|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 23, 2019 16:03:16 GMT
Kara watched Dhaunmyr’s lesson attentively, following the creation of the three lines with a little frown puckering her face. Her eyes widened a little in appreciation when he erased one of them, and she looked up at him, nodding, understanding the point. She hoped. Harsh angry strokes for movement. Kara fixed that in her memory. Gentle still lines for crisp fragility. There was a lot to remember with art; it seemed difficult. But she wouldn’t give up. Had she drawn as a girl? Kara remembered learning to write, tracing her letters over and over again under her father’s watchful eye. These things she could think of with only a faint tinge of pain, bittersweet. She remembered her brothers teasing her when she couldn’t get the g correctly. There hadn’t been much paper to spare; she had done her letters on a slate with chalk, the same one each brother had used in his turn. Drawing she didn’t remember. Carefully, Kara tried the new technique Dhaunmyr had suggested. One line had wobbled; she erased it. Between the other two she thought she could - carefully she nudged at the paper with the eraser, gingerly taking away the bits that didn’t fit. By the end the bowl looked much more like a bowl. Kara tried with the edges of the fruit as well; in some places she succeeded, in others she failed, but she kept working at it, until her hand cramped. Kara looked down at it in surprise, slowly unclenching her fingers from the pencil. A little frown puckered her brow and she massaged it with her other hand. How could she be sore from just holding a pencil? She looked up at Dhaunmyr, almost accusingly.
((Word count: 14483))
|
|
|
Post by enchilada on Apr 23, 2019 16:56:54 GMT
“Yes, yes! Wonderfully done, my friend.” Dhaunmyr nodded, clapping with just the tips of his fingers, in a rather joyful display of encouragement.
He laughed a little to himself at her hand cramping up. Ah, a delightful pain.
“You see, you are using muscles you’ve never really used for long. The ones in your arms and your stomach are well trained and big, but your hand muscles rarely get, ah, ‘swollen’, even with considerable practice. They are much smaller than anything else. If you clench and unclench your hand quickly, you are not able to do it for long at all, but I believe you could probably do sit ups for a very long time. You’ll recover.” He smiled, sighing a little. Dhaunmyr slightly reminisced about his first drawings, before cringing at the memory of the outcomes.
So malformed. So ugly. He wished he had had someone to show him what to do.
|
|
|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 23, 2019 19:44:54 GMT
Kara nodded, slowly, grudgingly. She rarely wrote much anymore; even in her guard days, she had usually not been responsible for report writing before the war, when they had done it. After the war, they had been so few that most reports were verbal, and someone else had been responsible for note-taking. Kara, thinking it through, couldn’t remember the last time she had really… written anything.
Grudgingly, Kara conceded that the soreness was reasonable. She rubbed her hand a little more vigorously, then let it go, treating it like she would any muscle which needed a bit of a rest. Too much rubbing would make it worse; using different muscles in the hand would be easier. Carefully, she flexed and unflexed her fingers, turning her wrist from side to side.
Kara glanced down at the drawing. The lines were there, but… it didn’t look like fruits, not really. She peeked over at Dhaunmyr’s drawing. He had done a lot with the pencil that wasn’t just lines; there were areas where he had filled things in. “Shading?” Kara asked, looking from his paper to hers, and back again. Shading and markmaking were the tools he had given her, and she thought the filled in areas of pencil could be called shading. She liked Dhaunmyr’s drawing; it didn’t look exactly like the bowl but it made you think of it, somehow. Hers was trying very hard to be the fruit and mostly failing.
|
|
|
Post by enchilada on Apr 23, 2019 20:54:22 GMT
“Do you want me to show you shading now?” Dhaunmyr asked, and, without asking for an answer, he drew a few boxes next to his sketch. In the first one, he scribbled careful circles, until the whole thing was completely gray, without a single patch left white.
