For the Ecstatics in the room time is a fluid thing. Now is then, then is when, and when could be yesterday or twenty years from now. For Sid, who has not yet begun to rid herself of the shackles of a more rigid belief of how the world works, time is a more linear thing. Point A goes to Point B, then C, and on and on, forever marching forward. It's better for her to believe that's how time flows, better to believe there's no point in looking back. At least, not back along her own timeline.
That's not entirely true, though. Sid is constantly looking back over her shoulder, past at the things that were, that could have been, that will never be again. Tonight her thoughts stay a little more current. She'd tried to sleep, long-limbed body curled on its side in the motel room's only living chair, an overstuffed and uncomfortable monstrosity upholstered in ugly orange and yellow fabric. In the semidarkness of the room, the heavy fabric of the curtains drawn against the shine of stars and moon and the sickly yellow light of nearby street lamps, it's difficult for her to measure the passage of time. Sometimes she blinks her eyes and when she opens them again she feels disoriented, displaced; it's in these moments she supposes her brain has finally shut down to give her a few minutes' peace.
When she's awake, listening to the breathing of the other inhabitants of the room, some steady, some not so steady, her mind goes over the events of the evening. Whether she wants it to or not, her mind keeps flitting back to Sera's recounting of the vision she shared with Jim and Jake. She can almost see the events, or imagines she does, and when she does she tenses, her body tightening up. Then she steadies her breathing, willing her muscles to relax so that she can turn her body the other way. Her eyes drift close, and when she opens them again she feels disoriented.
It only happens a few times before she gives up. Sitting up, she stretches her arms up over her head, biting back a groan. Scratching her temple with one hand, the other gropes in the darkness for her glasses. Rising, careful to avoid any bodies that might be stretched out on the floor of the little room, she heads as quietly as she can for the door.
SerafineAll these hours later, Serafíne is still seated/sprawled between the cheap a/c unit and the door to the small room. If she were sleeping, there would be no waking her - not without an act of congress and a personal invitation from the marine band. She is not sleeping, however. The thing about acid is, the speed in the mix keeps you awake for hours - and tonight Sera's high is shaped and heightened by the wards Jim has woven all around them.
So: Jim sleeps. Mara dozes, somewhere. Jake is not sleeping but not moving. Dan is dozing, propped at the edge of the bed into which they tumbled the grief-striken consor. But when Sid wakes from her restless, dream-laden, psychedelic slumber, Serafíne is still awake.
It might seem that she's not moved for hours. This is not true. She's had a shower, washed all that ash off her limbs, scrubbed herself clean beneath scalding water, and then beneath water so cold it felt like needles against her skin. Her hair is still damp.
She has discarded the fishnets and her boots are off. She's slipped back into her Sesame Street LIVE! t-shirt and cut-offs, but these are short as short can be. Her feet and 'long' legs are bare. Barefoot, she barely reaches 5'5". Even then, there's likely some chicanery involved. Still, coiled on the floor of the hotel room as she is right now, the illusion of height might well remain.
The movement of her head, lilting backward against those solid walls, watching Sid's shadow cut through the darkness. She says nothing, not-a-thing, until Sid reaches for the handle of the door. Then Sera's hand uncoils, pale in the darkness, except for the flash of ink on her palm, inside her wrist. She grasps Sid's hand, thumb gentle in the redhead's palm, fingers loose.
Shakes her head, no. This is gentle too. Private somehow, the smeared reflection of light in her eyes.
"We need to stay inside the wards." Her voice is quiet, her pupils are hugely dilated from the drug and darkness, drowning-black. "There's some air coming beneath the door, though. You can feel it if you sit down."
SidSid has not showered. The nerves, the tension that make it impossible for her to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, make the close quarters of the bathroom nearly unbearable. With no change in clothes she's still dressed in her ragged shirt with its faded, cracked design, and her frayed and fraying jeans. Her shoes, their condition just as bad as the rest of her belongings, are over by the chair she claimed, her socks tucked safely inside each. Ash still clings to the denim fabric, still grits against the surface of her skin. Maybe in the morning, when the thought of remaining in this filthy state becomes intolerable, she'll hop in for a quick scrub.
