happy pride, etc

[papadopoulos]

“Uh, people were killed.”
“No one was killed at Stonewall.”
“No…body…was killed???”
_________________________________________________________

The café is looking much more colorful than it has in the past. Specifically, there are various flags draped on top of the walls – certainly it is much brighter than anything Enjolras would have cared to come up with. Directly behind the pastry case there is a rainbow flag, and scattered around there are a myriad of other pride flags. (Whatever they could scrounge up from the cupboards, basically.) There is also a small table set off to one side, with various types of beaded necklaces and colored bracelets lying atop it. There is also a small flier with descriptions and explanations of what the different flags represent. Explanations of pride in general will be freely offered, as well.

Dionysus has offered up his cd player, though instead of the same music from the party, it is playing songs from various queer artists. There’s a selection ranging from Bowie to Cole Porter to Billie Holiday, including more modern artists such as Lady Gaga, Mika, Queen, and Green Day. Apollo can be found near the music as usual; but he is currently engrossed in making more of the colored bracelets. He is seated at the table with a box full of friendship bracelet making supplies, wearing an artfully cropped version of this shirt, a hyacinth bloom set behind his ear. Dionysus is at a different table, wearing a knee-length sundress of pink, yellow, and blue stripes and one of the beaded bracelets Apollo is making, this one in yellow, white, purple, and black beads. He found a small facepainting palette with a few pride flag options and is willing to offer up his services if anyone happens to want a tiny flag on their cheek (or, well, wherever.)


Let us know if you want Apollo, Dionysus, or both for your threads!

Comments

[vineleaves]

Dionysus isn’t sure if Claudius is asking if he’ll leave him physically right now, or if he means in more of a metaphorical sense, but the answer is the same for both.

“Of course I won’t leave you,” he responds softly, holding him close, his own weight adding to that of the blanket. “I’m here as long as you want me. I’m stubborn like that.”

[wickedwit]

Claudius breathes in slow. He breathes out slow. Cotton seeds, drifting. "The universe is a lonely place. I think often, know'st thou, of the monologue you prepared for me. Our world is arduous. Such need, such desperation." Breathe in, breathe out. "Thou wilt not leave me."

[vineleaves]

"I won't leave you," he repeats, and starts to lightly rock Claudius back and forth. The gods Shen Teh had to deal with in Good Person of Szechwan couldn't say that. They left, repeatedly, multiple times, but especially notably right after she gave that monologue.

"Part of the problem for Shen Teh is that she tried to bear every burden alone. Granted, the script was written in such a way that it would have made it difficult for her to find someone who could help her out," Wang the Water-Seller is really the best option she could have had, and, you know. Plot devices to keep the two from actually talking much, or whatever. "But we don't have to worry about that. Especially not here. It's hard right now, but we've got such a sweet little community of people. None of us have to bear anything alone. You don't need to invent a Shui Ta to get through this, Claudius, you can just be Claudius."

[wickedwit]

"I have a name here," Claudius says, working aimlessly through his thoughts, lulled by the rhythm of Dionysus's rocking. "It was a rare thing, in Elsinore, to be called by my name. My brother called me a beast and a serpent. Courtiers called me prince, or your highness. Sometimes they talked around me, like an untoward secret, without calling me anything at all. I had to learn to read between the lines." Between the lines was the only place he felt allowed to exist.

[vineleaves]

"I know," he says softly. It's not too difficult to extrapolate from Hamlet that people - even before the curtain rises - hardly ever referred to Claudius by name. "I, for one, am so happy that I get to meet you as Claudius. That you get to be yourself here."

Yeah, when they first met, it was a little bit like meeting a celebrity. He got to meet King Claudius, how special is that? But the actual special thing about this place is that he can get to know just Claudius. Who he is, separated from who Will wanted him to be. That's the person Dionysus cares about, not just a character in a play he already knows.

