HAMMOND EASTWELL

[Hammond Eastwell]

HAMMOND BENNINGTON EASTWELL
what?





second year • 18

full name: Eastwell, Hammond Bennington.
known nicknames & or alias: Eastwell, East .
age: Eighteen.
birth date: January 11.
gender: Male.
sexual orientation: Asexual.
grade: Second Year
home town:London, England.
current residential town: London, England.
wealth status: Just above average.
income: Parents, art sales.




eye color: Blue green.
hair color: Dark brown.
height: 6'0"
weight: 150lbs.
distinct features: None.
piercing's: None.
tattoo's: None.
modeled after: Milner, Pawel.





personality:
A dark matter universe that stretches and spreads finds no shore to bound its sea, goes on because it can, then. Cosmic inertia that drags it on, come on it, it says, pulling hard, bunching it up in slow-going hands, dragging it, pulling it, tugging it. Expansion into empty space, a deconstructed vacuum which is in itself a fallacy : cities, empires built up inside of nothingness, the collected singularities of self blazing infinitely into pointless monotony, affecting no change. Affecting no change except the progress of dark matter and the dark energy which breaks from it and expands instantaneously, becomes a bit of black that has always been black and in working itself into the black that has always been black, becomes immortal not just in this time, not just in the time that flows after this time, but the time that flowed into this time. A universe, composed of many smaller nothings, all chewing away at matter, deconsecrating the sanctities of molecules and intermolecular, intramolecular forces and leaving them damned, hellish Antichrists of gravitation. Antigravity. Dark matter. Blank matter. A universe made of the end-on-end rammings of nothings, too many nothings with too much noise to bear. Where there was a sound, there is what is no sound, booming infinitely loud and infinitely outward, a screaming echo of antisound. That pervades the dark matter universe. Where there can be no light and can be no time because they’ve already been eaten, fed to the tide and drowned. Tide that rolls on, rushes on, pushes out and becomes antishape because some place, some time that has not yet been touched by black, there is a shape. A shape whose resulting non-self languishes in the belly of a universe with antigravity. That folds it and creases it then holds it in the damp, sweaty palm of one hand for safe-keeping. Extension through nothing, reconfiguration of space. Limb from limb, space is then torn. Its new shape creating antishapes that slip like whispers through the shouting, screeching vacuum of antisound. A dark matter universe looms across the world’s frayed edge, threatens to spill out, doesn’t just threaten to spill out. Spills out in increments, pieces so small that they swallow him whole because a bit is enough, too much to stand. Drips through pores in torrents infinitely small. Pressurized bursts of dark matter. With a will of its own, exerted over a mind made of pink matter, which isn’t dark matter, is weaker than dark matter. Is eaten by it, in increments. Because the inertia is slow, and momentum gathers speed more slowly than it loses it. But surely. There is inevitability in its progression.

There is inevitability in the work of his hands, which dance on strings of dark matter. He deconstructs the world and feeds it to his universe. Unpins the underpinnings of lightbeams. Then takes the resulting, loose-hanging flaps of gathered photic dust and cautiously brings them out. Then tears shred from shred until they hang like yellow-white teeth, rattling on a cross-bar. Feeds these segments down into himself. Because he cannot help it, cannot stop. Picks apart the weaving of time and lets threads of seconds hang loose in their seams. Then plucks open those seams, bursts them open with his fingers when he can’t be gentle, isn’t gentle when he doesn’t have to be. Doesn’t think in terms of gentle. Becomes his action, an extension of the dark matter, every act a pulling inevitability down into the consuming, expanding nothing. That he feeds with his eyes, his hands. Bits of time fed down, bits of light fed down. Color loosened from the inside, a resulting process the opposite of natural phenomena; fingers inhabit many spaces, many places, unpin and unhook and untwist. Unknot the forces of the universe and in looping arcs drag them down to drown. Where the dark matter cannot reach, his fingers go. Where his fingers cannot go, his eyes settle, pull in. Shapes. Geometry exposed raw, ugly to the eye. Every place. Beautiful grotesque shapes preen and cavort in the shade of his burgeoning blackness; he stands over them, staring. Staring off into the ripped, shredded chasm of himself and sees, for a little while, the shape of the shadows forming. Gathering antishapes, new antishapes. Because what exists beyond him, comes to exist inside. But inside he’s older than time so it comes to be that what it is in him happens to exist beyond him, for a little while. Because dark matter holds together permanently; he unpins God’s universe with his eyes, infinitely more powerful than what holds it together. He is not himself dark matter, just its receptacle. It chews. Swells. Pressure like an infinity of stab-wounds plunged down through his chest and wrenched wide building. Mounts. Stretches. It is all new, it is always the first time, he’s hanging over an edge of himself, dead still. Afraid to fall down through dark matter, afraid to drown.

