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Tweak says, "don't go chasing waterfalls"

Alan Tambling 🐾 Tyrion Lannister (alittlelion) wrote in thereincarnates,
@ 2017-11-22 21:39:00

Entry tags:

alan tambling, josephine boss

Who: Alan Tambling and Jo Boss
What: A very drunken holiday.
Where: A pub in Glastonbury
When: Thursday, November 23; afternoon
Warnings: TBD, drunken idiocy probable

Alan very much hated holidays. On weekdays he kept himself at a tolerable level of functional, and on weekends he had when to stop drinking so that he'd be back to that tolerable level of functional come Monday morning down to a fine art. There were always exceptions of course, weekends when something unexpected came up. Alan had been drinking heavily since before some members of his department were even legal adults though. He knew exactly how to fake it. Oh, he imagined that Jo and Raif knew exactly what he was covering up, but they also needed far less supervision than their younger counterparts. Some days Alan thought that really, Jo should be in charge of him. She acted like she was at least. Not that he was claiming he didn't need it; that was a lie that Alan couldn't even begin to pull off with a straight face. His department was as good for him as he was for it.

Holidays, though. Holidays were outside the norm, particularly when they happened to fall in the midst of the week. This particular holiday wasn't even one that they celebrated, but there were enough American employees at Camelot that they got the day anyhow because never let it be said that Camelot wasn't the most accomodating place that Alan had ever worked. Not that he was complaining, really. He was fairly certain that he'd have been kicked out on his arse anywhere else long before this but Camelot was apparently the land of the functional alchoholics. It was almost as if Alan had found his people at long last, though he maintained that he was very much the king of that particular vice. It didn't keep him from being damned decent at his job. In the field... in the field it would hinder him. Sitting safe in an office most of the time it was less of a problem.

It was difficult to stay at that 'functional' level when there wasn't work to keep his mind occupied but Alan did have to be back to work bright and early the next morning, ready to spend another day pretending as if he wasn't relying on alcohol to keep the very act of living tolerable. Blur the edges a bit, so to speak. That did leave him in a bit of a quandry. Holidays weren't built into the system that Alan had come up with for himself when he started attempting to rejoin the world in a small grasping way that most people probably wouldn't consider counting. The solution he'd come up with in this particular case was going in to work half a day on catching up paperwork and plotting out what he was going to toss at his minions the next morning and then settling himself in at a pub for the rest of it. It was, he thought, a very nice compromise. He could even listen in on the locals and keep his eavesdropping skills sharp.

Not that there was anything all that interesting going on. Alan was just another pathetic drunk imbibing on a weekday when he ought to have been out serving as a functional member of society. That meant that he was surrounded by other pathetic drunks who ought to have been out being functional members of society, and they tended to keep to themselves just as much as he was making every possible effort to. They were all a very sorry, antisocial lot, the entire group of them. Of course they were all probably trying as hard as Alan was to convince themselves that there was something about them that made them different than all the rest of the pathetic excuses for human beings. Alan was reassuring himself that at least he did have a job. No telling what the rest of them were telling themselves so that they could look at themselves in the mirror in the morning.

At least it was quiet at this time of day, and at least he very much doubted that anyone who shouldn't see him making the sort of horrible choices he made when left to his own devices would happen to stumble into the fairly seedy pub he'd selected for the afternoon. The American portion of Camelot had family to be with, after all, and he imagined that quite a few of the non-Americans had gotten themselves invited to their coworkers' celebrations. No one had invited Alan; not that he'd have accepted even if they had. Not quite his style. No, Alan imagined that he'd manage to spend the day alone, just how he liked it.

Unless, of course, he'd managed to jinx himself with that mental proclamation. It wouldn't be the first time that he'd swear someone had heard his thoughts and decided to laugh at him a bit.

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doubleohs
2017-11-26 01:49 am UTC (link)

Living in Israel and then in the United Kingdom, this particular holiday wasn't anymore significant to Jo, except as an excuse to drink. Not that she usually needed one. Normally, she would be more content to drink at home and away from people, mostly because she hated people. That might surprise you, considering how cheerful Jo could appear to be most of the time and how well she was able to deal with them on the job, but half the perks of her profession was that she might get the chance to hit someone. One of Jo's deepest, darkest secret was that she actually hated almost everyone she ever met, and she definitely didn't trust any of them.

She was good at lying. She was good at a lot of things, but lying was something she'd always been a natural at, even before she made something of a career out of it. Jo was pretty good at putting on a convincing act and making other people believe that she really was as friendly as she seemed, but underneath the pleasant smile and the occasionally chatty attitude, she was actually a lot more like an animal baring its teeth under her lips, waiting to see if she'd have to bite. With the people she worked with, it was a little different. She respected Raif too much to dislike him, and hating Haley and Terra was like trying to hate small, helpless puppies. Which she assumed they actually sometimes were. Then there was Alan.

He was a barely functional human, a drunk, and maybe the rudest person she'd ever met. That last thing was one of the reasons she'd taken an immediate liking to him, but inexplicably, the other stuff didn't seem to bother her either, despite her Type A work ethic. Her personal life might be in shambles, but Jo somehow managed to keep that from seeping into her professional life. Alan was a mess. He could fool the others, but Jo saw right through him. He seemed to see right through her too, though, and maybe there was a part of Jo that liked having someone who wasn't afraid to call her on her shit, and didn't seem to mind when she called him on his. Her professional relationship with Alan was an odd one, but it worked. Besides, someone had to make sure he didn't drown in his own cereal.

While she still preferred to be alone, once in awhile, Jo did start to get that restless feeling like if she had to stare at her own walls for another five seconds she was going to crawl out of her own skin. She didn't really bother with things like furnishing or nesting since she spent so much time on the job, all she had in her apartment was a shitty couch, a mattress which she usually neglected for said shitty couch, a mini fridge, a lamp, and a small bookshelf. She didn't even bother with a television since she was never home long enough to use it, and the hotels she often ended up staying in while she was working always had them in the rooms.

That was more or less how she found herself in this shithole of a pub, because it reminded her of her shithole of an apartment, and there was absolutely no way that anyone would try to bother her here. It was ironic that the minute she saw Alan inside, she immediately felt the urge to bother him instead of keeping to herself like she'd originally planned. Well, plans changed. She was easily adaptable, and pestering her boss had become one of her favorite past times in more recent months. After grabbing an ale from the bar, Jo sidled up to the booth Alan was holing up in and set her drink down on the table with an unceremonious plunk. "Drinking your dinner?" Not that she could really talk. They had that in common.

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