Guilt

Serafíne

"Where are you going?" Like a bright little moon drawn into orbit by his gravity, Serafíne follows Pan from the cabin and its clearing, the sound of the river fading as their ears are filled up with the crunch of gravel beneath their foot. There's a ragged accumulation of vehicles here. Sid's truck and Annie's what-ever-she-drives and Lena's motorcycle and Dan was here but now he's gone because Sera wanted her consor nowhere near this place when things started happening and people started accumulating and handsome young men with whom she had once flirted in a bar started strapping on katanas that had the skipped groove wrongness of something dark and fell, like some cold fissure in solid ground. Like some breathing exhalation from the hell in which she does not precisely believe, as such. Not the way the priest does.

This is Aftermath and more things have happened and she ran through the woods and she was fast. She is fast the way he is strong: natively so. It was worked into her muscle and bone and she loves to make her body move so she does, does so religiously, the way he offers prayers in Latin to the saints and martyrs and apostles and disciples that mediate on his behalf with the great almighty.

She cannot read his mind, cannot tell whether he means to try to sleep somehow in the cramped cab of his truck or in the bed which is fucking metal or whether he thinks he's somehow capable of driving himself back to Denver right now, exhausted as he is, but there she is, slipping behind him down the driveway, past the dark bulk of the others' cars, one hand on the lift-gate of Sid's truck as she frowns in the dappled darkness.

Dressed so conservatively for a Sera: jeans and combat boots and an old dark hoodie over a t-shirt. Didn't even think of her fencing kit and the kevlar and the plastic chest plate they make girls wear and all that protection until Justin was pulling on that black reinforced shirt and then, well, then it was two hours away and it was Let's Go.

And then she was cursing under her breath and sticking to Pan's flank and carrying one of the two pistols she and Dan kept in the glovebox of their van when they did their motherfucking 'tours' of the motherfucking 'south' just-in-case because when you're in Macon, Georgia, you never know, and watching the Verbena with a wary awareness like: This Is a Thing You Do? while they crept through the woods in the direction of the other cabin.

"Hey, no," more quietly then, closer, the light touch of her hand at the small of his back as she flanks him and reaches for his keys once more. "I'll drive you home." The swimming edge of her smile in his peripheral vision as she reaches for them and nudges him away from the driver's side. "I'm totally sober, remember?"

Look, she even reaches for his duffel bag, peels it from his shoulder. It's heavy and she's short but she takes it from him anyway unless he holds on to the straps tight and circles the back of the truck, hefts it over the liftgate before pushing him around toward the passenger's side.

There are adjustments to be made in the cab. No way she can reach the gas and brake pedals from the distance he requires and even if she's licensed and capable, Serafíne is usually too fucked up and does not drive often. Even when she does, it's not a pick-up truck so it may be like sitting there watching a brand new pilot on her first solo flight, searching the cockpit for the familiar instruments, frowning over their placement before she finally gets the key into the ignition and turns over the engine.

Pan

To call the man exhausted would be to ignore the fact that he has been exhausted all week. He has been awakened before dawn more than once and he has slept on a couch with a woman slumped against his heart and he has slept in a bed after being bidden save the trip of a woman accosted by a man reminding her of someone in the dark places she cannot access and he has slept on a couch with his bed taken over by a woman having awakened him by falling traumatized and emetic in his bathroom and through it all he has not complained.

He is the last to come out of the woods and he does not go into the house before he leaves. They must see him through the window, or feel him, bright as a bomb-burst as he is. A pause at the head of the driveway to heft up the duffel bag and put the Glock into it and he starts off alone.

A clatter of keys and she's behind him, asking where he's going, and he stumbles. Doesn't mean to. Hasn't drawn himself entirely down to the dregs but he has not been eating and he cannot remember the last time he slept through the night and he killed two people tonight.

"I should lie down a minute," he says like that answers anything. Like he doesn't gotta drive two hours before he can lie down. It's always I should lie down a minute and not I don't have anything left in me tonight. Like if he just takes a minute he can pull himself together enough to find another well inside himself.

And he makes it to the end of the driveway before she catches up to him. The keys leave his hand and he blinks hard for the want of sleep descended over him and he laughs quiet for the flash of teeth that makes him look younger. Younger, but even in this light the silver in his hair shouts. He hasn't trimmed his hair since all this started and it's grown slightly shaggy for the lack of care taken to it.

"Alright," he says, and she takes the bag along with the keys, "alright," and she pushes him to the other side of the truck.

The cab does not have a bench seat. She can slide her seat forward without bringing the entire arrangement forward. He has to drop his seat back so his knees are not crunched against the glove compartment.

The goddamn truck is a stick-shift. Like she didn't sort that out the night he had to reach between her knees to push it into a higher gear and apologized like he was the one doing something out of line.