Not neat. Not clean. Not rigorously instinctual. Afraid. There are galaxies in dust. Collisions of worlds that spawn echoes that make his teeth chatter and break. The grating holler of books being adjusted; the blinding, searing flash of book edges misaligned, skewed. Throbbing. Aching. Pain like geysers caught behind his eyes. Always there. Distortion of the dark matter. Constellations of hornets in his mouth, in his chest. Adjusting of the universe, its shift an ocean twisting back on its spine and breaking open, bleeding against the sky. More than afraid. On fire. Burning away inside of the universe, a single point of vibrating light, fixed, pressed upon by dark matter, suffocating in antigravity. He inhabits a sterile space, black. Black, black. Always black. So black. Darker than night, darker than shade. Infinitely black, forever black. A mobius strip of black looped about itself and then again, around itself, strangling itself; an asphyxiation of black suffocating at speed folded all the way back to near stillness. While he’s cut through, speared through, rammed through; afraid, aware. Unpinning the world and letting it fall apart. Picking with his teeth at the hems and seams of things, the teeth of his eyes, yanking, tugging, petulant to see it all. And shapes that unfurl slowly, that rise to the surface in movements, the resulting arcs of movements that make hyperbolic melody across blank space. While he stares. Because he can’t help but to stare. Because his eyes are not his own, directed by the dark matter, full of dark matter. To see the shapes. The lives of shapes. As they are undone and dissolved and made a part of him, brought back into him, into the origin of things. While his skin seeps black and he languishes on the floor, sweating it, breathing it out in shallow bursts of breath made of dark matter air. It is too big to contain, he is too small to contain it. It all blends together, becomes what is dark matter and what is not dark matter, it all overlaps. Interloping energy fuses it, two inverted panels welded one to the other.

And he’s stuck to its curve, burning. Watching. Watching, dark-eyed REM. Too fast for his pink matter mind to register, too slow for his dark matter universe to tolerate. So they move faster. Make shapes from nothing and pass them on to the inside, where it twists and folds, bunches and knots; knock one, knock two, the exploding yawp of a volatile universe expanding suddenly, bloating. Hands echo out, move to grapple with what is near. Undo it. Pass it on, too. Hands on fire, buzzing, twitching, muscle becoming plasma ricocheting out from high-energy transfer. Bones transmuted into a higher state, the stuff of stars. Framing new worlds in black-fire color and black-sulfur shapes. But it can’t silence the sound, though he tries. And tries. Until his hands quiver with stillness and his mouth hangs open, blank and vexed. The sound goes on, travels on through his fingers, gathering at the knuckles like eddies from an underwater explosion, heavy ripples dragging on. Dark matter tittering with its polyelectrophonic gossip, stretching in is flurry of photogasfire bubbles firing on in spirals through bones, irradiating marrow until it’s a toxic heap of mess sagging limp on knuckles. Fingers, now dark matter eyes, twitch back, move back, become an extension of the stillness that the record’s been amended to show never happened; grasp at the fringes of the echo and sketch and draw and loop; bend, move at curves, fingers on fire, loose, falling away from sensation, overpowered; nothing to show for the trouble, just the afterimage, just the impression left after the butterfly landing that’s blown his bones from his body with its density. Sensation overwhelming, the world is too much. There is too much. But its not enough. To feed the thing growing, spreading, moving against the shorelessness of no space, antispace that’s folded back and pushed wide, whoring itself out to dark matter that ruts inside of it. And he watches. From inside, from outside, from the tip of some angle hanging from an obsidian spike of a curve; staring down, watching, because he can’t look away. The delicate unfolding of consumption’s destruction. Not decay, not nearly so organic. A dissolution, dispersion; entropy mounts, dark matter glistens. He’s frightened, hiding. But stretched as wide as he can go, trying to contain it. Hold it back. Lucidity, a curse. Ignorance a minor reprieve from the blistering swelter of being stuck inside dark matter.

