OMFG! Anakin might do ~something~ *pearl clutch* (darkforcerising) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-03-03 21:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, anakin skywalker, james potter |
Who: Anakin Skywalker and James Potter
What: Meeting for the first time
When: After the Zombies
Where: An EDM concert
Rating/Warnings: Low
Status: Complete
You are really calm about this. Padme had said that to him when he was explaining to her this new universe she’d stumbled into. He had been calm until that point. All through that night when the zombies had arrived, during their trek from Ahsoka’s place to his, he had been calm, until she’d pointed it out to him.
This stupid, fucking place and everything it threw at them.
Anakin wasn’t calm Tuesday morning when they woke up and the zombies were gone. And the Adderall couldn’t make him focus. After one day, Anakin knew he wasn’t going to be any good at work so he took the rest of the week off to do anything his mind wandered to.
And at the end of the week he’d wandered into a concert with a heavy bass and a track so loud that it drowned out the sense of life humming in the Force, that sense of all things living that never shut up and Anakin couldn’t make go away. It was part of him now, because of the Dreams, and he knew it would only get stronger the more he Dreamed.
At least in this hot, packed space, symbiotically connected with the crowd, jumping as one, that hum wasn’t a dissonant counter note to his being, it was just another bass line with a light sequence to back it up.
There was a break in the set and Anakin took that moment to go find the bar.
James had never actually met Anakin before. He’d talked to him on the Net before, and he’d seemed like a bit of a twat. Definitely not any fun at all. Which made it even more confusing that Lily and Andromeda seemed to be such good friends with him.
It wasn’t that James wasn’t grateful that Anakin had kept them safe during yet another zombie apocalypse, though James kind of wished Lily had come to him instead. That, and, well, Lily sometimes had questionable taste in male friends. He still remembered her friend from school, who had already planned out their entire futures together by the time they graduated, without bothering to clue Lily into that fact.
When Anakin had posted about the Jason Ross show, James couldn’t resist. It would give him a chance to meet Anakin, away from the girls, and James enjoyed dancing well enough that if it all went south, he could still enjoy the rest of the show.
The problem, of course, was actually finding Anakin at the bar. By the time he did, he was already sweating from the exertion of dancing and from the heat of the crowd. He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes, and made his way up to the other man, a rum and coke in hand. “Hey. Anakin, right?”
Anakin, rootbeer now in hand, was about to step away from the bar when James stepped over and called for his attention.
He didn’t recognize the voice, but turned anyways. It took Anakin a moment to figure out who he was talking to, they had never met face to face before.
James Potter. Anakin didn’t actually think about James enough to have an opinion of him. He knew some very basic facts: Lily and Andromeda knew him and he was on the Network. And that was about it.
“Yup,” he took a drink of his rootbeer and then returned a similar question. “James, right?”
“The one and only,” James said, with a mock bow. “Are you enjoying the show, mate?”
Anakin didn’t have a reaction to the bow. He just took another drink.
But when James was standing straight again, Anakin offered his hand for a handshake. His metal hand. He just had a t-shirt on - it was hot in the club - so his robotic arm was completely exposed.
“Ross is good,” Anakin said, taking the question in good faith. “He’s still less established as an original artist. But his remixes are solid. What do you think?”
James took Anakin’s hand, only realizing after their hands were touching that Anakin’s wasn’t made of flesh. He started, looking down at it, and then tried to appear like he hadn’t done that at all by bringing immediately bringing his gaze back to Anakin’s face.
“Not too bad,” James agreed. “I haven’t been to something like this since moving here, but it reminds me of my school days. He and his friends had snuck out of their boarding school often to go check out all the clubs and shows. “You do these sorts of thing often?”
Anakin didn’t mind people looking, or their shock at realizing his arm was robotic, just as long as they didn’t recoil. He judged people who recoiled, and he did so without compunction.
“Occasionally. If I’m not working on a project.” He shrugged. “This week, kinda needed it after the zombies. Seemed like a good brain cleanser.”
“The zombies aren’t so bad, if you know how to deal with them,” James said, a little smugly. He had spent most of the invasion trying to perfect his transfiguration spells, and thought that, all in all, it had been a rather successful venture. He tried not to think of the last time the zombies had come, when Lily had gotten sick. And then, a little too casually, he said, “so, you had Lily and Rom over during it?”
Anakin. his expression even, took a drink.
“Sure,” he said.
