Pepper is the sword-arm of crazy (pickledpepper) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2009-03-04 14:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! [1980-03] march, kate proudfoot, octavius pepper |
Who: Pepper and Kate
When: Tuesday afternoon/evening
Where: Gairloch
What: Pepper is crazy irrational. Kate gets caught up in the wake.
Rating: PG-13 for language
Status: Complete
The last two weeks had been fuzzy round the edges - perhaps not as fuzzy as Pepper would have liked, but still. Blurred. Greying. His head throbbed vaguely and he stared blankly into space, the mug of Irish coffee warming his hands (maybe more Irish than coffee; the alcohol had been splashed rather liberally when he made it) as the land waited for spring. The sensation of being drunk and hungover at the same time was not new to him. The care with which people tiptoed around him was. Aside from the semi-argument with Jo... Well, he wasn't sure even Amelia or Alice had said a sharp word to him since before the Library, but then, while it was true that he hadn't had any blackouts, his memory was.... fuzzy.
He barely noticed when it started to snow again - it'd been doing that on and off for the last two months, anyway, and it was light enough this time that all it really amounted to was white flecks on his jacket that would melt as soon as he went back inside. At least it meant there weren't too many people hanging around out here, which suited him fine. He didn't particularly want to chat.
Kate had been worried about Pepper. She had seen him moody, certainly, but so absolutely despondent? She couldn't remember it - although she'd known him for several years now. When she noticed him sitting alone she hesitated for a moment trying to figure out if she wanted to approach him or not. It wasn't as if she particularly knew what to say to make it better, but she thought that perhaps to say something at this point was better than to say nothing. At least he would know that people cared, even if he didn't really want to chat.
She crossed the distance between them, wishing once again for it to not be cold. Her toes were so frozen and had been the entire time they'd been at Gairloch no matter how many heating charms she cast, or layers of socks she wore. She stepped up beside him and stood for a moment staring off into space before she turned and looked at him. "How is the coffee?" She asked more tentatively than she had intended.
"About forty proof. And burned." This was why Aubrey should have come with them - nothing about the principle of it, nothing about him wanting a bitch boy around to cater to his every whim, just the fucking coffee. It escaped him, sometimes, how people could be so incapable of making a decent cup. The possibility that it was his prejudices colouring his opinion did not occur to him; it rarely did. He was simply Right, and that was that. "I may have scalded off my tastebuds, though, so it's not really a problem."
Kate made a face at his statement. Although she'd drank her share of terrible coffee during her tenure at the DMLE, that didn't mean that she had to enjoy the drinking of terrible coffee although she couldn't help but feel that in the middle of nowhere, they probably couldn't be picky. On the other hand, maybe because they were in the middle of nowhere they should be picky.
"Well if you've got no tastebuds it'll probably just taste like nothing, so the question is whether or not that's better or worse than tasting burned," she said lightly. She realised that Pepper and Mill had been close: the rumours, however untrue they might have been, had been based in some fact. This mostly just meant that she had no idea what to say to him now. Similar to how she'd had no idea what to say to Elle, but at least Elle she'd been able to try to take care of.
He lifted his head to look up at her, finally, expression inscrutable as the chill air for a moment before he let himself smile, wryly with no amusement in it. "That's the million sickle question," he murmured. Not what she'd meant, of course, not the coffee, which held about as much interest for him as the dirt under his feet: useful for a purpose, but beyond that essentially ignorable. It was that word, though, 'burned', that he hadn't noticed as he'd said it, but seemed to take on new depth of meaning when she did. That was the question he'd been operating on, wasn't it? Whether it was better to feel scorched, burned, ground razed by fires whose heat had long since past, leaving nothing but aching death and pain, or to drown in numbness. He rather preferred the latter.
Kate turned her head to really look at him then. She'd been talking about the coffee, but she was fairly confident he hadn't been. Was he talking about the Library they'd burned, or something else entirely? Sometimes she felt as if no matter how well she knew Pepper, she'd never really know him, and today was one of those moments she felt like she didn't know him. In fact, it had been that way for nearly two weeks now. "I could say a knut for your thoughts," she suggested. "But I don't know, you don't really seem like you're in need of a knut." Really, what he didn't look like was that he was in the mood for sharing.
