(no subject)
Who: Ryoko Hashioka (QUEEN OF HEARTS) & Toby Hastings (WHITE KING)
Where: Her place.
When: After this exchange.
Summary: Toby comes over and tries to drown his woes in absinthe, but Ryoko isn't having any of his self-pitying BS. :>
Rating: PG-13 for swearing, references to sex, the usual.
Toby: Why did the queens have to have such similar taste? Ryoko's inner-city apartment reminded him unpleasantly of Anne's place -- of what had, up until very recently, been home -- but thankfully, those were the sort of thoughts he could block out with enough high-grade alcohol, some fast conversation, and maybe some channel-surfing on the woman's absurdly large flatscreen. He walked in through the door bearing a bottle of wine (red, brand-new, had been in a store rather than simmering in some collector's basement) and, in classic Tobyesque fashion, immediately threw himself into verbal distraction.
"Hi, Ryoko. How are you? I'm absolutely terrible but I think everyone knows that already." He almost sounded sulky. "And Scott complains a lot about his sisters, but you know, their squabbling just made me miss my own sisters -- oh, look, you managed to redecorate. Nice. I hope this year is okay, it's not really a proper vintage wine, but."
Toby Hastings, for all his scattered nuances, was not often a candidate for ADD. It was clear to anyone who knew him that Things Were Going On; his moods were even more flighty and capricious than usual.
Ryoko: "We did," Ryoko answers as she takes the wine, looking at the label and giving it a shrug. "You're not very good at it." Being terrible, one would assume. She makes a vague motion at the couch - there were floor cushions, once upon a time, but minimalist modern furniture has replaced them - and carries the wine to the kitchen island to pour drinks. "I don't really understand what absinthe is so I unplugged my phone and you're not going until you're back to sober. You might hide your Compendium somewhere while you're at it." She returns, despite these threats, with two glasses of wine. She offers one to Toby.
"You need to fix things, sooner rather than later. The flight to Japan is sixteen hours, you can't give each other the silent treatment the whole way. Anyway you don't have to talk to me about it, just make it better." She falls into a seat against one of the arms of the couch.
Toby: Despite the sofa's decidedly modernistic and not-ideally-comfortable setup, Toby collapsed onto its sleek contours anyway. He stayed there, a pitiful immobile lump, until Ryoko came back out with the glasses. And he spoke, directing his speech vaguely towards the ceiling, and vaguely in her direction: "Absinthe is very green, and very well-known for causing hallucinations. Mainly a green fairy, thus all the logos and references. I've never seen the fairy, though. Bit of a shame."
Wait. Wait. Wait.
"... Flight to Japan?"
Ryoko: "Noted," says Ryoko, and she sips her wine. Hallucinations? Pff. That's hardly original. "It's good," she says by way of a compliment, raising her glass to indicate the wine. Not that she would seem to have the most discerning tastes, but still, it's something. "Yes," she goes on, neatly separating herself from Anne, where their decorating tastes might unite them, by slumping back in her seat and putting her slippered feet on the coffee table. "Kilroy and I will need to do some work there for the movie. You're coming, as is the rest of my extremely small circle of friends." It's a statement of fact, and she looks across at Toby, eyebrows slightly lifted, a gentle dare for him to protest.
Toby: He was conflicted. He loved movies -- jetting off to accompany Kilroy and Ryoko and others to extravagant new locations was highly tempting, but this was no four-day sojourn to England for a short pilgrimage. Toby couldn't travel. There were problems.
"I..." And, for once, his voice faltered. He always had quick quips ready, but his train of thought seemed to wholly fail him now. "Ryoko, buttercup, you know I'd love to comply with your requests as soon as possible, as always. But sixteen hours is too little time." He could feel it in his bones, time -- and backwards time -- creaking in that place inside him where the tale resides. "I don't think I can fix it this time."
Wine. Needs more wine.
