Serafíne
So, a strange number and her number and an odd hour, which is to stay past dinner time and later-than-you'd think. Because that is when Sera lives and breathes and makes such phone calls to strangers: later than you'd think. Or, in this case not a phone call. The first point of contact is a text message from a strange number, that buzzes in at 10:47 p.m. on a night to be determined by later agreement of the gods:
Text: Hi. We have friends in common. 1 has warm hands.
(Which is: Justin. He has such warm hands.)
Text: CAn we talk?
Katiana
It is a strange hour in the farmhouse for phone calls, and the stillness lays heavily across the old wood flooring, touches the details in the window sashing, hushes across unguarded thresholds where Kat is both too new and too old to have set up the seemings of wardings. It is a strange hour for phone calls, but not as strange as it might seem. Katiana has seen many strange nights that didn't really get going until well past the bewitching hour. Hell, Sera's call came at a downright respectable hour compared to some of the discretions of the Verbena's youth.
But the phone doesn't buzz. It can't buzz. There is no vibrate setting on the antiquated piece of hardware that is tethered to its handset with a curly-que cord. The text message goes no where, or perhaps it comes back undeliverable. Kat neither knows nor cares how the mobile telephone industry handles data sent to land lines. The first text dies in relative silence. (We have friends in common.) The second feeds that quiet. The third, if there is a third, probably confirms the echo of something Justin might have said.
Katiana is one of those Verbena. Katiana -- Herald, Scion, Healer -- is of the Old Ways. Katiana is the type of Elder that you send a raven for, or an apprentice out into the woods to find, or send up smoke signals for... not text messages or email. So eventually Sera reaches out with a call instead of a text, and the heavy-set touch tone rumbles to life with a bell-like ring (still struck from metal, and rattling), and she answers.
There are formalities, of course. "Hello?" The polite trading of names and acquaintances. "Yes, that's me." Pauses, thoughtful, but then over-ridden by some underlying (caregiver) nature. "Justin said someone might call."
Pleasantries couched in a sort of kindness and the general texture of patience lead into more direct questions. "Where is he?" There is the sound of practiced movements from Katiana's side as she gathers implements and supplies into her old, weather-beaten tool box, which was destined for her old, weather-beaten truck. The hint of a horrible efficiency is there, subtly evident to a well-tuned ear, but Sera is likely too young to know its measure. For that, at least, Katiana can feel grateful.
The bed of her truck already contains the essentials: Her staff. Her boomstick. A duffle bag a with a few changes of clothes, dark hair dye, and some cash in non-sequential bills. Katiana has already turned Liath out of the barn. In case. Just in case. So she can be ready for whatever for Sera answers...
Fr. Echeverría
The chain of bodies between the patient and the waiting room is not long but it is forged of something thicker than steel. Red tape and health information protection legislation. A son who does not fear the depthless shadow of the Technocracy the way people Pan's age or Kat's age learned to avoid it. People their age may as well sit white-haired in rocking chairs telling tales of hiking five miles to school in the snow without shoes.
Been the same song since Sunday: doctors are sedating him. No one but family in to see him until he's coherent. When he isn't sedated he pulls the EKG leads off his chest and the IV out of his arm and he can't do anything about the Foley catheter or the stent that's draining pus out of the hole in his lower right quadrant or the central line they jacked into his vena cava because it's hard to feed someone solid food when he has a chewed-up intestinal tract and no clue what day it is or what he's doing in the hospital.
It was either that or wrist restraints and nothing to dull the pain. The family voted for sedation. The family is one person.
---
On the most recent of the occasions that Sera tried to visit she found that the charge nurse did not roll his eyes at the sight of someone unrelated to the big priest. He's less big than he was a week ago. Hard to put on weight when you're being fed through a tube in your torso.
No one will discuss his case with anyone besides Rafe but Ana told her at one point not to get him too worked up. She figured out soon enough that F. Echeverría was still feeling the effects of what dropped him that day in the park. Not confused anymore but blunted and bleary and no longer boasting the energy to open his eyes. If they spoke it was not at length and his Spanish was slurred and he had no strength to grip her hand if she went for it. Won't remember talking to her later.
That wound in his gut has not improved. He looks a wreck and even worse for being in the hospital. Too tired to try to break himself out anymore.
Sera can only stay about 15 minutes before someone comes by to kick her out. They have to change something or check something or administer something. Go away, stranger. You are not family.
Serafíne
Don't get worked up, is brilliant advice and Sera (who is tense and anxious and white-knuckled and whose heart rate is up and whose breath comes in short little bursts when she works up the courage to try try try to see the priest which is rewarded this time by seeing the priest, which, it turns out, it not such a reward.) intends to heed it. Fell a little bit in love with Ana over the awkward hug and something about the weight of her patient exasperation, something about whatever solidity Sera sensed behind the reassurance that he was not alone. Something, god. Something. See: she intends to heed the advice but Jesus Christ.
The way he looks in that hospital bed. All opened up and torn apart and pale, so fucking pale. That fucking hospital gown wrapped around his body it has stupid little fucking ugly faded blue flowers on it. She hates it. He is supposed to wear black.
