He laughed through a mouthful of sweet, cheesy goodness and tried not to choke.

Things must truly be dire if Figaro was putting him into context like that! To his gillyweed-befuddled senses, it took a second to parse the enumeration of random Virgil Facts. What a little Frankenstein's monster of quirks. Although that begged the question: who was Frankenstein in this analogy?   

           "Fights can be fun. Sophie and I fought all the time."

"She is feisty isn't she?" he fell into the change of subject happily enough, opening the ice box for something to wash down the snacks. "And so direct. I liked that about Flickwick..."

Virgil hooked a bottle of kombucha and read the label distractedly, raspberry citrus. "If she wanted something she'd just come out and say it," he muttered as he opened the cap against the counter ledge. "Want a fuck? Just ask for a fuck, easy as pie."

Figaro learned at some point not to call a girl 'feisty' unless one fancied a smack. Perhaps girls allowed it from Virgil. Figaro had to agree, though, about Sophie. She always seemed to know what she wanted. So did Wil. He caught his mind wandering back to her serene mouth and barest smile, how her lips moved when she asked him to do things or corrected some mistake in manners. He stopped himself from diverting the conversation back to her.

"Sophie never asked for a 'fuck'," he laughed, absently, from his place of authority on the subject. "Or pie, actually."

They'd been all hands, those two, in broom closets. He licked crumbs from his fingers and pressed up from the cool countertop.

The kombucha went down with a sharp fizzle, that strange sourness bordering on disgusting. Why did he like it so much? He stood there in front of the closed icebox, pondering the aftertaste with a vaguely puzzled air.

           "Sophie never asked for a 'fuck'. Or pie, actually."

Right, they were having a conversation. He took another swig of the bottle and wandered absently to the balcony door; he cracked it open to let in a little of the unseasonably warm breeze.

"It's easier to ask when you're not in a relationship with someone, isn't it?" Virgil turned back, dropping into a seat at their small kitchen table. "Nothing to lose, a simple yes or no and it doesn't have to mean anything."

Even as he said that he knew it wasn't true. At least for him, sex always meant something. Or he wouldn't always be talking about it or remembering the people he'd lain with in the past - a past quickly receding. "Sophie wanted to lose her V card," he muttered. "And she didn't want any fuss about feelings."

Virgil laughed abruptly, to himself, and quelled a kombucha-flavoured burp. "If that isn't direct, what is?"

Figaro was still smiling, the gillyweed pleasant in his brain. Virgil's response, Figaro picked up on, were not hypothetical and washed over Fig in strangeness that was cryptic to him. He pivoted to find Virgil where he was sitting now.

"Huh?" he asked with a breath of laughter. "What are talking about?"

Figaro hadn't grown out of this, not yet. A certain lack of intuition, being out of practice reading between the lines.

He didn't know how much of it was the gillyweed and how much was simply... Figaro.

"I'm talking about Sophie?" Virgil laughed, shooting him a searching look while he patted down his pockets for a smoke. "Back at Hogwarts, I mean, she wanted to get her first time over with. Oh, right--" he gestured his wand and the "SUGAR" jar on the counter lifted its lid so that a pack of cigarettes danced out, over to him.

Cigarettes tasted different when he was high. Almost better. "Made sense," he opened the pack with a wry smile. "I was getting around, she must have figured I'd be easy."

Virgil lit up, sighing in satisfaction.

Figaro was slow-blinking dumbstruck, a contrast to Virgil's mirth.

"When?"

Fig and Sophie had broken up in February of his sixth year.[1]  It wasn't the explosive affair that their first break-up had been in their fifth year[2], it'd been more mature but nonetheless a shake-up. It had been enough for them to fall out of contact, god, until the New Years' party.[3] Figaro hadn't been chastely despondent or anything, moving between weird little monogamies, but he was sure if Sophie had been with Virgil someone would have told him. She would have told him.

"No, no, that's lovely. So happy for both. Magical," mumbled lazily and unconvincingly, as if he was trying to convince himself that there was no reason to be bothered. He was sure, doubly sure that she'd not have slept with Virgil when they were together. She was loyal, always kind.

"But, when though? Just curious. It's wonderful. Really nice for her. For you." He rolled his neck and sucked in some air.

1.	25 Feb 2010 - Flipping Out
2.	9 Mar 2009 - go not with a whimper but a BANG
3.	31 Dec 2011 - We Are Young

He was caught between the tart sweetness of the kombucha and the familiar char of tobacco, trying to decide if they went together or if he was going to want to be sick later.

Figaro was dwelling on the subject of Flickwick - he was being rather odd about it really. Virgil wondered if he preferred him waxing lyrical over Wilhemena. He pushed his drink aside (finally deciding it did not, in fact, pair with cigarettes) and leaned against the table to give his friend a properly appraising look.

A hint of his underlying snark peeked through as he half-smiled at Fig.

"It wasn't really nice or magical," Virgil drawled, briefly imitating the other wizard's accent. "It was a bloody one-off, I wanted to see what she would..." he remembered himself abruptly and bit his lip. "Never mind."

Sophie hadn't wanted him to tell anyone - and he didn't want her telling others either, at the time. Of course he'd told his friends, but by keeping mum the two of them ensured their own control over the narrative of sleeping outside your friend circle.

In retrospect, he realised how embarrassingly childish that was. Why did those cliques matter so much?

"Sometime before Easter," he added in a breath of smoke. "In our last year. To answer your question."

For a few long seconds, Figaro saw tints and shades of who Virgil had been back in school. What was magnetic and languid now had been snotty and sneering then. The smile left Figaro's face upon seeing this, so he shook himself sober with a sharp breath through his nose. He clapped his hands once and wandered away to the couch.

"It's fine!" he declared. And it had to be. For why, why, why would he let himself feel a moment's discomfort when what he had now was so ... purposeful. Figaro laid down, and pulled a magazine out from under his shoulder and let it slide to the floor.

"I want to take her somewhere. Somewhere amazing, where she's never been. There's this flying place in Slandermouth, I think," he said, his own languid tongue a little less bright than before.

He wished he could shrug things off as easily as Figaro seemed to, albeit with a head full of gillyweed. Virgil seemed to glance over the big wounds of life-and-death but it was always the little things tripping him up. In the corner of his eye or the back of his mind...

His gaze tracked Fig to the living room and he got up to follow, still smoking distractedly. "Ascendio? Edgar likes[1] it," he remarked lightly, wandering to the Wireless set to fiddle with the knobs as the sound of static jumped to life. "You think she's not been? You ought to take her somewhere deliciously transgressive."

Virgil suspected Wilhemena had been to Ascendio Italiano before - it was an easy place to think of, to impress. And Figaro can't be the first bloke who tried to impress her.

"You know," he tuned into one of those stations playing jazzed up covers of old wizarding rock, "where they make you sit on beer crates by a canal and eat half-burnt pizza."

1.	Edgar dines at Ascendio monthly

Figaro had closed his eyes, content to be horizontal on Virgil and Nick and Ariadne's sofa. He was not sleepy, it was just a nice place to be. He received Virgil's feedback regarding Ascendio (yes, that was the place) in the way he figured it was intended to be received, helpful. He smiled admiringly at the thought of Wilhemena Gunn taking in anything to do with a crate.

"Oh, she'd haaaaate that," he purred. Then he added, "it'd be hilarious. What's it called?"

He'd missed that the suggestion was a hypothetical, an example of, a type of place, a concept of transgressive, unexpected dining.