thecapitol | And I'll blend up that rainbow above you

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And I'll blend up that rainbow above you

Who| Terezi Pyrope, OPEN!
What| Terezi is making it her job to "redecorate" the training area. After that arena, everyone could use a little more color. So she's putting it everywhere.
Where| Training area
When| About a week after the arena ended, timing can vary.
Warnings/Notes| Nothing yet!

Another arena has come and gone, leaving dozens of emotionally-troubled tributes back from the dead--and one no-less-emotionally-troubled Victor, she's sure. Pretty soon, people will start lining up to work on their skills for the next round. It's relatively quiet right now, though, as she stands in the middle of the training area. She's been here for three arenas now--not even the longest running member, and it's not any surprise to her that she's starting to feel run down. It's tiring, throwing so much energy into those death matches, only to be rewarded with yet another and another and another.

What she really needs, and what some of these other tributes need... is color. She remembers smelling the colors that the Initiate had painted on the wall the first time she came in here and how touching that had been. That was what they needed. Something to make them feel like people again, not animals. Primed with the paints from the painting station, pastel chalk from her personal collection, and the best of intentions; Terezi Pyrope gets to work.

At first, she just paints swirling colors, mixing paints and pastels and smelling how they work together. She trails across the wall, stopping by the knot-tying station to spill onto the floor with deep greens and browns. Once the paint dries, she scratches whimsical bits of flora overtop, things she's found on her own forest floor. On the other side of the station, she scribbles a forest of tall blue-trunked trees crested with fuchsia canopies. She stops on that wall and restarts again across the room by a rack of weights, reaching up on her tip-toes to scribble mountains and clouds and fearsome beasts flying across the sky--dragons of every shape and hue, big and small. After spending no small amount of time on that, she stops and moves to a new place. This time, she's not working off of personal memory, but she tries anyway. She haphazardly spreads blue paints across the wall, dripping onto the floor. Overtop, she scribbles every manner of sealife she can think of. There's a lot of empty space when she's done--places for other people to fill in what they want.

Near the center of the area, she leaves some paints and chalk and a scrawled note on the floor in big bright letters.

It reads: "Help yourself."

[OOC note: There's one closed thread in the comments, but the post itself is open to anyone who wants to reply!]

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They show up almost simultaneously. Terezi isn't sure if she relieved of not. Mostly, she just feel unprepared to be tackling this, but she's glad that she doesn't have to separate them at the doorway. Now she just has to get Fraysong to stay, and Meulin to come closer.

She takes the Initiate's hand in hers, holding it tightly to keep him from leaving. Then she motions to Meulin for her to come closer. "I wanted to talk to you. Both of you. I didn't think you'd agree to meet me here if you knew the other was present... So. Sorry for that bit of deception."

She does seem genuinely sorry at least. She didn't like the idea of tricking them, but she couldn't think of any other way to get them to exist in the same room again. And she just had to try.

When the Disciple shows up, he has the perfect look of deer-in-headlights. He remembers what all happened in the arena. He remembers dying.

He's all just about to snap, to ask Terezi 'why the motherfuck is she here?' when she grabs his hand. He gets to tugging automatic, looking betrayed and maybe feeling it a bit too.

"WHAT. Is there to up and talk about? THERE AIN'T NOTHING," He says quick. He mutters low, "Messiahs dammit Pyrope you know at I ain't all to be..." he jerks his head at the Disciple without making eye contact. "...near." Anywhere near. Not even remotely close. If all they had no choice they were on a strict motherfucking policy of zero interaction, surely she knew this. He won't plead but the message of 'let me go' is clear in his eyes. Or it should be.

Edited 2014-04-15 00:18 (UTC)

She stays where she is, long skirt bunched up short in her hands. She can't hear what he's saying but she can think it, why is she here, I don't want to talk to her, I never want to see her. I don't trust her, make her leave or let me go. She doesn't want to hear it. Whatever they were close to on that rooftop died with him and he's made no effort to speak to her since.

Holes are tearing in the thin fabric of her skirt--for spring her stylist had said, a nice spring green too many shades lighter than her own and touch too blue.

She lets it fall from her fingers, settling into the straight lines, not keeping a bit of her grip in its smooth surface.

"It's fine Initiate. I'll leave. Terezi..." Her voice trails off, things she doesn't want to say or can't make herself say hanging in the air.

