like rain

Serafíne

Sunday - morning to Serafíne, midday to most of the civilized world - finds the Cultist sitting on the Chantry's back patio in an Aiderondack chair, fishnet-clad curled up beneath her body, her heavy black boots on the ground beneath the chair. These are her 'sensible' boots, basic Doc Marten's, hardly ideal for 90 degree summer weather but Sera probably wears cut-offs and fishnets-as-pants and lingerie as outerwear even in the dead of winter so seasonality may have little impact on her choice of clothing.

Her hair is still damp from the shower she took after texting Jim to arrange to meet and before heading out here. Nevermind that it's a thirty or forty minute drive, her hair's think and it takes two hours to dry fully if she doesn't blow dry it. She's pale in the sunlight - not pale precisely, though her skin is not turning golden from doing outdoor yoga in the park like Jim's - but pale as in: a wee bit sick at the moment, still vaguely drunk from the night before, fighting off her incipient hangover by sparking a joint and trying to figure out why she left the fucking take-out she brunch she brought with her on the table two chairs away, deciding if the stomach-sopping properties of biscuits and pancakes and hashbrowns are worth the effort of standing up and fucking moving.

Since it's daytime, she's dressed rather down: in a black tank top that says SKIN AND BONES AND SKIN AND BONES in a font made of, well, little white cells and little white bones, really. The tank's longer than her cut-offs so it functions as a sort-of Is that a dress? but she is wearing the cut-offs today, so technically it is NOT a dress.

Though, knowing Sera, tomorrow it might be.

Unless he's blind to the world today, he'll feel her there when he shows up. Or maybe he's already there, out walking the property, doing yoga in one of the far flung fields, with a view of the mountains and the garden plots and the -

Either way, between drags she cradles her head in her right hand, just feeling that cotton wool sensation of the hangover trying to crowd around the edges of her mind, but she looks up when he's close. Doesn't get up because hungover, but offers him the joint and opens her arms all loose and languid if he bends down to give her a hug.

Something wary about her, or maybe just a bit withdrawn, or maybe its the fucking hangover, because she flashes him with wan sort of smile that ends with a bit of a grimace but this shit, it comes with the territory.

"Didja find that butterfly?" There's no mockery in her voice. If Jim wandered off after a fully articulated skeleton of a woolly mammoth prancing down Sante Fe in a tutu Sera would probably follow.

For one reason or another.

"I got some of the info from Sid. Not much of the story."

Jim

He must have felt her because when he finally emerges from the house he has two glasses of orange juice in his hand. He sets them down on another piece of outdoor furniture littering the manicured and vibrant exterior of the property. His arm had been pressing a brown paper bag to his chest while carrying the beverages.

"Breakfast sandwiches. I forget if you're a carnivore or not," snapping his teeth, he turns over the bag and two wrapped sandwiches, one labeled B.E.C. and the other V.B.E.C., the V differentiating veggie bacon egg and cheese from it's non-meat-substitute cousin. Both are on rolls when opened. He doesn't seem to care which one he ends up with. But that might just be out of a polite yearning for her to get her preference.

Jim sits down on the chair across from her. He's wearing a pair of pale blue shorts - finally something that isn't bathing suit shorts. He seems to make up for not wearing bathing suit bottoms by walking around shirtless, soaking up the sun and the existence it shines down upon. He looks solidly built, athletic, but average in his strength and ambulatory (acrobatic) abilities. More like he's been hardened, but not really out of any real quest to develop his body.

He tells her a story. A story through his own lens. Of a shadow on the other side of a frosted glass, of a street suddenly emptied, of a crazed girl seeking out another and some other entity wrapped up in junk-time also inside this world she'd created through the looking class. He'd tried to even the playing field and ward his companions in this story, the other players in the tragedy, but paradox had nearly knocked him out for good. He'd recovered. He'd sobered up. They'd found a vial of PCP left behind, the spent remains of a charm.

And here he is at the end of it. Dipping himself, drenching himself, rebuilding himself in the rejuvenating energies of the chantry and the confluence of ley lines, echoes of the Eternal Moment, that make up its node.

