Logs:Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia
Dramatis Personae Lucien, Sera	2021-10-16 "I want to taste starlight."
Location <PRV> Tessier Residence, Halloween Edition - Backyard - Greenwich Village
The spookification of the backyard is at once more whimsical and more genuinely creepy than the rest of the property. There are ghostly (fake) cobwebs, to be sure, and smallish cocoons of the same material dangling from the branches of the oak tree. An eclectic little fairy village has cropped up on the far shore of the koi pond from the patio set, but there are no fairies to be seen. The empty houses range from simple toadstool shacks to an elegant manor house constructed from a broken tea pot partly re-assembled with gold mortar, and at least one dwelling that appears to be made of real animal bones. Improbable glowing flowers have sprouted among the more prosaic ones in the garden, and soft balls of light can be seen faintly amongst the bushier plants like Will-o'-the-wisps. The night has worn past "technically morning" to "actually morning but who wants to be awake?" The sky is as dark as it ever really gets here, and clear with the kind of high October chill that older people always say used to be more common. The city may not sleep, but it is drowsy, its murmuring rush distant, barely noticable to long time residents. Sera has been lounging in one of the chairs, her legs pulled up beneath herself and a soft black blanket covered with actual constellations bundled around herself. She did not bring out the telescope, and her binoculars are sitting on the table unused, but her head is tipped back towards the stars all the same. Saturdays are far from a time of rest in Lucien's world; by all rights, he ought still be sleeping. Perhaps he was, recently; at least he is still in soft white-trimmed black pajama pants and worn old tee with a filigreed Ace of Spades playing card logo, beneath a black knit cardigan. He feels exhausted even if he is no longer technically convalescent, neurochemistry humming overtime to to tidy in the wake of a virus no longer there. He carries a tray, two mugs of tea and a small plate with a pair of freshly cut and buttered pumpkin scones, and sets it down on the patio table without a word. He is silent as he takes a seat, too, picking up his mug and cradling it close. Sera glances at Lucien when he emerges, something like relief slipping her still imperfect control, tinted with the whispered edge of the fear and loneliness it displaced. Relief and hunger. "{Thank you,}" she whispers as she reaches for a scone first, then for the tea to wash the first bite down. Somewhere in the middle of all this, her powers have attuned to Lucien's biokinesis, following its intricate routine, even if her nervous system is incompatible and cannot copy it directly. But watching his powers at work does not bring the bright wondering interest it usually does. She frowns, and though the aim of her fierce concentration is opaque at first, its results are plainly sensible when her attunement to Lucien's neurochemistry tries -- clumsily -- to pull him along with her abrupt calm sense of restful well-being. Lucien's head dips in quiet acknowledgement of this thanks. He sips his own tea in quiet, tilting his head back to look skywards. The creep of Sera's power into his senses is, at first, only met with an excessively gentle disentangling, so subtle it might seem almost passive, his own internal workings easing out of her clumsy hold to continue their tired aching work. Slowly and without much appetite, he off a corner of scone to nibble. His eyes slip down from the stars, canting sidelong to watch Sera, instead. "{Sorry.}" Sera is already pulling her influence back to leave Lucien out of its reach. She's lapsed into the accent she bore when she first came to this Tessier family -- unmistakably Québécois but more polished, less working class -- and which she usually tries to suppress in favor of theirs. "{It is more difficult, without Matthieu.}" She rolls her head aside to look up at the master bedroom's window, dark now. Then at Lucien. "{He knows what he is doing, no?}" There is no concern in her placid expression, but all the same something in her even tone makes the question sound less than entirely rhetorical. "{He will have Jax, and many others, also.}" "{It is not a question of your skill. That will come with practice. But some things,}" Lucien replies, quietly, "{just need to be allowed their own room to feel as they will.}" Even saying this, his internal landscape is shifting again, one sense radically remapping to another -- where his appetite had been absent, the food holding little appeal, now the scone lights up not just his taste but his sight, twinkling in pleasurable harmony with the stars above. "{They have done this before,}" is the answer he gives. Sera gives a thoughtful moue. "{But it does not help me to be anxious about it. It does not help anyone.