Comfort and Joy

[simplestgift]

Who: Come one, come all! ...In formal attire.
What: A Christmas ball, old world style.
When: December 1st, beginning around five in the afternoon and ending when the last person leaves.
Where: The rec center.
Summary: Earth's eighteenth-century peeps are throwing one hell of a party.
Rating: Well, considering no one is serving water? Probably PG-13 for alcohol consumption and the results thereof (there's coffee and hot chocolate!).

The recreation center has been utterly transformed.

The doors open to a host of candles and a warm, old-world smell and feel. The scent of food and spices hangs in the air—mulled wine, wassail, evergreen boughs, fresh bread and roast meat. Cream brocades, simple but elegant, are draped over the walls. Traditional red rugs have been thrown over the floor. Gone are the billiard tables, ping-pong, and foosball. It looks like a different place entirely, every table impeccably dressed with light linen cloths and set with fine china and crystal. At least one-half of the room is cleared and ready for dancers.

The tables are lit with candles, and five chandeliers have been temporarily added to the room for more light, giving the room a golden glow instead of the sterile luminescence of fluorescent lighting. On the tables, boughs of evergreen and holly surround the candles, and mistletoe has been hung discreetly here and there. In one corner of the dancing area, by a large and beautifully decorated fir tree (Buffy’s insistence), the musicians are set up to play, unobtrusive to the diners but essential to the dancers. Leading them is Frederic Chopin himself, and few here can say they have had anyone better play for their pleasure.

Things will begin with a grand dinner late in the afternoon, with a light supper (mostly consisting of cold meats, bread, and other lighter fare) at around nine o’clock. The selection of food on the tables is enormous. Most of it is meat-based and some of it is simply meat. Roast beef with mushrooms, goose in giblet gravy, herbed chicken, baked salmon, and a whole pig are among the choices. There is some hope for vegetarians, though, with spinach mixed with bread crumbs and cheese on small toasts, turnips (or rutabagas if you speak American), onions, carrots, parsnips, mashed potatoes, asparagus in breadcrumbs, and savory onion and wild mushroom pies. There is hot fresh bread and rolls with butter and heaps upon heaps of small mince pies filled with fruit, molasses, and yes, a little minced lamb. Moreover, there are fresh winter fruits like oranges and mikans and many different desserts, such as Christmas pudding, a rum chocolate dessert, and spotted dog with custard. Sit and help yourself. For a complete list of the food offered, take a look here.

Among the drinks throughout the evening are wassail, tea, hot chocolate (less sweet and much more intense than most modern characters would be used to, made with cinnamon, vanilla, and a hint of cayenne pepper), coffee, brandy, wine both mulled and plain, port, sherry, and gallons of rum punch. Even though the food is fantastic, overseen by Jack Aubrey, the conversation is the point of the game, and who knows who they will wind up sitting beside. At the center of each table is placed a pineapple as a sign of welcome and wishes of prosperity.

There is dancing light as the music itself, with Archie Kennedy and Elizabeth Swann teaching the steps of each dance before striking up the music and letting everyone go to town with it. They are poised and elegant but relaxed and seeming to glide as they demonstrate the motions with an effortlessness that comes with years of practice. They were both raised on these dances and this sort of social function and seem completely at home here. The dancing begins after dinner with the minuets and continues after a light supper with some informal English country dances. Anyone unused to dancing like this may find that it’s harder than it looks, but when one gets used to it, it feels very graceful, beautiful, and…fun! The activity will only end when there are too few dancers left to continue, and will continue all night if possible. As dancers pass each other or move hand-in-hand, eye contact can be made, quiet words exchanged, subtle (or not) messages passed as they spin through the room, or perhaps the room spins while they remain still.

It might depend on how much they’ve had to drink.

Those who do not wish to dance have other activities to participate in. In one corner, card tables are set up with multiple decks of cards stacked up, and there is even a box or two of dominoes and a handful of dice. The tables themselves are round and made of polished rosewood or mahogany. This area is well-lit and on the opposite end of the room from the musicians and dancers, probably as a mercy to the tone-deaf Horatio Hornblower who loves cards but can’t abide music. Here, discreet (or indiscreet) gambling is inevitable. There may be no money here, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to wager.

Are you lingering at the dining tables, drinking and talking loud and laughing with friends, or will you shyly sit and watch the dancing and games and hope to be invited in? Are you sitting quietly alone and listening to the music as your foot taps on its own, or are you unable to sit still and ready to dance all night if they’ll let you? Are you playing cards with a few new acquaintances, or are you hanging on someone’s arm and helping them cheat?

Whatever you do, have fun.

Comments

[herotypical]

Her cheek fell to his shoulder and strength entered her half-hug.

"Colour me happy that you're so convincing, then."

[all7seas]

Jack dropped his cheek against the top of her head, breathing in the fragrance of that shining hair. "Color me happy that you're happy, love. Sorry about the forty-seven minutes."

[herotypical]

"I think you're coloured enough."

Muffled but...lighter. Sweeter. It generally took her a few moments but Buffy would reliably thaw out given the right application of non-insult.

[all7seas]

"Suppose I could have gone red, like Aubrey," he grumbled, and in near-petulant tones: "Need to step back two paces."

[herotypical]

"Then we would've matched. It would've been nauseating."

And then, also petulant: "Don't wanna." Her grip tightened.

[all7seas]

Jack wrapped both arms firmly around her waist in return. "You're not properly under it." And he would make his best effort to lift her and move them both the required distance.

