Dorian (oscarwilde) wrote in madisonvalley, @ 2013-09-08 12:35:00 |
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The comic book store was closed on Sundays, but Dorian had always weaseled himself a set of keys so he could have the run of the place whenever he chose. His employers should have, perhaps, not trusted him -- but he’d always had a way of getting what I wanted, he always had a way of convincing people that his ideas were best. Being a personal friend of Oscar Wilde’s, after all, meant he must know how to handle himself in a room filled with literature. The store’s owner had been charmed and Gray was presented with an alarm code and ring with all the pride that suggested he was being granted the keys to the very kingdom.
Of course, Dorian didn’t mean a word he’d said. Comic books and bargain books about dragons were hardly something he’d count as literature and even if he did -- Oscar Wilde would have been better trusted as the charge of a brothel than he would be as the keeper of pages. When someone has themselves half-convinced that they are God’s gift to a craft, they have little respect to the works of those lesser.
“What would you have to say about all this?” Dorian murmured to himself, a smirk awakening his perfectly sculpted rose-coloured mouth. Gray always missed the dead. The finality of loss and grief and recovery never quite sank in because the vividness of his moments with these men and women always felt as though they were yesterday. His memories were as vivid, saturated and permanent as Wilde’s plays. It had been so ever since he was cursed, and he often wondered if that was why he was so easily bored. He always pushed for something else, something new and something more exciting because the thrill of what had come before never quite faded enough for him to be delighted by a repeat performance.
Grey sat on the counter in the shop, looking through a set of Marvel collector’s cards with minimal interest. He’d invited Tony to come see him so they could have the run of the place in secret and continue to flip through the musty pages of old comics and Essentials.
Really, he wasn’t sure why he’d taken an interest in Iron Man, suddenly, be it the old books or the man that they were about, but he supposed he was always drawn to the very best and the brightest. Whether it had been Alan Campbell, Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes or the hundreds of other people that he’d had the chance to meet and hold onto. But he wanted to get to know Stark, that desire was honest enough, because so far he’d proven he was the most interesting fixture in this sleepy river town.