“You pass the pencil lightly over the same area, in circles, or else you’ll end up with linear patterns. It can be useful sometimes, if you want that kind of texture, but mostly you probably won’t. Then, press a little harder, and harder, and so on, you can end up with a wide range of tones with just one pencil, but you may like to add something darker, like charcoal.” He explained, and began to fish through the box until he found a once-white cloth, and unwrapped it from its contents. Inside were a few thin sticks of black, brittle charcoal. He very gently traced the bottom of the box, and rubbed it upwards with his pinky finger and the cloth. It darkened the demonstration considerably. “You can also draw with charcoal, but it’s harder to correct. The only real way of doing it is blending it out until the area around it is a light gray, and the line is mostly gone. Chalk can work, too, but not always.”
“You can also try cross-hatching, or just hatching.” In the other boxes, he drew a series of quick, sharp lines, straight across. In the lower one, he went back over in the opposite direction. “The closer you make the lines, the darker it looks. You can also try to curve the lines around the object, it gives it volume.” He drew a final box, this time a circle and not a square. He demonstrated the cross-hatching with curved lines, and it quickly resembled more of a sphere than a flat circle.
|
|
|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 23, 2019 21:14:58 GMT
Kara nodded in response to Dhaunmyr’s question. She watched him very attentively, following with her eyes as he made circles in the little box, then watched as he used the charcoal to demonstrate it further. Kara whispered the word cross-hatching, fixing it in her mind, watching as Dhaunmyr did that as well. Her eyes widened a little when he did the circular one.
Kara looked down at her paper. She took a deep breath; it felt like a shame to practice the shading on the paper, but… her drawing really wasn’t very good. Very, very carefully, Kara made her own little squares at the bottom. She imitated Dhaunmyr fully, making careful circles in the first, and drawing lines back and forth across the second in a hatched patterns. The last thing she did was to draw a little circle, then paused, tip of the pencil touching the paper. She peeked back at his work, then went back to trying the curved line cross-hatching, eyes widening more as she saw it become sphere-like before her eyes.
“Oh,” Kara let out a happy little sigh. She was still focusing very, very intently, but she had lost a little of the grim look that she’d had, both earlier in the day and immediately following her brief period of staring at Dhaunmyr’s wall as though it would reveal the secrets of the universe to her.
Kara looked up at Dhaunmyr, and set her pencil back on the fruits, hoping for further instruction on how to apply this exciting new technique to her actual sketch.
|
|
|
Post by enchilada on Apr 23, 2019 21:30:37 GMT
“Aha! Wonderfully done! You are quite the natural, Kara, I assure you.” It was either that, or Dhaunmyr was the opposite of naturally artistically gifted. His first— nevermind. Not going to think about those ever again.
He took to his own drawing, sketching out the cross-hatched lines, carefully suggesting the roundedness of the fruit, the bowl. Next, he took the charcoal to darken the fruits that were furthest into the pile, hiding them away in obscurity. With the pencil and the cloth, he began to gently blend it out, nodding to himself as he did so. Yes, yes, okay a little darker here — wonderful.
Dhaunmyr looked somewhat expectantly at Kara, keeping a good eye on her drawing, as she did his. It was funny how he could see the real effort and value in what kara had drawn, and yet was already ready to throw his away. But maybe he’d keep it, just for... comparison, yeah, comparison. So in a few years he could look back and feel good about what he had learned. Comparison. Of course.
Dhaunmyr didn’t feel any sentimentality towards the moment at all!!!
|
|
|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 23, 2019 21:36:23 GMT
Kara still didn’t believe any of Dhaunmyr’s praise – she had eyes, after all. She drank in his drawing, watching almost greedily as he turned the suggestion of the bowl into something round and full, and using the shading of the fruits to bring some closer and send others further away. Then he brought in the charcoal. It was – it looked – Kara looked from the bowl to the fruit and back again. She didn’t understand; there was so much of it that he hadn’t drawn, but Kara could immediately have recognized the bowl of fruit on the page.
