The Artist and the Canvas [Pyper]

[Jesse Fforde]

--The following transcript was a live chat roleplay--


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse stretches. He rolls his shoulders, and glances around the space; Larch Court is the hub. The place where he brings all the new progeny; the place they can stay, if they need it. A place where they can meet, safely, away from the public and prying eyes. He’d tried to make it as comfortable as possible; games, beds, showers, and all the other things that vampires seemed to require – a crafting table, a ritual circle, and a computer for everyone’s use. He’d even installed a fadeportal, so that those new to this world could get to the Quarantine Zone more easily – a question that he had put forward to the Fforde lineage, and the overwhelming majority voted that they’d like easier access to Corvidae. So be it.

It is into this space that Jesse is about to summon Pyper. In one of the corners he’s set up a chair for easy tattooing, and a table upon which is organised all his inks and drawing implements. Upon the walls are tacked different designs and drawings – random images that had come to mind and which he had to get down on paper. Snakes, owls, and mythological imagery, mainly. A lot of colour. A few in black and white.

He is barefoot, as he stands; he wears only a pair of track pants, and a black tank top. Probably the least amount of clothing that Pyper will have seen him in, thus far; once, she had asked what all his tattoos meant. It wasn’t a conversation they had continued. In the end, she’d only really seen the tip of the iceberg.

Pyper isn’t Fforde, but that doesn’t matter to Jesse. Larch Court isn’t just for those of his lineage, not really. The blood bond doesn’t mean as much to him as it seems to matter to others. If he likes someone, and if he deems them worthy, then they will be allowed into this space. Pyper is the first outside of Fforde that he has welcomed into this space, and she is thoroughly deserving of it. In his humble opinion. She had agreed to be summoned, and so that is what he does; standing in the middle of the room, his fingers flex and his eyes close as he focuses on the girl; he projects his desire for her presence out into the ether, and he can feel the magic working. A tug, somewhere in his core; invisible hands reaching across space to grab her, and transport her here.


<Pyper> A forest green spaghetti stringed tank top was the last part of the outfit that Pyper needed in order to step out from a fogged bathroom. Steam collected and plagued the mirror with water droplets that she hand matted across. The streaks she left behind were worse. The towel swung over her shoulder and hooked to the metal 'J' on the back of the door. This shower had only taken an hour, opposed to the one prior, doubling in time. Habits that originated at the hospital were the same ones she veered from; wanting to avoid reverting back to such organized behavior, it was necessary for her to go against the norms set in place for her. It drew attention; and after a brief run-in with Paige, whom introduced her to a man named Wendigo. He made statements about her filthy appearance, explained to her about the wounds. About the Masquerade and how it should be upheld. Death was the only alternative pathway, should a vampire deviate and expose the rest of the species. Pyper still didn't know why they hid from humans or if there was some way to co-exist but Paige was very insistent that not dabbling in her hobbies was in her best interest. It made things less interesting, unfortunate as that correlation went. Just as the bed creaked under her weight, a paralyzing grip on her closed in. The sensation a person felt similar to pulling the rip cord of a parachute. Or the rope yanking them back while bungee jumping. Had there been a cartoonish cloud of smoke that puffed out from the tear in reality that swallowed her, it would have come as no particular surprise anymore.

Easing into a ready acceptable, very little excited the telepath's expression. Bouts of overstimulation could and had occured in her time settled in Harper Rock. This abrupt, startling mode of transportation sparked overactivity in her nerves. Spit out, she didn't recognize the final destination and a hand grabbed for a kitchen knife, knuckles blind-white with the intensity of her grip. "Where am I?" The iris wrapped pupils never stopped jerking back and forth.


<Jesse Fforde> The smirks wraps around Jesse's lips as he takes a single step backward. He should have given some kind of warning - he knows this. But there's something so completely satisfying in just once surprising someone. Not all the time, of course, because he doesn't want them revoking his ability to summon them. And besides which, she knew this was going to happen. It had been agreed upon - even if more than the three nights had passed. Jesse crosses his arms over his chest - she certainly looks cleaner than usual. "Larch Court. For your tattoo," he answers, calmly.


<Pyper> The objects in the room were fluttered over, too many objects to seriously consider. Her lighter irises darted maniacally and abruptly stopped at Jesse once she believed her accessed everything. "I showered. Skin is still wet," she said, not knowing whether that made a difference in tattoos or not. Her pictures with ink ran, staining the rest of the paper. It could have been the same with Jesse's pictures. "I was told that, I needed to habituate certain levels of hygiene." Every word is over-annunciated. Beyond the chaotic mind, was a girl trying to assimilate into her new community. If only just in certain regards. The parasitic cancer eating her brain and limiting her cognitive functions had some areas that refused to be tamed.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse laughs, and nods. "Still trying to fix you, then?" he asks, but it's a rhetorical question. He doesn't fully require an answer to it. "I'm glad I didn't summon you while you were IN the shower, then. That could have been awkward," he says. "Though I suppose I do agree, to an extent," he adds offhandedly. "We're required to keep the Masquerade in place, and I suppose unhealthy levels of hygiene might draw attention. Though, plenty of humans run around with very low levels of hygiene," he gives a shrug. He gestures in toward the tattoo station, where there's a chair, and his desk, and all his pictures tacked to the walls.


