Jim left; Sera sent a text and a few minutes later called a cab. Hey, the priest had been her ride (though a cab or something had to have gotten her to his place) and he'd been summoned away before the promised dinner, drinks and cigarettes.
--
Five or ten or twenty minutes later, the cab pulls up in front of the Four fucking Seasons. Sera opens up that little studded leather bag and pays the fare with cash and tips generously, then slips out with a certain grace, holds the back door open for Sid to follow, and slams the door shut behind the Orphan.
There is a certain tension to Sera in the cab. She's fucking quiet, but there's a sleeper in the driver's seat and anyone would be fucking tense with the idea of a marauder on PCP, right? Still, she's distracted watching the city roll past and her own reflection superimposed on the windows and her breath fogging the glass as the a/c runs far too cold for someone wearing so little clothing.
And the Four Seasons is indeed, as a certain someone told a certain burnout named Kelsey, a baller hotel. And neither Sid nor Sera look like they belong here, though Sid likely looks more out of place than Sera. That little clutch swining at Sera's hip that we are assuming is a knockoff is an Alexander McQueen, see.
So Sera breezes past the front desk and pulls Sid in her wake, through the lobby and to the elevator bank where they wait for but a moment before one arrives, silent and elegant, to whisk them up and up and up and up, into the fucking sky.
They are deposited onto the highest (or close to it) floor and step out into a world wrapped in hushed luxury. Even Sera's (fucking ridiculous five inch) heels make no sound on the plush carpet as they walk down the hall. The Cultists has to front at the brass plaques with the room numbers a couple of times to find it, but here they are.
Sera gives Sid a bracing little smile - the first since Sid rocked up outside those galleries on Sante Fe - then knocks.
SidThere was a moment, back before Sera called the cab and after Jim left, that Sid lightly brushed her hand against Sera's, gave her a little look like Are you okay? Is this okay? And if it wasn't okay well that's one thing, but if it was, she slipped her hand into the Ecstatic's. Because she was tense, see, unbending. Somehow she doesn't tell Sera that her truck is nearby. Somehow it still doesn't come up, because let's face it, life is more interesting for Sid when her truck winds up across town from where she ends up. Look at that night at the club, and all that followed.
So a cab is what gets them to the Four Seasons. The women are quiet in there, Sid keeps her hands to herself. When they get there she slides across the seat to follow Sera out into the world, and there she stops to look up at the glorious facade of the Four fucking Seasons. And she can't believe she's about to walk into this place. She, in her faded old clothes that are at least a size, maybe two too large, and falling apart besides. She, with her long red hair the sort of flat and wavy that indicates no tools or products have touched it for at least half a decade. She who, well, you get the idea. Sid Rhodes doesn't belong in a place like this, and yet she follows in Sera's wake, hand in hers, but she doesn't let herself be dragged. She makes herself keep up.
Sera gives her a bracing sort of smile. Sid gives her a weak sort of almost curve of the mouth in return. It'll have to do.
HawksleyThere are always cabs around the Four Seasons. Yellow ones, orange ones, purple and white ones, one very noticable pink one that donates a portion of proceeds to breast cancer research even when it isn't October. It is one of the premier hotels in the area, and Hawksley is on the 16th floor in the fucking presidential suite because he can.
But Sera may or may not have seen his car like Dee did, or maybe Dee didn't tell her about it. And Sid only saw him kayaking at City Park and wearing a ridiculous bandana and sweater and shorts before he got swept away to talk to a jazz conductor, so it's entirely possible that the Four Seasons Presidental Suite comes as a surprise to both of them.
Or neither of them. They're mages. It does take quite a lot to surprise any of them.
--
The staff at the hotel doesn't bat an eyelash at Sera. Whether she's a prostitute or a trust fund baby or a rock star, they hardly even blink at her. Or Sid. It's not their appearance that causes long looks or wariness; they feel a little strange, even to the most obtuse Sleeper. Regardless: they walk with purpose and they know where they are going, or at least Sera does, and Sid is with her, so.
