[002] i wonder when the night will reach its end [OPEN]

[amourtician]

Who| Jay and YOU! Special invitation extended to Insomniacs Anonymous
What| Jay has insomnia and is stargazing. Feel free to bug him.
Where| the park
When| now-ish, at night
Warnings/Notes| Jay's been drinking again, so things to do with alcohol. Other warnings will come if needed.

Jays lost track of how long he's been awake and he's just now starting to feel tiredness nibbling on the edges of his brain. He thinks he might be approaching twenty hours awake, but he can't be sure -- he never got into the habit of carrying a pocketwatch, back home, and he hasn't had a chance to find one he likes in the Capitol (he's as picky as he is vain, which is inhumanly so). He's more than a little drunk, too, but it doesn't seem to be making him sleepy at all (because, unknown to him, the last think he drank was the Capitol equivalent of a vodka with Red Bull and the caffeine's doing its job).

Right now, he's back in the park, somewhere towards the heart of it. He's lying on his back in the middle of a rosebush -- one mercifully genetically modified to be free of thorns. He thinks it's an awful waste of a perfectly good and deeply metaphoric plant. He also thinks the roses -- neon pink with black leopard spots -- are the tackiest thing he's seen in the Capitol, which is saying something, especially given the amount of mirrors he passes every day.

He's stargazing, trying idly to find familiar patterns in the unfamiliar sky above. He found a distorted version of the Fiery Eye and something that looks like an upsidedown Cradle of Rivers and he feels almost comforted, in an absurd way. The alcohol and the hours spent with his stylist, buried in fabric samples and haute couture magazines and the endless lure of the televisions have buried homesickness, but not very well or very deep. It's starting to claw its way back to the surface. He misses Mara. He misses the bookshop. He misses Raimut, though he'd never admit how much relief he feels upon being away from him.

Absurdly, he misses his twin most of all. She always was everything he never could be and he admits, grudgingly and only to himself, that being athletic and brutal would be far more useful here than being beautiful and clever.

While Jay's trying to prevent his mood from swinging to "maudlin", what are you doing?

Comments

[carnagecarnival]

There are still too many around for him to be comfortable without clubs in hand. Especially not without the weight and tide of the voodoo. He finds himself flexing his fingers often, as if they'll suddenly be there in his grasp. They stripped him of his armor, of everything, but his claws and the horns on his head.

He can't hear the shore either. He's not sure whether he's bothered by that too or not.

He wanders the park now simply because there are less people in it than anywhere else, no wide-eyed aliens to gawk at him without even fearing him, which had already gotten old. It's dark in the park, of course, but he can see everything much better for it. Including Jay lying down in a bush. The Initiate walks up to and leans over him, his long hair hanging as he stares down and says, "The fuck are you doing?"

[amourtician]

Jay, finding that the sky has been replaced with the face of a scowling troll, smiles as sunnily as he can manage. He's not exactly displeased to see the Initiate. A brute he may be, but he's a fascinating one. And he's certainly exotic.

"I'm stargazing, my dove," he says. "I'm nostalgic for the skies of my own world. I'm also rather drunk and being upright is a bother. Would you like to join me? We could make up names for constellations!"

[carnagecarnival]

He raises his brows at Jay, then, looks up and scans the park over. There isn't really much here he can't take, he's certain, and he's nearing that point where he'd rather something did jump out so he'd have excuse to tear it or them apart-- he never needed excuse for that on Alternia. He never needed to wait. He even had better things to do, sometimes.

Like watch an empty horizon.

He settles down, cross-legged by Jay's side. "AND WHAT does he see in different motherfucking skies?"

[amourtician]

"Different stars, in familiar shapes," Jay says, dreamily, then points up and traces a line of stars. "I see something resembling the Celestial Serpent -- see, the kite-shaped thing is its head and that line is the tail ... oh."

He stops and frowns, studying what had seemed, two minutes ago, to be a perfect transplant of one of the more prominent constellations of Mir.

"I suppose we can ignore the triangle stuck to the tail."

[carnagecarnival]

He squints and tries to follow Jay's line of sight to where he's pointing, not entirely sure he's seeing this so called Celestial Serpent. And then Jay gives that "oh" and he snorts.

"DOWNS HIMSELF IN THE MOTHERFUCKING SOPORIFICS AND MEANS TO SEE CLEAR. Surprised at he can pick it out to find fault. COULD'VE SAID NOTHING and what would an Initiate have known?" He peers up again. "Took hatchet to tail, they did. BEAST UP AND SPLIT TWO WAYS but not enough onto make it motherfucking twin."

[amourtician]

"It's a Serpent, darling, not an earthworm," Jay says, making sure to emphasise Serpent and make it clear such a beast deserves a capital letter. "Though ... I think there's a minor Tulun goddess that was split into two. One half chose mortal life. The other half went off to do ... goddess things."

He turns to the Initiate and smiles. "I'm not the least bit soporific, darling. Just a bit giggly and silly. Full of silly ideas, too!"

[carnagecarnival]

He knows a hissbeast from dirt noodles, but they were talking of constellations and myth. And whatever ever a Serpent and an earthworm were, though he is imaging they may be something similar.

He raises a brow at the latter bit. On Alternia, religion that wasn't of the Grand and Holy Church, was a dead religion. "AND TO HER did they take hatchet then? A GIRL WHAT IS HALF disregard?" he asks not sounding entirely kind in speaking of her.

He raises a brow. "SOPORIFIC BEING OF WHAT ALTERS MIND. But if he so gets on about insistence." He leans close with a smirk. "WHAT SILLY IDEAS spin in over a brother's nug?"

[amourtician]

"I think it was a sword, actually," Jay says. He honestly doesn't remember. "Or maybe she was torn in half. You know how mythology is. Dreadfully gruesome."

He smiles when the Initiate asks about silly ideas.

"Too silly to share," he says, dreamily "Far too silly." He turns his head to smile at the Initiate, eyeing him through lowered eyelashes. Lord, but the Initiate looks good right now. Terrifying and feral, but good, too. Pity about his dress sense. "Maybe when I'm sober, darling, I'll tell you."

[carnagecarnival]

“TECHNIFUCKINGCALITY,” he says. Gruesome. He laughs. The naiveté has a charm, he’s finding.

The rest of how Jay’s acting he frankly has no idea about. But he doesn’t think it worth too much thought.

“FINE,” he says, smirking. “He’ll hold you to it though, Brother. BEST NOT AT TO FORGET.”

i think this is a good stopping point

[amourtician]

Jay smiles at him again and reaches out to tap the tip of the Initiate's nose.

"I won't," he says. "Promise, darling."