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» she saw the pictures and painted them

Who: Angela and You. YES, YOU!
What: Come be drawn like one of her French girls.
Where: A street corner a few blocks away from the inn.
When: Early Misdi afternoon
Warnings: The warning is... it's Angela.

On this chilly, yet sunny afternoon, Angela Montenegro can be seen walking down on of Baedal’s many streets, dragging behind her is a little red wagon filled to the brim with art supplies. Where she got the wagon isn't important; what is important, however, is what Angela's planning on doing with the equipment.

Setting up is done quickly and easily with the finesse of a pro (this isn't her first rodeo, kids.) One sketchpad is placed on an easel and flipped to a clean page where Angela scribbles in thick black marker:

ART DONE BY PARIS TRAINED ARTIST – 6 SHEKELS EACH PORTRAIT

She stands back and eyes her handiwork before an almost evil grin spreads across her face. And in smaller, but not too small, letters, Angela writes the words:

NUDES ARE WELCOME. 1 MARK.

And in even smaller letters:

PLEASE HELP ME NOT STARVE. SUPPORT THE ARTS!

And in almost illegible letters towards the bottom right corner of the page:

Please? I don't want to do death masks anymore. ):

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"Um."

That hangs there, for a long moment, Jules scrabbling for some kind of answer. They'd not ever been married, no, but they'd had rings, but-- but.

But.

Levi had said, in their long hours together, that Emilia didn't want a hybrid around her children, which only lead to a long list of extremely negative conclusions. Jules blinks, shakes her head as if to snap herself out of a daze, and gives Angela a bright smile which is in no way genuine. Angela might deal in death masks, but Jules deals in masks that make things seem much better then they were. "My ex, actually." For all the positive spin in her expression, there's definitely still a touch of strain in her voice, and she's fiddling with the finger where her ring had been before Levi took it. "Chloe and Matthias are with her, so I don't see them anymore."

And she's here, that wouldn't help either.

"Oh," Angela sheepishly shoots back with her mouth the perfect little o. Good going, Montenegro. Foot in mouth strikes you again.

Back on her mental feet, Angela pats the second stool nearby comfortingly. "You don't have to fake it for me. I know how it can be with exes." She wonders that if her and Hodgins had had a child before anything went down, would he let her see it? It's a hard question to swallow, knowing that the last time she saw him, his anger over their breakup was so tangible and palpable that he couldn't even look at her, much less speak to her. Angela shakes her own head, snapping out of the mood to ask more questions to add to the unanswered ones she already has.

"Do you want me to draw you in the picture too or would that be too much?"

Not a stranger to sheepishness, Jules gives her a bit of a smile. "Don't worry about it. You weren't to know."

Jules wasn't really comfortable with thinking of Em has her ex, either, even two-- or was it closer to three, now? months later. She's rather grateful to perch on the stool, shaking her head a little as Angela talks, laughing just quietly. "Thank you. Our situation was rather complicated, in the end. More than I thought." Naive, probably foolish. A whole number of things Jules could easily apply to herself, and yet somehow had managed to live in denial of for eighteen months.

Looking back to Angela, she thinks for a moment. "That would be nice, actually. And not horribly strange, I hope. A portrait with an ex." Part of her just wanted to hold on; to what it had felt like being treated like a human, even if it wasn't genuine. Making herself comfortable on the chair, she continues, "I'm Jules, by the way. Jules Grumley. Sorry, I've got a bad habit of totally forgetting my manners."

"Love is always complicated, but of course, we prefer it that way. If it wasn't, we'd take it for granted and expect it to fall in our laps once one thing was over and done with." A fool for love. Angela's been one a time or two or ten. But she prefers it that way, even. You let yourself be controlled by fear and you'll never really fully love a person. And that is a disservice to yourself.

"I wouldn't have asked if it was strange." People all have their own ways of dealing with a broken heart and Angela can tell that Jules still has lingering feelings for this Em. It's written all over her face and in the simple act of wanting a portrait drawn of her and the kids. Nobody pays for a sketch of a hated enemy.

With her opinions on the situation given, she carefully places the photograph on the edge of the easel before turning to smile at Jules. "Angela Montenegro, and manners are overrated. Don't worry about it."

Edited 2011-11-13 08:50 (UTC)

She doesn't need to be an empath to appreciate that there's something almost inherently kind of calming about Angela; she appears to have a knack for putting people at ease and drawing out smiles, and while Jules doesn't have a particular excuse to grab her wrist and drag those deeper truths out. (Nevermind that she's been wrong before, she's always preferred intuition over cold logic.) Tilting her head, she considers Angela's words. "Maybe it's better that way. If you keep charging in without appreciating just what it is, you're probably all the more likely to end up with nothing."

