Never can be too close.

Jim

Jim's got a sweatband on his forehead, but it can't catch all the drops making their way down his face. He isn't dancing. Well, it depends on your definition.

He's jumping up and down, mostly, bopping his head. Jim isn't as young as many of the kids around him, but he isn't as old as some of the hippies either. He's somewhere in the middle, which is to say, old enough to not seem entirely like a creep. Despite his mustache and stubble. He's wearing a pair of short khaki shorts that come halfway up his thigh and a v-neck t-shirt.

In all honestly Jim looks like he could've just entered the hipster Olympics, especially with those aviator sunglasses he has pulled on. At night.

He takes a break from hoping around and decides he wants to get closer. That or his companions decide. Walking down the amphitheater steps with a beer in one hand and a friend's hand in the other. A tall blonde woman (taller than his six foot frame) who has her own hand in another man's, and they're making a little beeline toward the stage between sets, trying to find someplace where they can disappear into the music.

Someplace a little closer.

You can never be too close.

Serafine

(Perception + awareness.)

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Jim

[ Ditto. Because I said so. ]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5) ( fail )

Serafine

Serafíne felt Jim's resonance from the parking lot, soon as she slipped out of the van, boots hitting the asphalt with a solid sound. Already a little bit high, she breathed in the smokey air and the vast dry heat and linked arms with Dee and Dan and waited while Dee's friends from roller derby clomped out of the back and got themselves sorted and arranged. The view of the city is brilliant but all hazed out and damped by the smoke, but Sera was not looking much a the view by then, just vibing on the crowd and feeling her way toward the other Cultist. Something in her like a lodestone, right, and she's known no one else like him, addled, psychedelic, and stoic so it'd be no one else.

Those weeks at the cabin she came out almost every day. Followed Jim out on those hikes he took Leah on, listening at the edges of his circle of instruction, sometimes coming closer and watching the pair of them, contributing little enough on her own, sometimes meditating or trying to meditate, but just as often crawling up some outcropping within close-to-earshot and just sunning herself on the rocks or watching the movement of the clouds through the sky and the scrub pines in the wind.

Since then, though. Nada. Maybe she saw him with a few others at the funeral held for the dead cabal at the chantry. If so she didn't stay long, just stood with Jake and was spare and still gave the others a stiff spare smile before retreating as far the hell away as she could from the fucking idea of fucking funerals.

Now though, whatever it was that kept from looking for him after that one, singular, bloody night (she drove Pan home, Serafíne, when she saw that Jim was bloodied but breathing) three weeks ago may still be there but she's learned to live with the way it lodges beneath her skin, in the striations of her muscular heart, and there's got to be some fucking reason they're both here, on a smokey Wednesday night.

Sera's companions could give Jim for a run for it in the hipster Olympics but she herself looks like she's dressed up in post-punk drag. Whatever the band on stage and never mind the heat she's got on a tiny leather skirt and torn lace stockings and a cropped Public Image Limited t-shirt, John Lyndon's ugly face transparent over the little black bra she wears beneath. Yes you can see it and yes that is deliberate. Her only concession to the venue and the crowd, maybe, are her boots. No heels, no platforms. So she can't see for shit when she gets close to the pit because you never remember it when she's wandering around on 4" or 5" heels but she's short and fuck.

"I'll share if you will." That's a voice from just behind his left shoulder as he's descending the steps, his friends on his right and just ahead of him, and there are enough people here that he might pretty easily assume that whoever it is is talking to someone else because people and pushing through up and down while they're setting up the stage for the next band but no:

A silver flask bumped against his left tricep becomes an offer of a drink and the hand offering it has long-fingers and short, painted-black nails and a fucking spiked leather-and-metal bracelet and a tattoo of: scissors on the the inside of her hand, blades on her index and middle fingers, the handle on her palm being eaten by or turning into a fucking shark.

Marijuana scent curling through her hair, tobacco and whiskey on her breath. Can't be anyone else even if he didn't feel her coming up behind him until she was there.

