OH HI CHANTRY IS SOMEONE I KNOW HERE? (Per + Awareness)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )
SerafíneSomewhere between unpacking the booze and fixing herself an honest-to-god drink rather than just grabbing the bottle and tipping it back like the certified lush she actually is, that's when Sera senses his presence. She's upstairs in the kitchen, not half-way down the winding, isolated drive. She's upstairs in the kitchen and then she's so goddamned pleased that she's grabbing both the drink and the bottle of whiskey she used to make the drink and she considers making another drink and holds that thought for a solid, gleaming moment in her head then makes another goddamned drink so:
despite her rather immediate desire to see Hawksley, it is a solid five minutes before our Serafíne is descending the stairs to the library, a bottle of Stranahan's in one hand, two Mamie Taylor's in the other, no hand for the railing on the staircase which is dangerous given the goddamned heels she's sporting, and a ridiculous amount of rigamarole with all the security system because she keeps trying to give it a handprint-with-bottle rather than straight-up palm print and she doesn't understad why the doors no opening and then it does.
Oooh. Library.
Hello library.
Hello library inhabitants.
Hawksley[Hawksley's resonance:
http://youtu.be/DGIgXP9SvB8]
HawksleyHe slept here the other night. Fell asleep in the back of the library, and no one else was there but Kalen was upstairs, Alyssa was upstairs, Grace had been there at least once. He fell asleep with strangers here and there, fearless because he is the beloved of the gods: he is a god, himself. Maybe I'm a king, and no one can harm him.
He didn't sleep here last night. He came out here late tonight, and he is downstairs drinking wine because today's weather has him feeling like chilled white wine instead of whiskey or tequila or the like. He is waiting for summer, and summer flashes her skirt at him over and over before slapping his face with winter again.
That's how she finds him, later on, hand on the reader or some-such, coming inside. This library really isn't that much more incredible than his. It certainly has a less welcoming atmosphere, though a broader variety. Which only means that the pieces of it that are applicable to him are not that much more impressive than his own collection. Just different. Different can be good. So that's where she finds him, near the back, sitting at a desk, or sitting back from it, feet propped up, drinking white wine and eating from a charcuterie plate that Collins sent with him, and he is reading and hearing the doors whisper open without looking up or saying a word.
Til she totters back to where he is, and he looks up and over his glass and at her and smiles.
Puts his finger to his lips, his other fingers grasping the rim of his wine glass. Watches her as he sips.
SerafíneThey spent Carnival in Rio. Sera was topless, essentially, from the they hit Brazilian airspace to the point where they returned to the states. So it seems nigh unnatural now to see her wearing clothing. Even the minimal, ridiculous things she choses to wear. The leather skirt that doesn't even cover her ass; the seamed stockings, the garters. The see-through lace bra beneath - what is that? an unbuttoned button-down flannel shirt, the tail of which is three to five inches longer than her actual skirt? - but they're not in Brazil right now and it isn't Carnival and the world isn't wrapped up in a last hurray, an orgy of celebration before the starving season.
He puts his finger to his lips. Shhh right? They're in a goddamned library. That makes her laugh and she laughs with a golden glow about her and she laughs aloud and then she tries to swallow her laughter and Be Silent but silence and Sera go together like sardines and peanut butter so really her Silence is fucking loud. It is constructed of whiskey and leather and laughter.
She feels magickal. She feels sublime.
She gleams at him and slips past him and parks her ass on his desk where his feet are propped and manages, more or less, to set down her drink and her other drink and also her bottle bottle without spilling.
Well, without spilling much.
Kicks off a high heel and settles a bare foot on his thigh.
"I brought you a drink!" Sera announces, too-loud. Shhh. Glances at his glass of chilled white wine. "You already have a drink. Now you have - " and she actually counts them out on her fingers, see? one. two. Announces the results of her scientific survey of the number of drinks he has available to him as if she had just discovered a new continent or some fucking thing. "Two!"
"Hi.
"Hihihihi."
Serafínestop!
HawksleyThey took the jet. They lived in a floating house. Hawksley was naked or nearly so most of the time. Hawksley wore a bronze torque while she wore those draping strands of sparkles, picked her up against a wall, swore in another language and growl-groaned against her neck when he came.
She shopped. He slept. He wasn't studying, he wasn't doing much other than dancing and drinking and getting barbecue from hole-in-the-wall joints with her. He swam and he drank and danced more and they did some drugs and invited themselves to parties at the Copacabana and then they came back here, where it is not really summer yet and everything, for a day or two, seemed colorless and silent to him, though not for Sera:
Sera is always high, one way or another, and does not experience crashes in quite the same way as others.
