18591/A Month is a Long Time pt 2

A Month is a Long Time pt 2
Date of Scene:	15 July 2024
Location:	Aria's Apartment (8A)
Synopsis:	Aria and Colin's reunion continues through a moment of shared vulnerability and platonic connection.
Cast of Characters:	Colin Wilkes, Aria Seraphine

---

Colin Wilkes has posed:
In the bathroom, Colin disrobed. He was covered in dried blood and his own discarded meat pasted on the surface of freshly healed skin. He examined himself, poking and prodding. His memories of the girl in the dryer and the man with the sword surfaced in horrific flashes of stress hormones and intrusive mental imagery. He choked on tears, sobbing under the concealment of the shower, pounding his fist lightly on the tiles. "Nononono....".

He wiped the water from the shower out of his eyes over and over, but it wouldn't clear, renewed after each iteration.

Wasn't supposed to be like this, this wasn't in the comics he read in the orphanage. He pushed hard against the convulsions of his tears, grating his teeth in frustration at his inability to cope. He disassembled into the floor, sitting cross legged under the water, the disassembled woman in the dryer hiding behind his eyelids. "Why would you do that. Why." he burbled.

He refused any review of what he had done to the man in reaction, how he had left him, and what he would be culpable for.

The shower cruelly washed him clean taking any hint of the woman's blood, transferred to him by the killer's sword, into the drain. He pressed his palm heels into his eyes and slowed his breathing. A few more sobs came and went, the tears washed into the drain with the blood and some measure of innocence and sanity.

Aria Seraphine has posed:
At first, Aria thought she could endure it -- the sounds she heard through the wall. The apartment was large enough to have a 'room' that was called the bedroom (which wasn't that much larger than the bed itself), but it was not a large place at all. And, as she well knew, the walls were _very_ thin.

When Colin went to get cleaned up, she'd started setting to the task of figuring out which service she could order clothes for him from as well as what to make them to eat. She wasn't exactly a gourmet chef. Neither did she really have the budget for delivery every meal, so there was a lot of makings for salad, some cheeses, some deli meats, and fruit and nuts. She could make a little tray of it all for them to snack on...

But even as she tried, she kept hearing those sobs, and every one broke her heart. She may not have known exactly what happened. She may not have known exactly why he was feeling what he was feeling. But she knew what it was like to sit and sob, night after night.

And for no one to care. For there to be no comfort. No answered prayers.

Listening to Colin suffer that? If she manages to convince herself to do nothing, God and her faith in the purpose of her creation will both well and truly be dead.

It's unclear if she would have cared about the gore, but in any case, by the time she stepped into the shower with him, it had already been washed away. She's stripped off all of her clothes, but even as she reaches for him, there's no sexual subtext to the way her arms lift towards his shoulders and seek to draw him against her. She simply clings to him there in the water, a pillar of strength -- at least emotionally -- for him to lean on.

Colin Wilkes has posed:
Colin leaned in, his voice muffled into her skin. "Don't save me. Don't save me." he said over and over, but he made no move to reject her body or her intentions. "Don't save me."

Save her.

The woman in the dryer. She had been tied to a post in the middle of the rented room. He must have looked at her like a tatami mat. So proud of his new sword, a weapon with a legacy from an older world. His weapon, and only a short time in his possession, he imagined it already a part of him. An extension of his arm, or his will, or his phallus. He cut her until she was a pile of meet. He was so proud of himself. He imagined no one else could do what he had done. Ayn Rand's wet dream, a man of intention, committed to his own darkness, infallible, acting as a force of will, unstoppable.

When Colin was done with him, he looked much the way she did. Another pile of meat. And so Colin didn't feel like an avenging angel, he was the only one alive in a room with two dead people. Didn't matter who started it. No. Just one freakish hulk and two mangled victims. Both victims, and he was a killer. Killer and victims.

"I don't have any paint." said Colin, smearing his cheek into her skin, acknowledging her nakedness, turning in her grasp to face the wall, and lean back into her. "I can't paint you. I don't have any paint. You wanna go for a ride later?" he wondered, his trike the 'cycle of abuse' that Robin had gifted him was outside in all its splendor. Frillies on the handle bars, light strips hidden in the wheels, the boomin stereo. He smiled to think about the thing.

The switch back to innocence was stark and symptomatic of deep trouble. He reached out and grabbed the shampoo bottle, uncorked it and put it between his legs, then he gave it a hard squeeze such that it sophomorically issued a jet of thick ropey white liquid.