So: up the elevator, whoosh, ding! And down the elegantly-lit hallway with some shoes outside of doors waiting to be shined, with silver platters and silver covers waiting to be brought in or taken down. It's late, and the hotel is very quiet, and even their own knocking sounds out of place.
From inside, they hear nothing but silence for a few moments, then an obviously habitual bellow: "COLLINS!" Another silence as Hawksley remembers that his man Collins is not in this suite, brushes salt off his palms, and comes to the door himself. How gauche.
His hair is mightily disheveled. He is wearing a pair of red and silver basketball shorts and nothing else. His left hand is wrapped in a white bandage around the palm. He seems drunk but there's not a whiff of alcohol on his breath or around his person. He does look high, however. "Shit, hey, awesome," he says, seeing them, and opens the door wider, ushering them in. The sitting room has all the furniture shoved to the sides. There is a large circle that neither of them will recognize the sources of -- well, it's unlikely, given that half of it he made up on his own and the other half is closely guarded secret but apparently not so closely guarded when it comes to Hawksley -- drawn on the carpet in sea salt. Some of the sea salt is stained bright, bright red, at obscure points.
The door swings shut behind them. Any other two women might think they're about to get sacrificed by some freak. But again: they are magi, too.
Hawksley, scattered at the moment, looks from Sera to Sid to Sera then Sid, his head tipping with that avian intensity and his eyes focusing tightly on her, suddenly. "I've met you, right?" he says suspiciously, and he's thinking of City Park but there were a lot of people that day and right now he's sort of seeing multiples of everything which comes from staring at a candleflame for roughly forty-five minutes not so long ago. He blinks repeatedly, tips his head the other way, cranes his neck forward at her. "Yeah. I did." Looks at Sera! Again! "Right? I totally did."
SerafíneSera accepted Sid's hand when the redhead offered the gesture. Gave her a squeeze and a bracing little smile then, too. So that's two bracing little smiles and the two women linking hands a Very much yes all right, right? sort of squeeze.
The stories about Hawksley's Porsche (well, his Jag, Dee told everyone) made the rounds of the roller derby team but somehow never quite made it to Sera's ears. Maybe Dee thinks that Sera doesn't give a fuck about things like Porsches (or Jags) or maybe the general gossip always seems to turn into something else when Sera's in the room. Even so: Salisbury and Oxford and the Hamptons and crew and every WASP sport imagineable: Sera is not surprised at the Four Seasons.
She is surprised at the presidential suite.
And for the first time since Jim mentioned the PCP on the streetcorner - what, forty minutes ago? less? more? - for the first time since Sera received Hawksley's text message and returned it to ask if he was home, she relaxes enough to laugh.
"Yes," because she's usually the one who has no fucking idea who these 17 people are in her house whom she met last night and oh it's the Swedish women's handball team, awesome. A huff of a breath, not a full-bodied laugh. " - you fucking met her. This is Sid. Sid, this is Hawksley."
And Sera is looking past him, surveying the room, walking in, taking in the circle and the salt and the bright red and the -
- a sweeping look back to his face, then to Sid.
"They had an encounter or something with - " a quick breath in and a sharp breath all out. A brief shake of her head. "I didn't get the details. We were standing out on the street. And I got your text. So."
Sera wants a cigarette, and starts fidgeting around with her little bag in lieu of lighting him. She stalks further in on her murderous heels still looking around, peaking into any open doors with as much subtlety as she can manage (which is Not Much) like the World's Worst Spy.
"The girl you found - is she - " and here is what she's meaning to ask, but what comes out instead is, " - okay? I mean, she's okay, right?"
SidThey step into the presidential suite, Sid a little behind Sera, the better to gawk and still have someone in her peripheral to follow in as the door closes behind her. She doesn't get to gawk for long, though, at the salt circle or the rearranged furniture or any of it, because suddenly Hawksley is regarding her the way a hawk regards a mouse, head tipping, craning, moving like some avian raptor, and Sid is stopping and tipping her head down and eyeing him warily. She's thinking the same thing, though. City Park. He'd been different then, not quite so animal-seeming. Sid had been pretty much the same.
