poly_chromatic | [action/text]

[action]

[Justin, looking older and more worn than usual, is in the garden. If his rumpled appearance or the cigarettes don't indicate a cursed state, his complete inaction should. He's seldom idle, usually, and the police force has been keeping him occupied lately.

But right now, he's sitting under a tree. Smoking. Looking either bored or blank--it's difficult to tell. He's not going anywhere soon.]

[text]

This again. And again, and again, and again. The details change but the plot repeats itself. Not just one weekend a month or even here alone. Listen to the clock. Each tick is just like the one preceding it, like the one following it. Tedious second after tedious second. Identical seconds, adding up to minutes and hours and days and years that blur together into a single unremarkable life until, finally, we have the privilege of dying.

I wonder why we bother living through the tedium.

Why do we consider life so valuable when it ultimately comes to nothing?

[ooc: Cursed with The Years That Never Were. This is a Justin I've been working on for a while, so there's an explanation for the curious. Responses will come from the curse journal, mostly.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It'll drive you insane.

[If you let it.]

It's a short drive.

You can take a detour. Go sightseeing. Drive slower. Make pit stops.

Are you coming along?

On the road to insanity? With or without pit stops?

With pit stops. Otherwise I'll go straight there.

[If she says no, he'll do it anyway just like he said. If she says yes, she can at least delay the inevitable for both of them. The choice is clear.]

I call shotgun.

[A decent amount of time goes by before Justin replies.]

Do you hurt enough to want to escape like that?

[How does she answer a question like this? Where she admits that she's been faking for so long, that she's been lying to him so he doesn't fall off the same edge she's teetering on?]

Sometimes. But I know there's no point in doing that here.

It'll happen when I go back, too. It's just a matter of time.

[But.]

This road trip? You're not coming along.

I've been uninvited.

[She's not sure if she's disappointed or relieved.]

I think you would've escaped by now if that's what you wanted.

[He's not talking about the City here.]

Escaped how?

[But she is and now she's confused.]

By going insane. By finding some other way to get away from life without quite dying. We're not the City's prisoners. We're life's.

No, here we're the City's. Anywhere else we would have a choice on how we wanted to live, on what we could do. Here, we only have one choice and it's no choice at all.

[He doesn't agree--and some of that could be due to the fact that life outside of the City takes place in a literal prison where the options are similarly limited--but Angela can believe what she wants.]

There are choices. They're limited to existing or dying one day at a time, but they're there.

We can't die here. You know that.

It's temporary, but it's still death.

And then you get up and realize nothing's changed. So what are you going to do? Do it again? Over and over? Truly the definition of insanity.

I told you it was a short drive.

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