For Thryn and Ella - All You Need Is L O V E Forum

Topic: For Thryn and Ella

Because they're too lame to start their own thread. X]

LOVELOVELOVELOVE.

#1 Feb 22nd, 5:46pm

tart, a specific time setting you want or can I just go for anything?

..I'm just going to GO FOR IT. Because... yeah.

#2 Feb 22nd, 5:50pm . Edited Feb 22nd, 5:53pm

Lucy ran down the stoop from the old brownstone that Paco's radical group was using to put out leaflets, information, and organize their protests. It was only her first time meeting him, and despite the fact that she wasn't a student, Paco didn't seem to mind. And she was glad for it. It had been the hardest thing in her life to hand over the induction letter to Max, and now that he had passed and was drafted, it was only a matter of time before he was shipped off to god knows where in Vietnam. And who knew... who knew if he would ever come back?

The thought of living without her older brother was impossible. He had been her protector, her confidant, and her best friend for as long as she could remember. To not have him there... to lose another person to this war... Lucy shook her head free of those thoughts. At least if she helped out Paco and his group, then at least she would be doing something. Something was always better than nothing.

It was still August, and the days were mild as well as the night. She was in a light purple shirt, whose sleeves came just past her elbows. She retained a little pin from the fifth avenue peace rally, which was stuck to her shirt. She was in a pair of blue jeans and her regular sneakers. Sure, Lucy still had a few cardigans but she rarely wore them anymore. Only when it got cold. And she'd long given up knee length skirts and knee socks.

She was headed back to the apartment. Jude would undoubtedly be there. Unless he was coming to meet her. They hadn't made real plans. All she knew was she wanted to see him. He understood how scared she was about Max. Lucy often thought back to the afternoon when Jude and she sat at the pier. It was a very important day, after all it was the day she fell in love with Jude. He had just listened to her, like no one else did, and offered her heart felt advice. And he'd been kind. And she knew she was falling, but she was afraid. After Daniel Lucy wasn't sure if she could take losing someone else she loved. It seemed, however, that it would happen anyway. Max had been drafted, after all.

Trying to lift her spirits, Lucy slowed down her pace and took the time to look around. She had never really looked around The Village before. She'd been down the streets but did she really look? No. So she took the time to do it now. To see everyone, everyone who was, in the end, the same.

#3 Feb 22nd, 6:06pm . Edited Feb 22nd, 6:08pm

New York City made Jude's heart beat faster. There was something about the sheer size of it, the sheer mass of life and worry and dreams in it, that exhilarated him. He was nothing amongst all of it. If he were to die, the taxi cabs would still break every traffic law. People would still sip luke-warm coffee at the cafe down the street, the clubs would still pulse with music at night, children would play, mothers would sigh, lovers would lie together... He was as inconsequential as yesterday's newspaper, caught in the sewer grate. He didn't even have any official documentation that he belonged in the country. At once he felt terribly alone and terribly liberated. It made him want to sing.

Rather than sing, he hummed a tune as he gathered up a notepad and some charcoal and headed out of the apartment. Lucy was off, and he didn't know where. Sometimes he felt an irrational anger when she left him without telling him where she was going. He didn't like to be away from her. He knew she had every right to live her own life, but he was afraid of losing her. He was afraid of losing Max, as well, but it was a different kind of fear. His fear for Max was a solid fear. His fear of losing Lucy was...well, what did he even fear losing her to? The world, perhaps, and the cruelty of it? He feared that she would lose that spark that made her Lucy.

But why was he dwelling on such thoughts on a day like this? He continued humming snatches of a song and sauntered off down the street, eyes drinking in everything about him. He wasn't sure what the song was. It was a medley of tunes, a half-formed rise and fall of notes that had come from the deep recesses of his brain--the part of him where his art came from as well. Some days the images came easy. Other days, he needed inspiration. And where else to find it but in New York, the city that never slept? There was always something going on.

A few blocks past the apartment, Jude found such an inspiration. There, standing on a door stoop with a broom in hand, was a mother yelling at her children. Apparently they had run out into the street or some childish nonsense. It didn't matter. What mattered was the face of the mother: she was in the flower of mid-life, with youth fading fast but still caught somewhat in the wispy hair and the high cheekbones. She turned to look at him and he saw in her eyes a flash of defiance that moved him so much he sat down on the nearest step and began to draw. He drew the proud, upturned chin, the brow creased with worry...when he was done, he could have sworn he'd just drawn the Divine Mother. But now she was looking at him, eyeing him warily, suspiciously...

He shot her a smile and then got up and headed back to the apartment, heart brimming over with emotions that were too big for him.

