2022-01-08 - The Blues

It's about eleven o'clock in the damp, drizzly evening when there's a knock at the door. And a call through the door: "Abildgaard, it's me. Lemme in."

That's Itzhak's voice, unmistakable.

That's not a time of day that Ravn usually expects visitors without a text or a call first -- but this is Gray Harbor, and nothing here is ever exactly by the rules. Ravn is barefoot in jeans and a shirt when he opens the door because he was one step short of falling asleep with a book on his face; enjoy the view of bullet scars on his abdomen.

"Everything okay? You look like -- well, like shit went down." He stands aside to let the other man in. "Coffee, tea, whiskey, me?"

Itzhak has his violin case, his mandolin case, and a full satchel slung around his chest. His curls are frizzy from damp and he's scowling like only he can do. He steps in, past Ravn, careful not to bump him even as he announces, "Get me drunk. I mean get me fucked up. We're playing the blues. You know 'Born Under A Bad Sign'?"

"No, but in ten minutes I will. Hang on." Ravn sticks his feet in his boots (socks, what are socks) and heads beeline for the liquor cabinet. If it's going to be? It's going to be, and he takes out several bottles. Then he shrugs his blazer on because chilly winter evenings -- and heads back to the door. "Toss your satchel on the floor, we'll hit the Studio."

Studio, capital S for shit and giggles. It's a garage with walls padded with egg cartons. "Want to tell me what's going down, or are we drinking and playing tonight, and dealing with shit tomorrow?"

Itzhak dumps the satchel on the floor as instructed. Then he whooshes out an enormous sigh, tipping his head back, eyes closing. He tips his head back down and looks at Ravn. "I dunno. Maybe either. Maybe both. Are you really gonna not wear a shirt?" Despite his obvious unhappiness, that gets him to almost smile. "You look rock and roll as hell."

"It's after eleven in my own home, I'm allowed to let go of standards even by the rules of my father who was a hell of a stickler for that sort of thing." Ravn, ever the rebel; for his next acting out in public, he may wear socks in sandals.

He herds the other man across the driveway to the garage; it's got its own gas heater which he turns on, and it's nice enough inside -- in that same half artistic, half random way of the rest of the house. It seems be a matter of both principle and fun for both room mates -- why buy new when you can raid thrift stores and find the most curious and strange things? And as long as some of those curious and strange things are comfortable to sit in and you can place a couple of whiskey bottles on top of another, all's well -- right?

"So, let me pour a couple to get us started, and you can give me the first hint. Are there women involved? I've had a few women with heartbreak issues come my way lately but I don't think you were the root of it in either case." High-end whiskey goes well with plastic cups. Right?

"YES." Well, that was decisive.

Itzhak checks out the place, poking his big nose into everything, prowling around the space on those long legs. He's restless, more than restless. Driven.

He comes back to accept a plastic cup of high end whiskey. Instead of the Hebrew toast he usually offers, he just drinks. "Thanks," he says when he comes up for air, saluting Ravn with the cup. "Knew I could count on you, buddy."

"Worst pun ever," Ravn murmurs and refills Itzhak's cup, knowing full well that the other man had no intention of being funny. He doesn't seem bothered by Itzhak's wandering about -- possibly because he does the exact same thing himself when off his emotional kilter, get all that excess energy and frustration out there in form of talking, moving, doing.

Blue-grey gaze follows the human tennis ball though as he pings and pongs back across the floor. "So -- it's a woman. Next -- did she say yes, no, or maybe?" An eyebrow goes up in that very typical Ravn fashion. "It's not as simple as she will or she won't, not for you. I swear to God, this is relationship trouble week -- spent New Years' Eve with Leontes, also struggling with relationship issues."

Itzhak doesn't even give Ravn a dirty look for the joke. He goes back to his exploration. Though at this point it can safely be called pacing. "Not a woman. Women. In general. Fuck!" Sudden explosion, Itzhak barking the curse, free hand clenching into a fist. "God fucking dammit. Okay I'm gonna tune." He's a little emotionally unstable.

He comes back and sets the cup and his cases down. It's the mandolin he goes for, taking it out and beginning the laborious process of tuning eight strings.

