It is late Sunday night or early Monday morning, depending on whether one is the sort to see dawn before retiring for the night, or after waking at the start of a new day. Caged, sickly trees line the sidewalks here and there. Sparrows and robins and house finches, gray and brown and black, camouflaged and adapted to city life, dart among the trees have started to sing, so let us call it morning, even though the sky has not yet started to grow light.
One of the employees in the day care (they open before first light, so that the early shift workers can get to their own service jobs), sends the parish priest either an apologetic page (coded with an unhappy smiley by way of apology) or knocks, equally apologetically, on the front door of the rectory. She's twenty-something, a pretty girl, overweight, with a round face and a scattering of acne and warm brown eyes and long black hair. Her English is poor, but she refuses to speak to Father Echeverría in the Spanish they share.
Hesitantly, in broken but improving English, she conveys that there's a drunk sleeping one off in the sanctuary. She's sorry to disturb him and there's a bruised adoration in her eyes for the priest and it's still early (or late), but -
- well, they did try to wake him but he won't go.
--
The drunk is stretched out on one of the pews in the back, black leather jacket over her legs, turned on her side and curled up asleep. The lights are off, the sanctuary is redolent of candle wax, and the incense he uses sometimes to satisfy the Catholics who want something closer to high mass than low. Long shadows cut in through the windows, the amber-yellow of the streetlights through stained glass if they have them, or industrial windows if they lack them. Or perhaps he has flipped the switch for one of the circuits of lights in the sanctuary.
Once he sees her, there's no mistaking Sera. That hair. Even with his varied acquaintance, who else does he know who has both long, curling blond hair and a buzz cut?
She is dressed in a differently ironic pink dress - a different differently ironic pink dress than the airplane dress - and combat boots, and has a leather jacket wrapped around her bare legs and a black crocheted - well, something - draped over her shoulders. She's sleeping on her side, one arm cradled beneath her head as a pillow, the other tucked tightly against her torso, fitted, quite neatly and narrowly, on one of the back pews. Shoulders rising, and falling in rhythm with each breath.
Some people are light sleepers, stirring when the slightest movement or shift in shadows happens anywhere close to them. Sera is not one of these people. She does not twitch, or roll over, or murmur or sigh in her sleep, or shift on the bench and burrow into or away from sound or light, when the lights go on, or when his footfalls are audible in the shadowed space.
She does not wake easily. Calling her name will not do it, nor will a gentle nudge, nor will any combination of these things pull her from sleep. No, he has to take her shoulders and shake her if he wants her up.
Fr. EcheverríaAnd they've seen him come in to vanquish the dark times before like all they had to do was think of him to bring him to them. A drunk in the auditorium is nothing compared to the shootings and the overdoses and the suicides that have left empty spaces where their children used to be. The girl who wakes him up has no children but the ones she takes care of but she has a mother's nature and she does not want to wake up the flock's shepherd for she knows he does not sleep much.
What she knows and what she does not need to know do not often coincide. A knock on the door brings him to the door in the clothes he fell asleep in. All black, cowboy boots slid on before the knob turns and he answers.
Father Echeverría does not lock his door. He has not been here long enough but no one has the balls to come in unannounced. He's the biggest priest this congregation has ever had and he frightens those who do not believe in what he preaches. Purity in a man who has sacrificed his wretched life to a dying god.
He comes into the auditorium not with confusion but with conviction. It does not melt when he sees who sleeps on the padded bench like she has nowhere else to go. He left her a voicemail late Friday night. Her phone took him straight to it.
(Hola, Serafíne, habla Padre Echeverría, favor de llamarme a la iglesia, 831-6035, gracias, ciao.
Lazy Spanish run together like the Techs and the Fallen cannot understand him if he speaks like he's on a beach and not in the mountains.)
"Sera. Wake up."
Nothing.
"Ay, Dormilona. You can't sleep here."
Nothing.
With no eyes on him but those of God's the priest puts a hand on a small thin shoulder and shakes her hard like he would have thought she'd gone and died on him were not for the tidal movement of her chest.