"They're probably worth more." He shrugged, lackadaisically, swallowing down more of the somewhat awful coffee and feeling the burn both from the heat and the brandy in his throat. It was sort of comforting, in a weird sort of way. "Or less. Hard to tell, really, I'd say get back to me when I'm sober, but..." A slight headtilt. "That might be a while." Unless he ran out of alcohol, which was looking likely if Grady didn't follow through on his offer - he could, of course, take advantage of Aloysius' hospitality, but he suspected the full weight of his current desires would be rather heavy in that quarter.
"You have been drinking quite a bit," she remarked casually, keeping her eyes mostly ahead of them, although every now and again she would glance at him with the corner of her eye. "So it might be a while. I'm beginning to wonder if you keep a fully stocked bar in your bunk, and why on earth you haven't been inviting the entire camp!" she turned then and gave him a quick smile so that he would hopefully know that she was laughing and not particularly serious. She wanted to ask how he was doing, but she felt as if the question was almost too intimate - an absurd thought when you considered that they had been intimate -and she wasn't certain she wanted to force Pepper to answer it.
Once he would have taken that humour and run with it, a marathon or a sprint maybe. His sense of amusement had always been more in shape than he was, and with five years active hit wizard duty, that was saying more than it could have been, despite the smoking, the deep-fried food, and, yes, the drinking. The part of him that acknowledged that, though, spent most of its time firmly quashed, buried under a pile of excuses - he wasn't hiding it, wasn't shirking his duties or even stealing to fuel the habit. He just... wanted to drink, right now. "I really don't think I want the entire camp in my bunk," he replied, and his voice was tired. "Or part of the camp." He considered adding that most of them hated him, but even in his head it sounded sulky and petulant.
Kate decided she wouldn't push that one almost instantaneously. The easy laughter and camarerie of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement offices seemed so long ago. She could close her eyes and see everyone at their desks, and she wondered who sat at hers now - whether it was a Death Eater, or someone else that she'd worked with and known. "It would get a little crowded," she said softly, and a little uncertainly. "Even with just a few of us. The rooms are hardly a mansion are they then?"
Pepper nodded vaguely towards the closer of the barracks buildings; even if she wasn't sleeping in one herself, she could see them easily enough. "Wouldn't want a fucking mansion anyway. Probably get-- fucking lost." It was sort of true, actually. Hogwarts had been... Hogwarts, but between that and the occasional visit to the entry hall of some overly-rich and pretentious pureblood home, his experience of spacious living was limited. He peered into his cup - it was almost empty, and he tossed the last of it back with a faint grimace. This conversation was beginning to wear at him, and he added abruptly to his comments. "Stop feeling sorry for me."
Kate was startled by his abrupt change of pace. She hadn't meant to be feeling sorry for him, although she supposed it could have come across that way. Mostly she was upset about the fact that they were all stuck in the middle of nowhere, with very little they'd been able to do to fight back, that Elle was hurting, and she knew Gawan was worrying about his daughter and ex-wife, and she was worried about her father. Although she supposed she had been feeling badly for Pepper, because he had lost someone close to him, it wasn't as if she hadn't spread that feeling around quite a it the past few weeks.
"I'm sorry, Pepper," she said, pressing her lips together. "I'm not. I mean, I suppose - I just know Millicent meant a lot to you and it's got to be hard. I wasn't trying to-" she stopped uncertain what to say. Perhaps coming and talking to him had been a bad idea. He'd just spent so much time alone and drinking that she did worry.
Irritation flickered, making his fingers twitch, and for a moment his rational and emotional sides warred over whether or not it was logical, warranted or needed. Emotion won; it had been doing that a lot, lately, which if he'd stopped to think about it might have been novel. But then, if he was stopping to think about it, it would be a pretty crap emotional side. "I swear I'm going to stab the next person who apologises. For fuck's sake." Instead he stood, cup discarded on the ground as he moved fluidly to his feet, and all of a sudden Kate was shorter than him again. "It's like everyone on our side has a fucking guilt complex and it's getting really old."