A grateful look, relieved, and she just nods. "Thank you. And it's nice to meet you, Angela. Did you like Paris, when you were there?"

It seems odd to ask, but she has come to understand there are countless different realities. Paris in Angela's world might not be dangerous as the one in her own.

Edited 2011-11-13 09:01 (UTC)

"But," Angela adds with a firm tone that this next part is important, "Sometimes charging in is exactly what you need to do sometimes. You just need to decide which moment calls for which. Do one instead of the other and you might end up losing everything and nothing at the same time."

She begins on an outline of one of the twins as she speaks, slowly and thoughtfully both in her words and actions. Angela tends to zone out completely to anything around her when she's creating, but in this position, people expect her to talk to them. It's a little difficult to split her attention, but not impossible.

"I loved it. I went back a few times afterwards, but I wouldn't mind moving there permanently one day." Permanently is just a nice word for Angela to use, though her history of permanency has only been five years in the same state, not counting her childhood.

"Judging when you need to do what isn't necessarily the easiest thing," Jules replied with a wry smile. "People make all sorts of strange decisions for all sorts of reasons." Some more comprehendible than others. "Losing everything and nothing sounds... painful, whatever way you look at it. Even if someone doesn't realise the pain of what they've missed."

That sounds nice, really. The Paris she saw, it still had it's beauty from the life before the monsters, but there was something so desolate and mournful about it, like the spirit that should be inherent in a city had been stripped away. "What's it like?" A moment, and she clarifies, "from what I've heard, my world differs a bit from some of the others people here come from." A little shrug, though she's trying to keep somewhat still. "I was only there once, but it was so... heavy, I suppose. Like it was suffocating, somehow."

"We need a little pain in life to appreciate the good. There has to be a balance of things and without one, we'll overlook the other again."

Lord knows Angela is speaking from experience. These last few years of her life have been full of pain, sadness, loss, and disappointments. And she let them beat her down for a while. She isn't perfect; she's liable to collapse like anybody else. But she picked herself up and she refuses to hit rock bottom again. Once was enough.

"Heavy?" Angela eyes Jules uncertainly. "That isn't the word I would use for it. Were you in the city parts? It could get crowded there, I know."

Hah. There's something of a sound from Jules, but she tries to politely cover it. Even if she agrees - and she does, really - it's so grim. Self-conscious, her right hand strays to the left side of her neck, tugging at her shirt to try and more effectively cover a partially visible, violent-red scar. "I suppose you're right." Unless that pain starts to eclipse everything else and you lose parts of yourself to it, but... Angela didn't need to know that. No one here needed to know what she was.

It was just as well Balthazar found her, helped her, or whatever was in Baedal now might have been more a monster than a person.

"I..." she trails off awkwardly, before the sentence can really begin. "The world I come from had changed from what it used to be. There are monsters, and devils, so... whatever places used to be, they changed. Big groups of humans are like targets, almost, so it's more like it looked abandoned. There were all these feats of human achievement, the Eiffel Tower and the Arch, but just small handfuls of people, aboveground."

Angela shakes her head and leans over to stop Jules' hand. "Don't hide it. It's a part of you." Whoever doesn't like that scar, that's on them, not Jules.

She goes back to drawing only to freeze at Jules' description of Paris. Sounds more like Hell, really. "That's a little more than heavy, don't you think?" Like more into the depressing and horrifying departments?

She stiffens a bit at the touch to her hand, but stops regardless, silently easing her grip on her shirt.

"It's all most people have known," Jules offers by way of explanation, but as her hand drops away from the scar, she starts to fiddle her hands together. They know it's more than heavy - she knows very well. "When life gives you lemons, I suppose! Or something along those lines."

A smile, because sometimes trying to gloss and glide over everything really is the only way to cope with that reality, whether it's the danger at every turn, or knowing you're one of the things parents tell their children goes bump in the night.

"Most people are idiots." Blunt and easily said, that's how Angela does it. "And when life gives you lemons, throw them back at life and ask for limes to go with your tequila."

Things that go bump in the night may bump, but in some cases, they don't bite. They're just misunderstood. Angela's learned this lesson hard.

Jules can't hold back a laugh, an actual genuine one, not a smile that she just holds onto like some desperate facade. "I might try that, in the future. It could make things more interesting." Shaking her head, she grins. "There's absolutely no reason to force ourselves into sobriety now, is there?"