#4 Feb 22nd, 8:35pm . Edited Feb 22nd, 8:38pm

Restlessness had come upon Maxwell Carrigan. The unadulterated, irrevocable essence of it was present in everything he did, everything he had done this week, even. There was an unhappiness that overcame him, knowing that this was his last week at home, and it was an unhappiness that he didn’t want to admit. However, whether he admitted it or not, the aura of it was as pungent as fresh paint, and it bathed every crevice of the apartment. Max never admitted to anyone when any kind of mistemperment came upon him, unless it was anger. He was always the one to hold strong when sadness was all around, and to offer a handshake and a bit of hard liquor if a friend was down. Not only was he sad, however. His glum feelings were outweighed by a certain impatience. For his last week at home, there were not enough things to back into an hour. These last few days should be memorable, and he could find nothing better to do but lounge on the couch, muting the television and doing quaint voice-overs for his own petty amusement!

He was not content to sit on the tired piece of house furniture in his bathrobe all day, but alas, he had done so. Perhaps he would traipse down to the café tonight. Perhaps not. Really, he didn’t give much thought to it, for he found that impersonating various characters of Peanuts as he watched the screen very distracting, and it required most of the functions of his mind to do so.

Max hadn’t said much as Jude trotted out the door. He had merely given his friend a small salute and held tightly to the bowl of cereal in his lap. It was about thirty seconds after the front door had shut that Max had a revelation. He was going to do something, by God, and he was going to do it now. Careful not to completely slosh his cereal everywhere, he rose as quickly to his bare feet as possible, placing the bowl on the coffee table resolutely.

He made a business of throwing off his pajamas and dressing himself quickly, grabbing a pair of jeans off the floor, finding some shirt, and pulling on a pair of sneakers. Rumpling his hair, the man marched through the empty apartment and slammed the front door shut upon exiting, only to face Jude on his way back. Not even waiting for an answer or a hello, or even noticing the state of artistic, emotion bliss the Englishman was in, the blonde grabbed his best friend by the arm and said in a rush, “Jude. Let’s do something.”

Of course, being Max, he had put absolutely no thought into what he and his friend could do right now. However, if one would mention this to the dropout, he would quickly rebut the statement by simply stating that he was in New York, and there was always something to do, and for that matter, he'd do whatever the hell his heart desired. Why? Because he was Max Carrigan.

#5 Feb 22nd, 8:56pm . Edited Feb 22nd, 9:00pm

Lucy continued her walk, getting closer and closer to the apartment. She always knew when she was coming up on their building because the normal red brick walls suddenly turned into psychedelic art murals that seemed to rise up from the city streets like weeds in a garden. They excited her eyes and made her smile, just like Jude. She was swinging her arms by her side as she greeted people on her walk. It seemed in this neck of the woods people were always ready to say hello, to offer you something - whether it be legal or not - or to just talk about anything. Sure there were the fair mix of homeless people, kids with neglectful parents, and the occasional vet, but they made themselves scarce.

Lucy was so afraid for Max. Not only for his life, but assuming he came back alive, how would he be different? You could always tell a veteran by the way people parted around them. New Yorkers, the most cynical of all the people on this planet - they really should be a sub species - would walk on the opposite side of the street, afraid if they got too close they'd go right through the ghost like vets.

She would never treat Max that way. He was too strong. He would be fine. He would be. She told herself this as she walked past the familiar Cafe Huh? and she was unable to suppress her smile. She remembered the look on Jude's face as they walked up the block, talking about nothing - oh wait, they'd been talking about Daniel, and Max, and the war. That was all anyone talked about.

Making her way up the gazillion - or maybe seven - flights of stairs, Lucy slipped into the apartment only miliseconds after Jude. Seeing her brother up, dressed, and obviously bursting at the seems, Lucy couldn't help but smile. "Hey," she said, alerting him and Jude to her presence. Sometimes Max and Jude got so wrapped up in their own thing she wondered if they knew she was alive. Of course they did. But Lucy had to admit that sometimes she was on the outside of their friendship. But, it was true, that the three of them were very, very close.

#6 Feb 22nd, 9:51pm . Edited Feb 23rd, 8:23am

OOC;; I AM SO SORRY I HAVEN'T REPLIED YET. My internet has been down all day and it's only back now that it's 1:00 AM. I'm not going to reply because I've just been up working on a major project that I procrastinated on until the day before--actually, technically now it's the day of. ANYWAYS I'm so sorry and I'll reply tomorrow unless there are any more unexpected computer breakdowns.

