semi-open post: portraiture

[peaklordshen]

After shifting his way through oil pastels, watercolors, house paint, colored pencils, and an endless variety of paint markers, Shen Yuan has finally managed to get the Mansion to produce a decent set of oil paints, and—wonder of wonders—an easel. He's set up in a spacious, well-lit hall, probably for dancing or salons or whatever, where he's arranged a bunch of furniture in various configurations—wooden screens that he's draped cloth¹ over for backdrops; armchairs stolen from the lounge, wooden stools and high-backed dining chairs from the kitchens; even a lovely chaise lounge in a deep purple that he wistfully thinks he won't actually use, because it would definitely be for Aleksander, and he doubts he'll be doing that entry in his protagonists of the Mansion series after all. He has one of the stools pulled up next to the easel to hold his paints, and is wearing a wide-necked sweater over a black turtleneck and some loose, worn jeans that already have a few flecks of paint on them from when he was doing his color tests.² He's pulled his hair back in a practical bun, and he's currently laying down a layer of gesso on his canvas.

¹ Look, he has to do something with all of those robes he accidentally conjured in his last post.
² After days of feeling very lost and confused about how he's not required to LARP anymore, he's pretty much decided that it actually means he can just change who he's LARPing as at will, and the main way to do this is through fashion. Today he is An Artist.

[Primarily for those Shen Yuan has offered to paint, but anyone else is also welcome to come bother him while he works.]

Comments

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, indubitably," Susan agrees. "It's an excellent way to unwind."

[peaklordshen]

Oh, thank god, she understands. "I knew you were a woman of taste," he says, approvingly.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"There's a series of absolutely abysmal detective novels back home," Susan says, fondly. "I left the most infuriating installment yet on my bedside table the morning I arrived here."

[peaklordshen]

"Oh, I love a bad detective novel," says Shen Yuan. "I keep wondering about the quality of the ones Nightingale is from, but it seems like a rude thing to ask." If he could even tell, from the inside—he doesn't have the distance for objectivity, unlike Shen Yuan with Proud Immortal Demon Way.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"You think Thomas from a book, too?" Susan asks, startled. She takes a step back, bringing one hand up to her heart. There it flutters, briefly, before she brings it carefully back to her side. "That's so many of us."

[peaklordshen]

"I think everyone is," says Shen Yuan, glad that he's not breaking that news to her. "Except possibly¹ myself and Janet, who have... slightly different relationships to our respective fictional worlds." He cocks his head. "You know you are, then?" He turns Susan Pevensie over again in his mind, but he still can't place it.

¹ The possibly is really there for Janet, rather than himself -- but it seems self-aggrandizing to say with certainty that he's the only real person in the world, even if he wouldn't mean it the way he would have when he first got here.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Thomas told me he'd read of me," Susan admits. "And my siblings. In a children's story, no less." She has the grace to look a little embarrassed by this. "It is difficult to wrap one's mind around, so I admit I haven't been trying very hard."

[peaklordshen]

"I think if it were me I would want to know everything about the story I was from," says Shen Yuan, thoughtfully. "Whether I was a major character or not, whether I survive. But I suppose it must be odd to be a sophisticated adult woman and then learn one is from children's fiction."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I know Janet stumbled across Fillory, from those books," Susan says; she's not quite ready to talk about how she learned that Thomas knew of Narnia a scant twenty minutes after she, herself, remembered it was real. "But wasn't in them herself. What fictional world did you - visit?"

[peaklordshen]

"You'll enjoy the irony of this," says Shen Yuan, a little wearily. "It's something we call a 'stallion novel'--a dark and violent adventure story, but only as a thin veil over endless erotica." He raises his eyebrows at her. "Heterosexual erotica."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan blinks. "That is ironic."

[peaklordshen]

"Also I wouldn't necessarily say I visited." He shrugs, a little. "Before I came here, I thought I was trapped there forever."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan looks at Shen Yuan for a long minute, expression thoughtful but otherwise blank. She's considering what Shen Yuan knows about her, and what he doesn't. She hasn't really seen him since he kissed her, but she does like him. She thinks, perhaps, they have a few things in common. In many ways, she's not the same woman she was that night; she thinks perhaps he's not the same man he was that night, either.

