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.