Emerges into the world flush-faced, flustered, weak. Pale. Sensitive eyes, because it’s dark inside. Sensitive ears, numb from the screaming universe. The creeping, bristling knowing that he is a herald of the dark matter universe that sends his eyes to where it will go and where it will take; that uses his hands to mark its breeding ground. His body circles a confined space, he’s walled himself off from them and their voices. Which make antisounds and antishapes that make it larger, stronger to take them as they are, not in the incremental undoings of his eyes. Isn’t protecting them, is protecting his body, frail as it is. They are nothing, wisps of sound and frivolous geometry; feed them to it if it wants them, will. Holds hard against the pushing ocean swell of dark matter rising. A breathless anticipation for his own destruction which rides hard down an sharp, hard-edged curve, eminent, pressing. Consumption. Taking, eating away. Their sounds are too loud, their mouths have shapes that make the dark matter careen wildly against the brink of himself; they are too much and he is too small to contain what it is that they bring so near to the surface. Pushes it back, folds it back, but doesn’t force because he is simply a retainer. Can only be rocked and tilted. Spills it sometimes, because it wells across his surface, bursts out of him and becomes a new shape and a new wildness. That splashes across the world and immediately forms, what they might call art. But it’s there, grimly smiling at him, when he glances toward it. Draws his eyes toward it, and holds them there, leering; coming, always coming, expansion that has no end and no boundary because its steadily fed. By a world that seeks its own destruction. Set into motion, motion through antispace, with no impediment, media only to feed its extension. Its rutting into antispace. He holds fast in place, whirled around, whipped around, beat to death before his eye’s come up from its blink that has taken an eternity to go down and back up. Two eternities stuck back to back, rushed one into another. Swallowed. Beat to death and bloody, bleeding black from infected wounds that dark matter won’t heal because its got a sick sense of humor and he’s too weak to stop it. Bleeding into the world until the excess is drained off and what’s out there now is chewing, feeding on the shapes, gutting open matter and mass.

To feed the burgeoning dark matter universe.

likes: Quiet , solitude , outdoor spaces , dark indoor places , new brushes , old brushes , dull light stuck at the bottom of old milk bottles , curves , lines , light , blank space , charcoal , penicls , pens , ink , abstract mathematics , industrial settings , dusk , clean air , pollution , harmonics , anti-harmonics , distortion , ripples, the seaside , standing bodies of water in the light , floating things, pause , movement , order , enthalpy , entropy , pictures , heavy loads, restriction , limitation , straining against limitation , straining against order, straining, slamming doors.
dislikes: Sharp noises , dust , grit , stiff bristles , light loads , mess , bright lights , rodents , crowds , people , things falling out of frame , too fast can't keep up , losing track , drowning , falling away , staring , water colors , acrylic , plastic , blood.
quirks: Mumbles to self , eyes always moving , fingers always sketching even empty , walks in circles, squares, and rectangles , stares when addressed , easily overheated (prone to nudity in various forms) , forgets to eat, forgets to breathe sometimes, always in some sort of motion , when he's still, is dead still.
bad habits: Chews the inside of his mouth , smokes , throws things , breaks things , talking to himself , drawing on walls, furniture.
strengths: Creativity , intensity , open-mind , highly intuitive, intelligent.
weaknesses: Detached from reality , violent mood swings , hyperaware/hypervigilant , frail , dependent.
hobbies: Painting , pacing .






