Not Popcorn! ((Open RP))

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

((This is to get John Amsterdam caught up with the end of season 1.))

John was pretty confident that while he had gone to bed naked, he hadn't been covered with butter at the time.


So now he was flat on his back, staring at the stone ceiling above him, and trying to figure out how he had gotten from his bed in New York to a room in a Scottish castle. Again.

He had left Hogwarts as suddenly as he arrived, and had dismissed it all as a bad dream. Life had gone on as usual. No, the pain in his back from hitting the stone floor told him that it was worse than usual. The bullet wound in his side was almost healed, but it still twinged a bit.

The bullet... John tried to wipe the butter out of his eyes as the last few weeks came back to him. He'd been shot, and he wasn't dead. Which meant that Sara wasn't the One, and that was why he had dumped her. Yesterday. Or what felt like yesterday. Thanks to Hogwarts time and popcorn, several weeks in New York had meant only five minutes as a kernel for him.

Something was licking his arm. John rolled over to find Thirty-Six in his own pool of butter. The damn dog must have been sleeping on the bed, and John couldn't be happier. "Hey, boy," he said, running his fingers through the dog's slicked-down coat. They both needed a shower. John just hoped that nobody would bother to ask questions as the naked guy and his dog made their way to Ravenclaw.

Comments

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

"I didn't know that I knew you," John replied. The New York accent was probably also a clue that this was not Dieter. However, they both shared a disturbing lack of shame.

Poor Thirty-Six was trying to lick the butter off himself. It was probably going to make the dog sick. "This is what the guy gets for jumping up on the bed," Amsterdam said, trying to wipe some of the grease off the dog. "So if I have to come from my nice, warm bed to this place, so does he."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

The accent does indeed clue Chance in. Thanks to the uncanny similarity between her boss and the Antichrist, she's familiar with the Hogwarts phenomenon of lookalikes. (She's also intensely grateful she hasn't got a lookalike wandering around. Imagine trying to explain that to Emmie, who barely knows Chance as it is.)

"I didn't know that you weren't the guy I knew," she answers, level and not laughing but the oddness of it all strikes her as a little funny, and that takes away a little of the awkwardness inherent in the situation. "Not that I really know him, just everyone's seen him around. The German guy from Ravenclaw who wanders around in a towel."

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, I know him," John said. "I'm in Ravenclaw, too, and he's taken all the fun out of it. John Amsterdam." He'd shake her hand, but the poor woman didn't deserve melted butter.

"So how do you get back to there from here, Ms...?"

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

Chance doesn't have any real desire to shake a buttery hand, either. "Silvey. Dr. Chance Silvey. A fellow Ravenclaw. Ravenclaw Tower is that way," she points in the direction she's come from. "Take a right at the suit of armor a little way down the hall, and you'll come to a flight of stairs. Go down that, then take another left, and you'll be on the right path. If you want, your dog can come have a bath at the Care of Magical Creatures shed."

Being a teaching assistant has so many perqs.

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

John turned to the dog. "Did you hear that, Thirty-Six? We both get to take a bath." He had to pull the dog's attention away from the butter again.

"Thanks for the directions. The Care of magical Creatures shed is that barn out there, right?"

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"The only outbuilding sizable enough to be called a barn, yeah." The groundskeeper's hut is big enough to have housed a half-giant, but it's still just a hut. "Did you just call your dog 'Thirty-Six'?"

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

"Yes." The dog's ears perked up at his name. "Replacement for Thirty-Five, who was a good dog. Predecessor of the eventual Thirty-Seven."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

It's a sequential thing? "You've had a succession of thirty-six dogs?"

That's a lot of dogs.

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

"Yeah. Or, you know, 252 if you're using dog numbers."

Ba-dum tsh.

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

Chance doesn't exactly roll her eyes, but the sentiment is there. "Maybe I shouldn't say this in front of Dog Thirty-Seven, but what is that, a dog for every year you've been alive?"

Oh, Chance, if only you knew.

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

He frowned. "Oh, no. Thirty-Six is only four. Thirty-Five was thirteen when he died. Veterinary science has come really far in the last century."

[chance-silvey.livejournal.com]

"And that makes you how old?" She can't actually total it all up, since all the dogs won't have had equal lifespans, and she doesn't know how old he was when he got his first dog.

She's all but forgotten she's standing here talking to a naked man covered in butter. Hey, it's Hogwarts. You get used to this kind of thing.

[400-years-young.livejournal.com]

For John, standing around talking to someone while naked just makes it Tuesday. It's the butter that makes it Hogwarts.

"Four hundred." He shrugged. "Almost four hundred and one."