Mistletoe

Serafíne

There are cigarettes secreted in a few places around the house and sometimes on shockingly cold nights Sera cracks a window and leans against the frosted glass and lights a cigarette, watching as the smoke drifts out the window, but these nights are not shockingly cold and the house is full of guests and even though everyone in the house gets stoned with some regularity, the guests know that they are expected to slip onto the front porch or into the back yard or at least onto the bridge between house and garage apartment to smoke.

Sera does not wait for Pan to locate the cigarettes he's patting down his body for and he does not really even need to mention that he wants a cigarette. She gives him a look that drifts down his black-clad frame and sidles up to Hawksley at the stove and murmurs something to the Hermetic and unearths a pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter from a cannister on the kitchen countertop that looks like it should contain sugar but actually contains marijuana and cigarettes and assorted paraphanalia, then leads the priest outside.

The kitchen is open to a sort of sunroom / breakfast nook, which in turn opens onto a winter-wrapped garden through sliding glass doors. The garden has an errant, overgrown charm - someone loved it once, but likely not the house's current inhabitants - and a flagstone patio in the shadow of a large oak tree quite nearly in the center. An assortment of patio furniture, nice looking but rather mismatched, as well as a cabana bed (of course Sera has a bed in her backyard) and a chiminea and a firepit. The backyard is as brightly decorated as the front. There's an arbor someone hung with Edison bulbs and lights wrapped around the trunk of the oak and fires burning in both the chiminea and the firepit and ashtrays and the like scattered around. Sera is wearing basically no clothes but someone gives her a blanket and there is the fire to which they can flee, so that's where she leads him, blanket wrapped around her shoulders like a refugee until they are close enough to the fire that she can feel the bloom of its warmth on her bare skin.

Sera smiles at Pan as he reaches the ring around the fire with her and bumps him and taps out a pair of cigarettes and slides them both into her mouth and lights them both and inhales the smoke from both until the embers crackle and snap sharply with the fragrant scent of the spiced cigarettes. Then hands one over to Pan, the stain of her lipstick visible even on the dark blue paper.

"I'm glad you came," she tells him, rather quietly, the din of the party a hubub behind them. Strangers, warm and bright, visible in almost every window.

Pan

The day being warm as it was means nothing for the evening. Nightfall brings with it a plummet and a pernicious chill and Pan has to find his peacoat even if he can't find his cigarettes before they go outside. Big as he is he's whittled down since his hospitalization.

He's putting back the weight he'd lost. It's slow going though. He hasn't been this thin since he was in prison. He was younger then. Doomed.

Out the backdoor they go and they form a two-body contingency around the fire pit. Someone had the foresight to give Sera a blanket and she has it wrapped around her as she coaxes two clove cigarettes awake. Every time she shares one with him Pan forgets that they are kreteks. The spice of the tobacco startles him. Pan never inhales deep into his lungs though. Doesn't startle himself into coughing.

She's glad he came.

Like always the priest makes nothing of the quiet in her tone.

"Hey, thanks for inviting us." Us. Him and Grace. He squints against the harshness of the smoke as he exhales and examines the paper before taking another drag. "You having a good time?"

Serafíne

Sera has the blanket ranged around her shoulders and down her back and her arms like a cape, open to the heat of the fire to catch every gleaming tidbit of warmth. Stands close enough that soon there will be a flush beneath her skin, like a fever, close enough that if she shivers, it is not from the cold.

"How could I not?" The question is rhetorical, hummed over a stream of smoke Sera is exhaling through her nostrils, like a fucking dragon. "Two of my favorite people. Did you get a load of Grace chugging that beer like a boss?"

Then, and just then, Sera looks up. Tips her head back and finds the priest's eyes, if he is looking down at her, or his profile, if he is not. Finds the priest's eyes and then looks up and past him, past the silver threaded through his black hair, which stands out, glistening in the firelight, to the arms of the oak tree above them. There are balls of light hung from the limbs, scattered haphazardly high above, gleaming LEDs like a bruise against the darkness, that cool-brilliant light that feels saturated with color but shadowed rather than incandescent.

Is she having fun?

"'Course I am." Sera assures him, that same quiet in her tone. And it is true: she is having fun. She is half-drunk and there is a party happening in her house. The way she was cannoodling with the Hermetic, well, the priest can easily imagine how she will be entertaining herself in the wee small hours of the morning. "I always have fun. You know that."