He has been in the hospital for a fucking week and he looks worse than he did the night he collapsed and she tried to catch him and could not do more than cushion his fall. Manages to hold back her tears long enough to get kicked out of the hospital room but then: le deluge.
--
That's the night she goes searching again. Calls Justin and hears about Kat; or Táltos, see. That's the night Sera sends fruitless texts out into the ether, all that data dissolving, disappearing into an old fashioned handset with a metal bell in a plastic case.
"Uh you didn't get my texts did you?" is one of the first things Serafíne says to Katiana in non-text form. The conversation opens up from there, however. Late-but-not-too-late, which means that it is just the beginning of Sera's evening. Or would be if her evenings were ordinary, which they are not.
She is: outdoors, in a garden that is varyingly overgrown or drying up depending on the general level of rainfall in Denver this week, sitting on her cabana bed. She has been crying. They exchange names and she is Serafine-call-me-Sera she mentions Justin (who has gone back to Wisconsin, some emergency, and did you know he never told her where he was from until he was leaving? cryptic bastard) and "Táltos the táltos" precisely like that and so it goes.
--
Where is he?
"Denver Health Medical Center."
She has been crying, though not throughout the phone call. Saying the name of the hospital, though, that almost starts her up again and the hitch-and-promise of tears may come through the phone line. Or perhaps not: the crackle of an imperfect mobile signal sizzling through a hooked-up landline. Who knows.
"They have him on so many tubes. And - and things. I - I can meet you there. There's this park across the street. Or you can pick me up?" If the latter option is preferred: well, Sera gives Kat an address, too. Somewhere in CapHill.
--
(Just for reference: Sera will not make it into the hospital tonight, so saving this for the later IC post, heh.
Twilight @ 10:36PM
Private Message to Twilight
WP for second trip to hospital!
Roll: 6 d10 TN8 (1, 1, 3, 7, 7, 7) ( fail ) VALID)
since that is a botch.)
Katiana
"Uh you didn't get my texts did you?"
The older woman pulls the handset slightly away from her head and glances at it meaningfully, before bringing it back to her ear so she can hear Serafine-call-me-Sera clearly again. A number of replies cross her mind, but she settles on: "I don't really text."
It seems polite, if urbane. The world has changed since Katiana was last in Denver, or at least so she tells herself. And that's a good thing, or so the prevailing wisdom goes. And then:
"Denver Health Medical Center."
She pulls the phone away from her head again, but the look she gives it now is downright baleful. Narrowed eyes intent and unforgivingly focused on the tiny holes in the handset, lips thinned down to nearly nothing, jaw set, nostrils slightly flared. The first reply Serafine (not Sera just now) receives is a sharp and measured exhalation, tense but undeniably kinder than the flood of words that rising like bile at the back of the Elder's throat.
It takes a long moment to swallow them down, and in that heavy silence Serafine (not Sera just now) is alone with her thoughts and her visceral fears. Katiana (not Kat, not call me Katia) is likewise alone with her own. And so the past intermingles with Sera's report.
While Sera explains Pan's status in terms only a friend or family member would think informative, Katiana opens an upper cupboard and slides out a leather roll. She delicate unties the strips of leather than bind it, and unrolls it on the counter. From this, she withdraws two very sharp blades and tests their bite gingerly with her thumb. These are hidden close to her body, under her clothes but ready. Always ready.
"I'll pick you up," she tells Sera. Kat gets the address from the Cultist, but she does not google it to map it. Instead she pulls out a paper tome, looks the street name up in the index, opens to the prescribed page and runs her finger along the grid of map squares until she finds the location. This isn't magic; it's not even scrying; it's the slow and predictable pace of an unplugged life.
Then, more gently, and with a measure more concern than outright she's shown for Pan's well being: "Have you eaten, Sera?" The girl's name is carefully said, gently, cradled almost. Perhaps now Sera feels that her call was well placed and not sent off to some unfeeling Elder. If the girl says no, then Katiana will bring her a sandwich and a small side of garden vegetables to eat on the ride over to the hospital.
--
Katiana's truck is an old and lumbering thing. Its design speaks to a simpler time. It is weather-beaten and rusted; the paint has faded and shows variation based on wear. But it goes. And it is reliable, more or less. Though the tool box -- equally weather-worn and faded -- in the back bed may worry Serafine just as much as the mostly-disguised shot gun.
That sandwich is wrapped in parchment paper, and the veggies are collected in a mason jar. They wait for her on the front seat, along with a lidded mason jar of something that looks like faintly tinted water, and tastes of strawberries (and a faint note of gin) and something herbal. It soothes going down, and quiets a bit of the anxiety -- if Sera will drink strange brews from a strange Verbena. Even Cultists have their limits, when they succumb to common sense.
Kat seems younger than her years, sharing that warmth and faintly anachronistic feel of most Life mages. Right now her hair is bound back into a loose and messy chignon. Her jeans are clean -- unmuddy, really -- and dark hued. Her blouse is a soft rose color, very feminine but contrasted with a black leather jacket that is broken in enough to be an obvious favorite. Her feet are in boots. Always in in work shoes. This time they are black, but still obviously work boots. When they reach the hospital, Katiana pulls the toolbox to the edge of the truck bed and opens it to reveal tools, of a different sort than wrenches and drivers. She slips some of these things into the pockets of her small messenger bag. These movements are very practiced, very familiar, perhaps worryingly so.
