Through the Mail Slot

Deep breath. Exhale.

...

Deep breath.

...

Exhale.

Dial.

Deep breath.

And hit send.

Sparkle had a call to make today. One he'd been putting off since forever, and his last excuse had run out. The island was back to normal. He didn't have to worry about The Big Stuff being completely derailed because he woke up one morning underwater or he couldn't leave the house because there were dinosaurs or on account of nightmarish penance zombies. Dr. Lecter had given him the number to phone, and yeah, he knew it was Saturday and yeah he knew it was early, but he was kind of hoping he could just leave a message and wait for a phone call back on... Tuesday. Because long weekend! See? Smart. Sparkle was super smart. It wasn't procrastinating if there was Labour Day to contend with.

Somebody actually answered the phone.

"Um."

That wasn't supposed to happen.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

"Hi, uh. My name is Sparkle," and ugh, he felt like he wanted to vomit just spitting out his last name, too, but he kind of had to in this case. "Dr. Lecter suggested I call you. Yeah. Dr. Hannibal Lecter. He said you're probably the best lawyer for... a couple of cases I have, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I can talk right now, sure. So..."

It was not a short phone call.

Dr. Lecter had picked a good lawyer for the job, for sure.

But by the time Sparkle had hung up the phone again, he was looking a little green. That was fine. This was fine. It was all going to go super well, and...

If anybody needed him, he was going to just be burying his face in a pillow and screaming himself hoarse.

Sparkle Vs. The Criminal Justice System was off to an excellent start.

[OOC: Open! Probably not happy! But open! TW: Both threads contain some talk of child abuse/grooming.]

You know, Sparkle was impulsive, but he was not that special sort of impulsive that would have involved him going outside today. Much as he loved his job. Much as he worried about his business. Even Sparkle sometimes had the good sense to listen to the radio and hear about people being kidnapped by goblins, and then look out the window to see the sprawling maze that had sprouted up outside, and then shake his head and go, "Nope. Not today, Fandom."

And so he was in the apartment, laying on his back on the living room floor, staring up at the ceiling and singing 'Baby Shark' to himself in a fit of boredom.

Loudly.

Give him ten minutes and he'd go find his tin whistle and try to figure out how to play it on that, next.

[OOC: Open for texts, phone calls, other people in the building who just want to stop hearing 'doo doo doo doo' through the walls, whatever!]

Sparkle had spent yesterday on a mission. A sort of home-base mission that had involved interspersing half-assed attempts at going through his usual daily routine with actual research, and now he had three destinations picked out; Nar Shaddaa was the obvious one. Something familiar where they could just go and get lost for a while, maybe do some drinking, make some bad life choices. The second, some mostly aquatic Outer Rim resort world, one that Sparkle had admittedly just chosen by closing his eyes and pointing at a list of resort planets. And the third? Just... empty space somewhere Mid Rim, not necessarily near anything in particular, but near enough to something in general that they could theoretically just pick a direction, go, and find something to do once they got there.

Armed with those three destinations, he was making his way to Atton's bedroom door, raising a fist, and knocking. Hard.

"Hey, Atton! Get your ass out of bed! Tomorrow's another stupid family and togetherness holiday and I fully intend to drag you up to your fucking ship and make you fly it somewhere before anybody thinks to invite us to dinner!"

Also, he was worried about you, Atton. Also that.

[OOC: For the one!]

Sparkle sighed as he puttered around the kitchen, contemplating what to do for breakfast. If Atton was going to keep sequestered to his room, Sparkle was going to keep feeding him, dammit, but the Thanksgiving leftovers had run out, and he hadn't gone for a grocery run yet this week. Something to add to the to-do list, he supposed. In the meantime, hey, cereal. They had cereal. And the milk hadn't gone off yet, either.

Of course, just as he was reaching for something altogether too sugary and marshmallowy, that was the moment he happened to turn into a--

-- Huh. Not a dog this time. He wasn't terribly certain how he felt about the island changing him into a weasel this time around, but sure, he'd cope with that. At least it meant he stood a slightly better chance of scaling the counter in his quest to get to the cereal.

He, uh, hadn't figured out how he was going to pour the cereal and get it under Atton's door from there, but hey, one thing at a time.

[OOC: Open if the roomie wants it, otherwise establishy!]

If anybody were to ask Sparkle, he'd happily tell them that the last person he ever figured he'd be going for drinks with was Seivarden. Like. Ever. He'd also admit that he'd put more time than he had ever figured he would into picking a bar they could both probably enjoy, something with live blues music on Saturdays that still didn't get too rowdy. He had no idea what kind of music Seivarden liked if she even did, admittedly. Mostly he just wanted some sort of guaranteed background noise, in case whatever drunken conversation they had turned into something weird.

They lived on Fandom Island. That was always a pretty good possibility.

"Huh," he said as he stepped in and looked around for an empty table. "Cozy."

It was that sort of bar that always kind of felt like it was being lit by the streetlights outside, with the occasional neon sign or dim lamp doing the rest of the work, though the light on the singer at the stage was doing wonders to brighten it up the slightest bit, too.

"What do you think, Seivarden? How's this for tonight's drinking establishment?"

All the other places Sparkle knew were gay bars and dance clubs. So.

[OOC: For one!]