He gives more of the story than the tangible and temporal parts. His words drip atmosphere and gut-wrenched feeling. Emotion. A Wizard of the Oz they'd been whisked off to before being dumped out of that otherworld on the other side of a wild and maddened psychic tornado the next day.

Serafíne

"Orange juice!" - exclaimed, or really, not-quite-exclaimed, as Jim emerged onto the lower patio bearing OJ and breakfast sandwiches. Not-quite-exclaimed, because Sera is not-quite-ready to speak in more than a low, hoarse voice. Not-quite-ready to test the limits of the cotton wool that seems to cushion her movements. But OJ, hey. She licks her index finger then pinches off the cherry of the joint, carefully checking that it is indeed out before she sets it aside on the table next to her chair, beside the the glasses. And reaches up for the breakfast sandwiches, opening her mouth in a silent laugh (which is silent because oh-god-my-head and a laugh because Jim is snapping his teeth to indicate a carnivore and that is fucking adorable and opens her up, pulls her out of that spare, watchful, cushioned place with a flash of teeth) as she reaches for the not-vegetarian-one.

"I'm an everything-a-vore," as she begins to unroll the paper, her eyes on him as he takes a seat. Hopefully in the slant of the morning / afternoon sun so she can watch him soak it up She was careful to stay in the shadows, and there's probably a pair of sunglasses set aside close by, just in case the sun is so rude that it decides to move or something, through the sky and shine in her eyes. As he sits, her blue eyes track down his frame, linger on his pale blue shorts. And she gives him a fucking thumbs up - which may be for the shorts, his style having passed some invisible muster this Sunday? Or may be for the breakfast sandwiches, or the OJ, or his presence this morning, or the fact of his existence in the universe. "Thanks. Nice shorts."

Then, he tells her a story. Sera leans back into her seat, shifting her legs but never entirely uncurling from her tucked, sidelong perch on the slanting wooden chair. Leaning forward, her eyes on him as he begins, but cutting away several times as the tale unfolds. When he mentions the beating paradox gave him she - blanches, cuts a look back to his addled gaze, her own bright and sharp in that moment, her shoulders cut forward, her concern and something else searching and palpable in the bright sweep of her attention.

When he finishes she's glances away, past his shoulder, out over spectacular view of the hotspring and the fields and the mountains in the distance, the prairie grass of the plains waving in the way, moving all undulant like a sea. Sandwich forgotten in its wrapping and set aside, mid-tale. One distinct Sera-size bite taken right out of the middle.

"I know a guy." Of course she does. Hell, Jim might've been once-upon-a-time like the guy-she-knows. "Twisted his arm a bit and was able to track down a hit and bought some. Took a look - back? at the last time they met. This guy, Byron, he gave ten doses to my guy. Said it was like ketamine on acid, and asked him to get it out there. Said to give it away, right?

"First hit's free."

A brief twist of Sera's mouth as her eyes track back to him.

"After that, he'd come back with more to sell and a grand for my guy. 'Cept he never came back with anything, the drugs or the cash, and he's not answering his phone. I have his phone number, though. And half-a-hit for you to use if you want to scry for him or something. I'll get it for you soon as I feel human enough to walk again."

--

Then she looks away from him again, out through the striations of shadow and light, past the edge of the patio, the spill over the sunlight on distant mountains. Even her breath is withheld and she is still as a statue.

"Can I tell you something in confidence?"

Jim

Her fellow Ecstatic, cult-brother, Tradition-mate... Was it slowly becoming cabal mate? Perhaps. Anyway, he smiles at the compliment, and then slowly works his way through his sandwich, both during his own story and during hers, washing it down with his own glass of orange juice as he does so.

Jim hadn't asked for vial, hadn't asked her to get up and get it, not in her state. He wouldn't even need to examine it if she did show it to him, because he'd seen it before, and because he's seen a bit of the residue it left behind. He'd also seen what it had done to another.

"Do it..." He does seem like he's considering it. Like he wouldn't just deny himself the experience, deny himself the rush, simply at face value. But he finally stops contemplating when it dawns on him - it takes his addled mind a while, yes, to realize - that she'd said half a dose. That she has half a dose left for him. And the state of her...

