Elevator Bay

Shoshannah

In the couple days that Shoshannah's been camped out at the hospital, she's garnered a cell phone of the pay-as-you-go sort, which does her little good as she doesn't have anyone's phone numbers on her - somewhere she has the card Hawksley gave her and a slip of paper with Justin's, Sid's and Padre's numbers on it, but that doesn't help her much here and now, where she sits. Maybe in this time someone's had the presence of mind to bring her a change of clothes, but Shoshannah doesn't ask for favors if she can help it.

There are reasons she insists on being as independent as possible, though she doesn't talk about them. Two people know enough about her to begin guessing, and one of them is currently in a coma.

Anyway, yes, she's been camped out by the elevators since Wednesday except when she goes to the vending machine (not even the cafeteria, most of the time) for something to eat or some coffee or something, or to the bathroom because though she may not always seem so, she is only human. Just because she can sense her bodily functions and those of others doesn't mean she's reached a point where she can completely control them, or alleviate their inconvenience. So maybe Sera finds her in the women's room, or at the coffee dispenser, or . . . something. Chances are good the girl is still wearing the shorts and shirt she arrived in, something tasteful and pretty and modest without being puritanical, colorful, and bright in a way that's a jarring contrast to the girl who seems to belong as much to death and ghosts as she does to this realm. As always, she's the cold finger of ill-fortune on the nape of one's neck, the twitchy, nervous shiver that comes when it feels like someone's watching you.

Did you ever think as the hearse rolled by
that you might be the next to die?

Whichever the case when Sera finds her, the willowy tall, runway model-looking teenager looks down at (not on, Shoshannah's well acquainted with that feeling and wouldn't wish it on anyone) the singer-Cultist with that odd combination of intensity and indifference that she always holds.

(Except with Pan, or Sid, or sometimes Justin. Sera may have seen the way she brightens, opens up when people treat her like she's human, like she's at least somewhat grown up, like she matters. Or maybe not. But she's a different person on those occasions than what most people see, most of the time.)

"Hey. Ana wouldn't let you in either, hmm?"

Serafíne

The ICU has strange visiting hours. 1:30 to 2:45. 5:15 to 6:10. Whatever: they are limited and most of the patients inside have family camped outside in the family waiting room. Some of them bring blankets and pillows and some of the bring coolers and some of them bring pajamas and teddy bears. Shoshannah isn't in the family waiting room, which is tucked off from the corridor and has softer lighting and a coffee pot constantly on but rather: in the waiting room by the elevator bank. It feels closer, because there is no way someone could slip past her. Because the doors woosh open, and deposit everyone who comes up to or leaves the unit: right here.

The lighting is brighter though, constant, flurescent. It is harder, here, to sleep.

--

But sometimes: bathroom. Vending machines. Coffee.

So: bathroom. Vending machines. Coffee: at a particular hour on Thursday when the elevators opened up and out wandered a particular cultist, who is not dressed like Shoshannah in pretty but modest clothing, that brightness a visible and nearly visceral contrast to the feel-of-dread about her. Sera is wearing her longest black leather skirt (it is still tiny) and a white sweater that would be modest had she not paired it with a black push-up bra. Every detail of which is visible beneath the transparent white sweater. Oh, and also: tights that are opaque up to the thigh, and then cut to reveal an impression of the Paris skyline, and then are transparent above that.

Her shoes are close-to-flat, though. So yes, Shoshannah's looking down at her from that willowy height, emerging from the bathroom or the vending machine bay as Sera comes back down the hall.

Carrying a Starbuck's cup in her left hand and nothing in her right. Her nose is red. Her eyes are bloodshot. There are tear tracks down her face, Sera, and she's probably still actively crying. Weeping.

Quietly now but she was bawling so openly at one point that her nose is running and her will is half-spent and she looks, well, ruined, right? Ruinous. End-of-the-night make-up smeared nose-red sniffling ruined.