For now, though, she remains disheveled. And becomes a little moreso when she catches movement beside the door, just as her hand is reaching for that handle. Even if she didn't notice it too late, there's not enough space for her to sidestep far enough to avoid the contact. Sera's hand finds hers in the dark and Sid, her chest tightens as she chokes down a gasp that might have woken the others, her self-preservation instincts mimicking courtesy. Still, she twists, turning quickly away automatically. Her hand she yanks away from that loose, gentle grasp with unneccessary vehemence. This, too, is automatic. Sera hadn't gripped her hand for long, but the heat of it would still be imprinted on her fingers. Sid's hands radiate a gentle heat, a warmth that can be a comfort, if only she could bring herself to touch people, or be touched by them in return.
It is a quirk of hers that seems no less abated by her time in the van, when she made herself rub Jim's back as his stomach heaved.
Sid's panic is momentary, settling down enough that she can hear Sera's quiet words. In the darkness, it's difficult but not impossible to see the distress that crosses Sid's features on hearing those words. Her heart hammers so hard against her ribs she's almost positive the sound will disturb the others, even though logically she knows that it won't, it can't. Her brows furrow, and she casts a stricken look over her shoulder at the door that should be her salvation but isn't. She's trapped in here, with these others.
She could go back to her place in her chair, over near to the windows, but she doesn't. Instead, she closes her eyes and breathes in a deep, steadying breath, which is followed by another. And she takes Sera's suggestion. Already turned with her back toward the door, she crosses her ankles and she drops to the floor. Removing her glasses, she scrubs at her face as she leans back against the ancient wood. She feels the air, light and feathery against her skin. More than that, she feels the power of the wards as they creep up her spine, loosening her thoughts and still somehow supporting her.
SerafineSera's first instinct - a deep, abiding physical instinct - is to drape her arm over Sid's shoulders when Sid slides down to the floor. Settles with her back against the door, the cage of the wards Jim has worked pulsing all round them. It is an instinct the creature arrests, mid-movement, tucking her half-raised arm back against the line of her body, tipping her head backwards and letting it slide against the wall, cushioned by the damp fall of her hair.
She can hear Sid's heart pounding; that panic is a taut, bright skein all around her and there is a certain concordance between the brightness of her fear, the bird-fast pounding of Sid's beating heart, and the pulsation and trail of the tracers in Sera's vision.
So, they sit. Sera still smells faintly of vomit. Also: orange juice and clove cigarettes, cheap, scratchy pink soap and Doritos.
"I can calm you down." The offer comes five minutes later. It is quiet; like Sid, Sera is aware of all the other bodies in the room. The awareness is a tattoo in the back of her mind, the darkness of the room seems to breath around them and the walls move. Sometimes there are no walls for her, but she still remembers the wards. " - if that would help you Be."
Noise in the back of her throat; the swish of gatorade in a plastic bottle as she uncaps it and takes a sit. "Or help you sleep. I don't know how long we'll have to stay here.
"Do you understand - " a pause, a cessation, then, " - who might be looking for us? Who those people were?"
SidThe quiet stretches out around them, broken only by the sound of Sid's heart and the breathing of those sleeping or pretending to be. In those five minutes between Sera's arrested instinct to comfort and her offer to calm Sid down, the redhead's heart rate has slowed. Her breathing has eased. Her muscles, though still a far shot from relaxed, are not as tightly tensed. In those five minutes she has breathed deeply, slowly in, slowly out, in measured, practiced waves. She sits with legs folded, her hands resting loosely on her knees. Her glasses are still held lightly in the curl of the fingers of her left hand; she doesn't need them in this darkness, had only picked them up because she thought she'd be able to escape for a little while, to get fresher air than can be found inside the hotel room.
The offer is made anyway, to which Sid gives the same slight nod she'd given to Dan when he'd offered her a gun. Except, this time the reasoning is different. She doesn't know how to handle a weapon like that. She does know how to slow her panic, it just takes time. Time she doesn't usually have when she's around people she doesn't know.
She doesn't answer the next question immediately, but thinks on it. Her thoughts are shifting in her mind, difficult to grasp. Does she understand? Does she know who those people were?
