A morning collection of random thoughts
Oct. 29th, 2007 10:57 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
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The sun was slowly trickling into Zac's flat through the curtains. It meandered around the edges of the sofa, and formed a little pool on the threadbare carpet.
Lying on the sofa, Tegan watched the morning light gathering through half closed eyes. Soon she would have to get up. She could doze for a little longer, as Kayd was taking a class at Kew this morning (one of the three classes he was able to fit in around his schedule at the Natural History Museum), but she would have to get up soon.
She pondered the man who's flat she was sleeping in. She wondered whether he would mind if she borrowed his shower. She thought not, and had a vague idea about what would constitute a fair payment for it.
Outside the sun rose a little higher in the sky, and Zac stirred very slightly at the sound of running water somewhere in his flat, before pulling his duvet up around his ears.
Tegan padded back into the sitting room, still slightly damp, and pushed her hair back from her face. She was in a surprisingly good mood this morning, particularly considering the odd tangle of emotions that she had been feeling the night before. She'd been quite close to throwing herself at Zac, just for a night of feeling something simple, but some faint and underused voice of common sense inside her had suggested that that wasn't a very good idea. Zac was her friend, and Tegan was aware that she didn't have enough of them going spare to cheerfully beat one friendship with sticks for the sake of...something.
Tegan shook her head, and smiled a wry smile.
"Bad blood," she muttered to herself. "You've got bad blood in you."
She remembered her grandmother, graceful and lovely in a way that a grandmother should not be, cradling her on her lap as a small child and promising her that she'd have men fighting to the death for the sake of her smiles. It had seemed very glamorous when she was five. Later, when she had seen Fergal kick the crap out of anyone he'd felt was encroaching on his territory it had been much less romantic. She's decided then that her grandmother's belief that anything could be fixed by a man in love was maybe not as accurate as her five year old self had believed.
A few years on the street, where sex lead to love considerably less often than it lead to strangulation and a body being dumped in a skip had also battered her faith in her grandmother's wisdom. These days, Tegan rarely expected much from anyone, and no longer looked on every handsome boy with bright eyed hope in the way she had when she was thirteen. Still, there was the blood in her, and the blood called out for something. Not love, she thought. House Fiona (which was where the bad blood came from) had never really been about love. Maybe it was just that friendship was made up of soft and muted colours, and there wasn't enough Glamour in that.
Tegan sat down cross legged on the floor, and pulled out three sheets of paper from her bag, and laid them out on the floor. Three pictures for Zac, as a 'thank you' for the hot water she'd taken.
She remembered Zac talking about the girl he'd liked, and pulled out her brightest chalks from her bag. Heliotrope, he had said. Her name meant 'chasing the sun', and she began to imagine how that could be both a picture and a song. The sun she began to draw was electric orange, made up of spikes and pulses of energy. Around it, she drew a whirlwind of jagged little sparks and flickering flames, of reds, oranges, blues and greens. She remembered the electricity jagglings that Fergal had shown her once, when they were still crazy about each other and he'd wanted to show her all of his world. She tried to draw them on the paper, seeking out the sun as it hung in a sky that was thin and grey in comparison with the solar energy in the foreground.
At the bottom of her picture, she wrote 'chasing the sun' in careful letters.
Tegan smiled wistfully at the bright colours. They were beautiful. She had never really seen Heliotrope that way. She'd just been mildly afraid of the women with the large laser gun who's shot her. It was nice to see another side. It was nice to know that there was something beautiful about Heliotrope to someone.
She paused for a moment, searching for more inspiration.
What had she wanted last night?
Primarily, she had wanted to not go home with Michael Stands Ready, which would have been very easy to do, and incredibly awful in the long run. She knew Fergal well enough to know that he would view Michael touching her after he'd lost that challenge as reason enough to go for the kill.
Tegan sighed, and looked at the claddagh ring she was wearing again on her finger. She wasn't sure why she was wearing it again, other than that recent events had rather forcibly reminded her that she was married. There were moments when it almost looked comforting. Then...
Tegan wrinkled up her nose.
"Stop moping, Tegan," she said firmly, and stared down at the sheet of paper again.
She sighed. She could almost live with Fergal being...well...Fergal, if she thought he was doing it because he cared. She hated the violence, the hurting and the blood, but it was the cold and seething contempt afterwards which always made her feel utterly sick inside. It seemed that even now, even after everything, a part of her still desperately wanted her husband to like her, in some way.
"That's not going to happen," she said out loud, and closed her eyes for a second to clear her brain. When she opened them again she had her focus back, and bent over the sheet of paper.
This time she started off using her cream and white pastels, shaping a glowing orb in the centre of the paper, rather like a single bell-like note. Around it, she began to work a pattern. At the edges she drew the strong dark lines of the beat, and in-between she wove bright colours together, as intricately as her celtic knotwork. She tried to draw music, in pastels and chalks.
She stopped after a while, and stared at it. She wasn't entirely satisfied, but maybe Zac would be amused by it. Glancing up at the clock on the wall she was slightly startled to see how late it had gotten.