Jim

Serafine is very suddenly there and he forgets the other two - Michael and Brie, their names given as they begin introducing themselves to Serafine's own entourage.

But as has already been said, he forgets about them, those he had come here with, as Serafine's presence is suddenly behind then before him when he whips around. Jim forgets the music, if that is possible with the speakers hanging right overhead, tilted down to consume with sound.

For one with his mindfulness is both is and isn't possible at the very same time. Jim forgets everything, but her. Even that flask. Jim throws his arms around her, one over her shoulder and the other under her armpit, to wrap her up in them.

There is nothing overtly carnal about the closeness he engages her in. He lets her go, holding her shoulders to look at her through the bug bubbles of the aviator shades, smiling the whole time. And then hugs her deeply again.

By the next time he lets her go, though, it has settled in. Perhaps what he had come here to forget. Perhaps what he admonishes himself for trying to forget. He's solemn for a moment, but can't help by smile again as he takes her in. "You're here!" A statement that is fact, they both know it, but he makes it anyway.

"I'm so glad you're here." He takes the flask, finally, holding it high like he's toasting the sky, and then tipping it to catch what of its contents fall out (a small but healthy stream) in his mouth. And then he hands it back to her.

Hawksley

If you smoke a cigarette in the stands at Red Rocks, a dozen angry people all around you snap at you to go to the goddamn steps, man, Jesus. Smoking other things, however, is a communal, friendly affair. People share beers, cans of Sunshine or Coors and, yes, flasks of this or that, coolers of this and that. It's part picnic and part rave and when it gets darker than it is even now, truly dark enough to see it all clearly, the moon and the stars will be the only ceiling the ampitheater has ever needed. By then, though, the opening act will be a long-gone memory and the headliner will own them like a god owns worshippers. There are nights when they could call for a human sacrifice on that stage and get it. Bloody and moonlit, til the rain comes to wash it all away overnight.

Hawksley stands at the top of the ampitheater, way in back, looking down the side steps and the masses of people and the stage, at the city in the distance, at every view and how they're all framed by ancient, orange-red stone. He's not looking for anyone, though he has that seeming. He's dressed simply, and he's dressed comfortably, but even then he's dressed well: the shorts he's in are tailored, even if they are rumpled. The v-necked white shirt he has on is also tailored, but who tailors white t-shirts, I ask you. He is not the sort who is going to be painfully awkward every time he runs into someone else wearing mirrored aviators. He's in loafers, with one hand in his pocket, a beer in his hand, and a field watch on his wrist, the hands of which glow in the dark ever so slightly.

Blond. Tan. Probably went to -- or is still going, he only looks to be somewhere in his twenties -- some place like DU. Laxbro. Also possibly: douchebro.

After he gets a good look at the ampitheater and all the people in it who he is not looking for, he starts to shuffle his way down the steps, lazily athletic about the way he side-steps other people who are going to have a smoke where they won't disturb the people in the crowd having a smokesmoke.

Serafine

This conflicted cascade of emotions on her face as he turns around, back to the stage, all mediated by a sort of hushed - well, it's not quite wariness and it's not quite expectancy and there's not really time enough to define it, whatever it is, but call it an alertness, a sort of attenuation she has chosen not to attend until now and even so -

- all that dissolves as he wraps her up in that hug. Sera hugs him back, wraps her arms around his neck and rests the sharp point of her chin on his shoulder and hugs him back just as thoroughly and just as tightly as Jim hugs her. Takes in a deep breath, inhaling his sweat and the beer he's had tonight, the dust and smoke of the crowd, all of it, and releases him a moment after he releases and stares up at him, or - really, her distorted reflections in those aviator glasses and cross-your-fingers that he's so pleased to see her or that the lenses at night sufficiently fuck with his visual acuity that he misses the line between her brows or the brief not of apprehension there because it's already smoothing itself out of her brow as he wraps her up in the second hug and this time her arms around him are tighter than his around her.

I'm so glad you're here.

That before he tips back the flask. Which is full of Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey.

