Days and weeks and months; even close to a pair of seasons, all have passed since the last time Sera showed up in the weedy parking lot of a certain nameless motel somewhere on the ringed outskirts of Denver. Beyond the first blush of the city's growth, near some crossroads that has become - not obsolete, but different - since the structure was first built. Sometime in the 1950s, maybe. Back when a cross-county trip meant 55 MPH on two lane roads dotted with diners and truck-stops and two-story motels with concrete pools sunk into the tarmac, surrounded by chainlink fences. The remnants of the chainlink fence are still there but the pool has been infilled and now the place is filled not with tourists and truckers, but mostly with families of low-wage workers either too transient or too poor to invest in an actual goddamned lease.
Those folks and Jim.
The sun's out and in March the weather swings wildly and today there is a certain biting chill in the air, but still the neighbor's kids are out in the parking lot, kicking a soccer ball back and forth as a certain tattooed man turns a certain non-descript Econoline van into a certain parking spot near the door to a certain room. Which still tastes like Jim: his stoic and addled and psychedelic resonance is soaked into the bones of the place. The drywall and the lathe, the metal girders and concrete footers, the threadbare carpet and the grout and tile. Sera slides out of the passenger's door of the van and for a long moment, she just stands there. Looking around the parking lot, watching the slant of light across the blacktop, the way the children's lengthening shadows tangle as they play.
--
If he is awake and his senses are open, he has to know who's there. There's no mistaking her resonance, that tangle of base instinct and fascination. There is also a new note: some sense of doors; of passageways; of thresholds: between, see? Liminal.
She's here.
It's been a while.
She's here and she can feel him right? And she can taste the remnants of whatever dream she had this night last in the back of her throat. Tangled up with sleep and her own memories and a certain subdural something she refuses to consider or name.
She lights a cigarette, Sera. The paper is deep blue, the tobacco spiked with cloves. The smoke sweet and crackling and a little bit noxious. She doesn't inhale as deeply as she would a joint. Holds the smoke in her mouth more than her lungs and mostly lets it go, though sometimes she breathes it all the way in, then exhales through her nostrils. Like a dragon.
She's out there for five minutes or so. Eight maybe. Just standing in the parking lot smoking and watching the smoke curl and drift in the afternoon light.
Not long after she arrives, though, there's a knock at his door.
JimIt would be hard to call Jim a dreamer or pin him down as a pessimist or optimist. An idealist? Surely. But he's the type to be mindful and contemplative when awake. The last time she had seen him it had been in the depths of stupor. That hasn't set in an he's not so sure it will.
But laid out on that bed in the silence of his hermitage, unsure if he's awake or asleep, his mind wanders. It remembers things. People. Places. It journeys your time and when he senses the aura that accompanies Serafine's presence it takes a few minutes to realize it's not imagined. Not one of many memories he's drifting through and considering in a how-did-I-get-here sort of haze.
The needles didn't break off in his arm. That's a good sign. As he staggers toward the present it's the pain of the rubber tube still tying off his arm that serves as lighthouse toward temporal shores. By the time he's sat up and pulled it free he hears the knocking. Pulls down the long sleeves of that chunky bird's eye sweater and squints to see if the door is even locked.
Of course it is.
Stand.
He wills it and though his body protests as much as his will does to fuel it he finds his footing and makes his way. Hand on the door handle and he pulls it open.
Jim doesn't look like he wants to stay inside. He looks like he's going to come through that door and maybe take up space on the lawn furniture pulled up in front of his room. But he doesn't. He doesn't look up at Serafine to greet her, but he does look sideways at the children through the man-sized crack he'd created in the doorway.
Jim decides not to subject them to his appearance. Infectious human waste is how he looks and he looks at the van next where Dan is waiting.
“He knows he can come inside, right?”
Jim's eyes look raw from saline and the bags under them are hobo sized. Otherwise his face looks despondent.
"Long time no see, sweet cheeks," turning around before she can answer his question.
"Fuck. Deja vu. Was all that a dream?" A dry chuckle and an honest-to-God smile.
Serafíne"'Course he does," Sera assures him. Half visible through the slice of light between the door and the frame, or not precisely visible at all, as he glances past her to find the tracer trails of the kids bouncing hte soccer ball back and forth. Her voice is low; there's a sort of living affection stitched into the words themselves and she throws a glance back over her shoulder at the van and the consor who has nursed her through a helluva lot. Catches sight of him as she catches the edge of the door to the motel room and pulls it open wide enough to slip inside behind him. "He's just circumspect. Plus he probably wants to play some fucking football."