"Totally sober, eh?" he asks as he fumbles the seatbelt across his midsection. "That mean you gonna drive better or worse than when you're fucked up?"

Serafíne

It's the curse that earns him the full and sudden flare of her slashing grin, all-at-once, in the darkness of the cab, the dashboard lights just flaring to life all around him. Maybe the curse or his laughter early, the brief and quiet burst of it, the white of his teeth in the darkness. The fact that he is capable of both after all they've been through. After all she's put him through.

Night after sleepless night.

She is in profile, biting the crest of her lower lip as she feels out the pedals and realizes / remembers it is a stick shift and does she remember how the gears feel and the engine churns moving through its paces? They'll find out, the both of them.

"I don't drive whem I'm fucked up," Serafíne assures him, with a sly and sparkling look, sidelong, her eyes with all color lost and just reflective then. "Don't - " but the rest of it is swallowed up because what she would say is: Don't wanna kill someone, and hey, he just did. They just did and there's still gunpowder residue on her hands. The retort of the weapons in her ears. At the firing range they make you wear hearing protection. They put up human shaped targets and if you are a Sera you tell them to take them down and put up anything else. Stormtroopers or maybe orcs or they don't have such things? Okay: a round bull's eye. Like the archery butts from some green Irish summer dotted with the silent habits of black-clad nuns so far away from anything and anyone that the only thing to do was get fucked up and stare at the stars and convince Katie O'Connor to make out with you again.

If he ever comes to her house for one of her parties, if she ever throws another party, he will see how seriously she takes this. There's a cab fund by the door and a sign and a tree where people deposite their fucking keys and designated drivers can get a kiss before they go even if she doesn't like them one bit.

A short huff of laughter, then, opens her mouth. Eases the strain on her face.

"Which pretty much means I don't drive," she admits as she settles her hands over the steering wheel as primly as any driving instructor. Then remembers - oh fuck - the shifter. She glances at him once more time, takes in the exhaustion, the shagginess. Remembers the way he stumbled and the way she has never seen him stumble and the way she has always expected that stumbling was something he wouldn't ever do. The smile eases, but not the regard, "You need a haircut and dinner, too. But don't worry, I got this."

Then the truck's in reverse and she's trying to remember the half-hundred things that happen in a moving car and there's the cabin in the flare of the headlights and christ she's going to grind his gears or hit a tree or something.

Crunches the brakes as they make the backward spill onto the main road from the driveway and takes a deep breath as she shifts again, then pushes it into park briefly and strips off her hoodie, which she stuffs at him to use as a pillow.

"Seriously Pan, I got this. Take a nap. We'll be home before you know it."

Seriously, Pan. Take a nap. It's probably better that way.

Pan

He draws a deep breath and sits up straighter at the news that she does not drive. Flashbacks to teaching a teenage boy how to drive, perhaps. Few things more terrifying to a grown man than to be in the passenger seat of a vehicle with an inexperienced driver behind the wheel. His alertness is a temporary thing but for the time it flashes his eyes are open and aimed at her side of the cab, taking in the placement of her hands and feet on the equipment and the tension or lack of it on her face in the dark.

Then she tells him not to worry and he isn't worried necessarily but he doesn't relax right away either. The truck rattles down the driveway and he turns his head to look out the rear window at the trees and the darkness gaping behind them the road just beyond it and he winces with the squawking of the gears into neutral, the cry of the brakes as she stands on it to haul off her sweatshirt.

"Uh huh," he says, his doubt exaggerated, and takes the sweatshirt. Puts it between his head and the door. He doesn't lean into it until they start moving again and even after they do start moving again he pulls his rosary out of his pocket and starts to worry the beads with his fingers. If he prays on them he does so silently. The clicking of the beads slows with time and distance though and before they've gone a mile down the road his eyes have closed and he's fallen asleep.

Sat upright he does not snore. He does not thrash with nightmares and he does not talk in his sleep. As the wilderness crawls past suburbs and the suburbs disappear again he sleeps and when the city swallows up the roadways and they are joined by other drivers on their own missives through the night he sleeps. Soon the highway gives way to the city grid and she takes the truck away from the exit and towards the church. This late at night all of the lights are off and no lights shine in the rectory.

Even after she pulls on the handbrake and kills the engine the priest breathes deep and even and slow.

Serafíne

What he misses as he sleeps are the detours and wrong turns and improper exits that cost them another solid half-hour or even hour of time on the road. She drives carefully once they are down from the mountains, alert and slow, sticking to the right lane on the highway, never swinging out to pass unless she is required to do so by some arcana of highway design. What he misses are the five minutes they spend idling beneath a highway overpass while she frowns at her phone and tries to map Apple Maps work and cannot quite manage it and then looks at him asleep and listens to the rattling highway overhead and thinks to herself oh hey, two more exits.