"Yeah well," her smile, sudden, not quite full but crawling and familiar and brick. She takes back the flask and takes a somewhat-less-moderate drink herself. And if her eyes are shining then hey, there's the burn of the whiskey in the back of her throat. There's the smoke from the forest fires in the air. "That's fucking two of us."

He has no idea that of all of them - of every last one of the awakened she's met in Denver, his good opinion matters to her the most. Even she doesn't really know that she's been afraid that she lost it that night three weeks ago and that's why she hasn't been able to face him, since.

"Hey," a moment later, while the introductions and connections and questions linger on or peter out among their groups of friends, and this quiet because most of their friends don't know. Can't really know. " - feel that?" Sera's turning around then, long hair swinging down her spine, frowning up the steps through the dusky twilit crowd. Then supplies, if Jim answers in the negative - "Someone new."

Hawksley

Jim can't feel a good gosh-darned thing. But even when she's at the pit of the formation and Hawksley is at the top, Sera feels someone else out there whose resonance is not her own, and not Jim's. Not familiar, either, unless some previous life of hers knew him, or someone like him. It seems right, when she senses him, that he should be up so very high, that when her eyes find him, they should find him framed against a sky.

Someone up there is soaring, the way she soars sometimes when certain substances interact in certain ways with certain parts of her nervous system. Soaring not like Icharus, not like the Wright Brothers, not like any being that must inevitably and quickly return to earth, but soaring. Always, as though their flight circles and encircles the world, makes the world itself circle.

For a heart-thudding moment, she is soaring, too, to feel that. Following the rise and set of the moon, following the earth around the sun.

Oh, the sun. It won't melt those wings, either. It soaks her skin even when it's after dark. This is like laying out in the heat of this very summer, letting it drench her flesh. They call sunbathers sun-worshippers, and they call sun-worshippers pagans but why not, why not when it feels like this, when your own body becomes molten with it, motionless with it, transcendant with it?

That's what he feels like. Like flying in the sunlight,

never burnt, never falling.

Jim

All that he's felt it worn pretty plainly on his face, and he hasn't felt that, but still shakes his head no to give her and answer. Then he mouths it, the first echo. Then he says it aloud, "No," the final echo through their little square yard of the amphitheater. And then she says what she feels, and he looks down at her, then back up where she's looking into the crowd.

Something to take both their minds off the past few weeks. He reaches out to take her hand, just as he'd taken that tall blonde woman's to get into this mess of a crowd, and looks up again.

"Well, we shouldn't leave them like that, should we?" Trusting in her senses, that had sought him out so easily, judging by how the momentum of Dan and Dee and the roller derby team is just now starting to grow. Yes, they'd just got here, he didn't think Serafine would leave him unfound for long.

"Let's go find 'em." He. Her. It's the royal them that Jim uses to describe the stranger-he-doesn't-want-to-keep-that-way.

"Lead the way, sunshine," trailing behind her once she does so, but still gripping her hands in his knobby knuckled (too many fistfights, if she can believe that) fingers.

Hawksley

Let's be truthful and just get it all out in the open: Hawksley is a damn handsome bastard. He's tall and he's athletic and yes, dude, he probably lifts. Part of the tailoring of that shirt is to make sure each sleeve neatly hugs one of those well-formed, golden-tanned biceps. There's a lazy, elegant stylishness to the way he wears what would be schlubby on... well, a schlubb. And all of that, sweet children, is before we get to his face.

When he's closer, or even half an ampitheater above them, it's plain to see that it's a rather nice face, with a fashionable amount of stubble above a cleanshaven neck. He's clearly of the mind that there is no excuse for a man who, if he chooses to wear facial hair, does not keep it tidy. His hair did not take him very long, but he does know that 'shampoo' does not count as 'product'.

More than that, though, he has a distinctly aquiline look about him. Something about his nose, or his mouth, or simply everything about him, is rather avian. It calls to mind heavy raptors, though, more than the curious head-tilt of a sparrow. Depending on who is looking, it comes as a flash of an eagle pulling trout from a river mid-flight, a falcon holding down meat with a talon while tearing at it with their beak.