Kate looked up at him, feeling a little as if she had been doused with cold water. "I didn't mean-" she faltered, feeling as if she were about to apologise again and she did not particularly want to be stabbed. She didn't think she had a guilt complex and she didn't have time to dig deeply enough into her motivation to really figure out if she did. "Pepper, I don't think anyone means to be condescending, or over-apologetic, or whatever. It's more like - well," what was it? She stood up so that she was once again mostly even with him.
"I don't care." And god, even he was aware how sulky that sounded; he ran fingers through his hair, exasperated, not sure how he was supposed to be reacting here, just that he was most probably doing it wrong. It was an uncomfortable feeling and not one that really helped his mood, particularly as he turned his head to glare mulishly at the path to the graveyard and felt reality spin dizzily for a moment. Fuck. This was why he should not drink sitting down. This was why everything sucked, because he couldn't even get his own level of intoxication right and if you couldn't control how fucking drunk you were, things had to be pretty fucking pathetic. "I really just, do not care about this shit, so unless you have something else to drink, or some really fantastic weed, I don't care."
Kate frowned. She didn't think Pepper needed anything else to drink, or fantastic weed, or anything else that was likely to make him behave erratically. She knew that she couldn't completely understand, but on the other hand his behaviour seemed childish and immature to her. After all, they had all given up shit to be here, and they'd all lost people; granted she'd lost fewer in the sense of death as her father was still alive, but she couldn't see him even so. "You should care," she said stubbornly, surprising herself with the statement. Where had that come from? Her friendship with Pepper had always been defined by the lack of intimate details they shared (excepting that one night on her birthday which had been rather physically intimate). "If we all just give up and drown ourselves in firewhiskey they will win."
It probably was childish and immature, and all manner of things aside, but god he was just... so sick of this. Elle and Jo and now Kate, all acting like he was just going to give up when every death that added to the count in the back of his mind was really just giving him more reason to fight, more reason to tear down everything they tried to build, to destroy everything they held dear. And here they were in the middle of the fucking highlands, nothing to fight against for miles in any direction. Impatience clawed at the inside of his chest and he wished he could delude himself into thinking Rufus would approve of any plan that would get him within casting distance of one of them - or that he could think of one to start with.
Anger, hot and brash and undirected, bubbled up in his throat, and he had his hand halfway up before he even realised it was moving. Fuck-- Probably more effort than it should have taken to put it back down, shoving both clenched fists in his pockets, fingernails digging into palms hard and sharp and what the fuck was he doing, this was Kate, not-- Not anyone who deserved it. He backed up several steps, putting distance between them as his headache worsened. "I'm not-- I'm not giving up." The words sounded hollow and rather completely beside the point.
Kate was not naive enough to have missed the motion, and she stared at him worry in her eyes, although after a moment she dropped them away. She didn't attempt to move closer to him, the distance seemed suddenly safer all of a sudden, and she was half tempted to take a step back herself. She didn't know how to help him, she realised. She didn't know how to help any of them. The ideas the group was talking about were things that were not going to make that much difference, she thought. The Library and the Foundation had been good targets, but they weren't government targets. Perhaps it would be wiser of them to give up.
She wanted to apologise again, but obviously he was sick of that, and to be honest, none of it was her fault. There was nothing she could do. "Maybe I'll make the coffee tomorrow," she said pointlessly. "I can't promise it won't be burnt, but my Mother could always brew a decent cup. It will be the little things that keep us going, really."
For a moment Pepper stared at her incomprehendingly, then he shook his head, less a negation of her statement and more a meaningless, helpless gesture. He'd almost hit her and she was talking about-- coffee, and her mother and keeping fighting, and all he could focus on was the twist of self-disgust in his gut that whispered in a low and dangerous voice. He needed to get out of here. At least as far as the bluff. "Thanks," he said, because that seemed like the sort of thing he should probably say to that. "I'm going for a walk."