Clean.

Pan

Out in the darkness he could conceal his weariness and his stripped-bare rawness because the blood was dark and looked as if buckets soaked into his shirt. None on his face or hands meant nothing. He walks up the steps and into the cabin and there in the light the toll of his encounter with the Nephandus comes on slow like the electric pink of the sky as the sun rises in the morning before the world below it does.

His body was healed. He did not tell them how he didn't black out, not really, how he lost consciousness from the force of the blow and came to choking on his own blood. Told them he would have died if Annie weren't there. Everything he said tonight was true but his eyes didn't blink and he did not embrace Sera when she wrapped an arm around him.

Now he stands in the center of the cabin. It is not unfamiliar to him. He has been here before, once, and he knows which room Leah sleeps in and he knows if he went out to the truck and came back and put a bullet between her eyes before she opened them that would not solve everything.

It would solve one thing but not everything.

He's standing there when Sera trails in after him and when he hears the door whine open he snaps out of whatever place the solitude brought him to and moves into the bathroom. Doesn't turn on the light and doesn't think she'll follow him in there. He ought to know her better than that.

If she comes to see what the hell he's doing: he's sat on the edge of the bathtub in the outfit he would have died in, elbows on his knees, everything in the bathroom off, his brow rested in the heels of his hands. The posture of one praying for succor but if he prays he does it silently. More like he sat down to take off his boots and exhaustion claimed him and he thought he was alone enough to let it.

Serafíne

He ought to know her better than that.

There are scrapes and thumps in the cabin outside. The lights are on from where Jim turned them on, except for the bathroom, Leah's room, and another of the spare bedrooms. Pan is in the darkness, sitting on the edge of the porcelain bathtub, head in the heels of his hands. Outside: the (by now familiar) thud-thud of Sera removing her boots. She heel-toes them off just inside the door, leaves them piled on a rubber mat and pads across the hardwoods through the kitchen to the fridge. The soft slap of her fishnet-clad feet on the hardwoods heralds her movement around the place. And the quiet, thoughtless hum of her voice, some background and half-remembered song.

He thinks he is alone and that she will leave him alone. And she does; for a time. Glances at him when she steps into the cabin, an alertness wreathing about her. She's high, yes. But she's not fucked up. She's tuned in to the pattern all around them, hooked into the stream, aware of the beating of his heart. And Leah's. Jim's and Sid's rabbit-fast outside. The bats swooping low in the darkness overhead and the raccoon eyeing their trash and the slow-deep-beat of life in the trees and scrub all around the cabin.

So, she glances at him standing in the center of the room and then away as he walks off toward the bathroom without looking back at her. Busies herself taking off her shoes, padding to the fridge. Glancing outside at the ring of firelight where Sid and Jim are. Stands at the window by the sink just looking and and listening and being still. Waiting for the familiar beat of water against porcelain from the bathroom. Listening for it, really.

He has a few minutes alone, then. Long enough to strip off his clothes and turn on the water and step beneath the shower and let the day drain away. But he doesn't turn on the water and there's no sound from the bathroom. Just the beat of his heart against her senses. The lingering resonance of the Work he had performed. And the Work that had been done to him.

--

The bathroom door opens, then. That slice of light beneath the door expands and contracts and her slender shadow darkens it as she peeks, then slips in. Sera closes the door behind her with a firm but gentle pressure and gives herself a moment for her eyes to adjust to the sudden lack-of-light.

She smells of clove cigarettes and hashish and smoke from Jim's fire. Chanel No. 5 and the nightwind. And her Work: the animal immediacy of it, so close to her skin.

Sera slips by Pan. Pauses just in front of him and bends over, quite nearly placing a kiss on the crown of his bent head. She stops short, though, studying him in the darkness through half-lashed eyes. Stands there, close in her own aspect of prayer or benediction, then slips past. Sets a bottled protein shake from some organic juice bar down in Denver, which is still damp from the ice in her cooler, on the bathroom beside him and a bottle of Gatorade on the sink in front of him. Then folds her small frame into the space between the bathtub and the sink, just beside him, sitting first on her knees, then curling back until she's cross-legged at his feet and looking up at him in the darkness.