Sera blinks at Shoshannah like she wasn't-quite-expecting to see the Dreamspeaker there. In the elevator bay, in the too-bright, too-modern hospital. There's this moment of confusion drifting across the surface of her dark blue eyes, a curve of her mouth, all O, and then acceptance. The sort of acceptance-of-the-strange that one might expect in someone who takes hallucinogens with some regularity. At first Sera just shakes her head. No, Ana wouldn't let her in to see him. And that has her chin trembling and a few fresh tears spilling over her lower lashes. Gleaming on her cheeks.

Then, she sniffs and swallows hard and refocuses on Shoshannah. Looks at her, all up-and-down.

"How long have you been here?"

(FYI: ze tights - http://www.xl-images.uktights.com/Xpm_Paris-Skyline-Tights.jpg )

Shoshannah

Truthfully sleep here, for Shoshannah, is more fitful than most anyway; she can turn off the staticky radio that is spirits studying her speaking to her yelling at her asking her questions most of the time but here she's distracted, and it's different. Here, they know what she is and maybe they need her, or maybe they're bored and curious and as tired of waiting as anyone else in a hospital. They poke at her, tie knots in her hair, move over and through her clammycold or feverishhot or both at once and so the chances of her having gotten any appreciable sleep since Tuesday are slim to none. She looks it, too, all wilder-than-usual curlywavy hair and dark circles under pale blue eyes in a pale face. She hasn't cried, though.

Oh, no. Shoshannah (almost) never does that.

Luckily for her, though, it's only been twenty-four hours and a bit of trying to not look crazy when she really wants to answer the voices that aren't in her head but aren't in anyone else's either, when she can't help snapping at someonething particularly uppity. It's an odd place for her to be, this too-bright-too-modern hospital and yet there's a familiarity (for her) too that maybe Sera can see, or maybe she's too lost in feeling everything as she does. Let us not be confused; Shoshannah feels as keenly, as painfully. But her way is to swallow it like winter swallows the sun, to simmer it into that low humming rage that's always there, waiting to burst alight, nuclear, at the wrongpersonwrongtime. Maybe Sera feels this, knows it as Sid and Padre do, or maybe she's only met Shoshannah a handful of times and is wrapped up in her own misery, a different sort than the Dreamspeaker's, but not so different too.

In the girl's right hand, a styrofoam cup of whatever passes for coffee on this floor and in her left also nothing; it's discomfort-reflexive that her empty fingers move to adjust her arm warmers, the things that draw attention even as they hide what she doesn't want seen. Or, maybe? Maybe it's just a personal style. Kids these days, and all that.

".....Wednesday morning. I think only a day?"

It's purgatory, it's waiting, and Shoshannah is a thing of travel of passage of movement. It fits her ill, this, but she's not going anywhere - or rather the likelihood of her doing so is very slim. Secondsminuteshours blur and she can adjust so she could quantify their passage if she wanted to, but she doesn't care. This is where she should be, isn't it? Nowhere, with no one, outside.

Alone.

(It sounds more angsty and overwrought than it is. Really, Shoshannah's grown to prefer her independence, her solitude. It's the caring and connection that are strange, that chafe, but they would, wouldn't they?)

There's hesitation, and reluctance, and, ".....are you alright?" The girl's not blind, can see that the Cultist is anything but. And maybe she's asking because it's what people do, or maybe she really cares - it's difficult to tell when everything is indifference and intensity and Death walking on one's grave. Or maybe she's taking an unaccustomed first step.

Serafíne

Are you alright?

Serafíne sniffs quick and sharp and sinus clearing. Looks away from Shoshannah, down the gleaming corridor, which marches on endlessly, the stark, industrial, sterile lights overhead reflecting in the buffed industrial linoleum floor. The colors here, Christ. The engineered, ordered reassurance of it all. The chrome gleam of the elevator bay, reflecting the two of them in the now closed-doors. And she flashes this rather sad little half-smile, summons it from somewhere inside herself, you see. It lifts the corners of her mouth and curves her cheeks but doesn't really reach her tear-stained eyes. "Yeah," this small nod that has her hair, which is long and curling and blonde-on-dark roots except where she keeps that sidecut shaved, whispering up and down her spine. Takes a sip of her mocha, which is cold now but the secret is that it is spiked. Fortified. If Shoshannah were standing closer she could smell it but ordinary conversational distance in the USofA is not close enough. "I'm okay."

