InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "you smell like beef and cheese"

Doors Verse (doorsverse) wrote in doorslogs,
@ 2013-10-18 21:51:00

Entry tags:

plot: halloween

Who: Everyone!
What: The Halloween plot
Where: Passages → The RMS Mauretania
Notes: This is a group log, so anything goes as far as adult content. Please provide locations and warnings, whenever appropriate, in subject lines. Characters may only be in one place at a time, not in multiple threads simultaneously, and you must post using the “doorsween” anon account. This post is anonymous; no names, accents, or defining fonts, please. Lastly, comment with "dibs" on threads you intend to hit, and feel free to exit your characters from threads at any time.

The Mauritania is a ghost ship.

Launched in 1938, it's been decades since she sailed the oceans, and yet the doors of Passages open onto the night-darkened deck of a ship that is barely afloat. She tilts, she lurches, and she is cobweb-lined from her deserted bridge to her silent deck. There is no land to be sighted from any railing, and no light save that from the stars overhead. The promenade winds around the upper level in ominous silence, and haunting music can be heard beyond the doors that lead into the ship's interior.

Promenade; Elevator: It's a curious thing, this ghost ship's elevator. Opulent and splendid, it takes up the entire center of the grand entrance, and it is meant to carry passengers down into the belly of the ship. But it doesn't work just right. Sometimes, the elevator drops impossible lengths. Sometimes, the elevator stops altogether for hours at a time. Yet somehow it's always empty and awaiting new passengers.

First Class; Baths: The upper-level, with its height and distance from the ocean, feels safe and bright. Classical music can be heard in these halls, though there is no orchestra and the ballroom is ominously dark. Laughter leads passengers to the one mostly-lit area in first class, where a swimming bath leads to smaller, more private Turkish bath. The lights here are quiet, flickering and barely there, and shadows dance elusively in the depths of the pool, while ghostly laughter can be heard in the private bath stalls.

Second Class; Theater: Down a level, the second-class floor is louder than the elite first-class floor. Here the air is thick with cigar smoke, and glasses can be heard clinking from the open doors to the smoking room. But it's the theater that draws passengers on this floor. It is cramped and entirely dark, save for the monochrome film on the screen, hauntingly devoid of sound, where a collection of terrifying collages and darkly sexual imagery fill the screen.

Third Class; Dining: Claustrophobic stairs lead down to the narrow passages of the cramped third-class rooms, where the air is heavy and thick, and where the lights flicker and cast the hall into windowless darkness. Here, the ghostly gears of the engine room can be heard sputtering dangerously, and the sensation of the ship's tilting is most pronounced. At the end of the hall, the dining area gives the illusion of windows where none exist. Chairs are pushed aside to allow for dancing to soulful and intimate music, while ocean water teases shoes and heels.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-19 12:29 am UTC (link)

She doesn’t remember wanting without fulfillment, here. Want is needle-bright and sharp but slim, followed quickly by whatever it is that she has looked for, like drinking moonshine and gin in the middle of Prohibition. (Take what you want, take it before anyone else can, take it before it goes). She lets him slide his fingers over hers as the glass passes from her hand to his, chased glass and the skip of cool skin and a little smile curls into the corner of her mouth, secretive - there’s mirth there, written in lipstick the color of old blood and her fingers still deliberately beneath his. There’s a ring on her middle finger, grassy-colored agate and old, and he tilts back the glass and his throat works as if he’s never drunk before at all, as if he would drink the bottle were it there.

A curiosity.

He’s pale enough that the screen flickers fall across his face, soft shadows drape him and she can see the color of his eyes (just) and the set of his mouth just before he turns his head and says something a woman from Gatsby’s era, all lush expense, would slap him smartly for. She laughs instead, delighted-sharp.

“I set no terms,” she says, arch and quick and if she had a fan perhaps she’d snap it at him, but she doesn’t, there’s the cigarette-holder, and she sets it between her teeth and the beads rattle and clatter as her hands work quickly at something at the top of her knee. A lighter, old with elaborate scrollwork and the click of the wheel is quick and smooth. She draws in a breath of mingled old smoke and new, “Are you that quick in fucking or just in conversation?”

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-19 10:42 pm UTC (link)

The young old man smiles faintly. She thinks she hasn't set terms, but she's made an offering, and there are rules as old as the sun about offerings and what they mean, what they create, summon, and stir into being. She's pleased by his vulgarity and he knows she dreams herself miles above all earthly concerns. He can't seem to get any going himself, tonight.

