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 Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 8:50 pm
She was keeping her feet right where they were, thank you very much. Between the whiskey, the vocabulary lessons, and the dull pain she didn't even register that he'd moved the chair. All it had really accomplished was shifting her legs so they stretched just a little straighter. It was very fortunate for Taym that Peyton wasn't aware of just how distracting her feet were to him. Leaning forward she reached for the bottle, though she kept her attention on his face, lips twisted skeptically. "Does it have any actual meaning? Or is it literally nothing but poetry padding?" She didn't know much poetry, but that wasn't really the point.
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Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 9:01 pm
"It's French, obviously," he answered, "but I don't remember for what." Let her leave her damn feet there then. "In English it seriously just means any meaningless filler word you shove into a line of poetry to make the meter work or force a difficult rhyme." He moved the bottle away from her, giving her an appraising look over another swallow, clearly of the opinion she didn't need any more yet.
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Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 9:15 pm
The bottle moved away from her fingers and she frowned down at it before rolling her eyes up to the death trainee currently hogging it. "I did pay for that, you know." She sounded more amused then irritated, and she was smiling when she sat back again. "So it's pretty much like a mulligan for poetry then?" Because she totally knew all about golf. Mini golf. Tiny fingers plucked a nonexistent spot of lint off her shorts and flicked it away.
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Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 9:50 pm
"More like a Macguffin," he suggested, after a crowded moment of trying to puzzle out what a do-over had to do with cheville and coming up completely blank. "But not really that either. So no."
He paused, and offered up an example after a moment of raking through his mental bank and silently, eyes roaming the ceiling, counting syllables up on his fingers as he took another drink, clearly struggling to recall the material in question. He counted the syllables off again on his hands:
"But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I, that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust--
"That O, to hit ten syllables. That's a cheville. I mean I guess some people would say it's a rhetorical flourish and not a cheville, so maybe Shakespeare isn't the best example, but really all that O does is force the line to fit the meter." He offered her the bottle, abruptly, again, self-conscious. "How hard is it to upkeep that hair on a desert island? Seems like a waste of time." A transparent change of subject, but he didn't care.
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Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 10:05 pm
Words weren't her thing. She appreciated them, but they just weren't her thing. So her pride didn't take any damage when he corrected her. His example did serve to clarify what a cheville, so even if he thought it was a bad choice, it got his meaning across all the same. It wasn't very likely that she'd ever need or use this knowledge in the future, but it was still interesting to her. Interesting enough for her to poke him about new words every so often. The change in topic was abrupt, but not unwelcome. With a blink she pulled her braid around so she could eye the slightly faded pink end. "Not as hard as you would think. Blonde hair takes bright shades better then any other color because you don't have to bleach it and damage the hair to get it to show up." She let the braid go and it slid back over her shoulder. "I've only had to redo it once, and that pretty much only entails dipping the end in this little jar of color I got when I went off island that one time. Let it sit for 20 minutes, rinse it out, and done."
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Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2013 10:18 pm
His shoulders loosened with relief that she wasn't calling him out on having had that committed to memory, however poorly. He tipped the chair away from her again, another half-unthinking effort to make her withdraw her feet that he could disguise as idle fidgeting. "Would you believe me if I told you I dyed mine purple once? I mean you couldn't see it except when the sun hit it because I'll be ******** if I'm bleaching my hair, but I did." He grinned, shaking the bottle at her. Whoever the Taym was who dyed his hair purple and got embarrassingly bro tattoos, he seemed miles away from the skeletal Taym whose hands trembled and whose brows were drawn in a constant expression of frustrated anger, the Taym who probably wouldn't be caught dead in anything but jeans and a sober T-shirt and something to cover his arms.
