caballero ∞ until one day it did (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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multiversallogs2011-11-08 09:22 pm
caballero) wrote in multiversallogs2011-11-08 09:22 pm
Entry tags:
there is a community of the spirit.
Who:Bruce WayneTom and you.
What: Creeping out from the fringes and the shadows, investigating the city through a closer lens.
Where: Various areas in Baedal, mostly the central districts, and along the river.
When: Coardi (Wednesday), or any day this week after that, I'm easy.
Notes: OPEN LIKE AN OPEN THING. I want your cr and I want your revenge, tag in under whatever scenario your dark heart desires.
→ new note: if you'd like to start a new thread please come up with a new setting on another day, Coardi has hit critical mass of things Mr Hermit BatCrab would put up with before vanishing back into the shadows. :E
Warnings: TBA. (Swearing? Not much else.)
Bruce doesn't want to admit it at first, but after he gets a decent night's sleep and has a real conversation with someone, he feels a lot better. It took him an hour of silent reflection on Hasi's little balcony to come to terms with having felt awful to begin with - it's not being here, it's everything else, being here is a strange misstep but it isn't enough to throw him, not really - and to accept that attempting to remain a ghost in the machine wasn't an acceptable plan of action. For a whole armful of reasons. Also on that balcony, struck by the view at night, with oddly-powered lights set into strange buildings like scattered candles and gems, Baedal reminded him of Baku, maybe Lahore, and the inoffensive memories chided at him from quiet corners about his aseptic behavior.
He still isn't social when he goes out. He's quiet, unassuming, and spends hours wandering, watching without truly interacting. He keeps to the edges of the river, then, walking alongside it off the roads, going under bridges where he can. There are people washing the dye out of great, bright reams of fabric in the still shallows, speaking a language he guesses must have once been of Earth; he practices with them for a time, talking of the river's current and temperament and the goddess that lives within instead of about the tenure of their citizenship.
He walks up into the city proper when he comes to the water's split, skirting the arena - there are men and women practicing familiar-but-not-quite movements in a great lined rectangle. It's an experience on a scale Bruce never had even during his own time as a student, and so he sits and watches for a while. A woman speaks to him about a guild that trains and dispatches warriors to serve as private guardians; he keeps the paper she gives him, but invests in nothing further. It isn't anything he'd truly consider, but he's curious in an academic way about what lies inside their doors.
There's a library he'd like to see, but a group of children with wildly varying ages (and genetic markers) end up kicking multicolored rocks into the cobblestone street - he kicks one back, artfully, and ends up engrossed for the next hour learning a game with rules he suspects are not actually written down anywhere. With few words, he teaches one of them how to hold his arm to balance anything on his hand, and laughs a little, privately.
He still isn't social when he goes out. He's quiet, unassuming, and spends hours wandering, watching without truly interacting. He keeps to the edges of the river, then, walking alongside it off the roads, going under bridges where he can. There are people washing the dye out of great, bright reams of fabric in the still shallows, speaking a language he guesses must have once been of Earth; he practices with them for a time, talking of the river's current and temperament and the goddess that lives within instead of about the tenure of their citizenship.
He walks up into the city proper when he comes to the water's split, skirting the arena - there are men and women practicing familiar-but-not-quite movements in a great lined rectangle. It's an experience on a scale Bruce never had even during his own time as a student, and so he sits and watches for a while. A woman speaks to him about a guild that trains and dispatches warriors to serve as private guardians; he keeps the paper she gives him, but invests in nothing further. It isn't anything he'd truly consider, but he's curious in an academic way about what lies inside their doors.
There's a library he'd like to see, but a group of children with wildly varying ages (and genetic markers) end up kicking multicolored rocks into the cobblestone street - he kicks one back, artfully, and ends up engrossed for the next hour learning a game with rules he suspects are not actually written down anywhere. With few words, he teaches one of them how to hold his arm to balance anything on his hand, and laughs a little, privately.
no subject
"I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear it," oh here we go, "but I don't actually get out all that much."
Indeed.
What he means is: he doesn't have a usual crowd. And, yes, he's definitely older than Penelope, ambiguously in his early thirties with something just behind his eyes that speaks of a soul much older than that. (Or maybe just someone really patient and boring - hard to tell.) But he seems comfortable there, walking next to her. It doesn't happen often.
no subject
It's not that she hangs out with people all that young-- what few friends she has are about her age, twenty-three through twenty-five or so, with a few notable exceptions-- it's just that they're so much more steeped in pop-culture than this Tom character seems to be. Her friends are much more on the Sound-And-Fury-Signifying-Nothing side of things. She likes it that way-- it means she doesn't have to invest emotionally in them too much. And we all know why that is. Loss is her constant.
"You're not missing much, but. You know. I've never been one to let life pass me by. Or opportunity, or whatever. Somebody's gotta be the one to tell you about the kind of bullshit you're successfully avoiding in your self-imposed hermitage, anyway." Just to be off-putting, she offers him the last couple of bites of her donut.
no subject
And his work is terrifying... To be fair, even before all that, he kept to himself; when he's quiet and sneakily personable like this, it's hard to tell whether or not he's poorly socialized or pulling this act on purpose. In truth it's a little of both.
