2:53 a.m.

Serafíne

2:53 a.m. Wednesday-into-Thursday morning.

Hard to say what wakes him up. The slam of the car door outside on the dark and quiet street, or the rustling of his bushes. She doesn't ring his fucking doorbell but that is a close thing. There's the errant whine of the front door opening late at night and the clatter of heels on his old, battered hardwood floors. The solid thunk of a small frame against drywall, as she gets disoriented in the darkness.

This night last she was stoned but calm and clear and humming, beneath her breath, a soothing song as she scrubbed his dried blood from his back, all one-with-the-universe. Cleaned the passenger's side of the truck too, with whatever chemicals were tucked beneath the sink and the world's largest pile of paper towels. Left him to sleep in his truck and spent the rest of her evening sitting at the fire; or maybe sleeping in the cabin, and caught a ride back to Denver with him the next morning, too.

Told him she had a gig that night. One she couldn't miss because she'd skipped out on so many recently, her bandmates getting pissed (Rick) or just hurt (Dee). Did he know that they still don't have a name? Bright and sober in the morning light, Sera prattled about inconsequential things all the way back. She did not ask him if he had called Rafael, but we would be lying if we said she had not checked the history of her phone to see if a call had been made. Beyond the suggestion and offer, though, she'd said nothing more about it.

There's a moment where she's standing in the dark in his little hallway, swaying like a reed, deciding Where to Go Next. Whether to wake him or just sink to the floor with her bottle and wait for morning. She's drunk. She's really fucking drunk, and that's what decides her. Her body.

--

So maybe what wakes him is the sound of her retching. The bilious scent of her vomit.

This is where he finds her: in his bathroom, on her hands and knees on the bathmat, poised over his toilet. She is wearing a bikini-style bustier. The band is black, tapered and hooked in the back. The cups are covered with tiny, textured pink roses. That's what he sees: the black band interrupting the long articulation of her spine, her bare flanks heaving, this hitching, segmental crawl of her vertebrae as her body spasms and she pukes.

Again, and again, and again.

Long hair hanging everywhere, her shoes kicked off. Hands flat on the linoleum. The soles of her feet dirty in her fishnets, a few beads of dried blood from minor lacerations on her ankles and lower calves.

A nearly-full bottle of fairly cheap champagne is parked on the floor by the bathtub.

Hard to smell anything but vomit and alcohol, but there's this, too: the faint threads of her frustrated Work are hanging in the air around her. Overlaid with the lingering, oleaginous corruption of His.

Pan

It's the collision of impermanent body against drywall that jolts him. The hinges and the heels started to slowly drag him up out of his nothingness but the closeness and the loudness of that thump thrusts open his eyes and he sits up before registering honest and full why it is he's on his feet and going for the baseball bat.

Last time he hadn't called out a warning to the intruder before coming upon her in the kitchen. He hadn't fully dressed. Tonight for whatever reason he fell asleep on top of the sheets and blankets in his socked feet and dress clothing. Another funeral maybe. Last Rites late at night. Whatever: she does not have the presence of mind to note that but for the shoes that when he appears on the threshold between the bathroom and the hallway he's dressed all in black.

The arm holding onto the baseball bat remains out of sight.

"Madre de Dios."
The quickest prayer he knows.

Before he steps into the bathroom he puts the bat down in the corner. The handle clicks against the drywall and his feet make no sound. The pulsing of John Brogan's resonance does not frighten him out into the hallway. He swallows down the rise of copper in his throat and crouches down to take up her hair in both his hands, peel it off her face and neck and hold it back. Doesn't put a hand anywhere else.

When he speaks, if he speaks, it's in the lull between purges.

"Estoy aquí," he says and his voice is quiet and still-rough with sleep. "Estás a salvo, no te puede encontrar."

Serafíne

How did he know not to touch her? He just peels her hair off her face and neck; and even in the middle of purging he can see her muscles tense and flinch when his hands come close to her skin. Had he put a hand on her, her shoulder or her heaving spine, she would have recoiled like a wounded animal, lashed out with the flare of a half-hissed warning. But he does not touch her; just skims up her hair in his hands and holds it back as she throws up.

The only think in her stomach is a churning mixture of alcohol, but her diaphragm continues spasming three or four times after her stomach is entirely emptied out. She just kneels there, crouched over the toilet, letting it all come up. Acknowledging his presence only with a faint, stiff nod when that rough, quiet Spanish emerges in the moments when she's catching her breath.

Serafíne is not injured. Not seriously; there's not a bruise or a mark on her body, except for a few small cuts on her lower legs and feet where she was lacerated by flying glass from the whiskey bottle she dropped on the dance floor after he left. Her feet and legs are sticky with it, and when she finally, finally, finally makes it through a full and quiet minute without dry heaving, and sits back on her heels, and reaches up to rub her mouth with the back of her right hand and flush away her stomach contents, it is the sticky-sweet smokiness of the whiskey that remains behind, the dominant scent beneath the churning bile.

