Author Games Compilation [Cycle 1]

Task 4 ♟Myriad of Hues [FSC]

ART OF WAR - 4

It was a special sort of art, Florian thought, to watch the flames flick. There they were, tossing their orange little bodies from side to side like dancers he'd find in patches of Sarcelle; there they were, flinging yellows against their necks in suggestion; there they were, wavering without knowledge of doing so. They were simply there. He'd always thought them a festive thing. Now he wasn't so sure they were appropriate for celebration.

They waved towards him, and his shoes drank the color in heartily. It wasn't hard for the myriad of hues to reach the rest of him, either, as he was sat in a chair angled off to the side of the fireplace. It was a large armchair, covered in some roughly soft brown fabric that reminded him of his apartment back home. He'd slept in it the first night at this new, lavish base, and no one else had gone off and snatched up the seat while he was off doing other things. For that, he could appreciate these people.

But he could not appreciate them for staring.

It wasn't direct - they were far too smart for that. Gazes were accomplished through feats of employing peripheral vision, and even then they never lingered. When Florian faced them head on, they'd already turned away, and when he looked back to the fire, he caught the slightest shift of a jaw in his direction.

Then again, perhaps he was just putting too much thought into it. He was prone to doing so, Chris'd gone and told him so over and over during visits. "Quit staring at the nurse," he'd always mutter off to Florian, his head down as he sketched along the edges of a shoe in marker. "She's not here to spite you," he'd say. "She's here to help me."

Florian would always answer back with a laugh mixed with "shut up" before snatching up his shoe and the marker again. The visits went the same way every time. He very nearly went to thinking of when he might make his next trip to Candidus before remembering where exactly he was, and why.

To that, he sighed and leaned forward. The two encounters of the week had done much to fry his brain, what with all the fire and bullets and mop-swinging underway. It seemed his skull was still cooling. His eyes, too, took a moment to focus on, well, anything, but when they did they were on those shoes. He immediately frowned in scrutiny.

Slabs of mud stuck to the edges, and streaks of dried up muck were smeared over the tops. The browns of earth covered up the blacks of ink, and he didn't like this, not one bit. It was mindless how he yanked his shoes off and snatched up a rag from the table beside him. It was mindless how he pulled his sweaty, socky feet under him so that he was sitting criss-cross applesauce upon the chair. It was mindless how he hunched over himself and began to scrub, very carefully, so that the words underneath might never erode.

All of his movements had been quite mindless, but as the lettering came into view, he could feel a concentration taking root. He worked slower, more mindful, so that the feel would last longer before he had to give it up and stare off at the fire for another couple hours.

He caught a few phrases, a few words, and processed them. His lips turned up when he read "Chris waz here" and he could've dared a chuckle when he saw a crude drawing of a baby's head right beside it. His finger trailed over one of the cleaned sections, stopping at a drawing of a card's spade, which he remembered Chris sketching on a particularly cold day. They'd been inside the hospital, though. They'd been warm enough without the fire. Florian didn't like being warm with one.

A voice startled him out of his reverie.

"You're awfully invested in those little accessories, yeah?"

He snapped his head up to the voice, eyes widened, for he hadn't expected to find someone hovering over his shoulder, no less a piteously short redhead. She was of a smooth face, and there was a certain warmth to her expression that kept Florian off his nerves.