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Post by Croix Severiano on Mar 2, 2010 2:24:42 GMT -5
BANG!...BANG!...BANG!
The sound of hammering filled the air at the Memorial late in the morning. A man was poised over a bench that was set to its back side. His arm came up and down in solid strokes as the hammer contacted the metal side framing. The bench slowly obeyed to the commands of its crafter and eventually tightening into position to where Croix was satisfied with the end results. Finally another sitting area could be created for those who wished to meditate within this area.
Finally completing the construction portion of his small project, he picked it up and began moving it over to the designated area. Every muscle in his arms flexed underneath the modest uniform of a navy blue jump suit that he was required to wear. The outfit belied the true physique of his body as he hauled the metal bench around like it was merely an over-abundant bolt of cloth.
It was a nice day to be doing some manual labor around the Memorial. Everything seemed to be doing that ‘perfect harmony’ type of atmosphere and it eased him as he worked diligently setting the bench into place. After a meticulous amount of centering, he bolted the wedge anchors down into the concrete and then jerked the chair to make sure it wasn’t budging.
When everything seemed well in good, he stood back up and ran an arm across his brow to wipe a little perspiration away. Eventually he looked over to the marble effigy of the late Queen Serenity and smirked, “You’re looking pretty lovely today in this sunlight, M’lady.”
It gave him satisfaction to be working in this place. There was a lot of work to be done, and the pendulum was beginning to swing in another direction. “But it looks like things are about to get real ugly.” Removing his gloves from his hands, he brushed off any loose dirt from his uniform and began inspecting his color chart to see which paint number he was using on this new addition.
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Post by Morpheus on Mar 2, 2010 9:42:19 GMT -5
This place was haunted by something. Morpheus was not entirely sure what. There was something wrong with the atmosphere—it set her on the edge of a precipice she was not sure she wished to stand on. And yet, there she was.
Standing, hands locked behind the small of her back, Morpheus was there. Statutes stared back at her, unseeing, and her eyes, pale and unnaturally colored returned the unwavering gaze. She was unmoving. She was no leaf in the breeze, but a stone, settled deep in the ground. It would take eons to wear her down, to move her form. She was as the statutes she stared at, and yet, not entirely so.
She was flesh, blood, the whole nine yards. Human, weakness and strength born of muscle and bone, unlike the stone she saw herself in, which could truly take ages of wear and tear from the wind. And, she too was unlike her master, the King, who stood far off, hands locked together in prayer for those lost all those years ago. He was beyond human, something wrapped in the mysteries of the universe. She too had her mysteries, but they were not of the universe, they were entirely mortal.
Mysteries of a human life lost, but she had decided a long time ago (a lost lifetime ago) were something she would not (could not) obsess over it. Her shoulders tensed together with the intake of air, the blades of bone just a breath from lightly kissing against her spine. As she stood, she counted the bones in her body while one eye strained to stare and watch the King, make sure he was safe. So many little bones made up the human body, Morpheus thought as she tried to release the tension that had settled knots around her neck and shoulders. Nothing let go, the stress clung to her like death.
This place always left with crinks in her neck and muscles that would not relax. And then there was a boom, a sound that left her heart racing. Gun shots, she feared. It was difficult to fight metal, when it was coming at you hundreds of miles per hour. She could only take so many for the King; however, she was well aware that someone else would come to his rescue in that case, or so she hoped.
But there were no flying silver shards of death, just a man and a hammer. Her heart came to a halt. He was making such an awful racket—she hoped (for his sake) that he was not upsetting the King’s prayer. Of course, from what she could tell, the King rarely got upset over anything; he was an epitome of decorum. He’d taught her restraint.
Morpheus sighed. She really did not wish to speak to this boy (perhaps he was a man by age, but she quickly made the choice to see him as a child), but she wished peace for her monarch. The boy had stopped his racket, yet she was not sure if and when he would start up again. It was best to put a stop to it before he did decide to start making that awful noise once more. “Excuse me.” She walked straight towards the blue jump-suited male, body still tense; head tilted, and eyes wandering up and down his form, sizing him up. “There are those who are here to pray, and while whatever you are doing I am certain is quite important, could you perhaps wait until those paying their respects have parted?”