relatives: : Francis Gerard Eastwell IV, Elizabeth Anette Bosworth-Eastwell , Francis Gerard Eastwell V.
attending cedar creek academy since: First Year.
background:
Oh, but there’s something wrong, she used to say in that whining, pitiful way with her head turned to one side on the pillow, her hand cast aside in a dramatic fashion, chest lowering from the sigh that she pushed out everytime she made those words. Voice going up, a magical, warbling sound, like a bird’s song. She was just so lovely, much too lovely to be a mother, at least that was her thought. Her children had torn her up inside, had stretched her beyond stretching and worn away the luster of herself. Sometime after the birth of her second child, she took to saying it about the first. The boy with the large eyes and the blank expression. Three years old. Sitting in the middle of the floor, staring at the window. Not that there was just to see, just the gray side of the Thames appearing in bits of gray-flash silver in between the long horizon of windows and concrete and buildings. He never spoke. Except to scream. Never shared his toys, except to throw them, break them. Because there had been something in him, even them. Something that wanted out and he didn’t know how to let it out. Didn’t know how to turn the key and let it pour all down the drain. And it beat against his insides. Curling a scorching curl through him, burned and peeled and scraped. So he screamed. And wailed and broke things. A fitful, wild, willful child. Whose long silences were broken only by the mania of his fitful outbursts. He had a younger brother, who was two. Who turned two three days after he turned three. So she used to say that, and his father used to nod and smile and kiss her. Spread her legs with his knees and ease inside. And she’d take him. Take him and smile and touch his lips with her fingers and touch his chest with hers; they were in love, had no use for children. He was three the first time he heard it though. Maybe she’d been saying it all along. That there was something wrong; was there something wrong? Maybe. But no sound would come, no words. Only the wordless volume of screaming and crying and fear. Because what if it did pour out? He’d be empty. So empty. Empty, he’d blow away. Just like papa’s cigarette cartons, the ones he wasn’t supposed to have. Because Mama said that they made him smell bad.

When they weren’t in love, they hated each other. Split their fucking with shouting matches. He’d come by the temper honest. The flippant hot-cold switches. One to the other, one from the other; peace gave way to violence and violence to moans of ecstasy. He listened for it at the bottom of the door. The bottom of their bedroom door; they lived all together in one of those refurbished buildings, two floors all to themselves. They were well off. Listening at the bottom of the door, he saw black. Heard sounds. Sounds from black. They caught him once. Heard him breathing. Hadn’t he tried not breathe? Hadn’t he? Dragged him all the way to his room by his leg; Papa’s dick bounced, his thick thighs swung angrily, one then the other. He’d stared. Papa had hit him, told him not to be such a pervert. He was three. Or four. When you were little, it didn’t matter. The next day, he had a coloring book. And crayons. And Papa had a smile. Francis wanted to play with them. He tore them the pages out, made coarse-papered graffitti on their playroom floor and threw the glossy, empty covers at Francis. But the crayons. What to do with them. Papa had showed him. Had stooped down next to him, smiling a moist-lipped smile, whispering at his neck, grinning. One hand on his stomach, bigger than his stomach; Papa had colored a sun for him. Colored it black, smiling. The stubble itched. He pushed away from Papa, Papa’s smile didn’t fade. He went away, smiling. A new lock, too. They were stuck together. He remembered. Picked up the crayons, colored and practiced how not to breathe. So that next time, he could listen and not get caught. Drew swaths of color on the mustard yellow walls; Francis was nearby some place, looking dull. Staring out of his green eyes, smiling. He turned, pushed Francis down, and kicked him. Shut up, Francis. Shut up, Francis. And because he could not stop, he kept kicking. Until Francis stopped crying. Until there was no sound left inside of him. He sat. Colored on the leg of the bright red chair they had in the bright yellow. Colored a blue smear up its leg; his first work of art.

