Three Dead Crows

Entropy

It'd been a couple of days now at the motel. The monotony and the cramped quarters were broken up a bit for Jim and Serafine whenever Pan and Shoshannah arrived to replace them, which was a small blessing at least. The mages took turns guarding the girl, occasionally changing the order up so that one or the other of them could go somewhere with Pan. Now it was the Cultists' watch. Leah had just finished eating some of the food that'd been brought for her, and now she stood by the window, pacing back and forth with a restrained sort of agitation.

The stay hadn't been so easy on her.

At first, there'd been exhaustion and that sense of weary relief. Gratitude to be able to stop and be still and feel something approaching a sense of security. Some small weight had been lifted from the girl's shoulders once she'd been given permission to live - to possibly begin to forgive herself. The first night she'd slept like the dead for nearly 12 hours. When she was awake, she barely spoke, choosing to occupy herself by watching tv or staring out the window, as she was doing now.

She did not like to be touched - that much had been made clear on the first night. Not with comfort or affection or play. Even passing accidental brushes of contact would send her into a state of hyper-vigilant tension. But she did her best to be polite - to be kind in return for their kindness.

As time passed though, the confinement seemed to wear on her. Sometimes she'd fall asleep and wake up screaming. Sometimes her eyes would glaze over and she'd become unresponsive - or worse, begin to speak in a hushed murmur with garbled words that held no apparent relevance. It's dark here. Yes, dad, I paid the electric bill. Stop. He smells like a dog.

At some point during Pan's last visit, she'd turned one of the curtains to dust. It wasn't the first time that had happened. One or twice during her dreams, other items around the room had broken or decayed. Nothing serious yet, but it didn't exactly put one at ease - wondering what it was she might destroy next. Wondering if it might be something living - perhaps even one of them.

"I hate it here," she said rather suddenly. "You said you would help and it's not helping." There was a slightly wild look in her grey eyes as she tried to tuck a thick section of her hair behind her ear.

Jim

Jim has stocked the motel's fridge. In fact, if Sera hasn't been there often since they last parted ways, it looks like he's moved in. A rucksack so lumpy it can only be stuffed with clothes, a few worn paperbacks near the bed he'd slept on, and his own sheets replacing the ones that had come on it.

As for the fridge and its contents: Cold fried chicken. Chinese and thai leftovers. Potato salad. Jello pudding packs - vanilla and chocolate, but not mixed.

And various liquids. Mostly juice and booze.

But of course, Leah got fresh food. They all seemed to be going out of their way to accommodate her, and Jim was happy to go along with that.

Anyway, it's all there waiting when they get back. Even the wards on the rooms, just as strong as when he'd made them and hopefully enough. He's managed to reclaim his security deposit for his other apartment, happy that one of the college kids that were moving into the place had a pre-med pal who also needed a room. He'd also hustled a better room rate from the guy at the front desk.

Jim actually seems to like the place. He can sit on the outside steps and watch the kids play. Sometimes he even kicks a soccer ball around with them. Their parents don't mind, probably because he's always stone cold sober when he interacts with them. It's more than he can say for them.

But this isn't one of those times. They come in, trading places with Pan and Shoshannah, and he cracks open a cold one - one of the tallboy Pabst Blue Ribbons that he actually takes the effort to poor into one of the glass pint glasses he keeps clean near the bathroom sink. His tongue may be playing tricks on him, but it tastes especially stale.

He looks down at his hand and then up at Leah. "Well, I'm still here, so there's that," a not-so-subtle nod to the fact that at least she hadn't killed any of them yet.

"Talk helps. Sometimes."

Serafine

Sera took in the new sheets, the signs of evident occupancy with a certain curiousity that first night she took a 'shift' watching Leah. With Pan or Jim. One of them is always here at the priest's insistence. Since then, she's been back a few times; and has had Dan playing taxi-driver and delivery-man when needed. For whoever needs him. He doesn't seem to mind, but sometimes he pulls her aside, reminds Sera quietly of some project he's working on and then he's gone for a few hours and they make the best of it.

No touching. Sera figured that out the first night in the courtyard of the hospital, when Leah finally made her way to the group and the exhausted, spent Cultist wanted to throw her fucking arms around everyone and everything. Stopped herself before she sent Leah into that hypervigilant state and has been careful about it since then, but still hugged first Jim, then the priest, as if the warmth of their bodies, their solid presence might banish the creepy-crawlies that Brogan's mind slithering against their own had engendered in her.

A few nights later and Sera's almost wholly recovered. When she shows up tonight she has a plastic bag from Ulta with a handful of nail polishes, one of those make-up palettes in colors slightly more conventional than she usually wears. Some magazines - glossy and otherwise - rolled up in the bag with maybe a change of clothes. A dress in Leah's size. Under her other arm, a pair of board games. Carcassone and Settlers of Catan, stolen from her housemates. Which is fine with her, she always loses. She sets those aside without comment. Just leaves them tucked somewhere for now.

She drops these gleanings on the single armchair by the window, then circles by the fridge to inspect the contents and grab a - bottle of water for the moment. Straightens and glance from Jim to Leah.

"It kinda sucks. But this place is pretty safe and we've gotta keep you safe while we figure it out, you know? If there's something you really want, let me know - I'll grab whatever it is next time I'm out.

"Like Jim said, though. Talk helps. And he's a pretty great fucking listener. Listened to me talk my ass off for like three days in here."

Entropy

Talk helps, Jim said. Leah turned away from them and didn't respond.

Serafine tried to reassure her. Offered to get her something if she needed it. "I don't want anything," Leah replied in a sullen and intractable tone. It could be easy to forget, given the extraordinary circumstances, that she was still just a teenager.

She went quiet again for a while after that, drifting toward the chair she'd occupied on and off for the past few hours. When she climbed into it, her movement was a little too quick and jerky and it made the frame creak with her weight. She pulled her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, leveling a quiet, eerily direct gaze at Jim and Serafine over the denim-clad surface of her knees. "Why are you protecting me?"

Jim

Jim looks to Sera when the question hits, doesn't hide the fact he's thinking for an answer, and maybe it's that long gap of a wait where he looks a bit confused by the question that makes his final answer seem just a bit more genuine. "Because you need it," a pause before he continues.

Maybe, if she didn't want to, and was at least asking them questions, it was their turn to talk. To open up to the girl.

"You were just going to jump. But do you think that's the answer? I'm not going to give all the cliches that it's the easy way out, because it's not, but it's not the answer either. It might not even be an option. You saw what happened when that bullet was headed your way. If you can't control it then, you think it's just going to let you jump off a building and..."

"And end it?" He talks fast, words addled together, muddling ideas that manage to still form some cohesive structure.

"You don't have to stay here. It's your choice. Us?" Looking at Serafine. "We're a kind that respects choices. That's how we do things. But that doesn't mean we're not going to try to help," his eyes jerking back to Leah again.

"We don't know if we can help," honest as he can be. His voice doesn't break, it's firm, persistent, even if the content is disjointed. "But we're going to try."

"You've got something inside you. It's not always pretty, but that doesn't mean you can't use it to do beautiful things. You're not an ugly girl. Not an ugly person," shaking his head. "I've seen ugly people. You need to give yourself a chance."

Serafine

"I have like, a half-dozen to that damned question, Leah," returns Sera, in a low voice threaded with a certain wry humor that feels entirely native to her. The edge of a half-smile curves across her mouth, the suggestion of teeth behind it. A certain quality of light in her eyes, reflecting the sullen fixtures of the cheap motel room. "Believe it or not, one of them is, you came to me in a dream and asked for help."

Leah doesn't want anything, ignores the bag Sera tossed onto the bed. Serafíne pays this no particular mind. She picks it up and dumps out the contents onto the bedspread, then settles there, cross-legged, not looking at Leah precisely, just sorting through her finds while Jim speaks. She's wearing cut-off jeans tonight and an old Bee Gees t-shirt, with an iron-on decal of a peeling rainbow on the back, and a pair of slightly-less-ridiculous-than-usual boots. The ones she wears on stage sometimes - black, with an inch platform and another 2 inches or so of silver wrapped heels. On the bed, she unlaces them while Jim finds his way through his thoughts, peeling together something whole and cohesive from the whirlwind of them.

Her eyes are on him, not Leah, the whole time he's speaking. Steady across the room even as she shifts and begins toeing off her boots. One and then the other. Then her socks come off, and she stretches her legs, wriggling her toes, thoughtfully. Picks up two of the little bottles of polish and holds them between her thumb and finger, tucks in a quiet - "Whaddya think? I'm Not Really a Waitress or Vampsterdam?" with a sidelong look at Leah, and another direct one at Jim, the right corner of her mouth hooking upward.

As Jim continues, Sera just nods, this quiet steady agreement with every one of his sentiments, the sort that sends her long blond curls dancing around her left shoulder and down her spine.

"It's everything he said. See, there are a lot of people out there who want you, Leah. They want you to become something, or to destroy someone. They want what's inside you, that piece you can't really control, that's fucking with your head, they want that power, or they want to destroy that power. You're just in the way, to them.

"All the way around.

"We think you're the important part of the fucking equation. Not just a vessel for - " here, she breathes out, once and sharply. "Not just a vessel.

"Like he said, we believe in choices, and your right to fucking make them. How old are you, anyway. Sixteen?"

Entropy

She nodded once, lightly, to Serafine's question (yes, she was sixteen,) but didn't otherwise respond to anything the two said. At least, not immediately. Instead she appeared to consider their words with careful deliberation.

"You don't know what I did," she said finally, turning her head to look at the wall. "You don't know what I am. If you knew, you wouldn't want me here." The muscles in her face contracted into a look of barely restrained disgust. "I am ugly.

