InsaneJournal

HB fic: The Party [Scripps, Dakin/Irwin, general]
Title: The Party
Author: celandineb
Fandom: History Boys
Characters: Scripps, Dakin/Irwin
Rating: general
Summary: Dakin asked Scripps to a cocktail party, and he goes.
Note: Teenyfic, 689 words. For emiime even though she didn't ask for anything.


As always at their parties, the guests are a very mixed bag. There are various television people, both some that Irwin has worked with directly and some that he has simply come to know here and there over the years, and also assorted government-types. Most of the latter are staff, the sort of who stay and do the real work year in and year out regardless of which party or politician is in power, but there is a sprinkling of MPs also. Dakin's friends come more from the worlds of law and finance, of course, although there is really a surprising amount of overlap and mutual acquaintance between his friends and Irwin's.

Thus when Scripps arrives at their house he doesn't feel so out of place as perhaps he had expected. He sees no fewer than four people he is acquainted with in the first fifteen minutes, while he still trying to find one of his hosts and say hello.

Although it was Dakin who invited him and Dakin who was his friend for years in school, it is Irwin whom Scripps sees first. He is sitting in his wheelchair in the back room where French doors let out onto the garden, and he is wearing the same earnest expression that he uses on television -- the same expression he wore when teaching, for that matter.

Scripps shakes his head "no" at the server who is offering a tray full of fruit pieces skewered with toothpicks, pineapple and strawberries and green grapes and slices of mango. He goes over to Irwin, who looks pleased to see him and tells him to get himself a drink and they can talk later. Irwin is solider than he used to be, not physically so much as emotionally; Scripps doesn't get the sense that there are chinks in Irwin's armour the way there once were.

Obediently he goes to fetch a drink, whisky and soda, and finds Dakin holding forth near the liquor to a small circle of television people, mostly women and all a good ten years or more younger than Dakin is. He is flirting with them, in fact, in an automatic way which Scripps recognizes now as the way that Dakin acted at school, not just toward Fiona but toward the other boys as well, including Scripps himself. For an instant he is back there, changing his kit after a session of rope-climbing, watching Dakin surreptitiously. His momentary reverie is interrupted when Dakin sees him and shakes off the young women to come over and greet him. Scripps is prepared for a handshake, but not for the rough one-armed embrace, and quells the treacherous pounding of his heart by making ordinary polite comments about what a splendid party it is.

Dakin nods and shrugs and asks Scripps if he has seen Irwin yet, to which Scripps answers affirmatively and adds that he's promised to go back and talk more with Irwin in a bit. Dakin nods and says that he's sure both Scripps and Irwin will enjoy that.

First, though, Scripps circulates for a while, chats with some of the other guests, sees parts of the house that he hadn't when he came to interview Irwin a few weeks ago. The ever-present journalist in him notes the reappearance of photographs of Dakin on the piano in the living room, and in other rooms he spots both books and artwork that leave no doubt that this house is occupied by a male couple.

Abruptly Scripps decides that he doesn't feel like staying and talking to Irwin, not tonight, not under these circumstances. He is too polite to simply disappear, however, and so he finds Dakin and apologizes for his early departure, stretching the truth only slightly when he says that he doesn't feel entirely well and had better make it an early night.

Dakin looks disappointed and before Scripps can figure out how it has happened, he has promised to come back the next weekend to have dinner with the two of them.

As he makes his escape into the dark welcome of the evening air, he berates himself for his weakness.