She had one more piece to make for Zac, and she began to scribble determinedly.
She had thought of friendship as being made out of pastel colours, instead of the bright primary notes that brought out desire. Undoubtedly she and Fergal's relationship could have been drawn in a thousand variations of the colour of blood, but her relationship with Michael hadn't been like that. They had been lovers, but their feelings had, to her, always felt like cream and candlelight; together they were soft and comfortable. What colour was her friendship with Zac?
She began thoughtfully with a simple geometric pattern, as if she were weaving together a rug.
"Weaving..." Tegan murmured as she drew. "Now that's a new idea..."
She took a variety of different colours, and used them as threads. First of all she drew a border - a frame for the world that she and Zac lived in. There was a rich green for Kew, where she and Zac worked. There was a bright electric blue for Zac - blue like the heart of a flame, or like the colour of the wind. Then there was Petra, who she drew as brick red, like the city Petra loved. She entwined Petra and Zac's threads closely together, around the edges of the paper, rather like knotwork again. Tegan was a softer green, rather like bracken from the moors.
A few thin grey threads represented the Ratkin, and then she began to work on the piece at the centre.
Tegan stared at the paper for a while. She didn't know how to paint friendship. She also found herself coming to the slightly odd conclusion that she couldn't, in this case, paint herself as a butterfly. Zac didn't, she thought, see her as being pretty but useless. Well, maybe he saw her as useless, but she had tried to be helpful.
After a while, she began to draw two figures, circling around each other. One was a horse. It was an electric blue horse, strong and vibrant. It was in movement, because it always was. It could not be anything else, for the horse was the symbol for a life lived in motion. After some consideration she began to draw another horse, this time in a mossy green. It followed the stallion, for horses are herd animals, but in following it could make the stallion stronger. It could see new paths, and maybe see new traps. That was what friendship was, wasn't it?
It was nearly noon, and Kayd would be done soon. Tegan scrambled to her feet, and began to pull on her boots. She pinned the three pictures to Zac's bedroom door, with an added note which said 'one for friendship, one for the music, one for the girl. I borrowed your shower while you were asleep'.
Outside the air was crisp and cold, and Tegan was incredibly grateful that she'd had somewhere to sleep last night which had central heating. The commune would be extremely chilly today, although Kayd would probably have turned the heating on. She absent mindedly pondered on the extraordinary number of people acquiring geasa lately, and wondered how they would all deal with them. She wondered exactly what that random Fianna woman last night had actually wanted out of her, and how exactly she was meant to avoid Garou and do her job. She wondered many things, and then she smiled because it was a new day, after all, and she was alive and well rested and on her way to work.
And that, Tegan thought, was enough to keep her happy for the moment.
Lying on the sofa, Tegan watched the morning light gathering through half closed eyes. Soon she would have to get up. She could doze for a little longer, as Kayd was taking a class at Kew this morning (one of the three classes he was able to fit in around his schedule at the Natural History Museum), but she would have to get up soon.
She pondered the man who's flat she was sleeping in. She wondered whether he would mind if she borrowed his shower. She thought not, and had a vague idea about what would constitute a fair payment for it.
Outside the sun rose a little higher in the sky, and Zac stirred very slightly at the sound of running water somewhere in his flat, before pulling his duvet up around his ears.
Tegan padded back into the sitting room, still slightly damp, and pushed her hair back from her face. She was in a surprisingly good mood this morning, particularly considering the odd tangle of emotions that she had been feeling the night before. She'd been quite close to throwing herself at Zac, just for a night of feeling something simple, but some faint and underused voice of common sense inside her had suggested that that wasn't a very good idea. Zac was her friend, and Tegan was aware that she didn't have enough of them going spare to cheerfully beat one friendship with sticks for the sake of...something.
Tegan shook her head, and smiled a wry smile.
"Bad blood," she muttered to herself. "You've got bad blood in you."
She remembered her grandmother, graceful and lovely in a way that a grandmother should not be, cradling her on her lap as a small child and promising her that she'd have men fighting to the death for the sake of her smiles. It had seemed very glamorous when she was five. Later, when she had seen Fergal kick the crap out of anyone he'd felt was encroaching on his territory it had been much less romantic. She's decided then that her grandmother's belief that anything could be fixed by a man in love was maybe not as accurate as her five year old self had believed.
A few years on the street, where sex lead to love considerably less often than it lead to strangulation and a body being dumped in a skip had also battered her faith in her grandmother's wisdom. These days, Tegan rarely expected much from anyone, and no longer looked on every handsome boy with bright eyed hope in the way she had when she was thirteen. Still, there was the blood in her, and the blood called out for something. Not love, she thought. House Fiona (which was where the bad blood came from) had never really been about love. Maybe it was just that friendship was made up of soft and muted colours, and there wasn't enough Glamour in that.
Tegan sat down cross legged on the floor, and pulled out three sheets of paper from her bag, and laid them out on the floor. Three pictures for Zac, as a 'thank you' for the hot water she'd taken.
