LuxThe studio is a place of learning, two floors and the lights are off on the first floor and the windows are dark. Lux told István to use the side door and head up to the second floor. The side door was in an alley, behind some boxes and a dumpster with a series of questionable smells. He could look around the first floor if he wanted to. He could see a couple of in-progress installations, a laboratory or kitchen area that might look almost familiar, a lounge area too and a number of easels, shelves and cubbies and communal property, a desk in case they ever do a thing here and want to sell or have a reception. There are sheets separating some work areas from others and imagine the shadows which might hide behind: if light were to strike just right, what hidden shapes might be carved out've the dark?
That's the first floor. The second floor is open. Big expansive windows, looking out at the dark (artsy) city, dark themselves and because they're dark reflective. A couple chalkboards on wheels, the smell of chalk-dust and linseed oil and turpentine and minerals and clay, something earthy, wood, oils, twelve wooden benches set slabs at an angle for students to straddle and sketch on. Adjustable easels. A table. Cabinets. Most of the wooden artist's benches are in a half-circle around nothing, as if sometimes there might be a something in all that nothing, and when there is, it gets sketched. But over there, a low couch for models to lounge on, an assortment of stools stacked together for putting together still lifes. A bowl of fruit not yet beginning to turn, but on the cusp.
Everything clean, and the lights are on.
Lux is lying on one of the wooden benches, exactly as they are not supposed to be used, with one foot resting against the neck of it where one's sketchpad would rest at an angle and be clipped in place and her knee bent. Her other leg is stretched out. And she is reading while she waits.
IstvánAlleyways ought to cause him more trepidation than they do. Alleyways and the entrances that he is supposed to use to enter into places he oughtn't be. This is no place for him and not until he is inside can the Tremere glean parallels between a scientist's laboratory and an artist's studio. As if he has never been inside an artist's studio before. Doesn't have a solid grasp on the chemistry of paint and the differences in the way that oil and charcoal interact with canvas and paper.
The soles of his shoes clip against the concrete as he steps off the sidewalk which is well-lit and does cause him trepidation to walk down. Open and public spaces are more a danger to him than the shadows he would think but at this moment in time István is still upright and still in possession of all of his faculties and his freedom and he doesn't know enough to know he ought not think himself so bold in the face of shadows because he is not lain still in a shadow-monger's wine cellar with a shaft of wood buried in his heart.
In he goes and of course he wants to look around. Shapes inside the darkness once he's closed the door and he is nearly five minutes on the ground floor before Lux hears footsteps on the stairs. His reflection appears in one of the big dark windows before he speaks. Draws nearer as his footfalls take on a quieter tone. Respectful of the space.
As he approaches the bench where Lux is lain he holds his hands folded behind his back. Eyes traipse around the space to take in the easels and the benches and the aging bowl of fruit. His shadow reaches her moments after his reflection hits the window pane and then he's standing at her head and looking at her that they both appear upside-down to each other.
Tonight's game is called Keep Your Hands To Yourself István. They remain behind his back.
LuxThe soles of his loafers aren't quiet on the stairs and they're not quiet in the studio and Lux hears him approach and she lifts a hand by way of hello. The light causes darkness to well up in the grooves and cracks of tonight's jewelry, that 17th century poesy ring on her wedding finger, a thick band on her thumb that would be silver but is so tarnished, so corroded, that it is almost black and must stain her skin when she takes it off. His shadow reaches her, but it doesn't quite reach the yellowing page of her paper back, so it is a beat before she pulls her gaze from the last paragraph to look at an upside-down István and when she does she smiles at him like heartbreak is the only thing inevitable because that moment's not going to last. The smile is direct -- impetuous: quick. She looks him up and down.
"'Sup, Virág!"
And down and up, lets the paperback close as it wants to close, spine creased but the glue still strong, then lets it slip from her fingertips to hit the floor when she sits up. Tonight Lux is buttoned up. Demure. Severe, in her long blouse with its many, many buttons, in her jeans that have laced up, too, in her tall button-up boots. All black.
"Do you ever have true dreams during the day?"
IstvánSup, Virág!
This greeting baffles him but he tries it anyway.
"Sup!" It comes out sounding like 'sap.'
He could make much of the fact that she wears such difficult clothing this evening but he is not so observant and he is not so aware of others' motivations or hopes either. As the paperback falls to the floor he ignores it but once it has come to rest and does so in her shadow the Tremere gives her a curious cant of his head and steps around her.
Tonight he's wearing a gray cotton suit with a red dress shirt beneath. Of course he's wearing a belt and suspenders and a tie all of them black but he's ditched the waistcoat. His hair is combed and he continues to shave all of the beard from his face when he rises.
As she asks after his dreams István releases his hands and crouches to pick up the book. Rises again and looks at the back flap of the book rather than her but she knows the center of his galaxy these nights is her.
"Hmm... define 'true dream.'"
LuxHeh. Sap. Her mouth presses together, a firm line which hooks up at the corner in a sharp smirk. The paperback is a dog-earred copy of Dashiell Hammet's The Thin Man. The spine has a tear along its edge, as if it's ready to loose the cover neatly if someone were to just give it a tear. The book has survived some water damage and is foxed all up along the pages. Lux braces both hands on her thighs, and her skin is pale against black fabric, fine filigree of lovely bones beneath, and she watches István pick up her book and while he's reading the back of it she replies.
"A dream which is a precursor to something that is happening in the wakeful world; a dream that tells you a secret you didn't know yet. A dream that is true! You know, truthful and telling, without malice."
IstvánAs he reads the tall blond thing wanders aimless around the bench. As if it helps him absorb the sentences. Perhaps this is how he reads everything regardless of the language. Standing up and pacing slow. As if sitting is too much effort for him.
When he's finished with the blurb on the back of the book István flicks his eyebrows as if uncertain of what to make of what he's read and then sets the thing facedown on the bench rather than where he found it.
His hands he folds behind his back when Lux concludes her definition.
"Ah, an omen!" he says bright like he's happy to confirm he knows what she's talking about. "No, my starlight. I do not have these things while I do sleep." A beat. "You ask for a reason, eh?"
Lux"I do. Can you guess what reason that is?" Lux sounds amused. Lux looks amused. Look at Lux, amused. Her hair is dark and her eyes cup darkness, too; are as clear as green glass, except where they've begun to corrode, to suggest starlessness; her lashes are thicker than usual tonight, the paint around her eyes making them look wide-set and knowing, even when their expression is direct and vibrant and did we mention yet: amused. There's a contrast there. Like salt and sweet.
IstvánCan he guess.
István clicks his tongue a few times not entirely unlike the way one clicks one's tongue when one wishes to coax a cat out of hiding only quieter. Amused by her amusement. Watching her eyes and the way the light dances through them and she knows he isn't the world's most astute emotionalist but he knows her words well enough. Her mind isn't an utter secret to him.
"Youuuuu..."
Draws it out slow like to pretend he is actually guessing and uncertain of his guess.
"... did dream true. Of what?"
Lux"Hah!" Lux claps her hands together. The sound her palms make together is loud, energetic, and when the clap is over she points at him. "Incorrect!"
Lux's chin is not raised, insouciant, just now; her head is lowered, as if she might have horns to catch someone on, fling 'em up with, gore 'em; and she brings her hand back so that her fist hides whatever shape her mouth makes, touches the tip of her nose with her finger, raises her fine eyebrows. Her mouth is painted tonight, too, some almost nude color that just blushes, gives her a wintry look.
She drops her fist. "That is not at all the reason why I ask you; although I did have a true dream. A vision while the sun burned and--"
The reminder sluices through her; stills her.
"Do you think the sun loves us and that is why it puts us to rest?"
Her eyes had left him to touch the grain of the wooden bench she's still astride and to linger on the marks made by countless student nails the oils of countless student palms the natural prediliction of the wood to be a design.
Now they return. Wide. Direct. Less amused, but not giving up on amusement just yet. Lux: she looks at István like she's a second away from gazing.
IstvánNever has he nor would he ever confess to such a thing but she knows István wants few things the way he wants to gaze at Lux and see her gazing back. It is an embarrassment and it is the blood and it is nothing he didn't know would happen. This is what he signed up for the pain mixed in with the pleasure.
He is still the way he has always been still when speaking with her. Still and some distance away. Before she could feel the interest and the uncertainty he felt in looking at her but the warlock is not the same creature that first laid eyes on her.
Tragic and yet he's learning so much from it.
"Leave the sun out of this," he says. The admonition is light. He finds her attempts to anthropomorphize celestial bodies endearing. "It cares not for us."
Lux"How do you know?"
Her tone could be challenging, couldn't it? There could be challenge in the way she lifts her sharp, imperious chin; the way she holds his gaze, and the way she is otherwise so utterly still, so breathless. There could be challenge in it; but if there is, the challenge is not for the usurper.
Usurper: there's a funny name. Lux has thoughts on it, but they haven't talked about his clan, excepting of course when she asked him whether or not he could turn people into toads, excepting of course when he asked her to undo him, unbutton all his secrets, and she said she wanted to look at him when she did.
Her tone could be challenging, but it is more curious than anything.
An invitation of some sort.
István"Transitivity."
Oh this ought to be good. If she wants a challenge she shall have a challenge. Holding his gaze has never caused him to waver before and István does relish the opportunity to debate her. It always has been more diverting than any other game to him.
This creature has played other games through post with her in the past. He is a terrible drawer but when he does take pains to sketch a sketch the slashing scratch of his pen is nigh unto literal. It's easy to tell what he's trying to draw when he tries to draw because his imagination isn't a colorful thing.
"The sun is not sentient. Only sentient entities are capable of thinking so. Ergo, the sun is not capable of thinking so. It floats in space and it will make fusion on and on until it does burn up its hydrogen and collapse in on itself and consume everything in the system. Until then, it does burn us because we are cursed to burn so. But the sun, it does not care. This I know."
Lux"My fox," she calls him. Run a knife's edge across the endearment, blood will well; blood is affection; oh, she is affectionate or playing with affection; she is ardent. Her gaze has yet to become less direct; less attached to his.
"Do you know, the more you speak the more I become convinced that you are incorrect. What reason do you have to suppose the sun is not sentient? Because it floats in space and fusion and," a gesture with one hand, sweeeeeping (graceful), "so on and so on. Because it has been measured by the instruments of a rational mind?"
"What's a curse without somebody to feel it? To suffer it? To know it from afar?"
"I mean, really. What is it?"
IstvánHis ghoul is familiar with the story of Le Petit Prince. In both languages. It was written in his native French and he speaks English as well if not better than he ever spoke German and when István asked if István asked he could tell him of a French-language tale involving foxes and why his lover would have called him such a thing.
All of the reasons she mocks are the reasons he has and István looks as if he would laugh for she being the incorrect one but for the gesturing and the implication that observation and logic are not sufficient grounds for determining a ball of gas's capacity to feel and think.
"The sun is not the one who did curse us, my rose. Cain did think himself marked and his god did cast him out to wander in darkness and when he did meet Lilith he drank of her blood, no? And then the three angels who did come, they did offer him each a mercy, and he did say No, no, I do not regret the slaying of my brother, I regret nothing, go, and they did lay upon him curses. The fire and the sunlight and the hunger. Even if the sun should notice from so far away, why should it care? It did not make the curse."
Lux"No, but if it did decide to care, why shouldn't it? Why shouldn't it see the curse, judge it unfair, and do whatever it could to soften the blow? You will be hungry, yes, I can do nothing for the blood you crave or the blood you spilled, but my light is my light, and though it will kill you, true, re-write you in agony, I will do what I can: and make it so you can barely lift your eyes when my light shines; you will sleep as if you will never wake again. And so I will not touch you, and so you will be safe, and have a chance for -- "
Lux pauses; now her lashes sweep downward, shadow her eyes and shadow her pale cheekbones. She is cold tonight, but if she is ice it is all pretense, and say instead that she is glass-fine. She doesn't inhale, but when her gaze flicks up again it is a startle of color, a sudden thing, accompanied by a small and reckless lift of her shoulders.
Anticipatory, she leans forward: as if whatever István's going to say now is something she wants to lick up like cream, though of course Lux doesn't care for cream any longer, has a different hunger.
IstvánOnce upon a time he called her constellation inquiry a fairytale scenario. He had just learned the phrase fairytale perhaps or speaking in the mudroom at a party with dozens of people he did not know and did not care to know he had thought the phrase amusing. Fairytales have little to do with stars. They're concerned with other times and other realms but the things with which they concern themselves are not impossible. Witches and changelings and shapeshifters are not impossible.
István speaks of gods as if they are real and yet he continues to argue that the sun doesn't care one whit for them.
He has never tried to convince Lux overmuch of impossible things. If she does not want to accept his truths it is not his job to sway her. He is not a proselytizer. For a long time she thought he was a blueblood or a lunatic. As an outed warlock he hasn't changed but she at least now has context for his arrogance. It isn't backed by money or by madness.
Her fervor draws a smile from him. If she thinks his eyes kind it could just be a trick of the light but it troubles him sometimes how fond he is of her. How he would do just so much as she asked of him even before he chained himself to her. Warmth is nothing he knows unless he wastes blood and yet within his dead flesh he does hold an ember for her.
"If it did care this would mean it would have some power, no?" he asks. "In this instance of yours, Sol has awareness of something that did happen... ninety-two and something million miles away through the space. It can make out among the... seven billion bodies on the surface of the planet, those who are so cursed." He releases his hands and unbuttons his suit jacket and hooks his thumbs into the belt loops at his hips as he paces slow away from her. When he comes near the window he gazes out it and she can see his reflection's brow furrowed in thought as he considers the course he's on. Time and the wasting of it but it's all they have and any time he spends with her is not a waste. When he turns back towards her he's squinting for her sharpness has gone to blur with the distance. "Three millennia of this, no? Maybe more? Billions and billions of people all on the surface and we are so few and have always been so few. And you wish to burden the sun with caring."
Lux"Caring is not a burden," Lux says. "Come here; are you ready to be my student?"
IstvánWhatever passion she might have started stirring up in him arguing an infinitely arguable point skitters away just so soon as she tells him to come to her. Her question has István smothering a proper smile but the light of it still stains his eyes.
He lingers by the window a moment longer hands loose on his hips like stood before the cityscape stars dotting the black and all the neon shone as proof the kine think of them less than does the sun István looks as if he could continue to argue. That caring is indeed a burden. Nothing for which István cares he would claim to be a burden and yet he can argue just as fervent a pointless point as she.
Once he's proven he can linger if he wants to István saunters from the window to the bench. Does not touch her even as his eyes sweep errant strands of hair from her brow and touch the many buttons on her blouse and find her hips that he might pull her nearer. He has no need of her body when her blood is in him and yet they are sensate creatures. Touch is a pleasure.
"Ja," he says. Eyes on hers. His stance is loose and his chest unprotected like this. He ought to fear her but he doesn't. "What shall I call you, if you do not like the 'artisan' I did name you before? 'Miss Dubois'?"
The mess his accent makes of those last two words is on par with his attempt to mimic her slang. He knows he sounds funny and doesn't care.
LuxHe lingers by the window and Lux watches him linger, then measures the angle of his saunter, and then she smirks. The smirk is sharp.
Lux raises dark eyebrows at István's accent and what it does to one of her names. She was leaning forward in anticipation, but now she has straightened, is no longer bracing herself against her thighs or the bench. When Lux stands, it is a precise sweep of grace; it is with a quicksilver air, a compact between gravity and blood, between air and body.