What he misses while he sleeps is the hum of her voice in the air, the background song undefined and undefineable, just something native to her, this looping awareness of rhythm and melody and the way the night breathes around them. Or perhaps the way he breathes beside her, sleeping upright, slumped against the passenger's side door.

He is still sleeping when they (finally!) make it back to the rectory and she kills the engine and pulls the handbrake and glances at him in the darkness with the engine ticking quietly beneath the hood and the neighborhood dark and quiet. Mostly quiet. Quiet in the way neighborhoods like this one are quiet, which means very little. A siren in the distance, the squawl of a crying baby closer but not close, or is that a yowling tomcat serenading his would-be love.

Serafíne slips out of the driver's side, jumping the height down to the pavement and shuts the door quietly. Circles the truck and leaves his duffel in the bed for now, finds the passenger's side and executes the complicated maneuver of climbing onto the running boards while leaning out the way of the swing of the door and opening it and sort of shouldering herself forward to keep him more or less upright and in-the-seat as she leans in and reaches across him to unlatch the seatbelt.

Grabs his right shoulder with her left hand and shakes, very gently. "Dormilón," her right hand against his chest to keep him from spilling outward, balanced precariously on the running boards, the narrow line of her torso flanking and framing him into the seat of the truck.

Her hair is loose now, mostly. The French braid undone thoughtless while she drove, and curlier for it. She smells of pineneedles and gunpowder and blood and him. " - sleepyhead. Sleeeepyhead. Wake up. We're here. We're home."

Pan

He is unlike Serafíne in near as many ways as a person can be unlike another and he is unlike her in this: he does not sleep through all but the roughest of awakenings. When the engine driver's side door opens his brow furrows though his breathing does not change its course. He draws a sharp breath in when her hand finds his shoulder and her voice finds his ear.

Few mundane cruelties ring as sharp as awakening before one feels rested. He groans as he stretches his legs so far as the cramped cab will allow.

"Basta ya, estoy despierto," he says at the apex of the stretch. Alright, alright, I'm up, I'm up. Coughs that ragged cough come from polluted lungs called upon to draw in air as normal and peels himself away from the seat.

And he might have gotten himself inside just fine without her there but even with her here and the nearness of her reason enough to keep up the composure whose absence frightens others more than his stolidness the priest hesitates before stepping down out of the truck. Doesn't know where to put his hands to brace himself at first. He's not used to riding on this side of the vehicle.

The last time he rode on this side he fell out because he was bleeding profusely from the nose and mouth and did not want help from a girl half his size. Another girl half his size cleaned his blood off the interior.

Pan makes it to the ground and claps the door shut behind him. Hands her back her sweatshirt and takes a lazy loop around the front of the truck headed towards the front door. No scratches in the paint or bodies plastered to the grille. Somewhere in the distance a pair of speakers blasts reggaeton and young voices lift to the sky to holler out their immortality in between swallows of alcohol.

"Sera," he says as he follows her to the front door, "thanks." For everything and for nothing in particular. For surviving, maybe.

Serafíne

Soon as he's awake and clearly under his own power, oh, she jumps down backward from the running board, light-footed though not quite as light-footed as a gazelle and her boots are heavy ones and they make noise regardless of her size, a solid clomp when she hits the ground. She's ranging ahead of him then and mostly misses that moment of hesitation except for a glance back over her shoulder to see where he is. Then she's standing at the front door waiting for him to let them in when he follows her up the steps leading to the front stoop, tells her thanks and she cuts him a glance back over her right shoulder, the shaved line of her hair dark against her skull, the blond above it like a golden crown, her head canted backwards though just so and she,

well, she rolls her fucking eyes at him, but gently, and he has the impression of her smile more from the cut of her cheek against the pale darker stucco of the entryway than from the curve of her crawling mouth and she says, " - yeah, well. Likewise."

Her eyes are on him, though. Dark and shining and just stuck there for a heartbeat.

Or two.
Or three.
Then just stands there edging a bit out of his way just waiting not quite appreciating that she has his keys and that's the only way they're getting in until she does remember and cannot shake out all the many keys that belong to a priest. The one for the house and the truck and the church and the upstairs and the office and the sacred vessel where the blessed sacrament is kept beneath an ever-burning candle so that the flock always knows that God Is There.

Doesn't know if he believes in transubstantiation and she has done so many drugs since she knew what that was that maybe even the concept is lost in the dark folds of her mind.

But here. She remembers the keys, tosses them to him so he can let them in, then remembers the duffel and jogs back to grab it and heft it because probably the neighborhood does not need someone stealing the priest's recently fired weapon and using it in some random convenience store robbery.

She's in the house four or five steps after him though, shifting the weight of the duffel aside and out of the way in the entryway.

"Why don't you go grab a shower and get cleaned up and I'll fix us something to eat, 'kay?" Already slipping past him toward the kitchen like she belongs here. Though that hardly seems unusual since Serafíne appears to believe that she belongs everywhere she wants to go.

