The neighborhood is a nice one. One and two story brickhouses on treelined streets. Mature trees well-tended over the years by upper middle class owners. Some of the homes have been overhauled extensively, others have been split into duplexes or even condo units. But most remain as they were: single family homes on city lots with modest yards and well-tended gardens and high garden walls.
The invitation by return of text was to a particular address on a particular street. Sid found Sera (wearing a hooded jacket) sitting on the front stoop there, and could feel the hum of her magic in the air around them. The low visceral song of it, physical and sensual and alive. Quiet yeah, but -
- enough to ensure that no strangers were following Sid. That no effects were hanging in the air around her. That Sid was intact and whole and under her own power and alone. That the sparks of life scattered up and down the quiet street had been augmented by just one: Sid's and no other.
Then Sera stood up from the stoop and started down the street. The address she'd texted Sid wasn't her own. She's paranoid enough after the events of recent nights that she's not putting that house number out into the ether. So they walked, two three four five six blocks through the quiet treelined streets, until they came to a nice two-story house in the middle of a quiet street with a double-lot and a stone garage hard against the alley bisecting the block.
Inside, the sort of chaos that belongs to a house with four twentysomethings, all of whom like to party and play music and take drugs and generally enjoy a lively social life of the sort that leaves not-much-time for housekeeping. Something about the space seems old and well-lived in, though; the detritus of the housemates lives has been scattered atop it. There's original canvases scattered around the hallways, not yet mounted to the wall. There's a giant sign with the numbers for all local cab companies just inside the front door. IF YOU DRANK MY BOOZE YOU DON'T DRIVE, the whiteboard on which the numbers are recorded says. There's even an old spring water bottle from some office water cooler labeled CAB FUND beneath the lovely mahogany table in the hallway.
Sera leads Sid through the wide open kitchen - renovated sometime in the last decade - where her house-mates who are also her band-mates are scattered. Offers her a drink from the fridge, then tells the rest that they are going outside to smoke. Which is code for: don't follow me. Dan's cool. Dee and Rick are just cool.
So Sera leads Sid onward.
SidIt seems like ages since Sera sent out that text. She had information to share, the kind that could only be shared face to face. Sid had replied at the time, had messaged once after about those cameras she'd been seeking out around the city, then she, too, vanished. If messages had been sent her way in the in-between times, they would have gone unanswered. She doesn't really know why she responded to this one.
Maybe she's missed the woman. Probably not.
She parked her truck around the block from the address Sera gave her, and arrived early enough that she could perform a scan of her own. It takes her a long, long time to exert her Will over the area and see what can and cannot be seen by a sleeper's eye. But Sera isn't the only paranoid one on that block. Hasn't been for a few hours.
When Sid appears at last she's well aware of her surroundings. She's well aware that she's not being followed, that no one is noticing her trying not to be noticed - in her faded, falling apart clothes, an olive green cap pulled over her vibrant red hair and tugged as low as it can be tugged over her glasses. She keeps her head down and her hands in her pockets, but her eyes are constantly moving, constantly watching. She gives no sign she's noticed the Ecstatic sitting on the stoop. She gives the other woman a quick look when they meet up on that sidewalk, and she falls into step with her without a word.
They come to a house and Sid stops when it's clear this is the destination. She hesitates at the edge of the walkway, looking up at the building with a slight frown, but the hesitation only lasts a moment. That frown seems to be stuck there forever. Walking through the halls, she keeps her hands in her pockets and her shoulders hunched, and she sways to avoid knocking into things. It's done out of respect rather than fear of some sort of retribution for knocking into someone else's belongings, though who could tell with her. She's always so nervous. She's eyeing the roommates warily, even Dan, whom she shared a tiny room with for a few days. There's a twitch her head that is almost a nod, a kind of acknowledgement. Then they're going 'outside for a smoke.' Sid's brows tighten, a movement lost behind the brim of her hat but shows in her eyes. Saying nothing, she follows in Sera's wake like a kicked puppy.
SerafineThe garden is lovely. Bounded by a stone wall covered with moss and lichens. It is dark now and difficult to see, but here and there low lights brighten the garden's rich, dark shadows. Someone else tended it well and lovingly. Lately it is going a bit more to seed.
There's a stone patio away from the house, a scattering of chairs, a well-slung hammock, and one of those covered outdoor cabana beds, the rattan roof pulled back for a view of the sky. Ashtrays scattered all around out there; cigarette butts, the odd pipe tucked away, a modest hooka sitting on an old stone garden table in the center of the space. The scent of cigarettes inside the house was faint. This really is where Sera comes to smoke, saving the artwork inside from the constant exposure to tobacco smoke. Sera grabs a couple of beers and a bottle of water from the fridge on her way out, then a pack of cigarettes, and it is notable and remarkable how affectionate she is with her housemates. With Dahlia and Rick and particularly Dan, sliding an arm across his shoulders and dropping a kiss on the crown of his head when she slips past him to the fridge.
