This happens -- when? May 30th. Night of the 29th becoming the 30th? Dates are difficult. Flood's cell lights up with a call from a particular Rose who very particularly wants to speak to him (the particulars of the matter being of particular importance to her.)
FloodFlood looks to his phone and answers the call.
He begins with her name, "Viol," and continues with a question, "how are you?" He doesn't sound surprised to be hearing from her, but it doesn't sound expected either. It just is.
There's nothing in the way of ambient noise on his end of the line. He sounds to be in a relatively quiet place, as wrapped up in its peaceful comfort as someone of his bearing can be. That's to say he sounds pleased with the interjection of a ring from her.
Lux
There is silence from the other end. No deep breath, scraped into lungs that don't need it to enliven the creature on the other end before she says a thing, no tap, tap of fingernail against the shell of her phone. No music and no dull roar and clamor as if a bar or a club or some party, her usual haunts. Let's go on, speak of haunting.
"Haunted, alas; but can you guess by what, Daniel, darling?" Brief pause; helpfully, "That's a line."
Her voice is quizzical; her tone, an invitation to conspiracy. Lux as usual. She sounds like she's going to invite him out for a bite.
Flood"I can," a beat. "Yes," a moment where he is considering how to present his guess, his grasp into darkness, but darkness is something he knows something of. Just as Viol is. Just as this call is. Or so he can guess, and he does at her prompting.
"Inevitability. It's such an ugly word. A concept that fills me with such trembling rage. Would you not think we had escaped it at the hour of our deaths? Gained something for what we gave up or was taken from us? And here we are at its whim again. And it's almost whimsical about how it beats us with circumstance," and he sounds almost finished on his little diatribe. It does not sound like he is being too woeful. Again, he sounds enlivened that it has brought him to this point.
"Am I still your darling? Or are we on a precipice where that word will not longer apply? I wonder because I care," he says like it's a rare thing, him caring. "You do know that, don't you?"
There are questions lost in questions by the time he falls silent and which she chooses to give dignity with answers in her drawing (and quartering?) voice will tell him which she values most.
LuxLux preserves her silence except for a brief glint of noise (a blood-drop needle-prick on foam -- the voice wants to move but is restrained) when he brings up that word (inevitability). Her silence is attentive and studious and complete. Lasts longer than his questions. Pause between his last and her response.
"You know, I think I'd like to tell you what I believe. I don't really believe in inevitability. I guess that's what fatal flaws are for, huh? But I just don't. I don't believe in giving up to the whim of big ol' concepts like 'inevitability' and 'fate' but I guess I am spoilt. I believe circumstance is just a room and, you know, make it into what you want, make it into an animal and crack it open, get at the meat -- that's where the thing's at. The meat. The heart. Circumstance. Well, fine, here we are."
Here we are. Pause. Lux laughs. The radiance is sublimated -- quickened. Dark thread; to relieve tension, let the bad blood flow.
"I don't believe if you throw a body off a cliff it turns into anything else on the way down. Bob's still Bob all smashed on the rocks. Do you really care?" Beat.
"What do you want from him?"
FloodLux had taken a time to answer and he had not pressed. Had not checked the pulse to see if the line was still alive between these two dead allowing them to speaking with one another.
“Would you care to know what I have always enjoyed and valued in you? Even in our briefest passes by? Even with our differences, whether they are wide of breadth or small in scope?” He waits for an answer. To find out if she cares to know. And he will show her how much he cares with the answer. That is what he intimates.
Lux"Sure. I'm partial to lists, but I trust you."
Flood“Yes. Trust,” and he grasps hold onto that word like it was what he was looking for all along or what he already had and hoped to show.
“I do not expect flattery to fix this and I do not expect you to take this as a flattery,” he says first. A preface to what will come.
“You have never interrupted me. You have always spoken with me, instead of at me, and as an aside I hope you see the same in the part I've played, pardon the digression,” and he is ready to get back to his point.
“You have always let me speak, trusting I will come in my own way to something worthwhile of your time, something worth listening to. Perhaps it is my vanity and arrogance, or perhaps it is that you understand those qualities in me,” he wonders and then ceases wondering with the firmness of his next words.
“I was not aware,” he says. She has made it unnecessary to elaborate on what he was unaware of. “I was protecting what is mine and doing what was expected of me at the revelation. In that order,” firmer still.
“Now the movement has begun. I have begun something. Will you trust me to take what I am now aware of into account when I make what I will of this room, this circumstance, I have found myself in?” He falls silent after this question.
Lux"But what exactly are you now aware of? What is it you're telling me you'll take into account?"
Flood"If I am still your darling, he is your dear Ist, is he not?" Flood has remained cool and even now as he plays with words he still manages to seem invested in how she reacts to them.
"And I hope you will take into account there was a time when someone came to me," a pause for her to conjure the remembrance. "Came, albeit with less preparation and arguably worse reasoning than I came, and because he was your dear and darling, salt of your waned light, I did not make an animal out of the circumstance. I did not crack it open to get at the sweet organs," his words undulating in their tempo like his tongue is a winding serpent.
"And you thanked me. If that is not enough, and it may well not be, ask a thing of me," he says. "I will tell you if I can do it and if I will do it," a stray clarification, but a necessary one.
Lux"He is also my teacher," Lux interjects. Emphasizes. Her interest. Darling. Dear Ist. They may both (all) be true. Lux doesn't care about Sect-lines except insofar as they're bastions of tyranny and stasis. They'll make unlife a Hell. Lux doesn't care about Sect-lines: except insofar as she can stay out of their scribbled brawls.
