fandomhighdorms | Fifth Floor Common Room, Wednesday Afternoon

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Fifth Floor Common Room, Wednesday Afternoon

Jeff had acquired crisps for the day's endeavour. He'd maybe gone a little bit overboard, leaving several horizontal surfaces covered in bags (including Nana's poor pink head, which stayed, moping, on the floor) and some bottles of soda.

However, the one thing he was truly interested in was the television. He had the remote, and he was using it to flip through the channels, trying to will images of the Portugal - Czech Republic game into being.

Stupid timezones. It had to be on any minute now.

[ open! ...yes, i know the game hasn't actually started yet. place yer bets ]

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River walked into the common room, heading for the fridge. She watched Jeff. "The TV schedule is rarely influenced by will power."

Jeff piped up with a voice that was laced in desperate conviction. "You don't know that!"

"It is unlikely." She opened the freezer and found the ice cream. "The combination of football and crisps is an interesting tradition."

"They just sort of belong together," Jeff said, hammering down on another button with his thumb, "Can't have football without crisps." Pause. "Or lager, but I'm not certain the timezone allows it."

River said nothing. She sat down on the couch next to him with a bowl of ice cream, then reached for a bag of salt and vinegar crisps and sprinkled some of it on top of the ice cream.

Jeff wasn't paying much attention to her, for once. He appeared to be trying to will the television into showing his sports-- down to squinting and refusing to actually blink. His eyes were going a little red.

River looked at him, then put her bowl down and attempted to pour the contents of a bag of crisps over his head.

Jeff?

Jeff still wasn't noticing.

He had a mission.

River looked slightly disappointed, but returned to eating her ice cream and crisps. "Good flavour," she said.

"Which ones?" Jeff asked, as River finally caught his attention. He twisted his head to look at her, sending a rain of crisps onto the floor.

"The vinegar ones." She looked at the spoon in front of her, full of ice cream and crisps, and then tried to push this through her mouth.

"Oh, those are good," Jeff said, shifting his attention away. You got used to River after a bit. "'Specially when the English are playing."

And strangely enough, you got used to Jeff. "Explain the rules of the game and its purpose."

"It's football," Jeff said, enthusiastically. "You got eleven blokes on one side and eleven blokes on the other, and then there's two goals, and the point is to kick the ball into the other blokes' goal." He took a moment. "Well, it's not actually that simple. You've got offsides and refs and diving and all sorts of things."

River just looked at Jeff.

"It's the most beautiful game," Jeff explained, deflating a little.

Staying silent, River continued to watch Jeff. Then she poured another bag of crisps over his head.

He just blinked at her. Repeatedly.

Then lifted a hand to his hair, picked out a crisp, and ate it.

River looked at the bag. "Sourcream and onion," she said.

"Oh, there you are!" Turtle remarked as she came into the common room, as if she'd actually been looking for Jeff everywhere, which she hadn't been in the slightest, she just happened to notice him there among the bags on her way to see if he was in his room. She breezed in easily, brushed a few of the bags off the cushion beside Jeff, and plopped down in the spot. A quick attempt at a kiss on his cheek, and her attention went to the television. "What's on?"

Television. Girlfriend. Television. Girlfriend.

This was a very tough decision.

Jeff wound up sort of half-tilting his head in her direction, pressing repeatedly on the remote in order to underscore some kind of point, "It won't show the football."

"Did you try the football channel?"

There was, after all, a news channel and a stocks channel and a supposedly boring government proceedings channel, so it made sense to Turtle that there was very likely to be a football channel. Even if her nose wrinkled a little at the prospect.

"It only shows American football," Jeff said, much chagrined, "And I can't get it to show me the Czechs and the Portuguese and," as if it had only just struck him, "Turtle!"

The sudden declaration of her name had Turtle jumping slightly, giving Jeff a confused look. "Why would you need it to show me when I'm sitting right here?"

"...Sorry," he stammered, scrambling back-- verbally-- and smashing the button on the remote in the process. The TV switched to a green field full of men in red and white, running around-- he wasn't really noticing right now. "I was just trying to... reaffirm... your there-ness."

Turtle held out her arm a little. "You could just check," she said, poking it. "I'm very here, promise."

She also took a nod toward the TV. "Is that it?" she asked. It looked soc-- err, football...esque. She had no idea. It was sports. Ew.

