She fell asleep in the bathroom; wouldn't move, wouldn't let him touch her. Just sat there on the toilet seat listing ever-so-slowly to the right under her cheek found the edge of the vanity, and then she slowly laid down her head. The room was sideways then, shunting light and dark on the floor, the vanity and its shadows. Her eyes half-open for another ten or fifteen or twenty minutes as she resisted sleep and wished for the fucking champagne bottle and thought about moving but did not move because she could not remember how muscles worked in the body. In her body or any other.
Then at some point: sleep, hard to tell the drunken dreaming from the true thing, except for the way her spine lost what remained of its coordination and her body sagged further aslant. By then he had made up his, or hers, on the couch. Maybe checked on her twice and found her still gauging whether or not she could reach the champagne without falling over. Maybe he was already drifting off to sleep when she fell from her perch, asleep, onto the bathroom floor, too fucked up, and too deeply asleep, to even notice.
So he found her there, curled up at the base of the toilet, carried her, already twitching and murmuring from incipient nightmares, to his bedroom and his bed. Tucked her beneath his sheets without her waking and saw her agitation, the strain of her sleep, the choking darkness of nightmares drifting up from the depths of her subconscious. The locked-away memories John Brogan had offered to unlock for her, if she could but turn and face them.
And he put his hands on the crown of her head. Murmured a prayer, to Mary, the Mother of God and watched her quiet.
Pan was up long before Serafíne. There were vespers to be prayed and morning mass to be conducted; the day care to be inspected and the day's appointments to be tended to. He was up two or three hours after she woke him and had put in nearly a full day's work by the time she crawled to consciousness accompanied by the incipient pounding of a sick headache and some other, dark and wretched curl of something nameless in the back of her throat.
This is not the first time Serafíne has awoken in a strange bed.
--
She's awake when he returns from morning mass and morning prayers and morning meets. Freshly showered. She let the water run through all the hot water and all the cold water while her skin turned pink and then white from the shock, while she scrubbed scrubbed scrubbed at herself with his fucking bar of fucking Dial soap until she had nearly raised welts on her skin. Picked out the remaining bits of glass embedded in her feet and thighs. Washed her hair three times, gasping in the icy frigid water the second and third times.
He finds her standing in his kitchen, leaning against the counter, wearing last night's clothes. The fucking bustier bra, the front covered in textured pink roses. Tiny little skirt held together by leather strips and safety pins and a prayer, barefoot on his linoleum. Has his cheap old plastic comb and is pulling it through her hair.
PanHe fell asleep standing in front of the reception desk in the office. Not for long. Long enough for Rosa to walk in on him and jolt him out of it with a hand on his elbow. She knows better than to ask him what's going on. She doesn't want to know and she doesn't want to get involved and he would never ask her that.
"You need to sleep," she said."I will.""Before you're dead.""I will, Rosa. Relajáte.""When will you be back?""I don't know. Don't burn the place down before I get back."
Back across the street he said a prayer before he let himself in the front door and found her in the kitchen. Looked as if he'd slept all night, full of vigor and good energy. She could feel the intensity of the minor miracle.
"Let's go," he said. "We got a long drive."
-----
If they talk in the car it's of little of consequence. Maybe she sleeps most of the way, until they turn off the highway and their speed drops twenty miles per hour. He doesn't touch her to wake her up if she does sleep. Starts whistling to himself like as not to keep his concentration up and then they're there.
He shaved before he left the house this morning and his eyes reveal an alert mind but his skin and the muscle beneath betray his exhaustion. He hasn't been sleeping enough lately. Wonder why.
"Alright," he says, like that's that. Doesn't get out the truck right away. Kills the engine and sits in thought a moment.
JimJim is getting tanner. Going on months of outdoor yoga, first in the parks of Denver, then out here in the woods where the light peaks through trees and rays that aren't visible to eyes still manage to touch and transmutate the skin in their spectra, through even the cloud cover.
Maybe it hadn't been as noticeable in the amber glow of the firelight, shifting through all the autumn and incendiary colors the previous night, but it's definitely showing when the truck pulls up and he walks out of the cabin to greet them. The headlights bathe him, standing there still barefoot, in a plaid robe that only comes down to about halfway up his thigh. Thankfully they can see he's wearing undershorts beneath as each stride takes him closer to the car.
