maskormenacelogs | I black out on dessert wine

Entry tags:

I black out on dessert wine

WHO: Dorian & others! some closed prompts, some open prompts
WHERE: all over the place
WHEN: all through the month of February
WHAT: surprise, Dorian Gray is actually secretly really pathetic
WARNINGS: talk of depression, mild drug use, alcoholism, body horror

open ish prompt: for people Dorian's got good cr with
Dorian's still an absolute wreck. It's been a month since Toby ported out and while he handled December by getting blackout drunk on a near daily basis, he's handled January by holing up in his apartment like a recluse, staring at his portrait, and just thinking about the past, about how he messed everything up, how it's his fault that if Toby comes back here, he won't be the same.

Of course, that's a big if in the first place. He's already lost Toby twice. What's the likelihood that the third time he loses him he'll get lucky?

Dorian's thankful for the blackout--it saved him the trouble of having to go out and pretend to care about all these sorts of trivial, boring imPort things. But he's hidden himself away for most of January and he knows that his friends are probably wondering why one of the community's most social butterflies has been laying low.

He has friends. Friends that care about him. That's still damn weird to wrap his head around.

So, Dorian's invited people over, partly to stop people from worrying, partly to force him to actually clean up his goddamn apartment. As he opens the door, Dorian gives whoever he invited a grin. There are still signs that things aren't great: there's far too many liquor bottles in the trash can, far too many shot glasses in the sink, and Dorian's wearing a sweatshirt. Still, he's able to put on a fake enough smile.

"Come on in," said with a nod.

open prompt: a bar in maurtia falls
This 'trying to people' and 'trying to seem like he's got it all together when in reality he almost had a breakdown at the laundromat when he discovered one of Toby's shirts in his load' fucking sucks. So Dorian's getting drunk. Again. Surprising no one. This bar's a bit more dive bar than his usual locations, but the alcohol's cheap, there's a jukebox, and nobody'll bother him.

That is, nobody except the bartender who recognizes Dorian as that guy who kind of passed out drunk sometime last month and they had to call a cab to get his alcoholic ass home. Needless to say, Dorian's gotten cut off after one drink.

So hello there person who Dorian might or might not recognize from the network, he's sliding right up to them, presenting them with his most winning, most 'surely I'M not trouble', most persuasive smile he can muster.

"Buy me a drink? I'll pay you back later, I just left my wallet at the house."

This is a lie. Just talking to the bartender will reveal this as a lie. Still, Dorian's delivering it like it's the utmost truth.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The portrait is absolutely horrifying. It looks like Dorian but a warped version of Dorian, withered with age. Traces of all the injuries he's ever received show on the portrait: burns are spotted around the face, two puncture wounds on the neck bleed, it's every sin, every injury, every trace of age writ large on his portrait.

Finally finding the dropcloth (how did it get under the couch?) Dorian tossed it over the portrait and gave Teekl a Look. A sort of 'don't try anything, cat' look. The last thing he needed was Klarion's cat to try and use the portrait as a scratching post.

"It's my portrait," Dorian explains, as he looks over at Klarion. "I brought it back to my apartment when the blackout happened. I don't..." He doesn't want Klarion just to see how much of a truly awful person he is. "You don't need to see it."

"Why not?" Klarion steps inside the living room, carrying a plate of cold pizza. He's already halfway through a slice himself, and he holds the plate out to Dorian, because offering someone their own stolen food is the polite thing for unwanted houseguests to do under these circumstances.

"Is it a bad likeness? Or did you get a new black eye recently?" His tone is halfway between teasing and goading; he only has a vague idea of how the portrait works, and bickering with an irritated Dorian is usually easier than figuring out how to deal with his moping moods.

Teekl keeps his distance from both of them, edging closer to the portrait while keeping his eyes on Dorian. He saw what was under that dropcloth, even if he hasn't communicated it yet.

Dorian shakes his head at Klarion's plate. No thanks, he's not going to eat cold pizza (that he bought himself, that's not how sharing works, buddy). Instead, he pauses for a moment, trying to find a good way to communicate just exactly what the problem is.

"You know that I'm immortal and can't be hurt. Well my immortality works...differently than most. Any sin, any trace of age, any wound that would appear on me, instead appears on my portrait. As such, it's not a pretty sight."

A hundred and fifty years of sin, debauchery, and various bloody circumstances? It looks awful.

