Arthur Lester (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theotherright) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
come_sailaway2022-09-20 05:31 pm
theotherright) wrote in come_sailaway2022-09-20 05:31 pm
[OPEN] the labour and the wounds are vain
Who: Arthur Lester and YOU
What: The walk of shame after rafting with two other idiots off the edge of the world
Where: Around the ship
When: The day after the beach party
Warnings: The normal Arthur stuff. Traumatised man hours. Death happened. Sad about blind. Also, the thread with Bash eventually contains a couple references to 1930s homophobia, plus displays of ignorance about queer people.
Mistakes were made. Big ones. For those sensitive to that kind of thing, an invisible death counter has ticked up in Arthur from zero to one.
i. scoops
It's a big ship, but unless you count Tommy Bahamas, it's not infinitely big. Why the hell can't he find Smith or Steve? Particularly Steve-- you know, the teenager he just helped kill?
In truth, Steve is hiding in his cabin and he happens to keep missing 6, but Arthur's brain is pleased to conjure some more unpleasant scenarios, and the effort of talking it down is exhausting. Looking for people while fucking blind only compounds his frustrations, and he's already feeling a few SAN points down after the whole 'fell into the fucking void' fiasco, and he's currently searching on the promenade which is already fucking overwhelming, and so his reaction when he collides with a fucking stool that's sitting outside of Scoops is, as soon as he's regained his balance, to pick it up and toss it as hard as he fucking can across the fucking ground.
"Fuck!"
ii. tauva
...not long after that, Arthur realises that he needs to calm the hell down.
He forces himself to stop pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing. And once he stops, it's like the energy leeches right out of him, both physically and mentally. Part of his mind is still just spiralling down that invisible void, screaming.
The whole raft thing is a part of it, but it's far from the whole. He's so far out of his depth and he doesn't even know which way up is, and he's been holding his breath for as long as he can, focused on the possibility of escape, but now escape has put him right back on the ship and it feels like he tried to take a breath and instead filled his lungs with salt water.
He ends up in Tauva. It's not consciously planned. But he has been thinking about someone else who frequents the place: someone to whom he once again owes an apology.
Arthur's slumped back in one of the leather armchairs, his useless eyes closed. Until now he's perched on the edges of chairs, sat with his feet beneath him, ready to move if he needed to. This time he's just... folded into it. Head tilted down. As still as if he was asleep, or even more so, because even sleeping people murmur or turn over once in a while. The only parts of him stirring are his lips, which move as if silently singing to himself, and his hands, whose long fingers bat restlessly against one another and against the soft arms of the chair.
He is not super okay.
What: The walk of shame after rafting with two other idiots off the edge of the world
Where: Around the ship
When: The day after the beach party
Warnings: The normal Arthur stuff. Traumatised man hours. Death happened. Sad about blind. Also, the thread with Bash eventually contains a couple references to 1930s homophobia, plus displays of ignorance about queer people.
Mistakes were made. Big ones. For those sensitive to that kind of thing, an invisible death counter has ticked up in Arthur from zero to one.
i. scoops
It's a big ship, but unless you count Tommy Bahamas, it's not infinitely big. Why the hell can't he find Smith or Steve? Particularly Steve-- you know, the teenager he just helped kill?
In truth, Steve is hiding in his cabin and he happens to keep missing 6, but Arthur's brain is pleased to conjure some more unpleasant scenarios, and the effort of talking it down is exhausting. Looking for people while fucking blind only compounds his frustrations, and he's already feeling a few SAN points down after the whole 'fell into the fucking void' fiasco, and he's currently searching on the promenade which is already fucking overwhelming, and so his reaction when he collides with a fucking stool that's sitting outside of Scoops is, as soon as he's regained his balance, to pick it up and toss it as hard as he fucking can across the fucking ground.
"Fuck!"
ii. tauva
...not long after that, Arthur realises that he needs to calm the hell down.
He forces himself to stop pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing. And once he stops, it's like the energy leeches right out of him, both physically and mentally. Part of his mind is still just spiralling down that invisible void, screaming.
The whole raft thing is a part of it, but it's far from the whole. He's so far out of his depth and he doesn't even know which way up is, and he's been holding his breath for as long as he can, focused on the possibility of escape, but now escape has put him right back on the ship and it feels like he tried to take a breath and instead filled his lungs with salt water.
He ends up in Tauva. It's not consciously planned. But he has been thinking about someone else who frequents the place: someone to whom he once again owes an apology.
