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+--- Thread: Brink (Gray Mood Post) (/showthread.php?tid=394)
Brink (Gray Mood Post) - Ordinance - 10-05-2013
"We tell ourselves, time and time again, that this will get easier. This will get better. There is no shortness to our time here, so long as we are careful, that we cannot eventually get over something.
But then, I think to myself, maybe being alive was what made things fluid. Made things effortless or at least, an effort only for a time. Grief, Suspicion, Decadence, Pain. It all seems to pause with us, when we pause in place. When our hearts stop beating, we seem to carry it all without pouring it out. The pump that flushes the system no longer works. So where does that leave the Harm to flow?
Where can we go to grieve it out?"
~Truman, Malkavian~
He felt the heat taste and lick the air around the barrel's rim. He listened to them chirp and chime and laugh with one another in this way, that was too subtle to for him to catch a hold of. He tried every so often, grasping at the embers that flicked off the barrel's edge, with slow and methodical motions that had no hope of success.
None of them asked questions. They had long since gotten used to it. Gray was not someone who talked often. Explained less. Clarified never. The voice spoke when it needed to and when he needed them to listen. This was not a time for them to listen and so they talked. Boasted. Chirped and chimed.
And he listened. He remembered.
She used to dance. On the rooftops when she visited, once a month. He would be summoned by some quiet means; a note on an apartment door, or a scared little 'banger that came and found him and told him 'She's here'.
He would go, to where she had summoned him to, different every time like she was testing to see if he were listening. Waiting for her. Which he was. Always.
He would climb up onto rooftops, which was the only detail that remained the same about their little get togethers and she would be swaying to some rhythm he couldn't hear. Her hands and feet would point and tip with the delicacy of regret and poor decision making. Her hair would curtain in just the right way to slip a glance over one shoulder or let that shoulder be a glimpse of flesh.
She always came with a blush in her cheeks, a fact he never realized was a show just for him, until he found out it was something you had to consciously do.
She wold smile and say with all the prim and care of a goading older sister.
"How is my quiet little maul doing this evening?"
And he would nod. Never smile, but nod in that grimly sort of way that said
"We're fine. Block's secure. Nothing in and nothing out."
And she would state with an inhaling purr and another swish of motion.
"Excellent."
Sparks banked off the rim again. His hand scattered them further, tiny little burns no longer than a wing flap, plucking at the inside of his palm. He'd grasped enough of them that his fingers were getting chalky, his palms, full of soot. He watched the fire and heard something in him cringe. He hadn't thought that word could have a sound attached. Like a moan and a whisper tangled up in one another's echoes.
"There's going to come a time when you're standing here. Watching the world below the roof. You'll regard what is left of who you were with something like distance. Something like pain, dulled to an ache."
She looked out over the city and told a re-iteration of the same lesson. Over and over and over again. Like she could layer it between each new month that went by in his new existence.
"It isn't pain though. It's alteration. A changing of the insides, releasing the old memories. Turning them from fantasies and dreams into something far less bright. Shedding the from of who you were for the function of who you are."
She liked to breathe. In and out. A deliberate thing. A forgotten thing she liked to remember every so often because remembering was not a chore but a past time.
"Soon enough you'll be on this roof, staring out at the quiet and wondering what you're supposed to do with yourself for the years ahead of you..."
She would turn to him then. Ask him the same question in a dozen different manners and ways.
"Do you know what you're going to say?"
He always shook his head. He secretly liked hearing her correct him. Or maybe just seeing the self-satisfied smile on her face when she spoke.
"You're going to say 'Tell me what I'm supposed to do' and then...my Dear little Maul...then I'm going to tell you about all the Fun we can have. How truly colourful your gray little world can be."
"Boss."
His eyes flicked up. His head remained still and his eyes flicked up. He stared across the fire at the man talking. Merv. Nineteen. Three hits under his belt. Forty in his hand. Dressed to conceal. Driver. The kid was staring at him with something like a frown that might have been mistaken for concern anywhere but the corner.
Merv was just being curious and a little ignorant.
"Don't that hurt?" Merv up nodded at the hand near the fire, fingertips touching the rim of the metal, as if poised to lash out at the sparks that might leap out at any moment. He glanced down at his own and and pulled it away, brushing the length down his wool coat with a casualness that belied the scream his cringe was making on the instead.
"A little." He offered, then flicked out a half smile. Merv smirked and raised his forty, draining off a small chunk. The rest of them chuckled and the conversations that had paused, resumed again. The blunts continued their rotation, a haze drowning the air.
He flexed his fingers, the pain a sharp thing under his radar. He felt the blistered skin, strangely muted in it's sensation, brushing across the wool of the jacket. He stared at the fire, greedy and sadistic and felt the cringe begin to settle with his maintaining proximity.
"What's up Boss?"
Someone called out when he turned to go. He felt their eyes on his back when his hands went into his pockets. He didn't bother stopping to correct that bit of ignorance. Merv was feeling brave tonight.
"Going for a walk. Hold it down while I'm gone."
There was a rooftop nearby. Fire Escape that went all the way up. Easy walk. Good place, maybe, for a dancer. Maybe.