"Tell me how to kill it. The... the thing. Whatever it is. I want to take a knife and cut and cut until I find it and then slit its fucking throat."

Did she mean the thing inside her? Her soul? Her avatar? Her atman? Whatever one wanted to call it. Her voice went cold at the end, when she spoke of killing off this piece of herself. Cold and angry and nihilistic.

The hope they'd given her a few days ago was waning.

Jim

Maybe it's to help slow things down, help cut the tension, that he does help Serafine pick a nail color, pointing at the second of the two.

"That's just it. That thing? That thing you want to cut out of yourself? It's not you," pointing his finger at her, and then back on himself, poking himself in the chest as soon as he realized the accusatory nature of the gesture.

"I was born with one, a different one, and if I hadn't been? Maybe someone else would've been. Maybe whatever baby was next to me in the nursery at the hospital. It's part of you, but it's not you," shaking his head now, very certain of it.

"You didn't do it. You didn't decide to do whatever it is you're beating yourself up over," his eyes, a faint curiosity in them, as he says it. "You're just caught up in it, Leah. But you can't kill it, not any way that's easy. But you can try to control it."

Serafine

While Leah was silent, Sera shifted positions, curls her legs into her frame until she is sitting on the comforter with her sharp little chin resting on one bent knee, the other leg tucked carefully beneath it. Jim chooses and so she uncaps the second one of the bottles and starts painting her toenails. It requires a steady eye and hand - but hey! she's still sober this evening. And the truth is, she doesn't really care if she smears the polish a bit on the skin of her toes. It will come off when she showers.

The scent of the polish is sharp, immediate, chemical. The liquid color catches the light like a cat's eye as she lays it down with steady precision. When the first foot is done, she stretches her foot, pointing her toes to admire the color, then wiggling them to advance the drying process. Then tips her head aslant, resting the apex of her cheek on the fulcrum of her knee. Watching Leah through a half-lashed gaze as Jim speaks.

Sera inhales when Jim's finished, her back expanding with the drawn-in breath. Then, and only then, does she venture - all quiet, " d'you mean, at the warehouse? Or is it something else you're thinking about?"

Entropy

"I... at..."

Her voice choked off. She took a couple of thick, shaky breaths, but couldn't seem to make her tongue form the words she wanted to convey. Couldn't manage to keep herself in the here and now. Perhaps Serafine would recognize the signs. Or perhaps this was a side of herself that the Cultist preferred to forget.

Leah's eyelids went wide - then drooped low and sleepy as though she'd been drugged. "Stop, stop, stop," she murmured in that faraway voice. "No."

She hitched another breath. "It's cold and dark and smells like death... and there's nothing. Nothing for miles and miles. Not even stars. It even ate the stars."

Outside the window, a soft thump sounded. And then another. And then a third hit the glass pane dead-on: the body of a crow, wasted and half-decayed. It slid down the glass and rolled onto the ground, leaving a trail of blood and feathers in its wake.

Then Leah gave a start and blinked. She looked at the expressions on the Cultists' faces and huddled back into her chair. She didn't look out the window. She didn't want to.

"I want to go somewhere else," she said quietly. "I don't feel safe, I feel trapped."

Jim

"Where do you want to go, Leah?" It's barely an interrogative. It's more that, if she says someplace, he's going to do her best to get her there. That's the tone he uses.

His hand flexed around the pint glass, which he'd been holding in his off hand, and it's like he just realizes it's there. He'd truly forgotten about it. The condensation has grown into larger beads, probably meaning it's closer to warm than cold, but he picks it up anyway and takes a sip while he waits for her answer.

Serafine

The first thump against the window startles Sera thoroughly. She gives a short little jerk of her spine and cuts a winging glance back toward the window, wide-eyed, staring. That frisson of startlement, wariness, even fear is difficult for her to swallow. Her features are quiet, still, but her eyes are wide and her shoulders are stiff in her cotton tee.

She stares at the window another moment, or two, or three, finding the rhythm of her breath again, somewhere within the framing rhythm of her quickened heart.

Cuts a glance back to Jim, her eyes wide and still and dark; drops that look to the glass in his hand as he picks it up. Then sweeps a look back toward Leah. Steady and quiet and watchful. Her heart, oh how it aches.

Like an open wound.

Entropy

"I don't know..." Leah's voice cracked. Wetness welled up in her eyes and slid slowly down the curve of her cheek. She reached up and wiped it dry with the back of her hand.

"Somewhere nice," was all she could think to say. "I just need to... do something. Be useful. I don't know. I can't be stuck in a room with all these things in my head."

What she didn't say, but what was perhaps implied was: Somewhere where I can be happy.

Jim

Another long sip, and he shuts his mouth, licking his lips to get at a few drops that cling to that dirty blonde mustache of his. Leah answers, and he can't help but look at Serafine again, instead of at her.

He doesn't look like one to hold back words that want out, that want to be said, to put out the idea, but he looks to Serafine instead. And his look says that he knows a place.

They both do. A place of rejuvenation.

"We might need to talk to the others and reconsider this whole living situation," finally, as subtle as he can say it. It doesn't seem like he wants to consider it, but once it's wormed its way into his head it seems like he can't get it out.

And it seems like the only option.

[ Manipulation + Empathy. Trying to be smooth without mentioning the Chantry. ]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 1 )

Serafine

Serafíne's blue eyes are gleaming-dark in the ugly lights of the cheap motel room. Wet, that gleam, but she hasn't shed any tears tonight; not even when a few well up in Leah's wide eyes and slid down her pale, freckled cheek. She leans backward, stretching out her bent knee, her toes still angled carefully to keep her polish from marring. Just one foot has been painted. The bottle is recapped, the rest of her purchases tumbled on the bedspread around her, sinking into the little hollow her bodyweight creates in the mattress.

"That's fair," says Sera, to Leah. Her voice is soothing and low. And to Jim, too: she's looking at Jim now, across the cheap motel room, rather than the girl flailing for an idea of someplace nice. Someplace where she can be fucking happy. "I hated being stuck in a room with things in my head, too.

"Even if there were different things in my head than yours."

The crown of her head tipped aslant so the buzz cut is more prominent and the heavy length of the rest of her hair falls away as one mass toward the mattress. Her attention sweeps back to Leah here, " - stuck is stuck is stuck. So we'll see what we can do, Leah.

"Until then, though. We can help you feel better tonight. Peaceful if you want, so you can sleep. Or happier, so you can remember what that feels like. Or hopeful, a little bit. Because as hard as this is we're going to find out way through it.

"Cool?"

Entropy

Leah chewed on her lower lip and glanced toward the door in a manner that conveyed wordlessly just how desperately she wanted to escape the confines of the motel's walls. But either she was afraid to leave on her own or she wanted their company more than she let on, because she made no attempt to argue with Serafine's suggestion. Finally she exhaled and nodded in agreement. She could stay one more night.

She wiped the rest of the wetness from her eyes and glanced at the bag of things that Serafine had brought with her. Nail polish didn't seem to hold any particular interest for Leah, but when she saw the boxes of games she gnawed on her lip again and said, "I guess we could play something."

It was the first time since her arrival at the motel that Leah had willingly offered to participate in a group activity, which was probably a good sign. Maybe even her version of a thank you.

And yet that streak of blood still stained the window behind her - a grim reminder of why they were all here to begin with.

But after a while - after Serafine stepped outside to clean up the mess while Jim and Leah picked out a game and set up the board - the evening settled into something that almost approached normalcy. At least, as close as they were ever likely to come.

Out like a light.

Pan

After last night and the slithering of the Fallen's presence against their own, oozed inside their mental link, the clean sunlight coming in through the windows of the rectory feels almost obscene.

Leah did not want to get in the truck with them but she hadn't had much of a choice. By the time they worked out what to do with her and who to contact the girl had fallen asleep and the priest had decided that after he ran home and got Shoshannah nobody would be left alone with her again.

He did not speed and he did not let his mind wander but until he arrived back at the hotel with the Dreamspeaker he could not let himself relax.

Night is sliding back in Monday by the time he comes home. He's been awake since five o'clock yesterday morning and that is no problem for a man capable of Working his mind into wakefulness but the body needs to rest occasionally. The rectory is a modest two-story house built, like many of the places in the neighborhood, in the Spanish Colonial style. Upstairs is accessible via both an exterior and interior staircase and he explained at some point that Shoshannah is staying upstairs. He lives downstairs.

This is his home but he still knocks to let her know it's him before he unlocks the front door and lets himself in. With the renewed vigor of a man running on fumes he drops his keys by the front door and locks it and starts back towards the bedroom.

"Did you eat today?" he asks like the booze fumes don't bother him, and then: "I gotta take a shower. Don't go nowhere, we need to talk."

 

Sera

Serafíne is leaning against the kitchen counter when he returns.  The sunlight all day and all the lights too; every single light she could find except the light in his bedroom, where the door remains closed if he left it so when he emerged from it the night before, his ritual complete, a vision of the girl on the bench, startled to awareness of him by her own untrained senses, alive in the back of his mind.

The priest has a parish that depends on him.  Masses to be said and men and women to be counseled, through grief or addiction or pregnancy or poverty, through all their beginnings and ends.  They come to him when drunks show up in the church, when their sons and daughters and mothers and fathers have died, when they are sick, when they are desperate, for advice or absolution. 

No one depends on her.  She disappears for a day or three or five and it is expected.  Her bandmates will grumble about her lack of responsibility and Dan sent her a text midday asking if she was okay and: she thumbed back a yes. Then asked him to bring her a change of clothes. And: that was that.  Were she not so utterly spent, Pan must imagine, she would never have just - lingered here, haunting the bare-walled rooms, only the religious texts and her iPhone for company. 

