. . . content?

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 04:28:19 GMT

Someone understood.

[Private]

--------------------------the pole star---------------------------

There is an estimation that there are hundreds of billions of stars in a galaxy system.

Yet, in the city, with the searing of light from all directions... even in the darkest corners, it's hard to even glimpse them. The sky wasn't black so much as it was dark blue, with the fuschia and white glow of Shinjuku Neon looming like disdain and mistake over the tree tops, glowering with a red-light unhappiness that tinged the sky grey and hid the stars from whoever hoped to see them.

Hope...?

"Motherfucking Tokyo. Can't even see Scorpio tonight..." Head tilted back and chin to the sky, a Korean sprawled across the grass in an open bit of feild at a park that shall, at this moment, remain nameless, because no one had cared enough to give it one.

All Jay wanted was silence, peace of mind, and a night of goddamn fucking stargazing. He got none of it.

Full was watching the sky while he walked, a graceful limp-waltz with his cane, looking for something through the haze and aurora borealis of the city's hissing noise. A single star, a little prick of light in the warp of the muffled night, something to pierce the haze of the city, something to clear the wash of glowering, bruised red from the trees and dulled grass. Just something.

There was a placid, dull stone bench that rose up out of the darkness, just on the edge of a pool of light from a lamp, just far enough into shadow to still make searching the dirty hems of the sky possible. He sat, crossed his legs in their heavy tweed covers, pulled a coppery wool scarf up around his chin and resettled the matching knit hat that his straw-like hair stuck out from underneath.

If there were no points of light, then there were the refrains of music to follow through the leaden, star-robbed sky. He had just begun to unfurl a whisper of sound onto his inner score when, "Motherfucking Tokyo. Can't even see Scorpio tonight..." skittered melliflusouly out of the darkness somewhere to his left and behind him. Startled, Full jerked his posture around on the bench to peer over it into the darkness beyond the pool of the lamp. Someone was lying on the grass there.

"Perhaps," He said softly into the shape of the night, "Perhaps it can see you."

It wasn't like him to speak to a stranger like that, but startlement will color a person in strange shades of motion.

"Hnn?" Kegan asked, before Devi knocked him right back down.

Shutup, please, Internal dialogue asserted. People will pay when they want to see a freakshow, kthx.

Jay, once more, returned to his elbows, looking at the man in that sillhouetted-by-streetlight-darkness that seemed to wash the entire world in that blue tinted hue. A blue that hid all other colors-- white, green, black. Monochromatic, at best. Which meant Jay was wearing a dark blue t-shirt in opposition to the red he'd thrown on before he'd left the house.

"... I didn't think anyone could see me. Can you?"

Full considered that a moment, squinting to make out a more clear shape, but the dark blue and greyish-slate hues resolved poorly in the dimness of the night. "I see a shape in the darkness. However you could be anything, really." He leaned his cheek on the arm that was lying across the back of the bench now. "Should I not be seeing you?" The soft voice was curious and mild, as though seeing an invisible person or ghost or fae creature might not be very out of the ordinary for him.

"Honestly?" Jay quirked his head to the side a little, a slight cant. It was highly probable that he could see the man better than the man could see him, what, in accordance to the location of the streetlamp and several physics equations involving light and its reflections that Jay didn't really care to do. Since, yanno. Physics would destroy his You can't see me stance on life, at the moment. "I wish I could just disappear sometimes. But if you can see a shape, then I guess you can see me, and that means I fail at invisibility."

Bam, another failure, m'boy. You're just awesome, aren't you? Kegan quipped from his position in the back row.

Quit being a dick, Kegan. Rolling her eyes, Devi just went back to watching placidly.

Eat my ass out, Devi, y'bitch. :D

Not in front of the children, you assmunching dicklicking homo fucker. :D

And Cricket just stared.

"What's your name?"