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Post by Croix Severiano on Mar 2, 2010 18:42:35 GMT -5
All train of thought was halted when he heard a voice that seemed so familiar to him. Pausing, he glanced over once before performing a double-take upon the nymph-like woman. It was obvious that her mere presence caused him a great amount of surprise before his features suddenly shifted into devilish confidence. “Well, well…never thought I’d see you here out in the open.”
Her chiding him didn’t seem like anything new, but he still bucked at her complaint with disregard. “People pray here every day, all day. If I waited for them I would never get my work done, darlin’.”
With a snap he closed the folder full of color charts and finally faced her directly in order to size her up. She may have been a stocky kind of girl, but Croix’s bulk and few inches height made him take a dare into coaxing the knight to try arguing back.
“You here to finally help me out?” He asked with complete seriousness before adding in, “Not that it would matter in the long run.”
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Post by Morpheus on Mar 2, 2010 18:56:05 GMT -5
Morpheus frowned. She seemed to do that a lot these days. Nothing ever seemed right, or to go exactly the way she wanted it, and this man just added to her annoyances. “Sir,” she began, her voice dropping a level, trying to control her mouth from running off on a racetrack of insults or just words of any sort. She always did speak a mile a minute when upset. “The King is here in prayer.” She waved her hand off to the side, eyes always on her ivory haired monarch, needing to protect him even from this manual laborer. “Please, show some respect, if you are even capable of such an action.”
She probably should have regretted the words, but they came out in the same nonchalant alto that everything else did that rolled off of her tongue. Sure, she was smaller than he—bird-boned, short, more fae than girl, but his build did nothing to frighten her. She was not a physical fighter, not by any stretch of the imagination, and she preferred mental confrontation, but she made it a rule never to be intimidated by a bigger person. Particularly a man, or else she would spend all of her days in fear of those she worked with, or at least trying to defer to them. None of them were worth submitting her intellect to.
It was his next words that bothered her. She had been unaware of the look on his face when he turned to face her, far too busy watching Helios. “Help you out?” It came out as a mush of words, spoken far too fast. Why would she help him out? And then she realized it—he must be playing a joke on her. Pulling her leg that she was supposed to help him with the upkeep, that or he was trying to pawn his job off. “I am a Knight, not whatever you are.” |
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Post by Croix Severiano on Mar 2, 2010 19:11:52 GMT -5
The reaction was enough to confirm something that held fast in the back of his mind for a while now. With a chuckle he looked down real quick and scuffed the ground with his boot before looking over at Helios in the middle of prayer.
“Yeah, he’s still the same wispy king I’ve always known him to be.” Regarding the knight once more, his expression turned into an almost knowing disposition. “Guess the rumors were true after all about you and those others. Well…at least you from what I can see. Never thought you’d be the type to regard pony-man over there as your sovereign, let alone lecture me about respecting him. Man, how things change.”
There was a comical laugh coming from him as turned away from the woman and crouched down to make the numerical adjustments on his spray painter. “Well, like I said before…” Again there was some fidgeting with dials and screwing in a bottle of pearl colored paint, “…people pray here every day, including His Majesty over there. But if I waited for everyone to finish I would never be home in time for dinner.”
Grasping the painting gun, he stood back up and began to rev the motor up on the compressor. It hummed at an audible level that could most likely be heard clear across the memorial. Pulling down his goggles, he leaned in and shouted back, “And I don’t miss my dinnertime, even for your precious king!”
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Post by Morpheus on Mar 2, 2010 22:28:12 GMT -5
“Wispy King?” Bile rose in her throat, and Morpheus blanched at his words. However, her face did not stay that pale pretty color for long and quickly flooded with blood, hot and furious. She was not entirely sure why she was so suddenly enraged. She had heard the King criticized before, and it had always upset her. Yet now? Now she was seeing as if she were gazing through a crimson slab of glass.
She had to hold her form. She was as a statue. She was rigid against his verbal idiocy. What he spoke was only idiocy, but it scraped at the back of her skull, ran down her back, made her so entirely unsure of herself. More unsure of herself than she had been when she’d first awakened.