Sera pulls the door closed and there goes that slice of daylight. Jim's already turned around and looks like hell but she's behind him, and she doesn't seem to care how he looks or what he smells like or any of it, because she wraps her arms around him from behind and presses her face against his shoulder blade and inhales it all. The sour ache and the stale salt and everything in and around and beneath it.
Smiles and he can feel that when she hears the honest-to-God smile in his voice.
"Fuck if I know," she returns, smoke in her hair and in her voice. The bridge of her nose braced against the collar of his sweater. "All I know is the fucking finale scared me and you look like hell and I have missed the fuck out of you. All what?"
Then she lets him go at last; lifts her eyes from some nebulous, out of focus view of his cheated profile to take in the state of the room.
JimThe room looks clean. The sheets are a rumple with a slight swirl of a fit where he fell upon them, but he hadn't crawled under the comforter and the pillows are sitting in neat little stacks where two people can rest their heads. There's no ash tray. There aren't any empty bottles. There are two stacks of books, and judging by the spines they're Read and Unread. The ones in the latter are weathered with stains and rumples from rain but otherwise well taken care of.
Then there's the tube on the floor at the foot of the bed. There're the syringes and the works open and that's where he's aiming to walk as soon as he notices them. Zipping the little mouth of a bag closed with the retrieved needles.
Or at least that's what he was aiming to do before she hugs him. He takes it like he's an inanimate object at first and then eases back like at least he's a tree in the wind and then lets go and truly melts into it like a pet might at getting scratched or pet.
And then she lets go and he moves on, answering as he sets about his task.
"Everything working. It's like I closed my eyes after the last time I saw you, and a wonderful dream happened, and then I woke up and the world was worse for none of it being real," chewing his lip at the end of it, like he's thinking, like he's really trying to figure out if he can make it all that.
But dreams are more easily forgotten.
"Don't worry about it. What did you see?" Suddenly curious. Looking half-over his shoulder at her, but then focusing on his hands, putting them to work finding the bottle of water he's mixed the heroin with and this time using it to refresh himself rather than help as a medium for narcotics.
SerafíneReally, when Jim melts into the hug Sera holds him and holds him and holds him as long as she can or as long as he requires. The moment hangs; gets caught against itself, hooked in place, not precisely repeated but held and held and held and doesn't it feel like the magic of holding your breath, that suspension, except time does not fucking matter, and so no one turns blue.
The the moment changes. Jim continues his path through the room. Sera sort of half-flings herself on the edge of one of the beds, tucking a her left leg beneath her body, shrugging off her jacket. She's wearing something ridiculous beneath it, a cropped white t-shirt (THE RAINCOATS) over a crimson bra, cut-offs nevermind the weather, seamed, thigh-high fishnets (naturally a bit torn here and there) held up with garters. Heels that make her sway a bit when she walks, which she kicks off as she settles on the edge of the bed.
Taking in the needles and the tubing with a look that is remarkably thoughtful for a Sera before her gaze is back on him. Lifting to trace the motion of his shoulder joint as he reaches for the water bottle before settling on his face again.
She listens to him, Sera. Tastes his words in the back of her throat. Everything working, he says and there's a shadow or something across her eyes. The dream between the last time she saw him, and this one. There's blood in it for her, in the back of her throat. Something soft, for him, in her eyes.
Perhaps it is sorrow; maybe it is love. Maybe it is everything, all tangled up together. Isn't that the way it always is?
"I don't know - " The t-shirt is a bit oversized, the collar all stretched out, the V-neck torn. "A different ending to this visit maybe. Or a half-dozen different slices of possibilities. You, in a room with a half-dozen doors, not all of which led back here.
"The choice you had to make; in a place where it was hard to make one."
Her eyes, dark in the shadows of the motel room, drop from his countenance to the paraphanalia he is gathering up. Linger there, as she tongues the roof of her mouth.
Thinks of the tracks on a certain priest's arms.
"I didn't know you were into narcotics." Quietly. "I'm glad you came back to us."
Jim[ Perception + Awareness ]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 5, 8, 10) ( success x 2 )
Jim“Everyone is into narcotics. Anyone who isn't just hasn't tried them yet,” continuing down a more humorous line of dialogue because it's preferable to anything contemplative and topical and contemporaneous.
The little case gets tucked away in a slid open then shut drawer. He hooks his forefingers into the belt loops of his jeans, not so crisp as they usually are (very much lived in), and then he tugs them up around his waist as if he's tidying himself up. Tussled what there is of his hair and then...