Full tipped his head the other way, unconsciously mimicking the curious cant of the other man's posture. "Full," he said in response to the nomenclature query. A complete introduction did not feel necessary here in the hazy gloom of the night-draped park. "What's yours?" Quietly childlike, Full more completely turned himself around on the bench to regard his semi-invisible companion with more comfort.

"Kegan--KEGAN!!-- Jay." Slyly, bitchily, then calmly. The last said like he had said nothing before it, because, quite simply, he hadn't. Sitting up a little more fully, and making a good attempt at ignoring the peanut gallery and its cold secure comfort of group awesomeness, Jay found that, yes, someone outside of his own head was more interesting than listening to Simon's new list of symptoms while looking at a sky that was blank of everything he was looking for. "Nice to meet you," he offered quite blithely. And, half in English. "Full? Like the glass is half full?"

Full blinked a few times, watching the slate blue-sketched figure sit up. Jay, he presumed, since the former group of syllables had seemed curiously interrupted. Full bobbed his head politely, offering an automatically formal, "Pleased to meet you, as well. And yes, much like a half-full glass." The latter phrase was tinged with rusty orange wryness. "Were you looking for stars as well, or merely practicing invisibility?" It sounded as though it were a perfectly normal hobby from Full's point of view.

And it probably was. Considering Jay's mental state most of the time-- busy beyond belief. Scattered. Unlike most people, Jay actually did have the ability to go guerilla warfare invisible. It's just that he tried not to do that if at all possible.

"Looking for stars," he answered with a shrug. "In Tokyo, it's not a very fruitful venture. I shouldn't have been stupid enough to think I could see through the smog."

Full nodded sagely over his arm. "Truly. I find that the attempt is better made from the roof of a particularly tall building." He paused, putting his chin back down on his arm. He wasn't entirely certain what else to say to the strange man in the gloom, though there were words teetering on the brink of his voice for some reason. He was not a personality that was comfortable with strangers, or even lengthy conversations. Perhaps it was the curtain of shadow that encompassed them both, in spite of the wan puddle of light nearby. Any number of thoughts came and went, regarding Jay's company, but he let them flitter through without catching their beating wings for now.

"They let y'up on those things?" The character in the boy's voice seemed to change. A little different. Pitched a little higher. Accent a bit different. More excitable, maybe. More electric. "They let you go up unattended? I'd love to jump off a roof sometime."

"You're never unattended, Adrian." That cool voice with yellow-toned eyes, smoothed back in response with a bitchy "I swear t'GAWD, you try t'jump offa roof again, and I will kick yer ass all around Tokyo proper!" thrown in from bitchy Devi, for good measure.

Jay responded peacably, not noticing his own commotion. "I'll have to try that sometime. I've never seen the stars from Tokyo, and... I don't know. For some reason, it seems like they'd be very pretty here."

Full tipped his head to the side, wondering at the fluctuations of color and pitch he had just heard in Jay's voice. The verbal discrepencies hardly registered on his hear compared to the vast tonal changes. He felt as though he had just heard light filtering through a kaleidoscope. Uncertain as to the politeness of replying to different colors of a person, he replied to Jay's satin, orchid shade, "The tall hotels are best; the stars are quite beautiful from there, even if they're dim. Somehow, the neon hiss of the city throws them into relief and makes them sharper here." Full puffed out a small sigh, and turned his gaze back up to the neon and smog-choked sky.

"I haven't had a lot of time to check it out," Jay replied quite simply.

"Too much time dealing with bandages and running Lee Soo Man up the fuckin' walls." Adrian winked with his little pointless addition to the conversation. Blinking back up to Full with a slight squint of his eyes to better make out features. "If you know so well the way to see the stars, why're you in the park, where they hide?"

Full turned his head back down, and felt the connection of Jay's gaze (or a different shade of Jay,) on his - however obscured by the charcoal of the evening. He considered the fair question for a moment, then responded truthfully, "Ah, my leg wasn't quite up to the effort of finding a properly unattended roof escape. I had scant hope for the park, but it seems to have netted its own unique findings."

