with the payment, either, for pride if nothing else: he paid his bills on time, even the eldritch ones.
Chalk up one more annoyance in the life of a reincarnated fairy tale, he mocked himself. Damn sure Indian rock pythons never have to deal with lost checkbooks.
Sebastian: Sebastian hated the Pentamerone. Ever since his induction he endeavored to spend as little time there as possible - to him it was nothing more than a hotbed of slovenly American morality and standard Tale community lunacy. It didn't help that several of his 'enemies' were in residence, nor that Moderns generally received a blend of suspicion and condescension. No, he liked to meddle in such politics through the safety of his compendium, and maintain as much distance as he could.
Thus, he was looking distinctly unhappy about sitting in Patricia's waiting room - especially since he did have an appointment. He'd been called in for a meeting, which was ominous unto itself, given that his dues were not yet due. He had an amicable enough relationship with his librarian, but he knew that there was an inherent power struggle between them, and he'd been making an extra point lately of testing his boundaries to see what he could get away with. Now that he faced the prospect of paying for his transgressions he was visibly disquieted, though he was a man who rarely looked at all comfortable.
When John arrived he was already present, sitting in the darkest corner of the waiting room. He was dressed in an immaculately tailored black casual suit with an olive green dress shirt, without a hair out of place. Sebastian's eyes followed John as the man entered and took a seat, unapologetic and scrutinizing. He watched John ruffle through his satchel for a moment before speaking, in an abrupt, direct tone. "Who are you?" The question seemed more accusatory than polite, though the tone was largely obfuscated in its formality.
John: He hadn't even noticed the other man, being so caught up in his thoughts and where the hell was that checkbook, so the question thrust starkly out of that shadowy corner took him completely by surprise. John stared up, automatically orienting on the challenging voice, and sat for a frozen second while his heart rate rediscovered its rhythm. Another Tale, pitch-perfect in dress and attitude and dramatic presentation . . . He felt like a worn old schlub by comparison, in his brown sports coat and slacks, with hair that needed a trim and a beard awaiting spring's ritual shaving -- and that feeling unfroze him. He wasn't going to give an inch to anyone, and certainly not to any slick, rich-looking jerk, on this neutral ground.
"Girl Scout," he rapped out like knuckles brisk on hollow wood and let the satchel slide off his lap to slump, still open, between his feet. He folded his arms on his knees and leaned toward the guy, smiling a little, just a bare (bared-teeth) little. His accent swaggered more strongly than usual: Brooklyn born and bred. "You wanna buy a box of cookies? I got Thin Mints, Tagalongs, Samoas. . . ."
Sebastian: Sebastian seemed equally aware of the stark contrast in their appearances, something he seemed to be trying to make especially evident. His hands lifted from his lap to fastidiously straighten his cuffs, never taking his eyes off of the other man. He seemed to have picked his seat particularly for its shadows, which fell ominously over his features. His solemn expression managed to darken ever so slightly at John's glib reply, characterized by a minute wrinkling of the man's nose.
"Ah." He responded knowingly, with open disapproval. "You must be a Wonderlander." The word was punctuated with the same tone one might usually attribute to lepers or door to door salesmen. This seemed to be all that Sebastian needed to know, as his gaze finally shifted away from John, moving with veiled anxiety towards Patricia's closed door.
John: "I'm not one for tea parties," John demurred, once he'd tracked down the reference and decided whether or not to be offended. The other man's tone made it clear that he should be, and that was reason enough to go the other way. On the other hand: tea parties, indeed. No, thanks. He snorted softly, easing into the chair (ahh, his back liked that) on a relaxed elbowing of the nearer arm. Nothing like a little verbal sparring to relax a person right down.
He flicked his attention after Sebastian's, to the door, and then back. The guy did seem a little tense, now that he looked more closely, though it was hard to read his expression and not just because of those oh, so histrionic shadows. Did he look a little familiar, too? Couldn't quite place it; let it go for now. Instead, John asked, "Called in to the principal's office? I hope it's nothing serious, nothing you can't handle." His voice oozed pat-pat-patting anxiety, with just that nice soupçon of condescension. He had come of his own volition, after all, whatever Sebastian's story turned out to be.
