Room 210; Wednesday Afternoon [02/06].

[white_oleander]

Good-bye, pinwheels. You were fun while you lasted, a blip in Astrid's amusement after a ridiculously long case of artist's block, and now she was so fueled with a new idea for her wall so soon after putting you up. Like flowers that wilted soon after plucking them from their life-giving stems, the joy of the bright colors and the unexpected moments when the light would catch them just right or a breeze from seemingly nowhere would push them to spin had faded, wilted, fell away, replaced b a vision she couldn't get out of her head since Monday. A memory, really, more than anything else, but the urge to get it out of her head and onto her wall was finally strong enough to pull her to drag out the tarps, pull her bed away from the ever-changing canvas, crack open all the windows, and get to work with white-washing the boxy geometric shapes that had complimented the pinwheels.

How much smaller would this room be by the time she graduated, shrunken by slowly building inches of whitewash and paint on this wall?

And then she'd get started on next vision, a blurry, somewhat impressionistic scene, cloaked in dark shadows. Dark blue background, bold black shapes in the foreground, stretching in a long line diminishing as it went to the horizon, but in the center, a sliver of bright, golden light. A burst of a star, the unrelenting sun, if not for the curves and lines to suggest the vague shape of a woman. She was already looking forward to figuring out how the light would cast itself against those shadows; that was always what intrigued her the most about a new piece, the distribution of light. And around the edges, starting in shadow, slowly growing brighter into a light pink at the edge, bunches of oleander, little bubbles of red dotting their petals, a bit like blood, a bit like dew.

In a way, it was nice to feel so absolutely driven and inspired again. But, considering the source, she wondered if it'd better if she wasn't.

[[open door, open post!]]

Comments

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae, never having been super good at "boundaries", wandered right on in through that open door.

"Woah." She tilted her head, taking in the painting. "That's . . . wow."

Astrid was clearly on a whole different art level than Mae and her scribbled journal.

[white_oleander]

"Hmm?" Astrid had definitely been wrapped up in her art bubble; she wouldn't have even realized Mae had wandered into the room if she hadn't said anything. Even as she turned her head, she did so at first without even looking, attention still on trying to figure out whether it was better to make the bright light vague and intistinguishable or to make the feminine form in it more obvious. And even when she saw Mae standing there, she had to blink a little before she realized what she was looking at.

"Oh." There it was, and she shook her head slightly as if to get it back down into the actual world. "Hey, Mae. What's up?"

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae shrugged. "I'm wandering around." She tended to do that a lot. Or hide in her room and ignore everything and everyone. There wasn't really an in-between mode for her. "You're making a mural."

She was well familiar with murals. Possum Springs was lousy with them.

[white_oleander]

"Yeah," Astrid agreed, turning her head to look at it even though she just was, brushing a loose strand of hair out of her face, getting a little splotch of dark blue paint on her ear as she tucked the hair behind it. "It's kind of what I do. Well, Sabine and me both." She nodded to the other side of the room, very different in style but no less bursting with a similar artistic energy, and she smiled, just a little. "So if you're ever wondering what smells like paint and turpentine around here, it's probably us."

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae turned to look at the other wall, then back at what Astrid had going.

Those were definitely some very different aesthetics in play.

"And no one comes in to tell you you're, like, destroying school property?"

Mae's side of her room was going to end up covered in weird graffiti now, just you wait.

[white_oleander]

Astrid just shook her head a little and shrugged. "Nope," she said, vaguely even remembering that faint moment of doubt she had when they'd first started. But Sabine hadn't seemed to care at all, and so Astrid followed suit, and now the both of them had probably gone through enough paint to coat the Great Wall of China.

"I honestly don't think they really notice stuff like this," she said. "I skipped almost an entire class my first semester, and didn't even get a shake of a finger."

And she was possibly thinking of doing that again, too. This semester was leaving her a little too exhausted to be so outright rebelious, though. Which, she realized, might have been the intention.

[thishouseishaunted]

". . . Wait, really? Did they just fail you?"

