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 Posted: Sat Nov 16, 2013 6:01 pm
Orah leaned against the counter as she cradled her cup in both hands, letting the warmth of it flow into her through her palms. Combined with the dry clothes, she felt nearly recovered. She sipped her tea and let the caffeine of it give her back some of her flagging energy.
Sliding a glance over, she watched a hint of a smile flit over his face before he bent low to stroke Lola. Orah felt a hard thump in her chest, but she brushed it off, straightening up. Guys and cats were cute, what could she say? And Lola had a special soft spot in her heart. Anyone who treated her kindly couldn't be all bad in her mind.
Reaching, she handed him his cup as she straightened up. "I'll be right back. Go ahead and drink your tea."
Yet another trip upstairs... but that's okay. She was used to climbing them. The teen made the trip in quick efficiency, knowing exactly where to look for the clothes she needed. She had a little bit of a stumble deciding just what to grab, but ended up settling on a pair of sweatpants with a draw string and a t-shirt with the nike logo on the breast. Whatever, it wasn't like he needed to be fashionable. He just needed to be able to keep them on, and he was a lot thinner than her father was.
When she came back down, she handed the folded bundle to him and pointed at the second door by the stairs.
"The bathroom is through there, I can throw your clothes in the dryer when you're done. Um... the clothes might be a little big. I could have given you my brother's, but they would have been too small.... Oh!" She brightened when she remembered something, shrugging. "I can lend you an umbrella. I have plenty here."
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Posted: Mon Nov 18, 2013 8:58 pm
Alois accepted his cup, but did not drink from it. Instead he set it on the nearby coffee table, on a rare coaster amongst the sprawled newspapers and other paraphernalia offsetting the vase centerpiece. Afterward he hoisted the kitten onto his lap and ran his fingers through its unconscionably soft fur while his mind drifted to darker topics. The cat purred, and he considered the stark differences between this place and all the memories he'd known throughout his life. Existence, as he understood it, differed so harshly from these mild trappings that he found himself wholly unable to relate to them.
Even as he glanced at the newspaper, he tried to remember a time in which his father would read from it. Sometime, maybe in the middle of autumn, when the rays of sunlight peered through the eastern windows of their apartment, still colored by the leaves that pressed against the glass. But even as he searched and scraped and strained for such a memory, he came up short.
All he could remember was that look of shock, that incredulous glare, those revolted words around the warmth of a starseed. He scratched at the cat's neck while he bit back regret.
When she returned, he relinquished his grasp on the calico kitten and it dropped to the floor with grace intrinsic to her species. But Alois did not watch her as she about-faced to rub against his leg once more; rather, he eyed the folded clothes in Orah's grasp. After taking the offered outfit, he left for the door she'd indicated earlier. He never confirmed whether or not he would borrow the aforementioned umbrella - maybe it went without saying that he would.
The bathroom itself spoke no more about her life than the rest of the house did. A medicine cabinet hung on the wall, offering a multitude of views of his face, and when opened, a perpetuating arc of bathrooms that petered into nothing. inside he found another overwhelming disappointment - no ipecac, no percocet, no sertraline or ativan lingered on the shelves. Instead, he found nothing but the common medicines of aspirin and ibuprofen, even some bandages and spare travel toothbrushes. The cabinet harbored no secrets about her family's ailing health, or her potentially fragile mental state. Nothing. Not even a heart condition, not even cancer.
He searched the drawers and came up with more of the same story - common items stowed away for bathroom use, like hair clips or makeups or hair dryers and their attachments. Even when he peeled up the drawer liner, he found nothing but a few errant strands of hair - no secret cavities carved into the wood. Nothing housed drugs or its corresponding paraphernalia. In fact, the most personal items he could locate were used toothbrushes propped up in a ceramic glass and a hair brush still caked with her hair. As he peeled a clump of the strands away from its bristles, he sighed in defeat.
There weren't even bugs in the overhead lights.