SerafíneTell the truth, Sera is used to waking up in strange places. With strange people, at strange hours, in unfamiliar beds, the stirring sounds of a strange house all around her. The church pew in la iglesia del buen pastor is not the strangest place she's found herself some abandoned morning. It wholly possible that it is not the strangest place she's found herself waking just this week.
And she does wake, when he shakes her. Suddenly and abruptly and entirely - sitting up and putting an elbow underneath her, shoulders rising, the crocheted black shrug falling off her her torso, between her spine and the bench. There are a few minutes where she's just breathing like she's still asleep, which is to say deeply and luxuriously, sleepyhead indeed, her brows drawn together in that confusion that arises with those first few moments of waking. Who and what and where am I? Consciousness drawing together over the dark depths of the un- and sub-concious wrapped in the self-same body.
"Oh, hey." - and she sounds mildly abashed and muzzily aware of him, as her eyes touch on his midsection, the black clothes, slide up the column of buttons bisecting his chest until she finds his face. She's slipping upright, reaching for the jacket before it slips in a heap to the floor between the pews, tucking her legs beneath her until her feet touch the ground and she's sitting up. "Sorry - "
A quick slip of a smile. It comes and goes, bruised and as lazy as a waking puppy's curl of its tongue. Her hair is still damp from a shower, which means that she is clean, so blessedly clean, as are all the clothes she's wearing. Stretching her spine open, so that the vertebrae decompress, she reaches upward to push her fingers through her hair and pull it back and away from her face.
"Came over here after I got home and grabbed a shower and then I was like, fuck of course no one's around, it's a church not an after-hours club? So I figured I'd just hang out until you actually got up. Don't worry," a sudden twist of her grin, a flash of her eyes to his face. Beneath it, though, Sera is still subdued. From more than sleep and the shock of waking. " - I didn't smoke pot or anything in here. Wait, is it morning already?"
Fr. EcheverríaFor his part he has not combed his hair or showered yet. Looks like he slept in the clothes he's wearing but not like he's just woken up. Despite the vague rumpled quality of his work shirt he shows no other signs of wear. Black jeans hide many a sin.
He waits for her to draw herself up out of dreams or deadness or whatever happens behind a Cultist's lids while she sleeps off the night before and if he's amused he keeps it off his face.
A wooden rosary has been tucked into a pocket, hand-carved crucifix hanging from his hip. It sings a confession of recent Working but it does not scream it.
With a sigh he drops himself onto one knee in the aisle, puts himself at eye level to her for the first time in their acquaintance and she can see better than she ever has in the wanness of a morning not yet severed from its birthing darkness that his eyes are green and his hair has gone not just gray but white in places.
"Just about," he says and coughs into his elbow to clear his lungs. The lifelong smoker's morning rite. "Got home from where?"
He remembers the phone. Doesn't trust that she does. He can't lie for shit and his face has no interest in helping him.
SerafíneHe drops to one knee and that's unusual enough that it draws her eyes right to him; her mouth is half-open, a breath she was taking arrested mid-movement. Surprised to find herself with such a clear view of his face and eyes, the strands of gray and white striped through his black hair, she searches his face as if it was her first time looking at him. Pulls the leather jacket she used as a blanket back up to the pew and puts it aside, then pushes her open palms down her thighs, smoothing out the hem of her dress.
"This cheap motel," Sera tells him with a diffident sort of half-shrug. Voice sheepish, like its a confession and not a story. Her mouth is curved upward at one corner like an apology, and though the expression shapes her cheeks, it does little to brighten the darkness in her eyes. Swallows hard, " - we went there after. Jim wove wards so they couldn't find us and worked a curse into them so they'd be fucked if they did?"
Sera's not sure who they are in the searching-and-finding scenario. But with both techs and fallen involved, they cannot mean well.
"So." Curls her fingers into the hem of her dress, nearly abashed, maybe to be subject to the scrutiny of someone so illuminating, all-bright against the darkness. As if the girl who can talk her way through four days of exile in a stinking hotel room with five fucking other people cannot quite settle on the proper.
