lostcarnival | Oh Hell No [Closed]

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Oh Hell No [Closed]

Who: Taako and Foster
When: After Rex's Birthday Party
Where: Lakeside
What: Taako tries to figure out what Foster's problem was. Foster has to explain black people to some kind of space elf, I guess.
Warnings: Foster is trying to explain black people, racism, and genetics to an elf. I don't know, it'll probably be kinda... dicey.

Hours later, Foster was still at the lake. After escaping the party (he'd attended, he'd been there, he had obeyed his supervisor's order(s), even if in letter only and not by spirit), he'd found his way there, somehow, at some point. How or when, he didn't know. It didn't matter.

If he'd had an idea in mind when he steered himself here, when fate(?) had driven him here, again--

Mmh. Was that it?

He couldn't immerse himself in the water now, could not sink into its dark swallowing depths, not without committing himself to its final definition--not without submitting himself to the water's judgment and abandoning himself to drown.

Was that what he'd meant to do on his way here? He couldn't remember.

Over time, it didn't matter. He sat by the water's ledge, on a bank of clay, his hooved feet dangling in the water--he was cooling off, literally and otherwise. He was still agitated, but not in any emotional way. Just... his brain was scrambled up, snarls and turbulent echoes. A condition he was treating, intuitively, with silence and water.

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Taako had, meanwhile, already forgotten his encounter with Foster entirely. He had other things to concern himself with; other party-goers who had made much easier conversation, who had offered him more rewarding companionship even just for the short time he'd remained at the party. Even Rex, the supposed host, had proved more memorable.

But that had passed, and Taako had honestly had his fill of punch and awkward conversation, and he left, intending to head towards his shared trailer; however, when his eyes traced over the shape of the lake, he paused.

It was... him. All at once, he remembered the surreal exchange they'd had, the rage that had come seemingly from nowhere, and curiosity overran whatever sense of caution he might have had, at least long enough to make him turn and stroll instead towards the lake, his hand instinctively going to take the Umbra Staff and hold it at his side, just in case.

"Hail and well met, my dude," he greeted Foster, keeping a wary distance.

As a general rule, Taako, people whose company you left on unambiguously bad terms--who, in fact, were forced to make multiple attempts to get the fuck away from you before they succeeded--aren't people you should be re-approaching just a few hours later, but it's okay. We all fail our Wisdom checks once in a while.

Foster doesn't actually turn all the way around at first, though--he glances sideways and stares at Taako, watching his... fantastical doppelganger draw up short and.... 'hail' him.

Foster doesn't respond for a good second, just... staring at Taako, silently.

He's trying to decide whether to let Taako talk to him at all or just get up and leave, for one. But, and this informs that first decision, he's a little suspicious that Taako is actually just making fun of him. 'Hail and well met, my dude?' One half of that is fine, any half--it doesn't even matter which. But put them together, and...

"Why are you so determined?" is what he finally asks, but it just sounds like he's bitching. Which... he kinda is. To be honest.

"See, that's the thing. I'm normally, like, the least determined person you'll ever meet." Taako sounds every bit as puzzled as Foster is, if a fair amount more calm about it. He shrugs, grinning easily at him. "So I don't actually get it either. But here I am."

It's the least explanatory answer he could have possibly given, and it was lovingly crafted as such. Really, everything about that fact should be everything Foster needs to know about Taako.

"So, hey, is there any sort of terrible, tentacled beast dwelling in that lake, or is it just... a lake?" Taako gestures to it with the staff, furrowing his brow; "I just gotta know whether everything here is a trap, or just most things."

"Oh, everything here is a trap. But no, nothing as obvious as that."

Foster, in return is being... deliberately cryptic. It's something he's actually exceptionally good at, when he chooses to do it on purpose.

He's good at it by mistake, too, but he doesn't like Taako looking at him, let alone talking to him. Which is why he's being a creep. And why he deliberately turns his face away back towards the lake--his eyes stray even further, so he's staring bitterly into the trees on his right.

"What do you actually want?"

"... o... kay, that's... ominous, thanks for the warning?" Taako glances from Foster to the lake, and then back again, shuffling his feet uncertainly. He plants the tip of the Umbra Staff against the dirt, leaning against it, his expression... mixed.

"Hmm, what do I want? Goooood question, my man." Taako clicks his tongue, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "Well, I guess I just wanna know what your deal is, you know? Because, honestly, you're not the first person to walk out on a conversation with me, but I hadn't even had the chance to insult you first! You got mad all on your own. Efficient, but I suppose it leaves one wanting, you know? At least give me the chance to offend you properly before you storm off on me."