Hawksley is back to studying. He's dressed simply, finely, the way he often is, and she is dressed like a wet dream crossed with a Nirvana video. She is laughing noisily in the library, which contradicts his shushing finger, but he doesn't scold her. He watches her, sipping and holding his spot in his book as she saunters over and puts herself on the edge of the table. Kicks off her shoe and plants her foot on his thigh. Hawskley looks at that foot, not at the liquor she brought.
"Did you," he says, and sets his wineglass down, wrapping that somewhat cool hand around her ankle. His eyes flick back up to her face.
"Are you seriously so drunk you can't count to two?"
SerafíneThey were ridiculous and golden and they got tan everywhere. Drank caipirinhas until their eyes crossed and god the boobs. Not just hers. It was Carnival. The fucking feathers.
--
"No."
He can see something coy and fleeting in her face; something that is both strangely and beautifully aware. This self-possessed admission.
She smiles around the words and around the whiskey and around the moment. Drops her eyes to his hand, cool against her ankle. Then lifts them again to meet his gaze.
"I'm so drunk that I like counting to two. While you watch me. I said hi to you five times.
"Wanna say it a thousand times more."
She could peel back time and do that. Some strange part of her is inclined just to that.
HawksleyHawksley's hand is still wrapped around her ankle, fingers cool but warming quickly, because he's him. Because he's touching her. Because alcohol.
His hand slides up after a while, smoothing over her calf, and he leans forward, resting his forehead on her shin. Breathing in a scent, her scent, the scent of books that is so strangely muffled in this environment, perfectly climate controlled and perfect and impenetrable and static, static, static. Unchanging, unassailable. Truth be told, Hawksley sort of fucking hates this shitty library.
But he's still here. Because power.
--
He licks her shin. Runs the tip of his tongue up from the front of her ankle all the way to her knee, and then his hand is on top of her thigh, and he lays his head down, closing his eyes. "You counted the hellos, too, then," he mentions, smoothing his palm over her skin a few times, back and forth, up and down.
"Touch my hair," he says, without preamble or politeness.
SerafíneHe's still here. Because power. The doors are closed and the walls are sealed and it feels so fucking underground and it is so fucking underground. Climate controlled. Down here, there's no place to see or feel the sky. He still feels like he's soaring.
They are canoodling in the chantry library. She wants to tell him that that is what they are doing as he's bending head his forward to her leg, which is more or less bare. She likes the word canoodling the same way she likes the word Liechtenstein! Both curl on her tongue quite strangely, but then he's licking her shin and she stops breathing for a moment, her dilated pupils sharpening, her breath captured in brief, bright bursts. Curling toes dig into the meat of his thigh and she was going to ask him what he was reading because library and book but she has forgotten the meat and measure of the potential question.
All she remembers is him.
Well, not quite all.
"Did you hear about Alexander?" Sera is asking him, as he bends his head to her thigh. She is more than a bit breathless and there's a something in ehr voice that she explains a moment later, right? " - new last Thursday."
Which is a fucking metaphor. He'll remember when Grace was new-last-Wednesday.
But his head is on her thigh and he wants her to touch his hair; tells her to touch his hair and it makes her breath catch sharp because sometimes everything he does makes her breath catch sharp and of course she plunges her hands into his hair, left and right. thumbs tracing a heavy caress along his jaw, his cheek, his mouth.
"Do you know how much I want you?"
HawksleySera wants to use the word 'canoodling', just like she wants to say 'hello' a thousand times, or count to two on her fingers because she can, she feels like it, why not? She doesn't. He is licking her leg, stroking her thigh, and she is doing what he wants, which is putting her fingers in his hair, which is surprisingly thick for all its fairness. She massages his thigh with her bared toes, and he smiles into her skin.
Neither of them do, or have, spoken of that other night in front of the bookstore, or anything said, because perhaps it doesn't matter. If it doesn't matter, though, then they are wonderful liars. Neither of them is a very good liar.
"Nope," he says, when she asks about Alexander instead of anything else. Maybe he remembers when Grace was new-last-Wednesday, but that was nearly a year ago. Sera was fasting from alcohol and from this sort of touch back then. Why should he bother remembering that? And maybe by now it's not last-Thursday, it's several Thursdays-ago, but Sera is a time mage. Sera is a Seer. Hawksley never even asks her what time it is; he has Collins and an expensive watch for knowing When he is.
"New to town or new to his brain explodi--" he is asking, but she is asking him another question about him, which is a far preferable topic to neonate Awakened, who are really interesting to him at first and then super boring, which isn't to say that Grace he finds boring, just that he isn't particularly interested in New Mages just because they're New Mages. Also because he's a prick.
He grins, kissing the cap of her knee. "Yes," he tells her, because this is the truth, and he doesn't dare lie.
SerafíneSera makes a noise that is mostly a hum and lives in the back of her throat and would be speculative or perhaps even not-speculative but some other word she cannot remember just now, because her brain is looped around the idea of two and the precise moment in time when the world shifts and something is new; and the way she can bury her fingers in his hair, and the way the fine golden strands slide like silk over her fingers.
