Re: [Tea: Daniel/Claire]
Daniel had been referring to The Hobbit, not that he would be able to quote it. Daniel had an appreciation for languages, possibly even those that did not exist. Despite his nature, however, Daniel had never been much for tales of elves and ghosts. He was more of a romantic, and the more likely the elves were to pine after ephemeral humans the more likely he was to like it. Perhaps 5% of Tolkien might appeal to Daniel: language that described the gold-grubbing dragons, a tiny appendix about aforementioned pining, and the tut-tutting of various elderly characters about their foolish youthful counterparts. If forced to recall, he would probably recall the wizard doing the tut-tutting, and would assume the dragon won.
The vampire glanced sideways at the phone as the music went silent. "I can never get mine to play anything but that horrible screeching that means someone is calling for me." His accent was no lighter these days, though it was far thicker in the lap of inflection than it had been when they'd first met not a mile from the Tiber. It wasn't even real British, it was older than that, farther still from her musical Italian that he adopted in his own antique way. "The music never sounds the way it might from the instrument." As if she might be able to take this complaint to someone of higher authority and handle it promptly.
He added an additional smirk-ish edge to his glance now. "I remember things about books." One of his brows went up, but he approved her affection for the objects and smiled slowly. "Not a replacement for higher education, but you shall manage." It was true that Daniel did not approve of Claire's finite language. She always spoke of her violent death as immediately forthcoming and inevitable. Even if it was so, Daniel believed that things like that should take humans by surprise. It was cruel otherwise, and he didn't like it when they were overly cruel to each other (or themselves).
"Hm?" Daniel looked up from his contemplation of the wine, which was mostly gone and glistened like gold at the bottom of the glass. "Oh, certainly. Love." He waved a hand at the book as if it gave instructions to create explosives and should be simultaneously dismissed as uncouth and treated with care.