A more childish voice, this time around-- "What happened to your leg?" -- followed by a gentle chiding -- "Y'know what I said, honey. It's rude t'ask things like that." Jay however, finally stood, brushed off the seat of his pants, and strode forward, more into the light and more toward the man called Full.

"There's unique findings everywhere. Sometimes, it's just harder to see them through all the repetition, I think."

Full almost had to smile at the question and its sudden, almost motherly retraction. His reaction registered as a soft quirk of his lips - that partially obscured by the night-dulled scarf around his neck and chin. He didn't answer, since the question had seemed curiously withdrawn. As Jay came forward, Full reseated himself into his usual seated position - one leg over the other's knee, hands on top of that, fingers interlaced like pale ribbons. His slightly elfin face peeked between the hat and its fringe of his slightly wild hair and the curb of his scarf, eyes glittering like a curious bird's as he replied softly, "You are quite right. Truthfully, sometimes our reliance upon pattern recognition hinders our ability to see anything else beyond the patterns."

The vocalist was content to stand, but, apparently, Kegan was not. So Jay soon found himself seated next to this strange man with his hat, and his wild hair, and his limp, and his ability to see what was simply not there. "Kinda like how... in English, when you write something, so long as the first and last letters are the same, the other letters can be in any other order and the word will still be recognizable, hmm?" He just laughed a little, and sighed a little, back scraping against the back of the bench a little. "Everything's always the same. You think it'd be easy to see something that stood out."

Politely, the composer did not press Jay with his gaze, but looked ahead, into the night. "Ah, isn't it? But then, perhaps it is too subjective to ever say for certain."

The Korean, however, wasn't so polite. Or maybe it was the combined curiosity of Iai, Adrian, and Cricket. Who knew? Jay didn't really. He considered his gaze simply curious. Nothing really pressing-- though Iai's eyes were always scary, and Adrian's were always considered hungry.

"Sometimes. We all have our own opinions, I guess. I'd like to see a night sky from a rooftop sometime. If you know good ones, and can't make it alone, I'd help you."

Surprised [peridot wave] and irrationally touched [faded, greying aquamarine], Full turned his head back to Jay, his dark eyes registering their startlement. The look softened after a moment into what seemed to be the composer's usual half-mysterious regard. "That is quite kind; I certainly would not mind the company. I always bring cards, but I find the Queen of Spades especially tiresome of late." It was a very serious statement.

Dark eyes with that yellow glint named Kegan answered back, for once, on his own. The voice was low, smooth, and... perhaps predatory...? Perhaps. A low purr. "And what of the other cards? Do you not tire of their presence as well? I would think that the Jack of Hearts would be particularly annoying." His statement, as well, was exceedingly serious.

Full tipped his head slightly at the new amber and mahogany that filtered through Jay with sharp edges and acute angles. "He can be forgiven; he is often well-meaning, if over-zealous. Of the whole court, Madam Spade is the most tedious and bitter. But then, perhaps your deck is significantly different from my own." I wonder just how much. What other colors bleed through this stained glass?

"The Jack that I know is a whiny sort. Always pining over a love that he was offered but refused and refuses over and over. He complains incessantly. I find him to be the worst of the lot. The Queen of Spades might be a cynical, bitter old nag, but at least we can find humour in her dissertations, and she, inevitably, can laugh on occasions." Kegan shifted, facing more toward the other man, one leg on the bench, his arm across the back and his head tilted against his arm. "The Queen of Diamonds is the Queen that I find the most beautiful though. I'm not really sure why."

His eyebrows had canted upwards before he could halt them. He felt there was a crimson thread being drawn between the amber and orchid shades of Jay somehow. The satin-grained mahogany voice insinuated. The composer felt snake scales against the back of his hand.

"Ah," he said, considering the quandary of the Diamond Queen for a moment, drawing his gaze away from the amber Jay. "Perhaps it is the inevitable parallel with the gemstone. Clarity and brilliance are, perhaps, rare things to find in any person - let alone a queen."

