while the room moved off its axis

[Douglas Pearson]

(ooc: I really was not kidding about all of my thread titles being from St. Vincent songs!)

Doug was not generally someone who assigned great meaning to times and dates. It was all arbitrary, right? Miss a meeting here, a deadline there, have a pleasant surprise when your birthday somehow catches up to you or someone informs you that it's actually Friday, not Thursday. Lather, rinse, repeat.

All that said, staring down at the date on his watch that morning felt like a punch to the gut. He remembered all of the stupid things he and Tom had done after a night at the Hog's Head, and how his best mate should have been here with him instead of dying at the hands of dark wizards all those years ago. He extended one arm and solemnly poured out a little of his beer into the empty space next to him, before being snapped out of his trance by the barman and jumping slightly.

Uh. Sir. Please do not do that. "What? Oh. Ha! Right." He stuck a napkin to his foot and sheepishly mopped up the small remembrance to the best friend he'd ever had.

[Sarah Watson]

Sarah sat morosely in the corner of the dingy pub, staring into the amber liquid in her glass like it was the most interesting thing on earth whilst trying to ignore the slightly lecherous bloke sat at the next table that kept trying to engage her in conversation. If she had to, she would knock him out, whether by magic or fist-based means. That was the thing about the Hog’s Head – it had its own ‘charm’ which put most people she knew off the place entirely which meant she had zero chance of running into anybody she knew here, the unfortunate consequence of that was that it attracted less-than-savoury characters. Having come straight from a day at work where she’d done nothing but snap at people, grumble incessantly and take out her frustration on Justin – poor boy – she sat in a crisp black suit and looked entirely out of place with the shabbier décor. With a sigh she shrugged off her suit jacket and downed the last of the drink, grabbing her stuff and heading for the bar instead where she intended to get heroically drunk in the next half hour to stop herself thinking about him, about today, about how much it was her fault.

Sliding onto a barstool and dumping her things on the bar she called, “Another Firewhiskey and if you could make it a double measure, hell a triple, it would be appreciated,” before letting her head fall onto her hand, her chin resting on her palm as she looked disinterestedly at the people she’d joined at the bar. Seeing a once rather familiar man beside her she was taken aback, “Doug,” she murmured softly, surprised, and then she frowned in confusion as he seemed to be sheepishly mopping up his drink from the floor and avoiding the eye of the barman. “What’s with the…” she gestured vaguely to the pool of alcohol he was wiping up.

[Douglas Pearson]

Doug looked up when he heard his name, then quickly rubbed at his slightly red, watering eyes like he'd just got dust in them. "Oh. Hey," he choked out. He and Sarah had just sort of... stopped hanging out. He didn't have anything against her, but trying to be normal friends without Tom around just seemed impossible. Doug looked down at the puddle of beer and started shaking his head as he said, "Well, you know. This is a classy establishment with very particular customers. The only pools of liquid allowed are of one's own piss and vomit." He kept trying to glance at Sarah's face to see if she was okay, which only succeeded at making him look even twitchier than normal. Maybe she was fine. Maybe she was a stronger person than Doug. She'd probably have to be, to keep doing that job.

Doug squinted his eyes closed before inclining his head toward Sarah. "Hey, can I. I don't know. Get you a drink? I feel like I should get you a drink."

[Sarah Watson]

Sarah nodded as he explained about the spilt drink - a semblance of a wry smile at his joke twitched at the corner of her lips but quickly faded again when she looked at Doug. It was impossible to look at Doug and not see Tom - the two of them had been thick as thieves and Doug had quite graciously accepted Sarah too when her and Tom started dating, allowing her to share some Tom time. She wondered whether Doug had been drinking himself into unconciousness every anniversary of Tom's death like she had.

Thanking the barman as he returned with a triple measure of Firewhiskey she wrapped both her hands around the glass and looked down at it as Doug spoke. "Oh, nah it's fine, you don't need to," she murmured distractedly as he offered to get her a drink. Taking a mouthful of the amber liquid she finally looked at him properly and said the first thing that came to mind, "We stopped hanging out," she stated solemnly, "I liked you, and you know very few people don't irritate the hell out of me so..." she trailed off with a slight shrug of her shoulders, wondering if she should just ask him if he was okay - it was evident from his slightly jittery nature and red eyes that he wasn't, however. "This sucks," Sarah decided aloud - nothing could quite articulate what she was feeling inside, what she felt every year on this date, so she just didn't try; she knew Doug, if anyone, would understand how it felt.