Admonishing him as she slips by, "Don't fall asleep! Pretty sure you don't want me having to come in after you." Her laughter is not as silent as his. It lingers in the air behind her as she passes.

Pan

The priest has no notion of how women look at him. He never does and he never has. Big as he is and frank as he is he does nothing to encourage the unprovoked crushes that some of the girls nurture for him but so long as men have served God and tended the souls of His children so have they felt warm and unrequited feelings for these men. An older preoccupation than lusting after one's schoolteacher.

So the cast to Sera's gazes boast no bait and even if they did he has not shown any sign of hungering for such. They stand on the rectory's front stoop and it takes her a moment to toss the keys to him and he fumbles to catch them. Drops them this time and they ring out on the concrete as she rushes back to grab his bag.

It isn't his gun but it carries his fingerprints and his fingerprints tie into a system that remembers everything he's ever done. His god has forgiven him and he has repaid his debt to society but that wouldn't mean a thing if that gun washed up in a river and the police thought he'd used it to knock off a liquor store.

In they go and he leaves the keys sitting on the windowsill beside the front door. Locks it behind them. It doesn't mean anything, and yet it does. He never locks the door when he's here alone. Someone might need to get inside but he is of no use to anyone right now. Were not for Sera telling him to grab a shower he might have just crawled into bed and stayed there for the rest of the weekend but she puts the notion in his head and he watches her saunter into the kitchen and he stands in her wake as if still stuck in a dream.

She cannot see the expression on his face when she says she's pretty sure he doesn't want her coming in after him.

"I won't fall asleep," he says.

Nearer to the truth is this: he goes into the bathroom and he brushes his teeth. She can hear the swishing of the brush and the Listerine splashing in the sink. He leaves the door ajar so the steam from the shower will not turn to mildew on the drywall. He folds up his clothes and leaves them sitting on the edge of the sink, a black mass visible through the crack in the door, and he runs the water. Ten minutes go by and he does not emerge. Ten minutes turn to fifteen.

Not the act of shedding evil blood but the nearness to it, perhaps. The fact that he did not act when he would have acted but waited too long and in waiting allowed the demon to swallow innocent lives. Something keeps him underneath the water longer than she knows his showers to take. Five minutes is all he gives himself on a normal day.

Maybe he did fall asleep.

Serafíne

The ingredients are simple enough, easily found even in a bachelor priest's fridge. Potatoes and onion and sausages and butter and milk and salt and pepper. If there's sour cream or better creme fraiche she grabs those too but does not expect them. Lays the ingredients out on the kitchen counter in order and ferrets out a cutting board and a skillet and saucepan and then stands at the kitchen sink looking out through the window into the backyard and breathes out, shakily, wishing for moonlight or something sweeter than the light from the flourescent fixture overhead and less piercing than the sense of brilliance that suffuses the bones of the home, down to the framing and the timber and the nails.

I'd've made you tostones, she told him once, presenting him with a fucking white-bread sandwich after he had scryed out Leah for her from the darkness into which she'd fled, but I can't cook. Didn't want to burn down his house.

Everyone has something that they can cook, however, and this is like muscle memory for her and then it is more - just a fragment floating up from the darkness, not quite knowable but knowable enough that she breathes out sharply as the scent of browning sausages fills the kitchen and the water comes to a boil in the saucepan and she tosses the chopped potatoes in to cook. Starts in on the onions, turning the sausages and removing them from then pan, tossing in the onions after to start the gravy and glances with a frown over her shoulder at the hallway. Walks back and shoots a look at the bathroom, the faintest frown cresting her brow as she studies the door propped open.

Her glance back at the kitchen shows her path through the house. She's leaving clogs of mud behind her from the grooves of her boots and she knows, oh she knows, that the mud wasn't from any recent rains because half the state is on fire and smoke is rising, no: it was blood mixed with earth and then she shivers and breathes out a deep and resonant breath from her solar plexus and bends down, unlaces then toes off her boots. Peels off her socks and stuffs them into the shafts and tucks them out of the way with her sweatshirt. Gives her arms a brisk rub because why does she think it cold in here? as she jogs across the kitchen and turns down the heat beneath both pans, all the way down to warm so that she doesn't burn down the house.

Thirty seconds later there's a hesitant knock on the bathroom door. She's just wedged herself into the slice of opening, then nudged it further open with her hip and thigh. Doesn't look at his clothes folded on the sink or the shower curtain, just with a tucked little frown as straight ahead as she can manage, or maybe just down at the bathmat damp on the old tiled floor, the impression of his bare feet left behind in the pile, curling her left hand and fingers around the door as she holds it another inch or two inward.