She points to the bench beside the one she has claimed, and perhaps it is the same bench he placed her beaten copy of The Thin Man upon. The wood is pine and unsplintered.
"You shall call me whatever you wish to call me, but you shall sit the Hell down, darling, and roll your sleeves up. I don't know; are you left handed or right? What's your favourite color tonight?"
If he sits, Lux will turn and open one of the cabinets. Click, hollow sound. If he doesn't sit, she'll wait.
IstvánIn order to sit the hell down and roll up his sleeves István has to remove his suit jacket. So he glances at the options and decides to take the paperback off of the bench she has chosen and toss it to set it down on its neighbor and then slings a leg over the bench. Doesn't sit yet.
First he shucks jacket off his shoulders and reveals the suspenders Lux could only suspect he wore. As if he needs suspenders and a belt at once. One or the other would suffice.
Black against red then with the gray cotton slacks left behind. Red is not a color he wears often. It's loud against his paled skin.
He tosses the jacket that it comes to lie overtop the paperback and then he undoes his cuffs. Still hasn't sat down because he's taking his sweet time folding back his cuffs and answering her. He starts with the right cuff. Must be he's left handed.
"Tonight?" Hmm. "Tonight I wish to say my favorite color is green."
LuxThere is no harm in looking, just looking, just in that manner drinking him (details) in. He's taking his sweet time and Lux takes her sweet time, too, turns that time sweet by drinking in the little gestures. István carries himself like István. He's very himself and she pays attention to the way he undoes his cuffsleeve and rolls it up over his forearm. She pays attention to the shift of shadow and light across his red shirt and what it does to his skin, what hidden tones it brings out and what it makes paler. Does he look down while he undoes his cuffs? Or does he look at her? Does he look down briefly, as a matter of course, a habit?
Lux is going to snap those suspenders. But not yet. Some men can pull them off. István can pull them off, old-fashioned though they are. He's an ancilla, after all.
First, patience; poise, of course. Her weight rests more on one hip than the other while István, slowly, gets himself situated and she watches him do so, her head canted just so. He's close enough to sitting that when he answers her question, her eyes not on his face but on his hands, she says approvingly, "Very good! Green's a classy color with a classless heart. What kind of green?"
Has he sat yet? Lux snaps his fucking suspenders, careful to only touch them.
Then, air of innocence, she drifts over to the cabinet and opens it and gets István a pad of watercolor paper, a little plastic case, sends a glance (like an arrow [flung], or an anchor [settle]) back over her shoulder while she does to see what he's doing.
IstvánThe Tremere can pull off plenty of things that the average person cannot pull off. Chalk it up to his lack of self-consciousness or the fact that he is tall and has a thin build and could be considered attractive if one is willing to overlook the fact that he does not breathe and does not blink and does not move unless he has to. Unless something else draws him away from his stillness.
In life he was an attractive man. Easy to see that he is still handsome but the light does him no favors and when Lux comes near enough to take his suspenders she can see how the blue in them is near electric. Maybe it's the red of his shirt.
"Eh... you know the--"
She snaps his fucking suspenders and István lifts his eyebrows and that tension in the corners of his mouth has no beard behind which it can hide. He was only thirty years old when Peter Laszlo Konstantin Gabor decided to cease his life-ruining courtship and usher the young academic into immortality. Smiling has gone to rust because of the time since then not because of the time passed up until.
That innocence of hers has his smile calcifying. His eyes can rake down a person's spine when he looks at them so sharp but Lux does not feel it as anything other than a presence at her back.
Ahem.
"Swan Band emissions, eh? From the carbon stars? You know the spectrum is blue so, but at certain distance the color does go green? This green. Any other green I do not think will show if you do wish to paint with water."
Lux"Tell me the truth," she abjures him, solemn as anything. He's still standing, isn't he? Lux returns with her loot from the cabinet and clips a hard masonite board up against the head of István's bench, then clips (the clips are metal, steel, waver reflections) the watercolor pad to the masonite. Deft in a way that speaks not of practice, but of things done so often they become as easy (if not easier) as turning one's head toward a sound. The little plastic case she settles on the bench beside István's bench, hauling it nearer his. The wood legs scrape against the floor. The light is bright, wants to tease something bright from her hair, but only manages shadow, only manages to kiss a suggestion of other color out if she turns her head like she does when she unrolls some duct tape and tapes the bottom of the watercolor pad down across the masonite.
"You picked that green just because it's got a scientific explanation. You're a troubador, darling, of numbers, and it's all the poetry you've got. Do you really think it's the only green one can pull outta water and paper? You'll break my heart."
IstvánNot until the other bench barks with its dragging and Lux has affixed her trappings to the Tremere's stand does he sit. His knees are sharp against the fabric of his slacks and he knits his hands in the dead space between them and does not twiddle his thumbs as he watches her work her way through her admonition.
"That is not why I did pick that color, my gem," he says. As if she's the one being unimaginative. Or maybe he's just fanning the flames. Might as well while he's looking at her all a-haze in his love for her. He indicates the subject of his next sentence with an incline of his chin. "Your eyes in this light, they are this sort of green, so."
Lux"Very good!" she says again, spark of amusement (simmer of it [blood and foam, baby]), or something that might claim kinship to amusement at very least. "But you know you are a troubador, don't you? Show me how you hold a paintbrush."
There are paintbrushes in the plastic case she settled down. She'll indicate it with her chin if he pretends he does not know where to find one. They're all watercolor brushes, and there are some sticks of charcoal, too, brittle and full of holes, charcoal dust and tubes of paint.
IstvánThe handle of the brush is thinner and finer than anything he's held in his hand in some time. His fingers are not elegant things but they could be. Blood would make them so. His craft doesn't require much in the way of physical precision but rather mental.
Lux is correct in her accusation that he is only so poetic when he speaks of the natural world but she is part of the natural world too. His eyes linger on hers as she calls him a troubadour again and he wants to smile but he does not. Laid upon the stand is a slew of instruments he does not recognize and István picks up the brush in his left hand the way he would pick up a pencil.
"A troubadour? How I can say yes my darling I know this so if I do not know what it is a troubadour does with his nights?"
Lux"Why, if you are one," Lux says, her critical (perfectionist) eyes on how he chooses to hold the brush as if he's going to scribble equations not tease color in a swathe and catch water, "wouldn't you just know? Troubled Troubador who doesn't know himself," the shadow of a smirk again. Lux has gone into an easy (poised, balanced) crouch between István's bench and the bench to his left with the box of brushes and paints. Her heels don't touch the ground and her thighs don't quite touch her calves and she doesn't rest an elbow against either of the benches to help preserve her balance. She doesn't need to.
"But I guess I can remind you! A troubador," and she herself plucks a brush from the case, and shows him how to hold the brush for tonight's lesson. Low on the handle, like holding a sword. She'll even say it: "Like this. Like you're going to be a wasp, stinging, during some sword-swash play bout -- like fencing, do you see? Hold it firmly, but lightly. A troubador," picking up that thread, "plays. And is devoted."
IstvánA glance at how she holds her brush has him mentally transposing right-to-left and adjusting how he's gripping the thing. Perhaps he's never held a sword before. A stake is nothing like a sword. More like a dagger. They're meant for plunging in at close range. Different grips. The Tremere loosens his fingers and lets the hilt rest easier between them.
And then he makes as if he aims to whack Lux's brush with his own like they are actually fighting with swords but he has marginal respect for her craft and the tools of it. Their brushes do not hit each other.
"Ah," he says, "but you do say the word 'troubadour' as if it is a vulgarity, no?"
Lux"Isty baby," she begins.
PAINTBRUSH FIGHT? HELL YE -- no. Decorum! Lux is decorous tonight. But the feint polishes a gleaming edge out've Lux's eyes and they flick back to István's face. They find the corner of his mouth and then his eyes. The gleam's sharp enough to cut but submerged enough to wonder at: reflective, refractive.
"I sure as fucking Hell do not. The word's refined sugar, melts on your tongue, you know, it's a refined C major chord. Troubador," she repeats it; tests it and tastes it. Frowns faintly, but at his hands. She switches her brush from right to left and shows him again. "Oh no, not a vulgarity tonight."
"Let me see how you'd use it." The brush, she means. On the paper. Not vulgarities or the word troubador.
IstvánAll of the touching and the disrobing and the kissing to which he's subjected her in the past was for the sake of novelty. Because he felt even before they'd drank of each other a curiosity about her and he did enjoy the sensuality of being with another person whose mind was no longer a mystery to him. He thinks of Auspex as the greatest gift that Death has brought to him.
When she looks at him like that István feels no compulsion to lean forward and kiss her. Kissing her is nice but screwing around when she's supposed to be teaching him. Schoolboy antics. István flicks his eyebrows at her and she can see the love he has for her banked in his own gaze. The feint does not escalate into a fight. He settles down.
Okay. How he'd use it.
The Tremere eyes the row of paints and his right hand is still on his knee while the left hovers over the colors. Think think. Plenty of scientists are also artists. Might be he is one and just never knew it. He would have had to draw if he ever took a biology course. Some degree of art exists in geometry and physics.
István said green was his color tonight but he taps his brush against yellow first and splats the brush against the paper. Makes two pointless downward strokes on it before smearing a crescent line beneath it. It's an invisible smiley face.
As he slaps the brush around:
"So if I am this troubadour... ah, no, I do recall now, they are the ones who did write of court-love and did die out after the Plague. No more songs to praise the Crusades."
Lux[Self Control not to cringe at István's brush-work. PERFECTIONIST.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
Lux"No." The creature stands. Lux coming out of a crouch isn't quick but is as poised a thing, as beautifully done, as sinking into and holding the position was to begin with. Lux has grace and in the marrow of her, now, blood-kindled, blood-given, blood-dredged. She is economical. She does not brace herself against either of the pine benches. Does not use the moment as an excuse to place her hand on István's thigh although she might've and might yet still.
Lux enjoys touching people and being touched. Lux is suggestive without meaning to be suggestive (and Lux is suggestive when she means to be suggestive). The Anarch lives (yes, lives) and chooses to give herself up to sensuousness. But touch -- it isn't the sense she is indulging tonight. She is indulging herself.
Guess how.
No. Lux doesn't mean to say there are still songs sung in the praise of Crusades. The no is for his brushwork.
"You're not drawing a stick figure boat, you're painting; get it? Your brush is going to be dripping, it's going to be drenched; you're going to be in control of an element that doesn't want to be controlled, or that's -- yes, let's say this! -- that's already controlled. It's already in love, you know? Gravity; it's already falling, see? It's rude to race it down," she draws a line down like István did, smack. Another. "And it's just mean to help it along, obscure its grand -- you know -- story. Do it like so."
Like so: Lux places the tip and the side of her brush (and the brush is fine, the hairs silkish; see how they catch the light and curve it? See all the shades within?) against the paper, holding it at an angle, and draws it across in a straight line.
Dry paper, he has to imagine all that. She hasn't brought him a dish of water yet. No using paint yet.
Prompting: "If you are this troubador - ?"
IstvánIt isn't at all possible for him to love her more strongly than he does now but that could be his own tethering misunderstanding of how love works. As if he needed blood to love her. As if his love for her won't persist even after the bond wears off. If she were to die tonight and leave him adrift that would not absolve him of the mess he's made. It would not be as waking from a dream.
Yet Lux alludes to physics as she tells him how he can and cannot control the brush and he feels so strong for her that István could derail their lesson as he has derailed so many other lessons. His eyes are on her jaw and the lines of her throat and his fingers itch to trace them.
But he turns back to his paper and squints down at it and attempts to replicate her brush strokes as he answers her.
"If I am this troubadour, this makes you what? The audience? Or are you the... what it is called, the parchment the troubadours did read from. With the notes and the what-not."
István[dex + celerity!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 5) ( fail )
LuxMaybe István should have been paying more attention to her fingers and the brush they hold.
He draws his brush across the paper, squinting, and it is a disaster. How can a disaster come from a dry brush and dry paper? He isn't so strong he'd press too hard and break the thing, but perhaps too much care and vigor combine to send the brush catching on the side of the paper and the tape, then flinging up into his face. Does István attempt to grab it again? Is that his natural impulse? This just beats the brush into Lux's leg.
Lux covers her face with both hands. Her shoulders are still. A beat. Another beat. Her voice is muffled. "I do enjoy," a beat, and she lets her hands drop, picks up the brush if he hadn't yet to hand it back to him. See how delicately she holds it; how deft? A sword, sure. A knife. A stiletto, something to stitch somebody's life out into death. I do enjoy - "being written upon. But no, it makes me nothing at all; your troubador swagger has nothing to do with my troubador swagger. Or does it? Maybe I will be your parchment, darling."
"Try again."
István"If this brush did have paint on it you would have been my parchment. Eh? Did I not tell you I would be a terrible student?"
Good sport that he is he sounds as if he could laugh at his own ineptitude. He readjusts his grip on the brush once the thing no longer bounces around the bench and the bodies upon the bench. At least he knows now that she was not lying about the thing not being within his control. It isn't within anything's control. Never again will he claim inanimate objects cannot boast sentience. This one is possessed.
"I did not command it to dance so, and yet..."
He tries again slower this time.
Lux"You did, but I only believe you half the time," Lux tells István, watching his next try carefully. There are so many things to notice. The shadow of his hand. Where it looks like he is holding too firmly, where it looks like he is holding not firmly enough. Where one little stray hair from the brush is out of alignment with the rest. The sussuration as it moves on the paper. Watercolor paper is pitted, not smooth at all.
István"This is perhaps twice so much as one should believe the things a warlock says, my rose."
Must be time for a paradox. If she believes what he's telling her then what he's saying is true in which case he's just invalidated his own statement by saying something true. He goes so slow that if he were to have paint on his brush it would form a puddle on the paper.
"When you do paint, what is it that you think of?"
LuxThis is one of those moments when Lux might flush, were she alive still; might blush, if she'd put the requisite effort into seeming alive, moving blood beneath the surface consciously; she doesn't. Her gaze cuts from his hand to his head. Lux is still standing, so she is looking down at him; it's a different angle, cheekbones and lashes and eyebrows, forehead and his carefully combed part. He's going so slow his hand hasn't moved much when her gaze returns to it.
"What can I say," she says. "I got into the habit. Besides, I barely believe you're a real warlock. Go on, guess why."
"Try again, but more quickly. Not quickly," hasty, those two words -- like they'd grab him before he fell over an edge, or flung the brush at her again. "But more quickly. What do I think of when I paint?" Because though she hadn't responded to that immediately, she was going to circle back. "Hmm."
She leaves the side of the pine bench now. Even if he doesn't look, he can feel her go -- can't he? There's an absence. Lux instead goes behind one of those chalkboards-on-wheels. Turns a faucet on. Water hits metal, splashing; then it gets caught in something plastic.
"Why do you ask; don't know what to do with your mind?"
She kills the sound.
István[-1BP
WP: activate Animate the Unmoving]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 5, 5, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
István[Roll requires the expenditure of WP if he gets fewer than 4 successes. DDDDDDROP!]
