velocette | (no subject)

[As usual, he's smoking. And it's not unusual that he's staring at the smoke like he's been hypnotized, but he's smiling more than he has in the years he's been on board.]

You know, I've been so fixated on these things for so many years. On cigarettes, I mean, Kools if I could get them--and it's funny that these are the greyest thing in my life. The single thing that lacks color now. I sort of expected the smoke to be blue...or pink.

I actually stopped seeing color when I was four. I think that was when I stopped believing in God, Santa, and the American Dream. I assumed for a long time that everyone went colorblind (literally, figuratively, whichever) when they got old enough to be cynical. But I came here and I met a real muse, and I've realized that I was mostly wrong.

I wonder what the rest of you lost when you stopped being kids? I don't expect many of you will answer, since most of you are understandably very sensitive about your pasts, but it's a real question. What did you lose when you grew up?

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From:

rhapsody_in

[Bleu leans against him, taking the cigarette between her fingers.]

She took the colors with her. What was she like?

It was an adventure, at least the start of one. [One that eventually brought him here, as he is. She can't be too sorry about that.]

You've guessed, I think. But I do.

From:

velocette

My old man tells me she was just like me. I know I have the same sense of humor she does, but past that, I don't remember much about her. ...What is your earliest memory?

[He smiles, delighted by her all over again. Being abandoned as a child was an adventure for him. The same experience permanently scarred his little brother and drove his father to alcoholism, so he tends not to bring it up.]

I'm glad. I do, too.

From:

rhapsody_in

Have you ever tried to find her? She must have been something. [Snuggling a little closer, she passes the cigarette back.] The first time I had a body. I'd never felt anything before and everything was sensation.

[But that was a long time ago, and the rest of the memory wasn't worth thinking about. This moment's what she wants to focus on.]

From:

velocette

I ran into her by chance, about a month before I came here. I thought about going back to visit her, but... [A shrug; he mimes a gun going off] She was living in a tree hut with an artist. Very Bohemian. Very different than the woman I knew.

[He takes a drag, blows the smoke toward the ceiling]

Do you try to let yourself get lost in sensation, to relive what it was like? I don't want to get used to all the color. I think if I stopped seeing it as vividly as I do now, it would be about half as bad as losing them all over.

From:

rhapsody_in

Very Bohemian. [A rather different usage than in her experience, but she likes it nonetheless.] What do you remember?

[She rests her head against his shoulder, arms around his waist.] Sometimes. [From anyone else that would be innuendo, but she knows from Piper it's a real question.] It's always different each time I take a new body.

[She would rather not get into the specifics of body-switching.]

You won't. I promise. [She noses against his neck.] I'll put on the rainbow dress for you.

From:

velocette

When I was a little kid she was always scared. She'd check the drains, the locks, the windows a hundred times. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and she'd be sitting in the living room on the floor, all alone. When I saw her in California she was restless, but like a bird, you know? Always moving but it was because she had somewhere to go finally. She kept saying I could feel the same way if I stayed but...oceans just aren't my thing.

[He smiles and returns to the moment.]

I want to see it on you. See if it brings out your eyes.

From:

rhapsody_in

What was she afraid of? If you know, or if she did. [It might make more sense if she didn't. Bleu brushes her fingers over his arm, reaches to link her hand with his.] A bird's a good thing to become. Maybe you'll be one too.

Maybe it will. [She smiles back.] I want to see it bring yours out.

From:

velocette

It's hard to say for sure...I think she was afraid of drowning in all of our expectations. A child's expectations are heaviest and she had two boys in a hopeless home. It would have crushed anyone. [It's a fact of life, for him, and so he smiles genuinely at the thought of flying away.]

Are you happier here than at home?

From:

rhapsody_in

What made it so hopeless? You were in it. [Although she can see how his rich imagination might've daunted her.]

Yes. [Her answer is immediate.] I don't have as much power or magic here, but I'm not serving anyone. At home, I can't show anyone what I am. Not more than once every few eons, anyway.

From:

velocette

[He smiles, a tiny wince in it. He wishes that his mother had been able to see it that way, sometimes, but she hadn't.] Motherhood is excruciating and terrifying and difficult. Or so I've observed. My mother wanted everything to be softer than it was, I think. And maybe she felt pressured to have kids; there weren't a lot of options for women when I was a kid.