<Pyper> Pyper, deep in the marrow of her bones, disagreed with him. Why were bodies awkward? All they were were torsos with levels of extremeties and appendages. It's what people did with them that was awkward. Inner thoughts casted off from the forefront of her mind and she cleared her throat and form different words, gearing the thoughts in an alternative direction. "Why, do we hide?" Meaning the origin, and for a second, the hitch in the sentence conjured an alarm; Pyper didn't want to break character, with stuttering and loosely associated - if at all - hard-to-follow patterns of response. With television and movies to emulate what was an average person, however overdramatic (depending on the genre), social cues were vaguely recognized and copied. She knew all of these once.


<Jesse Fforde> Again, Pyper throws Jesse for a loop. The questions she asks sometimes are so specific, and yet also entirely vague. Contradictory in nature, for a few moments Jesse can only stand there with an arched brow, lips partly open as the cogs in his own brain slowly begin go churn; to accustom themselves to this strange girl and the conversation she might inspire. His thoughts spiral out from that single question; so many connotations. He can only assume she's referring to his statement about showers and awkwardness. He finally finds a smirk. "I like to think it's not hiding, but retaining mystery. Naked bodies inspire lust, basically. To slowly reveal a naked body is like unwrapping an unexpected gift. If we don't hide, there's none of that... anticipation," he explains.


<Pyper> When Pyper's eyes go for a very slow blink, illustrating the confusion that bubbled to the surface thereafter. He didn't answer the question she wanted him to, but it did explain Phoenix's unwillingness to allow Pyper to dress herself similarly to Leah. It's the first time the blonde laughed the entire night and probably weeks prior. The act caught her off guard, the corners of her mouth coming down as quickly as they'd perked up. "Bodies are just things, there is more that we have than just them," she murmured, closing off that portion of the conversation. Things like attraction may have been better left up to Phoenix, and Paige to explain to her. "I meant, the Masquerade. We hide, all of the time. I don't .. remember why." A lot of things fled her mind. It took her a handful of nights to find her exact resting spot in the abandoned asylum. Her OCD had been strained, and shot up her nerves. So she hid, from everyone.


<Jesse Fforde> "Ah," Jesse says. He was quite enjoying the talk about bodies. He could have argued that point all night. Yes, bodies are just vessels within which they live, but they are also a hot mess of nerves and pressure points; and oh, how he just wanted to get started on skin. The softness, the curve, the suppleness. No, bodies are art, for him. They are canvasses. Some are better than others. And art should not be so easily dismissed. He sighs, and rolls his shoulders. "That. We hide, because if we don't, the Hunters will rise. They'll grow in number. Evangelists will call us demons. Monsters. There was a holocaust once, you know - all vampires wiped out. Because the secret was given up. Only here, in this city, there's a rift. Some were able to rise from the dead. We are all new, all born fresh from them. We hide, because we don't all want to die again," he says.


<Pyper> A single picture cluttered any other thoughts. Of blood, waves of it splashing upon mountains of corpses. Fire licked their digits, crackled at their wrists. Some of the rising flames were doused and hissed with their disapproval. A massacre of vampires, an extermination. Jesse had his bodies as a conduit for his art. Pyper did, in her own way. More of it stemmed for a need to test limits, of anything. The body was just a convenience. If someone handed her a knot, and said it was the universe, every strand would be carefully unwound. Artistry of disorganization, often leading to chaos. A disorderly stack of dead bodies might have been nice to see, just once but offering people like Jesse, and others, as a sacrifice to this piece wasn't right. That much she knew. It didn't keep the smile away, though. "New bodies every time?" Pyper's feet shuffled near and apart from each other where she stood.


<Jesse Fforde> This question isn't quite as specific as the last. This one is generally just very vague, and Jesse's brows furrow. He leans up against the nearby bench, hip against wood. His arms cross over his chest, even as one foot crosses over the other. He licks his lips; he searches the previous conversation, his previously uttered sentences, for the point at which this question could have been born. "Nope," he finally responds. "You've lost me now. New bodies every time? What do you mean?" he asks. He's not afraid of offending Pyper; he doesn't treat her any different to how he would treat anyone else. She, too, is victim to his bluntness.


<Pyper> Pyper's hand clutched the jewel that hung from a chain around her neck. Phoenix's. The fisted hand wound and worked the gem around to the back of her head and she yanked up. It was a very slack, but very accurate noose. "When we die, and we come back, do we get new bodies everytime?" Her voice deepened to try to imitate his voice, "We are all new, all born fresh from them." A horrible impersonation but then Pyper lacked the correct levels of androgen Jesse's had over a decade to brew while he was human. "Do you think like the Evangelists? Do you believe you are a monster?" The fidgeting was controlled but it started coming up little by little as more time went on. So the blonde's eyes darted around for a chair. Her chair, for the tattoo.


