Welcome home.

Serafíne

Morning the day after and Sera has been up and Working for twenty-four hours and there's an ache in her body and an ache in her bones and the grit of sleeplessness behind her eyes and the flare of those sirens and those lights and the ooh-waw ooh-waw of the ambulances rushing to the courtyard where the kids were found. Mass poisoning. Comatose. Traces of some sort of fucking poisoned PCP in their system. Sera and Jim watched from another vantage point Sera in a hoodie that she found in one of the fucking closets in that creepy flat where the creepy guy from her creepy past was being a total fucking creep and hoarding magic PCP charms with the hood pulled up over the crown of her golden head and her throat aching and her hand in Jim's, the whole time they watched. Listened, and felt, making sure the kids in their 'charge' all night were all found, accounted for, rescued. The big kid and the shrill girl and the rest and the others -

- not the ghosts, though.

The ghosts are gone, except from memory.

Sera and Jim fucking walked there. Maybe a few buses but - walked and then Sera walked Jim to the busstop that would take him to a route that might (after hours of travel) take him back to the chantry outside of town.

Then she kept walking. Hands in the pockets of the hoodie that wasn't hers, commandeered after one of the kids puked on her favorite Siouxsie Sioux t-shirt because the only thing else she's wearing is a black and red lace push-up bra, but it's Sera so the hoodie is more than half unzipped and she shouldn't be walking around like that in this or any other neighborhood and she's still sort of bleeding resonance and hasn't eaten anything solid in how fucking long and -

- there it is.

The Church, at the end of the block. Sera sends her senses out, seeking.

She's just checking to see if he's home.

Serafíne

Per + Awareness - are you there Pan?

Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 4, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 5 )

Pan

Every other time she has come by in the past three weeks he has not been here. He has been caught up at the border heading from Texas to Veracruz or he has been caught up at customs going from Veracruz to Texas and he was definitely held up coming back into the U.S. longer than he was held up going into Mexico. They didn't believe he was a citizen even traveling with a passport and they were more aggravated by the fact that he spoke fluent English and didn't get upset than they would have been if he were stammering and confused.

Suffice to say he was slightly late getting back. Rosa was more relieved to see him in one piece than she was upset at him.

The day is warm and the sun is bright and the children who attend daycare are outside playing to work up an appetite so they will nap after recess. The women who run the daycare during the summer have assistants this year where they have not in the past. When Padre Echeverría comes out to see how things are going the lead teacher comes over and is so grateful that he's back and that he's given her extra hands that she gives him a big hug and almost cries on him. Consuelo - Connie, 42, engaged to be married

Pan

And the chat is eating all of my posts and doesn't think anyone cares about Connie's parents being second-generation Mexican-Americans or that her Spanish is terrible. It's character building Jove get it together.

Any-fucking-way: by the time Sera rolls in she's calmed down and she and Padre Echeverría are standing in the shade shooting the shit. Sera can feel him from the street. He's got a Mind effect going so he can't feel how tired he actually is, so it won't affect anyone else.

Serafíne

WP

Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (7, 8) ( success x 2 )

Serafíne

She can feel him. It's warm and bright and the sun peels down from the sky and it hurts her eyes, gleams off the windshields of the cars lining the street, the gaudy ornament of some saint or other in his fucking shrine. Sera stops on the street down the block and just - feels him and wonders if it is an hallucination or a fever dream or some strange amalgam of both. Shakes herself half-way awake and feels the familiar flavor of his bright magic at work in the air, somewhere close but not visible until she climbs the steps from sidewalk to churchyard, slips her skinny ass through the small gate and circles around to the playground in the back.

Sera is wearing: cut-off jeans and fishnets and she's been wearing them not for a solid 30 plus hours and a bra and someone's second-hand heathered gray hoodie with the hood up and her hands slung in the kangaroo pockets and the hood caught on the crown of her hair and she stops as soon as she sees him, there with the teacher and the kids and she pulls a hand from one of those pockets and lifts it up to push her hood back and squint at him through the glittering light and then raises that hand by way of greeting nevermind that she wants to go running and throw her arms around his neck, it's daylight and she knows something about denial, today.

So she contents herself with a wave; skirts the kids and is careful of them and doesn't run and doesn't even approach him until that laughing conversation he's having with the teacher's aid has come to some conclusion and the woman has to go tend to a bumped knee or a dispute over the teeter totter or merry-go-round or the best of the swings.

Then she does walk up. Bumps him with her right hip, both hands back in the pockets of her hoodie. She's biting her lower lip and looks so very pleased to see him and she's skinnier than he remembers and he might be forgiven for thinking that she's started using heroin or something you sink into so thoroughly you forget to eat.

She wants to hug him so damn much but yeah, all she does is look at him and give him this tired, lopsided grin and say, all obvious, "I'm so glad you're back. I missed you."

Pan

"Miss Davies. Hello."

He turns his back to the daycare center then. A cue that they're meant to walk away from the premises. Isn't ashamed of her but no one would blame her for thinking that knowing how he's shielded Rosa from her before, how the women talk about her when she isn't there, talk about her and the priest like she's some kind of she-demon looking to suck the goodness out of him and they can't tell if she has yet or not.