Still, here she is.  Leaning against the kitchen counter, holding his post-cards in a fanned array, earbuds in her ears.  The change of clothes: a fitted black halter that ends somewhere between her eighth and ninth ribs and well-worn jeans secured at her waist by a thick black leather belt. 

Mid-afternoon she found that she had had enough to drink to overcome her qualms about the priest's privacy and take that shower and scrub herself pink and still it didn't leave her feeling clean.  Hours later, pieces of her thick hair are still damp and drying from that shower. 

Did she eat today?  Sera reaches up to pull the earbuds out with an absent motion of two finds, eyebrows lifted in question until he repeats it, then waves the postcards and gives Pan a lazy smile that does not quite reach her eyes by way of answer.  How he takes it is his business, but there are no dishes in the sink and Sera does not seem the sort to clean up after herself. 

Then he tells her not to go nowhere and she gives him a thumbs up. 
Okay, chief.  Not going nowhere. 
 

The countertop is doing an admirable job of holding her upright, afterall. 

 

Pan

He showers like the entire state of Colorado's gone and declared a draught. Maybe five minutes after the water starts running it stops again and then his pager chirp. With her earbuds in she does not hear any of this.

Fifteen minutes after he first came home Pan rejoins her in the kitchen. The white in his hair is not so visible when it's damp. Hard to tell if he's dressed like he's planning on going out again because he is actually planning on going out again or because he chooses to adhere to some semblance of modesty with a guest in his space. Black work shirt hangs unbuttoned over a black t-shirt and he's got a belt on and his boots, a watch. He opens up the refrigerator to fish an apple out of the vegetable drawer and hands one to her before grabbing one for himself.

"Escucha," he says and this is when his accent really rears its head--he drops the s like he didn't need it anyway, so it comes out sounding like ehcucha. "She's awake now. On your next watch I'm taking Shoshannah out to the Chantry. I want to do some reading, yeah? Figure out what we're gonna do with her."

 

Sera

Serafíne is still capable of reasonable movement on her own.  By the time he re-emerges, showered and dressed, the post-cards are back on his fridge, under their respective magnets.  Sera thinks he should have more magnets.  She thinks about telling him this but the thought disappears into the swirl of her subconscious as soon as it rose him.  She's back against the counter too, whatever she was drinking gone, hidden away.  The only evidence the faint scent of ETOH in the air around her.  Priest that he is, though, Pan knows that smell well. 

Her eyes find him as he re-emerges, track up and down his frame as he appears in the doorway, linger there as he opens the fridge and bends over to pull out apples, one and two.  She accepts her own with a bemused look at her hand, then brings the fruit to her chest to give it a sort of desultory polish while reaching up with the other to pull out her earbuds once more, this time for good. 

Listen, he instructs, and listen she does, her eyes finally sliding from him to some point off to stage right.  One of the cabinets, a knot in the wood stained darker than the rest.  And nods, a sort of exhausted acceptance of his plan.  The truth is: Sera never thought beyond finding Leah.  Beyond saving Leah. 

And what then?

Sera struggles to suppress a shudder.  It radiates out from her spine anyway, and she tips her head back into the crown hips the base of the upper cabinets.  She still feels slimey - the memory magnetic darkness of the Fallen magus inside their minds crawls across the surface of her skin like an army of spiders, dragging their webs behind them.  Why the fuck did he let them go.  Why the fuck did he smile at her. 

"Lo siento, Padre," another twist of her mouth, lips flat against her teeth, as pulls her gaze down from the ceiling to find him again. "Creo que nunca. No sobre lo que me metía en."

 

Pan

If he intends to eat what he took out of the fridge now is not the time. Though he shuts the door to the refrigerator the apple finds a place on the countertop and then he's resting his hips against it, the heels of his hands against it, and it's clear it holds up him more than he holds up it. He's tired. He's getting too old to be running around saving people but he does it anyway because he doesn't have much of a choice.

And then she says that's not what she got into and he sighs. Runs his face down his unshaved face and puts his hand right back on the countertop.

"Lamento que esto haya pasado," he says. "Tampoco creo. A no ser que Dios anhela si no, ella morirá. Y si mato la niña, tengo que matar John Brogan, y no estoy preparado para hacerlo. Él es más fuerte de yo." A beat. "Pero yo no puedo marcharme. Si deseas marcharte, dime, Serafíne."

 

Sera

"I can't walk away," Sera returns, something of her native passion embedded in the words.  Some return of it, strained and changed by her exhaustion, the low ebb of her Will.  By her fucking self-pity, a whole day with it and all the lights on in his little Spanish colonial house, when she should have been sleeping. When she couldn't sleep because there was no one else in the room, just the constant drone of her exhausted mind.  Her hope giving way to fear and dread, the sick, unconscionable feeling that none of them would be involved in this but for her thoughtless insistence, her driving hunger to find Leah and save her, as if anything were ever that simple.  That, and the darker things that sludged to the surface in Brogan's presence, nameless and all the more harrowing at her run-down state for their blankness, their absence.

"I couldn't.  How fucking unfair would that be?  What sort of - "

Here, she puts her hand over her mouth to stave off whatever else she meant to say.  Bites the heel of her hand and shakes her head. 

"I'm not that person.  I'm being such a fuck-up right now and I'm sorry for that and I'm sorry - "  Sera cuts him a sharp glance, sidelong.  Takes in his unshaven face, the dark shadows under his eyes.  The exhaustion evident in every line and perhaps for the first time recognizes it for what it is. 

"I don't want her to die, Pan.  I don't know what comes next, but whatever it is I'll do my part." 

Her gaze cuts away from him then, and she looks down, her mouth still her features in profile, the vulnerable length of her neck, the curve of her ear, the cut of her jaw, the soft hollow where they join all evident on that side, where her hair has been buzzed away.  Her eyes track some hidden pattern in the dots on the old tiles, the old linoleum.  Whatever's in here, lashes dark and shadowed against her cheeks. 

"You're exhausted," Sera tells him, with a rushing, exhaled breath like she has any right to judge him.  To instruct him.  But oh, her mouth is full of a sort of begrudging rue.  "You should sleep."

 

Pan

He doesn't speak to tell her this but she can see it in the minute cant of his head to one side and the softening of his gaze that he doesn't believe in fair. The god he serves honors loyalty and justice and unfathomable sacrifice but He does not honor fairness. Fairness is not a virtue that the god of the Old Testament places above all others.

Mercy didn't become a motif in the writings of the Bible until Jesus was born. Fatherhood turned even God soft. Everyone in the neighborhood calls the priest Padre or Father but the only person who could call him that through the bonds of their blood calls him something else. She has to have figured out who the kid in the photograph kept separate from the others is, the one wearing ironic clothes and holding both thumbs up in an ironic pose.

Abraham bound his son Isaac and brought him to the mount in Moriah where God commanded him offer up the boy as a sacrifice. He would have gone through with it if a messenger of the Lord hadn't interrupted him.

Pan doesn't look like the sort of person who could kill a teenage girl and sleep soundly that night but that isn't the sort of thing you can tell just by looking at a person. He might kill his son if he thought God had commanded him to. That's another thing you can't tell just by looking at a person.

She can tell he's exhausted. He exhales through his nose, an almost-laugh, and picks up the apple he'd ignored all this time.

"I will," he says, and takes a bite. After he's swallowed he adds: "So should you. When's the last time you slept?"

 

Sera

That minute cant of his head in her peripheral vision draws her eyes back to him.  The lights are stark and bright here; not bright enough to drown out that sense of illumination he exudes so strongly, that sense of the flame kindled within.  But: oh, the flicker of her dark, bloodshot eyes over his exhausted  features.  Wordlessly absorbing the non-verbal cues.  Strange how her gaze is drawn back across the room to the snapshot on the fridge.  Strange that he has a life outside this spartan little house.  Strange that he had a life before the rigidity of his black attire and his vows, the cassock and the masses.  Strange, even though it is the before she sees so clearly every time she looks at him. 

Strange, all the things you'll never know, just by looking at a person.  She knows this much: what he looked like when he stepped in front of her, of Jim.  Shielding her entirely with the bulk of his body. 
So he picks up his apple and takes a bite.  Her own remains whole and entire, like a movie prop, tucked against her body with a curl of her wrist.   Her body can metabolize the alcohol she consumed for the calories it requires today. 

He asks when's the last time she slept, and she hooks her right shoulder in a wordless gesture by way of reply. That halter is tank style, and her arms and shoulders are bare, the impression of a tattoo curling under her bicep, the tail of it tucked around her deltoid, merely an impression unless he examines it closely.  There's another on her forearm, more inside her wrists, and the strangest one of all on the palm and first two fingers of her left hand.

"More recently than you," she's looking down again, her face in profile, an absent sort of half-smile on her face.  There's humor in her voice, but it is a spare sort, surface-skimming rather than deeply felt.  "Went back to sleep after I left here yesterday and slept until early afternoon.  Whereas you, Padre - "

A slanting glance back towards him.  Her chin remains tucked low against her chest, and the look is mostly obscured by the sweep of her lashes.

"I'm sure I'll pass out soon."  Her gaze slips away from him once more, back to the sunburst flare of the overhead light on the tiled floor.    "Just having trouble falling asleep by myself."  The subtlest tremor of her spine, some suppressed memory of Brogan's eyes on her.  The curl of his smile.  "Another shot or three should do the trick."