The trio, that trio, is playing a hard-fought game of stoned Scrabble. Extra points are awarded for using drug-slang. There is argument over whether ZA for pizza constitutes drug-slang when Sid and Sera sail through.
Outside, Sera sits down on the cabana bed. Cross-legged at the edge.
Lights up a cigarette and just looks at Sid, all alert and aware.
"Have a seat," on the bed, or anywhere. Sera pulls one of the ashtrays closer to her and opens one of the beers. Offers the other to Sid. "You been okay?"
Sid
Sid noticed the affection, the open closeness of Sera's bonds with these people. They don't just share a living space, not like Sid and her own roommate. Though, she's not entirely sure they merely share space anymore, either. Whatever is happening there, Sid doesn't like to think about it.
Sid doesn't like to think about a lot of things. She watched the easy, comfortable affectionate exchanges, the kiss to Dan's head, the touches, with a detached gaze. She is an outsider here, Jane Goodall among another branch of primates. No, that's not quite right. That does a disservice by Sera and Dan and their friends. But still, Sid feels alien inside that house. She feels a little better out in the garden, with the sky stretched out above them, stars twinkling through a thin veil of cloud. Out there it's open and not so close. Out there it's just the two of them.
She pauses once outside, just off the step, looking around at the tools of drug use, the cigarette butts, the moss and the lichens, all of it. All of it is taken in without sign of judgement or disdain. Sera's voice brings her back to the present, to the reason that she's here. To talk, catch up, exchange information, something like that. Sid looks around for a seat and takes one, not on the bed, but on the edge of a folding chair she adjusts so that she's mostly facing Sera straight on. Her eyes lower to the offered beer, but she gives a quick shake of her head. That gaze darts upward with the next question, alighting on Sera's face for a moment before shifting away and down. She doesn't know how to answer that, really.
So she nods her head, a hesitant lifting of her chin followed by a quick lowering. "You?"
Sera
"Not too bad," Serafíne returns, the flash of her smile in the darkness like heat lightning. Look: Sid sits on the edge of a folding chair. Sera sits crosslegged on the cabana bed, but then shifts her position, leaning back on her elbows, long legs curled beneath her. Faux-long legs, really. She just seems tall because of her body structure and addiction to heels and platform boots and tiny, tiny, tiny skirts. This is earlier: see. Pan has not yet attempted to scry the Fallen (or perhaps he already has; perhaps that is happening now and here is Sera, oblivious beneath the stars, beneath the canopy of the outdoor bed) and Sera has not yet had her encounter with John Brogan. Still, there is a sort of lie in the blithe response that lingers in the back of her voice, something alert and weighty about her countenance, her eyes gleaming in the dim light of the gathering evening as they glide over Sid, take in the redhead's body language, catch the quick little nod and move onward.
"The natives," a lift of her chin back toward the house, " - are getting restless, though. Been busy and keep skipping out on practices and gigs. If I keep this up I'll probably be homeless and they'll try to stuff Dan into one of my bustiers." There wasn't any real sign of that tension when Sid walked through the house, but the house was strange and full of strangers, entirely new, a country in which she does not speak the language.
"So, I've got some news, information really, but before I pass it on I wanna make sure you wanna hear it. You've as much right to it as anyone else, but I guess you've a right to keep on keeping your head down, too."
Sid
Not too bad, she says, and Sid is watching her, from the corner of her eye with her head angled down and away. She watches Sera and she listens to the night sounds of the neighborhood, and she's aware of noises from inside the house. She sits forward in her chair, her feet beneath her but spread far apart, and lifted to the balls of her feet, her hands tucked between the press of her knees. They are opposites. Sera wears tall shoes to increase her height and tiny, tiny, tiny skirts to increase the illusion of the length of her legs. Sid tries to make herself smaller, hunching her shoulders to be shorter, curving her spine and lowering her head to avoid notice.
It's quiet here, peaceful even. Two women chat in a walled in garden while the Wheel turns around them, setting things in motion far too quickly. It's before. Before Sid talks about death with Jim by firelight, tells him that she's not afraid, not of that. It's before the call from Justin, a call that starts to bring them all together, making the congregate because there's safety in numbers.
Right now, though, Sid is still avoidant. Or maybe she's not as much anymore. She's here now, after all. And Sera's talking about her band because it's okay to talk about things like that. It's okay to talk about life and such because the sense of danger is still a far off thing. The thought of Dan in a bustier almost, almost makes Sid smile. The change in her demeanor is almost too subtle to be seen, it can only be felt. Like the air around her has changed, a crackling energy has gone from electric to a heat haze. And then it fades right back again.