Offend him properly? What could be a more thorough offence than jerking him around like this?

Actually, Foster could answer that, perhaps too thoroughly. It's too bad Taako didn't take his warning about traps at face value.

"Your face is offensive," Foster replies with unkindly bluntness; a normal person might have snapped at Taako, but that's a significantly more passionate kind of emotion than he's capable of. But then he has to add another word, because he's miscalculated again.

"Literally."

Taako's eyebrows shoot up the second Foster responds to him so sharply-- and then he adds that final word, and he literally rolls his eyes so hard that his body leans into the gesture, shoulders rolling back.

"Yeah, okay, right, got it, but like... what is really the deal there? I mean, what is it in particular about my face that has you so, ehh, up in arms, my guy?"

Uggghhhh.

Instead of answering, Foster buries both hands in his hair, shoving them back under the blond curls as far as he can reach--then pulling them back out, dragging his hands down his face in a gesture of protracted suffering at least as exaggerated as Taako's eye roll.

Of course, his facial expression doesn't change at all, so that probably detracts from the effect.

He doesn't want to explain this. There is no possible way he can explain it. He can't even explain why his head's a mess, why people are reacting incorrectly to simple things, how the fuck is he supposed to explain something actually complicated.

"No... no, no, no. Fuck. It's not just... your face." He pries his hands off his face only to press one of them back into his hair again, feeling somewhere between that airy detachment he calls 'hysteria' and the bitter drop of another oncoming failure.

"Do you even have black people where you're from?"

"Uh... yes?" Now that is a bizarre question. Taako seems legitimately caught off guard by it; he glances off for just a moment, puzzled, before he finally does look back at Foster. "I mean, yeah, that's a thing that we have, all the... various shades of humans and all that."

The other races or species do, indeed, have other colorations and subraces, as well, but they have different names for them.

"Can I ask... what that's got to do with anything?"

Foster wants to rip his own face off right now. Just... rip it off, dripping blood and trailing sinew and just press it against Taako's face, as though perhaps the raw material of blood and flesh would impress upon him the message that he can't.

Which is, he knows, not how things work. He has to use words.

"What's that got to do with anything? I... haha. Okay. You have... you have humans. You have people of colour." He looks and sounds a little like he wants to die, like having this conversation is sucking the life right out of him.

"Then do you know what genetics are? How you end up looking like your parents?" He looks at Taako with an intensity that begs him to fucking listen.

"Features like mine? Like--yours? Blond hair? Black--brown, coloured skin." He fumbles on the categories--he has only just been punished with the memories of those conversations, and talking about it now is bringing them back. Conversations about what he was or wasn't, how that depended so much on who he spoke to and where he was. Being black. Being mixed. How 'mixed' still meant 'black' in some places and not others. He's drowning in it.

"This? Is not normal. Common. Not... common. No one looks like this." No one he knew looked anything like him--his dad, his mum, they'd looked like him in pieces, parts pasted together, but in some ways, he'd looked so unlike either of them that it invited comment constant basis. Weekly. Daily. So far back that his dad still had to pick him up to show him their shared nose and round faces in the bathroom mirror the way he did all the time--with such pride. He doesn't want to think about that now.

"Except me. And now you."

"... okay." Taako speaks slowly, carefully, obviously considering his words for once. His tone is, instead of his usual sharp, fast wit, softer, thoughtful. "So... let me try to understand this. You're upset that you and I look alike because humans... they don't see a lot of people like us."

Humans are so jumpy about things that are strange to them.

"So... okay, so... hmm." He considers that, turning it over in his head. "... you know, uh, most people would be glad to see somebody else like them out there. Do you want to be the only one out there like this?"

Taako's question gives Foster a bit of pause. It's never really come up before, so he doesn't know--not in words. But that's not the issue, and if he can say that--

He has the feeling of it, inside his head; this idea that he wants to express. But he can't find it, concretely--just the way it feels to brush up against it.

"Mmh, no... hhhngh, it's... "

He closes his eyes tightly, running his hand up and pout of his hair, then rethreads his fingers in its curl. Just looking at Taako's face gives him a sick, angry feeling.

It's like... looking at something uncanny, something unnatural. Something he--or, no, not him, but the child who took being shoved from the goal in basketball without complaint, the boy who said 'owie, man' in something suspended between his parents' two disparate accents. That child with his close shaved blond hair and skinny brown legs--something that child that was and wasn't him at all could have grown up to look like.

