A Starbucks, London, Tuesday Afternoon
Mar. 15th, 2011 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bitten_notshyJack normally could suss out the romantic potential of any given encounter within the first five minutes, so he had no reason except distraction to be so surprised when he realized that this -- this coffee-with-a-classmate thing he and Alistair had been doing for the last few weeks -- was, at least in Alistair's head, a date.
If he'd known the expression, he would have said his gaydar needed a tune-up. Really, he should have worked it out back when Alistair was just glancing at him from across the lecture hall in a way that suggested he knew more than he was saying, but he'd been deep in a bout of post-Bristol paranoia at the time: He'd thought it was about time travel or vampires, not anything as mundane as lust.
Well. As long as Alistair was being slow and shy and waiting for Jack to make a move, Jack had no particular need to press on the point, and wouldn't (at least, not with a visit to Emma on the horizon).
Which made for a double surprise when he reached into Alistair's bookbag to retrieve a pen and spotted an old, vaguely familiar text. "You have Gray's Compendium of Spellcraft," he noted. "Holding it for a friend?"
Alistair looked like he'd been caught with something far more illicit than a spellbook. "No. Actually it's just ... something I should have mentioned."
Jack waited patiently through the pause.
"There's a strain of sorcery in my family," Alistair explained, in the end. "I want to go into magical investigations after university, so I take night classes on the witchcraft side of things. Our school tolerates it, barely." He ran a sheepish hand through his hair. "I should have told you, but -- some people go all funny about anything supernatural. Wasn't sure where you stood."
Well. This coffee-date-thing had just gotten even more interesting. After a bit more chat -- during which Jack established very well that he was not the type to go all funny about something as minor as a bit of magic -- Jack was almost sorry he had to take his leave.
He had a portal to catch.
[OOC: NFB, NFI. Just setting up a magic user in Jack's world for future plot.]
If he'd known the expression, he would have said his gaydar needed a tune-up. Really, he should have worked it out back when Alistair was just glancing at him from across the lecture hall in a way that suggested he knew more than he was saying, but he'd been deep in a bout of post-Bristol paranoia at the time: He'd thought it was about time travel or vampires, not anything as mundane as lust.
Well. As long as Alistair was being slow and shy and waiting for Jack to make a move, Jack had no particular need to press on the point, and wouldn't (at least, not with a visit to Emma on the horizon).
Which made for a double surprise when he reached into Alistair's bookbag to retrieve a pen and spotted an old, vaguely familiar text. "You have Gray's Compendium of Spellcraft," he noted. "Holding it for a friend?"
Alistair looked like he'd been caught with something far more illicit than a spellbook. "No. Actually it's just ... something I should have mentioned."
Jack waited patiently through the pause.
"There's a strain of sorcery in my family," Alistair explained, in the end. "I want to go into magical investigations after university, so I take night classes on the witchcraft side of things. Our school tolerates it, barely." He ran a sheepish hand through his hair. "I should have told you, but -- some people go all funny about anything supernatural. Wasn't sure where you stood."
Well. This coffee-date-thing had just gotten even more interesting. After a bit more chat -- during which Jack established very well that he was not the type to go all funny about something as minor as a bit of magic -- Jack was almost sorry he had to take his leave.
He had a portal to catch.
[OOC: NFB, NFI. Just setting up a magic user in Jack's world for future plot.]
