Welcome to Thursday night at the chantry, and surely by mid-January the Christmas decorations have all been cleared away, put up in boxes and bells and bows for next year, god knows who will be here next year. Let us remember who was here last year, and how they left us all.
January has such a bright, clean, clarified sense to it. The sun comes earlier and stays later. The sidewalks and streets are stained with salt. The snow comes and comes and comes and sometimes it goes, leaving behind such stark, blasted looking pavement down in the city proper. Out here it lingers, doesn't it. In hollows on the north-facing slopes even when the sun comes out bright enough to make in melt in sub-freezing temperatures.
The warmth billowing off the hot spring melts everything in the immediate vicinity, creates strange, lacey impressions of hoarfrost on the sliders, so it is not immediately clear when seen from inside whether someone is soaking in the spring, communing with whatever the fuck they call the fundamental magic of the ode.
Unless you can feel them, out there.
Sera and Dan's van is in the driveway and Sera's guitar is propped up in a corner of the downstairs living area and Dan is puttering around doing something in the kitchen. Whistling. He's whistling. He's probably having a bit of a clean and thinking about some obscure B-side of The Cramps, the details of which have been niggling at the back of his mind and he probably promised Sera a hot toddy when she comes in from the spring but she hasn't come in from the spring yet.
It is cold outside but not freezing not yet but cold and damp and shiveringly so now that the sun has disappeared beneath the horizon. And Sera is still outside, sunk in the hotspring up to her neck, a bathsheet and robe carefully laid out for her right where one emerges from spring to flagstones, for the quick dash inside. Her eyes are closed. Her hair curls around her neck in damp and darkened snakes. The warm fog billows up all around her.
PanThe evenings are cold enough to rid the mind of the notion that the brightness of the sun and the fleetingness of the snow mean anything. Not cold enough to kill but they've been fortunate this winter. Folks like Sera can soak in hot springs and not feel their hair freezing where it does not submerge.
Pan is not out here to soak in the spring. He is out here to smoke a cigarette and watch the stars come out. But he knows she's here. He has learned the resonances of the people who spend the most time here and he can tell most days when they are on the premises and when they have recently worked. Their spells linger like scents vulnerable to time and the passing of it.
When the sliding glass door opens Sera does not have to guess at who it is. Light come out into the darkness could be one of two men but this man is not like flying into the sun.
He clicks the lighter and draws a sooty breath before his voice reaches out to her.
"Serafíne," he says from some distance. "¿Qué tal?"
SerafíneShe has to feel him because she cannot see him; sits with her back to the house proper, facing the view of the mountains in the distance. The front range. She does feel him of course, behind her eyes and at the back of her throat; brightness without the enduring, drenching heat of the sun.
"Pan." Our Sera tips her head back on the flagstones to catch his profile and the reflection of it in the glass somehow in her peripheral vision. There's a curve to her mouth and a looseness to the gesture that suggests that she is high.
And pleased to see him, if that smile curving her cheek is any indication. "Hola."
So very, very pleased. "Feliz año nuevo."
PanHard to tell whether Sera was high the first time she saw him. He can count on one hand the number of times he's seen her when she was not under the influence of a substance or a sphere and those times were as potent as the bad trips for what they signified. Abstinence was a focus for some of her Working. Not all of it. But that was her explanation for why she'd lost weight while he was down in Veracruz burying a dead man who did not stay dead.
"Happy New Year," he says with a smile staining his voice. Like they ain't seen each other since before this one arrived.
Today must not be a day he has to worry about getting blood on his hands. He's wearing bluejeans and a flannel shirt underneath his jacket. Dressed like that it's not hard to imagine him belonging to the land same as his parishioners once did. Like in another life he could have run a ranch or been a proper teacher instead of rising up out of his own ashes to prove God will take in those who've got nowhere else to go.
His hands had callouses once. Not from gripping the stock of a gun but from guiding tools and throwing a basketball around with the kids there after school. His hands have gone soft from so long in convalescence.
"How long you been out here?"
Serafíne"Long enough that my fingers are all wrinkled," returns Sera with a quiet sigh of the sort that signals a delicious, physical contentment, warmth soaked into skin and muscle, blood and bone. There is a hint of laughter or perhaps wonder beneath the immediate physicality of her tone, and he can hear the water lapping as she brings those hands up to breach the surface, as if to show them off. See? Show and tell time.
"But only my fingers. Maybe my toes."