He draws in a breath of smoke and breaths it out, no pretty shapes, just a rough cloud that obscures the brief but vividly graphic images onscreen. This close, the smoke rolling from his mouth smells like wet tobacco leaves, clean scratchings of ivory, and copper. "Neither," he says. He isn't, not usually. Tonight is different, though, and everything seems to move almost too fast to track. He's making quick decisions where he would usually hem and haw, and following through on his choices without asking permission or thinking on guilt.

He leans in close to her, across the armrest that separates them. He takes the cherut from his mouth with his left hand, and reaches up to gently tug the headband across her forehead down over her eyes. "Hold still," he says. "And don't peek."

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-19 11:07 pm UTC (link)

She’s a Bright Young Thing in the dark of a theater, the candle-flare of an era and she would say she was certain nothing is offered that cannot be taken back. She’s not in the habit of giving what she cares to possess but her fingers twine and enmesh themselves in the old gold of the lariat until it slides around her wrist, serpentine. He’s brassy, rude like youth with his old eyes and his smoke cloud that obscures the screen but she minds little, at least it’s vim.

She kicks one foot up and swings her leg over the other at the knee, the click of the lighter and the hiss of breath around a slim cigarette that has been bought, rather than rolled with those cool white fingertips. Her first breath upward gusts toward his, a say-nothing stream of pure soft gray. Perhaps he is, perhaps he isn’t. People often lie in the dark.

Her cigarette permeates the woodsmoke clarity of the combination of scents, penetrates with the distinctive musk of cloves. She turns her head, ready with rejoinder and the cut of her chin is glass-clear but her headband glides over otter-dark hair, slides smartly forward to blot out the light. “You’ve made it so I can’t,” she says, and close to she smells of attar of roses, of lavender-folded clothes and the husky sweetness of the cloves. “Do you need me blinded?” Her elbows slice against the arm-rest, nubbed velvet and stark white skin.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-20 04:21 pm UTC (link)

He crushes the cherut out on the back of the seat in front of him, dropping it to the floor. He has no need for it now. Instead, he takes hold of the strap of her dress where it closest to him, and he pulls it over the shelf of her fine, pale shoulders. There's a lot of artifice to her, with her hair coiffed just so and her expensive clothes, and he wonders how far that goes, how long it might last. He'll see.

"No," he says. All his motions seem slightly outside his control at this point. This is compulsion, hunger in requirement of an outlet. Even if he wanted to say no, though he doesn't have the guilt anymore to care, he doesn't get that option. Nothing is stopping her from reaching up to take the headband off. There is nothing to keep her. There are only his fingers, rough on her velvety skin, rubbing her the wrong way. Those fingers are as cool as the room around them and the ocean below, But he doesn't give her too much time to think about that before cool lips find the curve at the base of her neck. "Do you ever give anyone anything?" he asks, against her skin. He doubts it. She smacks of the aristocratic in the time when he was born (or so it seems to him tonight). She is only the latest model from her own time, those same men and women who wore shoes with heels and discussed fashion and kept their nails as long as they liked, perfumed oils and leaded makeup and velvet patches to keep the telltale sores of iniquity out of sight. Not that he can much judge, being a fan of iniquity himself.

He wonders what she'll taste like. Sweet and dark and rich as plum juice, running down the chin in a hot, perfumed orchard? Will her privelege make her rancid, like the spoiled meat he ate in his youthful wealth, coated in expensive spices to make the rankness less noticeable. Who knows? She might, despite appearances, bubble like champagne, effervesce on the tongue with milk and honey, innocently made up as the manna of god.

There is only one way to find out.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-20 04:52 pm UTC (link)

The dress is shiver-thin beneath the beads, the gauzy strip of it looped over the sharp slant of her shoulder. The glass bugles wail retreat and her elbows dig dark into the worn velvet of the seat’s arm in surprise, the stockings wrinkle past repair at the scissor-flash of her legs uncrossing. He doesn’t need her blinded but he blinds her anyway, blots out the light with the velvet of her bandeau. There are words for men like him and it isn’t vim any longer. His fingers scud down her shoulder, the pads of them abrade the impossibility of youth. She’s never behaved in the dark.

“No,” her laughter coalesces like a bubble but it isn’t champagne but gin, bitter and strong and impossible, caught in aspic, in amber, in surprise. “No I never do.” She never does and she won’t, even with the elongated curvature of her neck tilted toward assault. She takes. All women do and she’s one of them and she doesn’t offer but demand. The lariat swings loose from her wrist and clatters softly against the beads of her breast, her collarbone is a knife-blade warm beneath his mouth and she can imagine smoke even if the coil of it is no longer sharp inside her nose. The cigarette holder tips between her fingers but she doesn’t let it go.