“You're different.” Yes. Make it about her. That's easy. And he doesn't have to be ingenuous to do so. He opens himself up to feel it. To soak it up. For a moment she seems both in focus and sharp. A blur of movement and both existent here and elsewhere. His eyes open a bit wider and it's only then he actually turns around to look where she has perched herself on tufted bed corner. Finds a seat in one of the easy chairs and keeps looking at her.
For an explanation.
SerafíneHer eyes are on him; always in that quick way that she has - the place where the skin comes alive; the place where the nails start to bleed - and there's light behind. Last afternoon sun cutting in between the curtains, illuminating these drifting motes of dust in the air, and the three-quarters halo she has of dyed blond curls in a way that only emphasizes the dark roots, the shaved fringe over her right ear.
He makes it about her. That's easy and she's watching him, see and she turns her face a bit so that her features are not entirely in shadow. The light catches the apex of her cheekbone and cuts aslant down to the delicate line of her jaw. She has a large spike and a whole colony of studs, chains, pins and the like skewered through the lobe and cartilage of her right ear. The tattoo of a small black triangle tucked just behind.
She's watching him and there's something in her expression that is a kind of assent. He can change the subject. She'll allow it, if that's what he needs. But she hasn't forgotten about him, and she never will.
"A few weeks ago, yeah. I went seeking. Apparently I also had a fucking seizure and cracked open my head which fucked up his night," a wry gesture of her head outside. Indicating, of course, Dan. " - but he survived."
"So did I. She kinda tricked me into it." This quick and supple curve of her shoulder. "My avatar, you know? I guess she thought it was time."
Jim"If you found something on the other side she must have been right," and Jim says this with a bit of reverence. He's not talking about Serafine. He's talking about that piece of the Eternal Moment inside her. The well that nourished the bud that sat opening in front of him.
Jim's stubble and mustache look like they'd grown into a beard long ago. The colors are patchwork. Lighter and darker blonds and browns though they're symmetric to the sides of his face and it gives him the look of a young billy goat. A satyr if he were a bit more enlivened in this moment. There's not much exuberance. None at all. None of the yearning for life.
Though he'd wanted it enough to stay here. To come back to them, as she'd said, and put his suffering somewhere he could contend with it instead of running from it.
"I'm sure it did more than fuck up his night. You know how much he cares," nodding like he knows she knows, it wasn't worth saying, but he'd seen it in every interaction he'd had with Dan. When she'd been gone especially.
"I thought I was almost there," his own toss of his head, as if he's going back to her mention of a walkabout that had taken her to another echelon of understanding. A better point of view. Epiphany and enlightenment continued. "But sometimes you slip. Sometimes you get to the peak and there's just a hundred more waiting in your way," a very un-Jim way to think about it.
"Stuck."
SerafíneSera should have a drink or something in hand. Bottles fit naturally into the lacing of her fingers. A drink or a cigarette or a joint. But nothing, so she sits with her hands folded sort of in her lap, laced together, and gives him another strange, one-shouldered shrug, that is oddly abashed. Breathes out a laugh a moment later, murmurs a quiet, "He takes care of me," as Jim mentions Dan, without really interrupting his pattern of thought.
She's rather sober, all things considered.
It feels quietly strange, in its own sometimes lovely way.
There feels like something beneath her tongue, something stange, a stone or a secret, the sort that could lodge like a lump in the back of her throat, or be swallowed down and metamorphasize into something else. A seed. An egg. A bolder. A sun.
Her mouth is closed around that idea; her lips pressed together and she is breathing quietly through her nose but then she sort of holds her breath, still see. Drawn in on the cusp of an inhale and -
oh. Oh.
Stuck is the strangest word to hear on Jim's lips. From Jim's mouth.
"I don't think about it. You know? Or much of anything, sometimes. Maybe that's my fucking problem. I don't think of it as a climb. Or work at all.
"I just am, I guess. For better or worse, and maybe sometimes a whole lot worse." Her eyes have drifted from his, to the edge of the mirror affixed to the wall above the sink, at the far end of the room. The window and the curtains reflected there; a slice of light surrounded by vaguely moving darkness.
"Worse is okay, too, you know?" And there's a kind of tightness in her chest, then. For herself, see. For him, too. For so many nameless others. Her breath feels clipped and her throat a bit raw and the sting of tears in the back of her eyes, but they don't spill. They just linger there. "When I got out," a pause, then a rather comme-ci, comme-ca correction of the phrase, "when they got me out, I was worse for a long fucking time. Should've come to see you, maybe. I didn't. I just think, worse is okay, too."
The sparest of smiles.
"It's Sid, isn't it?"
He knows, somehow, from her voice or her manner, that he doesn't have to say anything he doesn't want to say. That he doesn't have to say a goddamned word.