She says nothing, nothing at all, Sera.

Just reaches out and starts unlacing his boots.

Pan

He sits in the dark to fill the cracks in his armor with the words he knows by heart and the truth that did not fall away from him with the assault from the Fallen. His scripture is silent but she knows from the stillness in him that he is praying. His breathing is steady enough that she might mistake him for sleeping. As she slept she was not aware of the cadence of his respirations.

All she has seen of him is that he does not judge and he does not give in to strong emotion. He feels emotion but it does not rule him. He is calm and even outside he was calm but it was an Old Testament sort of calm. Like if anything had come out of the woods meant to harm Sera or Jim or Sid he would have stricken down that thing. Nothing he could do from a distance and he knows that now. He knows that he transgressed.

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.

At the thump of the bottle on the sink, on the tub beside him, he breathes deep and pulls his hands away from his face. The Cultist is at his feet and he can smell the hashish around her and his eyes are still wide in the dark but they are not wild. Maybe it was the fire made them wild, stood to close to it after whatever happened to him.

"Sera--" he starts to say but then stops himself. For what is comfort in a time of crisis but a helper sent by the Lord? Who is he to push her aside? Pride landed him here and pride will keep him here.

He wears cowboy boots without laces. His jeans conceal the hides of them and they run up his calves beneath the denim. They slip off with some coaxing. He lifts one foot and then the other. He runs both hands through his hair and holds it back off his face a moment.

"--thank you. I'm alright now."

Pan

Prayer. She sensed that he was praying and that is what stopped her from planting that kiss on the crown of his head. That kiss is a sort of prayer for her; every morning she wakes up in her own bed and slips down the stairs and finds her housemates groggy over coffee and donuts or last night's pizza and sushi or cornflakes with whiskey or what the fuck every they might be eating, she greets them each like that. Slipped behind them, a kiss on the crown of the head, a quiet, sleepy hug from behind. Dahlia and Rick and Dan, all of them. Whoever they might've brought him, too. Whomsoever they're sleeping with, whoever crashed overnight, in the spare room or on the couch or on the cabana bed out in the back garden, where she opens up the curtains to look at the stars and the garden in darkness when she wants to smoke what she wants to smoke, and where she closes the curtains and the blinds when she sleeps with whomever she wishes to sleep with.

Now she's at his feet, not precisely looking up at him. Running her hands beneath the hem of his jeans for leverage to pull off his cowboy boots. Accepting the help he gives her and shifting them off then putting them aside, beside the sink, where neither of them will trip.

Jesus washed the feet of his disciples before he was crucified. One by one by one. Laid down their objections, one by one by one. Sera was raised Catholic; she knows the rite but the resonance is so distant for her, so shrouded by history and her lack of belief that she may not see any of these parallels. Pan, though. He knows the scriptures by heart. The Old and the New.

"Yeah, well," she's still looking down, the crown of her head golden in the dim light. "You might not be after you try that protein shake. It's beet juice and banana and wheatgrass and chia seeds and almond butter. So."

She's after his socks now; pulling down the shafts, which are stiff with blood in places. With his blood, which makes her feel stricken when she thinks of it and all she's drawn him into. So she doesn't think about it.

Just pulls the shaft of his left sock down over his rough heel, nevermind the blood and dried sweat, the humid, human smell of feet encased in thick leather in summer. Lightly as she speaks, there's a sort of visceral undercurrent to her words, some glottal passion inflecting her tone. (Dear Padre: if you had died on me, I would have murdered you.)

"Best I make sure you fucking survive that too."

Pan

He helps her with the socks beyond lifting his heels off the bathmat. As if the intimacy involved in touching the fabric closest to the skin and the sweat goes beyond the shucking of his blood-soaked shirt to look for injuries. Rough thumbs peel away the dark cotton and he tucks them into the boots where she's pushed them out of the way.

And he knows or suspects she is not going to stop at his feet. She opened him up outside in the dark and he does not wait for her to rise so she can do it again. The priest starts to unbutton his shirt again and nearer now, calmer, she can see the blood has dried and he has already tried, hours ago, to rinse it clean but the water wouldn't take it. Some of the plasma rinsed away and took a degree of stiffness with it but the hemoglobin stays behind, stains the fabric so it will never come out. He'll have to throw away the shirt.