Sebastian: Sebastian's expression soured openly at the patronizing concern offered from his anonymous peer, and John received a particularly murderous look. At the exact same time the lights in the anteroom flickered slightly, a coincidence that seemed to momentarily quell the percolating ire in Sebastian's eyes. He cleared his throat and tugged at his lapels to straighten them, clearly unaware of the openly nervous gestures that telegraphed his state of mind.
"Neverland?" He opted again, ignoring John's comments to pursue their original topic of quote-unquote conversation. His tone had become less aloof and more snide, though there was a slightly more conversation edge now, albeit an acidic one. "Or perhaps one of those American 'tall tales'." His lips flickered at a restrained smirk, and he added with idle malice, "I recall there being a parable or two about slaves in that jumbled oral mix."
John: The flickering lights hardly registered -- old building, old wiring, what could you do? -- compared to the pleasure of seeing his syrupy solicitousness dribble into a sore spot. Faintly smiling, John watched Sebastian go through his tidying twitches and figured all right, got in one good hit, and now he could quit while he was ahead. Patricia was surely going to call in one of them any minute now, and that'd be that.
And then came the race card, played with such mean insouciance that he wasn't immediately certain, in his blinking, rewinding surprise, that the guy was really going to go there. On such little provocation? My, my, a touchy bastard, wasn't he?
John stretched a smile out for what it was worth, straightening up with a slow head-shake. "You know," he said with a sort of marveling pity, sliced through by the hard edge he couldn't entirely wear down, "that's the kind of crack I expect from some dumb white kid from Woodlawn. And you sitting there so dignified, so well put together, so clearly above such uncreative crudities -- but you really nailed the mouth-breather demographic. Congratulations, sir! Are you an actor, by any chance, or does it just come naturally?"
Sebastian: Touchy was an epic understatement. Sebastian was a big ball o' rage with a hair trigger under optimal conditions, and being stuck waiting outside of Patricia's office without reason had him wound dangerously tight. The brief show of shock from John seemed to give him some mild amount of satisfaction, which was swiftly wiped clean by the sardonic reply. Sebastian's lips curled up in an aggressive snarl, and a string of what could safely be assumed to be Korean profanity was uttered in a rapid stream.
"How dare you?" Sebastian finally managed to spit out in English, his voice full of righteous indignation. He rose purposefully to his feet, his hands held at his side as though preparing to make some sort of gesture - and in doing so, something particularly odd began to happen. Little swirls of dark green energy began to spark and crackle at his palms with a slowly building intensity, a fact that Sebastian only seemed half aware of. He was livid, and his rage was overruling logic - all he could think was if I'm going to be reprimanded for magic abuse anyways...
Lucky for John, Patricia took this moment to make a timely intervention, the door to her office swinging unexpectedly open. Completely startled, the energy at Sebastian's hands immediately fizzled out, though judging from his choked expression doing so was not entirely pleasant on him. He had the strained look of someone who had just swallowed water into his lungs, though he struggled most ineffectually to smooth over his guilty expression with something more benign. His posture was still suspect, as he was standing in a notably threatening manner, and Patricia gave him a critical, knowing once-over before nodding to John and inviting him into her office. The pleasantness of her manner to the professor, coupled with the disapproving look she cast Sebastian, indicated that he was being made to wait even longer for his inability to even sit in a waiting room without causing trouble.
He barely managed a restrained nod to Patricia before sitting back in his seat in humiliation, all of his fury being condensed into one final glare at John as the man disappeared into the office.
John: When John was a month shy of five years old, he had slipped free of adult supervision in a department store the week after Christmas. While his mother argued with the clerk at the returns counter with six people stacked up behind and arguing at her, he wandered off into the sea of big-people legs and shopping bags that swung alongside them with the size and heft, to his scale, of Big Ben's pendulum. He had ended up in the hardware department: a little boy washed and brushed and dressed to painstaking neatness for the outing, his hands splayed like chubby brown starfish against the side of the band saw that he was determined to climb with all his neophyte jungle-gym prowess. The blade he'd glimpsed at the top was so shiny, a toothed metal ribbon strung vertically across the machine's metal mouth, that even after a horrified employee had swooped in and bodily carried him away, he reached out for it, crying to have it, just to touch it, to see.