Sera reintroduces them and Sid relaxes just a little, remembering and relieved to be remembering that Sera is there, and if Sera is there then Sid isn't alone in a hotel room with a strange male.
"I remember," she says quietly.
"Ah," is all she manages to interject between or something with and I didn't get the details, because then Sera is talking and snooping and Sid is still standing where she stopped inside, one arm crossed beneath her breasts so her hand can grip the opposite upper arm.
She waits until Hawksley has answered Sera's query about Kelsey, and if she can, she poses a question of her own. "Why did you ask if the PCP was blue? Did you find some, too?"
HawksleyThey, Sera says, and Hawksley knows who she means only because she mentioned a couple of names in her text. She digs around in her bag for a cigarette that she's not supposed to smoke in here and then walks around, peeking in and seeing a rumpled bed and a shockingly pristine kitchenette and a not-as-bad-as-you'd-think bathroom and so on and so forth. Hawksley doesn't stop her. He's peering at Sid thoughtfully, even as he answers Sera to the side: "She's asleep. Collins is checking in on her every few hours, and then he sends me these little notes with the time and date written at top on these ridiculous little slips of paper to inform me of her condition."
Hawksley shakes his head. Indeed, there are a few bits of hotel stationery floating around the room with tidy handwriting in night-black ink that contain dates, times, neat little summaries, and a signature of R. Collins, Esq.
Hawksley also rolls her eyes. "Fucking Collins. Fucking -- what am I supposed to do with sixteen slips of paper telling me 'still sleeping, still a fucking burnout', right?"
Maybe he's not so obtuse, such a fucking bro that he doesn't pick up on it, but here's the thing: he takes his eyes off of Sid and he stops staring at her like a fucking predator about to pin a mouse down and rip its head off. He doesn't even look at her curiously, then. He looks at his circle, the casting interrupted, but no matter; these things take days, sometimes, as it is. Sid asks Sera a question, then, and Hawksley's head swings up with interest at the two of them.
"Fucking PCP? What the fuck?"
SerafíneAnd, once more, the ridiculous little pieces of paper time and date-stamped, signed updates make her smile. She finds one on a side table and another tucked half beneath a lamp that has been shoved away from its usual position to make room for -
- a circle of salt in the middle of the room. Sometime during her circuit, Sera just, steps out of her heels. They're fucking high and she's been wearing them for hours, and at some point even her feet start to ache, toes all cramped, calves and thighs constantly flexed. Just steps out of them and curls and flexes her toes luxuriously on the plush pile carpet.
"I bought some." That's Sera's answer to Sid, accompanied by a narrow shrug of her sharply articulated and mostly-bare shoulders. "And I have the number of the guy who's selling it. Distributing it, anyway. That's the Byron you're looking for. He brought it out here and gave it to a dealer and told him to give it away.
"First hit's free."
Her expression is so very spare.
"I'm pretty sure whatever is happening to Kelsey came from the PCP."
SidHawksley stops looking at her like he wants to eat her and Sid relaxes a little more. Enough that she can trace the progress of her friend around the room for a bit before she looks around herself. Cautiously, she steps a little further into the room, but off at an angle that doesn't take her directly toward the man. Her arms unfold and she shifts her bag a little, the better to hold the strap with both hands, right hand low, left hand high. In this way the scar on her left arm is plainly visible, but no one's looking at Sid right now, not her or her arm. Not until she speaks, at least, risking drawing that stare onto her again.
Because when Sera says she bought some Sid perks up. Her spine straightens and her shoulders set a little and she almost, almost stops looking like she's trying to shrink herself down into invisibility.
Sera says whatever's happening to Kelsey, she's pretty sure it's coming from the PCP, and Sid says, "Well yeah. The stuff we found was a Charm. Used. I couldn't figure out what it did. If it's the same stuff..." she trails, her gaze falling away as her mind starts working. Then she looks up at Sera.
"Can you find out. I mean, do you know. Is Byron, is he, is he Awakened?"
HawksleyHawksley, quite suddenly, remembers himself. Not that he is half-naked and not that he is waiting for his hand to stop bleeding but that he has guests and he was taught manners. Jesus. He flashes back to prepatory school and the first time his mother visited. God, he's a prick.