"A little," she says finally, her voice soft and low. Her chin, tipped down and away as she worked to calm the racing of her heart, lifts a little, angles just enough that she can see Sera's pale profile. "I...try to stay out of the way."
Serafine"That's a good policy." Sera returns. Her voice is dream-like and as attenuated as the darkness in the room. The bottle of gatorade is returned to the floor, and she turns her hand over, palm up to the ceiling. She does not always see the ceiling, now. Sometimes she sees constellations, changing in time with the movement of the bodies of heavens no one has ever seen before. Sometimes, she just sees darkness. Sometimes she sees snow falling like ash - no, ash falling like slow - between the trunks of silent trees. "Though not always possible.
(Cue quiet, the creeping disorientation of Jim's psyche, the breathing, psychedelic swirl of the darkness; the strange shadows that cut through the drawn blinds. The sound of an 18-wheelers airbrakes sighing open in the parking lot.)
"I don't know how long we're going to need to stay here."
And then again, later, her head suddenly slung aslant, her eyes dark, devoured by pupils, the convex curve of her neck, the taut pull of the tendons flanking her spine. The hint of her teeth behind the soft curve of her mouth, spreading now in a drugged, delirious half-smile.
"I'm out of my depth, too."
SidThere is a sound that comes from Sid's spot in front of the door, a quick outburst of air that could almost be a laugh. It has the feel of humor to it, the mirthless, desolate kind. On another dot in the linear track of Sid's timeline it might have resolved into a low, throaty chuckle, but no. It's just a breath. She doesn't think her heart could sink any lower.
She's wrong.
It comes with the Sera's repetition of I don't know how long we're going to need to stay here. Sid's heart drops through her stomach, through the floor, burrows a hole through the crust of the earth and tries to make itself to the planet's molten center. Maybe that heat could give her heart new life, allowing it to return to her body. For now, though, a sort of cold, empty dread seeps into her stomach and starts to work its way up.
It catches in her throat, tightening it. It burns in her cheeks. It tingles behind her eyes. When she speaks, her voice is choked, desperate.
"I know. I know it's for the best, but...I don't...I don't want to stay here." Her voice drops away at the last, so low that if the room weren't already nearly completely silent she wouldn't be heard. There is a quiet desperation in her, in her voice and in her Pattern.
SerafineThe elastic pull of that desperation seizes through Sid's voice; once more, Sera's head slides down the wall until her forehead hits the door jam. She leans forward against the wood framing like a fulcrum, balanced and drifting and intense.
The a/c rattles and sighs beside her; white noise like the background hum of the universe. Between the two women, Sera's arm. She forgot it was attached to her body, but sees the faint pale glow of it, the shadow interrupting the dull line of light from outside the hotel room. The wash of sepia street lights in the parking lot, the brilliant fluorescing of the ugly lights that flank each cheap room.
And, there is her hand. Her left hand. She turns it over, dark ink on her palm, crawling up her index and middle fingers. Palm up on the floor.
Sid does not like to be touched.
Sera does not touch her.
But her palm is open, between them.
"You should tell me why not." And her voice is rich, open, inflected, sure. "I'll help you if I can."
Sid"I don't like to be trapped," she says, the words spilling from her lips in a rush. She digs the heel of her hand into her eye, as though the overflow of emotions could be stopped with physical pressure. That's not how it works, though. Her hand comes away damp, drops into her lap. Tipping her head back, it bumps softly against the door behind her, and she reminds herself to breathe. In and out. There is room to move here, Mara made good use of it earlier. Not that her constant pacing had helped with Sid's nerves in the slightest.
Sera lays her hand on the floor between them. Sid's eyes dart down and her brows tighten, emotion twisting her gut, desperation and something else at war inside. Sera, even in the throes of a high or perhaps because of them, offers Sid comfort without really offering it. She leaves it there, in plain sight, giving Sid the option to accept it or leave it as she will.
It is, in fact, the best way to invite the stray Orphan to come closer. Her own hand, her right hand, drops to the floor beside her hip, but comes no nearer to Sera's. Wanting, but not quite ready.
