Clarice and Terry - BH Party

[ax_siryn]

Island girls have some things in common, as it turns out.


Terry didn't really know what time it was, since her phone was in the pocket of her fake leather jacket, and she'd abandoned that in a corner of the room a while back. She only knew that it was time for another drink, and she headed for the kiddie pool - giggling at it again because seriously, a kiddie pool - to see what was still in there. Between the heat from the presence of so many teenagers, and so many dancing teenagers at that, and the fact that she'd been very steadily drinking and dancing, she was actually feeling a little too hot in her sleeveless knotted denim shirt and jeans.

But she was rocking at walking in a straight line, right then - until someone stood on the edge of that straight line, and she failed to adjust her trajectory, bumping her shoulder into theirs. "Sorry!" she blurted out immediately, then broke into a grin as she saw who it was. "Clarice! How are you enjoying the party? It's fierce, isn't it?"

The party had been fierce, Clarice couldn't deny that. But it was still difficult for her to relax, surrounded by so many strangers. Especially when their hosts were supposedly terrorist nutjobs. She'd loosened up a bit, as the night had worn on, though; she'd even started to think maybe the Professor had been a bit quick to judge these kids. They'd been nothing but generous, in as far as the food, booze, and music went. And nobody had tried to recruit her yet for any kind of mutant revolution. Standing at the periphery of the party with a fresh beer in hand, she was inclined to call this a pretty successful, low-stress get-together. Of the kind she wouldn't mind coming to again.

When Terry bumped into her, she reached out a hand quickly to steady the other girl, holding her by the shoulder. "Is been a pretty cool time," Clarice acknowledged, brilliant green eyes shining with the several drinks she'd consumed up to that point. "You been havin' fun, Terry?"

"Craic," Terry confirmed with a grin. "Craic is even better than fun." Okay, it was exactly the same, but it sounded better. It sounded like home. "Let me grab a drink," she added, and stepped over to the pool, grabbing the first alcoholic drink that she found, which was a beer. She stepped back to Clarice and tilted her drink against Clarice's. "Here's to a great party."

"Craic," Clarice echoed in her distinctive accent, as their bottles tinkled together. "Is been fun, yeah. Maybe these Brotherhood kids ain' as bad as the Professor was worried they'd be, ay'?"

"They throw a good party," Terry agreed after taking a drink. Never mind that anything with alcohol would probably qualify as a good party to her; this one was better than that. "And I like their playlist, and the beer pong. And some of them are fit."

That last part had Clarice giggling into her beer, since, yeah, she'd noticed, too. Especially the boy with the abs. Damn. "There's a couple that ain' hard on the eyes, that's for true," she admitted. "And the music's been good." Very little of it familiar to her, but all fun and easy to dance to. "What's beer pong?" she added, realizing she ... really wasn't sure, now that it had come up.

"You don't know what... Let's go play," Terry stated, and smiled brightly at Clarice. She leaned in as if to share a secret. "I'd never played it before tonight, either. But it's fierce!"

"Is fierce, ay'?" Clarice laughed, falling back on the very Bahamian tactic of repeating what she'd just been told in the form of a question when she wasn't sure what else to say. But Terry's no-doubt booze-enhanced excitement was contagious, she had to admit. "Gal, lead the way."

"So the set-up's on that table over there," Terry told her, linking arms with Clarice to lead her over. "You take some of those cups and fill them with beer. Not to the brim, not unless you're looking to be more scuttered than I'd recommend. You set them up in a triangle on your side of the table, and you try to throw a ping pong ball into your opponent's cups. When you get it in, the other one's got to drink the cup it landed in."

"And that's ... a game?" the other girl asked, still chuckling. "On the islands, when we wanna drink, we just drink." Still, Clarice eyed the setup with some interest once they arrived, and picked up a ping-pong ball speculatively.

"Drinking games are fun." Terry grinned at the other girl. "But I like your philosophy!"

"Oh, we's very philosophical on the islands," Clarice told her, grinning and tossing the ping pong ball lightly up in the air to catch it again in her palm. "Comes from alla drinkin' we do. So how's this game s'posed to work?"

