hell is empty and all the devils are here [amber moods]

[errin]

The third floor is level with the street lights, Flood said, and so the third floor is what Amber's claimed, almost all of it. All for her. Hers. She'd been prepared to fight for it, but he'd let her have it, just like that.

What the hell.

Only a few weeks ago she was living in a studio on Federal with no furniture, no place to store her belongings, no bed, nothing. It was a sign of how far she'd fallen in life, of just how much had been taken away from her. All she had left were a few changes of clothes, a handful of books, four canvases painted over, and over, and over. She hated it, hated everything, hated seeing happy people living their happy lives exactly where they were supposed to be while she struggled, barely able to keep a roof over her head, barely able to keep herself fed.

And now...Now she has almost an entire fucking floor all to herself.

The first few days she drifts along in a perpetual daze. Lifted so quickly from the gutter to the lavish life of a kept woman, Amber finds herself in a state of constant head rush as she wanders through each room, waiting waiting. Any second it'll wear off. The world will butt in and drop the floor out from under her and she'll have to go back to that place of broken dreams with its smashed, splintered wood frames and torn stretched canvas. Except, it doesn't.

The first of the month came and someone else paid the bills, making sure the electricity stays on, the heat is readied for the coming winter (for her, obviously, he doesn't need it), the phone works (an actual fucking land line, some fancy old relic of the past; like it's master, this house seems displaced in time), et cetera, so forth, so on. There isn't a single day that she rolls out of bed to trudge off to work, and yet, as promised, the second Friday of her new life a check arrives for her. A few hundred dollars isn't much, but it's more money than she's seen on one slip of paper in her whole life. She doesn't question it, just puts it in the bank and tries to figure out:

What the hell. What does she do now.

The answer comes quickly enough. She goes to Meininger and she fucking stocks up. Paints, brushes, drop cloths, everything she can fit into a book bag she does. And when she gets it to the house she goes out and she does it again, steadily as the days go by, until there's a pile of things that need to be organized in some corner of one of her rooms. When she gets a car she'll get an easel there, and stacks of blank canvases to do whatever she wants with. For now, it stays a small sitting room.

She does her own things during the day. She doesn't let him see her sleep, doesn't want to let him see her that vulnerable. Even she couldn't say why, but, she stays awake until the sun rises and wakes sometime in the afternoon. A few hours to herself, the rest of the night with him or without as she continues to grow accustomed to living in this big house with a dead man and he gets used to having a living, breathing woman on the premises.

She doesn't let him see her paint, doesn't want to risk him questioning it (even though she knows deep down he won't except from curiosity). So one night he rises to the smell of fresh paint. Her bedroom has been redone. The furniture is all still his, but, the walls are now the color of the sun through a summer haze over the city, the gentle sepia of faded, half-lost memories. Two nights later there are birds, twice the size of her hands, all over three of the walls. Some sweeping up, some swooping down, some almost touching beak to beak. Some black and red like fire, some in shades of blue like ice.

The next night a mural is forming. Slowly slowly, day by day, the world comes into being on the fourth wall of Amber's bedroom, the long one with the window facing out onto the street. A map, brown and old looking, some creation half out of an old atlas, half out of her head. Some places stand out, have little images of important attractions (La Tour Eiffel, the Pyramids of Giza, Saint Basil's Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, and so on) in bright colors. Places she wants to see, places she wants to go, places that have always only ever been a fantasy.

He sees it sometime after it's finished, some night when he comes to find her. Standing in the doorway, Amber seated on her bed reading the Iliad for the thousandth time, Flood sees it. Maybe he says something, maybe he doesn't. It doesn't matter.

The next night it's gone, hidden beneath a fresh layer of yellow paint. She's still afraid to dream, still scared of wanting what she wants, still terrified of the darkness which keeps giving her everything.

That house is not a home, not yet. But, they have time.

They have forever.

Maybe.

=====
The birds. Adam S. Doyle has some pretty rad stuff.


niko @ 10:07AM
[paint]
Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) VALID

niko @ 10:07AM
[6 suxx]

niko @ 10:07AM
[paint]
Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 6, 10) ( success x 3 ) VALID

niko @ 10:07AM
[4 suxx]

niko @ 10:07AM
[paint]
Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 5, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 3 ) VALID

niko @ 10:08AM
[and the last one, 'cause she's been there long enough to do lots of junk]
Roll: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 5 ) VALID

[errin]

I chase your love around a figure 8,
I need you more than I can take,
You promise forever and a day,
And then you take it all away,
And then you take it all away
Ellie Goulding - Figure 8

---

Late night 2/13 - Early morning 2/14

For the second time tonight Amber is wrapped in darkness and shadow. It's not the first time. That time was the worst. There are many things he could have done to show her how little she mattered to him, how completely insignificant he found her to be (a bug, a toy, just another piece of a chess set, a piece that's lost its value and must be cleared from the board), but nothing would have driven it home so thoroughly as when he enveloped her in her deepest fear, using it against her to get her out of his sight for she doesn't even know how long. She's never been so completely terrified in all of her life. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of her lungs, like her heart was going to burst out of her chest and her bones were going to rattle free of their joints.