He's totally taking the offered donut.
no subject
She is just gonna watch to see if he eats it. She dares him.
"Working a lot has its advantages though. I mean besides the cash money milli. Like I hear stuff. It's funny how rich people talk like they forget the people who work for them are actual, like, people. I could probably pay my rent with just the shit I hear from my clients during fittings, not that I'm a Chatty Cathy or anything. You'd be fucking stunned how much I know that I don't say out loud."
no subject
"Is it the same here?" That's not actually a concept he's ignorant of - growing up, his friends were not in his tax bracket, and Bruce, personally, is always intensely aware of that dynamic. Oftentimes it makes him uncomfortable, his own privilege like soot on his hands he can't ever get off. Not that he has the extent of here, which is, even more perversely, a relief.
no subject
"What? Oh, I was already talking about here. Back home I was working retail. Which, let me say for the record, I am glad I am no longer doing. At least here I get a better chance to make a name for myself. 'Land of Opportunity', you think? Fucking mental."
She has sold more of her own work in the few weeks she's been in Baedal than she did in her entire 24 years in her own universe. In a smaller pool of resources to draw from, people want to know what's new and exciting in the outside world. Penelope's making more than enough to get by. (She's saving almost all of it, though. For a rainy day, you understand.)
no subject
He doesn't sound surprised, really, just sort of a misconception. Maybe because he remembers Penelope making things for people in Taxon, and has always associated her with the kid of broad and fascinating artistic spirit he doesn't fully understand. It's nice to know she's successful.
"I definitely can't afford you, then."
no subject
Talking about men is making her crave another cigarette. She's trying not to turn into one of those chain-smoking whiskey-voiced cigarette-hags, really! But she is eyeballing her bag as if there's a particularly annoying and slightly threatening imp of some sort contained within (clarification, since this is Baedal: there isn't).
"Tell you what though, I can screenprint a t-shirt with the best of 'em. How about I make you something for old-times-i-don't-remember's sake? Call it a 'Welcome to Hell' present."
i make good on my threats fyi
He raises his eyebrows. "You're giving me part of a donut and a t-shirt? You're not gonna come asking me for my soul after, are you?"
He's teasing. Mostly.
you dick.
"Why, do you still have yours? 'Cuz those things can come in handy. Just saying."
...That wasn't creepy at all, Penelope, good job!
no subject
Thus:
"I sold it in prison."
(He did not, and if she has a sense for those kind of things, he is completely ensouled.)
no subject
And anyway, they tend to be bigger assholes than Bruce.
"Uh huh. And how's that turning out for you?" She does not comment on the fact that he just joked about being in prison. True or not, she'd really rather not know.
no subject
"About the same as everything else."
Which doesn't mean fuckall, and Bruce knows it.
no subject
"Considering you're here, I'm guessing that leans towards the 'not fucking good' side of the spectrum."
no subject
If it had to happen at all, anyway.
no subject
"...I mean it was bullshit, but it wasn't all bad. I mean, it was my life, back there. Now I'm here. Coming here, it's like your life goes upside-down and you have to start over, except all your shit's on the ceiling and nobody knows who the fuck you are and won't loan you a fucking ladder."
no subject
Baedal is, compared to Gotham, safe, wholesome, and quaint. He misses home; Bruce lives and breathes his city and every time he's stuck outside of it he's inherently unhappy. But comparatively... well. He's mostly pissed off he's stuck at all.
no subject
Somehow their conversation has gotten entirely too serious. How is it that's happened? How has this random stranger inspired her to have such ~feelings~ about stuff, and why is that okay? It isn't, really, it's exactly the sort of situation Penelope has spent years practicing how to avoid, and this guy just sidesteps all that and is like 'hey, what's up, i'm going to fuck with your mind', and she lets him, because seriously part of her kind of likes it.
Goddamn troll.
no subject
"Mm." He sticks his hands in his pockets. "There's got to be a reason though. Even if that reason is 'accidental cosmic randomness.'"
Shut up with your persistent desire for logic, Wayne.
no subject
That gets her thinking about what he said, though, about the accidental cosmic randomness thing. And that just reminds her of home again.
"Where I come from the world kind of operates on balance. Black and white, positive/negative, that kind of shit. Maybe that's got something to do with it. Not that I've asked anybody, but I mean, there's people who have been here for generations and they still don't know what the fuck, so IMHO it's kind of not worth worrying about. Just as long as you don't piss off the Gods, pretty sure you'll be fine. And avoid giant ants."
no subject
Even faking it, even in his mask of a human persona, it sounds like a lie. There's something about him, soft-spoken nearly-humorless nerd or not, that says to anyone paying attention that this man is not the sort to be satisfied with complacency.
But he isn't the sort to torture someone in conversation, either.
"When I'm less broke, I'll get you to make a shirt for me."