Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-10 16:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | cat dubrovna, reece eos, ~plot: memories |
[Memory]
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing
Warning, this memory contains: Nothing requiring a health warning
You begin halfway through the end, with a series of mixed emotions as an overture.
There is the lingering and ever present sense of anticipation and curiosity never fully slaked, an appetite that is perpetually whetted. There is candid self-disgust mingled with a distinct lightness of being that leans away from caution. There is a muddle of adrenaline, warm humor and admiration and when you are midst the memory, you are in gloom. It is not dreary but the sound is specific and contained. There is comfort in that, in a curtain drawn between here and there, as if here were safer and yet not. At all.
Your shirt sleeves are folded around your elbows, softly expensive cotton and the smell of spirits is in the air, a sharp and very precise burn. Your focus is narrow but your awareness is not: there’s a heightened sense that comes from being in proximity albeit not kissing-close to danger. There is danger here and god, you’ve missed the needle-prick certainty that something could kick off at any second. It’s an unsettling, pleasant buzz down the back of your neck, pooling at the nape of your spine. It’s near and present and it is an almost-certainty. Just almost enough to pay attention.
You are aware that beyond this room are a thousand opportunities to rekindle what has dwindled to ash but there still remains the glint of an ember. Half a dozen chances, along with a game of chance that’s too rich for most people’s blood but the impulse is sitting underneath. The memory supplies inclination, sharp and keen in the absence of obvious fulfillment. It’s honed, slid through opportunity like water over whetting stone. It sits under your skin, floods your focus.
The light is low, although you are aware it sits at your back and some very short way off, it is glittering and busy. You are stood next to the side of a bar, with a stretch of expensive, expansive wood at your back and in front of you a conversation that has circumnavigated enough mileage to take in the world, if it really wanted to. The memory supplies the counterpoint to what is said but not the substance. and the challenge of the conversation, the darting of the thread of it back and forth.
There is the smooth taste of expensive whiskey on your tongue but buzzed is a couple of steps off and you are standing on the precipice. You want. It is simple and sharp, it is savage jolt electric in the kick of your gut, and clear like water watched through glass.
It is a metronome. It is a moment in the hush of this back-recess of the bar where you are acutely aware both that it’s a terrible idea to want what you want and equally, that it is impossible not to, and it is a precipice, a sheer drop. The proposition is on your tongue, warm as cloves, there is a split-second choice to be made between what you want and the wealth of banked good humor, sharp challenge and informed affection that hangs in the balance. You can remember the days of dust in your head along with the scream a dead man makes for his mother when he’s facing slow agony, blood on sand. The intention to do anything in that moment to evade it, dry paper in flame and an intention to live long enough to scorch it out until the next trip out, coaxing the synapses of your brain to spark again, with whatever was still stinging on the rim of your gums.
You know how to light the touchpaper and burn it down to convince yourself of living. You know something else.
She laughs. She slides away with the elegance of a woman who knows she is being watched as she goes, supreme confidence in the poise of her spine. It is cultivated precision. You know she knows she is being watched because you very much doubt she’s not been watched in years. It is stage-managed to the last and there is admiration and amusement in equal measure.
There is no backward glance as the glitter of the space beyond closes over her, into secrets conducted in full-blown disregard to whoever may be watching, displays of raw power elegantly dressed.
There is the detritus of a glass on the bartop and the smell of whiskey and you finish the glass in its entirety and pour another and you sink that, too. On your way out - you’re not finding your way out of this mire on someone else’s tab - you’re walking with purpose towards a cheaper place, buried in the back-alleys. Somewhere the air is hot and muggy, where the drinking is cheap, where nobody is a high-roller, where you’re lucky if you get nuts at the bar. There is one choice un-made in a moment. There is another ahead.
The memory holds the sensation of folding up tightly, furling inward and then ends entirely.