WAAAAAAAAART: Wherein Liz really does have good intentions, and Shaun is...Shaun.
Shaun had a mixed history with WART broadcasts. The last one had been…bad. Bad beyond words. So bad he still hadn’t told Liz just what he’d done, partially because he couldn’t remember everything--all he knew was that there had been some unfortunate dents and blood-splatters on the cricket bat the next morning.
His first one, however, had been undeniably fun, and Liz had been saying for months that she wanted to do one when she got to Hogwarts. She had also, albeit inadvertently, given him an excuse for one: Susan’s birthday. She’d seen it when Susan got all her paperwork from ‘that Ministry guy’, and thus was one of the only people on planet Earth to actually know when it was. Liz being Liz, she’d wanted to do something nice, but Shaun had rather a different idea. So far as he knew, Susan had never told anyone when her birthday was, but Liz had the day and he knew how old she was going to be, and he could so totally use that. Really, man.
The pair of them were currently sitting in the WART broadcast room, an assortment of music on the table in front of them. Liz, as ever curious about the odd meshing of modern Muggle technology with magic, had had to make a complete round of the room first, poking everything and occasionally trying random minor charms with her newly-gotten wand. When she finally sat down, looking and feeling like a kid in a candy store, they got down to business.
“All right, Hogwarts, this is Shaun,” he said, adjusting the ancient baseball hat he’d worn to raves in high school, and that he insisted on wearing whenever he wound up playing DJ.
“And this is Liz,” Liz put in, tapping the microphone.
“And we’re here to dedicate a Happy Birthday WART to Susan, out there in Ravenclaw-land. Happy 26th, and I’m sorry to say that it’ll seem like it’s maybe three days before you’re thirty.” Shaun spoke with almost gloomy conviction; he himself would be thirty-one next spring, and hadn’t gotten over it yet.
Liz looked at him, reproachful--this was supposed to be a nice WART. “Ignore him, he’s just bitter because he’s been alive for three decades,” she said, shooting him a smile. “I’ve still got another year before I can say as much.”
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in,” Shaun grumbled, or tried to--he didn’t make a very good job of it. “In any case, my first selection is the Arrogant Worms Happy Happy Birthday Song.”
Liz listened, somewhat appalled. “Good grief, Shaun, that’s horrible,” she said. “If I was her, I’d smack you for that.” Not being Susan, she elected to poke him with her wand instead. “Anyway, mine’s a little less completely inappropriate--Five for Fighting’s One Hundred Years.”
“Oh, because that’s not depressing,” Shaun said, rubbing his arm--Liz could poke with the best of them, when she felt like it. “I think I like my next one a little better. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Weird Al Yankovic’s Happy Birthday.”
That one made Liz sporfle on the bottled water she’d brought with her. “Well,” she said, coughing, as Shaun patted her on the back, “that’s…novel.”
“Bit of an accurate description of the school, really.” Shaun grinned at her, taking away the water before she could spill it.
“Now, now, there’s not been any nuclear war here yet,” Liz managed, wheezing. She paused. “Has there?”
“I don’t think so.”
Another pause. “The fact that you can’t be sure really does frighten me.”
“It probably should. Anyway, while my girlfriend is still choking over here, I’m gonna steal her thunder and put on a good old They Might Be Giants song, Older.”
Liz poked him again, harder this time. “You know, there’s such a thing as a pretty song about getting older,” she said. “I like this one a bit more.” Liz wasn’t normally a Fleetwood Mac fan, but Landslide had seemed both nice and slightly annoying, under the circumstances. Being a woman, she understood the subtleties of needling someone about their age that had wholly escaped Shaun, who clearly thought that everything had to be loud, obnoxious, and mentally twelve. While they were all things she loved about him, she knew full well that most of the rest of the world wasn’t going to share that fondness, and thus was occasionally hard-pressed not to want to thwack her sometimes thickheaded boyfriend.
“Yeah, but they’re just not as much fun,” Shaun said, shaking his head and going for something that was--gasp, awe--rather less obnoxious than his previous selections: Pink Floyd’s Time.
Liz blinked at him, stealing her water back. “And you tell me mine was depressing? Anyway, this last one is from me, and Susan, love, please don’t kill Shaun for this. I like my boyfriend in one piece.”
“Wait, kill me?” he protested. “This was your idea!”
“Weird Al was not my idea,” she said. “You did that all on your own. Anyway, our last song is, well, Paddy Goes to Holyhead’s A Last Song. And yes, Shaun, before you start, maybe it is a little depressing, but that’s what getting older is, isn’t it?”
“Too right,” he agreed, lighting a cigarette. “Sorry to say, once you get past your eighteenth, it’s all downhill--you don’t ever want to mark anyone one again.”
“Twenty-one’s big, in America,” Liz said, half to herself. “It’s when they finally get to drink. Legally, I mean.”
Shaun paused. He hadn’t known that. “They can’t drink till they’re twenty-one?” he asked, appalled. “God, no wonder their country’s all bollocksed-up. Oh, uh, no offense to any Americans out there in the audience,” he added, belatedly. Liz sighed and smiled at the same time, shaking her head.
“Anyway, the point is, getting older--what’s the Americanism? Sucks?” She looked at Shaun, her resident ‘expert’ on Americanisms.
“Might be ‘blows’,” he said, after a moment of consideration. “Although actually I think they mean the same thing.”
“Whichever way, getting older’s no fun, but we all do it, so happy birthday.”
“And look on the bright side,” Shaun added, evading Liz’s attempts at shushing what she just knew was going to be something he shouldn’t say, “at least you don’t have to worry about your hair going grey.”
Liz facepalmed. She literally facepalmed. “Now that Shaun’s gone and been completely tasteless, all you listeners out there go ahead and Floo in any requests you might have--anything at all, birthday-related or not. Since we’re here, we’re going to do this right.”
“And we’ve loaded up with enough Guinness for the long haul,” Shaun added. “Because, you know, you’ve gotta know where your priorities are.”
((Send in anything and everything, guys--have at it. After all, it's not just birthday humiliation, it's a WART, dammit XD))