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crossing_lostrp[OOC: This takes place later that night, after everyone has gone to sleep. Faith started coming so clearly that I had to get it out and posted.]
Meditation had not worked. Tai Chi had not worked. And there wasn't anything to read. Her copy of A Wrinkle in Time, battered and dog-eared, but given and not taken from a fellow inmate was back at her and Mara's makeshift camp, so Faith could not even turn to that as a distraction from the press of insomnia.
The insomnia wasn't anything new to Faith. She couldn't just curl up in bed and go to sleep on a good day; on a bad one, like this one where she was stranded on a desert island, sleep was even more difficult to find without some way of burning off steam first. In prison, there'd been time for exercise before lights out. Sometimes, that hadn't been enough but there were things that could be done in the privacy of her bunk that took off that Slayer edge, that driving pressing need to hunt and run and just move without boundaries and with freedom.
Truth is, she'd gotten used to the lack of freedom in lockup. Her body adapted and so did her mind; that's what she'd come to believe. Before crashing here, when she was handing a plastic bag containing her belongings and dressed in a dress that looked more like a funeral gown than anything anyone in their right mind would wear, the Slayer beast surged forth, instinctively smelling that elusive freedom. Faith, and her two Watchers, Ms. Blake and Mr. Verlin had spent the first three nights in a posh hotel – Closet Gay Guy, as Faith had dubbed Verlin had his own room of course. The second night, Faith left the hotel to roam the streets, looking for a fight. Finding one hadn't taken long, and when the vampire was dust under her heels, Faith breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, (I'm still me. I’m still a Slayer.)
Blake and Verlin had been less than happy with her nocturnal run. She wondered many times over the course of the next few weeks how it was that they could be Watchers when they clearly didn't even understand what a Slayer was. Only the threat hanging over Angel made her stay with them and do her best to abide by their rules. She pretended it was prison again; it helped.
Seven days ago, the Slayer had finally been set free. Free to roam, free to jump, free to hunt, free to be. Even limiting her roaming to daylight hours after the first close encounter with the Creepy Stalkers because she didn't dare leave Mara unprotected at night, hadn't completely calmed the need and the itch to hunt. The Slayer was a nocturnal creature because her prey moved at night.
Now the awareness of night pressed in on her, a heavy weight pressing upon her chest and her mind. The Slayer felt it and crawled around inside of her skin, clawing and itching to get out, to touch the night and become one with it. (To hunt.) On every level, from the conscious to the subconscious, Faith's being knew that it was night and knew that it was the first night she could completely be the Slayer with no holds barred and still, there was no freedom. Willingly, eagerly, she'd come to this ship and it had been a good thing – she learned who these people were and that they were just as stranded as she was – but she should never have agreed to stay when they bedded down for the night.
Faith was trapped inside this spaceship and as fascinating and cool as it was, it didn't lessen the feeling of entrapment.
The room she'd chosen to sleep in was all leather and suede, hard and polished, yet still felt feminine and had that air of woman to it, and right now it only intensified the itch.
Giving up on capturing illusive sleep, Faith swung her feet to the floor and stalked across the room. The corridor outside was deserted, because no normal person would be awake this time of night, and Faith hovered between relief and disappointment. Someone to actually talk to might be a pleasant distraction.
(Shoulda dragged Ash into the shower with me,) Faith thought, then shelved it. Not now, not yet, she wasn't going that road again, wasn't going back to the time in her life when everything had been divided into the fight-it-or-fuck-it/slay-it-or-lay it category; even her relationship with B had those undercurrents of charged sexual energy and frustration to it. Faith could admit it, wouldn't deny that soft womanly curves every now and again did the job just as well as a man; fortunately, B had never picked up on it so it was one less thing for The Slayer – the first one and foremost – to not hate her for.
She stopped and drew back her hand when she realized that her feet had carried her right to the room that Ash occupied. Unthinkingly, she had approached his room, knowing that a way to cure the itch was right there – and her heart pounded, blood roaring in her ears, her hand trembling as she stared down to where it hovered just over the door. Faith cursed herself, jerked her hand back and back pedaled as quickly as she could. Flirting was safe, playful teasing was all good, but crossing that line – going back to the dirty bump and grind with not a care for anyone's feelings or needs – wasn't. It was a part of her that she'd left behind, a part of her that she'd hated, but had cultivated out of "self-protection" according to her shrink.
