Andrew Kirke (tuned_in) wrote in the_colony, @ 2010-11-07 14:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | ^ week 22, andrew kirke, gregory blair, | drew and greg |
Week 22: Monday
Characters: Greg and Drew
Location: The parlor / Farmhouse
Summary: Greg is chillin’ in the parlor. Drew joins him. The two men talk about their respective ambitions, the future of the world, and play a little music to pass the time.
Rating PG
With the weather outside making it next to impossible to do anything outdoors, Greg had quickly taken care of his share of the chores and checked on his horses before cleaning himself up and settling down in the library. Lacking anything better to do with his time, the chevalier put his mandolin on his lap and began to tune it up. Maybe playing a few tunes would put him in a better frame of mood.
He’d just finished tuning up when one of the other inhabitants of the farmhouse came through the archway. The young man gave a start, having clearly not expected to find another person in the room just then.
“Heya,” he said with a cheery grin, pushing his hands into his pocket and rocking on his feet in place, having stopped midstep.
Greg looked up from his instrument and nodded in greeting. “You’re Drew, right? I’m afraid I’m still working to get names and faces together. You’re not disturbing me, come in if you like. I thought I’d pass the time with some practice.”
Drew’s eyes had already been drifting back and forth down at the mandolin with interest, but his eyes snapped back up to Greg’s face again with a wider grin. “You play?”
“Indeed.” Greg inclined his head. “Though I’ve been out of practice of late.”
“Always nice to meet a fellow musician,” Drew replied, moving over to settle on the little piano bench in front of the upright. When they’d first found the farmhouse, he’d been positively elated to find a piano in the parlor, even if it was slightly out of tune. He needed to teach himself how to tune the thing; there’d been an elective in college to learn that sort of thing, but he’d never taken it, having thought it wasn’t very important to his skill set overall.
“What kind of stuff do you play?”
“The circles I travelled in were mostly Celtic and bluegrass, with some high tempo country thrown in for good measure.” Greg responded, and launched into a short but fast paced tune to try to get his fingers used to playing again. He finished and looked over at Drew. “You’re a musician yourself then? What instruments do you play?”
“Li’l bit of everything, honestly,” Drew said with a laugh. “I trained on piano, drums, guitar, and sax, though, but give me a couple days and I could probably teach myself to play anything.”
“An impressive list.” Greg nodded his head again, a small smile on his face. “My parents insisted I learn piano as a child, but I have forgotten most of what I’ve learned. I can play the tin whistle some, and the Bodhrán, just from spending time with other musicians and trying their instruments out in jam sessions, but the mandolin is what I know best.”
Drew’s grin only lengthened at Greg’s explanation. “Meg plays, too. And so does my fiancé. We played a little during the Christmas dinner. I think that was the first time we all played together at the same time. Honestly, I was ready to sit every person down in the house at one point and teach them some instrument, but it’s nice to know we’ve got ourselves the makings of a four-part band.”
“Considering we’ll have to make our own music from now on for the most part, that can only be considered to the good. I don’t know how well our genres will meld, but mayhap we’ll sort that out with time.” Greg plucked a few strings, frowned, and adjusted one of the knobs at the neck of the instrument.
Drew chuckled. “‘Mayhap’ indeed.” He twisted on the piano bench, pushing up the cover and sliding his fingers up the keys from the middle-bassline up to the higher octaves, then played out the C, A, and G major chords. “Were you a LARPer or something?”
“LARPs were for pussies that liked to pretend they were in Middle Earth, dress up like elves and go prance around in the forest whacking each other on the head with plastic swords.” Greg responded archly, ignoring the other man’s reaction; he’d barely finished his sentence before the younger man had all but exploded into laughter. “I was a professional western martial arts instructor, and I’d been training with live steel since I was a teenager.” He paused momentarily, and his expression took on a bit of uncertainty. “I recognize I’ve become a bit...eccentric since everything changed, but I’m no LARPer.”
