Keep dreaming, Denver
SerafíneThere is a cave and there is a wild-haired and wild-eyed woman whom Sera has known since her awakening, whom she has never seen before. And that woman is standing in the midst of sacrificial smoke and her feet are bare over sacrificial bones in an oracle's graffiti-laced grotto and she has a voice like thunder beyond the horizon and she has a mouth like rain and she wears flames the way other women wear silk. Sera would like to become part of the storm part of the sky, part of the scissoring strikes of lightning flashing down to the churning sea and she is reaching and reaching but she does not know how to climb that high. There is a cave and a mouth and the sea below is black. They are dancing, whirling like dervishes, dark and sacred and cetripetal and she is going to be flung and before she can be flung, she jumps
Wednesday evening, Thursday evening - Sera does not know the day and she does not know the time except for the way it runs beneath her skin. It is: night and dark and very very cold in Denver this week. Not below-freezing cold. Below-zero cold. In weather like this evening turns up the goddamned heat and stays home, plugs in the electric heater, fills up that old creaky kerosene one. Turns on the oven and opens it up, if None of the Above work. The wind is furious and rattles the frames of the windows in the rectory. Maybe the priest who replaced Pan taped plastic over them in lieu of storm windows, or maybe he foud the storm windows, dusty, covered in cobwebs and dust, in some crawl space beneath the wooden house. Regardless: it is fucking cold and people put on layers and keep their heads down and put on practice, low-heeled, waterproof boots and walk carefully and the old ladies in the League of Mary stay home except on Sundays, because they are afraid of breaking a hip and won't risk it for daily mass or the Adoration of the Blessed Virgin, but God has expectations, doesn't he still have standards, aren't there some fucking laws, some goddamned requirements left in the world that cannot be and have not been and will not be waived?
But this is Sera out in this weather, and god knows what she's wearing. On her feet, on her body, how she's keeping her stupid ass from frostbite given her proclivities for baring flesh. Over/under the rattle of the windowpanes in the howling plains' wind late on a weeknight, a knock at his door. A ring of the bell. She only does that when she's sober, or mostly-sober. When she thinks perhaps that he still might actually be up.
He knows who it is because he can feel her; gut-wrenching, entrancing Serafíne. From the other side of the door, from the other side of the hall. And someone else, too - like a door, opening. Like a passageway, dark at both ends. Like that road Paul took too Damascus, excepting no one knows exactly where it ends.
Another knock, then. Let me in.
SerafíneWednesday evening, Thursday evening - Sera does not know the day and she does not know the time except for the way it runs beneath her skin. It is: night and dark and very very cold in Denver this week. Not below-freezing cold. Below-zero cold. In weather like this evening turns up the goddamned heat and stays home, plugs in the electric heater, fills up that old creaky kerosene one. Turns on the oven and opens it up, if None of the Above work. The wind is furious and rattles the frames of the windows in the rectory. Maybe the priest who replaced Pan taped plastic over them in lieu of storm windows, or maybe he foud the storm windows, dusty, covered in cobwebs and dust, in some crawl space beneath the wooden house. Regardless: it is fucking cold and people put on layers and keep their heads down and put on practice, low-heeled, waterproof boots and walk carefully and the old ladies in the League of Mary stay home except on Sundays, because they are afraid of breaking a hip and won't risk it for daily mass or the Adoration of the Blessed Virgin, but God has expectations, doesn't he still have standards, aren't there some fucking laws, some goddamned requirements left in the world that cannot be and have not been and will not be waived?
But this is Sera out in this weather, and god knows what she's wearing. On her feet, on her body, how she's keeping her stupid ass from frostbite given her proclivities for baring flesh. Over/under the rattle of the windowpanes in the howling plains' wind late on a weeknight, a knock at his door. A ring of the bell. She only does that when she's sober, or mostly-sober. When she thinks perhaps that he still might actually be up.
He knows who it is because he can feel her; gut-wrenching, entrancing Serafíne. From the other side of the door, from the other side of the hall. And someone else, too - like a door, opening. Like a passageway, dark at both ends. Like that road Paul took too Damascus, excepting no one knows exactly where it ends.
Another knock, then. Let me in.
Fr. EcheverríaNo trace of Father Ruíz is left in this place.