"No one posesses true clarity. And if they do, they die soon after. We cannot survive with light filtering through our heads. Too much air airs us out and leaves us dry." The tone was a little more curt, to be sure, before it dropped completely, leaving Jay's own clear, middle toned trained voice. "I don't play cards too much. It's not really my thing, although I used to be pretty good at Texas Hold'em. A friend of mine used to play with Tarot cards though-- and I was always fond of that one card. The fuck was it? The Moon. I dunno why though. I think it might just've been the card art that fascinated me." The boy smirked, and looked back at Full, shifting slightly again. "I thought the three of swords was always gruesome too. But it was attractive in its own way."

The composer considered the orchid satin's unawareness of the amber mahogany's words. He had never met someone who was so faceted before - much like a prism, or iolite. He was hesitant to ask, hesitant to break what comfort they had found sitting as strangers on a gloomy park bench at midnight with chrome-plated, surgical personal questions. Instead, he simply replied to the orchid voice that issued from the younger man next to him. "Tarot cards are fascinating, are they not? A person could collect them for their art alone, I quite agree. My favorite was always the Hierophant. He is always portrayed as such a strange man."

That higher pitched, blood tinged voice rang out again. "I believe in regeneration. Card thirteen is Death. I always loved it the most. I guess that's why G natural always sounded so pretty to my ears, when murmured at the right frequency." Slow blink, sudden tension in boxer shoulders sighing away for just a moment. "Someone said something about it... that I read. He said :: The personality undergoes a willful 'death', surrendering everything that it believes itself to be. Most difficult is that, this total surrender of life, this initiatory sacrifice must precede the experience of cosmic awareness." Sanguine smiles and sanguine eyes. "... It's sad that no one in here gets that. But, yanno? I think we do well enough without cosmic awareness. We've got enough to deal with on our own."

"It's sad that no one in here gets that." Full nodded his head in understanding as the vermillion voice trickled by his ears. Iolite prism, he determined to himself. "I have always called that card "Transition," though I have never agreed very well with cosmic awareness. Tying oneself to such ideals binds you to a horrible wheel, an uncomfortable mold."

He tipped his chin up and regarded the still smogged, neon-smudged sky above them for a moment before looking down again. "I have always found that living within your own view is enough. To live by someone else's is to slowly go blind."

"It's good to be open." Carmine commented, before amber shades touched down again. "It's also good to be closed."

"It's good to be nothing," silence spoke slowly--

Before the female of the species added-- "Particularly when we want to be everything."

Struck by the strange poetry and disjointed symmetry of the voices and colors that had just paraded in a knot before him, Full could only say, softly and gently. "Ah," Iolite. He found himself not the slightest bit uncomfortable with this prism that was Jay, because all the colors were beautifully saturated and unwavering. In a way, his seeming schism was more stable than what many people had in the solidarity of their single set of colors.

"... so what happened to your leg?" That childish, obsessive innocence and curiosity that was so apparent in the years between five and twelve. A mother's chiding-- "Ye'll hafta f'give him, sir. He just can't help his curiosity."

He smiled gently. He liked children with their sky-blue innocence open to the world and its possibilities. "It's all right, it is not offensive. I lost the good use of it in a battle with a particularly vicious monster, I am afraid."

"... what kind of a monster was it? A sea monster? Or was it... like, something from the forest...?" One knee to chest. Perhaps Cricket was blue.

Yellow again-- "Don't tell him stories that're too scary. He's young. He's still capable of nightmare." That gruesome laughter and a lick of teeth.

"Tell me, please. I'd love to hear. I like to read about monsters and ghosts, but Devi says it's bad for my imagination."

Full smiled again, warmly, the lips curling into visibility over the edge of his scarf. "Nothing is bad for your imagination, as long as your imagination is not very bad. This monster was a sea monster, from the glacial, frost-capped waters to the far north - so far it's almost south. He was all white with slicked, pale green patterns on his spine and fins. He had teeth as long as fingers, and one day I made the mistake of stepping in his pool. I was too curious about the reflection of his mirror eyes. He bit me, and we struggled for a very long time. I only got away because it was close to sunset, and he can't stand the firewater that the sun's sinking makes on his pool and oceans.

