though my wrists and my waist seem so easy to break;
It was quiet in the art studio. In the pocket of her grey cardigan, pulling the material down with its weight her pocket watch marked the time as being after midnight, closer to one. That was okay though. Lucille liked the first few hours after midnight, it was quiet and even though with it being the height of summer and how the nights didn't really get very dark for very long anymore, it was still the calmest time of day to her, the time she could think the clearest and get the best of her work done, she guessed that made her a night owl and that was just fine too. Those grey sleeves that usually dangled around her hands, covering her knuckles while her thumbs pushed through holes she'd picked in the seams were bunched up at the elbows for now, her hands were dirty, streaked in grit, grime and WD40 and a band aid covering her pinkie finger on the right where she'd stupidly sliced the skin open on a bit of sheet metal, sworn in French and then gone to run it under the water in the sink. Hair pulled up into a haphazard, messy pony tail that was starting to droop down around the nape of her neck now thanks to the weight of her hair, Luce sat perched on a stool, bare feet on one on the rungs so that she could lean her elbows on her denim covered knees, it wasn't the smartest thing to wander around barefoot but she was alone and she didn't care, she'd kicked off her flip flops to take a break and they were scattered behind her somewhere. Between her hands she cradled a coffee mug, one of those mugs you find in art studios everywhere, chipped around the edge in places, stained on the inside. This one had a dolphin on it and Lucille had pretty much claimed it as her own, she could usually be found wandering around the art rooms with it, half full of coffee, or jangling a few bolts around in it when she was using it less as a mug and more as a bucket for carrying bits around, picking through boxes of parts and whatnot. A sigh widened her ribcage and then subsided, her eyes still on her work as it sat there silently glinting at her.

Between the Danger Room -- which she had been training in a lot over the past few weeks -- and the art studio she had enough places to go to take her mind off things, to decompress and she was doing just that. It had taken a little while but she was decompressing; she didn't feel so much like a drum anymore, pulled taut and expectant. having things to focus on was her main outlet, when she was training in the morning and working in the studio in the afternoon, or learning first aid in the medlabs, and hanging out in the evenings, stealing a few hours here and there for her own projects she didn't have time to stop and think about other things, her mind was busy and there wasn't room to feel sorry for herself, or to replay any of the recent events. There wasn't space to feel unwanted or useless, those feelings fell away and there was only room for her to focus on the tasks immediately at hand. Like working on her whip-like-dragon-snake-thing that she wasn't quite convinced she knew what she was doing with yet.

So far it consisted of a metal spine, little interlocking metal vertebrae curved up from the stand she'd propped it on in a languid S shape, overlapping one another, articulated with a complicated looking array of spiral wire and small, shiny bolts. When it was alive it was like a snake but it sounded like rain on the hard floor and she liked that, the susurrant breath of the metal tips was almost musical, she'd had it running around earlier while making the coffee that swirled around her mug, but for now it was silent and motionless. Luce didn't know what it was yet exactly, she knew what it should look like, how it should move but not necessarily what it meant, or if it even had a meaning, maybe she was just making something totally shallow and pointless. Maybe not. Musing over the way the base of the spine looked like the brim of a waterfall she caught her bottom lip between her teeth and played with one of her earrings listlessly, apparently oblivious to anything outside of herself and the metal in front of her for the moment.

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