She could still remember those first few hours. She’d screamed for the first thirty minutes, nothing could console her. Something was missing. She was missing. All she was at that time was a body, and it ached without knowledge of a psyche. When her voice had finally cracked, she cried. Cried and cried, asking her name over and over again, knowing no one really knew. She didn’t know, why would anyone else? There was no sense that she knew anything beyond the language that flowed from her lips.
“He is my King. He is your King. Know your place.” She hissed, actually hissed the words out. She wanted so badly to hit him as he began his damn machine, but she clenched her fist at her side, feeling nails sink into transparent flesh, attempting to break it. She wanted blood, even if it was her own.
There was something in his voice. He had a familiarity with her that felt oddly proper, like it belonged, but it didn’t. Her position would not allow for such familiarity. Bare, she felt bare the way he spoke to her, as if he removed everything from her, even the Dream Catcher, and revealed someone else—the woman, girl she’d been once. She was Morpheus. Whoever came before no longer existed; Morpheus had known that from her waking moments. She was as she was, and always would be from that painful first few hours onward into the future. She was guard to the King, to the royal family. She walked dreams.
This man did not know her. And in a flare of burning white brilliance behind her eyes, she reached out, wrapped her fingers around his bicep as best she could and pulled on him. Her voice did not rise, but it dropped, and she focused on each word, her eyes darting to her King, hoping he didn’t see her. Half-uncaring if he did. “You do not know me.”
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Post by Croix Severiano on Mar 2, 2010 22:46:43 GMT -5
It was euphoria to him watching her twinge with such feelings of rage behind that carefully crafted disposition of hers. Good to know that not all things had changed in the world. But it was quite comical to see someone like herself lecture him on ‘his place’ in this world. The only response to her with that was, “He’s my employer, nothing more.”
His tone was dead serious, but it almost twittered with audacity to push her temper further. It didn’t take a moron to figure out that she wanted to wring his neck for his blasphemies, but on the same token he was not the type to shy away from hitting a red button like a two year old hopped up on pixie sticks. Croix had the upper hand in this game of cat and mouse for information; it was obvious that this “knight” no longer had the capacity to remember her true self. To that he relished the situation in full, and planned on indulging her only enough to keep the carrot dangling in front of her nose.
When she gripped his arm and yanked him to her level, he couldn’t help but feel the heat of excitement from this interlude between them. She was blinded to her devotion, as false as it might have been. His emerald eyes pierced right back into her own hot vision, his aura now giving off a vibe of complete confidence as he stated back to her.
Croix’s fingers switched the machine off to stop the noise long enough to pull of his next move. Leaning in close, his lips only a few centimeters away from her earlobe, he whispered in a sultry voice, “You don’t know yourself.” His breath hot on the intricate curves of her dainty ear, it even caused her multiple metal piercings to absorb the temperature of his poignant statement. The manner of the words and how they were spoken dripped of a sexual desire for the knight that rivaled the most torrid of love affairs.
He wanted to push her like this. It felt appropriate.
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Post by Morpheus on Mar 2, 2010 22:59:42 GMT -5
Something low in her stomach dropped, so hot. Sinfully so. It was not something she was used to feeling. Occasionally, early on, she had been flustered, flushed by the King and his sweet manner towards her. He treated her softly, reserved, and led her by the hand, virginal and new to this world, his world. But this, this was entirely different. The small metal bands that bent around her ear gathered his heat as he leaned over her, and she was certain the display was quite something for the prayers. She wondered if her King was watching, but she could not see him through the man that had placed himself alongside the shell of her ear.
She had—she had a million urges. Hit him, obviously that was her first one, but there was one more base, disgusting. She wanted to throw him against the wall and turn his flesh ablaze, the way in which her ear burned. It was an awful feeling, her stomach twisting and clenching, wanting to disappear within itself. Her shoulders felt tenser than they had just standing before the stone of the former Senshi.
She’d forgotten the other sort of awful she’d felt moments ago. The memorial no longer seemed of any concern, just this godforsaken boy who taunted her like he knew her. And he was right—she didn’t know herself. “What’s there to know?” She muttered, not aware the words that she had perceived as thoughts had slid out between her lips, floating out into the air, waiting to be answered or blown away as a musing of nonsense.