Pan

He is not a graceful man. When he moves it is as a matter of necessity and he imbues his steps and the flexing of his fingers with no elegance. His stillness hums with light even as he leans against the counter biting through an apple because his calories have to come from food, because he can drink alcohol but not enough to get him drunk, and for all the heaviness of his body it is his aura from which his followers cannot take their eyes.

In the midst of all that jostles for their attention when they have stood in conversation like this she has never had to wonder if she has his undivided attention. He eats and he is grateful for the food and the people who harvested it and the people who got it from the farm to the produce stand but he does not stand in mindful contemplation of the apple as he eats. Since settling like this his eyes have not drifted away. That kind of attention scares some folks. Other folks are warmed knowing that he gives enough of a shit to shut up and listen for five minutes, ten, an hour, however long it takes them to get out all the words.

Tomorrow Shoshannah will tell a girl who Awakened with a twisted Avatar that he's helped her, that he's good, as he sits on the edge of a motel mattress and kneads his left hand and prays to a god who does not care if Leah lives or dies for guidance. Jim and Sera promised not to hurt her but he made no such promise.

The Cultist has slept more recently than he. He keeps eating his apple while she works her way through to a conclusion. Stops when the tone of her voice changes with that shudder that he cannot see. He sets the core next to the sink and puts his hand back onto the counter.

"What can I do to help?"

 

Sera

Somewhere in the midst of this, Serafíne does take a bite of that apple.  While he's eating;  while he's watching her, his attention steady and undivided and indivisible.  While she's looking away.  She will not eat it to the core; but enough that there is something in her stomach that is not an intoxicant. Two or three or four bites, all absent.  Enough.  Because the apple is in her hand, and because he gave it to her, wordlessly, before grabbing another for himself from the crisper drawer. 

Her half-consumed apple joins his core on the apron of the sink.  Her hands are damp from the juice, and she wipes them thoughtless on the thighs of her jeans.  Palms, then knuckles, like a surgeon drying off after scrubbing clean.  Well, not quite.

There's a quiet flush to her when he asks his question, though the warmth beneath her skin could easily be explained away by the alcohol she has consumed.  She lifts her chin, her eyes sweeping back to find his own, which have been steady and unbending in their attention on her all this time.  She wonders what he sees.  If she were less tired and less drunk, she might wonder what he misses, too. If she were back to her usual self, she might not fucking care, except that he does.

"Sit with me," her eyes are direct on his own, steady and open and oh-so-shadowed.  " - while I fall asleep, so I can feel you breathing."  So she doesn't have him in her head.  So she doesn't think he's in the room.  There's an extra pillow, an old utilitarian white sheet set folded on the couch in the living room, neither of which she's touched all day.  The edge of her half-smile, below her steady gaze, is bruised.  A romantic might call it wistful.  A realist might call it wounded.  A idealist might call it whole.   

 

"You don't have to stay long.  Once I'm asleep, nothing wakes me up.  Not even a fucking freight train."  Here her eyes drop from his, cut back to the fridge, the dark shape of their reflections in the surface, distorted and improbably.  "Then you can go sleep, too, and - "  The narrowest curve of her shoulders.  "I'll never know you're gone." 

 

 Pan

 

Other than the photograph tagged to the front of the refrigerator no proof of the life he lived before having holy orders conferred upon him exist. The young man beside him in that shot was an infant once. It's as inevitable as the fact that one day Leah will die. Of natural causes if she does not die by someone else's hand, or her own. Everything dies and the way John Brogan spoke brief and oily last night he thinks of oblivion as a new beginning. Ordination wasn't a tabula rasa for Francisco. Whatever was there before his sins were washed clean remained but it's distant from him now.

At the request nothing comes past his eyes. He crosses his arms low on his chest like he does, like he's got to lock in whatever she's asking of him, and then he laughs, quiet and without malice.

Blame it on the fact her eyes wandered. Maybe he's thinking about the kid with everything going on. Maybe he's just exhausted. A certain amount of time without sleep causes a person's cognitive function to plummet as it would if they had had one or three shots.

"First four months of his life," he says, "my son wouldn't sleep during the day for nothing. His ma'd be with him all day trying to get him to stop crying and nothing would work, so I'd get in from the auto shop, I was working as a mechanic at the time, and before I even got in the front door she'd just--"

He pantomimes thrusting a ten-pound bundle at an invisible entity in front of him before returning his arms to their place across his chest. Hoists himself away from the countertop and his boots clunk against the aging linoleum and he tilts his head towards the couch. Reels the story in before it gets too far away from him.

"Left shoulder. You'll be out like a light."

 

Sera

"What's his name?" asks Serafíne, quiet, her gaze slipping back to him as he moves.  Or look - drawing a line between the two-dimensional snapshot on the fridge and living man in the room, hoisting himself away from the countertop.  Her expression is a strange one, not quite serene but more peaceful than she's seemed since - well, since any of this started.  Since she told him about her dream in his office and he told her that, hey, they'd figure it out.  And thanked her for telling him.  "Your son?"

There's a certain finely drawn tension in the muscles around her eyes, that withdrawn thoughtfulness, which is more than a little bit drunk, which appears at odd times and in odd places with her.  A quiet noise, perhaps a laugh, punctuates his promise that she'll be out like a light.

Then she, too, pushes off the counter.  Oh, her lucidity is so deceptive.  The room spins so pleasantly when she starts to walk; all the alcohol may not have much impaired her conversation, but she sways like she were walking down the deck of a sailboat on open seas. 

Somehow, even her drunken stagger has more masculine swagger to it than feminine sway.  Like she's always ready to claim two or three times more space than she requires in this world.  A moment, fingertips grazed against the countertop while she finds some perishing and diminishing sense of equilibrium before she can walk.  Then she finds it, or at least remembers which way is up, and precedes him into the living room.  Turning off the lights behind her as she goes. 

Sera completes a circuit around the living room, too.  Turning off the lamps, one by one until the only lights in the room come from the hall.  Or him. 

A mechanics, for fuck's sake.  With a wife and a crying kid, and all of this maybe even before she was born.  Oil on his callused hands, grease under his fingers.  Somehow the story he tells her feels more intimate than sex, in just that moment.  So does this. 

Maybe it's the booze and lack of sleep.  Maybe it's the darkness of the room.

While he follows her into the room, perhaps takes a seat on one corner of the couch, she snaps open the flat white sheet.

She's not looking in his direction when she tells him, "Close your eyes."

 

Pan

 

Off the living room sits an open door and through it a bedroom that has lain empty these past few nights. The bedding on the lone twin mattress has been made up with a precision born of meditation and solitude. In other religions the devout shave their heads to show humility and in others they swear skullcaps and in others still they never cut their hair and kept it tucked up under headdresses. Men of the Western persuasion take vows of celibacy. Optional in the Anglican faith yet not an anomaly.

Even with the son in his past born before Sera he keeps to his chastity. Came up from the baptism and didn't look back.

His name: "Rafael."

When the priest sits on the couch his exhaustion leaves his body in the form of a sigh but he does not sink into it like it's the only thing holding him up. Lights fall away as the Cultist moves to kill them with a click. One lone bulb pushes against the darkness in the foyer and the house does not suffer for its singleness in battle.

And he does not fidget as she awakens the sheet and casts her words into it. As calm stood before the Fallen as he is here--the calm of a man who thinks whether it is delusion or truth that death is not the worst that could happen to him. Anything imposed upon his flesh is nothing so long as it does not mar his soul. The lighthouse is not injured when the boat misses the harbor and disembowels itself on the rocks.

Close your eyes.

Pan takes a breath and lets it go. His hands are knit together where they rest on his thighs. He closes his eyes.

 

Sera

 

"Like the painter," Serafíne muses in the darkness. Another snap of her wrists and the sheet is free of its folds, open and loose.  Twin-sized and no more than that.  She tosses the fitted sheet away from the onto some side table.  Some occasional chair.  Her voice hums around the words implicitly.  Drunk though she is she says them with the precision of an instinctive musician. 

"Or the angel." 

Then, she corrects herself with the precision of a Catholic catechism, "The <i>arch</i>angel.  Did you pick the name?" 

Even without lights the room is spinning.  Particularly when she is still, as she is now, struggling to toe off her heavy black boots.  One comes off, then the other, though there's a bit of falling about along with them as she loses and finds her balance a solid half-dozen times; he can hear them thump on the floor when they finally come away, solid thunks against the old hardwood.  Without them, and barefoot after she peels off her socks, she's instantly two inches shorter.

"Or did she?"

Sera cuts him a glance in the darkness to assure herself that his eyes are closed.  He is a swimming presence in her periphery, solid and heavy and dark-not-but-shadowed.  He can hear the click of metal against metal as she undoes her belt, then the button and zipper of her jeans.  Another awkward, drunken half-step sends her careening into the other half of the couch as she struggles to peel them away.  The couch cushions sigh with the impact, but otherwise it's negligible. Not even equivalent to the solid thunk of her boots on his floor, she's so fucking small. 

She breathes out, a heavy, triumphant sort of laugh (VICTORY!) as the jeans finally come away and get tossed in the wake of her boots. Throughout it all, she's humming an old song beneath her breath.  It sounds like a lullabye, but sometimes the lyrics break through the swimming of her drunk mind and she sings them, too.  Here and there, almost non-sensicle.

Then the impression of her weight and her warmth on the cushion beside him; as she presses the extra pillow (musty with the scent of old dryer sheets from the linen closer) against him, into his hands.  

"You can open them," almost an afterthought.  Sera has no modesty, so it must have been his she was preserving as she stripped off her jeans, down to her underwear.  Which are black cotton hipsters, no lace in sight.  Nothing, in fact, in sight, as she has carefully wrapped the flat white sheet around her torso and hips, tucked it with a child's precision around her bare legs.  Wrapped it like a sarong, or a mummy's windings and seated herself a few inches away from him. 