But he can't really put into words what about that is so offensive to him.

"Mmm." Taako hums thoughtfully, catching his own chin between his fingers as he ponders. "Look. I guess the important thing is that looking at me is, you know, not a great time for you, right?"

He pauses, and then his smile turns almost sheepish.

"Maybe I should've kept my distance after all... I mean, it's too late now, I guess." He shrugs lightly, half-sighing. "I guess I just wanted to know why, because, like... I'll be real with you: that's weird. Hell, it's still weird, even though you... kind of explained it to me just now. Sort of."

He picks the Umbra Staff up off of its tip, returning it to its place at his back, and he smiles at Foster.

"Anyway, we're gonna have to be around each other, since we're both kinda stuck here and the carnival isn't that big, you know? May as well try to be civil, facial twinsies or not."

It's too late now, I guess.

Honestly, what was even the point? Why did he have to explain anything--since they were going to have to be 'around' each other regardless of his reasoning, wasn't it pointless to make him explain anything at all?

Instead of saying that, however, Foster laughs at it. It's a cover for how he actually feels--a habit, maybe, a reflection of the feeling of absolute futility. Is it funny? Not to anyone, really, but there's a kind of absurdity to pointlessness that makes it much easier to laugh.

But laughing doesn't communicate his message. It is with a kind of earnest vehemence that he deflects Taako's 'good' intentions.

"No, please do whatever you want! Being nice--civil--to someone like me is a mistake. The only appropriate way to handle this is to be as indifferent to my condition as it pleases you to be."

... that's... offputting. Taako's expression shifts, just a bit; not quite showing just how unnerved he truly is, but it's pretty obvious that he's a little bit deflated by that response.

"Look. I've got no problem with you. Seriously. I mean, if you want me to be an asshole to you, then fine, I'm more than willing to do that, but, like... that's tiring, you know?" Is he joking? Is he serious? It's unclear, and the tilt of his head, the narrowing of his eyes could honestly imply either.

Edited 2017-06-15 02:18 (UTC)

Why should Taako be deflated at all? Foster just gave him free rein to do whatever he wants. For whatever reason, without question.

"More tiring than pretending to be nice to someone who already doesn't get along with you?" Foster smiles, at least until he breaks eye contact.

Then he turns to Taako fully, spreading his hands--

"So go ahead! Abuse me however you wish! Slam doors in my face! Humiliate me in public! That's the appropriate way to handle garbage!"

Edited 2017-06-15 17:17 (UTC)

"Okay," Taako says, and he sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "How about this: indifference. How's indifference hit you?"

Foster hasn't even done anything to earn Taako's proper anger except be very vocally upset about Taako's face.

Edited 2017-06-15 17:34 (UTC)

There's a moment, maybe just half a moment, wherein Foster looks at Taako out of the corner of his eye, that same weirdly empty smile brightening his face. But then he just looks out over the lake again, half-contemplatively.

"For now," he replies.

His tone is calm, somewhere between cheery and ominous.

"Yeah, that's fine," is Taako's exasperated response. Talking to this guy has officially stopped being interesting, for the time being, and started to become something of a headache. Well, he wasn't able to solve whatever grand mystery that would make this motherfucker make sense, but at least he now has some idea what he's so worked up about. Sort of.

"... so, hold on, are you now planning to wrong me somehow? Or is that just an expected part of the package deal with you?" He can't resist firing off again, after a few minutes, despite his growing annoyance.

if by 'firing off,' he means 'hitting the nail a little too on the head,' then yes. Foster just laughs at him, but doesn't bother to confirm in either direction. Or rather, he is confirming--it's just not clear which one, or to what degree.

He's not even look at Taako now--just out over the water, his eyes lidded half-mast and the ghostly traces of that smile still touching his lips like he's involved in some private thought that has nothing to do with the elf.

At the very least, he's less... openly angry about things.

"... okay, cool. Good talk, buddy." With a sigh, Taako spins the Umbra Staff around his finger, and then hangs it at his back again, fairly confident this guy isn't about to launch into him-- he's clearly got his own shit going on, and Taako isn't entirely sure he wants any part of it.

Well, he's kind of involved whether he wants to be or not, by this point, but maybe he can just try and ease his way right back out of the path of whatever oncoming clusterfuck this guy's life is.

"Well, if that's all, then I guess I'm... gonna go? Unless you've got some other racially-charged fuckin' discourse you wanna throw at me here."

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Oh Hell No [Closed]

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My head hurts just take it

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