Sid tilts her head, just enough to look a little more directly at the woman laying back on the bed. If it weren't for the darkness or the hat, the worry that creeps onto her face would be more noticeable. Perhaps Sera already expects it, though. Most people consider it to be Sid's default state, and in a way they're not wrong.
"What...what is it?"
Sera
Sera reaches for the ashtray. Once of the ashtrays scattered around. There wasn't much smell of tobacco back in the house. Serafíne is a musician, not an artist, but she seems to accumulate art work the way other people do books. In trade for a gig or a song or a keg or a bag of weed, or maybe she pays cash. Somewhere in there is a frog she commissioned from the guy with the chainsaw in the backroads of North Carolina, because she wanted to see if he could make anything other than eagles and grizzlies emerge from the spent logs he carved and lo: he could. She has maybe a dozen large pieces and another dozen smaller ones. Canvases and collages and tapestries and whatnot. None of it is worth much, not in the eyes of collectors. She's not haunting high-end galleries, so much as accumulating bits and pieces of people she's met in bars and at festivals, at art walks and craft shows. Dynamic and alive, all of it.
So they don't smoke in the house, not much, not really, not unless it is late on a Friday night and morning's crawling around the corner and she's barefoot and there's snow on the stones and she's lazy and golden and not ready to move and wants just a bit of that burn int the back of her throat. The scent of tobacco isn't littered everywhere inside. But out here it has sunk into the hangings and the cushions and scattered itself around the flagstones. Sera is careful about where she leaves her filters but not everyone who wants through the home Sera shares with her bandmates is careful and there are crushed butts on the patio here and there, underfoot.
It's dark, though. So Sid can't see them.
That change in demeanor catches the edge of Sera's attention; the sharper view of her profile, all aslant, softened by the long fall of her (dyed) blond curls.
All Sid asks is What is it - and Sera's not looking directly at Sid anyone, has dropped her attention to a mahoghany box she'd left on the cabana bed. Which is clearly her stash: because now she's got a baggie open and is stuffing the bowl of a pipe with sticky buds. Dark enough that Sid could pretend it is tobacco but the scent is familiar, muskier and more herbal than tobacco ever is.
"Ever been to a chantry?"
The work of filling the pipe in the gathering dusk is enough to keep Sera's eyes off Sid. Or maybe there's another reason that direct look has fallen away from the redhead.
Sid
What comes out of the box doesn't surprise Sid in the last. Sera and Jim always seem to have something on them, some vice or another. Though she's never accepted offers to share, she's never appeared offended or put off by these things.
It wouldn't be my first trip she'd said in the motel room. Maybe, once upon another life, Sid tried those things. She looks away while Sera readies her pipe, reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear, keeping that peripheral view open. Watching her, watching the ground, watching the house. Her hand returns to her lap to clasp together with its twin.
Her head moves while the rest of her stills at that question. A second later her eyes lift to watch Sera, to see her face which isn't turned toward her, then down to her hands, and finally away. Sid swallows hard before she answers.
"Yes."
Sera
There's a whole ritual here, and Serafíne takes her time with packing that pipe. Tamps down the buds with the edge of her lighter, allows them to settle, breathes in the familiar scent, considers whether there's room for more. All in the steady darkness of the twilit garden.
Sid is aware of her surroundings, keeps the ground, the house, the garden walls in view. The light from the kitchen spills outward, warm on close to the house, but they are far enough away that there's no echo of whatever conversation is happening inside.
Sera's leaning on one elbow now, the left one, holding the pipe with her left hand while she fills it with her right. Mostly her attention is still on her work, but a glance up at the hunched-over redhead from this position is enough to catch the stillness wreathing about Sid.
"Wanna go back to one?"
Sid
Sid's head lowers, her gaze firmly on her hands, pale and slim in the low light. With her hair out of the way, there's no hiding her expression, even in the darkness. Worried, tense. She feels exposed, and so she shifts her weight slightly, moves just a bit so that she's turned a little more away, giving Sera a fraction more of her profile. It doesn't help.
"No," she says, and tilts her head left before shaking it. "No, I don't think so."
Sera
Sera makes some noise in the back of her throat; quiet, reflective acknowledgment of Sid's response. Then judges her pipe adequately packed and tamped down and leans forward, shifting her long hair over her shoulder, to light the bowl with her lighter while drawing in a first deep lungful of smoke. That brief, bright strain as she holds it in, offers the pipe to Sid just in case she wants to take it, and finally exhales through the left corner of her mouth, all at once.