Her head rolls away, her eyes lifting to the ceiling - which for her is just a ceiling, unfortunately. "Trapped means..." she starts, but her face tightens, and she shakes her head.
Serafine"Mmmph." So, so quiet, the noise in the back of her throat. Sera's eyes are dark glassy pools on Sid's face, then slide like rain down to the floor as Sid allows her hand to fall. The carpet is rough and worn to an insubstantial, matted blur, the fibers long since broken down. There is that edge of light from outside. The hint of cool air. The promise of darkness as wide and endless as the sky somewhere beyond the rings of limited access highways and ex-urban settlement.
"I knew a girl who was trapped. Maybe not like you. Hospitals and - " a drifting pause as she turns her head to follow the movement of light across the room. Some stirring from one of the beds. Some strange noise that people make when they sleep. " - boot camps.
"Her name was Chastity."
Then her head tips back again, until it is the crown rather than the back of her skull balanced against the exterior wall.
Sera's thumb moves with unconscious surety across the curve of her open palm. Following the lines of the tattoo on her skin.
"What does being trapped mean, Sid?"
SidSid falls quiet, whatever words she might say caught like birds in the cage of her chest. They flutter against her ribs, crash against her sternum, desperate for release but unable to be freed. Sera fills the sudden silence with her own quiet voice. Sid shifts uncomfortably, lifts her hand from the floor to rub the opposite shoulder and the side of her neck.
Hospitals and boot camps, she says, all in the past tense. There's movement from one of the beds. Sid looks out over the room without moving her head, her mouth pressed to a firm line.
"It means," she says, sucking in a shaky breath, "this." She nods her head, meaning this, this room, this cramped space that smells vaguely of mold and too many bodies, of Gatorade and Doritos. "But...not this. I can't leave, but no one here wants to hurt me. I can still breathe a little."
JimJim stirs, eyes fluttering open with a gentle sigh that holds the semiconscious vibration of vocal chords.
His shoulders shimmy as he rights himself, slouching upward and against the headboard and probably giving it less of a smack against the wall than it's used to from the hotels' other transient occupants. The movement pulls him further into the present.
Some time in the night he'd managed to pull off that sweat-drenched v-neck and slip himself under the covers, chukkas kicked off on two thuds on the floor.
Well, some time the previous night, to be exact. He'd slowly undressed himself, piece of clothing by piece of clothing every few hours, until he only wore a pair of saggy boxer briefs in that gross shade of grey that shows its wetness like a newspaper left in the rain. Luckily he'd pulled himself under the nylon-polyester-or-whatever-the-Hell that stuff is they make all these motel bedsets out of.
He looked drained and beaten to Hell, and he'd taken a good day or two to simply sleep and eat whatever was placed near him. It gave his blood time to filter through the organs that needed to do their work.
He wipes the sleep out of one eye with the back of his hand, coming across to do the same to the other with the butt of a thumb. He hasn't seemed to notice anyone else shares the room with him yet. It may be by choice.
SerafineThe air conditioning rattles and chokes and coughs and hums. Wheezing like a rattletrap bellows as the condensor cycles off and on. "We're not trapped now, Sid." Her head is slung back, again; Sid does not have the sense that Sera's dilated eyes are focused on her profile, faint and pale in the darkness, the gleam of whatever refracted light cuts over the curving lenses of her glasses, but up and up and up.
The ceiling is as moldy and gross as the the carpet is matted and stained. There is a dark, seeping stain the shape of alaska above the chained light that hangs down over the narrow, particleboard desk. But from their vantage point, on the floor in the gloom, it is mostly lost in shadow. That darkness could be anything.
"We're hidden. We're hiding from the people who would want to trap us for having opened our eyes. Whatever traps there are for you, right now, they're all outside.
"And if you look up, in the right way," she breathes, slow and deep, as if she were savoring that strange, furiously blooming mold-scent that cycles through the a/c now and then. Damp and strange and blue-green. This is still-dreaming and still-dreamy, she's following the trail of something Sid cannot see above them as if there were no such thing as ceilings or limits in their lives. "You can still the sky."