"Did you?" He doesn't simply assume. But he is curious.

And then he goes on. "All the pharmaceuticals and plants and other things there are out there... It's just that I think we need to be mindful, Serafine," again, he only says her full name. Only pieces the vowels together as one, like cutting it short would do it as an injustice. He's never used the shorter form. "I don't think we need to go headlong into it because it's there. It's not Everest. We don't need to climb every mountain just because it's there. It'll leave our hands raw, and our friends on the ground, if we try."

And then, on to her last question. "You can tell me anything you're ready to tell me," is his answer to that last part, when he's finally with the previous subject.

Serafíne

Maybe all those things. And this: her teacher. His fucking student. Look at the way she watches him, even through the dregs of her hangover while she works her way through the sandwich and OJ. Which, together, begin to restore something like color, though not quite vibrance, to her cheeks. The way her gaze just... sticks to him, flashing in a sweeping arc when he says her name, her full name and never the diminutive, then just lingering there, on his eyes.

Her response is a quiet negative, a brief shake of her blond curls. The movement's enough to make her grimace but still, for him, a half-smile through the grimace all: yeah, it's okay, that's not what this is, this'll pass.

"I didn't, no. I just - " She exhales a huffed breath, half-wry something. Not quite laughter, which is tinged by a spare twist of her mouth. "I'm just hungover. I meant, I figured with the hit and the name and number maybe we could track down Byron, right? If he made it, his resonance is all over it, and even if he didn't, I know he fucking uses his own product. So it'll be all through him, right? Find him and we're a step closer to finding whoever is -

"Shit. Fucking people over like this. That girl you met, she's been like this for weeks. Fucking weeks locked away in that effect, right? Pulled out and apart and - She came up to me in a bar a while ago. A couple weeks. Right? That's why I went looking for the stuff.

"I didn't do anything to help her, though." That is quiet. That is confession, and it's here that Sera glances away from Jim again, her mobile mouth tightly compressed, brows drawn, eyes shining. "Should've come to you right away but I figured I'd make the buy first and bring you something tangible."

You can tell me anything you're ready to tell me. - makes her smile, and smiling makes her head hurt, just a little bit, though just a little bit less than before, now that she's layered OJ and bacon and egg and roll and cheese in her stomach and there is such a rush of affection: from her, for him, bright and warm and lovely and absurd on the patio. Where he's in sunlight, across from her, and she's all in shadow as the sun moves from the sky and the deep, long shadow of the chantry house moves with the sun. Sera's attention slips back to Jim, steadier now and just a little bit sad.

But see: she smiles for him. And just for him, and makes a point of doing so.

"See, I'm the girl she was looking for."

Jim

"If his mind's out there drifting, tweaked and exploring, it would help, but for me..." He seems to consider. To try the idea on for size. The implications, the drawbacks, the possible pay-off. "I'd need it in me. For me, that would be the only way it would really help, more than a simple... More than..." And then, the rational, the logic, it muddles. He squishes it. Tries to find its essence. Find it and then smash the glass to unleash it. Pours it over his head and lights it ablaze.

"Point A. Meet point B. To Hell with both of you, I'm out of here." The addling is more violent, in an ideological sense.

"No. Yes. Lack thereof. The sick. The urge to do it. That's how I'll do it," painting a picture. His eyes, they'd been darting around, but they find focus. Again, stoic, unphased by the possibilities that flood his mind. They find hers. He elaborates like he knows she wants him to. "Sometimes, it's denial where you find the truth of a vice. Holding it at arms' length. Imagining how good it would feel, until you want it, so badly, that that's the experience. That's the opening. That's where I'll find him, in that ugly place he's afraid of, that ugly place he's running from now that he's hooked and trying to hook everyone else."

He seems to have rectified his refusal to try the drug with his own paradigm. A part that Serafine hadn't encountered since that one time he purged, emptied himself. The ascetic side of it.

And with a new focus he unearths a way to come about to what she'd said last. He'd left it there, like he didn't want to pick it up, didn't want to touch it, until he was ready to give it the attention it deserves. And now he is ready.

