[OPEN EVENT] Weekend Winter Wonderland

[wintershepherd]

Characters: All?
Date: March 8th-11th
Location: All of Keeliai
Situation: It's been a stressful month thus far for a lot of people, but Jack is determined to Make All The Happy and decides he needs to get back to his wintery roots by giving the city a proper snowing.
Warnings/Rating: People high on snow glitter?
NOTES: Actionspam OR prose, whatever is preferred! (Settings were just easier to prose.) Make your own thread headers if none of these suit! ♥



Jack had spent the last three hours balanced motionlessly on the top of a flagpole, head tilted back as he listened to the wind and the sound of the city below. Where is Winter? it asked. I'm here! the spirit replied, but he knew it didn't mean his physical presence. He'd had too much on his mind and too much in his heart and in that sense he had indeed been absent these last few weeks.

Eyes closed and thoughtlessly trusting, he tipped forward into open air, letting the wind catch him and hurl him upward into the misty cloud cover that scudded across the stars tonight. At his touch they thickened, fat and pale grey against the indigo backdrop and Jack swirled them up, the motions so ingrained in him they felt just like breathing. In the small hours of the morning snowflakes began to fall on the sleeping city, specks at first but then quickly becoming heavier.

Now with a fresh canvas to work with, Jack was really in his element. He could never have done something like this back home, not anywhere in his world. It would have been too strange, too inexplicable, drawn too much attention. But here on the turtle, things were different. There wasn't really a semblance of normal and Jack poured his imagination and heart into the things he wanted most to share, and from the snow rose gleaming swirls of snow and blue light, forming things of exceptional detail and delight.

By the time the sun rose, a solid three feet of the snow had blanketed the city, glistening and crisp and Jack went rocketing down the streets, rapping on doors and windows to leave spirals of frost on every surface.

"Whooohoo! Snow day! Get up sleepyheads, everyone come out and play!"


THREAD STARTERS
Ice Skating | Snowball Battle | Sledding Hill | Ice Cityscapes | Kids Playground | OOC Plot Post

Comments

[epigrammatical]

It isn't often that Henry is inspired to quote anything but his beloved French writers, but there is one—and an American, no less—who his favourite Baudelaire admired enormously, and it's a few morbid lines of Edgar Allan Poe that come to his mind now.

"Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest."

He looks over at Rogers. "I was unaware that there was a mainland, in fact. I had imagined that our turtle plied the waves of an endless ocean."

[usavatar]

Steve listens to Henry's recitation with his eyes closed, pausing in the street to enjoy the sound of Poe's verse in the man's voice. The book was certainly right about its musicality, and despite the morbidity of the lines, it's somehow calming.

"The City in the Sea." Like something out of the Revelations. Steve falls in beside Henry again. "You were? I suppose it's not too surprising - none of us knew, either, until the first time we made landfall."

A slight grimace. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hit you with all of that at once."

[epigrammatical]

Henry smiles, his hand drifting in a graceful gesture that at once accepts the apology and suggests that it was unnecessary, but appreciated. "I am glad to know of these things. Does the turtle come to land very often, then?"

[usavatar]

"Only once while I've been here. Once in almost eight months."

Eight months. Every time someone asks a question that has to do with the duration of Steve's stay it shocks him all over again.

[epigrammatical]

"There must be very little mainland—or very little of it worth visiting, then," Henry replies, and then is unable to resist adding, "Rather like Australia, or so I am told."

[usavatar]

"Or a lot of ocean." He finds himself inclined to be contrary in conversations with Harry. He ducks his head to hide a smile regarding the Australia thing, though. "I've heard that the only thing in Australia that doesn't try to kill you is the people, but that's only because they were on our side."

[epigrammatical]

That contrariness is, in fact, one of the things Henry is growing to like about Rogers.

"Indeed; considering how the people got there, I should hedge one's bets against them as well." Transportation stopped when Henry was a boy, but the place still has a rough reputation in his day.

[usavatar]

He kicks another spray of snow into the air, for some reason wanting to play with it. "This might be a strange question, but... do you know Oscar Wilde?"

[epigrammatical]

There's the slightest flinch at that name, like a cat that's had a few drops of water fall on its head. But when he speaks, he's entirely calm.

"It is certainly not the strangest question that has ever been posed to me," he says. "I am acquainted with the man—in my circles, one can no more avoid him than Sir Coutts Lindsay can avoid exhibiting another en plein air peasant landscape."

[usavatar]

"Not a fan of Bastien-Lepage's legacy?" For some reason Steve finds himself more amused by the comment than put off. Part of it is the history, hearing about Wilde from different angles - maybe understanding a little better why he wrote certain people the way he did. "I always liked Grimshaw myself."

He brushes a toupee of snow off the top of a stone statue as they go by. More shyly, he says, "You didn't get along with him, I take it."