His reaction now, half a lifetime later, to the angry spectacle confronting him was exactly the same in two aspects. First, despite the breath-stopping shock of the crackling green energy filling Sebastian's palms, a part of John desperately wanted to touch it, just to see. At the same time that he slammed himself back in his chair, braced by arms and legs turned to fight-or-flight iron, he stared at the terrible beauty of that light -- of that magic because that was what it was, wasn't it, now, Dr. Tracey with your critical sobriety and fancy school learning and thirty-year mortgage? Yes, of course, magic was only a story told to wide-eyed children before bed -- but so were you, weren't you?
The second point of similarity with the band-saw experience was the total relief that swept through him at being rescued by someone familiar and trusted. He did refrain from throwing himself at Patricia in a paroxysm of hysterical sobs, clinging to maternal safety in a world exploded suddenly bigger and scarier than it had any right to be. Nevertheless, he was shaking when he finally pried himself up and out of the chair, and he felt no humiliation at the rescue. Forget strutting attitude and fuck posturing gamesmanship. If the Librarian hadn't come out when she did, would he have ended up a charred stain on the floor? He didn't know. He didn't want to know, really did not want to know, for once in his data-craving life.
But he wouldn't forget. He dragged the shellshocked shards of his pride back together and, on his stalk into Patricia's office, shot Sebastian a fulminating glower, cold rather than hot as suited his temperament and his Tale. He'd remember that face, that polished elegance, that arrogance and that rage. That magic. Yes, he'd remember . . . for a next time.
What: A pseudo-villainous encounter, 'principal's office'-style
When: Shortly before these two scenes
Where: The waiting room outside Patricia's office
Rating: PG13 for venom
John: It was just another building on the Upper East Side. No reason, no reason at all, to feel delicate prickles down his spine like an army of spiders as he walked up to the door, dealt with security, and passed inside, into the venerable building that was just like any other in the neighborhood. Sure it was. John shook his head, tried to shake the nerves away, tried to reason them away because, for God's sake, he was just running a couple of errands in the Pentamerone, like any other Tale in the community.
Sure he was.
He hadn't called ahead to get a formal appointment with Patricia, so he wasn't surprised at having to wait outside her office. The room was comfortable enough; his chair certainly was, easing that kink in his lower back from another late night at the computer, fighting with Haloscan and the new moderating software he was trying to get working for the blog's comments. He scowled at the memory while poking through his leather satchel on his lap, past the student papers and file folders, in search of his checkbook. He had brought it for dropping off his dues, hadn't he? Dammit. Not about to get back on the train and ride all the way back home just for that. He didn't want to be late with the payment, either, for pride if nothing else: he paid his bills on time, even the eldritch ones.
Chalk up one more annoyance in the life of a reincarnated fairy tale, he mocked himself. Damn sure Indian rock pythons never have to deal with lost checkbooks.
Sebastian: Sebastian hated the Pentamerone. Ever since his induction he endeavored to spend as little time there as possible - to him it was nothing more than a hotbed of slovenly American morality and standard Tale community lunacy. It didn't help that several of his 'enemies' were in residence, nor that Moderns generally received a blend of suspicion and condescension. No, he liked to meddle in such politics through the safety of his compendium, and maintain as much distance as he could.
Thus, he was looking distinctly unhappy about sitting in Patricia's waiting room - especially since he did have an appointment. He'd been called in for a meeting, which was ominous unto itself, given that his dues were not yet due. He had an amicable enough relationship with his librarian, but he knew that there was an inherent power struggle between them, and he'd been making an extra point lately of testing his boundaries to see what he could get away with. Now that he faced the prospect of paying for his transgressions he was visibly disquieted, though he was a man who rarely looked at all comfortable.
When John arrived he was already present, sitting in the darkest corner of the waiting room. He was dressed in an immaculately tailored black casual suit with an olive green dress shirt, without a hair out of place. Sebastian's eyes followed John as the man entered and took a seat, unapologetic and scrutinizing. He watched John ruffle through his satchel for a moment before speaking, in an abrupt, direct tone. "Who are you?" The question seemed more accusatory than polite, though the tone was largely obfuscated in its formality.