Kara turned her attention back to her own work. Slowly, carefully, she tried the rounded cross-hatching on the bowl, trying to make it look as rounded as Dhaunmyr had. There, at least, she was sure of what to do. She ended up with her pencil hovering over the page for several long moments after that task was done, eyes darting from the bowl to the page and back again. Finally, slowly, she started trying to shade in the further-back fruits, very, very carefully. It wasn’t nearly as successful at Dhaunmyr’s efforts, but at the end she thought – maybe – that at least she’d made them different colors. Maybe between the placement and the shading, someone looking at it would realize that some of the fruits were meant to be further back.
Carefully, satisfied, Kara set her pencil down. There was a time in training when one had to stop or risk injury. It wasn’t exactly the same here – although her hand really was sore – but Kara thought roughly the same principle applied: more shading would make things worse, not better.
She knew Dhaunmyr could see the drawing perfectly well already, but some silly, childish impulse took hold. Kara cleared her throat, very softly, and slowly extended the finished product towards her new friend. The word dropped into the stillness of her mind like a rock into a pool, and Kara stiffened, but – held, looking wide-eyed at Dhaunmyr. Her friend.
|
|
|
Post by enchilada on Apr 23, 2019 21:57:18 GMT
Dhaunmyr felt pride, somehow. He was just so excited to see someone do something for the first time and, with his help, not objectively completely suck at it. He was also happy that Kara might now have something relaxing to focus on, alongside her practice, and whatever she did in Waterdeep to keep her afloat. He wondered what that was, exactly, but he could guess. That said, without knowing his actual focus, he wondered what the hell people thought he possibly did. He couldn’t really sing, he was too nervous. He hadn’t learned an instrument, yet, if you asked Fae, period, if you asked him. He probably didn’t come across as though he allowed himself the pleasures of sitting in front of ledgers and such. Perhaps some noble living off of money that had been in the family so long it was all interest. But he was a lone dark elf with an obviously changed name. He supposed he could fear the worst. It didn’t matter too much what people thought about him in that regard.
Beaming, he took the drawing. He looked it up and down, left and right, then held it up to the subject.
And then he nodded. “Incredible work, Kara. I’ll make an artist out of you yet!” He very carefully set it beside him, and opened his arms, slightly reaching for her, but by no means invading her space. The offer of an embrace. He jerked his head in a way that suggested ‘come here’, still smiling warmly and with no care for how it stretched the skin or caused quite irreversible wrinkles. At least once you reached the three hundred and fifty mark.
|
|
|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 23, 2019 22:10:29 GMT
Even though Dhaunmyr had so far been extremely complimentary, Kara still felt an odd pulse of nervousness at his serious-looking contemplation of her drawing. She followed his gaze from the drawing to the fruit bowl and back, then looked at him, swallowing hard. She saw all the mistakes – the spots where the fruits were odd or lumpy, the bit of the rim of the bowl that just looked wrong, the way the shading on some of the fruits didn’t make any sense. Suddenly, fiercely, she wanted to grab the drawing back and try again – couldn’t she have done better? What had she been thinking, to offer this like it was anything worth looking at? Dhaunmyr was very talented, and – and he must –
His nod and compliment relaxed her. Unbidden, a tiny smile curled Kara’s lips, and her shoulders relaxed, losing a little of their customary tension. She relaxed a tiny fraction towards the pillows, almost giving the suggestion that she intended to relax on the bed.
Dhaunmyr spread his arms wide and gave Kara a smile and a nod. Kara looked at him, uncomprehending for a moment, and realized – he wanted to hug her. It was a very open gesture, not forcing; he hadn’t reached for her, only given her a choice. Kara didn’t know how long she sat and stared at him; it felt to her like three hours, although it was probably only a few seconds.
Slowly – very, very slowly – Kara shifted towards Dhaunmyr. She made it halfway across the tiny distance between them, and paused, regretting her decision, holding still for a long moment. There was a part of her that wanted to pull away and another part that wanted to get up and run out of the room, and another part of her that was realizing it had been – a very long time since anyone had hugged her, and couldn’t help remembering how nice it was to be hugged.
