tushanshu | [video] the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner

[It's video, so it's clear that Dorian looks the same. Still the bright roses of youth on his cheek, still the crisp dark curls on his head. The candour of youth in his face, and 'youth's passionate purity' in his smile. To look at him, you'd think he had kept himself unspotted from the world—even if all that the blue smoke around him is from one of Lord Henry's opium-tainted cigarettes.

But that is the visual half of things. As for the audio half?]

1986. The summer. [For audio, there is something torn in that low and musical voice, something of electrohouse's wretched distortion ripping the guts out of the base and leaving the jagged beat in its wake.

Dorian laughs.] It was 1986, it was the summer, and Highlander came out for UK audiences. Crooned over scenes of loss, Freddie Mercury asks a question he'll never need to answer: "Who wants to live forever?" [The cigarette held away, conductor holding the note to let the question hang.]

[And callously, we're back.] Contemporary efforts in medicine might suggest 'just about everyone,' but in stories about immortals, the weariness is always more loss of people than loss of time. It's more that you're watching your granddaughter's funeral than it is that the shop beside the graveyard is a chain electronics place instead of the private member's club where you met her grandmother decades ago.

[Another drag of the cigarette. He is still smiling a pleasant, youthful smile.] But it occurred to me, speaking with Rebecca, that that sense of loss, of friendships brief as mayfly lives, is one we all get to share here. It's not a curse of immortality, something known only in a long term. It's frequent, repetitive, and to all intents and purposes, mundane. We foreigners just lose people, over and over and over and over, and there is never any resolution to any of it. Like the workroom of a perfectionist, it's a slaughterhouse of unfinished stories, and the corpses just keep piling up. Only corpses would give more closure than disappearances, and we aren't likely to be here ourselves by the time we can hold a funeral.

So we get used to it. We cope and we carry on. [Cigarette between his fingers, he gives a salute that somehow doesn't come across as sarcastic.] Congratulations on all the recent efforts, and good luck to everyone still with us in the future.

[Dorian holds up a mobile phone (circa 2007) with all lightness of touch and tone.] Does anyone have anything to for a mobile's battery? I left the charger in the 21st century, and I'd like to get my music off of this, but it gave out.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Are you now. [Dorian puts the cigarette out.] It's kind of you. You're right; I should probably quit.

[She eyes him thoughtfully for a second or two, before switching the feed to private using the encryption she stole off Vanessa's boyfriend]

I could probably help, you know. [It's not like he doesn't already know she can do things to people's minds. He hadn't freaked out about it at all, so she doesn't think there's any harm in telling him something if it'll help. Besides, if it does freak him out, she can always remove the memory that she told him]

[Dorian pauses, there's wariness: for a very specific reason.] You're not going to try to put me in a twelve step program, are you? [There is dubious morality, and then there's cruelty.] Because I am pretty confident that rehab'd be enough to make me pick up every drug I've ever quit.

[That gets a laugh] Well, we are trying to run an outreach program. But I was actually thinking of something a little more direct.

[And hesitating for a second here] You remember what happened with the guard back in the palace?

[Ah, now he sees where this is going. Dorian looks at the girl and answers calmly.] I remember. So . . . mind control, then?

[Not freaked out. He has seen too much and known too many people far worse than her to approach this with wariness.]

[Okay, now she looks a little embarrassed. It's sounds so bad when you put it that way!] Not - I mean, that's not what I'd do to you. But if you wanted, I could...sort of...remove the addiction. From your mind.

And that wasn't mind control before! I just removed his memory and put a new one in, it's different. [She can mind control too though oops]

Yeah: it's more indirect. [But it's an affectionate comment, and he considers what she has said, what she has offered.]

So you'd just . . . pull it out from my head? And it would go where, exactly?

At least I didn't like, knock him out and give him brain damage or break his legs to make sure he couldn't run or something.

[That gets a nod] Well, it depends, I guess. I mean, it's an addiction, no one really want to keep those around. So it'd just - cease to be? [But the way she says it implies that she could keep it around if she did want to]

[Fair counterpoint, he concedes with the gesture of his hand.]

But you could keep it. Same for memories?

[yeah, das right.

Oh, but they're talking powers, and that is honestly way more interesting. Especially because other than Vanessa (who is incredibly disapproving), she hasn't had anyone to really talk about them with since she got them. Talking about how much she loves evil with her Dad and the Atrox and whatever guys she got set up with doesn't exactly count]

There's no reason why not. I'd have to keep it locked in one of my memories so that I didn't like...absorb it, I guess you could say, but that's no problem. I've got-- [Six years worth of space] --room.

Wouldn't that be difficult on you? Carrying other people's memories.

[There's the well-meaning emotionlessness of curiosity, but also this: Dorian has too many memories. He cannot imagine how terrible it would be if he had to bear more than just his own life.]

[She shakes her head] It'd be like a filing cabinet. I'd know they were there, obviously, and I'd have my own memories of 'reading' them, but they'd be in storage. Not a part of me. [Raising an eyebrow] Any reason you want to know?

[He shrugs a little.] My instinctual curiosity? I remember a friend's words about it: "The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them."

[A pause.] The friend in question was very literary. At any rate, I'll . . . consider taking you up on your offer, on the cigarettes. It's kind of you.

Your friend spoke about you in the third person? [She grins]

[Oh but it slips into something more suitable for the subject at that last comment] Okay. Just let me know, it's not like I really do much around here, I've got the time whenever.

For almost eighty thousand words.

[Hard not to make jokes about that book—but he gives her a smile, one that is grateful.] I will. I promise.

[...] Your friend wrote a book about you? Are you sure they were just a friend?

[She smiles back] Holding you to that. [She wants to help]

[Dorian laughs.] It was—a joke between us, I suppose, a trick we played on the world. Or a challenge for him and his art. He wrote the book, published, then convinced the world it was a work of fiction. A triumph of his prose and his personality.

[She smiles, pleased to see him laughing] I don't know, I kind of like my idea better.

[She hesitates for a moment] Oh, and, um - the memory thing, if you could keep that to yourself? I'd really appreciate it. People were bad enough finding out I can time travel, and it won't even let me change things here.

Of course you do.

[Understanding, he reassures her.] I promise: it will be our secret. No one else needs to know.

[video] the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner

video;

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private

video; private