He interrupts completely, even his own keen interest in the PCP and Byron-that-fucker, to say: "Look, can I get either of you anything? I know the sitting room is a mess but there's chairs over by the fireplace, we can all have a sitdown and I'll have Collins bring us some drinks, right? And maybe a nosh?"
Casting his eyes around, he swings to the left and then in a half-circle til he finds one of his ubiquitious white t-shirts, only this one is grey, and he pulls it on over his head while Sera is saying she bought some, Byron brought the shit out here, she has his number. Hawksley's shirt settles around his hips, obscuring that lovely view, and he is being kind and not paying overmuch attention to Sid, or at least she may think it kindness. Maybe he's just going to focus his attention on whichever woman in the room has the most semi-transparent or tightest clothing on.
But he's not focusing on Sera, either. He's looking at his circle, his brow furrowed in a deep frown, while Sid talks. Then he can't help it. Then he looks at her again, still ken, but less predatory. "It was -- at least -- Time and Correspondence and Matter lingering around her, but fading. I think it'll come out of her system if she doesn't have more. At least the magic will." That frown deepens to a scowl. "I didn't get that good of a feel off of her, and I don't want to be casting on her while she's unconscious if I can avoid it. That's rather tawdry."
Not to say he won't do it. Just: it's distasteful, isn't it?
"What I'd really like to do is get my hands on some of his shit and start scrying for him. Even if it's just a taste of what the Charm was, it could show us who else might have had some, and if Byron didn't make it, then it could lead us to whoever did."
Serafíne"I could use a drink," the brief view of her rich, wry smirk. Says nothing about a fucking nosh, but Sera could almost always use a fucking drink. "Feels like a whiskey night, if you've got one that's not made of paint thinner and amber food coloring. Which," another glance around, then back to that fucking circle, " - given the digs, seems pretty likely.
"I don't know Sid, whether he's Awakened or not. I don't know what he looks like, other than short and mean looking. I got glimpses of the last deal he did with my guy, but he wasn't in the right place for me to - "
She hasn't alighted on any of the chairs, Sera, but she has found a place to stand in the sitting room, where she imagines that she will not fall over and upset the salt circle or otherwise shift whatever is in alignment out of alignment in the room.
Then Hawksley - that's rather tawdry.
"Leave her alone." - Sera returns, rather more vehemence behind the words than she intended to infuse them with. Pushing her left hand through her unruly, tangled blond curls, "Unless you can undo the Work that's been done to her, just leave her alone. Let her sleep it off or whatever, fuck. She can come to my place if you're tired of the fucking notes.
"I mean, I have the stuff." She means, with me. "It's not like I was going to leave it lying around for one of my fucking housemates to take."
HawksleySera snaps at him. It's more than she meant, he can see that, but she keeps going even after the intensity leaves her voice. Hawksley's reaction to the first words were instant. A moment ago he was getting ready to call Collins, he was going to say glasses and ice and that one thing you know the thing I drink no the other one it's lighter and kind of summery but still whiskey, you know? And of course Collins would know, or guess, or provide something suitable, but Hawksley doesn't have his phone out when Sera says that.
He frowns at her, and it's actually a milder frown than he had when he was thinking, and thinking hard, about anything. "That was a bit much, Sera," is all he says, and with surprising calm to his tone, a surprising seriousness given that he is rather hyperactive tonight. "I said I wasn't. I brought her here and I've done nothing but leave her alone. When she was with me, shit was happening around her that she wasn't trying to do, and for all I know, being around me is what triggered it. I'm not even going into her room unless I have to."
That frown skews a bit deeper. His voice, despite the words, actual softens, is bordering on imploring: "Give me some fucking credit, all right?"
Hawksley steps back, then. He finds his phone on a side table and picks it up. That conversation, mentioned before, actually happens. Whiskey. No, the other one. He glances over at Sid. "You want some food? I'll get us some food." And then to Collins, a few seconds later: "I don't fucking know, just whatever. Jesus, want me to do your job for you? Fuck. I'm hungry and I need some iron."
