Ya basta.

Pan

In the weeks since she came out to Katiana's farmhouse to see him Pan has made greater strides in recovering from the backlash that nearly killed him in August. None of them are back to their fighting weights but his spirit is intact. His spirit had been intact from the moment he regained consciousness and the doctor overseeing his case decided to keep him sedated so he didn't keep trying to escape from the hospital.

Sera knows better than most what happens inside those places. He is old enough to remember the Ascension War. Few of the rest of them can say that. The war they lost and the people they lost and the flagging faith the rest of the world lost. All of these will fade with time. So many other events throughout the course of their history have. They are a dying breed.

He would not be so tolerant of the rest of them otherwise. The priest's beliefs are accepting but rigid beliefs.

It's true though. He is freezing. The evening hasn't given way to winter yet but it will. When she threatens him with Rosa he laughs again.

"You don't have to do that," he says. Keeps holding onto her arm even after they've moved through the patio door into the kitchen. Greater strides but he's still not steady on his feet. He doesn't trust his balance or the brain responsible for maintaining his balance. "Next time I'll pray inside."

Serafíne

Dan's in the kitchen when they enter, leaning back against the counter, plaid shirt rolled half-way up his forearms, which are covered in tattoos. Bow tie a bit askew, and purposefully so, skinny jeans tucked into battered combat boots, the close cropped scruff of his blond hair in mild disarray. The consor is tall, perhaps as tall as Pan himself, but skinny - not the way Pan is now, deflated from injury and the long, hard recovery therefrom - but natively so. The way Sera is: whipcord lean, not as sharp as she, but of a kind with her. Easy to see that they belong together.

His eyes are a dark and meandering sort of blue, and they flick up from the screen of his phone to take their measure as they enter the room. He notes several things at once: how close they stand; that Pan has Sera's tea, and the look of entreaty on Sera's face. Before she even asks him, he's turning to fill the copper kettle at the sink and settle it on the gas range.

Pan keeps hold of her inside. Sera doesn't question or call his attention to this; and in that brief window where the blast of warmth makes the exterior chill settled over their skin all the sharper, she just tucks herself into the spare shelter of his flank. Rests her forehead against his bicep, her eyes closed. Just breathing.

Next time he'll pray inside.

"Pinky swear?" Sera needles as she opens her eyes and looks up at him, the flash of - yes, a kind of strange desperation, as she is not quite sure that he is real, and that mute, shining adoration. The quick edge of her smile slices suddenly through the saccharine note of that brightness. "I'm serious, I'll call her. She fucking hates me but she loves you more, I'm pretty sure.

"And I'm not going to ask you what you were praying about. I'm not getting involved in that shit."

Pan

As they come back inside the warmth of the kitchen the cocoon of frigid weather melts off of him and a shiver courses its way up his spine. Sera can feel it in his arm and his shoulder but it's brief and he does not address it.

Dan receives a smile and a "Good evening, Dan," but he doesn't aim to distract Sera from the conversation upon which they've already embarked. She tucks herself in against his arm and he unfurls it so he can slide it around her shoulders.

Even with the distance and the absence he still finds her charming. Still half-laughs at the things she says that amuse him. Her assessment of Rosa being one of them. It evaporates completely by the time she says she's not getting involved in the shit he was praying on.

He pulls in and releases a heavy breath and looks down at her before he holds out the hand not holding her shoulder. Extends his pinky.

"Yeah," he says. "Alright. I promise."

Serafíne

Dan flashes Pan a glance when the priest greets him, and that glance is followed by a mildly ironic salute. Two fingers tipped to his right brow, something alert and aware sliding across his features. Even then, his gaze is more or Sera than the priest. But, "Hey," Dan offers back, not interrupting except to clarify with Pan, or Sera, or both, "Darjeeling cool with you?" as he reaches to open the cabinet and sort through the orphaned boxes and bags of tea that always end up strangely strewn through any shared kitchen space.

Meanwhile, Pan slides his arm around Sera's shoulder, and Sera, oh Serafíne, she slips her own around his waist. His much reduced waist, her hair beneath his arm crisp and redolent with the cold outside. She feels more than hears that half-laugh, and it makes a halo of a smile crinkle the lines around her eyes, without ever quite coming to life in the curve of her mouth. That expression is quiet, and queer, and delicate, and framing and then he's offering her his fucking pinky, and she well and truly breaks into a smile.

Breathes out her own half-laugh, which hitches through her shoulders like a half-sob. What he sees when he looks down at her then is the crown of her blond head, tipped forward as she reaches out to seal the deal on that pinky swear.

"Unless you need me." Quiet, a curving shrug beneath his arm. "You know? If you need me, you just have to say."

"I'm glad you're back, Pan. I missed you."

Pan

Sera has the dizzying capacity to feel and project more than one emotion at once. Has to come with not always living in one moment in time at once. The priest has never studied Time and if he intends to he hasn't spoken of it but when she lets out that laugh that sounds almost grieved.

He tightens his finger on her tiny finger and his arm around her tiny shoulders. Arm tighter than the finger. Strong as she is they need her stronger than she is now.