Then, wry, low - informational. "I have some more acid," In the darkness, both brows rise. The shadow of her face is a minute query, "if you want to try it. But it might not be a good night for your first trip.
"Or I could make you feel less trapped. If you wanted me too. Just take the edge of that off so you can bear it. Until it's safe to go outside again."
SidSid glances right, then looks up, following Sera's gaze as though she could see what she sees. In the ceiling, perhaps, a pattern in the stucco in the shape of a face or a constellation, or a stain that looks like Alaska. Whatever Sera sees, whatever moves above the ceiling, Sid can't see it. She's limited, her vision trapped to what is in front of her.
We're not trapped, she says, and Sid at least does not scoff. She knows that it's not the same for other people, that not everyone gets that cold clammy feeling in the center of their chest when the door closes and they find themselves somewhere they don't want to be. Sid does not want to be here, but there are worse things. She knows a little about the people who might try to find them, and she knows that this is for the best. She knows it's for her safety that she's locked within these walls. She is trapped, but she is trapped of her own volition, of her own Will. That makes it just a little bit easier to bear.
There's more movement from one of the beds. Sid lowers her gaze, her head still pressed against the wooden comfort of the door, the portal of her wouldbe escape, to watch the shadows move. There's a slight thump from that direction, and she lifts her head up a little. Almost, she misses what Sera informs her.
There again, the small huff, that little breath that passes as close to a laugh as Sid gets these days. Only this one is colored with something else. In the darkness she does not smile. When she speaks, some of the cold, lost void escapes with her voice.
"It wouldn't be my first trip," she says, her voice a whisper in the darkness. "But it's been so long it might as well be."
JimShaking his head back and forth when the last of Serafine's words sink in, just exactly what he's refusing is anyone's guess. "This isn't my first slumber party. But it's been so long it might as well be."
He could've sworn he'd seen the sun come and go. Maybe just one of the tractor-trailers pulling into the parking lot outside, its blaring lights cast upon the curtains like a silver screen. When is it? He wonders. His eyes glance at a wrist that doesn't wear a watch. Well, his head turns toward his wrist. His eyes are still closed.
But stops caring when he looks over at Sid. He turns toward where her voice had been before his eyes finally open. Maybe, by osmosis, a bit of their conversation had managed to settle into his own subconscious mind. His dreaming psyche. Who had said what to whom and when isn't what matters as much as the tone. The symphony of voices of a conversation that had been worth awaking from his coma.
Where they all might've seen his personality as a force of nature, this is a very different Jim. The energy is toned down, much of himself given in making the Tapestry around him in his own image.
He jumps right in. "The company could be worse. I spent five years in prison. It should've been a lot more. This isn't trapped. That wasn't trapped. There are worse things than a cell. Worse things than a six by eight room. You have all the freedom you let yourself have," sounding like he wants to be motivational, but giving up when he laughs at himself. It's self-deprecating. He can't find the gumption to buy into his own brand of bullshit.
"Or a tree grows in Brooklyn. They can take our lives, but they can never take our freedom. A man is a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. And all that jazz," his forearm raised, a single index finger pointing up and spun around in a well, woop-itty-doo, circle.
"Gandhi. That last part, before the Fred Ebb showtune, was Gandhi. So it must be true. But you're both women, so you might just be fucked," the last part, he genuinely laughs at, and a small glimmer of that good-natured Jim shines through. Like he really believes it. Like he wants to lighten the mood. Like he wants it all to be alright. Like he wants them all to be safe. Alright, that part is more in the way he looks at Sid, then Serafine, then feels out for the other surrounding resonances and sounds of breathing in the dimly lit room.
He really does.
"At least we've got each other." The altruism is building momentum. It must for that to have slipped from his lips.
Serafine"I can't tell if that's a yes or a no to now - " Sera tosses back to Sid with a short, quiet laugh. Some tamped down, dampened, muted version of her usual sort. And though Sid cannot really know Sera's usual sort of laugh, she has heard them before. The night at the bar with the band and all the eyes on her. A bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a microphone, fucking up and launching into an entirely different song than her bandmates and continuing right through the first verse like it was an intentional mash-up. Then laughing through a crawling smile - white teeth flashing in a red painted mouth - and starting over like she meant to do that all along.
