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xp_logsAfter Doug and Marie-Ange arrive, there's dinner and chat and a small amount of embarrassment.
"...half his hair singed off, his eyebrows just about gone... Oh, you should have seen him," Amanda said, reaching for her wineglass. "And he had the hardest time convincing anyone Lockheed could breathe fire. Kitty was half-convinced he'd done it on purpose, made the poor little bugger drink petrol or something." She chuckled, shaking her head a little. "Poor Remy."
The scene was a rather domestic one: the remains of dinner on the battered wooden table, several bottles of wine scattered between serving dishes. Four young people at that lounging stage of proceedings, where the food and wine and company have mixed to produce a certain relaxed atmosphere. The night was warm, so the windows and doors were open to the sea breeze and not so far away came the sound of surf crashing onto the beach.
"I kind of miss Lockheed", Angelo said reflectively. "Joyita liked him, an' he was fun. Remember him an' Jay tryin' to fly in the storm an' both comin' in through the window?"
"We could persuade Kitty to come work for us and bring Lockheed with her. But then, Jamie would have a fit and Remy would have another fit, and they would be remarkably similar fits, without being anything alike at all." Marie-Ange said, giggling over her glass of wine. It was easily her third, and the fact that she could giggle and make jokes indicated to her that she was going to have at least one more. Possibly several more. It was good to be able to laugh.
It was also good to be able to relax. There had been far too little time for relaxing lately, not to mention a series of crises that hadn't exactly lent themselves to relaxation. But the vacation was helping a lot. The combination of the wine, the sun, and the gentle sound of surf had rather visibly drained the tension out of all four of them. Doug poured the last of the current bottle into his glass, shaking out a few extra drops. "More wine?" he asked the others with a smile.
"You have to ask?" Amanda immediately said with a grin as she got up to get another bottle out of the kitchen - there'd been a stop at some little winery on the trip down, and she and Angelo had stocked up, at Amanda's insistence. Wine, she'd said, made people relaxed, and they all needed that. She leaned over to collect finished-with plates, waving Angelo back into his seat as he started to get up to help. "You boys cooked. I can get this. 'Sides, your turn for the funny story. I'm sure there's something from your wacky adventures with Nate that'll fit."
"That means choosin' just one", he said wryly, but he'd already got the one in mind. "I guess, though, since we're talkin' about wine... it was in Kashmir, that first time we met Samie, an' he'd found an old friend runnin' a bar out in the middle of nowhere. An' he was tryin' to outdrink him, but his tolerance was shot round then. So he was insistin' he was fine, not drunk at all, an' then he got up... an' fell over. Twice. We had to practically carry him upstairs."
The mental image of Nathan staggering around drunkenly proclaiming that he was not actually drunk was enough to re-start Marie-Ange's giggling. "Nathan has lost so many of his tolerances. Chocolate, alcohol, rodents. Or is that just Rachel?" She wasn't sure, had drunk too much wine to remember if it was just Ray's prejudice or if Nathan was included in the anti-squirrel bias. "We should have dessert, speaking of chocolate. Chocolate is good. Necessary."
Doug was not at all shocked by his girlfriend's desire for chocolate. "There's a pie in the freezer," he called to Amanda as she walked into the kitchen to deposit the plates in the sink.
"You mean the master chef isn't going to whip up something from scratch?" came Amanda's teasing reply as she dumped dishes in the sink and opened the freezer. "Ooh, hey, someone got raspberry ice cream too!" This was bound to get a more excited reaction from the witch than chocolate. She returned, balancing ice cream on the pie box. "Thanks, whoever that was. You've made the non-chocolate eater very happy." Then she looked around. "Shite, forgot the plonk," she realised, and went back to the kitchen to get it.
"The plonk?" Doug with a raised eyebrow. "You forgot the wine? For shame!" he scolded her jokingly. "And Angelo gets the good boyfriend points for the ice cream," he informed Amanda. "Besides, I didn't do all the cooking, he helped. So really we both get good boyfriend points for the evening." He grinned and scooted his chair closer to Marie-Ange so that he could put his arm around her.
"Are you going to ask for.. what is that thing your friend from your game called it? The sexy time?" Marie-Ange asked. "Because if you are, I am going to have to drink more before you ask." She was tipsy enough to talk about it, and sober enough to blush at the same time. "Because asking will lead to questions and questions lead to answers and that leads to I need to drink more." She got up, while speaking and turned towards the kitchen. "And we need plates and spoons and people who have cooked should not have to get the dessert plates."