A moment of stillness, before she reaches up and puts her hand through her hair, slowly shaking it free of his hands without coming close to touching him.

The she reaches out, shuts the toilet seat and lid in one gesture and lifts herself to perch on the edge of the seat. Legs together, knees together, shoulders forward, hunched and curled, this self-protective posture that invites no comfort. She is aware of him (she cannot ignore him), and he knows this by the way she avoids so much as looking in his direction. By the way she turns her head so that she cannot and need not see him. Keeping her eyes down, searching the floor for her bottle of cheap champagne.

If the champagne is in reach, she reaches for it. If not, she holds out her hand expectantly, as if he's supposed to enable her. Pass on more booze because she's just emptied her stomach entirely into his toilet.

"He came to the show," she tells him; when she can speak at last. Five minutes or more sitting there, feeling the room spin, tasting the acid burn in the back of her throat. She's looking ahead, at the darkness in the hall. Just cheats her face toward him enough that he can tell she's addressing him. But she cannot fucking look at him; can hardly look at his shadow.

"He likes me."

Here, a sharp little inhale flares her nostrils. Her eyes are glassy, her movements loose as a snake with its jaw unhinged. "Thinks I've got real - " and a shuddering exhale, " - potential."

Pan

He has a son. He had a relationship with his son's mother when she was still pregnant. The sort of relationship where she trusted him enough to thrust her inconsolable baby at his father as soon as his father got home smelling of brake dust and heroin withdrawal. Francisco learned when he was eighteen years old what happens when a man puts his hand on a woman when she's knelt over the toilet to vomit.

Beyond that: he feels the Fallen's resonance warping the air around her. The thought of touching her does not repulse him but it was not too long ago that he smacked away Annie's hand and roared at her to get off of him before he fell out of the passenger seat of the truck and revealed himself to be too concussed to walk properly. Not entirely sure if he was yelling at Annie or at the Fallen.

As soon as she straightens from her supplicant posture he lets go her hair and hauls himself to his feet. The crackling of sinovial joints when he knelt was a dull dry sound lost beneath the wetness of rejected alcohol but when he stands his ankles and vertebrae pop like dust on lit kindling. He does not complain. He gives her her space.

She has to pick up the champagne bottle herself but this is not a large bathroom. By the time she starts to speak he's out in the hallway again, a dark form in the shadows. Doesn't occur to her much during her hours of sobriety but Father Echeverría is a tall, broad, scary-looking man. He's got eyes easily inclined to broadcast wildness and when he stands in ill light with his face unshaven and his hair mussed he looks like he could Fall or lose his mind and no one would notice until he was burying that baseball bat in someone's head.

It's no wonder she can't look at him.

"Demons will say all sorts of things to open up cracks you already got," he says. "And we all got cracks where they can get in, girl. But you can't listen to him or they're gonna get bigger. Él es un mentiroso, you understand? He lies. That's what they do."

Serafíne

So she reaches for the champagne bottle herself as he's exiting the bathroom. Is uncoordinated enough that she almost topples from the seat of the toilet before she somehow rights herself and carries her prize in a triumphant sweep upward. Holds it by the neck and takes a long, sour pull from the bulbous mouth, then tucks the bottle firmly between her thighs. Hugs it close.

Él es un mentiroso.

It's the Spanish that pulls her eyes right up to him; this huffed out, scoffing breath, the faintest roll of her eyes for his naivetée, drunk and glassy as they are.

"Yeah?" Her right hand goes to her mouth, asmear with crimson lipstick, then. Cups her chin, index finger and thumb spread across her mouth and she contracts her paraspinals to forestall the shudder that wants to open up through her body. Left hand's raised though, pointer finger crooked like a parliamentarian stepping up to the microphone countering some half-remembered opposition argument. "Well. He didn't ask you or Jim to pop 'round his place for a little chat sometime."

Her attention slips from him, drips away like the yolk of an egg sliding down a wall. She is looking off at something unseeable just stage left when she remembers, suddenly, the fucking champagne bottle and takes another swig.

"Did he."

It's not his darkness, the wildness in his eyes. The rumpled clothes and rough scrim of black-and-gray whiskers bristling under his dark skin. Not his wild eyes or the bulk of his shadow in the hall that keeps has her shunting her gaze away.

It's her shame.

"He sees something in me."

Pan

So the priest drags his hand down his face. The scruff on his jaws hisses against the callouses on his palms and she hears him sigh but it's not frustration or bewilderment. A weight settles on his shoulders and he shores himself up against it. Eyes the bat once before he steps back into the bathroom, memorizes its placement in case something walks through the door that don't belong here.