After dumping the stray strands into the open toilet, he resigned himself to stripping off his clothes and dressing in the ones offered. But he paused once he removed his shirt - as he glanced toward the mirror, his gaze drew to various scars still sporting their discolorations: a gunshot wound, an angular slice up his torso, various scabs from more recent injuries... But perhaps the worst of it was seeing his face again. Sallow, feverish, haunted - was this how others saw him? How Orah saw him? Small wonder he felt so disconnected from humanity - he looked about as far from it as one could get.
But he still wasn't a youma.
Once he dressed in Art Gowan's borrowed clothes, he washed his face in the sink. It seemed to remedy some of the exhaustion, but it didn't dispel it entirely. He pressed his face to the terrycloth towel lying flat against the counter and sighed; it felt good to just stop for once. To quit thinking, quit trying to analyze the environment around him and look for a thousand faults that weren't there. Orah was just a girl. This was just a house. He was just a man by the name of Alois Scholz.
Not everything needed to amount to revelations.
But... Maybe that was the epiphany behind it all.
Alois emerged carrying a remarkably heavy wad of black clothing under his arm, and promptly handed it to the waiting girl. "Sanks," he offered, though it probably sounded too artificial to hold any meaning - much like someone of normally meek demeanor cussing for the first time. After a pause, he added another question, almost as an afterthought: "Do you ever regret anysing?" Disjointed as it was, the question held grounds for similarities between the two seemingly opposite individuals.
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Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 12:15 am
While the young man who had walked her home was changing, Orah stood nervously in the kitchen and leaned on the counter, her eyes on the cup in her hands. Why did her mind keep coming back to the fact that she didn't know him very well and he felt... awkward here in her home? It had never been like this before and she really didn't understand it.
Lola curled around her ankles, demanding attention, and Orah set down her cup before scooping the kitten up and cuddling her for a bit, fingers working through her soft fur. Things were far easier for Lola... all she care about was being comfortable, full and entertained. She didn't care about motives or history. It was so much easier, being a cat...
When he finally emerged from the bathroom, she blinked at him as she let her cat down and held her hands out for the clothes he offered her. He looked, if anything, even stranger in her fathers clothes. They didn't fit him well, in cut or size, and while they made him fit into the surroundings more than before, there was just something about him that was incongruous. Every motion, every look... he just didn't belong here, and that feeling made her a little sad. She wanted her home to be one that welcomed every body... she'd never met someone before who... didn't welcome her home, if that was how this could be described.
Gathering the clothes up to carry them, she frowned at his question and gave him a searching look before her gaze dropped to his clothes and she shrugged, the frown easing.
"Of course I regret things..." Orah said, being truthful about the emotion, if withholding of just what she regretted. Most of those memories involved a powered life he must never know about, but there were others, more personal ones. "I try not to dwell on them though, you know? I'd rather look at the positive things, the things I'm happy about. If I spent more of my time worrying about what's happened in the past, I find I miss good things that are happening right now." Her slender fingers toyed with a button and she turned to head towards the stairs.
"Its all kind of how you look at it." She called back over her shoulder as she disappeared into the upper floor, moving down the hall to pull open a pair of accordion doors. They revealed the washer and dryer and she loaded his clothes into the appropriate machine, after emptying his pockets onto the top of it. As buttons knocked against the metal and she threw in a dryer sheet, Alois' wallet caught Orah's eye and she had a strong urge just to flip it open.
The teen closed the door as she studied it, reaching to set the dial to the right time. On impulse, she flipped it open with a finger and looked for his license, curious about the sundry details of this stranger. Height, weight, eye color... was he a donor? A bit of something tucked in with his money caught her attention and she tugged out folded picture paper. As she opened it, she was startled to see her own face staring back at her, next to her brother.
This... this was one of her pictures, she remembered putting it in a frame down stairs. Brown eyes flicked over the stairs and she frowned as she leaned against the rumbling dryer. Why on earth would he have taken one of her pictures? Why would he want one? Why take it without simply asking for it? She had a thousand questions, but no answers to them... and a lack of desire to ask them of her strange guest.