"Still, I was in pain, and I was a slave to an alchemist for a very long time, before I could walk on my cane again. I will certainly never forget that bite."

A simple question from innocent eyes. Blue like the water, and white like the sea.

"Were you scared?"

The composer nodded seriously, to the young sky-shaded voice. "Yes, I was. I wasn't sure if he was going to eat me or keep me and make me compose music in his cold, wet halls for eternity! But Fear wasn't enough to keep me from fighting, he is a very pale grey spectre if you know how to see through him. Now, I am always very happy to see a sunset."

"But the sunset is evocative of the fading of hope and the rising of the dark-- the image, as it were." Another tone, unheard before on this earth. "Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe not, maybe so, maybe yes, maybe no, maybe not, maybe so, but when the sun rises? The image is recast-- the fire comes from the very water of your seabeast creature. What will he do, when the sun resides in his home, boils his waters, and sends him running?" Languid, lounging, and just a little bit... tense? Maybe.

There was always tension in these veined discourses, bloodied with the secondary uterine wall that we all came from.

"Tell me. What colour did he bleed, if he bled at all."

"He flees it," Full replied softly to the new voice, the new metallic sheen, the wire threads that spun the sound. "When it rises, he flees into the West. He can never stay anywhere long, and he is always circling the earth's oceans in frustration."

The composer shifted his position, obviously to ease his favored leg then nodded solemnly, as though the question of the monster's blood were expected and important. "It was the color of an oil-slick's iridescence. I only knew he was bleeding because of the swirl against the surface of the water."

The voice was keen, and purred, and asexual, and strong, and all sorts of opposites all at once. High and low. Soft, yet striking. Precise, flighty.

Dead. Yet... alive?

Monotone, contrasted with every emotion flinched in at once.

"Mm."

Glitter metal and glass eyes flicked this way and that. To the hummingbirds flitting across five inch long blades of grass along the horizon, invisible to the naked eye, masked by the colours of the cars roaming by near the not-too-far-off entrance to the park. Cars honking in green and angry flashes of dark, blood red. Like the lips of a whore, parted like her legs at the registration of yen in her ovaries.

Ha. Haha. Haa.

"I think there are more of your sea monster in this world than we'd like to percieve exist. I know more than a few myself, though I've not yet been bitten by those type. The fiends I've encountered were of a far more disgusting countenance than green and white and seafoam caresses could ever prove to be."

Full considered the reflection from the metallic shine of the new voice. Harsh brushed steel, polished warm bronze, sterile titanium. He wondered at the refraction and glare from it, the confusing blur and the complex shivers in the timbre. He was, initially uncertain as to how to respond, many of the voices spoke largely in rhetoric. He inferred, being interested and sincere in his curiosity. He offered his own dove grey neutrality to them: "Indeed, far worse exist. I count myself fortunate to have been struck by one as mild as ice and saltwater."

One voice-- a union of all the cold in the world of metal mining and task force hunger strikes.

"Have you ever tasted burnt umber tinged with the slightest of unsightly mercury-gun-metal-gold? I find it similar to charcoal-- charcoal and glass. Chalky clean and slick on the tongue." A slow nod, one foot slipping back to the ground as the boy (man?) slouched into the bench, chin tucked in, fingers finding their way into the lint ball linings of jacket pockets that were low enough to tug to crossed thighs.

Asexual monochromaticism. A chrysalis of vitriol and motor oil.

from this we are BIRTHED

...from that we bring the metamorph into distinction.

"Fingerprints. That's all."

Full was struck silent. He let the metronome of his mind swing back and forth, tick-less, as he considered that flavor and the bitter copper tang to the inflection of the man's voice.

1. 2. 3. | 1. 2. 3.
Metal. Glow. Edge.

"Well?"

He could almost taste the heartbeat of the other man's waltz.