He has a glass in his hand. Ice and liquid the color of maple syrup. Dark liquor. He swirls the glass with the twist and gyration of his wrist as he does so. Walks up to the window of the truck.
Pale blue eyes fall on Serafine when he does so. Leans against it, hoping the window will come down, though if it doesn't he opens the door for her and the words are the same. "Serafine, angel, come in side and sit. And we'll talk and you'll feel better," he says, sure of the last thing, or at least sure - it's plain on his face, plain as any emotion that manages to crack and crumble that stoic exterior is - that he'd do whatever he could to make her feel better. To rejuvenate that soul that sometimes, in the right light, you can tell in his eyes he's in awe of. Connected to. Kindred to.
And with that, his hand comes out. Slowly. Tentatively. And the glass he'd been swirling, she'd see now the rim is bone dry. It was meant for her. His hand takes hers only long enough to put a drink in it. Perhaps to grasp the back of her palm and fingers long enough it could simply to make sure she has a good hold on the cool glass. But that probably isn't the only reasons.
SerafíneSera says nothing; not really. She follows him to the truck, stopping only to grab a little bag on a chain of a black zippered rose, her heels (though these she carries by two fingers of her left hand) and, incidentally, the bottle of cheap and now flat and now warm champagne that she lost last night. Carries it with a shadow of her usual arrogant swagger, but that's muscle memory more than anything.
Pan asks for the bottle of champagne back before she's out the door. Open fucking container laws. She rolls her eyes and hands it back to him, giving him the bulbous bottom of the bottle. Holding onto the neck as long as she can. But she gives it up.
She climbs in on her own power; glances at Pan once or twice, enough that she can read the exhaustion etched into his skin in the morning light, as the city whirs along beside them. Then just sits there, her forehead against the glass in the passenger's window, wet hair slowly drying down her back. If she falls asleep, she falls back into the nightmares she sleeps too deeply to wake herself from. Of which she remembers only the bile in the back of her throat. So she tries not to sleep.
She's still leaning against the window when they arrive; the world changed. The close crowding of the city gone. The shadows of trees spread across the windshield of Pan's truck, but she straightens Pan kills the engine, glances at his profile once more. Then lifts her gaze to follow Jim's track down the steps from the front porch, across the sun-dappled drive, her gaze dull and removed. Watching him mostly because he's the only thing moving in their immediate world.
The window does not come down; she doesn't even turn to look at him, but there's this point where he opens the door for her and can see that she was reaching toward the handle to open it for herself.
Sera is not as bone-deep and physically exhausted as the priest, but there's that dull sheen to her eyes, all withdrawn. When Jim says her name her eyes touch his face and her brows drawn minutely together and her mouth compresses firmly around her teeth.
Slides out of the passenger's seat then, barefoot on the graveled drive and therefore five or so inches shorter than she usually is and accepts the drink from Jim's hand with a grateful sort of fucking grimace that aspires to but never becomes a smile.
When he grasps the back of her hand, though. She stiffens her shoulders, turns her head in this sharp and negative gesture. "Don't." All firm, not looking at him but refusing the comfort of contact. Just: Don't.
"I'll be fine." A sharp breath expelled, the grimace slips into a tight, rallying sort of twist of her mouth and she cuts past him, headed for the cabin.
Spent forty-five minutes in the priest's shower this morning, Sera. She still feels too fucking filthy to be touched.
Pan[perc + awareness-as-empathy: payback for last night]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 5, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 )
SerafíneSera feels worse today than she did last night. Despite his prayer the remnants of the nightmares lingered; she doesn't know waht they were about but she remembers the feeling and the feeling is gross. And it makes her feel even grosser, not just because of brogan, but because of whatever's inside her. Which Pan knows about from their talk a bit. Maybe Brogan broke it loose? She's not usually troubled by it like this and never has nightmares. She's afraid and ashamed and angry and withdrawn and either doesn't want them to know - IDK, Stuff, Lori, Stuff. On some level, she feels like she's radioactive. She's pretty resilient but right now she feels so gross.
Also she's probably steeling herself up to like go back and see Brogan. or something. SELF SACRIFICE. So maybe there's that, too.
PanAll he does is sit and watch. What they saw of each other in the bathroom last night is not enough to take away the filth of what she thinks and what she feels and so he sits and watches Jim come down out into the late morning sunlight and he watches Sera sharp and fast in her pulling back into herself.