"What, am I supposed to drink it? Sounds like the lawn care aisle at the hardware store."

A joke. A touch of light as they sit in the dark and return him to rights. It does not have that self-aware quality that load his jokes on any other day. In the kitchen at the rectory the other morning - Nice place you've got here - it was wry, like he knew she knew he formed the sentence with the intent to be funny. Diffusion. It was a sentence with purpose.

This is a different sort of joke. The words just fall out now that she's seen him slapped back down to Earth like an angel with its wings half hacked off. Vulnerable don't have to mean weak. Just means he's human.

He's accepted this of her about a dozen times already.

Serafíne

He forestalls her rising by reaching up to unbutton his blood-stained shirt himself. She sits still at his feet, her hip against the cool porcelain of the tub, legs tucked neatly beneath her. Not necessarily looking at him but fully aware of his presence, of the space he takes up. The bulk of his body; the scent of his blood and sweat in the air. Aware of these things and also: the quiet of the house, the rhythm of Leah's breathing, the brightness of the light out in the hallways, the scruffle of some blind dark thing beneath the earth, the coyote slinking away from the fire through the trees.

Perfectly quiet and strangely, finely still, her eyes averted as he finished unbuttoning the shirt and reaches up to strip it off his shoulders. She's shifted position in the interim and grabbed that bottle of protein shake, so she doesn't disloge it from the edge of the tub. It is cold and slick in her hand, so she rests it against a knee she draws up as she sits back with her spine against the bathtub in companionable silence.

When he is done and is pulling the shirt off his second arm she half-turns, reaches up thoughtlessly and nearly blindly to take the shirt from his hand and bundle it up and stuff it into the trash.

Sera replaces the bloodied shirt with the protein shake, her head canted to show the stark line of her jaw, pale in the darkness, her eyes shaded above it. "Yeah, you're supposed to drink it. I hear it's good for you.

"What can I say?" she continues, takes up the thread of the joke that falls out of him, the edge of a tempered half-smile slicing through her tone. "Jim's a fucking hippie - " All affection, in those words, a deep and resonant fondness. " - loves that shit.

"Don't worry though, I bought Gatorade too if you prefer to get your electrolytes the way the Coca-Cola company intended."

While he's trying - or refusing to try - the protein shake, Sera opens the cabinet beneath the sink with her toes, then shifts forward, searches blindly until she finds a clean washcloth and a clean towel. Sets both on the sink within reach, hers or his own, then cuts her gaze back to him, looking at him for the first time, really, with the shirt stripped off. Studying the pattern of the blood dried on his skin. Trying not to allow herself to understand just how much he shed.

Because that would hurt.

Pan

The body underneath his clothing has gone soft with time. His skin is dark by virtue of genetics and time spent in the sun but it is losing its elasticity. As a young man he would have had effortless strength and an athleticism inherent in his build. Maybe he played basketball as a teenager, before he flipped whatever switch revealed itself to be The One that forever locked the addict to his substance. Now he has the powerful arms and torso of a man who can still lift his own weight, who can swing an axe and hoist an engine block and carry other people's children around, but his own weight is more than what his doctor would like it to be.

With the lights off she can't see the scars on the insides of his elbows. He has one short faint white line on his lower back, over a kidney, but no other testaments to the violence of their existence lingers on his flesh.

He cleaned the blood from his face and his chest and the shirt still tells of it. But he doesn't.

He reaches for the protein shake and frowns at it before breaking the seal to open it.

"Got plenty of electrolytes," he says. "My thanks to Coca-Cola all the same."

Serafíne

"Stop." Quiet, to him, as he starts unsealing the protein shake. She forestalls him opening it by reaching out and tapping the lid. Tells him: "You gotta shake it first or it'll be all settled and grainy."

Doesn't tell him: it'll probably still be grainy.

Then her hand drops away and she instead sets the heel of her palm on the edge of the tub beside him, using the leverage to lift herself from the floor to perch on the lip of the tub as well.

