Gumby's has two levels and three stages and all of them are dark tonight. All of them are dark most nights except for the all-ages shows hosted on random Tuesdays when they don't even serve alcohol but still end up cleaning puke up off the floor. That's the sort of place it is. The lights are low, though, and the drinks are strong, and there's this sense of fucking age to the place. The bartender is an old punk who likes like he might've been original issue and there are posters and portraits layered on the wall like wallpaper from back in the day when the place was packed.
It is not packed tonight but there's a respectable crowd of oddballs and strangers and the floating scent of marijuana filtering down from the second-floor bar: which is full not of tables and barstools but of sinking old couches and loveseats and recliners stacked in odd array, old billiards tables, and even a table-tennis set-up somewhere near the small back bar, though the paddles and balls have long since been stolen and the table has been used more for... other things since then.
There's a black light behind the bar and the low wash of the soundsystem in the background is playing post-punk and New Wave and the occasional rockabilly piece. It's her first time here.
The text she sent Justin earlier was pretty concise: Bar research: tonight x:00 PM? Followed by an address with a PS - TAKE A CAB.
He'll find her at the bar proper when he gets there, seated on a barstool, leaning forward against her elbows, a strange-looking mixed drink in hand, her teeth white and sharp against the darkness as she flashes a laugh at something the old bartender said. She's dressed in usual Sera-fashion. Tonight: cut-off jeans over patterned black tights, which are opaque to just above the knee. The opacity ends in pattern blocks over her thighs, where they become translucent again. Over that, a short black halter top covered in silver studs, an unbuttoned flannel shirt, the tails of which are longer than her fucking cut-offs, and a leather jacket. Her hair is pulled sharply back from her features, emphasizing her side-cut, already with the vaguely drifting motions of the half-way drunk.
Serafine(BRB!)
JustinWhat Justin didn't tell her in his reply (which consisted of: sure why not) was that he'd actually spent about five minutes beforehand wondering if agreeing to go somewhere with her was, in fact, a good idea. If maybe he might be violating some kind of social protocol. But judging by the fact that he inevitably agreed, this clearly wasn't enough to stop him from taking advantage of the offer to go out for a drink with another human being, which is a thing that he'd admittedly missed since leaving behind most of his friends.
When he got to the bar, he walked in the door and gave the place a slow, curious survey, taking in the ambient sounds and the array of scents that reached his nose. For once, he'd had time to shower and change into non-work clothes, which meant that he actually looked moderately respectable in one of his better pairs of jeans (dark, slim-fitting boot cut that highlighted his agile height,) and a crisp white t-shirt, accented with a couple of leather bracelets, a stone pendant and a pair of very nice-looking brown leather boots. He even did his fucking hair.
It actually took him a moment to approach her at the bar. The time he spent gathering the place in like a sight-seer was probably a good thirty seconds. But then his feet moved, and he made eye contact as he closed the distance between them and settled in beside her at the bar.
"Did you start without me?" he asked with a wry smirk.
[Awareness?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Justin[And Alertness for uh... any weirdness? (Acute senses -2)]
Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 4 )
spark gap[heh heh heh *cough* heh...]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 9) ( success x 2 )
spark gap[part 2]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
SerafinePerception + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 4, 6, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 4 )
spark gap[Poor little Cultist. Maybe if she wasn't daydreaming about a certain tall dark handsome priest she would have noticed...]
Serafine"What the fuck do you think?" - returns Sera, with an edgy, slashing sort of grin. The sort that sparks light in her eyes and crawls all over her mouth. No red lipstick tonight, just clear gloss, and dark, dark shadow around her eyes. Her nails are freshly painted tonight, a color called starstruck, black scattered with glitter like the dusting of the milky way across a deep night sky. They gleam in the dim light of the bar, a few flecks of glitter fluorescing beneath the blacklight.
She's a Cultist. Starts sometimes when she wakes the fuck up, sometimes it seems like when she's still asleep. Tonight it's less the alcohol (she's only on her second or third drink) and more the hashish she was smoking earlier, the scent all tangled in her hair and around her body.
Lifts her chin as he approaches; there's this movement to her jaw that is almost autonomic, though he's not likely to read it the way one of her bandmates would: the expectation of a kiss on the cut of her cheekbone, the greeting she nearly always receives when one of them finds her at a bar and slides up beside her.