And she doesn't know by now because he tends to write her off as drunk or high when she acts out. Doesn't stop to figure out what's underneath the makeup and the fishnets because if she wanted him to know she would go ahead and tell him. He isn't her pastor and she isn't his daughter. Other than the tenuous binds that come from community they owe each other nothing.
But there's a lot of reasons why his resonance feels like light. Light shines from things holy and clean but fire is also bright. So are floodlights, road flares. Atomic bombs are so bright they burn the shadows of the dead into brick. He does not have a temper but that does not mean he has not asked God to give him the power to kill before.
He prays for guidance and another solution every goddamn time but last night didn't tell him anything other than what they already know. John Brogan is a demon and they cannot destroy his Avatar so that only leaves one other option.
Pan gives Jim a look that is only a small fraction of an apology and gets out of the truck. The chassis rocks with the loss of his weight and he leaves the door open. Leaves the keys in the ignition. The console dings at him but he ignores it.
Walks right up behind Sera and takes her upper arm in a hand that feels as if it has never been soft.
"Hey," he says. Doesn't let go of her.
JimJim crosses his arms as he sees Pan walking by, intent on gaining on Serafine before she reaches that big wooden front door. He leans against the truck, legs crossing so that his left heel is to the right of where it should be, watching his finally run her down and put his hand on her arm. The ding of the truck, eventually, gets to him.
Probably not.
But either way, maybe to offer this interaction a bit of privacy, he does his own circling of Pan's car, takes the key from the ignition, takes his time figuring out how to lock it, though he probably knows how to lock a car. Seals up the vehicle and takes his time, again, the long away around the back end and bed, swinging the keys from their ring on his index finger.
Gives them time, reaching into the front pocket of the robe and pulling out a small cylinder of crumpled and twisted paper with God knows and they know and who really couldn't guess what inside? A lighter, his being tapped and slapped before its found (how do you lose a lighter when you're wearing a robe and underpants? Jim finds a way.
Jim finds many ways to give them privacy and time to figure out what a hand on the arm, what walking away, what Hey, what all that means. To sort it out before again interjecting himself into the situation, puffing away and admiring the smoke for its changing ways, disappearing and reappearing in different beams of light in the growing night.
SerafíneSera's taken a sip or two of the drink Jim brought her on her path back to the cabin; maybe more than a fucking sip. She didn't eat breakfast in Pan's kitchen, not one of his fucking apples and not his wilted lettuce and not his orange juice and there was no coffee for her to make. Maybe she had a glass of water from the tap, and then another, but she has had nothing solid since before she got on stage this night last, with her friends behind her and John Brogan cloaking himself from her sensing back there somewhere in the audience, watching her.
He did nothing to her that another man might not do. He watched her from the back of the bar; when the set was over, he crossed the dance floor at a deliberate pace to intercept her. She saw him as she was returning the microphone to the stand and froze. He asked her to dance and she fucking agreed and he was pleased that she had. Humor an old man. He told her that she was special. That she could be something great if she just listened to him. But really, look at her. Assholes say shit like that all the time to girls like her, and she isn't the sort to listen to assholes.
Assholes don't usually block out the noise of the crowd so that, if he wanted you to, no one could hear you scream. We consider these things technicalities.
--
Hey - says Pan, and puts his hand around Sera's upper arm.
"Don't touch me." The words are autonomic, quite nearly. No deliberation and no thought and they're torn out of her throat.
They have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with Pan or Jim or anyone but Sera and there's a note of apology, the rising whine of it, in the me that's obviated if he does not let her go.
She jerks herself hard away from him that her drink sloshes out onto the dusty gravel nevermind the solid belts of it she's already downed. Hard enough that she might give herself whiplash, but she's half his weight and hung over and hungry and drinking again and the tension in her is suddenly enough to make her tremble.
"I'm sorry Pan just let me go."
Pan"Este no ayuda nada, Sera."
He says this quiet the way he offers prayers at the bedside of the sick, clutching the hands of the people who stay behind when a loved one dies. Like his presence is not a physical thing but a gateway between them and understanding. It's a calm and incontrovertible statement.