Well, that's what the man gets for picking an instrument with too many strings. Ravn reaches for his own violin case and joins Itzhak in the process of preparing to play -- or take out frustrations on innocent music, whatever one's preference might be. He's certainly aired his frustrations that way many times; usually through rigorous practise, because the instrument creates a wall of sound that insulates him from a sea of stormy emotions, and also because unlike a lot of life's problems, a complicated passage can in fact be beaten into submission with persistence.

"Myes, well. You know me. Not exactly an expert on them. Not exactly hunted by them either, with a few notable exceptions." Such as the one who chased him literally halfway around the world, after her own death. "Someone you want, or someone who wants you, then?"

"No, no, you don't get it," and whose fault is that, "there isn't a woman. Unless there is, I don't know, but," Itzhak shakes his curly dark head, plucking the strings and twisting the tuning knobs. "Christ, this weather makes it a bitch and a half to tune anything. De la Vega said he don't even know if he wants to be with guys anymore and he dumped my ass, so fuck him. Gimme an A?"

Ravn blinks. He's seen a lot of things coming. He did not see that one coming.

Slowly, he nods and, well, strikes the A. Give that a moment to sink in because of all the things --

Nothing is ever permanent, he reminds himself. The only thing that's ever permanent is that people will find magnificent new ways all the time to make themselves miserable. And that nothing shares like misery, a profoundly Danish saying which holds true in most languages all the same.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs at length because he is. The last thing he wants for anyone he likes is to see them unhappy, after all. "And I'm guessing from the way you're not putting on the riot gear, that this is not a matter of some superior reading him the book or otherwise forcing him to make choices both of you hate."

"Nah." Itzhak stares down at his mandolin. "Nobody left who could, maybe the governor. Nope, it's all him being a fucking jackass. Saying he needs... he needs..."

He rubs his eyes. Then back to tuning vengefully. "Never mind," he growls, gruff as de la Vega himself.

A few minutes and he's got the mandolin tuned, plucking sweet bright notes from the paired strings. "I built me a raft and it's ready for floating," he sings, soft, "Ol' Mississippi, she's calling my name...'

"I'm the last guy on the planet to go to for relationship advice, that ought to be obvious," Ravn murmurs, perfectly aware that his friend knows how many relationships he's been in, and how neither ended in a way that could by any means be described as satisfactory.

He shakes his head. Instinct makes him want to reach out, suggest solutions, look for the silver lining, anything that might turn bloody awful to mildly inconvenient. But life doesn't work like that, and he knows that well enough.

He touches the bow to the strings, tests out the pacing -- an unfamiliar tune but that's never stopped anyone with a certain level of expertise. Then he pauses and looks back. "I'll say this. It's better to have an open break than letting it fester. I still feel like shit about Hyacinth -- I don't hate her, I still wish things had worked out, I am deeply resentful at life for dangling something in front of my face and then taking it away. But what I hate the most is all the time I spent wondering. I am still there. And I wish on some level it'd been a clean break-up that I could shout about, get drunk, be mad, and then move on."

Itzhak pauses in his singing. Not his playing, he keeps fingerpicking but mutes himself, resting the heel of his hand light on the strings. He grunts, wincing sympathetically over what Ravn says. "Well, yannow what they say. Late is better than never. You could always just do that."

"From the sounds of it we're about to do just that." Ravn smirks lightly and lets his bow tease out little variations on what Itzhak is providing; like a jazz musician, lazily testing out little swirls and eddies in the current of the musical river.

"It's not that I can't get laid if I wanted to." He chuckles. "Which is -- kind of funny, actually. I'm not usually swimming in offers, but I had several lately. One of which I would probably have accepted if there had not been complications and rebound issues. It's not, though. It's more -- I don't know that I want to talk about true love and ever after, but if you go into a relationship not expecting it to last, then why go to the effort in the first place? And I know you did expect it to last, just like I did, and it fucking hurts to be standing there alone, realising that you were wrong."

As if ashamed, Itzhak looks away, down at the mandolin. The neck of the instrument is very slim, the frets quite close together, but he forms chords skillfully despite enormous hands.

He pauses to drink more. "I'm sucky at relationships. Terrible at 'em. Longest time I just stuck to fucking around, then..."

