Serafíne: holy holy holy

Hawksley

Staring at a candle and reading books. Cutting his hand and drizzling the blood over salt. Experimenting with substance-specific circles. Getting drunk on whiskey and eating prime rib until he passes out on the floor. This is how Hawksley wants to spend his very-late-Friday-night-going-into-Saturday-morning. He couldn't think of anything he'd rather be doing right now. But as he said: Ravenclaw. Of course, Ravenclaw.

Serafine, on the other hand, gets seventeen texts just while they're standing there. She is invited to Beta, to Church, which is not a text from her actual church-going friend, to that new place they can't remember the name of, to dinner, to drinks, to a swing class, to the derby, to a game, to come over and get high and maybe fool around which isn't much of a maybe, and all of these things sound more interesting than hanging out while Hawksley stares at candles and reads books. Hawksley, for what it's worth, is hardly going to blame her. In fact, he's nearly ushering her and Sid out the door so he can get to it.

The door does close behind them when they leave with a luxurious softness. If they check on Kelsey, it's under the supervision of that tall, dark-haired man named Collins. His employer was not kidding: he does sit by the girl's bedside, reading about historical naval battles to himself, though when she tosses or turns in her sleep, he reads aloud to her in a voice that is so steadying, so stable, that she drowses back to stillness.

Down the hall, Hawksley reads, but keeps getting distracted trying to think of why the redhead seems so familiar to him. It isn't just meeting her at City Park. Where the fuck has he seen her?

He flips a page and comes upon a drawing of circle not terribly unlike his own, filled with molecular structures and heiroglyphs both, and he is delighted. He forgets about Sid; that seems to be what she wants people to do, anyway.

Hawksley does not forget about Sera, though. And no one really ever could; in this she is the opposite of Sid. She could never be ignored, does not want to be. Sometimes he still smells her when he notices his heart beating. Sometimes he looks at the moon, or the darkness where the moon thinks it is hiding, and he smirks to himself. Closes his eyes and tastes her. He does not call her, then.

He calls her, yes, either because he's old-fashioned and doesn't like texting -- nonsense -- or because his hands are busy or because he wants an answer right now. But he calls her, and she either picks up or she calls him back, for if he leaves a message that is all it is: Sera! Hawksley. Call me back. I just remembered something.

And that is why he called her. To ask, in a voice that rushes past pleasantries: "Do we know who Chastity is?"

Serafíne

They do check on Kelsey - down the hall, in her own luxurious room, drowsing beneath the watchful eye of Hawksley's man Collins. Hawksley's man Collins. Jesus Christ, he's filthy rich. Sera has never in her fucking life had the occasion to employ that phrase and she has had the occasion to employ a very many strange phrases in her life and the words in her mouth both please her and make her roll her eyes at the same time. But see: Kelsey. Despite her stated interest in the girl, the guilt she swallows down over not doing something for her, despite all of that, Sera edges into the room and just barely. Sleeping; thank god. She's sleeping and Hawksley's man Collins is reading and that looks so fucking boring that Sera has to fight the urge to yawn like a kitten, all curling tongue.

Except, mostly her eyes are on the girl and between those thoughts Sera is still and breathing. Shoulder hooked against the doorframe, dark eyes ticking over the surroundings, all: okay. And: okay.

Lets the door close quietly and for some reason Sera wants to take the stairs in looping circuits all the way down to the lobby, just running, and those spike-heeled shoes weren't made for it but she can do it barefoot.

And does.

No luxury in the stairs: they are concrete and metal and framing and made for emergencies and maintenance and maids and bellhops and all the people hidden behind the scenes that make a place like this possible. Sera is fast but the elevator is faster but Sid is Sid and maybe comes with her or maybe is just - owl-eyed amidst the finery of the lobby and regardless: Sera finds Sid again. Would take her scarred arm the way she takes everyone's arm, the way she takes a priest's arm in the middle of the street except with Sid Sera never knows the boundaries and does not wish to push them because they are the edges of a deep and ugly wound, that much she knows, which she does not wish to set to aching again.

Outside: they catch the pink cab back to Sid's truck.

Sera accepts four of her seventeen invitations. Sends out a few more. She drank at least a double of Hawksley's whiskey and has had nothing to eat since French toast in that warm kitchen with the glass sliders this... afternoon. She calls it morning, Sera, but it was assuredly afternoon, so that tells us something of the sort of night she's planning / not planning, creating, right? Conjuring out of the ether. Or at least out of her iPhone.

It is going to be so fucking great.

She won't have to think about anything.

So later: that fucking night? Three days later? But later, right - he calls her and whereever she is it goes to voicemail and whereever she is she thinks enough about or of him that the call is returned in ten minutes.

She is outside somewhere. It was loud inside so she's outside now and sparks a cigarette - she is still smoking cloves, when she smokes them, which are still more illegal than her fucking joints - but the music throbs out, pulsing like a strobe, this deep bass beat that just crawls up her spine as she leans back against the brick wall and she doesn't know where she is or what street this is or what sky this is: just that they are and that's so fucking good right now. And she's so full of bonhomie for the three or five or whatever minutes she spends smoking and biting her lip and sort of lolling her forehead toward the screen trying to rearrange herself to return his call and when she finally figures that bit out (it is, after all, just one button) she's grinning to herself all proud and all ready with a quip like Hey how's your man Collins?

But he's focused. He's on-task. He doesn't say hey or que pasa or anything. Just greets her with a question that makes her heart stop.

That carves open the brick wall behind her and maybe her spine a little.

Silence.

That's what he gets.

Music in the background and the faint sounds of traffic in the foreground and her breathing, maybe.

"I don't - " No. Those words get arrested in her throat and her mouth pulls away from the receiver. She thinks about split ends and split infinitives and the street feels changed. Altered. There's this fucking phone in her hand. "I can't talk now - " comes slurring back into focus a moment later. "Okay? I hafta go."

Hawksley

There's his money. There's Collins's money. There's the money entrusted to Collins to be used for Hawksley since he can't be trusted with all of it. They all saw what happened when he went off to Oxford, didn't they? And there's more than that besides that he can't always access, isn't permitted to use on his own, but if he asks -- if he asks the right away, if he performs the exchanges of manners and so forth that are required of him -- it is given.

She's felt his hands. He's never worked a day in his ludicrous life.

Hawksley is filthy. Fucking. Rich. He will grow wealthier still after a few more people die. Perhaps he will squander it all on Presidential suites and rooms for transient burnouts and so on, and so on, and so on. Perhaps he will forget he has it in his clawing for greater knowledge, deeper understanding, for Ascension.

For power.

Later, sometime, and it hardly even matters to someone like Sera and truth be told it hardly matters to Hawksley when some nights he stays up all nights Working or studying or both or drinking or yelling at Hawksley,

he calls her. And she calls him back rather quickly. He jumps to his point, which is a question he forgot to ask. A question about a name whose taste he found familiar without knowing why, and he couldn't explain to anyone his synesthesia with names if he tried so he never tries.

Silence, which is interrupted by Hawksley chattering: "Hello? Sera? Hey. Shit, fucking piece of fucking sh-- COLLINS!" Which is what he does when Things Don't Work or Things Need Doing. He yells for (or at) Collins to fix them, or to do them, with the entitlement of someone born to unimaginable privilege. Certain people are there to make his life easier. In his case, almost constantly, that certain person is Collins.

Sera is talking though. Hawksley only barely hears the I can't talk now -- and he's interrupting again. "Hey, you called me back though," which is just logic. "Sera? No, hey, not okay. This is important. That's the other name Kelsey was talking about and she said this girl Chastity doesn't even know her own name, and that kind of makes me wonder if that blue stuff is wiping memories or something, I don't know, but if it does then Jim really shouldn't try it, and -- Sera? Hellooo?" He almost hoots that greeting.

Serafíne

There is money and then there is Money. There is Money and then there is Old Money and even if she knew him for a WASP and prep school kid and an Ivy Leaguer or, better: graduate (or near-graduate) of Oxford or Cambridge, even if she knew every single one of his WASPish sports and what he'd look like playing them and why and how and his future trajectory down to the choice of drug and the tennis skirt his future spouse might wear on the grass courts at their dedicated Club - well, she did not know that was not merely rich, but filthy, fucking, rich.

Not until she saw him in the Presidential suite at the Four Seasons.

Not until she knew he had a Collins.

Jesus fucking Christ he has a Collins.

So now, still on the sidewalk, still with a cigarette in one hand and an iPhone in the other, still fucking lit and she doesn't remember exactly where she is or why she came out here and she thinks that in there was better and that in there was not quite so dark and she wants a fucking drink and she'll get one, she'll get another fucking drink, as soon as she can move. Once upon a time when she was tripping and blind drunk and stoned and wouldn't stop trying to leave, to walk out the front door onto the balcony in the snow and Dan was sure she was going to fall off the balcony but couldn't get her to stay still because they were playing Pink Floyd and she hated it: he tricked her into staying in one fucking place for a solid forty-five minutes by telling her that her shoelaces were tied together, so she actually couldn't get up.

