Work Text:
Where: A beach on the French Riviera
Enter: Various champagne socialists
What a beautiful day to be rich and lounging about on a French beach with other rich, self satisfied people. The sun, alone in a sky free of the envious clouds who would dull its glory, grins down upon a waspish woman in her forties and her equally waspish, equally forty-something friend. The pair are attempting to tan by wearing designer, striped swimsuits while lying on sunbeds made of Egyptian cotton.
A manicured, but severely nailed (red and clawed actually) hand full of tendons and bones, and in danger of growing bunions, drapes itself across its friend's plump arm, and then, when that fails to gain its companion's attention, it slaps her, hard.
"Darling! Attend to me! Drop Witch Weekly. It's full of rubbish anyway. Look! What a nasty man. Hmpf. What a nasty man. Darling, do you see that nasty man? What a nasty man that is."
Rita Skeeter, intrepid journalist extraordinaire, yanks down the brim of her black, designer sunglasses ostentatiously and peers over them at a man lying on the next sunbed over. He's older than her, agreeably so, but not a day over fifty. Much like her, he is wearing designer sunglasses, and much like her he has a designer tanning foil flared across his grey furred chest under his square and solid chin, reflecting designer sunlight onto a satyrish face of Irish disposition. Things are beginning to collapse, skin is beginning to lose its tensile strength, most notably at the corners of his eyes, but somehow the first portents of approaching doom and death and the end of the line is incredibly attractive to a woman who makes her living on despair and degradation. Plus, the guy is very nicely built, chunky and hard and virile, like a prize fighter, with just the slightest layer of fat over his muscle so the hugs will still be excellent. And obviously he's rich. The reason why she has designated him to be a 'nasty man' is because:
- He IS a nasty man. She, of all people, can tell that.
- He is ignoring her extremely obvious glares, which she terms 'stealing glances'.
Rita's friend, after finishing a very good article about magical nail polish and its ability to attract Wizard Brad Pitt, lowers her magazine and looks over at the man. She stares for a while, then returns to her magazine, beginning an article about calories.
"So talk to him."
"Excuse me? Darling, I do not talk to men. They talk to me."
"You talk to men when they have scoops. I guarantee that gangster hunk has scoops. Many scoops. Scoops of bloody ice cream by the carton load."
"Hmm…" Rita takes another look at the man, trying to see beyond his black shades. She wonders if she ought to transform into her beetle form and escounce herself in his thick and wavy hair, silver now, but once blond.
While she's staring at him, the man's left hand leaves his tanning foil, dipping below his sunbed and returning with a bottle of designer sunscreen lotion. "If you're going to stare, at least make yourself useful, woman," growls Colin Moriarty, in the most addictively exaggerated Irish accent known to man.
"Oooh! What a nasty man!" Rita flips up the lid of the bottle with a sharp, sharp nail, a much charmed smile on her hard face.