Memories and a Harvest Pie

Re: Memories and a Harvest Pie

Postby Glenn » Mon Apr 29, 2024 7:25 am

She was still living. His excuse was better. They'd both been through unnatural experiences; more accurately, unnatural experiences had been through with him. If he had any sort of job or duty or mandate, it was to forget. Hers was to remember, to honor, to make sure it was all worth it. He could do nothing of worth, nothing of value. He was worthless. His value was past tense. His currency was all spent, twiceover even.

"As Inquisitors go, you are one." There was nothing quite like a tortured, parched rasp to accentuate such an annoying declarative statement. "A blunt hammer and hammers are only as effective as their swingers, no, their wielders," he amended, playing with a language that hadn't been his own even in life, "wielders are dedicated. A hammer held back never secured a nail or shattered a bone or pounded out a truth. If you wanted to know your father's name, you'd know it. You prefer the absence."

It was a dangerous thing to say to one so good at wielding bluntness, figuratively and literally, but then he was already dead which provided a certain sort of freedom. "I had a tutor. He taught me of power and pressure and leverage. I had a father too but he taught me more of women, wine, and song. Mostly women." The rasp turned to a barking laugh. That was possible even if a spit was not. "And a mother that taught me just enough about the violence of consequence, the consequence of violence?" The statement turned into a question for he wasn't sure which of the two it was. "The tutor had tutored them both. Three disappointments, I think. Maybe he was not a very good tutor, no?"
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Re: Memories and a Harvest Pie

Postby Rance » Tue Apr 30, 2024 6:34 am

Maybe it was this place that muted the responses, or sucked the aggression out of the air: it would have been exhausting to be angry at an observation so true. "I do prefer it. And if still he lives — which I highly doubt, given Jernoah's brutality — he'd either love me more fiercely than I could ever imagine, or detest what I've become. I'd be able to bear neither of them."

Strangely, it was nice to hear him laugh. It was what shook the death out of him. He seemed, for a few moments, alive — or a counterfeit of it, a clever ruse created against the backdrop of dull colors and old memories. In life, she'd hated Giuseppe Chiavari; now, though, that was so many years ago, so many miles, so many steps ago, everything about him had lost its luster. When he mentioned his tutor, her mind flashed briefly back to Sylvius: a man who been her instructor, her teacher, her friend. Trying to imagine Giuseppe as a fledgling in the custody and responsibility of someone else became increasingly comical. Hadn't he just leaped, fully-formed, into this life, as crude and as cruel as he'd ever been?

"Or he was too good," she reasoned. "Good enough to shape not just you, but your whole family into acts of civil disservice. Please tell me this story ends in you finding a way to outwit him, or — or run him through in his sleep. It wouldn't be anything like the you I came to know if it ended in some other fashion."

There was some morsel of this mention of ending, of killing, that seemed to pull the color out of her cheeks, and she stared down at the ground where her own saliva still glistened.

"All the things you did when you were alive, I could almost forgive them. Because now, I think, I understand their utility. At least to a certain degree.

"But what you did to Genny," Gloria said, the line of her lips hard as stone. "You tell me: Do I let it go as easily?"
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Re: Memories and a Harvest Pie

Postby Glenn » Fri May 03, 2024 5:25 am

"No, no, nothing like that. I fell in love and was a disappointment to everyone." And now, even as this half creature, he was able to look disappointed at her. "Wynsee, it's almost never a straight line, not with anyone interesting. You're a straight line, though, aren't you? At least until you got here. This place ah, what is the word," and to say he struggled would have been a falsehood for he was not capable of such things anymore, but it did take time, "refracts, a large word, a scientific one, yes? It refracts, but only in the stupidest, most ridiculous ways."

He did not bark out another laugh though, not yet. Not so soon to the mention of love? "I was sent away to do better. I did worse. So it goes. I did well enough here, though. There are certain, shall we say, experiments, that can only be done when there's a madman in power. Magic spoils the mix, you see, but it was interesting enough, I'm sure. They would have seen my death worth it. My unlife too, for it gave it all just a bit more time."

Which brought him to that laugh, that second laugh, as she brought up the Tolleson girl. "Genevieve, Wynsee? Out of all of them, out of all of you, she's the only one I did well by. You have to forgive it, you hagged grumpy lump, for it was the only thing with good intentions! There's a whole wide world to blame for that, then, not poor Giuseppe, dead twice over."
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Re: Memories and a Harvest Pie

Postby Rance » Wed Nov 20, 2024 3:02 am

"But like you, perhaps I seek to disappoint. That's human, isn't it," she said. "To ruin all we've done for goodness with impulse and emotion."

It felt good to be the hammer sometimes. in fact, it felt good all the time. Be the hammer. Be loud. Be forceful. Be so large, so unforgettable, that with a swing you can break glass of bodies or hearts. She drifted close to him, to where she perceived him last; she filled up space and pushed out her belly and her chest and lifted her chin, sucked in her ribs, and sought to be a mountain.

