(Liz likes to roll dice. Per + Awareness.)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 2, 2, 5, 7, 8, 10, 10, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 3
SerafíneThe knock on his door is solid and soft and sure and if he's awake and aware he knows who it is outside the bedroom he has claimed in the chantry. If he's awake and aware and alive to the buffeting currents of energy in and around the communal space he has to know she's here, doesn't he?
No one else feels like her.
--
But Sera, she felt him from a mile away.
Maybe five.
--
So she knocks. Tips her head against the door like it is the only thing holding her upright as she waits. The world is pleasantly sideways and she has pulled the hood of her cotton jacket up so that it half-shrouds her face and hair. Otherwise the hoodie is unzipped to reveal a see-through black lace halter-top over a push-up bra - black satin trimmed in hot pink ribbon, with hot pink roses, outlined in hot pink piping. Sera smells like rain and cloves and sugar; marijuana and pecans and a sweet undercurrent of something. If he takes more than a spare second or two to answer the door, she's looking away when he opens it.
There's a stray smear of powdered sugar on her lower lip that she has not yet licked away.
PanTime was she used to be able to find him at the quiet-bright rectory across the street from La Iglesia del Buen Pastor which was also bright but louder and surer than the brightness suffusing the rectory. The essence of his presence stopped lingering about a month after his hospitalization. When he went away to learn how to inhabit his own body again.
She used to bang on the door if she didn't just let herself in and he never asked her to stop. Never told her to. Even when the abuelitas began to chatter and Rosa began to berate him in the mornings when he'd come over tired and blinking away the tiredness but not complaining.
Rosa has prayed for patience and found herself having to do most of the work herself.
When Sera knocks on the door she does not have to wait long for her to open it. His feet are bare and he wears black trousers and an untucked black undershirt. Clothing from the day behind him hung up already. He does not look as though he was awakened from dreaming. A book lies facedown on the duvet behind him.
"Sera," he says, pleased but cautious all the same. Like he's expecting her visit is because of something having happened.
SerafíneSera half-falls as the door swings open and out from beneath her left shoulder. It is a fucking door and she asked the person behind it to please open it and still there is something about the way she falls that says that she is mildly surprised to find everything in working order; that she was leaning her weight into it without though about what might happen next.
"Pan."
So she half-falls, catches herself as she staggers a half-step into the room and - incidentally though not purposefully - into him and flashes him up a lazy sort of smile and her pupils are a bit dilated and something about the way she moves, as if the endpoints of her range of motion and the middle pieces too were cushioned, were wrapped in cotton wool, says that she is a little bit - and rather pleasantly - fucked up.
"I can come in." It could be a statement but it must be a question from the arch of her brows to the way he eyes first find his, then drift directionlessly off past his left shoulder before finding his eyes again.
There's something in her hands.
Which she has only just remembered, and likely then only because she has started to fall and needs to catch herself and also needs her hands for holding the thing in her hands. Which is a tin decorated with Christmas-y scenes and Sera's dark eyes drop from him to the tin and oh! a tin. She seems both surprised and pleased to find it there in her hands and watches it for a few drifting moments until oh! she hands it to him, biting her lower lip as her tongue darts out to catch the last bit of sweetness from the powdered sugar on her mouth.
"S'for you."
PanShe nearly tumbles in but so long as he's stood in front of her and so long as he has his wits about him Sera will never fall. When she does not catch herself in an instant Pan reaches out a hand to take her elbow and give her steadiness that she finds on her own.
Finds his eyes after she's done sweeping the room. Never anyone inside his lodging with him when she comes around but the weight of his solitude sometimes makes it seem as though she's interrupting anyway. Like alone is the only time he can commune with his maker.
Still a surprise. She can come in.
"Course you can come in," he says.
He puts a hand on her shoulder like he would put a hand on the shoulder of anyone else come to his office asking for absolution or confession or both and in they go. No place for her to sit but the end of the bed. The borrowed bed is twice as large as the one to which he has become accustomed. A childhood grown into poverty and a young adulthood spent behind bars. Adulthood in the seminary and the priesthood circled back into poverty. He has to feel lost in a bed that large.