IstvánPerhaps it occurs to him then that he hasn't done anything around her that would prove he isn't just a Malkavian who in his madness derives a good amount of amusement from lying his way through his nights. He might just know so much about the usurpers that he has absorbed their history and their paranoias into his demeanor. It isn't as if he's worn a robe to greet her. He hasn't done anything with her blood that would cause her skin to crawl.
René could tell her about the time he watched István drain a Gangrel neonate from across the room. How once the Gangrel was fallen he drove a stake into its chest and removed the thing's head from its body and dragged it outside for the sun to take the pieces. But René would only tell her this if she commanded him to do so.
Tonight René is at work and not being accosted. This hasn't happened yet. He hasn't forgotten what István is capable of but he loves him and does not dwell on it. It was a long time ago.
Anyway: István is bored or just showing off. As Lux gets up from the bench he continues to make purposeful practice at holding and wielding the brush but once her back is to him he decides that's not challenging enough and takes his hand off of the brush.
"I receive no letters from you," he says while the water runs, "now that we do live in the same city. Maybe I do miss hearing your thoughts, my starlight. Hmm?"
When she turns around he's got his hands knit between his thighs again and the watercolor brush is looping quick-but-not-too-quick patterns across the uneven paper.
Lux[Hmm. Self control not to be all *startle jump*]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )
Lux"I am writing you a letter," she tells him. "A response to your last. Do you want -- "
He's playing around. Lux is holding a little plastic dish of water when she comes back around that chalkboard and sees István sitting, at his ease, hands against pine and laced together, paintbrush playing at being a broom from Fantasia, and she is startled.
The surprise sluices through her, toe to tip, but she is also far too self-possessed to spill the little dish of water, and though she stops dead for a second, she doesn't stay dead-still and motionless.
Lux places the little water dish on the pine bench between István's laced-together-hands and the masonite board, where it fits into the groove, and she cuts him another look, side-long and dark and absorbant. Can't he see what he looks like to her? Perhaps he can't. Perhaps he only sees what she looks like to him.
"All right, fine, neat trick, you can be a little more real -- but only a little more! Because," she says, "little fox, can't your invisible hands do it right? Not like - " and she sketches a loop " - but like - " and see, diligence. Her mouth begins to curve, but no smile yet.
István[-1BP
WP: let's make the case do shit too]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 5, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
István[Dropping another WP]
IstvánIt isn't an invisible hand but the brush itself that moves. Her comment threatens to cut a grin into his lips but the Tremere is not impressed with himself and he wasn't aiming to impress her either. This trick is a terrifying thing when he wields it the way he knows he can wield it. It is no dire omen to watch a paintbrush dance across paper but if it were a stake or a length of rope. A canister of gasoline and a match. She has no idea how many objects he can control at once.
Perhaps he looks like a villain to her. An amateur villain. One who is not so assured of his power that he doesn't need to flex to remind himself and her of what he is capable. Not impressed with himself but more amused with how she startles and how she critiques the little brush's technique.
"You do hear how she speaks to me?" he asks the brush. Keeps his hands together like to prove it isn't an illusion when the lid of the case yawns open and the brush begins to imitate her strokes from earlier. "Insulting both of us so." The palette jumps out of the case and sits still. He isn't looking at what he's doing but rather at the Toreador. Not even gauging her reaction but picking up the conversation where they left off as the first tube of paint stands from the case and unscrews its own cap.
"If you do write to me a letter as response, this means you will not tell me your thoughts when I do see you, now?" He clucks his tongue the way he does when he's feigning disappointment. "This answer is one I am interested to hear, darling, even if I cannot give to you my own . How can I tell you what it is I do think of when I do paint when I do not paint, as a habit so?"
The blue tube returns to the case before the yellow tube lifts to follow its steps. Red comes next. Then white. He leaves two wells empty in case he needs to mix. At least he understands the concept of a color wheel.
LuxHe may not be guaging her reaction, but it is difficult to miss it. The creature is still in a state of startlement; it lives under her skin, immanent, vibrant, and she is lucent occasionally - the shadows never flee, but adore the shape she makes, compell suggestion from the way her lips part and her wide eyes fix (fascinate[d]) and her pupils dilate and her shoulders still and her throat works when she swallows a word. Lux can be so sharp; she is, after all, beauty as a weapon -- and she cuts without meaning to.
He has distracted her and it takes a second for her to reply. When she does:
"You!" Beat. "You're getting ahead of yourself," and she, precise, pulls the palette off of that other bench, leaning across István to do so, and puts it far, far, far from him. "First let's see how you do with water. Color is a privilege, baby, and you're not earning it."
Beat. She is, side-long, staring at the paintbrush.
IstvánSo she reprimands him and she takes away the palette. As if he could not just coax the thing back to him and continue on with the mixing of paint.
But he could not. He cannot. Not now that she has laid down such a condition as he must earn the privilege of adding color to his water. He has not proven he can handle the brush with his own hand. Magic commands the thing now and that is a trickier territory if one hopes to lay down lines to define responsibility.
For all her sharpness Lux can see no sign of how he makes the things move other than that he has willed them to move and so they did move. He cannot will her to move without commanding her to and even then she is stronger than he is and he has conceded in the past that it takes a combination of his own strength and some amount of luck to force her to act.
The case closes itself that the tubes might remain inside until a hand removes them and István stands. He takes up the brush in his own hand and its dancing ceases. Once he's stood he leans over and presses his lips to one delicate cheek. If she submits to it Lux can feel contrition in the kiss.
Whether she does or does not submit István sits himself back down a moment later and rests the bristles above the face of the water so light they pick up only a few drops of wet.
"Gravity," he says as he lifts the brush again. "Command that which does not wish to be commanded. I am ahead of no one."
LuxThey stop! When the case closes itself, Lux stares at it. When István takes the brush up again, Lux stares at his hand, and then flicks her glance up to his eyes. Up, because he stands. Lux does not allow him to kiss her cheek at this time, but stops him with a sharp gesture -- though when did sharp gestures ever stop István? Perhaps she stops him with a look, or touches the ridge of his hip to still him and stay him.
"Very good. Now - "
Once he is seated again and has drawn the brush through water. Lux doesn't stay standing either, but crouches again between this bench and that bench, although instead of facing István so she can look to the side and see his progress on the page, she is facing the page and there is a bare half-inch between his knee and her arm.
"What answer is the one you are interested in hearing, ván? A preview of my response to your last letter, or what it is I think about when I am painting."
Both of her hands have come together, the paintbrush she was using earlier to indicate how to hold one properly tucked rakishly behind an ear, and she rests her elbows on her knees and her chin on her clasped hands and looks from István's brush to his face to his brush again.
István[dex + crafts: I PAINT SO GOOD]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 7, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
IstvánMy dearest Viol,
Though I am certain it will come as no surprise to you, I feel nevertheless compelled to confess that I almost did not write to you. I thought, fool that I am, that my affection and esteem for you would be clear by now. Time is not kind to the memory, and I had forgotten how one cannot know one is loved unless one has the words.
Is how he began his own letter.
We can and ought not deny what we are but darling, when I am with you, the night is no mere idle thing. Before I came to Denver, when I would awaken, it was with the hope I would learn something I did not know before, and my hopes extended no further. Each night I am with you, I feel something I have not felt, if not before, then not for a very long time.
Sharp gestures stop István now. She does not have to push him back from her to get him to abandon the kiss. The attempt was not part of a game as was his plucking at her sash the night whiled away at the Brown Palace the objective of such a game being to see how many times she will deflect him before rebuking with renewed strength. This time she does not have to dangle a knife over his eye to test his trust in her.
Lux stops him and he sits and begins to paint with water. Her eyes move between the brush and his face and the brush. He can feel her watching him and her question makes him smile a smile that portends a laugh but the laugh never comes.
Forty years and a thousand miles passed between us once and yet I feel my flattery has never had to travel further than it does now. Now that I have greeted you again, sat with you again, met you in light places and dark places and light places made dark, I cannot content myself with laying flowers upon you. You are not a thing I covet; you are not a thing at all. Think me a player if you wish to think this a game, but that does not change the truth - that I am too far gone to take pleasure in games. Would that I were truly mad that I might have no awareness of my madness and thus find pleasure in it. I am as that blessed-cursed being in your constellation scenario.
"Why I should wish to know the contents of the letter before you do send the letter?" he asks. Voice metal-bright the way it gets when she has riled him though he is not riled tonight. Bewildered perhaps and delighting in the bewilderment. Under her gaze his brushstroke is light. A shape begins to appear straight lines forming what will be a night-blind scientist's interpretation of a tree. "That is the point of the letter, for to keep some things secret until the one who does read the thing is alone. Eh? What if I did say to you before I did send the letter what it was I did intend to write? You would laugh, so. Your thoughts, eh? The ones you have when you do paint, they have nothing to do with what I did write, and they interest me so. Tell me."
Lux[Speaking of letters, perhaps Lux hasn't set her response yet because it is not perfect. Int + Exp.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
Lux[Perc + Exp. -2 auspex.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN4 (1, 5, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 4 )
Lux[NOT GOOD ENOUGH. *rewrite* is the name of that song.]
LuxThe water on paper (and see how the paper reacts, how it begins to curve, how it fills - this is why water-color paper is taped down at the edges or clamped down somehow, kept in place and straight as possible) begins to take the shape of a night-blind scientist's interpretation of a tree. Lux can see it take shape, the way light scuds across the wetness.
"Not like that," she tells him, again. The palette with the colors he -- because she believes in invisible hands, in Warlock-witchery, not in inanimate objects moving without a will to coax them into motion; what does she know? Nothing -- squeezed out is something she takes up. Dips her own brush into water, quick, then mixes the yellow and the blue. There are a number of different yellows and blues. He chose cadmium yellow and ultramarine light.
After she has mixed them for all of half-a-second, she dips her paint-wet brush back in the water -- watch it cloud with colour. Dripping, she puts her brush to his paper, and draws the colour across the page in a straight line. It does fall toward gravity; the point of her brush sluices a bead to one end. She catches that bead, then sluices it in the other direction. More water on her brush, a little dab of paint, and she does the same thing, not bothering to make the gradations of colour even, although they more or less are. She is not trying to pull a haunted atmosphere from the colour; just to show István what she wants from him.
Not a tree. She just wants to see that he can do a wash.
"I could make my answer difficult," Lux tells him. "A shield, you know, a deflection; you are easy to deflect," she thinks he is, at least: or maybe she's trying to rile him. "Ask you, why, István, mon petit renard, flower of my regard, fizz in my soda pop, string in my yo-yo -- no, not that one. I could say to you, why István! Darling! What do you think when you work on an equation? When you conduct a scientific experiment?"
"I imagine you would tell me that you think only of the numbers, troubador that you are, or perhaps of what might yet be discovered. Perhaps you'd tell me it is a different matter, huh?"
"And maybe it is. When I paint," she stops making a wash across the paper, hands István her paint-wet brush so that he can try with color, "I think about heaps of things. All different. You should rather ask why I think what I think when I paint. What purpose thought has! That's more fun to answer."
IstvánAnything she wants from him she has to show him and maybe that would be a consolation to anyone else that the warlock cannot intrude upon her thoughts with so much ease as he gives movement to a paintbrush but they are both practitioners of the same gift. As she learns to open up her senses so does he. Sensory awareness lends itself to precognition and telepathic projection.
But István cannot read auras yet. He cannot hear others' thoughts. Hers are safe from him so long as she keeps the words from him.
Painting is not at all like sketching or drawing. István is no slouch at sketching but he does not know how to do a wash. He watches her intent as she gives green to the paper and he listens as she deflects him. A tic of an almost-smile as she tells him how easy it is to deflect him.
He takes the brush from her and sets down his own and mimics the stroke. Trying for a gradient though she did not ask this of him. Negative space. István understands the concept of negative space.
"Randomness," he says. Speaking of deflections he does not touch anything she's said at all but rather appears to dance away to another topic. "This does have a place in art so, or no?"
Lux"What do you think?" Lux holds the little tin pallette for him to get more paint from if he wishes; holds it balanced on her fingertips, cups her chin in her other hand. Oh no, István -- a test!
IstvánHe does wish. István paints green lines until the bristles go dry enough to leave the green as a ghost and then he reaches to dab the paint. Where's the water. He just watched her do this.
"How I am to think so if I do not know?" He pauses in his preparation of another brushful of paint and turns towards her. Fond and playing at frustration but not frustrated at all. Beside her sits a creature who can argue with her even in the midst of profound bodily distraction. This is nothing. "I think I am to count the times you do not answer what I ask of you. The number is so high by now I have to start from zero. Only tonight, so as not to invent a new number. I think you punish me. I think art cannot be random because the artist is not random. Eh?"
Dab dab dab. He lets the green water pool on the paper before guiding the brush in a line.
"I think the artist can paint without conscious effort but this is not the same as randomness. I think you did never think of this and this is why you deflect." A beat. "I think art and science did keep each other company so many centuries and yet art does feel a threat, when science is near. Eh?"
Rile, rile.
Lux[Hey. I can read auras. I wonder what István's looks like. Perception + Empathy. Diff 8!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN8 (1, 3, 8, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
IstvánOf course his aura is pale. He has been dead so long but this is not the weak flickering aura of a ghost. This much she knew for she knows the way his blood tastes and knows she can take so much from him that it would kill a human and only leave him hungering stronger than on a typical night.
No black veins course through it. István has never drained another to the dregs and taken their soul along with their blood. In this he is clean but he is hardly innocent. Few of them are.
Even pale as it is she can read the character and hue of the blues that make up his aura. They are not dark. They are as the gradients she has not yet taught him to draw out of the paints blue like his eyes are blue very light in some lights and oceanic in others but it is only the blue that comes from light. No sign of darkness in him. No sign of the green he claimed was his favorite color tonight. István is calm and woven through the calm is the love that has him captive to her.
Vermilion is a color he could not recognize or name as being vermilion. In his native tongue it's pronounced élénkpiros and in chemistry it comes from mercury sulfide. This has wrapped itself around his calm and his love. István is happy right now.
Lux[Hey Lux. Lux. Is it too pretty? Self Control.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
Lux[Lux lies. -1 diff for blood.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 3, 4, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )
LuxThe creature crouched beside István's left knee is not a creature in control of all her impulses. But she is in command of herself more often than she is not. Lux watches him paint and then she closes her eyes and when she has lifted her lashes (slow, sweet) she has turned her eyes away from it. She looks up at István when he turns towards her and if his knee moves a fraction it still does not touch her, because she adjusts so that spare half-inch of space remains; her eyes are shadowed, but he can see the moment laughter flicks in them, light on a knife's edge dancing, light in a diamond 'capt -- submerge that radiance in more shadow. Her mouth quirks but the laughter remains a visual thing, the suggestion of sound in her throat and a firming of her pale-tonight mouth but nothing else yet.
The pressure of her gaze changes, behind that laughter. The creature watches István and she watches him so rapt that she can see him re-fashioned into a moon -- see his halo gleaming around him, pale but lovely, and if she did breathe she would stop in order to preserve the totality of her attention. She could be absorbed by it; the way those colors shift; the way they star him, saint him up.
Lux wishes to play cool and collected and she is cool and collected, but there's also a sharpness to how quick she has straightened; she is staring, but perhaps he won't notice that there's anything unusual about how she stares. She does like to gaze, ardent and playing at devotion.
"You're presuming," she tells István, "that art requires an artist." The laughter is in her voice; chases away some hushed Cathedral quality, still intent. "I think that's why you like science better. Because you don't think science needs a scientist."