"No." She says it loud enough and strong enough that Meulin can hear it, too. It's meant for both of them. She's not going to let either of them walk away without a fight. She knows they can get along, they've apparently done it once. She's not going to let them both ignore that when things could be so much easier if they just sorted that out.

It's a little ashen, maybe. But more than that, she just wants her friends to not hate each other. That's not a terrible thing to ask, she thinks.

"Meulin. I don't want you to leave. I asked you here for a reason, so... Can you come over here?" There's a pause, and then she adds, a little more beseechingly: "...Please?"

Attention splits to Fraysong, and she knows that he's not doing much to make this any easier. Not that he has any reason to want to, but he has to know that this is important to her. "I know you don't want to be here," she says more quietly to him, giving him the same pleading expression that she gave to Meulin. "But... Do you think you can stay here for just a little while? For me?"

He responds with a look of helplessness, not something he let's show often. She uses the word again and he wonders if by now she's figured him all out enough that it's on purpose. He hasn't anything good enough to respond and so he squeezes his eyes shut.

"I'LL STAY," He grinds out. "Tell him what all you need."

He knows the disciple is right there, that she can see all this, but he still can't look at her. He'll have to soon, he's sure, but he takes the time he has, which really don't feel like enough. He doesn't know what all to say to the cat sister.

It's not fair.

She wants to leave because she doesn't want things thrown in her face or to hear words people don't mean or to have to explain herself again when she's surprised she managed to push past all the guilt and self loathing long enough to admit that the future, her past, wasn't her fault.

Her steps are slow and she doesn't say anything, but she walks over, eyes firmly fixed on the wall behind Terezi and the colors already spread there.

"This isn't really a good place for a conversation." Not that videotaped rooftop was. She still couldn't believe nothing had happened to her.

"I know. That's why we're not going to be using words."

Hesitantly, she lets go of Fraysong's hand, hoping that he won't bolt as soon as he's not tethered to that spot. She kneels down and scoops up a piece of chalk, using it to draw a long line between the two of them. In the center, she sets the chalks and paints where they can be reached by both sides. She's pretty sure that the purpose of the line is apparent to both of them.

"I want you both to draw with me. You're my friends... and you're both important to me. You don't have to talk to each other. You can just draw--anything you want. I'll sit in the middle. You don't even have to look at each other."

Not tethered. Now there's a joke.

He watches her mark the line on the floor. The line in the motherfucking sands where all it was always them versus the empire. Theirs versus the rebellion. He's painted before others a hundred times by now. He's painted beside Terezi plenty. The Disciple not so much but this ain't so impossible a task.

No words. Funny.

"AIGHT," He says simply and he settles down on the right. He doesn't think about it. He dips his fingers into color and he spreads it on over the floor before him.

Edited 2014-04-15 06:04 (UTC)

The line doesn't help, she thinks, just makes things more readily apparent. Where she ends and he begins. Her glance at Terezi is quick, she doesn't want to do this and it's obvious in her eyes. This won't solve anything. Painting never solved anything, not little things like wriggler disputes or the big things like making a difference when the world is wrong or saving a relationship that had never started.

Her eyes flit back down to the line where the Intiate is already settled down, color spreading over the floor in front of him. This is so ashen it hurts and she wants to leave, she doesn't want that quadrant with either of them, even if this is just Terezi trying to fix things. It makes her bristle somewhere deep down because it's wrong, not what she wants at all.

She forces that down, takes a seat and a piece of chalk. She doesn't speak or look at Terezi, making her displeasure at this piece of nonsense known. The first thing she draws is a club and then she carefully wipes it away, turns further and starts sketching.

Intent on observing them as she is, Terezi doesn't miss the tiny symbol that Meulin draws on the ground before wiping it away. She stiffens, her head turning a little to check if Fraysong caught that, too. When it doesn't appear that he did, she relaxes just a little.

Terezi fixes a frown on her, showing her own displeasure. She takes up her own bit of chalk and starts to draw along the line. She tries to catch Meulin's attention--just long enough to draw another club on her side, blocked from Fraysong's sight by her body. Then she firmly draws an X through it.

The Initiate doesn't look over at the other side. Even when painting with Terezi, he rarely lost focus on what he himself was doing. It's hard not to get immersed.

He paints fractures.

He paints the cracks in the world, the shatter glass pieces, the little holes where everything falls the fuck through and gets lost. The darkest color is indigo. He's always known that.

On their edges, he paints light. The bright ones. Teal, gold, lime, red. He fills the curves in with every other hue.

