caveofsapphires | hurt myself again today

Entry tags:

hurt myself again today

WHO: Gabriel (Sylvester Wilton), [OPEN]
WHAT: Power discovery goes very, very wrong.
WHERE: Syl's caravan, the Cave, anywhere else it's conceivable to him to be
WHEN: 2 June - 9 June 2012
WARNINGS: None yet
NOTES: Looking for nummy new CR, or call-backs to earlier CR he hasn't spoken to for a while, especially for the initial helping-hand thread, please. :3 Multiple threads with the same character throughout the week are welcome. Also, Gabe will not be able to see peoples' souls for the duration.

Actionspam also welcome if that's better for people!

It was the conversation with the Doctor which had planted the thought in Gabriel's head. Well, the conversation with the Doctor and that little hole Re-l had discovered in the back of the wardrobe. The fact was that his constructs were, technically, a reality-warp. They used the fabric of reality to create something out of nothing ... well, nothing that could be seen, anyway.

And if he could do that, then maybe he could take things a step further into doing something else. Like actual reality manipulation.

Which was why he was staring contemplatively at the wall of Syl's caravan, ratta-tapping the counter. A small pocket to start with, he decided. A little safe in the wall. He could cover it with a painting, or something. It wasn't like anyone would assume there would be anything behind it, given the tininess of the caravan.

In the past he'd found that as long as he kept a detailed image of an object in mind, he shouldn't think too hard about the creation in order for it to work. As long as he knew how it was built, that seemed to be all he needed. Well, he knew how these reality manipulations went. So once he had a structured image of the little hidey-hole in mind, he lifted his hand and snapped his fingers.

The ensuing flash of light and shockwave which rattled the caravan was visible from blocks away. Gabriel pushed himself up onto his elbows, his head ringing and back aching as if he'd just been thrown against the far wall--which he had. He moved gingerly, pushing himself up against the wall that opened, breathing hard and blinking, and trying not to be sick. The nauseous feeling passed after a few minutes and the ringing in his head dulled to a slight throb.

His vision faded from the white turn of dizziness into steady blackness, and the archangel's stomach flipped over with dread. "Oh, no."

* * *

The next week was ... well, it was something close to Hell. Gabriel couldn't tell whether his screw-up had permenantly messed with his sight or not, and every time he opened his eyes and saw nothing it twisted his gut to such a degree that he felt sick.

Blind. Not just blind the way his brothers were still blind, but completely. He couldn't even move the caravan far, because he couldn't see the streets; there was an autopilot installed on the driver's booth, because Syl had referenced it in his notes, but the archangel couldn't see to program it in the first place. The archangel was forced to walk if he ever wanted to go anywhere, one hand planted firmly on a wall just so he could make sure he was going the right way.

And no angel radar meant he got lost. Frequently. There were few things as terrifying as having no wall, no concept as to where the wall was, and no idea if he was on the right street.

He managed to find his way to the train back to the Cave, once, on the 7th, with some intention of seeing the doctors there. Then some part of him had spoken up, told him he couldn't very well just give in like that, and he hadn't wound up going to see them at all. Instead he'd wandered, lost, through the Cave until he'd found his way back to the metro and returned to the City with his pride intact and his sanity shot.

The day he woke up to find his sight had returned, blurry at first, he was about ready to weep with relief.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"She's bigger than any housecat kitten has a right to be," Gabriel pointed out, and then grinned. "Oh, I will. Hey there, Bombalurina!" He scratched her behind the ears again, pointedly, an acknowledgement of her new christening.

He had been happier. Distracted. Until then.

The Archangel's expression faltered. The fact was that he was a talker, which wasn't something he'd ever denied. The problem was that he talked, constantly, as a cover for everything else that he'd rather be doing and couldn't because it was just too painful. Like instead of using words as a ward, using them in a song, or using them in a story. (A story for his little brothers as he made up things that his older brothers had never actually ... well, mostly ... done.)

And the fact was that she was right. He'd lived for a long time. And lot of it had been horrible.

The Archangel forced a smile up. "Sure, whatever. Any preferences, or am I just going to snap one up out of the ether like everything else?"

"She's just the right size," Re-l said, rolling her eyes at the name. Not that it mattered, since the kitten had no access to language, and couldn't possibly care what she was called.

Re-l's ribs were aching again. The pain came and went in waves, and there was nothing to do when it was there but breathe through it. In a way, though, Re-l was grateful for the sensation. Sometimes this world, with its beautiful parks and lack of people, seemed like a very strange dream. The pain made it real.

"Tell me something true," she said. "Did you ever meet any of the philosophers or poets? What were they like?"

It wasn't obvious, but Gabriel did feel it. The way her shoulders curled in his the slightest, the hitch in her breathing as she rode it out. If he only had his full powers, he could have healed her in a moment.

Since he didn't, a distraction was about all he could offer.

"A few," he said offhandedly. "Most of 'em were pretty crazy in their own ways." He laughed. "You shoulda seen Luke! Swear to Dad that guy was high half the time."