Ryoko: "Buttercup?" Toby gets A Look. Then, "The flight is sixteen hours, not in sixteen hours. I pay more attention to the language than most of you do, I know I said it right." Ryoko makes a dismissive wave with her hand. "We're still pitching the idea, there's no cast, you have more than enough time to fix whatever needs it. Though maybe you killed Anne's kittens and it is as dire as you say, I don't know. No one tells me anything." She takes another sip of wine.
Toby: "Oh."
He lapsed into another strange silence. Usually those things were only known as 'pauses between sentences; time it takes for Tobias to catch his breath', but he was moody and quiet today -- and the faster he downed this glass, the faster he became maudlin and tipsy.
"I don't really know how dire it is. Can we open that absinthe now, please?"
Ryoko: "Yes, well, at least we have that in common," Ryoko says with a cool look, putting her wine glass down and rising from her seat. Shuffling over to the kitchen, she gets the bottle, glasses, a spoon, some sugarcubes and a glass of water - bless the internet, which explains these things - then returns. The whole array is laid out on the coffee table, and she contemplates it a moment, turning the lighter over in her hand.
"You know I considered fucking you once upon a time, in that brief window when I thought you and Anne were just roommates and before - whatever's going on now." She puts a sugarcube in the spoon. "As you can see we're not really changing the subject. Your being occasionally pathetic wasn't really a problem, you tend to make up for that by being a decent and marginally interesting human being. Also most personality flaws are mitigated by sex." She drips the water over the sugar cube, and once there's a satisfactory amount in the glass, does the same with the absinthe. "But without that you're just kind of this mix of frustrating and endearing, more the former right now, and if all you're going to do is drink and get quiet and sad, I may throw things at you. So. You've been warned. If you don't like head injuries, cheer the fuck up." She repeats the same process of the sugar, water and absinthe with the other glass, then passes one of the cloudy green mixtures to Toby. "Cheers."
Toby: This time, the silence is a stunned one -- he absorbs this new information and then hides his perplexity and shock behind taking a very long, very generous sip of the absinthe. By the time he's swallowed, Toby's finished reeling, though the potency of the drink makes him wince. He likes dancing around the subject. And endless, endless verbal roundabouts. It's not every day one experiences bluntness quite like Ryoko Hashioka's.
"Drinking and getting quiet and sad was my agenda for the night," Toby finally says, a bit dolefully. "But if that'll result in concussions I do think I'll stop. And I think I'll take that as a compliment, even though it came with the word 'pathetic'. But I can't sleep with you, you know," pause, "because you're the other queen and Anne--"
He falters into another one of those awkward little self-pitying moments. Sulk, sulk, wallow wallow.
Ryoko: "That's too bad. You can do that alone." Ryoko makes a dismissive wave with her hand. "Christ, Toby, I know. Of all my great faults, stupidity is not one of them." Her tone is sharp as always, but she sits relaxed, sniffing the absinthe in the glass. She takes a sip. "But impatience is. So what about Anne. I sincerely doubt you're having an existential crisis about repeating your past lives into infinity because you hook up with a woman." She takes another sip. "We can talk about something else, of course, but you're responsible for picking the topic and making it entertaining. Given your current state I don't see that going too well for you."
Toby: "I did have an existential crisis, just so you know -- after the trip to England I started losing track of all my memos -- because I realised that maybe if this one guy named Dodgson hadn't taken one stupid little trip on the river, I might not be standing here today. Because who's to say how the entire system works and how this incarnation thing goes? Would I still be me if 'Through the Looking-Glass' hadn't been published? How much of me is me? I suppose Tobias would still be here, but the king wouldn't be, but what sort of difference would that make anyway? Have you ever considered these things? There'd probably be no friendship with Anne if that hadn't happened, though. And it is a friendship, for the record, even though everyone's just so damned convinced that we're something more."
He's a talkative drunk; no one's entirely surprised when they discover this.
"I took a girl from the bar home and I go on dates. Is what she's mad about. And something about forgetting the groceries, and never noticing. I can't remember. I think I apologised already. What should I do? I can't--" Toby's speech judders. "--can't live on Scott's couch forever, and I want to go home. I need to fix this."