Her shoes did not even have laces, but there she stayed, affixed to an imitation leather couch trying to figure out how to untie herself long enough for her to fixate on something other than the door and the balcony and the ridiculous drop from the balcony to the drifts of blowing snow.

Serafíne is not that fucked up tonight but listen: she would've hung up on him if she could've made her thumb move and she's sliding down the brick while he rants, her loose hair catching on the little grooves in the brick, snapping and pulling at her scalp.

Oh, a cigarette.

She draws her knees up and leans her head forward and stubs the cigarette out on the sidewalk. The phone's still framed in her palm, fingers curved over its slim purple and black case. Her nails are three different colors tonight.

And he's talking and talking and she has her left wrist on her left knee and she can see the shark's tail on her wrist but not any part of the scissors and she's leaning forward, right, staring at the screen, her head sort of bobbing like a lost buoy in the surf, and what she thinks it feels like, is having someone punch through the muscles framing your spine and grab your sternum and pull it, snapping ribs off like twigs, back through your chest, the first time you wake up without a name on your tongue.

He's almost hooting and she's leaning closer to the phone and if she weren't sitting with her ass on the concrete now she'd be practically falling over. Forehead resting in the heel of her right hand, right elbow on her right knee.

There's silence on the other or rather: ambient fucking noise, because the first time she answers him her voice is too quiet and her mouth is too far away from the microphone but the second time, the second time she's craning her neck and tucking her mouth closer to the glowing screen. What she says - what she mouths - is, It's, me. staring down at the screen, her own shadow dark and strange over it, the conversation not precisely with him but with the street or something. The night air or -

- it's the mention of Jim that keeps her focused enough to lean closer and answer a second time, audibly but in a closed-off voice from a closed-off-fucking throat. "It's - it's not. She didn't take it. Chastity it's not - "

Hawksley

Hawksley would argue that Serafine has a Collins. Doesn't she have Dan and Dee and Rick? Doesn't she have everyone she meets wrapped around her finger? But Serafine has not yet been seen shouting at Dan or Dee or Rick to answer the door or fix her phone or stay up all night watching over a magically drugged girl... while also getting him whiskey and prime rib and answering the door and fixing his phone. Hawksley would not see the difference, but Hawksley cannot always see that other people can never see what is actually going on between he and Collins. It isn't that he thinks it's So Obvious; it's that in his rather potent self-involvement, he just assumes people know what he knows, sees what he sees.

That self-involvement is what has him chattering on, only vaguely aware that something is wrong, but he thinks she's just high or stoned or on downers or drunk or all of the above plus a few other things, and nothing is wrong with that but dammit, Sera, this is important, and she's really the only Awakened person he's met so far that he feels like he can actually talk to because he and she have actually talked before, at least until they weren't saying anything anymore but muttered prayers to nightfall.

Hawksley sort of assumes she knows all that, too. Even if he doesn't know that she wants very much to hang up on him but can't make her thumb go that way. Even if he has no idea that she's sinking to her ass somewhere, that she's nearly in shock, may in fact be in shock. He can't see her. And try as he might, he's nowhere near the most empathetic person she'll ever meet. He is far, far from that.

On his end, he's frowning deeply. It's not an annoyed frown, though. It's concern, even if something about it makes him seem like an angry god who is going to send lightning on her crops for displeasing him, or maybe he'll just stop flying and the earth will stop spinning until they wail and cut themselves and rub sand into the cuts and howl at the sky in pleading. Something about his face is too alien, too inhuman, for his very terrestrial, very human emotions to always shine through.

Unless you're like Sera, and can peel back the layers of his thoughts with a side-glance from her strangely keen-and-mad-at-once eyes.

There's a bit of quiet where he stops hooting, stops chattering, and listens to how fragile she sounds. He knows fragile. He knows far-gone. He knows, more than he ever wanted to know, what it sounds like when someone is faced with a reality that they cannot,

in fact,

face.

He hears that in her now. And a mantle comes to rest on him that is neither guilt nor shame nor anger nor even protectiveness. It is something else entirely. She can't see it. He exhales.

"Sera," he says, and his voice has a pitch to it that reaches into her brain, pulls at the part of her that has heard that name in that voice from that person before, "I think I could probably find you if I needed to, but it will be much easier and faster if you just tell me where you are, cool? Cuz --"

I'm going to come get you and we'll talk about it.

I'm worried about you.

I need to fucking know what the hell is going on and why the name 'Chastity' made you shut the fuck down you crazy tart.

But he cannot lie. And though he knows that full well, it's one of the few things he doesn't assume everyone else knows, too. In fact, he keeps it somewhat of a secret and just plays up the idea that he's a dudebro with foot-in-mouth disease who never thinks before he speaks who Just Tells It Like It Is, Man, who is so noble and honorable and honest or whatever. But he cannot lie; doesn't, now, as he finishes, quieter, lower:

"-- I wanna see you."

Serafíne

If they ever had that argument in the presence of Sera's at-least-three Collinses Hawksley might well triumph in that argument, because of course Sera cannot see how Dee and Dan and Rick and even Emily and the roller derby girls and those guys from the record store and that redhead sweep the world and their concerns aside for her. How Dan spends a fair portion of his every night out checking on her and checking in with her and assuring himself that she's okay, that she's got cab fare and is coherent enough to keep going or has someone with her to watch over her and Dee sets up her gear and buys the groceries and owns the house and they all dance attendance on her when she requires it.

And she does not yell, true, and she does not ring bells or issue commands or shout for assistance with door-answering or prime-rib-procuring. She just is and these things happen for her and she takes them all in stride.

Some other night - any other night - and some other name - any other name - the conversation would border on the comical, Hawksley in his Ravenclaw tower flipping past a new diagram of a casting circle, dammit this is important and Sera all fucked up and flying not-quite-getting his question replying in nonsensical nonsequitors.

And she was prepared for that name Friday night. Prepared to hear it from Hawksley or Sid, and if not prepared (and she is never prepared, preparedness requires planning, requires thought, requires consideration, requires reflection), then she was braced for it at least. She had not yet considered what she would do or if she would try to lie or bluff her way past the bit of panic that always swells up in her chest when the dark places in her memory surface and reassert themselves. But there was a certain solidity in her chest, as if she were bullet proof. Fireproof. Just another way she lies so thoroughly to herself.

Now, though, that solid repetition of her name pulls her upright and her left hand follows and she's frowning at the phone, she doesn't remember why they talk so much and she wants to tell it it is right here then she listens to it her head lilting aslant and the line is still open and footsteps.

He hears someone ask are you okay and it's a female voice that is farther from the mic than Sera's has been all night, then the conversation is muffled to insubstantiality by the curl of her hand across the mic and then a stranger's voice on the other end, "Uh, yeah man. It's the Hi-Dive. Know where that is?" And this stranger's voice is male and neither young nor old, with no particular accent except: middle American. If Hawksley requires directions, he gives them - in a vague and somewhat drunken or stoned way, of course, which is fortunately not entirely divorced from reality.

Hawksley

[fixed!]

Hawksley

Hawksley would win a great number of arguments against Sera, not because of sobriety or enhanced intellect or anything of the sort, but simply by going in with his own rules, winning according to them, and then discounting utterly whether or not he convinced anyone else of his stance. But that's Hawksley. And Hawksley, in the end, is not very argumentative. At least not with Sera. Perhaps not with most people.

He's frowning when he waits for her to answer, but she doesn't. He hears voices, and one of them is certainly not Sera's and the other one only vaguely sounds like a version of Sera. He's frowning when he tells the woman who takes Sera's phone: "Yeah. I can get there. Listen, man -- if you can get her to go inside could you get her inside?"

At least then if someone gets her a drink or something, he will still know where to find her. He may have to remind her why he came, or pretend they just ran into each other by happenstance, but he'll know where she is. He lets the guy go, whether the guy is going to try and get Sera to do anything or not.

In the middle of the night, the two-point-five mile, nine-minute drive is significantly faster. The way Hawksley drives, it's even less. He doesn't drive out of panic or anything as gauche as that, he just drives his Porsche like it's a fucking Porsche and like he's twenty-something and while he has faced his own mortality more than once, it has yet to produce in him an insistence on preventing the inevitable that outweighs his sheer, unflappable delight in being dangerously, stupidly, wildly, overwhelmingly alive.

He gets to the Hi-Dive in a little over five minutes, and he whips past the chains and the Car Toys and once you get past 3rd it's hipster city with TRVE Brewing and the Mayan and Sweet Action, which is closed now but which still gets his eye because he really likes ice cream.

Parking is a fucking nightmare down here during the worst weather, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. Right now it's not a nightmare, it's a sub-realm of the spirit world that some souls have visited and called Hell. The lot of the Hi-Dive is completely full, and so are most others. So Hawksley does what anyone who can shape reality at whim does, and he fucking cheats. He drives past the Hi-Dive, turns around, and goes into a lot on Archer. He's been here a few weeks; he has found his way around rather well, despite that. It comes from making lots of friends as fast as he can. It comes from considerng Space and Distance in a creatively irrational way.

