Drinking it in

It was in a darker corner at the back of the bar where Damon toyed with his half-empty beer glass. He'd just arrived in Hogsmeade and tomorrow was a weekend. The children were coming! He could barely wait.

He'd spent the day getting his bearings around the small village, which to his astonishment, had barely changed in the intervening years. There were one or two new buildings along with improvements that had been made to the old, but for all intents and purposes it was still the same place he'd visited that one time before fleeing to The Continent.

Watching the humans living their hectic lives did not bother Damon as it did some of the newer blood. That was the advantage of age. It taught one restraint. Even now, the warmth of their blood and the thudding of their arteries was little more than a pleasing ambience. As pleasing as this stout, in fact.

Damon's reverie was interrupted by a sharp jerk at his collar. Someone had stepped on the trailing end of his cloak and pulled it sharply downwards. The hand holding the glass lost its grip and although he could have recovered, Damon forced himself to let it smash on the floor. If wet ankles were the most he had to pay to remain an unregistered vampire in this country, then so be it.

Elliot usually would have never come into the Hog's Head, but things had changed. The lost man was even more lost than usual... Having found love, lost it, went after the woman, thinking she would be pleased to see him on her doorstep... And then to see her kiss her husband goodbye for work and flip him off behind her husband's back.

Now he had a duller, drearier look on life. He had been nursing a Firewhiskey for quite some time, his eyes watching some man in the back, thinking to himself She would have stayed if I were more important. I could bring one of these people in to the Order and it would almost be certain they'd be a Death Eater or a criminal and I'd be a hero...

Shattering glass caught his attention. He looked up to see a man stumbling, having tripped over some man's coat and the man had dropped his glass. The man who had tripped turned and was looking as though he were angry. "Your coat tripped me!" The man shouted. Elliot blinked, opening his mouth and saying, "Please, sir, we're just trying to-" The man turned around and said, "Mind your own business." Elliot shook his head and sighed, downing another sip.

There was a certain sort of fellow who felt put upon his entire life long. It was just that sort who'd tripped on Damon's cloak, and in the manner of a man who'd seen the bottom of too many glasses in one night, he wished to make something of it. It was quite inconvenient.

Before Damon could put the man at his ease, another had interjected with his own opinion. This was how brawls got started. He turned his eyes toward the younger chap and held his gaze for just a moment.

"What were we trying to do?" he asked.

Elliot blinked a few times at the man who had had his drink spilled by the other brutish, drunken man. Elliot had sort of defended him and suddenly the anger was becoming displaced onto him. Oh, boy. Elliot did not need any more trouble than he already had, but it seemed that he was going to get it no matter what he did.

"I was just saying that we, being the other consumers here, were trying to drink in peace. I don't think anyone here wants any extraneous trouble." He grimaced and awkwardly turned away, hoping that was the end of it, drinking more of his Firewhiskey.