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 10:56 am
Just like last time, his attempts to dislodge her feet didn't go as he had planned. They did move, but only enough so the arch of her soles were resting on the cross bar instead of her ankles. Likely, this wasn't an improvement. His confession had her looking at him skeptically. She was having a hard timing seeing it, Taym with purple hair, even dark purpley brown. "Really? I wouldn't have guessed that." Which didn't mean she didn't believe, just that in the picture of him that had been pained in her mind, purple hair had not been a part of it. Though now that he'd said something, that too was added. She accepted the bottle and took an obliging drink. "I used to dye my hair other colors. Teal was pretty predominant for a while. Then it was teal and pink, but that was actually a pain in the a** to up maintain.
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 12:31 pm
He was quiet for a minute, eyes roaming the wall. "What's the point?" he asked. "Now, I mean. Here. I met another girl with pink in her hair the other day and suggested it's some sort of cute totem against the forces of darkness," he said, and his voice was thick with sarcasm. "You stay here long enough and everyone's gonna see you dirty and bleeding and unshowered at your worst. But everyone's always painted up. Probably because they're all trying to crawl into each other's beds," he added derisively. This was, honestly, a hypocritical question: it didn't seem like it, not with Taym looking like he did in a too-big cast-off shirt and a beard and jeans that hadn't had an intact hem in over a year, but looking like s**t secretly gnawed at him. He did these things because he didn't imagine it mattered, not any more. There wasn't much to clean up to under the tatters and the grime, and he'd thought being stranded on an Island would take care of the rest. It hadn't, and Rep had made it worse, reminding him that he looked like what he was. He cared, deeply, what other people thought about him when they looked at him, and although he sounded and looked dismissive, the question was a needling attempt at validating that urge.
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 12:46 pm
She blinked at him, then let her gaze wander off towards the wall side wall as she considered his question. "Because I like it." It was a simple, easy answer, but it made sense. "I like the way it looks. Not because someone else might like it, but because I do." If you weren't in the habit of trying to crawl into someone else's bed, what better reason was there? She could have left it at that, and it would have been an honest answer, but it wouldn't have been the entire truth, and if he cared enough to ask, then she could at least give him complete honesty. "And I guess a small part of me cares what other's think." The bottle was tucked between her knees so she could scratch at her cheek, gaze still not quite examining the wall. "Maybe not to the same extent as other's might. I'm not trying to get into anyone's pants, but I at least want to appear as if I've got my s**t together." There was no actual correlation between physical appearance and how competent a person was. Not really, but Peyton would rather project the image of being in charge of her own life.
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 1:06 pm
That startled him, because it was exactly his problem: looking like he had his s**t together. Which he didn't. He made a beckoning motion for the bottle, a troubled look ghosting across his face that contorted into a grin that looked considerably less forced than it was. He leaned in. "Some of us don't bother with the lie," he said, rubbing his scruffy chin demonstratively and then leaning back. "Pretty sure no one here actually has their s**t together."
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 1:17 pm
Obligingly she passed the bottle back to him, then set her hand her thigh, plucking absently at the loose threads at the bottom of her cut-offs. "Maybe not, but it's nice to believe we do." She dropped her attention to her lap, and her tongue slid out to moisten her lips before she kept talking. "The illusion of control, even if it is an illusion," she started, and it was obvious by the softness of her voice that this wasn't something she really enjoyed thinking about. "Is important. It helps to keep confidence up, morale. It makes us better soldiers." Her lips pursed. "In a way, wanting to look like we have our s**t together, and believing it to be true, helps to make it true." Control was important to Peyton, it always had been. Her life had been turned upside down at a very young age, and she had struggled to get a handle on things, and had worked to maintain it through out her teen years. The paradox was that she knew just how much it was a lie. So much in life was beyond her control, but she would cling to those threads she could maintain.