The Verbena pulls a tarp over her belongings, to hide them from obvious view, though it is unlikely that anyone would think to rob her. The truck feels like she does -- tarnished, antiqued around the edges, a little past her time.
"Are you ready?" she asks, with a tangle of anticipation and careful patience. The hospital looms in her field of vision, twice its height and infinite it depth. Its windows have imagined snipers; its hallways all lead to the same place.
Serafíne
That grid-bound map takes Kat through the city proper, into a leafy neighborhood full of early to mid century homes, apartment buildings, duplexes, and renovated condominiums. The streets are leafy, tree-lined and the trees are old enough that nobby roots have buckled the sidewalk. The specific house in question is three plus stories, a solid old brick foursquare. There's an oak tree in the backyard taller than the house, and the front yard has the crawling appearance of a beloved garden gone rather to seed. Two people on the porch steps, waiting - a guy and a girl and they are sharing a cigarette between them and the smoke curls up, becomes translucent beneath the porchlight. The guy is tall, is bearded, is skinny, and is covered in tattoos. The girl is not tall, but fakes it see. She's skinnier than he is and Kat can feel her from a half-block away and she feels a bit like a wound except: the sort you welcome.
The sort you savor.
--
There is a unicycle on the porch and a bicycle with a lock wrapped around a brick pilaster and metal porch furniture circa the 1950s that has been spatterpainted and a rather quaint porch swing and - and - and -
soon as Sera feels Katiana's resonance, sharp and aware and alive and stands, handing off the cigarette to the guy, bending over to kiss him on the crown of his blond head. He takes another drag, watches Sera as she ambles down the front walk, the last few steps to the sidewalk, slips between the parked cars to the truck and opens the passenger's door.
"Hey," a little bit breathless, as you might expect when greeting a stranger. There's a moment's pause where the girl just - breathes, right? breathes in through her nose and exhales through her mouth, where her eyes, which are dark-without-definition now, and ever-so-slightly bruised, flicker over Kat, from the crown of her head to the what can be seen of her boots in the pooled shadows of the floor of the truck. Then, with the sort of committed heedlessness you might expect from someone who feels like Sera, she flashes this quick, tight, grateful, engaging smile, and climbs right in.
"Thank you," before she has touched or noticed the sandwich, the vegetables, the lidded mason jar. Before she has noticed anything except Katiana. "Seriously, thank you."
There are tears of gratitude in her eyes, but she swallows them, breathes out sharply, and looks away.
Sera eats: part of the sandwich, though not as much as she should. Some of the veggies ("shit, these are really fucking good") with a note of surprise at the richness of their flavor. Sniffs at the liquid in the lidded mason jar, and asks maybe what it is, and drinks it down. Entirely.
You see, she rarely succumbs to common sense.
During the drive, Sera tells Kat some of the story. Enough that the Verbena is able to pull at least three-threads from it: that they were attacked by a pack of dogs; that the dogs were not alive; and that as bad as his wounds from the dog attack were, Franciso Echeverría was still standing, after.
It was the snap-back of reality that brought him to the ground.
--
The truck pulls up outside the hospital and the hospital looms as hospitals do, dark against the smear of the city's glow behind it. Holds herself up in the cab, one hand wrapped around frame of the door, then jumps down to the pavement with a thoughtless physicality, with a surprising grace.
She's dressed in tiny denim cutoffs, and slightly torn fishnets, and fairly flatheeled Doc Martins so there's no particular illusion of height about her. An old Joy Division t-shirt, white, over a push-up bra, black, with a black leather choker and a bicycle chain wrapped around her wrist several times by way of a bracelet. The scent of clove cigarettes and the herbal brew on her breath, against her skin.
No tools, no weapons, nothing except herself and a nervous energy that just gathers and builds while Kat sorts through the items from her toolbox in the bed of the truck, work a nervous hand through her blond curls, threading her long fingers through them, breathing breathing breathing and
Are you ready?
"Yeah," Sera nods, and her voice is tight and her body language is tight and she says it with this inherent conviction because she means it, because she wants to mean it so very, very much.
Says it with passion, the sort that approaches grace, but with each step they take toward the hospital, Sera's body language grows sharper and more taut until she looks as if someone has opened her spine and all its minute articulations up with a needle and when they are on the sidewalk, say, fifteen or twenty or thirty feet from the entrance. Close enough to smell that blown-out sterility, the chemical-laced air conditioned scent of the place when the automatic doors open for a family clotted around a heavily pregnant woman in a wheelchair, chatting happily and/or worriedly about labor, Sera stops, stock-still.
Heart in her throat, spine like a whip, breathless with an anxiety so pounding and immediate it makes her ears ring. There's a sharp, aching pressure beneath her sternum and she keeps breathing breathing breathing in, but hardly seems capable of getting enough oxygen inside her.