They're going to laugh when they hear his name. That's what he looks like.

Serafine

No and no and no. Jim shakes his head and her reflection weaves in his glasses; then it mouths it, then says the word fucking aloud and she doesn't really precisely understand what it was he read in her expression or even what it was underneath that kept her away, but somehow still. It's an answer to that unspoken and unacknowledged thing inside her since that night. Which she does not think about any more but which does not leave her, or him, or any of them.

Even so: she gets it, right. The precise vibration of his denial as it thrums through her the way the stranger's resonance does. She can feel him in the air all around her and the knot does not dissolve but oh, it eases. Her breath catches in the back of her throat and she squeezes Jim's knobby knuckled hand when he takes her own and she's already moving, slipping her flash into a little holster she's carrying at her waist, climbing back up the steps against the press of the crowd and the press of her friends and their friends and waving hey! and waving we'll catch up and lifting her head to the evening sky, her hair blowing back in a sweaty tangle with the first gust of wind.

"Feels like they're fucking flying," Sera confides in Jim half-way up the steps, when some bottleneck has them both on the same step. With a slash of her familiar grin and a laugh. "Just fucking soaring."

Then they're moving again, against the crowd and when the stranger comes in view, Sera waits for Jim to draw up alongside her and points him out with a lift of her chin and a " - there he is."

Apparently it's the Disciple's job to greet the stranger tonight, because Sera leads him closer but waits for Jim to be the first to speak.

Doesn't she fucking always?

Jim

Jim's fishing a thin-pointed sharpie out of his pocket as they go along. It's actually attached to his keys on a ring, the they jingle as he trails behind her, catching up a step now and then, though sometimes their arms stretch and they almost are (but refuse to be) separated. Both of them seem to know their way through a crowd, even if it's only Sarafine who knows where they're going. She points him out and Jim doesn't miss a beat. He smiles. He looks down at his hand. He starts writing long lines, then smaller ones, then filling in others. It takes a few moments.

A few moments in which Hawksley can probably - easily, if he has eyes like his name and his look and his everything, according to Serafine - tell they're looking at him. Jim does look up every once in a while, like he's sketching the man on the palm of his hand with the little writing instrument.

But he's not. And he finally takes a few steps forward and up to Hawksley, though he tosses his head for her to come along as they finally present themselves before him.

He speaks loudly and clearly, without shouting like he's practiced at it, over the music.

"My friend and I need help finishing our crossword," turning his palm toward the man, almost like a fan looking for an autograph. It is indeed a makeshift crossword puzzle, laid out quickly and with words written into it, though no legend of clues. It has a number of words completed, amongst them,

WE

ARE

ECSTATIC

TO

GREET

YOU

These falling down or laid out from the top, some horizontal, others vertical, to complete still other words.

ISN'T

AWESOME

Yes, he's managed to work in contractions. And is probably coming off like he has lost his mind if Serafine is wrong about this. But they're at Red Rocks. And that makes it all okay.

And the word he has yet to finish? The one he is pointing at, asking for help on, other words coming in to meet it, but not complete it? Between ISN'T and AWESOME?

"M_G_C"

Hawksley

Flying. Just fucking soaring.

It makes sense when Jim and Hawksley come face to face, each in their aviators, each tall. Something about his face, something about even the way he carries himself. He looks like he should be soaring. Maybe he's secretly a fighter pilot. Or not secretly. Maybe he has more right to those aviator shades than Jim. Regardless: something about him does seem to inspire flight, reflect warmth. Even if, at the moment, the expression what they can see of his face is bewilderment.

He's trying to get to a decent seat. It's not hard, when there's only one of you, as he seems to have no friends -- unless he's trying to get to them somewhere in the ampitheater. And suddenly he's got two strangers in front of him. One looks a little bit punk rock, a little bit bluesy-avant-garde ingenue, and one of them is mind-alteringly beautiful, and that's not just her face it's the way she's put together, everything from how her legs slope up to her hips and how her torso curves above that and the lines of her shoulders and the crushing longing to just kiss her, you fool! when he makes the mistake of looking at her.