"That doesn't really surprise me," Re-l said, shrugging. "But it's also not a story. I want details." She reached up and rubbed one of Bomb's paws. "If you tell me an actual story I'll tell you what I found in the ruins."

An actual story. An actual story about famous poets and philosophers. For a long, long moment Gabriel was silent, before finally he murmured:

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and, sorry I could not travel both
and be one traveler, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other, just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim,
because it was grassy and wanted wear.
Though as for that the passing there
had worn them really about the same,
and both that morning equally lay
in leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

It wasn't song-like, exactly, but the Archangel spoke with the cadence of the very familiar, with rising and falling and inflections. It wasn't so much a matter of him saying the poem. It was more like he was giving it life, with how his voice turned from nostalgia to heavy regret to the whimsicality of future possibilities, and the final, quiet resignation of accepting the choices of the past.

There was no magic in it--but there was a kind of power, and it was utterly unlike his usual tones. He turned slightly toward Re-l, even though he couldn't look at her, wouldn't see her. "Robert Frost. Still have that one in your arsenal post-armageddon?"

It was a nice poem, a little sentimental for Re-l's taste, but she found that Gabriel's voice gave it in strength what she thought it lacked in substance. Some part of her added that Vincent would probably appreciate it more than he did.

"Thank you," she said at last. "I never heard that poem before. I must have been lost a long time ago. Though we did have Yeats. And Keats. For many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death. I always liked that image, even if its not, in my experience, particularly true."

"Death," Gabriel said with a snorting, humourless laugh. "Met him a few times. He's not so bad, really. He's got class. Just doing his job, not out to make peoples' deaths as painful as possible. Can't say the same for the other Horsemen. So!"

He turned suddenly toward her again, a smile on his lips which was sardonic and nostalgic all at once. "Who else d'you have, then?"

"I don't think your metaphysical friends were the point of that quote," Re-l said, "fascinating though I'm sure they are."

Her mind was turning back even as she spoke, thinking of the long summer days of her childhood, when she'd read poetry to herself on the grass and laughed, before she'd realised what the world was really like.

"We had a lot of fragments," she said, half answering Gabriel's question and half thinking out loud. "About a third of The Wasteland, I think, though that's really nothing but a guess. I would have loved to read more of that poem. We had most of Bishop, she was good. Most of Plath, though I found her very tedious. A little of Kavanagh, he was awful. Some ee cummings, who was just unfathomable. I liked Byron, and Tennyson when he was writing about war. The Lady of Shalott, now that was dull. My favourite was always William Carlos Williams."

"The Wasteland, eh?" Gabriel's lips quirked humourlessly, and then he chanted the epitaph in a deep rumble that lent weight to the heaviness of the Latin, a light curiosity for the first of the Greek, and a crushing weariness with the second. He followed it with the quote:

"I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her 'What do you want?' she answered, 'I want to die.' Yeah, I can see how you'd enjoy that." The last was said in his normal voice, starkly different to the voice of the poet. More sardonic, for one. In this case, it was ironic, too, and just a lityle tired.

"Is that the opening? How fascinating. Our text begins at "I had not thought death had undone so many", and ends with "Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits". I wonder why he began it in another language."

Re-l drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head on them, turning it sideways to look at Gabriel. The memories of the poem brought something back to her quite fondly.

"When I was a little girl," she said, "I used to imagine that one day I would go out into the wastes and find a full copy of The Wasteland, and bring it back to the city. I thought if I could do that, I would understand everything there was to know about humanity."

And then it turned out that she wasn't allowed to leave, and that there was almost no one else in the whole world who even cared about TS Eliot. Just another delusion to be washed away by her later cynicism. She almost forgotten that she ever even cared.

"Two others," Gabriel corrected, and shrugged. "Latin was big, in those days." Despite himself his lips twitched at her words. Not in amusement. Okay, a little in amusement. More in sympathy, in sad resignation, at the hopes and dreams of a child.

"I wouldn't call it the pinnacle," he said. "Poetry's too subjective for that.
April is the cruelest month; breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
earth in forgetful snow, feeding
a little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee ..."

As before, the way Gabriel spoke was nothing like his usual voice. The rhythm, the intonation, the way he used his words, were all the tools of a master orator. Sometime into the poem his eyes drifted shut almost unaware, and he leaned a bit forward, as if captured on the words himself. His chin tilted upward, his face to the sky, and his hands traced unseen lines and patterns in the air, rising and falling in accompaniment to the poem's emotion. Lost. Spellbound, almost--or perhaps weaving a spell of his own.

"... I sat upon the shore
fishing, with the arid plain behind me.
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih."

The last words he murmured, and yet they seemed to imbue the air around them, one after the last; and when he stopped the sounds lingered, heavy and notable for their absence. All of a sudden Gabriel felt drained, and he let the step behind him take his weight. It had been ... a long time since he'd done anything like that. Empowered or not, it didn't matter. He wouldn't have done it at all, except there was something so friggin' tragic about how much Re-l's world lacked of the things that made humanity so ... human. So worthy of admiration.