He takes the tin and plays at rattling it.
"What is it?" he asks like the point of a present isn't to open it. Leaves the door open.
SerafíneThe look Sera gives Pan when he catches her elbow and keeps her upright, keeps her from spinning outward in a widening arc, keeps her from falling - has a running thread of startlement in it, like someone waking from the strangest dream to find that lo their physical body is real. More than that, though, deeper and wider and brighter, is something so brief and kindled and unguarded that it makes her breath catch in her throat half-way down. The sensation lasts a fractional second and then the breath finishes and her lungs expand like opening wings and she's steady again, dropping her gaze to the odd gleam of his reading lamp over the painted, polished surface of the metal tin.
Sera feels his hand on her shoulder, the warmth and the weight of it, and it makes her feel all bright and present, and then she's tumbling onto the foot of his bed and kicking off her heels as she brings her legs up beneath her body to settle cross-legged on the rumpled comforter. Glances at the spine of the book he abandoned before following her instincts back to him.
The tin in his hand, rattling.
It sounds like cookies.
Oh hey, it is cookies.
"Wedding cookies," Sera is telling him probably was he is opening the tin to discover this for himself. Sera does not tell Pan that she all but stole them from the porch of his replacement. 'Course that guy doesn't really need cookies, does he?
Pan's church.
Pan's abuelitas.
Pan's fucking baked goods.
"They are really good." Says Sera, lean/swaying forward and lifting her chin rather winningly. She may or may not have the munchies. Then: "God this bed is so tiny. I guess though it's bigger than the one you had, huh."
PanWedding cookies.
The irony of their name and their appearance as a gift combine to make the priest huff out a laugh before he takes them over to the edge of the bed to sit down beside the Cultist. He pries off the lid with his blunt nails and sets it aside so he can offer her the tin's contents.
What he doesn't know won't hurt him. He could figure out where they came from and where they were intended to go but Pan is not so paranoid as that. A time and a place for everything. This is not the time and the place to doubt her silence.
So he offers. He takes two of his own. He returns the lid to the tin and sets the tin down on the bedside table. Eats neatly so he does not attract ants spilling crumbs onto the floor.
"Yeah," he says of the bed being bigger than the one he's used to. Then: "Didn't know they made them any bigger."
SerafíneOur Serafíne takes one of the cookies and pops it into her mouth whole and entire and allows the sugar to melt on her tongue. They are homemade. They are delicious. As the sugar dissolves the shortbread begins to as well. It is richer and nut-sweet and crumbly and Sera has powdered sugar on her hands and on her mouth and if this were a movie someone would need to kiss that powdered sugar off her mouth but this isn't a movie so she just licks her lips and her fingers and then - honestly - wipes them on her hoodie. Dan can deal with washing it later, and then Sera glances at the tin and thinks she wants another cookie and glances at Pan and thinks she wants other things and looks away and remembers the walls,
hold the ceiling up.
Hello walls!
And looks back at Pan, and the bed. And Pan, and the bed, disbelieving. "Seriously? My bed's like twice as big. You can fit a lot of people. I mean if you wanted to.
"This one's a good size though."
PanA glance to the tin becomes a glance to the priest and the priest interprets that different than Sera would have translated. He looks away to take the tin from its place on the bedside table. Its lid was loose on the base. When he takes it off this time he leaves it on the table. The tin he holds out to Sera before setting it on the duvet between them.
"It is. Does what I need it to do. I'll be back in the normal-sized bed soon enough."
Like a single-sized mattress is the standard by which all sleeping arrangements are set.