"This is only my second one of - " a lift of her chin toward the bartender, that grin once more, " - what the fuck are these, again?" and he utters something indecipherable, really. Whatever, Sera laughs, and assures Justin that they are the "House Specialty, whatever they are.
"So," brows lifting, to indicate the whole of the bar, " - what do you think about the place? Dee's throwing a party for a roller derby team and I'm in charge of the venue. I'm thinking this is fucking it."
JustinHe didn't kiss her cheek. Maybe he wasn't accustomed to it and it just didn't occur to him, or maybe he avoided it intentionally. He didn't seem cold or aloof though, so maybe it was the former. And when she said, with that sharp grin, what the fuck do you think?, he raised an eyebrow and reached out to brush the backs of his knuckles over the soft buzz of her hair, over and behind her ear - a quietly affectionate greeting.
"You guys have Sazerac?" he asked the bartender, and assuming they did, in fact, have it, he pulled his debit card out of his wallet and slid it across the bar to start a tab. (He was out with a Cultist. It was probably going to be a long night.)
In answer to Serafine, "This place screams roller derby. Go for it."
spark gapWhen the woman came in the door she came in loose as sloe gin over ice. Subdued punk-rock in her vestments, heavy black boots and battered denim jeans, army jacket, hair bleached beyond all hope of repair and hung out around her in a translucent mane. Eyes rimmed with lack of sleep, the ghosts of kohl rubbed away long ago. No taller than Sera on a short day.
She escaped notice but only because everyone else was draped in conversation. Tied up in their drinks and the pursuit of drinks, the bodies sat beside them at the bar. The music or the lack of music. A dive bar with nothing live to propel the people to move. Laughter clinkles like the frozen cubes against the constraints of dirty class.
And she did not stop at the bar either. She sauntered with unsteady hips past the bar and cut a glance at the tender who noticed but did not notice her and then she went into the bathroom. Eyes followed Sera out of the corner of both women's vigilance but one is less addled than the other.
She disappeared into the bathroom. Now the door opens.
SerafineSerafíne always turns into physical contact, and so it is here. Just a curve of her neck with the movement of his knuckles over her close-cropped hair. Black tonight, so inky it has clearly been dyed, and recently. The scent of her hashish will linger on the backs of his fingers, after. Not strong, no, but it needn't be for him to sense it.
"That's what I thought. Two thumbs up." This back to the bartender as he returns with Justin's whiskey, though she's not so far gone yet that she actually makes the thumbs up gesture, or worse imagines that she has more than two thumbs with which to make it.
Whatever they were chatting about before Justin arrived is either over or so inconsequential that there's no point in continuing the conversation and so the 'tender retreats down the bar to see to some other customers. Sera pulls her drink closer, inhaling the wafting vapors from the booze layered into its... colorful striations like a sand sculpture.
"Their captain's some sort of fucking born again Christian, too, so this place'll give her conniptions. I think I'm sold."
Leaning forward, she takes another drink from her cocktail, confides, quietly to Justin, " - this thing's actually fucking terrible. But I think it's like 160 proof so fuck it. I'm getting my money's worth. But trust me, creme de menth does not go with amaretto. Not now, now ever. Not in any century known to humankind, now or ever, amen."
Shining dark eyes flick back to the bathroom door as it opens. Just that and nothing more.
JustinJustin made a face when Sera mentioned the combination of flavors in her drink, subdued but nonetheless horrified. He'd actually been able to smell it when he walked up - the syrupy artificial mint and the warm undertone of almond - but had been trying to ignore it out of courtesy. Sera had never seen Justin order or consume a mixed drink. Only beer and, now, whiskey. He probably would have found the thing too repellent to drink.
His eyes darted to the woman when she walked past, noticing without really taking note. She seemed, like Serafine, to be the sort of person one would expect to see here.
"You know I'm pretty sure there are high-proof drinks available that actually taste good," he offered dryly. And speaking of drinks - there was his. He picked up the tumbler and put it to his lips, drinking a slow sip as he watched Serafine, and then the bathroom door, out of the corner of his eye.
Serafine"That," returns Sera, with a precise somehow rather drunk gesture of her left thumb and forefinger, "is an excellent point." She's grinning now, catching Justin's profile in he peripheral vision, taking some sort of perverse pride it seems in her ability to keep the fuck going on a concoction as noxious as this one.
"But I'm given to understand that if I finish this one, the next one may be so brilliant and so subtle and so amazing that it actually blows my mind, so in the interests of science," that sharp edge of her grin again, she's opening her left hand - the tattoo inked into her palm and first and second fingers clearly visible. The scissor blades on the fingers, handles on her palm, one of the handles turning into or beaing eaten by a fucking shark
Seriously. A fucking shark.
