if_inconvenient | (no subject)

It is not, in Cal's experience, difficult to get around his mother's decrees. He just has to disobey in a manner that lets her pretend not to notice.

Which, when he's out of the house, isn't hard at all. It's Peter who follows the minutiae of Cal's movements when he's being followed, and the fact that he never even mentioned to Mother that he caught Sherlock sneaking in speaks volumes all by itself. Cal is pretty confident that a visit to the Stark residence will go similarly unmentioned.

(He's not wrong. Peter's been out this way to check out the Stark property, and one look was enough to tell him that Cal is safer here than he would be anywhere else in Sunnydale.)

Which all boils down to Cal driving up the driveway, grabbing his backpack, and heading to the front entrance without any hesitation.

"Your friend Cal is approaching."

"Oh, let him in, would you?"

"Certainly, sir."

Sherlock is just arriving at the bottom of the stairs, down the hall from the foyer. When Cal reaches the front door and it unlocks audibly, Sherlock is still ten feet away.

The heavy door unlocks just as Cal was reaching for the doorbell; he decides that this must be the equivalent of it's open, come on in, and does so.

"Hi."

"Always nice to see you."

The references just pop into his head. He can't help it. That's a lie; he could. But letting them through is more fun.

(Jarvis is silent. He prefers to be unobtrusive.)

Cal actually recognizes the reference this time, thanks to the movie.

"Right," he remembers, "I brought -"

He goes digging through his backpack, which is kind of a mess, but it doesn't take too long for him to surface with the Sherlock Holmes DVD. Along with a couple others.

He forgot the binder of Holmes titles from the Bar. Whoops. Maybe next time.

"Ah, yes. Thank you. Well, come inside."

He doesn't look it, but Sherlock is utterly and completely out of his depth. No vampire research, no sneaking into houses, nothing that can be remotely described as within his area of expertise. He's watching a movie. With a friend. How did this happen?

Cal is more persistent than people tend to give him credit for, that's how. Sherlock needs the occasional dose of normality even more than Cal does, and that's really saying something.

He brings the Holmes DVD over to hand it to Sherlock, saying,

"I brought the one you had picked out (http://americas-son.livejournal.com/1290.html?thread=127754#t127754) before, and the sequel." Because he really, really doubts that Sherlock owns any normal movies. They're probably all like, documentaries and French movies and all that other smart people stuff.

"Thoughtful of you." He takes the DVD and leads Cal a few steps down the hall to the—well, a—living room.

As it happens, the selection of DVDs already present on the shelf are devoid of documentaries and French. This is because they're all Tony's. Which isn't to say they're not for smart people, if by smart people you mean geeks; Tony has standards for his science fiction.

Cal looks at the movies with interest - like everyone else on the planet, he likes knowing what movies other people own. He's seen a few of these, but not all of them held his attention very well. (The last twenty minutes of 2001 are perfect for getting high to, though.)

"No problem," he says, "you really seemed to be looking forward to it." Yes, that is a joke. Cal is smirking as he says it. In a strictly friendly kind of way.

Sherlock laughs. "But in the end I did not prove impossible to convince." He tucks the Holmes DVD away on the end of a shelf, smiling.

Cal smiles and says,

"I can be very convincing." It's a skill.

"Really? I hadn't noticed."

"Good," Cal says cheerfully, "that means I'm doing it right."

Sherlock probably thinks he's making his own decisions here. How charmingly naive of him!

Or something.

He laughs even harder at that.

"Dear me, you sound positively nefarious."

Which is a compliment.

Cal laughs too, but says,

"It's practically in my DNA. I am a Chandler, after all." He pronounces the name with gleeful sarcasm, jumping on the chance to send up his family image.

"Ah, yes. Certainly, if your mother is any indication, you are destined for a life of charm and subtle venom."

Cal snorts.

"Yeah. You know, I'm not supposed to tell anyone, even though everyone knows anyway, but Dad's running for President in the next election, so I'm gonna get a lot of practice in the next couple of years."

Getting votes for his father is pretty much why Cal was born. It certainly didn't have anything to do with anyone in the family wanting a child.

"Oh, that sounds delightful," he says dryly. "Bless Howard Stark for keeping his offspring out of the public eye."

For one thing, it introduced convenient doubts about the number of said offspring.

"Yeah, you guys got lucky there," Cal says. "You got to skip all the boring parties."

Cal was always jealous of the kids whose parents left them at home for the stilted social affairs that consisted of everyone trying to impress everyone else (and, he realized when he was a little older, everyone knowing that everyone was trying to impress everyone else), but he himself was one of the ways in which his own parents aimed to impress. Such a lovely family, such a charming boy, just like his old man.

He wants Dad to be President, of course, and he knows he has to put in the work along with the rest of his family, just like every other would-be President's family has always had to do, but he wishes he could just skip ahead to the day after Election Day.

"Now imagine the pair of us at one of those parties, and reconsider who exactly is lucky to have escaped such a fate."

Sherlock is certain that only disaster could have resulted, and knowing Tony, that disaster would have befallen everyone else.

Cal thinks about this.

"God, that would have been awesome."

There is something that could almost be called longing in his tone.

"Would it really?"

"Anything that could make those things not boring would be awesome."

Also anything that might piss everyone else off. Double points for that. The people who attend those social affairs deserve to be fucked with, as far as Cal is concerned.

"Use your nefarious Chandler powers to convince Tony to crash one," he suggests.

Cal grins at him.

"Don't think for a minute that I couldn't."

This is one of very few areas in which Cal is genuinely confident in himself. It shows.