Mae had not yet grasped the whole "no grades, minimal rules" deal Fandom had going yet, no.

[white_oleander]

Astrid only shrugged again. "If I did," she said, "I didn't hear anything about it. I'm pretty sure they do a whole 'aternative school,' no report cards thing."

If they did, it had gone straight into a file and straight to her case worker, who hadn't said anything about it. But she wasn't about to say that to Mae, even if she felt Mae being in therapy would reduce the chances of her thinking a case worker was weird.

Then again, why was she even thinking about what a girl with a cat's face would think was weird?

[thishouseishaunted]

Because despite having a cat face, Mae was pretty damn normal?

"See, now you've got me thinking I should be skipping class more."

She actually kind of liked her classes though. And there were only the two of them. . . .

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"Changing it up already?" Sabine asked as she came in, stopping to appreciate the work.

Her side didn't change much. She added to what was already there.

[white_oleander]

Astrid finished up on a little swatch of reflection on some shadow's head before responding, blowing on the newly applied paint as if that would help it dry a little faster. "Yeah," she said, turning her head then an offering a faint smile toward Sabine. "I wasn't about to argue with the muse when she showed up, especially after she'd been gone for so long,"

And she almost added a hope you don't mind, but she caught how stupid that would have been before it left her mouth. Sabine hadn't minded any of it, not the pinwheels, not the one that made her feel like she was drowning, not the oppresive trees or the poison flower forest, and even if she did, it was her room too. But the painting just put her in that frame of mind, and she felt a little proud of the fact that she hadn't completely gone back.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"I really like it," she said thoughtfully, because of course she had to consider the actual work. "You can tell you're feeling this."

[white_oleander]

Astrid's laugh came out as a bit more of a snort than she would have liked, considering how the whole point of it was that she couldn't stop feeling it.

"Thanks," she said, hoping the snort didn't then make it sound sarcastic, because she did mean it. "It's been sort of stuck in my head since Monday, but work's kind of nuts with Valentine's Day that I didn't have it in me to start until today."

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"Another one of those holidays that makes no sense?" Sabine checked.

She was not a giant fan of the holidays here, no.

...Halloween got a pass.

[white_oleander]

"Yeah," Astrid grinned faintly. "This one's about love and romance and letting people you care about know how you feel, named after a saint who apparently used to perform secret weddings. Thus the romance."

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"That could actually make for a good story," she allowed. "There are a lot of holidays about togetherness here, huh?"

[white_oleander]

"You know," said Astrid, after taking a moment to consider it, "I've never thought of it that way, but you're right. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, all about togetherness. But, then again, we just had Groundhog's Day, and that's just about watching a large rodent come out of a hole and thinking he can predict the weather."

But you kind of had to admire its straightforwardness, as far as holidays went.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"...Ohhh, that's probably what delivered the pizza," Sabine realized.

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae waved. "Hey Sabine. Nice wall."

Seriously, her room was going to get so covered in sharpie later.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"Thanks," Sabine said with a little smile. "We do a lot of work in here."

Her desk was also bright pink and black, with a distinct bird theme.

"Are you into art?"

[thishouseishaunted]

"I guess," Mae said. "I don't really know a lot about it, but I draw in my journal all the time."

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"Me, too." Which probably made sense when you'd seen her room. And the murals in town. And her. "What do you draw?"

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae shrugged. "Stuff from my day. Back home I drew my friends a lot." All, like, two of them. "Or the weird creepy statues we have all over town. Or, like, the skyline of empty factory buildings."

Sometimes her town could be a very sad place.

[seriesofbaddecisions]

"That actually sounds pretty interesting," Sabine mused. "At least from a certain point of view."

Empty buildings could be cool, especially to someone who'd taken over a warehouse on her first day here.

[thishouseishaunted]

Mae had managed to take over an arcade! Of sorts.

"You think?" Mae asked. "I never really thought anyone would be interested but future-me. And maybe not even her."

Future!Mae would probably have her own crap to deal with.