That half-smile widens into something that is fuller-but-tremulous. The thing is: Sera is not lying. She is miserable and she is also okay. All these things can Be simultaneously. "Fucking hate these places."

--

There's a bandage on Sera's left arm. Whenever she flexes her hand she can feel the pull of the stitches in her healing skin.

--

Then there's a moment where Sera's focus sharpens then, or just opens up. It is noticeable only if you're looking for it. Only if you know Sera, the subtle swing of her attention, just some tightening really of her orbital muscles.

"Let me buy you dinner or something. I think it's okay to leave. It's not like they're going to fucking let you in. And Ana has my number. Said she'd give it to Rafael, and I'm pretty sure she'll call me if something changes.

"And he's not alone, you know?" Oh, look. A few fresh tears that have Sera lifting her sharp chin and cutting a glance aslant, compressing her mouth against the instinct to sob. Which is mostly for Shoshannah's benefit. "She's watching over him. I'm pretty sure."

Shoshannah

Fucking hate these places.

"Can't say I'm a fan," comes the wry, pointed answer and this is quite possibly the most congenial Sera's ever seen the younger girl. She's still all sharp corners prickly edges, but she's too tired to fight. It's telling, maybe, that she's considering the Cultist's offer - it'd taken even Padre a full 24-hour cycle to convince her to come in out of the proverbial cold. But now she looks vaguely nauseous, a little faint, and translucent around the edges, like she's fading letting go leaving even as she's adamantly, uncomfortably staying exactly where she is.

Then there's the bit about Ana, and Rafael, and Shoshannah's stiffening almost imperceptibly, just a tightening of the jaw, a perceived but not actuated step back. Because of course Ana or Rafael would call Sera, why wouldn't they? And Shoshannah hadn't even yet thought to give the former the number for her recently gained phone, but the thought of not being one of the first (if not the first) to know of changes in Padre (and that says it all, doesn't it, that one word with no modifiers or possessive addendums) freezes her. It doesn't occur to her that even sitting here the doctors and nurses and Rafael might call someone else before her; she's unrelated, hardly more than a kid (however much she rails against the people she perceives as treating her so), a nobody that no one in their right mind wants to be around.

She wants to lash out, but instead the energy coils just there, in her sternum. It's a snake ready to strike, to sink venom into veins, to hurt and tear and flay. It's almost visible, that.

He's not alone, you know? and She's watching him. I'm pretty sure. The words that come are brittle-sharp, cutting. "It's not like I'm with him. Not family, not anyone. Ana can't tell me anything even if she wanted to, and you." There's a subtle-but-there snort that can only come from a late teenager who thinks she knows everything but is oh-so-uncertain at the same time. And she knows it's antagonistic, but that snake, see? It wants its blood, and Sera's an easy target and Shoshannah is a girl with a temper bigger than she is. She doesn't mean it, maybe, at least not entirely - that much is clear on her face as soon as the words pass her lips.

The next is almost - relatively speaking, for Shoshannah - meek. "I could eat. If you're hungry. I guess. And I've got a bit of money."

Submission is no path for her.

Serafíne

There are still tears in Serafíne's eyes - which are dark and which are blue and which are rather luminous tonight, in the corridor leading from the oncology ward to the ICU. In front of the elevator bank. Shoshannah stiffens and Sera - still sniffling her eyes shining with tears that have yet to be shed - marks the movement and feels the strangest rush of compassion. Whatever barbs Shoshannah lets fly do not seem to find a mark. Either Sera is impervious to them or she's really, really good at hiding it. Since she's really, really terrible at hiding anything, it seems like to be the former rather than the latter.

She still looks tired, Sera. Not translucent, not faded the way Shoshannah does from a night in the hospital, but tired, spent. Worn out and wrung through.

Still, listen. She summons a half-smile when Shoshannah lashes out at her. This simmering sort that is leavened by her tears.

