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Strokes of Genius, Wednesday

Not being possessed of a shred of proactive curiosity where the lives of her fellow students were concerned and thus as of yet unaware of any goings-on on the third floor, Katchoo dragged herself into work in one of the more benign forms of her usual bad mood. Once she'd stashed her bag under the counter and gotten things set up and blah blah all that jazz, she put a Best of Griffin Silver Volume 1 CD into the stereo, picked up a pencil, and, half-focused, let the page begin to fill up.

Clocky, who'd accompanied her today (and who met every one of her grumbled mentions of the weekend with a nervous chirp), had taken up a station by the front door, though with occasional tours of the aisles.

Well, someone had to take inventory, if Katchoo wasn't bothering. There was just the problem of Clocky being able to write any of this down. Or effectively communicate numbers.

. . . or Katchoo caring, really.

[OOC: I am fleeing for work now myself, quite possibly in a manner similar to Chewie's but without the semisentient clock. Open once I get there, of course.]

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On his lunch break, Liir made straight for the art store.

Walking in, he noticed Clocky's more sedate behavior and made sure his steps were quiet and careful as he made his way to Katina. When he got to the counter, he waited patiently for a few minutes before figuring it'd seem, well, creepy if he kept standing there.

"Katina?"

"Yeah?" she asked in her usual gruff tone before looking up. "Oh, it's you, Greeneyes. Whaddya want?"

How did one phrase it, even when they were sure that they were coming to the exactly the right person?

If you could be so kind as to-- No.

I was thinking of learning how to-- No.

As you're someone I happen to think is an expert-- No.

It was the most ridiculous sort of request, and he had no claim on her, of course, not even a little. He shouldn't even be asking. But she seemed to accept that he didn't know how to do some things, seemed content that he was, well, just a bit screwed up, and that helped.

"Could you teach me how to be angry?" he asked her, those green eyes wide and completely and utterly honest.

A pause while he realized how that might sound.

"I'll make it up to you however you can think to have me do it," he offered, not wanting her to think he'd ask something of her without being willing to help her in return.

Katchoo dropped her pencil at the question and just gaped at Liir for a while.

"You want me to teach you --" and that in and of itself was a question completely out of left field, and she'd have laughed in his face if he hadn't looked so earnest -- "how to what?"

He swallowed and looked down, away from her. It really was the most pathetic thing he'd ever asked another human being about.

"Express. Anger. Be angry."

Let go.

Because while he'd been deeply, heavily, extremely annoyed, he'd never actually, well, been enraged. Not for longer than a few moments, anyway. When Amber had told him about what Cal had said. When he'd realized what Shell was doing. When he'd seen the Piglet thrown against the wall. It was glimpses of the thing, brief fragments of a rage he was too afraid to let lose.

And even then, it was women's anger, cold anger, scheming sneaking cowardly anger. If he was going to do what he planned, he'd need to be a man.

At least when it came to anger.

"Look," he backpeddled quickly as he looked up to her face, "I'm sorry. I hope you're not insulted, because that isn't what I intended but I thought-- I don't know what I thought. Assume I wasn't thinking. It happens often enough."

"Huh. Hell of a question." Katchoo propped her head up on one hand, the other hand reaching down to pick up the pencil that she then started chewing on in thought. How did you learn how to express that, anyway? It'd come to her so naturally for so long now, she had no idea how to go about breaking it down into points, or a flow chart, or some crap like that. "You got something to really be angry about?"

He nodded.

"I think so. And I expect more to come."

And yes, it was surreal even to him, but he wasn't about to fix things if he couldn't even throw a full-hearted punch.

Katchoo nodded, chewed a little more, grimaced, and spit out a bit of graphite. "You think about whatever it is a lot?"

"There isn't very much to me," he admitted, looking around the store mostly to have something to look at. He didn't mean it to say he was simple or that it was easy to understand him. Anything but, and he knew it the same as anyone else might. But as far as he was concerned, there wasn't much of him, his Liirness, whatever essence was uniquely him. He'd spent most of his life as a mindless monkey, a tik tok drone as unaware of his own existence as one could be until he'd flown out of Southstairs.

"And what there is, most of it is worth anger, I think."

Clocky emerged from the paint aisle and whistled a greeting to Liir before disappearing down the next aisle in its continued route.

"Anger at what?" asked Katchoo, then waved a hand. "You don't have to give me the details if you don't want to."

She was still a little agape that he'd actually come to ask her about this, but well, if there was anything she knew, it was living in a constant state of half-boil.

"Somebody screwed you over, maybe? Something you can't fix?"

"Dead doesn't fix well," he said with a rather emotionless shrug.

Katchoo grunted, and from somewhere down by crafts came a sympathetic electronic tweet.

"Yeah, that one's kind of a bitch."

This was where most people would suggest looking for a way to get past that.

Most people weren't Katchoo.

"Well, Greeneyes," she ventured after a moment or two of pencil-chewing silence, "if you don't think about it much you don't have a reason to be that pissed about it, do you?"

He was quiet for a minute.

"Do you have to think about walking much? Not really. But you do it all the time."

He breathed out in a short 'huff' of noise.

"I wouldn't ask if there wasn't a reason. I need to be able to hit someone when it isn't a game or by accident. There's things I'm going to have to do. And I'm going to need hot anger. Or I should have it, anyway."