István[perhaps he won't notice my ass no rerolls because that wasn't an impeccable lie -1 diff because auspex]
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
IstvánAnd he is not so wrapped up in what he's doing with the brush and the paint that he cannot notice her grown rapt by him though István cannot glean what about him has her rapt like this. Neither his wit nor his looks have stricken her silent yet. He is neither the wittiness nor the most handsome creature she has met recently.
His painting is rudimentary but with time and practice he could make something beautiful.
István notices. The stillness come over her has his brush standing still also and he looks over at her once and brief before looking back again. A double-take. Curious before she casts the awe from her voice and then he looks back to his lines.
"Art and science do both need minds to be art and science, my love," he says. "Without the artist and the scientist all we do have is nature. Eh? And nature is wild and beautiful and has no need for the painting and the physics and the whatever-else we do make of it. Art and science, they are both born of observing. Interpreting, eh? Organizing, all of this. They are not so different. You're presuming."
So there.
Lux[Self Control, again. Master your impulses, Lux.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 9) ( success x 1 )
Lux"I? Presume?"
Lux wants something, but she does not take it. Wanting is not enough for her. She is not a child. She is not a childe. Wanting whetts her and gives her appetite. Lux wants something, but she does not take it. What Lux does is straighten and, if István is not planted at the rear-end of his bench, sits (side-saddle) behind him, and, if István is planted at the rear-end of his bench, leans over him, a hand on his shoulder, the other hand on his left wrist and then over his hand, because she is going to guide him properly -- show him how to really control what he's doing.
"I have been called presumptuous by some of the brightest minds, the flickeringest tongues, and I'd hate being rude and calling them a liar, 'specially if it means you're a liar, too.
"Why shouldn't one trust in warlocks, István? Why shouldn't I?"
István"Because they lie, darling."
István has long arms but not so long that sits at the very edge of the bench and leave no room for a slim body to perch behind him. Not so long that Lux cannot reach from behind him to guide his hand. Nearness to him does eclipse his aura.
Nearness to him does nothing so dramatic as change the intensity of it but she is touching him. The orange-red of his happiness shifts to a darker more desirous crimson. It isn't anything he's aware of and it tries to obviate his calm but István is an old creature and even if he acts on whims on occasion he is not an unfettered creature. His impulses are no more his master than Lux's are hers.
That lust isn't for her body. They are leeches both. He can desire little more than her fangs now that her blood stains his veins and yet he would never ask that of her. She bit him once to learn to command others and he knows she will not bite him again.
Yet even the unbeating heart wants what it wants. He hasn't had enough time to teach it not to. His calm persists even if his aura does not paint him as a creature strong with it.
"They lie, and you may call me a liar. I am a liar. But then you will have to sit so and tell me oh but István when I did say you presume art has need of an artist I did not mean it, so, it was only words, you say untrue things all of the time, this does prove nothing."
LuxLet's tell the truth: István's respectful silence, that he does not ask her to drink of him -- it has troubled Lux since the second time he sank his fangs into her arm and took her blood. He knows it has bothered her. If he cares that she is troubled, he has done an excellent job getting past that.
Love [Wanting] is selfish, huh?
Let's not dwell. Lux guides his hand and adjusts the way his thumb rests on the paintbrush and in fact pulls the paintbrush from his grasp completely, then closes his fingers on it in a way very similar to how they were already closed. The difference is minute, but it is a difference. Perfectionist. Be perfect.
"Is that the only reason? Liar's hearts. Liar's minds. Liar's eyes and liar's fingers," and on that word, Lux takes her hand from István's; gives him back control, She is still rapt. Behind him, she runs her hand through his aura and watches it shadow and dapple and disappear where her fingers pass. There is space between: a bare breath of space; it is where warmth would emanate, had István any warmth to share. Had Lux.
Doesn't.
"I feel for the ones who've come to Denver, you know." He doesn't. She's telling him; or maybe she's just playing coy, telling him she feels for him. "And, my little fox," there is dusk in her voice, "I meant exactly what I said, but I don't shrink from being proven wrong. When I am wrong," he can hear the grin.
IstvánHe knows it bothers her and that she is troubled. They have discussed this although at no greater depth and length than they discuss any of the matters which trouble her. Nothing to be done for it and he's said as much. If she wants to drink from him he would allow it and gladly but he is not going to ask her to.
Call it a form of self-delusion. So long as he thinks she only asked to drink of him to learn a discipline then the nature of the experiment persists unadulterated. She is a control.
When he smiles Lux can almost hear it. That imperceptible but necessary adjustment to his grip on the brush is endearing. He would do the same thing if he were to teach her to use a microscope. No no not like that.
Her hand off his and he moves on to making red lines. A loud blush that fades away to pale as he listens to Lux.
"You are wrong so often," he says. Amusement stains his voice. "If you were to shrink each time, you would stand no higher than this bench."
LuxLux rests her chin on his left shoulder and slips a cold arm around his ribs. Her lashes flicker in an unchecked expression of surprise and her arm tightens for an instant, because that pale and luminous crown of stained light around him is seen - was seen, because she ceases to look at it once her arm has slipped around and found a place it likes to be - so clearly that it is a shock not to feel it too.
"Mm."
She is not distracted. "More water on the brush, darling."
"So is that the only reason? Lying?"
IstvánAs time passes the longing that came curling up out of the pit of him dissipates and the happiness that had been there before its invasion retakes its place around his calm. With her at his back he ought to at least feel some unease. Some mistrust. This is how stakes find their way into a body's chest. Easier to stab someone from behind than to come at them from the front.
But he doesn't. He trusts her. If Lux were to ask István where he would rather be if he could be anywhere else in the universe right now his aura tells her what he would say. He is content right where he is thank you very much. Lover's arm around his ribs and chin on his shoulder. Even if she is not bound to him he at least feels as if she loves him.
This is why he doesn't ask it of her.
More water on the brush. He glances quick with the scantest of movements of his head and wets the bristles before continuing his lines.
"The lying," he says, "and the not being so harmless as they do appear, and the, how you say, the concern with affairs of which the rest of the Tower knows nothing. And yet the rest of the Tower, they do meddle sometimes. It makes a mess, darling. Warlocks, they are shy so. I am sorry to be the one to be telling you this, but you have attracted the attention of such a creature. Eh? Very bad idea. You will never be rid of him."
Lux[Time for István Accent Impressions. Manip + Perf today. I can't remember what I rolled before.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Lux"Oh, really." He can feel her throat vibrate with a laugh that goes unvoiced. Lux thickens her voice so it sticks to the roof of her mouth and gets in her teeth; until it's clotted honey, an impression of his difficult to understand Hungarian accent.
"Ah, but my darling, we only have one absolute. Eh? Everything does end, so. If I did want to be rid of him so, I would be rid. He is an absolute no more than are the stars in the sky which are subject to fusion and their dying. They do last only so long, huh? I mean, Eh?"
"Try," her voice has dropped back to her own, no more pretending, "to use your brush so that I cannot see that you have been making lines back and forth back and forth. You're almost out of white."
Beat. Her chin digs into his shoulder, sharp but not meant to hurt. Still: sharp. "Tell me about meddling and messes."
IstvánWhen he laughs it rumbles high up in his chest that she can feel it through his shoulder blades. A low sound without far to travel. Her mockery does not strike at him any more than her bones do.
Such vague instructions. He lifts his brush away from the paper and tilts his head like a canine befuddled by a noise. Might as well start making a mess instead of just lines back and forth. He rinses his brush and picks up yellow and diverts himself putting new color onto the lines one droplet at a time.
"What there is to say of meddling and messes that I did not already say?" he asks. Mild. Then: "Aaah, you are looking for more secrets!"
Lux[Oh my god, what are you doing, not like that. Self Control, Mz. Perfectionist Demeanor When It Comes To Art.]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )
LuxIf Lux were breathing, her breath would be caught. He would feel her ribs still, because she is draped at his back now. He doesn't feel that. He does feel an insinuation of [diamond-hard, intractable] something whisper through her muscles when he jabs the brush into the yellow and then starts to drop the color one bead at a time onto the red and the green he's already put on. Watch the yellow bleed into the other paint, carried (chaotic system, false) by the dampness here and there, changing the colors, all dependent on interaction of paper and water and paint where-ever he does drop the brush.
"Who says? You?"
István"Who does say what?"
He isn't cute. Maybe he thinks he is. Playing at ignorance when they both know he is the opposite of ignorance. But Lux doesn't believe in beauty having an opposite so perhaps she doesn't believe in the opposite of ignorance either.
"No, darling. I am making the speculation."
LuxHer eyes are fixed on his paper, intent, avid. But her attention belongs to István right now, not the paper. Her arm's around him; she lets it loosen and curls a finger around one suspender strap.
"Your speculation runs along incorrect lines; they're squiggles. Blobs. Blotches! Now," incorrigible is a good word. Use it often. So is shameless. "Tell me about meddling and messes. What kinda mess?"
István"Before, when I did live in Chicago, I would tell you this story but for I would have to translate into smoke, yeah? To keep other eyes from the story. This thing did not concern me but it does concern another of my clan."
Hmm. His paper is drenched. He considers asking for a fresh piece of paper and she can hear the consideration in the silence but in the end he keeps adding celestial bodies to a green sky.
"The name of the witch is Cybele. As old as I, the childe of an elder, with childer of her own, very much feared by the usurpers of Chicago for the breadth of what she did know. I do not appeal to you to try and understand how the clan does think, my love, but they are paranoid. The magic they practice, it uses the blood. You know this. Very good reason for paranoia. Warlocks on the side of the Sword, they are more dangerous than the ones who stay in the Tower."
He is not a natural storyteller. He doesn't understand things like exposition and rising action. Trapped as they are in his head in a native language or a second language or the language of his nascency his words seem as a stream of consciousness more than anything else. Listening to him speak at length is not at all the same as reading his letters.
"A fiend did take her childe one night. I believe the fiend did wish to learn of the blood magic and did believe the childe would give up so willingly. What he did give up, I don't know, but the Regent did learn of the abduction. They did never recover the ashes but from the Chantry, they could see that he was ash. This fiend did think himself sneaky, made of his own flesh the image of the childe and went out after this. He was not so bold as to walk into Elysium as if Oh hi hello nothing is wrong this is such a perfect disguise no one will suspect but when he did meet with Cybele she knew. She did boil the blood of the Tzimisce where he did stand and then she did return to her own haven with what was left after the boiling and she did find the rest of his pack with his blood. And they did die as well."
Well then.
LuxIstván would have no difficulty getting another piece of paper if he wanted. The watercolor pad is what's clipped to the masonite, taped down at the edges by the duct tape so it will not curl; peel the tape off, flip the page over or tear it out, a fresh page awaits. Lux listens as István speaks and she is still.
And silent, until it becomes clear that his tale is concluded.
Then she says, "It won't do. I mean, sure, it's interesting, a mess, but that's not the kind of mess I was asking after. You said the rest of the tower meddles sometimes in these affairs you liars busy yourselves with, you know, the ones they know nothing of, and then a mess."
"So go on. Tell me about messes."
Her eyes leave the paper and what he does with the paint on it. Her chin stays on his shoulder, but he can feel when she cants her head in order to look at his face sidelong; can feel when she rests her cheek on his shoulder instead of her chin, relieving him of the sharp indent of stubborn bone. Isn't she sweet? Isn't she a finely crafted ornament?
IstvánSo she doesn't want to hear about the gore. That appears to befuddle him further.
Her cheek on his shoulder lets him look down at her and see the top of her head. Maybe her brow if her cheek is high on his shoulder. Near enough in either case that he can see and smell her but do no more than lean his own cheek against her. She can't see what he does with the brush but she can feel his shoulder move slight as he keeps on lighting the sky.
"I am making this beautiful piece of art for you. I do not wish to talk of messes. Where I am to start with the messes? The Gargoyles, you do know of the Gargoyles? Or how now that the Assamites do join the Tower it is their sorcerers those who wish for magic approach and not the warlocks? All while the antitribu do hunt the warlocks. They were once set with a curse, after the Treaty of Tyre, you know this."
Does she know this? He doesn't know what she does and doesn't know.
"Politics bore me, my gem. Why you are so wanting to hear of messes? You are thinking you wish to meddle?"
Lux"But haven't I already meddled, István?"
István"You did meddle. You have meddled. You do meddle now, yes. Why do you want to hear of messes?"
Lux"If a mess is going to follow the meddling, I want to know what I'm in for, Isty baby; I want to know what to anticipate. Anticipation's half the fun of a thing, don't you find?"
István"I know of no messes that did come from a warlock teaching an anarch how to command others so."
If she snaps his suspenders sooner rather than later it will come as no surprise to him. The blueness of his aura has not given over to anything else. Though he banters with her as he does he does not suspect her of scheming. She has always been curious. That was part of what piqued his interest that she asked question after question. That when they spoke of stars she spoke of them as beings while he only spoke of them as bodies.
"So long as you do not betray me, and even then... you were correct in this, my starlight, this city is like one of those moving pictures, with the dead grass and the wah-wah-wah music, all of the men with the guns shooting at each other. The Chantry here is not so big. If you do betray me I do not expect much mess although I can make no promises. I don't know the Regent here so well as to say if she would melt your bones and the bones of all your friends or no but you are in no danger this night. You are no threat. Hmm?"
LuxLux lifts her chin from and instead hides her face against the back of his shoulder, laughing into it. He can't feel the flash of her teeth, can't quite feel the movement of her mouth; only the movement of the fabric of his crimson shirt. The finger curled through his suspender strap slides downward, a precise sluice, sharp knuckle a certain kind of pressure. She does not snap it. She just slides downward while she is laughing, though not so loudly that she'd interrupt him. She stills again and after István has hmmed at her she smiles against his back.
"Good. So if I meddle a little more, I've nothing to worry about!"
István"Mmmmmm..."
Protracted thoughtful noise for the sake of comedy. The longer he holds it the funnier he thinks he is but there's a balance to maintain. An uncanny valley into which he'll drop if he holds the note too long. It hums in his throat but not in his spine. Not until he speaks again can she feel the timbre of it through his body.
"No. If you meddle more I will have to bind you so you do not betray me. Little anarch with your fear of tyrants."
Lux[Wait. You are joking, aren't you István? 100% joking no grain of truth? I do not have a sense of humor about this. Perc + Emp!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
István[He both is and is not joking.]
Lux[Manip + Subt. Say... I'm not an open book, am I?]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
István[perc + subt: shit girl i forgot you've got an extra die now -1 diff auspex]
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
István[7 successes. Her lie was impeccable.]
LuxThe smile vanishes; a drop of blood into foam, dispersed. As Lux is behind him, István cannot see it. He can only guess at it because of that omen-drenched blood-Discipline he calls his favourite; or doesn't he? He calls it something good anyway. He can't hear an actual chord, as if he'd plucked one and now she is the sound of a string diminishing toward silence, but he gets a sense of it or something like it in how she presses her knuckle into his flesh - not a punishing strength, but a deviation from that downward sluice - and see how gentle she lays her hand flat across his side thereafter? Deliberately so; care-full.
Eventually takes her hand away to peel the tape from the board and the watercolor paper. There are drips and drabbles on the silver. One smears across her palm as she peels the tape up and out and the page curls too, bumpy from water. He can read into that deliberation too, and the fact that she has turned her head so her cheek is flat against his shoulderblade and she is looking elsewhere; Lux, she is beauty is war.