He crouches next to her the way he did when he dragged her up from sleep in the sanctuary weeks ago, down on one knee with his arms draped across his thigh.

"He's warped, Sera," he says, "his mind and his Avatar, everything is trashed and it's not coming back. You didn't do nothing or say nothing to get his attention. Could just as easily been Shoshannah or Sid." A beat. "Besides, I go 'round his place, I'll kill him. That's why he don't invite me over for tea."

Serafíne

That night he woke her from sleep she - well, she yearned toward the warmth of his solid body. She always does: such a physical, tactile creature. Tonight when he sinks low beside her, settling his considerable weight on one aging knee, she turns almost imperceptibly away from him. Scoots a half-inch to closer to the counter on the toilet seat, without every realizing, entirely, that she's shying from any contact, any contact whatsoever.

He tells her it could just as easily have been Shoshannah or Sid, and Sera shakes her head, a wordless, immanent no. Obdurate and intractable. He is wrong, and Serafíne knows this as surely as she knows that she has already decided not to give in to the sick roil of revulsion and shame so fucking alive inside her tonight.

"This wasn't a chance encounter." Her chin drifts downward, away from him. She is avoiding him and avoiding any stretch of his reflection in the vanity mirror, looking down at the battered undersink cabinet through the sweep of her dark lashes. Sera swallows, picks up the bottle and holds it sideways while her unfocused eyes crawl over the label, without ever really seeing it. "He sought me out. He was waiting for him.

"I couldn't feel him. He cloaked himself so I wouldn't sense him, but he was there the whole time, watching." Her voice is almost inflectionless, her gaze cast off to the side. Face almost expressionless except for the bladed little twist of a half-huffed smile with that last word. Watching. "I didn't see him until we were finished. Walking through the crowd on the dance floor.

"My friends were up there. Dan and Dee and Rick. Told Dan to get them outta there and jumped down to intercept him.

"He could see my fear. Asked me why I didn't run away. What the fuck - " and as she tells the story, there's a drunken-sort of sobriety creeping back into her. The room's still spinning, he can see that in the way she sways in place, even sitting still. In the way she leans forward, clutching the bottle of champagne like it was a lifeline. " - like that would've done me any good."

And her band was there; up on the stage behind her.

"He asked me to dance." A side glance here; her eyes on his shadow, then his knee, then his arm. Perhaps his mouth, never quite his eyes. "I'm not lying, Pan. He was pleased when I said yes."

Then her eyes close. She's too tired to stave off the shudder that envelopes her small frame, and does not bother to try.

Pan

"I believe you. Can I have that?"

That - the champagne bottle. He doesn't reach out to take it from her and he won't even if she refuses to hand it to him. He indicates it with a tilt of his chin all the same, his eyes flicking from her face to the bottle and back. If she gives it to him he thanks her and sets it down underneath the sink where it won't spill if a boot hits it or a hand loses its grip.

If she clings to it he lets her. Doesn't move to impede upon her space any more than he already has.

"Sera. Look at me."

Serafíne

Maybe it's the I believe you or the shadowed movement of his head. The tilt of his chin. The quiet calm in his voice that has her dropping her eyes to the neck of the bottle and considering it and considering her shadow in the overhead light cast down over the tiled floor. She wraps her hand around the neck and lifts it up, waveringly, holding it out to him. Lets it go as soon as he has grabbed it, and thoroughly regrets the loss.

Then he tells her to look at me.

And she does. This fractional movement of her eyes, this sidelong look that does not resolve itself into a straightforward response.
There's spittle at the corners of her mouth. Dried white.

Pan

"M'ija..."

He says it gentle but slow, as if it causes him a pain he deflects to see her like this. It's no more powerful or purposeful than the Madre de Dios he breathed into the air when he saw her dropped in front of the toilet but neither is it a prayer for guidance or protection. The dark wretched part of her that attracted the Fallen does not beat back the priest.

Maybe he doesn't see it or he doesn't even know what she's on about. Doesn't matter. He looks at her with the same compassion with which he would look at any of the members of his parish come to him saying they used again, they slept with their husband's brother again, they wanted an abortion. Doesn't look at her like he's about to tell her every single person on this planet is a sinner himself included and he isn't going to judge her but it's true.

She isn't one of his flock but it's gone beyond that now. He lets the law and God deal with the problems that his parishioners cannot rectify with his help. Never in his life has he told someone who took Communion from him that he'd kill someone who was fucking with them. That's where they're at, now. Isn't even a vengeance thing. Pan called John Brogan a demon. It's gone beyond that now.

"How'd you get away from him?"

Serafíne

Maybe it's the pain in his eyes that hooks her gaze, and keeps her own blue eyes fixed on him. She's wearing stage make-up. Heavy black liner, heavy black mascara. Dark shadow all around, though it has smeared with her sweat, her scrubbing hands. Only the mascara has survived the night intact.

