open to all y'all
Tony grabbed an oyster, leveled a wink at an indistinct figure in an admirably shocking purple somewhere across the room, slurped it down - and set the shell back, flipped, in its mountain of chipped ice. He wasn't quite three sheets to the wind, but he was looking to get there, happy for any excuse to leave moderation in the dust and have the kind of night that even just a couple of weeks ago would have come perfectly naturally to him, with no immediate concerns aside from whether the person who lugged him home was going to take proper care of his shoes. This was grisly as far as parties went, even he knew that; but it was a party, and he would damn well use it to forget. The less said about everything he'd left at home, the better.
It still echoed back to him at inconvenient moments, of course, when he caught a glimpse of the wrong face, or convinced himself he'd heard the wrong words - like a trick of the acoustics of this weird, winding place, bringing him up short against things he was trying very, very hard to put behind him. For now.
The liquor helped, and his behavior was as loose and as objectionable as always. The anxiety had manifested mostly in his clothes, actually. There were things he wanted to hide, now, that felt more urgent than they ever had before. And so instead of making sure he'd be the shape that popped out in any photograph, he'd gone the relatively subdued route, ditching the more obvious jungle references for close-woven peacock feathers, intricate, iridescent, practically satin - and pretty on the nose. No one could say it wasn't him. The jacket was stifling, but comfort was never paramount, and he'd be out of it within a couple hours anyway, judging by the pitch of the crowd. Everyone was dutifully living it up, and instead of being freeing, instead of feeling like the water to his fish, it was - it was like being in a pot and waiting for it to boil. He fucking hated it.
And he hated flowers, so he was staying well clear of the outside as much as he could, elbowing his way through the lobby and letting himself be pulled into conversations wherever he was snagged aside, always turning just back from the door, always passing again (and again) by the drink table. This time he grabbed something in a flute - an immaculately layered orange and black - and peered up at it under the light of one of the hanging lamps. "Wasn't that a song?" He fumbled for the reference, something ancient that he should have remembered from - where? Not any of his tutors; the study of history wasn't exactly encouraged. "Fearful - uniformity?" Whatever. Thrusting the glass up into the air, setting its neat stripes twisting together, he looked around for - anything, really. Another distraction. In many ways, a couple of days holed up with all these people seemed like a nightmare, a pocket of something explosive being compressed too tightly, too quickly - but in others, well, at least he wasn't home. At least he had something to worry about that wasn't the mud he was about to kick up in his own pool. Have fun: that's an order. "Someone get one of those tigers over here, I want a picture. Can you ride those? I'm pretty sure you can ride those."