But what does she say? Did she say while playing with his side and then the tape?
"Oh reeealllly?" - and he knows by her voice because it's metal-dark; that is, blade catching darkness when it flicks light away; a subsumed gleam. She is hiding a spark of temper, of fury, and also of challege: go on, try it. She is hiding just how dry of amusement she is.
She is hiding these things in a world where István is not so attuned to her anyway.
"Go on. Define 'more.'"
IstvánShe isn't hiding anything from him. Even if he isn't looking at her he can feel the sharpness of her bones and the movement behind her. Stillness after the movement is done. Purpose in taking away the tape and in turning her cheek again.
István sets down the paintbrush and knits his fingers together.
"You are no threat," he says. "And I would not bind you against your will so. You know this."
Lux[Oh, do I, Mr. Liar Who Says He's A Liar? Perc + EMP.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 4 )
IstvánHe never means exactly what he says except for when he does and when he does it sounds as if he doesn't mean exactly what he says. No one could hold her own suspicion against her.
Forty years doesn't mean anything when they're talking about betrayal but István thinks it does. He trusts her. He doesn't have a choice anymore but he trusted her before they met at the Oxford Hotel the second time and drank of each other.
Maybe in another forty years this will no longer hold true. He's said this before. Just because he does not know believe her to be a threat or to be plotting to betray him doesn't mean she won't in the future. He is no clairvoyant and even the clairvoyant are wrong sometimes. They can see possibility and not absolutes and he only believes in one absolute anyway.
But he is not lying when he says he would not bind her against her will. He will never find a way to sneak his vitae into her system. He will never hold her down and force it upon her. He will never command her into piercing his wrist or his neck or any other part of him with her fangs.
That is what a creature with a sharper sense of intrigue would do. If he thought she was working in league with the Assamites or the Tzimisce he would have done this. It is no slight against her. He does not believe her to be a threat to him. This does not mean he thinks her harmless.
If she chose to she could end him. He's leaving her that choice.
She knows this.
LuxLux tears his beautiful piece of art off of the pad and sets the paper aside; maybe she lets it fall, drift heavy to the studio floor, and then she wraps her arm around his ribs again. Her skin is startlingly pale against the color of his shirt; winter cream (isn't she lovely; how well this creature Heaven wrought - brightest) against blood. Her cheek is soft still against his shoulderblade, but why shouldn't it be? He must be comfortable. He's taller than she is, even if on occasion the heels of her ridiculous shoes often make that height difference negligible. Negotiable.
"Who says I am? I just want to know what you think meddling more might be, blue eyes. You like being twisty, don't you? Like a Q or a spiral or a slinky in a nest of snakes."
Luxooc: ahem. "Who says I am? Who says I don't?" etc.
IstvánAnd he is content to sit with the fine-spun woman pressed against his back. To rest cold and still against each other her arm around his ribs that he might release his grip on his own hands and rest his left against the outside of her thigh. An entire lesson without laying his hands on her. Ignore the thwarted kiss of earlier. That was a kiss of contrition and not a kiss of seduction.
He doesn't try to kiss her now. He doesn't try anything with her now. She reads the reality of his words and finds nothing about him has changed.
"What is this slinky in the snake nest?"
Lux"You," she says, passion-pricked. Lux is cold but she doesn't think of herself as dead. Because she is living, if not alive; because she feels things, or thinks she does. He's a slinky in a snake nest.
And then, change of pitch to her voice, "I don't fear tyrants. Ván, ddidn'tcha ever think that maybe I don't mean to meddle a little more by meddling with you?"
István"Why I would need to think this?"
His hand is pacing lazy lines up and down her thigh but not probing the way he would probe if he wanted something from her. Every time he sees her she wears a different fabric. Bare legs some nights and stockings others. Jeans tonight. Laced up and tucked in like a two-legged NO TRESPASSING sign.
István doesn't know what a Slinky is. If he saw one he would declare it to be a helical spring that serves no purpose other than to demonstrate the properties of gravity to those who haven't discovered it yet. No idea of what it would be doing in a nest of snakes. This is what happens when one argues with an artist. Nonsense.
The pitch in his voice changes too. Lower like that will mean anything to her. Lower like it means he's being honest. Intimacy in nearness and he's always tried to be honest when they've cast off each others' clothes. He's the one with his sleeves rolled up now.
He takes his hand off her thigh to find the back of her neck. If she turns this way she can see the pale of his flesh and the knob of the ulnar bone. Dark blond hair on the back of his hand. No pressure in his fingers as they touch her hair.
"I do know. And the less I tell you, the less to others it looks as if you do mean to meddle. Hmm?"
Lux"Hmm?" The green-eyed creature echoes him with a lilt of mockery in it, but she is pensive (in reverie) now. Her arm stays where she has wound it. Her cheek stays where she has pressed it. He could expect her to bite him in annoyance or affection or both; she does not and her gaze is unmoving on the point it's come to rest on. Crystal, all shadow-caught and flux. One corner of her mouth curves up.
"Do you really think blindness is protection? Are you a monster under a bed or in a closet?"
István"I am a philistine," he says and he keeps on raking her hair with his fingers gentle even as she persists in her questioning, "who did come here for a lesson on coloring with water. Not this arguing of words."
That doesn't matter. They always argue.
"If you wish to continue we will have to go out for a drink, darling. Arguing with you does give me a thirst."
Lux"Oh really? How great a thirst?"
István"What is the scale one does use to measure thirst?"
Lux"Oh, let's see. I guess you could weigh past experience against desire; then again, you could probably substitute desire for past experience and weigh it against your self control, but only if you've dressed it up in comfort -- or maybe you'd just weigh that emptiness which isn't truly empty, you know, against fullness. Don't be coy, ván; how great a thirst? Let's hear it."
István"The thirst does not press me so."
Behind him as she is the Tremere cannot caress her as he has before. He isn't touching her in hopes of seducing her anyway. He's content just to sit in her presence she leaned against him and touch her hair.
"'Not great,' is how great."
Lux"Then why," she says, "would we need to go out for a drink at all? I thought you'd hung your hat on the hope of a fourth drink; am I misremembering?"
He's got nothing to go on but the sound of her voice and the feel of her arm wrapped around his ribs (steady, staying).
IstvánNo laughter now but she can hear humor in his voice all the same.
"You are not."
Only one arm is hooked around him now. He seeks the other hand now. Hardly any flesh visible in the outfit she's chosen tonight but he can find a pulse point even with the sleeves so long as they are.
"But it is not a 'we,' is it, darling."
Lux"Oh." Her voice wasn't loud; it was pitched as appropriate to an intimate conversation conducted in an empty studio in the dead of night. There's a shadow in it of laughter that could've been if only the stars had been a little more aligned; if only, "But the only thirst I have is for argument and answers, little fox. You know I like to hear what you think." Lux keeps her other hand away; he can seek it all he likes. He can find her hip and he can find the bench; he can find her shoulder and go from there, get tangled up in her hair. "D'you really think blindness is protection?"
Lux[Actually. +4]
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (6) ( success x 1 )
IstvánIn the end he settles on her knee. A hand in her hair and a hand on her knee. This scene is never going to end.
"No," he says. "Not blindness. I did say something to make you think this is what I mean. What was it?"
LuxThey could be immortal if the cards fall just so. What are endings? They're nothing Lux concerns herself with- Lux who shifts (restless) when his hand finds her knee again. Both her knees are together, demure, because Lux isn't astride the bench as István is.
"The less you tell me, the less to others it looks, etcetera. Isn't it what you mean? That it's better to be ignorant; that it's safer if you're going to get your hands dirty not to know what might be lurking in the filth?"
István"Ah, so now you call my people filth, and you wonder why I wish to keep you ignorant."
He thinks he's so funny.
Lux"Afraid I'll think of worse names?" she says, and then after a beat, nudges him. The nudge is more of a press -- a gentle push, her weight negligible the force. She lifts her cheek from his shoulderblade; what's his hand doing in her hair? He can get tangled in it; she doesn't put her chin on his shoulder again, reaches between his side and arm with the hand that is not cold against him for the watercolor brush. Dips it, neatly, precisely, into the color-clouded water.
IstvánOnce she'd sworn she would never use her not-yet-born skill in commanding others to force one of their own to move and he had told her not to promise such a thing. That nudge sways him with the ease her words would sway him if she chose to be a tyrant but he knows she does not want to be a tyrant without Lux telling him so.
She lifts her cheek from the blade of his shoulder and his fingers find their way out of the forest of her hair. He leaves a hand on her knee and the other forearm drapes itself across his thigh and he flicks a glance towards the dipping of the brush into the water.
As he answers though he's looking at her so much as he can.
"Fire," he says, "and sunlight, and Fiends. I fear these things. Not your names."
LuxLux laughs at him. "Why? Douceur de mon coeur, I could come up with such names. Your tongue would run away down your throat out of fear it might be taught to repeat these names. Why the Fiends, of all things? Is it because their colloquial name is so terrorishy?"
Terrorishy is not a word so it is not strictly fair to use it, but Lux is a creature of insouciant slang. The brush hovers over the palate, then over the sliver of wooden bench not taken by palate and water-dish and István himself, and then she straightens even further. Does not give off warmth, but still her nearness can be a felt thing (magnetism; impulse), and when the nearness becomes less so, that can be felt too. She taps István's side; his ribs.
Up, up, get up. Tap tap. She wants to sit where he is sitting.
IstvánTheir kind exude no warmth not born of blood or blessing. The coolness of her flesh does not repel him. It never has and if ever was a time that it would that time passed before she was even born. He is older than she is. Was perhaps older than she was at the time of his Embrace but they don't talk about the past. It doesn't interest him.
He doesn't know if he is a creature who prefers to look forward or if his near-sightedness applies to the present moment also. He doesn't think about these things.
When she taps his ribs he lifts his brows. Hmm? unspoken. He can't remember the last time anyone has tapped him to get him to move. He takes his hand off her knee to take hold of her wrist.
Lux"What are you doing?" The Toreador likes to be amused. Lux: is frivolous, isn't she? An ornamental, frivolous creature: lovely as a matter of course, vibrant because she is lively even if she is not 'alive' according to certain definitions of the word, and what need for more, no need for anything else (for)ever. Sure. Stars are like that too, aren't they: from the ground they mean nothing. They're just pretty things in the sky, take 'em or leave 'em.
He can feel the tendons in her wrist flex against his palm; tap tap, convert it to pluck pluck of his shirt. Her voice is amused.
IstvánShe knows how István feels about stars. Even when they were nothing more than ornaments to the rest of the room he thought of them as constellations. Their meaning wasn't lost on him. If she had ever asked him what Perseus and Andromeda meant he could have told her. The Greeks and their mythologies are not foreign to him. He never would have likened her to Andromeda nor himself to Perseus.
What is he doing. She plucks at his shirt and he shifts on the bench so his shoulders are turned and not just his neck. He can look at her more fully this way. With the lifting of his eyebrows and the tension around his lips Lux can tell he too is amused.
"What am I doing?" he asks. This parroting is part of the immersion process of mastering a language. Arguing has its place and English has its share of irregular verbs. He could kiss her now but she rebuked him once tonight. "I am sitting, and you are making a drum of my ribcage."
Lux"No," precise. "I," she mimics his tone, "would have you for a cello, darling, remember?" - and, as if to illustrate this point, Lux: well. Lux is seated behind István. Her legs are (were) on the left side of the bench; she squirms the right one across his turned-back-side and settles so now heis between her legs. Markable enough: that she can do this with a measure of elegance; thoughtlessly fluid. "But I can be explicit: Get up! Switch with me."
IstvánWere not for but he wants nothing that she does not want he would sit like this until the sun became a threat. More than a century alone but for the company of a ghoul and he hasn't the eloquence to tell her what it is to have her make a cello of him. A comfort. What comfort one can take from another undead creature he takes from her and she can feel István sit heavy as a cello between her knees before she bids him get up and switch.
Okay. Fine. His head is turns as if he means to kiss her but he does not kiss her. He lets the command rest a beat and then he smothers a smile and says, "I remember, yes." Rises graceless from the bench. Has to hold his balance with a set of fingertips between his knees and he slides one knee around the edge of the bench instead of swinging a foot overtop.
Taller than her as he is he cannot sit against her back as she did against his. István traipses his fingertips along the curtain of her hair to bare her neck before he switches with her. Once she's where she wants to be he sits behind her. Not sidesaddle as she was but knees akimbo. He slides an arm around her waist instead of her ribs. Rests his chin on her shoulder rather than a cheek on her shoulder.
There.
LuxWhile István clumsily (relatively) gets up, Lux chooses to open the box of paints and pluck out a charcoal pencil instead, pauses once she has done so. Isn't she an invitation? Lux cants her head when his fingers traipse across her hair to bare her neck. Helping, see. Her eyes flash up at him, side-long, lucent: isn't she an invitation?
But he's up; let the pause last a beat. Then she moves forward; he has space behind her and she has a paintbrush and a charcoal pencil, and means to use them both. As he slides an arm around her waist (and he can feel, through the blouse of buttons and buttons, that beneath it she is wearing something else, something with less give, stiffened, can feel the suggestion of laces under the fabric too, une corset de Christian Lecroix or Jean-Paul Gaulthier), she sketches something quickly; burns blood, even, burns it blood like it's a candle's wick, to sketch just so quickly, move on to the painting portion of this demonstration.
Chin on her shoulder; she doesn't turn to look at him, quite, although she does take an breath. Luxury.
"Do you still want to know," pause, she blurs some of the lines, "what I think of when I paint?"
[Oh, yeah. -1 BP (total waste) to extend this sketch-roll in one turn. Here's the sketch-roll -1 die.]
Dice: 9 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 7, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 )
Lux[And here is the unnecessary extension, jesus.]
Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
IstvánIt would be a lie to say that István is the sort of guest who accepts an invitation without responding s'il vous plaît. Once she invited him and on another time he invited himself. Her arm that time. A strange place to bite a person but the body doesn't care where the fangs well up blood. A Kiss brings pleasure wherever it lands.
She bid him bite her somewhere new last time. He hasn't bitten her again.
As he settles in behind her his fingertips continue their traipse strange with their callouses in spite of his academic leanings in life. One hand free still even after he's settled and he lets it come to rest on Lux's thigh. Chin on her shoulder still and he can feel her chest expand against his as she inhales. She can feel the smoothness of his skin as he rests his face against the side of her neck.
A question begets a nod.
His fingers want to bare whatever it is that gives her shirt this texture but his arm stays about her waist for now. István kisses what of her neck he can find beneath the collar and his eyes are on the paper but she has no notion of where he looks so close as they are.
"Mm hmm," he says. The hum of it in his throat echoed in her spine.
