2019-07-15 - I Don't Know

After the whole mess with the Dreams and the weird shit in the city, and salads, Ash left the house. She claimed she didn't have to work, but didn't go out with Ast, or even end up at any of the local bars. Assuming someone checked, no one probably checked though. Why would they? That'd be just silly.

It is the wee hours of the morning when she finally comes back home. Sneaking, like she was some sort of teenager still at home. Her shoes are held in her hand, her purse hanging from her shoulder, and she's moving as quietly as she can so that she doesn't end up waking anyone in the house up.

If you sneak, you get snuck. By which we mean you end up seeing things you maybe wish you had not.

Ash sneaks in and she catches sight of something outside, in the yard. It's white, propped up. Further inspection reveals it is a canvas. This isn't the first time a canvas has been outside, but it is perhaps the first time it has been outside in the middle of the night. There is a tall stool in front of the canvas, and--again, in his damn underwear--Jens is sitting on the stool, paintbrush in one hand and palete in the other. He scratches his back with the back end of the brush. It's a thin-tip, used for detailing, which he seems to be doing very meticulously, by the look on his face.

It's not the first time, and Ash could probably easily slip past and head upstairs to her room, none the wiser that she'd gotten home. Instead she dumps her purse and shoes next to the couch before she drifts towards the kitchen. It's not a beer that she grabs, and despite the early hours she makes not one, but two Ash Specials. Which basically means that she's poured random amounts of alcohol together, added a mixer. Today it seems she's added Coke as a mixer. With two drinks in hand she starts to head out into the backyard.

He's so intense about this shit. He is lost to it. She dumps her stuff and mixes drinks and he isn't that far away--he can totally hear it. But his mind doesn't parse it. He's locked in this spiral, perched on the very edge of the stool, brush stroking. The back legs of the stool just slightly off the ground from how precariously he's sitting as he dances the brush over the canvas, long thin lines in a blackish crimson. He doesn't even notice she's coming, he's so bloody focused. Jens, whose focus is notoriously inexistent, most of the time.

Everyone knows that this is how accidents happen. Since he doesn't notice her out there she takes the time to get a good look at what he's working on, well, as good as she can in the low light of the backyard. Eventually she moves up behind him, tucking her chin onto his shoulder and holding one of the two drinks out towards him, all without saying anything like 'hi, itsa me Ash'.

It's no wonder most girls run away.

This is definitely not something for class: a haunting black border that fades into sharp spikes towards the center is covered in thick, dark blue runes that are barely visible against the pitch. At the center is a girl; long-limbed and white-haired and sprawled on the floor in an unnatural angle, naked but her biology vague, nabulous; her eyes a fiery orange. She's burning intensely, a fire so hot it's consuming her so fast it can't spread, eating its own source of power, arduous only at her edges, her pale skin blistering in crimson and purple. The smoke around her wraps around the jagged spikes of black pointing towards her at the center, sometimes merging with them at the lengths. But it's when Ash moves behind him that she can see the painting at the full light of the moon, and she starts to... see... the invisible shapes--so faintly painted they can barely be made out--of ... men... of ... things... of ... teeth, and eyes, and long, spindlly fingers reaching for the girl at the center.

It's some fucking Pickman shit going on here.

When she puts her head on his shoulder, jens startles and reaches out, grabbing the edges of the canvas. "HOLY SHIT." He takes in a deep breath. "Fuck." He reaches up and grabs the sheet bunched up at the top of the canvas, then drops it over the painting. He slides off the stool and looks over his shoulder at her. "You gotta stop doing that. Fuck." After a moment, he reaches over and takes the drink. Fuck, says his expression, as he takes a long gulp.

The reaction might have been expected, maybe not. Either way when he startles she straightens up, taking a half step back so that any potential flailing arms don't end up with her wearing her kindly made drinks instead of consuming them.

When he reaches for the drink she gives it up fairly easily, moving to slide onto the stool that he's recently abandoned, crossing her legs before she takes a sip from her glass. There is a long, drawn out moment where she looks at him with this bewildered look like she has no idea what she's got to stop doing. But then she tilts her chin towards the painting that he's covered up, "You know you don't actually have to hide it, right?"

That look she gives him gets a roll of his eyes. He keeps his hand at the bottom of the canvas, the sheet covering it pulled low. "Just because I don't have to doesn't mean I shouldn't." Or that he doesn't want to. "S'private." He takes another drink and then sets it aside, taking the canvas down from the easel and grabbing the latter, folding it up into a long, thin thing easily transported. "What are you doin' sneaking around at this hour anyway?"

