It's nearly full dark by the time they leave the café and the streets are only sparsely populated by now - after dark on a Sunday night. The rest of the world is washing up from a Sunday meal, drying dishes and stowing them away in the cabinets or the dishwasher, fixing lunches or pressing clothes, going over the minutes for the meeting tomorrow, or frantically trying to complete whatever they brought home and then put off all weekend long. Not that it matters to either of them: Sera knows what day of the week it is because she can just know things like that to the nth degree if she has the need and the desire, and because her iPhone tells her, and she's holding Hawksley's hand, her right in his left, and unearthing her iPhone from the back pocket of her cutoffs with the other as they hit the sidewalk, the dry hot blast of the summer's night like a body blow after the air conditioned bookstore.
Outside, she turns around, glances back through the storefront towards Grace, this narrow line between her brows as she considers the young woman, and now from a distance, wondering if they shouldn't've done something more, acknowledged her change in some way. Fucking invited her home, opening the mirror to the otherside. Hey, here down the rabbit hole.
Some passages Sera thinks, should be marked, though she does not know why and she does not know how and she does not know precisely how to translate that thought into words, she just feels it, rather skewered between worry and wonder.
So she's caught between three or four things, this quick and quiet survey of the street as they walk outside, the places where it is shadowed and the places where the shadows pool and the places where it is bright and lights reflect off the storefronts in gleaming array, the strangers, so fucking many strangers, all marooned in their human skin, idling or hurrying by, the mysteries of all these lives and frames and views she can never inhabit.
Which makes her inhale, deeply, even as she drops her attention to her phone and thumbs through a handful of texts to see if a call has been returned. In the next moment, she thumbs the thing off and returns it to her hip pocket, because the bag she has slung across her body tonight is too small even for the phone.
"You think she's gonna be okay?" in profile, looking back again as they start down the street. A note of concern there lingers between her brows, though it is not particularly deep. But if she thinks too longer about it, she will think about the last newly awakened mage she knew and breathing in the ashes - "Grace seemed like she had a pretty fucking good handle on what was going on. But still, feels weird to be like, hey, you just woke up. See ya, text me sometime. You know?"
- so she doesn't think about it. Not really, she watches Grace from every angle she can until Grace is out of view, and she remembers Leah in the muscle of her heart, and she bumps her shoulder against Hawksley, grateful for his presence, too, and in between she's humming Beethoven beneath her breath without thinking about it. These spare little notes.
"Maybe I'll throw a party for her."
The Ninth Symphony.
The Ode to Joy.
HawksleyFull dark and raining. The rain swept up suddenly while they were still talking to Grace, the sky going orangeish with sunset and dim from clouds before a torrential downpour started wetting the streets and the walls and the people. No one cares. It's warm enough to walk in in the rain and not get a chill; it's warm enough that when Hawksley walks out into the rain he smiles and tips his head back and lets it rain down on his face. By the time Hawksley starts driving the rain will be sputtering out, fading into night completely. For now, though, he feels Sera's hand in his hand and something about the rain makes him close that hand around hers a little closer, a little warmer.
Sera glances back towards Mutiny, but she doesn't say anything about Grace yet, not yet. He feels her breathe at his side, walking in the rain with her down the sidewalk, past Sweet Action closing its garage-front door and across the street from Fancy Tiger and the Goodwill (the one as big as a department store where the hipsters go, not the little one to the east where the Cherry Creek folk take their never-worn designer castoffs), past the Hornet, around the corner to the parking lot where Hawksley stowed his goddamn anniversary-edition Porsche.
She asks him if Grace is gonna be okay. "God, I hope not," he says, with effervescent delight and hopefulness and a little too much eagerness for the sheer chaos and madness that Awakening can bring. He beams at Sera, but when he looks at her he sees she's serious, she's concerned, and he stops smiling like a madcap criminal. His hand squeezes hers. "No one has taught her anything yet. No one has told her what she can't do. No one has gotten into her head yet and even told her the names for things she hasn't had a chance to discover yet."
He leans down, which -- in today's heels for Sera -- isn't as hard as it would be if she were in her boots, and he rubs his brow against her temple, animalistic but brief. "Which is all very dangerous for her. But:"
of course But
"-- no one Awakened her. No one plucked her out of work or church or academia or the nightclub because they saw her potential and worked to nurture it and guide it." This is how things have gone in the past. This is how most traditions have increased their numbers, by active recruitment, by seeking out those who stir in their slumber and gently waking them, drawing them out of the dream. "It means that she reached this, apparently spontaneously, through her own insight and will. And that's already amazing."
He presses a button, and the Porsche blinks and beeps a hello to them. Hawksley walks with Sera around towards the passenger side as he continues: "She wasn't defensive or suspicious, but did you notice -- she didn't accept anything we said without a moment to think it over. She was deciding, for herself, whether or not what we said made sense according to the laws of her own mind and soul." He can't help but smile, thinking of that. His hand reaches over to open the door, because he's a fucking gentleman occasionally, particularly when he's not paying attention. "I think she'll make mistakes and take some bruises for it and learn some harsh lessons, and I think she will be exhilirated and frustrated and amazed by it all. Which isn't really 'okay', but it's also... y'know. Okay."
But that is not, and he knows this, exactly what is bothering Sera. So he smiles, folding his arms over the top of the open Porsche door. That is, if Sera has let go of his hand to get in the car.
"We should throw her a party. Invite everyone, introduce her to everyone, let her see how colorful and different and messed up and weird we all are. Collins said he found a house and is expediting its purchase as we speak. I could totally host a party for Grace. I mean, fuck: did you see those eyes she had? Little universes in those eyes."
SerafíneFull dark and raining. Sera feels the first kiss of it on her shoulders and the crown of her head, and she too lifts her face to the sky. Watching the silver nitrate rush of half-illuminated raindrops as they pelt from the dim shadows of the dusk-wrapped clouds overhead. Not so long, it should be noted, as Hawksley. But long enough that the matte darkness of her eyemake-up goes watercolor soft and begins to melt into the softness of charcoal and a few tracks of rain coalesce on either cheek, trailing down like soot-stained tears. Sera can feel the make-up dissolving a bit - not the mascara, thank god: a girl who cries as easily as Serafíne knows to invest in industrial strength waterproof mascara.