[epigrammatical]

"I rather prefer Whistler to both—the paintings, at any rate, if not the man." In fact he rather likes Whistler, or at least is amused by him, which is of course not at all the same thing.

As for Oscar—he is silent for a moment. It isn't as if he has ever made a secret of his dislike for the man, or vice versa; he has sometimes half-suspected Mrs Leverson and other society hostesses of secretly selling tickets to dinners to which they are both invited. Henry cannot deny his intelligence or wit. But Oscar is perhaps the only person whose friendship with Dorian has inspired anything resembling jealousy, and for that he cannot be forgiven.

And then there's the book, which still lies in his future, and which he now anticipates with dread.

All of this passes through Henry's mind in the time it takes to walk two or three steps. Out loud, he says, "He is a most worthy opponent with whom to cross a foil in a drawing-room, and if he chooses to antagonise me—well, I daresay that reflects well on his own character, for what intelligent man would want to have a fool for an enemy?"

[usavatar]

"I like his nocturnes and his etchings, but most of my teachers preferred his portraits."

Steve pauses himself, weighing his own answer carefully. "I suppose that speaks well of your character too. At least as far as choosing enemies is concerned."

He has more questions. More things he wants to know about Wilde and Dorian and Wotton himself. But there's only so much that academic curiosity can justify asking. Steve scuffs one heel along the gutter. "How... did you and Dorian meet?"

[epigrammatical]

"Of Whistler, I must stand in opposition to Ruskin on all things; therefore I am obligated to prefer Whistler. But even without that consideration, I will say that I find his nocturnes quite beautiful. Of Oscar, I suppose you would say that is very vain of me, and perhaps it is." In the brief pause before answering the question about Dorian, he adjusts the tassel of his ebony walking-stick; it is falling in a way he does not like. "Of Dorian, we met the day that my old friend Basil Hallward completed his portrait. A very fine June day with marvellous lilacs, as I recall."

It's a "when". Not a "how". Henry knows it, but leaves it to Rogers to decide if he wants to pursue.

[usavatar]

Steve tucks his hands into his pockets, marveling again that he's walking alongside someone who can throw out names like Whistler, Ruskin, Wilde, with that kind of familiarity.

And Basil Hallward.

"I never got to see any of Hallward's work." The comment is made in an offhand way, though the idea of Basil Hallward's existence makes Steve's head spin as much as Dorian's existence did. "You two were close? You and Mr. Hallward I mean."

[epigrammatical]

Secretly, Henry is just as happy to not talk any more than he must about Dorian's portrait; the revelations he has been vouchsafed since arriving in Keeliai are discomfiting and he is also too discreet to say much about it to a relative stranger. Basil, who still exists in the present tense for Henry, is an easier subject, recent disappearance notwithstanding.

"We met at Oxford, Basil and I. A singular fellow with a real genius for painting and no small feeling for music, and thus precisely the sort of fellow one wishes to cultivate as a friend, particularly at twenty. Yes, we were quite close."

Well, at least until Dorian Gray entered their lives.

[usavatar]

Lord Henry Wotton at twenty. There's an image that never occurred to Steve before. He's one of those men that seem to spring fully-formed into existence, sidestepping youth. It makes Steve wonder - if Lord Henry was always so calculating, if emotional expression was something excised out over time.

The thought is saddening somehow.

"It's called the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art now," Steve says, innocently. "The one at Oxford."

[epigrammatical]

Henry would like to pretend that he never passed through a period of callowness and naïveté, or that if he did, it was mercifully brief. In hindsight he imagines himself as having passed from boyhood to an unusually worldly seventeen in the blink of an eye. The truth is, as ever, more complex, and a puzzle Henry reserves for himself.

He laughs. "Of course it is. He was the Slade professor there, after all. I am sure he would be well pleased."

[usavatar]

He got Lord Henry Wotton to laugh.

If that doesn't beat all.

Steve smooths a hand over his mouth to hide a smile, focusing on their surroundings instead of on his companion.

[epigrammatical]

Henry looks over at Rogers, wondering if that's an expression of amusement he's covering there, and if so, what he finds so funny. Not that Henry is in a mood to bridle at being laughed at now. So he continues on the subject of Ruskin.

"He has not been well of late, poor fellow. And the times have rather outpaced him. Men have solved a great many problems in the nineteenth century—and in your own, even more, I do not doubt—but the inexorability of history is not one of them."

[usavatar]

Steve sobers quickly at that.

"No. No, history takes what belongs to it. Without art, without freedom, without goodness."

[epigrammatical]

Henry finds that phrase striking and smiles with pleasure at the sound of it, though there's a certain melancholy agreement in his look as he nods. "Clio is crueler even than Melpomene, for the muse of Tragedy at least offers κάθαρσις—her sister, however, merely records the unceasing passage of time."