It feels a bit like that still. She thought he was going to break her neck. He reached for it, could have snapped it like so much kindling if she'd let him get hold of her, but she didn't. She used the strength he gave her and she got herself free but to go where? There had been that other one. The stranger woman on his arm who'd come gliding onto the roof with her wings of shadow like some dark and twisted angel. She'd blocked Amber's escape and tried to catch her the way he had. Amber can still see the way the shadows danced for her, the way the surged at her to try and catch her. She would shiver if she weren't already shaking.

She's glad for the trembling in a way. It means she's still alive, though she has no idea for how much longer. She'd managed to get to the roof access stairs, had frozen for a handful of seconds or minutes when the door slammed shut behind her and she found herself wrapped in darkness all over again. Breath catching in her chest, coming out in short, sharp gasps. Jerkily, she'd made her way the rest of the way down into what was apparently a storage room.

There's light in here, just enough for her eyes to become adjusted and make sense of the shadows. No, that isn't a lurking monster waiting to lunge for her, it's just a stack of boxes. No, that isn't a giant spider, long spindly legs a jumble in all direction, but a table stacked with chairs. That's where Amber goes, soon as she sees it's there. She dives for it, knocking her knees on the floor, bumping her head against the table's top, scraping her arm on a chair leg hard enough to draw blood from her upper arm.

And there she waits. Most fears, the answer when they rise up and overtake the senses is to run. That's because most fears? They're things that can be fled from. Scared of heights? Get away from the ledge. Scared of flying? Take the train. But Amber's fear is not something that can be escaped so easily. It's everywhere inside this room. It's everywhere downstairs in the lower floors of a newly purchased and not-yet-open independent grocers. And there are two creatures who it answers to up on the roof. Any second now they're going to come down to find Amber. They're going to find her and they're going to kill her because she's nothing. She can't run away from the darkness, and she can't run away from those who control it. All she can do is curl up with her knees to her chest and try so hard to not make a sound.

And no one will realize she's gone, or miss her, or remember her. She will disappear from this world as though she'd never existed in the first place, and she cries for that the same as she cries from fear. The tears leak free of her eyes despite being squeezed so tightly shut. They drip down her arm and soak into the fabric of her jeans.

=====

Eventually she must have fallen asleep. One minute the dark is pressing in all around her, the next light is streaming in through the high windows. Amber's eyes, the lashes glued together with dried salt water, the skin around them red and puffy, peel slowly and painfully open. She's still curled up beneath the table. Slowly, she stretches out her legs, her arms, joints creaking and popping, muscles achingly resistant.

There's movement downstairs. Voices. Amber makes her way down slowly to find workers moving about the main level getting stands and displays put together and set in place.

"Amber?"

She looks around for the owner of the voice and finds the middle-aged man who bought this place, and who hired her to work through the night making the outside appealing. It was his idea for the sunny daylight theme. This neighborhood is so dark and terrible, it needs a little light.

She can tell by the look on his face that she's a fucking mess. But he also looks...relieved? She turns her face away, unable yet to handle that kind of goodness.

"One of the guys found your stuff still outside. Are...you okay?" he asks, sounding hesitant. She's already gotten into one screaming match with one of the workers. That's part of the reason she's been asked to work after hours. Her answer for him is a grunt, which serves as a noncommittal wall between them for the time being. She needs to go...wherever. Somewhere. For a moment she considers calling up Laurel, but no. She doesn't know the woman well enough to ask to crash on her couch.

She finds her stuff and she gets her money for last night's work and she gets the fuck away from this place. Uses some of that money to put herself up in one of the cheapest motels she can find. It's by-the-hour but that's alright, she doesn't even need one. She doesn't let herself feel that terrible and pathetic for that long. They were supposed to have eternity but instead they only had a handful of months, so what. He lied to her, so what. She meant nothing to him at all, so--

Amber ends up staying in the motel for longer than an hour. But once she's outside and walking away she doesn't look back.

=====
Amber @ 11:34PM
Private Message to Sam-Lurk
[I need a witness! Courage!]
Roll: 4 d10 TN10 (1, 3, 4, 6) ( fail ) VALID

Sam-Lurk @ 11:35PM
Private Message to Amber
[[Witnessed!]]

