Alisha, Nathan, and Harley, backdated to July 13

[om_vault]

At the birthday bash, Alisha and Nathan are soaking up some sun when Harley crashes the conversation. Nathan dutifully attempts to corrupt Harley, Alisha tries to keep things in hand, and Harley... gets drunk.


It was a recent blow. Alice and Lydia both thought they could tell her what to do. They both thought they could just magic up a cure for her. They expected that she should have been able to control her powers at least to some degree. She knew that she couldn't, but every time she came across a problem, one of the two of them - or both - gave her looks as if it somehow should have been better.

But today, it didn't matter. Today she was showing off her tan in a bikini top and wraparound skirt and to hell with anyone who thought she could do things better. This was good enough. Except that she was pretty sure she was currently hitting a new low. She was spending time, willingly, with Nathan. Oh, there were other people she could go see. The birthday boy, her roommate, but she seemed to keep gravitating back to the people she'd been with back in London.

She took a sip of her drink and wondered when she'd officially hit the low. Especially because it wasn't as bad as she might have thought it'd be.

Nathan hadn't the slightest why Alisha was deigning to keep her lawn chair parked next to him in his Xavier's logo swim trunks and his slather of sunscreen, when she was always going on how foul he was. She'd been going on about it less since they'd got here - not to spare him at all, he didn't think - but she'd been less catty and chatty all around compared to in community service. Whatever her reasons, he didn't mind sitting next to her, either, though he did wish she'd crack one of her bitchy smiles for him. Besides getting a front row view of her in a bikini, (what? he didn't have any designs on that, he wasn't going to keep looking, but he was certain she'd be offended if he didn't have even one glance! He wasn't dead again yet!) it felt like a better place to be than trying to hang on to one of the however fuckmany Curtises there were running around now. He just didn't know how to be around Curtis anymore that wouldn't turn out shit by the end. Alisha was a relative safezone, someone he had reason enough to sit with without looking like he was avoiding anyone or anything.

...Definitely time to sneak another drink.

"Would m'lady like another fine beverage?" He cracked open the cooler they'd stocked special for their enjoyment and dug around to see what they'd got left. Beer in dollar store coozies so as to make them look more like cans of cola, plastic fizz bottles with what was definitely not fizz in, nice and chilled over ice.

Harley was wandering around the party, not really talking to anyone but feeling good. Sunshine and happy people! She'd even been in the lake earlier, which she'd never done before! But then she thought she saw a fish so she got out, because ewwwww, fish. Then she'd talked with Alice a while 'cause it was her birthday. They'd talked about gymnastics, and it made her sad and angry and then she'd told Alice that she'd wasted all that time on gymnastics and never kissed a boy or had any alcohol or anything. So Alice had fixed her a drink, and Harley didn't know what was in it besides juice, but it was pretty tasty and it made her feel kinda tingly!

She spotted Alisha lounging in the late afternoon sun. Alisha! Alisha was fun - Harley didn't always understand what she said, and she could be kinda mean, but she'd made Harley hot chocolate that one time so they were friends.

"Alisha!!" Harley bounded toward the older girl like there was going to a tackle-hug-pounce thing, but converted the move into a dive and forward roll to land in a straddle next to her chair. Thinking this was a great trick, Harley giggled and beamed up at Alisha, ready for her reprimand. Then she noticed Nathan, and cocked her head to one side. "Who's he?"

"Make that two drinks," Alisha told Nathan once her heart had started beating again. She'd had this conversation with Harley and it was nice to see that she hadn't actually run headlong into Alisha this time, but she'd still looked like she would and that was terrifying enough. She needed something to calm her down and alcohol was the only thing Alisha had in mind.

She looked at Harley with a stern look. "But only if you promise never to fucking scare me like that again."

She jerked her head at Nathan and gave Harley his name. "And the kid is Harley."

Nathan's great dark eyebrows scrunched where he watched the manic pixie-thing flopping and tumbling about Alisha's person, reflexively shifting away and holding aside the fresh beer he'd pulled out of the ice chest and stuck in his coozie for the empty one to protect it. "I'm not pouring perfectly good alcohol into your faulty motorcycle-girl," he protested in a sentence that entirely made sense to his mind, directly back at Alisha rather than giving the giggler a vote.

Harley's hand was still on her forehead, saluting Alisha a promise not to scare her again. She converted the hand to a sunshade over her eyes, ostensibly to see Nathan better as she flat-out stared at him. Then she turned her quizzical look on Alisha. "Does he speak English?"

Alisha shot Nathan a look. Really? Everyone she seemed to talk to in this school had some kind of alcohol source and he was complaining about giving up one drink? "Yes. You are." She wasn't giving him any more of a choice than he was giving Harley. She spared a glance for the girl. "Not really. This is about as close as he gets."

