senri
in
bedlam_mix
Paradisa!fic - Footloose on a Long Moebian Strip
Genre: Gen
Warnings: T
Characters: Faye Valentine, Anthony Crowley, Zelman Clock
Notes: For the paradisa secret santa gift exchange. SO LATE oh my god, my recipient was lovely and very patient though. ♥ So I hope she does enjoy at last! Although God I worry about this Zelman voice, I imagined him watching me and judging me (correctly) as totally inadequate the entire time. God. I can't write smart, debonair psychopaths, I feel myself judged too much. I'M NOT MENTAL THOUGH DON'T JUDGE MEEEEeeeeeeee augh
---
Paradisa’s Christmas is honestly the most distinctive holiday season Faye’s had in a while, what with that obnoxiously homey feeling, all tinsel and floating blobs of space ectoplasm and bells a-tinkling and kissing more people in quick succession than she did even at home (not that it‘s so bad, although she is in a microcosm now and most of these people are people she‘ll have to look in the face again later. Faye has a knack for shamelessness, though; she’s not worried).
“It’s a strange damn place,” she has to say, if she’s honest, and Faye often isn’t (it comes with the line of work). She fires these kinds of words at her favorite people, or just the ones who seem to invite talking, presents them to Crowley sipping cognac at the Death Match or to Zelman, whose eyes flicker with internal fire, sometimes something like amusement and sometimes like mild interest but never anything that she could say for sure is surprise. Damn confusing gentlemen she has come to know, here. Faye Valentine doesn’t often think of men as complicated creatures but now and again in shockingly high proportions in the castle she seems to stumble over them, self-contained little microcosms who listen more than they talk and watch the world with smart, narrow eyes.
“Well, sorta,” Crowley says in these kinds of conversations. Some of the stuff he does still makes her smirk like it would’ve back at home - what kind of man really wears sunglasses indoors at all hours? But Crowley, she knows what kind of man, and that is to say not a man at all, but something bigger and darker and older than her, weirdly approachable and human sometimes, sitting at whatever bar or bolthole they find together. There’s something sort of reassuring about how familiar he seems, not so far removed from the crap she thinks about at all. As if whichever way Faye goes when she goes belly up (whether she rises or falls) the employees there just might be regular joes that you could have a drink and a cigarette with.
(“No, I’m a bit of an anomaly, honestly,” Crowley says, grimacing like he’s had a taste of bad wine. “It comes of being around humans a lot, you know. Most of my co-workers weren’t nice at all. Of course, some of the most unpleasant things in the world have come from humans borking themselves, so who am I to judge?”
“I‘m not noticing that stopping you.”
“There‘s something in the old Book about that.” Crowley waves his glass, ice cubes clinking and liquor sloshing slightly over the edge, the color of honey. “Damn. - Anyway, something about that. Something about throwing rocks. I didn‘t bother listening, really.”
Faye thinks about it herself and has to shrug. “I don‘t know.”
“That‘s what I like about you,” he grins, suddenly, “You‘re not a religious woman.”
“Why would I limit my options?”
“That‘s my girl.” They both drink, then. The lights are low and mild, it‘s warm and quiet. Faye swirls her liquor in her glass.
“Do you remember it now?”
The furrows on Crowley‘s brow suggest that he‘s squinting while he thinks. The way he sighs a bit suggests that he‘s humoring her, but even if he‘s just humoring her Faye is still getting her way, so she‘ll humor him humoring her.
“Sins,” he says eventually. “Something about throwing rocks and sins. And sinners. And the sinless. Let he who is without sin -” He cuts himself off then, tosses his glass back and drinks. He drains his whole glass like that, setting it back onto the bar table that‘s seen so many glasses tapped back home just like that, scarred with its age and silent. “Let the blameless blame. ‘s what it boils down to.”
“That makes neither of us.”
“Well, you know,” he says, “if humans really lived by that, most lawyers and politicians and preachers would be out of luck.”
Faye laughs. “I guess they‘re the cream. We should follow their example.”
“This is what I like about you,” he says. “You‘re a sensible girl. Oi, barkeep-” He raises his finger for another fill. Faye puts her head against his suit-clad shoulder and laughs and laughs.)
And then, “Not really.” Zelman shrugs when they discuss that kind of stuff - he never seems all that invested in anything, he’s so strange, this bony, slender figure with his cigarette lighting his face and his back against the wall. Wherever he is, he always seems like the most important thing in the room (or in the hall, the kitchen, the garden - wherever), and that was a skill Faye thought she’d mastered but she looks at Zelman and it feels like she still has a lot to learn.