She isn’t innocent but he doesn’t deserve it and there’s delight in denial in her voice, spicy as the cloves. “Do you often take without asking?” She can hear the movie, the subdued sound of screaming very far away.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-20 11:08 pm UTC (link)

He thinks he knows the black butterfly woman in the theater seat, with her fingers floating and scraping over her own skin, fluttering in anticipation of the pin. He thinks he knows her, and knows her kind. He's never resented such people, though he's never had the things they do. There were times when he was young when life was kindly, but nothing was perfect, nothing was catered, and so much, so much went wrong. The blade like nature of her - her narrow face, her sharpened nose, her razor thin shoulder, it all seems so calculated, so decided, a defense but not a defense at all, decided upon to make her alluring to the right sort of men. The kind who would leap the wall to get inside the virgin's garden. There is no sincerity, and her harshness protests too much. He thinks he knows the woman in the theater seat, but he won't know for sure until he has a sip of her.

The truth is, he's very old. He's lived too long and seen too many things, but here he still is, with the self-centeredness of self-preservation. Suicide has been considered and discontinued, but death remains somehow a constant. People have had to die for him to be here today, on the gently bobbing thousand ton hunk of metal floating on the ocean like an impossibly out sized stopper for the waters of god. It was a hard thing to admit, but it was true. There was something selfish in his selfless sacrifice to keep living, when the expense to do it was so high.

She doesn't see it, unless she peeks (he told her not to) but his face is just the same. He is still the same young old man, though fangs lock into place just so like telescoping daggers, a neat little theater trick for the theater setting. He doesn't bite so much as he leans up into the curve of her neck and cuts with his fangs, piercing her. Then the blood flows, fast and hot, into his mouth.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-21 01:44 am UTC (link)

He thinks he knows her. Vaudeville is an act from a moment in time and anyone past it can shiver fingers through the dust and find it later, hold it up like a museum piece to the light. But she isn’t pinioned. She won’t be and the kick-kick of her feet are like the Charleston step, swift and sharp as the slice of her shoulder. A butterfly is thin and delicate and the dress is but she is not. Her neck twists, spirals and the gloom finds the white of it, licks along its curve as her head turns and the headband slides over the crimped waves of an obsolete style.

He’s a lie in his seat, the man full of vigor and the voice filled with smoke and dust. He’s a lie and blood is life and that’s blood without one letter, as close to truth as a seat in a theater can take you. She isn’t truth but the blood that spills down his throat is lively as a dying age tries bravely to be and it’s coppery thick where she’s thin. She doesn’t see (the headband holds out the light fast) but his mouth is like the point of a knife and she shudders like sincerity died long ago. “Is this fast, too?” And she laughs like broken glass, like poured out champagne. There’s truth in consistency and the wealth tied around a life like a ribbon undoes with a trickle. They’re all the same beneath the skin. Even him, death for a night in a seat.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-21 02:04 am UTC (link)

He's curious to see if she'll give up any fight at all. Eventually the loss of blood will make her drowsy, and perhaps the fear will keep her in her chair. The lack of flailing limbs and dragging nails does vaguely surprise him. She gives up smoothly, surrendering to where ever this might lead. Will he kill her, or does he simply want his share? Either way, it's a pact sealed in blood, and he intends to have the whole of what he's owed.

His tongue lathes against her slippery skin, and thought quiets. There's more body to her than he ever would have expected, and his mind is awash in thoughts that all point to red. It ought to feel good for her by now, one of those small blessings he can offer in return, but he's still drinking. The question is when he'll stop. If he'll stop. Will he leave her a shriveled husk in a dress? No way to know. He loses track of the swallows, knowing only the thrum of pleasure, heartbeat in the pulsing sanguine flow, ocean sounds in his ears and nothing to see but miles of red. This is more than survival, it's a balm on a wound that doesn't heal. Acts of violence, acted compulsively to smooth those old ills and numb them, briefly.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-21 03:11 am UTC (link)

Giving up is a girl’s trick. Surrendering to the crack of a door in the dark, hallway light beyond and are you asleep?, a question without an answer that will make it different at all. She’s never been small in her nightgown and she’s never hidden under the bed from her nightmares even if a ribbon of slow crimson scrolls the length of her neck and stains the bugle beads ruby red. Death is a game or a dance partner and her card is full but her card is tucked somewhere out of sight and she doesn’t think the old-young man asks first. She’ll walk towards it, instead of away because a choice makes everything different and the champagne shatters on the floor, old glass broken like a promise.

Thoughts are fleeting. Her eyes are heavy and they close, a parody of pleasure and she shudders once again in the symphony of dark. There’s safety in the dark, in the danger, a girl can’t get into trouble if she seizes it up to the elbows and the flame of an age gutters like troubled wind. Her heartbeat strums and it pumps and the blood in his mouth must taste like pennies, like a price paid out for a song. She wonders if it’s smoked, if it’s spiced as the cloves she held up to her lips, breath made sweet on the wind.

