❧ Henry Winter ❧ OPEN Voice Test

[tinkertank]

ἀλκυονίδες
A Period of Calm Before the Storm

✘ Leave a Prompt [A Line, a Picture, a Written Post]
✘ Non-TSH Characters Welcome - state if you are AU'ing into Henry's verse (modern college student), or if he should AU into yours.
✘ Let me know if you have a preferred previous relationship in mind (ie. friends, classmates, enemies, student/teacher, lovers I'm so sorry for you if you pick that one though), or if they're just meeting for the first time.
✘ Have a Henry. I'm sorry about that, too.

Comments

[inhibit]

[aglaochartos]

I'm only trying to help you.

[Insisted, coolly, with serene dispassion, on the doorstep into Charles' apartment. Granted, he had significantly more interest in helping (himself) Camilla, and he did think it was high time the two parted ways, permanently if need be, the more Charles raved and drank and grew sloppy and destructive to those around him as much as himself.

Which is why, quite frankly, he was even here, showing him the bottle of sleeping pills he himself had been recommended. He was sure it said on the label somewhere that the medication didn't go well with neat scotch and whiskey on the rocks, but he really wasn't accountable for it if Charles decided to forgo the warnings.

Which was the other point of his visit.]

May I come in?

[If he was going to be snarled at, then he preferred it in privacy, where he could speak a little more freely himself.]

[neanias]

[aglaochartos]

[English had certain limitations. Here was one: Exhaustion.

Exhaustion would be how he'd have to describe the slow, monotonous thrumming of the blood in his head, the numb, lagging movement of his fingertips, the over-saturation of every one of his five senses by cleaning fluids: everything smelled like lysol, tasted like bleach, felt like brillo, sounded like the low echo of a washing machine, had a soapsud sheen.

But in Greek?

There was πετηλώδης: to be like a leaf. Worn thin by the coming of colder times, yet somehow more dazzling for it, swaying lighter in the breeze, letting more light filter through your body, glowing. See-through, for the first time. Every vein and synapse on display, for a few rough moments.

What they had done had illuminated him.

There was τρίβων2: tired, by practice. It had taken a lot of gruntwork to clean everything, to drown out all the evidence in hues of clean sheets and fresh bandages. But, like a solider who'd done his best on the grounds of the barracks, there was a certain pride that purred with each ache of muscles, every haggard look in the mirror.

When it was all said and done, when they were finally awake and together again, Henry found Francis' resting place and went to take the seat across from him. Even though he hadn't been the worst off of all of them, he'd certainly acted as if he were, and it was only natural to try to show some concern.]

How do you feel?

[Pointedly.

He might have asked 'how are your injuries', as he was certain there had been some (what, he did not recall, in the haze of the night's exploits, the shadow of Charles' more pressing pincushioned back), but the more open-ended question nonetheless left room for the answer Henry knew wouldn't come. They weren't enough alike for Francis to feel truly uplifted by the shared experience, but he would give him the benefit of the doubt, if briefly. The chance to prove him wrong. The way a tolerant owner might ask a pet to 'speak', knowing very well that cats and gerbils did no such thing.

He had more respect for Francis than that, certainly, but they were far from being kindred spirits. Really, he just had to make sure Francis' spirit had not escaped his body entirely, that being what accounted for his relative laziness in the hours that had followed. It would be satisfactory to have an update on any wounds, too. The sooner they healed, the better.]

(hit me with whatever! i am canon blind :C)

[oswinforthewin]

[aglaochartos]

[Trips to the coast line during spring break weren't a rarity among the student body, but they were a rarity for him. A petty insistence from his mother that he wasn't able to refuse, and the timing had been good enough to warrant leaving the bounds of the school for a while.

Still, he looked nothing short of out of place standing on the beach, holding a book, wearing a dressed-down suit. Not a swimsuit, mind. But the vestiges of something one might wear to dinner, rather than the beach.

He'd only looked up from the book clasped in his hand briefly, noticing not far, another student from his campus. Not that that was a surprising thing to find- more, it surprised him that her face registered with him, and he recognized it. That was rare even on campus. But hardly a reason to strike up any conversation.

So, a brief unnerving stare later, and he was back to his reading.]

[oswinforthewin]

You're seriously reading on the beach?

[ If he wouldn't talk to her then she'd definitely talk to him. Clara had noticed him looking at her, so once the moment was right? She picked up her towel and went straight over to him. She might of had a hand on her big sun hat to keep it on her head though. ]

[aglaochartos]

[Glancing up, barely, with a long, slow blink, as if especially bemused that she'd actually decided that going to the same college merited acquaintanceship.]