But it hurts her to look at him. Like he's too clean and too bright and too sure for her to comprehend.

Like she's too drenched in filth to be this close to him.

All that in the framing tension of her eyes.

There's a hook-curl to her mouth, though. He asks her how she got away from him, and she breathes out a huff of laughter.

"He let me go."

--

Breathes in, altogether, all-at-once.

"Told me he wouldn't stop me if I ran away from the beginning."

But her friends were there; and in any case: running away does not seem to be in Serafíne's nature. She's always fucking running toward everything.

"He said I shouldn't be afraid of him. That I should be wary, but not afraid. He said that alcohol pollutes the body. And that we were shaky for the first three songs.

"Said I'm not like you. That you were strong, but I could be limitless, because I understand things that you don't. Like pain. Not what it feels like, but what it means." The quote is so direct, so well-remembered, that she has to drop her eyes from his, and Pan can almost hear the Brogan's resonant tone embedded in Sera's low, familiar voice. "He cut out all the noise from the crowd; closed us in and told me that he could give me back everything I'm missing, everything I've closed off, if I was strong enough to look.

"I tried to scry his future."

She's staring down at the floor again, her head drifting and bobbing like a buoy on the dark, dark ocean. A line between her brows.

"He felt me Working and shut it down. Didn't even bother to hurt me."

--

She stares at the floor, silent, for several long heartbeats. This heaves a breath, her shoulders lilting upward with it.

"He said, I should come talk to him. That you know where to find him. And that I should come alone, or the next time he wouldn't be as friendly."

Without the champagne bottle to support her weight, Sera has slowly curled her arms inward, low around her torso. Her brows rises in an expressive lilt, like she cannot quite believe in the denouement.

"Then he just left. I didn't get away from him. He let me go."

Pan

Through all of that Pan just rests where he is on his one knee that isn't going to hold up through too many more decades of kneeling and he watches her even when she won't look at him and he doesn't interrupt. Doesn't even look like he wants to interrupt. He could listen to her talk all night but the night is hurtling towards a conclusion.

She thinks she knows the dance after this. Water and a blanket. No aspirin, no sex, nothing that could take away the consequence of drinking beyond the fact that he accepts this as a part of her, a choice she makes, a lifestyle and not an addiction.

He knows where to find John Brogan and he knows what he'll find when he gets there and what he's capable of and he knows if he goes it won't be a surprise and he knows what pain is and what it is to inflict pain and what it is to endure pain and he knows what it is to see nothing but blackness empty and starving when you look in the goddamn mirror and to regret every breath you're cursed to haul in and to get it into your head that one day it'd be better to choke off the breathing than go through another day but he doesn't tell her any of this.

It's better for her and everybody else if they think he's nothing but light and strength and stupid baseless hope.

He pulls himself to his feet and uses the sink for leverage and swallows the exertion it takes to get up off cold hard tile rather than worn carpet over worn hardwood.

"We're done talking to him."

Serafíne

Oh, she knows the dance. The way the couch cushions compress beneath her weight; the way the cording lining the upholstery will dig into her face and leave a line in her cheek for the first half-house after she awakens. The way that immanent sense of light that remains, radiant, in the space even after the lights are off and full night has fallen will infect her sleep or her hallucinations. The musty smell of the old pillow he pulls out for her.

She knows it but isn't thinking about any of it. Seems so lost, so drenched in the wrongness of Brogan's Work, around and about her, and never to her, not that night. Not until she tried to divine his future - in the wrongess of Brogan's Work and his words and his knowledge, and his awareness of the lapses in her own history.

Do you think he saw -

- she asked Pan, not even a week ago. The priest thought she meant: her. Asked her if she had felt him scrying. This is what she meant, though: did he see the holes in her; the missing pieces that she knows will only be filled by dark and darker things.

And again, fucking again, Sera will not look at Pan. She always looks at him, keeps her eyes steady on him when he's in any space they share. Pan has no idea that she does this or what it means, but Rosa does. Rose would. Tonight, Sera looks at Pan only when the priest directs her to do so, or when he moves, as he does now, rising in her peripheral vision.

How it is she sees him, really, sees him, in the midst of her own drunken misery is a question best left to the gods of chance and Dionysius, too. But her attention hangs on him, captured, her mouth half-open, for a heart-stopping stutter-step of time.

Then she closes her eyes. Contemplates reaching for the bottle of champagne he took away from her, because she does not want to be on that couch along with her thoughts. Gauges whether or not she could do it without falling over, and concludes that she cannot.

She's listing to the right now. Nodding a bit but not so much in agreement as with the movement of the room.

Oh, god, she wants to tell him how sorry she is.
But her throat is closed and she's not sure she remembers the words.