Sera is looking away from him, down at the floor; the dark shadows in the room. She does not need to see him to know where he is, and there's something careful about the way she both studies him through a scrim of lashes; notes that he has cleaned away the blood, that he is whole; and then cuts her gaze deliberately away from him, giving him back some measure of privacy in the darkness.

"I'm really sorry I brought Sid out here," Sera confesses, hands to herself, elbows on her fishnet-clad thighs, her voice low. Pan can hear her concern there, her regret; and also something sharper in the tone. She's more than sorry; she made a choice she should not have made and it is a sharp one. It is not just that the Orphan is in danger here. Her presence heightens the danger for the rest of them. Sid is afraid of Jim's shadow. Jim is the most chill person Sera knows. The Nephandi would tear her apart.

It is not just a confession; it is an implicit apology to Pan for involving another fucking helpless magelet in this situation Sera has somehow authored for him. Let me help.

Right now; here and now, Sera keeps her arms and torso and thighs to herself. They are close enough that she could skim against his body with her own. If he were Jim, she would. Or Dan or Dahlia or even Rick; or possibly if he were a stranger, sitting beside her in the dark, whole but covered with what was almost his life's blood.

Her elbow are on her thighs, her hands clasped between her legs. She's looking downward. She's to his right so the curtain of her hair tangles with and obscures the most starkly delicate parts of her profile - the jointure of neck and the hollow of her jaw, the curve of her ear, the sweep of tendons attaching her skull to her spine and clavicle.

"I'll talk to Jim. We should do another divination. The future, here. The next few days. See if they're planning to come here. I don't know if he's willing to fight, Padre. I think he may have given up violence when he - " they all have pasts. Jim gave up violence and took up drugs. Pan gave up drugs and took up a sort of holy violence. " - but maybe he can help Leah."

Keep her anchored. Keep her safe. Keep her her. Sera has never given up her faith that the girl could somehow be healed, made human if not whole. She doesn't now, even so.

There's fear in her voice; for him and the rest of them, but she is still quiet and steady and alert to their circumstances. Bravery is never about the lack of fear, so much as facing it.

"I haven't, though. I'm not strong but I'm not helpless." This is all in profile to him, her eyes down, her voice low and even. "I can use a gun. We have two 9 millimeter pistols back at the house. I'm not great. But - " a short little shrug. " - and I used to fence. Sabre more than foil or epée. So, I'm not helpless.

"And I will fight. For her and you and them."

Here she glances up, cuts a look to him in the darkness, the edge of her familiar smile lifting one corner of her mouth.

"And for me."

--

She's rocking forward to stand. To give him back his privacy. He probably wants a shower and does not want her to join him, but she stops as she's leaning back; touches his spine, between his shoulder blades. Her fingers are cool and damp from the cold water beading on the bottle of protein shake. Dried blood flakes off when she pulls them away.

Sera sighs out; a long, ragged breath. He can feel her beside him; shaking just a bit at the thought of what he endured. Though he does not tell her and she does not press him and she does not know and will likley never know the whole of it. There's a moment, just a moment, when she finds blood on his skin rather than just his clothing where she's undone by it.

"I'm gonna wash your back, okay." It isn't really a question; she's just telling him, quietly and surely as one would inform a sick child, what she's going to do. "Then I'll get out of here so you can grab a shower."

Pan

Other than a huff of a laugh at her instruction to shake the stuff before he imbibes it and the sussuration of Grace given before he drinks the stuff that makes him grimace with the liquid heft of it he is largely silent as he drinks. As he sits beside her in the dark and looks ahead just as she does. His magick is a terminated thing after earlier but the illuminating quality of his Working still weeps for the oily corruption that beat it back.

The water in the shower cannot sluice deep or hot enough to cleanse him of the knowledge that that thing was inside of his head and it dragged him down from whence it came. He has slept alone without consequence for decades, more, and he is not truly alone because the Lord watches him and keeps him. But he asked the Lord for sight and the sight will not go from him as he sleeps. Even as he sits here far from sleep now he knows this.

