Roof, Saturday Night

[withoutverona]

Romeo owed a lady a sonnet.

And, for reasons of his own, he wanted it to be a good one, not one tossed off in his lunch break and not meant to be read more than once. It had to be the best poetry he could write, and he had to follow all the rules, because even if the subject wouldn't notice his wobbles, he would.

Eventually, he got bored with trying to come up with a rhyme for "everything from nothing" that would fit his rhyme scheme and settled himself near the ledge, smoking and feeling very much as though the weight of the world pressed on his pen. He was pretending his open notebook did not exist for the second, though he'd take it up again soon enough.

[OOC: Open.]

Comments

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

Despite what his earlier altercation with Amber would have suggested, Cal had gotten a lot of work done. Perhaps, he figured, the whole thing had been entirely useless, but he didn't care. He couldn't care. The music had eventually stopped. And that was when the words started to flow out of him, an uninterrupted stream, a veritable outpouring of his thoughts and minds and memories.

More than he could have ever expected, and the sheer amount of lack of censor in the pages that laid beside his typewriter surprised him. A lot. They struck him deep with what had eventually come out, writhing out of his fingers as they flew over keys.

They scared him. He hadn't known this next part was going to be so honest. He never knew until he wrote them, and, once he looked them over, he was so shaken that he needed some fresh air. He needed a smoke.

He needed to go up to the roof, where he figured he might at least either have peace and quiet or the company of other people like himself who were out there for the reason of escaping something.

He noticed the other guy near the ledge, but didn't greet him, didn't give his back more than a passing look as he hunched against any wind to light his own cigarette. The only greeting he sent out was the click of his Zippo opening, the scratching of the flint as it sprung a flame to life, and the deep inhale that followed.

[withoutverona]

The noise was enough to get Romeo to look up, at least. Any distraction was a welcome escape from his damnable writer's block. "Good evening," he managed. "Why do all the smokers in the dorms end up here?"

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

Cal looked over at him for a moment, weighing whether or not the question was rhetorical, since it seemed pretty obvious to him.

"Good view," he finally said, "lessened risk of burning down your room."

[withoutverona]

It was entirely rhetorical. Cal should have been grateful he wasn't being asked how to summarize four months in the past in iambic pentameter, really.

"Lessened risk of your roommate tossing you out," Romeo agreed.

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

"With how much I'm up all night typing," Cal said as he sucked in a careful, long drag of his cigarette, "and he hasn't kicked me out yet, I think I'm safe."

[withoutverona]

"At least my notebook is quiet," Romeo said, with a wary look at that particular torture device. "But I'm always back and forth in my girlfriend's room, as she's across the hall. It surprises me that Teyla's not said a word about it."

"What are you typing at?" he asked.

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

Cal shrugged, examining the end of his cigarette a moment before tapping off the ashes. "A story," he said. "For someone. I like working at the typewriter; I express myself better at it, or something."

[withoutverona]

"Maybe I ought to try that," Romeo said. Because, clearly, the first thing any failing writer should do was blame his equipment. "I've always written in a notebook. Typing feels cold, somehow."

He shoved his hair back. "I owe someone a poem."

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

Cal shrugged a little, as he realized that the two of them were a bit in the same predicament, only opposite. They owed someone something written; Cal's problem was writing too much and he was guessing that his current companion was struggling with writing at all. He wondered if what he was writing was a personal as Cal's own story.

"I only started writing with a typewriter," he said. "Therapy thing. Doctor wanted me to type out my thoughts."

[withoutverona]

Romeo raised an eyebrow. Of course he had talked to a therapist -- even in Verona, they sent one to your hospital room if you drank poison -- but acknowledging that would mean acknowledging his suicide attempt, and he would need to be in a very different mood and know Cal much better to do that.

So: "Ah," he said. "So do your thoughts take well to being pinned down? Mine keep running away." Unwittingly, he answered Cal's question. "I'm working on an anniversary poem, and I fear she'll laugh at it."

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

"Too well," Cal muttered into his cigarette, thinking of everything that his fingers had betrayed to paper. He shook his head, wondering if he should just take his lighter to it, all of it.

For now, though, he'd just divert his attention to somebody else's problems. "Why do you think she'd laugh?"

[withoutverona]

"Because I know her," Romeo said, not terribly helpfully, and lit another cigarette before continuing. "She likes that I'm romantic, but sometimes she ... I don't know. She's not one for big gestures. She says it's cultural." He shrugged. "Maybe I ought to just get her flowers, but I told her I would write something, so now I must."

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

Cal considered this information carefully over a long drag, trying not to laugh too hard inside over the irony of the fact that he'd be the one giving unsolicited advice about a relationship. But, as his latest chapter lead him to remember, he always was a bit of an expert at the understated and silent exchange of devotion.

"If she's not one for the big gestures," he mused, "then why so worried about what you write? Just write something simple, with just enough, without being overbearing, you know?"

[withoutverona]

Something sparked in Romeo's eyes at that suggestion. "I hadn't thought of it that way," he admitted, mind racing. "I think I worry so because it comes to personal pride. If it were less than my best, I would know, even if she didn't."

"But," he added, "something simple that I do not loathe is a far sight better than nothing at all, which is what I seem to be working on at the moment."

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

"And, I mean," Cal added, tapping ashes down to his toe, "what good is your best going to be if she hates it? There's still no shame in making it something she'd like more. Thought's still there. Still a challenge trying to suit it to her."

[withoutverona]

He hadn't said she would hate it, only that she would laugh, but that was a tiny point.

"It might even suit her more if I don't spend a hundred years trying to make what I have to say fit iambic pentameter," Romeo said. "Thank you, sincerely."

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

The reaction was one he couldn't help. Cal cringed, face twisting as if his last drag tasted exactly like sewer sludge.

"Iambic pentameter," he said. "Ouch."

[withoutverona]

"Is it really that bad?" Romeo inquired, making a face at Cal's face. "It's a discipline, to make your writing fit the form."

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

"Maybe not that bad," Cal said, "but I think if you're good at it, you're good at it. If you're not, don't bother, and leave it to the people who can really manage to make it sound like music and not a chore."

There was a slight pause.

"I probably just say that because I'm kind of a crappy writer."

[withoutverona]

"It is like music," Romeo agreed. "Usually botched badly by amateurs. I know the structure, but I can only make it sound like anything decent perhaps a third of the time. I don't think it has anything to do with being a good writer."

[OOC: I cannot write iambic pentameter. At all. Thank you for giving me an IC reason not to make the attempt.]

[not-a-mused.livejournal.com]

Cal shrugged a little bit again. "Some," he declared, "have the muses on their sides, and others don't, or, sometimes, the muses work in mysterious ways."

He couldn't help a small grin at Romeo there, flicking the butt of his cigarette off into the unknown darkness of the night. The irony was so beautiful, and wasted in the fact that only Cal understood it.

Muse of Epic Poetry, indeed.

[withoutverona]

"The muses are fickle beasts," Romeo had to agree, stamping out his own cigarette as he reached for his notebook.

He had an absent look in his eyes, though, one Cal might know as that of Getting An Idea. "I ought to go where the light is better," he said. "Let me know how your story turns out, if you finish it."

[OOC: Hee. Night!]