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?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

From:

velocette

[He's quiet, looking at her in that steady, almost-unblinking way he has when he's really deep in thought.]

I was wrong.

I thought if I ever hurt someone it would probably be due to the Barge, but I think you know people I would visit torture on.

[He can be protective, but it's usually a quiet, maybe instinctual thing that he does. He hardly ever feels enough to be passionate about it, but that's the thing with being with a muse, isn't it? Everything becomes passion.]

You probably know so much of pleasure there's not much for you to imagine, either.

From:

rhapsody_in

[She looks back at him, eyes on his, and a small smile forms on her face at his words. Plenty of men have fought for her before, but only when she was other women. Never when she was Bleu.

It almost makes her wish the Colorman was here.]

I do. And I hope you never meet them.

[She drops her gaze with a laugh.]

That depends whose pleasure you mean.

From:

velocette

[He honestly hopes he never does, too; and that she's done with them, that if they do visit her it will only be in the warped realities that the Barge sometimes throws at them.

He grins slowly, tucks her hair behind her ear]

I'm very curious about yours. My pleasure is still so new, I think, compared to everything that I could know.

From:

rhapsody_in

[She holds the same hope, that when she goes back the Colorman won't regain his power over her. It would be different with Piper.

She turns her head to kiss his fingers, then takes his hand.]

We could learn together.

From:

velocette

[He pulls her a little closer with a hand on her waist]

I want everything you'll teach me.

From:

rhapsody_in

[She smiles and tilts her head up to kiss him again, holding his hand to her face.]

Then what are we doing here?

From:

velocette

[He grins, steps them back a bit]

Name the place.

From:

rhapsody_in

Yours.

From:

velocette

[He puts his arm around her shoulders and leads her as quick and quiet and excited as if they're running through the rain after a long night on the town. He locks his door behind them, which he almost never does (hardly anyone visits anyway).

It's a tiny room really, a mattress on the floor and a little reading nook in the corner. He's begun to fill up the walls with practice paintings he's done with Steve Rogers (and in face one of them is of Steve's uniform). A few of them are impressionist versions of the people on the Barge, or of rivers.

But mostly right now he's watching her.]

From:

rhapsody_in

[She follows, trying not to laugh as they move down the halls, tempted to grab him and kiss him again. But they have time, and she wants to use it.

Bleu steps back as he locks the door, drinking in the sight of the room, his work, the little home he's made, the slices of fantasy he's chosen to add. She smiles, straight from her core.]

If I didn't know any better, I'd say an artist lives here.