SerafíneStrangely enough Sera takes the open tin on the duvet between them as an invitation to shift position and crawl up the side of the bed and somehow end up in a half-curl with the tin of cookies between them and the weight of her head supported by her left hand. There's ink on her skin there, the very very odd sharkscissors tattoo, and ink on her right hand, which she extends to take another one of the wedding cookies - which is a messy sort of thing but which Sera eats neatly, ducking her head close to the tin to catch excess sugar.
Her hood has fallen away from her hair. The heel of her right hand rests on the shaved side-cut. The rest - blond curls and dark dark roots - tumbles over her shoulders onto the bed.
Then she's chewing and stops chewing midmotion as he says he'll be back in the "normal-sized" bed again soon and her eyes are steady and a little bit haunted despite her evidence curl of intoxication. "You mean your place at the church, right? The rectory?"
Pan"Claro."
Of course, he says. Like there's anywhere else in the world he could go if he weren't lodging here. Like he'd meant to abandon his congregation and leave a hole for the Bishop to have to fill. He hasn't spoken to the Bishop since he's come back from the Verbena's. For all they know he's still convalescing. They expect him to still be convalescing.
The doctors said he'd need outpatient physical therapy and rehabilitation for at least six months before he'd be ready to return to the task of standing in a hot airless sanctuary under heavy robes preaching and performing rites. Marrying couples and baptizing babies and hearing confessions.
Nothing else for him to do with his life but this task with Thakinyan is not finished. If he came back to his flock and then died fighting Thakinyan he would leave them even worse off than they are now. At least if he dies fighting Thakinyan Rosa can lie to them. Say he threw a clot or had another stroke or something.
"I'm not gonna be staying here - " Here. At the Chantry. " - much longer."
SerafíneSera is trying not to think about the demon, or anything to do with the demon, or the fact that Pan may die fighting a demon. She does not know the demon's name or manifestation; she has not touched an object or memory associated with that film since -
- since,
- since,
and yet she is aware of it all, of course she is. Her eyes gleam moist in the low light and now she's done with the cookies. Would reach for the lid and replace it if it were in her reach, and she breathes out, ragged and fine and slow.
"I missed you when you were gone. Went over there sometimes, anyway. But I guess Rosa told you that."
Pan"Rosa don't tell me nothing."
Not entirely true. Her job is to tell him what happens in his absence. But she does not tell him what the Awakened population is up to. She has left Sera out of her phone calls out to the Verbena's farmhouse. No point getting his blood pressure up if he's coming back from a stroke. Plenty of ways to justify her omissions of action but Pan's health is always the primary concern.
He isn't oblivious to her suffering. Her suffering is an apparent thing. It comes up buoyed by drugs and drink and disastrous evenings. Pan doesn't ask what happened tonight to bring this on. He looks at her though and he sees the glimmering eyes.
The tin goes back to the bedside table and he sighs. Reaches out to rest his hand atop the part of her head that is not shaved.
"Vale," he tells her. It's alright.
SerafíneVale he tells her and it makes her smile as she breathes in the world. Oh, that smile is compelling, lovely, genuine. Hawksley offered to pay her if she dressed up like an angel and went to church on Christmas and she didn't but she might've and nearly every waking hour you would call her anything but an angel except for that name she wears, that name someone chose for her, which in the end just means burning one, doesn't it?
But see: when she smiles like that she could be an angel, the genuine awareness of pleasure and its passing, of life and its fragility, of the places wear human bodies meet and where they collide. The tensile frailty of this human world.
Vale he tells her, and "I know," she says, with that rather aching smile. Turning her head into the weight and warmth of his hand. "I do.
"And when you were in the hospital I came to see you. Every day I could. That last day, with Katiana though, I couldn't make myself walk through the front doors to that place."
Pan"It's alright," he says again.
English this time. Pan smooths back hair from Sera's brow like she could imagine he would smooth back hair from his son's forehead when he was lain in his crib newborn and still his. Ana never gave him back his custodial rights. She didn't have to. Eventually the boy became an adult and now he doesn't need anybody to take care of him.
He took care of just about everybody else when he came back to Colorado over the summer. He wasn't here on vacation. A phone call brought him back.