Glances at him in the darkness.  "Left shoulder, huh?" - already beginning to tuck her legs up onto the couch and lean into him. 

 

Pan

 

With his eyes closed and his body still she can't read the sin or the haze of age come riding on the fumes of her questions. Knows as soon as she begins extrapolating the origins of the absent man's name that she'll want to know more even if it's only why they picked the name. Why of all the names in the world they would pick the archangel who helped Tobias fight the demon who plagued Sarah who would later become his wife.

"We agreed on it."

A couch large enough to hold a grieving family does not shudder when she lands on it. Clinking and thumping tells her she aims to preserve modesty but not for whose sake. An unfamiliar melody. His fingers close on the pillow and he does not open his eyes until she bids him to. Brief closure was almost enough to drop him off to sleep and he inhales to keep himself afloat a while longer.

(In humans the heart is normally located left of midline with the apex of it housed beneath the fifth intercostal space. He did not know this when he was a young man carting a colicky infant around. He did not know a lot of things back then.)

Left shoulder, huh?

Lifting his arm so he does not trap her is a lazy movement for him. His elbow hooks over the back of the couch, wrist and hand draped behind her as she's curling up to rest against him, and it does not move unless she moves it for him.

 

Sera

 

Oh, she ducks her head down beneath his hand as he lifts his arm over her.  As he tucks his elbow against the spine of the couch and leaves it there.  The pillow she pulls back from his hands and wedges it more or less between them, so it fills the oblong curve between his flank and the back cushions of the couch and the hard line of her shoulder, elbow, forearm.  There's a moment where she's leaning close but not quite touching him, balanced on her elbow and forearm, bleary and drunk and oddly not-quite-sure of herself.  Then she leans in closer, settles her head against his shoulder, right elbow against his ribs, ear against chest, the twisting curls of her still-damp hair spilling down her shoulders and spine. 

She can feel him breathing.  She can hear his heart beating.  The solid, chambered movement of blood through its dark folds and hollows, more regular and constant than any clockwork made by human hands.  There is an almost lacerating stiffness to her beneath the intoxication, which he can feel and sense for the first time tonight only now, as she tucks herself against his flank and allows herself to relax, slowly, into his warmth.  Into the steady rhythms of his body - his breath and blood.

His arm remains on the back of the couch.  It does not move unless she moves it for him, and she is not so presumptuous. She can feel him breathing, every expansion and contraction of his lungs.  She can hear the echo of her his heartbeat in his chest.  There is no one else in the room, and nothing and no one else can intrude upon her solid, nameless dreams.

The only points of contact between them are where she leans against him.  Her shaved head against his shoulder, her eyes closed, her cheek and mouth against his chest.  Breath warm and still sweet with alcohol. 

Come morning, the scent will sour.

Her own shoulder a sharp point against his ribs, above the apex of the pillow, then her elbow, as she pulls her right hand up to her mouth, stifles a wide yawn with the pressure of her knuckles against her teeth and settles back down.  He's supporting the entire weight of her torso, through the musty old pillow.  Heavier than a colicky infant, the Cultist, though not particularly substantial in her own right. 

She pushes into him as she shifts her weight forward, then burrows her lower body into the couch, finds some comfortable compromise between upright and passed out and smiles a lazy smile against his chest.  He can't see her eyes.  There's more pain in that expression than he might realize. 

But - "Thank you."  quietly mouthed against his black workshirt before  sleep finally takes her.  Perhaps he's already asleep.  Perhaps he never hears.

--

It is not a freight train that wakes her at 2:41 a.m., but rather the insistence of her bladder.  He's still there, his arm still propped along the back of the couch.  His t-shirt and workshirt modestly wrinkled by sleeping upright, the impressions of those lines creased into her cheek.  She's quieter now; her hangover incipient but not yet roaring.  Still a bit drunk, but pleasantly so, and her body is small and her feet and bare and she crawls off the couch and sneaks off to the bathroom to pee.  To splash water on her face.  To rinse out her mouth with Listerine and pad back to the living room, just as quietly. 

She should wake him up. 

She doesn't.  Just curls back into the warm but fading hollow left by her own body in the cushions of the couch.  Settles herself back into the space she vacated, glances up at the shadow of his hand, and chooses not to pull it down onto her.

--

Pan wakes at his usual hour: ungodly early o'clock, still sitting on the couch.  Maybe he's slipped a bit, into more of a relaxed lean/slouch against the arm of the couch. Maybe he  is upright and rigid as ever.  His arm is still along the spine of the sofa and light is leaking in through the blinds.  Sera's head has slipped from his shoulder and chest to his legs, the pillow punched beneath her head, against his left thigh.  She is curled, facing inward towards the back of the couch, her knees drawn up nearly to a fetal position, right arm forearm tucked over her face in some sleeping protest to the very idea of morning, her long hand a tangle of curling blond across his lap.  The sheet is wound loosely and imperfectly around her legs revealing the long, pale curve of her right thigh. 


She was right of course.  Nothing wakes her.  He shifts her out of his lap long enough to stand, and she settles easily back down, barely stirring.  Maybe she tucks herself more deeply into the pillow, but the movement is so minute as to be vestigial.  She continues to sleep, all through his morning ablutions, his routine.  Through the scent of coffee if he makes it; through everything by a hard, waking shake of her shoulders, some demand from the world that she Get Up Now.

She does not sleep away the day, though.  Perhaps an hour later - dawn's light cold and clear over the still-quiet street between rectory and church - she finds him across the street.  Tells him that Dan's here.  He's taking her for her shift.  He'll bring Shoshannah back. 

She still looks tired; a bit run down, spent.  But she's rested and clear and she inhales the scent of candle wax and smoke in the sanctuary the way she might savor a particularly sticky bud, particularly if she was just smoking for her pleasure, and not for her Work.  And she drops a white paper bag  full of chonchas and other pan dulces from a local Mexican bakery, onto his desk.  

Doesn't say anything about the night before.
Wouldn't know what to say if she wanted to. 

 

 

 

Meet John Brogan [12]

Serafine

"Fuck." Sera's curse is low but voluble, all force. Pan has parked the truck and cut the engine. He's smoking his cigarette and she's leaning forward, frowning out the windshield at the bulk of Aurora Presbyterian in the foreground. There's a big blue H sign mounted on the glass-and-steel exterior, glowing brilliant against the darkness, and another, equally bright, directing patients and ambulances to the ER bay. How is it that through all the possible futures she didn't see this right in front of her? The place is a fucking hospital. There is a moment there where she freezes, and then Jim's agreement registers, and Pan says it all sounds better than the roof. Some of that whipcord tension eases out of her spine.

Sera closes her eyes for a moment and tells herself, silently and repeatedly, like a mantra or a prayer, We don't have to go in there. We don't have to go in there. You'll be fine. You'll be fucking fine. Mouth moving with the words faintly, the way one might mouth the words to a familiar song on the radio, but no voice given to them. She seems, even, to believe it too, because then she's straightening, breathing out a shaky breath that grows more and more steady as her lungs empty.

Telling herself, "Okay," and them, too, Sera casts them both a stark glance, " - let's go. We need to find the spot where they're going to land." - and waits while Jim and Pan climb out of the truck. She'll follow.

In the meantime, Sera finally finds the second of the prepaid cell phones she bought at that convenience store in the middle of the exurbs the week prior. Reads off the number, not once but several times, repeating it so that it is embedded in their heads.

Sera clambers after Jim out the passenger's door and onto the sidewalk. Pulls her hands up over her hair, tugging the bulk of it back and twisting it upon itself, then reaches back with an arch of her spine to shake out the hood of her a hoodie - one of her many layers tonight - from where it's been trapped beneath the bulk of her leather jacket, then pulls it up over her head. She is sparking, bright with nervous energy, gaze drawn back, repeatedly, to the bulk of the hospital in the foreground. Keeps looking, up and up and up, at the glow of the navigation array that guides helicopters to the rooftop landing, heart firmly in her throat for more than one reason.

Jim

Full disclosure.

At first glance it may seem like business or legal terminology, in the same league as terms like due diligence or mea culpa. Its true origin is in technology and software, though it is bandied about on the pages of rags from Cosmo to the Paper of Record.

But deeper than all that there's an ethical connotation to it.

At least in Jim's mind. Which is all that matters to Jim. Because it serves as impetus for the effort he begins as they leave the truck.

And as he gathers his Will, it is that weight of connotation that he lends to the working.

Serafine wanted to connect them with the girl. To implore with her while she jumped, fell, was caught by that darting mass of darkness.

Words could only do so much, though. And if it was a connection they were opening, why not let it run freely? Why not bare the truth? Not just some of it. All of it.

To share that they were of the same cut as the woman, Shelby, that had given her life for Leah. Visions of what they'd seen in the past, showing her what Leah said to the others of the Traditions, demanding they protect her. That they all didn't want to control or even save her, but to simply free her – from the foregone conclusion some named her Fate, from the cancerous stigma some placed on her budding tsunami of an Avatar, and from those who would try to blacken her very soul.

Jim's fingers sink into the Tapestry again, the sensations already alive from the lightening substance in his system. He is enlivened by it, the inhibitions melting away as his own memories rise to the surface. And like the tide to the moon, he tries to raise them up, draw them toward where he knows the girl is. His own mind brushes out toward Pan and Sarafine.

Waters joining. Watershed welling. Tributaries becoming confluences and returning from fresh rains and ancient glaciers to the oceans as he tries to join their thoughts into a cohesive whole. Will working to craft an ocean for her to swim in.