And maybe she did.
--
"Sleeping Beauty wakens," Sera ripostes, her voice rising enough to be caught across the dimly lit hotel room. Not enough to wake whoever's still asleep. The night is still webbed and she is still high; even Jim's words have tracers, the echo of the words trailing after them like a comet's tail. There is affection in her voice - the sudden warmth of it. Because she knows how much he spent of himself and why and wherefore. Saw him weave the wards out of the stuff of himself. Because what the fuck - " - welcome back.
"We're cool," a steepled look at Sid, the warmth in her voice lingering, maybe deepening. Maybe that's just the clove cigarettes she was smoking earlier this evening, the burnt sugar crystalized in her lungs.
The glittering reflection in her eyes - the sweep of her glance toward the orphan - stands in for a physical nudge.
"Aren't we? Just getting some fresh air. Door doesn't fit the frame so." There's a hint of a breeze.
"Sid's gonna be okay. She's working on."
And Sera? On some level, she always is. Just fine.
"What the hell were you in jail for, anyway?"
SidThe one waking turns out to be Jim. Jim, who Sid doesn't think of as a force of nature, not personality-wise. If she did, she wouldn't have regretted running away from their first meeting. She wouldn't have approached him, cautious as a stray dog, in the park. This toned down Jim is the one who bought her a ticket to a museum, who lost her in its labrynthine rooms and corridors full of dioramas and stuffed-animal-exhibits of the wildlife in Colorado, the animals of prehistory, the creatures that once lived but have now become extinct largely thanks to mankind.
Before she can respond to Sera, to that quiet laugh, Jim wakes, and in the waking picks up pieces of their conversation. And his first act of social engagement is to declare that there are worse things than this motel room. Prison was worse and even that wasn't trapped. You're only as trapped as you let yourself be.
Except, of course, when you're not.
Sid listens, her head lifting a little to peer in the direction of his voice and his vague shape on the bed. Then it lowers again, tipping forward now. Her gaze is turned down, studying the dark shape of her frames that rest in the upturned palm of her left hand. If the lights were on he would wake to see Sid's cheeks, nose, and eyes a little reddish. But the lights aren't on. All he can see is the dark shape of her taking up space by the door.
So. Instead of responding, Sid falls silent. It's not the deeply uncomfortable silence she generally lapses into. She does not tense, does not brace herself as if social circumstances are a field of thorns she has to fight her way through to get to peace again. She's just...quiet. Like she's said all there is to say, even though she hasn't. Sera says they're cool, and she lifts her head then, looking over at the woman sitting close-but-not-too-close to her, who looks at her in place nudging her.
"Oh," she says, and she looks down at the floor, at the tiny little wedge of light that seeps in under the crack, puts her hand there and feels the breeze. "Yeah."
Sera asks the interesting question, the only one that seems important to Sid right now. Why was Jim in prison, and for five years that should have been more? Sid turns her head in that direction, waiting for the answer.
Jim"I disagreed with certain Articles in Titles 18 and 21 of the United States and Colorado Revised Statutes," the earlier wordings obviously belying a lucidity that is taking hold. He turns over, and in slivers of light his form might begin to take shape. Especially to those whose eyes have so adjusted to the darkness. He is now on his side, arm cocked onto the bed, palm against his chin and legs straight. Like a model might pose for a still life.
I want you to draw me like your French girls. You get the picture.
No, he's not as much of force of personality as forced by his personality, which they all are in one way or another. Sid in a different way, and him in a way that made his amicable to hers.
"Thank you for the van. And Dan. And thank you, Dan," if he's awake, though he doesn't say it loud enough to awaken anyone who might be sleeping. Just loud enough that an eavesdropper might be able to hear it.
"And the room, Serafine." He calls her by her full name. He's yet to cut it down or clip off a half of it. Maybe it says something about how he likes its sound or its meaning or both.
"A day. Maybe two. Maybe three. I'll probably make the most of it. Pop in now and then, even after, just to throw any tails. It's... It's going to last, the willwork. A moon's life. Maybe more. Might as well make the best of it. I might ditch my security deposit and try to hustle a good rate out of the guy at the front desk," turning onto his back, adjusting the pillow under his head.