Angelo laughed at them. "Come on, you two. Leave that for later - 'specially if Angie has to get drunk before she can talk about it."
With a grin, Amanda came around the table and slid onto his lap, arms around his neck. "So no boyfriend points for you either?" she asked, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
His arms went round her waist automatically and he gave her a lazy grin in return. "I'll be claimin' them later too."
"I do not -have- to drink to talk about it." Marie-Ange protested as she came back, bearing a small stack of dessert plates and spoons and forks. "It is just easier. Like when Doug was a woman. It was easier to talk about, but not necessary." Maybe. She could tell herself that now, in hindsight. "It is because I was sheltered as a teenager. Wait, no, that is wrong. It is because... no, that would be wrong too." She set the plates down. "I forget why. But it is."
Doug snickered. "I think Angie's drunk enough to start talking about it already." He thought for a moment, blinking a bit owlishly. "Well, we're not really drunk. Just tipsy. But I think I need to be tipsier before any sex discussions happen around this table, considering." ~Considering I've had sex with two of the three people at this table, and the third made a disturbingly hot woman.~ He licked his lips nervously as they dried out.
"Oh, look, dessert!" It was a fairly obvious diversion, but definitely considering things Amanda felt it was needed. Besides, she was having too much fun for the first time in ages for things to descend into Awkward Land. Stealing another kiss before slipping off Angelo's lap, she flipped open the pie box. "That's... a lot of chocolate," she said, blinking at the contents. "It's not death by chocolate, it's bloody genocide."
Marie-Ange giggled, and waved a fork in Amanda's direction. "Is this where I am supposed to say that the world will end in a flood and watery deaths for everyone and not in chocolate? Because can I please pass on that? I like the chocolate apocalypse instead."
"If there's one thing I learned as a woman, it's that you can never have too much chocolate at times like these," Doug blurted out. "So I, for one, welcome our new confectionery overlords." He made grabbing motions at the pie. "Gimme."
Angelo blinked. "What do you mean, 'at times like these'? Somethin' you're not tellin' us, Doug?" It was pure friendly teasing, of course.
"I dunno," Doug demurred, trying to cover his lingering embarrassment. "Girl talk times? I mean, everyone at this table has been a woman now." He chuckled and carefully poured himself another glass of wine.
"And this is why organised team bonding exercises or whatever the hell Sof wants to call that are bollocks," Amanda pronounced, cutting into the pie and serving out generous chunks. "No-one ever had gender changing weirdness at a Finnegan's Friday." She paused. "Still, there were perks." She winked at Angelo.
"I still think she lost a bet and just could not tell us. Or that it -was- a bet." Marie-Ange said cheerfully. "She did not ask anyone except Doug and I, and we were the most likely to say yes without too much argument." Not that they hadn't argued. "Or threats to do something horrible to her." Which was to say, she hadn't come up with anything nearly creative enough until they were there already, and by then it was too late. "I still say had I wanted a cute blonde girlfriend, I could have just dated Amanda and not had any of this gender confusion nonsense."
There was a fit of coughing from Amanda as wine went up her nose at that one.
"But this way, you got a cute blonde girlfriend temporarily", Angelo pointed out with a wicked grin. "With the option to go find Paul again if you liked it enough."
It was Doug's turn to cough as a large mouthful of wine went down wrong. "I suspect Angie would say that once was enough. I was..." He shrugged self-consciously. "I kinda threw myself into being a woman. Plus I don't know if I could go looking for Paul to have it done on purpose. He...she...was pretty weird."
"And kind of dumb," Amanda said with a shrug, reclaiming her place on Angelo's lap with a generous portion of ice cream. "Anyone ever work out why he, she, whatever, did it? Besides for jollies?"
"We asked", Angelo said with a shrug. "Never did really get an answer out of him. Even when Pietro broke his finger an' Marie an' I threatened to hang him out the window." He was sticking with 'him', on account of the male name.
