xistentia | (no subject)

Characters: Mandy Slade and Arthur Stuart
Summary: A fanboy and one of his idols get wasted and talk about their various escapades in the glam rock scene.
Date(s): Sometime shortly after this
Warnings/Notes: Very likely a fair bit of swearing and talk of sex and drugs. Possibly a few less than PC terms since they both came out in the 60s and 70s If anything else comes up I'll update.

There were still a staggering number of things about this place Mandy didn't have a firm grasp on--including but not limited to the strange thing that looked a great deal like a Siamese cat that followed her about, but that talked and projected something like a keyboard and reminded her of far too much cheesy scifi.

But bars? Bars she understood no matter the time and place they were in. While she might not have liked the reason she spent so much time in them before coming here, they were still the sort of place where she could be...well, as close to herself as she had been in quite a long time, whoever that person was. And while she'd certainly been asked out for a drink since leaving Brian, aside from Curt and a small number of others who were now mostly gone in one way or another it hadn't been anything properly friendly. And maybe Arthur wasn't a friend in the way Curt was, but who in the entire bloody universe could be? She knew Brian had left a whole trail of broken hearts in his wake, but the two of them had experienced something uniquely awful.

Arthur had been rather sweet though, and while seeing him now made her see the man she'd spoken to both weeks ago and a decade in the future in an entirely different light that wasn't especially gentle, he hadn't been insulting then and was doing far better than she would have expected of any fan back then in actually treating her like a person instead of an idea now. So, drinks with him didn't even come close to getting onto her list of bad choices. She'd even bothered to pull out the few cosmetics she had with her, tempering a bit of her pallor that had changed from brilliant to sickly at some point in the last decade with lips that thankfully didn't make her look like a clown and pulling out a faded silk scarf with some indeterminate pink or maybe purple and red pattern to it that she'd found to contrast with what might be able to pass for a little black dress.

Leaving the drink and music selections up to...the computer or whatever bloody thing was at work here did seem like a decidedly bad choice, so for the first time in what felt like far too damn long, Mandy took immediate charge of the situation to at least get one sorted out, slipping behind the bar with an actually genuine smile.

"So darling, what's your poison?"

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It's still so damn jarring, to see that being in her presence is making him ruffled. Maybe it had been there back in New York too and it's just clearer without the weight of a decade on both of them. Or maybe it was the fact she'd never seen it so close--it had always been a crowd of beautiful clamoring bodies, and usually they were reaching for Brian far more than her. Not that she blamed them at all; she'd put him there for them. She's not precisely sure what to do with having the light all on herself for the first time in--well, almost since before she was married, actually.

She chuckles, unable to keep a hint of bitterness out of it, but keeps her eyes on her drink. "Thank you darling. I nearly forgot what it's like to hear that."

Mandy realizes as he offers an ear that she also doesn't know how to see him anymore than she knows how to handle being truly seen. Even now when he's ponced up more than he had been in ages when she first met him, it's difficult to see anything but the man who was looking for what happened to Brian--being, still, just one more coming to her for a glimpse of the glittering god she'd helped create. The fact he's not looking for that now is disorienting.

She takes a long sip of her own drink, staring at the ceiling for a second as she makes an attempt to gather something more than cleverness. It had been easy to talk about what she'd watched from the sidelines of her own life. But the idea of talking about anything before that night Brian had asked her to jive, or after she'd run--she never made herself a script for that.

She sets the glass down, resting her elbows on the bar and really looking at him now, as she actually digs for something that wasn't Brian's. It doesn't take near as long as she would have thought. "You want to know something positively rotten? I am certain I trust you more than nearly anyone I was running around with back then." She taps her fingers on the bar, knowing she's dragging on this not because of Arthur, but herself. She'd thrown off the outward trappings of the masks, but they were still so thick inside her that peeling them away was almost physically painful.