What do people do if they find out what you are?

From:

rhapsody_in

It is. It starts off exhausting and bloody and ends up bloody exhausting, as I've heard it said. [But in this context it's not funny so her exhale of laughter is dry.] Would it have been different, you think, if it had been a different time?

[She worries her bottom lip between her teeth before sighing.] They usually feel betrayed. Sometimes they kill me, sometimes I have to make them forget.

I don't tell people often, only every few millennia. It's too risky otherwise.

From:

velocette

I think so. [He smiles; was smiling, in fact, at the joke.] I hope so. It would mean that women no longer felt cornered by family life, the way you chase a bird that's flown in through a window.

Anyone who would feel betrayed by learning who you really are must have wanted nothing but your face on their fantasy to begin with. And I hope those people end up as disappointed as they should be with their lives.

From:

rhapsody_in

I've read that's what it's like a few decades from my time. Suffrage is still a quarter-century away for me, and women have always done better with options than without. As does any creature, birds especially. None of them deserve cages.

Almost none.

[She looks up at him, those quintessentially blue eyes now deep and wistful.] Everyone wants my face on their fantasy, Piper. All my artists. That's what I give them, and instead of disappointment they feel cursed. And honored.

Edited Date: 2015-02-20 02:00 am (UTC)

From:

velocette

The only reason for violence is a sense of being trapped. Trapped by survival, by circumstance. By cages or fishbowls.

But I can't disagree, who or what do you think deserves a cage?

From:

rhapsody_in

If we're lucky, we get a bigger bowl.

Just those who have proven they don't deserve their freedom. [The Colorman.]

From:

velocette

[He looks at her with a touch of sympathy, reaches out to stroke her cheek.]

What would you do if someone like that turned up here?

From:

rhapsody_in

[She smiles at that tenderness and turns to kiss his palm. She's spent centuries considered sovereign and centuries considered inferior, but centuries don't mean much, in the long run.

Her face hardens at the question and she laughs humorlessly, shaking her head.]

I wouldn't be kind.

From:

velocette

[He isn't used to seeing her like that, all edges and brittleness. He's pretty sure he'd help her do whatever it is she decided to do if it came to it.]

I think you have a great creative capacity for being unkind, if the situation calls for it.

From:

rhapsody_in

[It's a rare sight, like blue ice shattering under force or under circumstance, but a true sight nonetheless. As they all are with her. She'd appreciate his help; she'd accept that so easily and reward that with her own favor.]

You're right. As does everyone... but perhaps more so in my case.

What would you do to someone like that, if you could get away with it?

From:

velocette

Rat torture, I think. I've never hated anyone enough to kill them slowly, but it's always possible.

...What about you?

From:

rhapsody_in

Rat torture? [She's familiar with many torture methods, some including rats, but none with that designation.

She thinks very carefully.] Slow death is best -- while entombed, I think, with no hope of escape.

From:

velocette

You have the person tied to the ground, where the rats can climb all over their body. And then after a few days you take a few rats, put them in a cage with no bottom, put the cage on the prisoner's abdomen, and place hot coals on top to make it so hot the rats will burrow into the human body to escape. That or you let the rats stay there long enough to begin starving; they'll eat the meat beneath them.

[He thinks of graveyards with bells above the tombstones.] Yours sounds horrifying.

From:

rhapsody_in

They used that in the Inquisition. A method to use all the scavengers their bloodshed attracted, I think. [She seems unmoved; uncharacteristic perhaps for someone who's undergone similar brutality.]

Mine does? And not yours?

From:

velocette

Well, mine is. But mine is all theory to me...I can't imagine it actually happening, I can't picture more than the feel of their feet or the heat because I've never been tortured that way.

But I know that you've been through some of it. I can't guess how much [and he doesn't expect her to tell him; some things are better left private] but I think that you can imagine it much better than I can.

From:

rhapsody_in

Good. Some things aren't worth picturing.

[She shrugs; her memories of each individual torture are clear, but run together in one blurry amalgam of pain.] There's not much left for me to imagine.