Her iPhone is tucked away quickly, before more than a few drops have spattered on the screen, and while they walk she shakes out the left sleeve of her wrinkled, oversized plaid shirt (which she leaves unbuttoned, of course,) tucks the cuff over her hand and wipes some of the rain and some of the running shadow and liner from her cheeks. Squeezes his hand as they walk, and breathes in even deeper as they pass Sweet Action - that bright, crisp sugar-and-cream scent that seems folded into the air in ice cream stores, oh it makes her mouth water, makes her gaze come a little unstuck from whatever remains to be seen of grace and instead snag on the movement of that garage door rattling closed.
And she's listening to Hawksley, gaze eyes cutting back up to his when he says God I hope not, like that, which earns him this bright but silent huff of a breath from the back of her throat and another shoulder-bump when his eyes find her own and his expression changes.
Her eyes close, she leans into the pressure of his brow against her temple because of course she does. Because that is what she does, and when she opens her eyes she is no longer looking at him but aslant, at the edge of the sidewalk, where the concrete curb cuts down to dark asphalt, where the gutters are awash with runoff from the sudden storm, which swims with amber light, and she's holding the sensation of that gesture inside the frame of her body, right? Savoring it. Letting the warmth of it dissolve in the back of her throat.
And she's smiling in that moment, face turned away from him, a private curve to her cheek.
The way it moves, the street and the sidewalk, with her and around her and when she's not there: the pointillism of the universe and the fact that she can feel both the borders of things and how very porous they are even now: inside her body, a little light-headed from hunger but otherwise so-very-clear, attending both to the street, and to the warmth of his hand in hers, and his words in top-down layers, one-two-three, while she remembers with her throat and her tongue, a song-in-a-song-in-a-song.
By the time they reach the Porsche, the darker edge of Sera's concern has receded from her expression and she's nodding in time to his points, even when her attention is on the sidewalk rather than his profile. Sometimes she squeezes his hand back: when he notes that Grace was deciding for herself. When he says that she'll be exhilarated, frustrated, amazed by it fucking all, and that she'll be - not 'okay,' but Okay.
"Yeah," Sera says then, but the way she says it is Yeah, really. Gives the word meaning, intention, some sort of punctuate depth that does not usually attend the casual utterance. He has the door to the Porsche open by then and she does let go of his hand to climb into the passenger's seat, resettling her little silver-mesh bag from the back of her left hip to her flank as she goes, but not before bending down and pressing first the bridge of her nose, then - quite briefly - her mouth to the shoulder-seam of his t-shirt. Her breath is warm as she pulls back, brows rising, a silent laugh written into both her mouth and her shoulders as she folds herself in."I don't think I could teach her anything, though. When she got into the meat of it, I hardly understood a word she said. " Her voice is wry, looking up at him as he leans over the edge of the car and she's reaching up to pull her seatbelt across her body. And hey: she does know how to manage that, sober. "But yeah, she did have amazing eyes. Like - those pictures you see, of the earth from space, the seas all swimming blue and melting into kaleidescope of colors you can't quite name, because it's more about the way they fracture into each other and fold themselves around again, than about what they are at the moment."So yeah, a party. That'd be awesome. You supply the books, I've got the shrooms."Gives him this little glance up, this peaked look as she reaches out to pull the door closed behind her, then watches him as he circles the car, reaching up to slide her fingers through the loose, damp mass of her hair, peeling it back from the part as if she might somehow restore it to order with no more than a finger-comb.
--
"What about you?" This, after he has climbed into the driver's seat, her eyes on his profile. "Was it like that for you, plucked out your heavyweight men's eight on the Thames during the easter Boat Races and slowly initiated into the secrets of Diagon Alley and the ways of House Ravenclaw?
"Or was it just - fucking Eureka?"
HawksleyIn the handful of times Hawksley has been around Sera -- and it really is only a handful, though often it feels as though he's known her for years, and years upon years -- he has been kissed on his clavicle or shoulder or in that area countless times. He thinks on that when she does it this time, and it makes him smile, his head bowed a bit to look at her profile. The smile is fond. So is the man.
Hawksley cocks a half-smile when she says he can supply the books. "Oh, I think I can manage a bit more than that." Because it'll be a party. Grace can study after. If she can fight past the hangover. Because by his honor, there will be a hangover the likes of which none of the gods have ever seen. Poor Grace. Maybe he'll see if there are any Dreamspeakers around who can wake up the spirits inside Sera's shrooms and then they can really get going.
The door is shut and the other one is open and then shut and Hawksley is filling up the interior of the Porsche with his liveliness and brightness and warmth, damp shoulders and hair notwithstanding. This time he doesn't have to buckle her in, but unless her hands were shaking or she looked about to swoon from the fast, he hadn't thought he'd need to. She's sober tonight. The Porsche starts to roll out of the parking lot and through the rain, which is already starting to abate when a moment ago it seemed like another deluge of mythological proportions.
Not knowing where he's going, Hawksley decides to just drive south. They pass Mutiny again on the left, but Grace has left by then. No sign of purple inside. Sera asks him about how it started for him -- not the Awakening, really, but the rest. He glances over at her, lifting a brow. The corner of his mouth curves in a smirking smile, thoughtful, as his eyes go forward again.
"I told you I always dreamt of flying. I think the potential was there long before I knew what sort of potential it was," which is likely true. With a breath, he leans back in his seat, one hand on the wheel, driving lazily as the rain slows to stopping, even if the sun isn't going to come back for some time still. Hours and hours. "My first year at Oxford, I went to a Christmas party. It was really just to make an appearance with some colleagues of my father's at his behest, but there were a few professors there, some other luminaries from academia, international finance, general high society -- all that bullshit. Very black-tie, almost no one under forty anywhere to be seen."
He shrugs. It brings to mind an eagle lifting its wings a bit without fully unfolding them, resettling with a flutter. "A gentleman struck up a conversation with me, and wouldn't really leave me alone. At first I thought he was trying to fuck me, but then we got talking and -- to be honest, I don't remember a lot of that conversation. I wasn't that drunk, even, I just... don't remember the details. Just the feeling of it. When he left, the party was still going on, but it felt like we must have talked all night. I almost remember the wood in the fireplace burning down to embers, but it was still going strong when I kinda... snapped out of it."