“Hey man, everyone’s a bit crazy now,” Drew reassured him as he wiped his eyes with the back of each hand. “Severely life-altering events tend to do that. I’m sure you’ve gotten crap before; I didn’t mean to be a jerk about it or anything. I moved from Roseberg to Vegas and trust me, I got some crap for regional phrasing for a while.”
“It’s all right.” Greg assured the younger man. “You couldn’t have known. The organization I worked for was probably the only one in North America, my skill set was rather unique even before the plague.” It was something of an understatement. “Not many people knew how to fight for real with sword and shield and horse.”
“Unless you count the good ol’ folks of Medieval Times,” Drew said with a wry smile. He’d been there once, and it certainly had been an experience to behold. Drew turned his body a little bit more toward the piano again, playing something improvisational for a few moments as he tried to recall a tune that might appeal to the other man.
“They knew the basics, but their stuff was slowed down and made fancier to put on a better show.” Greg started slowly plucking out a traditional Irish tune on the mandolin as he talked. “Our group trained some of their people, and we’d consult on period movie pieces as well.”
Though he didn’t know the song Greg was playing, Drew improvised around it, his head turned to glance over at him with a wry smile. “Like what, Lord of the Rings?”
“Someone had to teach Viggo and Sean how to handle a blade.” Greg smirked back. “I liked those movies, Jackson pared it down to a simple narrative and he told the tale well. It was the people who wanted to dress up like elves and go bash each other with fake swords that I didn’t like.”
“Word,” Drew agreed. “That was at least half my graduating class.”
“Most of my graduating class was more into how much of their parents’ money they could waste on fast cars, loose women and cocaine.” That wasn’t strictly true, but there had been a high percentage of rich kids who just wanted a good buzz in his school. Greg upped the tempo of the song a bit once Drew had the general idea of how it went. “They thought I was weird, and maybe I was. They knew better than to try and pick on me though, they knew I could kick their asses eight ways from Sunday.”
“Well don’t kick mine; I’m kind of a pacifist,” Drew said, grinning sideways at him again. He fell silent for a few moments, just enjoying playing off the other man. Despite what he’d said about being out of practice, Drew thought Greg was pretty good. “I was always the scrawny kid. I’m gettin’ some muscle now, but I wouldn’t know the first thing to do in a fight.”
“I can fix that if you like,” Greg told him seriously. “I’ve been teaching Abigail and Nathan how to defend themselves since I met them. The unarmed martial art I know has forms that are simple to learn and easy to teach.”
Drew’s hands stilled on the keys. For a moment he stared down at his hands, frowning, his jaw working. He took a breath to start, then stopped, his brow wrinkling in thought again.
“I don’t...” he started, then wet his lips and tried a second time. “S’long as it’s just learning how to disable someone. I don’t wanna hurt anybody.”
“What if it meant the difference between your lady being free or in the clutches of those who would treat her badly?” Greg asked, peering at him closely. “Ideals are wonderful things, but in these times they can be harder than ever to adhere to.”
“Still doesn’t mean I gotta kill anyone,” Drew said, his words clipped. Jed had given him the same sort of lecture when they’d first met, and he’d gotten the impression that the once-defacto leader had always disliked him because he refused to carry a gun.
“Who said anything about killing?” Greg asked, pausing in his playing to look at the other man. “I’ll not look down on you because you want to keep another man alive if you can, and I didn’t mean to cause offense. I said they can be hard to adhere to, not that they should be thrown away and buried.”
Drew relaxed a fraction at Greg’s response, but he still held a rigid line of tension along his shoulders. “I know there’s crappy people out there,” he said slowly, his voice a little quieter. “And I’m not saying they don’t deserve a shit ton of karmic backlash for the things they do or did, I’d just rather it not be me who gives it to ‘em. Who the hell am I?” He sighed, pulled a hand through his hair, and forced himself to relax. “But yeah. I’ll take you up on that, if you’re offering.”
