multiversallogs | someone's mouth said, "paint them all red"

Entry tags:

someone's mouth said, "paint them all red"

Who: ~~Bruce Wayne~~ "Tom" and you?
What: Some new stuff and some old stuff; there are a couple of thread starters but otherwise it's totally open.
Where: Various places - default starter is Bonetown, but if you'd like to bump into Kermit elsewhere, ping me to wrangle an idea, the world is our oyster.
Notes: I want your CR and I want your revenge. Tho I apologize ahead of time - Bruce is not really proactive socially so if you want to hurl your character at him you might have to be the one to poke him with a stick. Also his permissions post has been updated, so if you haven't interacted with him before it's worth a read. I'M SORRY THIS CHARACTER IS SO DIFFICULT.
Warnings: TBA.

Bonetown, despite all political hardships and polarized status compared to other cantons - hell, much of the city - has managed to carry on relatively securely. Bruce appreciates the population of paranoid hermits, nonpowered nonEarthlings, and scientists and alchemists working to fail-safe their material, locked in a bubble free of interference. The salves and bandages he can pick up near his flat, made from all natural products originating from planets he's heard of and ones he hasn't, fill his medicine cabinet to overflowing; sometimes these old mothers look at him over the rims of their glasses and inspect the bruises on his hands with something like skeptical judgment, and he doesn't begrudge them that. He doesn't look like a hippie and never will, feelings deep in his heart aside.

Today's a mystery tea day. He can't pronounce what he got (yet), but the donut in the accompanying bag is laughably mundane (rainbow jimmies). The riverbank that overlooks the three-way split is good for the view, and also scoping out chaos at the arena across the way. He'll sit there for a while, then melt back into the crowds.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Inviting Tom to kick the piss out of him after he's spent a day over irons in the forge always seems like a much better idea beforehand than it does afterwards, soaking the ache out of his muscles in slowly cooling water - on the other hand, there are worse ways to end a day than sunk in the end of the long tin bath he keeps out behind the house with halfway decent company in the other end, under the slightly bemused eye of the horse that is not actually his but lives here because he has more land than is available in Bonetown.

(He can't even spell exhibitionist, Bruce, he is just a simple mountain boy.)

“Here a minute,” he says, raising one hand lazily from the side of the tub-- “What's a baseball when it's at home?”

(He'll spell it for him, for the amount of cajoling it took to get Bruce in this thing.)

"Baseball is a game," he says, already sitting forward to attempt to yank a coil of tension out of his shoulder - Bruce's therapeutic manipulations always look just as painful as his hand-to-hand combat. "People on Earth pretend it's more interesting than it is out of no alternative to tradition. You get a stick and hit a ball with it and go run in a circle before people get the ball back to the starting point. A baseball bat is the stick, made out of solid wood, a bit like a katana, lopsided. Most people can crack someone's head open with one on a decent swing."

America's national sport, ladies and gentleman. He reaches past Seoraj's shoulder to stretch, uncharacteristically (by virtue of acclimation) unconcerned with personal space.

Edited (i accidentally a word) 2012-05-04 10:46 (UTC)

(No one is looking at you but Seoraj and the horse, Bruce, and the horse doesn't care.)

There's some speculative gesturing on Seoraj's part to go with this explanation - estimating size and shape in an amiably absent sort of a way, the physical equivalent of thinking out loud - and after a moment of thoughtful silence: “I can think of worse ways to spend an hour than watching a pretty woman swing a bat.” It is, for example, very easy for someone as physical as he is to envision the kind of motion involved, and-- well, he has a very particular sort of a weakness.

It's just there's something about a woman who might put her heel on his throat. Who can say.

"I figure chances are about even I'll get hit," he speculates, but doesn't sound too fussed about it. In terms of heels on throats, he and Seoraj share a certain fondness - even if Bruce is likely to choke someone every so often, himself. (.. There'd be a narrative clarification for context, here, but look.)

"And I suppose you've just been working." Sure, and nobody creeps on the network in private. Bruce leans back in the water again, feeling returning to the upper part of his shoulder.

“I can't complain if business and pleasure run side by side,” Seoraj says, peaceably, to the guy he knows periodically actually borrows his CiD in addition to just being prone to obsessively stalking everything the cohort ever says. He is not fooled. (Laidback as hell, but not fooled; it's just he doesn't mind, see.) “That woman's mind is frightening.”

It's funny how much that sounds like 'and it gives me a boner'.

Bruce doesn't laugh, but if he smiles as he leans his head back, he doesn't try to hide it. (He gave up, with Seoraj.)

"I guess you have a type."

“Can't help what suits me.” A moment later, “Worse things in the world than giving Sir Hellsing something to look at while she's getting her horse shod.”

--he has no illusions that he's actually got a shot with her. Still.

"What with how busy they've been." An implication of a shrug, in his tone - might as well do something nice for the woman. (That's as close to crude as he gets, for the record.)

On that subject (... Hellsing, not Seoraj flashing anyone) he continues, "I'll probably be doing something a bit more worthwhile with my time, soon."

Something more worthwhile than whatever makes him show up with bruises all the time? Hm.

“I reckon that's plenty worthwhile,” Seoraj returns, amiably, and he does mean flashing his knees (...yes) at Integra, because clearly he is performing an important stress relief service to an overworked civil servant. That's right. ...anyway: “Give, then. What's it to be?”