Sparkle had been having a rough... life, really. He'd been having a rough life, starting with when he was little and just getting more and more complicated from there. This whole thing with the shark hurricane had just been one more complication in a long line of complications, and Sparkle had been kind of dealing with it, for a while there. He had! Except that he'd tried to check up on the state of the insurance for Demon Marcus that morning, and he'd been given a pretty stupid amount of runaround, and...

... Look, Sparkle didn't bottom out often, but when he did, he did so thoroughly and generally quite drunkenly.

He wouldn't remember later when he'd decided it was a good idea to go breaking into somebody's house today.

Hell, he wouldn't have been able to tell you whose house he'd broken into. Or whose vodka he'd busted into. Or whose sofa he'd passed out on. He sure as hell wasn't going to remember when one of the residents of the house walked into the living room, paused, squinted for a minute, and then went to grab a blanket to throw over him while waiting for his husband to come downstairs so that he could deal with this.

Sparkle was not Jonothon's problem unless he started getting sick on the floor. He was washing his hands of this one, thank you.

[OOC: For he who knows who he is!]

It was probably worth noting that Sparkle wasn't cleaning the apartment from top to bottom today. Sure, he'd gotten a lot of that out of his system yesterday over at Casa del Leverage, and between that and the whole thing with the explosives, mostly he was kind of just feeling numb, now.

So instead of scrubbing the bathroom from top to bottom until his lungs hurt, he had kind of oozed into the living room and was hugging his stuffed cat, ignoring a box of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, and staring at whatever fluffy kids' show happened to be on Netflix. Peppa Pig or something. He wasn't actually paying attention, he was just... tired. Maybe later he'd try to figure out where to go from here, but this morning? This morning was for cartoons and moping.

At least he wasn't sitting in the bathtub hugging the fish tank again. This was kind of like forward progress.

[OOC: Open for phone calls or that roomie or whatever, though I'll be pinging around work like the freewheeling rebel I am.]

Okay, last night had been nice. It had been nice. Sparkle had spent some time with Raine, who he hadn't spoken to in it felt like ages, and got a feel for how the kids were settling into the new home. By the time the morning rolled around, the cops were gone, apparently satisfied that the group home kids were too busy stuffing their faces with pizza to stir up trouble down their street, and he'd explained to Raine what it was he was doing in town, even if he was kind of wanted for arson and assault and breaking and entering and...

"I need to go and find Carla."

"Carla?" Raine had sounded surprised. She certainly looked surprised.

"My sister."

"You mean you weren't just making her up?"

Sparkle hadn't been about to either confirm or deny. He didn't want to invite more questions. Really, he had wanted to get this over with.

So now Sparkle and Parker were standing in front of the address that Hardison had found for them, and Sparkle was having difficulty making his legs work. It was a nice house. There was a car in the driveway, and a smaller, ride-on toy car in the front yard that suggested that there was at least one kid living inside. Carla's kid? Did Carla have kids? Oh, shit, was he an uncle? He pulled in a breath, opened his mouth, and just kind of... kept standing there. Awkwardly.

"Oh god this was a stupid idea."

( Snipped for length, ouches, and references to domestic violence/child abuse. )

[OOC: Preplayed with the fantabulous whoisalicewhite, coded by the splendiferous vdistinctive, and follows this. NFI/NFB because distance and also owies, but OOC is welcome!]

Sparkle had been... less than functional today. The episodes of Sesame Street that an errant wish yesterday had bestowed upon him had gone away again, and so even getting his hands on his brainless g-rated amusements would have involved stealing from, like, PBS or whatever. Which Sparkle wasn't entirely opposed to, but figuring out torrents and shit involved thinking. And brains. And... combining the two, somehow, so that brains were doing thinking, and Sparkle wasn't exactly feeling that so much just yet.

So he'd kind of pottered around the apartment aimlessly for a while. At some point, he'd remembered how cereal worked. Somewhere around noon he'd realized that he was halfway through cleaning the bathroom for what was apparently the third time already, and around what would have been suppertime, he was already on his fifth shower.

By the time the evening rolled around and Sparkle could see his reflection in the bathroom floor, he'd given up on shower six and had mostly just deposited himself on his back in the otherwise empty tub, poking halfheartedly at whatever stupid cell phone game he could get for free from Google. There was a game that involved tapping the screen. Just tapping the screen. And it was just cartoony enough that the little cartoon character swinging the sword around to beat up cartoonish monsters didn't even bother him all that much.

If anyone asked, he'd just say that it was cooler in the tub than anywhere else in the apartment. He was Canadian. He wasn't made for... comfortable planetoid weather.

Shut up.

[OOC: Open mostly for phone calls, though that guy who lives here is welcome to check up on Sparks in person for our hilariously mismatched SP if he so desires.]

Was Sparkle in an excellent mood this morning?

Damn right Sparkle was in an excellent mood this morning. The island seemed to be laying off that whole oppressive pollen crap, and even if it wasn't, there was a trip planned for later in the day that would put some distance between Sparkle and that constant thrum of want. And besides all that, he'd had a great night. How great? Great. Take his word for that one.

Or just guess, based on the fact that he was waking up next to a hot older guy, and instead of immediately losing his shit or something, he was wondering if now was the time he was supposed to head for the kitchen to make coffee.

... It was a good sign that his faculties had returned to him enough that he could remember that the one request going into this had been coffee, really. He was just going to take a few minutes more before getting to that to kind of, like, enjoy this.

[OOC: For that hot older guy!]