paradisalost | rose-colored glasses seem to be the rage

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rose-colored glasses seem to be the rage

Who: Cain and Zelman
What: Another silly "date", drinking edition!
When: July 3 (tomorrow).
Where: Some classy joint out in town.
Rating: PG-13, for a cornucopia of bad decisions.

He's really not sure what to think of Cain. He's as idealistic as his brother, but consistently proves to be a lot more fun. He's not really sure where the luncheon turned into a two-person drinking party (but he has a sneaking suspicious it was probably around the time they started discussing science-y things). Maybe they're just so good at politely mirroring each other that they've unwittingly locked each other into an unending cycle. Maybe it's just really good liquor.

Either way, he doesn't expect too much; his body refuses to let these sorts of things hold affect for very long. But he feels a certain sort of detached satisfaction when he thinks of how many drinks he's had and realizes, dully, that he can't seem to count past four.

He glances towards Cain over a too-long sip from his glass. What were they talking about?

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Cain didn't drink very often, and he could count the amount of times he had actually been drunk on one hand. It wasn't exactly encouraged for the leader of the Red Mars Project to go drinking all the time, and it took a fair amount of doing to get an advanced clone drunk anyway.

Yet now was certainly one of those times, and he was beginning to notice his vision was blurred even with his glasses on. Putting his glass on the table firmly for emphasis before speaking.

"I don't think penguins should be even classified as birds."

Oh, right. Penguins. It's always marine biology with this guy. --Avian biology. Though even that's debatable, with how the conversation is going. He quickly gears back in and scrambles together the previous contents of their context.

"But they look just like birds. They have beaks. And the feet." The webbed feet, or the little claws. "Is that because they can't fly?"

"Exactly! Birds are far more..."

He pauses and flaps his arms a little in demonstration; in his mind a bird was something that flew, and a penguin was much more a fish than a bird.

"And penguins don't do that at all."

"No," he chuckles through his agreement, "No, they don't."

His fingers still wrapped around his glass, he manages to free one up for pointing in a non-specific and point-proving direction.

"But neither do ostriches. Or emus. Or--whatever those ridiculously large birds are called." He pauses for a moment, setting his glass down with an uneven clink. He's not actually sure which one it is. Maybe it's both? This really isn't his area of expertise.

"Are they not birds either?"

"Chickens either," he noted rather facetiously, even though it went a little further towards proving his own point invalid. "But they all flap. They can move their wings and flap them, even if it's only for show, but a penguin doesn't flap."

He thought it was rather sad really; the poor penguins being outcast from their own species, it was a subject close to his heart.

Huh. Zelman can't actually think up any empirical evidence to disprove the idea that penguins don't flap their wings. So he might have that one.

"All right, I'll give it to you." He gives him a very light pat on the shoulder as a contrived gesture of goodwill or something like that. "But what would you call them if they aren't birds?"

Tilting his head at his drinking companion, he grinned; glasses sliding down his nose with the derp expression.

"Not sure." He hasn't quite thought that far ahead yet. "Maybe they're a type of reptile."

He does his very best not to think about how the sliding glasses bother him. He rather forcibly pushes the thought to the back of his head in place of another. Reptiles, right.

"Perhaps. Or they could be like the platypus." In that the platypus has its own category along with various things that live in Australia. He thinks that's how it goes. Instead of adjusting anything, he tilts and slides forward on his shoulder, tapping the side of Cain's glass.

"Drink more. It helps with figuring these things." He smirks himself, "If you don't, I'll drink it myself."

"They do look quite like a platypus, perhaps they're the same type of species!"

He was so pleased that Zelman had solved that issue, he had been sad thinking of the poor penguins outcast without a species to call their own.

In fact, he may just be welling up slightly, like a real man.

Zelman stares at him a second longer than deemed normal, blinking once more out of confusion than out of a need to do so. Maybe he really should take his drink. For his own good, of course (which is a blatant lie--Zelman never does anything for someone else's good).

Staying where he is, nearly on his side, he tries to tug Cain's glass away from him.

"You okay?"

Seemingly noticing Zelman was trying to thieve his drink, Cain pulled it away and knocked it back stubbornly.

"It's just so nice... they don't have to be alone any more. They have the platypuses... platypi... platypuses?"

He's silent for a moment before he replies, with more confidence in his answer than he actually has, "Platypi."

And then with that seemingly settled, he retreats back into himself, sliding back the way he came and then propping himself up on his elbows against the counter as if he'd never moved at all.

"But they were never alone, right? There's tons of penguins." A careful thought, spoken more into his glass than out-loud, "Though I guess now they're doubly-not-alone."

Normally he'd be able to pick a bizarre metaphor out of all of this, but right now he's more concerned with how little is left in his own glass. It's a crime, really.

"It's not nice to be alone."