A beat. "Yes." This conversation is happening to the side, though; he's not interrupting his guests. His voice gets quieter a second later, almost a mutter: "I know you don't like it, but you've gotta watch the chicklet, right? ...Jesus, I'm fine. ...Collins. Collins, I'm hanging up. Collins, I'm --" he pulls the phone from his ear and scowls, tells it: "Well fuck you too, you soggy bastard."
SidSera says nothing about nosh and Sid doesn't, either, but she does pull a sort of face at the word. It's slight, faint, there and gone in an eyeblink that, if caught, could best be described as Did you really just. She shakes her head against the offer of drink or food.
That Sera doesn't know if the dealer-man is Awakened is clearly a disappointment to Sid. Because she has another little clue, and it would be nice if she could match it up to something, or someone. But she can't, not here, not now.
Then Sera's snapping, harsher than she intends, backing down again. Sid's reddish brows constrict together above the line of those totally uncool, not at all fashionable or in the slightest bit hipstery black glasses of hers. That look eases a little when Hawksley returns, quiet and calm and serious. His voice lowers and Sid, damn it. Sid's heart goes out to him a little, despite herself and her wariness and her uncertainty about this stranger. It feels like maybe an echo of something else, like it springs from some other place inside her that she's locked away forever. Or maybe it's the fact that Sid's opened up a little recently. Who knows. She tries to shut off that feeling but she can't, so she turns her head away from him while he makes his call to his man.
She looks away to the circle on the floor, at the little red sections and the lines of it.
"You have it here," Sid says, her head coming up and around to look at Sera straight on, finally putting together the woman's meaning. "If we can find out what it does, maybe. Maybe we can undo it."
Serafíne"I'm sorry." Sera is not precisely looking at Hawksley when she offers him the apology, but somehow the lack of eye contact does not make it seem less sincere. By now, in lieu of a chair, she's found a convenient console table on which to rest her skinny ass and is leaning back, legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, bare heels digging into the carpet to keep herself upright. Somehow, she has crossed her arms again, and there's an edge to her expression, between her brows.
"It's just - I saw her like two weeks ago. Felt her, you know? So fucked up. And she freaked me out and I just let her go.
"Fuck, I didn't just let her go. I stuffed money into her pocket and let her go. I should've fucking done something. I mean, two fucking weeks she's been like that, who knows how long before this. Can you imagine?" - the rhetorical question is framed to Sid but she includes Hawksley in the lift of it at the end. Her eyes are shining now, with unshed tears. Because Sera is imagining it, is feeling it, the fucking terror and fucking isolation and fucking Work with every beat of her heart. "Guilty conscience, I guess. I'm glad - " a pause, " - you found her and brought her home."
--
Then, a bird-quick movement of her mouth for Sid, and Sera nods, confirming that she has the drug here. In her fucking little black clutch.
She pulls sorts through and finds the vial, pulls it out and studies the substance inside. "If what you're gonna do is gonna consume it, I'll give half to you and half to Jim. If not, you can have the whole thing as long as you get it back to me soon."
Sid[per+sci]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )
HawksleyThe ladies do not want to eat anything, or at least aren't speaking up and saying so. Whatever. He's going to eat some nearly bloody red meat and he's going to feel fucking incredible afterward, particularly with the whiskey.
He sets his phone down again, and when he looks back at them he does catch Sid looking at his circle. It makes him smile, in an odd way: his work is intricate and esoteric, and it pulls from a myriad of disciplines that he puts together by sheer force of will and depth of understanding. Her eyes skim over it, but some of what she sees is so engrained, so deep in her mind, that she catches it without even meaning to. At first it's like seeing shapes it clouds: hey that looks like but it can't be but it is.
He is focusing again on Sera, though, because Sid also is, and he is just as interested in the fact that they have some of it here and there is so much you can do with that. He's excited. And:
Hawksley is smiling at Sera, too, as if he's forgotten their previous conversation. She says she's sorry, and he shrugs, and he's going to tell her it's totally cool, don't worry about it or some other fool thing, but she's going on, and his smile flickers as his brows tug together.
