+ Wanted to get it real home-like... +

[vitaelamorte]

Who: EVERYONE!
Where: EVERYWHERE!
When: ANYT-- Friday, February 20 to Monday, February 23
Rating: An average PG-13? (Consider warning for explicit sexual or violent content in your thread's subject line)
Summary:
For the duration of this event each character will discover that their room has been replaced with one of their own memories, one that they find themselves particularly happy or "at home" in. More information can be found here.

This log is an opportunity for your characters to describe the memory playing in their room, so that other characters might visit, and watch the scene unfold. To help browse the collection better, please include your character's name, and their room number in the subject line (e.g. Seta Souji - 100, 6th floor) of your top-level comment.

Rooms/Comments may be locked to certain people, or be available for all to see & visit. Log participation is completely and entirely voluntary.

Have fun!

Comments

[lifeskills]

Unconsciously, Victor fit himself into the doorway like one trying to conceal evidence from prying eyes. "How?" His voice rasped slightly from disuse, prompting him to clear his throat before continuing. "How did you know where to find me?"

The why are you here? was in there, too, as they lacked both the personal and the business relationship that might bring someone to his door in search of him. He knew for a fact he hadn't shared where he was staying with anyone except those from London...

He squinted. His instincts were normally sharper than this.

A little voice inside him nagged that her presence was oddly timed. Convenient. Something, something... something was familiar about it in a way he couldn't describe. If Victor had but listened to that voice, there was a chance he could have guessed the answers before asking the questions, but neither overwhelmed emotions, fatigue, or altered states of mind hadn't left him at his most astute.

A few seconds passed where Victor just looked at her, like the explanations might be written on her face.

"I... have the strangest feeling I'm not entirely myself," he admitted doubtfully. "Like I haven't been since all this started. But you knew what. That's why you're here?"

He'd ignored the sensation of holding a feeling close to his heart that didn't belong to him, an invasion of the foreign, a tether tugging him outside of himself, his dusty memories of boyhood being more than enough to drown everything else out like a tidal wave come crashing down around him... But the longer she stood there in front of him, the more reminded he was of a barbed resentment that didn't belong to him.

Like deja vu, but for something not to do with him.

[equalmeasure]

"I'm more observant than you might think," she tells him plainly, though she hadn't been certain that the door belonged to him. She had seen him come and go from this hallway, knew his door was somewhere in the vicinity, but it was the combination of scent and the strange and sudden surge of instinct she'd felt that had made her more sure, made her feel compelled to stop.

As for why she was there, her own explanation didn't seem to be enough, even for her. The question was as much hers as it was his.

She feels something wash over her, equal parts perplexed and wistful, and she knows that longing and the underlying feeling of loss don't belong to her. She has yearned, and she has felt loss, but it's never been like this, never felt so strangely out of place.

She narrows her eyes at him, curious.

"You're experiencing emotions that aren't your own, are you not?"

[lifeskills]

In contrast, Victor had had little opportunity to observe much outside of himself in all of this. In some ways it felt as though he'd traded the ability to feel his emotions in moderation for genius at some indeterminate time in adolescence, widening a gulf that had been ever present between himself and the rest of his family. He rubbed his forehead, bothered by his own mental exhaustion.

His own feelings were a burden, but twice the amount was twice as taxing--and twice as difficult to understand with Rebekah now standing in front of him. She was her own riddle, but more so today.

Why he didn't just send her away? He lacked the experience in this arena to answer either that question, or the one she posed to him. "I... I wouldn't know. Whoever heard of such a thing." It should be something to laugh at for the average person, but he wasn't average, and neither was she, and in the end Victor merely locked eyes with her in stark uncertainty.

[equalmeasure]

"This place seems to specialize in that which is generally unheard of." The smile she offered him was wry and oddly sympathetic, something that seemed almost out of place, so far gone from the haughty sarcasm she'd had to offer him the first few times they'd met. She could not be certain that anything within him had changed at all, but her own emotions were amplified as well as mingled with those that were distinctly foreign, and she felt another strong tug towards the room itself, causing her to attempt to steal another look past him.