And he says this quiet the way he said m'hija last night. But he doesn't let her go. He makes that face like forgive me before he hugs her. And she can struggle all she wants but it won't do too much good. His arms are as thick as her thighs and he isn't hungover and he isn't shaking like he can't stand his own insides. She can feel his heart slamming against his ribs from the effort of holding her still but he does hold her still.
He waits until she stops struggling before he says anything.
"I don't know what all you done, or you think you done, but I know this: they don't just fall out the bed one day and wake up wrong. Listen: They make a choice, alright, and it's the wrong one, and they gotta follow through with it. They gotta push through everything tells a normal person that it's fucked up and then they're stuck with it. They're beyond whatever kind of fucked up you think you are."
SerafíneAnd she does struggle. Spills even more of the drink and then drops it without meaning to do so, though the glass does not shatter. It hits a hummock of dirt and grass rolls down a slight slope to settle in old tire tracks. Then she has both hands free to push firmly and furiously at his forearms and twist her sharp, narrow shoulders and cause all the lashing muscles of her torso to contract and then open up with the parabolic movement of a whip set in motion.
Her back is mostly bare; she's all sharp-spine and bony prominences and when she finally calms down it is only because it is clearly fucking futile and so: his heart is slamming in his chest; her breath is sharp and short and her voice is raw and she angles her head sharply away from him as he speaks to her, the tension in her jaw a palpable, visible thing.
Swallows back her first, lashing curse of a response to him, closing her eyes. Takes in a breath deep enough to expand her chest like a bellows, a breath deep enough to catch the scent of the joint Jim's lighting. Tips her head back against the priest's chest so she can look up through the branches of the trees at the sky.
"You're right. I know that Pan." There's apology in her tone. Maybe gratitude or grace, but her voice is tight and still sharp, clotted with withheld emotion. "I really do."
She swallows something back. Then,
"I just don't feel it right now."
Which is all she ever wants to do.
JimJim ashes the short and stout spliff, taking short pulls though the thing keeps burning so damn fast, and finally holds it up to flick off the cherry with the tip of his index finger. A lick and a press, and the excitement of its end has died.
Just a few puffs to take the edge off. He could feel the edge. It hasn't been dulled. Not even a bit. Maybe Pan and Serafine would straighten out whatever it was that needed straightening... It looked like something would get straightened the way Jim watches him wrap her up in those oak-bough-arms. But the edge was more that sword of Damocles handing over them all. Threatening to fall or to cut the rope and let loose War and worse.
His approach is slow, up the drive, more a stroll than what Pan had tipped into to catch up with Serafine. He'd caught a little of it. The tail end of Pan and most of what Serafine had said.
"You fight a guy like that? You put him down. You prove him wrong? You kill him. Serafine, angel, that's what you are. Burning. You burn with love. It's your fuel and you're its match. And the fact something he could say would scare you so much? That alone proves him wrong," Jim interjects, a voice at the edge of the light that steps into it from his path from the truck a moment later.
PanHis heart beats slower once she stops fighting and the breathlessness finds its place in the cadence of his speech. The force goes out of his joints but he doesn't let go of her. If he could draw that wrongness out of her with his own self she can't doubt now that she would.
It's enough to hear her say something true.
"I know you don't. We're not gonna leave you though. Alright?" He loosens his arms from around her torso and holds his hands on her shoulders a moment to rest his forehead on the crown of her head. Lets her go then and stoops to pick up the glass she dropped. Comes back to his feet like the stooping brought the exhaustion smashing down on him.
He stands still long enough to bear witness to what Jim says and doesn't interject. Might just not understand what the Cultist is saying. They operate on two different planes of existence.
SerafíneThere haven't been tears in her eyes in the past twenty-four hours. Not once through it all; but for the first time she can feel them spring to prominence in her eyes. Just enough to shine in the headlights. Not enough to fall.
She closes her eyes against them; leans her head back ever-so-slightly as Pan rests his forehead on her skull. Her hair's still damp in the center from her shower two fucking hours earlier, it's so thick. Also: Pan Echeverría needs to buy some better shampoo and maybe some fucking conditioner.
The faintest nod acknowledges Pan's reassurance, and a hard swallow follows. When he lets her go she's still grateful to be returned to herself, but there's a shiver down her spine, mostly forestalled, contained in her torso.