Then she nods to herself, decision made.

"When I was a child, my brothers and my sister and I stumbled into a different world," she says. Her tone is mild; inflection-less. She's had a good day - she can still feel the ghost of Lancelot's hands on her body, his mouth on her jaw, and she's looking forward to their meal that evening - but this still isn't easy for her to talk about. "We were there for fifteen years before -" it spat us back out, she thinks to her own surprise. "We returned home. We went back a year later, in our time, much more briefly." She pauses. "Thomas remembered Narnia, specifically; I can't imagine I featured heavily in the stories. But during the first visit, I thought it might be forever."

[peaklordshen]

"Narnia," repeats Shen Yuan, startled. "Right—Susan, you're the oldest." He stops, not sure how to proceed - with Claudius it was easier, because he wasn't sober,¹ and he didn't care as much about his feelings (or at least he was confident that he'd already hurt those feelings far worse than he could by talking about Hamlet). And with Laertes, he'd had something specific to avoid, but no specifics to share. He likes Susan, and can't quite tell what's beyond the impassive neutrality of her face and voice.

"I haven't read of you," he says, because that seems like a maybe reassuring place to start. "But—the books are famous, especially in Europe and America. They made a few movies, which I did see—well, I saw the first one. They weren't very good."

¹ Either time - truth curses count as not sober.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"No, Peter was the oldest," Susan corrects, automatically, and then freezes. Movies! That suggests a level of import that she hadn't thought to assume. And - famous? The thought is discomfiting.

But she shan't let this overwhelm her. She has tasks to accomplish, and things she's looking forward to. Instead, she offers, with a nod to Shen Yuan's canvas, "He reminds me of them. The boy does."

[peaklordshen]

"I'm sorry," says Shen Yuan. "Peter. Of course." He follows her nod back to his canvas. "That makes sense—Magnus also ended up in a world not his own, though I think more like you than like Janet and I." The nested definitional categories of world, here, make sense to him, but would be hard to untangle. He should try to write it down sometime. "He has a talking sword."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan shakes her head - she hadn't meant it in a world-traveling way, but she's not certain that she has the capacity to explain her actual meaning.

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan notes the shake of the head; not that kind of reminding, then. He nods. "He's good," he says, more quietly. "Brave, and kind, and easy to talk to."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"He heals."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan nods. "I haven't seen it, but I hear he healed Claudius from a zombie bite when that whole... business happened."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"He did." Susan had been there, in the kitchen, helping Clarissant when it happened. She hesitates again. "Lucy was a healer, too."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan nods—he vaguely remembers the kids in Narnia having powers, but not what they were—and then the past tense sinks in. Ah, god. It would be really cool if everyone he liked didn't have such fraught relationships with their potentially dead little sisters. "I'm sorry," he offers, and then, cautiously, "is she—back in Narnia?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan's lips press together in a tight, thin line with very little direct purpose at all. "Perhaps," she allows, because Thomas had said they returned. There's no easy way to say this without shifting the mood of the conversation even further - it's a faux pas, is what it is - but she's told several people already and they haven't resented her for the burden of the truth. She focuses on the edge of the canvas, and says, "They're all dead, my family. Though Thomas said one of the books spoke of some change in the rules which allowed them all to go back even so."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Yuan is quiet for a long time. He doesn't want to just turn the conversation back to himself, but he is in a kind of unique position, in relationship to this particular complex grief. Finally, he says, "I died, before I was transported to my fictional world. My family still believe me dead. Because to them, I am." He meets her eyes. "All three of my siblings--alive, but in a world I can likely never access again."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan takes a step back, giving him a sharp, assessing look. She doesn't quite know what to say - likely there isn't anything - but questions crowd the back of her tongue anyway. Surely the specifics differ, between his experience and her family's, but - "Did it hurt?"