#7 Feb 24th, 9:51pm

It took Jude nearly a full moment to realize that someone had just spoken to him and grabbed his arm. He was still caught up in that artist's bubble--that frail layer of shimmery, soap-like substance that came down between an artist and his subjects. A layer that kept the artist strictly as a witness of life, and not an actual partaker in it. It suddenly occurred to Jude that this ephemeral bubble was exactly what set him apart from Max and Lucy. He knew he was different from them in some fundamental way, but it had taken him until now to pinpoint the reason. It wasn't because he was a foreigner, although some might merely shrug it off as such. It was the gift and the curse of the artist, the constant tendency to step back and observe life while it raged on around him. Jude had a sudden pang of fear that one day he would wake up and a thousand years would have passed, and he would merely be a particle floating among the stars. Forever a witness.

That's why when he finally comprehended Max's words, he was entirely willing to open up the door to the apartment, throw his picture in (although he immediately winced, seeing pages of the notebook scatter and crumple) the doorway and shut the door again behind him. "Yes, let's do something," he said to Max. He gave his friend an experimental grin, testing out whether or not the bubble had been burst. It had. He knew because everything suddenly seemed much louder around him, and he was suddenly very aware of how haggard Max looked. He peered closer at his friend. He had obviously been sitting around too much. Jude could literally see the unspent energy emanating off of him in waves. "We've got to get you out. We can't have you cooped up alone for your last week." He linked arms with Max and drew him closer.

Another voice behind him made him turn. Of course he couldn't keep himself from grinning a real grin now. His lips automatically parted when he saw Lucy. A slight jolt in the pit of his stomach caught him by surprise. Butterflies? Butterflies were for school boys... He shook it off and linked arms with Lucy as well. "So, we've got to show Max a good time. Where should we go to first?" he asked, winking at each of them in turn. He had the sudden wild urge to skip off down the hall and sing like in a musical--three friends linking arms, following the yellow brick road...

#8 Feb 25th, 6:27pm . Edited Feb 25th, 6:29pm

Lucy knew she'd taken Jude by surprise. It was like he was assimilating himself back into the real world after living in the world of his art for a while. Lucy always appreciated his art. Not that she understood it all the time, in fact that was a huge exaggeration because unfortunately for Lucy she mostly didn't get it. She tried, tried despeartely, to understand it in an attempt to better understand Jude. She knew Jude well, very well. And Jude knew her possibly better than she knew herself - but she attributed that to his amazing observational skills. He always seemed to be watching them. Lucy didn't mind, she just wished that she could see what was going on in that mind of his. She was always afraid that one day she would turn around and he would be gone and she would have missed the signs, the warnings. Next to losing Max, her next greatest fear was losing Jude. He was the only one who seemed to get her, and who made her feel complete. She didn't have to search for things with Jude... she just got to be herself and he was good with that.

"Show Max a good time?" Lucy heard herself repeat Jude, because she was so caught up in looking at him. It used to be the other way around. Normally Max showed them a good time - that was how it had been when Lucy had first arrived. Max threw the parties, he took her to Sadie's gig. Hell, he was the one to make the jump to move to New York City in the first place. If it weren't for Max she would still be living in a suburban bubble. Well, that wasn't for sure. With Daniel dead there was no way that particular bubble would have lasted any longer than it had. And Lucy wasn't cut out for suburban life anyway.

"I don't know where to go," Lucy laughed. She was the newbie to the city, after all. "Let's go out for dinner or something, I made some good tips at the diner..." Yes, Lucy was a waitress. It was mostly a part time thing at first, as she had only planned on being in New York City for the summer. But now her plans had changed. College? Please, who needed college. She needed to fight. She was going to be at the forefront of a revolution that could save her brother, there was no way she was going to back to an ivory tower where the draft and the war had no place in day to day life. It would always have a place in her life as long as Max had been drafted.

Linking arms with Jude, she pressed her lips to his cheek gently. She couldn't get enough of kissing him, and being with him, and touching him, and seeing him.

#9 Feb 25th, 6:42pm

OOC|| Hey, I got skipped! :[

BIC||

Lucy’s surprise arrival had been met with a large grin from Max and a brightening of his eyes. Ah, the more, the merrier. Surprisingly, he had never witnessed those protection issues that older brothers usually feel for their younger, feminine siblings when it came to dating. No feelings of mistrust could ever sprout from Max as far as Jude was concerned, because Jude had never been a stranger. Had Lucy brought the older guy home when they were younger, things would have gone as usual. Mom would have fainted at the idea of a gentleman caller who wasn’t still in high school, Dad would have skeptically asked him if the English believed in baseball, and there he would have sat, quirking a brow at the interesting new boy who had signed himself up to be mutilated by his parents. Instead, Jude's English charm and ready-made ally in Max had saved him a few scrapes. To Max's recollection, his parents didn't even know that Lucy had found herself a new love interest. Maybe they'd never find out. If all went well, he wouldn't ever go back to the suburbs unless he needed money for rent.