Jim

[ Mind 3 / Correspondence 2. Coincidental. Base difficulty of 6 - 1 for psychedelic resonance (trippy, man) - 1 for specialty focus and - 1 for Sera being kind enough to spend a Quintessence. Dropping a WP. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (1, 5, 9) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Pan

He's the last one out the truck, not because of a flagging of faith or a lack of conviction but because you don't just go running off to do God's work without praying first. Isn't anything showy that he does. Just sits there with his eyes closed for a few seconds mumbling to himself and the engine and the lights stay off and all they can see of him before he's done is the smoke drifting off the end of his cigarette.

Then he crosses himself and gets out and his boots hit the asphalt like he's at the bottom of a set of stairs. Sera has to climb into and jump out of this thing.

They haven't discussed this but Sera learned the night she fooled around in his confessional booth that the Reverend Francisco Echeverría isn't fucking around. He straight up believes in what's in the Bible and if you don't that's fine but don't be bringing that shit into the place where the people who do believe in it come to light candles for the sick and the dead. Makes it real hard to Work with him but they don't have to dig too deep to figure out he doesn't know how to Work with them, either.

Once he's caught up to them he cranes his neck to look up at the roof. Now that his eyes are open to the reality around them [OOC note - Watch the Weaving, activated in forums] he has the cast of a man distracted.

Serafine

Sera's piece: Mind 2 / Dif 5: -1 for resonance

Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 5) ( success x 1 ) [WP]

Jim

[ Extended at +1 difficulty. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 4, 6) ( success x 1 )

Jim

[ Extending once again. Sera is helping a brother out with another Quintessence. ]

Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (4, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )

Pan

[awareness]

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 2, 8, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Pan

[alertness]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 4, 7, 8) ( success x 1 )

Serafine

Perception + Awareness

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 6 )

Serafine

Perception + Alertness

Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 5, 6, 10) ( fail ) Re-rolls: 1

Jim

Perception + Awareness

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10) ( success x 1 )

Jim

Perception + Alertness

Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (4, 5, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafine

Per + Alert - reroll!

Dice: 4 d10 TN7 (4, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 2 )

Entropy

[Mysterious roll of mystery]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7, 10) ( success x 4 )

Entropy

The three willworkers left the cab of the priest's truck, stepping out to gaze up at the roof of the hospital, where they knew Leah to be standing. From this angle, they couldn't see her, but they knew she was there. Pan and Serafine could feel little flickers of her decaying energy, even down in the parking lot.

And so the two Cultists combined their Wills once again to work Jim's effect, and the Disciple reached out with his mind to join the three of them together telepathically. He'd feel Serafine's first and most easily. Then Pan's. And finally, he touched his thoughts with those of the girl on the roof. When the connection was made, the three of them would feel an instant surge of bleak terror, along with something else...

This was not like joining minds with another Traditionalist. There was something dark and alien inside of the girl's head. Something that was both herself and other. A conflict between her conscious and subconscious will. If she'd been older - if she'd had the kind of power and control that Jim had - they may have lost their minds entirely merely for touching it. As it was, its cold tendrils and cavernous hunger sent shivers of fear down their spines.

I know what I did. I know what I have to do. Please leave.

But Jim did not turn away. He put all that he had into sending her images and thoughts of support, of comfort. Into reminding her what Shelby had believed - that she was not doomed. That she had a Will, and could choose her own path. That they did not wish to harm her. That she was free to make her own choice.

And they were met with gloomy uncertainty. You don't understand. I can't make it stop.

But she was no longer trying to break away from the connection. And there was an almost imperceptible pang of desperate hope behind her denial.

That was when they felt it. Crawling into their awareness like a snake sliding up behind them.

Commanding. Inspired. Revolutionary. Enticing.

Whoever it was, they had the energy of a visionary. But there was something wholly dangerous about it. Like all this creature had to do was to desire, and the world would fall apart at their bidding. And the force of its Will was near-overwhelming.

(Run children. The devil is behind you.)

Serafine

Jim is already beginning to weave the threads of the tapestry when Sera joins him on sidewalk. She can feel the Work beginning to gather in the space around him, feel the way he reaches for her mind and she just - stops there on the sidewalk, drops her gaze from the flickering lights of the heliport, closes her eyes and reaches for him, pushing as much of herself as she can into the complex work he is creating.

Pours herself into both the Work and the connection he is creating, drawing their minds into concert and connecting them all to the girl - the girl on the roof, readying herself to jump over the edge, or perhaps even now throwing herself over the edge and hurtling toward the sidewalk far below. Serafíne's emotions are bright and wholly raw, but she takes that first moment of hurtling awareness to close out the rising tide of her irrational fear, to push that firmly down and let everything else rise up.

Full disclosure, indeed. Cri de coeur.

There is the whole of the history. Everything Jim pushes into the work: of who they are and what they are and why they're here. Shelby's vision for Leah and her sacrifice. Her conviction that the only fight worth having here was the one for Leah and her fucking soul. All that and more.

From Sera there is also this driving and impassioned identification with the girl at the center of this whirlwind. There is no other word for it, and mutely Serafíne pushes all of that emotional engagement toward the girl when that note of desperate hope breaks through the unutterable gloom of her grief and pain.

I can't make it stop. Leah tells them, and Sera is parrying a constant, nearly word thoughtstream: she can, if she wills it she can make it stop. If Leah is willing to fight for her soul, Sera will fight for it too. If -

- and here she feels it, that wash of resonance, terrible and terrifying, crawling up her vertebrae, lodging itself between the tiniest of its articulations, all the strange spaces where dark things can lurk and crawl. The sensation scissors through Sera's awareness like a serrated knife through living flesh.

All at once Sera turns back to the hospital, looks up into the darkness where the red lights blink constantly to make out the helipad.

Says, out loud and in their minds - "Leah?" - the name a single choked question. Are you out there?

She wants to say, I still believe in you.But she doesn't know if its true.

Serafine

charisma + expression, yo: be hopeful and stuff Leah! you can totes fight this darkness.

Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1 [WP]

Pan

Their minds are all directed at the rooftop and the pain and the push-back of the girl and she does not push them back but the oily slithering of that Other up there would have been enough to send the weak and the willless back into the truck.

The priest does not remove the rosary he carries from his pocket but his hand finds it and the beads click once before he starts to speak.

"Come Jesus... come, give strength to the light and to the good... come where dishonesty, ignorance of God, violence and injustice dominate... come, Lord Jesus, give strength to the good in the world and help us to be bearers of your light, workers of peace, witnesses of truth..."

[Hope's Birth Mind/Prime + Corr because range.Coincidental, base diff 5. -1 diff spec focus.]

Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Jim

Jim stays close to Sera. The ties that bind their minds crave that same proximity in the physical - as above, so below, other Traditions might label it. For him, it is more a growing reaction to have spun the Tapestry to brighter colors with another Willworker.

And still his attention is elsewhere. On the snake in the grass, bearing down on them where they commune with Leah and the thing that is inside her.

"Destroy." A flash in his mind. Shiva. Regaled in serpent. Trident. Drums. Destroyer. Transformer. It is here that Jim's resonance comes through. The addled mind, spawn to the psychedelic of sheer hallucination, tempered with stoic contemplation. Balance.

"Destroy. If it is part of you, don't hide from it. But don't destroy like they do." The words lash out. At the mind that comes. The Devil that rises. The Serpent, another archetype, a flash across the mind's-eye-that-is-his-and-hers, of the Enticer. Seducer. Who has inspired. Commands, in its own sick way, sending death out. "They destroy for nothing. They live for nothing. They fight for nothing. To end."

"There's what you've done. And there's what you do. Don't let one chain you from the possibilities of the other," again, words-as-thought that echo across his mind.

And they show his own past. Pusher. Dealer. His own brush with a bullet that never made its way to him, in his own Awakening. And the Awakenings that followed. Putting his past behind him. Learning a new way.

The kind of way that, she might be able to feel, quells the urge for violence within Jim. To simply lash out at that Enticer that would tempt Leah, and instead reach out to her. A hand. His own vision. Of her, with another chance, that is backed with his own belief as a Willworker.

Entropy

[Can I join this party?]

Dice: 4 d10 TN3 (6, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Jim

[ Charisma + Empathy. Dropping a WP. Jim is at WP 4. ]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) [WP]

Entropy

Let it not be said that Pan, Serafine and Jim were not the right people to talk someone down from a ledge. Each of them contributed their own form of hope, of redemption in the face of darkness. It was a thing they knew well, these three - all of whom had been to the depths of their own soul and back again. Pan spoke the words of his faith, pulling on that small thread of hope and bathing it in the light of the One until it grew within the girl to something almost like strength. Jim and Serafine merely spoke to her - gifted their own hope over the shared link as an inspired and impassioned plea. And it worked, because they truly believed what they said.

And belief could be a powerful thing. In their hands, it was near-transcendent.

Leah went quiet. Perhaps they expected a mad clash of wills, but that's not what happened. Instead, the dark part of her simply receded into the background.

Can you help me? she asked softly.

And then, behind them. Out loud. "You're wrong, you know. We fight for far more than you will ever understand."

It was a man's voice. Softly resonant and rich as honey. If they turned to look, they would see him standing there, arms folded loosely across his chest. A calm expression on his face. The man from Serafine's dream. The man from their vision of the hotel. No (visible) weapons. No threats. Just the overwhelming presence of him - of his essence and energy, touching and probing and curling about their skin and their thoughts. Inescapable.

Pan

The girl hasn't jumped yet and the man from Sera's vision did not jump down to catch her. An outcome deviated from the timeline of the portent does not mean they're out of danger. It comes to stand right behind them and Jim and Sera can feel no panic or fear in the priest but rather a stoking of that light inside of him. He does not jump and he does not bristle at the evil at his back.