"Private because you're worried some innocent soul will wander past and freak out over the content of it?" Ash tilts her head at him, "Or private because you just don't actually want to share?" Why these two things are different to her no one with two brain cells to rub together will probably ever figure out. Because it doesn't make any sense. Instead she takes a sip from the drink, then she shrugs, "Just got home, and I wasn't sneaking....exactly." She starts to get off the stool since it seems like he's going to bail now that she's scared him half to death. "I like your art, by the way."

Jens eyes her warily and then shrugs. "Six of one, half a dozen of the other." He swallows and gives her a tight smile when she says she likes it. "Thanks." It doesn't sound convinced. It's likely that the only people he willingly shares his paintings with are his famnily, and even they probably only get a smattering. He has a whole corner of the attic in his parents's house that's just stacked canvases. His room here is pretty much just canvases end-to-end. He doesn't have a desk, it takes up too much room. Bed, closet, canvases. "Where'd you go out to?"

"Library." Which, considering the fact she's in jeans and a t-shirt it's a possibility that she's not lying about what her destination was. "I had to work on a paper that was due Monday...last one of the semester." Which is fantastic, but also weirdly late to be turning something in. The hand that isn't holding onto her drink tucks into her pocket, eyes wandering back towards the painting under it's covering, then back to his face, "So...Explain it to me. Your painting."

So asks the person that thinks posters of bands are art.

"Expl--" Jens looks at his painting and then at her. "I don't know, man. It's a painting. I just paint it, I don't design it." He makes a face, looking incredulous. "It's not like, a philosophy or a twist ending in a story. It's just... art." It's art, mannnng. He takers a drink, snorts. "Explain it. I wouldn't know where to start."

"I mean...why a blonde? Why those colors?" Ash waves her half-empty drink towards the painting, "You've got to have some idea why you made the choices that you made, right?" She then shrugs, reaching for the stool to pick it up since his hands are busy with the other things, "Whatever, doesn't matter. You don't have to talk to me about it." If she could flip her hair of her shoulder right now she might, because when she turns on her heel to head for the door her chin is lifted upwards, and she seems to be wrongly assuming he just doesn't want to tell her.

"It's--I don't know." Jens lifts his hand like, what the fuck? "Why are you getting all pissy? I don't fucking know why. It's inspiration. I just paint what comes to me. I mean, shit, it's probably you. I don't know!" He waves vaguely at the painting.

1) Girls always want to be drawn, or painted, like French girls, but 2) who wants to be drawn, and/or painted, burning up while creepy things from the shadows are trying to grab them? The comment that it's probably her causes Ash to stop before she reaches the door, turning around to face him with a very confused expression, "Me?" She sets the stool back down, settling on it before she absently curls her feet around the legs of the stool. "I'm not pissy, either. I just was trying to talk to you about it..." Badly, she was trying to talk to him about it badly. "I don't get art." No, really?! "I was just trying to understand how you come up with stuff. Why are you painting me?"

Jens just sort of stares at her for a long moment, and then he downs that Ash Special like it's a shot of whiskey. It's not. "You gotta work on asking questions, man, you do not work your way up to the unanswerable ones, you know that? It's not like, easy-easy-intermediate-difficult-impossible with you. It's just, IMPOSSIBLE." He makes a big gesture with both hands, and then sighs. "I don't know. I sit in front of the thing, and I get an image, and I start to draw. You wanna talk about my school stuff? I can talk technique and shit all day, color choices, brush strokes, whatever you want." He points at the covered canvas. "This shit is some fucked up subconscious repressed bullshit I do so I can function." Jens has been in therapy since he was basically old enough to talk; he's well-aware of his issues and, for the most part, is okay with being broken. As much as anyone can be without being a psychopath, anyway.

Work on asking questions. Right. She can do that, right? Probably. Maybe.

Ash stares at him as she much more slowly takes a sip from it, thinking about it befre she nods, "Yeah. We can talk about your school stuff if it is easier to talk to me about that." She lifts her shoulders upwards, though, a smile creeping slowly across her face, "But if I know anything, I know that what we do for school isn't our true passions. My work for school is...boring compared to what I work on for me. So if it's all the same, I'd rather talk about what you paint for you, but we can talk about your school projects instead."

