[First things first, Nightmares!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 2, 3, 3, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
GraceGrace has set up at a desk in the library, with her (very shiny new impressive) laptop and several books scattered around the table.
If one were to look at the titles of these tomes (they're all a bit yellowing, all leather bound and gold leafed) they'd notice a pattern. 'Habits of the Umbrood', and 'Umbrood Encyclopedia T - U' etc.
It's just, when Kalen and Alyssa were having their conversation about the Thing, Grace was utterly lost. Grace doesn't like being lost. And if she's going to find out everything there is to find about Thakinyan's hunting routines, she's got to know what to look for.
See, this is her comfort. Wrapping knowledge around herself like a warm blanket, even if it's knowledge of this particular horror. Hell, especially this. It's like Sun Tzu says, 'know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster'.
And, it gives her focus -- a goal. Something to strive for other than thinking about the nightmares and blood and death and dying. Though she doesn't smile much anymore, this is about as close to happy as she gets.
Today, she's wearing jeans and sneakers and a ratty black sweater that looks a bit like it has been sitting in a drawer for a year with its wrinkles (it has). The disease left its marks, but the physical ones are fading. Kalen keeps getting her out, and keeping her fed, though she still looks a bit thinner than normal, a bit paler. At least she's not the grey ghost of a girl anymore. Having blood is nice.
The snow falls, the roads have gone to shit, and it's probably going to keep her here all night, but it's no matter. There is still the internet. She can still work.
SerafínePerception + awareness. Eventually.
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
SerafíneThe library is a long, long way from the driveway, all the way down in the bowels of the chantry. Down a half-hidden stairwell, behind a heavy door protected by seals that may be magickal but are also: immediate and factual, the specialized security meant to protect all that knowledge within which Grace wishes to wrap herself.
Upstairs, outside, in the dark November night: snowfalls. The library is hushed, well insulated from the outside world. Grace doesn't hear the balding tires of the old white conversion van on the snow-slick gravel driveway. Doesn't know that Dan and Sera pulled up fifteen minutes ago, maybe thirty, cut the engine and sat there in the dark. The engine ticking, the snow melting at first on the windshield, and then - as the chill crept into the interior and the dissipated - starting to accumulate. Saying nothing.
He drove her out here in the middle of a snowstorm, because she wanted to come. Now she sits in the front seat and cannot quite bring herself to move. Dan is patient with her, watches her profile in the darkness while Sera watches the snow fall outside the windows of the van, her gaze flickering over the dark, glistening panes of the chantry's windows. The hushed scrawl of the cold dark world.
He lets her be. Says nothing until the interior and exterior temperature has nearly equalized, and the cold makes her shiver, shudder, really, the way she does sometimes - and then just a quiet -
"You don't - " have to he is going to say.
"I know." Sera inserts, gentle and assured. Glancing at him for the first time, favoring the consor who is always her friend, often her caretaker, regularly her trip-sitting, her songwriting partner, often her Collins and sometimes her lover with a terribly sad but rather bracing smile that feels churned up from somewhere he can hardly name.
They sit there then for at least another fifteen minutes, while snow fills the world.
--
She is pleased to find the kitchen empty. The kitchen and the patio, and the snow melting into the hotsprings. The lights off, the house dark. Dan follows her in. They leave footprints in the driveway and trail melting snow over the tiled kitchen floor. Sera never thinks to stamp off her boots. The warmth is as welcome as the quiet. Dan leans in thresholds, against frames, watching Sera while she drifts thoughtlessly through the familiar spaces, not bothing to turn on any lights that weren't already on before. Fingers drifting lightly over the knicknacks, the signs of other people's presence or their passing.
It is Grace's resonance that draws her downstairs. Nothing else and almost no one else would. Sera does not care about those books right now, does not give a fuck about them. That slip-sliding sensation, faint and familiar and unsteady beneath her skin. Makes her catch her breath and feel further, reach further than she might otherwise do.
So: sound interrupts Grace's studies. Someone descending the steps. The chirrup as the security system recognizes a familiar face, and opens a familiar door.
Grace[Perception + Awareness too]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 6, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )
GraceGrace is working feverishly on something on the laptop that looks like the earth seen from space. It rotates and there are what looks like digital pushpins dotted on the surface, lines and such. Vienna, Atlanta, Denver... perhaps other places. And then, when she switches modes, there's a text file instead -- almost un-human-readable. Inscrutable. Data. It's not exactly magic, but a mundane analogue of what she does? Yes, very close to that.
She may be deep in that zen of concentration, but she's not blind -- not anymore. No, her eyes are open. So she feels it when the warp of the world bends toward Sera in that peculiar way -- the way that grabs her by the gut and says look.
Grace would know that feeling anywhere, and she looks up, turns toward the door. Even before Sera opens it, she knows who's there, and... Oh my God, Sera. Sera's here.
It's a strange feeling, the one running through her now. Sera knows. And you want to be around people who know. There's a bond in the shared suffering that won't be easy to break. But there's also cracks and fractures. She's become abrasive to people, she can see it in how they react to her (one reaction in particular was fairly extreme, fairly painful to experience) and so she doesn't want to hurt or be hurt.
"Sera?" she asks. The world spins in the glow behind her head, heedless.