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 2:22 pm
He turned that idea over and over, examining it and sarcastically querying Fiona about whether this was why he couldn't hit the broadside of a barn and getting an irritated and offended silence in return. He ran his thumb over the lip of the bottle again before taking a drink, an idle meaningless movement to occupy his hands. He didn't ******** around with this one, draining a hard swallow. It was catching up to him and having the happy effect of cutting the heat. For all his food snobbery, Taym had never quite mastered the idea of being choosy and reverent about his alcohol. He would never be one of those deeply appreciative connoisseurs arguing about how one should correctly drink whiskey and comparing notes and noses. He'd drink Listerene if it was all he had, with little less relish than he had for Crown. Alcohol functioned as a means to an end. Even wine, on the rare occasions he got it, was just a slower road to the same destination. He eyed her sideways. "You're gonna talk me into shaving," he said around a grin.
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 4:30 pm
He smiled at her, and it was hard to tell if it was that, or the budding effects of a growing buzz that was warming her down to hr toes. Maybe a little of both. Of course she smiled back, bright and honest, and rather obviously pleased that what she had to say, her opinion, mattered in some way. The tricky part was knowing what to say now, and she let the quiet settle around them for a moment as she turned her eyes down, considering. "You're starting to look a little bit like a lion," she commented rather suddenly, lavender flicking up to meet dark brown as she grinned at him. "But I dunno. I prefer the five o-clock shadow to the rugged mane." That was rather more then she would have normally admitted, but alcohol did have the unfortunate habit of loosening tongues. Or course in the grand scheme of confessions, telling a person you preferred them a little more tidied up wasn't really that bold or revealing. She didn't even seem to realize what she'd admitted, and as a result simply kept talking. "It kind of boils down simply. If you had a choice between working with two people you'd never met before, who would you rather have at your back?" She wasn't looking at him now. Her attention was all for her knees and the finger that was poking the tops of them as she talked. "The one that looks like they're in control? Or the one that doesn't look like they care?" And here her voice lost it's happy, light quality, as she realized that what she was saying might have been, even if off hand, insulting. The smile vanished, and she frowned as she flicked her eyes up to judge his reaction. "I know how hard working you are, how much you push yourself." Apparently whiskey made her ramble. "I'd trust you at my back in tough spot."
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 5:27 pm
The corner of his mouth curled up again, eyes averted. "I know I look like s**t," he said wryly. "You don't have to feel bad for pointing out the obvious." Context mattered. He'd been enraged when Nevada had essentially said the same thing. If he'd detected anything out of the ordinary in her little spiel, he betrayed no outward sign. He hesitated, tipping back a sip and tipping the bottle up to see how much they'd gone through. More than they should have, probably, but that wasn't going to stop him from trying to finish the bottle off before the end of the night. "Thanks," he said roughly. "Good to know I'm at least doing a decent job disguising my ineptitude." As he always did, he forced a change of subject when things got too personal, leaning off the side of his chair and reaching out to brush his fingertips over the edge of her bandages, gently smoothing down some invisible wrinkle in the tape. "Feeling any better?"
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Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2013 6:11 pm
When no flare of moodiness followed her word vomit she smiled again, then offered a soft snort at his dismissal of her compliment. "You're not inept, you did good in our last spar." Her features pinched at the memory. She'd single handedly managed to pretty much win him the match with a backfiring charge, but he'd healed her, beaten her down, healed her again. He'd hit her hard, and reliably, and it was a notable improvement to the first time they'd fought. She followed his hand as it came towards her, and tried not to wince when he smoothed the tape on her shoulder. It wasn't his fault she was one giant bruise, he wasn't trying to inflict any pain on her. Instead she gave a small smile of thanks, then took the opportunity to sneak the bottle out of his grip so she could take another long pull. "Yeah, actually I am. Instead of a grinding pain it's down graded to a duller throb." An attempt to move her fingers resulted in nothing, and she gave a sudden narrow eyes glare at her hand before releasing a deep breath in over all defeat. "I'm less stressed." Her thumb smoothed over the neck of the bottle just below the lip, not quite an echo of what he'd done. "Thank you."
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