He takes in and lets go a breath and takes his hand off of the rosary and turns to face him, arms at his sides and palms slightly out in a subconscious show of mutual and temporary mercy. Takes a step before he's settled so he's standing in front of the Cultists. His body eclipses Sera's so long as she does not move.

"Yeah?" he asks in a voice neither hard nor mocking. He doesn't want to understand but he doesn't want to be rude right away either. He likes being alive. "And what might that be?"

Serafine

Can you help me?

--

That's all that Sera requires to rekindle her own belief in the girl. That one question; more, the impetus behind it - which means she has not given herself over to the darkness inside her. That she is still essential and intact.

We can. - entirely affirmative, the bright wedge of Sera's joy and hope, all the things that buoy her against the interstitial darkness inside her, the literal holes in her past. Her love for the world; the visceral pleasure she takes in everything in it. We can help you. If you fight for yourself, your soul, we can fight for you. Come with us. Call us. Here, Sera repeats the phone number she had muttered aloud again and again as she jumped down from the truck. Find us. They want you to be something else. We just want you to be Leah -

Then, startling, behind them. Sera breathes out all out at once, half turns as Pan steps in from of her, her view of the man from her dream eclipsed by his bulk. She is neither so brave nor so foolish as to refuse the shield Pan offers her. But she has a glimpse of the Fallen over the priest's shoulder as he moves. Enough that she knows him from her dream.

Don't listen to him, Leah. Not ever. Everything he says is a lie. The worst sort. The sort you want to believe.

Still, her shoulders set, her body held whiplash tight. Quiet, in the here-and-now.

Jim

Jim skips a beat at the words, his mind wavering where it drifts, at once in the stretch of the Tellurian and in the shallows of physical reality where the Devil reveals himself.

"I'm thankful for that," is Jim's curt answer to the man, his neck craning even as Pan moves between them in a protective gesture he can't help but admire - the Man in Black staring down the Devil.

Whether or not Pan's inquiry gives the nihilistic general pause, Jim returns his attention to Leah, her life precariously in the balance. Sera says all that needs to be said. And even gives that number, which may have slipped his addled mind. Perhaps she was more anchored to the everything around them, the way she reveled in it, because in this attunement to others he may have gotten a little lost.

Jim being Jim.

But he has his own words. A supplement. Some are just an echo of her own, but he's no less earnest as they fight their way free from his psyche.

We can promise to do what we can, to help you help yourself, to give you the chance you need and be there for you.

Entropy

What might that be? Pan asked.

The man looked amused. His bright eyes glinted in the hospital lights. Given all the trepidation he'd caused, one might imagine him to look - well, a bit more frightening. More like the bogeyman that myth and history had made him out to be. But the truth was never as simple as the stories made things seem. After all, it was those same stories which would have one believe that Leah was a monster from the moment of her birth. That there was, and had never been, a single human bone in her body.

People liked to imagine that evil was monstrous. It made it easier to think of it as something other. But the truth was, evil was as human as anything else. (Or maybe evil was just a word people had made up to explain the things that frightened them.)

This man didn't look evil. He looked like an average guy in his late 40's with a tall, lean build and a charismatic smile dressed in a pair of jeans, boots and a black buttoned shirt. He looked like any guy who could have been walking through this parking lot. Except that he wasn't. He wasn't at all.

"A new beginning," he said, with the kind of calm reverence that Pan himself might have used when speaking of his own faith.

The others, they kept their thoughts on the girl on the roof. And their efforts were rewarded with a hesitant affirmation. But then...

Someone's here.

And the man's voice, this time in their heads, whispering with that same honey-rich tone. Surprisingly gentle, for all the commanding force his Will contained. Don't be afraid. We aren't going to hurt you. And then he raised his hand toward someone they couldn't see. A gesture that indicated: stop. And nothing happened. And when he looked at the three Traditionalists and said, "If you promise not to harm her, then we'll leave."

Entropy

[Edit: when he looked at the three traditionalsist HE said]

Serafine

Serafíne says nothing. Nothing aloud and nothing across the mindlink they share, which this stranger, the man from her dream, the man who lead Leah away from the twelve ashen graves to an unmade world, has invaded. When Leah speaks up across the link, Sera's response is a mute and wordless push of something like I know. He's here. So are we.

There is no way she can hide the fear that accompanies that pulse of thought across the link. But there's courage, there, too. Reflected and refracted: Leah's courage back at her. The strength necessary to take up a strange hand, offered in hope.

That's all. Here she is still, sharpshouldered, breathing steadily and shakily, and silent.

Jim

"We won't," as honest as the sentiments he'd offered to Leah moments earlier.

The stand off continues, and while Jim is surprised it's the Nephandus that blinks first. But he is not too proud to take the offer. And not too proud to let Leah make the choice for her future, as he's already expressed.

Pan

On the subject of image: the priest does not look like the sort of man one would want to run into in a parking lot. Not much younger than the Fallen and near as tall, the short sleeves of his work shirt show the strength in his form, like he's as used to manual labor as he is to anything else. From a distance he could be a sponsor leading two relapsed friends of Bill back to drug rehabilitation.

So they stand facing each other and at some point Pan pulls himself away from the telepathic link and takes his thoughts with him. The Fallen bids them make a promise and he grits his teeth but lets the other two call the ball.

We won't.

A measure of quiet comes before he says, "Alright. Go."

Serafine

"We wouldn't - " in a quiet rush after Jim's pledge. It has the same force, but perhaps a different emphasis. A sort of passionate avowal embedded in the structure and force of the otherwise quiet phrase. Perhaps quiet enough that only Pan and Jim will hear her. Though really - he is in their heads. Then finally, louder and steadier, echoing the Disciples.

"We won't."

Entropy

A strange thing, that. Reassuring a man like this that they wouldn't harm one of his own (or at least someone he would like to claim as such.) There are those who would brand the Cultists mad for doing so. Likely the Chorister among them was having somewhat more ambivalent thoughts on the matter - at least as far as the negotiating was concerned.

And yet, the tactic worked. The man was (for the moment) as good as his word. His presence left their minds as coolly and easily as it had entered them, and he took a step back, regarding the group one by one. When he got to Serafine, he smiled. In another moment, in another world, he might have looked handsome.

"I'm John, by the way. John Brogan. If you ever want to talk... I'll be around." He glanced up at the hospital. "Look after her."

And then he was gone, walking away across the parking lot to a sleek black BMW that he entered on the driver's side.

A few minutes after he drove away, a girl appeared hesitant and exhausted at the hospital's entrance. She watched them from afar for a few moments longer, then stepped out into the warm night air.

The Jesus Mobile

Sera

 They are in a precarious balance. Sera, seated on the console between the seats, her head ducked down, the blooming scent of marijuana clouding out the heavier, sweeter funk of the clove she smoked on the way out here, spine and hips wedged against the priest's right shoulder and arm, both knees tucked to her right, pressing into Jim's flank. Her boots are off the seat, but she digs her heels into the plastic casing housing the parking break and gear shift to give her something like purchase, to anchor her to her uncertain perch.

Drive carefully, Padre. One short stop is likely to send her careening into, or right fucking through, your windshield.

Her free hand (the one not employed with the joint) is braced against the headrest, but as Jim starts his rite and she feels his consciousness, his will pushing through the weave all around them, she shifts that hand from the headrest to his shoulder, thumb flat against the cut of his clavicle, fingers splayed against his back. Much of what he's doing is alien to her, threads of the tapestry she has not yet learned to sense, let along manipulate. It's like waking up from a dream of the sea to find yourself surfing the edge of a breaking wave.

But there she is. Still along for the ride (and little more than that, for this rite) as Jim pushes more and more of himself into the Work spending himself and expending himself far beyond the point where she can assist. Still there when the vision begins; and still there - breathless, quickening - through all the stuttering possibilities, the endless branching divisions of what may come.

Pan will feel as much as hear her sharp intake of breath when the rite comes off. The sound of a choked off cry of alarm or warning, in those first few moments, which she mostly swallows.

Not long after:

"That's him - " low and hissed, her grip on Jim's shoulder strengthening by way of emphasis when the scene jump-cuts and the man she remembers makes an appearance. " - I saw him at the end, leading her away."

--

By the time the kaleidescopic whirl of potentiality resolves itself into a withering tangle of destructive ends, Sera (who, unguarded, gives herself to the moment as thoroughly as she does any other) is crying or near to it. Mostly soundless, the muscles flanking her spine contracting, her eyes shining, her nose beginning to redden. Sharp little breaths hitching in and out of her lungs.

She releases her grip on Jim's shoulder, shifts the joint from left hand to right, and reaches up angrily to dash the few tears that have already fallen to her cheeks, then rubs the incipient rest right out of her eyes with a fist. Right then left. They come back, but fuck them. Seriously, fuck them.

Then Sera flexes her feet and thighs, shifting her uncomfortable position to find a new sort of purchase there and opening her body language to include Pan in the conversation that follows. He has to keep his eyes on the road, but in his periphery he can see the swing of her hair against her profile, the reflective gleam of her gaze, greenish white from the dashboard lights. She takes one more toke from the joint, though when she exhales that stream of smoke before passing the joint off to Jim for use or disposal, look.

She is conscientious enough to exhale toward the passenger side, rather than into the driver's face. So hey. There's that.

--

"She's going to jump." Maybe Pan knew that. Perhaps that's the flashing vision he head in the middle of the park that sent the trio running toward his truck. "If we don't intervene: she's going to jump off the top of Aurora Presbyterian and she's going to die.