"Ana told me. I know you were there." His hand rests. "It's today though, huh? Stay here."
Serafíne"I don't think she liked me," Sera is speculating, with an indulgent smile that says that Sera liked Ana and her eyes are going a little bit far away, holding the memory of Ana watching over Pan like a stone beneath her tongue. The web of connections unbroken, no matter how far we fall away from where and whom and why we were, then. Far away, she's amending, " - or maybe she did." quietkly and mostly to herself, because it does not matter to Serafíne particularly whether or not Ana liked her.
Then - It's today though, huh? Stay here. - and she closes her eyes and her brows are drawn as she feels the prick of pain, of awareness, lovely, spiking right through her strange and fickle and open and wounded heart and smiles around that wound and nods her head, quietly, firmly, beneath his hand, as much to feel the way his hand slides over her hair with the movement as for anything else. Yes the nod says. Of course she will stay.
Of course, of course.
"When you were in the ICU," Sera is telling him. "I wanted to stay with you. I couldn't stand that place but I wanted to be there and she wouldn't let me and Rafa wasn't here yet and I told her that you shouldn't be alone.
"She said, you weren't."
Pan"Claro."
Of course. He was in a hospital. He was surrounded by doctors and nurses and other patients. Besides them his god was watching over him. The same god who put into his path people who cared about him and could help him. The same god who could and would do nothing if he had gone to the ground alone.
Even at the end of all that the angel that came to him in prison is never gone from him. She does not manifest outside of seekings for him and none of them talk about their guides and guardians but She was there. If he had died She would have brought him home.
But that isn't what Sera means. That isn't what she means at all.
"I didn't do right by Ana. I don't think she didn't like you. She's got a good heart, yeah? She's a good woman. She's had to be tough, though. You understand."
His hand braces the back of her head like the next thing he's going to do is going to be to kiss her forehead. But he doesn't. He lets her go.
"C'mon. Let's get you a toothbrush and something to sleep in."
SerafíneNo, that Angel, that fucking God of his, that isn't what Sera means at all.
--
His hand braces the back of Sera's skull and Sera half-closes her eyes, expecting that kiss, expecting the dry brush of his mouth, all chaste, over her brow. Like a blessing. She's just a little bit fucked up, enough that when her eyes half-close, the moment stretches out like taffy. For several heartbeats, she does not know or understand how to get in or out of it.
But the priest is talking to her. A toothbrush. Something to sleep in. She is going to tell him that she doesn't usually sleep in anything. She just sleeps, but she remembers what he is as she straightens and takes in his profile, the scruff of his beard, and her shoulders are straight and she is very quiescent then, Sera, childlike in the manner of well-mannered drunks.
The toothbrush is easy. Something to sleep in is rather more difficult. One of his t-shirts, in the end, too large for his currently frame and therefore large enough to hit Sera mid-thigh. Clean but folded up with the rest of his clothes and stored in his room for long enough that it smells like him under and over the scent of the detergent stocked in the chantry.
After brushing her teeth, Sera pads back to the priest's room and sits on his bed and then climbs into it, beneath the covers. Warm as the day was, tonight the temperature will drift below freezing and snow will fall; gently, an inch or two out here, where the plains are beginning to rise, less in the city proper.
Sera curls up facing the wall and there's room for both of them and she intends to give him that room and for all that she has seemed more well and solidly and truly herself over the past few weeks - throwing a party, showing up drunk and stoned at the chantry, trying - with shining eyes - to counsel Grace about the freighted weight of a weapon-in-hand - the nights are different. At night sometimes, she's still in a white room and the door is locked. No one comes and no one goes and there is no way out, and she knows that she will die here.
It is not a nightmare, this. Just the knowledge in her bones. When Sera finally falls asleep she sleeps the way she always has done: so deeply and entirely that she is hard to wake. In those quiet moment before sleep takes her, though, sometimes -
she shakes,
and shakes,
and shakes.
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