Francis bit him when he was eight. He pushed him back. They were in the tub. Bathing. He was too old to take a bath with his brother. He wanted to practice his not breathing. The light was breaking apart inside of the water that rocked back and forth. It made him think of Papa’s dick bouncing up and down. He knew it was called that because he could read. He could read and had snuck into the study and read a dictionary. Not just dick. But the whole thing. The whole cover. The words were like bees in his brain. Always moving. Hitting against each other, angry. He knew more words than anyone else. He had more words in his head than anyone else. Once he figured out how to not breathe, he was going to go join the circus. But stupid Francis bit him. And now he was bleeding and Francis was sitting there, crying. Because he had hit his head on the faucet when he’d been pushed back. It served him right. For being such a moron. He was eight. He knew better words than moron; he didn’t want to waste them on Francis. Francis knew words too. But not as many. They were gifted. Papa and Mama were having sex in the next room, being negligent. He knew that word. He didn’t lika Papa. Mama was nice, though. She smelled like lilacs. Lilacs were ephemeral. He liked to paint. Francis did too. They had to get the paint off. So they had to take a bath. Their playroom was an art room now. He was talented. Francis was okay. And staring bug-eyed and blond back at him, frowning. Francis was bigger than him now. Papa liked him better. They went for ice cream and to the zoo; he stayed with Mama. Mama and him would lie in bed all day. And do nothing, just whispering to each other, laughing. Papa and Francis watched cricket. Francis and Francis. Mama told him secrets. Secrets like Papa wouldn’t tell Francis. Like how Douglas, the grocer, was her special friend. He came over sometimes. With groceries. And he’d sit and color. For a little while. Before Mama wanted to ask him a question. And then she and Douglas would go and whisper together for a while. He dind’t listen at the door. He was too busy coloring. But that wasn’t what Francis needed to know about. So when Francis bit him, and he pushed back; he just stuck his head under the water, to practice not breathing. Francis yelled to tell on him. Dumb Francis.

He was fourteen when he almost died for the first time. Painting. He had been painting. Every morning, he woke up. And painted. Before the sun came in and destroyed all of the shadows. Crept into the small room. Painted for hours. Went to school. He painted because he couldn’t stop. Francis played football. He woke up later, when the sun was up, to chase his tail around the city, for exercise. He was painting. And painting. In the shadows. When the thing came back. The thing that made him clench up tight. And hold really still like he usually did, like he had been doing for a long time. Longer than he’d known Francis. But it dind’t help. He fell over, hit his head, shook himself blind and then back to light and then blind again. Shook and shook and shook. He was nearly dead when they found him. Out of his mind, muttering and mumbling. The black thing, the black thing; how he must have sounded. A seizure. Not a grand mal, but bad. Out of nowhere? Maybe. He sat for a while in his bed convalescing after that. Making shapes on the wall. Haunted by the blackness, increasingly aware of its edge biting down against his throat. Dead, but alive. In a curious middle space. Consumed by it, he chased death. Death chased back. He emerged colored black. They hovered over him them. Papa and his perfect son. Francis and Francis. Papa didn’t love him after all, he’d just been biding his time. Healthy, golden-haired Francis. Mama looked frightened. He hated himself. He’d done that to her face. Made those lines; there was resentment. They were close. Closer than they should’ve been. Three sets of eyes full of concern and bitterness bore down. He drifted off to sleep. And woke up with a stomach full of capsules. The gravity of their stare, all of it grating, eating. He was a raw, tattered strip doused in salt water. A nerve ending writhing. But he painted. Painted and read. Devoured the world. Consumed its organic matter and fastened for himself an alternate world. Where he didn’t have their eyes following him and instead could follow them. Began floating down below his surface, detached, unhinged.

His family was a perfect system occupied by idle bodies, spheres. Drifting in orbits of mutual gravitation, lives lived in separate orbits. Revolutions around a single sun of social conformity. So it couldn’t get out. Couldn’t move beyond the system into the surroundings. Contained. Contained. Stuffed inside. All of their disappointment, their bitterness. He’d always been odd, always been broken. She took to saying that, betrayed him. Betrayed their whisperings. Became apart of the other two, stuck between Francis and Francis. Cut him loose and left him to rot at the end, deprived of oxygen. He remains detatched, decaying, fraying, breaking down. Directed, following. Painting. Doing. Brilliant, disturbed. Came to CCA as a matter of course. So that the weight won’t get worse, so that they won’t stare at him more, harder, longer.





