Logs:Common Thread

Common Thread
Dramatis Personae Joshua, Mirror, Wendy, Polaris, Winona, Matt, Isra, Thing One, Thing Two, Scramble, Erik, Lily
In Absentia Dusk, Hive	2023-08-13 "The world remembers. Echoes of echoes of echoes keep going on, into-"
Location <NYC> Freaktown - Riverdale
Freaktown is always lively, to be sure, but tonight it's even more vibrant. There are several bonfires going, bright music in the air even as it grows late into the night. There are parties happening by multiple of the pools; at least one of these seems to have devolved into a lot more sex than swimming. Town Square has been cleared of its usual stalls and though there's no fighting starting yet the crowd that's already starting to mill there has begin taking bets for later. Joshua is none of these places; he's just dropped in by one of the fires, carting with him a lanky young Thai woman who is in the middle of thanking him politely before her face goes a little pale. Whatever exchange follows this isn't audible to him, at least, nor to most others there, but she's looking a good deal more ruffled as she stalks away to find a different patio than this one, thankyouverymuch. Something twinges pained across Joshua's expression, too, and he's giving an uncertain glance toward a (thankfully distant, thankfully obscured-by-hedges) bonfire around which a cluster of people have gathered. There's no censure in his voice here, but he's heavy all the same. "You're going to upset people, like that." Sitting on the wide step up to this particular mansion back door, Hive(?), still in jeans and secondhand reunion tee both too baggy on him, is looking far too gaunt, far too sallow, even for his usual level of forgetting-he-has-a-body. There's been a pained twinge in his expression too, but it fades away as he stubs his cigarette out and gathers his bony limbs into enough semblance of order to stand. He holds the back door open for Joshua, some thought of drinks thudding heavy up against the other man's mind. "People are gonna be upset." Off in the distance, that fire is crackling merrily, illuminating the fluttering scrap of fabric Wendy is holding up in front of her. She's sort of squinting at her handiwork, sort of squinting past it. The fabric is black, with lettering on it in rich purple hilit with bold yellow -- LET'S GET DANGEROUS in stark all-caps. Wendy is shifting the square one direction and then another before, with a small sigh, dropping her hand and dropping the fabric, as well, to flutter down onto the stone that rings the fire pit. "How do you know when people really die?" Perhaps it is the pipe in Wendy's hand that lends extra Earnest Contemplation to this question, but perhaps not. "Winona could still see him. I can half see him. Spread out through all the connections he left behind. What if..." She shakes her head and lights the pipe, taking a hit and passing it along. "...we could be immortals." Beside Wendy, Polaris is perhaps a bit higher than she expected, but she gamely she hits the pipe and tips her head back to breathe a long stream of smoke into the hazy night sky. Her eyes linger there, as if searching for--well, there are plenty of other dark wings about. "I can't see him, but I believe you." She almost hands the pipe back to Wendy, then remembers and passes it the other way. "Maybe I just see it in smaller pieces." She looks down at the quilt square in her lap, purple with a big red heart sprouting bat wings in black velvet, all stitched in fine gold-filled wire. Polaris has declared it done at least three times, and while she hasn't touched in it a while, the coil of gold wire is still hanging from her wrist like a bangle. "What you see is connections too, right?" she asks Winona, sidelong. "Just a different...scope?" Her head tips back again. "Maybe we die a little when they die to keep them alive." The flames of the fire reflect off of Winona's dark eyes, transfixed as she is on the burning there. Her hands are draped over her lap (a square with two mostly empty glasses and a bottle in between them, crudely but sincerely constructed) in a relaxed position, though her fingers occasionally twitch towards the fire as if she is going to reach out and grab it. Fortunately, the pipe distracts her before such a thing can happen. "The world remembers. Echoes of echoes of echoes keep going on, into-" She takes a hit, and then after a few moments, exhales. The smoke whirls about her hand as she gesticulates vaguely, "It's all just connections, stuff we touch and the stuff that touches us, and then you hope it all ends up better for it." A weight settles into her shoulders. "He got that part down." Matt's been wending his slow way between the houses and yards, a bit on the altered side himself. He's wearing a light gray tee with a heart-eyed cartoon bat bracketed by the words "I'M CRAZY" and 'A-BAT YOU!", dark gray hiking shorts, and green-gray athletic sandals, carrying a Chimaera Arts tote repurposed with a quilt square that reads, self-referentially, "Quilt Squares!" His smile when he spots the Blackburners is quick and bright, the emptiness behind it quiet and unobtrusive. The man himself, too, uncharacteristically so as he stoops to pick up Wendy's contribution, then accept Polaris and Winona's, makes a slightly wobbly leg, and nances off humming something so off-key, even Wendy cannot identify it. Though possibly, it's just deliberate nonsense. --- Over in the plaza, the current Fight Club bout underway has a splash zone advisory. This is not necessarily about the amount of blood so much as the speed and violence with which it's being shed. Although there is, in fact, a quite a lot of blood. Someone had the foresight to set the quilting station a ways back from the ringside, where Isra has left her silky red dress draped over a stool beside her quilt square: jet black and bedazzled like a starry sky save a negative space in the shape of chiropteran wings. Isra's wings are torn open in long gashes, and there are ragged wounds left by many, many teeth scattered over her arms and legs. There is a raw savagery in the growl that ripples continuously from her chest, rising with each new wound, that send chills down most spines. Her many, many talons are bloody, not least the wing claws that have just raked at one of her tiny agile opponents in passing even as she swings her tail around in a bid to stop the other one scrambling up onto her back. Around Isra, over Isra, there's been a veritable blur of claws and teeth. Their shirts and shoes have been left somewhere off with Isra's dress and another pair of squares -- one inscribed with a block of Python code in small neat paint marker, one with a pair of fabric bat-wings mantled protectively over a horde of stick figures below. In just identical black shorts it is likely hard for most to tell which sharkpup is which, save perhaps in which one of the two has left deeper gashes, more toothmarks. The crowd right now is parting, moving, staying far out the way as this fight whirls and shifts, the boundaries of ringside fluctuating wildly with each new lash of tail or slash of wing. One pup has clawed their way high, deep scrapes left in the wake of their unfortunately sharp toe-holds. The sharpquick swipe of claws leaves one wingsail heavily bloodied even as it unfurls to cut at the other twin, and in the chaos maybe it's hard to tell whose blood it is this time that flings droplets thick and red over clothing and quilt pieces alike as the shark-goyle-nado continues to whirl furiously. Matt is skirting the splash radius of the fight somewhat automatically, but that does not stop him stepping up onto the base of a streetlamp, one arm hooked around its post for a better view when the blood really starts flying. He does not shout or cheer or betray any sign of excitement beyond the subtle quickening of his breath, just--watches, still and impassive. Only for a moment. With a slow breath in and out, he hops down and makes his way to quilting station. He doesn't stuff the freshly bloodstained squares into the tote just yet, but pins them to the outside while they dry, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. As he turns to go, his gaze drifts back to the fight with an unblinking intensity, then to the emcee spectating beside the medics. He departs just a touch more briskly than he came. --- Scramble has been drifting from fire pit to fire pit, getting progressively if only mildly higher each time she partakes. She has a red quilt square with a design that involves hands, though more than that is hard to say because it's stuffed haphazardly in the rear pocket of her jeans. Right now it's a different fire that draws her, banked in the softly glowing embers in the forge. They, and the soft string lights overhead, illuminate Erik's careful strikes of hammer to tool to pencil lines across steel. Scattered across the workbench there are sketches -- of Dusk, of wings, of hands wrapped around someone else in tight embrace. None of that has made it onto the block of steel, yet. So far, there is just a name. Fetching up against the other side of the workbench, Scrambles smiles down at the sketches. "These are beautiful," she says, then looks up at Erik. Past him at his work in progress. "Not saying he'd blame you for wanting a memorial, but that ain't the kind he woulda wanted." She pulls a flask from her (other) rear pocket, drinks, then holds it out toward Erik. "Ionno if he gave you a taste for tequila, but this was his go-to, and now it's mine, too. And I think whether it's sum silly-small like that or the countless times he's literally saved my life, every thing in every life he changed for the