"Hey - Pan." A curious cant of her head, her eyes still down. The concern isn't enough to overcome her hesitation really, and her voice is quiet, but lilting. "You okay in there?"

Pan

Whatever food she finds in the refrigerator was given to him by other people. The fact that he manages to survive is by the grace of not only his god but that of the congregation that believes in the things that he says. None of the abuelitas or the manual laborers can afford to put into the church what the scientists or the government workers among them can put into it but they can bring him loaves of bread or pints of strawberries. Which they do with a frequency that one would think would lead to waste but no one who looks at him would accuse Father Echeverría of letting food go to waste.

Even if he were a shorter man or thinner it would not change the amount of food the mothers in the church push at him.

So she rummages and she finds enough food she recognizes to make a dish she could make on the peak of a pharmaceutical high and in the time she takes to find equipment and get the food to sizzling on the stovetop he has not emerged.

The creaking of the floorboards as she moves through the house towards the singing traces of his resonance does not change the cadence of the cascade as it crashes displaced into the tub. The curtain is a fabric affair that blocks the form inside the shower and she cannot see him even if she throws the door open wide. A rush of cool air and the whine of the hinges would wake him if he were asleep.

Lost time. He wrenches the spigots so the water stops abrupt, a final squelch before the hollow dripping.

"What?" he asks. His voice fills the space though it is not loud. Before she can clarify his brain makes sense of the sounds he barely caught he says: "I'm fine."

Serafíne

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 5, 6, 6, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 1

Pan

[OH FUCK RIGHT OFF]

Serafíne

That was Perception + Awareness-as-Empathy

Pan

For those of you playing along at home: this is the second time he's said "I'm fine" when he hasn't been fine. So apparently Pan has learned to use the word "fine" the way Americans use it.

I'm emotionally repressed and have been thoroughly conditioned over the course of the last 40-something years to not discuss my feelings with anyone at all because I'm a big tough hombre and it's not socially acceptable for me to admit to being anything other than Fine. Yeah.

For future reference, that's how "I'm fine" translates in Pan-speak.

Pan

But since you got like 4+ successes: he's not feeling too great right now. A little bit of the ole EMOTIONAL CONFLICT. Heavy amounts of guilt. Maybe some failure. There were an awful lot of dead people in Brogan's ring of fire tonight.

YMMV though - his WP is so low he can't talk himself out of beating his own ass over something he had about zero control over seeing as how when he tried to go out there by himself Sera flipped her shit. Also he would have been dead if he went any earlier. Hence the conflict.

Extrapolation time! Pan thinks he could have prevented more deaths than he did tonight if he had gone out there 24 hours earlier.

Serafíne

She's withdrawing from the bathroom the instant he wakes to her presence: What? The door's halfway closed, the draft contracts to almost the narrow stream of cool air from the hallway beyond and the rusting old hinges whine as she starts to pull them closed. Fingers curled over worn wood covered on worn paint, apologies for the interruption already in her mouth, the pads of her fingers find the grooves in the door frame and then, he appends the what with: I'm fine.

The door stops closing. Her left arm is higher than her head, forearm tucked against the wood and her fingers tighting on the edge. Her head tips forward until her left temple comes to rest against the wood beneath her wrist, and the door nudges every-so-slightly further open. The posture of someone listening, not through a door at the murmur of voices, but to some far-off and haunted and haunting song.

The spigots whine with that final wrench, the metal on metal threads screaching protest against their abuse at his hands. Her head drops aslant, as if she were tucking herself low against a strong headwind, and the most complex cascade of sorrow and guilt and empathy and sadness and this stark, hollow pain and something else, oh something else, with her there is always something else, falls like rain across her face.

Her decision is made and she is moving before any of this registers but she lives in the frame of her body, not the ivory tower of her mind. Steps into the billowing steam and reaches for the towel and glances at the smear of steam on the vanity mirror and registers the both the dampened and diffuse light and the light he still sheds, hours after he last Worked.

She's looking away when she opens the shower curtain and steps in behind him, though he can't see it. Or will see it only if he looks back at her. Her head still tucked as if she were walking against a strong wind, features shunted down and mostly aslant or even behind her. Bare feet and jeans blood and mud, caked around the hems and dark spatters rising higher an old t-shirt, which was, though he doesn't know it, promo for her old band in North Carolina. She's holding out the towel with both hands at oh, chest level on her, just guessing where it lands on him, curves it around him and hands him the ends to tuck or hold if he'll take them. Presses them into his hands.

She does not touch him until she has wrapped the towel around his waist and then: merely this. The cool curve of her face against his upper back: temple to the apex of her cheekbone, the long cut of her prominent nose and curve of her mouth beneath. The loose sweep of her hair against his skin.

"You couldn't've stopped them by yourself. Not without Justin. Not without Jim. Not without Annie, Pan. Not even without me. Couldn't have saved those people. Not by yourself.