SerafíneSo Grace is looking up when the security door opens; Grace's eyes and mind are opened, have been since longer than last Wednesday. Wednesday. If Sera thought about it she might marvel again though somehow that Sunday night in a bookstore seems very, very far away. Even for someone to whom the ordinary and all-too-linear course of time is more temporary accident than anything else.
"Hey," Sera's voice is quiet, a little bit hoarse. She looks okay. Whole, right? Skinny, yes - no longer so starkly skeletal, so hollow-eyed, so five-minutes-from-death. Her hair is washed and dyed and tumbles in thoughtless curls over her left shoulder. The dark buzz of her sidecut is recently shorn, too: from temple to the nape of her neck. "Grace."
Her expressive mouth hooks aslant, this lopsided and terribly sad smile just for the apprentice, which shines in her eyes.
Or maybe those are unshed tears.
There's too much to take in at once, though. To make judgments, to process. Sera's hands are sliding out from the front pockets of her skinny black jeans and something about her body language - the set of her shoulders or the twist of her torso or the way her arms are opening or the way she is crossing the library to Grace and her laptop and the spinning world behind her head - tells Grace immediately and implicitly that if she does not duck out of the way the Cultist is going to hug her.
GraceGrace has let Sera get away with a lot. More than most. Tousled hair, even. And it's not that Grace is phobic of this kind of thing, it's just discomfiting. There's a numbness in her skin, a prickliness. She doesn't want to hurt, or be hurt.
But she understands hugging in an intellectual sense. Other people find it to be nice, the thing to do when comforting a friend. So. There is no ducking. Not this time. Not to Sera.
It might be a bit obvious that this girl does not hug people. It might be one of the most awkward hugs Sera's ever had. But Grace opens her arms stiffly, gives it a try anyway, and when they come together, pats Sera on the back, almost like a robot.
"Hey, how are you doing?"
SerafíneIf there is something awkward, something terribly, remarkably awkward about the hug, Serafíne hardly seems to notice. They are close to the same height, Grace and Sera, at least when Sera is not wearing the heels she always seems to favor. And tonight: Sera is not wearing the heels she always seems to favor. Just jeans and Doc Martin's and a t-shirt beneath a leather coat lined in shearling, still damp from melting snow. Her hair is bright and cold and smells faintly of cigarettes and her skin has that bright-shock of chill that seems sometimes sharper inside than it does outside. Carrying just a bit of the wind still with her.
Grace understands hugging in an intellectual sense and opens her arms stiffly and pats Sera robotically on the back and Sera just
holds her,
arms opening and then wrapping closely around the apprentice, one of her long-fingered, callused hands finding its way into Grace's hair.
Brow to brow, cheek to cheek.
This sudden, remarkable, almost-terrible sort of intimacy.
It hardly matters that Grace's game go at this particular social convention is stiff-armed and mechanical, that she doesn't know quiet where to put her hands, or what to do with her feet, or any of it.
It lasts a very long time.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, Grace becomes perhaps uncomfortably aware that Sera is shaking.
Shaking.
--
If Grace asks that question mid-embrace, Sera does not respond except with her body; with her arms, with her hand, a little squeeze on the back of Grace's head. Some wordless and rather meaningless assurance that does not mean so much I'm fine as it does, I'm here and so are you. Which is perhaps the best they can hope for at the moment.
There's a rhythm to this; a movement. That shuddering deep in Sera's frame is beginning to subside as the creature lifts her cheek against Grace's and turns her head closer, long enough to press her dry lips against Grace's temple for a heartbeat, for two, before finally letting her go.
"I'm okay." Sera returns, when at last she is unwinding her arms from around Grace's frame. It is a lie and they both know it; but it is the sort of lie one tells. " - not really, but better I guess." A glance over her shoulder then, at Dan, her shadow tonight who has appeared at the base of the stairs down to the library, as if for confirmation. "You?"
GraceSera is shaking, and Grace is numb, stiff, wide-eyed over the Ecstatic's shoulder, unsure of what to do. There are no rules of social engagement she can fall back on for this. What do normal people do?
She can feel the tears coming, the aching from inside threatening to burst out. It's a mourning for Sera, for herself too. Maybe this is what normal people do?
Then, there is a kiss to her forehead, and Grace is about at her maximum limit of physical contact. Sera doesn't just hug, she embraces. But this is Sera, and Sera needs to. When she's out of Grace's arms, Sera will see the tears that won't flow just yet in red-rimmed eyes.
It's a relief when its over. And yet, there is something about that, yes? You touch someone, and you know for certain that they're there.
"Me too," she responds. "Not really, but better."
"Maybe... maybe it'll keep getting better, right?" she says, with hope. There has to be some hope. "It's got to."
SerafíneSera pulls away; catches the tears in Grace's red-rimmed eyes, the tattered edge of hope in her voice. It'll keep getting better, right?
'Course it will, Sera should say. Will say, maybe, and soon. Except right now, down here, half-underground 'course it will feels false and terrible and wrong on her tongue. Feels like the cliché that it is and Jesus Christ, right now Sera cannot stand them; does not want to dream them or inhabit them or hear them or utter them. Does not want to watch another human being - another awakened, magickal being - look at her and pity her maybe and utter a mouthful of rote, thoughtless words.
So instead she twists her mouth, holds out her hand, palm-up, for Grace's.
"C'mon," Sera says. "Let's go upstairs. I don't like it down here. It's too underground for me right now. We'll talk.
"Or whatever. Not-talk.
"I'm good with that, too."
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