It was an instinct that still reared its head when she wasn't careful, something to fall back on that was easy, that didn't require thought or control or attachment.
"It's harder on the outside."
(Yeah, yeah, Angel, I know. I get that. Would be easier if I could talk to you.) Faith gave a soft, rough laugh. (How many fucking slayers need a vampire as their grounding base?)
She found the kitchen and began mechanically going through cupboards. (Fridge is off limits.) Faith found coffee, she found mugs and she found an old Mr. Coffee which actually made her giggle. (Time traveling alien still uses the old reliable.)
Coffee brewing, she sank into a chair and watched it drip down. (Worse thing for insomnia, but it's not like I'm gonna sleep anyway.)
The dripping coffee entranced her. So much so that she was on her feet, back tensed and dropped into a defensive crouch, every predatory instinct in her body on alert when a voice asked from the doorway, "You can't sleep either?"
Meditation had not worked. Tai Chi had not worked. And there wasn't anything to read. Her copy of A Wrinkle in Time, battered and dog-eared, but given and not taken from a fellow inmate was back at her and Mara's makeshift camp, so Faith could not even turn to that as a distraction from the press of insomnia.
The insomnia wasn't anything new to Faith. She couldn't just curl up in bed and go to sleep on a good day; on a bad one, like this one where she was stranded on a desert island, sleep was even more difficult to find without some way of burning off steam first. In prison, there'd been time for exercise before lights out. Sometimes, that hadn't been enough but there were things that could be done in the privacy of her bunk that took off that Slayer edge, that driving pressing need to hunt and run and just move without boundaries and with freedom.
Truth is, she'd gotten used to the lack of freedom in lockup. Her body adapted and so did her mind; that's what she'd come to believe. Before crashing here, when she was handing a plastic bag containing her belongings and dressed in a dress that looked more like a funeral gown than anything anyone in their right mind would wear, the Slayer beast surged forth, instinctively smelling that elusive freedom. Faith, and her two Watchers, Ms. Blake and Mr. Verlin had spent the first three nights in a posh hotel – Closet Gay Guy, as Faith had dubbed Verlin had his own room of course. The second night, Faith left the hotel to roam the streets, looking for a fight. Finding one hadn't taken long, and when the vampire was dust under her heels, Faith breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, (I'm still me. I’m still a Slayer.)
Blake and Verlin had been less than happy with her nocturnal run. She wondered many times over the course of the next few weeks how it was that they could be Watchers when they clearly didn't even understand what a Slayer was. Only the threat hanging over Angel made her stay with them and do her best to abide by their rules. She pretended it was prison again; it helped.
Seven days ago, the Slayer had finally been set free. Free to roam, free to jump, free to hunt, free to be. Even limiting her roaming to daylight hours after the first close encounter with the Creepy Stalkers because she didn't dare leave Mara unprotected at night, hadn't completely calmed the need and the itch to hunt. The Slayer was a nocturnal creature because her prey moved at night.
Now the awareness of night pressed in on her, a heavy weight pressing upon her chest and her mind. The Slayer felt it and crawled around inside of her skin, clawing and itching to get out, to touch the night and become one with it. (To hunt.) On every level, from the conscious to the subconscious, Faith's being knew that it was night and knew that it was the first night she could completely be the Slayer with no holds barred and still, there was no freedom. Willingly, eagerly, she'd come to this ship and it had been a good thing – she learned who these people were and that they were just as stranded as she was – but she should never have agreed to stay when they bedded down for the night.
Faith was trapped inside this spaceship and as fascinating and cool as it was, it didn't lessen the feeling of entrapment.
The room she'd chosen to sleep in was all leather and suede, hard and polished, yet still felt feminine and had that air of woman to it, and right now it only intensified the itch.
Giving up on capturing illusive sleep, Faith swung her feet to the floor and stalked across the room. The corridor outside was deserted, because no normal person would be awake this time of night, and Faith hovered between relief and disappointment. Someone to actually talk to might be a pleasant distraction.