Sera shoots Jim a look of taut gratitude in the moment after. Opens her shining eyes and gives him another limited-engagement nod, this tight little smile, the sort women wear at funerals, remembering old stories with love, smiling through tears. Some part of her wants to hug him, too, but she still just feels unclean. That look, the shining eyes, the tight little that flattens her mouth will have to do.
Breathes out a huff of a breath, which is shaped like a laugh without any of its inflections, and compresses that smile into some taut and not-quite-ironic.
"He likes me, Jim. Asked me to dance." There's a different tone to her voice now, though. Pan and Jim can hear it; less of the desperation in her distress. Sera's trying for fucking humor. Irony. It falls well short of the mark, but she no longer sounds like she's suffocating under the idea of John Brogan's regard. "He didn't hurt me or anything. Just asked me to come around and sign recruiting papers. You know. Thinks I have what it takes to make it high up in his organization.
"But he's a fucking liar and he thinks that fucking alcohol pollutes the body, so I'm pretty sure I don't qualify. Dancing sucks too." There's something hollow about her flippancy, like she's putting on a show for herself or them or the universe but it is her flippancy and she's gritting her teeth and moving under her own power, then. Up the steps and into the cabin.
JimShe starts, tears threatening and then there, maybe still lingering by the time she starts explaining exactly what happens to Jim. His head tilts to the side, his hands fold in front of him, the dead joint between two fingers, and he ends all these gestures with the climax of a sigh and shaking his head. "How could he not? Serafine." He simply says her name. Repeats it. Had he ever called her any less than her full name?
Probably not. Because every time he says it, even now, it's like each syllable breaks down into a bit of who she is. Like a True Name, like meaning shared from knowing it the ways he knows it from knowing her.
Jim wasn't one for idle reassurances or promises it will all be okay. His are more concrete. Logical, if that logic is spun together and woven in addled and muddled color gossamer that threatens to break, spun glass that builds beautiful ideas and abstracts. Not beautiful, here, but hard to ignore as he continues. "He wants you. He wants Leah too. It's no more a reflection on who you are than it is on that terrified girl in that cabin. A bastard like him wants a beautiful soul so he can break it and make it in his own image. It's not you he likes. It's not who you are. It's what he can do to you. That's what he likes/wants/needs," the last a flurry of words that bleed together into a new construction.
And then, she's off, up the steps to that cabin, and he's following, tucking what survives of the joint behind his ear.
Pan"Jim."
His voice is like the wind rustling against the leaves around them, a formless thing that could topple an entire tree if he got it into his head to do so. Even when he stands up at the pulpit and preaches you can hear the rough tracks in the life he's lead and that doesn't do anything to weakness the man's charisma. Even in all black like to take attention off of his height and his bulk he pulls the faithful to him like the sun pulls the planets.
"Hang on a minute, I wanna talk to you."
SerafíneThe look Sera shoots Jim is a profile view; her eyes shadowed, her cheek curved. Her eyes are dark from this angle by there's a layering to the survey as she mounts the steps. And he can see the pullback in her, the way she nods so faintly when he compares her to Leah that that note, that note in particular, strikes a chord deep enough to vibrate in her for long moments afterward. To pull her a little bit more back into herself.
Sera glances at Pan when he says Jim's name, hesitates a moment herself, this sketch of a question in her brows, then heads inside.
JimJim's hands unfold, falling to his side, when Pan asks for a moment alone with him. His doesn't react to it as if he's surprised or even hesitant, only waits to see that Serafine has gone inside, and then turns his attention back to the priest.
They are the same the way men are the same, in some important ways, but so very different in others. Of course, there are also things they care about. Things they share. And this leaves Jim looking open to what Pan needs to share, now, with him and in the privacy outside the house.
He does not nod, simply waits, ready to listen.
PanHe doesn't stand before the other Disciple like a frightened man awaiting judgment or redemption. It's a dissemination of information and he keeps it from Sera because Sera is shaky. Because Sera hasn't asked him.
Because he knows where Sera is heading in her mind and he doesn't know Jim near as well. Who the hell even knows.
The priest puts his hands in his pockets and casts his grass-green eyes towards the road once and brief to make sure nothing is coming for them. In the sunlight the shadows beneath his eyes are dark as if he's strode away from a recent fight. His hair is growing unkempt and Jim can see the gray and white shot through the black of it louder now than he has the other times he's seen the man. He's not wearing sunglasses. His voice gets quieter for the knowledge that Sera is behind them.
