The night is dark but lights shine on the ground floor of the rectory. With the curtains drawn one cannot see in from the street but the shadows of the things they hide blot up against the screens. From past visits she knows he doesn't have a lot inside that he doesn't need. Mementos of relationships with other people cling to the refrigerator and books that don't fit in his office litter the floors but she can't see those things from the street.
She can see his silhouette though, once and brief, as he lingers in the living room. Up on the porch she can hear him talking in Spanish. He has not closed the inner door. All he has to keep out the bugs and stray cats and drug addicts is the screen door and the lurking wrath of God that the place effuses.
"Sé, sé, pero esto no es un proceso rápido. Tengo que llenar papeles, una montaña de papales, y no puedo encontrar el permiso de residencia suyo. No creo que tenía uno."
SerafíneShe knocks.
Serafíne knocks.
Probably she knocks because there's a screen door between them and maybe she doesn't remember how to operate it or maybe she was just stumbling on the top step of the stoop and falling forward but hey, she does not barge in on the priest tonight. She does not come falling into his lap (yet) or charging into that overheard conversation and hey, it's nighttime and hey, there are stars lurking overhead, right, bright points that she can feel inside her skull and underneath her skin when she remembers the way they look and feel in the sky, when she remembers the way they burn, they pointillist intensity.
Whatever she was wearing the last time she saw him: she's changed clothes again. Probably those jeans - poured on as they were - were too covered up. So hours later she's in this low-cut, black and tan lace top. Almost as see-through as the first, though this time there's some sort of nude lace framing the bodice, at least, because she's not wearing a bra. Black leather-and-chain suspenders hold up the world's tiniest black leather skirt, which is slung low and so short that it barely covers her ass and seems like it must have started its life as a ... belt or something. Thigh-high, striped black tights and insane fucking shoes complete the ensemble. The heels are spikes. Literal silver spikes and her feet, Pan, are sore but she doesn't remember why and she's leaning forward against the screen door, her forehead on the warped frame and peeling paint,
- and hey, here's why Serafíne is knocking. She cannot get the door open. Either she's pushing where she should pull, or she herself is literally blocking the door with her body and cannot quite figure out how this fucking thing works right now.
It is such a goddamned puzzle. Her brows just furrowed with concentration, her hair loose and wild and she smells like she has been bathing in vats of whiskey and she has a bag of some sort of take-out or something in one of those foil-swans that pretentious waiters at pretentious restaurants make but she's put it aside while she works out this fucking door thing.
"Fuck."
PanPan can feel her coming before she's at the door so her knock doesn't surprise him but he doesn't turn around until her knuckles hit the wood. He's still wearing what he had on this evening, during their truncated dinner date, and he still has a bright orange VISITOR sticker, some sort of county emblem in black in a corner, slapped over his left pectoral.
"Oye, lamento, Lara, dile que le devolveré la llama immediatamente. Ciao."
He hangs up the cell phone and sets it on the arm of the couch and she can see from the cadence of his footsteps that he's in a state of heightened alert. The fact that he left a cluster of them downtown to run off and attend to whatever has him standing in his living room at an obscene time of night still with his shoes on doesn't help.
The reason for the door's stubbornness reveals itself when he glances down and pops loose a metal hook lock keeping the flimsy wooden door closed. After it's out of the way he pushes open the door and smiles with his lips closed.
"You had a costume change," he says. His accent dissolves quickly but she may have started to pick up on this: when he speaks his native tongue he sounds as if he is back in Puerto Rico, the taste of it lingering on his tongue when he returns to Colorado.
Speaking of costume changes: a suitcase lies eviscerated on the threshold between the living room and the bedroom, like he yanked it down out of the closet and then left it to lie there. Nothing inside it but the white-and-blue relic of the last air journey he took.
SerafíneYou had a costume change.
- and he's smiling and she's smiling back, her mouth closed too. She was wearing lipstock but most of it has worn off and most of it is on someone else's skin by now but the crimson stain is there there on her seamed lips. Her smile's wide and doesn't remain closed for long she had a swan and - where is it where is it there it is? - and Sera is not particularly stable on her feet right now but remembers that they exist at the bottom of her legs.
Hey, there's Pan. You had a costume change and she throws her arms around his shoulders and sort of tip-toe-crawls up the column of his solid body until her mouth is somewhere in the vicinity of his ear and she's smiling and he has in his peripheral vision the flash of her teeth and she's leaing into him like she's going to tell him a secret and what she says is -
"I like suspenders."