"Chastity?" A new name. He seems surprised. Not by the name's implication. But it is a name dripping with meanings. It's one he couldn't truncate even if he wanted to. She looks at him with that growing emotion and affection, and he'd reflected it back, genuinely, in his own way. But now curiosity is the prevailing emotion that gently twists his face into a new form.

"She said she'd called you name and you didn't remember. And she can't. Couldn't," breaking off just like the girl had. A sentence he leaves for her to finish. "She said you knew. That she knows you know." And again, Jim speaks without any real interrogation in his tone. He doesn't even really question. He simply lays out the pieces, curiosities his tongue handles, for her to tell him more about...

When she's ready.

Serafíne

The truth is, Sera does not follow Jim's crashing progression from no to yes> and here's how. She does not have his shifting kaleidoscope of a mind and sometimes she's surfing over the peaks of those ever-shifting brainwaves of his, and sometimes she's floundering in the valleys, and sometimes her bloodshot blue eyes are quick on him, livid and living, and sometimes they're looking over his shoulder, into the bright smear of the afternoon sun, its rippling reflection on the bubbling waters of the hotspring.

Then he finds his point of departure, though, and begins to unspool it. He can see the very moment she makes the connection between the purgatory wards he created when they were all on-the-run, the psychedelic atmosphere of the van, then the cheap motel room, the faint little line of her frown between the dark sweep of her brows which is: puzzlement, consideration rather than disapproval.

Though one imagines that Serafíne has never denied herself anything she wanted. Does not know the meaning of the word ascetic. Does whatever the fuck she wants to do with whomever the fuck she wants to do it at any fucking given moment of any fucking day anywhere.

But her breath is caught in her throat and there's power even in the illness that comes after a night of indulgence. The sensation rather than the pleasure and hungover, aching more than a little, for more reasons than she could care to name or know: his logic clicks through some little lock inside her heart. Denial, Jesus fuck.

--

Sera glances away when he says the name Chastity, this tight set to her shoulders and spine, this flat line to her mobile mouth. "It's my legal name." And it is morning and she's sober and the name feels like a wound or a fucking weapon but she can bear it because she tore off the scab first. Because it's Jim and there's sunlight and OJ. Because she smoked half that joint before he showed up, in the afternoon sunlight. Three days ago she cried and last night she cried and tonight, she's probably going to cry again. Not snot-nosed bawling like she did when she was breathing the ashes of a dozen human beings and reliving the horror of their death, no. But still: tears.

They may be in her eyes now, but they don't make it to her cheeks. So her eyes just shine and it could be mistaken for lingering drunkenness or affection or the sheen of the sun across her irises. "My mother put it on my birth certificate to fuck with my father. I don't like it." This twist of her mouth.

"Never did."

And strange, how suddenly she looks emptied out. As if his description of the power of asceticism had had some sympathetic effect on her - she just sinks back into the chair and glances back at him, rather at a loss.

"And it's not really my name, right? Hasn't been for years."

Tilts her head aslant and rubs her brow thoughtfully with her ring and middle fingers.

"You've blacked out before, right? Just, lost a night or two. Maybe a fucking week? Some fucking bender."

Jim

"A person isn't a name, but what does it mean?" He starts.

"Purity, not just the what we make it mean now, not the way it's held over people's heads like a threat of damnation. And Serafine, the burning one," he continues, before that other word, that other name, can again cut in like a knife, like he might now know her enough to know it's doing. "Fire's just another kind of purity. A purifier. Maybe you chose your own brand of purity."

And then Jim nods to her question. He doesn't leave her alone with what she's about to say, he pulls the chair forward, leaving the sun for the shade she's cast in, the long shadow of the big house behind her, and even leans forward to place a hand on each of her knees.

A connection, both physical and in the eyes that again focus on her, like what she's saying or going to say is channeled directly between them. And his face opens up, that stoicism taking on a different meaning. Like anything that she throws at it, anything that she wants to beat it with, he will take, and not judge. Something steady like an anchor and accepting like a stone. He flows, from water to mud to rock, and stays that way now.

