Daniel Brown Webster (labete) wrote in bellumlogs, @ 2009-12-22 00:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast |
Who: Daniel
What: A narrative, of the unhappy kind.
Where: R1
When: After the masquerade.
Warnings: None.
Piper had cleaned the apartment. It was one of the many things that made Daniel absolutely crazy while the younger man dwelt there; the way he was constantly moving, moving things, moving himself, moving Daniel--when he ventured from the locked office off the front hallway--just moving, moving, moving, all the time. Daniel realized that he had become a creature of habit, shut away in his cave, and the paths of his movement had become set, the way water wears down the mountain side, just so, and just here. Piper came in with his stubborn anxiety and his wordless flailing, and shifted everything around, and now Daniel hardly knew what was ceiling and what was floor, both were so bare.
At least he was gone. Both men cared enough that neither wanted to see the other dead or bleeding or hurting, but that didn't mean they could stay in the same space for more than a few hours without wanting to strangle each other unconscious. The silence benefited both, however. Daniel's preoccupation with Montgomery, Boyd, and most of all, Jane, matched Piper's guilty, paranoid brooding about whatever had happened to him in the alley with the man Shane. Whenever Daniel brought it up, Piper just pushed back for more information about the blackmailer, information that Daniel wouldn't give.
So, silence it was.
And silence again, now that he was gone. Better that way.
Daniel had stopped reading the newspapers. These days he glanced at the headlines and let them be. He had no reason to believe the murderer would pick up his activities again after so long a silence, and though the papers had stopped reporting, what few informants Daniel had passed along the opinion that something had happened to him. Jack the Ripper, in his way. The bastard.
Most of the books that Piper had stacked or shelved stayed that way. Nothing Daniel had read already interested him, and he saw no point in trying to understand who he was when no book was going to explain the reflections he saw in the sole cracked mirror, or the dreams he had over and over. Either he was insane, or he wasn't, and neither diagnosis helped.
For the most part, he stopped writing. His journals had a few scattered lines, some fragmented notes, a vague listing of events when they happened. Compared to his usual productivity, this was a desert where a river used to run. He passed it off as expected. Considering.
The mirrors provided some distraction. He was unable to direct which reflection would appear, or how, but he could concentrate and make his own reflection change to a different one. Every once and a while Jane's living room would appear, and sometimes he would see her reading, or moving from one edge to the other, but little else. Other times he would see glimpses of Bellum Letale's private lives; sometimes he would watch, but most of the time he would simply let the mirror blank out into his own disinterested features. Life was very much the same everywhere, and he never again saw Montgomery's room.
The drinking, of course, remained. He noticed, in a half-buzzed, distant kind of way, that he didn't have to drink as much as he used to, and once he noted that he didn't taste the scotch at all, so it hardly mattered what year it was or what brand. More details. Mostly, he was just working himself up toward the end he thought he saw coming. It was a long skid downhill toward Sylvia Plath, really, though he didn't have her excuses.
The Masquerade had been a lively thing, and the monotony of thorned dreams had been interrupted by a swirl of Venetian color and Poesque texture. He even wrote a description down in one of his journals, with small observational notes about who was who, and who had done what. It entertained him, as observations of humanity usually did, but only for a short while. There wouldn't be anything like again, he expected.
He wondered, one night long after Vlad's piano had gone silent and his mirror had gone dark, if Montgomery would ever get up the guts to show up at R1 and try to take whatever it was she really wanted. The shadows of the roses outside the windows sent long claws of lined dark across his bed, and he turned to watch them reach dispassionately. Hopefully, he'd be dead by then.