Kara wasn’t sure if it was weakness or strength but she closed the last of the distance between them, and, very carefully, put her arms around Dhaunmyr too, holding them stiff and awkward as if she didn’t quite remember how to hug. Her body was tense and hard too; he could see the quivering tension in her stomach and sides, if he looked.
There was a moment – just a moment – when his arms wrapped around her and held and Kara relaxed, letting herself rest against him. The emotions – fear and sadness and happiness – played out over her face and Kara couldn’t even tell what she was feeling, other than that it was new and a little overwhelming. She pulled away much more quickly than she’d leaned in, shaking for a few moments before she got her body under control, trying to subtly wipe her face on her arm in case there was actual wetness in her eyes. She didn’t – couldn’t – look at Dhaunmyr, head bowed slightly.
|
|
|
Post by enchilada on Apr 23, 2019 22:43:27 GMT
A small noise escaped him when they hugged. A gentle hum, quiet and nipped short. He closed his eyes for the brief moment. He could trust her. Happily and easily, he could trust her.
He really only hugged Faerveren and Brennip, but they would be on each other for hours, content with drinking and laughing. When it came to everyone else, it was handshakes, holding the arm when you went in for a kiss of the cheek. And what he did with others, too, that he didn’t want to think about too much. At least not until later. Point being, almost every physical action he did with people was superficial. It never meant anything at all, other than that he had something to gain from them. From rich idiots it was money, from customers it was money, from everyone else it was not. But Kara? He just wanted to hold her because he cared about her and he was happy for her. It was a weird desire, physical contact, but a welcomed one, and a beloved one.
He was disappointed that she went back so quickly, but he understood. And then she avoided his gaze and then he did not understand anymore. “Kara? Kara? What’s wrong?” He didn’t want to force anything, but he had seemed to set something off again, in just a simple action. A question that meant absolutely nothing, and now a hug. Dhaunmyr felt pretty awful because of it. Maybe the signs were there and he wasn’t able to read them yet. Maybe it was a human thing that they didn’t talk about boys and they didn’t hug too often. Maybe it meant something he wasn’t aware of. In honesty, he didn’t associate any meaning, just a warm feeling.
“Did I do something wrong?”
|
|
|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 23, 2019 23:00:21 GMT
There was a heat in Kara’s cheeks, and a feeling behind her eyes, a sort of pressure. She pressed her hand to her face this time, wiping it one way against her eyes, then the other. There was definitely wetness in her eyes now; she could feel it. Her shoulders were trembling again.
Dhaunmyr was repeating her name; Kara might have ignored that or even his question of whether something was wrong. Of what was wrong. Then he asked if it was his fault and Kara shook her head and buried her face in her hands, shaking a little. There was a distinct feeling of wetness against her fingers and she held her breath, because if she didn’t then she might - she might -
Kara sniffled. She didn’t want to cry. If asked, up until a few moments earlier - well she would have said nothing. But she would have thought she couldn’t cry, not anymore. That Kara was gone, because she had already cried a lifetime of tears and she was done now. Her shoulders heaved, and she suppressed the noise into her hands, taking a deep breath that only sounded like a sob, because it wasn’t a sob, because she wasn’t crying.
Then at some point Kara lost all pretense and sobbed softly into her hands. She wasn’t even upset; that was the worst of it. She was - she felt - happy.
|
|
|
Post by enchilada on Apr 23, 2019 23:15:30 GMT
Dhaunmyr really wasn’t sure what to do.
She was crying. And it wasn’t his fault. Although it was clearly spurred from the hug, which he initiated, so...
But he still didn’t know what to do. She didn’t like being touched, apparently to the point of tears, so he just stared for maybe too long before any action sprung to mind. Maybe, he could stop her crying, if he could make her laugh instead.
He wasn’t too good with jokes that weren’t tied to the situation, and a funny story about Faerveren probably wouldn’t quite cut it, since she didn’t quite know her well enough yet. So he cleared his throat. “I will now do my best to achieve my goal of making you feel a bit better. No promises.”