Since he's assuming - perhaps generously - that Bruce hasn't brought it up just to get enigmatic and wiggle his fingers mysteriously.

Not much of a finger wiggling guy, this one, no. Bruce is quiet for a moment, attempting to put together how to phrase it. (What a good sign.)

Instead, he tries a different tactic- "You know what I do." Here. In Baedal. Unrelated to his engineering job. Seoraj isn't stupid.

“I've known enough,” Seoraj concedes; he is not stupid, and there's a time and a place for playing Big Dumb Arum-- this is not it, not least of all because successfully pulling the wool over this one would probably need the assistance of an entire barrel of something stronger than ale. He's curious, but he's bided his time about it - asked the questions that were welcome, the ones that'd get him answers, and made himself patient for the things he needed an invitation to know. “You keep your own counsel on that.”

"It's a little safer that way." Wry, not ominous. But they'd both be stupid to pretend otherwise - it's as much protecting their varied interests as it is protecting people, the way Bruce keeps his business private and compartmentalized.

"I did it at home, too. On a larger scale."

Distantly, he wonders about himself, and why he keeps trusting people he sleeps with. (Sleeping with people he trusts? Surely something greater happened first, with Seoraj.)

Silence is sometimes about trust, and not the lack of it; that's something Seoraj understands, even if his tendency to get a stranger's life story out of genuine curiosity and willingness to listen doesn't suggest that about him. He's conscious of which questions he should and should not ask, when's the right time and when isn't.

Like now: “Home's different. You know your space, mm?”

He nods, agreeing. He definitely knows Gotham; so much that he still feels spikes of uncontrollable possessive irritation when he sees other people wearing his symbol. "I'm two people there," he admits. And it shouldn't be difficult to figure out what he means - the man who does things and the man who pretends not to, the habit he keeps even in Baedal where he doesn't quite have to. "Now I'm three people."

“That's Tom, and the man who likes to take walks,” that is incredibly dry, from the man formally known as 'the man who isn't going to forget to ask what the terrain is going to be like, next time', “and...?”

It's strange to think that Tom and that guy who goes on walks are one and the same; he doesn't think the monster inside of him would be so whimsical. Maybe that was just, for him, something resembling a normal moment. (How concerning.) He smiles, faint.

"The person I pretend to be at home, so no one suspects anything about the other two."

It merits some thought, as alien to him as it is - Seoraj is many things, but though he isn't the simple man he claims to be, he is a straightforward man. There's only one of him at any given time, and he's only obliged to make decisions based around that one identity. It's strange to imagine putting pieces of himself in boxes like that; it's strange to think it can be done, but he's encountered all sorts of strange things.

The strangest thing is imagining Tom (Bruce) as someone who no one would think of as competent. It's the first thing he noticed about him.

“How do you remember who you are?”

Bruce does not actually flinch - he's potentially incapable - but there's a brief look in his eyes that's uncharacteristically cornered. It's unfair of Seoraj, to be this emotionally pragmatic.

"With occasional difficulty."

“Who are you to me?”

Speaking of emotional pragmatism. He doesn't hesitate before he asks, though that unkindly honest question had come before it because it took a bit of a psychological run up to achieve; it feels like a strange thing to want to know when being told something of this magnitude, the size of it something he can feel the edges of with his fingers and his part of this landscape so small, but then again it strikes him as exactly the most appropriate question when being trusted with that information.

That the question is, essentially, who is my friend and not is this real is a form of trust that he doesn't even think about, because it doesn't occur to him it wouldn't be.

The answer is simple in Bruce's head but ultimately difficult to articulate; me isn't simple when he often can't keep who he is straight. Baedal has been both easier and more difficult - he can breathe easier in his personal life, being free of having to split it again and again, but he can feel himself losing his grip without Batman.

"Someone I'd like to be," he says finally, and wonders if that's the right thing to say.

(Emotional honesty is a new concept.)

His answer prompts a small, lopsided smile; it's an odd thing to say, but it seems like the right thing from where Seoraj is sitting (across from him in the outdoor tub, yes). It seems like meeting in the middle somewhere, a little messy, something new - and that's the way he lives his life, isn't it.

“Well,” he says, philosophically, “I like him.”

Something like relief happens at that. Bruce still just doesn't know what buttons to push to produce the results he wants, when it comes to things like this; he doesn't feel any pressure with Seoraj (nor Hasibe, or Vanessza), which he appreciates.

"Thanks." Faintly amused, in a self-depreciating way. "I think I have more friends here, actually." He doesn't think, he knows. "It's..."

Stuck again. He leans forward a bit, fingertips brushing one of Seoraj's knees, his expression looking like he's trying to puzzle something out. "People know who I am, and I hate it, but it's useful. No one knows who Tom is." (Except them.)

Seoraj watches him with an interest that feels more participatory than cold scrutiny; he rests thumb and forefinger against the side of his face, elbow on the side of the tub, lifting his knee slightly under Bruce's hand. “You get to choose,” he says, making his translation of that train of thought almost a question. “Who knows, and who knows what.”

"That was the plan," he agrees, palm resting against Seoraj's knee now, and he's not entirely sure how he got used to that. "But my name is one that a lot of people in a lot of realities know."

His face as well, as logic follows. "So I'm.. thinking of doing something more worthwhile."

Back to that. Because his act is nearly blown, because he's going stir crazy.

Arum knees are very appealing, Bruce, just go with it.

“What'd you have in mind, then?”

● good people making good decisions

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