She cannot feel Father Echeverría from down the street but that has less to do with the weather and more to do with the newness of his return. Two months convalescing and another two months out in the plains where he took up a room at a house only Rosa knew how to find. No new parishioners since he left but for the ones who followed Father Ruíz from his own congregation. They went back with him.
The church is like a lighthouse against a white shore. Thick clouds bouncing pink city lights back down to join the snow and everything is all lit up behind the flurries. Magic cannot compete against technology. Not when the one performing the magic calls it miracles. Faith is dying out even faster than magic.
Even in weather like this he doesn't lock the door when he's home.
Pan comes to the entryway in his stocking feet. He wears a sweater instead of cranking the heat. She has not been here since summertime. When he was heavier and did not wear a beard. It isn't sight that tells him who is out there but he hesitates all the same because something's changed about her.
"Ay, loquita, you gonna freeze out there!" he says as he bangs open the screen door and opens his arm to shepherd her inside. "¿Qué pasa contigo?"
SerafíneShe is gonna freeze out there. Okay even a Sera makes concessions to winter weather when the temperature drops this far: she's wrapped up in a very thick coat, black leather lined with shearling, lined again with a thick black hoodie with the hood pulled up over the crown of her head. That coat is pretty short, though. It covers her down to her ass. Beneath that: a short leather skirt, her usual goddamned fishnets, and a pair of thigh-high leather boots, with heels are are only slightly insane instead of truly mad.
There's a fading bruise on her right temple. The fading line of a fairly well-healed laceration that nevertheless still may scar.
"I wanted to see you," Sera says, shaking the snow off her hood, starting to unwind a black scarf printed with white-sugar-skulls, as she comes into the warmth and the light. She looks - and perhaps feels more than a little bit dislocated.
Feels that again as she comes inside the rectory for the first time since he left it. Sera breathes in sharply and turns back to Pan as he goes to close the door behind her, rises to her tiptoes as she steps back and rather into him.
"I wasn't gonna freeze," she is telling him as she unearths her frozen fingers from her freezing pockets and reaches up to grasp his jaw. Her thumbs on his cheeks, his fingers on his neck. Her skin is cold, freezing: the bright, sharp red of that earliest stage of go-inside-dummy-before-you-get-frostbite. She just holds his face like that for a half-minute, her thumbs on his bear, smiling at him, this strange and tremulous smile. "I knew you'd let me in."
Another man would be struck by the conviction that she was on the verge of kissing him. But he isn't another man, and she does not, after all, kiss him.
Just studies him, with this open tenderness that feels so - strange, expectant, bright.
Fr. EcheverríaThough her thin fingers bite like icicles when they find his flesh the priest does not wince away from her or even flinch. It's only a sensation and the sensation does not mean anything. Nothing worth flinching back from.
Half of a minute is a long time. He does not stand there for thirty seconds letting her touch his face in some silent communion while she gets her bearings. Sera always strikes him as having come unstuck from time. It has never bothered him. But she is still of this earth and her flesh is freezing so Pan reaches up after about three seconds and takes both her hands off of his jaws and holds them between his own.
His health is come back to him. Though he is not regaining the weight at the rate at which he lost it he does not cut a cadaverous figure stood all in black at the end of the day. Low lights on behind him but he was not in bed. It isn't that late even if it is dark enough to pass for late. February is a harsh month.
Though his hands are not warm as a Verbena's they promise to thaw her out. He snorts when she said she knew he'd let her in. He has never not let her in. Never made her leave even when she came into the place tripping or shaking or floating. Pan is a patient man.
"Well," he says. His eyes don't go down past her neckline. They never do. "I'm freezing just looking at you. Come sit down, I'll make you something to drink."
SerafíneSo, not half-a-minute in the foyer, her freezing hands cradling his face, looking up at him, changed and new and Sera all at once. When he takes her hands in his hands to warm her up she starts shaking but it isn't fear or anything like it. Sera doesn't know what it is. It feels like that tremors one develops when one comes in from the cold. When one's body remembers what it means to be warm. Except this is something else, that will come later, in a minute or five when he has made her tea and she has perhaps doused it with whiskey from her flask as she is wont to do.
Sera allows Pan to warm her hands and allows him to lead her really rather docilely for a fucking Sera to the kitchen but she does not allow him to let go of her. Turns one of those hands over in his so that they are holding hands as he leads her through the small, familiar corridors of the rectory. She does not let him go until he needs both hands to fill the kettle and put it on to boil.