"The first one," her voice is low and rain and intent and intense and her mouth moves against his skin, but it is not a kiss. " - he would have become whatever he was becoming. And Brogan," there is still fear in her at the name; this subdued shudder that he feels only as a radial movement of her temple against the slabs of fat and muscle flanking his spine. " - and there was another, remember? If you'd gone alone, they would've killed you. And maybe I would've walked in there by myself. Maybe that would've been me they were sacrificing. Or - they would've killed Justin and Annie and then come for Jim and Sid and -

"Don't do this to yourself. Pan, please." Just this rough and quiet ache for him in her voice. "You don't have to be fine."

Pan

The thing about the bidding disciples cast aside worldly concerns and worldly things that they might better serve the Lord: virtuousness is not the same as stoicism and the Bible does not taut stoicism as a virtue for human beings need other human beings that they might keep to their path and be whole and good and not easily tempted by the things that cause men to end up like John Brogan.

And in his moments of virtuousness bordering on stoicism he is certain of himself and his actions. He apologizes when he has done things that hurt people even if they were not meant to cause pain. The turning point that causes him such anguish now caused Sera such anguish when he abandoned it: he didn't drive over to the cabin where the Nephandi were roosted, alone, where he would have died for no good reason if he wasn't dragged down with them.

He is even less certain of himself now than he was when he arrived at the cabin covered in blood and she sees through his verbal shrug and comes in after him.

By now he knows not to fight her. She is younger than he is and she is rawer and she is louder and she will fight harder if he takes her hands off of him. Nothing she has done has gone against his code of ethics - even this is nothing. It's just flesh and a towel over the flesh and the muscles in his back are tense with the blame and the denial of it.

He gathers up the towel without turning to face her. Before he can think to face her she's lain against his back and he presses a hand up against the tiled wall in case she leans too heavy on him but she doesn't. He could hold up both of them if he had to but he doesn't.

He does listen to her though. She can hear it in the slowness of his ribs rising, the rush of air through the hollow of his chest, the way he does not interrupt. Does not even think about it. She would hear it if he even thought about it, pressed against his back like this.

But then he huffs out a breath. Nearly twice her age and he doesn't know how else to be, doesn't know how to tell her no no really I am you weren't supposed to see this but that would be bullshit too even if he did say it. Black clothes lay discarded on the sink and she wasn't supposed to see him like this but there's no point denying it now. He is like this.

"Alright," he says and she cannot see his eyes closed but she can feel the tension gone out of his back. "Let me get outta here, huh? Don't want you slipping."

Serafíne

"Shhh," she murmurs back to him when the tension at last eases from his spine. He wants to get outta there. Doesn't want her slipping and he can feel the curve of her smile against his back. The quiet benediction of the kiss she lays on the precise point of his scapula where the apex of her cheek rested. A hand - her hand - against his waist to steady herself. The calluses she has are musician's calluses, born into being by guitar strings, not hard physical labor and metal tools and brake dust and oil and the whine of a grinder and an air compressor and a drill. "You stay.

"I'm making you dinner, okay." Already she's slipped away from him and he can hear the metal-on-metal of the curtain rings on the rod, the slippery whisper of the shower curtain as she pulls it open, the cool rush of air on his skin and quiet thud as she climbs out of the bathtub and slips out of the bathroom and, lo, pulls the bathroom door shut behind her.

Just the narrow imprint of her small feet left behind on the bathmat and the warmth of her mouth against his skin to mark her presence.

--

He's left alone to dress in peace and in private and the scent of his shower steam recedes and he can smell the sausages and onions cooking in fat even through the bathroom door. The clatter of preparation continues apace and when he emerges he will find the kitchen table has been set for two and there's a glass of orange juice set in front of one of the places made and the rich scent of basic comfort foods cooking on his stove. He doesn't know it, but she's been trembling the whole time.

A single glance at the living room reveals the couch already made up. The blanket and musty old pillow laid at one end even if it scores her heart hollow to think about sleeping alone tonight.

Sera glances at him over her shoulder if he comes into the kitchen and she's standing at the stove slim-hipped and young and finds his eyes and looks down and gives him a tight little half-smile, her brows drawn close and tight.

"The potatoes need like five more minutes. I'm gonna grab a quick shower, okay?"

Pan

When he comes out he's dressed in black socks and black slacks and a black t-shirt that's been tucked in but not secured with a belt. If he needs to rise and rush out tomorrow he will be dressed but Rosa knows he will need to rest tomorrow. Rosa also knows he probably has that güera with the fishnets and the thick hair and the loose morals with him.

Doesn't want to know what they do when they're over there with the lights blazing half the night so she won't be coming around. The deacon has promised to take charge of the congregation. He needs the practice anyway. But Pan still dresses in case something happens and when he comes out into the kitchen his hair is damp and raked off his forehead with his fingers and he is not completely at ease but he is not near as low as he was when he was stood in the shower deluded of his solitude either.