προσεπιρρητορεύω. Is your question rhetorical? Or are you posing it seriously?

[Great battles in vast wars had taken place on sandy shores; why not reading? Even if the glint of the sun on his glasses was the faintest bit too earthy-hippie for him to qualify as a good reading supplement.]

[oswinforthewin]

[ It does when you are Bossy Clara Oswald. ]

Actually it was sort of meant to start a conversation. It worked, didn't it?

[ She smiled and sat down beside him. ]

[idolatrist]

[aglaochartos]

[He doesn't quite know why he's agreed to this. A sheen of curiosity, perhaps, the way that a fine sweat sheens; light, quick to evaporate, slightly irritating. Or maybe it is even a more pressing sense of wonder: What will the artist see, what will he depict onto canvas, what will remain of himself in a reflective state of oil or charcoal long past when he is gone? A good painter could cut to the theme of the person, through the eyes. See the Mural in the Tomb of the Diver. The orientalizing phase of Greek cutouts in old, thematic necropolis art; heavy lines, minimalist backgrounds; had nonetheless served the purpose of plainly depicting the nature of man that had rotted beneath it once was. The youth was gone, the art remained. In it, the recently-dead was serene, erect, naked, and jumping seemingly from heaven rather than earth back into the earth, and into the sweetness of death, peaceful and brave.

As a condition of this, he had insisted that the work be done on wooden paneling, and encaustic paint used. With this condition met, the rest was in the hands of the painter himself. He'd agree to what was asked of him in the sitting.

To begin, though, Henry was stiff, his hair still matted over the side that covered his scar, his glasses tight on his face and glinting, face expressionless, heavy, well-tailored suit clinging to his finger and making him loom dark.]

Well?

[He would await instruction. If given none, he was glad to simply hold still for the duration, in his preferred presentation of self.]

[idolatrist]

Sometimes, moreso after Dorian defected from his life of angelic purity for Harry's world of excess and indulgence, Basil thinks that he must be cursed. He has no proof of such a thing, no broken mirrors or wicked incantations placed upon him by a gypsy crone with a hump and a glassy eye reflecting his failings. His life up to this point has not been boring, not limited to the live of a husband or a civil servant, but it had not been particularly exciting either. He was an artist from the start, and in spite of his pederastic leanings he had never been inclined, like his friends, towards what was so often considered the artists life. Every lavish party had been merely attended out of courtesy towards an invite from the more hedonistic. He would rather, in most cases, be painting.

Homosexuality aside, he had no real reason to be cursed (though by his estimation to consider homosexuality worthy of cursing was a bit extreme).

And yet, Basil is sure that he is cursed. It's a shadow of a weight that sits on his shoulder, that darkens his colors, that glistens back at him from his sitter's eyes, and what a beautiful sitter he is. He thinks again of Dorian, and how he lost him. Perhaps that was, in essence, his curse: to find beautiful boys, to long for them intimately, and to inevitably introduce them to the Devil named Lord Henry Wotton.

The wood panel insisted on by his sitter, the classical nature of all of this is somewhat encouraging, as if a classical leaning could dissuade the call to decadence. Under his brush the primed wood is rough and uneven; his task is to turn bark to porcelain.

His focus was not truly on his subject as he mixed paint, but on the colors in his skin, of the shade of rouge carried by his lips, on the pale edge of that mostly hidden scar that could never hide from the eyes of an artist. At the sound of Henry's voice, he looks up over the edge of his own glasses. ]

You can sit however you like. I would prefer you to be comfortable.

gives up. cries a lot about chrome killing the original tag.

[aglaochartos]

[Homosexuality as an incalculable sin and a pox upon the mortal soul- when had such a thing blossomed into conception? The first mentions of fraternal love in Western literature came from the ancient Greeks. They danced across the pages of Xenophon and Heroduts, sun dappled and shameless, under the ironically female pseudonym παιδεραστία, paiderastia. The important bit of the heady compound was in the erastês- denoting the man of faculty, authority, and agency. Pais, the boy, the pupil, the tutored, was tempted to his knees and made reverent by the greatness of the learned one, ready and willing to open mind and body, to bend in thought and limb. It was a delicious abstraction, wasn't it? The willing, eager student drinking in the master's vitality physically, spiritually, and mentally. The Greeks thought it a lively facet of good health and breeding, best indulged in by homeric youth and stunning creatures of advanced tragedy, old poets like Agathon.

Sometimes, when he read Plato's Symposium, his own mind trailed to Julian, his shadowy white hair, the distinguished lines at his eyes and mouth, and it was not a pang of sexual frustration or serious desire that Henry felt for his teacher, but a deep, aching love, crippled as it was by his singular heart but beating with such unusual vitality as to make him nearly sick, nearly mad with devotion. If they had been true Greeks, in more than just their souls, he might have been Pais out of empathic respect and darling, where there was no foundation of desire. The man was nearly sixty, after all.

