(no subject)

[fruktansvard]

[ Up Fabian meanders in his slow placid sort of way. He drapes his arms over the podium and links those bony fingers for a moment before deciding this question would be best delivered around a cigarette. Once that's been taken care of, he goes back to previous posture. ]

Do you fear death; do you long for it? Does death inspire a curiosity or a paralysis within your thoughts? Have you put great thought in to after death? Do you have your own personal belief?

Comments

[therightagent]

[Bucky's wearing long sleeves and has her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket so her metal arm's completely hidden.]

World would've been better off if I'd died when it was my time.

[fruktansvard]

[ He rolls a shoulder and doesn't particularly look to her right away, although he is listening. Prepare yourself for a potentially infuriating conversation. He has many thoughts on death and deserving of death and wanting death. Most contradictory. Many hypocritical. ]

If it was your time, you would have died.

[therightagent]

You fall off a speeding train in the middle of nowhere, pretty sure that's God's way of saying it's time to bow out.

[fruktansvard]

I'm pretty sure that's physics. [ Feh, god. ] Alas, here you are not dead. However did that happen?

[therightagent]

Hell spat me out.

[lych_o_learning]

Death is nothing to fear. It will happen, it is the natural way of things. Everything ends. There is nothing after death. Death is death, it is the end. Ghosts are just echoes and faded recordings of a person's soul. Not the same thing.

[fruktansvard]

If you haven't died then you can't know whether it is or is not the true end of things, can you?

[lych_o_learning]

Not for certain, no. [He agrees simply.]

[fruktansvard]

Well then. [ long break as he takes a drag ] How are you?

[lych_o_learning]

Surviving.

[There's a pause before he remembers that he's meant to trade pleasantries.] And yourself?

[rekindledtitan]

I don't worry about it. Don't think about it too much, either. It'll take some day, and then... [ Blaze shrugs ] I guess things will get interesting.

[fruktansvard]

[ He pauses a moment if only to grasp the initial concept of this figure speaking to him not being of a human variety. Which is fine, really. ] I'm going to ask you extremely ignorant and possibly offensive things very shortly.

[rekindledtitan]

[ The orange light in her eyes dims for a second as she tips her head. She sees no particular reason to worry about the prospect. ]

Well, that's all right. Everyone's got to get filled in somehow.

[ Most of the people she knows have spent a few centuries dead. It breeds a certain sympathy for the learning curve. ]

[fruktansvard]

[ Well congratulations on finding someone who's escaped death for a long time and now regrets it. He folds his hands after finishing his smoke. Well, let's start then. ]

I wish to make no assumptions, so please: tell me of you.

[rekindledtitan]

[ A strange request - but perhaps she's gotten used to being among people to whom her circumstances are obvious, who need only ask a couple of questions. Maybe three. Either way she's a bit flummoxed. ]

Oh. Uh, my name's Blaze-37. I'm a Guardian, from the city. I guess you could call me new at the job, seeing how it's only a couple of years since they woke me up. I'm Titan-class - specialized for heavy offense. That's a lot of fun.

[ She rubs her collar as she thinks, running out of significant details. Depending on whether you share her definition of significant. ]

That help? I don't think there's much else to tell.

[serialized]

I just wanted you to know that this looks and sounds like the beginning of a really amazing university lecture.

[ Nate and his apparently permanently-attached-to-his-face sunglasses are here to not answer any of those questions and also give Fabian a small bottle of something, which is offered without any explanation but does in fact have to do with cigarettes and shared food. ]

[fruktansvard]

[ He wonders, briefly, if he reached out to those sunglasses whether or not Nate's face would just fall apart. That is all imagination, of course, but one can't help but be curious of these things sometimes. ]

Are you saying I look like I haven't bathed or slept in a week? [ Which he does look a bit like a train wreck. Not that he doesn't always look somewhat a mess, but. He takes the bottle and offers a smoke. ]

[serialized]

[ Maybe his entire face would come off with them, like Groucho glasses. ]

Not a week... [ Deadpan, not least because he's in the same boat of constantly looking tired and slightly disreputable. ] ... but I was expecting the lights to dim and a slideshow of Bosch to start.

[fruktansvard]

You flatter me with lies, young friend.

Ah, Hieronymus Bosch. [ don't mind him for opening the bottle. He'd say it was one of those nights but it is often one of those nights. ] I thoroughly enjoy his works but I confess I enjoy Beksiński more.

[ he takes a moment. Spacing out? Fantasizing? Who knew. After said moment he realizes the ash on his cigarette is getting long. ] You didn't answer any of my questions.

[kashaph]

Supposedly there's some sort of afterlife, but we don't think about it much; it's the world we're in now that is important. Ehm, in my religion, anyway.

— I think I am still afraid of it.

[fruktansvard]

[ Sets of charms around his wrist jangle when he rubs said hands together a moment. ] what does said set of beliefs say of the after life?

[kashaph]

Not much — a lot is left to personal interpretation... ah, in general, the righteous are reunited with their loved ones after death. Probably. Who can say? There's some belief that the dead will be resurrected after the messiah come... I don't know about that. Some of us believe in reincarnation — that the resurrection is always happening, all the time. I don't know. There's a lot of beliefs.

[fruktansvard]

And yours are?

[peratic]

I always liked what Plato (and Derrida, much later) said about it, that all philosophy prepares us for death. There is a completeness in death that is impossible to attain while alive...not to romanticize, because I don't. Can't.

When I was younger, I was a bit obsessed with it. I hated the not knowing about what would come after, and if I ever thought about dying, well, it was more to eliminate any sense of that ambiguity than anything else. [ So she says, anyway, speaking in a way that's both absent and practiced. These are statements she has made in her head before, explicitly and deliberately spelling out her own thoughts. It's mostly true. Control freak since the age of twelve. ]

Some people look at death like an adversary. Something tangible they have to fight against.

[fruktansvard]

[ And he was one of those people. It started so small. It started with love, ironically enough. Love turned to greed, greed turned to vanity, vanity turned to pride, and pride turned to fear when he watched his partner and he did not. The blood was Fabian's hands. It was a lot of blood, a lot of blood. Three hundred and ninety seven years later, he's impossibly thankful to see his face aging. ]

I feel there's nothing wrong with wondering. There are so few ways to truly understand what lays beyond that veil. Certainly not healthy and safe practices with insurance of return. [ Which doesn't mean that there's not ways to see without possibly returning. Difficult? yes. very. dangerous. ]

I wonder sometimes what it is that drives this fear beyond the key idea of unknown. A life not fulfilled?