Then she sits, ass on his table rather than in his chair, busying herself with unbuttoning and unzipping and generally, disrobing. The coat is shucked off and the hoodie unzipped and beneath it - well, he doesn't know. He doesn't look below her neck, but it is Sera so the outfit features her boobs. Seems to've been designed to remind the world that she has some.
Sera sits there fiddling with a gold ring on her right index finger, watching him move about, making tea, as if he were new-made. He is new-made to her new-self and there is something like a storm outside.
"Tell me about your awakening."
Fr. EcheverríaSo he leads her into the kitchen by the hand. Not like a child and not like a lover. They're just holding hands. Jesus held hands with his disciples long ago. Men in distant countries will hold their male friends' hands as they walk down the street. Doesn't mean anything more than her laying her hands upon his cheek.
But they have to part eventually. And when she sits herself down on the table instead of at it he does not chastise her. He picks his battles. It's just a table.
Her request stills him only for a moment. Five words he hasn't heard since long before Sera met him. Since Sera was a little girl, like as not. She is only 23 years old. Pan is nearly twice that. Will be twice that in the spring.
He recovers to finish filling the kettle with water from the faucet and setting it on the burner.
"Why do you want to hear about that?" he asks.
SerafíneSera is still fiddling with her clothes or unwinding her scarf or something. The ring maybe, twisting it around her index finger. He takes up space that she does not take up, all in black. She watches his reflection in the glass of the window that overlooks the sink.
Outside, the city is dark.
"Why do you think?"
It is - strangely - not oppositional, when she asks him that. It is a question. Her voice curls up at the end. Her head is canted sidelong and her eyes are simmering on him.
Fr. EcheverríaThe priest does not turn back towards her yet. He's gathering other things out of the cupboard. A jar with cloves and a jar with cinnamon sticks. Honey. Once he's gathered all these things he turns and leans back against the counter. Props the heels of his hands against it. By then she's asked a question.
His answer to her question:
"If I wanted to think I wouldn't've asked you, huh?" He's teasing her. "It ain't a nice story, and it's a long one. You sure you wanna hear it?"
SerafíneThe teasing makes her smile; even her smile feels new. New and strange and liminal. Like she's just trying it on. Like she hasn't remembered her name yet; like she does not need one, and may never need anything like it again.
Her cheeks curve with a closemouthed smile that is otherwise mostly compressed. Sera stops fiddling with her ring and instead leans back rather as he has, the heels of her palms resting on the table, her long-damn-looking legs swinging, leather creeking with the movement, clothes falling away from her body, revealing - reveling in - its inverse-curve.
"If you don't mind telling me." A brief pause, not precisely sharp. "Then I'm sure I wanna hear.
"If you mind - "
Fr. EcheverríaSuspenders must keep his goddamn pants from falling down now that they don't fit him around the middle anymore. Same color as his shirt but she can see the dull glint of the clips where they bite onto his waistband. Can imagine him shucking the bands off his shoulders as he sits to write a letter but not taking them off this early in the evening. Just in case he has to go back out.
Anyway.
"I don't mind."
Nothing else to do before the water starts to boil. He runs a hand through his mostly-silver hair and clears his throat. He's stood up at NA meetings and told this to newcomers. Sometimes he tells the story during sermons. Not High Mass. That's a ritual you don't improvise.
"When I was nineteen, yeah? I was dropped out, working on cars so Ana could go to school. She was finishing up her nursing degree. Rafael was... not even six months old. And I was shooting up heroin and smoking methamphetamine every day. I kept it from Ana, but she ain't stupid."
The water in the kettle is starting to rattle but it has not hit a boil yet.
"One of our friends from high school. Carlos. He was going to college same place as Ana. Commuting from Pueblo where we lived out to campus. They spent a lot of time together. Meth makes you paranoid, but I don't think the drugs had nothing to do with it. Got it into my head she was fooling around with Carlos. Carlos never did nothing to me, but one day he was there when I got home from work, and we got into an argument, and we started to fight. So I dragged him outside and I hit him until he stopped breathing."