"I've seen plenty of unsavory things in my lifetime, Dorian," says Klarion, jaded beyond his years at 16 or 17, "I doubt you look worse than a Horigal that had just been run over by a subway train, or a burning man with his arm bitten off."

He takes a seat on the couch, steepling his fingers as he glances back and forth between Dorian and Teekl.

"If it's truly that bad, then why were you looking at it? For that matter, if your life depends on it, then why isn't it locked in a closet somewhere?"

"It was locked up safe and tight in a bank vault. However, the blackout happened and once the electronic security goes..." Dorian trailed off, with a sigh and a roll of his eyes. Once the electronics went, everything went. He spotted a few more savory criminals than him trying to find a way to break into a safe when Dorian slipped into the bank to retrieve his portrait.

"At least during the blackout it was safer here than there. I simply haven't gotten around to taking it back." And, based on the dismissive tone of Dorian's voice, he might not want to in the first place.

Note how he doesn't answer in the slightest why he was looking at it. He's not going to say the obvious answer, because he has self-loathing out the whoa. Klarion can come up with something on his own.

"Oh, electricity," Klarion says it dismissively, as if he hasn't gotten used to living with it, and didn't whine for ages when everything in his freezer either melted or spoiled during the blackout (so many pizza pockets were lost!). "Sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth, you'd think people would remember how to live without it by now."

He glances at the portrait again, while Teekl edges ever-closer to the drop cloth. It's obvious that Dorian's in one of his brooding moods again, but if he hadn't made such a big deal about the portrait, Klarion wouldn't be nearly as curious about what it looked like.

"Buy us some sushi, stick the thing in a closet, and I'll ward the doorway, idiot."

"As someone who did use to live without it, I'd take having electricity that occasionally goes out over not having electricity any day." Dorian's old as dirt and has found that he really likes things like 'microwaves' and 'freezers.'

But oh yeah. Klarion can do magic. Huh.

"How do wards work? I could still get things out of the closet, right?"

"From what I understand, it's a bit like an electric fence, or the equivalent of booby-trapping an entranceway. Mine are arranged so that any potential intruders are shocked and forcibly repelled, and then turned into either mice or cockroaches should they attempt to breach the wards again. Teekl hasn't eaten any intruders yet, but it's probably just a matter of time."

He shrugs, and sprawls back onto the couch with his pizza.

"And of course you could, what would be the point if you couldn't? You can specify that sort of thing in the wards."

Dorian wrinkles his nose because EW. Mice and roaches are just gross. Why would he want a mouse scurrying around his apartment, that would be absolutely disgusting. He's got a fish, not a cat that could take care of it.

He idly sits down on one of his living room chairs, thinking it over slightly.

"Make it so my wards vaporize someone instead of the mice and roaches option and I'll buy you two rolls of sushi."

Hey, just say the word, and the cat will be perfectly willing to take care of the fish! Think of the money you'll save on fish food, and the time you won't have to waste on tank cleaning!

"Let me see the painting, and I'll do it for free," Klarion flashes him a wolfish grin, though the slice of pizza detracts somewhat from the menace of it. "I'll even throw in some alarm bells, so that you'll know exactly when someone else is trying to open the closet door."

Dorian simply raises an eyebrow. Part of him is a bit wary about showing Klarion all of his inner demons and all of his past regrets...but then again, he liked the kid. And he had a feeling that while Klarion might be off-put by the painting's true appearance, he wouldn't be downright horrified.

"It's not a pretty sight," Dorian idly remarks as he walks over towards the painting. Carefully removing the dropcloth, he turns it so that Klarion can see the picture of Dorian Gray in all of it's aged, warped, depraved glory. Every trace of sin, every evil action he's committed, every wound he's taken is writ large on the painting itself.

Huh, that wasn't as difficult as he'd thought it would be! If Dorian had refused, Klarion had just planned to have Teekl stick his head under the dropcloth and look at the painting through his cat's eyes, but part of him is glad that he didn't have to resort to trickery.

To his credit, Klarion doesn't flinch or recoil at the big reveal. His eyes do go wide, though, and he's silent for a few moments as he takes the whole painting in. Gods, it really is unpleasant to look at. Klarion had grown up with necromancers who raised the dead from their graves to perform manual labour, regardless of how gruesomely decayed the bodies were, and even they would have taken one look at something like this and gone 'nope, put it back'.