Serafíne

He says her name like that and oh, it makes her smile at him with those shining eyes. She might've leaned forward to kiss him, if they were closer. If not for the sharp delineation of shadow and sun between them, which he will break in the next moment. If not for the textured weight of her hangover, which has its own sort of inertia and keeps her more or less in place.

And Sera listens to him as she always does, her chin a bit higher than it was before, this curve settled on her chapped lips, which is not quite a smile but is: aware and alive and grateful. For his words and his hands and his presence. For his mad eyes and the solid spine behind them. For his fucking blue shorts and OJ and bacon egg and cheese rolls. For his belief, in her, and in the world.

And she does not disagree. Finds her path no less fucking sacred than those saints and martyrs in the deserts of the past, who endured scorging and flagellation and death-by-fire keening for heaven because they found the earth and the skin they were wrapped in so fucking filthy.

Truth: she finds her path more sacred.

When she thinks about it, on dark nights, when she feels it open up in the hollow places in her body. When someone she cares about is close, and for fuck's sake she cares about almost everyone in their way. Hell, sometimes just when she breathes.

--

And she does breathe, now. Still shining. Telling him,

"Someone else picked the name."

as he's pulling his chair forward to join her in the shade, leaning in to her, planting a hand on either one of her knees.

She leans forward, too, threading a long-fingered hand through her still damp hair to hold it off her shoulders, not quite sure she can bear the eyecontact for long - and yet: he makes it possible. Opens up, turns himself into a foundation rather than a tower; into bedrock rather than a scaling cliff.

Jim nods; he knows the meaning of absence and Sera, she catches her breath and looks away from him then, this veiled glance. "So yeah," this soft edge to her mouth, "I'm missing more than a week or two," a little curl of her shoulders, not precisely surrender. " - a solid couple of years, maybe. And even, before that, everything's patchy for a while. Like a signal you can't quite tune in. The sound of someone's voice through static, right? All this white noise.

"I did some things then," the confession in a rush, and she doesn't quantify it because she cannot quantify it and her mouth is a twist of something and her eyes come back to him. "I don't know what. And this stuff, with Kelsey and this fucker Byron and the drugs, I think it's just that, I knew them both back then, and she saw me and recognized me and thought I could help her find the guy who gave her this shit, because we all used to -

"I don't think they're from the darkest part of that. Or even that it has anything to do with me except in a tangential way. I think I'd taste that, right? Like ozone.

"Brogan offered to unlock my memories." This shiver that she cannot suppress. "Pan says I need to turn around and face them if they keep coming up behind me.

"But Jim, I don't want to."

Jim

"We're not going to talk about them, for at least a moment, Serafine. And it's alright if we never do. If you never want to again, and if you don't want to remember," his hands still on her knees, as if to show that he would not withdraw because of what she says, would not withdraw because of whatever her decisions.

"But I want you to tell me about Lakashim," and when he invokes the word, he says it with an inflection that is not found in any other word he's used thus far, either today or in the time that she has known him. An inflection that was learned from who knows who. But an inflection that is now, in his use of the word, as much his as it belongs to any other. "I want you to tell me about our most sacred principle. Our Eternal Moment, as you understand it."

Now, like rock baked in the sun, Jim brings some of that warmth into the shade with him. It's in the sheen of sweat on his upper body, on his face, on his neck. The slight sparkle that it had in the sun is now all the darker wet in the shade. His hands are more dry. Their callouses and scars a bit ashy, like grey coals. He had imagined her skin would be supple, even drained and dehydrated as it might be in the light of the morning after, but even if he's not he sinks his fingers in a little deeper. Grasps at her knees, trying to reassure her, like any answer would be right.

Like he's joining her in that Eternal Moment.

Serafíne

He's right of course. She's young and lovely and showed and moisturized and her frame is whip-lean and her skin is soft and supple, and he can sink his fingers further: feel the long, lean fibers of muscle beneath his fingers. Up close, she smells like marzipan and patchouli and pears, like cigarettes and ashes, with just an edge of sourness, the hangover working itself out, not quite like the warmth he brings with him from sun to shade.

And he assures her that it's alright if they never talk about: whatever it is behind the unopened doors in her mind, beneath the layers of memories she has harvested and cultivated and sought and stitched back together since the singular day some three years ago, nearing four, when she woke up in a narrow bed in a warm room that smelled like baking bread, without even a name on her tongue.

