A/N: Happy Belated Birthday Angel-Sue76! Sorry it's late hun (hey, don't you glare at me for apologising…) and I hope you enjoy this. It's just a bit of a self-examining character study, but I hope it makes at least some sort of sense. (Fulcrum, as noted in my last chapter, is currently under construction… First chapter should be up within the next few days.)
Enjoy, all.
Disclaimer: If not for Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, I would not be able to play in this wonderful playground, so no; I do not own the Thunderbirds.
The colours whirl around in both his peripheral and foveal vision; iridescent, undulating, and utterly captivating. The spectrum he creates with his mind and fingers dances across the page, glancing off wild ribbons of glass-clear chimes and glittering swings as his lips tighten in concentration at the thrill it represents.
When he's writing, or playing or painting, he's completely immersed in the colours and tones of what he is doing; sound and shade mixed together in swirling snippets of emotion and sense that both confuse him and clarify every single thing he's ever experienced.
For Virgil, colour isn't merely a mix of tone and chromatics and shadowed light; its hollowed timbre and shattered octave, each sound creating bursts of colour and shatters of complex sound-weave, creating pathways and webs of glittering thought everywhere he looks. An almost-veil is what it is, insulating him from the realities of the world, but at the same time, keeping him safe and grounded, with air above, and solid earth beneath his feet.
It is the same with reading and the penning of words; he gets both flavour and scent when composing, both written passages and musical scores; a taste really, that is sharp and inimitable to every peak and valley he sees, both in print, and in the real world of people, speech and the physical turnabout of day-to-day life. Both irresistible and undeniably stabilising, it's what's most precious to him, even when the world is spinning so fast, he cannot find his bearings in the chaos.
He knows that it's not quite normal, this cross-over of senses he experiences; it keeps him up, the times where his head is just so full of the things that he needs to get down on paper or stave that he cannot empty or calm it enough for him to be able to sleep. He stays up all night, just sitting and absorbing the frenetic, twisting miasma that represents the tangled netting of his rational thoughts. However, despite his occasional periods of unrest, the almost-organised chaos in his head is comparatively soothing, letting him relax and allowing him to search again for the self that he feels like he so often loses among the nimbus of life and meaning.
There is a name for this… this thing he can do; this involuntary, perhaps slightly abnormal mish-mash of sound and visual he experiences the world with, but Virgil has always hated labels and stereotypes. Usually, he can shirk the anxieties these categorisations put into his head, but sometimes, he's unable to separate his fixation with shapes and numbers and patterns from one another; his extreme need to associate numerary symbols in their previously and permanently-set configuration really doesn't seem to help him too much to be able to be worthy of the reverential and endless patience his brothers and father (Scott and Jeff especially) expend on him, but they all manage, somehow.
Let's just say that it makes his life at home very interesting, especially when interruption comes when he's immersed in something that has completely captured his attention. His particular brand of fireworks are interesting, especially when the rising tension in his own voice colours the air like the very atmosphere is vibrating; unnamed hues of the white-to-black spectrum emerging with every word that tumbles and skips from between teeth and lips. The echoing, trembling, ethereal script, shaded with pastel and burnished bronze; dazzle bright with enquiry and wonder, distract him somewhat, which allows him to calm himself. Most of the time.
On the flipside, Virgil finds that his ability to see things the way he does helps him indescribably in creating his more cherished pieces. It might seem like he knows what he's doing, when he's at work, but in truth; he's merely following the guidance of what he sees in his mind's eye, despite it actually being there, strong and sure at the edge of his vision.
All he needs is a paintbrush and a canvas, or his own, classically-trained fingers, and then he's off and racing; so lost in his newest brand of sun-shattered, glittering inspiration that he has no room for anything else in his head, barring a wailing distress call that sounds like the panic of the wounded and dying, personified. He's had to train himself very hard to be able to snap out of his reveries, but even while he's on a rescue, there's still a part of his brain locked on his work; stamping out the wrinkles and kinks, ready to dive back into it completely, when he returns home.
Even when he doesn't have a project in the works (it's very rare, but it does happen occasionally), the bare, raw, unalterable joy he feels from guiding and coaxing Thunderbird Two to her optimum level; heart and mind and soul focused on what he is expected to do, he is still immersed in the sensual, emotive workings of sound, sight and machinery.
It's something that will forever be a part of him, and though sometimes, Virgil wishes with all his heart that he can escape it, he knows that he'd feel naked, empty; even dead without it. It's his perspective on the world; crazy and churning and unsettled as it might be, but he wouldn't change it, even for a sleep-filled night, or just one day, without visual echoes or painted sound.
Because what is a world without any of those things?
A/N: Thanks for reading!