"That certainly is something," Klarion says, after a moment or two. "... Is that large dent in your forehead from the time you were hit by a toilet?"

If Dorian had something to throw, he'd throw it at Klarion. Instead, he gives the witch boy a Look. Death by toilet wasn't one of his finest moments and he'd rather Klarion not bring it up, thank you very much.

"Possibly. Either that or the time I fell out of a window, or the time when someone tried to kill me with a baseball bat to the temple, or the other time I fell out of a window..." He trails off, with a shrug. Dorian's picked up a lot of dumb ways to die in his lifespan.

Luckily, Klarion has been on the receiving end of so many Looks in his lifetime that he's become practically immune to them!

"How many times have you died?" he asks, tilting his head to one side. "... Well. Not died obviously, but how many times would you have died if not for the portrait? Have you kept track, or is it too much of a bother?"

"It's too much of a bother. I'm fairly unlucky, don't ask me why, so after the hundredth near-death experience or so, I stopped keeping track."

Gee Dorian, it's almost like something called 'karma' exists.

For once, Klarion is going to be tactful and not bring up karmic vengeance, or the fact that Dorian is amazingly good at ticking people off!

"I suppose the novelty must wear off after the first hundred times," he shrugs. "So, about the wards - do you care if they're done with a permanent marker on the doorjamb? That way, you don't have to worry about accidentally smudging one of the sigils and undoing the whole thing."

"The novelty wears off after the first ten times," Dorian can't help but add in, with a little scowl and a roll of his eyes.

As for the wards question, he shrugs. "Go ahead. Really, the most idiot-proof you can make this, the better." Because again, he doesn't know that much about magic. The last thing he needs is to mess the wards up somehow and cause some sort of nonsensical magical calamity.

"Sharpie it is, then."

Here's hoping you weren't attached to the closet door, Dorian, because Klarion's already across the apartment and drawing sigils around the doorknob. It looks like complete chicken scratch, and the sigils seem to move a bit if you stare at them too long. He even starts drawing on the actual doorjamb, though he can't reach the top of the thing, even on tiptoes.

"Dorian, get over here and bring a footstool or something, will you!"

"Can't you just magic yourself taller?" Dorian lazily responds, giving Klarion a little look. Still, the teasing only lasts for a few moments, as he grabs a chair from the kitchen and walks over towards the closet door, setting it down behind Klarion.

"I don't use it on myself," Klarion rolls his eyes, as if the very idea of magicking himself taller is stupid, and not something he's thought about every time he can't reach a high shelf. It doesn't take him long to finish the wards off, once he has some extra height on his side, and when the last chicken scratch is in place, he steps to one side and nods at the door.

"Alright, put your hand on the doorknob, that should do it."

Dorian just watches and waits as Klarion continues to scribble all over his doorway. Once he finishes, Dorian puts his hand on the doorknob...and just kind of holds it for a moment.

"How long do I need to hold it?"

Look, he doesn't know how magic works.

Klarion puts his hand on the scribbles, and the sigils under his palm pulse with energy and light up the entire doorframe like Christmas lights before they fade back to normal. Dorian might feel a bit of a shock from the doorknob, like a jolt of static after walking through a carpeted room.

"There, it's done. You can still get through, it should respond to your hand on the doorknob."

Dorian can't help it--he lets out a small yelp of shock as the doorknob zaps him. Removing his hand almost instantly, he gives Klarion another little Look before turning back to the doorway.

"If this works as well as you say it does, maybe I'll get you sushi anyway." It's said in a slightly teasing tone, but Dorian's serious. He does need to actually get out of the house...taking the kid out to eat would suffice.

"Of course it will work, I'm good at this," Klarion scoffs, but he does it with a grin, so he obviously isn't too bothered. "Come on, then. We demand, no, deserve Californian Rolls for our efforts."

Teekl comes up from behind Dorian and headbutts his ankles in agreement, which is probably the closest thing to a friendly gesture that the man will ever get from the cat.

With a little laugh, Dorian reaches down to attempt to give Teekl a few scratches behind the ear, which is probably the closest thing to a friendly gesture that Teekl will ever get from Dorian.

"California Rolls it is! And we'll just hex anybody who tries to kick you and Teekl out."

I black out on dessert wine

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shall we wrap this up soon?

yeah, let's!

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