It is Christmas or maybe the day after Christmas or possibly even the day after that and there is a certain house on Corona Street in Capital Hill where a house party is in progress and it is the sort of party that shows up in film montages about holiday parties. Listen, the house is lovely, three-stories, blonde-bright, with a wide front porch and a graceful, square-faced facade looking out onto the tree-lined street. It is impossible to get a parking place.
The house is grandly though rather messily decorated without. Whoever strung up the lights had perhaps never decorated the exterior of a home before and so the fittings are makeshift and the light strings have, here and there, started to sag from the eaves.
The front doors are unlocked and keep opening and shutting as people come and go. Some of them know the residents of the house, others don't. Some had a text invitation. Others were asked by a friend at the bar. Others heard from a friend of a friend, had a drunken invitation in the back of a taxi cab, or got a heads up from an old college friend or a dealer or what the fuck ever.
Inside: sometimes there is a crush and sometimes there is not a crush and somewhere there is a fire laid in the hearth and no matter the hour, darlings, there is food. Christmas cookies and appetizers and someone is always bringing something and baking something and pulling something out of the oven or the fridge and there is an ever-growing-and-dwindling assortment of booze: bottles of wine are given and opened and emptied. Bottles of beer and growlers too, and bottles of booze and mixers and there's a curl with a headful of curly black hair who is one of the best mixologists in the city and loves that shit who does catering these days since he's between gigs after a dispute with his old business partner, Ron-Ron, and he is presently acting-bartender and is making chatatinis for anyone who wants one.
Here is how you start a chatatini: pour a wash of 151 rum into a martini glass and light that shit on fire. Then make the goddamned drink.
So: people everywhere, board games even and someone is playing a very complicated cross-over of Risk and Clue and people are dancing and people are making out and there's probably someone upstairs engaged in copulation of some sort and someone doing a line in the bathroom and so on. There are, assuredly, intoxicating brownies to be had.
And at the center of it all in the warmth of the kitchen sitting on the granite countertop with a chatatini in one hand and a bottle of Stranahan's in the other there is a Serafine.
Sid[IGNORE ME, or don't, I'm a roll, not a cop]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 4, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 3 )
Claudia[Let's do this awareness thing]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 7 ) Re-rolls: 2
Sid[oh right, Awareness]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 3, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )
SidFor a large majority of people who acknowledge one or another or all of December's holiday festivities, it is a time of love and peace and togetherness or whatever. Family's gather, lovers kiss and more beneath sprigs of herbs, presents are exchanged, et cetera et cetera. It's a time when people are supposed to be cheerful and forgiving. It's also a time of high stress, family visits with that relative wherever along the bloodline that lifts the blood pressure with a laugh or a thoughtless (or all too thought-out) sentence. It's long lines at the mall and crowded restaurants, with some people tipping generously in a vain attempt to balance that poor waiter's paycheck out with the people who had a rough day.
For some there is an extra date that's supposed to be commemorated but usually is merely a footnote to end the year on. For some it's an anniversary, a time too steeped in bad memories to be terribly joyful.
And for the woman named Sid Rhodes, December is all of these things.
Despite that tumultuous swirl of emotions and memories (a tumult that is mirrored in the air around her, which almost seems to shimmer with the warping of her resonance), Sid is out. She parked her truck three blocks over and walked the rest of the way to Dee's-house-which-is-Sera's to step through the front door. There's a paper bag tucked into her left arm, and as she makes her way inside she offers slight and crooked near-smiles to the strangers she passes. Her hair is down, curling over the shoulders of a navy blue sweater with three rows of pink-green-pink argyle diamonds. The sweater is worn over a blue buttoned shirt, its top three buttons undone down into the V-neck of the sweater. She knows that Sera's here, and she knows that Sera's in the kitchen, and since Sid has a bag full of liquor she directs her steps toward the kitchen. The last time she was in that kitchen it was less crowded. The air was different. Sid was different, but then Sid is always different. After years of running-hiding-escaping notice she's finally settled into a place, and with that settling has come a barrage of events that have shaped and reshaped and reshaped her again and again.
She steps into it now, and she pauses when she sees Sera sitting there, Dionysus in female form. Her smile is only a little hesitant, and then she strides forward to set her bag down so she can pull out a pair of bottles.