LuxLux is too deft and too quick and too sure of her hand for the sketch to be a messy thing, to be something she attacks from all sides. Her hand is supernaturally quick, it is true, but István has wit enough to see if he watches how she starts at the upper left-hand corner of the paper, lightest of lines, darkens a shape lots of lines condensed becoming a fox a rakish fox no a slender fox a fox with a certain je n'est ce quois not a rake at all but a watchful unblinking intentness an expression anyway the point is it is a recognizable fox holding some doohickey telescope-looking thing (less time spent on that than getting the arrogant tilt of the fox's head just right, giving it spectacles worn low on its snout), the lines are fine as they sweep his tail down hiding one of his feet and he's wearing a coat and looks rather sneaky argumentative and from the crook of the arm holding the telescope or whatever it is happens there is a net and in the net happens there are little somethings represented as two quick dots or sparks and happens that she has sketched a bare window with three lines that are barely on the paper and happens that there is a toad looking with an air of offended surprise at the fox and happens also that it seems to be about to leap away and the fox is pointing a wand at it and happens also
that Lux sets the pencil down and her fingertips and her knuckles gleam with the hematite dull glow of charcoal dust and then she takes up the brush and dips it again in water and mixes some of the red -- no; takes a couple of colours from the case and squeezes them on the palate which is balanced rather precariously and then begins to mix a color that seems to be a pale pale pale pale rose pink and this she washes the entire thing in almost sloppily, like staining rose petals, see, and
well, can't he just feel a tremor insinuate itself up the creature's spine when he Mm hmms or his mouth finds bare skin above her collar (not difficult; the buttons are everywhere else, but the blouse though high-collared is not a turtle-neck), this in spite of a certain poised careless languor, y'know the kind, which remains undaunted, because why not, and Lux says or smirks (she is probably smirking; he can probably see the sharp lift of one corner of her mouth),
"Well, then let's make a deal. A game! Games are better than no games, aren't they?" The question sounds sincere rather than a rhetorical, though she doesn't stop yet to hear him answer or not answer it: "I'll tell you what I think when I paint," the brush goes right and the brush goes left and she dips it again in the water, back to the palate, back to the page; no; pause; back to the reds she has squeezed out, re-mix; now back to the page, layering more color on, "if you..."
"Answer a question I ask you after, with an answer just as thorough as mine. What do you think?"
IstvánNo pounding of the heart inside his chest to tell her anything. His heart doesn't pound. It doesn't beat. It doesn't quiver in the throes of an electrical thing trying to wring the last bits of energy from itself bid the muscle live dammit. All his heart serves for now is a weakness. It can paralyze him. A plate of bone-armor and ribs and lungs and the esophagus all get in the way. His heart has never known dagger or arrow or wooden shaft. Never known infection or inflammation. No one has ever broken his heart.
Yet she can feel the love he has for her as he rests against her. It seeps from him same as any other bloody thing will seep.
What does he thinks.
István smiles and Lux can feel the smile as it moves slow across his lips with his lips against her neck as they are. He tightens his arm about her waist.
"Mm hmm," he says. Kisses her behind the ear and presses his brow to the crook of her neck and then rests his chin upon her shoulder again. "Yes. Deal."
Lux"Shake on it," she says -- no, declares, turning her head fractionally to the side, brush stilling that she might hold her other hand over her shoulder for him to clasp.
They're predators, whatever else they feel or think they feel or know they feel or feel that they feel or have decided they feel or truly are. They're predators, and the Tremere against her back mouth by her neck (another fine tremor, see, but it is so fine, how to notice it? Notice instead the subtle way she cants back into the cold blonde creature who has never had his heart broken as if his arm around her waist, tightening, his lips against her skin, none of it is enough), well: it could be a threat. It could be dangerous; even friends can lose control so easily, if they're bearers of the First Murderer's curse, huh?
He shakes on it or he doesn't. He shakes on it, doesn't he? And then Lux continues to paint.
"When I paint I think of all sorts of things, really, that isn't a lie. I don't need to be in a certain mood to paint and I don't, you know, think about noble deeds or metaphors or exalted thoughts on whatever it is artists are supposed to think about. I used to paint much more than I do now; now I hardly paint at all, and when I do, I think about what I don't want to think about -- "
Paint, paint, paint; a pause.
" -- or, gosh, that's a lie; I'd never force myself to do something I didn't want to do if I could help it. Wouldn't that just be devastatingly silly?"
"But I think about what troubles me. D'you think being troubled is always just awful? I don't; I'd much rather be troubled than serene." Flippant: frivolous.
Now, softer, more meditative: "But it feels good. It just scrapes me out, lets me empty everything, while I just devote myself wholly to some thought, one thought, one idea."
Lux places a hand on István's knee: role reversal. Slides that hand up his thigh: caressing or covetous or teasing or simply savoring.
"Sometimes I think instead of a moment when I was stirred. You know, just terribly moved; terribly taken by that moment. Possession. It's nice to be possessed, isn't it? Wanting. An image, an idol," just a little bit yearning, the Toreador's voice, her hand on his knee again.
"And sometimes, or eventually, yes sure, eventually! why, I think about the technical trick of what I'm trying to evoke on the paper. I don't usually think very hard about what I'm trying while I'm painting, you see. All that thinking I get out of the way beforehand, or after I take my first break."
[PAINT PAINT. Specialty, I guess, + WP because we can't botch on that pretty sketch.]
Dice: 10 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Lux[5. will do. for now.]
IstvánIt isn't a command but the way she phrases it it could very well be a command and it's a clear command at that. Shake on it.
István takes his hand off of her thigh that he may clasp it in hers and they shake on it. Doesn't do anything so gauche as to spit into his palm as if the saliva would serve as a glue. Centuries past since he's engaged in schoolboy solemnity. They shake. He runs his thumb over the back of her hand once the promise is sealed and now he sits with both arms around her.
She is much too thin to be a cello for him but that is not to say that he is a creature of great bulk and strength. Underneath his clothes he's thin too. Spent his life hunched over a laboratory bench and his unlife hasn't passed any different.
To listen to her answer at such length is a gift. To hear her speak what thoughts would go on paper on nights past. Her question is frivolous but he cherishes it. Her hand on his knee and is that a shiver that goes up his core? His arms tighten about her. It's an ache that tightens them. He didn't know he could ache like this.
A hand leaves her hip to brush hair back from the other side of her neck. Bares it though his chin stays where it is. His palm smoothes the side of her throat and he traces her jawline with his thumb and he wants her.
He has no notion of what it means to want her. Only that that is the clearest translation of the ache in him. Something to fixate on. Maybe this is the first he begins to understand possession.
"That answer is thorough, so," he says with a gleam of good humor in his voice.
Lux"Oh, but Isty baby," she says, and restrains herself from turning to look at him. He is too near to look at properly anyway; she'd only wind up moving him. Restraint: she does not enjoy chains, but she takes pleasure in restraint on occasion. A dark thread of amusement, vibrant against her otherwise silk and smoke voice. "I wasn't done yet. Listen. The technical details I do think of are things you wouldn't understand yet, like did I get the shadow wrong, should I have used this other colour for the base instead of what I did, how do I fix it now that I want it to be cool rather than warm, will I be able to blend this same hue again and if I am not will the complement to this other hue ruin the perfection I am striving for in laying the god damned paint down. Or I think I need a new brush; I wish for one without synthetic fibers; I yearn after ermine and mink and," Lux licks the tip of her brush, the brush hovers; then she places it down and goes for a different size from the watercolor case. Something finer.
"I am thinking that perhaps I should not have started you with watercolors. I am thinking that maybe you'd enjoy something messier, like finger painting."
The fox is gold not red; fair colors that shade to bronze, streaks; it is difficult to conjure up out've watercolor when one is not taking time, but Lux is a very good paintrix, and she is not having trouble translating the color of István's hair by dim light gleaming with the city lights caught in it to a fox's fur and then giving that fox's fur ruddy shadows.
The toad has something of amber to it too, though she means to make him black-dappled olivine but keep the face expressive.
Colors layered on colors.
"I must really want you to anwer a question thoroughly."
[More painting. More WP, because no botching on art-in-front-of-people. We'll spend all the WP. But +1 diff for distractionz.]
Dice: 10 d10 TN7 (3, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 7 ) [WP]
IstvánEven though he doesn't understand the English he's listening to the cadence of it. The tone. Trying to sieve out meaning from sounds that don't have any mapping in his brain and maybe he would have understood her if she'd spoken in Latin but he gets the gist of her explanation. Shadows and light and hue existing in science same as in art. But he's watching her painting more than he is watching her explanation.
"Ah," he says. It all makes sense now. He's already shaken on it. Thorough begets thoroughness and he's committed to the thing now. Dawning revelation in his utterance and he rests his cheekbone against the side of her face like he could fall asleep right here. No drowsiness in him. Contentment. "Yes, this not-just-yet question." His hands conspire together to leave her neck and her hip at once. To trail towards each other and feel her ribs beneath the article that feels like a corset and keep moving down her sides until they find her thighs. "Why it is you think I would rather make a big mess, eh? The coloring with water was a mess. I did roll up my sleeves for the colors."
LuxNow let the darkness creep in, flow in, puddle in and pool in, just along the edges let some of the amber-pink glow of the initial wash shine through, give the shadows a hint of blue to set off the red just so, it is so colorful and yet dark ambience around the edges and now let us give the window a sky and now let us note that the net has gone unpainted except for the first light rose wash and now it is time to with paint reveal what is kept in the net see and it will be starlight Lux thinks starlight suggested in a dark Rackham-moody hall where a scientist fox has turned or is turning a toad into something and the toad is like whut and
The corset (it must be a corset) under the fine-spun thin blouse-thing with its many fine-sewn buttons does not wish to let István feel her ribs. Unless and until she inhales, exhales, she is kept snug within the corsetry, there is no suggestion of anything but sculpture until he finds her thighs again.
Lux laughs. Her back moves against his front; there, the corset's laces. She twirls the brush she is currently using idly between her fingers, then sits up straight, at attention, archs her back and leans leans leans stretching see stretching and one arm up let her fingers glide into his hair first a touch then a fist so firmly (but not hard, no; she doesn't want to hurt him) burrow and grab and gently pull when she turns her head to look at him finally or some portion of him his cheekbone is against her so maybe she has to duck away with her fingers in his hair in order to turn and look.
"I think making a big mess is more your style," she tells him, frankly. "I think you like seeing what other people do when there's a big mess, while you lord it over. I think you'd be a treasure, El Dorado. I think you like to use your hands! Go on, deny it."
She sounds like she thinks she's got him pegged or trapped or something.
IstvánHer frankness amuses him. No point denying it but that she asks him to deny it. Lying is no new thing for him. It comes as easy as piercing a person's skin with his fangs.
And his hair is long enough that when Lux's fingers make a fist she doesn't have to scrabble for purchase. That fist turns his head and they're close like this but their eyes find each other.
Flush against her as he is she arched against him as she is they don't have much room but István even as he answers her contradiction that she had to know was coming aches the closer to her he is. On the opposite side of the planet he would ache. Oblivion is the only thing that will take away this ache and yet he thinks he would choose an ache over oblivion.
He thinks and yet as he thinks he is whole and hale and in his right mind. In his right mind he chose chains. Out of his fucking mind is a different story. Lux has not yet seen him out of his fucking mind.
Deny it.
"I hate using my hands," he says even as his hands find the apex of her thighs.
LuxBut see, Lux keeps her fingers in István's hair as he contradicts her and as his hands roam he can feel the subtle flex of tension (good) in the muscles of her thighs and again the further (sharp) insinuation of her back against him as if she'd dissolve into him just for fun. Lux is not a strong monster, not unless she calls on blood to make herself strong, but she does enjoy giving herself over to sensuousness -- it is in the gentle curve of her spine now, how it lets itself pretend at bonelessness, except of course for the strictness of corsetry and blouse and István himself.
So. Yes. Her fingers are still in István's hair although the rest of her is an exercise in dreamy carelessness. The slender stem of the paintbrush a chip in its wood and the resonant vibration of István's voice against her back and he isn't warm but he is solid and there is give and eye to eye, well, that's just a step away from gazing again, isn't it? Her mouth wants to curve but hasn't yet begun to and there is something playful about the reverence or reverent about the playfulness when she leans in like she is going to kiss him. Doesn't. But could. Touches first his nose with hers instead, then his cheek; eyes flash from his, down, back to his again, her lips part, she inhales so that she can taste and smell (a predator), and is breath less precious because it is unneeded? How else are they going to smell and taste?
"Liar," she says, with the same tone someone else might say, my dearest love, and he can feel her lips shape the words, and her eyes leave his again to travel down. There has come a stillness to her; a centered motionless.
"That's hardly a denial at all."
Anyway: she's painting. Can't paint without looking at the paper; at least, Lux can't, not this kind of painting, and wouldn't it be a shame to ruin it? Without looking, she taps the brush on the water-dish, cleans it, wipes it on her knee, and yes. That's it.
IstvánPart of the anticipation of being kissed comes from the hormones and the breathlessness and the wanting and István sits dead behind her and does not surge blood into the act of playing at life as he did that night in the chilled hotel room. His hands are cool this night but not cold as they were that night. Warmer outside than it was that night and the air conditioning does not blow in just beyond where they sit.
Not so much a fight to keep his eyes open as it is an acquiescence to shutting them when Lux touches her nose to his nose and to his cheek and he too parts his lips desire met by a desire but it does not come though she draws in his scent with her breath and he opens his eyes again to catch her accusation.
Liar. That's hardly a denial at all.
No blood in him and yet he could sit molded to her like this for a thousand years. Runs his hands back down the insides of her thighs and their senses overcome the deadness of their flesh and it is a pleasure to feel the way the denim moves beneath his palms. Knowing her legs are beneath it. He squeezes both knees just before she cleans her brush against her own knee.
"I know." Voice gone soft for how near she is. "Art is the reflection of true things, yeah? Some mess I would expect." He draws a breath and as all his breaths have purpose this breath is meant to move slow over her skin. Her ear or her jaw or her mouth whatever is nearest. Maybe his breath smells faint of blood. He fed this evening. "How I am to paint as a mess if what I think when I do paint is not of messes. Hmm?"
Lux"A trap!" Lux says, or laughs. Her voice is not loud. "I'd ask you what you think of when you do paint, but I feel sure it wouldn't be very interesting. Besides; this is your first time, huh? You're welcome to prove me wrong," isn't she inviting? Lux is inviting; her fingers in her hair work to move his head again, bare his throat; perhaps she wants to turn; yes, she does turn- a little- in order to touch her nose to his jaw. His breath finds her eyelids; he can feel her smile.
"Have you ever hated, despised, anybody? Tell me your thoughts on that -- thoroughly," cut of a glance, bright.
IstvánA laughed outburst draws a drowsy bit of smile from him. Near like this he's as a creature bedded down in a dream. Only once has she removed his shirt and fed from him. He is not an endless vessel but she could sate herself on him without leaving him starved. To drink from him would be a long drink and he does not fight her fingers to keep his neck from her.
At her smile István presses a kiss to her forehead and chocks her to him with an arm about her waist.
"I did hate, on one occasion," he says. "Two people." A pause. "Ah, darling, this time passed so long ago..."
Lux"Thoroughly," she reminds him. The bench beneath them rocks slightly when he chocks her to him; how much closer can they get? The water is troubled; splashes out, but only onto the wood, only a dribble, a drabble.
IstvánThey can always get closer. Now is not that always. He has her against him and her blood is in him and when she repeats herself he makes a small soft noise of affirmation she can feel in his throat and in his chest and he's silent for a spell because he does have to think.
István does not think often of the past. He has so much of it compared to others. The hand not keeping her still passes over her hair.