And Sera smiles because she believes him and the smile is sad because she hurts and both are: okay.

Then her eyes drop to his hands on her knees, and her hands follow, covering his his split, scarred knuckles with her own, smaller hands. She has callouses but no visible scars but listen: the pads of her thumbs and her fingers are rough and familiar and dextrous.

Lakashim

She never uses the word, Sera, but her eyes half-close with a breathing sort of reverence for his invocation. The weight of her half-smile shifts from sad to something else, wistful and aware and sweet in its way.

"I've always known it. When I was a kid and I'd run on the beach, heart pounding, the surf pounding, and the sky all blue and streaming, like there was something you could run into and be everywhere.

"Everything. Connected.

"Or, behind the school there was this rocky hill and a statue of fucking Jesus near the top, this hard scramble of a boulder-strewn path up to these Mary-and-Jesus statues and the fucking nuns would give you the fucking last two periods off if you were making the pilgrimage and you'd start climbing with a bottle of communion wine they'd usually never miss and give the saints a kiss when you got there, granite or what the fuck ever all covered in lichen, their sightless eyes and the world spread out beneath you, at your feet.

"Yesterday and tomorrow.

"I mean, even before I opened my eyes. Fucking reform school and rehab and this shitty we'll-teach-you-to-climb-so-you'll-be-less-of-a-reprobate place.

"Have you ever been to the Alps? You could pierce your lungs on those peaks.

"They'll split you open. Give you back to the sky and the earth below."

When she speaks, Sera, she sounds like she's soaring. A few of the lingering tears shining in her eyes begin to fall, and not from sorrow.

"I just feel it, Jim. I don't really understand it, I never have. It's just inside me. I just - breathe sometimes, and it's there. And I'm there.

"And I'm nothing and everything, all at once."

Jim

"Nothing and everything. And I think we do ourselves a disservice if we don't try to understand it, Serafine. Maybe it can never be understood. But maybe that is part of understanding it. Maybe you've got that part right," he says, with a nod. Not eager, but certainly encouraging, just as he'd nodded, even smiled with only the edges of his lips, at times she describes. The glimpses toward that understanding.

"Lakashim," saying it again. This time slower. "In Lakashim there are things called good and there are things called evil enough that there is neither. Enough that it is balanced. In Lakashim there is the us we are, the us were were, the us that we will be, and the us that we never will be and never have been. There is creation and destruction and order in equal measure that they dance. That they do war, and they do love, and they do loath, and they even at times forget about one another as they get lost in their games," he continues, his words a bit more controlled than normal, though still the way he leaps and jumps through his theories, that muddling and that crazed creation-of-the-mind, hallucination-given-voice, is also there.

"By not remembering, now, you block yourself from your part of the Eternal Moment, the Eternal Whole, the Eternal Nothing. And that is okay. Now you don't remember, and maybe another day you will, as you did remember in the past. As you remembered in the moments you forget," he says.

"Many would say that we must know how our actions effect others. That's the weakness of our Tradition? Maybe we don't know how they do, maybe to assume we know is the greatest folly, but maybe it is simply that we understand that they do. Maybe that is enough to be mindful, to be mindful of ourselves, and understand that the self is the other, in that we effect it," continuing, he lets go of her knees only enough to turn the palms of his hands and take hers. To bring all four hands together, and he leans forward, to smell her hands and his. Hands, perhaps the greatest manifestation of agency, but they he touches them with the next, the mouth, as he kisses the backs of each of her hands with his lips.

"Now, there is a Zen koan. They are stories that are not always meant to be fully understood. They are meant to work the mind and the soul. But there is one that I want to tell you," a brief pause as he looks up into her eyes.

"A master, when he was a student, built a bamboo irrigation system to feed his garden, for it seldom rained where his temple had been built," Jim begins, and, though the story has its outline, there is somewhere in his tone that he is adding. Embellishing. Crafting it as his own, crafting it as a story for the two of them to share in this moment.