"Oh don't give me that creepy fucking smile with the 'true selves' thing," Jens says, very defensively. "Obviously schoolwork is boring, that's why it's easier to talk about!" Jens tosses his arms up and just paces in a circle. He's chewing his nails now. Actually, he's ripping his cuticles up with his teeth, which is... painful, if you're aware of it. "You're aware that that's not how repression works, right? I can't just talk about it? Why do you care, anyway?"

"Why would I be aware that's how repression works?" Ash isn't a psychology major, after all. She wouldn't know anything about crazies and their methods. She probably knows how repression works, though. "Why wouldn't I care?" Which is probably very annoying as an answer, since it isn't an answer at all. Thankfully, she gives a better...ish answer. "I don't know, Jens, because asking you to talk about your art in general is probably easier than poking you about why you were painting me naked."

"Answering questions with questions is bad form," Jens says with a furrowed brow. He sighs and shrugs. "I don't paint clothes. I don't know why. Just never do. If there's people, they're usually like, naked, but not explicitly. I don't know." It's a lot easier to live with this stuff when you don't have to articulate it, to be fair. "So don't, like, read into it." Hrmph. "It might not even be you." Does he know any other long-legged blonde chicks who've recently been sprawled on the floor at roughly that angle?

"You don't ever paint clothes?" At least there wasn't a question that was asked before she asked her question, so maybe she's getting better at this conversation thing. When he says that it might not be her, and to not read into it the look she gives him is very 'bitch, please'. She's already read everything into this entire situation possible. "Yeah, okay. You just said me instead of some other blonde you know, alright." She finishes what is left in her glass, then she leans forward, "So have you ever painted anyone explicitly naked?"

"I paint clothes for school stuff," Jens says quietly, and then he rolls his eyes at her. "Like your ego needs a boost," he says, snorting. Her last question makes him shrug. "Same as the clothes. For school, yeah. Otherwise, no." He rubs the back of his neck.

"How come?" Ash is curious, no one else is around for her to target with the questions and the bothering. Lucky Jens, right? She slides down off the stool again, picking it up before she turns to start heading towards the door back into the house, calling over her shoulder, "I was just going to offer to let you if that was something you wanted to do. You want another drink?"

Jens holds his arms up, like he doesn't know if she's trolling him or not. "I don't know!" And then she's offering to pose nude for him and he rolls his eyes. "Maybe if I need to for some project or something." He doesn't seem interested in painting her naked. But then, there are signs Jens isn't the typical stereotype of a painter. He doesn't have the affectations common to his ilk and he definitely stands out in a crowd of them. His intensity is wild and kind of everywhere; he lacks focus, but not in the distracted way a space-headed painter might. In short: he's fucking weird. "Yeah. Sure."

Drinks can't be made without a glass, so once she's set her own glass on the counter and put his stool out of the way she has to come back outside to get his glass, "Anytime."

That might be for the drink making, or the posing nude. Hard to say. Either way she picks up his glass and heads back into the house to make more drinks. This time the ratio of alcohol changes, and the mixer becomes OJ, and really calling it a mixer at this point in time is really a very generous observation that is very inaccurate. Once the drinks are mixed she takes a large swallow from hers, then tops it off one final time before she heads towards him to give him his drink, "So are Astrid and Marius....studying?"

Jens watches her mix the drink and then shakes his head. She mixes drinks like he paints, to be honest. But he doesn't say it. He just takes the drink and takes a sip. "I don't know. I don't think so. Neither of them seemed drunk enough? Living in the same house is gonna fuck that uuuuuuuuup," he murmurs, leaning on the counter.

"I can't believe they still think no one knows." Ash shakes her head, her drink getting slow swirled around in her glass before she takes a swallow from it, "It's kind of cute, though. In a stupid idiotic sort of way, it is very adorable." She points at him, almost in warning before she starts towards the couch, dropping down on it before she kicks her feet up onto the coffee table, "You can't go telling either one of them that we know, though. Unless they start getting stupid about it." More stupid. "They'll eventually realize that there isn't any real reason to hide their true love, and that'll be that. Until then, we can keep making bets on when they are going to come out in the open about it. I'm still saying September at the earliest."

"I'm not gonna say shit," Jens says. "But if they keep trying to keep it some sort of secret I'm gonna troll them." He shrugs, making his way to the couch. He finds his discarded shirt from back when she splashed him and pats it. It's dry(ish) so he puts it on and flops on the couch with his drink.

