deercountry | i've looked at clouds from both sides now (𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥)

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i've looked at clouds from both sides now (𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥)

^{Who: Peter Graham + you! Prompts will be placed here.
What: Canon update business, potential event things, tba.
When: Through the month of November.
Where: Various places in Trench / tba.

Content Warnings: This character comes with demonic possession by default. There's a gif including nudity (non-sexual, just a couple of people shown naked from behind) in one of the posts.}^{Additional warnings will be placed in individual spaces.}

^{( On Peter's birthday and Blessed Month, he will go through a canon update that's given him updated memories. For weeks 1 - 3 he will mentally be MIA, and Paimon/Charlie may be interacted with. On week 4, Peter will return. Closed starters will be placed under the appropriate posts. Please hit me up @ plot post / plurk / large bat#2354 / pm if you're interested in a starter / if you'd like to plot for the month! )}

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( Peter lights the end of his joint, leaning back against the wall again as he listens. )

Oh— shit, yeah, you're right. I used an apple a couple times back home, when I was younger.

( Some memories manage to last through the weird foggy haze in him. There's a vague image of giggling stupidly with one of his friends who showed him how to do it back before any of them could get ahold of actual bongs or pipes or stuff like that. Standing in the bathroom with the shower going, steaming up to cover the smell so his parents wouldn't know, passing a stupid apple between them. He can't remember what the friend's name was now, though.

(Was it the same friend who was bowing down to him, chanting the name of an ancient demon? Was everyone in Peter's life in on this big horrible secret? Was any of it real?)

His mouth twitches around the stick in his lips and he feels sick as he wills himself through taking a drag that goes on a little too long, eyes closed. When he opens them again he sees Fiddleford setting down his banjo, and Peter casts a goopy-eyed stare at at it. )

Is that a banjo? ( He knows the instrument, it's just not the kind of thing he's probably ever seen in person. Has the subject come up between them, before? Peter can't remember if it has, but he does remember that they both have problems remembering things. ) You play?

[Has it? Fiddleford knows Peter has seen the banjo, but he doesn't know that was Paimon piloting Peter and not Peter at the wheel. He can't remember if they talked about it. He knows they've talked about music. If it didn't come up then when would it have?

He chooses to assume the subject just hasn't come up because that's neater for both of them.]

Sure. I play the banjo and my brother Banjomin plays the fiddle. Ma and Pa almost got it right.

[Ha, ha.]

I figured a smoke session wasn't really complete without music, right? You can have one without the other but they go best together.

( Wait — give him a couple of seconds before he gives the soft breath of a sound that's close to a laugh without actually touching on it. But there's a note of amusement there to Peter's eyes that flickers in for a moment, livens them up slightly. )

You guys had to have started some kind of brother band, right?

( The set-up was there, man... Their parents must have been ready for it... Peter glances from the banjo over to his own instruments propped against the opposite wall, as he breathes in the comforting heady skunkiness and tries to remember when the last time he picked up his guitar was. )

Yeah. They do go good together. ( He's quiet, thoughtful, before he looks back to the other. Finally there's a true smile, even if it's small. )

Do you like getting high before playing, or getting high while playing?

[Aha! A smile! There it is, he did it, excellent. Huge success.]

Either. Both? Doesn't matter. You puff, you pass, you play a song and by the time you're done it's come back around to you. The Backupsmore dorms always smelled like a whole family of skunks died in the walls.

[Speaking of puffing. As much as he joked about the bong, what he actually reaches for is a joint. That's simple, familiar, and most importantly easier to keep out of the way of the neck of a banjo once he starts having trouble keeping track of where things are in physical space. He could ask for a lighter but what he actually does is one of the few things having stupid magic blood is actually good for: he lifts a hand and a crackle of electricity arcs between his thumb and forefinger. He's never heard of an electric lighter, but he is one now, and he has to admit it's convenient.]

We should've started a family band, but I had to go and move cross country to California and go to college. You know how it is.

[Peter probably does not know how it is.]

( It's not something Peter did too much of. The whole — sit and pass around a joint while jamming it up, thing. Maybe a couple of times, but there came a point as he got older that his friends stopped coming over, because nobody wanted to be around his mom, and then nobody wanted to be around his grandma when she came to live with them.