This was Cain's sagely reply to the conversation, speaking with some authority as though it were a matter of world importance that Zelman understand that being alone was terrible.

"M'glad penguins have each other, and platypi... no, I think it's platypuses."

The authoritative tone strikes something of a chord in Zelman. It's another thing he doesn't like, tacked on top of smaller things. He's been keeping a running list back there somewhere. Thankfully it hasn't gone past four.

He leans over a little and carefully pushes Cain's glasses back up his face. One down.

"It's not that bad." He argues, sounding neither matter-of-fact-like or authoritative. Just observant. Which makes... two down.

Cain wrinkled his nose as Zelman pushed his glasses back up, eyes crossing drunkenly as he tried to follow the other man's finger and getting a little dizzy when he couldn't.

"Don't you get lonely? Not... choosing to be alone, but if someone told you that you had to be?"

Voluntary solitude was different.

He takes his hand back. These sort of questions make far less sense to him than they should.

"But I've always chosen." He starts, resting his head on his reclaimed hand to try and force himself to think a little more clearly. Then he subconsciously reaches for and drains the last of his glass, completely defeating the purpose of the earlier gesture.

He tries to think of a scenario in which it would not be his choice, but someone else's. "Do you mean like, if... everyone on Earth were gone but me? No choice that way?"

"No, no..."

Not like that at all; in fact, most emphatically not like that. He doesn't even want to comprehend that sort of world at the moment, and there's a flash of something genuinely discomforted that breaks through the usually impeccable mask as he shakes his head.

"I mean if you really wanted to go somewhere because all the people you liked were there, but then when you got there they said no red haired people allowed."

"Who says it, though? That's..." A word. That's a word. "...Important."

Which speaks to the fact that he really doesn't see these things the same way that other people do. He figures the conversation has reached a point of no-holds-barred, so to speak, because even if he's kind of tipsy, he knows a break in a mask when he sees one.

He straightens up a little, collecting himself, "Though I can tell you already that I'd either be fine with it, or I'd be angry."

It probably has something to do with how 'all the people he likes' can be easily counted on one hand.

"The person you like most, is the one saying you can't come in."

Angry? Yes, that's how Abel had reacted, lashing out and making things so much worse than anyone could ever have imagined. Not that his own ploy of keeping it hidden had worked out much better.

"Don't you think solitude is a bad thing in that circ.. cirtum... situation?"

"No."

He says it a little too fast, that biting syllable cutting across the end of Cain's struggle for an appropriate word. This is something he sees in other people; this is something he dislikes. This is something he settled with a very, very long time ago.

"There's a reason for it. If someone I truly, truly like tells me I cannot follow them somewhere, then I would have no choice but to trust that I have a different path before me."

It's a somewhat sobering thought. He absently rotates his glass around its center point. "And if I can't trust the people I like, then they're not worth my time."

He suddenly smirks, as if something funny has occurred to him. But if he has stumbled across something self-assuring, he doesn't say it out loud.

"Those are... very wise words."

A different path, hm? It was easier said than done, though, as they had all found out while growing up. Lilith had said that, always saying that you could choose your own path and the approval of others shouldn't matter to you as long as you knew who you were inside.

But that hadn't stopped Cain and Abel both wanting to be desperately part of a group they never could belong to, and that had just led to destruction.

"You're so smart, Zelman. So smart!"

"I know, I know," he says, with that same sort of confidence that shows when he admits to being unreasonably good-looking, "It's true."

And just like that, he regards the situation with a little more light.

"I think this is around the time I cut you off...? From drinking, anyway." He laughs a little, not at all burdened, "But that's really your choice. It's now like I'm your mother."

Psh.

He sniggered at Zelman's arrogance, reaching over to ruffle the other's hair quite fondly as a retaliation.

"You can't cut me off, you're too... little."

He looks openly shocked at he does that, then wriggles away from his hand like a child who can't stand another second of his mother's well-meaning adjustments. Flattening his hair with one hand, he bunches the other up in a fist.

He looks immediately put-out. "I'm not little. You're just moronically tall."

Snorting aloud at Zelman's protests, Cain tugged on one lock of his own hair contemplatively as he sat back and watched the other man flatten his own petulantly.

"I know, s'like we had growth hormone."

Wait.

"...probably did."

That gets him to stop fiddling with his hair (which is pointless, because his hair looks pretty much the same no matter what you do to it). Something about that little statement doesn't quite match up with Zelman's super-imposed predisposition regarding Cain.

"Whaddya mean?" he asks, self-consciously going back to combing his bangs into place with his fingers.

"About what?"

He has already forgotten anything he said that could have required further clarification, and Zelman's question took him off-guard. Not to mention that he would have been very surprised to hear the other man had pre-conceived notions about him.

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rose-colored glasses seem to be the rage

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