"If it doesn't blow my mind though, I'll probably switch to tequila. Feels like that sort of night, you know?"
Like she's going to end it eating the worm.
spark gapNothing more to her than hair and eyes and armor that would stop a nice boy like Justin but not a bullet or a blade. In the absence of any other sound or stimulus her boots would sound a percussive warning against the bar's floor but tonight she moves as a shadow through the crowd and the seats.
Nothing more to her until she's leaning in between the two of them and they can smell the war on her, the soot of the fires burning since before the summer, spilled beer and the fumes of too many hard nights in a failing body.
Her fingers are thin and even look cold in this light. When she breathes out she breathes out the smell of unwashed teeth. Looks at Justin brief, looks to Sera longer.
"Where is he?" she asks.
JustinSera has seen him make sudden shifts in demeanor before - has seen the way his armor can go up or down with the fluctuation of his moods and in response to environmental stimuli. She'd see it again now, when the woman with her brimstone scent and her fuck off outfit stepped in between them. Justin hadn't been sitting down yet, but rather leaning one hip against the bar as he and Serafine traded this relaxed banter.
But there. The moment the woman's physicality entered his sphere of awareness and displaced the air beside his skin, his relaxed pose went tense. And he pushed the stool at his side back as he took a step away from her. His drink he settled slowly on the bar, as his right hand slipped into the front pocket of his jeans - an almost subconscious gesture for him at this point, to reach for and touch the knife he kept with him, as though to remind himself that it was there.
But the assumption on his face, for the moment, seemed to be: friend of yours?
Serafine"Who's he?" Sera returns, not cool-as-you-please but not alarmed. Not now, not tonight, not yet. She's drawn back every so slightly, this sharpening of awareness that pulls back to take in the full picture of the woman, the soot of the fires in her hair, the spilled beer, the hard days and harder nights, all the cascading suggestions of failure. How the fuck does she herself manage to look so fucking amazing in the midst of nights like these?
It can't last forever.Hell, it can't last long.
So, the edge in her gaze at the sudden and strange interruption softens to a sort of untendered compassion, all damp and dark. "Bartender's down the other end but," a curling shrug. "If you're looking for someone else, I don't know that I can help you. I'm not a regular. It's my first time here."
Justin straightens, pulls back, shifts and stiffens and reaches for the knife he always fucking carries. Front pocket. Sera, well fuck, no wonder she gets into so much trouble. Sera just gives her an open look. If you asked Sera to bleed for you, she probably would.
spark gapShe's not looking behind her. Doesn't see the gardener reach for his front pocket to prepare himself for confrontation. Must be a part of her that would prefer the permanent darkness of death to the uncertainty of what lies before them but that would be taking advantage of poetic license. They don't know her.
Of everything Sera can say with certainty it is that she, as she is Now, does not know this woman.
But this woman scoffs and smiles an oil-spill smile and looks away from both of them to stare at the line of alcohol in front of her.
"Don't give me that," she says, and looks back to Sera. "'First time.' Look, Byron's gone off the map. I need to get ahold of him. You don't gotta play dumb in front of your boyfriend." She looks back at Justin, looks him up and down once before stowing the smile. "Or does she?"
JustinA little of the tension left his frame. A little, but not much. And he left his hand settled lightly in his pocket like he'd just tucked it there to have somewhere to put it, his thumb hooked outside the seam.
When the stranger looked him up and down and made that comment, his expression furrowed into a look of bemused irritation.
"I'm gay," he answered flatly, dismissing her assumption.
Serafine"Leave him alone," when the stranger's attention has swung in Justin's direction, just like that. Sera's challenge is automatic, though it's not the same dismissal Justin made. There's visible tension in her now, the edge of her concern evaportating into a much more fraught and edged sort of look.
"I have no fucking idea what the fuck you're talking about," and, see. See: there's this chill then - sudden and stark - that settles luminous over Serafíne's frame. Her profile and her dark and reflective blue eyes and the set of her mouth, curved in her sculpted face. Gone still with an alarum (still-yet mild, but too alert and taut for someone faced with the mere ravings of a stranger with a case of mistaken identity) that is perhaps out of proportion with the here and now.
Or not: two weeks ago they faced death.