"Hey," she greets, her eyes on her hands, which pull out a tall bottle of Dragon Blue vodka and a smaller bottle of Jim Beam's Tennessee Honey Whiskey. She looks over her shoulder, back the way she came. Someone else is here, someone fundamentally shadowed. She glances at Sera, dark eyes lifting to the side, does she sense that?
ClaudiaThe thing is, Claudia wasn't even supposed to be in Colorado right now. Technically her dad had Christmas rights, but he'd changed plans last minute so he could take his girlfriend to Paris, which was neither new nor surprising. Claudia hadn't been terribly keen on another Christmas in LA, in any case. And Portland was still too full of ghosts.
The nineteen-year-old Verbena did not arrive at Serafine's party by way of invitation. She came, as she often did, by luck or fate or simply intuition. She was downtown, driving listlessly through holiday traffic; christmas lights reflecting and refracting off the polish on her dark car.
And a few of the cars seemed to be headed in a certain direction. And in the direction was a light magnetic pull that steadily grew stronger as she turned the corner and came upon a row of houses and a line of parked cars and then: one house in particular which glowed and reverberated with life and lights and music and... resonance.
She parked the car a ways down the street and locked it behind her, making her way down the sidewalk as she pulled her winter coat more snugly around her torso. When she stopped to survey the house, a stray bit of snow fluttered past on the breeze and landed in her hair.
It looked like the place was open, so she walked in, climbing the steps to the front door and peering inside. The thing she felt, pulsing and humming and magnetic - it was coming from the kitchen, but she didn't go there right away. Instead, she slipped into the house and slid free from her coat, folding it over one arm as she threaded past a group of dancers in the living room. Her manner was at first quiet and unobtrusive. Watchful (curious.) Once or twice she returned the smile of a tipsy party-guest, but always she kept moving. Until, finally...
She appeared at the entrance to the kitchen, dressed in dark skinny jeans and a burgundy cashmere sweater and a pair of strappy black leather boots, her coat still draped over one arm. Light makeup with smoky eyes and a bit of gloss on her lips. Dark hair loose and flowing about her rounded face. She regarded Sid and Sera with a soft tilt of her head, slightly animal in her curiosity.
"I haven't met you yet."
SerafíneSera is not wearing a pink argyle sweater. She is not wearing a sweater at all. In fact, she's barely wearing a top. It's warm in here with the humid press of bodies and sometimes the oven is on and god only knows. If one does not look closely, Sera appears to be wearing a bra and a mini skirt and a set of red and white stripped thigh-highs. Which are trimmed in fucking ermine, baby.
The bra is black and pink and the cups are transparent. Not transluecent but transparent so the outline of her rather small breasts is perfectly visible through the fabric. Twee little bows are sewn onto the straps there they cross the apex of her shoulder and it does appear to be a push-up bra because it has given Sera some rather lovely cleavage.
The short skirt is green velvet trimmed in white fur, I mean, lovely you know, lovely? it is very, very short and would barely cover her ass if she were standing up but she is not standing up, she has parked herself on the kitchen counter. Putting the logical pieces together, it appears that Sera started the evening in full regalia as a Sexy Elf, and has been steadily shedding pieces of the costume ever since.
The hat went first. The goddamned elf-shows. That stupid cropped top blouse thingy that covered up as much as it showed.
Sera's a little bit fucked up. More than a little bit fucked up. There's a sheen in her glossy eyes and a curl of scent in her hair and a languor to her body that - yes - seems rather Dionysian, doesn't it? The way her fingers wrap around the neck of her bottle of whiskey, or curl over the stem of her martini glass, Christ. You want her to touch you the way she's touching those things.
And it has been a long-ass time since was more than a little bit fucked up and a long-ass time since she threw a party of any sort, let along like this one, which is likely to unspool for days rather than hours, and a long-ass time since Sera saw Sid and since Sid saw Sera and Sid's looking at her hand as she pulls out the alcohol, and Sera - no matter how fucking painful or briefly jarring she might find Sid's sudden appearance - Sera stares straight at Sid, open-eyed and direct-as-hell, and says, "Hey - " back.
A softer curl of Sera's generous mouth though there is a subtle layering of tension in her spine.