He wanted to keep her image with him, and fleetingly she wondered if he didn't share the disconnect she felt towards him. Did he... like her, and want a picture of her? Surely not... she'd never been one to draw male attention. Still... whatever his motives, it left her with the question about what to do about it. As much on instinct as anything else, the teen folded the picture and tucked it back into the wallet, closing it again. Let him keep it, if he wanted it... it wouldn't hurt anything.
Turning, Orah headed back downstairs to check on her guest, a thoughtful expression on her face as she went to pick up her tea cup again. What she found was Alois in her living room and her brother slouching in through the door to the lower stairs, wearing his usual belligerent look and his hands buried in the pockets of his too-big, black jeans. His skin was tanned like her, but his hair was a now-familiar black shot through with streaks of radioactive green, a studded collar around his neck and a Black Sabbath t-shirt wrapped around a lean, youthful body.
"Who the ******** are you?" The youth tossed at the stranger in his home, drawing a startled sound from his sister.
"Matthew..." Orah hissed. "Don't swear. This is Alois, a... friend of mine. Alois, this is Matthew, my younger brother." She cast a worried glance between the two young men, wondering why Matt chose now of all times to finally come home from whatever mischief he had gotten into with his friends this time.
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Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:24 am
Regret was human, and someone as mundane as Orah felt it just the same as he. She didn't wish to alter her very existence into something monstrous, and she felt too. In a way it unnerved him that it was such a common, human occurrence. Everyone regretted something. He wasn't so different. But wasn't he? Wasn't that the reason he sought the Rift over a warm home like this?
Then again, he didn't exactly grow up in a home.
Perhaps the most maddening fact was that Orah, who lived in an average home with an average income father and average desires to work in their average store, dealt with regret much more easily than he did. It wasn't a death sentence or a lifetime of slavery to the rotten feeling that she'd done wrong. She swallowed it, endured it, and chose to look toward the brighter side of life. She sought the positive, she said it herself. She was strong enough to acknowledge that regret and move forward with her life.
As Alois sat on the arm of a nearby chair, an uncomfortable yet familiar perch to him, he smelled the tea offered and considered how he stacked up against this remarkably normal girl. He already knew how she dealt with adversity, particularly regret, but how did he react to these very same stimuli? Running away mostly, it looked like. Retreating into the Rift, attempting to forsake all of his humanity by becoming a monster, shirking those feelings through an irreversible transformation. He didn't confront it, he just tried to circumvent it entirely. And since becoming a youma was no longer an option...
He just had to act as Orah did and accept it. Get through it. If a normal, straightforward girl like Orah could do it, couldn't he?
You killed your father and now you miss him. Tough s**t. But it still hurt, and as he glanced into the glass at the untouched tea, the reflection staring back at him confirmed that nothing had changed. It would take more than hard words and an utter lack of sympathy to remedy such conflicted composure. But when he just wasn't himself anymore, how was he supposed to press beyond the welling grief and cynicism?
Well s**t, did he need to look at Orah again? He was growing tired of how short he fell compared to her.
At that moment she descended the stairs once more, as if to remind him that yes, she was better and yes, she's still around as a shining example of mental strength. She didn't even need pills to do it. She didn't need a goddamn thing. No boyfriend, as far as he'd discerned, and certainly no self-help books. Maybe a pep talk, but the chronicles of her life didn't reveal such trifles. Now at a dead end, Alois sighed and forsook his cup of tea in favor of rubbing his eyes.
When the boy's voice broke the silence, he could've laughed. Something normal, something sane. Something entirely revolted by his presence. Like a familiar reminder amongst strange new surroundings... Something he could connect to. Because if someone wasn't pissed off that Alois Scholz was still around, then he wasn't sure how to behave like himself anymore. Maybe that was it. Maybe this whole weary fugue was nothing more than him floundering for how to act while no one was shouting at him for arbitrary s**t.
It was relieving.