role-play sample:
The uncomfortable bunching in his chest flattened back against his sternum, would not move when he pushed forward into it and remained a slightly angled plane folded against his ribcage. Was he really using Archie as a way to shake the bars of his cage? Possibly, probably. Oh no, he didn’t like to think so at all, because Archie was a friend, his good-good friend and you weren’t supposed to use those. Not even in the instance of mutually beneficial escapist forays into the grounds fringed in stiff-swaying evergreens. It was more than he liked to think because he had gotten so used to be such a good person in Archie’s company. Not thinking about breeding or civic duty or the like; he had been so free to discuss whatever wayward thoughts wandered across his mind with a offhanded, casual amusement, had been able to trust his instincts in the matter of social discourse as being free and easy and gentle. Their conversations had been so enlightening! Not because he’d learned anything he hadn’t known before–well, not just because of that, since he had learned quite a bit from squelching off Quint’s mind–but because he had been shown inroads into himself and his most basic, most easygoing tendencies. Their slow-going rapid-fire thought processes spoken in the stop-gap no, you politeness of two mild-mannered people. Mild-mannered but not boring, since they laughed so often when they talked! And walked. And sometimes, sometimes even, drank. The quiet, self-assured laughter, no judgment, who would judge them but them? He had trusted the reflection of himself he’d seen in Archie’s eyes, had let himself believe in the person he was becoming, framed in the fading light of flickering library light fixtures of the sun spreading its wings across distant treelines. In that red-gold flickering, he had appeared to himself to be... or to be at least capable of some sort of goodness, some sort of fine character. A fine character that he did not wish to shed, but was now, immediately, forced to reconsider as being all that good or all that substantial. Because, he was, in fact, using Archie. To some degree or another. He didn’t like that idea much. But it was infinitely necessary that he ought to accept so that maybe in the using, he could come to accept it and enjoy the not so bad parts about the whole situation of the business of going around the grounds with this good-good friend of his. Archie. Oh bother, he hoped Archie didn’t notice.

He attempted to not breathe for a few seconds, pushing the top of his waist against the flat of the rail. Air sucked down into the lungs that could find no space to expand and was threaded along the rectangular discomfort. His hands were fixed against the cold, the knuckles dry and reddening. What was he to about it except hope that he didn’t take too much from Archie this time, that maybe he could use him in some small way that was still using but wasn’t really. Since he had already come too far to abandon their plan entirely, he couldn’t very well stop -using- once it had begun. And could only, he figured, mitigate it. Make it smaller, small enough to fit into his small insides that were growing smaller with each breathe he tried but did not try to take. Snapping, crackling airless fire crept across his lungs that were being folded down neatly into linear configurations; it hurt so much to contain it, to hold it back. Tighter in the fingers, his chest levered forward across the rail and his eyes dipped to the browning grass spreading out from him in shapes of delicate geometry. The aberrations in coloration made it that way, the shapes that appeared when the wind changed the direction and rippled their tips. Tricks light flashing through the grass, becoming something like himself that seemed to change when the wind changed its pace or its angle of impact. Blue and oh so dry, he tried to blink it away. Only managed to make them more dry. His head full of more wayward, distracted fizz. How was he going to talk while he was so utterly lost within himself? Bottom lip twitched, he rolled his hands forward, a little more, fingertips dangling but tense. And then his lips moved to one side, slightly pressed together, a silly, boyish half-frown as he sank down into himself further, in a slump of his own youthful frustration with his lack of understanding. It had always been that way in some respects, his tendency to slump and slouch internally. As if regressing physically to the point when he had been a single cell quivering on the point of being snuffed out by his mother’s immune system would then allow him to glimpse the infinite wisdom of burgeoning existence. Before the doorway had been slammed and he’d come bursting into being. You never could get back to that place, he knew. It was the way of inertia, a constant drifting from all-knowing toward eventual, all-consuming ignorance. Still, his shoulders pushed forward just a tiny bit, imitating his unseen body language. Rigid with thought, livid with himself, why did he have to be such a user?