She asks if it's okay if she grabs a shower and he stands still a moment, thinking, before he comes up to her and puts his arms around her shoulders. If he were just a man he'd crack a joke about not wanting to wait until she's in the shower to bust in on her to give her a hug but his humor is not quite so vulgar.

"Take your time," he says, "I'll keep an eye on them," and lets her go.

Serafíne

Oh, she rocks up onto her tip-toes and leans forward into that hug, her half-smile in his peripheral vision. Maybe he feels the subtle quake of tremors that have been rocking her body since - well, since she slipped into the shower behind him, though they must have been there earlier. Incipient and promissory and and not-yet-to-be-admitted all the time she drove him home, sober as a deacon, she. Though perhaps she controls them, stiffens her shoulders against them and just returns his hug with a tight exuberance that is less about whatever shines in her eyes when she is looking at him and he is not looking at her than it is about their mutual survival.

Then she's past him and taking the same path he took out back into the bathroom. The water runs and hums through the old pipes as valves turn and the hot water heater fires up again, and either he's used up all the hot water or she's just plain sober or she's thinking of the potatoes on the stove but she's only in there for a few minutes. More than five but less than ten, the door barely cracked and the quiet hum of her voice rising with the steam, this rhythmic pattern of self-reassurance.

When she comes back out she's wearing one of his old t-shirts. One he likely never wears, just the favor given out at a three-on-three Midnight Basketball tournament half-a-dozen years ago. The shoulder yoke hits her somewhere mid-bicep and the hem hangs down to mid-thigh and her hair is damp but not washed but she has scrubbed all the blood, all the fucking blood and gunpowder from her hands and feet and calves and forearms. Has scrubbed her face three times with his terrible soak and there's no goddamned moisturize except for an old bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby lotion so she slathers that on her skin and emerges from the steam smelling like smoke and that sweet taclum smell that baby products have.

--

Barefoot and bare-legged and bare-armed. No, Rosa does not want to know what he does with that güera with the dyed blond curls and the heels and the garters and the bustiers does in the rectory with her pastor. Would be mortified to see her pushing the Padre away from the stove (if he has not already succumbed to something like his own stupefied exhaustion and settled in his chair) and finish the mysterious workings of her strange meal.

There are the potatoes to be mashed with butter and salt and the gravy to be finished with flour and cream and then two plates on the table: sausages and mashed potatoes and an onion gravy made with the fat from the sausages. Nothing south of the border about this, except where the ingredients in his fridge skew in that direction.

Sera sits opposite Pan and gives him this look, a little bit shy.

"Bangers and mash," she says, the curling edge of her mouth curving upward. "This - this guy used to make them for me."

And Pan does not know and cannot know that the memory is just turning over in her mind. Filtering up from the darkness, just broken free. "It's suppose to be dinner, you know? But he'd make it in the morning. This tiny little kitchen. This, this view of - "

But she doesn't want to know what the view was of and breathes it out as a long sigh. "He'd be wearing like boxers or maybe nothing at all," she has taken up her fork mid-story and her eyes are on her plate as she starts to eat, the edge of her mouth curved upward in this bittersweet expression. " - just like, maybe an apron."

She's telling this story to a priest in the kitchen of his rectory and the room is bathed in the light of his faith. Serafíne's cheeks redden.

Her head falls aslant, loose hair damp and wild. "I think he was like the first guy - " No, something arrests the thought and she shakes her head, " - maybe he was the first guy I liked it with." She tells him that. She does not tell him: I'm pretty sure he's dead.

"They're pretty good, though, yeah? Like, easy and pretty much everyone has the ingredients in the fridge. 'Cept for fucking vegetarians.

"So, you know. Eat. I'll take care of the dishes, too."

Pan

When she returns to the kitchen he's standing at the stove ineffectually shuffling the potatoes around the pan with the fading spatula she found in a drawer somewhere and he relinquishes control of the pan when she comes back. Breathes out a laugh at the sight of the shirt but has nothing to say about it. Picks up the glass of orange juice she poured for him earlier and takes a sip and sits at the table.

If he had any clue what she was making he would help but he doesn't. He can help by staying out of the way. By listening. So he does. And when she sets down the food he doesn't comment other than to say that it looks good with a slight lilt at the end of the statement like he doesn't quite know what he's looking at?

Bangers and mash.

"Come again?" he asks.

And then the story comes. He thinks rather than recites the grace and she can see him thinking it in the brief glance down at his plate. If he lost his voice he'd still think it. No need to inflict the words upon those who are around him all the time but aren't believers. When he looks back up he tucks into the meal but slowly, concealing the ravenousness of his hunger.