When he looks back he says, "By the time I broke through his wards the other night I didn't have nothing left to keep him out of my head, but I found him. I know where he is. I'm going over there--" He pulls his hand out of his pocket to check the watch strapped to his right wrist. His face reveals nothing as he puts the hand back. "I'm going over there. This needs to end, like, yesterday."
JimJim, again, doesn't not. He soaks it in, though. Is mindful of Pan's tone. Decided. And he doesn't disagree. But he comes to the conversation on his own terms, also unafraid of being judged for those terms.
"I live my life by a law of love and a promise of peace. But those are my laws. My promise to myself," and saying such, to a religious man of holy orders and righteous action, may seem... Well, it isn't wholly ironic, but might be mistaken for such.
"You find him and you do what you have to do, holy man," and the words, they can't be mistaken for sarcasm, not the way Jim says them. It isn't satire either. It is an honest descriptor, like he's saying what he maybe referred to the Chorister as in his own internal dialogue. " I won't stand in your way. And I'll stand in the way of his violence, however I can."
"I hope you come back. And I hope Leah, Serafine, none of us, have to worry about him again," and then he pauses, considering what he's said thus far and finding no qualms with his own statements. "How?" Turning on a dime, it is genuinely inquisitive.
PanAnd he doesn't judge. Even if he doesn't agree he just lets it be and he doesn't retaliate. He didn't flinch away from the cannabis smoke when it drifted towards him and more than he flinched away from Sera's insistence that he not touch her. Intuition drives him more than it drives some other people but the thing that gets him where he needs to go is his humility and the steady onward marching of his boots.
Ain't a whole lot you can do with a person like that and Jim doesn't aim to. No qualms in his statements but then a question.
"How?" he asks, repetition gone to counter-question with the furrow of his brow. He doesn't have an anchor point for it.
Jim"How will you end it? Who will go with you? How can I help? I've got ideas on the last one, but I want to know more, what to expect, not that you can have... Expectations? For something like this. Hopes. Dreams, maybe. Nightmares. But not expectations," he finishes, clarifying.
PanThe priest nods. They're on the same page again.
"I will call on the name of the Lord," he says, "and he will answer with fire." He gestures with a pointed finger to the cabin, at the girls gone back from the windows and the doors. "We've already as good as lost one of them. I don't intend to let another one walk into that Hell he calls a new beginning. You can help by keeping her here until it's done."
JimJim listens to that first part and doesn't blink. He understands the meaning behind it. He would do what he thought was right, the way he thought it would be done, and it would be done, and Jim accepts the basic truths that Pan doesn't say, but that he is still able to find in what others might find...
Disturbing? Lunacy?
They may not actually be on the same page, or even reading the same book, but they care about the same library not being burnt to the ground. Jim is more accepting. He waits until Pan moves on to the other questions, answering them, before nodding.
Just a nod. It's hard to say more, really, and Jim doesn't speak to hear himself speak. He looks back at the cabin. "She should be with someone," turning toward the door, as if they should go inside, now that is settled.
Pan"Yeah." He takes the hand not attached to the watch from his pocket but does not hold it out. Sees the doors to the truck are shut and hazards a guess. "Gonna need the keys back."
JimJim tosses them to Pan and heads into the cabin.
PanHe catches them - barely: if he played anything besides Doctor in high school it was Basketball and that was what thirty years ago? - and takes his other hand out of his pocket and turns to walk back down the driveway.
SerafíneSo, not listening at the door. Serafíne respected their privacy and left them alone; she's made a nest for herself in one corner of the couch
She has exchanged her rose-covered bustier for an inside-out t-shirt that makes her look as young as she is. Younger maybe. That nest on the couch has provisioned herself with a glass of ice water and an as-yet unopened bag of sourdough pretzel nuggets and the soapstone box in which some of the smoking paraphernalia is sometimes stored. Maybe a fucking afghan, uncoiled around her bare legs as she rises and heads back to the door.
Then Jim's coming in and Pan's not behind him. Sera has a carved pipe in one hand, the haze of smoke coiling lazy from her nostrils as she glances between them, then comes back outside. The scent is strong in the air around her and the pot is calming her, taking - oh yes - more of the edge that the two of them sanded so finely down for her.