Alright. He turns away not from shame but so he can finish what he's doing at the counter. A mug for his tea and a mug for whatever it is he's making for her. Either that bottle of whiskey has been there all this time or Father Ruíz left it. He puts a teabag into his mug and a generous splash of whiskey into her mug. Everything else he took out goes into the mug as well.
"I pled guilty to second-degree murder and the judge gave me twenty years out at Fremont. They got one ward out there for guys who ain't been convicted of sexual offenses and the other eighty, eighty-five percent of 'em, that's what they're in for. I lasted a little over a year, and then I hung myself in the shower."
There goes the kettle.
Serafíne
So, so. Sera's long, fine fingers are still sharply red from the cold. They are numb but just starting to ache as feeling returns. It is cold, it is damned cold, it is goddamned cold and she is a mad creature, isn't she? Here she is sitting on a celibate priest's kitchen table - a familiar priest, a familiar kitchen - legs swinging, eyes skimming down his black-clad body to find those bright points, the glint of metal at his waist, where the teeth of the clips bite home.
His hands. The black-threads through his silver hair. Sera can hear the familiarity with which he tells the story, which tells her that he has told it so very many times before. She is leaning back now, her hands braced on either side of her thighs, a compressed compassion shining in her eyes that he does not seem to require. She remembers when he was as close to broken as she had ever seen him, and even then he was merely bowed. Briefly bowed.
And she remembers, Sera, the warmth of his skin beneath her mouth.
She watches him.
She does not interrupt.
Pan
A body gets to be as old as his and the stories come out of time all have that blunted edge of memorization to them. The first few attempts are sharp and painful. If she had known him twenty years ago she would have had to wrench this story from him. Might not have heard if if she weren't sat at one of the NA meetings he had to attend.
They aren't at that point yet. At this point in the story he's telling Francisco Echeverría is dead or trying very hard to be dead. Pan however is stood in the kitchen Sera has infiltrated so many times and he's finishing making what will be a hot toddy by the time the spices are done mixing. He doesn't have lemon sliced up but a bowl of citrus fruits sit on the counter and he finds a paring knife to make a sliver to put into her drink before he gives it to her. Something to warm her hands and her insides.
Something to clean up while he finishes his story.
"An angel came to me," he says. "Tall black-clad thing, wings and a cloak, you know. Couldn't see Her face but I knew She was a She. And She said to me, 'Nunc non est tempus abire tibi.' I didn't know Latin. Had no idea about the words coming out of Her mouth. But I knew. I felt it. I had to stay on Earth, I had Work to do. No dying yet."
Everything is put away. Even the lemon has been bound up in plastic and tucked back in the fridge. He claps it shut and turns around to face her. Leans against the counter with his hands braced on either side against it. His tea isn't done steeping yet.
"Next thing I knew I was across the grounds, outside where I wasn't supposed to be. Guards thought I'd escaped and I let 'em think that. They put me in solitary confinement for the rest of the year. Had a lot of time to think in that cell."
This is the part where he tells Sleepers and Believers about how sitting alone in the dark he had a lot of time to think about all the wrongs he'd done and truly repent for his sins and come to the determination he was going to make things right and he was going to start in the cell.
No point blowing smoke up Sera's ass. He was alone in that cell. His Avatar didn't come back for him and that wasn't where his religious conversion happened either.
"I had a parole hearing seven years after that and they approved releasing me early on the grounds that I'd been a model prisoner. I was out six months later. Twenty-eight years old and I was like 'Well what I'm supposed to do now? I killed somebody, ain't nobody want nothing to do with me, I'm not gonna find no job, why I told the parole board all that stuff about being reformed and being ready to go home and shit? I ain't got no home.' Went back to Pueblo, started going to NA meetings once a week. Met a woman named Sister Ruth one of my first nights going. She was an Adept of the Chorus and a pastor at a church that burnt down before the War ended."
Oh shit. His tea's going to burn. Pan draws a lugubrious breath and pushes himself off the counter to fish the bag out the mug. Squeezes out the excess water before he tosses it in the rubbish bin beneath the sink.
"I'll tell you about Sister Ruth some other time. That's another long story."
Sera is not yet crying but her eyes are shining, and he can hear her reaction in the pattern of her breathing. A sharp, punctuate inhale.