"I'm sorry, I can't. I can't go. FUCK. I can't go in with you. I - "
Tears again, though tight this time, and Sera is shaking and tense and miserable and terrified and fucking ashamed of herself and her arms are now wrapped tightly around her midsection and she looks like she is ready to bolt. To flee in fear. Or break down, entirely, if she goes even one step closer to that entrance.
" - I'm sorry, I thought I could. I just - I can't."
Katiana
During the drive, Kat says as little as she can get away with. She lets Sera ramble, taking the flood of words as they come or braving the silences without self-consciousness. She is steady, solid, resolved without being cold. Kat listens acutely to the amble-shamble of Sera's limbs, to the dark-without-definition in her eyes, to the bruising around them, to the way she picks at what she eats yet drinks with abandon. She's been listening since the tingle of Sera's resonance -- so abrupt and clear and new -- washed over her awareness.
So she is not too terribly surprised when Sera -- who has summoned her here, to this edifice of artificial health and imprisonment -- falters and stumbles and cannot, Will not, enter.
That drought, by the by, is more than simply spirits and something. It soothes, calms, works a quiet warmth through her senses and limbs. A prelude to sleep, perhaps, but not the precise cause of it. It mingles in an uncertain way with that look of I'll deal with you later that is not quite anger (but perhaps quiet anger) or exasperation, but dances somewhere close to it.
Fuck. [You] can't go in with [me].
Of course you can't. Of fucking course you fucking can't.
But this is not what Katiana says, or even what she thinks in conscious words. It's more of a keening, deep within her bones; the wailing shrieking frustration of a thousand lifetimes of love and loss and vengeance; unforgiving of unforgivable transgressions. It is a pre-emptive I told you so from a part of herself that is both identity and other, a red-haired fury: War. These things do not need words, or discrete feelings. And this war with War has been an on-going and riotous thing within her since she was younger than Sera is now.
What Sera sees is this: The Disciple pauses, watching the Cultist devolve into panic and hysteria. Warm hands, strong arms enfold her as Kat redirects her to the truck cab. She finds Sera's eyes for a moment, and holds that gaze with the surety of her own.
"Stay here." She says. It's not a question. "Watch the truck, and try to get some rest." It's not an either or proposition. "These are scary places, and no one expects you to save the world... today." The corners of her mouth turn up, just slightly, in what ought to be an inside joke -- if Sera's resonance bespoke her strength and that held any relevance to her experience.
Once the girl was settled, Katiana turned the side mirror of the truck's passenger window out a little and used her fingertips to wipe away a bit of the grime. This was a practiced thing, this seeing without seeing, this looking through but not into. Her breathing leveled, slowed, and the threads of her resonance came more sharply into focus:
There is the taste of metal-in-the-mouth to her, a turned thing, a Tarnished thing. Older than its seeming. Patina-ed, one would say, in a kinder setting. A sort of grey-dark flush to the edge of something silver. A vignetted photograph -- the word spelled out with all of its letters, here, is also significant.
There is the touch of more to her. More, as they all are. More, as they all long to be. Unsleeping and alive. Rising to be ever so much greater than she seems. Building towards Breaking. A cycle within herself, like suntides or moonswells. A clarion call rooted deep in her bones.
It builds, catching Sera's heartstrings up in it. All heart-in-mouth, heart-in-hand, until the rote snaps off with a finality (Breaking) that barely seems to hum as it lingers.
She turns the mirror back toward the truck, places one hand on the side of the doorframe and repeats: "Stay here. Watch the truck." Nods once before she closes the door. And then: "If I'm not back soon, find help." She does not add: Find all the help you can, and gods above I hope you have a few more Disciples in your pocket.
---
Katiana could count on her fingertips how many times she had stepped foot inside a hospital, despite quickly running out of digits when enumerating how many times prevailing wisdom (call 9-1-1) might have landed her there. Her nose flared at the medicinal-not-clean scent of it. Its brightness and white-greenness and sameness was unnerving. How Sleepers expected their bodies and souls to heal in a place so stark and -- just say it, Kat -- Technocratic was beyond her. Nature held little sway here, which was about to make the Verbena's life much, much harder.
She paused in the lobby, knowing full well that the mindless orbs of the security cameras had seen her now and this, this was the point of no return. If some thirteenth floor tactical unit had not already been scrambled to tackle her where she stood, well, then she could exhale and silently thank the Adept who had drilled a bit of Arcane slip-step into her outward seeming.
She exhaled. No SWAT team. Moving on.
There were benefits to having a sense of authority and direction in a place where everyone expected you to be distraught and unaware enough to actually drink the lunch room coffee (disgusting). Better yet when the specifics of your appearance slid just slightly sideways in the mirror of the mind once the exchange had passed. Eventually -- and it wouldn't be easy, or fun, or particularly quick either -- Katiana would find that one member of the staff who would succumb to a measured mixture of Leadership and Intimidation. There is always one. (On this mission, that One was Watching the Truck, and Calling for Help.)
Serafíne
Katiana's fear of the hospital is rational and measureable and more importantly: wise. It is the bastion of a long-known enemy; it is enmity itself to her own ways. There is nothing green in there; and nothing grown, and nothing growing except that which grows in the artificial media of petri dishes and nutrient baths and is then folded into blocks of paraffin or stained and smeared between glass slides to be examined and evaluated and Known. The windows do not open and the doors never stop closing and the lights in those cold and sterile hallways are always on. Life starts well before dawn for a vitals check and continues without regard for diurnal rhythms, all day and all night and all day again.