The memory is not the oldest in his mind, but it is a good six or seven years. He breathes in deep, remembering, holding that memory in his lungs and chest, then exhales. "He introduced me to his wife." A smirk. "He introduced her as Nefertiti, which sounds really lame, but... she fucking looked like her. Like my heart did a somersault when she came over and gave me her hand. I nearly fell on my knees to kiss it before I caught myself."
And he shakes his head, shakes the memory out. He speaks of that remembrance and the words are potent, but the tone is not enraptured or nostalgic or even... fond. The memory is bright and warm and full of color, but the memories since then make all that color taste of ash.
"They -- mostly she -- taught me. It started with an invitation to come borrow some texts from their library, but every time I went to their house I ended up staying for hours, sometimes the night. I'd read or we'd talk, sometimes all three of us, sometimes just Nefertiti and I. She was more powerful than he was. I could feel it then, too, even though I didn't know what it was or what it meant. After a while, they started letting me in on things. When I was prepared for it, when my disbelief was pretty well suspended, they showed me some of what they could do. I wasn't really their Consor, because by then Nefertiti had already chosen me as her apprentice. They were teaching me. Theory, history, all that. I couldn't do any of it on my own.
"I was alone when I Awoke, though," he says, his eyes simultaneously on the road and far, far away. "Studying in their library, where I must have been for a full day and night at that point. I'd barely eaten but I didn't feel hungry. My head felt so full that I could almost... physically feel it expanding. All words and names and runes and numbers and symbols, things I'd been reading and studying and memorizing all that time. I thought my head was going to explode."
He huffs a little laugh. "And then it kinda did.
"I'm not sure how to explain how that felt, right before it happened. I thought I was going to die. Like, actually die from trying to contain so much information and all the meaning within that information. It was like my skin was trying to hold in the universe. I could hear my heartbeat like it was a thing outside of me, booming, like the voice of a god or an executioner's drum or... the beating of wings." Here Hawksley breathes in. He hasn't spoken of this in such a long time. Even remembering it makes his skin feel hot, makes his heartbeat feel close to the surface, makes his consciousness expand.
"Come to think of it, as intense as that was, I wasn't even afraid of dying. Or going insane. I was afraid that if I stopped trying to hold it all, I'd lose it forever. I was afraid I'd never be able to feel that again, understand any of it the way I felt I was close to. Scariest thing I've ever done in my life was deciding to let go. But I did, and all of those words and names and symbols I had filled myself with became... transformed into something else. Light. Sound. Reality. I didn't die, but more importantly: I didn't lose it. I... stepped into it. And I wouldn't say that I became a part of it, because I think that what really happened was that I dissolved that illusory boundary between what I think of as 'myself' and the universe. It was never really there."
Hawksley blinks several times, but it is like a dreamer waking. He breathes in, turns his head, looks around at her, sees her, seems shocked to see things like the car, like her body, like the world around them. Of course he is.
"I'm reasonably sure I turned off gravity in their library for a while during that, too. Where are we going?"
SerafíneHe's driving lazily south and the Mutiny storefront is the last piece of Denver Sera sees for a good line time. Her gaze tracks past his profile, yes, looking through the bright windows for that hint of purple. But Grace, indeed, is gone. Then she's leaning back into the bucket seats, shifting her weight onto her left hip, knees curving up to make contact with the center console, so that she can watch him as he unfolds the story, watch him framed against the street beyond, one hand on the wheel. She hardly notices his hands, though, just his face - the glittering reflection of headlights on his eyes, the superficial gleam from the dashboard instruments, the way the cut of that smirk wraps itself into the next expression, tasting both the warmth and potency of his memories, and something else too that she cannot quite name.
Strange how she finds herself breathing in time with him, without thought and without reservation. She can smell the wood burning in the fireplace, the murmur of voices, the faceless crowd of important half-strangers, hear the ripple of noise around the room, the way it advanced and receded, that sense of dislocation, of broken time.
Her mouth seams around the next memory her shares, still. And she holds it like a penny on her tongue.
--
He was alone when he Awoke.
Here that rhythmic convergence ends. Sera is no longer matching him breath for breath, simply because she is no longer breathing. Her breath is caught in her throat and in her lungs and she holds it in the way she holds in a lungful of smoke when she's getting high, that same intentional entrapment, see, as she allows the memories - his memories - to steep inside her until her lungs are aching. Aching and she finally exhales but only because she has to.
There are places she wants to kiss him then: once each on either temple, softly enough that she could taste his pulse, and then in the center of his forehead. Ajna,/i>, the third eye, though she never calls it by either name she knows it still, knows it the way she knows all such things: with her body as much as, or even more than, her mind. And then, once each on the hard planes of his scapulae, right and then left, with her teeth scraping against bone, where the delicate structure of his wings would erupt just so. Then, more softly between them, in the midpoint of his dorsal spine.
But they are in a car and she may be curved a bit toward him but he's both wrapped in memory and he's driving, south and she's strapped in with the seatbelt and he has no idea where he's going and she has not thought to tell him. The city is moving past, not fast, not yet, but dark and unfocused and live and bright all around them in that washed-clean way it is after a sudden summer storm. The windshield wipers are off, that rhythm removed, but she does not remember when he turned them off and perhaps he does not remember the instinctive reach for them. And Sera, she's fasting and so she feels the urge at the base of her spine, at the root of her tongue, and she breathes it in and she swallows it and she pulls it back into herself and allows it to settle like sediment through her skin, but she can still taste the urge, dark and sweet and resonant in the back of her throat.
--
"Oh, my fuck," her chagrin is immediate and palpable when he asks her where they're going, and there's this sense that she's just waking up too, see: from the spell of his story, her dark eyes so affixed to his profile, so attendant to the rhythm of his voice. Oh, and Hawksley is about to discover how terrible Serafíne is with driving directions, primarily because she drives so very rarely. Because she sees the world from the passenger's seat or the back of a cab or not even that, because she spends so much of her time fucked up that she leaves things like direction and navigation to everyone else in her life.
And they oblige her. Of course they do.
And, she just assumed that he already knew where he was going. For Christ's sake, he has that air about him, doesn't he? "Uh, you go like you're going out to Red Rocks, right? And then it's south, you go through this town and then there's this road and then this turn-off or whatever? It's not hard, we'll find it."