They do look good on her. Taut lines of leather and chain drawn from her shoulders down to her hips, over the incurve of her fucking torso. Not that he'd notice that part, not really. Just the change.
"You missed dinner, I brought you a swan," she's going on, holding onto him because she's not got the door to hold onto anymore and she's telling this to his ear and his collar and she's peeking over his shoulder and the room spins counterclockwise and she claps a hand over his visitor badge and then looks down at it and peels her hand away and frowns again, tipping her head forward like she's trying to puzzle it out and upside down.
- and on and on and on. Starts to pick at the sticker with her short fingernails, because this is his house and she should be the visitor. But the motion is arrested when she remembers the suitcase in the hall or sees it or sees it not now but twenty minutes from now or tomorrow swinging from his hand and so she stops picking at his sticker and frowns up at him, glassy-eyed, not precisely able to focus.
"Where are you going?"
PanSo Sera half-climbs up his side and Pan puts an arm around her waist so she doesn't slip one of his vertebrae out of place as he latches the latch with his other hand and swings her away from the threshold to deposit her all the way inside the house.
She likes suspenders.
"Oh, is that what those are supposed to be?"
When her hand finds the traffic pylon-orange sticker he lets her examine it. She starts to peel at it and Pan doesn't bat her hand away but he does help her, reaching up with his left hand to remove it all the way. It flaps at the end of his middle finger. Black fibers of his linen shirt painted across it like a shadow.
"A feligrés died tonight," he says. "Overdosed." No judgment but there's anger in the proclamation and she can see it flash through his eyes as he looks away from her to glimpse the suitcase. "Gotta go down to Veracruz and perform the service for his family but there's customs, you know. Got all these papers I gotta fill out."
He does not affix the sticker to her arm once it's off his shirt. It came from the county morgue.
Serafíne"It is." Sera returns, all humming - all humming something, she's so vibrant and so close and settled and she's mostly fixated on the sticker still as she peels it and he helps her and she settles into the sweep of the arm he uses to steady her like she belongs there and she smells like whiskey and she smells like pot and they are really, really lucky that she's not tripping (and he does not know this but she has not yet taken hallucinogens since that night nearly a month ago but she misses them, alcohol and marijuana and hashish make her liquid and light and brilliant and sliding but they don't change things and unzip them the way LSD and shrooms and peyote can) because that would be a fucking ridiculous combination.
"It is a suspenders!" Delighted by - god, it sounds like a fucking discovery. A SUSPENDERS ON HER BODY. This when the sticker comes away, the threads clinging to the adhesive and she's looking down the lean line of her body trying to decide where to plant it since she's a VISITOR and Pan gives it up to her and he doesn't put it on her arm because it's from the county morgue but she's about to put it on her left boob if she could figure out how to get her fingers (which are sticking to the back) on the front, she's a bit like a dog right now that has just stepped on a piece of tape, leaning into him now and resting her head on his shoulder as they walk in and listening to him, his voice and the rumble of it in his body and his voice and the words he makes with it and the clatter of her heels on his floor and oh, her feet she has feet her feet hurt.
But then - died tonight - Sera's holding her breath and looking up at him, at his profile, this awareness swimming in her gaze even when she's too fucked up to walk and too fucked up to quite know where she is or that she shouldn't've come here at two a.m. with leftovers in a foil swan or anything except that she wanted to be here and she's here and he's here and there's light all around and she sees the flash of anger in his eye and that's enough for her to still and to focus and to frown and to swallow down her first reaction (which is: she doesn't want him to go.) and swallow it deliberately and hold it back like a stone in her throat and breath out around it and sort of drift a bit on the warm currents of the evening air, the breeze in from the screen door.
"C'mon," she says instead of don't go. "I'll help you pack."
And then she's lurching forward, tugging him toward his bedroom.
PanSera has trouble with the sticker and with walking and it's a wonder she can still hold onto the leftovers. So the priest takes the sticker away and takes his arm off her waist to take the foil bundle from her. Maybe he can hear the undertones in her request or he just doesn't want to have to make the trip again. When she lurches forward to grab him he resists her. No more effective at moving an ancient stream-worn boulder than the river itself.
"Momentito," he says, huffing out an almost-laugh like it's the first time he's laughed all night. Earlier he laughed easily and regularly.
He does not grieve for he and the young man were not close. Drugs can form a membrane across the afflicted and those who would see him thrive. It shuts out everything the body needs to survive.
All of his parishioners are as close to him as his own kin. Closer perhaps for all the kin he has left is his son, who does not need him. If he had ever needed him it was a brief and now-dead thing, a parasitic growth starved so that the rest of the boy could grow. They don't talk about it now.
