Re: Janus A/Eames - log
The figure concealed on stage left stepped out onto the stage just far enough that the gaslights could reach him, lighting up a face full of teeth and smiling malice. He was gone only a moment later, in what would have been a gust if the theatre was not so still. He brought with him the memory of music, like a circus organ very, very far away, and the smell of newly-shredded iron.
Janus looked down from the ceiling in time to see the poker chip appear. He remembered it from an age ago in Eames' room, where he supposed they were both sleeping, and he looked at it blankly. "What's that for?" Eames had even more of Janus' attention when a moment later she wasn't the blonde anymore, but a generic stamp from Caucasian ancestors spread out all over the racially dominant west. It was the kind of person Janus made when he didn't want people to notice him, or recognize him again. The young man sitting at the neighboring dining table the first time he and Eames had met, for example, was one such young man. Generic, (debate-ably) harmless, mildly racist, predictably hearty. "What?"
Corinthian appeared again under an exit sign. He had a better view from here, and he looked up to scan the boxes in the lofty edges of the theatre, the two sets of teeth that made up his eyes spreading wide in a three-tiered grin. Janus was still talking in the background.
"I know the real stuff. It's sometimes secret. But it's not the same as a secret. Don't tell me my stock in trade, brother." He didn't say it the way Cris and Atticus said it to each other, or the way two people with the same parents said it. It was a decades-gone, high start low end brother, like they'd just met on a bus to a protest in DC. "You've just got a different vocabulary."
"I change because of how I feel," the boy repeated, now looking away toward the empty audience because the dancer had stopped moving. "Both inside and outside. Maybe outside because of the inside. Maybe. Unless it's for work. I've explained this a few times over the last few days and I think I do a shit job," Janus said, finally leaving off the hangnail and running his burnt fingertips along his jaw as if it itched.