Ryoko: Ryoko gently taps the side of her glass as Toby speaks, not an impatient gesture - despite her stated impatience - but a contemplative one. When he finishes, she says, "Radical as it may seem, I'm going to pose a question: Does it matter? You're here, and you are who you want to be. Past lives influence you just like your past in this life but when it comes down to it you make your own choices. I know this but maybe it's a very Eastern thing and that's why everybody keeps whining about not getting it." She shrugs a little, then squints down at her glass. "This is really good."
"Anyway. Toby. Dear God. Let me try to line this up for you." She takes a longer drink of the absinthe. "You and Anne are very good friends. She thinks - rightly or no, I don't know, but I'm guessing rightly - that you take her for granted. You don't notice things, putting the burden on her to notice and take care of everything without, you know, your noticing. She is upset when you are with other women. Maybe I'm missing some finer details but that woman is in love with you, or was, and all you're doing is being an asshole and treating her like shit and sure as hell not fucking her when she'd probably really like that." Ryoko regards the dwindling contents of her glass, then Toby's. "Want another?"
Toby: As she spoke, Toby's face shifted and went through a myriad of expressions: level acceptance, then uncomfortability, then surprise, and then sheer, aghast horror. He slipped out of his slouch on the sofa, back straightening to a ram-rod posture worthy of any inanimate chesspiece. Appearances are everything--
"I'll take another. And can I take that whack to the head now? You'd probably get a kick out of it, promise."
Despite the faint drunken quaver in his speech, Toby's tone seemed to have sobered much more over the past minute. Alcohol was supposed to eliminate self-awareness, damnit, but Ryoko's honesty was making his bubble of self-centeredness start cracking at the edges.
Ryoko: "You may." Ryoko leans over, and before she takes Toby's glass, gives him a sharp slap to the back of the head. He, however, seems a bigger and thus easier target, as she has to focus a bit to aim her hand and properly take his glass. Still, she manages to lean back and put both glasses on the table without incident, repeating, much more gingerly this time, the sugar cube, water and absinthe ritual.
"Don't say I never did anything for you," she says, and passes back the refilled glass.
Toby: "Do you queens always do the psychoanalytical thing?" he retorted, before he could think better of it. Well, yes, okay -- part of him was still bruised at finding out he'd been going about things all wrong. His stomach still felt a little bit like it'd dropped through the floor. But getting new direction was what he was all about, wasn't it?
Ryoko: "No. We're just smarter than you are, so of course 'seeing the obvious' seems very complicated to you." Ryoko smiles over the rim of her glass, and sips again.
Toby: Wince. Shield it by drinking more absinthe. Toby relaxed a little, slumping back onto the cushions; he finally seemed to be past the dangerzone of having hard objects flung at his skull. But he still wasn't out of the problem of not having a place to live, which is what prompted the next two questions, mumbled over the edge of his own glass:
"Firstly, when is this flight to Japan, so I know how I'm supposed to restructure my life--" Lots of that happening lately. "--and secondly, can I stay the night, because I don't actually have a key to Scott's and he purposefully locked me in the bathroom the last time I came in late and accidentally woke him up."
Ryoko: "Winter, probably. You have time. We can even overlap with vacation. Christmas in Japan is nothing special, but New Years is the biggest fucking party in the world." And for all her stated dislike of her home country, she seems almost happy about this idea. The latter gets a short and not kind laugh from her. But more kindly, "There's an extra bed. You're going to be too wasted to go out the door, anyway, let alone make it back to Scott's."
Toby: "I'm very good at moving myself around, thank you very much," Toby answered, with a small laugh. He immediately remembered what it felt like to be picked up -- carried by his father? No, it was one single hand -- jesus christ, Alice's, one massive hand descending from the sky and lifting him into the air. The stuff strange nightmares were made of.
He shivered, even through the faint warmth in his throat and stomach. "You're a good psychoanalyst, though, for the record."
Pause.
"Thanks."
The thank-you halted on his lips, and sounded hard to give, but he gave it anyway.