"I know I called you - " - she remembers, too. The fact of it, though not the specifics. " - but I'm not sure what you got out of it. I was kinda fucked up." That is, after all, how she Works. He can feel it wrapped all around her being, even now, when she's sitting her sleepy and mostly-sober on sacred ground, and he's kneeling at her side. "Mostly I wanted to make sure you wouldn't go looking there if - "
A narrowing shrug, lingers in her shoulders even after the gesture's finished. If never came to pass. "So."
Fr. Echeverría"Got enough out of it to decide if you hadn't shown up today I was going to."
An entire weekend with a connection that never made it through and nothing but the sound of escape or racing or just flight with no destination. Doesn't mean to make that confession but he does it anyway. If she hadn't shown up today he was going to go looking.
So long as he has been here he has professed no knowledge of other Awakened and even if he has never left the state Colorado is vast and entire communities could have scattered like ash after they lost the War. Entire communities did scatter like ash after they lost the War.
They have no reason to trust or even give a shit about each other but here they are even though his secretary threw out half their messages. He learned about that during the Confession prior to Sunday's Mass. Isn't supposed to mention anything he hears in Confession and he frowns at the thought but that doesn't keep it stoppered.
"Listen... Rosa didn't give me your message, or Jim's. I'm sorry."
SerafíneWillpower
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneShe has the sudden urge to kiss him. Not his mouth but his forehead and then his cheek. There are religions such a kiss would be a blessing, or a benediction. Perhaps even in his belief - Greet all brothers with a holy kiss. or Greet one another with a kiss of love - certainly in the history of his Church, whichever one lays closest claim to his heart. Another man could perhaps even read that urge in her - the softening in her sleep-lazy eyes and the twist of her mouth and the lift of her sharp chin, which she arrests, before the movement is fully born. But he is more man of god than man.
And she, she breathes a sharp breath out and arrests the motion. Turns her eyes aslant and shakes her head as if she would refuse his apology just as she refuses the thought of his searching for her against her warning.
"If I hadn't turned up under my own power and of my own accord," here her eyes dart back to his face, her mouth curves into the sort of sad, mysterious half-smile the oracles at Delphi must have worn, reading the future in the mists. "I wouldn't have been in a state worth finding."
So she does not kiss him, but she does reach out and grasp his hand with her own. The tattooed hand, the dark lines moving against her palm, but unreadable in the gloom. Her thumb brushes over the first joints of his fingers.
"I'm glad you weren't there. So, forgive Rosa, okay?
"I sort of wish that we hadn't taken Sid and Mara with us. If they know about it, the techs must be watching that place. Maybe we got lucky and it's been long enough that they're not hypervigilent. That seems unlikely.
"And someone was there after, someone who took him or herself out of the time stream. A hiccup. Like a scratched record. So, someone like that is surely capable of hitting replay. Better that they don't see your face when they do.
"Did I tell you about the girl?"
Fr. EcheverríaHe reads nothing in the light of her eyes to suggest an impulse such as that she staves off with a quick exhale and he lets her take his hand because why should he not let her take his hand. This is the house of his Father and all who enter it call the man of god Father and why should a person who comes into this place and sleeps here in the safety of a place ringing with light even in his absence not take his hand if she should want to?
Even if she should wish him ill he would not shake himself of her. His trust in his God or in his own strength shows in the way he does not flinch at the passage of her thumb across his inelegant fingers.
For the sake of absolution, his own or Rosa's or the Techs' or that of the Fallen, he squeezes her fingers folded beneath his own and does not pull away from her.
So, forgive Rosa, okay?
His own sharp breath out now. He'd never felt anger towards her. One cannot forgive if one does not grow righteous in the face of a mistake but her contrition sprang up all the same.
Did she tell him about the girl.
"You did," he says. A beat to let that lay, and then: "Shoshannah and I had a visitor Friday night. The sister of one of the dead men. She told us about the girl, too, and..."
A briefer beat. His eyes flick over her shoulder to ensure their solitude before they come back and he goes on.
"There's a holy place, out past Red Rocks. She took us there."
Good morning, Sunshine.
Fr. Echeverría[PAUSE]
SerafíneGood morning, Sunshine indeed.