Looking at the popcorn cracked ceiling in the darkness. Something tells him it's interesting. Some vague memory, like a dream, that maybe he'd be able to see the sky if he looked up at it. "The Man might be busy dealing with the Nephandi, anyway. We've all got our priorities. That girl..."
A tick. A decision. "Can't leave her out on the streets."
Serafine"Five years - " Sera again, her laughter in the darkness more as a sharpened exhalation than anything voiced. Her chin rising, spine lengthening, shouldblades cutting sharply backward as she pulls herself completely upright. Or rather, upright enough that she can see Jim's shadow, fully articulated, posing on the bed. "That's how long I was in Catholic school, before they kicked me out.
"For getting drunk on communion wine and making out with Katie O'Connor in the sacristy. I couldn't begin to tell you the precise legal code for the charges, though."
--
Then, the litany of thank-yous. Sera says nothing in response, but Dan is awake now. He was just dozing, half-seated at the edge of one of the beds. They can hear him shift in place when address, the rough sound of his fingers in his bed as he scratches. "Welcome," Dan returns, quiet too a bit embarassed to have been eavesdropping, a bit embarassed to have been singled out. The sound of his voice drags Sera's eyes over to his shadow in the darkness. Her gaze stays there for the next little while.
"It is," going to last she means, echoes back to Jim beneath the line of his stream of consciousness about the space, lifting her eyes to ceiling and crawling across the walls. He might try to hustle a better ate of the innkeep. "I might be able to hustle a better rate out of him, for you, hey?" Sera makes a quiet noise, cuts a look back to down Jim, laying on his back on the bed.
Which is objectively true. Men usually give her what she wants.
--
And, finally. The girl. Leah.
"Jim." Still-voiced, now, is Sera. His name is spoken like an arrest. Her breath is bated, withheld in her throat. She's not agreeing to anything, yet. "What are you going to do with her?"
They're strangers, after all. Every fucking person in this room.
SidFive years. Five years of prison. Five years of Catholic school, which - to Sid - always sounded like another kind of prison. She doesn't chime in, doesn't share with them what she did or didn't do for five years, or six, or longer or less. She doesn't know what she would say.
Then comes the gratitude, for the transportation and the consor and the room. Sid doesn't expect to hear her name, but it does make her think. Of what they did and what she did, collecting her samples for study. Pointless now that she knows what it was, but perhaps she could look at them with other senses. But to do that she needs tools. She had planned to buy those tomorrow - today, now, given the hour. It doesn't look like that's going to happen now. Ah well.
The warding is going to last, for days, weeks, a month. Sid looks up. With her glasses in her hand and not on her face Jim is just a blur in a sea of other blurs. She looks in the direction of his bed, though, her expression stricken.
"But-" she starts, and stops. The hand she brings up to her mouth to gnaw on the thumbnail happens to be the one with her glasses. Carefully, she unfolds them, pushes them on, adjusts their weight on the bridge of her nose. The darkened room comes into focus. There is Dan, seated upright on the edge of one of the beds, and there is Mara where she slumbers. And Jim, laying on his back looking up at the ceiling.
But there is the girl to consider. Leah. Freshly awakened and all on her own with horrible things coming for her. "We can't look for her from in here," she says. Then, a little more uncertain, "Can we?"
Jim"I'm useless. A willworker without any will left to work with. I need a few days," his immediate response to Sid's question.
But then his attention turns back to Serafine. "I'll tell you what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to treat her as a foregone conclusion and I'm sure as Hell not leaving her to the Technocrats. I'm going to honor the path of the woman we lost," we a subtle nod to the Tradition they shared with Shelby. We counting even the consors, Jake and Dan, among them.
"She had a gun drawn on her, bleeding out in warehouse. Widderslainte? The poor thing had tears in her fucking eyes. Tamas gone mad? With a bullet coming for her and an army of mirrorshades behind it," he shakes his head.