"The reason I ask is," she continues, voice a bit stripped from the smoke, but otherwise easy and conversational, as if they were talking about nail polish or their favorite designer or their favorite local coffee shop, "we know where it is now, and have sort of an open if probationary invite to stop by.
"There's a caretaker but otherwise everyone's gone. The caretaker says she's going to stay until she trusts us. Shoshannah's already living out there now, though I don't know if that's part-time or what. So."
A little shrug. Sera doesn't expect Sid to accept the pipe and doesn't take it amiss if the offer is refused. "I can take you out there sometime if you're interested. But if you're not, no one's gonna make you go."
The briefest pause, as her gaze shunts off. AWay from even approaching Sid's vicinity, back to the dark shadow of the house where it edges the garden, where the lights from the kitchen windows and sliding glass door cut through the gloom.
"Is that where you got hurt? A chantry somewhere?"
Sid
Her eyes flick toward Sera when she moves, and sees the woman's arm lifted, the pipe offered. A quick flick of her own head passes for a shake, a refusal. No, not this time.
They've found the chantry, the place that Shelby and her cabal guarded until they died. It's out there, and Shoshannah's already living there, maybe permanently, maybe not, which means it can't be all bad. It's not the badness that makes Sid shy away from the chantry, though, that one and all others. It's there and they're invited, but no one's gonna make her go, though. She almost relaxes.
Almost.
Sera looks away, then, pausing before asking a question that should be easy, should be okay. A week ago it would have been. Hell, four, five days ago it would have been. She would have asked and Sid would have said No, quietly but definitively, and it would have been no big deal. They would have a different conversation.
Tonight, though, that question hits her like a hammer. She thought she was okay, thought she could do this, she wanted to be here. When she saw Sera's number attached to that text, she remembered the hand resting on the carpet between them in that tiny motel room. She wanted to be near someone who had been kind to her, someone who didn't press too hard on old wounds. And hadn't Sera made that time spent cramped together with five other bodies a little more bearable?
Sid drags a ragged breath in through her clenched teeth. Her hands flex into fists atop her thighs, clenching so hard her arms start to shake.
It takes her a moment to try to brace herself, to get somewhere in the ballpark of "steady." When she finds her voice, it is low, and it is harsh, and it is pained.
"No."
Sera
"Shit." Sera's curse, quiet but forceful, is accompanied by another lungful of smoke. Hashish tonight, thick and redolent and stronger than most of the locally available strains of pot. It hangs sweet in the air around her as she exhales - and flops back down on the cabana bed. No longer looking at Sid but up at the sky through the opened canopy.
Down here, in the middle of the city, surrounded by security lights and porchlights, you cannot really see the stars, and its too early still for most of them to come out, but the sky is a sweeping and always-changing thing, even in the middle of a city.
"I never say the right thing, do I?" Wry, with that fine strain from the pot against her vocal chords.
"I swear to god, I'm not trying to - " but whatever that thought is, Sera arrests it. Breathes out, this long steadying breath that is, this time, not accompanied by a cloud of intoxicating smoke. The pipe is held carefully in her hand; there's a little lid to slide over the bowl, to cut off oxygen to the buds when she needs a break and she pushes that over the mouth with her thumb, thoughtlessly.
"Anyway. The chantry's out there. If you ever wanna go, Jim knows where. Shoshannah. The Padre, too. Remember him? Has a church down on Federal. You're think he'd be an asshole, being a priest and all, but he's pretty fucking chill.
"Hardly blinked an eye when I asked him if he wanted to make out in the confessional, first time we met." Pause, wry, " - well, maybe he blinked an eye. You ever been in a confessional? He was on the other fucking side so I couldn't see his face. Didn't call fire and brimstone down on me, though.
"Just asked if I wanted to go talk in private. So we did."
Sid
On the outside that's all there is to it. No, says Sid, a lot less simply than that. Her body is shaking where she sits, mostly in her arms. She doesn't explain, doesn't go on, doesn't say whether she meant No that's not where was hurt or No she doesn't want to talk about it or No both. She doesn't because she an't. Inside her head it's just Nonononononono on and on while Sera talks.
Sera flops back on the bed, her attention up at the sky and no longer on Sid, and she changes the subject. Changes it back, rather. To the chantry and who knows it. Sid barely even hears her, or what she hears doesn't make sense. Not until she lists off names, names of people familiar, people she...people who have become somehow important to her. Even Sera's voice, strained from the pot, is like a soothing balm to that old open wound. Jim she says, and the shaking starts to subside. Shoshannah is next, and that takes some more of the tension out of her body. Even The Padre, who she hardly knows beyond his connection to Shoshannah, relaxes her. She repeats them internally, using the names as a mantra, her eyes squeezed tight. Her chest expands and she's able to take in a lungful of air, sharp and quick and hard, like a drowning person whose head has finally breached the surface of the water. Panic subsides. Slowly, slowly, she unclenches her hands, first one and then the other. If her nails were longer there'd be blood on her palms, but there are only four little half-moon indentations pressed into her skin.