This revelation inspires the most complex cascade of emotions in her. Disbelief on some level, and a sort of hunger. Relief, right? And somewhere in there is a shearing twist of exacting, remembered pain. One of the dead men. One of the men whose ashes coated her legs and caught in her fishnets. Whose end she breathed and witnessed and watched and felt roaring across her othersenses as they were torn apart from within, rusting and rotting and disintegrating and dying and drifting to the ground the way snow drifts, lazy but not white.
Gray-black soot and ash. He has folded his hand more tightly around her fingers and now she redoubles the pressure without knowing what she does. Serafíne is not strong, but sometimes, my god, she is fierce. So she is now.
Then - abruptly - she shakes her hand free of his and brings it to her mouth. (Or, if he is not so easily shaken-off, she brings his hand to her mouth.) She is leaning forward, body folded low in her torso, at the hips rather than the spine. The rocking posture of an animal in pain. Or a girl trying not to puke. Presses her knuckles firmly against her flattened mouth, leaning forward, as she struggles to contain the sudden urge (once more) to vomit.
As if emptying her stomach might empty her mind of the memory of all that death. All that fucking pain. And not that sort she might seek sometimes - a waking clarity to pierce the veil of indulgence, but a mere ending, a deep and smothering darkness, screaming at the end.
So: there is quiet of sorts as she masters herself, sits there stiffly, willing the sourness in her throat to recede, willing her diaphragm and esophagus to relax. Resisting the urges of her body, whatever they are, is not natural to her. But she does, gritting her teeth, jaw flexed, eyes closed, until the moment passes. Then at last she drops her hand from her mouth, braces it on the pew beside her, and opens her eyes. She's staring forward into the dark shadows of the quiet church, but oh, she is aware of his bulk beside her.
"Sorry. I'm sorry - I mean, that's good - " Her eyes are shining in the dim light of the church. From the sheer physical effort of holding down her gorge or - no, those are tears liquid rimming her lower lashes, beginning to overflow. Just a drop or two, but enough to slip through her lashes and hit her cheeks. She reaches up, angrily dashes the fallen tears away, then runs her thumb along the lower lids, getting the moisture out of her eyes. Reaches to dash it away before it can fall onto her face again. The gesture is vehement, stubborn, resistant: very much Fuck you, tear ducts. "It's just I saw it all.
"And I knew they had a place. Shelby and Will and Jai. Outside the city somewhere, and while we were hiding out, I was thinking maybe we should go look. And how would we find it. But then it also felt so macabre, like - like, plundering the corpses of the dead, like scavenging, or -
"And I couldn't think - fuck."
This is all very stream-of-consciousness. "Fuck fuck fuck." Because there's also desire in her. She knows exactly what he means and these places are so rare (holy, he says, and though the pair of them have deeply different definitions of holy, she understands the reverence of the word. Might even use it semi-regularly herself, in far different contexts than he does.) that the longing is (almost) as gut-clenching and reactive as the remembered horror.
Twice remembered.
She's dreamt it twice.
It's a good thing she sleeps so deeply, Sera. If she didn't, she might remember more of her dreams, and not just the prophetic ones.
"What did she say?" Finally, a glance back. Her hands are on the pew again, and she sniffs against the liquid in her sinuses, trying to forestall any more tears, fingers wrapped beneath the hard wooden bench, flanking her thighs. Her head is forward, bent like someone readying themselves to kneel in prayer, but she rarely kneels and any prayers she utters take other forms, entirely. Shoulders forward, pulled narrowly, close in around her torso, damp hair falling loosely around her shoulders, drying into its usual kinks and waves. "The sister?"
Fr. EcheverríaWhen the memory and the pain of remembering come to claim her he lets go her hand but he does not rise from where he half kneels on the carpet. When it recedes again he is still there. Concern clouds his face but he does not question her even as his waiting is answered by invectives and words that don't make sentences.
He is not a man who asks a lot of questions. They did not meet when he was young enough to want answers to things he did not know he did not know, when his blood was hot enough to drive a person mad. Silence is something he holds to now the way one holds a candle while stood alone in a dark place but he is not afraid. Fear is not something one tends to exhibit when one believes that the body is but a vessel but he is still human.