[Douglas Pearson]

It was hardly an accident that they both ended up at this pub, alone, on this particular day. Doug could tell it from Sarah's face. He rubbed his nose with his sleeve before slamming more money on the bar and gesturing vaguely at the barman.

"Great. Moooore for meeee," he replied in a high-pitched sing-song, choosing to follow Sarah's lead with the triple Firewhiskey. While waiting for his drink, Doug leaned his elbows against the bar and ran his hands through his hair until it was sticking straight up. "Wow. No one's ever told me I don't irritate them before. That might be the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me. Aww! Put 'er there," he laughed in spite of himself as he took his glass and moved to clink it against Sarah's.

Doug stared straight forward for a second before glancing at her from of the corner of his eye. "I liked you too, you know. And I'm sorry we don't hang out. And it does suck. It really, really sucks," he said, unable to come up with a better word for it. He could try to pretend they were having a normal night out, but it was too late, the floodgates were open. "I was supposed to meet him here that day, after work. I remember leaving him some long, drunk, angry message. I thought he was moving on with his life. Leaving me behind. It's crazy. At that moment, that was the worst thing I could have imagined."

[Sarah Watson]

Sarah smiled a rather grim smile as Doug also ordered a triple Firewhiskey, “Nice ordering,” she complimented dryly as she sipped at her own, not even realising the speed at which she was drinking the rather potent alcohol. “And, coming from me, it’s a rare thing so… be equally amazed?” she suggested and, not being able to help but smile momentarily, she clinked her glass against his, “Let’s drink to your frankly astounding capacity to not-irritate-an-easily-angered-woman.”

As she raised her glass to her mouth she paused, mid-sip, and stared straight ahead as he said he liked her too, “I’m sorry too. It sucks so much that I lost him and you back then. I just can’t look at you and not see him, and when I still see him, it hurts,” she admitted quietly, biting her lip anxiously as she thought through this. Then her eyes closed for a minute; she couldn’t watch him as she told him this. “He… he got the message,” Sarah recalled, “We had just got… got married and were on our way back to our little surveillance base to… let’s say consummate it… he turned his phone on and he heard the message. He laughed, first, then felt bad, you know how he had a habit of apologising for everyone and everything… and then I’m afraid I rather distracted him and he never replied to it. Thing is, we should have been practically home and dry then, the surveillance was finished, we were all packed up to leave in the next few hours and then… they came and...” she broke off, opening her eyes again as her jaw tightened and she shook her head, “Well, of course, you don’t need telling the rest,” Sarah scoffed slightly at herself.

[Douglas Pearson]

"It's fine. I thought you found my physical presence upsetting because of all the sleeveless jumpers," he attempted to joke. Doug then leaned forward and lightly massaged his temples. "I don't even like going down to the Law Enforcement floor. I usually just send Casey down. Pretty sure she thinks it's some kind of... weird power play," he explained while widening his eyes and waving his fingers around.

"... worst coitus interruptus ever?" Doug finished her sentence with a sense of dry, dark, ironic detachment, considering the horrors that actually occurred. He pushed his suddenly empty glass away and quickly asked for another. "How does watching Death Eaters all day put anyone in the mood for romance? You people were weird," he forced a smile at her and shook his head. He never knew about the impromptu marriage. It was strange to think how angry he would have been that Tom had gone and done it without him there... and how little it mattered now.

"Oh god. He got the message," Doug finally said, far too late in the conversation, the implications of that revelation only just sinking in. He put his head on the bar and mumbled, "How bad was it? My last words to him weren't calling him a... dicknose or something, right?"

[Sarah Watson]

Sarah found herself snorting softly in amusement as he mentioned his penchant for sleeveless jumpers, "No, it wasn't that... although you really could branch out in your wardrobe choices," she remarked dryly. "I had noticed you never came down, sending Casey in your stead whenever you needed to. It's hard, sometimes, when I talk to some of the tech guys and... they work in the same space he used to and I can't help but be reminded of it. And yet, I persist in working there... I must be a masochist for nostalgia," she decided, shaking her head in disbelief at her own actions.