better? That's his memorial." She looks back down at the sketches. "But I think he'd be aight with a work of art reminding folks where the real memorial is. Maybe slap that poem on there, you know the one goes like 'do not stand at my grave and weep...'" "... I am not there," Erik finishes softly, "I do not sleep." He does not look away from his work when he sets down his tools. The flask floats from Scramble's hand to his -- he lifts it up, a silent toast, before drinking deep. The alcohol buoys, for a moment, the slow drag of his mind downwards. "I do not understand this memorial," Erik admits at last, sweeping the flask out towards the rest of Freaktown, at the fires burning and parties ongoing. "It's -- rootless. You cannot visit a celebration, once it's ended. Memories fade. At least a stone --" His voice does not break, but there is a tremor there, "-- is harder to erase." He reaches for his quilt contribution -- a plain, blue-black square, the thin silver wire woven into letters prioritized for legibility over artistry, reading All this has happened before, and it will all happen again. Two stars, the rightmost one larger than the other, adorn the right top corner, broken lengths of tiny steel chains hanging from each of them. He glances from there to the sketches, then finally up to Scramble. Lets go of both square and flask to float them to her, reaching instead for pencils and sketchpad. The steel plate he was working is cast back into the forge, the outlines of dates melting away. There are two pencils in his hand -- Erik holds the other out to Scramble. "We shall raise some other monument, then -- to lives saved and lives lived." Matt's drifting is purposeful, as if he were magnetically drawn to the forge by his mission. The pacing of his steps puts him in just the right spot to casually intercept both Erik's quilt square and Scramble's flask. He studies the former serenely and takes a slug of the latter, then starts to return the wrong Metallic Object to Scramble before reversing which hand he extends. After tucking the wire-embroidered square carefully away, he inclines his head gracefully and drifts right back out. On his way past Scramble again, he plucks the quilt square deftly from her back pocket without so much as slowing down. It's even odds whether she notices its absence before his tuneless humming has faded into the not-so-dark night outside. --- Someone, maybe, thought it wise to gather up the quilt squares before anyone Got Their Freak On -- there is a basket of them sitting on the edge of the stone steps at the side entrance of this mansion, ready to be whisked away. Lily hasn't put one in yet, the square balanced on her knee blank, and it seems unlikely, at this late juncture, to grow any decoration. Her pastel-green linen shirt is partially buttoned over a black mesh bra and black shorts -- or possibly boxers. Rough red bites run down the side of her throat, a promise of blue-purple bruises in the days to come; the scent of sex still clings to her skin, hair still mussed from more than just the breeze. There's a collection of wristbands stacked on her arm, color-coded to what she might want to be asked. It's a contradictory mix of colours -- top and bottom both are there, as are both domination and submission. Give me pain, declares another, but this one, almost uniquely, has no complement. She fidgets with the hunter-green Dom band between sips of her beer, staring with unfocused eyes out into the rest of the the neighbourhood. Lifts the bottle up, not in greeting but a salute, to the person approaching, nudging the basket out with a sandalled foot for retrieval. "More inside, still." The wristband rips off. Lily tips her head up, rolling the band between her fingertips. Her expression is difficult to read, but it's clear she's looking for something in Matt's. "You going in?" Does she find what she's looking for? One eyebrow lifts."You want a hand?" Lily might justly expect a salacious comment or three out of Matt, but in context perhaps the sharp hook of his smile serves just as well. He kneels beside the basket and adds this conveniently pre-harvested bounty to his quilt bag. His eyes slip aside to Lily again at her offer, indefinably dispassionate in their steady appraisal. Maybe he's found what he was looking for in her rainbow of wristbands, because he reaches out for the green one she's just removed, tugging it gently from her grasp. There's no provocative smile now, no punny come-on, nothing smoldering in his gaze, but when he stands up he's very decidedly standing over her. Looking down at her past the scrap of the "Dom" band he's idly twirling, there is something behind his eyes now, strange and intense. Whether that something is lust might be open to debate, but he just gives her a quietly peremptory hand up and draws her inside.