Sera's dissolving panic - however reasonable it might be - is not remotely rational. She is just. fucking. undone, or so clearly on the verge of it that she feels like a wild bird thrashing its wings around the casing of an iron-barred cage and more than that, she hates herself for it. Hates the balloon opening in her throat and the wild, irrational panic spiking needles through the muscle of her heart, hates her fear and hates being mastered by it; hates that she cannot bluff and bluster and chew her way through the moment and make herself walk in those doors.
Hates that she is forcing Katiana to go in alone.
--
She can be steered.
She has to be steered because without Katiana's strong arms and warm hands she might just root herself somehow to the spot and dissolve into the cracks in the concrete. Might: flee with the heart stoppering panic of some ruminant being run-down by a great cat. Might might might.
But no: Kat redirects her back to the truck, which is far enough from the entrance and the smell and the shadow of the building, which is old enough and rich enough and worn enough that perhaps the lick of Katiana's tarnished resonance was wormed its way into the welds and the joints and the joists.
"I can probably go tomorrow," Sera protests her voice breathless and tight. "I'm not a fucking coward I just - "
Seated in the passenger's side once more, her hands shaking so actively she probably could not light a cigarette if she wanted one, right now. And she does want one: wants burning lungs and a mind-on-fire, wants transport, wants trauma, wants anything that might help her Not Be This at precisely this moment. Nearly offers to call someone else but what the fuck do you say. And there aren't many she would call anyway so. So.
Sera breathes in that building, opening, cyclic resonance, that work, feels it sharp and taut in the back of her throat, the jangling movement of it and looks up, past Kat's dark, toussled head through the shadowed campus of the medical center and sets her teeth.
"Wait - " after Kat has finished her instructions. Before she has left. "His name's Francisco Echeverría. Father Francisco Echeverría. He's the paster of the Church of the Good Shepherd. His assistant's name is Rosa and his son is Rafael. You can call him Pancho or Pan and he was in Room [Numbers Go Here] earlier today and he was only talking in Spanish do you know Spanish? He's Puerto Rican and if you just get him well enough to go to the chantry did you know there was a chantry - "
So, yes. A controlled panic because she's gritting her teeth and bearing down and just willing herself to expel any information she thinks might be useful to Katiana. Inside the hospital and Sera is not imagining technocratic constructs or snipers or swat teams or tactical units or anything rational or related to the Ascension War, no. Because it was over long before she Woke Up.
But she knows: that all the windows are sealed.
And sometimes the doors, too.
--
Then, she watches Katiana go. Pulls up her legs and sits in the passenger's seat with her arms wrapped around her shins and her chin resting on her knees and her hair coiled around her shoulders-and-spine all tight and opens her clutch with a shaking hand and gets out her cigarettes just for the smell and her phone for god knows what reason but, gets it out.
And watches Katiana go.
Fr. Echeverría
Otherwise reasonable and healthy people see the impenetrable magnetic doors and the tile floors that bear no scuffs or scratches for the age of the place and the sunlight drifting in through windows without hinges or shutters and of course they worry they won't walk out again. A place that boasts perfection cannot possibly fulfill it and nothing about the notion of a hospital is natural.
Time was women would give birth in their homes and healers would tend to wounds with medicines brought up out of the earth by their own hands and the dying could lie in their own beds surrounded by their family.
If he had had any say in the matter Father Francisco Echeverría would have gone to the rectory and called his administrative assistant and she would have bid him go to the hospital though she knew it would be fruitless. And Rosa could have called any number of people who could stitch up his leg and stitch up his gut and the rest would have been in God's hands but he had had no say in the matter because God had seen it fit to strike him down. If it were up to God he would have died that day.
God does not dwell in this place any more than Nature does.
---
Two ICUs in the place: one for post-surgical patients and one for medical patients. The man is in the SICU and the charge nurse is unnerved by Katiana but he does not grill her more than he has to. The waiting room behind her teems with family and friends awaiting their turn to see their loved one for policy will not allow more than two people in at a time.
Who are you here to see?
Mister Echeverría. He's in Room Sixteen.
Go on back.
And the SICU more than the rest of the hospital shows no signs of life for all the life it aims to save. Shaped like a semi circle with all the rooms on the outer ring. Doors to each room are thick plexiglas and they slide closed. Pink curtains cover the portals and keep the sound of beeping machinery trapped inside. The Verbena passes by other doors with other patients' names on them and she can sense the flagging life in each bed. Not a lot of consciousness in this place. Distraught family, or resigned. Paperwork moving quicker than the staff.
Around the bend and far down she sees the priest's room. F. ECHEVERRIA printed and slipped into the placard on the bin bolted to the wall. It holds not his chart but a clipboard bearing instructions for the next person to enter the room. They are recording his vitals every 15 minutes and he's due for another incomprehensible round of pharmaceuticals.
She can turn back now. She doesn't.