(Shoulda dragged Ash into the shower with me,) Faith thought, then shelved it. Not now, not yet, she wasn't going that road again, wasn't going back to the time in her life when everything had been divided into the fight-it-or-fuck-it/slay-it-or-lay it category; even her relationship with B had those undercurrents of charged sexual energy and frustration to it. Faith could admit it, wouldn't deny that soft womanly curves every now and again did the job just as well as a man; fortunately, B had never picked up on it so it was one less thing for The Slayer – the first one and foremost – to not hate her for.
She stopped and drew back her hand when she realized that her feet had carried her right to the room that Ash occupied. Unthinkingly, she had approached his room, knowing that a way to cure the itch was right there – and her heart pounded, blood roaring in her ears, her hand trembling as she stared down to where it hovered just over the door. Faith cursed herself, jerked her hand back and back pedaled as quickly as she could. Flirting was safe, playful teasing was all good, but crossing that line – going back to the dirty bump and grind with not a care for anyone's feelings or needs – wasn't. It was a part of her that she'd left behind, a part of her that she'd hated, but had cultivated out of "self-protection" according to her shrink.
It was an instinct that still reared its head when she wasn't careful, something to fall back on that was easy, that didn't require thought or control or attachment.
"It's harder on the outside."
(Yeah, yeah, Angel, I know. I get that. Would be easier if I could talk to you.) Faith gave a soft, rough laugh. (How many fucking slayers need a vampire as their grounding base?)
She found the kitchen and began mechanically going through cupboards. (Fridge is off limits.) Faith found coffee, she found mugs and she found an old Mr. Coffee which actually made her giggle. (Time traveling alien still uses the old reliable.)
Coffee brewing, she sank into a chair and watched it drip down. (Worse thing for insomnia, but it's not like I'm gonna sleep anyway.)
The dripping coffee entranced her. So much so that she was on her feet, back tensed and dropped into a defensive crouch, every predatory instinct in her body on alert when a voice asked from the doorway, "You can't sleep either?"
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[Mara] Jackson Pollock-style Paintfest (tag open)
Date: 2006-04-18 08:49 pm (UTC)She laid out every color she had available, be it pencils or pastels or watercolor or gouache; filled her water-tin from the bathroom tap; readied her brushes. She took her entire pad of Bristol board out and glued three sheets together per panel, then laid the panels out in a square--nine in all. As they dried, she stared down at the white expanse, breathing deeply. She didn't know how much time it would take before she came up for air again.
A blue wash first--pale stormcloud blue, patterned like light underwater but more complex; she saw hints of the Tardis's strutwork in it, even before she started laying in details. Trance was already taking her. Her mind was falling into the painting, into the process; even as her mind tumbled complex bits of psychic information inside it and tried to translate them into a 2-D medium, a strange serenity was rising up inside her.
The girl, first. The granddaughter's face and form, near-photographic, surfaced slowly from the blue in the center of the painting; it played peek-a-boo inside soft streaks of gold and silver mist that seemed to be made up of letters and numbers Mara couldn't read. The hypercomplex patterns she had seen within the Tardis during her first attack were back again, but more manageable. /Clotho's threads,/ she thought, and again did not know what was meant by that.
Other people--the Doctor, Rose, hints of a few others. She laid them in in pale nimbii of green and royal and amber, like spirits attending his granddaughter. The lines of light/energy/words/equations wove around the lot of them, dancing in patterns so complex she could barely represent them. The girl's heart was at the center of them, weaving the threads of all the others into a pattern that she obsessed over alone for...she didn't even know. Over an hour, certainly. It seemed to be the most important part of everything.
No burning worlds here. No sunflowers. The past was dead; the promises of the future were what needed to be shown. That and the admonishment to seize them fully, before his refusal to live meant that his granddaughter did not get to.
She knew the end result was beautiful; she knew it was more complex than anything she'd ever done; she knew she'd spent most of the night on it, so it damn well /should/ be good by now. When she hit the wall at six-plus hours and found herself so stiff and aching from kneeling on the floor that it took her a minute of painful effort to straighten...she knew she had to be done. /Please let me be done, and have done this right./
She started picking up her things, carefully wiping the floor free of any traces of pigment. She'd sprayed the panels with fixative; her work here was done and she was so tired she wanted to cry. She had more smudges on her nose, her arms were multicolored up to the elbows. /What am I gonna do when I run out of art supplies?/
She stretched tentatively, alarmed by several very loud and almost painful pops. "Ow. Ow. Ow."
