It's funny. Even in the wake of his conversation with Daud, Ludo finds himself sitting up through the night, occupying his hands as always with bits of nothing that become something under the blade of a knife: oak into owls, rosewood and meerschaum into pipes, cherry into servingware. The act of turning chaos into creativity, into creation, always comforting, settling the mind into its usual state of calm. Waiting for a knock at the door that he doesn't expect.
Half-expects. Something is very wrong with the other man, something that doesn't want to be put to voice, and Ludo isn't the sort to pry. (Perhaps that's why people talk to him; he's a filter, a place to set down a burden and watch it wash away by morning. Someone to hold the problem for a moment, turn it in the light and inspect the shadows it casts, and help to set it aside.) Not the sort to pry, but certainly the sort to wait until the small hours of the morning for a familiar knock at the door.
People know his nature - some of them better than he does, himself. The Van Tassel girl is one of those, somehow, who reckons with Ludo's eccentricity and parlays it into something bearable, something hopeful. She negotiated a party under some pretense, simply to put him in the same room as Daud, and out of the corner of his eye, he had watched her giggle silently and hug herself in triumphant glee as he handed a finely-crafted pipe (one of his own) to someone he thought was...similarly eccentric.
Daud clearly hadn't understood the significance of the pipe, to his amusement. But their eccentricities called to one another.
For a while, that had been enough. Good. Sharing rooms, sharing conversations and passing, comfortable silences. (The silence has been different lately. Too loud to the ears of a man who seeks out the solitude of the woods to escape such noise.) He had thought for a while that maybe he and Daud had found a place to exist in a world that seemed crudely made for men like them.
And then there was a breach, somehow, in the companionability. Daud withdrew, further and further into himself, into a place Ludo didn't dare try to explore. It offended his sense of courtesy, his decency, to push into the depths of another person without invitation. So he waited. Watched as the vehicle for their meeting, a mere child, teased out whatever was darkening the other man's moods and hoped that somehow things would right themselves.
Nothing seems right. It all still seems to have an unnatural shape, the way cities and ships in the river seem unnatural, too grotesquely man-made and forced away from the order of things. The distance is unmanageable, uncrossable, and the thread between himself and Daud seems all too fragile.
But tonight he sits waiting, and that knock at the door is answered without surprise - just slightly raised brows and a look around at the darkness without, shadows that have gathered around the man before him and turned real.
Well. As long as Daud wipes his feet on the mat, he can help deal with shadows.
Ludo steps aside without a word, the welcome perpetual, unshakeable. Always an open door, a fire in the hearth, food and drink waiting. Something different from hospitality, where Daud is concerned.
no subject
Half-expects. Something is very wrong with the other man, something that doesn't want to be put to voice, and Ludo isn't the sort to pry. (Perhaps that's why people talk to him; he's a filter, a place to set down a burden and watch it wash away by morning. Someone to hold the problem for a moment, turn it in the light and inspect the shadows it casts, and help to set it aside.) Not the sort to pry, but certainly the sort to wait until the small hours of the morning for a familiar knock at the door.
People know his nature - some of them better than he does, himself. The Van Tassel girl is one of those, somehow, who reckons with Ludo's eccentricity and parlays it into something bearable, something hopeful. She negotiated a party under some pretense, simply to put him in the same room as Daud, and out of the corner of his eye, he had watched her giggle silently and hug herself in triumphant glee as he handed a finely-crafted pipe (one of his own) to someone he thought was...similarly eccentric.
Daud clearly hadn't understood the significance of the pipe, to his amusement. But their eccentricities called to one another.
For a while, that had been enough. Good. Sharing rooms, sharing conversations and passing, comfortable silences. (The silence has been different lately. Too loud to the ears of a man who seeks out the solitude of the woods to escape such noise.) He had thought for a while that maybe he and Daud had found a place to exist in a world that seemed crudely made for men like them.
And then there was a breach, somehow, in the companionability. Daud withdrew, further and further into himself, into a place Ludo didn't dare try to explore. It offended his sense of courtesy, his decency, to push into the depths of another person without invitation. So he waited. Watched as the vehicle for their meeting, a mere child, teased out whatever was darkening the other man's moods and hoped that somehow things would right themselves.
Nothing seems right. It all still seems to have an unnatural shape, the way cities and ships in the river seem unnatural, too grotesquely man-made and forced away from the order of things. The distance is unmanageable, uncrossable, and the thread between himself and Daud seems all too fragile.
But tonight he sits waiting, and that knock at the door is answered without surprise - just slightly raised brows and a look around at the darkness without, shadows that have gathered around the man before him and turned real.
Well. As long as Daud wipes his feet on the mat, he can help deal with shadows.
Ludo steps aside without a word, the welcome perpetual, unshakeable. Always an open door, a fire in the hearth, food and drink waiting. Something different from hospitality, where Daud is concerned.