"The one who did bring me into the Tower was called Peter Laszlo Konstantin Gabor. I did first see this man in the... how you call it, the basement of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in Budapest. In the year eighteen hundred and fifty... nine, eight, somewhere in there. At the time I was engaged to be married and did teach physics at the Academy and I was entranced so by this creature. We did pass many late nights speaking of hypotheses, yeah, things that were not yet true, and years did pass. Not until eighteen hundred and sixty-four did he embrace me. He did have many childer, and I did think this creature wise. Yeah? I was young, darling. I knew nothing."
Thorough. She's asking him to speak of a time when he was still a neonate. Like asking a man who's passed a century on this earth to speak of his toddlerhood. Still:
"After the archduke of the empire did die, the Great War did come, yeah? I do not know why it is the kine did wish to call it Great. Great because it was nothing man did see before or because it was vast. As if the world had never known a war that did span so many oceans. Europe did still stand after. The buildings, not so. The governments, not so. But the land, I watched the world go to ash and come back up again and then twenty years later, another war. They did not call this war great, so."
Get to the point István.
"We did go to Vienna, after he did take me into the Tower. And I hated it. I was young and I knew nothing and I remember, now. That I did wish to see my family. I cannot remember the faces of my mother and father now or their names. The woman I was to marry, yeah? All gone. But I did love Peter Laszlo. I did trust him. This is very foolish. I was so bound to him that I did think nothing but love for many years. Decades. For more years I think than you have known only nights."
Still not at the point.
"The Prince of Vienna did decree that none were to embrace new childer so long as the curfews and the bombings did happen. We did pass our nights in darkness for a time, not even so much as a candle, but Peter Laszlo, he did have a ghoul. A woman he did meet some years earlier and wished to also bring into the Tower. Elsa. To dislike a person you have only once met is a strange thing, but I did meet this Elsa and I did think that I did not like her. This when she was a ghoul, so. And then Peter Laszlo did bring her into the Tower. Even with the decree so: so long as the bombs do fall, none may sire new childer. This war did end in the year nineteen hundred and forty-five. If he did wait these six years, the Prince, he would not learn of the transgression and summon the both into his chambers and say to them You did transgress so, this is a terrible thing, Final Death for both of you."
This is a prologue. Not his thoughts.
"I did despise him for a time, for his weakness. I did despise her as well. I knew nothing. Nothing to despise, eh? They did make a choice and it did kill them. But I was, eh... how you say, in the English. Magányos. When you are sad because you are alone."
LuxLux does not once seem as if she would interrupt. He's holding her fast to him, but she wants to press her mouth to his throat as he speaks and feel his words on her tongue. As comfortable as it is on the bench in a grave-cold embrace (I am stretched on your grave [and I'll lie here forever]), she does not stay quite motionless. She stirs and turns but she can't reach his throat as she'd like to reach it; not unless she twists more than she is willing, so her head is heavy on his shoulder, her neck is a flash of paleness, her hair a tangle caught between his shoulder and chest and her back, more than one tangle, and it is a strange angle to look at someone. The paintbrush: she spins it again, weaves it in and out between her fingers, an idle game.
"But my fox, if that's what happened, why'd you bite me a second time and a third?"
István"Because you are not Peter Laszlo."
Lux"Thoroughly."
IstvánHe wants her at his throat.
He is 150 years gone from the desires of the flesh and yet she arches against him and turns toward him and she cannot move unless she shucks aside his arm. No way to satisfy this want for fangs set upon a vein unless one of them moves. Baser creatures cannot deny their urges and yet the two of them are still sat here. Yet she repeats her command.
A cheek pressed against a cheek for her head is against his shoulder and István wants her. Why did he bite her twice and then final.
"He did compel me," he says, "as a man. As the body dies, you have no choice, eh? To drink or to not drink. The body does die and the sire does feed to the body the blood and then the body does rise a childe. Eh? No choice. And when I did rise I was his childe and he did bind me to him so for I was not so willing to feed on the kine as he would have me be. He did compel me to drink from him so that I did not waste. You understand? I did not bind myself to him because I did desire him or because I did love him. I did come to desire and love him because he did bind me to him."
He wants her at his throat.
István stands from the bench. Careful as he swings his foot overtop of it not to hit her and comes to stand at the side of the bench. She has to look up at him if she does not rise or make room for him to sit before her.
"I bite you a second time and a third because it does give you pleasure, to bite you so. Because I love you and to be with you is a pleasure. I did love you before I did bite you the first time."
LuxHe stands from the bench and Lux lets gravity (isn't she going to tell somebody that she's got a love affair going with it? something like that) tug her down, bereft of her chair-back as she is suddenly, abandoned, etcetera, etcetera, but of course she doesn't actually let herself fall off the bench or need to brace herself on it with one hand. She looks reproachfully at István.
[And look, Lux is beautiful. That is the one thing, isn't it, that people remember about her, that people think: she is beautiful in a way that compells, that chains, that moves; that makes the eye linger and the imagination covet. She is beautiful; that is all she is: dark-haired gamin with green shadowed eyes and tonight a pale mouth.]
She does look up at him. Rake a straying lock of hair back behind one of her ears, youthful insouciance,
"But Ván. How did you know?"
"I loved Charlie."
They are two separate thoughts; one is a confession that doesn't need to be confessed. It's a shadow for the question.
IstvánReproach begets contrition. Coming from him it is a hollow thing. How can he ever show contrition if he thinks himself to be right all of the time and will not concede when he is wrong and he's stood over her with his head canted watching her fall back so dramatic as if she could not feel his hands leave her body and the muscles in his chest and abdomen flex as he prepared to stand. He does nothing quickly.
His eyes trail from her face to her neck to her trunk as she lazes and looks up at him. She loved Charlie. How did István know that he loved her.
As Lux lies back and plays with her hair István goes to a knee beside her. Not like a knight swearing himself to a liege nor like a man asking a woman for her hand.
"How I did know I did love you?"
He glances towards the ceiling as if searching to find the words. He does nothing quickly. When he looks down at her again he leans and she has ample time to stop him. If she does not stop him he's going to kiss her.
Lux[Bro, what's up? Perc + Emp minus Auspex + WP because I want to be keen and understand you.]
Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 7 ) [WP]
LuxLux doesn't stop him. Lux is looking at István, and he could be a pool of clear water; he could be something crystal-spun, something glass-fine, couldn't he, for how she looks at him; for how she reads the intentions in his spine, the reason for this movement or that-
Lux doesn't stop him; he can kiss her. Her fingers tighten on the edge of the bench, which she has come to grip- and perhaps she'll be compelled to kiss him in return.
She wants- well, she wants.
IstvánTo kiss someone who only submits to it rather than sharing it is not a kiss at all. István is a willful selfish creature and he is a monster and he has no sense of others' emotions or their pain or their desires but creatures without rotten cores can tell when a woman does not want to be kissed.
She will let him. And he may lean like this one hand at the back of her head and neck and the other bracing himself on the bench and he does press his lips to hers. An answer or a hesitation. How did he know he loved her.
That was an answer he'd given her once. That he knew before he came to Denver that he loved her and he wanted to feel it instead of just know it. As if his love for her was an algorithm on a piece of paper and not a part of him.
Either she kisses him in return or she doesn't. István does not pull away premature if she does but in time he does pull away. His eyes are intent upon hers and she can see the small stitch between his brows that tells of the depth of his thought. In life he was a thinker. István had frown lines etched into his skin before he turned 30. Laugh lines around his eyes. He was not a man with an incomplete life. Fond now even as he questions her.
"You will ask me this question how many times?" he asks.
Lux[Do Something Stealthy That Istvan Doesn't Notice You Doing Yeahhh]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
István[lol yeah prob -1 diff bc auspex]
Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 5, 10) ( success x 2 )
Lux"Seven," she says, without missing a beat. Obviously, István. Her frivolous tone is accompanied by a faint lift of her shoulders; insolence. His eyes are intent on hers, and hers are not insolent eyes. They're just kissed eyes, which is to say, they're transformed by a thread of wanting, something which wants to dredge a gleam up out've the dark; they're the eyes of someone just kissed, which is to say, still dreaming a little in spite of sharpness. They're pretty green eyes, all knowing and not-knowing, and direct as they always are.
They're vampires. To kiss like this is trust. They're vampires. To look eye to eye like this is trust, in spite of all he has claimed.
Or it is recklessness.
The top four buttons of István's red dress shirt have apparently become spontaneously unbuttoned while he was kissing Lux. Fancy that.
"Or until you are less of an enigma; whichever comes first. But enigmas, they like to stay enigmatic, don't they? Would you like me to ask you a different question?"
Here -- impulse-sparked grin; Lux traces István's eyebrows with her thumb, touches the thoughtful stitch between them:
"I can. I've got one at hand."
IstvánQuick fingers and distraction and István does not realize she's undone his tie and his buttons until he sits back and the air hits his chest. He glances down and his water-colored eyes are charmed. He glances back at her face and her thumb finds his brow and István shuts his eyes. Not entirely unlike an old dog comforted by touch but old dogs are not dangerous. They grow less dangerous with times. Old vampires not so.
An offer of another question and István does not tamp down the smile the question provokes. The smile lingers as he opens his eyes again. He hasn't taken his hand off the back of her neck.
"No," he says. He would not like her to ask him another question. He leans forward to kiss her on her third eye. When he speaks again the recklessness continues. Grants the moment a sincerity it may not have otherwise. Still difficult to tell if he's joking. István so rarely cares if she believes him or not. "If you do one night decide you also love me, I will answer this. Hmm?" That hand bracing her neck leaves it so that his fingers might guide errant strands of hair back behind her ear. That he can touch her earring to see how it moves if it moves at all. "Until then I stay enigmatic."
LuxBut Lux laughs at his expression when he looks down, before he closes his eyes. Lux likes to laugh; what's the point of immortality if you're not going to enjoy yourself and the people who share it or come across your path? Old vampires let themselves become fools through boredom.
She also sits up straight; he's not looking down at her any longer, because she is looking down at him- or perhaps they're more eye to eye- the bench isn't that high and it isn't that lw. Her earring does move when he touches it; the pair is pink, tourmaline and gold filigree, rosette [classical] design all a subtle insinuation of architecture-as-gems, as if a flower from some hazy dream was crystallized the better to capture light or to be sucked on because it is a perfect pink and how not to want to eat a perfect pink? Pink is the colour of all good things. The point is: the earring does mov e.
The point is also Lux finally makes room for István n the bench again, though she says, "You're a rake, my fox. A scandal; and a tease. I thought you had a thirst, huh?"
He wants her at his throat. She wants to be at his throat, too. But she also wants him at hers.
Want want want.
IstvánSo she makes room and István rises from his knees and now would be the time to divest himself of his suspenders and his dress shirt half the buttons still done up but István has nowhere else to be and this is not a transaction. They are whiling away the time together. Spinning their time for they have no other fiber with which to make anything of any substance and when he sits he does so facing her.
She is done up as much as he is and as she gives him name upon name István takes in her eyes and her face and the shape of her beneath her clothes. Not until she reminds him of what he said a moment earlier does he smile again.
"I had," he says. Academic's fingers start to pop her buttons. "I have. Do I tease you so?"
At the bottom of her shirt he rucks the hem from her waistline if she has tucked the garment into her jeans and even if she hasn't he bares her throat before he slides the thing down her arms and onto the floor. A hand at the small of her back and another at the back of her throat and she could get closer to him if she wanted to.
He kisses her ear first and then the corner of her jaw and then her pulseless throat. As if overcome with what he feels for her István rests his temple against her cheek.
"I do not mean to tease, drágaságom."
He's going to bite her.
István[BUTTONS]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 8) ( success x 1 )
LuxThey're difficult, the buttons on her blouse: tiny, intractable, hard and unforgiving, they slide away from István's fingers if they can (but not through the button-hole as he'd like) and if they can't they require pushing, they require practice, they require skill, oh yes, because this is a demon lover difficulty level blouse, go ahead, unbuttoning was never so fun, and Lux is amused when his fingers are not deft and she curls her fingers around his wrist not to still or stop him but to feel it working. The blouse is not tucked in: underneath the blouse is the corset, sculpting contours that are there naturally, laced up tightly in the back but not so tightly that she is all seamed up in a carapace. He could, if he wished, reach through the laces with his fingers and touch the skin of her back.
Does he move the water-dish and painting accoutrements to another bench before he sits? If he does not, there is serious danger of oversetting the water-dish. It is only a matter of seconds; Lux's gaze is drawn over his shoulder, because she'll be damned if anything happens to her silly illustration of a magician fox turning somebody into a toad or a toad into a somebody, because that study is good, will be a masterpiece if she keeps working at it.
But if he does move those tiny things first the same thing happens in the end. Lux curls a finger through his suspenders but doesn't snap them yet. Lux wants to be closer but resists the totality of what she wants for no reason other than it is an instinct to rebel: even if it is against herself. Lux lets her head drop back when his hand finds the back of her throat again.
He's going to bite her.
She's going to let him bite her.
When he opens her with his fangs and starts to suck, Lux is going to shiver with bliss and make a small caught-sound and slide her eyes closed. Lux is going to melt into the moment because she is a sensualist but also because she cannot help it because euphoria again; it works under her skin and could make her forget that he might drink her down to her soul and beyond; it makes the act of being destroyed/constumed and consuming/destroying the most pleasurable thing.
He's going to bite her. He bites her; what's better than vitae? Nothing.
--
When he has pulled away, of course her breath is not coming rapid and her pulse is not fluttering. But her eyes stay closed; she is utterly still for a moment.
"What does that word mean?"
IstvánBiting a human and biting another vampire brings differences in logistics and in this they adapt. István does move the water dish and he does not ruin her painting. Does not ruin the one that has already been cast aside. His study in lines and shading. The colors his brush drew after it relinquished its autonomy and went back into his hand.
Everything ends. He believes this. Until the world ends he is going to be a prisoner. He believes this too.
When the Kiss ends István can do nothing for the red lingering on her skin and yet he tries. Kissing her without Kissing her and every time his lips meet her neck she can feel the love reverberating from him.
What does that word mean?
His lips find her jaw then. Her cheek. The corner of her mouth. His voice is low so close to her ear and he is careful with the translation. Handles it like some delicate thing he does not want to break with his indelicate tongue.
"My dearest one."
LuxSnap, go his suspenders, the curl of her finger sliding up then down again before pulling out and letting go.
"I'll learn Hungarian, if you learn French," Lux says, and she opens her eyes. His lips near her jaw, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and though he did quite literally drain her she does not feel drained; instead, she feels ardent. Her mouth is a bright passionate thing tonight, pale-painted as it is, and she wants to taste the ghost of her immortality on his tongue, but chooses not to let herself.
Her voice is (inscrutable creature) a game:
"István, try to command me."
IstvánLast time he tried to command her three times before conceding defeat. The demonstration was meant to be a lesson and he told her what he knew about commands and the failing of them but she has made no progress and has declined to show him so. She just thought she might like to know the thing and what is he supposed to do with a student who will neither learn nor use the thing he aims to teach her.
István looks at her and he does not move. He is moved but he sits still. Easy enough to read him when he makes no effort to maintain a dead expression but right now she would have more luck gleaning the thoughts of a creature from another galaxy than she may have gleaning his.
He has so many thoughts. Asking him what he's thinking in one moment is never productive. He rambles on so easily.
If he were human he might draw a breath and let it out as a sigh.
"Sing," he says.