The Romans sullied the practice in shades of slavery, and Theodosius' loyalty to Christianity above tradition- his fear of the one God, which did not exist so acutely in a society where you could merely appeal to another- set screaming fire to the whole dandy fracas. The ashes of those burned Pais, thick and dark and heavy and reeking, was placed like dust across the reputations of men today, as a forehead might bear a gray smear on Ash Wednesday.

Henry was an acute judge of character- Basil was obviously a homosexual. It would not have been very difficult for anyone who was looking to perceive, almost by right of prejudice. Artists had a lean towards the outrageous, after all, they were naturally on the precipice of some screaming volley against normatively, precariously self-loathing, divinely hopeful of humanity, obscenely needy of it, and deeply wary and superstitious at the same time. Could anything better describe the modern homosexual? Snatching at tendrils of beauty, and letting them slip through the fingertips when the fear and loathing became too heavy, leaving only a weak, unsatisfying stain in their place, and the insatiable desire to repeat the process. Yearning for shadows and jumping at shadows. A sort of pathetic, deeply human ailment; the Greek cure had been long unsold to men like this.

Henry tapped a finger once against the fabric at his knee, then tilted his head, expressionless. It would make him comfortable to read- he had brought a book. But.

Perhaps there was more to do here, first.

Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out a cigarette case and matches. Striking the head of one, he lit up, pressed the thing between his lips, and replaced the case in its pocket.]

Men are your preferred subject matter.

[Less a question, and less than that a reassurance. A monotone statement, stale on the air, pirouetting as it waited with savage patience for a response, a reaction.]

Plato would say that you suffer not from sickness, but from despots.

[akrates]

[aglaochartos]

[There's a certainty here. The certainty is that one of them will die. Well, perhaps there's a crass, false note to such a prophecy, for it was the divine fate of every living creature to some day be a dead thing, cinis ad cinerem pulvis ad pulverem. No, Henry's realization is much more immediate: in the way that darkening skies and Zeus' keen thunder foretell an incoming lightening storm, there is something electric here, palpable.

One of them is going to die, and it will be very soon.

Charles has become something akin to a cracked vase holding withering flowers. He keeps filling himself up with liquids and groaning as they seep out of him through the cracks, an endless cycle of insobriety. The water, as it leaves the used-up vase, erodes the surface of the cracks, forcing them wider. The holes in Charles' facade have become wide and grinning, and the petals of his flower have withered and shriveled up. All he needs is one strong tap, and the whole semi-solid structure will come down in shards.

Charles, who is convinced that Henry wants to kill him, and Henry, who is convinced that Charles will try to do him in first, and is somewhat opposed to the idea of it on Charles' terms. One of them, he is sure, would end up unhappy with the result- but there would be a result.

Sure of that now, as he planted a hand against the front door of Charles' apartment where he might try to shut him out, gave him a sort of freedom and calm he had not recently experienced with him. A sort of control and mastery over the situation, as it had dawned on him in its full spectrum of conclusions, from out of the fog.

There was no reason to be very afraid of Charles. The meeting with the lawyer had gone awfully, but, he hadn't expected anything more. If Charles insisted on being afraid of him then that was really his own issue.

In the meantime, he would play the role of dutiful friend, even if it ruined the man he was bestowing it on.]

Even if you close the door, you realize, Camilla has a key.

[His meaning was clear: I have Camilla's key.]

You may as well let me in so we can discuss your recent outbursts with some civility.

[akrates]

[ Charles hadn't remembered falling asleep, but waking came with the shock of falling into ice cold water. Henry's voice, even unassuming as it was lashed through his restless sleep like a whip. He froze, his breath stuttering as his curled fingers released the neck of an empty bottle. The clatter it caused as it hit the floor made him wince, a lance of white hot pain between his eyes. The hangover was inevitable, he'd been having them more and more often lately. His course of action would have been clear, had Henry not spoken again.