"All our drinking mostly leads to singing, and a few fights," Terry replied thoughtfully, then brightened as Clarice's question registered. "Right! Let's grab some cups and put them on the marks on the table." Very helpful marks, those, that way she didn't have to think about how big a triangle they might want; they could just follow the design. She grabbed the stack of red cups beside the table and offered them to Clarice.

Clarice accepted the cups and began placing them where the rough, triangular outline seemed to indicate they should go. "We see a coupla fights, now and then," she admitted. "Nothin' too serious, though. Guess we get pretty serious about philosophy, sometimes--ain' much else to do, out that way."

"Apart from swimming and sunbathing?" Terry asked, setting some cups on her own end. It sounded like just the life. Swimming, sunbathing, drinking.

"I didn' actually do much sunbathin'," Clarice admitted. "I mean, I never really ... tanned, that anybody could tell, ay'? But I went swimmin' a lot. Swimmin' is totally my thing. Snorkelin' and conchin'. I draw the line at spear-fishin', though, after one cousin of mine got a bite taken out of him by a angry barracuda." She set up the last cup. "How we do this, then?"

Barracuda. Whoa. Terry stopped staring at Clarice with wide eyes at her question, and looked back at the table, hurriedly finishing setting up her cups. "You pour beer into your cups. Not too much, or you'll never make it to the end of the game."

Keeping down another smile at Terry's fascination with the hazards of predatory fish, Clarice did as instructed, pouring a conservative serving of beer into each of her cups. "That might be fun, too," she noted, "but prob'bly would go better at the school. Don' want me droppin' down when the time comes to be gettin' people back home, ay'?

"Oh." Terry frowned. She clearly hadn't thought it through. Clarice was people's rides. "Right. Hmm. How about you're allowed to cheat?"

One of Clarice's magenta brows rose. "You callin' me a lightweight? 'Cause I tellin' you right now I will drink your freckly butt under the table an' carry you home afterward."

"Freckly butt?" Terry asked, eyes wide, shock plain on her face. Until she burst out laughing. She finished pouring the beer into her cups as well as she could despite the giggles making her hand shake, then smiled over at Clarice. "Bring it on."

"Oh, it brought," Clarice assured her, tossing the ball up in the air again and catching it. Then she looked a bit confused. "What I bringin' again?" Since she had no idea how this game worked, still.

Terry laughed again. "Try and throw the ball into one of my cups."

"Is that all?" Clarice tossed the little plastic sphere in Terry's direction casually. It was almost immediately swallowed up with a blink and deposited in one of the plastic cups on the Irish girl's side.

"Goal!" she cheered.

Terry whooped and then laughed again, picking up the cup and getting the ball out of it. "And there you were all affronted I'd suggested you cheat." She knocked back the contents of the cup, then discarded it and surveyed Clarice's cups. Right, this was always easier at first. She threw the ball in the general direction of the cups and, grouped tightly together as they were for now, sank it into one of Clarice's, then beamed proudly over at her.

After guzzling down the contents of the cup, she answered, "I was affronted," the word wasn't typical to Clarice's vocabulary, but she picked it up with gusto, "that you'd suggest I need to cheat. Cheatin' 'cause I want to is a totally dif'rent thing." Smirking, she tossed the ping pong ball over her shoulder, only for it to blink away and reappear over another of Terry's cups. "But is the best kinda cheatin', ay'?"

"Your power's fierce, and you know it," Terry confirmed, and drank another cup, wet ball in her fingers. When she threw it at Clarice's cups again, she misjudged the distance and grimaced before it even hit the table.

It didn't get the chance. There was a blink, and the ball dropped neatly into one of the cups on Clarice's side. "Yeah, I know it," she said, "but I's just one of the crowd. Besides, what fun is it drinkin' alone?" She retrieved the ball again and finished off the cup, emerging with a hearty sigh. "Is my turn again, ay'?"