"You won't need any cash. We'll go to the Four Seasons. I'll put it on Hawksley's tab." Which is decidedly not her plan. The Hermetic moved out of the Four Seasons weeks ago and she doesn't know if he had a tab of any sort even when he was there, but: this quick, slicing smile as the elevator doors open and Sera leads Shoshannah inside.

"It's not a competition, you know. Any of it." A beat, as the doors woosh closed behind them. They are briefly alone in the elevator, though likely not for long, not in a busy hospital. "Did Justin tell you what happened?"

Shoshannah

"..........." What this weighted pause is in response to - comments about competition, Hawksley's tab, or gracefully taking any slings and arrows - is anyone's guess. When Shoshannah talks she's as verbose as any teenager who knows multiple languages and has absorbed a thesaurus, but that doesn't mean she's the sort who talks often. Or necessarily has much to say. But mention of the Four Seasons and the thought of those fine linens, that silver and china and decor brings any protestation the girl might have had about being treated up short. She has few clothes because the ones she does have are high quality and probably expensive, not just because they've had to fit into her backpack and/or saddlebags for the last couple years. Her room at the chantry, though the smallest and least windowed, is arguably the best decorated, both in aesthetics and quality of materials used. The ongoing common area project (which by now includes Sera's bar, no doubt), her brain child, is similar; she's done nothing permanent, but it's small things as well as large that indicate Taste and Eye.

At any rate, she ends up allowing herself to be herded into the elevator (again, a telling thing for anyone who's taken a moment to look past the hard, prickly surface) and the question about Justin and what she's been told gets a scowl.

"Not really. I knew Padre," so rarely does Shoshannah call him anything else, "was with you and you were hurt but less so. And that it was something to do with dogs and Otherness."

They're in a hospital in an elevator, but there are ways to get around that.

".....I didn't really listen all that well, after he said Padre was here."

Serafíne

Sera does not seem to have the same longing for fine things that marks Shoshannah. She has oodles of clothes, and some are fine and some are not and some were dug out of the dollar bin at the thrift store and some, well, some come from Other Places but - she buries her privilege deep beneath her skin. The abuelitas at the Church of the Good Shepherd think she's a prostitute, and her fishnets (though she has eschewed them today in favor of her Paris tights, which she apparently believes to be more Acceptable or Modest or Appropriate or some other adjective that must be capitalized in her mind, given space before and after) are torn, sometimes deliberately so, sometimes because that is all she has on hand.

-- But see: she hadn't really intended to take Shoshannah to the Four Seasons until that shift of expression, minute as it was. That gleam of longing beneath her skin. So okay: the Four Seasons it is. Shoshannah doesn't really know what happened. Sera gives her a Look - and it is an assessing look, and there is a strange sort of muted compassion threaded through the weave of it, which is bounded and strapped down by her own anxiety, which is intense in this place, and her own grief and fear, which pour through her - and exhales a long and rather shaky breath.

"It wasn't just dogs. I'll tell you about it later," the edge of that Look again. Because really, there are some things we don't need to hear. " - if you want me to, I should say.

"You know I'm not sure you do him any good sleeping in the hospital.

"Or not-sleeping in the hospital," while the floors tick down and the numbers gleam and the chrome skims too-bright. A quick and subtle curl of Sera's shoulders. "We have a couple of extra rooms at my house. You could camp out there if you wanted to, while he's here. It's pretty close by."

Shoshannah

Shoshannah sort of knows what happens - she knows it wasn't just dogs, that there was magic involved. She had stated 'Otherness', after all, but no, she doesn't really know what happened. Floors tick by and the Dreamspeaker keeps to her corner of the elevator, as far from anyone else that might be in it at any point (including Sera) as possible, and as tight and guarded as possible too. Even the promise of a gourmet meal and real linens, china and silver hasn't loosened her up (much).