He wants to hear what she has to say and he has to have heard worse through the grille in the confession booth. First night they met she asked if he wanted to make out and he shrugged that off the way he would shrug off a fly buzzed around his head. Does not shrug off her story now.

"You're not doing the dishes," he says after he's swallowed. Gestures to the living room with his fork before he takes another stab of food from the plate. "You ain't sleeping on the couch tonight, neither. It's bad for your back."

Serafíne

"I am doing the dishes," steady and straightforward. She's eating too but slower than he; still, there's a relish in the familiar food. Which she explained to him after that come again. Sausages and mashed potatoes. Bangers and mash. Pub food. A lilting glance over her shoulder follows his gesture to the living room. The tendons in her neck pulled taut as she turns her head to its maximum rotation.

"Pan, I've slept in stranger places." He may even remember a few of them. Then, a quiet shake of her head. "And, I'm not putting you out. You saved my life. Not just mine, either."

Pan

"Uh huh," he says through the last of a mouthful of food which he then chases with a swig of orange juice. "Well, the only time you ever slept through the night here was when we was both on the couch, and if I throw out my back picking you up off the floor because you fell asleep between the inodoro and the sink again Rosa's never gonna stop yelling at me. Let's try something new and start off in the bed."

He polishes off the plate full of food with that suggestion.

Serafíne

The sudden flash of tears in her eyes are enough to catch the light before she looks decidedly away from him, her shoulders stiff beneath the cotton t-shirt. This tight little I-was-trying-to-be-brave-why-don't-you-let-me grimace on her mouth as she sort of bounces in her chair. Once and then twice and then nods without quite looking at him. Probably she would've spent the night wide awake on the couch of maybe moved to the hallway beside his door and sat there wishing for some sort of drug to make the hours crawl by faster.

So she nods, okay, shy again and more: raw again from the night they shared. There's only so much trying-to-be-brave she can manage and he stripped the fiction of it away from her, so she gets up not really looking at him and takes his plate and her own and puts both in the sink. Runs some water over them and the cooling skilling and saucepan too and drizzles a stream of dish soap on top of them.

"Okay," breathed out, then, as she runs the water until bubbles start to form and spill out over the stacked dishes. Which can keep until morning. "I guess I wouldn't've slept on the couch much anyway. I'm gonna brush my teeth and wash my face or whatever."

So she disappears into the bathroom. Swishes with Listerine and scrubs her teeth with her index finger. Scampers out if he needs the restroom and brushes her teeth over the kitchen sink, humming, then takes over again when he's done. Waits until he's the bedroom and hopefully in the bed before she follows him in. Turns off whatever light he left on for her and hesitates and hesitates and hesitates and finally crawls in beside him. Closes her eyes and now he can feel the trembling, subtle and constitutional tonight, in her frame, her shoulders and spnie, her arms, tight and controlled and slipping slowly into subsidence as sleep closes in.

Pan

If he will not grant her her fiction then he at least grants her the solace of stunted eye contact as the meal ends. He might think about getting up to help her but if he does he talks himself out of it. Instead he sits at the table and finishes his orange juice. Lays his eyes on her profile when she concedes she wouldn't have slept much anyway.

"Alright," he says to her plan for the next few minutes. As she retreats she can hear the scrape of the chair's feet across the linoleum and his puttering about the kitchen as he rinses his glass and moves into the living room to break down the couch. No point leaving it made up if no one is going to sleep there.

The linen closet yelps as he opens it to stash the spare sheets inside and when she vacates the bathroom he ducks in to clean his teeth. Ducks back out again and drapes his socks and slacks over the chair at the small writing desk pushed into one corner of the bedroom before he climbs into bed.

Even without the light she knows where the bed is. It lives in the corner of the room and he is on his back close to the wall, as if she needs more space than he does. He lies still and her hesitation is a palpable thing but no more so than her trembling.

As they settle his breath sighs from his lungs and he does not force his arm around her shoulders, does not force her to lie with her head over his heart the way she lay the night she slept through until dawn, but he molds himself that way if she turns toward him.

"Vale," he says. It's alright. "It's over."

This may end up being a lie but right now it's as true as anything he's ever said to her.

Serafíne

She does not require more space than he does. There's barely an indentation of the twin mattress as she crawls in beside him. First curving her back in his direction, the line of her spine narrow and stiff and she's looking away from him, her eyes half-closed, shaking. Then she lifts herself on an elbow and turns over. Slides closer to him and finds that position he molds himself into for her: his arm around her shoulders, an arm slipped around his ribs, her head against his chest. Over his heart.

Just nods against him when he tells her it's over, it's all right, it's over. Squeezes him once. Those tremors linger, antipodal and strange, two or three sharper after he has reassured her that it is over, and then they begin to fade. He's exhausted. He'll sleep before she will, but she'll sleep soon, and well, and deeply. And she won't wake until morning.

Pan

[i can't even with you]