The other one is holding up what he says is a crossword puzzle. One that, had Hawksley been watching as they approached, he would have seen was being made as they walked over. It's not hard to tell once it's presented. The other one is nearly as tall as Hawksley himself, is... sort of weird looking, if we want to be fair, with a way he occasionally sets his mouth so that it looks like it's carved from oak. Hawksley would know that he also has terribly serious eyes, too, underneath it all, if he could see through the shades. But he doesn't remove his, and Jim doesn't remove his either. And, faced with a woman who makes his head spin a bit just to look at her and a man showing him a makeshift crossword puzzle on his palm, Hawksley does what any sane man of his character would do.

He steps forward, says a mild "May I?" to Jim, then takes the man's wrist and hand in his own -- which do have callouses, here and there, but not from hard labour -- and lifts his sunglasses to perch atop his head as he examines the puzzle. His eyes are pale, the pupils blown to take in as much light as they can in the dim light, and without the shades the avian seeming of his appearance is only intensified. Those eyes skim over the surface of Jim's hand, and then his lips curve at one corner.

It's the sort of smile you give a clever child being sassy. Or an old friend telling the story you've heard a hundred times to a new group of people because they just love telling it so much, and you can't really blame them, they're so happy when they get the big laugh at the end. That is: the smile is sort of fond, and amused, and indulgent, and familiar.

"Thank you," Hawksley makes sure to add, when he lets go of Jim. He doesn't flip his shades down again. He looks between the two of them and says: "So which one of you picked me out of the crowd? Or was it a joint effort?"

He blinks. "I swear that wasn't some kind of sad attempt at a pun or a backhand at your tradition," he says rapidly, putting up his hands.

Serafine

While Jim's writing out that crossword puzzle, Serafíne's watching Hawksley, not out of the corner of her eye, but fucking openly, because neither the word subtle nor the word subterfuge are in her vocabulary. When she's not watching Hawksley, her head is canted so the buzzed part of her side-cut is up and her long hand spills sweeping down, checking out Jim's hand, frowning all quizzical at first then opening her mouth in a laugh made soundless by the sound system, but one rich enough to show her teeth, not just incisors but also molars. Checking out Hawksley, again, then glancing back down the moving mass of people on the steps and up toward the horizon.

She looks like she should be taller than she is, but when Jim unfolds again he has a solid six inches on her since she left her heels either at home or in the van and any illusion of height she has comes solely from the fact that she is basically wearing clothing that is proportioned to her frame and as little of that as possible.

Between hither and yon Sera unholsters her flask against and takes a nip and offers Jim a nip but is careful of the pièce de résistance on his hand, pushing the flask into the uninscribed palm.

Takes the flask back as they get to Hawksley and stands there holding it, the cap hanging on a little chain over her knuckles.

"That was me," an edgy little grin that twists into a smirk not for the potential pun but instead as he walks its backwards. "Serafíne. Call-me-Sera." A lift of her chin and a fond smile up at the other Cultist. "This is Jim."

She doesn't offer Hawksley a hand or any part of her body, Sera.

But she does offer him that fucking flask, mouth twisting wry.

"New in town?"

Jim

Jim's arm goes limp except for the few muscles that twist, relax or pull to make it easier for Hawksley to get a closer look at his palm and what's written on it. Once he lets it go, Jim takes a look at it himself, and his lips purse, like he's finally realizing he's been left with a hand covered in sharpie and nothing he can do about it just yet. He gives a resigned shrug and shifts his focus back to the now-not-a-stranger.

"That's disappointing! It would've been a good joke," Jim says, laughing out loud, the scent off of Serafine telling it could also have been true.

