upmoving | COURT: Heart Game!

COURT: Heart Game!

[Your consciousness drifts in to the sound of discordant whispers. It sounds like a hushed argument in another room, something you can't quite catch. You're cold. Your skin tingles slightly, and then...]

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[theoretically he could try. There are people here, ones he knows, going about their lives, but they seem to ignore him. They're all behaving the way they always did, trying to live normally while in constant fear of the man whose presence fills this whole palace, even when he doesn't reside in this particular wing. He'll be here, but one never knows when, or who he'll be after. And the woman who lives at the end of the hall is just a constant awkward reminder of how little power anyone but that man has.]

[Sad. Pathetic. All of them. They'd be better off dead--no they are dead. These versions of them. He made sure of that. He leaves the open doorways and the people he knows living their tense, artificial lives in these pretty rooms that might as well be a dungeon and heads to the closed doors.]

[You have been here too. The queen's chambers, as pretty as anything else. You knew the women who lived here better than anyone, didn't you? In some ways at the very least. But she isn't here. Or is she? The room seems to change every time you blink, once the visiting room of that girl you knew, a little soft, sad, the whole place just slightly unorganized and melancholy, and then orderly and much more stark, but fuzzy, half-remembered, a place where a completely different Empress lived. Sometimes it's empty. Sometimes one woman or another is standing by the doorway to the gardens, her back to you, looking out. It's hard to get one image to stay.]

[He loved one of them and didn't hate the other. So even as the room fluctuates he walks across it to the doorway to her garden, watching the shift between one woman and the other and neither.]

[But who does he end up next to?]

[That decisiveness seems to make it click. When he stops next to her, the image settles, and he's standing next to his mother. But she doesn't acknowledge him, either. He may notice his colours have faded again, washing out a bit further, and there's a click somewhere in the room.]

[He doesn't look to see what it was. The door or something else. He frowns at the colors though, it;s unsettling and not something he's happy with.]

Ariel.

[He won't address her by mother, because she's not, not really. Just some memory of their mother, the queen, the tyrant, the warlord.]

[She doesn't answer, but she does tilt her head slightly, as if to hear him better. Her gaze is focused on the garden, which appears in full late-spring bloom from here.]

[He glances at the garden.]

All this doesn't exist. You, like this, it's all memories.

So tell me, I'm in Ariel aren't I? You're part of him.

[It seems fine, but she's watching it like there's more to it than Tristan can see.]

That's right.

What part are you? ...And what's out there?

It depends on what angle you're looking from. Out there, though, is a scar.

What scar?

And every angle, I suppose. I don't know why I'm here.

Out there, war. In here, attachment, lack of it, self-awareness of that fact.

What do you want to do, with access to everything?

[He looks at her again, at the room.]

I should want to kill him. But I don't. Not really. I want to fix... This. All of it.

Can you?

[The room is as nice as it was. The garden is accessible, but now the door further into the queen's chambers is ajar, just slightly, where before it was tightly shut.]

I did inherit your stubbornness in my own way.

[He glances at that, but back to her.]

Do you have any suggestions? I'd rather know what I'm dealing with. If I go through that door [The one that just opened] or into the garden, or if I light that disgusting hall on fire, the things I do will have repercussions. But I can't predict them on no information.

[She finally looks at him, just slightly, out of the corner of her eye, calculating -- a look that's hers, but also Ariel's, because it's a look he got from her in the first place.]

Not everyone will see me. Not everyone has the option of going through that door. I'll tell you that much. You can do what you want to do, but you do have experience with visceral desires being enacted inside of someone, don't you?

[It's strange. Surreal, really.]

We're brothers, more alike than I think either of us ever wanted. But I'll follow my own judgment. It's hard to repair something you've already destroyed, I know that much.

[He lifts a hand.]

I'm fading. I take it that's another reflection?

We're all disappearing to some degree, aren't we?

Are we?

In a manner of speaking.

This is rather more literal than a manner of speaking.

But it "isn't real", is it? As you said.

Not out in the world. But I suppose in here it's more real than anything else.

...Things are going to change. For you, him, whatever way you want to see it.

Edited 2015-05-29 15:31 (UTC)

I suppose that's to be seen.

[She looks back out the window, an obvious dismissal.]

Re: the queen's wing

royallyfuckedup - 2015-05-29 15:43 (UTC) - Expand

Re: the queen's wing

upmoving - 2015-05-29 15:50 (UTC) - Expand

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