“Why was six afraid of seven? It wasn’t, because numbers are an arithmetical concept, therefore nonsentient and incapable of feeling fear.”
|
|
|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 24, 2019 0:40:30 GMT
Dhaunmyr’s joke – if that was a joke – caught Kara so totally off-guard that she stopped crying largely out of confusion. She lifted her head out of her hands, blinking away the last few tears, face slightly red, and stared at Dhaunmyr with an expression of mingled surprise and bewilderment. She didn’t laugh, but she also didn’t start crying again. Instead, Kara took a deep breath, wiped her eyes on her arm, and looked down, then back at Dhaunmyr.
“Sorry,” Kara said. It was her turn to apologize for her behavior now, she felt. Hopefully Dhaunmyr would be decent and politely dismiss it. She was also grateful he hadn’t tried to touch or hold her again; she wasn’t sure she could have stood it.
In truth, she felt - better. Lighter, somehow. Not just than before she'd cried, but... Kara wasn't exactly sure what to make of it.
Also – she hadn’t been able to process it before, but looking at him again made Kara realized just how far in her arm had had to go in order to hug him. Dhaunmyr was much thinner than he looked fully dressed; she hadn’t fully realized the extent of it before. The extent of it – not eating since… whenever he had left the Underdark – sunk in a little, and left Kara faintly worried.
|
|
|
Post by enchilada on Apr 24, 2019 1:02:15 GMT
“Aha! I have succeeded in my quest. I turn in the bounty to the guild and receive my reward, which, I see is an apology. And I refuse it. Sometimes it’s good to cry — necessary, even.” His joking tone faded from his voice, until it reached a point of concern, although from then on he would ignore it. They were both refusing sorries left and right. And handing them out, too, expecting them to be taken. It was peculiar.
Dhaunmyr hadn’t thought about his weight. He had thought about Kara, though. Her warmth, her rather solid figure. Her body was something of a machine. Finely tuned and working so perfectly, but the pilot needed time out.
“You cry for a reason, your body doesn’t do things unnecessarily. It’s bad to keep it in.” Dhaunmyr was a hypocrite. And he knew it. He sort of thrived in it, calling it another aspect of being who he was. He gave advice he never followed, expecting his acquaintances to take it on board but never really thinking they would by any means. It was a circle of absolutely nothing changing, but he didn’t want that for Kara, or, he supposed, him and Kara. He wanted everything to be right. He wanted it to work.
|
|
|
Post by moralhazard on Apr 24, 2019 1:13:34 GMT
Kara nodded; she accepted Dhaunmyr’s right to refuse the apology just as easily as she had refused his earlier. It didn’t bother her that he wouldn’t accept it; in all honesty, she was relieved that he didn’t feel it was warranted. It was generous of him.
Kara paused, thoughtful in response to Dhaunmyr’s thoughts on crying, not exactly sure what to say. She didn’t – keep it in, exactly. Did she? There were some things she kept in. She thought Dhaunmyr wasn’t exactly right; there were some things it was worse to let out. Now that the crying was over, she let go of the shame she had felt over it. He wasn’t wrong, she supposed. She wasn’t angry with her body when it hurt, or when it needed food; she accepted those as things it naturally did and needed to do. Was crying really so different? Others had had it worse, but she had had emotional pain of her own. She knew, deep down, that she wasn’t over it; it wasn’t the sort of wound that healed.
Like physical pain, all she could do was bear it, and try to breathe through it.
Kara nodded in agreement, somewhat eventually. She was also glad Dhaunmyr hadn’t asked for any explanations; she hadn’t afforded him the same courtesy. Now, with the tables turned, Kara was a little sorry she had pushed so hard; probably she should have let it go. She cleared her throat, playing with the edge of her burnt braid, and shifted back a little on the bed, getting comfortable – finally! – against the heap of cushions Dhaunmyr had set there long ago. She felt unaccountably sleepy, between the long night and the early morning and the food and the crying.
|
|