The cracks align and become a spiral, spinning in and in, wound tighter, until the center and then he smears the color down still like a wound. It becomes the sea, where all it clears. The water bleeds from a simple surface to color after color in scattered mosaic. It's a confused piece, and he's okay with that.

He scatters the light over that water's surface, the golds and teals, greens and reds, the way the moons' light would scatter as he remembered it, pink and green there, bone white like the shores of here, like the way the city looked in the rain. It's not very distinct as such, all these quick marks done, but he's not so concerned with clarity.

Her shoulders sag in a disconcerting way, because she didn't realize how tense they were, how much she had been fighting that idea. Her eyes flit over to the mess of colors on his side, her eyes drawn to the middle before she pulls them away.

She continues her sketch, soft lines at first, then bolder strokes as she pieces in the land. It's a forest, a town, a town she remembers vividly if she were honest, but she's not right now. The edge of a forest melding into streets and hives, buildings clumped together as short hives stacks on top of each other, a mixing of space where trolls were low and the protection afforded in numbers was greater than the loss of privacy. Buildings are drawn in grays, highlighted above in pinks and greens, below in oranges and yellows. The forest is purples and greens and blues and the dark silvery grey of the floor is the sky.

Her fingertips are turning pink and green as she smooths and blends colors with careful concentration. If his drawing is a confused mosaic of colors and light, hers is a memory in loving detail. She pauses, stopping in her color to add four figures, just barely distinguishable from the background in a dark blackish purple, along the side of a building. Just before the lights hit the grass, between town and forest, four silhouettes.

Terezi relaxes when Meulin does, the tension easing out of bother her shoulders and her expression. The frown fades from her lips, and she rubs her own little mark away from Meulin's side of the drawing space. Instead, she goes back to sketching between the two of them, doodling aimlessly while she waits for the two of them to get comfortably involved in their drawings.

It's nice, almost. Being able to sit between them and draw with both of them. It's hard to forget that they're only doing this because of her--that if she wasn't sitting there, they would have nothing to do with each other. But it's still nice to listen to the silence, only broken by the noises of their drawings. It's the closest thing to peaceful that she's had in a while.

After a while, she lifts her head, smiling a little when she smells the drawings on either side of them. There's so much feeling in both of them, even though they're so drastically different. What she wouldn't give for them to be able to see that, too.

"Okay, stop for a second," she says, standing up again. There's a hesitance in the way she moves, like she's anxious about what she's about to do. There's no easy way to ease into to this, so she might as well just come out with it...

"I want you to switch places now."

The Initiate jerks upright back straightening. His eyes dart from the paint to her, confusion marring his features.

"What?" He says. Just switching places shouldn't be as confusing as that. "SISTER, WHAT ALL ARE YOU TRYING AT?"

He's got a palm to the floor, ready to stand, but he stares at her first to see if she means more by it.

And all of a sudden the confusion is back. She instinctively glances back toward the wiped away chalk and back up to Terezi. It's exactly like that, it is, what is Terezi trying to do? She palms her chalk for a moment though, not rising from her spot.

"Why?" And really that's all she feels the need to ask, everything else is implied within it.

She knew she would run into a snag at this point. It was inevitable, especially with the resistance that Meulin has given her already. But she squares her shoulders a bit and moves out in front of both of them, turning to face them.

"Because. You're both my friends. I'm not going to stop, not with either of you. So this is something that you need to understand. I know you both think I'm crazy for liking the other. You haven't said it in so many words, but believe me, I've gotten the message. I just want a chance to show you what it is I'm finding that you're not. That I'm not as crazy or as misguided as you think." She pauses, hesitating on her next words.

"...This was how I first found it. I wanted to show it to you, too. So... Please. Switch places."

He stares at Terezi a long moment, then sighs. Up he rises. He steps far enough back that there's a decent space-- they can't attack one another without really trying for it-- and he waits for The Disciple to pass by.

She's visible annoyed at first, mostly because this feels like such busybodying, it feels ashen, it feels weird. But she slowly lifts herself from the floor, letting the chalk fall from her hand and roll towards Terezi, then steps across the line. The mess of colors that awaits her is more confusing than anything else and she's not sure if Terezi wants them to continue what was started or paint something new.

She doesn't want to ask either.

Whatever this is accomplishing, she's not sure it would help to get directions about it. She glances at him, her gaze mostly hidden by waves of hair, and ponders him. Terezi's not crazy for being his friend, she thinks, but she's slightly crazy for being both of theirs.

"I think it's the contrast that makes you a little crazy."