The only feeling that sprung forth when looking at that couple that consisted of his best friend and sister was a remorse of his own romantic detachedness. Max hadn't experienced real love since, well, since sophomore year in high school, when he had a freshman girlfriend named Michelle. The relationship didn't even get past a sloppy attempt at first base, but nonetheless, Max remembered it. Michelle Adams with her curly brown hair. He smiled at the thought. Since then, it had only been silly flings with girls from college pubs, half of which he couldn’t recall. Nothing that lasted. Prudence had been a candidate, but to himself, he often wondered if she was mentally intact. A week after meeting him, she had been trying like mad to get into his pants, and a month later, she had gone all crazy for Sadie, and two days later, she was gone. Still, Max missed her. She had a certain quality that was kindred to Lucy’s: an undeniable vulnerability that made him want to give her everything she asked for. Guys liked that, he mused inwardly. Make them think they’re stronger than you, that you need them, and they’re on their knees.

His stomach pulled with the sensation of being the fat chick. Yes, the fat chick, i.e. the ugly one whom you take out for ice cream when her self-esteem has totally collapsed. Max would be damned if he was the fat chick here. Jude could be the fact chick. Insistently, Max took the reigns of the conversation. “Dinner, Luce? That’s fun for you? Welcome to your fifties!” He grinned sheepishly, running and hand up his forehead and through the messy golden locks that crowned his head. He worked his way down to the stubble that marked his jaw, rubbing it contemplatively. “I say we drink.” And find me a lady friend, he added mentally, a corner of his mouth upturning.

#10 Feb 25th, 6:50pm . Edited Feb 25th, 7:48pm

I'm sorry! I didn't realize we were going in an order *stupid*

#11 Feb 25th, 6:53pm

Ooc;; Wow, upon re-reading my post, I see how incredibly lame that last line was. Please excuse me. I'm running on less than three hours of sleep. While many people consider this normal, I am not used to it and am quite delirious.

#12 Feb 25th, 7:48pm

OOC|| I liked it, Thrynnie. I could see them doing that. If they were high. XD

#13 Feb 25th, 7:56pm

so since I royally screwed up the order should I now wait for Thryn to post?

#14 Feb 25th, 8:06pm

Ooc;; No, you can go ahead. Max was talking to you anyways, so you should reply and then I'll post. I'm not sure what the order is. I'm spacy. Spacey? How do you spell that? -is still running on not enough sleep-

#15 Feb 26th, 1:28pm

Lucy smiled at Max and rolled her eyes at him. "Fine let's go drink," she said. Anything for him. And she really would do anything for him. Max meant the world to Lucy, and the fear of losing him to Vietnam was constantly weighing on her mind and her heart. She couldn't help it. The fear and sadness was revealed in ever hug she gave him, every glance she shot at him, and every smile. Not to say she was sad all of the time, but it was certainly on the forefront of her mind.

Max was the greatest person she'd ever known, really. She never wanted to admit it, but Lucy had always wanted to be like Max. She wanted to be able to be strong and stand up to her parents. Lucy never had the guts to do it. Sure, she was very outspoken about her ideals and her beliefs, but she still shone like the perfect little all american daughter she was supposed to be. But Max and Jude had changed all that, and thank goodness they had.

Not to mention the fact that Max trusted Jude. That was a big part of Lucy's happiness. If it wasn't for Max, Lucy would never have met Jude... and never have fallen in love like she was now. Sure, she had been in love with Daniel but it was different. Jude was helping her get over that, and was opening up all these new doors to the world for her. The fact that Max liked and trusted Jude made it that much easier. She never had to worry about what Max would think. And she also thought that Jude wouldn't hurt her, because that would in turn hurt Max... and the last thing anyone wanted to do was hurt Max. Perhaps it was naive of her to think so, but regardless of all that... Max and Jude were the two most important people in her life.

"So are you going to lead the way, Max?" she asked, nudging her older brother. Lucy had made it her goal to spend as much time with him as possible before he got shipped off... god she was so scared.

#16 Feb 26th, 7:08pm

Ooc;; I really, really, REALLY hate to say this, but...could you reply Tart? I'm having some serious writer's block here. No joke. I don't know why. Usually I can eke out a half-decent post, but this time I'm finding myself lacking the ability to...

#17 Mar 01st, 7:05am

ooc;; Sorry that I haven't posted, guys. I'm totally swamped with schoolwork. Maybe sometime before Sunday. X[

#18 Mar 04th, 3:51pm