bakerstreet | You said, "we were born with nothing, and we sure as hell have nothing now"

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[meme] shipping

You said, "we were born with nothing, and we sure as hell have nothing now"

Mutual Healing Shipping Meme

Healing doesn't come quickly, whether the need comes from physical or mental wounds. But you're trying regain your strength - and yourself.

People, as a general rule, are kind, or at least not outright inflammatory to you, it seems. Still, you just can't connect with them. No matter how nice, how caring, they don't understand. They've never experienced anything like what you've gone through, or they're not like you in a way that lets them see what you still go through; they have no frame of reference. Sure, they have sympathy, but it's not the same. So there's no real connection, despite any friendliness. It's so easy, then, to feel detached...

...until you meet them, in this place of both death and healing.

They may not have been through the exact same struggles, they may not be exactly the same as you, but they know what darkness is light. How they handle this fact may be better or worse than how you do, yet you can see yourself in their actions. And for once? There's connection; more than that, too. Slowly, you can feel yourself opening up towards them, and then, falling for them.

Is this something your used to? Will you fight your feelings, or will you jump at the opportunity to be with someone who can begin to get you? You may have little choice in the matter, as your instincts may just reach out to be with whatever compatible contact you can get. That's better, in the long run, though. Who else could have wounds like yours?

Essentially, it's what it says: a "romance," in the loose definition, or "shipping" meme for characters who have been through the wringer or have hangups.
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[M/F with priority to Jesse but will do platonic against Cassidy.]

[M/M for shipping. Basil has built his entire identity around the Romance of his own heartbreak. Sad about the loss of his muse. Sad about the moral gulf between himself and his hedonistic friends. Sad and ashamed of the entirety of his homosexuality. A St. Sebastian of his own making, wounded by a dozen arrows of fear, shame, melancholy and obsession.]

Ambrose Sinclair is not a man one labels as 'ambitious' after meeting him, but inspired. Yet, for his dedication to the art he seeks to represent, one cannot call him 'serious,' either. Earnest, perhaps.

It's taking note by many, especially in this year of all years. The families that travel back into London for the social season marvel at the entire cast of talents, these individuals of uncanny beauty and grace only before seen depicted in the most beautiful interpretations of religion. On the stage, they appear oil-painted, unblinking and soft as angels, but move with all the life God could breathe into a body.

None are moreso arresting as the leads for the show of the season at the Amaranthe Theatre, in the West End of London: Claudette Simmons, and Ambrose Sinclair. Roméo et Juliette may be a performance of decades past, but the revival of the classic penned originally by the French composer Gounod has been promised to be refreshing and gripping, like it has never been before. For one, people cannot stop talking about the unprecedented choice to cast Roméo, but it seems that trading a youthful tenor for the mournful baritone of Sinclair was nothing less than an impeccable choice, a voice so penetrating and a style so vulnerable, putting whole audiences into dreamy lulls every night. Really so unexpected. Where did such talents come from?

And Sinclair dodges all inquiry on the subject. He does not steam with guilt or shame, his insistence that he was very much innocently chosen for the role as genuine as a heartfelt confession. In fact, the actor seems to sharpen with some disturbance at the knowledge, every time he is pressed gently with eager questions. He cannot admit that he didn't even audition for the role. He isn't allowed to.

They say that the newest theatre owners live in the money purse of Leon Bellomo, the highest billed actor at the venue. In fact, how is it he can pay off the owner for all the control in the world, and doesn't get the lead role, but this unknown singer? Just one of many questions as of late...but none of them really the correct ones.

Truth is stranger than fiction: the theatre now stands almost exclusively with undead in its wings. Leon seduces the mortal owners daily (or, nightly) to help keep appearances. If they retain any of their own original thought, Ambrose would be impressed. How wonderful all things seem from the patrons outside of the theatre...a sad mockery of the real life within.

Ambrose is force-fed this success, straining under the unexpected force of attention under the position of being their lead. All too much, all too soon. For all the joy that performing gives his heart, this bears a terrible weight on his shoulders. Letters and invitations come to him daily, requests to parties in houses he was never prestigious enough to step foot near. Nights with guests too vapid and aggressively opinionated to mesh with his inspirations for his tastes. The same questions over and over, rarely ever posed about the work he does, but rather to ask for his gossip. 'Isn't it all that you dreamed?' Leon, the sire, asks him in a purr against the back of his ear.

It's nothing he ever dreamed for.

Ambrose can live by excuses — terribly busy, you see, the ever-diligent and shy talent, and oh, the headaches he always suffered, they're cropping back up again. Blood can appear so similar to laudanum in the right glass bottle. So he chucks the letters away night after night, feed for the fire in the hearth.

As he flicks the notecards in their envelopes, one by one, he stares listlessly at the flames until — a name in his hand catches his attention. Hallward.

*

It's an hour and a half past sunset. It's half an hour since he said in his correspondence that he would arrive. If it helps at all to know: Ambrose would never make a curtain call on time if he didn't have people to physically come collect him on time. He's been this way all of his life; death can't cure an illness quite like poor time management.

And he doesn't even come wearing his best. A man of so little use for egregious material luxuries, he comes dressed humbly, nothing shoddy but nothing upscale, and you can't get the poor man in a hat if life itself depended on it. Not that life depends on much for him, anymore.

But he is here, and knocks upon the door of Hallward's home. He stands here under the gentle light that spills out of the windows through sheer curtains and it emirates in him, this soft glow, almost sleepy. He watches with gentle anticipation in his hazel eyes, nearly brighter than the ambient light that reaches him here on the stoop of the front door. Basil Hallward. To meet the painter, and to be his subject for a night...is still nothing Ambrose would have dreamed of, but not for a lack of wanting to.