People look. Driving down Broadway, parking, walking away from the car, Hawksley can feel people looking at him, and it. Of course they do: it's a glorious car, and when he steps out of it, he is a glorious young man who somehow seems sun-lit even in the dark.

He crosses the street, crosses through the parking lot, and approaches the exterior of the Hi-Dive. Looking for Sera, if he didn't already see her when he drove past. Going inside, if he doesn't see her out front.

Serafíne

Five minutes, that's it, driving his Porsche like a fucking Porsche was meant to be driven and when his whips past the Hi-Dive he can see her still outside. He has no idea that she had sunk to the concrete and she's on her feet now, with another young man and young woman standing in front of the bar. The young woman has short, platinum hair and tattoos and the young man looks a bit more like a lawyer than most young men ever really want to look, even when they are lawyers. They're all still there, part of the congregation of smokers on the sidewalk out in front. Sera is half leaning against the brick, half leaning against the other blonde. Who would be slightly taller than Sera if Sera were not wearing Insane Shoes. But she is Sera and wearing Insane Shoes is one of her many things, so Sera sort of towers, modelesque over her new friend, head tucked aslant as she forges through a very drunken story punctuated by very drunken gestures of a very drunken index finger and this intimate drunken half-smile curving her mouth as she bends her head toward the other woman.Serafíne is wearing a very very sweet very very white sundress. It is quite short, naturally, sleeveless with a scooped neckline and tiers or even fucking flounces of eyelet and lace. It would be lovely and flattering and appropriate for a garden party or a christening if someone were to add another, say, five inches of skirt to the bottom hem, except that the fabric is white and thin and therefore fairly transparent and Sera has worn her rather transparent white sundress over black lingerie that you can maybe sort of ignore when she's in the shadows on the sidewalk but cannot help but see when there's any light source anywhere close to her, with a black leather wristlet covered in spikes and a twist of is-that-bicycle-chain? as a choker / lariet and garters and fishnets and heavy black ankle boots with two-inch platforms + silver-wrapped three-inch heels. Which, taken all together, make her a rather unsteady five feet ten inches tall.

The straps of the sundress are tied in bows on her shoulders but she has untied the left one or it has come mostly undone because she was hot earlier and was going to slide the bodice down to her waist and just wear her bra as a top and the dress as a skirt. Never got that far because of Reasons that have to do with drinks or dancing or distractions or all of the above but it makes her look a little bit more undone.

People look at Hawksley.

Sera does too. Never quite connecting him with the car, precisely, because it doesn't occur to her that he would drive, but she can feel him speed past and she imagines that he was flying and had to turn that corner to find somewhere to land. That is quite literally what she believes has happened and as soon as he is crossing the street she's looking up from her conversation still attentive at her new friend(s? the lawyer-looking dude is the designated driver and is tired and has to present a case evaluation to one of the senior partners in the morning and doesn't know why he came out tonight and and also there's a strange drunk girl hitting on his girlfriend and okay, stopping to see if she was alright was the right thing to do -

- hey, look at that fucking car.)

Soon as he's gained the sidewalk she's opening her arms in a great sweep in expectation of a hug and somewhere in here she's introducing him to Helen and Doug and there's a point where she says, to Helen and Doug, This is - and arrests herself, her head weavering a bit because the name she wants to use in her head and on her tongue is not -

- they are going to have to come up with a mnemonic for her for his Sleeper-name. Tonight he has to insert himself for a proper introduction as Davie because Sera just looks a bit hooked by the whole thing.

Somewhere in there: a point where she meets his startling, avian gaze. There is something aware about her own, no matter how glassy and unfocused, no matter how sloppily she moves, that tells him:she remembers why he came.Doesn't know the name of the bar or perhaps even the city right now. Cannot remember a single one of the stars overhead. Does not know the street or whom she came with or how to operate her fucking iPhone. Does not remember (thank god) the four hits of acid tucked into the lining of her little black clutch but she knows, oh she knows, why he came.

Hawksley

People look at Hawksley the way they stare out the window on a sunny day, wishing to play outside. Or the way they crawl into patches of sunlight and curl up to nap like kittens. Or the way they watch the sun filtering down through rainclouds, like not even the storm can stop the light. The storm can't; the storm would not exist, in fact, without the sun's warmth. Of course people look at the man who is young and handsome and rich and drives like a freak. Of course people look at him when he walks, purposeful and direct, because in their varying shades of drunk and stoned he looks like a bird-headed man or like he should have wings or like he's an apparition from the other side of the world where it's still day, and they can't see the sunbeam on him but they can see the brightness of his eyes and smile and hair the way they shouldn't be able to at night.

He is going to the other person on this street who draws any and all attention back to her. He is going to her the way people inevitably go to her, drawn in by the gravity of her ravenous emptiness or the promise of new, unknown, terrifying creation. He is going to her because she's why he came but even people who don't know that would guess that if he's going that direction, he must be going towards that woman. Some of them are afraid to approach her, and perhaps rightly so. But they are all, every man and woman and hipster and tramp and lawyer and girlfriend,

drawn to her.

She looks at him and thinks he flew here. His wings are probably golden-brown, just a few shades brighter than his car, actually, and maybe he is wearing a torque of gold, set with lapis, turquoise, carnelian, and he is probably not wearing anything above the waist or below the knees because --

because,

because.

Hawksley is standing in front of her, a tilt to his head, and her arms are opening like she is throwing open doors to a palace. In spite of himself, Hawksley -- who is not wearing a linen sarong or a torque of any kind but a pair of madras shorts and a heathered green t-shirt -- laughs at the sight of her, at her presence, at her dress and her attempts to greet and introduce at once. He wraps his arms, summer-warm and cedar-strong, around her waist and hugs her the way people hug when they have known each other far longer than four or five meetings. His face goes to the side of her neck and he inhales deep, gives her a squeeze, then loosens his arms but does not quite let her go completely.

His head turns on Helen and Doug in a way that makes them think for a moment that they're about to be hunted like mice, but she's struggling to find the name of this young man who just hugged her and he smiles. "Davie," he says, one arm around Sera's waist, the other held out for shaking. Firm grip, solid shake, lots of eye contact, and so Doug thinks they must work in similar fields or something but what Doug thinks doesn't matter.

Normally he would ask them where they're drinking or where they're going and if they want a round on him as thanks for keeping an eye on his friend. Tonight doesn't feel very normal, though. He does flick them minicards, asks them to let him know next time they're out, he'll come buy them a round. "And cabs," he smirks to Doug, who is sober as a bishop at the moment. Because he's Davie, because he wants to know everyone, because he genuinely does want to thank them for not just leaving Sera on her ass on the sidewalk outside the fucking Hi-Dive in the middle of the fucking night when she's too drunk to work her iPhone. Or too stunned. Or too Everything to do Anything.

Which he gets. And does not fault her for. Hell: maybe he fucking admires it.

Time slips. Hawksley is, if Sera doesn't fight him, walking with her across the parking lot, his arm around her waist and possibly with her arm around him, too, depending on how affectionate-slash-wobbly-slash-whatever she is. Towards another parking lot, and his car.

He doesn't bother her with questions just yet. Truthfully, he's rather distracted by her body alongside his body, not in a befuddled or overwhelmed way, just in a way that makes him not want to interrupt his experience of that sensation by asking her in parking lot why the name Chastity freaks her out. Other than the obvious, which is like: seriously, are you asking for your daughter to end up bucking that name like a horse bucks a saddle? Is that what you were doing when you picked that name out? It's a freakish thing to name a defenseless child, he thinks, but

that probably is not why she stopped being able to talk when he asked her about it. And he doesn't think it's the alcohol-plus-whatever, either.

A press of a button and the car says hello with a pair of beeps and a flash of lights. Hawksley, WASPy Oxford man that he is, opens the passenger door for Sera. Because of course he does. He even hands her down into the seat if she lets him, though he stops short of telling her to watch her head. He does not stop short of telling her: "I put a bag there," and so there is: a bag, "in case you need to throw up."

So practical you are, Hawksley old sport.

Serafíne

Sera wants Helen's number in her phone but cannot remember where she put it (in her clutch) or how to get it (the number) in there (the phone) and all this in five minutes to drive and five minutes to descend from his eyrie to the goddamned streets in the middle of the night and park his chariot in the lot across the street. Where there was no room until he found it. Until he made it. Until he cheated.

That's okay. Maybe she'll see them out again. Maybe they'll call Davie for that drink he promised. Maybe they'll come to one of her shows.

Listen: she has detangled herself from Helen and Doug and wrapped herself back up again in Davie. She hugs him, eyes closed, her cheek against his shoulder, his nose against her neck. And her hair is damp and she smells like sweat alcohol and limes and the bright, sweet burn of her clove cigarettes a little bit like the blonde Moroccan hashish she was smoking with who-was-it at where-were-they all before-this.