"Psychotic gender issues and he wanted to share?" Marie-Ange offered. "And Doug, you did a bit more than throwing yourself. I think, it would be more like if Cain threw you. Wanda told me about the banana." Which explained a lot, that Wanda was largely responsible for Doug's unnatural knowledge of things. Wanda was responsible for a lot of that, now that she thought about it. "I never want to be male again. I had hair in places I really ought to not have hair. "
"She told you about the BANANA?" Doug's voice cracked slightly at the end of the question. "Oh god." He looked at Amanda and Angelo's bemused and expectant expressions and groaned. "I'm going to have to explain, aren't I." When nobody answered in the negative, he sighed. "Someone pour me another glass of wine first." Fortified by a healthy swig from the glass, he told the story. "So, Angie was busy hiding in her room saying she didn't want to come out until we switched back. And I was...curious. So I had Wanda take me out clothes shopping, since I needed a dress if I was going to go chaperone prom. And then, after the shopping, we had ice cream, and I asked Wanda for...advice."
"You can't leave the story there", Angelo objected, laughing. "What kind of advice?"
Amanda snickered. "Advice that involved bananas and Doug turning bright red," she observed. "Which narrows it down a fair bit..."
Bright red didn't hardly begin to describe the color Doug's face was turning. "Blowjobs," the word came out in a rush of exhalation. "I was curious. But I said that already, didn't I. So I asked Wanda, she gave me advice. Embarrassing advice," he added, "and so I came back to the apartment, got a bottle of wine, put on the lowest cut top Wanda and I had bought, and went over and seduced my girlfriend's male body." He took another long drink of wine.
Marie-Ange muttered to herself in French and ducked her head, blushing. "Why do we have to have the embarrassing sex stories? I think if we have them, everyone should have them. It would be much easier to not want to hide under the sofa if everyone shared." It made no sense, the request was a product of the alcohol and chocolate, but she was firm about it, punctuating her sentence with a stab of fork into pie.
"It's only embarrassing if you think it is," Amanda said, mock-sagely, licking ice-cream off her spoon. "Tho', falling off the couch the first time we got our act together wasn't exactly one of my shining moments..." She grinned at Angelo. "Or there's that time in Madagascar where the tide came in a bit sooner than we expected and you lost your swim trunks."
"I got them back before anyone saw!" he protested, still laughing out loud. "That's what nice quiet private beaches are for. An' I could think of a few like that about you, too..."
"...half his hair singed off, his eyebrows just about gone... Oh, you should have seen him," Amanda said, reaching for her wineglass. "And he had the hardest time convincing anyone Lockheed could breathe fire. Kitty was half-convinced he'd done it on purpose, made the poor little bugger drink petrol or something." She chuckled, shaking her head a little. "Poor Remy."
The scene was a rather domestic one: the remains of dinner on the battered wooden table, several bottles of wine scattered between serving dishes. Four young people at that lounging stage of proceedings, where the food and wine and company have mixed to produce a certain relaxed atmosphere. The night was warm, so the windows and doors were open to the sea breeze and not so far away came the sound of surf crashing onto the beach.
"I kind of miss Lockheed", Angelo said reflectively. "Joyita liked him, an' he was fun. Remember him an' Jay tryin' to fly in the storm an' both comin' in through the window?"
"We could persuade Kitty to come work for us and bring Lockheed with her. But then, Jamie would have a fit and Remy would have another fit, and they would be remarkably similar fits, without being anything alike at all." Marie-Ange said, giggling over her glass of wine. It was easily her third, and the fact that she could giggle and make jokes indicated to her that she was going to have at least one more. Possibly several more. It was good to be able to laugh.
It was also good to be able to relax. There had been far too little time for relaxing lately, not to mention a series of crises that hadn't exactly lent themselves to relaxation. But the vacation was helping a lot. The combination of the wine, the sun, and the gentle sound of surf had rather visibly drained the tension out of all four of them. Doug poured the last of the current bottle into his glass, shaking out a few extra drops. "More wine?" he asked the others with a smile.
"You have to ask?" Amanda immediately said with a grin as she got up to get another bottle out of the kitchen - there'd been a stop at some little winery on the trip down, and she and Angelo had stocked up, at Amanda's insistence. Wine, she'd said, made people relaxed, and they all needed that. She leaned over to collect finished-with plates, waving Angelo back into his seat as he started to get up to help. "You boys cooked. I can get this. 'Sides, your turn for the funny story. I'm sure there's something from your wacky adventures with Nate that'll fit."