So with Sera hanging off of him the priest puts the sticker into the refuse bin beneath the sink and puts the swan into the refrigerator and while he's in there he grabs a bottle of water. Then he lets her drag him into the bedroom.
SerafíneSerafíne is approximately five inches shorter when the priest returns from the kitchen than she was when he left. He doesn't take her with him; god maneuvering her through the various stops would be a nightmare and she'd probably sit down on the kitchen table or lay back on the counter and bump her head repeatedly against the soffit and want a hug. Instead, Pan manages to park her at the doorway where her forward progress is effectively barred by the suitcase in the hall - and it is a bar, she kicks it experimentally a few times, keeping her balance by holding onto the door frame and frowning down at it like what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.
what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.what the fuck is this? oh -
until Pan has returned from the kitchen and hey she's five inches shorter because she has stepped out of or fallen out of her silver-spiked heels. They look like fucking weapons. You could probably use them to skewer meat or punch a new hole in a leather belt if you wanted to and as per usual it is a near-miracle that she hasn't broken her neck or an ankle while wandering around in them completely drunk off her ass.
Oh hey there's Pan, that's what her arm says as he comes back to her and she's still sort of moving her fingers like she's remembering that there was a sticker there and she thinks she should still have it but then he's there and she's inhaling against him and
what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.pick it up Sera.
And she does, like this is a lark though it isn't, like that huff of almost laughter had been something brighter and more full, like she wasn't going to miss him like fuck when he's gone, but she's not thinking about that now or anything or any of that shit and she's not even telling him about it because she does not want to feel his eyes on her spine and she does not want to think about the things that disappear and gape and yawn beneath her and in the bedroom she drops the suitcase on the floor and hugs him, it is a sidehug because she doesn't know which was is front and which way is back and it is tight and her face is pressed into his chest and she just inhales before letting him go. Like she could infuse some of his solidity into her blood and bones through that singular breath.
SerafíneSerafíne is approximately five inches shorter when the priest returns from the kitchen than she was when he left. He doesn't take her with him; god maneuvering her through the various stops would be a nightmare and she'd probably sit down on the kitchen table or lay back on the counter and bump her head repeatedly against the soffit and want a hug. Instead, Pan manages to park her at the doorway where her forward progress is effectively barred by the suitcase in the hall - and it is a bar, she kicks it experimentally a few times, keeping her balance by holding onto the door frame and frowning down at it like what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.
what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.
what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.
what the fuck is this? oh -
until Pan has returned from the kitchen and hey she's five inches shorter because she has stepped out of or fallen out of her silver-spiked heels. They look like fucking weapons. You could probably use them to skewer meat or punch a new hole in a leather belt if you wanted to and as per usual it is a near-miracle that she hasn't broken her neck or an ankle while wandering around in them completely drunk off her ass.
Oh hey there's Pan, that's what her arm says as he comes back to her and she's still sort of moving her fingers like she's remembering that there was a sticker there and she thinks she should still have it but then he's there and she's inhaling against him and
what the fuck is this? oh, it's a suitcase.
pick it up Sera.
And she does, like this is a lark though it isn't, like that huff of almost laughter had been something brighter and more full, like she wasn't going to miss him like fuck when he's gone, but she's not thinking about that now or anything or any of that shit and she's not even telling him about it because she does not want to feel his eyes on her spine and she does not want to think about the things that disappear and gape and yawn beneath her and in the bedroom she drops the suitcase on the floor and hugs him, it is a sidehug because she doesn't know which was is front and which way is back and it is tight and her face is pressed into his chest and she just inhales before letting him go. Like she could infuse some of his solidity into her blood and bones through that singular breath.
Pan[perc + aware - what, are you gonna miss me, or... +1 diff because he's distracted/not paying too much attention]
Dice: 7 d10 TN7 (2, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 4 )
PanBefore she can drag the suitcase too far into the bedroom it disappears from her hand. It is meant to fold at the middle so suits don't crease inside of it and it doesn't have wheels but it's sturdy. It could survive crashing from the cargo hold of an airplane if the baggage handler got tired and just started dropping things onto the ground instead of waiting for the truck.
"I got it," he says. Doesn't take his arm off of where it's gone around her shoulders to steer her. "We don't gotta pack tonight, I was just getting it down from the closet. Thought I might've lost it."
Like he could ever truly lose anything. He found a widderslainte girl ten miles away. He knows exactly where is the boy whose name Amanda would take to her grave. He's helped wandering wretches find their way back to God. Didn't try hard enough with the one whose body he had to identify tonight because he was the guy's emergency contact because all his family is back in Veracruz and the money he was making at the factory was going back to them but then more and more of it started going into his fucking veins.