<Jesse Fforde> Aha. Poor choice of words, really, on Jesse's behalf. "I was talking figuratively," he says. "I mean there are only a handful of vampires who can say they are older than a human lifetime. The rest of us have only been here since that rift... I don't know the exact timeline. I'm kind of vague on the whole history of it," he says, thoughtfully, his brows still furrowed as he tries to summon the things that he had learned. He shrugs and gives it up. "I suppose we must get new bodies. If we turn to ash, when we die, we can't exactly keep our old ones," he says, in answer to that question. "And I do not. I asked for this. I wanted it. If we are monsters now, then we were monsters as humans, too," he adds.

[Pyper]

--The following transcript was a live chat roleplay--

<Pyper> Humans could be monsters? Pyper must have seen some of them, at some point. Flesh like hers, a voice. Their own thoughts rattling and ping-ponging back and forth. What made them off course from everyone else? "I will find a monster," she stated, then with a gesture of her arm posed the question, "Where do I sit?" Her fingers needed the arms of a chair to steady themselves. Arms and legs to fasten flat to their accomodating surfaces, like having the straps in the doctor's chair clamped tight enough to interrupt the steady blood flow through multiple, defined veins. This, she found a comfort when things varied too much. Jesse's summoning her here, a first tattoo. All deviations from what she picked and arranged as a normal routine. ".. I also forgot the picture.. "


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse has no idea what Pyper means when she says she will find a monster. He's not all too concerned; willing to brush past that particular topic to move on to the obvious reason he had summoned her here to begin with. Of course, idiot - he should have warned her, so that she would remember the picture that she wanted. The picture she herself drew. "You can sit over there," Jesse says, pointing to the black leather chair that almost looks identical to a dentist's chair. Almost, but not quite. "Sorry. I should have warned you. We can go get it - or you can describe what you want, and I can try replicate what's in your head," he says, tapping his temple with his finger.


<Pyper> To engulf herself with a form of long-term gratification, Pyper lessened the distance wedged between herself and the chair. Carefully lowering down, with a palm to its assigned arm rest, her throat rejects a bout of oxygen that staled in her lungs. A habitual physical response to the dose of nostalgia, and relief. The simple sigh dropped weight from her upper torso and caved in her abdomen so the sharp protrusions sloping along the lumbar curve were the first to touch the chair's cushioned back. Both feet touched the rubber covered sheet of metal, and her arms anchor into place. Pyper felt immeasurably better.

"I might be unclear, my description, but I trust you," the finality of her voice advanced towards dictation. "Sharp angles. Ivy, coming from the outside of the shoulders, to the sternum. Balled, tightly around light. White won't show. Create a negative of light to symbolize the sun." In her mind, she could see it but she stared expectantly for Jesse's opinions and suggestions. She valued them.


<Jesse Fforde> Pyper had seemed so very particular about making sure she had her pictures, that Jesse is a little that he'll be able to replicate exactly what she wants. Always open to a challenge, however, Jesse retrieves the larger sketch pad and a couple of different pencils. He'll try the design first in pencil, and go over it later in pen. Maybe he'll do this old-school, free form on the skin, rather than transfering the design from the sketchpad, to the transferable paper, and then finally onto his canvas. He grabs the rolling chair and pulls it closer to Pyper; he sits, and rests the sketch pad on his knees as he draws, brows furrowed in concentration and focus as he tries to visualise what it is that Pyper has in mind; then, as if recieving a prompt from on high, he suddenly stops.

"Hey. That thing you do with the... projecting memories into my head. Can you do that with this, too? Show me what it is you want? Maybe a memory of the picture you already drew?" he asks. He'll still be able to make his suggestions for changes, but it might take less time to get right.


<Pyper> Remembering all of the details proved to be a daunting and impossible obstacle, given the two minutes passed in silence from the parlor chair. Shifting her upper torso's weight to anchor each side accordingly, the blonde slouched down and folded both lids over their designated eye. Underneath faint lines of the veins criss crossing from the inside of the eyelids, the image created itself. Not from a memory but from the dreams she had of it. A ferocious ball of fire, an infinite star with licking flames choked out from the branches of ivy. They twist around one another, like tethers, keeping the light from being lifted away. Pyper injects her self image into the fold, trying to overlap the area she preferred the tattoo be placed with a minimized version of the burning ball of vegetation. Breaks happened; they were interruptions in her thought, and sometimes split frames flashed to dominate the imagery shared between the two. A needle, pushing through a vein. The tattoo. A POV of biting into an orderly's bicep. The tattoo. Bloodied clawings at closed doors. "Can I stop?" The longer honed in on the picture, the worse and more frequent the deviating thoughts came.