Sera, as she is now, does not know this woman. But Sera was not always as she is Now, and the fissures in her memories are wide and dark and, oh. She draws in a sharp breath, swallows it back into the center of her throat. Then breathes it all, slow and controlled. Gives Justin a look over the woman's shoulder. They don't know each other well, but listen: it's a plea. It's you might want to get out of here now.
Then her attention drops back to the woman's face. The edge of her smile, or really, its pallid ghost, returning to her face in a controlled and careful diminuendo.
"I still think you've got me mixed up with someone else." That twist sharpens. "Because the only Byron I know is a sixty-five year old banjo player from High Point, North Carolina. But, why don't you tell me what you think I know."
Sera bites down hard on the inside of her mouth. Past the first twinge of pain, though the spasm of it. Hard enough to draw blood in a sluice wash through her mouth.
SerafinePrime 1: Watch the Weaving Dif 4-1 focus!
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (7, 9) ( success x 2 )
spark gapThe woman bobs her head in a nod and he might not have noticed until now but once she took in his clothes and the form beneath the clothes she lost whatever interest she had had, or else the interest just floated away. Her eyes trail off over his shoulder and focus without focusing on something just beyond his field of vision, hazy with listening, and his voice hits but does not touch her.
Leave him alone.
Her eyes are blue and they widen brief and amused. Only Justin can see this. She gives him a coy sort of oh shit look like they're in on this, like they're kids and they just got busted for staying up giggling past bedtime. This woman doesn't exist on the same plane as they do. Has that lean look like addicts tend to get when they're so tied up in the habit that they forget to listen to the other parts of their bodies but she's not wild with longing.
When she turns towards Sera she looks at her all void-eyed and thinks about the order she's been given. Decides to go all-in.
"I think if you know Byron, you know Dick," she says.
[FPM incoming!]
Justin[Awareness-as-Empathy on Sera - precisely which type of "you might want to get out of here" look was that?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )
spark gap[The magick is around her but not of her. It's weak and dying. All Sera can make sense of is the scrambling of Time and Correspondence and Mind. She loses track of the threads a few moments after she grabs them.]
Justin[And while we're at it, he is so jumping on this bandwagon - Watch the Weaving diff 4 -1 focus]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
SerafineThat "you might want to get out of here" look is: layered.
But is mostly: you might want to get out of here, I don't know what is going on but I don't want you to get hurt because bad shit might happen, because I don't know you but maybe you know me.
Serafine"Fairchild?" the question she returns is quiet and is low and not there's a frisson of recognition in and about Serafíne. Following the patterns in the air around the woman's head, and losing them just as certainly and just as quickly. She's breathing carefully through her alarm, feeling the way her body moves with each breath, feeling the bloom of alcohol in her veins, listening to the background clink and din of the crowd all around them.
This in her voice: the softening of recognition without fondness. "I do know him. Why don't you tell me your name?"
And Sera, Sera fucking reaches for that wretched drink she had been not nursing so much as brooding over when Justin arrived at the bar and tosses back a great-big-fucking-gulp of it. All at once.
It is horrid but the burn of alcohol hits the back of her throat, warms it as it is sliding down her gullet. Blooms against that which she has already imbided tonight: the drink before this and the hashish.
SerafineTime 2: Dif 5 -2 (merit) Divining this woman's past
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 9) ( success x 1 )
JustinJustin met Sera's gaze, taking in the Cultist's silent communication. He didn't know if Serafine knew this woman or not. He didn't know the vast depths of unopened places in Sera's mind. But he knew this: sometimes strangers walked up to you in bars and they were just weird strangers, and sometimes they were something much worse.
He gave a faint twitch of his head (no.) Then he popped the flip-blade free in his pocket (just a little - just enough to touch the sharp edge) and sliced a small cut into his thumb. Familiar pain and blood welled up, and he pressed the torn skin to his mouth casually to suck on the wound.
The scrambled weaving around the woman came into scattered focus then, telling some clues, if not many, to the woman's odd behavior. He'd been about to tell the woman to leave when, evidently, it turned out that she and Serafine had a connection after all. So he stilled himself and waited, watching the two of them carefully.
spark gap"Because it's not important."
She rubs half her face with one hand the way a child does when the child is aiming to fall asleep, trying to push away the tiredness so she can stay up longer out of spite. It doesn't work like that. It persists.
And the pop of the blade is not loud but she twitches with the sing of it anyway and the twitching brings her head turning back towards the Verbena and her forearms sliding closer to her on the bar but not leaving. They hang on the lacquered surface by her jacket-buried wrists and she looks back to Justin.