[wickedwit]

Claudius chokes back a sob. Oh, he thinks. There it is. The tonic Dionysus gave me must be taking effect. It feels awful but only because everything is awful. His body feels tired. His eyes feel wet. His heart feels utterly empty, and yet crushed with pain. "I don't want to lose what we have here," he says. It feels so frustratingly petty and small. "I love this place. I love the astonishing variety of people who come through here. I love ..." He almost laughs. "I love listening to someone badly explain one of their celebrations, the same way I loved to walk through cities where I only half knew the language, and learned it as I went. But what if I was only ever meant to live out a tragedy?"

[vineleaves]

Dionysus thinks of so many prophecies that came true regardless of what people thought would set them free. Laius believing he would not be killed, because he was certain his child had been abandoned to die, then later that same child believing he would not fulfil his side of the prophecy because he left Corinth. That's the whole point of a prophecy. They're going to come true.

But a play is not a prophecy. And even if it were, Dionysus is pretty sure Laius would have lived if Oedipus had been teleported to the mansion. That's clearly something that neither him nor Apollo can foresee, as evidenced by the fact that they were both taken by surprise at arriving here.

"I think you're here so that you don't live out a tragedy," he says, with full confidence. "The same way Étienne and Mercutio are here to be saved from death, the same way my brother is here to escape our father, the same way I'm here to give you monologues to learn and to make sure everyone had enough vitamins to make it through the winter."

He boops Claudius's nose, you know, for old time's sake.

"I'm not going to pretend I understand everything that's going on with this place. Anything that's powerful enough to keep me trapped -- not to mention Apollo -- that's weird. But I can't imagine they'd want to bring us all here if the plan was to have us live the same kinds of lives we all had to deal with before. If that were the case why even bring us to start with?"

[wickedwit]

It's a true, in a way Claudius can't deny. He works through a sleepy logic of it, nestling against Dionysus's shoulder, "If the spirits truly chose us from stories they loved, they could easily read the same stories over and over. They wanted new entertainment. Something different. I suppose for someone with a tragic fate, anything different would be better." A little sulkily, as though to concede in some imagined debate with the mansion's spirit, he says, "I am glad Étienne is here. I'm rather hopelessly in love with him, and it grieves me to think he might have died so young. And Mercutio is a feckless bear-baiter of a young man, but I like him. I'm teaching him alchemical reactions, and he's going to bring me back gossip from his flirtations." All future things. Things that aren't the chasm of his own hopelessness stretching on and on, forever. He can almost touch the other side.

[vineleaves]

"Oh, I didn't show you when we came in," he says, as if they hadn't been dealing with Crisis Mode when they first entered Dionysus' room, "Étienne painted that for me." He points up to Ariadne's constellation on the ceiling. "Actually, I suppose you might have heard about it already, your sweet Galahad gave him the idea. They knew how much I was missing my wife's stars and took matters into their own hands to make things better for me." A sigh, then he adds quietly, "...I love him so much."

Étienne, not Galahad. Obviously.

"Whatever the downsides to this place are, we can work together to make it better. To make it bearable for each other. More than bearable. You're getting married, for goodness sake. There is so much happiness to go around."

[wickedwit]

There's an aching, in the emptiness of Claudius's chest -- the emptiness Claudius created by vacating his body, but it must not have worked, because there's something there that can be hurt. He tries to grasp it, tries to imagine the wedding day, but after the loss of Shen Yuan nothing is certain. "How canst thou bear it?" He asks, looking up at the stars of the ceiling, put there by two men he loves for the god he adores. "How canst thou bear all the losses thou hast had?" Is he looking at the answer, while looking at those stars? He finds he can't look away. That aching in his chest starts to feel like bitter hope.

[vineleaves]

"It's hard," he answers truthfully. "Sometimes I'll be going about my day, and something someone says, or the way the light hits their hair, or a look they give, or just -- well, anything, really. It'll remind me of Ariadne, or one of my children, or Ampelos, or any number of friends. But those are the moments when I get to remember them, too. I wouldn't trade my happy memories for anything in the world."

One hand travels down to Claudius's chest, to rest above his heart. "Grief means you had someone worth missing. To block it out entirely is to deny yourself the chance to remember the good, too."