There will be silence. Serafíne does not interrupt him. She allows the moments to settle into their grainy texture. She listens to the kettle, whistling in the kitchen. She feels the dry, wooshing warmth in the air as somewhere in the basement, the old furnace kicks on.
Serafíne
Sera accepts the toddy and there is still that strangely quiet grace to her, which makes her feel like some seam is about to come undone. She takes the mug from his hands, looking up at him, so attentive, and wraps her bright red fingers around the fired clay and bends over and inhales. The whiskey. The spices. The hot steam from the near-boiling water, that little slice of lemon.
Her reflection strange in the water. The priest moving familiarly around the kitchen, the motions of making tea and cleaning up quite nearly rote, quite nearly ritual, especially in this space that is beginning to remember his light.
And maybe there are places even in the rote telling of a time-long-passed and a story often-told: in pieces, in piecemeal - maybe there are places where Sera, watching Pan, aches even if he no longer does. Where the corded, blunted memories of what-he-did and what-he-suffered open up in her rather differently than they do in his telling.
Sera sips her toddy; and oh it does warm her, and she swings her legs and glances at the priest, and then the old cabinets, plywood or maybe painted metal given the age and the era of the house, and then back at the priest. Nods when he tells her that he will tell her the story of Sister Ruth another time. She trusts him, Sera, so implicitly it could break her heart.
"Have you seen your angel since?"
Pan
Serafíne has a way of living in the moment as if it's the only one she has and he has never told her this but if he did not respect that she has to know the priest would have said something by now. Maybe she has heard stories from the others about his methods of correcting behavior that he does not appreciate or condone. Maybe they are all too afraid of him to make mention of it or haven't noticed when he has spoken up about habits that could bring ruin down upon the rest of them.
This is not his life. It never has been. His life ought to have ended in a prison shower before many of them were even born but his life doesn't just belong to him. Something bigger than him stepped in before he could asphyxiate. Threw him outside of the gray walls and the double-locked doors and gave him the only real chance he ever had.
He hasn't mentioned parents or siblings. She's met his son and the mother of his son. A reason he didn't mention his birth family and a reason Ana and Pan keep their distance from each other now. A reason Rafael was the one everyone looked towards and leaned on when it was his father lain half-dead in a hospital bed over the summer.
The notion of everything happening for a reason is one of the cornerstones of the Christian faith. God wants people to help Pan. God wants people around Pan. God doesn't want Pan to die just yet. Even sent a Euthanatos to his bedside. To Sera's home.
So: she drinks her drink and she lets it warm her chill-red hands and she asks a simple question after a story that almost made her cry though that was not the point of the story.
"Yes," he says. "The first time was right after we buried Ruth. I was angry, and I didn't want nothing to do with any of this, and she found me. Second time was maybe five years ago. I went looking for her that time. I'm gonna go find her again soon. I think it's about time."
Serafíne
Sera can taste the strangeness of her new self on her tongue. She can feel the moments slipping by against the roof of her mouth, each pendulum swing of her legs, which are stupidly, foolishly bare given the bright and bitter cold outside, but that is how she is and what she is and she is here now: warming.
"Mine wasn't an angel." Sera's voice is a velvet ribbon, low tonight, and rich, and a bit hoarse from the cold, warming from the whiskey. Doesn't she sound like whiskey, too. Whiskey and cigarettes that she inhales as if she didn't need any fucking boring shit like oxygen to survive. And she's biting her lower lip and looking at him, and her legs keep swinging, swinging, swinging.
"I didn't go looking for her. I guess she was looking for me. I didn't even remember her 'til I saw her again half-way across the fucking bar after we finished our set. One bare breast. Eyes like the edge of a storm. You know? How they roll in over the plains.
"Once I saw her, I couldn't let the idea of her go. She started playing hard to get, all elusive. I looked for her everywhere in the bar.
"I kissed her when I found her. She tasted like lightning." A brief and rather breathless little smile, which is still limned by the gleam of the unshed tears in her eyes. "Scorched my lungs."
A little bit far away, Sera brings the toddy to her mouth. Just inhales, and then takes another steaming sip and glances away from him. The fridge; looking for that postcard. That snapshot. That evidence of life beyond his vows.
"Your angel and my - " here Sera breathes out, half a smile, half a laugh. She doesn't have a name for the woman inside her. The shape of her soul. That silence stands in.
"Do you think they come from the same place?"
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