The door slides open and gives a buckling sigh as it does. Where once she knew silence and doors leading into nothing now Katiana can hear and see everything keeping the other Disciple from dying: his pulse pings on a large glowing monitor and oxygen flows out of a tank in the wall through a tube clipped to his septum and another tube snakes out from beneath the sheet covering his lower body. It plugs into a red-stopped plastic jug latched onto the side of the bed. Pus congregates in the bottom of it. Another tube creeps out and ends in a bag neighboring the jug. He wears the hospital gown but backwards so the nurses and doctors can get at the large white swatch of cotton covering the lower-right part of his abdomen: the source of the stent. Higher up on his torso they have stuck another catheter, this one jammed in under his sternum. His left elbow hosts the intravenous line through which they pump fluids and medication and a beige plastic clip has chomped onto his index finger, a faint red glow coming from between its little jaws.
His right elbow is bandaged. Both wrists are tied to the bed with triangular cloths normally used for temporarily slinging a dislocated joint in the arm. He's been breaking through the sedation and trying to escape but he's too goddamned weak for soft restraints.
Once she gets through all of the equipment jacked into him this what Katiana sees of the patient himself: a tall man in his mid-forties, dusky skin gone darker from an entire summer in the sun but the blood gone out of it. His short hair was black once but silver and white have laced themselves through it and he does not dye it. She cannot tell how much he weighs when he is upright and conscious but his skin has a loose and sallow appearance and she can tell he has lost mass.
It's no wonder he keeps trying to escape. This place is a prison.
Katiana
There was a time when Katiana moved between the dead, the dying, and the injured so frequently that their breath became her own and she hardly noticed. When the long-sighted stare of the departed was mirrored in her own, haunted eyes. When the blood beneath her fingernails was indistinguishable from her own. Her hair was longer then, and braided back it swung like a narrowed pendulum across her spine, counting out the movements and pauses she made.
And there was a time when Katiana stood in the ruins of all she had known and, like the spirit-soul within her, called down Vengeance to her side in the words of the Old Ways and she became not one with nature but a force within it. Herald. Scion. War.
The charge nurse is wise to be unnerved by the woman, who seems unnaturally calm and ready (in a marshal sense). Though Katiana is polite, almost urbane, she is unyielding. There is something uncanny in the air around her, in the unyielding directness of her eye contact.
Undoubtedly, there is a moment caught on some security camera feed in which Katiana is in full focus. When the shape of her face is, for a moment and until the tape degrades, hauntingly familiar. But only if the right (wrong) people are watching. It has been more than a decade since the Verbena woman tangled with the local Company people.
---
Stepping into the priests room, Katiana finds herself across an unholy threshold. Much like finding herself on a space station, it takes a moment for the Disciple to orient herself. First the familiar things -- she finds a chair, shrugs of her jacket and lies it across the arm. The pale of her skin and the dark hue of Pan's makes it painfully obvious to any passer by that she is not family. Not of the blood, at least. It is possible, though, that she is a member of his flock.
Katiana withdraws from her jacket pocket a string of small carved beads. To the uninitiated, they look a lot like a rosary. This is the intent: a distraction. In truth, they are prayer beads from another culture. Her thumb rubs each bead past the curve of her index finger as she observes, equilibriates, and tries to find center in this unnatural place.
Witnesses, in the form of tiny monitors constantly crying out the priest's condition, stand between her Art and secrecy. Though she is a trained healer, these beeps and blips and constantly spiking graphs mean little to Katiana. They are to her as modern navigation's kludge-and-sparkle is to a sailor of old, who is content to roam the seas with his sextant and spyglass, who forged new worlds in the span of the seas. There is no conquest, no glory, and no Life in these beeps and blips that seems to suck and steal more from the priest than they save in him.
The first to go are the soft tethers that bind him. Let the staff wonder at the magic of a priest who rises, unbound, from the valley of the shadow of death. Let them wonder, she thinks. Let them, for a moment, court belief.
The Witch has carried her athame close against her skin since before she left her house. Its blade is warm to the touch, carrying the blush of her life (the song of her blood) in it. While the hilt is decorated, the blade is a small, dual-edged practical thing. Katiana carefully slips it from its hiding place and just as gingerly rests it on the bed beside him so that the warmth of it touches his skin but it does not bite. She covers this discretely with one hand and with the sheet from the hospital bed. Kat scrapes the chair across the floor so that she can sit beside him, head bent, presumably in prayer.
The beeps and blips fade away as Kat find his pulse at his wrist and lets its rhythm tie her focus to him. The hospital fades, vignetted and distanced in her mind as she Wills herself to draw down from the world without and project through her blade from the world within. As above, so below. Her hands grow warmer; that warmth is translated through her hand to the athame, through the athame to Pan. From Life to my hands, from my hands to you, from your life to Life again. The energy of it spreads out and engulfs them both. It is a horrible intimacy, to be so aware of the intricacies of another person's patterns, and she can see that the press of her Work has taken root. Katiana can feel his pattern strengthen, dragging him back off death's doorstep, giving him at least a foothold from which to fight for his own again.