Sera is talking about the padre now. Sid only catches the end of it.
...in private. So we did.
Sid's breathing is still ragged, halting, but it's calming. And she's still here. She didn't run away. The realization is a little surprising.
Not looking over at Sera, she asks, "What?"
Sera
Serafíne seems entirely unphased by the thought that Sid missed any or all of her meandering reassurances and unstuck threads. She does lean up, forward, lifting her chin and canting her head so as to catch a glimpse of the redhead's profile in the darkness. The edge of the smile spreading across her mouth is fine though not sweet. Wry maybe. Sera spends half her life fucked up and misses so many threads. Given the detritus of drugs and alcohol out here on the patio, one may guess that many of her friends are the same; that the ever-widening circle of her acquaintance hinges, in some sense, on that willingness to get fucked up, that openness to alteration of consciousness. Or maybe: just enjoyment of a really great fucking part. The sort that lasts all night and well into the dawn.
"How much did you catch?" The question is as lazy as Sera's lean sprawl on the bed. She lays back down, the pipe sealed now, the smoldering bowl smothered inside. Just the faint whisp of smoke from the mouthpiece. One arm cushioning her head, the other drifting off the bed, holding the pipe with a sort of negligant familiarity.
So Sera repeats herself. Tells Sid that the chantry's there if she ever wants to go. Tells her that all those people: Jim and Shoshannah and Pan know where it is, if she ever wants to go. That whole story about Pan gets sort of repeated too, though this time with some pot-related expansion. Oh, Sid gets some sense of the back and forth of the whole exchange, then. Sera waxes poetic on these points: how she wandered into the church, where the abuelitas were lighting candles (and in the single word, abuelita, Sid can hear some sense of Sera's Spanish, which was learned at her mother's knee and not in school, for all that Serafíne otherwise seems as American and as fucking white as anyone Sid might know) and there was that resonance coming from the fucking confessional. The looks the abuelitas gave her, crossing themselves and gossiping low as they studied her covertly. Oh, they thought they were studying her covertly, but Sera knows what it feels like when eyes are on her.
"So I'm like, Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been three thousand seven hundred eighty-three days fourteen hours, and twenty-two minutes since my last confession. I said, I hope your ass has a comfy fucking cushion, 'cos this is gonna take a while. And he laughed, I could hear it, but he went through that whole confession rigamarole, right? Bless your mind and your fucking mouth, that bit.
"And I was like, fuck. I forgot. I don't believe in sin. Asked him to make out.
"He took it pretty fucking well, all things considered. He's good people.
"Oh, so anyway. Annie, she owned the place with her brother, she came and found Pan. Said we could come out on a sort of trial basis. So if you ever get the hankering, you let one of us know.
"Fuck." Abruptly shifting her hips on the bed, digging something out of her pocket. "She gave me this to give you."
In her hand, a little leather pouch. Sid might feel the resonance emanating from the pouch (unbreakable) and it is not Sera's own.
Sid
Sid has been invited to that kind of party, the first night she met Sera. It was practically her farewell, or maybe it was her way of saying goodbye. But this is the first time Sid has come to this house, and by all appearance she has no interest in getting fucked up or enjoying a really great fucking party, at least not anymore.
Sera asks how much she caught, and Sid tells her, quietly, "Just...just the end." As Sera repeats herself, expanding on bits here and there, she relaxes a little more, but, she realizes, only so far. She is still tense, the muscles of her shoulders so tight and drawn they ache clear up to the back of her skull. She tries to shrug one, tries to loosen them, but the result is a tight cramping feeling, which is so much worse than before. So, while Sera talks about the church, the kind of place she remembers the Ecstatic used to go before, until she was kicked out for making out with a girl. It was part of the night time confessionals of the motel room. Sid didn't participate.
While Sera is talking now, Sid lifts her hand to her mouth, to gnaw nervously on her thumbnail. Her eyes are on Sera, on her lazily outstretched arm, on the pipe held in her fingers. Hesitantly, she starts to rise but stops. Rises a little more, but stops again. In this way, shoulders hunched, spine still curved, knees bent, she slips across the distance between the chair and the bed. Doesn't get on it, no, but she crouches down. Sera can feel her presence, can maybe even feel the warmth of her.
Whatever she had intended to do by coming closer, the attempt is momentarily thwarted when Sera moves, shifting her weight to dig into her pocket. Sid rocks back a little, puts her hand on the edge of the bed to keep her balance. She stares down at the little pouch in Sera's hand, and she frowns at it.
