[Open Post] "Cold-hearted orb that rules the night/Removes the colors from our sight"

[silvereyedphage]

Yet another loss, yet someone else snatched from him. This sense of emptiness has haunted Muraki too many times than he cares to recall. His nights, sleeping tangled in his sheets, have been sleepless. At least the days have been busy, running chemical analyses on the samples which that dark gent from the land of the Nile collected, or visiting

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[invsbl_eyebrows]

Tom comes into the room, humming slightly because he's in such a good mood. He hasn't heard anything about the murders.

He stops walking when he sees Muraki, though, since Muraki is someone he recognises. "Hi," he says.

[silvereyedphage]

Here's someone Muraki can honestly say he's fond of, but not for *that* reason: looking at Tom is like looking at a younger brother. "Good evening... I hope that my sighs and moans and brow-beating didn't disturb you?"

[invsbl_eyebrows]

"Nope. I don't think it counts as disturbing someone if they just walked into the room. So why are you, um, brow-beating?"

[silvereyedphage]

He looks out the window. "I hesitate to elaborate since it's something that haunts me so much that it tires me to speak of it, but I will say that it's something which requires me to wear black instead of white," he says. "And unfortunately, the Mansion decided to stop being a decent tailor: the jackets aren't fitting properly across my shoulders."

[invsbl_eyebrows]

"Looks like I got here just in time," Tom says. "Do you want me to let the seams out for you? Or I could make you a new jacket. I found this really nice black fabric, it's Merino, really soft. Or if you'd prefer something lighter I have this nice sturdy cotton. It's a bit rough, but. If you cut it right it might look really nice. Stylish, you know?"

[silvereyedphage]

"I hate to discard the one that I have, in case I seem ungrateful to the powers that supply the goods in this place," he says. "But I would appreciate the offer of a Merino suit: my spirit is fond of the winter, but, alas, my flesh is not," he adds, wryly.

[invsbl_eyebrows]

"Bloody oath," Tom says. "It gets way too cold here. It's even worse than in New York."

[silvereyedphage]

"I haven't been that far, but I've been north to a ski resort in Hokkaido, where my parents first met, and I studied at Oxford, the year that the winter there decided to be snowier than usual," he says, wryly.

[invsbl_eyebrows]

"You went to Oxford? That's cool. I always wanted to study in England. Though I don't think I would have gotten into, um, Oxford."

[silvereyedphage]

"Mmm, it wasn't easy to get in, but I was fortunate enough to get into a foreign exchange program with several other students," he says. "It was a good experience: it allowed me to see more of the world and to learn more about it. It also gave me a chance to make use of the spoken English lessons that my grandfather drilled me in as a youngster," he adds, with a bit of a nostalgic smirk.

[invsbl_eyebrows]

"It must be tricky going somewhere where they speak a different language," Tom says. "I've never been anywhere where people didn't speak English."

[silvereyedphage]

"It is, but it's a good challenge: mine was the best English of the lot of us in that group, and so I became the de facto interpreter for them," he says. "I was rather a shy sort, and while it had me feeling a bit self-conscious at first, it helped me to build up some amount of confidence."

[invsbl_eyebrows]

"I bet that could have gotten really awkward," Tom says, then grins. "Like if you made a mistake and accidentally made it sound like someone had said something really embarrassing."

[silvereyedphage]

"Mmm, the English grammar is one of the more intricate forms -- not a bad thing, in and off itself, as it makes it, which can make phrasing a sentence quite challenging, if you're not accustomed to it," he says. "My classmates and I had to be careful those first few weeks until we got the hang of it."

[invsbl_eyebrows]

"So do you have any really embarrassing stories?" Tom asks, because he has to know.

[silvereyedphage]

"The name of our host family's eldest son was Nathan, but the way I was pronouncing it, my accent muddled it, and it came out sounding like 'onee-san', or 'big sister' in Japanese," he says. "One of the other students started to address Nathan as 'big sister', to the young man's annoyance, his younger sister's amusement and to the embarrassment of the rest of us."