}" She seems to have already moved past the question, and is eyeing Lucien with frank curiosity. "How are you doing that? I want to taste starlight." Distracted by fiddling with her senses, she lets her powers bubble outward again, currents drawing soft and persuasive across Lucien's mind even where they cannot take hold. "{Anyway, that,}" she points out, just a touch indignant and just a touch reminiscent of Matt -- though it's hard to say which one, "{is not what I asked.}" She takes a sip of her tea in what she probably thinks is a very dignified manner until her attempt to transpose her own senses cuts off her sight and taste altogether and leaves her sputtering in a panic. "{It doesn't necessarily help anyone for you to decide what to feel for them, either.}" Lucien's eyes have turned back up to the stars, letting them play lightly across his senses, still, and continue to render the task of eating a bit less onerous. His head tilts at the question, and in lieu of verbal answer he pares down some of the other bustle in his mind; the artificial synesthesia becomes more clear and prominent with less other chaff around it. "{I gave myself,}" he admits, not unsympathetically, "{so very many -- somewhat disconcerting episodes before I figured it out. It helps with more things than eating, though this is pleasant.}" He takes another sip of his tea. Rolls it slowly in with the rest of the glimmering feelings. "{They have done this many times before, and come back. That is not not what you asked. It took quite a bit of knowing what they are doing.}" Sera is quick enough reversing her accidental blindness and ageusia, and a little slower to attempt again, observing Lucien's demonstration carefully now. She takes her time considering his retort, as well. "{But it can. Would it not distract him if he knew I were scared?}" Her calm re-establishes its hold, flushing away the little spike of adrenaline from her failed experiment. The next attempt also fails, if less dramatically, by dissociating how the senses are transcribed to task memory. She blinks rapidly at the stars she can see but not realize she sees (yet). "{That's -- good. Are they usually this worried?}" "{Do you suppose he needs to feel it to know you are scared?}" Lucien's quiet mental recalibrations change direction very drastically, now, a sudden stark calm asserting itself with eerie totality over his previously busy mental landscape. "{Do you truly suppose,}" quietly, "{this is not itself distracting.}" It's less of a snap settling back into his previous routine; he eases back into it over the course of several breaths and a long sip of tea. "{If they were not worried, I should be. It is quite dangerous, what they do.}" Sera is just about to make her third attempt at producing synaesthesia when Lucien's neurochemistry abruptly flattens out. Whatever she just transposed with her sight definitely is not supplying her visual cortex with anything it can parse, and her view disintegrates into becomes seemingly random blossoms of something like shape and color but not quite. She closes her eyes but the signals are now coming from inside the house, as it were. It's another beat of inward flailing before she successfully restores her vision again. Only at a delay after that does she concede, "{That is very distracting, but I wasn't doing it like that.}" This protestation is mild, though, perhaps only token. "{And knowing someone is scared is different from feeling it as if it were yourself, no?}" She does not, in fact, seem so very certain anymore. "Mmm." Lucien's mind is relaxing back into its own kind of calm -- still exhausted, still aching, but there's a peace to whatever inner work is happening. It's a peace that's augmented by the tea, by the glimmers of starlight overhead, by the carefully-crossed wires that join the two senses. "{There is a fine line between sharing calm because you wish to share calm and sharing calm because you are scared of what people might see in you otherwise. You are only in control in one of those situations.}" Sera mulls this over, too. "{...and that's the difference between doing it with them and doing it to them.}" She frowns, and reluctantly presses on. "It's not always easy to know the difference, is it?" Her artificial calm recedes to reveal a low, roiling disquiet. Uncertain. Afraid. She sets aside her own experimenting and just lets her power pull her along to Lucien's more skillful weaving. "No," Lucien agrees, readily enough, "it is not." For a time it seems as though this is all he might offer. His eyes slip half closed, both hands now cupping his mug. His foot pushes in slow rhythm off the stones, setting his chair to a steady gentle rocking. "{I dreaded any touch, for years. I do believe it was worth some of the agonies, learning to get past imposing or being imposed upon and find some harmony with people, instead.}" Sera settles back into her blanket nest, drawing a pastry of her own along, this time. She gives the barest nod and does not speak for some time, but in where her power gently tugs back and where it acquiesces Lucien can, perhaps, read the rudimentary shape of a debate. Or a conversation. "That sounds," she concludes delicately, "a bit more complex than seasoning your scones with starlight."