"Hey," he says, and he walks over toward her with that frown. "You did something. You found her and felt her and stuffed money in her pocket and didn't put her in a cage. Maybe that's like, y'know, the best thing that could have been done. Or the only thing. And then later when I ran into her and she fucking collapsed in my arms, it meant that when I started phoning-a-friend, my friends knew what the fuck was going on and could do more. Right? So you don't know. Maybe you would have made it worse because she freaked you out. Maybe enough was still in her system that she would have hurt you or your people."
When she first met him, he spread his hands like a magician, he flipped them over, and his gesture now is similar: his hands wipe the air in front of her, turn over, display nothingness. "Lots of times, guilt is just an illusion we create so that we can believe we have more control than we do. Or should."
But he remembers: he's talking to a Seer. Hawksley shuts the fuck up. She opens her clutch because she has a vial. He looks from that vial over to Sid and raises an eyebrow. "You... gonna... consume it?" he says slowly, standing somewhere between the two S-women.
SidWhen Sid looked over at the circle she meant only to turn her face away so that she could maybe sort of start to hide the fact she felt a little something in the face of Hawksley's quiet not-quite-imploring words. Her eyes skim over the salt figures, a place to go, really, until she realizes she recognizes that symbol. And that one. And that one. It's like looking at someone's made up language, only they've used familiar syllables. Her attention was drawn away at that point, though, and so she doesn't try to decipher it. She probably couldn't without picking his brain, anyway.
Which, maybe, at some point? Maybe she will do just that.
Sera asks if what she's gonna do is consume it, and Sid frowns and shakes her head at the suggestion at first. But then she frowns a little more, considering that option.
She nods her head once, the gesture definitive as she comes to a decision, all on her own. "Give half to Jim." Which seems to answer the question of Hawksley's, but doesn't actually. Her eyes slide toward him a moment before her head follows the look.
"I'm not...planning. I want to analyze it. But, if I can't, then." The sentence doesn't even fade, it stops completely dead. "Not if I don't, not if it's not necessary, though," she's quick to add. "And not by myself."
SerafíneSera's perched her skinny ass in her poured-on jeans on Hawksley's (or rather, the Fourh Seasons and temporarily Hawksley's) console table and if she weren't to small and if she weren't so fucking thin the rather delicate piece might be in danger. Her hair is pulled back - twisted into some sort-of-thing on the back of her head, which only emphasizes the dark delineation of her sidecut.
She's not looking at him until he starts to walk toward her, frowning, and then she cannot ignore him, glancing up, finding his eyes and watching him as he rewrites the story she's written in her head and gives him this look, nostrils flaring as she breathes out. The look: is wry and aware and perhaps a bit - grateful, that's the word.
Then, she's attendant to that magician's gesture and breathes another propulsive breath out of her body. Not wry, this time, not scoffing, but close. There's a dismissive note to her refusal of his aphorism because: she feels guilty, jesus christ, she can't fucking stop feeling it. As well to tell someone who just dropped a sofa on their toe to stop feeling the pain.
Her eyes slide past his, past his shoulder, to the circle on the floor and back.
"I didn't know you were a Hermetic." A certain shadow of a certain crawling twist to her mouth. "House Gryffindor or fucking Ravenclaw?"
---
Then, though, Hawksley asks if Sid's going to consume it and - Sera's all sharp edges "Fuck no she's not," before she takes in a breath and realizes or remembers or just LOOKS BACK five seconds and gets that she used the word. "I mean, does whatever you're going to do destroy the sample, is what I meant. There weren't many of them. Maybe ten doses. Byron hasn't resupplied anyone and won't answer his mail."
Serafínehis VOICE MAIL sera is not writing him letter.
HawksleyHawksley does look at Sid, sidelong, for a long moment. He's watching her profile, and he notices how red her hair is and how it cuts across her cheek, which is as fair as cream. As fair as a porcelain teacup of cream, which is distracting on a sensory level, but he doesn't stay distracted for long. He considers her, and then she's looking up and away and around and so is he, but he's... not the stealthiest. Hard to be stealthy when you seem made of fucking sunlight. Nor is he the best at dissembling in any sense, even in his body language. For instance: Sera could read, if she wanted, that moment of distraction in his eyes when he looked at Sid and liken it to someone looking at a piece of art.