Sera wants to hug Helen too but by now her arm is around Hawksley like it belongs there and perhaps right now it does.

And her arm stays around him, wormed beneath his and around his back, her cheek resting on the point of his shoulder like a fulcrum, her eyes more or less fucking closed, allowing him to steer and guide and navigate and double check traffic and warn her about the storm sewer with his body if nothing else. She does not even think about fighting him, because he's close and warm and baking her with his heat, which is constant and radiant and warm enough that even the hole in her chest where her sternum used to be feels like it just might heal, like it always does, every fucking time she does this to herself.

The only time Sera fights Hawksley is when he tries to hand her into the Porsche and then she's all spreading shoulders and opening arms and assertive tension: waking up. Waking with a sort of drunken start that has her eyes open and drifting over the lines of the sports car like she's never seen a thing like that before, like she's puzzled by its purpose and its presence and its nature and also: fascinated by the way the light runs over and through the paint, the way it gleams. Like it is a New Thing in the world, and it makes her smile and her smile is raw and her smile is wry and is hooked and is built of a certain wonder for and at him, like she's just realizing or remembering or processing he is:

"Filthy fucking rich," this laugh that is little more than a twitch of her shoulders a dark haloing glance over her shoulder at him, "aren't you?" Such affection there, so unbidden, in the gleam of her eyes and such wry fucking - what? Something toothy

Then she slings herself into the passenger's seat and tucks her head back until her skull contacts the headrest and she has the bag in her lap, which was wise, Hawskley old sport, if the deliberate and audible cadence of her breathing is any indication.

He has to reach across her to fasten her seatbelt, but he has long arms, right? That fucking wingspan and the movement of his hand from shoulder to opposite hip pulls her a bit more upright. Her attention drifting over the dashboard in a motion reminiscent of the movement of a buoy on the surface of the ocean.

"She was looking for me." In the end, he doesn't have to ask her. The admission comes after he has fastened her seatbelt, and whether or not he fastens his own. After he has put the car into gear and peeled out of the parking lot, but before they have gone too far down the road. And Sera isn't looking at him, isn't looking at their reflections in the windshield, but she doesn't have her eyes closed, either. Her head is turned away from him, toward the dark street rushing past.

"That fucking name. I'm the one who didn't remember her."

Hawksley

Though Hawksley is not entirely surprised that Sera opens her arms to hug him, he is a little startled to find the way she hugs him, wrapping herself around him and inside of him the way he wouldn't expect someone to embrace him very often, very easily, or in public. He does not stop her, or seem taken aback, even if he is. He folds his arms around her waist and pulls her closer, tighter, til those insane heels of hers are lifting a half-inch, til his lungs are burning from the smell of her.

He sets her back down, and they walk, and she keeps her arm around his waist just as he keeps his arm around -- well, her ribs or thereabouts, because he wants to catch her if she stumbles. She walks madly, drunkenly, yet with great practice in those shoes, though, and he does not have to keep her from hitting pavement tonight. Yet.

It takes time for him to notice that her eyes are closed, and his steps slow for a second as the realization stabs through him. Hawksley takes a breath, as though to speak, but doesn't. He lets it go, instead, and steers her to the car.

There, he hangs onto her with one arm to his side as he opens the door. He turns his body to bring her to that door and that's when she starts to come alive, which makes him blink and hang back a bit. He keeps his hand on her side, juuust in case, but doesn't push her or finagle her. That startled waking-up may be familiar to him, and maybe he doesn't want her to turn on him and pull a knife out of nowhere or maybe he just doesn't want her to throw up all over the interior.

Of course he doesn't: there's a bag.

Filthy fucking rich makes him smirk to the side as she's descending into the vehicle, as he's telling her about the bag. Hawksley doesn't answer right away. He closes the door and circles the car and gets in on his own side. "In a manner of speaking," is all he says, but by then she may have forgotten she said anything about how fucking wealthy he is. His family is. Whatever. Where he comes from, you are your family. Your family is you. That name will guide you, protect you, dominate you, haunt you.

No wonder he has a new one.

It takes him a bit to realize she's not putting on her own seatbelt, so he rolls his eyes and reaches over, pulls it across her body and buckles her in because he's reasonably sure that the amount of magic it would take to keep her from flying through the windshield would be --

possible. Would be within his power. If he arrested the laws of physics, grabbed them in midair and said no with that voice that made Kelsey listen and made Sera remember herself, he would not be working outside of his scope. He's not even worried about the obviousness of it, the strangeness of it, for people survive incredible wrecks and walk away without a scratch, and this would be no different. People would find a way to explain it to themselves so they could sleep at night.

It's just that for one thing, he knows he'd tap into his will to the point of burning it out if he had to.

For another thing, she would definitely throw up.

They are buckled in. The car comes alive with the turn of his key, a flash of his wrist, and it growls and stretches and purrs under them like a goddamn tiger waking from a short nap. The seats are a deep grey leather rims around cushions in a houndstooth pattern. Accents of silver are everywhere; the instruments have white pointers, green increment markers. 911 50 is on the headrests. The pale blue glow of the stereo's LCD is scrolling the name of the artist [ATLAS GENIUS], the name of the song [TROJANS], but the speakers are turned up enough to hear it clearly enough and realize it isn't about condoms. Hawksley turns it down just a couple of notches, because he still isn't asking her questions, and he doesn't want the bass to give her a headache but he doesn't want silence, either.

Sera breaks it, anyway, and he glances at her as he's pulling out of the parking lot he found in a place where there are so few and they are always packed. Her very first words make his eyes sharpen, but of course he doesn't interrupt. A good thing, too: her next words pull a few things together that were disparate, facing away from one another, refusing to acknowledge their connection. He looks from her to the road ahead, because he needs to, and he doesn't drive as fast this time. The moon roof is open, and fresh night are streams in, not as loud or windy as driving a convertible, but fresh. Natural. Something real.

Hawksley doesn't need to have a double-take moment. Wait, you're Chastity? Sera has seen him at Red Rocks and City Park and his hotel room and he's always got a bit of bounce to his step, a bit of mania, bounding from one person to another, one thought to another, and perhaps it is partly just who he is, but it's also partly an affectation. This is the second time they've been alone with each other. This is the second time she's seen him quiet, still inside, steady, somewhere between reverent and commanding, and he takes everything in stride.

He does say this: "No wonder that name tasted familiar," which is not a question and perhaps not even entirely intended to be said aloud but is said aloud and with some fondness, some wryness, some wonder. It is a musing, as is this: "I wonder why she was looking for you," also not a question.

That fucking name. A false name, a shadow name, a forgotten name, it doesn't matter. It isn't the name she's given him, and he meant what he said to her in Arabic, even if she doesn't know what he said to her Arabic. That isn't the name she gave him, and to Hawksley, that means it either is not her name, or it is a name so secret, so sacrosanct, that he will not even utter it aloud again without her permission. Without her request.

Because he meant what he said to her in Arabic. Fuck his life.

Her chaffeur for the night spares a glance for her. "I won't tell anyone," he says quietly. His eyes go directly ahead again. Driving. Right.

Serafíne

In a manner of speaking.

By the time he has circled the Porsche, the fucking Porsche 911, she has indeed forgotten entirely her comment about his evident wealth. Sera smiles at him anyway, a drunken smile that has her gaze snagging on the light in his hair, the way his hands grip the wheel and she remembers his hands, and she remembers his hands on her. Watches him a little bit backwards and a little bit forwards because when she's this fucked up time is always a bit more friable, a bit more elastic even before her will enters the equation. Watches the way he opens the door and folds himself into the low-slung seat with a half-dozen shadows of his frame crawling in a half-dozen directions over the houndstooth cushions and the deep gray leather, cast by the streetlights, the business signs, the security lighting, the ambient glow of downtown, and the Porsche's own interior lighting. And she thinks:

how myriad. And she likes the word.

She'd like to share it with him, but she doesn't know why.

And then she forgets to say it, after all.

Flashes. The Porsche comes alive beneath and around them and it makes her head drift and she wonders if they are going to fly. She flies sometimes but never literally, but she dreamed once of a flying woman wrapped in darkness and it was a future dream, of falling, of a girl falling through darkness, caught up in an even darker web, and then they changed it, and it never came to pass.

Oh and there are lights there are lights there are lights, look. Lights. Sera stretches out her hands toward the glowing blue of the LCD display like she means to warm herself at the fire, like she can feel some resonant glow behind them and maybe she can, because the beneath lights a beat, music, turned lower so it will not make her head pound, but not so low she cannot feel it in her half-empty chest cavity, in her blood and bone marrow, at the root of her tongue. Had she remembered the acid in her clutch earlier in the evening, had she taken it tonight, her attention would stay on the dash rather longer, as glowing instrument dials turned into comets, planets, galaxies spun out by farflung arms of other spinning -

- christ, she doesn't have names for the things she feels sometimes, that fill her up and open her out. But she is not tripping and has not done so in quite some time and thinks (when she is sober, when she is inclined to think, neither of which occur often) that it is becoming a hangup. But maybe she'll do it soon with him close and he can read his fucking books and stare at his fucking candles and she'll become one with the ever-narrowing brocade pattern of the fucking upholstery on the fucking stool on the fucking vanity and nothing will go wrong because his resonance is so baking and so bright that the wrongness piled on the wrongness of that past few months will not intrude.