She laughs. It’s a dried sound, like leaves in a dead tree, angled towards him and his mouth fastened at her throat like a tarot card of lovers laid down on a table, fate a phantom at the back of the room. She’s choosing, even if he thinks to take because to choose is to take it back and her spine spasms against worn velvet as the screen flickers vivid violence.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-21 11:29 pm UTC (link)

Something makes him stop. Under the torrent of blood, he finds a saturation point, and he slows. The blood on his lips when he releases her, it tastes like shimmering nights built on bad credit and a fantasy bubble, ready to pop. It tastes a little like smoke, but threaded through, not preserved in it yet. It's as warm as cloying summer evenings lit by weeping candles, and yes, she tastes like money.

She's still breathing when he releases her, something deep inside deciding that he is finished - he is done. He may not be worrying about anything anymore, but that doesn't mean he's entirely another man, after all. There are certain lines he tries not to cross. In his present state, how well he'll succeed is a good question indeed. For now, at least for this, he makes himself release, reluctantly.

He doubts he'll find better tasting, fresher and greener and richer on the tongue, not tonight. So he offers a brief, chaste kiss to the wounds on her throat, and they stop up almost as soon as he pulls away. He takes her chin in his hand and grasps it lightly, turning her head toward him, and he kisses her, lets her taste what he's had of her, what he'll keep.

"Don't get up," he advises, though he stands, himself. His hands go into his pockets, and he's just tall enough for the projection to slide over his head down to his neck, flickering white and gray across his face and casting a long shadow on the screen.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-22 01:22 am UTC (link)

She's drifting, she's slipping, the velvet of death is a-call but her fingers don't clutch and claw, they curl into her palm obedient as little white mice. She's willing, and that's sweetness as honey, a life given up in the dark in search of the next thing and the next, excitement for shadows chased down to their starts. She thinks hazily of starless nights, of water dribbling over feet, sitting side-by-side on the edge of a dock.

And then the man with his old-young eyes and his curt lack of manners and the cool clutch of imminent whatever-may-be draws back and his lips on her neck are a courtesy call, an ode paid to the flicker of youth. H e kisses her like a confessor might, like a benediction taken at night. He kisses her and she tastes earth and life and the ash of something long gone and isn't it wild? She can taste her own blood on his lips in that kiss.

But Vaudeville is not chaste and neither is she. It's a dirty joke, a filthy dream and a song to tie it together and she's a bawd in the chair and she tips her chin up as the blood dries ruby on her throat, a jewel paid for beyond price, and the band tips back and her eyes are gilted green as dollar bills and cross. Isn't it just like a man?

Her fingers flit like a cranefly on a May night, and they snag in the soft gray of his coat. Her pupils are wide, blown dark by a screen that cantilevers other visions into the night. "Now who doesn't give?" she says with a tug, and there's demand clear as daylight, as the flame of her age as he's faded by shadow, faded as a movie and a bygone age.

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Re: theater; aisle seat

doorsween
2013-10-22 11:25 pm UTC (link)

He stays still when she tangles her hands in his coat. Under the layers, he's just as cool as his lips imply. He doesn't move toward her, and he doesn't pull away. "I fancy myself the giving kind," he said, with a small, indulgent smile. He does indeed, on a normal day, a day unlike this one.

He leans down and murmurs into her ear. It gives him a chance to smell her hair, once last chance. "But that's not what this is about," he says. This is about taking what he needs, selfish as can be. That's always been a part of him despite his overtures of affection and good deeds. Once upon a time there were things he needed, and he took them from the world with blood and steel, over and over, and he was never satisfied, and he isn't satisfied now. "And you shouldn't tempt me to have more."

He knows what will happen if he falls into the theater seats with this woman, fucks her between the armrests while twisted porn flickers across the screen. There will be a moment, before the climax, when she'll be riding high as a kite, and he'll bite down hard enough that she'll be dead before he's done feeding off her. It will be ugly, and it will feel amazing, drinking the height of pleasure from her already rich as sin blood. But he isn't going to do that, because she didn't sign up for that when she sat down with him, and that only happens to those who sign with actions and with words. Only to the deserving.

She's spoiled, but she's not that kind. She's a sparkler, and she'll burn out on her own eventually, but he's not going to help her on the way with another dash of his teeth. If someone makes of her a husk, it won't be him.

"I hope somebody handsome comes to rescue you," he offers, since that would be a nice end to this story. Once upon a time. Once upon a time, he thought he was that man.

He untangles her fingers from his coat, shadow parting from shadow in the darkened theater. He moves away, ducks his head, and the light from the projector weeps up and over his face. By the time he clears the frame, he's out of sight.

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