"Maybe I don't think there's so much contrast, then." She is of the firm belief that she's not crazy... despite whatever they might happen to think. But she does seem mildly relieved when they finally do switch places. She waits for Fraysong to make it to Meulin's old spot before seating herself as well and issuing her new instructions:

"Okay. You can keep drawing, now."

The Disciple calls her crazy and he actually laughs. "Only a little crazy?" He snickers.

He settles down in place, legs folding again, and he beholds a memory.

He finds those silhouettes. They could be anyone, truly. This could just be shadows. He doesn't think the are. His finger tips hover over one what all he's already guessed. He wants to mark there, but this, this particular part of this particular motherfucking time, ain't for his sinner's hands to touch.

They pass over the homes, just a regular hivecluster, something he's passed on mission countless times. He doesn't draw the look of nothing there. He draws the feel. In the background bursts off each little hive, he paints waves and swirls, growing off and out from the buildings in intricate pattern. Light blue there, orange there-- all the little textures and layers of fear felt and passed by.

He paints anxiety, he paints worry for a quadrant, he paints that long stretch where one feels like they're holding their breath in wait of something, he paints a scream, he paints a rush of adrenaline. The swirls and colors in such a close hive cluster interlock and tangle in the backgrounds.

He paints tree roots at the furthest edge like fingers dug into the earth, spreading upward into an arm of stars and midnight. The darkness and stars dotted within make an indistinct form of some great being. A crescent pink moon make the lashes of a closed eye and a half-full green moon make an opening one. He smears a mark of red blocked out mouth, but from it, he makes more pattern, like the way the fears were patterned but different too. They start in lime and bleed slowly into teal then blues and eventually his own indigo. Like the figure above is whispering, breathing a sacred fire, but one what all would cast a blanket down on the other half of un-star-marked sky, pooling down to flat indigo before it can meet the other side. From that indigo, another star made hand, cradling the world made there as it digs into the other side.

Up above, between the eyes of the figure, he paints yet another star, the light of it so bright its beams divide the face in two. The star is made of blue and gold.

He is drawn back again to the four figures and his lack of knowing what to do there. He puts the lime whisperings in the dark behind them. Unable to help himself, he marks gold on one silhouette's heart and hands.

She almost turns her back on his painting, unsure of what to do with it, unsure of what it is or what it means. He paints color for the sake of it, she thinks, where she paints it to portray or to show lines and shapes. It's strange and she wants to see what she can make of it at least. So she reaches for chalk and starts where the paint has dried, up in the fractures of the sky--it's the sky she thinks, melding into sea--and she gently puts a line of white, separating sky from sea, ground from heavens. The colors above are mixed like clouds, tumbling over mountains and shore.

Brown and red mountains along the back of the shore, just shapes, beneath a sky, along the sea, back beyond it. Then skimming across the ocean, lines of color from a city that is only light in the darkness and soft patches of greenpink from the sky reflecting bright and beautiful. A few ships are scattered far back in this bay and she put them in in night colors, the colors of indigo and black, framed in in her green as the light touches. She tries to work in color, not lines now, patches of brights and darks.

The shore is harder, beyond the dots of light of a city so far back, away from the land in the front and so she simply adds by taking away. The land disappears beneath deep browns and indigo, spots of reds and greens and teals. No hives here, just land, like the land near where they set out on the First Ship, quiet and free from trolls. Lusus white is grey as she draws in small beasts, a tiny barkbeast in the shadows of a tree and a strange mix of bird and beast she once saw with its paws in the shallows and head dipped to catch fish.

When she pulls back enough to look at it all, it looks strange. So obviously the work of two people that she wants to wipe it all away. He paints and she sketches over it, adding in lines and places and things--she thinks he'd hate it. Her adding in the things she sees in it without even asking.

It's a world with only the barest touch of the trolls who ruled it and it's so peaceful. She wonders if he wanted peaceful in this.

Terezi returns to her own drawing when she tells them to start again, but she remains keenly aware of what they seem to be so absorbed in. It's not that she doesn't trust them not to be jerks about this, but she knows how fragile this is. There's a tension in her shoulders that she can't relax away, and her own doodles are more stilted and unfocused.

But they seem to be behaving, and that's as much as she could hope for in this case. It's impossible to tell what they're thinking. She hopes that they're gaining some kind of understanding... that this isn't some pointless thing that she's forcing on them. She hopes that they won't walk away and forget it as soon as they're done.