Fear or something like it drenches the space around Sera. She is very human.
Which brings them back to the sister.
"A lot of what you already know," he says in a voice still low for the reverence in the place. "That the girl was Widderslainte. That the Techs are looking for more Fallen in the area." A pause. He is not a particularly gifted speaker but when he speaks it is the truth and that carries him past the dryness in his elocution. "That their parents left the house to her and her brother but she didn't want anything to do with it before he died, and she intends to stay here until she's sure she can trust us."
SerafíneShe is very human, Sera. It takes her some time to master those physical urges. After a few beats of silence she straightens her spine and draws back her shoulders. Still, though, she sits in profile, brings her hands from the pew to her lap, then crosses her arms, low over her frame. As low as they'll go while she's sitting there. The posture is defensive, but there's a tautness to the length of her neck, the muscles of her forearms that speak to the way she is mastering herself while he waits kneeling through it all, buffered from her the raw edge of her fear, the rank memory of the horrors she witnessed by the illuminating halo of his faith.
At last her chin rises the way her shoulders did, and she cuts him a half-slung glance, her eyes still bright with the tears she refused to shed for long, her nose red, her mouth still. Breathing forward, in a way that lifts her chest rather than her shoulders, deliberate and quick as if the consciousness of the act of it soothes her.
And nods, this minute little gesture in the darkness. Searching his features for a long moment before she responds. "Shelby said they were going to use Leah to lure the others. And someone put the illusion over the warehouse. The Techs would've cleaned that place up and erased it from property records and every map they could get their hands on.
"This bastard just threw up an illusion and took himself out of the time stream so we couldn't see him. I bet he's gonna go and check the playback, though. Then he'll know who I am. Sid and Mara and Jim too.
"I wonder if he's the guy from my dream. Jim said, maybe that's just Leah's Avatar made manifest, but maybe it's one of the Fallen the Techs are looking for."
Sera breathes out a quiet little burst of air, glancing away from Pan. Up toward the altar where he will celebrate mass, come morning light. Then she looks down at her hands, empty in her lap.
"Did the sister say anything about her criteria for trusting us?"
Fr. EcheverríaPatient though he is his body is not quite so and the position he's held these past few minutes cannot be maintained forever. He stays where he is and that concern and that sympathy dissipates but does not fade the more she pulls herself back into herself. She can see his right hand splayed on its thigh and the left held onto the pew ahead of them. But he does not move until she looks up towards the pulpit.
Then he stands, a sharp intake of breath and the resultant cough the only sign of exertion. He is big, not just tall but solid, and he carries what excess weight he boasts around his midsection in the tradition of aging men. Agility and he parted ways decades ago.
Once stood he considers the question and grips her shoulder. Incidental as the brushing of fingertips during a transaction but his hand is warm through the fabric covering her skin covering the muscle and bone beneath. Incidental but not impersonal.
"Time."
His hand leaves her shoulder.
"What's your plan, then?"
SerafíneHer head turns sharply as he rises from his kneeling posture, blue eyes made dark by the gloom pulling up and up with him as he stands. Chin lifted, her features cheated into a three-quarters profile. Mouth half-open with an expression that seems half-formed, attenuated, expectant, until he remarks that time is her criteria.
Then her mouth closes and her expression curves wry, so finely contained given her convulsion of remembered agony a quiet few minutes - five minutes, ten minutes? how long did he kneel there, on her level, concerned and sympathetic but allowing her to Be - ago.
When he grips her shoulder, the twist of her neck arcs another 45 degrees so that her chin is hovering over the webbing of his hand, where his thumb and index finger spread in different directions across the apex of her trapezius muscle. Her eyes linger on his face, then travel in a slow cascading point-to-point down his shoulder, his arm, the edge of his black sleeve, the inner joint of his elbow. The dark, wiry hair on his forearm. This time, she is well-contained, and does not curve her cheek over the edge of his knuckles. If the impulse exists, she holds it back well, though her mouth does part, just as he draws his hand away.
