Post by Deleted on Jun 21, 2014 20:56:36 GMT -5
On a good day, Vance was pretty tolerable; he could be fun-loving and the life of the party, he could be charming and flattering, and he could use his sly tongue to get out of any and every situation. Those were the nights when the highs felt higher, the good things felt better, and the bad things didn’t exist. On a bad day, he was a horrid person, one definitely not fit for the company of the general public. He was bitter and rude, and just generally an asshole. He was argumentative, and didn’t even treat his bartend like a human being, despite being one himself and knowing how awful they were treated to begin with. Those were the times that he tended to get into fights, or wake up the next morning in some back alleyway with no memory of exactly where he was or how the hell he got there. Those days were the days that made the few friends that he had consider an intervention, though none of them had ever actually tried. Probably because most of them were just like him.
Today was a bad day.
It had started early that morning, when Vance woke up with a throbbing headache and a sharp pain shooting through his ribcage as if someone was reaching inside him, grabbing onto the muscles surrounding his ribs, and twisting viciously. Carefully, he pushed himself up out of his bed, hissing in pain as he did so, and stumbled over to his bathroom, where he kept the bandage that he used to set his ribs until he could find someone to heal them for him, since he couldn’t reach to get the right angle himself. Wrapping his ribs, setting them, was always the part that hurt more than anything, the part that he hated. Gritting his teeth, he wound the tan bandage tightly around his torso, to keep the bones in place. Once the bandage was completely wrapped around his torso, he fastened it and stood in front of his sink, gripping the sides of it so hard that his knuckles began to turn white. After a majority of the nausea that accompanied this bout of home health care had subsided, he opened the medicine cabinet next to the sink and grabbed a small orange bottle. Unfortunately, this particular prescription had been really expensive, and he could only afford to take one, even though usually it took two just to cut through the everyday haze that surrounded him.
By the time Vance apparated to Diagon Alley, he had found someone to heal his ribs for him; the older woman who lived next door had seemed all too happy to see him with his shirt off. However, he was still in desperate need of a drink, and right about now he was in the mood for someplace a little more savory than his usual haunts, the kind of place where he would hopefully not get killed, or at least hit, for looking at someone with his usually surly expression. The Leaky Cauldron was the perfect place for him today, and that was where he was headed on this miserable afternoon. Thunder rumbled in the sky as he walked, thoughts running through his mind, mostly having to do with his sister and her engagement. He was happy for her, he really was, but at the same time, he knew the guy’s reputation, and he wasn’t sure that he liked it much. Back in his Hogwarts days, which really weren’t so far behind either one of them, Daemon had been even more of a womanizer than he had, if the rumors had any kind of truth behind them.
The last thing Vance wanted was for his sister to end up with someone like him, though he had decided to ultimately withhold judgment on the man until he actually met him. In his mind, Daemon’s reputation had knocked him back a little further, but if he made Nellie happy, if he was faithful to her, and if he loved her, then maybe, just maybe, he could approve. Not that his approval mattered much, Nellie was the kind of girl who would do whatever the hell she wanted, though he liked to pretend that his opinion would matter. Pushing open the door, he walked into the bar and sat down at one of the tables near the back, drink in hand. Normally he would actually sit at the bar, but tonight wasn’t most nights, and he wanted to be far away from the more annoying, drunken patrons that had been there long before he arrived. Sitting back into the chair, he took a long sip of the drink that the attractive bartender had made, and let his eyes trace the curves of her body as a small smirk unfolded on his face. She wasn’t his normal type, but that had never really stopped him before, and it certainly wasn’t going to now.