Maybe that’s just what eight hundred give or take a few years of distilled war and violence and nihilism will do to you, and Faye isn’t dumb enough to be the fabled moth dancing at the edge of the flame, but still, still, there’s something… but every time she thinks that she shakes it off. There will be no sandwiches made, she isn’t dumb enough to leave herself open or to hand him any openings. She thinks. She believes. But still, he turns away from her and she has to wonder -
(Faye waves her own cigarette at him in a way that she imagines is inquiring and after a moment it lights, flaring for a moment before the flame settles into a sullen little eye against the night. She closes her eyes and takes a drag, relaxing as she does, feeling her shoulders slump down a bit, aware of her body, the smoky fug in her lungs, her feet askance on the cobbles, the exposed skin on her stomach cool in the night air, her breasts heavy.
Something about a cigarette just makes her aware of herself, where she starts and ends, and she holds her breath for a long moment so that her heartbeat is booming in her ears before she lets the smoke out in one long, slow draft, something like pain squeezing her lungs and kinking her spine. It feels especially good to breathe, then. “No? You don’t think so?” She really wants to know; she can never completely get a handle on him, is never sure what he’s going to say.
“It’s more or less what I’d expect to get if I put a bunch of idiots and crazy people together and stirred the pot occasionally.”
“Really?” She breathes in again, holds her breath until she counts three, exhales. “But… we’re trapped.” Faye is by now so used to running that not holding her breath, ready to be on the move, feels damn strange. Just like food and goods for free and all these trusting people, trusting each other, trusting her. Some of them. Damn strange. She hasn’t had a place like that in a while, and the last place she had that was anything like that dissolved just when she’d started to feel like she could put her feet on it firmly without it falling away from under her.
“And that’s seriously never happened before?” Zelman breathes too, the tip of his cigarette flaring to light, reflecting ruddy in his eyes. He’s a vampire, isn’t he dead, why does he bother with breathing, with this? Maybe it makes him conscious of himself the way it does to her, or maybe it’s just something to do, a fun pastime. Faye isn’t sure it’s right to ask yet, and she puts it off by going through her own ritual once more, smoke shrouding her body and her brain.
“Not like this,” she says on the exhale. Zelman breathes in and closes his eyes; she’s sure he’s heard her, and it was the truth anyway - Faye has never been so trapped that there was never the possibility of running. She is well and truly on a choke-chain now.
“It’s just a place. A stickier place than some, but just a place. Just a world…” Zelman shrugs like a cat, all muscle and laziness expanding into a moment of straining tension as he reaches the limits of his form and then relaxes again. “A sticky world.”
Faye never laughs with him the way she laughs with Crowley. He’s so much more contained, so much farther from being human even though it seems like he should be younger and closer to their world, which is strange. Faye wonders how one turns out like that, and another turns out like this, but maybe that’s just the way people are in every world. Mysterious.
Paradisa has them all kicking like flies on sticky paper, anyway. This world like any other world that takes all kind, the undernourished and dispossessed, the rotten and the kind, and forces them all side by side, breathing mingling, elbows bumping, not a moment to be had without someone calling out.)
---
Faye drinks with friends, but sometimes she still drinks alone. She smokes with friends, but sometimes it’s good to smoke alone. She doesn’t like it much, sometimes; solitude gives her too much time thinking about herself, and sometimes that’s uncomfortable; that echo inside her, that hungry hollowness that drove her on port after port, person to person - she thinks to herself and hears the sounds coming back refracted from there. It scares here a little, that echo, that feeling, and then the feeling that if she has to be here forever, it might not be so bad. Talking to these people. Living with them, working with them. Being friends with them, maybe even loving them.
One thing Paradisa does to everyone in common: it nails their feet to the floor. There’s no moving, no running, and sometimes that made it easier, taking off in a dash of breath, of light and fire, running like hell and never looking back.
The easy way out is still gone. If Faye lets herself think about it, it scares her.
The undernourished, the starving, the dispossessed, the misfits, they all crowd her and each other, pressing shoulder to shoulder with hungry eyes, all shades of brown and black and blue and gray and green and white and red and gold. She wants to shrink into herself, sometimes - it’s claustrophobic. Faye hates to be afraid (but she’s afraid) -
This motley crowd she’s found herself in. They snarl and bite at each other, they lick each others’ wounds and love each other, as painfully as people ever do.
Faye finds her own corner, jostled by the others, roughhoused and warmed and helped along. It’s not always comfortable, or easy, or safe, but at least she manages to stay warm.