Going over to other people's houses wasn't really much of a thing, either. Not when he had to be home to help take care of Charlie. So hanging out with his friends became something that just happened at school — sitting under the bleachers sneaking stuff to get a little bit of a high on inbetween classes. It wasn't that much fun. ...And then after the accident, he became the odd one out. Now he was the one nobody wanted to be around. The guy who accidentally killed his kid sister and now has panic attacks and fits of crying when trying to get high, yeah, he's kind of a buzzkill.

Even here in Trench, it's usually a solitary activity. Not— fun, or entertaining, just a way to stay numbed down the way he needs to.

Peter watches as Fiddleford reaches for a joint, about to offer him the lighter when he witnesses the man spark it up on his own. Not long ago that might've wigged him out, but he's gotten slightly more used to seeing that kind of thing, around here. (Of course, there's an odd moment when his eyes get very wide and very intense and it probably just looks like he's stunned by what he's seeing, but it's just. It's Paimon. Observing what is clearly a display of Fiddleford's Demonic Power.)

The moment's brief and Peter's glancing to his own guitar again for a moment. Not moving just yet, but.... thinking about it. )

Oh— yeah, college wasn't for me. ( He takes another inhale, already mellowing back out. Just sitting and talking to someone when he's upset is weirdly foreign and weirdly helpful. Other things to think about. ) I sucked at school. Wasn't even good at P.E.

Did you get to play at all in college, though? Or were you studying too much?

( He had access to beakers, okay, clearly the dude was in with the Smart Crowd. )

[Fiddleford snorts halfway through a drag and yet somehow manages not to cough. That's real talent.]

I played more'n I studied. Backupsmore wasn't exactly West Coast Tech.

[Not that there's any way he could have got into West Coast Tech. Just one of the textbooks would have cost more than everything his family managed to scrape up to send him to California in the first place.]

Stanford was the one who always had his head in a book. I'd have to climb up on the roof and play there because he'd get all snippy with me about the twang breaking his concentration. God forbid his A not have a plus next to it.

[It's not that he didn't study, or didn't care. It's more that he didn't really... need to? It was always intuitive for him, and more than that, it was something he loved. A difficult math problem wasn't work, it was play. Enrichment.]

( Peter's focus shifts to that name again — Backupsmore.... Come to think of it, he's never heard of West Coast Tech either, but he's definitely not familiar with a lot of schools, so it's not something that's too weird (even if the first name is definitely... unique). But listen, Waffle House University is a thing that exists in his timeline. He won't ask questions.

But the admission that Fiddleford played more than he studied makes him feel a little more relatable, and Peter's interest in this conversation isn't forced or waning or any of the things it might usually be when he's talking to someone through one of his Bad Days. )

Oh, he was one of those types of nerds, huh.

( It's not said to be mean-spirited, and there's a ghost of another smile playing at Peter's mouth; he has a pretty high opinion of Stanford, given the man's helped him out more than once. )

I uh, guess I never cared about anything that much. Like... school-wise. ( (Or anything, is the thought that echoes in his head almost accusingly.) ) Like there was never a subject I wanted to spend my time working on to... master.

( Music was the closest thing to a "passion" that Peter ever had, and even then it was muted down in so many ways. But here... he's dabbled, a bit more. Not as much as he could. )

I guess if I could do it all over again, I might try writing music or something. I've even thought maybe I could do that here, but..... well. You know how it is. This place is a nightmare.

( That is not an excuse Peter, there is still downtime in the nightmare world!! )

[It's easy to have a high opinion of Stanford Pines when he's not your best friend. Fiddleford knows him too well for that. He loves Ford, of course, and unfortunately that doesn't seem to change no matter how much Ford makes him want to pull his hair out.

The point is he meant it a little mean-spirited, but dunking on Stanford Pines is not the main topic of conversation here. He regards Peter with an owlish sort of look, then shrugs and takes another hit of the joint.]

Seems to me you write music about that, then. Lord knows some of the best music came out of folks feelin' fed up. You ever heard Sixteen Tons?

( Peter keeps his joint pressed to his mouth for a long moment, fingers pinching it tight. There's an initial response to that, but he's already used the word "suck" to refer to himself in this conversation, and even he is aware of how stupidly miserable it'd sound it he said it out loud now. That he hasn't tried writing anything because he knows he'd suck. People get tired of him dripping despair every goddamn second. He's not trying to be a drag.

So he focuses on the question, but for some reason his eyes are feeling wet again. It's like he keeps leaking; he doesn't know what to do with it. He clears his throat, takes another drag. )

I don't think so. How's it go?