She remembered Zac talking about the girl he'd liked, and pulled out her brightest chalks from her bag. Heliotrope, he had said. Her name meant 'chasing the sun', and she began to imagine how that could be both a picture and a song. The sun she began to draw was electric orange, made up of spikes and pulses of energy. Around it, she drew a whirlwind of jagged little sparks and flickering flames, of reds, oranges, blues and greens. She remembered the electricity jagglings that Fergal had shown her once, when they were still crazy about each other and he'd wanted to show her all of his world. She tried to draw them on the paper, seeking out the sun as it hung in a sky that was thin and grey in comparison with the solar energy in the foreground.
At the bottom of her picture, she wrote 'chasing the sun' in careful letters.
Tegan smiled wistfully at the bright colours. They were beautiful. She had never really seen Heliotrope that way. She'd just been mildly afraid of the women with the large laser gun who's shot her. It was nice to see another side. It was nice to know that there was something beautiful about Heliotrope to someone.
She paused for a moment, searching for more inspiration.
What had she wanted last night?
Primarily, she had wanted to not go home with Michael Stands Ready, which would have been very easy to do, and incredibly awful in the long run. She knew Fergal well enough to know that he would view Michael touching her after he'd lost that challenge as reason enough to go for the kill.
Tegan sighed, and looked at the claddagh ring she was wearing again on her finger. She wasn't sure why she was wearing it again, other than that recent events had rather forcibly reminded her that she was married. There were moments when it almost looked comforting. Then...
Tegan wrinkled up her nose.
"Stop moping, Tegan," she said firmly, and stared down at the sheet of paper again.
She sighed. She could almost live with Fergal being...well...Fergal, if she thought he was doing it because he cared. She hated the violence, the hurting and the blood, but it was the cold and seething contempt afterwards which always made her feel utterly sick inside. It seemed that even now, even after everything, a part of her still desperately wanted her husband to like her, in some way.
"That's not going to happen," she said out loud, and closed her eyes for a second to clear her brain. When she opened them again she had her focus back, and bent over the sheet of paper.
This time she started off using her cream and white pastels, shaping a glowing orb in the centre of the paper, rather like a single bell-like note. Around it, she began to work a pattern. At the edges she drew the strong dark lines of the beat, and in-between she wove bright colours together, as intricately as her celtic knotwork. She tried to draw music, in pastels and chalks.
She stopped after a while, and stared at it. She wasn't entirely satisfied, but maybe Zac would be amused by it. Glancing up at the clock on the wall she was slightly startled to see how late it had gotten.
She had one more piece to make for Zac, and she began to scribble determinedly.
She had thought of friendship as being made out of pastel colours, instead of the bright primary notes that brought out desire. Undoubtedly she and Fergal's relationship could have been drawn in a thousand variations of the colour of blood, but her relationship with Michael hadn't been like that. They had been lovers, but their feelings had, to her, always felt like cream and candlelight; together they were soft and comfortable. What colour was her friendship with Zac?
She began thoughtfully with a simple geometric pattern, as if she were weaving together a rug.
"Weaving..." Tegan murmured as she drew. "Now that's a new idea..."
She took a variety of different colours, and used them as threads. First of all she drew a border - a frame for the world that she and Zac lived in. There was a rich green for Kew, where she and Zac worked. There was a bright electric blue for Zac - blue like the heart of a flame, or like the colour of the wind. Then there was Petra, who she drew as brick red, like the city Petra loved. She entwined Petra and Zac's threads closely together, around the edges of the paper, rather like knotwork again. Tegan was a softer green, rather like bracken from the moors.
A few thin grey threads represented the Ratkin, and then she began to work on the piece at the centre.
Tegan stared at the paper for a while. She didn't know how to paint friendship. She also found herself coming to the slightly odd conclusion that she couldn't, in this case, paint herself as a butterfly. Zac didn't, she thought, see her as being pretty but useless. Well, maybe he saw her as useless, but she had tried to be helpful.
After a while, she began to draw two figures, circling around each other. One was a horse. It was an electric blue horse, strong and vibrant. It was in movement, because it always was. It could not be anything else, for the horse was the symbol for a life lived in motion. After some consideration she began to draw another horse, this time in a mossy green. It followed the stallion, for horses are herd animals, but in following it could make the stallion stronger. It could see new paths, and maybe see new traps. That was what friendship was, wasn't it?
It was nearly noon, and Kayd would be done soon. Tegan scrambled to her feet, and began to pull on her boots. She pinned the three pictures to Zac's bedroom door, with an added note which said 'one for friendship, one for the music, one for the girl. I borrowed your shower while you were asleep'.
Outside the air was crisp and cold, and Tegan was incredibly grateful that she'd had somewhere to sleep last night which had central heating. The commune would be extremely chilly today, although Kayd would probably have turned the heating on. She absent mindedly pondered on the extraordinary number of people acquiring geasa lately, and wondered how they would all deal with them. She wondered exactly what that random Fianna woman last night had actually wanted out of her, and how exactly she was meant to avoid Garou and do her job. She wondered many things, and then she smiled because it was a new day, after all, and she was alive and well rested and on her way to work.
And that, Tegan thought, was enough to keep her happy for the moment.