Archie would never call him that, but what if Archie just didn’t know it was so? Of course, Archie was polite and probably wouldn’t have said it anyway. There was that fact. The grass shifted again, Brimley watched an orange leaf roll by, tumbling along. One of those bright orange that seemed so strangely incongruous with the rest of everything that had been so washed out and gray all day. Just tumbling, bumbling along a few feet in front of the brown flowerbed slowly running over with patchy white-tipped weeds that jutted out through some of the shrubbery. Or, the skeletons of the shrubbery, anyway. Staring down directly on top of it, he paused to wonder what it must have been like to lose so much of yourself on a regular basis only to put it back out again when the temperature rose and the sun recovered from its anemia. Threads of thin light did manage to penetrate the thick cloud cover, died somewhere just above the ground, where he could see it falling slwoly, drifting gently downward; a slowfall into death. Inevitable death. Because in this place, there was never really a perpetuity to the light. It seemed to either be replenished by fresh worn-out light or to die simply and leave its black corpses beneath the shadows of the oak and cedar trees. If he wasn’t a user, then what was he? Or, rather, who? Brimley. He was Brimley. The door opening brought his eyes around and his neck with them, just peering across his shoulder. Seeing Archie was odd. He appeared from a place Brimley had not been contemplating at that exact moment, a place that dragged behind the moment in which he appeared. So instead, he seemed to bring about thoughts of his origin by being, a projection from a past place that then became the present, trying to play catch-up. Which bunched his thoughts up, it did. Because he was so used to thinking about a place. And then having a thing appear from that place. Not to have a thing appear from a place only to find that its origin had not yet been conceived. The confusion made his pursed lips open some, and Brimley stared into the gaping hole in this chronological logic. But then it knitted itself closed, the door shut back and Brimley smiled. It started at the tips of his toes. An instantaneous warming that seemed to take a long time to gather its full strength. By which time, he was already standing away from the rail, one hand at his side, the other resting on top of the stone rail, and his thighs were spreading apart a little, to give him some balance. His body had been brought around a little more by the time the warmth decided to head upward. And the smile was gaining momentum, borrowing on margin from warmth that had not yet reached it–after all, it was a time of credit and speculation, buy today with what you might not have tomorrow, or the day after that, even. But in the business of smiles, debts were paid whenever. And it was a deficit of his own warmth that was threatening him, he didn’t mind being a little cold later, if it meant smiling with Archie, now. Didn’t mind at all. A feeling like a rubber band pinching around his brain stem made his fingers curl a litlte around the rail : guilt was never too far from a pleasant moment. The smile. The gesture. Brimley’s cheeks pulled, his mouth opened, and his smile broadened, became alive, dynamic, steadily changing.

At his knees, the warmth moved on upward, spreading, widening, warming. Touched the base of his stomach, he moved forward a step. “Fancy indeed, “ he returned, smiling still, face relaxing, shoulders lowering a tad, but not too much since bad posture was a bad sign and he didn’t want to give away that he in fact felt quite guilty over using Archie this way. Which way was this, he hadn’t yet determined, but was sure, in general, that someone here was being used. While he usually assumed that he was the one taking the rough in the raw deal, he the needling, bristling heat at the back of his neck gave him the impression that he was the culprit this time, using someone so... so... his eyes wavered the smallest bit. Archie was still at a distance, closing, having tied his shoe. The wavering eyes on their way to the left, came down instead, glanced at his own shoes. They were tied. Relief. His hand came fully away from the rail and he smoothed his legs’ rhythm, let them carry him easily, trying very hard, really, to not appear guilty. But it was there. He felt it, flagging behind his knees, pulling under his skin. Working up against the curve of his smile, grating him down. His chest felt so completely full, and his tongue felt so rough against the edge of his cheek, the words he’d uttered left an aggravated patch of red cutting against it. And the cold air settled in a hard, rock-like plume at the back of his torso, lodged somewhere deep down, against his spine. Paralysis of the soul, of common sense. They were at a distance, but carefully arranged to affect closeness; he felt Archie’s familiar presence, braced himself against its warmth internally. Surveyed his friend’s attire. Jacket, sweater. Let a soft puff of air out of his mouth, smiling, eyes retracing a bend in the coat’s line back to the chest and then the neck, “I knew I should have brought a coat.” Said in the way of someone completing a thought from another time, self-deprecating, but good-natured, amused with himself and what must have come off as flightiness. Cracked a grin, hands in his pockets. And then shrugged off his own silliness in not selecting better attire, he wasn’t really very cold. Just his hands. Putting them in his pockets, they were warm, but made his arms tense, his shoulders rise. Archie stood there, warm; Brimley stood with his chest perpendicular to Archibald’s right shoulder, slightly to his side, but facing him.