Now her attention sweeps forward, the approaching intersection, the flare of headlights across the windshield. Briefly quiet as he reorients himself, as he figures out where they are and where they're going.
"You're amazing, you know that, right?" Sera's attention is mostly forward, on the road, and when she says this she says it in such a conversational way, without looking at him now, with that hint of chagrin still lingering in her voice.
"And you have no idea how much I want to kiss you right now." Her wry huff of laughter cannot resolve the tension of that unrealized want, merely acknowledges it as she continues, rather more quietly, as she finally glances back at him, finds his profile again with the dark sweep of her eyes. "Thank you for sharing that with me."
Serafíne[Note: I'm good with going with the first roll? But I did the second +1 difficulty just in case. :)Denver @ 6:20PM
Serafíne, welcome to oublietteSerafíne @ 6:21PMPrivate Message to Nobody
Per + Awareness-as-empathy for the witnessing!Roll: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 4, 10) ( success x 1 ) VALIDSerafíne @ 6:22PMPrivate Message to Nobody
Sera's looking harder than that? +1 difficultyRoll: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 ) VALIDNobody @ 6:22PMPrivate Message to Serafíne
[I SEE IT. - love, Jess] ]
Serafínefixed?
Hawksley[Hawksley's talk of Nefertiti -- a name he uses exclusively in his story even though he knew then and knows now it's not her given nor her craft name -- is complicated. She was vastly important to him, though he doesn't speak of her with emotions like longing, desire, or fondness. When he mentions his heart somersaulting, it is only dimly similar to the way he spoke of Sera making his heart pound; the tone there, what can be read of it, sounds more like when he met Nefertiti, he recognized her. And that recognition compelled respect in him, or maybe even awe.
Then he grew up. Then he Awoke. And whatever else happened between he and his mentor -- for it's obvious that she, far more than her husband, was the one who chose Hawksley and trained Hawksley -- that relationship did not end well. It doesn't pain him, and he isn't bitter about it -- partly because he remembers so keenly the wonder of that moment and that recognitoion. It's a little bit more like frustration: at his younger self in awe of someone who might not have deserved it, at the end of a relationship with someone who at very least he respected, who deserved some of that respect, at the way it must have ended
HawksleyHere is another thing Hawksley can do, if he likes: he can find his way when he's lost. If he's been there before, if he knows the taste or the signature of a person or a place or even the name, he can find his way. If he casts an even wider net, if he opens his mind to watch the weave and weft of magic in the air he can find leylines, he can find knots, he can find nodes. If he needs to, it is no great feat, and it is a good skill to have. If one doesn't have someone riding shotgun who can just give you directions. Right now, he's going to trust Sera to give him directions, though those directions are currently not very helpful, and if they get lost they get lost and getting lost is no awful fate, because of the things you find and the way you can be found if you are not afraid to get lost.
So: he laughs softly at her chagrin and he grins at her words and then he just smiles, sort of fond and patient and all those things, and he nods. "We'll get there," he says, which is both an echo and an addition to her we'll find it. And he goes, like he's going to Red Rocks, only they're not. He knows where he's going. He knows he'll get there. Even if he doesn't always know what lies between Now and Then, Here and There.
Partly because he knows that Then is also Now, and There is also Here.
--
you're amazingyou know thatright?
Hawksley is smiling at the road ahead of him. He smiles like the answer is yes, is obviously yes, has she seen him? Has she met him, talked to him? He's a fucking miracle. He knows it. The only thing that makes him tolerable is that he knows that she is, too. And so is Sid, and so is Jim and Pan and Patience and back there, Grace, she's a miracle. None of them could ever ascend past the first rank in any sphere and they'd already be able to see the world in a new way, in a true way, in a way so few people ever get to and that's fucking amazing, isn't it?
Oh, he knows. And he smiles at the road, but he's smiling at Sera because Sera is the road and is on the road and they are both moving at exactly the same speed through the same space and sharing thoughts through nothing more artful than sounds they're producing with air and bits of muscle and these things, too,
are miracles. Are amazing.
But he has no idea how much she wants to kiss him. Hawksley laughs, and utters quietly: "Don't I?" so maybe he does or maybe he's just teasing her or something. She thanks him, and after a few more rolls of the tires swiftly along the asphalt, he looks over at her.
"Sera..."
the name she told him to use, though far from the only one she's given him,
"what are you fasting for?" This said, specifically, as though he knows there is an exchange in it. A fast is a sacrifice. You fast for a vision, you fast for forgiveness, you fast for focus, you fast for many things in many different cultures, but it is, at the heart, a sacrifice. He is looking at her when he asks, and looking away a moment later because he's driving, of course, saying:
"If you don't want to tell me or can't tell me I won't fault you for it, but... it just... doesn't quite... seem like... you."
A side-cut glance this time. He's choosing his words slowly and carefully, his brows tugging together, but that last one is full, is resonant, knows itself.
SerafíneOh,
she has settled into the rhythm of the car, the tires on the street below. The low profile and the sweep of the headlights, the gleam of the dashboard lights, her head lolling back, strands of her long hair curling like snakes around the headrest and sometimes she watches the road and sometimes she watches him and somethings her chin rises and she's looking up through the moonroof, which is closed because of the rain but she has this distinct and assured sensation of the drift of the night wind on her face which comes to her in this disconnected but still resonant fragment, one piece laid over the other in a way that makes her breathe in deeply and hold the air in her lungs so that when Hawksley, who is a miracle and knows it, who would be fucking insufferable if he weren't so keenly aware of all the other miracles surrounding him, each and every one, says Don't I? there's a beat of silence and then: a lungful of laughter.
First open-mouthed, then caught between her teeth.
--
Sera hums a note of quiet agreement when Hawksley remarks that fasting doesn't quite seem like her. The noise is gleaming and amber and low in her throat. It doesn't seem like her. It doesn't feel like her. It makes her eyeballs ache and her chest feel constricted when she thinks about it for too long, and she's not sure if it will be enough, except -
- when she inhales and feels her want like a physical thing inside her, the knot of it beneath her solar plexus, all potent, all potential, just waiting to be transformed.
"It's for the ritual?" A small shrug, here, mostly contained in the frame of her body, wrapped up in the luxurious curve of the Porsche's seats. "It was mostly Jim's idea, but that's how we're going to find Byron.
"Without taking fucking magic PCP.
