[Asra slides the shot across the bar's slick surface and Julian lifts it between two long fingers, takes it up, knocks it back...almost chokes on it. Because Asra's talking, and of course he means to step in and deny and contradict and argue his own point, interject with his self-derision and the bleak thoughts he has about himself. His lips part around his response when the magician cuts him off at the pass, quiet words like a blade across his tongue.
Asra keeps going, and again, as predicted, the words are there and ready in him, to deny it, to assuage Asra's assumed guilt, to say something that will make him feel better to take all blame onto himself because yes he'd known Asra to be cruel and petty both, but surely it was Julian's behaviour that has dragged those small but deep and jagged cruelties from him. His own lack of understanding and his need and his inability to be anything anyone would want to be around for long, his stark ugly failings on so many levels. But again, Asra stops him, his lips part and then close again around the sound and he winds up sitting there quiet and at a loss and altogether confused over what has just happened.
It's...a shock. To hear it. All of it.
The feelings in him, they're big raw things.
He's not sure whether he agrees or not, with any of it. Needs a moment to think it through and digest perhaps when things aren't starting to feel just a touch blurry around the edges from lack of sleep and food and the beginnings of too much strong liquor.
The sudden shift in the conversation wrongfoots him, leaves him vaguely unbalanced, and for just a moment he says nothing at all, the words still ready in him, the ones Asra had tried to cut away but--
--but.]
I uh, well, what I mean is...
[He clears his throat. Takes a breath. Onetwo]
Contrary to popular belief, I'm not entirely useless, you know. I've spent enough time with pirates and other kinds of sailors, not to mention growing up by the beach with Pasha as a child, to know a thing or two about building shelters. There were palm trees and a little other vegetation, and I was able to put something together to keep the worst of the sun off me. I was there for three days, I and spent most of it drunk, singing sea shanties to passing gulls and lamenting my terrible fate until that ship came along and saved me. I was quite delirious by the time they found me, but look, here I am, alive to tell the tale.
[He flashes his very best debonair smile. And the rest of what he'd wanted to say-- it can wait.]
no subject
Asra keeps going, and again, as predicted, the words are there and ready in him, to deny it, to assuage Asra's assumed guilt, to say something that will make him feel better to take all blame onto himself because yes he'd known Asra to be cruel and petty both, but surely it was Julian's behaviour that has dragged those small but deep and jagged cruelties from him. His own lack of understanding and his need and his inability to be anything anyone would want to be around for long, his stark ugly failings on so many levels. But again, Asra stops him, his lips part and then close again around the sound and he winds up sitting there quiet and at a loss and altogether confused over what has just happened.
It's...a shock. To hear it. All of it.
The feelings in him, they're big raw things.
He's not sure whether he agrees or not, with any of it. Needs a moment to think it through and digest perhaps when things aren't starting to feel just a touch blurry around the edges from lack of sleep and food and the beginnings of too much strong liquor.
The sudden shift in the conversation wrongfoots him, leaves him vaguely unbalanced, and for just a moment he says nothing at all, the words still ready in him, the ones Asra had tried to cut away but--
--but.]
I uh, well, what I mean is...
[He clears his throat. Takes a breath. Onetwo]
Contrary to popular belief, I'm not entirely useless, you know. I've spent enough time with pirates and other kinds of sailors, not to mention growing up by the beach with Pasha as a child, to know a thing or two about building shelters. There were palm trees and a little other vegetation, and I was able to put something together to keep the worst of the sun off me. I was there for three days, I and spent most of it drunk, singing sea shanties to passing gulls and lamenting my terrible fate until that ship came along and saved me. I was quite delirious by the time they found me, but look, here I am, alive to tell the tale.
[He flashes his very best debonair smile. And the rest of what he'd wanted to say-- it can wait.]