The misanthrope flashed a mischievous grin and watched Orah for a moment. "Who indeed?" He echoed quietly while he listened to her meek reprimand. Always dainty, it seemed.
He half-turned to regard the boy, who looked an echo of how he did years ago. Different band, different complexion, but the general idea remained the same: look as offensive as possible and no one should bother you further. Shallow, the first signs of intelligent thought dawning in a species that never should've existed in the first place. "Hello, Mass'ew," he greeted in a calculatingly even tone. "I'm here to rape your sister, murder your dad in cold blood, and burn ze house down. Now if you two would excuse me, I need to siphon ze gas out of your car. Helps ze house to burn a little quicker, you see. Patience is no virtue of mine." He made no move to get up.
Feigning sudden realization, Alois sat up with a half-audible gasp and pantomimed incredulity by placing a hand on his hip and cocking his head toward the boy. "Oh, wait, you were just looking for an excuse to use ze word <********>? My mistake - carry on cussing until you sound like a sreat." Maybe it was a little extreme to reprimand the boy in such a vociferous manner, but could she blame him? He certainly didn't blame himself.
Instinctively he reached toward his back pocket to trace the unyielding form of his switchblade - except it wasn't there. Neither was the pocket. No, his pants were in the dryer and his switchblade was in his boot downstairs.
What a stupid idea.
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Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 10:06 am
While the reprimand from his sister rolled right off his back like water off a duck, having his suspicions thrown back in his face seemed to make the boy uncomfortable and he shifted, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets. His fists clenched and a scowl returned to his face, more belligerent than ******** off." He grumped, though he still look uncomfortable. Pulling his hand from his pocket, he under-hand tossed something at the stranger, hoping he'd fail to catch it and get smacked in the face or something. "Keep an eye on your s**t next time."
It was, of course, the blade he had found in a boot down stairs. The teen turned and stomped to the stairs, running up them two at a time while his sister stood in the kitchen with a pained expression on her face, her cheeks bright red.
"I-I'm sorry." Orah finally got out, having been unable to come up with anything to say through the exchange. Alois had put Matthew in his place with just a few statements. Maybe the reason she had never been able to was her inability to meet him on equal terms the way the man in her living room had. What he had said had shocked her, but she realized that it needed to be like that to get past her brother's '******** everything' attitude.
"He's just... troubled. I don't know what to do with him any more, but he has no excuse for acting like that." Embarrassed to her core, the young woman couldn't bring herself to look at Alois and she bent her head over her cup as she sipped it, trying to bring the color down in her face.
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Posted: Sat Nov 23, 2013 9:22 am
"Everyone's troubled," he shot back in response. "He's no different - just more vulnerable to it." It felt strange to bring that to light, in the midst of Orah's simple abode with its sprawled-out newspapers and glass vases full of flowers that they peddled downstairs. It felt so simple and plain, to match her simple and plain trappings. But it still had a hint of Alois behind it, with either his unusual inflections or his marked disdain of other people. He couldn't figure out which, and it didn't really matter. He'd found something within it that set himself in motion again, as if the gears groaned out of their rusted holdings and returned to work once more.
Maybe running into Orah wasn't such a bad thing. Even though it still poured outside, as was heard in the kitchen area and surrounding the house, he found something a little brighter to take home with him.
Not everything was a mystery these days. It didn't have to be. What amounted to ennui and a terribly insurmountable impasse didn't need to relate to his existential crisis and his place in the Negaverse. It didn't have to surround his need to change the world, or at least the lives therein. It didn't need to address his failure, or his constant toiling that amounted to little change in those around him. It could be something simple, like with Matthew Gowan and his petulant, irritating attitude.
And the resolution to that stagnating cesspool of self-doubt and questions could be as simple as catching a switchblade tossed across the room.
"He doesn't need an excuse," the misanthrope continued as he examined the weighty blade that sat in his palm. It felt so familiar again. "I was like zat not too long ago. He's just searching for somesing zat he can't quite find yet." Casting his gaze back toward the tan-skinned girl of rough beauty and honesty, he shrugged. She looked so troubled by the whole affair, more so than the brother she passed off as locked in his own tribulations. And he wanted to push her toward the kitchen, level a mock unimpressed glance toward her and tell her to get herself some more goddamn tea, but she looked so slight, like she might shatter in his grasp.
