Participants:
| Scene Title | Yellow |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Two paths collide in a strange place when Logan and Peyton pay their respects to Wendy Hunter. |
| Date | July 16, 2010 |
The Hunter Family mausoleum in a Brooklyn cemetery
In the movies, when someone goes to visit the dead, it's romantic, with green lush lawns surrounding a grave adorned with vibrant, technicolor flower bouquets, sometimes an American flag. Tall and majestic trees stand like sentinels keeping vigil over those buried in the sacred grounds, and the living can find refuge and solace in the tranquil beauty that surrounds them.
This is not the movies.
The Hunter family mausoleum does sit on a lush green lawn under the shade of a tall tree, but inside it's not at all as cathartic. While marble slab of course helps to keep the interior of the mausoleum a little cooler than out in the sun, it's still sweltering without air conditioning. There is no grass inside, and while the marble walls have ledges with little holes in them to put flowers, it lacks something… that je ne sais quoi that Peyton Whitney is looking for.
The girl is sitting on a marble bench near the spot on the wall that holds Wendy's ashes. Hair up in a loose chignon, her bangs a touch too long, Peyton is dressed for summer in a light yellow sundress — the same shade of the coat she wore to Wendy's funeral, a little homage to the fact that Wendy loved color and wouldn't want her to be mourning.
She's talking quietly, a bouquet of purple, blue and fuchsia wildflowers on her lap. "I'm just going to make the most of what's left, right? I mean, that's what you would have done, if you knew you were going, right? You wouldn't have moped around. I know it."
His arrival is quiet, so it's probably no wonder that Peyton doesn't notice she's not alone until movement catches her eye. Logan is leaning his shoulder against the mausoleum's entrance, his blue jeans casual but as ever designer, spotless and pristinely blue, and the white shirt left unbuttoned at the throat adds to this summer palette, golden thread giving a hint of evening and glamour where it runs intermittently through the soft cotton. Perhaps unusually— for anyone that has met him for more than ten seconds— he does come bearing gifts.
Gift, singular. A single flower over bouquet, a thick stalk and yellow petals as sharp and gleaming as though they were made of plastic, but the sunflower held loose in his hand does seem to be real, other hand casually circling the other wrist as he lets the token weave a little with minute twitches of fingers, thoughtful.
Rather than take his weight off the stone frame and make way or enter, Logan stays where he is, as if blocking the entry way. "How long has it been?" he asks, prim and proper accent echoing through the crypt.
When the motion catches her eyes, her words cut off and she looks up, a rosy hue infusing her cheeks as she realizes he might have heard what she was saying. Hints to a secret she hasn't voiced to anyone. She swallows hard, her dark eyes dropping to the flower in his hands, so close to the color of her own dress. Her lips twitch before they smile, more at the flower than at John Logan himself. She's only met him, what, twice? And neither of them in good circumstances.
"March," she says, reaching up to touch the marble where Wendy's birth and death dates are etched. March 4 was the date that Samson Gray killed their mutual friend, though the funeral was several days later. "Some days, it seems like just yesterday, and some days, a lifetime ago." She frowns a little. "I don't think it's even been a year since I met her. How is that possible?" The same way it's possible that her will bequeaths her estate to three people she hasn't known for more than a year, either. Her entire life prior to last July seems to have been someone else's.
She nods to the flower. "She'd like that," she adds, standing to add her own colorful bouquet to one of the slots meant for flowers.
"I know." He sounds more matter-of-fact than defensive, still unmoving from his spot, glancing towards the bouquet, heavy with its colours and its fragrance, be set down. Logan restlessly glances over his shoulder, where summer sun is beating down on his back, but ultimately— ultimately he sets his weight back down on both feet, feet clad in black, patent leather that glimmers the rainbow colours of an oil spill. They creak a little, as audible as his foot falls, as he wanders towards the urn on display.
The sunflower spins a little as he twists his fingers around its stalk. "I think I'd want to be cremated," Logan notes. "Should write that down somewhere. Superstitions. What's done should be dust." And with that, he goes to set the sunflower into place as well.
Funeral arrangements are not something she's quite managed to get to yet. The will was hard enough. Peyton's dark brows knit and she nods slowly, glancing down, studying her pedicure and her pink peeptoe flats for something to look at. "I guess. It seems so," She pauses, trying to think of a word, "violent, though. But the alternative isn't really pleasant either." Perhaps not words to say in a mausoleum.
She steps aside to give him more room at the wall, to give him space to pay his respects to the woman who they both cared about. "I'll let you be," she says, moving toward the door where the sunlight streams in, a beam of light like one sees in movies depicting God's blessings on such places. Peyton doesn't buy that, of course, but it's a nice thought. This isn't the movies, or it would be someone besides John Logan standing beside her as she seeks for peace. Right?