So the suitcase goes into a corner, set down gentle, and when he glances down at her a wash of light comes across his eyes and he recognizes something in her he did not know before. Never thought to look for before. Wasn't looking for it now but now she's breathing him in like--
Christ.
"C'mon," he says, gentler than he's said anything all night. "Lie down. I wanna tell you a story."
Serafíne"I'm good at packing," Sera assures him with a drifting look and a private little smile, curving and small and fine. The side hug ends as all things must and she's - she's - she had a fucking suitcase and now it is gone. She is decidedly not good at packing, Pan, but she's not lying because she believes she is or she just wants to be fucking useful somehow the spare bedroom is swimming in her site, all angles and corners, all rooms have corners, places where things get trapped between two straight walls, where the shape and shadow of the room comes to a point, where it ends. "I can come back tomorrow and help you."
But Pan wants to tell her a story, and his voice brings her glassy eyes back to his profile, this sweeping survey that peels out the brighter gleam of green eyes in the dark shadows of the spartan room.
He wants to tell her a story.
She says okay and sits on the bed and gives him this - look, not quite wary but aware, and it is okay? - as if there were suddenly boundaries in the room or she remembered that such things exist but doesn't remember exactly how to figure out what the border looks like and whether it is guarded and where she crossed it or how, but the look is withheld and a little bit breathless. See, she doesn't really want to offend him. She only crashes into his space and his life because she fucking crashes into everything because when she breathes in an impulse that runs all electric down her spine she has to start moving, right then, all in time to it, because her spine lights all up and is brilliant and she just wants to -
be there. Or some fucking thing, Christ.
But he tells her to lie down and she reaches out automatic-like for the bottle of water, cold from the fridge, so she curls up on the bed with her knees tucked together as if modesty of some sort were a thing she understood, not opening the bottle, not yet, aware that something's change but not exactly what. This strange, tucked away expectancy about her and she's not sure she's going to like whatever story he's going to tell her right now, but he wants to tell her a story.
So Sera's going to fucking listen.
Pan[PAUSE TIME WOOO]
PanParables are what priests preach when they want to reach out to those in the parish who are faltering. Stories in the Bible are a source of inspiration and strength and retold by a man stood up on a pulpit with the light of the morning coming in behind him and the spirits of the congregation lifted by song and ritual they become truth.
Sera is not one of his sheep and she's not lost.
When she sits on the bed he sits beside her. Loosens the factory perforation on the cap before he hands it to her but doesn't remove it first.
"Farmer goes out to his fields one day, has a bag of seeds to sow. As it happens, some of them fall out the bag, and some birds come by and eat them. Some fell onto stony ground didn't have a lot of soil in it, and it sprang right back up. Whoa, this is some seed he's got to sow. But then the sun came up, and it turned black. Earth was too rocky, plant didn't take root like it should've, so it withered away and died. And some fell into thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it before it could give fruit. Some fell on good ground, yeah? And on the good ground it gave fruit... thirty, sixty, a hundred bushels.
"Sower didn't bother with the seeds the birds got ahold of, or that fell into the stony ground, or that landed in the thorns."
A beat. He scratches the side of his nose before he makes a confession to wrap up the parable.
"That one gave me trouble when I was going through the seminary. I thought I came from stony ground, yeah? That ain't what the story's saying. It ain't where you come from determines what kind of future you're gonna have. It's up here." He taps his temple. "And I must've told Eddie that a hundred times. He wanted to make out like of course he was gonna keep slogging uphill his whole life, he'd slogged uphill the entire time already." He sighs. "He had good in him, Serita. He was good. Just... fucked up. I couldn't reach him. Maybe he was right about himself. Maybe he was stony ground."
Pan rubs his face with a hand and reaches out to clasp her shoulder. Isn't looking at her. Could have just as well have been talking to God right now but some part of her has to figure that that story was meant for her, too. No point sowing seeds where it ain't going to yield fruit and all that. Maybe he's just sleep-deprived and rambling like he tends to.
"Get some rest, huh?"
SerafíneAnd so she takes the water bottle from his hand and this is easy and this is familiar and this is their routine. He offers her the bottle, she takes it. He sits her down and then he sits beside her and she leans close because she years for contact of all sorts: because she was made to touch and be touched. This not because she's half-in-love with him, but because she's more than entirely in love with what they are. Which is to say: human, limited, fallible, wrapped up in skin, burning with -
- with so fucking much she doesn't have words to describe.