"What is it?"
Sera
Sera's attention curves lazily in Sid's direction as the Orphan starts to rise from the chair. Just that sense of blind awareness from the creature sprawled out there, the movement of her head no more intentional or deliberate than the movement of a morning glory to follow the face of the sun. Reaches across her body and drops the little leather pouch on the edge of the bed where Sid can reach it. There's a strange, bitter, herbal smell coming from it.
And that unfamiliar resonance.
"Healing charm," Sera supplies, low-voiced. "Annie's a Verbena. If you're ever injured, you just eat it. It'll heal - well, pretty much anything.
"Way better than a fucking hospital. She made one for all of us."
Sid
The pouch is dropped on the edge of the bed, and Sid continues to stare at it warily, as though it were a living, potentially poisonous thing. Healing charm, Sera says, and that wary look deepens a little, almost becomes suspicious. The hand that reaches out to take it from the bed shakes a little - it's not that easy to push through that panic, Sid's Will isn't that strong. But take it she does. The hand that grips the edge of the bed tightens as she leans her weight back, lowering herself to sit on the ground. Carefully. Her eyes dart one final time to the pipe in Sera's hand and its stress relieving properties, but she looks down at the thing in her hand instead. She lets go of the bed. Resting her elbows on her upraised knees, she studies the bag. She feels that unfamiliar resonance, which must belong to that person named Annie.
"Why," she says, stopping in the middle of the cadence of a more complete inquiry. Shakes her head. "Thanks. Tell her...tell her thanks for me. If you see her."
Sera
"Because," a wry look. Sera's watching Sid now though it is a sidelong thing; not precisely sly but see - the edge of her profile, the lean line of her body, one foot propped up on the cushion, that knee raised, the other curled beneath. The pipe in one hand and the other, well. Now that the healing charm has been delivered Sera tucks it back beneath her head as a pillow. Long hair snakes out around her head but Sid is on Sera's right and has a better view of the shaved strip there. "Things are dangerous. We're supposed to stick together or they'll tear us apart. And she doesn't want any of our kind, on our side of this whole fucking thing, whatever the hell it is, to get hurt.
"If you need to use it, take it out of the pouch and eat it. It'll taste like shit, but - " Sera has noticed that glance of Sid's toward the pipe, maybe, or maybe she's just in the habit of offering regularly to share whatever she has that anyone else may want. A tip of her hand in casual offer, easily taken and easily refused, toward the redhead now seated on the ground.
The flagstone is cool but not damp, there's a different view from the level Sid has taken, though not much improved. Still, the edge of the bed like the horizon and Sera reclining against that horizon line like a line of hazily seen mountains in the distance. Or maybe that was what Sid would see if she were tripping right now. Sera's lazy smile is mostly lost in the darkness, but it's there.
"We found Leah. The girl from the warehouse. Jim's taking care of her now. At this cabin out in the mountains."
Sid
Her expression tightens for half a second at Sera's answer to that aborted Why. That wasn't quite the question she started to ask and then rethought, but it's close enough. It's dangerous to go alone, she thinks, and she would almost smile at the thought, if only others didn't crowd it out.
Good ones.
Bad ones.
Worse ones. Ones she stamps down and pushes back, because if she doesn't she'll lose it. Already she can feel her muscles clenching.
We're supposed to stick together or they'll tear us apart.
Sid frowns, wraps her arms around her legs and lowers her chin toward her knees. She doesn't want to stick together. She wants to stay apart, it's...it's not safer, but it's better. There's less chance of being noticed if they're not all grouped together. They present less of a solid target. This is before she gets that call from Justin. She'll change her mind then, but here and now she still wants to stay separate.
The hand that lifts to run through her hair is shaking, and is stopped by the hat she wears. Sid removes it, lets her knees drop to the sides and forces herself to sit up a little straighter. The muscles in her shoulders scream at her. When the pipe is offered again, Sid looks at it, lips pressed together, brow furrowed, but only for a moment. This time it is not refused. This time, she reaches out with trembling fingers to accept it. She holds it for a moment, studies it between thumb and forefinger. Then, twisting a little, shifting her weight over to one buttock, she slips the charm into her pocket before settling again. She looks for all the world like someone about to try swimming for the first time. Inhaling deeply, exhaling quickly, she takes the plunge.
Her shaking fingers make her fumble, but that doesn't disguise the fact that she knows what she's doing. At least she doesn't have to wait for Sera to show her how to open the bowl. She doesn't check to make sure she's doing it right before she inhales that pungent smoke, holds it in her lungs for a beat, and lets it out again.