[errin]

Amber was not entirely truthful when she told Flood last time she saw him that leaving him dropped her right back where he'd found her. She's been crashing on couches which isn't the most luxurious lifestyle, but at least it's not an unfurnished shithole of a studio off Federal. And the people she stays with, acquaintances really, don't usually ask for repayment in cash, so she manages to keep herself fairly well fed even between jobs. Sometimes she even has enough leftover to splurge on a good meal at a nice steakhouse (someone please tell Amber that Rock Bottom Brewery is not a "nice steakhouse"), a case of better than piss beer, and paint supplies.

It may seem strange that a woman who paints for a living - murals on the sides of businesses lately, which has been surprisingly lucrative - would choose to do it in her spare time. But for Amber it's not a job, really. Someone else dictates what they'd like on the side of their building and they pay her money to bring that vision to life, but even that is a form of release. It's better in the privacy of...someone's home. Artistically she goes wherever the mood takes her, doing whatever she wants, or pouring out whatever happens to come flowing out of the paintbrush. It's all release, and she is never more relaxed than when she's in front of a canvas.

Not having her own space (oh how she pines for certain rooms on a certain floor of a certain house sometimes!) means she has to get creative with where she works. Today she's set up in someone's bathroom, drop clothes laid out all over the counter top with a small 12"x12" canvas propped up against the mirror. There are a few tubes of oil paints arranged to her left, brushes to the right. The sink is full of clear clean water, with a container of industrial strength cleanser for when it's time to drain it out. The setup is awkward, but Amber doesn't mind. She's willing to be flexible if it means she gets to lose herself for an hour or two.

She pulls back her hair - only a little longer now than when she left, with about a pinky's width of brown between her scalp and her red streaks - puts on a pair of cheap headphones, and turns on her mp3 player. As the electronic vocals of Rotersand are pumped into her brain, rattling her skull, Amber closes her eyes and moves to the beat for a few seconds before she swipes up a tube of paint and starts working.

There was a time when doing this meant that her mind was clear as a fucking bell. That was before she met him. Such disdain she feels for him, such anger, such desire. Such fear. And yet, like a tuft of static-charged fuzz that floats and wanders and drifts and curls in the air only to zip onto the nearest bit of fabric, her mind always goes arrowing straight back to him, ever since that night in the clock tower. It does so now, just as it does when she's working. But it's different in a little closed off bathroom than it is on a street in broad daylight in front of everyone. In here, as she flicks lines and swirls of color onto the little canvas, her mind is relaxed. It is free from the fear she felt the last few times she saw him, the fear that stayed with her since and kept her hidden away indoors after the sun went down. And that's how mind starts to wander back to those last times.

And how strange it all seems now. Telling her he'd listen and try to understand the night she left. The night on the roof. She frowns as it tries to encroach on her attempt at clarity, and for a few minutes she lingers on that night. On her fear and her heartache. He plucked her up, wrapping her in a blanket of abject terror that overwhelmed her senses and left her unconscious for she still doesn't know how long. Then he was there, trying to force his bite on her, telling her that she wasn't a woman to him and he wasn't a man. She realizes suddenly that her whole body is tense and she doesn't hear the music for the pounding of her blood in her ears. Stepping back, she breathes. She shakes herself out like she's in a ring against an unexpectedly formidable opponent. Or like she'd just been gripping her brush in a vice grip; it takes a few moments for her fingers to uncurl, moments she spends sitting on the closed toilet seat examining the wallpaper.

When she's relaxed again she examines her work, and she frowns at it. Tilts her head this way, that way, this way again, examining it more critically than she had the floral patterns on the walls. She starts on it again and this time she focuses on keeping calm. She breathes slowly, relaxes...just paint, Amber.

And paint she does, thinking about his face that last night. His words to her. What he offered her. It wasn't to get her out of his sight, was it? He acted like he didn't want her but that was just--

She stops suddenly, looks at what she's thoughtlessly put on the canvas. His face the way it looked the last time she saw him, before he compared her to mold and she lost her fucking mind. It is...no, that just won't fucking do. Taking up her Exacto knife she slashes the thing to ribbons and dumps some of those ribbons into the waste basket. She takes more out to the garage and dumps them in the large bins, puts some more in the kitchen trash can, and still more in another room's waste basket. This way no one will ever find the pieces and put them back together. Because even now after the last month and a half she's still bound to him, still loyal and above all still protective.

The only people who will ever see Flood looking caring or soft are the people he chooses to show that face to himself.

=====
[[there were timestamps until i accidentally refreshed the window i was typing out this post in originally]]
niko
First: Zen out (paint)
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )

niko
Second: Zen out (mull over things, -1 diff for zen-like mindset)
Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 3, 3, 9) ( success x 1 )

niko
Of fucking course

niko
Extending!
Dice: 5 d10 TN5 (1, 3, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )

jamie
LOL