<Jesse Fforde> The image is quite clear, and Jesse closes his own eyes in order to focus upon it. His brows furrow together as he attempts to concentrate, and to remember as much of the imagery as possible. There's no way he'll be able to work with the barrage in his mind. He just wants a look. One single look at what it is she has in mind so that it can be burned into his own memory. And he can work from there. She could have stopped after five seconds, but Jesse is curious. The deluge of other images, though morbid and no doubt upsetting, are of interest to Jesse; as if he's learning more about this girl from watching them. Is it rude, to want her to continue? She asks when she can stop, and Jesse just nods. "You can stop," he says. He doesn't say anything about the other memories; doesn't pry, doesn't push for more information. Instead, he opens his eyes and returns his focus to the drawing of the design. The pencil flies across the page, capturing the detail that Pyper has projected into him. Drawing is a thing that he has been doing every since he can remember. It is a hobby, and a profession. He can draw something that he has seen only once, in almost complete accuracy. He is expert at scale. And as he sketches, he often glances up at Pyper, willing her to interject if there's anything she needs for him to change, or add.


<Pyper> Each iris vibrated steadily, capturing the tempo in his hand while he draws. Some areas he's more certain of than others and the pencil never ceases to wave its eraser. Some contours demanded more consideration; and while they were undertaken through an expert lense, each stroke took its time. It reminded her of the needlework that was now staling in its forced hibernation. Meditative states of mindless work, weave in and weave out. The surfaces of her eyes sometimes pulsed with discomfort and the veins illuminated with irritation when she'd forget to blink. Hours, dedicated to such mediocre work. Now, Pyper watched a professional. "Where will you put it? Where is the start, and the end?" was the only question that bemused her, leaving a worried expression.

The work was immaculate. Every detail of what she'd shown to him. Sharp curves of vegetation in the right places, and twirling braids of ivy. All of it. It wasn't until her hand was wiping at her cheek did she realize that she was smiling. Widely.


<Jesse Fforde> "I'll put it where you want me to put it," he says with a shrug. With this particular design he thinks he'll go freehand - rather than try to copy it all onto transferable paper before transferring to the skin. "This is okay? This is what you want?" he asks. She seems to be grinning from ear to ear, so he has a feeling that he's doing something right. "If this is what you want, if you like I can draw it directly onto your skin. Just with pen, first. See the vines? I'll have them taper off - you want them to go over your shoulders, yes? I can have them go as far as you want. Have them end wherever you want them to. All the way down to the wrist, if you like. Or just at the shoulders. I can draw them on and you can tell me when to stop," he says, arching a brow inquisitively.


<Pyper> The picture clouded over her vision, and both orbs collected moisture to help facilitate a glazed over expression. A gnarled knot of vines burned into her sternum and arms of vegetation shot from the sides, like tentacles. They wound, bending in loose roads across her skin, braiding and meeting in a sometimes tightly coiled whirlwind. The organic whips mark her, expanding to create an angled venetian blind pattern at the fronts of her shoulders. They would in synchronicity, like lanes on a racetrack and came up along the outter edges of her shoulders, slipping up over the tops and up the slope of her neck. It'd have to end at her hairline. Capturing the image, locking it tightly, her mind hurried pushed out the placement she wanted. "That."


<Jesse Fforde> The image accosts Jesse's brain. His chin tucks, his fingers pressing against the bridge of his nose; his eyes flutter closed so that he can focus on the image, the placement, the specifics that Pyper wants. This is, indeed, a very new way of going about his trade. "Okay," he mutters, as the images subside and he is left again to his own thoughts. They are burned into his retina, but he feels the need to act fast, lest he lose them. He rolls away, momentarily, to retrieve one of the felt-tipped pens from the desk. "Okay," he says again, sharper, more certain. He wheels back to Pyper, before standing. He weilds the pen. "This will be easier without obstruction," he says, head canting to the side. He's referring to the straps of her attire.

<Pyper> The tiny form seemed to sag in the chair. Unable to separate them, some powers that should never leave her body in a state of exhaustion, did. Her thoughts always scatter, mulling over even the most minute details of several individual scenarios. To articulate her words more concisely - despite progress in communication skills - and dump only a strained few details to piece together a complete, uninterrupted image, Pyper's mind expended a lot more of the energy that held her corpse together. Magically, she thought Paige had said. Jesse's voice jarred her from slipping into a catatonic state, just barely. Both pupils dilate, concentrating on the room, and Jesse, rather than the things inside her subconscious battling to claim the forefront.