"You did?" she asks, her voice tight as she passes the pipe back. Shifting her weight a little, she leans her back into the edge of the bed, and waits for the buzz to kick in.
Sera
"Yeah," when Sid takes the offered pipe, Sera tosses her the plastic lighter too, just in case the embers have been fully extinguished already. Tucks her now empty right hand across her stomach, long fingers dappled idly over her old cotton t-shirt. "The day after we left the hotel. The Padre scried her for me, and we hooked up with Jim and found her.
"Do you know what Fallen are? Sometimes they're called Nephandi."
Sid
If Sera doesn't take back the pipe, then Sid keeps it. She closes it up, the lighter held in the closed fingers of her left hand, she holds the pipe between her thumbs and forefingers. She needs something to do with her hands, something that will keep her from resting them on the ground and finding any cracks in the flagstones. And, she needs something to focus on so that the other thoughts recede, and with them the tension. She has no intention of taking another hit, at least not yet.
Talking about Leah doesn't much help. Sid knows that it wasn't the girl's fault all those people died. The deaths were an accident, a result of her Awakening, but still. That kind of power, uncontrolled, and near the padre, who has been okay if a little frightening, and Jim, who took her to DMNS that time. She still owes him for that day, she needs to pay him back. When she'll be able to do that she has no idea.
Turning the pipe over in her hands, she leans her head back so that she looks at it through lowered lids.
Sera asks if she knows what Nephandi are.
Sid frowns, but nods her head.
Sera
The story about Leah will not help Sid calm down, but Sera has passed the point of no return with it. There's more. And Sera tells it, in a quiet and quietly impassioned voice: she and Jim scried Leah's future. The girl was going to kill herself, to jump from the top of a tall building, a hospital. We could see the lights, says Sera, for the helicopter pad. But as she jumped, someone jumped after her, someone cloaked and hooded who caught her and floated gently to the ground, then removed the memory of his deeds from the minds of the witnesses. Someone powerful. Someone dark.
Three someones, watching her. The man from Sera's first dark and bleak vision, and two others, one cloaked, one with maddened eyes.
Jim and Sera say a half-dozen, a dozen, a half-hundred potential outcomes where, with Pan, they confronted this dark trio on the roof of that hospital. Each disastrous in its own way. So Sera suggested that they reach out to Leah, make a connection with her mind and show her that hope was possible, that she could make a choice to turn against the darkness inside her.
Oh, Sid cannot know what Sera means when she says this; how strongly she identified with Leah, the dark things from her own past that inspired her above and beyond mere compassion to search for and find the girl at the center of it all.
Between them: Jim and Sera and Pan, they made they appeal - to hope and the promise of new beginnings, and the girl, lost in self-hatred and self-doubt and guilt, soaked in the resonance of death, opened up to them just long enough that she started to hope.
Then they felt Him behind them. The man from her dream, stronger even than Pan and Jim, Sera shares. He invaded their linked minds as easily as a shark cuts through still ocean waters, but - let them go if they promised not to hurt Leah.
Sera shudders when she mentions John Brogan, when she describes him, this stark motion of her small frame on the cabana bed. She does not say: that he smiled at her. But she describes him, thoroughly, both Brogan and the other male they saw, so that Sid will know what he looks like should she ever see him.
Sid
It's true, the story doesn't help with Sid's attempts to relax. Her muscles are still painfully tight despite the drug entering her system. And still she doesn't take another breath. She turns the pipe in her fingers, over and over, and as she does she breathes in slowly. Holds it. Releases it slowly. Despite the terrible content of what she says, she lets Sera's voice wash over her, using the cadence, the timbre, the resonance, as an almost lullabye.
It works, a little. Tilting her head to the side, she feels herself slowing down.
Belatedly, her brain processes the information. The scrying, the visions, the trio on a rooftop, the figure that fell after Leah, or would have. Later, she'll hear Jim and Pan and Sera talking about a Him and his droogs. Later still, she'll realize they mean this John Brogan and these henchmen of his. That's later.
In the now, silence falls over the garden for a short while, but not too long.
Sid frowns suddenly, her nose wrinkling. Freeing a hand from the pipe, she scratches the back of her neck.
"Why would he do that? Why would he just let you take her like that?"
Sera
The narrowest of shrugs expresses itself upward on the bed. Sera's head lolls to the side and her eyes find Sid, sitting there, turning the pipe around and around in her hands. That's hashish they're smoking, not pot, and while it's good stuff, stronger than any marijuana available, all concentrated residue, one hit is not enough to do much beyond relaxing that leading edge of tension, Sera knows. But she says nothing, just watches the Orphan from beneath half-lidded eyes, then looks back up to the sky.