But what she knew was that he could and would see through that.

Glass.

"I am going to kill a fae, or I am going to kill Glenn Burnie. It may be by my hand. It may be by another's. This is the swiftest conclusion to a confusing act, Giuseppe. It is not the correct solution, but it is a solution."

Bodies.

"No one sees it, but a war is somewhere on the horizon. Close, maybe. Or at a great distance. These humans are too stubborn and these fae are too greedy. No two stones simply form into one: they crash against one another until there are but pieces left."

Hearts.

"I have fallen so helplessly in love with Genny Tolleson that I can no longer make sense of what I do, whether it's for her or for me, or for anyone else."

And then she turned, made a noise in her throat and almost stumbled in the folds of her gown and as she threw Liam, her knife, into the fog in the distance: oh, he'd still be near her when she woke, but it was a monumental relief to free herself of the stupid weapon, and then it felt even better to just open her mouth and yell and scream because nobody but Giuseppe could hear her here.

When it grew quiet, her shoulders dropped, and she scratched the back of her scalp so vigorously that the nails sounded like reapers cutting through wheat.

"Help me," is what she asked, of a memory who had no reason to.
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Re: Memories and a Harvest Pie

Postby Glenn » Thu Dec 05, 2024 1:19 am

Help me

It was agony, but then he could bear agony. And anyway, it was only for a moment. It was a moment that would sustain him for another hundred years and that was agony as well. It could have been more. Some might have seen it as an opportunity. He would have once. He did once. Never say that Giuseppe was incapable of learning from his own mistakes, even if it took death, undeath, and death again to teach him.

There was invocation and then there was invocation. A direct request like that brushed up upon the latter.

But then to speak with Gloria Wynsee was to trudge through mud. The dead could work with mud. They grew familiar with it.

The request wasn't direct at all. If he had wanted, he could have made use of that. Because he did not want, it's generality was useful as well.

Still, he laughed, laughed in the face of her own agony. He was well past the point of polite restraint. "Ah, Wynsee. Ah, Gloria, dear, dear Gloria, which is it that you need help with? Murder, war, or love?"
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Re: Memories and a Harvest Pie

Postby Rance » Fri Dec 06, 2024 4:47 am

"You were an Inquisitor long enough to know they're all three the very same," she said, and dragged her hand down her face as if wiping away sweat — wiping away the moment of vulnerability that accompanied her plea. "Years ago, I would have said that love outlasts the others, and to rely on it in place of murder or war.

"But then I met you."

She tightened her hand into an immutable fist. Raised it high, holding an imaginary shard of mirror-glass. Drove it down, elbow bent at a sharp right angle, into an invisible chest.

"I think about it when I lift a kettle for tea, Giuseppe. Or when I pull a thread through a pair of pants I'm stitching, and the arm bends just so. I think about—" she swallows, "—does Genny ever look at her arm and wonder at exactly what angle, and with what force, she undid Rhaena's neck? She must. And I wonder if she lives in Genny's mind the way you've come to live in mine."

Brow furrowed like the wrinkles on a too-large raisin, she finally snapped her stare to him.

"Or is it the other way around?"

A lazy blink or two — one gray eye blinked just a beat slower than its brother, as if it couldn't escape exhaustion even here. "Of the three, I'd choose war. For however much he infuriates me, I've got no want to kill an old friend, and I will sooner seek advice in love from...other sources."

Gloria's smile did not apologize. She did not need to apologize to Giuseppe.

"I want to start a war in which no blood is shed. Do you think you're capable of as much self control?"
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Re: Memories and a Harvest Pie

Postby Glenn » Fri Dec 13, 2024 12:47 pm

Self control. Self control was not feeling too much in this moment. Feeling was dangerous. Feeling meant attachment. It represented immersion. Feeling was the well along the way on the path to substance. Substance was the last thing he wanted. It should have been the last thing she wanted for him. There was no saying what his substance might bring along with it. The dead should stay dead and the undead should stay deader if at all possible.

Mainly, he was trying not to laugh.

"People try to be too clever. Lets say, shall we say, that there was a saying, an old wife's tale, yes? Something said again and again. People rush to deny it, to explain it away, to try to be smarter. Usually, it's just true. People say things for a reason," though what reason he was saying this was hardly clear up until the point where he picked his saying. "They say, Gloria, that murder gets easier the more you do it, that the first time is the hardest. And I'm sure you and all your clever folk are supposed to think otherwise. But it's not otherwise. The best way to get over a murder is to do it six or seven more times. After that, it's commonplace." There was the laugh, sharp and barking, the sound of a man who was missing part of his throat but heard quite the joke. It would have been just as unpleasant in life. "The same is likely true for war and love too, yes?"

But then she had finally asked something practical. She had come all this way to get an answer after all. So answer he did. "The only way to win a bloodless war is by wielding a bigger lie or a bigger truth. As you mentioned a fae, a bigger lie is unfortunately out of the question."
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