"...you know when we were all playing that silly game about the lies? That one about me nearly getting locked up because I was caught with a girl, that was true. It was when I was actually making something of an attempt at going to university, making a proper woman of myself or whatever rubbish my family had in mind." The fact she actually wants to look at Arthur for this, to let him see the wistfulness for something that hadn't been destroyed from the inside, is rather shocking but she does it.

"Her name was Karen. She had green eyes and a laugh you could have heard across a crowded auditorium." It's tempting to reach for the burn of the drink, but she doesn't. "We were careless--didn't lock the damn door and the wrong person heard just enough. I heard her family... washed their hands of her quite differently than mine.

She clears her throat roughly, on something that isn't social awkwardness but something far older. "And I never told anyone that. Not her name, that--nothing but that it happened to me and I got out of it with a silly story about jumping out a window half stoned on whatever sedative they'd given us when we were trying to claw the eyes out of the people we'd so dreadfully offended by being in a room all by ourselves with our hands up each other's skirts."

It's not an original story by any means, she knows that. Nothing unique in it. Which is honestly the depressing part, because she knows other people lived it and because even the fact it's an old tale doesn't change the fact it might hurt worse than anything Brian did, which is why she does finally raise her glass again to hide her eyes.

The more Mandy talks, the more upset Arthur gets, despite the insistent voice in the back of his mind telling him he has no right to. He only has enough pieces to be able to see the vaguest outline of the whole story, and even that is enough to make him feel a bit sick on her behalf. Added all together, it's too much for anyone to bear, even if she really were the magic, ethereal being she'd worked so hard to appear to be.

He doesn't gasp or shout or threaten to rain fire on anyone who would do her harm--based on what little he knows of the real man, he's still fairly certain that's Curt's job--but there's a part of him that would like to. He'd also like to reach over and take her hand, but before the thought has a chance to even fully form, he's suddenly aware of how clammy his palms are from the nerves, and he turns his attention back to his beer to distract himself until the urge to do something stupid and overly intimate has passed.

But clammy hands or not, he can't just leave her hanging, so he swallows and tries not to look dodgy even though he can't quite meet her eyes.

"It's not--I think it must have been harder for you than it was for me, especially since it brought me to Malcom and the other lads, but I do know how it feels to have someone walk in and humiliate you like that. And when you're...the way we are, it's that much worse--they look at you like you're the one who's humiliated them."

There's a moment when she honestly does want to laugh, when he says what happened to her was harder.

But it's been--well, she's not really sure the fact that she'd gone through the same lot as a great deal of the boys was even acknowledged before Brian was talking for all of them to the whole world. Of course what the boys went through was different, always would be. It was easier for her to hide in plain sight than it was for most of them. But that in itself was it's own special sort of hell, the one only the people inside it knew existed. "Yeah." She says on a sigh that more to her glass than him. But then she looks up, a smile that is small and maybe a bit fragile crossing her face.

"But, by the very same token, it gave me a reason to stop giving a single care what people thought. I spent months hiding something that was gorgeous and I still lost it. I figured at that point, if everyone was going to get pissed at me for something I hadn't even been throwing in their faces, I'd do exactly that." She knows that's at least part of why she'd been delighted by Curt, that very first time they saw him. Even without knowing how many of the stories were true, the fact he hadn't run from their disgust the way Brian had that same day had been incredible.

"And," her grin is much broader now, the devilishness real. "It also threw me into a world where what I'd been caught doing was positively tame. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir a little here but the first time I went into the Sombrero and saw Jack and all the rest of them, doing exactly what they felt like and actually enjoying the way people stared was like...seeing color for the first time. And once I didn't feel like I was going to get locked up--I think I probably made Brian look like a prude, that first year or two. Like I was catching up on all the lost time and then some. I had my first threesome that very first night." There were some people far older than Arthur she wouldn't have told that to, but--well, she'd helped craft the world he'd crossed into, he could hardly be shocked by that