"We all admit to doing things, seeing things, tasting things that we are not proud of. If you've drunk from the monster that slayed your leg, it's but a gratification. A revenge, so to speak. Ritualistic in the most primal of base sense, it is, but it's no difference than the shrinking of heads and the bone grinding of relatives. In rememberance." A slow, small smirk.

"It's respectful."

One more glass eye look, one more metal tinge in the air. The scent of copper and iron on the fingerprints that Luke himself had referred to.

Jay blinked. Dizzy.

Whoa. That was fucked up.

"Indeed," the composer murmured into the copper of his scarf, pondering that. He believed it, he felt the ivory crunch of it in his own heart and soul, but the presence of the metallic unity had startled him in a fashion he could hardly find a color for. He was struck translucent for a long moment.

Breathe. Pale green, new shoots of lily of the valley.

He brought his dark eyes back up, letting them slide back into soft detachment to see the blink, the slightly disoriented look. Ah, and is this the root of the color? "Are you all right?" It was a soft query.

"Y-yeah. Fine." It was base. Primal. The final body... or maybe the first. Who knew? Jay shook his head out a little, sliding back up the bench, sitting in a decent boy's position, hands still in his pockets. "Just a little dizzy... I guess." He weathered a look at the stars.

One twinkle.

"Hmm. One showed up. Y'think that's the pole star-- the one the entire sky revolves around?"

Full looked up and found the icy twinkle in the blanket of the night. "Ah," he smiled. "He is tonight, isn't he?"

Korea's eyes fell out of Tokyo skies, regarding the dim blue of the trees across the way, over the sheet of green-blue grass spread before them. "Someone's gotta lead the way."

The slight Japanese man kept his gaze on the coldfire in the sky. "Aa," he agreed softly. "Sad as that often is."

And the night was still for at least one moment.

One second's worth of peace-of-mind was worth a thousand years of enlightenment.

"... what hoteltop do you frequent?"

"The Park Hyatt," the composer replied, still not relinquishing the star from his dark eyes. His voice was hushed, as though concerned the star might flee from the reverberation of his voice. "Usually, I spend a whole night if I can manage it."

Tentative paused with the juncture of one hushed breath, joining one movement to another. Namely, the movement of head upturning to the sky to gaze back at the anomoly shining through the neons of industrial night.

"We like you."

It sounded strange. It did. Pluralism. Referring to eight people at once, and speaking for them.

"Not a lot of people can... bare us. So. Thanks."

Full let his gaze fall to the horizon first, and then to the young man at his side, he nodded very solemnly, understandingly. Iolite prism. "You are a startling array of tones. I am..." the composer paused as the words would not filter through the color. "I am glad." He finished simply, lacking eloquence for a moment.

"I don't know about tones, so much as violent, horrible collisions and crashcourse accidents..." The wrds were breathed out on teh tail end of a sigh, gentle and light. Soft as could be.

Almost as soft as the slight movements in the tree so far above their heads.

"We're glad someone's able to talk to us. Very glad."

"I have enjoyed it." Full nodded again, emphasizing his sincerity. "I hope I will see you - the whole array - sometime again, but beneath more stars." He smiled lightly.

"Sunday night, on the roof of the Park Hyatt," the boy suggested, quietly. "Will you be free? Or even inclined?"

"Ah, yes, to both. I am always inclined toward rooftops." A flicker-ghost of smile again, and then the composer pulled himself agilely to his feet, unconsciously flourishing his cane to his aid. "A tapestry of blue evenings to you." Full touched the brim of his cap in polite goodbye, and then quite simply, quietly, made his elegant limping way down the path of the park again.

Jay said nothing to polite, curt hat tipping and the limp resulting from heroics that had Cricket smiling and Luke talking. He said nothing to the tapestry, the blue, and the evening. He said nothing in return.

There were no goodbyes to be had, after all.

[/private]

... and ~~we're~~ I'm content.

. j a y

And we learn to fly...

. . . content?