"Except: we're not the only ones watching her. They are watching her too. And when she jumps some motherfucker jumps after her, catches her, and carries her down to the ground."

Sera pauses, swallows hard, her voice raw from the pot, throat swollen with emotion - which is more grief than fear. And perhaps, more anger than grief. She harnesses that, pulls it inside and pushes it back through her body; feels the way her heart races in her chest.

"He's powerful Pan." A flickering glance toward Jim, in query or confirmation. All this in a rushed and hurried whisper. "We can't see him; he's all in shadow. Cloaked against our seeing - " another glance at Jim's profile, the question embedded firmly in the statement. " - I bet he's the fucker who put the illusion on the warehouse and pulled himself out of the timestream.

"He's going to save her and erase the memory of it from the witnesses. Then take her elsewhere, a hotel someplace. There are others there, including the bastard from my dream.

"If we go up there, though, up to the roof." A sharp breath out, all at once, which she swallows back just as thoroughly. Pan and perhaps even Jim can feel the subtle tremors in her musculature, shaking from the spike of adrenaline flooding her system even as her high is just starting to open. " - we don't do her any good. The rest of them are already up there. Two other Fallen at least. There's a confrontation at the least, and then a fight, and alot of shit happens."

Pan falling to the ground with a withered arm, screaming.
Or, Sera leaving with Leah, alone.

Now she scoots back a bit, her torso a concave curve, pulls herself so that she can wrap a hand around either headrest to keep herself in place.

Her attention swings back to Jim, here. "It'd be the warehouse all over again. A bunch of fucking bastards fighting all around her, pushing her further over the edge of sanity. She doesn't need another fight. Another fucking trauma on top of all the others. I wouldn't be surprised if those bastards led the Techs to the warehouse, you know? Engineered the whole fight to traumatize her into waking up. Or just took advantage of the situation as it presented itself.

"How else could they have been there so quickly to throw up that illusion?"

There is a pause here, Sera's eyes tick upward to the streets sliding anonymously by. Maybe they've within sight of the hospital now, and if so something cold seizes her at the base of her spine and sends a fresh spiral of shivers crawling up her vertebrae.

--

Then - unless one of the Disciples interrupts before she continues on -

"So here's what I'm thinking. Can we do that thing we did with Jake - where you joined him in to our scrying - and just talk to her?

"We wait at the bottom, where they're going to land. That bastard has so much to do right then. Right? He's got to fly and fucking catch her and land and zap the goddamned memories out of the witnesses he'll hardly have time to see us. And the other fuckers are still on the roof."

This is stream-of-consciousness, unspooling as Sera sits there, her eyes still bright with tears she's more or less refusing to shed now, staring forward, intent and intense, at the street in front of them, or perhaps at their own reflections - ghostly - in the windshield.

"So we do that ritual. And we open up a connection and we talk to her. We tell her - why we're here; and why want to help her. Why Shelby healed her. We're not chasing her. We're not hounding her. That she has a Fate, but she also has a Will and her Fate can be changed."

There's force behind Sera's voice; power in it even shaken and raw as it is in just that moment.

"I have - I have," she uncurls her fingers from one of the headrests and starts patting down her jacket with its many pockets, her hand shaking minutely from the adrenaline spiking through her body. " - that extra phone I bought, that night. We give her the number, right?

"We give her the number. And we give her some agency. And we let her make a Choice."

Joey

There is no peace in the visions; there is no peace in Jim's wide eyes as they see what may be. He seems as unsettled as Sera by the violence and many possible fates that play themselves out. It simply expresses itself differently on his visage. Sera's gripping hand is less an anchor to the present and more a reminder of the companion that joins him in his travels through time. His own hand raises to lay atop hers and squeeze it tight. His jaw is set, flexing as his entire body tenses. Each glimpse builds to a wave crashes against his stoic demeanor, and while his reaction is not as emotional as Sera's tears, each barrage takes a bit away from him.

As before, when they'd gone to the warehouse and seen things that must be repeated, he lets Sera speak the unspeakable. She is better at it. He seems thankful for her presence, though this is only one of the many reasons why. She even goes so far as to suggest a course of action as Pan drives them closer and closer to the hospital.

The significantly shorter joint, passed over to him, is pinched between his thumb and index fingernails. He takes a last pull, throwing the small circle of paper that's left out the window once he's followed Sera's lead and blown the smoke out the window.

Only then is he prepared to speak. "You're right. Give her the choice. Don't confront her. Don't make it about us or them. Make it about her. And maybe show her more in bared soul than we could in words," a final nod at the idea.

 Pan

Of all the times to be glad to live in Colorado, the time the Cultists decide to spark a joint in the cab of a truck is chief among them.

Whatever the other Disciple does doesn't take long. They're only going a mile. The road wants for traffic but is not completely deserted and he doesn't speed. After five minutes, less, who even knows, time is relative, the pastor pulls the truck up to the curb and yanks on the handbrake and he waits. With the engine running and the radio dead it is the rise of her ribs and the sharp of her breath that catches his attention.

Sera and Jim come back to cognizance to find Pan has rolled down his own window. He rubs his lower jaw as he listens to Sera speak and when she comes to the place where the rhetorical question sits he cuts off the engine. The headlights aren't missed until they're gone. Aurora Presbyterian sits in the distance and they can't see the roof from here. He doesn't interrupt and he doesn't sigh until the very end of her stream of words when the sound comes out of him like he's been holding his breath and his judgment and everything else inside his head this entire time. Big as he is the sigh is a brief other entity for a moment and then he's removing a hand-rolled cigarette from the breast pocket of his work shirt, lighting it with one of the Cultists' lighter.

"Sounds better than going on the roof," he says.

The smoke isn't meant to feed an addiction but to Work. It's a small thing he does but he has to focus anyway.

jamie @ 4:11PM
[Prime 1: Watch the Weaving.
Coincidental, base diff 4. -1 diff for appropriate resonance.]
Roll: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 5, 7) ( success x 2 ) VALID
jamie @ 4:11PM
[+1 diff extending it.]
Roll: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 5, 10) ( success x 2 ) VALID
Joey as a Witness @ 4:16PM
[ Witnessed! ] 

Sera


"Fuck." Sera's curse is low but voluble, all force. Pan has parked the truck and cut the engine. He's smoking his cigarette and she's leaning forward, frowning out the windshield at the bulk of Aurora Presbyterian in the foreground. There's a big blue H sign mounted on the glass-and-steel exterior, glowing brilliant against the darkness, and another, equally bright, directing patients and ambulances to the ER bay. How is it that through all the possible futures she didn't see this right in front of her? The place is a fucking hospital. There is a moment there where she freezes, and then Jim's agreement registers, and Pan says it all sounds better than the roof. Some of that whipcord tension eases out of her spine.

Sera closes her eyes for a moment and tells herself, silently and repeatedly, like a mantra or a prayer, We don't have to go in there. We don't have to go in there. You'll be fine. You'll be fucking fine. Mouth moving with the words faintly, the way one might mouth the words to a familiar song on the radio, but no voice given to them. She seems, even, to believe it too, because then she's straightening, breathing out a shaky breath that grows more and more steady as her lungs empty.

Telling herself, "Okay," and them, too, Sera casts them both a stark glance, " - let's go. We need to find the spot where they're going to land." - and waits while Jim and Pan climb out of the truck. She'll follow.

In the meantime, Sera finally finds the second of the prepaid cell phones she bought at that convenience store in the middle of the exurbs the week prior. Reads off the number, not once but several times, repeating it so that it is embedded in their heads.

Sera clambers after Jim out the passenger's door and onto the sidewalk. Pulls her hands up over her hair, tugging the bulk of it back and twisting it upon itself, then reaches back with an arch of her spine to shake out the hood of her a hoodie - one of her many layers tonight - from where it's been trapped beneath the bulk of her leather jacket, then pulls it up over her head. She is sparking, bright with nervous energy, gaze drawn back, repeatedly, to the bulk of the hospital in the foreground. Keeps looking, up and up and up, at the glow of the navigation array that guides helicopters to the rooftop landing, heart firmly in her throat for more than one reason.

Jim

Full disclosure.

At first glance it may seem like business or legal terminology, in the same league as terms like due diligence or mea culpa. Its true origin is in technology and software, though it is bandied about on the pages of rags from Cosmo to the Paper of Record.

But deeper than all that there's an ethical connotation to it.

At least in Jim's mind. Which is all that matters to Jim. Because it serves as impetus for the effort he begins as they leave the truck.

And as he gathers his Will, it is that weight of connotation that he lends to the working.

Serafine wanted to connect them with the girl. To implore with her while she jumped, fell, was caught by that darting mass of darkness.

Words could only do so much, though. And if it was a connection they were opening, why not let it run freely? Why not bare the truth? Not just some of it. All of it.

To share that they were of the same cut as the woman, Shelby, that had given her life for Leah. Visions of what they'd seen in the past, showing her what Leah said to the others of the Traditions, demanding they protect her. That they all didn't want to control or even save her, but to simply free her – from the foregone conclusion some named her Fate, from the cancerous stigma some placed on her budding tsunami of an Avatar, and from those who would try to blacken her very soul.

Jim's fingers sink into the Tapestry again, the sensations already alive from the lightening substance in his system. He is enlivened by it, the inhibitions melting away as his own memories rise to the surface. And like the tide to the moon, he tries to raise them up, draw them toward where he knows the girl is. His own mind brushes out toward Pan and Sarafine.

Waters joining. Watershed welling. Tributaries becoming confluences and returning from fresh rains and ancient glaciers to the oceans as he tries to join their thoughts into a cohesive whole. Will working to craft an ocean for her to swim in.

[ To-be-rolled... ]