"The worst coitus interruptus imaginable... and if we hadn't been... if I hadn't have started to... to kiss him he wouldn't have been distracted. He concentrated a lot more than I did on that surveillance mission, he would have heard them coming for sure but his one downfall was... me," the blonde murmured quietly, tightening her grip around the tumbler she held in her right hand. She merely shrugged at his forced smile, "We were in love, we were in a foreign country, he'd managed to persuade me to be impulsive when it came to my feelings. That's how that happens. Technically I'm still married to him, I've only ever told a handful of people, I can't even face admitting it to my parents or sister."

Downing the rest of her drink in one she winced heavily for a few seconds before slamming the glass on the bar and wordlessly gesturing to it and the barman to express that she wanted a refill. "He got the message alright," Sarah repeated, "No, it wasn't that bad, it was weirdly sweet, I think you drunkenly broke out into song about how much you missed him, I remember joking that I ought to be worried about him realising his feelings for you and saying he'd made a huge mistake in marrying me, especially when I can't sing for shit and you seemed to have a lovely drunken karaoke voice," she recalled, painfully, and shook her head.

[Douglas Pearson]

"Then we all are," Doug asserted, the final drops of Firewhiskey burning down in his throat. "I mean, I love all those guys. Martin, Andrew, Willa," he listed, muffling the name of his crush slightly so it came out more like 'Wrrlgha'. "They have all that excitement, you know, that was always so cool about Tom. I've never been that happy to go to work in my life."

Doug glanced sadly at Sarah before pushing her glass towards her with three short prods. "You can't think like that, Sar. You can't. You can't! He made his own decision, and there's no way either of you could have known what was going to happen. If he wanted to keep watch, he would have kept watch. He never got distracted unless he wanted to get distracted. Look, Tom wasn't the one who spent all of third year sprinting out of classrooms hiding his lap with a Potions textbook, alright?" Doug admitted with a short laugh, trying to distract her. He then quietly listened to Sarah describe her and Tom's decision to get married, looking down while spinning a bowl of pretzels with one hand.

Doug wasn't entirely sure why, but it was the song thing that sent him over the edge. He had to take a few silent moments before he was composed enough to say anything. "I'm sure we could have worked something out where, you know, I get him on weekends and holidays," he laughed while wiping his nose against his sleeve. "I'm glad he... well he knew I wasn't really angry with him, right? It's just... his life was going somewhere and I wasn't ready to let go. And I do have a great karaoke voice, sorry. If it's any consolation, I'm sure you look better in heels."

[Sarah Watson]

Sarah nodded glumly, “Yeah, I figure we are,” she agreed to his assertion and then looked to him curiously as he said Willa’s name a tad… oddly. “So… Willa, huh?” she repeated, as though asking him a question, which she was actually if he could interpret the look she gave him which said ‘you like her then?’. “They enjoy what they do, and they do it with so much enthusiasm even when sometimes us Aurors probably don’t appreciate their efforts anywhere near as much as we should,” she commented.

“I do think like that though,” she disagreed, shaking her head vehemently as he tried to make her feel better about the whole thing, “How can I not think like that?! I shouldn’t have been so distracted. I was on a surveillance mission, I was fresh from Auror training, I should have focused on the mission at hand, not on fooling around with my boyfriend, well… husband,” she said, her breath choking slightly on the word as she looked away from him. “I will never forgive myself for that, ever,” the blonde said, jaw tightening as she made the effort to hold back the tears. It was in vain as they began to streak down her cheeks until she sniffed sharply and wiped a hand across her face, erasing all signs of them although her eyes were still shining with the moisture.

They fell into silence for a moment, Sarah taking the time to get her emotions in check and slide the payment over to the bartender as he brought her another triple Firewhiskey. “Mmm, before we got married we drew up a rota in our heads, you got him weekends and Wednesday nights,” she told him, only half-jokingly, before she looked sadly at him as he wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Of course he knew you weren’t really angry with him, you were his best mate, you guys couldn’t ever have really held that much anger against each other. His life wasn’t going somewhere that meant you couldn’t be a part of it, you know?” she told him seriously, “It’s not like I would have went psycho wife on him and had him coming straight home from work and saying he wasn’t allowed to go out and get heroically drunk with you and end up stumbling home at 3 o’clock anymore.” Then, she couldn’t help but smile at his heels comment, “It is a consolation… although, I feel as though I need to actually see you in my heels to judge it properly.”