"If people were honest, we'd all admit staying in the hospital isn't as much about the patient as it is the ones waiting. The immediacy of being Right There if something happens, or whatever." She shrugs, and maybe she feels this way based on experience or maybe not; like so much else about her, no one really knows. "Padre only even knows I'm there if Ana told him and he's processing that kind of information right, you know? Or." The rest comes a lot softer, and with a scowl that doesn't seem any angrier than anything else about her, but for the way scowls always do. "I guess if he's further gone than I know." But she likes to think that if his spirit were wandering, it would be one of the ones bugging her, or at least that she'd feel it.

"Thanks for the offer. I'll . . . think about it, okay?"

The last person who offered Shoshannah a place to stay was Padre, and never mind what came after that. It feels weird, now, that Sera is - but then, Shoshannah doesn't really know Sera at all, beyond the judgments she's made in their handful of meetings.

Serafíne

"Suit yourself," in the quiet rush of the elevator, just before the bell rings and as they are being spilled out into the lobby. This, as Shoshannah assures Sera that she will ...think about the offer. "We've got room, and it's not far."

Maybe she offers Shoshannah a vague, tight smile as the younger mage waxes philosophic on the reasons people linger in hospitals - for themselves rather than the patient - but she doesn't comment on the particulars of Shoshannah's theory except maybe to say that Shoshannah could be right: Sera hadn't every really thought about it. And doesn't think about it much now. A subtle shiver rockets through her frame as the elevator doors open and they are in the corridors again and soon enough the elevator bays disappear behind them and there is the lobby and beyond the lobby the great bank of glass doors leading to the street.

Sera is not easy until then. The street in the afternoon sunlight, but even so she keeps walking, takes them out of the Denver Health Medical Center campus, that complex of medical office buildings and parking garages and secondary wings and specialty wings and on and on, until they have reached Sunken Gardens Park and there is green-not-beige and Sera can breathe. Which she does: a deep exhalation that feels like letting go, or being-let-go-of.

Sera promised Shoshannah the Four Seasons and intends to deliver. Summons a cab with her phone and every minute every second every fractional passing moment between the hospital and here puts her more and more at ease.

While they wait for the cab Sera tells Shoshannah the outline of the story of that night: the dark, deserted park. The feeling of anger, Old anger, saturating the air. The blood on the sidewalk, the sudden eruption of moths from the trees. The pack of dogs, corpses all, not a spark of life in their patterns, abandoning the easy pickings of a dead man and turning on the three mages. Pan, burning them from inside out. Sera and even Lena, once, scaring them away. Pan, of course, put himself in front of Lena and Sera, and Sera, still exhausted from nearly expending the whole of her will, starts crying again when she recalls the terrible wounds he suffered, the way he turned around, blood streaming from his gut, before paradox hit and he toppled like a tree.

In those moments, Sera's deep and abiding exhaustion seems all the more clear. No denying it and no ignoring it and no fixing it except with rest and time and time and rest.

Still, she promised Shoshannah the Four Seasons and the Four Seasons she delivers. The cab appears and the two young women crowd in and Sera asks for the Four Seasons and the driver gives her a skeptical look and she repeats herself and so they are whisked there.

The have a meal - a late lunch, an early dinner - at The Edge inside the hotel. Sera orders extravagantly and eats little and doesn't cry at all while they are there but: does not seem to crave or need this sort of luxury the way Shoshannah does. Indeed, were she not so distracted, there might have been some sort of prickling ambivalence over the level of luxury but no: no. The bill she takes care of discretely enough that Shoshannah does not know whether or not Sera genuinely put it on Hawksley's tab or no. Still: how else could Sera pay for a place like this? She must have, mustn't she?

--

Afterward, they exchange numbers. Sera is going home, but she'll see that Shoshannah gets to... whereever it is she wants to go.

This is Thursday, the week of the attack.

On Sunday, August 18, Pan's son, Rafael calls Sera with an update on the priest's condition. Sera passes this on to Shoshannah via text.

Rafael in town. Says Pan is going to be ok.

Rafael takes up residence in one of those spare rooms Sera offered the same night. Maybe for a few days. Maybe for longer. It will be some time yet before the priest is allowed visitors other than family, another week or so of fruitless vigilance and then -

- well, then. Things begin to happen.