[herotypical]

In a most contrary voice: "Don't have to be under it to be kissed, you know. You could just kiss me because you want to kiss me."

But being lifted was one of her chief weaknesses -- strength was all well and good but she was still a small thing of a woman and was easily repositioned. Perhaps a little too easily; however, she would deny her complicity.

[all7seas]

"I want to kiss you under the mistletoe," he offered, "because you are the most beautiful woman in the room. And it's a Christmas ball. And because I've dreamed of it for a year, and I shan't miss my chance."

[herotypical]

"A year," she echoed him but felt the real reverberations within her ribcage. She had her own tale-telling heart beating a fierce number in her chest. Such superlatives never grew stale or tiring when there were still so many incredibly enviable women turning up in Luceti every two months. She didn't need to believe his clams, though. She only needed to know that he believed them.

"Fine. You and me and mistletoe. Let me make your dream come true." And she leaned upwards to catch him in a kiss.

/evilly immortalizes the unbelievable clams

[all7seas]

Jack kissed her back eagerly, letting the reality of being home wash over him afresh. He pulled back briefly to catch her green eyes with his own before renewing that kiss. Possibly others in the room were staring, but he did not care about that at all.

OH MY GOSH SARALNDA. :|

[herotypical]

So what if they stared? There had been a time, of course, when a display like this had been decidedly off the menu. A time when even venturing near the town meant disengaging hands and pretending not at all to want them once again linked. But things had changed; Buffy wondered, now, if she might be hard pressed to find any non-newbie in the village who didn't already know of this unconventional union.

Her hat-holding hand drifted up his back. Gaining angles and pulling him close.

: D

[all7seas]

La Martinique. Sand. A woman washing in the surf, skimming dried sand from her bare arms and legs, her long dark hair curling down over the tanned skin on her back.

Jack Sparrow had held the scrap of lace against his lips and watched her from the shade of the jungle's edge, waiting for the moment she would return to his side--the opportune moment when he would slip the shimmering onyx-stone ring around her finger. Possessive and claiming her, not just as a student or to sate his lusts: no. She would be his, just as she had made him hers.

It had all worked out remarkably well until she'd left him, coolly and without allowing him any words on the matter. The onyx Thieves' Ring had been traded away quite shamelessly for information; he'd found it at Tia's shack and given it back to the beautiful con-artist on the Queen Anne's Revenge. The rest of their tale, he realized, was still unwritten.

And now, this, here, with Buffy--Jack shivered. She was not like Angelica at all. She was an unknown quantity, really: unlike any woman he'd known. And that was frightening all on its own, but he would not let it terrify him tonight. Hungry lips claimed hers as Jack lifted her against him once more; this time, though, he had no intention of bringing her anywhere.

[herotypical]

Mistletoe was forgotten and so too was the party around them. It existed only as a swell of music that engulfed the moment and gave it a sudden soundtrack. Live and antique, not at all mediated by the tinny speakers of an outdated stereo system. In the fractious half-seconds between full seconds, she felt transported. But not, like Jack, to some older memory or some other matter of the heart. This was somewhere wholly new for her. Gloriously cinematic at the same time as it was uncapturable.

...What was the right word for this? Buffy's mind tripped over a colourful but suddenly frighteningly inadequate vocabulary. Classic, perhaps. Something beyond the framework of Hollywood films and MTV music videos. Something excised from the horror of Sunnydale, too.

With frayed breathing and working lungs, she broke away only when it became impossible not to. And even then she returned for one additional and smaller kiss. Tonguing the top of his bottom lip with her own possessive claim before also taking back her ability to stand on the firm ground with own two feet.

[all7seas]

"Nice to be home, actually." And who really needed to breathe? Overrated, that. Jack relaxed and let his palms drift down to her waist.

[herotypical]

It was a curious confession that she wasn't going to press. Hadn't the mission seen him nearer an actual ocean? Probably. And yet here...and yet the word nice. And home.

And his hat.

So what if it was filthy? She leaned back and popped his pirate's hat right back onto his head. He needed some part of him left amongst all that blue -- just as she had a wicked-bladed, sheathed knife strapped somewhere about her person. Emblems.

"Have you had anything to eat yet?" It was only a matter of time before she asked.

[all7seas]

"Nah; haven't eaten properly in..."

In a week. Not since the Thanksgiving party has Jack had a decent meal. And it wasn't because the Malnosso did not provide food, but that he hadn't taken the time to consume it, so eager was he to finish the jobs set him.

"Feed me."

[herotypical]

"What? No magic word?"

[all7seas]

"Mutton?"

[herotypical]

"...Strike one."

[all7seas]

"Stuffed partridge?"

[herotypical]

"Strike two. Mention pear trees and I'm gonna steal your hat back and dump it in the punch."

[all7seas]

"Why on earth would I mention a pear tree when I could be mentioning 'oh please Buffy please feed me'?"

Nevermind that he could easily get his own food, here. That wasn't the point.

"'Sides. You'd never punchify my hat. You love my devilish and piratical hat."

[herotypical]

"Fine. I'll spare your hat and punchify you instead."

And then she was off -- leading him by the hand towards the food. She would relish feeding him, tonight.

[all7seas]

Possibly not as much as Sparrow was going to enjoy eating.

"Be gentle; it's been a long week."

[herotypical]

"How gentle are we talking, here?"

This was a layered question. Obviously so. After all -- plans had been planned, last week. Plans about how long she would give him to recover after his mission before a whole other flavour of relishing.