Hands roam robotically, objectively removing the upper portion of her outfit without hesitation. It's often in hospitals that a doctor, nurse, or an aide sees you nude. Pyper's shyness about nudity wilted and turned to ash the day she was committed. The generic sports bra clung tightly to her but that too, is removed without pause. They obstructed the pathway of the vines. "Do people bleed a lot?" she asked, having her clothing piled in her lap. She had considered whether to set them aside, so blood couldn't have the chance to stain them.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse pays zero attention to Pyper’s nakedness. It’s almost as if as soon as he enters work mode, nudity becomes just a natural state of being. Pyper is not a woman anymore. Not a friend or a ‘sibling’ as the case may be, but instead a canvas. One cannot be attracted to a canvas. A canvas is only what you make of it, and Jesse has a job that he needs to do. The felt-tipped pen is of a make that washes away easily - non-permanent, like one might use on a whiteboard marker. But thinner, capable of more detail. He begins at the heart of the design, and just over the clavicle. From there he will work his way outward, glancing often at his previous sketch, with a furrowed brow as he also works from memory. Again, he works quickly so as not to lose the important details, and certain that Pyper will correct him should he go wrong somewhere. As she asks her question, he shrugs his shoulder. “It depends on the person, and the thickness of the blood. Some people do, some people don’t. And sometimes it depends on the part of the skin,” he says slowly, each word enunciated slowly. He’s still getting used to talking while working; ever since he started he hadn’t spoken while working. Only now has he begun to learn to focus on the two tasks at once.


<Pyper> Feather light, was the word she'd use to describe the initial feeling. Proving that there was no needle, no pain confused her and it showed in the subtle way her brows come together in an attempt to kiss at the center of her forehead. Flashes of the imagery wound in an otherwise disarrayed mental canvas flicker to work off a comparison of the vision and the beginning stages of the outline of the tattoo. Pyper was a living testament that Jesse was a master in his trade, for little criticisms were voiced for the duration of time that ticked by before she spoke up. Ten minutes gaped his prior explanation. "Did you always draw?" Movements were an involuntary risk to her speech. Forcing air down into her throat in order to breathe never died the night that Phoenix recreated her.

Imitations of rigor mortis stilled her, battling the early set, uncontrolled memories in her very muscles. The tics she's grown into, that have become such a heavy part of her. Phoenix wanted so badly for her to be like everyone else; and there is a minute piece of Pyper's thoughts that find the concept of normalcy intriguing. Willingness to explore and adapt into the role wedged into her existence blossomed soon after the curiousity began. Seeds of a sappling named obsession.

[Jesse Fforde]

Jesse settles into the silence like a fish slipping into water after too many long minutes gaping and gasping on a hot dock. Sometimes words, noise, conversation is like air that he doesn't need. He's not comfortable in it. It's air that is cloying, strangling, wedging into his throat to slowly choke him to death. People do a lot of talking, but words don't always mean very much. They're just noises. Actions will always speak louder than words. And thus it is that Jesse is comfortable in the silence that descends; the furrow in his own brow is a frown of concentration.

The flourishes and flicks of the felt-tip pen are not the scrawlings of some untalented imbecile. He is not working with crayons, and Pyper isn't a wall. The pen may only be one dark colour; he may only be working with one single tool, but that doesn't matter. He still manages to thin the lines when they need to be thinner. Though he does no shading - though the piece is just an outline for now - that's not what Jesse sees. Jesse doesn't see what Pyper will be seeing. No, he can see where all the colours will blend; he can see where he'll need to switch needles and shade. In the silence and concentration the artwork blossoms beneath his fingertips.

The tip of the pen pauses and his frown deepens as Pyper utters her question. He doesn't answer it straight away. He instead has her hand in his, lifting her arm every so slightly so that he can finish the curling design as it curves down the length of her arm. Only when he's finished with that arm, and wandering around the chair to start on the other, does he answer.

"Yes," he begins. Maybe, maybe because Pyper has entrusted him with her own images, her own burdens - if that's what she considers them - he feels open enough to spill at least a little about himself. "My brother was dead and my mother was catatonic. I'd forgotten ... well, I lost my will to speak. He and I, we used to draw roads on the pavement, outside on the street. We'd play with little cars," Jesse shrugs. "I just started drawing other things with that chalk instead. Found I liked that better than anything else," he answers. Good enough. He clears his throat, and continues with the design.

[Pyper]

A version of Pyper arose from the depths of the fragmented memories, thrown into the filing system of a decaying mind. Seven years old, her features lacked the defining curves they would develop years later. They were subtle facial markings from the events that made up her past, she'd come to realize when catching a transparent reflection of herself in the glass windows that separated some of the doctor's offices. Or the ones that cast out an exact mirror image in the otherwise unstimulating interrogation rooms in the bowels of police stations.

Decades shed, the unseen hands running their fingers over the images of those early adolescent years, trying to select a moment - like a movie - to play. It left her eyes with a glassy sheen on their surfaces, the top rim of the irises bumping past the superior eye lid. The deeper Pyper tried to reach to find something significant to share, the more the whites of her eyes invaded. A discomfort began at her temples, distracting pressure that halted the search. Trying to sift through the wreckage brought on migraines, a relentless and constant crushing blow that could lead to an incident. According to her records, from what she could recall of those, she's had a lot of incidences.

