Foster Van Denend (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
control_freak) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lostcarnival2017-06-03 12:26 am
control_freak) wrote in lostcarnival2017-06-03 12:26 am
Entry tags:
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.
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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
My head hurts just take it
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."
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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!"
no subject
Foster hasn't even done anything to earn Taako's proper anger except be very vocally upset about Taako's face.
no subject
"For now," he replies.
His tone is calm, somewhere between cheery and ominous.
no subject
"... 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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."