His body convulsed again, this time though, it was a guilty chuckle.

Aria Seraphine has posed:
"Colin..."

With the boy in his smaller form, the two of them were almost the same height. Both slight of build in that teenager-ish way, though Aria's was more soft, feminine curves and Colin's was more lean sinew.

The girl's voice is so soft, but she doesn't fight with him. She doesn't wrestle him. When he turns and rubs his face on her shoulder, she holds him, and when he turns his back to her, she presses against it, holding him there, too.

"Shhh.. You don't need paints right now. We have all the time in the world for you to paint me. It's just us, tonight. We're going to talk. And sit on the couch. And watch some stupid movies, if you want." She smiles, pressing her cheek against his shoulder blades. "Or smart ones. I _am_ going to go for another ride with you. I'm going to make you take me. You don't have a choice. Just not tonight."

It's the bottle that makes her sigh, a soft laugh escaping at the end.

"Give me that back before you waste it all," she feigns exasperation, still hardly able to keep the laugh out of her voice. "What are you, twelve?"

And she reaches around to grab -- yes -- the bottle, plucking it out of his grip.

"I'm going to wash your hair," she tells him. "Then I'm going to use the soap and make sure you've gotten _actually_ clean. Then we're going to get dry and curl up on the couch, and we're going to pick out a movie to watch out of the comedy section."

She didn't sound like she was entertaining any disagreements.

"Okay?"

Colin Wilkes has posed:
Colin settled in awaiting the experience eagerly, his shoulders slightly hunched in anticipation. He rubbed the side of his nose with one hand, the other resting on his thigh.

"We had like three Billies inside and one of the neighborhood kids was named William too, so at some point we decided to call him Dollar, and he kinda liked it. Dollar Bill? Anyway we all had bikes from the Shriners, but they were really crappy. Dollar had a Trek. Really nice bike." recounting his twelve year old self, "Anyway he let me ride it one day and the whole time I am riding it I got this weird feeling in my...tip?" he pointed down into his own lap. "Its not bad but definitely weird. They didn't really explain anything to us there, like a total babies come from stork's type situation. Like non of the penguins wanted anything to do with The Talk. So we never had it. Anyway. What was a sayin. Right so I loop around I am on my way back, and all of the sudden funny tingle turns into sharp pain. Like not painful pain but like urgent pain? You know what I mean? Like a pain that makes you stop everything and pay complete attention, makes the world this big. You and the pain. So like I am on the block, right? Its day time. People everywhere. I am in the middle of the street. I stop the bike, drop it, and pull down my pants, in front of the world. Did not care, had to address the issue, nothing else was important. Like everyone can see me, and everyone is just staring..."

"There was a black ant on the tip, and he had one of his little mouth spikes on the inside of the hole, and one on the outside and he was just staring up at me with his beady little black eyes and going gnnnnnnnnnnnnnn! at me." at this point Colin was using his arms as any mandibles, mashing his fists together and looking back at her challengingly. "GNNNNNNNNNNNNN takes that bitch!"

"Yeah so anyway even a humble ant you know? Its just like, you can't unknow that like, people are fragile."

Aria Seraphine has posed:
It's been hard living without her divine gift of empathy for the last five years, like suddenly losing one of your senses and having to learn to sharpen the others to compensate.

In Aria's experience, people behaved around her in mostly predictable ways -- especially men. Women, too, though there were a few more categories to slot them into once she had a better read on them. But some people could be strange. Sometimes they're strange in bad ways. Sometimes they're strange in all the best ways. Either way, it often meant that their life somehow deviated from the 'predictable' path at an early age, for one reason or another, and as a consequence, they were no longer predictable adults.

Mostly, the men she's had any experience with over the last five years have wanted a very specific kind of attention from her -- the only unpredictable part was exactly what flavor they enjoyed. Some were timid. Some were violent. Even if she couldn't see far enough into the future to know exactly what was going to happen, she still had a pretty good idea.

But Colin is not predictable. She knew what she was doing when she got into the shower. She'd been prepared for any number of reactions to her presence, but she had not been prepared for that story.

At the beginning, Aria doesn't seem to know what to expect. Three Billies and a Dollar Bill doesn't sound like the opening of any kind of story she's ever heard before, so she listens as she pours some shampoo into her hand, sets the bottle aside, and proceeds to lather it into his hair. The pointing has her making some assumptions about what he was about to describe -- and the cynical part of her has already started trying to figure out how he was going to work the story of his first time 'figuring it out' around to getting her to help.