"As a student and as a master he would spend many hours of his day, while working his garden, in contemplation of the flowing water that fed it and kept it abundant. He grew many fruits and vegetables, and always thanked the water and the ground, because it allowed him a surplus to share with his fellows. His students, the town, and any travelers or beggars that came to his small plot of land were fed. He turned the water's compassion for the dry earth, that kept the plants alive and the plants roots kept the soil moist and firm, and turned his own compassion out to others. Even when he did not have the surplus, he would pretend that he did, so that he could take pleasure in the gifts he could give to his fellows. One day, when there was a drought and the stream ran dry, and the master was starving, he went again to his garden to pick the last of his vegetables to bring to the children of the town so that they could eat. When he was picking them, a storm rolled in, a blessing of a storm, and rained down. The rain touched him, it fed his garden, and again it was green. Again the stream ran strong. And the master, understanding the nature of compassion, the nature of water's compassion for the earth, burst into tears. Because the master, as he too became drenched in rain, realized the true nature of compassion. That it is not only to be turned outward. That it must also, though it is so much more difficulty, be turned within," finally taking her hands, he puts them first to his own heart, and then to hers.

"We often forgive others of their weaknesses, their flaws, but when the rain falls, does it not fall on every one of us?" He says, looking up into the sky, like he is imagining the drops hitting his face, and his eyelashes even flutter with the glance, though perhaps only because of the glaring sun. "Do we not all partake in its bounty? So, too, do we need to turn that compassion, empathy, sympathy within. To forgive our own flaws, our own weaknesses, our own pasts. And allow that water to flow into us and make us grow stronger, so that we may give our fruits to others."

Serafíne

Nothing AND everything, he confirms, she knows this - feels it, really, the way she feels everything - and she's caught her lower lip between her teeth worrying it right? and Serafíne, she smiles around the bite, all fixed on the Disciple of her craft. Something wry about her attention when he tells her that they do themselves a disservice by not trying to understand it, that dissolves into something else as he continues.

Her eyes are shining, still.

Sera looks away from Jim just once, as he tells her, reminds her, that she blocks herself from herself by not remembering. That she is closed off to some part of her creation, of all creation, some vital pulse of the eternal moment. Her face in profile, the long sweep of her hair pulled back and over her left shoulder, sharp and sharply vulnerable. Her throat works softly as she swallows - something - down into her body. Behind the hollow beneath her ear, beneath the shaved fringe of her sidecut, but only visible when she pulls her hair back like that: another tattoo, of a small black triangle.

Even when she's looking away from him, he can tell that she's listening, and listening intently, and listening with as much awareness and perhaps even mindfulness as she can bring to bear in her hungover state. Truth: she does not precisely understand what he means by mindfulness. Another truth: she often gets there without trying and without thought, peeling one moment into another. And just as often, perhaps more often, she fails.

But listen: she listens. Turns back to him as he takes her hands, uncurls her legs now, sliding her bare feet to the patio, the concrete cool beneath her toes.

Her first tears fall when he kisses the backs of her hands, the sharp points of her knuckles, the array of extensor tendons spread beneath her skin like an eccentric star. She does not even try to wipe them away.

By the time the story ends, by the time he has settled their hands first over his heart, then over her own, Sera is weeping openly. She does nothing to conceal her tears. They falls as generously and openly as the rain in his koan.

It isn't pain, not merely pain, not precisely. She isn't simply crying. There's something else to her tears, whole and entire, that makes this seem closer to catharsis than anything else, the way she weeps.

In the end, her throat is closed by those tears. She cannot say anything and does not know what to say but, she thinks, he does not need to hear her voice. He can feel the way she squeezes his hands with her own, with force enough to compress the carpal bones, and then she's sniffing as her sinuses open and her nose starts to run nodding to him, stiff and bright-eyed: acknowledgment, understanding, thanks.

Oh, she's not there yet, Sera. Not sure if she's strong enough to look back; if she has the capacity to forgive herself, if she even knows precisely where to begin.

But she knows, just as wholly and just as entirely, as if she had swallowed his words, as if they had dissolved to nothingness on her tongue, as if she had inhaled them from his mouth, that she has to start, trying, somewhere.