Zac didn't see what was so appealing about pubs in general, really. He'd told Perrin as much on more than one occasion, every time the other scientist decided to take him out for a drink after work. Not that Perrin had ever listened to him; he'd laugh it off, or say that Zac only thought that way because he drank alone too much. Wasn't healthy to drink alone, he'd say. The company would do him good.
Easy for him to say. When Perrin was drunk he was cheerful and jovial, cracking jokes and flirting with any pretty young ladies who happened to be about - sometimes with the wrong young ladies, but he was usually able to talk his way out of those situations with a bit of well-placed flattery. Zac just seemed to sink deeper into his usual melancholy, his mind shrinking and closing in on itself so much that he barely noticed the outside world. He had enough to worry about without looking at the rest of humanity; his entire mind was a pit of endless worries, and if he didn't give them due attention they would spill over into his sleep, or his work - not into his life, since if he was to be brutally honest he would have to say that he didn't have much of a life, outside of those other two things. When he drank alone, he was doing a great favour for all of the people that he wasn't drinking with.
Not that he'd ever convince Perrin of that. It made him wonder why the man tried so hard to be friendly with him, even when they disagreed on everything. He supposed that even when he was sober Perrin was the sort who had to be everyone's friend, and so he continued to pop into Zac's office when their shift at the lab was over and drag him out to the pub just about every night. Zac never argued too strenuously; it didn't seem worth it. He'd just go along with it, have a couple of drinks, wake up the next morning and show up at the lab to find Perrin conspicuously absent.
Even now, when they'd just started working on this new Project Flashlight, Perrin was already talking about going on a trip to London after it was done. He was going to take Zac with him, he said, two bachelors out for a good time in London, visiting some of the best pubs in the world. And Zac would nod and half-smile, only half-listening to Perrin, knowing that he'd probably end up utterly hung over in a rented room and in need of a vacation after that vacation, and Perrin likely wouldn't even notice.
Besides, they were starting to receive data transmissions for the new project, and Zac was having trouble making them fit together. He had enough on his mind.
---
A/N: Character study I wrote for obscurefandom at livejournal. You can see in the film that Zac is not a happy drunk. As for Perrin... well, he gets maybe ten seconds of screen time, and all of it as a horribly burned corpse, so I figure I can do what I like with him. grins
This film is licensed by Anchor Bay Entertainment, not by me. I make no profit off of this, and neither does anyone else.