And she withdraws. The warmth fades away, leaving the cruel and crushing reality of where they are to come crashing down on the heads of the Disciples. Katiana blinks open her eyes and draws in a deep, sterile breath. She almost chokes on the smell of disinfectant, of over-aggressive hygiene. Breathing that heresy out through flared nostrils, the Verbena once again hides her blade close to her skin -- and it is hot now, uncomfortably so, having served its purpose well; but it is also cold now, touched with the reprehensible stillness of this place and in need of cleansing.
Before Pan can fully stir, she slips a simple silver band off of her left thumb, and slides it on to one of his fingers. "From my life to yours, father," she says, barely breathing the words, letting them worm around and settle uncomfortably in his memory. "You will know how to find me." The ring carries an echo of her resonance, of the Work she'd done on his behalf (though not at his behest).
Katiana shrugs into her jacket and noisily scrapes the chair back to its original position. The prayer beads are returned to her pocket. She bows her head, like so many heart-sick visitors of dying patients do. Walks out of SICU without terrorizing the charge nurse further. By the time she reaches the elevator, a slow trickle of blood has started trailing from her right nostril, leaving a crimson trail down to her top lip. It is an outward sign of the headache that throbs forward in her face (like getting punched in the nose), brightening her already sunny mood.
By the time she reaches the magnetic front door, Katiana has to hold her hand to her face, as if her nose were running from crying, to disguise the red trickle. Her hand is bloody, but damned if she will leave drops of her Lifesblood in the halls of this Technocratic place. That thought builds a sort of panic that she forcibly swallows down until the rush of being in the outside air can slake it.
When the Verbena arrives back at the truck and hauls open her driver's side door, there are drops of blood on her rose-hued blouse. Her hand and face is smudged with it. Sera is between her and the glove compartment, where Kat could hope to find tissues or a handkerchief but reaching across the terrified girl with a bloodied hand seemed inhuman and inhumane. Even through Katiana's headache.
[And I think it's Liz's turn again! Sorry for the wait. And here: have some dice!
Private Message to jamie
[Healing: Life 3 + Prime 2, vulgar with witnesses, base dif 8. -1 Unique focus. -1 Practiced. -1 going slowly.]
Roll: 3 d10 TN5 (1, 5, 6) ( success x 2 ) VALID
jamie @ 6:57PM
Private Message to Syll
BACKLASH WOOooooOOOOoooooOOoooo
Roll: 2 d10 TN6 (6, 8) ( success x 2 ) VALID
jamie @ 6:57PM
Oh shit it's highest Sphere not successes. DAMN YOU WINE. One more.
Roll: 1 d10 TN6 (8) ( success x 1 ) VALID
Syll @ 6:58PM
Private Message to jamie
[Soak!]
Roll: 2 d10 TN6 (6, 10) ( success x 2 ) VALID]
Serafíne
Serafíne has not moved from the passenger's seat of Katiana's worn old truck. There she is still, seated cross legged with her clutch on her lap. The cigarettes have disappeared back into chic black leather bag and the remnants of the half-eaten sandwich have been shifted to make room for her knees on the big old seat and she has her phone in her hand and her cheeks are shining with tears that she's still shedding, though silently now. Seems to have swallowed her panic into the frame of her body as there's a spinal stiffness to it, a coat-hanger precision of sorts to the way she holds her shoulders sharp and shapely and squared off.
That tightness eases but does not disappear when Katiana reappears in the dark shadows of the Denver Health Medical Center campus. The manicured and well-plotted sidewalks planted with a few well-bred and well-behaved bushes and perhaps some drought-tolerant knockout roses to ease the eye. Curved beneath the tall, hulking facades of the hospital proper, the medical office buildings, the satellite offices and specialty wings and and and -
- Katiana weaves between the half-illuminated shadows and although Sera does not know her well enough to pick up her shadow from a half-block away she can feel the assertion of the Disciple's resonance in back of her throat and beneath her skin and behind her eyes. She is - yes, still crying, though remember, silently now - and shooting a wary glance up at the bulk of the building as the choppy echo of an incoming lifeflight beats downward eleven stories when Katiana opens the driver's side.
And notices, of course she does, the drops of blood on her blouse, her face, her hand. Sera breathes in sharply and breathes out, " - are you okay?" The dome light comes on then, harsh after the quiet dark of the truck's cab and reveals more of the smear of blood on her upper lip, her right hand.
A low whistle. Sera is already pulling off her t-shirt, hands crossed at the waist, lifting it over her body and pulling it free of her tangled hair in a way that dislodges her bag and her phone to the floorboards of the truck, too. Beneath she has a black push-up bra with crimson pin-striping and little satin bows and she strips down to it without hesitation because: this is how she dresses. And because Katiana is bleeding onto her own blouse.
"Here," oh, still shaking. Sera wills herself not to shake but all she can do right now is will herself to act. The rest is up to her fucking autonomic nervous system and the adrenaline burst from her goddamned panic attack is still coursing through her bloodstream. Balls up the t-shirt and hands it to Katiana, " - your nose is bleeding. How bad is it?
"Can you drive?"
Katiana
The hinges of the old truck's door creak. Of course they do. And the dome light over head is slightly clouded with time. The suspension sighs just a little at the added weight as she climbs inside, wreathed in resonance and singing with tension. Serafine is not the only person who has been, at least metaphorically, on the edge of her seat tonight.