Finally Alois dropped the switchblade onto the couch, as he had no pockets he wanted to deposit it in, and snatched up his cup from its half-forgotten perch. Still warm, he finally drank from it as he padded across the room. The carpet felt strange beneath his feet, but soft and welcoming enough. The room held enough lighting to illuminate her possessions in a favorable light (and he wondered if any form of lighting might cast Orah in an unfavorable light). He approached the window with the tea mug in hand, seated in one palm while his fingers found the curvature of the ceramic glass, and he watched the streets in their passive resistance against the endless sheets of rain. Sometimes it even sounded like the storm palpitated against the window.
Maybe it did, he didn't know. Didn't care. He was just glad to find a patch in the storm where he felt human again.
A long, residual beep indicated that the dryer had finished his job, and he no longer had a reason to linger in the depths of her apartment. It signaled that Art didn't have much longer to fear his presence in the house, and Matt could continue his dark and brooding antics without a stranger to rebuke him in vitriolic wit.
It was too bad, too, since he had become rather fond of Orah. He doubted he would feel much if she was struck and killed by a drunk driver in front of him, but he still liked her just the same. "Sanks for ze tea," he offered, as an indication of such acceptance.
Maybe they'd run into each other again, and he could finally show her a small spark of his (admittedly maddening) personality.
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Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 6:05 pm
Orah wilted a little, thinking he was rebuking her as well. It was her fault Matthew was how he was... if she had been better at taking care of him, more understanding, more strict or something... maybe he'd be better adjusted. Happier. Something...
After a calming sip from her tea, draining the last of the liquid from the cup, the young girl looked up with her troubled eyes and watched as her unusual guest picked up his tea at last and drank from it as he looked up the window. It felt like some kind of small victory, or at least forgiveness for being such a weak person. Whatever it was, she felt marginally better and Orah set her cup down on the counter as she heard the timer go off upstairs. That meant his clothes were dry, and he could finally return to looking like himself, instead of some stranger with hints of her father.
Disappearing upstairs to leave Alois to his thoughts and his tea, Orah pulled his clothes out of the dryer and stacked them on top. She made quick work of folding them neatly, her motions practiced and easy. His wallet went on top before she made her way downstairs, stopping only for a moment to dig something out of the closet along the way. Stocking feet padded downstairs as the teen reappeared in the living area, black clothes in her arms.
"Here you go, all dry. Oh, and here is an umbrella, so that tumble in the dryer doesn't go to waste." Orah smiled a little shyly as she offered the pile up to him, complete with a black umbrella. The clothes were pleasantly warm and had a faint scent to them from the dryer sheet she'd used... 'clean linen' or something generic like that. At least it wasn't a floral scent... the men of the house probably would have revolted if it had been.
"I'm sorry that took so long. I'm sure my father's clothes weren't all that comfortable... its never easy to wear someone else's clothes." At least now he could go back to being himself again, separate himself from her little world again, even if a part of it would go with him until the scent and warmth faded.
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Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 8:42 pm
Alois wasn't terribly fond of the tea, he much preferred it over the alternative. He never quite understood the appeal of American coffee, nor did he care much for the coffee he was more accustomed to. If anything, drowning it in cognac improved the taste and caffeinated buzz, but he doubted Orah could furnish such tastes here when it wasn't culturally relevant to make coffee in such a European fashion.
It was relieving, at least, to allow himself to like the food and drink that he'd grown fond of over the years. At least humanity was acceptable now - if only as a fault unique to the lot of them.
When she approached with his clothes (at long last), he regarded her without the severity that he normally wore. After setting his cup atop the sill, he took the warm bundle easily and tucked it under his arm. A quick examination of the umbrella returned favorable results as well. "At least ze color is right," he returned. It could've been worse - would he really stroll down the street touting an umbrella adorned with kittens? Worse yet, pink with white polka-dots? "Danke sehr, Orah." Strange as it was to thank someone for such a small task, she still went out of her way to do it.