To alleviate some of the soft raps coming from the inside of her skull out, she grabbed an image at random. Ignoring the knock of pain was easy once the motion of the recollection gained its momentum. The room in Larch Court phased out, receding behind a black veil while the story played out. The habitual act of breathing slowed and stopped altogether; a means of self restraint, the only way she thought would control the spasms that might result in the occasional thrashing limb. That would destroy his work, and Pyper didn't want that.

It also meant that sharing this clip to expose another part of her life was best kept to herself. Flickers of a small hand - her hand - gliding across the pool of blood diluting with the water from the overflowing bath tub. The hands worked together, and they spread out. Even upon a very close look, one that she herself had seen those years ago, whatever little Lucretia's palms wanted to smear over the tiles never finished. A boot came down on one of the hands and her vision blacked out. She must have blinked, the fuzzed crystalline filter she saw Jesse through now focused each time her eyelid relieved the drying orbs.

Instead of chancing obscuring his vision of the tattoo, or speaking and bank of her uppertorso remaining stock-still, the words flow without the use of her mouth.

"What about your father? I never had a brother."

[Jesse Fforde]

There’s a tenseness to Pyper’s limbs, a stillness to her entire body that eclipses her former stillness that alerts Jesse to a change in demeanour. It has him laying a hand over the girl’s fragile wrist as he glanced up and away from his work; to see her eyes rolled up into the back of her skull, like some kind of gypsy in the middle of some future-telling vision or other. He watches. Seconds turn into long moments, and he wonders silently whether everything’s okay with the girl. He licks his lips – is about to ask the question when her eyes, sheened with water, blink. Jesse, too, blinks, and turns back to his work.

He could ask, of course, whether there’s something that’s bothering Pyper. He could pry. But, he doesn’t like it when other people pry into his business, and so he had adopted the habit of never prying into other people’s business. Though, truth be told, it isn’t all as selfless as that. He doesn’t refrain from asking questions due to some respect for other people’s private lives. Normally, it’s due to a lack of care.

With Pyper, however, he figures the girl will share what she wants to share. She’s not shy about it. He doesn’t have to ask if she gives freely – and anyway, he has a job to do and would prefer not to have the image in his head obscured by more of the morbid memories that Pyper might show to him.

No, he gets no more images from her, though her voice does reverberate in his skull. His brows furrow. He continues to work in silence for a bit; another glance is spared for Pyper’s face, his brows still furrowed not only in concentration but because there are certain things that he doesn’t ever talk about. It’s not painful, to talk about his father – or lack thereof. But it’s a private part of himself that he doesn’t give away freely. These kinds of conversations are ones that he tends to avoid, and he’s internally scolding himself for opening up the flood gates. He’d started it. By talking about the brother that he had lost and the reasons for his drawing, he’d inadvertently given Pyper permission to ask more questions.

Finally, he offers a shrug.

“My father is dead. I don’t remember him much,” he says. Simple as that. He meanders around behind Pyper, to begin the finishing touches of the design as it creeps around behind her shoulders.

[Pyper]

People to Pyper, were alien. Their habits, the way they've learned to speak. How the muscle underneath their expressions recalled its exact positions. Eventually, the skin imprinted with the creases. Did the person laugh a lot? Or did they have the perpetual need to squint their eyes together? Why do they do that? Growing up, the need to purposefully not develop habits formed her body's physical jolts. To betray her refusal to express herself in whatever necessary routines that kept some resemblance of inner euphoria.

Those blue eyes would always covet that glint, the figure of intellect that was screaming inside. The folds of her upper eyelids were defined but she hadn't received the etchings of worry lines yet. Dr. Proulx had relented, agreeing that delivering a series of shocks to Pyper's brain may hold a cure for her. Nothing else tried bore them any fruit. During that time, she spent a lot of time with her eyes forced open. Days used to go by, and an arm or a leg still jerked. The worst had been the times they had to bathed her afterwards. Her body gave out, and she lost control.

In short, the body and its use told stories about that individual's life. Things other people overlooked or never noticed at all. Pyper enjoyed stories. Jesse's haven't been difficult for him to share, and she listened. Both eyes darting in their sockets to study the way his face moved. The gestures, too, whether the body echoed familiarity as it moved to portray some unspoken reply. The shrug. That's where her eyes trained now. Up until he moved.

Another savored blink sharpened her vision once the flesh rolled back to aid with the adjustment. Etiquette dictated that something be said to illustrate empathy and express condolence. Despite the inhospitable conditions that plagued her past, stained her present and had the chance of being permanent for her eternity, emphasis on politeness between Anais and Dr. Proulx had been overkill. "I apologize," hushed her mind. She thought the phrase was synonymous to, 'I'm sorry,' and so it offered the same message of condolence.