But it was too close to his old job for his liking, and Re-l probably wouldn't get the significance, and he was already pulling away in mind if not body.

Re-l wondered briefly if Gabriel's blindness had given his words their power, but it was an uncharitable thought, and she knew it. He simply had an incredible voice.

"I think I could listen to that all day," she said at last, and she lifted up his hand so he could feel her expression again, and tell that she she was being honest. "Maybe you could even make me like ee cummings."

The Archangel's fingers traced the absent lines of her face, her lips and eyes and forehead, reading the truth in it, the appreciation. He looked away without lowering his hand, his throat and jaw working for a moment before he answered.

"It's a gift," he said, a little thickly, and drew up the veneer of a leer and a laugh--though not enough of one to actually turn toward her. "Believe you me, I'm a master at making hot chicks enjoy coming."

"Don't be stupid," Re-l said shortly. "It's annoying. And that joke, if it really was a joke, didn't even make any sense."

She didn't swat his hand away, though, because even if he was making stupid jokes, at least he seemed less miserable.

"Orgasm," Gabriel clarified, giving an exasperated, pitying look to the air in front of her. Better that than to return to his realisations and his past. "The slang in your world sucks ass, in case you didn't know."

The tips of his fingers rested on her lips, and stayed there.

"Of course it would be sex," Re-l said. "Everything seems to be, with you. And the slang in my world is fine."

She twitched her mouth down exaggeratedly, so he would know what she was thinking, and then let it return to normal.

"Hey," Gabriel protested, "with a name like Cumming, how can I resist? What, I'm meant to just let that straight line pass me by? Psh."

He tapped her lips with one finger, smirking. "Go on, then. Give me some good stuff. What's some of your slang?"

"I would, but then we already established that my taste is infinitely superior to yours."

She thought for a moment before she answered. It was odd how fast the memories of Romdeau had dwindled, become then and not now.

"There was a lot of emphasis on correct speech in my class," Re-l said. "I mean, we used the common technical names - Auto-Reiv, Turing Application - but we were expected to otherwise abstain from the talk of the lower classes. That's what it means to be a fellow citizen, after all. But it does have the advantage that you always understand what other people are saying."

"We've established that your taste is boring except when I'm here to spice it up," Gabriel corrected, and then made a face.

"But no wonder, if you grew up with those kinds of rules. Language is more fun than that."

"Did you really just call me boring?" Re-l's tone is dry like a good Riesling, a dryness that's much more amused than it is irritated.

"Of course language is more than that. It's truth. Which is why, in as much as it's possible, I believe in leaving it unmuddied by misdirection and inanities."

"If you and your taste were the same things, I'd need to be locked in a padded room for having to spend this much time with you," Gabriel shot back. Then he snorted.

"Truth. Lies. Dirtier than a trashy porno from a back-alley pirate's shop. Language is everything, babe. Like a lot of things--" he smirked "--it's all in how you use it."

And now you're implying that you don't need to be locked in a padded room. The absurdities just follow one after the other."

It was about time for Bomb to be fed, and so Re-l pulled out a little packet of meat. She'd taken to carrying strips of meat around with her, because Bomb needed a lot more feeding than a human. Carefully she unhooked the cat from her shoulders and pulled her into her lap, then offered her a piece of chicken. Bomb chewed it up greedily, nudging at Re-l's hand for more.

"Wittgenstein believed that language defines the world around us. I don't necessarily agree with his logic, but I feel the force of his conclusion. If language really does affect how we see things, then I want it to be as clear as possible. I've spent too much time with lies."

At the movement Gabriel let his hand drop from where he'd replaced it on Bomb's head, sliding down between them and resting on the grass near enough to Re-l to still be able to feel her, use her presence as a compass.

"Words aren't just divided between being truthful and being lies," he pointed out. "And then there's how many languages there are which change all the meanings all over again. It's perception. The people who use it aren't simple, so language can't be simple either." He wouldn't have disagreed that language defined the world. Math was a language, sort of. Okay, a foundation. One language built upon. Words had created the universe; Dad had said 'let there be light' and there had been, after all.

"What makes you think the truth is simple? It's tangled and complicated and painful, and it hurts like hell. I watched the truth destroy my home, my whole world, almost everyone I loved. There's nothing more difficult than truth."

She waited until Bomb had finished the chicken before she gave her more, watching the kitten carefully.

“I didn’t say it was simple,” Gabriel corrected, “just that people think it is. But, point.” He shrugged. “Truth can be hidden and tangled and really, really shitty.” He wasn’t even going to touch how difficult it was. “But being straight-forward in language is just boring and doesn’t cut through as much of the red-tape as you’d think.”

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

I feel that at this point I should make it clear that Re-l's taste and mine don't always coincide

and yet both are very interesting to me.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject