The six block stretch of Santa Fe lined with art galleries, coffee shops, bars, tattoo parlors, and such and so forth and so on is experiencing a moderate amount of foot traffic tonight. That'll happen when the temperatures rise enough that even the shaded patches of ice begin to melt down, going from a thumbs' width in thickness to, ah, fractionally less than that. It's nice out, is what that means. The sky is clear and there are people in their winter coats and people in t-shirts and jeans and Crocs. Takes all kinds in Denver.
As the sun throws out its last golden ray over the ridge of the Rockies, all those kinds are rising in all kinds of ways. For Sid's part, she's wandering as she sometimes wanders. Not all that long ago she parked her old blue and cream (and rust and cracked) truck along the curb to see a classmate's drawing hanging on the wall of that classmate's friend's friend's uncle's ex-roommate's gallery. She was very proud, the classmate.
It's a little later now and Sid's managed to slip free of the herd in order to find something to eat. A breakfast house fills the cracks between one large gallery and two much smaller ones stacked atop each other. It's a small place, a greasy spoon place, and a greasy everything else place. The walls are a greasy yellow, the wood a waxy, greasy looking blond pine. The seats are old and cracked green vinyl, but hey, no one's coming here for the color scheme and the décor. They're coming for heaps of eggs and piles of bacon.
Sid finds herself a seat in the corner, her left arm against the glass front window so she can see...everything really, while she waits for a server to notice her.
[and awareness because it's Sid]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 2, 6, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneSid feels Serafíne rather a long way off. From blocks away, even - through those icy sidewalks and the wan glory of that setting sun, which is arctic in its brilliance tonight. Sera, who is both undeniable and hard to ignore, both instinctual and a bit overwhelming; who lights one up right through the gut, the base of the spine, and consumes attention, because where else would you look when she's in the room. Feels Sera before she sees her, which is still rather a long way off - half-way down the sidewalk, full of Denver's strange combination of sandal-clad hopefuls and bundled-up snowbunnies and everything in between.
Nevermind the ice, Sera's wearing thigh-high boots with four and a half-inch heels and has an arm slipped around her closest companion (who is Dan, for the record)'s midsection and some tiny little leather skirt made almost entirely out of straps and buckles and fishnets beneath it down to the thigh-high boots and a cropped white t-shirt over a lacy black halter-thing over a sherpa-lined leather jacket that has been tagged and scored and covered in pins that were removed and replaced until it seems more tattered than held-together and that, by the way, is deliberate. That coat is open to the bright chill and shows bare-fucking-skin and she is wearing gloves, Sera, but they are fingerless white lace gloves, and her long, fine fingers are a bit red from the cold but she's lighting up a cigarette and tucking her head against Dan's shoulder while someone behind her leans forward to insert something and there's laughing movement out from then like an opening hinge and she's turning, see, on a low-pivot to glance behind her when she feels something or sees something or something changes, beneath her skin.
Something alert or different at the least. Something about doorways and hallways and cavemouths. And she looks up from half-way down the block and looks right at Sid through the window of that greasy spoon, a look full of a surprising steadiness, a remarkable directness, that piece of her she refuses to ever really turn off.
And smiles.
And waves, with that cigarette (the dark-rolled kretek) in her left hand.
And takes another drag and looks like a fucking painting.
Then leans back over to Dan and drops her mouth to his shoulder and mutters something onto his own leather coat and rests the bridge of her nose against the flat line of his upper arm, until he looks up too and murmurs something to her and then behind them.
And lo, the two of them are redirected when they start walking again, aren't they - right to the Swift Breakfast House. They pause outside the door long enough for Sera and Dan to trade off drags on Sera's clove cigarette and then she hands the remainder of the smoke off to someone else in the general crowd they had inhabited, who is taking it off elsewhere or hanging out outside, it hardly fucking matters.
The front door opens.
There is a goddamned bell and it jingles and Sera peels herself away from Dan or Dan peels himself away from Sera.
He's headed to the counter.
Sera's headed Sid's way.
Sid has 4.52 seconds to get away if she wants to make an escape.
Maybe less than that, though. Sera is, after all, a Seer.
SidSid has longer than 4.52 seconds to get away. She has from the moment she senses that particular resonance - visceral, enthralling, and something else, something new that changes the shade from Definitely Sera to Hm Maybe Probably Sera? - blocks and blocks away. And maybe she thinks about it. Maybe she considers Christmas and the strange stiffness in the Cultist and the odd stand-offishness of her other Awakened guest, and she thinks about making her escape again. She hadn't stayed much longer after Sera left the room, it was too strange, too weird, too different. That wasn't the room where Sid and Jim batted at each other while making smoothies. It wasn't where Sera sat perched on the edge of the table near to Dan while the four of them discussed a demon. It was a different, foreign place. So Sid left.
Sid does not leave the Swift Breakfast House when she senses what could maybe possibly perhaps be Serafíne. She's sitting next to the window still, a plain dark blue sweatshirt hanging from the back of her chair, her messenger bag tucked beneath her seat. When Sera spots her, smiles, waves, Sid is sitting with her chin cupped against the heel of her hand, the corner of her mouth raised in a slight half-smile. The hand propping up her head shifts, her fingers wiggle in a return wave, and while Sera and Dan make their eventual way inside, Sid sits up. Her hair is down as it nearly always is, waves of red spilling over her shoulders. She's wearing a dark blue sweater with a neckline so wide her left shoulder is exposed along with the black strap of her bra, the dark colors making her fair skin appear much paler. She, too, is wearing a skirt, one that probably falls a few inches above her knees. Brown leather boots that go up to her pale knees, with thick straps that close over her ankles, complete the look.
She lifts her chin when the bell jingles and Sera-and-Dan enter. Sid knows without having to watch that they will peel apart and that Dan will go to the counter. There is a glass of water before Sid's hands on the table, next to a folded, laminated menu.
"Hey," she says, the greeting quiet. "Are you here for eggs and bacon, too?"
Serafíne"Naw," this is Sera who feels like Sera yes and also something: new. New-and-different. So not merely Sera or perhaps not even Sera except that look is brief and whole and bruising and god that looks like her, doesn't it. Full of that awkwardness of Christmas and honestly the awkwardness of the months that came before and the fact of winter and also eggs. Eggs and bacon.
Well, no. There are neither eggs nor bacon in Sera's eyes and who can read someone else that quickly through all the layers of their skin?
The quirk of her little half-smile half-smirk and awareness of solace and the awareness of pain and the awareness of Sid's hand cupped around her chin and her elbow resting on the table. The solidity of that. The immediacy of that.
"Not eggs and bacon," she shucks off her leather coat and beneath it that cut-off t-shirt, which is half-a-rainbow rhinocerus and half, well, the lean line of her torso, the teasing suggestion of her bra because: white cotton, black bra, and also cut-off. A hint of Sera's ink, something scrawled down her flank, another thing-or-three closer to hidden beneath black lace. The tats on her arms and her hands and on and on. Sera is wearing a small ring of beaten gold on her right index finger and an armful of cheap plastic bangles from the dollar store on her left wrist.
And she's sliding into the booth across from side, and she's picking up a menu and she's opening it but not really looking down at it. Probably doesn't care what she eats, Sera.
"I'm here for you. Hi Sid.
"It's been a while."
SidSid doesn't wear jewelry. There are markings on her, sure. The sleeve of her sweater is pushed up, but her left arm is angled and at rest. The tough, raised line of scar tissue can't be seen. The dark lines seared into the skin of her wrist are hidden until she gestures, but Sid isn't one for excessive gesticulation. Her movements are conservative.
Even now. She scarcely moved a muscle before she saw Sera through the window, and since she sat up she's scarcley moved again. Her dark eyes lifted, her chin raising slightly so that when she does look up she continues to look through the frames of her dark glasses. And when Sera began sliding into the seat opposite her, Sid's hands remained resting on top of the table, resting between them.
"Me," she says, doesn't ask, the corner of her bottom lip tucking between her teeth briefly before her smile widens slightly, releasing it. "I guess it has. You seem like you're doing better." Last time they were both still recovering from illness, though Sera looked the worse for it. She'd still been recovering from a fast when the Hydra virus was forced on her, and she spent her days wasting away further from that. Sid had been thinner, too. Perhaps she's back to normal again, or as close to normal as is possible for her to be.
SerafíneSee, Sera is a fucking dramatic gesture. The way she shucks her coat, the way sliiiiiides into the bench seat, the way bracelets clatter across the plane of her wrist, the way she tosses her head back and allows it to loll on the axis of her spine, as if she were already drunk and high and feeling some sliding golden light all serpentine up her spine and
she does look so very much better. Healthier or whatever you want to call it. No longer ravaged physically but worse: psychologically. Just devoured, just spent.
Just consumed and not in any of the ways she always wants to be consumed.
But look, a sort of softness in her eyes that feels like a kind of quickening, and is hard to measure or note because it appears and disappears and turns over beneath the surface and some absolutely native part of Sera absolutely hates this part of the conservation.
Sid says, you seem like you're doing better and Sera, what the living fuck can she say to that; there's that in her eyes too, the steely and countermanding grace of it.
"I guess I am." Which is true and false and so many things at once: hollow and full and a half-hundred other contradictions we cannot be bothered to mention.
And more. Here is something she doesn't say: You look better, too.
Sera draws in a deep breath and glances at the window and then out the window, at the street. Strangers walking by and her own image superimposed on them, luminous, liminal. Between.
"I didn't wanna see you for a long-ass time, you know?"
SidIt really has been a long-ass time since they saw each other. Really, really saw each other. The last time they saw each other properly was...fuck, October? The night they met a man in a restaurant just miles from here. They've seen each other since, but not really. Those were moments. When was the last time? That time with the red velvet cake and the alcoholic floats?
A long god damned time ago.
They're both looking better and the conversation is chit chat, the thing that acquaintances do when they see each other. Sid says words to fill the void because there is a void to fill and she can see that Sera hates it. This place where they are now? Sid's not terribly fond of it, either.
There is a slow lowering of her lashes and Sid's gaze lowers with it, tips away from the brightness of Sera. Looking at them, it's hard to see if there's a common ground, a common denominator, a common thing that has them sitting at a table together in a breakfast restaurant in a place of art and beautiful and terrible things.
Sid, still looking down, says, "I do." Sucks in a breath and her chin lifts, her gaze drifting to their reflection - faint now but growing more distinct as the world outside the window darkens through Denver's truncated dusk toward evening. "I didn't want to see you, either." Finally those dark eyes lift again, her head still angled so her face is away, but her eyes are on Sera. "But you wanted to see me now?"
SerafíneThere is something winged in the arching grace of the glance Sera sends Sid's way, then and there. The question tips the honed edge of something both bitter and sweet into her, and it is like stepping diving through a darkened window. With no idea what is on the other side. The answer is a complicated, indissoluble mixture of yes and no and a half-dozen other things to which Sera does not give voice because she offers Sid a simmering smile that says them all: both yes and no and I did it anyway, didn't I because even a creature like Sera who gives in to every whim and desire of her tattered fucking soul knows that sometimes you are many things at once, reluctant and needful and bright. Sometimes you do something you don't want to do because you want the thing on the other side of the hard and difficult thing more.
So, that sort of a yes smile and a no smile and a raw smile and a wry smile and a quiet, lilting lift of her narrow chin.
"Why didn't you want to see me?"
Steady, steady, her drowning eyes.
SidSera is not the only one who straddles two sides of an infinity of answers, yes and no and all the shades in between, she's just the one who feels like it. Sid lifts her own chin, tilts her head so that it faces the same direction her eyes are looking. And she is also yes, but also no, and a lot more I did it anyway, too.
Somewhere just beneath the surface, or perhaps a little further (and further) down, is a kindred feeling, the barest hint of something connected, something similar. Sameness. Ready, waiting, waiting, waiting. For the right moment? For the right step in the right direction? Who knows. Maybe it's not down, but back, somewhere so far behind Sid it's been lost even to her rearview mirror.
Sera asks a question and Sid's lips part to answer, but she pauses, not because Sera's steadiness arrests her, but because. There are a hundred ways to answer that question, and not all of them are true. "It's...it was. Complicated." Her shoulder, the one still covered in soft, dark blue fabric, lifts and falls in a shrug. "It doesn't matter anymore."
Serafíne"I don't know," Sera returns, a bit wry and a bit raw and a bit aware. Of her body and her breath and the permanence and impermanence of all things. A flicker of a glance; drawn and taut from the window to Sid's eyes, to Sid's curving shoulder, to her mouth again. "I think it does matter."
And just like that, some part of Sera believes that that is true. Knows it.
"If you don't wanna tell me, that's one thing. A different thing."
Maybe even something Sera can live with.
"But I'd like to know."
Sid"No," replies Sid "it really doesn't," a shadow forming between her dark brows as she looks across at Sera. It's a passing thing, that shadow, there and then Sid is breathing in deep through her nose, letting that breath out on a quiet sigh. Because she remembers that this is Sera, and sometimes Sera pushes, sometimes hard enough to shove Sid away from her. And Sid doesn't want to be shoved away again.
"There are things in the past that matter, because they're bound to come up again," she continues. "And there are things that don't matter, Sera, because they're done and over." She slides her hand forward, her left hand, slides it so it's on the table between them, between their menus and past Sid's glass of water, closer to Sera's side. And there she twists her arm, turns her hand over so the palm is up, her fingers splayed. An offering.
"You're my friend and that's what matters."
SerafíneSera breathes out, this long, slow breath through her nostrils. The glance she gives Sid is really rather quiet and a bit opaque, but only because there is something measured to it. Something considering, something thoughtful, something withheld -
- and something lovely.
Sera's eyes - dark-rimmed, reflective, blue - slip from Sid's eyes to that hand half-way across the table. And Sera takes Sid's hand, of course she takes Sid's hand, Sid's amazingly warm, incredible fucking hand and folds her own right hand around it. The ring on her index finger and the ink on the flat edge of her palm and more ink at the wrist but not sharkscissors, sharkscissors is on her left hand, see?
Wraps her own hand around Sid's, and -
smiles, this haunting, lovely, heartbreaking smile.
"Sid, you're my friend. That's why it matters."
A brief hitch of her shoulders.
"I can tell you why I didn't want to see you.
"If you wanna know."
SidSera takes her hand and Sid wraps her fingers around those of the Ecstatic. And yes, Sid's hands are warm, full of a magic that exists in her blood, runs through her veins and radiates outward, giving life to certain Patterns. In the past they've also given a sense of comfort beyond what the Verbena mage had been capable of giving. Those times are rare now, and become rarer as more and more of those internal locks come undone. Releasing her own inner warmth, the empowerment of her own presence, steady and still and strong, radiating as surely as the warmth radiates from her skin. To the point now where Sid is still quiet, that is not a thing that will likely change in this life, but she is steadfast.
She gives Sera's hand a squeeze, looking at their joined hands thoughtfully a moment before looking up into those blue eyes.
"I don't," she answers. Wanna know, she means, because that is who Sid is. She does not want to know the secrets of others, does not want to pry them open to look inside and scoop out their mysteries, laying them bare. Which is where they differ. "But I'll listen if you want to tell me."
SerafíneSera is a fucking hedonist, and it's easy for her to get lost in the warmth of Sid's hand. Sera's own hand is pretty chilly; she's just come in from the cold, after all, and she's skinny and, even in the midst of winter, wears far too little clothing, so: warmth. The fascinating, ambient pull of it, and Sera remembers the first bloom of that fascination last summer - suddenly and entirely, remembers it - Justin and Sid and Sid and Justin, and the memory chases itself across her clear features, her flat brows drawing together, her quick mouth going a bit softer as she loosens her hand and thoughtfully traces the tip of her index finger over the radiant warmth of Sid's palm.
The gesture is as intimate and as familiar as a lover's, but there's a certain hint of distance in Sera's eyes, then. This hint of horizons and vistas and the seams of things, where the sky is stitched into the ground.
Sera glances up then; away from Sid, across the diner toward Dan where he sits at the counter, forearms slung over the lip, laughing with the waiter tending the counter as the guy overturns Dan's coffee mug and pours him a cup from the pot he's carrying around like a proper hash-joint food server.
Sera looks back at Sid then; her smile does not precisely fade, though it does shift to something poignant and more a bit charged with memories, which are not precisely good.
And, quite thoughtfully, Sera unlaces their laced hands. Drops her eyes to the table between them and pulls her own hand back. The tattoos she does not remember scribing into her skin an unfocused scrawl of blackwork against her flesh. Sid's shadow in the formica tabletop no more than a suggestion between them. The noise rising from the dining room a kind of washing, pleasant hum. "If you don't want to know," Sera says, with quiet little shrug. "I don't really wanna talk about it."
Sera's smile is rather poignant. She can feel the weight of unspoken words on her tongue.
"But if you wanted to know, Sid - " A glance back. Sera is a little bit drunk but surprisingly clear-eyed. Sera is magic. One of the girl's in the next booth over feels, for some reason, that she is on the verge of something know, though she hardly knows what, knows it in her gut. That's just the way the universe bends around Serafíne, now.
Sid[awarepathy!]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
SerafíneThe immediate surface is this sort of awkward melancholy. Sera thinks it is important to talk about why they didn't want to see each other; ignoring it means that it will always be there. She was pretty ready to lay herself open in a way that is remarkably painful for her, as she is actually quite private, but when when Sid that she didn't want to know, that arrested her. Because want and desire and intentionality also matter to her.
So: sad. Painful. Distant. Strange. Affectionate. But distant for sure; more so than since she walked into the diner.
Serafíne(That was the empathy reading!)
SidSid does not pull away when Sera begins tracing her finger along the warm planes of her upraised palm. They've been close before, held hands, hugged. Sid has held Sera close before, tucked in against that warmth of life that runs through her veins and radiates from her as though she were not a human but a hearth-warmed stone come to life. She feels like life, too. Like a frantic, desperate, ohno ohno ohno scramble for survival and the bliss, the high of life, of living, these feelings twined together and she feels stronger than she did before the Hydra virus tried to claim her life. Looks it, too.
When Sera untwines her hand from Sid's, Sid does not immediately pull hers back toward her. It's not until Sera speaks, until she smiles in that sad and moving way, that Sid returns herself to her side of the table. She withdraws, folds her hands together on the tabletop, and studies the Ecstatic across from her. And it seems to her that almost none of the people she knows by that Tradition are living up to the name these days. Not Sera at least. Not Lena, either. Sadness and heartache and hardship has touched them all too roughly, has settled in too deep.
Sid withdraws because she knows Sera well enough and she can see it in her now. She knows that even if she wants to mean it, she doesn't.
Taking in a slow, long breath, she releases it just as slowly, letting it take just as long. There are so many things that she could say, point out, discuss. What do they matter, though?
"Tell me."
SerafíneSera pulls herself back in the booth until she can just sort of lounge there, her shoulders and spine against the cool glass, her hair loose over her shoulders and the frame of the booth. One forearm on the tabletop, tracing the impressionistic flecks in the formica with a thoughtless and careless hand.
"I'm phobic of hospitals." Usually Sera says that she hates them, which is a sort of living lie. This is the first time Sera's said in plainly in - well - ever, and she says it quietly and painful and she mimics, consciously or unconsciously, Hawksley's phrasing when he explained quietly and clearly to the nurse tending her in the Emergency Room in the aftermath of her seeking precisely why she woke up and ripped out her IV and tore away all the fucking monitors attached to her body or glued onto her skin. And she finds that it might make her ache, in very strange places in her very strange body, but it does not hurt and it does not wound. There is her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she measures out the weight of the words; thinks them and thinks them and says them, aloud.
Strange.
The things we fear.
Sera is not looking at Sid right now; no, her gaze has swung back up, across the diner to Dan, who is sipping at his coffee and checking his phone and glancing back at her, now and then. Aware of her; alert to her; alive to her.
"I spent a lot of time in and out of rehab when I was a teenager. Being locked up sucks, you know? So, all of that together, that place fucked me up."
Sera's voice is really rather conversational. Which is also strange, but she's not returning to the torment and the torture, the graphic hallucinations of her own death-to-be, the imprisonment, the ongoing and regular violation of her body and her personhood she experienced while suffering through the illness Sid cured. That isn't this sort of confessional.
She's returning to the aftermath.
And the aftermath was surprisingly quiet.
It was Sera curled up in bed, sleeping. Hawksley beside her with a book in hand. Or Dan or even Dee, sitting with her or sprawled in her armchair in the shadow of the windows overlooking her garden.
"I didn't go out. We didn't throw parties or any of that shit. I mean, Christmas was really the first one. I spent alot of my goddamned time drinking tea and looking out the window. Which probably had everyone in my fucking life wondering what the hell was wrong with me, but it seemed to me - and I never really thought about it, because I don't think about fucking anything - that if I started slipping my skin, I didn't know that I'd ever want to come back to it.
"Why the fuck would you wanna be here when you can be everywhere.
"Which is a different story, I guess."
Sera offers a little shrug, this wry and really rather elegant surrender, with a slow-spreading grin because wry and elegant surrender are not really her cup of whiskey-spiked Darjeeling, are they?
"I didn't wanna see you. I didn't wanna see anyone.
"Except that's not really true. I didn't run and hide when Hawksley came by to check on me. I went to chantry a couple of times, too, and at first I didn't wanna see any fucking one. Grace and then Pan, I don't know. It was okay. It wasn't terrible. Maybe I wanted to see the people who wanted to see me. I told Grace I didn't have the energy for any of that shit with the movie, and I didn't, so I didn't touch it, because I coundn't touch it. I wasn't even doing magic. Or anything that could lead to magic, like fucking, or more than two shots of tequila, or any tea except Darjeeling.