Sid's quiet look of inquiry is followed almost immediately by Claudia's appearance. There is no time for a response and no indication in that moment that Sera did feel that, just a sweeping glance over Sid's shoulder, toward the entrance to the kitchen. And Sera's fucked up and the world's spinning on its axis and she can bear fucking normal people but not -
I haven't met you yet.
The brief, sudden flash of Sera's smile. It does not quite reach her eyes, but there's humor somewhere in her body.
"You sure about that?"
SidIt is rather warm inside. It's been rather warm outside, as well, though the air is cooling as night progresses. And Sid is wearing a sweater layered over another shirt, jeans, mid-calf black boots. Eventually she, like Sera, may begin shedding clothing, dropping layers and pulling up her hair and occasionally stepping out into the unkempt back yard. That is later, this is now.
And for now Sid remains as she was as she stepped inside. Only when she glances over her shoulder and sees Claudia there does tension visibly begin to climb up her spine, and even then it's a subtle thing. Up close one might see more, but Sid is not up close to either willworker, and she has her back to the kitchen as she sets the second bottle on the counter. Crumpling up the paper bag, she looks for the appropriate bin. Only after she's tossed it away does she finally turn to face the newcomer. Sid had been preparing herself to face Sera - in a full and boisterous house as a party surges all around them, without much chance of private conversations about, well, anything.
Sid turns and leans back against the counter, one hand lifting to tuck her hair behind her ear, the other sliding into the hip pocket of her jeans. And she studies the newcomer with the smoky eyes and the touch of gloss, who came into Sera's house for a party because eventually most of Denver makes it into Sera's house for a party.
"I haven't met her," says Sid, in a voice that is not so quiet as it was when the other Awakened started popping up around the city, but still couldn't be described as terribly loud.
ClaudiaClaudia was the youngest and the smallest of the three of them. Even with the extra inches her boots added to her height, she still had to look up to meet Sid's or Sera's eyes. To them, she must have seemed almost painfully young. And yet she walked in with a vast, primordial darkness curling at her heels. (They were each of them contradictions, in their own ways.)
It was difficult not to stare at Sera's breasts, given the way they were on display. When Claudia first regarded her, there was a short pause where her gaze landed there and hesitated, as though surprised, but it didn't seem to rattle her much. She didn't blush or look away demurely. Instead she retrained her gaze on Sera's face and made her introduction (such as it was.)
You sure about that?
Claudia lifted her eyebrows. "I'm sure. I would have remembered."
Sid confirmed this point, and Claudia regarded her a moment with that same steady, watchful gaze.
"I wasn't sure if this was a private party. I can leave if I'm interrupting." After a pause she added, with a small lift of her mouth, "If not, I could use a drink."
SerafíneIn truth, Sera is not especially tall. If they were standing in their stocking feet, she would have a bare inch on Claudia. But they are not standing in stocking feet: Sera is on the countertop of her warm white kitchen (Dee's warm white kitchen) which makes her tower a bit and her heels tonight are remarkably high and even if she has not yet regained all of the weight she lost during either her endless fast or her recent ordeal, she is no longer skeletal, and regardless of that: she always seems to try to take up more space in the world that she was ever originally allotted.
It's just her way. So.
Sera is bantering or maybe just needling because sometimes thing curl in her head and hand and sometimes things prickle beneath her skin and the night feels sharp and strange, both, all around here. Surreal even though she's yet to take the LSD she has tucked in her nightstand because who the fuck knows what happens when she takes a hallucinogen this time.
The last series of hallucinations she had were far from benign.
And Claudia feels like shadow and Sid was: there and then, not there and pieces of the night feel a little bit unhinged already. Sera swings down from the kitchen counter with an animal sort-of-grace, a native athleticism that lives deep down in her body. Picks up her bottle of Stranahan's and reaches up for a pair of juice-glasses from the overhead cabinet and pulls them down and turns them over and pours both Sid and Claudia three-fingers of Colorado whiskey.
"It's not a private party." Sera says, nudging one whiskey to Sid and the other to Claudia. "You're more than welcome. Have a drink. Have the goddamned bottle.
"Excuse me, though. I have to go piss. Entertain yourselves while I'm gone."
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