Warnings: T
Characters: Faye Valentine, Anthony Crowley, Zelman Clock
Notes: For the paradisa secret santa gift exchange. SO LATE oh my god, my recipient was lovely and very patient though. ♥ So I hope she does enjoy at last! Although God I worry about this Zelman voice, I imagined him watching me and judging me (correctly) as totally inadequate the entire time. God. I can't write smart, debonair psychopaths, I feel myself judged too much. I'M NOT MENTAL THOUGH DON'T JUDGE MEEEEeeeeeeee augh
---
Paradisa’s Christmas is honestly the most distinctive holiday season Faye’s had in a while, what with that obnoxiously homey feeling, all tinsel and floating blobs of space ectoplasm and bells a-tinkling and kissing more people in quick succession than she did even at home (not that it‘s so bad, although she is in a microcosm now and most of these people are people she‘ll have to look in the face again later. Faye has a knack for shamelessness, though; she’s not worried).
“It’s a strange damn place,” she has to say, if she’s honest, and Faye often isn’t (it comes with the line of work). She fires these kinds of words at her favorite people, or just the ones who seem to invite talking, presents them to Crowley sipping cognac at the Death Match or to Zelman, whose eyes flicker with internal fire, sometimes something like amusement and sometimes like mild interest but never anything that she could say for sure is surprise. Damn confusing gentlemen she has come to know, here. Faye Valentine doesn’t often think of men as complicated creatures but now and again in shockingly high proportions in the castle she seems to stumble over them, self-contained little microcosms who listen more than they talk and watch the world with smart, narrow eyes.
“Well, sorta,” Crowley says in these kinds of conversations. Some of the stuff he does still makes her smirk like it would’ve back at home - what kind of man really wears sunglasses indoors at all hours? But Crowley, she knows what kind of man, and that is to say not a man at all, but something bigger and darker and older than her, weirdly approachable and human sometimes, sitting at whatever bar or bolthole they find together. There’s something sort of reassuring about how familiar he seems, not so far removed from the crap she thinks about at all. As if whichever way Faye goes when she goes belly up (whether she rises or falls) the employees there just might be regular joes that you could have a drink and a cigarette with.
(“No, I’m a bit of an anomaly, honestly,” Crowley says, grimacing like he’s had a taste of bad wine. “It comes of being around humans a lot, you know. Most of my co-workers weren’t nice at all. Of course, some of the most unpleasant things in the world have come from humans borking themselves, so who am I to judge?”
“I‘m not noticing that stopping you.”
“There‘s something in the old Book about that.” Crowley waves his glass, ice cubes clinking and liquor sloshing slightly over the edge, the color of honey. “Damn. - Anyway, something about that. Something about throwing rocks. I didn‘t bother listening, really.”
Faye thinks about it herself and has to shrug. “I don‘t know.”
“That‘s what I like about you,” he grins, suddenly, “You‘re not a religious woman.”
“Why would I limit my options?”
“That‘s my girl.” They both drink, then. The lights are low and mild, it‘s warm and quiet. Faye swirls her liquor in her glass.
“Do you remember it now?”
The furrows on Crowley‘s brow suggest that he‘s squinting while he thinks. The way he sighs a bit suggests that he‘s humoring her, but even if he‘s just humoring her Faye is still getting her way, so she‘ll humor him humoring her.
“Sins,” he says eventually. “Something about throwing rocks and sins. And sinners. And the sinless. Let he who is without sin -” He cuts himself off then, tosses his glass back and drinks. He drains his whole glass like that, setting it back onto the bar table that‘s seen so many glasses tapped back home just like that, scarred with its age and silent. “Let the blameless blame. ‘s what it boils down to.”
“That makes neither of us.”
“Well, you know,” he says, “if humans really lived by that, most lawyers and politicians and preachers would be out of luck.”
Faye laughs. “I guess they‘re the cream. We should follow their example.”
“This is what I like about you,” he says. “You‘re a sensible girl. Oi, barkeep-” He raises his finger for another fill. Faye puts her head against his suit-clad shoulder and laughs and laughs.)
And then, “Not really.” Zelman shrugs when they discuss that kind of stuff - he never seems all that invested in anything, he’s so strange, this bony, slender figure with his cigarette lighting his face and his back against the wall. Wherever he is, he always seems like the most important thing in the room (or in the hall, the kitchen, the garden - wherever), and that was a skill Faye thought she’d mastered but she looks at Zelman and it feels like she still has a lot to learn.