"You're right," thoughtful, humming around the words. "It's not really me. I'm not even sure if I'll be able to get there, right?
"But I've seen Jim do it before. Felt the wards he made then? They were - " and her voice is rich with emotion, though a bit withdrawn, pulled back into memory. " - they were really powerful. Kept us safe from the Techs.
"And the Fallen.
"He just purged, man. He took all his want and all his need and used that to - I can't really describe it, because we were on the inside, right? They like, pulled on other people's desires, just made them give in a little bit more in all these subtle ways to their urges to keep us hidden, unnoticed.
"On some level, I wanna see if I can tap that, too. I mean, this is really more his jam than mine? I wouldn't be able to find Byron on my own, I don't have that sort of skill? That kind of reach? Jim and me, we've Worked together a few times before though so, I can usually find him. His wavelength, so." By the time she's done, Sera's looking away from Hawksley, out the passenger's window. A little bit abashed, maybe, rather than bashful. Because she never talks about these things, not really. She just does them; feels them; knows them. "I figure if I'm going to be able to do it, right? Tap into the urge rather than the sensation, it'll be with him.
"Even if it works though, I won't be starting a fucking ashram. God. This sucks."
HawksleyIt scrapes her thin. That's what he thought when he saw her in Mutiny, like her insides were being scraped like leather, thinning her out to transparency. She didn't look okay when they went to Lydia's, and now he knows why she had that disgusting smoothie with it's nutritive-but-just-barely kale and seaweed blended with what he guesses was distilled death. Now he knows why, and he understands.
He does. He understands the theories surrounding ritualized purification and the many forms it takes, whether that be fasting or self-denial or self-flagellation or a soak in salted holy waters of some far-off land. He understands the power of waiting for something you want, forestalling satisfaction of some desire. He also understands waiting, and timing, and doing things because the time feels right and the moment is right and not because you just want to do it right then, like Augustus Gloop faced with a chocolate river. Hawksley is not so much as an apprentice of Time. He just has a well-oiled internal clock. And it should go without saying, given the salt circle on his floor or the way he so readily handed Sera his knife, that he knows the importance of focus, of ritual.
She'll try anything twice. He hasn't heard her say that. Maybe he just thinks it, right then.
It was mostly Jim's idea, which makes Hawksley's eyebrows pop a little bit, but the surprise is short-lived. He just wouldn't have thought self-deprivation would be up Jim's alley. Or any Cultist's. He glances at her when she says that this is how they're going to find Byron without taking the PCP, but the meaning of that glance will have to wait. She admits that it isn't really her, she's not sure it'll work for her. She talks about magic almost like one speaks of an orgasm, and Hawksley notices that but understands it: he has seen the way she comes.
He thinks of that. He loses a few of her words, comes back around the time she's talking about the way Jim's wards felt. How powerful they were. His mouth quirks at the corner, a side-smirk that fades. Kept them safe from the Techs and the Fallen. Hawklsey blinks, but his hand doesn't go white-knuckled on the steering wheel and he doesn't flash his eyes over to her in shock, in panic. Just a breath in, a relaxing of his shoulders as the breath goes out again. He keeps driving, south, like he's going to Red Rocks but not. He thinks he knows the town she mentioned before, that they're going to pass through.
But he smiles. At I wanna see if I can tap that, too.
"I think you could do it on your own," he says, but that's neither a discouragement nor a nudge. Just the truth of it, to which he adds: "But granted, I have a pretty robust anti-mentorship bias. I think we turn here," he adds, and takes the exit, and it will either take them to the chantry or it will take them where they need to be, and maybe that will be the chantry and maybe it won't, but
that isn't what matters to him right now.
He looks over at her, and doesn't try to hide the sympathy, even if it's a bit wry. "So how do you know what desires to suppress? Just the traditional Sleeper vices -- sex, drugs, booze? Or anything you want: music, art, laughter, a good long hug? Or anything and everything, even stuff you need -- like a decent meal, a solid stretch of sleep? What goes and what stays?"
Serafíne"I like working with Jim," Sera returns, this neat little shrug of her shoulders in response. " - like, even the first time, it was fucked up, but it was so seamless, you know? We just clicked into place, and that connection - it helped. And then the things we saw - I was really glad he was there.
"I don't think he thinks of it, really, as a mentorship." The word itself feels alien in Sera's mouth; there's an ironic undertone that cuts into academic formality of the word, or perhaps merely highlights how stange it sounds - coming from or allied to a creature like her. "I mean, that shit kind of freaks him out?
"But," and she's glancing again, this time for good reason, squinting at the changing scenery, looking for the landmarks that will lead them on to the chantry proper. "maybe I do? Oh, turn here! That house with the mailbox that looks like a fucking elephant, what the fuck."
--
"Mostly," she catches his gaze when he shoots her that look full of wry sympathy. There's something quickened about her own expression, and as hollowed out as she looks in brighter lighting, the shadows of the car soften those harsher angles. " - sex, drugs and booze. The Sleeper vices," a wry grin, her voice warming around the words. "Christ, I couldn't give up music or art or laughter. This is fucking bad enough, but if I had to turn around every canvas in the house or stop hearing notes or stop noodling around on the fucking guitar or chase sounds out of my head I would go fucking batshit.
"Wow." Back to the window, her gaze shunting both aslant and down, watching the running movement of the shoulder, the solid white line framing in the road as it slides past. "I hadn't even thought about that. That you might give up all that shit? Or how you make the choice?
"I am doing this fucking juice fast, and I was going to do like just water for the last day before we scry? I don't even know how I made that decision, it just seemed like right set of restrictions, like, stripping away excess or something?" It is wholly clear that she's working her way through the intention behind the fast, the strictures, the limits, the boundaries for the first time since she started it. "So you come back into your skin and you can live inside it for a little while?
"So yeah, I think hugs are pretty okay. Laughter and sleep, no way I could live without those and stay remotely sane." Here, Sera huffs a brief, ironic laugh. "The longer this goes on, though, the more dangerous the fucking hugs become.
"Poor Sid. The other night? She was all trying to comfort me or whatever and I almost started making out with her." The spread of a quick, engaging grin, "That would've freaked her the fuck out, I'm sure."