So he drinks the shake though it makes him grimace. He listens to the Cultist apologize and speak of the miracle they would like to perform. He shakes his head No at the notion of helping Leah but he does not voice it. It's futile. Improbable but not impossible. He wants to believe but for all the fantasy he takes as truth he is a pragmatist.

He is big and gentle with people but Nephandi are not people. They're demons. Demons cannot be redeemed. It's like asking a pile of ash to rise up from itself and return to the business of being a tree. Twisted Avatars do not return. Gilgul is the only hope for her and none of them know the Rite. The Masters have all fled this plane.

But Sera is going to fight.

Pan puts the cap back on the protein shake and sets it on the edge of the sink and wraps his arm around her shoulders. She can hear the breath rush into his lungs and come back out again in a sigh. His skin is warm and the muscle beneath the skin is hard. She can feel the solidness of his bones but not the articulation of them. Nothing about him is thin or frail and yet he bled tonight.

She remembers this when she brushes her fingers between his shoulder blades. The priest frowns at the placement of the blood, some thin memory coming back to him. She says she's going to wash his back and he shakes his head again. Slow for the exhaustion oozing into his bones again.

"That isn't necessary, Sera," he says.

Serafíne

Pan wraps his arm around her shoulders, Serafíne breathes out another long, slow breath, and slides an inch and a half closer to him, tucking her body against his solid frame. Just, sits there quietly for a moment, her eyes half-closed, her own arm wedged between them (she has not returned the gesture), left shoulder curved forward, the right one back. Tension in her body, though no match for whatever tension remains in his.

Tonight, it was the priest who had the vision of hell, not the seer.

Sera tips her head aslant, until her left temple comes to rest on the solid knot of his deltoid muscle, cushioned by the wreathing weight of her long hair, which spills across his arm and down his chest. Pan has a spare tire, not a six pack. Serafíne doesn't fucking care.

Right now, really, all she cares about is that he is okay.

She moves her head a few times until the hollow of her bones match the curve of his muscle and is then still. If he looked at her aslant, he would see that her eyes are half-closed, and focused off into the middle distance.

He tells her that that isn't necessary.

She half-smiles. He can feel the curve of her cheek against his chest, the taut articulation of her scapulae like amputated wings, just as she can feel the solid weight of his solid arm settled around her shoulders.

Jesus allowed a woman to wash his feet with her tears and dry them with her hair.

"I know," she murmurs back, almost drowsily, though here her gaze flicks back at his profile and he can feel if not see the questioning arc of her brows. "But you can't reach and I want to.

"If it's alright."

Pan

If it's alright.

He laughs that silent laugh that shows his teeth and shaved the leathered heavy years off his face. Reaches up with the hand not clasped about her shoulder to scrub at the half of his brow obscured from her and the laugh fades, takes the smile with it.

"It's alright," he says.

He takes his arm off her shoulders so she can move. Hoists himself up off the edge of the tub so he can turn on the vanity light over the mirror. Squints at the ferocity of it after so long in the dark. With the light washed low over them she can see the blood smeared down the space between the blades closer to the left where it dripped down and caught and fought with his shirt.

As he stands Pan puts his palms flat on the sink and she can see as he stands that the stonewash of his jeans does little to hide the blood that poured onto his thighs and dried there. The trajectory of it suggested the collar and the space above his sternum caught most of it. His right wrist was stained front and back. Fewer splatters made it to his midsection. Below the knee he is clean. Underneath the shirt he is clean. All that remains is that errant smear of oxidized red where he can't reach.

Without another word he picks up the washcloth and runs the tap to wet it. Turns off the tap again and squeezes out the excess water. He hands it to her and he can't see her for his form blocking hers in the mirror.

Serafíne

She's behind him. He cannot see her but her can hear her rising after he does. She's young and slender and fluid. She doesn't wince when she rises from a crouch. None of the joints in her body pop or crackle when she moves. Whatever wounds have scarred her seem to be the sort no one can see with their eyes.

Few people look beyond that.

So: it is the whisper of movement; her hair over her shoulders, her t-shirt against her torso, her feet on the cold tiled floor. The quiet music of a pair of bracelets sliding down her wrst as he reaches to take the wet washcloth from his hands.