The moon roof is open. She lifts her face to the stream of air and basks, then her attention falls to the passenger's window and there's the city. Streets all dark but glowing the way they do, full of the sleeping promise of places you've never been.

No wonder that name tasted familiar.

- has her eyes back on him. Has her, of all things, laughing. Though her laughter is nearly silent, just an open mouth and glassy eyes lifted through the moonroof toward the sky and three or four audible little breaths that she draws back into her body in the interstitial moments after she breathes them out.

Her eyes are on his profile now, though she cannot quite bring him into focus even though the street beyond him does not rush by now the way it did when he drove out here. Because if he drove like that, she'd puke. So he is part of the impressionistic rush of the world-beyond and she doesn't mind. "I think she just recognized me." It's not an answer to his question because he did not ask her a question. It is wry, though. A little bit pained and a little bit painful and admitted with a drunken little sigh as her shifting gaze tracks away. "Thought I could help find the guy who fucked her over. Maybe I knew him, too." So: just this. Someone you knew once, who wanted your help Sera, finding someone else you knew once. And all this fucking mess over something so goddamned simple.

Serafíne does not know what he said to her in Arabic.

Serafíne does not know that he spoke to her in Arabic. Could not identify the language in a lineup of languages, all those alien sounds. But when he spares that glance for her, and makes that pledge, I won't tell anyone he finds her looking back at him, looking up to meet his pale eyes.

Her own are dark but shining. And her voice is low in return, is hoarse from alcohol and cigarettes and laughter and shouting to be heard above/below the crawl of an ambient beat, and is shining, too. "Thank you." And, listen: the words mean more than one thing, as most words do.She leans toward him, then, this drunken sway arrested by the strap of the seatbelt, the console between them. Tips her head aslant until her temple comes to rest on his shoulder.Closes her eyes.

Hawksley

Many of the thoughts they share, they do not share. That is: they do not speak them aloud, and never know that they are similar. Like certain words and how they resonate without any explanation, and other words and how they aren't there when you need them but you know what they mean you could make up the definition if you just had a word to wrap around the feeling, or the thing you see, or the things that fill you up. Hawksley understands words, and the Word, and would recite to her poetry about words and the Word and the world if he knew that she thought so fondly of myriad, or if he knew that she has no words for what she sees when she lets the semisynthetic psychedelic melt

her

tongue.

She is not tripping, she does not share. Hawksley is quiet, leaning back in that supple leather and elegant cushioning, driving with one hand on the center console and one hand on the wheel. It's a standard transmission; he refuses to drive an automatic unless someone's life is in danger, or so he is sometimes fond of saying. His eyes flick over as she stretches her hands toward the light and his lips twist in a wry smile. She shares no thoughts because she is not, strictly, thinking. He doesn't ask her to, because he's been drunk off his ass and high as a tower and, essentially: he fucking knows. There was something dry and distant in her voice even before he came to get her and that is why he came to get her, but she doesn't talk much once they're in the car and he doesn't tell her how hearing that kind of voice in anyone makes him twist into a hard knot inside. Turns him cold.

That knot is relaxed and that chill is gone now, though. It was gone when he wrapped his arms around her and felt her solid and real and warm and drunk and Sera, gone when she hugged him back. So it's all right now. As it was always going to be.

She laughs. He smiles, actually cracking his lips apart this time, shaking his head. He drives and it should only be a couple of minutes if he drove the way he drove out here, but he doesn't. He drives like a chaffeur, perhaps because it was a chaffeur who taught him to drive in the first place, perhaps because he just really, really does not want her to puke in his car. And he doesn't drive them towards the Four Seasons, not really, but she probably doesn't know that.

This is the second time he has heard traceries of guilt in Sera's voice, but he doesn't offer her platitudinous bullshit this time. He doesn't glance over as she's talking. It doesn't sound like it should be a big deal. Doesn't sound like it should have cracked her open the way it did just to hear the name, but it did. And he promises, and she says thank you, which does get him glancing over ot meet her eyes in return, and that gratitude is enough confirmation to him that he should not dig his nails into that wound, peel the layers back, just to find out what's underneath.

Even if he's curious.

At least not right now.

Hawksley breathes in deep as Sera lets her head loll on his shoulder and closes her eyes. He moves his hand from the center console and over, searches blindly but rather expertly for her hand, and then holds it. Not lacing fingers, palm to palm, but covering the back of her hand with his hand, curling his fingers around her fingers, encompassing.

The car glides through downtown Denver quietly, smoothly, on side streets, past flocks of people in colors both bright and dark and heels as high as Sera's and big hair and tattoos and tight jeans and even some suits. Hawksley drives past the Four Seasons and goes around and around until he gets to a parking lot and slows, and stops, and: they are at Confluence Park, one of several parks along the Platte River, with paths descending right down to the water. No one is rafting or kayaking or inner tubing right now, not at this time of night, but there is still lingering detritus of the people who were here earlier doing all those things: a forgotten bottle of sunblock that hasn't been found yet, a colorful towel that blew off a railing and is stuck on a rock down below, trash cans full of empty soda bottles and water bottles and snack bags and so on.

Hawksley looks at her when the car is motionless, though the stereo is still playing and now it's playing another artist [WALK THE MOON] and another song [I CAN LIFT A CAR] but it's still low. And then it's not playing anything, because he turns it off with a press of a button.

His shoulder disrupted her at least once or twice as he drove, shifting occasionally, but he always resettled it, or tried to, and did not take it personally if she chose to lean against the window instead. But now he looks at her, whether she's on his arm or curled away, and says:

"We can go down by the water," he says. "Or I'll take you home. Or back to my hotel." There's a beat of a pause. "I should have asked where you wanted to go before, sorry. I just kinda drove wherever and ended up here."

Serafíne

Sera has resettled a couple of times. His shoulder, the cool window with the city moving behind it. His shoulder again. The window is lovely; her closely-shorn fringe against the smooth glass, the deep and abiding hum of the sports car such a resonant purr that it feels organic and basic and timeless. His shoulder is better.

This is another thought that she does not share.

That isn't really a thought at all.

But a feeling. Sometime warm on the curl of her tongue.

When the car stops finally, she comes back to consciousness again, another minor eruption into wakefulness. Lifting her head from his shoulder and breathing in and breathing him in and the tick of the engine and the muted stereo and then no music at all. The city dark and quiet and the park quiet and dark and the well-insulated interior of the Porsche screens out most of the sounds except - the open moonroof. The night comes through in so many secret ways.

He's apologizing and she's still taking in the setting with that drunken survey and she hasn't thrown up yet but she's breathing in and out and steady through her nose rather than her mouth, as if she still just might. And she's a Seer and she does not accept his apology and because she does not want it.

"Hawksley," a correction, an interruption, gentle enough that she would reach for his mouth if she could do so the way he reached for her hand: blindly but with such precision, with such awareness of the space around him. Would reach for his mouth and lay a finger across his lips. "Shhhh." Her voice and his name will have to serve instead. "If I wanted to go someplace other than where you were taking me," her attention drifts back to him, imperfect, unsteady, aware. "I would've let you know."

And she dips her forehead back toward him. Kisses him at the apex of his deltoid, breath warm through his heathered green t-shirt. It's a gentle kiss, given while her gaze drops the line of his chest to his legs, all Picasso from angles and alteration of consciousness. Oh, he's wearing fucking Madras shorts, she sees. Nearly says it, does say it, really, and though the words are beneath her breath and are given no voice whatsoever, perhaps he can feel them against his skin.

"Let's go down to the water," which feels right. "Then you can take me home."

Which feels right, too.

He has to undo her seatbelt for her. That's how drunk she is. She cannot depress a button or figure out this cross-body tangle of webbing that - that - that does something she is not precisely equipped to understand or appreciate right now. Holds her in, holds her back, keeps her safe. He has to open her door too but she gets more-or-less to her feet more-or-less on her own and the more-or-less attaches herself to him again, sinks into him when he is situated, when the passenger's door is closed and the Porsche has chirruped its obedient awareness that it is to remain in place and quiescent until he comes for it again.

"It sounds like a bird," and pieces of her skin are stitching themselves back together. Something still soft but hardening-into-bone is beginning to fill in the hole where the shield for her heart should go, and on some level she knows-without-knowing why he came,

why he came for her,

why he came for her, tonight, and what that says about him. Maybe even where it comes from.