[Jesse Fforde]

“You have nothing to apologise for,” Jesse says. The response doesn’t even surprise him, although it could have. It’s an odd way to phrase it, but he gets the gist. The way people apologise when someone’s died – a way of offering condolences. He would prefer it, of course, if people were to say my condolences rather than giving an apology. It just seems an odd thing to do. His brow remains furrowed, but not in thought, not because he’s lost in any kind of painful memory, but because he’s focused on getting the design finished, and done properly. It’s rough, the way that he’s setting the pen upon the skin, but rough in the way that sketches are sometimes rough – they still show the full picture, and give a full account of the image that is supposed to come to life.

“As I said, I didn’t remember him. My father’s death is not something I can be sad about because he’s not someone I have the ability to miss,” he says, as if he’s quoting some line that he’s uttered a thousand times before. He hasn’t. But nor does he wish to explain that he does miss his father. Not because his father is warm presence that he remembers and wishes that he could have back, but because if his father had never died, his Uncle would never have taken advantage of his mother. His father’s brother – Uncle Tommy - had been everything that Jesse’s father was not. He was a ********, a greedy scrounge, who only made Jesse’s life worse.

But he had had this discussion with Grey. With Micah, even. Everything seems to have settled. All the bad things that had happened, all the trauma, had led to the good. If Jesse’s life hadn’t been so fucked up, he might never have met Phoenix. Might never then, have met Grey. And might never have discovered that Micah was his honest-to-god blood-related cousin.

“Okay, I think this is good for an outline,” he says, before sauntering over to the desk to retrieve the digital camera.

“This camera can catch the image of vampires – I’m going to take a couple of photos so that you can see what the design looks like, so that you can recommend any changes. This is forever, this ink, and so we want to make sure it’s exactly what you want,” he says, arching a brow inquisitively at Pyper as he waits for her acquiescence. Pyper is an unknown entity and he has no idea how she might react were her to just start taking photos of her without her permission.

[Pyper]

Phoenix could never grasp why Pyper was drawn to Jesse Fforde. Never forbidding her childe from seeing what was technically - in her mind - someone she shared a common origin with, she seemed wary of their interactions. Had she ever asked, the answer would have been simple: Jesse was thought provoking. Like the devil's advocate, he doled out theories and opinions that often went against the generally accepted view. This in itself acted as a sort of camoflague, and learning to predict him had been invariably harder than with other people. To say that he cannot miss his father because he never knew him dredged up instances in her life that were acceptably applicable introducing this basic idea: That since she's never known normalcy, why should she pine for something to make her like everyone else? At times, yes, her speech was very abstract and broken but that never bothered Jesse.

Impressionable. Pyper's considerations and ephipanies derived from the moldings of the people around her and they were an ever changing. Just like the body could be easily transformed through a vibrating needle and ink, the mind was as malleable whether through purposeful intentions or through a subconscious prerogative.To be invited and privvy to the values that a relative had fed a certain hunger in the Telepath that blood didn't satisfy. The same way working with the sewing needles replenished her mind with a natural sedative; every time a project of that nature consumed her time, it had her enter a mediative state and her muscles worked from a learned collection of memories. Mental hibernation - the most times it overcame her - had been detrimental to any improvement in the handling of rat corpses, or the techniques used on wounds she had taken on herself. Those happened less and less since Phoenix introduced blood packs.

With now another contradicting line of reasoning to compare to Phoenix's ideas of how Pyper should assimilate into the Harper Rock vampire community, the lag time in her listening skills lengthened. A minute and a half after Jesse's verbal instructions on how the next stage of the tattoo session was to proceed, do Pyper's eyes rotate in their orbits and there's acknowledgement of the camera. Pictures had been an ordinary thing. In order to categorize markings left on her from other patients, or from the experimental treatments. Most of the time the daze was so heavy she never saw the camera flash, but they were all old polaroid cameras. Without the luxury that modern cameras offered, that spark of light was always utilized for the best shot.

Now with the artist readying the shots, Pyper assumed straighter posture, holding her shoulders back. It's the same way that the orderlies had wanted, in order to fully view every marking. It's what Jesse wanted, to show her the details in their final prepping stages before the actual permanency bit into her flesh and carved out her shared vision. As fixed as a statue, the blonde's eyes winced expecting the blink of light to startle her pupils to contract into pin holes to let in as little of it as possible.

[Jesse Fforde]

There’s something that’s changed in Jesse upon the introduction of Grey into his life. It was a slow change; in the beginning, she was like everyone else. She was a woman, with a man who did not believe in love, who thought he would never fall in love, and who claimed sex as one of his favourite hobbies. Grey had absolutely no idea what she was getting into, the night she allowed Jesse to walk her back to her motel. Even worse, she let him know where she worked. She let him in, the wolf from the white van – the demon who would do her no good. A devil’s advocate.