And so it went, until all their cups were empty. The portals became a little less precise the more they drank, adding a little spice to the game, but they still went through them in record time. Then it was time to visit the toilets for both girls, and as they walked out of them, Terry leaned companionably against Clarice. "I take back what I don't think I said in the first place. You Bahamans can drink with the best of us!"

"Bahamians," Clarice corrected. Or, at least, she tried to. Leaning easily into Terry's shoulder, her head probably cloudier with beer than was entirely wise, it came out sounding more like "Bahamee'ns". She blinked at the other girl. "And nah, gal, I don' think you actually said that. I was just bein' difficult 'cause I's contrary, 's all." Slightly bleary green eyes turned toward the open area where other teens were moving to the music being pumped through the old warehouse.

"You know what else we's good at? Dancin'. We should go do summa that."

"You're also good at having fierce ideas," Terry stated with a bright smile. She moved away from Clarice, but only to grab her hand (and she managed on her second attempt!) and pull her towards the dance floor. "What about singing?" she asked enthusiastically. "Are you any good at singing?"

"I dunno," Clarice admitted, holding on to Terry's hand and following her out among the other dancing mutants. She laughed. "I only ever sing along with the radio, or when I'm by myself in the shower. Nobody's ever lemme know whether my voice is worth listenin' to or not."

"It'll be worth listening to if you pour your heart into it," Terry replied as they started dancing, and the song switched into its chorus. The sort that was so easy to sing along to, and Terry led by example, smiling as she sang, "Thunder! Feel the thunder! Lightning and the thunder!"

Despite the very healthy drinking they'd recently done, Clarice was still a bit too self-conscious to join in, though she did stamp her foot along with that one little part in the chorus. She kept hold of Terry's hand and grinned. "Girl, now I've heard yours, I'd be too embarrassed to even try. You sing like one of God's own angels."

"If hearing me stops other people from joining in, I'm going to stop singing altogether," Terry retorted, torn between a smile and a frown.

"Now, girl, that would be a sin," the lavender-skinned teen chided lightly. "An' if you is gonna sin, you might as well make it one of the fun ones, ay'? Not the kind that leaves everybody music-deprived an' miserable."

"Stopping other people from singing's just as much of a sin, if not more," Terry replied, tugging playfully on Clarice's hand as they danced. "Singing's a necessity in life."

"Jus' like good food. And beer," Clarice agreed with a tipsy nod. "But you ain' really stoppin' me, y'know. I just don' like attention. Is hard for me not to think of people lookin' my way as a bad thing."

"I don't like it either," Terry answered, completely missing out on the reason why Clarice in particular would not think of it as a good thing. "But I've drunk enough!" And, as the chorus came back, she squeezed Clarice's hand and sang again, "Thunder! Feel the thunder! Lightning and the thunder!"

Laughing, this time Clarice did join in. And, while her voice wasn't exactly bad, it didn't really compare to Terry's. Luckily, she was having enough fun by that point not to feel too self-conscious about it.

Terry was grinning brightly as she sang, now holding both of Clarice's hands as they jumped along to the chorus. She half collapsed against her when it was over, and hugged her all too happily. "That was fierce!"

"Was pretty good," she agreed, giggling softly with an arm draped around the other girl. "You Irish gals can party with the best of 'em, no lie."

"Your islands and mine might just be soulmates," Terry agreed, grinning at Clarice.

"Ain' that much to do on an island," she nodded. "So I guess it stands to reason, ay'? I'll show you mine sometime, if you promise to show me yours."

Terry brightened at the thought. "I miss Ireland. And I'd love to see your island too!" Whatever it was actually called.

"Mine's a lil' hotter, and prob'bly got more bugs," Clarice admitted. "But I miss it, too. We'll set a weekend aside, or somethin', for an island gals' solidarity day."

"You're on," Terry nodded, 100% behind this decision. "Whenever you like." Maybe they could go to Cassidy Keep. Terry missed the old place. "But for now, we should be having another drink."

"You have all the best ideas," Clarice agreed, still holding onto the other girl and clearly in no hurry to let her go any time soon.

"Alcohol is always the best idea," Terry grinned at Clarice, and led them back towards the kiddie pool, not letting go of the other mutant either.