Hawksley"Whatever works," is what Hawksley says, of mentorship or non-mentorship mentoring or whatever one might call it. And he means it: whatever works, works. Look at him with his fucking salt and his knife, like he thinks he's a Verbena or something. And he turns, and the conversation rolls on well enough, as he takes this road, then another, until he's driving down one that's rather out of the way, distant from the main thoroughfares, being told to look for an elephant mailbox.
Hawksley can be, at times, a good listener. He's not so good at turning off his opinions or listening without bias, but at least he knows that. He can, however, listen without interrupting. He listens as she realizes she didn't even think of it: what you give up. How you choose. Stripping away excess makes him almost glance at her, his eyes nearly cut, but he doesn't. He's in the dark now, far from streetlights, looking for that goddamn elephant mailbox.
His jaw is a little set as the car starts slowing down, because he thinks he sees it. But this is only around the point where she's saying that the longer this goes on, the more dangerous hugs are to... whatever it is she's doing. It's before she talks about Sid. He laughs a little at the idea of Sera going from comfort to making out, a huff of air from his lungs. "Why would that have --"
because he doesn't know how shy Sid is. Because he sort of thinks that if Sid is into anyone she's most likely more into women and that's just a vibe he gets from her. Because, perhaps, he can't imagine Sera kissing you being something that would freak anyone out, or he just thinks it would be silly to be freaked out by it, or something. But his words cut off, because he sees
an elephant mailbox.
Hawksley slows the car to a stop, lets it idle, and looks at Sera for confirmation.
SerafíneWhy would that have -
but, yeah. He's cut off before he finishes the question and there's laughter in Sera's voice which is the sort that attends to the phrase: are you serious? Because he does not know how shy Sid is and Sera, oh Sera knows nothing but. How painful that shyness is;
how deep;
and little else: just that someone hurt her once.
But he's cut off and there's the turn and - "Yeah, here, turn right?" - in the darkness, Sera lifts her chin in the vague direction of the turn-off. The drive is still paved but narrow and one-lane, and it peels away from the main road in a lonely and meandering fashion through the sparse countryside. Past the house with the stupid fucking elephant mailbox, curving away from the neighbors towards a sparse copse of trees and beyond.
Far enough away from town that more of the stars are visible through the windshield and Sera looks up, leaning forward, searching for them.
"So there's a girl named Shoshannah that lives out here. I thought she was Pan's apprentice for the longest fucking time, man. 'Cos he was always telling her to eat a fucking sandwich or whatever, but I think he was just giving her a place to stay at the rectory.
"And Justin's here sometimes, too? But not all the time like Shoshannah. Other people come and go, mostly. Jim's been staying out here alot lately, but he doesn't really live here.
"There's a big house, a bunch of land. And a hot spring, right behind the house. That's where the fucking node is. It's owned by this woman named Annie, but she doesn't live here anymore.
"Her brother - Apollo - and his cabal used to ward it," and her voice, of course, changes, shifts, becomes a little more thoughtful, perhaps a little more solemn - there's a certain softness to the undertone of her voice that dovetails with the ordinary joints of memory and other mutable things that have come and gone - "I can tell you about them sometime, if you want."
All this talk: but Sera is also quiet, and the drive is not, after all, so very long, and he is piloting a fucking Porsche, so the lights of the home eventually come into view, cradled in the curve of a hill that rises beyond, more heavily forested than many around here. Maybe it's the node that gives rise to that excess life. Maybe it is some peculiarity of wind and weather.
HawksleyWere the chantry no more than a house, a large house with some land, Hawksley would be... well. Disappointed in it. A fucking house. How quaint. Let's build a house as a chantry and put a wee mailbox outside of it and really, he doesn't think he's much of a Hermetic but oh how thrown he would be, how appalled, how horrified.
Except one of the reasons he doesn't think he's much of a Hermetic, at least not the Hermetics he's known himself, is that there is always more under the surface. More to the redhaired woman with the bad vision and the intriguing tattoo he hasn't quite gotten a look at yet. More to that priest, though none of it has been hinted at yet. More to Sera than torn fishnets and a guitar and sex and drugs. More to this fast than self-deprivation or trying to see things the way Jim sometimes sees them, more to finding Byron than just tracking him down to hurt him back the way he's hurt other people. There is always more.
More to know. More to learn. More to crave and more to see, more to long for and more to grieve. More to achieve, because he can't yet fly, and he can't yet rise up to the sky and look around him and beneath him and see it all, see all of them,
and understand.
Hawksley can feel it. Didn't he find this place? Didn't he get here with the barest of directions while distracted by conversation? He felt its pull. And he feels it now, humming under all that surface of crafstman architecture and twenty-first century opulence that thinks itself middle class. So when Hawksley is there, the Porsche turned into the driveway and the engine turned off, he closes his eyes. Sera's voice fills his mind, because the car is dark and the world is dark right now and everything is dark when he closes his eyes.
"I know Shoshannah," he murmurs, without opening those eyes. A hot spring, and Annie, who is gone. Apollo, her brother, and his cabal who used-to. Used to ward, used to use. Used to be. Hawksley can taste the death in the words the way he can taste the power in the air. He sits there, quite still, breathing in, breathing out, both silent.
His eyes open. He doesn't look at her. But he does speak. When he does, his words are heavy and full and they resonate in the small space of the car in the antechambers of ether, the inner circles of the node, the space around but not in. It's the voice Kelsey's heard, and that Sera heard when he was speaking to Lydia at times. It can be soft and it can plead and it can comfort but it is also thrumming with its own power, and knowledge of that power, which is greater. Hawksley, sometimes, takes his pitch from the song of the universe itself. The movement of stars, burning in the midst of cold nothingness. The answering roll of the deep earth, its own fire encased in stone.
"I want to kiss you."
So.
"I want to lay you out and make love to you."
He isn't choosing the phrase as a euphemism, a dodge, a fluttering avoidance of naughty words like fuck. He wouldn't. Hawksley, of all people, would use
exactly
the words he means.
"I don't know why taking the PCP even enters into the equation with finding Byron, especially if you might have known him once. Because if it was me, I'd find him through that connection, not through the drug. But that's me. And I don't like this ritual you're doing, or the way you're doing it, or the fact that it's Jim's thing and not yours and you talk about cutting out what's 'excess' but I don't think that food and ice cream and sex and drugs and alcohol are 'excess' to you at all. It sounds like it comes from a place that already believes those things are hindrances or obstacles and... for some people they are but I don't believe they are for you. Maybe not always. I just wonder if you think that with all that stripped away, you're something or someone different without them, or... I don't know."