Nathan made a sarcastically non-amused expression at the kid haha, it is to laugh, then looked right back at Alisha, unfazed and definitely undaunted. "Have you even noticed she's all of about ten years old and well special without a drop of drink in her yet?"

"When was the first time you had a drink?" she pointed out. "I'm trying to calm her down." When she wasn't in party mode - and even when she was - she tended to be very laid back when she drank.

Nathan shrugged his angular shoulders at her, but it wasn't really worth getting fussed over. It was possibly even not a bad idea. He re-considered the girl sprawled at Alisha's feet with a more curious expression this time. "You like 7-Up, kid?"

Harley was grinning because Alisha had totally won, and because she'd done a little better with Nathan's accent this time. Still not great, but better enough to get that he thought she was ten and that he was asking about 7-Up.

"Yummm!" she confirmed with a bouncing nod. "And I'm not a little kid, I'm thirteen!"

"Too small for thirteen," he told her, as if changing her status, while he got out a red plastic cup and scooped some ice into it. Nathan splashed some Seagram's on that - not too heavy with his pouring hand, so not an even half, but it was about a third - and the rest he filled with the 7-Up brought for specifically this purpose. He tried a swallow - yep, sugar sweet, lemon-lime, the whiskey not so strong tasting at all - and held it out for her approval. "We'll call it eleven. Mum here says you're old enough, anyway."

Just before Harley's eager hands could snap it up, though, Nathan lifted the cup out of her reach. "No ratting out your elders if you're caught with it, young lady. Nobody likes a rat bastard," he warned, lowering the cup for her again.

Looking at him suspiciously, Harley didn't try to take the drink again yet. "Small but mighty," she told him, sticking out her tongue. "And no one catches me with anything."

She disappeared a hand in front of her, and brought it back with a big bag of tortilla chips she'd pilfered from the snack table. Still squinting at Nathan suspiciously, she reached for the cup again with one hand, offering him the chips in trade with the other.

"Except when you nearly run into them in the halls," Alisha pointed out dryly. She could have been an adult and whatever Harley had with her would have been out in the open for everyone to see. She would have been caught in Alisha's grip. "Good to see that you two are making friends, though."

"So you went and adopted her?" It was suspicious behaviour from Alisha, he thought, but Nathan had an immediate distraction that let her off without answering.

Nathan's eyes widened at the disappearing-reappearing-with-crisps-in-hand trick, and he looked from Harley to Alisha to down in the beer can propped up against his thigh, looking for signs of drugging, maybe, before shrugging and tipping it back for another swallow. Then his attention was back at the girl again, where he still had that drink he'd made her, finally accepting her offering and handing the cup over. "All right, Tinkerbell. The crap was that?!"

Holding her newly acquired drink in both hands, Harley took a big gulp. The sun was hot and she was thirsty! She made a little face 'cause it tasted funny - why did everyone drink so much alcohol if it tasted so bad? - but it was sweet enough to keep drinking. Humming over the rim of her cup, she blinked up at him. "Nooo, Kohaku is Tinkerbell, I'm Vault." Well, Kohaku was Cherub, but Harley didn't like that word, and she made such a pretty fairy... "I stash stuff, it's my thing."

"More like the other way around," Alisha said and quickly took a sip of her beer before she could be tempted to smile. The only person she knew here who could be as hyper as Nathan was Harley. Match made in heaven. For them. Hell for everyone else. "She adopted me when she nearly bowled me down in the hall one day. I just put up with the kid."

What was she going to do, put a hand on the kid's forehead and watch her flail. Although...

"You're downright maternal," Nathan muttered at Alisha wryly, mostly because it was the most ridiculous thing that could be said. "What do you mean with this 'you stash stuff,' Tink? Where's it even go?" The larcenous cogs were already beginning to turn those gears about in that curly head of his, and he started to look at the blondie less like a pesky kid and more like an excellent opportunity for trouble of all sorts.

"It goes here," Harley told him like it was obvious, sticking her arms out on either side and plunging them both into the Pocket space up to the elbow. Knowing it kind of freaked people out, she wiggled her arms up, down, and around with a wicked little grin. But that was kind of hard, so she brought her hands back and tucked them in her lap. Then she realized she'd lost her drink.

"You should try that trick with guys sometime. Pretend you're reaching into your purse." Alisha shot Nathan a glance that was really more of a glare. She was not maternal, damn it. Weird people - like him - seemed to adopt her, not the other way around. "Guys always think women's purses are infinite and that we have everything in there."