"May I come in?" She did not wait for a response, but instead felt her breath catch as she catches the faintest glimpse of the woman fixed at the center of his memory over his shoulder, a surge of something that was not her own making her chest suddenly feel tight.

[lifeskills]

All the while calling herself a demon, Vanessa had once repeated a conversation he'd been a part of word for word--a conversation she couldn't have possibly overheard. He'd seen a creature speak through the bodies of those it had physically deformed and left in a quasi-conscious state. He knew the truth was sometimes uncanny and difficult to comprehend. Having a force tap into his most private self like one tapped a tree for sap was no stranger than the other supernatural events he'd experienced.

He knew it, and yet he was still largely an empirical creature who guarded his personal life jealously. Accepting that whatever was at work had unravelled the boundaries between people's psyches to share memories and emotions remained a bitter mouthful to swallow. Even so, with those same boundaries lowered, Victor found it harder than ever to pretend he was all right, that his world was under control, when it was just the opposite.

Wonderland had dug his world up from its grave and unleashed it upon him as he had once done with Caliban and it was just so--

It was so hard to be alone in this as with everything. Just like it'd been hard to watch his brothers and father move on from his mother's death and be the only one left grasping for more palpable consolation.

Having gone still, it was Rebekah's move to peer past him that caused Victor to stir again; swallowing, he moved to look with her. If put to task, he wouldn't know where to begin untangling what he felt--what either of them felt. Before anything else, he found himself murmuring, "You can see her, too?"

For a while, he'd wondered if his mind wasn't just playing tricks on him.

[equalmeasure]

She looks to him then, brow furrowed as though his question should answer itself. Why shouldn't she be able to see her? If he'd had yet to venture beyond his own room, perhaps he was unaware that nearly everyone's memories were on display, but there was more to it than that, and she feels it run through her as strongly as though she felt it all on her own-- the memory in this room was something he considered to be private, important, and it was only then that she was certain who it was she'd been tied to by Wonderland's efforts.

"Of course I can see her," she says evenly, making an attempt to keep her own emotions guarded even as she wonders if it will do any good-- she's handled them various ways in the past, worn them on her sleeve or buried them deep to try and protect herself, but the sudden prick of insecurity and uncertainty regarding someone else knowing what ran through her made her ill-at-ease.

"She's right there. I'd have to be blind not to."

[lifeskills]

Rebekah's doubt spurred on his own, a fusion of his and hers that did very little to help him decipher what, exactly, was more unsettling to him--that this memory and this cacophony inside himself could've been his own doing, or that once again the entire world bore witness to the story of his life thanks in part to some power he couldn't understand.

This time, though, what was on display wasn't a novel someone had written way before his time. It was the truth, a truth. His truth.

Both an ending and beginning of things.

Victor accepted the answer in silence and worked his jaw, still standing back from the door. Indecision gnawed at him for different reasons. He looked first from the past--his mother, the bright eyes he'd once thought he'd inherited from her, the generous smile--to the present. The young woman, still largely an unknown, features smooth and unmarked by the passage like hard surface of a diamond.

Maybe it was curiosity at what he was reflecting onto her that persuaded him to nod. Yes, she could come in.

Maybe it was instead just a desire not to shoulder the burden of Wonderland's meddling all by himself.

[equalmeasure]

The nod is enough; it circumvented the need for a verbal invitation, and Rebekah stepped past him in turn. It was an invasion of privacy, perhaps, but she had never been fussed about those, walked into most rooms as though she owned them and followed her own whims whenever she was able. The fact that she did so now with legitimate interests that served to potentially benefit the both of them, or at least sort things out, did not make that any less true.