Just as Sid notices when he takes his eyes off her and is like whoa, hey, the ceiling! cool!
Someone knocks on the door. Hawksley starts to yell for Collins, they can see him take the breath, but he remembers it probably is Collins and walks over there, around his own circle, past Sid, to open the door. There is a tall -- though not as tall as Hawksley -- man there, an older gentleman with close-combed black hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. He has a wheeled cart, and on that cart are three glasses, a steel bucket of ice with tongs, a bottle of Stranahan's, and a covered platter that smells like red meat. Because it is. It's ribeye, rare. With some weird vegetable things on the plate as well but those have their smell overpowered by the meat.
Hawksley is delighted. And then he drags the cart in and physically grabs Collins by the shoulders, spins him around, and marches him out again. Collins bears this gratefully, even though Hawksley looks like a kid who is getting a shoulder ride from their favorite uncle. The door swings shut again. He beams. "Whiskey!"
Yes, Hawksley. You made whiskey happen. And the room slow clapped for him in silence.
--
A sidebar, but it goes back in time: he doesn't believe his own aphorisms. Talk of control, of not having it: he doesn't believe a word of it. He says it and knows it is bullshit, but not for the same reasons Sera scoffs at it. One has to do with feeling. The other has to do with power.
--
"That's good," he says, to both Sera and Sid, of Sid Not Taking The Fucking PCP. "I mean you gotta do what you want, you're a grownass whatever and all," he's uncorking the Stranahan's as he says this to Sid, "but I was gonna be like yeah, maybe do that somewhere else, and then I was gonna feel like a total prick, you know? Just, y'know, PCP is bad enough on its own without --" he has poured one glass and hands it to Sera, "-- without adding whatever the fuck spells are on it." The other glass is held out to Sid.
I didn't know you were a Hermetic. Maybe she said that earlier, and Hawksley ignored it. Maybe she says it later, looking at that circle, and he smiles wryly to himself when he finishes pouring his glass, when he takes his first lingering sip.
No one knew he was a fucking Hermetic. He doesn't walk around in robes, he doesn't spout Latin at the drop -- okay well sometimes he spouts Latin at the drop of a hat, but he hasn't done that to other Awakened, and Choiristers do it too, so there, so nyeh. He has a wand. It's nowhere to be seen. He uses bloodletting in rituals and salt and those are... more Verbena, actually. But the symbols he's drawn, the wadjet to the east side of the circle, the pentacle to the west, the other lines and shapes, mark him rather clearly. As does his wealth, sadly enough; there are few poor Hermetics in the world. Old money. Old blood. Old, old magic.
"Hard to say," he muses, of the question. "I am courageous and friendly, but also ambitious and a touch ruthless at times. I enjoy hard work and a good meal."
He's described all of the houses but one, and he says nothing of the above with a trace of chagrin or sheepishness or false modesty or equally false hesitance. He isn't thinking solely in terms of talons and beaks. Hawksley looks at his whiskey and tosses a mouthful back, then smiles to himself. "Ravenclaw. Of course, Ravenclaw." Looks over at her with a smile. "What else would I be?"
More than ambition or power or bravery or friendship or anything else. Knowledge. Understanding. Study. He knows what she might have actually been asking, but he doesn't offer that information. "Maybe don't brag to any other Hermetics you meet about me, though; I don't tend to get along terribly well with most of them."
He finishes the rest of his first double in one more drink and then sets the glass down to pour again.
"You're both welcome to stay here, if you like," he says mildly. "I'm going to eat a steak, get riotously drunk, and then alternate staring at a candle with reading until I pass out. You can check on Kelsey, too, if you want. Collins has the second key to her room." He looks up, and over at Sera. "Mostly I think he's been reading to her a bit, though he won't admit it. Naval battle histories. It's like fucking elephant tranquilizer, listening to that guy read that shit."
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