But of course that's impossible. They're everywhere. Here they are. Flood conjures up salt of her waned light and he can't see her appreciative smile (if there is an appreciative smile. But why wouldn't there be? Lux appreciates eloquence she can sink her teeth into. Appreciates poetry). He can hear her silence and perhaps the silence takes on an added weight -- the sort've thing that's all glass-caught and full of air-bubbles, flaws and fractures and meant to hold something down and be forgotten until a wind comes blowing.
Ask a thing of him. He'll tell her.
"I -- " brief pause. This isn't a pause because she wants to weigh her words. Lux is an impulsive creature as often as not. "I hope a lot of things, Daniel, darling. Wish 'em, too, just like that song about the star. Can I really ask a thing of you? I'm going to appreciate the Hell out of your candor even if I don't like what you say."
"I want him back. I want to be in a room with you both. I want to see him. Or, and, I want to know what you will make of him. What do you see yourself taking from this whole mess? Ideally."
Flood"You made him aware of what could happen to him here, but your words were tight and few until then," Flood says, noting her conservation of words and their conservativeness. Now the gates seem open. Will Flood storm the castle?
"Your lips sound tight as if they are wrapped around sharp teeth in your mouth, and I wonder if they are for me, those fangs," he continues.
"Have we ever shared more? Have we ever held more common ground? When Bernard fell I felt something, and I don't know what it was, but I knew it came from the loss of someone who loved Denver as I do and as I think you do," he says next.
"You hate the tower and still work to reform it, just as the sword is a sword I can wield without getting cut," sounding certain. "Do you hate me as you hate my sword? It wants blood. It does not have to be yours, but it has to be someone's. Ideals wont put it in a scabbard and bury it like the war is over," and again silence reigns from his side of the line. It's pregnant, though, and he breaks it open to get at the meat.
He breaks it to truly answer.
“There is a reason this is a phone call and a reason it was last time we spoke. If I were in a room with you wouldn't you try to wrap me around your finger? But let me find out if that is a possibility. Give me the freedom to do so unagressed. The hounds have his scent like a morsel and want it badly. I want out of him what you want out of him. If it is possible would you allow him to be ours?” It is barely an answer, but it is all he can give.
LuxHe knows Lux well. She isn't transparent and so many don't see her as she really is, but that's because what is luminous in her distracts them; what is bright, dazzles; isn't it? Because she is such a thing, and she can be so subtle when she wants to be. He knows Lux well; better now that he's gone through some of her correspondence, and if there haven't been many new insights, surely some confirmations. Lux is intractable and rebellious and thoughtful and dangerous. And idealistic.
"Why do you dismiss the possibility that I might help you in this, instead of hinder, instead of aggress? If you want from him what I want. Would you believe me if I promised?"
"You're right. Ideals won't put the bloody sword in a scabbard and bury it, but couldn't they? They're what gives a mind its fire; aren't they? What gives an instrument its strings; they're what sharpens the mind, aren't they? What would your hounds rather have? A bloody sword or an open gate?"
Pause. "Do you mean to say, you'd convert him."
Flood"Maybe we three could convert one another. What a grand plot it would be to change things. To change the world and the night starting right here in Denver, this place we love, with an outsider, an insider, and an inside outsider," he ventures in his answer.
He reaches. He leaps so far and holds out his hands to catch the edge of whatever ground is on the other side of that precipice.
It may be too far. Maybe he will be like Bob dashed on rocks below.
"A room. No, not a room, a cage. An arena. I saw something in myself. I saw a beast and it was ugly. I cannot bring myself to hate it. It has been locked in this arena, a gladiatorial stadium, and left to starve. Pitted against this foe and that enemy.What else would it become? But what if?" Here Flood sounds so very dangerous, because he is saying things like he can accomplish them. Lighting ideals afire and incendiary.
"What if we could tear down the room of our circumstance and see what it looks like outside?" It is quite an idea.
Flood[ Manipulation + Leadership. Specialty is Cult of Personality, and goddamn if this isn't some subversive propaganda. Blowing a WP. ]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 1, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]
Flood[ Six successes. Flood, you really know how to do it when it counts. ]
LuxThe following silence is finite. The phone is a wonderful medium for having a discussion free of the temptation of Discipline(s), but it is not a wonderful medium for reading the effect of one's words on the person one is conversing with and it is not a wonderful medium for seeing whether cold clay has caught fire and turned itself into something starry.
But Lux, isn't she always starry. Isn't that the way of her?
"You are beautiful," Lux tells Flood, when she breaks that silence, the words measured and distant; as if it were a thing she'd forgot. Her voice returns to something more intimate, fall of silk across steel of shadow across silk but now that silk has this lingering warmth.
She could linger on that thought too, couldn't she?
But she doesn't; or she doesn't for very long.
Speaking of leaps. "So I can see him; and help you both."
Flood"Will you still promise?" What is that word worth? What is her word worth? Flood seems to want to hear it, regardless of what it means. "We can start this compact with that," he continues. "That and our pillar."
Lux"The pillar belongs to itself," Lux says, quick and sharp and something quickening her tone, enlivening it just so, because she is a passionate thing. The intractable rose, fallen too far from the tower environs she's supposed to thrive in.
"But I will still promise. I do still promise."
Flood"I will let you know when," and he says it with a flourish that shows he is finishing this parlay.
Lux"I will wait, breathless from anticipation rather than circumstance." A joke, sort of. Pause. "He didn't hurt you, did he?"
FloodIt is his turn to laugh. "No. He was as tough as I imagined, but I've learned to get out of a the way when a pillar falls. Good night, Viol. I look forward to enjoying your company," and he hangs up with that.
Lux[roll credits!]
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