"Because they are! My mum's got everything in her purse. Or maybe she's just got the same mutant power," he supposed. Nathan's eyebrows had lifted watching Harley, though "freaked out" wouldn't have been a way to describe his nearly impressed expression. "How much can you fit in there, exactly? Have you got a car set aside, or the whole of a building? Wait, no, of course you haven't - I don't know how you'd lift them in, for starters." He still didn't understand where 'here' was, that is to say, where her stuff went. But he'd leave that to the brainy types.

Harley's hand was still disappeared, feeling for her drink. "Small stuff," she muttered, nodding with her eyes out of focus. "Only my hands can go through, and stuff can go with them." Finally her fingers touched the cold plastic cup, and with a triumphant grin she pulled it back. She took another big drink - mmm, cold! - and beamed up at Alisha again. "I use it for magic sometimes!"

Alisha sighed. Harley was just like one of those tiny dogs old women had sometimes. Yappy and affectionate and adorable and annoying all at the same time. And it seemed as if the girl had decided Alisha was stuck with her. Wonderful. "Now you see it, now you don't?" she confirmed. Because around here, talk of actual magic might not have thrown her too far off her stride.

"Magic is for losers," Nathan felt the need to inform the girl rather seriously, before it was too late for her to be cool ever again in her life. He sat forward in his chair to dispense with the Advice From Your Elders talk, pointing at her with the finger of his beer hand. "And you're not one of them, are you, drinking your alcohol like a wee little eleven-year-old badass and everything? No, of course you're not," he decided, reaching to tap his coozie against her plastic cup for a kind of cheers. "What you should be using your God-given gift for is petty theft! You're the most natural born shoplifter there ever was!" And what a perfect drug mule, besides - but maybe give her a couple of years yet for that. "I would've gave my left nut to have such a power at your age. I still might!"

"I'm thirteen," Harley complained, having only understood about half of that. Between Nathan's accent and the strange way he managed to string words together, it was more than a little difficult for her to follow. "And I wouldn't steal stuff, that's bad!" '

...although she had been taking whole boxes of the best cookies from the kitchen and stashing them. And the tortilla chips, those were for everyone but she'd nabbed those too... Oh! And Alaska's boomerang! Harley bit at the edge of her cup and looked away, trying to look innocent. "Stuff from a store, anyways."

"No one wants to hear about your nuts," Alisha informed Nathan, giving him a stern look. Turning her attention on Harley, she said, "Ignore him. He's full of crap. If he were to have his way, we'd all be perverts, just like him." She rolled her eyes, but there was something almost fond about it. Like she was talking about her annoying kid brother. Not that she'd ever had a brother in her life.

"That was a figure of speech," Nathan defended against Alisha with an equal sort of almost routine offence in the mock-hurt look he gave her. "And you're a fine one to talk about perverts! You've got stories the Royal Navy would blush at." He pretended to ignore her in kind, getting back to the important matter of corrupting the youth. "You know I'm right," he insisted at blondie, remembering the chips she'd given him and lifting the bag for an illustrative shake. "What's even the point of having a power if you're not going to abuse it properly?"

Having belatedly caught up with the previous comments, Harley was scrunching up her face at Nathan for being gross. Then she leaned back on one arm and stretched her legs out in front of her and between the two lawn chairs, an exaggerated thoughtful look on her face as she pretended to think about it. She took another big drink - it was getting harder to get liquid from around the ice now - then squinted up at him. "Hmm, what do you use yours for?"

(She glanced at Alisha too, but Alisha didn't like to talk about her power, and maybe Nathan was the same way, but it was just a thing you asked around here, jeez, but whatever... mm, funny warm feeling in her tummy...)

Alisha looked right back at Harley. The last thing she needed was the pair of them trying to get what her power was from her. At least one of the two had the sense not to pry. It made her wonder whether Nathan hadn't been hit on the head as a child or something. He just didn't seem to get the meaning of 'fuck off' to heart.

"Oh, here we go," she muttered. Well, if anything would distract Nathan from her power, it was talking about his.

"Isn't it obvious?" He glanced between the girls. "I've got charm powers coming out my arse! That's why you're going to let me take you shopping with your five-finger discount sometime," Nathan informed Harley with an impish grin.

Alarmed, Harley immediately pulled her cup into the Pocket and rolled backwards (with an alarming and unfamiliar whooshing in her ears), ending in a low crouch that was steady only from years of training, but really her head felt kinda funny. Was he doing something to her now?? She looked up at him reproachfully, a big pout on her lips but genuine fear in her eyes. "I thought there were only two!" she practically wailed. "You can't, it's not allowed!"

"Two what? Morons? Because I'm pretty sure that Nathan is the king of those." She leaned in a little closer to Harley and lowered her voice to a pretend hushed whisper loud enough that Nathan was sure to - and meant to - overhear. "Don't listen to him. He doesn't have any charm whatsoever. He just thinks he does."