"You walk because you gotta get from one place to another, right?" Katchoo countered. This was probably a metaphor that was going to fall apart on her sooner or later, but hell if she wasn't going to try. "You wanna get mad about something, you gotta keep it in your mind. Thing is, Greeneyes, people think they're supposed to act normal. Smile and act like everything's okay even when the world's going to hell around 'em. That's crap, is what it is. It's a frikkin' lie. The world's not all sunshine and puppies -- no offense to yours -- and it's bull that people pretend like it is. And you know what? It pisses me off that people do it."

"It doesn't have to be in the mind. It can be in the muscle, in the flesh, in the bone, in the heart, in the blood, sunk into the skin, boiling in the eyeballs, heavy in the chest. And I don't know how to bleed it out."

He was full of it, made of it, built up brick by icy brick of it. He was but couldn't be. Anger lived inside, in the past , surrounded by old hurts, kept stuffed away from the present for the trouble it could cause.

"Oz isn't wonderous or marvelous. It hasn't been in years. They play their parts in their gaudy dresses, their over-dyed suits. But if anything's to be done, I can't just... just scheme and quietly fume."

Katchoo listened to his rambling, silent and intent -- intrigued, really, and more interested than she cared to admit to herself -- before climbing up to sit cross-legged on the counter.

"What," she asked, deliberately letting her voice harden, "are you afraid of people thinking if you let it out? You think they're going to think you went crazy or something?"

"It's like trying to vomit," he said quietly. "It's not... not natural."

He'd been trained and trained well. Emotions were for people. He was still working on that.

"I'm already mad," he scoffed, his own voice a little harsher for it, "and if they haven't heard me warn of it, then they're deaf or obstinate."

Of course, in truth, he didn't quite trust himself to be angry with most of the people he knew, but there was also something in there, some wall, something stoppered up.

"So do you give a crap if they think you're crazy?" Katchoo challenged him, pushing just a bit. "Or are you just going to frikkin' sit there and let what they think keep you from acting the way you want to act?"

He could see what she was doing. His voice, however, was as even as before.

"I've warned them. And I think everyone's a bit crazy. If you love someone, you love the madness all the same.

"Generally, however, yes. I sit there and I'm quiet and I seethe. Even when it feels as if I'm going to fly apart from it."

"Geez. You have the boiling point of tungsten or something?" demanded Katchoo, who'd only paid attention to that detail back at Puncture High because she'd been trying to compose a long free-verse epic in her head about how she was like helium (with its low boiling point), only it fell apart on her spectacularly. "How the hell can you seethe for that frikkin' long and not lose it?"

He didn't get the reference but he understood the point.

"I wasn't supposed to," he said quietly, almost matter-of-factly.

Emotions weren't something to be fostered or allowed. They got in the way of chores done or laundry washed or food brought up for Her to ignore as she flew off into the night. Oz in general didn't give a damn what anyone 'felt'; Elphaba Thropp had, knowingly or not, actively suppressed it. The infant squalling of a sense of self had been thoroughly crushed time and time again between insults and guilt and while other emotions like joy and sadness had slipped through the cracks as relatively innocuous, anger had been her domain.

"Screw that," Katchoo said forcefully. "Screw whatever the hell you weren't 'supposed' to do. People telling you you're not 'supposed' to do something have their own reasons for saying it; doesn't have a thing to do with what's good for you. Let. It. The. Hell. Out. Sure, it'll throw people off. Screw 'em."

He was getting annoyed, yes, but that wasn't quite the same.

"If I could then I wouldn't have asked. It's like asking me to jump off a cliff; my legs won't move."

"Then maybe you're not cut out to do it," Katchoo said, short enough on patience to not bother softening her choice of words. (Not that she ever really did, with most people.) "Either that or your problem is that you're so hung up on the idea of not being able to just let go and blow your top that you crippled yourself out of it."

"I know I have," he told her with a tired glance up.

"Which is why I'm trying to figure out how I can undo the mess. Anything can be fixed as long as you're still alive and while that might not be long, I am for the moment so I have to try."

His back was a little straighter as he said the last part:

"I might not be cut out, but there's no one else. Better me than no one."

"You want to do this because you're trying to be some kind of crusader for truth and justice?"

Katchoo stared at him for a very long moment, then snorted.

"No wonder you can't do it."

He looked at her and his expression was incredulous.

"Truth and justice? For goodness sake, what do I look like? Are you out of your mind?

"I want to do this because it's my home and I have to do something, I have a responsibility to do something. And, if you really want to hear the truth, I have to succeed where she failed.

"Or she's right."

"Truth and justice, grand destiny, whatever." Katchoo shrugged, her expression as dispassionate as his was incredulous. "If that's what you're going for, you better realize that it's a waste of time. People don't give a shit enough to get their heads out of the sand and help you do anything about it. And if that doesn't piss you off . . ."

"I've known the woman most people hold up as the boogeyman and their savior in turns and she was a bitch. I knew the one they're starting to call a saint in my world and she was a nit. I don't believe in any of that... that nonsense.

"I have a responsibility because I know the man who's running things is an unrepentant rapist and a murderer. Not because I'm special. Not because I'm brilliant or talented. But because I know.

"I don't think anyone wants to help me. I know they don't."

And now he was fuming, letting some of it show. It helped that he didn't even realize it.

"And I am pissed off, spend every day of my life pissed off but what in hell does it matter because who the hell am I anyway? Who cares? Why be angry when no one's going to give a shit?!"

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Strokes of Genius, Wednesday

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