John: He hadn't even noticed the other man, being so caught up in his thoughts and where the hell was that checkbook, so the question thrust starkly out of that shadowy corner took him completely by surprise. John stared up, automatically orienting on the challenging voice, and sat for a frozen second while his heart rate rediscovered its rhythm. Another Tale, pitch-perfect in dress and attitude and dramatic presentation . . . He felt like a worn old schlub by comparison, in his brown sports coat and slacks, with hair that needed a trim and a beard awaiting spring's ritual shaving -- and that feeling unfroze him. He wasn't going to give an inch to anyone, and certainly not to any slick, rich-looking jerk, on this neutral ground.
"Girl Scout," he rapped out like knuckles brisk on hollow wood and let the satchel slide off his lap to slump, still open, between his feet. He folded his arms on his knees and leaned toward the guy, smiling a little, just a bare (bared-teeth) little. His accent swaggered more strongly than usual: Brooklyn born and bred. "You wanna buy a box of cookies? I got Thin Mints, Tagalongs, Samoas. . . ."
Sebastian: Sebastian seemed equally aware of the stark contrast in their appearances, something he seemed to be trying to make especially evident. His hands lifted from his lap to fastidiously straighten his cuffs, never taking his eyes off of the other man. He seemed to have picked his seat particularly for its shadows, which fell ominously over his features. His solemn expression managed to darken ever so slightly at John's glib reply, characterized by a minute wrinkling of the man's nose.
"Ah." He responded knowingly, with open disapproval. "You must be a Wonderlander." The word was punctuated with the same tone one might usually attribute to lepers or door to door salesmen. This seemed to be all that Sebastian needed to know, as his gaze finally shifted away from John, moving with veiled anxiety towards Patricia's closed door.
John: "I'm not one for tea parties," John demurred, once he'd tracked down the reference and decided whether or not to be offended. The other man's tone made it clear that he should be, and that was reason enough to go the other way. On the other hand: tea parties, indeed. No, thanks. He snorted softly, easing into the chair (ahh, his back liked that) on a relaxed elbowing of the nearer arm. Nothing like a little verbal sparring to relax a person right down.
He flicked his attention after Sebastian's, to the door, and then back. The guy did seem a little tense, now that he looked more closely, though it was hard to read his expression and not just because of those oh, so histrionic shadows. Did he look a little familiar, too? Couldn't quite place it; let it go for now. Instead, John asked, "Called in to the principal's office? I hope it's nothing serious, nothing you can't handle." His voice oozed pat-pat-patting anxiety, with just that nice soupçon of condescension. He had come of his own volition, after all, whatever Sebastian's story turned out to be.
Sebastian: Sebastian's expression soured openly at the patronizing concern offered from his anonymous peer, and John received a particularly murderous look. At the exact same time the lights in the anteroom flickered slightly, a coincidence that seemed to momentarily quell the percolating ire in Sebastian's eyes. He cleared his throat and tugged at his lapels to straighten them, clearly unaware of the openly nervous gestures that telegraphed his state of mind.
"Neverland?" He opted again, ignoring John's comments to pursue their original topic of quote-unquote conversation. His tone had become less aloof and more snide, though there was a slightly more conversation edge now, albeit an acidic one. "Or perhaps one of those American 'tall tales'." His lips flickered at a restrained smirk, and he added with idle malice, "I recall there being a parable or two about slaves in that jumbled oral mix."
John: The flickering lights hardly registered -- old building, old wiring, what could you do? -- compared to the pleasure of seeing his syrupy solicitousness dribble into a sore spot. Faintly smiling, John watched Sebastian go through his tidying twitches and figured all right, got in one good hit, and now he could quit while he was ahead. Patricia was surely going to call in one of them any minute now, and that'd be that.
And then came the race card, played with such mean insouciance that he wasn't immediately certain, in his blinking, rewinding surprise, that the guy was really going to go there. On such little provocation? My, my, a touchy bastard, wasn't he?
John stretched a smile out for what it was worth, straightening up with a slow head-shake. "You know," he said with a sort of marveling pity, sliced through by the hard edge he couldn't entirely wear down, "that's the kind of crack I expect from some dumb white kid from Woodlawn. And you sitting there so dignified, so well put together, so clearly above such uncreative crudities -- but you really nailed the mouth-breather demographic. Congratulations, sir! Are you an actor, by any chance, or does it just come naturally?"