"Nah, mija. You sit this one out, huh?"

Serafíne

Maybe it is time, living ahead and behind and now as if they were absolutely the same fucking thing. Because they are absolutely the same fucking thing. Maybe, instead, it is simply because she lives more in her body than her brain, more in her heart than her mind, and god knows what the heart is doing.

Sometimes it just pounds.

Pan tightens his pinky around her own and his arm around her shoulders and she understands everything wordless beneath it. Or maybe she just feels it all, without needing to understand. Dan has turned away because now this all seems to private. He's fiddling with loose leaf tea and teaballs and maybe making a bit of a rattle but decidedly not looking at the pair of them.

Sera swallows a breath and nod-nod-nods something like understanding back at Pan. Still just the crown of her head, because now she doesn't quite trust herself to look back up at him.

Both pain and gratitude in that gesture. And something else, coiling and selfish deep down in her viscera.

She whispers, like confession, "I wish you would," sit this one out, "too."

Pan

People on paths are the hardest to knock from them. Even if the path looks short it is part of a longer way and glimpsing the cliffs and the monsters and the dark places where one will need a light to get through is easier on the outside but that makes it no easier to dissuade.

Plenty of people understand Sera's pain and gratitude. The things he does keeps people safe and happy. It keeps their children from flunking out of school or joining gangs or becoming hopelessly addicted to drugs. It gives people like Amanda and Victoria Luciana chances they wouldn't have otherwise. Father Echeverría is the first person who that little girl will be able to say believed in her.

But the things he does chisels away at him. He needs a small cavalry of people to keep him fed and clothed and under shelter. Rosa thinks he doesn't have that out here. Rosa wouldn't know. All Rosa knows is when he goes off to help these people he comes back covered in blood. Drowning in it some days.

He doesn't know how to save people without sacrificing himself. That's not how his faith works.

"Sera," he says, just as low as she gives up her own selfishness, his pinky still in hers like this makes everything he said before just as true, like that makes this just as true as anything he said before, "I can't. I'm sorry."

Serafíne

Sera is trying so very hard not to cry. Her eyes are closed now and she's not looking up at him and his pinky is still linked in hers and her own, crooked, tightens around his and she gives him this (yes) brave little not but oh he can see the tightness stark in the shape of her shoulders beneath the leather coat with its shearling lining, beneath the hoodie and t-shirt she's wearing today, something with a dark shadow of a human body smashing a guitar or giving someone the finger or smashing a guitar while giving someone the finger, because that is how Sera rolls.

So: she nods, acknowledgment of all that she knows. He can't. She knows that. Oh, she knows that and she hates it too. And he's sorry, and that's the part that makes her almost cry.

"And if they go fight?"

Pan

And she knows before he draws the breath to answer her what the answer is going to be. She knows how he operates. If he's going to condemn a man to die he's going to be the one to pull the trigger. If he's going to decide they have to confront a demon thousands of years old glutting itself on fear and suffering then he's going to be the one to confront it.

If his actions are going to be the thing that end up causing her to break down sobbing not too far from now then he may as well be the one to tell her that.

He lets his breath go and he is not afraid. He starts to let go of her pinky like he knows what's going to happen next.

"I'm sorry," he says again.

Serafíne

Sera does not want to hear the first word about the movie or the demon or the nightmares that anyone else may be suffering. She has her own nightmares, a half-hundred broken things inside her, and she was withdrawn almost entirely into her own skin, eschewing contact except for the ordinary, delicious, painfully human sort, healing.

Or something.

Healing, she thinks she is healing. That's what it feels like when you are quiet and some things knit up inside you and others get ripped open and you reach out and realize that you still have skin, and breath and bones and a bed in a room in a house, and that the earth still moves, all around you, spinning and impossibly small, its light so negligible in the outflung arm of its galaxy and -

Sera does not break down sobbing. Not yet, not right now.

The kettle starts to simmer, does not yet scream a boil but Dan knows how to make tea and pulls it before the water hits a full boil, pours it over the leaves in the teaball and he is not going to watch this. He slips out of the room.

"You're still sick. Still healing." Here, she looks quite abruptly up at him. Oh yes, her eyes are shining, this bright and terrible love. "I'm not. Okay.

"So I'll go instead."

Pan

"Ya basta."

It's a mild admonition. The knock it off of an exhausted parent. So many of them call him Father or Padre and he is a father to his own son. No wonder he falls into that role as easy as he does even if he hasn't got a wife to hold him up.

"You're not going nowhere."

Serafíne

The deep abiding flash of something contrary and recalcitrant all silvery in her dark blue eyes. Sera looks up at him and he can read all that with a perfect and abiding clarity in her open features, the set of her jaw and the tension beneath her close-set eyes and the way her brows draw knotted-close and silky twist of her mouth. Even the way she holds her breath when she does look at him, with the clear directness of a toddler testing wills.

And then, she looks away. All at once her features crumple, but happens so quietly, and so wholly and so entirely and so inevitably that she hardly has room in her throat for words.

Manages to choke a few out, though.

"At least get healed."