Her eyes linger on the blood-let thumb. One eye cocks like she's thinking hard about something and she looks back up into his face. Leans a bit closer, like a flower finding the sunlight.
"You're a good boy, aren't you. You don't do drugs."
SerafineSerafíne slugs back the rest of that drink then. By now the layers that the bartender took such care to craft and no more than a sludgey mess and the flavor is grotesque and syrupy and strong but still: once again the burn of alcohol against the back of her throat.
The stranger turns; leans in toward Justin like she was hungry for his purity. He's a good boy, she suggests. Because he doesn't do drugs. Sera shakes herself loose and then looser, leaning back and opening herself to the alcohol and THC in her blood, letting go as it pushes her in opening waves from her skin, following the minute thread of possibility that was this woman's past.
Justin: if he is still watching can see the threads of her own Work as well, slowly teasing out not just the past few minutes, but pushing her vision further and further back.
Justin"Lots of shitty people out there who don't do drugs. Lots of good people who do." He didn't actually answer her question, but then maybe he didn't need to. He was plenty sober now, that much was clear. Even with a few sips of whiskey warming his stomach.
The wound on his thumb continued to ooze red, and Justin rolled some of the blood around between his thumb and forefinger before he picked up the napkin from beneath his glass and used it to dampen the flow.
Then, perhaps oddly, he looked the woman in her glassy eyes and asked, "You okay?"
[Aware-as-empathy again]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
SerafineExtending +1 dif for extending -1 for focus (total -3, two for merit, one for spec focus)
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 7) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
SerafineAwareness-as-empathy on Justin: does that mean you do or do not do drugs? +1 dif because I am time maging it right now and also maybe getting drunk.
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 5, 5, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
Justin[Justin does not seem to take any personal moral issue with the idea of doing drugs, though neither does he seem enticed at the prospect of doing them himself. It's not really clear whether he does them or not, but at the least he's probably not someone who does them regularly.]
spark gapOh but this woman's past knocks up against her own, doesn't it. She can feel it coming the way you know the second the metal bars lock down over your chest on the roller coaster that you're going to go up and up and up all tortuous-slow and then at the top before you can change your mind you're going to go flying down out of your own control and there's nothing to stop you but the metal monster itself.
London. Something happened in London. She was there and Byron means something to Dick and that's where they met the first time. Somewhere in there is this: she came to the States for the same reason everyone else comes to the States. Lower cost of living, better drugs, better opportunity. Someone asked her to.
Someone asked her to. It wasn't Byron. It was another woman who flashes by with a hand, blunt and black-polished nails traipsing along Byron's back all hey you. Does she know that woman? All the faces melt together after a while.
Come on, Kelsey, London's over. The green's better in Colorado.
It isn't green that got her. This stuff's blue.
SerafineWillpower - keep it together?
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 5, 5) ( fail )
SerafineThe past rushes - well, forward, this tangled skein of memory and experience unspooling in a jumble of associations and experience. Without seeking out a particular moment in a particular point in time she gets: the stuttersteps of the past stuffed together into a slowly collapsing center. Like the crash zone of an old Russian car that crumples into accordian folds, its history written in the rough wreck of what remains.
Abruptly Sera pulls herself out of the stream. Grits her teeth and closes her eyes and turns bodily away from the girl. Kelsey. Kelsey.
Her name's Kelsey.
Now, though. All Serafíne can do is sit forward, the leather jacket creaking quietly as she rests her elbows on the edge of the bar and her forehead on the crest of her knuckles and breathes these sharp and shallow breathes, like something inside the room, inside the fucking air inside the fucking bar inside this fucking room is trying to - fuck.
Eat her lungs. Compress the air in them into pellets. Swallow her sternum and sink something hard and sharp into her skin.
There's a tattoo on her hand. Scissors. Fucking scissors turning into a shark, or the fucking shark eating a pair of goddamned scissors. She has no idea what it means. When she got it or why: just remembers someone else's hand tracing the lines after, and the echo of her laughter.
Serafíne is now hunched over the bar, eyes closed, back curved, folded forward. Breathing, just, like she's trying to keep from drowning, all this in the span of a second.
Both hands cradle her face. She's trying to:shut it outshut it outshut it out.