They can't speak freely in front of the kids or the women watching the kids. Got nothing to do with the f-bombs she can't drop. Can't talk about Charms or dead cabals or reality-threatening trips, either.

"You quit drinking or something? You're too skinny."

Part joke, mostly concerned. He's looking a little smaller about the waist himself but he's got more weight to spare than she does.

Serafíne

Oh, she takes the cue, Sera. God knows what she thinks. It's been a day and a night and another half-a-day and she has reached the point of exhaustion where sleeplessness is beginning to feel like a trip and she glances back at the day care center and its ladies and the shouting kids and gives him an ironic little smirk when he calls her Miss Davies and then her attention swings back to him and hangs there when he asks if she quit drinking.

"I did," she tells him, quiet. "As a matter of fact. Food too. Two week juice fast. Gave it all up. Practically fucking holy now," a glance down at his waist not really pointed she just doesn't know how to really control her impulses right now. Gives in to them. " - what about you?"

And soon as they are out of sight of the daycare and its ladies and its children she gives in to that first impulse, shakes her hands free of the borrowed hoodie and throws her arms around his neck in a tight hug so that she's practically hanging from his neck. Hell, she's skin and bones, maybe she is hanging from his neck.

Pan

Pan is a tall man. He's strong. To even get her arms around his neck in the first place she has to leap up. He doesn't bend down to collect her into a hug not because he doesn't see it coming but because he thought she'd at least wait until they were across the street.

So yeah: she does hang from his neck for as long as it takes him to realize she's not letting go right away.

"¡Ay!" he says, "easy," though he's laughing as he says it. Puts his arms around her to return the hug and bends at the waist until her soles are flat on the ground again. He smells like the sun now, sweat obviating that godawful soap he uses though it lingers in his hair. Which he found time to cut between the phone call and the funeral service. It's short enough that she can just barely grasp a piece between her fingers.

Eventually she has to let go and let him get a good look at her. That's when he asks.

"What're you fasting for?"

Serafíne

Sera inhales the scent of his sweat with the scent of his resonance with the scent of his skin with the lingering scent of his Work in the air and the only thing that turns her nose is that godawful soap he uses. Surely someone in his parish still knows and practices the art of soapmaking though they probably make little cakes of lavendar and peony to please an old woman's tender hands and flatter an old woman's crepey skin but still, christ Pan, there are decent bars of soap in this world and also there is that thing called -

shampoo and something else we know as

conditioner.

By the time the hug ends she's figured out the haircut too. Catches a piece of his hair between her index and middle fingers and gives him a mournful little look as they let go, "You cut your hair."

He asks what she's fasting for then and she gives him a sidelook and says, "Ritual," with a little shrug, curving her body sideways when they come to the gate and she doesn't say anything more about it until they're across the street and heading toward the rectory: where it feels more right to explain,

tiredly, "Jim and I, were doing it, tracked down some fuck who was handing out magic PCP like Skittles. Had to find a way to find him without taking the damn PCP.

"Finished now, though. I just figured I'd walk over here to see if maybe you were here.

"And look, here you are."

Pan

"So I picked a good time to go out of the country for two weeks, then, huh?"

Oh, right: the week before he even left was spent making arrangements to even get the body down there seeing as they needed documentation that didn't exist or had to be tracked down. She walked in on that conversation the night she couldn't sort out the front door or the suitcase.

But still. Jokes. Makes up for the fact that he's been too busy to eat and in a foreign country where the people didn't give two shits if he stopped what he was doing to go eat lunch, making sure he had something besides tea and prepackaged junk before he retired with the sun.

"If the ritual's over, that mean you gotta make up for lost time, or what?"

Serafíne

"Yeah," Sera returns with a remarkably tired smile. She's running on fumes and she's not sure what else but she's going to make it home and she's not going to eat before she sleeps, like this is a sunrise to sunset thing, some last final challenge. "I was pretty fucking grouchy."

When she wakes up, though. When she wakes up: all bets are off.

Then a flare of laughter, god. His stupid fucking jokes and the sudden flash of her teeth in her crawling mouth, the curl of her shoulders beneath the hoodie, which is nearly shy, certainly girlish, in nature and movement. The laughter is mostly soundless, full of fond eye contact, and ends with another little shrug in response to his question.

She's all gleaming-eyed, all shining, when she huffs out a wordless answer to his question that ends with a quicksilver grin and a mostly-rhetorical question for a mostly rhetorical question, "What the hell do you think? I wasn't really made for denial, you know?"

Pan

And he laughs his own brand of quiet appreciative laughter at her counterstrike.

"Well, only thing I got to offer you is hot chocolate or rice. I don't wanna keep you too long. Just make you more grouchy."

Serafíne

"You probably have priest shit to do anyway," Sera returns with a faint shrug and a slightly sad flicker of her tired eyes. They haven't made it inside the rectory yet, they're standing in the yard in the sunlight and her eyes are on his face and there are a half-dozen other things she should tell him: about Grace most of all but she can't remember them right now and wouldn't know what to say even if she did.

"I'm gonna head the rest of the way home. Glad you're back."

And she turns around and heads back the way she came, hands in the pockets of her hoodie, head down, shoulders curled forward - one foot in front of the other, the way it always happens. Just one foot then the other.