Maybe that’s just what eight hundred give or take a few years of distilled war and violence and nihilism will do to you, and Faye isn’t dumb enough to be the fabled moth dancing at the edge of the flame, but still, still, there’s something… but every time she thinks that she shakes it off. There will be no sandwiches made, she isn’t dumb enough to leave herself open or to hand him any openings. She thinks. She believes. But still, he turns away from her and she has to wonder -
(Faye waves her own cigarette at him in a way that she imagines is inquiring and after a moment it lights, flaring for a moment before the flame settles into a sullen little eye against the night. She closes her eyes and takes a drag, relaxing as she does, feeling her shoulders slump down a bit, aware of her body, the smoky fug in her lungs, her feet askance on the cobbles, the exposed skin on her stomach cool in the night air, her breasts heavy.
Something about a cigarette just makes her aware of herself, where she starts and ends, and she holds her breath for a long moment so that her heartbeat is booming in her ears before she lets the smoke out in one long, slow draft, something like pain squeezing her lungs and kinking her spine. It feels especially good to breathe, then. “No? You don’t think so?” She really wants to know; she can never completely get a handle on him, is never sure what he’s going to say.
“It’s more or less what I’d expect to get if I put a bunch of idiots and crazy people together and stirred the pot occasionally.”
“Really?” She breathes in again, holds her breath until she counts three, exhales. “But… we’re trapped.” Faye is by now so used to running that not holding her breath, ready to be on the move, feels damn strange. Just like food and goods for free and all these trusting people, trusting each other, trusting her. Some of them. Damn strange. She hasn’t had a place like that in a while, and the last place she had that was anything like that dissolved just when she’d started to feel like she could put her feet on it firmly without it falling away from under her.
“And that’s seriously never happened before?” Zelman breathes too, the tip of his cigarette flaring to light, reflecting ruddy in his eyes. He’s a vampire, isn’t he dead, why does he bother with breathing, with this? Maybe it makes him conscious of himself the way it does to her, or maybe it’s just something to do, a fun pastime. Faye isn’t sure it’s right to ask yet, and she puts it off by going through her own ritual once more, smoke shrouding her body and her brain.
“Not like this,” she says on the exhale. Zelman breathes in and closes his eyes; she’s sure he’s heard her, and it was the truth anyway - Faye has never been so trapped that there was never the possibility of running. She is well and truly on a choke-chain now.
“It’s just a place. A stickier place than some, but just a place. Just a world…” Zelman shrugs like a cat, all muscle and laziness expanding into a moment of straining tension as he reaches the limits of his form and then relaxes again. “A sticky world.”
Faye never laughs with him the way she laughs with Crowley. He’s so much more contained, so much farther from being human even though it seems like he should be younger and closer to their world, which is strange. Faye wonders how one turns out like that, and another turns out like this, but maybe that’s just the way people are in every world. Mysterious.
Paradisa has them all kicking like flies on sticky paper, anyway. This world like any other world that takes all kind, the undernourished and dispossessed, the rotten and the kind, and forces them all side by side, breathing mingling, elbows bumping, not a moment to be had without someone calling out.)
---
Faye drinks with friends, but sometimes she still drinks alone. She smokes with friends, but sometimes it’s good to smoke alone. She doesn’t like it much, sometimes; solitude gives her too much time thinking about herself, and sometimes that’s uncomfortable; that echo inside her, that hungry hollowness that drove her on port after port, person to person - she thinks to herself and hears the sounds coming back refracted from there. It scares here a little, that echo, that feeling, and then the feeling that if she has to be here forever, it might not be so bad. Talking to these people. Living with them, working with them. Being friends with them, maybe even loving them.
One thing Paradisa does to everyone in common: it nails their feet to the floor. There’s no moving, no running, and sometimes that made it easier, taking off in a dash of breath, of light and fire, running like hell and never looking back.
The easy way out is still gone. If Faye lets herself think about it, it scares her.
The undernourished, the starving, the dispossessed, the misfits, they all crowd her and each other, pressing shoulder to shoulder with hungry eyes, all shades of brown and black and blue and gray and green and white and red and gold. She wants to shrink into herself, sometimes - it’s claustrophobic. Faye hates to be afraid (but she’s afraid) -
This motley crowd she’s found herself in. They snarl and bite at each other, they lick each others’ wounds and love each other, as painfully as people ever do.
Faye finds her own corner, jostled by the others, roughhoused and warmed and helped along. It’s not always comfortable, or easy, or safe, but at least she manages to stay warm.