Arthur's slumped back in one of the leather armchairs, his useless eyes closed. Until now he's perched on the edges of chairs, sat with his feet beneath him, ready to move if he needed to. This time he's just... folded into it. Head tilted down. As still as if he was asleep, or even more so, because even sleeping people murmur or turn over once in a while. The only parts of him stirring are his lips, which move as if silently singing to himself, and his hands, whose long fingers bat restlessly against one another and against the soft arms of the chair.
He is not super okay.
no subject
So far it's been a rough day.
The imperfect strains of Debussy get his attention, not because of the tune itself, but because it sounds like there's actually a person playing it. Usually he would be hearing a flawless rendition of something hummable that he doesn't recognise, played by ghosts, which he assumes puts it basically on the level of a supernatural player piano. This is... not that.
The realness of the music, bum notes and all, draws him in. He has wondered, on and off, if there is anyone here besides ghosts who plays piano. He finds himself lingering inside the doorway of John's, just listening, wondering who the player is.
no subject
"Oh, uh. Sorry, am I making too much of a racket?" It's a very controlled voice, trained perhaps, with a European accent of some sort that's nearly impossible to place. French? Swiss? Italian? Something that blends all three, perhaps. Posh. There's an inherent poshness to his voice. Her voice? No, his voice. "I can head off for a bit and try again when there's no one around, if you prefer."
no subject
What an interesting voice. Arthur tries to place the accent, and fails completely. Educated away from its birthplace, maybe, like his own?
"Only until now, I haven't heard anyone except the ghosts play, I think. And certainly not anything I recognised. I, er... I wouldn't mind listening to you practice, if you don't mind an audience?"
Arthur looks not at Johnny, but at the vague middle-distance as he speaks, and he's holding a shuffleboard stick in one hand. Johnny can draw his own conclusions about why someone would bring a shuffleboard stick into a piano bar.
no subject
His gaze drops to the shuffleboard stick, at first expecting it to be used for balance like a walking stick or Watson's cane. But after a moment, he realizes the man's eyes aren't focused on anything. Curious.
"Captain pulling anyone here's a cruel trick, but for you it's got to be worse than most. Trying to learn a whole ship without being able to see it, I mean."
no subject
"I don't believe we have. My name's Arthur Lester. Earth, and 1934, since it sometimes seems that should be a part of the standard greeting." He delivers that last bit in a droll tone, as if to highlight how normally he's saying this completely abnormal thing. "Yourself?"
Now that his place in the audience is official, he starts to venture forwards stick-first, looking for the chairs that he knows are around here somewhere.
Johnny's comment gets a shrug, and some classic humorous deflection. Arthur refuses to start thinking about the medical conversation with Tendi this morning. He refuses. "Oh, it's not as hard as I make it look."
His cane's little wheels knock into the hard base of something, then roll up over its lip. Ah, good. A chair.
no subject
He goes back to playing--with a little more fumbling now because he's anxious over having an audience. But he doesn't swear anymore, mindful to be on his good behavior. He has to make a good first impression, to get a good grade in first impressions, or he has Failed.
no subject
But he doesn't push for an answer while Johnny's playing. He listens, and he smiles a bit at the new and sudden politeness that Johnny is showing towards his instrument now that there's a witness.
no subject
He's perhaps the most weirded out by the last one, and he hasn't even realized that's not the only extra saint his world has.
no subject
Big philosophical questions to unpack, there.
"I don't suppose it would help to say we have a Europe, an Africa, and an America? And a Great War that-- god, if it exists in your world, might still be going on for you." The reality of that possibility hits him partway through the sentence, and he hopes that this is another point on which their worlds differ.
no subject
Johnny's hands still on the keys. "The war's taken over much of Europe. Most young men from Gallery are out fighting, now. I wasn't conscripted due to some issues with my paperwork. But...I am serving the city and its troops all the same. Military drink free at my bars, these days."
And in exchange for that, the Lord Mayor has allowed Johnny to run his building as neutral territory, between the anti-war protestors and the soldiers, between the city's corrupt elite and those who love it.
no subject
The playing stops. It pulls him out of his thoughts. He moves the wheels of his cane, unconsciously, back and forth across the carpet.
"I'm really sorry to hear that," he says, and means it, but then... can't say more, because talking about his world has made Arthur wonder whether Johnny knows. Whether it's really true, and if it is, whether he knows. That he won't serve the city or its troops again. That he won't return to see the end of his war.
Jesus christ. Arthur feels both agitated and paralysed at once, as if something in him needs to either shrivel or explode. The wheeling stops as he closes his fingers round his cane.
no subject
(What, did you think that agitation went unnoticed?)
no subject
When the moment stretches longer, with neither of them talking, he obligingly fills the silence. "Well. Don't let me talk over your whole practice. It's not quite riding a bicycle, but it'll come back just the same."