Kat leans her head back, rests her eyes for a moment but does not relax. In that moment, Sera is movement. She is worry and concern and action and when Katiana's eyes open again, the Cultist girl is sitting nearly half-nude in the cab, holding out her shirt to the Disciple in an earnest way.
Maybe Sera will hate her for it later, but it seems so absurd -- the pinstripes and little bows -- that Katiana's eyes widen a bit and then close in mirth. The amusement transfers to her shoulders, which shake with an unvoiced chuckle. Kat breathes out some of the tension she's been carrying, breathes in something a little less starched and static.
"Sera," her name is again gentle, again carefully cradled. "There are tissues in the glove box." She doesn't say put your shirt back on. She doesn't chide the girl for trying. It is a valiant try, and she is a beautiful girl.
A beat.
First things first: "He's going to be fine, assuming he knows how to get himself discharged -- which I'm assuming he does. He seems the fighting sort." Her mouth twists, slightly, into a somewhat knowing smile. From where Kat's sitting it's a rueful thing, but Sera might not see that. Sera might just see the weak attempt and levity and perhaps a little Elder insight.
"And I'm fine." Firm. Calm. Collected. Kat's voice assures without dismissing. "Just paying the piper." Because there are always consequences; Kat knows she got off easy tonight. And if Sera hands her the tissues, or insists on Kat using her shirt, she will clean herself up enough to turn the weight of her attention to the girl -- who Kat is guessing, now, is a member of the Cult of Skylad Celebrants.
"What about you?" A beat. "Where can I take you?"
As soon as makes sense, Kat turns the old, lumbering truck's motor over and gets them on their way. She has no plans on being present when F. Echeverria's sudden turn toward health becomes a matter of interest. Nor did she have any interest in seeing a half-dressed priest try to check himself out of the hospital in his medical gown.
Serafíne
When Sera is half-naked Katiana has a grazing glimpse of her tattoos. Something scrawled in a cursive hand down her left flank, the script curving against her skin. Something else coiled beneath her right breast, which gives the impression of knot-work or roots or the scrolling ornament of an illuminated manuscript but is mostly obscured by that - yes - absurd push-up bra to which she strips down without a care. Hell, the thing is black and red and the t-shirt she shrugs off was white so it was visible anyway, a crimson-black shadow beneath white cotton. She wants you to remember her. She wants you to: see.
Oh, and other ink. Ink on both arms and ink some word written on the side of her palm and another large piece on the fingers, palm and wrist of her left hand of which Katiana only gets glimpses but which will eventually resolve itself into: a pair of scissors, the blades inked into her index and middle fingers. The hinge and handle in a loop on her palm. One of the loops of the handle is, in turn, either turning into or being devoured by a shark, whose body curves further down her palm and onto her wrist, over the point of her pulse. Sharkscissors.
Sera's hands are still shaking. They are: shaking when she offers the Disciple the balled-up t-shirt with which to staunch the flow of blood from her nose, and shaking as she goes to unlatch the glovebox, retrieve and hand over the package of tissues to Katiana. Shaking as she folds them back against her body and listens to Katiana assure her that He's going to be fine.
Oh, Serafíne breathes in then, sharp and inadequate, the sort of breath that is meant to muffle a sob though considering how freely she is crying in front of a stranger, still and now, an Elder, still and now, she hardly seems the sort to muffle anything. Joy or grief or fear or rage or love. Or adoration.
It seems a shallow breath but when she breathes it out it is much longer than the sharp intake suggested and Sera listens, see. To the report, not looking at Katiana to take in that rueful smile but instead staring out the front window at the dark street lit by a chain of fluid lights. Floods basking the buildings and low-voltage lights sunk into the deliberately sinuous banks of the landscaping and streetlights ringing the dark streets and red lights and blue lights glowing to mark the path to the Emergency Room, to reception, to the trauma center.
"He was still standing after the attack," Sera returns, quiet, though the relative steadiness of her voice is interrupted by a deep sniffle. Crying makes the nose red. Makes the sinuses run. "Not - well but. Paying the piper's what brought him down."
Oh, just thinking about it makes the tears rise again, renew from somewhere deep inside her but this time Sera does try to master then. Swallows back against the floor, hard over the lump in her throat to find her voice again and looks back to Katiana, shining ears and red-nosed, wearing yes: torn fishnets and cut-off jeans and a push-up bra and combat boots and the scent of tobacco and marijuana tangled up against her skin and hair, oh yes, Katiana can easily make assumptions about to whom she belongs.
"You - you could drop me off at home. Where you picked me up?" This, when the truck is in motion, slipping away from the regimented campus of the hospital and its satellites. "Or, I could show you the chantry, if you haven't been."
Just leaving the premises does much to settle and quiet Sera. The shaking of her hands, her shoulders, the deep occasional tremors of the muscles framing her spine - which rise like the movement of the earth at the faults of its tectonic plates, unpredictably - subside and she starts to breathe more deeply and more fully as soon as they're away.
Another deep, seizing breath. "Thank you. Thank you so much."