The thing was, Jules did bite; a biological requirement, a need to maintain her humanity and keep her from hurting more people, ironically enough. Whether having a conscience and trying to use that monstrous need for good could work, or whether it just made it all the more repugnant, she wasn't sure. Even in good moments - and she'd call this one of those, because there was something relaxing about it, something fun - that doubt as to whether she could ever really be good was a constant weight to drag her under. She shakes her head, a habit to try and dismiss thoughts (with mixed success) and hums for a short moment. "How long have you been in Baedal?"

"Not if it's necessary." At one point it was necessary for Angela, but she's past that point--hopefully--and can now drink without going off the deep end so she can sleep without interruption from sounds or thoughts.

"About a month, give or take a few days? I haven't been keeping track, honestly." She tries not to because the next thing she knows, it'll be another three years and still no hint of home. "You?"

"A month?" She's surprised, but then, she wouldn't even imagine this has happened to Angela before. "You seem much more settled in and organised than I can even think of." Despite feeling like she should be still during this whole drawing adventure, Jules is feeling quite unbelievably fidgety, and actually thinking about the need to completely overhaul, start fresh wasn't entirely helping; largely because she had been glossing over things here and there to make herself feel better.

Making herself just put her hands in her lap, and leave them there, Jules rolls her eyes at herself. "A week or two. I'm not being terrible diligent about keeping track, either. That's far too scary."

"I've had time to get used to the notion of alternate dimensions." More than enough time. Too much, even. Three years plus however long she'll be stuck in Baedal, and Angela has no other choice but to deal.

"You'll get used to it. As scary as that may seem, it gets easier. Not simple, but easier." And even then, it's sometimes the hardest thing one will ever have to deal with.

That sounds a bit ominous, but her curiousity is piqued nonetheless. "Would you mind horribly if I asked what that meant, or is it one of those comments you'd rather was simply left alone? I won't be offended, if that's the case, really."

Her smile turns a little wry. "Things don't really tend to be simple, I've found." And she wasn't too sure about easy being a real concept, but then that was the entire basis for all that optimism and cheer; it made coping easier. It made just being easier. In theory, at least. "It's very nice to pretend, though."

A bit more honest then she has been in general, over the last few years. Having your world taken apart, the comfortable spaces you created suddenly disappearing and proving false, can rather throw you off.

"It's nothing horrible. I just came from a place like this where I spent almost three years in. I didn't have a choice but to get used to it since I couldn't actually leave."

Sounds simple enough, but what Angela leaves out are the hard times, the long nights, the depression, the drinking, the physical pains. Getting acclimated to the situation was a survival mechanism. The list of options of how to deal was a short one and she went through all of them at least twice.

"Pretending can only take you but so far, though," she muses as she adds some red to the quickly developing portrait. "Sooner or later, reality catches up with you."

Three years. She didn't know how to react, how to... even begin to absorb that. Three years. And yet, if you were restarting your life, if this was something she should take as an opportunity...

Well. It didn't feel much like an opportunity. Angela's second statement, that is another thing to take the wind out of Jules' sails, even if she keeps smiling. There's a brief tenseness to her expression, the fleeting struggle to control something and shove it down where it can't be acknowledged, and she gives herself a few seconds before she looks back up. "I suppose you're right."

She doesn't like it, but she has to admit it. Reality had caught up to her a few times over, by now, but some things she hadn't even realised were pretend.

"Maybe it's kinder not to make any pretenses. They don't really protect anyone, ultimately."

Angela's the one who tells the truth to everybody, even if there are times when she really needs to listen to her own words and take her own advice. Those times happen few and far in between, by the way. That how she ends up in the situations that she does.

"No, not really," Angela muses, slowing down in her sketching to think for a moment, "I mean, it helps, but it hurts at the same time. There's no padding from the truth."

"It's not good having false padding there and then having the truth hurt more when it finally does hit you. You might think you're prepared, but you're not."

And there's not much padding from Jules' weariness and bitterness mixing together, her inability to find some bright, shiny way to dress it up and make it look better from this or that angle. It's just there, and she's not all too pleased with the result. "Sorry," she muttered, rubbing her forehead and offering a worn-out smile. "It's been a long few weeks."

Eagerly, trying to force herself to a cheerier state, she sits up a bit more. "How's it looking?"

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» she saw the pictures and painted them

ALL the links? D'8

ALL THE LINKS!

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HERP reread post silly me

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