And she glances back at him, then. Over her shoulder, twisting far enough that he will have a glimpse of her profile, the curve of a cheek leading down her neck to the twist of a bare shoulder, and nothing more.
"You look like a cowboy." Which makes her smile, too. "Turn around."
Pan"Turn around?" he says.
A pause to blow the smoke back out. He smokes fast. Big lungs that didn't grow tarred even though there wasn't much to do in either prison or seminary but smoke cigarettes and play cards. Less gambling in seminary but Anglicans aren't near as righteous in their piety as the Catholics are.
He does not turn around. He looks like he finds the request amusing but he does not laugh to let her hear it.
"Ain't nothing to see there."
SerafíneSera breathes out this huffed and quiet laugh. She's not looking at him anymore, though her profile is still cheated toward him and the curve of her mouth has that louche and lazy quality to it. High. A little bit high. Enough to make the ambient lighting dance across the water more than it would ordinarily, enough make her wonder at how her skin fits so seamlessly over her bones; and how it opens up sometimes, to everything, everything around her.
Enough to make her close her eyes for a quiet, singing minute, just feeling his powerful brightness behind her. The layers sensations of the others too.
"I'm getting out," she warns him, then, and it is not really much of a warning by now, more of a narration as she stands up, water sluicing down the elegant line of her spine, over her breasts, dark damp hair clinging to her shoulders and neck. Not entirely nude but certainly topless, braced against the bright, sparking shiver of the bitingly cold air which is such a contrast to the humid warmth of the pool.
She reaches for the fluffy white bathsheet left beside the pool and wraps it around her body, draping the hood over her head and pulling it close as she sets her teeth against the cold. Shimmying a bit to try to dry off before grabbing rather blindly for the robe to cinch over top of the towel.
"I told you to turn around," unless he has left, Sera's closer now. The robe over the towel, a hood over her damp hair. Her feet bare, her fingers damp, shivering as she reaches for his cigarette. "Let me have a drag."
PanWith the warning Pan stops his joking and turns his back that she might maintain what's left of her modesty. Or that he might not find himself accused of immoral thoughts or actions later. Most of the stories in the Torah were meant to keep men in check anyway. Depending on who's doing the talking one can argue God gave up his only Son because he figured man was too wicked and depraved to follow all His rules. Might as well wipe the slate clean.
He hasn't finished his cigarette by the time she's gotten out the spring. Less than half remains but that's enough to get a buzz going.
She told him to turn around. That's where he is when she comes over to him.
"What happen, your shoes run away?" he asks after he's relinquished the cigarette.
SerafíneThe priest turns around anyway, which makes Sera smile both inside and in retrospect over his little joke. She has no particular modesty, except that which is bound up in her respect for him. Just ask her lovers. Any of them.
But he turns away and so she takes a few extra seconds, with the towel, with the sharp bite of the cold air against her skin contrasting against the billowing heat from the hot spring. With the robe, shrugging it over her shoulders and wrapping it around her body and then with the sudden, violent shivering that comes over her, overcomes her, for 2-3 seconds after she has gotten out.
And when she reaches him, his back his still to her, and she is an impressionistic smear against the glass and she nudges his back with her shoulder, all animal affection, before she demands a drag from his cigarette. Which she takes, damp fingers staining the filter darker.
"Thanks," Sera says, for the cigarette, handing it back and tipping her head aslant to briefly rest her brow against his shoulder, as she is wont to do. "You're the best."
Then, her eyes drop to her feet. And her toes, which wiggle. Apparently of their own accord. Like magic.
"Yes," she affirms, "they ran the fuck away."
Along with the rest of her clothes.
katabasisa spark from the cigarette when she takes it or when she reaches it a spark in her mind's eye a spark that ignites touches her and for a moment can't she see look this is your vision a sheet of flame a kiss of the presentiment of fire taste smoke and seeds just-bitten seeds on her tongue when it shimmers on her wrist a translucent cloth-of-flame there behind the bat of her lashes behind that badum that break between one beat and the next figure-clothed-in no, it's gone, gone, find it, instead there's just a thready insistance don't her feet feel wet don't they gleam as if with oil palm oil honey palm oil and honey and seeds crushed on the tongue and a spark from a cigarette they ran the fuck away
Pan[I DON'T NEED TO BE HERE FOR PMs PAUSE TIME ]
katabasis[thar ees no more!]
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