Quentin "did you ever have a sister?" Compson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shadowstepped) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
riverviewlogs2017-06-20 12:59 pm
shadowstepped) wrote in riverviewlogs2017-06-20 12:59 pm
( closed ) too much sanity may be madness
who: Quentin Compson, Cassandra Anderson, and Rin McPrettyelf
what: Saving a damsel in distress (guess which one is the damsel)
when: Time is an illusion
where: Somewhere outside the gates
warnings: Mild violence
What compels Quentin - unarmed, inexperienced, and alone - outside of the walls and into that which had been reclaimed by nature, by the disdain of that God of the Old Testament, is no mission or spirit of Manifest Destiny, but rather a cloying desire to simply vanish for a few hours. In his daily wandering, with his thoughts as peripatetic as his footsteps treading his shadow, it had seemed to him that the buildings towered too high, their windows gleaming too brightly like the water's surface catching the sun, and the people too numerous, each one of them rooted in different soil and sustained by different air. All of this striking him quite suddenly, as if he did not notice the water until it was sloshing over his nose and mouth and rushing in his ears. Perhaps too it is some shadow of a boy's recklessness, which he in his youth confuses for bravery, that lingers on him - the solemn recklessness with which he and a troop of boys of a particular age had once trampled the overgrown yard that swathed the sunken carcass of the Sutpen house, only to run (for what he couldn't say, but it wasn't terror) when they found the placid-faced wizened Negro woman still guarding the ruins of greatness.
He is alone, and then suddenly he is not. A faint clattering atop the loosened tiles of an abandoned house yanks his attention to where, through the thick tangles of vines, he sees a pair of butter yellow eyes perched upon a gnarled brown snout, the face lizard-like but the body ballooned beyond all probable proportions. Quentin holds perfectly still, holding the beast's gaze and watching it crawl down the eaves. Wondering if it is fear that arrests him there or the complete absence of it, the forgetting of it. Wondering when it might leap for him, or if it would leap for him at all, and knowing that turning his back to run would only lash the beast after him, because one should never run from a wild predator whose eye he has caught.
what: Saving a damsel in distress (guess which one is the damsel)
when: Time is an illusion
where: Somewhere outside the gates
warnings: Mild violence
What compels Quentin - unarmed, inexperienced, and alone - outside of the walls and into that which had been reclaimed by nature, by the disdain of that God of the Old Testament, is no mission or spirit of Manifest Destiny, but rather a cloying desire to simply vanish for a few hours. In his daily wandering, with his thoughts as peripatetic as his footsteps treading his shadow, it had seemed to him that the buildings towered too high, their windows gleaming too brightly like the water's surface catching the sun, and the people too numerous, each one of them rooted in different soil and sustained by different air. All of this striking him quite suddenly, as if he did not notice the water until it was sloshing over his nose and mouth and rushing in his ears. Perhaps too it is some shadow of a boy's recklessness, which he in his youth confuses for bravery, that lingers on him - the solemn recklessness with which he and a troop of boys of a particular age had once trampled the overgrown yard that swathed the sunken carcass of the Sutpen house, only to run (for what he couldn't say, but it wasn't terror) when they found the placid-faced wizened Negro woman still guarding the ruins of greatness.
He is alone, and then suddenly he is not. A faint clattering atop the loosened tiles of an abandoned house yanks his attention to where, through the thick tangles of vines, he sees a pair of butter yellow eyes perched upon a gnarled brown snout, the face lizard-like but the body ballooned beyond all probable proportions. Quentin holds perfectly still, holding the beast's gaze and watching it crawl down the eaves. Wondering if it is fear that arrests him there or the complete absence of it, the forgetting of it. Wondering when it might leap for him, or if it would leap for him at all, and knowing that turning his back to run would only lash the beast after him, because one should never run from a wild predator whose eye he has caught.