Then she indicates the hanging lights in the tree with a lilt of her chin and a little press of her elbow into his side. "See that?"

There's one right above their heads.

Pan

She does always have fun. Except for when she isn't having any fun at all. Except for when she's upset or scared or angry. But this is a party. This is not an emergency.

Half-drunk is better than having a bad trip.

Sera knows as well as anyone else that Pan is not diligent about keeping his hair under control. As of late he has taken care to cut it himself so it does not touch his collar. That does nothing to keep the moonlight color the black has turned out of prominence. Only the darkness does anything to conceal it and they are not stood in darkness this night. They are by a fire and underneath bright LED lights.

Up goes her chin. Her elbows hits his side. The taller man takes another drag off of the kretek and lifts his eyes.

"Mmhmm," he says around the filter. Yep. He sees it. It doesn't register though. All he does is blow the sullied breath out the side of his mouth and over her head and wait for the punchline.

Serafíne

She always has fun except when she doesn't, which is regularly and often. When the world has started tearing itself to pieces around her and has left her behind to struggle through the aftermath. The last two months have been remarkably quiet for Sera and her closest friends, but only because she has retreated so thoroughly from the world-at-large.

This is her first party in months.

She hasn't been sleeping around.

And, by all the gods, she was made to sleep around.

So he asks and there is something quietly poignant about her response, which he knows to be both true and false in equal measure, and that poignancy draws out a particular light in her dark eyes, which dance with reflected firelight.

"Mistletoe in each one of them."

Her eyes are on him, now. Her smile is spare and healing and whole and holy, too. The way some of the darkest things are holy. Then the smile dissipates from the edges of her mouth, and all that is left in the quiet at the center. "Though I should warn you. In case someone tries to catch you beneath one."

Pan

Must be they don't have mistletoe in Puerto Rico.

For all the quiet and the thought gone into her words they go over the priest's head same as the joke about singing Kumbaya had gone over his head. It isn't often that they find themselves butted up against language or cultural barriers. He will tell people with an ease that he didn't move to Colorado until he was fourteen years old. That he moved to Pueblo and then he went to Englewood and English wasn't his first language to begin with but it just got worse spending his twenties in prison.

It's funny sometimes. The fact that he doesn't have a cell phone or a computer. That he doesn't understand references to things that happened in the late 1980s or most of the 1990s. Just amplifies the image of chastity that Catholic priests have attempted to cultivate over the centuries.

"Catch me?" he asks. His attention sharpens now and he points up at the lights with the hand holding the cigarette. "Under a mistletoe?" He takes another quick drag. "I don't know nothing about mistletoe, mija. What happens if I get caught under it?"

Grace

As if on schedule, to rescue Pan from finding out what traditionally happens under mistletoe, Grace appears on the back porch, creaking open the door, which lets party noises outside and the chill inside, until she shuts it again.

She grabbed the coat off of 'her' chair first, obviously, because it's on her now, no longer claiming territory. Or maybe it is, delineating this space of hers for Grace.

Anyway, she's outside. Why? Maybe it was the crowd getting to her, or maybe Hawksley who wanted to get drunk and watch people devour each other over the presents he bought. Maybe she just feels more anchored around Pan and Sera, and needs a break.

She won't find a break from Christmas out back, not with the lights, not with Sera still looking like Santa's Little Trollop Helper, but perhaps out in the open, it'll be less oppressive.

She walks up to them, and just joins in the conversation like she'd always been there.

"Traditionally, if two people are caught standing under mistletoe, they have to kiss, Pan," Grace explains. "Something to do with Baldr."

Like Pan would know who Baldr refers to, or why it has anything to do with kissing at all. It's one of the more pagan, ancient Christmas traditions that has nothing at all to do with Christ.

Serafíne

The creature's dark eyes flick upward; past his profile against the spare winter sky to his hand point at the spheres, the cherry of the cigarette lambent against the darkness, bright in a way those glowing frames of light are not. Then flick back to his face, a narrow line of suspicion briefly cutting between her brows as Sera tries to determine whether or not Pan is having her on.

The line disappears as quickly as it was etched between her brows. Sera huffs out a laugh then, her mouth curves all quiet irony as her gaze falls from Pan's eyes and Pan's cigarette, down over her shoulder, back to the house, where the lights from the glass sliders leading into the kitchen spills over the flagstone and people move in indistinct smears of color and laughter against the slightly fogged glass.