She would have waited until the water was warmer.

"Soap," Serafíne prompts him, with an elbow or something in his right flank. There's laughter in her voice, which is quiet and almost prim, that note of admonishment beneath or over it twinned with her bemusement. So he hands her the soap, which is decorative and shaped like a shell and she scrubs some into the washcloth open in her hand, then slips it back to him, to return to its holder. Her bare arms warm over his bare flank. Only the metal bite of her two bracelets is cool, and then only if they hit him just so. Left hand against his lower back for leverage, she reaches over the curve of his bent and solid spine to scrub away the blood. She is humming beneath her breath, as she sometimes does, and the sound is dreaming, is sweetly meditative. Is mediated by the movement of the chambers of her heart, low and quiet and insistent, except for the upward lilt of the chorus, which rises a minor fifth, like a winged thing caught in an updraft. Like a hope or a prayer.

"He was in your head, wasn't he." She says, somewhere in there, as she works. No accusation, no demand of confession or confidence, just understanding, just quiet speculation. just a meditative sort of empathy. He's been in Sera's head for weeks, perhaps since that first prophetic dream, and Pan knows that better than anyone.

There's a rhythm here. She scrubs; hands the washcloth back to him, with directions to "Rinse," or "Let the water get warmer, would you," then takes it back from his hand continues, moving first up his spine, across his shoulders and upper back; and then down. The pressure is firm, but not quite brusque.

This continues well after the blood has been scrubbed away. When she finally says, "There." and hands him back the washcloth for good, she has scrubbed his back from his shoulders to the waist of his jeans.

If he were another man she would kiss him on the fifth thoracic vertebrae. Slide her arms around his waist and inhale his scent. But he is not another man, and these things do not happen when her work is finished.

She just steps back so he can straighten and step back too. Though she watches him, this time without shying from her want to see him.

"I'm glad you're okay."

Pan

So close to the stream they could have rinsed the blood from his back from the water flowing down out of the mountains. It would be cold enough to burn but the washcloth in Sera's hand is not much warmer. The priest has locked his elbows where he holds himself still against the sink. Blots out Sera entirely. She cannot see his face and he has nothing but the warmth of her arm and the unwavering task of.

Minute bumps rise where the cold water hits his flesh and a chill courses through the muscles in his shoulders and arms but he does not complain. A knob of cervical spine pushes against the skin when he bows his head. Like a horse put up for the night he could fall asleep while she scrubs away the lather of the day. He could have fallen asleep sat there in the dark praying on his transgression though he had already accepted his punishment.

When the cloth comes back to him he wrings it out with a hand that bears no jewelry and rests it beside the shell-shaped novelty soap. His ribs rise and fall with his respirations. The vanity light shows the fishbelly-white sliver of scar tissue over his right flank. It was stitched closed once. The scar is wide but not long, old but in fading grown prominent against the dark of his skin.

If she gets the impression she is one of the few people to have ever seen the scar the impression would not be inaccurate. No one in his congregation has ever seen his back bare.

He does not straighten or step back. Does not lift up his head. He lifts his eyes so they can glimpse each other in the mirror and she can see the corner of them crinkle when he smiles. But he doesn't say anything and he doesn't turn around.

Serafíne

Sera meets his gaze in the mirror. Her own eyes are blue and bluer in the stark brilliance of the vanity light than they often seem. The faintest crinkling there, his smile returned in reflection.

"You should call Rafael." He can hear slip a hand into the tight back pocket of her denim cut-offs. The clink of bracelets, the slick-slide of her bare feet on the tiled floor. "When was the last time you guys talked?" The question is rhetorical, barely lilting upward at the end. Her smile is half-hooked, but she's already retreating: he can hear that too. Hear her turn around, see perhaps the sweet of her hair down her spine, her hand on the door in reflection, or in his periphery.

"I'll leave my phone on the counter by the fridge for you, if you wanna borrow it."

Then the door's swinging open, and she's slipping out, as surely as she slipped in.

By the time he finishes his shower, she's already cleaning his blood up from the passenger's seat in his truck. The floor mats will have to be replaced, though. The stains there will never come out.