milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

(OOC: Following this bit of Canonpuncture and breakage ...)

Clarice is hunched up in a chair by the fire, still wearing her sundress. She has not changed clothes. She has not slept. She reads her copy of "Silence of the Lambs" with a kind of desperate attention, but every so often she has to set it down.

[Summary: Clarice is broken, broken, broken. Meg and Angua give her practical advice, she confesses some things to Barry, she ~~therapizes~~ talks to Ron about Harry and being fictional, the Opera Ghost serenades her creepily, and Aziraphael is at a loss for advice.]

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Clarice nods. "Yeah. He is." Her eyes narrow. "He threatened to blind your friend? Did you report him to Security?"

Ron shook his head. "No. Then he's just have a reason to blind him. Besides, Xander's fought demons. And Meg can fly. And I've got magic. And Anthy's just mental and turns people into cows and stuff. We'll look out for one another. He's just a clown. A clown that's completely mental, but just a clown," Ron said reassuringly. "Now, what's bothering you, if it isn't puppets?"

Clarice stares.

"I guess you can take care of yourselves, then," she says, and the words sound dull and disappointing to her ears. She wraps her arms around her knees and draws them in towards her, defensively, but as she does so, she manages to dislodge her book.

Ron reached forward and caught it. His reflexes had been fast enough from Quidditch, and even faster thanks to Faith's lessons.

"'The Silence of the Lambs'? What's this about." He quickly flipped through the pages. "Blimey, a cannibal, wicked. Hey, the girl in it's got your name, too..." He suddenly looked up. "Oh."

"Please give that back," Clarice says, trying not to sound too urgent.

He held it up to her. It was too personal a thing to read, to be honest.

"So you're in a story somewhere, then?" he asked. He grinned in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. "I am, too."

Clarice frowns, but welcomes the subject change.

"Really? What's yours like?"

"I dunno really," Ron said, shaking his head. "I haven't read it. See, it's all about my best mate, Harry, and it...it doesn't seem right. It would if it were from my point-of-view, but as much as he's my friend, I don't exactly want to get into Harry's head like that--mainly 'cause he is my friend. It's about him finding out he was a wizard, and going to school with Hermione and I, and all the stuff we've done. Apparently, in Xander's world some lady got the idea and wrote it all done and made a billion dollars off it. Which is weird, but I reckon everything has to be real somewhere. It's real life in my world and some lady thinking it up as a story is real life in that one."

He shrugged. "I dunno why anyone would read it, but I reckon it's more fun to read than to live," he said thoughtfully. He shook his head again, "What was even weirder is this lady named Chloe said her thirteen-year-old daughter and her friends were like fans of me or something. Me. That has the weirdest thing in the bloody world--in the whole universe, even."

Clarice smiles again. "Welcome to Milliways, right?" She frowns. "But it's kind of ... not right ... that everyone can see your life. What you're doing ... what you're thinking."

"I don't think the person that wrote that book was thinking that," Ron said, nodding towards it. "I think they just had a story come into their head and they never even realized that it didn't just come from nowhere."

He went on, "Besides, is there anything you do or think that you should be ashamed of?"

"No," Clarice says, "but it's mine. It's not for anybody else to know about-- people do things with that kind of knowledge."

"Then don't let them," Ron told her. Embarassedly, he admitted, "This little git who's pretty much bullied me all through school got turned into a cat and I took him in without knowing it. I talk to my pets--told him some of my worst secrets, some things that were bothering me, things that were worrying me. He knows all of that now. Thing is, I know that he knows it, and he may know what I was thinking then...but he doesn't know what I'm thinking now. He may know what can hurt me, but it doesn't mean I have to let him. Jsut 'cause someone knows what you were thinking or doing doesn't mean they control you somewhere. Just means they're nosy."

Clarice frowns. "A lot of people give you a hard time, Ron."

Ron squirmed and looked at his hands. "I reckon." He looked up. "Bullies always go after the people that are weakest, y'know?"

"You don't look weak to me," Clarice says, thinking of his impressive sprints around the lake.

Ron just shrugged again. "I'm trying to get better at stuff," he said. That was the closest he could manage to sounding self-confident.

"That counts more than anything else," Clarice says.

This is an integral belief of Clarice's, strengthened by years of successfully playing by the rules. All you have to do, in her opinion, is work as hard as you can until you outstrip everyone else. It's never failed her yet.

Ron scratched at the back of his head. "Well, there's always someone who's worked harder is to be the problem."

"It couldn't ever be you?"

Ron shook his head. "All I'm good at's chess. I've gotten good at throwing knives, too, I reckon, but that's all 'cause Faith's a really good teacher." He shrugged indifferently. "S'alright."

He went on with a tiny smile, "I'm good at making my best mate laugh. That's not an easy thing to do."

"Laughing's good," Clarice says, nodding.

"Especially for him. He's too bloody serious all the time," Ron said. "Not that I blame him, but still. He needs to laugh more. He hasn't had much to laugh about."

"I talked to him," says Clarice, and all that that implies. Most specifically, his tendency to seem much, much older than his age when talking about death and the people who want to kill him. "If you really make him laugh, you deserve a medal."

Ron just nodded to himself.

He cracked a crooked, bitter grin.

He tried to think of some way to express his hopelessness and the feeling of helplessness that nearly overwhelmed him now wherever his best mate was involved.

All he could managed wa, "It's getting a lot harder now."

Clarice nods emphatically. She knows.

"It's tough."