If the doors remain locked and barred, it doesn't matter if the walls bulge. It doesn't matter what noises rattle down deep in that fetid basement. And it doesn't help to tell yourself: maybe it wasn't that bad, after all. Because if it wasn't that bad you would fucking remember.
spark gapThe sturdy young man asks if she's okay and she smiles sad and honest. She doesn't remember. Neither of the women remember but this is a different sort of not-remembering, the sort come from hard living and hard dying and they can scrabble down after her maybe, try and pull her back up onto the brink she's already careened off.
An outward backwards reach and Sera comes up with more than just the girl's name. Sweet liqueurs mingled with rage-hot overproof doesn't protect her.
Another mossy smile and she pushes back from the bar, keeps her hands as anchors on it.
"It's okay," she says. That doesn't answer his question but he can tell just by looking at her: she doesn't give a fuck about his question. "You're one of the good ones." Drums her fingers against the bar one-and-three times and boosts all the way back, lets go and stands on her own power. "But I need to find him."
Like she's wasting her time, a whole city out there and no answers in here, she turns and weaves towards the door.
JustinMoments ago, he'd been ready to pull a knife on this woman (if he had to.) Now...
The tension left his posture, and he looked for a moment like he was going to say something, though really he didn't even know what he could say. The effects weaving around her were mostly unclear to him. Perhaps he might have tried to pull them apart until they unraveled, but he didn't have the knowledge for it.
And then Serafine crumpled over the bar in that awful panic, and Justin's reaction was immediate. He stepped quickly to her side, moving around the stranger if he had to, and put a hand out to touch her. His palm settled between her shoulders, fingers splayed as he gave a worried, comforting murmur. "Hey... you're here with me. You're safe."
They might very well have not been safe at all, but it wouldn't help anything to say that, and judging by the Cultist's response, whatever she'd just seen had probably been pretty fucking awful. He was familiar enough with those kinds of memories to know what it looked like when someone was having one.
But that was all he could do really. Anchor himself to her like the roots of a tree, and let some of his vital warmth seep into her.
SerafineJustin can feel the tension between her shoulderblades, the stark and convex curve of her spine, lifted against its nature shape. Feel, too, the way his touch does help her anchor herself, in the immediate and the present. The way she sits up, leans back into his hand and the way she words so fucking hard to pull the ragged strands of her will back together, to weave them into a stronger whole.
"Kelsey - !" Then abruptly Serafíne is in motion. Standing up, her voice ragged but rising through the otherwise quiet bar. Jogging to catch up with the stranger, digging through her pockets for some cash to stuff at the wretched looking woman. "Hey." This when she catches up with her.
"Before you go, tell me where I can find you. In case I find him. And hey, do you have some blues on you? Maybe?"
[-1 WP]
spark gap"No," she says, slow and sing-song, running on fumes now. If she keeps going downhill she can coast the entire way. If she takes the money it is only because Sera physically shoves it into her hand, makes sure the hand makes it into her coat pocket. "No, but if you know where I can get some... "
Oh. She doesn't have any way of getting in contact with her. That blankness comes back to her as her fingertips probe empty pockets.
"Well, your eyes are open. I'm sure you can find me if you want to."
And she leaves then, swaying still but not uncertain.
JustinSerafine managed to pull herself together enough to return to the here-and-now. Justin stepped back when she got up to chase after Kelsey, but followed in her wake, hovering far enough away that neither of them would feel crowded but close enough that he could jump in if something happened or someone needed help. Neither the Cultist or the stranger were in terribly good shape at the moment.
"Why do you need to find him?" he asked suddenly, as though the question had only just occurred to him. "This Byron guy?"
SerafineSo: Serafíne does stuff the money into the woman's pockets. At least one hundred dollars, maybe more, because that is all she can bring herself to do for the stranger here and now. Tonight. There's this closed door to panic in the back of her throat and a breathless hush as she exchanges the cash for an expired keycard, just snagging the latter as she pulls her hand out of the stranger's pocket.
Steps back then and stuffs her own hands into her own pockets long enough to stow the keycard, stepping back and crossing her arms in this tight, protective posture, breathing out short, sharp breaths, watching the haggard blond as she starts to leave.
That's how Sera - Sera in her heels and her cut-offs and her flannel and her fucking bustier - is standing when Justin asks his question. Tightly crossed arms and closed off body language, as if she were indeed being crowded but for fuck's sake it is impossible to crowd her. Her default demand of the world is: crowd me.
Sera waits to see if the girl responses, then either supplies or adds to Justin, quietly:
"I know a guy who might know more."
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