They are terrible liars.
He kisses the cap of her knee, and grins. She bends drunkenly forward, running a tender thumb over his temple. Feels his pulse there, and something else and wants to bite him there, to feel her teeth against his skin and so close to the seat of his consciousness that she could almost inhalte, but elevation is a treacherous thing when one is falling-down-count-to-two-for-the-fun-of-it-drunk.
She would fall off the table if she tried.
She is probably going to fall off the table.
It was last-Thursday or several-Thursdays or all-Thursdays-are-the-same-Thursdays. These things start to run together when she is both drunk and magic at the same time, all the seconds tangled up with each errant beat of her heart, when she is imagining that she exists only where he touches her.
He knows how much she wants him.
"Good," returns Sera, all bleary-slurring, toes inch-inch-inching their way up his thigh. "If you didn't I'd have to show you.
"And we're in a libraryyyy. Shhhhh."
You know, as if Sera herself were anywhere close to remembering her inside-voice.
Hawksley"God, you're so drunk," he half-laughs at her, as she bends over him, stroking his temple and swaying on the table. He's steadying her, so there's that, but frankly, if she falls off the table he might just let her.
That is a lie.
He grins up at her, chin on her shin now. "Yeah, I know what you do in libraries," he teases her.
Serafíne"I'm going to kiss you."
Sera is so very drunk, and she says those words like a promise or a prophecy or something that belongs in the no-man's-land between the two.
"All two of you. Seventeen times. That's what I do in libraries."
And maybe he steadies her and she somehow manages to defy the many ways in which the world spins away from her as she does so, wraps his hand in the flannel framing her hips or - fuck it - maybe she falls and he catches her, or maybe she just falls. Any which way it hardly matters.
She is going to kiss him.
All two of him seventeen times.
HawksleyThat is when Hawksley smiles, not grinning but more gently, softening, though it's difficult to see softness in those angular, predatory features of his. Yes, he does steady her a bit, reaching up and laying his hands on her arms, holding her as she tumbles down off the table and onto his lap, which he facilitates partly so she doesn't fall to the ground and partly because, well: Sera on lap. But that is where he reaches up and touches her face, pushing her hair back and looking at her up close.
Both of him. Holds her and looks at her and does not kiss her, nor permit her to kiss him. He is not smiling now, but not frowning. He is not grinning and not laughing but he is not upset, his cheeks aren't flushed. He isn't... wanting. Not so forcefully, powerfully, entirely as she wants, and this is the only way she ever wants.
"Let's go to a window seat," he tells her, quietly because Library, and because she's up close. "I would much rather you sit with me there, both of me, and tell me what's going through your mind. As it comes. While you're... drunk off your ass."
SerafíneSera inhales, arrested as he puts his hands on her face, glassy eyes rising to meet his. And it is a moment of arrest, sudden and entire. She does not and perhaps she cannot move for the span of several heartbeats, and then she's in motion again, rather like a cat denied a lap when he does not kiss her and does not allow her to kiss him, she just keeps pushing her forehead against the barrier he has created, until divested or diverted.
He diverts her; the warm vibration of his voice that she can feel somehow in her ribs and her throat and what he says to her stops her again, he can feel the shape of the moment, when she stops trying kiss him and just - looks at him. A kind of wonder in her she can hardly remember the shape of.
--
A windowseat, quietly. Library. That sounds lovely.
Sera sort of slides backwards off his lap and she's holding one of his hands somehow, how did that get there, which may be the singular point keeping her upright and then only because of the counterbalancing weight from him, as he stands too.
"Do you know why I like to bite your pulse?"
HawksleyShe has that look, that drunk-person going no no no no no, need to be serious, PRETEND TO BE SOBER and staring deerlike, unblinking, breath held before one remembers to breathe. It makes him smile at her. She presses her forehead to his and this, this he allows, rolling their brows together, wrapping his arms around her to hug her, hold her, though he has denied her her wanting, and god, what an asshole,
how could she love him.
But what he suggests, he knows she will also want, and Want, and love. It's dim outside, and will darken. The wind will batter the glass and her fingertips will leave ghostly impressions all around her hands, her heat fogging the chill. She is lopsided when she moves, though, and he holds her up while she either finds her discarded shoe or discards the other one. He has risen with her, for her, since he can tell better than she can what she's going for. One glass of wine, not even all of it, and she's three or thirteen sheets to the wind.
"Because you're an animal," he answers blithely, like this is the obvious answer, "and you want to hold my life between your teeth without ever sinking those teeth down and snuffing it out. I imagine that would be rather ecstatic."
The use of the word is not teasing.
A FINALE POST GOES HERE
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