"I didn't wanna see any strangers, I didn't wanna see anyone new. I didn't wanna see anyone who wasn't willing to knock on my door.
"I don't know, Sid. It's hard. It's shitty because I was fucking avoiding you, and I don't fucking know if that's because I thought you'd need me when there wasn't any shit anywhere I could give, or if it's because - "
Sera arrests herself, here. Inhales through the nose. Exhales.
There's only so much self-examination Sera is capable of. The truth is she didn't see Sid because she didn't want to see Sid.
"It took me a long fucking time. And by then, it was starting to be a habit. Habits get comfortable. You make a groove, you know?
"You settle in. I fucking hate them."
Sid
Sera opens up and Sid listens quietly. She's always been a good listener, whether she intended to be or not. She can be patient while someone else unburdens themselves, but she will not press them into it. She will not question and prod, or put someone under a microscope to be dissected. Sera starts and she does not find herself interrupted until the very end.
But she is not still while Sera opens up. Sera is phobic of hospitals and that causes a shadow to form between Sid's red brows and the line of her mouth to tighten. She looks neither surprised nor troubled that Sera didn't want to see anyone. Which of them did, really? They all came out of that facility a little quieter, a little tighter, a little more withdrawn. They all knew seemingly by instinct that they needed time to recover away from each other and in their own ways. For just a moment she looks bewildered at the suggestion she might have wanted anything from Sera when Sera had nothing to give. It passes, because ah. Well.
When Sera's finished Sid is quiet for a long, long time, eyes lowered to the glossy tabletop just in front of the Cultist.
Finally, after what feels like an age but lasts only seconds, Sid shifts where she sits. Her spine takes a curve, shoulders slanting as her head leans slightly to one side. She draws a breath, even parts her lips as though to say something, but there's another pause. A hesitation. Sid was once afraid of people, strangers, supposed friends, everyone. Over the years this fear intensified, becoming something like shyness. Words drew attention to her and attention could mean...But she's changed. That fear will always be a part of her life, but it is no longer a shyness that arrests her words but a thoughtfulness. She considers her words before she says them.
That pause is only a beat, a breath, before it becomes a sigh. Whatever thoughts might be lurking in the shadows of her brown eyes, Sid relaxes. Because they both know Sera didn't avoid Sid because she thought Sid might take from Sera when she had nothing in her to give. This is Sid, who is stronger than those who first met her in Denver give her credit for. She doesn't lean on anyone who can't support the weight, only those who can. And it's not because Sid didn't come calling, because she did in a way. She texted Sera at some time that she forgets, November maybe or even early in December, asking about a movie. Sera suggested an art crawl. In the end neither happened.
"Is that why you came in here?" she asks finally. "Just to break a habit?"
Serafíne
There are so may ways that we are formed and so many ways that we are forged and here they are in a greasy spoon, right? turned hip. Some day and hour agreed-upon by the masses, who never seem capable of recalling all the many ways in which they can opt-out of this daily grind.
Sera has her right arm braced on the tabletop and her back to the windowed view of the street and she feels all strange and terribly confessional even if Sid hears no more than a piece of it all. The smallest slice. The why-I-didn't-wanna-see-you, which Sera herself hardly recognized until she started speaking it aloud. Words really aren't her medium, not words like these anyway, taking-stock and giving-account and figuring-out sort of words, the sort that go with thing and causation. Sera likes poetry. Whatever it is, she just wants to feel it all quick right now to her slender bones.
So, yeah. She's looking away there at the end, an odd and oddly quiet expression on her face. Thoughtful,
on the verge of -
but isn't that also what she feels like now; the way she bends the world around her. Always on the verge -
Sid speaks. Asks a question, and truthfully the question Sid asks feels, well, as if Sid is unwinding and pulling oakum out of a very different sort of rope. Sera glances up, over. This gesture almost abrupt, like she's surfacing from somewhere beneath her own skin. Meets Sid's eyes again, and exhales, sharply. That brief question is cryptic, really. Hard to read the inflection on the just and Sera who reads everything and reads everyone and was made to feel like that rather than anything so base and course and intention as knowing still knows that she is somehow too tender, just now, to let herself See.
So she doesn't Look.
Just could be just or just or even JUST or merely just.
Sera holds Sid's gaze for a moment. There is in her a kind of softening, which is not without its own risks. A sort of advanced forgiveness of refusals and misunderstandings; a slip of rue, perhaps even a very un-Sera-like resignation.
"Naw," she says. "I wanted to say hi."
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