Saint Reilly (shutterbugged) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-07-02 05:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, !penny dreadful(s), *narrative, saint reilly |
Saint: Marvel --> Penny Dreadful
Who: Saint R.
What: Making back-up plans.
When: Recently. Post-attack, but not too far post-attack.
Matt wasn't back yet. This was a piece of information among many. He stood outside the door to Matt's room, and imagined its parameters: the clothes, the shoes, the detritus of life. The clues that sat alongside Matt's insistence of activity, of countering the dealers on the streets. He imagined traceries of blood, or the indications of excursions - he was awake, the light unlit, when Matt came back late, quiet in an apartment used to excessive quiet and movement enough to disturb. He imagined more pieces, enough to put together a picture of a man not dead, yet not well enough to return. He could have turned the door handle, gone in, found them for himself. It was intrusive. It was disproportionate - or was it? Was finding Matt urgent enough to go through his things? He'd done worse, in pursuit of a story. But the story had been primary: the truth behind a story was primary and the good outweighed the bad. Or so he imagined. Morality. He turned over the word like a coin flipped over fingers, restless. Morality was certainty, Saint thought. Morality was pews and prayers and a priest, the cool solemnity of rules and books and everything governed by God. Morality was knowing where the lines where and staying within them. Was he? Wasn't he? He turned his back to the door, leaned against it, surveilled what it was he could see of the apartment from this perspective with a critical eye. There was furniture now. A teak table, a sand-colored couch. Photographs, stuck to the walls (it wasn't frames. Did people frame their own artwork? It felt like aggrandizement, aggressive: telling the world you were more important within the walls of your apartment than outside). The kitchen was neat, small. There wasn't clutter on the floors anymore, and the bathroom still smelled astringent, but not so powerfully. There wasn't much. It could be traded in. The conversation rolled over the back of metaphorical fingers. Moral. Was it? To wait, and to wait. To read the back-page of the newspaper repetitiously every morning, to look for the obituaries. To dream abject guilt. Guilt wasn't moral. It was certainty of failing. So tell, then go to a different door. So could they. They. Luke-and-Wren. They were fused, weren't they? He hadn't seen it before, the Wren who had been lost in a city full of people who weren't there to find her. She had been flotsam then, like standing at the ocean's edge back home and seeing something flung high but not yet at the beach's edge. She was moored now. Anchored. He had seen that. Being anchored was important, when doors opened and closed and people were lost. It rooted you. But anchors dragged. Luke-and-Wren had been untroubled by the men on the floor, the breathtaking fluidity of violence. The children. Was violence part of their yoke, their mooring? If he told, what purpose would it serve? Who to tell? What to tell them? The assault was weeks past. Stark Tower had been torn down, the city teemed with destruction, the bodily harm a handful of dealers had taken was insignificant. Or was it? All lives were significant. Nothing was black and white. Or was it? He closed the door to the apartment. Lodged the key under the mat. Visited the small store wedged in between a hoagie place and a dry-cleaners that had a window streaked with dirt. Gold was still around, but gold was harder to acquire. He traded an old camera for a piece of jewellery: opals lined up on gold, a circlet that he thought the owner fondly imagined had been intended for a softer purpose. The hotel always showed up behind a particular door, an exit to the apartment block behind the trash, a locked and forgotten door that opened for a hotel key. The hair on the back of his neck was sticky-charcoal with sweat, the blue-striped crumpled shirt stuck to his shoulders, his arms, and the stifling humidity of the city was blotted out by the cool, subdued light of the hotel. Carpet under his feet, a row of doors in front of him. Choice. Certain death behind some. A different set of choices behind others. He had the ring in his pocket, and one door was the same as another from the outside, wasn't it? And he opened the door and walked through, into the dim fug of summer in another city, this one choked with fog and the sooty-streaked buildings crammed together that jabbed into a familiar skyline. Dark, and everyone looked the same in the dark, even those in modern clothes. He rolled the ring over in his pocket, and marked the door he'd come through. He could go back. He would go back. But his roots weren't embedded, he could be transplanted, partly. He rolled the ring over the back of his fingers within his pocket, and plunged into the street without looking back at the door. |