"How are you going to troll them?" Ash takes another large swallow off her drink before she leans over, resting her head on his shoulder, tucking the glass carefully between her thighs so that she can have her arms free. Messing with people is a fine art form, and this might be the next step in her agenda of fucking with him tonight, but she snuggles herself right in against his side, trying to hug his arm, "So what're your plans for the break before fall semester?"

"Not sure yet, but I'll come up with something." When she hugs his arm he rolls his eyes and then takes a long few gulps of the drink. "I don't know. Probably just hang around here, be annoying, drink too much. You know. Your basic break stuff. I don't know if Marius and Runa are planning anything."

"Probably the same thing as always." Is there really a same thing though? "I think Ast and I are working doubles until the end of time, and will never get the chance to do anything fun. It'll be the last thing we ever do..." It's overly dramatic, but at least she hasn't resorted to flinging herself down on the floor, rolling around. "You guys are going to have to have all our fun for us...I'm trusting you to handle it."

"Gotta make that cheddar," Jens says, lifting a hand to rub his fingers and thumb together, like 'money money'. "Don't worry, though. I'll drag Marius and Runa to the Deuce so we can have lots of fun in your proximity and you can leech it off us that way." He's so thoughtful.

"Pretty sure that is not the way that fun works, Jens." Ash narrows her eyes very faintly at him, trying to come up with actual reasons why that is not the way this works. "I'm not sure that fun vampires are a thing. I'm not a fun vampire!"

Jens looks like he wants to say 'oh, they totally are a thing' (because they totally are, especially around here), but he doesn't say it. He just gives a little shrug and then reaches down to pat her knee. "No worries. You can have fun here. In tyhe five minutes between when you get home and when you collapse exhausted in bed." He's so nice.

"You mean like naked studying kind of fun?" Ash glances up at him, her eyes widening for a moment before she starts to bat her eyelashes at him. "Why Jens, I didn't know you wanted to naked study with me. I'm kind of worried about doing that during the five minutes between work and sleep, though."

"I did not mean that, I do not last five minutes, I am not having this conversation. You," he informs her, "are a fucking hellion."

"It's okay..." Ash picks up her drink, taking a quick two or three swallows until she finishes it off, then she pulls her legs off the coffee table to set the glass on it. Then she starts to move from where she was nice and comfortable on the couch next to Jens, right into his lap, her arms thrown around his neck, a hand petting his hair before she gives him the most understandingly sad look as she informs him at a near-whisper, "I hear that if you practice more, that you can even learn to go longer than five minutes."

"Oh, fuck off," Jens says when she whispers. She doesn't learn, does she? He slides his hand under her legs and once again, flips her off his lap and otnot he couch. At least this time there's no wet spot. He rolls his eyes. "Five minutes my fucking ass." He grabs his drink.

At least there is no more wet spot.

Ash laughs as she gets rudely removed from his lap, "Well you're half right about that." She points out, straightening herself out, which includes using his lap in new ways as she stretches her legs across it, her head on the arm of the couch. Then she goes in a futile search for the remote, "I love naked studying kind of fun, you know. And...where the fuck is the remote..."

"We all love naked studying kind of fun, Ash," Jens tells her with a snort. "It's Marius and Astrid that think they need to sneak around about it. Probably because they only do it when they're blood-alcohol levels are so fucked if you light a match near them their arteries light on fire."

"Are you sure we all do? Because you keep saying no, and I'm starting to think you just don't like it." Ash finally finds the remote, which is a tiny victory that she waves around before rolling onto her side, turning the tv on and going to the Netflix menu after hitting the button. "I can't ever figure out why they feel they need to sneak around. It's a modern day mystery." She selects one of the many documentaries available, hitting play on it.

"I keep saying no because you don't mean it," Jens points out. And anyway, bad idea when living under the same roof, or so every sitcom and drama has taught him his entire life. "They're dumbasses. It's fine."

"You keep saying no because you keep assuming I'm not meaning it." Ash corrects his response for him, settling the remote on her hip as she tucks her hand beneath her cheek, much of her focus shifting from him to the documentary. Which might save his from being messed with more.

Jens snorts. "Exactly." He nudges her feet off his lap and stands up, stretching. "I think I'mma hit the hay. Sleep tight." He wanders off to the yard to grab his easle and painting.