He takes a pull of the quickly-emptying flask when it's offered. Serafine gives both of their names, and Jim nods when his own is giving, that writ-upon hand rising again at his elbow to give a simple wave Hello. The other Ecstatic goes about holding out the flask to Hawksley, and Jim looks to see if he'll take it, passing the time with his own couple words. "I was new-ish a month or two back. Don't worry, we won't hold it against you.

Around that time he starts to look curious. His eyebrows and the other expanses of flesh and muscle around his aviators tense with interest, as he realizes they're running their mouths and Hawksley has yet to really share anything of a concrete nature about himself. It isn't accusatory, but he seems to be quieting a bit, as if waiting for an information exchange to occur.

Hawksley

So as they approached, perhaps he noticed the beautiful one watching him. It was dark, though, and there's so many people; he would truly have to have the eyes of his as-of-yet unmentioned namesake in order to notice anyone looking at him. Maybe, even, he's used to it. Being watched. Being looked at.

He should be used to checking his drink before he takes it. They say they're Ecstatics; they could be anything. But he takes the flask as he gives Serafine-Call-Me-Sera a little upward nod, then Jim-Who-Is. "Quite," is his answer to Sera, before he lifts, sniffs, and then tips the flask. He doesn't close his mouth around it, though; he pours himself a mouthful and blinks at the taste, inhaling deeply after he swallows, exhaling, feeling the movement of air changing the taste on his tongue.

"Now that is interesting," he says, of the whiskey, handing it back. "Thank you," he says. Again. And always so sincere, so meeting-the-eyes, so earnest. He smiles. "I'm Hawksley," he says, before he's noticed -- if he ever would have noticed -- the subtle tension ratcheting up in Jim's realization. Then a wry twist of his mouth: "There's a lot more to it than that, as names go, but hopefully you won't fault me for foregoing some of the more specialized formalities." His hands in front of him spread, palms up, the gesture inexplicably reminiscent of a magician showing the audience that he has nothing, nothing at all, up his sleeves. They flip over again, then drop to his sides.

He's noticed the scent of her hair. Or the scent lingering in her clothes. He looks at Sera curiously. "You holding?"

Serafine

That's it for the whiskey. Serafíne's player failed to sneak a flask-of-holding onto her Ecstatic's equipment list and therefore Hawksley gets the last or second-to-last mouthful and one of the Ecstatics finishes it off. Or both of them, splitting the last mouthful as if they might expect to eke a biblical loaves-and-fishes miracle out of the remaining few drops of booze.

"Did he just ask if I'm holding?" Serafíne asks Jim, as if Hawksley were still potentially a shared hallucination they had conjured up between them. Or: she had conjured up for him. There's that crawling grin, the flash of her teeth behind her glossed lips, the gleam of her eyes in the darkness as she laughs and asks again, " - am I fucking holding." All rhetorical, to Jim.

Gives Hawksley this up and down, this quick once-over right, head to toe and toe to head and takes in all those perfectly pointed details about her appearance and this time her amusement is also physical, a coil of her spine in a slow-motion whiplash movement that ends with a closed mouthed grin and a steady study of the new comer.

"Hawksley, let me be frank," the name gives her a weird sort of pleasure, like she's just walked into some rich British soap opera or period drama and is the addressing the stiff and mannered butler or lord the domain. " - you don't look the type."

But in answer to his question: yes. Oh, yes.

There's a chain slung across her body, bisecting Lydon's crossed eyes, and she grabs it to sling her little bag around her lean torso. The bag is leather, covered in little metal studs, and snaps easily open. There's not much inside and the thing cannot hold much but: she pulls out a small, carved pipe with a cover on the bowl. Offers it to him and tosses him a cheap plastic lighter a moment later if he accepts it, ready and willing to share not just with Hawksley and Jim, but with whoever else is close enough to get in on the passing of the pipe.

The set change is over by then. The main act is taking stage, announced by a scream of feedback through the speakers. No chance of further conversation, so they just finish off that bowl standing at the top of the ampitheater, passing it back and forth, the smoke from their lungs joining the smoke from the forest fires hanging in a pall over the city.