So they walk, down toward the water, and she's settled against him, and her eyes aren't closed this time, but they are not particularly open, and even open, she is seeing in that disjointed and disconnected way he remembers himself because: he has been drunk off his ass. He has been high as a fucking zeppelin, and knows how the world swims into focus, and then out of it, and then back in.

"I was surprised to see the car. I thought you flew." This she tells him sometime later. Minutes probably, but, "All: swoop."

Hawksley

[BREAK FOR ROLL WITNESSING YEEHAW]

Hawksley

[Scrying. Correspondence 2 + Prime 1 + Matter 1 (what the hell)Difficulty: 2 + 3 (coincidental) - 1 (taking time) -1 (sympathetic magic) = 3]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (8, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

(stamped!)

Hawksley

[Scrying. Correspondence 2 + Prime 1 + Matter 1 (what the hell)Difficulty: 2 + 3 (coincidental) - 1 (taking time) -1 (sympathetic magic) +1 (extending) -1 (quint) = 3]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (5, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

Serafíne

(stamped!)

Hawksley

[Scrying. Correspondence 2 + Prime 1 + Matter 1 (what the hell)Difficulty: 2 + 3 (coincidental) - 1 (taking time) -1 (sympathetic magic) +1 (still extending) -1 (more quint) = 3]

Hawksley

[HELPS IF YOU ADD DICE, KAI]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (1, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

(WITNESSED)

Hawksley

The sound of his name arrests him. No.

The sound of her voice and the shape of his name arrest him. Hawksley silences as quickly as if she did cover his mouth, though his expression is a curious one, momentarily more like a sparrow or a robin investigating the garden after a thick rain. Then again, had she touched his mouth he might have bitten at her, snapped his teeth as quickly and sharply as he did at Dee earlier this month, making her blush and making him think of mice scurrying away from shadows of wings, shadows of talons. It wouldn't have been a nasty, vengeful bite, more like an autonomous reaction. Then, he might have also taken her finger in his mouth.

He does nothing of the sort, because she says his name and says Shhhh and there is something about the way he instantly reacts to that which might have told her, if she hadn't already figured it out, which Tradition took him in and taught him their ways. It is his Craft name that she uses to shush him, and she is not a Hermetic but she is still one who possesses the Craft, and

there are other reasons, of course, why he attends so obediently to that.

"I know you w--" he is starting to say, when he gathers his wits a moment later, but she leans over and kisses his shoulder. He huffs a small laugh, head turned to watch her, eyes glinting in her peripheral vision. As on the street, even darkness and shadow can't entirely encompass him; even here the light finds a way to touch him, reflect off of him. He inhales the smell of her hair again, and she mutters something about his shorts, and it really isn't that important but it makes him smile just that she's muttering, as though this is terribly delightful.

Down to the water. Then he'll take her home.

"All right," Hawksley says.

He has to tell her a moment later to sit up because she's just leaning on his shoulder, and he starts to unbuckle and get out of the car but her limbs are all confused and she's swearing and muttering other things, so Hawksley reaches over and unclips her. He grabs the strap so it doesn't immediately recede, because he's thinking she might lurch forward or the buckle itself might catch her on her jaw or something and yes, he keeps thinking about her vomiting in his car and ways to avoid that but the simple and plain truth that Hawksley of all people cannot hide is this:

he cares for her, simply and instantly and uncomplicatedly. And he -- who senses in her the potential for tapping into the strength and power to be found in pain as well as joy, and not solely because she is a Cultist -- would rather not see her injured or bruised. At least when it comes to no purpose. At least when it is not through her own will somehow. So he grabs the strap and eases it back away from her instead, helping her get her other arm out so it doesn't get trapped betwixt seat and strap. He hopes she can figure out how to get the door open, but if not, he's on the other side of the car in short order anyway.

The car that chirps goodbye to them when they walk away. Hawksley smooths his arm around her waist yet again, and before they start to walk anywhere, he looks down at her shoes as they stand on the pavilion. He's about to say something when she tells him that 'it' sounds like a bird. His eyes come up, quick as you like, then go from her to the car to her again. He laughs. "I suppose it might," if you were blitzed off your ass. "You should take those off," he says, gesturing at her heels. "They'll be ruined down there, and they're quite pretty."

Not: they look expensive. Not even: you'll break your fucking neck. Because this is Hawksley. And he would buy her new ones if she couldn't and he would catch her before gravity could do anything with her, but really, let's be honest because he is also transparent: he doesn't want her to trip and break her ankle or her neck. And he thinks, somewhere swimming around any other concern, that going down into the sand and water and rocks is a barefoot sort of thing, isn't it? That's when she might notice he left his own shoes back in the car. Because it's a barefoot sort of thing.

Whether she takes them off or not, he starts to walk with her. They walk down to the water, which is freezing even this time of year, but it's shadowed down there, and the bridge nearby is empty and the water is empty and somehow they are low enough that they can't even see his car. It feels very far away from the city, which is perhaps why he came here. Why he found it in the first place.

Hawksley tips his head toward her even as they're still walking, nuzzling her out of nowhere, rubbing his brow and his nose against her temple, kissing her fringe above her ear, like he just rediscovered her presence. She tells him sometime after this that she thought he flew, and he smiles but he doesn't laugh.

"Whenever I'm on a long empty stretch of road," he says, though he wasn't tonight, "I drive as fast as I can and keep thinking this time, this time I'm going to lift off. Sometimes I do. I wake up, after. But I've been dreaming of flying since I was a baby."

There is a patch of sand. "Here," he says, a touch quieter: "let's sit here." Her first. Because, and he doesn't conceal this, either: he wants to sit behind her. He wants to sit with her as he would if they were in a bath, his legs framing her, her back to his chest. Yes. Like that.

Serafíne

Serafíne sighs deeply and thoroughly when he finally manages the complicated maneuvering necessary to extract one drunk and stoned Cultist from one Porsche. The night air on her face is cool and bright enough that it helps her clear her senses, her throat of the bile that wants to creep up every time she closes her eyes without falling asleep. When the world starts to spin, as it always does, on more than one axis, which it sometimes might.

"My feet hurt," wry, when they are standing on the platform and she has the posture of a different sort of bird than a raptor. Something long-legged and long-jointed, like a heron or a flamingo, all awkward on its spindly limbs. Serafíne would never make such an admission sober but it is nighttime and she's been in them for hours and it is true and it is something she has just remembered (again) as he tells her that she'll ruin her heels down on the sand amidst the rocks where they were meant to be barefoot. My feet hurt with this swimming glance down at them and a look of mild surprise as if the heels were alien things that had somehow showed up on her feet without her awareness or acknowledgment.

Half-laced, half-zipped, the things, and it requires a certain bit of complicated maneuvering, probably a lightly assisted sit-down on one of the benches in the park for Sera to remember how to get them undone and off her feet, but she does take them off. Would have done so in the car except that she was distracted by the movement of his variant shadows across her body. His hand easing the metal buckle past her jaw.

She smiles and curls into him when he nuzzles her fringe, this blind seeking that feels a little bit disjointed, like she was sleeping during the quiet walk, between one sensation and another, until he woke her again with the warmth of his breath above the curve of her ear.

Listens to his story about flying; about dreaming about flying and turns to look at him with that drifting and drunken attention that is not and cannot be sharp, but feels so very quick when her eyes managed to snap onto his profile, when her mind tunes out the background noise.

He picks a spot and she holds firmly onto his hands and lowers herself to the sand to sit, then leans back against him as he sits behind her, turning her head to the right and drawing his arms around her torso. The suggestion of her profile, the frame of his shoulder. The chill drifting off the water and the warmth of his chest against her spine which is - oh,

familiar.

"I'll take you to the chantry soon. S'out there, kinda far. You can show me how you drive like that on the way." Here her laughter is more bodily than physical. Her can feel it in her shoulders, her upper spine, humming through her lungs, the promise of it. "I won't have any - well, I won't have too much to drink before we go."

So he doesn't have to worry about her throwing up in his car.

Then her eyes close and her head lolls a bit against his chest and this time when she walks half-way up she tells him.

"You're gonna fly soon." With such surety, with such quiet confidence, that maybe she Saw it when she closed her eyes. "I know you will."

Hawksley

Hawksley rather patiently holds her up while she gets herself out of the heels. She doesn't ask him for help, so he doesn't give it, but he is the one who notices the bench and gets them over there, gets her sitting down, while she takes them off. And if she likes, he'll even carry the stupid things.

Down to the water.

Water is not Hawksley's element at all. Fire and air: these are the things he is made of, the things he feels like when one closes their eyes and opens their truer senses. He feels like east and south, like far-away places where they speak Arabic and fight over false gods and gold, which they do anywhere regardless of what language is spoken, which they have done since time immemorial. They being human. They being Asleep,

though the Awakened fight wars over languages, gold, and god, too.