And she's drunk, more than a little bit, and she doesn't want water right now she's going to help him pack and there's stuff she cannot remember right now and she doesn't want him to go but she doesn't want him to know that so she is Not Thinking about it and defying herself like that, by Not Thinking, and he wants to tell her a story.
The threads of the bottle are broken, but it remains capped. She holds it cool and damp in her right hand but doesn't touch the lid and see, she listens. Even fucked up and rambling and weaving - and even seated on the bed she's weaving, her blond head swaying, the room spinning so much when her eyes are open and even more furiously when her eyes close, so she keeps them stubbornly entirely open except for these deliberate blinks and she's swaying toward him, her head canted curiously as he begins, not quite touching him deliberately but she cannot help the lesser points of contact and - listening, listening, listening, her glassy eyes dropping their focus from his profile to some point in the middle of the floor mid-way through.
When he clasps her right shoulder, it hitches beneath his hand. This doubled, crawling motion that's just - upward, upward, then down. And maybe he thinks that she's gonna puke - its the spasming of her diaphragm that leads to these little hitches, or the attempt to suppress that spasm - but no. He tells her to get some rest and she's assuredly no longer looking at him, but she nods, see. This rather sweet acceptance of his instruction and lurches to her feet to stumble off - to the couch, lifting the bottle of water in this neat little gesture of thanks.
When she starts to cry, her tears are silent.
She has no idea why, but she doesn't want him to see.
PanShe doesn't get very far because he does feel that hitch and because he's seen her vomit before he thinks he knows what comes before the vomiting. No Time Mage but worse: an aging man whose job it is to recount stories written over a thousand years ago.
The hand on her shoulder tightens like to stop her. And he knows the answer before she even says it but he asks anyway just to hear it. Whatever Sera says results in him standing but in the seconds between the tears and the question he stays seated.
"¿'stas bien?" he asks.
SerafíneHis hand tightens on her shoulder. There's tension in her body but it is a loose, drunken sort of tension, more liquid than solid, all tension lines and high voltage and wire. But she stops in place and the room has this empty echo to it because the room is so spare, so bare. There's nothing on the walls except the religious art in the living room, and not even that, not even the postcards from family, from parishioners, former and current, back whereever they came from, remembering the priest with the miracles, that adorn the fridge.
Sera nods a jerky little nod. It's not a lie: she is well. She's just well-and-sad and drunken and hurting for reasons that are both wholly opaque and entirely clear to her. But she reaches up to push the few tears that have fallen from her welling eyes off her cheeks with her right hand, which is wrapped into a fist around the cap of the water bottle (and the water bottle sticks out at this ridiculous angle) and she half turns around and looks down at him, her eyes shining, her nose red at the tip and a little bit splotchy. It's starting to run.
"I'm sorry about Eddie." She's looking down now, right into his eyes, this hooked little Mr. Potato Head-style frown softening the curve of her lower lip. Her god isn't his god. She mourns fucking everything. Remember who was sure they could save a widderslainte girl. Another hitch in her diaphragm as she drops her eyes from his, to the warped and worn hardwoods. "I don't think anyone's stony ground."
And she doesn't understand, Sera, why every seed can't grow.
PanThat they were able to save the widderslainte girl and what he thinks about that they haven't discussed at all. The fact that he has not Worked with them in the past and chooses to Work alone always has not yet caused friction. So far as fits into the story he told they are not in any of those scenarios for nothing has been eaten or withered or choked off. To call Father Echeverría's involvement with the Awakened of Denver fruitful does no one any favors.
He aided them, and he sought to protect them, but he cannot lead them because they do not worship the same god. They are not from the same tribe. Sometimes they don't even speak the same language. His skin bakes like bread in the summertime.
Her comfort has come in times of trouble for him though and Sera has not shied away from his blood or his weakness. That he asks nothing of her even when she offers apologies and offers of change says more of their age difference and her distance from him and his people than it does anything else.
But she doesn't understand and he doesn't ask her to. Scholars think parables exist to speak to those who already believe. They do nothing for those who question.
So Pan squeezes her shoulder and rises.
"I'm sure he'd appreciate that," he says. "Lemme get that couch set up for you, huh?"
Serafíne"I can do it," Sera returns, with a tight, brave little smile up at him. This time she doesn't find his gaze, isn't sure that she wants to find his gaze. There's an aching in her chest that she cannot quite impede or define and the room is an imperfect amalgam of walls and ceiling and floors. Which are not necessarily in their proper places. "I know where things are."
He has calls to return, after all. Someone to bury. A family to inform.
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