[It would likely be wiser to spend this time preparing for the danger that awaits wherever Two's fragment is hidden. She could be honing her martial prowess, experimenting with her shapeshifting, or trying to control her ability to phase through physical space. She could be doing any number of things that are more appropriate preparation for a mission, because it's not a question of whether she's going to go or not. She'll go because she needs to act—needs to fight—in whatever way she can. This world has not given her magic with which she can aid others in rebuilding. It has spoken to the violence in her heart and given it form. What else is she to do with that form if she wants to right this world and someday return home?
But her mind and heart have been ill at ease since her confrontation with Sleep. No matter how much she grasps for her tethers, they all feel too frail in her hands, set into the too-large recesses where the bonds initially grew. Some have recovered more than others. However, she's been reluctant to make wholehearted attempts at returning most of them to their former strength, knowing now the kind of profound intimacy she would be asking for—and the risk she'd be putting them all at again just by living in defiance of Sleep's claim.
It has left her feeling tumultuous. Uncertain. And she cannot hope to control her body if her mind runs so wild. So this is preparation in its own way, even if it feels trivial as she sits back from the canvas to appraise its whole.
It began with a single deep pit of black, so consistent and thick that the void became her canvas. Atop it, narrow trails of swirling gold, their whimsical curls broken wherever her touch became too light for the brush's tip. Then she ventured into the deep but rich darks in her palette, building in thin sweeps atop the black as if trying to find her way to the colors they're meant to be. Sitting in the hush with Arthur, hearing the faint mechanics of his physical form set against the ever-present thrum of life from the building's plants, she eventually found her way to quick blocky strokes of earthy green. Clusters of little globs of purple. A flat, unyielding expanse of dark cherry along one edge of the canvas. Little spatters from a brush laden in different colors, leaving no two specks the same hue as she flicked them sparsely into the black spaces that remained.
Truthfully, she had been working on something different when Arthur came calling, a series of violent and ragged things that lay on and around the desk in various states of completion, slashes of pitch and smears of red impasto as thick as viscera. They aren't hidden, as it wasn't a matter of discomfort to work on them in his presence. But she paints what she feels. And those feelings sit much further away when Arthur is near.
Hence the new canvas and the fussy blue she's been trying to unify everything with, strokes that soften the edges of each shape and set the whole piece somewhere between calmness and melancholy. She extracts the second brush from her mouth and sighs.] I think so. It's a lovely color, but it didn't take as well to reconstitution as some of the other paints.
[Difficult to work with. But its uneven graininess gives those edges a more transient quality in the end.]
no subject
But her mind and heart have been ill at ease since her confrontation with Sleep. No matter how much she grasps for her tethers, they all feel too frail in her hands, set into the too-large recesses where the bonds initially grew. Some have recovered more than others. However, she's been reluctant to make wholehearted attempts at returning most of them to their former strength, knowing now the kind of profound intimacy she would be asking for—and the risk she'd be putting them all at again just by living in defiance of Sleep's claim.
It has left her feeling tumultuous. Uncertain. And she cannot hope to control her body if her mind runs so wild. So this is preparation in its own way, even if it feels trivial as she sits back from the canvas to appraise its whole.
It began with a single deep pit of black, so consistent and thick that the void became her canvas. Atop it, narrow trails of swirling gold, their whimsical curls broken wherever her touch became too light for the brush's tip. Then she ventured into the deep but rich darks in her palette, building in thin sweeps atop the black as if trying to find her way to the colors they're meant to be. Sitting in the hush with Arthur, hearing the faint mechanics of his physical form set against the ever-present thrum of life from the building's plants, she eventually found her way to quick blocky strokes of earthy green. Clusters of little globs of purple. A flat, unyielding expanse of dark cherry along one edge of the canvas. Little spatters from a brush laden in different colors, leaving no two specks the same hue as she flicked them sparsely into the black spaces that remained.
Truthfully, she had been working on something different when Arthur came calling, a series of violent and ragged things that lay on and around the desk in various states of completion, slashes of pitch and smears of red impasto as thick as viscera. They aren't hidden, as it wasn't a matter of discomfort to work on them in his presence. But she paints what she feels. And those feelings sit much further away when Arthur is near.
Hence the new canvas and the fussy blue she's been trying to unify everything with, strokes that soften the edges of each shape and set the whole piece somewhere between calmness and melancholy. She extracts the second brush from her mouth and sighs.] I think so. It's a lovely color, but it didn't take as well to reconstitution as some of the other paints.
[Difficult to work with. But its uneven graininess gives those edges a more transient quality in the end.]