Sebastian: Touchy was an epic understatement. Sebastian was a big ball o' rage with a hair trigger under optimal conditions, and being stuck waiting outside of Patricia's office without reason had him wound dangerously tight. The brief show of shock from John seemed to give him some mild amount of satisfaction, which was swiftly wiped clean by the sardonic reply. Sebastian's lips curled up in an aggressive snarl, and a string of what could safely be assumed to be Korean profanity was uttered in a rapid stream.
"How dare you?" Sebastian finally managed to spit out in English, his voice full of righteous indignation. He rose purposefully to his feet, his hands held at his side as though preparing to make some sort of gesture - and in doing so, something particularly odd began to happen. Little swirls of dark green energy began to spark and crackle at his palms with a slowly building intensity, a fact that Sebastian only seemed half aware of. He was livid, and his rage was overruling logic - all he could think was if I'm going to be reprimanded for magic abuse anyways...
Lucky for John, Patricia took this moment to make a timely intervention, the door to her office swinging unexpectedly open. Completely startled, the energy at Sebastian's hands immediately fizzled out, though judging from his choked expression doing so was not entirely pleasant on him. He had the strained look of someone who had just swallowed water into his lungs, though he struggled most ineffectually to smooth over his guilty expression with something more benign. His posture was still suspect, as he was standing in a notably threatening manner, and Patricia gave him a critical, knowing once-over before nodding to John and inviting him into her office. The pleasantness of her manner to the professor, coupled with the disapproving look she cast Sebastian, indicated that he was being made to wait even longer for his inability to even sit in a waiting room without causing trouble.
He barely managed a restrained nod to Patricia before sitting back in his seat in humiliation, all of his fury being condensed into one final glare at John as the man disappeared into the office.
John: When John was a month shy of five years old, he had slipped free of adult supervision in a department store the week after Christmas. While his mother argued with the clerk at the returns counter with six people stacked up behind and arguing at her, he wandered off into the sea of big-people legs and shopping bags that swung alongside them with the size and heft, to his scale, of Big Ben's pendulum. He had ended up in the hardware department: a little boy washed and brushed and dressed to painstaking neatness for the outing, his hands splayed like chubby brown starfish against the side of the band saw that he was determined to climb with all his neophyte jungle-gym prowess. The blade he'd glimpsed at the top was so shiny, a toothed metal ribbon strung vertically across the machine's metal mouth, that even after a horrified employee had swooped in and bodily carried him away, he reached out for it, crying to have it, just to touch it, to see.
His reaction now, half a lifetime later, to the angry spectacle confronting him was exactly the same in two aspects. First, despite the breath-stopping shock of the crackling green energy filling Sebastian's palms, a part of John desperately wanted to touch it, just to see. At the same time that he slammed himself back in his chair, braced by arms and legs turned to fight-or-flight iron, he stared at the terrible beauty of that light -- of that magic because that was what it was, wasn't it, now, Dr. Tracey with your critical sobriety and fancy school learning and thirty-year mortgage? Yes, of course, magic was only a story told to wide-eyed children before bed -- but so were you, weren't you?
The second point of similarity with the band-saw experience was the total relief that swept through him at being rescued by someone familiar and trusted. He did refrain from throwing himself at Patricia in a paroxysm of hysterical sobs, clinging to maternal safety in a world exploded suddenly bigger and scarier than it had any right to be. Nevertheless, he was shaking when he finally pried himself up and out of the chair, and he felt no humiliation at the rescue. Forget strutting attitude and fuck posturing gamesmanship. If the Librarian hadn't come out when she did, would he have ended up a charred stain on the floor? He didn't know. He didn't want to know, really did not want to know, for once in his data-craving life.
But he wouldn't forget. He dragged the shellshocked shards of his pride back together and, on his stalk into Patricia's office, shot Sebastian a fulminating glower, cold rather than hot as suited his temperament and his Tale. He'd remember that face, that polished elegance, that arrogance and that rage. That magic. Yes, he'd remember . . . for a next time.