Excellent. Precedent now dictates that you half heartedly suggest a meeting once every two months or so, and other than that our paths will never cross again.
"What? The book thing was to piss off an old friend of mine. Well, it was sort of a dual pronged attack to piss off an old friend of mine and an old friend of the Masters. It didn't seem to work too effectively, but one must do something with his time." Ethan responded lightly, taking a long drink of beer as he declined to extrapolate on this.
"I suppose that's something we need to do, then. Stop you getting bored," Merlin said dryly. It was like Arthur - if you didn't keep him distracted, he'd just go off and get himself into trouble like an idiot. "Have you got a job right now? I've heard about people helping in the library and the kitchens and stuff."
"I have a job" Ethan explained a little coldly, "Custodial work. I clean things." More accurately, he hung around the library holding a brush which largely went unused, and read an awful lot.
"Custodial work? Really?" Merlin pulled a face. It was a task he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, especially since Nimueh would have been a terrible chambermaid.
"So much for not getting bored, I..." He glanced at Ethan. "D'you cheat? Use magic to do it, or something?"
Ethan frowned at this suggestion, did he look like something out of a Disney production? "Of course I don't use magic! I just work bit by bit, I take occasional brakes, and use the time for contemplation." Lies, lies, lies. It wasn't like anyone noticed whether the library was dusty anyway. He gave a slight shrug, "I rather enjoy it to be honest."
Re: ACTIONtakeyouapartOctober 16 2009, 22:00:57 UTC
"Occasional breaks and time for contemplation," Merlin said slowly, recognising precisely the sort of language he'd use to Gaius while trying to explain that his chores weren't done. "So...you mean you just don't do it."
"I do parts of it." Ethan asserted, "Then... I get bored and do other things." If Merlin tried to give him another job, Ethan calmly decided he would lie in bed and refuse to do it. No one even cared if he cleaned the library, it was the ideal task for him!
Merlin took a gulp of his beer and wiped a bit of foam off his top lip.
"All right, how about this? I want you to do it with magic. I'll show you the spells, and I'll sort it out with the Admiral that they'll work properly - I mean, if you do them right, they'll work. But you do actually have to clean stuff."
Ethan's expression bordered on offended "I do not need a magic teacher, thank you very much. If I wanted to do the cleaning using mystical energies then I'm fairly sure I could work that particular challenge out myself! How about instead, you do the cleaning, and in return, I'll show you how to summon the seventeenth Gregaourium of the black realms. It wouldn't work for me, but just sort it out with the Admiral, I'm sure he'll let you do it."
"Nah. I wouldn't want to summon a seventeenth something out of somewhere," Merlin pointed out, shrugging and smiling unshakeably. "If you want me to make you do your job the boring way then we could do that instead. I just thought you'd want some way of earning back your magic, but if you don't care about it then that's fine too."
"My magic, never got 'taken away', because it's not mine." Ethan replied snidely, "I don't know how it works where you're from, that some people are just born with it and some people aren't, but my magic isn't something inside of me that you can scoop out of me and trickle back in when my behavior permits, it doesn't work that way. It never has." Ethan leaned over the bar, studying the bottles behind it for a minute, before reaching out to snatch the tequila and two shot glasses. Setting them in front of himself, he poured out two shots and took one. If Merlin took the other that was fine, if he didn't that was fine too. Ethan was planning on drinking more than one shot anyway.
"Yeah," Merlin said as urbanely at he could manage. It probably wasn't true to the definition Ethan was working from, but a flat yes was easier than the yes-no-sort-of-maybe that he'd been using with other people.
"And if you're going to be a pedantic prat about it then fine. Not your magic, but your capacity to use magic. I know that a lot of the stuff you used to be able to do doesn't work here, or it doesn't work as well or for as long as it used to. Doesn't that bother you?"
"Who's being pedantic? I'm being accurate." Ethan replied coldly. He'd seen a lot of people whining about having their powers or their faces or their extra hearts taken away over the last year, and he'd seen just as many desperate and eventually futile attempts to get them back, the very concept of being forced through the same motions had raised his ire a little. He drank his Tequila in one smooth motion, before topping it up again, "Anyway, it works better here than it did in Nevada. How far through my file have you actually gotten?"
"I've read it. And they're cruel bastards for doing what they did to you," he said, quiet passion underlining a calm tone. "Nobody should have to go through that. It doesn't matter what they've done or who they are."
"I'm not asking for pity." Ethan replied taking a sip from his second shot, "All I mean is that this isn't as bad as that, so I can survive it. I might not be much for building healthy relationships or amassing great quantities of wealth, but I'm fairly good at maintaining my existence up to a certain point."
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"So much for not getting bored, I..." He glanced at Ethan. "D'you cheat? Use magic to do it, or something?"
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"All right, how about this? I want you to do it with magic. I'll show you the spells, and I'll sort it out with the Admiral that they'll work properly - I mean, if you do them right, they'll work. But you do actually have to clean stuff."
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"Are you actually Merlin?" He asked.
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"And if you're going to be a pedantic prat about it then fine. Not your magic, but your capacity to use magic. I know that a lot of the stuff you used to be able to do doesn't work here, or it doesn't work as well or for as long as it used to. Doesn't that bother you?"
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