"That means choosin' just one", he said wryly, but he'd already got the one in mind. "I guess, though, since we're talkin' about wine... it was in Kashmir, that first time we met Samie, an' he'd found an old friend runnin' a bar out in the middle of nowhere. An' he was tryin' to outdrink him, but his tolerance was shot round then. So he was insistin' he was fine, not drunk at all, an' then he got up... an' fell over. Twice. We had to practically carry him upstairs."
The mental image of Nathan staggering around drunkenly proclaiming that he was not actually drunk was enough to re-start Marie-Ange's giggling. "Nathan has lost so many of his tolerances. Chocolate, alcohol, rodents. Or is that just Rachel?" She wasn't sure, had drunk too much wine to remember if it was just Ray's prejudice or if Nathan was included in the anti-squirrel bias. "We should have dessert, speaking of chocolate. Chocolate is good. Necessary."
Doug was not at all shocked by his girlfriend's desire for chocolate. "There's a pie in the freezer," he called to Amanda as she walked into the kitchen to deposit the plates in the sink.
"You mean the master chef isn't going to whip up something from scratch?" came Amanda's teasing reply as she dumped dishes in the sink and opened the freezer. "Ooh, hey, someone got raspberry ice cream too!" This was bound to get a more excited reaction from the witch than chocolate. She returned, balancing ice cream on the pie box. "Thanks, whoever that was. You've made the non-chocolate eater very happy." Then she looked around. "Shite, forgot the plonk," she realised, and went back to the kitchen to get it.
"The plonk?" Doug with a raised eyebrow. "You forgot the wine? For shame!" he scolded her jokingly. "And Angelo gets the good boyfriend points for the ice cream," he informed Amanda. "Besides, I didn't do all the cooking, he helped. So really we both get good boyfriend points for the evening." He grinned and scooted his chair closer to Marie-Ange so that he could put his arm around her.
"Are you going to ask for.. what is that thing your friend from your game called it? The sexy time?" Marie-Ange asked. "Because if you are, I am going to have to drink more before you ask." She was tipsy enough to talk about it, and sober enough to blush at the same time. "Because asking will lead to questions and questions lead to answers and that leads to I need to drink more." She got up, while speaking and turned towards the kitchen. "And we need plates and spoons and people who have cooked should not have to get the dessert plates."
Angelo laughed at them. "Come on, you two. Leave that for later - 'specially if Angie has to get drunk before she can talk about it."
With a grin, Amanda came around the table and slid onto his lap, arms around his neck. "So no boyfriend points for you either?" she asked, pressing a kiss to his cheek.
His arms went round her waist automatically and he gave her a lazy grin in return. "I'll be claimin' them later too."
"I do not -have- to drink to talk about it." Marie-Ange protested as she came back, bearing a small stack of dessert plates and spoons and forks. "It is just easier. Like when Doug was a woman. It was easier to talk about, but not necessary." Maybe. She could tell herself that now, in hindsight. "It is because I was sheltered as a teenager. Wait, no, that is wrong. It is because... no, that would be wrong too." She set the plates down. "I forget why. But it is."
Doug snickered. "I think Angie's drunk enough to start talking about it already." He thought for a moment, blinking a bit owlishly. "Well, we're not really drunk. Just tipsy. But I think I need to be tipsier before any sex discussions happen around this table, considering." ~Considering I've had sex with two of the three people at this table, and the third made a disturbingly hot woman.~ He licked his lips nervously as they dried out.
"Oh, look, dessert!" It was a fairly obvious diversion, but definitely considering things Amanda felt it was needed. Besides, she was having too much fun for the first time in ages for things to descend into Awkward Land. Stealing another kiss before slipping off Angelo's lap, she flipped open the pie box. "That's... a lot of chocolate," she said, blinking at the contents. "It's not death by chocolate, it's bloody genocide."
Marie-Ange giggled, and waved a fork in Amanda's direction. "Is this where I am supposed to say that the world will end in a flood and watery deaths for everyone and not in chocolate? Because can I please pass on that? I like the chocolate apocalypse instead."
"If there's one thing I learned as a woman, it's that you can never have too much chocolate at times like these," Doug blurted out. "So I, for one, welcome our new confectionery overlords." He made grabbing motions at the pie. "Gimme."
Angelo blinked. "What do you mean, 'at times like these'? Somethin' you're not tellin' us, Doug?" It was pure friendly teasing, of course.