"I'll just leave otherwise, you know. I don't pray," is what Logan carelessly points out, over a shoulder, as Peyton begins to move off. Though he's not particularly aiming to stop her, and despite this point, he remains where he is, thumbs hooking into belt loops and shoulders relaxes beneath light cotton. He is, approximately, the same kinds of moody severity, velveted over with contrived politeness, that he was when she first met him, but at least the knives aren't out, nor are they pointed for her.
Scarred fingers stretch and splay, relax again. "I don't do the Jesus thing. Did she tell you we fought?" Another glance, but only brief, just out his periphery. "It was the last I saw of her, too."
She turns, her dark eyes full of sympathy for him. Peyton knows what it's like to lose someone, the last words spoken not words of love or understanding but of conflict and spite. She'd lost both her parents to the bomb, having told them she hated them, that they didn't understand, that she wasn't really theirs. She swallows and stops, a silhouette in the sunlit doorway, her shadow cast inside the mausoleum. Wendy would probably have made a Peter Pan joke about it.
"I saw her two days before she died," the clairvoyant murmurs. "For what it's worth, I told her to call you." She leaves out the fact that she also called Logan a walking rectum. "She missed you, I could tell. And she was beating it. She wasn't on it anymore, and it was hard, but she was free and she was going to stay that way." Peyton's voice trembles and she ducks her head, though it's not like he can see the tears in her eyes, dark as her form is with the sun behind her. "You were right, and she knew it, and … she probably would have called you, to make up with you. She wasn't mad at you, said you were a good guy." Peyton pauses, her head coming back up. "Just so you know."
Turned though they are, Logan's gaze elsewhere, Peyton can tell that he's listening from the cant of his head and the stillness of his lean body, arms up to fold to find a comfier position, unconsciously defensive. His mouth twists in something between a smirk and a frown, eyes in crescents from the low dip of eyelashes as he regards the ground. "I was good to her," he corrects, though correcting a dead woman's words seems a little useless. "I was alright to her.
"I could have been much better, but, there it is." Regrets and Logan are an uncomfortable mix — something with a shape that doesn't fit him, awkward and alien. A genuine voicing of truth but still, as ever, as removed from it as smiles are from his eyes.
That lack of connection that meant he was just alright to her. "But cheers. Nice knowing that."
"Not to disrespect her or the sacred tomb or anything," Peyton says, with a shrug of one bare shoulder, "I don't really do the Jesus thing either, and I don't think she's here, and I love her dearly, but she could have been better, too. The fight at the end — I don't know what was said or what wasn't, but it helped her. So maybe you weren't 'good,' but maybe you were what was 'right.' There can be a difference, you know."
She takes another step toward the sun, but turns back again, the light from behind her reflecting against her shiny hair like a halo — not that she is any angel. "I was in that agent's office the other day, the one that was at the funeral Wendy's picture still on the walls. I guess that's what made me come here today," she murmurs, almost to herself. "You? Do you come… often?" It's the first time she's been here since that cold, frigid day in March.
Logan can't help the slightly compulsive quirk of a smile at her question. It seems out of place, the kind of line dropped at a bar, but at least she's speaking his language enough for him to deal her his attention again, a brief up and down glance before searching out her shadowed face. "No," he admits, though his tone holds no rue. "Not often. Just once, after the funeral, and now— now." Her pondering about why she came out here has him doing the same, looking past her towards and out the geometric cut of light of the way leading out, thought reading in his eyes.
What does occur to him probably can't be spoken without sounding like an asshole, affectionate memories of how pliable she was in comparison to the likes of those he has to try to manipulate nowadays, CIA agents, Russian mercenaries, the spiky personalities of the Linderman Group as it quietly sinks into mud.
No. Never mind.
"It was a nice day," he says instead, another hint of a smile. "I suppose. Although I should go." Rather than wait for the young woman to exit the place of the dead to clear the way, nor say why he has to go, Logan starts moving ahead of that, bringing himself close enough for the acrid scents of cigarette smoke and expensive cologne to mingle with the ones of a damp New York summer and the earthy smells of turned over graveyard soil as he moves passed.
"Yeah," Peyton says — agreement to what? The nice day? That he should go? That she should? The reason she is here has less to do with Audrey Hanson's office and the pictures on the wall than that she knows one day soon she too will be interred in a similar place. Perhaps not a mausoleum; she's still a little squeamish of the idea of her body being burnt to ashes, though if she really thought of the alternative and what happens to a corpse at the hands of a mortician, she might agree with Logan.
She moves toward the door as well once he passes, the light on her face now reflecting off wet lashes. She gives him a nod and turns to head down a path that will lead to the sidewalk and the busy city streets, the dull thrum of car engines audible just barely over the chirping of sparrows and tinkling of water fountains.