He and Grey had been together for weeks, a month or two even. She was human, so Jesse had some inkling that she must have been different, if he continued to go back to her. Maybe it was this subconscious realisation that didn’t stop him from sleeping with other women – but that night, that first night he slept with Grey? Something snapped. Something broke, and from that moment on there would be no one else. Every woman that he saw, he would compare to Grey. He tried chasing them, but it didn’t work. He’d always return to Grey, and the only satisfaction that he could get was from her.

He thinks about it now, as he pushes the button on the camera; there is no flash. The lights are bright enough overhead, and the camera is of a good quality. There’s no need for a flash. Pyper is as naked, up top, as the day she was born and yet it arouses nothing in Jesse. Maybe perhaps because it is Pyper, and she sometimes reminds him of a child with all her bluntness and her curious questions; that wide-eyed look that she gets as if the whole world is new to her, rather than guarded and obscured by the world’s lies and masks. Or perhaps it is because he is working.

“I’ll delete these when I’m done,” he says. Maybe Pyper wouldn’t even think about it, but he wants to make sure that she knows he is professional. That he won’t keep these photos for someone else to find.

After he is done circling Pyper and photographing all the areas of her skin that he has marked with the design, he hands her the camera and shows her how to flick through the images. Hers are the only ones on the camera. He takes a step back as he waits for her to brows, to discern, and to tell him whether there’s anything she doesn’t like.

“It’s not going to be as sketchy as that – I’ll fill it in with colours. That’s just a rough outline – is the placement okay?”

[Jesse Fforde]

--The following transcript was a live chat roleplay--

<Pyper> Somewhere in Cheyenne, Wyoming there was a file with her full name across the tab, Lucretia Mercy Thisben. Inside of the bulky manilla folder, were a plethora of reports. They extend back over a decade of her life. The continuous process of being catalogued may have seemed like a glamorous exisence, but not when it involved documenting the physical results of a violent interaction between two patients. Or the orderlies overexaggerative way of handling their color codes. Pictures bookmarking every written report have something in common: a blonde female in a chronological string of photographs squinting at the flash of a lens. She's always heavily sedated with a cocktail of drugs, her vision nothing but a partial slit.

No one knew about the folder that Anais sent to Pyper. Not even Phoenix knew, and any willingness to share that information was washed away by the larger priority projects and experiences she was hungry for. The memories she can store, tuck away for a little while and breathe. It would have been baffling for a person to read her overstuffed file, and then see her allow her pictures to be taken. Not having the flash helped, Jesse will never realize how much. Tiny hands held the camera like a broken animal, with a stiff caution and brings the screen closer. After the end of the slide show, she didn't clear her throat with the intention of voicing disapproval. "It's perfect." The only time she had smiled like that was the night Phoenix killed her.


<Jesse Fforde> The grin is infectious. Jesse is a perfectionist in his work, and though he is always open to suggestions, although he will always change what he is asked to change, there was always a twitch and a cringe on the inside. He doesn’t like it when he gets things wrong. More so, perhaps, it’s not a need for approval. He doesn’t like it when other people’s visions don’t match with his own. Maybe that’s why, these days, he likes people to pick one of his pre-drawn designs, rather than give him one of their own. To be told that something is perfect, when he’d drawn it upon her skin in a most untraditional and extraordinary way, boosts his ego.

He nods. “Alright,” he says, and takes the camera back from Pyper. It’s a rather large design, and if they’re going to get the majority of it done in one night, they have to get started immediately. There’s a lot of work to do. He puts the camera aside. “Lay back,” he says, making sure that the chair is set properly, and at a good height for him to work. He busies himself with the ink, squirting first a few small tubs of black ink, and then a few of the different colours that he’ll need. He’ll do the outlines first. As soon as the ink is prepared and the gun is ready to go, he pulls a pair of gloves onto his hands and turns back to Pyper, tattoo gun in hand, the cord dangling, plugged in the wall somewhere beyond. “Ready?”


<Pyper> As her back flattened to become flush with the chair, she recalled the first of many following examinations by Dr. Proulx. It was a similar position. He used tweezers to remove glass from the bottoms of her feet. He wasn't her first doctor but he's been the most permanent one; the one to initially use experimental measures on her. Not without help but his face appeared in her dreams all the same. The glass had been deep and the work put into wigging the shards out of their burials without causing too much bleeding. At the time, the name Pyper didn't exist. The Telepath Jesse was looking at, even the woman she had been just before, was overshadowed by the deteriorating illness that carried over even in her assumed eternity.

Not watching Jesse, the memory played itself. An orderly grappled an arm around her shoulders. Something sharp cut into her hand, the palm squeezed out blood because of a decent sized sliver of mirror. He hadn't been too concerned with her legs. They pushed off every surface and during their unconventional dance, both feet launched off from above the sink in the bathroom. To a broken rectangular hold for the same mirror that the shard originated from. Pyper had never been able to explain why she had broken the mirror. Or what she planned to do with the shard. 'Ready?' "Yes.. I'm ready," she answers, trying to relax.