It's what she's come to expect. It's what most men would have done in his position, if they bothered to even talk to her at all, instead of just taking their comfort out of her in whatever physical manifestation of their need popped into their mind at the time.

It's the end, though, that has her laughing so hard she's crying. The mandible thing. The noises. The full on buy-in to the bit where he's pretending to be the ant. She practically loses her balance, and she rests the wrist of one soapy hand against her forehead like she was trying to hide her face from him. The whole thing hits her _just_ right, and she's just lost to the laughter that fills the room, echoing faintly against the walls amid the constant spray of the water and the rising steam.

Her she was, in her own shower, naked with a man she barely knows, and she's... happy. Blissfully happy. And maybe that's partly why it feels like she knows him better than she really does.

Because she found one person in five years who wanted to spend time with her that she doesn't have to be afraid of.

"Y-You need to..." Another round of giggles starts up. No doubt she's remembering his miming the ant again. "..to rinse... before it gets in your eyes..." she chokes out between the laughter.

Colin Wilkes has posed:
Colin Wilkes leaned forward, breaking their touch, and bowed his head into the water. The beads tore into the suds, pocking them, and pushing them into streams down his back and front. He was a little ball now, his knees hiked up and arms linked around them. The sound of the shower and a bit of steam. He slowly turned around to face her, the water coming down his head and into his eyes and face offered her only partial cover from his gaze.

He met here eyes, but he could see all of her now. Wasn't much worth hiding of himself either.

"People like us, I think we find each other." he mentioned, he still didn't know what she was, he just knew she was something.

"But we also find people like them." he nodded, as if agreeing with her even if she wasn't. "I don't think we get to have one without the other." he said after a long pause. "God gave me you, and I think he wants me to understand that I can't have you without him. So, its like barter. The scale is the same on both sides. As good as you are, that how bad he was. And maybe, thats what I am for you. Balance the scale. So when we're like this, we know the rest is gonna be bad."

"But at least we got paid a fair wage." he said, dipping his head in reverence to her.

Aria Seraphine has posed:
Aria's about to respond to the first -- 'I think we find each other.' Her lips are open and everything. There's even a little smile on them, like she might have said something about how sweet the sentiment was.

But then he hits her with the 'God gave me you,' and she actually seems to... recoil. Her expression falls, and all of that laugher from before just leaks from her face like she was a deflated balloon.

She's kneeling on the floor of the shower with him, just getting a spray from the water, but she looks suddenly... upset. Scared. Sad. She certainly doesn't agree, and if that's not evident in the downturn of her lips, it must be made even more obvious by the shake of her head.

"God didn't..."

Why does she look _so_ horrified by this?

"Colin, God didn't... I'm not a gift. I'm _not_..."

I'm not 'good,' she wants to say, but she can't bring herself to complete the thought. For eons, being 'good' was her identity. She was the embodiment of mercy and kindness. And some piece of her dies whenever she thinks about how much of herself she's lost... how much she'll never get back. It's like a little of he light in her eyes simply dims.

"Listen to me. Please. Life isn't balanced that way. You don't have to be hurt to experience warmth or love. Life can be... drastically unbalanced. It's even more unbalanced than I ever realized it was. But you're allowed to feel happy without being punished for it."

Said the pot to the kettle.

"God didn't put me here," she whispers, her voice barely above a whisper, even in that small space. "If he even knew why I was here..."

She shakes her head, her eyes dipping. If He knew and was doing nothing, she didn't know if she'd ever recover any amount of her love or loyalty ever again. So, she tried not to think about it.

Colin Wilkes has posed:
After some movement he was on her, splitting her knees with his body, arms around her middle and cheek resting on her belly; half his face in the spatter from the shower. Perhaps he was holding her in acceptance of the awful affirmation, or in spite of it. He wasn't letting on either way.

His body consumed the remaining floor space of the shower, his breathing was slow and steady. His heart was slow and quiet. He was not excited by her. The shower was killing them, each bead of water striking their bodies with no end in sight. Subconsciously he accepted the metaphor and decided to die in the cradle of her legs, and arms if offered.

There was no reason to leave the shower, no succor to be had in a world which she had just explained to him that he did not understand. So stay here, huddled in the shower, naked a wet, and wait for time to take them.