He looks at her for the first time since he opened his eyes again. "It's your magic. Your ritual. I know there's got to be things I'm missing about it, and... that drives me nuts but if you're doing it, it means you chose it, and if you chose it, it means you will it, and if you will it, then so it is, and shall be, and was."
As though
she were a god.
Hawksley inhales, licks his lips, and holds his lower one in his mouth for a moment before letting it slide out again with an exhale. "I like listening to you think more about why you're doing what you're doing. I know sometimes... we have to go by feel. What you're describing sounds... so... wrong to me, for you. And not just because right now I want to kiss you until we can't breathe anymore."
A beat. He sweeps his hand through the air. "Okay maybe that's part of it, but that's not even most of it." An admission.
His brows furrow, his hand lowering again. "You should know that no matter what the answer to this question is, I'm not going to bring it up again. I think we have to try everything to see if it works, and you don't know yet if this is gonna work. So... I'm not trying to talk you out of it." I just want you to-- but he doesn't say that. "But... you're doing it now, and feeling it," he says, and as he's gone on he's sounded more and more human, more and more like just-Hawksley, a little less like something ancient, something timeless.
"Does it feel right to you?"
Serafíne
In those first few moments after he has pulled in the drive and turned off the engine, Hawksley's quiet. Eyes closed, feeling the thrum of promise, the ley lines underscoring the land, the pulse of power where the world goes thin and - and -
Beside him, Sera's talking, leaning forward into the constraint of the seatbelt to peer at the dark shadow of the house against the brighter sky, considering the lights in the windows and also: opening her senses, just feeling to see if she can sense which of them might be here, somewhere in the house or on its grounds. Somewhere in the dark woods bracing the shoulder of the rising slope behind the place, or the open and long neglected fields that frame in the secluded setting. She is also reaching for her seatbelt, unbuckling herself with a quick, gauging glance at his profile and reaching for the handle of the passenger's door in the same gesture but -
- his eyes are closed.
Her reach stills, mid-motion, index and middle finger curled lightly around the handle, her body slanted in that aspect of motion. There's a twist of query between her brows, a certain consideration, damp and dark, framing in her close-set eyes. Her mouth is open. That's how she breathes, tasting the mechanically cooled air. The metallic undertone that feels like a penny beneath her tongue.
Which he cannot see, but perhaps he can sense her attention, arrested on him, in those heartbeats of silence and stillness, as he's tasting the death in the air.
He tells her he wants to kiss her and she looks away so sharply that the movement is audible - the whisper of her hair against the houndstooth upholstery, or the subtle shift of her weight in the seat - and she breathes out this sharp, deep breath as if she had been punched in the solar plexus.
She can hear the power in his voice. Of course she can. More importantly, she can feel it. The spaces between the stars opening somewhere in her bones, in her marrow; the pressure of the expanding universe beneath her sternum. Leans her forehead against cool glass, her breath fogging the passenger's window. When he fells her that he wants to lay her out and make love to her, in that way, in that voice, she makes a quiet noise he has heard from her before: when he knelt down on the damp grass in the summer twilight, rolled down her lace stockings with such fucking care, and pressedher thighs
open.
And oh, she listens to him, sits up and looks back at him right between the words ice cream and sex and is still watching him, his profile, his mouth more than his eyes, with this slanting look, her face cheated towards him in three-quarters profile. Searching and searching and listening and searching, her own expression mostly withheld. Or perhaps simply: interstitial. Her eyes drop from his toward the dashboard, her attention sliding inward as that voice ebbs and he becomes more immediately himself and human and rooted-in-time. And now Sera catches soft curl of her lower lip between her incisors, worries it quietly as she thinks -
- or perhaps, simply as she listens now, to something inside her as coiled and chambered as the shell of a nautilus, looking forward with unseeing eyes.
"I think," this is how she breaks the silence, her voice quiet enough that she can feel the resonance of it in her body, the vibratory excursion in her throat. " - that you take me more seriously than anyone has," and there's a kind of wonder to her tone, this note of surprise like etched-glass, not precisely opaque, not quite revelatory. "in a very long time."
Now her eyes are on him again, but she's looking at him aslant, keeping her view of him in her periphery. Because some things one approaches only from an angle.
"It doesn't feel right." Admission and acknowledgment in the self-same frame. Sera takes a breath, and gives herself a little nod, as if she is reseating herself in her body once again. "But I do will it.
"I've come this far, I'm going to see it through. I have to know - I want to know - what it feels like to work like this." Her right hand comes up to cover her mouth, fingers splayed over her lips and jaw, thumb following the sharp sweep of her cheekbone. "How it feels to work like this, and if I can get there. Maybe it's not so much about denial or excess, as it is about finding that precise, absolute point where my need - my fucking desire - is so sharp, and so present, that it becomes briefly as transcendent as fulfillment.
"I don't know." Sera drops her hand, huffs out a half-voiced laugh, "Three quarters of the fucking time I have no idea what I'm doing.
"And honestly, I like it that.
"But you're, this isn't me and I can't go on like this." Wry and private, the curve of her mouth, "We're gonna do it soon."
--
"Oh, and Hawksley? When we're done, I'm going to come find you."
HawksleyThere is poetry trying to describe the power of word, there are hymns about the Word, there are impossibilities in trying to describe a sound with words, even the sound of the words themselves. Someone who has heard Sera sing might say this is how it sounds and he would be at a loss to try and understand, because he has never heard her sing himself. But if he had, he might say: yes. that is what it is like. Hawksley, though, would not try to describe the sound of her voice any more than his own. He has already admitted that he could never write poetry. But oh, by god, he can recite it.
It's because of belief. Not even necessarily in the words themselves but in their power. That whether they can evoke a sound unheard in someone's mind, the way they are formed and the way they are chosen and then given to the air and to another mind is itself magical, is one of the first great powers any mortal humans came up with. It is, like heat by friction and the illusion of money, accepted by the masses as law and reality, just as gravity is. It amazes him sometimes: one can look at little black marks on a page and weep over them because somehow they have meaning, but one cannot believe that such a potent thought could also pass mind to mind without a sound, without a visible mark. There is so little difference.