He is comfortable by the water, though. He had swimming lessons, he swam at the club from the age when he was yelling at his mother to watch him until the age that he didn't even want to be out there if his parents were around. Sometimes he is not a soaring golden god but he is just a guy who coerced Kelsey back to the Four Seasons with the promise of fluffy robes, who wears basketball shorts, who rents a kayak because why the fuck not and gets high at Red Rocks because everyone does and has minicards to hand to people he'd like to hang out with again, which is just about everyone.

So: they are by the water, and he thinks of bracing his arms behind them while Sera leans against his chest, but his mind changes almost instantly as soon as she does lean against his chest. He sighs, more fully and more deeply than he thought he would, and makes the load-bearing muslces of his back do the work while he sits up, enfolding her in his arms instead. For a moment, he just... encompasses her like that, his right hand cupping her left elbow, his left hand curling around her bicep, and he knows better than to squeeze her but he holds her a moment, and then he

loosens up, relaxes, but keeps his arms around her, as though eventually the night air is going to get to her bare arms and she'll feel a chill and he never feels cold, not if he saw the sun that day.

Out of nowhere, she tells him there's a chantry, and he could smack her. Her and Sid and Shoshannah and all of them, every last one, for not mentioning it sooner. "Well, fuck," he laughs, shaking his head. He kisses her temple instead of smacking her. "Jesus. You guys suck at welcome wagoning." Which is fond. He will remember, even if she blacks most of this night out, that she promised to show him the chantry. Oh by god, he will remember.

They still. They go quiet. He lets his eyes close and bows his head to rest beside hers, like two birds, or maybe just one bird. If she dozes, he lets her. He's really... not looking for anything. He was earlier, when he called, but he's found it. Now he's in her presence, and as before, that seems to settle him, satisfy him, whether they speak or not. Whether they do anything but listen to the water.

But she speaks, and he knows what she is. He smiles. "I hope so," he whispers, and this is simply another moment when he cannot lie, he cannot bear to lie or is so bad at it that he doesn't even attempt it. The ache in the words is real. The longing is real. It's there: he does not care what the sleepers think, he does not care if the universe backhands him into next week. He just was not meant to tread on the earth for all of his days and never rise above it.

Hawksley's hand strokes her arm. "David is my given name," he tells her quietly, after a while. "But I was always 'Davie' at home. For a while at Salisbury I tried to go by David, just to feel grown up, but our teachers called me that. So it became a thing: my friends called me Davie, my teachers called me David."

There's a brief pause. "My mother called me Davie, and my father called me David. And Collins called me Master David, which is what you call little boys, until the day I decided to go to boarding school, and then he started calling me Mister Livingston." A wry curl to his mouth. "Now he just calls me 'Sir', pretty much. If he's not introducing me."

That is as much of his name as he gives her. Truth be told, it's already too much to know just not his names but what they mean to him, what he has retained of them. But he does it. And his hand strokes her arm, warm and hypnotic, while he listens to the water and thinks of

kissing her,

which is what he does then.

Hawksley turns his head and the bridge of his nose touches her jaw, his lips brush her chin, capture her lower lip. He has to lean his head around her but it's no trouble, it's not hard to shift her slightly to his shoulder, lean around her, kiss her mouth like that,

slowly. Softly.

Hawksley

[Scrying. Correspondence 2 + Prime 1 + Matter 1 (what the hell)

Difficulty: 2 + 3 (coincidental) - 1 (taking time) -1 (sympathetic magic) +1 (still extending) -1 (more quint) = 3]

Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (2, 8) ( success x 2 ) [WP]

Serafíne

(BELATED STAMP!)

Hawksley

[balete that! nm! i can math!]

Serafíne

"We just got it." Sera inhales with the words, leans her temple into his mouth as he kisses her rather than smacking her for sucking at welcome wagoning. Which makes her grin a faint little grin he can maybe feel as a brief flash of teeth more than anything else. As if this were explanation enough. There was a funeral there, and she doesn't not tell him this, but yawns softly, around and through the words, head lolling down from the press of his mouth a half-second later. "I don't think Sid even knows where it is. Maybe she does now but when I asked her she told me she didn't want to go there.

"Something happened to her. I don't know what."

She does doze, just a little bit. Spottily, so that the night comes into focus for her and then recedes, retracts itself back to its original dimensions when she wakes.

Serafíne offers him her - prophecy, if that's what it is - and the longing in his voice, the ache embedded in a handful of words I hope so brings her dark eyes around until she has his profile in her peripheral vision, his eyes in her sight. Her own, shining, unfocused, dreaming and always, always, always, more than a little bit hungry.

"I know it's no real consolation yet," she tells him then, over her shoulder, into his arm or his cheek or his jaw. " - but you already are."

Which he knows and she knows but she says it with such reverence and conviction and such a deep and bruised sort of voice that he might begin to imagine that this is another one of those dreams, and that after time has passed and he's driving her home he'll climb in the car and put it into gear and open the throttle and he'll take off -

- into the sky. And this time it'll last for fucking ever.

Her breath catches in her throat when he begins to tell her his name. His name and his names and what they mean to him. Does not understand his tradition and the power these names confer but she can feel some of that beneath the current of his voice and she nods into him, just into him. Forehead tucked toward the line of his jaw or the curve of his shoulder, sinking more deeply into his embrace if possible.

"Abigail," she non-sequitors back. With a quiet, sour little sigh. "Chastity Abigail Francesca Fuller." Because she's drunk, because ripping off a scab yourself hurts less than letting the strangeness of the universe wound you. Because she knows he offered her something and she wants to offer something so exquisitely simple back: her name. "But mostly, Seraíne."

Already half-turned toward him when he reaches for her like that, oh, she lifts her mouth toward his and closes her eyes and breathes him in. Even if tonight he smells like nothing so much as candlewax and old leather and dusty pages. Her mouth still tastes sweet and spicy from her clove cigarettes, and sour from all the booze she has consumed this long evening. Turns her own shoulder into his chest, her body into his as naturally and as easily as if he were the sun.

Hawksley

Something happened to her. I don't know what.

His mouth is still against her temple when she says that, and he feels a sharp stab of ache for Sid, who reminds him of something or someone and he doesn't know what or who. It's driving him mad. He sighs, whispers: "That one seems familiar in an all-too-corporeal way,"

which is to say: not familiar the way that Sera is familiar, the way that perhaps even Pan is familiar, but the way that Shoshannah was familiar because he has fucking met her before. In this life. It rakes at his brain, when he thinks of that bright red hair against that porcelain-pale cheek, that retreating gaze that seems to jar him, bother him, though not offend him.

"It's driving me mad," he adds in a sigh, because it is.

But: they doze. He doesn't want to talk about finding Sid ridiculously familiar, as though she is a face he's seen in dream upon dream upon dream, never in the forefront, always in the background. He pushes it to the side, to ponder along with elements of particle physics and ancient Greek poetry and whatever else he fills his mind with when he's not filling his heart with new friends and new lovers and new sights. He will ponder it later, muse over it and meditate on it as he has, until he finds her in his memory. It will take time; he is not even an apprentice of the art of Mind.

Oh, and that is true: they doze. Hawksley forgets what time it is and what day it is because he is studying intensively, always. He never has to work, he goes out when he wants to go out, he loses himself in the Work and the Word. Right now, he feels like dozing with Sera on a surprisingly sandy little beach beside a river northwest of downtown. With her in her white sundress and spiky jewelry and tattoos and black lingerie that he has thought of unhooking, of drawing off of her, of the red marks it would leave in her skin that he would kiss until the blood flowed naturally through that flesh again.

None of which makes him do anything but doze with her on that tiny beach, stroking her bicep mindlessly.

It isn't any consolation. Not for someone who has been needing to fly since he was born, for the sake of all gods and none. Being able to view distant parts of the world as though he has risen above the limits of vision to a place called Vision is well and good, but he is determined that one day he will have wings. One day he will find himself. Be himself.

You already are.

And god, he adores her then. His arms fold around her again, and maybe he didn't know this, maybe he forgets it sometimes because no matter how elevated his psyche or his soul, his body is still painfully mortal and still easily abused by the laws of physics and sleepers alike. He holds her a little closer after she says that, breathing against her and with her and breathing her like she is air and like he is a thing that can breathe air so hot, so vital, so visceral.

Because he is. He already is a being who can breathe that in, and hold it, and not be destroyed.

There is power in a name. A name given to Dee and Rick and all the people he invites to spend time with him. A name given to Sera and even Dan, a name he gives her that is more than the name given to Dan or Dee or Rick or his friends or, really, anyone in Denver so far. Because something in her is the same as something in him. He doesn't know what yet. He doesn't know how yet. But he recognizes it, and stays with it, and trusts it. He knows he has a choice to deny it, but

he has met those Hermetics. He threw their knowledge in their faces for how easily they put shackles on their own souls.