Sera cuts a glance from Jim to the priest's retreating back.
"Where's he going?"
Jim"The man has a flock to tend to," is Jim's answer, glancing over his shoulder at Pan's retreating - but still impressive - form. He's already got his keys and is heading toward or by now maybe even into a truck, an aged behemoth of metal to match its owner's brawn. And sometimes the wolves must be beaten off, he thinks, but remembers Pan's words.
There was a time where Jim lived a life of crime and that included as many lies and as much deceit as one would expect. He is by no means rusty as it, maybe even has to force the words out, but will them to come as smoothly as they once did. "Can't expect him to do it here," he finishes.
Crafted. A lie of omission, but no less on.
[ Manipulation + Subterfuge. Dropping a WP. ]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6, 6) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
SerafínePerception + Awareness-as-empathy
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 1
Serafíne"You're lying."
And immediately Sera is tight-faced and tight-voiced and sharp spined again, pulling back from Jim and pushing past him, out through the front door. Running, flat out, down the steps. Not as fast as she might have under other circumstances, when she was better rested or had she eaten anything, anything at all in the last 24 hours and she is serious enough because she gets that something else just happened out there and Jim lying is as rare as a fucking eclipse of the moon-and-sun-and-stars in her experience so:
one hurtling, underfed, hung-over, starting-to-be-stoned cultist comes running at Pan Echeverría's from behind and pushes him, sharply, furiously.
"Where are you going! Where the fuck do you think you're going. If you think you're going over there by your fucking self - " and fuck them both now she's crying, shouting and shaking and very much unable to see straight. She felt John Brogan's will as he batted down her attempt to divine his future.
She cleaned up Pan's blood from the passenger's seat of his car.
" - right now, I will fucking murder you. You fucking stupid fucking priest."
PanHe does not rush along the path and he has just reached the truck when bare feet hit the dirt right behind him and bare palms hit him in the back. A hand against the roof of the truck salvages his balance and he turns around to face her.
Unlike Jim he doesn't bother trying to lie. He couldn't do it even in his past life. Men as big and easily tipped towards violent as Francisco Echeverría was don't have to lie to get through life.
"Sera," he says and puts the keys back into his pocket. "Sera, I'm not going nowhere." She cleaned his blood out of his truck. He puts his arm over her shoulders and starts to walk back with her. "I'm sorry. Tranquila, tranquila, I'm sorry. Come on, let's go inside, you don't got any shoes on."
Jim"I'm-" but she's past him, and he's sighing, crossing his arms again, following behind her but at a significantly slower pace. She's well into her admonishment of Serafine by the time he catches up.
Maybe he'd considered lying again, but the way she's seen through it, like a child through a spider's web, only leaves him looking ashamed at the fact he had lied in the first place and that his instinctual inclination had been to simply do so again.
"I'm sorry," instead, to Serafine and Pan both as they head up the path again.
SerafíneAnd Sera: she's all wild now, keeps pushing Pan or punching for several seconds after he had given in to her assault and is turning her around and telling her that he's not going anywhere, that she should be calm, that he's coming back inside, that she doesn't have any shoes on.
Then she stops, ceases, turns around, and the priest lays an arm around her shoulders and the truth is somewhere underneath her passionate denunciation of Pan's decision she still doesn't really want to be touched she has forgotten that or remembered also what it feels like to be her and she leans into Pan's arm and jabs him in the flank with her elbow just as a fucking reminder that he is a fucking idiot and she is not putting up with it.
When Jim comes up, looking ashamed, apologizing, she stands there for a moment staring at him, then just shakes her head, that long blonde hair, breaks free of the priest or perhaps drags him forward because she does not quite trust him and then shakes herself free and launches herself at Jim. Wraps her arms around him in a tight and shaking hug, her small frame electric with adrenaline. The pipe is gone; dropped somewhere on the drive and she hardly notices.
Sera kisses Jim on the cheek and then the forehead, her hands clasped around his skull, then leans back and tells him, "He's a fucking idiot. You're a fucking idiot too."
Waits for Pan to draw abreast and then reaches to loop his arm over her shoulders or some fucking thing again, though once more she makes like she wants to punch him in the gut.
"That's okay. Because I'm not. And I'm not helpless. And I'm not stupid. And we're going to come up with a plan.
"And whatever it is, we're going to do this together."
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