Then realized she wasn't alone. As in.../multiply/ wasn't alone. And she didn't know how long they had been standing there.
[Doctor/Rose] Jackson Pollock-style Paintfest (tag open)
Date: 2006-04-20 11:20 pm (UTC)But Mara was there, on the floor, stretching. In front of her was another amazing piece of art. Rose’s eyes widened as she saw her own face, with an almost golden fire behind her, laces with green and blue. The Doctor was there as well. And was that the faint outline of Jack? Yes, but Mara had never met Jack. There were other faces, people she didn’t know or recognize, and this rippling light weaving through all of them, made her think of fluid, water, not lightening, although the glow of it might suggest something more. There were also words in that geometric, odd writing that the Doctor sometimes used, and that the main computer sometimes showed without translation. But who was the young woman in the center? She was pretty, and almost fragile looking. She stood out, by the colors ringing her.
The Doctor crouched next to Mara, his expression shocked. He knew none of his pictures, paintings or holo-images of Susan were in the section of the TARDIS open now. Except the two in his own room, shoved in a drawer.
“Past,” he pointed to the geometric word/writing closest to his image, “future,” he pointed to the one above and off to the side a little of Susan, “present.” The word/image was closest to Rose’s painted face. The ones at top proclaimed ‘the Legacy of Rassilon’.
The Doctor recognized some of the other faces floating about as well. Romana, Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Brigadier no more and the most happily married man he’d known aside from David Campell, Susan’s own husband, and there e was, ‘floating’ a bit above her. Next to him appeared to be the faces of Rosanne, Jenny and Simon, his great grandchildren, though they appeared to be adult here, and Jamie, the eldest, had barely been twelve when he’d seen them, before the war.
“Where did you see these faces?” It wasn’t accusatory. He seemed, almost melancholy yet awed as he looked over the whole. Hints of the Time Vortex. Rose couldn’t know the nimbus behind her image called to mind Bad Wolf, and the kiss she could, thankfully, not remember. The support struts in the consol room seemed to support the painting.
“It’s gorgeous.” Rose murmered.
[Mara] The Messenger (tag Doctor/Rose, open)
Date: 2006-04-20 11:44 pm (UTC)/Well, crap, at least it has his attention./
When he asked his question, she smoothed her hair back self-consciously, leaving several colorful streaks. "I didn't see them anywhere," she said in a tiny voice.
They were waiting for more. She blinked, looked at the painting like it held an explanation, and then said softly, "I don't see with eyes or hear with ears or learn these things from books. I didn't look at a photo album. I d-don't even know what any of it means or who these people are, mostly. I'm just the messenger. As...as usual." She started gathering up her things, leaving the painting behind.
"Yes, but who was the message from?" the Doctor asked gently.
She shouldered her bag and started limping for the hallway, hoping she'd at least get a chance at another shower and an hour's nap before they had to go. She paused and looked the Doctor in the eyes for a moment. "A friend of yours, who doesn't have a voice of her own these days," she said simply. Then she turned to go.
[Rose] The Messenger (tag Mara, open)
Date: 2006-04-21 03:07 am (UTC)Mara's parting words had been a bit enigmatic. Rose knew the Doctor knew lots of people, and she hadn't met many of them. But she had to wonder what friend would send a message through the shy artist... or even could.
She made her way to the kitchen. Coffee she could make, even if it had to do without cream. She eyed the refridgerator with care. Why was she thinking of the locker aliens in Men In Black? Would the sentient mold be blinded if the door ever opend and the fridge light came on?
Oh well. The bread was a week stale, as were the bagals. Not that the toaster would cook them anyhow. So she dug out the pop-tarts, as that was all the rewired chrome contraption would deign to cook. Coffee and Pop-tarts were not the best way to start a morning sure to lead to a long walk. There were crackers and peanut butter. Some wheetabix, but no milk. The milk was apparently evolving into some sort of curdled politician. Would it want to negotiate for ownership of the fridge?