Shakes his head on the pillow, then says, "No." A sigh and a deep breath, then the sound of nails digging into hair and skin as he scratches his head down his scruffy fact to his neck. "Maybe what you saw... Maybe the vision... Well, it wasn't what we saw, was it? Not exactly. But maybe it was the subtext."
He elaborates. "Was a time I had an avatar that was manifest. Came to me as men with faces that said things and pushed their own ideas and their own ways. If that was hers... Ugly. Ugly thing. But not all of her. Not all of her soul. And if I can help her, I'm going to."
SerafineAnd just like that, the stiffness in Serafíne's spine eases. She leans forward, palms flat on the gritty carpet, and pushes herself abruptly upright. She's barefoot, her hair still damp, heavy and long where it hasn't been shaved away. It's been a few days. She needs to shave it again soon. As she stands, she reaches up, stretching her arms up to the ceiling, allowing her banked senses to open up again to the room.
Sera is careful in the room, steps around Sid, honoring the bubble of space she requires, just so. There's a microfridge beneath the old cathode-ray TV, which is just between the beds. The bottled water and Gatorade and OJ and soda and Red Bulls and whatnot are all inside. She opens the door, pulls out a bottle of water for herself. Offers them around, wordlessly to everyone she senses awake in the room. Dan shakes his head no, lifts a bottle he's kept on the night table by way of explanation. But if Sid or Jim give her a 'yes' look, she tosses them each a bottle. Cold and damp from the sweating fridge.
She's on her way to the bathroom, but pauses between the beds, walks up toward him, a still shadow - smaller than she seems in 3-D and technicolor.
"I'm glad you said that," Sera is looking down at Jim, her face in shadow. He cannot see the faint edge of her smile, but perhaps he can sense it as she bends over him and places a chaste kiss on his temple. She smells sour from the long day and the long night, the hint of cloves lingering in her hair does little to sweeten the smell. "If you hadn't, we'd have parted ways."
Sera's going to help her, too.
"We'll figure this out tomorrow."
Now, though, she straightens, waves to Sid, a wordless goodnight, pads back through the hotel room to the bathroom. The tub is real porcelain. She likes the way it feels, cold against her skin.
"I'm going to sleep in the tub. Just wake me if someone wants a shower. Water pressure's fucked, though. Fair warning."
SidSid didn't see what they saw when they looked Back. Part of her's sad to have missed out, to not have a clear vision of the catalyst for Denver's quiet. Most of her, though, a much bigger part of her is glad. Glad not to have things pushed into her head, glad not to have shared in the horror that sent them all on the run, that led to them being holed up in this dingy little motel room with no end in sight.
A few days. That's what Jim needs to rest and reset, to be able to begin a search from within this motel room. Strangely, this news does not set Sid into a panic. She meant what she said before. In here, in this room, she may be stuck but she can breathe. At least a little.
Sera rises, stretches. Sid leans a little away, the better to look up at her rather than an attempt at increasing the space between them. The bubble that Sera traces around her is not so big as she would have needed it to be when they first met, or last night, or even an hour ago. Sid is working on.
She rises just after her, only without the stretch, weaves her way back over to her chair. Maybe she'll be able to sleep in a longer fit now, and if she does, she doesn't want to be leaning against the door. She shakes her head 'no' to Sera's offer of a beverage. Instead she folds herself up, becoming impossibly small so that all of her fits up on the seat of that ugly barely-comfortable chair. Wrapping her arms around her legs, pressing her cheek to the coarse fabric, she closes her eyes. Opens them again and lifts her head to look at Sera, offer her a wave before attempting to rest again.
And maybe she does sleep, and in longer bursts than before, waking a little less disoriented each time until the sun is up and they have to begin dealing with the cabin fever.
JimThe kiss is a simple thing, and Jim is the kind of man that can enjoy the simple things. He doesn't smile, but the sentiment is there in the swell of his chest. Another deep sigh, the kind that comes before sleep reclaims the conscious mind. "Tomorrow."
"There's room," his head turning from where it had been regarding (contemplating) the ceiling. It allows him to cast the words at Sid. He says it even as she takes the chair. Says it anyway. And means it.
Before his eyes shut again and his breath again matches the heartbeat of the universe in its steady persistence.
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