"I dunno," Doug demurred, trying to cover his lingering embarrassment. "Girl talk times? I mean, everyone at this table has been a woman now." He chuckled and carefully poured himself another glass of wine.
"And this is why organised team bonding exercises or whatever the hell Sof wants to call that are bollocks," Amanda pronounced, cutting into the pie and serving out generous chunks. "No-one ever had gender changing weirdness at a Finnegan's Friday." She paused. "Still, there were perks." She winked at Angelo.
"I still think she lost a bet and just could not tell us. Or that it -was- a bet." Marie-Ange said cheerfully. "She did not ask anyone except Doug and I, and we were the most likely to say yes without too much argument." Not that they hadn't argued. "Or threats to do something horrible to her." Which was to say, she hadn't come up with anything nearly creative enough until they were there already, and by then it was too late. "I still say had I wanted a cute blonde girlfriend, I could have just dated Amanda and not had any of this gender confusion nonsense."
There was a fit of coughing from Amanda as wine went up her nose at that one.
"But this way, you got a cute blonde girlfriend temporarily", Angelo pointed out with a wicked grin. "With the option to go find Paul again if you liked it enough."
It was Doug's turn to cough as a large mouthful of wine went down wrong. "I suspect Angie would say that once was enough. I was..." He shrugged self-consciously. "I kinda threw myself into being a woman. Plus I don't know if I could go looking for Paul to have it done on purpose. He...she...was pretty weird."
"And kind of dumb," Amanda said with a shrug, reclaiming her place on Angelo's lap with a generous portion of ice cream. "Anyone ever work out why he, she, whatever, did it? Besides for jollies?"
"We asked", Angelo said with a shrug. "Never did really get an answer out of him. Even when Pietro broke his finger an' Marie an' I threatened to hang him out the window." He was sticking with 'him', on account of the male name.
"Psychotic gender issues and he wanted to share?" Marie-Ange offered. "And Doug, you did a bit more than throwing yourself. I think, it would be more like if Cain threw you. Wanda told me about the banana." Which explained a lot, that Wanda was largely responsible for Doug's unnatural knowledge of things. Wanda was responsible for a lot of that, now that she thought about it. "I never want to be male again. I had hair in places I really ought to not have hair. "
"She told you about the BANANA?" Doug's voice cracked slightly at the end of the question. "Oh god." He looked at Amanda and Angelo's bemused and expectant expressions and groaned. "I'm going to have to explain, aren't I." When nobody answered in the negative, he sighed. "Someone pour me another glass of wine first." Fortified by a healthy swig from the glass, he told the story. "So, Angie was busy hiding in her room saying she didn't want to come out until we switched back. And I was...curious. So I had Wanda take me out clothes shopping, since I needed a dress if I was going to go chaperone prom. And then, after the shopping, we had ice cream, and I asked Wanda for...advice."
"You can't leave the story there", Angelo objected, laughing. "What kind of advice?"
Amanda snickered. "Advice that involved bananas and Doug turning bright red," she observed. "Which narrows it down a fair bit..."
Bright red didn't hardly begin to describe the color Doug's face was turning. "Blowjobs," the word came out in a rush of exhalation. "I was curious. But I said that already, didn't I. So I asked Wanda, she gave me advice. Embarrassing advice," he added, "and so I came back to the apartment, got a bottle of wine, put on the lowest cut top Wanda and I had bought, and went over and seduced my girlfriend's male body." He took another long drink of wine.
Marie-Ange muttered to herself in French and ducked her head, blushing. "Why do we have to have the embarrassing sex stories? I think if we have them, everyone should have them. It would be much easier to not want to hide under the sofa if everyone shared." It made no sense, the request was a product of the alcohol and chocolate, but she was firm about it, punctuating her sentence with a stab of fork into pie.
"It's only embarrassing if you think it is," Amanda said, mock-sagely, licking ice-cream off her spoon. "Tho', falling off the couch the first time we got our act together wasn't exactly one of my shining moments..." She grinned at Angelo. "Or there's that time in Madagascar where the tide came in a bit sooner than we expected and you lost your swim trunks."
"I got them back before anyone saw!" he protested, still laughing out loud. "That's what nice quiet private beaches are for. An' I could think of a few like that about you, too..."