So: Hawksley believes sometimes, believes not just in the magic of the words but sometimes in the words themselves, and when he believes it and he feels it so utterly, the sound of the words wrapped in his voice take on that magic, take on that power. Even when he chooses a language she doesn't know, he speaks it as though he believes she will understand, somehow, some part of it. If nothing else, he believes -- perhaps even knows -- that she will feel it.
Like she is sensation, touch and sound and emotion, experimenting with a human form and an Awakened mind. For kicks.
Of course she feels it. If anyone would.
--
Sera makes a sound and Hawksley's mind floods as though a drug has just hit him. His eyes are closed, thank god, and god dammit, because if he could see her then he might
but because he can't see her then he can imagine
so perhaps that has something to do with him opening his eyes not so long after that sound leaves her throat.
--
His brow furrows when she says what she thinks. It's his first instinct to tell her that he's sure other people her take her plenty damn seriously, how could they not, but he catches himself. She isn't offering a complaint, and she isn't fishing for anything. He also understands matters of degree, and scale, and how being taken seriously at all is not the same thing as being taken more seriously by X than Y. He remembers himself, too: she is about his own age, if he is supposing correctly. She is at least of his own rank, if he's sensed her correctly, and he believes he has. She doesn't need him to rush to comfort her, especially when she isn't in need of comfort.
As far as he can tell. Which, let's be honest, is only so far. Hawksley lacks Sera's particular powers of perception, at least in terms of depth.
God, he wants to touch her mouth. She's talking and he's looking at her and he wants to run his thumb over her lower lip and trace it with his tongue. Hawksley closes his eyes in the middle of her sentence, refocuses, exhales.
A tight but sincere half-smile tugs at his mouth when she says it doesn't feel right, but she does will it. It makes him want her. It's the power in the words, the conviction, the self-trust, whatever you want to call it. It makes his want like a spirit between them, pressing on the air against Hawksley's flesh and, perhaps, also Sera's. He almost lets out a groan when she touches her own mouth, runs her thumb over her cheek, but that's madness, and so the groan catches in his throat and becomes just an exhale of air, a sigh that comes from deep in his chest. Jesus.
as transcendant as fulfillment
"That sounds more like it," he says quietly, with a drop of his jaw, a sort of nod, a softspoken resonating with those words. Not denial. Not stripping away anything. Building something else, and building it in a new way,
still searing and visceral and flavored like she is flavored, feeling as she feels. The anxiety, the concern, whatever you call it, has melted out of him upon hearing that. She wills it. He understands it now. And the push, the drive, the challenge: god, he gets that. And respects it. And because he is in his mid-twenties and because he is with her and because it is dark and he drove all this way and they are talking about the point where desire becomes so keen that you reach nirvana or go mad or maybe they're one and the same: it makes him want to drag her into his lap and eat her alive.
I'm going to come find you.
Hawksley is already staring at her, so to say that he looks at her says nothing at all. He doesn't exhale or sigh or groan at that. He is just looking at her, and for a moment it seems as though he has not heard her, but oh, he has, and he wonders if she knows that she's fucking making him hard just sitting there talking to him, but it's dark and he's a little more self-controlled than he lets on and so:
after a very long time in that stare, he closes his eyes, and he thumps his head on the headrest of his seat, and then he's unbuckling his seatbelt and grabbing the doorhandle and saying with rousing enthusiasm: "And we're getting OUT of the car,"
which he does.
SerafíneThe atmosphere in the car is so charged that Sera can almost feel the electrical impulses in her body; the firing synapses in her breath, the diffusion of oxygen through the blood vessels in her lungs. He's staring at her and she's watching him and they're young and she is so very familiar with her body, with the edge of her desire, so unashamed of them that denying herself feels as unnatural and nearly sinful as indulgence of any sort, of many sorts, would to a believer raised to asceticism and denial, taught that flesh should be mortified and reviled, all thoughts given over to whatever comes after this world.
And then: she can feel them. This is out she does magic - she feels it and it happens, and the world opens to her, and she's never managed this before without the spark of stimulation, without someone's mouth on her throat, without drawing her teeth down the line of a lover's jaw, without kissing someone breathless, but oh - for a moment she is so hungry for him that the world opens to her and she can hear, literally hear, the beating of his heart inside her ears, sense the brighter points in the web where smaller, less complex creatures quickly and pulse with some essential rhythm of the universe all around them. She can taste his arousal in the back of her throat.
And she knows, they are such miracles. Such fucking miracles she cannot begin to contain it all.
She doesn't think about how she wants him, Sera. Her mouth on his, her body over his, her hands twisting sharp through his hand. Just that she does, and the weight it makes in the back of her spine and the back of her throat and the ache of it between her thighs. And she might wonder that she can contain such things except: is never contains such things, she's open and exhaling all at once and it sounds like laughter right, because of the energy behind it, because of the forward fucking motion, but it is far more weighted than her laughter ever is, and has an undercurrent of misdirected energy to match his rousing pronouncement that they are getting OUT of the car and so -
see, Sera laughs, strange how bright if feels in her chest as she lets go of that sound and climbs out of the car into the quiet country night.
The chantry's quiet. No other cars in the driveway, and few other lights to be seen in the wide vista of the valley, the hill rising behind it, the dark shadows of the Rockies beyond, all sawtoothed and shadowed against late evening sky.
They meet in front of the car, and she thinks of the careless way she took his hand as they walked from the bookstore to his Porsche, and thinks now that perhaps she should not take his hand after all because then she might be tempted to more -
- except, she remembers too that she has a Will. And he also has a Will, and what is her ritual but this: the cultivation of desire. Nurturing the spark in the kindling so it is banked but still smokes and smolders.
Very deliberately, Sera holds out a hand - her left. Sharkscissors bisected by the ugly frame of her self-inflicted wound. And very deliberately she curves her palm around his palm, and interlaces her fingers with his fingers, just so.
"I don't know what to show you first," she's humming around the words, which are low and hoarse in her throat. Giving him a glancing blow of a look, her head aslant, her eyes gleaming in the starlight, so very conscious of every point of contact between their hands and also the pulse points of their wrists. And: so very conscious of all the many ways in which they are not touching.
"The hot spring or - no, wait. The library. Definitely the library.
"C'mon. Let me give you the grand tour."
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