Julian Bell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
burns_so_brightly) wrote2012-01-09 05:43 pm
burns_so_brightly) wrote2012-01-09 05:43 pm
First Stanza: [Action/Written]
[The gentleman walking out of Community Building 1 does not live there, and in fact didn’t even walk in there in the first place. He’s dressed in a suit, tie, and trench coat and is tossing a fedora between his hands. Julian Bell walks through Luceti with a smile, as if this is nothing more than an exceptionally lucky day. He’s keen to explore and peers into every shop, sometimes actually going inside. The library holds his fascination for some time, and he’s delighted to find his own published books of poetry there (even if he’d admit it’s a faintly narcissistic pleasure).
He eventually sits down at the tea shop to read, looking for all the world like this is a vacation day and not the day after his death. That part, he’ll address once this actually sinks in.
At night, he’s at Cloud Nine, enjoying a Scotch on the rocks and a cigarette and listening to the music. For a crappy oppressed town, this place is doing very well!
Eventually, he works past an unusual (for him) nervousness and writes over the journals.]
Am I allowed to take any empty flat, or is that supposed to be assigned?
-Julian Bell
[action]
Those like Julian Bell who stands before him, winged, and worried over him. It's like a dream on the grasses of Trinity and Kings.]
A guardian angel.
[He starts to laugh but the sadness gripping it chokes him. He ends up having a cough and the sheen of his eyes heavy with weighted saltwater. It's nearly too much... that worry in Julian's gaze that besets a wider panic. Guy can read it, even in his own spiral-down cling to what he believes are remnants of reality. Oh Julian.
He turns his head toward the door. Julian can follow him, can't he? But there's a flick of a look back to the man with the printed wings.]
You'll be gone when I get there, won't you?
[Not we, but I. He still believes, with all his heart, that Julian is a figment of the wounds beset in it. He's scratched over them for years, and the festering pain of it all has brought him to this.
A delusion of grandeur. What a grand thing, to have a glimpse of love.]
[action]
[Is he really saying these things? Reading about it is strange enough, but at least it can float on the surface of consciousness, taken for granted. When something is spoken, it must be believed in order not to sound wooden, and Julian's words sound wooden in his ears.]
Guy. Look at me. [He tries a gesture that got the man's attention last time, cupping his face in his hands.] Feel. I'm here.
[action]
[Guy's eyes close, and those heavy waters give way for rivulets down his cheeks.]
The rain.
[He swallows back what might have been an audible sound for the crying that has begun.]
You remember it well, I'm sure. Sometimes it seems close, so very close and if I close my eyes like this it's as though I can recite Auden to you and you'll know. You'll know what I always meant to say.
[action]
Guy, stop it. I'm right here. Let's...fuck, let's get you home, all right? Tell me where you live and I'll take you there.
[action]
Stop what?
[His lips seem to move with something he can't say, as though he's gasping for words and hasn't the lung capacity to breathe them out.
So he talks, because he doesn't understand.]
You're beautiful.
[A swallow.]
And bright...
[Then his voice begins to cave again in a way that is hollow, the tones speaking leagues of anguish in them and so much uncertainty.]
... and I've seen you here before....
[action]
That's right, you have. Come along, now. I'll be sure to get you home safe, just...please, Guy, let's go home.
[action]
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky...
[He walks toward the door of the club, uncaring of the scene he has made.]
[action]
He walks quietly with his old friend, trying not to read too much into the poem he spouts, but oddly discomforted by it. They had been close in school, but they hadn't corresponded too often after Cambridge. Like with Anthony, it had been a gradual fading as they replaced their school friends with new ones, never forgetting each other but never being in the same country long enough to meet up. Not till recently, of course, and that...did not go well.
Why does Guy have to be so dramatic about it, though?]
[action]
...And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
[He keeps walking, steadily, and reaches for the bottle in his pocket.]
I wrote to you, once.
[action]
[Really, the longer this goes on, the less Julian wants to hear about other peoples' reactions to his death. His mother would be broken.]
[action]
[Thankfully there isn't much of a walk to the house. House 32 is so very close to all the shops in town.]
I already have, in part.
[He takes a deep pull from the bottle, then another. He wants to feel something other than the bristle of his clothes and that warm hand on his back. It's too good. He wants a burn of something.]
[action]
[action]
No, perhaps not.
[He restoppers it and places it back in his pocket.]
In a world of double everything, it keeps a man sane. Double crosses, double agents, double and triple copies of every file. I'd go mad without it.
[This is too real. Too damned real. Every minute with Julian's hand on his back and them walking and talking together is making this illusion too damn real to be nothing.]
[action]
Well, drink, then. [He pats Guy lightly on the back.] Which house is yours?
[action]
[He points as his path leans an odd sort of winding toward House 32. Steps being weighted and shuffled make for a bizarre wind, like an emotional drunkedness sans liquor enough to be so.
Eerily, his voice is far more sober than it has been since speaking to Julian.]
My dear Anthony will have quite the mess on his hands.
[Kim too, but Guy knew he'd reach for Anthony in his moment of collapse first. Perhaps Kim would see Julian. Perhaps this was a chance he'd never asked for by the fire with Jilly. Regardless of what it was, his chest ached with it.]
[action]
Anthony? Anthony's here?
[Because yes, the break-up was amiable, but the ex showing up is never totally without awkwardness.]
[action]
He's part of what makes it tolerable. A spark of art in survival. Friendship in everything.
[Guy couldn't have come through this all without Anthony and Kim.]
H.A.R. is just through the door.
[action]
[This is not weird at all, and his linefacing is not due to a dislike for Kim Philby. Or maybe it is. Julian has never shaken the Bad Impression he got from the fact that Guy and Anthony's sudden lack of conviction happened right around the time they made friends with Philby.]
Sounds like you arrived with all your friends. I suppose McLean is there as well?
[action]