It was nonsense—she had no reason to know. No need to know. She had to keep face, but her body wouldn’t move, and she stood in front of him, pale teal eyes ablaze with emotions she had not remembered until that exact moment. One hand rose, shaking as if it were trying to remember what her mind’s command had been, and as she gritted her teeth, she waited to hear the smack of flesh on flesh. Instead her hand lingered in the air, between them, fingertips half-kissing his skin, but not quite there. “You…” She couldn’t think of any words to say, her lips were moving to fast, but there was no sound. To control them, she bit into her bottom lip, breaking the dry top skin, reopening a scab from the day before, rust in her mouth. [/color] |
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Post by Croix Severiano on Mar 2, 2010 23:19:44 GMT -5
She seemed torn between rage and desire. That was good enough for him.
Eye darting over, he could see that Helios was beginning to wrap up his prayer. This would be a good place to end…for now.
When she resigned to ever wanting to know anything about her there was mirth in his eyes to this sentiment. He had to admit that she was a strong one, but not strong enough. It appeared that she was trying so hard to strike him in spite. This would have been an easy task to accomplish had he not hit home with a truth that she had probably spent so long burying into the abyss of her current ‘employment’. No matter, she was his game to be played from here on out. It was an opportunity not to be missed lest he be a fool to be merciful and allow her to carry on whatever this charade had become to her.
No, not after everything that had happened in the past. Not after this. She would continue to suffer and he would be sure of it.
Bits and pieces…bits and pieces.
“You’re a bad liar …especially to your self.”
It was the only thing he had to add at this point, and now the King was standing back upright and preparing for departure. In this moment Croix repositioned his stance in order to seem like nothing out of the ordinary had transpired between the two of them. The painting machine starting back up again, he tugged a breathing mask on and immediately turned his complete attention to the bench that required painting. As puffs of opalescent paint coated the metalwork, the fumes began to intensify. Croix knew it wouldn’t be too long before he would detract her from the scene and go back to her guard dog duties again.
But the seed was now planted. It was exceptional luck, and he couldn’t help but think back to the Doki Doki Darling store and what the salesgirl had told him.
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Post by Morpheus on Mar 2, 2010 23:34:38 GMT -5
She grasped at the air. She grasped at herself. A fleeting slipping image that burned and blurred, and suddenly it was too far gone, and she had to remember himself. He was moving away, the fire he’d ignited doused for the time. It was like a cat and a mouse. The feline had grown tired, for now. He’d allow her peace, space, but she knew he knew and she didn’t know. And that was what bothered her. What did he know, what did she lack?
She stepped back once. He had already moved away, but she needed space that she couldn’t get here. The statues were watching her. They knew something she didn’t. Perhaps he had told them, whispered into the stone her secrets. He knew them, she knew it. But he didn’t. No one knew her. She did not know her. Morpheus took comfort her in ambiguity, for once. He was a mad man, playing on her frayed nerves.
Her eyes closed, she softened her features as best she could. Tried to rid herself of the blood that had traveled up in anger and whatever else it had been that he had boiled beneath her skin. Desire, was that what it was? Truly? Perhaps in some narcissistic sense, because what she wanted from him was not him, not his body, but his knowledge of her. She wanted herself back, and it was entirely laughable. There was no girl before Morpheus. And he was a liar.
She knew her place. She walked with the King in this land and the land beyond. But there was something, a voice whispering in her ear now, who sounded vaguely like the groundskeeper. It tickled as it spoke, “But do you walk with him to protect him, or so he can keep an eye on you? Is he truly your King? Can he give you the answers you want?”
Gritting her teeth, running her tongue along the wound of her lip, she turned to face Helios. “Sire.” With that word, she was Morpheus again, her hands behind her back (not raised in passion, anger—hit him, stroke his cheek, force him to tell you everything). She was composed and serene, not a creature of base emotion and instinct. She was rational.
With that thought, she departed, forcing her chin forward, not to turn back and look at the man who had in one small instance brought up something she had worked so hard to bury down.
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