"No clue. Maybe he was thought that she really might kill herself. Maybe he didn't want to fight with her there because it might push her over the edge. Maybe he thinks she's - "
A sharp breath out.
"I can't imagine living through what she's living through, Sid. I thought I could, but I can't. She had parents like all the rest of us. Never talks about her real mom and there was tension with her folks, but she had a couple of brothers. A fucking dog she loved.
"Plays Settlers of Catan like a fucking dervish and has no interest whatsoever in the giant bag of goodies I brought her from Ulta.
"But what's inside her, sometimes she says she can't smell anything but death. I can't imagine living with anything like that. That awareness. That fucking darkness. That pain," and yet, this vibrant string of imaginative sympathy there. For Leah? for Sid? for herself? Well, perhaps she can imagine it then, some miserly portion of it, " - can you?"
The question is rhetorical, that much is clear. Sera is not looking at Sid, does not expect a response. Is laying there looking at the stars, but: if Sid wants to take the opening, well.
"Anyway, Jim's doing what he can for her. I guess we all are, though I don't really know what happens next."
Sid
No clue, she says, and Sid turns her head then, tilts it if she has to in order to find Sera's face on the bed. There's confusion on her own, because she can't imagine that. That man had that girl and he let Jim and Pan and Sera have her and no one asked him, Why?
If Sid had all of the variables, if she knew more about what it means to be widderslainte she might be able to posit a hypothesis. But she doesn't, so she can't. She just sits there, twisting the pipe between her fingers, the lighter wrapped in her fingers warm from the heat of her hand.
Destiny, said the man in the park, the memory lifting to the surface of her mind unbidden. There's a connection there, and Sid, just on the outside edge of a high, can't figure it out.
And anyway, Sera's talking about Leah. Leah who had parents like the rest of us, and maybe she did. Leah who plays Settlers like a dervish and sometimes smells nothing but death. A question is asked, a rhetorical one Sid isn't meant to answer. She could, of course, but like in the hotel, she doesn't know what to say, so she sticks with what she knows, and what she knows is silence.
She turns her head away, looks down at the pipe in her hands and frowns at it like she can't quite figure out how it got there in her hands, even though she knows.
What happens next. They've got a girl who smells death, who lives with pain, under their care - theirs, not Sid's - who was taken away from a dead cabal only to be handed over without a word to a loosely affiliated bundle of Awakened. What do you do with that?
Her head lifts suddenly, and she looks over at Sera.
"Had. You said she had."
Sera
"It's not like she can go back," the edge of her attention cutting back down to Sid, seated on the ground. The subtle gleam in her eyes, which are dark in the shadows of the garden, and only dark.
An ache in Serafíne's voice too - quiet and raw from the hashish or memory, the fucking drive to believe in things of-this-world and the people who belong to it, some shadow of the past surfacing or just a sort of sub-lingual and liminal empathy that is live and utterly physical in her, embedded into the matrix of sinew and viscera and sparking nerves that make up her corpus. - an ache there.
"They're lost to her. Even if she gets through this - and god, we're trying to help her through this. Give her a chance to be what she wants to be rather than what she was fated to become. But even if she gets through this, Sid, she can't go home again. Some doors close behind you and they're closed forever.
"Poor kid."
Sid
Sera looks back at her and Sid automatically looks away. The way she reaches up to free her hair from behind her hair, allowing it to fall like a curtain to shutter her face, it's reflexive, almost an instinct. There's an ache to Sera's voice, a strain from hash or from the topic of their conversation and the feelings, the emotions it evokes in her, and Sid avoids it.
And she closes her eyes. And she breathes.
She doesn't ask her what happens if they can't get her through this, if Leah can't fight off the darkness that rises up inside her, the thing that drove her to the fucking roof of a hospital. The girl will be lost. To darkness, to mayhem, to death or Death. She doesn't want to hear the details, the possibilities, the endgame scenarios that Jim and Sera may or may not have scried.
Right now she doesn't want to think at all. But she knows that smoking any more is a Bad Idea, so she makes sure the pipe is out, and she sets both it and the lighter down on the edge of the bed or hands them back to Sera, whichever is easier. Still keeping her head down and her face half-hidden.
Sera
After that, Serafíne falls quiet. Takes back the pipe and the lighter and takes another hit or two or three. Just laying there looking up at whatever stars are visible through the haze of the city's light pollution. The sounds of the neighborhood open up around them and Sera looks like she has or is on the verge of falling asleep. Lights a clove cigarette and smokes it, dreamily, then (at some point) curses quietly under her breath.
"I can't drive like this. Fuck."
Quiet.
Then, what will turn out for Sid to be a fateful request,
" - hey. I've got supplies to take out to Jim at the cabin. Be my designated driver, would you?"
And the rest, as they say, is history.
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