L Gryffiths (immoveable) wrote in at_the_gates, @ 2012-02-11 01:44:00 |
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Entry tags: | !plot: london burning, leo gryffiths |
Who: Leo Gryffiths / Cian Andley
What: Gryff's fantasy, the 'still a Librarian, still telekinetic' re-emerges.
When: The first night.
Where: Haven
It is a night indistinguishable in its ordinariness. The lights were turned down hours previous; a resident, perhaps - one of the silent, greying types whose faces are too thin to look long at (magic shines unwholesome out of the whole, glints all sharp edges along cheekbones) who do things because no one sees them seeing them, or Dominic, in past the natural curfew Haven’s hush casts across its halls, all characteristic whistling through teeth and perpetual noise turned down to thin hum that won’t disturb Gryff-at-work, a pose taken up and rarely put down in the weeks since his return. Even Emily, wisp and fable that she is these days - tight smile, always busy, whisking beyond reach and purview -- she could have stretched out hand and flicked the lights low until Gryff is sole-lit amidst the soft-creeping shadows, he and the bank of work that must be done.
For this is indistinguishable from other nights as well: there is a table drawn across the room to serve as desk and space to sprawl (the carpet is rucked, Gryff has not noticed), there is the customary drift of paper that is indistinct chaos and the crawl of crabbed hand meticulously noting numbers that descend alarmingly into the negatives. There is a ledger, balanced on the arm of the chair, and on top of that as innocuous as the creeping grey at temples or the spidering out of lines by the eyes, a folded pair of spectacles. The translation of Gryff at work in office to the common room has notable absences -- the glaringly obvious that lack of glass to hand, no door to sit barred behind. But he is alone, as he is in this late evening as all late evenings, when time stretches on past the guttering-out of bedside lights and bright-lit windows, and calm dampens Haven like favoured blanket of inconsistent sleeper.
So he is alone, when the pen slides from one side of open book to the other, alone when there is soft sift and soundless shift to London’s night within the room and without the room. The gentle roll of fountain pen from one end of the page to the other is nothing, simple force of gravity -- except it is flat, and the end of the pen picks itself up like drunken staggerer setting mind to task, and the whole hangs and dangles from invisible string in the air.
Look back at Gryff and see the erasure, soft but distinct, of widening lines and creases across the face, the emergence of what is now evidence of having smiled as often as frowned. The pen is observed, it swings from side to side like magician’s trick, and -- as the man sits back, steeples fingers together, enjoys the show much as a child may take admiration in its own small constructions of sand -- spirals perfectly and beautifully and nonsensically mid air, until it rotates upwards like spinning top. The rest of the room is unsettled, it shuffles and consolidates and rearranges and the paperwork fans in what is not breeze but the precise non-control of the telekinetic reacquainting himself with himself -- until it fans into nothing, the Cheshire smile of the dream made reality. Gryff, who sits in Haven and thinks there is reasonable explanation just beyond fingertips but has forgotten it (wonders, if perhaps, Andley has drawn fingernail along his brain’s nerves just to see what it would do -- wouldn’t be beyond the man to indulge idle curiosity at his expense) is happy in its darkness, in the quiet comfort of storm not yet expected, much less eye gone past.
The room swings and dances with itself, the pen is orchestral note and conductor’s baton and what is next is indistinguishable from ordinariness for the motion is one instinctive and unconscious, a movement as familiar as it is ancient and folded away in memory thin as tissue paper. There is a gleam at throat, the dull-silver-swing of dog-tags within the fist, and Gryff’s mind stretches, reaches in expectant stretch toward one as distinct in shape and space and dark knots and recesses as that of his own, slides curiosity as agreeable as it lacks form along that thready-strong connection that he does not remember is a decade buried and gone.
Here at least, magic is lover and giver and caress along unbidden dream.