This time, what flared through him was not pain, but white hot, seething anger. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced a shuddering breath through his lungs and tried to tamp it down, a harsh, and barking breath of laughter leaving him before he could stop it. ]

You act like you think you're so impartial. Like somehow you're above all of this. Like you don't yell and scream just as fiercely, like I don't get under your skin too. [ His words were slurred, with sleep and alcohol both as he sat up, dragged his fingers through his mess of hair. His feet were underneath him, but when he stood, the floor swayed, feeling unsteady. He did not move for the front door; what was the point? Henry had said it himself, he had Camilla's key. ]

Go away, Henry. [ He mumbles it, maybe not even audibly enough to be heard beyond the door as he made his way into the kitchen. His hands were shaking badly, and he had some vain notion that, with another drink, he might be able to compose himself a little better to deal with Henry. His heart beat in his chest like a caged bird, wild and desperate for release. Auribus teneo lupum — holding a wolf by it's ears. Any action to try and resolve their situation was no doubt risky, even dangerous. ]

[aglaochartos]

[Ah, and there it was. All his bile. When Charles was not literally throwing the stuff up (or so Henry could only assume had become his nightly ritual, if the lines under his eyes and his pale, shaking hands had anything to say or show for it), he did so metaphorically, all accusation and brimstone. His laugh sounded dry, and he drank as if he was parched, and so an ancient Greek doctor might assume that his humours were out of balance and that a black bile filled him head-to-toe, in abundance. It filled him with dark thoughts and dark words and hot air. His chymos was well-characterized as melancholic.

And Henry grew tired of it.

Sighing; a long-suffering brand of sound, the type a man might make when knowing he was fighting a losing battle even as he donned his armour to do right by his duty; Henry put more emotion into the mimicry of caring than in actually doing so. He stepped inside the apartment, flattened his mouth as if unsettled by its derelict state before fixing his gaze on Charles again. The sigh said as much as his expression did, that he was concerned by everything here, but the gaze itself held nothing at all. Charles could feel free to ruin his own life, so far as Henry was actually concerned. It would be unfortunate, and he'd rather he did not, and would do what he could to humanly prevent it. What was insufferable, however, was the idea that Charles would set a fire rather than take a bullet- he'd ruin all their lives, before simply severing himself away to self-immolate. It was a sort of selfishness that he really could not abide by.]

Your dramatics are climbing to new heights. [A pointed gaze at the bottle that had clattered to the floor, before he gave a slight shake of his head and went to unbutton his coat, stepping further in.] Fuelled, no doubt, by that. [Spoken, as if it were purely down to drink that Charles had grown so paranoid, as if he purely blamed the drink and not the man who chose to consume it. Not Charles' fault, but entirely his own choice.] I have no reason to shout. I'm only here to check on you. Everyone is concerned.

[Back into that context. The focus on everyone, the reminder that it was everyone versus Charles, that Charles was choosing to stand alone on the outside. It wasn't 'Charles and Henry' or 'Can Charles Get Under Henry's Skin as well as Henry Gets Under His.' That wasn't the way anyone saw it.

They both knew better, of course. That the canker existed between them, and Charles was allowing it to spread while Henry tried to contain it. Less for Charles' sake as for the good of the group- for the good of himself no doubt Charles would have sneered. But at the moment, Charles was a danger to himself and to everyone around him. And he seemed to want to flaunt that fact that he could hurt them, if he so chose.]

[akrates]

[ Charles had successfully managed to find a few last, precious dregs of scotch. Barely two fingers, but it would have to do. This he poured into a glass as Henry opened the door, turning to face the other. He was sullen, eyes sunken and bloodshot, but even so he fixed the other with a harsh glare, as though he hoped his expression alone could pin the other to the doorway, to keep him from coming in. He did not waver from the other's eyes, wouldn't sink so far as to be unable to face the other head on. If he was to face the lion, so be it- he could be a lion, too. ]

Yes, my dramatics; of course. [ He echoed the other with an ugly twist of his lips, the mutilation of a smile. ] I didn't invite you in; to take off your coat. [ He sneered at the other, a vicious expression- an animal baring it's teeth. A show of bravado; if he was a lion, he was a lion cornered.

All the same, he brought his glass to his lips, sipping his scotch gingerly as dark eyes tracked the other's every movement, each subtle shift catalogued, weighed, measured for threat. Would Henry be so bold as to try anything in his own apartment? Likely not. He was smarter than this, yet Charles knew Henry. Perhaps like none of the other's did, or understood. Henry was dangerous. ]

No reason to shout? Did you tell that to the lawyer after I left? [ He demanded this with a bitter laugh, swirling his scotch in his glass, eyes flicking briefly to the other's hands, before back to his hollow eyes. ] Everyone should be concerned. Concerned what you're going to do to do next.

[ That anger flared through him again, his knuckles tightening abruptly around his glass, hard enough to whiten. His features went blotchy, but his breathing remained calm, even as he fought the urge to throw his glass into the other's face, hand trembling with it. ]

If they're so concerned they can come and see me myself. I've no use for you. [ He scowled, fidgeted in place, before shifting, pushing off from the counter and beginning to pace. Prowling his kitchen, but maintaining a careful measure of distance between them. ]