Can You Hear Me? (Peter)

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

Ally whistled as she cleaned the soda fountains. She'd only reopened shop a few days before; her lengthy absence from Diagon Alley had made it impossible to run the place. However, this was a new day! She hoped that her old customers weren't mad at her for being away for so long. It would suck to lose business because she'd been called away to help fight a war. There had been one guy in particular that was cute. He used to come in all the time, especially during the TriWizard Tournament a few years before. What was his name...?

She shrugged and decided to leave it be. He probably wouldn't come back, anyway, and that was fine. She had more to worry about than some cute former customer.

[Peter Vance Rodgers]

Peter walked into a shop that he'd been in before a few years back. It'd been a while since he'd been in London. Three years to be exact. He was a sixth year and had been hoping to get into the tournament but then the English Minister, that jerk, had said only seventh years could. That had upset him so much that he'd went to Diagon Alley that night only to get lost. He'd wandered into a little shop that had a few people in it. It looked like there weren't many there now. Maybe they'd just opened.

"Um, this is the Pop Shop right? I found my way correctly this time?" he asked the girl that was there.

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

Ally looked up from what she was doing when she heard a voice. Oh! It was that kid from three years ago! What was he doing back in London? She thought he'd said that he went to Durmstrang. Ah, whatever. Business was business, and he'd been good business (adding cupcake sodas had turned out to be a very good idea).

"Ah! You, again! Si, si, this is the Pop Shop; what're you doing here, though? I thought you said you were headed back to America," she remembered. "I'm Ally, by the way, the owner."

[Peter Vance Rodgers]

"Well, I did go back... I actually am on tour right now, we're taking a break because one of our guitarists broke their strumming finger." he held out a finger and looked at it. His poor band mate... oh well. "I've been looking for my sister, I found her and almost got shot by her fiance."

He didn't know how else to put that. He had gone back, gotten a job and went on tour. End of the story. Now, how was he going to explain the reason he was here? Hmm.

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

"Your sister's fiancee? His name wouldn't be Damien, would it?" she asked, blinking.

It would be funny if he were the same man that Damien had complained to Ally over the phone about the day before. He'd been rather irritated by the visit he'd been paid, actually. Ally had been hard-pressed to not laugh. She wondered why Peter (that was his name!) had chosen to return to her store, though. There were many others in Diagon Alley, and the Italian District.

[Peter Vance Rodgers]

"Yeah, that'd be him. Take it he doesn't like me too much." he chuckled. "I'm a bit too much a morning person."

He was sure Damien would have complained about him to someone. The early rising rockstar was not someone a lot of people wanted to see a lot of the time.

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

"He's my cousin," she laughed. "And I don't think he necessarily dislikes you; he's not a morning person at all. Damien's a member of the Italian military; he'd just gotten back from the warfront that day. It had him in a bad mood."

She probably would've been in a bad mood, too. Getting back from a battlefield usually had all of them on-edge and irritable...paranoid, too. She was surprised that Damie hadn't shot him when he caught him outside his apartment. He'd been in a nasty mood when Ally had picked him up at the train station that morning.

[Peter Vance Rodgers]

"I should've known. My adoptive dad's in the American Army. He's always getting up early and I get up with him and eat breakfast. Amy usually sleeps, she's my mom. Maybe I should've waited till ten... probably would've been a smart move.." he thought aloud.

He hung his head, sometimes he just wasn't very smart... He'd have to work some comon sense into his life.

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

"Ten would've been too early the day he got back," she chuckled. "He was in a right-nasty mood yesterday; no time would've worked. It's not your fault, though! Damie's just like that! The next time you see him, he'll be a perfectly pleasant person."

He was usually so upbeat and nice...she was a little weirded out when he scowled and threw things out the car window at passers-by. That was more Alistair's thing than his...

[Peter Vance Rodgers]

"I was going to go the night before, but my manager called an emergency meeting. Go figure.. I was lucky to get to go yesterday." he scratched his head, "I hope I'll see both of them again, I'm starting to think they're going to get restraining orders against me.."

He looked at the soda machine. He wanted to pick a new flavor, one he hadn't had yet. But he'd had them all. Guess it was back to the favorite, but he'd wait till she was done. Didn't want to rush her.

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

She laughed when he glanced at the soda machine and cranked it up. She was pretty sure that she remembered his favorite: root bear ice cream soda. He was one of the few that ever ordered it; most of the people prefered the more outlandish flavors.

"I'm sure Damie will feel bad and apologize. He's not usually such a bear," she reassured him. "Brooke, on the other hand....well, good luck."

[Peter Vance Rodgers]

"Its not like I've gotten that treatment before. Steven was always at work, sometimes it'd be for weeks at a time. He'd come back and just wouldn't say anything. Left me and Amy at odds. We'd been so excited he was back that we never thought he'd be sleep deprived." he shrugged.

The machine was up, he was going to get the root beer ice cream drink he'd been dying to have again. He'd brought a few of his friends there once, one had tried hitting on the owner, the others had been too busy trying to hook up with girls from Beaubaxtons to notice anything else. Maybe she was the reason he kept coming back.

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

"I think it's just a side-effect of being a military family," she admitted with a laugh. "When I was a little kid, my dad would come home from the warfront after months of being away, and my siblings and I would be so happy that we'd forget that he hadn't gotten a good night's sleep the entire time he was working."

She began to hum one of the lullabies that her mother had sung to her when she was very, very small as she went about making the ice cream soda. She remembered his friends from back when the old owner had run the store and she was the only other employee of the place. His friends had been busy hitting on the Veela from Beaubaxtons and the previous owner (who had moved on to open another store in a different part of England), leaving Ally and Peter to talk to each other. It had been a fun conversation, she remembered.

[Peter Vance Rodgers]

"Yeah, I think I might just want to learn how to act against impulse. I'm one that if I get the urge to do something, I'm gonna do it. Bad thing to do when everyone's going bungee jumping." he chuckled nervously.

He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and dug around for some money. How much was the american dollar to the british pound again?

[Aleina Klair Cavaliere]

"Hey, it's on the house this time," she stated upon seeing him pulling out his wallet. It never hurt to help out a regular. "You pay for most everything in this part of the Alley in Lire, anyway, and I'm sure you don't have any. And I can't really say anything about you being impulsive; I'm pretty bad with that myself."

She smiled up at him sheepishly as she scooped vanilla icecream into the glass and measured out the malt powder. Root beer was added and then the mixture went through a quick spin in the milkshake machine. She then added the rest of the homemade root beet that she'd measured out, stuck in the straw and slid it to him across the counter.