"Okay, you can stop," she says after a lengthy amount of time. She moves out of the way again, scooting back and facing them from across the drawings. She doesn't doubt that curiosity will draw them to look at what the other had drawn with their picture, but she doesn't provoke any kind of conversation just yet. Instead she turns her head slightly, facing one and then the other, waiting expectantly for one of them to say something--either to her or to the other.

He looks. His eyes trail over each added in line, hers so set, neat, distinctly being. She takes the fractures and the holes of the world and she puts the world in them. In the empty, she puts things there and somehow manages to do so without a bit of chaos. It ain't just waters sky. There are things to see and uncover, even as god still lies beyond. He compares them both, and there's almost a glaze over his eyes, like he's seeing something entirely beyond that of drawings on the floor.

"IT AIN'T MEANINGLESS, YOU KNOW. Every piece has a purpose. EVERY COLOR A MEANING. It's all alive. EVEN THE THINGS WHAT AIN'T LIVING. All spirit. EVEN THAT WHAT AIN'T DEAD."

He traces his fingers over the spirals of fear, soul, come from each and every motherfucker in her drawn in hives. "In all the little places it comes apart... IT PIECES BACK TOGETHER AGAIN WITHOUT FAIL, ONE WAY OR OTHER." He lifts fingers away from those interlocking lines and pieces. His eyes close and his head tilts back. The revelations come easier that way, like a prayer made without the press of palms.

"You said, the spectrum here is made from pigments, not blood," He says. "BUT YOU REMINDED HIM. His brother spilled blood all of his own. YELLOW HE ALL DID AND IN SO HONOR OF WHAT I HAD GAINED, I SOUGHT TO PAINT. I did not thieve from him. I ASKED AND SO HE OFFERED. Freely given. FREELY TAKEN. A hand up an extended where blade could so have been, even knowing who all I was to be more so than myself."

He's already damned. By association with all them, the reason has already been committed. He can't ever go back. His head lowers.

"I CANNOT PAY THE DEBT THAT IS OWED. I ain't understand for the goddamn life of he your motherfucking ways. I AIN'T ALL ANYONE BUT WHO ALL THE FUCK I BE. But things are different now. YOU ARE, THE WHOLE GODDAMN LOT OF YOU HERE, THE STRANGEST TROLLS WHAT AS HE'S EVER KNOWN, BUT... IF HE MAY BE SO ALLOWED..."

He lifts his hand up to his teeth, pressing into and breaking the scarred flesh in the center of his palm. He pulls it back and squeezes the hand shut tight as the indigo wells up.

He says, "I want at to finally see where the pieces come back together."

He opens his hand and holds it between them, over where the line separates each piece. Some of it drips through his fingers, erasing that white mark. He still does not look at her or Terezi, yet his color is there to take.

Edited 2014-04-15 19:59 (UTC)

She doesn't know what to say. Seeing what he added to her memory, her time, and she wonders what it means really. The colors mean something, she thinks, something more than just what they are, because the color form something that is more than just the small shapes of each pull of the hue. It's odd, in a way, because the world is colored in such vibrancy and light when he paints in the things around them.

Gold heart and gold hands and stars above and she doesn't know what to say, not even when he speaks. Her eyes don't lift from the floor, because she doesn't want to do this. She doesn't want to try again and she doesn't want to do this out of some sheer stubbornness. Maybe it's because Terezi made this happen--or because Terezi couldn't leave it alone. Or maybe she just doesn't know what she wants out of this.

In another lifetime they were close, very close, but how close is too close and how close makes things fracture all the way into another life. Her breath catches when his hand reaches close, over, when he talks about debt to paid and understanding.

Her fingers touch in the space between them and she doesn't look at Terezi because this feels more private and initimate and for all she feels for Terezi, she doesn't want to be congratulated for this. She doesn't want teasing when this is done, when whatever this is is done. It feels too fragile, if anything, to subject to someone else's gaze.

Warm blood on her fingertips and his palm beneath that. She lifts her fingers, letting it drip and pool in the cup of his hand and she finally speaks.

"Did you want mine?" She doesn't know what is expected or needed in this, what he wants from her, beyond the trust to try. To try something.

For all of Meulin's fear that Terezi might take the opportunity to tease her for this, her fears are unfounded. She sits there, quiet and respectful as the grave, as if holding her breath while they exchange words. Her fists are clenched tightly in her lap, nails digging into her palms.

She wants to hope that this means things will be okay between them, but she doesn't dare to just yet.

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