She watched for a moment, her view now clear and unhindered, and the gravity of what she was seeing began to sink in. A loving mother and a devoted child, a concept that seemed worlds away to her now after what her own family had been through, what they had become. A mother who cared for her son and wished to nurture him, who cared for his poor health but did not see fit to bend the laws of nature to try and protect it as her own mother had crossed a very distinct line in order to do.

"She's very pretty," she said after several moments, a faint smile touching her lips. "You must miss her a great deal."

[lifeskills]

He had had a comfortable upbringing as a son in the Frankenstein family. His childhood bedroom was larger than the one he'd claimed in Wonderland and more generously decorated with toys, books, and crafts--anything, really, that a growing boy could need. Though their manor couldn't boast the same splendor as Wonderland's, Victor couldn't remember ever left wanting for something before Caroline Frankenstein had taken ill and splintered what family yet remained.

Those days were so long ago that not even Victor felt as though he owned the room entirely, complicating Rebekah's presence all the more.

Slow to close the door and even slower to tear his eyes off Rebekah's back, Victor finally turned to his pile of sketches on the floor, scattered in a half-circle around the spot he'd been sitting and drawing his mother for the past day.

"I'd started to forget what she looked like." The confession slipped free of him as he bent to gather the papers. If not for the fact he'd grown slightly numb to the scene after what seemed like the millionth viewing, he wouldn't have been able to form the words. It helped that he didn't need to explain that the woman in the memory was now dead. Rebekah had sensed it, felt it, maybe, and somehow being so out of control freed him somewhat of the burden of pretending at detachment. "I was too young and her health worsened too quickly, I didn't realize I should have taken more care to memorize how she was before."

He turned around to face her with the drawings in his arms. The loss and shame that continued to roll off him answered the rest for him. Loss for the simple and deathless time in the memory. Shame for how much time had changed him since.

"When did you know you were being affected by what was happening? You felt something?"

The last thing he would've wanted was what went on inside these walls to escape them, but that was also out of his control.

Did she know just how helpless that young boy had felt?

Could she guess how disappointed his mother would be if she could meet her son now?

[equalmeasure]

"How long has it been since you lost her?"

She asked without turning, her eyes fixed on Caroline's face, taking in each and every detail, as though memorizing her meant something to her as well, feeling something swell within her chest as she looked on. The memory wasn't hers, and yet it felt personal, felt as though it were.

Her lips pressed together into a careful line as she looked to him, a glance cast over her shoulder before she turned. "I was looking in on my brother when I felt something that didn't quite belong to me. It was out of place. Wistful when there should have been joy, peace. Both things rare enough that their being interrupted was difficult to ignore."

[lifeskills]

An uncertain sound left him. "Mm, more than a decade, I suppose," Victor said, and when he did so, he was quiet. Of course he remembered the exact day, the exact hour, but he had never liked to dwell on those sorts of things before, and now having a memory made flesh and an audience observing it made thinking clearly impossible.

He busied himself by putting the drawings away in a chest of drawers he hadn't seen in years, stopping when he felt a prick of annoyance hit him between the shoulders, either from her gaze or just from her.

"Oh..." There was a long pause before he spoke again. "I'm sorry."

He didn't know what had caused this, or what he could do to stop it, but what he said was true, he was sorry. Sorry for bringing this moment to being, for letting his darker emotions spill over as they so often did. This wasn't the first time he had spoiled a joyful or peaceful memory, just... the first time it wasn't his own.

Shaking his head, Victor shut the drawer with a click, hands resting on the handles. The frown he now sported was more for himself than for Rebekah.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this. I... can't explain it. You shouldn't have..." He shook his head again, tuning out the sound of his mother's voice rising and falling. What could he say, he would endeavor not to feel so deeply? Laughable. This event was mocking him for his weakness. "Well, you shouldn't have had to come."

How unlucky, to be brought together again. It was like Wonderland wanted to make sure this person, unnatural in her own right, knew exactly what mortal failings looked and felt like.