He's standing so she does, then, too - all at once. Hers is such an easy motion - the smooth contraction of her thighs, the easy balance she finds on the balls of her feet. Not a dancer's grace, just the confidence that comes from being very, very fond of the body one inhabits and well accustomed to its many uses.
"We're gonna find Leah. We can't leave her out there. She's alone and she's fucking scared and she didn't mean for any of that to happen. To her or by her or any of it." The sidelong look Sera shoots Pan in that moment is pugnacious. She does not think he would try to dissuade her or even oppose her in this, but. Ahh, but.
"They don't have her yet," a fierce little narrowing of her eyes, as she swallows hard. Tugs the hem of her skirt down over her ass and thighs to make sure she is not flashing him as she stands there. "Jim's going to scry for her, I figured I'd start with shelters and soup kitchens. Places with a free meal.
"When you're alone like that and have no place to go and no ideas about who's after you and - " Oh, impassioned, this, rushed through without discrimination, thoughtless in her haste. An arrest, she drops her eyes from the vicinity of his face, glances over his shoulder, through the entryway to whatever she can see of the gloom of the night turning to morning. There is still no sun in the sky. "Well. There are places you can go and people you meet, but it won't always earn you a meal. And sometimes you need a safe bed. Just for one fucking night.
"So. I'm gonna look for her.
"That's my plan."
Fr. EcheverríaAnd she doesn't have to tell him that this girl is young and terrified and that this was all out of her control. That so far as intent goes she's an innocent.
She doesn't have to explain to him what happens to people who have no place to go but he lets her anyway. He lets her and he listens like he hasn't heard stories sharing a vein from other folks and hasn't lived it himself and can't begin to wrap his head around the notion of being pursued. Nods and puts his thumbs in the mirrored belt loops of his jeans but does not tell her he knows.
Maybe she can see it in his form the way lost and angry folks see someone who has walked their path before and not hit the side of it in wait for the buzzards to collect his flesh from his bones. He isn't lost or angry but he accepts that she is those things just the same as he accepts that she is profane and unrepentant.
"Alright," he says. "Let me help."
SerafíneBut there are things she can see in him, in his silence and in his solidity. Hear in his voice and in his smoker's cough. Read in the rough parchment of his skin and the dark map of his countenance. Maybe even hear in echo in the way he calls a half-clothed Cultist who cannot keep the profanities out of her mouth even in the house of god dormilona when he finds her sleeping on a pew in his sanctuary.
"I knew you would - " she says in a rush of conviction, but he can read the tension of it in her narrow shoulders and in the cut of her spine against the thin fabric of her pink cotton dress. She knew he would but she has been wrong, can be wrong, is wrong so often that she makes a fucking art of it, and so, she knew he would but feared he wouldn't. Pink fucking cotton, for god's sake, which pulls taut across her scapula and upper back as she turns and reaches and throws her arms around his shoulders in a wide embrace that pulls her up onto her toes and has her leaning into him, smiling her relief into his chest for one long, unselfconscious moment. "I knew it."
And then for a much shorter, infinitely more self-conscious moment that has her tipping her head forward and pulling her long arms down from around his neck with a strange reluctance for all that it feels so fucking weird suddenly to be hugging a priest in a church in the predawn.
The narrowest little shrug, in the aftermath. One shoulder upward, as she looks away. Draws herself away, restores to him the personal dignity of space. The fey half-smile she casts him is almost shy. Or no, that reads it wrongly. It curls, a rich but quiet humor underneath.
"See, Padre? I had faith in you."
Fr. Echeverría[YAY]
Fr. Echeverría[Alright so going for Find the Lost first and if that doesn't do anything amazing going to go with ye olde scrying ritual.]
Fr. Echeverría[Find the Lost - Correspondence/Mind 2.
Coincidental. Base diff 5, claiming -1 for spec focus and another -1 for it being in line with his resonance because I am a bastard.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )
Fr. Echeverría[Extending, +1 diff.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 5, 6) ( success x 3 )
Fr. Echeverría[Extending it again!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (2, 7, 10) ( success x 2 )
Fr. Echeverría[That's not 8, dawg.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (7, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
Howl-witnessing[Per+Awareness what is this people be looking for me?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 2 )
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