Abigail. God, he aches. He hears her say her name and her other name and her other names and he wants to kiss her so badly that his mouth is halfway on hers by the time Fuller leaves her lips. He fucking recognizes the last name, too, because of course he fucking does, the Fullers of the Hamptons, he probably grew the fuck up not too far from where her fucking parents lived,

but she was sent to Ireland and he went to Connecticut and ne'er the twain shall meet until they are both unrecognizable to the selves they were then. Until, really, it does not matter that her family has heard of and knows of the Livingstons and that poor woman and it does not matter that his family has heard of the Fullers, even if there is little gossip to be had. They make their own, up there. They have little else to do.

Mostly, Serafine.

"Like the fucking angels," he mutters, his arms coming around her, holy holy holy, and one hand falling to her waist, and his mouth seeking to deepen that kiss, name to name, and how they are both ancient, and both -- in their own ways -- a little false,

and a little painfully true.

Serafíne

Sera will retain only the most disjointed, impressionistic memories of this night. Pain like a blow-out fracture, all fragmented and fragmentary, the shards of it mixed with the dimmest sorts of memory. Blood on her hands, blood on her tongue. In the back of her throat, the sensation mixes with bile. Metallic and sour and bitter.

But she will remember that he flew. Even though he does wear his wings yet, even though he has yet to leave the ground with the propulsion and support of nothing more and nothing less than his own Will, he has flown in her mind. In her past and in some future-sight, too. She will remember his Porsche like a chariot as a living them, purring beneath them, and the road unfurling alongside like a dark and vital carpet he was smoothing out just for her, that he was creating out of the place where absence lives and turning back into presence. She will remember the lights of the dash merged with the blur of the city all around.

How is it that these things sometimes seem so fucking transcendent?

She will remember, very distinctly, his hand on the buckle of the seat belt. His knuckles guiding the metal bit past her cheek. She will remember wanting to kiss his fingers, to close her teeth over his knuckles, but not remembering how to move her mouth, and how he kept swimming into focus out of the darkness, again,

and again,

and again.

Sid. That will stay with her. Something about the sigh, something about the whisper. Something about the ache in his voice, the itch of familiarity, the way his mouth moved against her temple, though she will know-not-what, it will make her look at the Orphan more distinct and closely and privately, from some new hidden angle, the next time they are close. And Sera will know even less than Hawksley about what she is seeking, and where and why. Because her familiarity is only this: the echo of his, superimposed on the memory of his pale eyes intent on her jaw.

She will not remember taking off her shoes. She will never remember admitting - with great surprise to find them there - that her fucking shoes sometimes start to hurt her fucking feet. She will not remember what she was drinking last (vodka gimlets) or how many she had (we don't want to know) but she will remember the first curl of smoke in her lungs from the hash.

She will not remember the path down from the promenade to the river's edge. Swaying while he held her, swallowing laughter as he picked there way over the rocks toward the small, sandy beach, swallowing it because she knew, just knew, that too much laughter would make her puke. She will never remember what park they went to, for fuck's sake, or the songs that cycled through his stereo as they drove.

But she will remember this place: below the level of the city, like a hollow, sweet and hidden, with the lights all smeared above, a new and alien sort of sky, and the sound of the river and the cool, damp air and the heat of his arms and the nest he made for her, framing her in with his body, couched in the cradle of his broad chest and thighs, and holding her close.

She will remember sand beneath her thighs, in the diamonds of her fishnets, beneath her garters, between her toes and the broad strength of his hand on her waist and his mouth on her own and her own opening,

opening to his.

She will not remember turning further into his body, her weight shifting from her ass to her left hip, reaching (and she reaches blindly and without focus and imperfectly but still, he is so warm. The night around him is so cool, how can she miss him, even drunk as she is?) for his arm, his chest, his shoulder, his neck, some fucking part of him that she can touch and feel the beating of his heart through his skin. The way she feels the beating heart of the university through her own. She will not really remember how suddenly and how entirely she wants him then, and how she's not sure if she can stand it, because the sudden rush of her desire is so thorough and so consuming and she's still so fucking drunk that the assertion of it almost makes her want to puke.

She will not remember precisely how much she wants to crawl into his skin, into his mouth, behind his eyes and just: stay, for an hour or an age.

But, like the fucking angels, she will never again forget: his name. His names.

All of them, and

all the things they mean.

Hawksley

There are nights when he remembers that an old god's flight around the world is what keeps it spinning, and there are nights that he remembers that the eyes of the god are the sun and moon. Nights when he remembers about the earliest love affair in creation, the one that goes on year after year, sky bowed over earth, leaning down to kiss its face at night, rising again in the morning to soar over head in color and light and wind. And there are nights when he is flying forever, feeling it in his shoulders when he wakes.

There are nights like this, all too terrestrial and immediate, where he smells river water and the city, tastes what a mess Sera is even as he kisses her, and feels a swell of tenderness that is equal to desire, and a swell of grief that is equal to curiosity.

Hawksley draws back from that kiss gradually, only gradually, and only after she is turning into him and toward him, touching him, all but climbing onto him. For that while he is holding her by the sides of her waist, steadying her when she doesn't seem to realize she's toppling, feeling the life in her so intently that it makes everything under his skin vibrate in an attempt to answer her, answer that life, call back to it: I know, I know. He is also holding her back, because she is so very nearly toppling, because she is so blindly seeking him in the dark and the cold, as naturally and as obviously drawn to light and heat as anything that is

so, so alive.

There is a time in between kissing Sera and withdrawing from that kiss when his hands stop trying to steady her. When they come around her back, press up her spine to her hair, holding her closer and slide down over the skirt of her pretty white dress and then under it, just to feel her skin. He spreads his long fingers wide and holds her upper thigh, almost her hip, and finding her warmth makes him shudder, but it isn't long after that when he draws back, breathing in, and he looks at her, and then he rests his brow on her brow. His breathing is elevated, like his heart is, and his hand is in her hair and under her skirt.

It takes a very long, deep breath for him to put one more kiss on her mouth, like a seal, and let his hands retreat slowly, withdrawing like the tide, down her leg, down her back. He opens his eyes when he exhales, looking at her clearer than she could possibly see him right now.

"I'm gonna take you home and dump you on Dan's lap," he says fondly, when his hands both get to her lower back, wrapping his arms around her in a loose hug. "I already have one blacked-out girl to look after, and that's my quota for, like, at least the week."

Serafíne

In those moments when his hands stop steadying and start seeking, go from framing her waist and holding her upright to twisting beneath her hair and crawling up her thigh, Serafíne lists with a sinking slowness to one side, like a cake left out in the rain, melting. She is such a fucking mess and upright is a dream she left behind long ago and how she managed to turn around in his arms is a question better left to rather-drunk sages.

Still, somehow she does and somehow her knees rather than her thighs are in the sand and somehow her arms are loose around his shoulders then, one falling off, and one Sera almost following it, nearly succumbing to the siren song of fucking gravity. After that, she laces her fingers loosely together, and they remain more or less in place as he pulls himself back from the kiss, and leans forward, laying his brow against hers, his hands sliding to the incurve of her lumbar spine.

Sera inhales through her nostrils and lolls forward again, and even steadied by the pressure of his forehead against hers - her head continues to weave. So, they are brow to brow, and then she slips and the bridge of her nose is against his eyebrow and his mouth is on hers like a seal, like a promise, like a lock and she smiles into his mouth though she doesn't know why she's smiling and doesn't know how to not-smile and he's telling her that his quota of blacked-out-girls has been filled for the week she makes this little noise - laughter - and lolls her head forward to rest her forehead on his shoulder while he hugs her.

So, he gets her to her feet. Then, or in five minutes or when he seems right, and she is so clearly slowly slipping toward unconsciousness now. Requires more of his help navigating the rocks and sand back toward the steps, and would have forgotten her boots, left behind, empty beneath the bench on the promenade, had he not remembered them for her. The whole process is repeated again, tucking her into the Porsche, fasting her seatbelt, situating the bag on her lap just in case and once more she falls asleep when the car starts to move, temple against the cool window. Then, after sitting abruptly upright five minutes later, against his shoulder, all the way back to her house.

When they get back to her house, Sera wants wants wants. Wants a drink, wants him to stay for a drink, wants to know what that thing in the sky is (it appears to be a tree), wants to know if he's ever gone diving underwater. Like deep sea diving, wants to know if he likes the Dead Kennedys and, too, where they are. The Dead Kennedys not Sera and Hawksley. Sera knows that this is a house. She may not know it is her house but: it is a house.

Dan takes custody of DrunkSera with a quiet series of curses just for her. Chastising her for not calling him or texting, goddamnit, because they have a deal, the two of them, which Sera violated at some point after she forgot how to use her iPhone.

Which she violates all too regularly.

There are some people still, downstairs, hanging out. Dee brought home a red velvet cake and they have pot. Hawksley's invited to hang out too, while Dan takes charge of DrunkSera, ushering her upstairs, putting her quietly to bed. Sera wants to cuddle while she falls asleep, so if Hawksley hangs out for cake and marijuana and Doritos and board games and wine with the dwindling group at the house, Dan won't be back downstairs to finish off his late night snack for another thirty minutes or more.

Serafíne

Saturday, July 6, 2013

holy holy holy

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