And then she smiles, a far-away, rather daring little smile, her eyes flicking back up to the priest's as she rises up to her tiptoes and then some and Sera's mouth is a little bit parted and Sera is .00009 seconds away from kissing Pan when the glass sliders open up and Grace steps out onto the patio, starts across the muddied garden toward the pair of them. Supplying Pan with a verbal rather than a non-verbal explanation.

Sera's eyes drop from Pan's eyes to Grace over his shoulder, then slide back to the priest's mouth. Then she glances away from both of them and there's nothing guilty about the look, but there is a sort of living awareness about her, isn't there.

Instead of kissing Pan, then, Sera looks away from him and takes a drag of her clove cigarette, dark eyes searching the familiar shadows of the garden, and the way they go strange in the sprawl of the fire, beneath the illumination of all those Christmas lights.

If the priest requires confirmation of the myth from Sera, she gives it to him. Nonverbally, with an eloquent shrug of her green-velvet shoulders beneath the shelter of her blanket. But she doesn't look back at him.

Not now.

Not quite yet.

Pan

The Catholics who make up Father Echeverría's church don't give as many shits about Jesus as they do about his mother. Women are the foundation of the Hispanic Catholic community. There wouldn't be a Jesus if there wasn't a Virgin Mary. The mythology of the religion is not terribly complicated.

But Grace's assumption is correct. The name Baldr doesn't mean anything to him. Neither does the presence of mistletoe or the threat of a kiss beneath it. Sera rising up on her toes to try and kiss him now that the groundwork has been laid. He couldn't push her away if she'd warned him that was what was supposed to happen.

They are not related by blood or adoption or communion and Pan is not a virgin. Worse: he holds his beliefs to be incontrovertible in their truth and he adheres to a standard of conduct help up by temperance and prudence and courage and justice.

Even if Grace had not come outside he could have handled himself.

But Grace tells him. Sera looks away. He laughs an uncertain laugh.

"Or did they start hanging up mistletoe so when they got caught kissing they could say--" He points up with the cigarette hand. His accent slips. Like he's imitating the teenagers in his congregation. Teenagers throughout history. "'Ay, no, we weren't doing nothing we weren't supposed to be doing! It's how you're supposed to do!'"

His eyes rest on Sera's profile a moment and that quiet takes him. But only for a moment. He looks back to Grace after it passes.

"You ready to go, or you just out here for the fresh air?"

Asks the priest smoking a cigarette.

Grace

Grace laughs at Pan's little joke, not nearly as uncertain. She interrupted something, perhaps, but she doesn't really care about that much, until she notices Sera's quietness, the shrug, the way she stares away.

"Mmm, yeah, because the air is so fresh out here," she smirks, but her eyes flit back to Sera again. "Nah, just had to get away for a bit. People."

Just, people. Too many, too pressing, too grabby and drunk or half-drunk, which is quite hypocritical considering she's had a beer and a shot herself.

Serafíne

Sera is smiling quietly at Pan's joke, not-quite-looking at him, taking another drag from her cigarette, until she feels at last the weight of his eyes on her profile, which is sharp against the shadows, and pale if only in comparison to the way that night wreathes the edges of the yard. Her eyes spike upwards to find his, then drop to find Grace and Sera's mouth curves for Pan in one of her small, patented, I'm alright, I'm alright, I'm alright smiles.

Which he already knows to be both true and false in equal measure.

The back doors sweep open again. Party guests framed in the open doors are summoning Sera. Three girls with Dee at the center, drunk and high, laughing, their sentient shrieks a bit piercing in the echoing chill. Good thing it's still early and everyone on the block is likely to show up to the party anyway.

Sera takes a last, sharp drag on her cigarette and then stabs it out in a convenient ashtray and takes up her blanket with both hands for the dash from the warmth of the fire to the warmth of the house and hands over cigarettes and lighter to Pan in case he wants another and admonishes him with a sardonic grin, " - I'm giving custody to you but be careful I think there's a joint hidden in there."

Smelling of sugar and cloves.

Then she's on her tip-toes again, kissing the priest oh-so-chastely on the temple and wiggling fingers at Grace and admonishing them both not to leave without saying goodbye and dashing off, quick as you can, back toward the warmth of the house.