He didn’t have to explain that this time his sister was dealing with the same monsters that had killed her fiancé; or that Padmé, another Network-connected staying at Anakin’s for the weekend, was brand new to any of the OC’s dangerous weirdness; or that he’d been forced to embrace using more of his powers than he felt comfortable with. Explanations were for people who cared.
“Ya, I went over and picked them up. My place was safer than theirs, and I wasn’t going to leave my friends to deal with that shit on their own... Why?”
“Because I’ve known them since we were ten?” James said, raising an eyebrow. Of course he was going to ask about where they were when there were zombies roaming about. “So, you’re just friends?” Lily had told him as much, and he believed it was true on her end of things at least. But last time she’d had some weird, stick in the mud friend, he had concocted all sorts of fantasies about their life together in his mind, and the last thing James wanted was for Lily to have go go through that again.
Ohhkaay.
Anakin understood the point of this interaction now. And because of that, using the Force he shoved out all the noise of human thought and emotion around him and filtered as best he could, and he focused more on James.
Suspicion right there on the surface, and, yup- the pointed question really drove it home.
He snorted, smiled, amused, because this was ridiculous.
“Yes. We’re just friends. We, all three of us, are just friends.” The more he thought about it, the more it made him want to laugh. Though it annoyed him, too. Because he had to deal with it.
His drink was done so he returned the bottle to the bar.
“Anything else you need reassurance about?”
Well, that was a relief. More of one than James had really been expecting it to be. “No, I think that about covers it,” James said, trying to ignore how much the ‘reassurance’ comment rankled. “Well, except on whether or not you’re weirdo or just a bit of a stick in the mud,” James said, which, for him, was just some light-hearted ribbing. “Sticks in the mud I can deal with. I think I’d better stick with you for the rest of the night to decide.”
Wait, what was happening? Anakin hadn’t been offering a ride-along. He may have found it a bit amusing that James asked him about his friendship with Lily and Andromeda. But it was kind of annoying, too. The person or persons James should be talking to about this were Lily and/or Andromeda.
Anakin shot James a suspicious look. “Why?”
Why? Because Lily had asked James to give Anakin a chance, and James wanted to get some idea of who this guy was before seeing him with the girls. And before Lily inevitably invited Anakin over to his house for her birthday party.
But he didn’t have to say any of that. “Why not?” he asked instead.
“You want to know if I’m a weirdo,” he raised his cybernetic arm, “or if I, the only non-drunk, non-high person at and EDM concert, am a stick in the mud? And you want to figure this out by hanging out with me?”
“See, when you put it like that, it could really go both ways,” James said, grinning cheekily. “But yeah, I don’t know how else I’d figure it out. You don’t have any suggestions on how to get to know a bloke without spending time with him, do you?”
“Because it’s an EDM concert,” Anakin pointed out. “This isn’t where people go for a meet and greet...
“So you want to… stand next to me?” Anakin asked. And then he gestured towards the middle of the pit in front of the stage. Where people weren’t so much as “standing” as they were a seemingly homogeneous, organic fluid vibrating with the beat of the music.
“In there?” Anakin finished without hiding his perceptible doubt of James’ hardiness. The glance down to James’ shoes and back up again was the dead giveaway.
“Concussions aren’t the best way to make memories.”
Anakin was just suspicious of this turn on James’ demeanor.
James tried to ignore the look, and almost succeeded. “That’s exactly what I mean, mate,” he samed, and looped an arm around Anakin’s shoulders in a move that he was sure would annoy the other man. He was trying. Lily couldn’t blame him if Anakin rejected all of his advances. “I’m hardier than I look. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Anakin caught James’ wrist with his metal hand and with an unyielding grip, lifted it off his shoulders and away from his body. It had annoyed him, and he didn’t care if it showed. This was not a boundary he was willing to bend.
But he finally accepted the fact that James wasn’t going to leave him alone.
“Put your cup back on the bar,” he said with a sigh and a nod towards the bar.
James kept grinning, only a tightening around the corners of his eyes and lips giving away the fact that that hurt. No way was he going to let Anakin get the upper hand as it were.
With a final gulp, he downed the rest of his drink and went to put it on the bar, only letting himself rub his wrist once his back was turned to Anakin. Note to self: Don’t get mixed up with that metal hand business again, he told himself. Once his drink was on the bar, he turned back to Anakin. “Well then, buddy old pal. Let’s get our dance on,” and then added a slight shimmy for emphasis.