Jim"It's always Sid. It's always been Sid. But it won't be anymore and it won't be ever again," a finality to what he's said. Not a book end. A book slammed shut out of frustration and sadness. It wells up inside him without any precursor that it's coming other than Serafine's utterance of a name. The only thing that's not there is anger.
Alright, it's barely there, but no more so than one would expect. It's not overwhelming. It doesn't twist into anything ugly. No, his lips only twist in sadness and his head only hangs because there's no life in it. A cut flower drooping. A tired dog's head lolling. All that was there is drained out of him.
Jim has given a lot. Jim hasn't taken anything. And it has left him in this state. Undone. A doll without any stuffing. He melts into the upholstery of that cheap recliner the same way he'd eventually melted back into her moment earlier, but it's easier because it's inanimate. Just him and it and Serafine to look at over there. Over there on the other side of the space between them.
“It wasn't ever going to work. I wish I'd known that going in. But,” a beat, “but,” repeated, “whatever. It's whatever,” and it's another one of those words that doesn't sound right coming out of Jim's mouth. Not from those lips that cared so much, even if it was about a dozen things at once. Even his stoicism came with a purpose. It gave his addled mind purpose. Made sense out of the menagerie of ideas and strange directions it could race in from one moment to the next.
“I use to feel like I had balance. Now I just feel like I'm getting pulled in every direction. My head feels so cluttered with thoughts I can't finish,” looking to her for an answer to a question he hasn't asked.
SerafíneThere is a very strange clarity to Sera in these moments; a distilled compassion, a compressed understanding. She is still and her eyes are on him and there's no warning except one word, a name and there's Jim and god, and by the gods, some part of her is briefly, incandescently ferocious when she sees him drooping like that; melting into the goddamned armchair, emptied out.
She's on her feet a moment later. Stockinged feet on the threadbare carpet and he knows without needing to read the branching paths of the near-future that she is going to come over to him. That she is going to put her arms around him. That she is going to give him whatever she can give him even if she does not know what that is; or what he requires; or how to make him - or herself - or fucking anyone whole.
They've done this before, haven't they? No wonder, she thinks - and this is absurd, the way the thought floats to the surface of her mind, an echo loosed or a promise kept as she pauses to yank open the minifridge in search of something to drink. Maybe a bottle of whiskey; maybe a bottle of cans of beer. - no wonder, she thinks, he said, Dejavu.
Barefoot, Sera has even more of a swagger about her, without the heels to get in the way, to foreshorten her stride. It is masculine, really, that gait: she means to take up space the world itself did not see fit to give her. Her gleanings, whatever they may be, she sets down on the sidetable beside Jim's armchair, circles around to plant a kiss on the crown of Jim's head, then finishes her circuit to settle her own ass on the other arm of the chair. Loops her own arm up and around his shoulders, hand open to brace herself against the cushion as she bends down to press her mouth against his temple,
and that kiss lingers. Thoughtful, warm. Infusing.
Aching, too. Aching, probably, but steady within the frame of that ache, and fierce, in her way.
"It's not whatever, Jim. Maybe it's what was, but it's not whatever."
If she could tear all that sorrow and misdirection out of his body with her teeth, just bloody rend it, she would.
She would.
But she can't.
So she kisses him. Hums against his skin in a way that feels like magic, though it isn't. Not now, not yet, but soon, perhaps.
"I don't know what to say. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. Sorry it didn't work. Sorry it wasn't ever going to work. Sorry you didn't fucking know. I'm sorry that you're hurting. Sorry that your head's cluttered and your balance is gone. All that shit.
"I don't fucking know. Maybe you shouldn't even be in your goddamned head right now. Maybe you should just be in your heart.
"It's okay to hurt.
"I'll be here as long as you need."
JimJim is quiet as she speaks. As she consoles him. She doens't only try to, but succeeds, at least in demonstrating that she cares and giving him something to focus on other than himself and his own feelings in this moment. Like most traumas, talking about it can only help, especially when it's to an open and receptive ear. It doesn't mend anything, but a few moments' respite is better than nothing.
What Serafine had found was a bottle of wine with a seal on it and a bottle of whiskey with the cork in it and she most likely goes for the latter.
Serafine most definitely goes for the latter.
And then Serafine's lips are bunched together and still manage to breath fire onto his temple. It washes over him and feels almost too familiar. He doesn't squirm, though, because the contact is as hard to resist as any addiction.
She says she'll be there and, “Thank you,” is what he can offer back. That and another smile, one that isn't at his own expense, and that's something she's actually given him.
Jim is the one that reaches for the bottle from the chair and opens it. The cork makes a thin thud of a noise and then sloshes as he tips it back without a glass.
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