Mouth flattening, Itzhak picks up the melody. "I dunno why I thought I could fall in love and not fuck it up."

"Because you wanted to?" Ravn studies the other man; trying, perhaps, to determine what he may need the more -- shouting at God until he feels better (and God presumably doesn't), or some kind of life advice (which will be the blind leading the blind). "Because being in love feels good."

He shakes his head, a little regretfully. "And when you fall out of love, it feels like your heart is being torn out of your chest. Why do you think I stayed with Benedikte even after I realised she was a psychotic bitch? I wanted to work things out. Figured that I could learn to not set her off, that I could show her over time that I wasn't going to cheat on her or ignore her. It was the one time in my life I was in an actual relationship with someone, and I sure as hell did not want to let it go. Even when it was a dysfunctional clusterfuck and I should have walked out months before."

"I'm not out of love," Itzhak murmurs, "but maybe he is."

The music pauses again while he rubs his eyes, fighting not to cry. "Ain't gonna deny that we're a dysfunctional clusterfuck but I thought we both liked it that way." His voice thickens and he growls in aggravation. Better to scowl than to cry, his people say, not that he's much good at not crying. "Ya ex fiancee is a raging cunt and I'm glad I sent her back to Hell."

"I'm glad too. But if you'd met me while she was still alive, I'd have defended her to you to my last breath because she was the only woman who ever actually wanted me to stick around like that." Ravn hitches a shoulder. It's not a truth he's proud of, but it's a truth nonetheless. Lack of self esteem makes a man stupid.

He shakes his head again. "I'm not in a position to guess at what de la Vega feels. I don't know him well enough, and I don't know your relationship well enough, and it's not my business to get to know well enough. But things are usually more complicated than just 'I got bored'. When people get bored -- from what I've seen, you can tell when you look back. The signs were all there, the other bloke was there, the excuses."

Lifting his head to frown at Ravn, Itzhak doesn't at first seem to know what he means. He has to rerun their last few exchanges through processing to figure it out. Getting drunk doesn't help. "N-nah, bored? That ain't what he said."

But then his eyebrows go tilted up like, it's not what Ruiz said but maybe it's what he meant and how is Itzhak, the autistic ex con who mostly knows how to communicate via his fists or his dick, supposed to know the difference?

Maybe Ruiz is bored. Maybe Itzhak, once you get to know him, is boring. He's certainly no astronaut, uneducated, just some schmuck with a bit of talent for wrenching and violin.

"Yannow what, talking about this sucks. Let's play." Itzhak drains the cup, which is going pretty fast even for him.

If Ravn could read minds he'd roll his eyes at the speed with which the other man reaches the exact opposite conclusion of what he was trying to say. And then he'd chuckle because somehow, that's actually an extremely Rosencrantz reaction. And then he'd wince, because it'd also be an extremely Abildgaard reaction and hello, kettle, it's me, pot, let's discuss our pigmentation yet again.

He drains his own cup as well -- because if there's one thing Ravn does do very well, it's ingest large amounts of whiskey and not fall over. "Let's play something angry, then. Because you're fucking allowed to be mad at everything at a time like this."

Itzhak's jaw clenches. Angry? Why, yes. Yes he is. Angry about many, many things.

His fingers find the right strings without looking, picking out the iconic notes of the beginning of Gimme Shelter. That vocal croon is too high for him but no problem, he drops the octave and croons the hell out of it. If only they had someone on that equally iconic percussion!

Then he switched to rhythm and sings, tossing his head back. Opening his throat.

Ah-oh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
War, children
Is just a shot away

The percussion is right there in the form of Aidan's drum set, but the drummer is sadly lacking.

It doesn't matter. The point here is not to give the best possible rendition; it's to find an outlet for the rage and the hurt. Ravn remembers playing, alone, frantically working his way through classical compositions that really deserved much kinder treatment, building walls of sound around himself, because it was the only time he felt any kind of sanity at all after --

He doesn't want to think about Benedikte, about the levels of fucked up he was to stay with her, and the levels of fucked up he achieved when she died and refused to stay dead. Or about the bitterness deep below the polished exterior -- because what is the choice to simply not bother with relationships but acceptance of failure?

So he plays. And listens. And on some level, understands. The rage needs to find an outlet, or it will eat a man alive.