The smile dipped a little, and Archie smelled like soap and books. A warm smell, but crisp. Like melting snow almost. But not quite so sharp. Just. Crisp. He rather liked the coat Archie was wearing. Admired its geometry. He liked coats, noticed clothing, for whatever reason. He always remembered people by the folds in their clothing. Unless it was Dax. Wry, a line curled against his lips as he exhaled a shallow breath, raised his brows slightly and pulled a hand free to wipe down the line of his leg. “I’m very happy to see you, Archie.” He said this freely, with a carefree, loose grin with no purpose and no premeditated emotion in mind. The expression had formed when the thought had formed, without his hand. It showed too much of him, he felt. And changed it slowly into one of the safer expression, one of the ones he knew to be happiness, pure happiness. That slightly-closed-mouth smile of his that made his slight dimples appear just a bit. His hand moved then, carefully, and he patted Archie’s shoulder, three times. Gentle, small pats. Extensions of the same motion, the same moment. The contact was reassuring, warming; he was taking again, using. Brimley left his hand there, on the shoulder, shifted closer, because it was his privilege of a good-good friend to occupy a sort-of-kind-of-maybe-almost-close space near his good-good friend. He glanced down at their feet with the bottoms of his eyes, they looked so silly there. Shoes. So curiously arranged. Neat shoes. Clean. Soon to be filled with the dust that made up the dreamstuff of dying winter grass; he liked that idea. Folded in on his mind like a comfortable daydream about to begin and he sighed as his hand filled with the warmth of Archie’s shoulder, the cold snap of wind biting against his knuckles. Stood facing Archie. His eyes not blinking, his smile not morphing into any too true shapes; he was comfortable in the slightly withdrawn honesty of the moment, was tightening in his stomach from its grip. He pushed against himself, raised brow moving a little higher. “We should get going, then.” Stepped back a little, folded his hands under his arms because he had gotten tired of sticking them into his pockets. Warmth. His warmth mingling with Quint’s warmth; he faced into the wind that was tiptoeing up the stairway and peered out into the waning faerie light of the day swirling gray through white against the black thrush of the forest jutting up in the distance. He was it moving in toward them then back again, its steps one retracted blur of gray and green rushed through one another. The grounds spread out. So large when he was occupying such a small place on the landing.

Breathing. Slowly. Sank into the art of artificially miming the motions of air exchange. Glanced, smiling, to Quint. Moved down the stairs, easily. Jauntily. Bound, step, bound. To the bottom, gliding along the incline. All the way to the bottom, pleased with the mechanics of his silly walking, how approximate to proper and prim, but so absurdly paradoxical to these, at the same time. Stone against the soles of his shoes, so resolute and strong. His eyes moved out, hair flicked against the side of his forehead from the motion, shifting brown-red-gold. Another leaf, caught up, spinning away toward the old fountain; he watched it retreat carefully, as if his eyes would cause its movement to collapse and degrade, rot away into stillness. Tight stomach, chest still so uncomfortable. Dry lips, licked. He turned, and jumped backward from the last step. Knees going high, body moving away from the stone. Laughter, arms spread, moving in a backward arc, he floated. Quint was there, in the shadows of the overhanging stones. Illuminated by the dark light filling up the window panes. Tall and lean against the implacable stone railings. He landed on the grass, laughing still. Softly, hadn’t been much a feat. But a silly one. Amused. His chest felt warm, a little loose. Air moved down through that channel, wound a river of cold sharpness through the oppressive bristling. Motioned with wide swings of his hand, “Come on, Archie!” Grinning, broad, free.

As if they were again children, set unexpectedly free from their mothers.
---------------



alias: Brandon
experience: Few years.
other characters:None yet.
how did you find us: Was a member.
other:

[Jason Dorado]