[Douglas Pearson]

"Who? What? No. Yes. Shut up," he muttered in quick succession while diving into his drink, even though Sarah hadn't actually said anything. "Me and Willa talk a lot. I get bored at work, one-man department and all. We come up with games, sometimes. I leave cartoons on her desk. It's... you know." He shrugged, throwing his hands up. "You must love your job, yeah? It doesn't seem like something you just... stumble into." Doug wasn't pursuing his life's passion or anything, since trying to become an artist was about as viable a career option as standing on a street corner banging bins together until someone decided to pay him for it, so he'd done the normal Doug thing: chosen a path completely at random and hoped for the best.

Doug frowned, (very awkwardly) tried to pat Sarah on the arm and handed her a bar napkin. "It's not your fault," he just kept telling her, because it was the only thing he felt like he could do.

"For Wednesday night Mario Kart, naturally. Ugh. I wish he knew about all the video games we have now. Is that stupid? Is there better stuff he should have got to see? No, you know what, the future's a bit crap really, tech and video games are the best things we've got going for us," Doug reasoned, half to himself. "I know you wouldn't. I just thought... well he wouldn't want to do stupid things at 3 o'clock for the rest of his life, probably. I mean, not that it matters now." He smiled a little bit at Sarah, just out of the corner of his mouth. "Well, I imagine they'd do wonders to accentuate the blinding whiteness of my legs and draw the eye to the ape-like coat of ginger hair that covers them. Is anyone into that?"

[Sarah Watson]

Sarah merely scoffed slightly as he explained about him and Willa, "I didn't even actually say anything," she pointed out knowingly, "Well, games and cartoons... let me know when you finally talk to her and ask her out, yeah?" she joked - despite everything she could still manage some of her usual dry, slightly mocking, jokes with people like Douglas. "I do love my job, it was always where I wanted to go, I wanted to do something that would really help people, do something good with my life... don't worry, that fresh-faced, I-can-change-the-world! optimism was soon slapped right out of me. What happened to Tom was the wake up call, actually," she explained.

She appreciated the awkward attempt to console her, really she did, and she gladly took the napkin and wiped her face. "Thanks, but is is, and that will forever be my final word on it," she shrugged lightly with a heavy sigh as she managed to reign in the tears again, her expression tightening with the effort.

"But of course. You know, I think he would have even appreciated Mario Kart Wii... sort of like... he wouldn't want to admit it but it would have been a guilty pleasure to play Wii games, pretend to be a pirate, or be a tennis pro, you know when the serious business killing zombies thing got old," Sarah suggested, "I wish he'd lived to see Portal, that was everything he'd want in a game. And films... he would have loved Iron Man, Thor, the whole Avengers thing..." she broke off, waving her hand vaguely in an attempt to encompass every superhero film that Tom would have geeked out over. Scrunching up the napkin into a ball she shook her head, "I don't think he would have. Just because he was doing well at his job and had got himself an old ball-and-chain does not mean he would have stopped doing blindingly stupid things with you at 3 o'clock, trust me."

"There are some odd fetishes out there so you never know," the blonde suggested, "I think you'd suit my black knee-high boots," she teased dryly, glancing sideways at him with a small smile of amusement.

[Douglas Pearson]

Doug shifted around anxiously in his chair, forever plagued by his complete inability to sit still. "Okay. Okay! I was going to ask her out. Christ. Do you want me to wear a wire, too?" He laughed and pushed his empty glass away from him, slamming his hand down on the bar with a little too much vigor. "Well you are helping people and doing good, right? That's... kind of the point. I don't think he'd want us to give up on all that, you know? I mean. I try to do right by m'wolves. Only what I think is right doesn't always uhhhh align with what the Ministry expects me to be doing with my time," he admitted.

"We camped out in front of the cinema for The Phantom Menace. Queued up for... twelve hours? It was one of the most significant disappointments of my lifetime," Doug recalled, laughing slightly. He just nodded when Sarah told him that Tom wouldn't have moved on, but he didn't really believe her. He'd seen it happen five times, with each of his older brothers. At least with his brothers, the fact that they'd stopped beating him up was a slight upside.

And he'd never found another best mate who could replace him. Not really.