Oh, it's a good one. Folks liked it because it was catchy, so they missed how angry it was.

[He picks up the banjo and settles it in his lap. Fingerpicks? Those are for weaklings whose fingers aren't themselves several layers of callus thick. The version that hit the charts was the one by Tennessee Ernie Ford, but the version he grew up with the one by Merle Travis. The way Ford sang it was a little too much like a performance for his taste. His playing is great -- his voice less so, but it has that rough and earnest scratchy nature that works great for this particular sort of music. That's real mountain sound. Somewhere in the middle he gets a little lost and a second melody creeps in. It makes sense in his head. Both have a simple driving beat (he has to approximate it by tapping the heel of his boot against the floor). Both are about the crushing weight of trying to work your way out of poverty. His thoughts always get so mixed up and that extends to the muscle memory of music-- he'd never lose the muscle memory but it gets away from him.

It's just you hear a song like these different when you had family in the mines yourself. It's not charming old-timey Americana to him, it's very recent history, and that's the way he sings it.]

( Peter's straightening up a bit as he listens. There's always something about watching somebody play live that just — makes a shudder ripple down his spine. And the way Fiddleford plays is clearly skilled; it's easy to fall into.

There's a melancholy to it for sure, and he's watching, drawn in by the way the instrument sounds, the way it pushes forwards, urgent. As the other melody winds in, fits into the slots in a way that works but adds something new, something more, Peter's mouth is parted just a little, eyes not moving from where he's staring. He's stopped taking long puffs of his smoke too, holding his joint down in his lap for a moment.

It's nice. It's really nice — and it's upset, the words, the stories behind them. Even he can understand what they're saying, and even if there's no particular nostalgia for him associated with it, the banjo itself makes everything feel nostalgic. Like old woods and dusty-covered things, and stories told through song. They don't have to be his stories to make him feel something.

He's swallowing for a moment, eyes only dropping back down to his lap when Fiddleford's finished. )

It's nice. That was— nice. You're really good. ( He means it, pausing a moment before he actually moves off of the floor (a feat, to be sure...) to find his own acoustic guitar and nab a pick (WEAKLING ALERT), sitting back down gingerly with the thing in his lap. )

Could you play some of it again — slower? I can uh, try to warm up. ( By imitating the melody, even if it's just by ear and inevitably won't be.... perfect, by any means. )

[This, here? This is a massive improvement. His eyes light up and his posture, usually the hunch of the chronically-poring-over-something-on-a-desk sort of man, straightens up just a little.]

Sure I can. Sixteen Tons is real easy, all the melody's in the voice and not all that much is in the hands. It's real easy to play along to.

[He starts up again at about half tempo, which has the added effect of making the music sound twice as melancholy. That's country music boy howdy!]

A lot of the music I know's like that. Simple, meant for improvisation, because most of the meat's in the lyrics. Not so much this one, but a lot of them tell stories.

[Well. Sixteen Tons tells a story, for sure, but it's more a character study then your classic three act structure. That's more what he means. All genres of music do it, but in his opinion country and bluegrass do it best. Not that he's biased.]

( Peter fiddles with the tuners on his guitar a moment or two, and it leaves his fingertips kissed in a slight layer of dust, which he wipes on his jeans. It really has been a long time since he picked this thing up. But it's there in his hands now, and he folds his legs in crossed, giving a couple of warm-up strums.

Then he's listening to Fiddleford play the slowed-down song and he's watching for a few moments before he starts imitating, finding the notes. He's not bad but he's definitely not close to expert levels — Peter's one of those "self-taught from a book, never really went anywhere far with it", kinds. He's actually a lot better on keys, because he started really little on that one, thanks to the grand piano in the foyer, inherited from way back when.

But guitar was something he got to choose for himself, not something that came with the house, the family. Even after months of neglect, the instrument makes him feel a certain thrill to hold again. It's quiet, padded under layers of all the weird aching shit he's freshly been made privy to — look ma, I'm a teenage sacrifice! — but it's still there, even if he's not perfectly playing by ear and there's a lot of little off-beat sounds as he doesn't quite hit the right note.

The melody is sad, and Peter's a visibly affected by everything, weed-weepy and frowning to himself, but this is... nice. He kind of needs this, maybe. And he starts getting a little experimental, inspired by the melody that's already going on, branching off into some other avenues with it. Is this what the youth call "jamming out?" )

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i've looked at clouds from both sides now (𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥)

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