Clearly he'd terrified the kid and just as clearly he was going to have to fix it. She shot Nathan a look. "Come on. Just because I don't tell people what mine is, I know that you don't have that problem."

"Jaysis," Nathan muttered, blinking over at Alisha from where the other girl had literally rolled away all scared. "I only said it for a laugh, all right? Don't lump me in with those assholes."

He opened up the crisps Harley had given him, crunching on the one, then held the bag out low for Harley and gave it a little shake of a peace offering. "Besides," he offered out as well - not that he advertised to just anyone, but Alisha was going to tell if he didn't to make the pipsqueak feel better, so he might as well have a brag - "my power's much cooler than that. Mine's top shelf, A-list, best of the best, can't be outdone. I'm immortal."

Oh... then maybe the drinks were making her head go funny, not someone's power. Harley was pretty okay with that actually.

Seeing no immediate danger after all, she grinned and flopped forward onto her belly, feet happily kicking back and forth in the air as she reached for a chip and retrieved her drink (by sending her arm straight into the grass for it). "That's okay then!" she decided, finishing her drink. ...and tipping some of the ice on her face in the process, but oh well! It was hot and she was funny-warm from the drink, so she sucked on an ice cube for a moment.

She was like some cat playing in the grass and Alisha had the absurd image of petting Harley's stomach or head or something, but she'd probably only be batted at. That was what cats did, right? She narrowed her eyes a little and wondered if the girl'd had more than just the drink they'd given her. She shouldn't have been that much of a lightweight. But it was clear that she was happy and she probably had a roommate or something to bring her home at the end of the night.

"We're raising a little lush," Nathan pointed out with a glance over at Alisha. "She must get that from your side. Is the drink-driving waiting until after she's licensed?"

"We are not raising anything." She wasn't going to be associated like that with Nathan even as a joke. But then she said, "And if anything, she gets it from you. You're the one who offered me the drink tonight, remember?"

"Back when I thought you were a responsible young lady," Nathan suggested in a flat-out lie for dramatic purposes. "And you can't leave me alone with the baby, not now! A girl needs her mum-figure in her life!"

"And since you are such a responsible young man, I'm sure you'll be fine," Alisha shot back. Responsible her arse.

Harley interrupted their argument about she-didn't-know-what (possibly her?) by shaking her ice-filled cup at Nathan. "That was tasty, can I have some more?" She wasn't sure she'd get it, but she had a back-up plan or two. The first was offering something else in trade, like she had with the chips earlier. The second... might involve swiping something of his and holding it hostage (but only if she thought Alisha would let her get away with it). Which wasn't stealing, it was borrowing.

"Didn't you say this was supposed to calm her down?" This, again, to Alisha, though Nathan crunched another couple of crisps and reached to recollect the squirt's empty cup from her anyway, pouring more liquor and soda once he had it in hand.

"So I was...you're giving her more?" Alisha was halfway towards admitting that she'd been wrong when she realized that, despite his complaint, Nathan was actually giving her more to drink. She shook her head at the both of them. She should just leave and wipe her hands from this whole mess.

"You have to pace yourself," she told Harley. "So you can continue drinking the whole night and don't just pass out in the first hour." Or wind up with her head hanging over a toilet wishing she'd never been born. Alisha knew all about that.

"Uh huh!" Harley nodded dutifully as she carefully watched Nathan pour the drink. Partly she was curious, but mostly she was waiting to see if he'd reconsider or pull anymore stuff like earlier, dangling it and pulling it away again. Her fingers wiggled, but she didn't reach yet, just in case.

"This was all your bad idea," Nathan insisted at Alisha, swishing the contents of the cup around for a bit of a mix. "I'm only following it through to its inevitable bad conclusion," he offered it back to the manic pixie thing, smiling a little at her gimme fingers. "Last one on the house, pipsqueak. And we don't take those sobriety chips either."

"One drink was my idea," Alisha shot back. "So when she gets too drunk to stand, you're the one who's carrying her home." Even if she did live in the girls' wing. Alisha could play proper chaperone. Or something.

Harley was pouting over her cup. Calling her pipsqueak and talking about her like she wasn't even there, that was rude and she wasn't just some little kid or whatever. "No one has to carry me," she complained. She turned The Pout on Alisha, like the older girl had said something offensive. "I'm totally tougher than him!"

"Well you're cut off regardless, tough stuff, Mum's said so," Nathan pointed out through a mouthful of tortilla crisps, shooing her away with both hands. "Why don't you do on and terrorize some other kids? Run along now. We've got our own drinking to do."

Comments

[om_malice]

SO MUCH LOVE.

And Alice still wants to take Harley shopping, too. She's a little worried that she reached the same conclusion Nathan did, tbh. ;)