"Well, obviously, you've got mountains of presence," Jeff said, with a nervous little laugh, which he kept up for a few seconds before he realised what else she was talking ab--

"It is!" Back to glee in a moment.

"Jeff," Turtle said, frankly, with a bit of concern as she shook her head and took a look around the room, "I think you need to lay off the chips. They seem to make you a bit more...ADD than normal."

"I was just coming to find you to ask you about a thing," Jeff's statement would've probably been aided by him not suddenly looking straight at the television. As if he had laser vision, or something, "But then I remembered about the footie."

There was a bit of a pause to that, as Turtle reasoned with herself that not only was Jeff male, but he was European, so, really, it wasn't to be taken as a personal insult that, apparently, football was more important.

Or at the very least more distracting. She'd like to think that she had a few ideas of how she could become more distracting than football, but she wasn't that type of girl. And it would just be really embarrassing and upsetting if her theory turned out to be false.

"What kind of thing?" she asked instead, only half expecting an answer because of the football as she tilted her head at the TV.

"Oh my god," Jeff said, distractedly, "It's one - one already! I missed all the goals!"

Well, in theory. In practice, they still had about eighty more minutes to go in the game, but Jeff was never a man to be distracted by practicalities.

... Not the right kind, anyway. "...Just a thing."

"...Oh," Turtle said, trying not to sound too disappointed and, instead, trying to focus on the TV. It was pretty clear to her that a conversation was not likely to happen, so she thought she should try to get into the game.

...Which was even less likely to happen than a conversation. She sighed, heavily, pulling up her legs and folding them under herself because she should at least be comfortable, which meant leaning a little closer.

"Good thing," she tried again, "or bad thing?"

Jeff's mouth opened, then shut, then opened again. Eventually, he shoved some crisps into it, which increased his thinking time by a considerable amount. However, it was not to last forever. Eventually, he had to swallow, and then--

"Well, that really wouldn't be up to me," he said, sanely, then stuffed another handful of crisps into his mouth. ...He was just going to die. He was going to find a corner and die in it.

Turtle was watching Jeff and his chip-shoving strategy very closely, very carefully, trying to figure out how exactly to interpret it. Interpreting with Jeff, however, was never really very easy, and she still wasn't sure if this thing was a good thing or a bad thing. It just so far had presented itself as a thing out of Jeff's control, which...did not narrow it down in the slightest.

But it was a thing he needed her for, apparently, so that helped a bit. "Who would it be up to?" she asked, and then dared to chance, "Me?"

"Yeah," Jeff replied, spraying some chips in a desperate attempt to keep his eyes on-- why was there no Koller on the Czech side? Had they gone insane?

Jeff shook it off. "...Y-you."

Maybe shaking it off had been a bad idea.

With her nose wrinkled only slightly for politeness, Turtle gingerly wiped a few bits of half-chewed chips from her face. "Maybe," she observed, "this isn't the time to talk about it."

"...Maybe tomorrow?" Jeff blurted. He hadn't meant to blurt that, but he was getting a little distracted by Ronaldo going just THERE oh holy mother of-- "...or the day after. I'm very flexible."

Turtle might have eyed the television with a small amount of hate burning in her glare. "...Are there any games on tomorrow?" she asked.

"Well, yeah," Jeff said, wondering where the sudden urge to shield his shins was coming from, "It's Euro. There's games every day."

"Oh."

It was all Turtle, shoulders sagging and pout on her face, would bother saying. She wasn't even going to specify what kind of oh it was, because she felt it was pretty clear, and, besides, they really only specified when it was a good oh. She glared at the TV a little more while trying to get herself used to the idea that, whatever the heck it was on Jeff's mind, they weren't going to be getting around to talking about it any time soon.

...

He was pretty sure that wasn't a good oh. He knew ohs. That was-- "Number twenty three," Jeff said, hoarsely, "I'm sorry. There's footie time, and then there's non-footie time, and somewhere, there'll be... talking time. With no football involved. Really."

"...Right." Turtle nodded a little. Made sense, really, just like there was working time and non-working time. It was now just a matter of whether or not Turtle decided she wanted to sit and be bored for the sake of being a good girlfriend or whatever, or just leave Jeff to his sports and go do something else. Good chance was that he'd actually prefer that, but, suddenly, she couldn't think of anything else she'd want to do but spend time with him. It was a conundrum.

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Fifth Floor Common Room, Wednesday Afternoon

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