[lol lux you're an asshole - WP for to fail at commanding her]
Dice: 7 d10 TN10 (1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 2 )
István[command is manip + intim i know nothing]
Dice: 6 d10 TN9 (4, 4, 4, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 1 )
LuxHe is moved but he sits still. Lux rests her right hand on her knee and the playfulness with which she snapped his suspenders again and told him to command her dissolves into something quieter. The air smells of turpentine and acryllics and of rags and spray and of charcoal and of whatever cologne István does or does not wear and of whatever perfume Lux does or does not wear; often something floral, but subtle, something with a honeyed note that requires time spent near to her skin. The air does not want music. Lux closes her eyes and Lux sings István a song. He promised her he'd learn how to carry a tune, but she made no such promise to him.
[char + perf.]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )
Lux[I guess 4 if 'Magnetic' would work for a singing performance type thing.]
LuxThe song she sings is a simple one without ornament and it owes more to her own presence (a siren's song smile; the oldest song, love) than it does to hitting each note as it should be hit, but it might as well be noted for posterity that the melody is sweet and happy but full of the ache that comes from unrequited longing. She sings him a French song, and when she has sung all that she is going to sing, she opens her eyes.
IstvánRené has not forgotten his native tongue but decades enough to make a lifetime have passed since he left Europe with his domitor and István has never shown any interest in learning French. Latin is the root of modern language and all of the academics whose work he wishes to read he reads in German and English takes up space. Manifest destiny. They went to America and István never learned to speak French.
He does not know what she's singing when she sings it but music is a transcendent thing.
If he were to write her another letter he would tell her he would like to learn French. Might tease her about how difficult she would find Hungarian and write a few sentences in his own native tongue to show her how it appears on paper. But István will not write her another letter. He will not learn French. She may wish she had kept more of his letters or that he had learned French or she had learned Hungarian. She may wish a lot of things but this is the last time she is going to see him and they cannot cram an entire lifetime into a night.
A night can last forever but so can they. Lux will survive and István will not.
When she opens her eyes he's gazing at her. Studious. He doesn't understand why she wanted to learn or why she wants him to command her. Maybe he doesn't really understand love either.
"Hmm?"
LuxA beat.
Then Lux laughs. Whatever happens will happen. Lux is under no illusions about how dangerous this city is. Perhaps later she might confess surprise that it was István who ran afoul of an enemy before it was herself, but confess to who? Paper and ink and fire, maybe. Now, Lux is laughing. Where are his hands? Lux reaches for them and then moves them so that he is clapping.
"Don't be a beast; you don't hmm a singer."
Another beat, and she lets his hands slip away from hers as she tells him:
"I want to drink from you again, but I'm afraid."
IstvánShe exerts little effort to coax him to clap. The contact of her hands on his threatens to etch a smile onto his face and she can see it where she always sees it first at the corners of his lips. A proper smile crinkles his eyes too. In his eyes Lux sees that her singing stoked a different hunger in him.
When the clapping ends and her hands leave his he places a hand on each thigh and runs them down until they're rested on her knees. Like he's bracing himself on her. No humor at her confession. She has his attention.
"Of what?"
Lux"That you will use it to dimiss me," Lux replies, after a beat during which she considers how to put into words what it is she is afraid of. "That you will look at me and see only your vitae in any gesture of affection I make."
Luxooc: dismiss, not dimiss
IstvánThe frown returns. Her fear doesn't lash at him. It's interesting to hear this and he's thinking.
"This is what you see when you look at me?" he asks.
Lux"No," she says. "I would not see you at all if I believed that."
Lux believes that she would not. She is growing callous, of course; she is becoming cruel, as all vampires must when time spins to the point where people they knew in life are dying or are dead, because time is inexorable. Because it is difficult to adapt.
"But I think it is what you will see."
István"How it is you think I will see this if you do tell me now that is a thing you do fear? You are a poor liar. If you were not fond we would not still do this, eh?"
As it stands he feels more strongly for her than she does for him and he knows this and it does not change how he acts around her. As it stands he moved across the country to be where she was. Of course he has his own reasons and his own motives for doing as he does but István first mentioned considering coming Colorado a decade ago but it did not sound as if it were a serious consideration. Or perhaps it did. Perhaps that was when Lux first began telling him Chicago would be safer for him.
"Darling..." He takes a hand from her knee to hold her jaw between his thumb and index finger. Blood gives his body strength and he does not burn what he took from her for fuel now. He just wants to know she's looking at him. That frowns takes on an imploring quality. "No."
LuxBefore winter of 2012-2013, Lux thought István coming to Colorado was an entertaining idea and a good time and a joke, especially if it was followed by an abandonment of his boring crownéd (Ventrue [Malkavian?]) principles for the path of righteousness and parties and liberty and stasis-begone.
But then, she hadn't written him very often that year at all, relative to other years. He probably heard about the mayhem in Denver before he heard from her again. Perhaps she called him and her other penpals at some point; a randomly determined moment when going to the usual post-drop box did not seem quite safe; perhaps she called him and others to let them know a different address or p.o. box.
It was a terrible year.
After the Battle of Richthofen, she thought it especially foolish, but even so: Lux thinks István might do well here. She just doesn't understand what he wants from her, doesn't know where to take him seriously and where not to take him seriously.
He wants to flee his clan? All right. We'll see.
Lux does look at him. No, he says. Lux meets his eyes, and her own eyes are crystalline now, are a shadow-touched green that is not quite clear, and then her eyes shift to the side and he can feel subtle pressure from her jaw against his thumb and finger when she cants her head briefly downward. And then her eyes return to his mouth; from his mouth to his temple; from his temple to his eyes and her eyebrows lift in a fleeting expression of who knows what.
Then Lux leans forward with her hands still kept to herself to kiss István on the corner of his mouth; or maybe she doesn't keep her hands to herself. She leans forward with her hands still kept to herself to kiss István on the corner of his mouth but then his hand at her jaw gets her attention and she takes him by the wrist and presses a kiss into his open palm instead. He can feel the touch of her tongue and then the suggestion of teeth; she's always play-biting him because she wants very badly to drink him up and vampires are only hungry.
She twists her fingers through his hair again and doesn't yet pull it back but she will; maybe she will. The bench rocks beneath them because it isn't meant for shenanigans; it's meant for a well-behaved artist, singular.
"Don't you know, I like it when you ask me for things. Why don't you ever ask me for anything?"
IstvánIf he had only asked her to she might have bitten him a month ago. Earlier.
They don't live in that world and István will never understand what it is she wants. Because he has been acting this entire time without her understanding him either and it isn't as if the thought of biting her had not come into his mind before that night at the Oxford Hotel when she bit him the first and thus far only time.
This whole affair would have been less messy if he were honest with her. If he had not deluded himself with thoughts that she only bit him because she wanted to learn to dominate others.
István is a fool. He knows he is. He does not know how else to be.
His eyes close with the kiss to his palm and open again with the teeth. He gazes at her and there's longing in his gaze. An ache in it. He's a wild thing underneath the tailored clothing and the combed hair. Could eat her up if they aren't both careful. Fools are not careful.
"I don't know," he says. He's never thought about it. It's an honest answer. It veers then into teasing. "Because you do like to argue and I do think you would say 'No.'"
Lux"Ask me for something now," Lux says. Her fingers tight in his hair release some tension and slide down the back of his neck instead; she starts to unbutton the rest of his shirt very slowly. There's no reason to, but he's a fair creature even if she has seen many more beautiful and she likes unbuttoning things and undoing them.
István[perc + empathy: what kind of "something"?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5) ( fail )
István[Should've been diff 5 he totally got one success good job buddy.]
Lux[Lux doesn't seem to want him to ask for a certain kind of "something"; she's playing, experimenting, etc., and wants to see what he'd do. But her want does seem to be that he ask for something that isn't a joke.]
IstvánA creature like Lux has no want for suitors and those who would pursue her. Those with pulses find themselves without breath often in her presence and István himself could watch her until the sun began to lighten the sky. He is not of her clan and he would not go to ash for the thrall she has him in but her beauty is not why he chooses to spend his time on her.
He enjoys speaking with her. He already told her: he wants to please her. Even if it is a laugh at something strange he's said or a shiver from his fingers passing over her skin.
Maybe he never asks her for anything because he doesn't know how to ask for something period. Ask René. He doesn't ask. He tells René what he wishes for him to do and then René does it because René wishes to please István.
René did not love István before the blood bond though. He loves István now the way he would love heroin if heroin had kept him alive the last seventy years. That is not how István loves Violette.
He kneads her knee as he thinks. He misses her hand in his hair already.
"If ever we do meet in a hotel again," he says, "I would like if you would stay the next day. To sleep." He takes his hands off of her to help her if she wants the shirt off of him entirely. "You would stay?"
Lux"If ever?" Lux sounds amused (all blood and foam and salt [such is amusement, see]).
Lux wants in fact to rip the buttons off his dress shirt. It is not an offensive dress shirt; it is just a whim and one which she controls, although her sharp knuckles press into his flesh. He can help her by sliding his arms out of the suspenders and saving himself from further snappings.
"What, don't you like meeting in hotels?"
Lux doesn't require the shirt to be completely off, but if he begins to finish what he thinks she wants by taking it off she won't stop him; she'll sit back and watch him do so. A predator's heart -- except, no, that isn't true, is it? Even predators have hearts that drum out the movement of their lives.
"If my man arranges it, I will stay," Lux tells him. There was a conditional, so she says it again without: "Of course I'd stay! What fun. I bet I'd be able to stay up later than you. Want to make the bet official?"
She rubs her thumb and middle-slash-index fingers together; her eyes are bright, and she stands but only so she put one knee on the bench and find István's hair again and pull gently that his head is tilted back and his throat bared and he is looking at her. The strand of hair he tucked behind her ear earlier has loosed itself; dances down toward him when she kisses his forehead and traces the shape of his mouth.
IstvánHe banishes his suspenders one at a time and not both-at-once like he's in a hurry. The left shrugs down the right first and then the right shrugs down the left one next and they both hang from the clips at the waist of his slacks.
Red is a color that can conceal blood only so long as the blood is still fresh. In humans plasma and oxidation do away with the camouflage. Black is the color one ought to wear if one wants to hide blood stains. István did not wear red tonight thinking he would bleed on it. He liked the color.
And Lux knows him well enough to know she has to close that conditional if she doesn't want his brain to do it for her. To tell him of course she would. It sounds like fun. István is charmed by this and his smile is a dusty thing even after months in the city with her but she can see the gleam of it in his eyes.
"Yes," he says. His tone still bright though he knows what she intends to do. He turns himself towards her both feet still on the floor and when she grasps his hair to bare his throat he does not fight her. Eyes on her face his hand finds the side of it a second later.
He lets the strand do what it may. Lux can feel time stop for him when she kisses his forehead. His lips part with the contact but he does not seek her. His eyes close. He trusts her.
LuxLux cants her head into István's hand just so and just slightly. Did their conversation allay the fear she confessed? That if she drank from him once more he would only see his vitae in any affectionate gesture? Perhaps it has. Perhaps she is just not used to denying herself something she wants as much as she wants to taste István tonight. Perhaps it is complicated because it is always complicated.
"Really," she says, after he has closed his eyes. Lux studies the sweep of his lashes across his cheekbones and the shadow they cast. Then she kisses his eyes. His lips have parted with he contact and Lux slips her finger between them to trace his teeth and then his mouth again and she presses his lower lip down and then pulls both corners of his mouth up to make him smile (playful, see).
Delay.
Delay.
Lux is a sensualist; she wants to enjoy him, thoroughly.
He lets her do this to him: bare his throat and cast a shadow on him and touch him as she would and closes his eyes because he doesn't need to see (he can still hear. He can hear the latch of her throat as she inhales deep and her ribs expand against corsetry and she exhales against the left side of his neck while watching his eyelashes to see if they flicker.
Lux is a sensualist; she wants to see how long István will keep his eyes closed.
"What's the winner going to get? Suggest," and before she says suggest she kisses the place where his heart would tell her it was quickening if he were a mortal man; after she says suggest she kisses his throat again. Her mouth is open against his skin; but only for a moment. Doesn't she kiss him so sweetly; isn't it chaste?
She wants him to suggest a prize. "Suggest anything, mon petit rénard," and her voice is a shadow moving on silk; it does not (quite) reveal the yearning that she feels.
And then of course she bites him; suddenly, and all at once, and it is sharp and it hurts for a second because she is a monster, and then it is the Kiss and the Kiss is euphoria and ecstasy and there is no guarantee they're not going to find themselves on the floor.
Lux bites him; right? Bites him once, and feeds; pulls back without licking the wound closed because first she wants to kiss his mouth again, cup her bite mark with the palm of her hand to keep the vitae from being wasted, and then, sure, yes, then she'll lick it closed, but only so she can bite him again, rake her hair back away from her face when it falls.
Lux trusts no one, but as much as she trusts anyone, she trusts something in István; doesn't she?
She must.
IstvánIf he knew this was the last time they would see each other he might have suggested they go to a hotel this night. Start that competition early. Drag it out a few days. They have the means to stay in hotel rooms for the rest of the owners' lives and what really have they better to do than to stay in those anonymous rooms with curtains shut against the sun and all they could ever want for nourishment coming in and out fresh supplies every time a room changes over.
Their wants are not so simple. Lux is an artist and she has a need to pour paint out of her hands and if he spent any time on the streets István could have made out graffiti she had left behind. Seen what his little anarchist did with her nights.
He had thought hiding in plain sight would stretch out his time here. That if all he did with his nights was toil away in libraries and toil away at solving mysteries of data-based communication and toil away at building a future not just for himself but for another crop of physicists he would not have to worry about the Sabbat. The Sabbat are in Chicago too lurking like the cowards that they are. Why would he worry about the Sabbat.
Arrogance. If he knew this was the last time they would see each other maybe he would have done something different. Knowing as he does in this moment that Lux fears his disbelief was enough for him to dispel the notion from his own thoughts but how will she ever know that. He is a difficult creature to understand.
The next time she sees him he will be chained to a chair starved and stabbed and near-slavering with fury.
Tonight though he is sat on a bench letting her touch him. Eyes closed even when she taps at his teeth. He clicks them in answer once they're drawn back from his jaws and when she pushes at his lips he smiles not a stingy smile but one that shows teeth. One that would have near closed his eyes if his eyes were open.
---
István is not and has never been a deft creature. He sat straight until she asked a question and then he opened his eyes and then her teeth were at his throat. He made a sharp noise deep in his throat for the sudden sharp and grasped at her not for fear that he would fall but that she would release him.
So they fall to the floor. Or he leans back and she feels him leaning back and they end up there without so much violence.
She can take more from him than he can from her. He holds onto her tight as he did that night at the Brown Palace. Head tipped back against the floor and his eyes shut and his lips parted as if he would gasp and cry out if he were human. He has not been human for a long time.
After she kisses him on the mouth István bites her lip and it is a Kiss quick and sharp like a promise.
Liars never struggle with promises. They're easy to break.
Lux[And they do vampire things. And they talk. And more vampire things. And work on your damned color wheel, István, it looks like this, DON'T CRUMPLE THE FOX, and more vampire things.
ROLL CREDITS.
*zip*]
LuxDenver @ 10:42PMThere is no escape from we're finishing this g-d scene man, István. You'll be back.
-- to keep in the transcript for irony's sake.