"Well that's not fetish-y at all," he noted sarcastically before jumping up from his seat, swaying slightly as he tried to find his footing. "This is a brief rendition of Tom I Miss You. Jump in if you know the words, everyone. Dude, you know I missed you when you stayed with your Gran for that summeeeeeerr... good thing I discovered I had feelings for your sisteeeeerrrr..." Doug just about managed to improvise one line before collapsing back into the bar, holding his hands up innocently at the barman: as if he wasn't a massive lightweight who'd managed to get himself drunk after a few glasses.

[Sarah Watson]

“Well yes, of course that’s what I expect you to do,” Sarah scoffed, fixing him with a deadly serious look as he mentioned wearing a wire for her benefit, not actually ever ‘breaking character’ to show she was, in fact, just joking around with him. “I’m just making sure you’re not heading in the same direction as Rory. Your cousin’s quietly pining act is running a little thin on the ground, don’t fall into that habit of inaction Pearson,” she threatened. “I suppose I’m ‘doing good’, it doesn’t seem like it’ll really ‘change the world’ any more though. Your wolves appreciate your efforts, I’m sure they do, whether or not it’s Ministry-sanctioned or approved. But if I have learnt anything it’s that you can keep capturing and killing those bastards that are Deatheaters every single day of your career but there will always be others who just step right up to take their place once they’re gone. And whilst that’s good news for my job security, it’s not so good news for the world in general,” she sniffed slightly and looked away from him then. “I know he wouldn’t want us to give up on that idea, that optimism about the world that was so… so him, but it’s just hard not to,” the blonde admitted quietly, then adding candidly, for it was always running through the back of her mind, “I’d have given anything to have them continue to torture me rather than move onto him, anything.”

Then, looking back to Douglas, a delicately arched eyebrow raised in disbelief she shook her head, “Even I could have told you it would be a disappointment,” she countered, “He liked doing stuff like that though, didn’t he? Even if it was disappointing as hell, he liked the whole… experience, the expos, the screenings, the midnight comic book releases… I feel like I should continue to experience those, since he can’t, but going with him to just one expo dressed up as Princess Leia was quite enough for me,” Sarah admitted, a fond smile twitching the corners of her lips upwards as she recalled that memory.

Working steadily on the next whiskey, she found herself laughing despite herself at Doug’s improvised song, pulling him back down to sit on the barstool, “Don’t give them too much, just whet their appetites with the song then you can belt it out later,” she said in a mock-advisory tone, tapping her nose in a conspiratorial way. “You really do miss him, eh?” she asked, rather redundantly, as she looked to him sympathetically – quite a feat for someone like Sarah who seemed to regard any emotion other than irritation as foreign.

[Douglas Pearson]

"Well, that's Rory. He doesn't mind things, you know, just staying the same. I get antsy whenever that happens, like, 'something is probably-definitely very wrong right now'," Doug explained. He didn't always take immediate action in his life, admittedly, but he also got distracted easily and would latch on to some new interest soon enough. "It's better now, though. Better than when we were kids. You've gotta see that, you've gotta... if you weren't doing what you're doing there'd be nothing stopping the bad guys from taking over again." He looked over at Sarah sadly, at a loss for words for once in his life. He couldn't imagine being there. He wasn't sure he would have ever recovered, if he was.

"We didn't know it would be bad! Nobody knew!" he interjected, suddenly waving his arms around wildly. He had a lot of feelings about this, alright. "Ha, I forgot about that! I didn't believe you were actually gonna go for it, you know. You earned major Pearson Cool Points there," Doug added confidently, as if his approval of his best mate's girlfriends meant everything. "Hey, so... any chance you want to go to Comic Con this year? Really take this friendship out on the road? It's super-mainstream now, I swear, between all the films and TV series and things there has to be something you'd like," he spoke quickly. Doug had a tendency to feel incredibly close to everyone when he drank, promising all sorts of things that he'd soon forget, but he was serious about staying friends with Sarah after they'd opened up about so many things. "And you can dress normally! Ha ha, oh God. I should have said that first. Unless you expect me to try those boots, then we'd have to talk."

Doug crashed back down on the barstool, taking the opportunity to take a full-360 spin before facing the bar again. "I do. A lot," he answered, perhaps unnecessarily, rubbing his face lightly. "You can add to the song, if you want. It's really easy, there's no rhythm or rhyme scheme, you just sort of... list all the times you've missed him," he explained dead-seriously. It actually meant a lot for Doug, letting Sarah in on their 'sacred friendship'. It was the least he could do.