[wickedwit]

"Wilt thou remember the good of me?" he asks, soft. He'd accepted the likelihood that he'd died before his first and closest friends, sometimes driven by the fear that a mortal life wasn't enough to do any significant good for them in. Now Shen Yuan the immortal has died, and he can't trust the likelihood of anything. He can trust, right now, in the fact Dionysus's hand on his heart. In the stars and the memories that Dionysus still carries.

[vineleaves]

“Oh, darling,” Dionysus gives Claudius a kiss. “The gods themselves couldn’t make me forget all the good in you.” It would sound like hyperbole if he wasn’t himself also a god.

[wickedwit]

"Imagine the parable," Claudius says, a flicker of brightness in his eyes, the fleeting shine of a smile at the end of a kiss. "The villain of a celebrated tragedy meets the god of theater, who promises always to remember the good in him. I could worship no god but thee, know'st thou."

[vineleaves]

There he is.

"I suppose when you look at it that way, it is sorta perfect," he says, as if this isn't a thought he's already had before, how it's so fitting that the person worshipping him here is one of the ones from a play. "Thank you, though," he says, grabbing one of Claudius's hands and kissing the back of his fingers. "It does mean a lot, that you'd trust me like this."

[wickedwit]

Claudius remembers Rome, where kissed the Ring of the Fisherman, and hoped the city's holiness would cleanse some stubborn wickedness inside him, but he only found more wickedness. It seems silly, now. "Thou art so unlike Him," he laughs. "Stop me. I'll do nothing but complain of God, like some tiresome suitor who thinks flattery is comparing his second love to the first. But He had me believe that faith must always be a trial to endure. Faith in thee comes easily."

[vineleaves]

Dionysus melts at that, both the fact that Claudius is laughing again, and that last bit about faith in Dionysus coming easy. He may be one of the twelve Olympians, but he's aware of the many ways in which he might not live up to someone's expectations of him as a god. He's not omniscient, he can't will himself to different locations instantly, and the powers he does have, while strong, are rather limited and aren't always going to be the most massively useful things.

He runs a hand through Claudius's hair, then wraps him up in a big hug. "I'm gonna be here for you, dear. Whenever you need me."

[wickedwit]

A god who swears always to be there for him, who hugs him and soothes him when he's sad (he's sad he's so hopelessly sad he doesn't want to feel anything else) is still unlike any another. "If I were to sleep," he says, realizing he's tired, too, "wouldst thou watch over me?"

[vineleaves]

"Of course, dear." He gives Claudius a kiss on the forehead. "My bed will be more comfortable than here though," he says, motioning to the pile of pillows they've been sitting on.

[wickedwit]

"Everything in thy room is comfortable," Claudius says. It occurs to him to wonder how long he's been calling Dionysus thou, without noticing it. That's not such a forward thing, is it? Even the psalms invoke God as a thou. Someone more familiar than anyone else, someone as close as your own soul. "Including thee," he adds.

[vineleaves]

"Bedrooms are supposed to be comfortable, silly," he says gently before getting up, and offering a hand to help Claudius up as well. "C'mon, we can snuggle on my bed, you can take a nap."

[wickedwit]

“We have a kotatsu,” Claudius says, dreamy as he lets himself be led. “Dost thou know what a kotatsu is?”

[vineleaves]

"I do, yes," he helps Claudius climb into his bed, covering both of them up with his regular bedspread as well as the weighted blanket. "It must have been an absolute lifesaver during the wintertime."

[wickedwit]

"It was," he says, settling under the blanket and looking up at the ceiling, the stars. "I was sad then, too. I spend a lot of time being sad. I'd say it's a family aliment, but I think it's a human one."

[vineleaves]

Dionysus, propped up on his side, starts combing his fingers through Claudius' hair. "There's -- unfortunately -- a lot of people who spend a disproportionate amount of time being sad, you're right. I'm sorry, dear. You've spent a lot of time in a very bad environment, and didn't get out until, y'know, relatively recently. It takes time to heal from these sorts of things. Doing what you can to get the emotions out can help. Right now though, I think you need some rest."