A silly little scene I wrote for ChrisxLodi in which Chris gets dragged to a museum and comes to the realization that maybe he needs to stop asking his time-bending situationship so many questions 😂. I am also writing a short story for these two because they’re a really interesting pairing. Enjoy!
Chris got dragged into a museum. He doesn’t know how. Doesn’t know why, maybe the details don’t even matter. Or maybe that detail was a linguist who specializes in a way with words.
A linguist from Wisconsin who bends time and wears horn-rimmed glasses and pressed suits. Chris is annoyed.
Or he’s pretending to be.
He hates this kind of shit, it feels very performative to him. People putting stuff in places for other people to stare at.
What is the actual point of it?
It’s far and away from what Captain Christopher Daniel Redfield is prepared for. The man has fought Bioweapons for Christ’s sake and he’s standing here staring at a painting of singular blue square.
Zima Blue, is the name of the thing. Beyond that, don’t ask him any other details. He doesn’t know them.
Lodi on the other hand, he can tell you the entire history of the piece, in fact he’s doing it now. Yapping Chris’s ear off about the origin of a blue fucking square.
Chris groans, walks away. He can’t take much more of this.
In the corner of his eye, Lodi is smiling. That smile that makes Chris’s heart do somersaults. He has decided he hates that too.
“You’re smiling. That’s not a good sign for me.” Chris muttered.
“No, Mr. Redfield.” Lodi pushes his glasses up. “It’s not. What if I told you that painting is not about the square?” Lodi says, and Chris wants to bash his head into a wall. There’s a particularly nice marble wall to the right of him. That might do the trick actually.
“I’m not sure I care what the painting is about.”
“It’s about returning to a simpler time.” Lodi’s words make him pause physically, now he’s standing there in the museum like an idiot. “To a time when a simple task done well brought the creator…a sense of purpose.”
Chris pinches the bridge of his nose. “Great, what am I supposed to do with that information?”
Lodi shrugs. “Maybe think of a task, a simple one you enjoy doing. I noticed you like carving wooden figurines with your knife.”
“That’s just…I just need to do something with my hands.” Chris sounds exasperated because this whole thing is stupid to him.
But Lodi, ever patient, shakes his head. “No, you enjoy it. The corner of your mouth lifts when you’re doing it.”
Chris huffs and continues walking. He’ll not be hearing any talk about purpose today. He knows Lodi is following him. As annoyed as he is, he prefers that. He just likes knowing where Lodi is at all times. Even if he’s feeling a little prickly, best to keep an eye on his time-bending linguist.
They wander around some more. They see about three hundred paintings of the same door. Chris gets that feeling he wants to find a different more suitable wall to paint with his brain matter instead.
He’s relieved when they finally leave.
As soon as they’re far enough away from the musuem, he pulls out his cigarettes and instinctively lights one for Lodi that he knows the other man isn’t going to finish. Then he lights one for himself and takes a deep drag.
“You didn’t enjoy that.” Lodi says as he blows out the smoke. He looks a little too good doing it. As if he were a Marlboro ad instead of a man.
“Museums aren’t really my thing. I told you that before we left.”
Lodi hums lowly, turning his attention to the people milling about.
“I mean,” Chris continues. “Who the fuck paints a door over and over?”
“It’s not the same door.” Lodi replies quietly.
“Yes it is, she painted that same damn thing until she got it perfect.”
Silence falls between them for a long moment.
“It was never about perfection, Christopher. She painted it during different times, different moods,” Lodi inhaled on his own cigarette again. “If you ask me, it was about making that feeling last.”
That statement hits Chris the hardest. Because he’s gotten to know Lodi now. He’s gotten to know some, definitely not all, but some of his secrets. Or at least the one he keeps closest to the vest.
Lodi stretches time, he’s doing it now actually. Chris can feel the slight pressure change in the air, the way everything just seems to move a little slower.
As if the volume on life itself has been turned down a few notches. It doesn’t impact him the way it used to. Before he’d get a little vertigo, particularly when the rubber band snapped and he was forced back into the present as if someone suddenly slammed the brakes.
But now, he breathes with it. He focuses on Lodi, the one fixed constant in all this time-bullshittery.
“You know,” Chris says as he flicks the ash away. “One of these days some time collector guy is going to show up and ask for all those seconds back.”
Lodi turned to him, smiling again. “They know where I am.”
“You don’t sound concerned.”
“There aren’t any rules to this shit? That doesn’t sit right with me.” Chris smashed the rest of his cigarette.
“There are less rules than you’d think.”
“Can you name any of them?”
Lodi is thinking. Not a good sign.
“Not off the top of my head.”
“So…you picked up a phone.”
“Someone—or something was on the other end gave you these…abilities and didn’t bother to give you an instruction manual of some kind?”
Lodi just shrugs. He has less answers than Chris likes. Scratch that—he has no answers.
“You realize that none of that makes any fucking sense, right?”
“It doesn’t need to.” That only frustrates Chris further, frankly at this point he has a damn migraine.
“Because you are asking questions that don’t have any answers.” Lodi is beaming again, and that manages to break through Chris’s frustration. He feels a mix of annoyance and relief.
Then Lodi smashes his own cigarette, as usual he didn’t finish it. He tossed it into the trash and took one of Chris’s larger hands into his own.
“You’re right…” Chris admits after awhile. “I guess I don’t need to understand everything.” His eyes meet Lodi’s again. “I just need to understand you.”