And in the country he'd hated for years, they would regard such hospitality as weakness.
Alois didn't comment on her frantic sympathies. She looked skittish enough, and as a favor to her, however small, he would hold his tongue. After all, introducing salt water to freshwater killed all the fish. Instead he returned to the bathroom once more, where he found no signs of heavy flaw and strife, where the lights shone warmly and the cabinets held no secrets beneath their lining. He changed once again, though he learned to avoid the mirror this time, as he didn't want to look over the plethora of scars accumulated by his second occupation.
Second? More like first as of late.
They smelled different and they warmed him all the same, tickling the edges of his thoughts with those faint flickers of a crematorium, of perfume long boiled over and evaporated as she escaped the pyre in the form of ash. In times like these, he still tasted her on his tongue, but he swallowed the echo of bleach and sought to clear his mind of her memory. Ghosts of the past, that's all it was. But with her dissolved a certain innocence - that everyone was ephemeral these days, even Orah with her tidy life free of heavy complications, at least the sort displayed in the home.
But she knew loss of her own, and that was enough.
Once he finished the transition from starkly contrasting normal clothes to his more comfortable attire, he tossed the clothes into the nearby hamper (as he figured Art Gowan would object to smelling of Alois) and exited the bathroom. Leaning to one side, he rolled the umbrella in a half-circle to its more northerly position, and deployed it easily enough. He leveled a mildly mischievous glance in her direction and quirked an eyebrow to accentuate his next statement. "Better?"
He must've looked like a gothic rendition of Dancing in the Rain about now.
"It was nice seeing you again, Orah." This was not a lie. "Do me a favor - tell him zat one day he will steal from someone who will not take it in stride. Tell him I had a friend who followed ze same antics as him - from dress to behavior. Tell him one day my friend stole a unique pheasant pendant from a jeweler, one he was crafting for a weals'y American woman, and tell him zat when he was caught by ze man himself, he paid in fingers - one for each hundred zat ze pendant was wors'. And when he ran out of fingers, he transitioned to toes. And when he ran out of toes, he transitioned to tees'. It is a lie, but a razzer convincing one at zat." Finally he flashed her a smile.
"Auf Wiedersehen, Orah. I'll return ze umbrella sometime." Maybe. After releasing the tines to a more manageable position, he headed toward the stairs.
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Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 10:08 pm
A chuckle broke from Orah at the approval of the color and she shrugged.
"I thought you might prefer that, considering." She said as she waved her fingers. The german thank you sounded good from him, more sincere than some of the things he had said. Was this Matthew's doing? She had felt awkward before, but there was something easier now... she felt less like she was walking on eggshells.
While he used the bathroom again, the teen retreated to the kitchen to pour another cup of tea for herself, craddling the cup in fingers that no longer felt chilled. Actually, she felt nicely warmed now, and comfortable out of the rain. Times like this were ones where she longed to curl up by the window with a book and a blanket, to relax to the sound of the rain.
When she heard the door open, Orah turned and a real smile broke out on her face. Was he being... playful? It was a nice change, even if it was a dry, restrained humor.
"Oh yes, you look much better in your own clothes." She said as she chuckled, settling her cup down on the counter. He looked more at ease, more like himself, and it was a good thing.
His story faded the smile she wore, but she nodded solemnly. "Hopefully it'll never go that far... but I'll tell him. He's a good person... I know he'll figure things out, I just wish I could make it easier." The teen trailed after him as he walked to the stairs and she stopped at the top, standing there in her big sweater and stocking feet.
"Good bye, Alois. Have a safe walk home!" She called down the stairs after him as she braced a hand on the door jab, leaning over to watch him descend. That visit had gone surprisingly better than she had expected... and it made her feel hopeful. He could smile at her and that's all she could really ask for.
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