“I’ll teach you properly, I’d rather you have the ability to do whatever was necessary to defend yourself and your loved ones and find a way to not need it rather than need it and not know how.” Greg warned. Drew nodded to show he understood, his hands moving along the keys again absently until he wandered into Chopin’s prelude Largo in E-minor. The tempo started slow, as was typical of the song, but he put much more gusto into it midway through.
The song wasn’t typical mandolin fare but Greg gave it a good shot, matching the general style of the tune and doing his best to keep up after the tempo change. “You’ve real talent there.”
“I was going to be a music teacher,” Drew said in a somber voice, following the same vein of the song. He rarely allowed himself to feel any sort of sadness openly, but with the shifted mood of their conversation he couldn’t help it; he hated the state of the world now. His only bright spot was Analise, but without her being in the room just then it was so easy to think of how things might’ve been if she’d never shown up.
“And you still shall be,” Greg told him confidently. “Only now you’ll have to wear a few more hats in addition to that. Give it a few years, you’ll be teaching all the children how to make music. I’m sure little communities will form over time as well.” Assuming the barbarians and orcs didn’t come sweeping out of the mountains and kill them all, but he wasn’t going to depress the other man with that train of thought.
“‘All the children,’ he says,” Drew echoed, moving his hands into a clashing minor chord that hung in the empty air between them in a way that was intended to make a person uncomfortable. He didn’t let it linger long however, and slowly found his way into another -- lighter -- improvisational piece. “We don’t exactly have a track record of coming across peaceful communities these days, let alone children. I’m surprised enough we’ve got as many young people here as we do.”
“Time will sort all that out as far as the communities are concerned. You’ll either be teaching music or you’ll be dead.” Greg joined in once he had the general idea of the song down. “I prefer to believe you’ll be teaching music. As for the children...” he gave the younger man a sidelong glance. “Mother nature should be taking care of that soon enough, as I doubt birth control pills are all that effective at this point.” He’d certainly heard Drew and his lady through the thin walls of the farmhouse more than once, though with so many people underfoot you just had to tune out the noises from other rooms.
Drew gave a snort of laughter trying to picture any of the other women currently living with them having children. Bridget’s babies would no doubt be enough to handle for the first few years by their little community as a whole. Ana wasn’t exactly the mothering type for all that she thought babies were cute to look at. Meg might, but Drew had a feeling she was the type not to want to bring a child into their current living situations. As for Alice... the thought of the brooding raider having a child was a little hard to believe. She hardly even smiled.
He and Ana hadn’t exactly been playing it careful ever since they found each other again, though. The realization was sobering, but he could just imagine how Ana would react if he’d started making the effort. No doubt she’d tie him to the bed in order to get what she wanted from him. That thought alone brought a heat underneath his collar that he tried not to let show on his face.
“We’re not exactly planning to produce a soccer team in the near future, at any rate,” Drew said at last, then realized what he implied. “Any of the women, I mean. Not just-- nevermind.”
Greg snorted in return at Drew’s comment. “We’ll see.” He’d be willing to bet Bridget wouldn’t be the only woman with a belly by the time Spring rolled around, but what did he know? They could all be sterile or something.
“I teach Abigail and Nathan in the mornings, usually after chores before breakfast. You’re welcome to join us.”
“Yeah,” Drew replied, still trying to recover from his blunder. He picked the first song that floated to the top of his head and threw himself enthusiastically into it without realizing it was one of the warm-up songs he and Ana usually did on small gigs.
Noting the new tune, Greg did his best to join in. Though he was out of practice for the high tempo of a song like What was I thinking it was a song that was a mandolin or dobro player’s dream and he found himself getting into it.
The brief flicker of social anxiety all but melted off by the time they got to the chorus, and Drew’s face once again reclaimed the perpetually crooked smile he often carried. Playing alone was fine and well, but it was always more fun having someone else playing along. They might’ve been two people who brushed past each other in the bar in the Back Before, but he could easily become friends with Greg now.